Even the youngest brother became an old man, his spine concave, ill-fitting gray trousers cinched with a worn brown belt above his hepatitis-distended belly, gray stubble on his poorly-shaved cheeks and neck, his crowded and yellow teeth host to the remains of breakfast.
Considered the simple one, this old man/forever child, his infant mind burnt by a fever that raged through the night, scorching synapses and neural tissue, creating infertile swaths where a rich and dense frontal forest should have sprouted.
At the cemetery, while others stand in quiet grief, he sobs, eyes ringed fiery red, grasps tight the hand of another mourner, wails the one-word question no one else dares to ask: “Why?” The plaintive sound of his grief obscures the ancient words of ritual, the rabbi’s words attempting to comfort the widow, the cantor’s reedy voice carrying words I don’t understand on primordial melodies.
When the words and the music end, and the eldest brother’s name is spoken for the last time, there is a small procession to the tombstone, each mourner holding a small stone to be placed atop. All do it right, stepping up with quiet dignity, distracted by concern about the propriety of stepping on a grave, about the size and shape of the stone they hold, about what the other people are wearing, about how so-and-so looks since the last time they were together, about how the widow is holding up, about how long they’ll have to stay at the luncheon before getting to all the other things they actually want to do on a Sunday. Brief, ephemeral grief has touched down and alit again, returning children and friends and even the widow to the mundane space of living as if life should go on exactly as it does.
Only the simple one, the baby brother, now 70, now stooped like his dead big brother, now having to re-order his place in line after subtracting one from three, but math is not his strong suit, grieves still, drops to his knees, rips tuftfuls of the incongruous new sod, clumps of damp dirt clinging to the voluptuous still-wet grass, leaving barren swaths as he reaches to place his offering on the flat, smooth headstone, blades of verdant green that irritate mourners with the just-right posturing.
Too cliché to say that the simple-minded one has a purer soul. But the simple way, the one unfettered by custom and socialization, might be to live as if dreams and fantasies are as valid as a load of laundry, an orchard of blueberry bushes tucked into the blazing heat at a mountain’s base, the truth of being both here and somewhere else at almost all times, the disjointed feeling of not being completely sure, am I in the Alps of southern France or the Cascades?
In the simplicity of a beloved children’s story, just-picked blueberries sing a delicate, kuplink, kuplank, kuplunk, as the bucket fills one berry at a time. My son outgrew the story years ago, but I reread it after a day in the U-Pick field, my handful of blueberries tossed lightly into your bucket as you picked the biggest, bluest ones and put them in my mine.
In the timeless expanse of memories and present moment, the memory of my uncle’s pure grief arises. I wish I’d been the one standing next to him, wish I’d have been as moved as he was to fall to the earth and rip swaths of fresh sod right off the rectangle that now blankets a man we both loved, even though in doing so we both ended up red-eyed and agitated.
I’d like to go back, hold a stone in my hand, kneel on my father’s grave, listening for the kuplink, kuplank, kuplunk of the others’ stones, placing mine in the soft nest of my uncle’s clumps of grass and dirt, the sound of my love offering muffled by the offerings placed one by one before me.
Except there is no going back. Not a drop more of love can fill a dead man’s bucket. Too late, I realize my father gave away berries as fast as he ate them. I can almost see him with juice-stained cheeks and chin, the face before he grew a graying beard. Back when the air was lighter, when we lived at the base of the same mountain, when I’d only lived in one place so could never mistake it for anywhere else.
Maybe the moral is simple after all: life should not go on exactly as it does. We should irritate and agitate against complacency. We should wander slowly through orchards, stand naked beneath the stars, search out constellations with names we don’t understand, sway to primordial melodies, drop to our knees when those around us are too distracted to feel what it feels like when life is pulled out from under us, love as if we have only today to offer sweet berries and kisses, one by one, kuplink, kuplank, kuplunk, in a loved one’s hands, two souls overflowing through surreptitious efforts to fill the other’s.
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Robert McCloskey’s Blueberries for Sal (1948) was awarded the Caldecott Honor in 1949.
Wow. Thanks.