The Lowering Days

by Gregory Brown

  “Do you want me to leave?” I asked.

  My mother shook her head, pulled another blade of grass, whistled feebly. “God, I was always awful at this.” She laughed. Overhead a raven circled the tree. I thought it must be one of Lyman’s.

  “It’s not,” my mother said.

  “Not what?”

  “His bird.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “Because I pay attention to things.”

  My mother turned around and faced the trunk of the ghost apple tree. She reached out and touched a set of carved initials near the base of the trunk. They belonged to my parents. I had never noticed them.

  “We carved them at the very bottom of the tree.” My mother’s voice was soft, tired. I realized I didn’t pay enough attention to her voice, which was lovely, melodic and comforting. The tree had grown over the years, twisting skyward and spreading its otherworldly fruit in a huge canopy. It must have been twenty feet tall. “The letters were very small at first,” my mother went on. “The leaves covered them, then the snow. You see, young love needs tenderness. It needs a lot of protecting. Over time we knew our initials would grow as the trunk grew. We thought we would grow too. Maybe we were being overly romantic. Maybe we were fools. But two people have to believe in something.”

  I watched the raven circling overhead and thought about the cost of love, which was the constant potential for loss.

  “We discovered that plane,” she said. “Your father and I made all these discoveries together. Sometimes I wonder what good they’ve really done.” I put my hand on her shoulder, and realized it was not only her voice I hadn’t paid enough attention to. We hardly touched anymore. Growing up had made the feel of my mother’s body foreign, and I missed her even though she was right beside me.

  “I only ever loved three men in my life,” she said. “I lost one when I was just a little older than you. And now I fear I’m about to lose the other two.”

  “You’re talking about Dad and Lyman.”

  “Yes. Lyman and I have tried to hate each other for twenty years. But that doesn’t erase that we loved each other.” I thought about that idea for a moment. If true, it meant that love perhaps remained under all things through time. “This has to be hard for you to hear,” my mother said. “I should stop.”

  She was right. It should have been. But I’d been drawn to Lyman most of my life. The connection had felt powerful that day we went to see Grace about the letter, and Lyman was out in the yard with his birds. It had linked us on those nights he stood in the dark, watching our house. Then it had been solidified when I came upon Lyman standing in this very spot by the ghost apple tree. The truth was, I had always felt at ease in Lyman’s presence, even when he seemed to cause unrest for everyone else in my family. I studied my mother’s face. I had her round eyes and wide mouth, her dark hair and her freckles. If love did remain under all things, I wondered if it could be passed down in our genetic whirlwind as well. Unable to tell her any of this, I simply shrugged.

  She looked up at the tree and then out over the sea. “She loved her husband.” I knew she was talking about Nigawes. “Even when she was watching his color turn red and then black. Even when she was watching him fall apart. Even when she was hacking him to pieces. She loved him.”

  “I know, Mom.”

  “That was the problem. Loving him. And I guess that’s what made it beautiful too. Until it wasn’t.”

  Not knowing what else to say, I kept my hand on her shoulder, feeling the strong and solid curve of bone, the endurance of her body. She lifted her fingers from the initials. “Do you understand, Almy? About how something can be beautiful until it isn’t?”

  “I want to.”

  “I know, honey.” She reached back and touched my face. “But that might not be enough. Lyman may never walk right again. Did you know that?”

  My silence answered for me.

  “Make sure you remember all of this. People think I don’t care. That I’m just greedy for details and gossip, out to make everyone into a story. What they don’t see is how much all these old rifts break my heart. I don’t write about this place because I’m nosy. I write about it because I want things to change.”

  My mother walked out from under my hand toward the edge of the bluff then. I was worried about the winds. The wet earth. Loose rocks. I wanted her to turn around. The thing about the sea is how easily it takes what it wants.

  “Your father’s probably right,” she said. “This nonsense with the plane will probably help. I just wish we hadn’t gotten here. I’d like to be alone now, Almy.”

  When I looked back, my mother had moved away from the edge. She was standing at the tree, her forehead against the trunk. Her hair fell about the bark, and it was hard to tell where the tree ended and her body began. Her lips were moving, but I could not hear her words. Overhead, the raven kept circling. Each time it was about to land on the tree, it rose back into the sky and loosed a mournful croak.

  An air show. It was an absurd and childish idea, but oddly brilliant. My father knew that people from all over the county loved coming together for small gatherings: contra dances and barbecues and high school basketball games and maple syrup tapping parties. They also loved being mesmerized. Every year they amassed atop Hatchet Mountain to watch celestial events: the Perseids in August, the high bright point of Jupiter in April, glimpses of Venus and Saturn, lunar eclipses, blue moons and super moons. But the Geminids, the last sky-streaking bodies before winter descended, were their favorite. The Geminids were the debris of an asteroid called Phaeton that orbited between the sun and Mercury. The sun’s great heat was slowly fracturing the asteroid, causing rock and dust to flame out in a comet-like tail. For two weeks every December, as Earth crossed Phaeton’s path, this rocky, cosmic debris besieged our atmosphere, drawing meteoric streaks across the night sky. The beautiful thing about swooping through a field of interstellar debris every year was the unpredictability of the celestial show. You knew the show would come, but you didn’t know what your eyes would receive. On the large grassy dome of this small mountain, people drank and danced and reveled and watched the sky, wondering what its meteor show would look like this year. Sometimes the Geminids passed in dull white streaks. Other years exploding yellow bursts painted the horizon with fire. Scientists said the meteor displays were intensifying every year as Phaeton passed closer to us with each orbit. I wondered as a child how many thousands of years it would take until the sun made ash of Phaeton. After that, how long would it be until space swallowed the remaining debris, and the December sky went dark? Would we even be here still to see such a thing? Not even Reggie, with his great and wandering mind, seemed able to answer this. My father wanted to fly for his community as his people gathered in the mountains to whoop and revel and wait. He wanted to perform. He wanted, I suppose, to make them love him again.

  My mother hated the spectacle but agreed to it, and my father’s notices showed up in the paper every week for the month of November. They were not large, and they were not flashy. There were no images, no color, no accompanying stories, just a simple printed notice in the bottom corner of the last page of the paper. But even the simplicity and the peculiarity of the placement seemed to add to the allure around town.

  Local boatbuilder Arnoux Ames to take to the skies again.

  Join him atop Hatchet Mountain to welcome back the Geminids.

  Around the bay there was a general lifting. The communal ice around our family began to thaw. Arnoux had coordinated his stunt with the return of the meteors, and the brashness of it—a man flying around in the sky backdropped by flashing, aligning his metaphorical reemergence with the return of a group of heavenly bodies—was outlandish and oddly intoxicating. It was a transparent ploy. Some simply wanted to celebrate. Others came to stare in grotesque wonder at the spectacle of one man’s bravado. Others came in hopes of seeing a stunning fall. I believe others were simply ready to love us again and quietly hoped this might provide tha
t chance. Normalcy, after all, is a return to breathing.

  In town the steady buzz of chainsaws let us know the Geminids were near. Giant piles of autumn deadfall were sawed up and skidded up the mountain. Fiddles and guitars and mandolins were restrung and polished and tuned and checked again. We wouldn’t lament the shift toward winter. We would dance and celebrate in fevered appreciation of Gemini, a constellation that had for centuries guided eastern sailors and fishermen safely home across the hungry sea.

  My father did everything legally. He had the plane meticulously inspected by an aviation outfit in Bangor. He filed flight plans with the municipal airport. He calculated his flight time, his fuel consumption, and coordinated his aerial maneuvers. He purchased and installed new radio equipment. He abandoned his rough landings in fields and meadows and clearings and made plans to both depart and land at the municipal airfield, which was to monitor his flight as well via its radio system. I didn’t know my father knew how to do any of this anymore.

  Early in the afternoon, on a cold bright clear December day, we headed up Hatchet Mountain. Grills were heated. Beans and casseroles put on to warm. At dusk the bonfire, which was twenty feet tall, was lit. The flames seemed endless. They turned the stars red. Swallowed the mountain pines at their back. Music started to slip out into the air, a tentative note here, a harmony note there.

  At first I didn’t watch my father’s flight. I was too scared. I wanted to be proud of him, but I couldn’t bring myself to risk looking up. What if by looking up, I caused some disaster? My brothers were staring into the sky. My mother made eye contact with me. Pride and anger filled her face. She nodded at me to let me know it was okay to look wherever I wanted. I listened to the gasps and murmurs around me. There must have been five hundred people up there, and I didn’t want to be near any of them. I wandered away from the crowd, over to the edge of the woods, still refusing to look up. I hadn’t been there long when Wren came across the meadow and sat down beside me in the dark.

  Applause and hollering answered the whining engine as the plane zipped back and forth overhead. “Fools,” Wren finally said. “If they skipped the fire, they could see the meteors better.”

  Wren sounded very tired and sad. I’d hardly seen her at all since she helped us escape that night on the water. She opened her mouth to speak again but seemed to collapse under the effort. She put her hand down on top of mine, and not knowing what else to do, I tipped my head onto her shoulder.

  “I’ll stay right here,” she said. “You should look up. It’ll be okay.”

  Overhead the Geminids had begun to streak, little pins of yellow tracing across the sky. My father made a few more passes through the night. I knew from the applause and the shouting that it was done, and that nothing awful had happened. I exhaled fully, and Wren squeezed my hand. I watched the plane disappear over the hills, imagined my father cautiously landing it at the airport on the far side of town, where Reggie would be waiting to pick him up.

  “They’re all mesmerized,” I said, looking out at the gathered crowd. Flames shimmered through the trees. People were singing and whooping. They would do so for hours still, waiting for the meteors to reach their peak.

  Galen and Grace, Simon and Link, my mother and even Lyman. They were all staring up at the sky. “Everyone is,” I said.

  “And you’re not.” Wren smiled. Her teeth were white against the dark. “The boy who thought himself above the cosmos.”

  “Nice title.” I smirked. “Where have you been?”

  “Around. Not that it’s your business,” Wren snapped. Then she let her head rest against my own, and I suppose I loved her for it all, and had honestly loved her for a long time.

  “Sorry.”

  “Don’t do that,” she said. “I’m tired of people saying empty things like ‘I’m sorry,’ or ‘Interesting,’ or ‘How’s the weather?’ when they don’t have anything better to say.”

  “Okay,” I said. “I missed you.”

  “That’s much better. That’s almost sweet.” She lifted our hands and brought them into her lap as she rubbed the cold from my fingers. “He’s going to be okay, your dad,” she said. “So is mine. I think I believe that.”

  “Because it’s true?”

  “No, because I need it to be true. All this between our families.” She gestured over the mountain and the sky and the river and the woods and the distant sea. “It really scares me.”

  I brushed her wrist with just the tip of my thumb. “Me too,” I said. Wren turned my hand over and traced the veins and lines along my palm. I felt my dread leaving my body, and I became aware then of how close we were to each other. Her hair smelled faintly like garden dirt. She was chewing mint gum, and I could see the sweat along her neck from the fire.

  “Were you really going to rob your dad?” I laughed.

  “Oh Christ, I don’t know. Probably. Maybe. You would bring that up now. I thought he was going to kill you both. But if he caught me with you, I knew he wouldn’t hurt anyone.”

  “Then he could stay with you.”

  She wiped at her face. “Something like that. I know it’s silly. He hardly talks to us anymore. He comes and goes to work, moves around the house, does laundry, takes the garbage out, cares for his birds, and he’s somewhere else the whole time.”

  I understood. I had seen my father become an apparition as well. “They’ll come back.”

  “I hope so.” Wren pressed her lips to the top of my head. Then she kissed my eyes and then my mouth.

  “We should probably be celebrating or something,” I said when we moved apart. In the distance the notes of a mandolin danced around the fire.

  “I think we’re exactly where we should be,” she whispered. “You could have come found me.”

  “I didn’t want to presume.”

  “Someone always has to come to someone.”

  There was a great question in her eyes, and then it was gone. She took my face between her palms and kissed me more firmly. I closed my eyes and kissed her back. It felt easy. She rolled my bottom lip between her lips and bit it lightly, and I did the same, and we stayed there with our foreheads touching and our breath moving together. She pushed my hands down against her thighs and pushed her fingers up under my coat. When she traced my nipple with her thumb, I gasped into her mouth and could feel her smiling before she pulled away.

  “Not here,” she said. “Not with all this. Do you want to know the truth?”

  “Yes.”

  “My father wanted your mother. Maybe he still does. And I think he hates her for it, like his desire is somehow her fault. And I guess part of me hates him for being that kind of man. You always think your dad will somehow be better.”

  I stopped short of telling her I knew exactly what she was talking about. I thought of my own father and his sudden violence on the dock, the way he’d delivered such menace and pain with such chilling composure, the way he had, in a few terrible moments, ceased being human to me. “I’m sorry” was all I could say.

  Wren put her head on my shoulder this time. “So am I,” she said.

  I pulled a coat over us both and remembered my mother’s words at the ghost apples—Young love needs tenderness, it needs a lot of protecting—as we watched the bonfire blaze beneath the Geminids.

  Part IV

  Fourteen

  Snow fell early that year, collecting overnight in great, suffocating banks that squeezed our houses. Windows rattled. Roofs shifted and groaned. Front doors met wet and sticky resistance when pushed outward in the mornings. The snow came unrelentingly, forty-eight inches in the third week of December alone, and for long stretches of time people were sealed in, entombed. Snow in the branches, snow in the creeks, snow in the marshes, snow in the distance, snow in the cracks of the world. For two months the temperature hardly rose above ten degrees. Some days the sun seemed dangerously bright in the thin, dry air. Heavy orange light, eerie in its absence of heat, layered the world until dusk, when purple shadows darkened the l
and. Other days an iron gauze seemed pulled across the sky. The roads became avenues of packed snow and ice. The snow got so high so fast we had to slide out an upstairs window and drop down into the yard to shovel. When the snows stopped and people dug free, the fog began rolling in from the sea. It blanketed the hills and coiled about houses, erased children tottering down the streets with their parents, choked brick storefronts and swallowed cars trying to pass through its belly.

  In the fog Wren and I searched for and often found each other. We passed about town unknown and out of sight, finding empty houses with musty bedrooms, and for a few short weeks it was as if we were inhabiting a mysterious, unknown world.

  Exhausted finally by the antics of my father and Lyman, talk turned again to the fire. Many assumed the arsonists had headed south or north, fleeing the state. Some thought they’d never be found. Others wondered if they’d ever existed. Talk started about tricks, about dark magic, devilcraft. Then a pair of hikers came across a set of moose tracks that disappeared mid-step at the base of Hatchet Mountain. Suddenly the ghostly fugitives were very much alive again.

  My mother had reached her limits around foolish rumor. The air show had placated many. Papers were selling. Calls about boats trickled down through the woods. This treading-lightly nonsense would do no longer. As the rumors intensified, as the slander and the hate again teemed, she again turned to language. Over the course of a month, she published a four-part editorial series that traced the history of tribal rights, treaties, and land claim settlements in the state; explored the environmental exploitation of the river; considered the collapse of the timber industry and the economic devastation wrought by clandestine mill closures; dared to imagine the look of a postindustrial landscape; and combined the impact of those exploratory threads here in the bay. My mother expected angry readers and canceled subscriptions. None of that happened, and it came as a great shock when Galen Creel showed up at The Lowering Days out of the snow and the fog after the final article was printed.