The Country Ahead of Us, the Country Behind (18 page)

Kansas City did not renew my contract, and I came home with baseball behind me, as if seeing the world for the first time. In my hometown the hard light of summer had softened and annealed; winds slightly cooler than summer winds blew, and in the mornings the sky appeared a heavy shade of mottled gray. I wandered a lot; at Adams Field a crowd of younger boys had come to dominate the baseball diamond, and sometimes I would sit against the chain-link fence behind the elementary school, watching their games from the hilltop. More often I would ponder the lost Eden
of the flower garden, and once or twice, when night came, I passed by the hedge at the Lewis home. Beyond the clasped gate there was only darkness and the shadowy flickerings of the television in the front window, where Doctor Lewis, I knew without a doubt, looked at the late news and chewed on his cigar in the easy chair. It seemed to me that all across town the streets themselves had changed; they were narrower, the quiet in them had become a sad thing—they seemed desolate, and I saw now, improbably, that there were intricate lives in every home.
A job
, I began to say to myself, seeing how most men came out of their houses in the morning—but I couldn’t bring myself, yet, to look for one. I spoke only when spoken to, and I am sure that people spoke of me as one who had failed at his dream. Yet everywhere I went I thought of our flower garden and not of baseball; perhaps, I said to myself, the day lilies have come out, or the evening primroses, or the clump of zinnias has bloomed. By the time September ended I had led myself to believe in the elusive perfection of that place, and stubbornly felt the urge to go there, to stand among the flowers one more time.

A night came in October when I awoke at two A.M. and knew the killing-frost had come. The sharp air of winter flooded at the window, and outside, illuminated by the glitter of the full moon, the leaves on the cottonwood in the yard had bound themselves up and dropped to the lawn. It dawned on me then that the flowers in our garden would close against winter now, and I got up and dressed quickly, shivering all up and down my neck and back and arms. I went out hurriedly into the street and ran toward Anna’s in the cold moonlight, barreling up the old broad avenues of my paper route. When I turned into Tullis I stopped and
waited while the steam of my breath died down. Moonlight bronzed everything—the leaves in the rigid maples, the clean, silent porches, the frost on the lawns and the gables and trellises—and the windowpanes all up and down the street shimmered like deep pools of water. The frost had hardened to a crust that fractured readily underfoot, and the night dew, silver in color, lay in drops the size of small pearls on the blade tips. The flowers, I thought: they will have folded up already where the frost is this thick, and I noticed uneasily a disturbance in the air then, and a steady drumming in the pit of my stomach, and my spine tightened as I walked and the tips of my ears felt furious with cold. I unclasped the gate I’d unclasped hundreds of times; inside the trimmed hedge each flagstone appeared as a ragged square of impeccable light; the three-story house rose hugely against the blue-black of the night sky, luminous, familiar, melancholy and silent—an impenetrable fortress of silver-white clapboard, with long eaves glistening beneath the moon.

Perhaps, I told myself one more time, everything will be in blossom—and then I stepped carefully along the lit flagstones. I went through the bend in the garden path; I came on the stone bench; on the low knoll to my left and before me I saw the outline of the white gazebo. I wound through the paths and down the shadowed lawn slope, but the garden Anna and I had planted was only a dark mass of stems now, everything cut back to a foot in height and mulched with several inches of raked leaves from the rest of the yard.

Everything else was as it should be, as it had been, but I had no place in it anymore. I’d trespassed in order to be there at all, and suddenly I felt more alone than I ever had, more desolate, more burdened by my own soul and by who
I was, however ineluctably, and it began to seem as if my presence in that place at night beneath the moon marked the last moment ever in which I could really be young. Years have passed, but still today—on buses going downtown, in restaurants booming with noise, on airplanes as they lift off, at weddings and at movies and at baseball games when those moments arrive and the field disappears and I find myself burrowing backward in time, lost in myself as the game goes on—I have felt in my heart that same widening aloneness that buried me then: the loneliness that boys feel who are forever afraid of death and of becoming men.

ALSO BY
D
AVID
G
UTERSON

EAST OF THE MOUNTAINS

When he discovers that he has terminal cancer, retired heart surgeon Ben Givens refuses to simply sit back and wait. Instead he takes his two beloved dogs and goes on a last hunt, determined to end his life on his own terms. But as the people he meets and the memories over which he lingers remind him of the mystery of life’s endurance, his trek into the American West becomes much more than a final journey.

Fiction/Literature/978-1-4000-3265-5

OUR LADY OF THE FOREST

Ann Holmes is a fragile, pill-popping teenaged runaway who receives a visitation from the Virgin Mary one morning while picking mushrooms in the woods of North Fork, Washington. In the ensuing days the miracle recurs, and the declining logging town becomes the site of a pilgrimage of the faithful and desperate. As these people flock to Ann—and as Ann herself is drawn more deeply into what is either holiness or madness—
Our Lady of the Forest
seamlessly splices the miraculous and the mundane.

Fiction/Literature/978-0-375-72657-6

ALSO AVAILABLE
The Country Ahead of Us, the Country Behind
,
978-0-679-76718-3
Snow Falling on Cedars
, 978-0-679-76402-1

VINTAGE CONTEMPORARIES
Available at your local bookstore, or visit
www.randomhouse.com

Table of Contents

Other Books by This Author