The Waters & the Wild

by DeSales Harrison

  Spurlock surprised himself by saying, “Yes, in fact—Herbert. George Herbert, um, the Anglican divine, priest, I mean—his poems. You seem to have here—you appear to have a copy of— Just one minute and I’ll have the slip made out.”

  Blundering around the computer catalog, Spurlock found the title, wrote out “The Temple: Sacred Poems and Private Ejaculations” on a call slip, and handed it to Cat. Spurlock braced himself for a quip about private ejaculations, but all she said was “Got it. Herbert, George. Back in a sec.”

  When Cat returned, the white gloves on her hands and the old volume they held stood out in sharp contrast with her dreadlocks and tattoos. She eased the book open on a pair of angled foam blocks she’d placed in front of Spurlock. “When you are done with it, just leave it on the blocks and let us know. We’ll take care of it.” The volume she’d presented was smaller than Spurlock imagined, re-bound in buckram, and the pages, when he opened them, displayed a hectic, almost childish disorder, with their f-shaped S’s, the irregular spellings. Surely at one time, he thought, the text had seemed as transparent as daylight. For Spurlock, however, the pages appeared to busy themselves even as he watched—like an ant colony he’d kicked by accident—with the task of restoring and repairing their ruptured privacy. Abruptly, he realized he was reading lines he had encountered before.

  Sweet day, so cool, so calm, so bright,

  The bridal of the earth and sky,

  The dew shall weep thy fall tonight

  For thou must die.

  He recognized the tone, at once weightless and grave, before he recognized the words. Of course, it had been in Abend’s confession. Not Abend’s, Oppen’s.

  Sweet spring, full of sweet days and roses,

  A box where sweets compacted lie;

  My music shows ye have your closes,

  And all must die.

  “The Temple,” a voice said. “Cat told me you’re working on The Temple.” There she stood. The voice had been her voice. However much the intervening years had altered her, she was so undeniably herself that Spurlock was certain she too must recognize him, though he had long since shaved his beard. But of course she did not.

  “Do you have a favorite?” she asked.

  “A what?” he stammered. Her face was so plainly the same, yet just as surely changed, its lines not harsher with age but clearer, as though the years had brought her into focus.

  “A favorite poem,” she said.

  “No,” he said, then, “I mean, they are all my favorite. Favorites.”

  “May I?” she asked, lifting the book from the foam blocks in front of him. “I’ve been meaning to look through this since I first found it in the holdings.”

  She hummed under her breath as she flipped the pages.

  “My father used to sing me one of these. Not that he could really sing,” she said, smiling. “But we had a song, at bedtime. Herbert wrote the words; someone else set it to music.” She began to hum again, this time a tentative tune. “Gak!” she said, and laughed. “I shouldn’t have even tried!”

  He could see how easily she had secured the job, her youth falling in her favor, an alumna of the college, friendly but poised, at ease in her surroundings. A sweet life it must be, he thought, to inhabit this quiet, the only sound the tap of rain on the glass. When had he known such silence in New York? When had the wash and jostle of the avenues not pressed in on him, even in his prayers, even in his long nights with the homeless in the impromptu shelter? Never, that’s when. And why should the young not choose quiet, if they were moved to? So many had teemed to New York, it had never occurred to him others might set out in an opposite direction. Was this what she had sought, the leveling horizon, the quiet of rain on glass, where a stranger’s arrival was something to notice? It occurred to Spurlock that his very presence (to say nothing of the envelope he’d brought) would breach the sanctuary she had sought out and painstakingly maintained.

  “You’ll let us know if you need something,” she said.

  “I promise I will let you know,” Spurlock said, and she disappeared through the door marked Stacks.

  What he needed, he thought, was to leave this place, to leave his envelopes on the table, tagged with a note saying nothing more than “For Em Oppen.” Yes, a note. That was the way to do it. He would write it on the back of a call slip.

  Spurlock lifted his pencil over the little slip and then stopped. He had assumed all along that she was entitled to her father’s testament, that whatever madness or torment had claimed him, whatever privilege of secrecy her father had unilaterally invoked, the story was not his but hers. The testament had been detained in his possession, but now that Spurlock knew who she was, he could and should hand it over. But hadn’t Spurlock—by reading it, by keeping it, by brooding on it, by refraining from seeking her out for seven years—had he not agreed implicitly to the terms that Oppen had laid out? Had Spurlock not consented to tell no one but God? Had he not afterward, in prayer, imagined even placing the envelope in Christ’s pierced hands? And yet now he would merely abandon it, leave it, and leave her alone with it.

  Perhaps there was a simpler option, a kinder one. Why not leave just the smaller airmail envelope, the one forwarded from the lawyers? That was the only one addressed to her. Yes, that was what he should do, he thought, but even then he could not move. Cat had left the reading room. Spurlock was alone.

  * * *

  —

  During an interview for his job at the Church of the Incarnation, he’d said to his interviewers that he had sensed “a reservoir of prayer” held within the church’s walls. The grandiloquence of the phrase had surprised him; what had he even meant by it? Maybe he had felt—or wanted to feel—that the church was a sort of cistern or catchment basin, a pool into which the halt and the lame, himself included, could immerse themselves and be healed. Or maybe he had just repeated, unwittingly, an orotund locution he’d heard or read somewhere before. He realized, abashed, that he’d had no idea what he had meant then, but now this unvisited room seemed such a reservoir to him. The silence over which the nearly forgotten books presided seemed to him a holy silence, the silence of things that had come to an end.

  Likewise his long journey had come to an end. Having done obediently what had been asked of him, he could lay his burden down, hallelujah. Something, however, hounded him still. He knew it had to do with that other, deeper desire to affix a name to her face, the face of the girl-no-longer who had appeared seven years ago in his church—to affix not just a name, but his own wondering gaze. But in this silence of things that had come to an end, Spurlock saw at last that underneath the obedience and longing, a darker motive lay: to pry free once and for all a foreign body, a hook, a barb set in the bone. Yes, that was the way David Oppen himself had described it. It had lodged in him seven years ago, that longing, that question—Who are you, Clementine?—and only one person could allay that ache. His heart knocked in his chest.

  * * *

  —

  “I’ve got it now,” she was saying. “I know what it was.”

  She had pushed through the door and had rested a stack of books she was carrying on the edge of his table. “I won’t try to sing it,” she had said. “Lucky you.”

  “Sing what?”

  “ ‘Come, My Way,’ that hymn I told you about. That’s what it’s called. You must know it.”

  Did she know he was a priest? Spurlock wondered, his heart knocking louder. Had she recognized him? But then he remembered the book he’d requested. Surely an expert on Herbert would know the words.

  “Yes, I do know it,” he said, hearing the tune in his head, a common hymn, frequently sung in his church. He’d not known the words had been written by George Herbert, but then again, he’d not known of George Herbert until he’d read Oppen’s testament. “ ‘Come, My Way,’ ” he said, “I know it well. Y
our father sang it to you?”

  “Before bed,” she said. “One of those childhood memories.” She had lifted the stack of books to take them to wherever she was taking them.

  Spurlock, however, had stood up and was facing her.

  “Miss Abend…,” he said, “if I may call you that.”

  She stopped and stiffened. A long second passed before he grasped what he had just said. “Miss Oppen, I should say.”

  “May I help you?” she said, her face ticking a half degree to one side.

  “I must tell you—” he said. “I must tell you the real reason I’ve come here. I have something to deliver to you.”

  “To me?”

  “You are Miss Em Oppen, no?”

  “And you, you are…?”

  “My name is Spurlock, Father Nelson Spurlock, rector of the Church of the Incarnation in New York. We met some years ago, when you came to my church. You wanted to know then whether your father had sent you something, in my care.”

  “Spurlock—” she said.

  “I had a beard then,” he said, adding inanely, “I was younger then.” He was now holding the envelopes, holding them out to her, both of them, the smaller airmail envelope and the larger bulk of Oppen’s testament. When she saw the packets, her face took on a gray sheen.

  “Maybe—” she said, “maybe we’d better go outside.”

  * * *

  —

  The rain had turned to a tight mist that beaded minutely, he noticed, on her hair as they walked. They had passed from the library through the quadrangle. A sort of converted golf cart, bristling with gardening tools, was parked to one side of the path where a groundskeeper on all fours troweled up a flower bed. “Afternoon, Emmy,” he said as they walked by.

  “Hey there, Ray,” she said. “Is the arboretum open this time of year?”

  “The arb?” he said. “Don’t know how we’d close it….”

  * * *

  —

  The hinges sang when she swung open the arboretum gate, and together they walked along a broad cinder path that crunched beneath their feet. The path wound past clumps of sumac and blackthorn, between swaths of long brown grass flattened by winter, disturbed here and there by first green. Although the fine rain had not quite let up, the clouds had broken up in chunks, pried apart, it seemed to Spurlock, by the late light leaning in oblique beams. Bare branches vibrated in the freshened chill. “Cold front,” she said, “looks like.

  “Welcome to my office,” she said, pointing to a U-shaped stone bench beneath a stand of evergreens overlooking a swale of new-mown grass.

  * * *

  —

  “You came here from New York just to give me these?” She had taken both envelopes, hefting their weight.

  “You should have them,” he said.

  “But what are they?”

  He felt she had had to force herself to ask the question.

  “They are for you.”

  “But the big one isn’t even addressed to me. It’s addressed to you.”

  “They are both for you.”

  “Who sent them?”

  Spurlock hesitated, then said, “I don’t know,” moved by the sense that his response was both dishonest and true.

  “You are going back to New York now,” she said. It was a statement, not a question.

  “My flight leaves tomorrow.”

  “So it wasn’t really our extensively unremarkable George Herbert holdings that brought you here,” she said with something not quite a smile.

  “I’ll look up that hymn when I get back.”

  “You should know it. You’re a priest.”

  “So they insist.”

  “I could tell you to come back and visit, but people never do.”

  “Do you ever get back to New York?” he asked.

  “One day I’ll go back. See what it’s been up to.”

  “Pretty here,” he said, imagining how in the warmth of the coming months, students would gather on this slope to sun themselves.

  For a while she did not speak but at last stood up from the bench. “I’m going to go now,” she said. “I’m going to find a place where I can read these things.” Spurlock, awkwardly, stood up too. “Do you need directions back to the hotel? If you get lost you’ll be the first in town history.” She gave a little laugh. “I don’t want to seem ungrateful. I just don’t know what to say. You made the trip, which I cannot believe. Thank you. That’s what I should say, all I should say.”

  “I don’t know if you should thank me,” said Spurlock. “And I don’t know if I should say you’re welcome. But I hope you will be in touch if the spirit moves.”

  Somewhere beyond the field’s edge, a crow’s percussive cry dislodged a series of echoes. Another crow answered, and for a moment the overlapping echoes contended in free air. She was gone.

  * * *

  —

  Later that night, having returned to the bench where she had led him, Spurlock sensed that daybreak was not far off. The last darkness had settled now into the trees like a sediment cast from the sky, the sky not lighter now but clarified. Spurlock felt the tug of the old summons. Now, he thought, now would be the moment to pray, to tap into the silence and stillness hidden under the surface of his being, like the dome of a water table beneath an irregular terrain. Now would be the moment, but this unfamiliar landscape pressed upon him the weight of an absolute solitude. His task accomplished, he had expected a wave of relief, the satisfaction of release after long suffering: that old knot finally loosened, that barb at last freed from the bone. But there was no sense of ease, no restoration. Instead, he felt sacked, used up, spent in a service neither chosen nor understood.

  * * *

  —

  “Nelson,” she said.

  He had not heard her approach. He turned and squinted: her face was indistinct, her hair loose and heavy, hazed with a coppery border against a sky red at her back. As she walked toward him, her feet had marked a green track in the dew. “I was afraid you’d already gone,” she said. “There was no answer in your room.” She sat down beside him on the bench.

  “I didn’t sleep either,” he said.

  “But still I had a terrible dream,” she said.

  Spurlock said nothing. It was his doing. He had handed it over to her in a thick packet.

  “It’s like he said,” she continued at last, “it’s like what Dad—like what David said: I am certain that on some level I always knew.”

  “What did you know?” asked Spurlock.

  “Just that…just…” As she hesitated, Spurlock noticed for the first time that her hands were empty. She had not brought the heavy envelope with her. “Just that I knew. I knew ever since I knew anything that something wasn’t right.”

  “What did you know?” asked Spurlock, unaware that he had just asked the same question.

  “Which is absurd,” she went on. “When did anyone, anywhere, ever feel that everything was exactly right?” She was looking down at her long shadow. “But I knew, and he knew I knew, that something wasn’t right. What he didn’t know was that it didn’t matter. When I grew up, I was pissed off, like every other teenager. I know he thought I was angry because I suspected something. He thought that my anger would drive me to hunt for reasons, causes. But he was wrong about that. I was angry not because I didn’t know something, I was furious because it didn’t matter what I knew. It didn’t matter what was fucked up in him or in his past or in Miriam. It didn’t matter because they were the people I came from. They weren’t even my parents, not my real parents, and still they were the people I came from. You can’t choose the people you come from.”

  “He let your mother die,” said Spurlock, the fact real to him as it had never been before. “Your mother, the girl who gave birth to you, she was younger than you are no
w.”

  “It didn’t matter.”

  “He could have saved her, but he let her die instead.” The fact faced him, in its horrid nakedness. “It was an inhuman act.”

  “Inhuman,” she repeated, in neither agreement nor denial.

  “I thought…,” she said after a pause, “I thought last night—or rather this morning, when I’d finished reading what he’d written—all of a sudden it all seemed just incredibly strange, being here, in Ohio, in Ohio of all places, for God’s sake. Like I’d been dropped here by a freak waterspout. That I’d been abandoned.”

  “You were.” Spurlock was aware that this expression of empathy concealed within it an insistence that she accept his conviction as her own.

  “Yes, I know that. I believe I’ve always known that. And I was furious ever since I could remember. What is more natural? Inhuman, you say—which is strange, because what I thought last night, this morning, was that outrage is a human thing. But they aren’t human anymore, Miriam, David, the girl who was my mother. They are all gone, and whatever they were, they aren’t that any longer.”

  She said, “It’s not that I’m trying to let him off the hook. It’s that I am the hook. Once he had me, he couldn’t let me go.”

  “But he did let you go. He left you an orphan.”

  “Like every parent does, sooner or later. And anyway, Reverend Father Nelson Spurlock, aren’t you supposed to say something now about my being the child of God, about forgiveness?”

  “Am I?” The very possibility of forgiveness struck him as obscene, an offense, in some literal way unthinkable. He wanted to say that forgiveness would be an outrage. But he said nothing, silenced by the thought that true forgiveness must always be an outrage, an affront to justice’s imperious claims. In fact it was inescapably unjust.