Remembering (6 page)

“Learn!”

“What you don't know, you'll have to learn.”

“What?”

“I don't know. But you must accept this as given to you to learn from, or it will hurt you worse than it already has.”

He knew that she had missed nothing. He sat under her words with
his head down as he had sat, when he was a boy, under a scolding. But she was not scolding.

“Given!” he said.

“You haven't listened,” she said, reminding him again of his grandmother. “But don't forget.”

He had become a special case, and he knew what he thought of that. He raged, and he raged at his rage, and nothing that he had was what he wanted. He remained devoted to his lost hand, to his body as it had been, to his life as he had wanted it to be; he could not give them up. That he had lost them and they were gone did not persuade him. The fact had no power with him. The powerlessness of the fact made him lonely, and he held to his loneliness to protect his absurdity. But it was as though his soul had withdrawn from his life, refusing any longer to live in it.

He was out of control. He
is
out of control. For months now he has not had the use of his best reasons. He is where he is, two thousand miles from home, where nobody knows where he is, in a room he has never seen before, because of a schedule that he made once and did not especially want to make when he made it. For months he has merely fallen from one day to another, with no more intention than any other creature or object that is falling, only seeing afterwards, too late, what his intention might have been, but by then fallen farther.

And this fall of his involved or revealed or caused the fall of appearances. He no longer trusted the look or sound of anything. He no longer believed that anything was what it appeared to be. He began to ask what had been secretly meant or ignorantly meant or unconsciously meant. And once his trust had failed there was no limit to his distrust; he saw that the world of his distrust was bottomless and forever dark, it was his fall itself, but he could not stop it.

He had long known that his quarrels with Flora proceeded along a line of complaints that they were, in fact, not about — or this had been true of their quarrels in the old days, before he had given his hand to the machine. Then their quarrels, as he knew or would know sooner or later in the course of them, were about duality: They were two longing to be one, or one dividing relentlessly into two. Their marriage seemed to live according to no logic at all, or none that he could see. It was the origin
of the quarrel that divided them, and the selfsame quarrel, having consumed whatever fuel occasion may have offered it, would join them together again, and they met in an ease and joy that Andy knew they did not make, and that he at least did not deserve. It was as though grace and peace were bestowed on them out of the sanctity of marriage itself, which simply furnished them to one another, free and sufficient as rain to leaf. It was as if they were not making marriage but being made by it, and, while it held them, time and their lives flowed over them, like swift water over stones, rubbing them together, grinding off their edges, making them fit together, fit to be together, in the only way that fragments can be rejoined. And though Andy did not understand this, and though he suffered from it, he trusted it and rejoiced in it.

And then his trust failed, because his trust in himself failed. He had no faith in himself, and he had no faith in her faith in him, or in his faith in her. Now their quarrels did not end their difference and bring them together, but were all one quarrel that had no end. It changed subjects, but it did not end. It was no longer about duality, but about division, an infinite cold space that opened between them. It fascinated him and held him, even as he feared and hated it. Always there was something that he burned to say about it.

At times, in their quarreling, he knew he was crying out to her across that abyss, and he knew she heard him but would not pretend it was a call she could answer. Sometimes he knew he was crying for her to pity him for his dissatisfaction with her. He knew there was no door leading out from that. If he wanted to be free of it, he must stop it himself, and receive no congratulation from her for stopping it. He knew he was living the life history of a fraction, and that the fraction was growing smaller. He saw no help for it.

“Do you know what you need?” she said to him one day.

“What?”

“Forgiveness. And I want to forgive you. All of us do. And you need more than ours. But you must forgive yourself.”

She was crying, and he pitied her. And he knew she had told the truth, and it made him furious.

He did not trust her to love him. He did not trust himself to trust her to love him.

“You don't love me.”

He made her furious, and was glad of it, and was sorry he was glad.

He could not win his quarrel with her and he could not quit it. Nothing in his life had ever so exhausted him. He would sit in the kitchen at night, after the children were asleep, and argue with her. All his effort would be to keep his anger and his distrust, the real subjects of the quarrel, in the dark or in disguise.

She would meet his attacks bravely, hopelessly, often in tears. “It's
you
you're talking about. It's not me. You're mad at me because I can't stop you from being mad at yourself.”

He would change the line of his attack, returning to his little trove of complaints against her, and she would check him.

“That's true. But it's not what you mean. You don't trust me. Or yourself. You have no faith.”

She was right, and he could not win. But he knew nevertheless how to wound her. He would perform another flanking movement and attack again. He was ingenious. He was never at a loss. The agility of his maneuvers surprised him, and he took a mean pleasure in them. He persisted toward a cessation and a peace that he could not achieve. And finally he mystified himself. At some point in the quarrel he would realize that he could not remember how it had started or how it had proceeded or what it was about, that he was lost in its mere presence. And through it all he felt inside him the small, hard knot of his guilt.

Only exhaustion stopped him. Finally, worn and emptied by his hopeless anger and Flora's hopeless resistance, he would have barely the strength to walk to bed. In bed, her back turned to him, he would lie awake. And then he would sleep, but only to dream a dream that would wake him and keep him awake in fear.

He dreamed that it became necessary to set fire to his house, and he set it afire, only to realize, as the flames altogether enveloped it, that his family was inside.

He dreamed that he was in a battle, about to throw a hand grenade. He hesitated, thinking of the humanity of those he meant to destroy, and the grenade exploded in his hand.

He was walking up the creek road. A woman with snaky hair was standing on the roadside, looking down at the water. He meant to pass by her and not be seen. As he drew even with her, she turned and with
her stony eyes looked him full in the face. At his outcry the room returned.

“What?” Flora said.

“Nothing.”

He heard a heavy engine approaching. He ran around the house and stood beside Flora. A spotlight, surprisingly near, shone directly on them. He cried out, “
Hey!
” and woke.

He picks up the hook where he left it on the floor, too strange to belong anywhere, incomplete in itself, helpless to complete any other thing, and begins putting it on. His hand fumbles at the fastenings. He labors under the balking impulse to use his right hand to install the hook on his right arm. Finally he is taken again by rage at the oddity of his handless arm and the hook and his incompetent left hand. He flings the hook into the waste basket, pleased by the sound of the heavy fall of it. “Lie there where you belong, you rattledy bastard!”

He goes into the bathroom and without turning on the light fills the basin with cold water and lifts it to his face, handful after handful, grateful for the coldness and wetness of it, and dries his face and hand. He feels in his shaving kit for his comb and combs his hair, and stands still again in the twilit little cubicle, waiting for a new intention to move him.

He is coming near to the end of a long labor of self-exhaustion. He is almost empty now. The world is almost absent from him. It is as though he still stands, emptied and shaking, behind the rostrum in his last moments at the conference. The conference was about, and was meant to promote, the abstractions by which things and lives are transformed into money. It was meant, as if by some voiceless will within the speaking voices, to seize upon actual lives and cause them to disappear into something such as the Future of the American Food System. He is oppressed by all that has oppressed him for months, but now also by the memory of his voice and of all the other voices at the conference, abstraction welling up into them, a great black cloud of forgetfulness. Soon they would not remember who or where they were, their dear homeland drawn up into the Future of the American Food System to be seen no more, forever destroyed by schemes, by numbers, by deadly
means, all its springs poisoned. For years Andy has been moved by the possibility of acting in opposition to this, but he does not feel it now. It has gone away. He feels himself strangely fixed, cut off, unable to want either to stand or to move.

And yet there is a memory flickering in the stump of his arm, and it is not that of the clasp of the hooks' fastenings. It is the imprint of the thumb and fingers of a man's hand, hard, forthright, and friendly.

When his first crop of alfalfa was ready to harvest in mid May, they came to help him — Nathan and Danny and Jack, and Martin and Arthur Rowanberry. Or, rather, they came and harvested his hay, he helping them, and doing it poorly enough in his own opinion, with embarrassment, half resenting their charitable presumption, embarrassing them by his self-apology.

Nathan, who ran the crew — because Andy was useless to do it, and somebody had to do it — mainly ignored him, except to give him orders in the form of polite questions: “Don't you think it'll do to go up this afternoon?” “What about you running the rake?”

When they were finished, Andy, speaking as he knew out of the worst of his character, said, “I don't know how to thank you. I don't know how I can ever repay you.”

And speaking out of the best of his, Nathan said, “Help
us.
” So saying, he looked straight at Andy, grinned, took hold of his right forearm, and gave just a little tug.

That was in another world. That memory in the flesh of his arm could not be stranger if it were some spirit's parting touch that he had borne with him into the womb.

The incident gave him no ease. It placed an expectation on him that he could not refuse and did not want. He did go to help them, but only as a nuisance, he felt, to them and to himself. He had little belief that they needed him or that he could help them. And, faced with his uncertainty, they seemed not to know what to ask of him. Except, that is, for Nathan. Nathan ignored him as he was, and treated him as if he were a stranger who required an extraordinary nicety of manners, speaking to him almost exclusively in polite questions. How would he feel about doing this? Would he mind doing that?