It's not right that Carmen died, making my life cruel and jagged. My sobs grow hacking; nothing can ever lessen my suffering....
Pat and I are in Virginia. She's wary of the South because she's black, but I want to see my old home in Charlottesville. It's dark, and we stop at a burger place to eat. No one is rude to Pat. Going out, I stumble around beneath the stars, forgetting which way the car is.
"What's wrong with you?" Pat says.
I mumble vaguely that I'm blipping out. When we are in the car again, I begin to groan.
"You're very depressing to be with when you're like this," Pat says.
After a moment's silence I laugh wildly. "So you finally noticed!"
My other college friend, Shizuko, found it amazing that Pat didn't pick up disturbing feelings from me. Am I getting worse, or is she more sensitive now? Does she despise me for my weakness? But I suppose it's something she'll just accept.
We begin to look for a fairly cheap motel, and I always go up to the office and ask, because I'm white. Soon we get a room, and go to bed at once. Lying in the darkness, I feel crushed and sob helplessly. Pat pulls her pillow over her head.
But the next morning my spirits rise, though I look a mess. I tell Pat, and she is glad.
"The great purge," she comments.
I nod eagerly. "I haven't been so broken up since the last plane."
But she doesn't remember the time we both waited at the LA airport all day trying to fly standby to Portland. When night came, the fog rolled in, and all the planes were cancelled. My mother took me home, and I cried all night, overwhelmed with hopelessness. Later I wrote a poem about it. But Pat stayed at the airport all night with her endless patience, and was still there when I returned the next morning.
I drive down the Virginia highway were Jackson and Lee marched their troops, and when we reach Charlottesville I recognize the road where I used to walk home from school, and I drive stright to my old home, and my old field.
My field is still there. I get out of the car and walk across the grass, followed by Pat. I look down the field where I used to look from my bedroom window, where I used to run every morning, beginning a new day with swift flight over the wet grass. I still carry the smell of those mornings. The field only seems greener, more bushy, but of course it's summer.
The gingko tree I always climbed (with its moss-soft bark) is still there, and the huge oaks planted by Thomas Jefferson. I sit down and begin to sketch the field, because I always drew it from this view. I know every tree, and I remember tracing these branches on the second oak in fall and winter. It's the winter view I long for most.
Then I run down the field, with Pat, past the manhole covers, past the willow Mickey and I used to pull switches from for our horse game, past the strange, low house I call the "apple house" but forget why, down to the fence enclosure that encloses nothing. Mickey and I used it for a corral. Everything is there. The creek where my twig boat the Unicorn was lost, the rocky ledge I sailed off with my sled, the sled-run hill and the two trees we used to aim through. Do they still sled here in the winter? On our most famous runs we ended in the creek, getting chilled and stained with sewage.
Farther back is the dirt path through the woods. Two miles down, if you turn to the left, past the railroad bridge and the tunnel where the terrible snapping turtle lay, was a riding stable Mickey went to. Once we brought back horses and rode them across the field.
The field never seemed so small to me as then. The horses began to canter, and I lost my stirrups and slmost fell off. In the other direction, the path leads deeper into the woods. One fresh fall I saw great trees that knew men of Civil War times, but in the winter I ran through the snow, playing the fox, chased by everyone. For hours I was alone in the forest, lifting my face to snowflakes, folded in silence and whiteness.
"Were there any paths you followed?" Pat asks.
We're on the road again, and I feel wonderful because I saw my field and it's still there. I feel the trees and the slope that calls me to the forest edge, the tallness and the wideness is in me, filling me with calm. I know. I am the field and I don't need anything.