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A Failure in Narrative by L. Le Grys Some heart once pregnant with celestial fire" Thomas Gray Gabriel God knows was no beauty even when young a scarecrow made out of barbed wire and grain sacks a few fistfuls of dry grass for hair and to tell his story for so many years now I have tried to tell the story of Gabriel Ferris but there is no story just a death a life most would scarcely consider a life of odd jobs gardening carpentry yard work a trailer up back on the land he got from his uncle where he grew superlative pot a legendary gardener which he sold cheap to keep him in beer and vodka the trailer a ruin surrounded by flowers and fruit-trees each fall spent deep in the woods hunting alone where he died a stray hunter's bullet that struck aimed if aimed at all if not simply shot off in some fit of exuberance or inattention at something else his body to be found in the spring by chance also for no one had missed him who would have known he was missing not even his daughter went up there three times in a year anymore and the genius which it seems didn't interest him much for he played as years passed seldomer a happy man there it is 2 to begin or rather to get to the end with dispatch it begins in a barn Jesus just like that and a crowd of drunk teenagers in late spring Carrie just seventeen aloof and artistic applying to schools out of here which is nowhere and certain to get there but why was she here for no reason at all almost certainly bored and uncertain the friend who had brought her an alibi probably getting fucked in a stall laid in a manger unconsciously sipping a bottle hoping to blend in the rough grain of the wall small black-eyed crop-haired calculating miles of dirt road to be walked in the dark if she doesn't wait for her ride unconscious of the boys on hay bales with electric guitars playing not badly for the others not using the stalls the smell of cheap beer and pot and hay and manure and heavy machinery and some sort of perfume from somewhere 3 Gabriel she knew of course in a town of a size where no one is unknown knew that he played the guitar knew he was good everyone knew yet she never had heard him as she never had lain on the floor of a stall and so did not know what he was who he was yes everyone knew yet no one even those who had heard him especially those who had heard him knew what 4 the others loved it also everyone did all who ever heard him loved it but none ever knew what it was they thought it was him the girls did the ones who briefly enchanted fell in love while he played with it thinking it him the spell lasting long enough for them to lead him to the floor of a stall the tall brush at the gravel pit the back of a car almost anywhere some of them so long as it lasted but it didn't last long and none of them ever went twice until Carrie because she alone understood that it was not him she alone fell in love with him it first but then him she alone knew on her back in the stall it was he not it she was getting 5 I heard him much later this a party for grown-ups where I was the one the one who knew what he was though I didn't know who a living-room this time at a house by the lake with glasses and wine and nice clothes though Gabriel looked like the yard man which he was certainly everyone wondered who didn't know him what he was doing there drinking beer from the keg on the lawn from a plastic cup when the host impeccable in a blazer called him to play and sat at the grand piano to accompany him the company settled resignedly filling glasses as Gabriel sat a bit drunk already with an old telecaster on a folding chair emptied the cup and they played and I knew who the hell is that I asked someone under my breath he mows Frederick's lawn was the answer 6 I alone knew the others knew he was good very good they enjoyed it like the kids in the barn waiting their turn in the stalls but he was not good but something else beyond that beyond him and he knew it so long as he played he played with it or it played with him then it stopped when he stopped for he was not it it was not it the girls led to the stalls though they thought it was he went back to the keg on the lawn he had mowed that morning and I followed him I knew he was not it but I followed him for it was in him and we knew our eyes met and we knew 7 Carrie followed him too that first night their eyes met as he played she had moved closer to the front in the light and there he had seen her seen her look and she was the first she knew what it was and he knew she knew when she followed him he was not it she followed him she was the first and he knew her 8 that was the summer of Eden spent it would seem in their memory as one endless day by a pond in the woods on a rock naked in post-coital repose and lucidity skin cool from the water droplets damp hair he fingering idly the frets of a guitar she sketching intent oblivious to all but lines tracing with a pencil the edge of his back the ribs through pale skin the tight ridges of his scrotum pulled cold from the water the feet scratched and calloused and long fingers with hair on the knuckles and countless nights all dark away from fires and porch lights in barns in tall grass backs of cars against the tin walls of sheds filled with heavy machinery as common as dirt 9 she told me much later after the death both of us a bit drunk she still in a rage almost beautiful still she must have been beautiful she was pretty I've seen the pictures small compact dark hair cropped short her eyes black and challenging as she talked in a rage though she was no longer beautiful but a middle-aged woman her hair now long drying gray in an early drought her funky clothes self-made she wasn't yet forty having entered the period and the class where a decade or two is irrelevant a few years of work at the mill and a child a wild one and there she was though the hair was still something like flowers hung to dry upside-down now grown out a single luxury never quite reaching luxuriant but still something and the funky clothes she still made for herself and the child the eyes black always angry even when smiling aloof but no longer ambitious but for survival a simple ambition against annihilation in the mill and the child she loved that had ruined her a child born conceived surely out of control and beautiful much more fucked than her mother 10 no there is no story so long I have tried to tell for Carrie yes there's a story as common as dirt it's the lack of a story that calls the attention look there is nothing would you believe it a vacuum abhorrent and he of course the happy one 11 that child the wild one beside whom even Gabriel seemed staid and respectable for his manner always was quiet gentle and friendly whether drunk stoned at work or all three but Gabby Gabriela named in the first burst of enthusiasm when the ordeal of birth had ended for a seventeen-year-old mother scarcely five feet tall without hips already out of the house of shocked Presbyterian parents graduated two weeks before as salutatorian giving the speech on a milk crate in order to reach the microphone and her belly my God what a belly I saw the picture you'd think it'd pull her right down off the rostrum below the picture her name grade-point average to attend in the fall New York University to study art a caption perhaps not the child premature at least she wore shoes 12 in two months she was caught in the mill and Gabriel who would never get caught in the mill was already up back on his land in the trailer his uncle's old hunting camp alone for the end had come when he offered to marry her for that was the source of her rage not in twenty years not after when he had died would it rest for she knew she told me he was offering not asking 13 he was perfectly willing she told me he wasn't begrudging he loved me he always loved me but I saw for the first time I knew it or knew what it meant that for him it was indifferent one way or the other not just marriage not just the child to him everything was indifferent the music this place this place I hated that all my life I had aimed to escape for to me then I knew it when I suddenly knew him when I knew what he meant for to me nothing is ever indifferent 14 it wasn't his fault I never said that he didn't seduce me he didn't abandon me he just struck me by chance a stray hunter's bullet but unlucky for me unlike him I wasn't struck in the brain just winged a bad wound festering always but it never will kill me it never will kill me but God he was beautiful useless and beautiful I know what he looked like so did he the only man alive he said ugly as his own dick the kindest gentlest man I have known deadly and beautiful Typhoid Mary was probably sweet as a blackberry pie and pretty as a goldfinch she said 15 but Gabby the child the frail lovely scene of countless quite maculate non-conceptions and many various hitherto untried experiments in chemical reaction by the time she had reached seventeen a head taller than her mother and now a body thinner also without hips long hair of dry grass from her father one of those girls found in trailer parks mostly whose body even when clothed seems naked the clothes merely hanging for the time being as on a rack bright sweet raucous utterly careless with her mother's gifts more than her mother's her mother says at nineteen she was waitressing partying fucking partying even I I never told Carrie had her once she's too kind 16 to control such a child once she hit puberty Carrie must have known it was coming that child of nature lovely savage I saw her first four-years old in a loose homemade dress bright red barefoot shrieking chasing a kitten through Gabriel's fruit-trees to control such a child once she hit puberty just when a corner had maybe been turned for Carrie broken free from the mill she had opened the gift shop selling water-colors began to turn pottery now we're both pot-dealers Gabriel said and she laughed briefly above the still rage but she knew she must have known what was coming to control such a child who can always break out to her father's up back in the woods away from lectures harangues to get pot alcohol sleep with boys or the older men she attracted even at fifteen when a child has access to a world without law just a step in the woods to her father's a father whose comment on finding his daughter at sixteen years old giving statutory head on his door-step to a friend of the family is take that out of your mouth you don't know where it's been as she chokes with laughter and says tastes like the back of a cow to control such a child she must have known was impossible a feral cat sleek lovely elusive licking milk from a bowl submitting perhaps to a brief stroking before vanishing back to the woods from whose darkness the echoes of her nightly carousels destroy sleep 17 destroy sleep the look of the mother who never sleeps the face which even unconscious for the body at least must fail sometime collapse knows no repose is constricted in dread of the blow to come not to her not to the mother to the child to the child run loose in the forest in hunting season 18 I saw the face collapsed on my sofa the half-empty bottle of whiskey still open on the kitchen table where was Gabby I wondered as I tucked in the blanket and turned out the light probably drunker much drunker I thought when I sat on my bed and stared at the window imagining her in the night that stray hunter's bullet that Gabriel now five months dead and half a day buried once shot off in a fit of exuberance or inattention aiming of this alone we can be certain at nothing at all 19 just what he was aiming at nothing at all so you see as I said the trouble for to tell a story one must see a trajectory the beginning the end the arc of its passage yet for Gabriel he began and he ended was there almost forty years it's laid out before me yet the connections between these points elude the grasp so many years I have tried to tell no story 20 that first night we lit out from the party ten minutes after our eyes met I climbed in his truck and we drove out to the trailer half an hour on rutted dirt roads without lights the guitar in its case sliding back and forth in the bed of the truck and I followed him through the lush darkness of Eden at night to sit on the porch smoke pot drink beer from a can and talk about music John Coltrane Gram Parsons Howlin' Wolf and Icelandic sagas the Bactrian campaign of Alexander the Great we smoked too much pot and drank too much beer from cans Jesus he said you're going to wash out the hollyhocks pissing so much off the deck and I spoke not turning around staring up at the stars as the piss hit the ground what the hell are you doing here exactly where he said ought I to be do you think I turned back the joint glowed at his lips he smiled then again it was dark you know yes I know he said and I knew he had heard it before and it bored him and even that night I had known him six hours even that night I could already hear him without asking the questions and the laugh for the laugh I had already heard if you would believe it there it is Copyright 2010. All rights reserved.
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