They Who Think the World is Theirs

© 2003 Stephen M. Dare
All rights reserved.

he. . . still will be stopping
The flakes in the air with a look,
Surrounding himself with the silence
Of whitening snarls.

—James Dickey, "For the Last Wolverine"

We lost Marcus one weekend in the fall. He was thirteen months old, walking by himself and saying such words as "Dad" and "Ma" and "ball." He was also a night owl, resisting any attempts to put him in his crib to sleep until he was nearly exhausted, which often came around midnight. He would sleep long nights and wouldn't get up until ten or eleven the next morning. The night before we lost him, which was a Friday, he was asleep by eleven so it wasn't so odd that by ten-thirty the next morning he was still asleep. When Jessie and I were up by eleven, we checked on him, and that changed everything.

It's the same old story that you read about or see on TV: the autopsy and its long-awaited report, the people visiting and bringing dinners and condolences and the funeral. I cancelled the writing classes that I teach at the university in Normal for that week, and Jessie took a week's leave from teaching at the elementary school in town. It was all too much for any one mind to absorb, which gives everything you encounter a strange, empty feel. You could compare it to a dream, but one that you experience when you are wide awake. Your world has taken a massive jolt, and everything takes on a skewed look

The afternoon after we found Marcus in his crib, not breathing and cold, I took to the backyard, numbness coursing through my mind as if it refused to believe such a jolt in my world had taken place. I set to burning a brushpile I had produced last summer from overgrown bushes I had trimmed on the edges of our property, dousing the grass around the bonfire with water from a hose. I was focused on working with my hands, getting away from my papers and class plans and e-mail and prepping and moving about outside, underneath a deep October sky. The fire pulling tight on my face, I worked numbly, moving and acting, grasping the saw and cutting wood and stirring the fire, releasing sparks and pouring forth heat. When the brush was mostly burnt away and the coals stirred orange-hot, I cut down more branches and limbs, working and moving and thinking blindly that these limbs were up when Marcus was alive. A few days ago; a week ago; a month ago: they had been alive together. And now I was taking them down, killing them and putting them into a smoking, wet fire that was eating up the big pile that my son had walked around that summer in his shorts or overalls or swimtrunks, his eyes wide with awe. I didn't need a mirror to see myself then; I know how I looked.

A slow, cold wind came up from the rye fields to the north, stirring the smoke through the backyard. I went beside the toolshed in the tall ornamental grass and threw up the lunch I barely ate.

That was October. Jessie and I tried to live like we had in the years before Marcus, but it didn't work. You can never go back in time. There is always too much that has happened. Life gives you experience. It brought the experience of Marcus into our lives and worked that experience into the compost of our lives together. It changed us, our way of thinking and being and relating to each other. It wasn't until January that I realized that we would never go back to how we had been. We had joined the ranks of Parents Who'd Lost a Child and were struggling painfully but enduringly to Move On. Dreams came: I'd get out of bed in the dark morning and go to the bathroom and make the trip down the hall to the baby's room and place the backs of my fingers on his warm sleeping cheek and I would wonder if he were dead or alive. My not knowing has transformed into a nightmare in which there is the constant question of when death comes. How soon after I check him does he somehow fail to turn just right in his crib so that he is not obstructed by a pillow or blanket? When does he go? When does that warmth dwindle to a lukewarm, to a coolness, and finally to a chill? When does it happen? This dream ends with my never being able to bring it together, with me stumbling around stupidly, incompetent in action, incoherent in speech and thought.

Inability and idiocy runs rampant in those dreams, but there is a rioting fear that surrounds me in another dream I have often had: Beneath a sky that is cold and gray, I stand in an endless rye field, grainheads brushing against my pants. Children are around me in the rye, playing and yelling and laughing, and I know that I am there to protect them, but I have no idea what from. I know that Marcus is around somewhere, too, because I can hear him laughing his little boy's laugh, but I don't know where he is exactly. But it is not that which terrifies me: it is the knowledge that these children—carefree and happy—are being hunted by something and that I have nothing to protect them with. It could be that the thing hunting them is death itself, a thing that will strike all of them down once it comes, but I know that it is never that simple. All I can do is stand in the rye, the breeze rippling over the field, watching the children play, and all the while my heart is pounding and my lungs are aching as if I can't catch my breath. All I can do is wait with dread for this big, dark thing, for whatever it is that is coming.

In each of these dreams, I am, simply put, impotent: I know nothing about Marcus on the night he dies, and I am unable to protect him or any other child I see.

I've heard of some parents dreaming of their dead children and how those children would be when they are teenagers or adults: peaceful dreams of a lost hope. Other times I've heard about dreams of grasping hands in the dark, a child's hands or a baby's chubby hands grasping at air, grasping at the light that falls over them: trying to seize at life, grasping and pulsing, but they are gradually swallowed by the blackness that surrounds them.

These nightmares, I am sure, will come to me inevitably.

When does he go?

In late January, the snows came with drifts that buried us in for a few days. Most of that snow was completely melted by mid-February. More snows came later, though not enough to bury us in again. It was, however, enough to remind me that I needed to be more than careful in my trips to Normal for my teaching. I drive a little Ford Escort that is lightweight and has a rough go most times in snowy weather. On ice-packed roads, I am sure to never go more than thirty or thirty-five miles per hour, and I always have my headlights on, even in the bright sun. I carry along an emergency pack with hand-warming packets, candles, a flashlight, even a little sewing kit. I've never been stranded or stuck in bad weather, but should such a time come, I'm more than ready to deal with it. And if I think the snow is bad enough, I cancel class so I won't have to drive. I've done that a time or two, though I don't like to cancel class. Usually when it snows, it turns out better than expected, and the county plows typically get the roads clear in a day or so after a storm.

Sometime in late February, a day after a small storm came through, I was on my way to Normal on Route 122 in the early morning, going through the newly white countryside, when I noticed ahead of me a couple of pickup trucks with their hazards flashing. The trucks were edged over in the drifted ditch, but as I came to them I dismissed my first idea that they were stuck: the trucks were over-sized and powerful, their heavy tires wrapped in snow-chains. They made me think of the kind of people and attitudes you would meet up with at a country music concert or Nascar race. The guys who had driven them seemed to fit that mold pretty well too, at least from what I could see. Two of them were standing in the bed of the second truck, and one was looking through binoculars; the other man was shading his eyes in the sun. The third, who was down between the two trucks but more toward the road, had also been searching that way, and when I drove past he glanced at me. He was bundled up in coveralls like the others and had a John Deere stocking cap stuffed over his beefy head. He wore a thick, camouflaged hunting coat.

I drove on, trying to focus on the audio book I had been listening to, but also giving thought to what these guys were so interested in. Whatever it was, it had enough of their attention to stop them in their big trucks.

Between Stanford and Danvers, Route 122 snakes around. When I saw these men, I had been going north. 122 then veers east, back toward Normal, and when I went around that curve, I saw another truck—this one a smaller, F-150 type—off to the side of the road ahead of me. Again, a man in coveralls and a hunting coat and orange cap was standing in the truckbed looking south with a pair of binoculars. Again, I wondered what had these men's attention—it was obviously something in the middle of the field that they were watching.

I drove on, thinking about deer scrounging for corn, or coyotes running in that field. Neither made much sense, since animals like that avoid going out in bright winter daylight. But guys like those clowns with their gun racks and trucks have never made much sense to me either: the world isn't theirs.

In my classes we often talk about anything and everything that has to do with the world around my students, most of whom are freshmen, and me. But since it is a college writing class, we try to discuss topics that involve writing essays for different audiences and that can "dialogue effectively in an academic community," or so says the instructor's manual the English department has given me. Common topics involve my disdain for the five-paragraph theme, narrow and vague thesis statements, conclusions that merely restate, poorly worded paragraphs, and incorrectly formatted papers. I just tell my students to write: Write, by God, just write; write about topics and issues that concern you, take a stand on these issues, research them, and revise enough so that your essays argue and educate. But I don't want to go on at length about the theories of composition. Though I know such writing is important, I'm not a fan of it. But the students need to know how to do it, and someone has to teach it, I guess, so I've found a comfortable niche.

I teach four basic freshman and secondary writing classes a semester, which means the workload can be heavy. It's tempting to get out of college instruction to find something that pays a little better and doesn't have such a grueling workload. But I find ways to deal with it. I set quotas pretty well, motivating myself to get so much graded in a day. And though I assign a lot of reading and writing, which I have to deal with during in-class discussions and grading, I can manage this load so that I have time to myself. I can read what I want and write when I want. I can watch movies when I want. And when we had Marcus, I stayed home with him during the day and taught at night. When I don't have to teach, I like to do all kinds of things outdoors. In the winter I might walk through snow-covered fields as the full moon rises to the east and I'll wonder what it would take for me to camouflage myself so well with the snow that I might disappear so well into it that I would think I no longer exist as anything but snow. I could convince myself that my life matters no more than the individual snowflakes around me. I could vanish into that if I wanted, and I would be just fine with it.

When it is warmer out, I do some kayaking and fishing on a little river that runs near town. I can spend days on the river and in the woods with very little, and with a little imagination I can begin to believe that I am the only person in the world. I imagine that Marcus is with me and I talk out loud to him sometimes, telling him about deer I see or about floating in my kayak, only I call it "our kayak." It is just he and me alone with the water and trees and wind, away from all people and their petty rituals like work and appointments and television and church. By no means do I ever need religion. The way I see it, any kind of religion is just another tool for people to justify their fucking up just about everything they touch or see, to help them think they deserve the world. I learned a long time ago that such beliefs are not for me. Give me a book I can read and a large area of woodland and I'll be just fine.

Sometimes I wonder if being out in the woods and on the river and reading a lot of books on such things as dada art, surrealism, and American and world history has done something to me. All of that taken together with the loss of Marcus have made up this journey to this part of my life. I've written a lot and read a lot and grew up in a little farming town and work in a fairly large city. I've watched television, listened to the radio, seen a lot of movies; I've read magazines and ads, seen commercials, lots of them.

So I have to wonder, am I a strange and new kind of Diaspora? Am I a compost of all that I have experienced in my life, a little bit of everything I have seen, done, and known? Am I misplaced in time, an anachronism? Or am I something predestined, a thing unchanged and predisposed in all my experience?

I know that I am each of these and so much beyond any definition: I am the worst kind of Diaspora you could ever meet. But you would never know it. You might see me on the street or in the hallway, but you would never know what you have seen. Your eyes would instead pass over me because I blend: there is snow, and there are flakes of snow, but you won't see them in the drift. You will only see the cold deep drift. You will miss the flakes for the world, which is not mine.

And so I blend: at one of the Thursday night sessions we talked about the "nature of writing." Attendance was fairly full, which is odd, especially after a month of being back in session, when students have once again become comfortable with their coursework. And though Thursday nights are not terrible nights for attendance, they are not great either; at a big college like this, many students begin their weekend on Thursday afternoon, so Thursday night classes and Friday classes suffer. Not this night, however. The class was well-stocked, students working hard on their second papers of the semester and acting a little wild, as can happen on Thursdays. They were loud, they interrupted each other, they debated with pent-up excitement and anger. I told them to relax, to think first, then speak; to be courteous, to listen to each other. Class discussion can meander, and I expect them to, and that's okay as long as we talk about ideas that we can learn from. So based on that, I knew I wanted to talk about the nature of writing, but I had no idea where the class would end up.

The nature of writing: What is it? I asked, Can we define such a nature? I talked about an author named Natalie Goldberg who had said once that writing comes from a deep, bestial place within the mind and the soul, if you believe in such a thing. I added that I believed that writing is wild, like an animal pacing in its cage, almost daring you to let it out.

I paused. Some students, especially a couple of the young women, are passionate about such ideas as equal rights, feminism, sexism. I wanted to tap into this passion, to get them motivated, and direct it into the atmosphere.

"Is writing like an animal?" I asked. "Is it anxious, is it a fiery, maybe even a primitive expression?"

At first no one said anything, so I kept pushing: "What if I said that the 1930s' South was a paradise for all people, that it was as fair as possible to everyone who lived in it? What if I claimed that all African-Americans, Hispanics, Native Americans, and Arabs in this country have it just as well as white people?" I let that sink in. I could already detect a rising red wall from somewhere in the class.

But I kept on with it. "What if I claimed that these groups, as well as women, have it as well as they're ever going to get it in America? That there is no sexism, no racism, anymore? That it's all fair, it's all equal? That women are valued for their minds and that they earn just as much money as men for doing the same jobs?"

One of the young women—an Irish redhead named Lindsey—had that red wall up and was pushing it at the class and me: she knew that most of the nine men in the class read the magazine _Maxim. "That's crap," she said. Her face was growing red. "I know you don't believe that, but a lot of people do. It's ridiculous."

"Why?" I asked.

"They're blind, then—"

I cut her off, pointing my finger at nothing. "Put that in writing. Put your response in writing. Write it out with that passion and let it sit and then come back to it. Revise it. But start it with passion."

Another young woman—a Katie—looked like she wanted to say something, but I kept at it: "What is writing?"

"A fire," Ron said from across the room. Ron was a business major, fairly well committed to working hard, which I liked. "A passion that comes from inside you, like anger."

"Like an emotion then?" I said.

"Yeah, like an emotion—it can be tied in with emotion, I guess. Like if you're angry...."

"Ah yes, like Lindsey."

"Yeah—if you're angry or sad or scared, you can write that out," Ron said.

"Okay, I can buy that," I said. "So it's a tool?"

"It's a tool that you can learn to use." This came from Patrick, who sat next to Ron. Patrick was a video game nut, not totally interested in the class and a little tough to motivate. He was wearing a St. Louis Cardinals jersey and an Illinois State University ballcap with the price tag still attached.

I raised my eyebrows. Impressive, I thought. "Very good," I said. "You have to learn it to use it. But what can you learn from something that I'm comparing to a wild animal like a snow lynx or a wolverine—something wild and unpredictable ... probably even dangerous? And, by the way, writing is dangerous; it's a thousand times mightier than the sword. But let's think about writing and its nature. A passion of what? Tell me, what is it that separates us from animals?"

"We can think," Patrick continued, conveniently derailing himself.

I didn't say anything. I let half the class have its laugh. I was glad the students were paying attention.

"We can reason," Katie said.

"Yes, but so can some animals. Some, not all. Anything else?"

"Creation," Ron said, and I thought, Man, what are you doing in this class?

"Specifically."

"We create things," he said. "Like art ... expression."

"Excellent," I said. "Yes ... expression. And writing is expression. One of the first forms of expression was writing on cave walls—not writing as we think of it so much, but pictures and lines and arrows. People were writing what they thought—a record, a history, an expression of events and feelings on walls: the creation of a text on walls. They expressed themselves. Writing was born and developed on such surfaces, on rock and on wooden tablets, and then carried on in paper scrolls.

"Its nature is wild and unpredictable and certainly dangerous because it can build up and it can also destroy, as if it is a tool of the gods."

Some of the students had perplexed looks on their faces, but I let that sink in. Then I continued: "Writing is, of course, expression but it's also communication—the cave walls, histories. It's used to communicate ideas, commands, wishes, promises, and countless other things: it's been used to put people to death; to create kingdoms; to grant freedom; to send messages. And because of the power of the written word—the depth of language on paper, the emotions it can conjure, the commands it gives—writing is often seen as mysterious, strange, and frightening."

I was quiet for a second. Then: "You know how others, maybe even yourselves, see writing. It's a mystery at best. And a lot of people say they hate writing. I think it's because they fear it. They see it as something that they cannot do or that they will fail at ... and how you could fail at writing on a scrap of paper is hard to see for me, but I digress ... they fear writing because of how the beast—the tool, the art, whatever you want to call it—has been presented to them or taught to them. Probably when they were young—grade-school young—they had a teacher who did something very, very bad: they imposed a set of rules on a thing that refuses to be ruled ... on a beast that doesn't want to be caged by rules ... rules that have been made up in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in order to"—and I gave a laugh—"conquer or master a thing that by its very nature is wild and simply unwilling to adhere to a few rules. Because it's natural and because it's wild and it is therefore dangerous."

I looked at the students. They were all watching me, most of them with a focused, sharp attention. I was on a roll and happy with it. But I wanted to turn it back to them.

"Can you give me a few of these 'rules' you may have heard about? Rules that were posted on your fifth grade or eighth grade classroom bulletin board. Maybe not even rules necessarily, but maybe even models of writing...?"

"Five-paragraph theme," Patrick said.

"Ah yes, good," I said. "That evil monster. Certainly. Anything else?"

Lindsey, the redhead said, "Can't use 'I' anywhere in your paper."

"Thank you, Lindsey," I said and smiled. "Jesus, what a rule. Can there be anything more oppressive, you guys, than taking away your right to refer to yourself as 'I'? It's absurd."

"Seven sentences to a paragraph," Katie said.

"Another nasty one from the fifth grade," I said.

"Thesis at the end of the first paragraph," Patrick said.

I was smiling. "Another one, man. In a lot of writing—at least the kind we're doing in here—you know that there is often no stated thesis. It's more implicit or hidden, for the reader to deduce him- or herself. And in some argumentive formats, the thesis will come at the end of the paper, or in the middle somewhere, and it can be explicit or implicit, depending on what the author sees is most effective. Any others?" I turned to the board and wrote these rules down with my black dry-erase marker. After a few minutes, they had almost twelve rules down.

I turned back to the class.

"These are rules that teachers and composition scholars dreamed up—most of them your good old traditional phonies," I said, smiling. I turned back and drew a wide, forbidding X over the white board. "They thought that rhetorical papers—essays—had to comply with these rules. Man, were they wrong. What they ended up doing was stifling creative thought, and they made writing out to be a strict, gray-haired librarian who had to have quiet, who had to have control and rules at all times. They turned it into a boring task of rules and laws, a task that is drained of passion because you're always worried about breaking these rules instead of letting your mind go where it wants. They turned it into a chore, and one that you had to get right on the first try or the first draft. If you didn't get it right, you got an 'F' written at the top of your paper in blood-red ink and there were red marks scratched all over your paper—your paper that you put yourself into, expressed yourself in. What kid is going to want to keep writing after that? What kid is going to want to even write stories after that? Poetry? Personal essays? No kid I know. It's no wonder that a lot of middle schoolers and high schoolers hate writing—they associate it not only with rules and school and structure and boredom, but also failure and embarrassment. So why subject yourself to that?

"And yet think of this theory: maybe, maybe you are supposed to hate writing. In many ways this applies to reading, as well. Reading books that make you think, that is; fluff books are all right because they ask no questions, they pose no problems. I know that offhand that sounds ridiculous. Writing, though, helps you think more clearly and easily. It's a tool you can use to voice an opinion that has been revised, thought out, and revised again and again until it is as effective as possible and then presented to the appropriate audience. But how can you do that if you have been taught to hate the craft? How can you put pen to paper if you've been taught that writing is a science, that it is made up of hard rules and laws, rights and wrongs? What will happen is that you won't write because by the time you're old enough to form an educated opinion—if you even have the motivation to do so—you will hate writing with a passion? And you won't come forward with your opinion, revised, presented in letterhead to your nearest congressman or to your employer or your newspaper or special interest group. You won't publish a poem or short story or novel that asks questions, that helps people think about life and about what they and the human species are doing on this planet. And the consequence is that social change—let alone change in your life—is even farther away.

"Now I'm making a few leaps here," I said, "but many theories are built like that—with leaping ideas that seem vaguely connected. You just have to work out the details. In fact, Einstein said that 'if at first the idea is not absurd then there is no hope for it.' And to prove what I'm saying is reasonable would obviously take a book-length project. Only a handful of people run this country—anyone with any average perception and education can see that. They control the money, and with that money they control the government, lawmakers, and the media. Their influence on you is inescapable. and their biggest fear is that one day they will lose their powers over the masses, that they will fall from their ivory tower. But that is not likely to happen, because they have inherited a near-perfect system of distraction, and if you blindly accept that this system—this world, today—is natural, and if you sit back and let these people remain somehow untouchable at the top, you may well grow numb: you get married, you have kids, you have your SUV and your suburban house, your kids' soccer games on Saturdays, TV on weeknights, you worry about bills, taxes, insurance, the stock market, a social life, being attractive, and whether Ross will get back with Rachel—all of this is greatly simplified, but: How can you ever be concerned with how the country is working if you are so busy—or so distracted—with such a life? And everyone that you know and have ever known lives like this, and because you have been discouraged to read and write, you simply don't have—or have lost, or sold out—the imagination you could use to imagine and even work toward a happier life, a life where you don't feel so numb, so robotic. But it's okay, because how could you miss something you have never experienced or even imagined? Ignorance, like they say, is bliss, and you've settled with this life. And in the meantime, your president is sending young people to die in the Enemy Country of the Month; racism is still rampant; millions of people—including children—are starving on our very streets; people are shooting each other; depression is at an all-time high not only among adults, but teenagers as well.

"But why would you care? Ross is back with Rachel, you're paying your bills, you've got soccer games to go to, a social life to keep, an SUV and a half-million dollar house to pay off, a job and colleagues and a boss to please ... I don't want to talk at length about distraction, but I want you to think of imagination, of wonder. Of empathy, of trying to understand the pain of someone less fortunate than you. Think of problems in your community, in your world. And think on this theory: they get you to hate writing and reading so you can remain ignorant and numb and so you won't have the rhetorical and critical thinking skills and imagination or even the motivation to effectively address the problems of the country without having to use a gun. All so a few people can remain at the top and in control."

I didn't say anything else about that, but I kept thinking about it. I let the students go a little early that night, making sure they all knew what was due the following week.

And yet still I blend: the night was silent and starry as I drove home after class. The moon was new so the only definite light in the snowy, gray country was occasional carlights and halogen lights at farms I passed and could see in the distance. Although it was dark—black and gray-dark, the dark of no-moon, even with snow blanketing the ground—I could see a lot of things I usually would have missed a long way over the fields: silos, rows of hedge trees, fencelines, even little black marks in distant pastures that I took for cattle or horses. Though I was usually tired after teaching, on this night I was alert, seeing these things in the great distance. Still, I yawned a time or two, happy to be going home and to be out on a night like this with the fields and the sky: the stars were big and deep and bright, and I wondered why I hadn't noticed them in that way before. They were brilliant and unchanging; there wasn't a cloud in the sky, no one near me on the road, and I could see forever, it seemed, even though the moon was tucked away somewhere up there in the big black.

It was a cold winter night, and I was alone. I was glad for that; I like to be alone.

When I approached the place where the third truck had been that morning back in February, I saw that south, across the field, a vehicle on another road had aimed a bright spotlight north and into the field. The car or truck was parked on that road, its headlights barely bright from where I could see it, overtaken by the violent brightness of the spotlight that cut over the field.

I headed around the first curve, going from west to south, and saw a good distance ahead of me another vehicle coming my way. Its bright headlights were on, and even from where I was I could see that it was pretty big, a truck probably, and moving fast and sure. To my left—southeast now—I could see the other car or truck parked nearly half a mile up the road. It was facing east, away from me and the other truck coming my way.

Coming up on the truck, I could see that it wasn't as big as I'd thought, but that it rolled on thick, rugged tires, had high CB antennas riding with it on each side of the cab, and carried an iron-like set of bars ahead of its grill. When it was turning to its right, keeping its bright headlights on and cutting me through the eyes, I saw that it boasted a set of small deer antlers as a hood ornament. It gunned hard to the east, heading for the other truck.

Coming to the turnoff, I slowed and turned. The road sign—which I had passed many times and never had the sense to pay attention to—said that I was now on Muldrow Road. I gassed my Escort hard but not too hard so as to alarm the people in the truck. Staying back just enough, I saw that the rusted tailgate was riddled with bumper stickers, some old and tattered, others looking new. In the bed of the truck was a man who sat out of the wind and looking back at me under a bright orange stocking cap; he held his long rifle by its stock so that the black barrel was up by him. Behind his head, I could see that the rear window of the cab was painted on one half with the American flag and the other half with the Confederate flag.

I faded back some, listening to the truck's powerful and explosive acceleration. The man in the truck bed kept looking back at me, his face cold and red. He probably wasn't sure what to make of this little car that had turned in behind them.

Eventually the truck began to slow, gearing down, engine coming up into a roar. The man in the back braced as the truck moved along the side of the road, its tires barely rolling through the shallow ditch, coming up behind the other truck. The bright spotlight from the other truck arced across the snowy field, bringing what was once gray and black into pure white, exposing the true color and bumpy terrain of the field.

A hundred yards out in that wide arcing light I could see a man in camouflage coveralls and a gun strapped over his shoulder approaching the truck. He was moving slowly and appeared to be dragging something limp and dark, a coyote or small deer. Whatever it was, the animal wasn't big enough for him to have trouble pulling it, though he was hunched over with effort. It looked like he was pulling the carcass with something, a tool with a snare maybe. Another man was trudging out to meet him in the spotlight.

The truck in front of me had come to a stop.

I pulled up behind it, careful not to get my wheels too far in the ditch; the snow out this way wasn't terribly deep, but I wanted to be cautious. Before I flipped my lights off, I saw some of the bumper stickers on the shoddy tailgate. One read, "Bag 'em, drag 'em, and hang 'em." Another, which looked a lot older read, "Fuck Iraq."

That was enough; it was all I wanted to see.

I reached under the passenger seat and pulled out a long bread knife: lightweight and just under a foot long, it had a rounded end, but was serrated along one edge. I had cleaned and sharpened it again a couple of days ago in my basement.

I opened the door and stepped into the thin snow. The hard cold hit me over my face, and the wind ran through my hair; I felt it seize over my hands. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw whatever light there was—carlight, snowlight, starlight, all of it—hit the blade of my knife. It was there for only an instant, and then it vanished into the black. I was glad I had my bread knife; only this knife could pull such light from the sky and then send it away, pure but captured.

I came along the side of the truckbed, where the man was. I saw that he was young—probably seventeen or less—and he was getting up to get out of the bed; I saw in the bed itself a couple of dead coyotes with blood frozen on their pelts. The kid had blood on his coveralls.

Leaning over the tailgate, he looked at me but was too late: I hit him across the side of the neck and again, quickly, I saw the blade catch that light, only to send it away toward the night. Too late; blood jetted in front of the kid and over the tailgate and down his coveralls. He didn't make a sound, and he was dead before I brought the knife back to my side. He fell to his knees and disappeared into the bed with his own kills.

Ahead of me I heard the driver's door opening with the god-awful screech of metal on metal. But before the driver could open it far enough to get out, I was there, pulling the door open and facing him. He looked to be in his forties, pink-faced, eyes wide, and shirking away.

"Ohmygod," he said, leaning back and trying to kick his feet out at me.

I hit him across the face, taking the blade down. His face opened like a soft, cooked ham. He fell back, hands coming up, but he wasn't fast enough; the next hit took him clean through his collar and into the side of his neck. The jet went over the inside of the truck: the dash, the wheel, the plastic covering the green-glowing dials became blurred in the red, instant sheet of blood.

I came away from him, stepping off into the snow and heading for the other truck, my coat seeming heavier. I looked toward the field. The men in the field had come together to drag the carcass. They either had been too far out to see what had happened, or I had just been too fast. They didn't show any sign that they saw what I was doing and might have thought that I was just one of the boys.

When I got to where the light was perched, I hit the rusty guard-cage that stretched over the hot glass. The wires snapped into the glass, popping the halogen light in a white spark. Some of the blood came into contact with the hot glass and metal, sizzling as the light died.

I heard the men yell from the field, cloaked in sudden darkness.

I stepped right and went north and toward them into the black. My eyes hadn't adjusted to the dark, so I was blind, blinder than them, probably, because they could see the trucks' parking lights on the road. I kept on moving, though, knowing that I wasn't going to pass them by because I could hear them to my left, talking and humping through the thin layer of snow.

In a minute or so, as I made my way through the dark, my eyes adjusted well enough for me to see the grayness on the ground and in the air. High overhead I saw that the gray did not touch the big black sky, the high stars so bright and sharp and alive that they didn't even appear to be twinkling. I thought that stars like that might shed some light over the field, catching diamondlike in the snow, like the light from a full moon, but down here, down where I was and where these men were, there was only the heavy gray everywhere. Up in those stars—up where there is precious purple and orange and red and white light—I thought of Marcus, my son, scattered about in that light, taken up with time and with space in one sense and in one understanding, but also gone through a barrier of all that light, visible and invisible, and sitting well outside of all that science and art and all words and theology could ever discern: though it could never be a place anyone could draw up, I thought that I could almost get to it and touch him again—maybe—if I could sink myself into a whole lot of snow, right here in this field, and cover myself with it so well that I might vanish entirely from the world. I could be so well covered that I would lose even myself in it, and I might then be closer to where he was, the snow—my snow—holding that light, holding his light, and him too. But I also knew that this would be a vain effort: I was alive and on earth and the place I sought was, as far as I knew, untouchable and unknowable and unreachable unless I too died. Still, when I watched that light flash over the blade of the bread knife, I knew that all that light was from such a place, and in that way it had reached me, from Marcus with the spaces beyond the stars to me in my way over the snow. The blade caught it and held it for less than a second like before when I was at the truck, and then it released the light, having spoken, having been touched, cold and transcendent.

In the snow I came in from behind the two men. They couldn't have moved more than fifteen yards, dragging the coyote carcass over the snow, leaving a dark trail of blood. In that time, they had called out to their friends to help them get to the truck, and I remember thinking just how blind they were—so blind and so stupid and lazy that they wanted more light to help them see their way. But they had soon given that up, pushing on as I followed them, not saying much and hunched against the pull of their kill.

When they came within a few yards of the truck, I stepped forward in the gray and hit the left one across the back of the neck, pulling through the orange stocking cap and into his skin and bone. He stumbled forward into the snow. As he did, I went right with the same movement and put the knife across the cheek and temple of the other one, drawing down and toward the ground. Both of them set to screaming, fallen down in the snow. I moved over the second one and hacked across his throat until his head snapped to his backbone. I stood and went left to the other guy, who was leaning face down in the snow and shrieking, and I hit him across the back of the neck again. There was a sickening plup sound, and he was quiet.

I straightened up, holding the bread knife up against the night. It was dark with blood, but if I turned it just right, it caught the cold light of the stars, cutting through the blood.

Before I went back to my car, I opened the tailgate of the second truck and pulled the kid out by the hair so that he hung over the edge of the gate. With the bread knife, I sawed his head off. With the knife as sharp as it was, I had the head off easy, the blade melting through skin and sinew and tendon and finally bone. Once the head was off, I took it and stabbed it over the antler hood ornament on the truck. It looked a little funny there, with the kid's mouth open and dripping blood, his eyes cocked up to the sky but catching no light. I liked it that way, though, and I even laughed some as I went back to my car.

I took off my coat and stuffed it into the trunk. I wiped the knife clean on the kid's coat and put it back under the passenger seat. I went home, back the way I had come. The taillights behind me in the distance faded into nothingness. I watched this with little interest.

When it got warmer and when the snow and ice disappeared into ground that had sent up green spring grass and flowers, I went to the Catholic cemetery on one of the days I didn't have to teach, bringing with me a gathering of tulips and daffodils along with a liter of water. I put the flowers in the golden, marble vase attached to Marcus's headstone. I emptied half the bottle into the vase and stood before the grave in my spring jacket, looking at the headstone and talking softly to Marcus about what his mother and I have been doing and about my classes and about the river I had wanted him to get on with me in my kayak. I told him about his toys and how his room is the same, unchanged with his Elmo and Clifford dolls in his crib; his Sesame Street wallpaper that we had put up before he was born; his hundreds of Golden Books and Bernstein Bears and Harold and Clifford and Elmo books; his toys that he used to play with. I talked even when I could feel myself begin to cry, and when the tears came I only kept talking to him. His tombstone—bearing his name with the words "Darling Boy" and a likeness of Clifford and Elmo carved into it—only remained the same, the grass around it beginning to green, the sky coming on gray with a chance of rain or sleet. With everything like this around I told him that I missed him and that I still listened for his babbling or yelling in his crib when he woke in the mornings, hollering for me to get him.

As I left, I bent down and kissed the tombstone.

Two days later, during a break from reading and commenting on papers, I watched President Bush on television talk about the "War on Terror" and I thought: What is terror? Is terror thinking that the world is yours to besmirch with the litter you pitch out of your window or out of your mouth that people have to tread around and over? Or is terror forging your own path through that filth, taking it and turning it back upon they who think the world is theirs?

I thought about my bread knife then. I thought about how the bread knife is just another pen, but instead of ink, the long knife sheds blood. The blood, like ink, has its meaning. No one has to say what that meaning is, but it's there. I had known it long before I threw up on the fire the afternoon of Marcus's death; I knew it long before I sharpened the bread knife with oil and a stone rod in my basement. It had always been with me, this meaning, but my realization of it—clear and welcome—was something new to me. It has, I know, come from experience, my own history, events in my life that have made me who I am. And yet, I am sure that I am my own blood, born into a mold, defined long before I was Marcus's age and before I knew what I was. It is a cast, something caught in glass as if on display in a museum. And because it can never change, because it refuses to morph into something else, maybe something more powerful, though I have no idea what, it holds a kind of purity, an innocence. These things—which you might think would be a violent meeting of two air masses, whipping into an incongruent storm, but which actually work quite well together—have made me this strange Diaspora: changing and shifting and reconfiguring so that I am constantly blending. All in the midst of a crowd where people look and think and act alike. I may be spotted from time to time, but blink and I will be gone from your eye and mind, soon forgotten, because I make myself insignificant. You will never know how close you came to a thing that can maneuver through speech and action with the grace of the wind, a thing that knows there is more to the universe than most people dare imagine: a thing that sees light and dark and all the colors of the world and universe, and knows all temperatures and movements, everything free and natural.

Standing in the rye, I wield my scythe, sweeping it over the heads of children, never touching them, but guarding them forever, letting them play as they will.

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