The Wards at Schoharie Creek (Week 5)

[serpentinejacaranda]

When the playwright fell off the Route 42 bridge in Lexington, the spirits were there waiting for him. Maybe they were water spirits. I like to think they carried away the burning part of Oakley that was about to collapse.

The playwright's creaking Barn Theater was clearly denied proper wards, maybe because his troupe loved him too much. Even spitting on the threshold would seem insulting, and no one would wish an accident, even an ironic leg-breaking one, upon such a magnetic talent.

Oakley didn't demand they spit three times or wish each other a broken leg. Maybe that was his last mistake... not to even ask. Or maybe he did. Maybe they said no.

After the accident at the bridge, Oakley became Tad, who inherited his own work and puzzled over it for decades. At first Tad didn't recognize himself. He eventually wrote new words and wondered about the playwright named Oakley Hall III, who had inhabited his body for almost 30 years and had shone brightly enough to leave genius-shaped tracings in the eyes of his actors.

Oakley Hall III, son of the famous novelist, wrote by candlelight in Lexington in the 1970s. The troupe claimed that on the opening night of his Frankenstein, the actors slid across the stage on rivers of fake blood. If anyone knocked on the rafters three times before the curtain rose, or if anyone spit three times on the threshold, none of it held.

The rain spit through the ceiling and onto the stage on opening night. It probably felt like good luck. Frankenstein's monster howled. Thunder rocked the barn. Audiences wept.

On July 17, 1978, Oakley fell from that steel bridge on Route 42 over Schoharie Creek, just within spitting distance of the barn, where terrified audiences had watched a hulking monster give blood-soaked speeches between strikes of real lightning just two years before.

The playwright teetered on the steel truss before he fell. That's what I imagine. He'd been at it in Lexington, going full bore Oakley. Writing, fucking, acting, wetting his full lips with his tongue, a gaze like conical drills, heating as they spun and mesmerized. Oakley had a off-Broadway production, write-ups in the Gazette, and an upstate buzz.

No one knows why he climbed atop the bridge. No one knows why he fell. It begs for mythology, but it was suggested an inebriated lark was more likely than either self-aggrandizement or suicide. Two men witnessed the final performance by the lusty playright of Grinder's Stand: one of the men hoofed it out of Lexington, never to be seen again, and the other, Oakley Hall III, disappeared somewhere in the bone and brain and blood under the Route 42 bridge.

The body lived. The man who emerged was a cooler, slower man: bruised, forgetful. But he had a twinkle of the playwright's gleam. The story of genius cut short has been narrated into oblivion, but Tad, the man who survived the fall, fixed his slow but penetrating eye into his own myth until that became the new, better story.

Tad had Oakley's lips and the general shape of his face. He had the same obsession with Alfred Jarry's Ubu Roi. His voice had the same timbre, even as he struggled and slurred. It was the same cello, but different wood--different strings. One by one, the members of his troupe left the room. They were there for Oakley, not Tad.

Sometimes I imagine that evening in 1978. The brilliant writer begins to sway, totter and howl atop the through-truss on Route 42. His Frankenstein was in the bag, now on the bridge, balancing with his arms outstretched. This is an image so irresistibly cruciform that I hope Hollywood never picks up the scent, but I do imagine drunk, ignoble Oakley, trying to jump or dangle his legs and missing just a single beat. His silhouette falls in silence.

The creek whacked the sense from him. His shadows deserted him. The fall also knocked Grinder's Stand, knocked Frankenstein, knocked Ubu Roi out of him, like wind from a stomach. It was the changeling who was carried away. Dear, sweet Tad, eventual investigator of himself, remained. Years later he gathered the pieces of his work together until he understood them as well as anyone.

Before his second death, Tad marveled at the man named Oakley Hall III who had played Dionysus in the short film Dionysus and the Maenads. That 1970 Oakley, whose spirit the gurgling waters of Schoharie Creek carried away eight years hence, seemed impossibly focused and beautiful and charismatic. But the Barn Theater was not abandoned until the year Tad left the earth. Tad reclaimed Oakley, then Lexington did.

Can you hear the creek? It's clear enough to see the bottom. You can also hear the distant thump of woodpeckers. The year after Tad died, they renovated the bridge, and now there's talk of renovating the theater. Before you step into the barn, knock three times on the threshold jamb, then spit on the boards the same number of times. Oakley might not approve, but Tad might.