by Jane Smiley
Most of the land I own runs up the hillsides in a bowl shape, to either side and behind the house, and that woodlot hadn’t been touched or exploited in seventy, or even a hundred years. It took me three years just to drag the deadfall out, and I heated my house for seven and a half years on that. If I’d had the stone masonry built around the range that I have now, it would have lasted twice that long. What we do is build our first fire in mid-September, then make sure a small fire is in the stove every minute thereafter. All that masonry will have heated up by about mid-October, and after that we only have to keep it warm. It works. I use a lot less wood than the woodlot produces, and it’s all hardwood. We even burn black walnut and cherry, wood the cabinetmaking companies would pay me for if they knew I had it. That’s my luxury, my conspicuous consumption—I burn black walnut for heat.
From the house, everything is perfect. The natural landscape offers enclosed, familiar, pleasing curves, softened with August haze and prolific vegetation—sugar maple, black cherry, hickory, butternut, walnut, beech, yellow birch, and white oak are some of what I can see from here—and I respond, unfailingly, with love (“regard” and “inspiration,” looking and inhaling). From everywhere else on the property, I must view my own mistake, the house. I built it—yes, I built it—mostly from brick torn out of the streets of State College, Pennsylvania, and pine pallets that I ripped the nails out of one by one. Recognizing my accomplishment doesn’t mean I’ve ever been satisfied with it. I resent its lack of grandeur more than its lack of size. What I meant to keep simple I made humble, and I made a mistake siting it, because I thought it would be easier to use the old foundation than lay another one. If we were to add on now, we would have to add outward, creating an ungainly, flat building. If I’d built farther back—into the hillside as I first intended—it would have been easy to add on upward, just to tear off the roof and build another small house on top of the old one. And we would have been closer to the springhouse. Sometimes I can see the structure I might have built so clearly that the frustration of what I’ve done is explosive. Here we live, here we will always live. No gardens, barns, sheds will ever mitigate the permanence of this mistake.
Chores completed, I return. The women are sitting at the table, still, talking about home schooling. Tina looks skeptical, which makes Liz speak more assertively, expressing none of the doubts she has expressed to me. Home schooling is my idea, and her arguments are ones I’ve made to her. “Actually,” she is saying, “studies show that they get along better with the other kids once they get to college, because they have a real sense of themselves and a sense of their own abilities.”
“But don’t they miss the other kids?”
“I don’t know if Tom would. We sent him to kindergarten, because we felt guilty about keeping him so isolated. He gets along okay, but until you’ve really considered home schooling, I don’t think you realize what a compromise school is, how regimented it is, and how the others expect you to act so you’ll fit in. And around here there’s nothing to do, so most of the high-school kids gather at one of the big ponds and drink, then drive around endangering themselves and everyone else. It’s not like a big suburban school, where they might be, only might be, exposed to something new.”
“Well, social life has meant a lot to Libby since she’s been in kindergarten—”
Libby must be a daughter. They have covered a lot of ground in my absence, and I am sort of shocked by the name, “Libby,” rather idle-rich-sounding, as if this project of Tina’s is a whimsy after all, not committed or serious as it would be if she had no children, or her daughter’s name was, say, Susie.
“But she’s a girl. Bob was a loner in school. I wasn’t. I think I missed more than he did. I just had the same experiences everyone else had. I don’t feel like my life had any integrity until I came here.”
“It’s lovely—”
“And you know, at first I hated it. I didn’t have any inner resources at all. I thought I would die of loneliness, even on days when Bob would talk to me.” She smiles slyly at me. “This was not how I intended to spend my life.”
“I just think it takes a lot of fortitude to have your child at home, to be responsible for everything that goes into his head. What does Tommy think?”
Now I speak up. “He likes the idea, but we promised him one more year in the grammar school before we make up our minds.”
Liz glances at me. I make the truthful emendation. “Well, he doesn’t always like it. But his schooling is my decision to make. He understands that. Anyway, we’re a closely knit family, and there’s so much going on around here all the time that he doesn’t want to miss anything. And as for taking responsibility for what goes into his head, that ATTRACTS me.”
Tina sits back. She says, “Your lives are so completely of a piece. I admire—”
“You know, I always think I’m going to love being admired, but then I get nervous when it happens, I think because you shouldn’t be admired for doing something you needed to do. I mean, until I moved here, I was so filled with frustrated yearning that it was this or suicide. When I was Tommy’s age, I thought it was yearning to be on my own. When I was a teenager, I thought it was lust. When I was in the army, and in Vietnam, I thought it was the desire to go home. But it was none of those things. I never figured out what it was, but it ceased. Tommy doesn’t have it. He’s enthusiastic about the farm and the animals and fishing and helping us cook and grow things, everything we do here that we couldn’t do if we lived in town.” Just now the rain begins, steady and warm, lifting the scent of the grass, of the valley’s whole morning, through the screen door—wildflowers, tomato plants, walnut leaves, pony and sheep manure, the rainwater itself. It is a smell so thick and various that I can nearly see it, and I inhale sharply. Liz laughs and leans toward Tina. “Put this in your book. Bob pretends to have opinions, but the real truth about him is that his senses are about three times sharper than normal. He’s really just a farm animal scratching his back in the dust.”
“Not true!” I say. “What I really am is a body attached to a pair of hands that can’t stop making things. Inclination precedes conviction. I want to make, therefore I decided making is valuable. The more I want to make, the more valuable making is.”
“Very nice, sweetie,” says Liz, standing up and kissing the top of my head. “But running your hand down the board precedes making.”
Tommy appears on the porch, dripping, but doesn’t come in. He calls, “Hey, Daddy, I got the pony and the foal in before the rain started! They didn’t get wet at all!”
“Did you wipe off the bridle?”
“Yes, Daddy.”
“Even the corners of the bit?”
“Yes, Daddy.”
Liz hands him a towel and he dries off in the doorway. He has what we call “the look.” His face is too bright, his eyes too eager; a kind of rigidity seems to grip him when he is still, but when he moves, the movements are quick and broad. Liz recognizes it, too, and says, patiently, “Sweetie, time to settle down for your rest. You want some milk before you go up? Sit by Daddy, and I’ll pour you some.”
He might sit. He might run into the other room. He might knock over his chair. I must have had the look, too, when I was his age, because I remember the feeling perfectly, a feeling of imminent eruption, fearsome, alluring, uncontrollable. It was like standing in a dim, warm, small room and having an astonishing bright light switched on every so often, and when the light was on I couldn’t remember what it was like for the light to be off. From the ages of about nine to about twelve, I worked steadily to lighten the room molecule by molecule, until the bright light no longer shocked me, and the room glowed comfortably. What I actually did I can’t remember, but I remember the sensation of light, the feeling of having labored, and my father remarking that I had gotten to be a good boy after all, no longer “all over the place like a crazy person.” My first real feeling of accomplishment, the first time I knew that I could master myself.
Perh
aps because of Tina, Tommy sits quietly, drinks his milk, and doesn’t knock over his chair until he stands up. Liz picks it up with ostentatious care and I say, “Time for your rest, son. When you come down, I want you to show me the chapter you’ve read.”
“How many pages?”
“A whole chapter.”
“Even if it’s ten pages?”
“A whole chapter.”
He contains himself and marches off. All of these things happen every day, and yet they seem so peculiar with Tina at the table, making notes in her head. I am tempted to apologize, but I don’t know for what, so I hold my tongue.
When we are undressing that night for bed, I admit it, that the interview was a bad idea. “I mean, I hate feeling this detached from everything. Look at my foot going under the covers. Look at my hands pulling the blankets up, aren’t these lovely quilts, look at my wife, ‘Liz’ she’s called, blowing out the lamp.”
Liz laughs, reaches under the covers to tickle me lightly. “She thought you were a genius.”
“What?”
“You heard me.”
“When did she say that?”
“After lunch, then again before she left. She said, ‘Everything he touches he transforms into something beautiful and useful.’ ”
“What did you say?”
“I said that I agreed.”
“You did?”
She runs her hand over my face in the darkness, a gesture that is tender and proprietary at the same time. She says, “I told her I hoped she put that in the book, because that’s what’s true about you.”
After we make love, when I am nearly asleep, I feel her ease out of bed, then I feel her turn, kneel beside the bed, and begin to pray. I hear that murmuring all night, even after I know in my sleep that her solid weight is unconscious beside me.
The next day is Saturday. At breakfast, Liz says, “You remember about the church meeting this afternoon?”
“I remember.”
“I’ll be home about six, unless someone gives me a ride to the end of the road. I might be home by five-twenty or so.”
“Fine.”
“Really?”
“Liz, you don’t have to ask. It’s fine.”
“Good. I’m looking forward to it.”
About a year ago, Liz started shopping around for a church to attend. There are ten churches in Moreton and she went to every one, judging them more on ambience than on doctrine. The two Quaker congregations, having within living memory been one, were hyper-aware of each other, she said, the Episcopalians enjoyed themselves too much, the Presbyterians were engaged in easing out their minister, and on down the line, until she decided upon the “Bright Light Fellowship,” a Pentecostal sect whose prophet resides in Gambier, Ohio. I was frankly astonished that my wife, a graduate of the University of Pennsylvania and a voracious reader, could feel at ease in this collection of the rural poor, the badly educated, and the nakedly enthusiastic, but that is exactly what she feels there, she says. Privately, I think she feels humbled, which is a feeling she is in favor of as a way of life. She began participating in January, and attended every Sunday. If it snowed, she went on skis; if it rained, she wore rubber boots and a poncho. She asks me if I mind. I do, but I would rather not, and I certainly don’t want to influence her. Nevertheless, it has become one of those marital topics of conversation, a rift that we consciously avoid making an argument of. My own religious views are deistic, you might say. I notice that days when she goes to church, for whatever reason, are special days, obstructing the smooth flow of time that I like. She assumes that this is my main objection. I also notice that, however else she arranges and varies her time with, and communication with, Tommy and me, she never fails to kneel at bedtime and make a lengthy prayer. That, both the unfailing regularity of it, and the awkwardness of its insertion into our nightly routine, is the real bone of contention. I have been married to Liz for a long time—twelve years—and I intend to be married to her forever, so I am cautious about drawing any conclusion as to whether this issue is a passing one, one that can be resolved through compromise, or simply a large, heavy object that sits in the living room, obstructing traffic, grudgingly accommodated, year after year.
Of course I have forgotten about the church meeting, so my response, because there has to be one, is to hold a little aloof—to go out in the workshop and dive into a project of my own rather than to do something more friendly, like sort iris corms on the front porch. What I do is remind myself that I am a genius, and, when I step into the workshop, that lends even these kitchen chairs I am making the glow of loveliness. They are made from ash saplings, with woven rush seats, and my tools are, basically, my draw knife and a bucket of water. There are chairs like them in every antique store—rounded stiles, ladder-backs, four stretchers below the seat—but mine are the only comfortable ones I’ve ever sat in. The seat is roomier, for one thing, and I soak the stiles and angle them backward so that you don’t feel like you’re about to be strapped in and electrocuted. I soak all the mortise joints, too, before I put everything together, and they dry and shrink around the tenon so tightly that the whole chair might have been carved from a single piece of wood. These are almost finished. All I have left is a carving of leaves and vines into the top rung of the ladder-back.
Well, it is a pleasant day. I sit on one of the chairs I’ve made and decorate another one. The chestnut tree above me is alive with light and shade, the weather is warm and breezy, my wife and son go about their business with evident satisfaction. The valley that is our home is soothingly beautiful, safe, and self-contained. We eat a lunch that we have provided for ourselves, and afterward I am so involved with my carving that I forget Liz is gone until I see her come walking down the road, and then, no matter who she’s been with, all I want to do is to meet her, kiss her, and walk her to the house.
“Guess what?” she says.
“I’m a genius?”
“Yeah. You know how I can tell?”
“How?”
“You forgot that school starts Tuesday.”
“This Tuesday? I thought that wasn’t till after Labor Day this year.”
“Monday is Labor Day. It’s been September for four days now.”
“Tina was supposed to come on the fifteenth of August.”
“Well, she was two weeks late and we didn’t even notice. She ought to put that in her book.”
“You went to church last Sunday. Didn’t you realize what day it was?”
“It didn’t come up. It’s not like when you’re a Catholic and you’re always counting backwards or forwards to some major holiday.”
“Well, I guess that shows that the prophet is a man of his time. He figures everybody knows what day it is.”
“If you really want to know, what he figures is that every day might as well be the last.”
We haven’t talked about specifics of dogma very much, but I let it drop. Anyway, Tommy comes out of the barn, where he has been haying and watering the ponies for the night, and greets his mother as if she has been gone since Christmas. She swings him up into her arms, and continues walking, his arms around her neck and his legs around her waist. The voice of my father tells me that he is too old for this, but my own voice disagrees, says that boys are isolated too soon, that as long as he seeks our bodies he should find them. And there is also this reassuring shiver of jealousy, a light touch raising the hairs on the nape of my neck, that reminds me how the pleasure of marriage and the pleasure of fatherhood take their piquancy from watching, left out, as they nuzzle and giggle and tease. He never tries to impress her; she never tries to mollify him. We haven’t used birth control since our marriage and she only got pregnant once. Most of the time I forget that it could happen again. Secretly, I have only ever managed to imagine one boy child. Maybe imagination is the key there, too. “Lovely sunset,” says Liz, and Tommy says, “We fried green tomatoes with basil for dinner.”
“Mmm,” says his mommy. “I just love that.”