A Place Between Sky and Earth

To sing, must I feel the world’s light? My green, graceful bones fill the air With sleeping birds. Alone, alone And with them I move gently. I move at the heart of the world.

—James Dickey, “In the Tree House at Night”

IN September of 1972, when I returned to Lincoln after a long weekend in Colorado Springs, I resigned myself, insofar as possible, to the death of my brother. We had spent three days talking and drinking and taking an occasional walk—and on television watching Coach Devaney’s Huskers pummel Army, 77–7.

We had said almost nothing about what would surely happen if his drinking did not at least slow down. Each time the subject tried to insinuate itself into our conversation, we shoved it aside. Through it all John’s wife, Mary Ann, remained discreetly in the background. She did this not out of fear or intimidation; she did it, I believe, because she respected the importance of our privacy. Perhaps she thought that, regardless of what we were doing or saying, our being together would pay dividends.

I shared this hope, but back home in Lincoln I saw it as being thin, if not downright anorexic. I had been reading the poetry of James Dickey, and one of his poems in particular, “In the Tree House at Night,” haunted me. The tree house brought to mind the houses my brother and I had tried to build when we wanted a place of our own to escape to; and the tone of the poem, Dickey’s attitude, struck me with a force I find difficult to describe. It seems to exist somewhere between slightly hopeful and deeply somber, a nebulous stretch of emotion that can be felt but not explained. I read “The wind changes round, and I stir / Within another’s life,” and I felt that Dickey knew more than any so-called higher animal, poet or otherwise, was entitled to—that to a significant extent my life was not entirely my own, much of it having been usurped, however compassionately, by a stranger.

So Dickey’s tree house was therefore mine, especially the one my brother and I built, or tried to build, high in the branches of a Chinese elm. We had spent most of the morning nailing two-by-fours onto some passably horizontal limbs to form a foundation, and most of the afternoon wandering up one alley and down another, looking for any type of wood strong enough to provide a floor. We found it when Johnny pointed to Mrs. Detweiler’s outhouse, to some loose boards at the back, a couple of them about ready to fall off, and said, “Why not take the boards from there?” Why not indeed? Mrs. Detweiler had passed away about a year ago, and no one had moved into her house, or probably ever would, the house being too run-down for anyone without divine powers to restore.

With a hammer we freed several of the boards. They were tongue-and-groove, beautifully weathered, and strong as steel. All afternoon we measured and fitted and sawed and measured again, until early dusk when the floor was laid and hammered down, its surface smoothed somewhat with pieces of sandpaper. We gave it a final inspection and pronounced it ready for occupancy.

No place is more private, more sacred, than a tree house, even if the house consists only of a floor made of boards from a dead woman’s outhouse. How well James Dickey must have known that! In our tree house at dusk we sat, dangling our legs over the side, talking—mystery in the form of darkness moving in. And what were we talking about? This and that, mostly—the building of the floor we sat on, the good fortune of having spotted the loose boards on Mrs. Detweiler’s outhouse, and the basketball goal, with its backboard attached to the side and roof of the ramshackle garage, that we could see through the leaves in spite of the deepening shadows. It was the goal we had been playing at...