warning, and failure after failure, and use and reuse and reuse until we knew it would not change, not even by a blazing miracle of a high God, though I’m sure Frank held out hope to the end. Daniel wouldn’t have been in my heaven for all the grief he caused.
This is about the terror I faced. Evident in the weather—in attacks of other sorts, both from inside and out—in attacks of despair—in attacks of terrorists—in attacks of aging, which are terrorists in themselves.
I can look back at myself and say, “a gulf separates us.” Often I retreated into my work as if the upheaval could be terminated in the kiln, where I fired the clay as if it was the circumstances Daniel handed to us.
I was a maker of ziggurats. I shaped clay into the likenesses of ziggurats. I was a maker of their clay forms. The various gradations that climbed from them. I worked mainly with shape. There’s an edginess that comes when I’m working—a vision of sorts—a zigzag line or the jump of a lightning bolt, jagged as the jaws of life and as disconcerting as tearing a car open to extricate what is caught there.
I kept journals of my work on ziggurats in my work shed, which I titled, The Ziggurat Journals, or Ziggurats and Me, volumes 1 through 7. I was now in my eighth journal. All of them massive, sagging the shelves in my work shed where they sat. Sometimes I spent more time writing notes on the making of ziggurats than I did on the actual making of the ziggurats. The journals were about how I stepped into what I think now was hell—or the beginning of it.
From the start, Daniel showed up in my journals.
—
Journal entry, May 2: I hear Daniel on the stairs at night. I hear him in the yard. I think he’s talking to someone I can’t see.
“If you hadn’t named him Daniel—a man crazy with visions,” I said to Frank when we visited the cemetery with a bundle of wildflowers. Daniel, who died in a car accident at thirty-eight, zagged on drugs, as he had been for years.
“I saw a vision that made me afraid, and the thoughts on my bed and visions in my head troubled me,” Frank said. “From Dan 4:5, the twenty-seventh chapter of the Old Testament.”
I took Frank’s arm as we walked back to the car. My accusation wasn’t a reproach as much as a manner of conversation between us.
“Daniel in the Bible survived his visions, unlike our Daniel,” Frank said as we drove back to our place, and I returned to my work shed.
Journal entry, May 23: I write to you foreclawed in Christ our Lord.
Sometimes, I read to Frank at the breakfast table before I went to my work shed. His eyes were not what they had been, and he read most of the day on his own, often with a magnifying glass. I started with the Bible that was not his favorite translation.
“‘You keep my eyelids from closing’ (Ps 77:4),” I read from the New Revised Standard Version.
Frank looked at his Bible. “‘You hold my eyes waking,’” Frank said. “That’s the King James Version, the one I prefer.”
“It means I can’t sleep because of your snoring, your voyages at night. The troubled waters of your sleep. You call out from your rowing. I can’t sleep, Frank. I think I’m moving to the other room.”
“Hopefully, Winnie or Warren won’t return.”
“It happens.”
“Yes, more all the time. But it doesn’t look like ours will be back soon,” Frank said. “They’d give us warning if they were coming.”
“They just have.”
“When?”
“I opened the e-mail before I fixed breakfast,” I said.
“For a visit or permanent?” he asked.
“A visit.”
“Short or long?”
“Winnie didn’t say,” I said.
“You didn’t ask?” he questioned.
“I haven’t answered her,” I said.
“Don’t make it seem like they aren’t welcome, or that we’re wondering how soon after their arrival they’ll leave,” he said. “What’s the purpose of their visit?”
“To see us. To make sure we’re all right. To see if we need to be put away. I’ll get Mrs. Woodruff to clean before they come.”
“You’re the only woman I know who calls her help by her formal name,” Frank said.
“I’ll have Edna Woodruff clean the house, so they know we’re still with it.”
“Don’t make them too comfortable.”
“Don’t drive them away too soon with your ranting,” I told him. “If they think you’re off, they might stay to corral you into some sort of reasonable presentation of yourself.”
“I won’t scare them.”
“I don’t know why it’s so hard for you to make yourself presentable,” I said.
“Because I’m looking at the lightings,” Frank continued, with his nose glued to his Bible. “‘His lightings lightened the world; the earth saw it and trembled’ (Ps 97:4, KJV).”
I looked at the Bible. “His lightnings, Frank. Not lightings.”
“I misread that for a purpose,” he said. “I wasn’t thinking of lights in the heavens. I was thinking of the lightings of the Word. I think God speaks with fire. There’s a physical light of sorts in the biblical language. I think I see it at night. I dream sometimes there’s a bright light blinding me. Each reading is a visit from God. In Scripture, there was light before there was the sun. There’s a mystery there.”
“Your children don’t like to hear your emanations,” I said. “I wouldn’t have them while they’re here. Our independence depends on their assurance that we’re still functioning. You can’t go on about his lightings lighting the world. You sound like you’ve not quite landed this morning.”
“No, I haven’t,” he agreed. “But it’s not from a voyage. It’s from somewhere in flight.”
“Don’t I know it.”
“You won’t be moving from the room until after the children leave?” he asked.
“No, maybe not then—if you’d stop your snoring.”
—
Once, I had asked Winnie and Warren how they had been affected by Daniel’s death. They were sorry, they said. They still grieved for him. As the oldest, Daniel had been the front-runner. They were closer in age, more friends with one another than Daniel. He had been absent for years. If he came to the house, he was distant, already disengaged from the family. Finally, his visits were dreaded. Winnie and Warren remembered him in his own world, even as a child.
—
“What
