LATE ONE WINTER NIGHT, AFTER THE NEW YEAR, WHICH CAME and went without my being aware of it for two weeks, after I had lost track of how much whiskey I had drunk and how many pills I had crushed and snorted, I lapsed into a blackout and awoke nearly frozen in the cemetery six hours later. I was laid out on my side, stopped up against the backs of three closely laid headstones, for three sisters, who had all died on December 12, 1839, at eight, seven, and five years old. I was sure that my toes and fingers had frostbite. By the wind and the barest light in the east, I could tell that it must be after five in the morning. The sky was still full of stars, but they were not the limpid, tame stars of an early summer evening. They were cold, wild, staring, and ferocious. They were stars that had arrived in Enon’s sky from the deepest trenches of space, from terrible, unimaginable beginnings, their light democratized by the present moment, but in fact a vast, tangled thicket of times, of ghosted universes haunting the hillside with their artifacted light. Their light unsettled me the way the open eyes of a dead person would—because it is impossible to believe that open eyes do not see. Their light blazed in the eyes of Enon’s dead for a moment in false resurrection.
I rose and convulsed from the cold and retched from the poison. I looked over at the snow-covered golf course, where kids sledded every winter, and imagined the dead having sledding parties at midnight, on the back slope of the hill, warming their finger bones in blue fires that they kindled in granite urns, laughing when they held their hands inside the flames. I imagined them melting clumps of dirty ice in a tin bucket over the fire and drinking the hot muddy brew and cackling with glee as it ran off the backs of their jawbones and spattered down their ribs. I imagined them using headstones for sleds. The idea made me nauseated and I repented of it. I had the urge to go to Kate’s stone and kneel in front of it and say, I’m sorry, over and over again, because no matter how much I knew better, I could not stop myself from stepping over the same dark threshold, night after night, trying to follow her into the country of the dead in order to fetch her back, even though she visited me in dreams and never left my waking thoughts. Memories of her feeding the birds and practicing running and playing cribbage were not enough. I was ravenous for my child and took to gorging myself in the boneyard, hoping that she might possibly meet me halfway, or just beyond, one night, if only for an instant—step back into her own bare feet, onto the wet grass or fallen leaves or snowy ground of the living Enon, so that we could share just one last human word.