A North Country Life

by Sydney Lea

  The man I am now prays for the places themselves, names be damned—at least insofar as his own is concerned.

  That Little Boy You're Holding

  Dear Dad,

  In a span from 1979 to 1980, I composed a cycle of poems in your honor, which would show up in my second book. I don't know whether I'm dismayed or not that you never had a chance to read it. At the time, I thought it comprised my best writing ever, that it made me look at last like a grownup. Today the whole thing seems sprawling, amateurish, negligible, except, precisely, for its dwelling on your memory.

  Whatever their quality, all those poems mention hunting, for which you kindled my lifelong passion. That ardor has stood up against the rants of People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals and the milder disapproval of milder folks, mostly because you showed me that a hunt has a lot less to do with game bag counts than with human involvement in a huge and wondrous process. Non-human too: All those breathtaking dogs! All that splendid game!

  From you I somehow learned that hunting is sacramental, that Meaning with a capital M is its real prey—not that you ever resorted to such highfalutin' words about the matter the way I can.

  One of the few poems in that sequence I'll stand by is the opening one:

  Late February. Orion turned

  the corner into the long

  sleep, blindness

  on the earth's black side,

  as you did.

  Sleet. Cloud.

  Woodsmoke creeping

  like a whipped dog flat

  to the ground, and heaven

  was all occultation.

  So the few last bitter lights,

  down to Betelgeuse,

  in familiar constellation—

  they slipped away

  before I'd caught the art

  of seeing, harder art

  of naming. Early

  fall now, now again

  the wanderers—the winter

  planets, memory, restless birds—

  begin to shift. It will be greater

  darkness if the language skulks, unrisen.

  Flesh of my flesh,

  you pause to take

  quick breath

  against the quick descent of evening.

  I feel that exhalation

  along the throat, I wear you

  as I wear your threaded

  hunter's coat, my father.

  From which in this gust

  into night there climbs

  —like word or star—

  a single feather. . . .

  I composed that more than a decade after your February death, and felt happiest with the single feather. To me it suggested that I could offer accurate testimony by talking about the scantest of your leavings, which meant your influence remained lively in the least detail that bound us. My life need not be winter unending, perpetual dark, as it so often felt after you died. I could take such a tiny detail and move from it to the bright constellations. I could see a whole universe.

  That notion seems a little like wishful presumption now. But maybe I didn't understand back then what my own poem was trying to tell me. Today that feather-figure seems most eloquent of my ineloquence. Or perhaps it's just that, being older, I have a different response to the same experience. At any rate, I'm most drawn now to the half-line that claims "I wear you."

  If I peek into my rearview as I drive to a bird cover, say, and in doing so see my face as your face, maybe that's a mere matter of genetics. In terms of practical life, we hardly resemble each other. You were the small businessman, I the "artist." You were steady, deliberate, handy with tools; I was impulsive, moody, and, relative to you at least, mostly thumbs. You were more than fond of that sentimental dog-and-cat story, The Incredible Journey; I was and remain a certified book snob. So on.

  Still, "I wear you/ as I wear your threaded/ hunter's coat, my father." The notion holds up. I don't of course literally still wear your hunting clothes, though I did for as long as they lasted; but I'm still hunting for meaning, for a shapely world—the same way that you, like me or anyone, must have done for all your too brief life. In other words, I see how wrong I must have been to think of your road as free of the melancholies. Whose road is ever paved with such exclusive good fortune?

  I was supposed to be a poet, but however much I loved you, and that was plenty, I stuck on surface details for too long a time, caught up in our visible differences. It's taken me all these decades to see how you and I shared a lot of spiritual garments too. To see that now is not, however, to give you up as Hope's muse, which you've been for many a year. Yes, it turns out that one's history must be revised day by day, maybe minute by minute, but some part of it will remain intact.

  How can I make myself clear about this? How tell it plainly?

  You'd often ask me, precisely, why I could never just say things straight. Well, forgive me again. What actually motivated this letter was the chance discovery of an ancient photograph of you and me; seeing it, I felt my mind take off. Not straight.

  Can you let me follow it? As if I haven't already . . .

  I wonder if you're sweating in the picture. Like you, I sweat like a racehorse, even when most around me are shivering. You and I shared a high furnace. Odd that I thought about this when I found the snapshot. The photo's old enough to leave such details to my strange imagination. That's true of so much between us.

  I can see the trees are leafless, but that could mean early spring, late fall, or winter. All the deep-southern seasons are warm by our standards. So, yes, you'll soon be mopping your brow; I recall the gesture well.

  But you have better reasons to sweat. There you are in Gadsden, Alabama. Some place to be commander of an all-black company of troops! You and your men, unlettered country kids one and all, are waiting for European deployment, hence the uniform you wear; you'd think fright would show up on your face, then, but mine is the one to show it.

  What would a kid of eighteen months know about world history in the making? That clearly wasn't what troubled me. No, there's another chain of events, the personal history we share to this day, one that makes our expressions on the Gadsden street seem completely logical. I'm confused there, afraid. You are trying to soothe me.

  I don't mean I recognized the half of all this until well after you died at fifty-seven. I obviously hadn't had many recognitions of any kind back there in Alabama, which couldn't be my fault, baby that I was when you were taken overseas.

  It wasn't your fault, either, that you also missed some recognitions. You never knew your grandchildren, for example. As much as anything in this world I regret that they can't experience your affection. Happily, you missed the day when a brain aneurysm blew away your second son, who hadn't yet reached thirty-five; nor were you there when one of your daughters was brave enough to affirm her lesbianism. All those unpredictables. How would you have responded to them?

  But then does any of us really want to know each last detail about our fathers or mothers or children or dearest friends? It may be partly because you're gone that I can mention a few particulars concerning you and me. Of course, since you'll never really be gone, you can hear me clear my throat here, hear me sigh. I scuff my mental boots in imaginary dirt. As if it were deer or trout, I have to sneak up on what passes for frankness, even though compared to most we were very open with one another. It's just that I've learned how real candor can threaten a wound. To someone. It may not deliver on the threat, yet the threat will lurk.

  To wound your memory, however, as I need scarcely say, is the last thing I desire, which is why I'm feeling my way, traveling with care. In this later life, it doesn't take much sometimes to rock the world. A child can't imagine that: he thinks growing up will fix everything.

  As the rearview proves, I resemble you physically nowadays, more than the photograph predicts. Why would that rock anyone? The likeness of son to father shouldn't be shocking, and it wouldn't shock in the least if I didn't so often note the resemblance chiefly when I'm su
nk in some darker mood.

  The set of our jaws, the raccoon rounds under our eyes, the sparse hair and incipient jowliness all give me pause, because—in the years before your coronary, and the forty-plus years since—you've been in all respects the model of promise. You led a short life, but left, so far as I've ever discovered, no enemies. We could all aspire to such an accomplishment. That our faces most resemble each other's when I'm feeling other than hopeful menaces me with incoherence. What if my sustaining vision of you is in some measure concocted, if naivete has blinded me all my life? Is the truck's rearview more accurate than my own? Must I completely recompose our common experience?

  This damned snapshot kicks up a lot of rabbits, so many that I want to chase them all. Or none. Every memory or thought seems random and relevant. I can touch the past anywhere, and you're in it somehow. Even when you're not.

  There's a day at nursery school, for instance, which I'm sure you never knew about; you were still off somewhere killing bad guys. Since early September, I've been competing with a certain rival to rule the playground, especially its wooden playhouse, into which a yellow jacket has just flown. Or so my classmates believe. I'm apparently the only one who saw it flare away at the last minute. Not even the rival will go inside.

  How, having entered that green box and come out again, can I convince anyone I've pounded the little hornet into the dirt? Don't my playmates demand to see the meager corpse, at least some remnants of it?

  Unchallenged, my charade makes me king of the mountain for a long time, right into grammar school, my classmates all taken in.

  Yet I can't be fooled by my own monkeyshines. I'm frightened all the time. Of what? I usually can't say, the fear non-specific, though I do recall one particular scare from the same general period, this one after you've come home from war. "A grasshopper bit me," I tell you. It must be August. The air above the Swamp Creek meadow is almost liquid; the meadow itself is eccentrically mowed, the 'hoppers hiding in the hay stubble; that old, pigeon-toed Farmall tractor seems to doze at the edge of the woods.

  These things I do know, but I can't be specific about other matters. Grasshoppers don't really bite, of course, at least not painfully; and yet—this is one of the things I can be sure of—there's some early pain lying under this memory. Tears widen the circle of perspiration on your chest once you gather me up. That circle represents succor at its purest to the child in your arms. Or no: the very impurity of it succors him, the non-ideal somehow implying the ideal, as he'll one day learn was true for Plato.

  There is earth and effort in that odor, and although I could never have told you as much, there's some encoded notion of honorable adult maleness, a notion that guides me today. All that rank, brawny, bodily presence suggests the sort of armor in which I'd like to sheathe the vulnerable: battered women, gays, the racially oppressed, and above all my children and their children. I could still use it too now and then.

  It isn't that you'll protect me from all the truly harrowing stuff—death, time, disease, injustice—which I'm too young anyhow to recognize; no, it's just that for my private, inscrutable miseries there exists a literal solvent. Mansweat.

  It sometimes feels nowadays that nothing can be solved. Not with you vanished, along with one or two crucial surrogates who too briefly survived you. Or that's the sort of thing I mumble whenever I see my face looking like yours in the rearview. I know I melodramatize; it's a cursed habit, damned near a hobby, and finally inexcusable. But in such moments I do crave some warm refuge from the challenges faced by any adult, particularly those awful night thoughts of mistakes and omissions, of people whom I may have hurt.

  I must even have hurt you, made you feel inadequate. Kids can do that, I've learned. In fact, there's already something in the photograph that causes me to re-experience my own genuine moments of inadequacy in forty-some years of fatherhood. Though it may be my usual inclination to guilt, it looks to me in the snapshot that you are there in a way I may now and then not have been for son or daughter. You'll be leaving Gadsden within the month, right out of the country; meanwhile, you try to comfort that little boy you're holding.

  I can't find any pictures from that time immediately after your return from the European theater, but my mind retains one indelible image: I see a stranger in khaki, paused in our driveway, a cone of evening light falling on him from a gap in the clouds, as if to emphasize his grandeur.

  Then the picture comes alive: Mom sweeps me up and rushes to greet this Captain Lea. As you take me from her, I scream my lungs out. I have, after all, been the only male in a house full of women—aunts, older girl cousins, the wives and children of men at war. I've been king of that mountain too, and you're an intruder. The way you clutch at my mother is a horror. I won't take it!

  Did I occasionally resist you in some similar way as I grew into young manhood? No doubt. It's a thing sons do, I suppose.

  You probably never read John Keats, since, besides that dog-and-cat tale, you didn't read much, least of all poems. I only think of Keats because he once objected to calling the world a "Vale of Tears." He called it, rather, "a Vale of Soul-Making." You vanished too soon from that vale, but my guess is that, pressed for such definition, you'd have said something akin in your own words. Which makes you still a model, as I say, an inspiration.

  Maybe at last I've learned from you that to be a father, a more crucial calling than writer's or hunter's or teacher's or fisherman's, isn't a matter of being king of any hill, of having it made. Instead, although the most strenuous phases of my parenthood are, somewhat to my sorrow, behind me, fatherhood should be a matter of effort, which one rarely lets up on. I think that's what I keep seeing in my rearview mirror, through my unKeatsian tears. Like you, I'm struggling to make a soul worth passing on for my children to wear. It takes a whole life to do that. I think those children may be more consistent and thoughtful in their own parental efforts, but perhaps they learned a little from my example after all, as I from yours.

  Sometimes the struggle has felt almost physical, as if I were with you, following a hard-going bird dog through heavy brush, the way I did when I was just slightly more than a little boy.

  And as I say so I get the smell of mansweat—the solvent, the small salvation.

  Love forever,

  Your Oldest Son

  In my father's arms prior to his tour in the European Theater, Gadsden, Alabama, 1942

  Daybook, March

  Yesterday, it was winter when I climbed the ridge just west of my writing cabin; today I climbed into spring!

  Spring, with its tobacco-and-mushroom odor in the leaf mould; spring, when, out of idle curiosity, I nicked a red maple with my knife and watched it gush. Leaning close to the base of the tree, I watched the infinitesimal snowfleas swim through old granules.

  On the way back down I lay a few moments on the south slope, patches of which the season's strong sun had thawed and dried, looking through squinted eyes at the absolute sky. I permitted myself some magical thinking: If I will it to be there, a bird may cross that blue blank. There appeared a bird. I thought it was a crow at first, but it looked too wide in the wing and soon became a high hawk. How languid its coastings.

  When I stood and took a few steps through the blueberry bushes, I almost stumbled on the spine of a winter-killed deer, its ribs likewise pointed skyward. I thought how the hungry dualisms grind us all.

  So I got to my feet again and kept heading east, toward home. Just before an old boundary wall, my pointer froze on a very early woodcock. I walked over and flushed it. Its whistle seemed spring itself, quicksilver.

  Beside our largest vernal pool, the red-winged blackbirds would soon come back to chant from the cattails. I noticed a shimmer along one bank: the pseudo-sunshine of last fall's withered ferns.

  I reached the gravel road to our house, its ditches tuneful with runoff.

  My chain of observations somehow led me to my forty-year-old son's elementary school days, when, with what seems in retrospect the s
ame surge of energy as mine just now, he'd run from the car out onto the playground, where he and his mates delighted in the suddenly usable swings and seesaws.

  Overhead, he-ravens rasped, swooping and quarreling with one another over she-ravens perched a few hundred yards into the woods.

  Skunks had begun to roam again, as I saw on one of those glistening mornings. One bedraggled animal had been clipped by a car out near the town pond, where the children would swim come summer. The poor thing stood mid-road, blood in its mouth, swaying its head back and forth, as though it searched to see what had happened, and how so quickly.

  I wanted not to fix on that image from long ago—feeling too fit, too good and glad—so I didn't.

  Spring

  Dirt and Blossom

  I piece this narrative together from some things the late Bill White told me, and these were sketchy, as he conceded, even to him.

  At the very turn of the twentieth century, Bill said, there were two savvy woodsmen. I think their names really were Harry and Charles; in any case I'll call them that. They had a lean-to camp in the Musquash country, smack in the middle of nowhere at all back then, and vacant of humans, because it was almost entirely marshland.

  One thing Bill heard from Harry and Charles has stuck with me more vividly than any other. It had to do with a dead man. Neither of those older woodsmen could reckon how he came to die. No blood on his body, no other mark of violence. He looked clean and pure as an altar boy.

  It was never found out just who he was, or so Bill insisted. I'd bet the authorities—such as they may have been in that barely populated region and in that era—did learn a name, but I never challenged the claim, nor so much as asked any of the other veteran citizens about the story itself, let alone about this detail, and I can't ask them now. I never speculated, because the victim's identity was not and is not the point. Indeed, his lack of it seems more important.