Spoonwood (8 page)

“I guess I will,” Dad says. When Dad tells me this story years later, he'll say it was the first time he'd felt satisfaction in a verbal duel with his father.

“I fear for that child,” Elenore says.

The Elmans visit for an hour or so every other Sunday after church. They bring canned goods, diapers, paper towels, household cleaners, and clothes for me. Dad is more or less cordial, but relations with his parents are obviously strained.

Elenore likes to tell Dad the town news, even though he insists he doesn't want to hear anything about the world outside Forgot Farm. This particular day in August we are sitting around a picnic table Dad has whacked together from lumber parts he pulled out of a construction dumpster.

“Lawyer Prell has moved in with Mrs. Salmon and her niece,” Grandma Elenore says.

“They all deserve each other,” Dad grumbles.

“Lord knows that mansion is big enough,” Grandpa Howard says. “Freddie, maybe she'll rent you a room cheap?”

“Don't make jokes, Howie,” Elenore says. “Prell is running for county attorney. He's quite the rising star, that fellow.”

“Do I have to listen to this?” Dad says.

“All right,” Grandma Elenore says, her voice suddenly full of false cheer. “Let me take Birch. I'm going to change his diaper.”

“I just changed his diaper twenty minutes ago,” Dad says, exasperated.

“She just wants an excuse to admire his body,” Howard says.

“Howie, you can be so disgusting,” Elenore grabs me out of Dad's arms the way he grabbed me back at the Salmon place weeks ago and walks away.

“I'll help you out,” Dad stands.

“No,” Elenore says in alarm now. “I want to do this. It's important.”

“All right.” Dad sits down.

Grandma Elenore brings me to the well, which is screened from the picnic table by some trees. Dad built a wood housing and roof around the well and installed a hand pump. Grandma pumps water into a bucket. She changes my diaper, washes me, and powders my behind. It's a great feeling, a giant and gentle hand grabs your ankles, hoists up your butt, and sprinkles talcum powder on your privates. Afterwards she dresses me in my finest boy blue.

Then she drops to her knees, puts her elbows on the well housing, and prays in a loud whisper. “Dear God, send me to hell for what I am about to do, but save this baby.”

She sticks her hand in the bucket, puts her forefinger and middle finger on my forehead, raises her eyes to heaven, and says, “I baptize thee in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost.”

The water trickles into my eyes and blurs my vision. I do not cry, but I wonder if I'll ever be the same again. How I long for the good old days before eternal life was bestowed upon me.

At that moment, I hear Dad's voice. “What's this? What's going on?” He picks me up.

Elenore backs away, her face full of guilt.

Dad notes the water on my forehead, and now he knows.

“You christened him!” he shouts.

“Take it easy,” Howard says, arriving on the scene.

“I did it for his immortal soul,” Elenore says.

“That's it—we're done,” Dad says. “Don't come back here. Understand? I don't want anything to do with you people.”

Dad with me in his arms walks away from his parents. They follow him, Elenore crying, Howard trying to calm both Dad and Elenore down. But Dad is angry, and when Dad is angry he isn't what you would call reasonable. He just keeps walking away into the woods, not following the path, bushwhacking until Grandma Elenore and Grandpa Howard have disappeared behind the foliage.

Finally, Dad stops. We hear Elenore calling out to us until she goes silent. When we return to Forgot Farm, the Elmans are gone. They will not come back.

6

EXPERIMENTS IN LIVING

W
hat does it mean to love another human being? Probably the fact that I am asking the question suggests that I can never know the answer. But I must try to deal with the question. I feel something like love for my mother, or perhaps I am mistaking anguish at disappointing her for love. I cannot claim to love my father the person, but I do love those qualities of character in him that I lack. I feel a sense of duty toward my siblings, but since they are so far away I rarely think about them, and I cannot say I love them. I conclude that my feelings for family, while strong, are not really mine but mandates delivered by culture. My love for Lilith seemed real for a time, but it was accompanied by sexual desire and dreams of conquest, and in the end tainted by jealousy and tension brought on by our differences and insecurities. I'm beginning to understand that I've always been more interested in others loving me than in me loving them. Love was something I grabbed and ran away with to gnaw on like a dog with a bone. At its best love was never part of me but a beacon shining down from on high that illuminated me. I am not capable of loving family, friends, or a woman. My salvation lies in honest answers to certain questions, answers that must be
tested through actions. In a word, care. Can I love this child by providing good care alone? Or is love apart from loving care, and if so what is its nature and value?

As a man, as a father, I see myself more as a protector from dangers than as a conveyor of affection. I lack any natural inclination to nurture him. In other words, Birch needs a mother. If I'm to raise Birch properly I must become his mother. I worry over this problem. I fear that eventually resentment and selfishness will take me over, as they did when I was living with my parents, as they did when I was living with Lilith. I cannot wait for love to shine down on me. I must act. I must create my illumination so that love departs from me and spreads across the globe. I must become the beacon. But how?

After only a week or two caring for Birch I realize that what I lack in my relations with loved ones is intimacy. I know this idea to be true because, quite magically, intimacy with Birch has come my way without me seeking it. I begin to understand that intimacy is an aura created by care. Since Birch is helpless, he can give me nothing. I must give to him. The more I care for this child the closer I am to him.

The rewards of a baby are partly tactile—softness, smell, baby thrashings and how they reverberate through the hands; I love the strange little sounds he makes. It's as if they contain meaning that even he is not aware of. God is speaking to us through our infants. (Not that I believe in God, nor do I disbelieve. I understand the need for a god, understand the possibility of same; it's just that God has chosen not to manifest Himself to me in a convincing form. He is like the thought of a shadow in a dark room: an idea without form and outside the empirical method. I'm a spiritual drifter, hoping for a hand-out from this stranger that is called God and that I cannot see or hear or touch, but whom I want to exist.) I sleep with Birch the first few nights, a delicious feeling, but I'm afraid of accidentally smothering or crushing him in my sleep, which is why I build him an improved crib of maple saplings, lashed together with waxed cord, the nails judiciously placed. I often lie with him not in sleep but for comfort. He pulls the hairs on my chest with his tiny hands and makes
puckering gestures with his tiny mouth. At first I think this is a game, and then I realize he wants to nurse. What to do? I don't know.

It's odd but I actually talk more now than I did when I was living in the world and participating in unnecessary conversations. I talk out my practical thoughts to Birch. I want him to know what I am doing, why I am doing it, and what the likely consequences will be of my actions. Birch is learning everything I know, from driving a pickup truck to recognizing dry from green firewood on the stump. He's learning by my actions and speech. Unnecessary conversation disrupts meaning and encourages misinformation. Unnecessary conversation always deteriorates into a contest, with all of the accompanying tension of a competitive situation with a winner and a loser, but a voiced monologue with a specific purpose allows both listener and speaker time to analyze and verify its information.

It's late summer. I work very hard, gathering firewood and making a home out of a school bus, but I allow myself a part of the day for adventuring. We fish on Grace Pond, which is on the Salmon trust.

Dad and I drive regularly to Grace Pond. Forgot Farm is only about a mile and a half trail-walking to Grace Pond, but it's five miles by road. We have to drive down our nasty road, turn onto the paved town road, onto another dirt road, and finally onto a two-rut car path into the trust lands to the pond. Dad says, “The Salmon Forest Trust Conservancy is closed to motorized vehicles, with one exception. New Hampshire law requires public access to all water bodies because they are owned by the people. I know you don't understand me now, but my words are sinking in, and some day they'll rise to the surface.” We drive down the narrow dirt road to the pond, nothing but forest on each side. The only sign that people ever stepped foot in those woods are stone walls.

When we arrive, Dad pulls the boat off the top of the pick-up and carries it to the sliver of beach that serves as a public boat landing.
There are no cottages on the pond and no fishermen. The state does not stock the pond with trout, so the only fish are perch, hornpout, pickerel, and rumors of smallmouth bass. Some of the local guys come at night to fish for hornpout, but nobody but Dad fishes for perch, because perch are small and do not tug on the line, which is what gives fishermen the thrill they seek. The boat landing is only fifteen or twenty feet wide. Trees grow right down to the shoreline. The boat is very tiny, light enough for a strong man to carry.

With bungy cords Dad ties the car seat with me in it to the stern seat of the boat, while he rows from the middle seat. He rows me to a beaver lodge at the rocky end of the pond, where the trees came right down to the shore and lean in over the pond as if about to drink, not water but light. Dad picks up some beaver-chewed wood to bring back with us as an ornament for our house. “The beaver,” he says, “ranks with the skunk as the most magnificent nuisance animal of the North Country.” We catch a pail full of perch that day. Dad cooks them back at Forgot Farm, the tiny fillets dredged in flour and salt and fried in bacon fat in an iron fry pan on the outdoor grill. Other fishermen stalk the aristocratic trout, the union card bass, or the action-adventure-hero pike, but Dad goes after the down-home perch.

Another day on the pond we are treated to the sight of an osprey dropping from a great height to take a fish out of the water. “Imagine being able to see so well that you're a couple hundred feet above a windy lake and you can spot a six-inch fish below the surface,” Dad says. “You can calculate where it will be after you begin your drop. You can see it rushing up to meet you, and you can make an in-flight course correction at darn near your terminal velocity. Fantastic!”

On one side of the narrow boat launch is the expanse of the pond; on the other side is a marsh, where a great blue heron has taken up residence in a huge nest at the top of a dead pine tree in the water. Watching the heron fish becomes a meditative activity for both Dad and me. Dad anchors the boat, waits quietly five or ten minutes for the heron to get over the upset of our presence. We watch the bird fish. She walks very deliberately, very
stately until she finds a station. She stands still, as if posing. The tension builds in Dad and me. We hardly breathe. Suddenly the heron darts her beak into the water like a spear and comes up with a fish. Then the heron with fish crossways in her mouth begins a laborious takeoff, flapping her huge wings, tucking her legs behind her like a knife in a sheath, wings sometimes hitting water as she strains for altitude, finally rising on an air current, circling, and back into the nest at the high point of the dead pine. Dad lets out a whoop, and I throw up my hands and imitate Dad's whoop. I don't know if it qualifies as my first word, but close. His whoop is my whoop.

Another late summer day, the heron breaks off from fishing and flies away, but in the opposite direction of the nest, as if never coming back. Dad watches her fly across the pond. But I keep my eye on the marsh where the heron had been. I note that some fall color has appeared on the swamp maples. Something begins to emerge from the tall marsh grass. Only when Dad hears a splash does he turn around to see what I have seen, a moose in moose knee–deep water, munching some growing thing.

“Birch,” Dad says, to me, “this is my favorite time of year.”

Birch and I are taking one of our walks in the woods. It has misted all day and the sky is almost clearing, so that the sun shines strong but with diffuse light. The mist has collected on spiderwebs, making them visible. Glistening spiderwebs in the grass, in the trees, in spaces between rocks. I tip a moose wood leaf toward my son's mouth, and the collected droplets of water quench his thirst.

I break off the path and start bushwhacking. It would be easy for the average person to get lost out here, but I know these lands. I walked them as a kid-trespasser and I walked them with Lilith, and now I walk them with our son. I know the trust as well as the Squire did, but there's always something new to learn.

We've arrive at a patch of young white pine trees on the north side of a hill. I know this grove and have avoided it. Here young pines grow, their lower branches all entwined with one another.
The walking is hard and snarly and dark under the canopy, and underneath my feet is a desert. Young pines and their acidic needles kill everything in their shadow, including, sometimes, each other. I'm skirting the pines when my eye catches sight of a darker branch growing at a forty-five degree angle. The branches of pines grow ninety degrees from the trunk, so it's more the anomaly of the angle than the branch itself that I notice. I go in for a closer look, breaking dead pine branches with my hands. Birch does not like the sound, and his hands flutter with alarm, but he does not cry. The odd branch is not a pine at all; it's from an apparently dead apple tree. I explore some more and discover that I'm in an ancient apple orchard. Decades ago the orchard was abandoned and the pines took over and are in the process of strangling the light from the apple trees.

The branches of dying apple trees have grown tremendously long, reaching as high as they can for light. But the pines reach higher, and over the years the apple trees are losing this little war in the woods. In their struggle, I see my own and the inevitability of defeat. I decide that I might be doomed, but these apple trees are not, for while there is no one to save me, I can save them.

The tree I'd first seen and thought was dead holds a few small green apples that grow on a single branch that has found a shaft of light. They'll be ready in the early fall if the tree can get some more light. I return the next day with my chain saw and cut some of the pines, and the light pours through, and the apple trees thank me. I cut the pine wood into firewood lengths. Split, it will make good kindling next year.

At the ledges Dad shows me the secret place where you and he used to go to be alone. “You were made in this lean-to beside that little hemlock tree and born nine months later in the same place,” he says. “I think maybe your mother's spirit is still here in some form.”

Mother, dear Mother, that is why I have come here in the terrible storm.

One afternoon we walk to Old Darby Cemetery on the edge of the trust and marvel at the gravestones. Men died from accidents and infection, and women died in childbirth, and children died in droves from diseases, but from the looks of the gravestones it appears that if persons could reach forty-five or fifty, they'd make it into their eighties and often their nineties.

As the summer gives way to fall, I continue my great experiment in living, making rules as I go along. To raise Birch properly and keep myself from going crazy or committing a criminal act, I will have to enforce our isolation. I will avoid the temptations and corruption of the material world, what my Catholic mother calls the near occasions of sin—bars, liquor stores, televisions, radios, theaters, shopping centers, and schools.

My philosophy is based on the idea that the root cause of human confusion is unnecessary conversation. Which leads me to the practical matter of educating my son. If I refrain from conversation, how will Birch learn to speak? I decide that he must hear the best of human speech, but without trivialization or argumentation. He must be instructed in practical matters, for we are alone in the wilderness. I will never talk down to him. I will speak in complete grammatical sentences. I will refrain from all small talk. Together we will learn about the world through observation and through library books that offer instruction, wisdom, and beauty. I resolve never to criticize him, and to give him the tools that will allow him to do whatever he wishes.

We leave Forgot Farm once a week to shop for necessities. If a clerk speaks to me about the weather, I do not answer. I speak to no one on the street, and if anyone speaks to me I do not answer. We spend an hour at the Darby Free Library, which is the only place in the civilized world where I feel halfway comfortable. I return books and check out books. Later, at Forgot Farm, I entertain myself and teach my son language arts by reading out loud to him. We read the classics, history, literature, how-to manuals. We read about religion but stay away from the sacred texts such as the Bible, which are fraught with scientific errors,
exaggerations, and mistakes in judgment, not to mention violence, ambiguity, pretentious language, and reports of unnecessary conversations with the Deity. Children should be protected from books like the Bible. However, I am most offended by so-called children's books, which range from stupid to trite, from insulting to patronizing, from left wing to right wing propaganda, cunningly or crudely disguised. I do admire some of the artwork in children's books, but the evil in the texts outweighs the good in the illustrations.