A Private History of Awe - Softcover

Scott Russell Sanders has received the Lannan Literary Award, among other prizes. His many books of essays include Writing from the Center, Staying Put, The Force of Spirit, Secrets of the Universe, and Hunting for Hope. He lives in Bloomington, Indiana.

1
WHEN MY FATHER wrapped me in his arms and carried me onto the screened porch of our farmhouse in Tennessee during a thunderstorm, he said nothing about the booming and blowing, merely hummed a tune, a sound I confused with the purr of the rain. It was as though he had swallowed a bit of thunder, which now rumbled in his throat.
Mama thrust her head from the doorway and said, “You’ll catch a chill.”
“We’re doing just fine,” Dad answered.
Mama paused, skeptically, for she believed that disaster could strike at any moment, from any direction. She frowned, as if doubting she would ever see us again among the living, and then she withdrew inside.
Dad tucked me closer and pulled his baggy hunting jacket around me. I shivered against him, less from cold than from excitement. Rain drummed on the tin roof of the porch, rattled in the downspouts, hissed on the new grass with the sound of bacon frying in a pan. Wind hurled twigs and last year’s leaves across the yard.
This year’s leaves, no bigger than the paws on a kitten, were just breaking out on the trees, so it must have been early spring, most likely March. In October I would turn five. I had climbed the smaller trees—pecan and persimmon, sweet gum and tupelo—but the huge oak out by the blacktop road I could only gaze at in wonder, for its lowest branches loomed far beyond my reach. It was the tallest thing I knew, taller than the barn, taller than the windmill in the pasture, taller than the spire on our church.
I was watching that oak sway in the storm, its fat limbs thrashing as if it were a sapling, when suddenly a flash and boom split the air. I lurched in my father’s arms, and he jumped, too, but held me tight. My ears rang. Bumps rose on my skin. I felt a heart pounding—whether Dad’s or mine I couldn’t tell.
He broke off humming to whistle. “Sweet Jesus, will you look at that!”
I blinked but could see only a white glare. I touched my eyes to make sure they were still in place. Gradually shapes thickened in the brightness and I could make out the porch railing, the gravel path stretching away into the yard, the flower bed with petunias bobbing their bedraggled pink heads in the rain, and out by the road, the great oak snapped like a stick, its top shattered on the ground, a charred streak running down the wet gray stub of the trunk.
“What happened, Daddy?” I asked.
“Lightning hit the old guy.”
“Will he die?”
“He’s done for, buddy. I’ll have to cut him up.”
His voice shook in a way I’d never heard before. I asked no more questions but only snuggled against his chest, craving his warmth and weight. Soon he began humming again, and I could hear the rain pattering more quietly on the porch roof and thunder grumbling farther and farther away, and I could watch lightning flicker beyond cotton fields at the edge of the world, and I could see the oak scattered across the yard in scraps of bark, broken limbs, and shards of wood the color of bread.
One moment the great tree had stood there by the road, as solid as my father, bigger than anything else I knew, and the next moment it was gone. That erasure haunts me still, over half a century later, long after our Tennessee farm vanished under a subdivision and my father died. I still ring with the astonishment I felt that day when the sky cracked open to reveal a world where even grownups were tiny and houses were toys and wood and skin and everything was made of light.
I learned the words die and dead that spring of 1950, at the age of four. From a litter of kittens, one quit nursing, quit mewing, quit moving, and the same happened with two runts from a litter of piglets, only the sound the piglets made before they quit squirming was a puny squeal. They lay in their bed of straw like cast-off shoes.
Mama spoke with me about this baffling change from motion to stillness. She had grown up in Chicago as the daughter of a physician who kept an office in the house, and she had met death early in the faces of desperately sick people knocking at the front door. She did not tell me then, would not tell me for years, that when she was eight her mother died of tuberculosis. She would also tell me later how her father sat in the curtained parlor with the black leather doctor’s bag in his lap, weeping because he could not heal his own wife. At eight, Mama took on the care of her two younger brothers, and took on the fear that if she relaxed her vigil for an instant, they might come to harm. If her own mother could be snatched away, who around her was safe?
She never had a chance to relax her vigil, for no sooner had her brothers survived childhood than they climbed into planes and flew off to war. The letters they wrote on onionskin paper and mailed home from distant lands were her only assurance that they were still alive. In the meantime, she married a rascal with wavy red hair and a southern drawl, figuring she could cure him of his reckless taste for boxing, gambling, motorcycles, cigarettes, and booze. Then along came my sister, Sandra, and me, and we gave her two reasons for worry that she would never exhaust. As though the sirens she’d heard all those years ago in the streets of Chicago kept blaring in her head, Mama worried that doom could steal up on us through germs on a doorknob, feet wet from rain, a rat drowned in the well, gravel trucks barreling down the county road, milk gone bad.
Dad had grown up on a farm in Mississippi, where he met death frequently in the barn and chicken coop and fields, and twice met it in his own family, when a young sister was taken by diphtheria and a brother was crushed under the wheels of a train. The sister he had scarcely known, and five other sisters remained to fuss over him. But of his four brothers, the one crushed by a train was his favorite, a year older, so much of a look-alike for my father that the two had often been mistaken for twins. At dances, they could switch partners and the girls would never be the wiser. As though to make up for the loss of this brother, afterward Dad lived twice as hard, got in fights, drove the red clay roads in a cloud of dust, tipped the bottles back, kept on dancing at parties until the band packed away their instruments.
Although my father gave me the dead brother’s name, Russell, for my own middle name, he rarely spoke of him. The only stories he told about himself were those that made him out to be a tough guy, a daredevil, or a card. He never admitted pain of any sort, past or present. He seemed to think that explaining loss or fear was women’s work. And so, when the kitten and piglets died, he left the talking to Mama. Instead of telling me about death, he let me feel the bodies, cold and still, before he buried them in the woods.
We enter the world as warm and squirming bodies, empty of ideas and full of sensation. In her first weeks of life, my granddaughter listens to her stomach and ignores the clock. Elizabeth knows nothing of death, nothing of past or future, knows only the intriguing present. When I carry her outside on a blustery day, she gives herself to the wind and the chatter of leaves. When I sing her a rollicking song and dance her across the room, she bobs in my arms and grins. Every second, neurons are knitting pathways through her brain, and soon enough she will begin sorting the world into categories and concepts. But for now, she still dwells wholly in her body, touching and tasting everything within reach, craning around to see whatever is to be seen, listening to each new sound. Her face reveals a pure astonishment, untainted as yet by fear.
If we live long enough to lose memory and language, as my mother now is losing hers, we leave the world as we entered it, full of sensation and empty of ideas. Eighty-six when Elizabeth is born, Mother cannot tell you her own age, the year, the month, the day, or the hour; she knows only that darkness outside the window means it’s time for sleep and brightness means it’s time for waking. Nurses bring her medicines; aides invite her to meals; the shuffle of residents past her apartment door alerts her to a video or slide show or gospel sing about to start in the lounge. A woman who always loved to read, Mother can no longer make her way through a novel, because she cannot remember the story from one paragraph to the next. She cannot decipher a newspaper, write a note, or operate a television. By punching the memory button on the telephone, she can still manage to call my wife and me, and this she does five or ten times a day. As often as not when we answer, Mother cannot tell us what she wants; she merely conveys, by her scramble for words, that she is lonely and confused.
The only weekly outing she still makes is to church, where she is comforted by the rituals and hymns, although she cannot follow the sermons. I sense that her mind is no longer spacious enough to accommodate awe. Her wonder at the gift of life has been overwhelmed by anger over what she has lost, and by fear that what remains will soon be snatched away. The knowledge she built up over a long lifetime is collapsing, but she still holds firmly to the discovery of death. She has not forgotten that life eventually comes to an end—not only for oaks and cats and pigs but also for people—a sobering truth that she explained to me when I was a boy, and one that baby Elizabeth, so new to life, has yet to learn.
On our farm in Tennessee, Mama presided over the house and yard. Dad was at ease only in the barn and fields and woods. Indoors, he paced about or sat in his easy chair folding the newspaper with sharp crackling sounds. On weekdays he went off to a factory where men made tires. I had never seen the factory, never would see it, and I could only imagine a room where Dad poured black pudding into big pans shaped like doughnuts, then cooked the pudding until it turned into rubber, then took out the warm tires and put them on cars with a wrench.
At home he never cooked, rarely entered the kitchen except to eat. But he did use wrenches, as well as hammers, screwdrivers, knives, pliers, saws, and other tools he kept on a workbench in the barn. Something we owned was always breaking—the washing machine ground to a halt, a weld broke on the plow, the car’s engine sputtered, a door lock jammed, a pipe sprang a leak—and Dad was always fixing it. When the fixing went well, he sang one of his country tunes; when it went poorly, he growled; and when it went badly, he threw down his tools, fetched a dog, and headed for the woods.
I never tagged along with him when he was riled.
“Daddy’s got a temper,” Mama often said. “It goes with his red hair.”
Sandra, four years older than I, also had red hair, wavy like Dad’s, and longer. But she never got mad. And even though Mania’s hair was brown, sometimes she lost her temper, too, and spanked Sandra and me for being naughty. But her blows were more like pats, meant to shame rather than hurt us. And even at her angriest, Mama never rivaled Dad, who burst with fury now and again the way that oak burst with lightning.
I didn’t think it strange that Dad called the oak an old guy. He would introduce me to trees by name—black walnut, shagbark hickory, magnolia, beech—and then to each of them he would say, “This is my son, Scott,” as if I were meeting a man on the church steps rather than a tree in the woods. No living creature was ever an it to my father, but always he or she, him or her. “He’s an ornery cuss,” he would say of the billy goat. “She’s a treasure,” he would say of a pear tree when the branches sagged with fruit.
If it was hunting season when Dad stomped off to the woods to cool down, he took a shotgun along. The jacket he wrapped me in during the thunderstorm smelled of gunpowder, tobacco, sweat, and blood. The rusty scent of blood I recognized from watching my father skin and clean rabbits, pheasants, and quail, which he carried home slung in the pouch at the back of his green jacket.
I had blood inside of me. I knew this from cutting my finger and scraping my knee. It flowed beneath my skin, like water in the creek behind our house, where crayfish scuttled backward to hide under rocks and catfish nosed along the bottom fanning their fins. Water, though, was clear, and blood, when it leaked out, was shiny red, as bright as the lipstick Mama wore when she and Dad went dancing. Dried blood turned brown and dark, the color of dirt. Maybe all the dirt in our yard, our garden, the potato patch, the dog run, the cow pasture, the far fields, and the deep woods, maybe all the dirt in the world had come from blood leaking through skin and fur. Maybe that was why Dad said the dirt was alive, because of that spilled blood.
Sandra’s red hair came in handy whenever we decided to go to the farm next door and taunt Mr. Jackson’s bull. She kept her scarf on until we drew up beside the barbed-wire fence. Then we pulled handfuls of grass and called to the bull, a lumbering black boxy animal that seemed as big as our car. When he quit grazing long enough to lift his muzzle and look in our direction, Sandra untied the scarf and shook out her flaming hair and we tore off running, sure the bull would be charging after us with lowered horns. We didn’t wait around to see. We just hoped the fence would hold when he barreled into it.
The fear felt good. It was like a wind blowing through me, cleaning the cobwebs from my head. Sometimes with Sandra or one of the neighbor kids, sometimes alone, I hunted for ways to scare myself. I jumped out of the hayloft. I crept behind the cow’s hooves, which could lash out at me. I climbed high into backyard trees until the limbs bent under me. I stole into the billy goat’s pen, shouted his name, then clambered out over the gate before he could butt me. I snuck into the windowless room at the back of the house, which Mama called Bluebeard’s Closet, and which she filled with boxes, out-of-season clothes, broken-down tables and chairs awaiting repairs, and a papier-mache dress dummy lacking arms and head. I peered through cracks in the wooden cover on the well, and imagined falling in. I slithered under the porch, where our dogs lay panting on hot days, down among the spiders and snakes. If I crawled back out into the sunlight and stood up quickly while holding my breath, the day would go dark and I would fall. But I soon woke again, which fooled me into thinking I would always wake.
An older neighbor boy named Joe Burns often sat with me inside the screened porch and read aloud G.I. Joe comic books while I studied the pictures. On those inky pages, bombs exploded, tanks flattened buildings, bullets zinged, and bodies went flying. The bodies with slanted eyes were Japs, Joe Burns explained, and the bodies with mean eyes were Nazis. The job of G.I. Joe was to kill as many of them as he could.
As he read the comics, Joe Burns imitated the ka-boom of grenades, the rat-a-tat-tat of machine guns, the snort of engines, the yelling of soldiers as they fought and fell. He knew every kind of airplane and ship by its outline on the page. He knew the names of every battlefield. He knew just where to stick a bayonet and showed me, jabbing a finger under the arch of my ribs. He knew so much about the war, in fact, and he looked so grown-up, with a stubble of beard sprouting on his chin, that I decided he and the famous GI must have been the very same Joe.
When I asked him if this was so, he gave a little nod, almost too slight to see. Then he leaned close and warned me to keep it secret, because he still had a slew of enemies out there. With a jerk of his chin, he sent my gaze through the screen of the porch toward the sheds, trees, bushes, and rows of cotton. There were plenty of places out there to hide enemies, presumably Japs and Nazis left over from the war.
I promised Joe Burns I’d never breathe a word. He rubbed my scalp through its burr o...