Chapter 33
Wednesday came.
Even though I slept up in my old room, I dreamt that I was downstairs asleep on the living room couch. I dreamt that I was back in high school again on some lazy afternoon. It was a dream within a dream. I had them often, cascading dreams, collapsing on each other like Russian Matryoshka dolls; each dream was an empty wooden casket that opened within another wooden casket, and I couldn’t wake up until I found a way to free myself from all of them. Even though my spirit was forever awake, I felt my body now was a stone. I tried to roll off of the couch I thought I was on, but I couldn’t. I tried yelling out to someone, to my mother, who, in this dream I thought was watching soap operas, but my tongue wouldn’t work; the nerve signal was blocked, and I could only murmur faint, forced moans. I finally remembered to surrender to it all. You see, to prove to my sleeping self that I was, in fact, in a dream, I had to test the bounds of physical limitation and try to do something impossible. I had to try to fly. Complete surrender was the only way to ever awaken. So I jumped up in the air in my dreaming wakefulness and floated and propelled with no gravity at once, all the way across the room and up toward the ceiling. With this discovery, I now became immediately relaxed and regained my confidence. I could do anything! I slowly moved toward the windows of my parents’ house. I moved freely now, bumping into the living room wall and pushing off. I was a spaceman. I flew into the kitchen and then out through the back screen door and up over the neighborhoods of Christian Hill.
It wasn’t long before I was out over the September choppy Merrimack. I pushed myself up still farther into the starlit sky above me, suddenly looking down with no fear, feeling liberated, looking down on the beautiful, abandoned mill city in the warmth of the real New England night.
The mill city changed rapidly below me as I traveled back through dreaming time. The mills quickly disappeared and changed into the beauty of a forested countryside, with the same old characteristic bend in the river that had always been there. It had always looked like an upturned horseshoe from the sky; the southward flowing Merrimack curved back upward and held Centralville like a great hand holds a beautiful dove. From there, the river continued its flow northward toward peaceful Paradise Beach and the distant New Hampshire sea. High above it all, I hovered there for a few moments and imagined that I was back in the time of the native nations. I suddenly stood on Tyng’s Island in the middle of the river, face-to-face with the great sachem Passaconaway and his own magical dreaming spirit. I noticed an early English preacher, right there beside him while all three of us said nothing to each other, silently surrendering to this still peace. Then I pulled slowly away from them, upward again, and watched as the two great men stood effortless in the rising waters. The water soon overtook the island they were standing on and flooded all of the surrounding towns. The upturned horseshoe was gone.
I finally awoke from it all in my old room upstairs. The dreams were gone. At the foot of my bed the floor creaked away. Old Woodward’s ghost was back in his invisible wooden rocking chair, I thought. The familiar creaking sound was nevertheless a little spooky, but I wasn’t afraid. After all, this was still the house he had built back in the 1880s.
Downstairs in the kitchen that morning in 1984, I talked Decky into running the back roads of Kenwood, Dracut, with me, just like I had done during my days in high school. It didn’t take much convincing with Decky.
“I’m ready. Let’s go!” he exclaimed.
I had a regular-five mile route that I would run on weekends. When I ran in the fall, there were always fresh smells of native corn from the small roadside stands along this route. On this morning with Decky, I counted the wooden posts of the old fences along the stretch and remembered the frequent childhood rides with my father. Peculiar clouds danced across the lower stretches of sky like errant white brushstrokes curling from some great canvas of the Creator. The signs of October’s soft footsteps were out there too, for they were evident in the gradual changes of color in the hilly landscape ahead of us. Out there in the distant hills of Dracut, I imagined Uncle Arthur’s weathered carriage house alongside his barn again. I only knew it from a black-and-white album picture taken during a 1930’s summertime. The structure had fallen down sometime back in the ’40s, but I thought I could always smell the dusty, humid air that came from inside of it just by looking at that old picture. The buzzing sounds of the Dogday Harvestfly mixed into the roaring sound of a motorcycle as the loud bike came up from behind us. As Decky and I pushed along these old roads, the motorcycle passed us quickly and weaved its way into the quilted countryside. I imagined my father and his motorcycle forever riding out there too, somewhere where he was young again.
That evening, I finally reunited with Richie Clark at his apartment in Pawtucketville. Dukie, Bessisso, and Whacko were there too. Lots of people came out to celebrate my homecoming that night. It was crazy. There was lots of beer, cases and cases of it, with wicked talk of days ahead and days gone by. My younger brother Steve and his friend Dan, my younger sister Kate and Sully, Sophie and Dylan, Dukie’s sister KJ, Frankie Tabor, Abby (a girl who pulled me drunk out of the water of Lake Mascuppic one night when I fell off of Gordy’s boat), Aidan Maloney, and even my old California travel companion Sal Caprissi, all showed up to see Luke, Decky, and I off on our great adventure abroad.
It was such a wonderful life.