Baptism for the Dead

by Libbie Hawker

  What were they thinking, the men who laid these roads so wide? They must have pictured a great tide of humanity rolling forth to fill the world with Truth, a migration of young men with neat hair and young women with fertile wombs who would spread the city limits out across the sage flats, out to the mountains, the march of an empire of Saints. What they did not envision was this: the trickling way of husbands and wives, two at a time, broken, in separate cars.

  X and I, we drove down those roads as flat and empty as made beds. We merged onto the Thirty-Three with a purr and a burst of speed, the highway which draws out to Sugar City and the mysterious hot dry places where the water sinks into the earth. The Thirty-Three and Sugar City, and on and on, away from this place.

  Ghost cars. Full of the men who built Rexburg, who laid the roads too wide, who thought their labor could fix it all, the broken couples, the silence of God, the nakedness of art. Their wheels blurred, slow-motion – perfect children and moms in their aprons, dreams dissolving into smoke over the valley, hot with the smell of sagebrush, the movement of the scrub land in the wind, color-reversed, scattering,

  …just before the dreamer wakes.

  The Lone and Dreary World

  1.

  Miles from Rexburg, over an inviting soft curve of wheat-planted plateau, the Tetons quietly assumed dominance over the landscape, and we stopped for breakfast in Driggs. The town as a friendly cluster of buildings ranked up around the highway, just after the road turned south and just before it fell down the pass into Jackson Hole. A huge faded fiberglass buffalo perched atop an empty stone diner with castle crenelations. A drive-in movie screen backed with gray weathered planks, maybe the last one in all the world, stood as timeless as an obelisk among the olive-gray scrub, and outside the drivein an enormous replica of a russet potato rested on the flat bed of a cherry-red snub-nosed truck. Cowboy Sized Omelet that X and I couldn’t finish between us. Driggs was all monument and stillness. Even the Tetons obliged the theme; they rose straight up from the valley floor without the common courtesy of foothills, arrogant as statues, a cloak of cloud halted halfway through the act of sliding from the highest peak.

  There was a bottomless pot of coffee in our diner, something practically unheard of in Rexburgian establishments. X made liberal use of it; the waitress kept pouring into his rustic blue tin mug and he kept emptying little top-hats of creamer, stacking them one inside the other with their foil lids peeled askew.

  “Want some coffee?” he said.

  I had never tried it before. Mormons, of course, are not sweet on strong drink and in my days of disguise I had done my best to look like one of them. But now that I was presenting a new sort of plumage to the world I figured there was no harm in a taste. It was awful. X laughed at the face I made and drained the last of his cup in a long draft.

  When the tab was paid we climbed back in the car. It had become stifling inside as the morning grew late. X said it would only take a couple of hours to get to Yellowstone; we might as well explore a little. He like Driggs and wanted to see what else there was to it. We set out to find an inspiring vista.

  Long empty green-scented roads divided fields of crop and pasture in a neat grid, each big square bordered by tall grasses with jagged seed heads moving frantically in the wind of our passage. Flocks of blackbirds burst from these wild verges at intervals to scatter across the road moments before the car could strike them from the air. We came to one juncture of road after another, and X turned the wheel this way or that, no agenda, no destination, wandering past post fences and barbed wire fences and acres with no fencing at all, just very rich, very green ditches wet with broad-leafed weeds, and out in the fields a quiet expectant placidity, the land waiting to be shown what to do. The lazy progress of the countryside on the heels of my dramatic morning made me sleepy. And that was to say nothing of the omelet. I laid my seat back and was about to tell X I thought I might take a nap when he slowed the car and said, “Look at that.”

  A mile or more ahead, the faded yellow block of some lone structure rose from a field, a dim upward slash against the bright grass. As we drew nearer the indistinct shapes resolved into a clearer scene. It was a house, old and long-abandoned but not quite a relic, two stories, painted yellow, most of its window panes still intact. A great cottonwood, large and ancient enough to have shaded the entire structure, had been uprooted by some unimaginable storm and now rested most of the way through the second story, cleaving the roof neatly down the center. What kind of wind could have felled such a tree? The thought of it chilled me. It must have torn through the valley like God’s fist. The scene was all the more awful against the serenity of the field, the warmth of the June day, the heedlessness of the grown-over double-rutted trail winding out into the tall grass beyond the dirt driveway where X put his car into park. We left the engine silently running, left the doors open – a wary bird ready to fly.

  Neither of us was entirely willing to approach, yet still we were both drawn to the broken old homestead. Something about ruination attracts the human mind in a special, terrible way: train wrecks and car wrecks and celebrity divorces in tabloid magazines. There was no one else for miles around, no one else to bear witness, and the weight of awe fell on us alone. X was braver than I. He crept toward the house, two or three slow steps at a time and pause, as if he half-expected he might be turned to a pillar of salt if he came too near. When he made it to the house’s dulled siding, put out a slow hand to touch, and survived, I strode after him, practically running, eager to close the distance between us.

  An empty door frame yawned above pale porch steps. Bird droppings on the stairs. The beginning of a name spray-painted and abandoned, incomplete. The birdsong seemed tense and furtive. The sound of the roof cracking and the children crying in fear still wavered among the wheat. X peered into windows, paced around the perimeter, gazed up at the leafless, still branches. “Maybe I’ll paint it,” he said uncertainly.

  I wanted to object to the idea of staying in this place long enough for him to complete even a sketch, but the ruin kept me silent. X approached one broken-out window, leaned partway in, looked around quickly. He seemed relieved to withdraw again. Then he stopped, glanced back inside, and said in a voice rough with pity, “Oh, no.”

  I was at his side in an instant. My own steadiness surprised me as I, too, leaned over the window frame. Walls intact, paper peeling to reveal the sickly yellow adhesive inside. Old carpet mildewed on the floor. The room reached back into the sun and shadow of the house’s broken interior, met a hallway at a sharp corner where a fractional glint of an unbroken mirror still hung on a dull wall. I did not see what had upset X until I, too, began to turn away. And then, amid a tangle of thin rusted springs and rotting fabric that had once been a sofa, there was a huddled furry shape, dark, dry, and very still.

  I stared for a long time before the particulate impressions (outstretched leg, long clean bare skull, sharp teeth) merged into a single, identifiable image: dead dog on the floor of the house. Small black dog with medium-long hair, face all gone, skull exposed, dull fur shedding away from the place on the haunch where sun streaming through the broken window for months or years had bleached the black to red. From the poor neck a long orange twist of bailing twine ran and disappeared amid the tangle of the old sofa.

  “God,” I whispered, and shivered.

  “Who did this to you, little guy?” X said quietly. The dog said nothing.

  “He was probably sick or hurt,” I said. “Just crawled in here to die.” And the bailing twine around his neck – broke off some dog house somewhere, not used to strangle him, not that. Sick or injured animals often took themselves away to die.

  Such a wave of remorse and fear rose up over me that I had to put out a hand and catch myself against the siding. It was warm from the sun. I closed my eyes, and in the sharp purple light – the reverse echo of the house’s innocent yellow – all I could see was James kneeling, crying in the potato field.

  X raised his ca
mera. It double-beeped on the focus and emitted its little electronic whir of shutter opening and closing. The birdsong in the field ceased for an instant, then resumed to fill the silence like an interrupted hymn.

  2.

  Grand Teton National Park: lush flowering meadows, scenic lake reflections, World’s Most Photographed Barn surrounded by tripods and squinting cameramen, X slipping his lanky body in among them to snap a few shots of his own before turning back to wave at me, grinning. We paused to appreciate the midday glow of a mountain meadow backed by aspens, but the specter of the dead dog was still haunting me, and I’m afraid I took in the scene with only half a heart.

  The rest of our drive that day was, I am sorry to say, a blur. It as undoubtedly a beautiful blur. There is no place half as poetic as the Grand Tetons in summer; if any place on Earth can unmake a nonbeliever, this is it. The starkness of granite, the delicate blush of alpenglow, and eastward, the great unrolling of the low grass valley, restless with pronghorns...and all this I know from later visits. When X and I passed by the range that summer I was in no fit mood to notice the grandeur of my surroundings. All my thoughts were for the spectacular wreck I had just made of my husband’s life and mine. I was afraid my absence might destroy him, yet now I could never stop what I had started. And I wasn’t certain I would stop it, even if I could.

  No explanation for my behavior would satisfy Rexburg’s ever-revolving gossip circles, those merry-go-rounds of good clean rural fun. My mother would eventually call me, and I would have to tell her where I was, and why. Then my sister and brothers would get the news, and before long Katherine and Danae would know all about it. Once those two had the rumor in their teeth it would be all over town, the whispered secret subject of every Relief Society meeting.

  The knowledge that this would happen, its enormous inevitability, gave me a nonstop feeling of damp shivery illness. Because in spite of what I had told James that night in the potato field, Rexburg’s opinion did matter. Save X, everyone I had ever known was in that town. I could not picture a life that didn’t revolve around my community, assuming I could still call it my community at all. Yet what else did I have? An artist I had met only days before, the interior of his car, and the shifting crowds at scenic overlooks and highway rest stops. I had obliterated my place in the world, made myself homeless, for the sake of a man’s body in a succession of hotel-room beds. That was the really amazing part. How unMormon of me, how bad. True, this was not any man – this was the lost love of my childhood come again – this was a sign – but even factoring Adam into the equation, the entire thing was too stupendous to be believed. The knowledge that I was capable of such brashness terrified and excited me by turns. One did not simply return to Rexburg after an adulterous cross-country escapade with a strange, beerdrinking, beard-wearing man. There could be no more business as usual, no picking up where I’d left off with meatloaves and Jell-O salads. In spite of having lived my entire post-Adam life trying to be perfect, a saint among Saints, somehow I had still engineered my own fall from grace, and I had done it all with as little effort as it took to pack my bags.

  That I was capable of this ruinous impulsivity stunned me. I wavered queasily between two extremes of self-image. On the one hand, I felt great pride in my confidence – what a polite Mormon woman might call “inner strength” and what X might call “having balls.” On the other hand, I was tormented by my fear of a bleak, rootless future where, without the simple wholesome sameness of my hometown as lodestar, I would drift among worlds of dust and rust inhabited by dissatisfied shades, where I would be forever without connection, without direction, without happiness.

  The memory of the dog’s pathetic shape among the wreck of the house made my guts tight with anxiety. If X was a sign, then so, surely, was the dog. There was a way life was just supposed to be, forms to be followed, conventions to be observed. And the payoff for perfection was true contentment, a happy life. I had cracked my own roof right in two, and now there would be more sad lost things strangling inside me than I could ever count.

  The irony was not lost one me, that it was only when I had left Rexburg that I’d come to doubt my doubt. As X ecstatically painted, standing among knee-high grasses with a mist of sage flies wavering about him, I stared into the stern faces of the Tetons, all hard angles and cold indigo planes, as near and imposing as a temple, and I wondered whether I was really as alone and unaccountable as I had thought.

  X, you don’t know how different I was with you, how un-Mormon, because you never knew me before. When you watched me toss my temple garments onto your chair did you understand what you were seeing? You were witness to a terrible transformation, an intense golden fire of metamorphosis that burned away something original and deep, something wrapped and protected. Mine was not the gentle emerging of a butterfly from its cocoon. Your body, X, your voice, your hands, your goddamn sketch pad – you were the brush fire that cracks the chrysalis as it hangs mute from its dry stem. You made me remake myself, and the scars of my remaking will always burn.

  There is this ember inside of me, an animal red, an awful crimson. No matter how I try to smother it, it continues to glow.

  Do you know, X? Do you know how I am crippled, how even a God I don’t believe in still has the power to rub the scales from my wings, how even when I am with you I can still feel that miserable brand inside me, smoking, and how sometimes I wish I did believe, just for the simplicity of it, for the ease of knowing that to want you and to have you is wrong, absolutely, unmistakably, simply – even though it feels as right as breathing.

  We made Yellowstone by sunset – do you remember? – and by the time we had checked into our hotel the stars were emerging from a violet, pine-scented sky. In our lodge room I opened the slats of the blinds until the mild light of night-time streamed inside and touched us, touched you as you pulled me against your bare chest and held me there to comfort me. The blinds made on the nearest bed a pattern of starlight and shadow that broke and misaligned and flowed, light into shadow, like the ridges of a thumbprint. Do you remember how the starlight fell across my back when I undressed, across the cool bed where we lay, where our breath caught and merged like smoke, how seconds moved like ages as slow as stone? Do you remember, X, how all that was real was rhythm and stars and skin?

  3.

  I had a terrible dream. A tree fell through the roof of our lodge, trapped us inside. I picked up the hotel phone to call for help, but a tinny recorded voice recited scripture at me, endlessly, in polite monotone, and offered me a selection of buttons to push for help. I mashed the keypad with a paw-like hand but nothing happened. The voice went on and on where it had left off, and finally, sensing that no help would ever come, X with a horrible feral grin put a length of bailing twine around my neck and tightened it, and I woke, gasping and trembling, while X muttered beside me in his sleep, his mouth slack and peaceful.

  I got up from our hotel bed and turned on the tap – its pipes groaned and grated for an instant but X did not stir. I drank flat, warm water from my cupped hands, and told myself, I’ve lost all the meaning in dreams. The significant has become the insignificant, mere coincidence or biology. What had been a signpost or a clue from on high was now the sorting and parsing of my own overstressed mind, its colorful attempt to categorize the various horrors of life, to set order to a burst of awful image and emotion so that it – I – could understand. What else could a dream be? What else made sense? Nothing. I went through this litany several times until I was partially reassured, until the inborn

  Mormon awe and terror at having witnessed another sign faded a little, and I could yawn again.

  I crept back into bed and pressed myself against X’s side. His breathing was easy and soft, automatic. Life goes on without direction, without any cosmic neon arrow pointing the way. As I lay there feeling X’s warmth and weight I considered whether it was better this way, with everything ultimately meaning nothing. At least with God in the picture nightmares could be turned into
warnings. Wasn’t the illusion of control preferable to the fact of...of whatever was really fact?

  I could not get back to sleep. Long before X woke, I slipped outside and wandered around the lodge’s parking lot among dirt-faded cars bearing bug-crusted bumpers and foreign license plates. Between the last of the night’s stars and the oncoming sunrise, pale pink somewhere in the mountainous east, there was sufficient light to see where I was going.

  The sharpness of my anxiety made everything seem more significant and agonizing than it really was, even if there was no watching God to lend a special meaning to that agony. As I paced between Nebraskan sedans and New Mexican vans the whole arrangement of space and time and parking lot and dawn light underscored the frail loveliness of life. I felt the lodge and all its travelers tucked away inside, X with his watercolors and his wide boyish grin, far-off James in his sweater smelling of home, all shivering at once along the surface of my tense tired body, a unison note, the whole beautiful burden reverberating like a struck tuning fork inside my veins. How pretty we all were, everything was – and how spectacularly pointless, too, as here we lay, snuggled together in the huge hollow eye of a volcano, which could blink at any second and turn the whole works into a puff of hot steam.

  I was in that kind of mood. On reflection it was probably not the best mood for phone calls. But all the same, I haunted the parking lot with my cell phone in hand, searching for any small patch of ground that would grant me a bar or two of signal. At last I got it, and dialed James’s number. He answered just before his voice mail did. He did not sound sleepy, despite the early hour. I had not wakened him. I guessed he hadn’t slept the night before. All well and good; neither had I. Not much.