I wondered whether I should rub some lanolin on his rope burns, maybe tape some gauze over them, but I decided not to. By now bruises were coming in, blue under the abraded skin, and they’d be painfully tender. I also knew he’d rather forget about it, not have me underline his vulnerability with too much solicitousness.
But, thinking back, I had noticed a change in Earnest during the past few weeks. Or was it longer? He had been quieter, more restrained. Blue, I thought, and distant. It troubled me.
I sat there with him. “Did you have a good rope man?”
“He’s fine. Good worker. Not his fault. I paid him for the full day anyway.”
“Why do you think you’re off your stride?”
He glowered at his hands, shrugged. “Preoccupied. Distracted. That’s all.”
I wondered what was bothering him. Something with his Navajo friends, or the uncertain fate of the farm? His sister? A girlfriend he hadn’t mentioned? Or some other aspect of his life?
My stomach growled and I remembered that I was starving and that lunch-making materials were waiting on the counter inside. Finally, I stood up.
“You really lost your lunch?” I asked.
“That was a feeble attempt at wit. Didn’t have any lunch.”
“I was just making myself a sandwich. How about I make you one?”
He needed a moment to think about the proposition. “No. I’m fine. I should try to get something done as long as I’m here.”
“With your ankle like that?”
He rubbed his eyes wearily, still reluctant but yielding. “Okay. I guess a sandwich would be good.” He shook his T-shirt to shed some dust, and put it back on with an inadvertent groan.
We took our plates and coffee mugs to the dining room and sat on opposite sides of the table as we ate. Earnest had nothing to say and barely glanced at me.
“What is it?” I asked.
“What’s what?”
“What’s bothering you. You’re not just preoccupied. You don’t smile much. You seem … guarded.”
He chewed, swallowed, looked around the room as if the answer were somewhere on the wallpaper or sideboard or china cabinet. “Just another aging fart’s midlife crisis.”
“That pisses me off, Earnest.”
“What does?”
“Every word you just said. First of all, you’re insulting a friend of mine! And ‘midlife crisis’ is flat-out ducking me.”
He shrugged. I stared hard at him.
Earnest never did well under an unyielding glare from me. He heaved a sigh of surrender. “It’s simple. I’ve screwed up some things in my life, and now I’ve got to think about what I’m doing and why. And what’s next, what I want. I need to make some changes, but I can’t figure out what they should be. So my mind goes around and around and doesn’t come up with solutions and then I fall out of trees.”
He inspected his coffee, took a swig of it, and finally did look at me. “I’m pretty sure you know something about that state of mind.” He didn’t smile, but his eyes warmed with the resigned amusement of a fellow sufferer.
“Yes. I am familiar with it.” He knew what an understatement that was.
We finished our food, drained our cups. Earnest stood and collected our dishes, but I stopped him as he limped toward the kitchen.
“Is there anything I can do to make it better? I mean your state of mind. Given my expertise in the subject, and all.”
He gave one small cough of a laugh. “No. Nothing for anybody but me to do. Thanks, though, Pilgrim.” His eyes met mine, and a little arc leaped between us—his appreciation for my concern.
He rinsed the dishes; I dried. Then I went back to the cows, and over my protests, he gimped out to his project in the machine shop.
Chapter 52
By now I was fairly competent at living on my hill. But the woods continued to change me, and in ways I could never have imagined.
It’s hard to tell all that I’ve seen and done, because I doubt you will believe it. But this is a fact: When you live in the woods, especially when you’re there at night, all night, you experience unusual things. At moments, you glimpse other dimensions of the world that are always present but that we’re habituated to ignore. Encountering them can upend your view of life and of your place in it.
I have been candid about the Great Fear and my own foolishness and weakness, and I’ve done my best to honestly describe the other inexplicable powers and wonders that revealed themselves to me. What happened that summer seems unbelievable, but I can only relate it as I experienced it.
To put these events in perspective: I’ve never been superstitious. I grew up in a proudly secular family. Though I’ve always felt that there is something like “God,” my sense of that being is not like anything I’ve encountered in anyone’s scriptures, tracts, or sermons. I’ve never taken LSD. I can’t claim to have had a “paranormal” experience. And as far as my primal fear of unnamed forces dwelling in the deep woods, the Great Fear, I know only that in the right circumstances we all can feel it and that when it arrives, one knows one is experiencing something primordial and real.
Here’s the thing: The world will teach you. It will. When you’ve been busted open as I had been and you’re on unfamiliar ground, the true world steps in and reveals itself. And it’s not what you expect. Most often, your days’ events are explicable by all the facts and assumptions you absorbed in science class. But sometimes, very rarely, you are allowed a peek through a crack in the door—no, through a crack or flaw in that misleadingly solid-seeming edifice of assumptions.
I can’t explain what the “mechanism” of a miracle is. There is no mechanism; there’s a vast living thing that dwells everywhere. I can’t further define it.
