The Surface of Things
It is October for the winds. Autumn gave way and the sun, still hidden, now grays its stubborn pinks at the beginnings and endings of days. I am restless when the sky and the wind get like this, and I can’t remember summer months.
There are willow trees outside the house, lining the farthest edge of the yard. The trunks of these trees are crosscut with wormwood tunnels and when it storms I think about them and wait for them to turn in the wind and to collapse the roof of the house with my family there inside.
In the evenings I sit on the porch and stare into the branches as night settles and the branches nearly disappear against the dark. My wife stands just inside the house. She stands in places near doors and windows, looking through and seeing me or not seeing me and, I am sure, wondering about me and maybe worrying. She is a generous woman but she is trapped by gestures determined in her youth. She stands, sometimes, in the yard, with her palm shading her eyes, and she looks at the clouds and points. I can never see her without seeing that she is extending something like mercy toward me.
This evening, I am watching the branches and I am thinking again about a man I remember from childhood. They caught him watching women. He left little notes. Profanities of a mundane sort taped to window sills or window panes. He was a man everyone knew. He stood in the grocery store taking your celery, or peanut butter, or milk, and placing these items into plastic bags at the end of the check-out counter. He had a way, with his hands, and moved fast. We called him the bagman. His eyes—I heard my mother saying in the kitchen—were always searching; but this was only hindsight. His eyes were dull and brown with crow’s feet, not unlike the crow’s feet of my mother’s eyes, or the crow’s feet at the corners of my wife’s eyes.
Local men finally caught him at night—expecting him to come again and he did. But they had not prepared for knowing him. They turned violent, beating the bagman on the front lawn before fleeing and leaving him bent up and bleeding and all the more familiar for suffering.
The willows are awkward trees. They don’t sway with the grace you expect. Their branches hang leaden, the tips of their branches are always too far from the ground. They look like they have not quite achieved their aim.
Sometimes my wife asserts herself by standing at my back. She says my name and then she says come inside. But I am not ready to come inside. Watching the trees I can’t help but expect them to present themselves in some new way. The feeling of not being able to see past the hanging branches changes until I feel as though I am not able to see the branches at all.
My wife knows about me—she knows the facts of my life, the pitiful curvature of its arc. And what cannot be contained in the facts of a life—the humiliating particulars—she has pawed her way toward with patience and deference. All of this is more or less in keeping with the mercy she is always extending me. Mercy which, for her, is loving.
But I have never told her about the bagman, or about his being beaten, or about the red that looked brown and dotted the grass the next morning. I never told her about the bagman leaving and not being seen again. And because I am nowhere implicated in this story—I am not the bagman, I am not the abuser of the bagman, I am not the women the bagman watched in the dark—she will never feel her way to the bagman through me.
Often when she stands at my back in the night, it seems as though she has called me by the wrong name, or, in saying the name, it feels as though the name has shifted, as if the letters or the sounds of the letters have plumped or become too rigid. When I hear the sound of my name while staring at the willows, it is as if I am hearing the name of a stranger from the mouth of someone I have loved.
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