Ordinary Love and Good Will (20 page)

At the end of the pond I turn around, flushed with adrenaline. Tom is showing Liz how he has learned to stop. She is praising him. I would like to skate rings around the two of them, slow, lazy orbits lasting days, a ritual of discreet containment, nothing coercive, no fences in the open pasture, only an alert dog at one end. When we are undressing to get into bed later, Liz says, “That was fun, wasn’t it? I think the nice thing about our family is that there’s all sorts of fun going around, and it’s easy to catch some.”

Still later, in the dark, when I am nearly asleep, she says, “Were you skating rings around him?”

“Exactly. Are you reading my mind again?”

“I wish I could. But I hear you have to be married for twenty years for that.”

“Maybe we could apply for early access.”

“I’ll call tomorrow.” I can feel her smile in the dark, against the crook of my shoulder. I am very warm.

A brother of Liz’s worked for the post office one Christmas, and he said that they were told that, if the truck got stuck, they should get out some fourth-class mail and throw it under the wheels. That’s the kind of package we get at the end of the month: dirty pages numbered 6 through 15 in a plastic bag with a fragment of a manila envelope containing only our address and a December 12 postmark. No letter, no return address, no clue of the sender until we begin deciphering the text. It is the chapter of Tina Morrissey’s book and begins, “fish bones and heads from the nearby trout stream, as well as sheep and cattle manure, rotted hay and grass clippings, maple and beech leaves, sawdust, wood shavings, wood ash. The five heaps measure about ten feet by ten feet by ten feet, so the Millers have stockpiled some five thousand cubic feet of excellent organic compost. Bob uses it liberally, digging as much as two of the heaps into his beds each year. He has neatly solved the problem of access to such large heaps by building a kind of movable tunnel out of old boards and wheels from two children’s wagons. He rolls the tunnel up to the open side of one of the heaps and begins shoveling from the bottom. As he digs his way into the mound, the boards that form the roof of the tunnel support the mound and direct it downward toward the center.”

Liz finds this very funny, and for the next hour keeps erupting with barks of laughter. I say, “It’s a good idea.”

“It’s a great idea, but I have this image of you tunneling
into this mountain of shit. Just a little man in a raincoat. Bye, Bob, see you in the spring!”

“You’ve seen me get compost, and you’ve gotten it yourself.”

“I’m not laughing at you, honey, I’m laughing at the image.”

I read the rest by myself, remembering my fears of how she would perceive our family, our likability as personalities. But it does not read, “For a profoundly neurotic son of a bitch, Bob Miller has done pretty well.” It reads, “Miller is careful to keep his carrot seeds moist until they germinate. He covers each bed with two layers of old newspapers, and then sprinkles these layers sometimes four or five times a day with water from the spring. After seven days of this treatment, Miller gets almost 100 percent germination, rare for carrot seed, which under normal conditions offers 30–40 percent germination in two to three weeks.” About Tom she writes, “Even the seven-year-old is an integral part of the family effort.” She calls our valley “a kind of paradise from which the Millers can catch sight of the twentieth century (as it is played out in the supermarket and the branch bank in Moreton, a town of a thousand people) without having to participate in it.” Nowhere does she call me a genius, but she does remark that “Miller’s manner is not unlike that of some powerful and wealthy CEO. He does what he wants, the way he wants to do it. Surely this comes from rejecting the power of money and from cultivating his ability to grow, build, catch, or find everything he not only needs, but wants.” I am not exactly flattered. Maybe there was once a letter, asking my opinion of this, or whether I would like to make changes, but it is gone now, along with the return address. The manuscript pages lie around for a few days, then disappear.

Liz gets up on Sunday and says, “Tom’s going to church with me today. We can ski. The snow is good and there
isn’t any wind, so we shouldn’t have any trouble. How would you like pancakes for breakfast?” It’s an effective speech, and leaves me perplexed. Any question will be a challenge now. I say, “Pancakes sound good,” and leave it at that. Later I plan to try the “I thought we were going to talk about this” line, because I thought we were, even though I don’t suppose we agreed on it. We clean up the bedroom and make the bed, waiting to see who will make the next misstep, and finally Liz says, “He asked to go.”

“He’ll miss pony training.”

“He asked me to ask you if you could save that till the afternoon.”

“I had other plans for the afternoon.”

“Could you be a little flexible?”

“Pony training is in the morning. A regular routine is important, both to the pony and to Tom. The ponies will be standing at the gate, expecting to be trained and fed again. I want to encourage those sorts of habits.”

“I understand that—” But she doesn’t go on. Over our whole-wheat pancakes and applesauce we talk about planting blue potatoes this year, and blue corn. Tom would like to know if blue tomatoes are available, and I try to explain that blue is somehow genetically related to yellow, but not to red. They exchange occasional looks across the table which I can’t read, and I sound pedantic to myself, loud and overly informative. Even so, Tom stays home and Liz skis off by herself.

The pony foal is nearly a year old now—she was born in March—and one or both of us has worked with her every day since she was born. She wears a halter, walks on a lead, and allows all of her feet to be picked up. Her skin twitches when we brush her, and her little tail switches impatiently back and forth. Her winter coat is thick, nearly black, dull in tone. Tom lets her take an apple that he holds between his teeth, and I don’t stop him. She is careful—her velvety
upper lip stretches and feels the skin of the apple, pulls it away from him almost prehensilely. He is on his best behavior with her; his hands move slowly and firmly over her coat. He stands very close to her and never moves around her without maintaining contact. He speaks in a low, definite voice. The boyish urge to supply cause and witness effect that impels him, sometimes, to blow into the mother pony’s ears or sprinkle water on the cats or walk right behind the sheep, so they can hear him but can’t see him, is absent with the pony foal. He wants her to be calm and happy and smart and pretty, to love him and obey him and grow up smoothly, as any parent does.

I push open the barn door, and he leads her out into the snow. She walks two steps, then snorts and kicks out with one back foot. He leads her steadily forward, the way I taught him, never looking at her, never acting as though she has done anything out of the ordinary. She tries a little buck and kick, then tries to reach her nose down to the snow. He casts me one glance over his shoulder. He is a little afraid—she is a little friskier than usual, because of the cold. “Keep going,” I say. “She’s paying attention.” I follow them around the corner of the barn and down the long side. At the barnyard fence they stop and turn around and begin back toward me. He is holding her loosely, his right hand next to the leadline clip, the free end of the rope in his left. Every day one of us does this, over this same ground, past these same windows that look in upon the same assortment of livestock, but today, for the first time, the pony foal notices something—a blatting goat? a cat?—and she suddenly jerks away from Tommy, backing and shying, her nostrils wide and her ears bolted forward. He loses her with his right hand, but his left instinctively tightens on the rope and she jerks him around. I can see the look of surprise and panic on his face as she begins to pull him in a circle, throwing her head, bucking, kicking, neighing,
now taking offense at every sound and movement in the vicinity.

The smartest thing for him to do would be to let go of the rope, and actually I have never thought to tell him what to do in this sort of circumstance—the mother pony is phlegmatic, and the pony foal has been so cooperative until now that her manners seemed permanent. But he doesn’t do the smartest thing; he reacts like a natural horseman and hangs on tight. There would be lots of reasons, if he knew them: to keep her from running off and maybe hurting herself, to keep her from successfully getting her way, to maintain his contact with her and therefore her attention upon him. I don’t panic. I don’t rush toward them. Whether by instinct, trust, or foolishness, I don’t react as if he is in danger, I just watch them float in the black-and-white picture created by trees and snow, yanking, tossing, pulling at each other. He keeps saying, “Sparkle! Sparkle!” His hat falls off. They are pretty far away when I finally begin to run toward them, dilatory father.

When I reach them they are still, if not calm. The pony is trembling and heaving, Tom is panting, his cheeks are aflame. They can barely walk, but I make them. Back to the spot where she shied, back to that moment, so that we can go over it and over it, erasing with habit any associations she might have with that spot. Was he in danger? I don’t know, but it is by common, and unvoiced, consent that we don’t bother to tell Liz about it when she returns in the afternoon.

That week is bitter cold, and it snows a few inches every day. Books and magazines are due at the library, and we long for new ones, but there is no going anywhere. Tom takes the bus, but we wrap his feet inside his boots in plastic bags, make him wear gloves and mittens, walk with him to the bus stop, more to make sure that he stays bundled up than anything else. Marlys and I exchange waves and
shouts of “Brr!” She and Paul, her husband, recently moved into town after twenty years’ farming, so that he could indulge his real love, volunteer firefighting. The bedrooms are unbearable, so we drag our blankets into the living room and sleep near the stove with its masonry shell. There is no sun, so the insulated panels that we built to fit the windows are up all day. We are confined. Twice a day I shovel aside drifted snow and go out to the barn to feed the animals, muck out the goat pen, and milk the goats. We live like this at least once every year, and I haven’t especially minded it in the past. Country people love to brag about the weather, to compare phenomenal details, like the cows’ eyelids being frozen shut. Tom and I have a ritual when it gets cold like this—I run half a bucket of water, take it outside, and throw the water into the air. My grandfather swore that he had seen weather so cold that the water froze in glittering marbles before it hit the ground. I have never seen that, and I intend to in my lifetime if it is possible. Liz calls this my only ambition. Maybe. Tom is excited as soon as he wakes up each day—how cold is it? is it cold enough yet? is this the coldest place in the world? Bundles of sweaters and blankets and coats and pillows and socks pile up in the living room. After kerosene lamps day and night, the sojourns outside are blinding and huge, and it is hard not to be convinced that every exterior scene isn’t somehow suspended in ice and time. We nap off and on all day, luxuriantly entwined with each other, stray items of clothing, the cats, layers of blankets. We read favorite bits of old books aloud but are too sleepy to stick with anything for long.

On Saturday, another bitter, overcast day, while I am breaking the ice in the goats’ water bucket, I hear a car stop at the end of the lane, and not long after that Lydia Harris and a child, who must be Annabel, appear vividly on the path. They are carrying skates. Up in the house, I know,
Liz and Tom are rooting around in their blankets still, drinking parsley tea with honey and telling each other jokes. As I left, Tom was saying, “How many raspberries can you put in an empty bowl?” and Liz was pretending she didn’t know. It seems to be fairly early morning, but in fact we let the clock wind down Thursday and forgot to set it yesterday by Tom’s arrival home from school. It could be any time. The Harrises, gazing around rather hesitantly, make me keenly aware of the yellow hole in the snow off the side of the front porch, where Tom and I have been peeing. Liz, to whom I never even mentioned my invitation, hasn’t been out of her nightgown since Wednesday.

Even so, they are a riveting picture, mother in jewel-green jacket and blue earmuffs, daughter in a parka so fuchsia-colored that it seems to expand as I look at it. The wind lifts a dry dusting of snow off the mounded drifts, and it whirls at their knees. Behind, the black filigree of the maple woods, snow on the mountains shading into snow in the clouds. It is the daughter who seems hesitant, from this distance almost sulky. She stops and Lydia pivots to talk to her, leaning down earnestly. Though I can hardly tell what she looks like, I can see a scowl on her face.

It’s still there when I come up to them, and maybe that’s the problem. She is a slender child, with a nutty complexion, a high, smooth forehead, and large eyes in wide-apart, flaring sockets. That she is a beauty in the making is a fact so present that talking around it is like not referring to a visible handicap. As I walk up to them, their conversation lingers in the dry, still air: “He said we should come when we felt like it. They don’t have a telephone.” “I’m embarrassed. I don’t think it’s nice to drop in.” “Skating will be fun.” Annabel throws me a hostile glance: my approach has robbed them of choice. She is not pleased, and it is obvious that hers is the pleasure most often consulted. Click click,
just like that, my dislike of the child is solid, in place, maybe even permanent.

We walk slowly toward the house. Liz’s face appears in a window, disappears. I detour the Harrises through the barn, show them the sheep and the goats, the cows, the ponies, and the chickens. At the pony stall, Annabel Harris snaps from sullen to eager. “The foal’s a roan,” she says. “A strawberry roan with four white feet and a snip and a star. I used to take riding lessons in Boston, before we moved here.” She throws her mother an angry glance. “My favorite horse was a strawberry roan. His name was Billy.” It is the humble name of the horse, the way it makes me see a tall, rib-sprung, hammer-headed old nag, that reminds me she is a child. “I was in the canter class when we left.” I could allude to her riding the pony someday. It would mean nothing, but I don’t do it.