Enon

by Paul Harding

  We crossed the boardwalk, walked up the log steps in the woods and into the milkweed field, which was full of swallows zinging around catching insects on the wing in the sunset.

  Kate rubbed her arm and said, “Oh, man, I must have fed like a hundred birds. That pretty little yellow one was the best. I couldn’t even feel it on my fingers.”

  WHEN I WAS A kid, we followed the Memorial Day parade from the Civil War memorial in the center of the village, down Main Street, to the cemetery. The veterans and cops and firefighters and dens and packs of Boy and Girl Scouts and the high school marching band formed a semicircle around a portable podium with a built-in microphone and speaker, which was never loud enough, set up once a year for this occasion in front of a file of uniform headstones belonging to a group of Revolutionary War veterans, each with a small United States flag poked into the ground next to it. An officer in the army or navy reserves would give a speech, which, translated through the podium speaker, sounded like a garbled distillation of every Memorial Day speech ever given in every small town in the country, the words of which were not as important as the spirit in which they were delivered. When the day was sunny and blustery, the wind would pop and roar through the speaker along with the speech. When it was overcast or rainy, the speech would sound nearly subterranean, as if it were channeled through the officer at the podium from one of the soldiers in the ground behind him. Villagers sat on the hill overlooking the podium or meandered among the headstones, searching for the oldest dates, or stood behind the crowd with toddlers in strollers. Kids ran around playing tag or hide-and-go-seek and were shushed by whatever nearby adults when they squealed too loudly. After the speech, the first trumpeter in the marching band played taps. When he was finished, the second trumpeter played it again, from behind a maple tree at the back of the cemetery. Three veterans from the National Guard fired three rounds of blanks from their rifles and the Cub Scouts scrummed at their feet for the shells. The parade re-formed, the drum line started a march, and the procession headed back to town, where it ended with another short speech in front of the town hall.

  I played drums in the high school band and dreaded the Memorial Day parade because I had to spend the day among everyone I knew dressed in a shiny blue polyester suit, with a white sash, white bucks, and a blue plume sticking up from the crown of my white vinyl shako. After high school, I never thought about the parade until I moved back to Enon and had Kate.

  Kate was born in November, on the Monday before Thanksgiving, but the next May, when she was six months old, I found myself taking her to the parade and following alongside the band with her in her carriage. I took her to the parade every year until she was old enough to join the Brownies, after which she marched in the parade, and I followed alongside her troop, taking pictures. She didn’t continue into Girl Scouts because by then she was preoccupied with tennis and running, but I was still able to lure her to the parade the two years before she died, although the last year, the spring before her death, she ran off with three of her friends and they all sat on a stone wall along the route, sucking on lollipops, knocking side to side off each other’s shoulders, laughing and yelling at their friends in the parade. I took their picture and they all mugged it up, making funny faces, and we kept the photo on the refrigerator until Kate died and Sue moved back to Minnesota and took it with her.

  THE FIRST NIGHT I spent alone in the house after Sue left I lay on the couch in the living room, in the dark, resting my broken hand on my chest. The hand was swollen and my black-and-purple fingers stuck out of the cast. The doctor had given me a prescription of thirty what she called instant-release painkillers and I’d been following the directions on the prescription bottle to take one pill every four to six hours. I took a pill and my brain felt slightly rubbery. But my hand hurt so much that I began to resent the pain for distracting me from Kate. I found myself having a debate between thinking about Kate and concentrating on the pain. The argument became one of those tedious, seemingly never-ending dreams that irked and provoked me but from which I could not rouse myself, even though I was not, properly speaking, sleeping.

  I had known lots of guys over the years who took pills and mixed them with other drugs and alcohol. I thought, A second pill won’t kill me; it’ll just sand the burrs off the pain and cool down these voices, these antagonists who haven’t the decency to leave me in peace. I need a break, some rest. I’m just so cooked, so cracked up and crooked. If I get some time out, if I can just step back a little, get my feet back under me, let this hand heal a little, stop killing me so much, I can figure out how to get hold of myself.

  I sat up and took another pill from the bottle and swallowed it dry. I was thirsty. My mouth stuck together and the pill seemed to adhere to the back of my throat. Instead of getting up for some water, I lay back down and rested my hand on my chest and closed my eyes and whispered, “Just have some mercy, please just have some mercy.”

  I surfaced into consciousness four hours later, sweating and parched. I rose and lurched to the bathroom and ran the cold water tap in the sink until the tepid water in the pipes cleared and the chilled water from underground poured out. I filled the red plastic cup Kate had used for rinsing her mouth when she brushed her teeth and gulped the water down and filled the cup again. I stood for a moment in the dark. What if Kate and Susan could just be upstairs, sleeping? I thought. Couldn’t I just be down here going to the bathroom and getting a drink of water, or having a couple Toll House cookies and drinking milk from the jug in the light from the refrigerator, the door propped open against my hip, and pulling back the shade on the kitchen door a couple inches to look out at the moonlit yard, to think for a second about all the animals out there, hidden, going about their business, to think that that was eerie but also taking some comfort in it and going back upstairs and peeking in on Kate to make sure she wasn’t hanging half off the bed like she often ended up and climbing back into bed next to Susan, and maybe even worrying about money or work for an hour before I fall back asleep? What a comfort that would be, worrying about money while my daughter slept.

  Going back to sleep upstairs in Sue’s and my bed, next to Kate’s empty room, appalled me, so I went back to the living room and picked up the bottle of pills and shook it. I tapped a dozen pills into the palm of my hand. I pinched up two painkillers and put them in my mouth and washed them down with the rest of the cold water in the red cup.

  I WOKE AT TWO the next afternoon and struggled to make a pot of coffee with my good hand. My broken hand hurt dangling at my side, so I held it up near my cheek. Out of habit I looked for birds in the backyard. We’d bought a couple of feeders and Kate kept them filled. She tried to get the chickadees to eat from her hand, but they never would. The feeders were empty by the time Kate was buried. I couldn’t bring myself to refill them, so I fetched the bag of seeds we kept in the bottom drawer of an old bureau in the garage. After cranking open one of the windows in the nook, I removed the screen and scooped up a bunch of seeds in an old plastic juice pitcher that had faint traces of a family of cartoon bears painted on it, and tossed them out into the yard.

  The empty house held its silence like a solid volume. There was weight to it. The hosts on talk radio sounded brash and insipid and oblivious. The music on the classical station sounded like music for a dentist’s office. Rock music sounded lurid and insincere. I tried to read a newspaper but the bad news made me feel more hopeless and the good news seemed invented. I wanted to call Sue’s parents’ house and ask if she’d arrived okay and ask if it felt better to be there, but I knew that that would be the wrong thing to do. Sue had called at some point the night before. I remembered hearing the message on the answering machine, and from the tone of her voice that she’d arrived without any problems. I already felt bad, not having answered her call, not having already called back, as if I’d missed my one slim chance. I couldn’t bring myself to listen to the message and I unplugged the phone. I checked my cell phone and saw that she’d left a message o
n it as well. I slid the backing off the phone and removed the memory card.

  By three o’clock, it was unbearable to be in the house anymore, so I went outside and started to walk. I didn’t want to walk along the road, on the sidewalk. Someone might see me and stop and offer condolences or deliberate small talk. I imagined myself walking down the sidewalk and a woman pulling over and asking if I was doing okay and other people driving by and seeing me and knowing I was that grieving father and separated husband, and the exposure and embarrassment and humiliation being too much to take. But, since the Fairfield estate had been subdivided into a development twenty years earlier, it was no longer possible to cut through the fields that had originally been called Wild Man’s Meadow, when Enon had first been colonized, at least during the day. As conspicuous as walking along the road felt, cutting through the meadow would have drawn more attention, if only for the strange and sorrowful fact that in the thirty years there had been houses set around it, I had never seen anyone, adults or kids, in the meadow, no one exploring or stalking through the high summer grass or marching through winter snows. Whenever I passed it, I recalled swiping my way through the tall, buggy grass and being half terrified that the wild man, after whom the area had originally been named and about whom I had been told by some older neighborhood kids, was scrambling toward me with unnatural speed and aim from somewhere along the line of trees bordering the meadow. My terror was greatest in broad daylight, because of a sense that the wild man was so terrible and so wild he did not even need the cover of darkness or creeping stealth to claim his victims in his realm. I told Kate about the wild man one day when we were walking by the meadow. She must have been seven or eight—old enough to be told the story and be thrilled instead of frightened. But she had not been thrilled or frightened in the least.

  “That’s just people’s backyards,” she said, and just like that it was true; her understanding of the landscape unseated my own—the mythical wild man of the meadow simply disappeared or, simply, had never existed for her and would never be grafted into her impression of the place.

  Scooting past the meadow, I felt so panicked that someone was going to pull over and talk with me before I reached the woods that twice I nearly stopped and turned around and ran back to the house. When I reached the West Enon playground, I hurried off the sidewalk and past the empty basketball courts to where an old path entered the woods at a break in a stone wall. I sat on the wall for a moment and half-sobbed in relief at reaching cover. My broken hand ached terribly. The blood pulsing through it hurt. I took one of the six painkillers from the breast pocket of my flannel shirt and swallowed it.

  The path in the woods dated back to the Revolutionary War, and I thought that only animals and kids must have used it for many years, deer and coyotes and the dogs of the village, which were allowed to roam with complete freedom, Enon never having had a leash law, and kids, at least when I’d been young, always having been given the run of the village by the time they were nine or ten years old. My friends and I had used the path when we were kids. I realized that I’d never shown it to Kate and that I had not walked it in over twenty years. As I recalled it, a quarter mile into the woods the path crossed in front of the ruins of an old cabin engulfed under thickets of bittersweet. The cabin was harmless but eerie. I had been inside only a couple of times, when I was a boy, on dares, during the day; otherwise, I always skipped into a half run to get past it. It lent the sense of some forsaken soul lying in a bed in the back room, someone who had been ill and semiconscious for two hundred years, his limbs and body wrapped in the bittersweet, too, who sensed me passing by out on the path, and who wanted me to come into the house and snip the vines from him and take his hand and put a cloth soaked in cold water on his forehead. But his hands would have been hairy with roots and would have crumbled away like dirt when I cut the vines from them and took hold of them, and his old striped shirt would be rotted and full of spores that would have made me cough, and his old body would have been packed dirt that had half-rotted through the bedding, and the entire room would be full of a noxious suspension that had been fermenting for over a century, since the dying man had been quarantined and forgotten, exiled in an obscure dead water of time, the sort of which Enon is full, if you observe carefully enough.

  There was no trace of the cabin where I remembered it being. I ranged up and down the area where it should have been, looking for a pile of logs or tangle of bittersweet that somehow might have digested the cabin, but there was nothing.

  “There was an old cabin here when I was a kid, Kate,” I whispered out loud, still scratching a little at the underbrush with my foot, half-looking for a threshold. “But it’s gone, just disappeared, like it never even existed.” I turned back to the path and resumed walking.

  I walked all afternoon through the woods and hidden meadows of Enon. The sun went down and dusk spread and darkness began to fall. At one point it occurred to me that I had not eaten anything, but I felt neither hungry nor very thirsty. I reached the western shore of Enon Lake as the last light left the sky. I knelt down by the water and raised my broken hand above my head so it wouldn’t get wet and cupped some in my good hand and took a couple sips. The water was cold and clean-tasting, fine, mineral. I swallowed two pills with another mouthful, then jogged across the street and into the trees on the other side of the road, at the edge of one of Enon’s two nine-hole golf courses. The cemetery was a quarter mile away, back toward the village. It lay between the two golf courses, along the flank of a large hill. The golf courses and cemetery begin on flat tracts directly off the old Post Road to Boston, which then steeply elevate in a succession of rises. I crossed the near golf course and stepped over the stone wall into the upper part of the cemetery. Kate was buried below, toward the front, in the family plot, next to my grandfather George Washington Crosby and my grandmother Norma Crosby and my mother, Betsy Crosby, and where I will be buried when I die. My great-grandmother Kathleen Crosby is also buried in the cemetery, in another section.

  It was just superstition, but I did not want to pass in front of Kate’s grave. I felt the way I would have had she been alive and I on as many drugs as I’d taken over the course of the day. Without having paid attention, I realized I had taken at least twice as many pills as I ought to have, and maybe more. It almost felt as if I were levitating when I stopped walking and stood still and looked down through the shadows to where Kate’s stone was. The moon was out and there was a beautiful view from the top of the cemetery. Deer browsed on the golf greens below to my right, and the tombstones made of white marble glowed. A corner of the lake was visible below, past the road, beyond the trees, sparkling.

  I sat and surveyed the land, and looked down the hill, toward the Norway maple under which my grandparents and my mother and my daughter lay. A stupor fell over me and I floated without direction for some time, possibly hours, until I was roused by the voices of two young girls. They were sitting fifteen yards away from me, to my left, cross-legged, face-to-face, hidden from the road behind an enormous rectangular white headstone, on the other side of which, as I knew from my many trips to read the inscriptions on both the cemetery’s prominent memorials and its modest ones, lay a family of six, named Smith, all of whom had died during an epidemic in 1839. The girls shared a cigarette and swapped a bottle of wine. They both bent forward to examine something on the ground between them. One took a drag from the cigarette and passed it back to the other and opened a small book she had in her lap.

  The girl with the book held it close to her face and fingered through the pages until she said, “Here it is.”

  “What, what; what is it?” the other girl said.

  “Give me a second, will you?” The girl examined the book, then dropped it into her lap and stared at her friend. She said, “Dude, this deck is whacked, it’s always so right. This card is that you lust for someone you know is evil.”

  The other girl blew smoke out of her nose and clapped herself on the head, her forearmful of
bracelets and trinkets clinking and twinkling in the moonlight, and groaned, “Oh man—that’s freaking Carl!”

  Both girls had long, very dark, unkempt hair, which I assumed was dyed black but could not tell for sure. They both had pale skin and heavy black eyeliner on, and very dark lipstick, which might have been black or a very dark shade of purple or red, and they both wore all black clothes. I guessed they were a couple years older than Kate. I liked them immediately, and imagined Kate being their friend and going through a safe and uproarious adolescence with them. I even found myself wishing that they might do what they did in front of Kate’s stone, so that Kate could hear them and have the company, although she was too close to the road, and the girls would have been overheard by someone walking his dog, who would probably have called the police on his cell phone. I lay still where I was for half an hour, while the girls sipped wine and smoked and used their tarot cards as prompts to talk about what was important to them. Their conversation was endearing, although I was embarrassed by a good deal of it, and embarrassed that I was eavesdropping on them. But I did not want to try to sneak away or attempt to rise and act as if I’d stumbled on them by accident. I did not want to frighten or upset them. So I let them chatter and laugh and enjoyed the smell of the smoke from their cigarettes and looked up at the stars and tried to see if I could detect their movement through the sky, and thought about Kate watching the whole scene and being amused by it and teasing me about it when we both returned home.