Spoonwood (20 page)

“The anxiety of the Funny Money people is in their craving to move out of the Funny Money category into New Money or Old Money or even Hunger Money. They're driven by the fear of going to jail and more subtle psychological forces, such as envy, and the desire for respectability. They are an unhappy lot, but then again so are the other groups. Money is not the root of all evil, it is merely the root of all.

“Nobody wants to be No Money—right?” I say.

“That's correct. No Money people have no ambition, or they have bad habits, or they missed out on how to live, or they're just unlucky. But it doesn't matter how they achieve their No Money status; they are not even loathed, they are ignored. The only attention they get is when they riot in the streets. To be No Money is to be unpatriotic, because our economic system and culture-values revolve around earning and spending. This is a commercial empire and not to partake of commerce is to be suspect.

“Your grandparents, the Elmans, for all their defects, are at least mentally stable, because they're secure in their category. They're Hunger Money people and will remain so until death. The people with problems are the ones who try to change categories. Katharine and your father are prime examples.

“Katharine is a divided person by money category. Her father was a moderately successful musician. He was Hunger Money. Her mother, my dearly departed sister, was Old Money who fell through the hippie realm into No Money. That was how Katharine grew up, conflicted and broke. As a college professor and scientist Katharine is forever doomed to be Hunger Money. She might have married Garvin to connect herself to her Old Money roots, but Garvin rejected Old Money for New Money, which went against Katharine's nature. His Old Money/New Money conflict led him to rash behavior, which I am sure put him in harm's way when he was run over by your no good father.”

“My granduncle Monet?”

“Right—Fuckbump. He's another case of Old Money/New Money confusion. You know what he wants, what he really wants?” (I already know the answer to this question, but I don't let on.) “He wants the Salmons' trust for himself and that kid of his.”

“Granduncle Monet has a child?”

“Right, he and that conniving Brazilian wife of Monet's are raising the kid in South America to take over the trust someday. Or I'm just a paranoid old woman. Probably both. There will come a day when you will have to confront the Salmons over the matter of the trust or be squeezed out of Upper Darby like everybody else.”

“What about my dad?”

“Your father is a category of one. According to the testimony in his trial, he had a pretty fair income, which would qualify him as Hunger Money, but he lived a No Money lifestyle. Not only stupid, but unpatriotic.”

“He called it his philosophy,” I say.

“His philosophy is the reason he lost you to me. Anybody with any philosophy outside survival of the fittest is putting themselves in danger.”

“But, Grandma Purse, I have to believe.”

“In what? Old Money?”

“No, in Dad, in you, in God, in the great big world, in everything, in everybody. That's my philosophy. I'm a believer.”

“You poor boy,” says Grandma Purse, and she hugs me.

15

CATACLYSM CLASS

E
very Sunday morning at 9:15
AM
Grandma Elenore and Grandpa Howard show up at the mansion. They never come to the door but wait for me in the car. Grandma Purse never greets them. She peers at them through drawn curtains and mumbles to herself. I go out alone, carrying a lunch that Grandma Purse orders Soapy to make, a lunch that will not leave the bag because the eats the Elmans provide are more than enough.

Grandpa drives us to Keene to St. Bernard's Catholic Church for ten o'clock high mass. After church we go to Lindy's Diner for a giant breakfast. I always order bacon and pancakes with maple syrup. Then it's on to the Elmans' mobile home.

I think at first it will be stressful to have to deal with Spontaneous Combustion again, but he turns out to be less of a problem than I imagined. Way back when I was an infant the Elmans' cat had seemed almost godlike. Now he is just a cat, difficult but not frightening. Sometimes he stalks me or leaps on my lap for no apparent reason, but usually he leaves me alone. I try to make contact with him telepathically, but he refuses to cooperate. It is only once in a while that he makes his powers known to me. For example, Grandma Elenore always spends a hour teaching me
what she calls catechism class. I can never make that word “catechism” stick in my brain. It always turns into “cataclysm.” The cat amuses himself by putting the mix-up in my brain.

Grandma Elenore tells me that since I am baptized I have a good chance of going to heaven, especially if I make my first holy communion. That is why she is teaching me what it means to be a Catholic. She gives me easy quizzes.

“Who made us?” she asks.

“God made us,” I answer.

“Why did God make us?”

“God made us to know Him, to love Him, to serve Him in this world and to be with Him in the next.”

Grandma Elenore helps me develop an idea that has been in my head for a long time, which is that there is another world after death where I might find you, look at your face, hear your voice, feel your arms around me.

Grandma Elenore teaches me to pray. She does not pray like Dad. When Dad prayed he was more likely than not to argue with God, and he never demonstrated faith, which is what you have to have to believe in God since there's no proof. Dad prayed to let off steam. Grandma Elenore believes, and in a humble way. She does not even use her own prayers; she uses prayers prepared by her church—the Our Father, the Hail Mary, the Glory Be to the Father, the Apostle's Creed. She repeats the same prayers over and over again. She never asks for anything from God for herself, nor does she criticize Him; she offers herself body and soul. She is holy and I love her, and I want to be like her, but I know that I can never reach the heights of love for God that she has. How can I be a good Christian if I love Grandma Purse, who makes fun of organized religions and brags that she is an atheist? I can't love God the way Grandma Elenore does. I love Him for my own selfish reason: to reach you, Mother. My plan is to trick God into letting me find you by pretending to be holy.

After cataclysm class and prayers, Grandma Elenore retires for her nap, and I go outside with Grandpa Howard. He teaches me how to work on
cahz,
lawn mowers, snowmobiles, but mainly we keep his trash collection trucks tuned up. Thanks to Blue
Heron Village, Grandpa expanded his business. He now has three Honeywagons with two-man crews for each. He runs the business and does all the mechanical work, but he only goes on a dump run when one of his felons (as Elenore calls his crew members) doesn't show up for work. Grandpa plans to retire in a couple years. He's agreed to sell his business to Pitchfork (a.k.a. the ignoramus) and a silent partner, Critter Jordan. I'm already handy with tools, so I'm a quick learner, which pleases Grandpa.

He also teaches me about guns. We target shoot with Grandpa's .22 “plinker” every Sunday afternoon. We don't have to go very far. Grandpa Howard sets up targets in the yard. I shoot at bottles, tin cans, aluminum cans, plastic jugs filled with water, and various other inanimate objects. “More fun to destroy something than put holes in a paper target,” Grandpa says to me one summer day.

“You ever go hunting, Grandpa?” I ask.

“Useta. Useta love it. I still love it.”

“But you don't do it.”

“I swore off hunting back before you were born.”

“Why, Grandpa?”

“I've become a softy in my old age.” He has a faraway look in his eye, and I know he has more to say on this subject, but he won't and he doesn't and I never find out his secret.

Sunday at the Elmans means we skip lunch and eat a giant, late-afternoon supper. They take me back to my mansion at 8
PM.
They do not come in, and Grandma Purse does not greet them.

This goes on for a year, until one day Grandma Elenore tells me it is time for me to decide whether I should make my first holy communion. My answer is a definite yes. I want to be as close to God as I can. I'm nervous, however. I must confess my sins. What will the priest say when I tell him how selfish I am, that I plan to trick God? Perhaps I should not confess at all, because if I do then maybe the priest will tell God what I'm up to.

I know what you're thinking, Mother, that God knows all and therefore knows that I am joining His church under false pretenses. I thought about that, and I have concluded that God does not pay attention to lowly beings such as myself. No doubt God
could know what I am thinking, but He doesn't pay attention because He has better things to do. I'm sure He listens to you. If the subject of my deceitfulness comes up, tell Him I'm sorry. Mother, is love a form of selfishness? Am I just pursuing this idea of loving everybody—especially loving you—simply because love makes me feel good? What if love didn't make me feel good? Would I still seek love?

I'm in this worry zone, in the Elman kitchen, alone, when I spot Spontaneous Combustion at his spy station on top of the refrigerator. He eyes me from a crouch position, tail swishing.

“You grow stupider year by year,” Spontaneous Combustion says.

“Then how come all of a sudden I can read your thoughts?” I say.

“Happiness makes a person stupid. Strife focuses the mind. There's more of a self in strife. You are closer to being you, which is bringing on your misery and temporarily raising your IQ. What do you think of that, dummy?”

“I don't know,” I say weakly.

“‘I don't know' is one of the marking phrases of your generation, as in, ‘Like, I'm going to the movies, to see, like, I don't know—you understand what I'm saying?' ‘You understand what I'm saying?' being another marking phrase. I pity you poor youths; you don't know what's happening, and you constantly beg for understanding from those who beg you for understanding.”

“What am I going to do, cat? Confess my sins? Take communion?”

Spontaneous Combustion leaps off the refrigerator and runs off into the other room, breaking not only visual but telepathic contact. I'm alone again with only my thoughts for company.

Another day back in the mansion I hear Grandma Purse on the telephone arguing and shouting. She's talking to Grandma Elenore. She bangs down the phone, lights a cigarette, paces around the house, then announces that she's taking to her bed. I follow her up. I learn about one of the many boners of contention between the Elmans and the Salmons. Seems as if when Grandpa Howard was starting up his business he dumped
some rubbish on the trust lands. He was caught and had to pay a fine.

That Sunday at the Elman place, Grandma Elenore and I have a long talk about Jesus and forgiveness and sin and confusion and faith. I feel less confident than before.

“Grandmother Persephone called me the other day,” Grandma Elenore says.

“She yells and swears but she doesn't mean it,” I jump to her defense.

“Well, I don't know about that. She told me that your therapist believes you're not ready to commit to a religion. Much as I hate that woman I suspect she may be right.”

“You mean I won't be making my first holy communion?”

“I talked to the priest and he thinks we should wait until you're out of therapy. What do you think?”

“I don't know what I think.”

“Do you think you are ready to commit wholly and unselfishly to Jesus Christ?”

I'm tongue-tied. I want to cry but I don't. I just shake my head no.

“That's all right, Birch,” Grandma Elenore says. “I shouldn't have rushed you. As long as you're living with your Grandmother Persephone it's going to be difficult for you to open yourself up to Christ. So let's just time our bide.”

16

MY MYSTERIOUS BROTHER

L
ike Dad, your mom had a nervous breakdown following your death, and like Dad she more or less recovered. (I'm a little vague about what a nervous breakdown is. If nerves break down, you would think that persons with broken nerves would be less nervy, but the truth is the reverse. Persons with broken nerves are extra nervy.)

Dad is released from prison and disappears for a year or so. Then rumors circulate that he's back in the area, laying low. In the years from ages eight to eleven, I don't think about him much. I begin my explorations of the trust lands. When Grandma Purse thinks I am only playing on the estate grounds, I am going deep into the woods. You might think that life in the woods would be lonely for a boy, but it isn't like that at all. I find playmates everywhere. I do it by stalking. The habit—and skill—began with Spontaneous Combustion when I was an infant, and I refined it when I was living with Dad and I eavesdropped onto the lives of insects.

Ants are like fraternity brothers living in a communal house and getting drunk in the basement: they can't walk a straight line. Caterpillars are homeless wanderers and charter members of
Overeaters Anonymous. They snack continuously until they're too fat to make their legs go, and then they check into the Betty Ford Clinic, where they're put on a strict diet of no calories and subjected to chemotherapy and reconstructive surgery and emerge with wings. They spend the remainder of their short lives flying around looking for sex. I like the spiders best of all. They are easiest to find shortly after dawn, when the dew on their webs beads up and shines in the morning sun. A spider is like a writer or an artist who builds an elegant studio for himself that is so satisfying he sits motionless in the center of it for hours to contemplate his achievement, until somebody drops in for dinner. Like any good host, he probes the innards of his guests and draws out their vitals to sustain him.

Dad's interest is Wood. Grandma Purse's interest is Money. Grandma Elenore's interest is God. Grandpa Howard's interest is Mechanics. Katharine's interest is Science. Soapy's interest is Food. Roland's interest is Soil. Spontaneous Combustion's interest is Himself. My interest is Everything Else. While other boys watch TV, I watch the world around me. I go from observing insects to creatures that leave tracks in the snow—deer, hares, red squirrels, coyotes, bobcats, ferrets, wild turkeys, and black bears. I see them from the lean-to at the ledges where I go to visit you, Mother. I keep thinking we'll bump into each other, but it never happens. Below me, overturning a dead log, is the bear. He's eating the slugs and bugs that inhabit the moist zone between earth and rotted wood.

Late one fall day I stumble upon a bear's hibernation den. Before I see him I smell him, like a nasty kitchen sponge. He'd dug out the den from the side of a hill and covered himself with branches. I creep closer, until I see his long dark bristly hairs. An ear twitches. I shout, “I am one with you!” But he does not move. I slink off, elated. I visit the spot all that winter. I see where he came out briefly, rummaged around sleepily, then went back to bed. One spring day he's gone, leaving a big pile of bear poop full of twigs nearby. I try to follow him but quickly lose the trail. I never see him again.

.   .   .

I also explore the world of water. Scores of new houses have been built in the woods behind Grace Pond, but the pond itself has been left as a preserve, the part of the trust charter Persephone and the buyers of the pond could not dodge around. No development is allowed on the shoreline.

In the summer, Grandma Purse buys me a mask, a snorkel, and fins. She drives me to the pond and sits by the shore and smokes while I stalk schools of perch and punkinseed, the lone pickerel, and the whiskered hornpout, which raises clouds of muck motes when he burrows in the bottom. I explore beaver lodges, and I will tell you that no gloomier place exists than the home of a beaver—dark, dank, still, claustrophobic. The beaver lives in a stick house; I lived in a stick house with Dad, but it wasn't gloomy because it had fire. Beavers don't have fire. God said to the beaver, “To you, I give fur, a flat tail, and a lifelong companion to share the despair of your dismal abode.” God said to man, “To you, I give tools—a Bic lighter and a Bic pen—go put on your pants.” Or words to that effect.

My explorations cost a beaver his life. I dive down deep, and come up from the bottom into a beaver lodge, shocking a pair of beavers in their love nest. They scatter, and I am amused. But the next day, I find bones and some gristle of a beaver near the shore, along with tracks in the mud. A couple of coyotes had killed and eaten one of the beavers I'd panicked. There's a reason beavers build lodges—they're as much forts as dwellings. Beavers also mate for life, and my intrusion widowed one of the pair. I remembered Dad telling me that without a mate a beaver is a lonely bachelor or spinster. The beaver does what he has to do because he has to do it. He gnaws on a tree, never knowing whether the tree will fall to the ground and provide him with nourishment and building materials for his home, or will fall into another tree and get hung up, making his labors fruitless, or will fall on his head and kill him. His philosophy of life is that you never know what will happen when you gnaw on a tree, but that you must continue to gnaw.

A remarkable event occurs late in the spring of my tenth year. By now I'm going where I please without Grandma. I find a deer trail in the woods, and I climb a tree in hopes the deer will walk by me. I know a lot about deer, because Grandpa Howard has told me and because I read books. (At the moment I've read one-third of all the books in the Salmon library. I should be done before I reach my teen years.) I know that if I climb real high in the tree, my scent will not be picked up by the deer. I feel protected inside a tree, and I can see down at the underlings of creation. I'm a spy, Mother.

It's June and the leaves are bright and clean. I'm sitting on the branch of a maple tree thinking about that bright green color of fresh leaves when a doe deer appears below. She's brown, with a white patch on her rump. She's walking slowly, her head rigid, as if she has a stiff neck. She stops for no apparent reason, goes on again, in a small circle now; round and round she goes, and then she lies down on her side. I think maybe she's going to sleep, but then I hear a low moan. And pop! Out he comes, a little fawn, about the prettiest thing I've ever seen in my life.

The fawn stands upon his legs for the first time—and collapses. But he gets up again, and this time takes his first steps. I remember the old days when I crawled at great speed. I want to jump down from the tree (I'd need a parachute, I'm so high up) and tell that little guy that everything is going to be just fine, even though I'd be lying.

In a few minutes mom and child are gone, she nudging him along with her nose. I scramble down my tree and inspect the scene—blood in the leaves, tracks departing. Mom's hooves are sharp, and she makes clearly defined hoofprints, but her fawn is so light he barely stirs the ground. Eventually, though, I find a good print in soft ground. My fawn has a slight askew curve to his left front hoof. It will make him easy to identify among other deer.

That Sunday I tell Grandpa Howard about the fawn. We are in the barn in a pit, and Grandpa is putting a muffler onto one of his Honeywagons. He'd dug out the pit and lined it with concrete blocks, which are starting to bow in slightly, so that I worry that the whole thing might collapse and we will be buried alive.

“You like watching that fawn being born?” he asks.

“Yes, Grandpa,” I say.

“Would you like to see this fawn again?” Grandpa asks.

“I sure would.”

“Deer live in families, in which the females are heads of the household, and like most families they're as conservative as Ronald Reagan's socks. If you can learn your fawn's habits, you can predict where he'll be.”

“So I can see him again.”

“Right. It'll be harder than you think, but you go ahead.”

“How did the deer happen to get born?” I ask.

“What do you mean?”

“How did the fawn get to be in the deer's belly?”

“Oh, that—that's called the facts of life,” Grandpa says, and I can tell by his tone that he wants no more said about the subject.

That night, after the Elmans take me home to my great big beautiful mansion, I ask Grandma Purse to tell me the facts of life. She does, and in great detail. Grandma Purse is not one to leave out the necessaries. I learn about Sex, Birth, Old Age, Death, and do it all over again. In a word, ProCreate. Not that I understand at that moment what ProCreate is really all about, but I have the basics to brood over. In the next few years she and Katharine will tell me more facts—how ants mate, and birds, and frogs, and snakes, and fireflies, and bears, and wolves. The facts of life are part of my home schooling. Grandma Purse raises me to believe that sex is natural and more or less wholesome, except of course sex between people. She doesn't come right out and say so, but I have the impression that she doesn't think that having sex is a good idea. I try to imagine myself having sex, but I don't like the picture that comes to mind. The thought that you and Dad had had sex is even more disturbing. In those formative years I go out of my way not to think about human sex.

For the first year I don't really have an idea of how to keep tabs on my fawn or his family. In the second year I go from knowing practically nothing to being an expert. That's how I learn—from Not Knowing to All of a Sudden Knowing. I don't
even need tracks to predict where my deer family will be. The season, the weather, the time of day, their ingrained habits tell me what I need to know. Books, Grandpa, pawprints, deer pellets, antler scrapes on hemlock trees—they all teach me.

From the tracks I count twelve different animals in the clan my deer lives with. (Ideally, a boy has a dear family; I have a deer family.) Every once in a while I'll see two or three in the group, but never all at once and never my mysterious brother. I can see where they have been, but not my deer. I keep track of what the deer are eating, where they sleep, the shape and consistency of their pellets, the types of scrapes where the bucks rubbed the velvet off their antlers, the difference in gender behavior. The does stay with their fawns and close to the family clan. The bucks prefer the lonesome rider life, but they sometimes join the family, and sometimes congregate among themselves. Once I see five bucks all together, gesturing and mooing at one another with such enthusiasm I swear they're discussing the world series between the Braves and the Yankees (won by the Yankees in six games that year).

In the spring the deer gorge themselves on all the sprouting leaves. They especially like the tender shoots growing out of logging cuts. In the summer they move to fields, where they graze on grass and alfalfa. In the fall they eat apples, beech nuts, and acorns. For a month in the late fall the deer all go crazy in their own kind of Mardi Gras celebration. Their sole interest is having sex. They are less wary and I am able to observe them. They are part of my sex education.

The bucks, who only a month earlier were enjoying each other's male company, are now locking horns (not a metaphor). Their necks swell, and the does show off their rear ends, and the bucks mount them, sometimes missing, sometimes connecting; sometimes the does are not interested and run away. The spectacle is scary and funny and disturbing. Some does seem frightened and confused. Some bucks are seriously injured in their battles. Once I see two big bucks fighting for the privilege of mating, while four females, looking a little bored, stand around waiting for the fun part, and other lesser bucks watch the fight, which
seems to make every animal all the hornier. Meanwhile, a little spike horn sneaks in and mounts one of the does. I wonder if it's my deer who does the deed that rubs the face of survival of the fittest in the snow. I hope not. I hope my deer will be like me, lonesome and pure. Afterward, I find my deer's prints in the ruckus, but it's impossible to tell which one in the melee he was.

In the winter, the family moves into a deer yard, a small area where they hunker down, moving very little to conserve energy, feeding on hemlock buds, not a very nutritious fare but good enough to keep them going until the spring growth on the hardwoods. The deer make highways in the snow. By March the snow banks along the sides of these paths might be four or five feet high. The deer yard comes to look a little bit like a town that includes restaurants, roads, and motel bedrooms under the hemlock trees.

At this point, I've had enough experience in observing deer signs and in thinking about my dear deer family that my knowledge surpasses Grandpa's, as he admits when I start drawing maps of my deer's family haunts—fields, orchards, acorn havens, winter deer yards, fall orgy arenas. Every time I see a footprint from my cleft-hoofed buck, I put a check mark on my map, along with the date. Eventually I'm able to plot out his day-to-day course.

My work pays off one late spring day in year three of my deer's life. I stake out a trail between the field where my deer sleeps and the grove of young red maples where he eats breakfast. I sneak out of the mansion before dawn and climb a tree and wait. Nothing that morning. I get back to the mansion in time for a quick bite to eat and my lessons in Grandma Persephone's boudoir. Next dawn, same story. The third dawn I am treated to the sight of a new fawn. It walks right under me. I wonder where the mom is. When I come down from my tree I follow the hoofprints of the fawn and discover where its mother waited and watched, only a few feet into the woods from my tree. The print of the mother has a cleft in it. My deer isn't a boy, he's a girl, and a mother at that.