Brave of the Dark

PART I

We find truth inside or not at all.

- Tim O’Brien, In the Lake of the Woods

ONE

Denver, Colorado

To give proper thanks for my life, I must give it not just to a long-gone Peruvian beauty, but to the brain tumor that took her. I must give it to a dancing Iowa farm girl cut down by a reckless young redneck … who also somehow deserves my gratitude. I should offer it as well to my accidental and callous mother, and to an abusive drunkard with broken teeth, and to a fearless three-legged dog. Certainly I must give thanks to that steadfast aunt of mine with that spirit as big as the mountains she won’t stop climbing. And to my brother, rising through the smoke of our childhood and rising still. The Catholic Church and the double-slit experiment should be on the list too I guess but mostly I must thank the man whose life wove through all of it. A man whose path led him to a knife’s edge and the chance to stop a darkness bearing down on me and my little brother. A man who probably committed murder and got away with it. A man named Harding Campbell.

For him, and them, and all of it, I am today thankful.

You must think I’m crass, even uncaring. Giving thanks to cancer, to coldheartedness, to abuse … even to homicide. That’s not the case. I’m not uncaring. At least I don’t think so. But if I’m going to be honest in my gratitude, I must acknowledge everything. All of those people, and each constituent of that list, influenced my life, directly or indirectly, and allowed me to be here, sitting on this couch in contemplation while my Lilly finishes preparations for Thanksgiving. Our first as hosts. I certainly give them credit for helping to make me a writer, or at least to exposing that core inside of me that must write if I’m to make any sense of this world.

It’s a rousing occasion to come to believe that a random life is a worthwhile enterprise. That my being here, for example, taking your time letter by letter as I am now, is more than an acceptable causatum but is in fact a good thing, despite all that had to occur for it to be. If I first give you my background, if I paint the base layers of my canvas as I’m able, and then lay in the highlights and fine lines, you might agree it’s a composition of note. Like all lives, really. Worth at least a pause.

On the table where my foot just was (I trust Lilly won’t hear of that transgression), on that table is a book of art, paintings of the American pastoral. It lives most of the year somewhere else, maybe at the bottom of another stack of books, but someplace I don’t pay attention to. Someplace tucked away. She brings it out at the holidays. I believe it must see daylight sometime after Halloween. It seems to just coalesce from out of the ordinary and suddenly it is where it wasn’t. But it’s certainly present on the coffee table at Thanksgiving and then stays through Christmas and New Years. She’s a ranch girl, Lilly. Grew up on her family’s cattle spread out east of Fort Collins. The book was given to her by her grandfather who was himself a painter on the side, oils mostly. I met him once before the heart attack. That one meeting was enough. It’s that way with some people. So I think of his rough hand sometimes, the hand that shook mine once, I think of that hand holding a paintbrush in a quiet room and laying delicate strokes of color on canvas. He killed chickens and steers with that same hand. Rats and rattlesnakes too. Even a flop-eared dog torn beyond saving by coyotes. Light and dark in the same hand, in the same heart.

We have some of his paintings in our place here. You’ll think I’m biased, I’m sure, but it is my uneducated opinion that he had genuine talent. That’s his there above the leather chair. That painting. When you can turn a saddle lying alone in the dirt into a storyteller all its own, you have something. I have often wondered whether he gave up a career in art, a career of acclaim, for all those chores he put that hand through. Or whether all that good and hard work, all the cuts and scrapes and burns and breaks, put something into that hand. Something that wouldn’t have been there otherwise. Something that became morning light on a rough, lonesome saddle.

So genius that I am, I have put together that she likes to add casual reminders of that country life when the holidays gain steam and swell like bred heifers at the drag end of the year. The book is a landmark for her, here in the heart of our adopted city. It is a talisman she sets out to guard our corner of the world and make it ready. She is less concerned about the reasons for the holiday season than she is that the season actually is, and what it really means: reconnecting, re-touching. The book, with its sun-laid pastures and laden hayforks and lonely houses hung with dark windows, like eyes soaking in the passing world, is better than roasting chestnuts for her.

For me the book brings something different than comfort, but not opposite. The soft hillsides, the homes and barns, the land draped in the colors of the seasons, make me think of that dancing Iowa farm girl I never met. She then leads me to Harding, and from him to all the others, back even to his own doomed mother; the Spanish-Peruvian transplant with the chestnut hair, Isadora Perez. But it was the farm girl’s memory, her facsimile of memory really, that whispered the possibility of a story and I believe it must have been she who whispered, Begin now. Her name was Annalee Campbell, originally Annalee Fahlstrom of Edgar, Iowa. She was the young wife of Harding Campbell and it was Annalee, or rather the emptiness she left behind, that sent him over the mountains from Boulder and into Avry seeking solace. That was where my brother Matthew and I met him, and where my aunt fell in love with him. And it was where, I believe, he made a final, desperate decision that opened up life’s possibility for me and my brother … and very likely the probability of continuing to live. At least beyond those increasingly dark days in our last winter there in Avry.

Of course I could carry my gratitude back much farther. Back through generations upon generations. I’m tied to them all, one way or another. At my center is my proof, my knot in that rope. Once, I was physically connected to my mother, Renae, and at her center was once a knotted reminder of how she was tied to my Grandmother Diane. And then from her to her mother and on back to the very beginning of beginnings. A knotted rope, tied through our very centers where blood and breath, where life itself, first came to us.

But I’d only be guessing going back too far. For those notables on my list, however, I have in one form or another, personal evidence.

In astrophysics, there is a concept called the cosmic horizon. It refers to what can be seen within the swell of light that bursts outward from a starting point and within a certain amount of time. So, for example, there’s a cosmic horizon that encapsulates the known universe, measured in billions of years. Since the beginning, via Big Bang or Big Breath, light, riding space itself, has had only so long to swell outward like a balloon. We’re inside that balloon so what we can see is inside as well. The balloon is enormous from our perspective but it’s not everything, in some cosmologists’ estimation, because physics tells us we can only see as far as light has had time to travel. Even if we had the tools to reach them we couldn’t speed past the farthest photons. That’s the latex edge, so to speak, and everything beyond is only a guess.

Isadora represents the backward edge of the horizon for the purpose of this story. I can’t see beyond her with any precision. I can only guess. So I’ll call this the known universe, with a diameter starting at Isadora and stretching forward across time to me. And now to me and Lilly and a child to be. We will continue to move into the future at this edge, packets of energy as we are, expanding our own horizon. But for this story, the historical edge will remain at Isadora. I guess all good stories must have such horizons lest they unspool into something like the Star Wars universe or worse.

I should point out that my thanks is not only because of the constituents of my finite list, but for them as well. It’s important, it’s important to me at least, to recognize their lives and mine as a consequence, direct or indirect. And more than that, it would be insulting to Isadora, to Annalee, to Harding not to be grateful that I am here. Each of them, and all the others, lives in me one way or another. Any rejection of myself would therefore be a rejection of them and what they went through. I’m not willing to do that. Not for very long anyway.

We are like freshets, each of us, like rivulets on our way to the sea. We edge our way forward, molecule by molecule, inch by inch, on a path of our own, but not always of our choosing. Like a ribbon of water running down a hillside, pulled by unseen forces. On our way, we are moved by that rock, turned by that unexpected stem. We are drawn down a previous course there, allowed to move freely down that section. We may see, in general, where we’re going, the distant destination. Certainly we can see that our journey ends ahead somewhere but we can’t see exactly how we get there. And on our way we are influenced by fellow watercourses, especially those that join directly with us.

Some bring debris, pollution even, that challenges our navigation and can even cut us off. That’s how I see my own mother, such as she was, and the men she brought into her life, including my unknown father and, finally, the vicious drunk Rollins Witherly.

Some bring a coloring that can change the way we see the world. Religion and science can be heavy dyes. They were for Harding at different times and were both a consequence of his entwinement with Isadora. Catholic faith flowed into his life from her and then science, physics in particular, took over his course when that tumor so radically changed where he thought they all were headed.

Some we encounter give of themselves, even all of themselves, to move us forward, like fresh tributaries giving volume and push to a river. Such was that fearless farm girl, as Harding described her, Annalee, with whom he danced for a time in this world and has never, I don’t believe, ever let go of. That’s also how I see my brother and that brave three-legged blue heeler named Max. It’s certainly how I see Lauren, who’s technically our aunt, Matthew’s and mine, but who became so much more. And it’s definitely how I see Harding.

He left Avry around the time we did. And when I say we, I mean Lauren, Matthew and me. Those weeks are ruffled in my memory. I don’t see them with any smoothness or clarity, and so days and events that might actually have been separated by stretches of time are to me folded next to each other. But it was roughly the same time as I understand it. It was a couple months at least after my mother’s small funeral where I remember seeing tears on my grandfather’s face, Grandpa Ed, and my brother’s. I remember Lauren dabbing at her eyes with a wadded tissue. But my grandmother’s face was dry in the cold winter light. Which was how my face was too.

My memory of Harding adds these highlights to this painting I’ve tried to create: He was clever and insightful and he combined those two into a subtle sort of humor. The kind that lingers with you and makes you laugh all by yourself on some quiet Tuesday in the distance. I know my aunt loved his humor. I am sure that Annalee did as well. I think a big part of the draw was that the humor came from that thoughtful, intelligent man. It was a contrast, like a sharpening of shadow caused by the morning sun. But unlike the dawn, it came without warning. It came in unexpected gifts, small but precious. It was like gazing at an eddy in a river, watching it move deliberately, reflecting the blue sky and the leaning evergreens around it, sunlight breaking from it like sparks, its depths only hinted at by the darkness below; it was like appreciating such an eddy for its existence outside of who you are as the observer, contemplative and alone it seems, and uncatchable, and then as you’re observing it, a little splash flings a droplet that knocks a rotund insect from the boulder at the upstream edge of the eddy and the bug pratfalls into the water, landing upside down on its back. It’s not an entirely unusual experience, but unexpected, and one that could only have come to be in that context. You watch the fat bug flail its legs helplessly as the little whirlpools in the eddy spin it round and round and you know the bug’s only hope is quick death by trout. You smile, maybe even laugh just a little, although you’ll laugh more and louder on that quiet Tuesday later on, when you remember the spinning helpless bug and the deep and uncatchable and playful eddy.

Perhaps it is that contrast I see in Harding that led me to create the scenario put forth in this story, which is so different from the official version of what happened the last night of my mother Renae’s life. There are other clues, too. Things I remember from that night, things I have picked up on from Lauren who knows much more than she has ever openly revealed. But it must be that contrast that I saw in Harding that allowed me to believe he’d be capable. Whatever frequency inside of me that tunes in on that sort of thing — Lilly’s grandfather and his hand both delicate and rough, both creator and killer; or humor contrasted with a contemplative, even melancholic nature — that frequency must have picked up on some emanation from deep within Harding.

I believe it must have been a vibration that came from some string pulled tight; from the tension he tried to maintain for so long. It was the line between light and dark, good and evil. It’s a line that typically wanders back and forth like a wave … or the separation seen in the yin-yang symbol. The wavelength and amplitude are different for every person, so some spend more time pulled toward their darker sides and some the other way, or so it seems. But I think Harding did his best to keep the string tight. He dared not let it move much, if at all, and so made a taught barrier between two halves. He certainly used science as a winch. And he did so despite the mounting evidence that life deserved no such reserve. Or maybe he did so because of it. As if because he had seen up close what can happen and how it felt when things did go dark, he understood intimately that destruction was also inside of himself. But it was a tension that he finally released, I believe, on one bitterly cold night when once again the shadow moved in. Only this time he saw it coming. So he let go and let himself be all of himself. As he was and still is, I hope. In that way, he is no different than you or I. We all carry the light and dark within us and who can say what it takes to move between the two. I must admit that it is my acceptance, or my attempt at acceptance, of my own starlight and shadow that led me back to this story and to my belief that it’s okay — no, it is good and right — to be thankful for it all.

TWO

You never know where life is going to take you or what, precisely, you’re going do. The last line of one of his last postcards, the one sent from Machu Picchu. I was grateful for the postcard, certainly, and also for the fact that he had claimed that marker in the world. But that wasn’t the most resonate aspect of the correspondence. It wasn’t what stayed with me.

It was the word precisely. Says so much in nine letters, don’t you think? He didn’t just write, You never know where you’re gonna go or what you’re gonna do. Something like that to commemorate his climbing Machu Picchu, a young widower in the land of his lost mother. He was more exact … more precise. Even adding the word precisely in a, well, in a precise way. It’s a cold word, precisely. It’s a scientific word with sibilant intrusions that slice like a laboratory scalpel.

Death is precise too. Even a death like my mother’s with its prelude of thunder and heat. It’s a switch. A binary change. On, off. This life to not this life. And I wonder how often Harding thought of that precision. It was first introduced to him in his youth when his mother was there and then she wasn’t. And then as a postdoc in astrophysics with a career blossoming, the switch was thrown again, turning off, of all people, Annalee, who was and was and was, as I understand it, right up until she wasn’t.

Then, on that brittle night in the mountains of Colorado, did Harding throw that precise switch himself? Did he turn off the light in my mother Renae’s eyes? I have my own opinion.

When we left Avry, we headed farther west. Harding went south. I learned later from his postcards and letters that he had always wanted to visit South America. His mother being from Peru was the major draw but there were other things he wanted to see including the very tip of that snow-cone continent where you can just about glimpse the end of the world. He sent sporadic correspondence to each of us, to Matthew and to me. As was his nature, they weren’t long or flowery. They were concise. Maybe precise is a better word. And I have come to believe that it was in reading those spare communications that I first glimpsed that what is said and what isn’t are two halves of a larger whole, light and shadow forever joined. Pay attention to the edges of a silhouette and what could be outside of it, I was being taught, not just the shadow creation itself. It is a lesson ongoing but one that has served me well.

I assume that he wrote Lauren during that time as well though I don’t remember seeing letters addressed to her. Perhaps they corresponded over email instead. Perhaps only through memories.

But the correspondence stopped coming a few years ago. I don’t have an answer as to why. A mailing I sent to the last address I had was returned after a time unopened. The last thing he sent me was a thick, hand-written journal. It came with a note congratulating me on a staff position I had landed at a national magazine with a better reputation than it deserves and saying that I might find some interesting story ideas inside. I was stunned. This cryptic man had offered me the drawings, or some of the drawings at least, of his very structure and functioning.

The journal as a thing itself was a surprising gift and one filled with layered revelations, but most curious of all was that the last entry was dated the night of my mother’s death. February 13. Harding had apparently kept the journal with him on his travels south but never added to it. If he recorded his life in those intervening years, he did it somewhere else. It was as if the man who had written the journal I now held my hands, the man who had recorded — in his reserved sort of way — his hopes and fears, his triumphs and pain, it was as if that man simply vanished. As if that man stopped existing that night.

He was raised Catholic, you know, and I’ve often wondered how much his sending me the journal was some sort of confession. Mind you there was no outright admission of guilt. He didn’t write that he had killed Renae or that he planned to, though she was in there and not flatteringly. The last entry was not about her, however. Not directly. It was about the dogfight and the shotgun. The final two lines in the journal proper read: Max is still in the back of the truck. Am I really this much of a coward? There are no entries, dated entries, after those lines. But on the inside of the back cover is an unusual scribbling. In a large, erratic hand, different than the compact penmanship throughout most of the journal is written, Forgive me Father for I have sinned … The note fills much of the end paper inside the cover. There’s no way to tell when it was written. Or why.

The journal is thick. I haven’t counted but I’d guess it’s around three-hundred pages and it’s letter size, not a small diary, but a large soft-sided notebook. All but the last twenty-some pages are filled, front and back, and mostly with words, but there are sketches too. Most are related to math or physics, showing his mind at work in spheres other than internal observation or the up-close and sweaty world of human interaction. But there are other drawings as well, cartoons they should be called, rudimentary cartoons expressing anger or sarcasm or trying to capture a moment better than words.

He did not write daily. Not even every other day. The journal is more like a photo album filled with snapshots of his life. If I had to identify the frequency of entries I’d put them at weekly. It’s a rough estimate but it’s close. They average about fifty a year and they’re of varying length, some a quarter-page, some a half. A very few a page or more. So with a wavelength measured somewhere around six to eight days, the journal ripples across ten years, from his second year of graduate studies to that last winter in Avry. The journal begins with Annalee, as you might imagine. She was the lever and whatever she set in motion inside of him needed room. She was the splashing stone in his contemplative pond, the lightning strike and trailing thunder in his lonesome dark. She required a record and so he began.

What an enterprise that must have been for Harding Campbell. There he was, encapsulated in the rigors of an advanced degree, a degree requiring fluency in the alien language of higher math, exposing himself to this unusual farm girl, letting her slice him open while he narrated it. Letting her play doctor amid his innards. And elbow deep she paid little attention to the recognizable pieces: the heart, the gizzard, the funny bone. She was more interested in the pieces made of mercury that defy capture.

On hiking trails here in Colorado, especially those up the big mountains, our celebrated fourteeners, you’ll see these human-made structures called cairns. They’re stacks of rocks made to mark the trail, particularly as it winds amid the rocky camouflage above timberline. They are also made just because they can be made and those who make them have seen them made so they do likewise. I’m sure cairns are found in other places. It’s a Gaelic word, cairn, so we didn’t invent them here in Colorado. But this is my state. It’s the one I’m confident referencing. Cairns on our trails here are landmarks. Reference points. Harding’s entries about Annalee are similar. He was not going to capture her with one of his simple sketches and he didn’t have the words to create a complete outline, so he marked their path. We were here. She was like this. The walk they took at the Air Force Academy got a big cairn. He devoted more than a page. It was that day that he decided to ask her to marry him. A cairn later would mark the actual doing, how he went about it on that full-moon evening on the Northwestern University campus.

She was nearly all he wrote about following her death. What he did write that wasn’t specifically about her was tangential: walks to try to clear his head, try to unsnarl his grief; thoughts about where he might go to escape Boulder and her ever-present memory; rage at the universe, the divine, the void for its cruelty.

In that stretch of entries there is a compilation about his trip back to Iowa, taking Annalee’s body home for the funeral and burial. The entries from that trip are insightful even as they are spare. He revealed that he and Jack, that’s Annalee’s father, that he and Jack took a walk down the lane from the farmhouse, just the two of them, Jack dragging his new hip and they stopped at the road and stood there for a time. Harding wrote, Sun was setting. Hawk flew by. Told Jack I was sorry that I didn’t protect her. Jack said he knew I’d have done anything for her. He got that right. That’s all he records of the conversation. I know there was much more.

Annalee was primary but the journal gave him the space to capture his thoughts about more than just her. It also contains memories of his mother and thoughts of his sister and his in-laws and sometimes his father. There are almost poetic entries about the nature of existence and this small stage of ours looking out on the entire known universe. In Avry, he put down his thoughts about Lauren and his thoughts about Matthew and me and what might be going on, really going on, in that house where we survived with Renae and Rollins.

So what follows is my translation of that unexpected journal as well as Harding’s letters and postcards. It includes my interpretation, based on personal experience, of him and Lauren and Matthew, of Renae and Rollins and the others. And it contains some of the long conversations I’ve had over the years with Lauren — and with Matthew too when he’s willing — conversations we’ve had about Renae and Rollins, about Ed and Diane and Avry, and about Harding.

All of that experience and observation and social research is stirred together in a mixture that contains a good portion of imagination. I’ve never lacked in that department, to use a worn cliché. That part you’ll have to trust me on. I guess the whole thing you’ll have to trust me on. That’s up to you.

The ending is my own. It’s constructed with the facts as I know them and mortared with that mix of perception and intuition and possibility. It lays out how I believe the end really came for my mother on that February night in my eleventh year. And it’s how I think the end perhaps should have come for Harding … and maybe did in a way. Things, as you may know, don’t have to be factual to be true.

In the foyer closet here in our home, on the shelf above the coats, is the Northwestern hat. It’s purple with a white N on the front and it fits these days, now that I am thirty-one, basically the same age as Harding was the last time I saw him. I have found myself putting it on a few times in recent months, usually for walks by myself. For so long I kept it just to keep it. Lilly wanted to throw it out last spring. I told her I’d use it for yard work or fishing.

Where’d you get it anyway?

Oh, I just picked it up along the way, I told her.

Along the way. Yes.

We were headed back from that camping trip. It was the camping trip when we did the bear dance at Lauren’s instruction and made a fire and Harding showed Matthew and me how to clean a trout and then made puppets out of two of the gutted fish, setting them atop his hands, one on each and putting his index fingers into their mouths through the incision running along their bellies. And he used the tips of his fingers to open the jaws of the fish as he gave them voice, saying silly things that made us laugh, until he said, Why’d you have to take my guts out? Why? and Matthew started to quietly cry and Harding stopped and put the fish down and said, I’m sorry buddy. It’s okay.

The sun was shining through my backseat window on the ride home. Harding was driving and he took the purple ball cap off his head and handed it to me.

That might help.

I held the cap in my hands, turning the brim toward me.

What’s the N for?

Northwestern University, where I went. Near Chicago. Great school. Full of knowledge. That’s why they put the N on there. Well, for Northwestern, of course, but really for knowledge.

I remember he briefly looked over his shoulder and smiled and I paused I’m sure and then said, Very funny. Knowledge.

Nolej Matthew had said quietly and smiled. I remember I looked at my brother but said nothing. I put the hat on my head and turned it so that it blocked the sun to the right and leaned my head against the window, looking at Harding’s profile and feeling the vibrations of the vehicle, hearing the hum of the tires on the road. I saw Harding glance at Lauren and smile. I fell asleep against the car door and didn’t awake until we pulled into my aunt’s driveway in Avry. I remember taking the hat off and holding it out for Harding to take back.

Nah, you keep it, he said. He sunk his hand into his dark hair and smiled. I think I got enough knowledge. It’s your turn now.

The hat holds more than the camping trip. It carries that Thanksgiving as well. The last Thanksgiving we had with our mother. The last Thanksgiving in Avry. The first and last Thanksgiving with Harding. Blood always comes to mind with that memory. Seeing the blood on Harding’s mouth and him wiping it with his hand. Rollins hit him solid. Harding never saw it coming and it dropped him. But he got back up. I remember that. Then the other big guy, the fishing guy, Lander was his name, Lander had Rollins in a bear hug and was taking him outside while my mother screeched cuss words. I see her fingers as knives slicing through the air with her words. Harding stayed where he stood after rising from his knees. Stood there with his bloody mouth. And that blood, his blood, always seems to carry me on to that cold day at the house later that same winter when Harding tried to pick us up for Wintercalia and Rollins sicced Eightball on us and three-legged Max threw himself in the way. How loud and vicious that fight was. And how loud was Rollins’ shotgun.

But what stands out most about that day for me was not the dogfight or the blasting shotgun or even sneaking out later to pick up Max’s bear lying on the snow near his blood. It was Harding holding the wounded dog in his arms and telling me and Matthew that he was going to take care of Max and then come back.

I’ll get you out of here, he said. I promise.

THREE

In the same shoe box where I keep the journal, there are newspaper clippings from 2003. They tell of the murder of my mother and the arrest of Rollins …

… Mr. Witherly is being held on several charges including first-degree murder.

The victim, Renae Fuller, was reportedly found dead in the home she shared with Mr. Witherly in unincorporated Salida County, a mile north of Avry. Sheriff’s Deputy Rick Cordova discovered Ms. Fuller’s body just after midnight on Feb. 14 when he visited the home at the request of a relative who was concerned about Ms. Fuller’s whereabouts.

Authorities said Renae Fuller had dropped off her children, two boys ages 11 and 8, at the home of her sister, Lauren Fuller of Avry, earlier on the night of Feb. 13. Renae Fuller left her sister’s house, saying she was headed home, according to the investigation. Reports indicate that Lauren Fuller was concerned about her sister’s state of mind and her safety if she did in fact return to her home. Lauren Fuller called the sheriff’s office to report her concerns and Deputy Cordova was sent to conduct a welfare check at the Witherly residence at 4913 County Road 17, also known as Braden Falls Road.

Authorities said that Mr. Witherly opened the door for Deputy Cordova but wouldn’t allow the deputy to enter the home. At one point during the confrontation, according to reports, Mr. Witherly pushed past Deputy Cordova and ran from the house toward a truck parked outside. The deputy was able to stop Mr. Witherly before he climbed into the truck. Deputy Cordova then detained Mr. Witherly in the back of his patrol vehicle while he returned to the home in search of Renae Fuller. Just inside the front door, Deputy Cordova reportedly discovered the body of Ms. Fuller and arrested Mr. Witherly on suspicion of murder. Mr. Witherly is being represented by the Public Defender’s Office.

Another article reports on the potential trial and yet another explains the plea bargain that Rollins agreed to, admitting guilt in exchange for a conviction of second-degree murder, domestic violence and drug charges. He was sentenced to twenty-four years and began serving his time at a prison on the eastern plains of Colorado. Seven years into his