A Face in Every Mountain and a Soul in Every Stone
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By mile five on the course, Peter had lost track of the boy up ahead of him. If he stopped, the kid he’d passed at the creek would catch up, and there were two miles left to run. He kept his pace to a gallop on the soft wood chip path which took its course through Missouri forests, but as Peter came up the hill, he was forced to stop because a tree had fallen across the way.
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It was an oak, healthy and green but fallen over from the roots. Peter scrambled over the thing while trying to keep his rhythm—the worst thing you can do in a cross-country race is walk. As he got going again and made it up the hill into a clearing—a meadow with billowing tan grass that brushed his bare legs—Peter had to slow and catch his breath. There’d been no marker for a while… but getting off course could be a happy accident; it’s only cheating if someone sees you cutting back into the race. Getting lost could mean good placement, and Peter wanted good placement because Dad had always wanted good placement. Dad wanted diligence, and proof that you were just as good as any other sunova-bitch, and that meant good placement. "Single digits,” he used to say with a Chesterfield cigarette bobbing in his lip.
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Horses stood in the pasture beyond the fence line—a few scruffy looking brown ones and a large old white one. They kept watch of Peter as he walked the fence huffing and puffing. The air was autumn crisp, and Peter cursed that there was so much left of the race to go. The fence ended before the tree-line up ahead, and in the grass he found an iron spigot stuck out at an angle. The spigot coughed brown water at first and ran clear after a few pumps. He could still be going the right way. Maybe the other runners didn’t stop for water.
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It wasn’t hot enough to dunk his head beneath the water like they did in the summer. Late September always smelled like chimney fires. Walking made the sweat on his back run cold, and so by way of a small deer path at the tree-line, Peter picked up the pace again.
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Peter didn’t wish to measure time in how long ago his father had died, but he knew it anyway: three Septembers previous. Next, it would be four, and somewhere along the way, Peter might find the relief of losing count. The forest leveled out flat which made Peter pick up the pace. He thought he might be closer to the finish than he thought. His Aunt MJ had said to Peter, "The fact is, you can’t be seventy years old and slam Red Bull-vodkas all weekend. You can’t do that to your heart. Same goes for smoking those cartons of Chesterfields he always bought. Disgusting. Every time the Cardinals played my brother would sit there smoking and smoking.” Peter’s aunt was talking outside the church where the funeral had just ended and they were getting ready to drive the casket to the cemetery. It was cold, and as his aunt talked, wisps of fog came from Aunt MJ’s red painted lips. "Seventy-year-old men shouldn’t be regulars at the Red Bird Grill. Seventy-year-old men shouldn’t want to hang around the River Des Peres Yacht Club.” But Peter liked the Yacht Club, and all his father’s friends who were always joking and laughing. The name of the Yacht Club was a joke. The River Des Peres is a sewer. It’s a big fat river sewer that runs through St. Louis to the Mississippi. "Big Pete Braun,” his aunt said shaking her head. "He was begging for it.”
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It was a myocardial infarction. One morning Peter Braun’s father got up from his desk at the Post Office and the ticker didn’t tick. Big Pete smacked his head on a corner of a desk as he fell over, and that was the end.
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His mother, and little sister, his older brother didn’t care to discuss how accidental the heart attack was. To Peter it seemed that some people became old and tired and then died. That was the proper way to go. It seemed unusual to kill yourself one party at a time, "right in front of everyone,” as Aunt MJ put it. The men from the Yacht Club had all held up their glasses at the dining room table after the funeral and said, "To the good life.”
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Peter knew he was lost in the woods when he came to the wall. The thing was made of tan plaster that crumbled here and there. A long time ago, someone stretched a barbed wire slinky across the top. The path split in both directions along either side of the wall, but down on the right another tree had fallen and crushed the wire. From what Peter could see of the other side, there wasn’t more forest, but maybe there was a field and it would be faster to cut across a field, so Peter took hold of the trunk and climbed it on all-fours like a bonobo.
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On the other side, Peter found orchard fields in the autumn sunlight. The groves were spread in even columns, and Peter hopped down easily into soft thick grass. The harvesting season had littered the ground with a rotten yield. In his spiked running shoes, Peter crushed underfoot what hadn’t been gathered because of imperfections or a bad bounce from the limb to the earth. They might have been soft apples, or over-large pears, but it didn’t seem to matter to the finch birds and cardinals which hopped around in the rot.
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The birds were fat and ready to fly somewhere warm. They rustled through the brush, and up to the shrub branches, and Peter’s stomach began to hurt. Maybe it was the stench. The fields smelled of fermented mash that seemed to waft up to him in waves. Maybe it was the water from that spigot. He regretted stopping to drink from it. The chirping birds assured him it was just a little further, and so he picked up the pace and jogged down the row, mashing blackened fruit. Before long, he found the dirt road, and there were people on the road.
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A stray memory came along as Peter followed through the trees—something guilty. It was during his sister’s First Communion. Peter was ten and his father had bought his sister a silver crucifix necklace to mark her big occasion. The cross necklace was for Pete Braun’s only daughter. Pete Braun was not a religious man.
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This gift upset Peter for reasons he couldn’t define. Peter cried, and threw a loud fit, and was sent to the attic room which he shared with his brother.
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For a whole day, ten-year-old Peter stayed upstairs. He wanted the necklace. Or, one like it. His ten-year-old self understood the rules of acceptable fashion to be this: boys could wear a necklace if it was a cross. For that reason, it was a valuable object gifted to the baby of the family who didn’t need it.
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When it was time for Sunday dinner, Peter’s father came up to the attic bedroom. Peter was still upset, and lay on his bed, working himself into a whaling cry, the kind he should have grown out of. His father said, "You’re in fifth grade, for crying out loud.” And chuckled to himself, with a Chesterfield in his lip. Peter continued to cry.
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Pete Braun often lost his temper. Peter’s father could shove, and yank, and put his first through a sheet of drywall. That day Pete Braun sat in the boy’s bedroom looking giant in the child-sized desk chair. Peter was allowed to wail, and beat his fists against his mattress and pillows, and all the while, Pete Braun watched with large folded hands. His father watched his youngest son writhe in not getting what he wanted, and Peter wondered what his father thought about in those minutes. When ten-year-old Peter exhausted himself, he dried his tears with his father’s handkerchief, a thin piece of cloth that had once been white and now was tan and stained. Peter came downstairs for dinner and no one spoke of Peter’s tantrum, and instead everyone began to serve the food. It had been steaming hot but it had gone a little cold.
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Peter moved diagonally through the orchard rows and got close to the people on the road without being seen. He was trespassing. The group was dressed in simple clothing. They wore jeans and tanned work shirts that seemed dirty and old even from far away. The group towed a horse with a braided tail. They beat tambourines and let something red from their baskets fall as they walked. They were petals from flowers. They were singing. Peter followed but the grove ended just ahead, and he wondered what this procession was, and how he’d get around it, when his arm was taken from behind—"Who are you?” came the voice of a woman.
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"I’m sorry. I’m lost,” Peter said, frozen and unable to look behind him, but then nails dug into his arm, and he saw the woman wore her hair in tight braids. Her shirt seemed made of cheese cloth with large sleeves and a high collar, like some kind of Amish or Mennonite uniform. "You’re not supposed to be here,” she said. "Why are you trespassing here?” She didn’t wait for Peter’s response, and instead pressed something metal into his back. It was a small flat knife the size of a carrot. In this way, the woman led him up the hill behind the procession. A proper view of the groves developed on all sides as they went up. A long barn lay at the other end of the road.
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At the top of the hill, Peter could see the face and snout of the horse were covered with a knit cloth with holes for the eyes; the old brown fur had white chalk spots; the hooves were dusty, and the tail was braided with chicken feathers and flowers. The people circled around a large flat rock embedded in the hill, and a woman cradled something in her arms nearby. It was a long gun broken in half, with two long barrels and a wooden stock. Peter heard the sound of butcher’s tools being passed from hand to hand amongst the people, and the woman beside Peter said something he couldn’t understand before she wandered away. "I’m sorry, son,” a man in a cheese cloth shirt said to Peter. "She was very close to Buck.” Peter wanted to ask what was going on, but his throat had filled with a kind of sweet thickness that he could not swallow; he felt afraid he would not be able to wake himself up from this bad dream. "Buck is old now,” the man said, "and we have to put her down. The foxes need to eat. The horse meat with give their pelts a sheen, and then we sell the pelts to pay the farm bills.”
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Brought forward, Peter noticed the horse’s leg was wrapped in a red bandage. It walked as though it had hauled a heavy wagon often, and the woman with the gun moved to feed it something from her palm. The horse’s grizzled lips kissed her hand. Peter’s throat was constricted. The woman backed away to ready the gun with a mechanical snap. She aimed, and the horse’s ears went up. They fired and the horse’s body wobbled, drunk for a moment.
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The horse faltered sideways, stumbling, hooves cracking on the stone so loudly Peter believed sparks might fly up like struck flint. The woman who had called him a trespasser came back to Peter’s side; "I’m sorry,” she said. "It’s very difficult to view a thing in pain, isn’t it? Sometimes you just want a story that will make you feel better about it.” The horse lay bucking the ground in panic, and then it happened all at once; the kicking stopped, and the body didn’t move. "I like the stories where everything is always changing,” the woman said. Peter was terribly upset all of a sudden, and tears came to his eyes for the first time in a long, long, while. "Do you know those stories? The ones where everything is shifting around in the grand constellation of things, and you can’t even tell if up is down? It seems like everything is always changing, and it seems like things disappear forever, and I like the stories that say that’s wrong. I like the thought that this is all a very persistent trick, and nothing really disappears forever, it only shifts from one aspect to another. And that means the truth is, there’s a face in every mountain, and a soul in every stone.”