The Night Listener and Others

by Chet Williamson

  They parted before him like water streaming to either side of his path, and his swinging club touched only the small piles of stones, scattering the pebbles everywhere, undoing the work of the unformed hands, the brains that knew only pain. Lattimore ran down the riverbed, his head a fist of white fire, raining down blows at the tiny things that swept themselves from his path, so that his club struck only the rocks on which they had labored.

  At last Lattimore stopped, panting. The pain in his head had grown no less, but something was different. He could see no more of the children ahead, nor to the side of him. They seemed to have swept around him and to his rear, and when he turned back in the direction he had come, he saw them not at all, but instead the Bodhisattva Jizô.

  He was standing only a few yards away from Lattimore, and was wearing a long robe with full sleeves. His hands were in front of him, and the features on the round face beneath the bald head seemed to be a combination of those on the statues that Lattimore had seen earlier and those that graced the countenance of his own wife.

  Jizô smiled Carolyn’s smile and shook his head slowly, then spread his arms wide so that Lattimore could see into the full, hanging sleeves, the sleeves that sheltered the thousands and millions and billions of creatures who strove every second to be free of their hell by drawing the compassion of the Buddha, but so far had only earned the sympathy and protection of a Bodhisattva.

  Then Jizô walked slowly toward Lattimore, whose sudden fear was greater than the pain caused by the children’s voices. He backed away, dragging his great club, but the Bodhisattva stopped, and so did Lattimore, trembling. Though Jizô’s mouth did not move, he heard the words in his head, like cool water upon the fire there.

  Did you think that I wished it as well?

  Lattimore didn’t understand, but his mouth felt incapable of forming questions. He listened to the words, in the voice of Jizô, in the voice of his wife.

  I did it for love of you. I did it for love.

  One of the long sleeves turned over, and from it one of the tiniest creatures of all floated down like a blossom and lay on the rock floor, its small white body twitching.

  The wisest. The most compassionate.

  Like unto Buddha.

  Lattimore knew. The words which had fallen like droplets of cool rain had turned to pellets of hot lead, and he ran, ran past the Bodhisattva, ran through the bed of the dead Sai-no-Kawara, ran to the mouth of the cave that had brought him into hell. The tunnel no longer led up, but down, and his heavy legs of spiked hide pounded the unyielding stone. He dragged his iron club behind him with his clawed talons, and sweat ran down the thick, wiry hair of his face.

  The voices of the children rang in his ears, and that of his own higher and louder and more piercing than them all, and though he plunged deeper into the caves, the wailing grew no softer. Soon he would have to turn and ascend and try to stop them once more, and so it would be, over and over again.

  He would hear them enter and wait and pass away, and though they spent eternities there, he would still remain when all were gone, and their cries would stay with him when not one stone sat upon another.

  A Father’s Tears

  I remember my father crying only twice in his life. The first time was when I got married. The second was when my own son died. Both times he cried because he lost a son. Whether or not they stayed lost is open to conjecture.

  I had always been somewhat close to my father, but never to the point where he was my best friend, where I entrusted him with the secrets and dreams that I held most privately and most guardedly. But, since there was never a friend to whom I unveiled those dark corners, there was never any jealousy on my father’s part.

  Sometimes I think he turned to me so possessively because his relationship with my mother had deteriorated into little more than necessary questions and strained answers. Over a period of years he had dominated her gradually, until near the end of her life she had slunk through her own house like a beaten cur, but with a touch of meanness that showed the spirit was not totally destroyed, and a feeling that the dog could still snap, though the gums were toothless. It was this tiny spark of rebellion, perhaps hatred, that made it impossible for my father to repair the twenty-five years of slow, gentle humiliations, once he realized the magnitude of his crime. Try as he would, there was no way for him to be kind to my mother. She had forgotten many years before how to accept kindness.

  As a result, although I suppose I had to have loved my mother, I never really liked her. When a dog skulks by cowering, teeth bared in fear and expectation that it will be kicked, a self-fulfilling prophecy occurs. I “kicked” my mother many times as I was growing up, mostly because she invited it, and often in revulsion at her spinelessness in the face of my father’s barbs. She took even good-natured joking seriously, no longer able to tell the difference, and as a result our house became a somber one.

  My mother died of cancer when I was sixteen, and neither my father nor myself felt the loss until several months later, when we both went through a period of deep depression that lasted several weeks. I had felt no obligation to mourn before then, and I think my depression stemmed more from a lingering nostalgia for the days when I was very young, and my mother was not yet cowed and embittered by the force of my father’s personality, than by any sense of loss of a loved one.

  My father’s depression, on the other hand, was heavily tinged with regret at what he had done to my mother and had then been unable to undo. But neither he nor I had cried over the loss, nor have we since.

  The death brought us closer together. We no longer had to speak softly in fear of offending Mother’s overly sensitive feelings, and soon the house trembled to masculine jokes and laughter, more like a deer camp than a home, but without the drunken bawdiness. My father did not drink, not ever, and he was very taciturn when it came to dirty jokes or even serious discussions of sex. His own father had had a drinking problem that had led to several clandestine affairs that had shattered my grandmother, making her sharp, suspicious, and aggressive. Although age and a rotting liver had made my grandfather reform himself, she had still hounded him to his grave, smelling for liquor on his breath, and checking for semen stains on his underwear long past the time when he was capable of drinking the one or producing the other.

  Those events marked my father with indelible memories that made him avoid both alcohol and licentiousness like a puritan, which was not hard to do, as he was not a particularly social creature. He belonged to no clubs or lodges, and his few social contacts were with other members of his hunting camp, a group informally restricted to five men, most of whom were loners like my father.

  Hunting was his passion, and I think he was always a bit sad after my interest in it had waned. I’d been an avid small game hunter through junior high school, until I’d learned that I had quite a lot of talent in drawing. An art teacher encouraged me, and soon my free time and weekends were taken up at a drawing board my father constructed for me in his workshop. His opinions of my work, however, were not always complimentary. He cared nothing for my still lifes and portraits, and a charcoal portrait of him that I did for a Father’s Day gift was put away in the back of some closet.

  He loved my wildlife art, however. With pen-and-ink I had gradually achieved a limited mastery in detailed animal heads, and he greatly admired the near photographic technique. He would watch for hours as I dipped the pen, drew a single line, wiped the nib, and repeated. His favorite gift was one I did in secret and gave him for his fifty-fifth birthday, a few years after Mother had died. It was a large and highly detailed pen and ink of a buck’s head and antlers. As a model I’d used the ten-point mounted trophy that he had hanging in his den, a deer he had bagged when he was in his late thirties, and the largest he’d ever gotten.

  He was enraptured by the drawing, which was the most detailed piece I had done at the time, every hair standing out starkly against the dazzling white of the Strathmore board. The only difference between it and th
e mounted head was the more realistic glitter of the eye, as the cheap glass eyes that the taxidermist had supplied had clouded and dulled over the years.

  I had framed it in a rustic wood, and he hung it immediately beneath the mounted head, remarking that although it couldn’t take the place of the stuffed trophy, it was the next best thing. The comment neither surprised nor offended me. He always preferred reality over symbol.

  By the time I was eighteen, my art had won me a great many awards as well as a scholarship to a prestigious university. I was selling my work at summer shows and in a few galleries, but still my father wondered when I was going to do something to earn a steady living. I could not seem to convince him that I could indeed make a comfortable income from freelancing. Perhaps it would have been easier had I fully believed it myself.

  He missed me desperately when I went away to school, though I didn’t realize to what extent until my junior year, when I decided rather abruptly not to go home over the Thanksgiving vacation, but to remain at school in order to complete the projects required by a very heavy course load. As I recall, I treated the decision rather cavalierly when I discussed it with him on the phone, and later learned through a letter from an uncle, my father’s brother, that he had been crushed by it, refusing to go to their house for holiday dinner, as we always did, and taking several sick days off from the tool and die cutting shop where he worked. My father never told me of his disappointment, which made my guilt all the stronger, and I made it a point to spend as much of Christmas vacation and semester break with him as was possible.

  The summer of my graduation I got married, and the first of the two breaks with my father began.

  Rachel was an art student who had received her teaching degree when I’d gotten my B.A. Although an artist herself (sculpting was her chosen medium), her talents lay more in the field of creative and original teaching methods for elementary art, and some of my most joyous moments were spent watching her work with the faculty children in the university’s model school.

  We’d fallen in love over a period of knowing each other and dating on and off for years, so it was an open and easy relationship. Considering our respective strengths and wishes, we thought it best for Rachel to support us both at first with her teaching, while I continued to build a base as a freelance fine and commercial artist.

  My father was stunned by my announcement of our forthcoming wedding, even though I had often told him about Rachel, and had even brought her home on my senior year semester break (she had slept in the guest room, but we had found an opportunity to make giggling and nearly apprehended love in the single bed in my old room, surrounded by Tigers pennants and Middle-earth maps).

  At first I thought his objection might have been that Rachel was Jewish, though her faith had lapsed years before and her family were Reformed Jews to begin with. When I asked him if that was his objection, he grabbed onto the idea like a drowning man at a lifeline, though I could tell from his expression that he hadn’t even considered it before.

  “Yes,” he’d said, “yes, that’s part of it! It’s very hard for two young people anyway, without that added to it. I mean, two different cultures, and any children…”

  I’d laughed, and he had turned pale, realizing that he sounded like an ignorant bigot, and we talked no more about it. Several days later, however, he did a complete reversal and started talking almost nonstop about what a wonderful wife Rachel was going to be, how good it was for men my age to get married, and a number of other homilies that, considering his own experience in marriage, rang lifeless and false.

  When he asked where we intended living, I told him the truth. Rachel was looking for a teaching position near Chicago, because jobs there would be easier to find, and it would have been nearly impossible for me to freelance without the easy proximity to prospective clients and galleries a major metropolitan area could offer. I didn’t know why this information came as such a shock to him, as I couldn’t conceive of his expecting us to stay in the small town in which I’d grown up. Yet it surprised him greatly, and sent him into another blue funk that finally disappeared two days before the wedding, when he and I drove to Shaker Heights, Ohio.

  Rachel’s family lived there, and the wedding was to be held in the synagogue they attended. Rachel had originally wanted a civil ceremony, but her mother was insistent and neither Rachel nor I had any strong objection to a religious service.

  The Golds were friendly and outgoing, and made both my father and me feel very much at home. Mr. Gold was a deer hunter too, and I saw much of my father’s unease pass away the instant he spotted an eight-point rack serving as a hall tree in their entry.

  In fact, I had seldom seen my father as happy as on that first evening with the Golds. He laughed at Mr. Gold’s stories, joked freely about the marriage and the possibility of grandchildren, and even relaxed enough to have a few guiltless glasses of wine. That evening in our motel room he told me that I was marrying into a very nice family, that Rachel was a lovely girl, and that I should be very good to her.

  I suppose I grunted something into the darkness while we lay there trying to grow accustomed to the metallic growl of the ice machine. Then after a few minutes he spoke again, so low I could hardly hear him.

  I’m not completely sure, but I think that he said, “Don’t ever kill her.”

  I was near sleep, but the words pulled me back from the abyss and a chill crept over my shoulders so that I pulled the covers up around them. Had I heard him wrong? “What’s that, Dad?” I said.

  There was a deep sigh, and he answered, “Nothing. Nothing. Goodnight.”

  The next day was low-key. We slept late, had a rehearsal in the afternoon, and then a nice dinner for family and friends. Tony Corelli, a college room-mate, was my best man, and he and some other friends and cousins who would be ushers had arrived that afternoon. After the dinner, they, both fathers, and I had a “stag party” in the private room of a club Mr. Gold belonged to. There were no naked girls popping out of cakes, but the beer and scotch and dirty jokes flowed pretty freely until it became too much for my father, who pleaded tiredness. He drove back to the motel and I followed well past midnight with Tony, a little tipsy but far from drunk.

  As I quietly unlocked the room door, hoping not to disturb my father’s sleep, I became aware of a dry barking sound, like a dog vomiting up grass. My father was sitting in his t-shirt and boxer shorts in front of the TV. The sound was turned all the way down, so the only noise was his crying. I asked him what was wrong, my voice slightly slurred by the drinks I’d had.

  He said nothing, shaking his head, words choked by tears.

  “Come on, Dad,” I said. “What’s the matter? Please tell me.”

  “It’s just…” Another heaving sob shook him, and I sat on the arm of the chair, my arms around his shoulders. “It’s just that I lost your mother, and now I’m losing you too, and I don’t think I can take it. I just don’t think I can take it…”

  I told him that it would be all right, that Rachel and I would visit him often, that we’d only be a little over 150 miles away, that he could visit us too, that we’d call often, he could call anytime, and on and on and on, and it didn’t do a damned bit of good.

  He finally pretended that it was going to be okay and went to bed, but his ragged breathing told me that he was still awake far into the morning.

  The wakeup call came too early, but I needed the extra time to fully recover from the previous night. My father and I showered and shaved, had breakfast in the coffee shop with Tony and the others, then dressed for the 10:30 wedding. He seemed fine again, happy, friendly, and anxious for the ceremony.

  Everything was fine until we neared the end of the marriage service. Rachel and I were almost finished with our vows when I heard a low buzz from the congregation. I turned my head slightly so that from the corner of my eye I might see what all the fuss was about. Then the sound reached me. It was my father, crying dry, low, hacking sobs that grew louder until they resound
ed like gunshots in the modern synagogue’s vast glass and steel interior.

  Suddenly I felt very angry, and I think I would have gone down into the congregation to roughly quiet him had it not been for the squeeze that Rachel gave my arm. The mild pain brought me back to myself and I finished the vows through nearly clenched teeth, stamping on the glass, kissing Rachel, and walking down the aisle, the sound of my blood rushing in my ears drowning out the cries of Mazeltov.

  By the time we formed the reception line my father’s crying had stopped. I stormed up to him, ready to reprimand him, even abuse him, but he was ready for me, and smiled and embraced me, “I’m sorry,” he said, “I’m sorry I lost control. But I was so happy, so happy for you, happy for you both.” Then he hugged Rachel, who had come up behind me.

  I told him that it was all right, and we joined the line. As friends and relatives were passing, I caught the quaint phrase, unmanly tears, and jerked up my head to see who had said it. It was one of Rachel’s great-uncles, a man too old to have to mind his tongue anymore, and he returned my gaze as belligerently as I had given it.

  He was right. That was why I was angry. I’d thought tears were tears up to that point, that men should be able to cry and not have it cast any aspersions on their masculinity, but my father, that day and the night before, had cried a woman’s tears, and it had diminished him in my eyes.

  Rachel and I moved to Chicago, and as my career blossomed my relationship with my father withered. We visited him once every month or so, and I would call on weekends, but he seemed detached from me, withdrawn as from one who had betrayed him many years before by being born.