.
You are standing knee-deep in Birch Creek watching a beaver
swim toward its lodge fifty yards upstream. It carries a load of fresh-cut
twigs and branches in its mouth, and you can make out the sleek form of
a second beaver adding its own cuttings to the structure.
Suddenly the first beaver slaps its tail loudly on the surface of
the water and dives. The second one, hearing the alarm signal, also sub-
merges. A moment later an elderly man with a fishing rod, a net, and a
creel emerges from the bushes and steps down to the grassy bank of the
creek.
“Good morning,” you say. “Looks like a good day for fishing.”
He ignores you. Pulling the barb of his hook, already equipped
with a fly, out of the cork-covered handle of his rod, he whips the rod
back and forth, paying out line until he’s got about twenty-five yards to
work with. Then he makes his cast, dropping the lure into an eddy below
a rock that breaks the surface of the stream.
“Beautiful cast,” you say.
This time he glances briefly in your direction, but finding nothing
there, he twitches the rod, making the lure fly up, and immediately a fish
rises to strike it. You recognize it – a trout of some sort, maybe a
brookie. The fisherman lets it carry the lure downstream a few feet
before snapping his rod sharply back, hooking the fish securely. He reels
it in quickly and scoops it out of the water with his net. Laying it on the
grass, he holds it down with one hand and removes the hook with the
other. Then he casts again. In short order a second trout joins the first,
and they arch and flop frantically, out of their element, strangling.
You’ve never thought fish were sentient beings, but the way the
trout fight for their lives disturbs you. Do even plants know that being
plucked from the ground kills them?
Feeling unsettled, you leave the creek bank and walk across the
pasture toward the big farmhouse in the pine grove. The sun is high in
the sky, and it must be almost time for lunch. But you’re not hungry,
even though you can’t remember having breakfast. You can’t even
remember waking up this morning. And you don’t know why you’re
alone. You’re married, aren’t you? Where’s your wife?
The question stops you cold for a moment, but you manage to
dismiss it. Maybe she’s making lunch.
But you can’t remember her name, or what she looks like. You
find the lapse of memory vaguely amusing.
“Not playing with a full deck, there,” you say to yourself.
You remember something a psychiatrist once told you: “It’s OK to
talk to yourself, but if you start talking back, you’re in trouble.” What
was the shrink’s name? And why were you consulting him? Or her?
“This is getting ridiculous,” you say.
“You must be dreaming,” someone else says. It’s a man’s voice, but
you don’t recognize it. You laugh out loud. “That’s it – I’ve finally gone
round the bend,” you proclaim solemnly, and laugh even louder.
But the laugh turns into a racking cough, and you have to lean
forward, put your hands on your knees, and hawk up a thick clot of
phlegm before you can catch your breath. Are you still smoking? You
can’t remember quitting, but on the other hand, you can’t remember
having smoked a cigarette recently. Marlboros? Winstons? You started
smoking in prep school, didn’t you? Andover? Exeter? Deerfield?
And where did you go to college? Yale, you think, because Yale had a
Drama school, and you remember performing in plays. But which ones?
“Don’t move a muscle for it,” says the man’s voice, and you
finally recognize it: the voice of your favorite director and acting
coach, who followed the Method and told you that you should never
speak a line or even change position until you felt an irresistible urge
to do it. By now you aren’t surprised that you can’t remember the
director’s name, even though he gave you your first role in a movie.
What movie?
“Never mind!” you say, talking back to yourself. “He’s mad, I tell
you, mad!” You cackle dementedly. But then you realize that you’re
talking to yourself in the third person, which proves you really are
demented.
You find yourself in the barn across from the farmhouse. No cows
or horses in it, not even a ghostly whiff of manure. Dust motes
drift in the air, turned golden by a shaft of sunlight that slants down
through a crack in the roof. A mouse skitters across the worn planks of
the floor and runs over your feet, unafraid- or unaware- of you.
It takes you a moment to identify the things stored in barn. Stage
paraphernalia take up most of the space: painted flats, some klieg
and Fresnel lights, a wooden throne painted gold which might once have
been occupied by a Shakespearean king, some motheaten costumes on
hangers, a hat-rack displaying a fedora, two bowlers, and a top hat, and
an armoire with its door hanging open to reveal a dueling pistol, a
revolver, and a pair of fencing foils.
Of course! The barn had been turned into a summer theater, like
the ones where you performed when you were younger. Something
had happened – a betrayal of some kind – to end your acting career.
And suddenly you remember who betrayed you. He was a director and a
close friend named Russ Trent, who cast you in an actor’s dream role:
the only speaking part in a southern vernacular version of the Gospel of
Matthew, called The Cottonpatch Gospel. You played everyone from
Saint Matthew through Judas to Jesus Christ His Own Self, while a four-
man country and western band played songs to back you up. The band
was made up of a banjo picker a guitarist, a fiddler, and a mandolin
player. They were all brilliant musicians and fine singers – one of them,
a guy named Garry, was a tenor who could slip sweetly into contralto
range: he played the Virgin Mary beautifully. After rehearsals in New
York, the cast flew to Dallas where we were all put up at a local motel.
The evening before we started final rehearsals at the Dallas Theater
Center, a curvaceous southern belle with a creamy accent, wearing a
Texas two-step skirt and a low-cut blouse came into your room, sat on
your bed, and gushed about how thrilled she was that Cottonpatch was
being revived. She told you that after the Dallas run, it was scheduled to
embark on what she called the Eternity Tour, travelling all over the
United States, playing open-air arenas. After each performance, she said,
you would take your bows and then tell the audience that presenting the
play was your mission from God. You’d then ask members of the crowd
to join you onstage and proclaim that thanks to the play, Jesus Christ had
become their personal Savior and Redeemer. She smiled and leaned
forward, given you a full view of her breasts in their black lace bra.
You laughed. “First,” you told her, “Nice tits, but no thanks.
Second, I’ll be happy to tell the tour crowds how much I enjoyed doing
the play, because it’s good. Third, I won’t talk about it being my
mission from God, because, because I’m an agnostic. And finally,
Actors’ Equity will be interested to learn that you said my continued
employment depended on whether or not Jesus saved me.”
Her face froze. She stood, and with a swirl of her two-step skirt she
stormed out of your room, slamming the door behind her. The theater
management had you on the next plane back to New York.
You kept in touch with some of the guys in the band, and one of
them told you that Russ Trent, knowing you weren’t a Born-Again
Christian, had cast a back-up guy who thought Jesus hung the Moon.
He was better at preaching than acting, and a sanctimonious asshole. The
musicians got sick of him and quit. So the tour wasn’t fell rather short of Eternity.
You got a few more roles, but your agent had dropped you for
taking the Cottonpatch job for Equity minimum instead of doing
commercials for serious money, and showing up for open calls where
the odds were heavily against your getting cast became soul-destroying
after awhile. The fire in your belly had gone out, and you had to face the
All along you had continued to follow your first passion, writing
short stories and novels. You had published a few of the stories, and
you redoubled your efforts. You acquired a literary agent, and she tried
to sell a three-part book about the Albigensian Crusade in the Middle
Ages that had taken you three years to write. It was full of battle scenes
involving knights on horseback, cities being torched, and general
medieval mayhem, including zealous Catholic warrior-bishops burning
Cathar heretics at the stake.
There was a subplot featuring a troupe of wandering minstrels who
had come up with four-part modal harmony, and added the lute to the
viol, shawm, and hand-drums. They played lively dances and
accompanied the songs of courtly love sung by a Cathar nobleman who
hired them.
Four American publishers turned the trilogy down flat. A fifth
was British, and he admired the action and praised your writing style. He
said he’d accept it if you cut all the religious and musical stuff and turned
it into another epic about King Arthur and the Knights of the Round
Table. You asked him if he’d ever actually read the Matter of England.
He said, “What’s the matter with England?” You said it was
sick because it was infected with publishers who had never heard of
their country’s national epic. You didn’t wait for him to order
you out of his office.
Your agent dropped you, and you began to think your writing was
fatally flawed. You fell into despair and began drinking heavily. Your
wife pleaded with you to join AA and get off the booze, but you swore
at her and told her to leave you alone. During one quarrel you hit her,
and she did leave you alone, permanently. She earned a large salary as a
prominent art dealer’s assistant and financial manager, and she paid the
rent on the apartment in New York and supported you. Without her, you
were reduced to depleting the small savings account you had set up for
the money you made from time to time as a consultant for other writers.
You couldn’t add to it, because when you lost belief in your own writing,
you could no longer, in good conscience, advise other writers. You cut
your expenses to the bone, spending less money on food so that you
could keep on drinking. There came a time when you couldn’t come up
with the rent, so you packed a suitcase and filled the cooler with
sandwich makings, beer, and ice. You loaded the cooler, the suitcase,
and your laptop computer into the used Oldsmobile sedan you had
bought five years previously and headed for the vacation cabin in
Vermont that you and your wife owned jointly.
For a wonder, the beat-up old heap made the journey without
breaking down, though the engine made an ominous pinging sound and
smoke was pouring out of the exhaust pipe by the time you reached
the house. You turned off the ignition. The car belched a final black
cloud, shuddered, and died. You took your cooler, suitcase and laptop
computer onto the porch, and unlocked the door. Going into the
kitchen, you opened the fridge and put in the contents of the cooler. You
put the suitcase on the rack at the foot of the bed. Then you took a beer
and returned to the porch. You switched on the laptop. It occurred to
you that your actions had a mechanical quality, just one damn thing after
another. Even that insight was boring.
You checked the news. Wars and rumors of wars. Political promises
and lies. California was on fire. The Russian premier was threatening to
use nuclear weapons in his war with Ukraine. A perky blonde woman
told you she’d drive you happy if you bought a new car from the
company she was pimping. The permafrost in the Siberian taiga was
melting and sinkholes were opening, releasing large quantities of methane
into the atmosphere. The liberal talking heads predicted that the
Republicans would take over both houses of Congress in the upcoming
election. There might not be an election, because supporters of Donald
Trump were threatening to start a second Civil War. A group of Kenyan
villagers hacked an injured elephant to death with their machetes because
it had stumbled into one of their maize fields.
That last news-bite pushed you over the edge. You began to cry.
Returning to the kitchen, you found a razor-sharp steak knife, and
still crying, you sliced open your left wrist. As the blood began to spurt,
you switched hands and cut your right one. You dropped the knife and
stumbled back out to the porch, where you managed to collapse into a
rocking chair before passing out. You woke up back in Birch Creek.
This time around the memories stuck. You move easily up the rise
to the little cemetery and stop outside its lych gate. It is locked, and
you think of everyone who has ever wronged you. You forgive them.
The gate swings open. You got in and lie down in the grass to rest.