CHAPTER FORTY-TWO
It's dusk and I am coming back home. This afternoon the heat was overwhelming; I abandoned my chores and went to swim in the pond instead. Crossing the meadow the dry foxtail tangled in my legs and the bees knocked against my face, drunk on flowers. In the woods the vines ran their wide, listless leaves over me like hands. Only the dead center of the pond was clear of algae. I treaded water there until my headache went away. Afterward, soaked in a helpless summertime sleepiness, I went to my cave for a nap.
As soon as I'd stretched out I was asleep and dreaming. If I could just remember my cave-dreams clearly I might understand more of myself, but they come from, and are locked in, my second mind. I do know that they are beautiful. This one was. Something about a herd of deer running on the heath, and catching hold of a dappled body writhing against mine, and rolling, and the sunlight coming at an angled glint, and voices in the woods singing, and wet hands and mouths touching my face: I've brought them a gift; I am being kissed, it is wonderful.
When I woke there was a moment where I couldn't remember who or what I was. Then I felt the length of my own body and its bare, fragile skin and I sat up and rubbed my face, stretched my arms out above me in the pulsing, water-song dark, a man again.
.
My clothes were where I left them, crumpled on the bank of the pond. A thought occurred to me- it is a thought that won't stay down, lately- that if my life is destined to be lonely, it may as well be honest. That is why I have stopped with small compromises, such as the boots I didn't put on today, the watch I have stopped wearing. In place of these compromises I have been substituting pleasure, also small, such as the little fish I caught in my fists and ate on the bank; each slippery, crunching bite a reward to myself, I'd decided, for drowning so long in the shame of a forced renunciation.
.
The skylark is done with the meadow, and it's now the hawks' shift. Two of them watch me from their posts as I walk home but the third, the fledgling, flies stumblingly along the treeline, shouting its stuttering call. I love a hawk's voice especially out of all birds: it is not a song at all, it is the cry of a hunter, and it as disquieting as my own.
.
For most of the summer my grief- in particular the loneliness of that grief- was intolerable to the point that I did not function as a man. The loss was with me every moment. I know I spoke to Agnes, to Rosalind; I know that Juke came by again and walked through the garden with me, his arm in mine; that I answered irritating letters from my mother; I know that I woke each morning and made the bed and brushed my teeth and shaved. I was not there. I don't remember what I said. I did not belong to any of those conversations, any of those actions. As my voice spoke I listened to it as though it were a voice in another room which meant nothing to me. Of all those months I do remember one thing clearly: walking in the woods.
So is it any wonder that now, having crumbled to a caricature of a man, I should find it so easy to drop the shell even further? Of course I am keeping the things I love- books, mostly, and humor, and chess, and Harthome. And the small pieces of human joy scattered through the days: Rosalind's high tremulous voice singing in the garden, Agnes brushing leaves from the shoulders of my shirt, the vengeful delight I take in Barker's conciliatory wave. But of the rest of it, not much seems worth retaining. Was I ever any good at it, anyway? Yesterday evening in the sitting room, as I sat cross-legged on the floor to be at a height with Agnes in her tiny embroidered chair, she paused our game of Écarté to reach out and run her hand through my hair, a gesture of affection she hadn't made since I don't know when.
"It's kind of you to play along with me, Henry. I've asked much of you, haven't I?"
Her fingertips stroked my scalp. I grinned at her, a patted dog, and shrugged.
Her voice was distant, almost dreamy. "Some mistakes you are doomed to make twice. Well. Fools have a special place in Heaven, that's a consolation, isn't it? I'm sorry, Henry. You did your best, but I'm sorry that I asked it of you in the first place. I shouldn't have. I won't, any longer." Her hand stilled, and I felt its near-weightlessness, its dry fragility. "Let me instead leave you to what is yours. And I promise I will do my best to tend only to that which is mine."
It was a dispensation. I pulled the hand away from my brow into mine, and shook it. She laughed. Later, after she had won all my pocket change, bid me goodnight, and took herself laboriously upstairs, I left the house in silence by the kitchen door, went out into the crackling blue-black night.
This morning, if she had anything to say about the newspaper bundle on the kitchen draining board, one of Jocelyn's pheasants still warm wrapped up inside, she kept it to herself.