Broken Vessels Read online

  Broken Vessels

  Essays

  Andre Dubus

  to Geoffrey Moran and his Grace

  I am abidingly grateful to Ann Beattie, E. L. Doctorow, Gail Godwin, John Irving, Stephen King, Tim O’Brien, Jayne Anne Phillips, John Updike, Kurt Vonnegut, and Richard Yates. On five Sunday afternoons in the winter of 1987, they read from their work at the ballroom of the Charles Hotel in Cambridge, Massachusetts, to raise money for me and my family, after I was struck by a car and lost a leg. And I am grateful to all those people who came to the benefit readings and to those who mailed checks to me in the year following my injury, and to Scott Downing and Frieda Arkin. All of this kindness saved me from financially going under, and made me feel, during a very bad time, that I had hundreds of friends I didn’t even know.

  Memory, like love, is an act of imagination, an

  abandonment and a possession.

  SUSAN DODD, MAMAW

  CONTENTS

  Part One

  Out Like a Lamb

  Running

  Under the Lights

  The End of a Season

  Railroad Sketches

  Part Two

  Of Robin Hood and Womanhood

  The Judge and Other Snakes

  On Charon’s Wharf

  Part Three

  After Twenty Years

  Into the Silence

  A Salute to Mister Yates

  Selling Stories

  Marketing

  Part Four

  Two Ghosts

  Intensive Care

  Lights of the Long Night

  Sketches at Home

  A Woman in April

  Bastille Day

  Husbands

  Breathing

  Part Five

  Broken Vessels

  A Biography of Andre Dubus

  Part One

  OUT LIKE A LAMB

  OUR FIRST YEAR in New England we lived in a very old house in southern New Hampshire. The landlord wanted someone to live in it while he was working out of the state, the rent was a hundred dollars a month, the house was furnished, had seven fireplaces (two of them worked), and in the backyard was a swimming pool. There were seventy acres of land, most of it wooded except for a long meadow, hilly enough for sledding. There were also three dogs, eight sheep, and a bed of roses. There was a caretaker too, whom I will call Jim: a man in his early thirties, who lived in town where he did other work and came to the house often to see about the lawn, the pump for the swimming pool, the sheep, and the roses. The landlady wanted the roses there when she came home after the year, and the landlord wanted the sheep. They were eight large ewes, and he bred them.

  They were enclosed by a wire fence in a large section of the meadow. They had a shed there too, where they slept. All we had to do about them was make sure they didn’t get through the fence, which finally meant that when they got through, we had to catch them and put them back in the pasture. This was my first encounter with sheep. When I was a boy, sheep had certain meanings: in the Western movies, sheep herders interfered with the hero’s cattle; or the villain’s ideas about his grazing rights interfered with the hero’s struggle to raise his sheep. And Christ had called us his flock, his sheep; there were pictures of him holding a lamb in his arms. His face was tender and loving, and I grew up with a sense of those feelings, of being a source of them: we were sweet and lovable sheep. But after a few weeks in that New Hampshire house, I saw that Christ’s analogy meant something entirely different. We were stupid helpless brutes, and without constant watching we would foolishly destroy ourselves.

  The sheep did not want to leave their pasture, at least not for long and not to go very far. One would find a hole in the fence, slip out, then circle the pasture, trying to get back in. The others watched her. Someone in our family would shout the alarm, and we’d all go outside to chase her. At first we tried herding the ewe back toward the hole in the fence, standing in the path of this bolting creature, trying to angle her back, as we closed the circle the six of us made, closed it tighter and tighter until she was backed against the fence, and the hole she was trying to find. But she never went back through the hole, never saw it, and all our talking and pointing did no good. Finally we gave up, simply chased her over the lawn, around the swimming pool, under trees and through underbrush until one of us got close enough, dived, and tackled. Then three of us would lift her and drop her over the fence, and we’d get some wire and repair the hole. For a while this was fun, but soon our tackling was angry, and some of us punched her in the jaw as we lay on top of her.

  One day in that first summer I looked into the shed and saw one of them lying on her side. The others were grazing in the pasture. Next afternoon she was still lying there; I stood at the fence and looked more closely, saw that her mouth was open, her head at a strange angle. I didn’t have to look anyway, because by then her stench was on the breeze. I phoned Jim, and he said next day he’d come out and we’d bury her. That evening her smell was in the air over the swimming pool and, closer to the house, it mingled with the aroma of burning charcoal on the patio. So we took the food inside and after dinner I filled a bucket with solid chlorine we sprinkled in the pool. Out in the dark I went through the pasture gate, trying to see the other sheep under the starlit sky. I imagined them huddled upwind from the smell, sleeping out there until someone came and removed death from their shed. The shed was open at its front, but there was a door at the back leading to a narrow platform. I did not want to go through that door, into a place where in the dark I would be alone. I held my breath, opened the door, and stepped in: then the shed was filled with sound and I released my breath, inhaled again in an instant of terror that was suddenly outrage as I saw the other seven sheep rising quickly from where they had been sleeping, around the dead ewe. They ran through the open front, into the light from the sky. They were looking back at me, over their shoulders, and in the pale light their faces looked abject, looked caught, as if they too knew they were more obscene than all the words I was now screaming at them.

  When Jim came next day he brought two cigars and we lit them and went to the shed. She was long dead. We both gagged and turned away, then got an old piece of tarpaulin from his pick-up truck. I had phoned him the night before, after going out there and returning to the kitchen and many beers, and said: Jim, let’s burn that thing. We need fire. We need cleansing. He had brought a mixture of motor oil and gasoline, saying the oil would thicken the gasoline, make it burn longer. We went back to the shed and, puffing cigars and averting eyes, we pulled the ewe onto the tarpaulin. We gagged again, left the shed, then went back in and dragged her far into the pasture, covered her with sticks, then dead fallen branches, then larger ones, and soaked them and her, then threw a paper torch: the gasoline-whoosh, the quick crackling of sticks and small branches, the sudden heat on our faces, and thick black smoke. The smoke stayed in the air for two days; she took that long to burn. When the fire died in daylight, I went out with more branches and the oil and gasoline and started a new one. On the first night we could see the low flames from our windows. By the second night she was gone.

  “Probably a fox got her,” Jim said, that morning of the burning. “Or a wolf.”

  “No wolves around here.”

  “Could be. Anyway, a fox. Come through the fence and bit her and she bled to death.”

  There was no blood on the ground, or in the shed, or on the ewe, but I said nothing; the image of a running fox was a lovely one to have that morning, as we sucked on our cigars.

  Neither of us had known how long it would take for the ewe to burn. We buried the next one. This was the following spring. They escaped from their pasture in winter too, and wanted to get back to it, and before we tackled them we slipped and
fell a lot, and more of us punched their faces as we lay on top of them in the snow and, when we had the strength, we swung them back and forth, holding their legs — one, two, three — and flung them over the fence. In spring the roses bloomed and one night all seven sheep got out. We looked from the dinner table and saw them eating the roses, and tenant-fear hurried us outside, to kick and push and pull at those woolly hulks, to shout: No no not her roses. They ran around the lawn while we dived at them, missed them, caught them, pulled them kicking toward the fence, and always they got away. It was a warm night, we were sweating, and we had not finished dinner. We were outnumbered seven to six, and our sixth was four years old. We gave up and went inside to eat. But we kept watching them through the windows.

  “They’ve moved down the lawn.”

  “Have they?”

  “They’ve left the roses, they’re just eating the grass now.”

  “Except one.”

  “One?”

  “One just went back to the roses.”

  I went to my den where a twelve gauge double-barreled shotgun hung on the wall. I loaded one barrel with bird shot, stepped outside, and aimed at the rump of the rose-eater. When I fired she stopped eating and looked at me. Then she looked at her rump. Then she started eating again. The other sheep had looked up too, and were grazing now. I put up the gun and went back to the table, muttering about sheep not even having the sense to know when they’re being shot at. After dinner, a child said: “Something’s wrong with the one you shot.”

  I looked out the back door. The six grazers were still eating grass; the rose-eater lay on her side, one hind leg sticking upward. I went to her, and crouched. There was blood at her nostrils, and she was not breathing.

  “God damn you, don’t you die. Do you hear me?” I stood and kicked her. “Don’t you dare die on me, Goddamnit.” I kicked her again, and she rolled over.

  I phoned Jim.

  “I’d better come out,” he said.

  I waited in the backyard, waited out there with beer and guilt and guesses at how much I was going to owe the landlord for my miscalculation about what a number seven shot would do to such a big animal with all that wool on her flesh. Jim came in his pick-up; his twelve-year-old daughter was with him, and when she climbed down from the cab he held up his hand.

  “You better wait here,” he said, and she got into the cab again.

  He squatted over the ewe, felt her chest, and told me she was dead.

  “We’ll bury her in the morning,” he said. “Might’s well get the others back in the pasture. Let’s drag this one down by the trees.”

  We dragged her down the sloping lawn to a small clump of pines. Then he called to his daughter and I called to my family and we caught the others one at a time and dropped them over the fence. Jim found the hole and closed it and went home, and I went inside to explain to children about bird shot and trying to get her away from the roses, and to drink beer with my wife and wonder what we’d tell the landlord and how we would pay him.

  Next morning Jim and I dug a grave beside the ewe. The earth was hard, and when we had a hole deep enough for her to fill, we rolled her into it. We covered her with a mound, then Jim said: “Something might dig her up. We can use stones, like they do out west.”

  We carried large stones from the meadow and woods until the grave was covered.

  “I guess I’ve got a letter to write,” I said. “And I guess the next one I write will have to include a check.”

  “Oh? Why’s that?”

  I pointed at the grave.

  “Oh, no, don’t write him a letter, and don’t tell it in town either. We’re both lucky on this one.”

  “Lucky?”

  “Sure. I was supposed to have them bred this winter, and didn’t get around to it. I’ll tell him this was the only one that took, and she up and died in childbirth. The lamb too.”

  1978

  RUNNING

  A SATURDAY AFTERNOON in late July, the heat wave has broken, and I am running at Lake Kenoza with my friend. We first ran together in 1958 when we were second lieutenants in the Officers’ Basic School in Quantico, Virginia: ran in the twilit evenings on a dirt road through woods near the apartments where we lived. We ran then, my friend said, for catharsis: from the classes, from the captains and majors, from the patterns of the days. Now on this July afternoon nineteen years later, married to second wives, we are still running for catharsis: the patterns of our lives are more complex, and the running has become more necessary.

  The air is cool and dry, as it was Friday, the day after the heat wave broke. That afternoon my wife and her two children and I went to Seabrook beach. I wanted to see the deep blue color the ocean has when the air is dry. The wind and current were strong, from the north. The wind blew sand that stung our flesh, and finally the children wrapped themselves in towels, their faces covered too, looking, to me, like victims of something unspeakable. I lay upwind from my wife and folded a small foam mattress between us, bundling, to shield her small body from the sand. I loved the sun on my flesh, and told my wife I wished I could work at night and sleep on the beach by day, for then I would be free of the night terrors.

  At Lake Kenoza on Saturday, the dry air gave the pond and the lake a deeper blue, and the evergreens and leaves were brighter green. Kenoza is on Route 110, going east out of Haverhill, toward the sea. The city tennis courts are there. Across the road from the courts is a pond, and purple loosestrife grows in the marshy earth alongside it. Some people fish there, from the bank. A wide finger of wooded ground separates the pond from the lake. It is a reservoir, so its large surface is free of boats, of swimmers, of fishermen. Mallards and Canadian geese stop here. The best run at Kenoza is five and a half miles, starting at the tennis courts, the road turning left around the pond and into the woods, past the finger of land before the lake, then it curves to the right, following the lake, and as you run you can look to your left at the water, on windy days hear it lapping at the bank, and you can look to your right at the woods. The road leaves the lake only once, going deeper into the woods, toward the hill. As it approaches the hill, there is a second road that goes to the left, down toward the lake again, where the bank drops sharply, and the slope to the right is steep and pine-grown, and brown needles cover it.

  This lower road joins one which goes up the hill, a long, curving, deceptive climb; it looks gentle but it is not; a crest appears, you reach it, and look ahead at another one. This is the part of the run where the legs always hurt, the heart pounds, the breathing is hardest. My oldest son ran it with me for the first time three years ago, when he was fourteen; going up the hill he stopped sweating, his face turned red, and I told him he should stop but he shook his head no. I believed he should stop, hoped he would not, remembered first aid I had learned years ago. We reached the top, where the blackberries grow. Another time he ran with me, wearing shoes that were too small. Within the first mile he said the tops of his toes hurt. We slowed the pace, and I urged him to keep going. When I drove him home, he took off his shoes: all his toes were scraped raw on top, bleeding. Later I told that story to a writing student whose novel was beating her. After she had given up on the novel, had her head shrunk out west, and was trying to believe she could live peacefully without daily combat, she wrote to me and said maybe your son should have stopped running. This was before he ran cross-country, then read Pumping Iron and accumulated weights, a series of exercises, girth, strength, a new walk, defined muscles, and an identification card for Massachusetts General Hospital where now a specialist tries to cure his injured back. After the crest of the hill, the road goes down again to the lake; the run back to the tennis courts is two and a quarter miles, the water on the right now, the sloping woods on the left, until you leave the shade and run on the open road past the purple loosestrife, the pond, to the tennis players, the parked car, the drive home through the city.

  On this Saturday in late July I am not running the hill. I am running one mile, recovering from th
e west coast of Mexico and two weeks of Montezuma’s revenge. (“The last thing I ate before it hit me was fish,” I tell Doctor Harbilas in Haverhill. “Ha,” he says, “I’ve been there. It could be somebody breathed on you. It could be you breathed.”) On the porch of the shed by the courts, young men have finished playing tennis and are listening to the Red Sox game on a transistor radio. My friend and I start running, and he tells me what happened to him two days ago, hiking Mount Washington with his seventeen-year-old daughter. After a mile I turn back and walk, while he runs on. A family is walking behind me. A young couple approaches me, passes on: she has long blonde hair, and they have about them an intimate, furtive look. Once a friend of mine was running up the hill; he looked down toward the lake, saw a boy and girl making love on a large rock; an epiphany, he said, which cheered him the rest of the way. Two young men come up the road; they are wearing shirts and slacks, dull grays and blues, and their faces remind me of young men in the fifties, on their day off from indoor jobs leading nowhere. One of them carries a transistor; they are listening to the ball game. I run back to the tennis courts. The fans on the porch have gone, and I turn on the car radio and listen to the game while I stand waiting for my friend.

  Two days earlier he had hiked with his daughter past a sign warning them that Mount Washington has the worst weather in North America, that at any sign of a storm, even in summer, they should turn back. The sky was clear, and they went on; joked, he said, about the warning; cursed it, and climbed. Under a clear sky until they reached the top and saw black clouds coming in fast as blowing dust; then it was raining and hailing. They began walking fast down the road. Then the lightning started. It was not, he said, a scribble across a distant sky. It was starting there, behind them, and on their flanks. Not in front of us, he said; thank God, not in front of us. They started running down the road. He believed he would die, he believed his daughter would die, he thought of what to do if she were struck, father-mouth covering hers, breathing. She looked straight ahead, and down, so she wouldn’t see the lightning she heard and felt around her. Running down a curve, they came to a car halted on the way up the mountain. She went to the window and knocked and shouted please let us in out of the lightning.