some.” He went through the motions of picking and eating berries.
He went on and finally came to the place where the long lodge had stood. He said to himself, “Now when I take hold of the door flap and raise it up you must do the same.” Coyote remembered all the little things his friend had done. He saw the spot where he had sat before. He went there, sat down, and said, “Now, your wife has brought us food. Let us eat.” He went through the motions of eating again. Darkness fell, and now Coyote listened for the voices, and he looked all around, he looked here and there, but nothing appeared. Coyote sat there in the middle of the prairie. He sat there all night but the lodge didn’t appear again nor did the ghost ever return to him.
AN OLD STORY
Some years after I began to think about tricksters, I sat down to write a short description of what I hoped would be the central themes and shape of this book. At the time I had been browsing in Homeric hymns other than the one to Hermes and when I finished the proposal I appended as an epigraph a line spoken by Apollo in the hymn that tells his story:
“ The Muses sing of the sufferings of men …
How they live witless and helpless and cannot
Find healing for death or defense against old age.”
It was late winter at the time. My wife and I were living in a rented house near the Cape Cod light in North Truro, Massachusetts, and when I finished typing I walked out into the constant wind and stood at the edge of the high scarp over the Atlantic, relieved for having written out the shape of the book at last, but feeling some sadness or fatigue, too, triggered by Apollo’s scornful voice and woven into the project in ways I didn’t understand.
Not long thereafter, I dreamed that I retrieved a dead child from the underworld. Up into the darkened central hallway of a middle-class home I carried the shade of some woman’s baby. I was in a rage at this woman. I saw my hands close around her beautiful throat just before I woke, tense and shaken.
My family moved to England five years after the end of the Second World War. In London, bright flowers, called fireweed, bloomed in the open cellar holes of bombed buildings. My parents brought with them a 1949 Chevrolet with green fenders thick as dinner plates. “The dollar was strong,” and the grounds of the house we rented in a village outside London included a tennis court, an apple orchard, a playhouse with leaded diamond windows, and a bomb shelter, inside of which the gardener forced rhubarb and on top of which sat the landlady’s two marble Buddhas, which my brother and I chipped at with a hammer for their fabulous flakes of soapy white stone.
When I was five, my parents had a third child, Edith, born in December of 1950. Twenty months later, she died. A mosquito bite had infected her with the trypanosome that causes the encephalitis they then called African sleeping sickness. One afternoon she began to cry inconsolably, then fell into a coma. During the week or so she lived, I was allowed to go once with my parents to visit her in the hospital. I can still see her lying on the white bed, her lips moving in an odd reflexive way, as if sucking. As I watched, her lips stopped moving and I secretly thought perhaps I had seen her die. At the funeral my older brother Lee wept but I did not. I was jealous of his tears, but felt none of my own. I heard them say I was “too young to understand,” whereas Lee “loved Edith very much.” After the funeral we sat in the Chevrolet by the churchyard while adults leaned toward the windows to talk to my parents. After that, Mother would sometimes rise from the dinner table, twisting her napkin in her hands, and walk into the darkened living room, Father following behind. Lee and I broke out with boils; I had one on my right calf that soaked its loose white bandage with pus. We were sent away for a while to stay with some woman who owned a guitar, which, if I did not leave the couch where it lay, I was allowed to strum.
I have sometimes imagined that an early experience of death turns a soul toward art. Reading that Flannery O’Connor’s father died when she was young, I thought, yes, no wonder she gave herself to those remarkable fictions of loss and redemption. I realize this is simpleminded—no one claims such vocational causes when death marks the childhood of supermarket managers or auto mechanics. But it is my simplemindedness; in my story, death and art have run in tandem. Long after those years in England my mother, reminiscing, once said to me, “After Edith died I needed a baby, and you were there.” I think we fell into a silent reciprocity, she and I. In return for her renewed attentions, I set out to relieve her of her sorrow. I became her willing anodyne, and whatever talents I had in terms, say, of reading subtle signs of grief and pleasure, I gave over to that end. In retrospect at least, to see how my unconscious choice of that epigraph in Apollo’s mocking voice was followed so quickly by that dream leads me to wonder whether my adult attentions were not still bound up in that task, as if at this remove of years I still hoped that the exercise of my talents might somehow lift Edith’s soul from the grave and return it to sunny England with its lupines in spring and its young queen.
Surely the old sorrow of all this was present as I stood in the wind that evening, but I now think it was mixed as well with the sentimentality of a grown man still attached to the child’s grandiose mission even as he longs to be quit of it. The dream, at least, picks up the latter theme and elaborates it with a vengeance. The situation is adult, sexual (that beautiful throat), and I am in a lethal rage at the woman I have tried to help, as if when Orpheus walked into the sunlight and turned to look back at Eurydice it was not doubt that moved him, but resentment. Who is she to have made him charm old Charon with song, and pacify that three-headed dog guarding the distant shore? Who is she that he let his art be drawn into this hopeless enterprise? And yet to imagine this Orpheus-resentment is to dwell on the anger of the dream, and that seems the wrong tack, for the anger, after all, wakes me up. Some change of consciousness seems to be called for, some jump in the narrative. Perhaps there is resentment in the Orphic stories, but the makers of those stories knew a wider range of feeling than that. In the parallel Coyote story, when Coyote’s impulsiveness sends his wife’s spirit back to the Land of the Dead, the death spirit scolds him: “You inveterate doer of this kind of thing! … Only a short time away the human race is coming, but you have spoiled everything and established for them death as it is.” The makers of that story knew death as it is, not as we might wish it. They knew we live in Coyote’s world, where sexual impulse and mortality are one thing, not two. The dreamer who must wake from the dream in anger does not know this, for he has tried to do what Orpheus never did, what Coyote never did. Nor can that dreamer find a way out of the plot he’s put himself in, at least not so long as he stays inside his dream.
In the coal fields of West Virginia there are abandoned mines—their entrances long closed, the nearby towns long impoverished—that have caught on fire. These fires are impossible to put out; slowly they burn through the seams of coal, thirty or forty years. How wonderful if the writer of a book should happen on a topic with such longevity! At times he’ll wish he’d picked some simpler theme, something he could stripmine in a season, or something that would flash up and die down in a matter of months so that he could publish and get on. Get on with what, though? Better to be enveloped in a matter that darkly feeds itself with hidden fires; better not to know fully where the veins of fascination lead, but to trust that they will slowly give up their heat in recompense for attention paid. Certainly, in considering my topic again with these memories and reflections in mind, I find that they inform one another in several ways. For one thing, I realize that framing my project with Apollo’s voice indicates some confusion of purpose, for it was not Apollo, nor those above-it-all Muses, who drew me to this work, but a figure much more earthy. To feel the call of those lofty voices is to be drawn into their scorn, which means to turn against this world, where humans die the way they do. To respond is to hope once more that the dead might return. Small wonder, then, that trying to work out my themes had left me feeling sad and spent, for in my confusion I was working still on a task not really my own (it was my mother’s grief, not mine), and impossible besides.
