Between the fullness of youth and the frailty of old age stretched a breadth of years full of aimless wandering. We were told that in this time joys and sadnesses would come at us as gently as spring rains and as savage as winter howlers, sometimes out of season in their volleys, but always one in succession of another. We were told we would weather them one at a time with no sense of the next one on its way, believing this one is the great one, the love, the laugh, the start of something new, or that one with its grief and throbbing loss is the one we won’t outlive. They would come at us, these highs and lows, when we were in our highs or lows, and we must find the strength to face them one on one, one after another, and we must live them as they come, and outlive them as they go, and get through them and to the other side as well as we can, for these years can last far longer than a body can stand them. But stand them is what we are born for.
We could not imagine these years when young. Youth is too busy inventing itself to bother with the basics everyone older knows already. We were told from our earliest times that the greatest bulk of our years must be a solitary pursuit, each one of us alone in our own bed, our names spelled out with the last letters, our hearts the last beating organs, because our blood had trickled too thin into a puddle in the middle of town and the puddle at long last was going dry. All around us were the tadpoles of warning born in that withering wet spot—the bodily extras and absences, the eccentricities and melancholia; they sprouted bowlegs and short little arms and hopped about with their admonishments that we must forego all fairy-tale desires, for all we’d give birth to from our loins if we should hop on one another would be frogs. We listened. We were not blind. It was obvious that the inbred Minton sniffer would look more apt were it protruding from the keel of a boat. Or Lopes from loins less polluted might not have come out in a litter so overwrought and underwhelming. But oddnesses like these surely are the low-hanging fruit that suffers because it does not get the sun in all its glory, and we young and hardy would climb to the top of the tree and pick the best and prove the past wrong.
We were of a mind that the old were too old to remember youth bursting through its pants or the yearning one feels for a wooden doll to squirm itself human; and that the older were already of an old world that in its unincandescent, unhydrolic, unpetroleumed way would never understand what youth now knew to do. Each one of us with our urgent business in our hands, or with our skirts up in a tumble and the grasses tickling our ever-mores: we’d climb our nimble way farther up than our elders to the top of the tree and gorge ourselves on the pick of the crop in that glowing sun, and with our stamens put to pistils there would not come a mutant among us. We were young, and that’s what we believed.
In that youthful time of self-invention, we judged our swellings and emissions as the sole of life’s sum. We were the first galleons to cross the oceans and discover this new world of fervent urgency. We could see the distant lands and all the lush new growth where we would put in at the end of our journey, and we could smell the earthy air blowing across the waters to meet us, and in its thrall, we would need no sextant to guide our ships to port. The Cozy Blisses among us shot their cannons across our bows to sink our expeditions before they ever left the shores of Grunts Pond, and we only shook our heads in amused pity at their outdated warnings and old-fashioned weapons. Surely they had forgotten, if they’d ever known at all, the pinch and struggle of skin engorging in tight denim and what it meant to free it and let it run wild where it wanted to run wild. If they’d ever known at all they would not have pointed knuckleless fingers at the epidemic of humps and carbuncles, or preached themselves purple inveighing against the home-grown blight that had obliterated family after family. Had they ever felt what we felt they would not have been so adamantine that we should learn to live with that swelling turning blue, they would recall the twitch and sting and ache and soften to our stiffness and send us seamen off on our white-capped voyage with a robust shanty singing go forth and mutate! But they did not, and we begrudged them for it.
We all of us swollen and alone chose to hold out until the old were no more, and once they were gone we could let go. But we were growing up, we were swelling to our peaks, holding out was getting harder and harder, the sweat of impatience was beading up on the tip of us, we were each of us a Carnival yearning to go the full three-ring circus on every Jubilee; the old were dropping like overripe fruits from untended trees and soon every one of them would be rot and rum and once they were we could open the spigot of our longings. We were so close, and we might have gone all the way, had that flopping flounder Knotsy O’ums not scared every last one of us limp.
Knotsy’s birth was maturity’s first slap in our collective faces that maybe the old folks were on to something. The spoiled fruit of Butte and Columbine’s cousinly loins was born with not enough skin and too many seeds, as pale and permeable as a jellyfish. She was alive as a barnacle is alive, sticking to life more than living it, and while she had most of the right body parts in a few of the correct places that evolution decreed, the functions they performed were throwbacks to that oceanic era just before fish walked on land. To those of us who were but a moonlit night away from our maiden voyages to that new land we thought we were the first to discover, the moonlight shining clear through Knotsy’s filmy flesh like the brightest lighthouse beacon cautioned our ships from anchoring off that shore. The warnings that had taken mis-shape only here and there, on Knotsy were in full mis-formation, and we came as almost one to the understanding that this was what so many generations of cousins on cousins had come to—a weakened, watery fluid with no more life to it than the algae on a still pond; and the likelihood of any two of us bringing forth another one of her was a shallow shoal full of sharp rocks and certain peril. From there on out, almost every bit of urgent business stayed a ship on the water going nowhere.
But urgent business unaddressed undoes. We were told from our earliest times that the greatest bulk of our years must be a solitary pursuit, and we came as almost one to understand the wisdom of this, but not a one had wise words to offer on what to do with all that urgency that would not abate, wisdom come nothing. We graduated from our youth into our adult years with this unspent urgency pent to implosion, and only on the shores of Grunts Pond or in the tickling grasses on Tumblers’ Ridge did any of us rid ourselves of the urges as a one-man ship of its ballast; but always the urges flooded back in and filled us with their distracting vigor and we would have to rid ourselves again, from fill to rid, fill to rid, nothing coming of our urgency but more urgency—urgency with nowhere to go. Urgency with nowhere to go is life in a suicide cycle.
Urgency had given New Eden years and years and years of life, but that life with us would end. We came as almost one to accept that a ship with too much ballast will at last sink under its un-unloaded weight, and one by almost one we did. The urges that had set sail on the shores of Grunts Pond and in the tickling grasses on Tumblers’ Ridge with no focused port, no shore in sight, only horizon and more horizon on the horizon, swamped us each and almost every. We wandered through our days in motion devoid of purpose, making do with our tasks, our needs, but without plans for making do again until it was time to make do again, repeating our days only because they repeated themselves. And this was how the desires for cousin on cousin as the years began to pass grew fewer and fewer, and with it the need for heart to heart grew less and less, and as urgency subsided to pastime and pastime became part of the past, the fluids we no longer needed dried to crust. There was nowhere to set sail for and no longer a reason. And we almost all of us sank to the murky bottom of life where loneliness doesn’t know what to do with itself.
This is what our middle years were made of: loneliness, stretching out a land bridge from the fullness of youth to the frailty of old age, day after day after day. Each and almost every one of us rode through these years as a barnacle on a hull, sticking to life more than living it, enacting the making do that makes up a life. We had our crops to tend, our chores, our mending, trees to fell and, when we fell, our holes to dig, and we did all of this as best we could as weather and wherewithal allowed. We had our Sunday Sit Downs and our tumblings; the Drells had their walkabouts, the Lopes their nightly howlings. The world around us modernized and moved ahead, and in small ways we let the modern world fill us with its urgency—its amps and volts, its rotary dials, the chug-a-lugs that did our farm work for us. But as the modern world around us moved ahead faster and further, we almost all of us in our own time unsuctioned from the hull of that progression. The sagging wires that had been strung from pole to pole down the center of town like a slack stitch through a temporary hem we were not sorry to see removed when the main road was forked at both ends, leaving the stretch in between unneeded. Like the main road through town with no destination up ahead we were unrouted from the voyage that is life, and no illumination stronger than a candle’s cast is needed when there’s nothing much to look for and nowhere to go in the dark.
Some of us were castaways together. Petie Soyle had Loma to light her way through these dark years, and all three Lopes had each other, despite each one’s frequent desire to rid herself of the other two. They were all to each of their siblings a ready presence that would serve the need for simple companionship in the daylight, or be a voice that called back in the dark when the night was too long to go through alone. In sibling-ness these five had a built-in buffer to unrelenting silence, but as they found—as we all found—noise alone was not enough of a comforting touch.
Urgency wants what it wants beyond mere want. And what it wants most of all is more than an echo, more than a shadow, more than the frictive slip of flesh in flesh. It was in our middle years that we came to understand that the distant shore we thought in our youth we would be the first to discover was not in fact urgency’s final destination. That land, out past where we could see ahead on the horizon, was but a barrier island off the coast of the real shore to be landed on—the land beyond the biological, far removed from the urgent, the undiscovered world where exists the deepest urgency of all: to attach one’s lonely fate to another’s. This is the real land bridge of life—the land bridge between birth and eternity.
Build a bridge, build a box, in the end it’s all the same.
From the time Hunko Minton first gripped a hammer with as much authority as he gripped himself, it was his job to build the town its boxes. He’d measure the body’s height for the box’s length and the spread of its shoulders for width; when rigor mortis set in and the ankles froze forever and made its feet stick straight up, he’d measure their length and that would determine how tall the box should be. Only once in his box-building life did he ever take an unorthodox measurement to build an unorthodox box, and that box was the box he built for his own father, and for that box he measured his father’s stiff Minton sniffer and that sniffer sticking straight up was taller by far than his stiff Minton feet, so Hunko cut a hole in the lid of his box and added a rectangular ell to the face of it like a rectangular branch growing off of a rectangular tree, and it made that box the only add-on box Hunko ever built in his life. The only box that would have ever rivaled it was a box that was never built, and that box would have been the last box Hunko ever built, and had that box ever been built, that box would have been his own.
He was good at building rectangles, not bad at toe-pinchers, too. His measurements were always nearly perfect; he’d take them once and never felt the need to take them again. He’d cut his planks—the same size for the lid as the base, the same size for the sides, the same size for the head and the foot. He never worried about boxes needing a lining, nor did he build them with any thought to comfort. If, when nailed together, the box proved too snug for its occupant because his measurements were a couple of inches off, rather than start from scratch he’d bust a couple of bones and make the body fit.
No sanding, no planing, no tongues in grooves, no chamfered edges. Nothing fancy was ever needed for something the occupant would never see. Hunko’s one concern was durability. Hardwoods make the longest-lasting boxes; cherry and walnut and oak assure eternity. The sound of his hammer hitting the nails that nailed the boxes shut as it echoed across the valley was the boarding call of that eternal journey readying to launch, and like a ship’s horn or a train’s whistle, if you heard it, it meant one less person you’d ever see again.
As the middle years thinned New Eden of its remnants, Hunko built the boxes that sent almost all of us on our way. He boxed up Frainey Swampscott in a cherry toe-pincher, and sealed her up with Chippewa’s hard-gristled heart in her hands. Zebeliah Was-She-a-Hackensack-or-Was-She-a-Whiskerhooven became twice the woman she ever was in her final days, swelling up like a summer melon, so Hunko made for her a walnut rectangle as wide as a wagon. (It was equal in width to the doublewide he’d built all those many years ago for Russett and Circe Aspetuck.) Though Luddy Upton had no box at least Hunko dug him a hole; there would be neither box nor hole for Petie and Loma Soyle, who were left to hold each other’s hands until their hands turned to dust in the beds in the small room of their house where the tree limb came to fall and their days came to an end. Onesie Lope went the year of the walnut blight so she was evermored in oak; Twosie would have preferred oak herself but cherry was all there was, and because she did not like confinement in any form (something that must have had to do with being sandwiched in the middle of the trio in her mother’s crowded womb), Hunko kindly gave her the first look at whatever lay ahead by fitting her lid with a window. Threesie lived as long as cantankerous does, outliving both her sisters with a willfulness to experience life all alone, even if alone meant she’d be screaming for three. For her box Hunko reused scavenged soft planks of pine and poplar and ash and tulip he tore up from the floor and walls of the Lope family home. The planks were all irregularly lengthed, no two alike, and with arthritis stiffening his sawing arm and his hammering arm, to save that arm for his preferred activity he neither sawed nor hammered hard those planks to make a form at all. Instead, Threesie Lope traveled to wherever in a box one could hardly call a box; lumber rushing down a flooding river and coming to rest in an angry jumble of jagged boards and splintered planks all juts and edge roughs would be elegant joinery compared to what he mish-mashed up for her.
But for the mish-mash of fish and flesh that was the see-through Knotsy O’ums, Hunko took his greatest care of all, and made for her neither a rectangle nor a conventional toe-pincher to last in the dirt forever; instead he made her a seaworthy vessel to return her to her aqueous origins. No ordinary measurements would have served to make a box of any suitable proportions for the girl; for Knotsy never was at any one time in her brief life a height or width one could count on. Her fluid body, lacking in any discernible skeletal understructure, was a membranous mass ever in motion; when she walked she moved in a series of undulations and jumps similar to a salmon perpetually spawning upstream; at rest, her body appeared to loosen its tenuous hold on structure all together, turning as quivery and wobbly and runny as an aspic on a warm day.
It was wintertime, the winter of the silent ice, the year when snowy rain was all that fell and it froze on contact with every post and twig, every barn and barrel, every exposed bit of flesh that wasn’t kept buttoned up; it was in this winter when Knotsy’s life fluids froze and ceased forever. She was found by Hunko down by the frozen shores of Grunts Pond, hard as any fish you’d catch in fall and freeze for a meal much later in the year. Hunko was down there for his daily ritual, doubly urgent in his urgency to keep his unbuttoned bit of flesh from turning as sleek and hard as an icicle in his hand. Across the pond on the spot where Brisket Whiskerhooven undertook to strengthen his tongue on Knotsy’s name all those years ago, Hunko spotted the tongue twister herself, a frozen lump, as shimmery as an egg white, encased in a veil of ice. It was uncommon for Hunko to ever interrupt his urgent business before his business was complete, but spotting Knotsy on that spot he cold-froze in his motions, and consequently, his hand cold-froze to his manhood. He was frozen this way when he crossed the frozen pond to study her frozen form, and frozen this way as he stood above her in his studies. Remembering Brisket’s words, Hunko did what he needed to do to unstick the moment from his mind and his frozen hand. It was the first and last time in his life that anyone but Kennesaw ever inspired him to such an ending. And although it did the trick, whenever he thought back on this moment in his life, grunting Knotsthy! was the one memory he couldn’t really warm to.
Perhaps it was the ice at hand that gave Hunko the idea to return Knotsy to the waters she was suited for. The ground was too hard to dig a hole, and would not be soft enough to do so until long after the first thaw of spring. But the ice on Grunts Pond would give way on its own when the sun came out of its winter hibernation. There’d be no digging to do; in fact, there’d be no need to make a box that would last any longer than a log submerged. So with pine and hemlock and balsam and spruce Hunko fashioned for Knotsy a kind of sarcophagus canoe, tapered at the head and tapered at the toe, with a lattice lid and a flat-bottomed hull. The lack of structure to her limbs came in handy when Hunko needed to snap both her frozen feet parallel to her ankles in order to make her head fit fully at its end.
The day Knotsy was to set sail it was too cold out for most to say their farewells. She had been the caution that came between urgency and eventuality for every member of the last of the last, and though she was not to blame for the rule that had sentenced us all to our solitary lives, the fact of her had made her an outcast the whole of her brief, transparent existence. She had clung to life like a barnacle, like us—alive but not really living. She breathed, she moved, she went through her days as a being with a pulse, yet without purpose, and we could see in her all too clearly the unlived lives we all had led. Perhaps to say good-bye to her was to say it to ourselves, and it was just too chilly a day to do that too soon.
Hunko slid her vessel out across the ice to the center of Grunts Pond, in view of Brisket’s shoreside perch, and there it would sit for more than two months before it settled and submerged into the icy waters when they were finally ready to receive her in the exact same spot where all those generations ago Hezekiah Minton became the first New Edener to go beyond to forever. It will never be known how Knotsy felt about being Brisket’s urgent inspiration. She never did in her time among us utter a word more solid than a bubble of spit. Yet, knowing the charity that in the recesses of every private heart forgives what it cannot help itself to begrudge, it is certain that the collective hope among us all is that Brisket’s moonlit grunts all those years ago made Knotsy’s fishy innards wriggle. And too, the hope that there would be for her a journey to complete what on dry land had eluded her. From there in the middle of Grunts Pond she could see the distant shore where Brisket once had called her name and with it still in the air she would need no sextant to guide her to his port. And if the vessel Hunko crafted for her didn’t get her there, she could always swim.