The End of October (Part 4 of 4)

asleep on trains

       A plume of smoke and steam dispersed like ripples in the sky as the train trudged through the sea of gold and red and fading green. There was a smile on Amelia’s lips as she leaned toward the window, her breath wet and clouding up the glass. There was a look of familiar wonder in her eyes—and that smile. It crept into Paxton’s being and grabbed his heart in a handful.

       Her eyes mirrored his. But his mirrored her.

       She was viewing this for the first time—this glorious avenue. There was a seed being planted in her. But there was a tree, already growing from him. A tree that now twisted and moaned inside him at being so close to this place again. And this time, so close with her.

       “It’s beautiful," she said.

       He smiled. “Yes,” he nodded. “It is.”

       Eventually, and as he knew she would, she drew back from the window with a shiver and leaned against him. She rested against his shoulder, but her eyes reached up to his in the way that made the corners of his mouth stir upward.

       You must understand that people like Paxton wear their souls in funny places—on their sleeves or on their fronts, or waving over their head like flag, or out in the open like a handkerchief to a coughing stranger. He wore his on his hands. But he tied it down, to the corners of his mouth, so that when one stirred, so did the other, like a shiver from the inside out.

       Of course, you can’t see souls. Not with eyes like ours, and not in places like that. At least not in the way that you see trains or trees or window-fog. You can see them in other ways. Emilia saw them when she looked into those eyes, and when those eyes looked back.

       If you had asked her why she loved those eyes, she would tell you the truth, almost certainly: “It’s the way he stares,” she would say. “With all of him. Every ounce of him is there. Looking into me.” It was his worst—and best—quality, to be unbearably present. And entirely hers.

       “This is where you grew up?” She asked, that sense of wonder not retiring.

       Paxton paused for a moment, staring out at the trunks, like the pillars to some ruining fortress, with fire and rain playing in its eaves. “This is where I did my growing up,” he said. “Here. Under the trees, grabbing at leaves. I thought my world ended here, too. But it was just nightfall. And morning came.”

       His arm, already around her shoulders, squeezed her a little tighter, and she released that little sigh against his chest. The shiver was secondary.

       “You’re cold,” he said, starting to stand. She held onto his coat, looking up with a little smile of her own, holding onto him.

       “I’ll be even colder if you leave,” she said.

       He slipped out of his coat and pulled it around her shoulders, kissing the top of her head. “I’ll be back in a moment, my love.”

       It was a far nicer carriage, that one, than the one that had taken him here first. Paxton slid out of the little cabinet and made his way down the red-coated hall toward the dining car.

       The people were sparse, that day—mostly elderly, and mostly in couples along the little tables, in their coats and hats and scarves. The smells of meats and coffee and cinnamon surrounded him as he moved toward the little bar, and the attendant beside it. “Excuse me,” said Paxton, “might I borrow another blanket? For the lady in box 8.”

       “Of course sir,” said the young man, disappearing into the next car.

       Paxton sat at one of the small round tables, across from an older man made of tweed and gray hair, who traded a very brief smile that parted neither set of lips, as men often do. A passing woman, buried in green and unafraid to show her own teeth, stopped and put a gentle hand on Paxton's shoulder.

       “I saw you and the little lady at the station,” she said cheerfully. Her voice was worn and warm and reminded Paxton instantly of apples and the pies that are their glorious byproduct. “She’s a lucky girl,” she said.

       “Blessed,” Paxton replied. “We both are. By each other.”

       “Just married?” Asked the woman again.

       “Yes,” Paxton smiled thinly. “Not a week.”

       “I could tell,” she said happily. “You have that glow.”

       Soon the attendant had returned with the blankets, and Paxton took them and an acquired cup of hot cocoa back to the box room where his little wife waited. He wrapped her in blankets and sat tight beside her while she warned her hands on the mug.

       The silence that hung between them wasn't an empty one. Consider for a moment, a person you never tire of talking to—but consider also a person in whose presence words are hardly necessary. Paxton had such a person. He held her while she drifted off to sleep, rescuing the half-empty mug and holding her sideways on the seat, as comfortably as he could make her.

       There were moments when he almost drifted off himself; and there, in that quiet room that is between the waking world and the sleeping one, he found a very old thing that he used to know well. A fear, rattling through him like a flag in the wind. It woke him from that wandering state instantly, and he sat up too straight.

       His little Amelia stirred and looked up at him with a hint of concern in her eyes. His arms, still wrapped around her, squeezed a little tighter, pulling her against his chest as though wishing any space between them to disappear entirely, so that they could occupy the exact same space.

       “I have this fear," he said quietly, “This hand-me-down-sort-of-fear. It was a cold night, at the end of October. We were alone. Just the two of us, and he had this look on his face…he was stone. I’d never seen him crumble. But he did. And he said to me—Well. He had this fear. And he gave it to me. That you might slip away, someday. And never know that you are enough for me. You are more than enough—that you are everything to me.”

       She looked back, not at his eyes but into them, seeing something beyond and behind them. She laid her head back against his chest, trusting herself to his arms. “You are everything that could have ever been home.”

       In a few moments, she had drifted off to sleep again.

       Paxton sat, staring out of the window at the passing sea of white-framed gold and red and green, the crispness of the cold wind and the blear of fog on the distant hilltops. He could already smell it, already taste the wetness.

       Home. This was his. And so was that beautiful little breathing that he held.

       Slowly and carefully, so as not to wake her, he dug through the little bag on the seat beside him, pulling out a little red notebook and pen and turning carefully through the word-scattered pages until he came to the place where the paragraphs ran out and only whiteness remained. Hardly moving to do so, he formed the words, dreadfully and gracefully black.

       “I think sometimes that I am very complicated. That I am not even understandable at all. But I know, in the same instant, that I am terribly simple—for I enjoy nothing more than simply watching her sleep.

       And the joy I feel at seeing her look at this place in the way that I look at her. She has seen even the final bits of my heart, now. But I feel no need to cover it back up.

       I never knew the terror I would feel at being entirely known. I never knew the joy and peace I would feel at being entirely loved.”

      

       There is a particular ability among humans—a pattern even—to find a sort of saving in their attempts to rescue someone else. It’s a frail thing. But in a wildly powerful way.

       The thing about caring is that it is somehow always the ones who care first and care most who break first and break most. The ones who live in the open are killed right off. And maybe that’s easier of course, because a lifetime of caring? A lifetime of that glorious, burdening pain? Sometimes it’s easier to let the light go out than it is to spend a lifetime nurturing a candle.

       But the thing about caring is that care is like a shield—you carry it around with you, and you shield whoever you can, all the while your arms get tired and your back starts to ache and you wonder why this has to be the way it is. But then you see—you learn to see the looks in the eyes, you get used to the burn in your shoulders, and then you almost love it.

       To be honest, I really had hoped to stay out of this story because it isn’t mine at all. But I don’t think that I can now. Because I’ve tried so long to understand the difference between dying and loving. Alone, you are the sum of your whole life—all that is within you. When you love, when you are truly overtaken by it, you are in a moment separated from all that you’ve known—and thereby everything that has made you. And you are standing, then, before the entirety of everything you’ve hoped for and everything you’ve ever been afraid of.

       Love takes many forms, of course. A medicine for the sick. A suit of armor, to hide inside of. A storm, to carry you off. And the shield, so very disinterested in self-protection.

       But for Paxton, love was distinct. It had a shape and a color to it (the color of fire). It grew from the tiniest seeds into something huge and sprawling, with arms that tried to hold up the sky. There was a glory in the sweeping frost and the collapse. A beauty in the way things fall—and the way that they stand back up. That love didn’t mind lightning and ice and it didn’t mind being split open or carved into and it didn’t mind nests being made in its hair. Maybe he knew, by then, that he couldn’t shield everyone, that he couldn’t catch every leaf. Maybe he did. But maybe he’d try, just the same. Or maybe he’d shield the one beside him, and hold his shield until he could no more—It would take a very long time.

       So Paxton fell asleep on the train—one of those beautiful, miserable sorts of people who never stop caring, going home like a leaf falling to the forest floor. But this time he’d brought her; that soul he held so tightly, that thrilled and delighted him, to show her the place that had made him.

       To show her the light in the shadows, to sit beside the fire and look at stolen bits of color when no others existed. To hold her close and watch the evening curtains come. To say goodbye, and wave at the final strokes of the retiring brush. To watch the end of October. And wake up on the other side.

      

      

      

      

The End of October (Part 2 of 4)

gold in the green; red in the black

       Hollis Norcoat had always seemed like a giant, to his nephew—and he had that sort of giantess that seemed unnatainable, as though no matter how much Paxton grew, he would always have to hurry just to keep up. That day, in his heavy coat and with his giant, tan boots, his thick beard and his smiling cheeks, Uncle Hollis looked like a huge bear—and a happy one, at that. 

       The road wound endlessly up through the avenues of trees—but Paxton didn’t mind. No matter how far they went, they always somehow encountered new colors, brighter and richer, and trees that were different than those down in the groves beside the house. 

       “More evergreen up here,” said the uncle. “But just wait until we get to the top. I’ve got a thing or two to show you, there. I used to take little Lucy up here every year, but she’s got a bit tired of the trek. I knew you’d want to see it, though.”

       The wind was icy, but the sun had a warmth to it, whenever it fond a gap to slip through, and fall slantways onto their shoulders. Paxton’s breath became a cloud that tried to block his eyes as they climbed higher and higher. His lungs ached from the cold and his legs burned from he climb, but with every step his wonder and excitement somehow swelled. 

       It wasn’t long before they reached a spot where his uncle put a hand on his shoulder and pointed to an upcoming break in the trees, through which nothing but sky could be seen. “Just around this corner,” he said eagerly. 

       Paxton could hardly help but run toward the turn, and his uncle didn’t stop him. His breath escaped in bursts as he ran, but when he came around the corner, and when he saw the reason that they’d both come so far, he abandoned whatever little bit of breath he still had. 

       Before him, the road slipped away into a rolling bed of boulders and red rocks, tumbling into the endless expanse of trees. But these trees were different than the ones they'd left around the house. Most were those everyday evergreens, unchanging and familiar—but in their midst, scattered like stars, stood trees of shining, solid gold. They burned like torches amidst the mottled blue and grey, a pattern that wrinkled and rippled into hills crowned in clouds like cotton candy.

       It was unlike anything Paxton had ever seen. He stood, unsure of what to say or do. His eyes were too busy for his brain to really have any say. He was searching—as children often do, for something b which he could make sense of this. Some means of appropriating this glorious view, into something that he could hold onto more plainly. 

       Trees like fire. Like honey. Gold, like his mother’s ring. Like…like something and yet entirely like nothing.

       The problem with autumn, you see, is that it really isn’t like anything. In fact, the more he stared, hunting for words, the more he realized that this was the sort of thing that other things were like—but that was itself like nothing but itself. And there aren’t many things like that. He was lucky, in so short a life, to have already encountered so many. 

       “Two weeks,” his uncle said. “Two weeks, and all the yellow will be gone. They’ll drop their needles and the whole hillside will turn black and white and blue with the snow. Just you wait.” 

       Paxton heard these words with a pang of stark, almost frustrated seriousness. He didn’t really want to see it. He didn’t want to even think of the gold falling off, of snow coming down to cover all this. It was a horrible thought. 

       “I don’t want to watch them die,” he said. 

       “Die?” Hollis chuckled thinly. “Oh, son. They don’t die. They only go to sleep. And the snow comes to tuck them in and keep them warm until morning. And just you see this place then. It’s own beauty, is spring. The colors against the ocean of green.” And then he put a hand on the boy’s shoulder to say, “Nothing dies, really. Everything wakes, in time.” 

       It was strange, to hear such gentle and lovely words come from such a massive and rough-handed man. But it somehow made sense, too. It was somehow autumnal. It reminded Paxton of the strength that his little mother carried around inside her, and at once the thought of her forced his eyes forward again. “I wish mum could see this,” he said. 

       “Oh don’t you worry,” said the uncle, and the hand on the shoulder squeezed fondly. “She’ll see them again. Don’t you worry.” 

       Together the two of them stood, watching the collapse of the afternoon into evening, the sunlight giving out like breaking pillars. The boy thought about his mother; about her little smiles and sweet words and about how much he’d like to bring her here, and about that book that she kept on the floor beside her chair, which she looked into every now and then, to see the colors of the leaves. 

       The uncle thought of his sister. And he thought of the trees—how soon they’d give up. He thought about her pale face, with the cold and the dark looming around it. He saw her like gold against green. And the boy who stood beside him, his mind and heart swelling with wonder, was red against black. Something sturdy. Strong. Something that would last. 

       There was something in him that the uncle recognized. You see, people assume that, in order to truly be magical, a thing has to be disordered, nonsensical, inexplicable—but it doesn’t. They try to make sense of colors and they make sense of changing leaves and assume that just because microscopes exist, real magic can’t. 

       Only they can’t change the fact that what Paxton saw, on those hills, was fire. What he felt was glory, and it tingled. Maybe magic doesn’t exist laboratories—and really why would it?

       But it exists out there. And once you see it, really see it, and once it gets into you, it changes you. 

       You see, the problem with “people” is that they are most always wrong. 

The End of October (Part 1 of 4)

      

 the cricks in all our necks

       Autumn came early, that year. Not loudly at first, but in pieces, all falling into a glorious disarray. Summer was not being replaced—it had simply grown older. Deeper. It had changed into something not altogether different, in the same way that a person who is now grown was once a child. It hadn't turned its back on youth—but it had outgrown it.

       Paxton had seen autumns before. But not like this. He’d seen them out of train windows, and he’d seen them in pictures. But that was like looking at paintings of the ocean, and never actually standing on the beach. Here, he was buried in autumn. Drowning in it. It was falling on his head, and pooling around his boots and leaving pieces in his hair.

       And just like that painting could do nothing to capture what the tide really felt like, what the salt really tasted like, what the foam really smelled like, Paxton was just as surprised, here. At first, it was the smell—the richness, the wetness. It hung on him like the smell of smoke, it crawled through his clothes, but never quite made him cold.

       It was dizzying, at first—and eventually, his neck started to hurt from standing, staring up at the branches. He’d known summers before. And he knew winters very well. He’d stared up at Januarys and Februarys, where the sky was the texture of cotton balls, torn apart and glued down to gray paper. The trees, there, were like cracks into space—the sorts of cracks that he saw in ceilings sometimes, but filled with soot.

       Not here, though. Here, the sky bled through in patches of stark, sharp blue or spilled in all gold, tumbling across the backs of the leaves. And from there it was hard to tell whether the wind rattled the leaves loose, or whether the sunlight talked them into letting go.

       It was there, with October piling up in gutters and reddening his cheeks, that Paxton stood, staring up at the branches, at the golden and red and the green that hung like ornaments from them, wondering what it would be like to fall.

       Some fell straight down. Others hesitated—they spun and danced a little longer, sometimes for so long that he had to let out his pent-up breath, and take another. And these had the most peculiar ability as they fell—though he did not observe it in so many words—as though they could make all of the world stand still. With every swoop and bend, every twist and turn, the sun was pinned; time itself held down at the corners in anticipation.

       And it was these, the ones that fought to stay afloat, that Paxton ran for, with his eyes peeled back as wide as they would open, his fingers spread and palms out, as far as his arms would reach, to snatch them up before they hit the ground. Most often, he’d get there in time; the leaf would nestle into his small hands, and he would take a moment to stare at it.

       He took in all the curling points on the fingers, the little veins in the skin like stained glass windows, or like dragonfly wings. The absolute redness, with its spots of green and its edges of brown.

       Of course, for every one that he caught, there were a hundred he did not. But he was only one boy, and there were hundreds of trees. And yet he caught and held onto each one as gently and with such joy in his eyes as though this, alone, was the very leaf worth catching. And he did it again and again.

       As everybody already knows, there’s no point in catching leaves only to drop them again. And that is not, of course, what a boy—especially a boy such as Paxton—intended to do with them. Instead, he took each precious little handful and ran, kicking through the heaps and the waves of fading gold and snarling russet and toward the old porch, eyes beaming and cheeks stained strawberry from the crisp air.

       From the porch, his mother watched and smiled and sometimes laughed. Her chair rocked slowly, and her hands, with their crocheting, were never quite still, though they were slower now than they were once.

       But of course, Paxton was a very occupied sort of boy, and can therefore be forgiven for not noticing. But his mothers crocheting fingers—in fact, her fingers in general—were slower than they used to be. She, herself, moved at a much slower pace. But Paxton didn't mind.

       He, of course, hadn't slowed down. But nobody made him hurry. He simply did. He treated each accosted leaf as though it was a matter of life and death to scamper them back to shelter.

       Shelter, in this case, was his mother. And more specifically, it was the very large red book that she kept beside her chair, beside the other books that she occasionally picked up to read—the latter were mostly books of poetry, but the former was one of those splendid prices of bookwork left entirely blank, a pliable and eager mess, waiting to be made.

       Paxton's mother was a young woman, and one of those rare and frail sorts who would never seem old. Her name was Rose Melving. Her hair was the color of caramel, and her skin no longer that soft tan, but a sort of cream, which made her eyes only bigger and bluer and her eyelashes longer and the rest of her younger. She hardly looked like more than a child herself, until she spoke.

       When she did speak, she seemed far too old for her body. Her words were soft and strung together like music, and they had color to them, and flavor to the way she made them, as though she'd torn every one of them from one of those poetry books beside her chair.

       On the far side of the books, in a chair of her own and with crocheting of her own, there sat an older-looking woman who frowned a great deal, but not usually because she was unhappy. She was very unlike the young mother, when she spoke, but not unpleasant. To Paxton, she was a piece of that porch nearly as permanently as his mother—but not nearly such a complimentary one. Her name was Edith Price.

       Her daughter, Lucy, was something of a middle ground—neither sitting on the porch with the Onlookers, nor wading through the leaves with the Rescuer. In fact, she didn’t really seem sure where she belonged.  She stood in the space between Paxton and their mothers, raking the leaves into a mountain, higher than her ribs.

       There was an obvious and profound difference between the two, the wonder of one and the experience of the other. It was the difference of familiarity. Of course, Lucy had lived here her whole life, and she’d raked leaves a half-dozen times. Had the roles been reversed, had she been astounded at the hugeness of city streets and the towering, monstrous buildings, she might not have given that little cousin such strange looks.

       But Paxton had that sort of obliviousness on his side that helped to undermine those looks—in short, he didn't notice. There were far more important things to do.

       “What are you doing?” Lucy asked finally, when she’d worn herself out raking and decided that her cousin really did need a talking-to. Then, remembering a game that she’d once played before, added, “Are you looking for the perfect leaf?”

       “No,” Paxton shook his head. “They’re all perfect.”

       Lucy frowned, looking at the wide, curling maple leaf that Paxton had just caught. “That one’s not,” she said, pointing at the creasing edge of the leaf’s fingers. “Look at those brown spots. This one isn’t perfect. But there are perfect ones over there.”

       “Those are freckles,” said Paxton, grinning.

       Lucy thought that this was among the more ridiculous things she’d ever heard. But she also had freckles. So she said nothing, and brushed her rake through the leaves while Paxton ran back to the porch with his new treasure. Of course, she was old enough to realize that she could keep up raking for hours and hardly make a dent. Those trees were maples and birches, and that forest seemed endless, stretching from the back porch and over the hills. She could never hope to pile up them all.

       On the porch, Paxton’s newest rescue was being glued to the open page, a torrent of gold upon the white.

       The woman Mrs. Price, very much of the same mind as the little Ms. Price, had a similar frown. “But why, Paxton?” she asked.

       “Soon,” he said, “all the color will be gone. I’m catching it for later.”

       Lucy had followed, and she was the one spoke next: “But it’s not even a perfect leaf, is it mama?”

       “Well who says what’s perfect?” Said Rosa happily, as she helped her son glue down the corners of the leaf. “The point of colors, after all, is to feel something, isn’t it? And feelings aren’t always the way they’re supposed to be or the way that we expect them. But we feel them anyway.”

       She held up the book to the two children. “What does this make you feel?”

       Lucy frowned. Paxton looked hard, his little forehead creasing with concentration. “I don’t know,” he said finally. “But it does make me feel.”

       “Is that good enough?” Lucy seemed dubious. She crossed her arms.

       But Rosa only smiled. “Yes. I think so.”

       Edith shook her head at Rosa as Paxton and Lucy hurried off again. “I hope you know you’re encouraging that nonsense.”

       “It’s not nonsense,” said the mother warmly, with her gentle laugh. “He’s right. Who says you shouldn’t collect your lanterns before night falls?”

       Edith snorted, but couldn’t quite manage a laugh. In fact, all traces of smile fell off her face, and onto the porch where they sat beside her shoes.

       “Winter is coming,” said Rosa, quietly. “And this one will be very, very cold for him.”

       “Now that,” Edith announced, “Is nonsense.” Only it wasn’t, and she knew it. And if Lucy had been asked, she’d have known it to. Perhaps Paxton was the only one who didn’t. But of course, no one was going to tell him.

       “Let him gather his colors,” said Rosa, more to herself than anything. “Let him gather all the light he can before it goes out. He’ll need it, if only to remind himself that it won’t be gone forever.”

       “They’re only leaves, Rosa,” said Edith, but not unkindly.

       “And he’s only a boy,” she said in response.

       For a moment, they watched in silence as Lucy consecutively raked and stared at her cousin, who continued his mad dash through the trees, his head thrown back and staring between the branches into heaven.

       Edith chuckled. “He’ll give us all cricks in our necks just watching him, if he keeps that up.”

       “Good,” Said Rosa with a smile. “We could all do with a little more looking at the sky and a little less at our feet.”

       And she watched those leaves almost the same way that her son did, watching their every movement with eyes just as wide. Only there was something different, in her. Where he was filled to the brim with wonder, there was a sort of understanding in her—not the familiarity of Lucy, but something deeper. She knew something that he didn’t yet; something about the way that the leaves fall that she saw so very clearly.

       Something he was grabbing at, and holding onto—without even meaning to.

       “Isn’t it beautiful?” said Rosa in that same quiet, poetic way, as she stared out over the lawn. “Their clumsiness. Their grace. That peculiar way in which those things can be the same. The way they fall.”

         Edith didn’t know quite what to make of that—but that was usual. And she stared, for some time, at the scene without quite knowing whether Rosa was referring to the leaves or to the children—it was impossible to tell by the direction of her eyes—and then, of course, whether or not it mattered.