Ordinary Love and Good Will (17 page)

She says, “I made sweet-potato soup, and there’s sprout bread and cream cheese. I’m starving. It looks delicious.”

“I want to ask you, but right now wanting to ask you feels sort of like wanting to ask you for all the sexual details of some love affair. Can I wait to ask you until I feel more friendly about it?”

“I would like to tell you.”

She speaks simply, with such pure desire to communicate that my heart constricts. We have had great luck in finding one another; we have few conflicts and much pleasure in our friendship; we have been held securely in this bowl of a valley; how can I deny her? I say, “Okay. The moment itself. Make me see the moment itself.”

“I was chopping sweet potatoes and looking down the valley. The fog was sort of caught halfway up the mountainsides, as if tangled in the branches, and then it lifted off in big scarves, and the sun shone on the tree branches, and I saw the shapes of the trees, one right after another. Well, the outline of the lower branches exactly matched this imaginary line created along the tips of the upper branches, and it was beautiful and uniform—all the trees were like that. And I thought, The roots are like that, too. Then I thought, Why shouldn’t all that striving be toward God’s love? Why shouldn’t it be God’s love that makes it beautiful? The whole history of culture tells us that it is God’s love. Why not just accept it, believe it? Why not? It seemed easy. So I did. It was.”

“Sweetie, the world is beautiful. It’s beautiful because it and our eyes have evolved together.”

“I still believe in Evolution.”

“Can’t you not be saved? Can’t you just believe in God and everything and not be saved?”

“But it feels like being saved. I feel full of relief.”

I eat my soup. I could say what I feel, “Don’t leave me,” but she would think I meant something practical. I know she won’t leave the farm, our marriage. I know, in fact, that this latest event represents the completion of that circle to her. I have been in love with Liz for twelve years, and our love grew largely out of shared interests, ideas, and ambitions. We have disagreed and compromised and learned from one another, and one of the things I love most about her is how she suggests new possibilities to me after the moment of anger as if they were speculations rather than issues. She is respectful of everyone, including Tom, including me. She makes it easy to learn from her. But being saved religiously is not something I want to learn, that is in me to learn. Nor, I suspect, is it something learnable, but, rather, a native talent. I could probably learn the formalities, but I could never make the leap of faith. Liz won’t see it neutrally, like this; she will certainly move willy-nilly toward giving that talent a moral color, using words like “choice,” “commitment,” “good,” “necessary.” Her “Bright Light” church doesn’t admit enough room for compromise, if any form of Christianity does.

She scarfs down her soup and two or three pieces of bread, not really more lustily than usual—she is a passionate eater most of the time. Then she sits back and says, “Bobby, this is good news.”

“On what plane?”

She smiles merrily. “How about the every-little-sparrow-that-falls plane?”

“God is happy?”

“I think so. I think he’s happy but not elated, sort of the way you are when you plant lettuce seeds and they sprout, rather than as you would be if you planted lemon trees in
Pennsylvania and they bore fruit. I don’t imagine it’s a miracle for him.”

“Is it a miracle for you?”

She gets up from her seat and plunks herself in my lap. “Only for me. It feels very private. I like it that way. Nothing is going to change. It makes me love you more.”

Well, it is easy to notice the foolishness of the transported, the sorts of promises they make, their unwillingness to admit the practical cost soon to be paid, their self-confidence. So let me not notice it, as Liz has not rolled her eyes in the past at my “great ideas.” Let us stay married, nuzzling, agreeing, eating, talking, being all the more present now that we recognize transience in a new way.

On Wednesday morning I go for the turkey. The fact is, I’ve gotten one every year so far, though more than once it’s taken from sunup to sunset. Turkeys are easier to hunt in the spring, when they are mating. You can go out before dawn and find them roosting in the trees, silhouetted against the lightening sky, and you can call them down to you at daybreak with a hen call, and often the tom will come at a run. In the fall their desires are more discreet—food and friendship—and they are far more suspicious. You have to call infrequently, no more than two or three times an hour, and, I always think, your call has to sound rather casual, relaxed but informative, as if the turkey you are is offering good conversation about safe and pleasant topics. You also have to stay as still as possible, since their hearing is exceptional and their eyesight is better than that. With all your efforts, a turkey in the fall still approaches mistrustfully, a step at a time, so you have time to debate over and over about whether it is in range or not, whether you are a decent shot or not, whether you’ve been kidding yourself all year about your marksmanship, whether you have also been kidding yourself about lots of other things, whether now is the time to give up meat-eating, whether you are cold and uncomfortable
enough to go home—but still you are riveted, can’t move, enthralled by your power over the turkey.

A flock has included the back part of our woods in its range this year: I have seen tracks and feeding signs all summer. I intend to outsmart the birds this year, and not to spend as much time as usual doing it. At the breakfast table, Tommy says, “Hey, Daddy, aren’t you going to get a turkey this year?”

“It’ll be here when you get home from school.” I sound lordly.

He looks around the room. “You said you’ve to jump them when they’re still sleepy.”

“That’s the spring. Don’t worry. I’ve got those turkeys all figured out this year.”

“Famous last words,” remarks Liz.

“Keep talking. We’ll see.”

Liz laughs. “How about a nice turkey breast molded out of mashed turnips? Mmm.”

“I want turkey!”

“And there is a turkey who wants you. You watch. Now, here, how many shells do I have in my hand?”

“Three.”

“That’s all I’m taking. One to scatter the flock, one to kill the dinner bird, and one to fiddle with in my pocket for good luck.”

He picks up one of the shells. They are my last three from a box I bought four years ago. I say, “Better still, you keep that for good luck all day at school.”

“Good luck if you want cream cheese for Thanksgiving dinner,” snorts Liz.

Tommy is grinning as he slips the shell into his breast pocket. I say, “Now don’t show it to anyone. Otherwise the luck will run out of it, and we won’t have turkey for Thanksgiving. Got that?”

“Yeah. Yeah, I guess.”

“It’s our secret? Promise?”

“Promise.”

“Two-shot-turkey promise?”

“Yeah.”

“The look” passes over him; he clenches his palm and one or two breaths come suddenly and fast, but he is good—he puckers and blows off the extra energy, waits a second, and then goes back to eating his toast. I feel as if I have just witnessed a private ritual exorcism, and I don’t want to lay claim to it by mentioning it, so after a little bit I say, “It’ll be great. I’ll be thinking of you, son.”

The trees are hung with mist, and the cloud cover is low enough to shroud the upper ridges—a good day for hunting, since the damp leaves under my feet make little noise as I climb the hill behind the house. At “the deer clearing” (a spot where we used to see deer once or twice a week), I pause, as I always do, and look over the roof of the house, down the valley. The roof of the house is blackly wet, mostly hidden in a tangle of branches. Our gardens, fenced, covered with leaves, make a neat pattern, attentive to the house, like seats in an amphitheater. Moreton is hidden in thick mist. It would be an ugly day anywhere else, but here it is only a particular kind of day, autumnal and interior. It feels adventurous to be out.

I check the springhouse and the water pipe. The clear, still water, dark in the shady springhouse tank, is about three feet deep. A steady trickle of water flows into it from above—rather than using a pipe, I took a chisel, and chiseled a deep conduit in a flat piece of sandstone that was already in place. I thought it was an especially tactful way of capping the spring. From the tank, buried pipe runs to the pump by the sink in the house. Buried four feet deep. The trench took Martin Summerbee and me a summer to dig, but it has never frozen up, even in the coldest winter. The spring produces about a gallon a minute, even in the summer, and
gives me the secret security of buried treasure—when I bought the land, I thought I would use the old well, but I discovered the first summer that its lower reaches were caved in and that digging a new well, if the driller could even get in to the house, would run about a thousand dollars—eight hundred more than I had. It was the well-driller who said he’d heard there were springs all over this ridge. The fact is, I used to think that the pleasure of receiving the earth’s free gifts—water, raspberries, firewood, walnuts—would fade with habit, but it hasn’t. That’s another prayer—good luck that feels like gratitude.

I cross the ridge onto the neighboring property, and encounter turkey sign almost immediately. It is not only tracks, but also the shadowy, rounded shapes in the dirt that they make with their wattles as they forage. I put the call to my mouth and give two quiet “cluck”s. A turkey answers almost immediately, from a cleft not far below me, where I happen to know that a spring rises and a clearing spreads in a gentle slope toward an old deer-blind. Between me and the clearing is a heavy thicket of young sugar maples and yellow birch. A turkey won’t enter a thicket, so I can use it as a blind from which to look down at the spring. I load one of the shells, take the safety off, and glide toward the thicket.

The turkeys are feeding in a group near the spring, the tom, three hens, and two young birds. When I stretch out on a big flat rock and give a single cluck, the two young birds come toward me at once, five or six steps. The nearest hen looks up curiously, too. She is my target, a twelve- or thirteen-pound bird, probably not very old. I take aim. She continues to look around. Through the sights she seems larger, and seems to take on personality. I choose her, as if I were choosing the smartest, most alert puppy from a litter. I squeeze the trigger, willing myself to resist the recoil and the noise of the shot.

By the time the thunder has dissipated, the turkeys have scattered into the woods, nowhere to be seen. In a heap of feathers near the spring lies not the little hen but the tom himself, who must have walked into the shot, which I must have misjudged because I was shooting downhill. I have never felt a sense of triumph at actually bagging the game, rather a kind of panic at having to approach it, touch it. There is a heart-sinking moment like exhaustion when I think of all the work ahead of me: gutting, dressing, trudging home, singeing, cooking, even eating, and wish I were still in that happy, unencumbered previctorious state.

It is carrying the bird home through the trees, tromping through the leaves, surveying the landscape that brings me back to myself. And, of course, Liz is impressed. It isn’t even lunchtime yet, and this is the biggest turkey I’ve ever shot.

At three-thirty, we hear the school bus gear up as it pulls away from dropping Tommy at the end of the road. We have left the feathers on the turkey for just this moment. Liz hastily spreads the wings on newspapers on the front porch, to display them, and we hide inside the kitchen door. The turkey seems about six feet long, so large that it is nearly human in some way. I can’t resist peering out and spying on my son’s progress toward the house—it is a weakness I have always had for wanting to know the solitary, undefended Tom. At first his step is idle—he drops his coat, steps on it by mistake, hastily picks it up and brushes at the dirt. Then he makes himself be more careful. At last he decides to run. About ten feet in front of the porch he stops short, startled and, maybe, afraid for a moment. He cranes his neck to get a better look at the turkey, realizes what it is, and climbs the steps. His awe is everything I could have asked for. “Wow,” he says. “It’s the turkey.” He walks all the way around it, fingers some of the wing feathers, pokes the beak, picks up one of the feet. I can feel Liz tense for
jumping up and shouting, “Surprise!” but I restrain her, and we keep watching. He stands back then and gazes at the turkey, arms crossed over his chest. He gazes for a long time, much longer than I would have thought possible for him. This is a fidgety kid, one who can hardly stand to read for half an hour in his room, who has to be asked to sit down at the table over and over during a meal. Now, though, he seems to be drinking this turkey in. No toe-tapping, head-scratching, sniffling. Nothing. When I become impatient, Liz restrains me. And then he steps forward and strokes the turkey’s breast with the back of his hand, gently, three times. He reaches toward the turkey’s head. We can’t stand it any longer—neither of us—we spring up and yell, “Surprise!” He jumps back, laughs, becomes a son again, says, “Daddy! You got it!”

I take the remaining shell out of my shirt pocket. “One shot,” I say.

“Wow!” he says, and we have a romantic night that night, all enamored of one another, of our house, our coming feast, of the beneficent turkey spirit that seems to have come for a visit.

The day after Thanksgiving, we walk into town for supper at the Claytons’ house. It is a yearly ritual—we walk to town, eat early, and all go to a movie in State College. This year we consider seeing
Platoon
. It is my decision, since I am the only veteran, but confronting my war experiences is not something I want to do on my one night out for the year, and we go to
Radio Days
instead. Dr. Harris is standing in line ahead of us. I can’t tell if she is alone or with the group just in front of her. She is wearing a thick, stylish camel’s hair coat, a fur hat, and leather gloves. I wave, and, after a moment, she waves. I wonder if our behavior would be different if we were going to be friends.