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In memory of James E. Tittle II, “Jamie”
October 10, 1965–June 19, 2007
The dead do not offer themselves up as a consoling study when we loved them so.
—Jim Harrison, The Road Home
ALSO BY KIRBY GANN
A Fine Excess: Contemporary Literature at Play (2001) (Kristin Herbert, co-editor)
The Barbarian Parade (2003)
Our Napoleon in Rags (2005)
All is sign. But only a piercing light or shriek will penetrate our blunted sight and hearing.... I’ve always been aware of hieroglyphs written across my path and a confused murmur of words in my ear. Till now I didn’t understand them.
—Michel Tournier, The Ogre
The things people do don’t add up to an edifying story.
There aren’t any morals to this confusion we’re living in.
I mean you can make yourself believe any sort of fable about it.
—Robert Stone, A Flag for Sunrise
Three shadows steal across a field of forgotten seed corn, stumbling over fallen husks rotted to the ground—three shadows bent low scurry past rough leaves that scrape the skin like cow tongues. Late November, deep night. Misting rain that once hung like fog sharpens into pin needles on great gusts of wind. The loamy mud sucks at their ankles, white breath blooms before their faces, and their bare arms burn with the cold as they surge over the sodden field, wild with trespass.
James Cole Prather comes last in line. He cannot keep pace with the healthy legs of his companions; a misshapen knee makes him list to starboard at each step, his excuse for a run an awkward pole-vaulting motion mastered from childhood. He catches up to where his friends still at the field’s end, hiding out before the cracked cul-de-sac drive. Their giggles and squally hushes spring from the dark stalks, a tiny crew of the stoned and invulnerable scanning for signs of any human figure, for the infamous caretaker making his rounds, the glint of his shotgun in the meager moonlight.
The spectacular ruin of the St. Jerome seminary looms before them. It’s a vast keep: five stories high, the facade as wide as a football field is long, row upon row of shattered mullioned windows gaping sightless over the broken fields. At the summit towers a stone cross; above that, clouds zoom across the moon like river rapids at full rampage.
His companions bolt across the open space and disappear behind a keeling pine. James Cole watches them go as he catches his breath, used to being left behind. He raises his face to the roiling clouds, feels the cold rain mix with the sweat slicking his cheeks. His eyes close at the simple pleasure, and he listens to the swim in his brain and the thousands of sounds that surround: wind on stalks; rain on leaves; a broken shutter attacking its hinges. Each a note sung precisely for him.
By the time he makes it around the pine his friends are gone.
He calls their names, softly; only the wind rises in answer. The basement windows nearest him are securely boarded shut. Above, on the second floor, a single window hangs open not far from the tree’s sturdy center, and he envisions the scene he must have missed only a moment before, Spunk and Shady hauling themselves up the weak extended branches without speaking, sneakers grabbing for toe-holds on the brick ledge.
The rain comes down heavier, in gobs. A shiver wrings his body as three cold drops shock his neck beneath the collar. Up the tree he goes, boots scrape-sliding on the slick trunk, clumps of scratchy bark pulling off in his hands. The climb requires more effort than he had expected, but he makes it to the open window and wiggles through headfirst. The wet linoleum floor shocks when it kisses him hard on the forehead.
They’ve left him here as well; he can feel the absence around him. The dark is such that it swallows the weak beam of his flashlight. Rain sluices noisily in one dark corner, and somewhere there sings a plopping song, an echo as water taps into deeper water, a melody without resolution. The first purl of thunder rolls the length of the sky in a gradual motion that seems to pour far into the distance and then return. And there is a stench—the room smells of piss and rot and wet dog.
The light from his hand works like an intangible guiding rope drawing him behind its lead. He has been in this place many times before, yet at each entry feels utterly lost—even, in some way, bereft; his heart in his throat. It has always struck him as the backdrop to undesirable dreams: inexhaustible in its rooms, tangled by puzzling stairways and corridors, often presenting mystical compartments with no function he can divine. In dreams he has staggered from hall to hall with slow-thighed dogs panting unseen behind him; he has fled down stairs and stone slides; he has been swallowed altogether into the belly of the earth. As if the building masked a portal that led deep into ancient caverns, sculpted by slicked flues and hidden rivers.
Now here he is again, and, as in every dream, he is alone. But he is not dreaming. What was it the sick man had said just an hour before? There is always something happening, you just don’t know what it is. It was a quote from somebody