Clearly Now, the Rain by Eli Hastings

Author:Eli Hastings
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: ECW Press
Published: 2013-09-09T04:00:00+00:00

Thirteen

In June, Serala finds a lull in her hectic corporate schedule and catches a flight out. I was mired in the numerous projects of my mom’s mountain home. It was she, Hugh, and me, and we were all glad of that.

The sum total of their previous time together was probably less than a month, comprised entirely by Hugh’s rambles through Riverside in his fire-red Ford Rocket. They shared a wordless peace and comfort, and asked hungrily after one another when I was the intermediary. It was Hugh’s brother’s suicide that had brought Serala close to me the first day I met her, so it certainly pulled the two of them together.

We spent a lot of time kicked back in the fetid cabin, which was just down the road from the proper mountain “house.” Hugh and I had turned it into a comfortable place: hand-carved easy chairs, ratty, soft old sofas, kerosene lamps, candles, and a hammock.

My father had given me Bob Dylan tickets for my birthday, so we headed off on a Saturday evening, back to the Gorge, despite my probation order to stay out of Grant County.

Dylan is opening for the leftover Grateful Dead. He plays some of my slow favorites—“Visions of Johanna,” “Girl From the North Country,” “Forever Young”—and we sit on the hill above the still-sparse crowd. He makes his rocking powerful; he is almost a young man, there, silhouetted against the bleeding sky on the lip of that canyon. When he strums and moves and bends double to blow through the harmonica, he commands healthy shadows, which slice across the dancing crowd.

When Dylan speeds it up and starts an energetic version of “House of the Rising Sun,” Hugh and I run and tumble down the hill to dance barefoot, like the hippies around us. And when he rocks his way into “Tangled Up in Blue,” I find there are tears leaking from my eyes and I feel better, higher than I have in as long as I can remember. I feel a part of Hugh and even a part of the dirty kids twirling around me, and a part of Dylan hunching over his guitar, jumping and strumming. When I look up at Serala, watching us from the hillside, above, I know she is with me—I know that the residual numb that has pried us apart since the winter and her “accident,” is done. And I know she is fighting a smile, disguising it with cigarettes. It’s fair to say that during Dylan’s set of my favorite songs, I permit myself the vice of hope for her once again, I let the ragged thing back into my heart because I have to, because I can’t be so free in the embrace of that music if I don’t.

When Dylan is done and the legions of Phish/Dead Heads rush forward like refugees on a relief convoy, we split. The cabin is waiting with wine in its lap.

I glance at a trio of sheriffs standing around their cars as we roll past, not recognizing any, luckily.

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