you’re better than me at that. I like to watch you and see how you do it.”
“Do what?”
“How you take it. How you let Boggs whack away and you just take it.”
“I don’t understand.”
“I mean you’re smarter than me. You’re calm.”
My hands throbbed as I laid them against the ground to rise. I began circling in the blackness, feeling for my books.
“What’re you at?” he asked.
“My books.”
I heard him get up and enter the grass. I moved blindly a moment more, then felt something against my arm. He’d found them.
“You can see?” I said.
“Yes. I’m a born miner for it, huh?”
I took the books and staggered down the hill a little. I heard Thomas moving beside me. After a while his voice broke the black.
“Will you teach me how you can be that way?”
“What way?”
“How your blood can be so still.”
I kept walking in silence. The few town lights swelled closer.
He said: “If you can, I’ll teach you to see in darkness.”
THESE DAYS WERE THE FIRST IN WHICH AUTUMN TOUCHED ME WITH A sense of dying, as it has done ever since. On Sundays, free of work to witness some daylight, I found the sky boiling and oceanic. I stood on the ridge-top and looked to the mountain, dark clouds like monsters of froth teeming about the twin peaks—blackish brewing-place, thunder belching terribly. And as the weeks shrank and dimmed, declining toward the winter solstice, the hills stood greener and shapelier against the dark sky, eerily colorful. It seemed a morbid charade—the land’s last glimmer. At dusk the scintillating effect was peculiarly strong, yellow tree and emerald grass and russet earth: stupefying.
Thomas Motion and I went up to the flat ridge-top. We ambled east to see the tarnished mirror of the San Joaquin River below, its shine drowning slow under the dusk. To the west lay the humped valley of Clayton, Concord, Walnut Creek. South was Diablo—our Parnassus, looming and wigged in clouds.
We invited the blindness of night. Then night fell, hermetic and black. If a moon was up, a bank of cloud smothered it and at most I could see only imagined shapes.
I felt Thomas step away from me. “Watch!”
The rustle of movement. His body parting the black air beside me. A whisper of rock trodden upon. Then the sounds fading, the furrow of air closing again, and all was silent. Just a lowing wind and a dark sheet upon my eyes and the incalculable certainty of desertion.
Thomas walked with intuitive ease, without stopping or turning back. I was to follow.
“Eyes don’t open against the black till they got no other choice,” he had told me.
I stood alone on the ridge. I waited for form to come. But even in stillness: nothing. Only silence, thick and confounding as a riddle. I edged forward and strained to listen. Tried to trail the memory of Thomas’s withdrawing noise.
Each step threatened a void. Stubs of rock beneath my soles. Rock: the familiar crunch. Rock yet. Then grass, cool against my shins. I paused, unsure which way I faced, tried to remember back the seconds along my path of sound.
I decided to turn a quarter left; that would take me back. I shifted and stepped, but my cheek grazed something coarse. The bark of a tree. A tree? I turned again and stepped: the hiss of grass. Where was the crunching rock now?
For a long moment I stood mapping out the darkness like a foreigner. Finally I started again, hands out in front, creeping. In that blackness, distances stretched like dough. Yards unraveled from endless skeins.
Nothing but the sound of grass.
I stopped again and stood, listened, crept forward, strained to hear. Stood. Listened.
It seemed I spent long seasons alone in that blackness. Space stood open before me, unfenced and yet as impenetrable as a wall. Then I would get to fumbling in some bush or low-grown tree. In scattered intervals I heard scampering in the grass, the slinking of a skunk or coon, the tiny screams of bats.
Suddenly the earth sloped down, dropped away from my feet. In my mind the huge firmament unscrolled and I fell through that emptiness, my body cut loose of earth and tumbling up through air. With a step I was anchored again, that blind hollow behind me now. I tried to penetrate the darkness once more, listening.
Something thrashed in the field, momentarily growing louder, and Thomas tackled me from the darkness, threw me to the wet leaves.
“Too much trying, Witherow! You can’t try!” He dragged me up from the grass. “You have to move! You have to bolt like this!” His invisible fingers clamped cold over mine and he pulled me after him. I barreled across black earth—knees jarring as the ground leapt hard against my feet. Here and there the earth dropped into tiny craters and the wind burst from my lungs. Twigs lashed at my shoulders and neck as if the night itself had brandished claws.
“You have to travel! You can’t pause!”
“Thomas, wait!”
“Make yourself see it!”
He dragged me across a wide lake of nothing. I passed through envisioned trees. I tore my arms against brambles where I’d pictured only space.
Then, like fierce eyes opening in night’s face, the amber town lights winked below. Thomas released me. I could see him now, a flicker of darkness obscuring the light here and there. His voice was stark in the shadows, all its roughness embossed.
“So tomorrow you’ll teach me.”
“Yes.”
At that, I heard him careering down the hill away from me.
I stood a while in the dark after his sounds died out. I willed vision to come. But again there was nothing: only the moist brush of my own breath on my chin and neck. So I crept in blindness toward the lights burning below.
{4}
THOUGH OUR LIVES HINGED ON THE YIELD OF COAL, WE FOLKS OF Nortonville were really a people of shale and sandstone and lime. Geology is important. One can hardly know of what stuff he’s composed if he doesn’t know what’s underfoot. Was it one of the Concord philosophers who stated that the greatest achievements of civilization correlate directly to the areas with the most abundant deposits of lime?
In Nortonville, the high ridge to the south was a thick spine of sandstone. And our declivitous valley walls were monsters of Cretaceous shale, risen long ago from the floor of the sea. They plunged down to our very doorsteps from all sides, buckling into furrows and ravines. Only beneath these hills, shelled up amidst tilting strata of sandstone and lime, were our black
