Every Last Cuckoo (8 page)

Sarah was bolder than she had ever thought she could be, but this last thought was more than she could utter out loud. So far she had not even seen this much-imagined penis; she had only fondled it through clothing. Ignoring his puzzlement, she kissed Charles and unzipped his fly and reached in, briefly fearing she would fumble hopelessly, but, no, there it was, alive in her hand, its heat and springing energy astonishing. She had never imagined. She broke away from Charles's kiss and bent her head to see. She had no thought of restraint or seemliness as she unbuckled his belt and let his trousers fall and then swiftly pulled on his undershorts until they were at his ankles. She rose quickly, overcome by the nearness of her mouth to his erection.

Charles shuffled clumsily backward until he sat on the bed. He kicked his cumbersome clothes away and bent to remove his socks. He lay back, smiling at her. “Now you,” he said softly.

“You do it,” she answered, drawing close so that he could remove the last of her clothing. Charles took her skirt off and lay his cheek on her belly. She had bought extravagant, satin lingerie, none of it like anything she'd ever worn before. He
unfastened her stockings from her garters and carefully rolled them to her ankles and lifted each foot in turn to take them off. She steadied herself with her hands in his thick hair.

Next he dealt with the garters themselves. All the while Sarah stood before him like a schoolgirl or, rather, not like a schoolgirl at all, since now his mouth was on her stomach as he slowly drew her lacy tap pants down, over her backside, letting them drift to the floor. She stepped lightly out of them. He ran his hands over her hips, pulling her closer, kissing her belly harder, until he moved his hands lower and found the center of her longing. She gasped, and he drew her down beside him, and she felt for the first time the intimate length of him next to her, skin on skin. He entered her slowly, measuring his urgency until her virginity gave way with a sharp twinge. She cried out softly, then was overtaken by sensations that were entirely new but felt as if she had always known them.

They married halfway through his residency, in 1950. Less than two years later, with Charlotte on the way, they moved to a small house in Montpelier, near Charles's new one-man practice. Sarah's thoughts of running a botanical nursery lapsed as she decorated a different nursery for her first child. After she and Charles moved to the house outside Rockhill, she contented herself with her own gardens. She joined the generation of housewives that Wendell Burnham's
LTW
had helped to create, but Vermont's Yankee culture and her own upbringing saved her from the worst of her time and station.

T
HE DAY AFTER
C
HRISTMAS
, flakes as light as torn tissue eddied in the middle air. Sarah sat at the kitchen table in the early afternoon and watched as they changed from dark against the sky to white at eye level. The snow was coming down fast and thick, an inch an hour, with more than a foot predicted by evening. The hemlock boughs bent under the weight, their branches scarcely visible. They assumed fantastic shapes—gnomes with white robes and soft pointed hats falling sideways or bearlike creatures with heads bowed, shoulders hunched, limbs loose.

Charles and their grandson William had been out cross-country skiing all morning. William, who had arrived just before the last storm, was the younger of Stephie's two sons, a sophomore at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh. He usually opted for Christmas in Vermont, not wanting to risk the longer trip home to Minnesota in winter. No one else had come for the holiday. Stephie and Jake did not travel between November and
May, and David and Tess were spending Christmas with her large family.

The two men had returned a half hour ago, carrying cold into the house with them, stomping their boots, joking and steaming in their down vests and wet wool sweaters.

“Nana!” William hollered from the mudroom. “Thanks for the snow!”

Sarah grinned. Once, in the car, when Stephie was two, she had objected to the bright, late-day sun in her eyes. “Turn it down, Mama!” she had demanded, having recently seen her first dimmer switch on an electric light.

The story grew and changed until it became a well-worn piece of family folklore that Sarah had powers to control the moon, sun, tides, and weather. But nature was Charles's domain, not Sarah's. She never went into the woods alone. Wild weather got under her skin. She no longer swam in rivers. Even simple aging confounded her, the relentless flight of her remaining days.

Charles, on the other hand, seemed fearless, undaunted even by his own mortality. He had seen so much death in his practice, in the war, on Albert Graves's farm, and even in the very woods where he felt so fully at home. Once, he had come home from an unusually warm and sunny early-winter trek, stinking outrageously and guffawing almost to tears as he told her about rounding a head-high outcropping of rock and tripping over a tall, entirely unexpected structure. “God, Sarah, it was the weirdest thing,” he had told her. “I fell and found myself in a cage—a ribcage! Of a moose!” He caught his breath and added what Sarah's nose had already told her. “Lord, it was ripe. Critters had eaten the organs, thank God, but hair and flesh were still sticking to the bones, and most of the bones were still there—gnawed,
but not clean. Those ribs held me like a hand. You don't quite realize how
huge
a moose is. I fit in there like a baby. A moose papoose!”

Mysteries riddled this story. Why had the rib cage been upright? It rested against the steep rock, and so the moose would not have been able to turn onto its side in that direction. But why not the other? Why had it died with its ribs skyward, its legs in the air? And why were its bones so porous?

Finally Charles discovered the answers. The moose had had late-stage osteoporosis. This, his research informed him, was common among the bulls, which shed their enormously heavy antlers after each mating season and grew them anew the next year. The process leached calcium from the rest of the body and endangered the entire skeleton. Charles thought that this particular moose had fallen because of his weakened bones. He had struggled to right himself and in the struggle had broken his diseased neck or spine. He had died flat on his back, leaving his upright ribcage as a trap and a puzzle. Charles had found his way out of both.

That story, too, was legend by now. Charlotte and Stephie had told it to their children, who might pass it on forever. But they left out the stink, the carrion eaters, the osteoporosis, the reason the moose had died with its legs in the air. Really only the punch line remained from Charles's telling, though fictional details were added. For instance, when Papa looked out at the woods through the bars of bones on his cage, a bear came wandering by and roared at him, making Papa glad he was jailed. And so on. Getting the children to laugh was the whole point. Still, it pleased Sarah to think that she and Charles might one day enter the minds of children they would never know, who
might nevertheless believe in them as the Nana Who Ruled the Sun, and Papa the Moose Papoose.

W
ILLIAM LEFT TWO DAYS
later, having repeatedly skied the trail he and Charles had beaten down with their snowshoes. He skied alone. He skied with Charles, with Tom, and even once with Charlotte. He had tried to persuade Sarah to ski with him. “Come on, Nana,” he teased. “I know you ordered up this snow just for me. We'll go slow.”

Sarah had relented, but on her own terms. “Oh, fine. I'll go try out your trail with you, but I won't ski. My bones are too old. Let's just hike.” She enjoyed the woods, as long as she had company.

So they had set out together on the well-packed trail, Sarah and her tall grandson. The air sparkled with powdery crystals. Here and there were shallow furrows where snow had fallen from branches and rolled lightly down small slopes. Sarah saw the tracks of a mouse going in and out from under a half-rotten deadfall, perfect cover for a tiny creature, guarded as it was by a tangle of brush. William spotted a porcupine at the very top of a white spruce. He had brought binoculars, and he zeroed in on the fat ungainly thing asleep in its swaying perch. He handed the glasses to Sarah, who wished Charles were there to see it.

So a few days after William had gone, Sarah said to Charles, “Let's go for a hike. Maybe we'll see that porcupine.”

“Good idea. Bring your snowshoes, so we can go off the trail to a spot I know. Maybe I can show you something else.”

They had just finished lunch. Sarah grabbed a ski pole to use for balance and called the dogs. They often went with Charles on his walks and were good about staying close, so he never leashed
them. This time, though, Charles signaled the dogs to stay. He explained only that they might interfere with his plans.

Charles and Sarah set out under a pale winter sun and light clouds. He carried a water bottle, thermos, and snacks in a light backpack that also held first aid supplies. Years ago, Sarah had worried when Charles went into the woods alone. She couldn't recall when she had finally learned to trust him completely, but he was a good woodsman and a careful hiker. He knew his way around.

They followed William's ski trail for a little over a mile. They didn't speak as they walked along, carrying their snowshoes. The silence between them was as familiar as their faces, their bodies, and the synchronized rhythm of their days. Sarah kept up with Charles easily, but he would have gone faster on his own.

Sarah's ski pole took some of the strain off her lower body, especially on the ascents. Otherwise she didn't tire much, though the weight of her snowshoes, tied together and slung over her shoulder, made her feel clumsy. The cold, diffuse light of this January afternoon spilled all around them, down through the trees, clear as water, alive. Sarah noticed everything. Deer tracks on the trail, its beaten path an unwitting favor to animals that would otherwise struggle in deep snow. Old wounds on red maples that had scabbed over in the years since moose incisors had scraped the bark away. Copper and blond leaves still clinging to the lower branches of beech trees. The humming energy in the air, the sound of her breath, and the moist warm fog it made in front of her mouth.

But Charles noticed more. He knew where to look, for his memory had banked a wealth of tiny signs left by animals going
about their business. He pointed out bear hairs still clinging to a tree that a female had rubbed and clawed last spring, marking the territory in which she was keeping her cub safe. He showed Sarah where he had most recently seen Stallone, a big bull moose who wintered high up in their woods. He took her off the trail a few feet so that she could see where an ermine had recently scurried home carrying prey in its mouth. Tiny spots of blood made a dotted line beside the small weasel's tracks, and the tail of the mouse or vole that the ermine had held in its teeth made a dragline connecting the dots. Later, they saw hoof and belly marks where a deer had done just as they were about to do themselves, which was to leave the packed trail for the unbroken snow.

They laced on their snowshoes. “Where are we going?” Sarah asked.

“Bobcat country,” he told her. “After that first storm, I came up here and saw lots of sign. It's right above a deer run, so this smart old cat comes here a lot.”

Sarah shivered a little. “Well, at least the bears are asleep.”

But she was fascinated, half an hour later, after they had climbed steadily, to find herself next to Charles at a high, cliffy spot that dropped off sharply to the game run he had mentioned. Far beyond the run she could see four ranges of the Green Mountains through the naked trees, the nearest slope lit gold by the winter sun, the others variously blue-green, gray-green, or dark cobalt.

Sarah thought such perspectives were good for the soul. She felt in her neck and behind her knees a vertigo that had nothing to do with geographic elevation. This spot had an odd intensity, as if she and Charles, like the deer on the run below, were being watched. Sarah would never dare come here alone.

“Look,” Charles said, pointing to a tiny black spot moving erratically on the nearest range. It was scarcely visible through the leafless cover of hardwood trees. It crossed a small open space and then darted into a stand of conifers and was gone. It looked like a scurrying insect.

“What was it?”

“Fisher,” Charles said. “They like high country.”

“Horrible thing,” Sarah muttered, believing one of the large, muscular weasels had carried off her favorite cat six years ago. They hadn't had a cat since. They'd scarcely had cats at all, and none that could come in beyond the mudroom, given the allergic gene from the Lucas side.

A moment later, when the fisher appeared again in the clearing, she got out the binoculars. “I've never really looked at a fisher,” she said, scanning the range and then focusing when she found the animal in her sights. “What do you know,” she cried. “He looks rather sweet—all that thick fur, those little round ears.”

“Sweet like needle teeth and a lousy temper,” Charles answered. “That's a furry little killing machine.”

Sarah lowered her binoculars. “And here I was trying to be open-minded.”

“Let's go a little higher,” Charles said. “You okay?”

Sarah nodded, though tomorrow her muscles would ache.

They climbed another dozen yards and then went straight ahead a quarter mile. The sheer drop was to their left. Sarah was looking to her right, at the massive girth of a grandfather beech, when Charles suddenly caught his breath. She turned, and he pointed, far down below the cliff, to an animal stock-still in its tracks. He put his fingers to his lips. Sarah dared not move. She
stared down at the bobcat as it hovered beside the carcass of a deer, switching its stunted tail. It had lifted its head, perhaps having heard Charles's quiet gasp. But the cat did not look all the way up to discover them. They stared breathlessly at the powerful body, the lovely, dense, ticked fur, the silvers, grays, and spots of black that disguised the cat well in dappled summer woods or in falling snow, when everything turned gray, black, and white. Warily it returned to its feast of red meat, the brightest color in the landscape. They watched until suddenly the cat bolted away so fast it might never have been there at all but for tracks that went into a thicket of brush.