The Snow Geese (11 page)

‘I don’t have a drier. I hang things on a line in the garden. We visited Venice a few years ago. We walked down lots of these alleyways with beautiful old houses on either side and washing-lines strung between the houses. There was all this fresh laundry hanging over our heads – shirts, sheets, dresses, brassières, colours, and whites with the sun in them. All those bright colours. The shirts were waving like flags. When I walked under those clotheslines I felt like a bride walking under arches of fresh flowers.

‘I had a friend who passed away last year. She’d been sick for four years. I went to see her pretty much every day and did all her laundry. I made sure she had clean clothes and clean bedlinen. I thought that if she had clean bedlinen that would make quite a difference to how she was feeling. There was one particular nightgown she liked to wear. It was very thin cotton with lace around the neck and on the shoulder straps. I washed that nightgown by hand over and over again, and she was wearing it when she died. I felt very close to her then, because we were such friends, and also because she was wearing the nightgown which I’d washed. I don’t like to hear anyone say I’m wrong to love doing laundry.’

Jean reached down for the tote bag that lay between her feet. She lifted it to her lap, rummaged briefly, and pulled out a postcard.

‘I like to collect things that have to do with laundry. I brought this along to show my sister. Maybe you can guess what it is.’

I looked at the postcard: a surreal, near-photographic painting of a washing-machine, not a commonplace household washing-machine but something like a large earthenware bowl, painted grey, with a chunky lid on top, and a round window in which a jumble of clothes was visible: it seemed antique and futuristic at the same time.

‘No,’ I said. ‘I don’t think I can.’

‘It’s Mickey Mouse’s laundry room,’ Jean said.

‘Really?’

‘Yes! It’s from the Disney Museum.’

Yes, I could see one of Mickey’s yellow mitts pressing against the window. Containers of laundry-related products were ranged along a shelf: a box of Freeze Detergent (For Really Cold Water), and bottles of Toonox Bleach, Toony Fabric Hardener and Toonite Liquid (For Fine Washing). A small barrel of clothes pegs hung from a rail. Each smooth peg had been carved from wood and resembled an elegant chess piece.

‘Up on my kitchen wall I like to stick photos of my friends’ laundry rooms. I have a needlepoint picture of women doing laundry. It’s from a painting by Clementine Hunter. She came from a slave family on the Melrose Plantation in Louisiana. There are three women doing laundry, wearing dresses, orange, lemon yellow, the hottest pink you can imagine, and a big black kettle with a fire underneath it – one woman stirring the cauldron and the other two leaning over baskets, about to hang clothes on the line. I’ve got a collection of clothes pegs and laundry pins – old wooden pegs without springs, like these here’ – she pointed to Mickey Mouse’s clothes pegs – ‘and all sorts of sprung plastic pins, every colour you can think of, transparent, opaque, milky, glittery. I don’t need to tell you I’m proud as a peach of my laundry collection!’

I lifted myself up in my seat and looked back down the bus at people sleeping, the Greyhound a gallery in which diverse attitudes of repose were on display: heads tilted back, mouths agape, necks limp, cheeks on shoulders, couples slumped together, all lit up when the Americruiser cruised through concentrations of streetlights at the intersections, and all eyes closed but for those of the two white-bearded Amish elders, who looked straight back at me with the inscrutable, wild gaze of prophets. Tail-lights moved in the traffic flow like red-hot coals in lava streams, and sometimes the line of Interstate 35 appeared ahead of us, a light-course bending eastwards, not perceptibly founded on solid ground, but airborne, like the tube of bats that had curved away from Congress Avenue. I imagined this rope of lights as something useful to migrating birds, a guideline, and thought of flocks flying above us, town and city lights arranged beneath them in fixed constellations: zodiacs above and below.

The mechanisms of avian orientation are not fully understood. In species that migrate in flocks, including ducks and geese, experienced birds may guide juveniles from breeding grounds to winter grounds and back again. Birds are known to inherit an endogenous programme for migratory activity; to navigate using solar, magnetic and stellar compasses; and to pilot by familiar landmarks. It has also been suggested that they find their way by reference to winds, smells, infrasounds and minute changes in gravity and barometric pressure. ‘Birds,’ Emlen wrote, ‘have access to many sources of directional information, and natural selection has favored the development of abilities to make use of them all.’

We came to Kansas City and waited in the terminal for our connection. The Greyhound for Minneapolis got under way after midnight, helmed by a younger driver, a man in his mid-thirties, spick and span the way a house can be, with a neat, trim moustache and a smooth, shining bald pate like a cap of polished wax, his uniform exemplary in crease and aspect, his announcements crisp and honed – he appeared just-minted, like a new coin. Jean and I sat together, two rows back on the right-hand side. The terminals received travellers and discharged them in fresh combinations: we recognized some of those who had boarded the coach with us, and noted the absence of others, like the Amish elders, who had boarded coaches assigned to other reaches of the network, bound for other destinations. Across the aisle sat a grey-haired man, jowled like a bull seal in a green suit, his tie loosened and top button undone, and before the Greyhound reversed away from the terminal gate he addressed himself to Jean and me, saying, ‘I’m just waiting for the wheels to get turning. As long as the wheels are turning, I’m getting closer to home.’

Soon he was asleep. Jean slept. She had removed her glasses; there was a moist pink groove on the bridge of her nose. She slept with her head straight, tilted back on the headrest, mouth open, hands resting on the black tote bag across her lap. I slept, woke, and slept again as we continued north up Interstate 35, continuing north with the snow geese across Missouri and Iowa into Minnesota, between the Great Plains and the Great Lakes, sleeping when the coach hit cruising speed and the wheel-drone settled to an even pitch, lights spinning past in regular cadence, and waking whenever such constancy was interrupted, opening my eyes to find Jean asleep next to me, shoulder to shoulder, dreaming of tennis and fresh, fragrant laundry.

Laundry. We had a laundry room, with a drying rig of dowels raised by ropes and pulleys, so that you hoisted the wet sheets and towels like sails, and if you needed to walk from one side of the room to the other you’d have to part the drying clothes with outstretched hands as if they were lianas and fronds, or else give in to the clamminess of damp shirts and trouser legs as they dragged across your scalp and cheeks. There was an old wringer with crank-turned rollers, and an oversized paint-stained sink beneath a shelf that was crowded with bottles of Brasso, bleach, turpentine, household ammonia and limescale remover, and also with paintbrushes, scrubbing brushes, yellow Johnson’s wax polish and beeswax polish and a rusting pink Flit fly-gun with a trademark white-trousered soldier marching on its canister. This white-trousered soldier could himself be seen toting a pink Flit fly-gun, and once, when I was very young, I studied the soldier’s fly-gun to see if I could find on its tiny canister an even tinier soldier toting a fly-gun, imagining an infinite, shrinking series of quantum soldiers toting fly guns. And opposite the washing-machine, on its own square concrete plinth, rested the old blue oil-fired boiler, the house’s heart, with a complex system of padded arterial white pipes leading from it to the ceiling. The small room in which I’d slept as a child (and in which I slept when illness returned me to the condition of a child, dependent on my parents, unable to cope with the challenges of the world outside my immediate home range) was directly above the boiler, and each morning, soon after the rooks began cawing, I’d hear it shudder to life as the timer decreed – the walls shaking, the table-flap rattling on its secret latch, a sound in the floorspaces as if big, clumsy bubbles were galumphing up the white pipes, carrying heat to the house’s extremities.

It was not hard, sitting on the Greyhound that night in March, following the snow geese, with Jean asleep beside me and the mesmerizing, hallucinatory flare and slide of lights all around us, to return home, to go back to the laundry room, or to the short white passage that led from it to the back door of the house, where the bars of three bolts slid with known weight and easiness into sockets on the jamb. The door opened on to the small paved terrace, the feeder with its red-husked peanuts, and if you looked to the left you’d see chestnuts, sycamores and limes, you’d hear the bassoon caws of rooks in the tree crowns, the sound of the Sor Brook dropping off the waterfall, and if you looked to the right you’d see shrubs and climbing roses along a wall, a copper beech, farmland receding in a gentle upward grade to the west, the fixed pattern of fields named Lower Quarters, Danvers Meadow, Morby’s Close, Allowance Ground.

Illness had taken me back, the first time since I was a schoolboy that I’d spent more than a few days, a week at most, at home. And it
was
home: the fact that I hadn’t lived there for years didn’t change that. Nowhere was my sense of belonging so unambiguous. I could still find my way around the ironstone house in the dark, or with my eyes closed, moving by reflex, habit, muscle memory, my hands knowing just where to reach for a handle, switch or rail, my feet ready for a step up or down, a loose board, a shift from carpet to stone. I knew the names of things, their details, histories, every surface burnished with memory and association. When I fell ill, feeling threatened, under attack, with all sense of control or mastery gone, I longed for the house, imagining a place of safety, without dangers or conflict, where all my needs would be provided for, a still point from which life’s unsteadiness could be viewed and measured. But the longing was a fantasy of escape. It was nostalgia.

I opened my eyes. A grey morning, dull, pewter-toned, twenty-four hours since I’d left Austin. The Greyhound was cruising steadily. Jean was awake, rubbing her eyes, replacing her glasses.

‘Did you sleep?’ she asked.

‘Sort of.’

‘I was out for the count. Oh my, I was bushwhacked.’

And without warning she flung her right arm across me, pointing eastwards.

‘Look!’ she said. ‘Those are geese, right?’

Yes, those were geese. Flocks of snow geese were flying in skeins and straggling Us of thirty or forty birds each, moving northwards over flat country, above the horizon, parallel to the Greyhound. Slow waves rode through the strands as leading birds deviated slightly from their straight course and birds behind them followed suit, one after another, passing the discrepancy like a rumour along the line until it reached the last bird and flicked out into open air. Even in the grey light I could distinguish blue-phase from white-phase birds – the morphs not jumbled randomly along each skein but grouped together in bands of three or four geese of the same colour. Each group of blue-phase or white-phase geese probably represented a family, two mates and their young: snow geese pair for life and forge strong family bonds, parents and offspring staying together on the first migration south, during the winter, and on the spring migration back to the breeding grounds, with the male usually leading his mate in flight – the opposite of ducks, where the female takes the lead. Jean leaned over me, getting her face close to the window, craning for a better look at the snow geese, and for a few minutes we kept level with the flocks, until the Greyhound pulled ahead, bent on Minneapolis. I was wide awake now, heading north with snow geese, complicit with birds.

We arrived shortly after nine o’clock. Jean was anxious to see her sister. She got into the back seat of a taxi, looking surprisingly fresh, ablaze with red, yellow and blue, the black tote bag hanging from one shoulder, the badge still adamant on her fleece vest. She wound down the window.

‘I hope things are all right,’ I said.

‘I know. We’ll see. I hope those geese haven’t skipped town when you get there.’

‘Bye, Jean.’

‘Bye!’ She was calling it out; the taxi was already moving.

There was a bird in the terminal at Minneapolis, a passerine, perhaps one of the sparrows, skittish in the roof girders. Exhausted, disorientated, porous with distance, I sat watching a tall, swarthy man keep a leather purse of beans up in the air, the little sack jumping from knee to knee, the arch or instep of one foot to the arch or instep of the other – a hypnotic, stringless yoyoing accompanied by rhythmic percussive beats as beans scrunched together in the impacts on leg or shoe. I boarded my last Greyhound at noon, limbs aching, the coach proceeding north-west on Interstate 94 towards Fargo, crossing from Minnesota into North Dakota. Farmed country ran flat in all directions, as if the land had conceded to the sky’s magnitude, and given ground. Intricate centre-pivot irrigation systems stood motionless in the ploughed black fields. Farm buildings hunkered down in horseshoe windbreaks. I looked for geese, black wing-tips flickering in smoky white sky. The coach passed St Cloud, Sauk Centre, Alexandria and Fergus Falls, and it was close to six o’clock when we arrived at Fargo. The temperature had fallen dramatically. Thirty-five hours had passed since the Americruiser had pulled out of Austin in the storm. Eleanor’s shining birdcage stood empty 1,000 miles due south as the crow flies.

4 : SAND LAKE