Even Now (13 page)

I told him my favorite hymns, and he told me his. I told him my favorite prayer, and he told me his. A baptismal prayer, oddly
enough, and he recited it—the sweet request for an inquiring mind, a discerning heart—leaning against a tree, there in the
woods, unembarrassed by his audience of one.

So he asked of my children, what they were like, and did, and said. I told him that Mark had once cut open Mexican jumping
beans to discover how they “worked,” how he relied on duct tape to repair everything from bicycles to tennis shoes. We split
a Coke and I told him how Ellen didn’t like the way her new-clipped nails felt against bedsheets and that Mark didn’t like
ironed shirts because they were “crunchy” against his skin. We laughed about Ellen using Wite-Out to give herself a French
manicure and Mark announcing at eight, “I’m afraid of dying because there’s nothing to
do
all day in heaven.”

And as we talked of children, we talked, eventually, of Ceel. Of her childlessness, a condition as chronic and debilitating
as an illness, and how I admired her stoicism and longed for her prayers to be answered. “She never despairs,” I said. “Never
blames. Yet for me it wasn’t until I already had a child that I realized how badly I wanted one.”

I asked him how he’d come to the decision not to have children, or was it the only road to take in his position, a necessity?
Did he ever feel a lack, an absence? “Sometimes,” he said. “During a christening, when I hold this perfect little package,
imagine the life ahead. And yesterday, when you told me how teaching a child to pump a swing is the hardest thing you’ll ever
teach them.” He quoted me. “You put your legs
out
when you go up. . . now fold, fold!”

He’d raked back his hair, the backward-finger gesture I’d come to know. “It was largely Daintry’s decision, I guess. We have
a lot we want to accomplish, so . . .” He smiled faintly. “One of those things that seems like a good idea at the time, like
cutting open jumping beans. Besides,” he said, and gently stepped on a puffball mushroom, “people change. They change their
minds.”

Beneath his foot the globular mushroom collapsed soundlessly in a small cloud of mustardy dust, a volcano folding upon itself.
During those afternoons and conversations, I forgot that he was married and to whom.

*   *   *

And so inevitably we talked of Daintry. We had to; she lay between us.

“Mind if I smoke?” He burrowed through the inside pockets of his blazer and pulled out a cigar. “Daintry won’t let me puff
in the rectory.” I shook my head, watched him trim and light it.

“What’s this?” he asked, pointing to a crude wire cylinder weighted at the bottom with stones.

“Mulch in the making. Eggshells, coffee grounds, broccoli stems.” I swiped at a hovering yellow jacket and tossed an apple
core into the container.

“Won’t it draw rats?”

“Bees, mostly. You worried?”

“Worriers do not schedule Jesus film marathons.” The previous weekend Peter had arranged for five movies depicting Jesus,
from the art house to the commercial, to be shown and discussed at the church.
The Ten Commandments,
even
Godspell,
were expected; the controversial
Jesus of Nazareth
was not.

“You didn’t use
Jesus Christ Superstar.”
She’d had that album. I recalled it precisely, the brown cover with gold lettering. Singing along, we’d thought ourselves
wildly heretical.

“I’ve given new definition to the term ‘bully pulpit,‘” he said.

“I admire your courage. I’d never be that brave.” Cigar smoke meandered gracefully, hypnotizing me with its bluish flow. “Daintry
was.” I drew lines in the dirt with a stick. “Once I watched her cut her own hair.”

“Haven’t you ever cut your own hair?”

I shook my head. “Not like Daintry. She leaned over, grabbed whatever hung down, and whacked off that beautiful black stuff
with one chop of the scissors. Scalped herself with an instant shag. We were thirteen. I thought it was the bravest act I’d
ever seen, until an hour later. She telephoned a crush who wouldn’t give her the time of day. When he answered she held the
receiver to the record player so he got an earful of ‘Mr. Big Stuff.‘”

Peter laughed. “That doesn’t sound like a brave Daintry. That sounds like a thwarted Daintry.”

I gazed at the lesser hills, footstools to the Blue Ridge. “What have you done to her?”

“What do you mean?”

“She’s. . . different.”

“Different how?”

I wasn’t sure how. “Does she still thump in bed?” Peter looked at me curiously. “No, no, I. . . ”

“’No, no, I’ what?” He laughed.

“She used to rock herself to sleep. It reached a point where I couldn’t sleep without the noise of Daintry rocking because
I spent so many nights with her.” I toed a shovel. “We always tried to remember exactly what position we fell asleep in, so
the next morning we could see if we’d moved during the night.” Ambushed by memory, I looked at him with embarrassment. Like
switchbacks of a hiking trail, memory follows an indirect route. “Amazing, what you manage to recall.” But his smile was kind,
indulging.

“We assigned a different fortune to each color scarab of the bracelet I got for my eleventh birthday. Then we’d ask school
friends to pick their favorite stone and we’d predict their future. Entirely invented.”

He tapped knuckles to his chin. “You two were close, weren’t you? Daintry never speaks of it.”

I was quiet for a moment, both wounded and relieved by the revelation. “In the way that girls of a certain age are, to survive,
yes. I was a. . . disciple of Daintry’s.” With the stilled clarity of photographs, visions of us constantly paired flashed
before me: wobbling on stilts, counting pogo stick jumps, selling lemonade on the corner, playing croquet at twilight.

I uncapped the highlighter I used for the columbarium’s blueprint and waved it under Peter’s nose. “Which is better, this
or gasoline?” Too close; I left a small streak just above his lip. “We never could decide which smelled better, Magic Marker
or gas.” How to convey such closeness, the nonsense significance of girlhood’s innocent intimacies? That blue was the best
color in the whole wide world; that seven and nine were girl numbers, one and three were boys. That wishing for something
not
to happen guaranteed the opposite effect.

“I hated ever missing school,” I said. “Not because there was homework to make up, but because I’d miss being with her.” I
zipped the marker in my backpack. “But it was never the same after I went away to school. We didn’t have that intensity of
the everyday. You have to know what your friend is wearing, and thinking, and whose initials she’s scribbling in her notebook.”

“I can’t imagine Daintry scribbling initials.”

“But she did.” Tree bark was rough and uneven against my shoulder. “And when I came home for vacations something had changed.
We weren’t as close. We were just . . . apart. Different.” I tried to recall those homecomings, brief and hurried. At school
I’d dreamed of Cullen, and Daintry, what was known and familiar. Yet once home I’d longed to go away again in an inexplicable
paradox of wanting both the old and the new, independence and security, safety and free fall.

I closed the cooler as if I might shut the dark underpinnings of the paradox inside it and stood, brushing off the seat of
my jeans. “I need to get to work. Not many of these snake days left.”

“What days?”

“Because it’s so warm still. They’re out sunning, soaking up the warmth for their cold blood and the cold winter.”

“Shit!” Peter jumped to his feet, shaking his hand and dropping the cigar. “Bee stung me. Ouch! Damn, it hurts.”

“Let me see.” He extended his arm, a welt rising on the pale skin of his inner wrist. “Stinger’s still there, wait a minute.”
I pulled out the minute splinter. “Hold on.” I reached for the flattened cigar, pinched off the butt end still moist from
his mouth, and pressed the damp tobacco against the reddening flesh.

“Home remedy?”

“The best kind. Sorry. October bees are so dogged and territorial. They must intuit the first frost, realize their buzzing
days are numbered.” Sweat beads had broken out on Peter’s forehead. “Give me this,” I said, easing off his jacket and pushing
him down gently. “Sit a minute.”

A plume of smoke curled beside a windowless house in the valley, a thin gray ribbon against the palette of autumn colors stretching
out before and beneath the shelf of land. Breathing deeply of the tangy burnt aroma, I pointed to the leaf pile, a tiny distant
cone. “One time you asked why we moved. That’s why. So I could smell burning leaves again.”

Peter cradled his wrist in his other palm. I felt his gaze on me, though I looked straight ahead. I knew that gaze, direct
and riveting and interested. “Does Hal know what a romantic he married?”

Though it was only two o’clock, far up the hill the church bell pealed three times, still unregulated to the waning hours
of daylight savings. “There’s something I haven’t changed,” he said. “Every spring, those first few days after daylight savings
begins and I come across some clock—in the car, on the microwave—and think,
Oh, it’s five o’clock, and yesterday it would have been four, and I would have had that other hour.
Isn’t that ridiculous?”

But I understood Peter Whicker’s wistful, silly, profound melancholy for that lost hour.
That makes two of us romantics,
I could have said.

“Caught you,” he said, “goofing off on the job.”

I didn’t move, sit up from lying on my back. Against the azure October sky snowy clouds billowed in great puffed mounds. “I
always believed God lived behind those clouds. They were part of his beard. Bald head kind of rimming over them, fingers on
the top of them as he peered over.” Waiting for laughter, I tilted my head backward to look at him. Instead he pulled a small
black machine from his blazer pocket. “Is that a tape recorder? For what?”

“Taking notes.” He spoke into it, repeating what I’d said.

“You’re doing it all wrong. See, you’re talking into the speaker.” I pointed to the tiny microphone at the end of the appliance.

“No wonder my sermons are garbled. Are you listening yet?”

“To what?” I stepped away, conscious of our closeness.

“My sermons.”

“I like them.”

“Nope. Damning with faint praise is not an answer.”

So I asked him how he wrote them, what inspired him: a person, a passage, a piece of music? Were they week-long endeavors
or sudden, revelatory blurts? Whether he memorized or used notes. He wrote on Saturday nights, he said: late, alone, in pencil,
at a desk. And I could see that, the head bent in concentration, fingers worrying his ear or lip beneath a lamp’s pale cone
of illumination.

“Use yourself,” I suggested. “Things you’ve told me. Getting punished for throwing rocks down the well as a little boy. Your
own life makes you more, I don’t know, personal. Accessible.”

He aimed an acorn at the shovel head. “Go on.”

“What I want from priests is. . . humanness. I want to know they’re human. Then I can connect to you—them.”

“
Religio
means connect. Did you know?”

I shook my head. “I’m not good with definitions.”

That Sunday in the pew I heard my own words from the pulpit, a sermon about a benevolent God. Peter hadn’t used just himself
in his sermon. He’d used me.

“Brought you something.” He’d found a bird’s nest on his way down the hill. Downy feathers still clung to the twigs. “Were
you leaving?”

“Going to look for wildflowers. Trilliums, lady’s slippers, ferns. It’s against the law, but maybe I won’t get arrested for
transplanting them to a church ground.”

“Can I come?” He saw my hesitation. “You might hit the mother lode and need my help.”

We crunched deep into the woods, through leaves and sticks, stepping over fallen tree trunks, holding whip-thin bare branches
for one another. For twenty minutes I saw nothing but dying weeds, leaves, brilliant-hued vines. Then I heard something beyond
our crackling passage, a low trickling gurgle like rainwater in a gutter. I hurried toward the noise and nearly stepped over
it: a spring, barely more than a bubble in the soil, shining wetly on leaves and stones. The spring pulsed clear and cold,
rising only inches before seeping invisibly into the earth again. Surrounding and sheltering the tiny fountain were fronds
of fern, plush moss, waxy galax. And a virtual greenhouse of wildflowers. No longer blooming, but thriving. Peter’s mother
lode. I dropped to my knees, delighted with the lucky discovery.

He appeared above me. “I thought I’d lost you.”

“Oh, Peter, look, a pitcher plant.” I ran fingers down the fragile stem of a single-leaved wildflower no taller than my palm,
searching, hoping. It was there. Seemingly separate from the plant itself was a tiny fleshy jug springing upright from the
moist ground. I gently touched the rubbery curves, the slight opening at its tip. “When I was little, this was the greatest
find in the woods. We pretended these were fairy milk bottles. But if you pick it, it’s ruined, shrivels into nothing. Because
this is the root.”

Peter’s fingers grazed mine as he touched the little bottle. An erratic spiral of falling leaves died nearby, floating soundlessly
to earth. Exaggerated, mingling scents of decay and dryness stung my nose. I thought of Daintry, the other half of
we.
“I’ve changed my mind about transplanting it. It might die if I move it. Two more weeks and it’ll be killed by a hard frost
anyway.” Somehow September had become November.

“And will you still come to the columbarium when the snake days are over?” Peter asked. “Will you still be here?”

I looked at him, the dark eyes, the disobedient hair. This hopeful, playful, compassionate man.

How would I have answered the question that I’d asked of others: What is it that draws you, appeals, attracts?
Boyish but earnest,
I could have said.
Vulnerable. Funny. Gentle. Ordinary.
And though adjectives were enough, they weren’t all.