The Classic Crusade of Corbin Cobbs



  The Classic Crusade of Corbin Cobbs

  By Michael Ciardi

  Fiction

  Copyright 2012 Michael Ciardi

  [email protected]

  In E-Book Form

  Cover Design by Laura Shinn

  Chapter 1

  4:43 A.M.

  In the minutes just before dawn, one of nature’s strangest sounds echoed in the woodlands surrounding my home. During spring’s infancy, only a few weeks after the final frost thawed from Lake Endelman, the common loons returned to Willows Edge. Although these waterfowls were absent from this region during the winter months, a milder season promised a reemergence of their company among the wood’s indigenous dwellers. Usually, all the wildlife congregating within the thicket inspired me, but no other species compared to my allurement with the loons. Over the years I’ve come to realize that few circumstances in nature and life stayed unaltered, but at least the migratory habits of these creatures resisted change.

  Each one of these rusty-eyed birds delivered a haunting melody to this habitat. Frankly, I wondered why these dagger-beaked divers were tagged with a common label. From my perspective, they defied the ordinary. Their yodeling cries mesmerized me during the summertime. In fairness, those unfamiliar with the loons’ loquaciousness might’ve considered their repertoire tedious, even eerie. Yet I always regarded their harmonies as a vital factor to my inner peace. With few exceptions, while immersed in a chorus of the loons’ primordial songs, I embraced a calmness that always dissolved far sooner than I preferred.

  But lodged within the tangled pathways of my brain, an unsettling sound upset this morning’s quietude. While lying supine in bed beside my wife, I became distracted by the soft cadence of her breathing. She slept placidly. Not a hint of anguish distorted her expression. On another day or time I might’ve traced my fingertips through her flaxen tresses, which fanned out upon her pillow like splintered beams of sunlight. But all motivation for such affection withered beneath a dispassionate sigh of boredom. It humbled me to confess as much, but my spouse had become apathetic to our intimacy. At this point, I had no conscious explanation for my wife’s rejection toward my advances. Even during sleep, her icy visage seemed to brace me for a conversation that both of us neglected to initiate.

  Not even a raft of loons could’ve incubated my thoughts from our disharmony. I no longer denied an irrefutable consequence of shared complacency. My darling wife, as I once defined her, was a virtual stranger to me now. Perhaps she recoiled into a region within her mind that I never fully examined. Lamentably, there seemed to be no way to curtail the foreseeable course of our downfall. Even still, I wanted to startle her from her dreams on this occasion. Maybe, while shielded beneath the cloak of my bed sheets, I harnessed the fortitude to withstand her cutting words. Yet whatever fleeting courage I mustered in this moment didn’t endure for more than a few seconds.

  I then remembered why I awoke before my alarm clock sounded. A shallow layer of sweat drizzled down the center of my forehead and chest. It traced along the sides of my neck like a handful of chilled dewdrops, instigating a deeper apprehension within me. An acute migraine usually surfaced simultaneously, compressing my brain as if it was coiled in a boa constrictor’s embrace. In recent weeks, these signs of disease weren’t uncommon for me to encounter. In fact, I had experienced cautionary indicators of sickness over the past several months. But the frequency of such symptoms now occurred at regular intervals—almost every night.

  This still unnamed condition rendered me unconscious at random times throughout the day. My routine was compromised because these spells no longer occurred just when I slept. As any ailing victim anticipated strife, I endured it. But bravery had nothing to do with the outcome. This much I knew: a reprieve from this torment seemed as unlikely as reconciling my differences with my wife. Another devastating thought sickened me, too. What if she already foresaw my demise and subsequently detached her emotions from me? I secretly hoped that her callousness wasn’t derived from such a grim contemplation.

  As of this hour and day, my doctor failed to diagnose a disorder that explained the persistent night chills, headaches, or any of my episodes of lost consciousness. I had undergone a battery of invasive tests recently, including a CT scan on my brain that presumably revealed nothing to underscore the symptoms I described. Even Dr. Pearson, my once-trusted physician, initially attributed my complaints as manifestations of anxiety or guilt, both of which he fruitlessly attempted to alleviate by medicating me into a state of lethargy. Despite his expertise and goodwill in regard to my welfare, I began to suspect that a second opinion was long overdue.

  Perhaps the cruelest criticism came from someone who I once considered my fondest supporter. My beloved Rachel accused me fabricating this entire ordeal in order to preserve her affection. Although she hadn’t personally witnessed any of my episodes, it seemed unnaturally naïve of her to dismiss my complaints so hastily. After all, the physical markers of these attacks were certainly visible. How couldn’t she see and feel the layers of perspiration upon my skin? If I sought to display evidence of my rapidly deteriorating health to my wife, now would’ve certainly been the moment to do so.

  But as it was on many occasions prior to this one, I restrained my temptation to disturb her while she slept. I still clung to an ephemeral hope that Dr. Pearson had uncovered something substantial during my last examination. I had an appointment to discuss those particular test results later on this afternoon. At this stage, I would’ve eagerly accepted harsh news rather than being suspended in limbo. Perhaps the most terrifying aspect of this malady was the tension I experienced by potentially playing host to an unknown disease. It frightened me to consider that my own body had designed a syndrome to destroy me. Still, no matter what the cause, I already knew that paranoia didn’t fully account for the warning signs I encountered. My insecurity, as Rachel called it, hadn’t yet devoured my common sense completely.

  Was it too selfish of me to expect even a hint of compassion from a woman who once pledged her limitless love to me? I certainly understood that marriage had an ironic way of dissolving much of the simplicity that inspired romance, but I never fathomed that a couple’s emotional link also withered under such an arrangement. I simply couldn’t accept this rejection as passively as Rachel. I presumed that some fragment of ecstasy lied dormant between the tiers of doubt separating us. I wondered what level of commitment was necessary on both our behalves to at least salvage something reputable from more than seventeen years of marriage.

  We still slept in the same bed, but this charade just typified her disinterest in me. More often than not, our sheets remained unruffled from any semblance of lovemaking. We barely even kissed in the most rudimentary fashion. On this morning in particular, it seemed as if an invisible barrier transformed in the middle of our mattress. Unlike the early days of our marriage, when it appeared as though two bodies molded as one, we now hardly acknowledged one another in bed. Years of sparring had wedged us to opposite corners of the canvas like battered boxers laboring for the final bell. Lovemaking, whenever it infrequently occurred, felt as perfunctory as our smiles. Yet despite the knowledge of our breakdown, I wasn’t yet content to let her slip away. In the wreckage of our splintered dreams, I still hoped that Rachel remembered me when I put less of a burden on her heart.

  In the stillness of my surroundings, I observed Rachel’s face with a sense of admiration and uncertainty. A sliver of bronze light seeped between the slats of a window’s blind, partially illuminating her loveliness. Even under my scrutiny, her unblemished skin seemed remarkably preserved. Rachel’s eyelids didn’t flutter, indicating that her dreams were impervious to t
he reality existing just beyond a flicker of her eyelash. How could she appear so peaceful with our marriage in such apparent turmoil? Perhaps if I nudged my foot just gradually beyond my portion of the mattress, I’d be able to brush my toes against the side of her calve. At one time, she’d respond favorably to this gesture, as lovers often do. But now, as I feared, she instinctively pivoted her leg out of my reach, almost in a defensive countermove. I continued to stare at her, however, until the point where she consciously felt my eyes studying her from across the bed.

  “Are you awake?” I whispered. She mumbled something incoherent under her breath before turning her face into the pillow beneath her head. After a few seconds, she groggily leered at me through half-open eyes.

  “What time is it?” she asked.

  “About quarter to five,” I said.

  “God…it’s too early, Corb. Go back to sleep.”

  “I can’t sleep,” I returned wearily. I had no misconceptions regarding Rachel’s intolerance to my frequent patterns of insomnia. She, of course, had heard my nocturnal grievances before, which only made it less likely that I maintained any credibility in her mind.

  “Look,” she sighed, “I got a really long day ahead of me.”

  “It’s Thursday. You don’t even normally work on Thursdays.”

  “C’mon, Corb. Let’s argue about this later. I’m exhausted.”

  “You’re right,” I conceded. “Sorry for waking you. It’s just that my head is pounding again.”

  The weight of my words seemingly burst the air from her lungs. She huffed heavily before craning her head off the pillow to glare at me. I immediately recognized the signs of impatience brewing beneath her fair brow.

  “You’re going to see Dr. Pearson again later, aren’t you?” she inquired knowingly. “Maybe you should ask him for a stronger prescription.”

  “Nothing works,” I said sulkily. “Besides, I think he’s got me taking a placebo or something.”

  “You really are paranoid sometimes, you know that, Corb?”

  “Just forget about it, Rach. I guess I felt like I needed to talk to somebody besides my doctor. But don’t worry yourself over it. The feeling will go away. It always does.”

  “We’ll talk later. I promise. Okay?” She didn’t wait for my response before letting her head plunge upon her pillow like a deflated balloon. By now, I had already retreated to a neutral corner of the mattress. She must have sensed my frustration as plainly as I felt her frigidness.

  “Go back to sleep,” I then told her. “I won’t bother you again.”

  Rachel’s exasperation became increasingly evident as she squeezed the edges of her pillowcase around her ears. “Don’t make me feel guilty about any of this, Corb. You know how irritable I can get when I miss out on my sleep.”

  If anyone could’ve accurately attested to my wife’s petulance when deprived of sleep, then I was a prime source for the report. Lately, however, it seemed as though no amount of rest mollified her mood. In reality, the expectation of Rachel nurturing me like an ill child seemed farfetched at best. I knew when I married her that she wasn’t the type of woman who I’d ever classify as motherly. In fact, during our courtship, and well before our exchange of vows, she ingeminated her desire to never bear any children. At the time, the support and company of a vivacious, sensual lady far surpassed any paternal urges I briefly entertained. Besides, fathering no children as I neared my forty-third birthday bothered me less than I would’ve surmised fifteen years ago. But I still sometimes harbored moments where I wished I could’ve convinced her to reconsider her pledge to remain childless. Yet, at the same time, I couldn’t fault Rachel for upholding her conviction, no matter how selfish or shortsighted in nature it seemed.

  Honestly, since I was a teacher of children—albeit at the high school level—it struck me as mildly ironic that Rachel committed herself to a man who interacted with young people everyday. Many years ago my mother admonished me that couples were less likely to stay together if they didn’t parent any children, but I rejected this notion because our love seemed so candid and unrehearsed. Perhaps I once hitched my naïve hopes to some antiquated premise that we had a moral responsibility to uphold the inviolability of matrimony. I’ve since learned that fools have conjured better bits of wisdom. With no offspring to distract us from one another, it became inevitable that we’d eventually unearth faults in the foundation we had built together. In recent months, Rachel had drifted to an island far apart from me. I now bobbled like flotsam within an unforgiving tide, while being subjected to the unpitying undertows of rejection and shame.

  Maybe if I closed my eyes at this precise moment I’d be able to filch another twenty minutes of shuteye before my alarm clock sounded. At this point, any amount of sleep became an ultimate form of hibernation, for it proved to be my sole amnesty from the spells that overwhelmed me during consciousness. Quite recently, even in the midst of my remissions from those episodes, I began to think about my deceased parents more frequently than I preferred. I harbored no hidden resentment for either of them, therefore my struggle to support such memories seemed unwarranted. Yet in spite of their generosity, something dwelled within them both that instigated an unnatural tension to stir at my heart’s core.

  It was fair to assume that my parents, Chester and Norma Cobbs, never engaged in an act of cruelty or selfishness in their entire lives. Retrospectively, as their only child, I benefited from the privileges and discipline they instilled. Other than saddling me with the name of Corbin, which I never particularly favored, they provided the necessities for a stable, enlightening childhood. But even with these carvings of benevolence whittled into my mind, I couldn’t help shuddering at the possibility of adopting the customs and habits that defined most of their living years.

  I had no infallible logic to justify this confession. Obviously, a fear of mimicking my parents’ behavior, which I thoroughly respected, made no sense. But I began to speculate that my apprehension was linked to an ever-present plague of apathy. In my opinion, this silent slaughterer murdered my father and mother’s dreams long before they stopped breathing. I believed they both died with unspoken regrets, and they deserved far more recognition than what either of them cared to realize.

  Even today, nearly ten years after my father’s death, it still pained me to envision his vapid gaze in the hours before he succumbed to his illness. At that stage of his diagnosis of melanoma, more commonly referred to as the deadliest form of skin cancer, he revealed no signs of extreme discomfort or pain. But his vacant countenance caused my blood to flow in icy tributaries. He rarely complained about his fate, yet I sensed a remorsefulness churning within him that never quite faded from my recollections.

  As any responsible father from his generation demonstrated, Chester Cobbs always aspired to support his family. While this was a commendable gesture, I felt as though his obsession with earning a wage hampered his relationship with both my mother and me. Furthermore, his commitment to nurturing his job left little space for him to examine any personal achievements beyond work. Surely, society had defined the expectations of my father’s success for him. But when measuring his worth, he never questioned the validity of this one-side ruler. One time my father informed me that he enjoyed writing fiction as a boy. He mentioned this to me only once, however, and perhaps while I was still too immature to question his reasons for abandoning the craft. I gathered that earning and sustaining an income supplanted any short-lived notions he harbored about exercising his creativity.

  From my own observations, I sometimes discerned my father’s adherence to age-old superstitions. For example, while he was driving me to school when I was about twelve-years-old, he instinctively locked the brakes on his pickup truck to prevent from intersecting the pavement after a black cat scampered into the road. It was a minor event that I didn’t lend much speculation to at the time, but it grew in prominence as I noticed his other peculiarities. He didn’t take kindly to dark rooms or any yarns that promo
ted the belief of supernatural entities. In a sense, my father elected to live without complications, and assessed all things on the surface in the unobstructed light of day.

  Rather than yield to the imaginative sparks that regularly ignited his only son’s thoughts, Chester Cobbs did just as everyone expected. He settled into the routine of a conventional occupation, laboring fourteen hours every day at a factory that adhered labels to canned goods. There was nothing glamorous or remotely gratifying about operating a glue machine for the better part of four decades, but steady work wasn’t taken for granted in my father’s time. He did his job without subjecting his family to chronic complaints, and pocketed the crumbs offered in the form of a paltry salary. For thirty-seven years he arrived home from work with neither a smile nor a frown, but a glimpse of worthlessness never strayed too far from his eyes. As a boy, I never thought to question my father’s happiness. Perhaps he managed to mask his melancholy behind the fact that his wife and child never went to bed cold or hungry. For most men of his age and ilk, that was all that ultimately mattered.

  It wasn’t until many years after his retirement and subsequent discovery of a diseased mole on his bicep that I began to wonder if he had lived the life he truly desired. During his final months of coherency, I visited my parents’ home frequently between his doses of chemotherapy. As usual, my father never brought much to any conversation in the form of words. Apparently, men from his era weren’t supposed to verbalize their feelings, and since he no longer worked or partook in any hobbies, it left him very little material to elaborate upon. But on his deathbed, my father revealed his final words to me. Though visibly atrophied, he still harnessed enough strength in his once-sinewy hand to grasp my shoulder and pull me closer to his bedside. Then, in a moment that shall haunt me like a specter throughout the remainder of my days, he uttered four simple words into my ear: ‘I want to live.’

  I repeated his syllables as if they were stuck on replay in the recesses of my brain. Chester Cobbs wanted to live. How unfortunate, I thought, that he had survived on this planet for nearly seventy-two years, but never experienced the realization of being truly alive. Perhaps there was never a right time to die, but I contended that my father had waited too long to savor his days. Now he would never have another chance to do so.

  Although my mother stood beside me during my father’s closing seconds of life, I refused to relay his last confession to her. After all, she wholly believed her husband had gone to his grave with the satisfaction and faith that his soul was destined to emerge in a better place. I saw no reason to taint her illusion. My mother often retreated to her Christian doctrines when confronted with uncertainty, which characterized the philosophy of better than half of the people I had ever known. Personally, I never shared her blind euphoria for religion, but I recognized its function among those who yearned for something more substantial than what reality promised.

  From my perspective, Norma Cobbs wasn’t a complicated woman on the surface. She neither worked for a wage outside our home, nor had any inclination to do so. As a boy, I couldn’t recall an instance where I ever longed for her company. In truth, she was the type of mother that every child wished for. But in many ways I saw her as quite commonplace. She spent most of her life tending to the domestic chores expected of housewives of that age. In later years, when she wasn’t catering to her husband’s whims, she occupied herself at church. I suspected she endured many hardships in her seventy-five years, evidenced by the grooves channeling into her forehead and the conspicuous way the corners of her eyes welled with tears when she assumed no one was watching. Still, adhering to the principles no doubt borrowed from her house of worship for nearly forty years, she remained resolute in her commitment to our family. My father may have toiled with the mechanisms of a glue machine for most of his life, but it was his dutiful and divine wife who produced the cohesive bond to keep our family intact.

  Norma Cobbs, of course, wasn’t inclined to address any of her sorrows to her son; mothers of her generation had learned to stew in silence when hardships arose within families. But despite her impermeable facade, I suspected that a significant part of her spirit withered after my father died. She still frequented her church and gardened a plot of organic vegetables on occasion, but a distinct hollowness lurked into a countenance plagued by unfulfilled promises. Whenever we conversed, I couldn’t displace a thought that her concentration fixated on events from the past. Most of the stories she relayed in the last thirty-six months of her life were rehashed misadventures of her years spent married to my father.

  Toward the end of her life, after she was confined to a hospital bed in a harshly lit medical facility, my mother reminisced on the values she once instilled in me. In truth, I owed my love for the written word to her, for she introduced me to the sheer escapism of reading. On the day she died, she remained lucid in the conveyance of her fulfillment with me.

  “Corbin,” she murmured, “I want you to know how proud I am of you. You’ve done something respectable with your life. Teaching children to read and appreciate literature is such a noble profession.”

  This was a mother’s platitude, and I, playing the role of a humble nobleman, would’ve gladly surrendered my kingdom for a scrap of deference among my disciples. But as any good son would’ve reacted, I nodded my head in compliance. Honestly, I don’t know if I would’ve ever shared her rather banal enthusiasm for my current status as an English teacher for high school seniors. Surely, those who committed themselves to the nourishment of young people’s minds deserved a morsel of praise, but I couldn’t deny my own shortcomings. My aspirations of becoming a recognized novelist had all but vanished, leaving me to perform my present duties in the classroom almost as a consolation to the hope I had cultivated since I was old enough to scratch pencil to paper.

  My mother’s last message helped me realize how important it was for her to believe that I was at peace in my choices before she died. “You will go to grand places, Corbin—places that your father and I only occasionally dared to imagine.”

  I nodded my chin submissively. A part of me secretly wished that she hadn’t squandered her assertion on my unfulfilled endeavors. But for some time afterwards, I tried to find credence in what she proclaimed. Yet a shadow of regret still flitted against the skin behind my eyelids. Pretending that I was fully content with my present station in life didn’t make the anguish disappear any faster.

  Exactly three years to the day of her husband’s death, Norma Cobbs’s heart stopped beating. Sadly, not unlike my father, I detected an almost identical expression of disenchantment simmering in her dilated pupils. Not even the Bible, which she clutched so ardently against her breast, provided a sufficient barrier from her visible strife. Briefly, I wondered if my mother ever managed to attain the spiritual bliss she prayed so unselfishly for others to embrace.

  When I opened my eyes and surveyed the reality of my surroundings, I was reminded that my journey through life had thus far rarely transported me beyond my home in Willows Edge. In fact, those “places” where I was supposedly destined to go, whether figurative or literal in my mother’s line of reasoning, hadn’t yet been visited. Contrary to her optimistic forecast, I never ventured far from my childhood residence. Upon my mother’s passing, I inherited the brick veneer bi-level that my father worked his whole lifetime to claim as his own. By anyone’s standards, it was a modest-sized dwelling, but adequately equipped for a couple absent of children. It didn’t require an inordinate amount of begging on my part to convince Rachel that moving into my parents’ home for a short time made financial sense, especially after analyzing the monetary restrictions of a teacher’s salary and a sluggish real estate market.

  At the time, Rachel complied with my request, but only on a firm condition that we didn’t intend to reside in Willows Edge for more than five years. I tentatively agreed to her compromise, hoping that this was enough time for me to convince her of the practicality of our arrangement. Besides, I figured what had se
rved as a thoroughly sufficient home for my parents for almost half a century certainly should’ve worked just as conveniently for us. But different times brought different expectations, and Rachel happened to be a product of a pompous age where people judged each other’s worth by the size and style of their material possessions.

  After six years, we still remained in my parents’ outmoded house, but it’s not as if I ignored home improvements entirely. In order to appease my wife’s ever-changing taste in décor, I upgraded the kitchen and upstairs bathroom, and even added a sunroom to the back of the house five years ago. None of these offerings, however, prevented the inevitable resentment. After all, I had made a pledge to my wife, and she was intent on keeping me to my word.

  For me, the determination to remain in Willows Edge was never entirely about the house. I simply couldn’t find another location in proximity to the woods and water that I found more desirable. Rachel hardly shared in my passionate hold on nature, at least not as fervently as I. She was perfectly content to never again hike the narrow trails enveloping Lake Endelman. Two autumns ago, she stopped accompanying me on our daily walks around the woodland paths. Apart from my dog, I now perambulated this territory alone, listening to the loons with a fleeting optimism that she would’ve one day rejoined me by a specific willow tree rooted alongside the lake’s periphery.

  I always believed that those who partook in the unadorned pleasures of the earth lived less stressfully. Yet for others, such as Rachel, any fragrance of relaxation also hinted to one’s insignificance. According to my wife, it didn’t matter how many loons assembled in the tranquil waters just beyond our bedroom window. In her mind, a grander and glossier life existed somewhere closer to the throngs of people who rarely paused to indulge in life’s purest remedies.

  Chapter 2

  5:15 A.M.