Two Eternities
*
When he reached the porch, Cassidy set his poles against the railing and took a series of long, heavy breaths. He looked up at the sky, letting a few errant flakes settle upon his wind-burned face, then sat down heavily on the wooden steps, just as he’d done all those years ago when he was with Jamison. The dead, he thought, as his numbed fingers worked at the snowshoes’ bindings, would be alarmed if they knew the things we chose to remember about them. And rightly so.
He knocked the crust from the snowshoes with his gloves and leaned them against the cabin, beside his backpack. Then he turned and looked out at the valley, and the ridge, and the mountains darkly silhouetted against the vast, fading sky.
The accident—and, yes, it was an accident—had taken place the week after their cross-country trip. It had happened in the classroom, just before the bell, while they were waiting for Professor Lehner to arrive and begin his lecture. Jamison, who was being his irrepressibly obnoxious self that day, had leapt up on his desk and begun reciting a passage from some obscure poem, daring anyone brave enough, anyone who was willing to lay bets, to tell him where it had come from. It was a stunt he’d pulled before on any number of occasions and would no doubt have pulled again but for the two students, Hertwig and Rilke, who’d decided they’d had enough of his oratorical antics for one semester.
Hey, Jamison, Rilke yelled. Sit down before I knock you down!
Jamison grinned, taunting him. Pipsqueak! Philistine!
Sit down, numbnuts!
Jamison continued to taunt both men, egging them on. Daring them to try and best him. But when Hertwig—the bigger of the two fellows, a lineman on the varsity football squad—rose to his feet and threatened to knock Jamison from his makeshift soapbox, Jamison, laughing, hopped down and threw up his hands in surrender.
What happened next was difficult to explain. As difficult to explain as the disjointed sight of the cabin door clapping shut in the wind, falling mute when it struck the jamb. But what Cassidy remembered was this: Hertwig, shooting out his hands, shoving Jamison, and Jamison tumbling backward onto the carbon spike of Rilke’s freshly-sharpened pencil.
It was a stupid prank by any estimation. Admittedly sophomoric, even for a pair of football players. But when Hertwig jeered Get the point, jackass? everyone in the classroom, including Cassidy, had erupted into nervous laughter.
It seemed to Cassidy, even now, that he could have reached out that day, had he wanted, and stopped the entire thing from happening. But he’d looked on instead, coolly. As if he had no particular interest in the outcome. He’d watched, and when the blow was struck, he’d waited like everyone in the room for Jamison to leap up and grab comically at the seat of his pants the way characters did in the cartoons.
Only it didn’t happen that way. It didn’t happen at all the way they’d imagined it would. What did happen was this: the sharpened pencil found its mark, striking low and to the center, and with the weight of Jamison’s body behind it, it drove itself home with a strange and merciless ease. There was no comic yelp to accompany the blow. No bawdy leap into the air or wild fanning of hands. There was only silence—a grim, unbearable silence—followed by a ghostly groan and the thud of Jamison’s body as he slumped to the floor.