Teaching a Stone to Talk (15 page)

I find her some spring clothespins in this pre-equipped cottage which apparently has everything needed for life on earth except poker chips. I make her a sandwich, and put it in a knapsack with a jar of milk, a banana, and
a funny little riddle book I found last night. Off she goes.

 

Once, many years ago, there was a child of nine who loved Walter Milligan. One Saturday morning she was walking in the neighborhood of her school. She walked and thought, “The plain fact is—as I have heard so many times—that in several years' time I will not love Walter Milligan. I will very probably marry someone else. I will be untrue; I will forget Walter Milligan.”

Deeply, unforgettably, she thought that if what they said about Walter Milligan was true, then the rest went with it: that she would one day like her sister, and that she would be glad she had taken piano lessons. She was standing at the curb, waiting for the light to change. It was all she could do to remember not to get run over, so she would live to betray herself. For a series of connected notions presented themselves: if all these passions of mine be overturned, then what will become of me? Then what am I now?

She seemed real enough to herself, willful and conscious, but she had to consider the possibility—the likelihood, even—that she was a short-lived phenomenon, a fierce, vanishing thing like a hard shower, or a transitional form like a tadpole or winter bud—not the thing in itself but a running start on the thing—and that she was being borne helplessly and against all her wishes to suicide, to the certain loss of self and all she held dear. Herself and all that she held dear—this particular combination of love for Walter Milligan, hatred of sister and piano lessons, etc.—would vanish, destroyed against her wishes by her own hand.

When she changed, where will that other person have gone? Could anyone keep her alive, this person here on the street, and her passions? Will the unthinkable adult that she would become remember her? Will she think she is stupid? Will she laugh at her?

She was a willful one, and she made a vow. The light changed; she crossed the street and set off up the sloping sidewalk by the school. I must be loyal, for no one else is. If this is the system, then I will buck it. I will until I die ride my bike and walk along these very streets, where I belong. I will until I die love Walter Milligan and hate my sister and read and walk in the woods. And I will never, not I, sit and drink and smoke and do nothing but talk.

Foremost in her vow was this, that she would remember the vow itself. She woke to her surroundings; it was cold. Even walking so fiercely uphill, she was cold, and illuminated by a powerful energy. To her left was the stone elementary school, deserted on Saturday. Across the street was a dark row of houses, stone and brick, with their pillared porches. The porch floors were painted red or gray or green. This was not her own neighborhood, but it was her turf. She pushed uphill to the next corner. She committed to memory the look of that block, that neighborhood: the familiar cracked sidewalk, how pale it was, how sand collected in its cracks; the sycamores; the muffled sky.

 

Now it is early Saturday afternoon—the center of the weekend.

I am sitting under the sycamore on the riverbank below the cottage, just below the driveway. The dog and I have
returned from a walk through the woods by the river upstream. Now I sit and look around and try to comfort the dog, who, on his part, is trying to persuade me to continue our walk downstream to New Orleans.

It is the height of day in the height of summer—mid-July. This means that the sky essentially does not exist, or is not, at any rate, a thing you would care to examine. Under the sky in the distance ahead roll some hazy wooded ridges—the mountains. Below them are crowded slopes of field corn. In their floodplain pasture a dozen brown cows are drowsing on their feet, heads down, or browsing near the fence on slopes where the woods' shadow falls. I watch a flycatcher on a limb across the river. The air is so fat with food that this flycatcher never leaves its perch; it simply turns its head, snaps its beak, and dines.

Two things are distracting me. One is a gang of carp on the river bottom; I can see the carp where the sycamore boughs cast shade. During times of excess leisure like this, you can see not only fish, but also a loose-knit network of sunlight on fishes' backs. The same moving pattern falls on the stony river bottom. It looks as though someone has cast over the fish a throw net made of sunlight. Some people eat carp.

Near the bank at my feet is a sunny backwater upon which dozens of water striders are water striding about. They seem to be rushing so they don't fall in. I soon discover that these insects are actually skidding along on the underside of a cloud. The water here is reflecting a patch of sky and a complete cumulus cloud. It is on the bottom of this cloud that the water striders are foraging. They are the size of biplanes or prehistoric birds.
They scrabble all unawares on a cloud bottom, clinging to this delicate stuff upside down, like lizards on a ceiling.

While these complexities are narrowing the focus of my attention, the dog looks up. I look up. The wide world swings into view and fades at once while I listen for a sound. The dog and I are both hearing it. We hear a slow series of clicks up on the road. It is the child, riding her bicycle up the hill.

 

The child is riding her bicycle up the hill. I stand and look around; the thick summer foliage blocks the road from view. I turn back toward the river and hear the playing cards slap in the spokes. They click and slap slowly, for the hill is steep. Now the pushing grows suddenly easier, evidently; the cards click and slap. At once, imperceptibly, she starts down. The pace increases. The cards are slapping and she is rolling; the pace speeds up, she is rolling, and the cards are slapping so fast the sounds blur. And so she whirs down the hill. I can see her through the woods downstream where the road evens out. She is fine, still coasting, and leaning way back.

 

We do love scaring ourselves silly—but less every year. Have I mentioned that my classmates and I are now thirty-five?

There is an old Pawnee notion that when you are in your thirties and forties you are “on top.” The idea is that at this age you can view grandly, in the fullness of your strength, both the uphill struggle of youth and the downhill slide of age. I suggest that this metaphor is inaccurate. If there is such a place as “on top”—if there is a sensation of riding a life span's crest—it does
not last ten or twenty years. On the contrary, the crest is so small that I, for one, missed it altogether.

You are young, you are on your way up, when you cannot imagine how you will save yourself from death by boredom until dinner, until bed, until the next day arrives to be outwaited, and then, slow slap, the next. You read in despair all the titles of the books on the bookshelf; you play with your fingers; you revolve in your upholstered chair, slide out of the chair upside down onto your head, hope you will somehow damage your heart by waiting for dinner in that position, and think that life by its mere appalling length is a feat of endurance for which you haven't the strength.

But momentum propels you over the crest. Imperceptibly, you start down. When do the days start to blur and then, breaking your heart, the seasons? The cards click faster in the spokes; you pitch forward. You roll headlong, out of control. The blur of cards makes one long sound like a bomb's whine, the whine of many bombs, and you know your course is fatal.

 

Now the world swings into view again. I shift my weight. The cumulus cloud has dissolved in the river. The water striders have lost their grip on the heavens. One by one they seemed to have slipped from the sky, somersaulted in the air, and landed on their feet in this backwater under the sycamore. The carp are stirring up silt from the bottom. The cows are apparently moribund; the dog is at standby alert.

Here it comes again. The child has gone around the loop of roads and is climbing the hill once more. I turn toward the cottage, thinking she might be coming down
the drive. But there she goes again, down the hill. She really does sound like the London blitz.

 

This is limestone country. That means the dairy farmers lose a cow every few years; the cows, poor things, fall through their pastures when the underground roofs collapse. They break their legs or worse and die there of shock, I guess, or blood loss, or thirst, or else the farmers shoot them there. I once saw one of these cows which had fallen through.

Many years ago, walking far downstream where the land is clear, I came across one of these cows, a golden Guernsey lying down in a pasture with her back toward me. I only discovered that she was in fact
in absentia
by walking around to her front and seeing that she had no insides. She had not so much as
one
inside that I could see. Her eyes were gone down to the bone, and her udder and belly were opened and empty; there was her backbone. She was dry leather on a frame, like a kettledrum. Her mouth was open and there was nothing in it but teeth. Instead of the roof of her mouth I saw the dark, dry pan of her skull. Both her front legs were broken. They were stuck in the same hole in the ground—a hole two feet across, limestone shards with grass growing on them. The hole was as jagged as a poked egg. How could she have known which step was the false one?

I backed away. Trying to spread my weight, I made a wide circle around her, the way I had come, hoping the ground would hold me and not having the faintest idea what I would do if it did not, or how far I would fall. Back on the riverside path, I turned. Once again, from the back, that hollow golden Guernsey—old skin
and-bones—looked, as the saying goes, as though she were only sleeping.

 

It is limestone country, and toward the town is a mineral springs. Before the turn of the century, people from several cities bought farms here, or built summer houses, so they could take vacations near the mineral springs. Some of these summer people retired here and took to farming. The local farmers, a passive lot, accepted the new gentry—so easily distinguishable in town by their plaid shirts and rubber boots. This was, as I say, around the turn of the century.

Soon the valley became, like so many places, the height of fashion among its own inhabitants. The children of the original summer folk moved here, some of them, and raised their own families here. Then the back-to-the-landers of my generation came, and began clearing land for starveling farms. By then, most of the original farmers had moved to the cities.

The old gentry families and the newcomers got together. They talked about community. They raised barns; they built a Quaker meeting house and used it to organize the blocking of a power project. They held square dances; they blocked a proposal to widen the highway.

They are a people of profound beliefs. They treat cancer with tea. They have come here to abandon society to its own foolishness. They believe in wood heat, unpasteurized milk, and whales. To everyone they are unfailingly helpful.

 

I meant to accomplish a good bit today. Instead I keep thinking: Will the next generations of people remem
ber to drain the pipes in the fall? I will leave them a note.

 

Late afternoon: we are inside the cottage now, and baking. I am trying to tell the child a few of the principles by which I live: A good gag is worth any amount of time, money, and effort; never draw to fill an inside straight; always keep score in games, never in love; never say “Muskrat Ramble”; always keep them guessing; never listen to the same conversation twice; and (this is the hard part) listen to no one. I must be shouting—listen to no one! At this the child walks out of the kitchen, goes into her room, and shuts the door. She is this obedient. I have never detected a jot of rebellion in her. If she stays this way she is doomed. On the other hand, I wonder: did she do it for the gag? Even so.

 

We are baking a cake for Count Noah Very, the neighbor. Here a concern for truth forces me to confess that although I am writing in the present tense, actually some years have elapsed since this weekend in the country. In the course of those years, Noah Very has died. He died of a stroke, and, sadly, was not mourned by kin. His death, of course, makes me recall him with more fondness than I felt for him while he lived, for in truth he was a grouch who despised everyone.

It has been almost thirty years since Noah Very walked us children up to Carson's Castle. Now Noah is in his seventies. He is a hermit who hides in the woods. He is a direct descendant of Jones Very, the transcendentalist poet who composed “The Spirit Land” and other abstracting sonnets.

When Noah was in his twenties, with a degree in English literature from Yale, he had one of his parents' servants' cottages moved to its present location in the woods downstream. He intended, he told me once, to spend a year or two there writing a novel. Somewhere in there he took a false step, like the cow. He got involved milling lumber with which to build bookcases. In his thirties he made a desk. He inlaid the desk's surface with multicolored veneers in elaborate patterns; he carved the drawer pulls in the shape of veined oak leaves. God knows it is your human obligation to admire this desk if you ever visit him and get past the door—and in fact, I never did see such a wonderful desk.

Many years ago his wife renounced him for his adulteries; he renounced their children, who are now variously spoused and dispersed. Over the years he renounced meat, obligation, soap, work, pleasure, ambition, and other people. When the child delivered to him an invitation just before dinner, he was asleep. Like almost everyone, he considers himself an intellectual. He does his shopping when the store opens; if he sees another car parked at the store, he drives around in a rage until it goes away.

He refuses all visitors but young women and girls. When other people come into his woods, he hides and watches them. He hides in the hemlocks; he hides in a silver maple; he hides among clumps of witch hazel. He hides and watches the people knock on his door. He told me all this. The interesting part is why people visit him at all. Because he is hiding in the woods, he cannot refuse zucchini squash. He is the valley's sole outlet for zucchini squash.