a tree. I waited until I had no more tears, until my vision cleared.
This would be the last I saw of the house in which I was born and thus far raised. I wanted to watch the twilight begin to harden into darkness around those walls, to see lamplight bloom in the windows.
On those days when the sight of me had most troubled Mother, I had roamed the woods until dusk and had either slept in the yard or, on cold nights, in a most comfortable sleeping bag in the ramshackle detached garage. She always left a small hamper of food for me on the front seat of her Ford, and when banished I ate dinner at twilight, watching the house from a distance, because it pleased me so much to see the windows suddenly blush with warm light and to know that, in my absence, she must be at peace.
Now again, as the black of a starless night mantled the small house, as the wind died with the day and a hush settled over the woods, light came to the windows. Those glowing panes reliably evoked in me a most satisfying sense of home and safety and comfort. When I was welcome inside, however, the quality of the same light, seen from within, was not as golden and as stirring as when seen from without.
I should have left then, should have followed the narrow dirt track out to the distant county blacktop, but I delayed. At first, I hoped to see her pass a window, to get one last glimpse of this woman to whom I owed my existence. When an hour passed, then two, I admitted to myself that in truth I didn’t know what to do, where to go, that I was lost here at the edge of the woods as I had never been lost far deeper in the wilderness.
The front door opened, the subtle protest of the hinges carrying clearly to me in the stillness, and my mother stepped onto the porch, backlighted, a mere silhouette. I thought that she might call out to me, hoping I was still nearby, that she might say she loved me more than she feared me and that she’d had second thoughts about sending me away.
But then I saw the shotgun. The pistol-grip pump-action 12-gauge was always loaded in anticipation of unwelcome visitors whom she never named; she called the weapon her insurance policy. She was not holding it casually, but in both hands and at the ready, the muzzle toward the porch ceiling, as she surveyed the night. I assumed she suspected me of lingering and that with this display she intended to convince me that my banishment was final.
I felt ashamed of myself for not honoring her wishes without delay. Yet when she returned to the house and closed the door, I remained in the perimeter of the forest, still unable to make myself set out upon my journey.
Perhaps half an hour passed before the shotgun roared. Even muffled by the walls of the house, the blast was loud in the quiet of the mountain.
At first I thought that someone must have forced his way through the back door or through a window beyond my line of sight, because Mother often spoke of enemies and of her determination to live where they could never find her. I thrashed through the low brush, into the yard, and ran halfway to the house before I realized that no intruder lay wounded or dead in there, no enemy but her worst one, which was herself.
If my death could have brought her back to life, I would have died there in the yard.
I thought that I ought to go inside. She might be only wounded, and in need of help.
But I didn’t return to the house. I knew my mother well. When it was important to her that some task be done, she put all her mind and heart into it, and she accomplished what she set out to do. She neither made mistakes nor took half measures.
How long I stood in the yard, in the dark, in the after-shotgun quiet, I do not know.
Later, I discovered that I was on my knees.
I don’t recall leaving. I realized that I was walking along the dirt lane only a minute before it led me to the blacktop county road.
Shortly after dawn, I took refuge in a dilapidated barn on an abandoned farm, where the house had burned down and had never been rebuilt. Mice were the rightful tenants of the barn, but they were not too frightened of me, and I assured them that I meant to stay only a few hours.
Mother had included the essentials in the backpack, but also a half dozen chocolate-pecan cookies that she had made herself and that were my favorite.
ON FOOT BENEATH THE CITY, I ARRIVED AT AN intersection where abruptly a rumble rose, the underground thunder of a train, which was the only utility routed deeper than the storm drains. On the rare occasions when a section of the subway flooded, water was pumped up to these tunnels. Before the turn of the millennium, they had pumped it to the sewer lines; but a calamitous backflow once gushed filth through two miles of the subway, requiring weeks of decontamination by hazmat teams, and the existing design was reconsidered.
A city is half beast and half machine, with arteries of fresh water and veins of foul, nerves of telephone and electrical cables, sewer lines for bowels, pipes full of pressurized steam and others carrying gas, valves and fans and filters and meters and motors and transformers and tens of thousands of interlinked computers, and though its people sleep, the city never does.
The city nurtured me and provided me with a secret haven for which I was grateful, but I continued to be a little distrustful of it, and sometimes afraid. Logic insisted that, in spite of its intricacy, the city was only an accumulation of things, buildings and machines and systems, that could not develop an awareness or intent. Yet often it seemed that, though I remained unknown to the people of this place, I was known by the city itself, and watched.
If a city had a life separate from its citizens, then it must have a capacity for both kindness and cruelty. As a creation of men and women, it surely shared their evils as well as their virtues.
The rumble of the train passed away beneath my feet, and beyond the intersection of enormous drains, I turned left into a tributary that sloped upward more than the main tunnel. The passageway lacked elevated service walks, and its dimensions required me to proceed a considerable distance with shoulders hunched and head bowed.
I was so familiar with these subterranean avenues and alleys, I might have found my way without the flashlight. But although I ventured out only at night and lived days in the depths, I was born for light and yearned for more of it than my circumstances allowed.
I came to an open cove in the right-hand drain wall, like half of a cylinder, made of curved concrete blocks. It was five feet in diameter, seven feet high, rather like what you’d find if you took the cover off a manhole, except that a manhole was deeper, wasn’t open on one side, and remained accessible only through the top.
Overhead, a heavy iron lid featured a recessed nut along the perimeter. From my backpack, I removed the one tool it contained: a foot-long iron rod with a T handle at one end and something like a socket wrench at the other. When this gate key engaged the nut and turned it, a rim latch in the lid retracted from the manhole frame, allowing me to push upward, swinging that cover open on its hinges.
My father’s father had appropriated that tool from a street-department truck years before his death. That gate key was the most precious thing I owned. Most of the freedom of movement I enjoyed, such as it was, would be lost if that tool was lost.
After returning the gate key to a zippered compartment of my backpack, I held the flashlight in my teeth, grabbed the frame of the manhole, and drew myself through the open lid and into the basement of the city’s central library. All was silent, as should be the case in such a place, the air dry but not arid, cool but not cold.
