The Angel on the Roof: The Stories of Russell Banks by Russell Banks

maybe nothing more than the fluff-crowned roof and tops of the windows barely visible above the snow. There are never any people to be seen. My mother and my brother and I must be inside the house, looking out of one of those dark, small-pane windows at my father, who stands out by the road, snow up to his waist. Holding the box camera squarely in front of his belt buckle, he squints down into the viewfinder, finds the view sufficiently desolate, and snaps the picture.
    Probably the cameras most people owned in those days were not very effective in the dim, gray light of winter. But even so, it is odd that fully one-half of our yearly existence then is represented by fewer than a dozen pictures of our house and automobile, when the other half of the year seems to have been photographed endlessly.
    Another curious aspect is that, even though my memories of those years are almost completely of summertime, it was the winter that dominated our activities, filling our talk and views of the rest of the world, so that we could not even speak of a place without first mentioning that it enjoyed a kinder climate than ours. Of events that took place in summer, however, I recall only the general condition and have obtained my formal knowledge of the events themselves solely as data. It’s as if they could as easily have occurred in someone else’s life.
    The context of an event, the textures, physically, emotionally, spiritually, these remain uniquely our own; the particulars of an event, what we use to name it for strangers, are no more ours alone than our dates of birth. Perhaps this is why so much of the act of remembering is an act of the body, and why, sitting in my living room late at night, I can recall none of the particular, isolate experiences that, inevitably, come to me in a solid, complete block when, at the end of a November day, I grab my ice skates off the nail in the barn, walk across the road, and cross through the gray butts of winter grass to the pond. The sky is like a peach-colored sheet drawn taut at the horizon, a high rim miles away that circles the center of the pond. The air is still, thin, and cold. In a week, there will be a thick pelt of snow over everything that today stands before me like gray, brown, and lavender bone, cleaned and scoured by cold alone, neither dead nor dormant, but fixed, held in time the way a snapshot freezes a gesture at its completion or its start. And as long as the fading daylight holds, the pond, black and smooth as a gigantic lens, is the precise center of the sphere of space into which I have placed myself. I cannot see the house or the road from here, can see no way out.
    I sit on the steep, rock-hard eastern bank and take off my boots and put on my skates, and when I stand up, I am on the ice, moving across the black surface of the pond like a man running slowly through a dream, on a level plane, but also inside a matrix, as if underwater, free of gravity’s grating tug, and free as well to ply the weight of my body gracefully against it, like a dancer sliding against the felt measures of time.

The Caul
    You are in Richmond, Virginia, and you can’t remember your mother. She was an actress, she was beautiful, they say. No one remembers your father. Of him they say nothing, and so, you believe, it is “natural” that you do not remember him. But your mother carried you here to the city of Richmond—in her arms, in her arms. She languished through the sweltering months of summer. The play moved on to Charleston without her. Her pain increased daily. The coughing from the attic room, the groans, the sudden shrieks. The women muffled your ears against them. You were bad, a bad boy, bad little boy. She died. You can’t remember her face, her touch, her smell, her voice, all of which were beautiful, they say. They tell you this even today, the few who knew her those last months. Women, young women then, old women now. You remind them of her. If only they could remind you of