Authors: Newton Thornburg
So as Barbara Polanski and I sped along the road, heading for her home, I was not surprised to see up ahead in the darkness, among the lights of other parked cars, the red flasher of a police cruiser stopped on the creek curve.
“It might be someone we know,” I said to Barbara as I pulled in behind the other cars and parked.
Getting out, I took Barbara’s hand and we made our way along the shoulder of the road, past the other parked cars, toward the ravine ahead, which looked eerie in the web of lights playing on it. We came to the torn-up guardrail and I saw the broken tree halfway down and then the car itself, mangled against the base of a second tree, a huge oak that had neither bent nor broken. And it was then, as I dropped Barbara’s hand, that I recognized the car. I vaguely remember scrambling down the side of the ravine and pushing past the others gathered around the wreck and even shoving a policeman out of the way.
“It’s okay!” a voice said. “He’s her brother!”
But someone else was trying to pull me away and I had to fight him off until finally I made it to the car itself—to what was left of it—and looked inside. And I can remember that first blow as I saw her, as if someone had hit me in the spine with an ax. I dropped to my knees, I tried to breathe, I tried to climb through the flattened window frame into that bloody labyrinth inside, wanting if anything just to cover her, to hide her monstrous injuries from the world as well as from myself. The car seemed to have fit itself around her like a garment, the passenger door and post pushed tight against her back while the dashboard and engine embraced her from the front. Most of her dress had been torn from her and her limbs hung broken and askew and she was covered with blood and her face was unrecognizable, with her left eye exposed in that terrible way. It did not occur to me any more than it did to the police or to the others there that she could have been alive. And I remember screaming at them to let me cover her as they pulled me from the wreck again.
“You can’t get in there,” one said. “We got to cut her out. The fire truck’s on the way.”
And then it struck me that I had not seen Cliff. I began to yell at them to let me go, to let me see my brother, but they said he was gone and that they were searching the woods for him.
“He musta been throwed,” one of the policemen said. “We found half his bloody jacket—it was caught in the door.”
Then suddenly Tim Regan’s weasel face was in front of mine, flashing on and off in the crimson light.
“Willard Emry was the first on the scene,” he told me. “Willard says he saw someone run across the road and head into Jurgen’s place. Could’ve been Cliff.”
“No way,” the same policeman said. “No one in a wreck like this is walkin’ anywhere. He was throwed. He’s near here somewhere. We just gotta keep lookin’, that’s all.”
But that was something I could not accept. Pulling free, I remember yelling at them that Cliff was not there, not dead, and that he was waiting for me. A week later, at a bar in town, Tim Regan would tell me that I ran through the creek then and scrambled up the other side of the ravine like a wild man. He told me that I raced across the road and dove over the barbed-wire fence there and bounced to my feet and “just kept right on goin’, like it was daylight, for Chrissakes.” But I don’t remember any of that and I remember the rest of my journey home only vaguely, more like a single moment drawn out and repeated over and over, so that in the end the whole long desperate sprint now seems timeless: a few seconds or half an hour during which my feet keep pounding against the hard August ground and I keep tripping and falling and picking myself up, my heart thrashing in my neck, my voice whimpering like that of some frightened child trailing at my heels.
All that way I doubt if one coherent thought passed through my head. At the most, I had some sort of inchoate notion that I was trying to find Cliff, though in reality I imagine all I was trying to do was put distance between me and what I had seen in the car, that
thing
which I knew to be Kate but could not accept, not then anyway.
So I ran on, across Jurgen’s farm and Detweiler’s and Regan’s, until I reached our own land. My side ached and I was sobbing for breath as well as for myself, and I remember hearing the word
no!
moaned over and over as I stumbled on, walking occasionally, tripping still over roots and branches not visible in the quarter-moon light. I came to the pond and ran past it, unable even to glance at that place where Kate and I had loved. Slowing to a walk again, I became aware of a dog barking somewhere in the darkness, growing louder as I kept on. Then, reaching the corner of the barn, I saw Junior’s mutt Jocko standing near the open doorway. He came whimpering to me, then immediately ran back to the doorway to bark again, but with a greater boldness now. And for the first time since I saw our car down in the ravine, something like thought took place in me—but it was a thought that sucked the air from my lungs and jellied my knees.
One step at a time, I forced myself on into the barn, into the stillness of that vast dark vault lit here and there by the polelight outside: shafts and planes of light slanting like lasers through the windows and cracks. And there in the center of the vault, at the edge of the opening to the mow, I saw Cliff hanging at the end of a rope, not turning at all, just hanging there in the roaring silence. I don’t believe I even cried out when I saw him. All I remember is going into the equipment room and getting a scythe and cutting him down. And then I must have picked him up and carried him over to some hay bales and sat down with him in my lap, as if he were a sleeping child, for that was how they found the two of us at dawn, when the police and volunteer searchers came crowding through the barn doorway like awed and excited children. I learned later that they had to pry my arms from around him.
My parents were not notified of the accident until four in the morning, after Kate finally had been freed from the wreckage and taken to the hospital, and long after I had found Cliff in the barn. It is a terrible thing to think of them being wakened by the police and told of the accident and then dressing and calling Mrs. Detweiler to come and stay with the children while they went to the hospital with the police—all while their oldest son lay dead in the arms of his brother not two hundred feet away, without their knowing it. For myself, I neither saw nor heard a thing, probably because I was in a state of shock by then, indifferent to such matters as where I was or what I was doing or what I should have been doing.
Jason and Mother were told only that Cliff had wandered away from the scene of the accident and that I was one of those out searching for him. So all their concern at that time was for Kate, as well it should have been, for she was already in a coma when she came out of emergency surgery that morning. Later Mother would learn from a nurse she knew that no one at the hospital had expected Kate to live and that the surgery that prolonged her life—as well as her suffering—had been undertaken only because the surgeon on duty that morning was young and inexperienced. An older man would have recognized that the case was hopeless, the nurse said (which should remind us all not to suffer serious injury near a hospital where such “older” men are regularly on duty).
In any case, Jason and Mother did not learn of Cliff’s suicide and my having found him until seven that morning—almost an hour after Kate had been wheeled out of surgery, with a fractured skull and brain damage and crushed legs and a face that was all but destroyed. How my parents were able to survive successive blows such as those I really don’t know, other than to recognize the fact that human beings have been managing kindred prodigies of suffering and endurance since time began. Yet I still find it phenomenal that they somehow got through those crushing days one by one, week after week, until I was gone and Kate finally had joined Cliff in the ground. Only then, I imagine, did their faces set and their lungs fill, the terrible anxiety finally over and only grief to bear.
If funerals are for the living, then I must have missed something at Cliff’s. Throughout the service, my feelings of sorrow and loss seemed to coalesce under my breastbone into a steady, twisting pain that made me wonder if some monstrous thing were not growing there and about to break through at any moment, as through the shell of an egg. I gulped and swallowed tears and wiped my nose, and still the rivers ran.
I remember the church being filled to the walls and spilling over, with mourners in the basement as well as outside, under the portico and even on the front sidewalk. And I remember Reverend Sunbeam breaking down at one point himself as he insisted to the crowd that his words on this occasion were not the usual polite and proper eulogy, “because Cliff Kendall was purely and simply the very best—the finest—the nicest—and, yes, the most Christian young man” he had ever known. The Reverend asked the crowd if there was “anyone among us, anyone here, with a heart so slow or eyes so blind that they did not love this boy? Love him as a friend or as the son, the grandson, they had always wanted and never had?” At that, a wave of grief swept the crowd, especially among our high school friends, who at that point undoubtedly were beginning to deal with the chilling realization that to bury another youth meant that they themselves were not immortal after all.
Later, getting out of the cars at the cemetery, I wondered if I would even make it up the hill to that distant open grave, with Cliff about to be lowered into it. By I then, I was dizzy with the pain and my legs felt like rope. Yet it had been given to me to hold up my mother, just as it fell to Jason to hold on to Sarah and Junior—a trick, I wondered, to keep the two of us on our feet?
At the graveside, I remember looking up and being surprised at the great throng of mourners (including an entire troop of Boy Scouts) spread out over that same gentle hillside where the stones are now graffiti-covered and a grinning old black man hides behind a tree. The elms were still flourishing then, so almost everyone stood in welcome shade as Sunbeam went through the rest of the ceremony, not once mentioning how Cliff had died. At the end, I held on to Mother while she placed a single white rose upon the casket and then we left, moving slowly down the hill, toward the waiting limousines, we who were condemned to life.
The two weeks I was to remain at home seemed to go on forever. I did only the farm work that had to be done, and spent most of my time in long solitary walks or lying alone in my basement room staring at the plank-and-rafter ceiling as if I hoped to find in its cryptic symmetry some clue as to how I would go on living in this new and empty world. Barbara Polanski and the Regans and other friends called on the phone, but I declined to go out at all, except by myself. Occasionally I would drive into Aurora and find some seedy little bar where I could have a few drinks in solitude, then I would drive slowly back to the farm, always taking the long way home if there was a choice.
Jason as usual kept to the library and Mother busied herself with Junior and Sarah, trying bravely to show them that life would go on just as it always had. But I could see that she had been mortally wounded, that the light was gone from her eyes for good. And she must have sensed a similar thing in me, for we rarely spoke.
On two occasions I went with her and Jason to the hospital. The first time all we saw through the window of the intensive care unit was a patient bandaged like a mummy. There was no way of knowing whether it was Kate we were looking at or some other unfortunate creature. The second time we happened on the scene when the doctor and a nurse were changing the bandages on her face, and what I saw then caused me to run from the window like a child. Somehow I held my vomit until I was outside, crouched and hiding between cars in the parking lot, begging God to let me forget what I had seen.
On the way home, Jason said that he and Mother had spoken with the doctor and that the man still did not know if Kate would ever come out of the coma.
“He said it might be better if she didn’t,” Jason went on. “She might be—well, you know.”
Yes, I knew. A
vegetable
. And at that moment, I think, the change in me began. For the first time since the accident I felt not grief so much as anger, a cold and burgeoning rage at my own repellent impotence and vulnerability. I felt like a dog so used to being kicked that it virtually asks for more abuse just in the way it crawls. And I vowed to myself that this dog was not going to crawl anymore. No, it was going to run.
Even now, sitting here at this cluttered kitchen table a quarter century later, I still don’t know why Cliff did what he did. I know that a number of people had seen him and Kate leave the dance early, abandoning their outraged dates, but I never heard of anyone drawing any inferences from this other than the obvious: that a dutiful brother had come to the aid of his unhappy sister. As far as I know, I am the only one who ever took note of the fact that the crash occurred almost two hours after Cliff and Kate left the dance, which of course could have given rise to all sorts of speculation. In fact I can almost hear the wheels turning in your head right now: Two hours? Alone all that time, parked somewhere? Well, then, of course they did it. Kate must have gotten to my brother just as she did to me, and as a result he was so devoured with shame and guilt that he crashed the car in an unsuccessful murder-suicide attempt, after which, thinking his sister dead, he limped home to finish the job by hanging himself.
It is a plausible scenario, I will grant you. It
is
conceivable that Kate could have caught Cliff off-guard, breaking down with tears and anguish defenses she never could have breached any other way. I will admit that he was vulnerable. For one thing, Cliff had always had a somewhat unbrotherly attitude toward Kate, a sensitivity to her moods and a concern for her welfare that would have been better placed in an uxorious young husband. Her eccentricities in high school had always caused him inexplicable pain and worry, just as her recent ephemeral rejuvenation as a shiny young deb elated him unreasonably. So, admittedly, there was that predisposition in him, that
weakness
, if you will. There was also the fact that they had begun double-dating with Sally and Arthur that summer, coming home alone together night after night in our car, probably growing closer all the time. And I don’t doubt that Cliff found himself glancing over at her more than once as she lounged back in the green glow of the Packard’s dash, or that Kate may have used those occasions to unsettle her too-saintly older brother, mischievously touching nerves in his psyche that he had not even known existed. It certainly does not beggar belief to speculate that Cliff may suddenly have found himself comparing his Sally to Kate, to the former’s disadvantage. In any case, it was during this time that his attitude changed so radically, as he slipped into the relentless depression of his last few weeks. And then too there is the simple fact of his being male, the unappealing statistic that almost all persons prosecuted for incest are male, suggesting that it is only the innate probity and coolness of the female that keeps the act within bounds and that when such an inhibiting factor is missing or indeed is turned upside down by someone like Kate, then the father or brother simply doesn’t have much of a chance, his sex drive being what it is.