Three Moons

Marguerite Lawrence

Wolf Moon, February and a Phone Call

“Hello….Yes, this is he. Who is this?”

He sits up. .…“Ely Police? My daughter lives there.” .…“What kind of incident?” .…“Wait. Shot?”

He switches the phone to his better ear.

“What happened?” ….“Random? What? Wait…her son…”

The old man holds his head, “Oh God.” He jerks at the next bit of information. “Of course, she saved him,” he says. “She’s his mother.” He takes a ragged breath. “Where’s the boy now?” .…“You called his father? He doesn’t even know him. Hasn’t seen him in years.”

The man shakes his head. .…“I wish I could come get him, but I can’t.”

He looks around the room at the tattered furniture, out the dust-caked windows to the winter hills, and sobs, “I’m too damn old and I don’t drive anymore.”

Buck Moon, July and a Knock on the Door

He wakes to the sound of the rusty screen and a bang bang bang on the front door. The old man rouses himself from the Barcalounger. “Who in tarnation?” He lumbers to the door, opens it. A boy/man, soiled t-shirt, greasy hair, duffel bag at his feet, stands there.

“Grandson!” The old man hugs the 14-year-old and looks past his shoulder to the pickup blowing emissions on the street. He frowns and says, “Wait here.”

He hobbles to the truck and leans into the opened passenger window.

“What the hell?”

The bearded man behind the wheel looks at his former father-in-law.

“Nice to see you too, old man.”

“You’re just dropping him off?”

“I missed a month of the salmon run and I gotta get up there.”

“When are you coming back?”

“I don’t know.” He shrugs and says, “But by the looks of you, Gramps, and this place, I’d say you got room for one more sad sack.”

The old man shakes his head. “The boy just lost his mother, and now you’re abandoning him?”

The man pulls his ragged Seahawks cap over his stringy hair and sighs. “I did my part these last five months, but the kid won’t even talk to me. Hell, he just sat and moped the whole six hours from Ely.” He puts the truck in gear. “I’m not cut out for this fatherly shit. I told his mom that years ago. Your turn to be granddaddy.” He smirks and says, “Have fun with that.”

Hunter’s Moon, October and a Blue Moon

The old man sits in his chair, picks up his readers and book, turns to switch on the floor lamp. But light is filtering through the window, stretching a beam over the faded sofa and settling on long-dead summer roses in a vase on the table.

He pulls himself from the recliner and pads out of the house over the grass, over the knoll, with his cane. His eyes are set on the moon.

The grandson, dropped off months earlier to live with him – struggling separately and together with the old man – hears the door and looks out from an upstairs window. He grumbles and says, “Gramps, you forgot your sweater.” So, the boy/man pulls on a hoodie, takes the stairs and grabs the threadbare cardigan from a hook by the door. He climbs the knoll and finds his grandfather on the other side sitting on a flat-topped boulder. The moon is big as the world it seems to the boy/man, and he is astonished by it. But he doesn’t want to let on, so he tosses the sweater over his grandfather’s shoulder and says, “How did you get so old never taking care of yourself.” Not a question really. Just an exercise in pretending he doesn’t care.

The old man pulls the sweater into his lap. “Thank you,” he says, and turns his weathered face to his grandson. “There is a story about a rabbit and the full moon. Many stories, really, through the years and cultures, but the one I shared with your mother when she was a girl, was about a monkey, an otter, a jackal, and a rabbit.” He looks back to the moon and its glow lands on every wrinkled crevice in his face. It reminds the grandson of sunset on the crackled desert back in Nevada.

“We used to sit right here and gaze at the moon, and she’d ask to hear the story.” The man smiles. “Again and again, this happened.”

The boy/man sits next to his grandfather and says, “Tell me.”

“It’s a story from the Buddhist Jataka tales. These tales usually involve a cast of characters who find their way through situations that grow their souls.”

“Grow their souls?”

“Yes,” the old man says. “We all must nurture and strengthen our souls in order to reward our next lives.”

“Not sure about any of that, Gramps, but let me hear the story.”

The old man settles his bones onto the rock. “A monkey, an otter, a jackal, and a rabbit are together on a full moon and decide to practice compassion and generosity to commemorate it. They are approached by a bent and scraggly old man who asks them for a hand-out. This is our chance to do good, the monkey screeches. The otter claps his webbed front feet together, and says, Let’s get him some grub. The jackal scents the air. I smell dinner, he says. The rabbit nervously wiggles his nose, paws the ground, and whispers, Oh dear oh dear. The animals,” the grandfather says, “all take to the forest and while they are away the beggar builds a fire to warm himself.”

“So,” he continues, “The monkey climbs a tree and picks banana after banana, brings them to the beggar and jumps and carouses – so proud of himself. The otter swims in a creek, snags a beautiful trout and dumps it in the man’s lap. The jackal leaps at a lizard and carries it in his mouth to the edge of the forest, drops it, grabs it again, and adds it to the beggar’s lap of goods.”

The old man pauses, stands and pulls on his sweater, and the boy/man still eyeing the moon, asks, “And the rabbit?”

“Ah, the rabbit… he’s snuffling by the edge of the forest, distraught and fretful. The beggar, the rabbit says to himself, is starving. Grass will not alleviate his hunger.”

The man looks at his grandson. “What could the rabbit contribute do you suppose? Any ideas?”

The boy/man shrugs. “No clue.”

The grandfather sits and draws an arc in the sky. “As the rabbit worries, the full moon rises above the trees and its glow blankets the small animal in a lullaby. The rabbit quiets himself in the moon’s tenderness and peers deep, deeper – past his love for grass and his warren, past his joys, needs and comforts. His reflections meander through his rabbit-brain to his rabbit-heart and further, eventually, to the innermost sanctuary of his rabbit-being. A warmth envelops his soul in a gentle melody, and he listens and cultivates it, marvels at it, and finally realizes he must sacrifice himself so the beggar can get nourishment. The rabbit jumps up, hops to the fire where the man and animals are waiting – and leaps with all his might into the flames.”

The boy/man startles. “Why would he do that? How stupid.”

Your mother hated this part, too. She thought the rabbit should just give the beggar some grass and call it salad.”

An owl, wings spread, hunts low in the hillside brush. “Grandson,” he asks, “I wonder, why do you think the rabbit did this?”

The boy/man says, “To die so an old beggar could eat?”

“Well,” the grandfather says, “as it turns out, the man was not a beggar. He was a Sakra.”

“A what?”

“A Sakra, a protector of Buddhism – its virtues and morality. He was testing the rabbit to see how far he would go to save another being.”

“But did he let the rabbit burn?”

“No, grandson. The Sakra pulled the rabbit from the fire. And because the Sakra was so touched by the rabbit’s willingness for surrender, he transported him to the moon to live there for eternity.”

A coyote yips in the distance and the old man wipes his eyes on his sleeve.

The boy/man looks at his worn-out Vans, shuffles them in the pebbles at his feet. “When we were attacked, when she threw herself over me, do you think Mom thought about the rabbit?”

“Not sure, Grandson, but she knew this story. If we go with it, she was not burned by the bullet that took her life, but instead, she was lifted to the moon

as a reward for her bravery.”

The boy/man closes one eye, squints with the other, and traces the rabbit in the blueness of the moon. “For all to see,” he says. “I want to remember her this way.”

“Yes,” the grandfather pats his grandson’s knee, “me, too.”