The Shadow Catcher

Through this, through the bleak funeral and the setting of the stone, in the background, Hercules had wept. Grief trumps pride, it always does, real grief, the kind you never want to come, the kind that blots out everything, knots the safety rope of hope into a stranglehold and hones whatever happiness is left into a thorn. People in the house, visitors, had heard the weeping emanating from his upstairs room and they had looked at Clara as if she’d been remiss, as if something needed to be done to succor him. Such pain was not a welcome sound. It was discomfiting, it tore at their decorum — a child grieving publicly as only a widow might, in private, wasn’t something that the St. Paul crowd was used to, there was something in the sound of Hercules’s lament that was too raw, too uncontrolled, too criminal, too much like the sounds of protestation that the ancient gods had raised from men like Oedipus and Orestes and Job, that pagan and Old Testament crying that had dominated man’s existence before the muffling of the Christian era. Late at night, early in the morning, Hercules had cried the way Clara had wanted to, herself, with stark abandon. She had sat on his floor, patting on his back, had sat outside his room when he had locked her out, and listened, as one listens to a sermon, to a siren song or to an oracle. To have given oneself over to expression of emotion, that way, remained a thing beyond her reach, and she would think about that kind of abandon as she sat there in the dark, what it must be like to be consumed beyond one’s reason by raw feeling. To give in to it. Be shanghaied by it. To have one’s ability to reason vanquished by unconsolability, fury, rage — or, even, love. Hercules, by virtue of his grief, had seemed more alive than she had, in those days. But on their final day together in the house, on the day before they would move in, temporarily, with Lodz, Clara had been helping Hercules pack his clothes and he had begun to cry again, his blond head sinking to his chest, his narrow shoulders heaving. Stop, she’d whispered. Stop this now. You need to stop it, Hercules. We’ll be at Lodz’s tomorrow and you can’t keep on like this. Not in someone else’s house—

To her surprise he’d struck at her, his fist landing on her upper arm. “You’re always telling me to stop—I could have got them out, I could have saved them but you told me to stop—stop and go get Lodz — and when I came back they were dead—”

“Don’t blame me, Hercules,” she’d said, and he’d shaken his head in protestation, and she’d seen that look deep in his eyes, that terroir of terror that she’d seen the day their parents had been killed. “It’s my fault,” he’d begun, “I’m the one who wanted to go in there, I’m the one who said we should go in that stupid place, if it wasn’t for me they wouldn’t have been standing there—”

She’d taken him into her arms and let him weep — understood its deeper cause for the first time — and she’d rocked him back and forth, as if to exorcise all the unknown hells the dead leave in the living when they disappear into their guiltlessness.