The Book of Jonas

by Stephen Dau

  The photograph over the mantel. The folded flag on the bookshelf. She is used to them, aware she has gathered these things around her, made the decision to leave them as they were, in view, and as a result they are only occasionally difficult to look at, painful only when she thinks about them too deeply.

  But there are the other objects: the boxes of toys and sports equipment hidden away in the basement, out of sight, the school papers and certificates and finger paintings in the attic. And now, to these objects, she adds a list of people. If that which is left in open sight has grown less painful over time, she cannot even think about that which is hidden away.

  And then Rose is aware that she has slumped to the floor, that she sits alone in the foyer, pressing her back against the front door.

  She spends a few moments trying to gather herself together, rubs her eyes with her hands, is finally able to take a breath, and stands up. She has much to do, she thinks. She grabs a short-handled spade from a bucket next to the sliding glass door that leads onto the back porch and steps into the waning rays of the thin autumn day.

  The Henderson property is surrounded by a low stone wall, which Roy Henderson built before their divorce. The wall demarcates a smaller plot around the house, and a larger plot beyond, the back forty, as they always called it, although it is nowhere near so large as forty acres. The back forty is now the domain of overgrown grass, rabbits, and deer. Before he left, Christopher would occasionally mow a section of it, and, with help from the two younger boys, Matthew and Sam, pour down white lime from a large paper bag to mark out a football field or soccer pitch. Then they would stay outside, their footfalls like tiny thunderclaps, until it was so dark they could no longer see.

  Rose divides her days by tasks. She writes letters in the morning, attends meetings in the afternoon, or makes phone calls, the important work of organizing the support group occupying more and more of her time. The important work. They always tell her, as if she needs to be told, how important it is. And yet she can’t do it all the time, nor all by herself. She has some help, the increasingly complex work now spread among several volunteers. She hears from more and more people who want to get involved, and the group is growing, a fact she finds nearly as tragic as the fact that it exists in the first place.

  It wasn’t that the two other boys were unaffected, thinks Rose. Not at all. But they were young. And then time passed so quickly, as first Matthew went off to take a construction job outside the state, and then Sam started at college, the first of her boys to do so.

  Someone had once told her, insensitively rather than maliciously, that at least she had her other children, implying that when you have several, the loss of one is easier to bear. But Rose knew this for the lie it was. Her other boys were doing well, and she was proud of them, loved them, but everything seemed somehow fainter after Christopher disappeared, and Rose often felt as though she had one foot in the here and now and the other foot somewhere else. Maybe another person would react better, she thinks, and then, with effort, pushes that thought, all the thoughts, away.

  Between letters and phone calls and meetings, she takes out her frustration on the weeds in the backyard. She thinks about putting together something for dinner, something light, not really feeling hungry but knowing she has to keep up her strength. The sun is rapidly dropping toward the horizon, its descent chilling the air. Rose thinks about dinner, and something about the light or the crisp fall air reminds her of another dinner, at the end of another fall day not too many years ago.

  They ate it around the table in the kitchen. Tacos, she thinks, piled with lettuce and tomatoes in an effort to get her family to eat at least something of the vegetable family. Roughage, she used to call it, before one night when Christopher announced he didn’t like the word “roughage” because it sounded like you were going to be attacked by your salad.

  After dinner there was still a little light outside, and Christopher wanted to show them something he had learned in soccer practice that afternoon. They filed out through the sliding glass door and into the backyard. It took him a few tries. He got a soccer ball and put it on the ground, placing one foot in front of it and the other behind, and with a scissor motion kicked the ball high into the air, then hit it squarely with his forehead, before kicking it again with his other foot, and they all watched it arc neatly through the autumn air, past everyone, over their heads, and smack into the graceful stone wall. He looked over at his parents and smiled. “Isn’t that cool?” he said.

  “Yes,” said Rose, “that’s fantastic.”

  And for just a moment, she remembers, it was.

  6

  When we arrived, we told them we were there to help them, but they were ambivalent. It was almost like they were bored. But then we started passing out cash, and they registered the possibilities.

  One day we backed the APV up beside the central market. Skeets accidentally pressed the gas instead of the brake, and we hit a merchant’s stall. It damaged the wooden booth and the awning. So Jacobs goes over and offers him something to pay for the damages. He accepts it, looks grateful. We could have just driven away. But then the guy in the stall next to him pipes up and says that we hit his stall, too. Sure enough, his awning is knocked over, but Gomez swears the guy kicked it over himself. So what do you do? Jacobs gave him some money, but less than he gave the first guy, and this idiot gets pissed off. Starts talking about how he’s going to call the governor.

  When they realized how it worked, they started applying leverage. We’d have locals claiming we broke their shit all the time. For a lot of the guys, this is about when their outlook on things started to change.

  7

  Jonas sits in the front seat, looking through the folder on his lap, which entirely consumes his attention, but Shakri wants to talk. The photocopies of news articles and pictures and letters are spread across his lap. He glances over them, but he has the problem with car sickness. As he tries to read, his stomach turns and he gets nauseous. Shakri is asking him how he feels about seeing Rose, but he doesn’t want to talk about it.

  He engrosses himself in the contents of the folder. Black-and-white photographs, and letters on official stationery, army stationery, rendered by the photocopier in shades of gray. The late-autumn sun drops steadily, and Shakri is still asking him questions he doesn’t want to answer. He starts to sweat. His stomach feels as though it will come up his throat any second. Occasionally he takes a photo out of the pile to show to Shakri, who can’t really see what he’s trying to show her as she drives, or he tries to read aloud a section of an article for her benefit, anything to divert her attention. But he can’t concentrate.

  “Pull over,” he says.

  “What? Why?”

  “Pull…” And then his stomach opens up and he vomits all over the inside of the car, all over the folder, the photocopies, spewing a partially digested mix of cookies and juice.

  “Oh, God…” says Shakri, and pulls the car over fast, nearly running into the guardrail in the process. “Why didn’t you tell me?”

  But he is unable to answer, because he has opened the car door and is spitting the last of his stomach’s contents over the buildup of cinders and ash beside the road.

  “Why didn’t you say something?”

  “I tried,” he says, breathless, “but … so fast.”

  He is wiping vomit off his chin with his hand, wiping it off however he can, trying not to get any of it on a picture of soldiers gathered in front of a row of sandbags. They pull the damp floor mat out of the passenger side of the car and dump it over the guardrail, down a small ravine beside the highway, where it lands among thousands of cigarette butts, cola bottles, and a pair of white underpants. He salvages as many pages from the packet as he can, scraping vomit off those that can be saved with the edges of those that can’t.

  “Do you have a paper towel or something?” he asks, and Shakri rummages around for a while in the trunk before holding up a single fast-food-restaurant napkin. He uses
it as best he can to wipe down the dashboard, the seat, the armrest, but it is quickly soaked through and useless, and he tosses it over the guardrail, where it lands next to the floor mat.

  They get back into the car, which smells, despite their efforts, like ammonia and grape, and pull carefully back onto the highway. Jonas says he is feeling slightly better, and Shakri alternates between asking whether he is okay and concentrating to keep herself from retching.

  They drive the two hours back home, bathed in the scent of partially digested hospitality.

  8

  Jonas remembers the dusty road he walked back home from the schoolhouse, which was set on a hill just outside the village in a whitewashed old colonial building whose original purpose had been forgotten. He remembers being hungry, eager to get home, and the golden begonia lining the road, wild and scattered in the irrigation channels.

  As he pushes open the heavy front door, he hears voices, men’s voices, rare, but not unknown, a cousin, or an uncle, whose names he has long forgotten, but who were once frequent visitors. His mother is there, cleaning, putting things in order. Maybe she has been cooking, as he hopes, because his stomach has been rumbling in time to his steps. Or is this something else, another fragment recalled from another time? Is he not combining two different memories again, conflating them into a common past?

  There is no way for him to know for sure.

  He is more certain about walking into the front room and seeing it transformed, the shock of finding it unfamiliar. Furnishings have been removed, the common items to which he is accustomed, the low table, and the wool rugs and thin pillows, and the ornate silver teapot that usually sits next to the door. All the banal tools of the everyday have been swept away, moved elsewhere.

  In their place, groups of men, some of them familiar, some of them complete strangers, sit or kneel or squat on the balls of their feet in small circles of two and three. They huddle around little piles of dark powder heaped on the floor, or beside a stack of short lengths of pipe, or next to a large gray car battery, or over a coil of wire, wound around itself in a loose circle and resting in the corner of the room, sitting on the floor, looking for all the world like a snake.

  9

  They drive the rest of the way home, and Jonas disappears again into his thoughts. It’s dark by the time they get back to the city and park the car. He’s feeling much better, he says, but a little tired. They stop by Primanti Bros. on the way home, because Jonas insists on picking up some beer, which he says will help settle his stomach. He holds the packet Rose gave him under his arm, now damp and about three-quarters as full as it was when he received it. He buys a forty-ounce bottle and avoids Shakri’s gaze as they walk out into the blue-and-yellow neon, down Forbes to her apartment.

  “Is it okay if I take a shower?” he says when they get inside.

  “Please,” says Shakri.

  He takes the oversize bottle of beer with him into the shower, the cold liquid in his throat contrasting with the hot water pouring over his head. He takes another drink. Far from settling his stomach, the beer seems to upset it more, but he manages to force it down.

  10

  Rose found out only later that it was all a mistake. A bureaucratic problem. While explaining it to her, someone called it a snafu.

  Years afterward, at one of the meetings, someone tells her. They are supposed to visit you first, she is told. A real person. Two people, actually, casualty officers, are supposed to come and knock on your door and explain things to you. The letter is supposed to come only later. Or maybe they are supposed to hand you the letter. But at the time, she learns, there were so many, and they couldn’t keep up, and they have only so many people trained to do it, and things got done out of order.

  “Even for the missing?” she says.

  “Even for the missing.”

  “I got a letter,” she says.

  The day is frozen in time. She remembers that on the afternoon it arrived in her mailbox, she was baking cookies while Matthew and Sam were out in the back forty, playing football. Or perhaps baseball. Or maybe soccer. Regardless, they were outside, creating whole worlds on a sunny afternoon, while Rose baked cookies in the kitchen. Afterward, whether or not it was true, she swore that she heard the postman drive up before the cookies were finished, but that she did not want to go outside to pick up the mail just then. Not before she finished the cookies, before her sons received them, before they smiled at her with offhanded gratitude.

  Later, but not just then.

  Rose did not have any particular interest in the people who sent the letter, their biographies, their career paths, their motivations or ideologies. She noticed, in the same way she noticed good wallpaper, the official-looking seal on the corner of the envelope, the fine, ivory parchment. She noticed that the envelope did not have a postmark. And somehow that was when she knew.

  At some point before that, she called to her two remaining sons playing in the backyard, to tell them that the cookies were almost ready, but that if they wanted any they would have to come in and wash their hands first.

  They had been outside all day. They would talk about it later, with her, with each other. They would talk about how, for a brief moment, Matthew, who had just started at the high school, thought that he might be too old to be out in the backyard playing with his little brother, about how he quickly shrugged aside this thought. Sam would talk about how he knew, just knew, that this time he would be able to throw the ball clean over Matt’s head, forcing him to run and get it just as he had been forced to do for about an hour.

  When they heard their mother’s voice, the boys were torn between eating cookies and continuing the game, but their stomachs quickly won out. They ran in through the sliding glass door that opened onto the backyard, making a show of not tracking dirt inside even as dusty bits of it fell from their shoes.

  Rose had made two dozen chocolate-chip cookies. She baked them twelve at a time, on cookie sheets placed one over the other on racks in the oven. The first dozen was nearly done baking when she called to the boys in the backyard, and she deftly formed the second dozen from clumpy balls of dough using two floral-handled tablespoons. As the boys came inside, she pulled the first batch out of the oven with mitted hands, and she reminded them not to get dirt all over the floor.

  The two children sat at the kitchen table, each with a glass of milk that she poured from the carton in the refrigerator, and they waited expectantly for her to bring them a large, ivory plate of chocolate-chip cookies. She baked them once every couple of weeks, and when she did there was a minor celebration in the house. Even Roy got excited, and was known to come home from work early, if he could, just to rescue a cookie or two from his voracious sons.

  Several years after receiving the letter, Rose will remove one of the five chairs from around the kitchen table. She will not give any explanation, and the missing chair will never be mentioned again.

  But for now the bright sun streamed in through the window, and the steam from fresh-baked cookies rose through it. The two boys sat around the kitchen table and bantered, while Rose carried the plate over to them. As she set it down, she heard the mail truck rattle to a stop outside, noticed the silence of its stopping, but she did not go outside to get the mail immediately, did not yet step out into the October sun, did not yet feel its warmth on her arms.

  Under the table, one of the boys kicked the other. The other yelled out, and Rose just smiled as she pretended to take back the plate of cookies. Outside, the mail truck abruptly started its engine, drove away down the street, its fading rattle filling the neighborhood with the sound of its mandate. There was a brief moment of silence, until both boys realized that there was no way she would really take back this gift, this memory they would have for the rest of their lives.

  11

  Jonas hears a knock at the door.

  He has lost track of how long he has been in the shower, and Shakri knocks again and asks if he is all right.

  “Fine,�
� he says, and fills the empty beer bottle absentmindedly with water from the showerhead. He hears the phone ring, and knows from the tone of Shakri’s voice that it is her mother.

  Shakri talks to her mother frequently. Her mother, father, and brother are all doctors, as Shakri will be one day. She will be just like her parents, who still live in India, and her brother, in New York.

  Photographs of the family—on vacation somewhere exotic and palm-lined, or visiting her once during the winter, gathered around a snowman on a white Pennsylvania day, looking like bundled-up raisins on a sugar-frosted cake, or standing in front of the Taj Mahal, tourists in their native land, or hunched with aunts and uncles and cousins over a board game in a comfortable family room—clutter Shakri’s bookshelves and tabletops. When he first visited her apartment, Jonas stood transfixed by the images of Shakri’s abundant family. But now he does not really look at them. He finds it too much like staring into a floodlight, the portraits and casual snapshots painting in stark relief his own want.

  He keeps a portion of his heart to himself. Although he wants to do more, he finds himself loving her only halfway. He tells himself it is because he is young, too young to freely give away his heart. He tells himself it is because he needs to focus on his studies, or because of his friends, who do not always meet with her approval.

  But he suspects there are larger reasons for holding back, reasons related to loss, related to the dangers inherent in loving anything fully, related to the speed with which it might be taken away.