“Must be something wrong with the chain saw,” Alex says, crawling out.
I drop the rake.
We stand there scratching our heads. Alex gets back on the ground, and we try the chain saw again.
Zzzzzt. Zzzzzt. You’d have to see how fruitless this is—the mighty teeth of the chain saw will not cut through that trunk—to understand why it seems so logical to proceed to the next idea.
“A forest fire,” I say.
“Good idea,” he says.
Alex gets kerosene, rags, and matches, and he begins making a torch. I go get a hose. I hook the hose to the basement spigot and run it the fifty-some yards to our intended forest fire area. “Better safe than sorry,” I say.
We have no idea what we are doing. We are kids out for mischief with no parents in sight.
We sprinkle kerosene and gasoline all over the bush. We light the torch. I step back, way back, preparing for the conflagration.
“Betty, Marley—get back!” I shout.
I pick up the hose and prepare, should my firefighting skills, of which I have none, be needed.
Alex tips the torch on the branch. I have my eyes shut, waiting for the FWOOOM! that will accompany the explosion.
No FWOOOM happens. Alex moves closer with the torch. The gas burns. The rag burns. We watch with hope, but the flames … die.
Multiflora, it seems, cannot do a sustained burn.
I stand there holding the hose, looking at our failed experiment. Alex scratches his chin. He looks around. He looks around at all the acres and acres and acres of this stuff. It is like kudzu of the North, an angry red plague stretching up every surrounding hillside.
This is the first time that the scale of the farm really hits us. We surrender. To the multiflora and to something else, I think. We are smart, we are strong, we are brave.
And we are puny.
In the middle of this vast thorny nothingness, we need each other more than we ever could have imagined.
Under the thick sky, I breathe the air that feels like it could fill outer space, but also now stinks of burning gas. I feel the leafless trees holding me in their sway. I hear the booms in the distance, and I hear something else, I think. I hear the exhale in the hills.
SEVEN
ALL RIGHT, BOB. HERE YOU GO. THIS IS A CAT BED. This is a bed designed specifically for your cat comfort. Do you like it? Here, come on, lie down in it, here, curl up in it. Bob, curl up! This is your retirement bed, Bob. No, here Bob. See how soft it is? Oh, all right. Whatever. You’ll do what you’ll do….
Bob, it turns out, prefers sleeping on my scanner, my HP Scan-Jet 4p. Something about the rounded top he likes. The scanner is right next to me, here in my new office, and Bob likes to stretch all the way out on it, rest his head on his upper leg, and alternate between snoozing and staring at me. If it were any other cat besides Bob staring at me like that, I think I might find it extremely creepy. But we are a unit, me and Bob.
He’s losing weight, I think. But other than that, he doesn’t seem sick at all.
My bringing Bob down to the farm signals a further commitment to this place. It’s mid-December, only a few weeks since I moved my office down here, and already Bob has joined me. So have my bed, a bureau, and a refrigerator. Apparently I’m more ready to call this place home than I thought I was. I’m not itching as much; fear has given way to plain old confusion, as fear often does.
Bob, why don’t you go off and explore this house? Why don’t you go upstairs and see if there are some mice crawling around or something? Or, hey Bob! There are spiderwebs upstairs! Big spiderwebs to snoop around in. Remember how much you used to love those webs in the South Side basement and you’d come upstairs with your whiskers all tangled up in them? Oh, c’mon, Bob….
Bob has shown almost no interest in his new surroundings. He’s content to sit here and adore me. Maybe it’s his nerves. I don’t know. I’ll give him time.
Betty, on the other hand, has decided that her real calling in life is to be a watchdog. She positions herself at the kitchen door in the morning, the door leading out of my office in the afternoon, and a hallway door at night. I do not think she is getting much sleep. She sees things outside. I don’t know what she sees. But she barks, Roo roo roo roo, until I calm her down.
I can’t blame her, though. I spend a lot of time distracted by the scenery outside, too. As a matter of fact, I am not getting a tremendous amount of writing done; I’m too busy looking out the windows. There is a semicircular window, high above the doors leading out to the yard. And this window is like a frame, a TV featuring the sky. A sky with folds of every shade of gray and blue and white, spiraling into each other, out of each other, all of it headed left. Don’t look now, but the sky is moving. I’ve never had such a view of the sky. I’ve never known how busy the sky is all day.
And I never knew I could type without looking at my fingers, without looking at the screen. But I can. In fact, I can’t not. I look to my right, and as far as my eye can see there are fields, then woods. And in the field across the road, I’ll see a deer bounding now and again, and huge birds, the hugest birds, what are they, hawks? Turkeys? And outside to my left the solitary birch tree stands, as if impervious to the wind, and suddenly a yellow bird will be there, then a blue one, then a black-and-white-striped one wearing a red vest, all of these birds stopping by that tree looking for food. What do they eat? Are there frozen bugs in there? Seeds?
I have to get a bird book.
I have to get a bug book.
I have to get a seed book.
I have to get a tree book.
I have so much to learn.
I have learned some things about multiflora rose. I’ve learned that the plant was brought in from Asia in the early 1950s when the U.S. government came up with the brainstorm that this thorny stuff could work beautifully as a “living fence” during the postwar metal shortage. Farmers could throw some seeds down, and bingo—Mother Nature’s barbed wire. What nobody figured on was that birds might eat the seeds and disperse them hither and yon. In no time, farms along the East Coast were covered with a good idea gone crazy.
By now, I have gotten good at identifying multiflora rose. I’ll drive around and take in the scenery and note how we sure do seem to have more of it than most farms around. I have to wonder, but only sometimes, only at night when I can’t sleep, if this awful menace is my penance, or if my penance is something much more obvious. Penance? Why do I feel I have to suffer something? As if happiness were some kind of sin.
I have a friend, Mark, who believes, really believes, that everybody has a balance between good and bad in life. That if you have a lot of good stuff happen, that just means you are due a lot of bad stuff, and vice versa. I used to argue this point with Mark. Because I thought it was a childish view. I thought there’s no way God would design the universe using such an unsophisticated template.
Then I learned that Mark’s father jumped off a bridge when Mark was fifteen, and that ever since Mark has been waiting, really waiting, for the badness to stop. He keeps thinking the next stage of his life will bring happiness, has to bring happiness, because there is no way a person can be expected to live his whole life in misery.
Sometimes nowadays when I’m looking out these windows, at the birds and the trees and the awesome sky, I’ll feel as if I’m looking at the future. And the future is so pretty. Then I’ll look at the multiflora rose and feel sad, but not really sad, because to tell you the truth there is plenty of beauty, plenty of might in that weed. I’ve been told that it smells beautiful in the spring. This property is going to be a perfume factory in a few months.
Then I’ll look at Bob, and of course my heart will sink. I’ll think Mark was right. I’ll taste the danger. I’ll conclude that you can’t have happily-ever-after without first losing a piece of your heart.
Don’t look now, but the sky is moving. Not falling, just moving.
The phone rings. It’s Beth, one of the babes. She wants to kno
w how I like it at the farm. Beth has a way of always getting to the point. I am trying to tell her about how beautiful it is here. I tell her about the sky and the fields and the turkey/hawks and the birch tree.
“It’s like falling in love, isn’t it?” she says. “I remember that from when I bought my house. Enjoy it now, because it won’t last.”
Yes it will! Of course it will. Now why did she bring this up?
“But you still love your house, don’t you?” I ask her.
She doesn’t answer.
“You do, don’t you?”
She doesn’t answer. Have I hit a raw nerve here? Jeez, I had no idea.
When she doesn’t answer for the third time, I start saying, “Hello? Hello?” Then I realize we’ve been cut off. I click the receiver. Nothing. I try Line Two. I try Lines Three and Four.
This is weird. These phones have been working perfectly since Alex installed the lines.
I go out to the car and get my cell phone. (I guess that would be Line Five. Is this getting extreme?) I dial the phone company.
“Hello?”
“Is this the phone company?”
“Speaking.”
“Well, my phone went dead.”
“Hang on, I gotta get a pen….”
The Marianna/Scenery Hill Telephone Company is not, mind you, one of your telecommunications giants.
“Okay,” the woman says. “When Tom comes in, I’ll let him know.”
Tom? Who is Tom, and when does he plan on coming in?
“He’s up on the pole,” she says. “So I don’t know.”
Okay, a little technological snag. I can deal with this. It’s one P.M., on Friday. Time to get the mail anyway. I wonder if Alex wants to come with me. He’s off today, down in the barn trying to figure out how to stop it from collapsing. All the locals who drive up here say the same thing: “Hey, your barn is about to collapse.”
At first I didn’t really register the implications of this. Because all I could hear was “your barn.” I loved the sound of that. Just like I love saying “I have to go down to the barn.” Or “Alex is down at the barn.” I love having a barn because I love the sound of it. I feel like the luckiest person alive, having a barn. Never mind that it may not be a standing barn much longer.
I head down to the barn, thinking: I am heading down to the barn! Alex is in there, scratching his chin again.
“I think I’ve got it figured out,” he says. “I’m going to brace this whole section here with those old oak beams we found.”
“Great,” I say. “The phones are dead.”
“Oh, jeez,” he says.
“The phone company is checking into it. As soon as Tom gets down off the pole.”
“Who?”
“I’m pretty sure he works for the phone company,” I say. “Do you want to go with me to the mailbox?”
“Well, okay, sure,” he says.
“Let’s take the dogs,” I say. “No leashes.”
“A big day for the dogs,” he says.
“A small day for the leashes,” I say.
“Hey, our hats!” I say. Alex’s kids sent us two orange hats they got at a Hoss’s Family Restaurant. It was kind of a joke present, but not really a joke present. I run in to get the hats—because while buck season has ended, doe season has started. The hats are big, thunderous polyester numbers with “Hoss’s” printed over a deer head. We put them on. We look at each other. And the strangest thing is, we do not look bad.
Actually, that is not the strangest thing….
We head to the mailbox, and as we approach the corner of Wilson and Spring Valley, Marley veers off into the yard of our nearest neighbor. He starts staring up at a tree. He seems transfixed. What is so fascinating to him? He starts barking. Woof, woof, woof. I can see a tank of some sort in the yard, and a wheelbarrow turned upside down nearby. Why is he so upset? We get closer. I can see something hanging from a tree. Something red. It’s about five feet long, and it’s tied to a branch. It is something about the size, say, of a deer….
Oh, dear.
An entirely skinned deer is dangling from the tree, twisting ever so slowly in the wind.
Oh, dear.
“Marley, get away from there!” Alex yells.
“Marley!” I shout.
Oh, great. So now Betty has been alerted. Roo roo roo roo! she shouts, for every one of Marley’s woofs.
We stand there with our two dogs hysterical over a dead deer hanging from a tree, wondering what to do.
The neighbor comes out. Oh, great. She is carrying a big knife. Oh, great. Really great.
“Um, hello,” I say.
“Marley!” Alex shouts. “Betty, come here!”
“Sorry about the dogs,” I shout over the dogs. “They won’t—”
“Oh, don’t worry about the dogs,” she says. “They can’t reach. We love dogs. What kind of dog is that?”
“A poodle,” I say.
“A poodle?” she says. “I thought—”
“A standard poodle,” Alex says. “Not one of those little yappy things.”
(Just how many times am I going to be involved in this conversation?)
She introduces herself. Sarah. She doesn’t say why she is carrying the knife. She doesn’t say anything about the deer, how it got there, or how long she plans to have it hanging there. I am trying not to notice the deer. I am trying not to notice that the deer’s tongue is dangling out one side of its mouth, either. She welcomes us to the area. Then she says, “George doesn’t love dogs.”
“Who?”
“George over there,” she says, pointing with the knife. “The guy with the sheep?”
“Oh.” The farm now known as George’s is the farm abutting our property along the ridge. It’s George’s sheep that are sprinkled on our postcard view. George’s hills are the ones we fell in love with. It’s George’s land that won our hearts.
“George shoots dogs,” she says. “Watch out for George.”
Oh.
“Why on earth does George shoot dogs?” Alex asks.
“It’s a sheep thing,” she says.
A sheep thing?
She explains the dog/sheep dichotomy in these parts. Dogs chase sheep. A dog is capable of chasing a sheep to its death. Farmers have to protect their herds. If a farmer sees a dog chasing a sheep, the farmer will shoot it.
“Well, couldn’t he call first?” I ask.
“He’s shot plenty of dogs,” she says. “Keep your dogs away from George.”
“Okay.”
I look at Betty. A sitting duck. A sitting dog. Does she have sheep-chasing bred into her? She has become bored with the dead deer she can’t reach, so she is chewing on a stick. Well, I hope that’s a stick. That better not be a dead deer bone. Marley is sitting staring at the dead deer, as if perhaps he is waiting for it to fall. Marley is developing a tendency to stare like this. Something about country life leaves him transfixed, at times for hours. He’ll stand in front of a tree and stare at it. Maybe it’s part of his sentry aptitude, I don’t know. But when Marley is doing this, I think he’s the one getting good at solitude, not me.
“Betty, Marley, come on!” Alex says.
We tell Sarah we have to be moseying along. I really don’t want to stick around because I really don’t want to find out what she’s going to do with that knife.
On the way back from the mailbox, we say it’s amazing how much you can learn just walking to your own mailbox around here. I think about how much of my day I spend in my office, at my computer, searching the Internet, singing the praise of the Information Superhighway. I think how much more exciting it is out here on the Information Dirt Road.
The walk home requires passing the entire length of one of George’s fields—where there are no sheep today. Thank God. Do they make electric collars that keep dogs away from sheep?
When I get back, the phone is ringing. It’s Ellen, one of the babes.
“Who’s Tom?” she asks.
�
��Who?” I say.
“Someone named Tom just answered your phone.”
“Oh,” I say. “He’s up on the pole.”
“Where?” she asks.
My life is getting harder and harder to explain.
And so we mark the approach of the winter solstice by the size of the neighbor’s dead deer. It keeps getting smaller. One day we walk by, and a shank is missing. Then a shoulder. After a while, it is just a head and a neck hanging there. This is right about the time the booms stop. Hunting season is over, and we are still alive.
We’ve had a lot of our new neighbors stop by. Apparently, this is what people do around here; they “stop by.” At first you wonder what they want, but then you realize they don’t want anything, except maybe a little human contact. Joe and Joe the hunters stopped by one day to meet my “husband,” and they gave us two more orange hats as presents. We ended up giving them permission to walk on our land with their guns, just not to shoot anything on it. This actually was a compromise that pleased them since George, the sheep farmer, permits hunting on his property, and our place provides easy access to George’s.
A lot of other people have stopped by. A baker who works up at the Century Inn stopped by with an apple pie, saying did we know that once upon a time a baker for the Century Inn lived in our house? No, we didn’t. And what a delicious pie! Bob, the neighbor with the cow farm, which is next to George’s, stopped by to commiserate about the price of beef falling to under fifty cents a pound. Alex was sympathetic but didn’t really help when he compared the price of beef to the price per pound of a poodle. He did the math in his head. “Yes,” he said. “These dogs go for about fifteen dollars a pound.” Bob looked at him. Oh, Bob and I both looked at him. For a second there, I thought Bob might actually start talking to me. Which would really have been quite something. Because I am just “the wife.” That’s what Bob called me. Women around here aren’t expected to talk much, to understand much. It’s like the old days. Well, not the Madonna of the Trail old days, I don’t think. Somehow I don’t think the Madonna of the Trail would have tolerated that attitude at all.
Fifty Acres and a Poodle Page 10