3
IT HAD NEVER OCCURRED TO HOWARD TO TELL George about his own father. Howard thought to himself, That's right; my own father was always in the room upstairs at the walnut desk tucked under the eaves, composing. He was even there when we ate dinner and when I did my lessons. He would comment on this sometimes; he would say, What an odd thing, how I am here eating peas and there, too, scratching at my sermon. We said nothing, but a shiver would run through me at the thought of rising from the table at my father's left-hand side and passing into the narrow unadorned hallway and up the narrow stairs, which were the only way to the second floor, to the study, where I would see my father bent over his work. Sometimes I spent entire dinners imagining myself in a sort of loop where I continually went between my father at his desk and my father at the dinner table, always baffled in my intentions by his ability to be in two places at once and my limitation to only one. My father was a strange, gentle man.
A wind would come up through the trees, sounding like a chorus, so like a breath then, so sounding like a breath, the breath of thousands of souls gathering itself up somewhere in the timber lining the bowls and depressions behind the worn mountains the way thunderstorms did and crawling up their backs of them the way the thunderstorms did, too, which you couldn't hear, quite, but felt barometrically-a contraction or flattening as of tone as everything compressed in front of it, again, which you couldn't see, quite, but instead could almost see the result of-water flattening, so the light coming off of it shifted angles, the grass stiffening, so it went from green to silver, the swallows flitting over the pond all being pushed forward and then falling back to their original positions as they corrected for the change, as if the wind were sending something in front of it. The hair on my neck prickled from nape to crown, as if a current were passing through it, and as the current leapt off of the top of my head and if I had my back to the trees, I would feel the actual wind start up the back of my neck and ruffle my hair and the water and the grass and spin the swallows in its choral voice stirring all of the old unnamable sorrows in our throats, where our voices caught and failed on the scales of the old forgotten songs. My father would say, The forgotten songs we never really knew, only think we remember knowing, when what we really do is understand at the same time how we have never really known them at all and how glorious they must really be. My father would tell me this from his desk up under the eaves while I was across the pond tracking otters or fishing off the fallen fir tree near the point. I would hear his voice and look across the water to the white of our house, just visible behind the line of trees, to where I knew his open window was inhaling and exhaling the plain white curtains my mother had insisted on in the name of minimal domestic propriety. He whispered in my ears: Bring string and bottle caps and broken glass; bring candy wrappers and nickels and smooth stones; bring fallen feathers and fingernail parings; the old songs have shaken our small home to the ground again and we must rebuild. And our house across the pond would flicker and then blink out, disappear, because it had been such a fragile idea in the first place. Then I would again be on the far shore, looking at where we would build our home, once we cleared the woods and dug the foundation.
How can I not wonder what it would be like to sit in that cold silver water, that cold stone water up to my chin, the tangled marsh grass at the level of my eyes, sit in the still water, in the still air, bright day behind me lighting the face of everything under the dark millstone cloud lid in front of me, watching the storm coming from the north? There is my father whispering in my ear, Be still, still, still. And yet you change everything. What was the marsh like, waiting for the storm before you came and kneeled in the water? It was like nothing. Watch after you leave the water, now cold and regretful, miles from home, certain of the belt on your backside, the cold shoulder, the extra chores; watch. Watch the water heal itself of your presence-not to repair injury but to offer itself again should you care to risk another strapping, because instead of the sky being dark and the trees and stones bright, the next time the sky will be bright but the world gloomy. Or there will be rain with no wind. Or wind and sun. Or a starry sky laced with clouds that look like cotton thread. You could not do better if you passed a thousand acts of Congress.
0, Senator, drop your trousers! Loosen your cravat! Eschew your spats and step into that shallow, teeming world of mayflies and dragonflies and frogs' eyes staring eye-to-eye with your own, and the silty bottom. Cease your filibuster against the world God gave you. Enough of your clamor, your embarrassing tendencies, your crooking of paths in the name of straightness. Enough of your calling ruin upon the Moor and the Hindoo, the Zulu and the Hun. None of it gains you a jot. Behold, and be a genius! At a breath, I shall disperse your world, your monuments of metal, your monuments of stone and your brightly striped rags. They will scatter like so many pins and skittles. I shall tire myself more quenching a candle in its sconce. Phew! There: you are gone.
I should say that the sermons my father gave on Sundays were bland and vague. Parishioners regularly drifted off to sleep sitting up in their pews and it was common to hear snoring coming from this or that corner of the room. My father's voice droned on about the importance of every little creature in the field, enumerating practically every crawling, swimming, flying beast he could and reiterating that it, too, was as important as any other of God's creations. And consider the rats in the grain, he would say. And the barking crows, and the squirrels collecting nuts. Are they, too, not God's creatures? And the foraging raccoon.
There was no correspondence between these inept speeches with the passionate, even obsessive writing he did up beneath the pitched roof. It seemed, in fact, that the more time my father spent in his study composing, the worse his sermons became, until they were practically no more than incoherent mumbling, in the midst of which, here and there, if one was actually listening, you could pick out the name of the odd prophet or the citation of a psalm or chapter or verse. The people of the town had little patience for mumbling, and what they at first must have taken as perhaps an especially indirect intelligence, one perhaps even given to constructing his sermons as parables in emulation of Christ, they soon got fed up with and began to complain about first in discreet letters, then directly to my father on the way out of church. My father responded to this criticism with genuine surprise, as if shocked that what must have really been on his mind had not been included in his sermon. My goodness, Mrs. Greenleaf, he would say, I am so sorry the sermon was not to your liking. The path is narrow. I must have wavered, he would say, and look confused. This was the first sign that he had in some way become unhitched from our world and was already beginning to drift away.
Finally, the situation became so alarming to the congregation (after a particularly baffling Sunday-morning service, during which my father at one point clearly mentioned something about the devil being finally not so bad after all) that the parishioners demanded a special meeting to address their new minister's deteriorating condition. On the Wednesday morning he was to meet with the deacons and the congregation, my mother practically had to dress him herself. He was pale and unshaven and seemed like a child. My mother saw him and cried, What are you doing? We have to go to the church for your meeting. Good Lord, good Lord. Throughout my father's deterioration, my mother had kept her thoughts to herself. She cooked and ironed and kept his house and must have trusted at first that my father was in some sort of a slump, that his weak sermons and increased time working on them must be part of a natural ebb and flow in any minister's career. Perhaps she even believed that he was going through a kind of healthy crisis of belief, one from which her husband would emerge with his faith refreshed and his convictions stronger than ever. Whatever she thought, she never spoke a word about it.