Circle View (17 page)

Janey called back the next day to tell me that the kid from Pete's youth group had lapsed into a coma.

“I don't understand why this is taking so long,” I said, thinking of the Wednesday night jazz show on WAMR.

“The doctors are doing what they can,” she said, and I didn't correct her misunderstanding. Outside, I again went up three steps of the ladder, felt a twinge of dizziness and climbed back down. That night I stood in the driveway wearing my overcoat and hat, watching the stars, trying to remember which of those winking lights are actually satellites in geostationary orbit. I craned my neck and blew white breath at the sky. Minus my hearing aids, I discovered the true sound of night: not crickets chirping or trains rolling past in the distance or anything the poets will give you, but silence, a noiselessness deep as all space.

On Thursday, Janey stopped by to take me out for the day. Pete was at the hospital, talking with the fifteen-year-old, who was slowly finding his way out of the coma. Janey kept herself busy in my presence, fixing sandwiches and tea, wiping the counter, insisting that I eat mustard instead of mayonnaise.

“What would you like to do today, Dad?” she asked, mixing artificial sugar into the iced tea. The new contact lenses she wore made her eyes unnaturally green. I noticed tiny wrinkles around her mouth.

“I'd like to put my antenna back up.”

She stopped stirring, and her face darkened. “It's raining today, Dad. And you don't belong on the roof.”

“It's my house.”

“That boy who works on the lawn, why don't you ask him?” Unconsciously, she rubbed at her stomach.

“He wouldn't know what to do. He'd get it wrong. And I'm asking you.”

“We'll get it
fixed
, Dad, but can we not talk about this just now? Let's go have fun.”

“You shouldn't feel you have to do that.”

“Do what?”

“Insist that we have fun all the time.”

She looked at me. “It's probably better if we just don't talk at all.”

After lunch, Janey made the decision to drive us to the Armory, where the Ladies' Auxiliary was sponsoring a show,
Christmas Trees of the World
. After we parked, I walked beside her, glancing sideways to notice if she
was
showing yet, if the curve of her stomach was visible through her sweater. Inside, the smell of pine sap mixed with the smell of candle wax and Russian tea.

“So many trees,” I said in a whisper, careful in a crowd to avoid the loud speech deaf men are given to.

The trees were decorated with native crafts from their countries of origin: tinwork angels and trumpets from Germany, paper lanterns from China, crystal snowflakes from Ireland, Appalachian corn-husk dolls and beeswax candles representing the United States. People pointed, sniffed the trees, snapped pictures of one another with the trees as backdrop. As we circled the room, Janey smiled and made comments I couldn't hear against the drone of noise.

Most impressive was the tree from Japan, each green-needled branch decorated with a small, white, origami swan, folded from paper that seemed fragile as moth wings. Tiny feats of engineering. Next to us, a Japanese man knelt beside his wife, at the height of his young girl. She wore red barrettes in her dark hair; she was fat, and her black eyes squeezed shut when she smiled. The man gestured toward the tree, talking and laughing, and soon had his girl spinning circles, giggling. Though I couldn't hear, I knew him to be inventing some tale concerning the swan tree, and I felt a sudden stab at never having told such stories to Janey. It seemed in that moment the very business of fathers. I thought of the things I used to show Janey on our Saturday drives—sloping long-wire antennas, planned sites for new office buildings, radio towers I had helped design. Eventually, Agnes would say, “Janey's tired, we should start home.”

As I watched, the Japanese man pulled a dollar bill from his wallet, folded a perfect replica of the swans and clipped it to the girl's barrette, which set her off like a wind-up toy, laughing again. I imagined the family at home, assembling their own swan tree. I remembered the aluminum tree we had every year—silver foil reflecting a revolving colored light.

“We should've had a nicer tree,” I said to Janey. She stood smiling, watching the little girl, thinking, I knew, of her own baby.

“Did you say something, Dad?” she said.

I shook my head.

“No,” I told her. “Nothing.”

Last Friday, when I did not hear from Janey, I decided to fix the antenna myself. I carried my wooden tool box balanced on my shoulder. As I climbed the rungs my calves quivered and I had to close my eyes against a slight dizzying. Old age, I thought, is nothing more than an unwitting betrayal of the self. At the top I swung the tool box down against the gutter, braced my hand on the sun-warmed shingles and stepped across to the roof, crouching low to keep from falling backward. Gusts of wind stung my eyes, flattened my trousers against my legs. The asphalt shingles crunched under my shoes as I stepped to the yagi-uda. Several of its elements, the tines, were bent. I straightened them, lifted the antenna back into its brace, then reconnected the receiver wire, which had broken loose. My legs began to feel sturdier on the roof, despite a small ache in my shoulders.

I pulled picture-frame wire and screw-eyes from the tool box to anchor the antenna, which still shook in the wind. When it was fastened down I shook the antenna myself to test its sturdiness, and plucked the new guy wires like banjo strings. It held.

From that vista, I could see to the south the edge of Spa Creek and the tips of sailboat masts. To the east rose the steeple of the Episcopalian church and the white dome of the State House downtown. Two boys kicked a red ball down my street and disappeared around the corner. My antenna, I noticed, is the only one of all the rooftops in the neighborhood; everyone else has cable now, the signals sneaking into their houses from underground, the gray and black of their empty roofs scattered about like playing cards. The cover of clouds overhead made a white cotton batting. The whole, noiseless world stretched empty beneath me—no one raking leaves, walking dogs, jogging.

I walked the pitched slope toward the front of the house to retrieve the stuffed owl from the gutter. The owl threatened to come apart in my hands, the feathers water-ruined and pulling out in clumps, the dacron stuffing squeezing through seams. It smelled of rot. I fingered one of the glass eyes and it popped out, bouncing into the rain gutter. I stood at the edge of the roof, figuring how to wire the owl back together, when a flash of white on the sidewalk caught my attention. The eave of the house obstructed my sight and I leaned out to see. Mindy, Kate Warner's young girl, skipped rope in front of my house, her pink face blowing clouds of breath. She wore a hooded jacket, dull white fuzz circling the hood and cuffs, her shoes shiny in the gray light. As she twirled and hopped the length of rope, her brown bangs jumped beneath the jacket hood and her mouth moved with what I guessed to be the words to some children's jump-rope song. As I walked up to gain a better view, the scuff of my shoes on the shingles made me remember myself as Santa Claus, on the roof, making a racket. Looking at Mindy, I realized that of all those times I had played the part of Santa, I never once saw Janey's face, never witnessed what gladness my heavy steps must have produced in her.

“Hey, you—miss,” I said. Mindy stopped and looked around, the rope coiled in a dead loop against the walk.

“Up here,” I said, “Mr. Hopkins.” Her eyes found me.

“I want to show you something. Stay there and don't move.”

I walked to the peak of the roof and stood beside the antenna. “I perfected this array,” I told her. “It's called a yagiuda.” She looked at me.

“My life's work,” I said. Her face gathered in confusion. She tilted her head back and the hood fell away from her dark hair, revealing a red bow and a ponytail. I thought of the Japanese girl at the Christmas tree show.

“Listen,” I started over, “how would you like to see this thing full of seagulls?” I patted the yagi-uda. “Picture a big metal tree filled with white birds.” For effect, I flapped my arms, slapping them against my sides.

She nodded and laughed, and it seemed so easy, this small joke. I gave the rotten owl a final squeeze and tossed it into the backyard, by the trash bin. When I turned to the front, Mindy had gone back to her jump rope and rhymes. A gust kicked up and I grabbed onto the yagiuda. The antenna vibrated with the wind, and for a moment I imagined her skip-rope chant being transmitted to me, carried along invisible waves into the tines of the humming antenna, through the bones of my hand, along my arm, and throughout me. Such waves travel in skips and modulations, in swells of resonance. Basic stuff, I thought, first year engineering school. With this thought in my head I lifted a hand to Mindy, turned, and started back down the ladder, that long, shaky climb toward ground.

M
OST often now, I think of what happened that Saturday only because late at night, when we are in bed talking, my wife will ask me to tell her the story. Twenty years have slipped past since that cold February day in North Carolina, when my grandfather and I had started out to split more oak for the woodstove. My mother stood at the sink cleaning fish I had caught beneath the ice that morning. As a younger boy I had loved to watch her do this job, the way her apron would shine with scales, and how she would twirl around on the linoleum floor and ask if I liked her fancy ball gown. But now I was older and felt embarrassed when she did it.

“Careful, Daddy,” she called after us. “Remember your blood pressure.”

My grandfather clicked his tongue. “Foolish woman,” he said, pulling on his stiffened work gloves. I followed him out to the barn where he lifted the axe from the wall, and the two of us tromped out into the yard. The ground lay quilted with a crunchy snow, and I could smell suet we had hung out for the finches.

“Now, look here, boy,” my grandfather said. “There is no such thing as what the common man calls accident. You might remember how that child murderer, Saul, on his journey to Damascus, was struck blind and fell prostrate in the road. Now, that was no accident, but was the working of the Lord. Saul was made blind that he might see.”

A white breath, like steam, blew out of his mouth. He grabbed the head of the axe, held it at arm's length, and turned full circle, like the weather vane on top of the bam.

“Always keep such a circle,” he said, “that way there'll be no mishap.”

He steadied a log and spit into his gloves. On the first swing the axe rang a glancing blow off the side of the log and bit cleanly into the middle of his instep and halfway through his foot. I remember it looked so much like a Saturday morning cartoon that I almost started laughing. My grandfather sucked air through his teeth and his face turned white as the patches of snow on the ground. A coppery red pool darkened the snow beneath his foot.

“It's bad, son,” he said. “Run in and tell your mother to call the hospital.”

A strange quiet enclosed us while we waited for the ambulance to arrive. I remember my mother leaning at the porch railing, looking down the street, the knife still gripped in her hand. The paramedics arrived and began attending to my grandfather's foot while I explored the blinking, squawking machinery in the back of the ambulance. My hands were shaking, but more from excitement than fear. I was fourteen then, and such a gory accident seemed exhilarating. Finally, the ambulance drove off howling with my grandfather inside. My mother and Aunt Cleo piled into the Dodge to follow.

“Daryll, now you watch out for yourself while we're gone,” my mother called through the car window. “Watch that fire in the stove. Answer the phone for us. You're old enough to take care of everything.” Her face was red from crying and it made me want to take care of things, to take care of her. At that point in my life, I felt I could.

It was two weeks before my grandfather came home from the hospital. That evening, in the middle of watching “Jeopardy,” he removed the sock and bandage so I could see where the doctors had amputated. His foot looked like a knot on the end of a tree branch. The skin around the wound had browned and withered, like the skin of the mummy we'd seen on our field trip to the Natural Museum.

“I spent six months in a foxhole during the war,” he said.

“Never had so much as a nosebleed. And here I disable myself just trying to keep the house warm.”

Later that night, against doctor's orders, he limped out to the barn to begin what he called his new project. After two hours, he had not returned, and my mother sent me to look for him. I found him at the workbench with his shoe clamped in the vise, a hacksaw in his hand. He cut through the leather so the toe of his shoe fell into the dirt. Then he showed me a small box he'd fashioned from sheet metal, its sides neatly folded and soldered along the seams. He held it in his hand like a cup. On the closed end of the box, several layers of tin had been stacked up and riveted together. He placed the metal cup where the toe of the shoe had been. A perfect fit.

“Look at that. Better than any you might buy,” he said.

“The Lord guided my hand.” I nodded, though thinking that the Lord probably had no particular interest in semiskilled labor.

He riveted the metal to the leather and slid the shoe over his bandaged foot. He stamped his foot twice on the floor and kicked the lawn mower.

“If only the rest of me felt this good,” he said. His voice sounded heavy. I looked up at him and he nearly smiled.

After that, things settled down for a while. My grandfather clomped around the house in his new shoe and even picked up his trumpet again. We heard him at night when we were downstairs watching television. He would be up in his room playing “A Mighty Fortress Is Our God” and the opening notes of “Nearer My God To Thee.” Every evening after supper he walked out into the yard with his red, white, and blue basketball to take his customary two hundred foul shots, a practice he followed with his typical religiousness. He stood on a patch of worn-down lawn and threw the ball at an old plastic laundry basket nailed to a tree, the bottom cut out of the basket. He'd never played basketball and took his nightly dose of foul shooting as he took his morning dose of cod liver oil and brewer's yeast—it was tonic, approved by his doctor. One evening, I kept a tally (which he never would), and watched him sink one hundred and ninety-five out of his two hundred shots. I told him about it, and he shrugged.