Grief's Country

by Gail Griffin

  Cove and sound, mountain and tree line, sky and sun, converge in the bird, wheeling around it. It is the morning’s center point, the pivot of the universe. A phrase of T. S. Eliot’s slips into my mind—“The still point of the turning world.”

  . . . at the still point, there the dance is,

  But neither arrest nor movement. And do not call it fixity, Where past and future are gathered. Neither movement from

  nor towards,

  Neither ascent nor decline. Except for the point, the still point, There would be no dance, and there is only the dance.

  I feel the present, in which I have cowered for two heavy years, expand to dimensions beyond time. And yet the present is all there is, this stunned moment.

  Before the beginning and after the end.

  And all is always now.

  To get to this still point of land, in time, has cost me everything.

  The heron has moved up the strand. Herons nest in pairs but generally fish alone; this is a solo fisher, its solitude essential to its business and beauty. It stands for long spells at the shifting juncture of sea and land as if it were entirely alone in the landscape while connected to everything, occupying its place as a perfect single note occupies the air.

  Eventually, the day begins to move.

  Always/Now

  Later I root out the owner of the cottage and give her a deposit for a month next summer. It is not until the islands are behind me and I am back home that I recognize I have bought into the future—a small, rarified chunk of it, yes, but futurity it is. I have pledged that I will leave home again, and that I will look and live forward. I’ve put money on it, money I’m privileged to have. Through the dark midwestern winter I will carry in mind a tall, singular bird at the center of a morning.

  I don’t know that the heron my mother saw meant anything to her beyond the small thrill of seeing unusual wildlife in the suburbs. Its loneness may well have spoken to her. She may have carried it in her imagination, hoping to spot it again every time she drove down Fourteen Mile, but it’s equally likely she forgot it. Her heron lodged in my memory, drawing meaning as my mother’s life became clearer to me. It came to represent something singular in her, in every sense of that word, something apart from her circumstances. She was widowed twice, married three times, insisting that she was “a man’s woman.” But I always think of her as distinct and separate, and full of grace. What she wanted most for me was to be able to stand on my own in whatever winds blew through my life. So I try for that. I rummage through the jumble of myself for something like a bird balanced on the edge of time, patient as the sun, waiting for the approach of what it seeks.

  Bodies of Water

  The living walk by the edge of a vast lake

  near the wise, drowned silence of the dead.

  —Carol Ann Duffy, “Eurydice”

  You slipped around the bend in the river, just past our property line. I wonder what caught you there, downriver—the neighbors’ dock, tall weeds, a fallen tree? I can’t think about that. The woods were filled with men in drab uniforms, lunging dogs, people in wetsuits who finally found you after an hour. Then another hour of trying to drive life back into your body. I can’t think about that. And then, just past midnight, everything stopped. Stop. Stop.

  *

  Water signs, both of us: you were Aquarius. “Slippery,” you grinned. True: behind the convivial façade you were elusive, allusive, hard to grasp or hold still. You even spoke in codes. But Aquarius is not the water itself but the water bearer, bringer of life, douser of fires, quencher of thirsts. I am Cancer, awkward, overprotected, eye-beads peering out from under a carapace, scuttling away under the waves.

  *

  I am sitting on a sunny rock high above a bend in the river, and you are wading downstream, casting out your line. You move across the singing current, into and out of shadow. You cast, watch the bobber ride the water, reel in; you turn, assessing the stream, and cast again. I see it all, your composure and stillness, your deep integrity. The landscape—high bluffs, shining sky, rushing water—coalesces around you.

  Is this the day you tell me about the long, dark thing swimming upriver, coming straight toward you? You froze, and at the last instant it veered around you and moved on.

  *

  In the blur of that night, I remember clearly standing at the edge, looking down the high bank, muddy and root-veined. Always I had found that bank a little scary, and now I knew absolutely that I was about to slide down it into the river. Because if I didn’t, I could never say I looked for you. What if you were down there, just below me, and I didn’t look? And so I sat and slid. The water was colder than I expected and the current swifter, seizing my feet. I slipped underwater, as if I might meet you there. But I knew better. I knew better before I left the bank. You were somewhere else. And this water was not where I belonged. A low tree offered a finger of a branch, and I took it. Once again the imperative: You will have to live. And the concession: I will. I will.

  *

  I kept wanting the testimony of love, and always you offered the same story: you are coming off the river at the end of a fall day, wet and tired, creel holding a brown trout. You climb the bank and begin trudging back to your car, the ugly liver-colored Olds that rode so close to the ground I was afraid you’d bottom it out crawling back roads and over railroad tracks. And suddenly a wind raises a cyclone of leaves before you like a golden waterspout, whirling and dazzling, and you think of me.

  And for you, that was the story. For a long time I heard it as a preface, wanting something more. Finally I understood: the light, the end of day, the weariness, the river behind you, the rapture of the leaves by the wind, my sudden appearance in your imagination—there was nothing else.

  *

  Your body is what I cannot think about. I cannot think about your body in the air, having taken one step too far. I cannot think about your body in the water. I cannot think about your body in pain or terror. I cannot think about your body discovered downriver, retrieved, hauled up on land. I cannot think about them trying to resuscitate your body. I cannot think about why I didn’t run to your body and touch you once more and beg you to breathe. But when a stranger called at 1 a.m. to ask what I wanted done with your body, I had to answer. Maybe I said that word cremation so that there would be no body for me not to think about.

  *

  While you interviewed for a job all day in Marquette, I walked along the Lake Superior shore. It was a bright Tuesday, the eleventh of September, and that morning, back at the hotel, I had watched the flaming, gashed towers sink into themselves. Though the images replayed in my mind, it was hard to feel the calamity. The lake was deep indigo, as warm as it would get this year, running in small waves and lapping tamely at the stony strand. The edges of the thick trees were just barely gilded, but they would turn fast. Autumn is early and brief in this latitude. In just a few weeks the ice would begin to close in.

  We wouldn’t see each other until dinner. Then we could share what we knew about New York and Pennsylvania and Washington. I could look into your eyes and feel anchored to the earth. For now, I walked the water’s edge and wondered: would we wind up here together for good? You had once lived here; what would it be for me? Who would I be this far north?

  Tonight we had a cabin booked on a small inland lake. We would pick up steaks on the way out of town. We would watch the sun trail down across the water and drink gin, contemplating the world coming to an end somewhere else.

  *

  Walking down the hall to the funeral director’s office I try to pretend the big ugly house with its great-grandmotherly décor doesn’t exist. None of this is real. This is only another space in time to get through. The man is much more upbeat than he has any right to be and I let my sister-in-law do most of the talking. I take in the model urns on the shelves, vaguely recognizing that someday I will probably laugh about the one with the antlers. This is northern Michigan. The man gives me more detail about cremation temp
eratures than anyone ever needed to know, as if the technicalities were fascinating. I wonder briefly if I am dreaming. Suddenly I think of your ring, your father’s ring on your finger. I can get that for you, says the man and disappears downstairs. And then I understand that you are there, your body is there in the house with me, downstairs with other bodies, and a howl rises, starting small and growing, and I strangle it before it can ring through the dark heavy rooms of what used to be some well-to-do family’s home in Kalkaska, Michigan, in the 1920s.

  *

  I read it in the paper first, that the husband of an acquaintance has gone missing at Asylum Lake. The police have found cross-country ski tracks leading out onto the brittle early-April ice. A week goes by, and another, and still his body does not rise.

  Although I do not know her well, I send a message. I hold a terrible specialized knowledge none of her friends will have. I never thought it would have a use.

  She is Japanese, and I remove my shoes before entering her house. The house is spare and clean. We sit at the dining room table. She gives me tea and chocolate cookies. Our intimacy is at once tenuous and fierce. It is purposeful, pragmatic. She asks me questions about drowned bodies, autopsies, cremation, American funerals and funeral homes. About counseling, about grieving.

  I know more than I tell her. I know water, how it draws bodies down and how it yields them up, and I know the dark place between, the hopeless waiting. Here in this quiet, sunny house, we speak while the April afternoon goes on at some distance. We hold tears just behind our eyes.

  “Do you think I am a strong person?” she asks, as if I can provide some measure she can use. “I think I am a very strong person.” We are drinking a pungent ginger tea she orders specially. She gives me two packets to take home.

  I think we are all strong persons, for all the good it does us.

  We have never before touched, but at her door we hold each other for a long minute. Outside I put on my shoes and walk to the car through the bright afternoon. I breathe it in. Spring, finally.

  *

  The dark-gray vinyl container sits on a bookshelf in my living room. Occasionally I give it a sideways upward glance so that I don’t learn to avoid it, endowing it with power. I wait for some idea to take hold.

  And then one day, three years down the road, it’s suddenly obvious.

  With the container on the floor of the back seat, I drive for two days: around Lake Michigan into Indiana, around Chicago, north through Wisconsin into Duluth, and finally up the north shore of Superior toward the Canadian border.

  On this August day the massive inland sea that broke the Fitzgerald like a stick is pond-placid, clear as a wide eye, warm enough to wade. Inside the gray container is a plastic bag. When I empty it into the water, a milky ring forms around me, widening then slowly sifting down to the clean red and gray stones at the bottom. I give you to the greatest of lakes, Mother Superior, the only thing I know that is big enough to hold you.

  *

  Last night in a dream I returned to the river. I went there with someone else, to show where it happened. I was very calm, dispassionate. And as I’d expected, there was evidence: thin parallel lines, about two feet apart, down the bank to the water, as if I’d gone down on a sled; and next to the big white pine, some trace of where you went in, some object I didn’t see clearly or don’t remember. Maybe your slipper, as impossible for me to look at in my dreamscape as it was in wakefulness. I pointed out these traces to the person with me like someone conducting a tour of an interesting crime scene. I was miraculously whole and untouched, in a world where disaster leaves tracks and the earth does not forget.

  The Messenger

  In a dream a few years back, I was walking from the kitchen of a house into its garage. From the corner of my eye I saw, up on a shelf or rafter, a huge white owl. It spread its great wings and swooped down on me, waking me to my own thudding heart.

  I knew instinctively that the owl meant death. I felt it, heavy and powerful, coming for me. At this time I was well into middle age, lacking any real belief in the supernatural but always longing for it, as literary people often yearn for a world of symbol and meaning worthy of the one that words create. Despite knowing nothing then about owl symbolism, I was unnerved by the fierce clarity of the dream, the absolute specificity of the owl’s direction. But my life rolled on. Then, a couple of years later, my mother, just shy of ninety, was suddenly unable to recover her breath. Something deep in her lungs resisted even analysis, much less treatment. At her firm request the tubes and machines were removed, and she died peacefully, as I held her hand.

  Her death was breathtaking, exactly like the downward swoop of the owl. It swept the world like a sudden great wind. In its quiet wake, I contemplated my path. I considered the world without her, reeling without its axis. A week after her death I was driving north with Bob, heading to the cabin for Christmas. I don’t think I had ever known such bone-deep exhaustion, the kind that settles in only after extraordinary tension abates. Watching the silvered fields and trees fly past, I thought how unmoored I was, how free.

  Four years later, on an eerily dark New Year’s Day, we were northbound again in the same car, feeling a slightly different kind of exhaustion. The previous morning we had been married. The sole shadow on the day, for me, was cast by my mother’s absence. She’d probably resigned herself to my never marrying; she didn’t seem to care much. But I think she would have enjoyed seeing her fifty-something kid walk down an aisle, particularly with a man she liked a lot.

  We settled into the cabin and the long, white months passed quietly. One dark morning, as the winter began to melt, we were eating breakfast when Bob quietly said, “Look.”

  Outside the back door, on the deck, stood a big hawk. It was perched immediately over a chipmunk haven, biding its time. But it was staring straight into the house. Its obsidian bead of an eye was trained precisely on us. I had never seen a hawk that low, or that close. Until you look at a raptor that is looking back at you, you don’t really know what it is to be seen. I watched, mesmerized, wondering what exactly it was that the bird saw.

  That was March, I think. And then came the night in early May when Bob vanished and I felt my whole life drain out of me like blood.

  *

  Five days later, back home in Kalamazoo, as my car was being unloaded, Scout came sauntering around the side of the house. He’d stayed downstate that year, in a house sitter’s care. He acknowledged my return as he does, as cats do—with interest and the head rub around the ankles that plants scent, claiming us, which we translate as love. Nothing like the embarrassment of ecstasy a dog demonstrates. I remember bending to pet him—he hated being picked up—in a dreamlike state. I could manage minimal motions, minimal communication. “Scout,” I said. “Hey, Scout,” stroking his white head. He lifted his nose appreciatively. He was the most solid thing I had touched in days. And he was alive, and mine.

  Call him my familiar. The genius loci of my homeplace. Nine years before, as a runty, starving kitten, he was rescued by a student of mine from slathering canine jaws beside a busy street. From the first, his personality was intense, an italicized version of the weird duality of cats: soft, comical, heat-seeking domestic creatures and strange, unknowable, untamed Others. One takes refuge in your house; the other resists his captivity. Scout was needy, affectionate, responsive, running home (if he felt like it) when I whistled and called him, galumphing downstairs to welcome me home. He was also diffident, elusive, grouchy, and potentially violent, suddenly going after my hand, teeth and claws bared, with zero provocation, ears laid back and nothing in his eyes but killer instinct. He emanated both the vulnerability and the feistiness of the runt. Through him I came to know yin and yang in some relation other than contradiction.

  True to his bipolarity, Scout made it very clear from the get-go that while he was happy to have a home, he was not about to live his life indoors. I knew only that to keep him in cost both of us too much. He also quickly and fir
mly established that he was a hunter, hardwired to stalk and spring, stretch out and run low like a miniature puma. So, having put a bell on his collar to assuage my conscience, I recalled Tennyson’s line about nature red in tooth and claw, gritted my teeth, and opened the door—over and over again. I applauded the mole and vole corpses, I lamented the chipmunks. But the feathers on the back step—those I grieved.

  To “have” an animal: whatever it means, it means an intimacy with death—in that which our animals kill, or that which waits to kill them. Dog people are mostly buffered from it by all that trainability and unconditional love. Bird people keep it caged. Cat people see it in the eyes of their familiars on a daily basis.

  *

  Four years after that surreal homecoming, as another lush summer broke over the upper Midwest, I was reading on the porch one night. Around 10:00, I looked up to see Scout tearing toward the house, his mouth barely containing something gleaming in the dark, huge and white. Bigger than his head. Almost bigger than his body. Before I could reach the swinging cat door, he sailed through it onto the porch, where he dropped a massive pile of pale gray and white feathers, facedown. He stalked around it, agitated, with that look in his eyes that I’d seen before after a kill: hypnotized. Not fierce or fiery, but entranced. As if he were seeing something eons beyond this night, doing the bidding of something invisible to both of us.