It was back in late February when the last tiny islands of ice were still dancing on the Mystic that the old man first returned to face the river. From Jeremiah’s sidewalk view above, he looked like a loon, hunched in a thick worn coat and brown knit hat. Jeremiah watched as the old man buckled downward, clawed a single rock from the earth and then raised it, mechanically, to within an inch of his eyes. Across its face he ran his arthritic fingers, over and over, until finally, he threw it into the blank waters. For eight months, this became the harmless spectacle Jeremiah would pass by on his morning walk to the Sullivan T-station, three stops from the glossy teak desk he’d break from at nine, sometimes 10 o'clock at night. He performed logarithmic magic for a downtown Boston marketing firm, creating for it, and for himself, quite a pile of profit. He was only 29, but the heavy crystals of his watch, the quick-easy of his walk, indicated that he had outpaced even his own expectations.
Every morning before eight, the man would be there, collecting pebbles and drowning them in the river. Jeremiah didn’t know where he appeared from, or at what hour he left, because always, the riverbank was empty by the time his dress shoes met moonlight on his dark walk home.
But on this autumn morning, the sun rose colder. In his grey suit--his darkest one--Jeremiah headed out early, not to his teak desk, but to the airport. He hadn’t seen Uncle Sal in eight years. But by lunchtime, he would hover over him, breathless, his two thick familiar hands across his chest that would be holding only themselves. There were two reasons why Jeremiah would go home. After today, there would be just one.
On his way to the airport, inside the rusted loneliness of the Sullivan station, he heard the morning's first inbound train screeching, stopping. The doors creaked open, two footsteps echoed faintly. Jeremiah raised his eyes, and there he hobbled: the old man with nothing in his hands but time. Suddenly, Jeremiah’s throat burned as he met his pale eyes – their sagging kindness, the two long crow’s feet that ran from them as if he had spent most of his years wincing in pain.
Pausing, he waited for Jeremiah’s question. But after a long silence, the old man turned towards the stairs that would once again bring him closer to – the rocks. Those beautiful rocks, each one a memory of Mr. Eddy, the man who almost became his father. He, who, for one long season, freed him for hours before the orphanage lights shut off and brought him, a young boy, to the calm banks of the Mystic. Mr. Eddy taught him how rocks were the hard seeds of life and how holding just the right one could turn him smooth. Look, he’d say, picking one up from the shore. Pounded in here is the weight of a thousand stories you can only feel inside your fingers. Go on, now, hold one. It’ll tell you where it’s been. So he took it from his hands, felt the rough grooves of its stories, then asked it silently to lead him home. Once, he picked up a rock, opened his pocket to put it in. But Mr. Eddy put a gentle hand on his shoulder, and with his other pointed somewhere beyond and said: Don't forget to throw it back in the river, son, because the earth only cuts what the waters will heal.
When the next train arrived, Jeremiah stepped inside, alone. And as the doors closed to take him on a journey between two far places, he felt the shape of the question aching in his palms and the longing in the old man’s eyes. There were a quarter million reasons to come back to this place, but now only one would return him to the banks of these waiting waters.
No comments:
Post a Comment