Let me here just make some notes, add some things: you see this is near the end of the century and certain movements of small towns as I used to know them, as I knew them growing up, are waning. When I was a boy in Galva, Illinois, there were wakening gestures to a town. All towns had them. They were infused with grace. Mr. Bursell of the dry goods store would waken in his little apartment over his store — moving with the deliberate, uncaring slowness of a permanent bachelor, lifting the spilled flower of his blue dungarees around his waist, looping the belt slowly as he looked out his window, across the street where Ellen Barton was sweeping the sidewalk in front of her husband’s movie theater, The State. Ah, that gesture, the broom wedded to her arm and her arm to the broom and the swish motion, elbow bent, and the bits of ticket stub and tissue and popcorn being forced forward into the gutter. Her cool honey hair up in a clip. The bleached pleats of her skirt around her ankles. Bursell would study that movement for a moment, fingers on his belt, and then make his way downstairs, going out the front, so he could crank the awning open over his store to hold the morning sunlight (later in the afternoon he’d do the same in reverse), taking the worn wooden spool that steadied the bar with one hand while with the other he had to crank. His cranking would lead the awning, tart green and white stripes, to open gracefully — his work taking shape and form over his head. That’s how it used to be in a town that wasn’t betrayed yet by the onslaught that would eventually take so many of the finer gestures out of our hands; stolen from us, taken into the innards of so many machines.
We are the graceless and dumbfounded, insane with our own insatiable desire for another time and place and a sense of movement, we gesture hunters. One movement of a tongue over a dry lip will do for us; a women in the graveyard weeping at the foot of her husband’s grave, her navy blue skirt hiked up over her calves, and the flat worn soles of her shoes the color of dry sand — that’s just it, all we need, all we strive for in this world, nothing more or less. We have our modus operandi, our techniques, some preferring to await the passing of some perfect movement, to sit all day, day upon day, waiting. It’s a heartless means of searching, I think, to let the movement of the town go about you, but there are those, my fellows, who are content to work that way; and I say, go your way in peace. In town there are two such operators, though their intentions I have to doubt somewhat; their desires are not so pure as mine. With his hair gone and blotches of Vietnam — napalm, some say — purpling his scalp, Hank sits patiently, welded to a bench, but his searches are invalidated by his heaving sucks from a tall-boy, the paper sack tight around the top of the bag and wet from condensation. And there is an old hag nicknamed Boop — a la Betty — who smells of urine and wears stained nylon stockings and tattered dresses but doesn’t bring even the slightest glance from passerbys as she maintains her place on the bench in front of the ice-cream shop, making her sputtering, inane sounds, clucks and quacks and hisses and an occasional word or two, maybe searching or maybe not. It’s hard to know what to think of her, and I seldom do think of her if I can help it, but I do know that maybe at one time she was a gesture hunter, too, and went about it firmly and with all the good intentions one might expect. Long ago, when time was different and we were going about our business in town, she was the big realtor (and I, at the bank, the largest lender of funds). Then, as now, it was the duty of a realtor to bend and flex her personality to match those of a potential buyer, even going so far as to match him gesture for gesture when necessary: she might be standing in an inelegant little Cape Cod, with a bad roof of sagging rafters and a main beam ridden with termites, and still she’d have to throw her arms wide in one of those open embraces and take a deep chest-heaving breath of air as if it were the freshest in the world to match the gesture of the buyer, who, coming up from the city for a summer day of looking around, had happened into her office just to see what was available and, after seeing the Cape Cod, felt suddenly stunned by the idea of living in “the country.” So with Boop it was hard to know; she’d stolen so many gestures, hugged them to her, that maybe she was looking for one of her own that had become lost out there. That’s the basic nature of any of us hunters. We want above all to find what is rightfully ours.
Twice I’ve been consecrated by pure gestures — just twice if you discount the third incident. Once I took my late and long-lost son, Stevie, fishing up in Massachusetts; the Chesterfield River, rocky and hard-wading, day gone, faded, that blistering darkness pulling down midsummer slow over the water. We were holding out for the risers that were destined to come because there were spinners overhead, lowering themselves with the darkness like flecks of snow refusing to meet the earth. They were doing their copulation rite midair, and soon they would hit the water to lay their eggs. (I have not fished since that day, nor will I fish again.) Airfucks, we called them, one of those embarrassed dirty jokes between father and son that has a bitter taste now that he is gone and what was filthy between us is as dark as soot to my memory. It’s all memory, and perhaps that’s what makes the pain I caused him at that moment — just a sharp little barb in his wrist — stand out so acutely, and makes the gesture that followed his pain remain the cleansed and holy one (of the two), purified by time and memory and dust and all of that. He was working this deep oily pool that caught the night long before it fell, along a shale ledge, lounging his back against a large rock, casting and recasting while I worked my own pool along the other side. My backcast was caught by a single uprising of night breeze, the only one that night, as far as I recall, and to compensate I had to work my line sidelong, and then there was the sharp, startled sound of his voice cracking, returning to his child-voice, as I hooked him in the smooth white flesh of his wrist, not knowing I’d done so and thinking I was snagged, yanking thoughtlessly, just once, just once, but the pain I caused him is eternal and everlasting because and only because of his voice at that moment, mingled and mixed with the rabble of water over stone. You see, all this led up to the gesture pure and sweet, of his face, a large face, so much my face, smiling at the pain and flicking my fly back, swiping the blood from his wrist. Blood I couldn’t see and will never see. It was the flick and the smile, barely visible, maybe not visible at all to me in the falling darkness, shadow-laden, deep and brooding, the woods pressing in, the sides of the gorge seeming to swell up into the woods. I had caused him sudden and inexplicable pain, and he had flicked it off, a simple gesture that continued in one fluid motion to his cast and his line being laid out over that dark pool. Later, the trout rose to take his fly and spun him into that wonderful motion of working a fish, force against force — not a pure gesture (there were only two) but worth saving nonetheless. When I learned that my son had been killed in Vietnam, taken by pains that must have flowered and exploded from back to front, blood pluming out his chest where the bullet left, I imagined that flick of the wrist, and I smiled and vowed to worship it and perhaps one day equal it. I vowed to find just once more a motion as graceful, just once more, on the surface of this earth peopled by human souls going about their lives, to find a gesture that equaled that of my son in the stream a year and a half before he died, or that of his sweet little wet body in a tub, the scent of baby soap …