by Daniel Hecht
“And people ask what you do for fun up here,” Cat said.
Erik looked much better—last night, he had indeed been exhausted by his drive. Now his face was smooth and shiny, and though my immediate desire was to demand information about him and the contents of his van, nothing about him struck me as cloaked or caped. His eyes showed only interest in the proceedings, not calculation.
“He took a shower, an ice shower, in your stream water. Your brother is a hunk, Annie! He’s got muscles on his muscles! And then he shaved with your dish soap and a straight razor, which gave me the willies to watch.”
“I invited you to not observe my ablutions,” Erik said dryly, “if you didn’t want to.”
Earnest chuckled. Cat turned back toward the slow-moving commotion in the pen.
Later, Pelletier drove off on other errands, leaving Max with us for the night. Cat and Erik, Earnest and Brassard and Will and I went to the house and milled around the kitchen and dining room, improvising a lunch of leftover shepherd’s pie, leftover chicken, a two-pound chunk of cheddar, loaves of bread from a local bakery, coffee. The oven, reheating the shepherd’s pie and chicken, cozied the rooms with warmth and savory scent.
It was a gathering that would change the lives of everyone there, though only one of us suspected it at the time.
I was wound tight, supremely uncomfortable. I hadn’t had time to take Erik aside to grill him or threaten him or whatever I needed to do. I loved my brother, but I’d acquired a powerful protective love for this farm and these people, and I was not going to let him put it at risk any more than it already was.
We sat at the oval dining table, six of us, Brassard at the head, and talked about Max; Brassard recounted a few of Pelletier’s infamous exploits. Married young—“Seven kids!” he marveled.
“Jeez. Could put himself out to stud,” Earnest muttered, then looked abashed.
“Well, he more or less did, back in high school.”
Everyone laughed, much pleased. It had been a long time since Jim Brassard had shown any levity.
“So, Erik, tell us about yourself,” Brassard said.
The laughter quickly died away. Though he was a weary and blunted man, Brassard’s authority came across—nothing accusatory, but a simple inquiry from an honest, elder man is not easy to deny.
Cat jumped in: “Yeah, and I want to know what your tattoo says!”
Erik rolled his sleeve farther and held up his arm so we could see the whole line of characters, stretching from his wrist to the inside of his elbow. “It’s Chinese, and it basically says ‘Let him who is without sin among you cast the first stone.’”
This morally loaded choice for a tattoo changed the dimensions of everyone’s curiosity.
“Churchgoer?” Brassard asked.
“No. Never been in my life.”
“Well, it’s sure good advice. Why that one?”
“I guess so I could show it to good folks like you.”
The clink and scrape of eating continued, but the easy bustle of lunch-making had become something very different. This was, as Erik would have said back when, heavy stuff. Earnest and Will leaned back in their chairs, as if clearing the air space, the line of sight, between Erik and Brassard, surrendering control of the transaction to the patriarch. If Erik had hoped to tell me his story first, the option seemed to have been lost.
Brassard took off his glasses, tipped his head forward and thoughtfully scratched his left ear, and I saw that it did indeed bear a scar, a pale braid of raised skin that started at the top of the shell just at his temple and disappeared into the whorls below.
“Out on the West Coast all this time, Ann says,” Brassard said. “Kept yourself busy, I guess.”
“Wasted some years with a decadent lifestyle. Got a little smarter and got some schooling, though.”
“What’d you study?”
“Last five years, I got a bachelor’s degree in business administration with a concentration in marketing.”
“Good choices, this day and age.” Brassard, burdened again, was wiping his glasses on a napkin. “Huh. Maybe you can give us some advice on that score—could sure use it. Farmin’s not what it used to be, put it that way. What school?”
Erik had been toying with his fork, balancing it across one finger, tipping it almost to the point of falling, then letting it settle back into precarious balance. Nervous, but maintaining a wan smile.
“Mostly the school of hard knocks. But for the degrees, let’s just say I got the best public education money could buy.”
Earnest chortled, bobbed his head once, as if finally putting together the pieces of the puzzle. He leaned back into the table. “Where’d you serve?” he asked good-naturedly.
“Up in Elk Ridge, Oregon.” Erik seemed to be playing out a long joke, and clearly Earnest had anticipated the punch line.
“In the service!” Brassard said, pleased. “What branch?”
Erik stopped fiddling. “Mr. Brassard, I served time—seven years at the Oregon State Penitentiary in Elk Ridge. I got out twelve days ago.” He tipped his chair back, hands clasped behind his head to observe our reactions, both resigned and defiant. Let him who is without sin among you cast the first stone, his forearm insisted, in Chinese.
Silence. These were not overly judgmental people, but such an announcement demands a moment to consider and adapt to. Do you ask, “What were you in for?” Do you sit and wait for more explanation? Do you really want to know?
Then Cat asked, still on about his tattoo, maybe trying to kick-start the conversation again on a more positive note: “So … why’d you write it in Chinese?
Erik’s face grew serious. “So people would have to ask what it says. And then I could say it out loud.”
Chapter 37
Erik dropped our jaws about five times that day.
His tattoo, his whole approach, brought back to me just what a complex person he was—wired a bit differently from the rest of us, seeing the world through multiple lenses. He had always known that about himself. Back in high school, he’d gone through a period of being big on “cognitive dissonance,” usually considered a negative and stressful psychological state in which a person’s mind struggles with conflicting thoughts, opinions, emotions, or intentions. It can be paralyzing and painful.
But Erik had decided it was a positive state, essential to good mental health and moral integrity: “Ever think what would it would’ve been like if the Catholics and Protestants in Northern Ireland had been able to entertain a little fucking cognitive dissonance about their differences on religious dogma?” he’d ask.
Except that nobody got it, so mostly nobody got him. Those who did like him, those he therefore hung out with, were kids who liked his dashing negligence, his disaffection for convention and authority, not his smarts or subtleties. One likes to be liked; his social choices took the path of least resistance.
The way he explained it to me was that you could be a rabid Red Sox fan, as we all were, and still admit that the Yankees were the better team in any given year. You could be into heavy metal, as he was, and still love Mozart, as he did.
The problem was that he too often induced the state in others who couldn’t endure it as well as he did.
One particular Sunday afternoon gathering at our house, when Erik and I were in our teens, provides a perfect example. My father had invited several friends from Wilkinson Academy, my mother a few of her adjunct-faculty colleagues. The adults sat in various chairs and couches in the living room, sipping martinis that everyone praised—my father had prepared a pitcher and set it on the coffee table along with a plate of toothpick-impaled olives and pearl onions. Erik and I sat invisibly at the periphery, mostly bored but curious enough about adult social behavior, especially when the martinis kicked in, to stick around.
One of my mother’s colleagues was a music composition
teacher, a tall man defined by the angles of his elbows and knees, high bald forehead, and a degree of tweediness that struck me as a little overmuch. At some point the conversation meandered its way to music, and the group found a pleasant consensus about Mozart—how wonderful, how cheering, that lovely weightlessness, that effortlessness fluidity. How prodigious a talent.
I was as surprised as anyone when Erik, piping up from his crouch on an ottoman, offered the opinion that Mozart was sometimes “self-plagiarizing” and that his lifetime oeuvre had suffered from it. Erik believed he recycled too many of his own ideas, which no doubt helped get some of those commissions done on schedule and maybe explained the time he famously completed a symphony while bouncing around in a stagecoach racing toward the work’s premier. And didn’t he supposedly write one while bowling?
The music teacher was aghast. Erik had blasphemed. He could only assume, he said in a kindly but patronizing tone, that Erik, being his age and of his generation, could not be expected to understand or enjoy Mozart.
“No, no, I totally love Mozart!” Erik insisted.
“You just provided a pretty withering critique! Which is it?”
“The two are not mutually exclusive,” Erik said, stiffening.
Growing impatient with such a puerile discussion with an uppity juvenile, the music professor took Erik’s tone personally and returned it as such: “And, might one ask, who are you to have an opinion about Mozart? You’re what, fifteen? Do you know anything about classical music?”
Erik was taken aback. He couldn’t comprehend how anyone could fail to understand his viewpoint or get so worked up about something so obvious. He hadn’t meant to roil the social waters, just wanted to join the conversation at an adult level. Not yet in possession of his later bravado, he was intimidated by this circle of adults, gone silent now to listen to the exchange.
“Not much,” Erik admitted.
“Have you studied composition, or harmony? Or any music at all?”
“No.”
The music teacher flung his hands out to each side and dropped them onto his thighs, his argument sealed, Erik dismissed.
But Erik had a legalistic mind. He detested prejudice, especially in the form of underestimation, and he never backed down from anything. “That’s like … like, I mean, what would you say if I asked you if you’re for or against nuclear power?”
“Nukes? I was part of the Clamshell Alliance! You’re too young to even remember that, of course. We protested the Seabrook plant, laid siege to it, did our best to shut it down. And I’m damn well proud of it. What does that have to do with Mozart?”
“So … are you an atomic physicist? A nuclear engineer? What expertise entitles you to have any opinion at all about nuclear power?”
The music professor opened and shut his mouth, frustrated at having his ad hominem bounced back at him, his logic dismantled, and flummoxed by the continuing effrontery of this upstart kid.
“I’m just saying …”
“Honey,” our mother cautioned.
“I’m just saying,” Erik continued, not without a tinge of malice, “I think Mozart’s Fortieth and the Requiem—especially the “Lacrimosa”?—have gotta be among mankind’s greatest achievements. Totally. And I think he self-plagiarized too much of his own stuff.”
At that moment, my father stood and picked up the pitcher of martinis. “Who’s for a refresher?” he asked brightly.
All that came back to me as we got to know Erik that day. His tattoo, his philosophical complexity: Ah, yes, right. My brother. His knowledge of Mozart had not been due to his being a scholarly type, an intellectual—anything but. He detested all things academic. For all I know, that argument with Ichabod Crane was one of the catalysts for his determination to graduate early, to “get the hell out before the bullshit gets any deeper.” He was just really smart and broadly curious, could pursue a subject with fanatical intensity if it interested him.
Jim Brassard broke our silence after learning about Elk Ridge State Penitentiary, our reluctance to ask, What were you in for?
“What were you in for?” he asked.
He put his glasses back on, the better to see Erik with, the black plastic arm of his glasses hiding once again his scarred ear even as the reflection on the lenses hid his eyes.
“For farming.”
“Huh! Why not?” Brassard asked rhetorically, gloomily. “Next thing for us, I wouldn’t wonder.”
Erik told us: Since I last saw him, he’d gotten into raising marijuana in Northern California. He and his partners grew about twenty acres of a “dynamite” strain for a few years. Erik, among his other duties, kept watch: You lived right there in the patch to water, fertilize, and prune during the day and to keep watch for other growers who might “interfere with productivity” at night. Too many structures on the land would have attracted the interest of the DEA or state police conducting aerial surveillance, so he and his compatriots slept outside, kept their visible footprint small, and scattered their crop among small trees and bushes.
They had a pretty good business plan. They grew, harvested, hybridized, and maintained their own seed stock; they shrink-wrapped their product, transported it, and sold it in the Bay Area to local distributors they trusted, and had a pretty good sideline, even mail-order, in handmade pipes they whittled while the plants matured. Made good money for three years, except that so much was in cash and they had limited laundering capacity. For the most part, the only ways you could deal with it were burying it, starting lots of savings accounts and never depositing more than $4,999 at once, and spending it on relatively lavish living. You couldn’t buy a new car for cash, but greenbacks could still get you a pretty nice used Merc from the right dealer.
Still, he and his partners—“good people, a tight bunch”—lived with unrelenting stress that began to wear on them. One night, they got stoned together and everybody realized that the other was feeling the same thing: I gotta get out of this. Plus, the marketplace had become more competitive, resulting in aggressive encroachment from some new growers nearby who were “less oriented toward a mutually supportive local economy.” Actually, they were the sort of guys “with a different kind of ponytail,” wanting to consolidate a larger market share and connected enough “in other circles” to boost Erik’s group’s collective blood pressure. Erik slept with a shotgun and finally used it one night, firing over the heads of some intruders to scare them off. In retaliation, the other growers beat up one of Erik’s group, and retaliation seemed unwise: These guys seemed more willing and able to escalate than Erik’s people were.
So they did their best to vanish. They took their last crop and seed stock and set up again in southern Oregon. After a year or two, they started divesting and diversifying. They figured that their horticultural skills would help them explore other promising products without so much anxiety attached to them.
“So, second year in Oregon, we had about five hundred pounds of prime bud and leaf to deliver and I was the designated driver. We were moving it to some new connections in Portland and Eugene, avoid the long drive to the Bay Area. Bad plan—we didn’t know them well enough. Long and short of it, I got caught. I elected to take the rap on my own, keep my friends out of it, and got twelve years. Got out in seven for good behavior.”
What to say to that?
What Brassard said was “Mother of God. I smoked hooch a few times over there, couldn’t see as it had much goin for it. Hard to believe there’s such a market for it. You did too, didn’t you, Earn? Smoke?”
“A bit. Never got the taste for it,” Earnest said. “Lot of guys did, though.”
By “over there,” Brassard meant Vietnam.
Brassard, turning back toward Erik, staying on topic and now hardening up a bit: “So what brings you to our neck of the woods? Anything besides seein your sister?”
Chapter 38
That day, for
the first time ever, we ran late with afternoon chores. Erik kept us utterly caught up in his narrative.
Watching him tell his tale, I saw just how much he had grown. Prison, or maybe just life, had knocked off the sharper edges and rounded some of the harder angles. He expressed his certainties in ways that allowed more room for others’ opinions; his monologues were interspersed with pauses that invited others’ responses. And where he used to dramatize and emphasize, he now tended to speak with wry understatement. That said, there was a toughness to him—not the showy machismo of his younger years, that piratical dash and panache, but a slower, pragmatic kind that I supposed must be earned in, say, a state penitentiary.
He didn’t tell them everything—he saved some details for me alone, shared over dinner here at the camp tonight—but covered a lot of territory.
As Erik told us, he’d been betrayed by his buyers, and the police never learned the origin of his stock—he refused to incriminate his partners, who were also his dearest friends. They’d always agreed that if anybody got caught and didn’t talk, they’d reciprocate and preserve his or her share in the business, to collect later. Their experiences in California and his arrest discouraged them from continuing in the marijuana industry, but they continued as a corporation, more formally now. Erik got twelve years. Fortunately, the state had a progressive prison rehabilitation program, including access to college classes, and he had used it to develop skills he figured he’d need when he got out: business administration, marketing. He was determined to run his own shop—he wasn’t the employee type, he knew that much about himself.
So he got out, went to see his old partners. They were doing very well. They reimbursed him for his efforts on behalf of the corporation—“they stuck to their principles.” They offered, and he opted for, the van and its contents instead of cash.