Enon (11 page)

“I’m going to. Out of respect. He was the guardian spirit of Cherry Street.”

“Bullshit.”

“Yeah. And look at him. He’s all fucked up.”

“And he smells
nasty
.”

“Go home then. I’m getting a sheet and a shovel and I’m going to bury him.”

“Hey, Wader, I’ll give you ten bucks if you eat a mouthful of his guts.”

“Lord’s right. We’ve got to bury Freaky. Out of respect.”

“Out of respect.”

“Out of respect.”

How different we were at night, out from under the tyrannies of due dates and gym classes and school bells, luminescent faces in a circle, telling one another what we’d seen and heard, what we’d found (Algonquin arrowheads and flints
would still turn up now and then, when one of us scratched at a patch of sand), making small adjustments to the rules for the next dispersal, fetching Peter’s dad’s old GI-issue spade and spending the rest of the night taking turns digging a grave for a dog.

W
HEN WE CAMPED ON
Peter Lord’s front yard we always stopped whatever game we had been playing in the meadow just before the first fletchings of dawn and stood in the high grass for a moment or two, scratching bug bites, wiping our noses with the backs of our hands, raking our dirty fingers through our sweaty hair, murmuring a quiet, conclusive word or two.

“Something big moving in the pond tonight.”

“Huge.”

“Full moon’s why.”

“Bullshit.”

“Look it up.”

“Look
what
up?”

“He’s right.”

“Owl took half Watt’s hair.”

“Screamed so hard his balls fell off.”

T
HE LAST CARS OF
night had driven past hours ago on Cherry Street, beyond the fields, past the stone fences. The first cars of morning had yet to come. We thrived in that nocturnal kingdom, which emerged from the fields like a pop-up world in a cardboard book and collapsed back into the grass as we
kicked one another to jittery sleep. You could almost hear it folding itself back up just ahead of the sunrise, outside the nylon walls of the tent. We were careful never to be outside when it disappeared, in case one of us tripped on an overturning corner and was gobbled down into the throat of that old earth, into the cross sections of years and centuries and generations, folded up into the curled layers of prehistoric winters and antique summers where we had no business being after dawn, and getting coughed back up into the right night onto the right front lawn might be a one in a million or even slighter chance, and the rest of us finding a rope in Peter Lord’s garage and lowering it into the eons and lassoing our friend and hauling him back up through the constellated gears and pinions of eras and epochs was something we couldn’t get a grasp on, couldn’t plumb, didn’t have whatever tool, whatever rare sextant or theodolite was required for sighting the lines along which we could pull him back to the here and now without him being hoisted from the ground a dead Puritan or quadruped fossil.

T
HE SPRING BEFORE
K
ATE
died, she decided that she wanted to make the girls’ cross-country team when she started ninth grade at the regional high school. She did track at the middle school but disliked just running around in circles, as she called it, on the course behind the school. She was at that age where a lot of kids appear to be and more or less are in shape no matter what they do, but, as limber and slim and athletic-looking as she was, I still could not believe how swiftly she could run the first time I watched her at a meet. She woke
up early on a Saturday to start her serious training and I got up, too, intending to accompany her. I supposed I could manage the mile or two that I figured she was capable of, and I wanted to reconnoiter the route she’d told me she meant to use to make sure she wouldn’t have to cross any dangerous intersections or go for any stretches where she wouldn’t be within yelling distance of a house—even though I knew every stride of the route she’d described, having walked or ridden my bike on it, alone, since I’d been four or five years younger than she was.

As in shape as I thought I was from all the raking and mowing and bushwhacking, I was winded after half a mile. Kate’s legs were longer than I’d ever noticed. She took long, seemingly weightless strides, and appeared propelled not by her own exertions but by the graceful strength of her legs themselves. She hadn’t broken a sweat nor was there any trace of breathlessness when she asked me if I was already pooping out.

“Not pooping out, Kates; just warming up.”

Without breaking stride, Kate looked at the digital runner’s watch Susan and I had bought for her previous birthday. She pushed a button and the watch beeped twice. She undid the elastic band holding her hair in a ponytail, pulled her hair and twisted it up tighter against the back of her head, wound the elastic back around it at the base, looked at me and smiled, and said, “Okay, Dad.”

I knew that I was slowing her down, and that she wanted to run on her own, much faster and much farther than I was capable of.

“Just to Peters’s Pulpit,” I said. “Just to the Pulpit, and then I’ll let you do your thing, okay?”

“Okay, Dad. That’s okay,” she said.

Peters’s Pulpit was another half a mile. I intended to say something funny or nostalgic about the times we’d ridden our bikes there and had our impromptu picnics of chips and juice, but when we rounded the bend that gave way to the meadow with the rock in its middle, I felt Kate accelerate rather than pull up, so I veered off into the meadow and ran toward the rock, crying, “Help me, Hugh Peters! Help this sweaty old tub of guts!”

I kept running toward the rock and didn’t turn back toward Kate but waved my hand high in the air and shouted, “Go on! Go on! Save yourself while you can! I’m done for!” like in the old war movies we’d watched together late at night when she had had a tough time getting to sleep—all those corny John Wayne and Audie Murphy films.

Kate shouted, “Bye, Dad,” and lunged into a pace half again as fast as we’d been running together and disappeared around the bend. I half-sat against the rock, gulping breaths, and looked out across Enon Lake. The water near the shore was like sheer blue glass, transparent, filled with light, the lake floor lined with clean sand and smooth pebbles. Breezes etched themselves across the surface farther out, toward the center. I saw my reflection in the water and it angered and embarrassed me. I looked just the way I imagined I would: closer to middle-aged than I wanted to admit, a little heavy in the chops, sweaty, winded, my hair wet around the edges, the rest stood up by the breeze and salt in my sweat.

The name Enon, spelled Aenon for the first four years of the village’s existence, is from the Greek
ainon
, which is from the Hebrew
enayim
, which means double spring or, more
generally, a place of abundant water. It is mentioned in the Gospel of John. The evangelist baptized in Enon
because there was much water there
. The best of Enon’s water is in the lake, which is spring-fed and famous for its clarity and taste. Whereas five years before, I would not have hesitated to scoop up a handful of water and slurp it down, to show Kate how pure it was, while telling her about its history, about the Indians who’d fished it and the colonists who’d exported it (although I would not have let her drink any, “Because your nice young guts might still get grumbly from the stuff in it,” I’d have said to her, or something like that), now I worried that something in the water might worsen the queasiness I felt from running and lead to some humiliating intestinal predicament as I headed back to the house. This made my mood worse, and I walked home cursing the lake and its clean water, and all the half-bullshit history I’d told Kate over the years, for no better reason than that she’d been a kid.

When I got back to the house, Susan was in the kitchen taking dishes out of the dishwasher and putting them away.

“That didn’t go so well,” I said. I felt embarrassed, not so much at being out of shape and foolish-looking in my old tennis sneakers and sweat shorts, but by how inexplicably angry I felt. I had always anticipated the day when Kate would suddenly seem not like a little kid anymore but like a young woman, or like someone I didn’t know. It wasn’t that I was surprised that she could run faster than me or that she wanted to run on her own without me. It was that it had happened so abruptly and taken me by surprise, even though I felt like I’d prepared myself for it a long time ago.

Forty-five minutes later, I had showered and was sitting
outside with a cold beer when Kate came running up the road. She made a last leap across the seam between our driveway and the sidewalk, her finish line, and checked her time on her stopwatch.

“You
suck
.” She cursed herself with real anger, with an insular, personal seriousness that had become more frequent in the last months.

I knew that she would be provoked by anything that sounded like consolation, but I said, “Don’t worry. You’ll set a better time tomorrow. I screwed your concentration up, coming along, is all.”

“My concentration was fine, Dad. It had nothing to do with you.” She let the screen door slam behind her and stomped up the stairs.

I forced myself not to follow and try to make her feel better or explain why she shouldn’t take her training so seriously. There was a childishness in my impulse to dissuade her from placing such value on and devoting such effort to getting a better time on her run, or to excelling at her schoolwork, because I had not cared about such things in my own adolescence but had suffered the same degree of frustration with myself and the world, had found myself angry or sad for no reason. The beer had gone warm, so I tapped a couple of railroad ties in the retaining wall along the driveway, like I was checking them for rot, then poured the last couple of swigs behind the yew bush and went back inside.

M
Y GRANDPARENTS AND MY MOTHER DIED WHEN
I
WAS MORE
or less fully grown. That’s the way I imagined things should be. I never knew my father; nor did my mother. (He and she spent a night together at a college homecoming weekend she’d gone to with friends. He didn’t tell her his name and they both left the next day and that was that.) I had no siblings. So behind me were the ghosts I always expected to have there, looking over my shoulder. But after the accident, ghosts surrounded me. My whole family made a circumference of ghosts, with me the sole living member in the middle. Or perhaps I was at the end; perhaps my family was not a circle but a procession in which we all had our supposedly proper places but then my daughter ran ahead of me into death. My great-great-grandfather was the farthest spirit back that I could imagine in any detail, because he was my grandfather’s grandfather and my grandfather had known him and remembered a few facts about him. He was a Methodist minister who’d had some kind of breakdown and been taken away and that’s about all my grandfather could recall. Beyond him trailed a parade of phantoms. He would have told me that Kate hurrying ahead into death was a blessing, a mark of grace and mercy that I, myself a grandson of dear old fallen Adam, was not competent to see as such. I found myself
having imaginary conversations with him, in which he tried to console me with that point of view. I imagined myself wholeheartedly agreeing with him, not because I actually felt that way but because it seemed that he would be so convinced of what he said, so certain it was providence, and his certainty would be a comfort, however slight. I never once felt that there was any deeper goodness or benediction in Kate’s death, as easy as it was for me to imagine that idea, even accept its integrity. Because I understood that there are vastly greater meanings in creation to which I have no access did not mean that I could shed my sorrow.

Understanding that my woes were minuscule compared with the sum of the universe did not prevent them from devastating me. I knew that the anguish I experienced was presumptuous, that I pretended to absolute tragedy. If I claimed I was too weak to bear my daughter’s death, didn’t that mean I really had the strength? My persistence in feeling that Kate’s death was the end of the world was an embarrassment, because I knew of people who had suffered the deaths of children from suicide and gunshots and falling from windows, the deaths of siblings to drowning and avalanche, the deaths of friends and lovers and spouses to fever, to falling, to ice, and to fire. I could have bought a plane ticket or rented a car or hopped on a bicycle or in some cases walked to those people’s houses, knocked on their doors, sat in their living rooms, drank coffee, and talked with them about the override proposition or their vacation to Portugal and they would have done what people have always miraculously managed to do, which is carry on when there are so very many reasons why doing so should be impossible. I had a deep and abiding
love for the idea that this life is not something that we are forced to endure but rather something in which we are blessed to be allowed to participate. But I felt no gratitude whatsoever for, and no relief from, the pain I experienced every waking moment, and this life felt like nothing more than a distillation of sorrow and anger. Even after Kate’s death, when my prior, occasional despair became general, I still believed that giving in to it was a failure of character.

And yet. Wouldn’t my sorrows have been the greater if Kate had never been at all? Wouldn’t they? Wasn’t it the case that her short and happy life was the greatest joy in my own? Wasn’t the joy of those thirteen years its own realm, encased now in sorrow but not breached by it? That is what I told myself. The joy of those years had its own integrity, and Kate existed within that. She could not be touched by the misery caused by her own death. Sometimes I had the sense of her watching me and smiling because she saw me in my sorrow and anger and understood that it was a natural part of the comic tragedy of this life. I hoped that the reason she no longer felt sorrow or anger was not because she was inhuman but because she was now wholly human, even if I, yoked to this life, still had to suffer the joy of my life with Kate, unbreachable as it might be, in stark and ruinous contradiction to my life without her. That joy was the measure and source of my grief.