All of Us

by Raymond Carver

  of his Sherwin-Williams cap.

  Jim had to stand and watch as the helicopter

  grappled with, then lifted, his son’s body from the river

  with tongs. “They used like a big pair of kitchen tongs

  for it, if you can imagine. Attached to a cable. But God always

  takes the sweetest ones, don’t He?” Mr Sears says. He has

  His own mysterious purposes.” “What do you think about it?”

  I want to know. “I don’t want to think,” he says. “We

  can’t ask or question His ways. It’s not for us to know.

  I just know He taken him home now, the little one.”

  He goes on to tell me Jim Sr’s wife took him to thirteen foreign

  countries in Europe in hopes it’d help him get over it. But

  it didn’t. He couldn’t. “Mission unaccomplished,” Howard says.

  Jim’s come down with Parkinson’s disease. What next?

  He’s home from Europe now, but still blames himself

  for sending Jim Jr back to the car that morning to look for

  that thermos of lemonade. They didn’t need any lemonade

  that day! Lord, lord, what was he thinking of, Jim Sr has said

  a hundred—no, a thousand—times now, and to anyone who will

  still listen. If only he hadn’t made lemonade in the first

  place that morning! What could he have been thinking about?

  Further, if they hadn’t shopped the night before at Safeway, and

  if that bin of yellowy lemons hadn’t stood next to where they

  kept the oranges, apples, grapefruit and bananas.

  That’s what Jim Sr had really wanted to buy, some oranges

  and apples, not lemons for lemonade, forget lemons, he hated

  lemons—at least now he did—but Jim Jr, he liked lemonade,

  always had. He wanted lemonade.

  “Let’s look at it this way,” Jim Sr would say, “those lemons

  had to come from someplace, didn’t they? The Imperial Valley,

  probably, or else over near Sacramento, they raise lemons

  there, right?” They had to be planted and irrigated and

  watched over and then pitched into sacks by field workers and

  weighed and then dumped into boxes and shipped by rail or

  truck to this god-forsaken place where a man can’t do anything

  but lose his children! Those boxes would’ve been off-loaded

  from the truck by boys not much older than Jim Jr himself.

  Then they had to be uncrated and poured all yellow and

  lemony-smelling out of their crates by those boys, and washed

  and sprayed by some kid who was still living, walking around town,

  living and breathing, big as you please. Then they were carried

  into the store and placed in that bin under that eye-catching sign

  that said Have You Had Fresh Lemonade Lately? As Jim Sr’s

  reckoning went, it harks all the way back to first causes, back to

  the first lemon cultivated on earth. If there hadn’t been any lemons

  on earth, and there hadn’t been any Safeway store, well, Jim would

  still have his son, right? And Howard Sears would still have his

  grandson, sure. You see, there were a lot of people involved

  in this tragedy. There were the farmers and the pickers of lemons,

  the truck drivers, the big Safeway store.… Jim Sr, too, he was ready

  to assume his share of responsibility, of course. He was the most

  guilty of all. But he was still in his nosedive, Howard Sears

  told me. Still, he had to pull out of this somehow and go on.

  Everybody’s heart was broken, right. Even so.

  Not long ago Jim Sr’s wife got him started in a little

  wood-carving class here in town. Now he’s trying to whittle bears

  and seals, owls, eagles, seagulls, anything, but

  he can’t stick to any one creature long enough to finish

  the job, is Mr Sears’s assessment. The trouble is, Howard Sears

  goes on, every time Jim Sr looks up from his lathe, or his

  carving knife, he sees his son breaking out of the water downriver,

  and rising up—being reeled in, so to speak—beginning to turn and

  turn in circles until he was up, way up above the fir trees, tongs

  sticking out of his back, and then the copter turning and swinging

  upriver, accompanied by the roar and whap-whap of

  the chopper blades. Jim Jr passing now over the searchers who

  line the bank of the river. His arms are stretched out from his sides,

  and drops of water fly out from him. He passes overhead once more,

  closer now, and then returns a minute later to be deposited, ever

  so gently laid down, directly at the feet of his father. A man

  who, having seen everything now—his dead son rise from the river

  in the grip of metal pinchers and turn and turn in circles flying

  above the tree line—would like nothing more now than

  to just die. But dying is for the sweetest ones. And he remembers

  sweetness, when life was sweet, and sweetly

  he was given that other lifetime.

  Such Diamonds

  It was a glorious morning. The sun was shining brightly and

  cleaving with its rays the layers of white snow

  still lingering here and there. The snow as it took leave of

  the earth glittered with such diamonds that it hurt the eyes

  to look, while the young winter corn was hastily thrusting up

  its green beside it. The rooks floated with dignity over

  the fields. A rook would fly, drop

  to earth, and give several hops before standing firmly

  on its feet.…

  — ANTON CHEKHOV

  “A Nightmare”

  Wake Up

  In June, in the Kyborg Castle, in the canton

  of Zurich, in the late afternoon, in the room

  underneath the chapel, in the dungeon,

  the executioner’s block hunches on the floor next

  to the Iron Maiden in her iron gown. Her serene features

  are engraved with a little noncommittal smile. If

  you ever once slipped inside her she closed her spiked

  interior on you like a demon, like one

  possessed. Embrace—that word on the card next to

  the phrase “no escape from.”

  Over in a corner stands the rack, a dreamlike

  contrivance that did all it was called on to do, and more,

  no questions asked. And if the victim passed out

  too soon from pain, as his bones were being broken

  one by one, the torturers simply threw a bucket of water

  on him and woke him up. Woke him again,

  later, if necessary. They were thorough. They knew

  what they were doing.

  The bucket is gone, but there’s an old cherrywood

  crucifix up on the wall in a corner of the room:

  Christ hanging on his cross, of course, what else?

  The torturers were human after all, yes? And who

  knows—at the last minute their victim might see

  the light, some chink of understanding, even acceptance of

  his fate might break, might pour into his nearly molten

  heart. Jesu Christo, my Savior.

  I stare at the block. Why not? Why not indeed?

  Who hasn’t ever wanted to stick his neck out without fear

  of consequence? Who hasn’t wanted to lay his life on the line,

  then draw back at the last minute?

  Who, secretly, doesn’t lust after every experience?

  It’s late. There’s nobody else in the dungeon but us,

&nbs
p; she and me, the North Pole and the South. I drop down

  to my knees on the stone floor, grasp my hands behind

  my back, and lay my head on the block. Inch it forward

  into the pulse-filled groove until my throat fits the shallow

  depression. I close my eyes, draw a breath. A deep breath.

  The air thicker somehow, as if I can almost taste it.

  For a moment, calm now, I feel I could almost drift off.

  Wake up, she says, and I do, turn my head over to see

  her standing above me with her arms raised. I see the axe too,

  the one she pretends to hold, so heavy it’s all she

  can do to hold it up over her shoulder. Only kidding,

  she says, and lowers her arms, and the idea-of-axe, then

  grins. I’m not finished yet, I say. A minute later, when I

  do it again, put my head back down on the block, in

  the same polished groove, eyes closed, heart racing

  a little now, there’s no time for the prayer forming in my

  throat. It drops unfinished from my lips as I hear her

  sudden movement. Feel flesh against my flesh as the sharp

  wedge of her hand comes down unswervingly to the base of

  my skull and I tilt, nose over chin into the last

  of sight, of whatever sheen or rapture I can grasp to take

  with me, wherever I’m bound.

  You can get up now, she says, and

  I do. I push myself up off my knees, and I look at her,

  neither of us smiling, just shaky

  and not ourselves. Then her smile and my arm going

  around her hips as we walk into the next corridor

  needing the light. And outside then, in the open, needing more.

  What the Doctor Said

  He said it doesn’t look good

  he said it looks bad in fact real bad

  he said I counted thirty-two of them on one lung before

  I quit counting them

  I said I’m glad I wouldn’t want to know

  about any more being there than that

  he said are you a religious man do you kneel down

  in forest groves and let yourself ask for help

  when you come to a waterfall

  mist blowing against your face and arms

  do you stop and ask for understanding at those moments

  I said not yet but I intend to start today

  he said I’m real sorry he said

  I wish I had some other kind of news to give you

  I said Amen and he said something else

  I didn’t catch and not knowing what else to do

  and not wanting him to have to repeat it

  and me to have to fully digest it

  I just looked at him

  for a minute and he looked back it was then

  I jumped up and shook hands with this man who’d just given me

  something no one else on earth had ever given me

  I may even have thanked him habit being so strong

  Let’s Roar, Your Honor

  To scream with pain, to cry, to summon help, to call

  generally—all that is described here as “roaring.”

  In Siberia not only bears roar, but sparrows and mice as well.

  “The cat got it, and it’s roaring,” they say of a mouse.

  — ANTON CHEKHOV

  “Across Siberia”

  Proposal

  I ask her and then she asks me. We each

  accept. There’s no back and forth about it. After nearly eleven years

  together, we know our minds and more. And this postponement, it’s

  ripened too. Makes sense now. I suppose we should be

  in a rose-filled garden or at least on a beautiful cliff overhanging

  the sea, but we’re on the couch, the one where sleep

  sometimes catches us with our books open, or

  some old Bette Davis movie unspools

  in glamorous black and white—flames in the fireplace dancing

  menacingly in the background as she ascends the marble

  staircase with a sweet little snub-nosed

  revolver, intending to snuff her ex-lover, the fur coat

  he bought her draped loosely over her shoulders. Oh lovely, oh lethal

  entanglements. In such a world

  to be true.

  A few days back some things got clear

  about there not being all those years ahead we’d kept

  assuming. The doctor going on finally about “the shell” I’d be

  leaving behind, doing his best to steer us away from the vale of

  tears and foreboding. “But he loves his life,” I heard a voice say.

  Hers. And the young doctor, hardly skipping a beat, “I know.

  I guess you have to go through those seven stages. But you end

  up in acceptance.”

  After that we went to lunch in a little café we’d never

  been in before. She had pastrami. I had soup. A lot

  of other people were having lunch too. Luckily

  nobody we knew. We had plans to make, time pressing down

  on us like a vise, squeezing out hope to make room for

  the everlasting—that word making me want to shout “Is there

  an Egyptian in the house?”

  Back home we held on to each other and, without

  embarrassment or caginess, let it all reach full meaning. This

  was it, so any holding back had to be stupid, had to be

  insane and meager. How many ever get to this? I thought

  at the time. It’s not far from here to needing

  a celebration, a joining, a bringing of friends into it,

  a handing out of champagne and

  Perrier. “Reno,” I said. “Let’s go to Reno and get married.”

  In Reno, I told her, it’s marriages

  and remarriages twenty-four hours a day seven days a week. No

  waiting period. Just “I do.” And “I do.” And if you slip

  the preacher ten bucks extra, maybe he’ll even furnish

  a witness. Sure, she’d heard all

  those stories of divorcees tossing their wedding rings into

  the Truckee River and marching up to the altar ten minutes later

  with someone new. Hadn’t she thrown her own last wedding band

  into the Irish Sea? But she agreed. Reno was just

  the place. She had a green cotton dress I’d bought her in Bath.

  She’d send it to the cleaners.

  We were getting ready, as if we’d found an answer to

  that question of what’s left

  when there’s no more hope: the muffled sound of dice coming

  down

  the felt-covered table, the click of the wheel,

  the slots ringing on into the night, and one more, one

  more chance. And then that suite we engaged for.

  Cherish

  From the window I see her bend to the roses

  holding close to the bloom so as not to

  prick her fingers. With the other hand she clips, pauses and

  clips, more alone in the world

  than I had known. She won’t

  look up, not now. She’s alone

  with roses and with something else I can only think, not

  say. I know the names of those bushes

  given for our late wedding: Love, Honor, Cherish —

  this last the rose she holds out to me suddenly, having

  entered the house between glances. I press

  my nose to it, draw the sweetness in, let it cling—scent

  of promise, of treasure. My hand on her wrist to bring her close,

  her eyes green as river-moss. Saying it then, against

  what comes: wife, while I can, while my breath, each hurried petal

  can still find her.

  Gravy />
  No other word will do. For that’s what it was. Gravy.

  Gravy, these past ten years.

  Alive, sober, working, loving and

  being loved by a good woman. Eleven years

  ago he was told he had six months to live

  at the rate he was going. And he was going

  nowhere but down. So he changed his ways

  somehow. He quit drinking! And the rest?

  After that it was all gravy, every minute

  of it, up to and including when he was told about,

  well, some things that were breaking down and

  building up inside his head. “Don’t weep for me,”

  he said to his friends. “I’m a lucky man.

  I’ve had ten years longer than I or anyone

  expected. Pure gravy. And don’t forget it.”

  No Need

  I see an empty place at the table.

  Whose? Who else’s? Who am I kidding?

  The boat’s waiting. No need for oars

  or a wind. I’ve left the key

  in the same place. You know where.

  Remember me and all we did together.

  Now, hold me tight. That’s it. Kiss me

  hard on the lips. There. Now

  let me go, my dearest. Let me go.

  We shall not meet again in this life,

  so kiss me goodbye now. Here, kiss me again.

  Once more. There. That’s enough.

  Now, my dearest, let me go.

  It’s time to be on the way.

  Through the Boughs

  Down below the window, on the deck, some ragged-looking

  birds gather at the feeder. The same birds, I think,

  that come every day to eat and quarrel. Time was, time was,

  they cry and strike at each other. It’s nearly time, yes.

  The sky stays dark all day, the wind is from the west and

  won’t stop blowing.… Give me your hand for a time. Hold on

  to mine. That’s right, yes. Squeeze hard. Time was we

  thought we had time on our side. Time was, time was,

  those ragged birds cry.

  Afterglow

  The dusk of evening comes on. Earlier a little rain

  had fallen. You open a drawer and find inside