by Julia Holmes
He had once shown me a stash of the Old Money, which he kept under the floorboards his cabin. “Just in case,” he said and clamped his hand over my mouth. I could feel his callous palm against my lips, smell the pipe tobacco and old-fashioned soap on his fingers: “Keep our secret"—and I had. What a marvel . . . the massive pull of the continuity of civilized life.
The trail dipped lower into the dangerous valley; instinctively, I softened my footfall. All the native creatures of my brain (hopes, dreams, worries, expectations) crouched like hunted animals at the edge of a clearing. We marched in silence, listened.
Autumn came: the ground turned soft and gold in the sunlight; the trees were beautifully black and skeletal in the cold rain. Around a damp, smoky campfire, we helped each other to picture life in the city. Soldiers longed for holiday cake, for the spectacle of Independence Day, now, by our reckoning, under way. They made lewd wagers about the quality and quantity of young women still at large in the city.
But the longer I spent in the Enemy's Territory, the more I preferred to be alone, to sit quietly among the trees, awed by the beauty of the copper-black twigs against the powder-blue sky. At first, I attacked these unacceptable feelings with logic: the Enemy was trying to get a foothold in my thoughts. I reminded myself daily how much I detested his filthy customs, his sneaky nature, his simple-minded, worshipful attitude toward the trees, toward the animals of the world, an attitude that grants the unthinking routines of beasts something of a human characteristic. I reminded myself that the Enemy would love nothing more than to kick in the door of my family's house and murder us one by one, to shove aside our butchered bodies and take down the dinner plates, throw the cutlery into a heap on the table, raid our cupboards, tell his blood-weaned sons a long black lie about how my land and my city and my house had come to be theirs, the house they had stolen, the house in which they were now taking their ease and telling their tall tales, until the true story of my life was replaced by the Enemy's. My wife, our son, our life, our joys and sorrows . . . all of it forgotten, forever.
I hated the violence an enemy necessitated in my heart, when I felt that we were a people devoted to other people, to family life. When I opened my pack, I sometimes feared I would find my wife's head, sawed crudely from her body by the Enemy and snuck into my possession, as a way of destroying my mind. Or I feared I would stumble upon the body of my son, impaled on a broken branch along the ridge, or that I would wake to find that all of my fellow soldiers had been quietly knifed in their sleep.
I had always been able to summon scenes of incredible brutality effortlessly, and though I attributed these scenes to the Enemy, it struck me now that these scenes were entirely mine. In my daydreams, the Enemy thirsted for my blood, sacrificed his brothers, his sisters, his own children, in gruesome and ruthless military tactics—the unbelievable bloodlust of an enemy I had never seen. And an unseen enemy the mind must construct entirely from itself, from the raw material of its own desires and fantasies. I frightened myself.
Winter came. The earth was a white and flawless sheet: the muddy, rutted ground we had patrolled and patrolled suddenly pure, as if never trod upon. It was beautiful. I wandered into the immediate woods to be alone. I propped my rifle in the snow and sat upon an ice-cold rock to rest. The woods were still, bright, and silent—my mind wandered; like a man suddenly unchained from the wall of a prison yard, my mind set out full of life and hope in the direction of its own concerns. I sighed heavily in the winter air, watched the mist of my breath travel. Bright red berries thrived on the black limbs of the snow-capped trees. I tilted my head back to take in the startling heights of the evergreens.
Then I heard the devastating crunch of one of my fellow soldiers approaching. My stomach tightened; I was sick again. I lay my head against my knees in defeat, pretending to sleep; dutifully I chained my mind back to the prison-yard wall. I was sorry to do it, to be forever playing the villain in my own brain. I raised my head and nodded grimly at my friend. “Saw you wander off alone,” he said kindly. “Thought I'd come over.
"This reminds me,” he said settling down on a nearby rock, “of the story of the two brothers who went out to Crippler's Field to hunt.” I confess I was stunned. He must worry that I'm seriously adrift of our mission, I thought, if he's hauling out this old corrective.
I kicked my boot heel against the rock and knocked free the pressed tread of snow. He said, “Do you know Crippler's Field—it's about an hour's walk from the train station, just beyond the city limit? It's where the good hunter died at the hands of his very own brother . . .” I nodded. He went on. Somewhere in the city was my dissatisfied little boy, wishing powerfully for sweets, for me—a boy presumably afflicted by that mix of the wishful and the indifferent so characteristic of the young.
One evening, we were crowded around a low fire on the overhunted ridge. In the cold silence of the wintry woods, we were telling each other familiar tales to pass the time. A light snow was coming down. Men who had families talked about their children. I sometimes talked about Ben in an obligatory way. “He's a good boy,” I'd say in a voice that had become so dead and dispiriting I was amazed it passed muster with the other men. In truth, if I thought of my son that winter, I tended to remember him as a lazy, greedy animal who ate and slept, and then attacked me suddenly with questions: “What does it do, where does it come from, why is it crying, will it fit in my room?"
Of course I used to attack my own father in just the same way. There's a friendly pain that halts self-investigation—but it's only a matter of time before we discover that we can plumb the depths of one another and easily forget that pain in others. When my father came home from the war, he made a show of picking up his old pleasures to reassure us, but I could see that he was a changed and damaged man, and when other ideas got the better of him, he simply walked off to be alone until he could master his feelings. I trailed at a distance, tracking him through the woods. I considered that Ben might someday hunt me in the same way, catching my shadow moving among the trees, forever trying to please me, to see me, to keep me. I felt I would do almost anything to stop him from following me through life—
We heard an alien sound—the animal-expert footfall of an Enemy soldier moving through the ice-glazed darkness beyond our campfire. We stopped talking. We heaped the fire with snow, and we fanned out into the forest. My blood was pounding in my ears as I crept across the eerie luminescence of the snowfield alone.
From the dark ridge, I aimed my rifle into the woods—a cavern of tar-black air even in the moonlit night. Then I spotted them—my enemies crouched among the trees; I watched the white fog of breath leave the black silhouettes of their heads. God, why wouldn't they just leave us alone, let us live in peace? I could hear the boots of my commanding officer crunching stealthily through the snow, closer and closer. I knew what he would make me do. I decided to run. I hurried, unseen, down from the ridge and crept along the trampled path. I wanted to be left alone, and to leave others alone. All night I tried to make my way down the other side of the dark ridge, toward the water. I had noticed a ship anchored offshore that morning. Ours? Theirs? Something else entirely? I hardly cared—so long as I could be anywhere else, do anything else.
I woke the next morning in a cave of pines, feeling sick: I was a deserter, a coward. What if the Enemy had bided his time and then slaughtered my fellow soldiers in their sleep, because I had not named him, not called him out? I had fled from the faintest suggestion of the Enemy—his black silhouette, his white phantom breath.
I climbed back up the steep slope of the ridge to survey my position. I found the harbor and could see more clearly the mysterious ship upon which I had pinned all my hopes—burned out and sunk in the rocky shallows.
A branch snapped. I spun around, terrified, and aimed my rifle into the trees, but I soon saw that it was only a wild horse regarding me coldly from between the snowy pines of the ridge. I lowered my gun. As if carved from gray ice, as if made of stone and dusted in sn
ow, a ghost horse with black eyes. The horse and I stared at one another, both stock-still. I was thinking only of myself, of my broken heart. I could have regarded this unlikely creature either as a messenger of good tidings or as my enemy, and I felt sorry for myself, because I had thought of him immediately and deeply as an enemy of mine.
I said, “Fine! You win,” and I threw my camp knife, and it landed near the roots of a pine tree; and I threw my rifle, and it sank into the deep snow. Then I longed for the thin illusion of life that I had always taken to be Life to be displaced by the brutal, enormous, beautiful certainty of something greater, even if I were destroyed in the process. I waited. Nothing happened. The horse sighed, scraped at the snow with his pitch-black hoof.
There was nothing to do now but return to what I had always known and hope that what I had always known had survived the night.
I trudged along the ridge until I reached camp—I whistled a much-loved bit of triumphal music along the way; I displayed my empty hands high overhead lest I be shot by the boy from Crippler's Field or any of the other boys.
"I saw a horse,” I told the commanding officer as I warmed up later beside the low fire crackling in the gray light of the afternoon.
"That's it? That's all you saw?"
"That's it."
"But how did you lose your rifle?"
"I fell,” I said, “down an embankment. I couldn't find it again in the snow."
"You're lucky to be alive. Where's your camp knife?"
I looked searchingly around the camp. “It's here somewhere,” I said and shrugged.
The commanding officer studied me. “Are you all right, Son?"
"Just cold,” I said.
"Buddy, give him your pistol."
Buddy gave me an assessing look—who was I, and why was he always paying for the stupidity of others? He growled at me under his breath and slapped the pistol into my open palm.
* * * *
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JULY
* * * *
The sea is full of life, indifferent to men,
Just as the brown legs of the horses seem to pump infinitely—
Until they are thrown upon the sun.
Young Man, lay that precious, pounding hear
of yours upon the table, and see it for what it is:
A thing that dies in autumn.
* * * *
Ben
"Shouldn't you be out on the town, hanging around people your own age, meeting young women?"
Ben sat slumped in the infernally hot front window of the tailor's shop. “In this?” he said, and tugged at the wilted, black lapels of his suit.
"Ben,” warned the tailor.
Ben watched the butcher working in his shop across the street; he had been gazing into an empty display case for what seemed like hours. Maybe if Ben could emanate private pain through a layer of stoic, cool-headed conversation, the tailor's mind would shift sympathetically in his direction. “I'm sorry,” said Ben. “You're right."
"Why don't you try to get a suit from the Brothers of Mercy?"
"Then I might as well not bother! I might as well turn myself over to them now. I'd owe them my life."
"You'd rather owe me."
"One suit won't ruin you."
"Ben, I mean it."
"Why can't you make an exception?"
The tailor was cutting squares of fabric into smaller squares. “Every last one of you thinks of yourself as the special case. It's interesting to me how everyone pleads the special case using such generic terms. You all feel entitled to whatever you want in life, and each of you seems to think that your suffering is beyond compare. And beyond that, you don't think. I've heard it all, Ben. And the days of special dispensations are over. You are not a boy. You are a grown man. I'm sorry things aren't turning out as you had hoped."
"You'd make an exception for your son,” Ben said peevishly.
The tailor gave Ben a long look. “Of course I would, Ben. What father wouldn't? Your mother, a woman of infinite kindness and optimism, had such high hopes for you. She thought you might do well in life. And then you enlisted, of all things. Always hot on the heels of your father,” said the tailor, mocking Ben's tone. “All your mother wanted was for you to find happiness in life, to marry well, to have a family that would fill up the rooms of the old house. I cared for her a great deal, Ben, but I'll tell you this right now. You mention the suit again, and I'll throw you out of this shop for good. Now, I'm tired of watching you sulk. It's a beautiful day—you should be outside. And don't come back until you've cheered up. I hope you're not glowering at young women the way you're glowering at me. Try looking a little happier."
"I have nothing to be happy about! Besides, it's not a beautiful day. It's hot and everyone's miserable."
"Well. You're unlikely to meet anyone with that attitude—you'd be amazed what a positive outlook can accomplish. Consider the difference between that shop"—the tailor nodded toward the butcher—"and this one. As the adage goes, ‘A boy may thrive, while his brother fails.’ In the story, Ben, they've shared every advantage, yet one permits failure to enter his life, while the other doesn't."
"Yes, thank you,” said Ben. “I am aware of the story and what it means."
Ben walked through the park, frowning at women—when he walked, he thought, and when he thought, he frowned; it couldn't be helped. And what if the tailor was wrong, what if forcing a good attitude dulled the blades of thought, softened and corroded the mind so it could prepare itself for less and less?
He passed the police station and paused to study the tattered posters pasted along the south wall: happily married couples walking by the river; children laughing through mouthfuls of cake (disgusting); young men in pale suits, shotguns tipped jauntily over their shoulders; gray workers turning vague and massive cranks in the shadows. The Consequences of Failure! Duly noted: the official exhortation to pursue one's own happiness or be put to the task of generating happiness for others, or worse—to be not in the picture. Had he accomplished anything? Ben thought of all the pointless visits to the tailor, the hours spent fending off the Brothers’ efforts to administer mercy in the park, the merciless sarcasms of other bachelors, his own ham-handed attempts at conversation with young women. He had to reach so far back to lay his hands upon a truly happy memory. What if he was becoming, or had become, an unlovable man? What if the toxin of failure was already coursing through his veins, what if he was already stinking of defeat? Women sense things, know you before you know yourself . . . The tailor was right—he had to think differently, or else his brain would cloud over permanently, and his poor heart would have to chug the cold, dirty blood until it stopped.
Perhaps these unhappy scenes were the raw material of lasting happiness, as was often the case in stories. In the old stories, future happiness was almost always directly proportionate to the amount of suffering that preceded it. In which case, Ben could expect a beautiful life, an excellent and happy outcome. Happiness being the final product of the machinery that was, for the moment, generating such unhappiness. Unhappy life scenes: where else could they land him except in the arms of another?
Ben yanked a cluster of pink flowers from a park tree; he tucked the blossoms into the buttonholes of his dark jacket and strode up the slope of the bachelors’ hill, his heart beating fast, he felt faint with excitement. There were the hard black lines of the tree branches veining the pale blue sky; the streetlamps sentinel and straight beside the path. The green leaves shuddering in the occasional breeze. A perfect scene, a green globe of healthy activity, something of which he could simply elect to be a part. Ben made it across the bachelors’ hill without incident, and he continued on to the park cafe, digging in his coat pocket for the few coins he had left.
At the cafe counter, a father lifted his young daughter so she could see the pastries on display, and the mother pointed to this one, then that one, calling each by name. The girl looked over at Ben, and then the father look
ed, too. Ben smiled and stepped back slightly, mindful of the unpleasant smell of his suit. The cafe owner stood by, his musty, eternally damp rag in hand. The girl pointed to a slice of cake on a small white plate.
Ben looked longingly at the sugar-powdered ring cookies and the slices of white cake, trying to choose. He thought of Independence Day: the autumnal chill, the blazing leaves, when he would lie beside his wife beneath the great tree.
The girl and her parents settled at one of the marble-topped tables. The father dug through the sugar bowl with his spoon, plowing beneath the surface, digging for virgin layers; he sugared his tea, then dropped the spoon noisily on the tabletop. He reached over and pinched a bite of cake from his daughter's plate.
The woman behind the counter watched Ben expectantly; the cafe owner shifted the musty rag from one hand to the other. Ben decided: cake. His last coins converted (effortlessly!) into an old, respectable pleasure.
Ben stacked his coins on the top of the glass case. “White cake, please."
The woman glanced at the cafe owner; the cafe owner tightened his grip on the musty rag.
"Been away?"
"Pardon me?"
"Because that,” she said, pointing to the stack of coins, “won't buy you a slice of white cake. Not since olden days."
Ben noticed the postcards leaning against the counter—sentimental photos of boys in short pants running hoops down the street.
Ben's face was hot. “A cookie then."
"Have a mint,” she said, and slid the bland bowl across the counter. Ben took a fistful of the mints—the city mints he hated.