Afterword: Post 9: Finis Part B

So, yes, a disgruntled student of Allen’s triggered the closure of the school; her parents filed a lawsuit and as we had no liability insurance, in order to settle out of court we had to sell the school itself to pay our bill. Each of our several other options, including fighting the suit in court, would have required we compromise our community in some important way. We decided it was better for the school to die intact than live on as less than itself. Whether it actually did die at all is the subject of this last post, but at the time we saw no hope, no way forward but an ending.

I want to emphasize that while I have mentioned that the student was mentally ill, her illness was not the cause of her vindictiveness—mentally ill people are not inherently dangerous to anyone, and lots of healthy people are vicious. Indeed, we don’t know whether it was she or her parents who decided to come after us. The reason I mentioned her mental status at all is that had she had any other kind of crisis, legal blame would not have landed on Allen—there might have been no way for blame to find purchase at all.

Allen felt horrible, for while he was not in any way responsible for what happened, he had made a mistake. There was a kernel of truth to the lawsuit. But we all felt horrible. I can’t overemphasize how awful it all was, every step that we took felt just plain wrong. And there were a lot of steps to take.

Again, I don’t want to be detailed, or even entirely accurate in my description, because we engaged in some subterfuge that I don’t want to come to light.

The first priority was to appear to capitulate fully in order to satisfy our attackers and distract from the fact that we weren’t capitulating fully. The Six were the board members of the school as a legal entity and its sole shareholders, so we could not appear to remain involved after the sale, nor could we arrange to sell the school to an ally whose connection to us could be traced. We (staff and students together) therefore created the illusion that we were and had always been a quirky private liberal arts college, and we presented that illusion to several potential buyers.

We also quietly made a deal with a different quirky liberal arts college to accept our students and transfers and find ways to properly credit their real educational experiences, including the courses on magic and so forth. We would continue working with the students in secret, and the other school would find ways to credit that secret work.

Thus, we planned to honor our obligations to existing students, although we could not take on new students because we would all shortly have to find other ways of making a living.

We were sued in August. We sold the school in October, and according to plan Allen, Kit, and Greg all walked away unemployed and penniless. I stayed on, since I had not been legally added to the board, pretending to be an adjunct science professor and writing coach. The other allies stayed on as well, and more allies stepped in to cover Allen’s psychology classes and Kit’s classes on dance and movement. Joy and Karen lost their positions on the board, but they both owned their own businesses—as you may recall their classes were open to outsiders—and so they both kept going as though they were simply contractors who had lost a client.

Over the following year, most of us allies gradually left the school’s employment, replaced by real liberal arts professors who had no idea what the school had really been. Most of the students, particularly those close to graduating, transferred to the other liberal arts college, the one we had a secret deal with, to finish their studies. New students came in with no thought of magic. The place very rapidly became the ordinary liberal arts school we had pretended it was.

But we had not sold the campus to the same buyer. The campus was our home. It contained Charlie’s ashes and some of those of Shrimp and Jim, who helped found the school and whom I never met but have heard a lot about. And remember, ashes from the campus lie under my skin; as Charlie predicted, I can’t ever permanently leave.

So we sold the campus to a newly-formed non-profit created by Sarah Grimm whose stated twin purposes of sustainable agriculture and education would be furthered by continuing the farm and by renting the campus facilities to various other groups, including the college that bought our school and Karen and Joy’s businesses—and the summer camp, which my wife continues to run. How did Sarah get the money? Some of it was hers, some of it raised from our community, but the entire down payment came from Charlie; he had bequeathed her his life savings with the understanding that she would do just what she did, if it ever needed to be done.

We expected our retention of the campus and our deal to stay involved with our students to function merely as lifeboats for a sinking ship. We expected to more or less all go our separate ways. Kit spent a year as a full-time member of her husband’s band, the Blue Pixies, then got herself re-certified as both a dance movement therapist and a yoga instructor. She then taught yoga at the YMCA and volunteered her services as a therapist at nursing homes and in a women’s prison. Allen expanded his private therapy practice to full time and eventually founded an after-school program for troubled youth. Greg, long since retired from teaching, went to live with his sister, his social security check supplemented by a small pension collected from the school community at large, as per our promise to take care of the Six. The Joes moved in with their son. Raven G. went to work for Sarah supervising the care of the non-farm parts of the grounds. Rick went to work for the US Forest Service (where he stayed until shortly after the inauguration of Donald Trump, when he went to work for a state agency instead) but continued to consult on the management of the campus forest. Karen and Joy continued teaching their classes and did quite well for themselves. Sadie put her energy into her restaurant, becoming Sarah’s primary buyer.

And I became a full-time landscaper, supplementing my income in the off-season as a free-lance writer and writing tutor and by sometimes doing classes or workshops for area high schools and the community college. And I had a baby. And I wrote this blog.

The blog was an idea that came up very soon after we sold the school, the idea being to “seed” some of the values of the school into the wider world. We hoped that someone would take our example and create another community such as our was—if that has happened, we have not heard of it. But we had another goal, too.

Our community was never unique. I’m not the only one who has had the experience of meeting people who seem to be masters in our sense of the term but appear not to have gone through our program—they are out there. And there are places, or corners of places, where magical little communities very like ours grow. They aren’t obvious. In fact, they’re generally hidden, much as ours was, in plain sight—a school or a business or a private club or a neighborhood, wherever two or more gather amazing things can happen and yet the third who has also gathered might notice none of it. It’s very strange, yet somehow comforting.

So the other mission for this blog was to give encouragement to such places, and to all those who seek them.

The reality is that if our school is seen as a larger phenomenon, a reality beyond a single institution, then it never closed. It still very much exists. If you want to figure out the specific reality of my stories, who we really are, what really happened, you can give up now—I’ve hidden us so deeply you’ll never find us. But if you want to join us as a student, you’ll find we are all around you. All you must do is recognize our existence and want to join and we will take you in at once.

That paragraph was to be be the end of the blog. I thought of it years ago, almost word for word, though I have not written it down before today. I figured that the tragedy of Charlie’s death and the school’s closing might impel some readers to take me up on my invitation, to take seriously and offer care to the secret magical places and people around them, and then maybe my losses, our losses, would mean something.

But while I’ve been writing, a curious thing has happened, to me specifically and to us generally (something I found last week would require enough words to explain that I had to split the last post into two parts).

I have found myself transformed once again, no longer merely a science major who likes to write but a chronicler, a person concerned with and knowledgeable about the uses of narrative to communicate, to frame, and to transform. It has become my special skill and magic, and while I once felt myself inadequate as a leader of our community, I now have a place here. It has grown around me. And around me, around us, has grown a new version of “us.”

It happened gradually, as our meetings shifted from nostalgic get-to-gethers (sometimes precipitated by people wanting to know how the blog was coming, or by me wanting to consult the memories of others on points I wasn’t sure of) to catch up to semi-organized discussions of our various projects and how they fit into some kind of whole. We became, once again, the Six. I’ve given you hints of this process as it happened, told you of our decision—or was it a discovery?--to begin moving forward, to build something new.

Initially what we built did not resemble a school. Sadie had her restaurant, and when she decided to move it into a slightly larger space with a better location, we pooled our resources to help her buy a building with a restaurant and two other retail spaces on the first floor, a large finished basement, and two second-story apartments. The basement became the new home of Aaron’s library, which he had been running as a lending club through the mail from his home since the school closed. I took charge of one of the retail spaces with several business partners, also from the community, and sold science books and supplies and art supplies. Kit took charge of the other retail space and built a metaphysical book store. We rented the library after closing hours to 12-step groups and other community functions, and turned one of the apartments into an Air B&B. The other we gave to Greg, rent free, when his sister had to give up her house and move to an assisted living facility. We taught classes to the public. We took on small numbers of students secretly, bringing them on as novices at Brigid, just as we used to.

By that time the school that had once been ours had failed, its resources folded into other programs of its owner—enrollment had dropped precipitously after we left. We started talking about what might be done with the campus.

The election of Donald Trump was a turning point for us. The “real world” no longer felt safe for us or our values, and we realized we needed to create a refuge for ourselves, not to hide from the world, which is what we had done before, but as a base from which to act. We needed our own land again.

It took a few years to organize, but...we’re back. This Brigid, as I prepared to finish the blog, we inducted our first new group of resident novices. Some are new, but some have been secret students of ours for a few years now. We even have two candidates living with us.

We’re not the same school that we were. We couldn’t be—we don’t know how far the antipathy of that student’s family extends, for one thing. For another, we recognize now how vulnerable we were and have taken steps to make ourselves less so. The Six is no longer the institutional leadership on paper, nor are we one entity, we we used to be. Instead, we are a group of legally separate organizations, one of which is the school, which rents the campus facilities from Sarah’s non-profit. Never again can an outside attack threaten the entire structure—the school could close again, but it could be immediately replaced by a new legal entity with new people acting as its public face and behind that face the rest of us doing the same work.

It’s just in time. COVID19 has given us very good reason to retreat to a place that can, after all function independently. We grow our own food, and since the restaurant and our stores are shut for the duration, we none of us need to leave. We have invited our friends, allies, and families to join us—the student body is still quite small, so we have plenty of space and food—and some have taken us up on our offer. For over a month, now, no one have come in or gone out, we’re like the mysterious workers in Willy Wonka’s chocolate factory, and so far none of us are sick.

But who “we” are has changed, too. Of the Six who I knew as a student, only Allen and Kit remain. Greg has completed his retirement. Karen and Joy have been gradually drifting away from us for years, getting involved with unrelated projects, and when we decided to re-open the school they elected not to come with us. And of course Charlie is gone.

I am the new Craft Master, though my primary craft is writing. Allen retains his old position, but Kit is the new Spirit Master, replacing Greg (yearlings no longer do zazen; they do yoga), and leaving a vacancy that Ebony has filled. Ebony is the new Art Master, teaching mostly visual art and poetry. Breathwalker is the new Athletics Master (as well as our new grouchy old mystic). He spent many years as a long-distance hiker, before permanent injuries took him off the trail, and walking is the primary athletic form he teachers. It’s harder than it sounds. Our new Healing Master is a physical therapist named Brian who earned his Green Ring in the years when we didn’t have a campus.

Two months in, our new residential community seems to be doing well, still feeling its way into existence, but we seem to be finding our way. Yesterday’s on-campus Easter service was well-attended and lovely.

June and I and Carly (who is, by the way, named after Charlie, as are several other sprouts with similar names all born since his death) have given up our old apartment and moved into the suit of rooms formerly occupied by Charlie and Greg. June and I share one room, Carly has the other, and there’s the shared living room, too. It’s less space of our own than we used to have, but room and board is free and we have the entire campus as our home.

Greg, who was less sentimental than I, chose a different room from which to enjoy his retirement. He was 93 and though still perfectly clear mentally, he was getting frail physically and spent much of his time dozing or getting to know our newly-acquired barn cats.

Did you catch the past-tense?

This morning Greg Monroe did not wake up. When he didn’t come to breakfast, Kit went to check on him and found his body cold and stiff in bed. He must have died quietly very early in the night. Brian is dealing with the details of properly caring for the body and for the legal details of a death. We have another funeral to plan, and while we’re not sure how, yet, Greg’s ashes, too, will enrich our soil. And yet Kit found the body not quite as cold as it might have been, for his remains lay guarded and warmed by all our barn cats. We have no idea how they got inside.

I was among the first Kit told, and I returned to the Mansion in time to see Greg’s body, though not in time to see the cats. I did not involve myself in the initial discussion of whom to call and what to do, but instead retreated to my room. I wasn’t scheduled to teach until the afternoon—now, of course, classes are canceled for the week—and I blog post to write.

I sat there in my room, which used to be Charlie’s room, thinking about Greg and about my history here with this school since I have known him and everything that’s happened, everything I’ve learned and done, and thinking too about what I wanted to write in this, my last post. Because that’s what this is. It’s the end. The end always comes, sooner or later, and while beginnings are not guaranteed, they tend to come, too. This story may someday become a novel, and if that’s going to happen I’ll post about it here—so please stay tuned. Or you can go back and read the story again from the beginning. It’s all here. It’s not going any place.

So my thoughts went and my ideas moved, and I got out my laptop to write this post. But before I began to write I got up and I stepped outside and I played my tin whistle on my balcony.

Afterword: Post 7: Between Things

When the funeral pyre of Charlie went out, the rest of us went to sleep for a few hours. We'd been up all night, literally. I woke mid-afternoon and found that most of the people who had come to campus specially for the service had gone. Either they had declined our offer to camp on our grounds or they and woken before I did--of course many had gone to sleep, or even left, before the service was over. I found campus quiet, lonely, almost normal and yet so very not.

I walked out to where the fire had been and found a great pile of ash and a few pieces of charred wood that hadn't burned completely, as well as the little iron tables Charlie's body had lain on. The fire had rendered them empty.

I found Rick there.

He was down on the ground with his hands in the ashes, head bowed. I watch the angle of his head shift as he heard me walk up. He knew who he was without looking--either he recognized my step or he could smell me, like an animal. Rick is aware of his surroundings the same way Charlie was.

"Damn bastard," he said, his voice thick, "this wouldn't hurt so much if he hadn't made me care."

As you may recall, Charlie's assignment to Rick was to learn to love, so Charlie had not made him care, as in the love song, by being so lovable, nor by any form of seduction, but by an entirely prosaic form of benign force; Rick wouldn't have earned his ring otherwise.

"Do you regret it?" I asked.

"No." Rick sat up a little and wiped his nose with the back of his hand. He got ash on his face, wood-ash, mostly, but maybe some Charlie-ash, too. "I'm not...distant from you humans because I'm trying to hide from feelings. Mostly I just don't have the feelings you people do. Today, I have some of them. Regretting that would...undo my commitment to him, and my vow is either permanent or it was never real in the first place. Even now that he's dead it holds. I will spend my life fighting for the things, people, places that were important to him. I don't mind--my life is deeper because I care about something other than myself. But God dammit, I wish it didn't have to hurt so much."

I knelt beside him. Rick wouldn't look at me but I could see his face, see his tears making clean tracks through the ash on his skin. I wondered, not for the first time whether Charlie had anticipated that the assignment would work quite as deeply as it did, and whether Rick had not only learned to love but had actually fallen in love with the man. Does the fact that Rick is gay have anything to do with his devotion? Does the fact that I'm not have anything to do with mine?

I put my hand out, palm flat against the ash. It was still warm.

Before Rick and I could speak further, Raven G. arrived with several members of the grounds keeping team. Rick and I stood up to give them room to work, but before any of the others did anything, Raven moved the tables out of the way and combed through the ashes with a rake.

The pieces of wood she set aside, but she also found a few recognizable pieces of charred bone.

"I thought so," she said. "Jason, hand me the brick, please?" and, with us standing there, she pounded those bones to unrecognizable splinters. I heard somewhere that professional crematoria also crush any surviving bones to powder in order to produce less obviously macabre ashes to scatter, but avoiding the macabre had never been Charlie's thing, and it wasn't ours. We had a different reason. We had to make sure that no outsider would ever find human remains and start asking questions.

Bones crushed, Raven returned the resulting powder to the pile and stirred it in to the rest with her rake. Then she and the others raked up the ash and shoveled most of it into wooden buckets--there was a lot of it, mostly from the wood we'd burned, and I knew she planned to dig it into the soil elsewhere and plant trees in it. The rest they raked out flat across the burn area and into the grass, breaking up the burned, bare soil where the fire had been so they could mix in the ash a little there, make it less obvious. Soon, with rain and growth and the tracks of humans and other animals, Charlie's ashes, already indistinguishable from that of the wood, would become indivisible from the ground of campus, consummating a marriage he'd made long ago.

All of this shoveling and raking looked very utilitarian, just a work crew doing their thing.

Later that week, we re-started classes, with me teaching the full load that Charlie traditionally had. I had to fight against the urge to try to mimic him, to repeat the phrases I remembered him using, even to grumble and growl like he did, which isn't really my thing at all. I had to fight the urge to try to replace him, not only because it was hard not to feel like someone should, but because I could almost do it. I'd seen him teach the same things over and over enough times to know he didn't vary his classes much. He used the same phrases, the same trick questions, even the same jokes, quips, and grumbles almost every time. He stuck to what worked. And I remember what worked for him, to the point that I could enact those memories, play them with my voice and body like a recording, show these new students who had never known him the way it was supposed to be.

But my job was not to keep the school from changing; my job was to be the agent of change. My job was not to be a pale imitation of Charlie but to be Daniel and to find out what that meant and would mean.

I didn't expect that it would mean I'd have a full-time job at the school forever. There was a vacancy in the Six, and it would be filled eventually. While there was no guarantee Charlie's successor would teach all the same classes (our staff positions have always been defined by those who occupy them, not the other way around), I thought it overwhelmingly likely he or she would take some of them. Natural history, and particularly ecology, were too central to our community's overall identity not to be represented within the Six.

I thought perhaps Raven would get the nod. Of our six areas of mastery, Charlie had been primarily responsible for craft, so unless the Six reorganized their responsibilities entirely, the new member would be the new Craft Master, and Raven had the skill to not only take that position but to take over as chief groundskeeper, too. I didn't say so to her, though. Maybe I was afraid she'd say I should get it, though the thought never surfaced consciously. I did ask Rick if he thought perhaps he might get it, since he, too, could take on craft, and his dedication made him ideally suited to look after Charlie's legacy. He just laughed and said "Kretzman, you keep forgetting; I don't like people." For a while I thought Breathwalker might get it. I wasn't sure he could be Craft Master, but since meeting him I'd been impressed by his depth--he had an inner peace combined with a grumpy exterior that I thought suitably masterly, and anyway he seemed more like a real grown-up, being much older than Raven, Rick, and I.

The actual Six (all five of them) did not meet to discuss filling the vacancy, so far as I knew. I asked Allen about it once and he said it was too soon, that they'd probably figure it out over the winter break in time for the new person to start at Brigid. Kit would not talk about it with me at all, and Greg said only that it was time to wait and listen. Perhaps they felt the need to find out more about what the school would be without Charlie, before they could determine what it might need to go forward.

I thought about the history of the school, which I had learned in some detail while seeking my own green ring. People tend to stay in the Six a long time, so not many had ever held the honor and not many vacancies had needed to be filled, but there had been departures and arrivals--the original Six were long gone. I met some of them at Charlie's service, an odd experience to meet people whose names and stories I had already learned but only as part of history. Sally, the original Magic Master, and Ray, the original Athletics Master, who had helped found the community but then decided they didn't want to live inside  a counterculture their lives long. Once the school got accredited, they left, and the others quickly hired Charlie and Greg to round out the Six. Of course, that still left the positions of magic and athletics open, so the following year they hired a witch named Maggie and a rock climber named Jane Spider. Maggie left only a few years later, and Allen talked himself into a job in her absence. Tom, the original Craft Master, had a debilitating stroke and retired, living in the Herbarium because he couldn't manage the stairs, as Charlie did so many years later. When Tom died, Ruby, the last of the originals, left. She had been in love with him, and he was never interested. Free at last, she and Jane Spider became a couple and left to explore the world. Shrimp and Jim had already been killed together in a car accident, as I've described.

I met some of those people. I met Sally and Ray. Ray looked like an aging hippy and Sally wears heavy eye make-up and lots of crystals. Ruby is a tiny woman originally from Barbados, with deeply wrinkled blackish skin soft as velvet and a fluid physical grace. Jane could not come, but they are still together. Nobody has heard from Maggie in years, but Sally thinks she would hear if Maggie died. These people are still alive. They left by design, and gave proper notice. Even Tom, who isn't, resigned. He didn't die in the saddle, so to speak, and he was around to supervise the transition away from himself. Before Charlie, only Jim and Shrimp died while in office, and they died together a generation ago. I thought a lot about what that must have been like, to suddenly lose a third of the school's core faculty, what an awful morning announcement that must have been, and how the community put itself back together then, hiring both Kit and Joy. And I thought about how Charlie's choice to stay on the job literally until he died left the rest of us to make it up as we went along.

Beltane had been somewhat neglected--we were distracted by the beginning of Charlie's final decline and danced the Maypole without much conviction--but when Litha rolled around we threw ourselves into it, hosting our traditional giant picnic and dancing all night as the wicker figure burned.A week later, Rick succeeded in sourcing the trees we'd hoped to plant in the soil enriched with Charlie's ashes--a small group of blight-resistant American chestnuts saplings. We arranged for a small plaque bearing Charlie's name and dates to sit beneath what we hoped would become a nut orchard, and more than a nut orchard, in time.

A shift had occurred. We were all looking toward the future, if not necessarily forward to it. I, at least, expected the future to more or less resemble the past--it would be a warped and altered normal, but a normal none-the-less. Charlie was a big part of the school, but he wasn't the whole thing, and we would go on.

I was wrong.

Afterword: Post 6: Service

My friend and teacher, Charlie Robert Silano, died on May 23rd, 2011, outside in his hammock, on a warm afternoon.

We had of course, been expecting it, and yet it was a surprise. He had been cycling through good days and bad days, crises and rallies, with no discernible pattern or rhythm, for weeks. It had seemed at first that he couldn't survive another day, and then he could and did and then when he finally didn't it was a shock because there was nothing different about that last bad day than all the others.

I wasn't on campus that day, had not been, actually, for a few days. I found out an hour or so after the fact when Allen sent out a group text alert--"he's gone."

June saw me check my phone and didn't need to ask what the text said. She took me in her arms.

A few hours later, Allen sent around a more carefully thought-out message, sharing what information he had about Charlie's last days and hours, and inviting all who wanted to come to a meeting to discuss next steps.

Charlie himself had left no instructions as to funeral services and so forth, insisting "I'm too busy still living to bother with figuring out what you all should do after I am dead." He had not needed to tell us that his body could not be embalmed or incinerated using fossil fuels or sealed into an expensive, rot-proof sarcophagus, or anything else of that nature. We'd all been his students long enough to be as offended by such prospects as he was. But there are laws that more or less require expensive and environmentally destructive funeral practices, and so we not only needed to plan a meaningful farewell service but also to figure out how to break the law on his behalf.

I will tell you what we did, but not how we arranged to do it. I do disguise our identities in these stories, but there are limits to what I can hide and precautions that I must continue to take.

A few days after his death, a group of us gathered in a partitioned-off section of the Martial Arts Studio with Charlie's corpse, which was already starting to smell faintly of rot. There were six of us, all men--me, Rick, Steve, Breathwalker (a former student and ally whom I had only recently met), and two members of Charlie's family--all met to prepare his body. Allen was there, too, holding space for us, wordlessly paying attention.

We stripped and washed the body, dried it, and then wrapped it, confronting the physicality of his illness and death in the most direct, uncomfortable way possible, confronting reality, as he would have wanted. We took our time. There were moments in that process that the body seemed very much to be Charlie. Seeing him naked and ruined hurt, and we held his hands, touched his face. There were moments when what we worked with was very much an object, an animal corpse, and we worked efficiently, with faint disgust or detachment. Allen watched all the moments without comment, accepting the unendurable, his existence its own continued teaching.

In what did we wrap the body? Layers of wax-infused cloth, to begin with, then clean cloth, like a mummy, though we left the face, hands, and feet bare, and a plain white t-shirt. The layers replaced some of his lost muscular bulk, made him look a little more normal, but that's not why we did it--we left his exposed skin unadorned, waxy-looking, his face frozen in a somewhat unnatural expression, though we did close his eyes. We were making of him a fire-starter.

We intended to cremate the body, but to do it ourselves, in a bonfire, and human flesh has way too much water to burn easily.

Once we had him wrapped, we placed him on a clean, white sheet on a hand-made stretcher and placed another sheet over him, tucking it around him as though he were in bed, leaving his arms, his head, and his feet free.

The six of us lifted the stretcher--it had six, not four, handles--and stood wit our burden by the door, the back door that led right outside. Allen went to the door and knocked on it. Karen opened it from the outside. She wore her samurai sword and her ceremonial knife.

"We are ready," Allen said, formally. "We request a guard."

"Come. We will guard you," she replied, and stepped to the side.

We came out, awkwardly negotiating the narrow door and then walking formally, Allen processing at our right, Karen at our left. Our guard consisted of women, each of them carrying a staff of the sort used in one form of Japanese martial art (a weapon traditionally used there by women), except for Karen and her sword. Sarah and Charlie's sister marched before us. We were flanked by Nora and Raven G., and four more women fell in behind us. Together we processed around the building to the part of the Central Field where we hold the Burning Man Ceremony and where the soil is already scorched and wouldn't mind being scorched again. There, the rest of the extended school community awaited us besides a massive pile of kindling and wood and a row of recently-acquired low cast-iron tables of the kind used for garden furniture.

We laid Charlie's body on the row of tables and held a kind of viewing there for an hour or so. Then we prepared the bonfire.

We faced a serious logistical problem, here, for Charlie's friends and family and admirers extended well beyond the campus community and included people who could not be trusted to know the laws we were breaking. We had considered having a private cremation followed by a separate memorial, but somehow that did not seem right. Instead, we opted for something far more difficult and dangerous, holding a public cremation but not allowing the public to know what it was.

We covered Charlie's body, including is face, with another sheet. I expected that to be very hard--the last moment I would ever see his face--but it wasn't his anymore and I was glad to be able to stop resolutely confronting it. Then we laid fuel under the tables, so the flames would come up through the iron and claim the body. Then we covered all of it with a layer of wet plywood, then laid bundles of sticks over top--there were to be two fires, one under the body, claiming it, and the other above it, with the plywood in the middle. We would feed both, adding more plywood as needed, maintaining a kind of temporary oven until the object cooking inside it could be rendered unidentifiable. We even added bundles of sage and other aromatics to disguise and complicate the scent of burning flesh.

The strangers arrived at dusk, hundreds of them, in time to see the fires lit without knowing what they burned.

We had set up a low stage and a small sound system, and we circulated sign-up sheets for anyone who wanted to speak or perform. Once night had settled and the fire was burning brightly, Allen went first, sitting on the stage on a simple stool, and speaking calmly, intellectually, in his capacity as a psychologist, a philosopher, and a minister of sorts--he welcomed everyone, explained how the memorial would go, invited everyone to watch the performances or wander around campus, socialize, or sleep as they liked, and then he explained an idea of his that everything has an end and a beginning in both space and time. He held up one of those glitter wand things, an item reliably visible in the glow of the bonfire and the tiki-torches surrounding the stage, and said "we can see that this wand has two ends, and that after its ends it is not there--and yet the wand clearly exists. If the end of a wand in space does not invalidate or cast doubt on its existence, why should the end of a man in time invalidate or cast doubt on his?"

Then he paused and drew a ragged breath.

"I really believe that," he said, "and the idea is comforting to me, far more comforting than ideas about afterlives that seem so resonant to others but that fundamentally do not work for me. I offer it for anyone else who find themselves emotionally ill-prepared to believe what their intellects cannot accept--and yet, intellect itself only goes so far. I have no reason, no dogma, no credo to support it, but I find I cannot believe that my friend is really gone."

His voice suddenly broke.

"Charlie!" he called, looking out above our heads and into the night, "where are you? Do you see us gathered here, do you know that we all love you?" And the firelight shone on the tears on his face.

It is that moment that embodies for me, more than any other, the essence of being a master, of being of the Six--at no time is Allen ever purely professional, in the sense used in the outside world--he never pretends not to be a human being for the sake of his job, and if he needs to contradict himself, to admit to doubt, to weep, he does so. And yet even at his most personal moments he never leaves behind his role. That night he wept in public not because he could not help it, though I believe that was true also, but in order to role-model grief, in order to give us permission to do the same.

He sat a moment, weeping quietly, and then without another word left the stage. Joy read the name of the next person on the list.

The bonfire and the performances continued all night--our intention was to go from sundown to sunrise. I don't remember them all, and I don't intend to describe all of those I do remember. I did not go up myself, though I was considering it, and had my tin whistle in my pocket just in case, but it didn't feel right. Instead I watched the others and at times I mingled with the crowd, talking to the others, finding out who had come. His entire extended family seemed to be present, as were many former students, and probably the majority of those who wear the Green Ring, maybe sixty of us--some lived too far away to attend, and others have died, but those who could come did.

There were others, too, people who knew Charlie from the classes he taught at the community college, people who had read his writing, people from the AA groups he'd attended. Some of the eulogies were unintentionally funny as people who knew Charlie from one area of his life made clear they knew nothing about areas. Some made jokes about alcohol because they didn't know Charlie was in AA, and some AA members peppered their speech with 12-step truisms, apparently unaware that many in the audience wouldn't understand--none broke Charlie's anonymity openly, meaning that people who didn't get the references simply ended up confused.

Some people just delivered straight eulogies. Others sang or danced. Some did both. Allen came up on stage a second time about an hour into the event and brought his guitar. Without introduction or comment, he sang and played "The Boxer," a song I'd never paid much attention to before but have always loved since, honoring, perhaps, a time in Charlie's life and an aspect of his personality that most of us never saw, the scrappy, worse-for-wear, yet indomitable fighter.

Hours later, Sarah (the farm manager, not Steve's wife) took the stage. She, as I've said, was devoted to Charlie and had helped with his care in his last week or so. She sang "The Garden," a hymn I have heard at other funerals, but never so appropriately, since no one else found God so deeply in gardens.

And he walks with me and he talks with me
And he tells me I am his own.
And the joy we share as we tarry there
None other has ever known.

As she sang, I noticed Kit standing near the stage, yearning towards it somehow. She wanted, I'm sure, to join Sarah and sing. I thought of what I'd learned the day I'd overheard her beg Charlie for forgiveness, and I knew why she wanted to get onstage and why she didn't go.

Sarah surely meant the song in its obvious way, but there is another, vaguely blasphemous way to read the words--that the "me" in the song was not Charlie but Sarah, walking in the garden not with God, or not especially with God, but with Charlie.

Either way, there was something solitary, something that not widely shared, something Kit, anyway, could not have. As Sarah came down off the stage, she and Kit embraced and held each other for a long time.

As the hours wore towards dawn the people tending the fire judged it time to stop replenishing the plywood and let the inner and outer fires merge. They kept refueling the outer fire for a while and then let it begin to burn down. I had returned from mingling to watch the end of the fire and to see the final performances before an audience much dwindled by the need for rest and sleep.

Dawn was starting to color the sky but the air still seemed dark when Steve Bees took the stage to sing, unaccompanied, "Bridge over Troubled Water."

He had, by that point, become a very accomplished singer, if not quite to the level of Art Garfunkel, but his performance of that song on that night pulled him out beyond himself, articulating a promise he had been living, the essence of his own mastery, for the whole world--but for Charlie specifically as well.

Towards the end, Charlie had needed help, first with keeping track of his meds and fetching things, cleaning things, self-care details he wasn't always strong enough for, then help with more basic things when he could not get get out of his hammock for days, when he couldn't bring himself to eat. Mostly he sought help from women. Charlie was not what I'd call sexist--he respected his female colleagues as his equals and supported his female students as fully as his male ones--but he was somewhat traditionalist in certain ways. I think he believed that nurturing is a woman's role, not a man's, and he was not comfortable being looked after by men. He relied on Nora, on his sister, Mary, on Sarah, and on Joy, and did his best to keep men from knowing how weak he really was. And yet, there were things he needed a man for, both for bodily strength and for propriety--and he chose Steve Bees.

Please go watch a performance of "Bridge Over Troubled Water" so you can get a sense of what this was like, how the song grows gradually, building to a crescendo, a promise, to be there in the face of difficulty, selflessly.

And when the song was over Steve stumbled and his face went slack a moment as the thing that had song through him let go. He coughed a little, taking a little while to get his bearings again, and the growing light of dawn shone on the lenses of his glasses.

The bonfire behind him was dying down. There was no sign that there had ever been a body among the ashes.

Afterword: Post 5: Vigil Begins

April brought us a new puzzle.

As you'll likely recall, in early May, the school traditionally would send all the yearlings to camp on a certain island. All the Six except Greg would go as well, but they would camp separately, on retreat. Each would come out for a day or two to teach a workshop, but the real point of the trip was a group vacation for the masters and a group bonding experience for the students.

But that year, Charlie clearly could not go.

It was not exactly that he was too ill to go--he was weak, and probably could not lead his traditional hikes for students, but he could certainly have participated in the retreat, and I and another former student could have led the hikes for him. But going would have meant missing a treatment, and that he could not do.

The others did not want to go without him. He argued back, told them they were all stupid and crazy and neglecting their obligations, and then when they would not relent he at last said "thank you," in a small, reluctant voice.

But what was going to happen with the students? I and the other allies teaching that year were in on that meeting. We discussed various possibilities, from skipping the retreats utterly to sending the students on some kind of local retreat. Eventually Greg pointed out that the yearling students were adults and were perfectly capable of going to the Island themselves. He did not say, but it's also true and also relevant, that the yearlings don't know Charlie and will not mind being away from him for a while.

So, that's what we had them do.

We gave them a debit card, directions, camping equipment, and the use of the vans. We also gave them an assignment--a series of scavenger hunts (photos to be collected, not items) in teams, with the teams changing for each hunt so that everyone would be on a team with everyone else at least once. They were to use the photographs to put together a presentation for campus afterward. Charlie wrote the scavenger hunts, though he did not sign them.

It was well none of us had gone, because the first week of May, a shift occurred; Charlie, who had been living with cancer, instead began dying of it.

I'm not sure how to explain the difference--I was never told any details of his treatments, test results, etc., so I'm not sure how cold, hard facts might have aligned with subtle intuition, but we all felt it. He was more tired, more easily distracted, more frighteningly thin. He seemed, perhaps, more thoughtful. Whatever had changed, he felt it, too.

Once, while checking for scale insects on one of the hanging plants in the car port, he told me, "You know what pisses me off, Daniel? Those stories and such about people being told they have a month to live so they go sky-diving or whatever. By the time you get that news, you're sick. Really sick. It's too late for the bucket list." His attention was on the plant and his voice sounded calm, almost professional. I asked him whether there was anything he regretted not doing. At first he simply ignored my question, but after a minute he glanced at me. "Oh, come on, you know me better than that," he said.

But what did I know?

On another occasion, we walked together down along beside the sugar maple avenue and stopped, sitting in the grass so he could rest. I had little to say, but he seemed unusually talkative, telling me things about his life I hadn't heard before.

"You know, if anything happens, and the stories I tell you prove useful, you have my permission to repeat them. Anything, even the alcoholism stuff. Use your judgment." Of course, he meant if anything happened to threaten the school--at the time I thought such worries somewhat paranoid, though of course I didn't say anything. I was touched by his trust, but didn't say anything about that, either.

He told me of the founding of the school and his role in it, how he had become the Charlie I knew him to be. I'd heard parts of the story before, even from him. He was repeating himself a little, not remembering what he'd told me already. Of course, people rarely do remember--they're always surprised when I recall what they've told me better than they do.

"I never expected to spend the whole rest of my life celibate," he admitted, "but that's what I've gone and done."

"You're life's not over yet," I told him, urgent. He looked at me, amused.

"'Elderly cancer victim seeks willing woman for final fling?' I think not." he said.

But that wasn't what I meant. I could not tell him what I meant.

Charlie had not exactly retired, though he was no longer teaching classes. His life was his work, and vice versa. He spoke with and gave crazy assignments to the various students he already had, for although everyone had chosen new masters by that time, he had insisted on not giving up his role while he could still breathe. He explored and inspected campus and, to a lesser extent, the woods, giving instructions to Raven and Rick to enact on his behalf. He had a walker, a fancy one someone had found for him in a specialty shop, with purple tubing and wheels with hand breaks and a little fold-down seat. He took to using that walker, not just to keep from falling when the weakness took him, but so he could rest as needed. There he'd be, sitting calmly in that fold-down seat, halfway between here and there, getting his breath back. He'd wave or nod as people passed by him. He refused any help.

How much of his calmness was illusion I don't know, but at least some of it was. One morning, when I biked in to campus, a student who knew me shared an interesting bit of gossip he could not explain; the night before, there had been a huge crash from somewhere in the Mansion. He and the others, suddenly woken, had come out of their dorms onto the landing in time to see Security Joe hurrying downstairs, tying his bathrobe closed over his pajamas as he went.

"Go back to bed," he'd said without stopping. "I'll take care of it."

"We'd expected some kind of announcement at breakfast," the student told me, "but there was nothing."

"That's very strange," I agreed. Then, when the student had gone on his way, I hurried over to Charlie's room in the Herbarium and found what I knew I would--Charlie slowly returning somewhat wrinkled books to shelves and cleaning up broken knickknacks. In the night, alone with his helpless rage, he'd pulled the shelves over.

When he felt good, he'd go to his doctors for check-ups or permit various alternative healers, most of them presumably graduates, to come consult. When he was feeling especially bad he allowed nobody to examine him. He was serious about not wanting to be hospitalized. He had a horror of dying under a roof of any kind, and on particularly bad days he would not go inside at all, sleeping instead in a hammock slung between blue spruces next to the Mansion--I'm not sure why those non-native trees had been spared Charlie's axe, but they returned the favor, since the group of them defined an interior private space, a little room where interior branches had been pruned away and he could rest outdoors but away from prying eyes.

The trees could not contain sound, however, and on two occasions, as I approached for our arranged lunchtime visits, I heard things I was not supposed to.

The first time it was the sound of a woman crying and, over that, Charlie's voice, shouting "I am a teacher! I am not a goddam learning opportunity! And I'm telling you to take the ring!" I crept away and came back later. He did not mention the incident, and I would not have known what happened except that Nora, Charlie's primary caregiver and the owner of the sobs I had heard, spontaneously told me, without even knowing I'd overheard.

Charlie had tried to give her her ring.

As you might recall, Nora was a mastery candidate working with Joy. She was already a medical doctor, and on Charlie's suggestion had taken over his care so that she could learn from the experience of losing him. She could not earn her ring until he died, nor until she had passed the job interview or gone through the rituals at Brigid. I'm not even sure how he had procured a ring in her size in May, it was very much not how we did things. He had decided not to care. She'd tried to refuse, which was when he shouted.

"Of course I took it," she told me, looking at it on her hand. "What else could I do? But it's not like it's mine, yet."

"I don't know," I told her. "What's the wording of the ritual? 'Why do you want it,' 'Because it is mine?' Mastery is ours before we step on that stage, but who knows how much before?"

She nodded, accepting my reasoning, then said "I hate this. I hate it, and he hates it, and I hate it for him."

I could only agree.

The next thing I overheard, some days later, was Charlie's voice, quite calmly, saying "Katie. I was wondering if you'd show up."

I had been walking by, not planning to stop in and see him just then, but I stood still then, wondering who Katie might be. He could not hear anything else, just the occasional low, incomprehensible murmur, so I waited, confident I would breach no privacy, to see who might come out.

To my surprise, Kit did.

"You're Katie?" I exclaimed. of course a lot of people in our community use names that aren't the ones from the original birth certificates, and I'd always gathered that "Kit" was a Craft name, meant to honor the red fox that red-haired Kit identified with. But I'd never given a thought as to what she might have been called before.

She looked at me with tear-reddened eyes. For a moment she seemed furtive, angry.

"I didn't hear anything," I assured her, "just the name."

"Yes," she acknowledged. "Go get the story from him. I know you want to. I can't talk right now." And she hurried away.

I could not figure out whether she actually wanted me to know or not, but in the end I went in to Charlie anyway. He looked up at me as I came through the branches.

"Are you here to exorcise your demons, too?" he asked me.

"No. What that...?" I pointed behind me indicating Kit.

"She was here among others. Everybody and their mother's cousin seems to want to have a death-bed scene today." He was not happy.

"Who else?"

"Sarah. This morning. She came to beg me to return to the Church. I should have expected it. She's always worried about my soul."

"What did you tell her?" I asked, having trouble imagining Charlie in a church of any kind, let alone the Catholicism of his youth, a faith I've always associated with stone, with stained glass, with the works of human hands.

"I told her to send her priest, why not?" At my evident surprise he grunted in amusement. "I never left the Church in the first place," he explained. "Except during my drinking, when I left pretty much everything. Other than that, I've spent my life pursuing truth. The search has taken me in heterodox directions, but if anything I've ever done has offended my God, then I am heartily sorry."

He did not sound repentant, but his humility was entirely genuine. I waited, to see what more of the story he wished to tell.

"Kit...Katie...wanted my forgiveness," he said, after a bit.

"For what?"

But he looked at me as though I really should have known, and indeed she has treated him badly the whole time I've known them, and doubtless before.

"I was her teacher," he explained, and it explained much. I'd heard the same from Sarah, years earlier, but I had not known any of them well enough at the time to understand.

"What did you tell her?" I asked.

"I chewed her out, of course. This wasn't for me, if it was, she could have come to me years ago, when I wasn't sick. Now she wants to avoid feeling guilty when I die." His opinion of such an order of priorities dripped from his voice. "I told her that if lets go of the nonsense that caused her to act like a spiteful child, she may consider herself retroactively forgiven by me, even if I'm already gone. One last assignment from me, I suppose, to be graded by the student."

We spoke a little longer before I realized that Charlie, despite being amped-up by anger, was tired. I let him rest.

Later that day I saw Kit and asked if she wanted to talk. She walked towards the Formal Garden and I followed her. She stopped and so I stopped before we got there, beside the magnolia at the corner of the Mansion.

"You did ask him," she said, not looking at me.

"She I not have?"

She shrugged.

"Did he tell you what a spiteful child I've been?"

In those very words. But what I said was "Frankly, Kit, he didn't need to."

She started to smile, embarrassed, but then turned towards me suddenly and flushed.

"Did he tell you why? I bet he didn't. Did he tell you how I did everything he asked me to do, every single fucking thing, and it had exactly the effect he said it would have--I transformed, I found my way to a truth you can't find in a book or a fantasy, or an entheogenic drug, only direct experience and a reasoning mind, and I've based my life on that experience. And everything that I've learned, everything that I've taught, everything that I am, it's all just so much fluff to him. I'm like you--one of the most dedicated, successful students he's ever had. And he will never, never notice."

I had nothing to say--or too much to say for any of it to ever come out. She'd been stupid in her anger and her hurt, far stupider and more cruel than I'd ever thought her capable, but I could not be sure I would not have reacted just as badly were I in her shoes. Stepping into Charlie's shoes at that moment felt harder--though it's true I've taken very few of Kit's teachings to heart. Her kind of witchcraft has not called to me, and I have difficulty believing it. How much of that is Charlie's doing, and how much is simply me seeing what he saw, because it is there to see?

But I did not speak. I put my arms around her, folding her head to my chest, and she, for the first time treating me wholly as an equal instead of as a student, wept in my embrace and took some measure of comfort from me.

Afterword: Post 4: Falling

Charlie switched medications in December and appeared to bounce back. Through January he resumed his habit of snow-shoeing or skiing through the snowy woods alone, doing whatever it was he did out there. He kept his weekly lunch appointments with me, as well as with, I think, certain other people, as he had not done in previous Januaries (Allen, too, altered his plans, skipping his annual family vacation to the Keys), but otherwise the month seemed normal. I indulged in the thought that he might simply go on like this, terminally ill in a technical sense only, and that he might teach his spring classes after all.

I found myself in an emotional muddle, wanting desperately, I discovered, to teach those classes, and also wanting desperately not to be needed in that way.

But Charlie gave no indication of wanting his classes back. When the new students arrived, he did not introduce himself, either casually in the Dining Hall or officially during any of the various orientation activities. I taught every one of his traditional workshops, and Raven G. hired and supervised the new groundskeeping team. Charlie was no longer taking on new students, so he saw no point in, as he put it, advertising himself. I wondered if I was supposed to put myself forward, make myself available to students needing to choose a master--one doesn't have to be a member of the Six to serve in that way--but I couldn't bring myself to ask.

In early February, he started sliding again. It was subtle, at first--he seemed translucent, somehow, almost glowing, unearthly, and I could not figure out what was generating that impression, what had actually changed. Whatever it was, I didn't like it.

Then he got tired again, or at least stopped pretending he wasn't tired. He grew weak.

He fell on the stairs, this time with a witness, and Nora must have convinced him that breaking a hip would be bad, because he agreed not to go up and down by himself anymore. He went to stay with his sister for two weeks, and when he came back he agreed to move downstairs into the Herbarium--I have heard he's not the first medically-retired master to do so, and it does have it's own back door. On the main door, the one that opens on the Dance Studio, he hung a sign: if door is closed, do not enter. He left it open when he went out.

He asked Rick and I to help him move. Actually, we did all the physical work of moving. Charlie only supervised, while we put his books and his equipment and his various knickknacks in boxes. Some things, already occupied chests and crates, and we planned to bring those down entire, but he had said not to try to move his furniture--the herbarium already had what he needed. He didn't have a lot of stuff, so packing didn't take very long. It felt very, very wrong.

Charlie didn't speak, except on practical matters, as we worked. Only at the end, when Rick and I were about to start carrying down boxes, did he voice even a hint at what he was feeling--he looked out the window and remarked "This is the last time I'm ever going to see this view."

We carried the boxes and other things down in several trips, leaving Charlie in his emptying room alone, as he wanted. We unpacked most of the boxes in the Herbarium, putting books on newly-available shelves in their proper order, folding his few clothes neatly into drawers. Eventually we left. Greg, we knew, would meet Charlie upstairs and walk him down, two old men walking together through impermanence.

Spring classes started. I had taken a leave of absence for my job at the landscaping place and was drawing full-time (if not lucrative) pay from the school. I wanted to work in the campus gardens, but that was Raven's territory and that of her crew--I wasn't needed. Instead, I made myself available again as a writing tutor, both on campus and with outside, paying, students. I also took on a few free-lance writing and editing. It all added up to a reasonable income.

It was very strange, working with yearling students who didn't know who Charlie was. They had come to recognize the old man who lived on campus and now occupied the Herbarium, but they didn't know anything about him, and most of them didn't ask. They had heard his name, but could not always remember it.

At one of our lunches in March, I broached a subject I'd been thinking of for a while.

"Charlie, is there anything I....or anyone else, needs to know?"

"What sort of thing?" I'd expected him to tell me there was a lot I needed to know, but apparently he'd decided not to be a smart ass for once.

"Well, um, like what you want? If you...can't make decisions for yourself anymore, does anyone know what to do?"

"All the people who need to know do," he admitted. But I must have looked quite stricken to be reminded I'm not one of those people. His face softened a little. "I have left instructions that I am not to be taken to a hospital or emergency room for anything cancer-related. It's a little more complicated than that, but basically if I choke on my dinner, sure, give me a Heimlich, but I will not be institutionalized, even if it buys me a few more weeks."

I both did and did not understand that, and I looked at him curiously. He pulled back the sleeve of his uniform shirt and showed me the faint little blob of a tattoo, the same one I bear.

The tattoo made from the ash of the wood of the campus, the one that means we can't ever permanently leave.

Afterword: Post 3: The Sword Dance

After Charlie’s diagnosis, I made an effort to come to campus more often than I had in months. Partly I wanted to get to know the new students so that I would not seem a stranger when I began teaching the next year, but of course I wanted to spend time with Charlie while I could. He resisted my attempts, saying he didn’t need my neediness to remind him he was dying. A fair point, especially as I saw plenty of other people seeking his attention for the same reason, but I’m embarrassed to admit he had to tell me more than once.

On one of those occasions, in a rare moment of more obvious kindness, he explained to me that what I was trying to do wouldn’t work anyway.

“What I’m trying to do?”

“Yeah, you’re trying to save me up for later. But there is no saving up for later, just as there is no making up for lost time in the past. There is only only this moment we’re in now.”

Eventually we returned to our old habit of lunch once a week, most weeks.

Being on campus often also allowed me to spend more time with the other masters and to check in with Steve, who was then on track to claim his ring next Brigid—and I could see why. He seemed, not wiser in any definable way, but happier, more up-beat, more solid. Even his sadness, his anger, his fear, had developed a relaxed clarity.

I had no particular role on campus, so I spent a lot of time wandering around, exploring the progress of the autumn, and bumping into people and chatting. Often, Rick and Raven G. would be there also, bringing themselves up to speed to take over Charlie’s forestry, hunting, and landscaping duties. In fact, Rick had taken over hunting already. The three of us, too, would have lunch once a week.

From the others, from Allen and Kit, Greg and Joy (Karen and I continued to barely talk, though there has never been anything acrimonious between us), I heard stories. I learned that Joy had been the one to insist Charlie go to the doctor when she noticed him turn yellow—the first major metastasis was in his liver, which is typical for pancreatic cancer. I also learned that Greg, who, remember, no longer had any classes, had volunteered to take Charlie to all his appointments and treatments and so forth. It perpetually surprised me that Greg could drive (past-tense now only because Greg doesn’t drive anymore—he’s still with us), he’s so all but literally monastic, but Charlie’s driving was bad at the best of times and he needed company.

Allen told me of coming upon Greg and Charlie just as they were coming home from the first of these outings, seeing Greg drop Charlie off near the front of the Mansion before taking the car back to its lot. Allen hurried up to ask how things had gone and found Charlie in something of an emotional tizzy. They started to talk before Charlie realized that somebody might be able to over-hear him.

“Get me out of here!” he pleaded, so Allen took him out to the Edge of the World, where there is no cover behind which someone might lurk unseen without meaning to. But once out there, he wouldn’t unburden himself either, insisting that he had no time left for self-pity. Allen disagreed.

“This is grief,” he explained, bluntly, “and grief is a necessary form of psychological adjustment. Under the circumstances, I’d say you have no time left to avoid it.”

Charlie stopped quite still.

“I’m glad,” he said, “that my best friend is a psychologist and can think for me.” They had been walking slowly along, and Charlie started walking again, but Allen didn’t. After a moment, Charlie looked back at him.

“I didn’t realize I was your best friend,” Allen said.

“You’re not. I meant some other psychologist around here,” Charlie grumped, and Allen laughed and they walked on together. But Allen—what he told me later was:

“I really didn’t know. I should have. We work together, we all but live together—I don’t think we’ve gone more than a day without talking since sometime in 1987—he’s helped raise my kids—of course I’m his best friend, me and Greg, and he’s mine, along with Kit and Lo. But I didn’t think about it because I didn’t have to think about it. He was always just there. And now?”

Allen could be of no help to the rest of us in our grief processes. He needed us to help him instead.

Another person joined the team in those months—Nora. I don’t mean my friend, Nora, the bee-keeping witch, I mean Nora the medical student. I’ve mentioned her, back when she was a novice. She was close with Charlie then, which I noticed and puzzled at, as she wasn’t his student, but she and I had never really talked much. In the years since, she had graduated, first from our program and then from medical school. Midway through the residency process, though, she had stopped, saying she was exhausted and something was missing. She had returned as a candidate in order to find out what that “something might be. She had come as Joy’s student, but Joy was not giving her much in the way of direction, having decided that Nora’s own ideas for her future needed to be allowed to bubble up. Charlie disagreed.

Nora had been talking to Charlie about her ideas and her options when he suddenly said “I think you need to lose a patient.”

It took her, she told me, about a minute to realize what he was talking about. Pedagogically, he meant that she needed to go through the trauma of seeing a patient in her care die, and she needed to do it within the caring environment of the school so that the experience could be transformable rather than merely survivable. She would be set up to fail, much as Eddie had been. Practically and personally, of course, Charlie meant himself as her patient.

She did not become his doctor—she’s not an oncologist, for one thing—but she became his primary caregiver. She learned of all aspects of his treatment and kept track of his progress, asked questions of his doctors that he didn’t know to ask, made sure the efforts of the entire team stayed coordinated and sensible, and fought his insurance provider when he was too tired to do it himself. What home nursing care he ended up needing, she agreed to provide. She learned a holistic approach to healing, not in terms of methodology (she tends still to refer to most forms of alternative medicine as “woo”) but in terms of treating the patient as a whole person, an entire organism, a system, rather than as a collection of inter-related and sometimes broken parts.

And Charlie talked with her about his experience as I believe he talked to no one else. He had to, to help her, and I think that made it easier for him.

For the rest of October and into November, Charlie seemed normal, albeit physically weak and easily tired. Those who had been around him over the summer said he actually seemed healthier—he was no longer yellow, for one thing, and when he wasn’t fresh from a treatment he seemed more energetic, more focused, even happier. He felt better, clearly.

Around the middle of December, though, he started to slide ever so slightly. He started losing weight again and complained of strange pains. He said he could not sleep well. A yearling told me she’d heard a noise on her way in to the Mansion through the Green Room and found Charlie sitting on the stairs looking surprised. She wondered if he had fallen. He never said anything about it to anyone.

We heard that his chemo had stopped working. They switched him to a different chemotherapy agent and he sprang back, but not to where he’d been before.

I missed Samhain on campus—June and I had a small celebration on our own—but I made a point of attending at Yule, and for the first time joined the all-night party up on the masters’ floor. By chance, I was the only one up there who wasn’t either of the Six or immediate family of the same. Even the various non-teaching masters all had somewhere else to be, though they all planned to join us the next day. It was a very cozy gathering. I’d always wondered what those Yule parties were like, and I wasn’t disappointed, though mostly it was pretty low-key. There was a lot of good food, good drink (most of it non-alcoholic), and music, some of it recorded, much of it live. Mostly we sat around and talked or played Pictionary. They had a little Yule tree up there, a live balsam fir in a pot that I learned spent most of the winter outside in a little courtyard garden they have. Its ornaments were a mix of beloved holiday heirlooms from the families of the masters themselves.

As the night began to shift from late to early, though, Charlie stood up and everyone got quiet. I remembered having heard that he made it a practice to go out to greet the dawn much earlier than the others—the Six are always up on the mountain before the students get there, and it is they who play “Here Comes the Sun” over and over and over as the sun comes up, but dawn comes in stages and sun-up is only the final stage. The gradual lightening starts much earlier, and the first stage has already begun by the time most begin their climb—most of the Six don’t arrive more than a few minutes before the students do. But Charlie had made it his practice to go up much earlier, to be in place before the beginning of “astronomical twilight,” which is when the stars barely start to dim before the coming sun—which won’t be up for almost another two hours. And since Charlie wanted to be in place before that, he’d go out even earlier, leaving the Mansion to climb the mountain sometime around five A.M.

Only—and this was clear in the sudden silence—no one was sure he was strong enough to climb a mountain in the dark and the cold, nobody liked the idea of his attempting to do so alone, and no one had any idea what to say to him about it.

Except me.

I opened my mouth and said the first thing that came to me; “Charlie, can I come with you? I want to see what it’s like.”

And I did. I was still in some sense his student and maybe I’ll always be. If he was going somewhere, I wanted to follow. And while I had another motive for asking, and I saw in his face that he knew it and understood what I was trying to do, but I was not being disingenuous. And so he accepted and let me look after both his person and his pride.

“It’ll be silence after we leave this room,” he warned me.

“I figured. I just need to change my clothes.”

Before we could make our way out of the little group of couches and people, though, Kit stood up. I had been peripherally aware that she’d been breathing heavily and staring fixedly into space ever since Charlie stood, like someone trying to nerve themselves up to do something scary. Now, she stood up abruptly, violin in hand, and Charlie and I both sat down, expectant.

She played “The Sword Dance,” the musical component of a Morris dance associated with the winter solstice. It’s on the “Christmas Revels” album, which despite the name is mostly about Yule, and it’s an album all of us were thoroughly familiar with, since we on campus play the recording often and perform selections from it more often than that. And we all knew that the tune is preceded on the album by a few spoken lines:

“First comes Christmas, then comes spring;

Like winter I must die.

Then to life again, like spring!

Dance, men, the Sword Dance now for me!”

It’s a curious thing, this Sword Dance, since it ends with a simulated decapitation, a voluntary sacrifice presumably meant to identify the tribal chief with the cycles of the Earth and Sun, thing thing that dies and yet comes back, and in dying and coming back lives forever. In playing the song, Kit suggested the lyric and with it a whole complex of metaphysical ideas and emotional association that none of us needed to have explained—we all knew it. The experience was as immediate for us as if a Christian preacher had held aloft a Cross, meaning to invoke everything the Cross represents.

The dance involves the clashing of swords, heard on the recording as periods of rhythmic percussion. We spontaneously added that sound by clapping in time at the correct points. None of us said anything, we all just clapped along, and Charlie did nothing at all except listen and look slightly stunned.

When we were done, he stood, looked at Kit and then the rest of us.

“Thank you,” he said.

Afterward: Post 2: Research and Insults

After Charlie told me of his diagnosis, my first reaction was to head to the woods. I wanted comfort, I wanted perspective, and I wanted solitude--I'm not inherently a loner, but I didn't want to deal with other people's emotions just then, especially not their emotions about my emotions. I wanted everything simple while I sorted out the inside of my head.

I had my uniform, my camping hammock, and my water bottle in my car, so I changed my clothes, borrowed an extra cloak for added warmth, called my wife's voicemail, and headed uphill to my spot in the woods.

Somebody followed me.

I was aware of my tail because I could hear birds reacting to a second person and because the leaves, just starting to fall, made the trail noisy. I could not see anybody, and when I stepped off the trail behind a tree and waited nobody caught up. I therefore concluded that somebody was trying to tail me in secret, and that the person could not possibly be Charlie because he would have known I'd notice the birds and the leaf-noise. Yet who else would have reason to follow me without my knowledge, except someone worried about my mental state and respectful of my solitude?

"Tell Charlie I'm going to my spot for the night. I'll be down in the morning. I'm OK," I called out.

"OK," replied a distant voice I couldn't recognize, and the birds reported someone's passage back down the mountain.

Really, I felt touched.

I didn't sleep much that night, nor did I really do much of what could be called thinking. My mind wandered in dark, unhelpful, and seemingly random directions, and by morning the edge of my shock had worn off and I could pull myself together.

I think it must have been around nine in the morning--breakfast was over, people were heading to class--when I came back into the main part of campus and found Charlie under the avenue of maple trees that lead past the Dining Hall. He was raking leaves.

Nobody ever raked leaves on campus, the idea being to leave fallen leaves in place to shelter over-wintering insects and to enrich the soil under the trees. I had almost forgotten we had any leaf rakes, though the landscaping crew did pick up leaves from some neighboring properties to make mulch. And yet here was Charlie, raking.

I stopped to watch him. He glanced up at me a moment, without stopping in his work.

"If this is going to be my final autumn," he explained, "I might as well enjoy it." And he dropped the rake and jumped into the pile, then covered himself up to his chin in dry, fragrant leaved.

I jumped in after him.

"Who invited you?" he protested, but I could tell he didn't mean it.

"I did," I retorted. "I wear the Green Ring, too, now, I don't need you to tell me what to do."

"You're a cocky upstart."

"You're a grumpy old man," I replied. And just for a moment, I saw his eyes twinkle.

"Oh yeah?" he said, and threw a handful of leaves at me.

"Yeah!" I threw leaves at him.

"Get out! Go!" more leaves.

"Make me!" And with that we were wrestling, tussling semi-seriously like puppies or like little boys, each trying to pin or push out the other.

I had never wrestled Charlie before, but I had a fairly good idea of what it should have been like. I remembered his hunting bow, which I could barely draw, and his beautiful physical prowess with a chainsaw. I remembered how he had unobtrusively dropped into a martial arts "ready" posture that time he thought I might hit him, and I knew he'd had at least some training. I had seven inches on him and I was over four decades younger, but he should have been able to beat me. Had we wrestled six months earlier, I'm sure he would have. Now, I was clearly stronger than he.

If I pressed my advantage and beat him, he'd be humiliated, I was sure. But if I let him beat me, he would know and would likewise be humiliated. I disengaged and switched weapons.

"You ass-clown, fighting over a leaf pile?" I half-shouted.

"You self-important tyro, fighting back!" He followed my lead.

"Idiot!"

"Fool!"

"Nincompoop!"

"Twat-waffle!"

"Egg-head!"

"Shit-for-brains!"

"Ass-munch!"

And so we dueled. The rules were simple and intuitive, each of us trying to top the other in poetry and invention of insult. We used only insults that might occur to children--nothing political and nothing sexual. In retrospect, "ass-munch" could be taken as a reference to oral-anal sex, and "dick-breath," which also got a mention, could be taken in a similar spirit, but that didn't occur to me at the time, and I don't think it occurred to Charlie, either. We were innocent.

I was then in my early 30's, and not even with my brother could I be a boy among boys anymore, yet with Charlie, a man old enough to be my grandfather, I could. He sometimes took leave of his age and responsibilities and took me with him.

We quickly ran through our remembered repertoire of standards and started making things up. My favorite of my own inventions, and the only one I now remember, was "you poor excuse for a cheese sandwich!" It made him laugh. But the ring that made us peers did not make us equals, and he was far better at language than I. I started to reach, to have trouble keeping up.

Finally he came out with "You tiny Tater Tot of snot!" and I folded.

"I got nothin," I admitted.

"Damn right," he agreed, and tossed another little handful of leaves.

I let myself fall back into the pile and stretched out, looking at the yellow and orange trees above us, so bright they almost hurt my eyes.

"I'm going to miss you," I exclaimed, as though he were merely planning to move permanently to Paris or something.

"Me, too, Daniel, me too," he replied in a similar tone.

It was only later that I realized how truly strange that reply was. Did he mean, as I initially assumed, that he would miss me? A reciprocal statement of personal fondness? But Charlie, as far as I know, did not believe in an afterlife, so how did he expect to miss me after he died? And it would be unlike him not to notice that what he'd actually said was that he'd miss himself, so maybe that's what he meant, but that's an even more metaphysically bizarre statement.

Later, I went home, called my wife at work, called Allen, spoke to his voicemail, and got online. I typed "pancreatic cancer" in to a search engine.

Turned out most of what I'd thought I knew about cancer, and that cancer in particular, was wrong.

When Charlie had spoken of fighting and yet described himself as dying, I had assumed he meant he would try for a cure but expected to fail. I had thought of cancer treatment as a very either/or thing; either you try to cure cancer, or you accept hospice care. Turns out, there is a third option.

With terminal diagnoses, which is what stage 4 pancreatic cancer is, they try to extend your life and keep its quality high. With pancreatic cancer, the standard was, at the time, anyway, to use small doses of chemotherapy to make the patient more comfortable without producing debilitating side-effects. Charlie never talked about his treatment with me, but everything I saw over the following months--the rest of his life--was consistent with that course of treatment. He never lost his hair, but his energy and apatite waned and then waxed again over the course of every week...but I'm getting ahead of myself. Whether he also ever fought for a cure, I don't know.

What I found online also explained something else--how had Charlie not gotten to stage 4 without a diagnosis? I'd have figured him to be very proactive about his health. I'd even thought that maybe he'd been sick for months or years without telling me. I mean, he didn't tell me much about himself anyway. But it turns out that pancreatic cancer usually has no symptoms until it metastasizes, at which point it's incurable....

I read for a couple of hours and totally depressed myself until June came home. Then Allen called me back. I'd called him in order to find out more about how the school was handling things and maybe to talk over my own reaction, but for the first time Allen couldn't help me with anything. He just fell apart on me.

I remember thinking that this wasn't how this part of my life--a newly-minted master--was supposed to go.

Afterword: Post 1: Diagnosis

So the story is finished and yet it is not complete. You’ll want to know how I came to write this blog, for one thing. I’ve been referring to the closing of the school, and you’ll want to know how and why that happened, too, and maybe you’ll have noticed that I’m a member of the Six but have not explained how or why.

In short, I’ve brought my story up to a happy ending in February of 2010, but not up to the spring of 2012, when I made my first disjointed attempts at blog-writing (and started giving you equally disjointed hints as to the state of our community now), and some pretty heavy things must have gone on during the gap. You want to know what.

Fair enough.

I’m curious as to how much you’ve guessed? I haven’t meant to drop hints, but as I suspect you’ve noticed I am not the most disciplined or organized of writers, and I’ve let a few things slip. For example, I have not been able to bring myself to lie and refer to Charlie in the present tense.

Yes, one of the things that happened during those missing two-and-a-quarter years was the illness and death of my teacher—I still don’t like writing those words, especially not since some of you may not have realized and so for you, and for me when I wrote to you, he was alive until fifteen seconds ago. I suppose I could have waited, at let it be a surprise for you at its proper place in the narrative, but honestly you would not have been waiting very long because his diagnosis was almost the first piece of school-related news I received after earning my Ring, and his diagnosis was terminal from the start. The only doubt was how long that termination would take and how it would go.

Of course, here is where Charlie would grump (and here is where the part of Charlie that he gave to me does grump) that life is a sexually transmitted terminal condition, and that the only real uncertainty is always how long we have and what we will do in the time we get.

The other events I have to relate are related to that one, but not directly triggered by it, and I’ll get to them in their turn.

In a way, of course, Charlie’s death was a predictable part of the story, whether I slipped up and dropped hints or not, simply because of how I’ve chosen to structure the tail. Charlie always referred to the art of storytelling—and story composition—as “sectioning reality.” He was referring to conic sections, a group of two-dimensional figures that can be derived by slicing a cone: a slice perpendicular to the cone’s long axis yields a circle; a slice slightly off the perpendicular yields an ellipse, or, if it intersects the flat bottom of the cone, a hyperbola; a slice parallel to the long axis yields a parabola; and a slice along the long axis yields a triangle. Such different shapes, and they are all true two-dimensional approximations of the same three-dimensional shape. Similarly, since a story must also be a radical simplification of reality, multiple seemingly incompatible stories can all be derived from the same real events and yet all be true (doesn’t mean all stories are true, though; you can’t derive a square from a cone without lying). And I’ve chosen to section these particular events largely as a story about a teacher, and these are almost always elegiac in the end.

I mean stories about teachers from the viewpoint of the student. The natural and expected-if-not-universal of these is that the teacher dies, the same way that the natural and expected end of a romance is happily-ever-after. Why is this? I thought, for a while, that it was because only when a teacher dies do former students get moony enough to want to write an idealized account of the person. After getting to know Charlie, I guessed that maybe teachers usually object to being put on pedestals and so forth, and that students therefore can’t get away of much in the way of tributes until the teacher is safely out of the way. But neither explanation applies to people like Yoda, who are figments of their author’s imagination from the start.

I think now, rather, that the answer depends on a curious fact; at what point can you tell that the teacher has succeeded? At the point when the student no longer needs him or her. And how better can you prove, as a storyteller, that the point has been reached but to say that the teacher is no longer available, has died?

Except, I still feel like I need Charlie, and here I am without him—except for the grumpy, intelligent, and sarcastic voice in my head. That I appear able to keep.

As I mentioned before, I’m not going to tell these final stories journal style, as though reporting on the events o the week as they happened. Most of them played out far too slowly, with weeks going by between major plot points, and some of them played out far too fast, or overlapped in time with others. Then, too, I was not living on campus during those months and years, so there were long stretches of time when I had no clear idea what was happening at school at all.

So I’m going to try a more novelistic structure, where each section covers the time period that it must, short or long, on order to deliver a narrative or thematic unit (oh, god, I’m talking like an English textbook….). I don’t know how many posts this is going to take, but I’m hoping for eight and a nice congruence with the structure of the rest of the blog.

Here goes.

So, June and I moved out about a week after I earned my ring. We moved into a three-bedroom apartment carved out of the back of an old farmhouse. The owner lives in the front half and there’s a nice yard, which we agreed to henceforth take care of in exchange for a very good deal on the rent. It’s within biking distance—albeit a very long biking distance—of campus, some basic shopping, and the landscaping company Charlie used to own and where I still work (had I said before that he used to own it? He did—the friend of his who has owned it the whole time I’ve been around was his business partner). June can carpool to work.

We had to buy bikes, of course, since we can’t use the campus bikes all the time anymore, and we decided to buy a car, too. Cars are hard to avoid. We learned to eat from the store. We had utility payments. What all did to our carbon footprints I hated to think. I let my boss, the landscaper, know that I’d be available for a full fifty hours a week in the season, rather than my traditional twenty, and I pursued work as a writing coach for high school and college students, and so I prepared to earn my way in the world.

I made no attempt to find work as a paid ally at school because while I had demonstrated that I could be a useful employee there, so had lots of other people, and we couldn’t all be employees. I planned to wait for an actual opening, and I made my peace with the fact that one might never come. I believed myself to be competent, but not superlative, so I figured I’d just always be beaten out by the competition.

Months went by in which I rarely visited campus and I interacted with the people who lived there almost as rarely. I may have been trying to establish myself emotionally as well as physically without them, but the school is no insular, so different from everything else, that it can be difficult to get across without a determined effort of will. I saw Allen, Kit, and Steve occasionally—I was pleased to hear that Steve was making steady progress towards ring—but Charlie does not really socialize. I exchanged a few short emails with him only. I planned to return for sabbats, but for one reason or another I didn’t, not even for Lammas, so I didn’t get to find out what the masters do in the Mansion on that day (though I have since experienced it, and will tell you). Life went on and started to feel normal. June and I talked about maybe starting a family.

And then….

On a beautiful fall day in early October, Charlie texted me. He’d only recently gotten a cell phone, holding out even after all the other Masters had them, but I’d heard that lately he’d taken to using the technology to issue edicts. From what I’d gathered, this one was typical;

Come to campus today. Ch.

The “Ch” was a signature. After a lifetime of writing letters, Charlie could not help signing his texts.

I had planned to spend the day doing yard work, but there was no arguing; Charlie had turned his cell phone off. I had no idea what Charlie wanted or how long I’d be gone, but I keep a “bag for anywhere” packed for adventure or emergency, so I just wrote a note for my wife, changed into my uniform, and went—driving, not biking, as the day was far advanced by then.

When I found Charlie he was digging in the front bed, kneeling on a foam pad to save his knees and his uniform pants. He was in almost exactly the same place and position as he had been when I first asked to help him garden, over ten years before, a coincidence that struck me, for some reason, as eerie. He looked old. Of course, Charlie had a right to look old; he was almost seventy-three, but I had never thought of him that way before. Was it only the juxtaposition of the present with memory, or had he really aged a decade or more in the months since I had seen him last? I put the thought from me as he stood to greet me and dusted off his knees.

“Walk with me, Daniel,” he said, with no preamble. So we walked, strolled casually out onto the Flat Field towards the Edge of the World, and he politely asked me about my wife, my parents, and my writing. I answered as briefly as I could, as I knew he had not asked me there to make small-talk. When we reached the Edge, he finally got to the point.

“Daniel, I’m dying,” he said, and the bottom dropped out of my mind.

His voice was businesslike, unsentimental, and I just looked at him. He took my looking as a question, and answered me.

“I have pancreatic cancer. Stage four. My doctors think I have about three, maybe six months to live, with treatment. Don’t get me wrong, I’m fighting this, but I don’t think I’m going to win. Everybody has to die of something, and I think this one may be mine.”

I said nothing, and again he continued as though responding to me.

“I need you to take my spring classes. You don’t have to take all of them, there are other people I can ask, and if I can I’ll help you. Rick is taking over groundskeeping, and you can help each other. But I want you to take over as many as you can. I can’t think of anyone more qualified.”

I could not speak. My mind was a mess of competing emotions such that I could not express any of them. I just looked at him. It was such a beautiful day, that day, and he looked so at home in it, his face nearly expressionless, he short, gray hair somewhat mussed by the breeze, his eyes—and I had never noticed this before—the same color blue as the sky behind him. He was so incontrovertibly alive. I could not help it; I hugged him.

It was the only time we ever embraced, and he was stiff, at first, then hugged me back warmly. His body felt too thin—still strong in a muscular sense, but already bony to the point of frailty. His hair smelled like fresh fall leaves. When we disengaged he looked guarded for a moment, searching my eyes, perhaps, for traces of pity. He patted my arm, then turned to walk back to the mansion. We spoke of ordinary things, how many chicks the phoebes in the car port had fledged that year, which of the migratory birds had already left, and so forth. It was gossip to him. It was current events. Charlie did not watch TV, and I had learned he no longer read newspapers. I couldn’t tell if he had taken my hug as an answer to his request, or if he had simply assumed I would do as he told me—I always had. as his student. Maybe he just knew I was in no position to think. When we got back to the beds he excused himself.

“I may be dying, but I still have things I need to do. And you need to go meditate, or whatever it is you do these days.”

I took my leave as though the day were still ordinary, and walked back to my car. But I did not get in. My bag for anywhere was in the back seat. I didn’t have anywhere I needed to be, except where I was. I called my wife, relieved to get her voicemail so I didn’t have to deal with her response to my news just yet. Then I grabbed my bag and headed to the office to ask Sharon for the loan of an extra cloak for warmth. When I told her to tell Charlie I’d take his classes, all of them, she merely thanked me and said we’d make arrangements right after Brigid—but her eyes filled with tears. Then I left, headed uphill to my spot among the trees, my need for it itself a tribute to my teacher.