The Lacuna (54 page)

Did I scream? That isn’t my way, so I don’t think so. I’m sure I stood up, threw down the book, and moved about. I remember thinking I couldn’t go in the water because it would wreck my shoes. So it hadn’t soaked in yet, that life had set down here before me a far worse thing than wrecked shoes. Or anything else I’d thus far known. It’s true I lost a husband in the flood of the French Broad River in ’16, Freddy Brown, and that broke a young girl’s heart. But this was worse. My heart had grown older, with more in it to break. I can’t put words to that afternoon. He would know words for the feelings I bore, but I only knew the feelings.

I told those boys as best I could, to run get some kind of help. A group of men came out from the village and searched the cove. One was the friend, Leandro. Later the police came along too. By nightfall a hundred people must have been in that cove as the tide went out, every hour giving back more beach for the crowd that came to stand on it. It never really went dark, for the moon rose big and full, just as the sun went down. Most of those people were merely curious to see a body, I expect. Yet all went away that night without satisfaction, there was no body. He was just gone.

I remember parts of that day, not all. I can’t say how I came back to the hotel. Police had to search his room for some clue or a note, thinking Mr. Shepherd might have done away with himself on purpose. I knew better, and yet I really didn’t. I stood at the door while they turned out suitcases and drawers, and me thinking, “Here it is again, the police ransacking for evidence, and the man they will not find.” I spied one peculiar thing—the little stone man he liked to carry in his pocket. He’d left his room tidy, every last thing put away, but that little man was out on the table grinning at me! Or rather it howled, that round mouth open like a hole in the head. It made me want to howl too, and not much does. I could tell it had been set there for a reason, and I was the reason. But what he meant to tell me, I knew not.

Once back home, I took care of things as best I knew how, which was not very well. I could only think one thing at a time, starting with: get up. Arthur Gold was a great help, also torn up about it, but less surprised. He had done the will, you see. Mr. Shepherd left all to me, his house and proceeds from the books, if any. The cats. The money was no fortune, but more than a widow’s mite. Curiously, he had wired some money to a bank in Mexico City, addressed to Mrs. Kahlo. He did that shortly before our trip. He hadn’t mentioned it, but I decided it was no great surprise. That lady was ever in need of cash.

With his legal testament was a letter he’d written to me. It
contained certain instructions about his books, and personal things, appreciation for the years. Most of it need not be told here. But he said two things that shocked: first, that we’d had a great love. So he said, in those words. No one had been more important to him. And he said not to grieve. His sole regret was the stain his life and ways had put upon mine, and he wanted me to be shed of all such worry. He said this is the happy ending everyone wanted. Well, I was furious at that. For him to quit on life, and call that happiness.

I moved into his house, farewell to Mrs. Bittle at last, I won’t dwell on that. The part-time at Raye’s gave me afternoons free for setting things to rights in his house and answering what mail still came. My first chore was an obituary for the Asheville paper. I can’t begin to tell what care I took, keening over each word and many unwritten. I delivered it to the office and spoke with a man, and was barely out the door I expect when he threw it in his ashcan. They ran their own little piece instead. They had no wish to tell what a man has done with his life. That would require honest witness. The simpler thing is to state what he has been called.

In 1954 came the death of his friend, Mrs. Kahlo. The family must have gone through some upheaval, the usual business of sorting the clutter of the deceased, for they sent a trunk of Mr. Shepherd’s things. A young man’s clothes many years out of date, a few photographs, and not much else to speak of. But inside the trunk was a letter from Mrs. Kahlo, addressed to me. I thought that very strange. We’d only met the once. But there was my name, so this trunk was not some mere forgotten thing, she’d meant to have it sent to me. She planned that before she died.

The letter was so peculiar. A drawing of a pyramid sketched out in drab purple and brown, and on its top a yellow eye with lines like rays from the sun. Across the eye she’d written “soli”
to mean the sun, I gathered. And scribbled at the top of the page in a hand like a child’s: “Violet Brown, Your American friend is dead. Someone else is here.” It was in English. But I could no more understand it than the man in the moon.

The photographs I put away, and the clothes I meant to give the Salvation Army, for who knows what a person will wear if he’s cold enough. They would have to be washed first, and it sat for some weeks before I could get around to that. It was only by luck I went through the trouser pockets. That makes my heart race now, for how easily this could have gone another way. But it happened as it did. I found the little notebook.

I knew what it was. I’ll say that. I opened the little leather booklet and saw a penciled hand, the boy with his laments about Mother and so forth. Oh, I cried. I felt I’d found my own lost child. I sat and read it through on the bedroom floor where I’d been sorting the clothes. My heart pounding, because of that cave he found under the water. And his business with the moon, learning to wait for a day the tide would help push him through to the other side, without his drowning first. That was him all over. That patient study.

I read all of it. The happy ending, as he called it. Because that is what he did, right under my nose while I sat reading on the beach. He swam in that cave, to rest with the bones or else come out the other side, and walk himself into life as some other man who is not dead.

Fight or die was his choice. I know which it was. Mrs. Kahlo would have hidden him when he got that far, and helped him make a new start. She thrived on that kind of thing. He had wired the money. “Someone else is here,” she’d written, plain as daylight, and also the name she used to call him, long forgotten. It was his idea to make her send a message, to put me at rest. I feel I know that too.

I had to get out all his notebooks then, and look again. Three
years earlier I’d read most of it through eyes half-shut with grief, then packed it away, forgetting what all I could. Now, out came the box. Papers covered the dining table, a mess like times of yore. With that one little booklet put back in place, it came as a different story. Because of that burrow through rock and water—lacuna, he called it. This time I read with a different heart, understanding the hero would still be standing at journey’s end. Or at least, live or die, he’d known of a chance and aimed to take it. What you don’t know can’t hurt you, they say. Yet it can. So much hangs upon it.

What I have done with these writings he could have done himself. Set down his life as he chose, for others to read. He began the one chapter, then stopped, claiming he couldn’t go forward for want of the booklet that was lost. I could say, “Now it is found, so Mr. Shepherd would want to go on with his story.” Which is fiddlesticks, and I know it. He wanted to put his boyhood away and keep still about it. God speaks for the silent man, oh, that I have heard. I’ve struggled with my conscience, it has cost me dear. It does so still.

Yet one day I decided to go on with it. I was here in Montford, for he gave me the place and only could have meant for me to live in it. I use a different bedroom to sleep in, of course, and his study room under the gable eave is a place I don’t go. But it had to be his own bathroom mirror I faced each morning, the very place where he shaved and answered his Lord and conscience. Now it was a lady looking back from the glass, and one bright morn I told her: Listen here. If God speaks for the man who keeps quiet, then Violet Brown may be His instrument.

I don’t say it was swift or sure. It took considering. Typing up a manuscript, that I can do. His hand was legible, and errors were few. Putting all in order was no easy trick, but no worse than some card files I’ve seen at the Asheville library. I left nothing
out but the things that had no business, a market list or telephone numbers, certain letters. Of his story I have told all, even when it pained me to do it, or passed my understanding. But the question stood everlasting at my shoulder: Was it mine to tell?

This day the telephone could ring and my heart would squeeze, for the thought it might be him, and the answer no. Even as I am a person of the world, and eight years now gone by since I saw him in it. Years do not erase a bereavement. Mr. Shepherd, where be ye? I could still ask. And here is an answer: in those little books. I always could find him there. So this might be nothing very different from the pining girls singing for lost love on the radio. Maybe I turned to typing it for the pleasure of being his daily helpmeet again. Even if that’s so, in the middle of all, the story worked itself ahead of the man. I will say Mr. Shepherd persuaded me, against his own will.

Not in so many words. I did hope for that, some instruction in his text to guide my hand. Well, my stars, the thing was like the Bible—look hard enough in its pages, and you’ll find what you seek. Love your neighbor, or slay him with the jawbone of an ass.

It’s the same herein. He plainly said, Burn these words. He said a mute people will leave behind good stout architecture, and not their squalid lives of trial. Those who come after will be struck by the majesty. He meant to leave behind only the monuments of his books. As he lived and breathed, I saw his wish and I held to that. And then saw the monuments tumble. In this strange, cold time that has settled on us, people did what they could to bury the man and throw everything he’d ever made into the hole they’d dug for him. Like a mummy in Egypt.

His life was a marvel, whether he knew that or didn’t. His way of seeing a cat in a cold wind, or skeletons pressed flat in the dust. A dead fish thrown in the kitchen slop pail. He could cry for about anything and give it a decent burial. He was so afraid
of living, yet live he did. That’s a monument. He wrote about those who came before, giving flesh to their cares. He was driven to it.

Now I do the same for him. Even knowing, as I do, how everyone makes firewood from the fallen tree. The professors like to hunt out some sin of Shakespeare himself, and pass that off as the golden store of the learned. I couldn’t bear this to touch Mr. Shepherd, or his loved ones or even children, if such a thing has now come to pass. I want time for him. All the paint washed off, bare limestone revealed.

That is my reason for having it locked up and held. Mr. Gold knew how to fix that up. People at a bank do this very thing, holding documents for a set number of years before hauling it out of the vault for the newspapers or what have you. I told him fifty. I had to choose, and that is a sturdy number. Long enough to be sure we are gone. Yet not so long that I couldn’t imagine people still walking about in shoes, rather than flying on clouds. People who might want to look back on those who labored and birthed the times they have inherited. But maybe that’s wrong, and already we’ll be a graveyard of weeds they won’t want to visit. You, I mean to say. The times you have inherited. I wonder that: Who be ye?

I dread to do what I do now, commending a man’s life into the bleak passage to some other place, be it filled with light or darkness. This is my small raft. I know not what waits on the other side.