From Away

by David Carkeet

  “After I graduated, I came back home and worked the farm with my mom and dad, and then just with Mom after Dad died, and the margins got tougher, and everything kind of slowed down until it was almost just a hobby farm, and when Mom died so did the last of the farming—I’d had enough. I’d opened the repair shop long before then and knew that was what I wanted to do. Then came the barn renovation and the concert series. That was it. That was my life. And it would have been my life to the end.” He turned away from the fire and looked at Denny.

  “And?”

  “Three years ago, I got an email from the mastermind—the woman who ran the contest. She was a graduate student back then—I didn’t know her at all—and she explained the contest to me. She said that she hated her composition class because it was so technical, and everyone was writing out of fear of failing. She wanted to create a positive environment, with ‘wooing’ as the motivation. That word was in the title of her MA thesis, or was going to be: ‘The Woo Factor in Composing.’ She wanted to recreate the environment that produced great pieces inspired by love and longing—you know, in the spirit of Schumann, Berlioz, and practically everyone, at least in her view. Her plan was to take the best pieces from the marching band contest and the best pieces from her awful composing class, and test them on different listeners. But she never got that far. She had some family problems right after the contest and took a leave from school, and when she came back she wrote a completely different thesis. But my waltz stuck with her.”

  “And so the April Quartet didn’t know about it?”

  “Of course not. They’re not important.”

  “This Juliet, she never knew that you—”

  “No. Stop thinking about them.”

  “I can’t!”

  “Yeah, well, you would have fit right in with the band.” Homer began to smile, but another pelting of rain startled him.

  “How did the mastermind figure out you were the composer?”

  Homer stood up and went to the window. The dogs raised their heads and watched him. He shielded his eyes and leaned close to the glass so that he could see out. He came back to his chair, resuming his tale before he sat down. “She found me with a tune-searching program. You type in a few notes of a melody—you can use the letter keys to do it—and it’ll pull up all the web pages that contain that melody. She still had one of the mixes from school with my tune on it, and she worked from that as she typed the notes in. Only one web site in the whole world came up—the one I created for the Little Dumpling Farm series. My waltz greets you on the opening page. She got my email address from the web site.”

  The lights suddenly went out. Homer stood up again. In the firelight Denny could see him go to the corner of the room and grab the shotgun. He carried it to the front window, set its butt on the floor so that it pointed straight up, and grasped it by the barrel. He looked like an early settler on the lookout for some expected attack. After a moment, Denny joined him at the window.

  Homer continued, “She’s a filmmaker now—the mastermind—she and her husband. She asked about the rights to my waltz—the rights! She said they wanted to use it as the main title theme for a film, and she wanted to show me some footage that they needed other music for. They asked if I could come to Austin. I hadn’t been out of New England since college.” He squinted, struggling to see through the blur of raindrops running down the window. “The lights are out down in that draw. See how dark it is? When they go out up here, it means they’re out down there. That’s where Sarah lives. She’s afraid to stay in her apartment when the power goes out.”

  Denny looked from the dark valley to Homer’s face. This was the first mention of Sarah. Still looking out the window, Homer swung the barrel of the shotgun back and forth, though its butt remained planted on the floor. Denny said, “I’d better get out of here.” He started to turn from the window, but Homer grabbed his arm and squeezed it hard. He put his face close to Denny’s.

  “I took my trombone.” The sentence sounded ridiculous under the circumstances, coming from the suddenly terrified face of a big man with a shotgun at his side. “I took just one suitcase and nothing else except my trombone. I took it because I knew I was going to stay. It was either that or . . .” He released Denny’s arm, lifted the shotgun by the barrel, and banged its wooden butt against the floor—once, hard. Then, calmly, he pulled it up and cradled it in the nook of his left arm. He seemed out of words.

  Denny said, “If she’s coming, I need to go.”

  “No.” Homer stepped to the entryway, grabbed his coat from a hook, and hurried to the rear of the house. The dogs sprang to their feet and ran after him. Denny heard the rear door open and slam shut, followed by footsteps on the back stairs and soft whines from the dogs, still inside. Denny looked out the kitchen window and watched Homer enter the pool of light under the workshop door and step into the shop, but he did not turn the lights on. Denny guessed that he wanted to get the shotgun out of the house—to put it in its rack in the shop—but felt there was not enough time to do that and make it back to the house for Sarah’s arrival.

  And Homer was right. Within seconds a car pulled to a stop in front of the house. Denny followed Homer’s example and took flight himself, hurrying up the stairs to the bedroom. He would get to be Homer for one more night.

  TWENTY-ONE

  IT ALWAYS BEGAN WITH THE INSIDE OF HIS THIGH RECEIVING A furtive caress under a banquet table at a model railroad convention. The touch came from the woman seated beside him—a big-boned, full-figured gal famous for being the only serious female modeler in the Chicagoland area. He would be telling a good railroad yarn, commanding the full attention of the table, when the hand would suddenly begin stroking his shiny black pants under the linen tablecloth. He always wore a tuxedo to the banquet.

  The hand would cause a hitch in Denny’s tale, but he would soldier on, his musket rising, as it were, and he would periodically favor his secret admirer with exactly the same warm gaze that he distributed to the general company. The hand would wander from his thigh up to the command center, where it would try to encompass the entire tightly packed nexus—try and fail, for only by touring its magnificence could it survey the whole. Denny’s story, and only his story, would climax. As the laughter erupted, the hand would withdraw, the tide recede, the encounter end.

  On this occasion, though, the plot took a strange turn. The hand touched his thigh, yes, but it touched the bare skin of his thigh. Where had his pants gone? Had she yanked them off? Denny was delighted, but was this initiative consistent with banquet-table discretion? And his formal wear puzzled him. What about the cummerbund?

  Now this: many fingers touched his flesh. His storytelling skills had never been so challenged. He would make it to the end of the line as long as she didn’t overstoke his firebox, but before he knew it, he was roaring like the Big Boy highballing down the west side of the Wasatch. He covered his mouth with his napkin, but he roared and roared.

  And now he was bellowing not across a linen tablecloth but into his downy pillow, which he had pressed over his mouth as if he meant to eat it. He shook himself fully awake, examined his environment, and eased his body away from where his little party had taken place. He sat up, dizzy with disorientation. It was still dark. The front door closed with a thud. Was it Homer, returning to the house? Leaving? Or Sarah? As Denny hurried to the window, something occurred to him—something that fell into the category of unfortunate. He looked down and saw a flashlight beam dancing across the ground. It was Sarah, running to her car.

  He watched her drive off. His groans must have awakened her and driven her out in disgust. She would say nothing about it though. This was the advantage to having a relationship with no communication. He staggered back to bed and, spent by what he ruefully recognized as the best sex he had had in years, immediately fell back asleep.

  But in the light of day, certain incongruities hit him full in the face. Why would he suddenly have a wet dream, his first since he was an adole
scent? Why had Sarah carried a flashlight when her car had been parked right in front? And why, now, as he lay on his back staring at the ceiling, were his toes exposed to the air?

  He sat up and looked at the foot of the bed. The bedclothes had been pulled up at that end of the mattress. Could his thrashing have done that? He had a sudden image—as real as a memory, though not a memory—of Sarah lifting his blankets and top sheet and stealthily entering his bed from the footboard, crawling along the length of his legs. He saw her carrying the flashlight in her hand—no, in her mouth, commando-like—her little salt-shaker of a body working its way up his tree-trunk legs. But what was the purpose of her raid? Was this, at long last, her overture to him?

  No, fool. He knew the reason, and it fell into the category of dire. He groaned with dismay and got dressed.

  The power was back on, and a large pot of coffee was waiting for him in the kitchen. Homer must have returned from wherever he had spent the night and brewed it, but he was nowhere to be seen. Denny clutched a load of laundry, including the sheets, and he took it on down to the basement to start the washer. When he came back to the kitchen, he became aware of the tapping of a hammer from the barn. From the end of the front porch he could see Homer straddling the barn’s roof ridge. Homer hammered, scooted back, and hammered again. He worked briskly and confidently. He did this several more times, then sat fully upright and looked around. The rain had freshened the air, and Homer seemed to sniff it. He spotted Denny on the porch and gave him a big wave. Then he lifted a trap door of some kind and disappeared from view. It hadn’t occurred to Denny that one could get to the roof from inside. It would be a good feature to put in a layout—the roof door propped open, the farmer just emerging to perform a repair. He would wave to the train.

  Denny went back inside and poured himself a cup of coffee. Next to the toaster was the chore list that Sarah had thrust at Denny some time ago. Homer seemed to be making good on it. But why? Did he intend to move back here and become her serf again? The face that he had shown Denny the night before, in anticipation of Sarah’s return—wasn’t that the face of fear?

  As Denny fried his bacon, he heard the roar of a chain saw from the area of the barn. Through the window over the sink he saw the tall, dead birch on the far side of the barn fall away from it in a slow, dreamlike way. The thud gave Denny a small thrill. He went back to the stove. The chainsaw went on for a while, but by the time Denny’s breakfast was ready, Homer was tapping away at something else. From the sound of it, he was now working at the front of the barn.

  After breakfast, Denny went upstairs and put on his own clothes for the first time since his arrival at the house. He felt like a stage trouper at the end of a long run. A soft rain had begun to fall. From the bedroom window Denny spied two sawhorses near the door and some boards leaning against the barn, just out of the rain. The light was on in the workshop. Denny had never seen the light on in there before.

  He went down to the basement and put the wash in the dryer. All of the clothes he had borrowed would be clean for Homer. He poured himself another cup of coffee, then filled a second one and carried both cups out the back door. He hurried through the rain along the dog pen fence. The dogs watched him from the shelter of their small, roofed den next to the house. If they were confused by all the Homers, they didn’t show it.

  When Denny entered the workshop, Homer turned to see who it was, but he didn’t seem startled. How could he be so calm? What if Sarah showed up again and found both of them there? Homer was packing the odd tools he used for repairing instruments into wooden crates with layers of sheets protecting them. He raised his eyebrows at the cup of coffee Denny set before him.

  “I need to alert you to something,” Denny said.

  “Oh?”

  Denny watched him examine a tool and set it into the wooden crate. He tossed the next one into a metal drum—a reject, evidently —and it clanged when it hit the bottom. “I’ve bought a shop in Austin,” Homer said by way of explanation. “I’m taking my tools with me.” He reached for his coffee.

  “You’re going back?”

  Homer looked over his cup at Denny. “I thought that was understood.”

  “What does that mean for me?”

  “You stay here—at least long enough to pack some things for me. I made a list last night at my camp.” Homer plucked a folded sheet of yellow paper from his pocket and gave it to Denny. “Actually, you can stay until I sell the place.”

  “This place? You’re selling the house?”

  “The house, the barn, the shop, the 180 acres. All of it. After the sale you can still stay in the area, if you like. My camp’s on Woodbury Lake. It’s nearly winterized. It wouldn’t take much to finish it.”

  “But what about Sarah? What’s it mean for her?”

  Homer shrugged. “A new owner might not like the idea of music lovers clomping all over the land in the summer. It’s possible she’ll have to take her concerts elsewhere. At a minimum she’ll have to find a new office.”

  “She won’t be happy.”

  “Isn’t that the status quo?”

  Denny pulled a stool up to the workbench. “When you say I can stay in the area—”

  “As me.” Homer smiled. “You probably think it’s odd that I would let you go on being me. Then again, maybe you don’t. Maybe you don’t think anything’s odd. The point is, I don’t care how well you represent me, because you’re not me. You’re a body wearing my name. What everyone thinks of you—that’s not me either. That’s just a bunch of ideas. How could a bunch of ideas be me? The only me is the person walking around wherever I’m walking around.”

  Denny reached for his own coffee cup. He wanted to slow things down. The man before him seemed altogether different from the quaking soul of the night before. “Where’s Sarah now?”

  “She’s in Bennington at a barbershop quartet festival, scouting to fill a hole in her schedule.”

  “How do you know that?”

  Homer was frowning at a tool—the one Denny had used to clean gum from under the seats. Homer pointed it at Denny, but only to emphasize what he was going to say. “Leonard Bernstein once said to someone, ‘You’re just like me. You want everyone in the world to love you personally. But that’s impossible. You just can’t meet everyone in the world.’” He laughed and tossed the tool into the discard barrel. “That’s confidence. It’d be nice to be like that. They say a real Vermonter doesn’t care what anyone thinks of him. That’s my goal, and this is the maximum test: I’m me in Austin and I let you be me here, even if you ruin my reputation.”

  “Why would I ruin your reputation?”

  Homer smiled as if at some private joke. Then he tossed another tool into the discard drum. “I don’t mind throwing these away because they’ve been used. But I can’t stand it when something fails to find its proper use. If I’m building and it’s the end of the day and I find a nail in my pocket, just a single nail, I never throw it away. That nail was meant to be used. Everything needs to realize its desired use.” His eyes roamed the workbench as if in search of stray nails with thwarted potential. He looked at his watch. “We’ve got business to attend to. You’ll be the one to sell the house—you as me. I’ll give you a five percent commission for doing that. You’ll earn it. After all, you’ll have to tell her.” Homer’s eyes widened. “I could never do that. I couldn’t do any of this without you. I don’t have time to pack everything today, and I can’t stick around.” He paused. “It’s important that I not see her.” He looked at his hands. “I can feel myself getting weak right now just thinking about it.” He looked up at Denny. “You said you wanted to alert me to something.”

  “Well, now it’s an alert to me. Are you circumcised?”

  Homer made an uh-oh face.

  “I’m not,” Denny said.

  “Uh oh.”

  “Yeah. I think she saw me. I was kind of bounding down the stairs. I’m not sure where her eyes went, but . . . and then last night . . . in any cas
e, it’s a problem.”

  Homer seemed to fall deep into thought. Denny would not ask how Sarah knew what Homer’s penis looked like. To do so would declare to Homer that Denny was aware of the asexual nature of their relationship, and if he were Homer, he wouldn’t want that declared. She could easily have stumbled on him in the bathroom. Or she might have seen him naked when they were children. Hey, Homer, I see your wee-wee. Or Hey, Homer, you’re getting so fat I can hardly see your wee-wee.

  To Denny’s surprise, Homer clapped his hands and looked around with the air of one moving on. “I’ve got several hours of house fix-up ahead of me. I’ve also got to scoot up to St. Johnsbury to get Warren’s horn. I called the shop. It’s ready, needless to say. I’ll walk it up to his place—his driveway’s a mess in mud season. He lives about a quarter of the way up Little Dumpling. On Sundays, in good weather, he climbs to the top and plays ‘Till Eulenspiegel.’ She hates that. Actually, she hates barbershop quartets, too. It’s hard to say what she likes. Anyway, tonight I’ll give Warren his horn and settle his hash, and then I’ll be out of here for good. I’m taking the Rambler. I’ve missed it. You can tell her you sold it.”

  “Won’t that be out of character?”