George never permitted himself to imagine his father. Occasionally, though, when he was fixing a clock, when a new spring he was coaxing into its barrel came loose from its arbor and exploded, cutting his hands, sometimes damaging the rest of the works, he had a vision of his father on the floor, his feet kicking chairs, bunching up rugs, lamps falling off of their tables, his head banging on floorboards, his teeth clamped onto a stick or George's own fingers.
His mother had lived with him and his family until she died. Upon occasion, at meals mostly, maybe because that was the site of her being preempted, outsmarted by her former husband, left at the dinner table with her plans to have him taken away, she would recall what a frivolous man his father had been. At breakfast, she scooped oatmeal into her mouth and pulled the spoon from the clutches of her dentures with a stupendous clanking and sucking and would say something like, A poet, ha! He was a birdbrain, a magpie, a loony bird, flapping around with those fits and all.
But George forgave his mother her contrary heart. Whenever he thought about what her bitter laments sought to stanch, he was overtaken by tears and paused, looking up from the headlines of the morning paper, to lean over and kiss her camphored brow. To which gesture she would say, Don't you try to make me feel better! That man cast a shadow forever over my peace of mind. The damned fool! And even that would make George feel good; her incessant litanies soothed her and reminded her that that life was over.
As he lay on his deathbed, George wanted to see his father again. He wanted to imagine his father. Each time he tried to concentrate and go back, tried to burrow deep and far away from the present, a pain, a noise, someone rolling him from side to side to change his sheets, the toxins leaking from his cancer-clogged kidneys into his thickening and darkening blood, reeled him back to his worn-out body and scrambled mind.
One afternoon, in the spring before his death, George, his illnesses consolidating, decided to dictate memories and anecdotes from his life into a tape recorder. His wife was out shopping and so he took the recorder down to his work desk in the basement. He opened the door between his workshop and tool shop. There was a woodstove in the tool shop, between the drill press and metal lathe. He crumpled up some old newspaper and put it in the stove, along with three logs from the half cord of wood he kept stacked in a remote corner of the shop, near the door to the bulkhead. He lit a fire and adjusted the flue, hoping to warm the concretey chill of the basement. He returned to his desk in the workshop. There was a cheap microphone plugged into the tape machine that would not stay upright on the clip collared around it. The clip was so light that the twist in the wire running from the microphone to the recorder kept flicking it over. George tried to straighten the wire, but the microphone would not stand, so he merely placed it on top of the tape recorder. The levers on the recorder were heavy and required some effort to push down before they clicked into place. Each was labeled with a cryptic abbreviation and George had to experiment with them before he felt confident he had found the right combination for recording his voice. The tape in the recorder had a faded pink label upon which had been typed, Early Blues Compilation, Copyright Hal Broughton, Jaw Creek, Pennsylvania. George recalled that he and his wife had bought the tape at one or another of the Elderhostel college courses they had taken during one or another summer years ago. When George first pressed the PLAY lever, a man's voice, thin and remote, warbled about a hellhound on his trail. Rather than rewind the tape, George felt that such a complaint might be a good introduction to his talk, so he just began recording. He leaned forward into the microphone with his arms crossed and resting on the edge of the desk, as if he were answering questions at a hearing. He began formally: My name is George Washington Crosby. I was born in West Cove, Maine, in the year 1915. I moved to Enon, Massachusetts, in 1936. And so on. After these statistics, he found that he could think only of doggerel and slightly obscene anecdotes to tell, mostly having to do with foolish stunts undertaken after drinking too much whiskey during a fishing trip and often enough centered around running into a warden with a creel full of trout and no fishing license, or a pistol that a doctor had brought into the woods: If that pistol is nine millimeters, I'll kiss your bare, frozen ass right out here on the ice; the lyrics to a song called Come Around, Mother, It's Better When You're Awake. And so forth. But after a handful of such stories, he began to talk about his father and his mother, his brother, Joe, and his sisters, about taking night courses to finish school and about becoming a father. He talked about blue snow and barrels of apples and splitting frozen wood so brittle that it rang when you split it. He talked about what it is like to be a grandparent for the first time and to think about what it is you will leave behind when you die. By the time the tape ran out an hour and a half later (after he had flipped it over once, almost without being conscious of doing so), and the RECORD button sprang up with a buzz, he was openly weeping and lamenting the loss of this world of light and hope. So deeply moved, he pulled the cassette from the machine, flipped it back over to the beginning, fitted it back into its snug carriage of capstans and guiding pins, and pressed PLAY, thinking that he might preserve such a mood of pure, clean sorrow by listening back to his narrative. He imagined that his memoirs might now sound like those of an admirable stranger, a person he did not know but whom he immediately recognized and loved dearly. Instead, the voice he heard sounded nasally and pinched and, worse, not very well educated, as if he were a bumpkin who had been called, perhaps even in mockery, to testify about holy things, as if not the testimony but the fumbling through it were the reason for his presence in front of some dire, heavenly senate. He listened to six seconds of the tape before he ejected it and threw it into the fire burning in the woodstove.
Saw grass and wildflowers grew high along the spines of the dirt roads and brushed the belly of Howard's wagon. Bears pawed fruit in the bushes along the ruts.
Howard had a pine display case, fastened by fake leather straps and stained to look like walnut. Inside, on fake velvet, were cheap gold-plated earrings and pendants of semiprecious stones. He opened this case for haggard country wives when their husbands were off chopping trees or reaping the back acres. He showed them the same half-dozen pieces every year the last time he came around, when he thought, This is the seasonpreserving done, woodpile high, north wind up and getting cold, night showing up earlier every day, dark and ice pressing down from the north, down on the raw wood of their cabins, on the rough-cut rafters that sag and sometimes snap from the weight of the dark and the ice, burying families in their sleep, the dark and the ice and sometimes the red in the sky through trees: the heartbreak of a cold sun. He thought, Buy the pendant, sneak it into your hand from the folds of your dress and let the low light of the fire lap at it late at night as you wait for the roof to give out or your will to snap and the ice to be too thick to chop through with the ax as you stand in your husband's boots on the frozen lake at midnight, the dry hack of the blade on ice so tiny under the wheeling and frozen stars, the soundproof lid of heaven, that your husband would never stir from his sleep in the cabin across the ice, would never hear and come running, half-frozen, in only his union suit, to save you from chopping a hole in the ice and sliding into it as if it were a blue vein, sliding down into the black, silty bottom of the lake, where you would see nothing, would perhaps feel only the stir of some somnolent fish in the murk as the plunge of you in your wool dress and the big boots disturbed it from its sluggish winter dreams of ancient seas. Maybe you would not even feel that, as you struggled in clothes that felt like cooling tar, and as you slowed, calmed, even, and opened your eyes and looked for a pulse of silver, an imbrication of scales, and as you closed your eyes again and felt their lids turn to slippery, ichthyic skin, the blood behind them suddenly cold, and as you found yourself not caring, wanting, finally, to rest, finally wanting nothing more than the sudden, new, simple hum threading between your eyes. The ice is far too thick to chop through. You will never do it. You could never do it. So buy the gold, warm it with your skin, slip it onto your lap when you are sitting by the fire and all you will otherwise have to look at is your splintery husband gumming chew or the craquelure of your own chapped hands.