The Solace of Leaving Early by Haven Kimmel Read Free Book Online

did it, too. Why? he wanted to ask his congregants. “Why does this happen to us? Because we have abandoned an infinite number and variety of pure possibilities, and perhaps they live alongside the choices we did make, immortalized in the cosmic memory. Perhaps there are unknown lives walking alongside ours, those paths we didn’t take, and we reach for them, we ache for them, and don’t know why. We have, none of us, lived our lives as we ought to have, and maybe that’s a good, working definition of sin. God doesn’t care, the angels don’t care, no one is mad at us for our failures. But what agony, to know our better selves, the life we might have lived is there, just out of reach!”
    Amos put down his pen, took off his glasses, pressed his eyes. No, no, it was all wrong. Possibility, infinity, beauty—none of those words were right. He was begging for recognition, he was asking his congregation to tell him they were with him, that they understood this particular knot because it is the problem of the world, but he knew he couldn’t ask this way. Using Whitehead was too academic, too circuitous. What he really wanted to say was: have you felt this? this phantom life streaking like a phosphorescent hound at the edges of your ruin?
    *
    But he didn’t ask. In bed that night, unable to sleep, Amos went over his schedule for the next day: breakfast at the hospital with the Waltzes. Premarital counseling with Joannie Johnson and Jim Cross, seventeen and eighteen years old, respectively, and pregnant, collectively. A quiet lunch at home. An emergency meeting with Beulah Baker on the care and raising of two little girls. The thought of Beulah made him clench one of his fists with apprehension. Alice and her husband, Jack, had attended his church, and Amos had counseled them together and separately, and he imagined, wide awake, his eyes shining against the shadows, the pure possibilities for what he might have said or done, where he went wrong. A chasm, this one. He remembered everything about Alice—the clarity was suffocating. She had blond hair on her arms, and she was able to sit perfectly still for long periods of time, so still that she appeared to be absent. But she wasn’t absent. She was unfathomed, deep and bright. A smile like the northern lights, and gone.
    He would rely, finally, on Scripture to begin his sermon, as he usually did. Most people (even in Haddington) believed in the authority of a sacred text, regardless of how corrupt or inappropriate it turned out to be.
Come, let us reason together,
he would say. It was as good a place as any to begin.

Chapter 4
    HOW DID SHE DIE?
    “I started early, and took my dog,” Langston quoted to Germane as they headed out for their Sunday morning ramble. Germane’s intense civility, as a dog, came about in part, Langston believed, because of his early and repetitious exposure to Emily Dickinson. Other poets had done him no harm, but Emily seemed to understand the metaphorical relationship between women and dogs in a way that elevated Germane’s status beyond the literal, and thus, Langston concluded, he behaved more like the Platonic ideal. He exhibited more Dogness.
    Like many towns in the rural Midwest, Haddington seemed most comfortable with two directions, as opposed to the standard four; everything in the town that was not residential lay either east or west on Main Street. Langston and Germane turned right off Chimney Street and onto Main, toward the “downtown.” Haddington had no library, no place to hear live music (with the exception of the Full Gospel Tabernacle Church, half a mile to the west of town, which was subtitled The Israeli Church and Her Army—no one who attended the tabernacle would reveal the meaning of the name), no bookstore, no restaurant of substance, not even a bar. There was, however, at the west end of town, a little free-standing liquor store that sold cheap beer and grain alcohol mixed with lemonade; a retail outlet called