Idyll Banter (2003)

by Chris Bohjalian

  I said I would. I was surprised my mother's doctor had painted so rosy a picture, but I assumed he knew what he was doing.

  My father had the angioplasty that night, and by July 6, we were together as a family. We all took comfort in the idea there was still room for hope, and I know at least twice I said something to my mother about "that pneumonia scar in your lungs."

  I didn't believe for one moment it was a pneumonia scar, but I did believe this was what she had been told. I was wrong: My aunt told me later that given the questions my mother had asked the doctor that day in his office, he had decided to be candid about the progress her disease had made and honest about her chances. He had told her that afternoon what he had told my father that morning.

  And so when I spoke to my mother of pneumonia, we'd come full circle: She had lied to my father so he would have one less thing to worry about in the hospital; he--at once hopeful and disbelieving--had passed the story along to me; and my brother and I had then brought it back to her. As a family we've never been particularly good communicators, but it has never been for want of love.

  My mother never had that CAT-scan, because her lungs filled so quickly with water. By the time she went to the hospital, her cough prevented her from lying flat enough for the machine to record an image of the intruder inside her.

  She died in the hospital on a Sunday morning in July, moments after my father arrived. Her nurses were astonished that she had made it through the darkest part of the night, and said they thought she had hung in there for her husband. She died in his arms, a small smile in this case a surrogate for her salute.

  Chapter 5.

  FARMERS FLETCHER AND DON BROWN KNEW HOW TO GROW COMMUNITY

  EARLY DURING THE morning one day last month when Fletcher Brown, eighty-six, was going to be buried in Lincoln, his son-in-law, Claude Rainville, wandered past the cemetery and noticed an excavator beside his father-in-law's plot.

  The hole beside the machinery was massive, and for a moment, Rainville smiled at the notion that his father-in-law, with pharaoh-like preparation, was going to bring his beloved John Deere tractor from this life into the next.

  Of course, it was merely a boulder the size of a Volkswagen that was the reason the excavator was parked there that morning. Nevertheless, Fletcher had loved the time he spent on his tractor mowing the fields around town, moving great piles of earth and carting colossal tanks of sap to the family sugarhouse through snow and mud in the spring.

  And though Fletcher had been too sensible to have that tractor buried with him, he had allowed himself a bit of levity when he was planning his funeral: His coffin was a John Deere shade of green and the casket was festooned with the company's iconic leaping stag on the brass plates on the corners.

  Often the funerals for the very old are intimate affairs because so many friends have passed away, and there are only children and grandchildren and a smattering of acquaintances in attendance. This was not the case at Fletcher's service last month--nor was it the case last year when Fletcher's brother, Don, died. That funeral, too, was an uncommonly crowded event.

  Though the Browns had outlived many of their friends, it was a testimony to the way they had lived their lives that the church sanctuary was packed when it was time for us to bid them farewell.

  A village loses something when people like Fletcher and Don pass away. We lose the tangible immediacy of their stories, such as that moment five decades ago when Robert Frost tried desperately to convince Fletcher to sell him his farm with its panoramic views of Mount Abraham. That tale, and the details of their conversation, will soon fade into myth.

  We lose the knowledge of how life has changed: what farming was like before bulk tanks, what Lincoln was like before electricity. Don Brown remembered well what it felt like to bring in a wagon of hay when the wagon was pulled by a pair of field horses, and he would stand atop the bales with the animals' long reins in his hands.

  Fletcher and Don were not simply good men--generous with their time and their wisdom, their personalities rich with the irony and wit that can only come from decades of winters in this New England tundra--they each understood the value of community.

  Fletcher Brown loved that tractor of his, but he loved it most when he was using it in service to his neighbors: excavating the dirt around the foundation of the Old Hotel, for example, when his friends Dave and Donna Wood were renovating the inn in Lincoln last year. Don Brown savored his years owning the Lincoln General Store, but he once told me that what he enjoyed most was the opportunity the job gave him to see his neighbors daily.

  When Don's son, Jim, was eulogizing his father last year, he wore his father's sports jacket because of the metaphoric significance the blazer held for him: A torch was being passed from one generation to the next.

  Community is a word that has meaning because of people like Fletcher and Don. When we worry that the threads that link our communities are fraying, it is often because individuals like the Browns have passed away, and we--younger generations--have become so absorbed with ourselves that we have forgotten our friends and our neighbors.

  The Browns let no one around them remain a stranger, including this urban emigre from Brooklyn, and they left no friend alone who needed help. That is a wonderful legacy to leave a town.

  Chapter 6.

  A FAMILY'S FAREWELL TO TIGER

  IN THE WOODS beside the Gale family's sugarhouse is a small paddock, empty now for almost a month. On a particularly glorious Saturday in October--the leaves on the sugar maples glowing neon yellow in the sun, a dusting of white at the top of Mount Abraham, the sky above both a crisp and deep blue--the horse who'd called that paddock home died between a lone rock and a tree in a nearby meadow.

  The earth here in Lincoln is probably filled with the bodies of old Appaloosas and Morgans, and I imagine there was somebody present at the very end to grieve for them all. In the case of Tiger--Gumbo Tiger Lily C, to be precise--there was Jennifer Gale, the horse's thirteen-year-old owner, caretaker, and friend, as well as Jennifer's parents. I think the fact Tiger had mourners is important, but it isn't unique.

  What might be rare, however, is the affecting ritual that Jennifer offered her horse and her family at the end, the moving and meticulous ways she marked Tiger's passing. If a horse has to die--and, according to the veterinarian, it was indeed time for the sickly twenty-eight-year-old to be given her rest--it is good to go the way Tiger did.

  There was the public farewell party Friday afternoon, one of those occasions the soul craves because the emotions are deep and complex: It's possible to juggle sorrow and joy when the horse that will die tomorrow is surrounded today by the children she's known the last years of her life.

  There is young Lynn Sipsey, a seven-year-old whom Jennifer taught to ride atop Tiger. There is nine-year-old Prudence Meunier, who's been friends with Tiger since they were photographed together one day. And there, in a crowd of boys and girls between the ages of six and thirteen, is Nugget Meg, a horse-friend of Tiger's who's come by for one final visit.

  Yet this isn't a dirge-filled, pre-death vigil. The children are dangling from trees, they're jumping from the loft of the Gales' barn, they're racing Tiger and Nugget Meg. They are eating absolutely massive amounts of apple cobbler.

  Are they sad? No doubt; they understand what will happen tomorrow. But they are also raucous and loud and giggling sometimes, such as when Tiger tickles the palms of their hands as she munches the carrots they offer.

  Jennifer's carefully choreographed celebration of Tiger's last afternoon might have made the almost preternatural quiet that filled the next morning somewhat easier for her to bear. The next day, she walked her horse the three-quarters of a mile to the meadow she'd chosen for Tiger's last home and waited there alone for her parents--Don and Jodi--and the veterinarian to arrive.

  Tiger, a leopard Appaloosa, wore a pine bough wreath around her neck.

  As the pair waited, three horses walked by along the road beside the pasture. Tw
o were chestnut and one was white with black speckles. Tiger was pretty near blind at the end, so she probably didn't see them. But she heard them or smelled them or sensed them. She knew they were there. And so she whinnied a greeting of sorts in their direction, and the riders slowed their animals and waved. For a moment they watched the girl and her horse in the field, and then, perhaps sensing their presence was an intrusion, they quickly rode on.

  When the veterinarian reached the meadow, he stood for a long time with a syringe the size of a thermos in his hand. If Jennifer might have preferred his hiding the needle until it was time, she kept the notion to herself; she might have suspected this was no easy task for the vet either.

  Tiger went fast, her body collapsing atop her legs like the canvas seat on a director's chair once the braces have been unclasped. Jennifer stayed with her a moment, her cries considerably softer than her mother's.

  But as Jodi murmured, her words rich with pain and love, "It's easy for her to be strong. She doesn't have to see her daughter's heart breaking."

  *

  PART VIII

  BRIEF EXCURSIONS

  AWAY FROM

  LINCOLN

  Chapter 1.

  UNTETHERED IN SPAIN, SET FREE

  ON ROUTE 66

  WHEN I WAS TEN, my mother slept with two male strangers on an overnight train between Malaga and Madrid. She was always a very sporting woman.

  My family was on one of those airline-sponsored tours in which seventy Americans visit nine cities in eleven days, and an hour is allocated to the Prado Museum and perhaps ninety minutes to the palace and grounds at El Escorial. We were going to try to see virtually the entire Iberian Peninsula in the days before and after Thanksgiving.

  Fortunately, very early into this frenetic picaresque, the Caravel jet--a plane now mercifully retired in which one climbed into the passenger cabin through the bowels at the bottom rear of the aircraft--that was taking us from Malaga to Madrid was unable to land in the capital because of bad weather and had to return to Spain's south coast. Rather than stay with the tour and wait for the flight the next morning, my mother suggested that we all take the 10:00 P.M. train to Madrid, and travel, as she put it, like honest-to-God Europeans.

  We did. We were in a six-person compartment with an ornate sliding wooden door that separated us from the aisle and seats that folded down into one massive six-person bed. Somehow my father, my brother, and I wound up on one half of the compartment, and my mother wound up on the other half sandwiched between two elderly gentlemen who actually wore the sorts of fedoras one expects to find in the pages of a Graham Greene novel.

  They spoke a little English and my mother spoke a little Spanish, and I remember that the three of them were having a grand old time when I fell asleep. More important, my mother and father decided in the dining car over breakfast--a dining car with white linen as crisp as any I'd seen at my grandmother's, and doilies that were just as ornate--that henceforth we were going to be free of the tour, and we were going to discover Spain and Portugal on our own. We would not see as much, but what we saw we would see with some depth. And though my mother did not have the opportunity to sleep with additional men on that trip, as a family we were transported far from our original notions of what we should see and where we would go.

  This is, in my mind, the essence of recreational travel: freedom. (The essence of business travel is, of course, just the opposite. Business travel is all about restrictions, logistics, and connections; about seeing how much you can wedge into a sixteen-by-twenty-four-inch carry-on, and how quickly you can conduct your business and get home.)

  William Hazlitt, the nineteenth-century British essayist known today largely, alas, for sleeping with the family maid, observed, "The soul of a journey is liberty."

  If Hazlitt's words have not actually become my mantra when I travel, they certainly reflect with uncanny precision both the joy I experience on the road and the method to my madness. Last year when my wife and I were in Scotland, we missed the benchmark palaces in Edinburgh and Inverness, but we managed instead to stumble across the haunting castle ruins of Dunnottar in the east and Stalker in the northwest.

  Castle Stalker sits on an island no more than two acres square, perhaps a quarter mile into Loch Linnhe. It is uninhabited now, but on the shore is a railroad track that disappears straight into the water. We caught a glimpse of one of the castle's towers while traveling in our rental car behind a bus on a narrow coast road; the bus continued on, but we turned around. We asked permission of the man who lived in the house on the shore to cut through his property (the gate for his sheep was temperamental, he warned us), and followed the tracks to the pebbly beach opposite the medieval castle's remains. We picnicked there, alone on the shore with the view of the fortress to ourselves.

  Dunnottar is more of an archaeological restoration project than a standing castle, but the cliff-side remains--enshrouded by the sort of soupy fog for which Scotland is justifiably famous--are well marked (including the dungeon, which was actually aboveground and offered a fine view of the North Sea if you didn't mind spending your life stooped to about half your height).

  There I met a Scotswoman who loved the United States. "Someday I hope to meet someone from Seattle," she said. "I love that TV show Frasier, and that cute little dog they named Eddie."

  The truth is that whenever my wife and I travel for pleasure, we travel with a limited itinerary at best. When we drive that great American Mother Road west, Route 66--as we have three times, because my wife is a photographer--we know that we will start in Chicago and we will arrive in Santa Monica, California, nine or ten or eleven days later, but other than that we've little idea where we will be on any given day.

  Our favorite trips have always been like that: They are journeys in the best sense of the word, in which every morning is a mystery and each afternoon a surprise. One night we are in Shamrock, Texas, with its ribbon of old road and ceaselessly optimistic boosters who believe that someday the panhandle will indeed become a beckoning gateway to the Lone Star State. Another night we are in Kingman, Arizona, with its views of the stark Hualapai Mountains to the west, a range that grows salmon-colored at sunset, with a glorious yellow halo skirting the peaks.

  Likewise--and this has become very important to us--no one else knows exactly where we are, either, which further deepens the sense that we are, for a change, untethered.

  Grown-ups, of course, aren't supposed to feel untethered. Perhaps teenagers and college students are when they backpack across Europe with their Eurail passes. Perhaps hikers are when they take on the Appalachian Trail. But not adults who have careers, mortgages, and life insurance.

  This is precisely, however, one of the greatest pleasures that travel can offer: the opportunity to experience emotions that are, figuratively as well as literally, foreign. Certainly it demands a willingness to suspend our compulsive desires for order and exactitude, and the security that comes with a guaranteed room with a guaranteed rate. And, yes, there have been times when I would have given a great deal for the security of a reservation at a Holiday Inn.

  But more times than not I have savored the generous, unpredictable satisfactions that come with seat-of-the-pants travel. Suddenly the bills and the deadlines seem very far away, and there is only the altogether delectable rediscovery of what it is like to see a horizon grown boundless.

  Chapter 2.

  FLIRTATIOUS MINNIE PULLS UP

  HER HEM

  AFTER VISITING MY father this winter, my family and I went to Disney World. There I survived the most astonishing ride on the planet--the amazing "Dad's Empty Wallet," in which every credit card instantly reaches its limit--and then had the surprising experience of discovering that Minnie Mouse had a crush on me. The evidence was overwhelming.

  First of all, wherever I went, Minnie was there. One day in particular stands out. My wife, my daughter, and I began the morning in the Magic Kingdom, and Minnie approached us near Goofy's roller-coaster. We had lunch at Di
sney's MGM Studios, and Minnie sashayed over to our table. And when we were leaving the park in the evening, she appeared out of nowhere from a faux movie set and descended upon us once more.

  In between these three encounters, she seemed to be nearby all the time. We would see her constantly: on the stage by Cinderella's castle, strolling through Main Street U.S.A., signing autographs at a park entrance.

  "How did Minnie get here?" my five-year-old daughter asked my wife when we saw Minnie moments apart in two separate corners.

  "She's stalking your father," my wife said. When our daughter looked confused, she quickly explained, "She has a crush on Daddy."

  "No, she does not!" our daughter insisted. "I've seen her kiss Mickey a thousand times, and I've never seen her kiss Daddy."

  That evening when our daughter was asleep, I told my wife that it was possible we were seeing Minnie so often because there was more than one Minnie. Maybe, I hinted, it was sort of like that Santa Claus thing in the weeks before Christmas.

  "Don't be naive," my wife said, her voice on the verge of deep slumber. "There's only one Minnie."

  "In that case, maybe it's just our imagination," I suggested. "Maybe she's not really trailing us."