In the Company of Death
by Pete Kauffman
I used to come down here when I had questions to ask, life to confront. Now, I take my prize volumes of philosophy and use them as coasters for my coffee mug. This morning, the night rain has retreated, leaving the flagstones shining but the sky uncovered as the clouds have pulled back the window to the stars. There is water standing in the cupped wood of the porch rail. Often, now, I sit in the darkness, looking out my thirty-two pane window at the marsh while the moon sets or the sun rises. When I’m tired of looking outward, I’ll reach my cane over and flick on the light and in an instant I no longer look into the night but am blinded by what is immediate. The window that has given me a view now reflects my balding head. Formerly, I find another window: books. But I can’t read most of my own books anymore. Now, I borrow memoirs and autobiographies and novels from the library.
Before my wife became a late wife, she would press me to write our memoirs. That’s the excuse I used to build this shack. But the memoir was not forthcoming, and the wife is dead, and anyway who wants to spend their days brooding about the path to unwilling atheism? I have the first seven pages around here somewhere in longhand. It was the longest year of my life.
Most days when I’m down here, I’ll read and drink coffee until mid-morning. But this morning it all wells up on me again, and I must comb over my memories again in that futile circle that leads nowhere and circles the abyss of failure. The memories come as inexorably as a rain. Something will remind me of my failure with the boy Kurt, and I will remember that time we had a kerfuffle on the long canoe trip we did for his graduation, the one where he went along but wasn’t there, where he was a worse passenger than a spoiled client. I will work over my life to figure out what happened to bring me here, take my life and examine it from end to end, and find the cracks and see where I went wrong, or what I might have done differently. And if I find a crack or a wound I must stick my fingers into it because it hurts so good.
It’s not that Kurt is a bad boy. He just developed fascinations so far from mine that we missed each other. If he came to visit me today, he would probably want to take a selfie, which I would do out of social obligation, and he would call my walrus tusk that I picked up off the beach in Norton Sound, Alaska a “hunk of bone.” Like I said, he doesn’t have the first idea that the tusk represents a fair portion of his inheritance, what it is worth and how fantastic it is, and how proud I am to have picked it up as a tourist. It’s not that I resent him for it, it just shows that the only thing I have in common with my son is his mother. He went off, when he was twenty, to be a male fashion model. He was a good looking boy, but it seemed to me like prostitution, selling your body for commercial interest like that. But his reply went something like this: You’re a good one to talk, treating everything as if it were holy.
I saw him yesterday in one of those glossy magazines. He has made a real success of himself, selling that all-American physique. I have not recovered from that picture, although I hope to do it this morning in some kind of wound-licking.
I left home, myself, as a lad. I understand the impulse. But for the concrete jungle? All I wanted was the privilege of spending time in the wilderness. The morning I left, I loaded the little wood-and-canvas canoe I had built, my fishing rods, and camping gear into my truck. As I drove away, I stopped at the mill office to get my paycheck. Dad paid me back the money I had invested into the family business, along with my last paycheck, then, hesitating, he leaned forward with both hands on his knees and said, his voice rising with each word, “War, son, War. There’s a war going on for your soul.”
As if that were something new. I was hunting for peace, and I planned find it in the wilderness. I tried to become a good Christian, but failed. For a while I worked in the outfitters store, stocking shelves and helping tourists buy wilderness gear, and I would go canoeing on my off days and perhaps go to church on Sundays. I read books, all of them, about why Christianity is logical and reasonable. I also read the others, about why God is a product of wishful thinking. Once I was reading Doors of Perception, a book I had chosen more for its size and weight than its content, on a canoe trip and a friend who was with me looked at and me and laughed, and said, you have got to be the only backpacker that would carry Huxley on a canoe trip. There was an urgency in it, when I was young, to figure it out before I got into the business of living. But I never have figured it out and had to go on regardless.
And then I took over the outfitting business, both the store and the guiding. I’d take my clients out on a remote lake somewhere and they would listen to that free laugh of the loon, the sunset linger, the wild rice shimmer in evening breeze, and they would say, “How can anyone believe there is no God?” And I would think, it’s not that hard, actually, but would go on pitching the tent or baking biscuits. And then I would look at the scene myself long and hard and see if there was a God in it. All I saw was refracted light on water vapor, the light entering my eye in wavelengths that perceived it as orange or yellow. With a double rainbow I saw the light split in a raindrop to the second level of refraction, not God or a promise to ancient Noah.
And my questions grew less impressive and urgent as I grew older. They were questions that would never be answered, I discovered, only resolved with the passage of time or the acceptance of ignorance. On one of my days off, I was camping on an island in Jackfish Bay, watching the day flame out in red over the water, and I decided I couldn’t—or didn’t—believe in God anymore. It wasn’t an act of rebellion, or bitterness, or self-liberation. It was a kind of acceptance.
I’ve heard say that people become atheists, or agnostics, or an a-God-something when they want to lead a life free of moral restraint. That might be true for the lazy atheist. But the atheist who takes his stance in the world seriously knows it to be a terrible thing to believe. A Godless man must accept that there is nothing higher than a human capable of caring about you, and since that is the case, what is the point of caring about fellow humans? All the basic principles of decency apply to us as well. Don’t divorce your wife. Be loyal to your family. Be fair. It’s just good math, and it’s a civic duty: we owe it to our species.
But being Godless is awful, too. When something goes bad, some tragedy occurs, you don’t have a God to blame it on or ask why or to ask for help. An easier way to live life would be a mediocre Christian, if you know what I mean, using God and his church as a life hack, a kind of insurance with a small deductible. Even I could’ve been that kind of Christian. You just do no harm but be careful not to do too much good, either. It’s just like being a mediocre atheist, maybe even the same thing. One or the other will allow you to harness ignorance and laziness to moral lousiness. I would still be a Christian if I could. Not only would it be easier, it would get all my old friends back.
I miss Jesus, and all the people that go with Him. I see now that community was worth having. When we helped each other on Saturdays and pressed cider every fall, when we had our weddings and funerals. But I left that life, and am no longer part of it, and too much of my life is gone to return.
Then my wife died, suddenly, of an aneurism. One day she puttered about in the rose garden and baked artisan sourdough, the next day her brain was swimming in blood. Kurt came home for the funeral and we buried her under the maple in a downpour, and the coffin kept floating up from the runoff that poured into the grave from upslope. Kurt was leaning on his shovel, too winded to shovel the grave closed. It was an unholy moment, and I cried a bit.
But not as much as later, when I visited the grave and I looked up where the naked branches of the maple tree interfaced belly of the clouds, and for a moment I had a vision of the two-dimensional world where the limbs and twigs of the tree were cracks in the sky.
I even visited church, the one I grew up in. Most of the preachers that were at the church had the kind of impeccable logic, the clean oration of the learned. But the day I was there, they had a preacher leftover from another era, one that, as a boy, could make hell so real you could smell it. I was older than this preacher now, which severely diminished his authority and somehow hindered the psychological effect.
When the service ended, I shook a few schoolmates’ hands, and they were solid and they looked me square in the eye and smiled with their eyes. I missed them. I would love to be one of them, with a family business and a wife and Jesus. When I left, I hesitated at the door, looking back into the conversation and the solidarity they had among them. They were standing in a circle, and each one of them fit as comfortably in that circle as in his own pants. One of them said, “Yeah, we need to give him a reprobate for that.” And they roared with laughter, and it was obvious I would never understand the joke because I was not present when it was formed.
Standing at the door with my hand on the latch, I looked across the room to their circle and could imagine myself among them. Dave, a schoolmate, looked up and caught me looking over my shoulder, and for moment we looked into each other’s eyes from across the room. He began to turn toward me, but I pushed open the door and left them there, walking out to my car and driving back to my shack, where I looked out the window to the night. War, son, war. There is a war going on for your soul.
I don’t know what he meant by that. If there were a war going on for a man’s soul, would he know it? I don’t know. I have a hard time believing there is. There’s no war going on for my soul, anymore.
Is there?
The sun has kicked off the horizon now, and my reflection is no longer staring me down. The Carolina wren is singing right under the sill. The geese have come into the marsh, stirring up the water and the air and leaving a wake to catch the early morning sun. There is too much tragedy in a clean morning because it stands as if it were pure. I pull the daybed out from under the bookshelf and open it, stretch out on it. Maybe they will find me here, dead, my own shack as a sepulcher.
Pete Kauffman lives in Alaska with his wife and daughters. He writes more at petekauffman.org.
Artwork: Frank Weston Benson 1862-1951 Canadian Geese