Spoonwood (23 page)

We make a pact, signed in our blood, promising that we will never squeal on each other. Uncle Chester used to work for a ski area in Vermont on the snowmaking crew. It's hard work—how would you like to be in a manmade blizzard every cold night?—and so he quit, but not before he made a deal with a restaurant owner in the ski town. Uncle Chester provides the restaurant with fresh venison and wild turkey.

The bear was a “specialty item,” which is what Uncle Chester calls it. A rich skier from someplace in Asia wanted a bear gall bladder. Seems as if he could make a potion out of it that would perk up his sex life.

Bez knows almost as much about the woods as I do. Bez owns a .22, and he and I go shooting. We hunt coyotes, which is legal game during any season in New Hampshire. We track them, we harass them, but they are too smart for us, and it's only by accident that we get a shot off.

I happen to be holding the rifle at the time. I aim it and squeeze the trigger the way Grandpa Howard taught me, and the bullet strikes right where I aim in the shoulder of the coyote. But the
coyote doesn't die. He runs off, leaving blood in the snow. It takes us two days to find the body. He had gone more than a mile before he bled to death. Bez is excited, but I am sick about what I have done. I am too squeamish to be a hunter. It's a dispiriting piece of self-knowledge.

21

HOUSE IN THE TREES

S
ummer rolls around and Missy comes home, taller, skinnier, and homely as ever. The three of us quickly form a gang. I am elected president, Missy vice-president, and Bez is, well, nothing. After a week of hanging around the store, swimming in Grace Pond, and target practice, the three of us are in bliss.

Things change all of a sudden. Bez shows up with a smashed-in face. Junior beat him up when Bez found his stash of dirty magazines. I don't mean
Playboy
or
Hustler,
I mean really dirty. Meanwhile, Missy has a big argument with her mother, who thinks she is becoming too much of a tomboy.

We hold a meeting in our “club house,” which is the pool room at the mansion. I tell them about the Forbidden Room that Grandma Purse won't let me see, and we try to pick the lock, but it's too much for us. We are bored again.

“Something has to change,” Missy says.

“Amen,” says Bez.

I don't say anything. I don't want anything to change. I am happy just to have friends on the trust lands, on the estate, in my mansion—my domain. I am a very selfish person.

“Bez, Junior is going to kill you,” Missy says.

“I'm not afraid to die,” says Bez.

“I think we all ought to leave town for the summer,” Missy says.

“Let's work on our tans at the pond,” I say, though I have no interest in getting scalded by the sun.

“I have a better idea,” Missy says. “Let's go to the ocean. I have, like, a friend from school whose family has a place on York Beach.”

“I'm the president of this club, and we're not going to any damn ocean,” I say.

“Birch, you spend far too much time in this big stupid house and in the woods moping,” Missy says. “You need to see the world.”

“There's nothing in the world I want. And I love this house.”

“That is most stupid, Birch Latour.”

“Stop fighting. I get enough of that at home,” Bez says.

It is our first major argument, and we are all upset. We sit there silent with our own thoughts for a minute. Finally, Bez speaks. “No ef way our parents going let the three of us go to any York Beach without supervision,” he says.

“You're right,” Missy says.

“And you don't really want to be looked at on a beach by a bunch of creeps. You just want to get away from your mother,” I say.

“She, like, nags nags nags—she's driving me nuts. And I don't like this pool room either. It's too, I don't know, old man.”

“If you could have what you really wanted what would it be?” I ask.

“Freedom,” Bez says.

“Like a great bird,” I say.

“A home in the clouds, way up there, nice and cozy, where we would be, like, a family, just the three of us.” Missy raises her eyes to the heaven none of us believe in (except, secretly, me). We are quiet, we are still; we are in some kind of rapture; we are one in our powerlessness and hope and dreams.

We finally agree that all of the grownups we know have one thing in common—Stupidity, with a capital “S.” And then the
strangest, most beautiful thing happens. We all have
THE
big idea at
THE
same time. In a few minutes we have set our course for the summer: We will build a tree house.

I know exactly the tree for our enterprise—the wolf pine that the loggers passed up a couple years ago. We head for the woods, and we climb the tree and I show my friends the flat spot where the tree house platform will go. The tree has changed some in the last couple years. Small branches have grown in, blocking the views. We decide that that is all for the good, because now our tree house won't be seen. We can spy across the entire trust by parting a few branches and peeking between the pine needles.

We climb down from the tree, build an (illegal) campfire, and hold a meeting.

“We'll need lumber, tools, all kinds of stuff,” I say, and suddenly the project seems in doubt for our lack of experience, expertise, and confidence.

“We'll need money,” Missy says.

“I don't have no money,” Bez says.

“I've got money, but I'm not allowed to spend it,” Missy says.

“That makes no sense,” Bez says.

“It's supposed to be for my college education.”

Bez blinks with incomprehension. Nobody in Bez's family has gone to college, and the idea that you have money and won't spend it immediately is alien to him. Me, I was brought up by Dad not to think about money, and now I have tons of money. Despite Grandma Purse's lecture on how money makes people who they are, I'm as confused as ever about money.

“I've got money, but it's in a trust fund that I can't touch until I'm twenty-one,” I say.

We sit in silence for a while and look at the fire. We are never uncomfortable, even when nobody is talking. I am not thinking about the tree house. I am thinking about the wall between desire and possibility. Finally, Missy speaks.

“We don't even know what we're going to build. Let's start with a plan.”

“I don't have a plan,” I say.

“Me neither,” Bez says.

“I have a plan,” Missy says, with such importance in her voice that Bez and I gasp with admiration. She clears a space in the leaves, but she can't draw on the forest duff, so she picks up sticks and uses the sticks to show us the shape of what is in her head.

“We will build the cabin to follow the natural floor plan, which is irregular. It will be about eight feet long by seven feet wide, but it will have this alcove . . .”

“What's an alcove?” asks Bez.

“It's like a wing. Ours will be maybe six feet by four feet, with a curtain, so a person can go there for privacy, like if you want to go to the bathroom when boys are around.”

Bez and I break out into embarrassed giggles.

Missy designs a two-room tree house with a deck about four feet in depth running the eight-foot length of the structure. The door is in the middle of the deck.

I look at the plan, defined by broken sticks, and it gives me an idea.

“We can build most of this cabin for free and without having to go far for our building materials. They're all right in front of us.”

“A log cabin—no way,” says Bez.

“Not logs, saplings. A house of sticks,” I say.

“Be hard to nail,” Bez says. “I can barely drive a nail through a board without smashing my thumb.”

“We won't use nails,” Missy says, excited now. “We'll use fish line and maybe wire. It'll be like sewing. We'll sew the sticks together.”

“Lashed together,” Bez says. We all like the sound of those two words, so pervy.

“Sewed, lashed, crocheted, knitted—whatever. It'll be, like, a stick-quilt in a tree,” I say.

That day I build a shaving horse out of lumber laying around in the mansion's barn, and Bez and I lug it out to the big tree. It's almost a mile walk. Bez cuts saplings with a bow saw. I trim them to length, shave off the bark with a jackknife. I'm planning to get Roland to hunt up a two-handed draw knife. We rig a pulley so
Missy can haul up the sticks to our building site and start sewing the floor.

Grandma Purse may hide out in her bedroom for most of the day, but she keeps in touch. She soon wrings out most of the truth from me. I am surprised that she approves.

“It's about time you had friends,” she says. She gives me the summer off from lessons.

Missy, Bez, and I learn a lot about ourselves that summer. We are up at 6
AM.
We bring sandwiches into the woods. We sometimes stay until dark. We do overnights, sleeping out in tents and later on the tree house platform. I learn that I like being in charge. I like the responsibility. I work darn hard at figuring out how to get the most from Missy and Bez, how to avoid hurting their feelings, how to make decisions and look ahead for the good of the project. Missy acquires confidence for the first time in her life. She's our master builder. She has touch—that's the only way I can describe her work. She can visualize anything, and her hands know how to make the sticks fit together and look good. In that way she's a lot like Dad—hands that know. She uses wire, cord, and fish line to fasten the sticks together, and in the end everything is strong and beautiful.

Bez is our contractor. He can scrounge anything. He knows every dumpster in Darby and what you might find there. He keeps an eye out for carpenter pick-up trucks. “If you hang around building sites, or where somebody's renovating, they'll give you stuff they normally throw away,” Bez says. “My mom and me built a shed like that once. Course it didn't hurt that she was going out with one of the carpenters.” Bez will wander off by himself for a couple of days and come back with shingles, or a screen door, or a couple of windows, or a carpet, or caulking, and so forth. Without ever talking about it, we realize how much we depend on each other. Building that tree house with my friends is the single most rewarding experience of my thirteen years of life.

Everything is going fine. The floor, walls, and roof of the main room in our tree house are up, though the place lacks a frame for
the windows Bez scrounged and a railing for the deck. Also the ladder's a little rickety. Missy has started laying the stick floor for the “privacy” room she insists upon.

And then in the dog days of August—the first disaster. Bez's mom is marrying Uncle Chester, and the family is moving to Killington, Vermont, nearer the ski areas, where they figure they can get jobs. Disaster number two: I read in the newspaper (newspaper reading being one of my new habits since moving in with Grandma Purse) that Dad has been arrested for drunk driving. Loses his license for sixty days.

I do something real private that day. I collect all the spoons I made at the mansion and put them in a leaf bag, just the way Dad used to before going off to see his dealer. I throw the bag over my shoulder and go into the woods. I start a fire with a match, birch bark, and dead pine branches. When the fire is going well I throw the spoons in and watch them burn. I'm trying to feel something, maybe regret or anger—something. But my thoughts are purely practical: make sure you put the fire out before you leave.

If it wasn't for our grand project, I would mope and turn back to my old tricks of tracking animals. (Funny how “moped” and “moh-ped” are spelled the same but said different.) But that summer I have Missy and Bez, and we have our project, and I am happy. Well, I am not happy, not exactly. Something demonic is happening to me. Missy and Bez and I sit around and talk about how dismal our various parents and guardians are.

Missy, Bez, and I continue our work, but it's not the same. Bez is going to be leaving us, and I'm worried about Dad, and then another disaster. Missy takes a couple days off, claims she's sick. When she comes back, she's quiet and gazes out at the dropoff from the tree house as if she's contemplating jumping. Finally, I can't stand it anymore. “What is wrong with you?” I yell.

“Never mind,” she says.

“Don't fight,” Bez says. “I hate fighting.”

“We are not fighting,” I say. “We are seeking the truth, and the truth is that Missy has a secret that she won't tell except with her lying eyes.”

“All right,” Missy says. “I'll tell if you both promise never to mention it again—never. Understand?”

Bez and I swear.

“I had my period,” Missy says.

Bez and I are in awe at this news, mute with the wonder and catastrophe of it.

A few days later Bez gives us each a copy of a paper he's printed on Uncle Chester's computer. It's his last will and testament, leaving all his earthly possessions to Missy and me.

“You're not going to kill yourself, are you, Bez?” Missy says.

“No way, but I'm afraid Junior's going to murder me.”

We complete the tree house a week before Labor Day. The moment isn't nearly as exciting as I'd hoped it would be. For one thing, I realize that the idea to build the house of sticks was not my own. It came from Dad. I'd been brought up in a house of sticks. I was just repeating my personal history. I begin to suspect that I lack creativity. Spontaneos Combustion was right. Every year I grow stupider. Eventually I'll be as dimwitted as Dad, Grandma Purse, Grandma Elenore, and Grandpa Howard.

We have an overnight, sleeping on beanbags; we barbecue hot dogs and marshmallows over the grill on the deck; we sing camp songs that Missy learned years earlier; we swear allegiance to our friendship. Even so, life isn't the same after the work is complete. The work made us one. Without the work, we are just good friends who soon will go separate ways. And so it happens. Bez moves to Killington, Vermont, where likely he will die at the hands of his evil stepbrother. Missy goes back to private school, with the three of us understanding that when we see her again she will have hips, boobs, an ass, and no doubt a revised attitude sure to destroy our friendship. Me, I am alone again.