XVIII

A Time for Every Purpose Under Heaven

I had a dream that night, not a nightmare but a vivid enactment by those figments populating my pitching and yawing mind. I dreamt that Aníse gave up the ghost in her sleep sometime between midnight and morning. Morbidity, as Hedley called it, resulted from unforeseen prenatal complication, specifically resulting in a breach with umbilical strangulation accompanied and compounded by uterine hemorrhage. That was Hedley’s summary of the autopsy report as required by the coroner. Jim Cohen put it more concisely: She dead.

Neither Jim Cohen nor I slept that night, first slogging through a random hundred miles or so of his epic journey across the tidal decades, stomping concurrently through the bottle of scotch that loosened tongues on troubling truths. I put it to him to tell me, if he would, what in hell to name the infant. He said it wouldn’t make a pinch of shit’s worth of difference if dem yidda enfants be’s a high yella like he grea- great-grandmama uh one dem pitch black blue gum like he mama. Twix’t one of anovah you still gwine have de nextes pres’dent ob de Unated Steates ob Merica, mebbe, neb know.

“What? And you’ll be Ambassador to Uganda?”

“Neb know.”

The problem with too much liquor is that you don’t remember much, and what you do remember is often dubious. I’m not certain what we actually covered and what I merely imagined. I asked Jim if he’d dress up in military regalia with orange and green epaulets for reviewing the troops in Uganda, which an ambassador would not do, but he thought it over for a while and finally said, “Who?”

But even a drunk knows what’s real and what’s not in life and sudden death. Aníse’s passing in the night was both a painful loss and terrific release; she’d been so forlorn. Loss manifested in stabbing pangs. Relief was vague, suggesting that things work out for a reason.

I drifted aimlessly back to my place in town to fetch a lamp to read better by, a rug to keep my feet warmer and some odds and ends for minor convenience. I’d made a mess of things and stood at a crossroads, with rural seclusion up one fork and a return to the fold up the other. Maybe I wandered back to town for some of the old familiar, for some friendly voices and faces, to see what they’d say and help tell which fork to take. I couldn’t tell; a fellow I knew but not well grasped my arm on the street and confided, Welcome home. He emitted the faint stink of compulsory kindness, the decaying scent of failed preservation. And there I was, critiquing harshly again when he might have been simply warm and friendly, for all I knew.

Maybe I wasn’t ready for polite society. I’d known Marybeth Rutledge for ages in pleasant context. She didn’t grasp but came near for another confidence. Don’t you worry about a thing, she said.

Don’t worry? I asked. I loved her. Yet in my declaration of what I’d been unsure of, I wondered on utterance whose benefit I served; Aníse’s or mine, or Marybeth’s for the truth I wanted known in town.

My God, Arthur! Marybeth replied. I’m aware of that. You went through some changes. Some of us still call you friend and admire your career and value your help and want to return the favor. Can you understand that? Marybeth made me cry on the sidewalk in the middle of the night and a bad drunk, because I hadn’t understood it and still doubted it. But her saying it touched a nerve.

So we did sleep that night. I woke up crying but went quickly to labored breathing with the onset of consciousness, real consciousness, where a drinker knows why the bottle is empty, and it hurts. I struggled up, dragging my legs off the far chair and waiting for equilibrium to nose out the pain and dizzies—and the numbness so I could stand, or give it a try. Jim Cohen slumped on the other two chairs, both under his ass. His snoring sounded like an engine with warped valves, but another presence took over. Aníse wasn’t dead but grimaced, chagrined at the mess she’d made of things. That’s okay, baby, I thought but didn’t likely say; I can’t remember, but I tried to show tolerance and affection to ease her discomfort. The sofa was wet beneath her.

Stumbling out the door on adrenaline at first light, I ran to the Rockville store calling to the midwife on the way. I called Hedley on the phone once I got there, then huffed and puffed back to the Hunt Club where Jim stood in the door laden with swathing and paraphernalia of birthing and spirit cleansing, at a loss what next to do. The midwife hurried along in her nightie, but I yelled at him anyway, “Don’t just stand there. You got to do something!”

But of course there’s nothing to do. Like I said, Jim Cohen was nature’s metaphor, and so was I, with nothing to do but wait while life took the next step toward everlasting. He shook his head, too labored to speak. Aníse lamented but was soon consoled by the midwife. In a short while it was over. Or rather it began. Julya Cohen Covingdale came in at seven pounds four ounces with common infantile features in high yellow and mottled blue gums she wantonly showed, wailing for the tit. Blue gums on a high yellow had not thereabout been seen, so the murmuring began. It too marked an ending—of apprehension.

I held her, amazed at my paternal drive to ease her struggle. So it came to pass that the Covingdale line went over a line of a different nature. That we lived happily ever after remains to be seen. Our future feels bright. We have our tears but have yet to wear them as a veil.

Aníse and I never married per se but exchanged vows of one heart shared, her words, down at the brackish pond where many Cohen forbears rest. I grew to depend on her counsel and company, so the vow merely affirmed what was felt. I had another dream of Aníse dying some years later, not even seventy but defeated by liquor, hardly eating, yet blowing up big as a house. You can’t measure your feeling for someone till they’re gone. She was a loving mother who nurtured a loving daughter. They came to accept the quirks between them.

I woke up from that dream too. Aníse got her looks back, which was more than vanity for her and more than hormonal for me; nature is mysterious. So the flame blazed anew, though romance took a turn for the civilized, with less frequent congress and rarely with the old, wild service. The magic thinned as it will with child bearing, till the children grow up and leave, and the parents no longer seek each other but drift together now and then like a lazy hand casually scratching a vague itch. She went to town and knocked on the door of my old place on Queen Street and told the tenants how do you do, this is it, thirty days notice; thank you very much. The Covingdale controversy devolved from the Covingdale scandal, which perhaps was born of the Covingdale shame, a direct descendent of the Covingdale pride. By then we’d settled down to being the Covingdales, another family from the islands, so far removed from idle street gossip that the tenants were surprised to hear that Aníse was indeed the landlady, more or less.

She practically moved to town but didn’t call it a move. She called it efficient, sparing her the drive back and forth every damn day, and she sure as hell wouldn’t trust the subcontractors to get it right without herself to oversee things. She remodeled the Queen Street house so she and Julya could stay there while engaged in town pursuits. She included Julya in her motivation though the appetite for fun was her own. I joined her for dinner once in a while, and now and then for some dancing, as it were. The homosexual disco opened on King Street, where nobody looked twice if Puff the Magic Dragon waltzed in with Tinkerbell on his arm. In years to come she’d stay in town a few days to walk around, see a movie or lunch in a café. She said it made her feel good. We achieved fulfillment as people can in an arrangement viewed as modern. That freshened things up to where they leveled off and kept us happy to see each other.

Anne Waring is not forgotten. I don’t feel responsibility for her suicide, as friends often feel, except for adding to her disappointment and depression. I regret our friendship ending but think it only a matter of time; she’d have likely rejected me at any rate—or accepted me, leading to our shared unhappiness in marriage. My hunch is not based in logic but instinct, the one gained with many years passing. I’m no longer certain why people marry; it so obviously detracts from original passion. Her life ended soon after a failed marriage, and I’m grateful it wasn’t to me, proving again how little we know along the way.

I mark history and time as Luzon did, kind of, beginning with my first drive out with Jim Cohen’s Promise Land Produce Cadillac in tow. It was the beginning of the end, or maybe just a beginning. Development creeps south with new dredging, new bridges and roads for more cars, as if the traffic might thin. It won’t. More cars will ensure more jobs and reach further south and deeper inside to grab what remains of nature’s guts. I bought another two acres for protection from the scab spreading like shingles on a nervous old man. What’s to protect when so much ugly fills in on all sides? The scan button on my truck radio stops on Christian talk and Christian music on twelve stations out of fifteen, as if Jesus wants development as much as he wanted St. Louis to win the Super Bowl. It’s still good out here, but the blush is fading, and I’m grateful I’ll die before it does.

Jim went on ahead in ’92 at ninety-seven, which was good for him, his kin averaging early eighties in general, if you don’t count them that drowned or died in childbirth. I was eighty-two at the time and would have thought ninety-seven a goodly number of years for me too, my kin showing late eighties on average. You get up near a hundred and know it doesn’t happen one day but over time, functions and body parts failing here and there till you just sit there waiting to initial the last chit. Old Jim went good, hardly slowed down from eighty, still dressing himself and eating on his own, and us fishing and throwing the net now and then, till he went on in from his porch one summer morning on the last two hours of flood. He lay himself down in the bed he’d risen from a short while prior and stared at the ceiling.

I was there to see him go, smooth as a shadow fading at sunrise. I didn’t want to be obtrusive in that final time with so much family around, but a few encouraged me to lean in close with a farewell from a friend, so I did, whispering in his ear, “Hey, Bubba.” I wasn’t sad for his death or my loss but trembled into goose bumps, though I couldn’t say what from, but it wasn’t sadness. Even the tears on my face felt like somebody else’s tears on somebody else’s face, and when I said, “You the best friend,” it felt like somebody else’s voice.

He stared up, moving his hand a quarter inch till his fingers touched mine, letting me feel something I’d felt before, something alive and moving into me. Then he died, not fifty paces from where he and his father and his children were born. Those people in town for whom ancestry and heritage are revered could only admire such a tight radius to the Cohen homestead. The Cohen radius has stretched many miles in recent decades, to Atlanta, Charlotte, Chicago and other points of perceived opportunity. Now the gentry seeking refuge from what they created largely displace the homestead and surrounding forest.

I’m not necessarily next, though nobody would say boo if I am. Or be disappointed, given the solitude of a man who outlives his family and friends and is down to polite conversation with his wife. I stay busy, minding the till at the Cohen Bros. Salvage & Fixit Garage, or sitting near it among the worn outs, staring at thin air and seeing how it was. I sometimes see a brickbat arcing in flight and can easily view that same scene without it, but I can’t know if things would have played the same or different. In the end you learn that it plays how it wants to.

I’d rather be planted out here than in town, somewhere between the Ledinwah and Bohicket creeks, unmarked but for the stars and seasons and maybe for a while by the tides and critters. I fancy a shallow hole halfway down a flat, so a storm surge in winter might thin the top layer to reveal whatever nutrients I might be good for. I want to help feed a spring brood, to continue the greatest part of my life, which I now feel most strongly is my legacy to kith and kin.

They won’t do it. It’s illegal for one thing to bury someone in the marsh, and it goes against the general order for another. They want us wayward souls back into the fold to thereby bolster what is held more dearly in town than all the wonder out here. They’ll plant me in the Covingdale section where one spot remains for the sole remainder of the clan, as if my daughter won’t count, or maybe they’d only discount her on account of her name changing when she married. Either way, they’ll want me under the mud at Magnolia Cemetery, unless they forget.

Julya got on at the Rockville store; she was so service-oriented and a real chatterbox. She often told me of folks from town coming out to size her up, folks who knew me but wouldn’t say so, going pink in the face when she introduced herself and offered a handshake and asked who they might be. She married a fellow from Atlanta after he got lost one day and stopped for guidance. Smitten by the beauty abounding, he agreed to stay on for a while, though Julya swore he’d get none of the you-know-what till the last I do; or not much of it anyway. These kids today.

It was Socrates or Plato who wrote about the waters of forgetfulness; I can’t remember which one. Around here, when you’re dead, you’re dead, over and out to the garden for social ablutions to recollect that you lived, breathed and drank. I think forgetfulness in death affects only what was formally learned in life, like the Dewey Decimal System, or the reason time and circumference is measured on a root of twelve rather than ten, or Latin binomials, or cousins, aunts and in-laws, or generic names of regions or trees, fish, birds or subcultures, like Yankees, flatlanders, grits, spades and the like; you forget those facts and figures of civilization. Or your phone number or address. Or the date you were born.

I think immersion in a greater knowing more likely follows death. Instinct prevails; intuition confirms what you learn at last, what the other species sense more easily in life. Aldous Huxley called it the knowledgeless understanding of everything apprehended through a particular piece of knowledge. He was most likely tripping, seeing God in a grain of sand, or a pencil erasure, or the slight movement of a finger, or the three hundred sixty degrees of every orbit ever occurring in heaven. I wish I’d tried that, just to see.

I think the transition from flesh to spirit is more difficult when the transit begins far from nature, like, say, in town, any town, where local knowledge concerns pavement and commerce, and general information passes for wisdom. Yet even from the urban core the facts, stats and personal contacts default to a greater knowing. I don’t mean you’re suddenly smart at death, after a life of vacuous mentality. Take for example the President of the United States of America at this juncture, who best illustrates this point. His biographers record no ideas or positions in his youth. At Yale and Harvard, ideas and positions are presumed but in him were absent. He got by as an heir, avoiding the misspeak that might irk the patriarch in those salad days of liquor, cocaine and leg. But I suspect minimal discretion; I think George II will meet his maker knowing little else but what the cue cards tell him. Maybe I’m old-fashioned, a dyed-in-the-wool Southern Democrat who sees no value in the two-car suburbs with new appliances, who sees earthly power as no absolution for a mean spirit.

I have more faith in my cat Ruby, walking regally across the deck, jumping onto a chair and from there to a low overhang off the roof and easing on up to the ridge, where she fluffs, squints at the green-tinted sunbeams and seems to sense the world around her more than her president. That’s the knowing available to some of us, before or after death. Maybe things are best perceived from a rooftop, or at least from a reasonable distance.

We put Jim Cohen out with the rest of the Cohens under a good size magnolia by the pond they called brackish because it broke off from a curve in the creek about a hundred years ago and stayed half salty in spite of its freshwater spring. I knew the place well and went there often for its beauty and stillness. Nobody else went out there because of the graves, except for Jim, who went out for something else. He showed me the place some years ago, pointing out how the creek had snaked in and back out in a deepening curve till the pond had no choice but to separate, once the creek pinched back in so tight it left the pond and flowed freely without it. Then he showed me how fresh the pond had become, evidenced by the swarming dragonflies dipping their tail ends to the surface to deposit their eggs, so their larvae could hatch and mature below the surface. D’enfant skeeta hawk cain’t drank no saltwater now.

He still makes me laugh; the baby mosquito hawks can’t drink saltwater. I cupped a handful and tasted fresh.

Then he showed me how he scratched the itch when he hankered for old times with the old mobility, when mystery and adventure waited around every bend of every creek and river. Nothing scared shit out of him like lightning, and I shared that fear. Most people head inside at the first flash over the horizon, not waiting to see what moves in. The air and humidity in this region pump the ions up to discharge right now with so much current flashing in the bolts you’d think it was warheads exploding. Not that anyone would want to fire on Wadmalaw. Who’d care? Unless they missed the nuclear submarine base up in North Charleston and hit here by mistake.

Everyone gets caught out in the lightning sooner or later, driving down the road if nothing else. Jim Cohen got caught often as not in his bateau with nothing for it but to row like the devil for home. But that was years ago. Years later he stacked three old tires out by the pond and family gravesites, because he believed the lightning didn’t take nearly so quick to freshwater, and if it did, de sparit ob de fambly were there to save him, and if they didn’t, there wouldn’t be so far to carry his body. He got me to help him carry three more tires out there and stackumup one gray, blustery afternoon to demonstrate his technique, showing me how to sit on the tires for poor man’s insulation and warning me not to tip the whole load over, unless I got stuck, and then there wasn’t nothing else for it, if a man wanted out.

So we wedged into the tires as the clouds got black and blue on a bad mood till the bolts came crashing, first a mile out and in about two seconds maybe a hundred feet out. The squall soaked us to the bone, breaking regular with lightning for ten or twelve minutes. Then it passed, leaving us ready to head home with nobody restless anymore. He didn’t press for my assessment but seemed satisfied. Then he warned me that if I came back without him, don’t forget to check in dem rubbah tah fuh dem rattuh snek wid dem cawton in e mouf, which he had forgot to do, but neh min’; dem snek be’s sceeyid as us two foo, fuh true.

I haven’t felt restless enough to try that one again but did go back out to the freshwater pond a few times to feel the stillness and the place. I don’t know if they’d allow me in for the long haul, but I wouldn’t mind helping Jim feed that tree. I might see how his kin would feel about a plain pine box. It’d go away in no time, no marker necessary, unless they want to say something about a loving husband and father. I might have a little chat with Julya while I’m at it on the sins of squandering and the prudence of investing for the future, reinvesting the dividends, never touching the principal or losing sight of the greatest wealth of all, the one inherited long before my arrival.

I think Waites Waring was my friend and mentor, that he and I reflect the Lowcountry for better or worse. We arrived together long way around, adapting to a truth long buried in our hearts. Maybe his Yankee spitfire let him see it. Maybe not. Aníse and her uncle unveiled it for me and remain steadfast in quelling my doubts, and so does the beauty abounding.