by Brian Doyle
By now we were exhausted and hot and thirsty and both of us would have cried if the other hadn’t been there. We sat for a few moments reconnoitering and then my kid brother, to my amazement, walked right up to the tollbooth and knocked on our older brother’s window and our older brother took a break and drove over in a battered gray state truck and put us and our bicycles and our surfboard in the truck and took us to West End 2, which was and probably still is the best beach in New York for surfing, and we surfed there for the rest of the afternoon, not very well, until the end of our older brother’s shift, at which point he came to get us in his Ford Falcon and carried us home. On the way we were so tired that we both fell asleep together in the narrow back seat. We were so tired that we stayed asleep even after we got home and our older brother quietly unloaded our bicycles and the surfboard. I did wake groggily when he closed the trunk of the Falcon, and I saw him with one hand on each bicycle and the surfboard under his arm as he walked to the garage to put them away. Even today all these years later, when I think of our older brother, that’s one of the first things I remember. You’d think I’d remember him in his tuxedo on the day he was married, or in his flowing academic robe on the day he earned his doctorate, or hoisting up his kids delightedly like tiny loaves of bread on the days that they were born, or even gaunt and grinning in the weeks before he died. But, no, it is him tall and thin and silent as he walked our bicycles and our surfboard back to the garage at dusk that I remember most—a slight thing by the measurement of the world, yet to me not slight at all but huge and crucial and holy.
VI.
I Walked Out So Full of Hope I’m Sure I Spilled Some by the Door
Chessay
My son asked me to play chess yesterday. It was Easter. When a child asks you to play chess you say yes. He is twenty years old and an excellent chess player. I taught him to play when he was five years old. He first beat me when he was thirteen years old. What I remember best from that day is his slow smile when he and I realized, a few moves before the end, that he had toppled the king. I remember too that he did not crow or caper or shout or cackle but instead reached across the board and shook my hand, as I had taught him to do, out of respect for the game, and for your opponent, in whose mind you have been swimming for an hour. Chess at its best is a deeply intimate game in which you can delve into another person’s mind and if you are lucky you get a glance a hint an intimation of your opponent’s character and creativity, the cast of his mind, the flare of her personality, how he confronts difficulties, how rash or calm she is, how willing to be surprised, how well he loses, how poorly she wins.
He came out along his left wing, immediately establishing his knights, immediately forcing me to scuffle and skitter around on defense. My queen roared off her throne snarling and forced her way all the way to his back line but he deftly boxed her in with yapping pawns. Sometimes I think the pawn is the most powerful piece of all. Revolutions and religions begin with ragged beggars from the wilderness. I sent my bishops slicing here and there. My pawns grappled and died. He missed one golden fatal chance with a knight. The knight’s curious sidelong move is the deepest genius of chess; it is the one piece that does not move in linear fashion, the one piece with a geometry of its own, the piece that goes its own way.
In a moment he will be thirty. I want to stare at him across the board for a week. He catches me in a mistake that takes me forever to redress. I don’t know how to say any words that would catch the way I love him. I want him to outwit me. I want to win and I want to lose and I want to savor how deftly I am defeated. I often wonder if I have been a good enough father. A good father teaches his son how to kill the king. He makes an infinitesimal mistake and my rooks close in grimly. I have prayed desperately to die before he does. I would like to teach his children to play chess. I would like to show them how, if you are lucky, you can see inside your opponent, only occasionally, only dimly, only for a few minutes, but for those few minutes you get a hint an intimation a glance at who lives inside the castle of his body. What we see of each other is only a bit of who we are. I want to invent new words for what we mean when we say the word love. Chess can be a wonderful word for that. Chess is a lovely word that can’t be spoken. After the game we shake hands and I think never in the history of the world was there ever a man happier to be a father than me. Never in the whole long bristling history of the world.
Lines Hatched on the Back Porch
of Eudora Welty’s House
in Jackson, Mississippi
Where Miss Welty sat too nearly every evening for seventy years
As the darkness descended like a dress, she said, and then a glass
Of bourbon with which to watch the evening news, grace and evil
Delivered right to the house, and ice from the narrow refrigerator
Where once a friend stored an owl, and then maybe some old jazz
Records, or a book from one of the teetering towers everywhere,
When I was a child I thought books were mere natural wonders
Coming up like grass, or maybe the last letter of the day hammered
On that ancient typewriter, she finally got an electric typewriter but
Noted tartly that all it ever seemed to say was hurry up hurry up
Or maybe just sitting late on the porch inhaling the pines and roses
And cedars and magnolias and last murmurs of the mockingbirds,
And thinking about her mom and dad and brother, all long gone,
Who gave her the cool room upstairs because she was the only girl
And here she is many years later, let’s say a night when she’s eighty
Wandering around laying pages on the rug or the bed or the table
To find the shape and bone of the story, its smell and its weight,
Finding out the thing that matters with a story of any kind at all,
Where is the voice coming from? And there have been so many
Braided voices in this house and this head. Memory is a living thing,
She thinks, rattling the ice in her glass just to interest the wary owls
Up in the redolent myrtles and pines. As we remember we discover,
And my memory is my dearest treasure. She thinks of the young
Interviewer who was here this morning from the college newspaper.
The girl who asked, what was it like to have led such a sheltered life?
And Miss Welty smiles and shivers her ice one last time and says aloud
To the mockingbirds and owls and reporters and readers and scholars
A sheltered life can be a daring life, as a daring life comes from within,
And steps inside and closes the door and, humming, heads to bed.
Joey’s Doll’s Other Arm
…might be in Denmark for all I know, or Delaware, or perhaps, as my daughter surmises, it disappeared, evanesced, disarmed itself one morning—gathered all its armish energy, curled itself into a fleshy fist, and punched out of this earthly plane. All I know is that one day it was attached to Joey’s doll’s starboard side and then the next day it wasn’t. For a time it drifted around the house, looking eerily like a lost finger, and then it made its way out onto the lawn, where I saw a jay worrying it one morning (a Steller’s jay, the size of a robin on steroids), and then it vanished.
My wife thinks the jay took it, and that the arm now hangs out of a nest nearby, not unlike the teenage arms hanging lazily out of one of the battered roaring cars that clatter and roar up my street, arms that come to life and extend fingers at me when I roar at them from my porch. My daughter thinks that one of the foxes from the nearby fir forest took it, and that the arm is now mounted over the foxy fireplace as a sort of trophy. Liam, who is Joey’s twin brother, one minute younger, doesn’t think about the arm, or at least he doesn’t talk about it. But Joey thinks about it all the time.
He asks about it every morning, when I lift him out of his crib.
“Arm?” he asks, holding up the doll
to show me its gaping armpit.
“I don’t know where the dolly’s arm is, Joey.”
“Dolly arm owie.”
“Damn right, Joey. Dolly sans extremity. Dolly a Democrat—no right wing.”
“Owie.”
“Yeah, owie. Maybe the arm is out on the grass. Want to look?”
And off goes my oldest son at a gallop toward the glassy front door in search of the grassy arm of his beloved. To no avail. But I admire his persistence, his condensed breath in a circle on the glass of the door every morning, the unflagging relentless drive of his love, and it is that ferocious affection of which I wish to speak this morning, only a few minutes after Joey galumphed out of the room, his sneakers hammering the beat of his desire on the old oak floor.
All my life I have thought about love, perhaps ever since I was Joey’s age and learning then, as he is now, to say I love you mama (Yaiyuffumama, his voice a clear reedy silvery flute), and then through the thunderstorm of pubescent crushes and daydreams, and headlong into first serious loves, and then luckily, by the grace of whatever gods you wish to summon to this sentence, married love, which I understand less by the year and savor all the more. And then other rich, broad loves: my children, an island in the Atlantic, my dearest friends, woodland hawks, the flinty hipbone of the New England forest, the moist matted nap of the Northwest woods. And also, waxing and waning, delightful and puzzling, a love for God. Or god. Or our spiritual nature. Or whatever you want to call that occasional overpowering sense of a Sense under and through things.
Often I think we are afraid to speak frankly of God or gods because we cannot read that Mind, because so often religion is evil and greedy and bloody, because faith is so quixotic and unreasonable, because spirituality is a word as overloaded with connotation as a log truck top-heavy with the bones of trees. But because we sensibly fear a label does not mean we should be afraid of the content, and I wonder, on this bright morning, if divine love is not unlike Joey’s doll’s other arm: nearby, sensed, remembered, yearned for, searched for day after day after day, our breaths condensing on the glassy panes of this spectacularly inexplicable world as we look for it.
I also think that this lush, troubled world, so ferociously lovely, so plundered and raped and endangered, is itself a seething river of divine love, in much the same way as Joey is. Like Joey, the ship of this world came to me from seas unknown; both were made elsewhere and placed in my hands like squirming jewels, and my work and active prayer is to cherish them, to protect them, to try to hear in them Maker’s music, to sing a little of that music myself. Love comes in so many guises, and a deep respect and affection for cedar trees or sockeye salmon is close cousin to a deep respect and affection for children and neighborhoods and wives. Love is a continuum; so a man who says he loves his wife and children is at the least blind and at the most evil if he votes to rape land (a very slow-moving creature) and kill creatures. He is in a real sense killing his own loved ones; he is killing himself.
The truest words I ever heard about divine love were uttered once by a friend as a grace before a meal. He bowed his head, in the guttering candlelight, steam rising from the food before him, the fingers of the cedar outside brushing the window, and said, “We are part of a Mystery we do not understand, and we are grateful.”
Agreed. And now to join Joey in searching for it.
The Room in the Firehouse
So I went to a meeting with a friend. It was early in the morning in the town’s firehouse. The firemen had lent a room to these meetings for thirty years. My friend was rattled and defensive. It was the first time my friend had been to such a meeting. We sat in a quiet corner. Most people sat against the walls but a few sat at a table in the center of the room. There were women and men of all ages. The young man next to me fidgeted the entire ninety minutes of the meeting except when it was his turn to speak. A woman across from us knitted furiously the whole meeting, stopping only when it was her turn to speak. People took turns speaking. There was no particular order. A slight man in a baseball cap spoke first. He was wry and funny about the hash he had made of his life. Most of the people who spoke were wry and funny. One man’s voice shook when he spoke and the man next to him reached over and put his gnarled hand on his shoulder. Even though many of the speakers were wry and funny, their stories were not. Their stories were awful. Wives walking out the door with children, and police cars and police vans and police officers and court judges and probation officers, and broken teeth and bones, and having to camp in city parks, and companions who froze to death in alleys, and waking up in strange rooms with strange people, and your own children quietly locking the door when they saw it was you on the front porch, and security officers escorting you off the premises as you walked along with all the stuff that had been in your office cubicle now crammed into a big cardboard box, and walking out of meetings like this because meetings like this were for losers, not for you, and you didn’t need this vaguely religious holding-hands stuff, and then sitting right by the door so you could leave when it got to be too much, but then later taking a seat all the way inside, and maybe someday you would even sit at the table, although sitting at the table means you have to be savagely honest with yourself and everyone else about what you cannot do without help, and being that kind of desperately honest is unbelievably awfully hard.
But I sat in a quiet corner of a firehouse and listened as one person after another was that searingly honest, and did speak openly and ruefully about what one man called the delicious disaster, and I was so moved I could not speak for some moments after the meeting ended. My friend did not seem moved and strode out of the meeting appearing glad that it was over, and dismissive of those poor people, and I wished my friend was not dismissive of those people. It seemed to me that those people were the wealthiest people I ever saw in honest humility. It seemed to me they were battling ferociously to turn horror into some small shivering peace and maybe even someday somehow a shy stagger of joy. It seemed to me that they were great because they knew they were not great, healthy because they knew they were ill, admirable because they knew they were not admirable at all by the measures of the real world, as another man called the world outside the room in the firehouse.
There was something great in that room. There is something great in all the thousands of rooms like it in America, the millions of rooms like it around the world. I don’t have a good word for that great thing, but I saw it, staggering like a new foal, from where I sat silently in the corner. My friend did not yet appear to see it, or try to reach for it, and there was nothing I could do to make that happen. But perhaps part of the great thing that happens in these rooms is that, though no one can open that window for anyone else, everyone can applaud when someone does reach for that crack of light, shyly, shaking a little. My friend and I heard that applause several times in the room in the firehouse, and it sounded like the most wonderful painful music to me.
Selections from Letters
and Comments on My Writing
Why do you abuse punctuation so? What has punctuation ever done to you? Where were you educated, if you were educated? Did you not study grammar? Breaking all the rules of syntax, apparently deliberately, does not constitute art. The fur-trapper in your novel is an evil man and a liar and you should be ashamed of yourself. Why are there no dogs in your novel? Do you have something against dogs? How can a man write an entire novel about a town and not mention a single dog? In several of your essays you say that cats are the brooding spawn of Satan. Why do you say such things? Are you trying to be funny? I will assume that you are trying to be humorous but it certainly is not amusing to us in the cat community. In your book about a vineyard you refer constantly to your lovely research assistant. I just discovered from the Web that you are married, and have been married for many years. Does your wife know about your research assistant? In your book about a vineyard you veer off every other chapter into whatever seems to be in your head at that time. Why did your publisher let that happen?
Our book club read this book and we got into such an argument about it being inane or brilliant that the book club was dissolved and now I have to find a new book club, for which I blame the author. In your novel about seafaring there is a mistake on page 211. In your novel about a pine marten there is a mistake on page 208. In your novel about the Oregon coast there may be a mistake on page one, second paragraph, but your writing style is so weird that it may not be a mistake. I find your ostensibly “spiritual” essays to be nothing more than religious claptrap deviously designed to sell the scurrilous agenda of the Papist Church. Your nominally “spiritual” essays should bear a large warning sticker on the cover warning sensible and reasonable readers to stay away. I have now read all three of the books that you claim are “poetry” but not one of them is anything near as good as everything Mary Oliver ever wrote. (To that reader I wrote back, agreeing wholeheartedly.) Why do you not use quotation marks in your novels? Our book club just read your novel and one of our members pointed out that there are no adverbs in the entire book. Did you do that on purpose or was that an accident? I have to write a paper about your writing and when I go to Wikipedia it says you were born in 1935 and 1956. How is that possible? Is that because you are Canadian? Our class is studying your essay about hummingbirds and we do not understand the ending. Do you? Our class read your book about hearts and when our teacher asked What was he thinking? we were all thinking exactly that. Our book club had to read your novel for our April meeting and my question to you is this: who were you trying to ape and copy, James Joyce or Jorge Luis Borges? Please respond to this question: I have ten dollars riding on Borges.