The Way Here [2:5]

Part 2: Chapter 5

“I am an old man afraid of dying,” he said finally. The two were driving—a onetime favorite thing—down corn-lined highways. A fall harvest was on and low light cut through the first rows of stalk before being swallowed within.

She looked at him where he sat, his hands on the wheel and he watching the road.

“You’re an old man afraid of dying? You’re an old man afraid of your father,” she said. “You’re an old man that blames himself for Thomas. Or you’re an old man scared, after all these years, of responsibility. When did you become so afraid?”

He drove on, making sweeping lefts and hard rights, passing farmhouses here and there with their careful, sculpted looks. Porch and porch swing. Wood siding and brick. Dirt plots between house and barn where trucks were parked and dogs sniffed.

They passed a massive red machine with teeth and belts, exhausting black into the evening air as it ate through corn row on corn row. The traffic was scarce and slow and Jonathan passed the few cars they caught or watched those coming at him grow small in a mirror as they went.

He slowed as they passed through a small town with little save a depot for the coming-going trains. The rails followed the highway in its course and on days like this, they sought usually to surround themselves only in field as they went, taking little known routes where they left the highway at junctions or sweeping escapes. Some days though, they followed the routes laid down by locomotive in the early century’s expansion.

“You’re the bravest man I know and suddenly you’re on tiptoe,” she said. “It’s time you moved on.”

“Time I moved on? How? How is what I’ve been wanting to know.”

He drove down a two-lane number that left the highway in a gentle turn. Gathered sparrows left the deck in formation and lost themselves in the stocks of a field already harvested. Their bodies like quick spots through the dried, yellowed rows.

“When we first married,” she said, “I didn’t think we’d end up where we did. I certainly didn’t think you’d end up where you did.”

“And where is that?”

“You know. Between here and gone every few months for all these years now.”

“What did you think would happen?” he asked. “Where did you think we’d be?”

“I knew we’d be together. That was it.”

“How?”

“I just did.”

“But you can’t tell me what made you think that?”

“I can’t,” she said. “Faith? I don’t know. I just knew.”

“I wish I had that sense, Helen,” he said, still watching the road.

The afternoon sun was angling west. The break between harvested and ripened field was another dirt road. He watched the road rush at him and he kept on down the highway with the lane’s course obscured in the mirror by a camouflage of blue green stocks.

He imagined the look of field after field above, say at ten thousand feet and then at thirty. The regular patterns stretched across a continental canvas, the landscape itself a painting in three dimensions seen one way, a two dimensional work when seen the other. At this level he was a simple pigment among many, driving as he was. At that level his purpose and motion would be swallowed by the greater art and media of the work. But here, here his every step and effort, even the simple color of the car he drove, introduced a new chaos to the context of his surroundings. And to know that was something new.

“It’s not something I have,” she said.

“What’s that.”

“I can’t point to my faith in you as something I have. Or really, that faith in our relationship. It’s not something to have, it’s something I understood at that age. It has changed over the years. Like I said, I’ve wondered why you’ve come back and I’ve wondered when you would finally leave. Leave for good, I mean.”

“I don’t understand.”

“You and me both,” she said with a smile. “I guess I never saw you becoming so wrapped up with where you are, not knowing where you need to be. Hardly knowing, it seems, where you’ve even been.”

“You hit it.”

“What do you mean?”

“I know nothing anymore. Where I am. Where I’ve been. Least of all where I’m going.”

“Isn’t it funny, a man like yourself who’s been everywhere and still doesn’t know where to go.”

He smiled.

“Worse yet,” she said. “You’re afraid and you were one I never thought would be afraid. That’s why maybe you should go again.”

“Go again?”

“You said they’d want you to go back.”

“They do.”

“Maybe you should.”

“I told him I was done.”

“Maybe you shouldn’t be.”

“Maybe I shouldn’t be?”

“Maybe you should go.”

“I don’t know.”

The road was a gray stretch beneath them. The road was a gray-black canvas too. The road was straight and balanced before them. A course to follow and a track to run and a path west or east or south or north, a path from or to, and there always there. The road was always here.

This is much a beginning as it is an end. Shadow on shadow. Memory on memory. Long list of efforts—names and places, the purposes of the two. Litany. Catalogue. Page one is page two and you are, in the end, a sum total of experiences with no sum total in sight. You are, in the end, carrying on, simply continuing on in the self-same joy or anguish that never did define you. You always just were. Age of man can’t change that. White hairs curling, white hairs falling, whiskers in coarse growth part only of the cycle. Beginning to end and end to beginning and point along its path for ephemera only.

Geography, motion. Landscape, time. Each charted on their circling graphs and pointing only and ever in the direction of return. Return to what?

To believe is one thing. To know, something different. To share or teach, impossibility. Every man knows or does not know only for himself. Every man—island to island, no—given to ignore the tragedy of time past and passing or grip its turning in profound misunderstanding. A peppering of hope or dust of anxiety.

So I am this man here, knowing where I’ve been but not where I go. Knowing also that whatever roads traveled, the roads yet traveled, lead again and again to the same glorious and grating mysteries. And passers along the way, passengers too, all part of that unknown science and self.

So I go or stay, it’s all the same. So I continue here, old man to some, father to others, husband. So I go, old man out of sorts, man to be born across a new Hades, a squalid desert. Man to translate and translate for. We are walking translations. Confusions. Contradictions. Beauty is not knowing. Not understanding. Understand nothing and be left alone. King of silences and pursed lips. Mystery. Keeper of secrets.

The only secret is your own salvation. Suffering a simple display.