by Paul Harding
When I got back to the house, Susan was in the kitchen taking dishes out of the dishwasher and putting them away.
“That didn’t go so well,” I said. I felt embarrassed, not so much at being out of shape and foolish-looking in my old tennis sneakers and sweat shorts, but by how inexplicably angry I felt. I had always anticipated the day when Kate would suddenly seem not like a little kid anymore but like a young woman, or like someone I didn’t know. It wasn’t that I was surprised that she could run faster than me or that she wanted to run on her own without me. It was that it had happened so abruptly and taken me by surprise, even though I felt like I’d prepared myself for it a long time ago.
Forty-five minutes later, I had showered and was sitting outside with a cold beer when Kate came running up the road. She made a last leap across the seam between our driveway and the sidewalk, her finish line, and checked her time on her stopwatch.
“You suck.” She cursed herself with real anger, with an insular, personal seriousness that had become more frequent in the last months.
I knew that she would be provoked by anything that sounded like consolation, but I said, “Don’t worry. You’ll set a better time tomorrow. I screwed your concentration up, coming along, is all.”
“My concentration was fine, Dad. It had nothing to do with you.” She let the screen door slam behind her and stomped up the stairs.
I forced myself not to follow and try to make her feel better or explain why she shouldn’t take her training so seriously. There was a childishness in my impulse to dissuade her from placing such value on and devoting such effort to getting a better time on her run, or to excelling at her schoolwork, because I had not cared about such things in my own adolescence but had suffered the same degree of frustration with myself and the world, had found myself angry or sad for no reason. The beer had gone warm, so I tapped a couple of railroad ties in the retaining wall along the driveway, like I was checking them for rot, then poured the last couple of swigs behind the yew bush and went back inside.
5.
MY GRANDPARENTS AND MY MOTHER DIED WHEN I WAS MORE or less fully grown. That’s the way I imagined things should be. I never knew my father; nor did my mother. (He and she spent a night together at a college homecoming weekend she’d gone to with friends. He didn’t tell her his name and they both left the next day and that was that.) I had no siblings. So behind me were the ghosts I always expected to have there, looking over my shoulder. But after the accident, ghosts surrounded me. My whole family made a circumference of ghosts, with me the sole living member in the middle. Or perhaps I was at the end; perhaps my family was not a circle but a procession in which we all had our supposedly proper places but then my daughter ran ahead of me into death. My great-great-grandfather was the farthest spirit back that I could imagine in any detail, because he was my grandfather’s grandfather and my grandfather had known him and remembered a few facts about him. He was a Methodist minister who’d had some kind of breakdown and been taken away and that’s about all my grandfather could recall. Beyond him trailed a parade of phantoms. He would have told me that Kate hurrying ahead into death was a blessing, a mark of grace and mercy that I, myself a grandson of dear old fallen Adam, was not competent to see as such. I found myself having imaginary conversations with him, in which he tried to console me with that point of view. I imagined myself wholeheartedly agreeing with him, not because I actually felt that way but because it seemed that he would be so convinced of what he said, so certain it was providence, and his certainty would be a comfort, however slight. I never once felt that there was any deeper goodness or benediction in Kate’s death, as easy as it was for me to imagine that idea, even accept its integrity. Because I understood that there are vastly greater meanings in creation to which I have no access did not mean that I could shed my sorrow.
Understanding that my woes were minuscule compared with the sum of the universe did not prevent them from devastating me. I knew that the anguish I experienced was presumptuous, that I pretended to absolute tragedy. If I claimed I was too weak to bear my daughter’s death, didn’t that mean I really had the strength? My persistence in feeling that Kate’s death was the end of the world was an embarrassment, because I knew of people who had suffered the deaths of children from suicide and gunshots and falling from windows, the deaths of siblings to drowning and avalanche, the deaths of friends and lovers and spouses to fever, to falling, to ice, and to fire. I could have bought a plane ticket or rented a car or hopped on a bicycle or in some cases walked to those people’s houses, knocked on their doors, sat in their living rooms, drank coffee, and talked with them about the override proposition or their vacation to Portugal and they would have done what people have always miraculously managed to do, which is carry on when there are so very many reasons why doing so should be impossible. I had a deep and abiding love for the idea that this life is not something that we are forced to endure but rather something in which we are blessed to be allowed to participate. But I felt no gratitude whatsoever for, and no relief from, the pain I experienced every waking moment, and this life felt like nothing more than a distillation of sorrow and anger. Even after Kate’s death, when my prior, occasional despair became general, I still believed that giving in to it was a failure of character.
And yet. Wouldn’t my sorrows have been the greater if Kate had never been at all? Wouldn’t they? Wasn’t it the case that her short and happy life was the greatest joy in my own? Wasn’t the joy of those thirteen years its own realm, encased now in sorrow but not breached by it? That is what I told myself. The joy of those years had its own integrity, and Kate existed within that. She could not be touched by the misery caused by her own death. Sometimes I had the sense of her watching me and smiling because she saw me in my sorrow and anger and understood that it was a natural part of the comic tragedy of this life. I hoped that the reason she no longer felt sorrow or anger was not because she was inhuman but because she was now wholly human, even if I, yoked to this life, still had to suffer the joy of my life with Kate, unbreachable as it might be, in stark and ruinous contradiction to my life without her. That joy was the measure and source of my grief.
I REMEMBER SITTING AT our dining room table late one spring afternoon, with rain and wind blustering around in the side yard and through the maple trees. Susan was in the kitchen, finishing some schoolwork, while Kate and I played a board game called Sorry! at the end of the table nearest the windows. The rest of the table was piled with clean laundry that needed folding. Kate drew from the deck of cards placed on the middle of the board.
“Eight,” she said. She tapped one of her playing pieces along, counting, “One, two, three …”
I drew a card.
“Move backward four,” I said.
Kate said, “Sorry, Dad.”
“That’s half the fun, kiddo.”
“Dad, who’s my grandmother?” she asked.
“She was Grandma Crosby,” I said.
“So who’s my great-grandmother?”
“Nanny Crosby.”
“I never met her.”
“Yes, you did, but you were a real little kid, almost just a baby.”
“Who’s my great-great-grandmother?”
“Grammy Black, whose name, in fact, was Kathleen, which is kind of like Katherine, but we didn’t name you after her.”
“Why not?”
“Well, because she was what your Grampy Crosby used to call a pisser. She was a grump who lived in her bathrobe and bossed everyone around and complained all the time.”
“Who’s my great-great-great-grandmother?”
“I don’t know that far back.”
“Who’s my great-great-great-great-great-great-great-grandmother?”
“Take your turn, wise guy.”
“Okay, wise guy.” Kate took another card and tapped out the spaces.
“Hey, you and I need to go to the garden store and get some red geraniums and go to the cemetery where Nanny and Grampy Crosby an
d Grandma Crosby and even Grammy Black are all buried and plant them in front of their stones, to make them look nice for Memorial Day. You know geraniums; you’ve seen them the times we’ve gone to the Memorial Day parade and stood near where everyone’s buried while they talk and when they shoot the guns.”
“And all the Cub Scouts run for the bullet shells.”
The next Saturday the weather was mild and bright. Susan went out on the side porch and tipped the rainwater out of the seat of one of the plastic chairs and wiped it dry with a dish towel. She took her coffee and a stack of papers to correct and sat out in the sun. I dug up a couple of trowels from the mess in the garage and tossed them in the foot well on the passenger side of the station wagon. The wagon was the last my grandfather had bought before he died. It was rusted and decrepit but I had a great loyalty to it, an unabashed sentimentality about having ridden around in it with my grandparents before I had become a husband and a father. It was white and had a broken deck for cassette tapes and electric windows that worked only half the time and less than that in cold weather. The tires were bald and the chassis shook so violently when the car idled that it sounded as if the entire exhaust system were about to drop out of the bottom of the car. I felt like a bad parent every time I drove Kate around, but I also had a sincere if wholly unfounded faith that the car was charmed and that Kate would never come to any harm in it.
I said to Susan, “Kate and I are going to go get flowers and plant them at the cemetery.”
“Okay, babe. Say hi to everyone for me,” she said.
“Funny,” I said.
Kate and I bought a tray of six red geranium plants at the garden center, then drove to the cemetery and yanked up the old plants from the previous year. Kate took the job seriously, telling me to make sure that we lined up the rows of holes for the new plants and spaced them evenly in front of the stone so that they would look neat. She pulled one of the plants from its pot and held it in front of her nose. She sniffed at the flowers, then at the root bundle and soil.
“Smell nice?” I asked.
“Kind of,” she said. “I like the way the dirt smells better than the flowers, I think.”
“It’s the leaves that smell so strong. Cool how the roots stay in the shape of the pot, huh?” I said. “That makes it easy; you can just stick the whole thing right into the hole you made.”
When we had planted all the flowers, I said, “We have to water them now. See up the hill there, the spigot—that pipe with the faucet like the one for the garden hose at home? There’s a plastic milk jug by it. Do you want to go fill it up with water and bring it back down so we can water the flowers? Think you can?”
“Yeah, I can do it,” Kate said. She started to march up the hill, zigzagging in between the headstones. She sang a song to herself that I didn’t recognize. As she made her way up the hill, her singing became fainter and I could hear only intermittent notes carried back down on the breeze. The farther up the hill she went, the more the headstones in between us obscured her. I had a sudden impulse to follow her. The way the headstones looked—almost like walls made of alternating granite and marble and slate shingles—it seemed as if she might lose her way among them, as if they were arranged in narrow rows without exits or with dead ends, as if she were walking through a maze suddenly.
“You see it, sweetie?” I called up. She turned around toward me. “You see it?” I called up again, louder. She took a step back toward me. I waved her back.
“Never mind; never mind; you’re fine,” I yelled. She turned back toward the spigot. She bent forward and disappeared behind a row of three white stones and stood back up with the plastic milk jug in her hand. When the jug was full, she hauled it down the hill, bending and stepping sideways to keep her balance.
“That was a bit more of an adventure than I thought,” I said. “You okay?”
“Yeah, I’m fine, but I’m soaked,” she said. She set the jug next to the headstone, dropped onto the apron of grass in front of the plot, and lay on her back.
I sat down next to her and we were quiet, looking up at the maple trees and their new, luminous shawls of foliage, and at the blue sky and the clouds, which were gray with white piping and silhouettes of gold light. Kate tipped her head back far enough to see the headstone behind her. She whispered letters to herself, translating them from upside down, and half-spelled the names on the stone. She stopped reading and looked at the sky again and shivered. Her arms were covered in goose bumps.
“Chilly?” I asked.
“Yeah,” she said. “It’s warmer standing up.”
“You’re right. Let’s get up and water the flowers and go get you changed. Our work here is done.” I pushed myself up, then gave Kate a hand and hoisted her to her feet. She poured the water into the soil around the plants and it rose and broke over the edge of the grass and streamed down away from the plot, beading through the turf and shining like chrome.
I WOKE UP ON a Wednesday afternoon in October, nearly two months after Kate had died and Susan had left, with what sounded like the reverberations of some catastrophic, cosmic organ chord clapping off the walls and rattling the windows and dopplering in the blood of my ears. It took me a full two minutes to remember where I was and who I was and what the circumstances of my life were. Two minutes does not sound long unless you cannot figure out where you are; then it is a terrifying undertow out of which you desperately try to paddle and inside which you cannot figure out what direction is up, and no matter where you try to put your feet, they do not touch the sandy bottom of the upright world, and for all you know you might be upside down, as much as you feel that the surface of the water must be just above your head. When I coordinated my senses, my panic gave way to misery. The living room was littered with empty whiskey bottles and dirty drinking glasses with dirty spoons and forks in them and piles of old newspapers and magazines, books and maps, and dirty clothes. Cigarette butts were piled in pyramids in two glass ashtrays and scattered across the coffee table and stubbed out in the glasses and in the bottles and on plates and even in the potting soil around the houseplants. I groaned and pounded the couch in frustration. Its cushions were filthy from my having slept on them for weeks, and stained and slick from having spilled beer and whiskey when I passed out.
I wobbled to the kitchen. The old stove, spattered with food, with its rusty burner grates and greasy, dented blue teakettle and greasy hood that had dust gunked up on top of it, seemed a concise sign of my devastation. I yanked the kettle off the stovetop, opened a kitchen window, leaned out, and dropped it into the weed-shot flower bed below, but carefully, as if I were placing it there to great purpose, so as not to appear erratic to anyone who happened to be standing in the rank backyard. The cabinets were all shellacked in grease and dust, too, and had stains running down the doors. What seemed like every dish and glass and mug and cup and utensil was dirty and piled up in the sink and on the surrounding counters.
I decided to clean the house. Unless I took a shower and ran a load of laundry, with half a cup of bleach in it, and shaved and combed my hair and dressed myself in a real pair of my old pants and a real, button-up shirt and clean socks and a nice pair of shoes, and mopped the floors and scrubbed the cabinets, and washed the dishes and opened the windows and scoured the counters, the engines of ruin could never be reversed. So I spent the day cleaning. Every task took twice as long as usual, because I had to do it all one-handed, holding my broken hand up or dangling it off to the side like a wounded animal. Although I’d broken it seven weeks earlier, my hand still ached most of the time.
Darkness had fallen by the time the job was done. The house was not so much cleaned as ravaged. It still smelled of garbage and old cooking, as well as, now, of bleach and disinfectant. I was drenched and exhausted. The spotless, purified sensation I’d spent the day trying to achieve, had anticipated, had hoped for more and more frantically, scrubbing caked grunge from drawer handles with a toothbrush, swabbing buckets of oil soap over the floors, whi
ch always looked dirty anyway, even after they had been scrupulously mopped, that sanctification I so much desired, the feeling of having scoured and cleaned and purged the self-pity and druggy grit caking my brain and clogging my heart, taunted me from just beyond reach, like a cloying, shiny mirror image of myself prim and sober and at ease, sitting with perfect posture in spotless, pressed clothes, my hair freshly cut and combed down, clean-shaven, in an armchair upholstered with immaculate, ivory fabric, a portrait of my smiling, beloved Kate on a table next to the chair, a glass of freshly brewed iced tea glowing in the sunlight streaming into the room from the windows, an anthology of inspirational verse in my lap, my forefinger keeping place at a poem in which a pastor consoles a father who has lost his only child, which has quieted my heart and brought me at peace with my daughter having been ground up beneath the wheels of a car.
6.
I USED TO LOVE WORKING IN THE YARD IN NOVEMBER, ON SATURDAY afternoons. Even though I mowed and tended other people’s yards during the week, taking care of my own had a different quality. I loved the last fall cleanup, when the trees were bare and I raked up the last of the leaves from the grass and among the bushes. There was something devotional about it. The sun began to set by four o’clock and traffic subsided on the road. The yard had a majestic, planetary feel to it. Groomed, it seemed like a preparatory offering to winter, which was headed toward the village, just over the horizon. Wind swelled through the bare trees and made deep chords I felt in my throat more than I heard. It carried a cardinal’s chipping from the hedge and the neighbor’s sparkly chimes. The brightness and warmth of working evaporated in a sudden chill and I fetched my hooded sweatshirt from the picnic table. I raked all the yellow and scarlet maple leaves and the thatch from the grass and mowed and raked out the flower beds, too, and the yard looked clean and bare. I scooped up a last armful of leaves and twigs and pitched it into the orange wheelbarrow and teased the last dregs of the leaf pile from the grass with the rake and whisked them around, so they would blend into the yard. Except for someone using a chain saw half a mile away, and the occasional approach and passing of a car out on the road in front of the house, there was a sense of solitude. It was the hour when most everyone else in the village had gone inside to prepare dinner.