In the Country of the Blind

by Edward Hoagland

  “That sounds scary,” said Press.

  “It is scary, believe you me. Those women will throw it twenty yards. You couldn’t dodge or outrun that,” said Karl.

  “The pen is mightier than the sword,” she answered. “Supposing I write down all your nutty ideas and hold them up for ridicule. Wouldn’t that be worse?”

  He admitted that it would, but then he pointed upwards because he had seduced a trio of ravens into hailing him every day as they passed over between the mountain and the swamp. Like most farmers he disliked crows, which ate your corn, but ravens were special. “Intellectuals,” he called them, though they ate the gut piles hunters left, and such like.

  Carol dropped in after he’d biked home from lunch.

  “What are we going to do?” she asked.

  “You mean ‘commitment’?” he teased, in surprise. “Love, honor, and obey?”

  “You want a kiss or not? Call me if you want a kiss,” she said, opening and closing the front door as if once she were gone he wouldn’t be able to call because she had no phone.

  He gave up and got a kiss.

  “You’re eye candy,” she granted. “But we’re drifting.”

  “True enough. I’m a small boat. But you’re raising two splendid kids very well and creating, I’m sure, beautiful art.”

  “A very confusing, even thorny art if it’s not meant for churches, like my dad’s. And I don’t know what I do believe, religiously or otherwise. Or what may be quite wrong for my children. Your wife is raising Molly and Jeremy to go to Harvard, but mine are sprites—just wood sprites? My father was the best man in the world, but he had so many children he hardly knew what to do with us. Nine of us. Told me to work with glass, when I hadn’t gone to theological school like him, or decided whose God to commit to.”

  “Well okay, do Zen glass then,” Press suggested, and she slapped him lightly, moving away. He heard her sit on the couch and adjust her skirt.

  “I may be ovulating. I want to come.” Yet when he started taking off his pants, “No,” she added. “The other appendage that goes in and out, wiggly and warm. Oh, you are ideal. One doesn’t have to do one’s hair or wear a push-up bra.”

  “Don’t marry ’em until you’ve wintered ’em and summered ’em, they say around here.”

  “Enough already from the peanut gallery. I’m not marrying anybody,” she said, before obliging him, and vice versa hand job with culminating climax.

  “So,” he remarked, gradually recovering, meaning what next? Carol, having rested, served them juice and walked outdoors until he was afraid of hearing the brutality of her car’s ignition. Her scent filled the room.

  Yet she came back. “Want to go?”

  Trusting meant not asking where, but he bumped into what turned out to be Benny Messer’s loaner, or decoy car, also parked in the drive. When she settled him in her passenger seat she didn’t fasten the straps, which signified, yes, the commune again. He was soon ensconced on the porch with curious urchins holding up fingers for him to fail to count, and toddlers climbing toward his lap. The random energies of various adults with scant ideas for what to do with themselves vibrated in the atmosphere. They brought him carrots and green salads and good bread on a plate for dinner. Then he was led inside to join many others, holding hands in a ring, the conversation ordinary except that Press didn’t recognize the identity of a single one. He wondered for instance which was Jim, the guy who’d carpentered Carol’s cabin for her. And had Carol vanished, abandoning him to the horde?

  Then she reclaimed him, leading him outside and on a path, stopping so he could pee, till the familiar barn boards creaked underfoot. Muttering voices indicated the sleeping quarters jimmied into every cranny high and low. She placed his hands on the ladder and grasped his buttocks as a goad again. He wondered if the woman at the top had been at the dinner, scrutinizing him and eavesdropping as he spoke to his neighbors.

  At the top, once more strong female fingers helped him crawl safely into her loft, then onto the pile of blankets, futons, and quilts. “Mama wants a second helping,” she said, as Carol sat on the floor nearby, not playing an active role this time in disrobing him, just assuring Press that her kids were on a sleepover and they could stay all night. It was growing dark, and in surrounding apartments mildly revelrous.

  She—the unnamed lady—simply drew his hands to the Paleolithic places men always have grown tumid from feeling, like the outward cradle of the hips within which a fetus will reside and her breasts that will nourish it, once born. Carol didn’t kibitz this time; only lay down next to them to keep him stationary after his ejaculation so to increase the chances it would take.

  Passivity was a novel pleasure. He savored it till the ladies slid apart from him and, cross-legged, chatted about factions on The Farm. The druggies, the politicals, Nixon-focused, the gardeners, the grow-your-own vegans, the social experimenters, and mate-swappers, though several had worldly ambitions beyond the commune. They were smoking weed, unwinding from the crescendo of sex, so Carol pointed out, “Potheads like us can’t really complain so much, except to claim they’re mercenary.” Her joke referred to people who were okay growing dope commercially for the cities or running hard stuff across the border. With him listening, however, they weren’t specific. A few political people would drive clear to Washington occasionally for anti-Vietnam rallies, visiting friends and maybe dropping off deliveries along the way. Quarrels sometimes evolved around them if they had more money than the others, but chipped in less to pay the annual property tax, yet might risk The Farm’s future with their drug-dealing. These disharmonies so far had not split the community.

  Press did spend the night, indeed, the three of them piled like puppies in the quilts, after the women produced a can for him to pee into: not to have to climb down the ladder as they did.

  “So, want to take him on? He could be elected as a member,” Carol laughed, in the morning, as the other woman fried eggs on her hot plate.

  “No, no,” Press protested, laughing too. “I’m too square.”

  “Twice bit, twice warned?” the lady chortled.

  “Something like that.” No man demanding visitation rights. The ideal dad to her, Press surmised. “Why do I need to be a member?”

  “Of course you wouldn’t,” Carol assured him, hugging him and giggling.

  “All these hippies wanting money from you to buy their uppers and downers.” She and the unnamed woman then continued the merriment, gossiping about a young lady at The Farm who had just had a baby and then ate her own placenta as a mystical source of nutrition. In fact, fried it. But sure, yes, a guy like Press, whose wallet could be useful in paying bills could be voted in, “if he’s a Caspar Milquetoast,” as the nameless woman expressed it. Carol immediately defended him against the term.

  * * *

  When dropped off at home, he felt sharply wistful as Carol drove away. Why not live under the umbrella of rice and salads and swirling company in the kitchen instead of eventually in a “rest home,” or nursing home, assisted-living facility? Well, because it really might not be so clean and simple, as some voices he heard outside that night reminded him. If it sounded like a pickup from the swamp trail being consummated, hippies from The Farm themselves might be involved. At least one druggie kid, Carol had told him, wore a pistol in an ankle holster roundabout all day. A raid with that publicity would be embarrassing to him, at a minimum: word getting back to Connecticut. Did you hear where Press is living? Oh, gracious!

  “All God’s chillun,” he said to himself, hearing the voices outside again. Bystanders should be safe. Staying upstairs, he got on the phone to a night owl in New York but didn’t ask for help.

  Corralled by his own handicap, Press noticed Karl’s increased wheeziness and irritable edge at lunchtime, when he listened to emergencies on the scanner—not to be called himself, to respond, or at how slowly and blunderingly they were being dealt with. It seemed a comfort to him to come out onto the back porch and sit with
Press listening to the sweep and soundscape of the swamp. Which birds were squabbling over a speared frog—herons or ravens? A French restaurant across the border used to buy frog legs and turtle meat for their menu from him. “That could be me, fightin’ with those herons for that frog,” he joked. But the herons’ hubbub had told him where the good frogs were, and the kingfishers, with their rattling cry, did the same for fishing holes he didn’t know about, or beaver ponds newly dammed. You’d fish there and then in the winter come back and trap the beaver. The bears, too, led him to berry patches he didn’t know about and he’d seldom shot a bear except for a paying customer. As a houndsman, he only treed them in training his dogs. Dorothy, stimulated by Press’s questions, took notes for another newspaper column, on shadbush, highbush cranberry, fire cherry, and other raccoon and ursine fare. Then there was the basswood tree, whose wood Karl used for whittling deer heads for his customers who’d shot one. Or, speaking of fire, how about “Fighting a Steeple Fire,” drawn from Karl’s most famous local exploit, when he’d saved the Congregational Church?

  And, with the Clarks, it was amazing how a fraternal discourse could proceed for half an hour without stumbling over your fundamental disagreements about Evolution, the power of prayer, etc. Prayer certainly had a placebo effect, so why on earth argue? Whether the hay was too wet to mow was more important, though Press, after they had butchered a pig, once teased them about Jesus probably being a vegetarian.

  “Where in scripture does it say that? He gave them to us for our use!”

  But they understood that he was ribbing them.

  Press played telephone chess with his son, relying on Jeremy’s account of the chessboard, and it blossomed into some endearing moments for both of them, lovely to remember, lying in bed afterward. Feast or famine was the pendulum for him, either a banal loneliness, or richer, tender interludes mothered by Dorothy or Carol, and brothered by Karl or Darryl. The whistling dawn, the susurration of the leaves, a honking goose, and then a sentimental confab at the Solid Rock Gospel Church with a wounded soul who poured his heart out to Press precisely because he was blind and therefore harmless. Since these individuals had no money, he couldn’t give them financial advice, just wholehearted sympathy. As at the commune, a toddler might scramble into his lap, and while he petted the child its mother held a cookie to its mouth and another one to his to bite and chew.

  A world worth living in and for.

  Chapter 4

  Alone so much too, though, he developed mild palship or antipathy toward the assorted radio personalities he spent his days with—less frustratingly than having the TV on, whose premise of presentation was that you could see whatever was going on. Some DJs were genuine gourmets about the music they played, enjoyed a passion for it, whereas others were on an ego trip. The same could be said for the variegated news commentators, right- or left-wing. Some he liked were simply women’s voices, lilting or generous, inviting friendship. Others belonged to well-seasoned-sounding men, humorous and insightful about what a listener such as Press would care to know. Canada’s CBC and Great Britain’s BBC were refreshing alternatives, however.

  But when could Carol come again? Not urgency but an incompleteness inside him asked. And it wasn’t like when your wife is away; he couldn’t define the lack—that muffin-gentleness she offered, pragmatic yet religion-tinged. You’d want her on your jury unless you were guilty as hell. And Carol had layers, soft yet impermeable when her confusions made her pull up short and become formidable. “What’s going to happen to our kids?” she’d repeatedly said. They were being raised so differently, wood sprites versus private schooling—there must be a right way, a wrong way. “So long as yours go to college; it doesn’t matter where,” Press told her, which not only, he thought, was true but also carried the unspoken message that a lasting friendship with him could be useful.

  Impulse was Carol’s modus operandi unless a self-protective calculation intervened: is this man bad news, or the like? Her work was a governing factor as well. You couldn’t be a time-waster, or derisive about learning and art. During her years at Dorothy Day’s place in downtown New York she had visited the Met and the Museum of Modern Art only once or twice, and felt foolish now that her focus had changed from charity to creation and she was so isolated from such treasures, or “treasure houses.” And he remembered another phrase she’d uttered once—“I have something”—that hadn’t registered on him sufficiently. He’d thought she meant talent. She’d been putting off his importunities and he’d assumed this was simply impatience. Now however, suddenly he wondered whether she had been protecting him from herpes or the clap. If so he was more touched than alarmed. Indeed, she’d minimized his risk.

  “So,” Press teased Carol challengingly when she did show up and hugged him and let him fondle her. “I think I’ve figured out why you won’t make piggies with me. Do you have herpes?”

  She pushed him away, pausing, though not angry. “That’s what your wife and you called it, isn’t it, ‘piggies’? How clunky, how charming! Yes, you get a blue ribbon. How smart a boy you are.”

  He moved to clasp her again, and when he murmured, “Thank you,” she let him.

  “Incidentally,” he said, “when you go down to the city, do you ride with that guy—that trucker?” he asked, changing the subject.

  “You mean Al, ‘The Hippies’ Horse,’ ‘The Hippie Express?’” She laughed, referring to the auctioneer Rog’s younger brother and son of Rupert, Melba’s friend, who hauled cattle down to the abattoirs. “Well, he hits on the women who go with him. And I’m a nice Catholic girl. I don’t want to give him herpes.”

  “Because I thought of riding along. I want to see my kids—or visit them,” he corrected himself. “And he’s the quickest way out of here. He could drop me off at the railroad station in Springfield, or wherever.”

  She seemed startled, puzzled; he could hear her turning the notion over in her head, weighing Al’s character, perhaps, and the plausibility of kindness from the strangers at an Amtrak station somewhere.

  But gradually she cottoned to the idea of Al’s dependability. “He’s a little different. Not a money-grubber like his brother. But how much shall I tell him you’d pay?”

  He heard her lips click in a smile as she asked, which might be because he’d learned from the Swinnertons that Al charged hippie girls “a quickie” at a rest stop on the road south. But he named a modest price; then felt her tap him proprietorially on the chest. “I’ll worry about you.” Maybe for the first time she pronounced Claire’s name, sarcastically.

  Al, polite and practical, after Carol called, turned up in his cattle truck early the next auction evening, so as to meet Press before proceedings started, and to get a direct start for the slaughterhouse at midnight or so.

  Thus Press sat a long while on a bleacher bench listening to old TVs, sling chairs, wheelbarrows, a coyote skin, not to mention bleating calves and baying cows being laboriously sold to the highest bidder. Somebody put a beer in his hands. He had arranged for a friend to meet him on the station platform in Stamford, Connecticut, after he caught the morning train from Springfield, Massachusetts, which Al said he would easily make. The thrum of patter, spiel, and natter, or children clambering along the bleacher boards, women prompting their husbands about what to buy or pay or not, plus the ancient bray and moan of animals, biblical in tone, was fun. And Carol reappeared to take his elbow, whispering, “We need to pee outside.” She’d brought her kids along to see him off and remained to ensure that Al was properly enlisted. Press wondered whether he might be growing maybe closer to hers than his own. The doomed cows obstreperously delayed the loading process, crammed in with a smattering of other herds’ elderly ladies headed for hamburger but accustomed to leading their own herds to pasture. Al, though not cruel, was peremptory, having known cows all his life. “Not your best day,” he informed them.

  “So,” he said, settling beside Press in the cab and sparking the engine to a roar, “how far are we go
ing?” He knew, yet wanted to make clear that he was also a long-distance jockey, crossing the country a lot in moving vans, vegetable trucks, and other speedsters with a bunk behind the seat to grab some shut-eye in. “I’m divorced too,” he added, to establish a link with Press’s predicament. And yes, he had occasionally given Melba rides—Press’s house cleaner and his dad’s “reserve girlfriend.”

  As they hit the highway, the swarm of headlights surreal to his diminished vision, Press blurted out a question he’d managed to stifle when he was with Melba herself. Had a pig eaten one of her babies?

  “Well, I guess yes, to tell the truth. Hungry pig, Wyoming, wintertime. Nothing else for him to eat, and them out of the house. And nothing else, I bet, for them to eat but him.”

  “Rough!” they both said. Abandon that goddamned log cabin, abandon that screwball hubby. Pour soul—she had swallowed more than her fair load of grief.

  Since they’d hit it off, Al told Press the slatted livestock rig belonged to him and how much interest the bank was charging. Those long-haul runs in fleet eighteen-wheelers for hourly wages were when business was slow. And he claimed to be a better businessman than Rupert, his dad. “No consignments, no wild goose chases, no hobbyhorses—like that idea people here wanted unbroken broncs from Montana. So ship in a carload that Melba finds for you!” He laughed. “Those two in their heyday! No wonder Mom’s jealous.”

  At cruising speed the truck felt lulling like a Pullman. And the protests from the cattle jammed behind the partition lost some of its hysteria, becoming systematic, coinciding with the swaying of the vehicle, as they fought to keep their feet through each bumpy stretch. Press dozed off—it was after midnight—between bouts of asking Al questions, who needed to stay awake.

  Rog, for instance, his brother, what was he like?

  “Well, Rog makes more and has a pretty wife. I like Juliette. If you make more, you have a pretty wife. But people call him ‘The Vulture’ behind his back, the way he shows up the day after your husband dies, to see what you want to sell. That’s not enviable. Me, I’m on the road. I’ll pick up a runaway and be a father to her, take her to the Salvation Army.”