The Lowering Days

by Gregory Brown

  Link moved to turn off the television, but Simon grabbed his wrist. “Don’t.”

  Our mother had started smoking again. She went days without speaking. When she left the house to do errands, she insisted on going alone. And when she was at the house, she mostly stayed in her bedroom with the door closed, or up in the small attic full of Christmas decorations and boxed-up toys and clothes, where she didn’t think we would find her. Along the river, everything smelled of ash all the time. She motioned to leave the television on.

  “What will happen to his birds?” I asked. Wren had started to cry. She looked away to hide it. My mother ground the cigarette out on the countertop and walked out into her gardens. By four that afternoon she had uprooted all her peach trees and tossed them into the edge of the woods. In the distance, the ravens croaked and called. Perhaps they understood that their world too had been turned to ash.

  That night Grace went out and replanted the trees and pressed sugar and water into the roots. She sat outside with the trees all night long, speaking to them. In the morning, I asked her what she was doing. “I’m keeping things alive,” she said. Thick black garden dirt streaked the sink.

  Under the weight of grief, life takes on strange shapes. My mother and Grace had always been close, but now, with Lyman in jail and Arnoux gone, they seemed to need each other in a new, powerful way. During the months after the crash, Grace and her family gradually slid into nearly living entirely at our house. Though my mother and Grace rarely spoke, they seemed able to read each other’s thoughts, and I often wondered how much of our togetherness resulted from guilt and how much from love. Lyman had been refused bail. Soon he would be headed to prison. Most nights the TV was quiet. The air grew hot. The world was green and filled with possibility—chortling tree frogs and snapping fireflies and great spinning shows of stars. Our world along the river, though, was still a hole through which you could fall forever.

  Galen and Wren readied for school with us in the mornings and rode to school with us in Grace’s car. But I can remember very little of how they looked or what they said, only that Galen was crippled by night terrors and awful dreams. I would wake from my own heavy dreams to the sound of his yelling. I mostly wished he would shut the fuck up. He was alive, at least. I barely spoke to Wren, even though she never stopped speaking to me, seeking to draw me back into the world. I no longer dreamed about her body. I no longer woke up tasting her lips or neck. Instead we fell into a ghostly orbit of circling each other, returning, passing, never sure where the center was, who was a planet and who was a moon, which direction was the sun and which direction was the cold, dark side of the void.

  Eighteen

  Immortality is a funny thing. My father did not live, but in each of his sons he lived on, albeit in slightly mangled ways. The fall after our father’s death, Simon dropped out of college and moved home. His plan was to complete every one of our father’s unfinished builds. He moved a bed into the office at the marina and started living there. The task took two years. My gentle older brother was gone. What emerged was sharklike—composed, confident, calculating. The new boatyard he would later open, a modern ship-building conglomerate that far surpassed anything our father had dreamed of, was well under way in his imagination. Two years later, Link and I would graduate. I knew then that I would move toward a life in medicine, while Link was spending more and more time hanging around the US Navy recruiter’s office in town.

  “Do you remember my peach tree story?” my mother asked one afternoon.

  We were boxing up shirts and blankets in the house. The photo albums had been packed already. Cardboard boxes and bubble wrap littered the kitchen, waiting for the dishes. Link was going into the military, and I was heading to college. My mother was leaving the river as well. She had decided to close up the house and move into an apartment above The Lowering Days.

  I had long since stopped listening to her tales. I had stopped reading. I had stopped dreaming of the dark shapes of old ancestors and visiting ghost apples and believing in banshees. Like a fool, I thought then that I’d become too old for stories, too smart for fairy tales. In truth grief had slayed my capacity for wonder.

  “Of course,” I conceded.

  Had things gotten any better? My mother was still smoking. When people asked her how she was doing, she screamed at them in the streets, in the grocery store, anywhere and everywhere, until people simply stopped asking. Through it all, The Lowering Days came out each week, never missing an issue. Was that better?

  “Some people give up.” My mother held up a charcoal-gray sweater to the window light. It was my father’s. “They get to a place where they’re ready to go and they go. Other people, they keep wanting to be here, and here they are. So you can stay, but you have to want it.”

  She neatly folded the sweater and placed it in a cardboard box and came across the room. She cupped my face and held me there until my anger had nowhere else to go. I wanted to strike her for leaving. The only reason I didn’t hate her was because of how much I loved her.

  “Don’t be mad,” she said. “I’m not betraying him. I’m not abandoning him.” She waved her hand across the sky, fanned her fingers down the river as it slipped among the woods, around the ghost apple tree, and out into the ocean. “He’s right here still, and he’s coming with me.”

  My mother, Reggie, and Moses drove me from Penobscot Bay with my meager possessions loaded into the back of Moses’s truck. I didn’t understand why it took all of them, and my mother simply brushed away my concerns by saying, “Maybe it’s not about you.”

  I hadn’t thought about that. Instead of asking further, I settled for a general air of sullenness and self-pity. Reggie was driving. We were headed into Canada, where I had decided to study. We should have headed north and then east over the Canadian border. Instead Reggie put his right blinker on, and we veered to the south, heading for Machias Bay and the mouth of the St. Croix River. No detour was surprising with Reggie, so I said nothing.

  “I was hoping you’d get a little mad at least,” my uncle said. “There has to be some type of orientation schedule up there.”

  “Probably,” I mumbled.

  “I need to show you something before you go,” Reggie said.

  “You always did love an agenda,” I scoffed.

  “He means we need to show you something,” Moses added. My mother said nothing. She just stared out the window at the green trees bending past us.

  It took another hour to reach Machias Bay. Moses told me about how it was Passamaquoddy country as we got out and stood shivering on a rocky beach while staring out at the tossing sea. The French had come and established New France just up the coast in 1604. Their first settlement was on an island in the icy jaws of the Bay of Fundy, where the St. Croix River met the ocean. By December of that year the river had frozen solid. The tides rose and fell and smashed the ice until the waters around the island were an impassable field of jagged terrain. Cut off from the mainland, they began to starve.

  “For them it was the lost place,” Moses said. “The Passamaquoddy helped them survive. Then in the spring the French went farther up into what’s now Nova Scotia to start over.”

  I studied the terrain, baffled at the stupidity of trying to colonize a cutoff island in the grip of the Atlantic. They had brought things like gilded dressers and ornate furniture but not bothered with heavy coats, winter boots, or extra provisions. Looking more closely at the shore, I noticed giant slabs of rock with faint carvings etched into the stone.

  “What are they?” I asked.

  “Petroglyphs,” my mother said. It was the first word she had spoken since we left home. “Some of them are three thousand years old.”

  “Shamans used to carve an arc into the rocks,” Moses added, “before the French and other Europeans came. It showed them going up to the spirit world to seek guidance and then coming back down to their people with the knowledge they’d discovered. You saw these arcs, completed journeys, all over the place.
Then Christianity took hold, and they started carving vertical lines instead. Arrows that showed them going up but never coming back.”

  “I can’t do this right now,” I said. My father, the one not with us, hung heavy over the landscape.

  “Death is a circle,” Moses went on. “But they made it a line. Over time the link between the world of the living and the world of the dead got broken in the people’s minds.”

  “Arnoux isn’t some pre-Christian shaman,” I said. “Arnoux is gone.”

  “I know,” Moses said. I felt the world level some with his admission.

  “Maybe some people are more open to possibility than others,” said Reggie.

  I didn’t want to hear what he was talking about. My chest felt hot and tight. I wrapped my arms about my body and shivered at a blast of sea spray. I thought I might cry. It had been years since I’d let anyone see me cry. I realized there was something terribly sad in that truth. “I’m tired of a life where every moment is a lesson.”

  Moses nodded, and Reggie looked away. I thought it was over, until my mother spoke. “You’ve been hard ever since he died,” she said. “If you go away hard, I’m afraid you’ll never come back.”

  Of course she meant more than geographically back. I raised my head and met Moses’s eyes, which were dark and patient. “Your father loved these rocks,” my mother said.

  They would not look away from me, my people. The rocks waited. The roiling ocean waited. The breaking waves never seemed to end, and the wind was a constant battering ram. I shivered, imagining the barrage of a life lived at the edge of the world. I felt suddenly that the coast must have turned itself into rock and cliffs just to survive. Anything else would have been bent in two and broken in half over time. Yet people had persisted here for millennia.

  Moses traced his hand along one of the larger stones. An image took shape under his fingers. Moments before, the rock had seemed smooth and gray and in no way unusual. It was like confronting anything that exists closer to another world, say the life of a bird or the consciousness of a tree: once I saw the truth of the stone, I could not stop seeing it.

  “They call this spirit the Meda,” Moses said of the image. It was the rough shape of a face with large eyes and long ears hanging down to the sides. It had no mouth.

  “The pictures don’t show themselves to everyone,” he said. “It was not a lost world for the Europeans, but a hidden world. This picture?” Moses questioned. “You know it.”

  I suddenly remembered an old story my father told about a man with extraordinary powers. He had long ears that heard everything and large eyes that saw anything. In the story he didn’t need to speak to know everything that was happening. Now he was here before me in the stone.

  “I had forgotten,” I managed.

  My mother quietly took my hand. “That will happen from time to time.”

  “That’s why we’re here,” added Reggie. “To remind you.”

  I was embarrassed, ashamed, and enraged at the spectacle. I was also grateful to be here with all of them, though my father was gone, and the truth of that absence seemed to cover the entire sea, stretching from whitecap to whitecap, until I could no longer ignore it. I hugged Moses and then my uncle and finally my mother.

  We decided to camp that night on a small island not far off the shore, surrounded by more petroglyphs, which seemed to emerge everywhere we looked. As we crossed the darkening water by canoe, my mother pointed out a great blue heron doing aerial maneuvers under the full moon.

  I had the acute sense that a period of time in all our lives was ending. I pointed to one of the drawings beside our campsite. “When did Dad find these?”

  “A long time ago,” my mother said. “Before you were born. We came here looking for your father’s father. A man who had known him put us up for a few days. He told us stories. Said it had been a hard life for your grandfather. He said he talked about his kid a lot but never knew him. The man said he drank too much. That he never got over your grandmother’s car going off that cliff. The man said he’d lost touch with your grandfather and that he could be anywhere now—working road crews still, in jail, building boats, dead. Then the man brought us here before we went home.” My mother went quiet then. I could tell she didn’t want to leave the memory. “He said it had been one of the only places your grandfather ever seemed at peace.”

  “Arnoux was fascinated by this stuff after that,” Reggie added. “He’d come into the hotel for lunch and start telling me about shamans who had access to both good and evil spirits. He told me about different books on petroglyphs. Asked me to go to the folklore archives in Orono with him to do research. He said they could leave their bodies behind and travel from this world into others. Sometimes the other world detained them, evil spirits tricked them. Sometimes they couldn’t get back to their people.”

  It hurt to learn something new about my father after he was gone. There were so many things I wanted to ask him. Moses seemed to sense my sadness and put an arm around my shoulders. “He would have brought you here himself,” Moses said. “He just ran out of time.”

  Reggie rose, walked through the moonlight, and pressed a key into my hand. I knew it was to the cabin at East Grand. “You don’t lock it,” I said.

  “You can start if you want.” Reggie gripped my shoulder. “You’ll have a place to go now to decide if you believe in arrows or arcs.”

  “The ones who could go between worlds,” I said. “What happened if they stayed away too long?”

  “They sat in a trance until they starved,” my mother whispered. “They died.”

  “But what happened to their souls?”

  “That’s the great mystery, sweetie.”

  Part V

  Nineteen

  I woke up this morning full of the belief that three fried eggs and a good ten-mile hike up some remote and deep-wooded mountain would cure all the ills I’d ever known. It was a very good plan, simple like the best ones. The woodstove was crackling in the semidark. The frosty cabin windows looking out on East Grand Lake had begun brightening with the day when the phone I try to ignore started buzzing. When I answered, I was knocked from the present and flung into the past. What type of world is it where a tiny electronic device can overturn our realities with such devastating ease?

  I had not heard Wren’s voice in six months, when we’d gone out to Nova Scotia for a weekend trip, eaten far too much cheese, drank far too much beer, and hiked all over the barren cliffs of the Annapolis Valley. We’d traveled down to coastal Queens to visit the rural community of Mill Village and the surrounding forests, which held the ruins of an abandoned Teleglobe satellite ground station Wren had read about years ago. In those old woods we stood among decommissioned radio satellites being swallowed by moss, amazed the giant discs had held a thirty-year-long conversation with space. Then we traveled back north, listening to Acadian fiddlers at bars and roadhouses all along the way. Again we joked about making love, both of us having slipped into a state of what seemed like perpetual bachelordom, but chose not to mess things up, feeling perhaps after all these years that the boundary was firmly here to stay, and that perhaps it was the boundary that would keep us together for the rest of our lives.

  The voice on the line was not the voice I had heard just six months ago, though. It was Wren’s voice from our youth, high in timbre and low in control, the exact opposite of the instrument into which her voice had matured. It made me want to be young with her again, and the shock and power of that realization caused my throat to close and my hand to release the cast-iron skillet I was transferring from stovetop to countertop. I was no longer standing in a camp kitchen I’d known all my life, frying eggs and dreaming of the mountains in early spring. I was in Wren’s house, looking at six perfectly round and smooth blue stones. I was atop a mountain with the Geminids streaking overhead. I was on the Little River, hollowed out with grief and dreaming of an airplane that never stopped falling through the sky.

  “Are you crying?�
�� I asked.

  “Actually,” she said, “the ten seconds we’ve been on the phone is the only time I’ve stopped crying in the last two days.”

  The news was that Lyman Creel had died in prison. With my plunge through time, I realized I was not just sad for Wren, but sad for myself. What a hammer to the throat, to stand with a black iron pan rattling around at your feet and your favorite teenage voice sounding in your ears as you realize that you too will mourn a man you should have hated but never could.

  “He’d been sick for a long time,” Wren said.

  “People always say that, ‘He’d been sick for a long time.’” I struggled to hide my anger, shocked at how suddenly it rose.

  “It happens that way sometimes. It’s no one’s fault.”

  “I didn’t know.”

  “I didn’t tell you.”

  “Sorry,” I said, reading the edge in Wren’s voice. “I’m being an ass,” I said. “I’m just shocked.”

  “That he’s dead, or that you didn’t know?”

  “I’m not sure.”

  “I didn’t want to tell you.”

  “You should have. I could have—”

  “Helped?”

  “Maybe. What’s so wrong with that?”

  “Nothing. I’m not mocking you, David. I didn’t want to burden you. You have your own life. You can’t be managing the lives of others and trying to forestall the inevitable.”

  “I’m a doctor.”

  “And you couldn’t have done a damn thing, though you’d have gone crazy thinking you could.”

  She was right. Wren is a cosmologist at McGill University. She does research on time and the relationship between different types of matter and teaches a few classes up in Montreal. Wren does not see the world through a simple lens, and she decries the simplicity of my doctrine—we’re here to keep people here—as an unrealistic and impossibly sentimental value cribbed from an incomplete understanding of my father, who I was never able to get to know as an adult. Wren says this philosophy confirms I’ve yet to have an original thought in my life, which may be true, but of course is a hyperbolic viewpoint. Having loved her in various iterations since we were fourteen years old, I’m of course compelled to listen with great attentiveness to every word she says. “You may be right,” I always tell her. “But I still believe doing the right thing, whether it’s legally, philosophically, or scientifically defensible, is better than doing the original thing.” To this she just rolls her eyes or hangs up the phone. Wren thinks my morality around all this is somehow about male ego and, though largely disgusting, also slightly noble as well. I’m too close to it all to confirm or disavow her suspicions.