Cabin
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The mud at the outlet was rich with insects, and scores of goldfinches were provisioning against the long flight ahead. They were late nesters and would be among the last to depart the pond and hillside. I scanned the pond’s edges for the great blue herons and snowy egrets I had seen in the summer. The egrets reminded me of those old-fashioned carpenter’s rulers that were a half dozen pieces of pinioned wood that could fold to fit into your hand or extend up to six feet in length, depending on the need. I saw neither herons nor egrets, and I guessed both were standing in the warm water of a Caribbean cay, maybe picking up shrimp. Ah, Maine to the West Indies! The great coastal sweep from the Maritimes to Martinique was not a watershed, but it was a coherence of natural order, made so by winds, currents, weather and wildlife. Was there a better place on earth than this magnificent littoral? If so, I hadn’t yet seen it. I was lost in one of my Atlantic meditations when I heard the scratchy and guttural yawk of a raven. I looked up and saw it perched on the limb of a big hemlock tree. He was no migrant or fair-weather resident. He and I would share the hillside through the winter.
We continued to work at the cabin on weekends, and in October we put down the floor. I had bought pine boards, ten inches wide, from Lovell Lumber. They were square edged and straight and fit nicely together side by side. When a gap appeared between two boards, we bent the next board tightly into place, using a crowbar as a lever. We drilled shallow holes at the positions where we set the screws to secure the pine boards to the subfloor. This allowed us to countersink the screws, which eventually I would plug with oak pegs. It would be a handsome floor once it was finished. Already, its smooth buttermilk surface transformed the cabin, making it into an almost finished living space. It invited a walk around in just socks. And that is just what I did—I walked around in my wool socks, feeling it underfoot, and then I skated around on the smooth planed surface. I placed a camera on an empty box at the far end of the cabin, turned on the automatic shutter and kneeled on one knee next to Paul at the other end to record our achievement.
The month closed with reds and yellows on the hillside. It had been almost exactly a year earlier that we made our first failed attempt at the foundation. Now the completion of the cabin was within sight.
CHAPTER 8
RESPONSIBILITIES
In the twenty-two years that I was married and living in Maine, from 1974 to 1996, I built a house, a career and a professional reputation. I had moved from being the most junior reporter at the newspaper in Portland to its editor in chief. My life in those years had been a steady professional ascent. I was not famous, but I became a substantial person in my field. I worked hard, stayed late and went into the office on weekends. I was invited onto the boards of community organizations and asked to make speeches. I took my family on vacations to Florida, put my children through private schools and owned a sailboat. I bought my wife a piano and my daughter a horse, and I took my son fishing in Canada. I made an identity as a husband, father and editor. Eventually, it all came undone.
In 1995, the year before I left Maine for Philadelphia and separated from my wife, I would drop by my mother’s apartment two or three times a week in the evenings after work. She looked forward to my visits and made dinners for me. I would sit and watch television or read a magazine while she cooked, and then she 217 would serve me, and we would eat together and talk. I was fortunate then to be earning enough money, as editor of the newspaper, to pay her rent and help her in other small ways. After our dinners, I took her for short walks in the neighborhood to keep her moving and mobile. She held my arm and shuffled along.
By then, I was deeply lonely in my marriage, and these evenings with her provided me with some relief from the silence and tension at home. I said a little about the situation to her, but never fully divulged the scope of my despair. She listened. Things would work out, she told me. Things always happen for a reason, she said. It had been her life’s philosophy: Que será, será—what will be, will be. In these, the final years of her life, I think she was worried about me, as she always had been, but she also was content in her own life. She had her two sons and her grandchildren nearby, a nice apartment, a small circle of friends at church, and she was retired. It was no longer necessary, after fifty years as a beautician, for her to stand on her feet all day long to cut, wash and color people’s hair.
My decision to move to Philadelphia shook her. She never asked me not to move, but I saw the flinch when I made the announcement to her. Even in my forties, I was still her good boy. She knew that my moving meant I would not be coming by for dinners or evening walks and she would see me only occasionally, maybe a few times a year.
She was seventy-three years old then, and it may have been only a coincidence that her decline became more rapid with my departure. She needed a lot of attention. The swelling in her legs grew severe, and her breathing was labored even when she moved short distances. She developed a severe hernia, and because of her overall poor health her doctor advised against surgery. So she lived with it, and the disfiguring presence of it. Soon she needed a walker. Paul was right there in Portland, and he took on the ceaseless work of looking after her.
The first crisis came when Paul was forced to take away her car. She loved the freedom it gave her, but her driving was a danger to herself and others. Paul kept her car parked in a place where she could see it from her apartment window, but he took the keys and disabled the battery. Then her memory began to slip. She started to forget small things at first, like the days of the week, and then bigger things, like turning off the kitchen stove. One night, she left a burner on and a dishtowel caught fire. No serious damage was done, but it was clear that she could no longer live by herself. It fell to Paul to have the face-to-face conversation with her that it was time for her to leave her apartment and move into a senior housing complex where her meals would be served in a common dining room. She would lose her kitchen. Paul searched for a facility, found the right one and persuaded her to move in. He brought our uncles into the transition, and together they paid her new and much higher rent.
My divorce was then under way. The cost of it meant I was no longer able to send my mother checks for her rent. I was sick about it; I had resolved long ago to provide for my mother in her old age. When my marriage came apart, I came apart too. The marriage had been my bulwark against the demons of my childhood—instability, loneliness, fear of abandonment. When the bulwark collapsed, the first thing to go was my confidence. I was unable to make decisions about most anything. I then lost my ability to concentrate—not an insignificant problem as I was just beginning a new job. I was overwhelmed with a general anxiety that came into focus as a feeling that I was spinning downward, toward a life that had no meaning and would end in complete aloneness. None of this made any sense nor could it be justified rationally—it was craziness, pure and simple—but it felt real enough to put me in the hospital with my first episode of atrial fibrillation. That stay lasted seven days at Hahnemann Hospital in center city Philadelphia. The doctors shocked my heart back into a regular rhythm with two paddles while I was under general anesthesia. I left the hospital with singed chest hairs and a three-month supply of blood thinner.
I relate all of this because it explains how little help I was to Paul through the crisis of our mother’s decline. The good son had collapsed in a divorce. Paul had stepped forward and took on all of the responsibilities of being a good son. He had become the reliable one—the one to call when there was a problem.
The demands that our mother’s health put on Paul multiplied over the next few years. He drove her to doctors’ appointments two or three times a week, picked up her prescriptions and organized her medicines in a plastic box with day-by-day compartments. He checked on her daily to make sure she was taking the medicines. Often she did not. As he was attending to her needs, he was working at his job and helping his new wife in her restaurant. Through this whirlwind, he also regularly brought his children to our mother’s tiny apartment for visits in the
senior housing complex, and he dealt with her growing number of complaints. She was getting more cantankerous as she aged. The two of them bickered and argued—just as they had in the old days, except now it was over her health and unwillingness to follow the doctor’s instructions or the rules of her new home. She was as fierce as ever, and Paul could be his rough self too. Sometimes they wouldn’t speak to each other for a few days, but they always eventually resumed where they had left off—Paul insisting that she obey the doctor’s prohibition against eating candy, or she telling Paul not to order her around.
As for me, I called her nearly every day from Philadelphia to check in, and she talked about the children, events at her church, a recipe she wanted to prepare or a food show she had seen on television. She often praised Paul, “I have to hand it to that brother of yours,” she said. “I couldn’t get by without him.” There were no references, direct or indirect, to his being the bad boy anymore. She would occasionally say, “He can be awfully gruff,” and as I listened to her I would think to myself, Under the circumstances, he’s entitled to be a little gruff. When I visited Paul on holidays and asked him how Mom was doing, he would just roll his eyes. It told me everything I needed to know about the two of them. I had seen it all before.
She went from a walker to a wheelchair, her hair had thinned considerably and fluid oozed from her legs when they swelled. Her feet ballooned and were as puffy as pink foam slippers. She had lived her entire life with a single functioning kidney, and that lone organ now was insufficient to the demands that were being put on it. She required heavy elastic stockings to compress her legs, and either Paul or his children would sit on the floor in front of her and do the work of putting them on or taking them off. She was unpredictably flatulent then. If their help with those elastic stockings wasn’t a demonstration of love, I don’t know what is.
One night I got a call from Paul telling me that she had gotten the flu, and it was bad enough, in the context of all her other problems, that she needed to be hospitalized. My heart froze. Had the end arrived? I said I would immediately come back to Maine. He said I could wait if I wanted to, and he would let me know if the situation worsened. His voice was subdued, and it seemed to come from a place very far away. “No,” I said. “I’m on my way.”
The flu came under control, but something worse happened: she picked up an infection in the hospital. She already had it when I arrived the next day from Philadelphia. It had begun as a fever. Its source was a virulent strain of hospital bacteria, and soon it raged through her body. Her temperature spiked and she lost consciousness. Let this stand as a definition of irony: she picked up the illness that would kill her in the place she had gone to be healed. Maybe a doctor had neglected to wash his hands. Maybe a nurse had forgotten to sterilize an instrument. It’s impossible to know. No one at the hospital was in a big hurry to find out.
Paul and I stayed at the hospital around the clock during the six days she struggled against fever and failing organs. We slept on the floor of the waiting room. The many ailments that had conspired decades ago to swell her body finally had converged and undercut her ability to fight the infection. She did not let go easily. She had always plunged into life, often recklessly, and now she was clinging to it tenaciously between the stainless steel rails of her hospital bed. Even with her gut ravaged by some implacable microbe, she wasn’t willing to leave this world without a battle. With the help of machines she had fought death to a stalemate. At one point, swollen from the liquids that had been pumped into her to maintain her blood pressure, which had dropped precipitously, she regained consciousness for a few seconds. Weakly she asked me, “Louis, am I going to die?” I said, “No, Mom. Hold on.” So my last conversation with my mother contained a lie: let this stand as a second definition of irony. Her kidney failed, and the antibiotics dripping into her arm through an IV tube were powerless to suppress the infection. Two days later, a young doctor, a woman with a long white coat, clipboard and crisp professional manner, took Paul and me into a waiting room and said the situation was hopeless.
“I would like your permission to withdraw support,” she said.
“What will happen if we don’t?” either Paul or I asked.
“We will continue to keep her alive, but I don’t think she will recover. The chance is very slight, perhaps one or two percent. We will have to put her through a lot of pain to try to get to that point. If she does recover, her life afterward will not be good. She will spend a lot of time in the hospital. She will not go back to her life as it was. The infection is far too severe. Essentially, she has no intestine left.”
We asked more questions, talked between ourselves, wept, called the doctor back into the room and gave consent to withdraw care. We must have signed papers, but I can’t recall. We were with my mother when her death came later that day. Her breathing slowed over the course of several minutes, and then it stopped. A respectful nurse turned off the monitor over her bed. Paul made the funeral arrangements. His two daughters went to the funeral home and fixed her hair and applied her makeup. The church was full. My daughter sang “Amazing Grace.” I gave the eulogy.
CHAPTER 9
THANKSGIVING
It was a good acorn crop that year. They began falling from the red oaks around the cabin in October. On some days, there was the steady sound of them hitting the ground. Thunk, thunk. Pause. Thunk. The acorn of the red oak contains more tannin than that of the white oak, sharpening the bitter taste, but still a good crop of nuts from these oaks was a blessing for the deer and grouse and even my little friend Pericles. I hoped he was okay. I had not seen him in weeks. Each acorn would have been an armful for him. He would be well provisioned for winter under the rocks by the porch that Billy was sure was an Indian burial mound.
Toward the end of October, Paul and I set a goal for ourselves. We wanted to have Thanksgiving dinner at the cabin. Actually, it was Paul who suggested it. The thought of it had crossed my mind, but I figured it was too ambitious for me to ask of him. But with the mention of it coming first from him, I agreed it would be an awfully good thing and said we should try to make it happen. Paul was famous in the family for preparing big Thanksgiving dinners. He combined traditional dishes with some of our mother’s favorite concoctions—stuffed grape leaves, lasagna, spanakopita and her signature cranberry relish made with walnuts and oranges and a freight-car-load of sugar.
We still had a lot of work to do inside the cabin, some cosmetic, some essential. The interior window trim needed completion and painting. The plumbing was still not hooked up, and in fact we still didn’t have water to the cabin. There was not yet a woodstove for heat or even a stovepipe through the roof. The nights and some of the days were cool now, even cold, and heat would be necessary if we were going to bring people for dinner. The wall between the kitchen and the bathroom was still bare studs. We had to put up Sheetrock to make them separate rooms. There was also the matter of the electrical wiring. The cabin would not be connected to the power line down at the road, so I needed to bring electricity from the outdoor generator (also not yet in place) to the cabin and the well pump in the ground for running water. Paul had the name of an electrician who could help us with the wiring. We would do the grunt work of pulling wire through the studs and outdoor conduit, and the electrician would handle the panel and the connections to the devices.
To get all of this work done, we had to step up the pace. We were speeding along one day, working overhead filling in some of the blank spaces in the ceiling boards, when Paul smacked his thumbnail hard with the hammer. It immediately turned purple and throbbed as the blood from the bruise pushed up the nail. He applied pressure on it to slow the pooling of the blood, but the pain was bad enough to make working difficult. He kept going, but I could see he was having trouble. So I proposed a solution I had learned on a construction job and had once used on myself: piercing the thumbnail to relieve the pressure. It would hurt a bit at first, I told him, but it would then feel immediately better. He a
greed. I sterilized a tiny drill bit with the flame of a butane lighter and went to work in my operating room—the front seat of his truck. Slowly and carefully, I turned a tiny drill bit, about an eighth of an inch in diameter, back and forth with my thumb and forefinger over Paul’s thumbnail to make a hole. “You’re going to know it when I touch the flesh,” I told him. “That’s okay,” he said. “It can’t be any worse than what I’m feeling right now.” The bit came through and the pressurized blood shot over the dashboard and onto the windshield. He wrapped his thumb with a handkerchief and tied it tight.
We installed the trim around the inside of the windows. I had picked a bright red paint for the trim to give the place a cheerful look. The paint store called it tomato red. To me, it looked more like cream of tomato red. This was another controversial decision. Kevin did not approve. “You’re going gay, Uncle Louie.” He favored a dark green, and I saw that Paul was in silent agreement with him. Green was the standard move—the traditional choice. I held firm to the red. A little touch of the fanciful couldn’t hurt, and in the dead of winter, when the days were cold and short, it might do a world of good to enter a cabin with some bright colors. Kevin came around, but then I took a step too far. I picked pumpkin as the color for the trim in the bathroom. To my team, the choice was incomprehensible. Pumpkin? Again, I held firm. Pumpkin was one of my two favorite pies. I would soak in the tub and meditate on pumpkin.