Grand Canyon Lament
A Fateful Lesson in Extraordinary Measures
by
David Sheppard
*****
Copyright 2013 by David Sheppard
All rights reserved.
ISBN-13: 978-1-301-20211-9
ISBN-10: 1-301-20211-8
Author Web site: https://dshep.com
Cover Photo by the Author
Grand Canyon Lament
A Fateful Lesson in Extraordinary Measures
by
David Sheppard
[I wrote this short story for a class in intermediate fiction at the University of Colorado back in 1987 after reading a short story by John Ashbery titled, "Description of a Masque." I wrote it during the spring semester and just before I attended the Aspin Writers Conference, a life-altering event for me.]
You are blind and standing at the south rim of the Canyon. Gently and with kind words, as if performing a long overdue service for a patient of some convalescent hospital, he takes the cane from you, and you listen to the dull clunk of wood as he leans it against a rock.
You learn that place, knowing you may have to return to it alone. The heat of midday sun is on your head, and you wish to see the wall of the north rim, realizing that the image can be nothing more than a mental fabrication.
He returns, encourages you to stand a little closer to the edge. "To see," he says, "if you can sense what she must have — the ground plunge downward to the first plateau." He solicits more courage, urging you ahead, creating a comforting, therapeutic confidence in your action. "Don't be so timid. That's where they found her, you know, on the first plateau more than 2,000 feet below, which now has a thin covering of desert grass, just enough to give it a tinge of green. That's where she stopped."
This world is a stranger to you, to both of you. But with the untimeliness of her passing, you must take extraordinary measures. And surely, it was your fault. You, who see even the fall of the least sparrow, failed to see the fall of your only daughter, the Little One. And so you are here. And since you refuse to discuss it, he treats it as amnesia. You feel strange standing on the very spot where the accident occurred. It was a very human event, simply a death.
Now taking his suggestion, you lean, tentatively at first, then take a short step, feeling the ground gently slope off, the gravel move under your feet. Knowing he's close, you touch the thick hair and flesh of his arm, then feel him move from you, slightly back but still in touch, leaving you a little unsteady. An updraft rushes by, and then you detect a difference, an absence of reflected sound, a void in front of you as deep as that left in the heart from a sudden death. You yearn to cry out, to bounce an echo from the far wall, to make the abyss finite, to make it part of the Canyon. Instead, from within it comes the wordless cry of a human voice, a sound so strange, yet so complete in intent, young and old at the same time like that of a reincarnated child, lost and doomed to walk the face of the earth as an unaging spirit.
"Do you hear that?" you ask. "Do you hear the voice from the Canyon?"
"I hear nothing but someone on horseback hurrying away on the dirt path and the occasional caw of a crow." His voice is now stiff and unconvincing. "If I try to listen with the ears of the blind, I hear the claws of squirrels in the trees behind us and just now the sound of children's laughter around the bend. But if I can't hear it, perhaps it is she calling you. Perhaps it would be only fitting for you to follow."
"No. This is nothing like that. It comes from below. Maybe a climber stranded on a cliff," you lie. "There. I hear it again. It comes on the updraft."
He leaves your touch and moves away from the edge as if seeking some strategic position. You hear him behind you, shuffling among the rocks, and you wonder if he's moving your cane. You wish to feel the tip on the ground, rake it from side to side, feel the dirt and push around loose rocks. You reach out in front as if with cane in hand, the other arm out to the side for balance.
He's talking to you again, his voice subtly changed, hardly disguising an air of inquisition, asking if you remember being here, asking if the presence of the Canyon is somewhat familiar? Is it filtering through your darkness? He's close behind you, too close. "In the past, your eyes would have filled with a palette of colors, painting," he suggests, "the layered rim that cuts off the blue sky and the strata that goes from dirt-pink to chalk-white to rust, and the cliffs that fall away to the green valley and the river below."
You now change the abyss, his description allowing you to limit the distance, and imagine the sound as a call to a horse by some Native, uttered at the river far below then captured by a sudden gust and carried in the rising heat to surface before you as an updraft.
"Do Natives live at the bottom?" you ask.
"And why does that thought come to mind?" he asks backing away, trying a new approach, coating his words with playfulness, as if he has made an exquisite chess move but delaying, savoring the word 'checkmate.' "Are you remembering something of her? Is she creeping out of your darkness, or perhaps lighting a single candle to cast long shadows in that room where you hide all the memories of her and the end of her?"
"I only ask because I want to know."
"Let me describe more of it to you then." His voice is full of encouragement like that of a great teacher. "Far below us is the first plateau which is cut by jagged fingers were streams have fallen through. They are dark, shadowed even at noon, and widen down to the brush-lined streambeds which will flow next spring. From there, they drop and then, perhaps a thousand feet below, appear the white sands of the Canyon floor and the dark string that is the Great River. In places where the it slows, lush grasslands grow. This is where the Natives live, too far for her voice to find its way to your ears even though it may be young and wild. Too far for even the heightened sensitivity of your hearing to stretch a tentacle to grasp the faint whisper of sound just before its last ripple of energy is spent in a heat wave. However, when looking along the floor into the distance, if the position is just right, the dark string turns to mirror and a flash of the sun reflected from its surface is like that of someone signaling. All this, your eyes can't see. But if you were down there, even you would sense the state of wild things, things captured and protected within the Canyon's walls. And she locked within the cliffs because you, you of all people, forgot.
"Let us get more directly to the point," he continues, addressing you now as a defendant and he the counsel for the prosecution. "You think you have lived your life as most of us, with no atrocities. But what do your dreams reveal? Dreams are now the only time of your dark life where your eyes come alive. Does she come to you then, look up at you with eyes so blue you can see through them, perhaps see the sky like in that thread of river below? Do you see her life stretched out in time, flowing through ages from child to woman, perhaps with children, yes, most certainly, children of her own, and then to old age, the time of reflection, gathering her life to her, gathering together a good life? Do you see her in your dreams, look into those eyes, see the life that never was, never will be?" His voice persists, leading you from memory to memory, always in control, always dragging your mind through images of what was, what could have been, hoping you encounter that one loose memory and stumble, sending it over the edge creating that avalanche of memories that will bring her and the guilt, the suffering, back to you, giving you reason to follow.
But you have now rolled the details of the Canyon's walls and the description of the string of water below around in your mind like boulders in the rapids of a great river and have found that they are not what you
fear. You fear the abyss and the winds from nowhere. You now realize that is where you most certainly must search, where your only hope of encountering that waifish wisp of spirit that still might linger there.
He is silent now. Contemplating your purpose. Detecting for the first time a design in your quietness, a purpose in your tolerance. He is on his feet, moving from position to position, trying to find a strategy against you. He has underestimated you. Maybe misconstrued your purpose.
"You can't undo this one, you know," he says, his voice deep and slow. "Even if you did retrieve her, she could never live, not in this life. There is no place for her. Don't take such a chance. Think of yourself. What could happen to you? We have been together for a long while. What role could I play in such a desperate venture?" He is unconvincing and paces back and forth with coyote-like steps.
Ridding your mind of thoughts of the Canyon and concentrating on the void, reaching to the farthest depths, extending your mind beyond the Edge, the Little One comes to you. She starts as a point of light in the blackness, a point that slowly balloons and then, as in the forming of a fetus, takes on features as it swells, first splitting at the bottom to form legs, at the sides to form arms, gradually fingers and toes, a face. A face so familiar, with eyes, yes, the color of sky perhaps reflected in water, hair in yellow ringlets that would wrap your finger. And in her newly formed, reformed naked state, you notice her unripened nipples that would have one day permitted suckling and her thin frame which would have widened to permit the emergence of new life. As she comes to you, you cry out, not a loud cry, just a sound, almost a greeting, a surprise of recognition. She comes as an updraft from the void, her body colliding with yours, her child smell entering your clothes.