Remembering (5 page)

He cannot see himself. He reaches into the darkness with his left hand, feeling for the lamp. His fingers encounter loudly the shade, and fumble over it and down over the unfamiliar shape of the stem and base, feeling for the switch, and find it. The room, as strange to him as if he had just entered, assembles itself around him: the disheveled bed, the low stands on either side with identical lamps, and over the lamps identical pastel prints of large tulips, identically framed. Against the wall opposite the bed there is a long sideboard with empty drawers, and over it a mirror that reduplicates the duplicate lamps and pictures, the bed, and himself, his right arm stumped off at the wrist, his left hand still on the lamp switch, his hair and underclothes as mussed as the bed.

He stands, looking at himself in the room in the mirror as though he is his own disembodied soul. When he'd answered, “No mam,” to the young woman waiting to meet him at the airport gate, he had felt the sudden swing and stagger of disembodiment, as though a profound divorce had occurred, casting his body off to do what it would on its own, to be watched as from a distance, without premonition of what it
might do. And what of that young woman? He is going to be sorry for his lie to her. He is standing so still that he might be looking at himself, stuffed, behind glass: “
Homo Americanus,
c. 1976, perhaps from a border state.” And then he sees the image grimace in dismissal of itself or its onlooker and turn away.

He turns away into his singularity in 1976 itself, the twenty-first of June thereof. In the light the room reasserts its smell of stale smoke and perfumed disinfectant. It is a little before three o'clock.

In Port William now it is a little before six. Daylight, he imagines, is reddening the sky over the wooded slopes of the little valley of Harford Run, which falls away eastward from his house; the treetops are misty in the damp morning air, a few stars and the waning moon still bright in the sky. And he would be going out, if he were there, with the milk bucket on his arm, calling the cows. Flora would be starting breakfast, the children putting on their shoes, half asleep, getting ready to go out to their own chores.

He is outside that, the air and light of that place filling his absence, the disturbance of his departure subsided. He looks back on it as from somewhere far off in the sky. In the quieted place where yesterday he went out, the children are now going out to do the work that he went out to do, Flora going with them, probably, to help them. He knows that she is being cheerful with them. Even if she does not feel cheerful, she will be cheerful. She will be looking for reasons to be cheerful, showing the children the slender moon high up over the colored clouds of the dawn. She is saying, “Look, Marcie, how the mist is hanging in the trees.”

He would not have that grace himself. If he were going out into the morning aggrieved, he would be the embodiment of his grievance, and the day could be as bright as it pleased, yet it could not prevail upon him to be cheerful.

His right hand had been the one with which he reached out to the world and attached himself to it. When he lost his hand he lost his hold. It was as though his hand still clutched all that was dear to him — and was gone. All the world then became to him a steep slope, and he a man descending, staggering and falling, unable to reach out to tree trunk or branch or root to catch and hold on.

When he did reach out with his clumsy, hesitant, uneducated left
hand, he would be maddened by its ineptitude. It went out as if fearful that it would displease him, and it did displease him. As he watched it groping at his buttons or trying to drive a nail or fumbling by itself with one of the two-handed tools that he now hated to use but would not give up, he could have torn it off and beaten it on the ground.

He remembered with longing the events of his body's wholeness, grieving over them, as Adam remembered Paradise. He remembered how his body had dressed itself, while his mind thought of something else; how he had shifted burdens from hand to hand; how his right hand had danced with its awkward partner and made it graceful; how his right hand had been as deft and nervous as a bird. He remembered his poise as a two-handed lover, when he reached out to Flora and held and touched her, until the smooths and swells of her ached in his palm and fingers, and his hand knew her as a man knows his homeland. Now the hand that joined him to her had been cast away, and he mourned over it as over a priceless map or manual forever lost.

One day Flora came to where he was sitting in the barn and he was crying. She put her arm around him. “It's going to be all right.”

And he said, “What did they do with my hand?” For it had occurred to him that he did not know what they had done with it. Had they burned it or buried it or just indifferently thrown it away? — when they should have given it back to him to bring home and lay properly to rest.

“What?” Flora said.

“What did they do with my hand? The goddamned sons of bitches!”

Flora took her arm away. “
What
is the
matter
with you?”

“Just leave me alone.”

Alone was the way she left him. Alone was the way he was, as cast away there in his place as his hand was, wherever it was.

It is three o'clock. It is a little after three. He thinks of the lighted, night-filled, shadowy streets. He has no purpose at all. There is now simply nothing in the world that he intends. He looks at the opened, rumpled bed. He intends at least not to go back there. He would as soon lie down in his grave as in that bed.

He goes to the window, parts the heavy curtains, and looks down into
the empty street that seems to sleep and dream in the undisturbed fall of its shadows and weak lights. And he could be anybody in the world awake in the night, looking out. “How much longer?” he thinks. “When shall I arise, and the night be gone?”

They passed the winter alone, he and Flora, alone to each other, he alone to all others. He lay awake to no purpose, as he would have slept to no purpose, angry, sore, and baffled, willing to die if he could have died, tossing to and fro unto the dawning of the day. That he was alone was his own fault, he knew. He was wrong. And yet he could not escape the fault and the wrong. He clutched them to himself as he was clutched by them. He made no difference.

Nor did he work to any purpose, it seemed to him, except survival and the slow coming of dexterity to his left hand. The hand learned with the slowness of a tree growing, as if it had time and patience that he did not have.

And he was learning just as slowly to use the mechanical hook that he now wore on the stump of his right forearm, a stiff, frictionless, feeling-less claw that would do some of the things he needed done and would not do others. It fitted his arm clumsily and fitted his work clumsily. The only thing pertaining to it that was fitting was the curse upon it that was shaped and ready in his mouth the moment he put it on.

He now had a left hand and something less good than a left hand, less good than a shod foot: an awkward primitive claw. And the two, the poor hand and the poor claw, did not cooperate, meeting together in the air, dancing together, as his two hands had done, but for the simplest task required all of his mind, all of his deliberation and will, so that he wearied of them and cursed them. There was the problem of balance. He repeatedly set and braced himself, addressing his right hand to some task, only to discover again that the hand was gone.

He continued by the help of time alone. He went on, not because he would not have stopped, but because nothing else would stop. Through the winter he tended to his animals and kept the little farm alive. Flora helped him and so did the children, watchful of him, always apprehensive of his anger, but giving him patience and kindness that he knew he
had not earned and did not repay. He knew that Flora talked to the children about him. He knew, as well as if he had overheard, what she had said. “Well, now, listen. This is a hard time for your daddy. You'll have to understand and be patient with him. He'll be better after a while.” This was what she said to the children, he knew, because it was what she said to herself. And he could see them watching him, Marcie and Betty, as if for confirmation of what she had told them. That he was a trouble to them he knew, and regretted, and the knowledge only deepened his anger at himself and turned him harder against them.

At the edge of his anger at everything else was always his anger at himself. He was ashamed of himself. He had betrayed his hand. He had put his precious hand into a machine that had obliged him by continuing to do what he had started it doing, as if he had not changed his mind. His hand had been given to him for a helpmeet, to love and to cherish, until he died, and he had been unfaithful to it. He was guilty and he was angry at himself. And yet he turned away. The place of his guilt and shame was like the unknown ocean of the early maps, full of monsters. He knew it was there, but he did not go there.

He could not yet drive a team. He did not trust himself to try that, and for good reason: His left hand had not yet come up to the job; it was strong enough, but not discriminating enough; it had not yet taken responsibility for being the only hand he had. His son, Marcellus, could drive the team, was good at it for a boy, but Marcie was only twelve years old. He wanted to do more, and undoubtedly was capable of doing more, than Andy would allow him to do. For Andy was afraid. Catastrophe lived at the end of his arm. Whatever Marcie did, Andy could see how he could be hurt or killed, how the world might simply shrug him off, as a big horse would shrug off a fly. And so Marcie did not do the jobs with the team that he would have had to do alone, but only those at which Andy could be with him, ready to instruct or caution or help.

“We add up to pretty near a man,” he said to Marcie, and Marcie gave him a look.

“No,” Andy said. “You're pretty near a man youself.”

He was moved by Marcie, who was so able a boy and so willing to help, whatever it cost him, and often it cost him a great deal. The words of Andy's bitterness were always prepared; he uttered them before he
thought them. Marcie did the best he could, and he did well, and yet in moments of stress or difficulty Andy imposed a demand that it seemed to him he did not even will: He wanted the boy to be as answerable to his thought as his right hand had been. He wanted the boy to
be
his right hand.

“
Come
on, Marcie!” he would say. “Come on! Come on!”

Or he would say, “
No,
damn it! Hit it
there
! ”

Marcie, half crying with indignation, would say, “I'm
trying,
Dad!”

And Andy would say, “Try
harder.
”

He was wrong, and knew it. He yearned toward the boy. His anger revealed his love, and yet removed him from it. He seemed to himself far away from all that he loved, too far away to help or to be helped. The pain he gave to Marcie, he saw, stood between him and Flora, and was his shame, and could not be helped. There were days when he could not bear the eyes of his daughter Betty, who saw everything, and loved him, and was hurt by him, and could not be helped.

“Daddy,” she said, “are you all right?” And then, correcting herself, “Are you going to be all right?”

“Sure,” he said.

He went as an exile into his own house and barn and fields. His wound had shown him the world and, at the same time, his estrangement from it. It was as though he continued to speak to his hand, which did not answer. And this was a loss of speech that could not be spoken of to anyone still whole and alive.

He felt his father watching him, worried about him, and he shied away.

His mother gave him no chance to shy away. “Come sit here,” she said, reminding him for the first time of her mother.

“Andy, I'm sorry for what's happened. I can't tell you how sorry. But you must learn something from it.”