Driving on the Rim (30 page)

The real reason for my coming to the cemetery dawned on me but slowly. It was only when I had finished the job and should have been loading the hand mower into the trunk of my car that it began to surface. I pushed it back and forth while I thought, enjoying the whir of its oiled blades and the subtle knock of its ball bearings. In the end, I left it right where it was, while I sought the grave of the man I had urged to oblivion. I might have remembered where it was since I had attended his funeral, but there had been a surprising number of mourners and I remembered only the outpouring of grief for someone I saw as not worth mourning. I must have simply been drawn to the gathering without reference to where it was taking place. Of course, my unique role in the proceedings, known only to me, must have focused my thoughts in such a way as to obscure awareness of my physical surroundings. This was a working cemetery, hardly one of the antique jobs so old they spared the onlooker any of humanity’s burdens. I had to go from grave to grave until something rang a bell. I keenly looked forward to being inspired on such a beautiful fall day. I left my father’s well-cared-for lawn mower right where it was and set out.

In taking exceedingly good care of my parents’ graves, I had begun to expand my territory. I don’t think I realized what I was up to as I made my way from burial site to burial site. Everyone, myself included, looked for headstones with a relationship to some war. They were so plentiful! I found a little nest of them for WWI members of the Balloon Corps. What exactly were the “Woodmen of the World”? Civil War veterans who had served in Michigan or Ohio companies, landed here. Even some Confederate soldiers. I noticed that the urge to place flowers is not
terribly long-lasting and that the preponderance of stone and grass with no further commentary in the form of posies, messages, or whiskey bottles suggested that the facts were eventually faced. The immigrant names like Stefan, Wolfgang, Ulrica, Sven, and so forth faded with the newer interments. Even Esther and Gladys weren’t quite making it anymore. On the other hand, it was a fine place to be a tree. I should have recognized what I or my subconscious was up to when I came upon Tessa’s headstone, which I seemed to know a lot about, i.e., Georgia Gray granite polished on one side—no urn, vase, cross, wing, book, diamond, or favorite pet—just name and date. But a weird shape. I should have known all this because I bought the fucking thing! Good God, I must have suffered some sort of blackout. The salesman talked me into an ogee. I was feeling like a cheapskate after fending off Botticelli’s Venus, the Greek Winged Victory, Christ the Redeemer, an unbelievably ghastly Pietà, and various other high-dollar giant knickknacks; so I succumbed to the ogee. I didn’t want an ogee; I wanted a rectangle, but I was weak from the whole experience and ended up with an ogee. For a moment I was furious, seeing that ogee. Of course I was, egged on by sadness, remorse, guilt, and the recurrent surprise that you can’t turn back the clock.

It was a sunny day with a light breeze from the southwest, beautiful clouds, a rustle of leaves, the smell of newly mown grass and even of the flowers surrounding a grave or two. I liked seeing people walk so slowly. It seemed to have a balletic quality, just a few people moving quietly through the trees like deer. I found that I enjoyed coming here, and having more than the graves of my own dead to visit seemed to enrich the experience. With my garden shears, I was able to nip away some of the stray weeds around the base of Tessa’s stone, tidy it up a bit.

At St.-Lô, Hagenau, and the fights at the Saar Bridge, I gathered, my father had staved off battle fatigue with alcohol. Drinking water was not always in reliable supply, and so various forms of “stupor juice” and “Kickapoo joy juice” were kept on hand by tankers from captured stores, but eventually all went back on water, the liquid courage draining from their systems, and there were breakdowns. My father was among those whom medics tried to restore with Blue 88s, high-dose amobarbital
tablets; the idea was the pills would return you to combat, but when he came to, he walked out of the war. He told me that with large armies of young men all rushing to the same massacre, it was surprising how quiet the countryside was after you’d traveled a couple of days. He remembered when he started seeing the clouds again as an extraordinary epiphany. Once he was gone I sometimes felt I was seeing clouds again through my father’s eyes.

Jocelyn had fallen out of the sky into my life, literally. Fortunately, I’d made enough visits to her bedside, sparking sufficient electricity that when she returned to home base in Snyder, Texas, to learn that nothing awaited her at the spray plane base and reluctant to return south and fly sun lotion banners over bathing beaches, she called me on the phone, and I her.

“Do you remember me?” she asked.

“I do. How’s the eye? The knee?”

“They’re fine. I thought I’d hear from you by now.”

“You did?”

“I sure did.”

I had certainly had Jocelyn on my mind, but reason had kept me from pursuing it. I thought that our encounter was too insubstantial for me to pursue anything beyond state lines. Certainly, I remembered feeling something when in Jocelyn’s hospital room, even imagining that it was reciprocated—all dismissed. By me but not, evidently, by Jocelyn. How exciting!

I told her I was pleased to have her call me, and we arranged to meet for dinner. I was distracted during my few appointments by my anticipation of the evening. Enough so that I spent some time wondering what I could possibly be expecting and even feeling some alarm at my own enthusiasm as some new form of instability. I suppose I had a glimpse of the advantages of my complacency and feared anything I couldn’t predict. As soon as I had made a dinner reservation, I found myself daydreaming about exotic travel—that is, escape. It was pathetic. How about the honeymoon, you damn fool? All this while palpating a half-naked fat man on my table, trying to find his liver behind two feet of blubber. I must have gotten a bit avid in my exam, imagining myself flying
into the Seychelles with Jocelyn, because Tubby let out a cry, “Go easy, for Christ’s sake.” I should have been more careful, as the corpulent figure I was examining was Throckmorton, my lawyer. Throckmorton had been my patient for a long time and had frequently shown up for sometimes frivolous examinations. Each of them an ongoing search for an enlarged liver.

There were several reasons the community or its minions thought me guilty of negligence or even manslaughter. The first proposed was that I was reckless, which I gather faded in the face of tepid protest from my colleagues to the effect that I was a good and circumspect physician. A couple of things had come out in the paper exciting the credulous that it was murder; but after that, calmer heads prevailed, supported by the hearsay of several homeless people who attested to Tessa’s wish to end her life. Nonetheless, I was charged with assisting in her suicide and planting the knife to avert prosecution. What I was offered was the chance to reduce deliberate homicide to negligent homicide, unless we could dismiss the case.

Overnight I became a hero of the local Hemlock Society and its right-to-die sympathizers. One old woman called and said that if I beat the rap, she’d like to have me euthanize her. There were demonstrations of support around town, increasing my joyless ambivalence, yet another out-of-body spell as I felt that by my silence I was misleading these well-meaning people, some of whom already faced terminal illnesses. Maybe this was where I first thought up my nolo contendere posture, which my lawyer translated as throwing myself under the bus.

“Over my dead body you’re pleading no contest,” said Attorney Throckmorton in a most inapposite turn of phrase. Throckmorton beyond being a victim of chronic obesity also suffered from a belligerent crew cut and the loudest sport jackets since the death of Liberace. He was a controversial lawyer who traveled his bailiwick in a garnet-red Audi A8 über-sedan with fitted leather seats holding coolers of fancy food. Some of our conferences took place in this car, and I accepted these arrangements because he had taken my case “out of the goodness of my heart.” Nevertheless, as we tooled down the interstate at or around 100 mph, his eye on the state-of-the-art radar detector, a hunk of cheddar and a stout length of boudin sausage carelessly wrapped in pita
bread and clamped in one hand, I felt it might be better to pay Throckmorton for his hours rather than endure these death-defying sagas in a fog of food smells on the American highway. As this went on over days, I found myself—while for example parked in front of his burly mistress’s condo listening to the radio in the big German car—poking through the delicacies and finding various items that appealed to a finicky appetite now allied with the real need for escape: smoked oysters, emperor figs, potted meats, pâtés, duck liver in oil, and commoner things: Pop-Tarts, Hostess Twinkies, and so on. It was always the same fight: my refusal to plead not guilty. But Throckmorton didn’t really know the whole story, and he never would. Nor would he realize the profound feeling of one’s relationship to one’s community that can be learned by declining to claim innocence. I’m not a masochist, but from the earliest days of growing up in a crazy family I have wanted to throw myself upon this town to see what they would do with me.

When Throckmorton lumbered off the examining table, he said, “If changing my habits would add a decade to my life, I wouldn’t consider it. I don’t think people like you, looking from on high, quite realize how much I enjoy my life. Every time I pass inspection as I have done today I feel the gods have approved my habit of living. Tonight, when you put your head on the pillow or on some fair maiden’s bosom, say this to yourself: ‘
Not guilty.
’ ”

M
Y RECENT CONSCIENTIOUSNESS
about tending my parents’ graves had proven to be a consolation, as though I were tucking them in. When I saw others at the cemetery I began to theorize that this was a universal feeling—those people with pruning shears and watering cans had become serenely familiar. From time to time, one or another of us would simply sit down next to a headstone and weep with cleansing ordinariness, before getting briskly back to work, tidying up, trimming, tending. I did so a couple of times, until it finally became part of my no-contest attitude:
The Floater
, coming to a theater near you. I became increasingly aware of the landscape of a small-town cemetery with its trees and weather and purposeful visitors. As I had seen others do, the time came for me to move out of the vicinity of my own graves and see what was what. Hands plunged in pockets, an amiable and bemused expression on my face, the well-executed passing nods—all plausibly put the lie to the mission I was so slow to admit: I was looking for the grave of Cody Worrell.

At the time of the funeral I was so comfortable with my part in things that I’d attended as a kind of tourist, just curious. I did remember that it was a nice day and I enjoyed that. I had always been remarkably sensitive to and moved by weather. I remembered the zephyrs that fluttered the cottonwood leaves so attractively and the little cavalcade of ill-dressed people with their prematurely old faces. That carelessness, my almost aerial contentment, things having turned out as I supposed they should, I now saw as one of the lagging indicators of my prolonged adolescence. Whatever comfort I’d enjoyed, whatever pleasure I’d taken in the day, was now gone. I began to feel tormented by my part in Cody’s death
almost immediately after the funeral. And the thought remained: something was wrong with me. My indignation about the abuse of his young wife, my irresistible incentive, seemed to fade; I tried to revive it, but it returned as simple sadness, insufficient incentive for what I had done. I even caught myself angry at her for having been so hapless. I thought I had better put an end to this line of thinking before I started blaming her to get myself off the hook. No matter how I went at it, the issue would remain twisted inside me until I did something about it. That last moment of innocence in Cody’s face … unbearable.

I found his grave quite easily and, I suppose, from memory—on the expanding edge of the cemetery where the trees were smaller and the direct sun starker. From here, too, the houses of the living were more eminent and unaccountably intrusive. I sensed the distinct peacefulness of the old cemetery lost in this funereal sprawl. In any case, there they were, another surprise: the two graves. I had not recalled that the young couple had been buried side by side forever. Perhaps it was because I came to their funeral only out of morbid interest as to whether or not anyone missed him, and the peculiar pleasure of attending incognito when I was the reason all the rest of them were there. But here they were, the young couple, side by side. It wouldn’t be long before their brutal history would be subsumed in forgetfulness. She might reappear as the shy bride or he on his first bicycle. I would have to go on wondering what had impelled her repeated availing of herself to his rages. Then or now, I didn’t care what had inflamed him. His abuse was sufficiently prolonged to accord him opportunity for change, but he never missed a step.

For my part, this review of the facts was just whistling in the dark. I had, as was said, taken the law into my own hands. My father, when describing the pleasure he took in shooting Germans, said that we came from a long line of people who shot first and asked questions later. But I knew perfectly well that he had arrived at this only when seeing friends fall had made his accustomed humanity vanish in anger. I recall him admitting his surprise at how easily charity could slip away. He had thought it was a bit more enduring. Apparently that surprised all those soldiers, especially infantrymen. They had initially admired the Wehrmacht for its efficiency, but as their friends were mowed down their
hatred grew in detail. My father recalled the first time he tipped up the head of a dead German soldier for the purpose of guessing his age. He remembered thinking “somewhere around fourteen,” which disturbed him anew, undermined his anger. At the time of that recollection, I was helping him repair our unreliable furnace, and he held the big red pipe wrench in his hand as his eyes drifted off: it was all quite present to him, the burning figment of the boy in the Wehrmacht helmet, my father’s boot under his chin.