Awake. Sunday morning. The wind groaned and bawled and whined. A steady patter of rain—click, click, click, click—on the slate shingles was interrupted by the intermittent CLINK of a heavy drop annihilating itself on the aluminum gutter. The day’s first rays arrived as pale-gray streaks on the beige bedspread, which rippled under Richard’s creaky stirrings. He slid from beneath the covers.

He stretched, made a long, lip-splitting yawn, scratched his shaggy chest, then traveled southward to his balls, negotiating the elastic of his two-year-old tighty-whities, yellowed and frayed beyond dignity. Lately his underwear had taken to asphyxiating his two boys. Either the whities had become more tighty or his gut had plumped since the end of his tenure at JSEP. As a bonus, the underwear had bunched up and lodged in his crack during the night. Rather go sterile than buy new ones, he thought, as he extricated the obstruction.

After showering and preparing himself a breakfast of Wheat Chex and cranberry juice, he descended into the basement to continue where he’d left off the night before.

Richard opened Old English Poetry to “The Wanderer.” Yesterday, he had groped his way through the first few lines of the Old English text before glimpsing the “HWÆRCWOM” passage that matched the inscription on the sword hilt. Today, he proposed to read both the modern and Old English versions with laborious care, intoning every syllable in every line. He began with Carver’s translation.

Always the solitary one waits for favor,

the Lord’s sympathy. Sorry-hearted,

he’s long had to churn the flesh-chilling

sea with his hands, swim the channels

on paths of exile. Implacable Fate! …

Sorrow and pity were the bosom companions of the wanderer, the outcast, whether it be Odysseus or Tess Derbyfield or Neil Diamond’s “Solitary Man” or an aging, out-of-work bachelor barricaded in his cellar, shunning life’s adversities:

                                    Wāt se þe cunnað

hū slīþen bið sorg tō gefēran

þām þe him lȳt hafað lēofra geholena.

                                   [Experience shows

how torturous pity is as a fellow traveler

to a man with few dear friends.]

                                                     ll. 29b–31

Slīþen here meant not only “torturous” as in painful (as Carver had it) but also “cruel.” The Wanderer’s experience was validated by the fact that he could impart, with a dignity untainted by sentimentality, the reasons why a man separated from the company of others, even for a brief time, might come to prefer death to exile. The slow-dawning and bitter realization that his warrior-status had been stripped and he could not redraw his lot undermined his virility. He was consigned to fate, a thrall to its whims. This self-negating philosophy, which Richard did not concur with even as he became fascinated by it, bore the touchstones of the conceptions of free will, Original Sin, and predestination. But the Wanderer did not adhere to dogma; his needs were far less grand than the promises of paradise. Fire, food, friends, liege—these were all he wanted. Fate, Wyrd, Providence, the Hand of God, the Imminent Will—whatever its name or theological affiliation—was an enemy that worked hard to squelch human contentment, and war, expulsion, and decay were its scriptures. Whatever the Wanderer had once believed was moot, as he had witnessed the horrors of war, had seen the benevolence of the Creator shift into a ruination of all that humans had wrought:

Ȳþde swā þisne eardgeard ælda Scyppend

oþ þæt burgwara breahtma lēase

eald enta geweorc īdlu stōdon.

[So the Shaper of Men shattered this place

until the stoneworks of giants stood empty,

the din of townsfolk deadened to silence.]

                                                             ll. 85–87

Richard knew nothing of what a soldier feels in the heat of combat, or the nightmares that invade his sleep after he has quit the field. But he knew one or two things about death and the mechanics of dying, the inflamed hopelessness, the subsequent rage. After all, he had watched as his noble, poet-warrior father succumbed to mortality. “Ashes to ashes, dust to dust.” A somber admission, glutted with ironic grief. The earth vomited us onto itself, and then lapped us back up again, fattening up on its regurgitations, while all around wolves and ravens were circling, their hunger never quenched.

Sometimes the wolves and ravens were what we found in the poetry: allegories for calamities of all shapes and sizes. But every so often they took on fur and feathers and appeared in front of us, openly stalking. Sometimes they were us.

Richard was reminded of something he’d seen on TV once. He’d been flipping through the quadruple-digit cable channels when he landed on a public-access station. Speaking to a rapt audience on a stage in an auditorium was a bronze-skinned, silver-haired, packaged Adonis with a bleached smile, a navy suit, and a gold silk tie. Behind him was a pink backdrop adorned with a giant glossy photo of his earnest face surrounded by star-shaped mirrors. He was in the middle of a story about his childhood, how he “pulled himself up by the bootstraps” and “never gave up, never gave in,” how he clawed his way free of the hardscrabble Kansas town where he was raised by abusive, alcoholic parents. After earning a scholarship to Kansas State and receiving a business degree in marketing, he made his fortune as a commodities and futures broker. He retired at fifty-two and now toured the country teaching folks how to be successful in today’s volatile financial markets. But his positive-sounding rhetoric was a distraction from his real message, which was a diatribe against America’s lower class. He foamed at the mouth over the “weak-willed” and the “impoverished” among us who either could not or would not do as he did. Illegal immigrants were singled out, as were pot-smokers, welfare mothers, and, bizarrely, “pseudo-liberal libertarians.” An attempt to parse this phrase almost gave Richard an aneurysm. Apparently, this stentorian brute’s moral was that to be successful in this world, one must be acceptable to people such as himself. If those with big jobs and natty suits and piles of money were attracted to you, if they saw something of themselves in you, then you would be compensated. And all you needed to do to make this happen was to purchase this man’s book and accompanying DVD, Kenneth Wolf’s Guide to Personal Empowerment, only $39.95 with this special TV offer.

Richard looked up from the book. His t-shirt was stuck to the chair with back sweat. His ass throbbed. He stood and stretched. Veins protruded from the undersides of his forearms as his fingertips brushed the ceiling pipes. Did the sword etchings lead me to wisdom or just dead-tongued philosophizing? Am I being punished for reading too much?

He went over to the trunk and lifted out the leaf of parchment from the fire cave. Taking it between his thumb and index finger, he laid it on top of Old English Poetry and smoothed it with his palm. Blue lettering. Odd typescript. Uneven hand. Smudges. No punctuation. Turning to a blank page in his notebook, Richard began the reconstruction process. He tweaked syntax, improved diction, repaired grammar, carted away verbal offal. The job was not difficult. He had worked with this text in his former life, so he was able to pull most of the corrected version from memory.

[ … … … …]wer arrang[…] has taken as inspirat[…] el[… …] diversified as […]nting, sculpture [… … …]ture. […] Eden’s […] to your grand[…] […]able garden, flowers and p[…] ha[…] embodies ran[…] of sym[… … …] from the rose’s blood-[…]sion [… …] so[…] di[…] an orchid. S[… …] […]yptian times w[…] they first pla[…] […] flowers in a […]filled j[…] over 4[… …][…]go, the ar[…]ment of […]ssoms and […], lea[… …] buds into co[…] and [… …]y va[… … …]ons has flourish[…] amongst […] about every cul[…] planet. There has alwa[…] been [… …]out our botan[…] br[…] that exhilarates us [… …]ls us with awe. […] they are ut[…] as […] […]ugs, [… …]monial […], or [… …]ful dining-room [… …]eces, flowers [… …]ys rep[… …]ed one thing: the [… … … … … …]

––––––––

… The art of flower arranging is continually inspired by elements found in painting, sculpture, and architecture. From the Garden of Eden to your grandmother’s backyard vegetable garden, flowers and plants embody an expansive range of symbolic meanings, from the passion of a rose to the solemn dignity of an orchid. Since the ancient Egyptians first placed cut flowers in water-filled jugs over 4,500 years ago, the arrangement of blossoms, branches, leaves, and buds into colorful and wondrously variegated compositions has flourished among almost every culture on the planet. There’s something about our botanical neighbors that has always exhilarated us and filled us with awe. Whether they are used for medicinal purposes, in cooking, as ceremonial offerings, or as dining-room centerpieces, flowers never fail to remind us of the vitality of life.

In as far as they expressed the meaning and sentiments that Bertha was striving for, the words were spot on. On the surface, there was nothing about the passage that struck Richard as significant. Why then had it been left for him to rescue from the fire? It was quintessential Berthaese: bland and dispassionate with an undertone of condescension. And yet there was something about the passage that unnerved him, something that lurked behind the ostensibly uplifting praise of all things flora. Why was it that after writing the phrase “vitality of life,” he suddenly felt clammy and cold, as if death had entered the room?

“I need a break.”

Much had been shown and gathered over the past two days, and he had no idea how to process it all, or what he was supposed to do next. The poem was either the answer or a red herring. And the runic plea on the sword hilt was either a solemn directive or less than trivial. His instincts told him to turn off his targeting computer and trust his feelings. He tried this. Breathe in, out, repeat. But his focus was shattered by the distant thud of a migraine. He dissolved into a viscous state and pooled into the fat-ass concavity of the recliner.

He did not feel like watching TV, but this did not stop his Toshiba from springing to life. Like a circus tiger, his index finger responded to superior conditioning, pressing the power button the instant its master settled into position and gave the signal, which never varied: the honk of an involuntary fart. The Red Sox game was about to start, precisely what he needed to take his mind off of all else.

Don’t let this slip by, Rich.

He exorcised the urge to unburden himself and clicked off the game just as Jon Lester’s first pitch sailed high for ball one. Richard returned to the table. To Carver. The first sphere led me through darkness to a fragment from my former life, itself a fragment, which it left for me to recover from fire and regenerate. But the second? What did it show? The sea…the tail end of a voyage…the longship… He arched his back and interlocked his hands into a tense web behind his head, which again started to ache. It was time to unwrinkle that pass through the second portal, lay it out flat and smooth. The sea…

Next Chapter: Part Three: Diversions, Digressions, Discoveries, Chapter XIV