Independence Day
-Is that Greg’s?
-I don’t think that can be Greg’s. Too far away and too far west. His will show, if they will, just there, across the Peak.
We can see fireworks to the west, coming from somewhere near that second ridge, a place well beyond our own, a place I’ve never been, though I sight it every time I look that way. It turns out that from our vantage point, we can see the distant fireworks of people not known to us, the sky periodically alight and portioned out into what must be the farms of people doing as our people also do – firing up the sky out here where nothing but personal reticence bars blowing up or setting off whatever you might like.
I am sitting with my parents in the dark, on the concrete slab that runs behind the old milk barn. The concrete provides stable footing for them, for they are both unsteady. We sit in lawn chairs, perched where years ago a daily wash of cow manure made its way from the barn’s holding area down a slope to the lagoon. We’ve come here, in the dusk turning now to dark, to see the fireworks, if there are indeed any we can see. A hill, called Pike’s Peak, stands between us and my cousin Greg’s farm, and may well block the view. Greg reliably buys the ambitious fireworks, the ones that sail high but require some care lest you blow off some fingers using them. Even so, the Peak is in full foliage and just high enough that our view can only be uncertain.
***
In better times – really, in every year but this – we spend Independence Day on the other side of the Peak, at my cousin’s farm. Our families have lived alongside, with the Peak our boundary, for more than one hundred years, though we only achieved kinship in the 1940s when my grandfather’s sister married one of the sons of that farm. The magnificent fireworks on the Fourth are newer still than this. When my daughter was still small, our gathering together was for much tamer fare, the sort of thing achieved by handing over lighters, bottle rockets, and Black Cats to the children and hoping for the best. In the last dozen years or so, however, the Fourth has become a spectacle.
What began as a modest family gathering has grown to an event attended now by dozens, folks not just from the family, but from surrounding farms, from the family’s church, and from town. The potluck requires a tent and long tables that all comers then will burden with potato salads, chicken, and cakes decorated with red, white, and blue icings that will first ooze then mingle in the summer heat. Over all, my aunt and other ladies will wave empty paper plates in futile agitation against flies that will arrive in force. There is a fire blazing in a fire pit, hot dogs, marshmallows, and sharpened sticks for any who would like to roast their own. There are even sections of a sort, gatherings within the grander gathering. The older ones tend to fix their chairs and set in place, the middle aged to hover round the food or circulate, while the children nimbly hare off to some distance, the better to set off smoke bombs, make ash snakes, or shoot Roman candles away from older eyes or any who might scold them not to be so careless in how they aim the worst of what they have.
After most have had their fill of food will come a characteristic impatient aimlessness, that time when all want dark before it’s come. This is the interregnum, when the eating ruled over by the women gives way and we all abide in waiting for the men to start lighting up the works. One year this time passed with a hayride taken on a flatbed round the field, but this was a joy altogether too mild to justify the labor it entailed – all round here know what’s it’s like to circumnavigate a pasture. I think the only who enjoyed it were my sister-in-law and me, and that because we’d spiked our drinks. More lately, this time has passed disorganized, in talk or general idleness, though I have another cousin who will stand himself beneath a tree, there to read aloud the Declaration of Independence while some few souls unlucky enough to have sat near obligingly listen.
When dark at last comes on, Greg and some other men will gather far out in the field where they have parked a sizeable wagon heavy laden with combustible potential. Their voices, deep and often laughing, resonate across the distance till at last the first they light will burst above us. The sky out here is inky black, no city lights and naught but the fire to dull the contrast a good firework can make. The display is such to remind me why people ever started to pursue what should have counted as quixotic folly, why human ingenuity should ever have taken this particular turn and conceived a wish to explode colors in the sky. But in truth what I like best are the pops of human voice that intrude upon the general silence. Most watch with quiet awe, the way a people blowing up the sky should do, but there are always some who insert some verbal admiration. Better still are the sounds of those men way out in the field. They’ll sometimes laugh, sometimes instruct, sometimes gasp in ways that let all know they’ve just missed provoking some disaster. One year they inadvertently set up beneath the power lines and the extra frisson of alarm this caused joined with the marvel of it all – each burst of explosive light illuminating lines the works just missed, the percussive gasps from all around more prevalent that year. This sense of tension, of comedy, of camaraderie in reckless effort is part of what we miss this year, there atop our own hill and set on the concrete, just we three, my parents and me. What tension we have found is all a sadder, melancholic sort, the kind that a pandemic will turn up.
***
There really shouldn’t be a spectacle at all this year, not with the virus on the loose. But all of my more distant kin and the many who populate the place each year have determined that “life” should carry on. That life of the sort they thereby reference is already gone is a fact that none incline to grant. Facts are things one does not negotiate so their talk instead intimates the stuff of struggles we might overcome, or of battles we might win. Courage to go on with life, with our routines and with our ways, is what the moment calls for, or at least the call they claim to answer. So here we sit some near mile off, and I want to gasp, but with our loneliness.
We came out too soon, this much is plain. As impatient as the wait may be in an ordinary year, this wait is of a different order. It isn’t just the stillness – the absence of the restive many, the lack of feral children armed with lighters. It’s that we cannot even know if we will know when our kin have started off. We might not see a thing. The boundary between us may obscure it all and us be none the wiser, left to wait till such time as we at last just give it up as lost. Our people seem so far away, the Peak between us, and them on something I capitalize in my mind as The Other Side. The lonely thoughts crowd in fast with coming dark.
We have been in isolation since mid-March, retreating from the wider world because my parents both are old and because my mother’s doctor told us to in order to protect her. While we sometimes chafe against the bonds in just the way a sentient, social being would, we have managed mostly to endure. People who will live on farms and far from town have space to roam and are practiced in the several forms of solitude, so ours have surely been better than those taken in cities and by those used to crowded lands. The part to break my heart has been what others of our kin and neighbors do, their devotion to the usual and their resistance to aught that would be otherwise. We are the otherwise, the people now put on The Other Side. I would say that we’re doing as needs must, they that we lack courage and, still worse, faith. This is what they in fact do say to my parents. That I am faithless is old news, but my parents stay the course with God and should, somehow, trust that He will do what my mother’s immune system cannot, make it all come right if she should catch the virus. This mean theology of careless risk is the now the mountain stood between us. My parents have been largely cast aside by the people they once counted as their own, but they are trying hard, set atop this cracked concrete, to deny it. These are thoughts I hide while I natter on in false cheer about what bird that was that we just heard or about the way my brother and I used to blow up army men with Black Cats, the gravel lane left littered then with tiny green arms and legs. I wish I had to hand some sort of similar destruction I could do, but keep this also to myself. This is not the first time we have felt bereft in the pandemic, but it surely is so far the worst.
With full dark on, we debate the wisdom of remaining. Just as my will to stay at last is broken, mercy comes with a chirp of my dad’s phone. It’s Greg texting from The Other Side to urge us to be ready. He’s about to start the works and wants us not to miss it. His characteristic careless bonhomie should strike with me a sour note, I know. It will strike me as such later, but for now I am all and only the relief.
My mother has taken lately to saying that she does not mind the isolation of the pandemic. “It’s just that,” she falters, “I somedays wonder if there is still anyone else out there.” For this day at least, she has a signal that there is. It’s in the gasping pops of color now spiking against darkness, just there above the Peak.
