Sometimes he returns to awareness long enough to find Blewitt beside him, force-feeding him gruel and saying things like “Nuh-uh, no way, kid, you do not get to die, not without me.” At other hours it’s Rex who sits beside him, wiping Zeno’s forehead, the frames of his eyeglasses held together with rusted wire. With a fingernail, into the frost on the wall, he scratches a verse in Greek, as though drawing mysterious glyphs to scare away thieves.
* * *
As soon as he can walk, Zeno is forced back into his duty as a fireman. Some days he is too weak to carry his meager bundle more than a few paces before setting it down again. Rex squats beside him and with a piece of charcoal writes ?λφ?βητο? on the trunk of a tree.
A is ?λφα is alpha: the inverted head of an ox. Β is β?τα is beta: based on the floor plan of a house. Ω is ? μ?γα is omega, the mega O: a great whale’s mouth opening to swallow all the letters before it.
Zeno says, “Alphabet.”
“Good. How about this?”
Rex writes, ? ν?στο?.
Zeno rummages in the compartments of his mind.
“Nostos.”
“Nostos, yes. The act of homecoming, a safe arrival. Of course, mapping a single English word onto a Greek one is almost always slippery. A nostos also means a song about a homecoming.”
Zeno rises, light-headed, and picks up his bundle.
Rex buttons his piece of charcoal into his pocket. “In a time,” he says, “when disease, war, and famine haunted practically every hour, when so many died before their time, their bodies swallowed by the sea or earth, or simply lost over the horizon, never to return, their fates unknown…” He gazes across the frozen fields to the low, dark buildings of Camp Five. “Imagine how it felt to hear the old songs about heroes returning home. To believe that it was possible.”
Out on the ice of the Yalu far below, the wind drives the snow in long, eddying swirls. Rex sinks deeper into his collar. “It’s not so much the contents of the song. It’s that the song was still being sung.”
* * *
Singular and plural, noun stems and verb cases: Rex’s enthusiasm for ancient Greek carries them through the worst hours. One February night, after dark, huddled around the fire in the kitchen shed, Rex uses his piece of charcoal to scratch two lines of Homer onto a board and passes it over.
τ?ν δ? θεο? μ?ν τε?ξαν, ?πεκλ?σαντο δ? ?λεθρον ?νθρ?ποι?, ?να ?σι κα? ?σσομ?νοισιν ?οιδ?
Through gaps in the shed walls, stars hang above the mountains. Zeno feels the cold at his back, the light pressure of Rex’s frame against his own: they are hardly more than skeletons.
θεο? is the gods, nominative plural.
?πεκλ?σαντο means they spun, aorist indicative.
?νθρ?ποι? is for men, dative plural.
Zeno breathes, the fire sputters, the walls of the shed fall away, and in a crease of his mind, unreachable by the guards, hunger, or pain, the meaning of the verse ascends through the centuries.
“That’s what the gods do,” he says, “they spin threads of ruin through the fabric of our lives, all to make a song for generations to come.”
Rex looks at the Greek on the board, at Zeno, back at the Greek. He shakes his head. “Well, that’s just brilliant. Absolutely bloody brilliant.”
LAKEPORT, IDAHO
2014
Seymour
Eleven-year-old Seymour is walking home from the library on the last Monday of August when he spies something brown on the shoulder of Cross Road just before the turn onto Arcady Lane. Twice before he has found roadkilled raccoons here. Once a smashed coyote.
It’s a wing. The severed wing of a great grey owl, with downy coverts and brown-and-white primary flight feathers. A piece of clavicle still clings to the joint, a few sinews trailing out.
A Honda roars past. He scans the road, searches the weeds along the shoulder for the rest of the bird. In the ditch he finds an empty can that says übermonster Energy Brew. Nothing else.
He walks the rest of the way home and stands in the driveway with his backpack on and the wing clamped against his chest. In the lots of Eden’s Gate, a model townhome is nearly complete and four more are going up. A truss dangles from a crane while two carpenters move back and forth beneath. Clouds blow in and lightning flashes and for an instant he sees Earth from a million miles away, a mote hurtling through a barren and crushing vacuum, and then he’s in the driveway again and there are no clouds, no lightning: it’s a bright blue day, the carpenters are fixing the truss into place, their nail guns going pop-pop-pop.