The group would only be together for a little while. In time, after a final party with three families they met on the highway, the musicians went west, the first mate and the boy south. And Sergeant Foote and the con artist to me. She was already sick when I met her, and if the broken chair was not a riverbank, it was warm and quiet, the words from her lover the last she heard.
* * *
HE DID NOT KNOW what woke him at first. Sunny Jim had been dreaming of smoky trees, mist rising from water. A multitude of voices rushing forward, pulling away, too many words at once, each one trying to pour itself into his ear. He was flailing his arms, swatting the air in front of his face. Then he was awake. Purple light drifted through the shutters, night hanging by a finger. The room was almost too dark to see, and there was nothing. Then the three boys, but they said nothing, just huddled in the corner with their faces in their hands. Sunny Jim understood that they were scared.
“What’s happening?” he said.
“No,” they said together. “Don’t make us speak.”
And then there was Aline, her face ragged, hair straying from her scalp. She was crouching over him, her face so close that he could smell her, her sweet scent, algae, ash. Her hands on the sides of his face. He longed to touch her but was afraid.
“I knew you were still here,” he said. “I knew you would come.”
She took her hands away, stood up.
“Don’t go,” he said. She shook her head, raised her arm, beckoned with a wave, and he rose, moved through the quiet halls, until he was on deck with her. She pointed ahead at Binghamton, the darkened city spilling into the river. Three flares shot from its center, a short burst of machine-gun fire on a distant shore. The war was here already. They thought they had beaten it.
Reverend Bauxite was there, too, scanning the opposed banks. He had been watching all night, seen furtive soldiers taking their positions, the dark lines of guns being put into place. It was happening on both sides of the river, the Carthage slipping up the current in between. When he understood what was happening, he had a weak impulse to rouse the pilot, the captain, get them to turn the ship around, go back downstream. Then realized it was far too late for that.
“What are you doing up here?” Reverend Bauxite said.
So many more questions buzzing between them. No chance to ask them or answer.
“Time to get off this boat,” Sunny Jim said. He looked down the Carthage to one of the last lifeboats, swinging from a chain. The priest was gazing from shore to shore, to a new flare rising over the city ahead.
“Do you think the pilot can bring us in closer?” Sunny Jim said.
“I don’t think we have that kind of time,” Reverend Bauxite said. Sunny Jim, were you just talking to her?
No.
Answer me.
No.
Sunny Jim lowered the boat with Reverend Bauxite in it, jumped into the water, and climbed in. They both took up oars and were rowing again, as they had in Harrisburg, the war all around them. A tangle of corpses jammed on the columns of the bridges. A building exploding in a flower of fire. A woman stooping to give a limbless man a cool, damp cloth for his sweating forehead. The army’s soldiers slumped in their uniforms, one of them playing a concertina and singing in a faltering tenor, a dying song. Back then, Sunny Jim, Aaron, and he had been phantoms passing through it, Reverend Bauxite thought. As if God had heard the promise they made to Aline to keep the boy safe, and so they were safe with him as well. Someone, he could not remember who, had told him that. He had not been able to see it at the time, that the war had been looking for them, sent grenades to the Market Street Bridge, bombs to the pulpit where he spoke in church. Never found them. Then they were on the river and the war was behind them, eating every town. But now the war was here and the boy twenty miles away, and Reverend Bauxite saw everything. The sky flickered from a luminous blue to orange to black, and the water around them wrinkled with rising waves, telling the history of the current and how it had carved its way through the mountains to the sea. Its history and all that was coming.
It’s beautiful, he thought. Asking pardon for his pride, for there was no one to do it for him, he prayed. “Into your hands, O merciful Savior,” he said in a low voice, “I commend myself as your servant. Acknowledge, I humbly beseech you, a sheep of your own fold, a lamb of your own flock, a sinner of your own redeeming. Receive me into the arms of your mercy, into the blessed rest of everlasting peace, and into the glorious company of the saints in light.”
He looked over at the Carthage as they moved away from it, then at Sunny Jim. Thought of Aaron. Kept praying. “You led your ancient people by a pillar of cloud by day and a pillar of fire by night,” he said. “Grant that we, who serve you now on earth, may come to the joy of that heavenly Jerusalem, where all tears are wiped away and where your saints for ever sing your praise.”
The guns at the shore were arming all around him, pointing out across the water. He could almost feel, then, the force that had kept the bullets away turning toward him. He was their beacon, drawing them to him, so that he might be transformed.
“Get down,” he told Sunny Jim. “Down in the bottom of the boat. I can row us in from here myself.”
Sunny Jim drew in his oars, lay them down, trying to be quiet.
“Hurry,” Reverend Bauxite said.
A long volley of gunfire from the nearest shore spat into the water, rang off the boat’s metal hull, and Reverend Bauxite leaned forward and smacked Sunny Jim down, until he was stretched under the bench. The bullets scorched the air around them. Reverend Bauxite picked up his oars and kept rowing in strong, steady strokes, a short ha barking from his throat at the end of every pull. A bullet burrowed into his back and he gasped but did not stop. Another one in his arm made him wince, but could not slow him down. Sunny Jim lay there in the bottom of the boat, staring up at his friend, and with each of the priest’s mounting breaths in the early morning light, it was as though he were getting bigger, stronger. As though when they reached the shore, he would walk along the bank, bending trees, crushing the guns beneath his feet. Then a bullet passed through his gut and Reverend Bauxite shouted, turned his head in time to catch a final shot from temple to temple that toppled him into the boat alongside his friend. The two men lay there, face to face, and Sunny Jim swore he saw the priest’s eyes looking at him, then through him. A trail of ecstasy that took away the anger, for he had been a best friend, a father to his child. Pulled a dozen churches from the air and one from stone. Been ordained in the same water that carried him now. Years ago, felt God’s breath through the trees, knew He was there, with a certainty he had never quite forgotten, and never would now.
The boat glided to shore, nestled against the land, and Sunny Jim leapt from the boat, dragged Reverend Bauxite up the bank. Together, they saw three rockets ride streaks of smoke into the Carthage, the house of pilgrims, the priest’s last congregation. To Sunny Jim, the ship gave birth to a sphere of fire that split its mother in two, burst into a rising column of rolling flames and smoke that lit river, islands, and shore together. To Reverend Bauxite, the ship bloomed, released a swarm of souls, all who were there and had ever been there, from the mouth of the river in Chesapeake Bay to the drowning fields north of Binghamton. They spun outward from the opening vessel, across the flat of the shining water, over the land all around. And the country followed, blossoming into streams of light and color, voices and music that moved through the priest, bore him aloft over the changed earth, and took him in.
* * *
THEN THE SHOOTING STOPPED. No more rockets flew. The wreck of the Carthage was marooned in the river, breaking apart. Sunny Jim sat on the shore, his best friend in his arms. The hour was coming when it would hit him, just how much he had lost. When it did, it would knock him to the ground and then spill out of him, a flood of words. But he had no time for it now. All along the walled banks, tracers were drawing quick stripes over the water, rockets flying again. A tower a few blocks from
the bridge to Front Street took a missile, and the upper half teetered on a hinge of flame and fell into the city. He put Reverend Bauxite back in the boat, pushed it out into the current. Watched it go, waited until he could not see it anymore. Then he was sprinting down Riverside Drive to Front Street, hiding in the shadows of the doorways of abandoned stores whenever he saw soldiers or guerrillas make stuttering steps into intersections, close together, bristling with gun barrels like giant metal porcupines. They crept down the streets, dispersing in a flurry of hand signals, cringing when explosions nearby made the ground snap beneath them. Four times they saw him, shot when he ran, the bullets like poltergeists, kicking up rocks and breaking windows behind him. He ran under the empty overpasses for Route 17, I-81, out onto Route 11, past a string of asphalt plains and corroding buildings, until the road broke from the city and the trees rushed in around him. In the weak light, he could see the broken hills, the road heaving and falling, a rusting green trailer set back from the road, the earth cleared around it going to weeds and seed. The tear in the sky pushing ever wider, howling and murmuring. The wave of the storm about to crest. He was almost home, and Aline was with him, and something hot and hollow was pressing against his ribs, as if he were taking her home for the first time to meet the family.
The House
ONCE AARON WAS ASLEEP on the mattress in the attic, Merry climbed onto the roof to gaze into the sky. It was opening like the skin of a fruit, speaking to her with a clarity her parents, even her brother, had never had. She looked across the horizon from the north to the west and could see it, the land becoming indistinct, as if pieces of it were rising, breaking apart without a sound. Constant flashes of electricity. It was beautiful. Only a day or two more, it said to her, and she could go.
She recognized her brother by his gait alone, though he was slower than he had been years ago. Aaron was on the second floor, in her parents’ old room. She ran and got the boy, almost bore him aloft by his left wrist as she flew down the stairs with him. Your father’s here, your father’s here. Then they were running down the porch steps and across the lawn to him, and he broke into a hobbled sprint toward them. The boy almost knocked his father over, and Sunny Jim stumbled and laughed, harder than Merry had ever heard. That was what the boy had wrought in him, she thought. Made him into more. He had run twelve miles past Binghamton before collapsing midstride into the ditch on the roadside. Slept through a light rain. Woke up terrified of how long he might have been there, ran the last nine miles, paused when he saw what remained of the house. But even that vanished from his sight when the people he loved best came out of it. There were no gunshots for him then, no torn muscles, no burnt lungs. No one lost. He spun Aaron around and around until the boy couldn’t stand it anymore. Sunny Jim could have stayed that way forever, his boy’s face fixed before him, the rest of the world blurring away. You were right, Reverend, he thought. You always were. The light was coming, it would come soon, if he’d just let everything go. He was almost ready.
“Where’s Mom?” Aaron said.
Sunny Jim brought his son closer, chin to shoulder, held him until the boy’s legs started kicking.
“Put me down.”
“No,” Sunny Jim said.
“Come on.”
“Put him down,” Merry said. “We need to talk.”
“Aaron,” Sunny Jim said. “Go in the house and get your things. We’re leaving in a few minutes.”
“Is Aunt Merry coming with us?”
“No,” he said, and Aaron hugged Merry’s waist. She bent down to put her arms around him, too, and he kissed her cheek.
“Remember all the things I told you?” she said to him.
“Yes,” he said.
“You’ll tell your dad, right?”
“Yes.”
“All right. Now listen to your father.” He was up the stairs and gone, back into the house.
“Hello,” she said to Sunny Jim.
“Hi.”
“And hello to you,” Merry said. Smiled. “She’s pretty. I see why you fell for her.”
“…”
“…”
“How have you been?” he said.
“We don’t have time for this,” she said. “He’ll be back any minute.” She turned a little to look over her shoulder. Now Sunny Jim could almost hear it, too, crawling across the land.
“I want to go,” Merry said. Her voice broke, ached, on the last word.
“I know.”
“Will you let me?”
All the years he had carried her with him, down the spine of the country and back again. She had been with him in the old apartment above the Chinese restaurant, in the back of the purple van with Aline, heading south. The day that Aaron was born, and he first held him screaming. All through the crackling guns, the whispering bombs and mortars. The night the Market Street Bridge fell. Merry, I need you so much. Don’t go. Don’t go.
“Go,” he said. “Before Aaron comes back.”
She stepped forward, put her hands on his shoulders, then got up on tiptoes and kissed him on the forehead. I love you, baby brother. Then spun north, started walking. Quickened her step as soon as she broke into the fields. Almost broke into a run. He thought he heard her chuckle then, though he would never be sure.
For three minutes he was alone in front of the house where he was born. Half the shingles were off the roof, scattered around the yard. Long strips of siding in clattered piles. Paint peeling off in long tails, curling claws. Windows cracked from the warping of the frames around them. He could almost see the beams, the bones. See his family when he was a child storming through the house, his grandparents, uncles, aunts, and cousins. The shadow man in the tall grass at the edge of the trees on the other side of the road. The downed plane in the woods. The sparkling swings at the fair. His cousin’s truck, kicking up gravel. The bullet hole in the wall, his parents with bandages and stitches. The long ride on a purple bicycle. The three dead boys in the driveway. His sister had kissed him then, too. It’s what she did when she was sure she would never see him again. This house was falling. Soon it would kneel into the ground, and the earth would rise to take it. But it was in him, too, every plank, every nail, and Aline with it, until the day he gave them all away.
Aaron came out of the house at a run, jaunted down the stairs, a small pack on his back.
“So where’s Mom?” he said.
He was almost ready, ready at last. But there were more important things to do first.
“You have to tell me how you are,” Sunny Jim said.
“What do you want me to tell you?”
“Everything,” Sunny Jim said.
And he did.
* * *
IT TOOK A LONG time to find Aaron and his father. They were living in the shell of a boat that had washed aground where the river met the highway, fifty miles south of Harrisburg. Sunny Jim was in a wheelchair by then, too weak to speak. Aaron talked for him while his father looked on, pride swelling in his eyes for the man his boy was becoming. We were together for almost a month, and while I was with them, it was as if a message went out. People came with pigs and vegetables, and there were dinners, animals roasted and eaten, under the crashing sky. A woman with an accordion sat on a crate along the highway’s broken shoulder, stamping her foot in the dust, and a man put on his boots and danced in the road. There was clapping and cheering, and we all looked at the ground, the cracked rock, the dark soil, around our moving feet. I have not seen any of them since, and cannot recall them when I try. Yet sometimes they revisit me: I catch a glimpse of them, of their fleeting faces, as from the light of a spark. The way a woman’s scarf fanned in the air around her when she turned. A piece of a man’s laugh. His chipped tooth. A thing an older woman said to me: Do not forget us. Say that what we did here was good, even with everything that came before. Say it.
Can you see it? We are here, all that was left, that I could bring together in the flashes of these pages. We are here in the curves of every
letter, in the curl of a comma. In the spaces between the words. We are all here, all of us, and the towns and cities we knew, the ones that we lost, to water and fire and water again. We are a parade along the road, of funerals and parties, weddings with one witness. A birth in the shelter of a house half-occupied by animals, the child held up to the sky. And the river, the river, filled from the depths of the sea, flowing to the ends of the earth.
It is too much. It is not enough. There are not enough pages, and there was never enough time—I should have known that, but I am still trying. I am trying to reach you, wherever you are, wherever you have gone, because we all have to find each other somehow, even if the words are all that is left when we do. Perhaps now we can tell you the things we could not say then. How much we love you. How we are sorry. How we know it will get better, even if we are only here to see it through you.
Good-bye. Hello.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
To The Reverend Drew Bunting, for so much guidance. To Chuck Wall and Tara Duffy, for taking the canoe trip with me. To Laura Bean Kelley, for all the stories about mental hospitals. To the Pasquales, for telling me a few things about Binghamton. To James Leva, for writing the tune. To Jacob Curtz, Joseph DeJarnette, and Liz Toffey, for making the book happen. To Cameron McClure and Liz Gorinsky, for making the book better. To Central New York and Pennsylvania. To Steph. To Leo.
TOR BOOKS BY BRIAN FRANCIS SLATTERY
Spaceman Blues
Liberation
Lost Everything
About the Author
Brian Francis Slattery was born and raised in upstate New York. He is an editor for the U.S. Institute of Peace and the New Haven Review. He is the author of Spaceman Blues and Liberation, and is also a musician. He lives near New Haven, Connecticut.
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