“My mother was a saint,” he said. “Probably nobody will write a book about her. But she was a saint.”
I sat with him on a greasy rock, overlooking the lapping waves.
Suit coat, back home. But still the proper dark blue
windbreaker, tie, wing-tip shoes. “Just because you’re on the beach,” he said,
“is no reason not to look presidential. You never saw Kruschev in swimming
trunks. And Brezhnev, well, you wouldn’t want to. All that dark hair.”
We sat on the greasy rock, overlooking the lapping waves.
The lapping waves.
The lapping waves.
See? It is meaningless.
Meaningless.
We fed the squirrels, while their cows grazed on the
sawgrass.
“Quite the little herd,” he said. “Never knew cattle could
eat sawgrass, but,” he said, glancing at the sun-dappled sea, then up into the
black of space where Saturn and its visible moons and rings danced in the same
sunlight, “guess they’ve got to eat what’s available, right?”
“Yes, that seems correct,” I said.
“Damn this tapioca, though,” he said. “It’s terrible. Might
as well have flies in it; couldn’t taste any worse.” He dropped his spoon back
into the little hollow in the stone we sat on, from where he had been spooning
the pudding into his mouth. I looked at it. Though spoonable, it was as dusty
and unattractive as the grease we sat on, the grease that did not appear to
stain his suit, but left mine oozing a black ichor for weeks, even after I
washed it. I picked up the spoon and poked at the stuff. It was reddish-black,
the color of burnt toast spread with burnt raspberry jam. When I pulled the
spoon from the muck, a long strand stretched form the rock to the spoon,
finally snapping when it was about a meter long.
“I miss the challenge,” he said. “The fight. You know what
they wanted me to do,” he asked.
“No,” I said, putting the spoon back in place. “I do not
know.”
The dog danced in the surf, barking at the foam.
“Diplomacy in hell. Literally, in Hell itself,” he said. “My
grandmother, Almira Milhous, she wouldn’t hear of it.”
“But I did it. Studied it out. Read everything I could about
it. Do you know that Mormons don’t really believe in Hell like the rest of us
do?” he said. “Very few people go to Mormon hell. The rest of us, we all go to
heaven, though heaven’s divided like a three-story building. Sartre said hell
was other people. The Mormons say hell is knowing you could have done better.”
He clasped his hands, and his head drooped. He fumbled with
his fingers for a moment as the dog barked in the surf.
“You don’t have to say it,” I said.
“I say it every day,” he said.
We stared into the surf for a while, watching the dog leap
as the waves rolled gently in.
“We lived in the same house,” I said, after a long silence.
“She did her thing. I did mine. We got along well, so I thought we were happy.
It’s what happens when one hermit marries another – you forget. You forget
there’s togetherness.”
More lapping waves.
More lapping waves.
So peaceful. Regular. And calming.
The sea, is a hermit. Though it girths the world, though it
is filled with plants and animals making love and reproducing and birthing and
dying and rotting away and being eaten or hunted, it is a hermit. It is alone.
If something small within it dies, it moves along. The waves keep crashing to
the shore.
“The world moves along,” he said, finally looking up, back
to the sea and the sun. “No matter what you do, the world keeps turning. Night
turns to day, day turns to night. The stars fade as the sun rises, reappear as
it sets. And the colors,” he said. “Oh, the colors. Red and orange on the
clouds, rippling from the horizon on that sine wave of differing pressures. And
mackerel skies, patches of indigo, purple, blue, and that delicate pink you see
only in the sky. I’ve never seen it reproduced anywhere else.”
“It moves along,” he said. “Rain falls on the just and the
unjust. And the sun, it will always rise.”
Lapping waves.
Lapping waves.
“What is it,” he asked. “What is it that finally happened?”
I sighed.
“I tell people,” I said, “it’s because she said she could
tell the difference between butter and I Can’t Believe it’s Not Butter.”
He laughed. “And they buy that?”
“Not really,” I said. “But it’s the tale I tell.”
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