[Editor’s note: the following is the final excerpts from NYC Conference Speaker, Sarah Hinlicky Wilson, and her latest novel, A-Tumblin’ Down, the story of a Lutheran Pastor and his family, sudden tragedy, grief, and the grace needed to survive.]
Saul and Asher had the run of the parking lot, the strip between the parsonage and the church, and the meadow out back. For all that, every time they went out to play they followed a strictly determined itinerary, devoted to tradition as only the very small can be.
The boys were “Irish twins,” a fact of which Kitty informed the church teenagers with the same solemnity and noncomprehension as the rabbit-like milkweed. She knew only that it meant they were born within twelve months of each other and, in their case, even in the same calendar year. For the three weeks between New Year’s Eve and late January, during which period Asher caught up to Saul, they could even claim the same number for their age, a fact that pleased the younger Asher far more than the elder Saul.
The two boys lived in a small, rich, self-sufficient world of tractors, swords, and blanket forts. In winter they added snow to their oeuvre; in summer, bugs, sticks, and mud.
Asher, though the younger, always led the way. He had a shock of curls and a fierce gaze. His snuggles were athletic, squirmy, and brief, leaving Carmichael both elated and exhausted. Asher was not quite sure he wasn’t one of Max’s monsters in Where the Wild Things Are, just as he wasn’t quite sure whether he was a different person from Saul. The only certain border in his mind was the invisible circle drawn around house, church, and meadow. The steep driveway and the cemetery comprised a fuzzy annex to the circle, the state forest a reassertion of its limits, the eastern edge of the meadow a nebulous mixture of threat and invitation. Asher longed to creep past the forsythias to the edge where Kitty went to play by herself. She possessed the qualities of a fairy to him and Saul: a mystical figure filled with stories, wisdom, lore, advice, and warnings freely dispensed before she poofed out of sight. She became real only when she was to be envied.
On that particular August morning, Asher as usual shot out ahead of Saul and made right for the fire ring. He grabbed one of a stash of sticks and poked at the smoldering remains of the garbage that Carmichael had brought out earlier and burned. Saul caught up and parroted the eternal warning of parents, “Be careful or you’ll hurt yourself.”
Even at the age of five, Asher was tired of hearing it. He ignored Saul and tried to get the stick to glow red. Then he could wave it in Saul’s face, and Saul would run off. Saul was bigger but easily scared. In the short stretch of time when Saul existed but Asher didn’t, Saul sickened and spent a month in the hospital. Carmichael’s distracted worry over her baby accounted for the contraceptive oversight resulting in a second son before the year was out. The infantile sickness, both parents inferred, explained a good deal of Saul’s meekness.
Asher didn’t know any of that. What he did know was that something satisfied him beyond all reckoning, beyond even cookies, to see the bigger boy run from him or shy away from doing the things that Asher wanted to do.
The fire, mostly dead already, disappointed. Asher zoomed up to the tree line and Saul duly followed. They had a favorite spot where a copse of sprightly young sugar maples took a stand in front of the threatening shadows of the geometrically planted pine trees of the state forest. Asher shimmied up the tallest of the set. “Come up,” he called.
Saul ignored the summons. He squatted down and worked at a sea-green lichen stuck to a rock as if with super glue. Asher yanked off handfuls of leaves and dropped them on Saul’s head. “Stop,” whined the latter.
“Come up,” ordered Asher.
Saul slid between the sugar maples and picked his way down a sharp decline. Brambles impeded further downward progress. He spied black raspberries and stuffed them into his mouth even though they were still hard and sour.
“Whatcha eating?” yelled Asher. “Hey, save some for me!” He slid down the tree like it was a fire pole and pelted over. The berries were plentiful but he grabbed at Saul’s.
“Get your own,” snapped Saul.
“No,” retorted Asher. He clawed at Saul’s hands. Saul placed his right elbow neatly in Asher’s stomach, and Asher toppled over backwards. Other kids, especially at Sunday School, cried and tattled at such treatment, but Asher never resented a physical takedown. He jumped up and tried again, but Saul was ready this time and pushed him into the bramble. Asher tore free his bare arms and pant legs, earning scratches on the former and snags on the latter. “Look at my blood!” he shouted happily. Saul obliged. Asher licked it. “It tastes like a penny,” he said.
Saul shrugged with the wisdom of the wise. “I know,” he said.
At that, Asher liked his brother again, and the tacit call of the next station lured him on. “Come on,” he said. They ran back down the meadow, across the gravel in front of the parsonage and church, and over to the oak tree right at the top of the driveway. Without discussion or quarrel they hopped onto the swing hanging from its thickest limb. Its seat was wide enough to accommodate two little-boy bottoms, Asher as always to the right of Saul. They pumped their legs hard and got it going. Asher tried to go higher than Saul liked. The latter’s refusal to cooperate made the swing go all twisty, but not twisty enough to be fun. After that they swung together docilely, engaged in earnest conversation about what it would be like if the kinds of dinosaurs that didn’t have wings had superpowers instead that could make them fly.
After the swing they walked the verge between the parking lot and the weedy hillside sloping down toward town. They scoured the gravel for pineapple weed, yanking it up by the roots to get a good sniff. They tried, without any real hope, all the doors of the church. No good. They were always locked, which both boys figured to be against robbers, though in fact they were locked against Saul and Asher themselves. Asher pointed to the ladder leaning on the back wall of the church, resting quietly between summer shingle replacements and winter snows. A well-worn argument about climbing up (Asher) or not (Saul) ensued. Saul won by the simple expedient of running off to the hose at the back of the house. Experiments in varying the pressure with a thumb, soaking each other unawares, and rehydrating their favorite patch of mud saw them through to mid-morning snack.
The brothers sat on the porch deftly devouring a banana apiece when Kitty banged out the pantry door and stepped over their shoulders leaning into each other.
“Where’re you going?” shouted Asher after her.
“To my place,” she said without turning back. She had a notebook in hand and several pens sticking out her back pocket. One of them was an emerald green ballpoint, an English department special.
Asher shoved the rest of his banana in his mouth and dropped the peel on the porch. “I wanna come with you!”
Kitty turned around. She looked very tall. “You can’t come with me,” she declared. “It’s dangerous. You could die.”
“I wanna come,” wailed Asher. Saul could be prevailed upon by brute force, but only sympathy would work on Kitty.
“I can’t let you get so close to the edge,” said Kitty. Behind the words they both felt the vast, nebulous, unassailable force of all things adult.
“It’s not fair!” Asher jumped down the steps and kicked at a patch of grass hard with his rubber boot. He wanted to spray Kitty with dirt but it didn’t work. Even the white globes of clover only bent over and bounced back.
“The world isn’t fair,” Kitty quoted their mother. She turned away and stalked off.
“I wanna come with you!” Asher howled as loud as he could.
Saul finished his banana. He didn’t like it when Asher got like he would be soon, if left unchecked. “Come on, let’s watch TV,” he called over.
“No, no, no,” Asher wailed. “I wanna go with Kitty.” All of a sudden great big tears were spilling out of his blue-gray eyes. He stood rooted in place.
Saul scratched all over his short dark hair and said, “I’m gonna go watch DuckTales.” He went in through the pantry door, then peeped out to see if Asher was following. He wasn’t. He was still crying and fussing and stomping his boots on the ground.
It didn’t occur to Saul to ask either of their parents for help. Somehow he felt the whole thing was his fault. The situation was grave indeed if TV was insufficient incitement for Asher to relinquish his quixotic cause.
Saul stood in the pantry. One end of it held their mother’s collection of African violets under a UV lamp. Saul understood this to mean that they were specimens from another planet. He avoided them carefully because he knew what aliens were capable of. He clambered up onto the built-in counter, balancing on the very short overhanging ledge with a firm grip on the knob of a cupboard, and with his other hand wrenched open the opposite cupboard door. He grabbed two packets of fruit leather, not the good kind that kids at school got but some other kind their mom bought at the Co-op. It was strictly off limits outside maternally designated occasions. He shut the cupboard door as quietly as he could, dropped to his knees, flipped around, and sat down on the counter before slipping off. Asher would’ve jumped. Saul snuck back out of the house again.
Asher was still wailing in the same place as if planted there. He paused momentarily to observe his brother’s reappearance while licking snot and tears off his upper lip.
Saul knew better than to summon him. Instead he dropped to his belly and crawled, alligator-fashion, across the yard in the opposite direction of Kitty and the drop-off.
Asher watched until it became clear that Saul was headed for the church cemetery. Only one equally forbidden realm could break his desire for another. He tore across the lawn and caught up with Saul under a stand of sumac trees, ruddy in anticipation of autumn. He dropped to the ground. One after another they inched under the single-chain fence surrounding the cemetery, a fence that could only suggest but not enforce the rule.
Saul arose into a squat and waddled around the perimeter to the tallest gravestone at the back, affording both shadow and concealment from parental disapproval. The stone face was engraved with a long name the boys could not pronounce but gave Saul the opportunity to display his knowledge of the alphabet: S-C-H-I-C-K-E-D-A-N-Z. Asher liked the A best because, according to Saul, it was the first letter of his own name, too. Asher thought it amazing that he could share something like a letter with a dead person.
But the present occasion required more than alphabetic charms. “Sit down,” Saul ordered. Asher obeyed. “Here.” He handed over the fruit leather.
“Did Mommy give this to you?” Asher asked in awe.
Saul didn’t answer. Asher understood.
They ate together in silence.
