“‘Surrogation’ is another word that comes to mind, if it is a word,” I said.
—
Frank and his uncle John Winscott used to argue. Thelma, his wife, and I would stand on the porch until they finished, the children playing in the field or by the creek—Daniel, Warren, Winnie, John II, Lizbet, and Thomas.
John was only several years older than Frank. They were more like brothers. Thelma was younger, nearly my age.
“There’s a vacillation of language, and in its wobbliness, a direction of meaning of the highest order can survive,” we heard Frank say.
“Between the cherubim, I suppose,” John added.
“It’s abstraction that allows the other to be acknowledged, if not captured,” I heard Frank say. “There is little capturing in language. You go on a hunt. You may hunt all morning, and again in the afternoon, but the catch eludes you. You may hunt while sleeping. What is dreaming but a hunt?”
“That’s what I want to do,” I said to Thelma as we made a casserole for supper. “I want to hunt for the connectives there also. Mainly the land, which I feel when I play with the children in the clay. That’s why I like to travel to places. I get ideas,” I said. “But I don’t like graveyards. I don’t visit Civil War cemeteries. I remember being in England, visiting the graves of the American war dead, then leaving with a heaviness and sadness that stayed with me the rest of the trip. I felt their longing for life. Their grieving that they didn’t have a chance to live—maybe still carrying the pain, the maiming, the brokenness, the fear of battle with them. The tour guide asked if I was all right as the bus left. I told her I could feel their longings, and she looked at me with suspicion the rest of the trip.” I looked at Thelma, but she was staring at the potatoes as she peeled.
“Maybe it was the feelings of the families the soldiers left behind that you felt,” Thelma said, still not looking at me.
Often, I felt Thelma didn’t understand what I said. I thought she thought I was weird but kept it to herself. I felt I could say anything, and she would not grasp it. It would pass through her and be forgotten. But there were other times when I knew she understood my words.
A smear is what language is. A sparseness. A sparses. It takes the invention of words. It’s what a ziggurat is. The essence of getting at the abstraction. An aptitude for making what doesn’t exist until you make it. It is an indirect method of talking about—a talking about talking. A presentation of something like what it was like, but that cannot be reached because there are no connectives there. Or there is something that has no body. No physical presence. It is known by its effect on something else. The way the wind scatters the leaves.
We were corralling children then, calling them to supper.
“Don’t grieve over language,” I said to Frank at the table, “just because meaning rides upon it.” Why did I give Frank a hard time? I should set him loose from my sarcasm. I remember the children looking at me.
Frank worked all day with words, but never could quite tell me in words what he thought. But I could tell by his dejected mood that language was stalking him again. I slowly realized he was the hunted, not the hunter.
There were nights when I felt I heard the crunching of bones. Something had Frank in its teeth. Sometimes I knew there was no night, only continual struggle.
—
We went to the doctor in Fenton for Frank’s tiredness. He was given a prescription. When we left the pharmacy, I saw a man crossing the street. He looked at us as he passed, then looked away quickly as I turned to watch him. I knew in an instant that he had known Daniel. He was somehow connected. I looked at Frank. I wanted to say, “Let’s follow him. Let’s find out what he knows about what happened to Daniel.” Frank looked at me with disturbance. I didn’t want to cause further turmoil for him. The living were more important than the dead.
I looked for the man, but I didn’t see him again. In my mind, I had seen Daniel’s supplier. I think he was in the cemetery at Daniel’s funeral. I couldn’t be sure, but I had a vague memory of someone standing off to the side of the crowd. How many undercurrents were there? How many spidery tendrils to our events?
Frank woke dizzy sometimes in the morning, like he’d been whirling in sleep, and it took a while for him to get his grounding back. I wondered at times if he’d been in search of Daniel.
—
“And where is Frank?” the women asked at a town meeting in Fenton. Their husbands didn’t inquire.
“He’s translating.”
“What is he translating?”
“The Bible.”
“I thought it had been translated.”
“Certain parts of it have,” I said.
“The whole thing, I believe,” one of the women commented.
“Yes, the words have been translated. But he works with the meaning of those words. What they really say, underneath. Translation is difficult at best. An impossibility at its worst.” I wanted to leave these women in my wake. I’d known them for years, and we had never connected. “I hear Frank groan from the other room when I am fixing supper.” I took them into my confidence. They listened intently. “I think how fortunate it is that our roles are not reversed. I can think about meals or folding laundry. I asked him once to fold the towels, thinking it would relieve him of some of his burden of translation, but it sent him into another conundrum. He saw himself folding pages of language over and over.”
The women looked at me, most of them puzzled as to the point.
“You’d think he would want to get away from it now and then,” one of the women said.
“If he finishes, he will be here.”
“The whole Bible, you say?”
“No, the portion he’s working on,” I tried to explain to the women. “Frank’s working with how words fold into one another. He thinks about it for days. The absorption of words. But it’s him they absorb more than one another.”
The women wanted Frank to be there to entertain them with his thoughts. “The Bible is a trampoline from which various jumps can be made.” That was one of his statements. They would look at one another, wondering what he would say next. I think how an abstract can be framed in a narrative—that was another one of his remarks.
“It’s like the impossibility of carrying water in a cattle truck—sloshing all around, spilling over the road, an annoyance to anyone who follows. Maybe a danger,” I said. “He works with the nonrepresentational. That is the thrill of it. Sometimes he finishes a translation session with a statement.”
“What kind of statement?” the women asked.
“‘Let them praise your name, for it is holy.’ That kind of statement.”
Frank’s Uncle John was a translator in his own right. He also had been a minister. Whenever I was in the house, I listened as he and Frank discussed the Bible.
Often, he jumped here and there, not staying on the subject at hand. He was a man in his late seventies. Thelma had not come with John that evening. She had to stay with her children, or maybe it was her grandchildren. Time had a way of wobbling back and forth over itself.
My rebellion was marrying a religious man. Becoming an indirect Christian, an unintentional Christian by an intentional act, but I hadn’t realized I would end up in church all the time. That was back when the relatives were alive. Frank and John’s family filled John’s mother’s house on Thanksgiving. Frank and I, John and Thelma, had not replicated ourselves the way they had. Our children seemed to replicate themselves even less. There was no drawing power in our houses. I felt that Warren and Winnie returned to the emptiness of their former