Into Woods Page 13

  And on the gravel bar under the fallen hawthorne I find a small root system, not as big as my hand, bleached and polished, a sweet little sculpture, a keeper. But not a surprise—driftwood is the stream’s constant product. So, I keep looking in the water. It’s been raining a lot, and new shards will have turned up, and of course I’m not looking for any birthday surprises because looking for them isn’t going to help find them. Hum-de-hum, just looking for the usual potsherds. I find some nice ones, then ... a strange one. A curving odd piece of something or other, something certainly small enough for a luck basket that’s only about four inches wide and two deep. The thing is a plate as if tectonic, a decurved plate off a pool ball—though I don’t realize all this at first, figure it out over a minute or so, with growing excitement, as if yet another coincidence on yet another birthday were of even slight importance.

  It’s a cracked gutta-percha hunk of a pool ball, which I know not only because of the extrapolated size of the sphere, but because the chunk I happen to have includes the number—my tiny tectonic plate is from an eleven ball. Knowing the eel wouldn’t fit in my basket nor keep in any case, the stream has added this. Three years running, these surprises from the Temple Stream.

  But walking back with it and my eel and also the hand-size driftwood root system (which lovely thing is now on the picnic table) and many potsherds I’m wondering and wondering about the significance of the number eleven, if any. At eleven, what was I up to on my birthday? Worrying about going into sixth grade, certainly. West School in New Canaan, Connecticut. Probably back a few weeks from Boy Scout camp. A lot of roaming in the woods those summer days, a certain amount of fishing. The year would have been ’64, which if you reverse the numbers says forty-six, meaninglessly. But, Hey, Pop, was that one of the years you took me to a Yankees game? Or one you took me to Freedomland (an amusement park then, but later and now the site of the famous housing project called Co-op City)? My birthday cake at eleven would have been angel food cake with no icing, my favorite. Or with half no icing and half chocolate if Dougie and I were sharing that year he turned five.

  Well, you can try too hard to find meaning in these things, seven come eleven.

  I put down the goods in a pile including the eel in order to train binoculars on a midsize hawk flying and circling and trying to gain altitude and looking down inspecting the field for potsherds, no doubt. He’s got a good fantail, long, not too close to his body. Primaries are translucent against the sky—lovely. Hawks in Flight says it’s a Red Shouldered. I’m never too confident trying to identify hawks. But Red Shouldered seems to fit, given the size of the bird and his tail shape and wing “windows.” He gives me a long, long look, spiraling up and westward and out of sight over the trees, reminding me that I saw a kestrel the other day at the top of the dying popple—a real individual, missing a tail feather, like a kid with a gap tooth. I pick up my mysterious eel and again it twitches.

  I stop at the dying popple (poplar, or eastern aspen) to look under it for the kestrel feather. Not there. The kestrel could have lost that feather anywhere and when, but since it’s my birthday and I’ve already got an eel and pool-ball shard, I think to look for it. Underneath the popple all the grass and jewelweed are freshly crushed and matted. Deer bed? Then there’s my favorite sound, hummingbird, and I quickly find him in the jewelweed under the dying popple. I have seen hummers right here regularly this summer, but never when holding an eel.

  And this reminds me that I rescued a hummingbird from the barn yesterday. She (was female) was buzzing up against the old storm-door window I’d put where the outhouse entrance used to be, just trying to solve the problem of an invisible barrier, unpanicked. My presence did panic her, though, and she got frantic, up and down, up and down on the big window. I tried a gentle hand grab, but she didn’t like that, so I took a flowerpot and covered her and some of the spiderwebs too, and her head got caught up in the spiderwebs and she must surely have felt she was being eaten. Next, I tried to pull the pot back off the window, but her head was bent back by a strong strand of spiderweb. She made the most piteous sound—a faint bleating like a dog crying ever so softly. So, Jesus, I just acted decisively and pinched the web free and got her in the pot with my hand and rushed her outside and put the pot down and found her in there quite tangled in webs, but one wing free, neck bent back. Felt horrible if I hurt her! I pulled the webs off her, handling her gently, first off her face and beak so her neck could relax (it did) and then off her other wing, holding her as gently as I could, and she flew straight to the plum tree, no problem, and stopped there to finish the cleanup. I know hummingbirds use spiderwebs in their nests, so she must have known something about their sticky nature, and I can’t be blamed for spiderwebs, though maybe for the mess of the barn.

  Here it’s time for a leak, so I drop my prizes, eel, ball shard, driftwood root, pull out with somewhat eel-sticky hand my own version of what John Updike has Rabbit Angstrom (in Rabbit Is Rich) call his “pink wreckage,” my own poor eel, not wreckage yet, precisely, though it’s got some miles on it. Forty-six years, it has, come to think of it, neatly cut, veteran of college in the seventies, and more STD’s major and minor than it likes to talk about: gentle dumb beast, never a weapon, instrument of fatherhood to come, beloved corner of myself, same status in my personal body hierarchy as a knee, really, or a foot, or my nose (despite what some women seem to think), not so noble as its friends the hands, not so busy as the mouth. And I mark my place there in the field, sign for coyotes to sniff and raccoons to avoid (gardeners say), my own meaningless addition of moisture and acids and nitrogen to this spot where the millions also micturate.

  And I head back up the hill to the house in Dennis’s field, holding the eel in one hand, the eleven-ball shard, small root system in the other, no kestrel feather, chin up, marching proudly. Straight to Juliet’s studio to show her my prizes. She’s painting, but the eel is interesting enough, in my estimation, for me to interrupt her peace for show-and-tell. She’s surprised and a little grossed out. I ask for her Polaroid camera and she shakes her head but it’s my birthday so she can’t make too much fun of me, and out on the deck I take a picture of my eel next to a tape measure pulled out. The fish is twenty-seven inches long. Upstairs I find my species books for fish—then remember the eleven-ball shard. Where is it? It’s down on the picnic table. I rush downstairs and outside and retrieve the shard but stop helplessly in the kitchen and eat a couple handfuls of cereal, and only then back upstairs, where I look immediately in MacClane’s fish book, and then Peterson’s—these are both saltwater guides—and find “Freshwater Eels.” “A single catadromous species Anguilla rostrata, or American Eel, is caught by sports fishermen in salt and brackish water,” MacClane says.

  Catadromous means lives in the sea, spawns in freshwater. Peterson says:

  AMERICAN EEL—anguilla rostrata.

  Identification: greenish brown, sometimes yellowish below. Dorsal fin begins far back, above a point between pectoral fin and anus. Lower jaw longer than upper; both jaws have well-defined lip folds. Rear nostril round, located in front of eye. Vertical (dorsal, anal, and caudal) fins continuous. Size: Females to 1.5 m (5 ft.) but rarely more than 90 cm (3 ft.); males decidedly smaller. Range: Fresh and coastal waters throughout eastern N. America, to northern S. America, including the Bahamas and other large islands. Remarks: Adults enter sea during winter and early spring. Habits at sea unknown.

  Yes, yes, some habits are best left unknown. But you asked, Pop, you asked what I did on my birthday!

  By now it was well past time to get writing (happy birthday to me, yeah!). So back upstairs and to work for a couple of hours. And there I am writing more or less contentedly on the subject of kingfishers, and then suddenly I’m like: Where’s that eleven-ball shard? I rush downstairs and find the fragile-seeming thing in the kitchen, but it’s safe and sound, maybe tougher than it looks (it had lived in someone’s dump and then the Temple Stream fifty or sixty or a hundred years, after all).
And then I get the idea to make a cucumber salad for my birthday party. So to the garden, seven beautiful cukes, and quick since it’s writing time peel them and slice them into our biggest (huge) bowl, and slice in three fat onions, and run back down to the garden in the hot sun for parsley, and back in the kitchen rinse that and chop it up quick-quick and into the bowl, and mix water and vinegar one to one, a pint each, and a cup of sugar and pour that over the cukes, make room in the fridge, and bang, I’m done.

  Back upstairs and sit down to write, and I’m like: Where’s that eleven-ball shard?! And back down and find it on the woodstove, and get it upstairs with force of will, focussing on it, and into the little basket on my desk.

  I write a few sentences more on kingfishers, the way they flee upstream or downstream ahead of a canoe coming at them, startled each time they see you again when you catch up, three or four sentences, not quite getting it right. But I work those sentences, and work them a little more. Then go to visit with Juliet downstairs in her studio, where she’s leaning over a large canvas (four feet by six feet) laid out on the floor, splashing heavily thinned oil paint on it, very bright pink. She’s not bugged by my intrusion, but only because it’s my birthday. “Do you think it’s fumy in here?” she says. (We smile at the word fumy every time because that was my college girlfriend Susan’s nickname for fartsome me.) Juliet’s new box fan, which is the fifth one we’ve bought in recent years—where do they go?—is on a chair in front of one of the narrow Anderson windows some old owner of our house installed in this room. The better choice for a fan window is painted closed, one of the original sash windows (more than a hundred years old, glass bubbled and veined), and now I’ve got a project far from kingfishers and laptops. I search the shed and then the woodshop till I find my pry bar, and using it and knife and hammer and screwdriver and gentle persuasion I open that window while Juliet paints. The fan just fits—perfect.

  Then back to work writing.

  When I come up for air, Juliet has lunch ready. She’s wrapped seven presents and these are on the table, and after the sandwiches (goat cheddar from Nezinscot with fresh cuke, fresh tomato, tough lettuce, all from the garden, lots of mustard, thick slice of Nezinscot bread, a carrot, and a little of the aforementioned cucumber salad—in summer we don’t eat much meat). I open all of them—laughing with pleasure—some are gags, but there is a very nice shirt in there and a Leatherman tool inspired by the one a certain father of mine wears at his belt always: an ingenious folding knife, screw-drivers, file, scissors, bottle opener, and full-size pliers. Good stuff, which goes on my belt immediately in its leather case. Seventeen years Juliet and I have been an item, and she gets the presents right.

  After lunch, I settle in for a nap in the hammock, which is hooked at one end to a big white pine, at the other to a bigger balsam fir—you lie there in the tent all those branches make and look out at the hills and sniff the breezes and the balsam. Desi and Wally lie underneath. This is peaceful, plenty warm, a lovely day. I read in a British book assigned me for review by Laurie Muchnick at Newsday down there in New York City. Laurie I like. The book, I’m not so sure.

  Snore.

  I wake up and read a little more (some unpleasant British woman’s adventures in Australia), then stare a little out at the hills, then up and at ’em. Quick circuit through the woods with the boys, then upstairs for some e-mail, which is a mistake, lots of university vibes in there, lots of Ohio vibes, too many for a birthday in Maine. But birthday greetings from various friends, including Susan, the very college girlfriend who called me Fumy, now mother of two and a successful music professor. I bet her husband farts plenty.

  So to town—Farmington, Maine, a very sweet place—to find the post office closed (it’s after five already!), and the bookstore closed—and all the stores closed, actually, no savvy there about competing with national chains and strip malls. This nine-to-five stuff has got to go. I’ll have to buy myself my birthday book tomorrow. Nina is open—gourmet shop. I say it’s my birthday (Nah na na na nah-nah!) and she gives me a break on three bottles of wine for my party tonight. And I get a little mousse truffée, and some exotic crackers, and a good loaf of bread, and some chèvre, and a bag of candied ginger, and some other goodies. But I’ve forgotten any money, or my checkbook, so Nina puts it on a tab for me, knowing that a tab will get me back in the store, and that I’m a sucker for everything she’s got in there.

  As I’m leaving, her friend our housesitter slips in. I haven’t seen him—not once—since June when we got back here. He says he’s looking for a new place. Well, we’ll see what happens with him this fall. I ask about the money he still owes on bills. He tells a long story about nailing his hand to a board with the pneumatic nail gun at work. And then hints at wanting to store his stuff at our house even if he doesn’t come back. Not to worry. I smile and nod and stay noncommittal, and I’m pleased at my quiet reaction to him. Last couple of summers I’ve been less quiet with him. But he’s all we’ve got! Nina tells him it’s my birthday, and he gives me a hell of a warm handshake, and you know, I have to like him, too.

  Quick stop for ice cream at Gifford’s. These trips to town are important—I don’t make them enough. In fact, haven’t left the house for, like, six days! All that forest to roam in! Tomorrow maybe I’ll hit the Friday farmer’s market again, say hi to the handsome Nezinscot Farm woman (Juliet and I both have crushes on her—she’s all earth and sun and muscles), and to Carla from Hoof ‘n’ Paw Farm, who is a psychotherapist and grows great vegetables.

  And home, trusty red pickup, my 1984 F-150, just smooth thoughts in my head, not too fast (truck or thoughts), no cars behind me, through the big curves and onto our road, following the Temple Stream. It’s getting near six and I’ve got to cook. Home I crack a birthday Guinness and drink a little of it and start pulling things out of the fridge. We’ll have vegetables skewered on the grill, whatever fish Juliet brings home from Shop ‘n’ Save, little red potatoes from Hoof ‘n’ Paw. Cucumber salad is already made, thanks to my divagations during writing time, has already been sampled at lunch, found toothsome.

  And we’ve got wine. And beer. And that bottle of champagne my younger brother, Douglas, gave us when he visited, if anyone wants champagne. I contemplate the guest list, which is all last-minute, and all women by happenstance (pal Wes is away, for example), something a little different this year, especially different from my fortieth, that fiery ascent from youth, when I had ten guys over—all guys—and we sat around a campfire out by the plum trees and drank whiskey and laughed a lot and I puked the next morning! One last crapulous puke for old time’s sake! Trying to prove I wasn’t old, is my guess. In fact, I was perversely happy to puke, proof as it was that I was still a fool and not some kind of older-and-wiser relic.

  I listen quick to the answering machine: birthday messages from sister Janet, in-laws Frank and Ursula, oldest friend Kurt, champagne Dougie. Then outdoors to light the fire in our Wal-Mart grill, much rust and mayhem there, but it works well enough. Whole bag of charcoal. And rush back in to start cutting vegetables. Put on the radio: “All Things Considered.” Sip of stout now and again. Pleasant radio voices. Dulcet breezes. Rose-breasted grosbeak out at the feeder. Now this is nice. The Way Life Should Be, as the sign says when you drive into Maine from away, and true.

  Gorgeous Juliet comes bustling home from groceries, still covered in paint. Has she bought a cake? That is a secret! She’s got good things for our party. More beer, for example. And she’s got swordfish. Endangered species! Oh, my god. But, I don’t say a peep—it’s a beautiful fresh cut, and I love swordfish, haven’t had any for years and years—but. But quiet, and add ocean fisheries to university and housesitter for things that came up on my birthday to worry silently about. Off Juliet goes with the dogs on a circuit through the woods.

  This is the practical part of the day. I put the fish in a pan of white wine to marinate on some sort of vague theory I’ve got about swordfish getting dry on the grill (since affirmed
by chef friend), then finish cutting up peppers, tomatoes, mushrooms, onions, zukes. Spear ’em on skewers. Brush with olive oil. Check the fire. Juliet’s invited Jan and Barb, both a little older than I. And Jan’s invited her daughter, who’s just out of college and visiting. And Liza has invited a girlfriend.

  I cook. I sip stout. (I am stout.) Juliet is back, all smiles. She gets in the shower.

  Happy, happy birthday, baby!

  I, I am forty-six.

  First old Saab is Babsy, and the dogs go nuts barking. I let them out back as she comes in the front: old trick. She’s looking great, fit and trim, tough old girl, face bright and wry, all of her sunburned from working in the garden and outside around the house she built entirely on her own. Her gruff man left her a couple years back, but she’s over that, now, way over it, at that stage where being alone gets to be fine, all confidence and possibility. She’s a painter. Every time I see her I think of one of her poignant and sometimes wacky self-portraits (a great one is herself in bed with a broken heart, phone at her side). Every face she makes is in one of them. Several portraits hang around our house. Several appear in my head now as she greets me and hugs me hello.

  Then Jan’s there—this is Maine, no “fashionably late” here—newer Saab. The dogs greet that carload. Jan just split up with her husband (also a friend—I try not to play favorites!) last year, come to think of it, and she’s just past the rebound relationships and into the taking-stock phase, no fun, but she’s doing pretty well. She’s an artist, too, works with computers mostly now, incredible giant printouts of image and text. Her daughter, Liza, looks like her, and looks like Jim, too. Pretty, petulant face, thick dark Italian hair, slim hips, walks with a sashay, falling-off army pants, bellybutton showing. Her friend Cory is shorter, sturdier—very lovely, too, her eyes just coruscating with humor and intelligence and energy. And they are both unconsciously flirtatious in that way twenty-two-year-olds can be with old farts like me—feeling completely safe, they pump out all their charm, and completely safe, they keep it coming. Barb has a daughter their age, so she’s quite comfortable with their youth. Jan, she’s comfortable too. Juliet, too, and the kids love Juliet. We’re all laughing away, very different kinds of people, very different knobs and quirks, fitted together snugly like jigsaw puzzle pieces for the evening. I’ve got the fire ready, the food prepped, and all is well on my birthday.