by Paul Zimmer
When I saw him again vigorously striding down the street toward me, I’d think to run away from him once more, so not to be confused. But I did not run. Heath would be smiling, full of enthusiasm and more ideas—and when he talked and looked off into the distance, his eyes were Scandinavian blue like I imagined Wisconsin skies must be.
We tried to make plans. When he described his farm and drew some maps, it seemed possible to me that together we could make the place into a sort of park. We would border our acres of grass and grain with beds of flowers. I would create sculptures to place on the lawns. There would be green, well-tended paths through our woodlands. We would have many children to frolic on our lawns. I imagined we would host soirees for rustic artists and writers. Heath would buy me a piano, and our family would sing together—Berlioz and Gershwin songs—we would tell stories together and gaze out at the grandeur of the seasons on our small estate.
AS I look out now across the fields toward our woods I see the first challenge of the impending winter, snowflakes flurrying, skittering just outside my window on the deck that Heath had built many years ago. Still I do not feel strong enough to rise from my chair and bring in some firewood.
My cassette player is on the table beside my chair. I select a tape and snap it into the machine. If I do not yet have strength to build fire, I can at least have music. I think about putting on some jazz—Duke Ellington, Lester Young? Perhaps something quiet and contemplative like Oscar Peterson or Miles Davis. But instead, in the chill, I select a warm classic—Villa-Lobos, the fourth Bachianas Brasileiras, played by Alma Petchersky, which I’d ordered recently from the Musical Heritage Society. I turn my hearing aids up and close my eyes. Villa-Lobos’s rich, repeating tropical theme would have pleased Bach, I like to imagine, the music crossing and swooping over itself like flocks of jungle birds in the sun. After a while I dip into slumber, and the music engages my dreams. The rain forest becomes an orchestra and Heath and I are dancing in a green salle de bal. Somewhere a phone is ringing.
I awaken distressed. How long had the phone been ringing? Someone from the care home seeking my answer? The phone is silent now. It is cold in the living room, and snow is mounting beyond the deck in the yard outside my window and in the fields and bare branches of the trees. Beyond this I see it is sweeping out to the valley and beginning to cover the driftless hills.
At last I set the lap rug aside and painfully push myself up from the chair, tighten my shawl around my shoulders, shuffle across the room, open the door and step out to the firewood stacked just outside the door. The sudden cold makes me feel dizzy as snow swirls around the house, but I manage to gather up an armful of wood, enough to start warming up the living room. I bring it in to the fireplace, lay the fire with some tinder, and strike a kitchen match. Just the sight of small flames catching and spreading makes me feel stronger.
In a while I will bring in more wood and prepare a bit of supper for myself. It will be a simple meal—perhaps a cut-up apple and a bowl of soup heated from the tureen brought over by a thoughtful neighbor. But I will rest some more before I do this task.
A week ago someone called from the senior home in Soldiers Grove to say there is a room available. I must do something, make a decision soon.
I fear acquiescence and change. This hilltop has become my world. It began as my home away from home, but now it is part of my spirit. How can I leave this place that I have arduously grown to love—this solitude that I in time was able to accept and cherish?
If I leave, where will the music go? Where will I keep my books? Where will I write poems? Where will I paint? Where will the still days of silence go, the mysterious sounds of weather and the seasons, and my own voice talking to itself? This air that is so fresh, where will it go? The birds swooping onto my feeders, and the great trees that I once walked to for visits every day on paths that strung through distant woods that spread now only in my mind as I sit in my chair. Where will they go?
The farm has been closing in around me, the woodland is unkempt and its paths overgrown. The cows have been sold. The fields are untidy, cut hastily by a worker from a co-op farm that rents them. I pay a young man to mow the grass close to my house, but the extended lawns that Heath and I created are wild now with hardscrabble weeds, and my sculptures are swarmed over with vines and prickly ash.
But to give all this up for an air-conditioned, sepulchral room in a building crowded with other elders? There seems to be no decision here, and yet there is a decision that must be made. I have never been brave, yet I was plucky enough to come to these hills years ago—it does not matter now whether I was right or wrong, it is time to reach again into my meager reserve of courage.
IT WASN’T that Heath changed when we first arrived at the farm in Wisconsin, but his focus was redirected. He was once again locked back into routine and custom. I realized quickly that he had no choice—his instincts were overwhelming. His older brother had been caretaking the farm while Heath was in the service and had done his best—but now it was time for Heath to take up the ceaseless work: moving our cows from pasture to pasture, mending fences, cleaning our barns, cultivating and planting hay, mowing, raking, baling the cuttings, milking the cows. He had no choice. The work enveloped him from dawn to dusk.
Heath took such care in tending our fields. As I watched him he was like a poet masterfully cutting his rows of grass—windrowing them as if he were polishing his lines. Then his machine swallowed the rows of hay, and rolled out bales like poems—and the land was cleared again for a short while like a blank page.
In summer I would carry our lunches out to the acres in a basket and join him to sit under a large, solitary oak that had been left standing in the middle of the fields. Heath would be sodden with sweat, seeds and broken stems in his eyebrows and blond beard, but he would gather his energy to chat with me as we rested. In winter I would go and seek him in the barns as he worked with our cows, but sometimes he was so busy and preoccupied he could only speak briefly, his mind and body overwhelmed by duties and chores.
Soon after we came to the farm I recognized that this was what he had been born to. Had he conveniently forgotten these responsibilities when he held me in his arms in France? Had he effaced this from his mind when we were so young? Had he misrepresented? I do not hold any of this against Heath. He loved me, wanted me to come to America with him. That seemed to be all that was on his mind at that time. He was a guileless man, at all times grateful for my presence. I never asked him if he had forgotten.
In the evenings after supper we would retire together to our living room to read, and I would put on some music; Heath would turn the pages of one of his agricultural magazines as I read my books. He tried hard, but before long, in his weariness, he would nod off. I would gently shake him; we checked the windows, turned out the lights and went to our bed.
During our first years together I had two dangerous, almost fatal miscarriages which—in our remote rural environment, many miles from medical care—were such very close calls, frightening us into deciding against further attempts to have children. This was a fact, like many others, that I learned to live with.
Heath and I rarely had time to take walks together, but every day I strolled the ridges of our woods alone, over the weatherworn driftless hills, which had been gently shaped over the eons by the elements and not gouged out by glaciers. I fancied these serene rises in summer, the patient competition of their vegetation, their flush, slow-motion scrambling, feeling the comfort of the cool rustle of trees as I strolled in the green light beneath their canopies. I cherished them in all seasons, their changes, colors, the winds battering, and their snow-laden branches above the deep drifts when the blowing stilled.
I loved the edges of our woods as well, the in-between places where mowers could not reach, so fraught with changing growth and wildflowers, such delicacy through this fervent striving, sometimes the tiniest blossoms appearing on uplifted chandeliers of green stems, or the sudden, petite flowers that lasted on
ly a day or two like reminders of forgotten times, or the weeds that split and spread across each other in intricate green patterns.
But my favorite time in the woods was late autumn, when I could go out by myself in jacket and gloves to shuffle through thick drifts of leaves to look far down our ridge through naked stands.
Many things are revealed about trees when just a few scattered rags of yellow leaves are wagging on their branches. The limbs and crisscrossing trunks record the achievements of summer. Their bare abundance gave me comfort. I could count on their verdure to return after the coming snow and cold.
Then the snow. After the first tentative sprinkles, it would one day rush in to blanch and overwhelm the hills and valleys in sculptured whiteness for months on end, giving face to the winds.
And so the driftless hills were my Eden, in their varied attitudes, my redoubtable kingdom come. This is the place that Heath brought me to so many years ago.
Late in our marriage, one spring day there was a sudden, hard afternoon rain, which passed quickly and gave way to sunshine again. Heath, spreading manure in the fields, had been soaked. When he came in that evening, he stopped outside the screen door to take off his reeking work boots.
When he came in he looked so weary and soiled with his work, smelling like an animal himself, almost embarrassed to be in the kitchen; I went to hug him but he gently held me off and grasped me at arm’s length before bending forward to kiss my forehead. He was shamed to be so soiled. I wrung my apron—then hastened to lift the teakettle as it began to shriek on the stove.
Heath reached around and slipped something from his back pocket. It was a surprise. I don’t know what had prompted him—he’d never before done such a thing—but on his way in from the fields he’d paused to pick a spray of wildflowers for me and wrapped it in a large tree leaf. As he placed the bouquet in my hand he was damp with grime and the whiff of dung. He had arranged the flowers carefully with even some sprigs of green intermingled.
He seemed to be amazed himself by what he’d done—the flowers were such tender, intricate things in his rough, unwashed hand.
My own surprise preempted speech, but I removed one yellow blossom, went to Heath and slipped its stem into the top buttonhole of his soiled work shirt. Before our eyes could meet, I moved to the cupboard to find a Mason jar for the bouquet, filling it halfway with water from our tap. The flowers fanned out gratefully as I placed them in the water. I went to Heath again and leaned to kiss his weathered cheek.
Heath opened large gardens for me when we arrived on the farm, and at first I grew flowers, but over time these gave way to the vegetables we needed. If Heath and I walked together, we walked on Sundays. Then we worked at keeping our paths clear through the woods. When we talked together, usually it was in the evenings after supper, about fertilizer or rainfall or the cost of seed brands. In the early mornings before he left for his work we chatted over coffee about local things, neighbor gossip, dog stories, house problems. Then he would be gone to the fields.
I assisted Heath as much as I could with the farming. I tended small animals, grew the garden, kept the accounts, made our reports to the natural resources department, did the shopping, and ran errands to town. I was not able to work for long hours out of doors in the high heat of growing season, so I stayed in the house, reading and listening to music during those days, and this helped to sustain me while Heath labored in the fields. Occasionally I attempted a watercolor or worked at sculptures that I constructed from baling wire, old bolts and broken parts of farm equipment. I worked at my journal and poems. I practiced at our upright piano and over the years taught myself six Chopin nocturnes. On occasion I would play one of them for Heath as he sat so weary in his chair at the end of the day, and he seemed genuinely proud of me, sweetly applauding when I finished.
I had supper ready on time and Heath was always grateful for whatever I cooked for him; but early in our life together I perceived something—he was uncomplaining, but I could see that he did not favor French cuisine. So I prepared potatoes, soft vegetables and red meat for him, which he ate hungrily in his weariness.
Our life together was not as I had imagined it—but I allowed myself no lingering bitterness. I had no right to feel cheated. Heath had not lied to me. I had romanced and misperceived—had allowed myself to misjudge things, had manufactured my own dreams. We were Adam and Eve—but the serpent had come and gone. And I was far from home.
Heath had no choice but to do the work. I had nowhere to go beyond the farm, no one to talk to, nothing to do but cook, clean, read books, listen to music, work occasionally at my art, and tend the garden. Our rural neighbors—warm-hearted, generous people—do not speak of Mallarmé, de Beauvoir, Poulenc or Vuillard. Western Wisconsin Technical College is not the Sorbonne. I learned to be alone.
But how could I begrudge or be angry with Heath, who had stayed beautiful, loving, and true to his end—when he died of a farm accident, his tractor tipping over on him as he wearily turned a row at the edge of a rain-logged field. He’d grown less careful and alert about such things as he aged and his energies lessened. I found him crushed and bled to death in the weeds. It was the day of our wedding anniversary and we had planned to celebrate that evening with a sirloin dinner at the Driftless Tavern. I will not recover from the horror of his death. Ours was a quiet, misconceived life—but there was love, we did our work, endured and remained devoted.
I regret that I always must have seemed a tinge sad to him, but he grew to accept this as my nature.
THE HEAD nurse from the care home called again to press me for a decision, and I have agreed to take their room. She visited my house with several assistants to have me sign papers. These women, I realized, were also taking stock of me. They were overly cheerful and laughed a great deal, but seemed puzzled, almost mildly threatened, by my houseful of books, recordings, and pictures. We sat in my living room and I gave them coffee. They admired the view from my windows.
I do not know what they concluded from their visit, but I felt myself being discussed as their car disappeared down my road. We made arrangements for their van to pick me up with a small load of my possessions, and they gave me an imposing pamphlet of rules and regulations with a color picture on the cover of relentlessly happy-looking elders opening gift packages.
I read everything carefully. There are a number of rules, some of them daunting, many of them threatening and cold. For instance, rule sixteen reads: “More than three (3) emergency calls in one month from an apartment to the switchboard shall be conclusive evidence to landlord that occupant is not capable of independent living. Landlord can then have tenant moved to such health care facility as available.”
CHAPTER 3
Cyril
The sheriff and his deputy told me I looked like a quarter pickup load of grape popsicles when they found me on the road. They’d been looking for Balaclava after he jumped paying for his gas at the Mobil, and the station attendant had told them that he was pretty sure someone might have been abducted into the thief’s car before it went flying off into the blizzard.
So the officers put on their blinker lights and were sweeping with their overhead spots along the drifted berm when they saw a mound of snow. That was me. Luckily they found me before the snowplows started coming through or I would have been chop suey.
I’d actually made it back to within a couple miles of Soldiers Grove before I was not able to move anymore. The storm was still gnashing over the landscape and my legs finally played out. My brain was slipping away, and my gonads were freezing so that at the end I was waddling like a duck right out of a winter lake. Finally I went down face first in the snow. I still had enough sense to realize—this is it, Cyril, you are ready for the long nap.
I was so immobilized, aching with cold, it didn’t matter anymore. Bring it on! There are worse ways to go. You know the first thing I thought when I went down on the ground and felt the cold closing in toward my heart? Not about my miserable parents, nor my bar
acquaintances in Soldiers Grove—and I was definitely not pleading to some preoccupied god and his angels. I was thinking about a life, about Captain Robert F. Scott and how he’d died trying to make it back from Antarctica. I was feeling probably like he must have felt on his last day—his bloodstream slowing down and his brain cells turning to frozen yogurt. He’d lost the race to the Antarctic Circle to Roald Amundsen, the Norwegian, and now he was going to lose his life, freezing to death in his tent. The final thing he wrote above his signature in his journal was, “It seems a pity, but I do not think I can write more—R. Scott.”
It seemed a pity to me, too, that my life was going down in the below-zero drifts.
But the sheriff and his deputy swept the snow off me, hauled me stiff as a frozen lamb chop to their cruiser, and turned their heater up high. The sheriff drove as fast as he could on tire chains to the emergency room in Viroqua, while the deputy cuffed and slapped my cheeks, rubbed my hands, and thumped my chest in the backseat.
When they finally got me onto a cot in the ER my temperature was down in the eighties. I was ready to sign off, but I found out later that they covered me with some gizmo called a Bair Hugger—a big paper and plastic blanket with a hole in it. They fastened a tube into the hole and blew in warm air so that it hugged my body. They also strung me up with IVs of fluid, and gave me a warm enema. I think they did other things, too, to raise my temperature, but I can’t say for sure because I was way out there ice skating on a chilled dream, like Ted Williams in his frozen time capsule—but I’d never won any batting championships in my day.