STRATTON SAW little of Rain over the Christmas holidays. She seemed to be working at the restaurant as much as possible, so her hours were often at odds with his and the little time they did have together was over a quick meal before she hurried off. He found himself lonely in the house when she wasn’t there, and he tried to play the piano and listen to his music to enliven the empty rooms, but that often made it worse. After a few days of this he decided he needed to get out on his own. With his best winter jacket, duck boots, and a full thermos of coffee, he put himself on the road without a specific destination in mind.
Within an hour he was in Johnson City and decided to press on for Elizabethton where the Watauga River came alive after its dam release. He had taken Liza there a couple of times to fish when they’d first moved to the Tennessee house. The dam wall made an impression on her he’d not anticipated. She’d asked him if it was safe to be there and when he’d assured her that it was she gave him a look that lacked all confidence. When half an hour later the five-minute warning horn sounded, she lost no time in beating her way back to the car, convinced that the event would be cataclysm rather than the modest churning and rise of the waterline it was.
Past Hampton, he came into Roan Mountain State Park, where the road swiftly climbed and took him past the cabins and car camping and into the mountain itself. Driving here always felt like he was being gathered in by the belly of the mountain. The ground had to digest him. The road tightened and he accelerated into it, drew all the slack from his hands and arms so that the winding pressure of staying within his lane was tuned as sharply as possible to his touch. He had to grab hold of speed itself.
He slowed at Carvers Gap, nosed in along all the other hikers’ trucks and cars parked along the shoulder of winter grass. As he stepped out the wind reminded him of the change in altitude, the temperature close to twenty degrees colder than it had been at the house. After a sip of the coffee, he set across the road and mounted the trail, nodding hello to the few others who were coming back down from the top of the mountain.
He walked quickly up through the tunneled shade of rhododendron until he felt his face redden and his breathing catch. Badly out of shape, he knew. He slowed, having no desire to court cardiac disaster when he might be farther from medical help that he would have liked. Strange how that happened, how one day you woke up with a body that didn’t seem completely familiar. Of course, the body wasn’t all that changed. For a couple of years after turning forty he’d fallen into an odd version of a midlife crisis where he developed a fear that he was incrementally losing who he was each time he would sleep through the night. It had gotten so bad that he began to believe that it was true, that he could actually feel a significant part of him erode between one day and the next, as if he were something washed so thin that he verged on dissolving. He tried sleeping pills for a while, hoping the deep tumble into the back nowhere of his shut-down mind could keep the animal part of who he was intact. But that was slowness he couldn’t keep for long. Perhaps it had been around that time when Liza had become a stranger to him, just as he had become a stranger to himself.
He came to the ridge crest where the tan landscape rolled away on all sides, the sun and cloud shadows vying across the range for a sense of geographic depth. He cut away from the main trail for a small copse of trees encircling a scorched fire pit. Several piles of flat stones had been dragged up for seating. He settled his weight on the most stable looking of these and poured the thermos cap full, drank as he watched a distant hawk buoy up on coursing thermals, the country beneath him distant and unreal.
The hawk’s flight reminded him of a piece of music he deeply admired—Max Richter’s recomposition of Vivaldi’s Four Seasons. The violin from Summer 2. A sure and solitary movement that was not so much a reworking of Vivaldi as a distillation of what the beauty of the world could be when it was left on its own, a sphere apart from human interference.
For a time he had been a recreational environmentalist. Sorted recyclables, volunteered for river cleanups, attended Earth Day festivals. Anything reasonably easy and suburban. Liza had been the enthusiast in that regard, after all, wholly impassioned. But it seemed to him that things had changed. He wasn’t exactly sure when it had happened, but a spirit of resignation had settled over those who had once been so ardent to defend the integrity of the natural world. Perhaps it was simply a reaction to the sustained indifference, both political and personal. Regardless of cause or the many lost possibilities for creating a different future, he had no doubt now that the world was dying, though it was the human world, not the earth, that would suffer and disappear. It shouldn’t have been allowed to happen, but that had no bearing on the fact that it had. Strange how something still in the future could seem as though it had been written long ago on tablets of stone and then lost. He remembered a line from Edward Abbey’s Desert Solitaire, as profound a comfort as he’d ever had:
Men come and go, cities rise and fall, whole civilizations appear and disappear—the earth remains. . . . I sometimes choose to think, no doubt perversely, that man is a dream, thought an illusion, and only rock is real. Rock and sun.
What would that mean for who was left? Would that mean that they were only the dreams of rocks?
Late that afternoon he went back down to his car and drove home, arrived half an hour after dark. He had not left lights on inside and the light switch in the front hall wouldn’t work. The emptiness as he stood there was its own kind of immensity, so he allowed it to stay with him for a while. He would have gone to bed with it left like that but he didn’t want Rain to have to come in from work without a way to see. Turning on the standing lamp, he mounted the stairs.
HE SLEPT late the next morning, roused by daylight rather than the normal hard nosing of the cat. He stood at the window to see a frost had set in overnight. The thin grass was wearing a jacket of cold. He was awake for several minutes before he became concerned.
He went back to Rain’s room and tapped lightly to see if she was awake, but there was no answer. He cracked the door, saw her still sleeping, but the cat wasn’t there. The cat bed in the den was empty and the bowl of kibble appeared to be untouched since before he’d left for the mountain. He stood on the front porch and called for five minutes before he turned back inside and began to search the house.
The cat was under one corner of a pile of blankets at the dark end of a closet in one of the spare bedrooms. He lifted his head only slightly, gazed into a distance without definition. Stratton placed his hands beneath the flanks that were damp with urine and carried him into the front room. The weight was slack and alien. Once he settled him on the couch the cat’s only movement was the slow collapse of his breath. He sat and petted him until this too stopped.
He wrapped the cat in one of Liza’s scarves and carried it outside to place on the ground next to where he would bury it in the soft soil of the old garden. The spade tip went in deep and the soil broke and popped when he twisted. The frozen ground around it appeared hard, but the plot opened up with an easiness beyond anything Stratton could have expected. As he lay the cat in the bottom of the hole and covered it, the wind began to blow, the trees rustle.
With the grave closed, he had expected something to come, some grief to articulate, either in tears or that deep body ache of having lost something important out of his private world. Instead, there was only the fact of having finished what had been required. He put the shovel away and squatted there for a long time, decided to find a good stone for a marker and to make sure the body was guarded from scavengers. There was a piece of river rock under the front steps, rounded and heavy. He carried it over and set it to the ground. And it was then, with the perfection of the rock put to its right place that it all broke loose and he wept as he never had, not for Liza or anything else that had been ripped from his life, because for so long he thought he had been beyond any further grief, that losing her had been the completion of what could inflict hurt. But now he realized that the loss would go on and on, that he had no protection from it, that each new loss would always be a magnification of losing her.