Barefoot to Avalon

by David Payne

  I was quiet for a bit after he said that.

  –I hope so, George A. Listen. Hear that?

  In the middle distance, below the culvert, the brook, a trickle over big stones.

  –Sounds familiar, he said, smiling.

  –Does, doesn’t it? I said, smiling back.

  A lefty, George A. stabbed out his Winston in his right hand and tucked the jar lid in the mulch beneath the blueberries. He put an arm around my shoulder and hugged me, and I kissed him on the hair above his ear the way I did when he was four and I was seven.

  –Sleep tight, buddy.

  –You too, David.

  After he went in, I sat out a little longer and thought about the day I first came here in 1988. Thirty-three and living in Manhattan, I’d just sold my second book and gone from struggling to make rent to shopping for apartments. One weekend on a visit up here, I thought what the hell and called a realtor, and though land wasn’t what I sought, he took me to see a fifty-acre parcel on the lower slope of Northeast Mountain outside a little town called Wells. Five miles up an enclosed and wooded gravel road, the landscape suddenly opened into a hidden valley a half-mile wide and a mile long that held the late-day sunlight like a little bowl holds water. On the right as we advanced was a pond fed by a brook that came from higher up and around the pond a meadow full of black-eyed Susans, daisies, Joe Pye weed and chickory. Over the ledge, the land stair-stepped to a second higher meadow that beetled over the town road, and above that, the mountain disappeared into a low cloud bank. As I looked up I felt the hair rise on my back and a little current arcing, and then the realtor put his Wagoneer in four-wheel and drove me up to the top meadow, and we got out on that height and as I looked out to the west, through a small gap I could see the Adirondacks in blue profile fifty miles away. Standing there with me, this garrulous Irish fellow—who’d probably seen this happen scores of times with other ­clients—had the good sense to keep quiet. Dusk was falling and the wind picked up and I heard it rustling in the treetops and the brook murmuring over stones as it came down Northeast Mountain, and something in me remembered summer nights in the gray-shingled house in Henderson with George A. in the bunk below me when we kept the windows open and Ruin Creek whispered in the creekbed down below us. It came to me, This is where the house goes, and I was lost then just that quickly.

  I dreamed the house and built it and wrote the novel I called Ruin Creek about George A. and me, and Bill, our father, and Margaret, our mother, when we were still a family and believed that family love is stronger than time or death, except it wasn’t. Love was like the sunlight on the surface of the iceberg; beneath, some dark force was operating in the underwater portion, and it was stronger than love and we were scattered by it.

  And now Stacy and I had been scattered in our turn and to try to save it, I was giving up the house and land I loved and had made out of my life’s work.

  I think you’re doing the right thing, George A. said.

  I hope so.

  In my mind’s eye I saw Grace, her little face looking back at me over her mother’s shoulder. At fifteen months she started walking and I began to take her with me out on the old logging trails where Stacy had never been much interested in going. I showed Grace the secret glade beneath the hemlocks, where we sat in silence and listened as the wind blew through the treetops. And often in the sodden leaf mold, Grace with her keen eye picked out the hidden life, the orange newts that lived there under fallen logs, creatures I’d never noticed. Grace studied them with thrilling focus, reached down and picked them up with no fear, watched them crawl over her hands and then put them back respectfully. And as I watched her something tightened in my chest, I had difficulty breathing, my heart was pierced with some new feeling, something urgent, I didn’t know what to call it, regret or grief or fear, but that feeling had something to do with selling out and going, and up there with her when the wind blew through the treetops I seemed to hear its voice speaking, trying to tell me something.

  And a curious thing is that not long before I picked George A. up in Albany, I was mowing the lawn in Wells on my red Wheel Horse tractor and in my mind’s eye I saw two men in a room facing off at gunpoint, and one was white, one black, and the white man held a gun, and there was nothing left except for him to walk away or pull the trigger. They were from different times, I sensed, and had taken some sort of impossible journey—inward, or back in time, or both—to arrive in this room together. And somehow they were brothers, this black man and this white man, and their dispute concerned a woman. The white brother had lost her. And in the moment just before he pulls the trigger, the white man realizes that the black man is himself, that if he pulls the trigger, he, the shooter, dies too—not symbolically or metaphorically. Literally dies.

  That scene is on a Zip disk in the drive bay of my computer, where I’ve left it for safekeeping in the rear of the Explorer. It’s November 7 now, it’s 9 P.M., the polls have closed, we’re in the yard, the truck is packed, and George A., at the wheel, sits smoking in the greenish backwash from the panel with the trailer on the hitch I didn’t think we’d need when he flew up last week and didn’t even think we’d need this morning.

  As he collapses into the driver’s seat, reaching for the Winstons he’s been smoking on the porch all week, I walk backward down the hallway with the mop, like an Indian with a swag of pine, erasing a decade’s worth of tracks from the house I thought I’d grow old in. Now this will be just another place I’ve left, I think as I switch the lights off. And as I place the keys under the steps and stand, I catch the hay scent in the humid, unseasonably warm air, together with that hint of something inorganic. As I smell it, something wild and desperate stabs me, so unfamiliar I struggle for the name and finally call it grief.

  Opening the Explorer’s hatch to stow the mop, I see the last, most fragile items in cloudy Bubble Wrap—the Staffordshire greyhound from my great-aunt with the bloody rabbit in its teeth, my diplomas, the framed letter from my first editor—and something makes me take them out of the Explorer and place them in the truck with me. Framed posters of my books are there, along with our household electronics, including my PC with that Zip disk in the drive, the one I’ve left there for safekeeping and will find in the debris field on November 8. Tomorrow.

  Tonight, I close the hatch and tap the driver’s-side window, and George A., surprised, drops the Winston to his lap reflexively, as though to hide what I already see. I motion him to roll down the window, and when he does, I lean in on an elbow.

  –Ready?

  –Whenever you are, he says.

  Looking at the Winston glowing on his thigh, I almost say something about my pristine ashtray.

  –Thanks, George A., I choose instead.

  –It’s no big deal.

  –No, seriously, man, I say. I couldn’t have done this without you. You’re a good brother.

  These are words he hasn’t heard from me in quite some time. He contemplates them for a beat and then he raises the Winston to his lips.

  –It’s okay, David, he says.

  As the Winston brightens near his face, his features press into the darkness in the cab—the high cheekbones and strong chin, the black, pelt-thick hair already threaded, at forty-two, with silver. The dim light conceals the two black eyes—like a fighter who’s staggered on the ropes night after night—the tremor in his hands. He was so good-looking once, and splendid physically, with his broad shoulders and warm, dark eyes. He reminded me of a young Clark Gable, only the confidence in Gable that flirted with conceit and smugness was in George A. nuanced, sly and sweet. For a moment in the cab’s deceptive light, he resembles that other person, the boy and young man in that picture on the beach, the photo I think of as Before, as in before his illness, and have carried with me and put out in every house I’ve ever lived in.

  “It’s okay, David.”

  The truth is, I don’t make that
much of it at the time. It’s hours later than we meant to start, and I’m dirty, stressed, and tired, on the verge of leaving everything I’ve taken as my life. I simply squeeze his shoulder, turn away, and whistle up Leon, my brindled hound, who gains the high seat of the truck with one lithe spring, and we set off, riding the groaning brakes of our unfamiliar, overloaded rigs downhill.

  Only later does it nag me that George A. didn’t say, “You’re a good brother, too,” or “You’ve helped me in the past, so I help you,” or any of the countless other things he might have said. What he says is, “It’s okay, David,” not resentfully, but like someone at the end of a long contest, who’s been on the receiving end of something and is ready to forgive it.

  And I knew George A. was sick, but, looking back, it strikes me that the fundamental image of him I still carried in my heart was of the boy who’d run beside me barefoot to the pier and could have beat me on any given outing. If he was no longer that person, I wanted it to be his fault for giving up too early or Margaret’s for enabling him to do it. I wanted him to try a little harder, for there to be another angle, another way to run the numbers and not have to accept that my little brother had run as long and hard and far as he was able and was going to and the race was over, there was never going to be another, better chapter. If I’d looked more closely at those tremors and those smudges, I might have seen that the black gods had touched and marked him with a finger, and I’d have said, What’s one more day? It’s late, we’re tired, let’s go in and look at it again tomorrow when we’re clearer.

  But I didn’t.

  We speak later on that night at a rest stop in New York State, where George A. tells me he’s tired and needs to turn in, and at the motel in Binghamton where we spend the night, and the next morning in the common room of the same Super 8, pouring milk over stale Froot Loops from a cloudy bin. I recall a television blaring overhead—the tide by then has turned his way, for Bush. We gas up once that afternoon and would have spoken there, and again, and finally, at the Taco Bell where we stop for lunch a little after 1 P.M., somewhere off that little stretch of 81 that zips so quickly through Maryland and the West Virginia panhandle before it crosses into the Shenandoah and travels down the flank of the Blue Ridge through endless, high Virginia. We speak in all those places, but I can’t remember what we said. And so those words—“It’s okay, David”—spoken in the dark yard in Wells before we leave must count for me as the last ones my brother ever said.

  As I turn the big truck south on the dirt town road, I check the sideviews for him for the first of many times. Windshield, left mirror, right mirror, windshield, left, right, straight ahead . . . That becomes the rhythm of the drive, and I estimate I checked those mirrors every ten or fifteen seconds for the whole of our five-hour drive that night, and for seven hours the following day, November 8. Four times a minute for twelve hours—almost three thousand times—I look for George A. in the mirror, and he’s there, okay, each time except the last.

  II

  2006

  The way it works is this:

  we devote ourselves to an image

  we can’t live with and try to kill

  anything that suggests it could be otherwise.

  —“It All Comes Together Outside

  the Restroom in Hogansville,”

  James Seay

  2

  September 10, 2006. George A. would be forty-eight today. I’m standing at the kitchen window of our North Carolina house, hungover, at 8:15 A.M., thinking that in a bit I’m going to have to call Margaret to mark the anniversary.

  Stacy and the kids pulled out a little while ago. From the porch, I waved, and Grace and Will, eight and six, returned their somber goodbyes. Stacy, in dark glasses, merely held my stare, ducked into the Odyssey and drove away without a word.

  I’m staring at a set of footprints—I count six—dark green, in the dew-silvered grass outside the window. These proceed from our back steps to the trellis on the shed wall, where a dark stain spreads at the base of the rosebush I planted shortly after George A. died. The sun is warming up, and as the dew evaporates, it looks as if some infernal thing has passed there, leaving smoking footprints.

  After Stacy pulled off, I walked out in the yard and poured my vodka on the rosebush. I left the tracks, apparently, without knowing that I made them. Eliot is playing in my head, the passage from “Burnt Norton” I read Stacy the night we first sat up exchanging thirty-minute kisses and filling ashtrays till the sky grayed in the window.

  Footfalls echo in the memory

  Down the passage which we did not take

  Towards the door we never opened

  And where does the door open? Into the rose garden. And there are my footprints leading to the rosebush.

  I’m superstitious, I admit it. I don’t want to back away from this, though, for it’s as though if I close one eye and regard those footprints through the other, everything is normal. If I reverse and look again, I know I’m in trouble. I am, personally, and we are in our marriage. I don’t know when it even started. Once upon a time I knew it in Vermont, and then George A. died and I fell asleep and have been asleep for six years, and a part of me wants to go on sleeping and another part is bidding, Wake up, David. And perhaps that’s why as soon as Stacy pulled off, I poured my Burnett’s around the rosebush, a brand-new 1.75-liter bottle minus thirteen and a half ounces. That’s how much I polished off yesterday. And, yes, I know the precise figure because some time ago, in the hope of curtailing my consumption, I began to use a jigger, a strategy that hasn’t actually worked, but has made me more informed about my drinking.

  How many times have I dumped my bottle since George A. died up there on that Virginia highway? Five times? Ten? Fifteen’s probably closer. Till today, though, till this moment, it’s never occurred to me to wonder why the rosebush. Why not pour the vodka on that mulberry, those peonies, the cedars nearby in the lane, why not simply down the drain? Like a somnambulist, I’ve been drawn time and again to that specific place by some mysterious gravity. And I suddenly remember Sundays as a boy in Henderson—was it on Easter? On our way to morning service at the Episcopal church, we stopped at the Pine State Creamery on Granite Street. While Bill left the engine running, Margaret—they were Daddy and Mama then—clipped four red roses from the hedge that rioted along the chain-link fence, pinning them to our lapels with straight pins beaded with dark green. Everyone at Holy Innocents wore boutonnieres that day—a red one if your mother was still living, a white one if she wasn’t.

  Not Easter. Mother’s Day.

  And now the phone rings, and it’s Margaret.

  –I was about to call. How are you?

  –Not good, she answers, tearful. How are you?

  –I’ve had better days, but I’m okay. Why are you not good?

  –Why do you think? I miss him. I want him back.

  –I’m sorry, I say.

  –Why should you be sorry? Don’t be sorry, David. You were a good brother to him.

  Was I? I don’t know.

  –Wasn’t it right around now? I say. It seems to me he always got sick around his birthday.

  This is the cue for Margaret to chime in, for the duet to begin. So many of the family stories came down to me this way. But today there’s resistance on the storyteller’s end.

  –What’s the matter? I finally ask. You’re being quiet.

  –I don’t want you writing about this.

  –What do you mean? I’m already writing about it. I told you I was doing this last summer.

  –I know you did, I’m sorry. But I’ve changed my mind. I think it’s exploitative.

  Suddenly I can’t think what “exploitative” means. In my head, that static sound like midnight station sign-off in the old days, one that years of therapy have taught me to call dissociation.

  –It’s disrespectful to your dead brother’s memo
ry, she continues. He’s not here to defend himself. Write something else, something that belongs to you.

  –Wait, I say. This doesn’t belong to me? George A. died in my car, sitting in my seat. I was on that highway with him, no one else. Who does that belong to if not me?

  –I think it belongs to him.

  This stops me.

  –Just him? Not me?

  –That’s what I think.

  I stare out the window. The lawn seems darkened, as though a cloud has passed across the sun. The dew has started to evaporate. I can still make out the footprints, but the path is disappearing.

  And now, unprompted, Margaret fills the silence.

  –I don’t know what you thought I was supposed to do, David. Kick him out on the street? Let him become a homeless person? George A. fought the illness for a long time, as long as he could, and then it defeated him, it just did, and all I knew to do was try to make him comfortable.

  –I know. You think I don’t understand the sacrifice you made? You kept him here for nine years longer than he would have had without you. But it’s more complicated. The story’s not just about George A. and you. It’s about me and Stacy and our children.

  –Then leave your brother out.

  –I can’t.

  –I don’t want you writing about this. I think it’s wrong.

  –Look, I’m feeling ambushed here, I say. I need to hang up now and think this over before one of us says something we’ll regret.

  –I hope you will. I’m sure you’ll make the right decision.

  –I think you mean you think I’ve made the wrong one and you’re sure I’ll come around to yours.

  –I’ll talk to you soon, she says curtly and hangs up.

  In my head, on its constant loop, the old voice is chanting Bad! Wrong! Selfish!

  In my office, I look the word up in my online dictionary.

  Exploitative . . . Exploit . . . To make use of selfishly or unethically.