by Annie DeWitt
“I’m just not sure this print’s particularly modern,” Mother said that morning, regarding the O’Keeffe where it rested against our kitchen wall.
“Look around you,” Margaret chided, “Next to that window, the painting almost looks like a mirror image of your little view.”
“So now you’re saying I’ve bought a house with a dismal view,” Mother laughed.
“Precisely,” Margaret laughed.
“It’s depressing,” Mother said. “Staring at all that red in the distance. It’s like someone rained blood on the mountain.”
“Color overthrows form,” Margaret said. “Really, it’s a very modern idea.”
As if to lend credit to her heritage, Margaret was a gifted photographer. Her husband had worked for the Audubon Society and was rumored to have been a distinguished botanist and nature writer. In an act of affection for him, Margaret had taken up photography and had often accompanied him on his trips. Mr. Nydam had died some years before Margaret came to own her apartment above the Agway—really more of an attic studio than home—which now housed her plethora of nature books, hardcover photography manuals, and a collection of photographic equipment that harked back to another era. One volume documented the mission of an environmental photographer to chart the Earth’s topography, a solitary job performed under some level of duress and extremity of climate. Along with several scrapbooks of newspaper clippings and an indexed library of field guides, the manuals, cameras, and other photographic equipment made up the entirety of the existing relics of Margaret’s husband’s fabled career. I imagined Mr. Nydam, writer, philanthropist, bird enthusiast, disappearing from society for several days at a time, knee-deep in swamplands, charting the growth of exotic flora and fauna while predicting local weather trends based on the migratory patterns of various flocks of sandpiper and wood thrush.
The Nydams never had any children. Margaret was a woman with whom other women could relinquish all memories of childbirth and breast-feeding. She unbuckled herself after dinner and enjoyed a glass of good sherry with the occasional fag. This idea, or some combination thereof, made Mother giddy. She came home from those Sunday evenings at Margaret’s smelling faintly of smoke and brandy, some new book or broach that Margaret had lent her tucked away in her purse.
Father called the group The Separatists.
“Where you going, Rick?” Mother would say those evenings after supper when Father pulled a cigar from his pocket and lit off up the road toward the butte which overlooked the highway.
“A lady needs time for leisure,” Father would say.
I knew Father kept a box of White Owls in the glove compartment of his Bronco. The cigars were individually wrapped and sealed with thin strips of paper on which was displayed the white bird perched on his branch. Below the bird the emblem read: New Yorker, Est. 1887. I’d taken to stealing the tossed wrappers from the backseat of Father’s car.
Those nights Father went out walking, I imagined he found himself looking up at the familial scenes which presented themselves in the windows of the neighboring houses on Fay Mountain. Perhaps he was impressed with the scale of life they presented. The most important goal in life was to author something authentic, he’d tell us. There was something handsome in it. He’d insisted we call him Pop. Father was what he had called his old man. It had too much of the dictator in it, he said.
“So you’re saying O’Keeffe had a certain artificial intelligence,” Mother said that morning.
“I’m saying she had a certain hardness, is all,” Margaret said.
I regarded the print from where I stood in the kitchen. To me, it looked like a reflection of Mother herself, bold and red and sprawling.
Content with their handiwork, Margaret surrendered to the news. Since the war had started, Mother had kept a small television on the counter so we could follow the headlines.
“I’ll never get used to it,” Mother said.
“Used to what?” Margaret said.
“The continuity of all this coverage. I keep thinking they’ve dropped a bomb over there every time my teacups rattle a little in my kitchen. I find myself pacing the house waiting for the sirens to sound.”
“You’re a product of your generation,” Margaret said.
“I’m a product of the space race,” Mother said. “Growing up, I remember looking out the window one winter and thinking the Russian’s had finally bombed us. It turns out it was just the first snow.”
“What sirens?” I said.
“The air raids, baby,” Mother said. “I went to school during the Cold War. Several days a week we had a drill. An alarm would sound and we’d hide under our desks.”
“What were you protecting yourself against,” I said.
“A big red scream, darling,” Margaret said.
“Never mind all that, baby,” Mother said. “Come here and watch the news.”
I tried to imagine what a cold war would look like. I pictured a tundra of ice with soldiers frozen into it. To my mind, the current war in the desert was humorless. The endless shots of the soldiers which plastered the screen at all hours of the day lacked temperature or color. Those evenings Father returned late from work, Birdie, Mother and I ate TV dinners on folding trays in the living room. Mother liked to listen to Brokaw. She watched interviews with the POW’s in silent anticipation. I had recently come upon Mother standing in front of her bathroom mirror one morning imagining that she herself was participating in the coverage. An old college flame of hers had once been a filmmaker. He’d written one screenplay — Did I Wake You Up? For a brief stint in the seventies under his tutelage, Mother had entertained the idea of becoming a newscaster. She and her flame would sit up nights and he would interview her about her reactions to life at her women’s college, which was considering becoming Co-ed.
“What do you make of America’s response to this new war as a child of the Vietnam generation,” I had seen Mother ask herself into the old wooden handle of her hairbrush.
“It has a certain hardness about it,” Mother had replied.
There was, Mother taught me, a certain liberty in reflecting upon the experiences of one’s previous lives.
The news that morning with Margaret and the O’Keeffe was interrupted by a knock at the front door.
“Sorry to interrupt on a weekend, Ma’am,” the Ranger standing on our porch said. “Is your husband at home?”
“I’m sure he is,” Mother replied studying him through the gaps in the screen. “May I ask who’s inquiring?”
“I drove up from town,” the Ranger said, removing his hat so you could see the contours of his face where the sun hit them. “I’m here to inquire about your stream. We’ve had complaints about the pests in these parts.”
Two large, clear gullys of sweat ran down the side of his face. His hair was wet where the hat had been. A uniform often makes a man look older than he is, I thought. To a man of his age, pest was a specimen of experience no larger than biology.
Father must have heard the whine of the screen door. He emerged from the bulkhead where he’d been sorting packets of seeds. A long-winded pride swelled from Father’s chest as he watched the Ranger interacting with Mother. Mother had a way of casting men outside of themselves. It was in such moments that Father was most dumbfounded by his own good luck.
“I can see you located my trouble here, Ranger,” Father called to us, curling the thick, green hose around the underbelly of his arm.
“No trouble,” The Ranger said. “I just came to inquire about having a look around your stream.”
“Is there some issue with my stream?” Father said.
“Well, that depends, I suppose,” the Ranger said stepping off the porch and heading toward the bulkhead where Father was wrapping his hose. “On what you call trouble. There’s been talk of dredging your stream to rid the town of the squeeters and the gnats. A doctor recently
built a home on the east side of the mountain. A city man. High-up on his profession. With all the horse farms in these parts, there’s been rumor of equine encephalitis. The doctor’s wife is pregnant.”
The road was thick with bugs that summer. Inside the house, Mother had taken to hanging flytraps in the doorways. The thin, sticky yellow papers hung from the doorframes like rows of gristle. When the breeze came through the windows at night, it shook the papers, unsticking the carcasses that were less deeply embedded and unleashing them onto the ground. In the morning, the linoleum under the doorframe which led to the kitchen was littered with small wings and dried up bodies which Mother swept into the dustpan and threw out over the deck. She said the protein was good for her garden. Every now and again she missed a spot and you felt the crunch of a dried fly underfoot.
Above all things, Father prided himself on reason and what levelheadedness he could offer others less informed about the world than himself. Since moving to Fay Mountain, Birdie and I had been bitten by horseflies big enough to stop a cockroach in it’s tracks. Father knew that doctor’s baby was at no immediate risk. If he had been a betting man, he’d have put money on it. Talk, Father often said, had a reliable pattern. Most of the gossip which made its way to Fay Mountain Road had nearly extinguished itself in town before it reached us. Father took the Ranger out back of the house to the marshland where the stream emptied out just to appease him. Dressed in my bathing suit and Mother’s gardening boots, I accompanied the two men to determine what opportunity might lie dormant in the air.
The heat that day was dry and unsettling. The sun was strong and blocked out all sense of movement. Even the mosquitoes in the swamp seemed to have settled down under the leaves of the trees to find a moist spot in the shade and avoid choking on the dust. The stream coughed out a trickle. The marsh itself looked like a bald piece of earth, dry and cracked in some patches, wet enough in others that the land moved like jelly underfoot. We made our way—the Ranger, Father and I—down to the tributary where the stream emptied out into a small basin. At the mouth of the basin, a beaver had built a den out of twigs and torn bits of burlap, remnants of old feedbags that had been carried downstream from the pastures in the runoff. A green plastic soda bottle had caught on the south face of the den and bobbed listlessly in the water. As we crossed the dam, Father picked up the bottle and stuffed it in his pocket while I made my way toward the left bank of the stream to get a better view of the marsh. There, we surveyed the land for clouds of bugs. “You know those well-to- do folk,” the Ranger said by way of apology. “Always looking for someplace to cast around their improvement. They’d mow their neighbor’s lawn if it would make their own look greener.”
The left bank of the river sat slightly higher than the marshland below it. Amid the floating lily pods and clusters of cato’- nine-tails, it resembled an island around which the earth dropped off. An old white birch stood alone in the center of the island. The tree no longer bore leaves. Instead, it boasted a full head of barren branches whose thin, paper-like bark resembled the skin of a cabbage, nearly transparent in the morning sun.
“Finders keepers,” Father said as he made his way up the bank. Beneath the tree, he hoisted me up by the waist and set me on one of the lower branches.
“Hold on to this,” Father said, handing me the bottle out of his pocket. “If you want to claim a place for your own, you’ve got to learn to tend your land. The Ranger and I are just going to take a quick swing around back of the marsh to see if we can rustle ourselves up some of those baby killers,” he laughed. “Won’t go far enough to let you out of eyesight. You keep a look out, yah hear?”
The two men turned and started for the far end of the marsh.
“Now that’s what I call a little piece of gold,” I heard the Ranger say before they disappeared from earshot. The Ranger tipped his hat in my direction as the two men picked their way across the swamp.
When they had vanished into specks on the other side of the marsh, I slid out of the tree and made my way to the left bank of the river. Seated there, I put the empty bottle to my lips and blew over top of it. Sometimes at night when Father was at the piano, Mother sang a song about going to San Francisco. They called this song their old standard. I tried to remember the tune but nothing came except the sound of air rushing over the hollow glass like the whistle of a train as it grew near.
4.
With the scare on, people kept their horses in the barn most days despite the weather. Otto Houser said this was rubbish. In ten years, he claimed, the whole country had only seen the loss of a few good animals. Fewer bodies, he said, than he could count on one hand. Sleeping sickness, as it was known by the farmers, was a disease that affected the greenhorns, those people who lived backwater and liked to keep a filly or two cooped up in a barbwire paddock so small the horses stood in their own manure and ate whatever shrubs made their way up through the filth onto dry land.
But when word reached the feed store that a Palomino had fallen sick two counties over, even Otto Houser took to keeping his horses in the barn from before dusk to well after sunup, those hours when the mosquitoes were at their peak. Otto claimed he did it to protect the boarders he stabled at the barn. His own, he said, could fare. After a while, even the old all-weather Shetland Otto kept out of doors and rotated around the various paddocks to graze down the weeds and eat back the scrub brush had disappeared from the field and into the barn. Most mornings, we woke to the sound of horses kicking the insides of their stalls.
When Birdie and I pedaled our bikes over the bridge to the farm stand, we saw Cash at work in the fields, the thin outline of his body hunched over in the cab of the bright orange baler as it worked its way across the earth, dividing the grassy spoils into neat rows of hay that cut across the west side of the mountain.
Fender manned the register at the farm stand while Ada sat in the shade of the overhang in front of the old garage within shouting distance of the customers. Just short of four feet and built like a lumberjack, Ada had a shock of red hair that ran down her back in a long braid. She spoke to her customers like they were inviting in the type of trouble she’d worked all her life to keep out. Women liked her because she could be trusted around their husbands. Men liked her because she could jumpstart a car on a hill without cables in a pinch. The meaner Ada was to you, the higher you ranked in her opinion.
In winters, Ada went stir crazy. Without the constant drone of customers to meddle with, she took to the offensive, canning enough leftover produce to feed an army of squatters. The local newspaper ran a feature about it. Ada stacked the cans in the old carriage shed that had once housed their vehicles and farm equipment. Forced to keep his equipment out in the open, the joke went that after a snowfall Cash had to shovel out his own plow. If you drove by their property in winter, you could make out the faint outline of a backhoe towering over the empty cornfield gathering snow.
That summer, Ada had turned an old wooden carriage on end so the wheel made a table. Ada sat behind this table most afternoons in a rusted-out folding chair, playing checkers with Wilson. It seemed the two hardly moved position.
As Birdie and I turned our bikes into the gravel driveway one afternoon after the Ranger’s visit, Wilson got up from his chair. He began undoing his belt and moving his hips back and forth in the air.
“Stop saluting those girls,” Ada said, reaching into her apron for a folded up newspaper and cuffing him on the bald spot on the back of his head.
Wilson pumped his hips so hard the air moved, and for the first time that summer, I could feel a slight breeze take the hairs at the base of my neck.
“You stay put with the bikes,” I said to Birdie. Birdie was afraid of Wilson. She didn’t understand why an old man was interested in a couple of kids. Otto’s faded blue Cadillac turned into the drive.
The car was as wide as the road and moved like a boat. Dust kicked up around it and the sun cast a glare on the wind
shield, behind which I could make out two well-tanned shoulders in the front seat. A woman climbed out of the car, swinging her legs out from under the dash where they had been resting in Otto’s lap.
“Afternoon, Ada,” Otto said.
“Afternoon, Otto,” Ada said without rising from her chair.
That was the first time I had heard anyone refer to Otto by his first name. I wondered how Ada had come to know it.
“I hear the hay’s in early this year,” Otto called to her.
“I reckon it is,” Ada said.
“Well then, if it’s alright with you, I’d like to get in on it.”
“I reckon you would,” Ada laughed.
As Otto and the blonde walked into the farm stand, Wilson began rocking his hips.
“Ain’t it a little early in the day for all that?” Otto Houser said to Wilson as he walked by the table, casting a stare over his shoulder at his son.
Wilson pumped his fist twice in the air.
“Sailor’s salute,” the blonde laughed, walking over to Wilson.
The woman’s jeans were short. As she crossed the parking lot, the fray exposed her behind. She smoothed a lock of Wilson’s hair away from his eye and sat in his lap.
“Sailor’s salute,” Wilson said, as she settled into him.
“Afternoon, Callie,” Ada said to the woman, pushing her chair out from under the table and spitting under her breath.
“Is it?” Callie said, leaning forward and pulling a pack of cigarettes out of the pocket of her shirt.
As Callie lit the cigarette, Wilson straightened up in his chair.