Testing the Current

by William McPherson

  Nobody cried when Mrs. Farnsworth died. They just talked about her and the milkman, and how she certainly drank a lot of milk. “If Mrs. Matson drank that much milk she might not be in a wheelchair,” Tommy’s father said. Mrs. Matson was an invalid, and the Matsons had no children. She sometimes made curtains for Tommy’s mother, which Mr. Matson would deliver and hang. Their farm out on the River Road was near one that Tommy’s father had wanted to buy earlier that year when he had an urge to leave the Island and his mother’s house and live on a farm. He thought it would be healthier for them all, and that it would give Tommy’s mother a new interest. Although Tommy liked the bleeding hearts that grew in rampant profusion in front of the empty, spooky-looking house, the bleeding hearts and the kerosene lamps were the only things he did like about it. He did not like the way the water tasted when it came out of the pump, although he liked to work the pump itself. Most especially he did not like the cold and smelly outhouse full of spiders. His mother told him, though, that if they ever moved there—and she doubted they ever would—they’d have running water and indoor bathrooms, and they wouldn’t use kerosene lamps. Tommy was sorry about the kerosene lamps, but not the loss of the outhouse. He didn’t know which he dreaded more, going to a one-room schoolhouse in the country with the farmers’ children, or taking the school bus each morning into town. The farm boys who did come to school in town all smelled peculiar, a combination of wet wool and spilled milk and horse manure, and they wore boots all winter long, indoors and out, and they were rough. His teacher, Miss Case, said they never changed their socks, and she would send them home with notes to their parents, telling them to please see that the boys had clean socks. The girls were dumb.

  His mother told him not to worry. If they did get the farm, it would be a long time before they moved there, and even if they did he wouldn’t have to take the school bus every morning, although he would have to carry his lunch. And he wouldn’t have to wear boots, either, but could wear his regular shoes, and of course he’d have clean socks every day. Nonetheless, Tommy was relieved when his father got over that notion and they returned to the Island for the summer as usual and he started second grade from his house in town. So was his mother. She never wanted to be a farmer’s wife, she said. “It keeps Mrs. Matson at home,” his father said, and his mother replied, “Yes, in a wheelchair. Do you want me in a wheelchair, sewing curtains?” Well of course no one wanted his mother in a wheelchair. What a terrible thought, to be like Mrs. Matson, or Mrs. Henderson, who didn’t even have any legs. He’d rather his mother were like Mrs. Farnsworth than like that. Tommy always liked Mrs. Farnsworth. She had a wonderful cottage on the Island, and in town she lived in a dark old house on Elm Street, full of heavy furniture and lamps with fringed shades. She burned the lights day and night, as if she instead of Mrs. Sedgwick owned the Edison. She was always nice to Tommy when he came there with his brothers, who were friends with her son Nick. Nick was a year older than David and a year younger than John. Mrs. Farnsworth was sometimes Mrs. Kingsfield, and Nick now called himself Nick Kingsfield, although he had been Nick Farnsworth. Nick’s father was Mr. Kingsfield, but Tommy had never seen him. He had moved away many years before. Mrs. Farnsworth’s parents were Farnsworths too, and they had lived in the same big house until they died, also a very long time ago.

  Sometimes it seemed to Tommy as if everything had happened a long time ago, and that his world was peopled with as many shades of the dead or the missing as with the living. Mrs. Steer’s lithograph of George Washington had come from the Farnsworth house when Mrs. Farnsworth was selling some of her things, as she did every once in a while because she needed extra money and couldn’t touch Nick’s. She couldn’t break her father’s will. She couldn’t even get Nick’s allowance raised. “Fortunately for Nick,” Tommy’s father said. Nick’s money came from old Mr. Farnsworth, who had made a fortune in Calumet & Hecla before it collapsed. So did Mrs. Farnsworth’s, but she’d spent hers, a lot of it on Mr. Kingsfield, who according to Mrs. Steer was a fortune hunter from Brooklyn, but charming. When Tommy asked his mother why Mrs. Farnsworth wasn’t Mrs. Kingsfield, she told him that Frances liked her father’s name. “It was a fine old name,” she said. The name business was completely mystifying to Tommy but he liked Mrs. Farnsworth anyway. She reminded him of Mrs. Slade because she smoked, too, and also called the milkman by his first name, which was Andy. Mr. Matson called her Frances, and he called Mrs. Slade Max. In Tommy’s family the milkman was always Mr. Matson, although Tommy, when he saw him at the Slades’, called him Andy too. He wouldn’t hear of Tommy’s calling him Mr. Matson then.

  Nick had gone to military school and Tommy’s mother said he had beautiful manners. Tommy liked Nick, and so did his parents. Nick had a hard life, his father said, although until his mother died Tommy didn’t see what was so hard about it. It wasn’t as if they were poor like the Malottes, and he didn’t think his parents felt sorry for them. They never said the Malottes had a hard life, though it seemed to Tommy that they did. They even had to raise their own vegetables, and until Mr. Malotte died they kept rabbits to eat. Probably they should have had the farm, Tommy thought; then they could have kept cows, too, and Paul could have milked them.

  Nick always called Tommy’s father “sir,” and he would say “Yes, ma’am” to his mother. Tommy thought that calling his mother “ma’am” was fairly strange—the word made him squirm—but she liked it. Tommy himself couldn’t get the word out of his mouth, and “sir” wasn’t much easier.

  Nick Farnsworth came to Tommy’s house that Thanksgiving, and he said “No, sir” and “Yes, sir” to the older men, and “No, ma’am” and “Yes, ma’am” to the older women, and especially to his father’s Canadian cousins, Maud and Gertrude, who were spinster daughters of his father’s great-aunt. Tommy had to greet them as Cousin Maud and Cousin Gertrude, and dutifully kiss their papery cheeks, avoiding if possible Cousin Maud’s mole that sprouted long hairs. He didn’t like the kissing, and their brooches scratched. He wasn’t sure they liked it either. His mother called the sisters Tommy’s kissing cousins. He had difficulty thinking of them as cousins at all, because they were so old, older even than his grandmother whose cousins they had also been. The kissing was more difficult, because they couldn’t bend very easily and Tommy couldn’t stretch very far, and he was transfixed by Maud’s mole that he had to concentrate to avoid. They didn’t smell nearly so good as his grandmother, and kissing her had always made Tommy a little uncomfortable, too. Cousin Gertrude was practically deaf, and wore a big black hearing aid around her neck with wires connected to the plugs in her ears. The sisters looked formidable, like craggy fortresses with great unyielding fronts, as if they were all stony bosom from their shoulders to their thighs. They could have possessed neither breast nor bum; it was hard to imagine them with thighs. If Tommy squinted so that he couldn’t see their feet or their heads, they looked the same front and back, solid and impregnable from either direction. Tommy never saw them without their hats or their canes, and their hats, like the sisters themselves, were striking and almost identical, like great predatory birds—feathered wings flapping at the air, claws embedded in their skulls—who in a demented moment had seized on these two old ladies in their long dresses and their canes and were hanging on for dear life. Except they were dead, like the ancient animals they wore around their necks, spineless furry creatures with tiny flapping feet, beaded eyes, and narrow muzzles that snapped shut on their own tails.

  Sometimes, but especially in the fall, it seemed to Tommy that he came from a very bloody race: old ladies encased in dry skins and topped by stuffed birds, drawing their dusty, lifeless smell from ancient animal corpses; slaughtered creatures served at the table and glistening with pink juices; even their plates were garlanded with heaps of dead game, the tureen and serving dishes—relics of his mother’s mother’s family—with the heads of living animals whose mild eyes stared at him from beneath the glaze. Tommy imagined his father—he wasn’t old enoug
h to go hunting from the camp so he could only imagine it—tracking the deer through the dark forest, following the spoor, finger loosely clasping the trigger of the rifle he had carefully cleaned and oiled until it gleamed, waiting to fell and gut the animal that this Thanksgiving Day was hanging by its heels, belly slit and ribs wrenched open, from a rafter in the garage behind the house, awaiting the knives of the butcher. The rifle itself, with its steely blue barrel and burnished stock, was the same kind of lever-action Winchester the cowboys had used to shoot buffalo and Indians on the prairie. His father had told him that as he let him run his hands along its wooden stock and feel his own small finger on the cold trigger. Tommy thought of tramping silently with his father and mother through the dappled woods and sunlit hills that smelled of autumn, flushing the ruffled grouse from its cover which his father would then bring to earth with his 12-gauge shotgun, a much-admired piece with pump action that his own father had bought from V.L.&A. in Chicago and that had a kick, they said, as mean as a mule’s. His father held the gun tight against his shoulder when he fired so that his body absorbed the recoil; otherwise it might have broken his shoulder, which was why Tommy couldn’t fire it: he wasn’t strong enough yet. Once he was allowed to fire his mother’s .410, though. His ears rang and his shoulder hurt all day, and it was decided that he’d better grow another year or two before trying it again. His father could gut and strip the still warm bird without a knife, piercing its throat with his thumbnail and quickly peeling off the feathered skin all in a piece. It might have been a piece of fruit. When the job was done, the once magnificent bird looked very puny, as if all its flashing life were contained in its plumage. The birds, too—not the grouse but duck and geese—were hung in the garage to draw, and the remembered sweetness of blood and oily feathered wetness at this moment filled Tommy’s nostrils, driving out the warm smell of the roasting turkey that suffused the room and the entire big house.

  Earlier that fall, in the black morning before dawn, Tommy had been taken from his bed to accompany his father and three of his friends to the blind they had rented from a farmer whose frozen, furrowed fields lay below the flyway of the ducks and geese coming down from Canada. Tommy stumbled across the fields in the semidarkness, trying to avoid the frozen cowpies and still keep up to the men, to the blind that looked on the outside like an ordinary haystack. He crawled through the small entryway, after Mr. Sedgwick and Mr. Hutchins and Mr. Steer and followed by his father, and he huddled there in silence, wrapped in his mackinaw, enveloped in tobacco smoke and the cold damp smell of earth and wool, watching the sky lighten to gray, the stars dim and extinguish, waiting for the geese to resume their southern flight—like the Sedgwicks who usually went to La Jolla early in the New Year when winter had settled in with all its force. Tommy peered through the opening at the opaque slate skies, straining to catch sight of the birds which, if the hunters were lucky, might drop down to feed and thus be blasted from the sky. This was supposed to be fun, but Tommy didn’t see anything fun about it. It was cold and wet and gloomy. If he moved, his father’s hand would stay him; if he spoke, he was hushed. Nobody could say a word or even move quickly for fear it would alarm the birds, who knew the sound of human voices meant trouble. The waiting was interminable. If this was a man’s world, Tommy thought he’d just as soon remain a boy.

  Suddenly the geese appeared. It was thrilling to see them flying in their majestic V straight across the sky. There was something grand about it, awesome, stately, and magnificent. The sight gave Tommy goose bumps, which made him smile. So this was what they meant by goose bumps. Then, honking as if they had the croup—which his mother had said he’d surely get if his father took him out at that hour, in this weather—they circled above the grainfield and dropped down, great wings flapping, to feed on the stubble. Tommy could sense a change in the men’s breathing. It became shorter, quicker. He listened to the geese moving through the stubble, sporadically clucking, gabbling, now and then a muted honk as if they were talking to one another about the quality of the meal, the state of the weather, their plans for the day’s flight, the length of the journey. It seemed an amiable domestic conversation, like one at his own dinner table when there was company. One of the geese stood apart, not eating but guarding the pack, his head bobbing back and forth, first in one direction, then another until all the points of the compass had been covered and covered again. When he faced the blind, he seemed to peer into Tommy’s very eyes and Tommy was sure that he’d been seen, but the goose gave no sign of it. For a moment the men relaxed a little—half smiling, half awed—as if they wished to capture and preserve this numinous domestic scene so ordinary and so ineffable. The moment was brief. A current ran through the blind—their very heartbeats seemed suspended—and suddenly, as if by some prearranged signal, the men stood as one, the guard gave a wild honk of alarm, the geese lumbered to the air, and the guns exploded in a shattering, thunderous roar. The birds seemed suspended for a moment in the liquid air before they dropped slowly from the sky, feathers floating after them. Smoke curled from the guns. The fumes of spent cartridges filled the air, and the men began to shout and clap one another on the back and laugh and talk at once.

  “Great shot!”

  “What a sight!”

  “How many did we drop?”

  “That deserves a little drink!” Mr. Hutchins pulled out a flask of whisky and passed it among the men. “How about you, Tommy?” he asked. “A little nip to warm you up? It’ll put hair on your chest.”

  Everyone was very friendly, and Tommy’s father, surprisingly, allowed him to drink from the flask. “Careful, now,” he said, his arm on Tommy’s shoulder as Tommy tipped the flask to his mouth, “this is strong stuff.” The whisky burned like fire in Tommy’s throat. He had never tasted whisky before. He gasped and choked and his eyes watered, but he swallowed it. The men all laughed and patted him on the back. “That’ll make a man of you, Tommy,” Mr. Hutchins said. Then they all went out to the field to pick up the dead and dying birds. There were a lot of them; only a few had escaped. The men drank a little more whisky, lit their cigars, and they were home by nightfall, the geese hanging limp in the garage.

  That night Tommy thought it would be good to be rocked in the big old rocker in his mother’s bedroom as his mother used to do when he was little, singing “Bye baby bunting, Daddy’s gone a-hunting, gone to get a rabbit skin to wrap my baby bunting in.” He could hear the sweet thin tune now. But he was going to put away the tattered blanket he loved, with its cool satin binding frayed beyond repair, and he was too old for lullabies and rocking. The next morning, as his mother had predicted, Tommy had the croup.

  Well, it was all a bloody business, right down to the rabbit skin that his father had never actually gone to get, and the golden pheasant feathers on his mother’s new hat, and the shoes Mrs. Sedgwick was wearing now that matched her handbag and were made from the hide of an alligator. Tommy’s family had a dog that his father had wanted to train to go after birds, but once on the Island she caught a duck on her own and tore it to pieces, chewing it up feathers and all in the hideaway she had hollowed out behind the woodshed. She even snarled at Tommy’s father when he tried to snatch the bird from her jaws, but otherwise she was a gentle dog. Tommy’s father was disgusted and said she was ruined for hunting. Once a dog had tasted blood she’d be certain to devour the bird instead of retrieving it. His father was disappointed in her and gave her over to his mother, who kept threatening to get rid of her but so far she hadn’t. She insisted that it was his father’s dog, though everyone knew the dog’s true loyalty was to Tommy’s mother. His father wanted everything to be perfect according to his plan, and when he was disappointed in something, he seemed to feel personally affronted and never even looked at it, as if it had ceased to exist in his mind, which was where it counted. Tommy had seen this happen many times.

  When the Bargers’ dog died, Mrs. Barger had had him stuffed, like the antlered head of the magnificent bull moose that glared balefull
y down from the mantel above the stone fireplace on the Island. Of course, everyone said that Mrs. Barger was odd. Pets were supposed to be buried; prey was stuffed if you didn’t eat it, and the walls of the house on the Island were studded with the dusty heads of buck, the slender hornless heads of doe. They even hung their coats on a rack of antlers beside the door, and at the Sedgwicks’ the severed foot of a deer was nailed to the back of each bedroom door. You were supposed to hang your pajamas on it. The Sedgwicks had a bearskin rug, too, stretched out before the fireplace. If you stepped on the dusty bearskin—something Tommy always tried to avoid—its nails clattered dully on the wooden floor. Mr. Sedgwick liked to point out the bullet hole over the spot where its heart had been. He had shot the bear someplace, a long time ago, and it looked as if it had been a long time ago. The bear’s head was like a rock, its nose dry and rubbery, and its mouth was opened in a perpetual fierce snarl. You could see its teeth and its hard pink tongue, the color of Mr. Sedgwick’s plate—that’s what he called his false teeth, which he often had to fumble with behind a napkin at dinner while everyone pretended not to notice.

  Mr. Sedgwick’s men at the Edison had laid the cable that brought electricity and telephones to the Island from the shore. It was always called the Island though it was not one island but a cluster of them, separated by narrow, swiftly flowing channels and connected by small rustic bridges that the winter’s ice damaged almost every year. The Indians had to repair them each spring so that the islanders could get from one to another without using a boat. The bridges were strung with tiny colored lights that at night twinkled like jewels on the black flowing water, their colors playing and fusing in the current. Each of the islands had a name, too, Indian names, but nobody ever used them. One of them was called Fire Island because in the very old days, before they built the lighthouse, sailors used to burn fires on the beach at a spot still called the Sailors’ Encampment to warn ships approaching in the darkness of the dangerous bend in the river; and another was unofficially named Boomer Island, for Amy Steer’s pet rabbit that was its sole inhabitant until he was put away after Mr. Malotte died. Sometimes they had picnics there. The entire length of the big river was dotted with islands—Duck, Summer, Pleasure, Iroquois, Sugar, St. Joseph’s, Ste. Anne’s, Beaver, Lime, Drummond, Big Whitehead, Little Whitehead, Squirrel—and there were hundreds more in Georgian Bay. But regardless of what the river charts called them, to Tommy and his family and their friends their small wooded cluster across from the country club was known simply as the Island, and if you said you were going to the Island for the summer, everyone knew what you meant, even if the Island was really six or seven. The islanders lived on only three of them. Boomer Island, the smallest, was for picnics and berries and wild flowers, and Fire Island, which was the farthest and the biggest, was for picnics and swimming because it had a beach. Nobody ever went to the others; there were no bridges. The cottages were mostly rambling, shingled affairs, gabled, dormered, and turreted, with screened porches and wooden walls on the inside and big stone fireplaces. Each cottage was different, yet one seemed much like another. The Aldrich cottage, where the McGhees always stayed, was one of Tommy’s two favorites; it was a big log cabin—the only log cabin on the Island—with a Dutch door. The Farnsworth cottage, his other favorite, was a shingled house weathered to a silver sheen with blue trim and a round room in a high turret that Mrs. Farnsworth sometimes used to take him up to. You could see way up the river from that room. Mr. Wolfe’s cottage was interesting because it was full of strange objects he’d picked up in his travels. His work took him to many dangerous places, and he came and went a lot. Sometimes he wasn’t there very much at all, but last summer, the summer after Tommy’s parents decided not to buy the farm, he’d been there the whole time. Mr. Wolfe spoke Spanish, too, and he knew a little Indian, though not the Indian that Rose’s mother spoke. The Wentworth cottage was the biggest, and years ago an Indian had finished the huge living room and the balcony that overlooked it with burlap panels and split birch saplings—like the country club but fancier. The burlap had once been painted red and decorated with rope scrollwork in Indian designs, but the paint was faded now and the rope fell apart if you touched it. It was supposed to be very grand, but it smelled musty and damp and always seemed cold, even on the warmest summer day. Tommy’s own cottage was smaller than Mrs. Wentworth’s. His mother called it the little shingled cottage by the sea, even though the water was fresh and the ocean was hundreds of miles downstream. Tommy’s bedroom was downstairs and faced the woods. He liked listening to the sounds in the woods late at night when the Island was asleep. The Sedgwicks had an island to themselves. Except for Boomer, it was the smallest and contained only their three cottages—the big house with the bearskin rug and a lot of pottery from Guatemala, which Mrs. Sedgwick had visited when the Aldriches were there in the Foreign Service, a smaller house that Mrs. Sedgwick’s mother lived in, and a two-room guesthouse with a Franklin stove that was built out over the water so that if you spent the night there you could hear the waves lapping beneath it and you felt as if you were sleeping on a boat. Tommy loved to spend the night in the Sedgwicks’ guesthouse, listening to the sounds of the water and the transparent, silvery voices that floated so eerily over it, in patches, on calm summer nights.