Eli the Good

by Silas House

In movies there is always a carefully staged moment — a big crescendo of music, close-ups of the actors’ faces, the camera slowly pulling away to let all this sink in for the viewer. Like the moment when Gregory Peck was about to kill the boy in The Omen. But in real life, most all of the extraordinary things happen with no more loudness than a whisper.

Whole scenes of your life can slip away forever if you don’t put them down in ink.

“Go lightly from the ledge, babe, go lightly on the ground” — the Bob Dylan song she played sometimes on her little green record player. Her folded hands patted out the beat on her chest. Listening to her, I realized that Nell was maybe the saddest person I had ever known, although she hid it. I thought maybe she was sad for the same reasons as me. Because sometimes, there was too much goodness in the world to bear.

Later in my life I would come to understand that history books are the least reliable witnesses.

Ultimately reality is far worse and far better than anything that either adult or child can ever dream.

We were not a family who went to church much — both my parents believed that God could be best served by being the best people they could and treating everyone right and being thankful for all they had — so my guilt was not the kind that is created or fostered. I was simply made that way: a boy who cared too deeply for everything and therefore felt that any wrong in the world was partly my fault. In retrospect I see that this is a good

way to be, but it also makes for a miserable existence.

Sometimes just being still is the best thing you can do for yourself.

“If you want to know good music, then all you have to do is listen to the Carter Family, the Beatles, Bob Dylan, and Nina Simone,” she said, turning back to us. She took four albums out of a milk crate. The green record player sat near her bare feet. “That’s all it takes to have good taste.”

Since that night I have come to understand that sometimes the best families of all are those that we create ourselves, the people we choose to be with.

Maybe he thought I had chosen him over her, that I was back to the nine-year-old he had known last summer who never thought about anything except playing Hot

Wheels and swimming. But now I liked to read and I could hear the trees when they spoke and I was different from them. I was weird and glad of it. Nowadays I actually thought about things, which is that hardest thing to begin doing. The strangest thing was that I liked being different. But it had taken me betraying Edie to know that, so the realization wasn’t worth the price.

Perhaps we were all understanding that we had been free for two hundred years, or as free as people can possibly be. I like to think that everyone was filled with a brief melancholy, a moment in which we took into account everything we had, and appreciated it all, and felt blessed and lucky to have been born in this country, in this time and place. Or maybe everyone was taking into account all of the wrongs done to others to gain this freedom, the freedom that had been taken from others for our gain. Things like this were too complicated to think about; they caused a rock to sit in my belly, and even though I had

only recently discovered the power of constant thought, I tried to turn my mind elsewhere. Years later I would realize that this was one of the world’s great problems, that people often allow themselves not to think. They choose to not think, and that’s how the whole world gets into trouble. My only excuse that day was that I was a child.

“I keep thinking about this thing I learned in history class last year,” she said, watching the sky now. Her face went rose-tinted with the blast of a firework. “At

Gettysburg, these soldiers got sent into battle and they knew they were gonna die, but they went anyway. Now that’s being brave,” she said. “So what they did is, they wrote these short little letters to whomever they loved. And the best part is that they tied or nailed the letters to the trees.”

“You know who I think about?” she said. “The soldiers who had to go and collect the letters off the trees the next day.”

“But there’s not a tree in the world like the ones you grow up with. You never forget them, and the trees remember you.”

And somehow, Daddy’s and Edie’s crying made them seem even stronger to me. It was better to cry than to suck it up and go around conjuring hate in your heart.

And I also saw that a person never does know anything, really, until they have lost someone they love completely.

The beech tree says its old, true mantra: I am here. And this is a balm. But for the first time, the tree does more. Because it comforts me by reminding me of the last day of that summer back in 1976, when Daddy found me in this place I had thought was my own secret place, not knowing that it was his, too.