Ragged Company (34 page)

“Yes. A long time ago,” I said. “I left something beautiful and valuable and precious because I was afraid I couldn’t keep it. Because I was afraid that I wasn’t strong enough to hold on to it.”

“Was it still there? When you came back, was it still there?” she asked.

“Yes. It was.”

“Was it still beautiful? After all that time, was it still beautiful?”

I closed my eyes to hold back the rush of tears. I closed my eyes so I could hold on to the world, so I wouldn’t collapse in
shudders of agony on her lap. I closed my eyes so I could breathe and I held my hand up to my face to cover my mouth and pinch my nose so none of the hurt would erupt in front of her.

“Yes,” I said finally. “It was still beautiful.”

“Was it still yours?”

“No,” I said, looking at Greer, who had tears in his eyes. “No, it wasn’t. It had grown into something even more beautiful and valuable than it was before, and someone else was taking care it.”

“Like Eudora.”

“What?”

“Eudora grew into something more beautiful and valuable too.”

“What do you mean?”

“I don’t know where she came from. All I know is that she has always been here. Always been with me. Wherever I went, she was always there. She got pretty big for the pot after a while and I didn’t know what to do. But Phillip knew. He took part of Eudora and promised to take care of her for me and she got more beautiful. Would you like to see?”

“Yes,” I said. “I’d like to see.”

“Can we?” she asked Greer.

He wiped the tears from his eyes and stood up. “Yes,” he said. “We can do that, dear. I’ll get the lights.”

He flicked a switch on the wall and the lights on the back deck came on. Sylvan stood up and moved toward the door. Then she stopped. She turned and looked at me. She looked at me with the wide open look of the young woman I met so long ago and then she reached out and took my hand and led me to the door. The others stood and followed us out.

Greer was standing by the steps at the back of the deck and he guided Sylvan to the top riser. “Careful,” he said.

We walked down wordlessly, Sylvan still clutching my hand, and stepped onto the lush grass below. “Over there,” she said, pointing. “And there, and there.”

I was amazed. All along the property line, along both sides and along the back, was one long hedge of Eudora, one long stretch of jade plants, healthy, succulent, and vibrant.

“He took care of it,” she said.

“Yes,” I said. “He did.”

“Isn’t she beautiful?”

“She certainly is,” I said, looking at her. “She certainly is.”

“She got to be more.”

“Yes. She got to be more.”

“So maybe you don’t have to be sad about the thing you left. Maybe whoever’s taking care of it now has let it get to be more.”

“Yes.”

“Can I give you something?”

“Yes.”

She walked over to a small structure resembling a greenhouse beside the deck stairs. She bent over and reached inside. I looked at Greer and he closed his eyes and nodded. I waited. She came back holding a potted plant in her hands.

“It’s Eudora,” she said. “Maybe you can take her with you to where you live and take care of her. Would you like that?”

I smiled. “Yes. I’d like that very much.”

“Jonas?”

“Yes?”

“It’ll be all right.”

We stood there in the amber light and looked at each other. Something in that depth of shadow, in that hushed space just at the edge of darkness, made all the years disappear. We were Jonas Hohnstein and Sylvan Parrish and she had just given me a part of the world. We were young. We were alive. We were lovers. We were on a journey neither of us could describe adequately enough to cover the territories we explored together. I smiled. She smiled back. She reached out and took my free hand and it was like being enfolded in that amber light, sealing us within it forever—intact, whole, memorable, a keepsake.

“It really will be all right,” she said.

And I believed her.

H
E WAS GONE AGAIN
when we woke up the next mornin’. We was gonna walk around the beach together an’ he was gonna help me grab some driftwood on accounta I wanted to get some for One For The Dead’s garden. He said we’d do that before we went to our rooms but he wasn’t there when I went to get him up. His door was open a crack so I just walked right in. He wasn’t there. At first I kinda figured he was downstairs gettin’ something so I sat on his bed an’ watched some TV. When the show ended an’ he wasn’t back I started to get worried an’ when he didn’t come in after another show was over I went an’ got Digger. He snooped around in his room an’ then we both went to One For The Dead’s room. When we told her she just sat in her chair an’ nodded her head real slow before she said anythin’.

“The hands of time are heavy,” she said.

“What’s that?” I asked.

“It’s what Timber said last night to Sylvan. That time’s hands are heavy. I think that when he got back here he started to realize how heavy they really are and he has to get used to that.”

“I still don’t understand.”

“Timber’s been walking a long time, carrying something he thought he could never put down. Now, since he came here and found Sylvan again, saw her, talked to her, he realizes he doesn’t have to carry it anymore and he doesn’t know how to walk without that weight.”

“Oh. You mean he’s gotta learn how to walk again?”

“Yes.”

“How’s he gonna learn how to do that?”

“I don’t know.”

“Alone, I guess, huh?”

“I think so.”

“Are we gonna get the cops to look for him again? Do we gotta fly to some other place now?”

“I don’t think so. Not this time. I think that wherever Timber
needs to go to settle this with himself is a place we won’t find him. He’ll make sure of that this time.”

“How come?” I asked, worried now.

“Well, Dick, it’s like a bear when it’s wounded. Instead of being around other bears or around any other animal, that bear will walk far into the bush to be alone. Then it’ll find a good place to lay out where it can lick its wounds, maybe roll around in the mud and let the earth work its magic on the hurt, and spend as much time alone as it needs to get better. To heal.”

“No other bears know where he went?”

“No. I guess the bear doesn’t even know itself, really. Not at first. It just knows it needs to get away. Get away so the other ones close to it don’t have to watch it hurt. Don’t need to see it learn to walk without the pain.”

“Timber’s a bear?”

“Yes,” she said. “A very old, wounded bear that doesn’t want to let the others see its pain.”

“It’d be all right,” I said. “He could be hurt around me an’ I wouldn’t bother him.”

“I know, Dick. And Timber knows that too. But he’s an old rounder bear and rounder bears really only know how to do things the one way.”

“Do rounder bears come back when they’re better?”

She took my hands in hers. “I hope so,” she said. “I really, really hope so.”

W
E WAITED FOUR DAYS
. We remained in our rooms at the hotel and waited for him. Digger and Dick cruised the streets of the Skid Row area, hung out at the missions and soup kitchens in vague hope that familiarity might bring him to those spots. Margo and I spent time on the beach scanning its length for a tall walking man, perhaps waiting for the sea to carry its balm to him like a message in a bottle. James agreed that it was pointless to
involve the police and we resolved to bide an appropriate time and then head home. I understood. Maybe more than all of them, I understood his pain. There had been so many times through the years that I had imagined myself walking into a room and seeing Jenny one more time. She’d be sitting in a chair just like Sylvan had—comfortable, cozy, at ease—and I would cross the room silently, bearing all the years on my shoulders, and slump down in front of her and tell her everything I had never taken the time to say, all the things that time had never allowed me to say, and I would feel the heavy hands of time release me. But dreams are dreams. For most of us, they never materialize in the concrete world and it’s best they don’t because we’d never say the things we imagine ourselves saying in dream state. Hearts have vocabularies all their own, after all. So I understood that he didn’t get to say what he most wanted to say and I understood that he could never go back. You dream hard sometimes, and waking is cruel. So we waited and we walked and we wondered until the night we were supposed to fly out.

“We need to see the house again,” Amelia said.

“Why?” I asked, with caution. There were inescapable parallels here that frightened me in their accuracy.

“Because that’s his mourning ground. That’s where his life changed. That’s where the course of things swung in an unbelievable direction and it’s where he’d go before he did anything else.”

“You’re sure?”

“Yes. He knows about mourning grounds. He’s heard me talk about the shadowed ones and their need to return to the places where life was altered forever. It’s where he’d go. He’d want to heal from it.”

So that night, we stood in the twilight and looked at the small pale green house where someone’s dreams had fractured. It was a house. Just a house. It stood in the hushed light of that fading evening innocent and calm, waiting like houses do for lives to animate and define it. It was peaceful.

She opened the door before we got there, stepped onto the front step to greet us. “Your friend was here,” she said. “Four days
ago. We found him standing in the backyard early in the morning. It’s lucky I remembered him, because Jack wanted to call the police. He was cold so we gave him coffee.”

“Did he say anything about where he might be heading?” I asked.

“No. He just asked if he could leave something here.”

“What was that?”

“Over there,” she said. “Beside the garage.”

I think we all knew it was Eudora. I know I did. I walked over to the garage that used to be a woodcarver’s shop and I knew he would have left her here. No one spoke. We all stood and looked at the tiny sprig of jade plant hugging the earth, reaching for the sky. I looked around at the yard, at the verdant green bowl it created, and wondered how lives, cupped in the roundness, the fullness of life itself, can crumble. I wondered where you’d go to heal from that. In my experience, there was nowhere that had made that possible. As I looked at the trio of rounders gazing helplessly at a small fingerling of plant life pressed into the ground, I understood—briefly, fleetingly—that pain, like spirituality, needs community to find its truest expression.

“She got to be more,” I said.

I
DIDN’T GO BACK
. I wanted to. More than anything, I wanted to go back and sit at her feet and tell her about the life I’d led since I saw her last. But there was nowhere for the words to go. She would just sit and look at me, unknowing and innocent. So I walked away again. I walked away to think. I walked away to figure out the how and why of fate, of hope, of dreams. Dreams. Of all the things we carry, they are the lightest and the heaviest all at the same time. I had dreamed for all those years. Dreamed of Sylvan. Dreamed of us. Dreamed of love. But I always woke up. Always emerged again into the world where dreams are haunting things, because they have no power in the real world. Looking
into those beautiful eyes again and seeing nothing reflected back was a dream deferred. I had dreamed that she was still there, and making my way back across the country I had allowed myself to dream that seeing me again might rekindle everything. But there was nothing to rekindle. Not for her. For her, the world was a blank slate every day, and she had a man who helped her fill it. She had no need of me. She had no need of history. She had no need of something tossed away, lost in the
clock, clock, clock
of departing footsteps. I wondered whether I did, though, and that was why I walked.

I walked to a valley far away. I walked to a farmhouse where a young boy carved a small cow out of rough pine. I walked to a family that had lived in wonder almost thirty years and talked to them in halting sentences about where I’d gone, what I’d done, and who I’d been. I talked to them about a woman they had never met who had been the promise of a future generation and who was now far removed from those kinds of dreams. I talked to them about being lost, about the great voids in this world where a man can remove himself from the promise of anything and everything. I talked to them about dreams and dreaming and how dreams are fleeting always, leaving nothing behind in their wake but the vague hope of more dreams, bigger dreams, brighter, bolder, more hopeful dreams that never seem to come once one is dashed. I spent a week with them. I spent seven days walking in the past wondering whether it held enough to call me back to the farm where it had all begun. I laid my hand on that life and felt it, recognizable and foreign at the same time, and walked away again.

I walked to a small town on the opposite coast of the country. I walked to a house I had never visited and introduced myself to people who had lived in wonder almost twenty years and talked to them about a daughter who had been their promise. I talked to them about a love that had been my promise, about how that energy had shaped my world and how the loss of it had left me shapeless, deformed, and crippled. I talked to them about a pale green house on a tree-lined street, about a jade plant, and about a drunken man who had erased it all as casually as a drawing in the
sand. I talked to them of booze, how I lived in it, how it made it easier to ignore but not forget the feeling of something inscribed on your skin like an abandoned tattoo: unfinished, undefined, ugly in its lack. I told them of the life she had, the man who cared for her, and where to go to find her. There was no need to say I’m sorry after all that time. Sometimes language is unfulfilling, sometimes words can never lead you where you need to go, sometimes a solemn look is all the phonics time requires. I offered that look and then I walked away.

I walked to the streets of the city. I walked to the haunts I used to frequent like a ragged spectre and asked them for admission. I asked them to allow me to disappear again, to crawl back down into the depths and pull the concrete around me one more time, enshroud myself in it, allow its hardness to infuse my heart, my mind, my spirit, to weigh myself with nothingness. I walked there for days and for the very first time I felt like I did not belong there. I sat under a railroad bridge one rain-filled night, alone except for the whisky in my coat and her, the vestiges of her. She had made me more. She had lifted me beyond this forever. She had rekindled a fire, an ember at first, a struggling cinder beset by the winds and random breezes of doubt and fear, but a fire nonetheless. There was really only one way to honour the love that we once held so sacred, one way to validate it in the face of twenty years of denial and drunken absolution. If I loved her, then I would reclaim the life that she had empowered, reas-sume the boon she had granted. So I walked to a supply store the next morning and ordered wood and tools and knives. And then I walked back home.