Igloo Factory--Fourth Installment

FOUR

FATHER, SON AT HOLY GHOST

“Ting, Tingle, Ting….”

--Krista Saulstein’s wind bell

For the rest of that sweltering summer of 1968, Reed stayed close to the Igloo Factory. He went to the Jewish market on Kirkland Street with Sugar from time to time, just to see all the remarkable sights along the way and notice how everyone turned their head to watch Sugar pass. He walked over to Cambridge Common with Meyer on occasion to talk with the Freaks and ‘get the lay of the land’, as Meyer called their journeys. He would wander a block or two in either direction down Broadway by himself on some early mornings before the heat was too oppressive. Beyond that, he stayed close to his new home. He wasn’t ready to move around too much—fearing getting lost and thinking to himself that since he had been brought this far he should wait around to see what happened. He kept listening for the Voice.

Most of the regulars at the Igloo Factory stayed close as well. Jerry was an exception. He left each morning to spend the day at a storefront counseling center near Central Square. Even though Jerry was under authority not to practice as a priest, he could work as a counselor. He did draft counseling for mostly Black and Hispanic young men who didn’t want to go to Viet Nam. Jerry, it seemed to Reed, was one of the few in the Factory who had an inkling about what was going on beyond Broadway. Meyer certainly didn’t care.

“What’s the news from the front today?” Meyer would ask Jerry from time to time. But as soon as Jerry would start telling him about the conflict in south-east Asia or the young men he worked with, Meyer would change the subject.

“Don’t you care about the war?” Reed asked Meyer once, more curious than condemning.

“Of course not,” he said, “and you don’t either.”

“But I have opinions…,” Reed began.

“No you don’t!” Meyer snarled. “You told me that when all the pretty little words stopped registering in your cerebral cortex, you stopped having opinions. You told me that after a bottle of apple wine.”

Reed realized Meyer was right. Meyer seemed to remember everything anyone ever said around the Factory, even if they didn’t say it to him. Meyer took great pride in his memory…and in being right.

“Maybe it was the plum…,” he added.

“What was?”

“The wine we were drinking when you told me about your poverty of opinions…. I don’t remember which.”

“Meyer’s memory is remarkably selective,” Jerry once told Reed. “He can recount conversations verbatim that you had two months ago if it proves his point. But he can’t remember what someone said in the last sentence if it makes him wrong.”

“I’m beginning to notice,” Reed responded.

“Meyer’s mind is like a cul-de-sac—there’s only one way in and one way out,” Jerry continued, “and Meyer decides which way is which. In a lesser person it would be a character flaw. With Meyer, it’s just peculiar.”

Jerry pronounced the word “PE-cu-li-ar”, betraying a soft Southern accent. He was originally from Raleigh, North Carolina but after finishing seminary served churches in Maryland. He had been a hard-working, if unspectacular priest, with no peculiarities except an almost obsessive interest in the Civil War. Jerry knew more about ‘The Wore’, which is how he always pronounced it, than anyone Reed had ever met. He specialized in quirky little facts: the names of the mulatto children of Confederate generals, what kind and how much whisky Grant drank before each major battle, the number of farm animals killed on Sherman’s mad march to the sea, the size of General McClelland’s sexual organ.

It was the Civil War that resulted in Jerry’s being “inhibited”.

“That’s what the church calls it, Reed, the technical term for semi-defrocked.” Jerry didn’t seem embarrassed at all about his troubles with the church, which always surprised Reed. Jerry stared at him and said, “Inhibited, isn’t that a medieval sounding thing?”

“Frockin’ inhibitions!” Meyer yelled from his room off the kitchen where Reed and Jerry were talking and drinking Schlitz.”

Jerry smiled and shook his head. His cool gray eyes twinkled as he looked at Reed. “Meyer needs some inhibitions,” Jerry said in a stage whisper.

“And Jerry needs frocked,” Meyer called.

Jerry had been the Rector of a small, elegant parish in a small, elegant Maryland town halfway between DC and Baltimore, just off the Baltimore/Washington Parkway. “Smells and bells and very high tone,” Jerry described it. “Professional class refugees from the cities seeking safety, tax shelters and high church Anglicanism,” he described the parishioners.

Reed knew people like that and wondered how Jerry related to them. “I love those people, Reed,” he said. Reed believed him.

“Jerry IS those people,” Meyer shouted from the next room. “Jesus on a bike, Jerry’s family raises racehorses!”

Everything was decent and in good order between Jerry and the elegant members of his parish until he started talking to Jesus about The War.

“Now this is not easy to believe, Reed,” Jerry said, growing suddenly serious, “but I’d go down to the Potomac on my day off and read about The War. I’d take lunch and a nice wine and a blanket and sit beside the river, working on some problem I’d discovered in the history. It gave me great pleasure. Do you understand?”

Reed tried to remember ‘pleasure’, what that had been like. But since he had trouble understanding 'reading a book', beside the Potomac or otherwise, he probably didn’t understand.

“At any rate,” Jerry continued, ignoring Reed’s confusion, “Jesus started coming down to talk with me about The War.”

“You mean Jesus, like in the Bible?” Reed asked.

“No, you illiterate asshole,” Meyer called, “he means Jesus like the Hispanic juvenile delinquent who delivers the Globe when he’s not to stoned to ride his bike!” Jerry and Reed heard a thump from Meyer’s room. He’d fallen off his bed laughing.

“You’ve probably guessed Meyer doesn’t believe all this,” Jerry said, smiling.

Jerry didn’t know for quite a few weeks that the man who came to join him on the bank of the Potomac to talk about The War was Jesus. “He was just a normal looking guy,” Jerry told Reed, “he looked a little like Yogi Berra with a beard….”

“What was he wearing?” Reed asked, thinking it an appropriately attentive question.

“I don’t know,” Jerry shrugged, “jeans and a Maryland University tee shirt, shorts and a tank top….”

“The Son of God has lots of clothes!” Meyer wailed.

Jerry never seemed to get upset, not even with Meyer at a time like that. Jerry appeared to genuinely enjoy how Meyer made fun of his talking to Jesus. Maybe, Reed thought, talking to Jesus did that for Jerry.

“But after a while,” Jerry said slowly, his accent deepening, “I knew this guy was something special. He knew things about The War that no one should have known. And when he listened to my ideas and thoughts there was a gentle intensity that…it’s hard to describe…. It’s just like knowing, ‘really knowing’, that was listening completely.”

Meyer moved silently into the room. He leaned against the sink beside the table where Jerry and Reed were talking.

“Then this one day I brought up the whole question of the loss of life in the War. I still wasn’t sure who he was, but I was thinking that day about how many people died just so that I could have something to read about on my day off. So, after we ate lunch, I said to the guy….”

“You ate lunch with Jesus?” Reed asked, startled inexplicably by that detail.

“We had some nice pate with French bread and an orange and a bottle of a nice Chardonnay I’d grown fond of and….”

“O, for Christ’s sake, Jerry, get on with it!” Meyer hissed.

Jerry smiled. “’All the people who had to die’, I said to this funny guy who’d been joining me for a month or so. ‘I have trouble with that’, I said.”

The three of them were quiet for a while, thinking of all the dead people from The War. Meyer’s Airtemp was humming in the next room. The Coke machine was humming out in the hall. Outside, beyond Broadway, Cambridge was humming. It was growing late.

“And then,” Jerry said, barely louder than the collective hums, “in words I can’t remember for the life of me and for what must have been an hour but seemed like a few moments, he told me all about it.”

Reed wanted to ask, “all about what?” but it didn’t seem appropriate.

“All about what?” Meyer asked, inappropriately, but almost reverently.

“Mostly he told me about this little slave boy in Georgia named Jefferson Andrew Smith, a boy about John Henry Davidson’s age, who was killed by his own mother. His mother had stolen a pistol from the slave owner’s house when the slave owner ran away when he heard Sherman was near. Her name was Lila and she wasn’t very bright and didn’t realize the Union Army wouldn’t harm them. She thought that Sherman’s army would take her son and rape her. So Lila and Jefferson were hiding in the chicken coop until she heard the roar of the Union’s horses. She wrapped her son in her arms, draping her arms around him like a sweater on a cool night, told him she loved him and shot him in the head. Then she shot herself in the head.

“That little boy’s great-grandson, had the little boy lived, would have been the first African-American ever elected to Congress from the state of Georgia. Instead, that little boy and his mother died in chicken shit.”

“Jesus told you this?” Reed was caught up in the backwash of the story, losing the thread.

Jerry stared at him. Jerry had a way of staring right into Reed’s slumbering soul. “Who else could know this?” Jerry asked.

According to Jerry, Jesus thought those two deaths were the most tragic and senseless and lamentable of all the tragic, senseless, lamentable deaths of The War. Not only would the Union soldiers not have harmed the boy and his mother, the Major in charge of burning that plantation had been a chicken farmer from New Hampshire. He couldn’t bear to needlessly kill chickens. So the only man-made structures left standing as that brigade swept toward the sea were chicken coops.

“I laid on my blanket beside the river and cried for an hour about that boy and his mother. Jesus finally took me in his lap and rocked me like a baby though I was bigger than he was. When I finally finished crying, he peeled another orange and fed it to me, section by section. There are no oranges like that one in Maryland…or anywhere…. The juice ran out of my mouth and down my face, sweet-stickiness mingling with my tears.

“Then, when the orange was finished, Jesus said, ‘Don’t you worry about that story anymore, Child. That boy and his mama are okay now and always will be. I keep them near to me.’ While he was saying that, I knew that he was Jesus. I just knew it. I never asked, it would have been…I don’t know, impolite….” Jerry paused and blew his nose into one of Factory’s fine linen napkins. The he said: “We met again, the next two Fridays. We didn’t talk about The War anymore. I don’t remember talking much at all. We’d eat lunch and watch the river flow. But I did ask him that second Friday, because I somehow knew he wouldn’t be coming anymore, if he would hold me in his lap again. And he did.”

Jerry’s eyes were shining. Meyer restrained a strange noise, perhaps a sniff, and went to his room. Reed sat in stunned silence. He’d never met anyone who had talked to Jesus about The War. Or anything.

“Jesus,” Reed whispered.

“The very one,” Jerry said.

A few weeks after Jerry’s Friday’s with Jesus ended, he gave a sermon about it. It was an anti-war sermon since Jesus obviously hated war. The week after the sermon, at a special vestry meeting full of troubled and elegant vestry members, Jerry tried to explain how Jesus made him feel when he fed him the orange and rocked him like a baby by the Potomac. Words failed and the best Jerry could do was undress. Jesus, according to Jerry, make him feel naked and free, new-born. Because of his accent, Jerry pronounced ‘naked’ as ‘necked’.

Jerry’s bishop, Jerry told Reed, was an understanding man, a good man, who would have liked to talk to Jesus himself about The War, or anything. And Jerry’s bishop knew someone who knew someone who knew a certain Brigham Francis….

Jerry put HONK IF YOU KNOW JESUS bumper stickers on the VW bug and the big, red VW bus that belonged to the Factory. He once told Reed, “I meet lots of Christians driving around Cambridge.”

Meyer later told Reed that Jerry was a very bad driver.

Krista Saulstein was a mystic from Sandusky, Ohio. She is perhaps the only mystic Sandusky ever produced. Coal and natural gas and steel is what Sandusky is known for, not mystics. On the other hand, as Meyer was quick to relate, most really good mystics came from odd places.

“Think about it, Reed,” Meyer said, waxing eloquent about mystics, “there isn’t a lot of evidence for mysticism emerging from cosmopolitan, overly-educated places. Urban, sophisticated soil isn’t the seed bed of mystics. Deserts and small towns, backwaters and by-ways, whistle-stops and obscure islands—those are the breeding grounds for mystics.”

Meyer was, by his own admission, about as mystical as a Buick axle. Meyer, to the best of his memory, had never had an even faintly mystical thought. Meyer’s thoughts were more akin to wrought iron and tempered steel than to starlight and smoke. He believed that the daily Red Sox box scores in the Globe were as close to the ethereal as he dared to tread. Yet he was fascinated by mysticism and mystics.

“You and I, Reed,” he said, “are the much needed ballast to the Universal Starship. We are common and ordinary as plywood and carpenter’s tacks. We are pedestrian with a capital P. Our names should be ‘T. Reed Linoleum’ and Meyer T Wallboard. We are the surfaces and backgrounds of life. Krista, on the other hand.... Well, Krista is simply magic.”

Reed agreed about Krista—she was, obviously, a mystic—but he wasn’t so fast to rate himself as basic building material. Krista could see into the window of the future. She could ring bells by the force of her soul. She was also darkly beautiful and mysterious—like a moss covered cave with free flowing ground water running black and cold, silently within the cave. And Reed came to believe, Krista would someday make a perfect candle.

Krista stayed even closer to the Factory than Reed did. She seldom left the house, not even to buy wax. Pierce would go into Harvard Square twice a week to buy two shopping bags full of the purest bee’s wax for Krista. Since Meyer wouldn’t trust Pierce with either of the cars, he had to walk to the hobby shop and back. On the way back, he carried four seven pound blocks of wax in each shopping bag. And Pierce never once complained, though Pierce seldom said anything that wasn’t in someway a complaint. Bad-ass Pierce seldom had a good word for anyone or anything, but he would have walked to Timbuktu carrying 56 pounds of beeswax for Krista. Like Meyer said, she was magic.

“One day, Reed,” she would say each day as she began melting wax in huge pots on the big industrial stove in the Factory’s kitchen, “I will make a perfect candle.”

Krista’s face was smooth and oval and faintly oriental. Her body was long and lithe and electric. The oversized work shirts she always wore clung with sweat to her valleys and ridges. When she worked with wax, her face would shine like fine oil and her long, midnight hair would glisten like spun darkness. She always reminded Reed—for some reason—of apples, over-ripe and crushed, in high, damp grass.

“It will be like giving birth,” she would say about her perfect candle. “It will be the only candle I have ever made. It will be the only candle I can ever make. It will burn without smoke, without melting, and the fragrance of its burning will fill the whole room. And the light will lighten my mind.”

When she finished saying things like that she would seem spent and exhausted, but her face would be serene and a slight smile would linger on her lips. There was something so powerfully sensual about her in those moments that Reed would try to look away. But he never could.

“Will it be a mystical candle?” he would ask in a whisper.

Krista would close her eyes. “It will be the Perfect Candle. The True Candle. God’s Candle.”

They said those things—or things much like them—over and again in the Igloo Factory’s kitchen, waiting for the wax to melt. Each time, Reed believed her more.

Krista could ring a bell. She had hung a small oriental bell over the kitchen sink. It had a butterfly painted on it in intricate, tiny brush strokes. Krista would sit in one of the straight-backed chairs around the huge table and make it ring. Most everyone came to take it for granted. Meyer, ever the agnostic, tried to explain it.

“Convex heat,” he said one night, sitting at the table looking up from a high school physics book he’d checked out of the Cambridge City Library. “I’m not sure what that means, but it must be how she does it. Something about all the air currents that damned melting wax creates—eddies and flows and counter-currents to beat the band—whole fucking room’s full of convex heat. It makes the bell ring.”

“But she can do it on cue,” Jerry said, tossing back his seventh or eighth Schlitz of the night. “How do you explain that?”

“Meyer doesn’t explain,” someone said, “Meyer pontificates.” Reed looked around the room. It was Pierce. Pierce and Sugar were standing near the door, leaning against the opposite door frames. Sugar giggled. Meyer was wearing a wet-suit even though it was breathlessly hot outside. He and Bob Copeland, the Action News Weatherman, were expecting thunder storms. Meyer sometimes obsessed on weather reports. He looked up through his face mask and stared at Pierce.

“That shows what you know,” he hissed, as if from under water, I’m not even Catholic.”

It was strange to have Pierce around for late-night talks. Pierce usually avoided being in the same room with Meyer. Rumors and legends abounded in the Factory about Pierce and Meyer. Mostly they had to do with Pierce selling drugs and Meyer threatening to slit his throat if he didn’t stop. No one was quite sure about that—some people even whispered that Pierce was a ‘nark’ investigating Meyer and the Factory. But everyone was in agreement that Meyer and Pierce in the same room was cause for a high pressure system to delight Bob Copeland.

Reed continued to look around the room. He’d only been at the Factory for 6 weeks or so, but the people in the room had become as familiar to him as sunlight, as darkness, as breath. Yodel was rummaging through the restaurant sized refrigerator, looking for yogurt. Yodel ate yogurt like a bear eats honey.

“I’d like to hear you answer Jerry’s question,” Yodel said, his head almost inside the refrigerator. He backed away as a bear might back out of his cave. “How does Krista make it ring on cue?”

Meyer seemed annoyed, though it was hard to tell through his diving mask. He shifted in his chair. The wet suit made loud, rubbery noises.

“She never does it on cue,” Meyer said, “that’s the whole point. She just sits here like some beautiful, Sandusky Buddha with her eyes closed and waits for the sucker to ring. Then she smiles that damn mystical smile and goes to bed. We all sit here amazed. She’s just waiting for the convex heat to build up. It’s simple. You guys are morons….”

“Well,” Sugar said from the doorway, and as she spoke, her voice filled with emotion like a rapid mountain stream filling with rain from a sudden cloud burst. “I just think Krista tells the bell to ring and it rings. Just like someone tells me I’m a good person and it fills me up. Just like that.”

By that time, Sugar was crying. Everyone watched her like watching for water to boil so you can cook an egg. Only Pierce moved. He gathered Sugar up in his arms like an egg.

Pierce shook his head. “Jesus Christ, Meyer, you and your skepticism.”

Then the two of them went outside into the dying heat of Cambridge. Everyone was quiet for a while, like eggs waiting to be boiled.

“Bad-ass Pierce thinks he’s Francis of Assisi,” Meyer said, though no one laughed. “Well, Sugar’s no moron, but the rest of you are,” he said, pushing away from the table. “I’m off to the roof.” He waddled toward the stairs. Reed hadn’t noticed his flippers before. In the distance, out beyond the Pru, toward the north Atlantic, summer thunder rumbled.

The next morning, Reed took the oriental bell on its thin piece of thread, from over the sink. Krista glanced up from the melting wax without emotion.

“I’m going to lie down for a while,” Reed told her, “ring if you need me.”

Krista’s face was waxen, shining with heat as he left. He hung the bell on the same nail that held up Wally’s HAVE YOU WASHED YOUR HANDS? sign and laid on his bed. He was thinking of Krista’s calm look and feeling embarrassed that he was so occidental, mid-western and skeptical. He blamed it on not having slept enough. After the brutal thunder storm, he had stayed up with Sugar and Meyer as Meyer made up with her. Rain ran off Meyer’s wet suit and they drank strawberry wine in his room until almost dawn. By then, Sugar had forgiven him and was staggering drunk. Stumbling up the stairs, Reed caught Sugar as she almost fell. She was as fragile as a bird, as cool as some sea creature, as smooth as an egg.

“Isn’t Meyer something?” she said, giggling at her fall.

Reed’s heat hurt and his ears were hollow and full of cotton. His mouth tasted like someone’s attic, all dusty and dry. He was drifting off to sleep and the Voice was calling to him. “Ting. Tingle. Ting,” the Voice said.

Reed sat up in bed and held his breath.

Then the bell rang again: “Ting, Tingle. Ting.”

He got up and moved cautiously toward the door. The bell quivered but did not ring. Reed touched it as he would have touched a baby bird. It began to move in his hands.

“Ting. Tingle. Ting,” is all it said.

He was down the steps three at a time and skidded to a stop at the kitchen door. Krista was bent over a steaming pot of wax. Her back was toward him. Her blue work shirt held her form—the gentle arc of her shoulders, the long, smooth plain of her back. She did not look up.

“Hand me the wax thermometer from the table,” is all she said.

Krista stared into the window of the future as others stare into a mirror. She saw the future as others see their sleep creased faces in the morning light. The future shined in Krista’s eyes.

“You will fall in love while you are here,” she once told Reed, shortly after he learned to believe in her. She touched his forehead with her fingertips as she said it. “And you will hold great pain in your arms.”

“Will the pain be worth it?” he asked.

“Pain is worthless,” she told him, “but suffering makes us pure. So, Reed, it will seem ‘worth it’ to you.”

“Ting, tingle, ting,” Reed said to himself.

*

As the summer passed, days melting and running together, Reed tried out his new life like someone trying out new glasses with bifocals. After the months of utter self-absorption, he found himself growing observant and curious. Being at the Igloo Factory was much like finding himself in Tibet or Albania, some alien land. He began to wonder about how it all worked and what it all meant. Being Midwestern, white and secretly wealthy, he found himself wondering about ‘the money’.

“Who pays for all this?” he asked Sugar one day while she was perched on the Schlitz cooler reading some new poet Meyer had found her.

“All what?” she asked, clearly distracted.

“The beer, the Cokes, the bottomless grocery jar,” he said, “the electric bill for all these air-conditioners, the air-conditioners…the whole thing.”

“Meyer pays,” she said, anxious to return to her book.

“But how?”

“Mostly in cash, I think,” her lips continued moving but she was reading silently again.

Sitting alone with Meyer in the kitchen one afternoon, Reed asked him directly. “How do you pay for all this?”

Meyer had carried the Igloo Factory sign into the kitchen from the hall. He was supposedly thinking about how to reattach it to the outside of the house. Mostly, he was reading it over and over.

THE IGLOO FACTORY

(pre-fab igloos, spec.)

“It’s the spec I don’t understand,” Meyer said, mostly to himself. “Could it mean a fly spec or one-third spectacular or a spec of difference?”

“I don’t know,” Reed said, adding quickly, “how do you afford all this?”

“Why do you ask?”

“I was just wondering….”

Meyer’s face lit up. He sprung to attention, which was appropriate since he was wearing a World War I dough-boy uniform that was too tight.

“That’s the ticket!” he said, very animated, dancing around the room. “You’re beginning to ‘wonder’, Reed! That’s wonder full! That’s real movement. I told Brigham you’d be a quick study. We’ll have you back to normal in no time.”

“But not much has happened….”

“Nothing much has happened!” Meyer was incredulous. “Are you daft, boy? There have been numerous Meetings and wine drinking and candle making your walks to the corner in the morning. Sugar’s making you a scarf and Yodel is writing you into his next book. My God, boy, Hell’s a poppin’ all around you. I’ve almost convinced Jerry to say a novena for you, even though he doesn’t believe in such Papist things. What do you mean ‘nothing’s happened’? Are you nuts?”

Reed sat silently, contemplating his therapy.

“My God, son,” Meyer hoisted the sign as if to test its balance, “we’ll put this back up soon and then you’ll be ready for Holy Ghost.”

“What do you mean? What’s Holy Ghost?” Reed felt his familiar anxiety creeping in.

“Doesn’t matter, you’re not ready yet. And besides,” Meyer blinked his good eye several times in a one-eyed wink, “don’t worry about the money, honey.”

“The National Pastime,” Jerry said when Reed asked about the money, “and one of the world’s last great trolley lines.”

Yodel just laughed his Howdy Doody laugh when Reed asked how Meyer afforded the Factory. Yodel ate lots of yogurt, made the Factory’s bread and, according to Jerry, wrote mystery novels. All his novels were about Sgt Sam Sunshine of the San Francisco Vice Squad. Sam Sunshine and his beautiful female partner, Amber Darkly, prowled the seamiest underbelly of the City by the Bay’s nightmares, uncovering graft, corruption and rampant immorality on every page.

“Yodel’s pen name is David Endever,” Sugar explained once. “Nobody knows his real name. We call him Yodel because he does sometimes.”

All of which explained Yodel’s all night typing marathons and the weird noises, like a sea-lion strangling on a halibut, that woke Reed from his Voice-filled dreams in the darkest part of the night. But it didn’t explain where the money came from or the ropes, pulleys and strange implements that filled Yodel’s room.

“What is all this?” Reed asked him as they sat on Yodel’s bed eating fresh sourdough bread with butter and jam.

“I climb mountains,” Yodel said, slavering golden butter on his bread, watching it melt. “I’m actually a world-class climber. It’s about all I do besides write these dumb books.”

“Are they really dumb?”

“Oh yes, Reed,” Yodel laughed, “world-class dumb. But they sell like Tibet has mountains.”

Reed chewed his bread. It was warm and rich in his mouth. The butter oiled his lips. The jam was blackberry.

“And, about the money,” he added, “all this is brought to you by Carl Yastrzemski and Meyer’s natural clumsiness.” Yodel laughed some more.

Krista was the only one who could sit still long enough to piece it all together for Reed. One April day in 1966, the Opening Day of the Major League baseball season, Meyer T Meyer, law-school dropout and reference room librarian at the Harvard Graduate School of Education Library, avid fan of the writer J.D. Salinger, was waiting to cross Mass Ave while reading Franny and Zooey for the eighth time. He was reading on a traffic island in the middle of an ocean of steel and chrome and V-8’s, waiting for the light to change.

At the same time—“Simultaneously”, is how Krista put it—“Louie Poskowski was completing his afternoon bus run from Arlington to Harvard Square. Louie was listening to the Red Sox opening game on an oriental transistor radio with a three foot antenna. The three foot antenna, since Louie was driving one of the MTA’s electric buses, was extended out and down from his window to avoid interference from the overhead lines.”

Reed tried to picture the scene while Krista poured a candle. She poured it gently, lovingly, devoutly—and for all that, it was not Perfect.

When she returned to the table, she told Reed about one of those inexplicable accidents that make life so interesting. Carl Yastrzemski made a great catch just as Zooey was about to tell Frannie about their dead brother Seymour’s secret advice. So both Louie and Meyer misjudged the changing traffic light. As luck would have it, three-quarters of an inch of Louie’s yard-long antenna poked itself under Meyer’s eyelid and looked around.

As the crowd gathered, Meyer loudly announced that he had two years of legal training and began talking about the now diminished possibility of his budding career as a commercial airline pilot or brain surgeon. “He hadn’t decided yet,” Krista said.

“Which to be?” Reed, in his naïve illiteracy, asked.

“No,” was Krista’s mystical but worldly-wise answer, “which was the most expensive lie.”

An MTA lawyer reached a settlement with the injured party in the emergency room of Cambridge City Hospital after it had been determined that Meyer would never see from that eye again. The lawyer, Bernard Brown, was a little drunk from a long lunch with his shapely secretary, Silvia DeLuca, and anxious to take her to a small motel in Milford that afternoon. So, in exchange for Meyer’s signature, Bernard told him the Massachusetts Transit Authority agreed to a one-time payment of $50,000 and $97.99 a month for life. Bernard had rushed back to his office to have the agreement typed up by Silvia. Silva, tipsy and libido driven herself, had added two zeros to the one-time payment by mistake and Bernard, thinking he was saving the Commonwealth a lot of legal fees, had forgotten to put a decimal point in his hand-written note between the 7 and second 9 of the monthly payment. The tab for Bernard and Silvia’s vodka flavored lunch had been $97.99, which gave him the idea for the monthly payment.

So Meyer, who could read the mistyped agreement perfectly well with one eye, quietly requested the ER doctor to page one of the hospital’s lawyers and a notary public from the business office. The lawyer rolled his eyes at Meyer after reading the agreement but said nothing. The notary was only interested in signatures and attaching her seal to the document.

The Commonwealth’s appeal of the agreement lasted three months and cost Massachusetts high six figures in legal fees before a Superior Court Judge threw the case out of court because he was late for his grand-daughter’s fifth birthday party and tired of the incompetence public lawyers. One of Brigham Francis’ Jewish lawyers had represented Meyer. The agreement stood.

There was probably tales worth telling about what happened to Bernard Brown, Esq., the comely Miss DeLuca and the unfortunate Louie Poskowski, but Krista didn’t know those stories. She did know that Meyer used some of the money to travel the world, looking for heat until something traumatic happened in Turkey. When he came back to Cambridge in January of 1967, he bought the house on Broadway and let Brigham know that he was looking for roommates—Wanderers on the Earth.

“I was one of the first people who showed up,” Krista continued, “so he told me that much early on…. So the Schlitz will never run out. The Coke machine will never be dry. The Air-Temps will hum and Wanderers on the Earth will wander through here without ever realizing we owe it all to a reclusive novelist and a left-fielder’s catch.”

Reed was impressed that Krista knew Yaz’s position, still, he said, not yet convinced, “Meyer is rich….”

“By my standards, which are low,” Krista said, “he is fabulously rich. He owns a quarter interest in Brigham’s wine import business. He underwrites Jerry’s counseling center. And after reading the box scores in the morning, he turns to the stock market reports. Meyer is rich.”

“Carl Yastrzemski, Carl Yastrzemski…” Reed sang to the tune of a song about a house made out of Pancakes in New Orleans.

Krista finished the song with the four notes of the signature tune of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony. Even Reed recognized those four notes, though he knew next to nothing about classical music. Since there were five words in her song and only four notes to sing them, she put the third and fourth words together. It came out like this:

“Is the manI love….”

*

Now Reed knew how it was paid for—the Factory and all that. The second Midwestern question proved harder to discern. That question was about meaning. What was the factory ‘all about’?

Sitting around the Factory watching time pass wasn’t boring for Reed. Along with literacy and opinions, he had seemingly lost his capacity for boredom. He no longer felt a need to be busy doing something. He was willing to take Meyer’s word that he was imperceptibly getting better. He had begun to imagine it as huge creatures moving slowly under water—manatees or sea lions or dolphins. The surface of the water would be undisturbed, but deep-down, large creatures were shifting things around. He would be patient and wait, watching the time pass. Unseen air-breathing beings were healing him.

His waiting gave him time to wonder. Sometimes he wondered out loud.

“I wonder,” he said to Jerry as they sat eating some pasta salad that Marvin Gardens had left for breakfast, “what is this all about?”

“Is this a question of epistemology?” Jerry asked, looking at his wrist watch, “I have to leave in ten minutes.”

Jerry had grown fond of Reed. He liked his Midwestern expansiveness and told him so, though Reed wasn’t sure what to do with that information. Southerners like Jerry were not expansive at all. They were closed equations. Jerry thought of Reed as a Black Hole, capable of absorbing infinite matter. He also could depend on Reed to know what words like ‘epistemology’ meant.

“No,” Reed said, having thought it over, “it’s just a practical question.”

“Good,” Jerry answered, shoveling pasta and olives and sliced cherry tomatoes and garlic and olive oil into his mouth. “There’s probably time for that.”

“So,” Reed said while Jerry chewed, “what’s the Factory all about?”

Jerry finished chewing and swallowed. “That’s easy,” he said, “it’s about Jesus.”

Reed waited for Jerry continue. In the two and a half months he’d been at the Factory, Reed had learned that Jerry was not to be hurried. He’d also learned that, from time to time, Jerry would interject Jesus into a random conversation. Reed could only imagine that having talked with Jesus on the bank of the Potomac would make anyone like that.

Finally, Jerry spoke again. “This is really remarkable pasta salad,” he said, “Marvin took a great risk by using so much garlic. But it worked, don’t you think?”

“So, tell me Jerry,” Reed said, after mumbling something favorable about pasta and garlic, “how is the Factory all about Jesus?”

“Well, it’s like this,” Jerry was hesitant to stop eating and talk, “it’s about Jesus because Jesus is in all of us. And since the Factory is about us, it’s about Jesus.” After staring deeply into Reed’s eyes, right to his soul, he started eating again.

“Jesus is in Krista and Marvin?”

Jerry chewed and nodded.

“They’re Jewish….”

“So was Jesus.” Jerry’s mouth was full, so it took Reed a moment to understand what he said.

“Jesus is in Pierce, that’s hard to believe.” Manatees were moving skepticism toward the surface of Reed’s mind. It was part of his healing.

Jerry wiped his mouth with a fine linen napkin. Meyer had them delivered weekly by the dozens from a laundry service. Meyer was partial to fine linen napkins. There were no paper napkins in the Factory. Ever.

“Something you must try to understand about Jesus is this, Reed,” Jerry began, “Jesus is almost always where you would least expect. It is Darkness that holds Power and Jesus’ power comes from there. Jesus especially loves those who live in shadows. And besides, Pierce saved Sugar’s life. That, if nothing else, should prove that Jesus is in Pierce.”

Pierce was a ‘bad ass’. That’s what John Henry Davidson, a little black kid who hung around the Factory bumming cigarettes believed. John Henry said it like this:

“Piece is a baaaad asssss….”

John Henry knew all the symptoms.

Pierce was shifty-eyed, in Reed’s estimation, like a coral snake, and looked a bit like Mick Jaggar. His shoulder-length hair was matted and tangled, Medusa like. It rolled up like snakes around his Mick Jaggar face.

Pierce was 30, Reed had learned, a month older than Jerry, and the oldest resident of the Factory besides Meyer. Factory legend had it that Pierce trafficked in drugs, had been a Hell’s Angel for a while, knew some of the Weathermen personally, and had been a Marine hero in Viet Nam. Legend had it that Pierce, in all his incarnations, could kill someone with his thumb or forefinger or with his elbow. Reed didn’t picture Pierce as a killer, but he knew him to be a bad ass.

Meyer knew Pierce sold grass and hash to the Freaks in Cambridge Common. That didn’t bother him, but Meyer had loudly sworn—several people had told Reed—to slit Pierce’s throat if he ever sold across the street at Cambridge High and Latin or if there were hard drugs involved. It would have seemed to be a strange moral distinction for most people, but for Reed in his illiteracy, it made perfect sense.

Sugar sometimes slept with Pierce. Most everyone at the Factory was horrified by that reality. But shortly after Sugar arrived at the Factory with her friend Vachel, a poet and guitarist, she got up in the middle of the night, blew out the pilot light in the big, restaurant-sized oven, turned on the gas, removed the racks sat down with her head deep inside.

Pierce came in a little after that and found her, unconscious, limp and gray. His Marine training served Sugar well. He broke out the kitchen windows with one of Meyer’s hockey sticks, turned off the stove and carried her life-failing body into Meyer’s room, right off the kitchen. Meyer, who was a Great Sleeper, didn’t wake up until Pierce had breathed life from his rubber-band lips into her sweet tulip lips. For weeks, the legend went, Pierce was inseparable from Sugar. It was something like the Cherokee notion of the responsibility for the life you saved.

So Sugar slept with Pierce from time to time. Sometimes, Sugar’s face was swollen and puffed after a night with Pierce. But she would always intervene with Meyer.

“There is so much anger within him,” Reed once heard Sugar tell Meyer when her eye was blackened and Meyer was in a murderous mood, “that it gets mixed up with the loving….” Reed didn’t believe that explanation for a moment. Pierce gave rise to an opinion in Reed—a rare thing in his illiteracy—“Pierce was a bad ass.”

One day in early September, when leaves had begun to fall, as they do at that latitude, Sugar and Pierce and Reed were sitting in the little park between Cambridge High and Latin and Ringe Tech. The park is in front of the Cambridge Public Library. It was strange for Reed to be sitting anywhere with Pierce, especially in that little park. The three of them were watching people walk through the leaves that had already fallen.

People waded through leaves to ask them directions. People waded through leaves on their way somewhere or on their way back. An old woman, obviously suffering from a spinal disease, shuffled up to them through the leaves and asked the way to Dimwittal Street or some such place none of them knew. Then she shuffled away, pain in her spine.

“Isn’t she beautiful?” Sugar asked. Reed and Pierce both looked at her when she said it. Sugar was dewy-eyed and breathless.

“How can you say that?” both Pierce and Reed thought. Only Pierce said it, since Reed was too polite. And Pierce didn’t stop with that question. He went on: “She’s old and hunchbacked and it hurts her to walk, no one who cares for her is with her and, on top of all that, she’s lost. And she knows that everyone who sees her—even us—is wondering about how it feels to be hunched-backed and how she looks naked. Everyone is fucking paralyzed with fear of her. It’s horrible, not beautiful.”

Reed was shocked to realize he had been wondering what it was like to live bent over and how the woman’s hump would look unclothed.

Sugar slumped on the bench, sliding off to sit in the leaves. Then she jumped up and ran effortlessly after the woman. Sugar kissed the woman on her cheeks and on her lips and told her she was beautiful. The old woman seemed shocked and ashamed.

A fat Jewish lady, unbowed by spinal disease, her mouth painted bright red, her wig obvious but expensive, was walking her Pekingese dog in the park. She saw the whole thing. Reed imagined how she would entertain her canasta club for months to come with the story of the tiny Gentile girl, so beautiful with her odd-colored hair, who embarrassed the hunchbacked lady with a kiss.

Sugar returned to the bench and no one spoke for a long time. There were a dozen sirens in the distance, toward Somerville. Reed surveyed the horizon for smoke.

“Neither of you know anything yet.” Sugar’s voice was like a green apple.

“Don’t know what?” Pierce asked.

“About Meyer and the Igloo Factory—how it all teaches you that everything…everything is beautiful.”

Pierce was silent. Reed thought about what Sugar had said and had to agree that he didn’t know that everything was beautiful. He didn’t know that at all.

“Everything,” Sugar said. She looked at Pierce and then at Reed. “Everything is beautiful.” Her cheeks were the color of ripe nectarines. “That’s what the Factory is all about,” she said, already running away.

Calvin was a drifter, a Wanderer. He was one of the ones who came and shortly left. Reed watched him pass.

Calvin came to Cambridge to find God. He thought God might be at Harvard Divinity School. So Calvin came to track God down. But God, Calvin said, was on a sabbatical. So Calvin lived in the Factory for a few weeks as summer turned toward autumn. While he was there, Calvin mostly smoked dope and wondered about God.

Calvin was an inch over five feet tall. He had been a gymnast on the Indiana University gymnast team for four years. He had made the Nationals in his Junior year. So, being a Big Ten athlete of no mean merit, he knew who Reed was in his previous life.

“Mr. 880,” he said, the first time he saw Reed, “a pearl among swine at Iowa.”

Meyer made Calvin recount the races he had seen Reed run. Reed was embarrassed by it all.

“Then that skinny black kid from Michigan State did him in at the conference finals,” Calvin told everyone at a Meeting, at Meyer’s insistence. “Reed let up in the last 25 yards. He thought he had it won, so he let up.”

Meyer, perched on his bed, looked around the room for Reed and found him hunched back near the door. “Big Reed,” he said, “tell us the truth, did you let up at the end?”

Reed felt he was sitting in a perfect circle of silence. His embarrassment turned to anger. He did not answer Meyer. As a matter of fact, he knew, he had let up near the end. His legs ached and he was tired to the bone, his lungs empty of air and him safely ahead. The internal clock of runners told him he was breaking his own Big Ten record. He hadn’t even noticed the frail-looking black runner on the inside. All he saw, at the last moment, was a flash of old-gold and blue to his left. He had let up and lost. It would be his last big race.

Reed was angry and silent. He hated Calvin at that moment and hated Meyer even more. Unbeknownst to him, huge and ugly psychic sea creatures were moving, healing him in that moment.

When Calvin smoked dope, he stood on his head. He could stand on his head for hours.

“Why are you always stoned?” Reed asked him once, sitting in Calvin’s room. It was a question as presumptive as an appendix.

Calvin stared at Reed and frowned. Since he was standing on his head, his frown looked, for all the world, like a smile to Reed. Or an upside down pink and white rainbow.

“In my senior year, on a balance beam exercise in a meet with Illinois and Northwestern,” Calvin said, “I missed a back flip I’d made ten-thousand times. I was falling. It is a great fear, to fall from the balance beam because if you hit it with your head on the way down you can snap your spine. I did the most unorthodox twist I’ve ever done, but still I hit my forehead on the beam. People who saw it said my head snapped back so far they knew my neck must have broken. When I woke up in the hospital, I didn’t even have a headache. Nothing hurt. By all accounts and the film I saw later, I should be a quadriplegic. No kidding. It was that bad. The more I thought about it, I began to think God must have saved me.”

Calvin stood on his head with one hand. With the other he somehow fished a joint out of his jeans pocket and lit it with a kitchen match. He struck the match with his fingernail. He held smoke in his lungs for a long time. When he let the smoke go, he let some words go as well. The smoky-words drifted out of Calvin’s mouth and rose slowly, passing his feet on their way to the ceiling.

“By last spring, when I graduated, I was sure I had to go find God. I don’t know God at all, but I know I need to find Him. Someone told me he might be at Harvard Divinity School, so I came out here. I hung around the Divinity School for the summer session and for a few first lectures in September. God ain’t here. I’ll know Him when I find Him.”

Calvin took another drag on his marijuana cigarette and Reed thought about standing on his head. As athletic as Reed was, he didn’t like to put his head down below his waist. He didn’t like to dive into a pool or turn somersaults. He couldn’t imagine standing on his head, much less smoking dope upside down.

“Maybe I’ll go to the Orient and look for God,” Calvin’s voice had turned that husky, marijuana tone people get. “And when I find Him, I’ll ask why he saved me, what great work he has in mind for me.”

“What if God saved you just because He likes you?” Reed asked.

“You don’t know much about God!” Calvin was suddenly strident and angry. “God always requires a Great Work. And I’m pissed off about it. I want to get it over with.”

Reed sat quietly while Calvin smoked. Then he said, “but what about all the dope you smoke?”

“Well,” Calvin said, calm again, “that’s what the Factory is all about, isn’t it? Drinking beer and Meyer’s horrid wine or smoking dope?”

Reed let it go at that. The next week Calvin simply drifted on—to India or back to Indiana. For months, his room smelled of marijuana. Reed sometimes thought of him, how his words gathered in heavy, blue smoke.

The day Calvin left for wherever he though God might be, Reed came into the kitchen and found Krista in one of the chairs. She was staring straight ahead and the bell over the sink was singing a butterfly song. Reed sat beside her and listened to the bell. It was like being in an ancient shrine.

“Someday, Reed,” she said, after a long time, “I will make a perfect candle.”

“A mystical candle,” Reed almost chanted. It was part of their litany.

“The perfect candle,” she said, “the True Candle.” She said it softly, like the prayer it was.

The bell was silent, but it rang on in Reed’s mind.

“A man came to see Calvin,” Krista whispered. “He missed Calvin’s leaving by a half-an-hour or so. He was sad to know Calvin was gone. He had a book that belonged to Calvin, a book about St. Francis by Kazantzakis.”

Reed nodded. Calvin had read to him from that book, standing on his head, upside down. There was a line Calvin read from that book that Reed would never forget. It says: “Death is not a door that closes. It is a door that opens and we walk in all new….”

“He asked me a strange question,” Krista said, still whispering, “the man who came. He asked me if I remembered The Bananaman. He asked it like it was important, like someone he loved remembered but he couldn’t. He said he wanted to find someone who remembered. He was from West Virginia.”

“Who?” Reed asked, suddenly engaged. “The Bananaman?”

“No, the man looking for Calvin. The Bananaman was from television—I bet Marvin Gardens remembers. He took bananas out of his pockets and put them in a train he took out of his pockets. And he was French, at least that what Richard said. Richard, that was his name—not Rick or Dick…Richard.” Krista stopped whispering. She seemed tired but joyful.

“Richard was from West Virginia?” Reeds words seemed almost intrusive.

“Yes,” Krista was looking at Reed. Her eyes were so dark they might as well have been black. “Do you remember the Bananaman?” she asked. “I have Richard’s number if anyone remembers.”

Richard didn’t remember, at least not in any helpful way. He had never watched much TV. All he remembered about TV was watching The Ed Sullivan Show on Sunday nights with his father as Caroline slept in his father’s arms. She was mall and Reed’s father—Caroline’s father too—held her like an egg in the nest of his arms. Reed remembered that.

“No,” he finally said, “I don’t remember the Bananaman.”

“Someday I’ll go to a commune in Kentucky,” Krista said, “with a man named Jacob or something like that, something Old Testament, something rich and full when you say it. And we’ll be happy. And I’ll ask him about the Bananaman.”

Krista smiled at Reed. She wasn’t speaking in a whisper anymore. “It’s important to me too. The Bananaman. Finding someone who remembers him.”

For a while, they were silent. Slowly, like a swan taking flight, the bell began to ring softly.

“Ting, tingle, ting,” is all it said.

“Richard was very nice,” Krista said, more to the bell than to Reed, “he spoke softly, like a mountain stream.”

Reed tried to remember Lysander’s voice. He knew it was not like a mountain stream. He wondered if Richard had ever been to Buckhannon, if he had ever seen the buffalo.

They went into Meyer’s room and Krista dialed Richard’s phone number for Reed. Richard answered in words like a slow stream with lots of round rocks in the bottom.

“I was once in West Virginia,” Reed told him, “in Buckhannon where to buffalo lives. Have you ever been there?”

“I passed through on a bus once,” Richard said. “The bus driver told me about the buffalo. I wanted to go see it, but it was only a five minute stop.”

Richard sounded like the kind of person who talked with bus drivers. But he didn’t sound like Lysander.

“It was like a hairy house,” Reed described to him, “and it didn’t try to shake off the snow.”

They talked for a while. Richard asked about the Bananaman and told Reed it was fine that he didn’t remember. Few people remembered. Reed asked about West Virginia accents, why Richard didn’t sound like Lysander.

“There must be seventy-eleven accents in West Virginia,” Richard explained. “Lysander’s wouldn’t have been like mine.”

Then Richard asked what he should do with Calvin’s book. He’d met Calvin in one of his summer courses at Harvard Divinity School. Richard said that God was there, after all, but in no way Calvin was looking for. “You gotta be careful how you look for God,” he told Reed, “God will show up in mischievous ways.”

Reed couldn’t recall anyone he’d ever known who said “seventy-eleven” or used “mischievous” in that way.

Krista was melting wax when Reed returned.

“Isn’t he nice?” she asked.

Reed said he thought Richard sounded nice. “But he never saw the buffalo.”

“He’s got a Bananaman and you’ve got a buffalo,” she said, without looking up. The wax was close to ready. “Sugar’s got her world where she can be. I’ve go a perfect candle. Everyone is looking for something.”

“Calvin is looking for God,” Reed said.

The bell gave a small quiver—half-a-tingle.

“Do you think maybe that’s what the Factory is all about?”

“What?” Reed asked, forgetting for the moment it was his question.

“Looking for someone who remembers, someone who actually cares about what you’ve lost. And knowing—knowing against all the evidence to the contrary—that somewhere something makes sense.”

Reed didn’t say anything, but he knew what Krista meant.

“My wax is ready,” she said, turning to pour the thick, fragrant liquid into the mold she had prepared. The mold was a Maxwell House Coffee can. She had secured the wick to the bottom with a staple and held it straight by tying the other end to a Dixon Ticonderoga #2 pencil. As Krista poured, Reed hoped—against all evidence to the contrary—that the candle would be perfect.

*

If this were a book of essays, this essay would be called:

WHAT THE FACTORY IS ALL ABOUT

And it would burn like a perfect candle and light your mind. It would be a man called Aaron in a red pick-up truck coming to take you to a commune in Kentucky. It would be a snowy buffalo. It would be a banjo made from a Buick bumper. It would be the top-of-the-line Air-Temp air conditioner humming away the heat. It would be a song from a butterfly bell—“Ting, Tingle, Ting”—and it would ring in your heart long after the ringing was done.

If this were an essay called “What the Factory is all about”, it would be a walrus in a Union Army Cape; a vertebrae path through fine sand; marijuana standing on your head; a beautiful hunch-backed woman; homemade wine in green bottles; a Bananaman; a warm scarf wrapped five times around your neck; fresh bread—sourdough or date-nut; a greenbug with saran-wrap wings; a cat as round as a softball and a sleeping dog named Vincent Price; wooden-spoons and cricket-cages and mountain climbing gear; Jesus by the Potomac; a gray-haired juggler juggling three red balls; and a clown; and in the winter, snow that is white on white on white. Forever.

And it would end with a parade.

And be True.

***

There were lots of cats at the Igloo Factory. Reed never counted them, though he inexplicably never forgot how to count. But there were enough, he figured, to have a cat in most every window. However, Reed was a dog man. He liked dogs.

“Why aren’t there any dogs at the Factory?” he asked Sugar one day.

“There’s Vincent Price,” she said.

“Who?”

“Vincent Price. He shows up to go for rides. We aren’t sure where he is in between rides in the cars. It’s very weird.”

“Isn’t everything?” Reed asked.

Sugar was immune to irony. She was like someone with an irony vaccination. So she pursed her lips and thought before she said, “No, not everything.”

“Why is he named Vincent Price?”

“I don’t know,” Sugar told him, “there just isn’t anything else to call him.”

Ironically enough and as luck would have it, the very next day Jerry was going to Star Market to get cat food. He invited Reed to ride along. Reed was feeling slightly restless—a good sign, according to Meyer—so he went.

As soon as Jerry started the motor of the VW bus, a big black dog lumbered up to the car. Jerry asked Reed to open the sliding side door. When he did, the dog climbed into the bus and onto the middle seat and fell into an immediate sleep. Reed looked at the dog and knew it was Vincent Price. He looked just like Vincent Price would have looked if he had been a big black dog. There was nothing else to call him.

As they were backing out of the driveway, Sugar and Meyer came out of the front door dressed oddly. That was nothing new for Meyer, but Sugar looked strange dressed the way she was. Meyer had on a green hat—the kind your father wore to church—and a plain brown suit. Sugar had on a white blouse, a plaid skirt and knee socks with paten leather shoes.

“Ah,” Jerry said, stopping the car, “Pilgrims.”

Sugar ran over and posed beside the VW. “I’m 15,” she said, “and I go to parochial school in Concord, New Hampshire.”

“I knew it all along,” Jerry said.

“What’s going on?” Reed asked.

Sugar winked at him. It made him a little weak. “Your day will come,” is all she said before running away, like a Catholic school girl, to catch Meyer down the street.

“Remember for me,” Jerry said, accelerating the car backwards onto Broadway, narrowly missing an MTA, “we need six cases of cat food, 12 gallons of milk and about a swimming pool full of litter.”

Reed had all but forgotten about Sugar’s warning. He was gripping the arm rest as Jerry ground the gear shift into first and sped away, half-way across the center line.

From the back seat came a sound like the surf. Vincent Price was snoring.

*

Every other day or so, in the afternoon, Reed would notice people leaving the Factory dressed strangely. They would be wearing white shirts and ties and conservative dresses with pleats—dresses like Reed’s mother wore. The men would have their long hair pinned up or hidden under dress hats that had been out of style since the Eisenhower administration. The hats reminded Reed of pictures of Russian leaders watching the May Day Parade only the people wearing them weren’t Russian bureaucrats—it was Meyer and Jerry and Yodel, some of those who wandered through the Factory for a while, and, from time to time, even bad-ass Pierce. Pierce never looked happy.

Reed asked him one day where he was going.

“The fuckin’ hospital,” Pierce snarled.

“Are you sick?” Reed asked, genuinely concerned.

“Jesus, Reed!” Pierce said. Then he laughed. His Mick Jagger scowl relaxed and Reed found him almost handsome. “You aren’t part of this particular madness yet, are you?”

“Which madness?”

“The Dance of Death,” Pierce said, turning and heading out the door with Sugar, who was dressed in a cheerleader’s outfit.

Reed watched them go down the walk to Broadway and turn left. Sugar stopped a couple of times on the way down the street to do a cheer. Pierce would look uncomfortable and mean, but then he’d laugh and they’d walk on.

Reed experienced an unfamiliar feeling as he watched them disappear around a corner several blocks down. The feeling started deep inside his body, like an anxious itch. Then he felt a slight chill on the back of his neck and a sudden dryness in his throat. The dryness became a catch, almost like a physical object in his throat, something about the size of a marble but not smooth—rough and uncomfortable. His eyes were dry, he thought, from staring after Pierce and Sugar, but when he blinked, they filled with a sticky fluid momentarily. Reed noticed all this but couldn’t quite name it. It was the feeling of being left out, left behind, not included. If he could have named that feeling, he would have known he was becoming attached to Sugar, and in a strange way, to Pierce as well. Deep inside his soul, in a place he was only dimly aware existed, huge blind creatures, shaped like whales, were moving, massaging his emotions awake from their seven month slumber.

Back inside, he opened a Schlitz and wandered up to his room. He sat in one of the chairs and stared out at Boston. As he watched the Prudential Building he remembered Sugar telling him about it on his first day. A smile crept involuntarily to his lips, just thinking of Sugar, of how pleasant she was to look at and how she made him laugh. He thought of how her vertebrae were like tracks across the beach, of how her eyes were the color of Granny Smith apples and her hair the shade of cardboard. Attachments. Reed was making friends.

Everybody knew that Sugar was from Illinois. But only Reed knew she was from Kenilworth, a suburb of Chicago. The lawns in Kenilworth were as large as polo fields and sculptured like Greek faces. Reed had been there many times. Kenilworth was where the Percy’s lived. It was also where Angela, whom Reed might have married, lived. Sugar even knew Angela’s family.

“My father is in newspapers and magazines,” Sugar said. “He’s a financial writer. He writes about stocks and bonds and pork futures, whatever that is. We know everybody. We have lots of money.”

Reed commented that Angela’s family had lots of money too.

“Angela is very nice,” Sugar said. By that, Reed supposed Sugar meant that Angela had lovely breasts and did not wantonly kill Cocker Spaniels.

Sugar had run away from the large lawns and lots of money. Her father was trying to find her by contacting all the people he knew. That’s why Sugar was so secretive about her hometown and her name. She was sure there were private investigators privately investigating her whereabouts. So far, the only person from her former life who knew she was in Cambridge was Vachel, a lead guitarist from a much lesser suburb than Kenilworth, who had run away with her. The two of them had started wandering and ended up at the Igloo Factory.

Vachel, Sugar told Reed, wrote songs about a free and beautiful world. “A world where everyone can be,” she said. “You know, Reed, where we can really be?”

Reed said he thought he knew. That was a lie, but he couldn’t bear disappointing Sugar.

Vachel, not through with wandering, wandered away from Cambridge, down to New York City, Sugar thought, looking for a world to be in and a band to join.

“I hope Vachel doesn’t go back to Chicago,” Sugar seemed worried. “My father will make him tell where I am.”

“How,” Reed asked, “how could he make him tell?”

“Like I said,” Sugar told him, “my father has lots of money.”

“But what about Vachel’s world? The one where everyone can be? Doesn’t he want you to be?”

“My father, Reed,” she answered, as close to cynical as Sugar could get, “has LOTS of money.”

Reed, who actually had considerable amounts of money himself in a trust fund in Cleveland, couldn’t imagine how much money it would take to buy out A World Where Everyone Could Be. He was about to say something about money when Sugar told him Angela’s father had given her a pelvic exam when she was only 14.

“My mother was convinced I was pregnant,” she said. The memory creased her face. “My mother has always believed I’m a tramp, so she dragged me down to Angela’s father’s office and I put my feet up on this contraption. He was really very sweet. He kept apologizing for what he was doing and he didn’t take long. He waited for me to dress and then took me into his office where my mother was waiting.”

Sugar took a deep breath and stared up at the ceiling. When she looked back at Reed, her eyes were brimming. “And he did the kindest thing, he stood in his open door with his arm around me and said to my mother, loud enough for his nurse and the people down in the waiting room to hear him…he said, ‘If this dear child is pregnant then you should get on your knees and pray, because Jesus is coming again.’ My mother almost died….He was the sweetest man.”

Reed had liked Angela’s father. Sugar’s story made him like him even more.

“You know what, Reed?” Sugar asked, wiping her face with her arm the way a little kid does.

“No, what?”

“The world would be a better place if all the men had to have annual pelvic exams.”

*

As Sugar and Pierce had warned him, Reed’s day came to dance the dance of death.

He was getting a Schlitz from the cooler when he noticed Meyer peering around the corner of the kitchen door at him.

“How tall are you, Reed?” Meyer asked.

“Six-one.” Actually, Reed was six feet, one and three-quarters inches tall. But being from the Midwest, he was modest and always rounded down.

Meyer swooped into the hall, dressed in a large bath towel wrapped around his waist, and dragged Reed to his room to meet Florence.

Florence was sitting on Meyer’s bed, wearing one of Meyer’s bathrobes, drinking wine from a juice glass. She had a round, pleasant, box-office girl’s face, big brown eyes and red hair that came from everywhere on her head and went other places. Her clothes were strewn on the floor in a semi-circle. Everything—dress, bra, slip, panties, panty hose, shoes—all her clothes were white. Like snow. Like sugar. Like salt. Like sickness. Nurses’ clothes.

“What do you think?” Meyer was displaying Reed like an art object.

Florence eyed him for a while. “He’ll do nicely,” she said.

Meyer introduced them—two nods, two smiles—and pushed Reed into a chair. He looked at him for a long time, as if trying to read him like a foreign language.

“Well, Reed,” he said, “This is it—Showtime!”

He went to his closet and started rummaging. “Fill him in, Florence.”

“Your name is Malcolm,” Florence told Reed, “you’re Miss Masselman’s great nephew. Meyer is going to be George, your father, her nephew. George is the only son of her only brother, Frank, who was killed in 1960 by a Good Humor truck in Hartford.”

“How horrible,” Reed said.

Florence frowned. “You’re a senior in agriculture or forestry or some such thing at Western Connecticut State College. Do you know anything about plants?”

“No.”

“It doesn’t matter, neither does she. But you should remember you’re active in some plant honorary—Delta Compsta Heepa, who knows? Just remember in case there is a God to give Mrs. Masselman the strength to ask you questions. You love Jerry Vale, for God’s sake, and your favorite foods are ham and yams in marshmallow gook….”

“Forget the food,” Meyer called from deep in his closet.

“That’s right,” Florence said, “thanks, Meyer, I forgot.” She looked at Reed. “She hasn’t had solid food for months and months and like some of them, she obsesses on food. Avoid any mention of food. Or Democrats for that matter. She still thinks Hoover was a god.”

“Try these,” Meyer said, handing Reed an armful of musty smelling clothes—brown suit, white shirt, skinny tie. “You’ll look nice.”

Reed tried to say something like, “What’s going on?” just as Meyer started undressing him. By the time he was wearing the clothes from Meyer’s closet, Meyer had gone to the bathroom.

“I know this is your first time,” Florence said, whispering, “but this is Meyer’s thing. This is what the Factory is all about…visiting people at Holy Ghost Hospital who are dying.”

“Miss Masselman is dying?” Reed asked. He whispered too.

“She’s 93, for Christsake,” Florence said, louder than before. “She has liver cancer, heart disease, ulcers, arteries like granite, ingrown toenails and Lord knows what else she’d developed since I went off duty. If she lives for two days it will be cause for several promotions. And before she dies, she’s going to....” Florence buried her face in her hands. Her shoulders shook through Meyer’s robe.

“Shit,” she said, lifting her damp face, “I never get over this stuff.” She tried to compose herself but what she said came out in a monotone because she was holding back her emotions. “Before she dies, she will have a visit from her only two blood relatives—Malcolm and George—who in real life don’t give a damn about her, have never come to see her though it’s only 60 some miles to Hartford. But they will come this afternoon. Do you get it now?”

Reed said he got it. Florence pulled some cigarettes out from under some of the tangled covers on Meyer’s bed. Reed recognized the packaging even though he could read the words, written in white on a red background. Florence angrily lit a Winston and drew so hard that the end burned bright and fast.

She expelled smoke that wrapped itself around the mobile of can above Meyer’s bed. “Jesus, Mary and Joseph,” she said to nobody in particular though Reed was the only person there, “this man will be the death of me.”

Meyer and Reed walked through hallways and rode elevators. They were clutching visitor’s passes. Meyer had signed them both since Reed couldn’t write his own name, much less Malcolm Masselman’s. They walked more halls and showed their passes to a nurse at a brightly lit nurses’ station. The nurse was old and fat and took the passes, studying them carefully. She handed them back and smiled.

“Who’s your friend, Meyer?” she asked.

“My name is George Masselman and this is my son, Malcolm,” Meyer said, affecting what he must have imagined was a Connecticut accent.

The nurse looked at Reed. “What’s your name, son?”

Reed swallowed hard. Lying was difficult for him. “Malcolm Masselman.”

Another nurse, trim and in her 20’s, was studying a chart in the middle of the bright lights. She looked up and said, “Showtime!”

“If you don’t mind,” Meyer said, irritated, “we’ll go see my aunt now.”

“Father, Son at Holy Ghost,” the old nurse said, solemnly. The young nurse crossed herself. Then they both laughed, good-naturedly, thankfully.

Meyer and Reed stopped outside Miss Masselman’s door. “You’re an agriculture major,” Meyer reminded him, “so no hippie talk.”

Reed nodded. He was the son and grandson of lawyers, a product of military school, an Episcopalian with a trust fund, a Big-Ten track star. He couldn’t speak hippie talk on a bet. Meyer seemed to forget that.

His hand on the door, Meyer paused again. “Remember the food and Democrat thing and—this is the big one, Reed—when we get ready to leave you will kiss her on her cheek. It will be dry and leather-like, but you will kiss her and say, ‘we’ll see you soon, Aunty’. Do you understand?”

Reed understood. Meyer opened the door. “Aunt Gladys,” he said, rushing toward the bed.

Miss Masselman was older looking than anyone Reed had ever seen. She was older looking than Reed imagined people could look. She had tubes in her bony arms and down her hooked nose and running out from under the sheets into bags. There were three machines behind her that kept blinking numbers and patterns in green. She was tiny and covered with bruises of several hues on her wrinkled, wax-paper thin, leathery skin.

Meyer was talking a mile a minute into one of her ears. He turned and motioned for Reed to come closer. “Look who’s here, Aunt Gladys. It’s my boy, Malcolm. Malcolm, come talk to Aunt Gladys.”

“You’re looking good, Aunty,” Reed said, lying desperately.

“Cooking food?” Miss Masselman wheezed.

“Oh, Jesus,” Meyer whispered to Reed.

“I got Jerry’s new album,” Reed said.

“Cherries? New cherries?” the ancient woman asked.

“Reed, stop it….”

But Reed couldn’t stop it. He tried again. “It’s a beautiful Autumn, Aunty. The leaves in some….”

“Stev-en-son!” Miss Masselman almost sat up, straining against the tubes and wires, “Adlai Stevenson!”

“Shut up, Malcolm!” Meyer hissed through clinched teeth. Then he murmured soft words to Miss Masselman, words Reed could not hear. The old woman finally calmed and seem to understand who was visiting her. She even asked Reed how school was going.

He nodded and smiled, afraid to speak, patting her hand, trying not to touch any of the tubes and needles there.

When it was over, after an excruciation 15 minutes for Reed, he dutifully bent over Gladys Masselman and gave her a kiss on her cheek. When he licked his lips afterward, he tasted salt and only then realized that she had been weeping.

Meyer and Reed walked around in silence until it was dusk. Then they sat in silence in Meyer’s room, drinking wine and Schlitz until they passed out. Just after noon the next day, Florence came by to wake them up and tell them Miss Masselman had died at dawn.

Meyer started talking a mile a minute about his favorite books. He told them about Franny and Zooey and The Grapes of Wrath and was starting in on The Pickwick Papers, of all things, when he collapsed into Florence’s arms and cried and cried.

“Every time,” kept saying to Reed as she held Meyer like a child and stoked his face, “every time the same thing.”

She said that over and over again. Finally, Meyer slept and Florence went back to work. Reed sat on the floor by Meyer’s bed and listened to his slow, peaceful breathing.

***

[Buried in the piles of call slips from Byerly Library that cover my writing table, I found six call slips paper-clipped together. The paper clip had rusted, staining the top and bottom call slip with an elliptical pattern of orange. I will copy those words here for some reason I don’t quite know. They are words about a green bug I knew a long time ago.]

Tonight, as I sat in Byerly Hall, writing about the Igloo Factory—I’ve barely begun and it is a long way from True—a green bug flew through the window.

It was a tiny green bug, a round green bug. It was round like a softball in the backyard and when it landed on my desk, its wings were as thin as mist, as clinging as fog to the mountains.

It sat for a while on the edge of the desk—its filmy wings invisible—and then it walked across the call slips in front of me. To my eye, the green bug didn’t so much walk as roll. It rolled, like a ball. And it walked/rolled slowly enough for me to study it closely. Here is what I found.

*The green bug’s legs were like eyelashes—thin, fragile, ornamental.

*The green bug was green as a Lowenbrau bottle, green as a ginger ale bottle, green as a Maltuse bottle. Bottle green. The shifting, indescribable, reflecting, shining, sparkling, translucent green of glass.

I began to think that I had made it up—that it was an illusion. Or worse, that Meyer had sent it from his locked, windowless, gray room. That Jerry had taught him to pray and he had prayed a green bug. Or that Krista had taught him to charm bugs and this green bug was one Meyer charmed. Or even that his Silence, which has become epic, had gathered together into a green mass which became a bug that blew through my window tonight.

‘Any minute’, I began to think, ‘the green bug will leave the paper and fly to my ear and say,’:

“I am from Meyer. He sends you all his love.

His hopes. His dreams….”

But for Meyer, all such things are in the past. As if to prove it, the bug stiffened its wings and flew off, right into the fan near my desk, shattering into sparkling chips of green bug.

***

I found the green bug call slips because I was sorting through my lunch bags and spiral notebooks—which is as much a way to avoid writing as to decide what to write next. In that same search through my source material, though that sounds rather exalted for 20 year old pieces of paper, I found Fran Tucchio’s letter and my memory of the cricket hunt. The letter was still in its envelope and was addressed to me at the number on Broadway that was the Igloo Factory. I stared at the address for a while, realizing in the over-a-year I lived there, I never knew the Factory’s real address. It can’t be because I couldn’t read, because I stayed at the Factory for several months after literacy returned. I didn’t ever know the address because in some ways, the Igloo Factory never seemed like a real place. It was real enough—too real for its own good in the end—but it never seemed ‘real’ in the sense of an address. Yet there it was on that envelope from “O’Brien, Tucchio and Goldstein, Attorneys at Law”.

Francisco Tucchio was one of the senior partners in the law firm and the attorney with the most criminal trial experience. “O’Brien, Tucchio and Goldstein” represented Brigham’s wine import business. Brigham referred to them as 'Mick, Wop and Kike'. “Is that covering the bases or what?” he said to me a few weeks after Meyer’s arrest. “Is there a judge in the Commonwealth who isn’t Irish, Italian or Jewish? And these guys are good.” Plus, Meyer had plenty of money to paid them, though, unbeknownst to all of us, he didn’t plan to pay them for long.

Fran Tucchio was about 60 with a full head of black and silver hair he wore slicked back in an expensive cut. He had an Ellis Island photo face and wore $1000 suits, even back then. I met with him once, when it was still up in the air how much trouble I was going to be in and whether I’d be indicted for destruction of evidence.

“It’s a good bet,” Fran Tucchio told me, “that you’ll be called as a material witness. The question is, did you really witness anything? Did you actually see the knife?”

“It was a yataghan,” I told him, “and I didn’t see it.”

He made a note so he’d always say ‘yataghan’ instead of ‘knife’. He was that good a lawyer. “You didn’t unwrap what was allegedly in the cape? You didn’t get curious.”

“No,” I said, realizing the woman in the room with us was transcribing my every word, “I didn’t unwrap it. I guess I wasn’t curious about anything just then.”

“And you didn’t observe any blood on the cape?” He’d put on a pair of those half-glasses people always look over and was looking over them at me. His shirt was dazzling white. His tie was silk, a deep blue with tiny crests on it, probably from his law school. But mostly, I noticed his hands. His nails were perfectly manicured. He had no rough edges, no nicks in any of his fingernails. His cuticles were exquisite little arches. He wore two rings on each hand—a wedding band and three rings with diamonds. I thought he had the most beautiful hands I’d ever seen. I wondered if he shaved the hair off his fingers since his hands were smooth, hairless, like the tentacles of a small sea creature.

“It was dark blue, like your tie,” I told him. “I didn’t observe any blood.”

He asked the same question again three different ways and then smiled at me because I always used the word ‘observed’—the word he had given me to use. His smile was old world, just a bit crooked.

“You’ll do well, Reed,” he said, half-an-hour later. “I won’t tell you not to worry since you will worry. But, if the Commonwealth calls you to testify—and I hope it won’t come to that—I want you to know you’ll do well on the stand.”

I took the letter out of the faded envelope and read it for a while. It was four pages long and explained all the legal ramifications of my possible testimony—what I could say without fear of self-incrimination, how I should volunteer absolutely nothing to the prosecutor, just answer the questions with as few words as possible, and some questions he might ask me on cross-examination. He also promised to rehearse with me for as long as necessary if I ended up on the Commonwealth’s witness list.

On the back of that letter, written in green ink in the precise letters of my handwriting, was the story of the Cricket Hunt.

I read my words twice, trying to remember writing it. One afternoon or evening in May or June of 1969, I must have carried Fran Tucchio’s letter with me to Byerly Library and then, for some reason I do not remember, I wrote the story of the Cricket Hunt on the back. It is odd to me how many of the things I wrote back then I can no longer remember writing. A few things, even after reading them, I can not remember happening. A lot of brain cells die in 23 years, I suppose. But reading about the Cricket Hunt jarred loose some decades old brain cells from some obscure crack in my brain. It all came flooding back. I remembered it all.

I found Sandy in the basement working on a sculpture. She was bending over her work bench, patiently carving clay with what I would call a scalpel, but which probably has another name for people who sculpt. Just as Fran Tucchio’s letter was full of lawyer things, Sandy’s hands were often full of sculpting things. Both sets of things are faithful to their own language.

“Remember the Cricket Hunt?” I asked.

Sandy finished a delicate, slow cut. She paused and leaned back. She had on her glasses, which she only used to drive and work on her art, though she needed them other times as well. They are little half-glasses, like Fran Tucchio’s had been. I suddenly realized that Fran Tucchio was most likely dead and returned to dust. A lot of people seem dead to me these days.

“It was Krista’s idea,” Sandy said, looking over her glasses at me. I must have been a 6’1, 200 pound blur to her even though I was only 10 feet away. “Of course, I remember.”

I crossed the room and stood beside her. She was carving a statue about 18 inches tall. It was not finished but I could tell it was Carl Yastrzemski, an almost perfect likeness of my reading lamp shaped by her hands and knife. The bat wasn’t there and I imagined she’d carve that separately and attach it through some clay magic to Yaz’s hands.

“How do you do this?” I asked, knowing she really doesn’t know how she does such things. She simply does them. She looks at a lamp shaped like a baseball player and then goes and carves its likeness in clay.

“I do it very slowly, Reed, because I have heard the song of the cricket and my soul is at peace.”

“Do you want to read what I wrote about the Cricket Hunt, what I wrote back then?” I hadn’t asked Sandy to read anything since the first time when she would give me no praise. I had been too shy and embarrassed to even ask. But the story on the back of Fran Tucchio’s letter was, after all, 20 some years old and something I didn’t remember writing, though I remembered every moment of the event. Besides, I wanted to remember it with her.

“No, I don’t want to read it,” she said. “I am tired and don’t have the energy to read.”

I felt like a third-grader who had brought home something from school, something I’d worked hard on, and wanted my Dad to look at it. And my Dad was too tired and busy with something else and took little notice.

“But I want you to read it to me,” Sandy said, smiling mischievously, “I want to go lie on our bed and have you sit beside me and read it all. Then I want to make love.”

I was startled. Since I started writing, Sandy had slept downstairs or in our son’s room. I had grown monkish in all those weeks and had almost stopped thinking about sleeping with her.

“That is,” she added, pretending to be shy, “if you don’t mind a horny, overweight, middle-aged white woman.”

“Not so much over weight,” I said, “mostly just big-boned.”

“You have a way with words, Reed,” she said, laying her glasses aside.

So Sandy curled in the middle of our bed. Aided by Carl Yastrzemski’s circle of light, I read those fading green words to her. “I’m not going to sleep,” she told me before I began. “I’m resting my eyes and seeing it all in my mind. You’ll see.”

I thought she dozed from time to time, but I kept reading. This is what I read:

This is the story of the monumental, magnificent, almost metaphysical Cricket Hunt.

First, a prophecy from Krista Saulstein, Jewish mystic from Sandusky, Ohio: “Lo, the Song of the Cricket is in the land. The cricket song will bring peace to the troubled soul.”

And now a word from Meyer T Meyer, Master of the Igloo Factory: “Let the people build cricket cages and let the cages be built….”

After Krista told Meyer that cricket songs were good for the soul, there was a Meeting to organize the mass production of cricket cages. Meyer longed for peace for our collective souls. And for the metallic songs of crickets.

I had lived at the Factory for all of July and August. September had arrived that day and the heat of Cambridge was tempered by cool mornings and cooler evenings. Summer was limping away. Soon the Autumn would come. And then the snows.

“Meyer,” I said, “I have an opinion.”

“That’s good, Reed,” he said, eating an orange Popsicle, “it shows you are getting better. Thought I must tell you a terrible secret….” His voice dropped, as it always did for secret-sharing, “Opinions are not good things to have. They tend to clog up the airways. Opinions are psychic mucus. However, since you once had many and now have few, we can only assume that an occasional opinion on your part points to a return of normalcy. Continue.”

“There are no crickets on Broadway,” I said, expressing my opinion, creating psychic mucus. “I haven’t heard a cricket since I’ve been here and I listen in the night. I hear lots of buses and sirens and drunks who sing themselves home. I hear Sugar singing and Yodel typing and I even hear the distant hum of Boston. I can almost hear the River Charles flowing to the sea in the small hours of the night. But no crickets. I haven’t heard any crickets.”

“But there are crickets, Reed,” he said, searching through the freezer. “We will stalk them and track them and hunt them down. Then you will sleep. The cricket songs will lull you into a deep and dreamless sleep.”

He turned to me and smiled. “Want a Popsicle?” he asked.

Meyer was making a cricket cage out of Popsicle sticks. It looked like a kindergarten art project. He had been eating Popsicles as fast as he could for several days. He stuck them together with Elmer’s Glue-all and partially chewed Dentine.

Everyone was making cricket cages.

Sugar made a cricket cage out of yarn. She knitted a cricket cage. It wouldn’t stand up. It lay on its side like so much green spaghetti waiting for a cricket meatball.

“What do you think, Reed?” she asked me. “If I hang it from a thread, it would be a passable cage. What do you think?”

“I think there are no crickets on Broadway,” I told her, trying out my opinion.

Krista made a cricket cage out of candle wax. It was intricate work, like a spider’s web, only shaped like a box. It was like a honey comb. Krista was spinning a cricket cage.

“You’re spinning a cricket cage,” I told her, “like a spider spins a web.”

She smiled a mystical smile at me. She had painted a red dot on her forehead and a blue dot on her left cheek.

“Crickets are good for your soul,” she said, waving and spinning.

Meyer believed Krista’s cricket-knowledge had come to her in a dream, whispered to her by an angel.

Most everyone made cricket cages. From wooden things. From pipe cleaners. From coat hangers. From anything that would either bend or be tied together. Yodel tied together some wooden spoons.

“This is a wooden-spoon cricket cage,” he told me. “I have lots of wooden spoons. Do you think I should try to make a cricket cage from some of my mountain climbing gear? Or maybe from some copies of my dumb novels? What do you think?”

People were always asking me what I thought, I don’t know why. When Yodel asked me, he smiled like Howdy Doody. His was a Howdy Doody cricket cage.

Finally, on a cool September evening, Meyer called us all together. “It is time,” he announced, “to stalk the cricket.”

Everyone was serious, like we were planning the French Revolution. As if we were characters in a dark, Gothic novel.

Everyone dressed in black or navy blue since Krista said crickets couldn’t see dark colors. She told us that while she was staring in a mirror, painting her red dot black. Meyer was sure an angel told her to do that.

Ten of us went on the Cricket Hunt. Meyer and Jerry and Sugar and Krista and Sandy and Yodel and I were there. And three of the Wanderers who had wandered by the Factory during cricket season wanted peace for their souls. One of the Wanderers was from Norway and the other two from Utah. I don’t remember their names. I only remember Meyer commenting, “Given the Mormon factor, Utah is a lot stranger than Norway.”

Pierce wouldn’t come, even though Sugar cried and begged him. Pierce could certainly be like that. Marvin Gardens stayed home to watch TV although he built a cricket cage. He built it out of old TV tubes and tiny filaments. He made it so you could plug it into the wall and it would blink. “It will make the crickets think they’re seeing the Northern Lights,” he told me. “It is an aurora borealis cricket cage. What do you think, Reed?”

“The crickets are gathered on Divinity Avenue,” Meyer told us as we sat out. “They are grazing at the back entrance of the Peabody Museum.” Off we went in silence. It was a four block walk.

Meyer was wearing a Union Soldier’s cape. It had been Jerry’s until Meyer talked him out of it. The cape was for special occasions, like when Jerry talked about The War. Or for Cricket Hunts. Meyer also wore a black eye patch.

“The crickets will not see your eye patch,” Krista told him. Meyer’s bad eye was milky white. The crickets would have seen it a mile away. Two miles.

We crept on cricket-stalking feet down Divinity Avenue. Some Asian students were coming out of a building. We must have seemed to be a dark-clothed, cricket-footed, silent and solemn pageant to them.

“Crick-ET, Cricket-ET, Crick-ET,” the crickets were saying.

“Call to them, Reed,” Meyer whispered.

“Crick-et, crick-et, crick-et,” I called.

“Crick-ET, Crick-ET, Crick-ET,” they answered.

“Crick-et,” I called.

“Crick-ET,” they answered in a throaty, many cricket voice.

Meyer ran down Divinity Avenue. His cape billowed behind him like a blue storm cloud. He was in search of crickets for his Popsicle stick cage and his Soul’s peace.

We all had flashlights held close to the ground as we crawled on hands and knees, cricket searching.

The headlights of a large black and white car flooded the cricket field. A voice from the car called to us: “What are you doing?” it said. “What on earth?”

“Crick-ET?” the crickets said, many crickets.

Two men in dark uniforms got out of the car. The crickets would not see their uniforms. But the men wore shiny silver badges that would put a cricket’s eyes out.

“Turn off your badges,” Meyer hissed at them, “you’ll give us away.”

I knew one of the men. He was the policeman who helped me through Union Square. I reminded him about it. “You helped me find Homer Square,” I said. “We watched a funeral and a wedding and you gave me a Marlboro.”

Sugar came over to him. “We seek for crickets,” she said. “We have many cages and restless souls.” Then she leaned near him on tip-toe and whispered, lest the insects hear her, “Crickets are almost metaphysical.”

The policeman remembered me, which many policemen would not have, and he liked Sugar instantly, which almost anyone would have. He smiled a big, positively Irish grin and told us he too wanted rest for his soul. His name was Michael Quinn. When he said it in his Boston accent, it came out ‘Mack-el Quinn’. We called him ‘Mack’. He helped us look for crickets with his 24 inch, police issue flashlight. He captured two crickets and shared them with Sugar and me.

“Come by and listen to them sometimes,” Sugar told Mack. “Come by the Igloo Factory for some soul-soothing cricket songs.” Her eyes sparkled when she said that, like crickets sparkle in flashlight glow.

Mack’s partner was an emaciated white man named Steward. His uniform fell over him like a cloth falls over stored furniture. He did not like us as well as Mack did. He did not try to catch any crickets. His soul was as peace-less as a sleet gale on the North Atlantic.

On the way home, charmed by cricket songs, Meyer told me there were two Quinn boys on his softball team. “One’s name is Michael, Jr.,” he said, “but he couldn’t be Mack’s son. He plays center field like a young deer and told me his father was a garbage collector.”

I put my cricket in my sock drawer with a little wet grass and cornmeal. His song—like an electric tune—lulled me into a dreamless, restful sleep. The only Voices in my sleep were those of crickets.

“Leave the light on, Reed,” Sandy said after I finished reading to her, “and come on over here.” I thought she’d been asleep.

Spring had come to the mountains while I was reading about September in Cambridge a thousand years ago. The air was sharp and fragrant, moistly earth-smelling. We undressed each other with great care. We undressed each other slowly and with great care. In the light from Carl Yastrzemski’s globe, I lay beside Sandy and studied her nakedness. She smiled and sighed.

Sandy and I have been lovers since 1968—except for her months in Rockport at Newman’s clinic and the last two months since I’ve been trying to write this book, I’m not sure we’ve slept apart for more than than one night at a time. When we met, I was nearly 22 and she was almost 19. Now I’m nearly 44 and she’s 40 and 1/2. It’s almost crazy to think about where those years have gone. They’ve gone where lost puppies go, where the mate to your sock goes, where old friends disappear to. Places like that are where those years are now. And Sandy and I are still together—two middle aged, white people growing older together, watching the years slip by the way winter slips away in the mountains…slowly, tenuously, with much hanging-on; but then, one evening, without warming, spring has come.

After the Cricket Hunt, Sgt Quinn started dropping by the Factory from time to time. He lived in North Cambridge, near the Museum of Science and Lechmere Station. He had a wife and two kids. His oldest son, Michael Sean Quinn, Jr., played center field like a young deer and lied about his father’s job. Mack would drink a Schlitz or two with us and talk. He smiled a lot. Everyone liked him immensely.

Sugar always said, after he left, “Mack isn’t very cop-like.”

And Meyer would always answer, “He just isn’t copulated is he?” Sugar would always agree.

Once, when he was with us, Sugar couldn’t stand it any more. “Why are you a cop, Mack?” she asked.

He smiled shyly and lowered his head. He looked like Fred McMurray when he did that.

“Well,” he said, “it’s like this. I used to be a fish butcher. I was good too. Three slices with my best knife and you’ve got fillets.” His hands slipped through the motions. It was effortless, fluid, like a fish butcher artist. “Off with the head, slit the stomach down the tail, slip out the bones and cut through the back. Like that.” He went through the motions again and looked up. We all nodded.

“I was a showman,” he continued, “people would stand outside the window and watch. I’d give them their time’s worth. But that was over 10 years ago, when Michael, Jr. was only two and Billy was a baby. And the thing was, I had to wear gloves. Whenever I wasn’t cutting fish, I had to wear those thin, plastic gloves…like a doctor.”

“Surgeon’s gloves,” Jerry said.

“Exactly,” Mack replied. “I had to wear them because of some bacteria or another—something with a huge name I could never remember. Something in the fish activated it on my hands and…well….” He gave a sad Fred McMurray smile, “My hands would stink something awful.”

Sugar said she understood. Reed wasn’t sure.

“Some people’s feet smell,” Mack said, “because of this same bacteria. I was in the service with a guy from Little Rock who had it. God, his feet would stink up a room!”

“In Istanbul,” Meyer interrupted, pouring himself some raspberry wine, “everyone’s feet smell. The whole city reeks of feet….” Jerry glared at Meyer to keep him from launching into some endless Istanbul story. Meyer glared back, but kept quiet.

Mack shook his head and spoke slowly. “My hands were like that. The water and salt and fish…I don’t know how it works. The doctors said all I could do was wear gloves full of baking soda. I was one in a million, they told me. My hands smelled like low tide in the Back Bay. I wore the gloves.”

We all sat for a while, remembering low tide’s smell.

“Well,” Mack finally continued, “Kathleen, my wife, is a saint. She never complained. But with the boys, having to hold them with gloves on, never feeling their skin against my hands….I didn’t want them to grow up without their father’s touch. I’d been an MP in the Army and I passed the test on my first try. So I’m a cop.”

We all sat very still, like in church. Meyer sniffed a little and Sugar wiped her eyes.

“I’m a good cop,” Mack said. “I’m fair and honest. I always do what I think is right. I sleep well. But being a cop is as hard on my boys as the gloves might have been. They’re great kids—they play on your softball team,” he said to Meyer.

“Mike’s a young deer,” Meyer answered, “Billy, well, he practices hard.”

Mack laughed. “They watch the TV and all the protests at the Democratic Convention….”

“The Democrats had a convention?” Meyer said, startled.

“Shut-up, Meyer,” Jerry said sternly.

“No one told me….”

“A cop is a PIG now,” Mack took a breath and drink of beer, “even to kids, even to Mike and Billy. Well, you can imagine how hard it is for them….”

No one could imagine such a thing. We were quiet, studying our Schlitz cans and feeling our teeth with our tongues. Mack got up to go.

“I appreciate coming here,” he said, looking around at us like Fred McMurray looking proudly at his three sons. “Steward, my partner, calls me ‘Sgt Hippie’ these days. But I don’t mind. Choosing your smell might be the best anyone can do, don’t you think?”

After Mack left that night, Pierce stuck his head in Meyer’s door. He sniffed and sniffed. “Smells in here,” he said, “like a Pig sty….”

Meyer was off his bed and half-way to the door with an empty wine bottle in his hand when Jerry grabbed him. Pierce laughed wickedly and slammed the door.

After Meyer calmed down, he looked at all of them vacantly. “Where was this Democratic Convention?” he asked.

“Chicago,” Jerry said, “you would have loved it. High theater.”

Meyer shook his head. “The things you miss when you’re not paying attention,” he said sadly.

***

(In all the years that Sandy and I have been lovers, I imagine I’ve seen her naked several times each week—emerging wet and slippery from the shower, standing in the dawn by our window, dressing, laying beside me or beneath me or looming above me in our bed as we made love. Say three times a week, one way or another, for 21 years, I’ve seen Sandy naked. Probably, that is too low another because she is not modest about her body and moves no more quickly when she is nude. Often, she will stand in the bathroom door and talk to me, still in bed, without her clothes on. She can discuss a movie we’ve seen or politics or the world disaster of the moment as calmly and seriously disrobed as clothed. And since she has minor hypochondria, she thinks noting of asking me to feel her breasts for lumps or look for disfigurements in places she cannot see—moles that might be growing weirdly, funny colored bruises, God-knows what. But I’ll stick with three times a week seeing her nude.

That adds up to something like 3276 times I’ve seen Sandy naked. I find that remarkable. It’s the equivalent of once a day for ten years or more. I’m strangely touched by so much intimacy over so long a time.

And here’s the point to all that—there are always things about her body I never noticed before. That night, after reading the Cricket Hunt to her, in the peculiar angle of Yaz’s light, I realized for the first time that the very bottom of Sandy’s back, down near the swell of her buttocks, in the middle there, at the base of her spine, in that flat space…there grows a fine, almost invisible down of hair. That hair is not so much colorless as opaque, as fine as a spider’s web, as fine as eyelashes, but not as long.

I touched that hair with my finger tips, the back of my hand, my cheek, my tongue. It was so remarkable to discover, after all this time.

Funny what we miss when we’re not paying attention.

What I did on my 65th birthday

Jesus, am I really 65? How did this happen?

I used my Medicare card last week, so it must be true. But, I repeat, "how did this happen???"

I woke up earlier than usual since I'm on steroids and after a week they start waking you up early. It doesn't matter because you feel like you're 27 or so on steroids, which makes being 65 on steroids really weird.

I went to meet with the Clericus group I meet with every Tuesday, celebrated the Eucharist for us and had an everything bagel with cream cheese and lox.

Then I had a conversation with my Bishop about his visit to the cluster on Sunday for confirmation, etc. --14 candidates--and about a September and October 3 Wednesday forums about Roland Allen and Total Common Ministry.

I read a lot of a pot-boiler of a book by David Baldacchi that is a fast and good read (probabally good since I am getting elderly) and played probably 30 games of Hearts on the computer. I've very good at hearts on the computer because the computer plays 'not to lose' and I play to 'win' and I win almost 50 % of the games.

I made myself a pasta dish that I made up with diced tomatoes, peppers, bacon, good cheese and olives. Then I took more seroids, tapering off even though my doctor told me to stop...I know my body better than he does. Tapering off is the way to go....

My daughter Mimi called and asked what I was doing for dinner and I told her Bern was fixing me sea scallops and asparagus and fingerling potatoes. Mimi noted that she remembered that's what I'd had for birthday dinners for years and I agreed. If I were going to be executed, that would be my last meal.

Then I watched the Yankees and MSMBC--both of which I love--for a while and sat on the deck in the remarkable cool of this warm day and drank a great deal of cold, white wine and smoked a cigarette or two--only that, since I'm on steroids, and considered my mortality.

Then my son called and asked me what I've done and I told him all I told you and he didn't seem all that impressed so I told him it was the best birthday I could imagine--at 65 or any other age.

I think he acknowledged that and asked me not to use up medicare or social security before his girls--my granddaughters--were old enough to use it.

I told him I'd try.

Then I wrote this.

Now, because it is so remarkably wonderful, I'm going to sit on the deck some more and have some more cold, white wine and have another cigarette.

Not a bad day.

I talked to my children. My wife loves me more each day, as I do here. The air is cool, the wine is cold and being 65 isn't as bad as I had imagined....

birthday eve redux

OK, while there's still time, one more self-pitying, whiny reflection on turning 65 (O My God!) tomorrow.

I was standing in the kitchen figuring out how to be elderly, when Bern came down.

"I never meant to be this old!" I told her. "I was going to live fast, love hard, die young and leave a good looking corpse...."

She looked at me in that way she has for, lord have mercy, 42 years of marriage, shook her head and said, somewhat (but not totally) kindly, "When were you going to do that?"

I agreed, "well, probably never...."

"You were born to be an old man," she told me, "You've always wanted to be an old man."

There's some modicum of truth to that, I suppose.

Once I heard Jimmy Connors, the tennis player, talk about how he played tennis. "I try to 'slow the ball down'," he said, "just like an act of will--make it go slower...."

So that's what I plan to do now that I'm in my dotage. "I'm going to slow Life down" and savor it like a fine wine, like a firefly filled evening, like a series of ponderous moments, like something pregnant and important.

So, if you're around me, expect time to be like molasses, like a glacier. I'm going to 'slow it down' and take it all in and be present to it in a new way.

I have, Bern's right, always thought I was an 'old soul'. I just never thought my body and my life would catch up to my soul.

Maybe I can figure out the whole "Wisdom Thing" in the time I have left.

Something devoutly to be longed for, leaned into, explored.

We'll see. We'll just see.

Birthday Eve Musings

Here on the day before my 65th birthday, I should be pondering the impenetrable mysteries of the Universe, instead, I'm sitting around in a prednizone haze, waiting for my lungs and sinuses to clear up, wondering how the hell I got this old....

I was in my 30's not that long ago, I remember. When did the next decades go? Was I just not paying attention to the march, march, march of time? And how did those two pre-adolescent children of ours get to be the last age I clearly remember?

Who put these old hands on the end of my arms and what are those little squiggly blue lines on my legs?

And where's my young beautiful wife? Someone has taken her away and left this aging woman in her place....

I'm older than my mother was when she died though still about 20 years to catch up with my father.

I think I'll have a little wine and stare blankly at the back yard, considering mortality unless I can drink fast enough....

Happy birthday, humbug!

Steroid dreams

I have a long history of allergies and asthma and pneumonia. I am no stranger to steroids by mouth and a few times in an IV. I've taken allergy injections for at least 1/3 of the years of my life, off and on. My allergist has kept me off injections and reasonably symptom free for the last decade, God bless Dr. Randolph's heart....

But last week, after this weird winter, something popped into the air that threw my whole respiratory system into tsunami mode. Mucus like you wouldn't believe from all sources, sneezes that lasted minutes long and finally, regrettably, the dank, think liquid's descent into the lower regions of my lungs.

Walking upstairs left me breathless. Watching TV is exhausting. Nothing but laying down with my C-Path machine, which forces air into me, felt very good.

I've now, as of today, been on 60 mg of prednisone for 5 days. It is beginning to kick in. I can actually stay horizontal for hours without passing out. I celebrated a wedding and went to a pulled pork dinner and watched some TV without having to take a nap or gasp for air.

But what I always forget about massive steroids is the dreams.

Steroid dreams are like Hollywood block busters. Steroid dreams are like no other dreams. There are sound tracks and remarkable visuals and a cast of thousands. It's never bad, only BIG, BIG, BIG.

There was one last night when I was in the Philippines and then Hong Kong--and the production was first class, "Titanic" like special effects and whizzing around in remarkable sets and big stars as well as people I know and it was like a high class mystery-drama with me as the star even though I had no idea, in the dream, what was going on. Angela Jollie and Julia Roberts were on my side and the bald guy from that awful police drama was the bad guy and some of my childhood friends were walk-ons and it was really tense and amazing and never scary but big-budget, really big-budget.

This afternoon I just drifted off for a few minutes and had a conversation with Michelle Obama and Rodney Dangerfield about global warming and the big storms coming through the Midwest tonight. Actually, Mrs. Obama was funnier than Rodney.

If your dream life is a little dull, get some steroids and lay down to pleasant dreams....

The Igloo Factory--chapter 3

THREE:

CONFESSIONS

“Study long and you’ll study wrong….”

--Lysander Martin III (1946-1964)

Gerald Mann was a once and future Episcopal priest who lived at the Igloo Factory. When I first met him he told me he was ‘inhibited’—or as he put it, ‘semi-defrocked’, a category roughly akin to ‘somewhat pregnant’. He wore clerical collars almost constantly and would celebrate communion with Meyer in Meyer’s ‘troubles’, but his standing in the church was a cloudy as Meyer’s bad eye. Never the less, Jerry put great stock in confession. He would say, as a priest might, “Confession is good for the soul.” But he never stopped there. “Confession”, he said, to anyone who would listen, “is good for what ails you. Confession is a paradigm for wholeness.”

“Say, Reed,” Sugar asked me one hot night a week or so after I arrived at the Factory, “can I ask you something?”

“Is it personal?” I asked, coyly, trying to be wry and ironic—something I often was in my literacy.

For Sugar, irony did not exist. She was that innocent—or that fortunate. So she thought a long time before answering, “Isn’t everything?”

“So ask already,” I said, smiling.

“What’s ‘paradigm’ mean?”

“It’s like a pattern or a model or an example…something like that.”

She twisted her mouth up and thought. “So what Jerry means is that confession is ‘model’ for “wholeness”?

“That’s what Jerry means.”

Sugar went up to her room then. Nobody at the Factory, not even Meyer, knew her real name or exactly which suburb of Chicago she was from and next to nothing about her life before she showed up. She was a walking, talking, living secret. Confession was not her paradigm.

*

I was remembering that because Ash Wednesday was last week. Sandy had told me in the morning at breakfast. We were finishing our tea and she said, “Big Holy Day today….”

“Which one?” I asked. Sandy kept up with the surging, rolling rituals of several world faiths. She sometimes claimed to pray to the Goddess, attended meditation classes from time to time and found the calendars of organized religions interesting. She said it kept her in the flow of the seasons.

“Ash Wednesday.”

So, that day at noon I left Peaches in charge of the library and walked down the Grace Church. It’s a tiny little church built of native West Virginia woods and full of muted colors. I’d go and sit in Grace Church from time to time. It was a good place to sit but I seldom attended services.

The service had just started when I got there, then Fr. Boyles, dressed in black, read some lessons with solemnity and drama. There was a little sermon about how life is like wearing a raincoat with two pockets. In one pocket, we carry dust and ashes, the earth, humus, our own mortality. In the other pocket, there is starlight and glitter, wondrous stuff of life and joy. Fr. Boyles went on to say that we need to have our hands full of the contents of both pockets. That sounded reasonable to me.

Following the sermon was a confession that lasted about 10 minutes. We confessed all the appropriate and ordinary sins along with some I’d never really thought about before. We confessed we are broken and selfish and impatient. We confessed we have royally messed up the planet and not given people different from us a fair shake. We confessed we are envious, lustful and discontent. It was beginning to annoy me—which might be the point—when he stood up and forgave us every single sin!

Properly shriven, we got our ashes. I knelt at the altar and Fr. Boyles rubbed some gritty soot on my forehead and said, “Remember, my brother, you are dust and to dust you shall return.”

I stayed for communion, thinking of all the people I know who have returned to dust, how strange it is to imagine ourselves dust that is walking around and living for a while—apparently sinning to high heaven—before laying down and being dust again. I was also trying to imagine holding ashes in one hand and stardust in the other—but dust, after all. Before I knew it, I was back up at the altar rail, chewing one of the little wafers. Jerry once told me Episcopalians needed lots of faith to imagine those wafers were ‘bread’, much less the Body of Christ.

The wine tasted like deep maroon smoke—a port, I imagine, though in my old church back in Cleveland they used a shiny, golden sherry. It was easier, somehow, to think of cheap port as ‘blood’, not so large a leap of faith as a fine sherry.

Back at work, I started thinking about how Lysander and my father and Meyer T were dust that had fallen into deep cracks in my brain. Fr. Boyles’ raincoat story had brought them up as glitter stinging my hand. I wasn’t getting much done—‘nothing’, in point of fact—thinking about all that, so it was a welcomed distraction when Carrie Justice came gliding into the library about 3:15, floating over to the check out desk where I’d been thinking.

She smiled at me and then did one of those double takes kids do naturally and you and I have to act out. Her mouth flew open and she started climbing up on the desk, knocking pens and call-slips and God know what all onto the floor. I pulled her up to kneel on the desk top. She licked her hand, pulled my head down and started rubbing my forehead with her wet, sticky saliva.

“You got all dirty, Reed Daley,” she said, breathless and whispering, just the way I taught her to talk in the library. “Your mom’s goin’ to be fit to be tied….”

“Thank you, Carrie Ann,” Peaches said, walking by with an armful of books to mis-shelve. “Those damn ashes have given me the willies all afternoon.”

Most people in Buchanan, except up at the college, are Baptists or evangelicals. Ash Wednesday makes them anxious.

*

Since Ash Wednesday, I’ve been thinking about how my pockets are chock-a-block full with the dust of people I know and how confession, according to the now re-frocked Fr. Jerry Mann, is good for what ails you. Here is a confession: I never intended to write this book.

Oh, I promised I would. I promised Meyer T Meyer with a sacred oath. And I played at it for quite a while, filling lunch bags with memories and Byerly Library call slips with reflections. But I was simply playing around, waiting until Sandy came back from Rockport clean from drugs and we could go to Idaho and live happily ever after. When she came back and we ended up in Buchanan, I let all thoughts of writing this book slip into a crack in my mind and left well enough alone. After all, for over 20 years, I seldom saw anyone besides Sandy who knew I had made the promise. And to justify myself a bit, after being in West Virginia for a year or so, I did write to Meyer in jail to tell him about our Meyer, his namesake, and to mention I wasn’t getting anywhere with the writing. Since he never wrote back, I took that as a sign. If he hadn’t written that damned message on his jail cell with his own blood, I would have been off Scot-free and would have returned to dust without doing all this.

Here is another confession: Most of my ‘intentions’ turn out the same way.

I have lived a life of unfulfilled intentions—a life, spent away like so many shiny quarters, avoiding even having intentions. It is—or so I believe—not unlike the lives of many others. Many of us seem to be dust walking around unconscious about the promises we made.

Besides, ‘intentions’ are funny things.

Here’s an example: I was 17 years old and having sex with a cheerleader named Cindi in the back seat of my basketball coach’s Buick. It was the only time Cindi and I had sex, in a Buick or otherwise. It had been my highest intention for over a month to be just where I was that night—on top of Cindi, one hand on her firm right breast, the other hand holding us steady in the back seat, our legs entwined. That was what I intended to have happen for most of my waking hours (and some of my dreams) for four weeks.

At that very moment—precisely then—I found myself thinking about the calculus test I had the next morning. I didn’t know didley about many of the formulas that were going to be on the test. All through the consummation of my Great Intention, I was worried about calculus.

So much for intentions.

So much for lust as well.

For several years it was my intention to be an Associate Justice of the Supreme Court and a published poet. I also intended, during that same time frame, to marry Angela, the daughter of a gynecologist from Kenilworth, Illinois and give her four babies before we returned to dust.

When I became illiterate just before my 22^nd birthday, I had a friend write to Georgetown Law School to tell them I wouldn’t be coming in September to be elected to the Law Review in my second year (another intention of mine). Right after that, Angela left my life. And, the truth be known, my poetry was always abysmal.

One of my poems, a sonnet to a warm December day, began like this:

“When thus it comes upon a winter’s day,

Such a misplaced’ springtime afternoon….”

The poem ended like this:

“My sighted’ heart its mother-wet wings dons,

And seeking springtime, soars in sunlight blessed.”

Which, most everyone should agree, makes me a rotten poet.

My poetry was, if nothing else, quite alliterative. One line of a sonnet I

Wrote for Angela said:

“Shimmering sun, shining with such a sheen”

and another said:

“Tracing trickling tears of terrible trial.”

All my poems were like that—bad. Just the kind of poems an Associate Justice of the Supreme Court might find time to write. Poems only his law clerks would claim to like and which would contain many references to Greek mythology stolen from his paperback copy of Edith Hamilton.

Mercifully, not all my poems were sonnets. I also wrote in blank verse from time to time. Those poems are marginally better because they had no particular form to abuse. One of those blank verse poems was about fear and ended with these lines:

There is the fear of death

and the fear death holds.

There is the fear of love,

that too.

But most, most of all,

There is the fear of being

too near, too dear

with life.

I care about that poem, though it is a sorry excuse for poetry. I care about it because it was written in the shadow of a mountain named Massenutten and it was for my friend Lysander, who had returned to dust. There was snow all around when I wrote it. The snow was white on white on white.

I haven’t written a poem for years and will never be a lawyer, much less a Justice of the highest court in the land. And unless Sandy and I completely lose our minds, I will father only one child on this earth. So much for intentions.

Except…I am writing this book. With more luck than I’m used to having, maybe I can make it True. The way Meyer wanted.

Writing a book, after all, isn’t all that hard. Since I’ve been the librarian at the Buchanan Public Library, I’ve met several dozen people who have written books. And those are just the ones who have told me about their books. Sometimes, like bartenders, people will tell librarians secrets even their families don’t know—like they’ve written a book. Usually they whisper it to me, sliding some pages across the desk in my direction. They whisper it like a confession.

John Manor Tyson, one of the Baptist ministers in town, shared his book about sin with me this very week. He titled it SIN: THE WRONG WAY TO GO and it chronicles mostly sins of the flesh. I read most of it and marveled at how deeply he has considered the matters of lust, fornication and self-abuse. I plan to give it back with him along with a copy of the Episcopal Book of Common Prayer with page of the Ash Wednesday folded down so he might find it. Rev. Tyson has lots of things than seem to ail him.

Freda Sparks, an aging maiden who teaches third grade at the elementary school, has written a book about the screwy things eight and nine year old children say. She is the malignant side of Art Linkletter. Her kids say the ‘damnest’ things. Her book is called The Child is Parent to the Wo/Man. It isn’t half bad. Although Freda’s obsessive devotion to inclusive language gets rather tedious, her thesis is, in some twisted way, ground breaking. She flies in the face of all the books about how we are victims of our parents’ mistakes. Adult mistakes and craziness, according to Freda Sparks, are nothing more than adult reactions to the inherent demented nature of children. Children, she believes, are the genesis of anything gruesome, nasty or bad that parents do. Each of us, she reasons quite well, are responsible for how our parents turned out. As theories go, it is a unique and remarkable one.

Norman Gale, a retired Forest Ranger for the National Park Service, confided in me some time ago that he had written a book about the woods he had guarded and protected. He calls it Forty Eight Years and Eleven Months Among the Trees. The sub-title is “Almost Half-a-Century as a Forest Ranger”. It’s an amazing piece of writing. Norman asked me to write the foreword if it gets published. I was deeply moved by that. “Stormin’”, which is what I call him, is a true naturalist. He can almost make trees interesting. I read his book twice though it’s written with a #3 pencil on onion skin paper and is torn in many places. Stormin’ Norman tells me it takes many fewer trees to make onion skin paper and the pencils last longer with hard lead. He really cares about trees. He has things to say about pines that, to my knowledge, has never been said before.

Sandy’s written a book—though she doesn’t even know I know about it. It’s a novella about a young girl who fills her veins with heroin and twice finds a new life in a clinic on Cape Cod. The doctor who saves her both times is a recovering addict himself who lost his medical license but takes care of poison filled people anyway. He wears blue jeans and reads Sartre. Much of his therapy, if I were to name it, is ‘existential’. Sandy’s book is a disturbing tale with lots of descriptions of the song the sea sings. The first time the girl gets clean she comes to a house in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and against her better judgment falls in love. The second time she gets clean, she leaves with that man and goes to live in West Virginia. I’ve read it several times while Sandy was out teaching art classes, usually skipping over the really painful parts—the parts where the girl wants to be dust again. It doesn’t have a title, but I would name it Sea Song.

Most everyone, I’ve heard it suggested, has one book in them—the one about their life. Maybe this one is mine. So, writing a book shouldn’t be terribly hard. Writing a “True Book”…that may be a different story.

One of the lunch bags I’ve read and re-read lately has these words on it:

Writing a True Book is not easy, especially since I’m trying to write it while guarding a few thousand of the hundreds and hundreds of thousand books that belong, for one reason or another, the Harvard University. Percy, who gave me the job of guarding books, doesn’t mind if I write while guarding. Percy knows Meyer and claims to understand. I only wish I did.

The people who come into my little library want me to pay attention to them. They want me to find books for them. They want me to fill out cards for them. They want me to be pleasant and helpful, and I am, though it slows my writing considerably.

My library’s name is Byerly and Byerly has the reputation of being a pleasant, friendly library, unlike some of the others in Harvard and Ratcliff’s system. There is even a sign that Percy scotch-taped to the front of my desk that says:

BYERLY IS A FRIENDLY LIBRARY.

AND A PLEASANT ONE, WELCOME.

Percy has scotch-taped another notice to my desk. It is a message to me about the books I guard so faithfully. It says:

Books on term-reserve circulate overnight.

Books not on term-reserve circulate for three (3) weeks.

Books on permanent-reserve circulate for one (1) week

unless they are also on term-reserve

in which case they circulate only overnight

and official Commonwealth Monday holidays*

(*see Library Handbook for Monday holiday policy.)

I must read that notice twenty (20) times a day. It still confuses me.

I wrote that nearly two (2) decades ago, filling most of a brown lunch bag stained with some long-forgotten lunch. I hardly remember the person who wrote it, much less what he was thinking about. It is, in its way, a confession about how hard it is to write a True Book, given the distractions of life.

Now here I am, writing again, ‘intending’ to finish this time and keep my promise. I am hoping, wishing, even praying a little, that this will somehow be true. Just like Meyer wanted before he returned to dust. For all I know, he still wants it written and written True. Bless his heart.

***

This is a longer confession. This is about where I was and what I was doing with my stay on earth before I forgot how to read and came to live in the Igloo Factory.

I was born in a little-known area where two rivers and three states meet. One of the rivers is known and large and the other is smaller and unknown. The rivers are the Ohio and the Big Sandy. The states are Ohio, West Virginia and Kentucky.

There are places where I was born with names like Ceredo and Kenova and Russell and Greenup and Princess and Coal Grove and Hanging Rock and Getaway. None of those places are large or known. I always knew about them because I would look them up in the AAA Atlas, just to try to imagine the places near where I was born. Sandy and I visited there about a month after we decided to stay east and not go to Idaho. We found all of them except Princess and Getaway. When we were in Coal Grove, I got out of the car and walked up and down the road. The autumn mountains were a riot of colors. The wind was heavy with the hint of frost. I cried a little just in wonder of how I had begun my stay on earth near such a place. It was embarrassing, but Sandy kissed my tears away and told me she understood.

So, when I was four days old, about as interesting as a baby oriole, I was taken from that place to my real home. My eyes, I imagine, had not focused on anything besides swimming-kaleidoscopic-rainbows when I arrived in Cleveland, where I grew.

I was born in the emergency room in Ironton, rather than in Cleveland because my father was a brilliant lawyer for some important coal and gas concerns. He and my mother, with me slumbering in her womb, had come to Ironton so my father could meet with the coal and gas concerns and my mother—a life long citizen of Cleveland—could see such a place. She used to be interested in new places and sights. Besides, she though I was five weeks from beginning my stay on this earth.

I was born where the Ohio and the Big Sandy meet and I grew up in a nine-room house in a section of suburban Cleveland with wide, well-lighted streets, groomed lawns and many high-end foreign cars. My mother and father and I lived there for eight years, until my sister Caroline was born. My mother lives there still, hale but bored at 70. Caroline lives in Columbus with her long-time lover, Monica. The two of them visit my mother often. Caroline and Monica both teach in the psychology department of Ohio State University. They even co-teach a class on “The Myths and Truths of Sexuality” every other semester. So many people sign up that they have to turn 80 or so away every time. Yet they drive separate cars to campus and keep their private life…well, private. Columbus, Caroline often reminds me, isn’t as cosmopolitan as one might wish.

Sandy and I go to Cleveland in the summer for a week or so. It isn’t as much fun without our son along and he has found other things to do the last few years. Monica, Caroline and my mother always spoiled him terribly, but it wasn’t a bad thing. Everyone, it seems to me, needs some spoiling from time to time because the world is a rather harsh place.

Without ‘little Meyer’ around, my mother tends to remember that I’m not the lawyer my father hoped I’d be or the Supreme Court Justice I intended to be. She never mentions how she feels about my being head librarian at a public library in a college town in West Virginia. She never says much about it and doesn’t ask how much money I make—though she knows, as well as I do, that I have a trust fund full of money making money and it has made so much money so far I really wouldn’t have to work at all. Yet, behind the smoke from her Kent cigarette, I can see her—if her grandson isn’t there to fuss over—looking wistfully at me and remembering my father.

I want to tell her that I am ‘fine’—better than that—that I love my work and love Buckhannon and love Sandy more than life and that life has turned out better than I ever dreamed. I want to tell her about my softball team and the woods around Buckhannon where I walk and the things I think about. I want to talk with her about all that. Yet, I must confess that I don’t.

I’m not a very good son or brother as those things go. I send cards and presents on birthdays and at Christmas and receive the same in return. I write occasional letters and call my mother every week. Sometimes I think about Caroline and Monica, their fierce devotion, and wonder how my mother feels wandering around that big house all alone, smoking her Kent’s and waiting to die. I try to picture what my mother does with her time. She works on bazaars at Ascension Church, watches Phil Donahue and belongs to a bridge club. She still drives the 1967 BMW my father bought her a few months before he died, as if making sure she’d have a good car once he was dust again. Caroline says it still doesn’t have 50,000 miles on it and hums like a well fed cat, but my mother worries about it, takes it to the dealer on a regular basis and pays lots of money to fix things that aren’t broken. She only drives to church and bridge club and to Columbus for Thanksgiving with Caroline and Monica and their gay friends.

Sometimes my mother and Caroline are like blurs to me. Cleveland is too. Cleveland is a place I visited on holidays after I was 13. I wouldn’t recognize downtown without the Christmas lights. Most of the time, I was somewhere else. The place I was somewhere else the longest was at my father’s military school in a green, lush valley in the green, lush state of Virginia. I was sent there, as my father had been, to enter puberty and become as well-groomed and respectable of the suburb of Cleveland where my mother lives alone these days.

When I was 13 and some and in my first days at Massanuttin Military Academy in a rich, lush valley of Virginia, my roommate woke me up masturbating. He was Lysander Martin III and was from Buckhannon, West Virginia. He was groaning and his bed was squeaking as only military school beds can. I must have shouted out when I woke up because Lysander knew I was there, listening.

He paused for a moment. “So, what’s wrong?” he said.

“Ah…are you okay?”

“Jesus,” he said, his bed squeaking a little, “I will be soon.”

After he had resumed for a while, I said, “My father told me that would make you crazy….”

Lysander laughed and gasped. “God, I hope so!” he said. A moment later he shuttered and we lay in darkness broken only from a single light outside in the quad. It was late September and extremely hot. Windows in military schools seldom open. Lysander started telling me about his father in near darkness.

“My old man’s a gynecologist,” he said. “He’s looked up every twat in Buckhannon, West Virginia. Whenever I’m home I can hardly look women in the face, realizing where my father’s had his hands. Pap smears and looking up twats—what a life!”

“My father’s a lawyer,” I said, “he represents coal and gas interests. That’s a pretty good job.”

“Jesus, Reed,” Lysander responded, laughing like a tribe on Indians, “are you ever from O-hi-o….”

As things like that go, it was the beginning of an inseparable friendship. Lysander and I grew up together and re-wrote the athletic and academic records of our school. We became running, jumping, studying machines. Lysander was a guard and I was a forward on the basketball team that won 27 consecutive games our sophomore and junior years. We both averaged over 17 points a game. Lysander was the quarter-back and I was the wide-receiver on the football team. Our senior season, before he died, Lysander threw me 13 touchdown passes in eight games and Massanuttin beat Greenbrier for the first time in 20 years. I ran track and he was captain of the tennis team. We studied like mad. Had he lived, Lysander would have graduated first in our class. As it was, I did.

We lived in the same room nine months a year for almost five years. We double-dated proper girls from a near-by private school and wild little girls from the town. We parked with them in the basketball coach’s Buick Electra near the top of Massanuttin Mountain. With the private school girls in their proper blouses and pleated pants, we drank Coke-floats, listened to Bach and talked about J.D. Salinger. With the town girls in their too-tight, sleeveless T-shirts and oh-so-short skirts, we drank illegal beer, went to Dean Martin movies and talked about how fast we could run, how high we could jump. We both lost our virginity the same night in the Electra. I was with a town-y cheerleader and Lysander was with a girl from Greenwich, Connecticut. Or maybe it was the other way around. It doesn’t matter much anymore. It all happened on Massanuttin Mountain.

Everything in that lush valley was named Massanuttin Something or Other. Even the Massanuttin Emporium, a run down, roadside tavern owned by an old crippled woman named Minerva. Minerva had heard of a place in New York City called the Emporium, so—even though she had a vague notion at best of New York City—she called her tavern that.

It was at Minerva’s Emporium that Lysander and I bought our illegal beer. Minerva took a liking to Lysander and gleefully broke the law for him. She also gave us quarters for our dollars so we could by prophylactics from the rusty machine in the Emporium’s bathroom. We bought a lot more than we used, but Minerva always winked at us when we asked for quarters.

“Better safe than sorry, my fine young friends,” she say, cackling out a laugh like a 200 year old witch. “We don’t want no rich boys leaving babies behind here in Massanuttin.”

Minerva knew all the secret ways back onto campus after hours from generations of her favorite cadets. She shared those secrets with us, just the way she told us the curse of Wil’ Thomas’ rock

William Jones Thomas, Minerva told us, was one of the first white men who ever came to that rich, lush valley of Virginia. He was a scalawag of a fur trader who stole his partner’s furs, kidnapped a 13 year old Pamunkee Indian girl and headed west.

“When old Wil’ almost topped that mountain,” Minerva’s voice was like an old radio, crackling and wheezing, “he should have kept on going. But nuthin’ would do him but to stop and bed down that little maiden. Lust, my find friends, will undo you in the end. And it was right there, near the top, where the road bends back in on itself, that the Pamunkee braves caught up with them….At that big flat rock, you know the one I mean?”

Of course we knew. We passed it every time we drove the coach’s car up to one of the many secluded dirt roads near the mountain’s top.

“On that very rock,” she went on, “those Injuns slit Wil’ Thomas’ throat and carved out his insides for the birds to eat. Left him there to rot, taking his toes and tongue and fingers and private parts as souvenirs.”

Minerva opened herself a Black Label and took a long, toothless swig. “Then, the next morning, Wil’ Thomas’ partners caught up with him. He was splayed out in parts with significant parts missin’—and the Pamunkees had taken the furs as well as the little girl and Wil’s missing parts. After chocking back the bile from their stomachs, one of them fellows looked at Wil and said, “That’s the biggest mess of nothin’ I’ve ever see’d….

“So, my beloved cadets, that’s how our valley got its name.” Then Minerva burst into a rattling laugh.

Wil’ Thomas’ ghost wandered the valley, according to Minerva, seeking young girls to ravish. “Well”, Lysander told her once, “Reed and I will do our best for him….”

Minerva’s story certainly wasn’t the same tale our student handbook told, though both of them had to do with Pamunkees. Our school’s version talked about an autumn festival and the Pamunkee word for “fairest of valleys”. That same handbook warned cadets in no uncertain terms about the low-life potential of anything or anyone off campus. Lysander and I knew that meant Minerva.

The years in Massanuttin were lush and flew like whip-o-wills, calling our names. Lysander and I ran and jumped and studied hard and lived up to the ghost of Wil’ Thomas as best we could. We were sports heroes, patrons of the Emporium, hot items with both proper and loud girls, and more or less good cadets. We found summer jobs together—once in Cleveland, once in Buckhannon and once at a Jewish camp in New Jersey as co-sport’s directors where we never figured out how to lure Rachel and Miriam into our bunks. We applied to all the same colleges and were going to be room-mates at Brown or Stanford or some Midwestern University. Most people, I have come to discover over the years, never have a friendship quite like ours. But we thought nothing about it at the time—our lives, like Massanuttin Valley, were simply lush.

One Thursday night in February 1964, Lysander had coach Dobson’s car keys and a town-girl’s phone number.

“She has a friend,” he told me, “who is very, very bored.”

I had a history test to make up the next morning. The teacher was Mr. Sylvester Lee, who claimed, like every Lee in Virginia, to be one of “those Lees”. Mr. Lee, we all knew, liked to go midnight swimming with shy freshman cadets and give running-jumping seniors a hard time. So I told Lysander I had to hit the books.

We had just turned 18, could buy beer legally in Virginia and thought we knew everything worth knowing. The two of us had affected a stilted way of talking to each other that most of the school tried to imitate. So here is what I said:

“The books, my man, must take a lickin’….”

Lysander shook his head with disappointment. Then he told me what he always told me when we were playing poker with some other seniors and I would agonize over whether to fold or bet.

He said, “Study long and you’ll study wrong….”

He was out the window and down the fire escape as quickly as he dodged a linebacker blitz. I called out to him, “Do ol’ Wil proud!” I don’t know if he heard me.

Given the way things turned out, I might have chosen different ‘last words’ to exchange with the dearest friend I ever had. But you never know how things turn out, until they do.

Later that night, in the midst of one of the sleet storms that tear across the mountain in February, with Mary Moffet, a muscular-legged cheerleader from the local public school beside him, Lysander drove Coach Dobson’s Buick off the road near the top of Massanuttin Mountain and ended their all too brief stay on this earth. The next morning, when they found the car, they also found an unopened pack of Trojans frozen in Lysander’s shirt pocket and a broken six pack of Black Label Beer in the back seat.

Mary Moffet, God bless her, had been thrown through the windshield by the impact. She had died, according to the official report, instantly. Lysander, most likely, lived for a few minutes, crushed by the Buick’s engine, driven into his lap by the very rock where legend has it Wil Thomas’ throat was cut.

I remember that morning as clearly as yesterday. I stood between Col. Bruce, the Commander of the Academy and a Virginia State Policeman named Burl as we watched two tow trucks hoist the Electra back onto the road. The sleet had turned to snow at dawn and the snow had turned back to ice, as it often does in that part of the country, making Massanuttin Mountain into something shining and eerie, almost beautiful. It was white on white on white.

When I got back from the funeral in Buckhannon, Minerva’s Emporium was closed and boarded up. She’d lost her beer license and her will to live as well and had gone to live in a nursing home near Roanoke. Coach Dobson got an unexpected job offer at some school in Indiana and left overnight. Mary Moffet’s family had returned the flowers the Cadet Corps sent and the campus was locked down. All the secret, after-hour ways in and out were history. There was no plaque to Lysander’s memory. He simply returned to dust.

*

That fall, after a summer sleeping a lot in Cleveland, I went to a Great Midwestern University and became a Great Reader. I tried not to think of Lysander and convinced myself I succeeded at that. Since Lysander wasn’t studying or running anymore, I studied and ran for both of us. I read more books than it seems possible to read. I wrote papers and held opinions. I was president of the Political Science Honorary and the Junior Class. I was on the debating team and the track team. For 11 days, I held the Big Ten record in the 880 until a skinny kid from Michigan State beat me at the conference finals. We both broke my old record but he shattered it by three steps. Nevertheless, I became, in a word, ‘legend’.

At the beginning of my sophomore year, I became the faithful lover of Angela Dawkins, the daughter of the most successful gynecologist in Kenilworth, Illinois. Angela’s father even knew Lysander’s father from Gynecological Conventions. My life seemed tied to people whose father’s did pap smears and looked up twats.

Angela had beautiful, well-defined breasts and breath that smelled of Lark cigarettes and pears. Angela was as active as I was at our Midwestern University. She was on steering committees and conference committees. She was fiction editor of the student magazine. She held opinions. We had plans. She would be the drama critic of the Washington Post and I would be an Associate Justice of the Supreme Court and a published poet. We planned significant stays on this earth. And all our plans were made feasible by the fact that I was the only track star I’ve ever met with clinically flat feet. Though a war was raging in South-East Asia, I was 4-F forever. So, my opinions about the war were held with a blissful lack of passion. I had early admission at Georgetown Law School. Angela was going to George Washington University for post-graduate study in journalism.

Those years were golden. Each summer I worked for my father’s law firm in Cleveland and Angela was an intern for the Chicago Sun Times. Two weekends a month we met at a motel in Lima, Ohio to share sex and the opinions we were forming. My parents loved Angela more than me and her parents considered me their son. We moved in together at the beginning of our senior years of college. Our parents approved. Even the Episcopal chaplain approved. We were both Anglicans. How could things get better?

At the Great Midwestern University, we became known as the ‘dynamic duo’. And we made plans.

On a breathtaking October day—the Saturday of the Northwestern football game—a day I’ve only experience in the Midwest…a day with an almost too warm sun and almost too chill breeze and endless blue sky—my father died suddenly. With Angela’s help, I handled it well—as I tended to do all things well. Angela and I sat on either side of my mother and Caroline, who was not quite 14, as the Episcopal Bishop of Ohio committed my father to the earth, returning him to dust. He was buried along the Hocking River and the hills were like a landscape painting of solid, Ohio colors.

One of my father’s law partners helped me with the details since my mother was quite a mess. George Josephs was about my father’s age—too young to be dust—and wise for all that. As we were pouring over wills and trusts and death certificates, he leaned back in his chair.

“Reed,” he said, “you’re doing very well in all this.”

I thanked him, nodding.

“The death of a father, Reed,” he said after a long moment or three, “is epic, the thing of legends. It is no inconsequential thing.”

“I know,” I said.

“I just hope you know it will all crash down on you someday,” he added.

“I’m okay, George,” I said, a bit put out that he wasn’t fully impressed with how well I was handling things.

To this day, I regret I called him ‘George’ in that moment. After everything that has happened since, he deserved to be called “Mr. Josephs”.

At the time, I had plans in place. I couldn’t let my father’s untimely death upset all that. George smiled and nodded sadly. “Fine, Reed,” he said.

“George doesn’t understand you,” Angela said when I related the story to her. “How could he understand your qualities…to him, you’re just his partner’s kid.”

Nothing much changed, except my father was dead. Plans unfolded. I studied, wrote and ran endless miles to live into my own legend. If anything, I moved faster. Then one day, a week from the Big Ten track finals, I slipped in the shower and pulled a hamstring. My college track career was over. I wouldn’t be going to the nationals.

“You might be driving too hard,” Angela told me, massaging my leg. “You are so much….”

The day I finished my Senior Thesis—two months earlier than required—a great snow fell in the Midwest. That same day I received a package from my mother—candy bars I could have bought myself, two pairs of winter socks, several section A’s of the Cleveland Plain Dealer, a water color of the Hocking River Valley Carolina had painted and a letter my father wrote before he died.

He had left the letter in a safe-deposit box along with insurance policies and stock certificates. On the front of the envelope from his law firm—Daley, Josephs, Marchucci and Washburn—he had written this with a pen: “For T. Reed Daley: four months after my death”. Ironically enough, all that arrived on the fourth anniversary of Lysander’s death.

It was February again and there was ice and snow.

I read the letter and stopped making plans or holding opinions.

Here is what my father’s letter said:

September 22, 1967

Dear Reed,

Four months ago (the end of May) my doctor told me I’m going to die. He and the consulting doctors tell me, nothing can be done. There is a complicated explanation, but not one I can explain. It is as simple as this—sometime in the next few months, probably on some perfect Midwestern autumn day with a hot sun and cool breeze and endless sky, my heart will simply stop. Nothing can be done.

I’m not even going to tell your mother though I am going to buy her a new car, a car that will outlast me. Only you will know my secret, and you will know it after the fact.

I’m not surprised about this and not especially anxious. I am only 51 and don’t like the idea of dying, but, for some reason I’ve expected it.

You were here all summer, working at the firm, and there must have been a thousand times I thought of taking you to lunch and telling you I was going to die. But I let you get safely back to Iowa and concerned with all your activities before I wrote this. I don’t know why. But I do want you to know, in this very backward way, that I was thinking about you every day we were together during the summer and knowing you would handle my death with the same competence you handle everything. I wanted to talk to you about it, but I didn’t. I just let the time pass. I only wish we had been closer, but there’s no appropriate way for that now.

And I know you will handle everything with George that needs to be handled. Your Mother will be too distressed, I know, to go over all the business things.

I just realized I haven’t typed a letter for myself in 25 years. It will seem strange putting it in an envelope and taking it to the mail box without having Ruth involved in some way. She’d be horrified to know I was typing my own letter since she’s typed everything for me for so long! It’s funny that things like that are coming to my notice. The certainly of death—though death is always certain—brings things into focus.

I’m remembering how you told me about Lysander’s funeral. You told me how you held Dr. Martin by Lysander’s grave and then went to see the buffalo. I never understood about the buffalo but neglected to ask and now will never know. But I do wish you could hold me by my grave for a while and that you and I could go see a buffalo.

The hills along the Hocking River will be in full color when they bury me. I’ve always liked the fall—that hint of chill in the air.

I hope you’ll be a son and brother when I’m dead. Your mother and Caroline will need your strength and comfort.

I don’t know what else to say, except that I wish we had been closer. I can’t bring myself to call you and tell you all this now. I just can’t. It would be an act of desperation. And, as you probably know too well, I am not a man of desperate acts. If I had been, maybe I wouldn’t be so sad now about not knowing you better.

Ruth just buzzed me. Court calls. I have to convince a jury not to take money from my client over his mistakes and blunders. It’s a life and a living.

By the way, I’ll be fit to the end. I’ll be fine until the last day. Just one day I will die.

What was that buffalo all about?

I love you, Reed. Even now.

Dad

After reading my father’s letter being a published poet or Chief Justice or Angela’s husband or father to our 4 children or anything much mattered to me. The next morning I carried my Senior Thesis—a well-researched if deadly boring exposition of a minor point in John Locke’s social contract as it might apply to modern courts of law—to Dr. Stephen Morrison, my advisor. He thanked me for bringing it and told me none of his advisees had ever finished a thesis so early. He also inquired about why I had walked through seven inches of snow in my bedroom slippers and without a coat. I told him I wasn’t sure and then told him about the dream I’d had in the short patch of sleep I’d had overnight. It was a dream about a Voice calling me. Everything was cloudy and milky and sticky in the dream and I couldn’t figure out what the Voice wanted me to do. There was an ancient parchment in the dream, cracked and dusty with age. I was afraid to unroll it, afraid it would be damaged beyond repair. I knew the parchment had a message on it and somehow, in my dream, I knew it was in a language I could not read and the answer to a question I had not asked.

Professor Morrison sat quietly, as still as fallen snow, for a long time. While he pondered, I gazed at the books that line his bookshelves. I tried to read the titles of his books. None of the words made sense. I thought it was because I was so cold and my vision was fogged for a while. After Professor Morrison had given me some tea with a little brandy in it, he called campus security and I was given a ride home in what, for all the world, was a police car.

Back in the apartment Angela and I shared, I discovered I had forgotten how to read. At first it was like losing your car keys or your check book—minor panic soothed by the sure knowledge that things eventually show up. I could make out some letters and name them, but they didn’t seem to spell anything recognizable. I tried writing my name in the fog on the window; however, the R looked Russian and the ‘eed’ didn’t look like anything at all beyond some smudges in the frost.

After hiding out in the apartment for three days, feigning a bad cold, I brought it up.

“Angela,” I said, as calmly as I could, “I’ve forgotten how to read.”

She looked at me the way people sometimes look at miniature poodles, as if they were something other than dogs. I dropped the subject.

Two weeks later, as spring sought vainly to impose itself on the Midwest and I hadn’t left the apartment for 15 days, I brought it up again. I’d told Angela about some of my father’s letter and lied about throwing it away. We’d been through several layers of conversation about the letter and my father having returned to dust. The first layer was when Angela understood.

“I understand, Reed,” she told me over and again, “I truly do.”

Then, for a while, she wished there were something to say. “Oh, Reed,” she would tell me, “if there were something to say to make it better….Well, you know I’d say it.” I did know that.

Finally, it got to be too much—my inactivity and cessation of plans. Words, she told me, in so many words, weren’t enough.

“You have to pull yourself together, Reed. This is a delayed reaction, a mourning time.” She was smoking a Lark. Some smoke came out of her mouth like fog rising from a manhole in the Cleveland winter. And, she went on, death could be dealt with, lived through, conquered. Plans could still be made.

I told her, as best I could, that certain moorings had come out of place, that I needed to drift for a while.

So, we drifted apart.

I slept a lot, cut classes, ate cold meals when I decided to eat. Each time I slept there was the Voice in my dreams. Sometimes it was Angela’s voice, sometimes Dr. Morrison’s or my mother’s, most often Lysander or my father. The Voice always called my name. And, like a set of keys lost in an airport, my illiteracy deepened.

Angela never believed I’d forgotten how to read. “Don’t be ridiculous, Reed,” she once said, full of ire, pushing a book into my hands. I dropped the book and the subject of my being illiterate.

By April, Angela took her cosmetics from the bathroom, her clothes from the closet, her pantyhose from the shower curtain rod and her Larks from the kitchen table. She sat me down one day and spoke solemnly.

“Reed, I still love you….But I can’t stay here right now. You have to drift and I have to plan. I really tried to understand what you’re going through. I really tried to say things that would make a difference…you know all that. I just don’t see why….” Then she cried for a while, but not as long as I would have expected.

“You are ‘so much’, Reed,” she said before she left. “So much….”

The morning she left I tried to remember what ANGELA looked like written down. By then I had lost all touch with the written word.

For all that spring and into the summer, I was alone. I stayed mostly in the apartment, eating soup cold from the can and peanut butter sandwiches and tuna and whatever else seemed easy. Mostly I slept. I dreamed of the snow of Buckhannon when Lysander was buried. I dreamed of the colors along the Hocking when my father was buried. I dreamed of Massanuttin Mountain and Cleveland and places I’d never been. I dreamed of rooms stretching out into rooms of some enormous, unknown house. People—some familiar, mostly strange—moved through the rooms like dreams within my dreams. They nodded and their mouths moved, but the only sound I ever heard was of a distant Voice, calling me and calling me. In some of the dreams I was carrying that old, yellowed parchment with a message in a foreign alphabet. Often in my dreams, I sat alone and wept. But I didn’t cry once when I was awake. Not once.

In July, spurred by calls from Angela, my mother and the track coach, Dr. Morrison came to find me. By then I seldom bathed and never cleaned the apartment. My phone was disconnected. I was disconnected myself, living like a hermit, a hobo with an apartment, like someone waiting for the Voice.

“There is nothing to be done,” Professor Morrison told me in the midst of my self-made squalor, “except for you to go see my friend, a certain Brigham Francis, who lives in Somerville, Massachusetts. Brigham, I trust, will know what to do.”

It seemed like a fine plan to me. A road trip while waiting for whatever I was waiting on—the Voice, something else….I silently began to pack as soon as he suggested it.

Then he said, as Angela had said, as my mother had said endlessly, as everyone who cared for me had said: “Reed, so much…so much….”

When I die, when my stay on this earth is done and I return to my comfortable dust, I fully expect someone will pack me in zinc and buried in the ground. Hopefully the snow will not be flying nor the colors of the trees rioting when it happens.

And my tombstone, will say:

T. REED DALEY

SO MUCH…SO MUCH….