A North Country Life

by Sydney Lea

  I am living a miracle just now, and one miracle a day ought to do me, even if, perversely, I can sometimes forget that.

  I'm no nuisance to passersby myself, not likely even much of a distraction. I'm not noisily choking on my grief. No wailing, not so much as a sniffle. Instead the tears seep, turning my T-shirt to a chill bib as an ocean breeze washes me. I squint into the sun, which will be here more or less all day and night. What time, in fact, is it now? Noon, though it could be 10:30, a.m. or p.m.

  But even if I make no spectacle, I can't somehow stop, can't seem to pull myself together, as my late mother would have put it. This was a woman who actually boasted about showing no tears either at her husband's funeral or her second-born son's. Sad to say, liquor likely had something to do with her state of mind, too.

  There's a bar near The Title Wave, too busy for the time of day. I used to know that kind of place. Its clients stumble in and out. One of them, a young man though hard-worn, reels toward me with his spiel all set. When he sees me crying, though, he simply mutters God bless you, a remark for which, however routinely offered, I feel deep gratitude.

  I watch him make his way along 4th, taking up most of the sidewalk as he goes. Decent-Honest-Citizens retreat into entryways. Not that I blame them. The man got close enough to me I could smell the barroom —smoke, urine, liquor, and sweat—on his grimy overalls.

  The bar, I calculate, sits on the next rung up from the verdant hell across the street. It would be easy enough to turn my present emotions merely maudlin, or to quash them altogether. I could wander inside.

  It's been some years, praise be, since I've considered such an option. There aren't any bars near where I live, to be sure, and one doesn't want to be known as the fellow who buys twenty beers a day from the local general store. So what one can do is drive to the hideous chain-store pharmacy several towns away for a two-liter bottle of Listerine, which has more alcohol in it anyhow than the equivalent of beer. One can deceive himself that the antiseptic smell will fool everyone, not least the cops, who—speaking of miracles—have never figured into his life.

  Jacked up on mouthwash, I drove the dirt roads of northern Vermont and New Hampshire for hours, listening to corny country singers lament the loss of their livers and hopes, making myself feel bluesy. The encroachment of tasteless McMansions on the hills I used to hunt, the road-salt rust on the bordering evergreens whenever I hit tarmac, the twang of steel guitars and the hiccuppy vocals: I could turn all of these into a bleak eloquence. Of something. But the emotions weren't mine; something tellingly called spirits owned them.

  Now I want ownership. I'll own the pain of John Engels's passing, along with the other sadnesses that course through my brain on this Alaskan block—bar and bookstore and tick-tack souvenir shops at my back, permanent sun in the sky, human ruins lurching in and out of doors around me, or slumping on pavement, or sprawling like piled cabbages on that lawn cross-lots.

  I'm not the only one who ever felt these melancholies. I know that today. In fact, whatever other cockamamie convictions I've held, even drunk I never considered writers any more "sensitive" than the next man or woman, except perhaps to language, and maybe not even that: I've known half-literate woodsmen-raconteurs who'd put most of us to shame. Yet I'm the only one who has access to my particular versions of sorrow, and that suddenly strikes me not only as important but also a sort of consolation. I shall never surrender the metaphorical deeds to such property.

  I could be lying on that green patch over there or elsewhere, and only a Ph.D. education and attendant rhetorical talents—call it bullshit; I won't stop you—ever kept me from doing so. Those, and the grace of a countervailing spirit whom I choose to call God, unaware of a better word.

  Although I don't stop my weeping, laughter suddenly pierces it. I remember a moment in Dewey Hall at the University of Vermont. Our mutual writer-friend David Huddle had invited to campus the director of an MFA program, in which John—then with most of his five kids in college—aspired to teach part-time. The woman was to read her poems, and John to express admiration of the work, to win the visitor over.

  David had held a barbecue prior to the reading. Perhaps John overate or had one beer more than was wise. It got stuffy in that hall, and the poems from the lectern were dreadful. Intended to be racy, they were just gross; calculated to put us bourgeois on edge, they proved so tedious that John nodded off beside me. Except for jostling him now and again when we sensed a snore in the making, my wife and I let him be, his sleep adequately resembling rapt, closed-eye concentration.

  Enter the famous June bug.

  It had made its way through a high window in the rotunda, and, in the manner of its species, was bumbling clumsily about, batting at the ceiling, rattling off the chandeliers, a brief diversion for the stupefied listeners. At the moment of the thing's appearance, however, my wife Robin and I both knew it meant trouble.

  After a few more tedious recitations, everyone having more or less forgotten it, the June bug dropped with a loud thwack onto John's bald head. He lurched upright, spilling his bottle of water, bellowing something like HOO-AH!

  He was not offered a contract.

  The incident still makes me chuckle even here on 4th Avenue. My mind is going wherever it wants, the world both funny and tragic, exalting and bitter. I think for no reason of the cliff swallows' holes in the high banks of the Connecticut River, from which I flush hundreds of the birds as I pass in my paddles. How does each remember which hole is which? How do we humans know where we belong?

  Then I think of my children and wife inside the shop, as well as the two older children, who have not come on this trip. The firstborn son crafts custom electric guitars back in Burlington, John's home city. The instruments are works of art, and I'm as proud of them as their maker must be, though I'm even prouder of his character.

  I think of that grandchild developing in his good wife's womb. I think of his immediately younger sister, doing God's work in Brooklyn with immigrant and ghetto kids, not accompanying us just now because she is placing fourteen hundred of them in summer apprenticeships.

  Too bad it has taken me all these six decades and more truly to understand what unconditional love is, but I'll own that too, with all my own apparently sound heart.

  Lines from John Engels's late poem "Angina" occur to me as I make for the The Title Wave again; I'll look them up soon to be sure I have them right:

  After awhile, everything calms itself, and I can stand

  and walk away. And beginning right now

  down will come the suns one after another.

  What sends me this comfort? What

  is this brightness, precisely not the light of glory,

  by which I consider the garden, and it stares coldly back?

  Rest peacefully, friend. No one put things any better than you could, though in this case I disagree with one particular: just here, just now, the light of endless sun in Alaska does seem, precisely, the light of glory. Yours.

  I'll own that too. I'll take it home with me, against a garden's cold stare, or anything's, anyone's.

  John Engels, dear friend and nonpareil poet of the trout stream.

  Daybook, June

  The trophies, I recall, skulked in the deeper pools. But as a boy, I only needed current, a high-floating, over-dressed fly, and the splashing abandon of smaller fish. The light stayed and stayed.

  Hendricksons made a cloud above the riffles; nighthawks— such as we too rarely see now—sliced through that cloud with a boom, audible despite the river-yammer; even songbirds darted out to pick off the duns; the brook trout, green as spring's grass, sipped at the film.

  Though I have grown past boyhood and then some, coming long since to prefer the warier browns and the slacker water, that quick run of home stream will remain the only notion of paradise I need to know. It was, after all, more than fish that brightened those upper reaches. The same sentry beaver crossed every evening below the rips, towing, it seemed, the same blond asp
en whip. Low mergansers flashed around an open bend and gone, like a thought I didn't quite have time to shape.

  And the water itself seemed to possess all the cleansing power ascribed to it by the first baptizer, who cried in the wilderness. To think of that water in later life would lift my mood in classroom, office, kitchen, bed.

  Only a boy could truly love such fishing. Brush crowded the banks in much of the stretch so that it seemed half my flies broke off behind or before me, air swarming so densely with black flies that I'd bleed before I could tie on others, and fish so puny I'd sometimes skip them across the surface on setting the hook. But these very drawbacks left that part of the river to that boy alone.

  That boy, I know, is continuous with what I now call I, but something about him also seems quite different.

  The I that I now am does visit his old haunt, but must do so entirely in mind. Even so, much comes back: the smell of sun on stone there, spray on hands and forearms, late light leaking through the broadleafs, trout, nighthawk—all still jewels.

  And they still renew and cleanse, those headwaters in mind, the stream's mild voice speaking, I sometimes believe, of ancient mystery, like words of some divinity, specific meanings cryptic but crucial.

  Appetite

  —for Annie Fitch (1920-2010)

  Right after your daughter called to say you were gone, it occurred to me—hardly for the first time—that some platitudes survive by being true. The one that leapt to mind was Time flies.

  You were almost thirty years younger than I am today when we came into each other's lives. I was a kid, not yet twenty. Now I'd travel north to your tiny Maine village for the funeral, nostalgia traveling with me, as it seems to do more and more in my later years. This time, at least, the mood would have its justification.

  I stood with my wife and siblings in the town's two-acre graveyard. So many lay there now, including members of your parents' generation, men and women I'd also been privileged to know. Late May, but the hardwood leaves had yet to grow a full inch. Downriver, I could hear an angry raven protecting her nest from some interloper, real or fancied. A kingfisher chattered her way toward the river. There was that wet, fecund smell in the breeze, the sun peering out now, then hiding, reappearing, hiding.

  I looked for a rainbow, but no.

  The world was going on, impossible though it seemed.

  Someone—who?—would eventually move into your rambling house on Tough End. There were those—my daughters, I'd bet—who knew at least the ingredients, but maybe even some of the magic, that went into those irresistible pies of yours. Someone would watch the sun rise over your camp on Lower Oxbrook Lake. Still, things were altered forever.

  When word first reached me, I spoke my cliché out loud. And when I looked back on my own life in the many years we knew one another, I wondered: What can I show for this time that has flown? A bag of modestly successful literary work. Eleven collections of poetry, a novel, a book of nonfiction and one of criticism, this last irrelevant.

  But in fact it all seemed irrelevant just then. Or at least none of my compositions had been so involved in my supposed learning as what I'd gotten from you. I plain can't imagine how my existence would have looked without you and your many neighbors over generations, while I easily imagine it minus my Ph.D. and books. That tells me something.

  Yet how might I give even a précis of all your teachings, which, unlike so many of the world's moral arbiters, you practiced far more vitally than you ever preached? Preachment wasn't your medium. I can't provide an iota of what needs saying here; I'm a man of words at a loss for words.

  As another cliché puts it, you had to know her. True. And to know you was to know, far less by way of commentary than of example, what counted:

  Treasure your friends and family.

  Be honest.

  Don't deal as you've been dealt unless the deal has been good.

  Don't speak ill of others, no matter what they've done.

  Value every day of your life as, and however, it unfolds.

  In light of that last tenet, I remembered an earlier crisis, one of several you were not supposed to survive. That had been half a decade before, when you were eighty-five. The same daughter, Ginny, called to report she'd taken you to the hospital. Again.

  You'd already lived ten years past the heart attack that doctors said would drop you dead the night it struck, or at best within mere months. You kept defying the predictions, I'd bet, precisely because you considered every day after an even greater gift than ones preceding, and this despite the sad loss of your husband Bill, the diminishment of your stunning physical strength, the bodily aches of any octogenarian.

  I remember talking to you after a checkup, at which some cardiologist, noting a severe lessening of heart function, suggested an operation—not, however, without warning that the procedure might induce another attack, a stroke, paralysis, even death.

  "How long you give me without it?" you asked.

  "Two years at most."

  "Wonderful," you told him. "If they're as good as all the ones since that first spell, I can't complain."

  You lived another eight years.

  I will always think of you as one with an appetite for life. Such triteness keeps occurring to me, but I know exactly what I signify when I apply it.

  On the night I recall, that appetite, for the first time ever, was slack. You were the color of a bruise, your hair a shock of white bramble, your eyes flaming with fever from within their dark hollows. I thought you resembled certain grotesque literary creatures I'd considered in an age gone by, back when I was cranking out that obscure screed, my Yale doctoral dissertation, "Gothic to Fantastic."

  Of all the things to come to mind! That old mess of words means less to me than words can say. But why on earth should my thoughts have leapt back to those wretched days at the end of graduate school in the first place? Why picture a younger self struggling with his mammoth chore, his impoverished pen suspended in air? Perhaps it was your appearance and its likeness to a dimly recalled illustration—workshop of Doré, I believe—for some well forgotten tale about a damsel, whose chances of salvation seemed dim as yours in that metal bed. You looked like the monster, though, not the damsel.

  But again, how could wild fictions and pictures matter? Why piece all that ancient rot together? The moment demanded better. I held your hand, rubbed your back, taking turns with my good brother Jake, and wondered, How can I or anyone fit together the notions of Annie and Dead? Nothing like that made sense: you were, after all, as much a force of nature as water or wind. You devoured the world, both natural and human, chewed on it, though gently, and spat it back at us in handsomer guise.

  Once, while still-hunting a trail down to Wabassus Lake, I ran into you, a large doe slung over your shoulders, blood freckling your mackinaw. In that moment, and many another to follow, I believed you were some raw-boned goddess who embodied the abstraction Strength. It rose from you like your frosty breath. Later in the month, when the venison had aged, I took a meal from that deer with you and Bill. The meat was good. My God, it was good.

  Though I sought to hide it, I knew despair in your hospital room. To counter the mood, I tried to batten onto moments like that one in the woods or at your table or others equally joyous. That older, academic past proved a stubborn bully, however; I could not will it away, any more than in those days at Yale I could will myself into an open north, however much I longed to. That was the north—idyllic and hardscrabble at once—of which you were and remain the exemplar, the queen.

  At night, down that dismal New Haven street, dismal I'd go for my jug of gin, seeking to flood away my paper's rank inconsequence, and my own. Then came sodden bouts of sleep, of dream-attacks by the very monsters the paper was meant to make sense of and couldn't.

  After some years, I fell on significantly harder emotional times than the Yale ones, however bad I'd imagined those. I landed, a bit oddly for me, in a series of rather New Age group therapy sessions. The leade
r always began with "guided meditation." He instructed us one day to imagine walking through woods, stepping over a brook, and turning into a cave. He said we'd find someone inside who embodied courage and endurance, and must ask that person to be with us in periods of torment. I needn't tell you whom I saw inside, her face lit by an open fire, as I'd so often seen it before.

  I should have known. You'd been with me all along. I know you've been with me ever since, even after your permanent physical departure, but even more crucially than before my visit to your fire-lit grotto.

  Whatever these weird associations as I watched you shift and shiver, I thought I might live with how you looked; you couldn't have been a monster if you labored at it. What I couldn't accept was your pain, manifestly clawing its way over every inch of your skin, into every pore, along every sinew of your valiant old frame. That misery had to be awful, because you complained of it. I'd never heard you grumble about a thing, so that was proof enough for me: This, to summon further cliché, was it.

  My brother and I drove in near silence back to the cabin by the river, whose autumn roar seemed a warning, as if it might burst its banks. That shoosh, which I'd always so treasured, sounded terrible now. I lay there and prayed you'd be let go. The notion of your suffering a single day more overwhelmed me.

  At some ungodly hour, my antique portable radio, all hum and crackle, brought me, of all things on earth, a New York cooking show, in which a chef explained at length his rules for making salmon steak with saffron and beurre noir. I asked myself why he or his listeners, in fact why a solitary soul should want to make that dish—or any? What, I wondered, is the point of humanity's self-deceiving, gaudy ploys, all designed to distract us from the fact of death?

  Such tricks seemed pathetic. Or maybe gothic, maybe fantastic.