“Young Witherow,” he said one night. “How are your studies getting on?”
“Fine, sir, thank you.”
I watched my schoolfellows scatter down the hill without me.
“Does Mr. Evans please you?” he asked.
“Yes, sir.”
“Of course you wouldn’t tell me if he did not.”
“Did not what, sir?”
“If he did not please you. Mr. Evans. As a teacher.”
I was silent. We stood in the half-light of a schoolroom window.
Lyte leaned toward me and murmured: “He’s a nincompoop and a terrible little grouch of a fellow. That’s what you wish to tell me, isn’t it?”
I faltered from answering. My feet stirred in their boots, but I did not move.
Lyte snickered. A stream of breath poured from his nostrils. He drew a finger along the brim of his hat as he looked up through the night air. “Well,” he said, “though I’d favor that judgment of character myself, I can tell you that Mr. Evans knows his teaching. Learn from him. Learn well. Then you’ll be prepared for my lessons.”
“Yes, sir.”
“He says you excel in his class. Not that I’d have doubted it.”
For a long minute he stood gazing down the hill into darkness. I was unsure whether I might take my leave. He looked on the verge of speaking again at any moment, so I hung there in that dim light before him. Finally he turned to enter his classroom, gesturing for me to follow. From a row of shelves behind his desk he brought out a small book with a marbled cover, an ancient-looking thing, which he placed in my hands. “Here’s reading for you,” he said. “A special lesson.”
I squinted at the book. Faded characters on the spine read: Ovid’s Metamorphoses. Arthur Golding.
“I’d much rather you had it in Latin of course, but there’s no helping that. Mr. Golding will serve you well enough.”
The volume felt soft as kidskin in my hands, its edges turned in with use. The covers were fragrant with the yellow smell of ownership.
“Seeing as you’re to be my pupil soon,” said Lyte. He stood back from me grinning, as though measuring the effect of his gift.
I thanked him and bade him good night and started down the hill toward home. In the darkness below, the Main Street lamps burned reddish, and in the valley lay a glinting stitchwork of house lights.
{3}
DIM DAYS AND DARK NIGHTS—TIME ROLLED PAST IN THIS PLAIN equilibrium and only Sundays were punctured by light. I began to wear the darkness in my skin as father did—coal dust creeping through the slits and cracks of my hands, wandering under translucent flesh, spotting me. Around this time I also came to know the more furtive shadows—the shadows within, around which my body was closed like a canister; the shadows without, which lent me form like enveloping satin.
One night I moved alone through the darkness toward home, a schoolhouse window glowing high on the hill at my back. Only sound told me where I walked: the subdued thud of my feet in the dirt, then the rustle of grass—but was I in the grass?
From nowhere, a body slammed into mine. Stiff limbs forced me to the ground and my books tumbled into the blindness. The pages made a fluttering noise. I heard wild laughter and the scuffle of feet as the figure released me and stood.
“You’re a cinch, Witherow!”
“Motion, is that you? Thomas?”
“It’s like you just ask to be thrown down!”
I sat up and tried to distinguish his shape. I made out a slight contrast in the blackness.
“That’s how Boggs can whale on you like he does,” Thomas said. I felt him close beside me, sitting down in the dirt. “But you’re smart for that I think. It’s stupid to fight some things. Sometimes you shouldn’t fight.”
I saw a gray plume in the air and began to will his face into form. I could make out an outline. A brow and nose and mouth.
“Why’d you let me take your beating the other day, Thomas?”
“Cause you’re better than me at that. I like to watch you and see how you do it.”
“Do what?”
“How you take it. How you let Boggs whack away and you just take it.”
“I don’t understand.”
“I mean you’re smarter than me. You’re calm.”
My hands throbbed as I laid them against the ground to rise. I began circling in the blackness, feeling for my books.
“What’re you at?” he asked.
“My books.”
I heard him get up and enter the grass. I moved blindly a moment more, then felt something against my arm. He’d found them.
“You can see?” I said.
“Yes. I’m a born miner for it, huh?”
I took the books and staggered down the hill a little. I heard Thomas moving beside me. After a while his voice broke the black.
“Will you teach me how you can be that way?”
“What way?”
“How your blood can be so still.”
I kept walking in silence. The few town lights swelled closer.
He said: “If you can, I’ll teach you to see in darkness.”
THESE DAYS WERE THE FIRST IN WHICH AUTUMN TOUCHED ME WITH A sense of dying, as it has done ever since. On Sundays, free of work to witness some daylight, I found the sky boiling and oceanic. I stood on the ridge-top and looked to the mountain, dark clouds like monsters of froth teeming about the twin peaks—blackish brewing-place, thunder belching terribly. And as the weeks shrank and dimmed, declining toward the winter solstice, the hills stood greener and shapelier against the dark sky, eerily colorful. It seemed a morbid charade—the land’s last glimmer. At dusk the scintillating effect was peculiarly strong, yellow tree and emerald grass and russet earth: stupefying.
Thomas Motion and I went up to the flat ridge-top. We ambled east to see the tarnished mirror of the San Joaquin River below, its shine drowning slow under the dusk. To the west lay the humped valley of Clayton, Concord, Walnut Creek. South was Diablo—our Parnassus, looming and wigged in clouds.
We invited the blindness of night. Then night fell, hermetic and black. If a moon was up, a bank of cloud smothered it and at most I could see only imagined shapes.
I felt Thomas step away from me. “Watch!”
The rustle of movement. His body parting the black air beside me. A whisper of rock trodden upon. Then the sounds fading, the furrow of air closing again, and all was silent. Just a lowing wind and a dark sheet upon my eyes and the incalculable certainty of desertion.
Thomas walked with intuitive ease, without stopping or turning back. I was to follow.
“Eyes don’t open against the black till they got no other choice,” he had told me.
I stood alone on the ridge. I waited for form to come. But even in stillness: nothing. Only silence, thick and confounding as a riddle. I edged forward and strained to listen. Tried to trail the memory of Thomas’s withdrawing noise.
Each step threatened a void. Stubs of rock beneath my soles. Rock: the familiar crunch. Rock yet. Then grass, cool against my shins.