Burial of the Dead

SEASONAL COLDS - Lyle Brando

LYLE BRANDO

The hermit has little choice: He’s an object of margins, a subject of certain phobias, hatreds frozen in place, made silent with non-judgement born of self-service, a husbanding of those energies too easily spent in anger, resentments that need go unresolved because he’s moved beyond the anger attendant to judgement, having judged everything (including himself), having damned everything (including himself).

The hermit’s closure is the closed door, the dark cabin, the sleeping dog, the tin can of cold food:

Lyle sits in the autumn cold in the cabin he built years before in a stretch of woods several miles north of Punter’s Pond. The cabin’s nothing, just four walls and the aluminum siding he fashioned to make a cylinder that went through the ceiling, wide at the bottom, narrow at the top, a makeshift chimney for fires he’d make on a bed of rocks underneath. He sits there now, stoking a small one, two potatoes pierced and hung over it. He’s got his winter coat on and his hat and he watches the fire, cursing the scratch in his throat that was there when he woke up. Lyle never gets colds like this, and this time the cold was more than a thing he could ignore because it made him colder than the air outside and tired and warned him off doing normal things.

He has a new dog. He calls him Truck, just like the old one, the one who stayed behind with Lilly, and he never thinks of that dog, never thinks of his wife either, since the only thing they’d shared, really, was time, and not much to show for it, except what had been a warm place, a warm bed, some good meals, all the things that are normal for two people. He wonders if people figured that he and Lilly must have been in true love to have stayed together all those years, and he admits, sitting there, leaning forward to move a shard of yellow log from the center where it’s too much for the small flame, that they did have something like that in the beginning, though after that night on the porch with Tommy O’Neal and the red head bitch, he and Lilly didn’t share love so much as a common and deadening sense of shame, so strong that if they ever split apart the shame would have been strong enough to kill one or both of them, maybe not in the physical sense, but in the sense that they’d feel it every minute, reminding them, especially when things seemed okay, that things would never be okay, because at the bottom and source of their being there was something defective and wrong.

*

Lyle grew up on Punter’s Pond and he’d known the Kost house since he was a boy, long before Tommy O’Neal tore it down and built it up again. He knew Emma Kost-O’Neal, too, when she was just Emma Kost, a tall, beautiful girl with hair so pretty it almost pissed him off, made him wonder why some people get all and some people get shit. But he couldn’t stay pissed because everything he’d assumed about Emma Kost was wrong. He’d figured a pretty girl from the city with money, from a family who owned all the land around the pond would have to be a stuck-up bitch. But she wasn’t. Emma Kost was nice to Lyle, his senior by how many years, he never knew exactly, but old enough that she could look at Lyle and see the boy and the man implied there in the burgeoning height, growth and subsequent maturity. The first summer they met, she'd sit on a rock by the pond, and he’d throw his line out, and she’d ask if he ever caught anything, and he’d just look at her and point to the bucket by his feet, and she’d say: “You bought them at the store,” and he’d get all excited telling her she knew nothing about fishing. And then, the next summer she’d sit on the same rock and she’d tell him how college had prepared her for just about nothing and asked him if he’d teach her how to fish so that before the summer was over she’d be able to acquire at least one skill. And Lyle, a teenager, going crazy with his teenage self, taught her how to cast, holding her arm, touching her waist to direct the swing of her hips, almost losing it, almost embarrassing himself. And what made it so great and so awful all at the same time were Lyle’s suspicions that Emma Kost was nice to him because at the end of the day – at the end of that particular summer – he didn’t matter, not to her, not really, not in the ways of passion and romance that demand more of a game or a dance or displays of temperament, reticence and confusion. And then the next summer, when he was taller, darker and his voice had changed again, Lyle learned that what he’d suspected was true – Emma Kost had let herself be nice to him as long as he was a boy, but couldn’t afford to be nice to him (couldn’t afford to acknowledge him) once he’d become a man. And that summer Lyle would walk three miles from the far side of the pond and set up his fishing gear and cast a line and wait for her to join him, but she never came down to the pond, except for the one time she drove by in a Cadillac convertible with a scarf around her head like Grace Kelly and the big dark glasses like a movie star.