An Annie Dillard Reader

by Annie Dillard

  He had begun to wonder where, in this series of accidents, the accidental part left off. Could he as readily have been an actor, or a lawyer, as a high school teacher, when he had felt himself so profoundly and for so long to be a high school teacher? Would he do just as well as some other sort of fellow altogether? Was June only one of many women he might have married? Might he just as readily be living on some other street, in some grievous town in Wisconsin he had never heard of, with some other woman—a woman he did not know? This was a grim thought. He disliked strange women.

  A fresh, stiffening wind blew up through the lot below. A sheet of water gleamed behind the plunging precipice of the town. The colorless sea and the colorless sky were batting the dead light back and forth. What Clare really wanted to know was this: Would he ever see June again?

  It was a novel, uncomfortable question, linked in his mind with the shed church he attended as a boy, and with his mother’s floppy Bible, whose assigned chapters he had memorized perforce. He knew that forty years ago in the west they used to say, “Ain’t no law west of Saint Louis, and no God west of Fort Smith.” But now God had been planted in the west for two generations—God, women, and railroad trains. Towns welcomed churches for their civilizing influence and noble architecture. One of Clare’s favorite stories was about Chief Seattle. Chief Seattle had heard much about a common heavenly father who had come down to earth to live among people and save them. Chief Seattle remarked, “We never saw him,” and Clare repeated this to general hilarity in the hotel bar and in the Lone Joe Saloon. Chief Seattle said, “We never saw him.” Would there be something he and his friends could do together, like old times?

  Clare moved inside. His father had died many years ago in what people called a freak accident; he had not seen a hair of him since. From time to time he dreamed of him standing mute in his overalls in a family-filled log cabin. Everyone welcomed him, saying, “Rooney! We all thought you were dead.” Clare himself looked at his father, overcome with affection and shyness. Gradually he always understood that, in fact, the man was dead. He had no will, no love, and no way to express his embarrassment for the overexcited living. He was an apparition the family’s hopes could not sustain; his form faded as their faith failed, and where he had stood was only the sooty log wall. Now, as winter left the coast that year and spring wore on, Clare dreamed this dream again, and others like it.

  Everywhere he went he saw Obenchain. Friday it was Obenchain brooding at the new post office, his lower lip hanging. Last week he became aware of Obenchain at the grocer’s when, from the corner of his eye, he saw one pale forehead as high as his own above the other heads, as if the two men were lighthouses. From a high school window he saw Obenchain pacing the center of the street below, agitated, wearing his hat over one ear. Twice from parlor windows he saw him looming tense in the vacant lot below the house, cast in silhouette against the bay.

  One January Saturday he and June were replenishing the woodpile, and Clare had glanced up to see Obenchain just disappearing down the back alley. The alley ran through a tangle of blackberry bushes. Clare had leaned on his maul and peered hard through the thorns to learn if the ungainly, wrinkled form that was Obenchain had kept moving or stopped. He could not tell; he could not decide if he had seen a dark piece of a man moving, or if he was now seeing a man holding still, or a patch of gloom and no man at all. He had stood and studied and pondered, until he began to see not Obenchain, but his own self, as a man with a revolver behind blackberry thorns might see him: a target as isolated and still as some poor stiff before a firing squad. Would he then fall handily in his own yard on Lambert Street, with his wife at his side?

  June was carrying two alder rounds to the chopping block; she had not noticed anything. Small beads of drizzle like bird shot made a halo around her hair. Clare felt immense in his own yard and stripped, like a barked tree. Could it be that he, who had been a fearless boy, was a cowardly man? His mouth had gone dry. He quit the yard then, tucked tail like a dog, ducked back into the house without a word, and sat idle, clapping his hands repeatedly over his bony knees, away from the windows.

  Since that day, over two months ago, he had not felt fear. He could not bear to, so he had looked steadily past it until it left. In the post office on Friday, Clare fronted Obenchain, looked at him, and Obenchain had turned away.

  He had told June, on New Year’s Day. They were alone downstairs, late. He had fallen asleep over tea in the parlor and wakened to see June clearing his place, with her head cocked like a robin’s, looking at him.

  He told her right then—she started, for he spoke as soon as his eyes opened—that he had not long to live, that he would die one of these days or nights soon, that he knew because Beal Obenchain had told him on Christmas Eve that he was going to kill him, and she was not to worry because nothing could be done.

  As it happened, June never worried because she never believed that “nothing could be done.” Something could always be done; that is what people were for.

  She sat down and it sunk in. Her black-sleeved arms rested on the chair’s brocade arms and her head alternately bent and raised as she thought of things. She was thirty-four to Clare’s forty-two, fair-skinned and brown-haired, restless. High and curving brows made her look alert. Now her tender expression firmed. “What does Beal Obenchain have against you?” “Nothing. It was just some notion he seized.” It sunk in some more.

  She could, June had said in her soft, Maryland voice, shoot Beal Obenchain. It would be easy. He lived alone in the woods by the tracks, where any vagrant, any swindler or gambler or ruined miner or drunken logger, could shoot him for any reason. No one would find him for days—maybe even “till Almighty crack”—and no one would ever suspect Clare Fishburn, never mind June Fishburn. Why would these ordinary, quiet townspeople want to murder someone?

  “Why indeed?” Clare said. Obenchain was not all-the-way normal. What if he was just blowing off steam? Why should anyone go murder a poor lonely bugger who raved? Clare knew that Obenchain was not just bloviating, that Obenchain was, as he put it to himself, a bad hat in earnest, and would do him in. Clare did not, however, intend to murder, and said so. Capital threats are not capital crimes; you do not shoot a man unless he is actually in the process of harming you or your family. You do not cold-bloodedly kill a man under any circumstances, and you by golly do not let your wife do it.

  He had thought of everything, and here was June thinking of it all again. “Where’s your shotgun?” He had oiled it, and taken it to his shop in the high school. He had bought the Colt Lightning. His thinking was running, however, to knives. With a Bowie knife, a fighter could rip open a man up close before either could draw a revolver. He could throw a knife faster than Obenchain could raise and aim a gun—if he were a knife fighter. He had passed a few fine years as a boy throwing a Bowie knife at tree trunks and hay bales, and he knew enough about it to know it would take another few years to get the skill back. Of course he had thought of corralling his friends George Bacon and Jim O’Shippy to stand guard or fight.

  Don’t go near the water; don’t go out alone. “—And we must move.” June’s round head turned toward him, and away, and back. “We can move to Portland, and tell no one where we are going. We can sell this house for cash—it must be worth thousands now. You take the train tomorrow, and your mother and I will follow with Mabel when we have everything packed.”

  Clare saw that June was pink and heated. Her skin was always a thin membrane; she changed colors faster than a cloud. Her face seemed everywhere as liquid and live as her eyes. She subsided, looking down at her lap, but her cheeks still glowed.

  “And when do we come back?”

  June thought it through and fired up, “Anytime we’re ready for you to die, we just hop a train.”

  He reminded her that his livelihood was here. He directed the course in physical sciences and in manual training. He would probably be vice-principal before long. His voice was steady. He wanted to set a brave examp
le for his young, small wife, who had been reared delicately among women. He kept forgetting that she noticed when he tried to set an example, and flared up.

  “You can’t be vice-principal if you’re dead.” June sounded to Clare awfully contemptuous, as though he thought he could. He poured himself cold tea. The parlor’s high windows were glossy and black, and the lamp’s light streaked them.

  He brought out, “I have no preferment in Portland, and no position, and know of no proposition.” Clare talked this way when the thought of her powerful family in Baltimore shamed him. In fact, the galling thing, if he lived in any strange town, would be not knowing what was happening every day.

  “We have no need of further prospects.” She lowered her voice to a resonant bass, to startle and reconcile him, a trick he knew, which usually worked anyway. “My legacy has advanced—tripled or quadrupled, at least—these past few years. We can live in Portland without your making a stir in anything.”

  “I fancy making a stir in something,” Clare said. Having never lived in any big city, Clare had a horror of them all, and supposed their citizens must live perpetually as lost, footsore, cleaned out, and lonesome as he was when he visited. He repeated, “When do we come back?”

  “We don’t come back. We don’t come back!”

  Clare tended to stare at the grapes when he was in the parlor. June had draped a fringed scarf over a picture frame’s corner, and heaped blue glass grapes there, as if women commonly stored grapes on picture frames.

  He broke out in a fresh start, “Then do we live in Portland as nobodies, hoping every minute Obenchain never finds us, or wondering every minute if he actually meant to kill me at all? That’s sorry living. Or do we hope he decides to murder someone else? Who?” Clare regretted this latter tack, for arguments from universal morality tended to pass June right by when she was roused.

  He was waiting for her to coil down. He could not see her expression when she bent her head; he saw the untidy curved parting of her dark hair. It would take her several days, he thought, to study their possibilities as he had studied them, and get to the bottom facts—several days to conclude that nothing could, reasonably and honorably, be done.

  As the weeks and months had passed, however, Clare learned he been wrong. June did not “coil down.” She wanted to move. As she began to adjust to a new life based on Obenchain’s threat—as the days passed and Clare still lived—she wanted to move. She was willing to give up her familiar friends to struggle somewhere as a stranger. She had, Clare reflected, some sand in her.

  Their brightest hope next to moving, June held, was beating Obenchain to it. Clare should send Obenchain to his reward, without witnesses. The two sifted it all through again. People in town would make a complete row if Obenchain killed Clare, and hardly any row if Clare killed Obenchain. If Obenchain killed first, he would leave town or hang for it, but Clare “would be dead,” June said. If Clare, who possessed respectability, got the jump on Obenchain, he might go to prison, but he would get out alive, in time, and they could go on. She preferred “any degree of disgrace”—she once said ardently, her voice rising and hoarse—to losing him. Clare was surprised by her vehemence. “You truly want to save my bacon,” he said, and smiled at her; she had glared at him. He was touched. This was a wealthy woman. She set him to thinking as much as Obenchain had.

  Clare considered these things throughout the early spring. In the light and changing rain he rode his bicycle to school one morning along Lambert Street and down the hill. June had always seen things in him no one else ever saw. Of course she was fond of him. Why was he surprised?

  He saw she acted from an unmentioned source of feeling, a source that, he discovered, he tapped as well. It had been there all along. He asked himself if she was conscious of it and understood at once that she was, that she probably had been since Mabel’s birth, when their courting talk had hushed and let go, loosing them to drift into the great silence. She had been waiting for him to notice it, and she understood his doltishness in advance. Wherever he found himself, in whatever deep caves and vaulted mazes of understanding, he discovered her already there before him, her arched eyes glinting with amused sensibility, her untidy, small form seeming to beckon him onward. She mocked him, guided him, forgave him, and tantalized him, at every level of depth he reached. What else did she know that he did not?

  He steered his bicycle through the morning crowds on Commercial Street. At real estate offices, men stood smoking under dripping awnings. Women held their dark skirts out of the mud. There was Obenchain, ducking into the pharmacy. Let him. Two teams of black mules hauled a covered wagon from the docks. The mule shoes and the wagon wheels knocked planks. Clare and June quarreled about moving. Whatcom is better than Portland, he said; he chose to live and die there. He knew that June saw only a new fatalism in his decision, and he wondered if she missed his old carelessness. He did not.

  Clare imagined June’s tilted round head, her unfathomable silences. How had they found the courage to marry, when they had known nothing? Clare felt a bottomlessness in himself. He felt a bottomlessness in his attachment to June that made him teeter, and he felt a parcel of infinity between them, over which their days floated like chips.

  All that April it rained. The Nooksack River flooded its banks and spread over the farmers’ fields on the plain.

  South of Whatcom, the new cemetery became a low lake where green-winged teal dabbled and dove among headstones and logs. In town Clare took Mabel to the bridge over Whatcom Creek. They saw a henhouse tumble by. Clare rode his bicycle to school one day and told Jim O’Shippy that the roads were “slick as calf slobbers.”

  When the water went down it was May. Cold sun lighted the snow in the mountains. Townsmen forgot the flooding; they began to mend nets and scrape hulls, to make railroad excursions and dig clams. In the Lummi reservation orchards, the pruning was over and the bees were out.

  People became fitful, bold, or melancholy. Spring pried open their jaws and poured sunlight down their throats. The light picked them up and floated them as spring tides lifted logs on the beach: lightly, taking their heaviness from them, and setting them free. They moved pianos, adopted puppies, drove buggies out to look at land in the county, staked sweet peas. The schoolchildren grew careless and distraught; when school let out in June they hit the streets. There were boy gangs and girl gangs all over town—on the wharf and along the beaches and at the sawmills’ edges—gangs composed of children few adults recognized. The light never quit. The old people knew the season by heart, and their hearts turned over anyway, as lakes turn over by the season.

  By the third week in May it was light in earnest. Sunlight spread like a crescendo; June was a blare. The sockeye came leaping and leaping northward offshore. The winds left and the clouds dried up and the sun rolled almost all the way around the sky. Time expanded. The day widened, pulled from both ends by the shrinking dark, as if darkness itself were a pair of hands and daylight a skein between them, now flung wide. The fishermen fished day and night while the salmon ran, and the cannery worked around the clock. Loggers logged the forests, and their teams of oxen dragged the logs away. It was summer and no one seemed to sleep. The sky had fallen open like a clamshell. The days were round and lighted one after the other without end.

  Four weeks later, the town of Whatcom was on its beam ends. Financial panic was sudden and dire. In June, every bank in Whatcom County had failed and closed. Across the nation, fifteen thousand banks failed, most in the south and west. In Whatcom, people were soon to be poor as snakes, and they knew it. Already a few steamships had dropped Whatcom from their schedule. Already wholesalers were closing. Farm prices fell so badly that potatoes sold for fourteen dollars a ton. A man could insulate his house with potatoes.

  Clare Fishburn straddled a cedar shake bolt in his backyard and split shakes. He tapped the froe, and the shakes popped off the bolt.

  Of the seventeen thousand dollars in holdings he possessed that spring, nothing remained
but one thousand dollars of Whatcom Gas Company shares he had purchased for five thousand dollars. The bank certificates were worthless; the Northern Pacific Railroad had suspended dividends and fallen into the hands of receivers. The lost money was mostly June’s—her wedding present and legacy.

  June had never said so, but her father’s circumstance made it plain, that she could have found a suitor to match her fortune, not lose it. Clare’s simple pride before men, that a rich and beautiful young woman should have lighted on him, had long since changed to shame before men, that his wife was rich. Now he and June would be, as he said, scuffling for themselves like everybody else. He still had his job, but the principal cut his pay. The principal even intimated, when they talked yesterday, that the school system might have to pay in scrip instead of cash. If Obenchain killed him now, June would have nothing to shift with.

  Facing him a few feet away, June was kneeling to weave the shakes he had shaved yesterday. She had her sleeves rolled up. Until recently he had doubted she chose this life freely; perhaps, he thought now, he doubted because he himself would have chosen luxury, in a trice.

  Clare set on edge one of the last shake bolts, and split it in two with an old crab-apple wedge that was his father’s. Then he set the heavy froe blade in position along one billet’s grain, and tapped it with a mallet. A shake split off as if goosed. He adjusted the blade a notch and tapped again. The red shakes crackled at his feet. He worked through both bolts, whistling. He turned to the bolt he had sat on, reduced it to a clatter of shakes. He moved to the shaving horse and, with a two-handled knife, shaved those shakes into shingles. He was kneeling at the horse, for he was too tall to work the knife bent over. It was not yet nine o’clock in the morning.

  He stood and flexed his back. He surveyed the littered yard; would the grass reseed this fall? Old Ada opened the back door and Mabel came out, holding on to the dog. Clare had taken to looking at things as if for the last time. This practice caused him to see them as if for the first time: yesterday the principal’s dark and freckled forehead, now the froe leaning on the back step, sunlit, and the crab-apple wedge beside it. The crab-apple wedge top was furred from blows. It looked to be outlined in the blue shadow that streamed behind most everything; it held its shape for now, vivid and stubborn against the current, as he did.