FIELD EVENTS

But the young one, the man, as if he were the son of a neck and a nun: taut and powerfully filled with muscles and innocence.

— RILKE, “The Fifth Elegy”

It was summer, and the two brothers had been down on a gravel bar washing their car and sponges when the big man came around the bend, swimming upstream, doing the butterfly stroke. He was pulling a canoe behind him, and it was loaded with darkened cast-iron statues. The brothers, John and Jerry, had hidden behind a rock and watched as the big man leapt free of the water with each sweep of his arms, arching into the air like a fish and then crashing back down into the rapids, lunging his way up the river, with the canoe following him.

The brothers thought they’d hidden before the big man had spotted them — how could he have known they were there? — but he altered his course slightly as he drew closer, until he was swimming straight for the big rock they were hiding behind. When it became apparent he was heading for them, they stepped out from behind the rock, a bit embarrassed at having hidden. It was the Sacandaga River, which ran past the brothers’ town, Glens Falls, in northeastern New York.

The brothers were strength men themselves, discus throwers and shot-putters, but even so, they were unprepared for the size of the man as he emerged from the water, dripping and completely naked save for the rope around his waist, which the canoe was tied to.

Jerry, the younger — eighteen that summer — said, “Lose your briefs in the rapids?”

The big man smiled, looked down, and quivered like a dog, shaking the water free one leg at a time, one arm at a time. The brothers had seen big men in the gym before, but they’d never seen anyone like this.

With the canoe still tied around his waist, and the rope still tight as the current tried to sweep the ironladen canoe downstream, the big man crouched and with a stick drew a map in the sand of where he lived in Vermont, about fifteen miles upstream. The rapids surged against the stationary canoe, crashed water over the bow as it bobbed in place, and the brothers saw the big man tensing against the pull of the river, saw him lean forward to keep from being drawn back in. Scratching in the sand with that stick. Two miles over the state line. An old farmhouse.

Then the man stood, said goodbye, and waded back into the shallows, holding the rope taut in his hands to keep from being dragged in. When he was in up to his knees he dived, angled out toward the center, and once more began breast-stroking up the river, turning his head every now and again to look back at the brothers with cold, curious eyes, like those of a raven, or a fish.

The brothers tried to follow, running along the rocky, brushy shore, calling for the big man to stop, but he continued slowly upriver, swimming hard against the crashing, funneled tongue of rapids, lifting up and over them and back down among them, lifting like a giant bat or manta ray. He swam up through a narrow canyon and left them behind.

At home in bed that night, each brother looked up at the ceiling in his room and tried to sleep. Each could feel his heart thrashing around in his chest. The brothers knew that the big man was up to something, something massive.

The wild beating in the brothers’ hearts would not stop. They got up and met, as if by plan, in the kitchen for a beer, a sandwich. They ate almost constantly, always trying to build more muscle. Sometimes they acted like twins, thought the same thing at the same time. It was a warm night, past midnight, and when they had finished their snack, they got the tape measure and checked to see if their arms had gotten larger. And because the measurements were unchanged, they each fixed another sandwich, ate them, measured again. No change.

“It’s funny how it works,” said John. “How it takes such a long time.”

“No shit, Sherlock,” said Jerry. He slapped his flat belly and yawned.

Neither of them had mentioned the big man in the rapids. All day they’d held it like a secret, cautious of what might happen if they discussed it. Feeling that they might chase him away, that they might make it be as if he had never happened.

They went outside and stood in the middle of the street under a streetlamp and looked around like watch-dogs, trying to understand why their hearts were racing.

So young! So young!

They drove an old blue Volkswagen beetle. When the excitement of the night and of their strength and youth was too much, they would pick up the automobile from either end like porters, or pallbearers, and try to carry it around the block, for exercise, without having to stop and set it down and rest. But that night, the brothers’ hearts were running too fast just to walk the car. They lay down beneath the trees in the cool grass in their back yard and listened to the wind that blew from the mountains on the other side of the river. Sometimes the brothers would go wake their sisters, Lory and Lindsay, and bring them outside into the night. The four of them would sit under the largest tree and tell stories or plan things.

Their father was named Heck, and their mother, Louella. Heck was the principal of the local school. Lory was thirty-four, a teacher, and beautiful: she was tiny, black-haired, with a quick, high laugh not unlike the outburst of a loon. Despite her smallness, her breasts were overly large, to the point that they were the first thing people noticed about her, and continued noticing about her. She tried always to keep moving when around new people, tried with her loon’s laugh and her high-energy, almost manic actress’s gestures to shift the focus back to her, not her breasts, but it was hard, and tiring. She had long, sweeping eyelashes, but not much of a chin. The reason Lory still lived at home was that she loved her family and simply could not leave. Lindsay was sixteen, but already half a foot taller than Lory. She was red-headed, freckled, had wide shoulders, and played field, hockey; the brothers called her Lindsay the Red.

Lory was not allowed to work at the school where her father was principal, so she taught in a little mountain town called Warrensburg, about thirty miles north. She hated the job. The children had no respect for her, no love; they drank and died in fiery crashes, or were abused by their parents, or got cancer — they had no luck. Lory’s last name, her family’s name, was Iron, and one night the boys at her school had scratched with knives onto every desktop the words “I fucked Miss Iron.” Sometimes the boys touched her from behind when she was walking in the crowded halls.

The night the brothers’ hearts beat so wildly, they lay in the grass for a while and then went and got their sisters. Lory was barely able to come out of her sleep but followed the brothers anyway, holding Jerry’s hand as if sleepwalking. She sat down with her back against the largest tree and dozed in and out, still exhausted from the school year. Lindsay, though, was wide awake, and sat cross-legged, leaning forward, listening.

“We went down to the river today,” John said, plucking at stems of grass, putting them in his mouth and chewing on them for their sweetness, like a cow grazing. Jerry was doing hurdler’s stretches, had one leg extended in front of him. There was no moon, only stars through the trees.

“Summer,” mumbled Lory in her half sleep. Often she talked in her sleep and had nightmares.

“Who was your first lover?” Jerry asked her, grinning, speaking in a low voice, trying to trick her.

Lindsay covered her sister’s ears and whispered, “Lory, no! Wake up! Don’t say it!”

The brothers were overprotective of Lory, even though she was the oldest and hadn’t had any boyfriends for a long time.

“Michael,” Lory mumbled uncomfortably. “No, no, Arthur. No, wait, Richard, William? No — Mack, no, Jerome, Atticus, no, that Caster boy — no, wait…”

Slowly Lory opened her eyes, smiling at Jerry. “Got you,” she said.

Jerry shrugged, embarrassed. “I just want to protect you.”

Lory looked at him with sleepy, narrowed eyes. “Right.”

They were silent for a moment, then John said, “We saw this big man today. He was pulling a boat. He was really pulling it.” John wanted to say more, but didn’t dare. He reached down and plucked a blade of night grass. They sat there in the moon shadows, a family, wide awake while the rest of the town slept.

·

They waited a week, almost as if they had tired or depleted the big man, and as if they were now letting him gather back his whole self. John and Jerry went to the rapids every day to check on the map in the sand, and when it had finally begun to blur, almost to the point of disappearing, they realized they had to go find him soon, or risk never seeing him again.

Lindsay drove, though she did not yet have her license, and John sat in the front with her and told her the directions, navigating from memory. (To have transcribed the map onto paper, even onto a napkin, would also somehow have run the risk of depleting or diminishing the big man, if he was still out there.) Jerry sat in the back seat, wearing sunglasses like a movie star and sipping a high-protein milk shake. John’s strength in the discus was his simple brute power, while Jerry’s strength — he was five years younger and sixty pounds lighter — was his speed.

“Right!” Jerry cried every time John gave Lindsay the correct instructions. In his mind, Jerry could see the map as clear as anything, and when John gave Lindsay a bad piece of advice — a left turn, say, instead of a right — Jerry would shout out “Wrong! — Braaapp! Sham-bama-LOOM!”

There were so many turns to the road: up and over hills, across small green valleys, around a lake and down sun-dappled lanes, as if passing through tunnels — from shade to sun, shade to sun, with wooden bridges clattering beneath them, until Lindsay was sure they were lost. But Jerry, in the back seat, kept smiling, his face content behind the dark glasses, and John was confident, too. The closer they got to the big man, the more they could tell he was out there.

The road had crossed over the border into Vermont, and turned to gravel. It followed a small creek for a stretch, and the brothers wondered if this creek flowed into the Sacandaga, if the big man had swum all the way upstream before turning into this side creek, to make his way home. It looked like the creek he had drawn on his map in the sand.

Blackbirds flew up out of the marsh reeds along either side of them. They could feel him getting closer. There was very much the sense that they were hunting him, that they had to somehow capture him.

Then they saw him in a pasture. A large two-story stone house stood at the end of the pasture, like a castle, with the creek passing by out front, the creek shaded by elm and maple trees, and giant elms that had somehow, in this one small area, avoided or been immune to the century’s blight. The pasture was deep with rich green summer hay, and they saw a few cows, Holsteins, grazing there.

Again, the man wasn’t wearing anything, and he had one of the cows on his back. He was running through the tall grass with it, leaping sometimes, doing jetés and awkward but heartfelt pirouettes with the sagging cow draped across his wide shoulders. He had thick legs that jiggled as he ran, and he looked happy, as happy as they had ever seen anyone look. The rest of the cattle stood in front of the old house, grazing and watching without much interest.

“Jiminy,” said Lindsay.

“Let’s get him,” said John, the strongest. “Let’s wait until he goes to sleep and then tie him up and bring him home.”

“We’ll teach him to throw the discus,” said Jerry.

“If he doesn’t want to throw the discus, we’ll let him go,” said John. “We won’t force him to.”

“Right,” said Jerry.

But force wasn’t necessary. John and Jerry went into the field after him, warily, and he stopped spinning and shook hands with them. Lindsay stayed in the car, wanting to look away but unable to; she watched the man’s face, watched the cow on his back. The cow had a placid but somehow engaged look on its face, as if it were just beginning to awaken to the realization that it was aloft.

The big man grinned and put the cow back on the ground. He told them that he had never thrown the discus, had never even seen it done, but would like to try, if that was what they wanted him to do. He left them and went into the stone house for a pair of jeans and tennis shoes and a white T-shirt. When he came back out, dressed, he looked even larger.

He was too big to fit into the car — he was as tall as John but thirty pounds heavier, and built of rock-slab muscle — so he rode standing on the back bumper, grinning, with the wind blowing his long, already thinning hair back behind him. The big man’s face was young, his skin smooth and tanned.

“My name’s A.C.!” he shouted to them as they puttered down the road. Lindsay leaned her head out the window and looked back at him, wanting to make sure he was all right. The little car’s engine shuddered and shook beneath him, trying to manage the strain. The back bumper scraped the road.

“I’m Lindsay!” she shouted. “John’s driving! Jerry’s not!”

Her hair swirled around her, a nest of red. She knew what Lory would say. Her sister thought that all the muscle on her brothers was froufrou, adornment, and unnecessary. Lindsay hoped that Lory would change her mind.

“Lindsay, get back in the car!” John shouted, looking in the rear-view mirror. But she couldn’t hear him. She was leaning farther out the window, reaching for A.C.’s wrist, and then higher, gripping his thick arm.

“She’s mad,” Jerry howled, disbelieving. “She’s lost her mind.”

A.C. grinned and held on to the car’s roof, taking the bumps with his legs.

·

When they drove up to their house, Lory had awakened from her nap and was sitting on the picnic table in her shorts and a T-shirt, drinking from a bottle of red wine. She burst into laughter when she saw them approach with A.C. riding the back bumper as if he had hijacked them.

“Three peas in a pod,” she cried. She danced down from the table and out to the driveway to meet him, to shake his hand.

It was as if there were three brothers.

From the kitchen window, Louella watched, horrified. The huge young man in the front yard was not hers. He might think he was, and everyone else might too, but he wasn’t. She stopped drying dishes and was alarmed at the size of him, standing there among her children, shaking hands, moving around in their midst. She had had one miscarriage, twenty years ago. This man could have been that child, could even have been that comeback soul.

Louella felt the blood draining from her face and thought she was dying. She fell to the kitchen floor in a faint, breaking the coffee cup she was drying.

It was the end of June. Fields and pastures all over the Hudson Valley were green. She had been worrying about Lory’s sadness all through the fall and winter, on through the rains and melting snows of spring, and even now, into the ease of green summer.

Louella sat up groggily and adjusted her glasses. When she went outside to meet A.C., she could no longer say for sure whether she knew him or not; there was a moment’s hesitancy.

She looked hard into his eyes, dried her hands on her apron, and reached out and shook his big hand. She was swayed by her children’s happiness. There was a late-day breeze. A hummingbird dipped at the nectar feeder on the back porch. She let him come into their house.

“We’re going to teach A.C. how to throw the discus,” said Jerry.

“Thrilling,” said Lory.

·

He had supper with the family, and they all played Monopoly that evening. Louella asked A.C. where he was from and what he did, but he would only smile and say that he was here to throw the discus. He wasn’t rude, he simply wouldn’t tell her where he was from. It was almost as if he did not know, or did not understand the question.

They played Monopoly until it was time for bed. The brothers took him for a walk through the neighborhood and on into town. They stopped to pick up people’s cars occasionally, the three of them lifting together.

There was a statue of Nathan Hale in the town square, and, drunk on the new moon, drunk with his new friends, A.C. waded through the shrubbery, crouched below the statue, and gave the cold metal a bear hug. He began twisting back and forth, pulling the statue from the ground, groaning, squeezing and lifting with his back and legs, his face turning redder and redder, rocking until he finally worked it loose. He stood up with it, sweating, grinning, holding it against his chest as if it were a dance partner, or a dressmaker’s dummy.

They walked home after that, taking turns carrying the statue on their backs, and snuck it into Lory’s room and stood it in the corner by the door, so that it blocked her exit. It still smelled of fresh earth and crushed flowers. Lory was a sound sleeper, plunging into unconsciousness as an escape at every opportunity, and she never heard them.

Then A.C. went downstairs to the basement and rested, lying on a cot, looking up at the ceiling with his hands behind his head. John and Jerry stayed in the kitchen, drinking beer.

“Do you think it will happen?” Jerry asked.

John was looking out the window at the garden. “I hope so,” he said. “I think it would be good for her.” He finished his beer. “Maybe we shouldn’t think about it, though. It might be wrong.”

“Well,” said Jerry, sitting down as if to think about it himself, “maybe so.”

John was still looking out the window. “But who cares?” he said. He looked at Jerry.

“This guy’s okay,” said Jerry. “This one’s good.”

“But do you think he can throw the discus?”

“I don’t know,” Jerry said. “But I want you to go find some more statues for him. I liked that.”

·

That first night at the Irons’ house, A.C. thought about John and Jerry, about how excited he had been to see them walking up to him. He considered how they looked at each other sometimes when they were talking. They always seemed to agree.

Then he thought about John’s hair, black and short, and about his heavy beard. And Jerry, he seemed so young with his green eyes. His hair was blond and curly. A.C. liked the way Jerry leaned forward slightly and narrowed his eyes, grinning, when he talked. Jerry seemed excited about almost anything, everything, and excited to be with his older brother, following him down the same path.

Later, A.C. got up from his cot — he’d been sleeping among punching bags and exercise bikes, with dumbbells and barbells scattered about like toys — and went quietly up the stairs, past Lindsay’s room, through the kitchen, and into the living room.

He sat down on the couch and looked out the big front window at the moon and clouds as if watching a play. He stayed there for a long time, occasionally dozing off for a few minutes. At around four in the morning he awoke to find Lory standing in front of him, blocking the moon. She was dark, with the moon behind her lighting only the edge of one side of her face. He could see her eyelashes on that one side. She was studying him almost the way Louella had.

“Look,” he said, and pointed behind her.

The clouds were moving past the moon in fast-running streams, like tidal currents, eddying, it seemed, all to the same place, all hurrying by as if late to some event.

“What is that statue doing in my room?” Lory asked. She was whispering, and he thought her voice was beautiful. A.C. hoped he could be her friend too, as he’d become a friend of her brothers. He looked at the moon, a mottled disc.

“Do you want to sit down?” he asked. He patted the side of the couch next to him.

Slowly she did, and then, after a few seconds, she leaned into his shoulder and put her head against it. She put both her hands on his arm and held on.

After a while, A.C. lifted her into his lap, holding her in both arms as if she were a small child, and slowly he rocked her. She curled against him as tightly as she could, and he rocked her like that, watching her watch him, until dawn.

When it got light, she reached up and kissed him quickly, touching his face with her hands, and got out of his lap and hurried into the kitchen to fix coffee before anyone else was up. A few minutes later, Louella appeared in the living room, sleepy-eyed, shuffling, wearing a faded blue flannel robe and old slippers, holding the paper. She almost stepped on A.C.’s big feet. She stopped, surprised to see him up so early, and in her living room. He stood up and said, “Good morning,” and she smiled in spite of herself.

Around eight o’clock John and Jerry got up, and they chased each other into the kitchen, playing some advanced form of tag. The lighter, faster Jerry stayed just ahead of John, leaping over the coffee table, spinning, tossing a footstool into his path for John to trip over. Lory shrieked, spilled some milk from the carton she was holding, and Louella shouted at them to stop it, tried to look stern, but was made young again by all the motion, and secretly loved it — and A.C., having come meekly in from the living room, stood back and smiled. Louella glanced over at him and saw. him smiling, looking at the brothers, and she thought again of how eerie the fit was, of how he seemed to glide into all the right spots and stand in exactly the right places. It was as if he had been with them all along — or even stranger, it was as if he were some sort of weight or stone placed on a scale that better balanced them now.

After breakfast — a dozen eggs each, some cantaloupes, a pound of sausage split among them, a gallon of milk, and a couple of plates of pancakes — the brothers went out to their car and tossed all their throwing equipment in it — tape measure, discs, throwing shoes — and they leaned the driver’s seat forward so that A.C. could get in the back, but still he wouldn’t fit.

He rode standing on the bumper again.. They drove to the school, to the high, windy field where they threw. From there it seemed they could see the whole Hudson Valley and the knife-cut through the trees where the river rushed, the Sacandaga melting through the mountains, and on the other side the green walls of the Adirondacks.. A.C. looked around at the new town as they drove. He thought about Lory, about how soft and light she’d been in his arms, and of how he’d been frightened by her. Riding on the back of the tiny car reminded him of being in the river, swimming up through the rapids: all that rushing force, relentless, crashing down over and around him, speeding past. Things were going by so fast. He looked around and felt dizzy at the beauty of the town.

·

There was a ring in the center of the field, a flat, smooth, unpainted circle of cement, and that was where the brothers and A.C. set their things and began to dress. The brothers sat down like bears in a zoo and took their street shoes off. As they laced up their heavy leather throwing shoes, stretching and grasping their toes, they looked out at the wire fence running along the south end of the field, which was the point they tried to reach with their throws.

A.C. put his shoes on, too, the ones they had given him, and stood up .. He felt how solid the earth was beneath him. His legs were dense and strong, and he kicked the ground a. couple of times with the heavy shoes. A.C. imagined that he could feel the earth shudder when he kicked. He jumped up and down a couple of times, short little hops, just to feel the shudder again.

“I hope you like this,” said Jerry, still stretching, twisting his body into further unrecognizable shapes and positions. He was loosening up, his movements fluid, and to A.C. it was exactly like watching the river.

A. C. sat down next to them and tried to do some of the stretches, but it didn’t work for him yet. He watched them for half an hour, as the blue air over the mountains and valley waned, turning to a sweet haze, a slow sort of shimmer that told A.C. it was June. Jerry was the one he most liked to watch.

Jerry would crouch in the ring, twisted — wound up — with his eyes dosed, his mouth open, and the disc hanging back, hanging low, his knees bent. When he began to spin, it was as if some magical force were being born, something that no other force on earth would be able to stop.

He stayed in the small circle, hopping from one foot to the other, crouched low, but with the hint of rising, and then he was suddenly at the other end of the small ring, out of room — if he went over the little wooden curb and into the grass, it would be a foul — and with no time or space left in which to spin, he shouted, brought his arm all the way around on the spin, his elbow locking straight out as he released the disc, and only then did the rest of his body react, starting with his head; it snapped back and then forward from the recoil, as if he’d first made the throw and then had a massive heart attack.

“Wow,” said A.C., watching him unwind and recover and return, surprisingly, to a normal upright human being.

But John and Jerry were watching the disc. It was moving so fast. There was a heavy, cutting sound when it landed, far short of the fence, and it skidded a few feet after that and then stopped, as if it had never been moving.

·

Jerry threw two more times — they owned only three discs — and then the three of them, walking like gunslingers, like giants from another age, went out to get the discs. The brothers talked about the throws: what Jerry had done right, and what he had done wrong. His foot position had been a little off on the first throw. He hadn’t kept his head back far enough going into the spin of the second throw. The third throw had been pretty good; on the bounce, it had carried to the chain-link fence.

John threw next, and then Jerry again, and then it was John’s turn once again. A.C. thought he could do it himself. Certainly that whip-spin dance, skip, hurl, and shout was a thing that was in everyone. It had to be the same way he felt when he picked up a cow and spun through the tall grass, holding it on his shoulders. When it was his turn to throw the discus, he tried to remember that, and he stepped into the ring, huffing.

A.C.’s first throw slammed into the center of the head-high fence and shook it. John and Jerry looked at each other, trying not to feel amazed. It was what they had thought from the beginning, after all; it was as if he had always been with them.

But A.C.’s form was spastic. It was wrong, it was nothing. He threw with his arms and shoulders — not with his legs, and not with the twist of his wide back. If he could get the spin down, the dance, he would throw it 300 feet. He would be able to throw it the length of a football field. In the discus, even 230 feet was immortality.

Again, the brothers found themselves feeling that there was a danger of losing him — of having him disappear if they did or said the wrong thing, if they were not true and honest.

But the way he could throw a discus! It was as if their hearts had created him. He was all strength, no finesse. They were sure they could teach him the spin-dance. The amazing thing about a bad spin, as opposed to a good one, is how ugly it looks. A good spin excites the spectators, touches them all the way down and through, makes them wish they could do it — or even more, makes them feel as if they had done it, somehow. But a bad throw is like watching a devil monster changeling being born into the world; just one more awful thing in a world of too many, and even spectators who do not know much about the sport will turn their heads away, even before the throw is completed, when they see an awkward spin. A.C.’s was, John and Jerry had to admit, the ugliest of the ugly.

His next throw went over the fence. The one after that — before they realized what was happening, or realized it too late, as it was in the air, climbing, moving faster than any of their throws had ever gone — rose, gliding, and hit the base of the school. There was a crack! and the disc exploded into graphite shards. One second it was there, flying and heroic, and then it was nothing, just an echo.

“A hundred and ten bucks,” Jerry said, but John cared nothing for the inconvenience it would bring them, being down to two discs, and he danced and whooped, spun around and threw imaginary discs, waved his arms and continued to jump up and down. He danced with Jerry, and then he grabbed A.C.

“If you can learn the steps ...” John was saying, almost singing. The three men held one another’s shoulders and danced and spun across the field like children playing snap-the-whip. John and Jerry had never seen a discus thrown that far in their lives, and A.C., though he had felt nothing special, was happy because his new friends were happy, and he hoped he could make them happy again.

Riding home on the back bumper, the air cooling his summer-damp hair and clothes, he leaned against the car and hugged it like a small child, and watched the town going past in reverse now, headed back to the Irons’ house, and he hoped that maybe he could make them happy forever.

The brothers bragged about him when they got home, and everyone listened, and like John and Jerry they were half surprised, but they also felt that it confirmed something, and so that part of them was anything but surprised.

John was dating a schoolteacher named Patty. A shyeyed Norwegian, she was as tall as he was, with freckles and a slow-spreading smile. A.C. grinned just watching her, and when she saw A.C., she would laugh for no real reason, just a happy laugh. Once when John and Jerry had gone to their rooms to nap, A.C. went outside with Lindsay and Patty to practice field hockey.

A.C. had never played any formal sports and was thrilled to be racing across the lawn, dodging the trees and the women, passing the ball along clumsily but quickly. Patty’s laughs, Lindsay’s red hair. If only he could live forever with this. He ran and ran, barefoot, back and forth in the large front yard, and they laughed all afternoon.

·

On the nights when A.C. did not stay with the family, he returned to the old stone house in Vermont. Some days he would swim all the way home, starting upstream at dusk and going on into the night — turning right where the little creek entered the Sacandaga, with fish bumping into his body and jumping around him as if a giant shark had passed through. But other nights he canoed home against the rapids, having loaded boulders into the bottom of the canoe to work his shoulders and arms harder. After he got home, he tied the canoe to the low branch of a willow, leaving it bobbing in the current.

Some nights in the farmhouse, A.C. would tie a rope around his waist and chest, attach the other end of it to one of the rafters, and climb up into the rafters and leap down, swinging like a pirate. He’d hang there, dangling in the darkness. He’d hold his arms and legs out as he spun around and around, and it would feel as if he were sinking, descending, and as if it would never stop.

He would tell no one where he had come from. And he would forget the woman in Colorado, the one he was supposed to have married. Everyone comes from somewhere. Everyone has made mistakes, has caused injuries, even havoc. The woman had killed herself after A.C. left her; she had hanged herself.

This is what it’s like, he’d think. This is the difference between being alive and being dead. He’d hang from the rope and spin. This is the only difference, but it’s so big.

Sometimes he would sleep all night dangling from the rafters: spinning, a bit frightened, hanging like a question mark, only to awaken each morning as the sun’s first light filtered through the dusty east windows. The sound of the creek running past just out front, the creek that led into the river.

·

There were mornings when Lory was afraid to get up. She thought it was just common depression and that it would pass with time, but some days it seemed too much. She slept as much as she could, which seemed to make it worse and worse. She tried to keep it a secret from her family, but she suspected that her brothers knew, and her mother, too. It was like drowning, like going down in chains. And she felt guilty about the anguish it would cause others.

But her brothers! They anchored her and nourished her, they were like water passing through her gills. If they came down the hall and found her just sitting in the hallway, her head down between her knees, they — John or Jerry, or sometimes both of them — would gently pick her up and carry her outside to the yard, into the sun, and would rub her back and neck. Jerry would pretend to be a masseur with a foreign accent, would crack Lory’s knuckles one by one, counting to ten some days in German, others in Spanish or French, mixing the languages to keep her guessing, to make her pay attention. Then he would start on her toes as John continued to knead her neck muscles and her small, strong shoulders.

“Uno, dos, trey,” Jerry would hiss, wiggling her toes. He’d make up numbers. “Petrocci, zimbosi, bambolini, crunk!” he’d mutter, and then, “The little pig, he went to the market. He wanted beef — he wanted roast beef… ”

He’d keep singing nonsense, keep teasing her until she smiled or laughed, until he had her attention, until he’d pulled her out of that well of sadness and numbness, and he’d shake his finger at her and say, “Pay attention!” She’d smile, back in her family’s arms again, and be amazed that Jerry was only eighteen, but knew so much.

They would lie in the grass afterward and look up at the trees, at the way the light came down, and Lory would have the thought, whenever she was happy, that this was the way she really was, the way things could always be, and that that flat, vacant stretch of nothing-feeling was the aberration, not the norm; and she wanted it always to be like that, and still, even at thirty-four, believed that it could be.

When they were sure she was better, one of the brothers would walk to the nearest tree and wrap his arms around it, would grunt and lean hard against it, and then would begin to shake it until leaves began to fall. Lory would laugh and look up as they landed on her face and in her hair, and she would not pull them out of her hair, for they were a gift, and still John or Jerry would keep shaking the tree, as if trying to cover her with the green summer leaves, the explosion of life.

·

A.C. and the brothers trained every day. When A.C. stayed at the farmhouse, each morning shortly before daylight he would get in his canoe and float all the way to Glens Falls, not ever having to paddle — just ruddering. As if following veins or arteries, he took all the right turns with only a flex of his wrist, a slight change of the paddle’s orientation in the water, and he passed beneath dappled maples, flaking sycamores, listening to the cries of river birds and the sounds of summer as he slipped into the town.

Besides hurling the discus outside near the school, the brothers lifted weights in the school’s basement and went for long runs on the track. Each had his own goal, and each wanted A.C. to throw the unspeakable 300 feet. It would be a throw so far that the discus would vanish from sight.

No one believed it could be done. Only the brothers believed it. A.C. was not even sure he himself believed it. Sometimes he fell down when entering his spin, trying to emulate their grace, their precision-polished whip-and-spin and the clean release, like a birth, the discus flying wild and free into the world.

In the evenings the whole family would sit around in the den watching M*A*S*H or the movie of the week — Conan the Barbarian once — their father, Heck, sipping his gin and tonic, fresh-squeezed lime in with the ice, sitting in the big easy chair watching his huge sons sprawled on the rug, with their huge friend lying next to them. Lindsay would sit in the corner, watching only parts of the movie, spending more time watching Lory — and Lory, next to her mother on the couch, would sway a bit to her own internal rhythm, smiling, looking at the TV screen but occasionally at the brothers, and at A.C.

The nights that A.C. stayed over, Lory made sure that he had a pillow and fresh sheets. Making love to him was somehow unimaginable, and also the greatest thought of all; and he had this silly throw to make first, this long throw with the brothers.

Lovemaking was unthinkable — the waist-to-waist kind, anyway. If she gambled on it and lost, she would chase him away from the brothers as well as herself.

The idea was unthinkable. But each night she and A.C. would meet upstairs in the dark, or sit on the couch in the living room, dozing that way, with Lory in his arms, curled up in his lap, her head resting against his wide chest. That was not unimaginable.

A.C. trained all through the summer. Early in the evenings, sometimes the brothers went out looking for statues with him. Their back yard was becoming filled with statues, all of them upright just outside Lory’s and Lindsay’s windows. A.C. laid them down in the grass at daylight and covered them with tarps, but raised them again near sundown: long-ago generals, riverboat captains, composers, poets.

Louella kept her eye on him, suspecting, and believing in her heart, that he was the soul of her lost son come back in this huge body, come home finally. She did not want him to love Lory — it seemed that already he was too close — but she did not want him to go away, either. Louella watched A.C. carefully, when he could not see she was watching him. What would it have been like to have three sons? What would that third son have been like? She felt both the sweetness and the anguish of it. She could not look away.

·

He had not been so happy in a long time. He was still throwing clumsily, but the discus was going farther and farther: 250, 255 feet; and then 260.

Each was a world-record throw, but the brothers did not tell A.C. this. They told no one else, either. It was the brothers’ plot to not show him off until he was consistently throwing the astonishing 300 feet. Perhaps A.C.’s first public throw of the discus would not only set a world’s record; perhaps he’d hurl it so great a distance that no one would believe he was from this earth. Sportswriters and fans would clamor after him, chase him, want to take him away and lock him up and do tests on him, examine him. He would need an escape route, the brothers imagined, a way back to the Sacandaga River, never to be seen or heard from again ...

The plan got fuzzy at that point. The brothers were not sure how it would go after that, and they had not yet consulted with A.C., but they were thinking that somehow Lory would figure in it.

Certainly they had told no one, not even their mother — especially not her.

A.C. was euphoric as the summer moved on. When he was back at his farmhouse, he often went out to the pasture and lifted a cow and danced around with it as if it were stuffed or inflated. Or in Glens Falls he’d roll the brothers’ little Volkswagen gently over on its back, and then he would grab the bumper and begin running in circles with it, spinning it like a top in the deep grass. The muscles in his cheeks tensed and flexed as he spun, showing the most intricate striations. His veins would be visible just beneath his temples. A.C. would grin, and John and Jerry thought it great fun, too, and they’d get on either end and ride the upside-down car like a playground toy as A.C. continued to spin it.

The summer had not softened him; he was still all hard, still all marvelous. Children from the neighborhood would run up and touch him. They felt stronger, afterward.

Lately, on the nights he stayed over at the Irons’ house, once everyone else was asleep, A.C. would carry Lory all through the house after she had fallen asleep in his lap. He imagined that he was protecting her. He carried her down all the hallways — past her parents’ room, her brothers’, past Lindsay’s, into the kitchen and out to the garage: it was all safe and quiet. Next he took her into the back yard, among the statues, and then into the street, walking through the neighborhood with her as she slept.

There was a street called Sweet Road that had no houses, only vacant lots, and trees, and night smells. He would lay her down in the dew-wet grass along Sweet Road and touch her robe, an old fuzzy white thing, and the side of her face. The wind would stir her hair, wind coming up out of the valley, wind coming from across the river. He owed the brothers his happiness.

Some nights, far-off heat lightning flickered over the mountains, behind the steep ridges. She slept through it all in the cool grass. He wondered what she was dreaming.

·

Late in the afternoons, after practice, the brothers walked the mile and a half to the grocery store in town, and along the way they showed A.C. the proper discus steps. Lory and Lindsay followed sometimes, to watch. The brothers demonstrated to A.C., in half crouches and hops, the proper setup for a throw, the proper release, and he tried to learn: the snap forward with the throw, and then the little trail-away spin at the end, unwinding, everything finished.

Jerry brought chalk and drew dance steps on the sidewalk for the placement of A.C.’s feet so he could move down the sidewalk properly, practicing his throws. Like children playing hopscotch, ducking and twisting, shuffling forward and then pretending to finish the spin with great shouts at the imaginary release of each throw, they moved through the quiet neighborhood, jumping and shouting, throwing their arms at the sky. Dogs barked at them as they went past, and children ran away at first, though soon they learned to follow, once the brothers and the big man had passed, and they would imitate, in the awkward fashion of children, the brothers’ and A.C.’s throws.

Lory could see the depression, the not quite old part of herself, back behind her — back in June, back in the spring, and behind in winter; back into the cold fall and the previous dry-leaved summer — but she was slipping forward now, away from all that. A.C. took her to his farmhouse and showed her how to hang from the ceiling. He’d rigged the harness so that she could hang suspended and spin.

He had to get over the fear of injuring someone again. Had to hit the fear head-on and shatter it. He had run a long way to get here. He was ready to hit it head-on. It was worth it, once again. And he wanted her to be brave, too.

“It feels better naked,” he said the first time he showed it to her, and so she took her clothes off. Lory closed her eyes and put her arms and legs out and spun in slow circles around and around, and A.C. turned the light off, sat down against the wall, and watched her silhouette against the window, watched her until she fell asleep, and then he took her out of the harness and got in bed with her, where she awoke.

“We won’t tell anyone,” he said. She was in his arms, warm, alive. It made him dizzy to consider what being alive meant.

“No,” she said. “No one will ever find out.”

She fell asleep with her lips on his chest. A.C. lay there looking at the harness hanging above them, and wondered why he wanted to keep it a secret, why it had to be a secret.

He knew that this was the best way to protect her, and that he loved her.

He stayed awake all through the night, conscious of how he dwarfed her, afraid that if he fell asleep he might turn over and crush her. He rose before daylight, woke her, and they got in the canoe and drifted back to New York State, and were home before dawn. A.C. crept into the basement that first night, and every night thereafter.

Lory had not liked hanging from the ceiling. She didn’t know why, only that it had frightened her. She kept the harness with her, kept it hidden in her drawer. She just wanted to love him, was all.

·

Many evenings the family had grilled corn for dinner, dripping with butter. They sat outside at the picnic table and ate with their hands. Night scents would drift toward them. As darkness fell, they would move into the house and watch the lazy movies, the baseball games of summer, and then they would go to sleep. But Lory and A.C. stayed up later and later as the summer went on, and made love after everyone had gone to bed, and then they would go out on their walk, A.C. still carrying Lory, though now she remained awake.

When she was not too tired — when she did not need to go to bed — they would paddle the canoe upriver to his farmhouse, with Lory sitting behind A.C. and tracing her fingers on his wide back as he paddled. The waves would splash against the bow, wetting them both. They moved up the current slowly, past hilly, night-green pastures with the moon high above or just beyond their reach. Summer haying smells rose from the fields, and they passed wild tiger lilies growing along the shore as they crossed into Vermont. Lory felt weightless and free until it was time to go back.

They lay on the old mattress in the farmhouse, with holes in the roof above them, and through the roof, the stars. No brothers, thought Lory fiercely, clutching A.C. and rolling beneath him, over him, beneath him again; she knew it was like swimming through rapids, or maybe drowning in them. Her brothers protected her and understood her, but A.C. seemed to know what was in the center of her, a place she had believed for a long while to be soft and weak.

It was exciting to believe that perhaps it was strong in there. To begin to believe she did not need protecting. It made his protection of her all the more exciting, all the more delicious — unnecessary, and therefore extravagant, luxurious.

This new hardness and strength in her center.

They sat on the stone wall in front of the farmhouse afterward, some nights, before it was time to leave, and they watched the cattle graze under the moon, listening to the slow, strong, grinding sound of their teeth being worn away as their bodies took nourishment. Lory and A.C. held hands and sat shoulder to shoulder, cold and still naked, and when it was time to go, they carried their clothes in a bundle down to the stream, the dew wetting their ankles, their knees, so that they were like the cattle as they moved through the grass — and they’d paddle home naked, Lory sitting right behind A.C. for warmth against the night.

·

The brothers continued to train in the daytime, and as the summer ended, there was a haze over the valley below them. They were throwing far over the fence, better than they’d ever thrown in their lives. They were tanned from the long hours of practicing shirtless. The sisters came by with a picnic lunch while the men threw. They laid out an old yellow Amish quilt that had belonged to their mother’s mother, with the hexagon patterns on it looking not unlike the throwing ring in which A.C. and the brothers whirled before each heave of the discus. The sisters would lie on the quilt on their stomachs, the sun warm on the backs of their legs. They ate Swiss cheese, strawberries, and apples, drank wine and watched the men throw forever, it seemed, until the sisters grew sleepy in the sun and rolled over and looked up at the big white cumulus clouds that did not seem to be going anywhere. They closed their eyes, felt the sun on their eyelids, and fell hard asleep, their mouths open, their bodies still listening to the faint tremors in the earth each time the discus landed.

A.C. had stopped sleeping altogether. There was simply too much to do.

He and Lory would go for canoe rides out on Lake George, only they would not take paddles with them. Instead, A.C. had gotten the harness back from Lory, and he slipped that over himself and towed her out into the lake as if going to sea, bare to the waist, and Lory in her one-piece suit. They were both brown from the picnics, and with nothing but the great blue water before them, they appeared to glow red, as if smudged with earth. The sunlight seemed to focus on them alone, the only two moving, living figures before the expanse of all that water, out on top of all that water. Their bodies gathered that solitary light so that they were upright, ruddy planes of flesh, of muscle, dull red in that late summer light, and with nothing but blue water beyond.

A.C. waded out, pulling the canoe with Lory riding inside, sitting upright like a shy stranger, a girl met on the first day of school in September. And then thigh-deep, and then deeper, up to his chest, his neck — he would take her out into the night.

Once they were on the lake, he would unbuckle the harness and swim circles around her and then submerge, staying under for a very long time, Lory thought. She lost track of the time. There was no way for her to bring him up; she could only wait for him. She watched the concentric ripples he’d left in the lake’s surface until the water faded to smoothness again. She could feel him down there, somewhere below her, but the water was flat again, motionless. She would try to will him back to the surface, as if raising him with a rope from the bottom of a well, but he’d stay hidden below her.

For A.C., it was dark and yet so deeply safe at the bottom of the lake. But then he would kick for the surface, up to the wavering glimmer of where she was, the glimmer becoming an explosion as he surfaced. He found her trying to pretend she wasn’t worried, not even turning her head to look at him.

A.C. would get back into the harness and, like a fish or a whale, he would begin her on her journey again, taking her around and around the lake, leaving a small V behind the canoe. Lory trailed her hand in the water and looked back at the blotted treeline against the night and the restaurant-speckled shore; or she would look out ahead of her at the other shore, equally distant, where there were no lights at all.

With A.C. so close, tied to the end of a rope, pulling her and the boat through the water as if she were a toy, she wanted to stand up and call out, cupping her hands, “I love you.” But she stayed seated and let her hand trail in the coolness of the lake. She was not a good swimmer, but she wanted to get in the water with him. She wanted to strip and dive in and swim out to him. He seemed so at ease that Lory would find herself — watching his wet, water-sliding back in the moonlight, the dark water — believing that he had become a sleek sea animal and was no longer a true human, mortal, capable of mortal things.

Occasionally Lory and A.C. went out to the lake in the late afternoon, and she would take a book. Between pages, as he continued to swim, she looked at the treeline, the shore, all so far away. Sometimes a boat drew near to see if she needed help, but always she waved it away, gave the people in the other boat a cheery, thumbs-up signal. When dusk came, if A.C. had been swimming all afternoon, he would head back to the harbor, side-stroking and looking at her with a slow, lazy smile. But she did not want laziness or slow smiles; she wanted to reach out and hold him.

In the dark harbor he would climb into the boat, slippery and naked, as she removed her own clothes, pulling off the old sea-green sweater she wore over her swimsuit in the chill night air, then removing the yellow swimsuit itself, and then her earrings, placing all of these things in the bow, out of the way, so that there was nothing, only them. She met him, offering herself as if meat to a wet, slippery animal. They would lie in the bottom of the cool green canoe, hold each kiss, and feel the lake pressing from beneath as they pressed back against it, riding the surface of the water. With the water so very nearly lapping at her skin but not quite — separated only by the canoe’s thin shell — Lory felt like some sort of sea creature. One or both of her arms would sometimes hang over the edge of the canoe as they made love, would trail or splash in the water, and often she didn’t see why they didn’t just get it over with, dive into the lake and never come back to the surface.

Later, they would get up and sit on the wicker bench seat in the stern, side by side, and lean against each other, holding hands.

They would sit in the harbor, those cool nights, wet, steaming slightly from their own heat. Other boats rode slowly into the harbor, idling through the darkness back to shore, their lengths and shapes identifiable by the green and yellow running lights that lined their sides for safety, as they passed through the night, going home. At times it seemed as if one of the pleasure boats were coming right at them, and sometimes one of the boats with bright running lights would pass by — so close that they could see the faces of the people inside.

But they were unobserved. They watched the boats pass and let the night breezes dry their hair, dry the lake water from their bodies so that they felt human once more, and of the earth. They would make love again, invisible to all the other passing boats, all of them full of people who could not see what it was like to be in love.

A.C. and Lory would have coffee at a restaurant on the short drive back — five or six miles from home — on a deck beneath an umbrella like tourists, looking out at Highway 9A. Lory drank her coffee slowly, stirring milk and sugar into it, cup after cup, watching the black liquid turn into swirling, muddy shades of brown. A.C.’s weight was up to three hundred pounds now, more muscle than ever, but she would reach over, smiling, look into his eyes, and grip the iron breadth of his thigh and squeeze it, then pat it and say, “How are you doing, fat boy?”

She felt lake water still inside her, even though they had gone in for a quick cleaning-off swim — A.C. staying right next to her, holding her up in the water with one hand. She felt deliciously wild. They drank coffee for an hour, until their hair was completely dry. Then they drove home, to Louella’s dismay and the brothers’ looks of happiness, but looks that were somehow a little hurt, a little lost; home to Heck’s mild wonderment and interest, looking up from his gin and tonic; home to Lindsay’s impatience, for A.C. and Lory would have been gone a long time.

“We’re just friends, Mom,” Lory would say whenever Louella tried to corner her in the kitchen. “I’m happy, too. See? Look!” She danced, leaped, and kicked her heels together three times, spun around when she landed, then went up on her toes — an odd interpretation of the discus spin that A.C. was trying to learn.

“Well,” said Louella, not knowing what to say or do. “Good. I hope so.”

One morning when A.C. stayed in Glens Falls, he lifted himself from sleep and moved around the basement, examining the old weights, the rowing machines, the rust-locked exercise bikes, and the motionless death-hang of the patched and battered punching bags. A.C. ran his hand over the weights and looked at the flecks of rust that came off on his hands, and thought how the brothers were outlasting the iron and the steel. He stared at the rust in the palm of his hand and smelled the forever-still air that had always been in the basement, air in which John and Jerry had grown up, spindly kids wrestling and boxing, always fighting things, but being part of a family: eating meals together, going to church, teasing their sisters, growing larger, finding directions and interests, taking aim at things. That same air was still down there, as if in a bottle, and it confused A.C. and made him more sure that he was somehow a part of it, a part he did not know about.

He pictured pushing through the confusion, throwing the discus farther and farther, until one day he did the skip-and-glide perfectly. He would be able to spin around once more after that, twice more, and still look up after the throw in time to see the disc flying. It would make the brothers happy, but perhaps then they would not feel that he was a brother anymore.

He trained harder than ever with them, as if it were the greatest of secrets they were giving him. They put their arms around him, walking back from training. Sometimes they teased him, trying to put his great throws in perspective.

“The circumference of the earth at the equator is more than 24,000 miles,” Jerry said nonchalantly, looking at his watch as if to see what time it was, as if he had forgotten an appointment. Lory had put him up to it. She’d given him the numbers to crib on his wrist. “Why, that’s over 126,720,000 feet,” he’d exclaim.

John looked over at A.C. and said, “How far’d you throw today, A.C.?”

A.C. would toss his head back and laugh a great, happy laugh, the laugh of someone being saved, being thrown a rope and pulled in. He would rather be their brother than anything. He wouldn’t do them any harm.

·

Lory and A.C. took Lindsay canoeing on the Batten-kill River, over in Vermont. It was almost fall. School was starting soon. Lory stayed close to A.C., held on to his arm, sometimes with both hands. She worried that the fatigue and subsequent depression would be coming on like a returning army, but she smiled thinly, moved through the cool days and laughed, grinning wider whenever their eyes met. Sometimes A.C. would blush and look away, which made Lory grin harder. She would tickle him, tease him; she knew he was frightened of leaving her. She knew he never would.

They drove through the countryside, past fields lined with crumbling stone walls and Queen Anne’s lace, with the old canoe on top of the VW. They let Lindsay drive, like a chauffeur. A.C. and Lory had somehow squeezed into the back seat. Now and then Lindsay looked back at them when they kissed, and a crimson blush came into her face, but mostly it was just shy glances at the mirror, trying to see, as if through a telescope, the pleasure that lay ahead of her.

The road turned to white gravel and dust with a clatter and clinking of pebbles, but Lory and A.C. did not notice. They looked like one huge person wedged into the back seat. Sun flashed through the windshield. It felt good to Lindsay to be driving with the window down, going faster than she ever had. Meadows passed, more Queen Anne’s lace, maples, farms, cattle. A.C. reached forward and squeezed the back of Lindsay’s neck, startling her, and then began rubbing it. She relaxed, smiled, and leaned her head back. Her red hair on his wrist.

Lindsay drove down the narrow road raising dust, and brilliant goldfinches swept back and forth across the road in front of them, flying out of the cattails, alarmed at the car’s speed. Lindsay hit one; it struck the hood and flew straight up above them, sailing back toward the cattails, dead, wings folded, but still a bright yellow color. Lindsay cried “Oh!” and covered her mouth, because neither A.C. nor Lory had seen it. She was ashamed somehow and wanted to keep it a secret.

They stopped for cheeseburgers and shakes at a shady drive-in, in a small Vermont town whose name they’d never heard of. The drive-in was right by the banks of the river, where they would put the canoe in. The river was wide and shallow, cool and clear, and they sat beneath a great red oak and ate. Lindsay was delighted to be with them, but also she could not shake the oddest feeling. Again, the feeling that there was nothing special, that it had been happening all her life, these canoe trips with A.C. and Lory — and that it could just as easily have been John or Jerry sitting with them under the tree. If anything, Lindsay felt a little hollow somehow, and cheated, as if something were missing, because A.C. had shown up only this summer.

Lindsay had never paddled before. She sat backwards and gripped the paddle wrong, like a baseball bat. And Lory did an amazing thing that her sister never understood: she fell out, twice. It was like falling out of a chair. She hadn’t even been drinking. Lindsay shrieked. They had water fights.

Lindsay had baked a cake, and they ate it on a small island. When the sisters waded into the cold river to pee, A.C. laughed, turned his back, and made noise against the rocks on the shore.

“Lindsay’s jealous,” Lory said when they came trudging out of the river. Lindsay swung at her but missed, and fell back into the water.

The sun dried them quickly. Several times A.C. got out of the canoe and swam ahead, pulling them by a rope held in his teeth.

Lory had brought a big jug of wine. They got out and walked up into a meadow and drank from it whenever they became tired of paddling, which was often. At one stop, on the riverbank, Lory ran her fingers through A.C.’s hair. In six years, she would be forty. A crow flew past, low over the river. Farther upstream, they could see trout passing beneath the canoe, could see the bottom of the river, which was deep. Stones lined the river bottom, as if an old road lay beneath them.

On the way home, with A.C. at the wheel, they stopped for more cheeseburgers and had Cokes in the bottle with straws. They kept driving with the windows down. Their faces were not sunburned, but darker.

When A.C., Lory, and Lindsay got home and went into the house, the brothers were immediately happy to see the big man again, as always, but then, like small clouds, something crossed their faces and then vanished again, something unknown, perhaps confused.

·

The day before school started, Lory and A.C. paddled up to the farmhouse in Vermont. They were both sad, as if one of them were leaving and not ever coming back. Lory thought about another year of school. Tired before it even began, she sat on the stone wall with him, her head on his shoulder. He let her stay that way and did not try to cheer her up with stunts or tricks or feats of strength. The cattle in the field grazed right up to the edge of the stone wall, unafraid of Lory and A.C.

He rubbed the back of Lory’s neck, held her dose against him. He could be kind and tender, he could be considerate and thoughtful, he could even love her, but she wanted something else. He was afraid of this, and knew he was as common as coal in that respect. He also knew he was afraid of leaving, and of being alone.

·

A.C. was running out of money, so he took a paper route. He had no car, so he pulled the papers on a huge scraping rickshaw, fitting himself with a harness to pull it. It had no wheels and was really only a crude travois: two long poles with a sheet of plywood nailed to them, and little guard rails so that he could stack the papers high on it.

He delivered papers in the early afternoon. All through the neighborhoods he trotted, grimacing, pulling a half ton of paper slowly up the small hills, and then, like a creature from the heavens, like some cruel-eyed bird, he swooped down the hills, street gravel and rock rattling under the sled. He shouted and tossed papers like mad, glancing back over his shoulder with every throw to be sure that he was staying ahead of the weight of the sled, which was accelerating, trying to run him down. It was funny, and the people who lived at the bottom of a hill learned to listen for him, loved to watch him, to see if one day he might get caught.

But now it was lonely for A.C., with Jerry in his final year at school, playing football, and John coaching. Lindsay was back in school too, and Heck was still the principal. Only Louella stayed at home.

Usually A.C. finished his paper route by late afternoon, and then he would put the sled in the garage and hose himself off in the back yard, his chest red from where the harness had rubbed, his running shorts drenched with sweat. He’d hold the hose over his head and cool down. Louella would watch from the kitchen window, feeling lonely, but she was also cautious, a mother first.

Dripping, A.C. would turn the water off, coil the hose up, and sit at the picnic table silently, his back turned to the kitchen. Like a dog finished with his duties, he would wait until he could see Lory again, see all the siblings. Louella would watch him for a long time. She just couldn’t be sure.

When Lory got home from school, riding on a fresh burst of energy at the idea of seeing him again, A.C. would jump up, shake sprays of water from his wet hair, and run to open the door for her. He kissed her delicately, and she would ask, teasing, “How was your day, dear?” Though it was all working out differently from how she had expected, she was fresher and happier than she had ever been.

·

The children at Lory’s school were foul, craven, sunk without hope. She would resurrect one, get a glimmer of interest in one every now and then, but eventually it would all slide back; it had all been false — that faint progress, the improvement in attitude. Sometimes she hit her fist against the lockers after school. The desks with “I fucked Miss Iron” on them were still there, and the eyes of the male teachers were no better, saying the same thing. She was getting older, older, and each year she wondered if this was the year that the last of her youth would go away. It was a gauntlet, but she needed to stay close to Glens Falls. She had to keep going.

It was like traveling upriver at night in the canoe with him, up through the rapids, only it was like being one of the darkened iron statues rather than her live, loving self. It was like night all the time, this job, and in her dreams of it, there was never any sound, no promise, no future. She was in the wrong place, taking the wrong steps, and she knew — she could feel it as strongly as anything — that it took her too far away from him, teaching at Warrensburg each day, a place of darkness.

She was up until midnight every night, grading papers, preparing lesson plans, reading the barely legible scrawled essays of rage — “I wont to kil my sester, i wont to kil my bruthers” — and then she was up again at four or four-thirty, rousing herself from the sleepy dream of her life. But A.C. was also up by then, making coffee for her.

When they kissed in the morning she’d be wearing a tattered, dingy robe and her owlish reading glasses. His hands would slide under her robe and find her warm beneath the fuzzy cloth. He wanted nothing else for either of them. There could be no improvement. He knew she wanted more, though, that she wanted to keep going.

They would take a short walk right before she left for school. By the time they got back, John and Jerry would be up. Jerry’s clock radio played hard rock. John, with no worries, no responsibilities, sorted through the refrigerator for his carton of milk (biceps drawn on it with a Magic Marker) and got Jerry’s carton out (a heart with an arrow through it, and the word “Mom” inside the heart). The brothers stood around and drank, swallowing the milk in long, cold gulps.

·

Watching A.C. and Lory grow closer was, to Louella, like the pull of winter, or like giving birth. Always, she thought about the one she had lost. Twenty years later, she had been sent a replacement. She wanted to believe that. She had not led a martyr’s life, but she had worked hard, and miracles did happen.

It was true, she realized. She could make it be true by wanting it to be true.

She looked out her kitchen window at him, sitting at the picnic table with his back to her, facing the garden, the late-season roses. Sun came through the window, and she could see hummingbirds fly into the back yard, lured by the sweetness of the nectar she had put in the feeders.

Louella watched A.C. look around at the humming-birds, staring at them for the longest time, like a simple animal. The birds were dancing flecks of color, flashes of shimmering emerald and cobalt. Louella saw a blur of orange in the garden, the cat racing across the yard, up onto the picnic table, then leaping into the air, legs outstretched. She saw the claws, and like a ballplayer the cat caught one of the hummingbirds in midair, came down with it, and tumbled and rolled.

Louella watched as A.C. ran to the cat, squeezed its neck gently, and lifted the limp hummingbird from the cat’s mouth. The cat shivered, shook, and ran back into the garden. A.C. set the limp hummingbird down on the picnic table. The other hummingbirds were gone.

Louella went into the back yard. The little bird lay still with its eyes shut, a speck of blood on its throat like a tiny ruby. The glitter of its green back like scales.

“That damn cat,” Louella said, but as they watched, the hummingbird began to stir, ruffled its feathers, looked around, and flew away.

·

Each morning after the others had left, A.C. would sit at the picnic table a bit longer. Then he would come inside and tell Louella that he was going to Vermont for a while. Always, politely, he asked her if she needed anything, or if she cared to go with him for the ride, and always she refused, saying she had things to do. Always, afterward, she wished she had said yes, wondered what it would be like, wondered what his stone farmhouse looked like. But there were boundaries to be maintained; she could not let go and say yes. So A.C. would lift the canoe over his head and walk through the neighborhood, out across the main road and down to the river, leaving her alone.

What A.C. was working on in Vermont was a barn, for throwing the discus during the winter months. He wanted to perfect his throw, to make John and Jerry happy. He had no more money left, so he ripped down abandoned barns, saving even the nails from the old boards. He built his barn in the woods, on the side of the hill behind his farmhouse. It was more like a bowling alley than anything.

He had planned it to be 300 feet long. He climbed high into the trees to nail on the tall roof that would keep the snow out. There was not enough wood to build sides for the barn; mostly it was like a tent, a long, open-walled shed. He had built up the sides with stones about three feet high to keep the drifts from blowing in. It would be cold, but it would be free of snow.

He cut the trees down with an ax, to build the throwing lane, and then cut them into lengths to be dragged away. He was building a strip of empty space in the heart of the woods; it ran for a hundred yards and then stopped. He kept it a secret from the whole family, and was greatly pleased with its progress as the fall went on.

The air inside the throwing room felt purified, denser somehow. It had the special scents of the woods. He burned all the stumps, leveled the ground with a shovel and hoe, and made a throwing ring out of river stones. The rafters overhead reminded him of the church he’d gone to once with the Irons: the high ceiling, the beams, keeping the hard rains and snows out, protecting them, but also distancing them from what it was they were after.

He would work on the barn all morning, leave in time to get home and do his paper route, and still be back at the house before anyone else got there. Sometimes Louella would be out shopping or doing other errands. He would sit at the picnic table and wait for the sound of Lory’s car.

·

Feathery snow fell on the Hudson highlands on the third of October, a Friday night. They were all walking to the movie theater in the mall, A.C. and Lory holding hands, Lindsay running ahead of them. It was too early for real snow.

The brothers were as full of spirit as they had been all year. It was as if they were fourteen. They danced, did their discus spins in crowded places, ending their imaginary releases with wild shouts that drew some spectators and scared others away, then all three of them spun and whooped — John’s and Jerry’s spins still more polished than A.C.’s, but A.C.’s impressive also, if for no reason other than his great size. Soon there was a large audience, clapping and cheering as if they were Russian table dancers. (A.C. pictured it being late spring still, or early summer, before he had met them: back when he was still dancing with the cows on his back, a sport he had enjoyed, and which he secretly missed, though the brothers had asked him to stop doing it, saying it would throw his rhythm off. He missed the freedom of it, the lack of borders and rules, but did not want to hurt their feelings, did not want them to know he thought discus throwing was slightly inferior, so he’d done as they said, though still, he missed dancing and whirling with the cattle over his shoulders.)

Lory shrieked and hid her eyes with her hands, embarrassed, and Lindsay blushed her crimson color, but was petrified, unable to move, and she watched them, amazed as always. Lory’s fingers were digging into Lindsay’s arm; Lindsay smiled bravely through her embarrassment, and was happy for Lory. Everyone around them in the mall kept clapping and stamping their feet, while outside, the first snow came down.

·

A.C. gave the money from the paper route to Louella and Heck, and as he made more money, he tried to give that to them as well, but they wouldn’t hear of it. So he bought things and gave them to Lory. He bought whatever he saw, if he happened to be thinking about her: a kitten, bouquets of flowers, jewelry, an NFL football, a smoked turkey.

She was flattered and excited the first few times he brought something home, but soon became alarmed at the volume of things, and eventually asked him to stop. Then she had to explain to him what she really wanted, what really made her happy, and he was embarrassed, felt a fool for not having realized it before, for having tried to substitute. It was like throwing the discus from his hip rather than with the spin, he realized.

They went out in the canoe again that Saturday night, on Lake George. It was a still night at first, calm and chilly, and the full moon was so bright they could see the shore, even from far out on the water. They could see each other’s face, each other’s eyes; it was like some dream-lit daylight, hard and blue and silver, with the sound of waves lapping against the side of their small boat. They were cold, but they undressed anyway. They wanted to get close, as close as they could; they wanted to be all there was in the world, the only thing left.

He covered her with the blanket they had brought, and kept her warm with that and with himself. After making love to her he fell asleep, dreaming, in the warmth of the blanket and the roll of the boat, that he was still in her, that they were still loving, and that they always would be.

“You were smiling,” she said when he woke around midnight. She’d been watching him all night. She’d held him, too, sometimes pressing him so tightly against her breast that she was sure he’d wake up, but he had slept on. “What were you smiling about?”

“You,” he said sleepily. “I was thinking about you.”

It was the right answer. She was so happy.

·

One weekend, Lory’s school had a Halloween dance. A girl had been raped after the dance last year, and several of the teachers’ cars had had their tires slashed and their radio antennas snapped. A small fire had been set inside the school and had scorched the walls. Lory was chaperoning this year. She went up there with John and Jerry and A.C., and stayed near them the whole time.

The brothers dwarfed Lory like bodyguards; she was almost hidden whenever she was in their midst. The young thugs and bullies did not attempt to reach out from the crowd and squeeze her breasts, as they sometimes did on dares, and the male teachers, married and unmarried, treated her with respect. The four of them sat in the bleachers and watched the dance, listening to the loud music until midnight. There was no mischief, and they were relieved when it was time to go.

They felt almost guilty, driving home to warmth and love. They rode in silence, thinking their own thoughts, back down to Glens Falls, whose lights they could see below, not twinkling as if with distance but shining steadily, a constant glow, because they were so close.

·

Geese, heading south late in the year, stragglers. A.C. worked on his barn during the mild sunny days of November. He could feel more snow coming, could feel it the way an animal can. The hair on his arms and legs was getting thicker, the way it had in Colorado in past falls. The barn reminded him of the one that had been out there — the hay barn. That was where she had done it.

The throwing barn was almost finished. It was narrow, so his throws would have to be accurate. There could be no wildness, or he would wreck the place he had built. He would teach himself to throw straight.

He finished the barn in mid-November, as the big flakes arrived, the second snow of the season. Now the snows that came would not go away, not until the end of winter. He brought the brothers up to see the barn, to show them how they could keep training together, how they could keep throwing all through the winter, even with snow banked all around them, and they were delighted.

“This is the best year of my life,” Jerry said unexpectedly.

A.C. bought a metal detector, and when throws did not travel perfectly straight — the barn was only thirty feet wide — the brothers and A.C. had to search in the snow, listening for the rapid signal that told them they were getting near. They used old metal discs now, which flew two or three feet farther in the cold air. The brothers ate more than ever, and trained harder.

There was a stone wall at the end of the barn, the 300-foot mark, stacked all the way to the rafters and chinked with mud and sand and grass. A.C. had lodged a discus in it once, had skipped a few of them against its base. Hitting that mark was magical, unimaginable; it required witchcraft, an alteration of reality.

It took the brothers and A.C. about sixty seconds to walk 300 feet. A minute away — and unobtainable, or almost.

Sometimes the throws went too far off into the woods, and the discs were lost for good. Other times, they went too high and crashed through the rafters, like violent cannonballs, cruel iron seeking to destroy.

“Forget it,” John would say gruffly whenever A.C. threw outside the barn. They’d hear the snapping, tearing sound of branches being broken and then the whack! of the discus striking a tree trunk. John would already be reaching for another disc, though, handing it to him. “Come on, come on, shake it off. Past history. Over and done with. Shake it off.”

Past history. No harm done. These were sweet words to A.C. His eyes grew moist. He wanted to believe that. He wanted to make good this time.

·

As the winter deepened, they set their goals harder and farther. John and Jerry wanted to throw 221 feet, and A.C. wanted to be able to throw 300 feet on any given throw, at will.

And he wanted Lory. He wanted to build fences, to take care, protect. Sometimes while everyone was at school, Louella would decide that she just couldn’t keep away any longer. She would challenge herself to be brave, to accept him without really knowing whether he was hers or not. She would ride in the canoe with him up to the barn, to watch him throw. She had come over to his side, and believed in him, and she did that. Louella wanted to know about his past, but A.C. simply wouldn’t tell her.

A.C. built a fire for Louella in the barn, and she sat on a stump and sipped coffee while he threw. His spin was getting better. It was an imitation of her sons’, she could tell, but it was starting to get some fluidity to it, some life, some creativity. Louella enjoyed watching him train. His clumsiness did not worry her, because she could tell he was working at it and overcoming it. She was even able to smile when the discus soared up through the rafters, letting a sprinkle of snow pour into the barn from above — yet another hole punched through the roof, one more hole of many, the snow sifting down like fine powder.

They were alarming, those wild throws, but she found herself trusting him. Secretly she liked the wild throws: she was fascinated by the strength and force behind them, the utter lack of control. It was like standing at the edge of a volcano, looking down. She moved a little closer to the fire. She was fifty-eight, and was seeing things she’d never seen before, feeling things she’d never felt. Life was still a mystery. He had made her daughter happy again.

“Keep your head back,” Louella would caution whenever she saw that his form was too terribly off. “Keep your feet spread. Your feet were too close together.” She knew enough about form to tell how it differed from her other sons’.

·

The whole family came for Thanksgiving: cousins and moved-away aunts, little babies, uncles and nieces. Everything flowed. A.C. was a good fit; it was as if he’d always been there. Passing the turkey, telling jokes, teasing Lindsay about a boyfriend; laughter and warmth inside the big house.

The roads iced over. There was the sound of studded snow tires outside, and of clanking chains. Football all day on television, and more pie, more cider. Then Thanksgiving passed and they were on into December, the Christmas season, with old black-and-white movies on television late at night and Lory on her holiday break from school. Everyone was home, and he was firmly in their center, her center.

He was in a spin of love and asked her to marry him. “Yes,” she said, laughing, remembering last year’s sadness and the crazy lost hope of it, never dreaming or knowing that he had been out there, moving toward her.

In her dreams, in the months preceding the wedding, she saw images of summer, of June coming around again. She and her mother stood in a large field, with cattle grazing near the trees. In the field were great boulders and fieldstones left over from another age, a time of glaciers and ice, of great floods.

And in the dream, she and her mother leaned into the boulders, rolling them, moving them out of the field, making the field pure and green. They built a stone wall out of the boulders, all around the field, and some of them were too large to move. Lory gritted her teeth and pushed harder, straining, trying to move them all. Then she would wake up and be by his side, by his warmth, and realize that she had been pushing against him, trying to get him out of bed. That could not be done, and she’d laugh, put her arms around as much of him as she could, and bury her face in him. Then she would get up after a while, unable to return to sleep.

She’d dress, put on her snow boots, go to the garage, and pick up one of the discuses, holding it with both hands, feeling the worn smoothness, the coldness, and the magic of it — magic, Lory believed, because he had touched it. Certain that no one was watching, that no one could ever find out, she would go into the front yard, bundled up in woolens and a parka, and under the blue cast of the streetlight she’d crouch and then whirl, spinning around and around, and throw the discus as far as she could, in whatever direction it happened to go. She’d shout, almost roar, and watch it sink into the soft new snow, jumping up and down afterward when she threw well and was pleased with her throw.

Then she would wade out to where she had seen the discus disappear, kneel down, and dig for it with her hands. She’d carry it back to the garage, slip it into the box with the others, and finally she’d be able to sleep, growing warm again in bed with him.

In the spring, before the wedding, after the snows melted and the river began to warm — the river in which A.C. had first seen and swum up to his brothers — he began to swim again, but with Lory this year.

A.C. would fasten a rope to the harness around his chest and tie the other end of it to the bumper of her car before leaping into the river from a high rock and being washed down through the rapids.

Then he would swim upriver until his shoulders ached, until even he was too tired to lift his head, and was nearly drowning. Lory would leap into the car then, start it, and ease up the hill, pulling him like a limp wet rag through the rapids he’d been fighting, farther up the river until he was in the stone-bottomed shallows. She’d park the car, set the emergency brake, jump out, and run back down to get him.

Like a fireman, she’d pull him the rest of the way out of the river, splashing knee-deep in the water, helping him up, putting his arm around her tiny shoulders. Somehow they’d stagger up into the rocks and trees along the shore. He’d lie on his back and gasp, looking up at the sky and the tops of trees, and smelling the scent of pines. They would lie in the sun, drenched, exhausted, until their clothes were almost dry, and then they would back the car down and do it again.

He liked being saved. He needed her. And she needed him. Closer and closer she’d pull him, reeling in the wet rope, dragging him up on shore, bending over and kissing his wet lips until his eyes fluttered, bringing him back to life every time.