I don’t think Walt ever gave much thought to the fact that his wife’s sister was a writer. My Uncle Walt was a star man, the way some people are horse men or Harley-Davidson men; I doubt he ever read two books of fiction in his life. Each year for Christmas my Aunt Cat got him a subscription to Sky and Telescope, with the first issue bought off the news rack in town and wrapped up in paper. He bought himself a little telescope, and sometimes when you thought he was out checking on the cows in the evenings he was really up on top of the water tower with it. The water tower was only ten or twelve feet high, but my Uncle Walt took what he could get, and when Aunt Cat said he’d better come down before he broke his neck, he said you never knew but there might be a star ten or twelve feet farther off out there in infinity, and he wasn’t going to miss it for lack of standing on the water tower.
Uncle Walt never said much about what he saw up there. But sometimes when I went out with him to do the irrigation he’d give me a little lesson in astronomy. I can picture us, rolling on boots turned to spheres by the mud, Uncle Walt with a shovel over his shoulder, me dragging mine along behind me, making a slick mud trail through the grass while the dogs chased the prairie dogs that had been flooded out of their holes.
Out in the field at dusk when maybe Jupiter was lighting up just past the hills or Mars was glowing behind a constellation of mosquitoes, Uncle Walt would get to talking about black holes and extinct stars, specks of light out there that took a billion years to make it to our eyes, and stopped existing in the meantime.
Uncle Walt would set his boot on the shovel and dig up a thick notch of mud and grass to block the irrigation channel and direct the water down along to the other field, telling me that every inch of sky was thick with galaxies hurtling away from each other into a void whose emptiness you had to bend your mind to get your head around. And I would listen to him with the eagerness particular to nephews kept on charity, doing my best to bend my brain, when the truth was, all I could imagine of the vastness of the Universe was a panel of light bulbs stuck onto a grid in front of the sky.
I’ve wondered recently why it was always only him and me who went out to do the irrigation. Pearl would have been helping Aunt Cat fix supper, but where was Eddie all those evenings? He might have been there too, for all I know, off a little way blocking one end of a prairie dog hole with his shovel while the dogs howled and dug around the other, while I listened to Uncle Walt’s musing on a supernova out there past Polaris that was bigger and hotter than a million suns and would one of these eons collapse in on itself and become a black hole the size of a pinprick with an appetite for all its neighbors. I would have been listening without understanding much, like a puppy so eager to sit and stay that it scootches forward on its haunches with the effort, while my Uncle Walt—who sold his cattle by the pound, his hay by the ton; who bought his gasoline by the gallon and endured those Sunday sermons by the minute; for whom volume, mass, and time were such earthly facts, alterable only by more rain, more fertilizer, or, in the case of church, by calving season—marveled at the suppleness of the universe.
But it’s possible that Eddie wasn’t there, that Uncle Walt took me alone out to do the irrigating. Eddie was going to get the farm—that is, if he had wanted it—Pearl would get the house, and they took turns getting the egg with the double yolk at breakfast. But I used to like to imagine that Uncle Walt wanted to give me something too, a head full of facts or a feeling of having been singled out for a bit of conversation.
Well, you can imagine my surprise when, not long after I’d had my lunch, I looked up and saw my Universe—or more precisely, I saw that panel of light bulbs. I had gotten lost again, having wandered away from the streets around my hotel and onto a big avenue filled with people and packages. I was going slower than the rest of the crowd, trying to find a good place to stop and take out my map. People kept bumping into me, making little snorts of impatience that needed no translation as they jabbed me with the corners of their shopping bags. At that point I hardly had the will to fight it, and the crowd carried me along, leading me straight for the entrance of a big department store.
Above the entrance was a marquee covered with rows and rows of light bulbs. Some of them were blinking, one or two had burned out. I stopped right there and looked at it, not caring that people were flowing all around me and stepping on my feet. It was not an approximation, but the exact image that always used to pop into my head when Uncle Walt started talking about astronomy. I tried to edge my way over to the side of the crowd to get a better look, but all those bodies kept pushing me along. One stream of people was funneling in through the doors of the department store, while the rest hurried along the sidewalk, and by the time I got my bearings and looked back up again, I must have turned a corner because the light bulb marquee was gone.
That evening I hardly felt like sitting alone in my hotel room. My mind was sure to go around and around the thought of those light bulbs stuck against the sky, and I wasn’t sure quite where it would end up. So I took a shower and put on some fresh clothes.
Before I left for Paris I bought myself a rather expensive pair of white slacks, thinking that folks in cities dress differently than we do back home. They’re not the kind of thing I’d normally wear; in fact, the color was an accident. I’d taken them to the register, intending to ask if the same style came in brown or gray, when the salesgirl said, “Oh hi, Mr. Beart,” and I realized she’d been one of my students. Her name came to me as if I’d just taken roll. “Hi Ashleigh,” I said, and asked her how she was. We exchanged some small pleasantries, which for all I know she may have meant, but I was so flustered by the encounter—I had her in class the year my troubles with the school board began and I seem to remember her being friendly with the student the trouble was about. When she said, “Will these be all?” I forgot all about asking for the pants in brown or gray and handed her my credit card.
So, thinking that I might as well get some use out of them, I put them on, and a nice shirt too. I left my hotel key with the lady at the desk, who suggested I try the restaurant next door.
But I didn’t feel like eating. I got out my map and chose a direction I hadn’t gone in yet. I walked until I was thirsty and then sat down at one of the outside tables of a café. It was hardly busy, but even so the waiter took his time getting to me. I’d looked at the French phrases at the back of my dictionary, but it didn’t seem polite to make a mess of his language if I didn’t have to. “Do you speak English?” I asked him.
“Oui,” the waiter said, looking past me at the people on the sidewalk.
“I’d like a beer, please. Something French, if you have it,” I said, thinking it would be interesting to try something new. The waiter said something and when I didn’t understand, he tapped a laminated card stuck into a plastic stand advertising Kronenbourg 1664. You can buy that brand in the grocery stores back home, and it didn’t sound particularly French, but I told him, “That sounds fine.” The waiter may not have understood because he went off to take another order, then stood to the side chatting with a girl on a bicycle for longer than it should have taken to pour my beer. But it was a warm night, the café was on a busy street, and there was plenty to see.