Jonathan Bowen
John Elks stood before the picket fence that sheltered his yard, and he shook his head miserably. He watched the dense troop of insects that emerged from a tiny hole in the fence post and spread across the wooden slats. Yesterday there had been no sign of the insects, and now they had covered it. He tried to touch one insect with his finger, and in an instant dozens scurried onto his hand and wrist: he shook his arm wildly. John’s wife came out of the house—he heard the porch door creak open and slap shut—and she walked over and stood beside him.
“The fence has got white ants,” he said.
Joyce Elks knelt before the fence and studied the termites. She was a small woman with tidy hair and reverent eyes, and, on her knees, she seemed to be worshiping the fence.
“They’re ugly,” she said, and she bunched up her nose.
“We’re going to have to tear it down,” John said.
“Why don’t we wait and see if they go away?” She looked up at John and held her hands above her eyes, to block the sunlight.
“Can’t wait. They might spread to the trees or even the house. We’re going to tear it down and burn it.”
“Can’t they be exterminated?”
“Too late,” John said.
Joyce moved closer to him and touched his arm. “Can you remember how you and Michael and Marianne all work together to build this fence? It took a whole day. Michael dug the holes, and Marianne held the posts while you drove them into the ground. Remember?”
John preferred to forget. He believed that not merely the absence of his children, but the presence of the past was destructive to living here and now. You let yourself remember, and then you had to face the dark side of everything you had ever loved. The memory was vivid. He turned away from his wife and looked across the dirt road that ran in front of their house, across the field of harvested corn with stalks like crippled gaffers, withering in the dawning sun. “The only way to be rid of the termites is to tear down the fence and burn it,” John said.
“I wish we could wait and see if they go away.”
“It’s got to burn,” he said and left her and walked towards the house.
Michael arrived that evening, driving slowly down the dirt road to keep the dust off his shiny sports car. He was not expected. Joyce ran like a teenager across the yard and embraced him at the gate. John waited on the porch.
“How’s it going, Dad?” Michael held out his hand. He was dressed in a khaki suit, and his tie was loosened. The collar on his shirt was stained yellow with sweat. “Hot as a dog, huh?” he grinned.
“Good to see you,” John said, and he shook his son’s hand.
Michael lived in the city, about thirty miles away. He and his wife, Karen, lived in the house with bars on the windows and a heated pool and the back yard, and Michael made his living as a pediatrician. His schedule kept him busy, so he seldom visited.
“Supper will be ready in a few minutes,” Joyce said. “Why don’t you to relax on the porch. I’ll bring some ice tea.”
John and Michael sat on the old sofa that sagged across the porch. They sat there like clumsy lovers, quiet, measuring the distance they had put between themselves. Joyce brought out iced tea and napkins.
“I’m so glad you came by,” she said to Michael, and she went back inside the house.
“How’s she doing?” Michael said in a whispery voice.
“What do you mean?”
“You know—those lumps she found. Are they worse? Larger? Is she having pain?”
John sipped his tea and looked across the yard to the fence. Yes, he thought, I remember. Michael dug the holes, and Marianne held the post while I drove them into the ground.
“I think you better be going,” he finally said. “I told you we prayed for healing, and we have faith that it’ll come.”
“Is she better, yet?
“God’s going to send a healing,” John said.
“Goddamn God! She could be suffering or even dying and—”
John interrupted, “You won’t talk that way in this house, Michael Elks. I won’t have it.” His eyes bore into Michael’s. They had the same eyes: chameleon colors with differing wisps of blue, charcoal, hazel, and amber. Michael did not back down. So they sat with folded arms and crossed legs, sharing that funnel of stare, caught in that curiously symmetrical pose for a long moment.
“Supper’s ready…” Joyce’s voice rang from the kitchen; it came like the bell signaling the end of a round in a boxing match. They drew back from one another.
“She needs to have a biopsy run. Let me take her in,” Michael said.
“We’ve prayed for a healing.”
“Dad, there comes a time—”
Joyce walked out onto the porch, and the talking stopped.
“Y’all want a written invitation for supper?” She said. “Now come on before the termites get the food, too.” She returned to the kitchen humming.
“There comes a time when what?” John said.
Michael leaned close to his father in spoke in hushed voice. It was no idle motto; he clearly believed the words he said. “There comes a time when you have to take yourself more seriously or suffer the consequences. You either look at things practically or die.”
“We prayed for healing. She’s in god’s hands now,” John said, and he stood and walked inside the house.
Fried chicken and corn and green beans and hot biscuits for supper: Michael’s favorite. He smiled and sent a thank-you wink to his mother. The food steamed and heated air, honey sweetened it, pickle spiced it. John said the blessing, and they began to eat. No one spoke.
“What’s this about termites?” Michael finally said when the silence became a force, when the task of eating had become a performance.
“We’ve got white ants in the fence, and your father says we’ll have to tear it down,” Joyce said. “Michael, can you remember how you and your father and Marianne all worked together to build that fence? You spend a whole Saturday on it.”
“I remember,” Michael said. He looked at his father, who ate busily, not looking up from his plate, not wanting to hear what Michael said next. “Have you heard from Marianne lately?”
John dropped his fork on his plate. “I thought we agreed not to discuss that anymore.”
“I just thought—”
“You just thought you could make yourself look good by reminding us of your sister.”
“John, please,” Joyce said.
“I just wanted to know if you’ve heard from her. She’s still my sister. I haven’t forgotten her.”
“John… Michael…” She looked at them frantically; she held out her hands as if she wanted to cover their mouths.
“Marianne has chosen her life, John said. “I wash my hands of her.”
Marianne was always John’s favorite. So when she told him on her twentieth birthday that she was going to Nashville to earn her fortune as a country/western singer, he could not refuse. She left with the guitar and a demo tape under her arm and the promise of an interview with the small-time agent. Three days later she called and said things were going well: she had gotten a job performing at a nightclub called Benny’s and was sharing an apartment with a girl who also worked there. Soon the phone calls came further and further apart, and then they stopped. When John called, the roommate would say Marianne was asleep or out or not feeling well.
“I want you to come home,” John said when he finally got in touch with her. “I don’t like what’s going on.
Marianne didn’t answer.
“Do you hear me?”
She began to cry and hung up the phone.
That night John drove the two hundred miles to Nashville; it was easy for him to do. What was not easy was walking up the street and through the saloon-style doors at Benny’s and seeing his daughter naked on a table, squatting before the eager eyes of some balding businessman, spreading her legs for him, throwing back her head, offering to him what she could never give. There were five other girls, the pearly-blue spotlights hollowing all their eyes to pale sockets of glamor.
Through the stale zone of smoke, of cheap cologne and cheaper liquor, for a moment, their eyes met, and a voice inside John said, Go to your daughter. But the lights shaded to red, and Marianne’s skin seemed to glow in the wash of that hot lot. She looked at her father with desperation and misery sufficient to command a landslide; the look said, stay back, Daddy, I’ve got a fever, my bones are on fire. Leave me be.
And so it was that John Elks died a sort of death that night, by way of going deep into himself. He reduced himself to zero: no ego, no aura. Every part of him that was vulnerable, that might ever get hurt, he drew inward.”
John drove quickly out of the city, watching its neon lights diminish to a pale glow in his rear-view mirror. He sped his ruck over the roads that wound home and thought about a song Marianne sang to put herself to sleep when she was a child. He found himself singing that song weakly, softly as a girl: Goodnight ladies, farewell ladies, sweet dreams, ladies. I’m going to leave you now. His hope was gone, like dropped jewelry descended beneath water, out of reach.
Now Michael was talking again. “What should we do?”
“Your father says it has to be torn down and burned,” Joyce said.
“I’m talking about Marianne. Is there anything we can do for her?”
John stood up. “I’m tearing it down, now.”
“What? Why now?” Joyce said. “You haven’t even finished your supper.”
“It’ll be cooler to work in the evening. I’m tearing it down tonight.” And he was out of the kitchen, through the porch door, and walking across the yard. Michael followed him.
“Dad, wait,” he said.
John stopped and faced him. It was almost night, and in the paling autumn twilight cicadas sent their zany song screaming out of the trees and into the air. For a few moments father and son remained silent in that stance, facing one another through the coming darkness.
“I have a deal for you, Dad,” Michael said. “You have faith enough to believe God can heal mom. Let’s pray to God that He’ll rid the fence of the termites. If He does it, if the termites are gone tomorrow, good—your fence problems are over. If not, you’ll let me take Mom in for an examination.”
“You can’t test the Lord that way. She’s in His hands.”
Michael crossed his arms and shrugged. “You would trust your wife in these divine invisible hands, but not your fence? Have you ever seen these hands? Have you ever been touched by them?”
“Why don’t you ask yourself if she’ll get the tests?”
“Because she’ll ask you, and you’ll say, No, the Lord’s going to send a healing, and she’ll do whatever you tell her.”
Far away, in the hollows of some black swamp, a lonely hound let loose a howl. The sorrowful sound traced the sky up to the moon and filled the night with its echoes of violent solitude.
John lowered his head and sighed. “God forgive me,” he whispered.
“I’ll pray first.” Michael raised his eyes heavenward. His voice wavering with sanctimony, he offered his prayer: “Lordy, Lord, kill the bugs in the fence. Amen.”
“There’s a place called Hell for people who set themselves above God,” John said.
“There’s a place called a hospital for people who are sick.”
“I’m going to my room.” John turned and headed toward the house.
Michael called after him. “To pray?”
He answered over his shoulder. “To pray.”
He went inside and not to his room, but out the back door and across the yard, glancing at the house to be sure his son did not see him, to the toolshed that sat into the far corner of the yard, shrouded by the limbs and shadows of a weeping willow. Gathering every noxious liquid in the shed, he blended a rank poison, filling the mason jar to the rim. He held the jar up to the moonbeams coming through a hole in the shed and let the shine lace the poison’s promise. There, he thought, that should do the job.
Rather breathlessly he tip-toed out of the shed and back around the house, holding the jar out, away from his body because some of the poison was sloshing over the top. He could hear Joyce and Michael talking in the kitchen, and he hunched lower to the earth. He went to the spot in the fence where the insects had emerged that morning, set down his poison, and searched for them in the pale moonlight. They were not there. His eyes could have burned holes in the fence, such was the intensity of his searching, but he saw not one termite. On his hands and knees, he crawled the length of the fence and back again. He scanned the slats, pulled at the splinters, examining the fence as though the world depended on some brief show of life there.
“John?” Joyce’s voice came from the porch.
He turned and saw her and Michael standing side by side, their figures silhouetted by the yellow porchlight.
“Dad, what’s going on out there?”
John crouched and tried to make himself utterly small. He held his breath.
Michael started across the yard and clicked on a flashlight, and John suddenly found himself inside the arena of white. He blinked his eyes and held up his hands to shield off the light.
“What are you doing?” Michael said. He shone the flashlight on the jar sitting on the grass.
“They’re all gone,” John said.
“Dad—”
“You don’t understand,” John said. He stood and put his hands on his son’s shoulders. “They were already gone. Maybe your prayer—”
“Come on, Dad, let’s go. The mosquitoes are biting.” He wrapped an arm around John’s shoulders and led him toward the house. “I’ve talked to Mom. She’s been having a lot of pain. She wants to get an examination. She’s really scared, Dad.”
“I looked for them, but they were gone,” John said.
“Dad, are you listening to me? I’m going to take her in tomorrow morning, okay?”
As they approached the house, John looked to the night sky. He remembered his high school astronomy and how a star died. When its energy supply is gone, a super giant presses against its center, explodes and collapses in on itself to become a dwarf. And so, he thought, even the celestials draw inward to die the death that allows them to exist. He thought of dying stars to escape thinking about the worst thing of all—not his lack of faith, not even his own blasphemy, but the failure to be enough of a martyr so that infested fences, suffering wives, prostituted daughters and lost songs would seem mere emblems of that same desecration of himself.
They were on the porch now.
“Joyce,” John said. She leaned close to him to kiss his cheek, and then she turned and went inside.
“Come on,” Michael said, hold open the porch door.
“Go on. I’ll be in soon.”
“Dad—”
“Go.”
So Michael left him alone, and John sat on the steps of the porch. He raised his head to the breeze and let the smell of dark earth fill him, the breeze like cool velvet on his face. Above him, the moon was high and the stars were in order, so he surrendered to that living night and let it seep into him through his skin. He stood up and suddenly felt weightless, as though he were suspended in a vacuum. He walked out into the dirt road, and for what seemed a long time he looked up at the sky. Then he closed his eyes and bowed his head, and he lifted on quivering hand high into the darkness and waited to be touched.
After earning a B.A. in English from George Mason University, Jonathan Bowen graduated from the creative writing program at the University of Virginia. He has published short stories in numerous literary magazines, and his plays have been produced in Washington DC and Baltimore. For the past 10 years, he has served as the speech writer for the president of the University of Virginia.