Spoonwood (26 page)

“You haven't seen him in a few years,” Persephone said.

“Only at a distance.”

“Take a look, Latour.”

She reached for the flashlight and shined it on Birch's face. “Look closely.”

Latour parted Birch's lips with his fingers so that he could see the braces. “Elenore, my mother,” he said.

“That's right, Latour—he's yours,” Persephone said. She could feel Latour's body heave and shudder in the sleeping bag, his chest rising and falling, rising and falling, mournful hiccups barely audible.

“Lilith—how could I have doubted her all these years?” Latour said.

“It's okay that you're an idiot, Latour. Admit it to yourself, and you may be fit to join the human race.”

They lay quiet for a while. Persephone knew she had won that round, but she hated herself for it. Whatever Latour's faults he had saved Birch's life. She didn't exactly want to apologize as to explain herself, her overreaching aggression a defense that meant no offense.

“Latour?” she said.

But he was asleep, and suddenly, she felt her own exhaustion.

Persephone dreamed that she had lived an entirely different life—childless, poor, happy, coming of age as an international grand prix race car driver.

When she woke it was warm in the sleeping bag but cold in the shanty. Latour slept with his arm around Birch. The object of Latour's and her mutual concern had reached normal body temperature, his breathing regular but faint. Morning light came in through a window. She crept out of the sleeping bag and lit a cigarette and looked around.

For a hovel of about a hundred and fifty square feet the place was surprisingly homey, a stick home, complete with a door, a window, shelves, a bed frame, one chair. No clutter, as if Latour had been expecting company. In a corner was a curtain and a potty, clean, no smell. She wondered where he dumped the stuff.

A backpack and some other clothes hung from pegs on a wall. A snapshot of Birch in blue jeans, taken a couple years back, was attached to a pole by pushpins. Persephone had taken the picture herself. Somehow Latour had gotten hold of it. Beside it was an eight-by-ten of Lilith laughing, obviously looking amused at the photographer as he snapped the picture. Persephone had never seen her daughter look so happy, so in love.

She stoked the fire, putting in a couple pieces of split red oak. The stove was some kind of homemade thing, small and simple, a crude but efficient heat delivery system for this space.

The walls were made of lashed-together saplings, very much like the tree house the kids built, except earthbound. On the walls hanging from push pins were scores of wooden spoons, strings tied around the handles. They resembled Japanese wood chimes. Carpeting covered the dirt floor. A single recycled window allowed some light in. On a shelf beside the chair was a bottle of Old Crow whiskey half full, a shot glass, and a notebook. She picked up the pages and read an account of the creation of a spoon made of apple wood stolen from the Salmon Trust. On the margin was a note: “Don't sell this one. Deposit in time capsule.” Persephone didn't exactly admire Latour or his craft, didn't exactly envy him, or understand him, but the thought of this strange man absorbed by his labors touched her in its simplicity and humanity.

She'd had the same feeling when she'd stumbled across the expensive
handmade wooden spoons in the Arts and Trifles catalog. When she saw “yellow submarine” carved on the handle of a spoon she'd known intuitively that it had been made by Birch when he was living with his father.

2

PAYING DEBTS

O
badiah Handy and Chahley Snow pulled Latour's van out of the drifts with their horses. They charged him fifty dollars—he gave them a hundred. They were surprised that the Hermit of Lonesome Hill had money. No one in town but Persephone knew of his trade as a maker of high-priced wooden spoons. Latour's original plan had been to let the van sit in the snow until spring, because he liked the solitude and the desperate living conditions imposed by winter. Everything had changed. He needed wheels to visit Birch in the hospital in Boston.

The boy lay still, but he did not appear to be in a coma. It seemed to Latour that he was living and thinking and feeling in some other realm where he might reach Lilith. Latour knelt by the bed and tried again to transfer a message of apology to Lilith through Birch. A blank space in time ensued. Latour knew he was failing. Birch had the power to deliver such a message, but why should he? Surely he sensed that his father lacked sincerity at his core.

On the drive back from the hospital in Boston, Latour bought a bottle of Old Crow. A third of the contents had gone down his
throat when he impulsively threw the bottle out the window. He immediately regretted his actions and when he reached Keene a little more than an hour later he bought another bottle. He had a faint glimmer then of what he must do: seek the counsel of others. It was a disturbing idea for one such as he, and he shut himself off from it. He did recognize that in his anger and hurt he'd been blinded to other people. To make peace with himself, he must make peace with his world.

On Sunday Latour knew when Howard and Elenore would be back from church, and he timed his arrival accordingly. He'd been so long absent from his parents' mobile home that he knocked at the door. He had planned a long speech, asking for their forgiveness, but when his mother opened the door to let him in, his father standing behind her, he understood that they knew why he had come. His mother burst into tears, and then Latour burst into tears, and Howard said, “My word, but wonders never cease.”

Latour ate Sunday dinner with his family for the first time in years. His mother made meat loaf with mashed potatoes, peas, and gravy from the can. Latour told them truthfully that it was the best meal he'd had in his life.

They talked about Birch, the boy's injuries, the eight toes that had to be amputated, the tissue damage, the possibility that when he woke, if he did wake, he might have brain damage.

Latour spoke only kind words about Persephone, who had risked her own life for Birch, who was paying all of his medical bills, who had demonstrated that she loved him.

Elenore talked for a good hour about their family, bringing Latour up to date on the recent adventures of his sisters and their children. It pained Elenore that they had all moved so far away. The annual Elman Christmas dinner was no longer a family reunion. The Elmans were scattered across the country.

Howard gave Latour that half-injured, half-angry look that told Latour that his father was disappointed in him for not taking
over the business. In the past Latour (as Freddie Elman) would have left the table and sulked. Now he understood Howard's hurt and realized that there was nothing to do but accept the differences between them. Howard didn't say as much as usual, and in the end, almost in a whisper, he announced that he planned to retire “one of these days.”

After a dessert of apple pie and ice cream, Howard went out alone to the barn to work on one of his Honeywagons. Latour stayed behind to visit with his mother.

“Is something wrong with Dad, or am I just remembering him wrong?” Latour said.

Elenore broke eye contact with Latour for a moment and then turned to him. “I hope this doesn't make you mad, but . . . it won't make you mad, will it?”

“I doubt it, Mom. I'm seeing the world in a different way since Birch's accident.”

“It's your name. It bothers your father in a funny kind of way.”

“Latour—it's his name, too.” Defensive now.

“No, I don't mean the name itself. He doesn't care whether he's a Latour or a Howie Elman or an Elmo Dingleberry. It's just you grabbing the name on his birth certificate has got him to thinking about his mother and father, the past . . . you know, you understand what I mean?”

“I do, yes. But what about you, Mom? The last time I saw you, you were real upset about not finding your own roots.”

“That I was, but I got over it because, you see, I faced it. It'll all true up after I die and, hopefully, go to heaven. But your father, he hasn't thought about the smoldering hurt inside of himself. Boom! It went off when you changed your name to Latour.”

“I'm sorry. Should I tell him that?”

“He'd only get embarrassed, and he'd still have the ache. When a hurt steals upon you, it's harder to set it right.”

“What do you think he wants?”

“Why, he wants his mommy and daddy. That great big man. It's really kind of sad.”

.   .   .

THE NEXT DAY

Latour liked Frenchville, Maine, at first glance. It reminded him of a set out of a 1950s movie on rural America, wood-frame houses and storefronts, limited neon, no food or restaurant chains, pickup trucks parked outside Rosette's Diner, the town built along U.S. Route 1, just a two-lane road this far north, roughly parallel to the railroad tracks, which were roughly parallel to the St. John's River. Rising up from the valley were low hills, some wooded, some open, potato fields in the broad river valley, a landscape both rugged and pastoral at the same time. More snow here than back in New Hampshire. It was soon obvious from the street and business signs that the town's name fit its people—Ouellette, Raymond, Gagnon, Cyr, Michaud, Pelletier, Guimond, Boucher, Dionne, Hêbert.

He had come to Frenchville for a reason, but it would wait until he had a meal and a night's sleep. Latour had developed an instinct over the years for a forgot place to camp out, and he knew he'd find one nearby and did, a recent logging cut on a side road ten miles out and up. He had to shovel snow for an hour to clear the snowbank thrown up by the plow. After that he was able to drive in far enough not to be seen from the road. He smelled the sawed fir trees and branch detritus, which gave the area a messy, disreputable look that dirtied the snow. From this prospect he barely made out a church steeple across the St. John's River into Canada.

He started a fire and fried hamburger and onions, which he ate with good French bread, the last thing he'd bought at Ancharsky's Store when he left Darby in the morning ten hours ago. He tried to imagine Birch the way he was when he was whole, but he couldn't create a clear picture in his mind.

It was dark and he'd had his fill, but he kept the fire going. It was no longer a cooking fire but a meditation fire. He twisted open the bottle of Old Crow and poured himself a shot, downed it, another, and another.

“Do you see me in the fire?” Old Crow said.

“As much of yourself as you allow.”

“Yes, I admit I am cagey that way. For a while there you seemed relieved of the burden of parenthood and happy with my company.”

“Yes, I was relieved. Almost glad. I didn't think I would feel that way. When they took him from me I thought I'd have some sense of loss, regret—something other than what I did feel.”

“Relief.”

“That's correct, Old Crow. You know me too well.”

“You were not truly a father.”

“I loved him.”

“It wasn't a father's love,” Old Crow said. “It was a perverted version of mother love. You found a diluted version of the feeling in a father's weak milk. So I'll grant you some paltry imitation of mother love. But, Latour, you were, are, not yet a father. A father's love grows out of his own maturity since, unlike a mother's love, it is not innate. You have yet to mature, and that is why you cannot love him like a father. Why not just accept yourself as you are, a drunk producing silly spoons?”

Latour heard laughter come out of the fire, or maybe it was the wind in the fir trees.

“All I ever asked for was freedom,” Latour said to the fire.

“You have no freedom, Latour. You're in bondage to this fire, to me, to memory.”

Latour didn't bother with the shot glass. He took a long pull from Old Crow. His eyes watered, his throat burned, and the spell of the fire broke. Old Crow was not his friend or his lover or his confidante; Old Crow was some kind of twisted version of his mother and father that lodged in his thinking apparatus. He could not deal with Old Crow alone. That, at heart, was his problem—trying to go it alone.

The next morning at 9:00
AM
Latour's van was back in Frenchville, parked in front of a renovated shed that might have been a chicken coop at one time. Now it was painted mauve, with flat blue trim. The sign on a picture window said Claire's Unisex
Salon. Latour had been waiting until 8:30
AM,
when the place was supposed to open up. His mood had darkened; his old distrust of human beings ate into him like an acid. He wanted to flee, to hide, to contract. If only he could dispense with people and memory and the anguish they brought on. Finally, a stocky woman in her fifties arrived in an aging four-wheel-drive Subaru. The body might be thick but the face had small, pretty features. She was wearing make-up, but it was subtle. She vaguely resembled his older sister Pegeen.

“You waiting for me?” she said.

“If you're Claire, yes. I'm here for a haircut.”

“Well, come on in,” she said. “Usually people make appointments. You an ice fisherman, skier, or what?”

“If you mean tourist, no, not exactly,” Latour said.

Minutes later he was in the chair, white sheet thrown over him, the stocky Claire in a white frock cutting his hair.

“You're getting a little thin on top,” she said.

“The truth hurts,” he said.

“I can't do anything about truth but I can about the consequences,” Claire said.

“I thought your job was to make people look good, which is neither truth nor consequence.”

“My word, a philosopher in my midst. I guess Rogaine would never be enough for you.”

“Philosopher overrates me.” He took a deep breath. “I didn't come only for a haircut, I came to see you, Claire.”

“I'm flattered, but I'm a married woman.” She never stopped snipping, so he knew he hadn't frightened her. One of his big fears was accidentally scaring people and provoking a crisis. His voice, his body language intimidated people. In that way, he was like his father.

“It's not that,” Latour said. “I was in Caribou yesterday in the town clerk's office. I'm doing some genealogy, looking for my father's parents. According to his birth certificate they were residents of Frenchville. They told me that Claire knows everything that goes on in this town.

“Not everything, but close. What's your interest?”

“I'm looking for some history or background, any information, about a man named Claude Latour, married to a woman named Mary DeRepentigny. They were my father's parents. He was born seventy-three years ago. I checked the phone book, no Claude Latour in the area.” Claire was cutting his hair very slowly now, snip, pause, snip, pause. “I suppose they've died after all these years, but I was wondering if you know the name, the family, anything.”

“Anybody born in this town knows that Claude Latour was killed in 1925 on the river—he was a logger—but Mary, well, Mary is quite alive.”

“You sure?” Latour was startled.

“I ought to know. Mary DeRepentigny is my mother. She gave birth to your father when she was only thirteen years old. She had to give him up when Claude died. Later, when she married again and raised a family, there'd be times when she'd cry for the child she gave away. Hello, nephew.”

Claire and Latour talked for a long time, and then she took him to meet his grandmother—not Mary (a mistake in the Caribou register), but Marie.

The next day Latour returned to Darby and presented his evidence to his father. The look on Howard's face made Latour proud. Later, at Ancharsky's Store, he looked over the bulletin board advertising the time and place of the next county AA meeting.