“Poor, poor you, Mr. Garrett,” Marge said, taking his elbow, helping him stand. Henry could feel her hands shaking as they held his arm.
Poor poor pitiful me, he thought, and he heard the music, heard Linda Ronstadt singing, though it was someone else’s song first, he was sure, and he tried to remember exactly how old he had been when he heard this version and he was sure this was the album that showed her sitting before a mirror, her pink silk robe draped open, her hair up like Amy’s.
“I should have known it,” he heard Marge say, and Henry looked at her.
“Oh, it’s my fault,” she said, “thinking I’m a superwoman and all.”
“What?” he said. He didn’t understand her. He looked over at the Walmart employees, who were still standing there, though they had spread out, had organized themselves into an orderly row. “Oh, he’s fine,” Marge said, waving them away. “He’s just diabetic. He needs a little fruit juice, is all. I’ll take care of it.”
She turned back to Henry. “We need to get you some real help,” she whispered. “I should have known.” And she led Henry slowly through the store, aisle by aisle, filling his arms with shirts and socks and jeans. She didn’t ask him anything, didn’t say anything more than “This will do” or “That’s the ticket” as she pulled items off metal racks or plucked them from the shelves. When she found an empty cart, she took everything from Henry’s arms as if she were gathering up an infant and she filled the cart with that and whatever else she decided he needed.
At the register, she’d paid for everything herself, insisting that Henry keep the two hundred dollars he’d gotten at the bank, then she’d driven him somewhere, he wasn’t sure where—a real estate office, it seemed, the walls covered with plastic-framed pictures of sad brick ranch houses ringed by shrubs pruned into perfect squares. She introduced him to Rusty Campbell, a thin man with a sunken chest and a scraggly blond beard covering his pockmarked face. He’d been a doctor, Marge had told Henry, and was a doctor still but now sold property in the county. Henry shook the man’s hand, and he led Henry back into his office, just as much a mess—no, even worse a mess—than the judge’s had been, notebooks and files and magazines everywhere, but he found a place for Henry to sit.
“It’s Henry, right?” he said, and Henry nodded.
“Marge has told me about all that’s happening,” he went on, and Henry thought, When? When could she have told you? But the man didn’t wait—no one ever seemed to wait—for him to speak. “Let me tell you something about Marimore, Henry,” he said, and he pulled out a pack of cigarettes and an ashtray from his desk drawer. He lit a cigarette and leaned back in his chair. “I’m speaking from firsthand experience,” he said. “I’m speaking straight from my heart.” He pointed at his sunken chest with the two fingers holding the cigarette. “Here in this part of Virginia is near about the worst place in the world for holding on to your reputation.” He paused and turned his head away, as if he were looking for some particular detail in one of the framed pictures on the wall. “The worst place in the world,” he said again, and now he looked back at Henry, “but I’ll tell you what. It’s about the best place to be once you’ve gone ahead and lost it.”
Henry nodded and tried to grasp what Rusty Campbell was telling him. Was he suggesting that Henry had lost his reputation? Was he suggesting he was lucky to have wound up here? “I’m sorry,” Henry said. “I’m not sure I understand.”
Henry listened as Rusty Campbell began talking about forgiveness and humility. He sounded as if he were beginning a sermon. What he was doing, though, was relating to Henry the story of his life—how he’d been the local physician, just a regular country doctor like you’d see on TV, but had struggled more than a little—and for more than a short time—with drinking. “The drinking,” he said, “was on account of all I’d seen and done a hundred years ago in Vietnam. I was in reconnaissance and, if you don’t know what that really means, I’ll tell you. It means striking out on your own or with at most one or two buddies and you better not be squeamish about the prospect of slitting somebody’s throat—man or woman or child—before they can so much as cough or sneeze or whistle. You know what I’m saying?”
Henry nodded, and Rusty Campbell lit another cigarette.
“That’s exactly what they’d do to you if they could,” he went on. “The women and children too, sometimes. Of course, that’s the very kind of thing that causes, once you get back, what we’ve taken to calling by the nice-sounding name of post-traumatic stress disorder. But that wasn’t a word or even an idea back then. It doesn’t take nearly so much to trigger this PTSD as what you’ve been through already, Henry, fleeing that wet-dog carcass of a city and leaving everything behind. You lost your whole life, and now there’s this car accident. That’s like getting a second incoming a minute or two after getting the first.”
“It didn’t—” Henry started, but he was hearing Tomas Otxoa’s voice, You must speak in a Christian language, and the purr of a girl’s voice and then his own saying, A man is dead, his own calling out the name Clarissa Nash and then saying, Can I tell you about her? Can I tell you how she learned the peculiar entanglement of love and disappearance the summer she turned twelve? But he finally managed to speak out loud, to say, “It didn’t start with the hurricane.”
And he heard Rusty Campbell laugh quietly, heard him drum his fingers on the desk before leaning toward Henry. “It never does,” he said. “It never does, my friend.”
Henry looked at him. “You’re a doctor?” he said.
“Still got my license,” he said. “Family medicine. I don’t exactly do much doctoring anymore. Except, you know, when folks need some help.”
He walked over to a closet, hunted around inside it, and then came back to Henry with sample packets of some kind of drug. “This is something just to calm your nerves and help you sleep,” he said, setting the packets down on the desk.
Henry left them there. “I’m fine for now,” he said.
“Okay,” Rusty Campbell said. “But you come back if you need to. We’ll just go from there. Right now, though, my friend, I’ve got some houses to sell.”
He led Henry out to Marge, who was talking on her phone, and she waved Henry out to her car and then she got in too and began driving, still talking away. “Fine, fine, fine,” he heard her say, “I understand. You can call Sally, and I’ll call Elaine.”
Henry closed his eyes and waited.
“You okay now, Mr. Garrett?” Marge said, and he opened his eyes.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “I’m sorry for this mess.”
“Don’t bother yourself with sorry,” Marge said. “Rusty Campbell’s the one who got me through my scare. Rusty will help you. He’s as good a man as there is.”
Henry saw, up ahead, just past a traffic light, a sign in front of a cream-colored brick building. Pearlman, it said.
“There,” Henry said, pointing. “That’s the funeral home?”
“That’s it,” Marge said.
Henry looked at the digital clock on Marge’s dashboard. “Could we stop? Could we go inside?”
“Oh Lord, Mr. Garrett,” Marge said. “That’s not what you need.”
“You told them three o’clock, right?” Henry said. “That’s what you told them?”
“They’ll be arranging a service, I’m sure,” Marge said. He heard the panic in Marge’s voice, the first time she’d seemed undone. “You could pay your respects then if you want to.”
“No, please,” Henry said, and Marge slowed the car, pulled over into the gas station next door. “Please,” he said, “if you’ve got a few more minutes. I just want to—” What? What did he want to do? He just wanted to say again that he was sorry. To say it better somehow. To say it in a way that might actually help. How could it help?
“Please,” he said.
And Marge sighed and said, “I don’t know what there is to do, Mr. Garrett. There’s nothing you can do.”
“Please,” he said agai
n, and he knew what he sounded like—like a child begging for a toy or a piece of candy. But Marge nodded. “Okay, okay,” she said. She drove up to the funeral home and parked in the circular drive.
“Let me walk you in,” she said, but Henry told her he’d be fine.
“That’s what you said at the Walmart,” she told him, but she smiled and waved at him. “I know, I know. Charlie says it all the time. ‘You’re not my mama.’”
Henry smiled back at her. “My mother,” he said, “never had a car like this.”
He watched Marge laugh and wave him away. When he stepped inside, he felt the cold rush of air. The floor was covered with a dark purple carpet, nearly the same color as the one in his room at the motel. Two plastic palm trees stood side by side near the door. Henry could faintly hear music playing, a hymn on an organ—“Deep River,” he thought, and then he was sure. His father had played recordings of it, and he remembered hearing it again as he ran around outside of a church somewhere, his father inside, the choir’s voices rising and falling—My home is over Jordan and Dear Lord, I want to cross over—as he tried again and again to jump and pluck the figs from a tree at the side of the church. Was Mary with him that day? She was—she’d bet him he couldn’t reach the figs. And it was Mary who had explained, as if she were a schoolteacher, that the ancient Romans had worn crowns of figs when paying tribute to the god Saturn. He figured this was something she’d seen in a painting their mother had shown her in one of her art books, but she acted as if this were information anyone would know.
At the funeral home, Henry took a few steps forward and saw, in a small room to the side, Mrs. Hughes and her grandson, her wheelchair pulled up next to her grandson’s chair. The boy was holding his grandmother’s hand.
Henry walked into the room, but they didn’t notice him. “Mrs. Hughes,” he said, and now the old woman looked up and squinted as if she couldn’t really see him.
“It’s Henry Garrett,” he said, going over to her. “The judge’s office?”
The boy stood up, and Henry shook his hand. “I just wanted to say again how sorry I am.”
“Yes, sir,” the boy said. He was wearing a white shirt with a dark blue tie tightly knotted at his throat.
“You’re his grandson?” Henry said.
“Yes, sir,” the boy said, stepping behind his grandmother’s wheelchair and taking hold of the handles.
“Have you been able to see your grandfather?”
“She’s seen him,” the boy said. “They wouldn’t let me. They said I maybe could at the service.”
“You know when that will be?” Henry said.
“Pastor Rose is inside,” the boy said. “With Mr. Pearlman. They’re making the plans.”
Henry looked at the old woman, tried to see if she was following their conversation. He leaned near, started to reach out and touch her arm but then didn’t. “I’m staying at the Spotlight, Mrs. Hughes,” he said. “If you need anything, could you let me know? I don’t know what I can do, but I’m very sorry. Please just tell me if there’s anything.”
The old woman nodded, and Henry shook the boy’s hand again. “You’ll do that?” Henry said. “You’ll let me know if there’s anything?”
“Yes, sir,” the boy said, and Henry turned to go. Then he turned back.
“Would you tell me your name?” Henry said.
“Katrell,” the boy said.
“Hughes?” Henry said.
The boy shook his head. “Katrell Sparrow,” he said.
“I’m so sorry, Katrell,” Henry said. He took the two hundred-dollar bills from his pocket and handed them to the boy. The boy held them and looked at his grandmother. She nodded, and he put the bills in his pocket. Did they already know, Henry wondered, who he was, what he had done?
“It’s all I have right now,” Henry said. “I’m sorry it’s not more.”
“Yes, sir,” the boy said, and Henry saw now that the boy was shaking, that he was trying to hold himself still against all the grief and fear. He didn’t want to cry, Henry knew. He didn’t want to be seen crying. Henry raised a hand to say good-bye, turned away, and stepped out through the glass doors.
When Marge dropped him off back at the hotel, Henry sat on the bed and watched for hours the soundless television and all the pictures from New Orleans, the boats saving people from flooded homes and tree branches, the helicopters lifting men and women and children from shredded roofs, dead bodies floating facedown in black water, the crowd gathered outside the convention center somehow growing larger and larger, swelling until there seemed to be thousands and thousands there, all of them desperate and hungry and thirsty, burned by the sun, and he kept watching as he ate the food Latangi had left by his door, and he watched until he was worried he would fall asleep and wind up assaulted by his dreams, so he found the key Latangi had given him, and he walked down to the other end of the hotel, and suddenly here he was, sitting at Latangi’s husband’s desk.
A dead man’s desk.
Yes, and all the clatter in his head: A dead man’s desk and a bright pink fig and “Poor Poor Pitiful Me” and Clarissa Nash and Tomas Otxoa and oh Lord, make a way out of no way, and oh Lord, blossom and blossom and ache.
Quiet now, he whispered to himself, and he opened one of the desk drawers. Inside was a cardboard box and inside the box a manuscript bound with some kind of decorative string, a rainbow of colors woven and twisted together. He read the title page—The Creator’s Mistress by Mohit Chakravarty—then the dedication to almighty Shiva and Parvati and to the beloved son Ganesha and to the princess of all earthly princesses, Latangi Chakravarty, beloved wife, and with prayers and gratitude to the esteemed Rabindranath, and Henry turned the page and—though he was desperately afraid to add yet another voice to all the wretched others clanging and swarming in his head—he began to read.
II
Last of all it was loss
he sang, how like a vine
it climbs the wall,
sends roots and tendrils
inward,
bringing to the heart
of the hardest stone
the deep bursting emptiness of song.
—Gregory Orr,
“The Ghosts Listen to Orpheus Sing”
Nine
FINALLY HE slept. He lay down on the metal cot and pulled the worn white blanket over him. He did not know what time it was or how long he had read, but he did not want to step outside and face the fluorescent glow of the parking lot, the desolate highway, the ghostly gray sky. He did not want to see or hear anything. He wanted Mohit’s words to stay with him, wanted everything about the poem—the manuscript was, he quickly discovered, not a collection of separate poems but a single work, hundreds and hundreds of pages, thousands and thousands of lines long, vast and sprawling and sometimes for pages and pages almost incomprehensible to him, filled with allusions he did not understand, words that Latangi had left untranslated, a crazy impossible quilt, but all of it beautiful, devastatingly beautiful, even the manuscript pages so delicate and fine that the typed letters of each word seemed to have been embossed there—he wanted the lines, the images, the music of the poem to echo in his head. He wanted to continue hearing the strange and majestic cadences, the ordinary and the magical woven together into a seamless whole: a childless couple—the man with a withered leg, leaning on a crutch, the woman carrying agati blossoms—silently circling the temple at Madurai for forty-eight days, speaking only at night, once the moon had risen; a child perched beneath a palm tree playing some instrument called a mridanga, the rhythm summoning the barking deer from the forest, the red-tailed hawks from the sky; jealous gods churning heaven’s oceans into powerful storms; a flower snake making its way room by room through a dark house and wrapping itself around the waist of a sleeping child; a young bride gently placing her feet atop those of her new husband.
Henry lay on the cot and tried to untangle the thread of the poem’s story—the poet or God or both speaking to his beloved, the b
eloved asleep or absent or dead, the narrative a recounting of an arduous journey undertaken to rescue the beloved from her wretched state and return her to her rightful place at the poet’s side.
This was, Henry knew, the story of every epic—a hero’s death-defying voyage, a series of agonizing trials and tribulations, a final conquest that restored order to the universe, a city gleaming like gold in the sun, a funeral pyre’s flames extinguished with drafts of glistening wine, love itself and nothing more steering the sun across the sky. But this single secret poem, hidden away in a drawer, with its baroque, antiquated language, its preposterously grand ambition, made it seem as though Mohit had not merely adopted this poetic form but had somehow invented it, as though he believed he was telling such a story for the very first time, the poet and his beloved reunited after years apart, once again bathing as they had as children in the Ganges, silver-finned fish rising from the water around them in graceful arcs, sun-blackened boys with long crooked cane staffs steering herds of buffalo through the dusty fields beyond the riverbank, broad-shouldered fishermen casting their nets into the water, pilgrims molding lingams on the muddy shore, old men squatting in the shade of the pipal trees and reciting holy verses, the lovers now standing in the middle of the wide river, garlands of marigolds on their heads, constellations of stars appearing in the sky one by one, each depicting some aspect of the poet’s journey, night falling as the poet and his beloved embrace, as they sink down into the dark water, their fingers entwined and then their limbs and then their very souls as they descend slowly through the water until there is only darkness and they are no longer falling but rising, not back to the surface but to another realm, to a new life free of all suffering, the man’s withered leg healed, the agati blossoms transformed in the woman’s arms into a child.
When he had finished reading, when he had retied the manuscript with the colored thread and returned it to the drawer, Henry lay down on the metal cot. He felt that something new had overtaken him, something that he could taste on his tongue, that he could feel running through his arms and legs, an electric current or rushing river—he was not a poet; he couldn’t think of anything but clichés. Somehow, though, by some trick of grace, Latangi had been right. Mohit’s words had been, as she had claimed, waiting for him; it was as though he had been destined to step into this room and open this drawer and untie this colored thread. How had she known? How could she have known?
A Thousand Miles from Nowhere Page 14