Caught by the Train
Nothing to see here but autumn thoughts
[Oh y’all. First I wrote to you about Walter bleeding poor Linen to death and then I told you about Statius giving Dorrie TBD and finally I made Tim humiliate Jethra in front of their colleagues and rescue her mainly because he’s nurturing a 25-year-long itch to tell her off a little more — my boys are a rogue’s gallery of creeps and monsters, in fact. So if you’ve stuck with my Substack all these months because you love my darling little evil boys, you may disappointed now I write about SWEET BOYS.
One sweet boy, anyhow.
Tough. Imma do it anyway.
You can pretend he’s yours, if you need that energy. Everything is practice, as John Cage said (or maybe it was his honey, Merce Cunningham). And that’s what this Substack is, after all — practice in love. What else is there? What other discipline? What other art? Only Love, who leads us by degrees through pleasure, to beauty, then virtue, then communion with the blessed gods.]
As so often happens, the train idles and blocks Thrasher Pike just west of Highway 27. I put the car in park and half-dream. This train may linger here 30 minutes. Beside the railroad runs a branch, a tributary of North Chickamauga Creek, I think, rippling along languid and gold-brown in the October light.
I rest my arm on my open window, chin on my arm. I’m looking South. Ahead of the car, on the far side of the resting train, the sun lowers past mid-afternoon. Trees tower around and out of the creek. I don’t know all their names anymore, if I ever did. At any rate I know fewer than I used to. Birch, oak. Sycamore, tall and shaggy, with rumpled-looking silver-green leaves. Sycamore roots clutch the banks and grow down into the water.
Kudzu is taking this creek. Green columns tower down from high branches. In other places, a whole sycamore is mounded over, revealing its own leaves only here and there between the kudzu’s verdure. Taken together, kudzu formations look something like the inside of a cave — stalactites, columns, draperies.
Sun filters through the green. Aphids haze the air. Grasshoppers trill. From this angle the creek travels the bottom of a living canyon, a series of leafy vistas that look ever-more-likely to house fair folk as shadow and distance obscure them.
There’s something illusively luxurious about kudzu. You imagine you could nap on a hammock of it. But no, it wouldn’t support your weight and it’s full of chiggers.
Still, the fair folk dance somewhere upstream and the same sunlight hits the upper branches of the oaks high above your place at the same angle it strikes these trees and vines. You’re 20 miles off, nestled in stone and shade, asleep, perhaps, as the fairies are asleep in their dells.
I treasure the thought for a minute, then here with the sun dazzling my eyelids I find my face crumpling to pieces.
Tears! This won’t work. What if the train huffs and puffs to life?
I’ve been reading A Grief Observed and now I laugh at myself, but I’m afraid, too: how will I meet a big sorrow, if a handful of miles and a few days-full of minutes pull my heart up through my throat, taproot and all?
Sure enough, the train shudders awake.
I must trust you as I trust the stillness of stone — limestone, since I’m thinking about caves — which, too, is alive, which, too, reaches with true purpose up through the dark to meet itself descending.
In the meantime I imagine amber light on a windowpane, amethyst shadow on shingle, fair folk traveling the long last beams west to east, east to west between us.
I write this story one day, edit it another day. The third day, tonight, we talk.
“Your voice sounds happy,” you say. “It makes me glad to hear it.”
“I’m sitting on the porch under the stars,” I answer, “drinking wine while my grown kids smoke weed.”
True, it is in fact a warm October evening. No sirens in Eastdale tonight. The wiry black girl-cat hunts in the little wood below our house, above the abandoned factory.
You say Hey to the young folks. They say Hey to you. They clear out back into the house, leaving me the night and the cat and the candle.
We talk about what we talk about: books, dance, music, family. Sun and shadow. Food and sleep.
“What time is it?” you ask.
“Ten twenty-five.”
It’s ten twenty-five there, too.
The fair folks have effected their tesseract, or perhaps there never was any distance, not in time, space, or communion.
“You through talking, Ma?” Grown Son asks as I come back into the house. “Let’s go sit on the porch again.”
“Just let me publish this story.”
The young folks go outside ahead of me. I take longer to finish and proofread this. Someone might need it tonight.