The Book of Skulls

chapter fifteen Oliver

When I was sixteen I gave a great deal of thought to killing myself. Honestly. It wasn’t a pretense, a romantic adolescent drama, an expression of what Eli would call a willed persona. It was a genuine philosophical position, if I can use so impressive-sounding a term, which I arrived at logically and rigorously.

What led me to the contemplation of suicide was, above all, my father’s dying at thirty-six. That seemed like such an unbearable tragedy to me. Not that my father was in any way a special human being, except to me. He was just a Kansas farmer, after all. Up at five in the morning, in bed by nine at night. No education to speak of. All he read was the county newspaper, and sometimes the Bible, though most of that was over his head. But he worked hard all his short life. He was a good man, a dedicated man. It was his father’s land first, and my father worked it from the age of ten, with a few years out for the army; he brought in his crops, he retired his debt, he made a living, more or less, he even was able to buy forty acres more and think of expanding beyond that. Meanwhile he married, he gave pleasure to a woman, he sired children. He was a simple man — he would never have understood anything that’s happened in this country in the ten years since he died — but he was a decent man, in his way, and he had earned the right to a happy old age. Sitting on the porch, puffing his pipe, going hunting in the fall, letting his sons do the really back-breaking work, watching his grandchildren grow up. He didn’t get a happy old age. He didn’t even get a middle age. Cancer sprouted in his guts and he died fast, he died in agony but fast.

That started me thinking. If you can be cut off like that, if you must live under a sentence of death all your days and never know when it will be carried out, why live at all? Why give Death the satisfaction of coming to claim you when you’re least ready for it? Get out, get out early. Avoid the irony of being chopped down as punishment for having made something of your life.

My father’s goal in life, as I understood it, was to keep to the way of the Lord and pay off the mortgage on his land. He succeeded with the first and came pretty close with the second. My goal was more ambitious: to get an education, to rise above the dirt of the fields, to become a doctor, a scientist. Doesn’t that sound grand? The Nobel Prize in Medicine to Dr. Oliver Marshall, who climbed out of the tobacco-chewing ignorance of the Corn Belt to become an inspiration for us all. But did my goal differ in anything but degree from my father’s? What it boiled down to, for both of us, was a life of hard work, honest toil.

I couldn’t face it. Saving money, taking tests, applying for the scholarship, learning Latin and German, anatomy, physics, chemistry, biology, breaking my skull with labors tougher than anything my father had known — and then to die? To die at forty-five, or fifty-five, or sixty-five, or maybe, like my father, at thirty-six? Just when you’re ready to start to live, it’s time to go. Why bother to make the effort? Why submit to the irony? Look at President Kennedy: all that outlay of energy and skill to get himself into the White House, and then the bullet in his skull. Life is a waste. The more you succeed in making out of yourself, the more bitter a thing it is to have to die. Me, with my ambitions, my drives, I was only setting myself up for a bigger downfall than most. Inasmuch as I would have to die eventually, I resolved to cheat Death by doing away with myself before I began forcing myself toward the inevitable sick joke that was waiting for me.

So I told myself, age sixteen. I made lists of possible ways to bug out. Cut my wrists? Turn on the gas? Plastic bag over my head? Rack up my car? Look for thin ice in January? I had fifty different plans. I arranged them in order of desirability. I rearranged them. I balanced quick painful deaths against slow easy ones. For half a year, maybe, I studied suicide the way Eli studies irregular verbs. Two of my grandparents died in those six months. My dog died. My older brother was killed in the war. My mother had her first bad heart attack, and the doctor privately told me she wouldn’t last another year, which was correct. All this should have reinforced my decision: get out, Oliver, get out, get out now, before life’s tragedies come even closer to you! You’ve got to die, just like the others, so why stall for time? Die now. Die now. Save yourself a load of trouble. Curiously, though, my interest in suicide rapidly waned, even though my philosophy didn’t really change. I stopped making lists of ways to kill myself. I started planning ahead, instead of assuming that I’d be gone within the next few months. I decided I would fight Death rather than surrender to him. I would go to college, I would become a scientist, I would learn all I could, and perhaps I’d push the border of Death’s country back a little. Now I know that I’ll never kill myself. I’m just not going to do it, ever. I’ll go on fighting to the end, and if Death comes to laugh in my face, why, I’ll laugh in his. And, after all, suppose the Book of Skulls is authentic! Suppose an escape from him really exists! The joke would have been on me, then, if I’d cut my wrists five years ago.

I must have driven four hundred miles already today, and it isn’t even noon yet. The roads here are great — wide, straight, empty. Amarillo is just ahead. And then Albuquerque. And then Phoenix. And then, at last, we start to find out a lot of things.