Spoonwood (7 page)

“You're not fit to raise a child,” Elenore says.

“Really. I can give him the best education possible. I can give him a family legacy, financial advantages, a climate of civility and decency. What can you offer him?”

“A home.”

“With trailer trash for playmates?”

The “trash” word draws the blood right out of Elenore.

“She was just kidding. We should all lighten up,” Monet says.

“You buddinsky out of this,” Persephone says savagely. “I meant just what I said.”

“Well, Mrs.
Saminn,
” says Howard, “trash is my business, and the likes of your kind produce a lot more of it than our kind.”

“Too bad you had to dump it on the trust lands,” Persephone snaps at him. She's referring to one of Howard's more shameful episodes, which cost him a big fine.

Garvin prevents any further discussion by making a show of removing the papers from his briefcase and handing them to me with a pen. “You should read this before you sign it,” he says.

Monet withdraws, his face amused, as one watching the antics of children. He's enjoying the show. I reserve a special hatred for him.

I take the papers, look at them for two minutes, see nothing. It's as if I've had a stroke and lost my ability to read. I put the papers on the coffee table. The heat is so intense that I must do something to escape it.

“Mom—” I hold my arms out for the baby.

Something in my demeanor, or perhaps my voice, causes her to start shaking. “Please, Freddie. You're not going to hurt him, are you?”

“What is she talking about?” Persephone says. Apparently, I'm not sending any dangerous vibrations to her. It's only my mother who can read my true intent. I don't even know what it is myself.

“He's mine—mine!” I scream. Everyone in the room is stunned for a moment. I jerk Birch out of my mother's arms.

“Who gets the baby, her or us?” she asks.

“Don't you understand?” Persephone says. “He's going to keep him for himself.”

Persephone had to say it for me to know what was inside me.

“Come on, let's get out of this den of snakes,” I say. I hold Birch under one arm like a football and march out of the house.

The pickup barrels down Upper Darby Road, kicking up stones and dust, Birch lying on his back on the passenger seat, no safety carrier, which remains in my parents' car. For the first few minutes I have no thoughts at all, only my fine, blind rage. I reach under the seat, grab my Uncle Fred, and suck on him. The liquor calms me, the false calm inside the storm. My anger has cost me
fifty thousand dollars. I want to be alone on the road, but I've sabotaged myself. How can I be free with a baby on board? I can't bear to go crawling back to the elders, and anyway I don't want either my parents or Persephone to raise this child.

“Read page one in tomorrow's
Keene Sentinel,
” Old Crow says. A headline in bold type appears in my head:

Murder-Suicide in Darby

Father Kills Son, Self

How to do it?

I can drive to the ledges where Lilith died and throw my-self and Birch off the cliff. For a moment everything is quiet, everything is peaceful in my head. It's as if the sunlight has been dimmed, the sounds of the road muffled; I am outside myself, already in the afterlife, watching my last hours from the future in a time rearview mirror. I see a storm, me fighting my way into its vortex, my last chance for salvation. And, puff, the vision vanishes.

Which leads me to a philosophical question. If there really is an afterlife it's only worthwhile if you can keep some semblance of your earthly identity and experiences and memories and feelings, because identity, experience, memory, and feeling are what makes you you. But what about the poor infant who has neither an identity nor worthwhile memories, nor even an inkling of gender? If the baby is killed off, can the baby ghost grow into a grown-up ghost? If a baby has no personhood, how can one consider him a candidate for the afterlife? All Birch has is his name, which I gave him. The name is only an idea: it's not him. He has formed no identity. Therefore he does not exist as a person. Birch the baby is merely a collection of pulsating cells, no more or less important in the scheme of things than a birch tree.

“Hold on,” says Old Crow. “We may be miserable, but we do not want to die. We are a person. We have a personhood to protect. Scratch suicide from the murder-suicide option.”

“That leaves murder,” I say.

“How can you kill a being that has neither identity nor self-awareness? Infants do not distinguish between themselves and the people who care for them. And what difference does it make? Everybody you know is sick or stupid. Take your mother, for example.”

“She's the only person I can think kindly of.”

“She's pathetic, and you know it, Freddie boy,” Old Crow says.

“Don't call me that name.”

“All right, Frederick,” Old Crow says. “Look at Howard—overbearing piggish. He'd kill to advance his trash collection business.” After a pause when I hear the road under my feet, Old Crow says, “Who do you hate the most?”

“Persephone.”

“No, partner,” says Old Crow. “You don't hate her. You merely loathe her as she loathes you.”

“It's Garvin.”

“It's the baby you hate most. Here's what I propose. Lose the kid, change your name and identity; new, I, you, we will have no guilt for the crimes of the old Frederick Elman. You could mail Birch's body to Garvin's law office. That would get their attention.”

“What do you mean ‘their'?”

“Everything is about getting attention. Don't you understand anything? Attention, the quality of it, makes you you.”

I hear Dad laugh out loud. I laugh, too. Or anyway try to. I'm working on my sense of humor. I'm not sure what's funny and what's tragic, but I do enjoy listening to laughter, which strikes me as an interesting thing to do with vowel sounds. I practice laughing every day, not that anybody notices. My grownups often confuse my laugh with calls for food or cries of discomfort, or even the untreatable disorder of infantile hysteria.

By the time Dad and I reach the interstate highway Dad is drunk and crazed by rage, which has gone from hot to cold. He turns off at the Putney, Vermont, exit, which winds around to a gas station. He stops at the end of the parking lot near the dumpster.
He goes into the rear of his truck and comes back with a plastic trash bag. He puts me in the trash bag and lowers the bag into the dumpster.

“See you later,” he says to nobody.

It's hard to breath in the plastic bag, but it's warm and the darkness is a comfort. I try to voice my ambivalence but am frustrated by sticky plastic on my lips; still, I'm not panicky. After living nine months in a submarine an infant does not fear suffocation. However, from the heat and the taste of my own breath I know something is wrong. I send my thoughts into the deep. The response is almost immediate. I hear Spontaneous Combustion in my head.

“Booze and anger have combined to make your father something other than your father,” he says, no sympathy at all in his tone. “Such swift changes in identity brought on by the accidental collusion of events can happen to any human being. It can happen to you; perhaps it is happening in the storm years hence, where you are waiting for that moment when the chrysalis breaks apart and the new you flies off to bring your kind a major motion picture or, better yet, a snapshot of reality taken with a pinhole camera, an epic[urne] feast of literature or a few delicate[ssen] lines of poetry, something better than your telepathed thoughts to me or your mother, such thoughts being already weaker . . . weaker . . . weaker.”

I'm about to drive onto the interstate when I see a bent figure by the side of the road, an old man with his thumb out for a ride. Hitched to the back of his knapsack is a never-washed cast iron stew pot.

I stomp on the brake, stick my head out the window, and holler, “Cooty, what are you doing here?”

“Bumming the entry ramps,” says Cooty Patterson. “They won't let you hitchhike the interstate.”

“Get in. Where you going, old man?”

“Brattleboro, to get on the Amtrak to Texas.”

“Why didn't you call Howard or Pitchfork for a ride?”

“Good idea. I never have good ideas.” He gets into the truck. “You look peculiar, Freddie, like you bumped your head. What's going on?”

Cooty has always had a sedative effect on me, and the old hermit works his magic now. I'm still drunk, but my anger breaks, replaced by the horror of what I have done. I'm suffocating, just as Birch must be suffocating.

“We have to turn around,” I say.

I do a U-turn in the middle of the entrance ramp, almost run into a car coming in, and highball it back to the gas station. I leap up into the dumpster. My first thought is that he's gone. All the plastic bags look the same. I start ripping through them, but carefully. Third bag, I find him. His eyes are closed, his flesh warm to my touch, his body still. I flick his nose. His arms fly up and he cries out “Hey, watchit!” or words to that effect. It's the happiest moment of my life. In that dumpster I break down and weep, as much for myself as for Birch. For the first time since Lilith died I feel real.

We drive on to Brattleboro. I pour out my story to Cooty, who listens as he always does—in delighted confusion. For Cooty there is no such thing as usual. Cooty never learns from experiences outside his ingrained habits; even the most common event is new and exciting for him. Accordingly, he can never tell common from uncommon. For Cooty every day and every action is like a walk in a mine field. With an attitude like that a man must go crazy. Which Cooty did. But he came out the other side of crazy serene. Somewhere along the line he's taught himself to appreciate chaos. Because everything is perpetually new and strange for Cooty and because he's stopped being afraid he can enjoy every moment as novel and entertaining.

“You didn't like Howie and Elenore and Mrs. Salmon trying to take Birch for themselves, the fighting, I expect,” Cooty says in his own mysterious, half-crazy, half-insightful way. “You were thinking Garvin might be Birch's real father, not you. You got mad, the mad was you. The mad took it out on Birch, like mad does, going for the little weakies, and you met me, a weakie not mad, and me not mad made you not mad any more, and now
here we are plowing down the highway, me holding this baby—nice, nice, very nice.”

“That about sums it up, Cooty, but I don't know what to do. My anger scares me, especially when I'm drinking.”

“You know what I think, I think Birch was sent.”

“What do you mean, old man?”

“I never know what I mean. Words come out of me. I wish I had Birch for myself.”

“What would you do with a baby?”

“I would talk to him like I'm talking to you now.”

“Talk to him,” I say, then repeat, “talk to him.” Possibilities open up.

“You going back to your folks' place?” Cooty asks.

“I can't live there anymore—I just can't,” I say. “I was thinking of a road trip, but now I'm not so sure. Cooty, if I go anywhere near a bar, temptation, I'll just revert. Get a few drinks in me, and I commit rash acts. I left Lilith, I started a fight with a friend, and look what I did to Birch!”

“You know what the biggest troublemaker is? It's electricity. Camp out on some forgot land where there's no wires and you'll heal yourself over time.”

“Forgot land?”

“Land that nobody's using. Move in. All's they can do is throw you out.”

I'm picturing the abandoned hippie commune on Lonesome Hill.

5

FORGOT FARM

A
fter Dad delivers Cooty to the train station, he stops at Kmart and buys a baby car seat for the truck, some paper diapers, a set of bottles with baby formula, and a book on how to deal with people like me. The author is a Doctor Benjamin Spock. (No relation to the Star Trek guy as far as I know, but I do like to think that Dad had an idea to raise me on Vulcan principles.)

The last leg of the drive to the former hippie commune is a mile up a dirt road that is not maintained by the town of Darby. It is barely passable in the summer and closed in the winter by snow and ice and in the spring and fall by mud. It winds upward through a dense forest. Just about where the road ends and carries on as a hiking path and snowmobile trail, the land levels out more or less into a ten-acre saddle between the twin summits of Lonesome Hill.

“Here we are, Birch,” Dad says. “A tribe of young people in the 1960s started a commune on this spot. They abandoned their land in the late 1970s, and it's been forgot land ever since.”

Dad parks his truck just off the road, beside a stone wall and cellar hole where a farmhouse had set maybe a hundred years ago. The stones hold many colors in an aura of deep gray. Before
anything else, the tall trees, even the wildflowers in the clearing, the stones draw the eye. They seem more like religious objects than parts of a falling-down, no longer useful wall. I want to touch them, and I reach out. Dad seems to know what's in my heart. He brings me over to the wall and puts my hand on a rock. It's hot from the sun and rough as his beard. He laughs out loud, me too, and the forest laughs back, or so it seems in my memory. It is our first joyous occasion.

Just beyond the wall, partially hidden by the trees, is an exempt yellow school bus painted in psychedelic colors and designs. A few tattered tie-dyed curtains hang in the windows. The door is gone and Dad walks in. The bus seats are gone, the inside gutted except for a clothes rack and an old dresser with the drawers open and empty, as if someone left in a hurry. On the clothes rack are half a dozen dresses on metal coat hangers brown with rust. Moths or something have eaten away parts of the dresses. On top of the rack is a bird's nest, empty.

“Amazing how nature makes beauty out of everything,” Dad says. “It's a little mildewy, but the roof doesn't leak—not a bad space.”

I memorize Dad's lyrics but do not understand them at the time and therefore do not answer.

We walk into the clearing, where the hippies had cut down trees but had not bothered to pull the stumps. Now a decade later suckers grow out of some stumps; others lay rotting. Dad walks me to a huge raspberry patch, maybe sixty feet long and twenty feet deep. Inside is an abandoned Volkswagen Bug, the blue paint faded so that it looks as if a piece of sky has fallen into the briars. Dad spends a good twenty minutes picking raspberries and popping them in his mouth. When I complain, he crushes one between thumb and forefinger and I suck the juice from his finger.

Scattered here and there in the woods in a circle around the clearing are rotting tent platforms, a collapsed yurt, and a rather dignified outhouse with a peace symbol drawn inside a half moon on the door. Dad finds a dug well covered with a large flat stone grown over with moss. He moves the stone and drops a rock into
the dark. It makes a splash. We will have water. In the middle of the clearing is a ring of fire-blackened stones.

“When I was kid, Birch, Tubby and I used to sneak up here and watch from the woods, hoping to see hippie girls get naked, which they sometimes did. Everybody danced and sang to guitar music. They smoked their homegrown and held long discussions about the coming revolution. It was all going to be based on peace, love, and sharing.”

Dad builds a campfire close to our truck, starting the fire with birch bark, building it up with dead pine branches, and adding hardwood once the fire is going well. Dad is well-equipped for camping. Inside the plywood shell in the bed of the truck is a small propane refrigerator, a cook stove, a sleeping platform, and cabinets for gear. With a bow saw he cuts maple poles and builds a tripod over the fire. He ties rope around a plastic bucket, lowers it into the well, and fills a big aluminum pot, which he centers on the fire.

He fills a couple of bottles with canned baby formula. He is very careful, reading the directions three times. He warms the bottles in the heated water. He changes my diaper, putting the used one aside; he washes me, dresses me, then takes me in one arm and feeds me with the other hand, as per instructions in the Doctor Spock book. Unlike lightning-quick Grandma Elenore, Dad does everything slowly and deliberately. I enjoy the change of pace. I don't remember the meal. I do remember that Dad follows Cooty's advice and talks to me. As I mentioned earlier, it isn't as if I know what he's saying (mercy, I don't even know what I'm saying), but I memorize every vowel and consonant as musical notes. Today when I remember Dad's speeches they sound like opera in my head.

After my meal Dad puts me down on a blanket on the ground and constructs a baloney sandwich.

I'm about to eat when I remember the bottle of vodka under the truck seat. In an instant Old Crow is back in spirit if not voice. I put the sandwich down and go around to the cab for the bottle.
I'm of two thought-meisters. One says pour the bottle into the ground, and the other—Old Crow—says pour the bottle into the throat. In the end I can do neither. I return the bottle to its place under the seat. I pace, and pace some more. I must drink something—anything. I rummage around in my foodstuffs and find a jar that my mother gave me years ago, when I took off on my first road trip—Ovaltine. I boil some water, pour it into a ceramic cup (made in pottery class back in college), dump in some Ovaltine, and, thinking about my mother, drink with, surprisingly, immense satisfaction.

I spend the next four or five hours sitting by the campfire. I read Doctor Spock by firelight, then whittle. Read, whittle, read, whittle, knock down the Ovaltine: something a man can do instead of boozing. When it's time to go to bed, I dump the remainder of my wash water to douse the fire. A flaming stick captures my attention. The god of fire is teasing me. I pull the stick out of the fire. It's part of a maple branch that has fallen from one of the ancient trees on the property. The stick is burnt halfway through. Something about the texture and shape of the stick, almost scooped at one end, intrigues me. In this object I see something I don't in myself—possibilities—but for what I cannot say; I'm just responding to a feeling. I put the stick in the crook of a tree.

That night Birch and I sleep under the stars. He wakes me twice for feedings.

The next morning I bathe Birch, dress him, and give him a bottle. I make a long list of things I need, things I might need, things I do not need but want. Like my father, I'm very handy with tools and imaginative in using them. I spend most of the morning cutting maple and birch saplings and shaping them with my jackknife into a crude crib lashed together with fish line. Later I put Birch in his car seat and we drive off.

“Better get used to me, buddy,” I say. “We'll be spending a lot of time in each other's company.”

We're headed for Ike's Auction Barn. On the drive I tell Birch about the Jordan clan, because they're part of his heritage. Ike Jordan was murdered a couple years back. His son Carleton,
a.k.a. Critter, took over the business, and some people believe the murder was a family affair, that Critter did in his old man, or maybe it was Ike's brother, Donald, who runs the junkyard in Keene. The Jordans have been in this county since the last ice age, maybe longer, but nobody really knows who they are inside. They don't know themselves, or maybe the it's the other way around: they know themselves too well. Ollie Jordan, another brother, was Howard's best friend until he froze to death in the woods. Elenore hates the Jordans because, I suspect, she secretly fears she might be one. Anyone can see the resemblance around the mouth—bad teeth.

“Elmans or Jordans, we're both pretty close to being in the same place—at the bottom,” I say. “You come from both the top on your mother's side and the bottom on my side. I think that's okay. What worries me is you don't have a middle in your background, and in America the middle rules. Let me look at you and see if you have perspective.”

I take my eyes off the road and look at Birch. He grins at me.

“There's the auction barn,” I say. “Used to be a real, hip-roofed cow barn, the Flagg place, until Ike bought it. It's still called Ike's Auction Barn, but there's not only no Ike, there are no auctions. Critter revamped the place into a mini–shopping center and flea market. In the rear there used to be a porn shop, but it closed up. Now it's headquarters for Critter's used car lot.”

While Dad is speaking I feel buzzy on my bottom.

“Don't look so alarmed,” Dad says. “We just hit the bumpy parking lot. Any time you deal with a Jordan think bumpy.

“I made a budget last night. We have enough money to last a year, provided we live real frugal, I mean the bare necessities. The woods are going to be hard on both of us, damn hard, but, Birch, I feel free and eager for the first time since you were born.”

I leave the auction barn with a chain saw, a splitting maul, wedges, a sledgehammer, a couple of blades for my 21-inch bow saw, and
a front pack designed to carry babies. On impulse I buy a dozen versions of an item I'd never seen before. It's called a bungy cord, an elastic rope fastener inspired by the latest craze, bungy jumping. I drive to Ancharsky's Store for groceries and look over the town bulletin board. There's usually a boat for sale and an unspoken story featuring an outraged wife and an irresponsible husband. But not today.

I spend another two days gathering provisions and shopping for a reasonably priced boat, which I want for recreation and, more important, as a platform to catch fish—free food. I like the idea of a boat because water separates me from other people. I finally find a ten-foot aluminum johnboat with life preservers and oars leaning against the side of a garage in Keene. A leader line and sinkers are tangled in a rivet. I buy the boat for fifty dollars from the widow of the former owner. The craft is unwieldy, but light—no problem to lift it on top of my pickup camper and tie it down.

My camper is crowded for one-man living. With a baby added it's downright jammed. I go to work on the school bus to make it habitable. I haunt the flea markets for worn rugs, candles, kerosene lamps, shelving. I buy a used Franklin stove and piping for a crude chimney, a rusty set of chisels and gouges that appear useless but only need sharpening. With my bow saw I cut saplings and tree branches to make stick furniture—an improved crib, a highchair, a table, a frame for a sofa bed. No clocks. Human beings started down the road to unhappiness with the invention of timepieces. Birch and I are going to live by sun, stars, and weather.

Abusive as he is, I miss the Elmans' cat, but other than that I'm content with Dad. Two weeks have gone by when Grandpa Howard and Grandma Elenore show up at mid-day. Must be Sunday. We're outside by Dad's cookfire.

Elenore pushes by Dad to reach me, comfortable in my new twig crib that Dad has lugged outside. She picks me up and inspects me.

“We heard you were up here, thought we'd pay a visit,” Howard says, his voice full of cheer and sarcasm. “How you doing?”

“I'm gaining,” Dad says.

“You have a job yet?”

“No, and I don't intend to get one.”

“I knew you had bad habits, but I never thought being a dead-beat was one of them,” Howard says.

“I never thought you were wrong about anything, Pop,” Dad says.

“Me neither. It's dispiriting to learn different.”

Grandma Elenore strips me, checks my orifices, my skin, my joints, dresses me, rubs her cheek against my face, and produces those idiotic kitchy-kitchy koo noises grownups make in their attempts to relate to babies. “His color's good,” she says, “and he's put on a little weight—I guess you're taking care of him. What are all these red welts, mosquito bites?”

“That's right,” Dad says.

Grandma Elenore furrows her brow. “You have a toilet out here?” she asks.

“I bought a second-hand medical potty.”

“What do you do with the poop?” she sniffs. Points to the outhouse. “I don't smell anything.”

“I don't use the outhouse. I burn it,” Dad says.

“You burn it?”

“That's right—I burn it. I have plenty of firewood.”

“Freddie, you can't bring up a child in the middle of the woods, no electricity, no proper toilet, no water . . .” Grandma Elenore says.

“We have water,” Dad says. “We just don't have running water.”

Elenore looks at our school bus home. “What's that?”

“Come and take a look.” Dad walks toward the school bus, and the Elmans follow. They see an outdoor grill, stacks of fire wood, a clearing for a future garden. They do not see the fire pit where Dad burns paper diapers, sewage, and other refuse. They
see Dad's new front door of rough-cut pine boards. At the top of the door he's carved into the pine the words “Forgot Farm.”

Inside Dad stapled, nailed, and glued carpeting to the walls and ceiling as well as the floor. On the carpet walls he's started “sewing” sticks into the carpeting with fish lines. Eventually the whole place will be sticked or stuck or whatever you call an interior with twig walls.

“It's like being in a beaver lodge,” Howard says. Hard to tell whether he speaks in admiration or admonition.

“That's the idea,” Dad says.

“It upsets me, Freddie,” Elenore says. “You should move back into a regular home.”

“I'm going to raise Birch my way, Mom.”

Howard doesn't like Dad's tone of voice to his mother. “You won't work, won't live like a normal person—how you going to make a dollar?” Howard is no longer droll. He is more obviously exasperated. “Moreover, you'll be marooned out here when the snows fly.”