Rachel looked at me for a while with that look on her face she would give when I clearly offended a fat person or an Asian. It’s a look of loving pity, the way a mother might look at her retarded kid who tries to eat cereal with a wristwatch. I pointed vaguely at her sister’s grave, but I never actually said anything. She kept smiling at me though. She took a little step forward and asked if it was weird to see her like this. It gave me an opportunity to look her up and down which I always enjoyed doing. All these years of being away from her, imagining her, I never thought she would be dressed in black. And why couldn’t I see her hair? It was behind a head scarf so that all she looked like was Rachel’s face in the midst of some old black sheets. Don’t get me wrong. Even in this state she was still smoking hot. “Takes some getting used to, doesn’t it?” she asked, but I still didn’t say anything.
She said she had made a mental bet about whether her brother or I would visit first. Would prison and rehab beat out stubbornness, she asked. It had. Her brother visited three years ago, just days after getting out of rehab. “We stood right here, right at Angie’s grave,” she said. “The day came when I realized you just wouldn’t come, and that everyone who was going to see me like this had seen me like this. I think only then did I really belong here. To let everyone know I wasn’t running from anything. That I needed to be with these people because I belonged here. I needed everyone to see me. Now here you are. I’m glad.” I still didn’t say anything, though.
She took another step forward. She was just a foot or so to my right side, and for the first time in many years I could turn my head and see her face. I wanted to see her hair. I almost reached out to pull the head scarf away just to see that it was still there, but I bit my nails instead. She asked if I was going to come up to the chapel for a service. I still didn’t answer. I didn’t know what to say. She looked up at the clouds like she wasn’t sure she should speak, but then she started: “The first time you came to Angie’s grave on Labor Day I had to convince Mother Agatha not to run you out. I told her you were here for me, and I asked her if I should go see you. She said for me to stay. And I cried a bit I think. She said, ‘No, you can’t go down there.’ Then you came the next year at Labor Day, and I thought this year he’ll come say hello to me, he’ll look me in the eye, but you left again. And the next year. And the next. All the sisters called you the Labor Day Pilgrim. Every year you came, and the sisters would check what the temperature would be that night, hoping it wouldn’t get very cold. One time when you were out here a whippoorwill called, and Sister Mary said to me, ‘Do you hear that? It’s a whippoorwill?’ I knew it was a whippoorwill because you taught me what they sound like.”
I still didn’t say anything, though. I wished she would stop talking about chapels and mothers and sisters that weren’t really her mothers and sisters but really just women who stared at me from a distance. They could be like this, but not Rachel. When Rachel says she’s leaving you, that she is dying to her old life, she needs to mean some disease, or needs to be freefalling in an airplane that just lost its second engine but thankfully there was still time to make this last phone call.
Rachel said, “I thought I would come talk to you since it wasn’t your normal Labor Day trip. Maybe you’re making progress.” She paused and sighed. “But you won’t talk to me, will you?” I wouldn’t because the only thing I knew to do was to tell her I loved her. She said, “Maybe next year. Bless you, Cyrus.” Then she turned to walk back up the path to the monastery. So I blurted out, “They’re all leaving me, Rachel.”
She said she knew. Ever since she had become an official member of the community Charlotte had brought Boyce Jr. once a month. All the sisters at the monastery knew Boyce Jr. He would bring his guitar and play songs for them. Sometimes Sammy and Boyce came with them. In fact, she knew just about everything. “They told me you’re getting rid of everything. That since they’re leaving you’re going to leave, too. But they know what I know. What you know. That you don’t have anywhere to go. Even those migrating birds know where they're going, don't they?”
I got quiet again, but this time she didn’t turn around to leave. She waited for me, and even though I’m pretty sure she knew it all anyway, I told her everything that’s happened to me. About Hank. About Harris Ames. About Dr. Keegman. About the Resplendent Quetzal. About Bruce Barenburg. About Virgil Ray. About the Thunderbirds. About Antonio. About Marcel and Rex and Janice. About Virginia Blare. About my uncle. About my mother. About my father. About the time when she and I drove up to Boyce’s house and she hit a crow with her car. How it thumped and flipped over the windshield, she began to cry, and I shouted in disbelief and alarm: “You hit the crow! No one hits a crow! Corvus brachyrhynchos, no!” How we got out and stared at the crow that rocked back and forth on Boyce’s long driveway. We took it out to a barn behind the house and when I put it on an old wooden table the crows outside the barn really began squawking. How I made a little splint for its leg that only took a few minutes to make and attach, but I really milked it because I liked watching her look at that crow with all that worry, and then me like I was a hero. How I had told her she shouldn’t be sad about the crow, that it will live, and that all the other crows will remember we did this good thing. Crows can distinguish human faces, and will attack those who harass them and show affection for those who nurture them. How she shouldn’t be sad because all these crows around Boyce’s house will remember we did this good thing, and will show us good favor. And how from that time on every time we all sat out together crows would drop bolts and screws onto the picnic table as a reward for us helping that one bird. And even now, though she doesn’t come anymore and Boyce has a for sale sign on his front yard, they still bring nuts or bright pieces of metal to the front steps as a reward.
I finally stopped talking and she told me that it was true I was a good person. I told her Rex Tugwell didn’t think so, but she said, “That’s because Rex Tugwell is an asshole.” She told me she should go, that she shouldn’t be speaking in private like this with me. She asked if I would come up to the chapel and I said no. She asked if I was going to visit sometime and I said I doubted it. I resisted telling her I loved her and would give up every bird on this planet if I could come visit her and have it not hurt.
Before she became a nun, her girlfriends threw her a we-can’t-believe-you’re-really-doing-this party, and they were good enough to invite me, Sammy and Boyce. I couldn’t go inside that apartment, however, without throwing up. Sammy and Boyce went instead, asked Rachel to come out, and then went and waited in the car. She had already been over things with me several times, but I still wanted to ask her why, in the 21st century, any young woman wants to join a monastery. She was done trying to explain things to me with any real significance, so she finally just told me out on her doorstep, “If Sammy and Boyce started a monastery on some island, you would join it. You would do it because that’s the place you needed to be to love them more. And that’s why I’m joining.” I told her it was a fairly terrible comparison since no one is claiming Sammy and Boyce are God, but she said, “For you, yes they are. That’s the closest to understanding God you’re going to get it. And damn it, Cyrus, that’s better than most people.” Then she went inside. I never saw her again until that day at the monastery.
When I got home that same evening, I called Keller Bigsby and told him to take the first bid he gets on my mother’s house.
Thursday, December 30, 2010
Tuesday, December 28, 2010
Postscript, Part 1
For nearly five months Sammy and Boyce have asked me to post again on this blog. I told them, however, that I finished blogging and the entire Wetherbee Bird Casino had come to a natural conclusion. They both disagreed with me, and said that I knew for a fact many people thought I had gone off to commit suicide. To be fair, it wasn’t that many people, and I pointed out to Sammy and Boyce that everyone who thought I was dead was outright pleased about my death, especially that it had come by my own hand. I figured if my imagined suicide caused a few internet weirdos (and if email addresses can be believed, a U.S. senator) some satisfaction, who was I to ruin it? Sammy and Boyce made me promise, however, that by the end of the calendar year I would explain what’s happened in these last months. “What’s happened since August is much more important than anything that happened before August,” Sammy told me. That may be true, but before August I had reasons to blog. Since August—none. Yet, I am happy to appease Sammy and Boyce, so I will write this postscript, broken into three parts because my new environment has got me doing a lot of sketching lately, and it’s gotten to my wrists.
So to my loyal readers who had imagined my neck having long since slipped out of the noose made by a pair of my mother’s nylons, my putrefied body lying undiscovered on the basement floor, I apologize. Cyrus Wetherbee is alive!
Sammy and Boyce said the great thing about a blog is I wouldn’t need to remind anyone what was happening in August. After all, five months of reality equals only what gets posted on the web page. It’s not unlike when I used to listen to my New Order albums and think, “They sound this way whether I’m crying or not.” This thought comforts someone like Charlotte, but for me it’s very lonesome.
As my hateful readers will remember, I was getting rid of a lot of stuff and then went off to Rachel. Sammy and Boyce tried to make me understand why this would sound like suicide, showing me what I’d written for over a year. I still didn’t get it, and only agreed to how such a conclusion would be theoretically possible after they read some of the reader comments at increasingly louder volumes. Sammy liked to quote his favorite because he really wished he knew the person who wrote it: “Longest and bleakest suicide note ever.” Sometimes Sammy would stare at the furniture thinking about that reader comment and it sure looked like the love of his life had just gotten on some bus.
If I was ever going to commit suicide, I don’t think it would have been in August. That would have been an anti-climatic moment. Though when I think about it, there were some similarities between August and the time I came closest to “flying south,” as my father called suicide or any type of death that could have feasibly been avoided. My father didn’t really distinguish much about death. When my uncle would visit and tell him about one of their friends dying of liver cancer, my father called that “flying south.” When we drove past a motorcycle accident, he called that “flying south.” When he read about the man who shot himself on the golf course, he called that “flying south” too. I don’t think he thought mountain climbing and driving without a seat belt were any different than a bottle of pills or a shotgun. When birds hit the window he’d say “I hope he didn’t fly south,” and we’d both watch for a while to see if the robin was stunned or dead. Generally it was the latter, and we’d bury him somewhere in the yard.
No, August was no time to fly south, but as I said, there were similarities with the days of thinking about flying south. Ever since the death of Antonio the bird, I’d been having a lot of dreams about Rachel. I hadn’t really dreamed about her since the months after I first lost her. Once a man on a bus, overhearing my unsolicited interpretation of Lance the driver’s dream, asked me why he never has any dreams about watching tv or eating potato chips. Although Lance didn’t ask for my interpretation, he still liked me, and didn’t like the cut of the jib of this interloper, and told him, “That’s because you watch tv and eat chips all the goddamn day long. What do you want to dream about it for?” And while Lance could never be considered a dream interpreter, he was actually quite accurate. People generally don’t dream about breathing or doing the laundry unless they serve as the background for something unique. Rachel, much like Sammy and Boyce, was too much a recognized part of my conscious mind to be in my dreams. But in the months after she left this world, it was too much for my poor brain.
Sammy moved in with me for a while, and Charlotte gave Boyce permission to pretty much do the same. She would bring Boyce Jr. over, who was just a little guy at the time, and we’d sit around in silence, and they’d never blame me for anything or tell me that things always work out in the end. Even with their presence I began to dread the nights because I had dreams of Rachel. Constantly she was standing far away from me. I would run after her, right straight to her, but halfway there I couldn’t remember which direction she was.
One night Sammy and Boyce wanted to cook marshmallows in the microwave and eat them with forks, but Boyce forgot to take the fork out when he poked his marshmallow and decided it needed to be bigger. The thing flashed real quick and just died. I told Boyce not to worry about it and went down to the basement to bring back an old microwave from the early 1980’s. When I brought it up neither Sammy nor Boyce could stop laughing. It was the largest microwave they had ever seen, barely fitting on a kitchen counter. Naturally Sammy dubbed it The Macrowave, and that night we cooked all kinds of weird stuff in it. The rest of the night we made a rule to only microwave and eat foods we’d never microwaved before. We ate pickles, tater tots, cheerios in milk, and corn dogs. When I woke up the next morning, I told them we needed to do more with the Macrowave. They asked if all that weird food had kept Rachel out of my dreams. It didn’t—she was still in my dreams, but this time she knocked on my door with flowers and told me she was sorry. We needed to do it all again!
That night we tried some different foods, but the result in my dream was even better. This time Rachel and I were sitting on the couch and talking about people coming over and what we should wear. We never met the people but I didn’t care. The next night she and I were driving in a car and she saw a broad-tailed hawk on a fence post and shouted for me stop. And I did. And we watched. And when I woke up I couldn’t wait until the night when we would experiment with the Macrowave and food. Then Rachel and I were grocery shopping. Another night we were on a train drinking and watching some woods go by. And then she was pregnant. Once she took me to see her entire family and said, "My god, here they are, Cyrus!" And another night my father was alive and he told her that he loved her very much.
But that’s when Sammy and Boyce told me they wouldn’t let this happen anymore. They told me I hadn’t even noticed that for over a week I was doing all this food experimentation with the Macrowave all by myself. And they told me I showed no concern that I wasn’t eating until the night, I wasn’t showering, that I was dehydrated and weak, and that only by threatening to kick the living shit out of Rex Tugwell had they managed to keep my job. Boyce said, “We’re destroying this microwave, but it’s probably better if you did it, too.” But I carried on for another night and Rachel was my nurse in a hospital and I didn’t have any legs, but I didn’t care. And finally Boyce said, “We’re destroying it tonight, you can come with us or you can stay here.”
I didn’t go with them. I would have changed the locks when they left with the Macrowave but Boyce was a damn locksmith. When they came back I asked them how they did it and they said they put it on the train tracks by the middle school. In the middle of the night I took Boyce’s keys and drove his van out to the tracks. I thought maybe the train hadn’t come, but it had. The pieces were everywhere, and I thought maybe I should just lie on these tracks. Maybe. But Boyce and Sammy were waiting in the back of the van the whole time and told me I needed to come home. It was a quiet ride home until Sammy said, “By the way, Hamlet, we were waiting for you in the back of that van for nearly three hours.”
I didn’t dream about Rachel again except for a few here and there. Boyce asked me if I thought the dreams had been from all the food I put on my stomach, or if it was something about the Macrowave itself. It’s not possible to know, so I told them they should just decide what they thought was the coolest. They actually did, but they wouldn’t tell me what because they said I wouldn’t like it. They had both come up with the same thing, and they came up with it very quickly.
Not since then did I have dreams about Rachel, but this past summer they came again. These dreams weren’t as good as the ones before, so I didn’t care to lose them. Nearly every time Rachel would be sitting under a maple tree, but her brother stood next to me, and he kept whispering in my ear that this wasn’t the real Rachel. The real Rachel was dead. When I told him he was right he would laugh in my ear and the Rachel under the maple tree would run away from both of us screaming for us to leave her alone. Then I'd wake up alone in bed.
So it was in August that I decided I would go find her. I borrowed Sammy’s car and drove nearly an hour and a half. I parked on the south side of a pocket of woods by the state highway so no one would see me because all I wanted to see was Rachel. I walked through the woods and came to a cemetery. I’d been there before. Rachel had taken me only two times before. I tried to remember which grave it was—if I stood at the right grave Rachel would appear. I kept looking and looking until finally I found the name Angela McNabb. That was Rachel’s younger sister who died at just 12 years old. I stood at that grave and asked under my breath for Rachel to come to me. I had to wait a while, but she came like I knew she would. At first I couldn’t look up even though I knew she was near me. I just kept staring at her sister’s name. Finally I looked up though, and there she was. Her face was just like I remembered it. Like in the dreams. Like in life. I told her I thought people like her came in white and could fly. She smiled and said, “I’m so happy to see you, Cyrus.” And I just about fainted.
So to my loyal readers who had imagined my neck having long since slipped out of the noose made by a pair of my mother’s nylons, my putrefied body lying undiscovered on the basement floor, I apologize. Cyrus Wetherbee is alive!
Sammy and Boyce said the great thing about a blog is I wouldn’t need to remind anyone what was happening in August. After all, five months of reality equals only what gets posted on the web page. It’s not unlike when I used to listen to my New Order albums and think, “They sound this way whether I’m crying or not.” This thought comforts someone like Charlotte, but for me it’s very lonesome.
As my hateful readers will remember, I was getting rid of a lot of stuff and then went off to Rachel. Sammy and Boyce tried to make me understand why this would sound like suicide, showing me what I’d written for over a year. I still didn’t get it, and only agreed to how such a conclusion would be theoretically possible after they read some of the reader comments at increasingly louder volumes. Sammy liked to quote his favorite because he really wished he knew the person who wrote it: “Longest and bleakest suicide note ever.” Sometimes Sammy would stare at the furniture thinking about that reader comment and it sure looked like the love of his life had just gotten on some bus.
If I was ever going to commit suicide, I don’t think it would have been in August. That would have been an anti-climatic moment. Though when I think about it, there were some similarities between August and the time I came closest to “flying south,” as my father called suicide or any type of death that could have feasibly been avoided. My father didn’t really distinguish much about death. When my uncle would visit and tell him about one of their friends dying of liver cancer, my father called that “flying south.” When we drove past a motorcycle accident, he called that “flying south.” When he read about the man who shot himself on the golf course, he called that “flying south” too. I don’t think he thought mountain climbing and driving without a seat belt were any different than a bottle of pills or a shotgun. When birds hit the window he’d say “I hope he didn’t fly south,” and we’d both watch for a while to see if the robin was stunned or dead. Generally it was the latter, and we’d bury him somewhere in the yard.
No, August was no time to fly south, but as I said, there were similarities with the days of thinking about flying south. Ever since the death of Antonio the bird, I’d been having a lot of dreams about Rachel. I hadn’t really dreamed about her since the months after I first lost her. Once a man on a bus, overhearing my unsolicited interpretation of Lance the driver’s dream, asked me why he never has any dreams about watching tv or eating potato chips. Although Lance didn’t ask for my interpretation, he still liked me, and didn’t like the cut of the jib of this interloper, and told him, “That’s because you watch tv and eat chips all the goddamn day long. What do you want to dream about it for?” And while Lance could never be considered a dream interpreter, he was actually quite accurate. People generally don’t dream about breathing or doing the laundry unless they serve as the background for something unique. Rachel, much like Sammy and Boyce, was too much a recognized part of my conscious mind to be in my dreams. But in the months after she left this world, it was too much for my poor brain.
Sammy moved in with me for a while, and Charlotte gave Boyce permission to pretty much do the same. She would bring Boyce Jr. over, who was just a little guy at the time, and we’d sit around in silence, and they’d never blame me for anything or tell me that things always work out in the end. Even with their presence I began to dread the nights because I had dreams of Rachel. Constantly she was standing far away from me. I would run after her, right straight to her, but halfway there I couldn’t remember which direction she was.
One night Sammy and Boyce wanted to cook marshmallows in the microwave and eat them with forks, but Boyce forgot to take the fork out when he poked his marshmallow and decided it needed to be bigger. The thing flashed real quick and just died. I told Boyce not to worry about it and went down to the basement to bring back an old microwave from the early 1980’s. When I brought it up neither Sammy nor Boyce could stop laughing. It was the largest microwave they had ever seen, barely fitting on a kitchen counter. Naturally Sammy dubbed it The Macrowave, and that night we cooked all kinds of weird stuff in it. The rest of the night we made a rule to only microwave and eat foods we’d never microwaved before. We ate pickles, tater tots, cheerios in milk, and corn dogs. When I woke up the next morning, I told them we needed to do more with the Macrowave. They asked if all that weird food had kept Rachel out of my dreams. It didn’t—she was still in my dreams, but this time she knocked on my door with flowers and told me she was sorry. We needed to do it all again!
That night we tried some different foods, but the result in my dream was even better. This time Rachel and I were sitting on the couch and talking about people coming over and what we should wear. We never met the people but I didn’t care. The next night she and I were driving in a car and she saw a broad-tailed hawk on a fence post and shouted for me stop. And I did. And we watched. And when I woke up I couldn’t wait until the night when we would experiment with the Macrowave and food. Then Rachel and I were grocery shopping. Another night we were on a train drinking and watching some woods go by. And then she was pregnant. Once she took me to see her entire family and said, "My god, here they are, Cyrus!" And another night my father was alive and he told her that he loved her very much.
But that’s when Sammy and Boyce told me they wouldn’t let this happen anymore. They told me I hadn’t even noticed that for over a week I was doing all this food experimentation with the Macrowave all by myself. And they told me I showed no concern that I wasn’t eating until the night, I wasn’t showering, that I was dehydrated and weak, and that only by threatening to kick the living shit out of Rex Tugwell had they managed to keep my job. Boyce said, “We’re destroying this microwave, but it’s probably better if you did it, too.” But I carried on for another night and Rachel was my nurse in a hospital and I didn’t have any legs, but I didn’t care. And finally Boyce said, “We’re destroying it tonight, you can come with us or you can stay here.”
I didn’t go with them. I would have changed the locks when they left with the Macrowave but Boyce was a damn locksmith. When they came back I asked them how they did it and they said they put it on the train tracks by the middle school. In the middle of the night I took Boyce’s keys and drove his van out to the tracks. I thought maybe the train hadn’t come, but it had. The pieces were everywhere, and I thought maybe I should just lie on these tracks. Maybe. But Boyce and Sammy were waiting in the back of the van the whole time and told me I needed to come home. It was a quiet ride home until Sammy said, “By the way, Hamlet, we were waiting for you in the back of that van for nearly three hours.”
I didn’t dream about Rachel again except for a few here and there. Boyce asked me if I thought the dreams had been from all the food I put on my stomach, or if it was something about the Macrowave itself. It’s not possible to know, so I told them they should just decide what they thought was the coolest. They actually did, but they wouldn’t tell me what because they said I wouldn’t like it. They had both come up with the same thing, and they came up with it very quickly.
Not since then did I have dreams about Rachel, but this past summer they came again. These dreams weren’t as good as the ones before, so I didn’t care to lose them. Nearly every time Rachel would be sitting under a maple tree, but her brother stood next to me, and he kept whispering in my ear that this wasn’t the real Rachel. The real Rachel was dead. When I told him he was right he would laugh in my ear and the Rachel under the maple tree would run away from both of us screaming for us to leave her alone. Then I'd wake up alone in bed.
So it was in August that I decided I would go find her. I borrowed Sammy’s car and drove nearly an hour and a half. I parked on the south side of a pocket of woods by the state highway so no one would see me because all I wanted to see was Rachel. I walked through the woods and came to a cemetery. I’d been there before. Rachel had taken me only two times before. I tried to remember which grave it was—if I stood at the right grave Rachel would appear. I kept looking and looking until finally I found the name Angela McNabb. That was Rachel’s younger sister who died at just 12 years old. I stood at that grave and asked under my breath for Rachel to come to me. I had to wait a while, but she came like I knew she would. At first I couldn’t look up even though I knew she was near me. I just kept staring at her sister’s name. Finally I looked up though, and there she was. Her face was just like I remembered it. Like in the dreams. Like in life. I told her I thought people like her came in white and could fly. She smiled and said, “I’m so happy to see you, Cyrus.” And I just about fainted.
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