Purchase

by Christopher K. Doyle

  Outside a cruel wind came slanting against the roof to rattle the windows and beams, before leaking in at the chinks of stone to make me shiver to hear the world so thoroughly invested with reaching me even in the hidden spaces of my home. I had to laugh to know my predicament, that I could not claw and tear apart A.D. and Ms. Clara May’s union any more. That I could not persist in those designs with that sweet Jolie here now. Not with her face looking at me so precious and earnest that first instant of her arrival. With her simple self without any sin at all to add to the balance of the world, and to this one circumstance—the one with her mother and father and me—with no fault at all to bring us. Jolie.

  That’s it, I said and looked at the rafters, for I’d fixed them months ago but in the high top span there was a single prism that Annie had hung years ago and which I’d found beneath a decayed birds nest in the rain-rotted debris. That single glass was a gift to her from her father in Boonsboro, Maryland, something she’d kept and held always and had hoped to see in her home shedding peals of light upon the floors and walls she’d made for herself. For her life. With our daughter and me. But I knew what I had to do, and said the words once and then looked into the colors of the prism and then the fire for any reaction from the world, for any remonstration to what I’d said, but could only think of Runnymede then, of his talk of spirits, and the possibility that Annie was one now too. O the thought shook through me as another windy wave raised up outside to howl as that soft faint voice echoed from somewheres close by as a phantom must on cold nights in the ridge. For a moment, I thought it must have been my Annie herself haunting me from whatever spirit world she inhabited, if it was indeed true what Runnymede said. That she was gone. That maybe she’d been gone a long time. And I wondered if the Honorable Reverend Michael Williams had told me the truth all those months ago when I’d asked about her. Had anybody ever told me the truth?

  Isaiah?

  Yes? and I searched the room, the windows, in the corners and behind the chairs, my voice rising, my eyes imploring into the occurrence of it, of that sad windy resonance. But nothing. There was no answer. Only the shuffling of my boots. The breathing of my lungs. Yes? I said again, as if to tempt the voice into speaking. But only silence returned my call. So that when I finally did spy my face in the mirror, I seen the sadness of thinking on her as gone and gone a long time cloud my eyes, for what would that make of my little girl then? What would that make of my little Lucy? But a phantom herself. A spirit forever born to inhabit the world ceaseless and lost, clinging only to the spectral length of her mother’s trailing hand, forfeited to the wind, condemned to drift aimless for all time for what I’d done to that damn Hackett. For what I’d done to set them both loose like that. Out into the void. Without even their home to return to—without even that—and I knew then what I had to say to both of them as recompense for my deeds. I’m sorry, I said. I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry, and either with the wind howling, or the alcohol weighing upon me, I grasped the mantle for balance, but scattered instead the slips of the names to the floor. Sinking then to my knees by the flames, I begged forgiveness from the fate that had wrapped the shape of my family up as cold as winter wind in its pure cruel hand.

  I’m sorry, I said and bowed my head, whispering as of a prayer. Because I thought these names were it. I thought they’d pull you back up to me from where you were. That you’d be here, and I groped haphazard in a pile of names that had fallen before me so that they spilled again from my shaking hands, some drifting like snowflakes to the floor. While others only seemed crammed like splinters and shivers of ice between my fingers, scrunched into my palms so tightly as to illicit that cold blue spark of truth I knew each one of them to be. I thought this would do it; I thought I’d find you through them. That my name would be broadcast to the four corners and you’d hear it. No matter where you were or what you’d become. You’d hear it and know. And then I’d see you. Sure as Sunday I’d see you here and beside you would be our little girl and it would be like that, like before, like none of this had happened and we’d never had to lead our separate lives. That we’d be put back together, whole, as a severed man is stitched anew with thread. Like to like and piece to piece. That’s what I thought. It was what I prayed, too. It was what I hoped for. Annie. Annie?

  The fire leapt as if to respond and hovered before me as a wish perhaps, for I knew what it wanted and so held out the first slip and thought in that moment it was an offering to the void then, to the universe, to the darkness dripping down even then upon the ridge to scatter the stars that hung griefless in their nameless tracks. An offering to the flames of time itself, to the flames of circumstance and hazard. A prize made complete to the world, in gobbling up more and more of the truth that had seeped out of its cold dark core to begin with. The truth not yet returned as it must be returned to the center eventually. The truth that knows no end. That is as much a visitation as passenger in its own transience and touch of us. In how it knows us. In how it lives. Because now I would give it all back. I would return it piece by piece, and in that offering, perhaps the world would give me back Annie and Lucy piece by piece as phantoms at least, as wavers or glimmers of light. As a vast assortment of memories—anything to spell the void the years had carved inside me. Anything to rest the emptiness, and salve the piercings of a world that could not see me, that could not stand to hear me, that did not come close enough to touch me, nor love me neither. To love me. Anything, I said, and I shook the name as a recrimination, as a fever to the air, shaking it for all it’s worth. Anything that gets me there, I said, I will do. I swear. I will do it, and as I let the first name go, I seen it then, the truth, bursting up in a red hot glow. The slip touched the first bright coal and rose before me in an otherworldly flash. So that when the black puff swirled up, it dispersed into nothingness before my next breath, twisting into darkness, into the vast invisible design of the thing itself. I knew then that a little more had been returned, a little more of the true store of good that could still affect my life, that could still fortify my mind and direct me on, and so I wept to know it, what I’d done. I wept to know there was still more names to do the same with likewise.

  Well, he said, I hope that ain’t the last of ’em, for we still got a long ways to go and a full tank of gas. He might have been behind me the whole time, how could I of known? But when I turned, I seen him, and he said my name again all whispery and slow, Isaiah, and smiled in the flickering firelight—my A.D., come to me—his hand resting on the doorframe. His long thin face shadowed and still. While outside, as if set in relief below the faraway mountains and jigsaw tops of the indefinable ridge, I seen it, the headlights blazing up on that old car of Jessico’s as pure and white as portals in the everlasting night, and knew then that we were the same again.

  That we had to go. The names were calling.

  XXVII

  Some celestial hand ~ On the vagaries and agonies ~ A John B. Stetson hat ~ Always another song ~ The right center of them ~ Hymn after enduring hymn ~ Misericordia Jones ~ The confluence of the Shenandoah and Potomac ~ The absence of himself ~ Casting out for all time into the void

  IT WAS A LONG STRANGE ROAD WE DROVE THEN. I set beside him all the while and watched at how accustomed he’d become again to it. With how easy the rhythm of the curves and steep climbs and long sad stretches of just nothing would roll out before us as another roadway wound up up up into the blessedness of the ridge in late autumn with a thousand million colors coalescing and convulsing in the light. It was as if Annie’s prism had been hung down by some celestial hand to shed such an immense harmony and resplendence on everything we seen.

  O I still had the bulk of money I’d sent to the Honorable Reverend Michael Williams and that he’d given back in his disgust, and so I gave Ms. Clara May and Benjamin half as payment, I guess you could say, for taking A.D. with me, for driving off the way we did. With the other half, we just sort of used it to go. Of course I had a notion as to what Benjamin might do with his
portion once he got it, after he reappeared with his usual swagger after visiting with his cousin in Harrisburg and giving him what for with invectives and such that he repeated to us all in full as of a Shakespeare play one Saturday night. O to see him! How he come back on fire speaking most indignant about the vagaries and agonies of human greed, and then on the artifice of Man, and on the duplicity of financial institutions, before lastly expounding on the wayward motions of the irresolute Earth, as if she alone revolved in a sea of unending sin. So of course he never once mentioned all the monies we’d lost and how if you traced it all the way back to the beginning, as if pulling on a dusty string, you’d find him at the end of it. But once he seen what I give him, he shut up soon enough. He just looked me square in the eyes, called me his brother and touched my shoulder, and I had to laugh for I seen how happy he was to hear we were both leaving again—both me and A.D.—driving off into the ridge.

  And sure enough, after a few weeks of passing through towns untold and outposts unseen, that not a soul might have visited in months let alone decades— they were such destitute and backward places, with so many still hobbled and blinded by blight, and that might not have gotten over the influenza outbreak ten years before, let alone this Great Depression—whenever we did come roaring into town, it was all I could do to tell everyone how lucky they were with their meager possessions and health, living the way they did. But of course, as soon as I started in like that I’d have to stop once I seen him, and I understood what he could be capable of in those days, even in that general condition of the world, with his outright blindness to the miseries of the human condition.

  For Benjamin Marks would have something new on him each week and think nothing of it. Like the new brass belt buckle he paraded around, ordered straight from the Sears Roebuck. Or a pair of polished leather Lucchese cowboy boots mailed in special from San Antone. Or even a new white John B. Stetson hat, one he’d cock to the side as he eyed you and mumbled, saying Yes it was an awful sight what was going on in the world today, and yes, I know all about poverty and whatnot and what it can do to a man. I know clear well, and then he’d spit some fresh chaw tobacco to the sidewalk and off he’d go with Ms. Clara May who weren’t none better herself to watch her, and who might have just stared at the two of us as if we were of a nation beyond the likes of Man. Something foreign and benighted from beyond a darker Earth with our traveling ways that she never did forgive A.D. for commencing with again (even though she knew we needed the money). She’d just sigh and wrap tighter the brand new embroidered shawl around her cool leveled head. All the while that soft little Jolie just swayed as sweet as sugar in her cherry wood bassinet, or in her matching new cherry wood crib. Or in the prim Heywood-Wakefield baby carriage they’d just bought, the one with the wicker basket and adjustable hood. So it was all I could do to stand there and laugh devilish to see how happy the family was getting on without A.D., crafting in their own sense an identity even as he was edged further from the picture.

  If it was painful to see, it was true, but it was necessary for my own designs. (Though I can assure you it was a picture A.D. held onto too even as he was edged further from it.) Because I seen him do it most nights, after we’d drive off again, after he was intent on following some other name, bursting out of town after maybe only playing one live session of the song we’d found and shaped on the ride in. Stopping maybe only once at a local radio station to play it or to perform it right there over the telephone for Mr. Ralph Peer, who somehow recorded it like that way up in New Jersey. No, A.D. couldn’t stand to wait no more. He’d never stood to wait. Not even for his own marriage nor baby girl. He’d just been biding his time really, reading his books, playing house all the while. Because I don’t think he rightly saw what Jolie was to him then, or what she’d always be—his all and all—not with the specter of those names stacked up before him and with more accumulating day by day. The names that we just had to find, that we just had to burn ourselves through to get for another few songs.

  But how can I describe it? How can I write about his clenched fists, or his pinched jaw, or how tense and indignant his brow got most nights driving, as he turned up from another lost hollow or broken down depot, the moonlight nothing more than a spotlight. A presence echoing behind the darkness of the clouds and ridge as far off and mysterious as an airy gauze painted on with a gossamer brush it was so light and angelic. But always in seeing him, I’d know he was repurposing the picture of his family again. The one he turned over endlessly in his mind and held onto as the last fading strand of his life. Only this time Ms. Clara May and little Jolie weren’t besides Benjamin Marks as they’d been, smiling on the front cracked steps of their apartment, arm and arm, a picture of family life and trust. No, for this time it was A.D. and A.D. alone who held the two candied apples for them and smiled his sunsplashed smile, the one he’d set in stone with what he knew he still had to do for them, and what he had to accomplish.

  I knew A.D. still loved her, and of course little Jolie, but also that he loved the idea that he was providing something substantial for them even more, that he was in control. I know, I know, how he thought he was in control of his fever was beyond me. But I could see it in him, this pride, this force emanating sometimes like a glowing prominence that stretched and pulled and seeped from inside the very pores of his skin. With that strict focus he had in getting the songs and recording the songs before even reconsidering what he’d done to them, after he’d found the right center of them. Then always there was the way he sealed the brown envelopes afterward. Licking his wide thumb and then pressing along the narrow glue strip at the edge. Before sliding them into the mail slot and watching as all that money we’d made started on its slow journey back to Bristol, back to Ms. Clara May and Benjamin Marks and to little Jolie even. Always to them.

  Yet even in all this, I could see the remove in his eyes. He loved something even more than providing for them and that was the movement born in us and in him from the beginning—from before the beginning. All the way back to when he’d first made his way to Baltimore, roaming those dark, narrow streets, straining for sustenance amongst the littered row homes and slums. For in the very next instant of cresting a hill, or rounding a ravine, or backing into some abandoned train offing, he’d see another whole alien landscape beckoning with its rising tendrils of mist and sleek slanting sunlight. And it was as if the land itself was the thing doing the singing then, the thing composing hymn after enduring hymn to decry its blessedness and endurance and pride.

  The ridge.

  It never stopped giving to us in those days, and it never stopped taking from us neither, bit by bit. Until some weeks, I wouldn’t even hear mention of his family in Bristol no more. Nor how old Benjamin Marks had moved in permanent with little Jolie and Ms. Clara May, who didn’t even sing now with us when we did stop back in town and record something, but took the money just the same as he sent it in regular as rain.

  He spoke on it when I asked him. But of course I had to decipher his answers when he did, for he had a way of talking that wound around a thing, around the substance of his feelings and moods and pain. Instead, he’d mix it all up with the projections of the trees and trains and towns we’d see speeding by as a blur most days, a blur of the most indeterminate design. As if life itself was only composed of one fast speed in those days, one blinding away source of substance and truth that he was determined to find.

  Misericordia Jones, he whispered, and I knew it was a name on a slip for I’d seen it and knew it was a woman’s name—one that we’d never gone after, at least not yet, and that we might never go after—since she was told to live in Harpers Ferry way up north on the confluence of the Shenandoah and Potomac. And even if we were driving those days most everywhere it seemed, we still come back time to time to see Jolie and Ms. Clara May. For it was something to watch the loud pompous wreck of Benjamin Marks slink off as if he really wasn’t living there with Ms. Clara May when we would return. When he thought A.D. was blind n
ot to know it, nor suspect it, and I guess I was meant to be blind too, for no one ever asked my opinion on the matter, and certainly not A.D. He just nodded as Benjamin gathered his coat and hat from the kitchen table, as Benjamin mentioned some business concern or other he had with someone at the Mercantile. A concern that might keep him there all day and into the night, and then he’d snap his new gold pocket watch shut and be gone. As if the absence of him was the thing he was truly meant to meet, the absence and awkwardness that stretched between A.D. and Clara May. The awkwardness never named— except maybe in our car—in its roundabout way, as we drove on.

  Yes, indeedy. Misericordia Jones. Revival. A capella, I said and hesitated on the words, looking at A.D. who didn’t blink none, didn’t show nothing. Who never showed nothing by way of discord in himself or his life—and so I’d always have to nudge him to see what I could get out of him—to see what might show up in the balance. They say she keeps her rhythm with the balls of her feet, I said and watched him drive, kept watching him move through the motions as he listened or thought about something else entire. Another woman perhaps, one who had her own rhythm and code and who he could never quite capture, never quite pin down enough to name. Shakes it down they say, I said. Shakes it down cold and true on the sawn oak boards.

  Unaccompanied, he said.

  Yessir. Unaccompanied. A capella. I whispered it low and soft.

  A capella, he said and whispered the term too for he liked it very much I could tell, with how it moved him. The sense of one voice. Casting out for all time into the void its proclamation, its truth. I heard him whisper it again as he shifted braking into a turn. Yes, indeedy. Unaccompanied, and I watched him, for I knew it was a concept and abstraction so strong and true it needed nothing else but its own raw force to cry out as a beacon of substance, as a pattern of form. As if creating its own past and future with one breath and sustaining charge was its only intent. Its only function. With one throat. One song. Forever. Amen.