* * *
It’s late when Jo pulls up to his house, the road pitch-black aside from the headlights. Whose truck is that? Leni asks, craning to look at the SUV in the driveway. Xie frowns. I don’t know. Ruh-roh, Jo says, eyebrows high, your dad have a hot date over? A hot date with a gun rack? Xie stares at the SUV, knee jumping. We can go in with you, Leni offers. No one, aside from FKK, has ever been in his house. No, it’s fine. See you guys tomorrow. He gets out of the car, walks up the path. In the living room Erik on the couch, a stranger beside him. Baseball cap, flannel shirt. Filthy jeans. Hey, Erik says. You’re home. Yeah. Nearly a dozen bottles open on the table. This is Jason. From work. Jason lifts his hand; Xie echoes the gesture. He goes into the kitchen. Two bowls in the sink. That your soup I just ate? Jason calls. Pretty damn good. Thanks, Xie replies. He takes a slice of bread from the box, folds it over a banana, walks back through the living room. Jason leaning for the remote on the table, You mind if I change the channel? Erik waving his hand, eyes half-mast. Xie has not seen his father drunk in a long time. Go right ahead. On the screen: some woods. A man and a boy in yellow jackets. The man saying, Steady now. Smooth shift of gun from side to shoulder, the boy turning his head to sight the shape staring straight at the camera. It’s so quick. Shit, Erik says. Jason whistles. That’s a beauty. Xie out the back door, screen slamming, over the garden fence, cold slosh through the stream. Feet thrashing through the leaves. Windless. Go all the way to the east end of the woods, where the stream weaves beneath the bridge. The road amputating the breast of the woods, a thick bar of trash lining the concrete where it meets the dirt. Stopping near to scream. Scream and scream and scream. The mink and the library and MacAdams and his mother on the phone and Jo’s big house and the men in the strip mall and the scar on Nova’s face and the vanished moss and the blister on his palm and the way the body folded. The head hitting a stone. The sound of the head hitting. The boy lowering the gun to look. So serious. Pale face. Tentative smile. The legs going out. The eyes rolling back. The stranger inside his house. His own father letting him in. Not knowing better. The buck’s head hitting the dirt. You got ’im. Mist of blood in the air. You did good, son. You did so good.
* * *
Zigzag through the woods. Throat sore. He knows it’s stupid. A deer getting shot on TV, an idiot on the couch, who cares. You do. His mother used to say it was just depression. From her blood to his. Something as simple as sadness, easier to understand than grief. For what. Not for himself. If it was only that, he would just. Die. How much easier it would be. If it started with you, you could stop it. Stop yourself. But it’s much bigger than you. Xie looks at the house from the trees, a light on in the kitchen. Night soft on your face. Your back against a tree. The sound of a car starting on your road. Jason gone but you don’t move. The shot is still inside the house. It is almost everywhere you go. A thick rain falls, clouds knit hard together. No light from the moon but that old light, behind you, you’ve seen it every night for a year. You’ve watched it. It has watched you. The birch it touches luminous and if it is touching you then you, too, must be luminous. It raises the hair on your arms. And the thought hits you as the light hits you as the rain hits you. Get up. Walk the other way. Not to the bridge or to the house or to the road leading into town but the other direction, the only way you have not yet gone. The ground softening with every step, bark peeling in sheets from the trunks. Roots gathering the water, the wood always feeding itself, with the sky and the air and from every death that settles here, holding the land together, holding what is above to what is below; the chaffinch and the primrose, the wood sorrel and the violets, the bluebells and the woodcock. The crows. The pale moths with wings edged in black and brown and white, clinging to the serrated leaves. Witch’s brooms of dead twigs spread between the branches. The velvet mosses and ferns pulsing with beetles and worms, army of light and decay, of night and air. The husks of the winged seeds of the trees themselves, rotting since last spring in the seams of the earth. You can see it in pieces or all together, the parts or the whole, a chaotic encyclopedia in every square inch. Xie burrows deeper through the birch. In the city it was bright all the time, everywhere; but here you can track a single light for miles. He slips on a twig, his shoes soaked, hood heavy on his head. Soon he is at the edge, the last line of trees toeing the submerged grass. The light brightest. The light is brightest here.
* * *
The church is tiny, taller but no bigger than his own house, planted at the far end of the field. Dark stone and thin windows graze the steep red roof. Silver spire. Peaked wooden door, laced with rusting ironwork. A round window above, and above that the lamp, white light frosting the crumbling steps. Xie puts his hand on the door, pushing: it swings open. Inside there is no one. Two rows of pews, five deep from the altar, an enormous painted cross. A marble font. Stone floor. Enclave with a wooden gate to the right, rows of candles, a handful of them lit before a tall portrait of Mary, head tipped to the baby Jesus against her breast. A piano in the choir loft above the entryway. Stained glass all around: red, blue, white. An angel outlined in lead. To the left, a table with a leather registry, and behind it the confessional, as slim and severe as a coffin. His clothes drip; he turns in a circle of water, looking. He wipes his face with his hands. Holding his breath. Don’t think for a sec. He can feel it, whatever it was in the woods. Stands very still. It’s here. Right here. Turning back to the door, how did he miss it? A painted cabinet, dark gold, taller than Xie, pressed beneath a sloped stone arch. A little hole, also gold, for a key. Could be coats inside, or whatever priests wear, or Bibles, or. Nothing. Could be nothing. The rain stops. Such a silence, deeper than in the woods, pure, unrelieved. Xie takes a step; he strokes the belly of the cabinet, where the wood swells. He presses his thumb against the keyhole. Bends. Inhales. He knows the smell: cold, earth, bone. The way a smell can be like a sound, calling. The key hangs from a nail behind the case, its long chain swinging slightly against the stone. He slips his hand in the gap, takes the key, fits it into the lock.
How to describe the beloved?
Behind the door a pane of glass, and behind the glass, a body. Full skeleton dressed in an elaborate suit of silver. Knee bent, hip cocked, one hand pointing to the sky, the other settled on the hilt of an enormous sword. Head turned downward in its nest of metal to gaze at Xie. Silver boots to the thigh; long pleated skirt; breastplate in a Roman style. Narrow windows edged in heavy filigree cut over the arms, the shins, the chest, revealing the slim yellowed bones beneath. A plaque affixed to the bottom of the glass: St. Pancratius. Martyred 304 A.D. He traces the name. Pancratius. P. So. This is you. Silver cape strapped with more gold to his shoulders, falling in thick folds to his boots, a half dozen chains linked across the breastplate like necklaces, hung with medals. A circle of gold affixed to the back of the helmet, reaching a foot in all directions, as if the skull were a star crowned in fire. Everywhere the metal etched, tooled, stamped in layer upon layer of exquisite designs, not overwhelming the austerity of the bones but highlighting their merciless perfection. Those eyes, pitch-black in the low light. The body liquid in all its hardness, something not fixed but fixing, from boot to crown, the entire room on itself. A warrior. A prince. A king. Flames flicker in the glass. Everything moving and nothing moving. Everything alive and everything still.