Essays from the Nick of Time by Mark Slouka

Author:Mark Slouka
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
ISBN: 9781555970147
Publisher: Graywolf Press
Published: 2010-12-03T23:00:00+00:00

There are times, sitting up to my chin in a warm pond watching a damselfly the precise iridescent green of cheap tinsel perch on a spear of weed protruding above the water, feeling the velvety sides of the bullhead catfish bumping against my feet, when I can almost feel it. A genius. A music just beyond my range of hearing. The surface film, cooking in the August sun, stretches before my eyes, a teeming graveyard of mayflies and midges and tiny, ivory-white moths, a macabre and gorgeous litter of wings and legs and antennae, of pale exoskeletons like comic-book armor and lime-green duckweed. Twenty feet out, I can make out the dull glint of a dead bluegill. Water striders and dragonfly larvae move over and through this mat, this mulch. Organisms I know nothing about—a thousand to a bottle cap—zip and spin in every palmful of water. Something is swirling now beneath the dead bluegill and the fish jerks and then rises to the surface again. And I think to myself: This is beyond us. Only reverence is appropriate here.

V

On a still July afternoon two summers ago, a neighbor called to say that he’d found a baby rabbit in an open field by his woodshed. There was no nest in evidence, no mother. It appeared to be starving. Knowing my daughter’s willingness to serve as nursemaid (or priest, if necessary) to any and all, he thought she might take it in.

We walked over together to find a baby cottontail, some weeks old, crouched in the corner of a book carton. It was smaller than a man’s fist. It had impossibly soft brown fur and strangely sentient brown eyes and wheat-pale whiskers that moved whenever its nose twitched, which was often. When my daughter picked it up, it sat perfectly still in her hands and twitched its rubbery little nose. By the time we’d carried the carton back to our cabin, it had a name.

Winston died three days later. He seemed to be doing well the first day, greedily suckling warm milk out of the eyedropper, wetting his rabbit chin, but by the second morning something was clearly wrong. A terrible stiffness had set in, as if his spine had curved and solidified. His big hind legs, with their reversed rabbit knees, twitched and kicked spasmodically. We took Winston to one of those Good Samaritans who specialize in animal recovery at their own expense, who told us there was nothing we could have done, that baby cottontails were among the most delicate of commonly found creatures.

My daughter, who has grown up in the natural world and thus understands—perhaps better than I—that death, too, is in the picture, buried him along with the dragonflies and the voles and the chipmunks and the cowbird I’d tried to nurse in the clearing behind the second oak.

I wanted to say something, for all three of us, but what could I say? Science couldn’t help me here—it spoke a different language, a language washed clean of sentiment and pain.

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