by John Hodgman
Brian watched Jimmy dump the wood and said thank you. He asked Jimmy what he owed him, and Jimmy barked at him “Nothing!” and drove away.
I obviously wished to see a boat built by such angry and generous hands, so we went to the auction. We were not alone. There must have been fifty or sixty people there, and I am confident they did not come for the rest of the junk that was on offer. It was just old half sets of Candy Land, hair dryers, unmatched ski poles, and other miscellany, all tagged and arrayed on tables in the high school gymnasium. It looked like the last recovered items of a town that had been blown away in a tornado. I swear someone was auctioning a Folger’s coffee can full of nickels.
But there was the peapod, just outside the gym in the sun. It was beautiful, every piece of goddamned wood bent and fitted together like the elegant solution to some three-dimensional jigsaw puzzle Jimmy Steele saw in his mind and was compelled to solve. There was speculation over how much it would sell for. One of our neighbors, Heidi, a writer, offered to stake us to a bid of two thousand dollars. She is from Maine originally—Heidi is the one who introduced us to the town, where she and her husband, also a writer, spend the summer. We are very fond of both of them, but even though they also live in New York, and even though we make every promise to see them during the winter, we somehow never do. I suspect this is because Heidi, like my wife, would prefer to pretend the non-Maine portion of her life is not actually happening.
But even Heidi knew her two-thousand-dollar gambit was symbolic only. She figured it would sell for much more than that. And now that I examined its varnished rails and other beautiful boat parts I did not and still do not know, I knew she was right. The minimum bid was listed at thirty-five hundred dollars. Plus, it included a trailer.
My wife felt the same way I did about the peapod. We didn’t speak about it. I just knew. It’s when we start speaking that the misunderstandings start. I said, “Listen: I can tell that you want this boat. And for some reason, suddenly, so do I. But we both know it is going to get very expensive very quickly once the bidding starts. So here is my suggestion: why don’t you make the opening bid? Bid the thirty-five hundred dollars and then stop. We will not win, but then we can watch the bidding play out and enjoy knowing that we had some small part in launching this boat, this beautiful piece of ingenious, practical sculpture, onto whatever waters it travels.”
And my wife said, “Once again you have proven that you are America’s greatest living storyteller. I will do what you suggest.”
She did not say that. She said, “That is stupid. No.”
But when the auction finally occurred, we both grabbed folding seats near the front as the auctioneer made short work of all the gymnasium garbage and got to the main event. “We now come to the Jimmy Steele peapod,” he said, and everyone in the room took one solid step forward.
Unlike the earlier auctioneer, this one knew his stuff. “Now Jim Steele made 178 peapods over the course of his career. The one we have for auction today is later, number 104, I believe. Before we begin, does anyone know how much the first Jimmy Steele peapod sold for? This would have been in 1964. No? Can anyone guess?”
No one was guessing. I do not know what came over me, but finally I just farted out of my mouth the words, “A hundred dollars!”
The auctioneer turned on me, furious. “Yes,” he said/hissed. “That is correct.” I had stolen his punch line.
He turned back to the crowd. “The last Jimmy Steele peapod to come up for auction was in 2009. Does anyone know what that peapod sold for? Anyone?” A pointed glare at me. “Any guesses from the expert?”
I will not lie to you. I knew. And I believe in science. But I am not lying that some telepathic spark that connected me to this angry auctioneer and the boat that was in his charge told me the answer. But I knew not to speak. “I do not know,” I lied.
“Ten thousand dollars,” he announced, triumphant. The audience murmured in appreciative surprise. But I bet they knew too. This was their world.
Bidding began. I was glad I was not going to buy a ten-thousand-dollar boat today. As advertised the auctioneer opened with a request for thirty-five hundred dollars. It took some time for people to get interested. My wife was still not sold on my poetic first-bid scheme, but through a series of urgent eyebrow movements, I bullied her into raising her paddle. “Thirty-five hundred,” she said.
“I have thirty-five hundred. Thirty-five hundred dollars to the woman in the front row. Now who will give me thirty-six hundred dollars? Who will give me thirty-six? Do I hear thirty-six in the back? Thirty-six? Who will give me thirty-six.”
No one would give him thirty-six. Finally, the auctioneer shamed a tall man with thick glasses into a bid of thirty-six. “Come on, Dan, surely you will go to thirty-six?”
Dan sighed. He went to thirty-six.
Now, however, my wife was in it. Something had flipped in her the moment Dan made the mistake to challenge her. As soon as his limping “six” was out of his mouth, her paddle shot up: “THIRTY-SEVEN!”
Now we had an auction. “I have thirty-seven!” said the auctioneer. “Now who will give me thirty-eight? Dan, will you go to thirty-eight?”
Dan was aggrieved. “I already have a peapod!” he said with a shrug to convey, What more do you want of me?
The auctioneer, disgusted with Dan, turned back to the crowd. “Who will give me thirty-eight for this Jimmy Steele peapod? It includes a trailer, a rudder, and the spritsail. It’s a piece of history, ladies and gentlemen, so who now will give me thirty-eight? Who will give me thirty-eight? I have thirty-seven here in the front, now who will give me thirty-eight? Thirty-eight, please. Thirty-eight hundred dollars, and Tom, the owner, will drive it to your home. Who will give me thirty-eight? Who will give me thirty-eight, please? This is a Jimmy Steele peapod. This is the reason we are all here. Who will give me thirty-eight? I’m looking for thirty-eight, please. Who will give me thirty-eight?”
No one would give him thirty-eight. Not one person in the world. Everyone in the gymnasium looked down at their feet and took one solid step backward, leaving only my wife in the glare of a single shaft of white sunlight, angling from the gymnasium window. I did not understand what was happening.
Finally, the auctioneer finished it, like an angry engine that has died at the top of a hill: “Thirty-seven going once, thirty-seven going twice . . .” (Pause for roughly twelve hours.) “SOLD, then”—and he looked at my wife—“to YOU.”
At that moment, we owned a boat. And at that moment, everyone who had been staring down at their feet looked up and smiled at my wife. A short line grew to congratulate her. “Congratulations,” they said, one by one. “A Jimmy Steele peapod for thirty-seven hundred dollars. What a bargain. Good for you.”
She wrote the check out to benefit the church roof. As Tom hitched up the trailer to his truck to drive the boat home for us, they came up, one by one, smiling and repeating: “Good for you. What a bargain. A Jimmy Steele peapod for thirty-seven hundred dollars. What a bargain. Good for you.”
This went on for the rest of the summer: people stopping us at the library or the store or the boatyard, commenting on the boat, commenting on the bargain. Some weeks after the auction I was checking our post office box. It’s number 117. If you can figure out where we live and Claire at the PO hasn’t canceled it by then because we don’t check it all winter, you can send me a letter there. But please don’t approach me. That would be weird.
I was alone in the little room of metal PO box doors when I got approached. It was the owner of the local inn. I had never met him. We were the only ones there. I swear.
He said, “Are you the one who bought the Jimmy Steele peapod?”
“Yes,” I said. “I’m John.”
“Right!” he said. “How much did you pay for it again?”
“Um,” I said. “I think you know. It was thirty-seven hundred dollars.”
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br /> “Thirty-seven hundred dollars!” he said. “What a bargain!”
And then he said, “Hey, I want you to meet someone.”
I am telling you we were the only ones in the PO box room. But somehow, the innkeeper produced a whole woman. From somewhere behind his back emerged an older, handsome strict-looking woman, and the innkeeper said, “Pam, I want you to meet John. He bought a Jimmy Steele peapod for thirty-seven hundred dollars at auction.”
“Well,” I said, “my wife bought it actually.” I do not feel that white dudes need to take credit for everything, especially when it feels like a couple of locals are playing some weird mind game with me, perhaps as a prelude to murder.
“John,” the innkeeper continued. “I want you to meet Pam Steele. Pam is Jim Steele’s widow.”
Every molecule in the air reversed its charge. I said some polite words to Pam Steele that I don’t remember. I was in the living presence of a history that I knew nothing about before I saw this boat, and now I was being judged by that history.
Pam Steele placidly held me with her eyes. “I wanted to meet the person who paid thirty-seven hundred dollars for one of Jim’s boats,” she said. And then she peered through me for a bit, coming to some silent determination of her own. “Good for you,” she said, and then she left the post office.
What is happening? I wanted to say to the innkeeper.
Is this some ritual? Do you do this every year? You hold a bogus auction, and then you trick some couple from away into buying a peapod? And once they make that winning bid do you befriend them? You feed them, fatten them with compliments. You make them feel like they’re welcome. And then after some time of Ripening, do you bring them before the Widow for judgment? Do you wait until the end of the summer to Harvest them? Do you sneak into their homes on the eve of the town fair and drug them with strange, pungent herbs? Do you take them down to the fairgrounds at dawn where they will awaken, tied to a stake, surrounded by the townspeople and their silent children? Does one mother cluck and tend to one small complaining child who does not understand the Ceremony? Does that little boy or girl look to the suspended feet of the people from away, my wife and I, who cannot speak except with our wide, white eyes, because we are gagged and bound fast? Does that little boy or girl say, “Where’s the wood, Mommy? Where is the wood for the fire?”
And at that moment does some old man drive up in his truck? Does the crowd part as he backs in, barely looking in the rearview, so assured is he of the dimensions of his vehicle and his world, this world to which my wife and I do not belong? Does he dump out his payload of white oak at our feet, seasoned three summers in a hot, dry shed to take fire quick and hungrily on this morning?
Does he say to the little girl or boy, to my wife and me, to the town, “There’s your goddamned wood!”?
And then, when it is all done, when the smoke and silent, pointless struggling ends and what’s left is cleared away, when the fair opens to the public that first day and an antique tractor stands bright red in the spot where we died, will you all take the peapod back then, and store it for another year? And will your children be safe for that year? Safe from the cold and famished ocean and the clams that sing to them from the bottom of the lake?
None of those things happened, of course. I did not say those things, and my wife and I were not burned alive. I took my mail and went home. Maine is not a death cult. I mean, it is. But it’s a slow one. It creeps in like the tide, and without your even noticing, the ground around you is swallowed by water, until it is gone.
By the time we got the peapod in the water, it was getting cold. Leaves were yellowing on the trees, and you could already see the light was lower in the sky. Autumn was arriving. It was August first.
Vacationland
I have been pretty coy so far on the subject of my mother and her death. I was twenty-nine when she died. She was fifty-eight. I had been married to my wife less than a year, but we had been together already for ten. In many ways she had become my mom’s daughter too. What more is there to say than it was traumatic, a moment that breaks your life in half? That you never heal from it, and it blankets your life in sadness and fear forever? Not much, except for this little bit.
She had been diagnosed with lung cancer the previous fall. The cancer was as deliberate and strong and persistent as she had always been. By the time she was dying it was spring.
I had been finishing my seventh year working at a literary agency. I loved my colleagues and my clients. I loved an industry that encouraged long lunches and still closed early on Fridays once the summer started sneaking up. But I was unhappy. I wanted to be a writer, and that meant I could not be an agent in good faith and compete with my own clients. Oh, I also was unhappy because my mom was dying. So one Friday I left work and I did not go back. I went home to help my father take care of her.
She was in a hospital bed at home by then. My father and I would keep her company and watch movies. I do not know whether it was the drugs or the cancer, but her mind had broken by then. She was spacey. She lost track of days and people. She said weird things and got fixated on certain ideas. She became obsessed with going back to New York to see Cats, which was still running then. I called about tickets, but all of the wheelchair seats were booked until long after she would surely be gone.
Old friends would come to dinner and we’d eat together around her bed. After eating she would have a cigarette. She had taken up smoking again: it didn’t matter anymore. When the old friends said good-bye, they knew it was forever. Night after night this happened, but somehow it didn’t feel terrible. Slow death keeps you busy with chores and distractions. I loved the time I spent with her. She had no hair left, just a bit of suede on her scalp. I liked the way it smelled when I kissed her on the head good night. A combination of baby powder and iodine. I’ve never smelled anything like it since.
When I was little I found a paperback copy of The Exorcist in the hall closet. I only read the back cover, and became scared for a full year that I would be possessed by the devil. Possession by the devil was a powerful fantasy for an only child sleeping alone in the top bunk of a bunk bed, with only shadow and empty space below him for company. It didn’t matter how good you were, how closely you followed the rules. The devil didn’t care. If the devil wanted you, he got you. The girl who is possessed in The Exorcist first felt the devil coming when her bed started shaking. I would lie awake at night and wonder when I would feel the first tremor. And soon enough my bed did start shaking: it was a rickety bed, and my heart was beating so hard. I went in to see my parents. My father was asleep, but my mom was still awake, reading and smoking. I confessed I was afraid of the devil. She said, “Don’t worry. There is no devil.”
“There isn’t?” I said.
“That’s right,” she said. She told me then for the first time that she was an atheist. “There can’t be a devil, because there is no god.” I remember admiring my mother. She was funny and she was honest. But this was not a comfort to me.
After a few weeks caring for my mom at home, I noticed that none of my clients missed me. They wished me well, of course. They cared about me. But to my surprise, their personal and professional lives did not collapse without my being there to tend to them. I was not essential to their world at all.
Eventually my mom declined and she went to the hospital. My dad and I slept in her room. More visitors came. More good-byes were said. At some point I asked her if she was at peace with the idea of dying. She looked at me like I was stupid and insane. “No,” she said. “I want to live.” You idiot! would have finished the sentence nicely. It was one of the only times she seemed really disappointed in me. I realized I had learned everything I know about death from movies. There is no peace in dying.
She was still an atheist, but she had taken to saying the Lord’s Prayer. It was a revisiting of her own lapsed and comforting rituals, and maybe a hedging of her bets. My non-Catholic
wife taught her the Protestant add-on to the end: “For thine is the kingdom and the power and the glory, forever and ever. Amen.” I still say it from time to time to remember her.
My friend Liz came to town. She was promoting her novel. I asked her if she believed in any form of afterlife. I don’t know if she was lying or not, but she said, “Yes. I believe in all of it. I believe in everything.” I appreciated her kindness. I wanted to be comforted. But this was not a comfort to me.
One night my father, my wife, and I went back to my parents’ house to sleep in non-hospital beds. Liz was still in town. She and my wife and I were sitting in the kitchen talking when the phone rang. I answered. There is no peace in dying, but there is peace when it is done.
I went back to New York, accepted the condolences of my friends and colleagues, and then quit my job. I was back home in Massachusetts within a week. A friend at a magazine assigned me to write an article about cheese for money. I became a professional writer. I spent the summer there with my dad and my wife. I did not cry until the summer was over. We went back to New York, and I started a new life. It was the year 2000.
None of this is anything you needed to know to understand that I am sad my mother died. It’s not even worth mentioning, except I have to tell you that in order to tell you this. I wish she were alive, but I am grateful for her death. If she were alive, I would likely still be working at the literary agency. For how much longer in my life would I have believed there was time for everything? And by the time I faced my own mortality at the Bookmill in western Massachusetts, how much less would I have done? Her leaving taught me about the worst sadness, one we all must face eventually. I feel lucky I am better equipped to help others who are going through it now.
She left me and my wife a house in rural western Massachusetts. She taught me there is no devil.