I was in awe of my father's courage. I could not imagine myself so courageous, or so strong. To whom would I struggle so to speak, in such anguish!

"Dear? He says tell him about your life?"

Hildie had leaned over, to murmur seductively in my ear.

"My l-life?"

"Where you live? Back home?"

But I don't live back home. I don't have a home.

My life was transparent to me as water in a glass and of no more interest. I was impatient with my life, it was to me nothing more than a vehicle like the battered little Volkswagen rusted to no-color through whose windows I observed the West. How to speak of what's invisible? "I-I'm-" I was sitting up very straight staring now into the backyard of Hildie's house; at the weedy railroad embankment; I believed I could hear in the distance the rumbling of a train approaching; I was stricken with shyness; foundering about like a big fish tossed gasping onto the ground. "-I'm so happy to be here. I've m-missed you, Daddy. We all did. Hendrick, and Dietrich, and Fritz, and-" How strange to call this stranger Daddy; how perverse, to call Death Daddy; my very voice eager and yearning as a young child's; a child who will utter anything, in order to be loved. I didn't know if what I said was true, probably it wasn't true; for how could you miss a man who had always eluded you; yet it had the plausibility of truth. Inspired by Hildie's commandment to speak, I was able to speak; the train rushed by, a short freight train; I stared at the passing boxcars, seeing SANTA FE SAN DIEGO PHOENIX SALT LAKE CITY BOISE, names I would not have seen on freight cars passing through Strykersville. I waited until the thunderous train passed, grateful for the noise. Deafening! Yet I seemed to understand that Hildie and even my father scarcely heard it.

As, in the West, surrounded by mountains, red-rock canyons and lunar deserts, the inhabitants took their world for granted as one might take for granted any painted backdrop to a play. In a store in Crescent I'd seen a brattish boy of about ten wearing a T-shirt inscribed THE STARS ARE THERE TO SHOW US HOW FAR OUR WISHES CAN GO.

I heard my anxious chattery voice speaking of my brothers, of what I knew of their lives; what I didn't know, I invented; I said they were happy; I said they were working hard; I said they were doing very well; I spoke of my grandparents, who were my father's parents; what quarrels and disappointments and heartbreak between them and my lather, I didn't know; I spoke of these old, deceased individuals with a tenderness

I hadn't felt for either of them in life; nor would they have wished for tenderness from me, the last-born, the girl, the little one who simply by being born had caused my mother's death and expelled my grieving father into the world, to his doom. I spoke not of my grandparents' bitterness in old age or of their grief at their son disappearing from their lives, a grief that was hardened in time to a dull, smoldering resignation you might interpret as Christian acceptance. (The minister of the Strykersville Lutheran church had so interpreted it.) I spoke of their peaceful deaths and of their burial in the church cemetery near my mother; I was conscious of Hildie's sharp nails in my shoulder, and of my father's wheezing breath; this was dangerous territory, I knew, and yet I continued, though I didn't say what I so yearned to say Why did you leave us! We needed you. Wiping at my eyes, for I'd begun without knowing. My father seemed to be thrashing in his bedclothes, in distress, making his choked straining sounds Uhhhh-uh Uhhh and instinctively I began to turn my head but Hildie stopped me, pinioning my head, scolding sharply, "No! You don't. You promised, you would not." How quick and strong, how vigilant Hildie was. That sturdy stunted little body, deft as a girl guard intervening a basketball pass, she'd caught me, caught my head, holding me still. I smelled perfume, and felt the hissing heat of the woman's breath.

Afterward I would think that, in the presence of Death, living beneath a roof with Death, how many days, weeks, months, Hildie Pomeroy had become a little crazy. I didn't blame her, for I was becoming a little crazy myself. Certainly I didn't judge her.

In fact, I was grateful she'd stopped me from seeing whatever it was I was forbidden to see.

7

My seven days in Utah! Driving for hours out into the desert, into red-rock country. Since I could see my father for only short spells, and not every day. He couldn't bear the strain of most visits, Hildie told me. Sometimes he fell asleep while she was feeding him. While she was bathing him. No TV show could keep him conscious for more than a few minutes any longer. "It's a mercy, I suppose," Hildie said grimly, confronted with this truth she'd only now begun to acknowledge, "how a person just slows, stops."

Powerful drugs dulled the pain of terminal cancer, though not totally. You had to pay a price for being awake and conscious and at some point the price just wasn't worth it. Because Ida went before him when they were both young. All his life he's had that pull. To keep from going crazy, unless this was another form of craziness, I drove out into the high desert south of Crescent along a narrow, radiantly glittering highway into the San Rafael Valley. Temple Mountain was the highest peak, to the west. Here there was no human habitation and except for the road, no sign of humanity. I felt such relief! Such freedom. Even in the quavering little car (I'd been warned might overheat). If I remained in Crescent. I would be forced to think of things I didn't want to think about, and which exhausted me; if I didn't think of my father, whose physical predicament seemed to me a nightmare, I thought of my mother who'd died so long ago, you would suppose I'd put that loss behind me forever. But in the open country, these thoughts faded. The vast silent distances of the West. Where individual deaths can't matter. The deaths of entire species can't matter. The only reality is Time: the natural drama of the earth is Time. In civilization, this simple fact is obscured. In the West, you can't escape it. All things are shifting, sinking, eroding. In my life, a single day (a single hour! when I'd been sick with love for Vernor Matheius) had counted for something profound. In the West, a single day was nothing. A year, a lifetime-nothing. The wink of an eye. Nor was there anything to say of the blunt terrifying beauty of the red-rock formations past which I drove, and so I would say nothing about them. My father's death could cast no shadow here. All was erased here as in an overexposure of light.

Could turn off the highway. Drive into the scrubland. If no one sees. No witnesses. Drive and drive in the glaring sunshine until the car runs out of gas. Or breaks down. What better way to make an end to grief. Hildie would have no idea, no one would know. A mercy!

Yet: if my father's dying and my own dying mattered so little, why shouldn't I at least look at the man, before it was too late? The most painful of ironies, that I'd driven so far and wasn't allowed to see my father's face. But I will see him! I will. Like a mutinous child I plotted how it might happen, innocently. Next time Hildie brought me out onto the porch I would sit obediently with my back to my father but suddenly I'd become faint; I'd slump forward in the wicker chair, maybe fall out of it onto the floor; Hildie would try to lift me and in the confusion I'd glance back over my shoulder at my father; or, Hildie might hurry away to get cold water to sprinkle onto my face, and while she was gone I would glance at him. But he'll see me then, he'll know.

No: I couldn't do such a thing. I could not turn my head as Eurydice and Lot 's wife had turned their heads, with such tragic results. If my father's wish was that his daughter not look upon his disfigurement, how could I disobey?