by Tim Wynveen
Another jet passed over them. A car drove along the Marsh Road, stopped briefly and then moved on again. In a different voice, pitched a little higher, Hank said, “I love this place. It keeps me from thinking too much about all that. I got my plans, right? And when I come outside this way, I kind of get lost. Maybe it’s spending all that time in prison, but I almost get stoned when I’m out here. There’s the birds and the flowers and the bugs. Had a praying mantis here the other day, weird as fuck. And this pond, I could sit here forever and watch it. It kills me how it came up the way it did. Water’s a tricky thing, right? I mean they built that dike over there to hold back the lake, and it works all right—we drive every day on top of it—but the lake, I guess, is just waiting. The minute you make a space for it, it flows right under the dike. That’s what we did here. That’s what this is, I guess, a bit of lake that managed to escape.”
Hank struck a few more notes on the guitar, not really playing so much as keeping time. Then he looked at Cyrus and said, “You ever think of giving lessons?”
Cyrus closed one eye as though he’d been poked. “Funny you should say that. Billy Maddux called me this afternoon asking the same thing.”
“No kidding. Word gets around, I guess.”
They fell into a companionable silence, a space so calm and carefree it seemed to predate them and any of the troubles that had twisted their lives out of shape, before Portland and Burwash, before anything dark and dismal and disfiguring, back when two brothers could sit and say nothing and do nothing and just be together.
As Cyrus looked out across the pond, some part of the night detached itself and began to flutter toward them. It hovered above the water as if trying to make a choice, dipping down to the surface of the pond and then fluttering up again, dipping down and then up, before it finally continued in their direction. A moment later, he could make out a large summer moth, a cecropia, it appeared to be, lavish and unlikely. The closer it came to them, the more directly it flew, until it was almost within arm’s reach. It seemed to hang there a moment, as though it had been mesmerized by the moon’s bright reflection in the polished metal of the guitar. And before either brother could say a word, the moth moved on again, tremulous and fragile. The night was opening like a flower.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
In writing this book I relied on information from a number of sources, including: Music, The Arts, and Ideas, by Leonard B. Meyer; The Singer of Tales, by Alfred Lord; and in particular, Larry J. Solomon’s essay, “Sounds of Silence.” The Rilke epigraph is from a translation of The Duino Elegies by Stephen Garmey and Jay Wilson.
Many thanks to my editor, Anne Collins, for all her help; to copy editor Stacey Cameron; to my agent, Bruce Westwood who, among other things, prunes apple trees like a poet; to friends and family far and wide who allowed me to gibber about a work in progress; and most of all to Christine, Claire and Anna.