The Tragedy of Arthur_ A Novel - Arthur Phillips [11]
He parked on dirt. I held the flashlight. “Down!” he hissed. “Only point it down.” From under a tarp in the back of the station wagon he pulled a machine I’d never seen before, or ever again. Wheeled, with a chimney-chute on the back, it seemed related to a snowblower, but it had huge flywheels and loose, dragging cables of various lengths fixed to its sides and top. He had red gas cans and plastic barrels, shovels, two handcarts, and a long wooden board with ropes attached to both ends.
It is a photogenic memory: he took the flashlight in his mouth and led our stumbling little parade with the machine, wheeled it across a road and down and up a ditch, up to a fence. He cut the fence wire at one post, rolled it back to the next. Dana and I were highly excited by now, even though we were only performing manual labor by flashlight, each with our loaded cart.
He seemed to know where he was going, around a grove of trees, along a path next to a field of corn stalks as high as my ten-year-old waist. “From here, step only where I step. Put your feet in my footprints. We have to start in the middle.” This was now positively exalting, the opposite of daily life, our father at his best when we were at the age most receptive to his power. And we did it. It was work but it felt like something else, something higher.
Laying the guide strings, dragging that board on ropes, doing the cutting, spreading the material, brushing over the wheel tracks and footprints, restapling the cut wire fence, sweeping our tire tracks all the way down to the road. All this took probably six or seven hours. The three of us stank of that material. On the ride home, Dana and I slept despite our questions and bewilderment. I don’t remember going upstairs to his apartment or how I woke clean in my pajamas, with my cleaned clothes folded next to the air mattress, or when the doughnuts and chocolate milk had arrived. Dana and I both suspected a dream until we saw the other’s face (although this didn’t definitively settle it, since we did still have identical dreams now and again). It was past noon.
“It seems to me / That yet we sleep, we dream,” my father said, and Dana climbed onto his lap to hug him.
“What did we do?” she asked.
“The hard part is still coming,” he said. “The hard part of magic is letting it happen and not telling anyone. Anyone.”
“You mean Mom,” I said, suspicion prickling in me at last.
“I do mean her, but I’m not so worried about that. I mean anyone. Your friends. Anyone.”
“Because we can get in trouble?” I asked, finally realizing the obvious.
“Well, yes, I suppose so,” the convicted criminal gently granted only now, “but I’m not worried about that either. That’s not why the secret is important.”
“Who cares about getting in trouble?” Dana said, braver than I, as usual. “It’s not like we committed a crime,” she laughed.
“I know,” I protested.
“No, here it is.” His voice became very serious, and he had our attention. “You can’t tell anyone because that sucks the life out of what we did. All the fun, all the magic bleeds out, and it’s just an empty, stupid thing. But if we don’t tell, then we spent last night brilliantly. That’s the only difference. You decide, and you make our night what you want. Brilliant and ours. Stupid and theirs.”
My father made no money from this exploit. He spent a fair amount of money (invested it, he would say). The equipment, the time spent in researching the site (easy road access, unelectrified fence, good visibility from the air, long distance from the farmer’s house, no dogs), the time spent in building the Machine (adapting a snowblower to cut symmetrical, tiered paths through early July corn), the slime he concocted to slather over those paths, and, of course, the fines he had to pay to that farmer near Worthington, and the community service he had to perform. And what was his payoff? Why bother? To astonish. To add to the world’s store of precious possibility. To set the record crooked once and for all, so that someone’s life (some stranger’s) was not without