Campo Santo

CAMPO SANTO / Susan Wood This far south November might just as well be summer some days, it's that green and hot. Leaves don't turn here, or fall, drifting down to be raked into bonfires of their own color. Weeks from now we'll look up and—suddenly, it seems—find them gone, we won't know where. That's what I thought of, seeing you, your son two months dead. How, from now on, you'll look up from whatever you're doing—planting bulbs of pale narcissus, say, or scattering food for the family of ducks that floated downriver to live in the reeds behind your house—and find yourself, surprised again, flush against his absence. A day like any other. Today, for instance, sweating, we bent and stooped like gardeners, papering his grave with flowers, blue for iris, yellow for daisy, even the white lily so beautiful we plant it in the hands of the dead. You wanted, you said, to see it from the road. Across town, in the Mexican cemetery, every grave is piled high like this with paper flowers, so gaudy and touching the hills bloom all year long. It is not because they are poor, you see, but because they love the dead that much. It seems, from the road, really to be a garden. Campo santo, they call it, holy field, and even those without belief 30 · The Missouri Review say it is blessed by the dead who lie there, because, surely, all of them were loved once by someone. Some of them are still remembered. The Mexican boys who were your son's friends come each night to this field. They bring offerings, cigarettes and beer, play their loud music for him to hear. They leave letters pressed under stones. To them, it is holy, dying young in this man's world. It was just beginning for them, this world, the day they stood in a crowd of mourners, their faces stunned and open above the starched white shirts. For us, it had continued. When I drove away from your house that day I heard the Bach concerto for two violins. The first violin low and then another, higher, piercing, and then both of them together, answering what will not be consoled. I stopped the car and wept because I could do nothing else. There were months we had been like strangers to each other, distant and awkward, though I could not say why. Now it had ended, and I remembered a story a friend had told me, how when he was young he had loved a Beethoven sonata so much he had played it every day, again and again. And then, somehow, he didn't play it anymore—went away, maybe, or lost the record, and in time forgot. Driving across the Bay Bridge ten years later, he heard it suddenly, there, after all those years, on the radio and was overcome by grief for all that he had lost. I thought of that again this evening when we went down to the river. It was not yet dark, the air gray and slick with the coming chill. Susan Wood THE MISSOURI REVIEW · 31 You stood on the bank and held out your hand. I stood away from you a little, watching, because the ducks will not come for anyone but you. The large brown one, the male, came to you and gravely began to eat from your hand, as though being careful not to hurt you. I saw then that nothing could comfort you. I don't know how else to say this. He will always be dead and you alive in that emptiness. 32 · THE MISSOURI REVIEW Susan Wood ...