Sherbrookes: Possession / Sherbrookes / Stillness (American Literature Series) (33 page)

He, too, wore flowered shirts—open-necked, with a moonstone pendant and a bracelet of jade beads. He told Ian that encounter groups were where it’s at this season, but to accept no substitute for the painful private thing. “I’m involved with your ma, kid, you’re hep to that. Or I’d take you on myself. But that would be unprofessional. The best I can do is refer . . .”

Everett Armstrong was a banker with a private plane. He took Ian flying in the Catskills and over the Hudson, telling him, “It’s just the thing for morning-after headaches, or to clear your head. Up in the blue empyrean. That’s how I like to describe it, you see. That’s what it feels like, not sky: the
blue empyrean
.”

Maggie asked him if he minded what she called her “gentlemen callers.” “Because if you’d rather I don’t see them,” she said—“it isn’t any problem when you’re home from school. I’d rather see
you
anyhow, of course.”

“The penalty for incest in the State of California is fifty years’ imprisonment.”

“That’s useful to know. What else can you tell me?”

“I worry about Judah,” Ian said.

She turned to him. “You mean it?”

“Yes.”

“A little late to say so . . .” Smiling, she touched his arm. She studied him as if his were the one face she ever saw, the single voice she hears. Maggie retains—has always had—the gift of concentration. Judah must have reacted to it; Ian does so now, and feels, if not identity, the same vein beating in his temples, the same pulse-quickening anger that Maggie has been shared. It’s what men do with beauty, he thinks; it’s why they hoard and lock it up and nail No Trespassing signs on the gate; it’s how they end up mastered by what they’d planned to own.

He confronts her anyway. “Who’s the father?”

“You asked me before.”

“You didn’t answer.”

“And won’t. It’s not important, Ian, surely you know that.”

“Is it that you don’t know or aren’t telling?”

“We’re not playing twenty questions either, and I haven’t been planning to offer up clues. The point is this baby is mine.”

“You don’t know,” Ian says.

“I do. But as soon as I gave you his telephone number, you’d be on the phone. It would be easy enough. All you are is curious; all you want is answers to a crossword: Fill in the blanks. What Hattie wants is the assurance that the man’s a Sherbrooke, or at least of the same class. And all I want, my darling, is to be left alone.”

“By him or me?”

“By you both. By everybody’s neediness; by everyone who’s staking claims. I claim this child. Okay?”

Still, the paradox of ownership is that he must relinquish things in order to have earned them. He’d been born with silver spoons that left the taste of tin. So now he practices rebuilding a deserted home with his two hands, no power tools, and being someone’s son who had been fatherless before. It is not that he hopes to be Judah’s replacement or to replicate the past. It is as if the past had been unfinished business, a creditor whose note is due—some debt he has to settle with in order to begin.

And Maggie seems disorderly; she has a craving for frog’s legs, she says; could he possibly find frogs? She wants them with garlic butter and parsley, pure, the way she used to eat them at La Grenouille. She asks repeatedly. He visits the town’s supermarkets, and Morrisey’s, to see if they sell frozen frog’s legs. “I’m sorry, sir,” the clerk in the Grand Union says. “It’s just not a popular item.”

His mother is disappointed. She wonders if the local restaurants have frog ponds, and he says no local restaurant he’s been to offers frogs. She’s had such trouble eating and her appetite for frog’s legs is so keen, she confesses, that she wonders if he’d mind fetching their very own batch. Now that the Pekins are gone, the frogs are multiplying, and anyhow they keep her up at night. So Ian takes his waders and a net. He catches half a dozen with little difficulty—fat outraged swimmers, scissoring jerkily through the green slime. The first two jump out of the pail. He catches them again and weights his shirt across the top and, in fifteen minutes, accumulates her meal.

But preparing them is Maggie’s job; he leaves them by the sink. When he comes back from the mud room—having hung up his waders and replaced the net—the frogs are on the floor. One of them is cut in half; it wriggles. His mother has a cleaver in her hand. Her face is white and strained. “I just can’t manage,” Maggie says. “You have to skin them and slice them up, and cut off the feet. That’s what you’re supposed to do, then soak them in water—it just isn’t worth it. I’m sorry . . .”

He has always been what Hattie calls a ladies’ man; he has returned, he tells himself, to walk down a street where he’s known. Yet there is nothing he now wants to share with the prying villagers. They see in him just Judah Sherbrooke’s prodigal, just the soon-head of the house. And the Big House sets a standard that is not his to follow, its beds and halls and silver make demands. Each antimacassar
signifies
—or does so to Hattie, who would have him take his place as the reverential guardian of the family estate. Maggie has no reverence, but requires him there also, as a kind of guard. It’s not his place, he wants to say, it’s for the ancestors or heirs and assignees to come.

Therefore this shell on the shore of their holdings; therefore he will try to live within the Sherbrooke acreage, but in an abandoned house. Sometimes, in the village bars, he watches men come in to fight for the exercise—having had a drink or two and nothing else to do. They shout and swear and maybe break a chair and, in the morning, pay for it, and nothing’s gained or lost.

One day he finds a cornered cat in the carriage barn, spitting at him, snarling, its eyes like agates and its every rib protuberant; he leaves the sliding door ajar and hopes it might depart. Next day the cat is dead.

“I don’t have to stay here,” says Sally.

“No.”

“It’s a bullshit town,” she says. “If I opened that boutique I’d sell one dress a month.”

“With luck.”

She taps her chin backhanded, then spreads the fingers. “Up to here. I’ve had it, Ian.”

“We’re talking oil and water. Time ain’t nothing to a hog.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“This city slicker stops to ask directions from a farmer, see? And he’s standing by an apple tree, holding a hog in his arms. The hog is eating apples from the lower branches. So the stranger says, ‘Why’d you do it that way?’ and the farmer says, ‘Why not?’ ‘Why don’t you shake the apples down and let him eat off the ground?’ ‘The apples would get bruised like that. He likes them off the tree.’ ‘But it would save you energy,’ the stranger says, ‘and time.’ ‘Well,’ the farmer answers—I got this from a farmer, the one who works my mother’s place. He scratches his chin, considering. He squints up at the sky. ‘Time ain’t nothing to a hog.’ ”

“You’re telling me to go,” she says. “You know that, don’t you?”

“Yes.”

XII

“I rise at 4
a.m
. and help the Natives weed their Patch. Juan Alonso is grim this season, since he says we’re overdue for rain. I tell him trust in the Lord and be Certain of bounty but I confess to you, brother, that with every day and week of Drought I wonder whether Bounty is a term applicable to heathen land and think more longingly than ever of our own Green Hills. I recollect so well the contours of home. In the blinding noonday sun here sometimes I seem to see corn in abundance, the cows in ample pasturage, the limpid streams that feed the Bottom land and there where the river incessantly flows, where we kept our rowboats, the picnick place beyond the willows. It is a vision afforded to few. Here the cattle—what few we control—graze on hillsides so steep as to rival a Cliff, and the rivulets are dry. Vermont is earthly Paradise; believe you me who am at Great remove.

“Then I chastise myself for weakness, and would not confide such faithlessness to Willard for the world. We lack for nothing in these parts because the Lord is with us and His bounty is all-plentiful even without grain. I write you therefore secretly, and because I must needs share with someone these my secret Doubts. The boy I wrote of—Jo—has reverted. He speaks no more when preparing our fire; his mumble and chatter is mute.”

In the second winter of their marriage, she and Judah snowshoed down to the Walloomsac. The afternoon had had that brilliant clarity she knew the presage of a cold snap, bringing minus ten at best and maybe minus thirty. They had watched the sun go down and moon come up in tandem, and Maggie turned to him and said, “What would you say if we spent the night here; could we manage it?”

He answered yes, with luck, with matches and a bunch of scrap wood to burn and saplings for a lean-to, but it wouldn’t be much fun. She said, “Let’s do it,” and he said, “You’re crazy.”

“Maybe,” Maggie said. “Let’s try.”

So he humored her and gathered wood and said you break it up in sections and strip those pine branches there. Judah had his pocketknife and fire-starter and matches, but they had no hatchet. They settled on a space protected by a stand of pine, under the lee of the hill. There were six inches of crusty snow, but the spot was level. He cast wide circles, using the last light and saying he could use the light of the fire to find nearby deadwood later. Starting in the pine lot, she gathered a head-high pile of deadwood, warming to the work. Judah took off his snowshoes and stamped the branches with his boots, splintering them into usable lengths. He showed Maggie how to lash them, and she built a windbreak. “You sure you mean to do this?” Judah asked. “It’s not turned cold yet. Not even halfway there.”

“Will we survive it?” she asked.

“What time is it?” She had had the watch.

“Four forty.”

“We’ll know in twelve hours,” he said. “They won’t be a whole lot of fun.”

“Not if you take that attitude. If you don’t want us to try.”

So Judah had been challenged and was grim. “What if trying doesn’t work?”

“We’ll walk on home.”

“Not easy.”

“Oh, someone will come out and find us.”

The dusk was blue. She wondered, when would her teeth start to chatter.

“I feel called upon to ask this,” Judah said. “I’ve been in cold weather before.”

“How bad?”

“This bad and worse.”

“Well, you survived it,” she said. “My frosty hero. Right?”

“But I had sleeping bags. And a tent.”

“Will we die?” She dropped her head to look at him. He stood a full head higher, and it was a trick of flirtation; it made her look up through her lashes.

“Not likely. But there’s frostbite. You might lose a finger or two.”

“There’d be eight left.” She waggled her hands.

“Toes,” he said. “How good are those boots?”

“You gave them to me for Christmas,” Maggie said. “They’d better be good.”

“They are,” he adjudged them, remembering.

Then time slowed. Then he ceased to ask the time of her, and the night sky had no meaning, and she watched the constellations not knowing which quarter she watched. Wind rose and died, and she registered its arousal and subsiding. They had a flame in front of them, and a lean-to that sufficed. There were raccoon and rabbit and deer tracks and one two-footed track he couldn’t name. It appeared to snow, but the constellations were manifest, and therefore she knew it the wind, not sky, that had produced the snow. She pondered the distinction between the wind and sky. She remembered pictures of the wind with bellows as puffed cheeks, with its white hair streaming and a gunnysack. Wind was a god toting trouble, and forced to let it loose.

“Eight o’clock,” Judah said.

“Yes. Eight o’clock and all’s well.”

You take, she knew, a stitch in time. Flexing her fingers, Maggie wondered how you best stitch time, and what kind of needle it took. Judah, kneeling, seeming legless in the snow, was a furry creature she would have her children by. There were bears. He would take his leave of her when there was insufficient meat, and wander off outside and lie down uncomplainingly on the pack ice. The old and the infirm were luxuries, he said. Respect for age and infirmity was a mark of abundance, not strength. Those tribes that could afford to honor their elders were the best tribes to attack. They would be easy prey in the lean winters, he said, clustered to the fireside like flies in wet spilled sugar. There were rock abutments. In the hollow of the rock he hollowed still more deeply, and made a place to drink. There had been owls. She listened to them. She observed, for the first time, how alike are the cries of owls to those of railroad engines. She said this to her kneeling husband, but he was oblivious; there had been ice on his eyes. She wanted, obscurely, to wipe her own eyes. Kneeling beside him, Maggie attempted to wipe off the ice, but her gloves were thick and stiff and snow-encrusted also. Therefore she smudged his face further, attempting to cleanse it, and he blinked at her and whispered it was eleven o’clock.

“Time flies,” he said.

“No.”

“Maybe we should move around.”

“Yes. What’s absolute zero?”

“The temperature when nothing moves.”

“And how cold is it?” Maggie asked.

“I don’t know. It’s difficult to know yet. Maybe five below.”

“No. Absolute zero.”

His cheeks seemed splotched with measles, his forehead had been charred. “Not sure of that one either,” Judah said. “They can’t ever reach it.”

“Why not?”

“Because the thermometer moves. Because it’s absolute.”

“There are no absolutes”—she tried the joke—“absolutely not.”

“Two hundred seventy-three degrees below zero, I think. Centigrade.”

“This is cold enough also.” She clapped her hands. There was snowfall from her wrists. She watched his lips. They moved in opposition to his chin. They were not malleable anymore, and if he touched his knife to his lip’s flesh the knife blade would adhere. He spoke of men who gutted bear, then slept within the fur and fat and ligaments. They used the paws for gloves. They coated themselves with flesh grease. The two of them had bear-paw snowshoes not five feet away. These tilted against the hill’s angle and were rimmed by snow already. Maggie looked for falling snow. She raised and lowered her head. The wind abated, and therefore she distinguished falling snow from snow that had fallen already and was dropping from the laden branch. There was no falling snow. She looked for the snowshoes again.

Heat hurt. The side of her that faced the flame was warm. Judah bought her a rotisserie, since she wanted one for Christmas. There where her world was in shadow, there on the dark eastern edge she could not feel, there was no tingling quickness in her arm. She turned. She thawed herself. One fourteen, he told her, and said we should keep on walking or decide. The fire spat pitch, and the green branches seemed like filaments of sap. They embraced. They fitted together. She was grateful for the duck down in her coat. He clasped her with his bulbous, shrouded arms. The firelight was yellow. She was without sensation. He rearranged their legs.

In this fashion they weathered the night; it was not as long or cold as Maggie had feared. She could layer the sky, but not wind. Wind was a wrestling match in progress, all over itself, arms and legs. You couldn’t tell the cold wind from the warm, but the night was windless and the two of them did sleep. She woke to guttered coals. She could not see the moon. There was light enough to see. Judah lay snow-marbled, but she knew her husband breathed because his breath was air. His nose was alabaster and his hair had been blasted, then chiseled, then rubbed. She wondered, should she light the fire, and decided no. It was warmer where she lay than when she stood. She flapped her arms and stretched and attempted jumping jacks. Her left leg hurt where she had lain on it; she waited for pain; she stamped her feet and saw and listened to them move.

“The heat is extreme here these months, though dry. Indeed one would wish there were moisture, that the parched land might drink. At eleven
a.m.
we cannot support it and lie in the hammocks in Shade; it is that hour now. Willard lies in the hut while I pen these lines to you, dear brother, in the fervent hope you read. Amongst the people here He shines like a beacon, but dimmed. When down the terraced hillside I see some weary husbandman, his short-legged stride always—or so it seems to me—an attempt to remain Upright on the mountain, or pigs snouting in the wallow that is behind each hut, wherever earth retains a sufficiency of moisture so that it become muddy with trampling, then do I measure His arrangements with Wonder, Who watcheth over all. The clean and the unclean are both within His purview, those who build enclosures and the Beasts enclosed.

“This day I am barely able to write. I wanted to tell you one thing. When Willard’s stay is over and he wakes from this long Sleep, we will return to the Green Mountains gratefully indeed. I dream of our father’s House. The shutters fasten and the door bolts fast and there is privacy abounding in the upstairs corridor, no shameful doings open to the world. If you saw what I had seen. We live in a barnyard here, among the Tribes.”

The people in this town, she thinks, set too much stock by face. A facing cord was half the wood you used to call a proper cord; farmers’ barns are painted on the street side only, if they need to save on paint. There are houses with dirt floors and no plumbing that nonetheless have imposing façades; why paint the portico, she wonders, if you require a floor? Her sister-in-law puts stock in “face,” and always asks, with that sideways slant to her mouth that means gossip, “What can you tell me that’s new and different?” Although they don’t discuss the child, she knows—by the way that Hattie sniffs and arches her eyebrows and harps on the Ferguson girl’s pregnancy—that Hattie knows. And therefore it’s a toss-up if the town does too.

Judah, when she met him first, was thirty-eight years old. Then ten years intervened, and she met and married him when he was forty-eight and she was twenty-three. So she is older now than he had been, who seemed old to her when she was truly young. She finds a cardboard carton full of letters that she sent. Telegrams and postcards proclaim eternal love. There is her carefully copied version of the Shakespeare sonnet that begins, “Let me not to the marriage of true minds . . .”

She cannot bring herself to read the letters through. They are stacked at random in the box; Judah had been retentive but careless, jumbling the years. The passionate phrases she does read (in her open penmanship, the Papermate unfaded) make her want to weep. They are so certain (she was so certain; she’s uncertain now how all this altered) things would work out well. They promise to carry his child. They say how wonderful his arms and nose and teeth and hair feel to the touch. They reek of musty innocence, and she finds it hard to recognize the print. “I’ll love you forever and ever,” she wrote. “Oh, J. P. Sherbrooke, wait and see.”

Yet see means hearing Hattie tell how Nathaniel Shotter preached this morning on the subject of lice in civilized lands, and how licentiousness was Christ’s true text when he urged the Magdalen to put off the ways of the flesh. As far as Hattie is concerned, the only true license is marriage, and those who are licentious without it are the cattle of this earth. Why else does darkest Africa remain in such a shadow; what else keeps all those Indians from improving their God-given lot? It’s not an accident, the preacher says, that Our Lord refused the ministry to women—though his attitude toward women, taken within the context of the time, was progressive and positive and kind. There is an ancient Latin proverb that is appropriate here: “
Quod licet Iovi non licet bovi.
” Hattie says the minister says that, in free translation, the proverb means, “What’s feasible for Jove is not permitted to the cow.” She repeats this to Maggie in various ways. “What’s good for the goose is sauce for the gander,” she says. “What is licensed by God is licentiousness in beef.”

See means watching from her window while a picnic progresses beneath her, on the lawn behind the Toy House where the elms afford protection. The blue-haired ladies, Hattie’s peers, wear cloth coats and keep them buttoned. Their laughter and chatter and gossip assault her as she spies; they are plumper, each of them than she in her sixth month. Wait means accept how they guzzle that cucumber salad and cider and pie.

Her retreat is a long, slow season; she tries to give up cigarettes and fails. Cleaning, Maggie forces her body through paces that were painless once; she has too many aches now to name. Therefore she mourns her youth. She exercises every day, but her whole system complains. And the sense of beauty fled, of all her agility winnowed away, is with her like a bulbous shadow every step she takes. The letters that she used to read—attempting to establish kinship, poring over Anne-Maria’s pleas in the faith that they presaged her own—ring hollow now, or false. She remembers a woodcut she studied once, of a spotted cat biting its tail. There is no starting point or end point to the cat; it swallows itself, and its tongue is serpentine, a second girdling chain. She believes herself that beast these weeks, and is her own extinction as she grows.