It was a dreadful year.
But years pass. And so do heartaches. Soon after Valarie left, along came Mandy. “Hello, Beautiful,” Eustace wrote to this new love. “I appreciate getting to know you better . . . you have a lot to offer. When you can open up to this world we will be blessed for it. I feel dizzy learning you, dizzy meeting you. I do feel we were meant to come to- gether. . . . When I am with you I feel young and innocent. I could smile into your eyes forever . . .”
Then Mandy left, and along came Marcia. “I am high from meeting Marcia. She has been a blessing to me—an inspiration and a new hope. I pray for God’s guidance in all that I do.”
Then along came Dale. “So kind, so supportive, she shares my vision as well as anyone.”
Then there was Jenny. “A beautiful girl with black hair and a long white linen dress . . . what will become of you, of me, of desires, of dreams?”
Then there was Amy. “Beautiful long hair, innocent, radiant smile, I met her when I was teaching a workshop in a school, and she was so beautiful I could hardly concentrate on my words. I just kept staring at her and then went up to her after class and said, ‘Can I spend some time with you?’ ”
Eustace ended up spending a good deal of time with Amy. She was a graduate student in science, brilliant and serious, and she turned out to be a great helper. He spent a week with her in her family’s summer house on Cape May, New Jersey, and wrote in his journal:
“We have been housebound the week I have been here. We have gotten into paperwork for Turtle Island, with Amy typing things out on her computer and printing out master copies for me to Xerox later or mail out or whatever is appropriate . . . summer camp brochure, summer camp application, medical information and release form, lists of what should be in first-aid kits, emergency plan cards and hospital maps . . . a letter to Cabell Gragg to encourage him to sell me the land in 1994, a letter to the Turtle Island staff to thank and encourage them, list of staff members, names and phone numbers for my calendar, workshop advertisement for spring classes, list of what to bring and not to bring (revised) and orientation for campers when they come . . . confirmation contracts and more . . . Wow. Amy is very good at coming up with first-class results—a bit slow, but top-quality finished product.”
Then Amy was gone, her letters filed away in an envelope that Eustace labeled: “A fantasy with Amy that was spoiled by reality—dreams turned into education. At least I lived it for what it is and learned.”
Then there was Tonya, the beautiful and mysterious Aboriginal rock-climber. Eustace and Tonya went off to New Zealand and Australia for a few months and climbed every cliff and mountain they could find. She was stunning and powerful, and Eustace truly loved her, but he believed there was something hidden in her soul that held back from loving him completely, and, anyway, it was hard for Eustace to give his heart to her as much as he might have liked to because of the recent memory of the one woman who had almost broken him in half with passion and desire and misery.
That was Carla. Carla, the beautiful and mysterious Appalachian folk singer, was the massive love of Eustace Conway’s life. He met her at a folk festival where he was speaking and she was singing. (“You should have seen this girl on stage playing her guitar with her long hair and miniskirts, dancing and grinding all over the place until you damn near had to mop up the whole world, she was that hot.”) Eustace withered and melted and collapsed into love for Carla, and to this day thinks she’s the closest to an ideal he’s ever encountered.
“She was amazing. Here was this beautiful, modern Appalachian woman, a genuine coal miner’s daughter from Kentucky who had skills from four generations back of the people I admire the most in my culture. She was like a goddess to me. She played music, wrote, danced, was the best cook I’ve ever met . . . was wild and free and brave and brilliant and confident and with an incredible, flexible, muscular, bronzed body. She worked with horses, could play any instrument, could cook a pie over an open fire, make medicinal herbs, make her own soap, could butcher livestock, wanted to have lots of children . . . was the most capable and generous and insatiable lover I’ve ever met. God, I could go on and on! . . . She was a true child of nature, and she wore sexy gingham oldtimey dresses and danced through the woods like a young deer. And she was so talented it made me feel I would drop everything to help her advance her career as a musician. And she was much smarter than me! And she could sew and she could draw! And she could spell! She could do anything! This woman was a dream beyond even my capacity to dream, and I’m a goddamn dreamer!”
Almost immediately, Eustace asked Carla to marry him. And she threw back her head with laughter and said, “It would be my pleasure, Eustace.”
So they got engaged, and Carla moved up to Turtle Island. Now, looking back, Carla says there were serious problems from the start. “I felt he was a kindred spirit at first. But it was no more than six weeks into the relationship that I saw things about him that frightened me. I come from an old-fashioned and rigid Appalachian patriarchy, so I was very sensitive about some of the gender roles I saw Eustace playing out. In some ways, he had a true egalitarian sense about women, but every time he got furious at me for not putting dinner on the table exactly at the right time, it made me really nervous.
“Also, my family disliked Eustace intensely. They thought he was disingenuous, a con artist. They were concerned about the power he had over me. We’d only just met when he came to my family’s house, had a quick dinner with my parents, packed up my belongings, and took me away. My family is really close, and they felt like I’d been stolen. Eustace thought my family was turning me against him, so he tried to keep me isolated from them. Well, when my father and my brothers realized that, they practically loaded their guns onto their truck to come and get me back.”
It wasn’t long before Carla, a world-class free spirit, began to drift. Soon, she was involved with someone else. Eustace discovered her indiscretion in the strangest way. He got an enormous phone bill one month—hundreds of dollars of phone calls placed from his office in the middle of the night to the same number. Curious, Eustace dialed the number, and when a man answered, Eustace explained his situation. Then he had an inspiration.
“You don’t happen to know someone named Carla, do you?” he asked.
“Sure,” said the guy. “She’s my girlfriend.”
“No kidding,” Eustace said. “And here I thought she was my fiancée.”
It seems that Carla had been sneaking out of the teepee every night and hiking down to the office to call this sexy banjo player she’d been having an affair with. Another betrayal. This was not, as the old cowboy song goes, Eustace Conway’s first rodeo. And, as we know, Eustace is not a man who can live with someone he perceives to be a liar and cheat. Carla had to go. It had been a marathon love affair, and now it was over.
Eustace was unraveled by it. He was flattened. He was riven.
In December 1993, he wrote in his journal: “Fighting depression, resentment, and pain. It really hurts, the relationship with Carla, the rejection, the ‘not working out.’ I have never tried so hard—I gave it everything I had. I have never hurt so much.”
He was thirty-two years old and was shocked to look around and suddenly notice that, while he had accomplished much through sheer force of will, he didn’t have a wife and children. By this point, he should have been well into a family. Where was the beautiful woman with the loose curls and the gingham dress making buttermilk pancakes in the breaking light of dawn? Where were the strong and sturdy youngsters, playing quietly on the cabin floor and learning from their gentle father how to whittle hickory? Where had Eustace gone wrong? Why couldn’t he keep these women he fell in love with? They always seemed oppressed or overwhelmed by him. And he didn’t feel they understood him or supported him. Maybe he was picking the wrong kind of person. Maybe he was incapable of sustaining intimacy or was too fearful of being hurt to let a relationship take its often twisty turns. Maybe he needed to try a new approach. It was bec
oming clear that, in love, Eustace was failing to make this most essential connection.
He asked a friend who was a psychologist to come to Turtle Island for a walk one day. He took her in the woods and told her that he feared that there was something wrong with him emotionally, that he couldn’t make his relationships with other people work. The folks he labored with at Turtle Island were always angry at him or misunderstanding him, and he wasn’t as close to his brothers as he would like to be, and he was always driving women away or not getting close enough to trust people. He told her about his childhood and confessed that he still held a lot of pain about his father and wondered whether this was all connected.
“I think I need to talk to a professional,” he said.
The psychologist answered, “Everything you need to make you happy, Eustace, is right here in this forest. Modern psychology isn’t for you. You’re the healthiest person I know.”
Man, do people ever get a dream of Eustace Conway in their minds and then make it stick. This woman must have been so compelled by a Thoreau-inspired and idealized vision of life in the wilderness (“There can be no very black melancholy to him who lives in the midst of nature and has his senses still”) that she didn’t want to take a closer look at someone who was not a concept, but a real and afflicted person. Maybe it would have cost her too much to let go of her idea of Eustace. It’s hard to blame her; she wouldn’t have been the first woman to deny all appearances to keep this pagan savage as pure in her heart as he was the day she first met him.
Not necessarily convinced, and still deeply depressed, Eustace tried his father one more time.
“I am psychologically sick,” he wrote to his dad, “beaten down by years of oppression. I am damaged. I hurt. Every day I wake up and I am in pain over this. Show this letter to a psychologist and see if they have any advice for me. Please don’t misunderstand my most sincere gratitude for the help you give me with chores like money management. I do very much appreciate it. I hope that rather than be interpreted as an ‘attack,’my emotional truths can be appreciated as fuel for growth and understanding. A healthier relationship is my goal, not a more aggravated one. Respectfully, Eustace.”
Again, no response.
I know Eustace Conway’s parents well. I’ve been a guest in their home and eaten dinner with them many times. Like everybody else, I call Mrs. Conway “Big Mom,” and, like everyone else, I adore her. I love her generosity and her stories about when she lived in Alaska. I love that, whenever I come to her door, she hugs me and says, “There’s our mountain girl!”
And I must admit that I enjoy being around Eustace Conway’s father. I like his intelligence and his wit, and I find him to be endlessly inquisitive in the same bizarre and precise way as his son; he wants to know exactly how many hours it took me to drive from Boone to Gastonia, and when I tell him, he calculates immediately (and correctly) that I must have stopped for forty-five minutes to have a meal or I would have arrived sooner. His precision, of course, is relentless. Being a “creature of perfect logic,” he doesn’t yield an inch and I can see where he would be impossible to live with. His conversations with his wife are filled with such baffling exchanges:
MRS. CONWAY: There’s a slight chance that Judson will come visit tomorrow.
MR. CONWAY: Why do you say that? You don’t know that to be true at all. Did he call to say he was coming?
MRS. CONWAY: No, but I left a message on his machine to invite him.
MR. CONWAY: Then it’s puzzling to me why you would say that there is a slight chance he’s coming to visit us. Exactly what percentage of a chance do you suppose that would be, Karen, when we haven’t heard from the boy at all? Obviously, we know nothing about whether he will be coming or not. To say that there is a “slight chance” is incorrect and misleading of you.
MRS. CONWAY: I’m sorry.
MR. CONWAY: But nobody listens to my opinions.
So you can imagine.
Still, I can talk to the man. When I visit the Conways, I often talk to Big Eustace about the Wizard of Oz books, the wonderful series of fantasy stories that L. Frank Baum wrote back at the turn of the century. It seems that Big Eustace and I were both raised reading the same beautiful hardcover editions of these books. (In Mr. Conway’s childhood, he received one book a year as a Christmas present, while I inherited the entire antique set from my grandmother.) Most people don’t know that there were sequels to the original Dorothy Gale story, so Big Eustace was delighted to find that I knew the stories well and could recall each lush Art Deco illustration and discuss the most obscure characters. Tik-Tok, Billina the Chicken, the Hungry Tiger, the Gnome King, the Rollers, and Polychrome (the rainbow’s daughter)—I know them all, and so does he, and we can talk about that stuff for hours.
Other times, he takes me out to his yard and teaches me about the birds of North Carolina. And once we went outside at midnight to look at the stars.“Have you seen Mars lately?” Mr. Conway asked. I admitted that I had not, so he pointed it out to me. He told me that he likes to come out every night to follow that planet’s orbit in order to see how close Mars is drifting toward Saturn.
“They’ve been getting closer and closer each day for three months,” he said. “After all, remember what the word ‘planet’ means—wandering body.”
So sometimes Big Eustace and I talk about books and sometimes we talk about opera and sometimes we talk about constellations. But mostly we talk about his son. Big Eustace always wants to know how Little Eustace is doing up there at Turtle Island. Who are his apprentices? Is he planning any big trips? Has he constructed more buildings? How does that treacherous road up the mountain look? Does he seem overworked or depressed?
I try to fill him in. And once—because I cannot stay away from the most silent intimacies of other people’s private lives—I said, “He’s doing well,Mr. Conway, but I believe he is desperate for your approval.”
“That’s nonsense.”
“No, it’s not nonsense. It’s true.”
“He doesn’t ever talk to me,” he answered, “so I never know what’s going on with him. He wants nothing to do with me, apparently.”
Indeed, the two Eustace Conways rarely talk and they see each other even less. The occasional Christmas will just about do it for the year between these two men, and Little Eustace is loath to sleep at his parents’ home because he so dislikes being around his father. Still, one evening in the spring of the year 2000, Eustace returned home to Gastonia to spend the night. It was odd to the point of shocking that he would appear on their doorstep in the middle of May, when there was no big family holiday as a motivator. But Eustace had some lumber he wanted to check out near Gastonia, so he thought he’d drop by for dinner. I went with him.
We pulled up to the house, the house where Eustace had lived the worst years of his life, and found his father standing in the front yard, picking at an old lawn mower, which was small, push-style, beat-up, and fully rusted. Eustace stepped out of the truck and smiled.
“What do you have there, Dad?” he asked.
“This is a perfectly good lawn mower that I found in someone’s trash last night when I was out riding my bicycle.”
“No kidding? Someone threw that away?”
“Isn’t that ridiculous? It’s perfectly good.”
“That’s a nice-looking lawn mower, Dad. Real nice.”
The mower actually looked as if it had been fished out of the bottom of a pond.
“Does it run?” Eustace asked.
“Naturally it runs.”
“Boy, that is nice.”
I had never before seen Eustace Conway and his father together. After all my years of connection to the family, this was the first face-to-face meeting I’d witnessed. I can’t say what I’d expected, but not this— not Eustace leaning against his truck with a casual smile, complimenting his father’s salvaged lawn mower. And not this beaming father, giddy to show off his latest find.
“You can see here, son, that there was
a break in one of the handlebars, but I welded a piece of metal over it like so, and now it’s perfectly operable.”
“Nice.”
“Do you have a use for this at Turtle Island?”
“I’ll tell you what, Dad. I can find a use for that lawn mower. I could take the motor out for some other purpose, or I could disassemble it and use the parts, or I could use the mower myself or give it to one of my neighbors. That’d be great. I’d be happy to take it. I can always find a use for things; you know that.”
The next minute, father and son, both grinning, were loading the mower into the back of Eustace’s truck.
Lord, what a dinner it was in Gastonia that night! The two Eustaces entertained each other all evening. They had no eyes for anyone else. I had never seen Mr. Conway so animated, and Eustace, too, was in high form. I swear they were showing each other off to me. They were on fire for each other. And it was more heartbreaking for me to see these two men craving each other’s approval than it would have been to watch them fight. They could not, it seemed, have been more doggedly seeking closeness.
They nudged each other to tell favorite family stories. Eustace got his dad to tell about the time he went to the emergency room with a seriously cut leg and got so irritated that the nurses ignored him that he lay down on the floor in front of the triage desk and refused to move until he was attended to. Then Mr. Conway beamed while Eustace told adventure stories about hiking the Appalachian Trail, specifically about the time he was so thirsty, he drank water from around the carcass of a raccoon he’d found rotting in a stagnant puddle “with blue ribbons of putrefied flesh waving around in the water.” Mr. Conway howled, thrilled by the scene.
“I can’t imagine anyone else who would do such a thing!” he exclaimed.
After dinner, Eustace and his father stepped out into the yard to discuss the health of a certain holly bush that might need to be transplanted. It was a balmy Southern evening, and the sun hung so low in the sky against feathery clouds that the air was everywhere traced with a golden haze. The men stood in the yard, hands in their pockets, talking about the holly. Then, suddenly, there was a birdsong—long and melodic. Like actors cued by the same director, father and son looked up at the same moment.
The Last American Man Page 17