Page 46 - WTP Vol. XIII #1

Physics (continued from page 32 )
job, his asthma bedding him for years. My father, at last, strained to speak, trying, “Did you sleep good?” to unmuzzle the morning, and I answered, “Good enough,” as if truth might trigger prescriptions, as if accidentally my father and I might talk, as needed, swallowing to save our faulty selves, carefully speak- ing from the confluence of our altered blood.
Outside it was snowing so heavily I decided to stay, keeping my family there for another day. The fore- caster promised the snow would end by mid-after- noon. A warm front was approaching. In January, that meant the temperature would approach forty de- grees. The Pennsylvania Turnpike would be cleared, and neither my father nor I would have to worry about my driving into impassable conditions.
Brouwer’s Theorem
A month later, I returned to my father’s house by my- self. The snow that was falling when I arrived was nothing but an hour’s cover. When I walked across my father’s yard, the grass returned where my shoes had pressed, and the prints that didn’t refill pointed nowhere dangerous unless I trekked on foot a thou- sand miles north, as far as I’d ever been: Beaupre, St. Anne’s shrine stacked up with crutches.
With my wife, my two sons, and my daughter beside me two years earlier, I had trudged by canes and braces while it fitfully snow-flurried in late May. I took color photographs and considered each premo- nition pain in my doubter’s limbs, how nothing there in that shrine, because all of it was faith-based, could repair any part of me. So far north that week, after driving back into a few hours of winter, we retraced our steps by exactly walking backwards, creating a path of footprints that led up to a vanishing point like an ominous lesson in perspective.
After dinner, my father led me back outside. “There’s
my sky,” he said, and, not knowing what he expected, I answered, standing in his driveway, “It’s clear, all right.” I thought my father was planning to tell me the ancient names for the stars or the tales they inspired about people who suffered and changed and ascend- ed while somebody left behind handed their stories down to another generation. The two dippers and Orion were all I remembered, and I waited for him to show me where my mother was, how one cluster of stars had reformed, at least for him, to suggest hope. We stood with the night in our lungs. We breathed a sentence of silence until he said, “Venus and Jupiter,” directed me low in the sky where there were so many lights I could nod, certain they were among them.
Momentum
For thirty-eight years, counting from my birth, I had eight aunts and uncles by blood, eight more by mar- riage, all of them unscathed. When I was young, be- fore I began first grade, all but two of them attended the same church. They arrived early and sat on the left side, from the third row to halfway back, filling so many pews that the service looked like a wedding or a funeral.
Besides religion, their most important concern was work, the length and value of it, the wages paid taboo to speak unless they were earned by the dead. What they made was bread and steel, soup and railroad cars, the immaculate rooms they lived in. In pairs, with their children, they moved and scattered and built with brick and wood in seven states, some of them with long winters of heavy snow, some with nearly perpetual warmth, all with faith. All of those families but my parents seemed to form a fresh life elsewhere, redefining themselves with rivers and oceans, accents, love. No one died but their parents during those decades when the future was a guest in every home.
And then, for twenty years, one by one, they van- ished, leaving just my father. I was nearly sixty- years old, and he told their stories as odes to lives completed. He inflated them with the air of love
and wonder until they could rise enough for him
to imagine their spirits were working to shape his eternity. Until, as if preparing me for grief’s exten- sive era, my father quietly turned inward. I began to listen for spirits who addressed me by my name. My children grew and left. My grandchildren were born. There was never enough preserving, never enough remembering when alone, concentrating on some speck of sky while breathing what I sometimes
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