by Amy Benson
So in the middle of a large stretch of woods unbroken by roads, I am alone with the traces of a man no one really knew. I sit at the edge of his old well and try to think about what this means, but I am antsy, the flies are biting. I never learned the art of meditation. I need to turn back to my father’s cabin at the edge of the woods, closer, at least, to people I love. It’s good to know how thoroughly I’m incapable of Jimmy Moore’s misanthropy or courage. Was he filled with weakness or hope, and which one am I full of?
Let’s call it hope. I’m tired of accusing myself. We have so little time conscious here on our plot of earth, in the heat of its colors. And, truly, this place has us—you, the sparkling-eyed boy, me—for just a little time. There are many ways to be here but not here. Jimmy Moore’s place and the sparkling-eyed boy are reliquaries. I tell stories about them, visit them to point out fragments from the past. They become indelible legends. The ghost pipes, though, are elusive, off the trail, gifts appearing for the sake of themselves. How easily I could never have seen them—it’s much easier to find a dried-up well. It’s much easier to fixate on a tangible person than a certain sweet scent in the air you can find nowhere else, or the way light shifts on water so beautifully you find it difficult to breathe.
I am gliding through the forest in my own ghostliness. I want to hang on to the meanings that rise and fall away in a heartbeat. But a place is not about my use of it. A place simply is, regardless of the stories we’ll stitch to it. Here is my hope: that one day I won’t hurry back from where I go. For a moment as fleeting as a metaphor, I will pause and be amazed and breathe as I’ve never breathed before, through new, dying lungs.
…
Night 8
Sometimes I think, you say. Sometimes I think, you say. We are red with the heat of our bodies, white in the center, orange like steam off our skin, the evaporation of yellow to green, to deep blue beyond the porch light, to the deep cold of indigo farther into the night, the core of an iceberg. Sometimes I think, you say. The sun has gone down and you have come down and the world has gone so dark we could be anywhere. We could take a step sideways and fall off. We could end up two bright spots in the core of a glacier melting very little. My father is a crimson core at the end of the driveway who refuses to go away. He is afraid of our skin and the words that might loosen themselves from the tiny spaces between our teeth. Sometimes I think, you say, I will go crazy in a couple of years. And any ears could hear you, standing near you as we are. My father’s ears and mine and birds still awake to hear our peculiar chattering. The insects love us and are frantic for our hides. I slap at myself as if annoyed with my elbow, neck, shin. You move your big hand in a thoughtful wave. The road has been there the whole time, from the beginning to the end. Only this night you came down it, your truck a violence passing between trees. You say, Sometimes I think ten years have gone by, ten years have gone by, ten years. Ten years—count back ten to when you got married, when you said those things you hoped to mean always. Thirteen years to when I kissed you in your truck, when your hand held the ends of a clump of my hair, the underside of a small breast. Do you see how the light falls around us and at its edge the dark rises, confident and complete? This moment could be that moment or the ones before that. But your hands look rough and swollen now, my forehead deeply creased, my thighs ticked with dark little vessels. You say, Sometimes I think ten years have gone by and I have nothing to show for it. I say, What about your beautiful little girl? I say but don’t say, I have pictures of your deep reservoirs of joy. Have you given them all to her, distilled? Have you kept a vial of the impurities for yourself: sadness, frustration, resignation? I say but don’t say, Though I have been sadder, it makes me very sad to know you are so sad. I say but don’t say, I hope this means that you miss me. The mosquitoes are leaving drams of poison under our skin. I have asked but not asked my father to leave us. He doesn’t understand what is happening, but neither do we. Warm things are almost never elemental. Elemental things do not speak—as if vibrating air through our throats to change our lives or the lives of others could ever be the business of a rock. I have never wanted to be a person occupying a body on a particular square of earth at a particular time, but here I am, unable to negotiate the here-ness of us.
Start at the beginning: We are at the edge of pine trees, the edge of the water. I have known this spot since I was born; you have known it with me. We are not the most significant clusters of particles. Not even close. We are warm spots in a cooling night, a cooling season, cooling lives. Deep in our forest there is a four-billion-year-old stone ridge. Scientists can tell us these things. My father, a bewildered core at the end of the driveway, is proud of this ridge. I am terrified by it. I think you might be sadder than me. I am terrified by that, too. You say, Sometimes I think, you say, there is so much to worry about now. Things were better in high school. We only had to decide where the party was going to be on the weekends. You laugh, a sound like silt in your throat. You don’t know, do you, how few of us are capable of your grins. I say but don’t say, Do you know what you want to return to, what you would have to seal up and bury? I say, Yeah, it’s hard to let that stuff go, isn’t it. As if I am a former addict and you an addict.
But we are both slapping our bodies, the insects on our bodies. We both wish we could step backwards out of the circle of light, leaving the frightened rouge core of my father, every inch articulated. In the field behind the cabin, the blind indigo field, we would become indistinct from the field except for the red glow of our human heat. Without even seeing my face, my hand slapping blindly at my skin, you could say what you’ve said but not said. I could say what I’ve said but not said.
Have I gotten that right? That you haven’t said all you would say? You say, Sometimes I think I will go crazy. But you are a warm spot and the rest of the night is blue-black and cold. I ask but do not ask, What about the other times—what do you think then?
…
Day 9
I began with a central question: Why? Why did the sparkling-eyed boy visit my dreams unpredictably but often, the same scenario every time telling me I still wasn’t satisfied? After years of forgetting him, why when I saw the video of his wedding did my heart stumble, my lungs freeze? This is a mystery story, and I keep writing it because I’m never convinced I’ve figured it out. We are not tightly woven, plot-driven novels. We are all just small collections of events, impressions, moods, beliefs, which, in shards, we call our selves. Hold the shards up to the light, give them a twist, and you will have a kaleidoscope: a sharp-petaled flower, next an angry snowflake, next a shapeless spill of ink.
I am tempted to say, Aha! That is my problem: I have been looking shard by shard, but stand back and I will have the whole, fluid mosaic. But I’m afraid there is no perspective from which we can view every angle of a moment, let alone a year, a life, or the life of another. And there is no answer if I have to answer the question myself.
He came last night, driving too fast down our road. An hour earlier, my father and I had stopped at his house on the way back from the beach. I didn’t ask him to, didn’t mention the boy at all; my dad wanted to pay the sparkling-eyed boy for reshingling the roof of the cabin. He was on a tractor mower, holding his little girl in front of him. She marched right up to me, took my hand, and dragged me from spot to spot in front of the house while my father talked with him and his wife. The girl squealed and laughed and threw herself on the ground with a hilarity a body many times her size couldn’t contain. The sparkling-eyed boy asked me about my job, he remembered that I write. When we left, the rosy girl said, Where are you going? She said, No! Don’t go. He said, You should come back this week, take her to the beach. I said, I’m leaving tomorrow morning. Fifteen minutes after we got back he called—he just remembered that he never checked my dad’s driveway for nails.
We all want something from one another. Perhaps someday this truth will not be so ugly to me as it is now, but it still seems like a poison, surreptitious and deadly
. At the beginning, I wanted just this one love to be interest-free. I didn’t want love to be merely what I give in order to get what I need—a primal bargaining chip. I wanted to remember him, let him know that he was precious, not leave my fingerprints all over him. I wanted a true gift to be possible: a gift to him and not myself.
I used to think that acceptance of ugly truths was acquiescence, was the providence of the old softening into their lives, apples browning inside their skins. I thought that feelings, ideals, meant something only if they were held forever. Was I wrong? With this book I am growing up. He was my childhood, a deeply rooted evergreen. He was the child I couldn’t be and didn’t have enough sense at the time to admire. But, in the strictest sense, what he is is all he has, what I am is all I have. And what I am is not wise enough to truly learn. Sentimental, but often secretly exacting. A martyr, acting as if I can bear what others cannot. Ruled by fear and not curiosity or logic or love. I am sometimes sad.
But not one single thing can refurl itself. Not a bud, not a fetus, not a firecracker, a sunrise, a wave, a volcano, a sentence. So here I am, unfurled, trying to be glad that seasons collapse in on themselves and living things die.
Bread Loaf and the Bakeless Prizes
The Katharine Bakeless Nason Literary Publication Prizes were established in 1995 to expand Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference’s commitment to the support of emerging writers. Endowed by the LZ Francis Foundation, the prizes commemorate Middlebury College patron Katharine Bakeless Nason and launch the publication career of a poet, fiction writer, and creative nonfiction writer annually. Winning manuscripts are chosen in an open national competition by a distinguished judge in each genre. Winners are published by Houghton Mifflin Company in Mariner paperback original.
2003 JUDGES
Louise Glück, poetry
Jay Parini, fiction
Ted Conover, creative nonfiction
About the Author
AMY BENSON is the winner of the 2003 Katharine Bakeless Nason Prize for creative nonfiction, selected by Ted Conover and awarded by Middlebury College and the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference. Benson lives with her husband in New York City.
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