Returning to Earth (26 page)

On the way to the airport in the first light I was initially irked that I couldn't live in the little house I had bought because I had to look after Clare. K had told me that Clare had said she intended to move a cot into the den where her father had spent his last days. This was before what I thought of as her hibernation plan.

Polly was still uncomfortable about the money while we waited in the concourse for the plane. I explained that our parents had inadvertently taught us to despise money. David merely spent his on his cranky charity and in my case the money left to me made Donald uncomfortable. He'd only say “Save it for the kids.” I kept the books and he did very well in the cement and construction business plus I had my teacher's salary. He even paid Clarence's debts when there was no real obligation. He would say, “I like to think I can put three squares on the table and a roof over our heads.” The kids got straight A's and scholarships but Donald never knew that they couldn't accept financial aid because of the money left me by my mother and the occasional sale of Father's land. I even had to promise him I'd sell the big fancy SUV we drove him to Canada in. “What I'm saying is that I can't bear to see your savings going to a lawyer for your daughter's crimes when the amount isn't important to me.” And that was that. I didn't feel a shred of virtue.

I was jangled and boneless when I left the airport and instead of doing something sensible like going back to bed I
drove toward Au Train thinking I might lay down the law to Clare but then what is the law? I was confused and hungry enough to stop in Harvey for breakfast at the restaurant my father used to take David and me to for the turkey sandwiches we liked. There were a number of tables of deer hunters in the orange suits they wear to avoid shooting one another. They were pointing at and discussing a big buck deer draped over a pickup fender out the window and I had the sudden image of Donald frying venison at the kitchen stove. I could even smell it. At another table there was a group of men I recognized as cement finishers and block layers by the dried cement stains on their insulated Carharts and hooded heavy sweatshirts. The oldest man, probably the foreman, was eating a plate of fried potatoes and catsup as if his life depended on it. He stared at me, then looked away, then got up and approached my table.

“I was sorry to hear about Donald. There was a man who could put in a day's work.” I shook his hand as he offered this ultimate compliment of the north. His hand felt like a semipetrified baseball mitt. “You might not remember me. Donny and me played football way back when, then worked together. The name's Teddy.” He bowed, his face reddening, and walked away.

“You were the left tackle,” I called out and he turned and grinned.

When I made the turn near Au Train I wasn't a hundred yards down the small road toward Flower's when I saw a man lying on his back in an orange suit with a rifle across
his chest. I got out of the car and I called out to him but he didn't answer. I walked over and could see his footprints deep in the snow coming out of a swamp to where he lay. I said, “Hello” loudly thinking he was ill. I remembered Donald saying that about the same number of hunters die by heart attack as do of errant gunshots. He opened his eyes as if I were a dream. “I had a hangover and this fucking snow is too deep so I took a nap.” The whiskey fumes rose toward my nose and I hurried away.

There was no one at Flower's but I could see a trail out the back door through the snow and from perhaps a few hundred yards in the woods I could hear a chain saw, which would be Clare and Flower working on the shelter. The house was overwarm and water dripped from the eaves. The temperature outside was rising above freezing and the midmorning sun glinted off the snow. I lay down on a small corner bed in the room where I had lain with Donald so long ago when I was fourteen and he sixteen. How we loved each other. There were five bearskins tacked to the wall from the time of Flower's dad, whom she said was so hard he broke like a stick. Flower had become angry when she discovered Donald had put a bearskin on the floor for our lovemaking. It evidently broke a taboo of some sort. Then as now I was decidedly a white woman and didn't want to know. This thought made me wonder how much Clare had absorbed from her father but then it's impossible to be quantitative about such matters. In my essentially white Episcopalian mind-set I could somewhat understand Uncle Fred's Zen Buddhism but when I tried to read a piece in
Harper's
about Tibetan Buddhism it seemed an alien country. I recalled in
high school when the local Finns were angry because an anthropologist at the college had said that Finns were essentially northern European Indians. Clarence and Donald thought the whole fuss quite funny with Donald being half and half. Clarence would say, “I'm just an American whatever the hell that is.” When Clare was a junior in college she brought her Sicilian roommate home on Easter vacation and this girl had thick, black kinky hair that was beautiful. At dinner Donald asked if he could touch her hair and when he did so we all laughed. She said that over a period of thousands of years Sicily was vulnerable and everyone invaded it, Muslim countries, Africans, and Greeks. Donald said, “I agree with the results” and blushed.

Now there were ravens surrounding Flower's house and I swear a large, bearded male looked in the window which cast a yellow square of light across my chest. I sniffled a bit over daughters missing their fathers. I never missed mine.

I slept until late afternoon when the cold November light began to fail. I don't think I ever slept more deeply and there was the pleasant illusion that I had become part of the bed. I turned to see Clare and Flower folding up the five bearskins and wrapping them in a large canvas tarpaulin.

“Mom, are you okay?” Clare said with a windburned smile. In the few days I had been in Chicago she had become ruddy, her skin coarsened by weather.

“I'm not the one in question,” I whispered, which she ignored.

Clare and Flower dragged their heavy bundle out the door and left the door open. I got up and watched from the window as they skidded off their freight on a toboggan down toward a low area in the darkening woods where I once found a wild orchard. What a pair of women, I thought. The only thing my mother had in common with Flower was a fascination with wildflowers. Once when Flower drove her old Plymouth into the alley behind the garage to talk to Clarence my mother and I were in the yard and she acted frightened of Flower.

I went to the wood-burning kitchen stove and lifted the top of a Dutch oven smelling a venison soup made with dried corn and dried wild leeks. Herald was always leery of Flower but sent her packages of food from the Southwest that included chiles and a variety of dried corn and beans. When Herald was still a little boy Flower had sent him a hunting knife she had made with a deer-horn handle. He never used the knife but it was a prized possession.

I sat down at the table and tasted a chile sauce that burned my tongue pleasantly. Suddenly it was dark and I heard their feet crunching through the snow on the path back to the house. I tried to think of something to say to Clare, which made me want a drink. There was a jealous notion that Flower had become Clare's mother during this dark time. What did I have to offer? Should I say to Clare that your father is forever dead to you and you should resume your life? In my mind's eye I could see Donald and Clare packing for one of their countless fishing trips with Clare at age seven in pigtails sitting at the kitchen table going over her list of needed supplies saying, “Dad eats so much bacon I can't believe it.”

While Flower dished up the soup Clare sat down beside me and gave me a hug as if I were the one with problems. “Don't worry about me, Mother, I have to do this.”

What could I say? Nothing whatsoever, not even “Dress warmly.” We ate our delicious meal and ended up laughing at a naughty joke about an old woman with one leg who made love to a bear. Despite my laughter it was slightly unnerving that Flower told the joke as if the story were absolutely true. When I got up to leave I had decided not to tell Clare about the problem with Polly's daughter in New York. Though Rachel was younger Clare had patiently taught her dance steps and how to swim. The thought of this girl in prison made me think of Dickens's phrase “bleak consternation.”

When I got home I found my asshole father's martini shaker in the pantry and made myself an overlarge drink. At this stage, why not? There were two phone messages and I chose David in Jalapa to come first over K in New York.

“How are you?”

“I don't know. How are you?”

“I don't know.”

An exact transcription. We started over with me delaying the bad news about his ex-wife Polly and him telling me about his first interesting day driving around to villages taking samples from wells and water systems. The threat of cholera made me think of the novel I was rereading. Bears and cholera. I was a long way from Chicago. I took a big gulp of my drink and told him why Polly was in New York and he questioned whether he should fly up and help. I asked, “How?” and he was offended. I said that I'd call
tomorrow when I knew more. I left a message at the hotel where Polly and K were staying and K called back in an hour when I was half bombed and dwelling on a passage in the García Márquez novel: “Only God knows how much I loved you.” I nearly didn't answer the phone. K said he had given Polly a sedative and she was asleep. The arraignment had been perfunctory. The only things working in their favor were the fact that there were hundreds of similar cases on the docket and that the amount of heroin sold to the undercover agent wasn't in the major category. The lawyer had covered the bail with my wired money and they would need more to pay him. I said I'd wire more in the morning and then heard a noise from his end. K said his sister was sobbing in the bathroom because he wouldn't let her see her boyfriend or call him. After he hung up he was taking her to a detox center even though she claimed to be only an occasional user. He asked about Clare and I was noncommittal, then a little frightened because the night had been still up until fifteen minutes ago and now a strong wind from the north had begun.

“I think she means to hibernate to get close to the spirit of her father,” I said, my voice quavering.

“Jesus Christ I knew it was something like that. I just have no idea what we can do.”

“Me neither,” I said, hanging up the phone because I could no longer talk.

I went into the kitchen and made another drink and then went out onto the open back porch and sipped it in the blowing cold. I looked up and watched the clouds of the
oncoming front cover up the stars. Just like that, they're gone.

At some point in the night the furnace went off so that when I awoke at first light just before seven the house was frightfully cold. I put on a full-length sheepskin coat Donald had given me for Christmas, made coffee, and waited for the furnace man I had called to arrive. He turned out to be from the class behind me in high school though I didn't remember him. After he had replaced what he called the
igniter
I poured him a cup of coffee and he showed me what was wrong with the defective part with his oily hands. Heat was flooding the kitchen and I parted my coat. For an instant my left breast peeked out of my nightgown and we both blushed as I covered it. He left moments later and it occurred to me as I watched him walk out to his van that if he had made a move I doubt if I would have resisted. What could be erotic about oily hands and the scent of fuel oil? I had felt so naked beneath my robe and nightgown.

I dressed as warmly as possible then went out to Clarence's workshed and got my cross-country skis and poles. I still tasted last night's vodka in my mouth and my mind was unclear. I wanted to go to a wild area near Champion but remembered it was deer season and didn't want to be mistaken for a doe. Presque Isle would be too windy so I chose Trowbridge Park and skied for nearly two hours until I was soaked with sweat but hadn't quite dispelled the image of the repairman's large oily hands. My heart
jumped at the idea that I had forgotten the wire transfer to K and Polly so I stopped at the bank, and then picked up a steak at the IGA remembering how easily Donald could eat a two-pound porterhouse or a whole chicken, for that matter.

When I got home there was a call from Coughlin on the answering machine saying that he had got some interesting information from both the anthropology professor and a researcher at the Newberry. He was assembling it and would FedEx it north. He sensed the inquietude in my voice and we ended up talking for an hour. I covered the steak with salt and pepper with my spare hand and at the same time kept glancing at the stack of high school textbooks at the end of the counter with extreme distaste. He said that on all levels the main reason to live is because you're already alive. I tried to make a joke about my early morning nonexperience with oily hands and he laughed and said, “Real desire often takes us by surprise.” He reminded me that my own husband had told me to find a boyfriend and that though some people are able to transcend their biology I probably wasn't one of them. I admitted that I had thought over the matter of whether I needed another man but hadn't come to any conclusions. He was quick to remind me of the limits of thought. I asked if he wanted to come up for the weekend and go cross-country skiing and he was startled saying that it was already noon on Friday but that he could come up the following week for Thanksgiving weekend if I wished. The hardest part of the conversation was about Clare. He told me that it would be helpful to everyone directly involved if I stopped saying “my child” and “my daughter.”
Clare was twenty-three and past ownership, and I couldn't help her by pursuing her.

Despite this I panicked when I ate the steak and listened to the noon news. The weather said the front out of Alberta (a
clipper
, they called it) was passing quickly but that it would become still and very cold, perhaps drop well below zero. I was drowsy but immediately put on a coat and drove out to Au Train. My daughter simply couldn't be allowed to sleep in a fucking hut when it was that cold.