Epilogue #3
I came across the kitchen. I sat down next to her at the table.
I took her right hand in mine. I turned it slowly.
The gold band caught the kitchen light. It had the soft pillowed wear of an old ring that had been worn through dishes and through gardens and through forty-three years of marriage.
It had been my great-grandmother's, then no one's, then in a box for sixty years, then on my mother's right hand, then in a box for eleven more years, and now it was on the right hand of the woman who had walked into Tomás Navarro's shop with a clipboard and a plan and had changed my life by accident on a Tuesday in September.
I said, "Pop."
He said, "It belongs there."
I said, "Yeah."
We sat at the kitchen table for a long minute.
Nobody spoke. Gunner came in from the living room, saw us at the table, saw the box, saw the ring on Alma's finger, and turned around and went back to the living room without saying anything, because Gunner — my brother who breaks down doors for a living and who is, in his own quiet way, the most observant man I know — understood, in a single glance, what was happening and that it was not for him.
The football game ran in the next room.
The kitchen smelled like coffee and pie.
The light through the window above the sink was the particular gold of a November afternoon that has decided it is fall and is not going to apologize for it.
My father, my wife, and I sat at the kitchen table without speaking, and I thought, This is the thing my mother had been waiting for.
She did not get to see it.
She was, in some other way I do not have a theology for, present.
We left at six the next morning.
My father was on the porch again, in the same green chair, with another mug of coffee.
The sky was the gray of pre-dawn in the mountains, the gray that always struck me as a kind of suspended decision the sky was making about the day.
He stood up when we came down the steps.
He shook my hand. He hugged Alma. He pressed a small folded paper into my hand.
He said, "Don't open it now. Open it on the road."
I said, "Yes, sir."
We got in the truck. Alma drove the first leg again, because I needed her to. I sat in the passenger seat with the paper in my hand. I waited until we had crossed back into Virginia. Then I unfolded it.
It was a poem.
It was a Mary Oliver poem, copied in my father's careful tight hand on a piece of his old Marine Corps stationery.
I had never known my father to read Mary Oliver.
I had known my mother to read Mary Oliver.
Mary Oliver had been my mother's. My mother had read Mary Oliver to me on summer evenings when I was a boy.
The poem was the one called Don't Hesitate.
It is a short poem. It is about joy. It says, in essence, that joy is not made to be a crumb. That if you are offered joy, you should accept it, because joy is one of the genuine forms of resistance to a hard world. That you should let yourself have it.
My father had copied the poem out by hand and folded it in half and put it in my hand on a porch in the gray pre-dawn of a Friday in November.
At the bottom, in his hand, he had written:
Beckett. Take the joy. It's earned. — Pop.
I read the poem twice. I read his note four times.
I folded the paper back in half. I put it in the glove compartment.
I looked out the window at the mountains coming up to meet us on the Virginia side.
Alma drove. The country station played low.
Her hand was on my knee. The gold band of my great-grandmother sat on her right hand and the iron and copper ring sat on her left hand and the dawn turned slowly toward morning over the Blue Ridge, and I thought about joy, and I thought about resistance, and I thought about the long slow work of being forged into the shape you were meant to be, and I thought — and this is the thing I want to leave you with, before I close the book on this part of our life — I thought that the brook at the bottom of my father's slope had been making the same small sound for thirty years, and that I had been hearing it without listening for most of them, and that the brook was, in its way, the same instruction the poem had been: the world is going on, with or without your permission.
You may as well let it carry you somewhere good.
It carried us home.
Alma drove the whole way. I let her. She wanted it.
I needed it. We pulled into the lot behind the shop at ten-fifteen on a Friday morning.
The Indian sat in the lobby. The forge was cold.
The third bay was quiet. The town was waking up around us in the way it always did, with the coffee shops opening and the bikes starting and the smell of someone's woodstove rising in the cold air.
I carried her bag upstairs.
She started a pot of coffee.
I sat down at the kitchen table with the folded poem from my father in my hand, and I unfolded it, and I read it one more time, and then I got up and got the small frame I had been saving for something I had not yet identified, and I framed the poem, and I hung it on the wall above the kitchen table, where it still hangs, in the loft above the shop, in the town of Ember Falls, in the small particular life I had been forged into without knowing I was being forged at all.
The forge is cold this morning.
The hammer rests on the anvil.
The brook, four hours and seventeen minutes south, is running low for November.
The ring is on her hand. The ring is on her other hand. Both rings, both hands, both stories.
Take the joy. It's earned.
I did.
I do.