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Shenandoah Home

 OUR FORMER LIVES IN ART

by Jennifer S. Davis

     "Beanie Weenies or Vienna sausages?" Peter says, pulling into the Texaco parking lot. He turns off the truck ignition, nudges his son’s thigh for a response. In his camouflaged shirt and new orange hunting vest, Fischer looks like any other country boy, and Peter thinks that maybe today will be a turning point, that maybe this is the beginning of something new between them.
     Fischer stares at his sketchpad. Blinks.
     "How about the Beanie Weenies? The lunch of champions. They’ve got fiber and protein. No way your mother can get bent out of shape about that, huh?"
     "Sure," Fischer says. He turns his attention back to his sketchpad and be-gins whistling under his breath, a chronic habit. His hand moves over the paper in the uncanny way it does when he draws, as if it doesn’t belong to him.
     "Beanie Weenies it is," Peter says. The forced enthusiasm embarrasses him, something he feels often when alone with his son. He looks at his watch. It’s barely past one. He’s supposed to entertain Fischer until four so Susie can get her nails manicured and do some shopping.
     "You want anything else?" Peter says. He ruffles Fischer’s hair. It hangs past his shoulders in pale ringlets, a style more fitting for a two-year-old than a second grader. Peter is waiting for the day Fischer gets his ass kicked at school, but Susie refuses to cut the boy’s hair, perhaps because it is one of the few utterly childish things about him.
     Fischer lifts his frail shoulders, tucks a curl behind his ear. Peter takes this for a no.
     When Peter steps out of the truck, he shuts the door gently, not wanting to startle Fischer, who spooks easily at seemingly everyday things: a door closing, a car horn blaring, a dog barking in the distance.
     Outside, the sky is the vast blue of an Alabama winter, and the cold of January fills his lungs. He feels his body relax. These are the kinds of days that remind him why he’s stayed in Millville all these years, even though he could make a lot more money in Atlanta, where idiots with money to burn pay top dollar for even the simplest jobs. Peter renovates old houses, mainly for wealthy northern transplants who like to wedge expensive plantation chairs on the verandas of their newly restored homes and pretend they live in a history that does not belong to them.
     Millville is far-flung and sparsely populated, known for the lake vacationers flock to in the summer. Peter and Susie met when he was waiting tables at a seafood restaurant, one of those marina-type places on the lake where all the waiters have to dress like pirates. She came in with her sister for lunch, both of them in bikini tops and cut-off shorts, and Peter’d promised the hostess half his tips to seat them in his section.
     Before Fischer was born, Peter and Susie sometimes camped at Wind Creek State Park, a tiny oasis on a finger of the lake. They would climb to the flat granite cliffs slanting into water and make love, Susie pointing out the open field of a distant galaxy or far-off planets. Then they would simply lie there, silent at the weight of the world above them.
     When Fischer was a toddler, they took him to Wind Creek. Peter wanted to teach him to swim, but his son screamed hysterically, as if the water burned. Peter put Fischer in a life jacket, walked to the end of the community pier, and plopped his son in the water. Hours later, when Fischer finally stopped crying, Susie called Peter an animal, looking at him for the first time the way she does so often now.
     A few months later, Fischer found his art.
     When Peter opens the door to the Texaco, the pungent smell of the bait kept in tanks in the back reminds him of the summers of his childhood, and he wonders how much longer mom-and-pop places like this will be around. More and more, the country roads are peppered with the fancier stores, the kind where you can slip a credit card in the pump and never talk to an actual person.
     The canned foods, covered in a thick layer of dust, are sandwiched between the toilet paper and the charcoal. Nothing looks like it’s been touched since the Cold War era. Peter grabs two Beanie Weenies and some flat, wooden spoons from the box next to the ice-cream cooler. He thinks of getting a beer, but decides against it. Susie would freak if she knew he’d had a drink while handling guns around Fischer.
     "Hi," the cashier says brightly when he goes to pay. She couldn’t be more than sixteen, probably the owner’s daughter, and she’s wearing a tiny tank top even in this weather, the fabric stretched tight against her breasts. The local paper is spread over the counter. They don’t print much real news in it, because there’s not much real news to print in Millville, which is another plus for the town as far as Peter’s concerned. But there’s a whole section on local happenings — who spent the night with whom, where the Spanish class went for school break, whose house got rolled the weekend before, who got arrested for underage drinking — and the teens in the area compete to see who can get their name in the paper the most often. When Peter was a senior, he got a write-up for killing the buck with the widest rack that season, and he still has the clipping somewhere.
     "Going hunting?" the girl says, nodding at Peter’s orange cap.
     "Just skeet shooting. It’s my son’s first time." He looks over her shoulder to make sure Fischer is still in the truck, and spots him huffing on the passenger window, drawing in the condensation left behind. Peter doesn’t need to see to know that his son is drawing a row of cannons.
     "Any pertinent news?" Peter says. He tries not to stare at the girl’s breasts.
     "Huh?" The girl moves to ring up his purchases at a glacial speed.
     "The newspaper."
     "Oh," she says, smiling. "Just this old dude that died behind some diner on a business trip to St. Louis. He went to pee behind the diner and slipped into the river. They think he was drunk or something. He couldn’t pull himself out."
     Peter looks at the picture of the dead man in the paper, and it takes him a moment to recognize the face of Richard Watson, a boy he went to high school with. They used to go bird hunting with a group of friends. To be honest, Peter had forgotten that Richard Watson existed until just this moment. He feels shamed then frightened that a person could forget someone he once knew.
     "Two kids and a wife," the girl says. "Isn’t it amazing." She snaps her silver-ringed fingers. "Bam. Just like that, and it’s all over."
     When Peter gets back to the truck, Fischer has finished with the window and is back to sketching in his pad.
     Another battle scene. The central focus: a gutted Confederate attempting to reinsert his intestines into the open cavern of his belly.
     Fischer’s first word was "art," and he’d said it like he meant it. Then, "my art, my art," a constant wail until Susie shoved a set of finger paints his way, and his pudgy fingers exploded into color. In an hour he offered up, on a paper grocery bag, a perfect cannon, a Brooke rifled cannon they would learn later, properly shaded and proportioned, a weapon neither of his parents had ever seen. He was not yet three.
     That day, Peter and Susie sat hand in hand next to Fischer, watching him paint, the terror that passed between them unspoken.
     "Perhaps it’s hereditary, something from your dad," Susie said after Fischer fell asleep, a dozen paintings of meticulously rendered cannons clutched to his chest. He’d refused to go to bed without them.
     "Art," Peter’s own father had often said, "is not always kind, or easy."
     Peter’s father had been a forensic artist for the state. Sometimes he would sketch the faces of decomposed Jane and John Does found in the alleys, forest or dumpsters, but, of course, he sketched them how they once looked, alive, using their bone structure, approximate age and probable race in hopes that loved ones would recognize the images and claim the remains. Peter, encouraged by his mother, who hated the violence his father’s work brought into their home, went the way of normal boys. He took up hunting and fishing and football, then beer and women, then a wife, a kid, a job — the real kind.
     "Hereditary?" Peter’d said. "My father didn’t even own guns, let alone a fucking cannon. A cannon, Susie." |
      There’s no way they could have known how bad it would get.
     Over the last four years, Fischer has drawn the same figures repeatedly, their faces moribund and hollow-cheeked. The drawings are gruesome. Soldiers’ bones jutting from flesh. Limbless men submerged in murky ravines. But the landscape in which these brutal deaths take place is rendered with frightening sensitivity to detail; one cannot ignore their beauty.
     "20th Maine and 15th Alabama," Fischer says without being asked. He just lost his front teeth, and his th’s sound like f’s.
     "How do you know?" Peter says. "I mean, a soldier’s a soldier, right?"
     "I just do." When Fischer raises his head to answer, Peter is struck silent by his son’s haunting beauty — the vein-mapped skin, the clarity of the pale, sober eyes. Peter is reminded of the memento mori daguerreotypes they’d seen at the National Archives last fall, a trip Susie planned that did nothing but encourage Fischer’s obsession in Peter’s mind. The children in the photos were impossibly pallid, some of them with their eyes still open, their gazes glassy and vacant. When the archivist explained that memento mori meant "remember your death" in Latin, Peter told Susie he had to go to the bathroom. Instead, he walked the ten blocks back to the hotel and sat in the bar and got good and soused before Susie found him for the inevitable fight.
     "Here, eat," Peter says, pulling off the top of one of the cans and shoving it toward Fischer. "And don’t cut yourself."
     "I’m not hungry."
     "I didn’t ask you if you were hungry." Peter pokes an ice-cream spoon in Fischer’s can, then grabs the sketchbook and sticks it in the glove compartment.

THEY SIT IN the truck for a while at the shooting range, watch waves of black birds roll from one oak into the next.
     Peter finds himself growing increasingly maudlin over Richard Watson’s death, a hazy kind of sadness that he suspects has more to do with himself than his old friend. Two kids, he thinks. A widow. Damn.
     He eyes Fischer, his face as placid as unrippled water, and wonders what it would take to evoke some type of honest emotion from his son. Peter imagines his own death. Maybe in a nasty car wreck. Or an accident at one of his work sites. This is a game he plays often with himself. He thinks of various tragic demises for himself, and then he pictures Susie and Fischer standing over his casket at the funeral. Sometimes, Fischer clutches his mother’s legs and wails. Other time he throws himself on his father’s coffin. No matter the scenario, Fischer always responds with enthusiastic grief. Peter knows it’s perverse, but he finds the images comforting.
     "You ready?" Peter says. "You’ll be an expert shot in no time."
     Peter half expects Fischer, who’s drawn enough guns to arm a brigade, to whip the Stevens 311 out of his hands and handle it like a veteran. But Fischer won’t touch the gun when Peter tries to explain how to load it properly. He won’t even pull the release string on the skeet thrower.
     "Can we go to the art store now?" Fischer says within five minutes. His voice quivers. Peter tries not to resent it.
     "We’ll go to Wal-Mart later, and you can pick out anything you want. But just try this first, OK? It took me months to convince your mother to let you shoot with me, and who knows when she’ll let us go again. We’ll practice without the skeet first. Maybe that will be easier."
     Peter lifts the Stevens to his shoulder, aims at an imaginary quail, then shoots into the sky, the butt of the gun kicking into his flesh in a familiar way.
     "See," Peter says, eyeing where the shot went without removing the Stevens from his shoulder, "Since this is a double barrel, we don’t have to reload, just pull the second trigger."
     When Fischer doesn’t respond, Peter turns to see the boy sitting on the ground, his hands over his ears. Peter puts the safety on, swings it under his arm, kneels beside Fischer.
     "There’s nothing to be scared of," Peter says. "It’s loud, that’s all. The recoil’s nothing but a love tap."
     But Fischer won’t get up, and the more Peter tries to persuade him, the more he resists, until Peter is talking much louder than he wants. Fischer buries his head between his knees.
     Peter just intends to massage the boy’s shoulders, to help him relax, but when his hands made contact with Fischer, the boy flinches, like he’s been hit. Peter grabs Fischer by the back of his vest, lifts him to his feet, thrusts the gun in his hand, crouches behind him, places the shotgun against his son’s shoulder, flips the safety off, wraps his son’s finger around the trigger with his on top, and aims at the sky. In the midst of Fischer’s screams, Peter pulls the trigger. The kick slams his son’s torso into his chest.
     Fischer howls. Someone yells, "Everything all right?" Peter feels his pulse in his throat.
     "If you hold the gun too loose to your shoulder, like we just did," Peter explains, "It’ll kick like a mule. So next time, hold it firm."
     Fischer grips his shoulder, his bottom lip wedged between his teeth. His eyes film with tears.
     "Get in the truck," Peter says. "If you’re going to ruin it, just get in the truck."
     Fischer runs to the truck and throws himself into the cab. Peter slumps against the tailgate.
     "Everything all right?" a voice asks again. Peter looks up to see a tall, silver-haired man in an orange sweatshirt and overalls, a shotgun cradled to his chest. Behind him, a gawky teenage girl in a orange hunting cap that says DIVA across the bill kicks at the red dirt with her booted feet, her gangly legs as thin as the barrel of her Remington.
     "Just first time jitters."
     "Are you sure?" the man says. "He doesn’t seem so good."
     Peter turns to see Fischer, partially obscured by the empty gun rack, kneeling in the seat, drawing on the rear window. His face is ashen.
     A gust of wind blasts from the east; red dirt orbits their boots in small, opaque clouds. "He’s just overly sensitive," Peter says. He can taste the iron-rich dirt in his mouth.
     The man’s expression remains uncertain, the same expression of doubt and disapproval Peter recognizes on the faces of Fischer’s teachers when they see his artwork, the unspoken accusation: What have you done to your child?

IT HAS BEEN months since Susie had any time for herself, and by the time Peter and Fischer get home, she’s in an unusually good mood. When Peter bends to kiss her, she offers her mouth instead of her cheek. They open a couple of bottles of wine and make hamburgers for an early dinner. The few times Fischer speaks, Peter half expects him to blurt out a report of the day’s events, to sabotage the fragile truce in the house, but Fischer draws in his sketchpad, eats his dinner, then goes to bed without protest. When Susie asks about the day, Fischer doesn’t mention the shooting range. He simply shows her his new sketch, and she finds a bare place to hang it on the kitchen wall, already cluttered with scores of similar sketches.
     Susie insists on hanging up all of Fischer’s artwork. When Peter opens the refrigerator for a sandwich or beer after work, haggard soldiers lurch at him with their bayonets. When he walks down the hall, rows of cannons aim at his head.
     The few times they’ve invited company over, Peter could not persuade Susie to take the drawings down. Instead, she shows them off with the passion of a little league mom. Susie never seems to notice that although their friends and family are awed by Fischer’s drawings, they often ignore the child who produced them or eye him suspiciously as if he knows something of their own bodies’ betrayals, their tendency to decay.
     "I had some time to think today," Susie says as they settle into bed. Her feet are ice cold against Peter’s calves.
     He nuzzles her necks, says "No thinking. Just feeling." He drags a thumb across her nipple, feels it harden in response. But her body doesn’t relax, and she doesn’t lean into him. Peter has quit counting the weeks since they’ve made love.
     "I’m serious," she says, pushing him away. "I want to take Fischer to see Dr. Stevens again. We agreed that if the drawings didn’t stop, we’d give it another chance."
     "No," Peter says. He sits up and turns on the lamp. Susie has the covers pulled over her chin, and he yanks them off so he can see her face. "Discussion over. Let’s don’t start this one again."
     After Fischer drew his first violent battle scene, eviscerated soldiers and all, Peter and Susie panicked. They eyed each other warily, both suspecting that the other one was damaging Fischer in some way, that surely the boy had to be suffering severe abuse to create such horrific images.
     Finally, they took him to a psychiatrist. Peter thought the doctor would prescribe a pill or two — hell, half of Fischer’s pre-school class was medicated — and that would be the end of it. They picked Dr. Stevens out of the Auburn phonebook, too embarrassed to ask anyone for a recommendation. Peter disliked her immediately. She was one of those plain, arrogant women who arm themselves with degrees when they realize their looks won’t get them anywhere. She enunciated her words slowly when speaking to them as if they were idiots, even though Peter has a couple of degrees himself. She touched his arm when he shifted uncomfortably, which was often. But they were desperate, and after a couple of sessions, she convinced them to allow her to use regressive hypnosis.
     "Clearly," she said afterwards, "it’s a past life." She’d said this as if it were the flu, tonsillitis.
     "Clearly," Peter said on the drive home, "She’s a moron."
     According to Dr. Stevens, under hypnosis Fischer gave all kinds of details about his supposed past life: Over a hundred and sixty years ago, a man named Wilton or Wilson or William was born on a small plantation somewhere east of Millville, Alabama. He had at least three older sisters, she said, one of whom died of some type of brain ailment, most likely cancer. His mother died before he was old enough to remember her. He had a Saddlebred, and he loved it like a childhood friend. When he returned from the war, he used to sketch his memories by the quiet of a creek on the east end of his property. Before he died, he placed his sketches in a pile and burned them. His father grew cotton, owned slaves before the war, but was a generous man, wise, jovial, and he whistled all the time. In ’61, he left with his son and never came home. When Wilton or Wilson or William was in his late thirties or early forties, he eased himself one winter night, nude, into the cold waters of the creek and waited. For what, no one knows. One of his sisters found him, dazed and frostbitten, and took him inside. She tucked him into his boyhood bed, a view of a great oak out his window, and sat with him while he died, sometimes singing a song, something about Jesus or heaven or grace.
     "The woman’s a nutcase," Peter says. "I don’t want her putting ideas in his head."
     "Would it be so bad to have a special son?" Susie says. "A miracle son even. A gift from God." The tone of her voice is hopeful, and Peter understands that Susie is tired, that she needs a name for what her son is, and "miracle" or "gift"are better than the alternatives.
     As far as Peter’s concerned, he would rather remain unknown to a God who would give a boy life only to make him spend it reliving a blighted past.
     "My lawyer says I can petition a judge to order that Fischer get psychiatric help."
     "Your lawyer?" Peter says. "Since when do you have a lawyer? Is that where you went today? I though you were getting your nails done."
     "I did that, too."
     "Do you ever wish he was just gone," Peter says finally. "I mean not dead in some horrible way, just not here, with us." The words fall out of Peter’s mouth.
     Susie lifts herself onto her elbows, pushes her short hair off her forehead. In the low light of the bedside lamp she looks almost like the girl he met over a decade ago, and he wants to press his lips against the lobe of her ear, kiss the sharp edge of her shoulder blade, but he knows it would be a performance of sorts, a mimicking of familiar gestures that had long ago lost their meaning.
     "The day I met you at the restaurant, when you were wearing that dumb pirate outfit," Susie says, "I left my number as a joke. My sister bet me that I wouldn’t do it. When you called and asked me out, I went because I didn’t know how to say no. My whole life changed over a stupid bet."
     "Maybe that’s just how life happens," Peter says. "Look at my friend Richard Watson."
     Susie turns sharply toward him. The hollows under her cheeks are deep and pronounced. She looks old.
     "Who the fuck is Richard?"
     "We used to hunt together when we were teenagers," Peter says. "He died. Drowned in the river in St. Louis a few weeks ago. Apparently, he got drunk and went to take a piss behind a diner, fell into the river and couldn’t pull himself out. A wife and two kids. I saw it today in the paper."
     "His wife must be so proud." Susie stares at him pointedly. Peter wonders, not for the first time, when his own wife forgot how to forgive.
     "Besides," she says. "I don’t give a damn about Richard Watson. We’re talking about our son."
     "You’re drunk," Peter says. "You only cuss like this when you’re drunk."
     "You know," Susie says, "I read the other day that the majority of couples who lose a child divorce.
     "What’s that got to do with anything?"
     "That’s what you act like, as if Fischer were dead."
     Outside, the rain plucks steadily on the copper roof Peter was so pleased with when he’d finished the restoration of their home.
     "Perfectly authentic," he’d said to Susie the night Fischer was conceived, and she had gazed contentedly from where she hovered above him, naked and splendid as the ancient moon that lit them.

PETER’S LATEST RENOVATION project is an old plantation house near Auburn, just a few miles from the university. It was built in 1850 using timber from the fifty or so acres on which it sat. The man who built it named it Greenland, and it stayed in the family until the year before when his great-great-grandson died, the last of the line. A restaurateur from Birmingham bought it with the intent of turning it into a reception hall for parties and weddings, a dollhouse for the doe-eyed coeds spilling out of college and into matrimony. One hundred and fifty year-old English boxwoods lined the drive, and a constellation of cedar trees and giant hollies exploded from the lawn, shading the wrap-around porch.
     The house and its grounds will be finished by May, in time for wedding season, and for some reason it breaks Peter’s heart, the idea of clueless college kids who can’t appreciate the architecture dancing on its original hardwood floors to "Mustang Sally" or "Brick House," the girls’ high heels dangling from their wrists like limp corsages.
     To compensate for the wine, Peter drives slowly on the way to Greenland. He knows these roads well, cruised them with teenage girlfriends, girls he could have easily ended up with instead of Susie. Then Fischer came, and everything that had been familiar in his life had vanished. Now, winding through the quiet of the dark night, he can’t help but wonder whose life he is leading.
     Peter thinks of Richard Watson. His memories of Richard from high school are illusory and fragmented, small flashes like from a movie seen long ago: Richard waving from his father’s yellow Corvette, his smile cocky and sure; Richard dancing in his boxers at a party, an empty beer case on his head; Richard lying beneath the tree stand from which they hunted deer, daydreaming aloud about the naked body of a girl whose name Peter has long forgotten.
     What had Richard experienced, standing behind that diner in St. Louis, thinking he was going to take a piss and go back inside to his coffee, his hashbrowns? What choices led him there, to that moment? Did he have any time after he slipped into the Mississippi to examine his life and feel content in any small way, as if something were completed? Does anyone? Or maybe he just laid himself back into the water and gave himself over with great relief, much like Wilton or Wilson or William, watching the night watch him.
     Fischer falls asleep during the ride, and Peter parks the truck near the front porch before waking him.
     "What do you think?" Peter says, nudging Fischer as he turns on the brights. The house is magnificent in the flood of light, a ghost from another time.
     "Well," Peter says, "Does it remind you of anything?" If this is what it was going to take to connect with his son, he is willing to try.
     "What?" Fischer says, confused.
     "You know, does it remind you of anything you’ve seen before? I mean, not this house exactly, but one like it. The one you talked about with Dr. Stevens."
     "Oh," Fischer says. He looks at his feet.
     "Do you want to go in and see if that helps?"  
     "No," Fischer says. His lack of enthusiasm angers Peter, and suddenly the whole endeavor feels foolish. Did he think they would share cigars and sip brandy on the veranda while Fischer shared war memories from the old days?
     "Get your ass out of the truck," Peter says.
     Fischer stares at him, timorous and silent. When he gets out of the truck and walks to the steps of the porch, hunched and shivering, his face spectral in the headlights, Peter doesn’t move to follow. The truck is still in drive, which Peter knows is stupid and dangerous. But what if? What if his foot slipped? What if he just meant to drive away for a moment to teach the boy a lesson, and his boot got caught on the gas pedal, and Fischer, stunned in the glare of headlights, didn’t move fast enough? If Peter read such a thing in the paper, he would believe it. A tragic accident, no different from Richard Watson slipping into a roiling river behind a Waffle House.
     But watching his son tremble in the cold, not speaking, not crying out for his father to come to him, Peter knows that what devastates him is not that he doesn’t want Fischer for a son, but that Fischer might not want him for a father. And wasn’t this the age-old story of fathers and sons? Peter had wanted a father with a normal job at the mill, one who talked about football scores and admired the curve of a woman’s breast without imagining the bone that lay beneath it.
     "C’mon," Peter says, "get in the truck."
     Fischer sprints toward the passenger door, his pajama feet slapping the ground as he runs.
     "I’m not mad at you," Peter says after Fischer slides into his seat. He can see his breath whirl in the frigid air as he speaks, as if his words are tangible things.
     "I’m cold," Fischer says. Peter grabs an old wool blanket from behind the seat, arranges it around the boy’s shoulders.
     "There’s a horse around back," Peter says.
     "A Saddlebred?"
     "Maybe." Peter puts the truck in reverse, backs away from the house, circling around the added-on garage. He stops in front of a tiny pond behind a long white fence. In the distance, there is the shadowy figure of a horse grazing. Peter turns off the headlights so they don’t startle it.
     "Its neck’s too short," Fischer says, disappointed. "Saddlebreds have nice long necks."
     The horse seems to float across the field, its body a shade darker than the night it moves through.
     "You reckon he’s lonely out there by himself?"
     Fischer doesn’t answer. He’s already asleep, his eyes twitching under the thin skin of his lids, his hair tawny even in the absence of light. Peter knows from the research Susie unearthed that if this small boy in footed pajamas were actually part of the 15th Alabama, at this time in 1863, he would be in Northern Virginia, more than likely sick, definitely starved, waiting for promised action that would be a long time coming, maybe staring at a night much like this one.
     Peter’s reluctant to leave Greenland. Susie will probably be up, frantic, and whether he is ready or not, once he calms her down, decisions will have to be made. But for now, he feels a sense of calm with his son silent beside him. He tugs part of the blanket, warm from Fischer’s body, over his own chest, then reclines his seat so he can get an unobstructed view of the sky through the side window.
     Lightning marbles the night, electric gold against black, and then nothing. No distant galaxies. No far off planets. Just blackness. If Peter didn’t know better, he might believe that nothing exists in the universe except him and Fischer, this one present moment. He thinks of the earth’s endless spinning, its inevitable motion of return, and he is strangely comforted by how negligible their lives must be for them to feel so still in the midst of such great movement.