The women gathered, drawn from every direction, migrating like the winds, calm winds, stillness and calm but thick—as carrying something, like the congested wind of summer carrying pollen…awareness: also aware, that they were coming to celebrate in terms of ritual, not as to happiness or sadness, though both would be there but to call each other forth, a gathering like at a church, as in the olden sylvan Grove where the gods and goddesses gathered and gamboled…but now gathering alone...without the gods...here, tonight, celebrating the absence of one such god—him, her husband...Frank: disappeared.
“Disappeared.” How the paper stated it, “Frank Frakes, a graduate student in psychology at the University, disappeared….”
They consoled her on the mythic level. This which The Corn was meant to do. “Be a mythic healing.” When she first heard it, the words meant little, now they meant all.
“Adam disappeared from Eve’s world. He simply wasn’t around.” Meaning, not available emotionally, psychologically, spiritually—“Mythic disappearance.” It was manifest in the “absence” of the Mothering Goddess from any and all extant patriarchal myths.
Dalores knew this, but doesn’t speak it nor did she want to hear about it, rather, just wanted them to be, so she could be it.
She grieved for Frank in ways which startled even herself—the grief of the child to be born without a father. To never know his or her father.
Weeping Earth. Her Corn Sisters dance a crying song: a rain dance loosing psychic rain, astral tears...a grieving dance, grieving for the aloneness which does not have to be...a dance of an earth without a heaven, sky but no heaven—they grieved for the sky.
Dalores grieved as the grave grieves for the life not given to it.
For a father, never knowing.
“Disappeared.” It was how they told him it would be written. A word which is readily latched to evil doings: snatched, kidnapped, murdered…Frank accepted the word. He hoped that it would free Dalores, convince her that he was not coming back, would not reappear.
That “You’re father is alive” was real gave him the courage to leave...the courage of the soldier: desertion?
God, who’d believe?!
Belief. This was the issue. This was what Professor Major Bradford Campbell came to evoke. “Do you believe what you see?”
See. It was how he had been trained. As everyone striving to qualify as “scientist” is trained. “Seeing is believing.” That’s the simple equation. The balance on both sides of the predicate.
“Believing is seeing,” said the Professor Major.
“You believe your wife still loves you?”
He nods.
“Even though you can’t see her?”
Indulgent smile for clever but sophomoric ploy.
“What happens if she remarries?”
“We’ll have to see.”
Campbell’s smile returns the suffered indulgence.
Frank stops pacing—he’s been pacing for the last hour or so, round and around the room, each window an eye onto nothing but the outside, searching for the light inside himself, trying to take all of this “Cannonball Express!” type wreckage of his life once lived somewhere hours ago sometime on this same day...Really?...letting his mind open, Just possible?...like when he first dropped acid—he had to believe that it would not make him crazy… stops: “Fides quaerens intellectum,” Frank intone. The Major appreciates and is grateful for this cryptic validation of his mission. (Echoes: “Faith seeking understanding.”)
“When?”
That was the question he wanted answered. The tape was his father’s voice. The letter was his hand. The photograph was him, but each of these could have been created post mortem.
The question hadn’t really become a question until his father started linking together things which had happened since he “died.”
“Son, Brad, here, will explain things. Most things. Some things even he can’t explain. Security and all that.” Pause. “Son, I know this is an incredible story. Something…you’ll wonder why I hadn’t…but that’s why you’ll just have to believe. Not believe me. Not believe Brad. Believe yourself, son, believe yourself.”
A father he had loved. A happy family. A father playing ball with his son. A father reading with his son. A father offering thanksgiving at dinner meals. A father whose presence had always been there. Not one without his faults—at least not after he turned twelve. Faulting him more in his relationship with his mother than anywhere else. A young man sensitive in his own insecurities being annoyed at the spousal submission in little things. “Take out the garbage.” “Mow the lawn.” “Shovel the sidewalk.”
Faults. “Just tell her to shut up!” He wanted to say that, like Jackie Gleason, “Alice! Pow! Right in da kisser.” But he didn’t. He suffered his father’s weakness.
She—his mother died much too soon for this ever to become a two-way conversation.
Frank realizes that the disclosure of his father’s “secret life” has evoked a guilty thrill—the gasping, frightened panting of his first crime: snatching a cigarette from his mother’s purse…“Got away with it!” Relief. Excitement. Jitters. Tension. Dread.
He fooled her!
The Devil whispers: “Right on!”
Now on a plane to Miami. Frank was taking everything on faith. He believed in his father. He believed in himself.