Page 52 - WTPO Vol. VII #5

Devoted (continued form preceding page) Then I came here. Where else could I go?”
Or sat on the stone. She ran a shaking hand through her hair. Ardent touched her shoulder gently.
“Why be upset?” He asked her. “I feel relief. Now I don’t need to be haunted by a family past that is false, only a personal past that is real.”
“I feel bad, Ardent,” Or shook her head. “What can I do for you?”
“A personal favor. Something special. We need to do this together. You must say yes.”
~
The timeworn car was hardly in any condition for the journey to the old Zonder Estate, but Ardent insisted on its use, and Or had tendered her promise without conditions. The running boards were fastened with wire, the horn was mute, and the seats were blistered as if scorched by an open flame. They packed lightly, but Or felt a heavy permanence about the trip. Ardent demanded that all his papers be brought along, and that Or close the house as was done in times of cold and wind—so windows were sealed and shutters were bolted.
Driving slowly along the river, Or avoided divots in the dirt road. But near the caves, the car tipped into a crack, irrevocably jammed. Behind Ardent, a naked man approached.
Ardent,” Or warned, “behind you.”
Ardent turned and strode to the man. They shook hands warmly. The man was even taller and wider than Ardent. He smiled and laughed at Ardent’s words. They walked up to the car.
“This is Lyle Zonder,” Ardent told Or. “He’s a cousin. I spent time in his summer home in Pelham. He’s seen some hard times.” With that, the men hoisted the car out of the fissure. As they drove away, Ardent turned and waved. The giant held up a hand.
~
It was night when they reached the northern postern.
A guard emerged from his shed, sleepily squinting at Or.
“Why are you heading north?” he asked. “We’re visiting an old house,” Or answered.
“And you?” the man asked Ardent, who was asleep. The guard quickly lost interest in him.
“Do you have papers, Miss?” he asked. Or handed them to him and he lifted his dim smoky lamp to read.
“And this is you, Or Zonder? And you’re heading north? Well, can’t say what you’ll find up there. Good luck.” He waved them through and the road narrowed and darkened, and Or sped. She had no desire to de- lay, even though she knew what they would find. The Zonder Estate was a series of fallen columns, piles of collapsed bricks, walls standing alone in fields among impenetrable clumps of sumac, beside drooping pagodas smothered in wild sugar cane. Or knew all this. But Ardent sought to return to where he and Or, his country cousin, had played their games. He sought to find the dropped key to his recollections, retrieve the lost pearl which bound the necklace of memory. Where he touched her, and she touched him, and they drank deep from each other’s vigor. But his story was of the fall. Or, ten years older, had pilfered his pure soul. He was the casualty. He told himself this story until it was as true as his family narrative —a devolu- tion to sin.
But Or was a Zonder as much as Ardent. She was aware of the power of the pen to craft the past, and with that command, steer toward the future. Because she was a Zonder, like Ardent – a scion of a family without memory. She was just as welcome to mold the eras of natural and human life as her cousin. If she burned Ardent’s papers in the cracked horse trough at the gate of Zonder Estate, the same place he crashed his bicycle all those years ago, flying over the massive front wheel, into the cluster of banana trees, it was her right.
Ardent, asleep in the car, cannot see the yellow and red glow of papers burning in the blackened trough. The ash bows only to turn quickly upward, toward the chalky sky. Or sits on the hood of the dented tin lizzie and takes out pen and pad.
Or is writing her own history by that flame. Her time with Ardent, as a boy and a man, untethered from words of exploitation or misuse. Or Zonder’s love for Ardent was wholesome and untrammeled – a state between two acquitted beings, bereft of past and tast- ing the sweetness of an everlasting moment.
Maroney is the author of two books of nonfiction, Religious Syncre- tism (2006) and The Other Zions (2010). His mixed genre book, The Torah Sutras, was published in 2019. His short fiction has appeared in over twenty literary journals and publications. He is a regular fiction and nonfiction reviewer for Colorado Review. He works at Cornell University, and lives in the hills outside of Ithaca, NY, with his wife and two children.
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