We met up with the other men who had helped load the shed onto the truck in another trailer park about ten miles down the highway. Sliding the shed off the truck and into position near one of the trailer homes was easy, with various residents of the neighborhood gathering around to watch the operation. One of the robo-men pulled out his wallet and gave my dad fifty dollars, and I climbed back into the cab of my father’s truck to leave.
We were inches from a clean getaway in the big Brazilian flatbed when its back wheels started to spin, digging themselves into the soft ground up to their hubcaps. Pieces of plywood were produced and wedged beneath the wheels for traction. This method held great promise and actually looked as if it might work for the entire hour we spent arranging and rearranging the wood. I stood behind the flatbed, put my shoulder to its back rim, and we rocked and pushed the truck as my father jammed it into gear, only to have it slide back into the mud with each filthy pendulum swing.
The language of those surrounding the truck started to get salty. Men walked off in various directions to get more chain, and I acquainted myself with the woman who had bought the shed, who had come out to watch. As a full team member now, I felt some responsibility to distract her from the flatbed truck burying itself in her front yard, though she had the calm forbearance of someone who has seen worse and whose expectations were roughly equal to the scene. She cuddled her little dog—a licky bichon frise—and told me about her son, who had spent most of his life in a wheelchair and then recently died.
A decision grew organically among the group that the flatbed truck would have to be towed, rather than pushed, out. A guy ran off and came back driving his brand-new two-ton pickup that frankly looked like a toy next to the old Brazilian work horse. The owner of the truck proudly gunned his engine, and Buck silently took his place behind the wheel of the flatbed as a chain was hooked to its under-carriage and attached to the trailer hitch of the new pickup.
I noticed that my father was leaving the scheming to the other men and was standing more or less passively by as they engineered their wacky solutions. My father had been trapped in more than a few quagmires in his time. He had been towed and had done the towing. I wanted him to pipe up in the dominating know-it-all way I remembered. I wanted him to hearken back to the incident with the International and the snowbank, circa 1972. But it occurred to me that a lifetime of muddy mishaps and vehicular screw-ups might have tired him out. He looked like he wanted to call AAA. He looked like a guy who would gladly hand over his newly earned $50 in order to get out of this woman’s yard and be home for lunch.
The brand-new pickup gunned and thrusted and blew blue smoke from its shiny chrome tailpipe. Its front wheels started to lift precariously off the ground like a show pony at a rodeo. At the same time its back wheels dug themselves into the mud up to their customized hubcaps. Now both vehicles were stuck. The Brazilian flatbed sat lumpen and bored in its ruts, mumbling to itself in Portuguese. Another group confab. Another guy ran out of the trailer park and across the road to a small farm. Barn doors opened. A cherry red antique tractor came speeding out of the barn and across the road. More deliberation. Should the pickup and the tractor be hitched side by side, each towing the Brazilian flatbed in a flanking maneuver (see fig. 1)? The merits of this were discussed and discarded. Instead, the tractor was hitched to the pickup, which was hitched to the flatbed, tug-of-war style (see fig. 2). The tractor would pull out the pickup, which would gain traction and pull out the flatbed. The scheme had a certain unlikely schoolyard beauty to it. It was the scene in the movie where the doubter smacks his head and says, “It’s so crazy it might just work!”
fig. 1
fig. 2
Ideas like this are why country people are always on disability. Their access to chains and tractors combined with low education levels, innate strength, and a certain plucky courage make for a population who will drive fifty miles for an ice-cream cone and who think that a toy tractor can tow a two-ton pickup, which can in turn tow an obstinate Brazilian flatbed truck pi loted by a worn-out bear killer and his estranged daughter.
Gears grinding. More blue smoke. The red tractor reared up on its back wheels like an angry stallion, pulling at the pickup. Ten people mashed together shoulder to shoulder behind the Brazilian flatbed, pushing.
I pictured the trip to the hospital. Would they have an ambulance big enough for all of us, or would some of the more gravely injured have to hitch rides with the lesser injured? And if the nearest Sears was forty miles away, where was the hospital? I wondered if the bichon frise would licky-licky my face while I lay in the mud with a broken back. I wondered if being thrown clear of the wreckage was preferable to impalement, which would be quick and dramatic.
Somehow, in defiance of the family track record, flawed engineering principles, and the congenital and per sis tent bad luck of everyone involved, fortune smiled on us that chilly November day and delivered all three vehicles from the lawn of the bichon frise lady with the sad story and the new shed. Once we were free of the mud, the other participants in our adventure waved and disappeared into their trailer homes, and Buck and I started back to his house. We’d spent three hours moving the shed and the profit margin had sunk to familiar levels.
We had made enough money to pay for gas.
Pat was waiting for us in her yellow farm house. I walked past the woodstove and comfy chair, the gun rack and big TV, and into her large kitchen. She had three boarders at the house for hunting season—a band of hunter-brothers from Ohio. I heard gunfire ring out occasionally, bounce back and forth off the hills and carom through the valley. Pat would skin, dress, and cook any small game they brought back, and they would eat it for dinner that night. As Pat made her way from the stove to the table, she said in her no-nonsense way that what ever they killed, she’d find a way to cook it. She could make a squirrel stew or a pheasant pie, she said. I pictured a dinner of wolverine compote accompanied by muskrat wine and followed by bluebird cookies.
Over tuna sandwiches at the kitchen table, Buck started to tell the bear story. He produced some papers, which he said illustrated his claim of self-defense. The bear wasn’t his fault, he said. The bear was the bear’s fault. But I had a feeling that both creatures were simply being true to their nature.
Buck told me he first saw the bear when it ambled down off the ridge in back of the house and helped itself to a garbage can of cat food on the back porch. Here in his kitchen I noticed that he had at least two cats that periodically curled around his ankles as he talked. My father, the cat man.
Buck said that after the bear helped himself to the Friskies, he scrambled back up the ridge and disappeared into a stand of trees.
It was a male. Young. Big. My father said he was a beauty. He saw a tag pinned to the bear’s ear—this wasn’t the bear’s first taste of kibble; it had been caught and tagged before by the game warden. Buck had a feeling that this bear had been released into their backwoods the previous week.
He called the game warden. The warden came out, and together they set and baited a barrel trap with rotted meat and honey. The warden told him to fortify his hives. My father spent the morning installing fencing at the apiary. As he told me this, he gestured out to the field in back of the house, where wooden trays of beehives stacked waist high were surrounded by a low electrified fence. It looked like a stalag in miniature. I pictured groups of worker bees smoking cigarettes and hanging around the prison yard, planning their escape from the queen.
As my father described his efforts to guard his bees from the bear, I found myself wondering why the bees didn’t just fly out of their hives, group themselves into a giant flyswatter formation, and swat the bear away. Or they could just fly down his red bear trousers. Then I realized that all my knowledge about the interplay between bears and bees came from Hanna-Barbera cartoons.
After working on the fencing all morning, he and Pat had gone into town. On their way back to the house, a neighbor who kept goats flagged them down and said that
the bear was back and had been lying in the road. The neighbor had to get out of his car and kick him to get him out of the road. “That bear wasn’t afraid of anything. He was crazy,” my father said.
Buck raced back to the hives to finish the fence. He said the bear was watching him from the edge of the tree line.
That’s when my father’s instincts, running as they do toward the harebrained, violent, and adventuresome, made him decide to take matters into his own hands, so he went and got his twenty-gauge shotgun.
When Buck got to this next part of the story, he started to sound wounded and practiced, like a man on the witness stand. He said he called the game warden a second time. What ever. He got tired of the whole business.
The next time the bear came down the ridge, my father was waiting for him.
He says he waited until the bear got close enough—about twenty-five feet—and then he shot him in the chest.
The wounded bear fell down but then managed to scramble back into the woods.
That’s when the game warden showed up. He asked my father what happened to the bear.
Buck said I just shot him.
They went into the woods and found the bear, crumpled in a heap—dead.
The officer wrote him up a ticket. Buck showed me the receipt. I recalled how my father had always railed against the system. He was a refusenik when it came to taxes, licenses, permits, paperwork, child support, insurance, credit cards, and savings accounts. Somehow he managed to square his feelings enough to cash his Social Security checks, but paying for a dead bear—that’s where he drew his imaginary line.
Buck decided not to pay his $800 fine—two dollars per pound of bear.
He fought the fine in court. He called one lawyer who said she wouldn’t take the case because she sided with the bear. He retained the services of an old, retired lawyer in town. I pictured the two of them shambling up the steps of a court house, each wearing his only suit, my father managing to look somehow handsome with his necktie knotted thickly against his throat.
The argument was self-defense. The young bear, a menace, not only destroying his hives but also charging down the hill at him. My father was being scrappy, his favorite attitude.
The judge said they could take payment for the fine in the form of a money order.
There would be an appeal. My father pulled out some papers to show me and started shuffling through them. There was a precedent. He thought a lawyer for the Farm Bureau over in Harrisburg might agree to represent him.
I asked my father if he’d learned anything from killing the bear. I asked him if he saw the bear as a metaphor for something else and if he could explain that to me. The questions I really wanted answers for went unasked. I wanted to know who he was, what he longed for, and why he left all those years ago—cleaving my childhood in two.
“Ummmm, Jesus. I don’t see things as metaphors for other things,” he said.
I asked Pat what she thought of all of this. She said she had cooked bear meat before and that it could be very tasty as long as it was young and not old and tough.
My father walked me to the car. We had spent the bulk of the day together. I realized that in my whole life, I had never spent so many hours all at once with him.
We said good-bye, and Pat came out. I waved to them both as I drove away.
I wondered if I would ever see the old man again. I guessed there was a chance I wouldn’t.
I reflexively looked in the rearview mirror, but he was already gone.
I called Emily from the car. “Well, did Buck really kill a bear?” she asked. I told her the story. She sighed and laughed. She only knew her grandfather over the years through my telling, but she said to me, “Mommy, this sounds just like him, doesn’t it?”
“I guess it does. And now I’m wishing that you had been here with me, because I want you to know about some of the stuff you’re made of. I want you to see how some people really live—and it’s not pretty. Sometimes, it’s just one disaster after another.”
Fortunately, Emily and I were lucky enough to be surrounded by family members who were disaster specialists. In our world, it was the women who grabbed shovels and push brooms and swept up after the tempests that periodically blew down our house.
My father doesn’t see things as metaphors for other things, but I do. As I drove back home to Freeville, I tried not to think about the jobs, the wives, the children, he left and the grandchildren he would never know, but about the bees and the honey they make. The honey stands for the sweetness of life, while the bee brings the sting. My father, the self-aggrandizing bear killer, was both the bee and the honey to me.
ELEVEN
This Too Shall Pass
MY FIRST EXTENDED fantasy about taking Emily to college happened when she was three years old. She was flipping out in the parking lot of an Applebee’s restaurant somewhere in Maine at the time. We were on a long road trip from Freeville to Auburn, Maine, and by hour eight, she had had it. She wheeled and careened, running away from me through the parking lot, screaming and throwing herself onto the pavement. The serpentine slow speed chase ended in a row of bushes just next to the windows lining the restaurant. I caught her and tried to hold on as she squirmed and arched her back, like a cat on its way to the vet. Diners watched us through the windows with alternating looks of compassion and disgust as I wrestled my daughter into the mulch.
Mom, who was taking this trip with us, went ahead into the restaurant. When I was finally able to carry Emily in, my mother looked at her granddaughter’s blotchy face and tear-struck eyes and said, “How is she?”
“It’s more like, who is she, and the answer is, Linda Blair.”
I wondered if there was a military academy somewhere in the Maine woods that would accept an oversize toddler with anger management issues. I had it all figured out. I would drop Emily off along with her Beauty and the Beast backpack. Then I would drive quickly away and go to a roadside diner, sit at the counter, and eat a big piece of pie. All by myself.
“It’s a stage,” my mother said. My mother always said that. From her seasoned perspective, everything was a stage. I often thought my mother should write a parenting book summing up her childrearing methods called It’s a Stage. It wouldn’t be much of a book, frankly, because her philosophy pretty much consisted of “This too, shall pass.” Really, it would be more of a one-page handout, like the smeary Xerox of the cabbage soup diet that kept circulating among my friends. My mother’s parenting book would have to wait until she wrote her cookbook, however. She had long planned to share her secrets to country cooking but for now had only the title: After the Cat Has Licked It.
Like any parent who was learning on the job, I lacked two things: experience and perspective. I could imagine Emily physically growing (she was already an accomplished grower), but I couldn’t imagine her changing. I could only picture her as an eighteen-year-old toddler—six feet tall, out of control, careening her way through a tantrum, and wearing Depends.
Fortunately for both of us, Emily both grew and changed, and when the time came to say good-bye I had mastered the basics of motherhood and was deeply in love with her—after all, my inability to find an appropriately grown-up romantic partner meant that the kid and I had essentially been dating for eighteen years. It follows then that I would try to subvert her dreams by urging her to stay home, or at least in the vicinity of home, through her college years. Her response was to be interested only in schools at least five hundred miles away from Chicago or Freeville.
Emily navigated the lengthy passage of college prep with her customary calm. Her high school started revving up starting in the sophomore year, terrifying most of the kids and throwing gasoline onto the burning embers of their anxious parents’ college ambitions. For me, almost every contact with other parents, no matter how glancing, became an unbearable conversation about the ABCs of college, which to me seemed little more than an opportunity to brag about the prospects of our off spring. As the mother of an academi
cally average student who didn’t speak Chinese or play the violin and who had never, not once, built housing for the poor in Costa Rica, I didn’t really want to go there. Mainly I avoided the topic and tried to dodge queries because nothing I had to say mattered, and I was susceptible to sustained—though mainly private—freak-outs.
It started when I encountered a mom I knew in the school parking lot in the middle of a school day. She mentioned that she was taking Amber out of school that afternoon to go see a private tutor for PPSAT test prep.
I didn’t know what the PPSAT was, but I knew what the SAT was, and I took this whole tutoring business as a sign that Emily was already behind. I have spent the majority of my motherhood playing catch-up to the moms who have their acts together, so this sinking feeling was a familiar fist to the gut. This would be a replay of the famous “you’re too late to sign up for ballet” incident of 1995.
When I saw Emily after school that day, I peppered her: Was she preparing for the PPSAT, and if not, why not? Did she need a tutor, and if so, would she go to one? If she didn’t go to a PPSAT tutor, would she end up slinging garlic knots at a Pizza Hut, not that there’s anything wrong with that?
Emily spoke slowly, the way you might to a mental patient. “The PPSAT is a practice test for the PSAT.”
“And? So?” I offered, helpfully.
“The PSAT is the practice test for the SAT,” she said.
My mind was a blank.
“So you want me to get a tutor to practice for the practice test of the practice test?” she asked.
Well, actually—no. Even I know how dumb that is.
My anxiety had a focus: I was worried that Emily wouldn’t get into college. I was also worried that she would. I knew she must leave me. I wondered if I could possibly stop her.
The Mighty Queens of Freeville Page 15