The Same River Twice: A Memoir

Epilogue

My son is three months old and on my back, strapped in a red harness. Today is the first day of spring, his first visit to the woods. His chubby legs bounce against my back. Seventeen years have elapsed since the last locust outbreak and the forest floor is full of finger-size holes. The earth has given the insects to light. Their drone rises and falls around us like distant chain saws. Rita is home, grateful for some time alone. Our son sleeps between us in the bed, and at night I arrange myself in order to hold his hand.

Flocks of starlings migrate along the river. The softwoods bud, the hardwoods wait. My family and I talk more often on the phone. Dad inquires about the “son of my son.” I ask him what he wants the kid to call him. “Grandfather,” he says. “That way he’ll always know there’s someone grander than his father.”

My mother wants to know who he resembles and I tell her he looks like himself, realizing later that the same phrase is used to describe a corpse lying in state. We live far away from them. I grew up not seeing my grandparents and have always regretted the loss. Now it would seem the pattern repeats.

The load on my back weighs nothing and everything. I stop to shift him, and feel a vine on my leg, around my boot. It is a tiny garter snake. Behind its head is a yellow stripe the size of a wedding ring. I pick it up gently, knowing that children accidentally kill them through gleeful handling. I turn my head to my son and hold the snake over my shoulder. His little fingers float toward it, pull back.

The river is high from flood to the north. Rita and I are always sleepy. Six weeks after the birth, our doctor sanctioned making love, but our son interrupted us the first few times. It seemed fitting somehow and I didn’t mind the halt. I was worried that Rita would feel different to me, that birth had transformed her passage. Her breasts had already become utilitarian, functioning independent of aesthetics. Making love to a maiden is one thing, to a mother quite another. When our son slept, Rita and I molded together, pressing as much flesh against each other as possible. My fears shed as easily as autumn leaves in rain. Nothing had changed except everything.

I come to a downed tree and remove the pack containing my son. The pack has an aluminum bar that folds forward so it can stand alone. It is bigger than him and he slumps sideways, listing like a trawler. I straighten him and he slides the other way. No matter how I try, he cannot sit straight, but his eyes the color of mine never leave my face. I sit cross-legged before him. The woods are heavy around us. The equinox signals the beginning of life and crop, of nesting birds and mating animals. I want to explain everything. I want to tell him what to do, and more important, what not to do. I give him a leaf which he calmly tastes. He can’t learn from my mistakes, only from his own.

I think of all the things I want to tell him, and say nothing. According to my father, I come from a long line of bad fathers, improving with each generation. The birth of my son has made me a middleman, nearer to death and to life, closer to my father. With courage and work, my son will become an adult one day. Amid the trees and birds, I realize that despite the obstacles I set myself, I have somehow become one myself.

I press my forehead to the forehead of my son. His tiny brow is warm. I can see his fontanel pulsing with life. Daddy loves you, is all I can think to say. Like all sons before him, he says nothing. The woods enclose us like a tent. The river flows beside us and touching it means touching the sea.