There are acts that happen upon us, and moments that happen for no reason, and if we are to survive what comes our way to finish our rotations around the sun while feeling the sun for its warmth as well as its scorching, then we who are able must deliver ourselves from the aftermath to where we need to go. It was true with the serpent in the garden and it has been true ever since. The snakebite is not what defines a life; what defines it is how we extract the venom.
Kennesaw knew two truths to be his north stars: he could not endure his father’s attentions, nor would he risk tempting Hunko with the same southbound intentions should his own southbound intentions lead to lands as unchartered as the heavens. To keep himself from exploring the far reaches of Hunko, Kennesaw resolved himself to journey in a direction opposite his young friend, and in so doing, he’d be sure to circumnavigate what his life might be in favor of what he told himself it ought be. Hiding in the woods wouldn’t do, and merely averting his glances when passing in front of the New Eden Grangery would do less, or pretending to be espying woodpeckers up high and above when he happened to be strolling completely innocently down the path to Grunts Pond would do least of all. Only one measure was surefire, not that there’d ever been proof. Nowhere was there to be found in any New Eden lore that he knew of an instance of time turning back on itself, of a Bliss or a Minton or a Belvedere leaving New Eden and going back to whence they came. He grew up on the stories of forebearers coming to this spot from points far flung and flunger, of compassless dreamers who missed the footpaths worn by others before them and who in their inadvertence scaled on foot and hoof the magmatic tips of a mountain range beyond the town’s highest hill, then descended into the valley where the water and land and forest formed the Eden which, having nothing better to do, they claimed anew. But what no passed-down lore celebrated was a single soul in all New Eden’s swelling generations since who had ever crossed back—who had retraversed the uncompassed paths and retraced mistaken steps to forge newer lives on other inadvertent grounds; others who came upon Eden only to find it lacking what they weren’t even sure they were looking for and finding it lacking, left. But Kennesaw decided to do what no one of lore had done before him with or without plan, example, or thought. He’d leave. He’d be the first. He’d find a new New Eden elsewhere. Free of torment. Free of temptation.
With neither provisions nor belongings satcheled, Kennesaw walked out the front door of the Belvedere home with a determination to outgrow the town that he feared would never outgrow him. His gait as damn well determined as his father’s, he walked down the road he walks today, past neighboring farms and fields still tilled, past the rise to Tumblers’ Ridge and its tickling grasses, past the path down to Grunts Pond and the rock and the life force that down there beckoned. He slowed at the path a bit in hopes of seeing signs of Hunko, and seeing none, was both relieved and disappointed, and presented with a choice, chose disappointment as a lubricant for resuming his former pace. Past Saflutises’ fields he walked, past the Bucketts’ barn, the Whiskerhoovens’, the O’umses’; he followed the virus’s path past Nedewen Field and its ever-increasing markers, past True’s and her row of apple trees where one of the dozen had recently succumbed to blight, past Carnival who waved his ax to him as he passed.
This walk was an entirely different walk than any Kennesaw had heretofore embarked on. Different because it was a walk of departure, yes, but also, because Kennesaw had about him a new awareness of his surroundings. Landmarks he had passed so often as to not know they existed (much as he did people at times), now produced in him a sensation that if this were to be the last time he took in such familiar and well-worn sights he would indeed miss them deeply, surprisingly, and as this odd sentimentality took hold of his entirety his gait slowed, and his bluer-than-blues sought out details of the everyday that he had never really considered in his day-to-days. That eight shingles on one row and seven on another were missing from the east wall of the Bucketts’ hay barn. That Zebeliah Was-She-a-Hackensack-or-Was-She-a-Whiskerhooven did not look too comely from the back end when bent over and digging in her spring flowerbeds. That the O’umses’ only offspring set out for airing on the front porch looked not quite human, and more like candle wax readying to be form-poured. That the path down to Grunts Pond that used to be lined with jack-in-the-pulpits and balsam was now nearly bare.
Small and insignificant can be huge when viewed for the last time, and viewed through a nuisance of tears can produce in a man a stubbornness to get on with things. Flummox be damned, Kennesaw thought, as he rid damp sentimentality from his eyes with the back of his hands. He would leave everyone and everything he knew in the past. In time, Hunko would forget him.
His destination? An education. He would fill his head to overflowing with distractions eastern and western. He would learn great things, important things about important people, by important people, historical people, historic events, places, formulas and computations. He would fill his mind with every manner of distraction ancient, modern, and in-between, and so distracted, his mind would circumnavigate his heart and this would suffice as a life. It was certain that he knew his ABCs and his 1, 2, 3s. He knew a square from a circle, and most assuredly, having known the Lopes, a horse from an ass. But what schooling he had had beyond that had its limits. His was schooling done around the kitchen table from primitive primers missing pages and long out of print—primers a young and not-yet-troubled Porcine had rescued from the burn pile in her childhood when her own mother’s actions turned unmotherly. As her own mind went wild as an untilled field, Porcine laid these primers out before her own child like sacred texts from a Hebrew’s altar, plopped out before him like raindrops, spoke the words and the letters once and expected her child to repeat them forever, which he did; more proof of his outcastedness, Porcine then feared. And no sooner did she lay the books out than she snatched them back and returned them to hiding, learning dried up for the moment, That’s enough, she’d say, now heed your father, he’s out in the barn, hey Blue Eyes, he’s calling for you. Where Porcine’s mother, Agrippa, got the books was anybody’s guess; for all Kennesaw knew, they may have been gifts from the ghosts his mother’s mother communed with. But thank those ghosts for they lay a foundation that could be built upon. He could read; he could add; he could ask questions and take in their answers like air. Such learning was a short, steep drop-off to knowledge of any practical application, and although dragons lay beyond their limits, he’d more happily slay them than stay put.
The dirt road out of town led Kennesaw to a roadway of unfamiliar composition, hard and unrutted, wider, with an urgency to its unfolding: it did not even wind itself up and around the mountain range whose magmatic tips prior feet had climbed to blisters. This roadway did not want to waste a moment; it cut right through them. The trees he passed appeared not so green and tall as the ones he climbed as a boy, the roadside flora not as redolent, no funk of jack-in-the-pulpits, no balsam at all. Dwellings off this road were odd long metal structures on blocks that looked to Kennesaw as if they could be dislodged and heaved like hay bales by any strong wind that happened to blow by, and on the way to their front doors was a landscape so cluttered with adornments that surely large winds had indeed passed through. He could not imagine knowledge contained within a can, let alone conceive of any living soul dwelling in such structures that were not even attached to the ground they sat on; a man must have his feet on the ground to know he exists, and so must a house. Farther on there were homes of larger scale, fortress-like as they dominated smaller environs, attached to the ground by foundations built rock upon rock, but with surroundings devoid of any displays, landscapes clipped as precisely as a close shave, and grasses so immaculate, it was hard to imagine any feet, hooves, or paws ever being tickled by so much as a single blade. Nowhere was there to be seen gates shaped as heavenly harps, nothing fashioned with such care as Kennesaw’s gates by Hunko’s hands, nothing as forgiving, nothing that said I may look imperious, but I have a heart. Knowledge of any use could not live in so unwelcoming a place.
Beyond here, dwellings gave way to clustered groupings in brick and stone: store fronts whose windows beckoned with offers of 2 for 99¢ and buy 4 get 1 free; there were no store front porches for gnawing the daily grist on like the New Eden Grangery, no rockers for taking a load off, and heaven forbid a man who relieved his bladder by the side of this route. The air hummed like bees grouping for a kill, and on the street there were vehicles of every shape and speed that would finish the job the bees left undone. At every glance was a new sensation that Kennesaw had only seconds to process before another took its place. Multicolored illuminants that flashed and sizzled, great clouds of acrid smoke that belched from funnel stacks in the sky and from the vehicles, too. And the people themselves—a monochromatic herd less green and less tall than the folks of his familiar world, yet sweeter, he had to admit, though in a sickeningly odiferous way altogether not to his liking.
The deeper into this unfamiliar terrain he walked, the more he tried to assure himself that he would in time lose the discomfort of being a foreigner in this foreign land in his crisp overalls and tailored buffalo plaid, but the monochromatic herd whom he passed did not even look up from the ground as they passed him by, their downcast eyes did not once connect with his own bluer-than-blues. How can one become one with others so otherly if they refuse to even acknowledge that you’re you, Kennesaw wondered. He crossed a thoroughfare with the herd, he followed a stampede around a corner, he thinned himself to not touch shoulders with any passersby lest he catch their downcastedness and lose his ability to see what lay ahead, and it dawned on him as he made it from one end of a street to the other that he’d encountered more people in that hundred feet of walkway than he’d seen in New Eden in the entirety of his lifetime. And not a soul thought him anything special.
He’d left New Eden early morning; he’d reached this odd world late afternoon; perhaps he’d find what he was looking for before the sun went home for the night, though his optimism was not so sure-footed. He cleared his throat and approached anyone who slowed to a stop. Where can I find an education? he asked them. Most ignored him as they did the hum in the air. A few looked up from their downcastedness long enough to roll vacant eyes of no coloring at all; they either shook their heads or hunched their shoulders or muttered indecencies as they resumed their trajectories to wherever downcastedness must hurry to. One passerby told him to try the school of hard knocks; another said go to a red door on a street named with a number and ask for an Esther-Ann or an Evie, or if he was truly looking to be educated, ask for a Big Joe. A child no taller than Frainey Swampscott’s goat said to him, Uh, duh, the library, and showed him the way there by spitting it over her shoulder. Beyond where the girl’s saliva landed with a crack was a town square swarmed by a herd, and above their shoulders rose a statue of a soldier, in clothing even more unusual than Kennesaw’s, aiming his blunderbuss at a low-slung cement structure as long and squat as a loaf of bread. Nothing about its flat facades and windows too high to see through said to him come hither. In front was a sign hand-carved in rough-hewn cedar that for a moment made him think of Hunko’s gates, but the sign and what it said quickly trained his heart on feelings elsewhere. The sign read: Library.
Kennesaw entered through an opaque slab glass door that was heavier than gravity in his hands, and once inside, gasped with all the fury of a last breath at the vision before him. What had been an unremarkable exterior yielded its lack of charms to an interior as resplendent as a pasha’s caravan. Books of every size and shape, leather-clad, cloth-wrapped, etched, embossed, and embellished, gold leafs and illuminated frontispieces, periodicals, atlases, cartographs, tables and charts, so many tomes, so many subjects, so much of the world outside of New Eden, more than he ever imagined could exist, and here it all sat waiting for his fingertips to bring its essences alive. Oh, how wondrous this paradise of parchment with its smell of history mixed with possibility. Not another soul shared the space with him. Only diffused light filtering through the high windows, settling on every gleaming surface a hush of promise. This is what existence is when Flummoxless, perhaps even Hunkoless. Here Kennesaw would find the distraction he was looking for.
Shelves of facts and figures and forgetting. He’d begin at the beginning and he would not stop until he reached the end of all that man knew to learn, and so distracted, his mind would circumnavigate his heart as he hoped it would, and this would suffice as a life. He wasted no time, digging in like it was a mouthwatering Sunday Sit Down. He read about Darwin and the voyage of the Beagle, and Galileo’s heavenly wonderings, and was captivated by Ulysses and his perilous twenty-year wandering on the wrong route home. He’d open one book and then another and dine on both as he would a plateful of Sunday delectables. Volumes on Descartes, Plutarch, Epicurus—they nourished him as completely as chervil and lovage and a heaping helping of huckleberry slump. Their pages were silk against his skin, the thoughts moving through his dermis and into his bloodstream with osmotic intensity; he absorbed their ink like air. But no sooner had he settled on the teat than a bell with a velvet clanger rang, a bell that might call Frainey’s goat home for a bucket of clover, and as it rung out a melodic cling, clang, clung, the illuminants over his head one by one went dark, and slatted blinds descended over the windows that were too high to see through, and he found himself ushered out of his uninterrupted utopia and thrust abruptly back out the slab glass door, outside the low-slung loaf of bread, a plate cleaned of all treats but the ones he had no taste for—the shops, the acrid smoke, the vehicles, the hum, the herd. The moon was rising. He had not accounted for a time limit to his escape—escape, he was led to believe, is a sail always finding the wind, an adventure in perpetual self-invention, endlessly struggling against odds and ogres, but this escape had soft treacheries: a velvet bell and illuminants gone dark, and a door that locked from sundown to dawn. He had not thoroughly thought through this endeavor, brought no provisions with him, nothing in a satchel for bunking a night under the stars. And then there was the matter of currency, of which he had none. Not an eagle silver to his name, not a Jefferson two dollar (when’s the last time anyone in New Eden had traded currency for hospitality?) and without such, he could not buy what he lacked, not a meal and surely not a bed. Not even his bluer-than-blues could do his bidding here among the downcast, of this he was certain, although for a moment he was tempted to seek out Big Joe, but wasn’t that kind of curiosity what compelled him to leave Hunko behind and lose himself in a world of facts and distractions? Better not. Inside the library, the entirety of man was his to access for free; but free comes at a cost, and Kennesaw, for all his cleft and chisel, for all his crisp hems and darted buttonholes, for all his superior good looks and bearing was, among the herds on the streets of this odd town, unlike among his own, nothing but a bum with empty pockets, and despite the bounty that could be his at 2 for 99¢, was too broke to do anything but leave and make the long walk home. With no other choice, he would make every day a twenty-year journey: leave home every dawn and return to his mother’s dinner table of boiled rocks every night, to his father’s demands, his Scylla and Charybdis, Ulysses of the daylight. Dawn after dawn. So this he would do, and it would have to suffice as a life.
And for many years it did. Marco Polo and Magellan, Charlemagne and Columbus, Socrates and Plato, he followed every tale, every bit of wisdom, to a new piece of knowledge. From first rays to dusk his mind was occupied by a world of thoughts so far from New Eden and the lore that was his provenance that this library and its contents may well have been one of Galileo’s celestial orbs in the unchartered regions of the universe and not simply a room full of books in a building in a town on the other side of a hill beyond the end of the gravel road that formed the center of New Eden.
And it sufficed as a life. For many years long after his mother’s dinners of boiled rocks had burned the last of her pots, and long after his father’s neck twisted and snapped in the belt noose of his own slinging and the bastard was spaded deeper than Adam’s excrement, long after the Belvedere home went silent but for the rumblings in Kennesaw’s gut and heart, it continued to suffice. Hunko in this long expanse learned to spend his days by Grunts Pond intent on his own business without questioning if every distant twig snap or sudden flutter signaled Kennesaw coming to join him. The markers in Nedewen Field doubled, tripled, far outnumbered the spaces still to fill. Farms once cropped crapped out. True lost more apple trees. The tree that felled the Drells was milled to the nub Kennesaw rests on.
Days begat years, and years pushed the limits of Kennesaw’s universe. He filled himself to overflowing with more knowledge than the library at Alexandria could ever hope to contain, but what had started out an enterprise of distraction became itself an enterprise in need of distraction. For, as Kennesaw soon discovered, every advance he learned of became mired in complications from times back when, worlds thrived and fell, adventurers turned warriors, and mankind, for all its smarts, seemed never to move much further from its primal aggressions than a newborn from its need for teat. Learning for itself began to wear on Kennesaw; the violence he learned of in the world beyond his began to wear on him. Wars begetting wars. The violence in his own life—how had that come to call? He read Tennyson and Cowper and Hopkins and came to understand the blight man was born with and born for. But where were the birthday teas begetting birthday teas? The innocence of an afternoon on the shore of Grunts Pond? Why were these not among life’s must-knows? One can only escape so far by knowing the names of the continents and the planets, and poetry is a very weak aspirin when one learns from history that for every rhyming couplet there’s yet another senseless Carthage, Antietam, and Corregidor, another Flummox, and yes, another Kennesaw.
At home, at the heel end of each day, after so many years of this, in Kennesaw there grew a feeling stronger and more burdensome, a feeling of something insufficient in the unfolding of his actions, an emotion not thought through. Where he had found a world more suited to what his mind told his heart he wanted, his heart began a retaliation that Kennesaw was challenged to rebuff. Dusk treks home took to detouring from the insistent road to the dirt one to the path down to Grunts Pond, where quiet steps were careful not to snap twigs, and where in his stealth even birds were not moved to flutter. After full meals daily of religion and science and philosophy washed down with gulps of wars, and more wars and wars meant to end wars that only started new wars, Kennesaw’s diet wanted for nourishment he could only get from one place, and so he began nightly to snack on the sight of Hunko from behind the rock on the pond’s edge, feeding on the lad and his industry at hand, and the hand, and the heart, and never ever letting on that what they had had, had never truly ended.