Chapter 28, Part 1
At the bottom of the outside staircase Ennis scanned the shoreline and Lake uneasily, thinking how cold the water was even in June and how quickly it could overcome a swimmer deliberately putting the shoreline behind him. Seeing nothing out of place off the beach was only slightly reassuring, as the fog had moved closer and now appeared as drapes of cobwebs here and there in the city across the water.
In more than one Wyoming winter he’d dealt with white-outs in heavy snows; but the eerie selectivity of the fog that frequently rolled in from the Lake was something he’d had to get used to. On one early morning walk he’d noticed how unusually still the Lake was, looking like a dark blue mirror; and when he and David had driven across the Lift Bridge a few hours later it had been at an unusually slow speed due to the rising mists that reduced visibility to a few yards. “Got something to show ya bro,” David had said unexpectedly. “Not too far out of our way,” and detoured back to a part of Skyline Drive that usually looked out over the shoreline and Aerial Bridge. The drifting fog a few hours earlier had become a thick marshmallow cloud that totally swallowed up the Lake, shoreline and Park Point with only the top of the bridge visible.
Ennis knew now that before long, the only way to find his way around on the beach would be to walk at the edge of the water, and the thought of searching for David through this gray desolation produced a slight jab of panic.
But at the foot of the steps to the beach, he saw that David hadn’t gone very far. He was sitting at the edge of their part of the beach, on the same beached log that was Ennis’ favorite place to watch the sunrise, chin and folded arms resting on his knees. Along with the log, the mists and the grayish-green water lapping at the shoreline, he looked faded and depleted, and his face was expressionless as he watched Ennis approach. Ennis half expected a rebuff, but sat down next to him and gave him a few side glances.
“I sit down here mornings sometimes,” he said finally.
“I know. You love the Lake, don’t you?” David’s voice was a little steadier, and he didn’t move away.
The fog hadn’t yet become dense enough that Ennis couldn’t see the house over David’s shoulder. “There’s a lotta things here…. livin here…. I like.”
David sighed. “I’m sorry, Ennis, I wasn’t tryin to cheat you. I really thought this was over. . . . well, I guess I wanted to think it was over. Ever happened to you?”
“Well….” In the past five years it had taken him and Jack longer to get going, especially when Jack was sore and rusty from the long drive. “Slowed down some, I guess.”
David nodded, as if that had confirmed something. “For me…. it was after Nathan died, a few months after. And not just once. After two or three times -- well, it got tougher and tougher to tell myself it’s just temporary, it’ll be different next time. And it seemed like a kind of… retribution, too, or a verdict. So I just kinda shut down. For a long time after that moving here, getting the house, settin up the business, that pretty much filled up all the time.” He’d drawn up his knees and wrapped his arms around them, making himself tight and small. “I know I never told you how Nathan died.”
Ennis was oddly unsurprised that David had taken this particular turn. “Nah, you didn’t. I - wondered about it.” He’d already told David, as briefly as possible, about the ordeal of his phone call to Lureen and his own suspicions.
“He did it himself. Parked his car in an old garage, put the door down and ran the engine.” David looked directly into Ennis’ face, as if looking for a reaction he wanted to get over with. “I dunno if anybody close to you ever did anything like that. But I c’n tell ya, it’s like somebody settin fire to their own house and a couple ‘f others catch fire and even if they don’t burn down there’s scorched places and you can always smell the smoke. I’d like to think Nathan wouldn’t ‘ve done it if he’d understood that, but I’ll never know. There’s so much I’ll never know about how it went - just a big question mark I don’t know what to do with. But I guess I’m startin out backwards.”
To a casual observer, both men were staring absently out at the Lake and the gauze sheets of mist that were now drifting along the city’s shoreline, but both could feel a tether of regretted recollections tightening between them. David sat in silence for a few more minutes, gathering them up.
“Sometimes,” he began, “I wonder everything would have turned out different if it hadn’t been for that plane crash. By the time it happened, wantin’ everybody to think he was perfect already had Nathan hooked. And bein gay, lovin another man, well, that just didn’t fit in. Maybe if it stayed like it was in the beginning - good friends who saw each other a lot - instead of our growing up in the same house, he coulda worked around that. Or maybe we woulda drifted apart as we grew up, but I don’t believe that. Both of us, we never talked about it much but we both felt like we’d always been together, not just born on the same day.
“Not that I wasn’t happy about him comin to live with us, but it was rough that first year. Like I told ya before, Tom and Sheila getting killed hit both my parents hard. My mom went back and forth between talking about it all the time and then hushin’ up because she didn’t want to make things worse for Nathan. And my daddy, he was always the quieter of the two but he just seemed to shrink into himself after that, started workin’ longer hours, listened a lot to old music from the ‘40s, when he and mom were young. And that was when he started to take us camping more regular - it was just a few times when Dean and me were younger but after that it was once or twice a summer.
“But by that second summer, 1963, things had settled down and Nathan ‘d been in my class in school a whole year, already getting into junior varsity stuff. Of course, I was still workin’ in my dad’s hardware store so we didn’t always see each other much after school - but we made up for that. Weekends, summers. And nighttime, too. We spent a lotta time on odd places - there was this soul food place run by a lady everybody called Mama Louise, and we’d go over to the Indian mounds down at the river and climb up on the biggest one - you could just feel that old energy, it was like sittin on a giant battery. And more’n once we left a note for my folks, got on a bus and went to concerts at the old Municipal Auditorium in Atlanta. Saw a lotta famous people, James Brown was both our favorite.
“But our favorite place was Rose Hill Cemetery. It’s pretty old, goes back to 1840, and they intended it to be both a cemetery and a city park. Sounds weird I know, but it sorta was that, still is as far as I know. You’d see people jogging there, walkin their dogs, and it was always a hangout for teenagers, college kids too.”
At the heart of Rose Hill was a steep ravine that sloped down to the Ocmulgee River. Here the land tilted so sharply that most of the plots were on terraces backed by retaining walls, chopping up the ravine into mini-homesteads for the dead. While the flatter area to the south was sterile and orderly, and oddly shadowless on sunny days, the ravine was a lush riot of long-ago-planted shrubs, flowers and ornamental trees among brick walls, stone slabs, obelisks, statues often darkened and disfigured by time, weather and vandalism, and a few hillside vaults that could have served well for an Easter sunrise service or the set for the final scene of “Romeo and Juliet”. There were even grave slabs with headstones resembling tidily made beds, where young couples often lay in life-affirming passion over the indifferent dead. In the spring, flowers originally planted in tidy rows and borders spread over large areas, adding to the vigorous proliferation of life above-ground. The exception were the irises: purples and yellows long ago but now cross-bred enough years to turn them white: not cream nor ivory but a grayish, ghostly tint; like a scattered garden planted by the cemetery’s residents.
“We’d been there before, ‘ve course, but spring of that second year we started sneakin outta the house at night to go there. It started out as a dare - Nathan bet me I wouldn’t go to a cemetery at night and I said if he wasn’t scared he’d go along. We got to know every foot of that place, even the Civil War graves and the old Jewish part with the Hebrew letters on the stones. Even in the daytime you had to watch your step walkin’ through the steep part, you never knew when you’d go around a bush or a big monument and step right off a ten-foot retaining wall. And we got to where we could find our way around at night. But our favorite part, we always went there at least once, was this one plot that had a dogwood tree planted in it. If you stood on the retaining wall, up on the plot above it, your head would be right in the top part of the tree. There was a railroad track that went by the back of the place, and we’d sometimes sit up there and listen to the trains go by.
“We’d been buddies as long as both of us could remember and I still think what happened that spring woulda happened somewhere else if it hadn’t been in Rose Hill. But lookin’ back on it, I still think it was right, it happening when ‘n’ where it did. There was something about it that was…. gonna happen no matter what. Like somethin’ we’d agreed to.”
They were up on the ledge, surrounded by the umbrella of cream-colored, cross-shaped blooms on the dogwood tree. What took place might have happened in a different time and venue if the patterns of light and shadow hadn’t conspired to give their favorite refuge an unutterable strangeness that blotted out the rest of the world. The moon was full and halfway up in the sky, casting muted reflections on the river and filtering through the interlaced branches above and around their heads. The dappled patterns it would have formed if those branches had held only leaves were dimmed and diffused, though not completely cancelled out, by the reflection of the white blossoms; and in that eerie illumination they seemed to be in some indistinct borderland between light and shadow.
As with all boys, their play had often taken the mock-heroic forms of punching and wrestling, but the sudden tussle that brought them both to the ground was now flavored by the clamoring hormones of two 15-year-olds. David’s recollection of that first joining was a panoply of feelings and images; the moist earth under his fingernails, the sound of Nathan’s gasping and his own outcry as a newly-experienced but somehow already-known jolt of tension and pleasure shot up through him, the sounds of crickets and nightbirds and a mournful train whistle in the far distance.
Their couplings expanded beyond Rose Hill, but in that one summer it was the place they returned to again and again. On some humid Southern nights they lay and wrestled together at both levels of the dogwood tree, beneath a statue of a stone angel and behind the underbrush next to the railroad track as trains went by.
By this time David had stretched out his legs a bit, resting his elbows on his knees. “Lookin back on it,” he said, “those summers we were in high school were our real life together, everything after that was just a blurry copy.”
(to be continued in Chapter 28, Part 2)
Index to previous chapters:
Chapter 1: http://talkstocoyotes.livejournal.com/392.html
Chapter 3: http://talkstocoyotes.livejournal.com/1066.html
Chapter 4: http://talkstocoyotes.livejournal.com/1485.html
Chapter 5: http://talkstocoyotes.livejournal.com/1704.html
Chapter 6: http://talkstocoyotes.livejournal.com/2038.html
Chapter 7: http://talkstocoyotes.livejournal.com/2358.html
Chapter 8: http://talkstocoyotes.livejournal.com/2635.html
Chapter 9: http://talkstocoyotes.livejournal.com/2947.html
Chapter 10: http://talkstocoyotes.livejournal.com/3130.html
Chapter 11: http://talkstocoyotes.livejournal.com/3356.html
Chapter 12: http://talkstocoyotes.livejournal.com/3655.html
Chapter 13: http://talkstocoyotes.livejournal.com/3934.html
Chapter 14: http://talkstocoyotes.livejournal.com/4154.html
Chapter 15: http://talkstocoyotes.livejournal.com/4591.html
Chapter 16: http://talkstocoyotes.livejournal.com/4685.html
Chapter 17: http://talkstocoyotes.livejournal.com/5094.html
Chapter 18: http://talkstocoyotes.livejournal.com/5140.html
Chapter 19: http://talkstocoyotes.livejournal.com/5546.html
Chapter 20: http://talkstocoyotes.livejournal.com/6249.html
Chapter 21: http://talkstocoyotes.livejournal.com/6434.html
Chapter 22: http://talkstocoyotes.livejournal.com/6843.html
Chapter 23: http://talkstocoyotes.livejournal.com/7306.html
Chapter 24: http://talkstocoyotes.livejournal.com/7646.html
Chapter 25: http://talkstocoyotes.livejournal.com/7723.html
Summary, Chapters 1-25: http://talkstocoyotes.livejournal.com/8106.html
Chapter 26 Part 1: http://talkstocoyotes.livejournal.com/8417.html
Chapter 26 Part 2: http://talkstocoyotes.livejournal.com/8634.html
Chapter 27: http://talkstocoyotes.livejournal.com/8869.html