Читать книгу From the Dark Domain - Keith Potter - Страница 9

Eugene, Oregon, was a fairyland of possibility, with forests and rivers running between buttes that stood like the king’s guard over the ever-growing city of bricks and mortar and mortarboards that is the University.

There, in our small house built for millers, we made a life under the influence of the unique and constant odor of pulp mills. Weyerhaeuser and Georgia Pacific and International Paper hummed with industry along the roaring Willamette and the eddies ebbed and banks cascaded in logs waiting to be cut or floated or hauled or chipped or shipped. Finally, those felled trees became houses or paper or milk cartons in homes all over the west, and even in Asia.

And in the middle of it all, standing taller in my mind even than the ivy walls of MacArthur Court or the grandstands of Hayward Field or the pillared halls of learning, stood majestic Village Church of Eugene. With the notion that all Christians can lay aside differences, Village church gathered diverse comers under a frescoed dome that might have been suspended in the heavens of that place by Michelangelo himself.

My family walked from our tiny home near Coburg Road and out from under the shadow of the smokestacks until we could almost baptize away the stench of pulp with the rumbling rivers of the pipe organ. There I met the Lord in the dark pews and within the tall arched windows and beneath that dome that spoke heavily about the mighty hand of God.

My parents were God-fearing people, though my mother feared him not enough, or she would have held her tongue more. And my father carried a steady fear of God’s recompense for deeds done in darkness past. His greater dread was of his wife, who punished him regularly for some unmentionable sin and uttered the name Sally James like a cussword. This left me to surmise that my father, once a professor of literature and composition, had involved himself with a woman—or possibly a girl—in a way that defamed him and cast him into the new vocation of mill hand.

Still, he trained me in letters and harped gently on my diction until I spoke a dialect more like the son of nobility and less like the son of a miller. He didn’t want his life for me.

Nor did my mother, though she wanted it still less for herself. She wept often and wailed away at her situation until Father and I mastered every form of appeasement and avoidance known to man.

Then, of course, she grieved on more than one count.

My sister.

On a day of blue skies and green trees that the Pacific Northwest produces like gems rare and brilliant, my sister Angela coaxed me to the docks. Longshoremen heaved their loads and smoked cigarettes and swore colorful oaths while we sneaked and peeked around crates. Then on to the chipper that sprayed wood bits into a pile the size of nearby Skinner’s Butte. Finally, ever so finally, we skirted the banks until we found a gigantic but disconnected raft of Douglas Fir drifting in the shallows.

Forever fun and bold, Angie’s favorite game was Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer. She played Huck, of course. I played Tom and we imagined that Jim rode the raft with us along the great Missouri. We refined our southun’ accents and sailed to dreamy islands of freedom.

The lurking dangers were everywhere, greater than our imagined foes. According to our script, Injun Joe lurked nearby and menacing steamboats plowed toward our raft. In the real world, those disconnected logs swayed and rolled and bumped each other with forces stronger than their gentle movements revealed.

We’d been warned. Giant men had chased us off those logs more than twice. But Angie believed in herself, and I believed in Angie, so sure-footed and adept at skipping over roiling terrain until the threat no longer plagued our revelry.

In one cruel instant, a log shifted and rolled heartless and relentless, capturing Angie’s foot and crushing her ankle. The current pushed the logs tight against each other, or else hidden influences above or below destined my sister for a short life. Suddenly, the logs released her pinned leg and separated. Just as quickly, they spun inward so that my grimacing older sister splashed into the brown waters. So quickly, like a monster of lore, the mouth closed again with Angie beneath and swallowed her up.

I pulled and pushed and kicked against the beast, putting my own life into every kind of peril. Angie must have swum and squeezed into each potential opening from below while I screamed and bawled for help from God and all humanity. Both arrived too late and divers hauled Angie’s body from the waters after three agonizing hours.

Father came and held me, weeping for his only daughter, lending me solace and absolution and grieving in gentle ways. Mother arrived, screaming recriminations, barely shedding a tear, but grieving straight out of her bile duct. Some people, on stubbing a toe or hitting a thumb with a hammer, simply cry “ouch!” and see no need to punish the offending table or hammer or nail. Hurt means pain without rage. Others can’t stub or crush without swearing, blaming and punishing. Anger is so near the surface that it blasts out at the moment of insult and settles into an ooze of sting and stain.

Father said “ouch” with heart and purpose and allowed me to join in.

Mother said so much more and meant it. I would suffer her toxic grief all my life. I might as well have shot Angela in the face out of malice. And my poor father might as well have loaded the gun, since her perception of his neglect would sentence him to a lifetime of scorn.

They slept separately. We ate quietly. Father worked laboriously and I played long hours of baseball. I delivered the Oregonian early in the morning and collected fees door to door long into the evenings to steer clear of the river of accusation flowing like a dark brown slough through our house.

I loved Angie. I missed Angie. I don’t blame anyone, though the aftermath is hardly simple math. It leaves me perplexed by the notion that anyone would throw away all that remains of this life simply because another one, however dear, has been lost.

Mother ended our torment by dying of pancreatic cancer when I was sixteen. Her bitterness settled into a little known but utterly critical host organ and the punishment intended for us was visited upon her. Not that I blame God for that loss. It was a reprieve for all of us. God rest her soul.