The bedroom light finally came on upstairs, all warm and yellow and safe. When it went out, twenty minutes later, Howard put the little car in gear and drove off into the wind and rain. This would mark the first night they would live and sleep and dream without Eliot Woods among them. He hoped Ellen had found comfort in the fact that a friend—not a husband—had watched her drive home. That a friend who loved her had waited for her garage door to go up and then down, for her bedroom light to blink on and then off. He could never bring Eliot back, could never bring back her grandson. So Howard hoped she knew.
Grief
The driver who killed Eliot had not been found. He was anonymous, a virtual driver, careering down the information highway, hiding out somewhere in cyberspace. It wasn’t that law enforcement hadn’t looked. They were searching everywhere. They just didn’t have much information to help them, other than a small boy’s traumatized glimpse of a car that might have been blue. It was almost too painful for Howard to think of Eliot, to imagine him, and so he tried hard not to. During the three days that followed Eliot’s death, as he waited for the family to arrive and for the funeral services to be over, he kept busy by unpacking the many boxes and arranging his things in the tiny cabin. It was the only way he could shelve the pain. He now had shirts and slacks hanging from hangers in the makeshift closet. He had the crude bookshelf bulging with his books. He had stacked the wood box above the brim, just because it was empty. He had gone to the local Kmart and purchased a few pans, a few forks and knives, some dish towels. He had even bought curtains, a means to discourage the morning sun since the only window in the modest bedroom opened to the east. He had stopped by the hobby department and selected a can of cleanser and some bottles of paint for the toy car, the ’59 Galaxy. He had shopped at the huge IGA and picked up plenty of canned foods, some fruit and bread, coffee, and a few bottles of wine.
Howard was keeping busy, but he knew he couldn’t put it off forever. When he wasn’t being careful, he would find himself staring at the faces of drivers he met, in those blue cars that cruised along the highway. He stared at oncoming headlights, the silver sneer of a front bumper. Was that what Eliot had seen? Was that his last picture? There, that car just turning onto Fillmore Street! Was that the one that had run the boy down, his bicycle crunching like aluminum foil beneath the tires? Was that the one? That woman? That man, there, in the car just pulling up to the dry cleaners? That girl, the one talking on her cell phone and not watching the street? How blue did Davie think the car was? How new? How long? The questions, if he gave in to them, were relentless, and so he forced himself to push them aside. Instead, he concentrated on putting his physical life in order. He was getting ready for the pain the way one gets ready for a long, hard winter. And all the while he worked, he was aware that Ben Collins was keeping a close eye on him from the photograph that Howard had taped to the mirror over the tiny sink. Ben was keeping an eye.
At the bottom of the box that had Murray’s Clay Pot Kit written on its side, Howard found the battered dictionary that he’d kept for years on his desk, in his office at Bixley Community College. He was pleased to see it again. He had not realized how much he missed what it represented, that place to go when one needed help with words. But since his retirement, the only thing he’d written had been his letter to the Ford Motor Company. He flipped through the tattered pages until he came to the one he was looking for. The verb to grieve comes from the Middle English greven, which is derived from the Old English greven, which is derived from the Latin gravare, to burden, which is derived of gravis, or heavy. Howard closed the dictionary and put it on a shelf of the bookcase with the other books. Now he knew why the lightness had gone out of Ellen, why Patty looked as if she were being pressed to death. It’s been known for some time, then, that grief is a burden. It’s heavy as stone.
Howard Jr. had arrived first with his family and then Greta with hers. They had gathered, they had hugged each other, they had mourned. Apparently, Ellen hadn’t told these two older children yet about the changes that had taken place in her own life, in her marriage to their father. Nor had he mentioned it, the few times over the previous month that he’d spoken to them by phone. If they were surprised to learn that Howard was now living in a camp near Bixley Lake, they kept it to themselves. The larger, more important issue was Eliot, who was dead, and his grieving parents, who were alive. That’s all. Howard Jr. and his wife, Rachel, had gone to her mother’s home and put up there. Greta wanted to be with her own mother, with Ellen, and so she settled into her old childhood room for a few days, the kids in the spare guest room.
On each of those past three days, Howard had gone to Ellen’s door on Patterson Street to ask if she was okay. Did she need anything? And while he was there, he stayed long enough to visit his daughter and other grandchildren, girls who were not old enough to understand the mechanics of grief. And then he had gone to John’s house, Patty’s house, what used to be Eliot’s house. No one seemed to need him there either, so he had sat up in Eliot’s room, on Eliot’s bed. He had fed Eliot’s dog. But there was nothing else for him to do. John and Patty had made good friends in their marriage and now those closest friends moved in like a small, soothing army to see that the proper things were being done. The casket. The funeral. The burial. Howard was thankful for this. He assumed Ellen was thankful, and that John and Patty were thankful. Thankful. He had heard John say only one thing about the preparations: “His Gators T-shirt,” when the question arose as to what Eliot should wear in his casket. Howard left then. He wanted to hear no more. The family had decided that they and everyone else should remember Eliot as he was, not the bruised and broken little boy he had become under the tires of some unknown automobile. There would be no wake. There would be a memorial service for family and friends. They would say good-bye, they would separate again, and then they could all concentrate on the task of grieving.
On July 6, the day that hundreds of anxious runners gathered in Pamplona where they would soon skillfully dodge the bulls, Howard Woods stood with the rest of his grieving family and watched as Eliot’s casket was lowered into the earth. Eliot Lane Woods, born in 1991, on a god-awful, rainy night that had seen Howard and Ellen skidding into the same emergency parking lot at Bixley Hospital, unfurling their umbrellas, then racing up to the delivery room so that they would be there when John walked out with a baby in his arms. Their first grandson. Seven years ago, and yet it was a lifetime. Eliot’s lifetime. When the small casket disappeared below the edge of the burial hole, Howard heard Patty cry out again, that cry he’d heard in the hospital the night Eliot died, a cry she might have made with the pain of Eliot’s birth. John was there to comfort her, his arm around her narrow shoulders. But his own face was void of that confidence he used to have. Howard had to wonder if John’s face would ever return to them. Or was it gone somewhere now where they would never see it again? That happened sometimes with death, Howard knew. He’d seen it in his own mother when his father had died. It was as if his father had taken the best part of her with him.
After the funeral, they had all gathered at Ellen’s house for food and consolation. But Howard felt little comfort, the house already becoming strange to him now that his things were no longer in it. While the others huddled in the kitchen, trying their soldier’s best to tell the happy stories of Eliot’s life, the time he locked himself in the basement, the time he gave his teacher a white mouse, the time he found the hundred-dollar bill, the time he ran away from home and came to Patterson Street, Howard stood staring out at the birdhouse in the backyard and wondering how sixty-some years could disappear so fast, much less seven. His lifetime.
Howard Jr. had to get back, a meeting the next day that couldn’t be avoided. Greta and her husband were buying a house and had papers to sign. As fast as they’d come, in a whirlwind of suitcases and wet tears, they were gone. Back to their lives. The silence they left behind was unbearable. Howard wasn’t sure if a death had really taken p
lace after all. Was it real, or was it Hollywood? But this is how people must live, he told himself. This is how they go on, by pretending it will never happen to them. This is sometimes where their courage lies. His only concern now was Ellen. And so, he had gone to her again. He had told her he would come home in an instant. And again Ellen said no. “It would be because of Eliot,” Ellen said. These were the words she didn’t speak to him that night in the rain, standing outside the hospital. “But in a year, two years, Howie, this thing between us would raise its ugly head again, and we’d be right back where we started.” He couldn’t argue with her, for she was right. Ellen was always right about those subtle things that lie just below the surface. He knew in his own heart that he still didn’t feel forgiveness. He still didn’t feel it, no matter how hard he tried. On the afternoon following Eliot’s funeral, with his son and daughter disappeared again into the world, with John and Patty holed up in their own house not wishing to see anyone, Howard worked on the toy car, the one he had hoped to have ready for Eliot as a Christmas present. He did this for his own sake, so afraid was he that the grief would press him to death. And then, if it did, no one would be there for Ellen. He smiled as he poured some cleanser onto a damp cloth and wiped away the rust and grime. A 1959 Galaxy, the first year Ford ever made the model. Howard had been desperate to buy one, knowing that with his family about to happen, it would be his last splurge on a fancy car. He even remembered what the thing would cost him, a whopping $2,650, but it would be worth it. She was a beauty, sleek and shiny, with those little gold balls on the fenders. And if you pretended you didn’t see a Thunderbird flying past you on the highway, you could imagine that you had the sportiest model Ford could offer. She’d be a collector’s dream one day, given that ’59 was her debut year. He had explained all this to Ellen. The Galaxy would be his sporty car, and he would leave it sitting beneath a cover in the garage. Someday, one day, he would sell it for good money. It was an investment, damn it. But 1959 was the year Greta was born. Ellen was thinking ahead to two more children yet to come, to the appendixes that might need to come out, to the braces that might need to go in. How could a monthly payment be made on something as frivolous as a sporty car? She was right, of course, and so Howard had given in to marriage, fatherhood, the sensible Rambler, and impending middle age.
Howard painted the toy car the same color as the Galaxy he never bought, a shiny red. He painted the headlights yellow and then added strokes of silver for the chrome. When he was finished, he put the little car on the windowsill over the sink, where the morning sun could dry it fully. Then, he stood back and admired the simplicity of it, remembering how sweet it had looked rolling down the highways and byways of 1959. What a notion that had been, what a safety in those days. But Howard now knew the truth. America was a country sound asleep, waiting for something to prod it awake, the way Ellen had prodded him awake to tell him of Ben Collins. And when it came, it was a crash so loud that people jumped to their feet, dazed, stunned as sheep. Howard knew now that 1959 had been our last good sleep before the sixties.
“So what do you think, Ben?” Howard asked the photo beneath the strip of tape. Ben’s eyes were everywhere these days, like one of those Catholic icons that appear to see everything. “She’s a beauty, isn’t she?”
***
That night, in his narrow bed out at the cabin, with the sounds of the lake waters lapping against the shore, Howard dreamed that it was Richard Nixon who had been driving the car that killed his grandson, Robert McNamara in the passenger seat. He had peered from behind the curtains of his living room window and watched as the runaway vehicle veered up onto the sidewalk and then plowed its way down Patterson Street, killing other kids. Killing lots of kids. Howard wanted to do something, he wanted desperately to act, but his arms were broken again, useless wings that flapped at his sides as he watched in horror, watched as though the scene before him were taking place on a large television screen, Walter Cronkite narrating.
Finally, Howard woke, his back moist against the wet sheet beneath him. He woke and stared at the ceiling as he fought to place the dream fragments into some kind of order. Symbolic, he thought, like the Macbeth dream, a dream of longing and helplessness. Not to mention another war that Howard had missed because he was old enough to be safe with a wife, and three children, and a teaching job. Another war his sons were too young to be killed in. But other people’s sons, 58,000 of them, had perished among the rice paddies. There was Howard’s neighbor, Sam Mason, who still lived in the two-story brick on Patterson, the very street where Ellen was probably dreaming her own nightmares. Sam had lost his boy, Bradley, a nice young man, tall and good-looking, who drove a white Mustang wherever he went. That is, until Bradley went to Vietnam and stepped on a live mine, somewhere in the Mekong Delta. For years the white Mustang sat parked above Sam’s garage, pooling the spring rains, catching up the autumn leaves. A zillion snowflakes had hit, then melted, on the Mustang’s canvas roof before Sam finally had the heart to sell it. Everything takes time. Even for Robert McNamara, who had finally published a book admitting that the war had been wrong. It all takes time.
Howard sat up and slid his legs over the side of the bed. He sat there as the gray film of dawn ebbed in over the treetops. One of the loons was already awake, for he heard its cry echo from the other end of the lake. He thought of the eggs in the sparrow’s nest, back at the Holiday Inn. Soon, they would crack and break open, the safety of the shell taken from them. He imagined the fledglings opening their small plum eyes to the neon glare from signs along that busy street. The first thing they would know of this strange, new world would be Goodyear Tires, On Sale Now! Try Our Taco Salad! Develop One Roll of Film, Get One Free! Mel Gibson in Conspiracy Theory. They would wake to the first big car sale that summer, at Gregson’s Auto Sales, just across the street, their sealed eyes opening to the newest Chevrolets on the market, their small beaks coated with the dust of the parking lot, their feathers filled with exhaust. The ones that died in the nest, from sickness or hunger or predators, would never fly up far enough on their new wings to see the blue lake below, or the white birches, or the yellow stars. What had John said? “There were children beneath the bombs we dropped, there were children.” But didn’t John know that war was big business? McNamara certainly knew it. And big business meant good business, and good business meant body count. It had been that way since the first bloody war ever waged on the planet. It would always be that way. And some bodies were better to count than others. Howard had learned that from television, too. He’d seen how the corpses of Vietnamese civilians were simply thrown onto the pile and forgotten about. And those 58,000 American bodies? They were thrown onto a long black wall in DC, another mark for big business since lots of folks came every day to look at the names, to spend money in the cafés, the stores, the gas stations of our nation’s capitol.
Finally, Howard cried. And when he did, it felt as if his insides would run out of him, right through his tear ducts, his guts, his heart, his liver, his goddamn soul, whatever that was supposed to be, for this was where it hurt. It hurt in the part of him that lived, that recognized himself as a husband, a father, a grandfather. The human being part of him. Not the part that told him to invest a few pitiful dollars in McDonald’s. Or the part that had aspired to teach literature for a weekly paycheck. Or even the part that had tried to have sex with Donna Riley, the same part that had created Eliot in the first place. No, it was the best part of him that hurt, the divine part. It was the part that made him human and godlike all at once, made him aware of sunsets, and good books, and the smile of a fine French wine. The part that tells painters to pick up their brushes and shape the world on canvas, if only to save it for a few hundred years, or even an hour. It was the part of him that kept his heart beating, like a ticking clock, the whispering part that said to him daily, “Time is running out, Howie, old chap. The goddamn bird is on the wing. So get the lead out.”
But at least Howard
Woods cried.
Autumn 1998
Common Ground
“It’s a shame you’re sick. We get on well. What’s the matter with you anyway?”
“I got hurt in the war,” I said.
“Oh, that dirty war.”
—Jake Barnes and Georgette, the prostitute, The Sun Also Rises
July had brought with it a record heat for Bixley. All that long month, Howard slept with the windows open at the cabin, atop sheets that were wet with perspiration. August came with a blessed cooling, followed by September, and the first signs of fall when a single maple across the lake burst into scarlet. As September inched away, he could almost feel the land pulsing beneath the floor of the cabin, getting ready, gearing up. He had lain awake many mornings, listening to that prehistoric call of the loons. He had read about this. Sixty million years ago, there were loon calls echoing on the earth, in the smoky gray mists of those ancient dawns. The squirrels grew bushier as they grew busier, and in the birds he could sense a kind of anxiety. Those that were leaving had a long way to fly. But the ones who stayed behind had a long way to go before spring.
With October came the gold, the red, the orange, the yellow, as winter hovered in the air each morning. Howard had long been making fires from that stocked wood box, the one he thought he’d never need. He had come to view the small brown cabin as a kind of shell, a sturdy nut that would keep him safe from the elements. He had grown to respect the simplicity of the oil lamp, of quiet nights without radio or television. If he wanted music in his life again, if that day ever came, he would have the trusty CD player and the trove of unused batteries. He boiled his morning coffee in a pot on the woodstove, learning after a time the perfect amount of grounds to toss into the bubbling water. He had gone so far as to talk to Pete about the possibilities of winterizing the cabin, which he would pay for himself, maybe adding a small generator into the bargain. As it was, he ate his main meal of the day, his only hot one, at the Bixley Café, a chance to hear human voices again, something he needed. He knew now why Thoreau, for all his claims of isolation, had sneaked into Concord each Sunday to have dinner with his mother. Human beings need each other. Pete had left the answer to winterizing up to Howard, since so much hung in the meaning of it. Did it suggest that he and Ellen would never reunite? Would Howard grow old in the cabin? Would he die some morning in the narrow bed, only the leftover birds of winter to mourn him? Who knew? Maybe the cabin could shelter him from the elements, from the wind, the rain, the snow, but it couldn’t shelter him from life. He was one of those human beings, after all. But human beings endure. It all takes time.
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