by Robert Hill
The darkest dark of all is the dark that knows no light. Petie could breathe in the oil of camphor and feel her scalp tingle to its touch, but she could not reason out an analogy to its strong aroma in a bold color or a forceful action, having no reference to what colors and actions looked like. She could feel a face for its abundant nose and absent chin, but she could not conjure an image in her mind to contrast to faces not so New Eden in their appointments, nor was it flattery to call her buttercup-pretty when she had no sense of what a buttercup was. Tell her of a golden metropolis full of colonnades and coliseums and so agleam with perfection that all spines are straight and all heads are full and all eyes are all-seeing, but such a tale of visible splendors is wasted when, to understand a thousand words, a single picture is still needed. Petie was alone in a dark that Loma could never fully grasp. To Loma, dark was merely the absence of light, a time of day, a place where dreams didn’t need sun to grow, a hue, a mood, a lampless room, a refuge. It was where she could retreat to and then return from, lead herself into and follow herself out of. Loma had all the words and images for dark except the dark that only God and Petie knew. Petie’s dark would take a thousand images to convey and not a one would ever be the last word. One word needed no image, however. To Petie, it was the one word that made all the difference in the dark. It was her word for light. The word was Loma.
Sibling years pass with little things going unnoticed. Petie’s head had been migrating over time from center-most on her shoulders to the western end of a right shoulder shrug. It was such a small advance daily that Loma could hardly be blamed for missing the shift as it happened on her watch, but she did miss it, and missed something shiftier, too. Not only was Petie’s head inching its way east, her neck was twisting its way Egyptian, with her chin directing her head all the way one way even as her body set its course the opposite. You’d think that seeing that sight day after day would make Loma wake up and take notice, but as it was that she slept for what seemed like years on end, who was going to shake her and wake her just to tell her that something didn’t look like it was supposed to look—Petie?
Loma could look away, but she could not hear away, and so it was that when a gurgle was added to Petie’s repertoire, Loma at long last deduced that something in her sister was amiss. Petie took on the musicality of a fireplace bellows, with a glottal kind of slurp followed by a nasal sort of wheeze. Whether she slept or lumbered or sat or chatted, she resonated like a hearthside recital at all times, all slurp and wheeze, slurp and wheeze, slurpier sometimes and wheezier others.
Petie did not express disturbance with her new discordance. Slurping was a familiar sound at home from when their mother’s spitting was in its high water years—a condition as much a result of bad teeth as it was of a bad humor. As Petie could not equate her torquing neck with choking any more than she could make a connection between their mother’s tooth rot and slurp juice, with only a sound to go by, she naturally assumed it was a natural aspect of aspiration and not a forewarning of asphyxiation. Thus, she slurped and she wheezed as she unconcernedly went about brushing her own slop and emptying her own hair. Her curving spine twisted her head further and further, and as it did, it caused the air to her lungs to grow thinner and thinner, which led, over time, to the color of her pretty skin turning from buttercups to bluebells.
One day the sun slants down at just the right angle and something your eye never fell upon before all at once takes you by surprise. You notice that long, thick, diseased branch that hangs perilously close to the rooftop over your bedroom and how the droop of it seems so much more severe now that there’s no distance left at all between it and the years and years of decayed leaves and moss and broken limbs that are piled up on your sagging roof and rotting what’s left of your shingles. You stagger backwards as best you can and you crane your own twisting neck and your newly awakened attentiveness at what is undoubtedly the cause of all that slurpiness you’ve been half-hearing in your sleep and you speculate as to the entirety of the disaster that you are sure is impending—the limb breaking off and the soggy roof caving in, and yet another door you must shut on yet another part of your family home made unlivable by the slow degradations of time—and because the mere thought of it is as exhausting as any remedy you might take up—you take to your tuck on the parlor divan—at least the roof over that room is sturdy, for the time being—and as you lie there willing yourself to a standstill you wish and you cry and you dream and you pray that your sister is soundly sleeping in her thin bed in the room you used to share when the roof over it collapses and she goes in one quick final slurp and wheeze in the dark. That’s one solution.
Another solution is to cease waiting for your sister’s end to fall out of the sky, cease yearning for a hole to be dug in your own honor, cease praying for a sunken golden metropolis to rise from the depths and put to shame the all-too-real world you live in, and instead, wake up: brush your sister’s hair and your own, empty her slop and your own, cup your hands around her cheeks and force her twisting neck to turn back just a notch enough to let a bit more air pass through for the little time that’s left, and accept that what this life gave you may not have brought you to the golden metropolis, but it made you one in your sister’s milky eyes. And when the two of you are found long after your long-awaited stillness has finally come to call, you’ll be crushed in your two thin beds in your small room off the collapsed kitchen with your twisted heads twisted towards one another like a pair of crumbled Egyptians, and across the narrow space between you, so narrow a space that you never needed eyes to measure what you had there, you and your sister will be holding each other’s hands as you enter that beautiful black void of perfect ever-after-ness that only God and Petie have ever seen.
19. Kennesaw
There are acts that happen upon us, and moments that happen for no reason, and if we are to survive what comes our way to finish our rotations around the sun while feeling the sun for its warmth as well as its scorching, then we who are able must deliver ourselves from the aftermath to where we need to go. It was true with the serpent in the garden and it has been true ever since. The snakebite is not what defines a life; what defines it is how we extract the venom.
Kennesaw knew two truths to be his north stars: he could not endure his father’s attentions, nor would he risk tempting Hunko with the same southbound intentions should his own southbound intentions lead to lands as unchartered as the heavens. To keep himself from exploring the far reaches of Hunko, Kennesaw resolved himself to journey in a direction opposite his young friend, and in so doing, he’d be sure to circumnavigate what his life might be in favor of what he told himself it ought be. Hiding in the woods wouldn’t do, and merely averting his glances when passing in front of the New Eden Grangery would do less, or pretending to be espying woodpeckers up high and above when he happened to be strolling completely innocently down the path to Grunts Pond would do least of all. Only one measure was surefire, not that there’d ever been proof. Nowhere was there to be found in any New Eden lore that he knew of an instance of time turning back on itself, of a Bliss or a Minton or a Belvedere leaving New Eden and going back to whence they came. He grew up on the stories of forebearers coming to this spot from points far flung and flunger, of compassless dreamers who missed the footpaths worn by others before them and who in their inadvertence scaled on foot and hoof the magmatic tips of a mountain range beyond the town’s highest hill, then descended into the valley where the water and land and forest formed the Eden which, having nothing better to do, they claimed anew. But what no passed-down lore celebrated was a single soul in all New Eden’s swelling generations since who had ever crossed back—who had retraversed the uncompassed paths and retraced mistaken steps to forge newer lives on other inadvertent grounds; others who came upon Eden only to find it lacking what they weren’t even sure they were looking for and finding it lacking, left. But Kennesaw decided to do what no one of lore had done before him with or without plan, example, or thought. He’
d leave. He’d be the first. He’d find a new New Eden elsewhere. Free of torment. Free of temptation.
With neither provisions nor belongings satcheled, Kennesaw walked out the front door of the Belvedere home with a determination to outgrow the town that he feared would never outgrow him. His gait as damn well determined as his father’s, he walked down the road he walks today, past neighboring farms and fields still tilled, past the rise to Tumblers’ Ridge and its tickling grasses, past the path down to Grunts Pond and the rock and the life force that down there beckoned. He slowed at the path a bit in hopes of seeing signs of Hunko, and seeing none, was both relieved and disappointed, and presented with a choice, chose disappointment as a lubricant for resuming his former pace. Past Saflutises’ fields he walked, past the Bucketts’ barn, the Whiskerhoovens’, the O’umses’; he followed the virus’s path past Nedewen Field and its ever-increasing markers, past True’s and her row of apple trees where one of the dozen had recently succumbed to blight, past Carnival who waved his ax to him as he passed.
This walk was an entirely different walk than any Kennesaw had heretofore embarked on. Different because it was a walk of departure, yes, but also, because Kennesaw had about him a new awareness of his surroundings. Landmarks he had passed so often as to not know they existed (much as he did people at times), now produced in him a sensation that if this were to be the last time he took in such familiar and well-worn sights he would indeed miss them deeply, surprisingly, and as this odd sentimentality took hold of his entirety his gait slowed, and his bluer-than-blues sought out details of the everyday that he had never really considered in his day-to-days. That eight shingles on one row and seven on another were missing from the east wall of the Bucketts’ hay barn. That Zebeliah Was-She-a-Hackensack-or-Was-She-a-Whiskerhooven did not look too comely from the back end when bent over and digging in her spring flowerbeds. That the O’umses’ only offspring set out for airing on the front porch looked not quite human, and more like candle wax readying to be form-poured. That the path down to Grunts Pond that used to be lined with jack-in-the-pulpits and balsam was now nearly bare.
Small and insignificant can be huge when viewed for the last time, and viewed through a nuisance of tears can produce in a man a stubbornness to get on with things. Flummox be damned, Kennesaw thought, as he rid damp sentimentality from his eyes with the back of his hands. He would leave everyone and everything he knew in the past. In time, Hunko would forget him.
His destination? An education. He would fill his head to overflowing with distractions eastern and western. He would learn great things, important things about important people, by important people, historical people, historic events, places, formulas and computations. He would fill his mind with every manner of distraction ancient, modern, and in-between, and so distracted, his mind would circumnavigate his heart and this would suffice as a life. It was certain that he knew his ABCs and his 1, 2, 3s. He knew a square from a circle, and most assuredly, having known the Lopes, a horse from an ass. But what schooling he had had beyond that had its limits. His was schooling done around the kitchen table from primitive primers missing pages and long out of print—primers a young and not-yet-troubled Porcine had rescued from the burn pile in her childhood when her own mother’s actions turned unmotherly. As her own mind went wild as an untilled field, Porcine laid these primers out before her own child like sacred texts from a Hebrew’s altar, plopped out before him like raindrops, spoke the words and the letters once and expected her child to repeat them forever, which he did; more proof of his outcastedness, Porcine then feared. And no sooner did she lay the books out than she snatched them back and returned them to hiding, learning dried up for the moment, That’s enough, she’d say, now heed your father, he’s out in the barn, hey Blue Eyes, he’s calling for you. Where Porcine’s mother, Agrippa, got the books was anybody’s guess; for all Kennesaw knew, they may have been gifts from the ghosts his mother’s mother communed with. But thank those ghosts for they lay a foundation that could be built upon. He could read; he could add; he could ask questions and take in their answers like air. Such learning was a short, steep drop-off to knowledge of any practical application, and although dragons lay beyond their limits, he’d more happily slay them than stay put.
The dirt road out of town led Kennesaw to a roadway of unfamiliar composition, hard and unrutted, wider, with an urgency to its unfolding: it did not even wind itself up and around the mountain range whose magmatic tips prior feet had climbed to blisters. This roadway did not want to waste a moment; it cut right through them. The trees he passed appeared not so green and tall as the ones he climbed as a boy, the roadside flora not as redolent, no funk of jack-in-the-pulpits, no balsam at all. Dwellings off this road were odd long metal structures on blocks that looked to Kennesaw as if they could be dislodged and heaved like hay bales by any strong wind that happened to blow by, and on the way to their front doors was a landscape so cluttered with adornments that surely large winds had indeed passed through. He could not imagine knowledge contained within a can, let alone conceive of any living soul dwelling in such structures that were not even attached to the ground they sat on; a man must have his feet on the ground to know he exists, and so must a house. Farther on there were homes of larger scale, fortress-like as they dominated smaller environs, attached to the ground by foundations built rock upon rock, but with surroundings devoid of any displays, landscapes clipped as precisely as a close shave, and grasses so immaculate, it was hard to imagine any feet, hooves, or paws ever being tickled by so much as a single blade. Nowhere was there to be seen gates shaped as heavenly harps, nothing fashioned with such care as Kennesaw’s gates by Hunko’s hands, nothing as forgiving, nothing that said I may look imperious, but I have a heart. Knowledge of any use could not live in so unwelcoming a place.
Beyond here, dwellings gave way to clustered groupings in brick and stone: store fronts whose windows beckoned with offers of 2 for 99¢ and buy 4 get 1 free; there were no store front porches for gnawing the daily grist on like the New Eden Grangery, no rockers for taking a load off, and heaven forbid a man who relieved his bladder by the side of this route. The air hummed like bees grouping for a kill, and on the street there were vehicles of every shape and speed that would finish the job the bees left undone. At every glance was a new sensation that Kennesaw had only seconds to process before another took its place. Multicolored illuminants that flashed and sizzled, great clouds of acrid smoke that belched from funnel stacks in the sky and from the vehicles, too. And the people themselves—a monochromatic herd less green and less tall than the folks of his familiar world, yet sweeter, he had to admit, though in a sickeningly odiferous way altogether not to his liking.
The deeper into this unfamiliar terrain he walked, the more he tried to assure himself that he would in time lose the discomfort of being a foreigner in this foreign land in his crisp overalls and tailored buffalo plaid, but the monochromatic herd whom he passed did not even look up from the ground as they passed him by, their downcast eyes did not once connect with his own bluer-than-blues. How can one become one with others so otherly if they refuse to even acknowledge that you’re you, Kennesaw wondered. He crossed a thoroughfare with the herd, he followed a stampede around a corner, he thinned himself to not touch shoulders with any passersby lest he catch their downcastedness and lose his ability to see what lay ahead, and it dawned on him as he made it from one end of a street to the other that he’d encountered more people in that hundred feet of walkway than he’d seen in New Eden in the entirety of his lifetime. And not a soul thought him anything special.
He’d left New Eden early morning; he’d reached this odd world late afternoon; perhaps he’d find what he was looking for before the sun went home for the night, though his optimism was not so sure-footed. He cleared his throat and approached anyone who slowed to a stop. Where can I find an education? he asked them. Most ignored him as they did the hum in the air. A few looked up from their downcastedness long enough to roll vac
ant eyes of no coloring at all; they either shook their heads or hunched their shoulders or muttered indecencies as they resumed their trajectories to wherever downcastedness must hurry to. One passerby told him to try the school of hard knocks; another said go to a red door on a street named with a number and ask for an Esther-Ann or an Evie, or if he was truly looking to be educated, ask for a Big Joe. A child no taller than Frainey Swampscott’s goat said to him, Uh, duh, the library, and showed him the way there by spitting it over her shoulder. Beyond where the girl’s saliva landed with a crack was a town square swarmed by a herd, and above their shoulders rose a statue of a soldier, in clothing even more unusual than Kennesaw’s, aiming his blunderbuss at a low-slung cement structure as long and squat as a loaf of bread. Nothing about its flat facades and windows too high to see through said to him come hither. In front was a sign hand-carved in rough-hewn cedar that for a moment made him think of Hunko’s gates, but the sign and what it said quickly trained his heart on feelings elsewhere. The sign read: Library.
Kennesaw entered through an opaque slab glass door that was heavier than gravity in his hands, and once inside, gasped with all the fury of a last breath at the vision before him. What had been an unremarkable exterior yielded its lack of charms to an interior as resplendent as a pasha’s caravan. Books of every size and shape, leather-clad, cloth-wrapped, etched, embossed, and embellished, gold leafs and illuminated frontispieces, periodicals, atlases, cartographs, tables and charts, so many tomes, so many subjects, so much of the world outside of New Eden, more than he ever imagined could exist, and here it all sat waiting for his fingertips to bring its essences alive. Oh, how wondrous this paradise of parchment with its smell of history mixed with possibility. Not another soul shared the space with him. Only diffused light filtering through the high windows, settling on every gleaming surface a hush of promise. This is what existence is when Flummoxless, perhaps even Hunkoless. Here Kennesaw would find the distraction he was looking for.