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 3 of 4)

for the thousand year winter

       On the floor, in front of the fire, Paxton and his mother sat with the red book in between them. The mother turned the pages—the boy pointed at each one with a reflection of that excitement he’d had the first time he’d caught them. “This one is especially beautiful,” his mother would say, or “look at that red! Why, I don’t think there was anything quite that red in the city, do you?”

       Of course, Lucy did not find much interest in this. She preferred other books, and she preferred to read them in more comfortable places than the floor. But Paxton smiled on and on. Every color to him was different, in the firelight, and he felt as though he could rediscover every single one. Sometimes they would come across a shape, on the skin of the leaf, like they might have done once when looking at clouds.

       Every now and then, if she happened to encounter some truly exceptional shape, some color, she’d turn to her husband, in his chair, and point it out to him with a childish tone and he’d lend a very small portion of his smile. To him, they were really just leaves, just as they had been to his sister, Edith. But they were more to her—and he reflected some small part of her joy, if only at her enjoyment.  

       Doctor Melving was a quiet man. And nobody knew if he’d always been that way, or if he’d learned it somewhere. He didn't laugh much. If anything, this was his greatest fault—in the eyes of his son, he was carved from stone. Of course, he hadn’t always been nearly so stoic. His smile had once been nearly as quick as his little wife’s knitting fingers.

       If Paxton had paid more attention, he might have noticed the commonality. But it’s hard to be observant of the things that are important when you don’t know, until later, just how important they’ll be—Nobody knows why. But that’s the way that it is sometimes. He saw the big things, and even some of the little things. He saw the trees and the way that the leaves fell. And as he watched them, the grass was wilting and the frost was crunching under his boots and his father smiled less often, and he never did notice until later.

       And really, why would he have? Why should he ever think to put those two and two together? Perhaps it is a point in favor of his young innocence that he never did.

       To be painfully honest—and really, honesty is quite often painful—Paxton did not know his father all that well. And really, this wasn’t is fault. Some men really don’t seem knowable.

       He knew, of course, that he was a doctor, and that he’d been a doctor in the army. He knew that, while in the army, his father had been shot. But he knew this in the same way that a person can know what mountains look like from books, having never actually seen them. (And if you’ve ever seen mountains, you understand that those really aren’t the same at all.)

       What Paxton did know was that his father and his father’s mustache had something in common; they were both very serious, and that it took a great deal to stir either one into movement. They were not cruel or angry—they were simply sober. His countenance and spirit had been tempered by reason and science—and worse things, too.

       Those very different eyes saw very different things, when together father and son sat in the silent living room, staring into the fire. To the boy, all was trees and falling leaves and gold, a screeching and fluttering of color, launching up the chimney like bats made of sparks.

       The father saw cannons, in the distance. He heard them, drumming behind him, roaring over his head. As the dark drew in around them and spun cobwebs in the corners, he saw the spine of the sky breaking and the rain pounding down, ringing against his helmet and echoing in his ears like iron drums.

       When the nights went cold and the sky turned black, Paxton saw the frost lean in on the windows and stare between its fingers in at the fire and the books. When his father looked, he saw pale and dirty faces, between the trees.

       Those eyes saw such different things. And of course, one of them had seen death. And as Paxton would learn, the problem with death is that it’s just so damn contagious.

       Like a yawn, inspiring those deep, tired tremors, where there had been none before, and so that cruel, mortal awareness stirs. A tremble, suddenly afraid of drifting off—and at once, welcoming the thought.

       Of course, Paxton had some understanding of how a creature like Rosa had found him—and where, even. He had a picture in his head of that field hospital, and of that even smaller, younger Rosa with an apron on. He knew, to some degree, how the love of that tiny creature had done something transforming to that terribly serious one. But he understood this to the same degree that he understood war. (And his picture of it was as incomplete as his picture of field hospitals.)

       It was her joy that spilled into the doctor, and that tempted him, even, to smile through the deep evening shadows. But it was hard to smile then, even as he watched that laugh climb through her, kicking to escape like a child under too many blankets, and finding its way out her mouth, eyes and curls.

       “There were trees that uncle showed me on the other side of the ridge,” Paxton said excitedly, “like pine trees but gold. And he said that they’d drop their needles, just like the trees here drop their leaves. He said they only last a week or so like that, and then they’re all gone. I’d have brought back a branch, but it wouldn’t fit in our book.”

       The mother laughed. “No, I imagine it wouldn’t have. I suppose that only leaves us with one option, doesn’t it? We’ll have to come back and see them again next year.”

       Paxton’s whole being seemed to light up. “Can we?”

       His mother pointed and whispered, “you’ll have to ask your father.”

       Paxton turned excitedly to his father. “Can we, dad?” He asked.

       There was a long, quiet moment—the father stared not at Paxton, but at his wife, half-glowing in the firelight. The words came out of him almost pained. “Every year,” he said, and he made his mouth perform something very much like a smile. But colder.

       Paxton was ecstatic. He turned to his mother beaming, the words tumbling out of him in a flurry. “Then we can go and see them together,” he said. “Uncle said that they don't ever die—that they only fall asleep.”

       “He’s right of course,” said the mother, smiling. “Nothing really dies. Not ever. And that sleep never lasts forever.” She reached out gently and pulled him into a hug, the fire dancing over the leaves between them. “No matter how dark,” she said, “and no matter how cold, just remember—the night ends.”

       In the joining kitchen, the door swung open and a flurry of cold air rushed in, skittering across the wood floor as uncle entered, his beard parted by the same smile that creased his eyes in so many places.

       “Pax, lad,” he said happily, “I've a bit to show you, here. Come.”

       Paxton jumped up and ran to the door, his uncle's hand on his shoulder. And there, in the rectangle of orange, with the only blue spilling in around his little frame, he watched the snowflakes, tumbling down through the branches.

       The wind tiptoed across the grass; it rustled the leaves and kicked them up, stuck to the bottoms of its feet. Fat, white flakes, the size of dimes, performed a very clumsy newborn ballet against the indigo epilogue of the autumn.

       “Snow!” He shouted. “Snow!” And just like that, in his bare feet, he leapt out into the leaves. He ran around the yard, feeling the sting on his toes, knowing that they were turning as red as his cheeks.

       At the door, his little mother and her beaming face appeared. And even when she needed her brother's help to get down the step, she ran feebly out into the swirling whiteness. Her laugh escaped her in heaps and drifts as her son took her hand and, for a brief moment, regardless of cold, they danced in the building frost, and hardly even felt it on their toes.

       When they went back in, shivering and glowing, Lucy and Edith had appeared as well. They were wrapped in blankets as a household of eyes gathered to doors and windows and watched.

       “Right on time,” said Hollis. “It always storms like this at the end of October.”

       They stood until Paxton's little eyes started to droop, when those hands of his father, which one day would be his own, fell on his shoulder, and the eyes of his mother, already so much like his, settled smiling onto his face.

       She took him to the living room, to the red book, and they closed it together before the mother put a final kiss on his forehead. “This book,” she said, “will help you through the winter. Even if it feels a thousand years long. And even when all the leaves fade. You'll have that hope inside you. Everything wakes up.”

       And so he was taken off to bed. And when the door to his little bedroom closed, he had no way of knowing that his mother nearly fell over, outside it—or that the strong arms that had carried him to bed so many times instead picked up his mother and took her to hers. And he had no way of knowing that that bristling, serious mustache, so hesitant to smile, was kissing her very pale forehead as gently as a falling snowflake, and that those stone-carved cheeks would soon be wet. He didn't know. He didn't hear the goodbyes that were said.

       But of course, he saw that very obvious one, scrawled across the sky outside, as he sat with his face against the glass. He watched the snow, toppling down to join the leaves, so mesmerized by the way things fall. He watched October slip away on a carpet of yesterday’s gold—and he waited for morning to nudge him awake.

       Not everybody runs out of time, you see. Sometimes time runs out on us. Abandons us. Leaves us to ourselves and the winter. Why? I don’t know. But sooner or later, I suppose that everybody has to learn that the world hasn't ended—it’s only night time. And morning will coming.