“So it was simply a matter of putting things into perspective. If my cousins could lay down their lives for my uncle, surely I could lay down and sleep for a few hours.
“I rose on a Thursday morning in the second week of my efforts to sleep during the day. I showered, dressed, made my bed, breakfasted and returned to my bedroom, where I undressed, got into the pajamas I had taken off less than an hour earlier, removed the spread from the bed I had just made, got into bed and was asleep almost as soon as my head touched the pillow.
“Separation came quickly, my astral integument peeling off from my body like rind. The trip to Vermont was uneventful.
“I am, perhaps, too sentimental, but it was a place I’d summered when I was a child, where I’d spent all those sharp, bright weeks of un-Michigan youth, where I was a visitor, privileged, glamorous even to myself, cargo’d by all that distant geography of the Midwest, the kid who’d seen Chicago, who’d lived for a time in Detroit, where the automobiles came from, where dozens of factories employed thousands of men simply to tighten a bolt, or just to patrol, take down the names of men talking, where there were machines, assembly lines longer than the main street of my cousins’ New England town, where somehow — I knew it, my aunt did, my cousins — the scale was different, not just the buildings that were bigger and taller, but the people, too, who would have had to be if only to manage those immense planes and perpendicularities. (They asked if there were mountains in Michigan. I told them no. Of course, they said. Meaning, I think, that there wouldn’t have been room for them, that something would have to give way in the fierce moil of all that activity and that of course it would be Nature.) So, welcome as I was, I was looked on by my cousins with something like awe, and if they took me on trails in their mountains or patiently taught me to fish in their streams, or sidestepped with me, hugging the loose timbers for handhold, along the outside ledges of their covered bridges or sneaked me into their granges and meeting halls where we hid in the back or crouched beneath the stage while the grownups argued, or invited me to church on Sunday mornings or quickly hustled me inside their one-room schoolhouse after they had picked the lock or read aloud the strange motto—‘Live Free or Die’—on the New Hampshire license plates on the occasional car parked near the green, or Vergil’d me through the small, ancient graveyard, waiting while I read each tombstone, the dates and names and epitaphs, it was not so much to show off as to brief me, actually lobbying I think, pressing me with information, facts, their identities subsumed even then, if only I’d known it, their decisions already made, goners to the twentieth century and asking only that their mottos, names and epitaphs be taken back with me to what even they thought of as the real world.
“So if I hesitated outside my uncle’s smithy it was not grief, though it may sound like it, not a moment of silent prayer, though it may sound like that too. It was not even tribute. It was nostalgia. Not for my cousins, for myself. For those good old days when they had imbued me with the mystery of distance. (Who had it now, who could hopscotch space like a token on a Monopoly board, negotiate the round trip of half a continent in a piece of a night or day — the astral leapfrogger, the astral miler.) I did not re-attend those old haunts, the greens and streams and trails and halls, graves and grange, schoolhouse and covered bridge, merely taking them in at a glance, no more, the lovely street of the lovely town — it was daylight, not yet noon — and guessing at the weather like a sailor — in repose the astral essence, the astral gist is insensate as coin — gauging the temperature of the late August Vermont morning by the hard edges of the shining clouds against the high sky, blue and crisp as a fresh workshirt, putting it in the mid-sixties, say, from the legible, razor-sharp shadows of the leaves. It could have been twenty years earlier, I could have been that proud, privileged visitor who’d seen Chicago, who’d lived for a time in Detroit. I tell you all this to prepare you.
“The street outside my uncle’s shop was practically deserted. No farmers with wagons were lined up outside waiting. There was nowhere to be seen those cronies I’d heard about or seen myself when I’d made my visits as a child. A single wagon stood unhitched and pulled up against the great, shut, almost barnlike doors at the side of the shop. I could see smoke rising from one of my uncle’s special chimneys but in no great quantity and with no special force. I couldn’t hear anything, neither the ringing slam of the blacksmith’s hammer nor the great low huff of his fire. I went inside. I shan’t set the scene.
“My uncle was alone in the locked shop. Perhaps I had misread the weather signs, I thought, or maybe heat was cumulative, like sweets or starches, and if you stayed around it long enough you began at last to store it, like a fever thermometer that has not been shaken down. Except for his leather blacksmith’s apron he was naked.
“There was a mare with him, a Morgan, I think, a little darker than most Morgans, but maybe less full in the flank and croup. I’m not really expert in these matters, only what I picked up — overheard — from my uncle when I was a kid, but something off about her proportions. Her front, from chest to withers and elbow to shoulder, was full as a gelding’s but she tapered at mid-rib to an attenuated hind quarters and she gave one the sense — listen to this, I refer to the astral pith as ‘one’; you get used to anything — of prow, some foreshortened, figurehead horse.
“Pay attention, listen to me. What do I know about a horse’s proportions? Perhaps something was a little off, but I dance around like this because I don’t know how to say it. I’ve come this far, those two weeks of insomniac days, those four deaths, those five round trips from Michigan to Vermont, and I don’t know how to tell it.
“My uncle was directing the horse like a ringmaster. I don’t mean that the horse moved around him in circles but that my uncle constantly repositioned himself within her arcs and windings, ducked inside her torsions — more sheepdog, really, than ringmaster.
“ ‘How’s that shoe?’ he asked in a low voice. ‘Go ahead, put your weight on it.’
“Then he spoke to it more gently still, his open palms moving in and away from his body, doing the passes of perspective and appraisal, his low voice choked with implication. ‘Sets the hoof off nice.’
“The words were strange. He spoke of her walls and white lines, of her bars and buttresses and frogs. ‘Your elastic was almost threadbare,’ he said. ‘I could feel horn. In places it showed through the pulp like new tooth. Well, your frog’s so big. I never seen such frogs on a mare. I had to hold it with both hands. I had to hold it with both hands, didn’t I? No, no,’ he said soothingly, ‘you got the bulbs for it, sister. It ain’t as if you didn’t have the bulbs for it. Bet you could kick a man to Kingdom Mountain with those bulbs.’
“He might have been a shoe salesman, with all such a salesman’s oblique, evasive flattery. He was almost flirting with the animal, talking in tongues of the equivocal, the shy acrostics of obsession, his words almost matching the shifting position of his hands.
“He never touched it. All he did was look, encouraging its aimless parade around his smithy and constantly adjusting his own relation to it like a man changing seats in a movie.
“ ‘Well,’ my uncle said finally, ‘your owner will be calling for you. What do you say we get into our tack?’
“He turned to some harness hanging from pegs on the wall of the shop, pacing back and forth beside the gear before choosing.