Enon

by Paul Harding

  IT WAS EASY FOR me to imagine Kate living in an Enon that existed in the past, though, where all the citizens from all the village’s history lived among one another. I could see her newly arrived, walking alone down Main Street, between the cemetery and town hall—the Memorial Day parade route, I guessed. I saw her as having come from the beach a mile away, not from the sunbathing she’d done with Carrie right before she died but from a landing, a disembarkation after a trip across another Atlantic.

  Kate has dried in the breeze but her skin is salted and her hair, clothes, and beach towel brined. She is pale and still wobbly on her feet from the weeks of the rise and fall of the trip across the ocean, and still feels nauseated from the seasickness she suffered most of the way. The details of the shore and the dark boat that brought her are imprecise, beyond the boundaries of this other Enon. I knew that the boat turned back after its crew saw Kate safely ashore and that by the time she entered the village it had sailed beneath the horizon to fetch more pilgrims.

  Main Street is unpaved and called the Turnpike. A dog, a terrier, trots out onto the road from the high corn that grows in a field belonging to the farm opposite the cemetery. It approaches Kate and barks and grins.

  Kate crouches down and says, “Hi, boy,” to the dog and scratches it behind the ear. The dog is small, a descendant of the first terriers the villagers must have kept in order to help control rats. Kate takes a corner of the hard yellow corn bread she has rolled up in the beach towel and offers it to the dog. The bread must be old and stale and salty, the last of Kate’s rations from the crossing. The dog sniffs at the bread, looks up at Kate, yawns, shakes itself, and trots off, toward a low brown house with a high roof and small windows fitted with diamond-shaped panes of leaded glass. The house stands alone, behind a stone wall running along the road. The front door of the house is closed, and when Kate gets to it and knocks, no one answers. She walks around to the back of the house. There is a dirt yard and a garden planted with Good-King-Henry and purslane, smallage and skirrets, and other obscure herbs dotted with black and midnight purple flowers that have prickly, hairy leaves the color of bats’ wings. Kate does not recognize any of the plants. There is a pile of wood stacked against the back wall. Kate turns from the house and looks up the hill, which appears to be used for pasturage. It is late afternoon and shadows are long. A quartet of goats are making their way across the summit of the hill, slowly, in single file, and their thin shadows stretch at oblique angles ahead of them in parallel lines down the length of the hill, as if they are puppets being marched along the crest of a stage at the ends of long black sticks. Halfway up the hill, there is a girl, two or three years older than Kate, sitting on a stump, with her elbows on her knees, one hand curled into a fist, on which she rests her chin, the other hand extended and open, palm up, in which a small yellow bird is perched, eating thistle seeds. She wears a black dress that Kate finds archaic and beautiful, and black leather shoes with wooden heels. Kate knows the girl from all the town history I’ve told her over the years, stories that bored her in themselves but that she loved to hear because she loved that I loved them and that I loved telling them to her. Despite the girl’s later, infamous role in local history, after she had grown up and found herself homeless and spent her days scolding her neighbors for being uncharitable, Kate was loyal to her from the first time I told her the story and always remained so, convinced that theories about her hysteria and madness were the kind of humbuggery that always suppresses and deforms the spirits of strong young girls. Kate knows that the girl has seen her, or at least is aware that she is there, even though the girl has not moved. Kate knows, too, that the girl does not move or gesture toward her because she already knows that Kate will approach her. Kate walks across the yard and into the pasture and up the hill and stands in front of the girl, who looks up, squinting in the light of the late, low, orange sun. There is a cooling, gusty breeze that makes the flowers and the long, stiff grass shiver. The pasture smells like grass and open earth and, faintly, dung.

  Kate says to the girl, “You are Sarah.” The girl raises the little yellow bird in her hand to her lips and whispers a syllable to it. The bird nods and flies away, behind the hill, toward the setting sun.

  The girl says to Kate, “And you are Kate.” Kate suddenly understands that she and young Sarah Good are together in a suspended moment, a small eddy or niche set aside but within all the compounded times of Enon, which are always confluent and permeative. Sarah stares at Kate, in a manner that is patient and deeply familiar, and that frightens Kate. Kate begins to cry, and Sarah reaches out and takes one of her hands in both of her own. Sarah strokes Kate’s hand as Kate sobs, but her expression does not change, and even her hands stroke Kate’s in a perfunctory way, as if she is consoling someone else, and it feels to Kate like Sarah is looking into someone else’s eyes, not hers, and that terrifies Kate all the more. Kate startles and tries to draw her hand out of Sarah’s grasp. Sarah does not let go.

  Kate sobs to her, “Sarah, let me go.”

  Sarah says, “It is all right, my dear friend; everything is all right.” But again, it feels to Kate as if Sarah Good is speaking to someone else, just beyond her, maybe just behind her, or just to the side, she cannot tell where, but just outside of her awareness. Then Kate catches a glimpse of whom Sarah is talking with. It is Kate after all. There is a rushing sensation of relief, similar to what it feels like to regain consciousness after nearly drowning or passing out from having the wind knocked out of oneself. Kate gasps and there is a flooding of herself back into herself, and she looks at Sarah, who now is clearly looking right at her, was looking right at her all along, and who is once again Kate’s dear, cherished old friend, born, grown, scapegoated, accused, condemned, and hanged, and Kate is once again herself, also born, also grown, beloved, struck down, and killed three centuries on, tomorrow, just this moment, ages ago, on the very road laid out below them. Kate kneels down in front of Sarah and rests her head in her friend’s lap.

  Sarah runs her fingers through Kate’s hair and says, not much louder than a whisper, “Sometimes, it’s hard to remember.”

  4.

  WHEN I WAS A KID, MAYBE TWELVE OR THIRTEEN, WHAT I MOST wanted was to be outside somewhere, in the woods or crouching in the high grass in the fields of Mrs. Hale’s estate, next to my friend Peter Lord’s house, late at night, almost dawn, and knowing that my friends were scattered about the field, too, stalking one another but mostly alone. There were revelations that occurred only at night. Some were horrors, like the muddy corpse of a dog, its gums pulling away from its teeth. But there were other secret, nocturnal processes that I observed and could ponder days later, failing to fall asleep on a weeknight, say, dreading school and the regime of home-work. I’d think about being crouched in the field, dilated, tacky with cool, mineral damp, inhaling the fumes of the grass and soil and hearing the wind move up behind the hill and come over it and swirl through the pine trees and stick to the pitch leaking down their trunks and push across the field in waves through the long grass, all beneath the stars and the pink moon, the flower moon, the strawberry, buck, and hunter’s moons, and the clouds lit up in silhouettes, their outlines turning and cresting and collapsing so intricately that I could never recall their true extravagances days later when I lay sleepless in my bed.

  My friends and I scattered and hunted one another with flashlights across fifty acres of woods and meadows. The rules for hiding and searching were few and vague and seemed years later to have been kept so in order to preserve the respective solitudes of both those in their hiding places and those trying to find them, while still tethering us all within loose, shifting constellations along the stone walls and clefts, atop hillocks and across the fields. If being alone in the dark unsettled a hider, he was free to crash around and be found. If a hunter decided to turn his flashlight off and stalk the hiders in silence and frighten them to near fainting by pouncing on them where they hid, it was fine. No matter how deeply you crawled into
the thickets or the muddy reeds in the swamp or how high you clambered up into a pine tree, if you fell and broke an arm or got spooked by the stars suddenly getting brighter or the leaves stirring without any wind or a voice grunting a single syllable a few yards away, you could always call out and be heard by at least one of your fellows.

  When each round of the game exhausted itself—through fear or antagonism or boredom—we would find ourselves convened in some remote copse or break in the miles of granite stone walls that not only bounded current property lines but also ran through all the woods where the ghosts of old farms and the foundations of former houses mingled with the forests and clearings and streams we explored, and we would report to one another about the night—there was Jupiter; there was a dancing light we all saw but none seemed to have made; there was the corpse of Freaky, Mr. Jones’s mutt who after years of chasing cars and losing his tail, then an ear, then an eye, then a leg, now lay split open in the uncut grass of the ditch between the silent road and Mr. Jones’s orchard, his coat matted with gravel.

  “Jesus, it’s Freaky.”

  “What?”

  “It’s Freaky, man. Dead as shit.”

  “I’m going to bury him.”

  “Are you crazy?”

  “I’m going to. Out of respect. He was the guardian spirit of Cherry Street.”

  “Bullshit.”

  “Yeah. And look at him. He’s all fucked up.”

  “And he smells nasty.”

  “Go home then. I’m getting a sheet and a shovel and I’m going to bury him.”

  “Hey, Wader, I’ll give you ten bucks if you eat a mouthful of his guts.”

  “Lord’s right. We’ve got to bury Freaky. Out of respect.”

  “Out of respect.”

  “Out of respect.”

  How different we were at night, out from under the tyrannies of due dates and gym classes and school bells, luminescent faces in a circle, telling one another what we’d seen and heard, what we’d found (Algonquin arrowheads and flints would still turn up now and then, when one of us scratched at a patch of sand), making small adjustments to the rules for the next dispersal, fetching Peter’s dad’s old GI-issue spade and spending the rest of the night taking turns digging a grave for a dog.

  WHEN WE CAMPED ON Peter Lord’s front yard we always stopped whatever game we had been playing in the meadow just before the first fletchings of dawn and stood in the high grass for a moment or two, scratching bug bites, wiping our noses with the backs of our hands, raking our dirty fingers through our sweaty hair, murmuring a quiet, conclusive word or two.

  “Something big moving in the pond tonight.”

  “Huge.”

  “Full moon’s why.”

  “Bullshit.”

  “Look it up.”

  “Look what up?”

  “He’s right.”

  “Owl took half Watt’s hair.”

  “Screamed so hard his balls fell off.”

  THE LAST CARS OF night had driven past hours ago on Cherry Street, beyond the fields, past the stone fences. The first cars of morning had yet to come. We thrived in that nocturnal kingdom, which emerged from the fields like a pop-up world in a cardboard book and collapsed back into the grass as we kicked one another to jittery sleep. You could almost hear it folding itself back up just ahead of the sunrise, outside the nylon walls of the tent. We were careful never to be outside when it disappeared, in case one of us tripped on an overturning corner and was gobbled down into the throat of that old earth, into the cross sections of years and centuries and generations, folded up into the curled layers of prehistoric winters and antique summers where we had no business being after dawn, and getting coughed back up into the right night onto the right front lawn might be a one in a million or even slighter chance, and the rest of us finding a rope in Peter Lord’s garage and lowering it into the eons and lassoing our friend and hauling him back up through the constellated gears and pinions of eras and epochs was something we couldn’t get a grasp on, couldn’t plumb, didn’t have whatever tool, whatever rare sextant or theodolite was required for sighting the lines along which we could pull him back to the here and now without him being hoisted from the ground a dead Puritan or quadruped fossil.

  THE SPRING BEFORE KATE died, she decided that she wanted to make the girls’ cross-country team when she started ninth grade at the regional high school. She did track at the middle school but disliked just running around in circles, as she called it, on the course behind the school. She was at that age where a lot of kids appear to be and more or less are in shape no matter what they do, but, as limber and slim and athletic-looking as she was, I still could not believe how swiftly she could run the first time I watched her at a meet. She woke up early on a Saturday to start her serious training and I got up, too, intending to accompany her. I supposed I could manage the mile or two that I figured she was capable of, and I wanted to reconnoiter the route she’d told me she meant to use to make sure she wouldn’t have to cross any dangerous intersections or go for any stretches where she wouldn’t be within yelling distance of a house—even though I knew every stride of the route she’d described, having walked or ridden my bike on it, alone, since I’d been four or five years younger than she was.

  As in shape as I thought I was from all the raking and mowing and bushwhacking, I was winded after half a mile. Kate’s legs were longer than I’d ever noticed. She took long, seemingly weightless strides, and appeared propelled not by her own exertions but by the graceful strength of her legs themselves. She hadn’t broken a sweat nor was there any trace of breathlessness when she asked me if I was already pooping out.

  “Not pooping out, Kates; just warming up.”

  Without breaking stride, Kate looked at the digital runner’s watch Susan and I had bought for her previous birthday. She pushed a button and the watch beeped twice. She undid the elastic band holding her hair in a ponytail, pulled her hair and twisted it up tighter against the back of her head, wound the elastic back around it at the base, looked at me and smiled, and said, “Okay, Dad.”

  I knew that I was slowing her down, and that she wanted to run on her own, much faster and much farther than I was capable of.

  “Just to Peters’s Pulpit,” I said. “Just to the Pulpit, and then I’ll let you do your thing, okay?”

  “Okay, Dad. That’s okay,” she said.

  Peters’s Pulpit was another half a mile. I intended to say something funny or nostalgic about the times we’d ridden our bikes there and had our impromptu picnics of chips and juice, but when we rounded the bend that gave way to the meadow with the rock in its middle, I felt Kate accelerate rather than pull up, so I veered off into the meadow and ran toward the rock, crying, “Help me, Hugh Peters! Help this sweaty old tub of guts!”

  I kept running toward the rock and didn’t turn back toward Kate but waved my hand high in the air and shouted, “Go on! Go on! Save yourself while you can! I’m done for!” like in the old war movies we’d watched together late at night when she had had a tough time getting to sleep—all those corny John Wayne and Audie Murphy films.

  Kate shouted, “Bye, Dad,” and lunged into a pace half again as fast as we’d been running together and disappeared around the bend. I half-sat against the rock, gulping breaths, and looked out across Enon Lake. The water near the shore was like sheer blue glass, transparent, filled with light, the lake floor lined with clean sand and smooth pebbles. Breezes etched themselves across the surface farther out, toward the center. I saw my reflection in the water and it angered and embarrassed me. I looked just the way I imagined I would: closer to middle-aged than I wanted to admit, a little heavy in the chops, sweaty, winded, my hair wet around the edges, the rest stood up by the breeze and salt in my sweat.

  The name Enon, spelled Aenon for the first four years of the village’s existence, is from the Greek ainon, which is from the Hebrew enayim, which means double spring or, more generally, a place of abundant water. It is mentioned in the Gospel of
John. The evangelist baptized in Enon because there was much water there. The best of Enon’s water is in the lake, which is spring-fed and famous for its clarity and taste. Whereas five years before, I would not have hesitated to scoop up a handful of water and slurp it down, to show Kate how pure it was, while telling her about its history, about the Indians who’d fished it and the colonists who’d exported it (although I would not have let her drink any, “Because your nice young guts might still get grumbly from the stuff in it,” I’d have said to her, or something like that), now I worried that something in the water might worsen the queasiness I felt from running and lead to some humiliating intestinal predicament as I headed back to the house. This made my mood worse, and I walked home cursing the lake and its clean water, and all the half-bullshit history I’d told Kate over the years, for no better reason than that she’d been a kid.