by Gail Griffin
Over his protests I herded him into the living room and closed the intervening door. Then I bent to examine what I feared was (a) dead, or (b) waiting for its moment to fly into my house, or my face. I couldn’t tell what bird it was or whether it was alive. It was at least a foot wide; I couldn’t imagine how Scout got his little mouth far enough around it to carry it. Its feathers, lush and lovely, fanned out on its wings, opening precise zigzagging patterns of gray from pearl to dove to slate. It didn’t move, but I saw no blood or breakage.
Only one thing to do.
I opened the porch door. Then, very gently, I slid my hands under the wings and lifted it. It filled my hands completely and spilled over. Silken, clean as if it had just been created, it may have been the softest thing I have ever touched. Despite its size it felt nearly weightless, like a cloud. Barely breathing, I slowly carried it outside and then raised it, even more slowly, high enough to look underneath.
The round white face of an owl, motionless, eyes closed. It had to be an adolescent: bigger than a baby but certainly not the size of an adult. I had never seen an owl outside of a book. It was stunningly beautiful. I wanted to look at its ghostly, peaceful face forever, but I was terrified—for it, of it. Who knows what an owl does when it regains consciousness after being traumatized? I laid it on the brick step as softly as I could, facedown again.
I went back inside, closed the door and shut the window with the pet door, released a very chagrined Scout onto the porch, and returned to my book. He paced around, mystified and anxious, sniffing the tile floor for some trace of his enormous achievement.
For a half hour I heard nothing but the usual noises of the night—crickets, car tires. I tried to concentrate on the page before me. Finally, a small ruffling, scritching sound—and then silence. I waited a few more minutes, closed the book, turned off the light, and went to the porch door.
The steps were vacant.
*
If life were as mythic as it should be, I could anticipate a day when I would find myself in some kind of peril from which I would be rescued by a familiar-looking owl. But possibly some version of that was what happened on the porch. The night spirit Scout snagged was also the fatal white specter from my dreams. In the preceding years it had indeed come for me, in a variety of forms, finally in its own lustrous feathers. I had held life in my hands, seized from the jaws of death in the form of a small white cat who had once been similarly raptured. I had lifted it in love and fear. Something like prayer had pulsed in me as I handed it back to the darkness. When I heard its wings, I had felt a surging gratitude.
The association of owls with death and the dark side comes, of course, from their nocturnal character. From ancient times, and still in popular culture today, owls are figures of wisdom. In some sources you will find this duality labeled contradictory—the response of a culture terrified of death and given to stuffing complicated concepts into oppositional categories. As if wisdom and death were not intimates. As if wisdom were not a night-bloomer. The association with wisdom probably comes from Athena, goddess of wisdom, who took the owl for her symbol and companion because it could see in the dark—Athena, who was also goddess of war, her gray eyes keeping watch over death’s playgrounds. In cultures respectful of the powers and truths of darkness, owls became messenger figures, bearing their night visions to the human world. Owls, then, become messengers, bearing unearthly news.
Or was Scout the messenger? His kind are also nocturnal and thus associated with the dark. As owls are to Athena, cats are to witches—wise women damned by the unwise. In the altercation of a summer night, the roles of cat and owl had been strangely confused: more often it is owls that seize cats. Beyond seizing it, Scout had had no interest in doing violence to the owl. He’d brought it to me, as cats do, with the urgency of one bearing momentous news, truth of heft and import. But the message was far beyond words, caught in the spinning double helix of death and life. I found myself in the presence of genuine mystery, where all meanings reside but none holds still.
As Scout and I climbed the stairs to bed, I still felt the weightless softness. How still the bird had been, holding its energy close until it was sure it could reenter its living. I felt its fierce, delicate life thrumming in me.
Devastated
It’s what everybody says they are now.
Your favorite restaurant goes out of business,
you’re devastated. Your kid doesn’t make
the swim team—devastated. Your one-nighter
fails to call again—you get my drift.
No one hears in it the cities burning
or sees the ruined fields. It means laid waste,
as in Getting and spending, we lay waste
our powers. Wordsworth, what’s he on about?
I ask my class. Nobody has a clue.
They think he means we throw our powers away
like waste, like Styrofoam, or that we waste them
(whatever they might be, these obscure powers)
like money—not entirely wrong and yet
not right. Okay, try Jagger then: I’ll lay
your soul to waste? Nope, nada. Later two
or three of them will say they’re devastated
by their grade or someone’s nasty text.
Words—what can we say about them? Slick,
absorbent, malleable, they mostly fall
apart. And then again, sometimes they hold:
two strange Englishmen, poised at the dawn
and dusk of the industrial West, imagine
the soul as ravaged, leveled landscape, void
of life or color, or of movement, save
the smoke meandering from exhausted fires.
I don’t know how to tell you this story,
but if I say that for a certain while
I was devastated, I want you
to smell the fetid smoke, to see the dog,
starving and cankerous, nosing the waste.
Postscript: Breathe
One Christmas Bob gave me a small ceramic wall sculpture, the work of a Gold Hill neighbor. About a foot tall, it depicted a section of tree trunk from which a woman’s face was emerging. Her eyes were shut, her lips parted as if she had been desperate for air and had finally found it. The entire thing was a steady medium blue tinged with gray. He told me it was called Breathe.
I hung it in our bedroom in the cabin. Two days after Bob died, after I had packed everything I had brought north for the year, I walked around the place, seizing anything I thought I might want or need. I made myself alert; I had to be thorough; I would not be returning here. I took the sculpture from the wall, wrapped it in newspaper, and laid it carefully at the top of a box of items I was taking away.
After I had been home a while and found the energy to unpack everything, I noticed the sculpture was missing. Damn, I thought, a box must have been left behind. Or maybe the sculpture was removed from the box by other hands, though that seemed very unlikely, and someone would have called by now. Now what? How could I retrieve it from a place I could barely think about? But I had to have it—breathing was not easy.
The cabin was on the market for two years before I got an offer, which I seized. I sold it at a stomach-turning loss at the height of the national recession, more like a depression in Michigan. The buyers wanted anything in the cabin that I was willing to leave—a huge relief, as I wouldn’t have to sell things, which would have required me to be there longer than a day. Bob’s son and his partner and I headed up one Saturday to clean the place and take what we wanted. Priority 1 for me was finding Breathe.
In the course of that long, grim day, I searched the cabin—every cupboard, drawer, closet, and box. The sculpture was nowhere.
But it has to be here.
I repeated the entire procedure, to no avail. It was getting late, Mike and Kris had already left, and I was exhausted in every part. I had worked nonstop, laser-focused, holding myself tight, and I needed to get out. Finally I gave u
p and left, locking the door behind me. Just as I began to pull away from the cabin, I spotted the wood-burned sign swinging over the front porch, the one I’d had made for Bob for our first Christmas here, when we felt so nervous about buying the place that we pledged to give each other only cabin-related items. The sign bore both our names, the cabin address, and a leaping trout. I couldn’t bear to leave it. Feeling sick, I got out, unhooked it, and tossed it into the back of the car. Allowing one thick wave of pain to surge over me and exit in a sob, I drove away. Later I would burn the sign in my fireplace.
Okay, then, the sculpture has to be at home. Has to be, I thought. I clearly remembered packing Breathe, and I remembered putting the box in my car, with the sculpture buffered carefully on top. The next day I searched my small house again, everywhere. I called Linda, the sister-in-law who had harbored me in the days immediately following Bob’s death, on the off chance I’d left a box at her house. No, she said, nothing.
I never found it.
It might seem easy for such a thing to vanish in the confusion following a disaster, with me in shock and family members and neighbors moving around the small space of the cabin, coming and going, moving and carrying and cleaning. But that process, though hurried, was not chaotic; in fact, it was remarkably orderly, even my part of it. The coil of my brain that can organize and execute like a bitch took over. I knew I would come back only once, to get the cabin ready to sell. Beyond that I never wanted to see the place again. So I was methodical about selecting things to take home. I carefully packed up the index cards and legal pads and books I was using for the book I was writing, with the cards grouped, rubber-banded by chapter and topic, and in order. I packed all my clothes except some socks I decided to abandon. I went through the kitchen cupboards and drawers and pulled whatever had meaning or might be useful at home. I took a lamp. I went through towels and linens. I surveyed the walls and took down everything I wanted, and that included Breathe. It was agonizing to lift it from its hook in the bedroom wall, but I knew it had to be with me.
Except it wasn’t.
I am not given to supernatural explanations, but when I think through this mystery, I always arrive at one conclusion, almost by default: the one who gave Breathe to me took it back.
The problem is that I can’t imagine why. I know he would want me to keep breathing, not to stop. In fact, when I was overwrought about something, he would say, simply, “Deep breathing . . .” When I realized the sculpture was gone, what it meant to me was that my breath was gone too—seized, as it were, by the river, as his was. Why would he inflict such a message?
Now the sculpture hangs in my mind, a constant, potent absence. I see it clearly: the rippling bark of the blue tree, the woman’s emergent blue face, lips soft and open to the air. I feel her relief, muscles relaxing as oxygen floods them. I ponder her relation to the tree: did it entrap her, and is she now breaking free of it? Is she “of” the tree, the breathing spirit of it? Or have I read it all wrong: is she not coming out of the tree but sinking into it? Is she Daphne, the river god’s daughter, turned by him into a tree so that she could escape the rapist Apollo? In the years since the sculpture vanished, the place it holds in my imagination has drawn other sorts of questions: Are you breaking free? Are you a growing thing? What are you running from? If breath is spirit, are you releasing yours? Are you holding it in? What are you turning into, daughter of the strong brown god?
Absence holds a power over presence. What is lost is insistent; it pulls at our attention more than the thing we hold securely (or so we think) in our hands. Even words themselves only name what isn’t here, something we are chasing that has fled, so that writing, as Margaret Atwood has it, amounts to “negotiating with the dead.” I keep missing the face in the tree, so I keep studying it in my memory. It is a kind of sphinx, refusing to give up its secrets. In a voice that is sometimes like his, absence whispers its name: “Breathe.” And so that is what I do.
Notes
2 “I do not know much about gods”: T. S. Eliot, “The Dry Salvages,” In Four Quartets (London: Faber and Faber, 1941), 35.
18 The information on Gold Hill’s history is taken from www.goldhilltown.com. Some details of the story of the inn come from www.goldhillinn.com.
36 The story of Annabelle Kindig Miglia can be found at https://themtnear.com/2012/08/40-years-later-kidnap-victim-tells-story, or in Miglia’s book, written with Joyce Godwin Grubbs, Footsteps out of Darkness (Boulder: Annabelle, 2012).
58 On Linda Chase of Jackson, Michigan, and her longtime companion, Charles Zigler: Jackson Citizen-Patriot, July 11, 2012.
61 “wandering in a sea of people”: Colm Tóibín, Nora Webster (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2015), 204.
63 “The deepening of the heart”: Mark Doty, Heaven’s Coast: A Memoir (New York: Harper Collins, 1996), 271–72.
66 “There are times I feel I’m translating”: Doty, Heaven’s Coast, 157–58.
69 “Write a poem in the voice of a widow whose husband has drowned”: The title and all the italicized lines are from “The Widow,” by Maura Stanton, an actual writing prompt included in The Practice of Poetry, ed. Robin Behn and Chase Twichell (New York: Harper, 1992), 60.
74 “I feel that we began witnessing the end of the world”: Anne Lamott, Plan B: Further Thoughts on Faith (New York: Riverside Books, 2006), 17.
76 “grief constant as a twin”: Jesmyn Ward, Men We Reaped: A Memoir (New York: Bloomsbury, 2013), 127.
78 “All wise people say the same thing”: Lamott, Plan B, 25.
88 “that awful slattern of the printed page”: 1948 New York Public Library Bulletin, cited in the Oxford English Dictionary.
89 “a word or short phrase separated”: www.desktoppub.about.com (accessed June 4, 2014).
89 “widows and orphans are words”: www.wikipedia.com.
89 “An orphan has no past”: The Elements of Typographical Style, 3rd ed. (Vancouver, BC: Hartley and Marks, 2004, 43–44).
93 “A widow is a word or line of text”: www.opusdesign.us (accessed June 4, 2014).
105 “Each thing disappears”: Doty, Heaven’s Coast, 193.
113 “Deer playing about in great numbers”: http://www.washingtonhistory.org/files/library/viewpoints-visions_001.pdf.
115 “very narrow and intricate channel”: https://www.historylink.org/File/5060.
120 “. . . at the still point, there the dance is”: T. S. Eliot, “Burnt Norton,” in Four Quartets, 15.
122 “The living walk by the edge of a vast lake”: Carol Ann Duffy, “Eurydice,” in The World’s Wife (London: Pan Macmillan, 1999), 62.
139 “negotiating with the dead”: Margaret Atwood, Negotiating with the Dead: A Writer on Writing (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002).
Acknowledgments
I’m grateful to the editors of the following publications where these pieces first appeared, some in slightly different form:
“Heartbreak Hotel”: Full Grown People
“A Creature, Stirring”: New Ohio Review (2016 Nonfiction Prize winner)
“Bodies of Water”: MUSE/A
“The Messenger”: Chattahoochie Review. It originated as a much shorter piece in Encore, Kalamazoo’s magazine of local culture.
“Devastated”: Southern Review
My thanks also to the following people and organizations:
The Glen Lake Arts Council for a residency in my favorite corner of the world that helped me to write “A Strong Brown God”;
Margaret deRitter, literary editor of Encore Magazine, for initially soliciting the piece that became “The Messenger,” which is where this book began;
Sarah Einstein, whose painstaking line editing and rigorous critique made this a much better book;
Renée E. D’Aoust, who generously read an early draft of this book and sent extensive and encouraging responses, with chocolate, all the way from Switzerland;
the manuscript’s first readers, Diane Seuss, Zaide Pixley, and Rachel Rosenfield Lafo
, whose belief in me is crucial to me as a writer or as anything else.
My deepest gratitude goes to the people I call my Angels, who played a role in hauling me through grief’s country and bringing this book to fruition. Whether they are named in these pages or not, I hope they realize that allowing myself to be cared for was a very important lesson I had to learn in this crucible. I remember every phone call, every kindness, every stalk of asparagus.
Finally, this book comes with great love to Bob’s family—his children, Meredith and Michael; his sister, Breon, and her husband, Chuck; his brother, Brian, and his wife, Rita—who kept me in their hearts, before and after; and to Pam Poley, who walked every step with me for four years, providing safety, comfort, and wisdom, pointing me toward the land beyond grief’s country.
About the Author
Gail Griffin is the author of four books of nonfiction, including “The Events of October”: Murder-Suicide on a Small Campus (Wayne State University Press, 2010), which anatomizes a student shooting at Kalamazoo College, where Griffin spent her career. Her award-winning nonfiction and poetry have appeared in venues including The Missouri Review, The Southern Review, Fourth Genre, The New Ohio Review, and anthologies including Fresh Water: Women Writing on the Great Lakes, a Michigan Notable Book.