The Fall

by Jonathan A. J. Davis

Love is life, and life is to love
There’s nothing else, except music and hope

Walter F. Johnson – “Love is Life”

WALT’S ARTHRITIC FINGERS danced the blues riff that once made him famous. His self-titled 1976 record, particularly the track, “Love is Life,” earned him instant praise in Rolling Stone, Cadence, & Melody Maker. It continued to feature on many “All-time 100” lists. On the album’s iconic cover, Walt stood ramrod in the khaki drills and beret of his parachute regiment, squinting into the searing Aden sun, holding not a guitar but a MKII Sten gun. His friend, Edward Moore, took the candid picture.

In the 1980s, Walt toured with Bruce Springsteen and John Mayall. Into his eighties, the guitar felt heavier than the trees a luthier used to craft it. But even in his old age, music lived within his soul, a constant companion.

Thoreau Falls pounded the rocks below like a primal drumbeat; salamanders popped and copperheads hissed their chorus; warblers and sapsuckers chirped eloquent symphonies; opossums, chipmunks, and unknown critters rustled percussively in the undergrowth. Silent constellations, clear of city lights and pollution, dazzled against a spider-black sky. And Walt’s guitar notes filled the spaces between nature’s orchestra.

Walt stopped playing and rested the maple wood body across his lap. With hints of a Parkinson’s shake, he picked up the bottle of Jack Daniel’s perched on the log beside him. He drank down to the dregs, then flung the bottle toward his cabin. From a trouser pocket, he removed a steel cigarette case. The bone-white crescent moon glinted at acute angles from its worn surface. He lit a cigarillo, took a deep drag, and focused his gaze upon the water.

Though he sometimes pined for a big city, these mountains were his home now. Whatever happened, he would die here. His thoughts, as they habitually did, drifted to that afternoon. He recalled the Gulf’s oppressive August heat, his army uniform sticking uncomfortably to leathery skin. The stench of sweat and fear were ingrained in his memory like tattoos. So too was the deafening silence, absent of chatter or birdsong, but pregnant with the threat of gunfire. Decades had slipped by like heartbeats, unnoticed and constant, yet July 17th 1956 still filled his mind like a cinema reel. He thought of Edward and Aeesha, of how their falling in love changed everything.

So often, things have to do with love.

Walt felt grateful for his place and date of birth, but it occasionally bore him guilt. He missed out on both World Wars, Vietnam, and so many global atrocities. Sometimes, he felt an absence for missing out on a battle that would have been his legacy, a heroic folklore passed down through generations of Johnsons. Instead, he discharged from service unscathed, unlike many unfortunate souls before him.

The Durham Light Infantry drafted a young Walter Johnson to the Protectorate of Aden for his National Service during peacetime – or relative peace, at least during his stint. He still dreamed of the immense scale of it: the hot desert war with its red dusty air; patrolling Sinai streets that were little more than sun baked clay; his country’s determination to save the Suez Canal, this most precious of land-bridges, Africa’s great highway; cities razed to rubble like they’d never existed; warships, hawkish and intent, and the naval officers onboard; the Cold War’s menace, the threat of Russian hostilities and a new World War. At least he avoided the heroin addictions that plagued so many others.

“I’m heading into the market square. Should be back within the hour…”

Walt blew a smoke tendril skyward, watching it dissipate into the midnight air. He reached into his jacket to retrieve the shaving mirror his parents gave him before enlisting, a baby-faced eighteen, back when he identified as British. He sought answers in the haggard face that was impossibly his own. He noted the baggy, bloodshot eyes which shone gunmetal blue on the covers of old magazines; the wiry tangle of stubble that nested on his once chiselled jaw; grey-white hair which clung like snow-capped hay to his scalp; heavyset wrinkles ironed into rough skin; his crooked, bulbous nose, twice broken in the boxing ring as penance for his many sins. He dropped the mirror – he would no longer need it.

“Where’s Edward? Didn’t anybody go with him?”

One day before disaster, Walt’s regiment spent their downtime constructing a giant human pyramid, six rows high and twenty-one men strong. Reginald, the squadron’s charismatic joker, volunteered to be the capstone. Reggie’s boots rested on Walt and Edward’s shoulders as they hoisted him up, the two men forming a whole. When the sergeant heard about it, he reprimanded them for risking injury during conflict. “And they might’ve seen you from the air,” he said, cheeks turning red as the peaches sold in the local bazaar. Tirade over, the sergeant spat peanut shells at the dry ground, kicked his heel, and marched with purpose toward the port.

The soldiers built another pyramid.

Whenever Walt summoned the anecdote, he missed his best friend anew, like a physical thing he could express only in musical notes.

🎶

WALT PICKED UP the guitar, placed a capo on the third fret, and played a melancholic variation on the blues riff.

After Aden, which hardened him like the steel of his toecaps, he travelled to the USA for solace and adventure. Even as a child, he pined to be an American. His mother, a human dynamo in an era ruled by men, wondered if he had died there in a past life. He grew up on a steady diet of Westerns and Hollywood movies, rather than the slapstick Laurel and Hardy skits enjoyed among his school-friends. His mother bought him Count Basie, Hank Williams, and Frank Sinatra records – to this day, Walt associated her with music and dance.

Walt bounced around the Eastern Seaboard for a time, temping in welding and mechanical jobs until he settled in Philadelphia. He met Eleanor in a military bar in the spring of 1970. He was enchanted by the purple swish of her dress, the butterscotch husk of her voice when she agreed to dance, and the crimson lipstick she imprinted on his cheek at closing time.

Within a year they wed, in a low-key affair at their local Presbyterian Church. They mortgaged a corner plot in a post-war Levittown, designed for people like them, and joined a community of twenty-somethings that embodied the Great American Dream. He was a native in all but birth.

For the Johnsons, 1971 was a year of joy and verve. The organic scent of freshly mown lawn drifted perpetually down the cul-de-sac. That summer passed in a haze of drive-in movies, barbecues, and baseball tournaments. Children hosted lemonade stalls and played hopscotch on the curbside, whilst neighbourhood teens rode around on rollerblades and skateboards from dawn till dusk. Parents gathered to sip Coors and sloe gin fizz, gossiping about their children, President Nixon, and the Space Race. Walt and Eleanor were a progressive couple, and in the aftermath of Woodstock, they dressed as hippies whilst most in their picture-postcard town clung vice-like to the sixties. And Walt wrote the songs that comprised his first six albums. Most were about Eleanor or Edward; some were about them both.

Those halcyon days spent with Eleanor allowed him to forget the trauma of losing his bunk mate in Aden – the muse that sparked his music career – even for a few hours at a time.

🎶

SO OFTEN THINGS have to do with love – fraternal love, martial love, and the love for one’s children.

Walt thought back to one idyllic fall, the boys aged six and eight, long before their lives were torn apart. Tears blurred his vision like a bokeh as he recalled Jimi and Jared’s innocent laughter, as they flew kites on the meadow after church, their feet crunching in the new-fallen leaves. They tossed footballs and slopped ice creams on their faces and clothes. The sun beat down among clouds which hung like cotton-wool in the vast azure. Eleanor’s smile had been radiant, angelic: Walt envisioned it always being that way. Then came her diagnosis of aggressive glioblastoma. The end came quickly, shockingly so. There is no way to prepare for the end of a life shared with a soulmate. The translucent snaking tubes and droning machines horrified him; Eleanor’s emaciated limbs flopping by her sides like the afterthoughts of an abstract painter; doctors explaining the dire prognosis over and over, both denying it would end that way. The dying words of the skeleton purporting to be his wife would haunt him always: “I’ll love you forever, but please live your life to the full. Please go on without me.”

He swiped tears from the crevasses of his cheeks, then began strumming random discords. Doubtless, they had been lucky to spend five happy decades together. His children were free spirits that had flown the nest in their youth (Jimi was a successful freelance writer in Sydney, and Jared worked as something financial in Singapore; both had extensive families and friends of their own, with limited time for their reclusive, eccentric father who simply could not let go of the past). Unable to enjoy his twilight years with his beautiful wife, Walt was truly alone in the world. Some might say that a guitar, the neck of a bottle and a packet of cigarillos were all the comfort an old man needed. Perhaps, in normal circumstances, they would be right. But with a scarred psyche like Walt’s, this was not nearly enough. In the Appalachian Mountains, alone in his cabin by the waterfall, sometimes he felt like the last soul on earth.

“Walter, come right away. They’ve found Edward…”

Edward, eager to pursue the fairer sex, had been rendezvousing in secret with a local Arab girl named Aeesha. This broke strict unwritten rules, but it was also downright foolish. Aeesha’s father had discovered their relationship and lured Edward to their house. Instead of hospitality, they brutally tortured him, before publicly hanging him from the groin. Caring, gentle Edward endured an agonising, undignified death. Aeesha fled as far as the Arabian Sea. There, so the myth went, she weighed down her pockets with stones and drowned, falling to the seafloor where she remained, like a cast out mermaid.

Walt blamed himself. In hindsight, he realised Edward needed a friend to confide in. In those days, Walt was emotionally immature, more interested in cultivating his debonair image than helping another man with feelings. He spent his evenings playing poker, canasta, and pinochle by candlelight, and teaching himself to play guitar on a battered acoustic with only five strings, as Edward’s demise played out in private. His friend was a young eighteen, softly spoken, classically English, with fair hair and freckles. Edward loved life and everyone within it. He never should have been a soldier – would not have made the cut in another time – but he was destined to fall in love with a Persian goddess. Edward would have made an exceptional husband and father, better than Walt had ever managed.

The day after Edward’s death, Walt searched his friend’s bunk for mementos to either keep for himself, or return to his family. Tucked beneath the mattress like the most precious of artefacts, Walt found a scroll. Years later, a historian confirmed it as a genuine part of the Dead Sea Scrolls. Where and how Edward came across it remained a mystery to Walt. But beneath it was a second scroll, a love letter on parchment and ink, handwritten by Aeesha to Edward. Walt had never shown the words to anyone, but he memorised each line that very night, like the most precious of poetry. Some of the lines made it into his songs, whilst others silently nested in his heart.

Last year, knowing his years were running out, Walt returned to Edward’s grave, where he burned the scroll with a lighter and scattered the ashes beneath his friend’s headstone. He poured half a bottle of Drambuie onto the grass for good measure.

🎶

WHEN WALT WOKE each morning, he rolled onto the empty half of the bed, where he lay until his heart stopped pounding. Sometimes, he still expected to feel the snake of Eleanor’s spine, or the warmth of her breath on his face, like a kiss from the wind. For weeks after her passing, Eleanor’s floral scent had lingered, and he had refused to change the bedsheets. Like an infant with a comforter, he clung to any small reminder of her. Sometimes in the night he imagined her snoring softly, her back settled against his chest. On occasions when Walt knew he would not drift back to sleep, he poured a stiff drink and stared at some late-night TV re-run, until his vision blurred and he dozed until sunrise. Once, desperate to escape her memory, he even slept outside; but even with a sleeping bag, that wintry night exposed to the elements was one too many. Then he tried not sleeping at all, but after four days he collapsed, exhausted, and awoke in the same position twenty hours later with no feeling in his arms.

After Eleanor’s funeral, Walt stockpiled microwave meals, whiskey, and anti-depressants, preparing for something stupid without conscious thought. All he had was time to reflect, to think of how it might all have been so different. It should have been the two of them in their suburban McMansion – better still, the four of them plus grandchildren – with a dog running around their old backyard, picking apples in the fall and carving pumpkins at Halloween. He had long since settled in the Appalachians, and would never leave, but it was Eleanor’s original idea to move there. He enjoyed the anonymity afforded by a secluded way of living. In the mid-1980s, they took long hikes through the mountain trails and tried to identify the trees and wildlife. Back then, the vista had spread in all its splendour like an Albert Bierstadt painting. A scattering of cabins still stood, like relics from a lost era, but they had grown decrepit and gloomy, and now he lived here alone. Even the maple trees remained in formation, though out of bloom their branches took on an otherworldly effect, dead fingers against the sky.

Although Walt resigned himself to his fate as a widower and slave to a long-ago war, dark thoughts were resurfacing more frequently of late. Like strings of lead weights being hooked to his soul, his conscience grew heavier with each passing day. He felt the way Aeesha must have done, when she decided her only option was to fall into the depths of the sea.

It was time. Walt wrapped his palm around the cold metallic cylinder. He inched his grip down the shaft, sensing the brutal power of the chamber. That morning, he had loaded the Glock .38 with a single bullet. He had seldom held a gun since Aden, and its weight surprised him.

He disabled the trigger safety, which released with amazing ease and a satisfying click.

As he settled the gun down on the log, a vision struck him, mesmerising in its clarity. It was a winter’s evening, during the first Christmas with Eleanor in their starter home, when she was glowingly pregnant with Jimi. Flames flickered hypnotically in the hearth. They each held a glass of warm eggnog with cinnamon sticks, the first outing of their festive tradition. They had adorned the mantel with silver tinsel and a snow globe depicting a miniature New York City. Outside, in the dusk, snowdrops pirouetted like confetti to the blanketed ground.

“Do you believe in an afterlife?”

Eleanor’s question, for someone so grounded, came from left-field. “Huh?”

She repeated herself.

“I’ve never thought about it before, lovebug.” By then, Walt spoke with a Yankee brogue. He removed his reading glasses and balanced them on his shirt like a tie.

“I do. In fact, I think ghosts exist.”

“You’ve never mentioned that before.”

“Haven’t I ever told you about my father?”

“Well, yes,” Walt said. “They shot him down in the First World War.”

“Yeah, the Germans bombed his plane.” She uncrossed her legs and leaned forward, conspiratorially. “But I once saw something that I haven’t seen since. Maybe it’s because seeing is believing, and I find it difficult to.”

“What did you see?”

“I saw my father’s ghost, sitting on the edge of the bathtub.” Their eyes locked. The fire sizzled and flared. “He was reading a newspaper, cross-legged, just like he always used to in his armchair. I got up in the middle of the night to use the bathroom, and there he was. I saw him, clear as day. Clear as I see you before me.”

Walt reached for his eggnog, sipped tentatively, and placed it back on the coffee table. “So, d’you think there’s an afterlife?”

“I know there is. Even if it’s only in the mind, or some dimension we humans can’t grasp; there has to be. Life goes on somehow. I know it.”

He considered Eleanor’s assertion of an afterlife. If he shot his brains out, or let gravity pull him down the waterfall, would he see her again? Would death reunite him with the twinkling of her delicate emerald irises? Would he get to listen to her husky voice telling him about her day? Lock fingers like they used to on those long forest walks? Feel the tickle of her long hair against his face? See her heart-melting smile?

Maybe another glass of Jack as liquid confidence.

Walt raised the gun to his temple, but his brain would not action the ultimate command. He looked down at his tremulous hands. How much longer could he play guitar before the shake became too much? Before he could no longer hold a gun with steady aim? Would he rather be alive with crippling depression and Parkinson’s, or paralysed from a badly aimed bullet?

Or dead, from one precise shot, or a single fall.

Walt shivered like static as he heard Eleanor’s voice. It was almost as if she were right there beside him: she called out to Walt like a soma, breathing in his ear. A whisper on the wind, like the kiss of breath on the side of his neck in the morning.

And there it was again, Eleanor calling to him.

His lovebug, calling to her Walt.

Calling like the warblers in the maple trees.

Calling.

And then he was falling into forever.