“You just do your work,” said the man. He was not favorably disposed toward my father and was said to include him among flag burners. “You like to go fishing?” he said. I said we had fished the brook. He knew I meant with Liz. I bore down on my hunk of maple, which was how I suddenly saw it. “We go over t’the lake one night, got the outboard.” Liz’s father meant they would take me. I wondered how many in the boat. Liz’s older sister Naomi who was fourteen who I was sometimes preoccupied with. The mother…My country neighbors who knew all about my father having a little brush with another car in the covered bridge the other night that was not his fault.
My mother Claire’s elbow and shoulder bending across for the far A string, her wrist, the station of her knees, the amber-varnished belly of the cello inside which was a spruce patch she’d had me feel with my fingers — I witness her though I’m not there — and who cares about these little things that come with an entire day and night in one long blink of someone’s eyelids, these signs of Nothing? (I’m no musician!) but I have a reason to recall because the cellist broke off playing and for a second, as I stopped too at my woodwork (called that by my great-uncle who wrote me letters on USCG stationery) nothing came next. Yet now without missing a beat she was singing, but with no real, no fleshly severing from the long-drawn pressure across the string which hadn’t reached the end of the bow but passed it on to her voice. Funny or something, except it wasn’t — I heard it on my knees like sound meant for me, or someone. Mexican or what my dad called “south-of-the-border,” her song was inviting — not like the deep and aggravated solo I could hum that she’d been practicing so you couldn’t tell if the patient practicer were going back to get it right or Bach had written it like that. But now that I heard it, both voices against the presence of Liz’s father’s slightly threatening presence, I think the Mexican-sounding serenade was a lot like the Bach — who am I to say? — the way Caribbean Spanish from the Korean grocery or on the taxi radio follows syllable upon syllable so steadily, Liz’s father with me in my tool shed, then gone. Had I been rude? Yet having latched my door and turning the whaleboat over and over, I knew I could have approached my mother even with company if I had thought fit, my mother and her way of speaking.
I think it stimulates the woman I’m telling this to (it stopped her in the middle of a sentence she had to give it some thought, this natural relay from string to voice not missing a beat by someone inside a house unseen by me working outside — though inside my own tool shed). “I see, you sort of take off from one to the other — she was playing and suddenly she saw you—” “It wasn’t me she saw,” I said, “if it was anyone,” for the woman was almost flirting with me like a palmist, while I had been in the first place reminded of the cello-voice by something in her story.
“Your sister — she liked camp?” inquired the woman listening to me. Not especially.
Launched by its own lightness, my model my old boat for a second got fusilaged and decked kayak-like like smart materials responding to emergency signals, earthquake or ticking bomb, yet a second later wasn’t a boat any more. Varnished mellow under the layers of inland silence in which that person on vacation would make music: and so did the one bird out at that late morning hour extract such comfortable hollowness and morality from a tree trunk. It makes the tree a building, me inside coated with a mold of intrigue, boy inertia, flesh, hearing historically again and again a car on the ground, my dad an hour ago departing (as if he’d taken something) — the need for a plan.
But when she left off playing to sing and her hooded voice more true than the cello reached me, bending over my fingerprint gouges, boat-carver feeling the wood’s commanding depth that as there was less and less of it seemed less and less shallow, she was singing in the late-morning stillness crowded with small sounds in fact or the inner hum of that summertime day of 1966 to him—my father I felt — in my shoulders, at the root of my tongue, or literally my heart wanted it so — though he had gone to town. And Rob might be there with her visiting. In my palms I was making more than a boat. I think now, What could be more than a boat or more than me? I felt what I was making must be more than a boat. Or must turn into more. I was stuck, and responsible, and doomed, but excellent, no more than I deserved.
Sliding in behind the wheel, my father had said out the window, “The boat, now.” I didn’t know if it was a boat or what it was, I said, in despair. “You don’t?” my dad said; “well, if it’s something else, stay open, you owe it to yourself.” “I’ll keep it open,” it came to me to say, meaning the work I was finishing, and wondered if it was an open solution I was thinking about.
He knew how to look at me: that’s fairly stupid, his mystery look had said, or that’s incredible or dumb, you’re a fool — not a kid, a fool — I must have found in the wide thin lips of a rich face — or that’s a genius remark, go your way. How could you owe a thing to yourself? was in my mind to ask him. But I was the tooled, eight-to-five genius of the place and of departure; darkly separate and free and you’re free to kill me if you think I need it.
My father had had to show up at the town office that morning to explain a car-on-car meeting three nights ago in the covered bridge: you had to laugh seeing them disappear — one set of headlights off maybe (probably), the approach on one side straight, on the other looped like a hairpin — the collision muffled and comic stars shooting out of the bridge the middle of the night: which car had entered first? But the other driver was someone we knew well. I saw two cars disappear at opposite ends into the bridge and heard the rest, the overall, large structural impact in my mind. My dad hadn’t let me come along this morning, I had rested my elbow on the roof, it was nothing. Maybe it was being at his side. He thanked me, I was taking responsibility, he said, practically twelve and looked fourteen. It was only the town office, but they had a jail cell in the basement with a bunk. Car window rolled down to speak to me, “Should have seen the other guy,” my dad said, flipped the key: ignition, confirmation, blast-off Going Into Town.
“Never explain,” he said. Advice of high quality I have not been able to take. The other car, I imagined its front fender scraped with our “California Cream”—the grille maimed, door wouldn’t open, important leak underneath. My father said we would see. He widened his eyes out of their sockets almost, winked (more like a full facial squint or tic to close his eyes), blew out his cheeks — no problem. “Hey, you’re getting big”—as if he hadn’t been keeping an eye on me, “Haven’t seen you in weeks,” he goofed, he squeezed shut his eyelids and gunned the motor.
My mother had taken a her-side-of-the-family view of this, intrigued only by the chance that my father might get charged, an old story “coming true.”
“A risk of arrest?” asked the woman listening to me.
Only demonstrations.
The sweet song was to her absent husband or me or a friend. I couldn’t make out many words in the melody in this land-embedded, heat-hushed place softly grinding with subconscious insect existence, their soft parts, their hard parts, sharing supposedly with us their sanctuary wild life. It was some wit in the fathom and touch, the string note freeing the voice, I would say now. Though also a specialized risk all over me of my parents, and one between them that fixed my fair value alongside that of my currently absent sister—me, in the sense that in some way I couldn’t do anything about my existing, a pitch of light understanding between my parents. There was nothing much I needed to do—to fail or excel. It was all right. A value estimated swiftly — or destined — between them, those two intimate aliens; a level I was at, equality — but to what? I had a parent at all times. I took my own advice.