“Why can’t we go home now, Daddy?” asked Mike, the youngest, and the small tanned face I saw there in the skimpy shade of the olive tree was mostly a matter of eyes —all else, hair, cheeks, thumb-sized mouth, jelly-bean body and usually flailing arms and legs, were mere accessories to the round, blue, endlessly wondering eyes. (“The Wells of ‘Why’”… It would make a poem, I thought, if a poem were needed, and if I wasn’t so damned tired. And I also thought, “Oh, God! It begins. Five years old. No, not quite. Four.”)
“Because Daddy has to finish weeding this row of beans,” I said. “We’ll go back to the house in a little while.”
I would go back to the house and then I would follow the path around the rocks to the hot springs, and there I would peel off what was left of my clothes and I would soak myself in the clear but pungent water that came bubbling—perfect—from a cleft in the rocks to form a pool in the hollow of a pothole—also perfect. And while I steeped in the mineral water I could think about the fish which was soon to be broiling on the fire, and I could think of Sue turning it, poking at it and sprinkling herbs over it as though it was the first or perhaps the last fish that would ever be broiled and eaten by human creatures. She would perform that office with the same total and unreserved dedication with which, since sun-up, she had scraped deerskin, picked worms from new cabbage-leaves, gathered firewood, caulked the walls of the cabin where the old chinking had fallen away or been chewed or knocked away by other hungry or merely curious creatures, and otherwise filled in the numberless gaps in the world—trivial things mostly which would not be noticed and could not become great things in a man’s eyes unless she were to go away or cease to be. I don’t think of this because, for all immediate purposes—there are no others—she is the first Woman in the world and quite possibly—the last.
“Why don’t we live in the Old House in the valley, Daddy?”
It is All-Eyes again. Make no mistake about it; there is a kind of connectedness between the seemingly random questions of very small kids. These are the problems posed by an Ur-logic which is much closer to the pulse of reality than are any of the pretentious, involuted systems and the mincing nihilations and category-juggling of adults. It is we who are confused and half-blinded with the varieties of special knowledge. But how explain? What good is my experience to him?
“There are too many old things in the Old House which don’t work,” I say, even as I know that I merely open the floodgates of further questions.
“Don’t the funny men work, Daddy? I want to see the funny men! Daddy, I want …”
The boy means the robots. I took him down to see the Old House in the valley once before. He rode on top of my haversack and hung on to my hair with his small fingers. It was all a lark for him. I had gone to fetch some books— gambling that there might be a bagful of worthwhile ones that had not been completely eaten by bugs and mice; and if the jaunt turned out depressing for me, it was my fault, which is to say the fault of memory and the habit of comparing what has been with what is—natural, inevitable, unavoidable, but oh, God, just the same … The robots which still stood on their size-thirty metal feet looked like grinning Mexican mummies. They gave me a bad turn even though I knew what they were, and should have known what changes to expect after a long, long absence from that house, but to the kid they were a delight. Never mind transphenomenality of rusted surfaces and uselessly dangling wires; never mind the history of a senile generation. They were the funny men. I wish I could leave it at that, but of course I can’t. I hide my hoe in the twigs of the olive tree and pick up Mike. This stops the questions for a while.
“Let’s go home to Mummy,” I say; and also, hoping to hold back the questions about the Old House long enough to think of some real answers, “Now aren’t you glad we live up here where we can see the ocean and eagles and hot springs?”
“Yeth,” says Mike firmly by way of making a querulous and ineffectual old man feel better about his decision. What a comfort to me the little one is!
I see smoke coming from the chimney, and when we round the last turn in the path we see the cabin. Sue waves from the door. She has worked like a squaw since dawn, and she smiles and waves. I can remember when women would exhaust themselves talking over the phone and eating bonbons all day and then fear to smile when their beat husbands came home from their respective nothing-foundries lest they crack the layers of phony “youthful glow” on their faces. Not like Sue. Here is Sue with smudges of charcoal on her face and fish-scales on her leather pants. Her scent is of woodsmoke and of sweat. There is no artificial scent like this—none more endearing nor more completely “correct.” There was a time when the odor of perspiration would have been more of a social disaster for a woman than the gummata of tertiary pox. Even men were touched by this strange phobia.
Sue sees the question on my face and she knows why my smile is a little perfunctory and strained.
“Chris … ?” I start to ask finally.
“No. He took his bow and his sleeping-bag. Muttered something about an eight-point buck.”
We do not need the venison. If anything has been made exhaustively and exaustingly clear to the boy it is that our blessings consist in large part of what we do not need. But this is not the point, and I know it is not the point.
“Do you think he’ll ever talk to me again, Sue?”
“Of course he will.” She pulls off my sweaty shirt and hands me a towel. “You know how twelve is. Everything in technicolor and with the throbbiest possible background music. Everything drags or jumps or swings or everything is Endsville or something else which it actually isn’t. If it can’t be turned into a drama it doesn’t exist. He’ll get over it.”
I can think of no apt comment. Sue starts to busy herself with the fire, then turns back to me.
“You did the best thing. You did what you had to do, that’s all. Go take your bath. I’m getting hungry.”
I make my way up the path to the hot springs and I am wearing only the towel and the soles of an ancient pair of sneakers held on with thongs. I am thinking that the hot water will somehow dissolve the layers of sickly thought that obscure all the colors of the world from my mind, just as it will rid me of the day’s accretion of grime, but at once I know that I am yielding to a vain and superstitious hope. I can take no real pleasure in the anticipation of my bath.
When I emerge from the underbrush and come in sight of the outcroppings of rock where the springs are, I can see Sato, our nearest neighbor and my oldest friend, making his way along the path from his valley on the other side of the mountain. I wave at him, but he does not wave back. I tell myself that he is concentrating on his feet and simply does not see me, but myself answers back in much harsher terms. Sato knows what happened when I took my older son to the City, and he knows why my son has not spoken more than a dozen coherent words since returning. He knows what I have done, and while it is not in the man’s nature to rebuke another or set himself above another or mouth moral platitudes, there are limits.
Sato is some kind of a Buddhist. Only vaguely and imperfectly do I understand what this implies; not being unnecessarily explicit about itself is certainly a part of that doctrine. But there is also the injunction against killing. And I am— notwithstanding every meretricious attempt of my own mind to convert that fact into something more comfortable —a killer. And so … I may now contemplate what it will mean not merely to have lost my older son, but also the priceless, undemanding and yet immeasurably rewarding friendship of the family in the next valley.