Chapter 34

 

In the moments preceding his death, Demetrius returned with detached lucidity to his childhood. As a boy, he lived in a small house beside a wide creek with high banks in the fold between two steep, forested hillsides. In springtime, leafless black trees dripped cold rain, and outcroppings of mottled stone emerged from fading caps of ice, and the snow that had blanketed the forest floor for months shrunk away to reveal pressed black leaf litter and the yawning rib cages and stitched, yellow skulls of winter-killed deer. Sometimes, when, boots heavy with mud, Demetrius wandered these thawing spaces or lingered over bones imagining their stories and thinking about life and death, the words of his father, who had burned to death in the factory when Demetrius was too young to cross the creek alone, would return to him. It was as if he could feel his father’s big, calloused hand once more, as the dead man warned him of springtime melt-water flash floods. They came all at once, with little warning, his father told him. There would be only a distant booming; then a wall of water would rage past, there and gone, taking things—and sometimes people—with it.

One spring midnight, Demetrius awoke to one of these floods passing in the darkness outside, thundering and roaring like the end of the world. The following morning, he stood at the edge of the creek and stared at the changes wrought by the passing waters. Streamside trees were snapped to stumps beneath palpable vacancies where once had towered oaks and sycamores of great size and incalculable age. Below these, further change in the creek itself, where disgorged stones, massive and monolithic, canted at strange angles like pagan gods of tribes long vanished, pediment now only to muddy banks laid raw, where pendulous roots hung half-revealed, like the emboweled secrets of the world.