I could be stuck in this loop all day. I need to get out more. Solitude is making my brain loopy.
Betty is outside barking. Roo roo roo roo. Maybe someone is here? Tim? Someone to distract me?
I look out the window, and it’s … Joe Crowley. No, not that Joe Crowley. One of the other Joe Crowleys. The one with the limestone who didn’t really have the limestone. He’s done some work over here in the past months, some plumbing and wiring.
I head outside.
“Hey,” he says. “Did I leave my socket wrenches here?”
“Not that I know of,” I say. “But look around if you want.”
There are two other guys in Joe’s truck. I recognize one of them, the skinny one with the crooked bangs. I don’t like that one. He gives me the creeps.
“How ya doing?” I say to him.
He doesn’t answer.
Joe ducks into the basement to look for his socket wrenches, while I wait here with his friends.
“Check this out,” the skinny one says to the other one, a short one, one I’ve never seen before. “A poodle.”
Oh, please. Not more poodle jokes. They really picked the wrong day.
The two guys hop out of the truck and commence teasing Marley.
“You can put leaves on him and they stick,” the skinny punk says, demonstrating with some dried maple leaves.
“Hey,” I say. “You know, he doesn’t actually like it when you do that.” I am beginning to understand the urge to own a rifle. A quick pow! right at his feet, just to bruise him up real proper for a long time.
Poor Marley, sitting there with dried maple leaves on his head. They find some other leaves, toss them at Marley, seeing if the sticking works from a pitching distance. I don’t know what to do. What to say. I wonder if they know this taunting is about to put me over the edge.
It works, throwing leaves at Marley. They stick fine. Poor Marley. But the weird thing is, Marley doesn’t seem to mind. Which only makes the guys laugh harder. Because Marley is in one of his trances. He is sitting there motionless, frozen, staring off into the brush, oblivious to his crown of debris.
“What is he doing, communicating with the mother ship?” one says.
“He’s daydreaming about becoming a German shepherd,” the other says.
Oh, they are having a great time.
Poor Marley. I’m going to cry. I feel like I did when I was in grade school, trying so hard not to cry. The harder you try, the more your head takes on the size and pressure of a giant Hawaiian volcano.
Joe comes out of the basement and gives a shrug. No socket wrenches. He joins his friends. “Aw, Poodle Dude,” he says. “What’s up, Poodle Dude?” He leans on the pickup. He’s a nice guy; he’s been nice to Marley up until now. I hope his rotten friends haven’t contaminated him.
“He’s communicating with the mother ship!” the one says to Joe.
“No, he’s dreaming about becoming a German shepherd!”
What, these guys can’t come up with new material?
They’re laughing their guts out. They love their own humor. It occurs to me that they might be drunk.
Just then, Marley leaps like a windup toy to his feet. Whoa. And what? He takes off—fwooom!—like a bullet. He is a black blotch streaking through the sky. Now we’re the ones transfixed. Soon he is taking one giant leap into the brush, and before any of us know what is happening, he is swinging back around, like a gymnast that can both lunge and spin at the same time. As he swings around, we see it: a live groundhog in his mouth. Not any old groundhog. A groundhog a good six times bigger than Marley’s big head. We stand there motionless, all of us, even Betty, watching this poodle wrestle this mother of all groundhogs to the cold earth; he seems to know right where to go, just how to snap its neck, because within the next blink of an eye, the groundhog is on the ground, dead. Marley stands over it, huffing and puffing.
Huffing and puffing.
“Cripes!” says one of the guys, who looks at me. “Does he always do this?”
“Actually, no,” I say, my eyes bugged out.
“Hey, that ain’t no wuss dog,” Joe Crowley says.
“Shoot,” says the skinny guy. “And I could use me a huntin’ dog.”
When the guys finally drive away, I think: This is it. This is the day Marley wins respectability. The world has sacrificed one groundhog so Marley can show what he is made of, that he may be a poodle, but he ain’t no wuss dog. I feel, um, really proud of Marley. But I do sort of hope he’ll go back to the way he was before.
Marley sits by the groundhog all day. He spends the next day sitting next to it, too. Like it is a favorite stuffed toy. A most cherished prize. A toy he picked out on his own and got to bring home. I really can’t say why he needs to be near it. I wonder if he has to keep reminding himself it is true, or if he wants to make sure it doesn’t leave.
On the third day, I am sorry to report, Marley eats the groundhog.
“Okay, that’s gross,” I say to myself. I am sitting here watching this, wondering what I should do.
The phone rings. Line One. It’s Nancy.
I decide instantly not to tell her about Marley’s feast.
Not that I get a chance to.
She is crying. For a moment, I can’t tell if this is happy or sad tears, but soon it is obvious. She says Jack did it. He proposed! She is squealing. The diamond is an emerald cut. The wedding will be next October. She asks me to be her maid of honor.
Whoa. A wedding. With bridesmaids and everything? Just like that? It’s like bowling balls falling on me. I wonder if this is some great cosmic rearrangement, all the happiness over there, and all the sadness over here. I wonder if Hale-Bopp could possibly have had anything to do with this. Or some murmuring below by the seventeen-year cicadas. Or Mark.
I’m happy for Nancy. Of course I am. But it’s weird to hear her do all this wedding talk when I was supposed to be the bride. Bride? I am not the bride type. Nancy is the bride type. Nancy has been the bride type ever since the day she was born, and it’s about time she got to be one. It’s only right. It’s only fitting. Yes, this is good news indeed.
“Congratulations!” I say, and invite Nancy down to the farm to help her make wedding plans.
“And we can plan your wedding, too!” she says. “Have you and Alex set the date yet?”
“All of that stuff is sort of on hold,” I tell her.
“I think you should plan a wedding,” she says. She pauses. You can hear a breath of seriousness overtake her. “I think you should stand up in the face of this thing,” she says. “I think you’re giving this whole tumor thing way too much power.”
Maybe. I remember telling her a similar thing when her mother was diagnosed. And then when her father was diagnosed. And then I didn’t know what to say. There comes a point when there is nothing you can say. I am already planning for that stage. I am going to do all of my friends a big favor and leap right to that stage so they don’t have to stand around feeling awkward.
“So, what have you guys been doing down there all weekend?” Nancy asks.
“Waiting,” I say.
“Oh, God,” she says. “You guys have to get out.”
“Alex is out driving the tractor,” I say. “It’s his new addiction.” That tractor. Thank God I bought that thing. Because Alex loves that tractor. Yesterday, and again today, he got up early, went out there, and fueled up. He got out the chain saw, all kinds of tools, put them in the bucket. He strapped the weed whacker to the roll bar, and then he rode off, like a kid running away from home with all his prized possessions.
“Where does he go?” Nancy asks. “I mean, what is he doing out there?”
“He’s working on an apple tree,” I say.
“A tree?”
“That’s what he said.”
“What’s he doing with the tree?”
“I don’t actually know.”
When we hang up, I decide to go find out. I put on my hiking boots and head ou
tside. The air feels good; Nancy was right. I look around for green. Or how about one stinkin’ stalk of forsythia ready to pop? Nothing. Just brown, brown, brown. I’m about out of patience with this spring.
I follow the roar of the diesel engine. I hike to the top of the hill, and I can see the black smoke from the tractor. I can see a rustling of the brush. I make my way through and spot him there, with his tree. We have, perhaps, fifty apple trees on this property, and there is nothing special about this one. Like many of them, it is smothered in briars. Well, less so now. Alex has been freeing the tree. I stand and watch him back in with the mower and chop up some of the briars. I watch him hop off the tractor, pull the string on the chain saw with all his might, prune some of the tree’s branches. I watch him get back on the tractor, sweep away the mess with the loader. I watch him stop, look at the tree, as if planning his next attack.
It feels good watching him go to war with nature like this. I’m sure the tree appreciates it, too.
What kind of apples will we get? What will we do with them? Will we make applesauce and pie? And what about our peach trees? What will we possibly do with all those peaches? We had hoped to be talking about these things at this point in the season, about what kinds of lettuce to plant and how many onions and where the broccoli should go. And what about the pond project? What about building a greenhouse? What about our sheep? And our goats? And I want a horse, and he wants a mule, and what about all our plans?
We have made mention of none of these things. In fact, as a topic of discussion, we are finding the future to be highly overrated.
THE NEXT DAY, A SUNNY APRIL SUNDAY, NANCY comes down to the farm, her arms loaded with bride magazines. She got her hair streaked and a manicure and a pedicure to celebrate her engagement. She looks terrific. She’s a pretty woman, blond with deep, green eyes, and a cheerleader’s body and manner. It’s fun to watch her flip through the pages and make judgments about silk versus tulle and Chantilly lace versus Venise. Nancy has one heck of an inner princess. And she doesn’t seem embarrassed by it at all.
She takes over the whole family room with her magazines and her joy. I love that she feels at home here, like a sister. Like a roommate.
She wants me to join in with the wedding planning, but I tell her I really am too busy. I have to go outside and sit on a bench and wait for spring. This is getting serious. I have been spending a lot of time on this bench. I’ve waited for daffodils that never show. I got teased by a magnolia ready to bloom, until frost wiped out that plan. It seems Mother Nature has gone on vacation, and the person she left in charge is stupider than sheep. Sorry, sheep. I am having trouble eating and sleeping and concentrating—even on my prayers.
I sit on this bench, this rickety old thing sure to give me splinters. I sit here and think: Our Father who art in heaven, I should have bought him those poodle dishes. Thy kingdom come, thy will be done, I should have told him the truth six years ago, or four years ago, or whenever I knew. Give us this day, our daily bread, We would have had more time. We would have had a wedding. I could have gotten him a mule. Forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us. It’s all my fault. It’s all my stupid fault for waiting. Never wait. Never wait just because you’re scared, you idiot, you wuss. But deliver us from evil. Amen.
Nancy sleeps over in the guest room. In the morning, she and Alex and I have bagels, and Nancy gets his opinion on wedding gowns. I’m surprised to see he has opinions on wedding gowns. But he does. He tells her he likes the basque waist the best.
When they both pack up and leave to go to work, I listen to the crackle crackle crackle of the cars over the driveway. I am alone again. I feel it like a thud. I look for the ladybug again. No ladybug. I sit on the couch with Bob on my stomach and watch stupid TV, which technically I need to watch, because I’m working on an essay about 1960s sitcoms and need to brush up on my sitcom lingo, so at least I have a good excuse.
Roo roo roo roo! That’s Betty the doorbell. “Excuse me, Bob,” I say, standing up. I look out and see Billy’s truck. Oh, good. I haven’t seen him in weeks. I hope he wants coffee.
“Hey there,” he says when he reaches the door. He doesn’t look good. He’s lost weight. He’s pale.
He looks at me. “Have you been sick?” he says. “You’ve lost weight.” We stand there sizing each other up. I’m not sure why he’s here. He’s not even in his work clothes. He’s gussied up the way guys around here gussy up: tight Wranglers, plaid shirt, shiny, pointy boots, and white cowboy hat.
“My brother died last week,” he announces. He says it was leukemia that was diagnosed too late. “And my mother is dying,” he says. He asks why is it that everything comes at once.
I look at him. I want to tell him about Alex, but I don’t seem able to.
“You want some coffee?” I say.
“If you got it made,” he says.
I pour him half a cup and then fill the rest with hot water, remembering that Billy finds my coffee unbearably strong.
We sit in the kitchen and talk about everything under the sun, except for his brother and his mother and Alex. We talk about sheep. Billy says there’s a reason they’re stupid. Because the farmers shoot the smart ones. Because the smart ones will figure out how to get through the fence, and then all the dumb ones follow. If you get rid of the smart ones, you don’t have to worry about losing your sheep.
“So it’s really not the sheep’s fault that they’re stupid,” I say.
“The smartness is bred out,” Billy says.
Poor sheep.
We talk about pigs. “Don’t bother with pigs,” he says. “Pork prices are down. Nobody around here is doing pigs.”
We talk about his dad, who passed away years ago. He drove a school bus. He met Billy’s mom on that bus. She was a student, a little kid. He loved her instantly and without reservation. He waited until she got to be sixteen, and then he married her.
We talk about Billy’s Uncle Ophie, who lives in the mountains of West Virginia, near where Billy grew up. “Only he lives the old way,” Billy says. “I mean the old, old way.”
“How’s that?” I ask, settling in for what I have come to know will be another good Billy story. Sometimes I wonder if any of these stories are true. Sometimes I think they should hire Billy to write a remake of Green Acres.
“That barn you got out there?” he says. “That would be a palace compared to Ophie’s house. He lives in a shack, and the snow blows in.” Billy says Ophie is an old man, perhaps ninety. His hair and beard haven’t been cut in many decades, according to legend. He bathes twice a year, at which time he gets sewn back into his red long johns, which he wears until his next bath. He’s married to Corey, an American Indian, whom he met when she was a little girl, an orphan. Ophie raised her, then married her.
“That seems to be a trend in your family,” I say.
He smiles. “Ophie and Corey live together in that shack, at the end of a creek road,” he goes on. “You can’t drive to Ophie’s. Because the road is a creek. Ophie’s got the bank of that creek rigged up with cans and wires so if anybody comes by, he’ll hear. He’ll shout, ‘Who’s down there!’ And if you don’t answer, he’ll start shooting. He’s killed a few men. That’s why I always make sure to answer.”
Billy visits Ophie several times a year, just as he did when he was a boy. “I remember when I was little being so cold in the winters in that shack. I’d wake Ophie up and I’d say, ‘Ophie, I’m cold!’ And Ophie would say, ‘Well, pull up another dog, boy.’”
Billy says he visited Ophie last week, when he was home for his brother’s funeral. “And Corey, she had a big pot going over the fireplace,” he says. “She poured me some. I said, ‘Corey,’ I said, ‘Corey, now what is in this stew?’ She said, ‘Muskrat, groundhog, and a pork chop.’”
I slap my hand on the table and laugh. Laugh so hard, I think I’m going to pop. Wait till I tell Alex this one. It seems we weren’t so off base with our varmint recipes.
That reminds me of my news.
“Marley killed a groundhog!” I say. I tell him the whole story. I ask him to please tell Tom, because I know Tom will be so pleased. “Well, there you go,” he says.
I think how far I’ve come in just six months, that I would be sitting here swapping dead groundhog stories with a man dressed like a cowboy.
“Hey, you know, you should think about horses instead of sheep or pigs or cows,” Billy says. Billy would himself love to have a horse farm. He tells me about a man in North Carolina who he knows who is a good source of saddles. “He has one arm,” he says. “And he’s always wanted to make saddles, so this is what he does. It’s what he always wanted to do. I wish I could do that. Instead I gotta be in the mud.
“But you should think about horses,” he goes on. “You could fit, what, ten horses in that barn?”
“No,” I say. “Remember? The barn is collapsing, so at the moment we can’t fit any.” There is no headroom in the bottom floor, which is the place you would stall a horse. The foundation is crumbling, and so the barn floor is sagging nearly to the ground.
“We could shore it up,” he says. “I seen worse.” We talk about the size of the stalls, and we get out a piece of paper and a pencil and try to calculate how much money I could bring in by boarding horses for city people who are always looking in the area for stables.
It’s the best idea yet, and I feel excited. I’ve always wanted a horse. And Alex wants a mule. I imagine having nine beautiful horses to look at every day, and one mule. I imagine a briarless farm, rolling green fields, and beautiful geldings bounding—only the truth is, I don’t know a gelding from a filly from a colt. But I can learn. It feels great to get my mind in the future, and I wonder if Billy has any idea what his visit has brought.
Fifty Acres and a Poodle Page 18