The cathedral spire gracing the horizon was her lucky talisman, her compass needle pointing solidly at hope despite the odds. One of the bright things that sustained her. It stood for the divine order (and human) Hazel taught in classes and espoused in private life; stood opposed to Evan, her unruly son who’d fought her from the start, and now, it seemed, had fallen out with her beyond reconciliation. Her research on humankind’s attempts over the centuries to live in harmony with the cosmos hadn’t helped with her son—especially since that clash the month after his father died. And of course his PhD and rocketing career in military history had seemed chosen to oppose her and all she believed. They’d gone to Teotihuacan when he was small, and she’d been fascinated by the stone record of traditions, religion, and celestial events, while he had fixed on the forbidding warriors with their shell goggles, raptor talons. Later, though they both studied Daedalus, Hazel admired the builder of the labyrinth as a ritual dancing-ground; Evan the prison-builder, the creator of armor, of sails and masts for Minos’s navy, of those audacious wings that plunged his son into the sea to drown.

The little group Hazel was touring with had explored the cathedral that morning. Salisbury: the tallest spire in Britain, built around 1320 and still soaring above the famous plain that also held Stonehenge. The fact of its survival delighted Hazel; she was heartened to know it had endured all that time.

Now they were visiting the site of the original cathedral and William the Conqueror’s castle that was only scant ruins on a grassy rise. The path led on up to the hilltop where the ruins lay. She couldn’t help believing even now, walking at the end of the autumn afternoon around the scattered earthworks and the mute remains, that goodness does outlive the ravages of time and rash actions; that things would work out after all with Evan and her granddaughters.

She wondered if the unhappy Eleanor of Aquitaine—also with rebellious sons—had managed to go on believing she’d be freed one day from her prison in this castle. Whether the airmen whose planes had lifted off from the airfield below (a Roman road delimiting it on the north) believed they would return alive from their missions. The airfield had brought Evan to Salisbury last fall to write another book, taking his young daughters away from school, friends, home, and farther still from Hazel.

She crossed the outer bailey, the ramparts; looked out again over the English countryside, which somewhere held the girls, to the cathedral spire off in the gathering twilight. She’d gotten no answering call or text.

________

Hazel and Brother Raymond sat over coffee and currant scones in the cloister the following morning. He mentioned their mutual friend, the old Tewa dancer she’d interviewed some years ago, who’d lived in the pueblo all his life and took as given truth the myths that made up its cosmology. That rain came in response to the Corn Dance entreating the kachinas. That the dances, the pots, the space of the pueblo’s kivas and plazas were containers for order and continuity, preserving ties to the old world and the ancestors.

When the brawny Episcopalian brother with his scholar’s hands glanced over at the phone screen Hazel checked and checked, she was led to tell him about Evan’s work, his being always somewhere else—“typically somewhere dangerous.” She told him of Lucy, always happiest out in the garden; Libby enthralled by owls, bears, in picture books. “The granddaughters I never get to see.”

It had seemed so serendipitous when she’d received a flyer for the tour of English cathedrals Brother Raymond was leading—Winchester, Salisbury, Wells. The perfect chance to visit Salisbury, where Evan was working on his latest book, on the Great War, the girls now six and eight and only pixel pixies on her screen. She’d come not just for them, and not indeed with any real expectation; but how she’d love to see them and hug them again, besides seeing finally the great religious edifices in England’s southwest, traveling with others of like mind and interests, as she faced retirement at the end of the year, the loss of her familiar world, students and colleagues.

“Their mother?”

“Leana? She was…unstable. She went back to Nicaragua when they were little.” Then it was me, Hazel remembered, taking her place, giving them love. Lucy following her around in the Santa Fe garden, making hollyhock dolls; Libby wanting golden globs of honey in her oatmeal, from the plastic squeeze bear. “And then he took them off again.” She knew she sounded bitter.

“It’s said that when we’re injured deeply, we can’t recover until we forgive,” the man of God cautioned.

“Sometimes it isn’t possible,” she said, eyes down, crumbling her scone.

“Keep working at it. Pray to find forgiveness in your heart.”

She ran a finger around the smooth, hard rim of the coffee cup. Considered injuries beyond recovery. Not ready to tell him about those. She must have looked skeptical, mulish. (How well she knew that look in Evan.)

“Perseverance,” he assured her, “will allow it. Remember Romans 12:12, Saint Paul’s directive—‘Be joyful in hope, patient in affliction, faithful in prayer.’ Don’t give in to discouragement. Be steady in your faith, knowing that divine grace is always there. Well—here!” He laughed, and indicated with his graceful hands the long row of stone columns, the light-filled arches.

She felt again the rise of the great spire above them, its miraculous continuity. Continuity: the connective breath of families, of the universe, that the Tewas believed they kept alive.

Like hope, the only thing left in Pandora’s box—and in Hazel’s. Brother Raymond had given her that. This quiet cloister, the sweep of stairs at Wells, the chance to know the brave, bright Salisbury spire, triumphant over despair. In-spire-ing, breathing into, “filling the heart with grace.” Inspire came from spirare, to breathe; the breath of life continuing.

Continuing, if in shuddery gasps, after the human storm. Out of the box opened by Pandora, that fatally meddlesome woman formed from clay by the gods, had sprung war and pestilence, the stuff of Evan’s work. Hazel’s intention, as she’d told herself over and over, was only to set free a wistful prayer, fragile as one of the Holly Blue butterflies found in old churchyards. Palest blue wings with a small spattering of ink spots, embryonic words. What she had loosed instead had been catastrophic.

Brother Raymond interrupted her thoughts, saying, “Of course, if quiet perseverance doesn’t do the trick, you might try something more drastic.”

“Like what?”

“Faith in action. Jump feet-first—heart-first—into forgiveness, like a forbiddingly cold swimming pool. Plunge in, without the usual hemming and hawing and testing one toe after another. Spontaneous tears and bear hugs always shake things up.”

________

Action it was. Hazel lay in wait on Sunday morning outside the thatched cottage with river frontage Evan had rented. The address in the Salisbury outskirts scrawled almost illegibly on the envelope in which he’d sent a check before Christmas to finally pay back money loaned him for graduate school, Nicaragua, his and Leana’s house in Los Alamos. She paced and took deep breaths (telling herself alternately “this is a bad mistake”—against all of her principles of privacy, how things shouldn’t be done—and “we do have to make our peace”), until Evan came out at last. Lanky and easy-going, before he saw her. Then scowling. Dogs inside barking hysterically, a woman’s voice quieting them. The door slammed against any possibility of Hazel’s glimpsing anyone inside.

“How can you just show up?” Evan led her off, away. They walked at far too quick a pace for her, but she couldn’t complain. She found herself babbling, trying to find a safe topic, a scrap of common ground. She told him in too many words about the tour, how she’d been charmed by Wells, but even more—quite utterly—by Salisbury. Then into his continuing silence, how it had come to seem a beacon of hope for her.

“You know the only reason the cathedral spire lasted through the war, of course?” he asked with careful nonchalance, watching his mother’s face. “Because the German bombers used it as a landmark to navigate by. They needed it intact so they could go on finding their targets.”

She felt the breath knocked out of her. He’d always known exactly how to hurt her most; known all the ways people have learned to kill. She saw the way ahead as precisely mapped out as the Luftwaffe must have, crossing the lethal dark. He would never forgive her. The injury to all of them had been too deep. Her hope of his letting it go had been as naive as the bright story she’d clung to about the perseverance of the graceful cathedral. About hope triumphant.

Hazel grieved for Lucy and Libby, whom Evan would keep her from seeing again. Never forgiving her for having taken them that fall when they were six and four, snatched them as he put it, abducted the term in the police report—but really only needing to make sure they would be safe, not in those war-torn places his work and nature demanded. Unmoored already by her husband’s death, by the death just a week or two later of a close friend, loss upon loss, she’d lost herself as well, lost her connection to right thinking, right being, when Evan announced coolly that he’d be moving to Kabul with his daughters and the woman activist he’d taken up with. They’d leave as soon as he’d found a place to live there “close to the action.”

Maybe he’d been needling her, or she’d misunderstood, but Hazel, drowning in loss, feeling herself going under for the third time, panicked—panicked and fled. Bombarded by accounts from all the news sources, she lost all sense of direction. She saw only “a series of bombings . . . a barrage of deadly suicide attacks . . . sporadic gunfire . . . the site of an explosion . . . a change in tactics by the insurgents. The first half of the year saw an increase of 78% in suicide and complex attacks, such as the ones that shook Kabul on Friday.” And always, dead ahead, “children are increasingly among the killed or injured.” She bundled the girls into the car with the old Labrador, Charley, and a cooler of popsicles, and drove them seven hours to the cabin in Oak Creek Canyon. She knew Evan had no idea where the cabin was; she and Gerald had bought it when their son was in Nicaragua researching his book about the Sandinistas, under the volcano of León, where he’d met Leana. The details of his parents’ boring life hadn’t concerned him much.

In that moment of dazzled pain, Hazel had been so sure she knew best what they needed, precious Lucy and Libby; how terrible it was of him to choose to put them in danger. She’d give them the future they were meant to have instead, in red canyons, old grandfather pines.

She’d try once more, she thought now in the Salisbury countryside, stopping and compelling her son to stop and face her too, to explain where she’d turned wrong in the dark that day. Though he flinched away from her, she touched his shoulder quietly as she’d done when he was little, uncertain of his bearings, shy in crowds, to let him know that she was there. She laid her noticeably shaking hand on his tense, wiry arm, hardened by archery, tennis, but with the same freckly skin as hers, the same reddish dusting of hair. With all the anguish she’d kept bottled up she told him as they walked again, more slowly now—almost a sense of taking first steps, baby steps—on into the unsettled autumn morning with a remote intimation of cathedral bells, how much she regretted everything, and how she missed his vital energy. How similar they were, really; contrary but achingly interrelated, like yin and yang. He, Evan, always determined bravely on his wars, and she, Hazel—not ever brave, really—on harmony, on life.

The way the medieval or Pueblo cosmologies laid out, she went on, feeling her way forward. The heavenly bodies in their orderly spheres; future crops preserved in tiny-mouthed seed pots. The great blameless cathedral spires reaching up and up into the sky.

Note: This piece was first published in The Avalon Literary Review, Fall 2019.