you at the show,” he called across the parking lot. When our family gets together, the subject of his accident naturally bobs up, but he just looks at us with a kind of suspicion. It’s a story about someone else, a story he thinks we might be fudging just a bit.
When I can’t sleep I still sometimes will try to decipher that vision. My brother was never much of a churchgoer (he proclaimed himself a deist at age fifteen) but had been an excellent student of Latin in high school. His teacher, a sweet and brilliant old bun-wearing woman named Rank, drilled her classes in classical mythology. Maybe when it came time for my brother to have his near-death experience, to reach down into his psyche and pull up whatever set of myths would help him make sense of the fear, he reached for the ones he’d found most compelling as a young man. For most people, that involves the whole tunnel-of-light business; for my brother, the underworld.
The question of where he got Huck and Jim defeats me. My father was a great Mark Twain fanatic—he got fired from the only teaching job he ever held for keeping the first graders in at recess, to make them listen to records of an actor reading the master’s works—and he came up with the only clue: the accident had occurred on the eighty-fifth anniversary of Twain’s death, in 1910.
I’m just glad they decided to leave my brother on this side of the river.
MR. LYTLE: AN ESSAY
When I was twenty years old, I became a kind of apprentice to a man named Andrew Lytle, whom pretty much no one apart from his negligibly less ancient sister, Polly, had addressed except as Mister Lytle in at least a decade. She called him Brother. Or Brutha—I don’t suppose either of them had ever voiced a terminal r. His two grown daughters did call him Daddy. Certainly I never felt even the most obscure impulse to call him Andrew or “old man” or any other familiarism, though he frequently gave me to know it would be all right if I were to call him mon vieux . He, for his part, called me boy, and beloved, and once, in a letter, “Breath of My Nostrils.” He was about to turn ninety-two when I moved into his basement, and he had not yet quite reached ninety-three when they buried him the next winter, in a coffin I had helped to make, a cedar coffin, because it would smell good, he said. I wasn’t too helpful. I sat up a couple of nights in a freezing, starkly lit workshop rubbing beeswax into the boards. The other, older men—we were four altogether—absorbedly sawed and planed. They chiseled dovetail joints. My experience in woodworking hadn’t gone past feeding planks through a band saw for shop class, and there’d be no time to redo anything I might botch, so I followed instructions and with rags cut from an undershirt worked coats of wax into the cedar until its ashen whorls glowed purple, as if with remembered life.
The man overseeing this vigil was a luthier named Roehm whose house stood back in the woods on the edge of the plateau. He was about six and a half feet tall with floppy bangs and a deep, grizzled mustache. He wore huge glasses. I believe I have never seen a person more tense than Roehm was during those few days. The cedar was “green”; it hadn’t been properly cured. He groaned that it wouldn’t behave. On some level he must have resented the haste. Lytle had lain dying for weeks; he endured a series of disorienting pin strokes. By the end they were giving him less water than morphine. He kept saying, “Time to go home,” which at first meant he wanted us to take him back to his house, his real house, that he’d tired of the terrible simulacrum we smuggled him to, in his delirium. Later, as those fevers drew together into what seemed an unbearable clarity, like a blue flame behind the eyes, the phrase came to mean what one would assume.
He had a deathbed, in other words. He didn’t go suddenly. Yet although his family and friends had known for years about his wish
When I can’t sleep I still sometimes will try to decipher that vision. My brother was never much of a churchgoer (he proclaimed himself a deist at age fifteen) but had been an excellent student of Latin in high school. His teacher, a sweet and brilliant old bun-wearing woman named Rank, drilled her classes in classical mythology. Maybe when it came time for my brother to have his near-death experience, to reach down into his psyche and pull up whatever set of myths would help him make sense of the fear, he reached for the ones he’d found most compelling as a young man. For most people, that involves the whole tunnel-of-light business; for my brother, the underworld.
The question of where he got Huck and Jim defeats me. My father was a great Mark Twain fanatic—he got fired from the only teaching job he ever held for keeping the first graders in at recess, to make them listen to records of an actor reading the master’s works—and he came up with the only clue: the accident had occurred on the eighty-fifth anniversary of Twain’s death, in 1910.
I’m just glad they decided to leave my brother on this side of the river.
MR. LYTLE: AN ESSAY
When I was twenty years old, I became a kind of apprentice to a man named Andrew Lytle, whom pretty much no one apart from his negligibly less ancient sister, Polly, had addressed except as Mister Lytle in at least a decade. She called him Brother. Or Brutha—I don’t suppose either of them had ever voiced a terminal r. His two grown daughters did call him Daddy. Certainly I never felt even the most obscure impulse to call him Andrew or “old man” or any other familiarism, though he frequently gave me to know it would be all right if I were to call him mon vieux . He, for his part, called me boy, and beloved, and once, in a letter, “Breath of My Nostrils.” He was about to turn ninety-two when I moved into his basement, and he had not yet quite reached ninety-three when they buried him the next winter, in a coffin I had helped to make, a cedar coffin, because it would smell good, he said. I wasn’t too helpful. I sat up a couple of nights in a freezing, starkly lit workshop rubbing beeswax into the boards. The other, older men—we were four altogether—absorbedly sawed and planed. They chiseled dovetail joints. My experience in woodworking hadn’t gone past feeding planks through a band saw for shop class, and there’d be no time to redo anything I might botch, so I followed instructions and with rags cut from an undershirt worked coats of wax into the cedar until its ashen whorls glowed purple, as if with remembered life.
The man overseeing this vigil was a luthier named Roehm whose house stood back in the woods on the edge of the plateau. He was about six and a half feet tall with floppy bangs and a deep, grizzled mustache. He wore huge glasses. I believe I have never seen a person more tense than Roehm was during those few days. The cedar was “green”; it hadn’t been properly cured. He groaned that it wouldn’t behave. On some level he must have resented the haste. Lytle had lain dying for weeks; he endured a series of disorienting pin strokes. By the end they were giving him less water than morphine. He kept saying, “Time to go home,” which at first meant he wanted us to take him back to his house, his real house, that he’d tired of the terrible simulacrum we smuggled him to, in his delirium. Later, as those fevers drew together into what seemed an unbearable clarity, like a blue flame behind the eyes, the phrase came to mean what one would assume.
He had a deathbed, in other words. He didn’t go suddenly. Yet although his family and friends had known for years about his wish
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