by Tom Bouman
As I said, my office was small, and crowded even more so by the fume of anger hanging between the two men.
“If she shows up at my place again, I’m going to have to shoot her. That’s all,” said Mark.
“You shoot my dog …” Terry warned. He had a chaw in his lip and an iced-tea bottle for the spit. “It’s the kids’ dog.” He turned to me. “You heard him.”
“Okay,” I said. “Just—”
“Then train her,” Mark said to Terry.
“She is trained.”
“A trained killer, sure.”
“She loves your fuckin dog,” Terry said. “I love your dog. They’re dogs, they scrap. Sometimes they run away. Sometimes it’s coyotes.”
“Coyotes?” Mark turned to me. “She comes home one time needing stitches on her neck. That’s one hell of a scrap. I still don’t see him paying her vet bills.”
“Here we go.”
Mark turned to me. “I’m going to say it. His dog—Goldwing, right?—is a pit from the street. She has no ears. She fought for her life, all her life. And I’m sorry for that. But Puff’s been afraid of her. Afraid to come home. Or maybe she’s dead.”
“Show me the proof. Show me the proof. Show me the proof,” Terry said. “Show me the proof.”
“Shut—quiet, both of you,” I said. “There’s coyotes out there. Mark, what’s Puffball, ah …”
“An Airedale. She’s not an idiot. She knows coyotes.”
“She spayed?” I said.
Mark said nothing. Then, “She’s too old for that to be it.”
“We’ve got a bear,” Terry added. He spat quietly into his bottle. “Seen it.”
“Great,” said Mark. “Great.” He stood. “Anything comes on my land, bear, coyote, whatever …”
“Mark, you shoot Goldie, we’re going to have a problem,” I said. “Have some sense.”
Mark pointed a finger at me and said, “Then you find my dog.” He stalked out of my office. Terry waited until he heard Mark drive away, and then stood to leave.
“Wait a minute,” I said, removing my glasses and smoothing my beard. “Next time, send your wife.”
“Excuse me, Farrell?”
“Send your wife. Say you’re working. Next time he calls you down here for whatever, send your wife,” I said. “He wants a fight, you don’t. Send your wife. He’ll behave.”
“I hear you. Maybe.” Terry left.
Terry was right about the coyotes, and he was right about the bear. I’d responded to a Baptist church where the bear had visited a dumpster that summer. By the time I arrived, it had disappeared, and it was all over but the sweeping up. Since, I’d lain in wait on a ridgetop I knew, and seen the big lonely thing huffing raspberries in the dawn. In my mind I named him Crabapple.
THE NEXT TIME Crabapple appeared to me was on the occasion of my second wedding, as the late summer sun blessed Wild Thyme. At the Meaghers’ cottage on Walker Lake, where Julie and I would say our vows in an hour or two, caterers and decorators flitted from the house to the yard tying ribbons and placing bouquets of wildflowers. After the ceremony we would be put to cocktails and dinner with most of Wild Thyme and many more besides, and her family and mine would finally size each other up. Until then, I skulked in the mossy-roofed boathouse with the spiders. The scotch I’d drunk the night before had gone down clean, and the hangover was in the nature of a low fever. My head pulsed out into the world, and the world closed back in on my head. The lake water brought a dead fish into the slip to keep me company. I shooed it away with a canoe paddle but it came back, or was a different one.
I had showered and left my own place early to escape Father and Ma, recently arrived from North Carolina, along with my sister Mag and her family. I had nowhere else to be. The boathouse doors framed a sunlit piece of lake and some busy cottages on it. I leaned in a folding chair, thinking.
I heard Miss Julie before I saw her, talking to somebody who wasn’t talking back. A knock came on the door and she appeared there beneath a hairdo full of fronds and flowers. She carried a towel and wore a loose white robe. “I’m going to get in the lake and float. I found these two outside,” she said. “You know them?”
I looked out the door and there stood Brit, age nine, and Ryan, eleven, my niece and nephew from the Christmas cards. Ryan wore a shirt and tie, and Brit, a blue sundress and a straw hat. I wanted to hug them, but I didn’t know them well enough. Brit looked from Julie to me, and back to Julie. “Him seeing you is bad luck,” she whispered.
I suggested the kids and I take a canoe out, but Brit, eyeing the inch of slosh at the bottom of the boat, preferred to wait with the bride. Ryan pulled off his shoes and socks in a split second, took a paddle, and hopped in, and we two shot free of the boathouse. We paddled around Walker Lake, Ryan up in the prow. I knew enough of boys not to make him talk. Out of place at the wedding of an uncle he didn’t really know, in itchy clothes, at a big house far from home. He was uneasy. An unmarried uncle was like him. A married one wasn’t. Whenever the boy turned his head sideways I looked for Farrell genes in his face—big teeth, long face, ears like a dog.
“Nice place,” he said.
“Yeah.”
“Big wedding.”
“It’s all I’ve been doing for days. Anybody wants to rob a bank, now’s their chance.” In fact, there had been a masked gunman hitting the gas stations and convenience stores of northeastern Pennsylvania for some months now. I didn’t anticipate ever catching him.
Ryan looked back in the direction of the cottage. “You going to live there now?”
“Julie’s going to live with me at my place, where you’re staying. Good hunting up there. You know,” I said, “the Farrells have lived up here since before the Civil War. You belong here, you and your sister, too.”
“That’s what Granddad says.” With the blade of his paddle he pulled up some lakeweed to look at. “You like her?”
“Julie? Yeah, I like her.” I did like her. “You?”
“Sure.”
Ryan and I drifted for a while on the lake, looking back at the shore occasionally, where at that distance the wedding guests looked like a painting, moving slowly down the lawn toward the rows of folding chairs. The Meaghers had invited an unthinkable number of people. What was planned this day was not for my benefit. By the boathouse I saw my best man Ed Brennan, dressed in his rental tuxedo and waving mine at me, which was still wrapped in plastic. It flashed in the afternoon sun.
Once we were dressed and our ties reasonably tied, Ed and I gazed at each other mournfully, our stomachs wrapped in cummerbunds the color of raw salmon. I peered out a window of my mossy refuge. The Holebrook Farrells and our poor relations were outnumbered four-to-one by Julie’s people. But Sheriff Dally was there, as was Deputy Jackson, as was Lee Hillendale and his nice wife Greta, as were two friends I’d made in the army, there with their wives and kids, different now of course. And I’d seen my boss, the Sovereign Individual, walking the cottage grounds like he owned the place. Him and his wife. According to Julie, there was no way to keep him off the guest list, as the Milgraham family had owned the cottage two plots over longer than her family had been on the lake. I was disappointed to see him. But what did that matter in the end? I was nobody in the grand scheme of this wedding.
They have pills for what happens to me in social situations: tunnel vision, confusion, and a tendency to lock my jaw or let words escape in reels of nonsense. You know when you’re talking to someone and you realize there’s something not quite right? Allow me to introduce Officer Farrell, given to anxiety and depression. His cousins are homeschooled. Oh, and there they all are.
I took my place at the spot under the huge weeping willow in the yard, whose branches had been trimmed to form an archway. Ed was beside me; the several bridesmaids across from us, waiting in a line. Here came Miss Julie on the arm of her father Willard, who looked a little yellow and tired. Not Julie, though, who gave off life in her simple white dress and her flowers.
If you knew her, you could almost see her past trailing behind her like balloons: a wealthy childhood, too much education, drugs, her first serious boyfriend dead too young. A checkered career as an EMT down south.
Then a return home to Wild Thyme, to family and quiet, where she transformed, calmly and without regret, into the beautiful rosy person who walked down the path of sun-warmed flagstones toward me. She touched my cheek and told me I looked handsome. I could not get a word out. I took her hand and almost went to kiss her.
I passed through the ceremony as if in a series of photographs. The Episcopalian priest who married us said every sentence like a question, as if to ask the guests for replies. Many waters cannot quench love, neither can floods drown it, right? If one offered for love all the wealth of one’s house, it would be utterly scorned, huh? My voice shook as I said my part, then calmed as I focused on Julie: the dots of sweat on her cheeks, the damp strands of hair that clung around her ears, her embarrassed smiles.
If there was one thing getting in the way of this wedding, it was me. If there were two things, it was my other wife Polly, dead some years and two thousand miles away—it was unclear how she would fit into my life now. And three, a dream feeling, a fear that if I let myself fall backwards into this miracle of Julie and her sunny goodness, it might dissolve around me.
After the ceremony the ten thousand guests milled around the lawn with drinks. My sister Mag approached me with one-year-old Carter in her arms, a little girl in a pink dress and diaper, no shoes. She handed the baby to me. I can still feel her weight in my arms from that day to this, and her little hand swatting my face. I talked to her. She gave me a peeved look and helped me take off my glasses and untie my bow tie. I thought she was the best company available, but the feeling wasn’t mutual, and Mag had to take her away. With my best wedding guest gone, I was able to consider the many people I didn’t know, including Miss Julie’s relatives and Willard Meagher’s business friends. A great-uncle of Julie’s pinned me to the lilac bush with questions to make me admit that, more or less, I had amounted to nothing so far and would continue to do so. I didn’t like discussing my plans with strangers, so I hid in the woods and sat with my back against a tree. From there, I witnessed a curious scene: Ma gripping Julie’s forearm as she passed, their heads together in whispers, and Ma leaning back and smiling. The world was full of secrets.
It wasn’t long before we got a wedding crasher or two—a pontoon full of drunk cottagers dropped anchor nearby and wished the party well. Willard Meagher sent a kid out with a bottle of champagne for them. Then a kayak scraped up to the shore and a man dressed in golf clothes and a white hat climbed out. Even from far away I knew who it was: Joshua Bray, an aeronautics engineer who lived on a horse farm here in Wild Thyme, and had a number of side hustles to make himself richer, some I knew about, some I was only beginning to guess. His ex-wife Shelly and I had made a mistake together, and it had ended with bad feeling in all directions. The affair was no secret to Joshua, but it was to my bride, and the time had long passed to where I could tell Julie about it without consequence. I stood up and brushed myself off.
I quick-walked down to the lawn where Joshua stood, but before I could get to him, Willard swept in, clapped him on the shoulder, and handed him a drink.
“Jesus, where you been?” Willard asked me. “Quit your lurking for once, it’s your own damn wedding. You know Josh Bray? I told him to stop by. Hope the caterers don’t hit me with a frying pan.”
“We’ve met,” I said, with a smile I hoped was not too thin.
Joshua returned a perfectly civil smile that contained more: his wealth and comfort, my wild upbringing in the hills; his belonging, my lurking; what he knew, what I needed him to keep to himself.
For the past year, Willard had been trying to convert his grocery stores and convenience marts to a small fortune and then disappear to a beach somewhere. Possibly this was why Joshua had been invited—a potential buyer. I didn’t care.
“Bray,” I said, “let me show you around.” I was hoping to pull him aside and, in the nicest possible way, tell him to get lost.
“It’s like he already owns the place,” said Bray to Willard with a laugh.
Willard narrowed his eyes, then smiled and said, “Henry’s at home here. You be welcome too, Bray.” Willard took his leave.
“Bray, I hate to ask,” I said, “but can you move it along? We’re maxed out. Heads counted, seats assigned, you know how it is.”
“I do,” said Bray. “I do know how it is. Should Willard not have asked me? I have a lot to talk about with these people.”
“Another time,” I said. “Finish your drink and go.”
“In a minute,” he said. “Don’t worry, I won’t eat your dinner.” He joined the wedding guests. I walked to the shore and watched him as he moved through the crowd, smiling and gripping shoulders until he reached Julie. He took her hand and went in for a kiss on the cheek. She didn’t know Bray well, so it startled her, but she laughed and took it in stride.
I stood there by the lake, newly married to a woman I never deserved, baffled by my future and caught in my past. For a moment, I wasn’t at my own wedding, but in the midst of the Brays’ divorce again. I couldn’t keep it at arm’s length, no matter how I tried; Shelly, after disappearing from Wild Thyme, resurfaced months later at the station. Given everything that had happened between us and was known by a few, I was reluctant to help, or even have her seen in my company. According to a devil’s bargain visitation order, she was supposed to have the kids every other weekend, but the last couple times she’d made the trip up to collect them, Josh had arranged for them not to be there. I’d told her to take it to court. I couldn’t step in unless there was going to be harm to the children. She’d left in a fury and I hadn’t seen her since, but I’d heard rumblings from the sheriff’s department and friends: an altercation with Josh in the BAE Systems parking lot, Shelly on the horse farm when she should not have been, Shelly haunting her own family.
Eventually Liz Brennan—Ed’s wife, you know—found me. “Go meet Julie up on the hill. She said you’d know where. She wants pictures.”
Up on the hill among the Queen Anne’s lace there was only Julie in the heart of a happiness neither I, nor our families, nor any interloper could destroy. The photographer was a jolly hefty woman with romantical notions. She tried posing me, my hand gently holding Julie’s elbow, gazing into the distance, or I don’t know. It didn’t work and she mostly followed us around as we tried to pretend she wasn’t there. Away from the party, I felt my body relax for the first time all day. We let the photographer head down to the wedding alone and gave ourselves a moment.
I asked Julie what Ma had said to her back at the cottage.
“Oh, she asked if I was going to have a baby.”
“Really. What did you tell her?”
“I said yeah.”
“What?” That spring we had decided to go off the pill. I looked at Julie and understood what she was saying, and burst into foolish tears.
“Don’t make it weird,” she said, and dabbed at her own eyes.
“Sorry.” I looked down the hill at the distant Wild Thymers, Holebrookians, Farrell relations, and Julie’s people. I was going to be a father.
“We can’t tell anyone yet. You’re the only one who knows, you, and now your ma. How’d she even know to ask?”
The farther I am from a crowd, the better I feel. And if I can see into the woods, into cover, I am close to home, to my world. Up on the hilltop I turned slowly, taking in the timber-frame artist’s studio we’d built for Willard, and the perimeter of maple, beech, and white pine. At the edge of the trees, who did I see but the black bear. Was it Crabapple? I thought so. No doubt he was drawn by the scent of roasting meat, but repelled by people and the music thudding into his wild brain. He moved off. Bears almost float atop their long limbs, you ever really see one? Good for you, Crabby. Good choice, I said to myself. Julie looked up too late to see the bear.
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br /> We moved down the hill, back to the feast. Julie’s mother Tina had politely, staunchly objected to the pig roast, but I’d insisted on it. That morning, Liz Brennan’s uncle Derek, an organic farmer up to Broome County, had driven his pickup through the cottage’s yard to the pit I’d dug the day before, climbed into the truck’s bed, and tossed out a series of heavy iron devices that looked like pieces of a railroad engine. Put together, they were a spit and the rack it rotated on. He’d stuffed newspaper under kindling and set a match to it. When the wood was popping, he got back into the truck’s bed and lowered two huge coolers to me. He opened one; curled in it was the gilt I’d ordered. She’d been raised on acorns, no trash. Together we’d stretched the pig out and got it on the spit, a process I will leave to you to imagine. We slathered our hands from a bottle of dish soap and washed them from a jug of water.
In the other cooler: beer and ice. He gave me one, opened one for himself, and said, “Do what you got to do. I’m set.” His small eyes twinkled, and I felt I was in the care of an angel.
Several hours later, as Julie and I returned from the hilltop, we passed Tina Meagher gazing wide-eyed into the field as the pig caught fire. Uncle Derek sat bolt upright in his chair. He rubbed his eyes and slapped at the flames with what appeared to be a dirty towel soaked in water from the cooler. From out of nowhere came Ed with the garden hose. He doused the pig and knocked the fire down. Uncle Derek too sank back into his chair. Tina took a long drink from her napkin-wrapped G&T. I raced across the lawn, but by the time I arrived, Ed was crouched by the fire in his tuxedo, slowly turning the spit. “I don’t know anymore,” he said. Uncle Derek would not be roused from his drunk.