It certainly sounded like what I’d read about Miss Graham’s voice. I suggested she tell the boy in person and pointed to Rafe, standing alone near Mrs. Chief and the punch bowl. He hadn’t smiled yet but he was relaxing.
She could hardly believe that an actual boy, in his wrinkled whites, had been the fire bringer.
The social had nearly ended when Chief caught my eye— I was also alone at the moment. He stepped over and congratulated me on “recent honors.” Then he went straight to the point. “Bridge, I trust you recall the prayer circle?”
Short of telescopic surveillance I couldn’t imagine how Chief knew who’d remembered and who hadn’t. But you never questioned his sources; they tended to be infallible. I said “Yes sir, I plan to climb up towards sunset tomorrow.”
I’ve mentioned my guess that Chief was more than a little deaf. There was often an unnerving wait between telling him something and seeing his face respond. Whatever the impediment, his unblinking eyes never wavered off yours. This was the longest such wait though, and it ended without his usual quick blip of a smile. He just said two unexpected things. First he nodded and said “You of all people,” whatever that meant. And then he said “Alone, you understand. It only works alone.”
Honest to God, at first I thought he meant that I shouldn’t go up with Kevin. Chief had frequently spoken of his pleasure in our friendship. I had no reason to think he knew of my agreeing to go with Rafe, but the strange firm remark gave the final tap to my own decision. I assured Chief that I understood. And once he walked away, I looked for Rafe.
To my surprise he was standing on the porch of the lodge, in bright lamplight, in a group of his cabin mates. Plainly at ease, here no more than half an hour after the council, he behaved as nearly like a normal boy as I’d ever seen. It was almost as weird a discovery as seeing him dance that first night or finding him bit by a snake, alone.
Before he saw me, a long deep laugh tore up from his belly. He cried out “Never!” Then he grabbed a short boy and knuckled his skull till the boy laughed too and begged for mercy. Then Rafe looked towards me.
I didn’t speak but I beckoned to him.
At first I thought he might not have seen me. He gave a deep bow to the boy he’d knuckled, but then he pulled himself loose and came over.
Even as he walked, another boy said “I thought you were awful.”
So I told him right off how much I admired the new dance. Then I said that his whole new generous-minded outlook made it easier for me to repeat what Chief had just told me—It only works alone. I’d have to go back to my original plan and climb to the circle tomorrow alone.
Rafe’s wait was even longer than Chief’s.
I almost thought he was going to turn and leave in silence, and I opened my mouth to start apologizing.
But finally he said “Suit yourself, O Wise One.” He didn’t look angry or sound sarcastic. He gave a quick wave and said “Abyssinia,” which was that year’s slang for “I’ll be seeing you.” Then he went back to his friends.
When they saw him coming, three of them fell hard to their knees on the concrete porch and salaamed his approach. Everybody else laughed, including Rafe.
It seems worth saying again that, even towards the end of the summer, I was not all that much concerned with Rafe Noren. His eventual end was what made him grow so large in my mind. In fact, if I tried to estimate how much time I spent alone with Rafe, I’m sure it wouldn’t come to much over an hour, except for the time together in Asheville. I’ve stressed my many other concerns, local and away. So that last night I could take Rafe’s flip response at face value.
My boys had begun to collect around me for the walk uphill. They were still young enough to question the dark.
So I called to Rafe a final time, “Thanks again, Kinyan.”
He didn’t look around.
And it struck me that our tribal names might be secret; no one had said. Then the thought of my seven shaggy boys hauled me off. Despite our rural setting they’d had most modern conveniences these past five weeks. About the only deprivation was haircuts, and they gloried in their shag. Once in the cabin—and once they’d looked under every bunk for skunks, coons or possums, not to mention snakes—we disregarded taps. I told them to get undressed as soon as possible. Then I doused our lantern. And we all lay back, really blind to each other, and talked our way through the five weeks together. Most of the memories to be sure were of mass jokes, individual humiliations or titanic farts.
But in a lull the youngest boy asked about the Ghost Dance —were any of those people really ghosts?
The other six decided that was hilarious and woke us all back up with laughter.
To bring us down fast, I began one of their favorite lights-out activities; I started a ghost story. This was one I hadn’t told them yet, a favorite of my own childhood, from an uncle. It was called “The Old Woman All Skin and Bones.” And from the first line, I had them captive—“There was an old woman all skin and bones, woooo.” The moment I finished, the older boys would be unconscious, exhausted from the tension. And the younger ones, scared, would be eager for oblivion.
Once I detected a few slow breathers, I brought the story to a quick end and suggested a final round of Sentence Prayers. They were a popular devotional technique of the time, well before the Supreme Court made us reigning WASPs conscious of the anomaly of Christian prayer in an officially non-Christian country.
All my boys were apparently churchgoers. We’d tried this before so I knew what to expect. More than half of them would respond with unthinking thank-yous for sun, sky, birds and grass. A few more would turn up an unexpectedly nice detail, such as “Thank you for us having dessert every night.”
The last boy—my oldest and favorite, George Harrell—said “Thank you for Bridge being an artist and showing us where to look.” He’d been in the art class and was one of the few who’d only in the last two weeks begun breaking out of a cramped view.
So lying there I knew for the first time the old teacher’s frustration. Just as you cut a little path in their wilderness, you look up—they’re gone and you haven’t even told them the most important thing. Which assumes of course that you know it.
I’m glad to recall that when they got around to me for the windup prayer, I said “Thank you for these young men and all their gifts.” Men was stretching it, even with George.
But everybody said “Amen” and then Tim Tucker said “What did I give you?”
“Trench mouth,” I said.
And if I’d been all three of the Stooges, with buckets of whitewash, we couldn’t have ended the night with more laughter. I let them giggle themselves to sleep, and they did so fairly rapidly.
That left me alone, above them in my upper. Lord, they’d trusted me. And wasn’t that the absolute specific remedy to haul me back from the grotesque space I’d trudged through since winter? Calm genial trust, not howling need. I might not have made any money, but I’d got that much, and it felt a lot better than cold cash. Then and there again, I sent up thanks. I could never thank the boys; they’d look bored and run. I’d have to hoard it all for my work and pour it out there. Or for my own sons.
For another strange fact of my youth was the early conviction that I’d have two sons. A certainty that I’d participate in their making, I mean. I’d begun to suspect it in my early teens and would sometimes lie at night and think about their lives in detail, their names and hobbies. But I’d kept it to myself till, later that summer, for some quick reason I told my mother; and she hushed my mouth. She was from the old truly wise stock, who’d have never let you name them Wise One. They knew better than to foretell happiness or even mild success. Nothing riles the considerable amount of practical joker in God faster than that. Tell him you’re happy, his ears go up and he thinks “You were” A thing I’d never have let myself think, even that young, was what good men my sons would prove to be.
By two o’clock the next afternoon, all my campers were gone. And ther
e were only two boys left in camp. One was in the infirmary with an infected foot. He’d leave on Tuesday when his parents returned from France. The other boy of course was Rafe. Kevin told me that Mr. Noren had made arrangements for Rafe to stay with the Chiefs through Sunday night. Then he’d fly his private plane into Asheville and drive out to get him.
I would be gone by then. I’d arranged a ride east with my fellow brave, Roger. But knowing that Rafe would be around longer than I, I made no special effort to see him during the busyness of arriving parents and departing boys. Maybe I was hoping by then he’d forgot it, but really I assumed he understood that the painting was his and that he’d arrange to get it from me. The surface was still damp but could travel, with care. I’d even stopped looking at it a whole day ago. Brute cutoff is about the only way I can agree to part from a favorite picture. I seldom even keep photographs of them.
Kevin and I and two other counselors were planning to drive into Asheville that evening for dinner and a movie. Meanwhile I had four hours. Still wearing my whites I stretched on the bunk for a nap, mainly a pause between the weight of duty through ten weeks of minor boys and this sudden heady freedom.
The chance of sleeping through an entire afternoon hour in Cabin 16 would have been inconceivable till that moment— so much so that, when I bolted up awake at three, I leapt to the floor in cold terror. What or whom had I neglected? Rafe did fly through my mind—Kinyan and his painting. But again I told myself there was no urgency. My climb to the prayer circle was my only remaining plan. A final Sunday service up in the Pasture would be the time of farewells.
But the prayer circle now. Again like a child of my time, I felt that a sacred rite called for good clothes. And there I stood in my whites. They were appropriate maybe but foolish for a climb. So I compromised by swapping the duck trousers for starched and pressed dungarees and the white buck shoes for climbing boots. Then I found the carved stick far back in my locker. And I took the long way, past the ring and over behind the lake, to avoid all meetings.
I shouldn’t have worried. Camp was as peaceful as an old battlefield. Even the crickets were under a spell. Apparently no one saw me. If so, they didn’t speak. And I felt a small elation as I entered the evergreen thicket at the foot of the mountain. Even there I began to think I was foolish to wait till the last; surely I’d pass somebody coming down. Or somebody, maybe more than one, would be up there. Still the climb was easier than I’d expected. It was also silent, which boded well—no sounds of anybody else nearby, just the crickets slowing down as the air cooled slightly. There was only a little hand-overhand scrabbling in the last hundred yards. So I was winded when I got there. But I was also glad in the knowledge that the summer had given me strength I never had before. In June I probably couldn’t have made it.
My first thought on getting there was Chief was right. It was worth it, worth a lot more than the climb seemed at first to cost me. There was no sign of anybody else, and the silence was even deeper up here. The circle itself was on the mountain side of an oddly flat natural shelf, maybe twenty feet broad. The far side was open, with no fence or railing. And that side gave the view, past a sheer drop, maybe two hundred feet straight down. I sat on the edge there and gazed out a long while. It was five minutes maybe before I realized that, even here on the edge of a fall, I was calm in mind and heart.
Serenity was the last skill I’d planned to acquire at a boys’ camp. But here I was, alone again and glad to be. The view ran at a right angle to the one I’d painted, a long sweep right up the wild valley on the edge of which we’d perched so delicately all summer. If I’d climbed here earlier, I might have worried for the rest of the time at the prospect of an earthquake. The merest shrug by the ground would slough Juniper off its pretty moorings and send it and all its bodies tumbling five hundred feet deeper down. Not that earthquakes were likely. The Smokies are geologically among the oldest and most stable features of the American landscape. They’re about as likely to shudder as a shark is to smile.
The broad tops of trees, especially the hemlocks, pretty well blocked a view of Juniper itself. There were scattered signs of former life immediately below. The Tsali boys had left too, but I could see a few of their sheds, and I wondered how many of those suffocated rattlers would ever wind up as belts or hatbands. Had they suffocated just to spend eternity in somebody’s drawer? Otherwise it was me and a world I’d never made.
And in a quarter hour I felt more peaceful than at any time since the long minute in which I watched my dead father before an intern barged in and found us. It was the kind of space and silence in which most people—and I in earlier times— would feel compelled to speak, calling out a name or some basic request to the singing air. Giving the Smokies a rave review.
That day though I was supremely ready to add my focused silence to the circle behind me. I walked back there and stood till I made out its actual perimeter on the ground. It was a good ten feet across. Where it touched the cliff side, there was a low hill of dirt with a few wild bushes. And it was there that the odd thicket of prayer sticks stood. There were maybe a hundred, most of them simple sticks—uncarved and unadorned.
When a man had troubled to plant his stick deep, it was still upright. Still dumbly reciting the prayers of young men long since grown, maybe some of them dead in Europe or Asia. A few sticks had been beat down by rain. It didn’t seem advisable to prop them up. That would alter fate. A slow look also told me that there was not a single human name or other sign of pride, no defacements, no Kilroys. Chief had stated no rule to that effect and I was surprised. I was also glad that my own instinct had produced a snake and a rescued boy but no pointer to Bridge Boatner and his aims.
So I drove mine well down into the ground and packed the earth in hard around it. Then I went to the center of the circle and sat, facing all the sticks. With open eyes I thought my way back through these weeks. And at that moment there, the weeks and their contents seemed to become what I hadn’t let myself realize till now, an unbroken blessing. The one word healing kept coming to mind. I remember, after maybe ten minutes, saying to myself a thing that seemed directly inspired, not just a wish—This power will follow you for long years to come. I wasn’t about to look the power straight in the eye and give it a name. But I knew I’d felt it always. And as I said, I knew then and there it wouldn’t leave me. So far, I was right.
The first night of the summer, I’d promised myself to come up here and dedicate my mind and body to finishing my father’s cutoff life. Two and a half months later, I was here but not for that purpose. Father was himself and sadly he was gone. I was his unfinished son, alive and working. So here at the end, I made a vow to spend my whole life, if fate agreed, in using the one real block of capital I knew I’d been given. And that of course was my old need to watch those parts of the world that caught me, then to copy them out for others less patient or with eyes less lucky.
What happened that night, hard as it was, at no time entirely canceled my vow. In the short run the strangest fact for me was the fact of survival. At a time when the sum total of my actions—my hollow encouragement of Rafe, the slow parade of feebly thought-out spiritual hints that I trailed past him— might have called for me to quit the Earth too, I balked. I loved myself too much. I stayed and lasted. Above all else I worked. Men more gifted than I have resigned from life for lesser mistakes, van Gogh for one and a sad lot of poets.
But in under a week from my hour in the circle, I was working again in my mother’s house. And I worked not only because of my errors but with them, as instruments. It may be only a simple fact to claim, here now more than thirty years later, that Rafe Noren’s life is present deep under the lines I’ve drawn and especially the shadows. And more, I can sanely claim that every good and usable thing I learned in that valley and on its heights is in me now, compacted, altered and shaped by time.
Kevin and I and our two friends drove back into camp at one in the morning. We’d been to Asheville, eaten real steaks and s
een “Seven Brides for Seven Brothers,” an appropriately joyous rural stomp. Then we’d eaten an early pancake breakfast. Chief’s hold on us was still strong enough to rule out beer. The rest of our lives would be time for that. So we turned off the highway and in through the camp gate, tired but happy with overstuffed bellies and empty minds. As we crested the last rise and saw the lodge, there were two men standing in the road, with their backs turned. We were surprised and needed a moment to see it was Chief and Sam. My own only thought was “Thank God we’re sober.”
They came straight towards us.
Roger stopped and leaned out the driver’s window and said pleasantly “Nighthawks, I see.”
I knew he meant the two men; Chief prided himself on bed by nine. But something in Chief’s new fluid movements made me foresee trouble. Since late afternoon something had smoothed Chief out. He was suddenly almost a graceful mover. In another few seconds I saw it was his speed. Something had struck him. He was moving at half speed.
He set both hands on Roger’s window ledge, bent to see us all and said “We’ve had a tragedy, boys.”
He’d never called us boys before. I knew at once that the word itself was some kind of gauge of the pressure he felt. But even my anxious mind thought only “Mrs. Chief or Mike,” somebody old.
After that Chief lost his voice for a while. I’ve mentioned a new slowness. His skin had also aged ten years since afternoon. His head withdrew and he took a step back.
Roger said “May we help you, sir?”
Sam leaned in then and said “Young Ray Noren’s had a very grave stroke.”
Stroke? Strokes killed old men, like Franklin Roosevelt nine years ago or my own grandfather. Or it ruined their speech or halved their bodies. At that we all got out to hear the news. I only remember telling myself there was some mistake. It was somebody else. Rafe had earned more mercy from the world.
The Tongues of Angels Page 16