The Rock in the Gut

1.

I was walking down a long, utterly deserted sandy bay beach called the Gut. It was just over some dunes from a well-traveled walking trail on Great Island, which is part of the Cape Cod National Seashore, at the very end of Chequessett Neck Road in Wellfleet, Massachusetts, where I was vacationing (if writing a book can ever be considered a vacation, which, actually, it can’t).

I had been accompanied by my wife onto the beach. She took a seat as soon as we crossed the dunes. Because I’m a restless person, I said—as I always do on any beach, when she immediately sits down in the sand—“I’m going for a walk. See you later.”

As I walked away, I turned around every so often to see her sitting somewhat up on the tide-rising beach, in a dark sweater and with, for me, unmistakably beautiful hair. I doubt anyone else would have been able to see her from as far away as I had turned to look at her. But there was no one else there on the beach. Just the two of us, disappearing from each other.

She had been sitting in the passenger seat when our car was broadsided by another car six days before. There were no other passengers. She was more shocked than shattered. She was not taken by ambulance to the hospital.

I was taken by ambulance the forty miles to Cape Cod Hospital in Hyannis. My wife, driven there by our son and his wife, joined me.

We waited together in triage for about three hours until I was finally taken into the emergency room for a CT scan and X-rays. Nothing was broken. I was told my pain was the result of muscle spasms in my back. That had been my own guess, though my fears had had me imagining worse.

I was told I could leave. Our son and daughter-in-law drove us home to my mother-in-law’s house in Wellfleet. When we got there, everyone else went right to bed, but I stayed up alone, standing in the kitchen, devouring half the sandwich my son and his wife had bought for me. It had been about eight hours since the crash. I knew I could have died. It didn’t occur to me that I hadn’t.

2.

Let rocks their silence break
— “America” (“My Country, ’Tis of Thee”)

Image

Denise Landis

As I walked on the beach, I occasionally picked up heart-shaped rocks for my wife, as I had for years. I have no idea where she keeps them. But she does keep them. Every one of them, she says. Some inside our house. Some out in her garden.

I didn’t look as carefully for heart-shaped rocks as I routinely do. My neck was very stiff, a bit painful. It arrested my head in a downward position, like an old man’s. I was making every effort to hold my head high, like an explorer’s. I was looking toward the horizon, or sometimes out over the bay to try to sight one of the great white sharks warned of on a large sign before we crossed over the dunes.

By the time I reversed direction to return to my wife, I had put seven heart-shaped rocks of various sizes in the pockets of my shorts.

On my way back on the otherwise still-deserted Gut beach, before I was close enough to see my wife again with her dark sweater and beautiful hair, I came upon the rock.

Since it’s not a heart-shaped rock, I don’t know what made me stop to pick it up. It was lying, face down, in the sand. Upside down it’s an ugly rock. I’m not attracted to ugly rocks, which I hope is not politically incorrect to say in the vast community of rocks and stones who live everywhere among us and may have their own opinions concerning our appearances.

But for no reason I can remember, and never before having stopped and reached down for an anonymous ugly rock, I picked it up. I turned it over.I saw immediately that, as I was looking at it with my eyes, it was looking at me with its own. I stared into its (one must admit) ugly, but actual, face. It stared back into my whatever face.

That’s when it began to talk to me.

3.

Image

Denise Landis

I don’t mean “talk to me” the way people say, “That dress really talked to me, so I bought it.” I mean the rock actually talked to me.

I didn’t have to look around to find where the words were coming from.

I don’t pretend that anyone standing near me might also have heard its speech.

The rock’s mouth didn’t move as it spoke. But it wasn’t expressionless. No face is expressionless. It simply stared at me, talking to me and me alone.

I would quote here exactly what it said, but it told me that I must never repeat its words. When I asked why, it said… I’m not allowed to say. But it wasn’t polite.

Take a close look at that rock’s face. Not a face from which you’d expect speech of a polite nature. Not with those beady little eyes and its white bulb of a drunkard’s nose and grotesquely swollen right cheek and substantial, muscovite-crusted lower lip on its crooked mouth. One might have thought, as I did for a moment, that the rock had been in the car with me when it was impacted on Route 6. Wounded. Ugly.

And yet, what it said to me was beautiful, full of understanding and sympathy and even hope.

“Thank you,” I said. “I needed that.”

The rock didn’t shake its head—it is incapable of movement—but it did say something to the effect of telling me to stop speaking in clichés. I did need what it had given me. I should not have said, “I needed that,” like a beer after a long walk. I should have left it at thank you.

I showed the rock to my wife as soon as I reached her. I said, “Can you see that it has a face?” She could, or at least said she could.

She’s the one who took the photo of the rock. And of the heart-shaped rock. And of our totally wrecked, lifesaving car.

She has all the heart-shaped rocks that I collected that day. I have the talking rock sitting right here next to me. I know it will never say another thing. It’s done talking. All it does now is stare into my face. And I into its face. It’s such a beautiful thing.