by Doyle, Brian
There being nothing more to say, Mr. Shapiro said nothing, and Dave grabbed his stuff and left, yanking the door shut just hard enough to say something without saying anything, and Mr. Shapiro stood by the window and stretched for a while like the therapist said he should every day but he didn’t.
But all the way home, Dave felt a shiver of shame for the way he had spoken to Mr. Shapiro, and when he and Maria were in bed that night and she said what’s the matter, he told her, and she got out of her bed and padded over to his and hung her face an inch over his face and said be tender, and then she padded back to her bed. You know how when you are going one way in a river, and you stick your paddle in and hold it in the right spot for a second, and the whole boat turns? It was like that for Dave after that. Years later he would tell his own kids about those two words from their aunt Maria at that exact moment and how those two words woke him up and cracked something, and this is one of the thousand reasons why your aunt Maria is so cool, although all three of you already know that, don’t you?
44
RIDING AN OLD HORSE through a forest is a lot easier than riding a young horse in the woods, said Mr. Douglas to Miss Moss, raising his voice a little so she could hear him clearly, although he was talking frontward and she was sitting behind him on Edwin. Because your older horse, for example Edwin, knows not to be rushing along headlong but rather to meander and pick and plod his way along and not be knocking his companions off his back with untoward branches and things like that.
Meander is a lovely word, said Miss Moss. That’s a dollar word.
Thank you.
As is untoward. You hardly ever hear that word.
Thank you.
Are we allowed to be riding a horse in the national forest?
Yup. Nor does Edwin leave, ah, evidence. He saves that for home.
A meticulous being.
It’s more that he doesn’t like conducting his toilet outdoors, I think.
Ah.
Like most of us.
Ah.
Although he is meticulous about many things.
Such as?
He likes his hair brushed a certain way.
Ah.
God help us if you brush it any other way. He gets sulky.
Ah.
And he likes his food served a certain way.
Such as?
Mash cooked just so, with honey. You forget his honey, he lets you know about it right quick, and in no uncertain terms, neither. And it has to be a quart of oats—no more, no less. Two carrots, not one or three. And he’s not much for walking in the rain. Snow he doesn’t mind, but good luck getting him out in the rain. He just doesn’t see the point of moist. There have been times when I needed him to drag someone out of a ditch in a thunderstorm, and he just takes refuge in metaphysics. He’s an obfusticator. He gives you that look, you know, and then you know you are in for an hour of debate. It’s like living with a theologian.
How did you and Edwin meet?
Blind date.
Pardon me?
Edwin was a police horse in the city, you see, and they were just about to retire him, and my date and I went down to meet her brother, who was the policeman who had ridden Edwin, to pick him up, the brother, to give him a ride to dinner where we would meet his date, and that’s how I met Edwin. He was just standing there, and we became friends, and I worked out a deal with the policeman. He was happy that Edwin would be up on the mountain. He said Edwin had always liked the mountain but that he, the brother, had never had occasion to get up there with him.
Did you see your date again?
No.
Why?
To be honest, Ginny, I didn’t like the way she used her beauty as a tool. I didn’t like that at all. It seemed selfish and sort of cruel.
What did Edwin think?
Of what?
Of your date.
I don’t think he liked her much, either, but unless you are dealing with food or hair or rain, it’s hard to get a clear opinion from him. He keeps a poker face. I mean, I have known him for years, and I have no idea what he’s thinking right now.
* * *
This is what Edwin is thinking: When are you going to ask her again? It’s past time. Are you going to sit up there babbling about hair and rain or are you going to get down on your knees and ask the poor girl to marry you or what? If it was me, I would be down on my knees already instead of rattling on and on about oats and policemen, you silly oaf. You asked her the once, and she declined, but she didn’t decline permanently. Do you not remember the way she declined? She declined as gently and mildly and sweetly and affectionately as you could ever possibly decline an invitation to marry. That no was about as close to yes as you can get with a no. Me personally I thought she was gently closing the front door and flinging the back door open. Me personally I would be down on my knees as soon as we came across a dry place to kneel down. Do you think a being like her comes along more than once in a lifetime? I could tell you stories of the beings I know who never met the being they should have spent their lives with or spent their lives with the wrong being or mated with the wrong being and had to pay for that mistake the rest of their lives. Do you think you get many chances to ask this sort of question of this sort of being? In fact, if you do not kneel down, I will damn well kneel down and get the whole thing started myself as soon as I find a dry place. As if there’s a dry place on this mountain in May. The only dry places are probably caves or sun-soaked meadows or the hollows of old trees like the one Maria slept in. Fine—the first cave I come across or the first hollow tree or the first high dry sunny meadow I see, I am going to kneel down and make it clear that this is the time and this is the place and this is the person. Fine.
* * *
Maria’s final assignment in first grade, the big spring project due at the end of May, was to portray her domicile, in a medium to be chosen by you, the student. You can, said the teacher, write, paint, draw, sculpt, video, build a model, or portray, in any other form or manner you like, the place where you live. This is a Creative Project, so I am not going to tell you what to do. But I do want you to think about it first, and then work hard at it, okay? Don’t leave it for the night before and make your mom do it or just copy what your older siblings did in this class. Part of this project is to get you ready for next year, when you will be asked to do more work on your own, and part of it should be just fun, a way to see your home in a different light. The one thing I will ask is that you think of your home as a verb, not a noun—think of it as a thing in motion, not just a place. Do you see what I mean? I am more interested in what happens inside your home than in the actual building. Think about that for a while before you do your project.
And Maria did think about it for a long while. She climbed and clambered all over the cabin, on the roof, along the eaves, and in the dark dry crawl space below reachable only through the trap door in the woodshed. She took notes in a notebook and photographs with her cell phone, and she interviewed her mom and dad and Dave, and conducted a population survey of the beings in the house—animal and vegetable—from insects (Arthropoda) to mosses (Bryophyta) to Dad (Paternosotra, said her father), and finally she set to work. First she drew a map to the scale of one foot of house equaling one inch of map, in which she recorded every being’s movement in or on or through the house for one hour on a Saturday morning. Then she drew a second map, noting every being’s lowest and highest physical presence for the same hour; Dave, for example, went from sprawled on the floor by the fireplace to standing on the roof staring at the sky in which he was sure for a moment that he had heard sandhill cranes. Then she drew a third map, noting the places in the house where the most paths crossed the most times during that hour; she labeled these Crossroads and colored them in green. Then she drew a fourth map, noting the places where not a single being had been during the course of the hour; she labeled these The Arid Lands and colored them in red. Then she drew a fifth map, in which she redesigned the cabin so that all the
Crossroads were in the same room and all The Arid Lands were in a closet. Then she added a sonic map, showing, in different color inks, the musical tones of all utterances and voicings in the house over the course of the same hour. To this she added a recording of each tone, captured on a thumb drive. Finally, she wrote a two-page essay called “A Poem Without Any Words” about all the places in the house that she loved because beings she loved were somehow connected in the most subtle and gentle ways to those places—the place on the wall next to the thermostat where her dad leaned his right hand as he used his left to turn the heat down at night, so that after years of turning down the heat there was a gentle vertical poem on the wall written by thousands of nights of turning down the heat; and the tiny poem on the headboard of her bed in the bear’s den where the finch rubbed its beak every evening before going to sleep; and the infinitesimal penciled poem on the frame of the porch door where Dave had written his rising elevation over the years; and the gentle sag in the couch like a cupped leather palm where her mother had fallen asleep curled like a cat every third night or so for years; and the tiny nick in the kitchen wall that was the poem of the frying pan kissing the wall when you hung it up after cleaning it and it swung and tinked the wall once before coming to rest; and many other things, too many to list here, for eventually paragraphs have to end, even the most warm and lovely and riveting ones, like this.
45
THE UNABLED LADY LIVED ALONE, for complicated reasons having to do with money and love and loss, but another woman came every morning to help. This was Mrs. Simmons, who was about the same age but had a body that moved more freely than the Unabled Lady’s body did, so Mrs. Simmons did the laundry and cooked a bit and cleaned the bathroom and windows and did things around the house that needed to be done. She was not a nurse, quite, although she was a competent and gentle assistant in moments of medical and physical stress. She was not a caretaker, either, quite, as her service to the Unabled Lady was recompensed partly with money but also with vegetables from the garden and a share of the gifts that occasionally came the Unabled Lady’s way through the largesse of the community, such as elk tenderloins and deer burger and the occasional huckleberry milk shake, and rides to the city and homemade ale and pears and cherries from the vast orchards to the north and east of the mountain, and books from the library’s overflow sale, and one time an American flag with only forty-eight stars, which the Unabled Lady and Mrs. Simmons traded back and forth every few months just for fun, taking turns hanging it proudly in awed celebration of and gratitude for—as the Unabled Lady liked to say—Mr. Thomas Jefferson’s skills with the first draft and Mr. Benjamin Franklin’s skills as an editor thereafter.
Mrs. Simmons came every day but usually only for a couple of hours, as she had three other housecleaning jobs per week, and it should be said here, before we go any further in this sentence, that she did superb work. She never rested at all but filled her two hours thoroughly; as she often said, there were always more things to be done than you could possibly do, and sitting even for a moment allowed old weary in. You best keep in motion, as she said, so as old weary cannot get a toehold. Old weary is a slippery thing. It is the most amazingly patient of things. It will get you in the end, anyways, but if you keep in motion, old weary cannot get footing. One thing I have learned in life is just that. Old weary will take you in his arms eventually, but you got to dance and fence with old weary until then. O yes. Old weary is so polite and gentle. He is so warm and friendly that you want to just lie down and say alright, old weary, you have your way with me; I am ready for you. But when you do that you will be dead, and when you are dead you just cannot get your work done, and that is a fact.
Mrs. Simmons had a number of unusual convictions about life, one of them being that no person of sense would drink water from a faucet or hose or tap, because who knows what is inside those pipes and what mutant germs are living in there having sex, and besides, snakes can get in there, you know, that has happened. So Mrs. Simmons, when thirsty, drank from the clear cold water that the Lord Himself Bless Jesus provided us poor creatures of the soil, which is to say creeks and springs and rivulets and even sometimes the river when it was not gray with snowmelt in the late spring. So it was that at the end of her two hours today, Mrs. Simmons does kneel by the little friendly creek that marks the edge of the Unabled Lady’s yard, and she leans down to slake her thirst, having earned refreshment ten times over by the sweat of her brow and the honesty of her labors and the kindness of her heart, and something breaks inside her chest, and all the parts that have for the last sixty years worked relatively fine with only the occasional soreness and pain do now stutter and altogether halt, and Mrs. Simmons leans ever so slowly down and down into the creek, and her nose touches the water, and then her lips, still pursed to accept the clear cold water that the Lord Himself Bless Jesus provides, and then ever so slowly the rest of her face, and then her head, and then her neck and the first few inches of her chest and shoulders, but then old gravity calls a halt to the proceedings, and there, with her face and head beneath the surface of the creek and her eyes open and amazed at what they saw last in this life, rests what used to be Mrs. Simmons. Old weary has come at last.
* * *
The Unabled Lady did not notice Mrs. Simmons in the creek for quite a while, being absorbed in a piece of music at the piano that might under the proper circumstances grow into something like an oratorio; also she and Mrs. Simmons were quite comfortable with the idea that each could quietly do her work in another room without having to be constantly bantering and nattering about nothing and its second cousin, as Mrs. Simmons said. So it was twenty or thirty minutes before the Unabled Lady looked up and checked the time and did not see Mrs. Simmons in the kitchen or hear her in the bathroom or hear the squeak of windows being cleaned or hear her humming in the laundry room. Odd, she thought, and she wheeled away from the piano to the window to see if Mrs. S. was puttering in the garden, though it seemed early for that yet, this high on the mountain. And then she saw Mrs. S. kneeling by the creek, and she knew.
She was so still, as she told the policeman later. She was never still.
The Unabled Lady had a cell phone; sure she did. Who would be without a cell phone these days, especially in her situation? Of course she had a cell phone. But, she slowly realized, the phone was in Mrs. Simmons’s right-hand apron pocket. Mrs. Simmons was in the habit of calling her oldest daughter when she was finishing a shift, just to rest that blessed child’s mind about her ancient toothless thoughtless mother, and often she would make this call outdoors, partly for the ostensibly better cell reception and partly so as not to disturb the Unabled Lady at the piano.
So, then.
Listen, we have all read epic adventure stories. We have read them all our lives and had them read to us, and we have or will read them to our children and very probably will have them read to us again when we are near the end and old weary is reaching for us also. But consider how climbing a mountain, or grappling with a bucking boat or bronco, or wielding a sword or wand or gamma gun, is a lot easier when you have legs and feet under you for general balance, and then consider that the Unabled Lady does not have any legs and feet anymore for reasons having to do with cocktails and cocaine and cars and then a slow dying of nerves in the body, and now she needs to get from the house all the way up a steep uneven rocky trail not six inches wide, lined with dense fern and bramble and currant and snowberry, with not one but two fallen fir trees across the trail, each one fully three feet in diameter, before she can reach Mrs. Simmons’s right-hand apron pocket and call for help. Consider the next hour and four minutes—for it will take the Unabled Lady an hour and four minutes to traverse the hundred yards between the moment she sits in the window, steeling herself, to the moment when ever so gently she wraps her arms around Mrs. Simmons and pulls her from the creek and folds Mrs. Simmons onto a little bed of moss on the bank and then calls the police and then collapses exhausted and sobbing next to Mrs. Simmons in such
a way that their faces are both looking up at the sweet wild blue of the sky—as one of the greatest epic and courageous adventures of all time. Consider what it might feel like to lower yourself out of your protective chair and down onto the moist earth, so recently covered with snow and remembering the cold wet of it yet, and scrabble and roll and haul yourself up a wet rocky tiny trail, your hips and stumps being rubbed raw by stones and thorns, your shoulders burning, your breasts scratched mercilessly by the bark of the fallen trees, your jacket caught and held by branches, your shirt torn and stained. Consider what it might be like to stop, exhausted and sobbing, after making it over the first fallen fir and having to pee so badly from shock and fear and despair that you just do, right there, into the fir duff, and then you crawl on up the trail, dreading the next fallen tree. Consider what it might be like to slip and lose your balance as you haul yourself over the second moist tree and fall heavily on your right side in such a way that your right hand, your strong hand on the piano, is caught under you in your fall and is twisted in such a way that you scream in pain. Consider the desperate strength with which you grasp the body of your friend around the middle and yank with all your might and nothing much happens, for Mrs. Simmons was a substantial woman and you are not, until you scream with rage and loss and haul her bodily out of the creek and fall backwards with her onto the mossy bank. Consider how you weep from the bottom of your soul as you brush her hair away from her sweet lined stern face and fold her long thin arms over her flat chest and reach into her pocket for the cell phone and make the call and talk to the dispatcher and give him directions and then lie down next to Mrs. Simmons, so close that your shoulders touch, and stare at the sweet wild blue of the sky and the way that all the fingers of all the branches are webbed and woven, all reaching for each other all the time. Consider that.
46
MARTIN SAW ALL THIS. He saw Mrs. Simmons bend to drink from the creek and never stop. He saw the Unabled Lady crawl sobbing from the house to Mrs. Simmons and then lie there also in the moss staring at the sky, the two women dripping and silent. He saw the police car arriving and the policemen running and the radio blaring and the emergency vehicles later. By then it was dusk and when everyone was gone he slipped back into the woods to hunt, for he was very hungry, and in May there were new young things and many eggs to eat for a marten who knew where to look.