Learning to notice eyes, I saw Liz had practically black hair and blue eyes but no hair on her arms whereas Naomi had fine flax-white hair. My sister, who would trim her hair into the sink and leave it there, spent an hour brushing her hair looking thoughtfully or irritably elsewhere so that I would ask her anything at all in the way I had with words. Liz had taken my hand pulling me somewhere without looking at me when I went with her and her mother and father (he put his hand on my head) and her sister Naomi to the IGA (my father debriefed me later). Today she had said, “You busy?”
Naomi her sister is tall (“big-boned is what she is,” my father had said). I thought breasts, breasts either loved you or didn’t, and saw you always and waited, I liked all girls and all breasts, they were equally near. Naomi was always about to be a bully. Instead, she would say something funny — taking charge, though — so you thought you knew, but then you didn’t, as if her being nice was a coincidence or cut off from your hope that she would be. Last weekend she went with her mother and father and Liz quite happily to see her mother’s cousin and her cousin’s son who had won a Purple Heart, which I had Liz describe. I decided to call Whelan “Whelan,” the way Naomi did.
I told her this friend of my father’s was coming today from Vietnam, Frederick. Because she said, “Does he live there?” because I gave her a look. She asked what he was doing there, because I remember I said, “Prob’ly shooting gooks,” because I didn’t know honestly what he was doing, he wasn’t in the military but was against the war and had brought me a small, beautifully written-on thimble-size silver cup made by a Vietnamese once, and I had said “gooks” when Liz didn’t know what it meant, much less that we didn’t say that word, lest you be burned at the stake as a Hawk yet her father Whelan I found I couldn’t quite imagine saying it either, though I knew the word from my own father and his war against those who used it.
It is afternoon, nobody called me to lunch, Liz’s fishing pole is leaning in a corner, why did she leave it? Was she mad? I step out of my shed and look around.
The woman I am telling much of this to shakes her head, I see what you meant, that you were like the place. I laugh, but she does not. A pleasure in each of us.
Down near the brook, I devise an unheard-of canoe route across Vermont west to the Hudson like an early white trader along our rushing stream, often shallow or going nowhere, portaging where I had to, and thence down to New York where my dad’s at his rally if I’m asked on this past July 4th. The war was magical, if I’m honest in the warm, remembering woods on the river bank among poplars and elder bush. Hearing “Mekong” in the mercurial eddy around a rock where a dark trout waited suspended in gloom. Hearing in the near distances “Cao Dai, Tayninh” from a crow, two crows, three crows, somewhere low overhead. Somewhat as I, minor and privately American and not quite my father’s son, if I’m honest, sitting on the toilet at night conceived the war historically and technically and as a promise of curious successes in my later life as if government men or their deeds my father worked non-violently and violently against and rightly abhorred were some type of money in the bank for me. The war a magic of commuting copter gunships frowning down on a screen and field of sniper-infested jungle foliage, leaning, banking, sliding to shape at the controls virtually the space of the air just above what was never to be fully known below the trees and down in the famous VC tunnels which enthralled me in their construction laid out for us in detail by a visitor, the mined geography of a war without front lines. Control, a technique of control, doing things at a distance employing remote lighted panels like NASA’s in Florida and Texas. The tools and equipment of war my great-uncle liked. In particular, the sonar gear on his 311-foot Coast Guard cutter which they would test in northern waters in the vicinity of blackfish or “bigger fry” though sonar was pretty much saved for annual maneuvers with the Navy. I had my woodwork still, a boat or viol; and my town friend coming out — I wanted to get my hands on his air rifle and wondered what sudden death was like; and, as I can explain, though guilty of disloyalty, I was at the same time riveted and inspired, tall for almost twelve — looked thirteen at least, a more independent type of person. Where do crows go in the winter? Nowhere much, said Rob, friend of the family, intimate of my mother, sometime Nature mentor of mine:
:who knew two dozen mushrooms (not counting those that grew on a huge white ash in off the blacktop back near the covered bridge) — knew the scat of a dozen “critters,” had a moondial by his attic window at home and of the heavens had talked to me last summer and this at night trash astronomy I could tell he really felt though he offered me what would interest me and another evening brought his bronze sextant — the graduated “limb” a sixth of a circle (sex-tant, now more than a sixth) to teach me angular altitudes: the stars crowded and fixed, “astronomer, you’re always losing things,” a shooting star descending not as if overhead were the legendary canopy we hear of but a dark flat and deep field graphed briefly and laughably by this stroke fading across a screen — which took us to the summer triangle, Deneb to the left and Altair below and overhead to Vega and the tiny parallelogram harp above this island of Vermont a melancholy angle in his words and the voice, and how to bring the horizon up to the star.
Surprising how little music in the constellations. Harp, lyre, swooping eagle (you see Altair, the brightest), falcon, vulture. I opt for vulture, Rob said, at odds one night the summer previous but he did not fret in front of me. “Harp star, tortoise,” he said drily. “That cold blue glare”—did I know Lovecraft? — “yaller to Australian telescopes, I understand, isn’t it green, don’t you think it’s green?” The herd-boy and Vega — the weaving girl — more “trashy astronomy” (Rob called it) that night, but it was the Pole Star, North Star, Polaris twelve thousand years ago and in twelve thousand AD it will be again. Our sun, our solar system moving in the general direction of Vega at twelve miles a second — it would take it 450,000 years to reach Vega — twenty-seven light years to Vega might as well be infinity. The cosmos is in fact unthinkably big, let it go, let it go bang.
Of my boat, Rob said there was hard and soft maple, both of them hardwood. Mine was the soft variety. The woman to whom I tell these things can see the boy had a number of interests in those days. The boat…and the fishing pole…you and Liz went fishing.
Yes, but…how was I like the place? — you said you saw what I meant.
Yes. How were you like the place? You were there.
CANOE REPAIR
It was sunset and the boy was angry and wanted to be somewhere else. His father listened to him breathing. What did the boy expect? That’s the difference between you and I, Zanes’s fifteen-year-old son concluded cuttingly. And all Zanes had wanted to know was what was the use in soaring hundreds of feet above the granite hills and lakes in an expensive thing called a hang glider that might get you killed. Naturally Zanes would want to take a look at the contraption to see how it was made. What was so terrible about a father wanting to do that? The boy wanted to be somewhere else at this moment and at the same time he didn’t. Zanes saw dark lake water cooling the airs above so rapidly that, venturing into lake space, an airborne figure loses altitude and tilts steeply downward. They stood side by side staring at the lake. Zanes was glad of the lake and the long alien canoe passing along the far shore.