THE SUN’S OTHER MEASURE
Bear Kirkpatrick
Increase Darrow open his eyes and tell me how our forbears cross the oceans by storms. How they come upon these shores at night and how gale winds dash their frail barks upon the black rocks. He tell me our forbears snarl in blankets and nighties and ropes, they fight over chests of silver and books. Men of sudden idea blare into the winds. Women claim a natural resolve. But the hulls stove upon the reef and stormwater fill the holds and set the ships abeam. Our forbears drop into the cold water to fight over barrels and broken masts until the saltwater foam and windblown spray fill their lungs. The weaker and older forbears grab at the others and pull their hair and reach for their legs as they sink. The stronger forbears grow sleepy and slip below the surface and the last few alive the waves bear aloft and drive them down upon the wet rocks and break them open.
Increase Darrow close his eyes for a spell.
Increase Darrow open his eyes and fix on me and blink out the letters to the words of my lesson and tell me how just before the ships go under all the babies in the nurseries float out the cracks in the torn hulls. They are light enough to ride the swells, the gentle rush of saltwater and foam pull the swaddling from their bodies and set them down naked upon the gray sand safe above the breakers. The rain flatten their thin hair. The wind close their eyes. They fit themselves together as near as they can and come to look by dawn as a new creature entire laying there on the sand. The storm blow out by noon and leave the twisted wracks of seaweed and splintered boards and the put-together beast of independent parts in a shape not bird or fish or cat but rather by no design of their own most like a tree.
Increase Darrow close his eyes to rest and might recall his own tree shape upon the ground the long night he fall from his horse in a blizzard. How the snow cover the dead tree shape his body make and the crook at his neck. Increase Darrow open his eyes now and blink out the letters to say how upon the next tide the water rise high enough to float two of our seaborne forbears away and race them out past the swells where the larger fish cut and flash. Gulls and terns hover on their arched and rigid wings above our forbears and make them wince at the passing shadows and press even closer together. They shiver and leak out what last they have left in them of another country, another people, and somehow this is enough to keep the birds from diving. But the night fall and bring its own creatures in from the woods to pass through the tall bulrushes just upshore from us. We lay and listen to them cough and chatter and whine because nothing speak in this new country without meaning by sound. Then all to once the creatures fall hushed and soon after the first great nighthunting bird drop black from the heavens and lift a forbear away screaming up over the distant trees inside the thump thump thump of wingbeats.
Increase Darrow close his eyes.
One of the orchard men say a fox or bear might spook the horse that night of the blizzard. It could have been anything.
Another say could have been nothing with that horse.
She could stumble on a woodchuck hole because what horse don't yet?
You remember the snow that night.
Can't even find the truck. Parked ten foot from the house.
Truck. Can't even hardly find your own dink that night.
We stand around the truckbed and gas the saws, three or four of us. The snow just quit after two days of storm and we stand in it near to our knees and maybe how Obed come to think of that night he find Increase Darrow almost dead. The sun light up the black trees and the new snow make them stand blacker. They are long ago dead from lightning storms and somebody figure we can cut them up and sell them for charcoal.
An old man named Chub say maybe he take a stroke like Tuthill say and then fall off the horse because you remember how Tuthill tell us when the body twist like that and hard enough to break bones then even then a man don’t always lose the feeling to his body.
Increase Darrow open his eyes and tell me the first lesson of all babies is to know the impermanence of the world. A second giant nightbird drop from the heavens and carry away another forbear and then another, always taking the loudest one. They whisper and break apart and crawl up the sand and gather again inside the reeds but soon after one of them cry out in a new fear and a beast rush in and take her in its mouth and run off grunting. Another the new world rattle and he fall apart and babble about nothing. A beast step out from the reeds and bite him in half and carry the crying half away in its mouth. By now everybody learn to hush save one last forbear who will not stop pleading for his mother. The others push him away and this make him call even louder for her but at last a beast rush in and snap his head bones and carry him away.
Increase Darrow close his eyes to rest them and might recall something akin to his own night. When the snow at last drown the blizzard winds and he count away the seconds and minutes and hours. When Obed's voice reach him through the drift and then his light. The sound of breaking ice as Obed crack the shell that form around his body from the heat and then the cooling.
The other men listen to Obed tell it. They work their files over the sawteeth and listen to Obed tell us how the wind do all the hairiest tricks that night. How one orchard row look as somebody might have gone ahead of you and shovel all the snow away and then sweep it from the grass. Not a flake on the ground. The next row the snow pile up so deep you couldn't get a tractor down it.
Obed lean to the side and spit the cigarette end out of his mouth.
The other men stay quiet. They gas their saws and oil them and might take a look at the black trees.
Obed shake his head.
That one drift don't look right. I don't know. The light from the lantern I guess. What a fucking mess. No way the man still alive. His head was crooked all the way beneath his body, the way he must land when he fall. Head first and his neck sort of pulled out and rounded over. We don't often see things like that. The bones were broken and sharp and cut right up through the skin. Look like frozen deermeat with the red ice.
Increase Darrow open his eyes and blink to tell me how just before dawn a few of us crawl down to the shoreline and eat clumps of seaweed. We throw them up and eat them again until they stay down and later we go back for quahogs and mussels sewn to the weed beds. We crack the shells and pack the meat into our mouths and crawl back to the others and move body to body to kiss the food into them. At night we lay still and listen to the beasts come in from the woods and circle us. We gaze up through the lens of rushes made of the nighttime heavens and by the cold and hunger we begin to crook a new language.
Increase Darrow close his eyes and keep them shut for a spell because now he has grown weary.
We are all taught how scab learned how to overwinter below the fallen leaves on orchard floors. How it take a million years to learn how to bed down for months beneath the snow and then rise anew upon the earth when the winter storms fall away. By an increase in light they teach us. A rendering of the exchange between oxygen and carbon. How daylight is a given upon all of earth’s forms by how it garner a supremacy of vision and movement. But the world is not so. Imagine the sun as given. Then imagine the sun's fire divided into light and heat. Light give us days, nights. Give us weeks, months, a year. But the sun's other measure come as heat, a scale of time used by trees and grass and bugs and scab. A measure not marked by seconds or minutes but degrees of temperature. So that any hour of time spent one degree above freezing count as one day in our reckoning. Any hour spent two degrees above freezing count as two days. Add these days up and after two hundred and fifty four our apple trees will break out of winter dormancy and rise into silvertip. After two hundred and seventy two they will rise into greentip. Then on to half inch green and first pink and full pink and first bloom and full bloom. After so many days scab will crack through its shell and throw its dreadful spores to the wind. So also the codling moth and leafhoppers know the proper hour to come alive again and eat their own mantle, no matter to them light or day or month. The sun divide into its compound measure, a split in the world that engenders the two sons of fire in their highest forms: trees and man.
Increase Darrow open his eyes and search for me and tell me how we learn to mimic the sounds of our own killers. We learn how to snort and chuff and laugh. We learn how to trouble our mouths into new shapes for these new sounds and how we must even take to our hands and knees to make some of them. And the beasts stay back. They still circle through the bulrushes but don't rush in and so we live through a night without loss. The second lesson of all babies is to know that all language is the language of the enemy. At dawn we smear mud upon our heads and skin and take up stones and quahog shells. We keep to a line and pass through the rushes into a shorter tough grass and then into the spruce and hackmatack and fir of the dark woods. We fell saplings and buck their limbs and add these new sounds gathered from trees. We lash together a shelter and weave the longest grass for a roof and a door and a window to keep watch. Birches we strip to weave buckets for carrying. A seal wash up dead and give us fat and a skin to chew on and strips for binding. If bullheads gather in pools we club them. If flounder open their topside eye we spear them. But the first real joy come after we learn how to bend willows back with stones and tie them with binding. At dark we cry out like babies. Whatever beast come through the trees might hear a sound of wind or a creak of leather before the stone brain them into another world.
Increase Darrow close his eyes.
Obed tell us how that night he fall to his knees and push the snow away and crack the shell of ice around Increase Darrow when that beast of a horse come at him from out of the storm. Even over the wind he can hear the thump of hooves, feel them on the ground. Obed set Increase Darrow back down and stand up fast and raise the lantern and see how she must have been laying in the snow for how it cling to her hair and mane same as she made of it but her eyes and her nose stand out black.
Are you fucking kidding me?
Son, that horse bite everybody.
You figure she been nearby the whole time?
Obed nod and tell us she must hear him holler out Increase Darrow's name. And then she must see his lantern.
Son, that horse bite everybody.
Obed tell us he don't even have time to swing the lantern. All he can do is push it toward her and holler. She veer off at the last moment and pass along beside him and snap her teeth at the light.
Then what?
Then nothing.
She come back around?
Obed shake his head.
She don't come back around?
Obed shake his head.
Increase Darrow can barely open his eyes now. He work slow through the letters and tell me how our forbears learn that most things shit when you kill them. And shit you can use. And blood you can use to cover yourself and disappear from the beasts of the world. Our forbears set traps and build a forge they stoke hot enough with charcoal to draw from the rocks the pig they need to cast machetes and arrowheads. They gather more words and even make a song to use against the first bull moose they flush out the timber and chase into an eel rut and cut him open from the back. They run down goats for the milk they suck warm from their udders. They reach past the dead queen for her eggs. They clean their mouths in brine and wash their hair in fire and temper their speech hard enough to anneal what fury come hammered as wonder. They bear for the hardest and let god come to them. They build a heaven of cleared land and burn away the soft things and find a way to live where nothing else have the salt.
Increase Darrow close his eyes at last and keep them closed and the story end.