Kip was gone, he’d never be the same, whether he came back from combat or not. Gone with him, or so it seemed to me at the time, was Jessica, since my affection for her grew almost at once in his absence, and pathetic as my moral fiber has sometimes been, I could not see myself pursuing the object of this affection. Jessica would be so easy for me to love. If Kip had stood in my way, if he had recognized how I felt and demanded that I stop, then I might have been free to pursue her. But if he’d recognized it, he had managed to conceal his response brilliantly. Nothing, he gave me nothing in that regard. Unchallenged, there was no way for me to contend.
That night when I kissed Jessica goodnight on her cheek, and smelled her hair—a smell of chestnut, and butter, maybe of sage, certainly of warm earth—and sensed more than ever the danger of myself with her, I came as close as I ever would to wishing someone dead. Why was she so tangled up with him, what did she, as a woman, see? I knew him as a brother and a man, and knowing him thus had somehow come to see him as someone a woman might do well to avoid. Whether it was true or not, I doubt there was much merit to whatever reasoning stood behind such an opinion. And yet, I knew that to wish him dead was to all but wish myself the same. He’d said something on the telephone from San Antonio, Texas, that made me understand his thinking was not unlike my own.
Aviation cadet Calder on the phone to antiwar activist Brice, —You know, sometimes I think worse things could happen to you than getting your silly head bashed by some cop’s billyclub out there during one of your demonstrations.
—That’s charming, I said.
—Might knock a little sense into you.
—Right. And when’ll you see the light? When they shoot some antiaircraft fire up at you?
—Fuck off, Brice. We can’t talk about this subject anymore.
—Did we ever?
—Hey, I listened to all your palaver for years.
—A lot of good it did.
—About as much good as what I had to say to you about the topic.
—This is a dead end, Kip.
So it was. Thenceforward when we did speak we spoke of anything but the war and politics. We talked about the Hill, we talked about my mother sometimes, or Jessica in a superficial sort of way. And now he had finished training, and was gone to find his fate on the other side of the world.
After moving out I didn’t call Jessica for two weeks, and when I did it was to tell her that I had to be out of touch with her for a while. She knew why without my having to explain. Her response to this was to be ashamed of me, and she didn’t hold back.
—Just when you should stand by me and Kip, what do you do? It makes me so mad, Brice. What gives you the right to think you’re in love with me?
—I can’t tell myself who to love and who not to.
—Why not?
—It just doesn’t work that way. You know that. Why are you making me say such stupid things?
—I’m not making you say or do anything. You were the one who moved out. You’re the one who’s abandoning me—
—Most of my things are still there in your place.
—See. You even call it my place. And all because you think you love me. But you don’t love me.
—How do you know?
—You just think you love me because if Kip loves me then you’ve got to love me too. Isn’t that the truth? Well, isn’t it?
I searched, against her tide of words, for an answer. But Jessica’d hung up. First I was dumbstruck, afterwards what could be described as a slow panic—sharper than dread, duller than fright—came upon me. It was inevitable, I thought. It had been coming for a long time, this argument, but it hadn’t gone at all the way I might have hoped it would. Though I’d never had Jessica, I didn’t want to lose her.
The silence stretched into two months, in many ways the most disturbed, disturbing months I’d ever know. Filled with precious paradox, they slipped by slowly, switching back and forth from violence to catatonia. From melancholy to odd euphoria. From sensitive if witless clarity to the numb stupidity of the proverbial dumb ox. What was consistent was that I was very alone. Even in the midst of the crowds that would come to define that period of history, which over the years that followed would swell from hundreds to tens of thousands, I was isolated.
My arrest record as an antiwar protester meantime became longer and longer, memorably long in fact. This business of radicalism was incremental. One day, back when still an undergraduate, you elect to help write a position paper instead of finishing an essay on Macbeth. You tell yourself that Shakespeare would approve, and so would Macbeth. Nights and terms and years pass, then suddenly you are sleepless wondering whether to burn your draft card, wondering what it would mean to give up your whole life here and leave the country rather than participate as a peon, a hod-carrier of its policies. When I chose to throw a rock or a sidewalk brick, when I took the next step and forced myself down into the thick of a riot and actually drove my fist into the gut of a policeman who was just as surprised as I about it but who didn’t move fast enough to catch me when I dove back into the crowd and got myself lost in its storming sanctuary, when I tossed buckets of blood—often just red housepaint deepened with a bit of black to give it the right blush, but sometimes the real thing (I never found out where or how my friends came into possession of this blood, putrid and serous, whose weight and odor one does not forget)—on the front doors of government buildings, when I made these decisions they were like steps. One and then another. Nor did it occur to me to meditate too deeply on the fact that some of these were activities that no self-possessed pacifist should engage in. A step, then two, three.
Restrained pacifism, however, was not a trait I could claim for myself during that time of my life. I found it impossible to accept that everyone was so naive about the direction our government was taking us in Indochina, and had been taking us all along. I did my best to ignore Kip and the steps he had chosen to take.
Who said walking is a series of recovered falls? Jessica haunted me now. With her or not, little failed to remind me of her during the course of a day. I was becoming the very exemplar of the fool in love. There were moments when I found myself deviating toward hating her. Love her, hate her, love her—recovered falls.
It was like trying to waltz a mountain, though. She redefined the term stubborn. She gave me no reason to hope, and the integrity that fueled her principles only made my position worse. There were so many times I considered calling, or going by, but was blocked by that mountainous candor of hers. I wanted to apologize, I wanted to try to move back in to 115th Street and see if we couldn’t live together as friends, as we had for so long. With every week that passed my own fears became foggy and it became less clear what I’d done to deserve her enmity. What was the crime in falling in love with Jessica? Was it possible Kip left without knowing?—no, it was not possible. So what, so sue me, I thought. And it wasn’t as if I proposed to do anything about it. Why couldn’t she perceive my affection as a compliment instead of an affront? Through dubious logic I was able to convince myself that love, in certain controlled situations, could remain harmless to both lover and beloved. There’s inexperience for you. Love and logic, as is well known, have nothing to do with one another. But surely Jessica’d gone too far, and I wanted to tell her so. There was no viable or valiant purpose in this separation. Why couldn’t I be allowed my little infatuation, so long as I never acted upon it or asked her to reciprocate? My need for some time to digest what was going on in my life: I was unable to view this as an abandonment.
Silence is not golden, never was golden, never will be golden. You put someone in exile, you turn them into a cartoon, you dismiss all objective referents, you relinquish your right to review realities that are there, alive and available to you, at the end of your upturned nose, at the tip of your admonishingly wagging or accusatorily pointing finger. While we have words to speak with, let us talk. Emersonian as it may sound, this is what I now came to conclude, after hours of circular
pacing in my downtown room. I made up my mind to risk going over to visit her, but sat for some days, inert. I stood up, I sat down. And, ultimately, it wasn’t I who broke the silence.
She was so hysterical I didn’t at first understand what she was trying to say. There was something about a telegram, I got that much, and my heart sank. Telegrams are death when your country is at war. But there was more.
She said, —I’m pregnant. Brice, I can’t be pregnant.
When I arrived, she was a study in nervous calm. Jessica the mutable. Kip was not dead, as it happened. Nor was it a telegram she’d received, but a letter, the first from Kip since he’d arrived in Vietnam. She put it in my hand without a word, and I read a few lines, no more. Wild place, sick puppies fighting over ghost bones, hate it but can’t imagine being anywhere else, I may be assigned north into the fray, or deep south, one is doom the other monotony I don’t know which to prefer, no one’s coming out of here with anything of use—was how the letter began, or with words to this effect. A disjointed, wise, mad Kip. One who seemed even farther away than on the other side of the world.
I folded the letter, careful to crease it only where it had been folded before, handed it back to Jessica, and when she moved forward to take it from me she kept coming until I found her in my embrace. Some feeble phrase like, —It’ll be all right, was all I could manage, but what I felt was unambiguous and more immediate than a slap. Although it was too early in her pregnancy for such things to have developed, I could have sworn I felt her belly was expansive, firm and warm, with the fetus inside. My cheek molded, awkward but exploratory, into the curve of Jessica’s head.
—I’m moving back in, I said.
And once more our lives began in the midst of war. Except rather than it being someone else’s war, this time it was our own.
Part II
The Forever Returning
New York and Long Tieng
to Chimayó,
1968–1993
A WILLOW TREE grows down by the river that runs between the field and the small park—an open-air chapel, really—behind the church in Chimayó. Willows grow fast, especially when near water, and I would imagine that this one was nothing more than a sapling back when Kip and I first came here half a lifetime ago.
Now, this tree is aberrant in that it has two trunks. At the base of the bole, where the willow emerges from the powdery pale clay of the riverbank, the tree is an individual. A crease in the bark begins just above the ground and the trunk divides into two distinct extensions, one growing thick and straight, the other ascending out away from its counterpart, then flexing back toward it about halfway up. Whenever I have walked in the woods, whether back east or around the Hill, these crouchjobs, as foresters call them, have always been more abundant than one might expect. Nature embracing freakdom, I guess. The aberrants’ limbs and branches tend to plait one another in such a way that a double-trunked tree often becomes a threat to itself, with boughs strangling each other, leaves thick and casting too much shadow, so that it becomes choked and diseased.
This willow doesn’t seem to be like that. Its bright yellow pendulous boughs have begun to bud, and its contours give evidence of a healthy plant. It has matured, though, in a unique way. Its angled trunk twists back to meet the straight one and I can see even from where I am standing that the two have actually merged. Fused just above the leaf line, they are, so that if you look at the tree straight on, what you see is a single willow crowned with a head of sprouting greenery over two stems that form an elongated triangle. The trunk looks like a pair of legs, back leg upright, front bent at the knee. You squint, and for all the world it looks as if the willow is about to walk.
Kip is sitting under this tree.
He is different and the same. He sees me and stands. There are pilgrims all around us, the second Station of the Cross of the morning having just concluded. Were I trysting with an old lover whom I hadn’t seen for a long time, I would not feel more awkward or unnerved. As I work my way toward him through the congregation of Good Friday worshippers, who mill about under the twelve magisterial cottonwoods (one for each of the stations) around the cement pulpit there, and the rustic benches that fan away from it, I wonder what does one say in circumstances such as these—circumstances I as yet don’t fully fathom—what does one do? Do I smile? Do I say, Kip, it’s good to see you again? Do I wait for him to define the character of the meeting, or what?
Different and the same—eyes as dark as ever, capacious space between them, magnetic as ever. He is wearing an old leather jacket, black jeans, midnight blue sweatshirt. He has a cap on, which he removes. He is thin.
“Thank you for coming, Brice,” as he shakes my hand.
“It’s good to see you,” I say.
“I didn’t know whether you would or not.”
“You knew I’d come,” and his hand, firm and powerful, lets go of mine. To him there is an ineffable compressed seriousness. His cheekbones are more prominent than before, his forehead wrinkled with lines fine as thread, and thread-fine wrinkles fan at the sides of his eyes. He is brown, not quite as deep as mahogany. He has been in the sun. In the whites of his eyes, jaundiced to saffron, ocher like antique ivory, I recognize something off. This is my first impression.
He smiles his curious lopsided smile and in it I see immediately my old childhood friend. “Do you believe how many people make the pilgrimage now?” he says. “Not like back in the old days when just a few eccentrics and a handful of true believers would come out. It’s an occasion now. But you know what, I’ve been watching them and I swear most of these people are believers still. Even now, after everything that’s gone on. I envy them.”
“You look well,” I say.
Kip narrows his eyes at me and it is as if I am being looked through. Another of his traits I’d forgotten, a singular mannerism to forget, since it was one he displayed often when we were growing up together. It wasn’t the evil eye but was unconscious, I always felt, on his part. Something he did when a person made a statement he wanted to see better.
“A quarter century, can you believe how long it’s been?”
Despite everything I might have demanded of myself, despite my knowledge that to keep one’s own counsel is wisest, not to reveal but to read the revelations others make, I seem unable to suppress the complaint that’s inherent in my question. I can hear my voice as the words come forth, can even regret the indictment that’s there, subtler than I think perhaps, but apparent enough, and I can only be dismayed with myself. Already scolding him, Brice, already forcing a conversation at cross-purposes; it is as if some part of me has dreamed of this moment when I could finally let him know the extent of my hurt.
He says, “Did you notice this tree? It’s my favorite down here.”
I grasp he has revealed something to me.
“Not for that long, but the past year or so. I walk down here, listen to the water when it’s running. They regulate the flow. I never knew how much until I started coming every day. Even in the wintertime they’ll slow it down to a trickle and then suddenly open up the floodgates. It’s really more an irrigation ditch than a river.”
“You’ve been living in Chimayó?”
“I never much missed this place until I got sick. Then, when I knew what was wrong I thought, Oh well, where do I go from here? And then I remembered the santuario, and it seemed like the right place to come to.”
“What’s wrong, Kip?”
“First things first. Should we sit?”
“All right,” and so we sit and what we begin are several hours of tales from his last decades and from mine, and when I ask him what is wrong with him, and what the meaning of his letter is, he puts it off, rather casually, as just another part of the story, a natural consequence of what he decided to do with his life after the war. “I’m telling you,” he would say, a little exasperated at my wanting to hear the end before I have been told the middle. His stories wander backwards and forwards, just as he did. They begin wit
h a question he asks me, however, about whether I ever heard of a form of meditation practiced by the Buddhists where you set off from the bottom of a hill, a rounded hill chosen just for the purpose of this meditation, one like Cerro Gordo over in Santa Fe for instance, and walk in absolute silence to the top? I say I don’t know about it, and he says that the meditator walks along a path that ascends along a spiral around the hill. Every time you reach the place you began you are a little higher up, and from dawn you walk along all morning until finally you reach the summit, from which you can contemplate all the surrounding fields. This would be midday, if you’ve timed your climb just right. And then you turn and follow in your own footsteps, around and around again, all the way back down the hill until you reach the bottom that evening.
He tells me he used to do this as recently as last year. The first time he did the walking meditation was at Nam Yao.
“Where is that?” I ask.
It was nothing I might have guessed. Nam Yao was a refugee camp along the Mekong River, in Thailand, just across the border from Laos. He was young still, then. This was after the war was over and the Americans had given up on Vietnam and abandoned their allies in Laos. The Pathet Lao swept into the cities and those who had fought on our side fled the country. Thousands of them together in wretched shanties along the banks of the big brown slow river, families broken, orphans walking like little blind men, their mouths open, their eyes having seen more wickedness in the few years they had been alive than most people witness in a lifetime. In Nam Yao the tops of hills were deforested, and the few trees left standing were as skeletal as the refugees who stood in their gaunt shade. Seven lengths of barbed-wire fencing prevented them from straying deeper into Thailand. There was no going forward for them, and no going back.
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