Watching Matthew

4. The willows

This is your life, Matt Kolb, and I’m still the murdered twin who follows you around, although in the ripeness of your age you live in France, five thousand miles from Oregon and the basement where my little bones are buried. The lawn and garden are dead like me, the cherry trees have been cut down and the house trashed by renters, but nobody has dug me up yet.

You’re an old party now, and your well-trimmed white beard, you believe, is esthetically pleasing because it balances the bald dome of your skull. In general, the French consider beards unhygienic, but yours reminds them of Colonel Sanders and Wild Bill Hickock. They think of you as a monument, an avant-garde Old West author, and they hang around you at cocktail parties to hear what outrageous or ignorant thing you may come out with next.

It’s the spring of 1998, a good year for the dollar, and you’ve been traveling down the Rhône valley in a rented Opel with your son Arthur and his wife. Arthur is a chemist; he started manufacturing industrial essences ten years ago and is getting very rich. Sharon owns a chain of hardware stores in Los Angeles and is rich too. They have a little daughter, Melissa, left behind with Sharon’s mother because she developed a sniffle at the last minute. Sharon keeps in touch by cell phone.

Sharon is all soft curves, soft sweaters, wavy hair in a French bun, but occasionally you get a glimpse inside and she is keen as a knife. You have the feeling that she is still taking your measure. Sometimes she calls you “Papa,” because she thinks you’re trying to look like Hemingway. She doesn’t wear jewelry, except for a gold wedding band, and neither does Arthur. They don’t dress for ostentation, no rings, no Patek Phillipe watches.

Arthur is a casualty of your first divorce. He thinks if he discovers the trick of getting close to you, he may gain the important father-son bonding he missed when he was a child. Sometimes he believes the breakup of that marriage was your fault and sometimes he blames his mother. He and Sharon are in therapy, jointly and singly.

Now you’re pulling off the highway into downtown Aix-en-Provence. When Arthur finds out how the name is pronounced, he starts calling it “Aches and Pains,” but he doesn’t mean it, and he’s cheerful, glad to get out of the Opel and stretch his legs. You leave the car in a parking lot and stroll back to the Cours Mirabeau, a beautiful tree-shaded boulevard that is quiet and peaceful this morning. You three sit around a sidewalk table and order the fruits de met, little mollusks displayed in a pyramid, every color from primrose to violet, each more delectable than the last. Arthur holds them close to his big nostrils before he eats them. “Esters and terpenes,” he says. “Mm.”

“Could you duplicate that in the laboratory, Arthur?”

“Never. The food here is something else, Dad. How do they do it?”

“Cuisine, and the fresh ingredients. You can’t get anything like this in Paris, even if the chef is Provençal.”

A young woman at a table near yours closes her eyes every time she puts a forkful of something wonderful in her mouth. You’re thinking you would like to live here and eat nothing but Provençal food, but then would you lose the contrast?

After lunch you walk over to the center of town and do the shops. Sharon buys a few scarves, Arthur some knitted neckties and hand-carved swizzle-sticks, just to be buying something. You find a necklace of semiprecious stones that takes your fancy. Then you check in at the hotel south of town. Arthur announces that he wants a nap. You leave him in the room and invite Sharon down to the patio for a drink, but she doesn’t want wine or liquor. She orders a vanilla ice cream.

“Everything all right?” you ask.

She stirs the ice cream with a spoon. “Arthur wants a trial separation.”

“Oh, dear. What about you?”

“Trial separations usually turn into divorces, don’t you think? You were divorced, and now it’s our turn. What about your parents, were they divorced?”

“No.”

“Mine were. My shrink says I’m convinced that any man I love will leave me sooner or later, and I always make sure it’s sooner so I can be in control.”

“Do you believe that?”

“I guess so. Life is a bitch, isn’t it?”

“Very often. It’s the only one we’ve got.” You’re looking back over your life as a rounded whole, an egg-shape that means something, but how can you tell her that?

In your pocket is the necklace you bought earlier, teardrops of semiprecious stones on a silver chain, agate, jasper, tiger’s eye, amber, moonstone, and a few things you don’t recognize, clear colors, smooth to the fingers. “I don’t know who I bought this for,” you say. “I don’t suppose it’s your kind of thing.”

“I’ll wear it anyway.” She holds out her hand and smiles. “Thanks, Papa.”

In the afternoon you do the museums. Arthur and Sharon are subdued. They look at the tapestries without comment, and seem to avoid standing too close to each other. If they have had a quarrel, it hasn’t cleared the air. Then a famous restaurant for the lamb chops ŕ l’arlésienne, not bad but overpriced and overpresented. Arthur and Sharon are glum.

The next day, very early in the morning, you resign yourself to wakefulness, get dressed and walk out alone down toward the river. The air is cool and moist. Birds are singing in the luminous sky. The sun is veiled by a drift of cloud; below it you can see the bright spark of Saturn enthroned. As you pass a stand of willows, you notice someone standing there. It’s your father just as you remember him, in his gold-framed spectacles and the gold chain looping across his vest. He’s holding his staghorn jackknife with the big blade extended. He looks down at you from his great height and says, “I want you to remember this, Matthew.”

You move closer. “What, Father?”

“Watch closely.” He slices through a willow shoot. He trims it to a clear straight section about four inches long, and drops the extra pieces on the ground.

“The right time to do it is in the spring when the sap is running,” he says. “Feel here.” You touch the cut end of the shoot; it is moist and cool, like a piece of cheese.

He takes the piece back and cuts off a diagonal slice from the end, making it resemble the mouthpiece of a flute. “This is the hard part,” he says. “If you break the bark, you have to start over.” He works the blade of his knife under the bark, around and around, until he has loosened it and can slip it off in one piece. He moves the bark tube up and down to show you, then puts it back in place with a little bare wood at the far end. Now he cuts a shallow groove near the top of the mouthpiece. “This is the airhole.”

“You never let me do that myself, Father.”

“Watch.” He takes the bark tube off again and cuts a sliver of wood from the top of the mouthpiece. “Be parsimonious, you can always cut more.” He puts the bark on again and blows into the whistle. A resonant honk comes out.

“Is that it?” you ask.

“That’s all.”

“Father, I never learned that, and I never taught Arthur.”

“It’s a dying art.” You notice that he is coming slowly nearer without moving. His head and body are growing larger and at the same time sinking into the ground like an elevator. “Tempus edax return,” he says. Time devours all things. Now he’s just a head, but it is like Humpty Dumpty’s, taller than you are, and as it moves toward you his mouth opens into a cavern and you’re falling at last into the leaf-mold darkness where I live.

Here we are. Welcome home, brother.

“The only difference between you and me, Flanders, is that I read the homework before I ate it.”