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His Mothers and the Mountain
by Michael Thériault
Rory Leary waited while his older sister, Maureen, stayed after school to finish a fourth-grade project. A boy with time to kill, he deemed it sufficient reason to dawdle in the plain joy of bouncing a small red hard-rubber ball against the floor and walls of the alcove outside her classroom. Nothing urged him home sooner. In the alcove he had shelter, and the ball’s report came back in a bright echo. He would walk with Maureen when she finished, and they would come through the door together into whatever awaited.
A few minutes later she came out—auburn hair, rose cheeks, sweet Maurie. In the sidewalk’s open air and the gusts of motor noise and wind, the ball sounded duller, but all the way to their door he clung to its bouncing.
Maureen turned her key in the door and swung it.
Their mother met them on the stair inside, her heavy cheeks in purpled flush, a few strands of her dark waves in wild stray. She barely glanced at his sister. “Where have you been?” she demanded of Rory.
Rory had thought he might meet anger, though not this much, athwart his climb of the stair. He had no theorem for it. Through his remembered years, he had, on occasion, seen it greet his father, although not in recent weeks, when his father’s late arrivals—now multiplied—had found everyone in bed. Just days ago it had come to Rory, but this was a higher bounce of it. “At school,” he said.
“And why are you late?”
“To walk with Maurie.”
Lacking any part in the conversation and doubtless wanting none, Maureen slipped up the stair from her mention. Their mother let her pass.
Rory’s next step remained blocked.
“Why do you do this to me?” his mother said.
Having no notion of “this,” Rory found no answer.
“Get out,” she said. Her voice, already loud, rose and sharpened. “Get out of this house. Go to the church and say a prayer. Get out.”
Rory obeyed, went down, stepped outside, closed the door behind himself.
Before his first step down the sidewalk he heard the deadbolt clack into refusal.
The church was three blocks away, down Mission Street and right. The ball rode now in a pocket of his green wool school-uniform cardigan. His own anger swelled. She had told him to get out. She had not said to return. Something in him longed for this to have been unintended elision. His anger argued the contrary. If there was a place called home, he thought, it might be church—or the mountain—or anywhere not here.
He would let prayer decide.
The church was silent when he dipped right fingers into its marble basin of water and touched them to himself in the sign of the cross. The last daylight grayed the saints of the stained glass. A woman almost as small as he was knelt in a pew among the narrow rank of them below the late Stations of the Cross. She bowed a black lace mantilla toward hands pressed together and up-pointed. Beyond her and Rory, only statues populated the aisles and shallow side-chapels. He went to the blue-mantled Virgin Mother’s side-chapel and took the kneeler. He had neither bill nor coin for a candle. Elbows against the pad capping the kneeler’s wrought-iron rail, he brought his own hands together and prayed with no flame of his own.
He asked for guidance.
He saw the mountain.
From windows of his family’s second-story living room half up the College Hill spur of Bernal Heights, San Bruno Mountain loomed south past the McLaren Park crest. By day its mass wore a thick green cloak of vegetation—dark under sun and filling with black under cloud. By night its crown of slender lacework towers twinkled and flashed. His third-grade textbook had told him that California’s Native peoples had lived by acorns. Into that cloak of green, he thought, oaks must be woven. With dry fingers he crossed himself kneeling before the Holy Mother, then with fingers water-sanctified again in the narthex, he pushed through the great doors and into the beginnings of night.
At Mission Street he went south.
Past Geneva Avenue, the streets at left turned up, and some blocks along he entered them. He gave no attention to their names. Names lacked importance. He knew these to be the first slopes of the mountain. Any climb into them was onto it. He walked away from the door he had come through, away from the place that had just told him he wasn’t at home.
As he gave the pitch of the sidewalks what work and breath it demanded, he foresaw the practicalities of his new existence. It was late fall. Oaks found, acorns were to be supposed. He supposed also that he could eat them just as walnuts, by cracking them for the raw meat. A mountain would have no deficit of stones for the cracking.
Soon his belly would need more. He didn’t know what animals inhabited the mountain, but some must be small and stupid enough for a boy with a stone. Working one stone against another might make a kind of edge—enough of a blade. This would be one subject of his early experiments.
He had no means and scant knowledge of making fire. This was a clear challenge. He did not think it immediate. He had heard broken glass might serve, or metal to strike stone. A visit back to these streets could provide.
The night beyond the streetlamps held stars and no threat of storm, but through cardigan and thin cotton shirt and T-shirt he felt, despite the heat of his work, the thickening damp chill of an elevation between cold bay and cold ocean. Dry leaves should give him blanket enough for the first night. Other experiments should result in shelter. He imagined standing branches with forked ends into a cone, interlocking the forks in its vertex, and then weaving flexible twigs horizontally through the branches and thatching this fabric of wood with leaves or clumps of grass.
The grid of streets gave way to a zigzag, which he climbed while imagining, until at the far side of asphalt he saw, through a fringe of pines, a dark slope that had no light above it but stars and a moon thin and small as a fingernail trimming.
Here was where he would depart a life, and his feet and chest were gripped by what of it he would miss: Maurie, supremely, but also the younger brothers with whom he shared a room, Colm the Irritating and Séamus the Destroyer, whose trespasses seemed now absolvable, and Maurie’s toddler bunkmate, Anne, and even the baby Siobhán, whose early weeks of colic had been supplanted at last by bubble and coo. Maybe, too, he would miss his father’s mustache tickle and the whiskey smoke and sugar of his breath when Rory woke to them in their dark rounds of good-night kisses upon a late return. If home was a thing, he thought, maybe it was these people—and maybe it wasn’t in a house at all.
But the bloom of his mother’s anger in the short span from Siobhán’s arrival….
He crossed asphalt and passed the fringe.
He needed to piss.
Gleeful at this first freedom, he unzipped his salt-and-pepper corduroys and pissed where he was, among no walls, under only these high pinpricks of light. Somehow the strike of his piss against the blades of grass, into which his few steps past the pines had taken him, rang louder than the traffic grumble from the city below. Its dominance thrilled him.
He finished and zipped and turned to the work of the slope.
It was so steep that at instants his feet needed the aid of his hands. It was all grasses. Any trees with offer of a meal or of dry leaves for his sleep must be past it. Pebbles filled his low shoes and spikelets of grass pierced his socks. Twice he turned his back to the slope to sit against it and pull from socks what spikelets his blind fingers could find and to take off and empty shoes. The first time he puzzled at retying them in the dark. He succeeded without understanding how. The second time his fingers told him that they held memory of the knot and that his eyes were just confusion, and he listened and the task went well. The tufted grasses to which he returned were tough and his small-boy weight was so slight that they gave reliable handholds. He had no sense of time in the ascent. This went starward, and he gave himself to it.
The slope leveled; he came to a crest. More of the mountain stood high and black after the drop before him. He saw the red lights of the towers nearer than he ever had. The warning they flashed to aircraft was to his eye invitation.
A gentle downslope brought him among trees. The scent from the crackle under his soles told him: Not oak; eucalyptus. They cheered him anyway. Their leaves would give him a bed of incense, and he was sure to find by day many a fallen branch for his conical shelter. He had no need to stop now, though. He had usable night before sleep. His stomach, unfilled since lunch, hoped for acorns.
He went on.
Before seeing it, he half-slid down a steep bank. At its bottom his feet were in water to his ankles. He heard no flow. He could not know the water’s depth ahead, nor its extent left or right. He could not, however, imagine retreat. Step by short careful step he forded it. Muck tugged at his shoes, but the knots his fingers had remembered held. He told himself that this was not all bad, that where he found water he might at dawn find some drinkable; and he knew himself thirsty.
Reaching the far bank, he clenched his way up it.
At its top was guardrail and road. Down the road each way he saw not headlights themselves, but their glows. He hesitated to cross, and in the instant’s hesitation the glows became paired beams first left, then right. Hoping not to be found, he squatted behind the rail. The car from the left passed right, the car from right, left. When the taillights had themselves become glows in red, he tumbled himself over the guardrail. Finding nothing of headlights either side, just far radiances of city, he crossed.
Here his attempt at the slope found that its cloak was not of trees, oak or other, but of a thick scrub branching from the ground and taller than he. The dark revealed no path through it. He tried by pushing aside branches to make his own. With force he succeeded in moving them, but when he released them to take the next step they closed on him. He extricated himself, attempted a second direction, a third, with equal results. Counting twenty strides in which he found no path, he walked down the road one way, then forty the other, and at both ends worked at branches and was denied the slope.
He wondered then if the branches were stiff and dense enough and he so light that he might clamber, monkey-like, across their tops. He tried his way up and did reach their tops and felt his way a few painstaking clutches of hands and feet across them.
A wet shoe lost its hold.
He slipped down among branches. He heard and felt the tear of a corduroy knee, and then a pain in the shallow flesh behind it and a spreading wet below it. He hung suspended, his head just above the scrub.
He wept.
He did not then hear it; he felt it—in the lift of the hair on his head, in a small shift of pressure, in the sense—yes, the sense—of something alive breathing a finger-width above. It seemed to come from behind. He did not see it at first, and when he did, as it moved forward, it showed not as a body but as a wide shadow rippling across the stars, a big bird gliding low, the far tips of its wings flickering—a wingbeat, barely there.
He understood: The mountain was casting him off. Not this wilderness, not this road—none of it would claim him as home.
He spent a difficult while disentangling himself from the branches, and his crawl, hand over hand, back across the scrub-top to the road was slower than his way in. With his feet on the asphalt shoulder, he looked both ways and saw a glow to his left. When it resolved into headlights, he did not hide but turned toward them.
The car passed without slowing.
Another glow swelled from the same direction and became headlights.
They, too, passed. He turned to watch taillights recede and disappear.
In the other direction he again saw a glow. He crossed the road so that the headlights would find him on the near shoulder.
They filled his eyes and passed.
Three times more, then, he had been refused.
He imagined no alternative but to return to the door from which he’d been sent, and at the same time, no passage through it. In this bewilderment he started back its way.
He rolled himself over the guardrail and slid down the bank until his shoes were again in water. It felt colder this time, and cold went all up him and lit his hunger and thirst. He slipped a few times in his clamber up the far bank but made its top and the eucalyptus grove. The mountain having sent him past promise of a bed, he trudged through the scented crackle and reached again the crest of the low rise.
He attempted the descent of the steep slope toward the fringe of pines first by sliding on the seat of his corduroys. The grass’s clumping frustrated this. He turned to face the slope and came down as he had come up, by hand almost as much as foot. The pants where the scrub had ripped them had melded in dried blood to the torn knee. In its bending on the descent they pulled clear and restored his pain. Past the pines he followed the zigzag of streets to where they fell west into the grid. Not knowing by which street he had ascended, he took one at random.
Under streetlamps and the door lights of houses, he examined what of himself he could. Drying mud caked his pants to mid-calf and obliterated the salt-and-pepper of the corduroy. The mud’s light brown met below his right knee the red-brown bled from it. The scrub’s rejection had pulled loops of yarn from the cardigan and parted some. Grass spikelets frilled the extant knit. A car window gave him his imperfect reflection and in it the mad courses of his short dark hair.
The hour had come when sidewalks were empty and the street nearly so. Encountering no one on foot, he descended to Mission Street. He turned north.
In a block and a half he came on two police cars parked facing the wrong direction one directly behind the other. Through the open driver’s-side doors came tinny radio scratches. The uniformed drivers sat, one on a trunk, the other on the adjacent hood, thumbs in their freighted belts, and spoke and laughed. On the open door nearer Rory’s approach was “Daly City,” on the farther the seven-pointed blue star and “SFPD” of the San Francisco police.
Their laughter stopped at sight of him.
“What happened to you, son?” said the policeman on the Daly City trunk.
Rory gave up on summary. “I had to leave,” he said.
“Where do you live?” asked the policeman on the hood.
Rory noted it wasn’t: Where is home? He provided an address.
“Stay right there a moment, son,” said the Daly City policeman. He and the other exchanged whispers.
Then, from within the blue-starred door, the tin and scratch said, “We have an eight-oh-seven, boy, eight, height approximately four and a half feet, dark hair, school uniform, green sweater.”
Rory watched two pairs of eyes gauge him. The policeman at the hood said, “What’s your name, boy?”
“Rory Leary.”
The policeman left the hood and reached into the door. He pulled a microphone on its coiled cord to his lips. “You have a name for the boy?”
“Rory Leary.”
“I have him,” the policeman said to the microphone, and to Rory, “Let’s take a ride, boy.”
As Rory rode in the cage of the car’s back seat north on Mission Street into San Francisco, then from Mission to his address, his fingers found in his cardigan pocket the rubber ball and turned and turned it and found nowhere on it any point of rest.
“Why did you leave, boy?” the policeman asked as he drove.
“I was told to,” Rory said.
This concluded the interrogation.
Rory’s mother opened the door from the night into the bright entry hall when the policeman rang the bell. “Where have you been?” she said to Rory. Past her he saw Maurie in pajamas on the stair, and peering from behind her Colm, Séamus, and Anne. He saw nothing of his father. He had just time for his eyes to meet Maurie’s and their fear before his mother pulled his face against herself, and he could not answer. “I’ve been out of my mind with worry. Thank you, officer.”
The policeman was silent.
“Thank you, officer,” his mother repeated. “He’s home.”
Taking what breath he could past her clench, Rory understood that prayer to one mother had failed him. Now he was held by the other who had sent him to it and beyond. He was not home. He might never, on the turning globe, be home.