What is it that makes a person matter? That makes them worth having in the world? We all know. We don’t say it out loud very often because it’s scary how obvious it is, how short most of us come up. The folks who say it a lot, they’re generally religious, and say it so much you can tell they either never knew or don’t remember what it really means, how simple the right answer really is.
Your mother wouldn’t like that last part. She’d say, You don’t need to take a bite out of somebody else to get fed, Linden McKittrick. God’s all the food you need!
But this is my chance to say the way I see things, Little Alice, to get it all down, so I’ll leave that in — not because my way of seeing things is especially good, but because to know your mother, my sister, you have to know me.
It's not like I don’t know how faith helps folks get through stuff. No one’s seen that more than me, what with all the time I’ve spent in the hospital. I’ve seen what faith can do. I’ve seen folks you’d guess’d be dead in a week, their bodies shrinking, swelling and shrinking day by day as their souls or whatever, their life force, leaks away, leaving the meat to move around. Seen them get finally as still as stone, and that same lost stone color, too — that lightless glow that feeds on all the light around it until it turns the whole room into a picture.
But then somebody shows up one night, late: a pastor, priest or, sometimes, a family member or friend from far away, someone you’ve never seen who looks for all the world like they came on horseback and you can’t say why. And they wait with the person, pray out loud maybe, wait some more, go out for coffee — I only know this because they’d usually offer to get the nurses coffee, too, and I’d hear them talking in the hall — and then they come back later, leave the door cracked as if it’s time for telling secrets, pray some more and wait, and wait, and then it finally gets quiet and you think, “Well, that’s it, they’re across the river now, done.” Next thing you know it’s morning, blue sky in the window, and their family’s rolling them past your door on their way to the elevator, left to right, with thin ribbons dancing like they’re being jangled by electricity and then twelve big balloons trailing behind. I admit I saw that happen multiple times. And of course I’ve seen what faith’s meant to your mother all these years, I mean, it gave her the patience to put up with me! It’s just never been my thing. Something about it seems, to me, embarrassing.
Or at least it can be. Because there are two kinds of faith. There’s the faith that spurts outta folks unbidden, like a geyser, from inside, against their will, almost, and always out of need, the kind that makes people pray when their plane’s bouncing around or their kid’s really sick, a faith that has nothing at all to do with goodness, steadfastness or love, it’s just borne up out of panic and need. But there’s another kind of faith that doesn’t spurt up like that, that doesn’t declare its presence only in moments of difficulty. It’s the kind you can see every day in folks like your mother, faith as plain and persistent as a town across the valley or a lighthouse on a point, as clear as Polaris shining hard at the shivering skytop on Christmas night, a fat diamond at the bottom of a wide, rippling creek full of stars. That’s the kind of faith I’d want if I did want faith, faith like Buddy’s: the kind that just shines out steady by choice.
Even with everything I’ve tangled with, Little Alice — and, as you’ll see, I’ve tangled with a lot — I still never wanted to risk being one of those people you catch suddenly begging God for favors after a lifetime of hardness to others, Oh Lord Jesus, please, I know I – no sir. I’d sooner go to Hell than change that way. Now, having said that, as your mother loves to remind me lately, Little Alice, usually while she’s got you on her breast, I’ve never had kids, so I don’t know to what extremities and depths a soul can be pushed, how small and shameless a person can be made to feel by events expanding beyond their control, how weak and inadequate to the task of even daring to continue to care a person can be. Even so: the faith I’d want is Buddy’s kind: the kind that just rests in well-established peace like an underground lake whose glassy surface looks like it’s never been ruffled by the barest whisper of wind. And sure, maybe I only feel that way because I’ve never had to beg God for help because I’ve always had your mother at my side whether I wanted her there or not, standing in the space beside me where, for others, God would be.
Still, it’s undeniable to me, Little Alice: What makes a person matter’s what they give. We each get just one short life. It’s the one thing we know. It’s the weather. And to give from inside that heavy knowing, to give when you don’t even have what you need and time’s running out, that’s what matters. And it’s why my sister Buddy matters, to me, more than anyone else in the world.
Her name isn’t Buddy, by the way. That’s just what most people call her. Your grandmother named us all after trees – Rowan, Hazel, Buttonwillow and Linden – because her father, your great-grandfather Del (short for Delano) was the arborist for the City of Sacramento back when that was still a job with a title, and he planted a love of trees in our mother, his only daughter, that was striking and, to the minds of some people, inordinate. “Trees are the thoughts of God,” she’d say in an angelic and annunciatory way whenever she caught anyone looking concertedly at a tree, and they always well understood (How could they not?) this was an invitation to a lecture. Few RSVP’d. Those that did unerringly got an earful. When Buddy and I were little, we couldn’t ride two blocks in our double stroller without Mom stopping to explain to someone what made this tree, say, so special, or that one so troublesome, or explain how this poor thing got here through no fault of its own because it was native to China, Madagascar, Brazil, and, in some cases, suffering. Then would come all the ways this tree or that was home to which animals, how it spread itself around, and, if it happened to bear fruit, what a waste of energy fruit was, what a lavish and ostentatious expenditure. And sometimes, once she’d get done with the lecture, she’d get quiet, and it was then we knew she was remembering walks she’d taken beneath the ginkgos with Grandpa Del back in Poverty Ridge, that fancy Sacramento neighborhood she’d grown up in that I still haven’t seen, and we’d look up past the curved roof of the stroller to her face and feel sad, like she was the child and we were the parents and all we’d want to do was hug her. But even a child knows: It’s always too late.
People called me Lindy growing up, the same way they call Buttonwillow Buddy now. After my accident, though, most folks started calling me Linden, as if misfortune had made me serious, had somehow given me, a shortstop, the gravity of an architect, politician or saint. But it’s been almost ten years now since that morning I woke up unable to feel my legs and I still don’t feel serious, Little Alice, like anything close to a person named Linden. I do feel older lately, I’ll admit that. I see high schoolers these days doing things I used to do, hanging out on the courthouse steps across from Webster’s, staring as they’re eating their ice cream cones or riding in full cars to the quarry, back seaters leaning into the front to change music or trying, getting their hands swatted out of the way. kids feeling things I felt once, or close. Young people are reliable clocks that way: they tell you the real time of your life just being there. They tell you the time that can’t be counted with numbers, the time that has actually passed. That being said, I don’t view youth with judgment or concern the way I imagine a truly serious person does. I just view it the way your Grandma May viewed fruit: as “a lavish and ostentatious expenditure.”
Many things happen in life that are unbearable in bad ways, and some are almost as difficult to bear in good, but there’s nothing as steadily strange as getting older, Little Alice, as being walked into greeny shadows by Time.
I used to lay in bed before my accident and think about what Mr. Miss said in Bio, how the human heart rests for one-tenth of a second between each beat, how it rests more completely than any other muscle, and that’s how it keeps beating so long. I’d lay in the dark in my bed at night and feel it beating, my heart, mine, mine, mine, and feel badly for it, how it couldn’t stop for more than one-tenth of a second, ever. I’d close my eyes and try to slow it just out of sympathy. Twice after my accident I tried to stop it other ways and I’ll get to those times later, not out of morbid self-pity but because of what your mother did for me then, things you and anyone who cares at all about living need to know. If I told you all the ways your mother kept my heart going all these years, Little Alice, you wouldn’t believe it, that one person could give another person that much and still be there, I mean – even Jesus Christ ran out of life, didn’t he? You might say running out of life was the whole story with him — that he gave the life within him so completely he died. For three days, at least. Your mother’s still hasn’t run out. Tell me how that works.
So that’s the 1st chapter of BUTTONWILLOW, my novel, which I’m projecting will take fifty-one more Mondays to complete. It will be hereafter be available only to paid subscribers because A) this will make me finish it and B) I’m broke. If you ever wanted to be a patron of the arts, this is your chance! Thank you!