The desert sky is nothing like ours—Barr had used to say this to the students in his History of History seminars, Pierce among them—and as soon as you stand beneath it you know, he said, how certain you can be that the stars are gods, and near us.
I am she that is the naturall mother of all things, mistresse and governesse of all the Elements, the initiall progeny of worlds, cheife of powers divine, Queene of heaven, the principall of all the Gods celestiall, the light of the goddesses: at my wille the planets of the ayre, the wholesome winds of the Seas, and the silences of Hell be disposed. Leave off thy weeping and lamentation, put away thy sorrow; behold the healthfull day which is ordained by my providence; therefore be ready to attend my commandment.
Dawn winds rising as night turned pale.
Barr had written, in the draft of his last unfinished book, about how a lifelong student of myth, its cross-cultural transmission, its continual transformations, can feel at times like a parent watching children act out a story for their own pleasure: the way the plot is liable to be softened or hardened or curtailed or reversed, the boring or unintelligible parts flashed through with a gesture and the amusing parts repeated and expanded, characters swapped among actors so that one actor may end up battling with himself as another person, the whole transmuting suddenly into a different but similar tale, and never ending at all. “Any such student, as any parent, can tell you of the tedium these constant developments inspire, even as they assert again and again the endless willingness of the human imagination to play, the eternal primacy of the hand over the clay, the teller over the tale."
"Let us consider all this,” the dean said at the end of the day, “and get back to you. Real soon, I think."
* * * *
Roo had put up with Downside as long as she could, which was less long than Pierce, his general immobility her constant grief and burden. She'd knocked around the big once-fine old house that they managed feeling as though stuck daylong in the hour between rising and going to work: washing and tidying and readying and finding this and that, the whole place smelling eternally of morning, of unwashed boys and their belongings and their food and drink and their sneakers and unmade beds—the boys, too young anyway to be so far from home, and some of them very far from home, in effect exiled, following her on her rounds to ask pointless questions or tell tales about sports or homework or home, just to be near someone motherlike or mother-shaped, she thought: once, one sitting beside her on the sagging couch had simply bent his little cropped head and laid it in her lap without a word. It was the need that got her, when there didn't really seem to be a need for there to be a need. Why did they get sent so far from home?
Meanwhile Barney far away got worse and worse without her. Something debilitating drained him of his cheer, and when it was diagnosed as cancer (prostate) he at first summoned his considerable will to protect and sustain what was left of his wonderful life, but by then the odds had tipped out of his favor; the cancer metastasized; weekends Roo packed a bag and left the house to Pierce while she went with her father through that, his needs the reverse of the needs of her growing boys, but just as demanding. Barney somehow did fine day to day, anyway as long as she came often, to notice new things that ought to be seen to, and to get him out to doctors. Roo soon learned that, like the dead Egyptians Pierce told her about, the only way you made it all right through this passage was if you had a guide and a mentor, somebody to fight for you and negotiate for you at every station. That was Roo. Her only sustenance was what she learned, about what to do and how to do it, learning more every day from men and women who knew, the doctors and nurses and the social workers, they were all called caregivers now.
"You should see,” she told Pierce on returning late. “You should listen to them talk to these old men.” She meant the nurses, shift after shift. Barney was in a VA hospital by then, mostly men, mostly but not all old. At their kitchen table Pierce gave her coffee, which she had come to need at all hours of the day and night though it seemed to have no effect on her. “They have this—I don't even know what to call it. Humility. The good ones do, not all."
"Humility."
"I mean that they just keep on seeing these guys as people, no matter how far off they go; even when somebody stops responding, stops talking, seeing, eating, thinking. I mean they're realistic, they know what's happening, they try to be very truthful and observant, but they don't write them off, not ever."
"Uh huh."
"They talk to them. Hi, how are you today. Somebody just this side of a cadaver. One nurse told me: I know he's not in there anymore, but he's still right around here somewhere. He can hear. He minds if I don't say hi."
"Uh huh."
"How do they. That humility. It's what you have to have. Never thinking you know when somebody's life ought to be written off. It must be so hard. You could pretend, but it's not like being a used-car salesman. It would be hell to go to that job every day and pretend. You just couldn't. Your heart would die."
Pierce listened, pondering the limits of his own humility, his own humanity. He'd never liked Barney, and he wanted to stay as far from Barney's yellow canines and domineering intimacies as he could get. But his own father. Himself. If you do not know how to die never trouble yourself, Montaigne said. Nature will fully and sufficiently instruct you; she will do all that part for you; take you no care for it. Maybe not, not these days.
When Barney had at last made it over (his cropped head, too, laid upon her lap) Roo told Pierce she wanted to go to school and study nursing. “It's a future I can see,” she said to Pierce. “But also it's really the first one I think I can get to."
"Okay. I'll help."
"It's actually a good job. A good career. Steady."
"Yes."
"It's gonna cost, though. You have to trust me."
"I trust you,” he said.
* * * *
After a further interview, Pierce was hired by the community college.
"It was a tough decision,” the dean said. “I hope you don't mind my saying that. I myself was a definite yes vote. I thought we could overlook some of the gaps in your CV.” He leafed through the file he held. “You know we never got a letter from the dean of Barnabas College. A Dr. Santobosco?"
"Really."
"No matter. You impressed me, Pierce, and not only with the accomplishments. You can't always go on those alone. You have to go with what you see."
"I hope,” Pierce said, “to live up to your expectations. I certainly will try to. You have my promise.” And he meant this, with all his heart, as he had meant so little in his life; almost, indeed, couldn't get through the saying of it for a hot lump that rose in his throat. He got to his feet, and shook the dean's great fat warm hand.
"First we'll go down and look at your office,” said the dean, taking a big ring of keys from his pocket. “You'll be sharing with Mrs. Liu, whom you've met, she's Elements of Communication."
"Yes."
They went down through the plain halls of a standard utilitarian building, the dean greeting students with a raised hand as though in blessing.
"In here."
A battered gray desk, near another similar but different one; steel shelves and a gooseneck lamp; and a wide window.
No he hadn't been an alcoholic, or insane, nor had he burned down his life smoking in bed, or thrown it away by mistake like a winning lottery ticket, but he was as grateful as if he had done a thing like that, and been saved, for no reason. Lucius thou art at length come to the port and haven of rest and mercy: thus said many-colored Isis to Lucius the Golden Ass, not an ass anymore at last. Neither did thy noble linage, thy dignity, thy doctrine, or any thing prevale, but that thou hast endured so many servil pleasures, by a little folly of thy youthfulnes, whereby thou hast had a sinister reward for thy unprosperous curiositie; but howsoever, the blindness of Fortune tormented thee in divers dangers: so it is, that now unawares to her, thou art come to this present felicitie: let Fortune go, and fume with fury in another place.