Castle: A Novel (24 page)

I began to feel as though I had chosen the wrong place to live, and that I should leave and go somewhere else. And one day, many months after my discharge, I closed out my bank account, and loaded everything I owned—it was not much—into my car, and drove east until at last I arrived in Gerrysburg, and bought the land upon which the house and the rock and the castle stood. I suppose that, in the end, this was something that I needed to do.

With painful effort, I managed to stand and raise my arm up to my own waiting hand. I braced my feet against the pit wall and began, slowly, to scale it; my other self leaned back, counterbalancing himself against my weight. My broken ribs rang with pain, but I would not stop until I had reached the top. When I had nearly made it, a second hand appeared to pull me the rest of the way, and I grabbed it. At last I was up and out, and I released my grip, and as I collapsed to the forest floor I was surprised to discover that my other self was nowhere to be seen.

I must have passed out, for when I opened my eyes, the sun had moved, and the light was golden, and the air warmer. I got to my feet and began to walk, and the sounds of the forest were the same as those of the night before, except that now they did not terrify me; rather, they recalled the sounds I would hear in the gentler days of my early childhood, before I was sent to Doctor Stiles, when my mother was still able, from time to time, to find happiness, and I would walk to the end of Jefferson Street to the swamp and explore the woods in solitude, content with myself and my mind and my senses, and know that I could come home to a warm meal, and a warm bed, and my mother’s loving arms.

I don’t know how long I wandered, but I do know that when I emerged from the forest I was terribly hungry and tired, and it was morning again, though which morning I don’t know. The bright sun was high over the house, which looked the worse for wear, as if a long time had passed since I renovated, or perhaps as if I had never renovated at all. But the unmown grass smelled wonderful, and I settled myself down into it, and lay on my back and let the dew soak into my clothes, and I closed my eyes and felt the sun on my face, and fell into blissful sleep.

TWENTY-ONE

When I woke, it was once again to bright light, this time from a window, divided into strips by open vertical blinds. Beside the window stood a woman in white, who smiled at me, and came to where I lay on a crisply sheeted bed. I felt her hand on my forehead, it was very heavy, and I felt myself drifting back into sleep.

I woke again. This time it was evening, the blinds were shut, and a different woman sat beside my bed, reading a paperback book under the light of a table lamp. The woman was my sister. She turned to me, and her face registered surprise. She lay the book face down on the table, beside the lamp.

“You’re awake,” she said, her rough voice light, cheerful. She was smiling and she smelled of cigarettes.

I tried to ask where I was, but all that came out of my throat was a croak. I became aware of my body: I hurt, everywhere. I felt simultaneously heavy and insubstantial, like a rusted thing, a length of wire. I coughed, and the cough loosed some horrible pain, beginning in my abdomen and radiating out through the rest of my body. I groaned. A tube was taped to my arm and entered the flesh through a needle; my chest was heavily bound and bandaged.

“You’re in the hospital,” she said. “I found you in your yard, at the edge of the woods.” Her gaze hardened into a look, perhaps of concern, perhaps of curiosity. She leaned forward. “They said your rib punctured your lung, Eric. You would have bled to death!”

I let my head roll back and I stared at the ceiling. It was white and cracked and very far away. “Thank you,” I whispered.

“Eric,”
she said now, leaning closer still. “What were you
doing
”

I shook my head.

She asked, with a tremor in her voice, “Was he
there?
”

My sister and I gazed at one another, both of us weary, both of us older than we had ever been. She reached out, slid her hand underneath my sheets, and found my fingers. They were cold—I hadn’t noticed how cold until her warm hand wrapped itself around them. I needed to go back to sleep. But I answered her with a nod, and closed my eyes.

When I opened them again, she was gone. I lay still, saying nothing, trying to put together the pieces of my past few months. I saw the pieces as though they were blocks of algae on the surface of a still pond. And I was wading into the pond, trying to lift up each piece and put it with the others. But the algae just broke up in my hands, and my movement made waves in the pond, and the pieces floated away. And then I was one of the pieces, and it was my body that was breaking up and floating away, and when I opened my eyes again it was night.

Then it was day again, and my sister was there, in different clothes, and her hair was washed and still wet and tied back in a ponytail. There was someone with her, a man I’d never seen, heavyset, with a big gray beard, and he looked at me with something like sympathy. Then I was alone, and it was night, and there was a nurse holding my wrist. And I said, “What time is it?” and she told me to go back to sleep.

Then there was a time when I was fully awake, and I wanted to get up. It was daytime, and rain shook the window. Gently, slowly, I raised my head. I was starving, and my mouth was dry. I found the call button and pressed it and a nurse came, and soon I was eating again, and sitting up straight, and felt the life coming back into me. Within a few days I was walking and breathing without great effort, and a few days after that I was discharged.

Jill came for me in her pickup, with Hank at her side. He was the bearded man I had seen. He was gentle, somewhat shy, but he shook my hand firmly and said he was glad to meet me. He seemed sympathetic—whether to my convalescence or to something my sister had told him, I didn’t know. In any event, I appreciated the welcoming kindness of a stranger, and made a mental note to reward him, sometime in the future, with an overture of friendship. I was surprised and somewhat embarrassed to discover how deeply I had misjudged my sister. Whatever I might have held against her, she had helped me when I needed her help, and appeared, in the end, to have made a good life for herself. We drove to my house in silence.

“I took your car out for a spin,” Hank said, as he helped me from the back seat of the pickup. His hand was large and rough in mine, and guided me with easy, sure movements onto the surface of the lot. “It’s not good to leave it sit for too long.”

“That’s very kind of you,” I said, shaking his hand.

“Little Brother,” my sister cried, throwing her arms around my neck, “I’m glad you’re all right.”

“Me too,” I mumbled, unaccustomed to this kind of demonstrative behavior. I patted her back awkwardly before she let me go.

“We’ll be up tomorrow to check on you,” she said. “Be careful, okay? Don’t overexert yourself.”

“No, of course not.”

“Just relax and heal up. Call us if you need anything. We got you some groceries, they’re in the fridge.”

I didn’t know what to say. “Thank you” was all I could manage.

“When you’re ready, I’ll come over and we’ll talk all this through,” she went on. “We’ll figure it all out together, all right?”

And though I wasn’t entirely sure what she meant, I said, “Yes. That would be good.”

We said our goodbyes, and Jill and Hank got into the pickup and disappeared over the crest of the hill. It was late afternoon; the weather had turned warm. The sun was on my face, and in the windows of the house. I took a deep breath, the first one I’d taken in weeks, and then I went inside.

Nothing had changed, aside from the accumulation, upon the floorboards and furniture, of a thin layer of pollen from the trees outside. I picked up my meager mail—a bank statement, an advertising circular from the hardware store, a power bill—and carried it into the kitchen, where I dropped it onto the table beside the still-unopened official letter I had received some weeks before. I set a pot of coffee on to brew, and as it did so, I wiped down the counters, opened the refrigerator and examined the food and drink my sister had bought, and parted the kitchen window curtains. After a moment, I opened the window itself. Fresh air and light were now pouring into the room.

The coffee maker burbling behind me, I sat down at the table and opened the mail. My bank account appeared to be in fine shape; I set the statement aside. The hardware store, in preparation for summer, had patio furniture and charcoal grills on sale—perhaps someday I would build a patio outside the house, and put a grill on it, and enjoy the brief upstate summers in comfort and style. My power bill was low, owing to my absence from the house; I took out my checkbook, wrote out a check for the full amount, and sealed it up in the envelope provided.

All that was left was the official-looking letter. My name and address were printed in the center, and the upper-left-hand corner bore a familiar seal. I turned the letter over in my hands, slipped my finger under the flap, and considered, for a moment, opening it. Instead I stood up and tucked it in beside Jill’s greeting card, underneath the magnet on the fridge. Then I went outside to attach my power bill payment to the mailbox.

Once I was back inside, I climbed, with some effort, the stairs, and reached into the back of my closet for my old green duffel. I packed it, then brought it down and set it beside the front door.

With that accomplished, I poured myself a mug of fresh coffee and carried it out to the porch to meet the day.

Two weeks later, I was working in the yard, planting an apple tree. It seemed a good, simple, American thing to do. Jill had been by an hour before, had seen the tree in the yard, its root ball wrapped in burlap, and informed me that I needed another, if I wanted any apples to grow. She told me the trees had to be pollinated by bees, and that one alone wouldn’t do.

I hadn’t known this. Indeed, there was a lot I didn’t know about civilian life, that someday I would have to learn, if I wanted to live the way ordinary Americans did. This had been a prominent theme in my thoughts during the weeks since my discharge from the hospital—was this what I wanted, a normal American life? The kind of life that I had spent my career ostensibly fighting to protect?

The truth was, I didn’t know if this was something I should want, or could achieve. For all my talents and accomplishments, I understood now that my experience was actually quite narrow—I remained unfamiliar with the customs and obligations of ordinary society. I was, in the end, a misfit—and should I want to assimilate myself to the world, I would have to undertake it as I would any project. I would gather intelligence, I would build a structure: something I could live in, something that would make me feel safe.

But these were thoughts for the future. This day had other plans for me.

I heard gravel crunch on the drive, and I looked up from my work, expecting to find Jill’s familiar pickup. The vehicle I saw, however, was the twin of my own—a dark SUV, this one with deeply tinted windows and military plates. A driver was visible, outlined behind the windshield, and I raised a hand in greeting. He did not get out. Instead, he simply nodded. I nodded back, and laid my shovel on the ground. The planting was finished—the tree stood straight and true in the June sun.

Perhaps Jill could come and plant another, so that next spring, there would be fruit. In any event, I would probably not be here to enjoy it.

It is hard to convey the depth of relief I felt at this moment. For, although my experiences in Iraq would doubtless haunt me for many years to come, the army itself remained the same institution that had sustained me for more than twenty years, and once valued me for the skills I had worked so hard to perfect. There in the sunny yard, I began to experience a profound and uncharacteristic upwelling of emotion, akin to that one might feel if a former lover, still longed for, came to her senses and returned in tears to beg forgiveness.

I thought, with some regret, of the conversations Jill and I might have had, catching one another up on our lives. Now all that would have to wait. Everything would have to wait, except for the war, which continued in defiance of everyone’s expectations.

I removed my gardening gloves and tossed them onto the ground beside the shovel before turning, going back indoors, and picking up my duffel bag. I took a last look around the house, pleased at the work I had done, pleased at everything I had learned since my return to Gerrysburg.

Then I stepped outside, pulled the door shut behind me, and set off on my mission.

NOTE

My thanks to Rhian Ellis, Bob Turgeon, Brian Hall, Jim Rutman, Ethan Nosowsky. The children’s book Loesch reads is
The Nine Questions,
by Edward Fenton. Logistics Support Area Anaconda is a real American military base near Balad, Iraq, but Camp Alastor and its inhabitants are my invention.

J. ROBERT LENNON
is the author of five previous novels, including
Mailman
and
The Light of Falling Stars,
and the story collection
Pieces for the Left Hand:
100
Anecdotes.
His stories have appeared in the
Paris Review, Granta, Harper’s, Playboy,
and the
New Yorker.
He lives in Ithaca, New York, with his wife and two sons, and teaches writing at Cornell University.