He is going back after so many years. He doesn’t know what he will see, or what he will say, but he needs to close the circle of his life, “whose center is everywhere and circumference nowhere.”
By early morning, he sees the farmhouse rising darkly against a brightening sky. His eyes fix it as he turns on to the long, narrow earthen drive. The fence on the perimeter is broken in some places, missing in others; some of the once-sheltering oaks are gone. They have been living only in his memory, but the old poplars still stand on either side of the front porch, with its wooden steps sagging into the damp earth. Twisting bramble and weeds crowd the flower gardens that once grew in sunny spots.
Ahead, loom rusted parts of yellow and green farm equipment, abandoned near the barn with part of the roof down on one side. He sees the fading painted image covering the top half of the barn facing the house, the first thing he saw each morning from his bedroom window: a red cross against shafts of light, over which the words are printed: GOD IS LOVE.
He remains in the car, his eyes closed, until he shivers from the cold. Emerging, he walks toward the house, observing broken windows, warped siding, and fallen shingles on the path to the back door. Entering the low doorway, he bends in a gesture of forced humility.
There is the wide stone hearth, charred ends of logs still across a blackened grate. Here is where the oak table stood, he and his sister set for Sunday dinners. He stops, moves his hand over the place where it had been. Entering the front room, he scans the whole of it camera-wise. Tall windows line the west wall where, on summer afternoons, he would read stretched out on the window seat below, imagining he was drifting to a sun-soaked Greek isle.
The windows, coated with a fine yellow film, diffuse the light through the vacant room. He sees, not the empty space, but everything as it had been on the day he left—with no warning, no word. A rocking chair next to the fireplace; an old-style standing radio the family would gather round to listening to hymns on Sunday evenings; a sofa opposite the fireplace; his father’s straight-backed chair with its black, crackled leather seat; a marble-topped table with frosted globe lamp painted with peonies, matching the ones on the wall paper—now worn in places down to the plaster. How elated and proud his mother had been when she papered the walls herself, saying, “There, now we have a proper sitting room.”
All the while, his memory projects a tableau of intimate vignettes and voices from the past into the room that smells of earth and cold, and feels like pain. He has arrived—returned from another world to speak to his God-fearing family, who had raised him to work on the land, making sure he was educated enough to run the farm. All gone now, they had waited years for his return. He has to believe they will gather here again, in spirit to listen to what he has come to say.
Outside, the wind kicks up, whining through the house, rattling the remaining shutters. His fingers, though gloved, are numb. He heads outside to gather kindling. Tiny vortices of golden dust rise up here and there as he picks up broken branches and twigs to build a fire to warm the frigid room. When the fire blazes, in the glowing warmth of its flames, he conjures his imaginary family, summoning them to hear the truth of his life.
He wonders, Is reconciliation more possible with spirits than with living beings?
There is his mother, seated at the front windows, gazing out; his father stands at her side. His sister, Anna curls on the rocker next to the fire. His abandoned lover on the threshold, her back to the room. He can’t recall her face—only her despair.
He wants to say, “Call me Ishmael, Gilgamesh, Oedipus. I have seen the white whale, entered the cedar forest, solved the famous riddle.” But, those are his inspirations; they never would understand. He will speak in plain language, though those epic figures and their stories still live within him, the foundation for his thinking about the world, life, and himself.
To the conjured visions now assembled for his homecoming, he states his case:
“When I was a boy, I read about heroes’ journeys, and I knew I had to set out on my own. I don’t think of myself as a hero, but I do think that simply living life is heroic, contending with all the forces coming against it. Here I am…battle-weary from forging my own path. I have survived, as I must believe you also have. There is no end to our journeys, here or beyond. There is always still a far way to go.”
He had set out long ago, leaving everything behind, toward what he had hoped would foster consciousness and conscience. He freed himself to leave the known for what was out there yet to be discovered, and to acquire an understanding of what it is to be human, which his youthful readings and musings had begun to suggest.
“I strove toward a vision, but…I am flawed, still so flawed.” His tale unravels, partly in sorrow without remorse, partly in victory without joy. “Maybe it is I who need to hear my own story to grasp it, but I put it before you,” he, hoping in whatever feeble way, he might atone for the pain he had caused.
“I wasn’t ungrateful or, at least, I never connected what I did or didn’t do with ingratitude.” Early on, he knew he would not replay the worn record of his father’s life and his father’s before him.
He intends to acknowledge to his sister the he abandoned her, after the confidences they had shared. He wants to kneel before his mother to ask forgiveness for his “mysterious disappearance,” for her never to have looked upon his face again, for his not having fulfilled her reasonable expectation that her family remain near, and that life go on in the same way ever after.
He thought to apologize to his young lover, whose beauty and innocence must have long ago faded. Her words, screamed to him still resounding, "If you leave me, I’ll hang myself from the barn rafters.”
“No, no you won’t! Don’t say that,”he had shouted back, feeling held hostage to others’ expectations and needs, but also bound to them by love.“I can’t stay to save everyone else and lose my self.” The next day, with guilt and grief, but with the vision of the life before him, he did the thing he had to do.
“I veered off the trajectory created for me…set sail on my own voyage, uncharted and blown off course many times,” as he remembered his wish to see wide rivers, not content with irrigation ditches and small streams trickling through the countryside: “I wanted to see the Nile, the Amazon, cities rising against the sky: Athens, Paris. I wanted to meet people who didn’t live as we did in what I had come to think of as this God-forsaken place.”
His mother had said it was not God-forsaken, ”God is everywhere the eye can see and the heart can feel—horizon to horizon.” If that is so, he tried to reason with her, couldn’t He then be found in other lands and landscapes—ones that would better serve to shape and grow something still small inside himself? He wanted to see the open ocean, stand before and climb mountains, meet and get to know people not like him, people who might be God and angels in disguise—strangers who would become his guests.
“When I finally settled after years of wandering, it was on that island on the wide Hudson. I felt I had found my place…my home.” There he saw those driven in black limos stopping at hotels, theaters and restaurants. “I made my way among them, but mingled with those who had lost their way, but not their souls.” To those he had dedicated himself—those who carried the sum of their lives in carts or plastic bags, maybe disguising sainthood beneath blank and somber eyes.
“How can I tell you what it would have meant for me to have stayed here? What it has meant for me to have done what I did, see what I have seen? I did what I had to do…trade the predictable for… for the possible. Here, yes, I was secure and comfortable, but… I didn't want that. I…I didn’t know what I would wanted, or what I would find, only that I needed the unpredictable…and some sense of fulfillment.”
He turns toward the windows, “Mother, you said I was a dreamer, a doubter, selfish. Father, you said I was lazy, a sinner, a bad influence on Anna with my wild talk of journeys and trials…that I was wasting my time reading what you called ‘those foolish books.’”
Then to Anna, “I have prayed you found your way and lived a life you chose,” as they had often encouraged each other to do, but wondering through the years if she had instead submitted to the life laid out before them. Had she been left utterly alone?
He glanced at the figure in the shadowy doorway, but could say nothing, the snare of her last words to him having left a crusted over wound on his heart.
He paused until he could recall the urgency that had propelled him beyond all considerations to leave, and how the ideas in those books became ideals to be acted upon—light-filled thoughts that opened up all the color of dreams, inspiring his plan to free himself, body, and soul.
“When I was a boy, I loved this house…the picnics, the Sunday prayers, the hymns, and I always loved you…all. I knew what you wanted for me, and…I wanted to be good, to be grateful.” How he had struggled to be obedient, to honor father and mother—the commandment they repeated almost daily, noting the fires of hell awaited those who transgressed it, or any of the other nine “shall” and “shall nots,” until he could obey only one commandment: to experience life by following the fire within him.
“Please, Mother, I know you thought I should be content to be here, where I was born, but I…I had to walk into the world…on the narrow path of my own making…my own…limitations. I guess I…I had to learn things the hard way, and not just believe or follow all the things you tried to teach me. I couldn’t live up to what everyone else expected. I had my own expectations, and have come to believe as certainly as you had in your beliefs.”
He speaks what he could not articulate before he had lived it. “We have not come to earth to blindly fulfill the dictates of God or man, ignoring our own experience, avoiding our own thoughts and questions, denying our doubts. Wouldn’t an omniscient God have foreseen, even intended rebellion? The disobedience of Adam and Eve was not sin, but a picture of destiny, human destiny—to be cast out of a perfect garden, to lose our innocence and to learn through suffering. To be fully human is to…to choose the good—in freedom, not out of command or fear.
If I hadn’t left, how else would I have come to know that evil is a mystery woven into the very fabric of the universe? Evil is not so much to be resisted but endured. Good and evil are all mixed up, one can be mistaken for the other, and what we think is good may turn to bad, while our good intentions can affect others in ways we couldn’t have imagined, no matter what we intended.”
He knows his own rebellion, by default or design, has moved toward his becoming “one with the Father” and was meant to achieve that fulfillment alone.
“I wanted to find my own fulfillment. And I did once…for a while. At least the kind I had imagined could be mine, with a red-haired woman I loved too much. She painted my portrait in blue with a gold halo. That was before our son was born with his spine outside of his body,” he swallowed hard. “On the first anniversary of his death, I came home to find…she was gone.” For the first time, the realization comes to him with excruciating clarity that she had vanished, just as he had from the sad farmhouse in which he now stands. He had never spoken the words out loud before—until now.
“I burned the portrait, along with the letters I had written each day for a year, with nowhere to send them. What would I do with all the love remaining?
“I had wanted to find life—as if it were something to find rather than to live…too proud in my belief…or my illusion that I was destined somehow to find fulfillment. Instead I lived alone with yet another mystery, until I took in a young man in rags with violet eyes who danced in night in St. Mark’s Place—asking nothing in return for his performances of grace and beauty—but a witness.”
He had meant to speak many more things into the quiet room to those he imagines are listening now. He is spent, empty to speak of the years roaming the city streets, to which he will return after this pilgrimage to the past—maybe stronger, maybe more broken.
All at once his life appears before him—as a sacrifice, forfeiting simplicity for the sublime, facts for hard-won knowledge. With the vision, comes a warmth, a calm, the frosted breath of his words visible, his voice hollow and weak.
“I am sorry for the pain I caused and…wish only…that peace be with you—now and forever.” And he feels it is so.
The wind has died down, the fire gone to embers. Across the fields, the sun is low in the late afternoon sky. The circle is closed, he on the outside, the imaginary figures fading into the darkening room.
