“‘For the law having a shadow of good things to come, and not the very image of the things, can never with those sacrifices which they offered year by year continually make the comers thereunto perfect’ (Heb 10:1),” Frank said.
Frank and his uncle John would discuss the shadows in that passage for the morning. Arguing sometimes. Once, from my work shed, I heard Frank’s voice and went to the house. John Winscott was frail, though energetic. When he first stood after sitting a while, he steadied himself with his hand on the back of the chair. I found him standing that way when I entered the house. I don’t think Frank realized how overbearing he was when he was set on making a point. I calmed him with cranberry bread and tea. John sat down again.
“It is not possible that the blood of bulls and goats could take away sin,” Frank tried to continue until I hushed him. “‘He takes away the first that he could fulfill the second’ (Heb 10:9).” Frank made one more attempt, until I glared at him.
They were into similitudes and shadows and the realities toward which the similitudes pointed. It was right up my alley. It was my work in clay.
I tried to subvert my ziggurats. I tried to give them my shadows. I work blending colors. Frank works blending words. We both work with nuance. Hue. Shade. I know it’s the same with words. Frank works with shadings of words. I work with the sound of clay.
“Don’t put more on yourself than what you’re able to achieve,” Frank said.
“I’ll keep your words in mind.”
Uncle John Winscott went home that night exhausted. I tried to get him to stay, to sleep in Warren’s old room, but he refused.
“Thelma would be all right for one night,” I insisted, but he wouldn’t listen.
I got the feeling he felt he was fleeing our war, small as it was. “Skirmish” was the better word.
But John Winscott apparently cared for neither.
—
“Do we have to go to church again?” I asked on Sunday morning.
“I’m a minister,” Frank answered. “Let us not forsake ‘the assembling of ourselves together’ (Heb 10:25).”
Was that the irony? After all our efforts. We were sheep that clung together lest we see the ridiculous gospel we followed? Lest we know we belonged to a religion in which we could do nothing but believe? The high rate of intelligence seen in some, the achievements, the accumulation of honors and efforts, meant nothing? What a joke God played on us. How against human instinct. They counted me as one of them, so I didn’t have to examine my standing in the faith. I didn’t have to look at faith. It failed my hearing daily.
We backed our old car from its shed and turned around in the yard to start down the drive. I noticed some old tire ruts beside the drive, which a recent mowing had uncovered.
As I listened to the sermon in church, I had to keep up with the Bible to give Frank a hard time.
“How much sorer punishment who has trodden under foot the Son of God, and has counted the blood of the covenant wherewith he was sanctified an unholy thing” (Heb 10:29). How sobering. God was the one in charge. Our world was a sheep pasture from which he chose his flock. No, no that couldn’t be. I drove my ladder into the ziggurat of hell.
Once there, my core was shaken. Like the Russian mathematician who proved the universe was oval and could not work in mathematics again. I can’t remember his name, but he had flown above the gravity that holds us in our dimness for a purpose, and he couldn’t return.
“Grigori Perelman,” Frank said later.
Several Nights after Daniel Died
Sometimes it came back all over again, floating like an island through the sea of our years.
The police had trouble rousing us. I heard the knocking long before I realized what it was, and that I had to do something about it. I knew Frank could not be roused. It was up to me. I couldn’t remember if Winnie and Warren had left to start out on their own, or if maybe one of them wanted back in, maybe forgetting their keys. Daniel had not come around in a while, and my first dread was that it was him.
We had gone to bed early, as we always did. When I could sit up in bed, I looked at the clock. It was 10:30 pm. It was hardest to wake when I’d only been asleep for a couple of hours. If it was later in the night, it would have been easier.
I sat up and fumbled with the covers. The room was unfamiliar in its darkness. Frank’s clothes rested in a chair. Shoes were scattered on the floor. Shadows from the hall light made a path from the bed. I found my robe and crept down the stairs, holding onto the railing so I wouldn’t fall. I realized the knob on the bannister was still loose, though Frank said he had tightened it.
I turned on the front light and opened the door. Two policemen were there.
“The headlights of a passing car struck metal on a curve north of Fenton,” they said. Daniel had been found. He had been dead several days. Whose car? I asked. Someone they didn’t know. It had been stolen. Could we identify the body?
I told the officers it was impossible to wake my husband once he was asleep. He’d had a long day of translating, and I remember him being overly tired at supper.
One of the officers went with me into the kitchen and sat with me at the table. The other officer went upstairs to wake Frank. I realized how cluttered and overgrown the kitchen seemed as I saw the officer’s eyes go over the room.
—
At the morgue, I saw Frank talking to one of the officers. It was decided that only Frank would see the body. I would have to wait for him to return. I protested, but an officer said he would wait with me.
Frank returned, ashen faced. He told me the body was Daniel.
—
Daniel was dead. Daniel was dead. All the frustration. All the anger. The fear. The buzzing I always heard from the engine that ran the world. Cruelly. Cruelly. Daniel was the channel. Now, Daniel, our son, was dead. He was our grief. Finally, his death was our relief. After expecting the news for years. After all the shame that still burned. Daniel’s thievery. His attempt to accost Helen Harsler. His failures. Daniel was dead. After all my years slapping clay—all my years working with ziggurats, which were my translations in the space between rage and ragged forgiveness. Daniel was dead. Hope and despair were over. Daniel was dead. We would go on now without him. Frank took my arm and pulled me from the chair. I stood beside him as he signed the coroner’s paper—and we left the morgue.
We drove home in our separate worlds, each thinking our own thoughts, each wondering what happened to our lives. I slept in Winnie’s room that night, as I had done before. For some reason, I didn’t want to be with Frank.
What Is There in Ziggurats That Words Cannot Say?
I made ziggurats—likenesses of Dante’s nine rings of fire—only my funnel went up, something like the tower of Babel. Nothing you see everyday.
My work shed, when I approached it in the morning, a steaming cup of coffee in my hand, the birds singing my path through the weeds, seemed a ziggurat itself. The roof started to rise, then was capped, or allowed to go unfinished. It actually was an attempt of Frank’s to let more light into the shed.
“A roof window,” he said.
“But I don’t want the light streaming down,” I protested. “I want light from the side—through the windows.”
Frank, not much of a builder, was unable to finish it anyway.
I couldn’t wait until my hands were slick and wet with clay and water. I could feel them in my hands even before I entered the work shed. Was it an old rebellion from having to be clean as a child, not allowed to play in the dirt that called to me?