Burial of the Dead

SERENITY - V.

V.

Levon walks slowly across the recreation field. He’s tall, slim, broad shouldered, and walks with the easy athletic grace of a champion swimmer or center fielder. He doesn’t look left or right, his baseball cap pulled down, framing the high forehead, emphasizing the straight nose, the strong jaw, the sensuous lips. With the cap, he’s handsome; with his height, grace and style, he’s superior; with the attitude, he’s irresistible. He imagines how all must look upon him and wonder at the far end of worldly possibilities, at the perfectible image of an almost perfect specimen.

At the far end of the field past the main lodge, Levon looks for Molly Knox, the cook. After dinner Levon usually finds her sitting on the deck of the small cabin she’s made her own, resting in a lawn chair with a glass of iced tea, sometimes staring at nothing, sometimes looking through pines to the lake below.

Levon remembers the first time he met Molly in the storage room behind the dining hall where cans of food stood like pillars from floor to ceiling. He told her he liked her meals, but she sobbed and almost cried, saying: “Three meals and, except for you, just now, not one compliment, not one thank you, not one smile. Three meals and, except for you, all I heard was one complaint from the anorexic who’s probably not the best judge of institutional cuisine.” Levon took her hand and kissed the back of it and thanked her again. Then Molly told him how when Marta Ley had hired her in March, she’d imagined a life lived among the universally challenged at a compound of lodges, cabins, huts, a quaint tyrolean village set on the side of a hill overlooking a crater lake, as a task that might exercise her faith, call upon her tired grace, satisfy her desire to be needed, to matter, to count, to replenish her ever diminishing reservoir of good will. “But work is work,” she said, “and never as gratifying on Monday as it looks on the Friday afternoon they hire you.”

“Molly?” Levon calls in a whisper, and his voice rises like damp humidity giving way to the under-cool of twilight.

“Molly?” he calls again and Molly lowers her legs from the yellow banister and leans forward and looks over the railing to the grass below.

“Levon,” she says, with a warmth that transforms the heat and humidity to the feel of blankets on an October night when love wraps itself within itself. “What are you doing down there?” She asks, and with three movements, arms, legs, all muscle, tense and relaxed, the effort of a gymnast half his age, Levon levitates and vaults the railing and stands beside her.

“For you,” he says and from a backpack he takes out a small angel, kneeling on one knee, holding a pillar, perhaps a flame, waiting by the tomb, waiting on the dead Lord to live again.

Molly holds it in her chapped hands. “Levon,” she says, “how beautiful,” and she asks him to sit.

He declines and leans against the railing, legs thin, denim pants, nearly pegged over brown pointy boots.

“You remind me of a country singer tonight,” she says.

“I remind a lot of people of a lot of things,” he says.

“Well, tonight I’d say a cowboy or one of those line men for the county, because of the cap.”

“Yeah, well,” Levon says, “I never wanted to wear one of those Spin-and-Marty hats.”

“Spin and who?”

“All-hat-no-cattle hats.”

Molly leans back in her chair. “You did this,” she says, holding the angel before her.

“It’s nothin,’” he says. “I thought you might like it.”

“Nothing!” she says, an exclamation and protest. “This is beautiful,” but Levon’s smart enough to know the clay sculpture, baked and hardened in the camp’s only kiln, is flawed. He knows in the way his mind’s eye works overtime to correct the lines of the too thick arm, a misplaced muscle, the failure of the three quarter view. He knows in the way he wants to take it from her and set it on the railing in the only position where everything falls into place, where mistakes are hidden by point of view.