Michael Cunningham - Flesh and Blood

ALSO BY

MICHAEL CUNNINGHAM

FLESH

AND

BLOOD

MICHAEL

CUNNINGHAM

Picador

Farrar, Straus and Giroux / New York

FLESH AND BLOOD. Copyright 1995 by Michael Cunningham. All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America. For information, address Picador, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.

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Its Not Unusual; words and music by Gordon Mills and Les Reed Copyright 1965 Leeds Music, Ltd. All rights for USA and Canada controlled and administered by Duchess Music Corporation, an MCA Company. All rights reserved. Used by permission. International copyright secured.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Cunningham, Michael, 1952

Flesh and blood / Michael Cunningham.

p. cm.

ISBN-13: 978-0-312-42668-2

ISBN-10: 0-312-42668-2

I. Title.

- PS3553.U484 F57 1995

813.54dc20

94024628

First published in the United States by Farrar, Straus and Giroux

10 9 8 7 6 5 4

THIS BOOK IS FOR

DONNA LEE &

CRISTINA THORSON

CONTENTS

CAR

BALLET

1935/ Constantine, eight years old, was working in his fathers garden and thinking about his own garden, a square of powdered granite he had staked out and combed into rows at the top of his familys land. First he weeded his fathers bean rows and then he crawled among the gnarls and snags of his fathers vineyard, tying errant tendrils back to the stakes with rough brown cord that was to his mind the exact color and texture of righteous, doomed effort. When his father talked about working ourselves to death to keep ourselves alive, Constantine imagined this cord, coarse and strong and drab, electric with stray hairs of its own, wrapping the world up into an awkward parcel that would not submit or stay tied, just as the grapevines kept working themselves loose and shooting out at ecstatic, skyward angles. It was one of his jobs to train the vines, and he had come to despise and respect them for their wild insistence. The vines had a secret, tangled life, a slumbering will, but it was he, Constantine, who would suffer if they werent kept staked and orderly. His father had a merciless eye that could find one bad straw in ten bales of good intentions.

As he worked he thought of his garden, hidden away in the blare of the hilltop sun, three square feet so useless to his fathers tightly bound future that they were given over as a toy to Constantine, the youngest. The earth in his garden was little more than a quarter inch of dust caught in a declivity of rock, but he would draw fruit from it by determination and work, the push of his own will. From his mothers kitchen he had spirited dozens of seeds, the odd ones that stuck to the knife or fell on the floor no matter how carefully she checked herself for the sin of waste. His garden lay high on a crown of scorched rock where no one bothered to go; if it produced he could tend the crop without telling anyone. He could wait until harvest time and descend triumphantly, carrying an eggplant or a pepper, perhaps a tomato. He could walk through the autumn dusk to the house where his mother would be laying out supper for his father and brothers. The light would be at his back, hammered and golden. It would cut into the dimness of the kitchen as he threw open the door. His mother and father and brothers would look at him, the runt, of whom so little was expected. When he stood in the vineyard looking down at the worldthe ruins of the Papandreous farm, the Kalamata Companys olive groves, the remote shimmer of townhe thought of climbing the rocks one day to find green shoots pushing through his patch of dust. The priest counseled that miracles were the result of diligence and blind faith. He was faithful.