The Fool of New York City

by Michael O'Brien

  “Did she tell you anything else? When was he here?”

  “Late last fall, I think, because the painting wasn’t there at Thanksgiving, when I came for a visit, and she had her stroke in early December. I moved home for good after that, you see.”

  “Katie, do you think your grandmother’s well enough to receive a visitor?”

  “Oh, she’d dearly love to have a visitor. She doesn’t get many. She can’t walk anymore and part of her face isn’t working right, but her mind’s as clear as ever.”

  “I would like to visit her, if I may.”

  “You surely may,” Katie replied. Her eyes grew moist as she suddenly made herself busy wiping off the counter with a rag.

  “So you’re not going back to the city just yet?” she asked in a quiet voice.

  Not yet, I thought. I’ll sleep in the van.

  “No, I think I’ll stay awhile.”

  “Well, that’s fine,” she said. “That’s just fine.”

  In June I moved the last of my belongings up from New York, and began the herculean task of sorting order out of the Franklin place—now my place. Local roofers repaired the tin shingles on the white house, and carpenters raised the fallen porch roof to install new posts. They also buttressed the staircase leading to the upper floor. A major project was a roof for the brewery. Over sturdy new trusses went barn-red metal sheets that did no disservice to the style and history of the venerable old structure. Its stones were still intact and needed only a scrubbing with lye and water. Katie helped me with that, as did three of her five brothers, hearty lads who looked as if they were descendants of the boys who had once lived in these hills, hunting squirrels and deer, their lives pondered by only a few after too long a passage of time, their courage and sacrifice memorialized by bronze sculptures in the declining villages of New England.

  Summer brought an increase of tourists through the valley, not as many as one would meet in other places, but enough to keep Myrt’s Cafe in operation. Busy with her pies and serving, Katie bicycled up to my place once or twice a week to give a day of free labor.

  “This is what neighbors do,” she scolded me, a little affronted by my attempt to pay her. “So put your money back in your pocket, buster.” It was the last time I made that mistake.

  She preferred the tasks I least wanted to put my hand to: painting the rooms in the house, cleaning cupboards, caulking the new window glass, and ridding the place of an army of mice. My trapline, she called it.

  I liked her for her generosity, her perkiness, and her resolve, which was never intense, just focused. Despite what she had said about the “education racket” and “quiet desperation”, she told me she still wanted to be a teacher. She was devoted to the ideas of Montessori and Cavalletti, which she explained at length as we scrubbed the vandal soot from old stones. If people started having children again, she mused, and if a schoolhouse could be reopened in Tadd’s Ford, she would put all her energies into helping rebuild what she called a “rooted life connected to the land and human-scale community”. She believed it was still possible. Clearly, Katie was capable of serious thought, reflective and insightful but never intellectualized. She also joked a lot. She was, for a time, the little sister I never had.

  We twice drove down to Montpelier that summer and spent a few hours with Myrtle. She had heard much about me, I could tell, which she communicated by oblique questions and probing looks, cautious but ultimately approving of my presence in her ancestral valley. Occasionally she allowed herself a quiet, knowing smile that verged on the philosophical and timeless—perhaps the perspective that can be reached only by patient creation of quilts and families.

  With her damaged mouth she asked me about Billy.

  “Your friend, now,” she said. “I liked that boy. You should tell him to come back here.”

  “I haven’t seen him in a long time, Myrtle,” I explained, “and I miss him a lot. But if I ever track him down, I’ll bring him to see you.”

  “Well, that’s just fine. You tell him I’ll make him a right good lemon pie. Or this granddaughter of mine will. He likes lemon custard, doesn’t he?”

  “I think it was pumpkin.”

  “Now, that ain’t exactly right, Max. He liked lemon and pumpkin. I’ll make him both. And Katie here can order in some espresso coffee for him. You tell him, will you?”

  “I will tell him.”

  “That is a first-rate man,” she added. “A legend man. And I don’t mean how tall he is.”

  I nodded. “I know what you mean.”

  “Good to know they still make that kind.”

  I nodded again, but I thought to myself that Billy was who he was not only because of his nature and upbringing but also by his personal sufferings—rather, by what he had done with them.

  Sometimes Katie would bring a picnic lunch to my place and we would walk up the hills beyond the pond, onto the higher, drier ground where the blueberries were ripening. We would sit side by side, leaning against boulders and surveying the receding lines of ridges, dark green to purple to blue to gray dissolving into the sky in the north. Neither of us felt compelled to say much whenever we hiked there. It went without saying that I was beginning to wonder if she wondered if I wondered if she wondered what we two might become together. The subject was never discussed, nor was it broached by any liberalities of touch. For both of us, I think, the question was merely savored as a possible future. Would we be friends and neighbors, or would we become something more? Little by little I wanted us to become something more.

  For the most part, I was too busy for any preoccupation with love. And she was absent most of the time. Yet there were hot nights in August when I lay alone and sleepless on the old brass bed I had purchased at an auction, wondering if she would ever share it with me. I wondered as well over the generations who had been conceived and born and had grown to maturity and old age and natural death upon it. The window of the bedroom I had once shared with Puck was full of stars, and the violins of crickets and flute notes of peeping night frogs evoked profound feelings that I think were more about longing for a constant love than about passion.

  Deciding to delay the restoration of the mill—which might be possible next year, finances permitting—I partitioned the ground floor of the brewery with new and well-insulated walls and ceiling, leaving one section for an art studio, three of its walls unaltered stone, one with a wide window exposed to northern light. I also installed a chimney and an airtight wood heater, which would ensure a snug place to paint during the swift-approaching cold months.

  “We have two seasons in this neighborhood,” Katie quipped. “Winter and preparing-for-winter.”

  Early on, I had purchased a chain saw, and throughout the warm months I cut down the dead trees close to the house, and buzzed them up into firewood for the coming winter. Dry, seasoned by age and weather, they made excellent fuel for the stoves I had installed in the studio and the kitchen. By the time summer drew to a close, I had stacked about twenty cords for each—forty cords in all. My muscles felt perpetually sore, and despite my youth I came to the end of each day overwhelmed with fatigue and ready for deep sleep. Yet it was a good tired, a satisfied tired, and not once during those months did I wake in the mornings with more than a moment’s remembrance of a dream. The dreams, without exception, were good.

  Behind the house and along the pathway to the cabin, wildflowers bloomed, withered, formed seeds, giving way to other species in turn, the foxglove, red columbine, and blue lupine nodding, entangled with roses, the remains of Grandma Dorothy’s old garden run amok. The raspberries and blackberry canes spread rampantly throughout July and August, heavy with fruit. Katie came more and more often to reap the harvest, leaving me homemade pies by way of exchange, or generosity, or—I hoped—undeclared love.

  The cabin out back was scoured and repaired—slowly healed, to a degree, of its darksome memories. I had not yet tackled the condition of the pond, which to the naked eye appeared to be thoroughly natural a
nd sweet, as Katie had described it. Beneath the surface, however, were layers of murk containing the detritus of rage and despair, and who knew what else. For a week in September—sunny, warm, Indian summer days—I hired Katie’s younger brothers to help me dredge the pond. In our swimming trunks, and shod with work boots in case of broken glass, we waded in with burlap sacks, wooden hay rakes, and hoes, pulling up a surprising amount of man-made objects. Three heaps grew on the banks. The first was a mound of brown beer bottles of recent design (Ben’s, I presumed), the second a motley collection of genuine junk, including smashed computer components (my mother’s), rusty tin cans, broken glass objects, and such. These I transported in my van to the local municipal dump.

  The third was the smallest, where we deposited anything antique or verging thereon. Numerous medicine bottles surfaced, many from past centuries, smoky with age and filled with dirt, their embossed letters testifying to the popularity of what we might call snake oil remedies. To these were added clay and ceramic pots of quaint design, usually with only a crack or a chip to hint at why they had been discarded. I wondered at first over the country habit of depositing trash in a water source, for there seemed too many objects here to explain them as accidental losses. Had the pond once been a family dump? Had it once been a dry hollow? I reminded myself that in the days before garbage collection and public dumping grounds, each family dealt with its own refuse in whatever manner they thought best.

  Not content with these finds, the enterprising brothers decided to dig deeper into the muck. They took turns walking back and forth endlessly, up to their necks at times, exploring the entire bottom with finer rakes and sieves. Though the pond was a stone’s throw across and half again longer than its width, it amounted to a good deal of square footage and demanded an investment of time and patience. The treasures brought up from the depths proved to be well worth it. There were horseshoes and square hand-hammered spikes; parts of farm implements of ingenious, mysterious design; three blades of strap-on ice skates; several brass spigots; the long blade of an ice-cutting saw; and a ring of old-fashioned keys. There were also a few heavier items, such as stove trivets and boat-shaped weights for ironing cotton clothes. Finally, and most significantly, the boys found dozens of silver coins blackened by tarnish, with dates and features still readable. Most were from the nineteenth century, though three large ones were from the late seventeen hundreds. It was an astonishing find, and though the boys offered them to me as the rightful owner, I insisted that the treasure was theirs.

  As I pored over the antique items, cleaning them by the water’s edge, I happened to glance into an enameled kettle. Sitting in its muddy bottom were two gold rings. Later I mailed them to the people who manned one of Billy’s soup kitchens, requesting that the rings be sold and the money used to feed his street friends.

  The autumn turned glorious, the hills changing at a leisurely pace with successive waves of red and gold and yellow and purple. Light itself was transformed, alternately crystal clear and hazed with wood smoke. I sometimes wandered in the woods with my portable easel under my arm, and sat for hours making painted sketches on small pieces of hardboard, planning to work them up into larger pictures during the coming winter.

  One whole afternoon I sat on a massive, lichen-covered rock at the height of land, working on a painting of a sugar maple flaring crimson against its background of tinted hills and azure sky. At one point I heard a little cough behind me, and fearing it was a black bear, I jumped up and prepared to bolt. But it was Katie, sitting in the grass about ten paces away with a berry pail at her feet.

  “Oh, I didn’t want to interrupt you,” she said with an apologetic dip of her head.

  “You’re not interrupting me,” I said, overjoyed to see her.

  “May I look?” she asked.

  She knelt down on the rock beside me and closely examined the painting. I expected she would give it a quick glance and then offer a standard compliment such as, “It’s pretty.” Instead, she kept on looking, and then sat down and looked some more. I began to wonder if she didn’t like it, or thought it was nothing more than calendar art.

  At last she turned her eyes to me.

  “You love this tree, don’t you?” she asked.

  “Uh, yes, I guess I do,” I said.

  “It shows. What you feel for it is all here.” She paused. “And you understand light.”

  She returned to the painting while I absorbed this.

  “People look at things and never really see them,” she went on in a reflective tone. “No flower, no sky, no tree is entirely like another. Each marvel in the world has its own place and character, its own beauty. And you respect it as something unique and glorious.”

  “Do I do that?” I asked with a smile, at first amused by her seriousness. Then struck dumb by it.

  “Yes,” she said. “You do.”

  I didn’t see Katie for a couple of weeks as she harvested pumpkins in her family garden, and boiled them, spiced them (hopefully with not too much nutmeg), and canned them for next year’s pies. In early October she and I took a daylong hike up the mountain behind my house, for the first time following the creek to its source in a convergence of springs near the top. There we picnicked and said little, gazing out over the ranges, content to rest in each other’s company. At one point I reached for her hand, and she let me take it. Suffice it to say that our hands stayed united until we took leave of each other, hours later, at the end of my lane, where she hopped onto her bike and cycled for home, looking back at me with a smile. I was still waving good-bye when she rounded a curve and was gone from my eyes. Immediately I began yearning for her next visit.

  I was invited to share Thanksgiving dinner with Katie’s family. They lived on the outskirts of Tadd’s Ford in a three-story clapboard house firmly planted on its fieldstone foundation, with its back to their hundred acres of pasture, garden, and woodlot. Considering they were a family with six children, among whom were five hearty boys with enormous appetites, I could not begin to guess how they made enough money to survive. I presumed there was income from the fiddles Katie’s father carved and lacquered in his shed, and from the hand-planed refectory tables and Shaker chairs he built. Her mother made quilts and sold them at the cafe in the summer, and drove a small yellow bus for the remnant of local children who commuted to a school in a town ten miles away. The family must also have received a stipend for managing the little post office in the cafe, and doubtless Myrt’s itself showed some modest profit. In any event, they were prosperous in a personal way, though not in the line of possessions.

  I liked her parents very much. They were uncomplicated people who could surprise you with an insight or a carefully considered word. Their humor was gentle, their conversation was of the taciturn Vermont variety, kindly but not inclined to arrive at hasty conclusions. Their eye, so to speak, was turned to the lessons of the earth and the seasons and the endless marvels of fate and grace and nature—the intermingling of phenomena, the surprises to be found in the ordinary.

  That weekend the house and table were full of the vital uproar of youth. An older brother and his wife were present with their three children. Another older brother, studying at a nearby college, had brought his girlfriend and two foreign students. Katie’s siblings all played musical instruments, mainly fiddle, accordion, and an out-of-tune upright piano. Katie played a dulcimer that her father had made for her when she was a little girl. The singing and camaraderie went on into the wee hours of the night, long after the old folks had gone upstairs to bed. By the time I left to drive home, the sky was paling in the east and guests were spreading sleeping bags on couches and the rug in front of the fireplace. The foreigners, an African and a South American, both of them aficionados of beer, begged me to show them my “brewery”, which I did the next day.

  The snow began falling after Thanksgiving, and I tucked myself in for a long winter. Painting in the studio each day filled my hours, though I should say that this expression is not precise.
The hours were neither endured nor measured nor filled. They had become my friends, time itself a boon and blessing. There was always something new: the last of the Canada geese winging southward, high up and honking; the cries of blue jays arriving to squabble in the woods; the visit of cedar waxwings passing through, gorging for three days on the wizened crab apples in the neglected orchard.

  I was dazzled by the ever-creative displays of color that appeared in the sky before sunrise and sunset. The full moon rose, casting blue shadows of branches through the night woods. I came to love the cycling of the moon and the constellations revolving around the dependable polestar of the north.

  All sounds were cleaner, sharper than the background cacophony of the city. The crunching snow beneath my boots. The snapping of morning fire in the cookstove. The sighing in the trees. Owls hooting in the woods. Strong wind or deep freezes made the house creak and groan, as old houses should, as habitations long loved will do.

  At one point I swept the edge of the pond clean, and stepped out onto the ice. It crackled deliciously, fractures spreading around me in a concentric web, and I smiled. Good memories from of old merged with this newly forged memory of victory over terror, creating a new thing.

  On the morning of Christmas Eve, I found a small blue spruce higher up on the mountain, cut it down, and brought it home for the parlor. I made popcorn strings and colored paper stars for its decoration. It wasn’t exactly a work of art, but it was lovely and it was mine. In the afternoon I dug the van out of a snowdrift at the end of the lane, and drove down the other side of the mountain to Graniteville. From a pay phone there I called Robbie and Helen to wish them Merry Christmas. They would be driving up here for New Year’s, I knew, but I wanted to tell them how much they meant to me, and how I wished we were together now.

  “I love you more than you will ever know,” I said.

  “We know,” they answered, each in turn. “We know.”

  In the evening I drove over to Tadd’s Ford and shared a frugal Advent meal with Katie and her family. Later we all went to the little country church where they regularly worshipped. Katie stood and knelt and sat beside me throughout, dignified and recollected in her forest-green duffel coat, with her shining brown hair plaited down her back. She turned the pages of the hymnal, leaning into my arm so I could read the lyrics with her. Her voice was melodious, with shimmering depths of womanhood in the lower notes. Now and then she glanced at me with a reassuring smile. Don’t be a stranger here, her eyes seemed to say. Don’t feel left out. We’re with you.