Benson Watts Is Dead and in Virginia
by Doris Betts



After I died, I woke up here.

Or so it seems. Perhaps I am actually still dying, locked in that 
darkness between one breath and the next, still wearing tubes which 
leak from my nostrils and drain that long incision. My wife may even 
yet continue to bend over the high bed to catch the next beat of my 
heart while the blood jar is ticking down, like a water clock, into 
my veins. Perhaps that last hospital scene is the only scene and all 
the rest is a dream in passage.

But the room and her melting face clicked off, I think. Then the 
smells went. She was saying something; I could still hear that—I 
stopped hearing it. I unbloated and the queer whistle in my breathing 
stopped. I could no longer tell the pain from cold. All my circuit 
breakers opened and sensations blurred. Someone set fire to my hand 
but it barely tickled.

Through all this, my mind was clearer and more finely tuned than it 
had ever been. I treasured that clarity, though it had less and less 
raw material to think with now. I thought: I must withdraw into my 
brain and hide—there’s nothing left outside.

So I did. I backed into my brain farther and farther and got smaller 
and smaller the deeper I went, until I fell out the other side.

And woke up prone in this yellow grass. The color is important. When 
they rolled me back from surgery, it was May.

At first I didn’t dare move. If I lifted my hand, it might fall 
through the air and drop back onto a starched sheet. I could not tell 
what was still attached to me and might clatter if I stirred.

The place where I lay was so . . . so ordinary. A sky as blue as a 
postcard. Between it and me, one tree limb: oak. White oak, I 
thought. The grass felt like all grass. When a cricket bounced over 
my head, I knew for sure we were a long way from the recovery room; 
they would not recover me. I sat up. I was on a sloping postcard 
meadow. At the bottom, a narrow stream. Willows. I touched my 
abdomen, which should have been hot and painful. Dacron trousers 
instead of gauze. Not mine, though. These were new.

Around my left wrist hung a small bracelet and a yellowish tag which 
looked like the ivory sliver off a piano key. On it, carved, was the 
following:

     TO AVOID G.B.⁠—  
     1. Dwell, then travel  
     2. Join forces  
     3. Disremember

Very carefully, I got to my feet. It had been a long time since I 
could move without pain. The cool wind was a shock and made me clap 
both hands to my head. Bald as an egg! Not even a prickle, a wisp, a 
whisker. Otherwise I was myself as I had been before the intestinal 
cancer, even a little younger. I tried to guess by flexing muscles, 
checking where pounds were gone, feeling my smoother face. A little 
beard starting down the cheeks. I thought I might be forty again, or 
maybe less. I tried out my voice. Normal. For practice, I said aloud, 
“Well, it sure as hell isn’t Heaven,” and my laugh was normal, 
too—forced, but even that was normal. I took a few steps, then ran 
downhill and splashed into the water in a pair of shoes I had never 
owned. Everything normal. A bright September day and I was alive in 
it.

Yet there was something. There was something wrong with my mind. Too 
quiet up there, not enough panic, too small a load of bewilderment, 
not even enough curiosity. Earlier I said of the tree limb, “White 
oak, I thought,” and that wasn’t right. I didn’t quite think. 
This was spooky. It was more as if Something thought in me. I felt 
the words were moving by their own choice through my head the way air 
bubbles slide down the bowel.

I began walking along the stream bank waiting for—I don’t know. 
For my head to clear? I felt aged forty from the neck down. I waited 
for that age to rise and cover me like water.

I was in Texas when I died. These hills and fields and meadows looked 
more to me like—what should I guess?—like Virginia. I said this 
over and over, aloud, “I’m dead and in Virginia,” trying to 
make the sentence taste like mine. It never quite did.

Now and then, beside the stream, I would spot hoofprints. Cattle? Or 
deer? I saw nothing else alive except me, that cricket, and dozens of 
yellow birds on quick and nervous flights. Ricebirds in Virginia? 
They fed off tall stems and some stunted bush with brown catkins on 
its twigs. I jangled my wrist tag. I’d worn a bracelet there in the 
hospital, too, with my name spelled out in beads like an infant’s. 
WATTS. Benson Watts. Ben.

I got the first pain, under one ear. Ben Watts. 226 Tracy 
Avenue . . .

I got the second pain, a needle, higher. I rattled the tag. 
_Disremember_, it said.

Crossing the stream, I noticed for the first time I was traveling in 
the direction it flowed—there! You see how my brain was? 
Unobservant. Unconcerned. At the water’s edge was a stretch of pale 
sand. Beyond that the mud was like milk chocolate. More yellow grass 
grew on both sides to the edge of trees just turning from solid green 
to red maples and yellow hickories. The scattered pines were thinning 
their needles for fall.

I rounded a bend. To my right the land dipped off, and the water 
turned and ran downhill faster to empty into a long lake I could not 
see the end of, maybe half a mile wide. Its surface was very still 
with a skim of reflections. As I got closer, I knew what was wrong 
with this scenery, so ordinary and yet so unreal; and it came from 
absence. Everything I expected to see did not appear. No boats or 
motors, no fishermen, dogs, garbage, foam, signs, fences. No plastic 
bottles drifting near the shore. My head was aching. The sun was too 
harsh on my peeled scalp.

Near the water I glimpsed a small house, almost a hut. _Déja vu_. I 
spun to the southwest to see if the Fitchburg Railroad skirted the 
lake. No. Yet it was his house or nearly like it, built beside the 
pond a hundred years ago for less than thirty dollars. Built 
yesterday. I began to run through the ripening grass. If I was back 
in time, was Thoreau inside? Writing in his journal?

Or was it possible that each of us died away into our own personal 
image of serenity and would be tucked there forever like something in 
a pocket? 

Running made my head worse. But that gut I had cursed for a year was 
now so new and strong I thought it might be turned to gold or silver, 
and I ran with both palms pressed there to feel each strand of muscle 
move.

The wooden door was half open, heavy on its leather hinges. I jumped 
a low stone wall and ran up the path.

One room with an earthen floor, a smaller one beyond in which I could 
see strings of onions, peppers, and bean pods. I touched the table, 
chair, bunk, saw that high shelves on both sides of a fieldstone 
hearth reached over my head. They held a set of books, maybe a 
hundred, all with the same green binding. I called out “Hello!” 
to more absence. Nobody answered; though there were ashes in the 
fireplace, not quite cold, and the charred spine of a book which 
seemed to match the others.

There was no dust. Under the bunk I found a stack of empty picture 
frames, white canvases, a wood box of paints and brushes, and I could 
see the clean squares on one wall where somebody’s pictures had 
hung. There were no titles on the books, and when I pulled one out I 
found each page was lined but blank—the other books were the same. 
This time something happened that I expected; I found pen and ink on 
the bottom shelf.

To enter the back room I had to stoop. It was a pantry with a board 
floor. Cured hams were hanging from the ceiling over a flour bin. 
Crocks of meal and dried beans in sacks were under a table on which 
apples, potatoes, yams, pears, green tomatoes lay in neat rows. One 
high shelf held what looked like scuppernong wine in gallon jars. The 
woodbin was behind the door, full of oak logs, with a sack of cedar 
kindling nailed outside. The pantry was dim and its odors thick as 
fog.

I laid the wood over the andirons. Matches had been left in a tin by 
the hearth, and after I lit the lightwood I rummaged in a second 
strongbox where small jars of spices were jumbled, some without 
labels. I read once that if a man eats nutmeg his urine will smell 
like violets. Perhaps I will try it.

Slowly the oak bark caught fire underneath, curled off, till the log 
smoked and finally burned. Beautiful was the fire. Its colors moved 
and changed. I sat before it, watching for the sudden lick of blue 
which would reappear in a new place. So long as I stared into the 
flames, my head did not hurt. When there were coals, I slid three 
sweet potatoes in to roast and sat on, dreaming, sometimes tapping 
the log with a poker so sparks would leap off and shower onto the 
dirt floor. I must have sat that way for hours.

But the potato hearts were still raw when I peeled and ate them. I 
rolled the thickest log across the floor and heaved it into place. 
Then I went to bed though it was barely dark.

In the night I woke to hear rustling beyond me, something large 
scraping its hide between a bush and the wall of my house. There were 
no windows. In the red firelight I found the poker and carried it 
with me and swung open the heavy door. A large deer moved down the 
path, stepping as carefully as if he had made it, so heavily antlered 
that he seemed to be holding up an iron grille by stiffening his 
neck. He bent and drank from the lake, snuffled lightly, moved off 
along the water’s edge. As soon as he passed, the frogs that he 
left would sing out again, so I could follow him through the dark 
long after he was lost to sight.

It was the same deer. I put the poker under my bunk with the paints 
and brushes. Only when I was settled and warm again and had closed my 
eyes against the glow of the fireside did I wonder: What does that 
mean? _Same_ deer?

I knew suddenly it must be very dangerous to sleep. I might slide 
back. My gut would reopen; some bastard in a white coat would 
whisper, “He’s coming out of it.” I could almost see my wife 
hunched in her chair, the brown rubber tubes in her hands, waiting 
for me. And there was a drop of borrowed blood, halfway down, hung 
there till my arm would be under it.

But in spite of my fear I went to sleep and when I woke up, I was 
still here.

2

In the morning I could not remember the deer. I could remember 
getting out of bed in the dark, but not why. I ate an apple, found 
coffee beans and an old-fashioned hand grinder, and at last boiled 
the grounds in a cooking pot. The brew was thick and scummy, but its 
smell was magnificent. I remembered I’d had no cigarettes for two 
weeks, no solid food for longer than that. When I picked up the 
apple, saliva ran down my throat in a flood, and I felt my nose was 
twitching like a dog’s.

I had dreamed about a deer. That’s it. In the dream, an old stag 
came into this house and offered to carry me across the lake on his 
back. He spoke in rather a high voice for so large an animal. He told 
me that when many deer swam the lake, each rested his head on the 
haunches of the one in front, and since the one behind did the same, 
they suffered no trouble from the weight. He said the whole line swam 
for the far shore with all speed in this linked position, to reach 
land before being befouled. He would be lead deer on this trip, he 
said, and would carry me himself.

No. The headache started.

No, there had been a real deer, outside. I saw him by the lake. It 
was hard to remember the simplest details. Was it a doe, a fawn? I 
had never seen a deer this close before—that much was certain.

I grabbed one of the green ledgers and began to write down who I was 
and how I got here and that the deer was real. It was hard to write. 
My head felt as if something had come loose inside and was banging 
the bone. I read the entry twice, until I had it all straight and in 
order. Every day I would do this; every morning I would set down the 
previous day and read all the earlier entries. This would be good 
training for my mind, which, I now thought, had suffered oxygen 
deprivation there at the end. At the beginning? Whichever it was.

My name is Benson Watts and when I died in Houston, Texas, I was 
sixty-five and had grandchildren—none of whom I liked very much. I 
also had thick gray hair and brushy eyebrows. When I told my namesake 
grandson I looked like John L. Lewis, he didn’t know who Lewis was. 
Now I’m twenty-five years younger, in Virginia, and my scalp is 
like orange rind, nothing but skin and pores; and I don’t remember 
Lewis too well myself except for the eyebrows.

He might have been a principal in some school where I taught. He had 
the face for the job. For years I taught U.S. and world history in 
high schools all over Texas, for peanuts, because that left my 
summers free. Summers I read books, collected stamps, built halves of 
sailboats in the back yard, took auto trips, sold Fuller brushes 
(once), and encyclopedias (four times), coached Little League, tried 
pottery and built my own kiln, got divorced and remarried, and made 
notes for the book I would someday write on the Cherokee Indian in 
North Carolina. Here I am at last, dead and in Virginia, with a pen 
and inkpot and one wall of blank paper handy, and all I remember is 
Tsali and the Trail of Tears. Some joke.

Once, too, I thought I might go to graduate school and write a book 
on the Dark Ages, on the flickers of light in the Dark Ages. By 1969, 
I thought we might be edging into the shadow of some new darkness, 
and without a Church to persevere. I taught myself Latin so I could 
read illuminated manuscripts at Oxford instead of translations in 
Texas libraries. _Illuminated_ manuscripts. What a good phrase! But I 
did not write that book, either, and now I cannot call up a single 
Latin root.

All I can easily remember are random facts about myself, which 
don’t amount to much. Trivia. The substance is missing. Let me 
write down the details.

Texas is bigger than France. There are four or five Texases to be 
born in—mine happened to be Beaumont, four years after the 
Spindletop oil gusher blew in. There might have been 10,000 people 
there then; the city multiplied itself by twelve in my lifetime. I 
stopped liking Beaumont when it passed 20,000, finished at Baylor, 
and started teaching history to conceited teenagers who—if they 
owned the world and Texas—would rent out the world and live in 
Texas. That may be why Lyndon Johnson went to Washington, to see for 
himself how unlucky everybody else was. He stayed gone a long time.

Most summers I escaped from Texas, and once in the Notre Dame library 
I read the twelfth-century bestiaries and made notes, later lost in a 
Southern Railway boxcar. In the thirties I jumped freights and 
thumbed and left my wives (there were three in all) to go discuss me 
with their mothers.

The third wife, Grace, sat with me in the Houston Hospital while I 
died. She didn’t shed a tear. Grace came late in my life; she never 
expected much, so was never disappointed. When I loaded up the car, 
she’d stand in the yard with her arms folded and just say, “Okay, 
Sunnybitch, don’t leave me no dirty laundry.” Grace had Indian 
blood. I miss her calm ways and her slow talking in an alto voice. 
I’ve seen her make a face at a coming tornado and then go inside 
and forget about it. Nothing affected her much. Even sex. She was a 
challenge. If Grace had cried—even once—in that sterile hospital 
room, I might have stuck out a finger; I might have blotted that tear 
and sucked it off and gotten well, just from the novelty of the thing.

She didn’t cry, though, and I had not died off into a medieval 
abbey or a Cherokee camp. You’d think there’d be some choice. 
They even claim to give you that in the army.

Outside the hut I sat with my book and pen by the lake in the warm 
sun, reminding myself how the deer had stood and blown the water. 
Yes, it felt like September here. Indian summer. And for all I knew 
some real Indian, even a Cherokee with strings of hickory bark around 
his waist, might step out of these woods. Wonderful!

Might shoot me with his locust bow strung with bear entrails. Not so 
good. Could I die twice? Re-die? All that was . . . metaphysics. I 
could not think about it yet.

Could not. The landscape would not allow me. Virginia was opposed to 
thinking. While I sat in the brightness, empty as a sack, a praying 
mantis climbed up a weed stalk and lay along its blade. I bent my 
face beside that green swaying. Red knobby eyes. The only insect, 
I’m told, that can look over its shoulder. Maybe when this one died 
of winter, she would be raised up to my scale; as maybe 
I—shrunken—was now living on the tip of some weed and my lake was 
a dewdrop in the morning sun.

Yet none of this interested me. The four spread legs, two bent prayer 
claws, wings folded in layers on her back—I could have watched 
these tiny things all day, as I had waited for a blue flick on a 
burning log the night before.

Once I would have touched the mantis to see where she would spring. 
It was not necessary. I had been let out of thinking as if thinking 
were a jail. Nothing expected me to connect it with anything else. 
Not to anticipate—delicious. I felt that first morning the way a 
baby feels. _I am here._ Nothing else.

Some days went by. My ledger notes are sketchy. Like Thoreau, I gave 
time to birds and anthills. One afternoon—feeling so far from my 
other world that I mistook distance for wisdom—I analyzed 
completely how Western culture fell apart after World War II, and 
wrote down how this might have been prevented. My words lacked 
urgency. Nobody would read them. I bored myself.

After burning that, I tried to put on canvas my nighttime deer bent 
over a floating picture of himself in the black water. My painting 
was squat and clumsy, a hog at a wallow.

The fifth morning I was sitting on a log by the lake, watching the 
mist rise. Every morning it lay over the lake like cloud, then slowly 
churned to blow up the shore and fade among the tree trunks. I 
watched it begin to thin itself over the land. Down the lake, the 
mist suddenly shook like a curtain and I had a glimpse of someone 
walking by the water’s edge.

I ran forward a few steps. Like gauze, the air blew shut. I saw it 
again. If not a man, a bear, upright and moving toward me.

My eye fixed on the fog, I walked in that direction. Fear? I could 
not remember how it felt to be afraid. In the thinning haze I saw 
again a—a polar bear? Impossible. White but too small. We could 
hear each other now. Crackling brush, dry stems breaking underfoot. I 
moved faster but those other noises stayed unhurried and regular. The 
mist was waist-high. I walked beyond it into a field of broom sedge 
and she, at the same moment, worked out of a wispy alder thicket and 
stared at me. She had on a white uniform, like a nurse.

I called, “Hello!”

 She kept one bent alder limb taut in her hand. She was in her late 
twenties, red-haired, and pregnant. I saw that not only in her shape 
but the way she stood, bare feet spread wide, her spine tilted. She 
stepped forward and the branch twanged behind her. “Who are you?”

“My name is Benson Watts. I live . . .” That verb wasn’t 
right. I jerked a thumb over one shoulder. “I’ve been staying in 
a little house by the lake.”

“Good,” she said. “I’ve not had anything to eat but 
persimmons. My mouth has shrunk down to zero.” She gave me a 
normal-sized smile as she passed. “This way?”

“Just follow my track. What are you doing here?”

“Eating persimmons is all so far.” Flatfooted, she walked along 
the swath I had made in the ripe weeds. I could not think of a way to 
ask a pregnant woman if she were dead. I thought about it, but the 
question sounded impolite. I followed. She was no more than five feet 
tall. Her short hair was full of beggar’s-lice and sticktights.

I said, “Have you been here long?”

“Don’t remember.”

Her white skirt was streaked with mud and resin. “What’s the last 
thing you do remember?”

“Spending the night in the woods. Oh. There it is.” She made for 
my cabin in that stride which, from behind, looked bowlegged and 
clumsy. “What’s the last thing you remember?”

I decided to say, “A hospital room.”

“You’re not contagious, are you? TB or anything?” She looked 
back and I saw how thickly her face was freckled. “You can see why 
I’ve got to ask.” She patted her belly with her left hand on 
which she wasn’t wearing a single ring. There was a bracelet, 
though, like mine. I pulled at her tag and turned it over. _Dwell, 
then travel. Join forces. Disremember._

“Where’d you get this?” 

“The fairies brought it,” she said. “And the baby, too.” She 
led the way into my house, stroked the earth floor with the sole of 
her foot. “This is nice.” The tops of her feet were scratched, 
some of the marks white, some bloodied. I pointed to the pantry. 
Quickly she ran up to a dangling ham and laid her face on its salty 
mold. I said I’d slice and fry some. She poked among the pears 
until she found one mellow enough to eat.

While I chopped off some meat and set the pan in the fireplace, she 
finished the pear and bit into a cucumber, peeling and all. 
“‘What’s in this sack?” she called. I was trying to keep the 
ham from catching fire. “Peanuts!” She crowed, “Oh, glory! 
Peanuts!” I heard them rattle in a pot. “Let’s parch some.” 
She pushed the pan onto a bed of coals and a little grease popped 
into it and speckled their hulls. “Smell that ham, honey!” she 
said—not to me, but to the lump at her middle.

I sat back on the dirt floor and let her tend the skillet. 
“What’s your name?”

“Olena.”

I had her spell it. I’d never heard that name before. I think she 
made it up.

“There’s flour but no bread,” I said. She didn’t offer to 
make biscuits but sat back with her legs crossed wide under the round 
bulk of her unborn child. I thought through several questions before 
I chose, “Is your home around here?”

Olena said, “It never was before. Where’s yours?”

“Texas.” She plucked the fork from my hand and turned over the 
ham. I took a long breath and blew out a statement on it, watching 
her. “I was sick in a hospital and then I woke up here.”

Olena said matter-of-factly, “I fell down a flight of stairs and 
this place was at the bottom.”

We stared at each other, then quickly looked away. Each of us stole a 
glance at the pale tag strung to the other’s wrist. With a grunt, 
Olena got to her feet and went to the pantry to find a plate and 
cutlery. I warned her pork needed to cook longer than that, but she 
was already spearing an oily slice. “I don’t think you can get 
worms here,” she said, staring at the ham.

“I see plenty of regular insects.”

Chewing, she didn’t care. “Oh, glory, that’s good!” she said, 
with a sigh. I brought her a salt shaker and a tomato with the top 
cut off; she buried half her freckled face until its juice ran down 
her chin. “Can I sleep here tonight?” she asked, swiping a 
forearm over her mouth. I said she could.

Watching her chew the ham and pull its pink shreds from between her 
teeth, I tried to decide what accident had sent us both here, what 
kink in orderly process, whether there was some link between our 
lives or some similarity in our natures which made us candidates for 
transport to this place. I asked about the location of the stairs 
where she fell, and Olena said, “Florida. Fort Lauderdale.” All I 
got out of that was a vague sense of regional districts, but it made 
me walk to the door and search the edges of the lake for some other 
Southerner. The mist had cleared.

“What you looking for?”

“Just looking.” Somebody else would be coming soon. I felt 
certain of it. “Olena, is there someplace you’re supposed to be? 
Or be going?”

She finished the ham and raked a pile of peanuts onto the floor to 
cool. “I guess not.”

“We’ll wait here a few days, then.”

3

The fire kept me awake. Even with my eyes closed, its pattern of 
light and shadow on my face was a physical touch and moved like warm 
water across my skin. I rolled in my blanket farther across the floor 
and turned my back to the blaze. Above me, in the bunk, Olena lay, 
spread-legged, bulging. The covers seemed draped on an overturned 
chair. Behind me, the fire crackled. Rain had begun in late 
afternoon, so we kept the fire going against a wet chill rising 
through the dirt floor. Olena’s snore was soft as a cat’s purr.

I dozed, then leaped alert. What had wakened me? Perhaps that deer, 
passing my door, had ground his teeth? I threw back the blanket and 
sat up, listening. It must have been nearly dawn, since mockingbirds 
were taking turns, each song intensely sweet and swelling higher than 
the last. Barefoot, I crossed the damp floor and stepped onto the 
path. Raindrops on the weeds looked solid, like tacks or metal 
pellets, but the sky was full of fading stars. Far down the lake, 
something large and dark bent in the mist to drink, too wide and 
bulky to be a stag. My naked scalp prickled, for there had flared 
through my head the leaves of those old Latin bestiaries, page after 
page of winged quadrupeds and dromedaries, each fact of natural 
history bent to reflect an attribute of Christ. Just from Olena’s 
presence, this landscape had become a dream we both were having and, 
like those books, took on some quality of concealment and mystery.

I started through the wet grasses to surprise the drinking animal, 
but it melted through the brush and downhill into the woods, looking 
odd and fictional. The woods were, at the same time, dark and 
translucent. It seemed to me even the tree trunks were spelling words 
I could nearly read. I rested my hand on the bark of one, and tried 
in its cracks and lichen crusts to make out the Braille. Not since I 
was a child had I felt this expectancy, as if at last I were on the 
verge of seeing everything unveiled. Most of my life I’d been 
certain there was nothing _to_ unveil. A bit of lichen, like tough 
lace, came loose in my fingers.

Quietly, I walked inside the hut, dried my feet, and slid again into 
my blanket roll. Olena had turned her face to the wall and her back 
took on a woman’s curves. I was fearful of desiring her. I slept 
and dreamed that my mother was lying on her deathbed and the doctor 
took a large white bird out of his satchel and wrapped its claws on 
the brass bedstead. “If the bird turns to face her,” he said, 
“this is not a mortal illness, but if he keeps his back turned 
there’ll be nothing I can do.” The bird unfolded extra wings and 
feathers after being cramped in the leather bag and seemed to grow 
larger and larger. One at a time, he uncurled his feet and shook 
them, then flapped once around the room. Each wingbeat sounded like 
an oar slammed flat against the water. At last the bird lit facing 
away from my mother, who gave a great cry. I ran forward to beat at 
the big bird but I could not make it move or even look at me, and its 
yellow talons were wrapped on the metal rail as if molded there.

At daylight, we were wakened by loud thumps on the wooden door. Olena 
sprang half out of bed, one of her feet touching the floor.

“Don’t worry,” I said. “It’s another one.”

She whispered, “Another what?”

“Another one of us.” I jangled my bracelet in the air between us 
and stepped into my shoes. I dragged open the heavy door.

He was ugly. Malformed—not deformed but malformed—six feet tall 
and the parts of his body mismatched. Hips like a woman and a head 
flattened on both sides. I could not see a bracelet under the black 
sleeve of his suit. I pictured him yanked from his mother’s womb, 
not by forceps, but with a pair of cymbals clapped over both ears. 
His face, driven together by the blow, was long and its features 
crowded. The nose, buckteeth, popeyes had all pushed forward when the 
doctor first compressed his skull. “Come in?” he asked softly.

“Of course.” Another Southerner—Georgia Cracker by his drawl. 
“Are you hungry?”

Thinking about it, he rubbed his temples with both thumbs. “I think 
I just ate,” he finally said, and spotted Olena waiting by the bed. 
“Good morning, Ma’am.”

I introduced Olena and myself. He wasn’t curious. “Melvin 
Drum,” he said, and wrapped my hand in a long set of fingers. He 
was too thin for his black suit and the pale bow tie made his 
Adam’s apple look red and malignant. He said politely, “Hate to 
wake you up.”

“We’ve been expecting you.” That puzzled him. He took a seat 
and stared at his knuckles while he popped each one.

“This is a funny thing,” he said mildly. “It might be amnesia. 
But look here.” He leaned his head forward and his longish tan hair 
divided into two hanks. “You see a knot there? Anything?”

I felt his scalp. “Nothing.”

He leaned back and his eyes—which I had thought were blue 
—⁠glowed green as a cat’s. “Maybe I’ve gone crazy,” he 
said, obviously pleased. “They say religious people do.”

Dryly I said I thought Mr. Drum would find he had passed beyond all 
need for religion now.

He did not hear me. “It’s hard to tell nuts from saints,” he 
explained to Olena, “except for God, of course. He can divide them 
up left and right in the twinkling of an eye. The twinkling. Of one 
eye.”’ Smiling, he tilted his chair onto two back legs and I 
grabbed for his sleeve where something gleamed.

“Can you explain this?” I said, shaking my own tag.

“I can accept it,” he said. He pulled his cuff over the third 
bracelet. “We’ve all passed on and these are our instructions.”

“Passed _on_?” said Olena. She crossed to the pantry, carried 
back a skirtful of yellow apples, and sat on the floor to share them. 
“Are you certain you’re dead, then, Mr. Drum?”

“That was the last promise I heard.” His rabbit teeth bit out a 
sharp triangle and he talked over the sloshing noise of apple in his 
mouth. “I turned down an alley—there were three men bent over 
somebody. I tried to run. They grabbed me; one of them put a 
flashlight on my face and said, ‘Oh, Lord, it was Willy and Willy 
had a big mouth.’ The one I couldn’t see said, ‘Willy’s a 
dead man, then.’”

“Who’s Willy?” I asked.

“God only knows.” He read the carving softly: “‘To avoid 
going back—dwell, then travel. Join forces. Disremember.’ Anybody 
want to go back?”

I pictured myself hooked up to tubes, pumps, catheters, filling and 
emptying at the nurses’ convenience. No.

But Olena had pressed two freckled hands on her abdomen and was 
staring at them while her eyes filled. She sounded hoarse. “How did 
you die, then, Mr. Drum? After that promise?”

Tire iron, lead pipe, he wasn’t sure.

“But you were cured of your final . . . condition. Your head 
wound. And you, Mr. Watts, of yours. Does that mean . . . ? Do 
you think I . . . ?”

We tried not to look at what her hands were cupping. Melvin Drum 
leaned forward and his face shifted in some way I could not see; his 
tone dropped down an octave and he got older and almost dignified as 
he laid his thin hand on Olena’s red hair. “Sister,” he said, 
nearly rumbling, “leave it to God.”

Water ran down her nose and hung there. “This baby’s alive,” 
she burst out. “You hear me? When the time comes, you’ll have to 
help me birth. I won’t leave that to God.” She shook her head 
loose from under his hand.

“Yes, you will,” he said, but I told her we’d both help and 
maybe by then we’d find a doctor, too.

Melvin Drum tapped his bracelet. “We’ve joined forces, then,” 
he said. “When does the travel start?”

Tomorrow, we decided. We’d pack food and bottle water. Olena would 
rest today and we’d swim, clean our clothes. I wrote these things 
down in my green-bound book. “Which direction shall we take?”

Melvin said east seemed appropriate. I wrote that down.

In the afternoon, he and I floated on our backs in the lake while 
Olena hung our clothes on the sunlit bushes. My younger body was a 
joy to me, moving easily, stroking well. Melvin had a large genital 
and as we drifted I could sometimes see it shift in the water like a 
pale fish. “Were you married, Melvin?”

He said no. I thought he must be over thirty. “Were you queer?”

Laughing, he had to gargle out some water. “Very,” he said.

I don’t think he meant for boys.

4

“I’m already tired,” Olena complained. “Why must you walk so 
fast?” On her short legs, she had to make three steps for every one 
of Melvin Drum’s. I was winded, too, and the sun stood directly 
overhead. “Why hurry,” she puffed, pushing swags of honeysuckle 
to one side, “when we have no destination and no deadline?”

“None that we _know_ of,” said Drum, leading the way like the 
major of a band.

Over her shoulder to me, Olena said, “This is silly. There’s no 
time in this place.” Overhearing, Drum pointed straight up at the 
blazing sun and kept marching. She poked him in the spine above his 
belt. “‘Disremember,” she said.

We walked noisily, single file, through woods which were thick and 
shady, their fallen leaves ankle-deep; and the sun slid with us, 
shooting a ray through a thin branch now and then.

Olena carried the lightest pack—raisins, dried beans and figs, the 
peanuts she brought over our objections. Drum and I had mostly ham 
and wine and water jars. The kitchen knife I’d strung at my waist 
had pricked me half a dozen times climbing uphill from the lake. The 
land was level forest now, with no sign of paths or trails.

We rested by a shallow spring with a frog in it. I asked Drum, “You 
hear a river?” He said it might be. Olena stuck her red hair 
backward into the spring, so the ends uncurled and hung wetly down 
her back and dripped on the leaves in front of me when we walked on 
again.

“I’m ready to unstrap this blanket and leave it on some tree.”

Drum told her for the third time we’d need blankets later.

“He thinks we’ll still be hiking in December,” she grumbled. 
“He’s got a new think coming.” She passed me a pocketful of 
peanuts to crack and eat as we walked. She wouldn’t give Drum any.

The river still sounded far away when we saw it flowing low between 
walls of thicket and vines which had briers under their heart-shaped 
leaves. Drum stopped, and we stepped to either side of him and looked 
downhill. The water was brown and sluggish, with small sandbars in 
the middle. “Want to camp here?”

“Won’t there be snakes?” But Olena let us lead the way and 
reach our hands back for her when the slope grew slippery or jagged. 
Rows of black willows kept us from the water’s edge, but upstream 
Melvin Drum broke through to a slab of gray rock which jutted into 
the current and had built behind it a sandy pool. Olena unlaced my 
borrowed shoes and slid her feet into it. “Glory, that’s cool!” 
she said and slipped forward until her white hem turned gray in the 
water.

“It’s a good place to build a fire,” Drum said, “but we might 
want to sleep on higher ground.”

“I’m so tired all I’d ask a water moccasin is not to snore,” 
she said, lying back and letting her toes float into sight.

Melvin and I dropped our packs to gather firewood and haul it to the 
rock. I nudged Olena’s shoulder once with my toe. “All right?”

“Sleepy,” she said. I climbed uphill for another load, thinking 
that was Drum who thrashed ahead of me through the bushes in the 
gathering dusk. I squatted to rip lightwood from a rotted stump. 
Suddenly, from behind, he spoke my name and I jumped up, pointing 
uphill at the moving underbrush. We watched the dark leaves stir.

“There?” said Drum softly. I saw only a dim trunk of a thick 
shrub; then it moved and grew a snout. I could make out between twigs 
the animal’s long outline, lean and low to the ground, with a tail 
curved around its hindquarters. He whispered, “Dog?”

“Wolf,” I said. Lupus. Very still, like a carving or a piece of 
statuary. In slow motion the wolf began to back away uphill, and at 
one point I could see the whole arch of his back and the curve of his 
tucked-in tail. Once he stepped on a twig which snapped, and he 
punished his own paw with a nip. I saw the sharp flash of teeth. He 
turned then, and went up the slope in three long bounds.

Drum’s breath blew out on the back of my neck. “A real wolf? 
Here?”

I didn’t think it was a real wolf. More like an animated artwork I 
had seen drawn somewhere, and I said so. “Didn’t you see how the 
shape was exaggerated? It looked so . . . so stylized.”

Drum sniffed at his armpit. “Well, I’m real enough. I’m organic 
and I stink and there’s a blister on my foot.”

I wanted to tell him about a pictured Lupus who could only copulate 
twelve days in the whole year and whose female could not whelp except 
in May and then when it thundered; but that was like saying a 
twelfth-century picture book had come alive before our eyes, and the 
Psalter or Apocalypse might be next. For all I knew, Melvin Drum had 
dream beasts in his own head to which I had yet to be subjected.

We carried down the remaining firewood, pulled the small bag of white 
beans out of its river soak, and boiled them slowly with a chunk of 
ham fat in our only pot. While they were cooking, I asked Melvin just 
how religious he had been.

“The last five years I thought of nothing else.” He stretched out 
on the rock. “It’s a shame I’m dead,” he said, “because 
someday I would have finished the stealing and had it all.”

“Stealing what?” asked Olena, stirring a peeled stick through the 
beans.

“Religion. I went in every church I could. Catechisms, hymnals, 
prayer books, rosaries, creeds—I stole them all. Went on field 
trips to the Mormons and Christian Scientists. I stacked all that 
stuff in my room. You could hardly walk for candles and books and 
shawls.” Olena speared a bean for him but he shook his head that it 
was too hard to eat. “I was in Los Angeles at the end,” he said. 
“On the way to visit the Rosicrucians.”

She snapped, “What on earth was it for?”

He smiled at the rising moon. “You ever seen a big set of railroad 
scales? Where you keep adding weights till the arm is perfectly 
balanced? When I got all the stuff together, when I had collected the 
right balance . . . weight . . .” Suddenly he giggled toward 
the darkening sky. “It sounds dumber now than it did then.”

I leaned toward him on both my gritty palms. “Doesn’t your head 
hurt when you remember things like that?”

“No. Does yours?”

Olena said hers hurt, too, just behind both eyebrows. She spoke in a 
fast singsong: “So I’ve quit remembering I was a beautician and 
having a baby and he was already married and I didn’t care and one 
day I fell down the steps of my apartment building all the way to the 
washing machines in the basement and the woman folding towels just 
stood there and hollered all the time I came rolling down and all I 
could see looking up was her open mouth and fillings in every tooth 
in her head.” She grabbed her forehead. “Whew! That’s the last 
time, damn it.” She turned away and for a while the three of us lay 
flat on our backs on the hard rock, not saying anything, while the 
sky got darker behind the stars.

The beans took a long time to soften. We got our spoons out of our 
pockets and tried them and lay down again.

I was almost asleep when Drum said, “Why don’t we use the 
river?”

“Use it for what? To travel, you mean?”

“Beats walking,” Olena said.

“If we knew anything about boats or canoes,” said Drum.

I sat up. “It happens I know a little.” I told them how the 
Indians would burn down a big tree or find one struck low by a storm, 
and put pine resin and tree gum on one side and set fire to that, 
chopping out the charred wood and repeating the blazing gum, until 
they had burned the log hollow. “Some of their dugouts would carry 
twenty men.”

“Won’t that take a long time?” One of Olena’s hands climbed 
up by itself and rubbed her belly.

“We have a rock, water, matches, trees . . .”

Olena pointed her finger at me. “Hah! Why didn’t your head hurt? 
Talking about the Indians, why didn’t your head hurt then?”

“I think,” said Drum thoughtfully, “it must not hurt if the 
things you recall are useful to you. Useful now, I mean.”

Which, in view of his vague religion, made us stare at him.

It was late when we spooned our mushy beans in the dark and rolled up 
in our blankets, tired enough to sleep on solid stone. If snakes 
crawled up at night, we never noticed. The last thing I thought was 
that any serpent I saw in this place would be like the one Pepys 
claimed could feed on larks by spitting its poison into the air, and 
for that one I would send forth a weasel, since—as the monks wrote 
in their illuminated manuscripts—God never makes anything without a 
remedy.

For all I knew, somewhere in Melvin Drum’s last rented room there 
were stacks of medieval books full of viper-worms and amphisbaenae, 
and perhaps even stories of the Cherokee Thunders, who lived up in 
Galunlati, close to that great Apportioner, the Sun.

And Drum was right—thinking of all these things, my head never hurt 
at all.

5

After that come repeated entries in my ledger: “Worked on boat 
today.”

I don’t know how long it took. We had one hatchet and we used sharp 
rocks. My knuckles bled, made scabs, and bled again.

I slipped into a way of life I seemed to know from the bone out. 
Squatted in the woods, wiped with a leaf, covered my shit. I peed on 
tree trunks like a hound—it’s instinct, I think. We’re meant to 
give back our excrement to plants. We washed in the river. Even 
Olena, after a while, bathed with us and I stopped staring at her 
stretched white skin and the brown mat of hair below. My beard grew 
out itchy; there were welts across my chest and the beans made gas 
growl inside us all. One night I spotted the wolf’s eyes shining 
near the rock and I called to him, but the lights stayed where they 
were. When the ham got moldier, we lived off fish. My fingernails 
smelled like fertilizer.

Olena kept saying the boat was done, but I wanted the shell thinner, 
lighter, and we chopped through the heartwood and sanded the inside 
down with stones. We pointed the stern and rounded the bow. Even 
after dark, we’d sit scrubbing her surface absently with rocks 
until she felt smoother than our calloused hands.

“She’s ready,” Melvin Drum said at last. “Admit it, Ben. We 
can go on.”

I did not want to stop. It seemed to me there was grace in the log we 
had not yet freed, shape that was still unrefined. But finally I gave 
in. I crushed pokeberries in my palm and wrote on her side with a 
finger, “_Escarius_.”

They made me explain. A labrus fish, thick-lipped, called by 
Sylvester “Golden-Eye.” The monks had thought the Scar clever, 
since, when it was trapped in a fish pot—they wrote—it would not 
dash forward but would turn around and undo the gate with frequent 
blows of its tail and escape backward. Other Scars, if they saw him 
struggle, were said to seize their brother’s tail with their teeth 
and help him back loose to freedom.

We loaded _Escarius_, even filling our water bottles, though we would 
be afloat in water. We still had beans and damp peanuts, and we 
opened a jar of grape wine on the rock and poured some on the boat 
and each spat a swallow into the river—I don’t remember why.

Pushing off from the gray rock, we started down the river, Drum and I 
trying our new poles and paddles. Olena sat amidships and let her 
fingers trail. She was singing. “Shall we gather at the river? The 
beautiful, the beautiful river? Gather with the Saints at the river 
that flows by the throne of God?”

Into the current we moved and skirted the sandbars, slipped silently 
past the drooping willows, and began an easy drift. The knobs of 
turtle heads dropped below the water as we drifted by, and floated up 
again when we had passed. We may have looked majestic, moving 
downstream in a boat so much longer than we needed. _Escarius_ tended 
to wallow to this side and that, but we learned how to balance with 
our oars. Our rock went out of sight and the water seemed thick and 
reluctant and bore us without interest, slowly, while the river 
spread wider and showed us floodplains and sycamores with watching 
squirrels.

I felt like a man on a color calendar, poised with my oar level, 
going off the page and out of sight.

“She’s all right,” called Melvin Drum. “She rides fine.”

Sometimes a snake would drop limp off a low limb and lie on the water 
like a black ribbon. Olena stopped worrying, since they seemed to 
fear us and would at the last glide toward the shallow edge and blend 
with tree roots there. “We’re dreaming,” she said, turning her 
face to me. “Even the snakes are dreaming.”

The first set of rapids was shallow and we bumped down it like a 
sledge. Late in the afternoon we pulled up to a low bank under pines 
and slid the hull over brown needles and braced her ashore with 
stones. Olena found a tick on her ankle but said it was still a fair 
place to sleep. My shoulders ached. I walked up the small creek to 
relieve myself, and on its far side saw the bent tail and stiff fur 
of the same gray wolf as he slunk away. He could not be the same 
wolf, yet I was sure he was.

With darkness, the air turned cool and rain spattered overhead. We 
huddled together under our three blankets but slowly the wool soaked 
through. Then we just pressed together to outlast the rain, Olena 
with her back against a pine trunk, Drum and I on either side. Her 
knees were up, her face down. “I hate it here,” she suddenly 
said. We leaned closer. “I hate it.” Putting an arm about her 
shoulders, Drum and I got tangled with each other, and once I slapped 
at the wet shreds of his sleeve. “I could have been married by 
now,” she said between her knees. “And had regular customers on 
my sun porch and bought myself a dishwashing machine.” Rain poured 
over us. “I could have joined the Eastern Star,” she wailed.

Trying to rub our foreheads on her soaked hair, Drum and I bumped 
skulls, and he said angrily, “You let me do all the work today!” 
Which wasn’t so.

When at last the rain stopped, what could we do? We went on sitting 
there while the moon started down. We were soggy and chilled and had 
wet wool in our lungs.

In the morning nobody spoke. We spread our clothes to dry and tried 
to nap but the bugs were too bad.

“We might as well go on,” I finally said. I felt resigned. There 
was nothing at the end of this river but a sea waiting to drown us. 
It would pull us home like caught fish on a line.

In silence, Drum wadded our wet blankets into the boat. Olena waded 
out and hoisted herself aboard, and without a word we pushed loose 
into the current. I was lonely and the river seemed hypnotic, just 
fast enough not to need our thrust. For a long time we sat with our 
oars laid in our laps. If Drum watched one bank, I stared at the 
other, and when his attention shifted I crossed mine over, too.

Once Olena said we should capture the next snake, lift him into the 
boat, just to see what would happen. Maybe, she said, if one of us 
was bitten he would move on another layer to someplace else. “We 
might wake up in the pyramids.”

Or Bethlehem, she hoped. I stroked the water hard. Drum grabbed at 
blackberries hanging from the bank until his hands were purple. I 
said, “Am I using my paddle enough today? Are you satisfied?”

He said, “It was raining, Ben.” We drifted on.

By night we had passed into drier land and could build a fire and 
string our clothes nearby. We heated a cup of wine apiece. I asked 
him, “Is there a God? Now? What do you think now?”

“It’s hard to think here.”

“You can remember, though, better than we can.”

The tin cup covered half his face. “I’m like every other 
expert,” he said. “In time, I got interested in the smaller 
sects. I specialized. Osiris or the voodoo drums. I went to the 
Hutterites and Shakers. Once I met Frank Buchman and I couldn’t see 
anything special about him. A man had the Psychiana lessons, all 
twenty-four. It had cost him twenty-six dollars during the 
Depression; I won’t tell you the price he wanted. I didn’t pay, 
of course. I stole the set and hid it in my mattress.” He finished 
the wine. “If a snake bit me, I’d wake up in Moscow, Idaho, 
asking about Frank Robinson.” He said to Olena, “I’d just as 
soon be here. You feeling better?”

She had fallen asleep, mouth open, the edge of her teeth in view. I 
knew that I wanted to put my tongue there. I jumped when Drum said, 
“One thing we mustn’t do is fight.”

Swallowing, I nodded. He rinsed his cup in the river, stared across 
its lighted surface. “My brother used to have dizzy fits and he 
said he dreamed like this. Always of journeys and trips. Mostly he 
rode on a train that went very fast and roared. He was always on top 
of the engine, holding to the bells, and the whistle would go right 
through him, he said. If a tunnel could feel a train go through it, 
he said he could feel the sound of that whistle, boring, passing.” 
Away from the fire, Drum looked taller. “The dream was always dark 
except for the engine lamps.”

“Where did he go?”

“He woke up too soon.”

“Is your brother dead now?”

Melvin Drum laughed coming back into the firelight. He couldn’t 
stop laughing. Even after we had curled up in the damp blankets, I 
heard him laughing in the dark.

6

How was it possible to dream in that place? Yet I went on dreaming, 
every night, inventing an overlap of worlds which spun out from me 
without end. I dreamed of a life in an Indian village ringed by 
sharpened stakes, where my job was to be watchman over the fields of 
corn and pumpkins and to run forth with screams and rattles to drive 
off crows or animals. I dreamed of being alone on a sandy plain, 
lost, staying alive by eating fly larvae scraped from the surface of 
alkaline pools.

Drum said he never dreamed. Olena did; she tossed and grunted in her 
sleep but claimed she could not remember why in the morning.

We blundered on down the river, shipping water, overturning once in 
white froth when _Escarius_ scraped a jagged rock.

“If we took turns sleeping, we could travel at night, too,” Drum 
said; but what was the point now that time did not rush from left to 
right? Only the river moved—for all we knew, moved forever.

Finally the banks began to withdraw and the wider current slowed. We 
seldom had to use oars or poles. Early one morning, the shores were 
suddenly flung outward and we were afloat in a wrinkled lake which 
seemed without end. Drum said it might be an ocean sound at low tide, 
since the waves were light but regular. We turned south to keep a 
shore in view. Soon Drum thrust down with our longest poplar pole and 
struck no bottom. It flew under the water like a spear and bobbed up 
far away, beating slowly and steadily toward the sandy bank. Under 
the hot sun my brain cooked like stew in a pot.

Olena had been silent for a long time. Suddenly she burst out, “You 
two might be dead but I’m not.” Perhaps the child had moved in 
her, or she imagined that it moved. 

Over her head, Drum said to me, “Shall we keep on?” For the first 
time, he sounded tired.

“Olena?”

She jerked her face away from the disappointing shoreline, so plainly 
empty of other people like ourselves. Her freckles were wet and her 
sweaty forehead flamed. “There’s nothing here,” she said, 
almost whining. We stroked the water. “You, Melvin Drum, you made 
us leave that house too soon. Somebody else might have come if we had 
just waited awhile.”

Or, by now, why hadn’t we caught up with whoever had burned his 
books in that fireplace? Yet, I thought, Old Lobo might be the fourth 
one in our group, and I eyed the shore as if I might spot his gray 
head sliding through the water, parallel.

The sun had started down the sky when we landed on a small and wooded 
island pocked with crab tunnels. Drum built a fire and dropped a 
dozen crabs into boiling water. We carried them in cloths, like hot 
spiders, up the beach and into the shade of high bushes.

“I’ll fix yours,” Drum said, breaking off claws, throwing the 
flippers downhill on the sand. He separated back from body, then 
gouged down to a paper-thin shell. “Hand me your knife, Ben.” He 
scraped out white meat for Olena and offered it in his palm. She ate 
bits with her fingers. I cleaned my own. In case there should be some 
later use for them, we scrubbed the pink shells with sand and set 
them to dry in the sun. Then, while Olena lay resting under a tree, 
Drum and I explored the narrow island. There were so many loud birds 
inland that every tree seemed to scream. We found one pool of 
brackish water and wild grapevines which still had late fruit, 
although some had fermented on the stem. We could barely see the 
shore from which our river had issued, but on the island’s far side 
there was only water and some shadows which might be other islands.

Before dark, the waves grew higher and crabs at their foaming edges 
carried off the claws and flippers we had thrown. Olena felt pain 
during the night. Her heavy breathing woke us. She sprang up and 
began walking on the damp sand, hunched over.

“She’s aborting,” Drum said, watching her pace.

Olena heard him and screamed that she was not.

“It isn’t her time. She’s not big enough for that,” he added.

I called to her, “When were you due? What month?” But she would 
not answer.

Drum asked, “How long have we been here, anyway?” I looked back 
through these moonlit pages trying to count days, but it was hard to 
estimate. I kept glancing at Olena. Drum jerked impatiently at my 
book. “Is it forty-nine days? Is it close to that?” I didn’t 
know. He said something about people in Tibet once thinking it took 
forty-nine days for the passage between death and further life; then 
he clapped both hands to his head. I stared, for at last there was 
some piece of remembering that made Drum’s head hurt. Good, I 
thought. I wanted his jaw-teeth roots to burn like fire.

I left him and crossed the sand to Olena. “I’ll stay with you.” 
The moonlight turned her hair black and skin gray and sank her eyes 
into pits. Together we marched on the cool sand. When the pain eased, 
we dragged her blanket closer to mine and I could feel the knob of 
her bent knee low in my back like something growing on my spine.

She had rolled to the other side when I woke at sunrise. I turned 
also, and fitted myself to her back. She only murmered as my arm 
dropped over her. Our parts were sweetly matched, as if she were 
sitting in my lap; under the curve of her hips I could feel my 
stiffening heat. My fingers slid past her collar to her loose breast 
until they could play on her nipple like tongues.

Drum coughed. Over Olena’s red curls I saw him watching my busy 
hand, staring at the cloth where it was moving. I pulled on her skin 
till the breast budded, all the while letting him watch. Olena was 
awake now. The cells in her body came alive and caused my own skin to 
prickle.

Now I yanked my blanket and threw it over both of us, taking care 
that Drum could see, and that he knew I saw him see.

Under the blanket, creating bulges for his following eye, I ran my 
long arm over the swell of Olena’s child until my thumb was 
centered low in her body hair and my fingertips pressed on. She moved 
to help me. I heard her breath. Her leg slid wide and dropped back 
over mine until I was touching her at last. The hot grasp was too 
much for me and my spasm came while she was simply widening and 
making ready for hers. I kept on until she made noises and threw 
herself on her back, knees up and shivering. Instantly, so Drum could 
not see her taut face, she jerked up the blanket and pulled it to her 
eyebrows.

Drum never moved. I gave him a long look, but he never moved. I fell 
asleep with my hand on Olena’s thigh and she must have slept also.

In the morning Drum was gone, and the boat _Escarius_ was gone, and 
half our possessions were neatly laid out by the dried crab shells on 
the beach. There was a moving speck near the mouth of the river, but 
I could not tell for sure if it was man or animal and, when the sun 
got higher, could not find it at all in the glare.

7

Sweet days! Long, languid, poured out like syrup.

Olena slept in my arms. No sex in the regular way—because of her 
coming child—so, like curious children ourselves, we played 
touching games on each other’s bodies.

Our clothes were very worn. I made a loin wrapping from my torn 
shirt; she sawed my pants off with a butcher knife for herself and 
left her breasts naked to the sun. We might have been Polynesian 
lovers from another age except for our bracelets, which, without ever 
discussing it, we did not discard.

Maybe ten days, two weeks went by. The nights were cooling but our 
afternoons were still part of summer. For many meals we dug clams 
from an inland mudbank, steamed them in salty water.

“Wouldn’t you give anything for butter?” Olena said. She had 
persuaded herself the sea waters were supplying her baby rich brain 
food and protein. She would watch me slide a knife along a fish’s 
backbone as if each filet were preordained to become some tender 
organ inside her unborn child. Maybe, she sometimes said half 
seriously, we should powder the fishbones since she had no milk to 
drink?

In spite of the sweet days and sweeter nights, I began gathering 
wood, poles, stakes, and lashing them together with strings of our 
ragged clothes or strips of bark. Olena didn’t like the raft.

“Where will we go? Not out to sea, and there’s nothing ashore but 
wilderness.” She ran a freckled hand around my waist, spun a 
fingertip in my navel. “You’ll help me when the baby comes, Ben. 
Things will be fine.”

But I could hear, in the night wind, winter draw closer than her 
child. How cold might it get? Which of the fish would stay and what 
shelter did we have?

She pounded sea oats into flour, mixed that with water, and baked 
patties in an oven of stones. They were bitter but we ate them for 
the sake of the different texture. “Now stop working on the raft 
and let’s go swimming,” she said. Sometimes I did.

“Isn’t it good,” she’d whisper to me in the dark, “not to 
be planning ahead? Saving money? Paying insurance?”

I held her tightly and watched the perpetual sea. “What do you 
think happened to Melvin Drum?”

Her whole body shrugged. “Who knows?”

Who-knows tormented me more than What-happened. “Maybe,” I said, 
“Drum’s found the place by now.”

“What place?”

The place it ended. The sweeter Olena felt and tasted, the more 
certain I was that this was an interlude we would both forget. Our 
stay on the island was timeless, so I felt certain it could not 
possibly last. I had even begun to feel homesick for endings, 
arrivals. Finality.

“Ooh,” breathed Olena, grabbing my hand, “Ooh, glory, feel 
that!” I laid my palm under her ribs. “Feel him move!”

I held my own breath in case there should be some faint shifting at 
last below her tight skin. “I feel it,” I lied.

She rubbed my chest with her forehead so her long red hair tickled. 
“When Eve had a son, do you think she worried about who he would 
marry? We’re married, Ben. In a way.”

“In a way,” I said, kissing the peak of her ear.

“Really, you’ll be the baby’s father.”

The word was not real to me, not in this place. I tested it over and 
over in my head. Fatherfatherfather until the sound was mixed 
meaninglessness and prayer. Fatherfather.

“We should have asked Melvin to marry us.”

I said, “He wasn’t a preacher.”

“Never did think that mattered much.”

What had mattered, after all? Damn headache.

“Surely I’ll not get much bigger,” said Olena, stroking 
herself. I thought she was the same size as the first time I saw her 
walking through the mist. We were both browner, though. Her legs were 
hairier; on my face grew a broad beard, still not a hair on my scalp. 
We cleaned our teeth by wrapping wet sand in wads of cloth, or 
chewing twigs into brushes. Nails on our toes and fingers were long 
and tough; my foot sole felt like canvas. Sea bathing had hardened 
our skin and crusted the smallest scratch into a quick scar. My 
forearms looked almost tattooed.

Yes, we had changed. But Olena was the same size.

One morning there washed on our beach an assortment of trash which 
made me shout for Olena. Empty blue bottles, finger-length. A warped 
black piece of a nameless book cover . . . the foot of a celluloid 
doll. She grabbed for that—a toy for the baby, she said. I followed 
the tidemark of seaweed, stirring it with my toes. Rubber tubing. A 
piece of comb with the teeth sealed by barnacles. A length of wood 
which had once been fluted, part of a carved chair or table. Olena 
traced its design with awe, like some archaeologist.

But I was afraid. While she scanned the horizon for sails or a 
smokestack, I thought of a rent in the membrane between worlds, 
perhaps the great suck of a filling vacuum which would sweep Olena 
down more stairs and drop me under another scalpel. When the wind 
blew, even lightly, it raised goose bumps under my tan. “I’ve got 
to finish the raft,” I said firmly. All day I watched, while 
pretending not to watch, for some vessel to follow its trash ashore. 
The raft grew wide enough for one person. Olena watched openly for a 
boat. The raft was wide enough for one person and a half. I worked on 
it constantly. Olena was bored with the building and bracing of its 
parts, and no longer sat nearby or carried me cooked fish in 
crab-shell dishes; but sat at a distance on the beach where the 
flotsam had washed, crooning to the doll’s foot and waiting for 
something to rear up on the line between sea and sky. Some days she 
did not cook at all. At sundown I would carry food to her. Often she 
was sitting in an unnatural, stiff position, and kept her hand poised 
like an eyeshade longer than she should have been able to keep it 
there.

One evening she used the doll’s foot to mash her fish meat into 
white gruel, then lapped it up with her tongue. I was disgusted and 
struck her under one eye. I watched tears spill on her reddening 
cheekbone.

“I’m sorry, Olena. Forget it. Come sleep now.”

She shook her head.

“I want you to put your hands on me.”

Her eyes were sliding off my face, across the streak of moonlight on 
the water.

“I’ll put mine on you, then,” I wheedled.

No. She shrank away on the darkening sand.

When the raft was done, Olena would not climb on. “We’re 
leaving,” I said, “even if it is dark.” I held the platform 
still on the water. She would not come and I threatened to hit her 
again as I had on that other night.

In the moonlight, then, we walked the raft past the low waves till I 
hoisted her on board and heaved myself beside. Olena wrapped her body 
and head in a blanket and sat in the middle, a lump, a cargo bale.

“We can cross most of the water in the cool of the evening,” I 
said. All I could see of her was the roundness of one pale heel 
showing at the blanket’s base. I tried to be cheerful. “We might 
even see Melvin Drum. I bet he made camp on the shore below the 
river’s mouth, and that’s right where we’ll land.” I paddled 
with wood, with my hands. The raft was slow and awkward and zigzagged 
on the black water. “Even if Drum moved on, he may have left some 
clue behind for us. Some message. Why don’t you answer me?”

“I don’t feel good,” said the lump.

We moved very slowly across the wide bay, as if the thick moonlight 
were an impediment. The edges of the dark water beat luminous on our 
island and the landfall.

In a loud voice I said, “I couldn’t stand just waiting like that. 
I couldn’t keep doing that.”

Olena would not move but rode on my labors like a keg under a 
tarpaulin.

At first light we landed on the same inland shore from which we had 
come, although the river was out of sight. No sign of Drum—no old 
campfires, no heaped shells or stones. The sand piled quickly into 
low dunes, stubby grass, underbrush.

“Why don’t you sleep now?”

“I still don’t feel good.” Olena tottered up the beach and lay 
down in her damp blanket while I dragged the raft high from the 
water. There were shallow paw prints in the wet sand, some in a 
circle, as if the animal had paced.

I squatted by Olena. “Are you hurting?”

“No.” On her back, she stared beyond me. The last stars looked 
like flecks of paper stuck on the blueing sky. “I feel funny, 
though.”

“It’s from leaving. I’m sorry I forced you, Olena.”

“Doesn’t matter,” she said. “But it’s colder on this side 
of the water.”

I asked if she wanted a fire, but she said no. I curled up with my 
head laid on her thighs and went to sleep.

The sun was high and warm when I woke, feeling sticky. Again, Olena 
was too rigid, with one arm raised off the sand and her palm spread 
open to the sky. I felt for her knee and squeezed it. “Move around 
some.” Her skin felt cool and dry.

I sat up, staring. Overnight her pregnancy had collapsed like a 
balloon which had leaked out its air. Without even thinking, I patted 
the blankets in case there should be a loose baby lying there. No. 
Nothing at all—no baby, no stains.

“Olena?” I got a good look at her face. She was—what else to 
call it?—she was dead, her eyelids halfway down. I kissed her cold 
mouth, which felt hard as a buckle. Then again I kissed her, frantic, 
blowing my breath deep and pinching her nostrils shut. I was trying 
to cry without losing the rhythm of the breath and my body shook. I 
thought my forced air might inflate Olena anywhere, blow up her 
abdomen or toes, because I did not understand how anything functioned 
in this place; but nothing happened except that my heartbeat got 
louder and throbbed in my head until even the sight of Olena lying 
there pulsated to my eye.

She was dead. I walked away on the beach. I covered her with the 
blanket and sat there, holding her uplifted hand. I walked some more. 
I took off every stitch of her clothes and, sure enough, her stomach 
was flat now as a young girl’s. She looked younger, too, fourteen 
at most, but her face was tired.

I dressed her body again and tried wrapping her hand around the pink 
doll’s foot but there was no grip.

Finally, because I could not bear to put her into this ground, to 
bury her in Virginia, I laid her on the raft in the blanket and 
spread her red hair, and combed it with my fingers dipped in water. 
The bracelet looked tarnished and there was rust in the links of the 
chain. I placed on her eyes the prettiest coquinas I could find, and 
she seemed to be staring at the sun with a gaze part pink, purple, 
pearly. Then I saw I could not push her out to sea without crying, so 
I wrote in the ledger book awhile, until I could stand to do that.

Now it is dark again, and I think I can bear to push Olena off into 
the waters and let the current carry her down this coast. There have 
been noises from the thickets at my back. I think the wolf is there.

In a minute I am going to close up this ledger book and wrap it in a 
strip of wool I have torn off my blanket and put it under Olena’s 
arm, and then I am going to walk waist-deep into the water and watch 
them both ride away. Who knows where this sea will end, or where 
Olena will carry the doll’s foot and the book? Maybe somewhere 
there’ll be someone to read the words, or someone who dreams he has 
read them.