Temple Stream Page 18

  He flipped one of the beavers again, pulled at one of the webbed rear feet, showed me the claws. He said, “See this! Little logger has a set of combs here.” The claws of two toes were split, in a way, a nail opposed to a thick pad of skin. ’They groom up with these.” He drew his finger to an opening in the lower belly. “And this is the anus,” ay-noose. “I don’t know the English for it.”

  “Anus,” I said. “But I think in the beaver it’s called a cloaca.”

  “So you say.” He put thick fingers to the lower part of the furry belly, opened a pouch of loose skin, turned the insides out in one skilled motion. Two large sacs protruded, two smaller. I remembered the fur shed, the smell of the oil. I began to recall some of this anatomy.

  Earl said, “Tell me the sex of this one.”

  I thought I was seeing testicles. “Male.”

  “No, see, that’s a female. These organs you see aren’t the nuts but the wax castors.” He gave a small squeeze, and a yellowish cream emerged. “Beaver wax. That’s what makes ’em waterproof, stroked all over their fur.”1

  He flipped the other animal, turned its cloaca inside out. He said, “How about this one?”

  It was exactly the same as the other.

  “Female.”

  “No, Professor, that is the male.” He pulled at something I’d missed, pointed: “Penis bone,” he said.

  He finished the tour with the anal glands. I wasn’t sickened, just fascinated. But I found myself getting angrier with him, and angry that there was nothing safe to say, no room for criticism.

  And because I was quiet, Earl grew prouder. “In the old days, you would leg-hold them. But it’s so horrible, that. You come to shoot them, you know, and they cry. They cry real tears, right down their cheeks. Then they cover their faces—you see the little hands, yes? They cover their faces with their little hands when the billy falls. I hate to find a live beaver—much rather to drown ’em.”

  “How did you kill these?”

  Short pause. “I thought it was you who killed ’em,” he said.

  “How do those traps work?”

  He held them in his hand, loops of wire. ’They are your traps, Professor!” His tone was mocking, but suddenly threatening, too. And suddenly, belatedly, I understood. He thought I was going to rat him out. My anger softened. He was the tiniest bit afraid of me, for the first time. But of course I couldn’t rat him out. He’d know exactly who’d done it, in the event anyone took me seriously, and I’d pay for my crime indefinitely, long after his fines were paid. We looked the animals over at length, like looking at a chessboard deep into the game. I had the impression that he wanted to head to his truck, that we were both lingering for diplomatic reasons only. The old bind: I didn’t want to be the person Earl expected me to be, the queasy yuppie animal lover, the shrill suburban rule-lover, but I didn’t want to be complicit in this assassination of these gentle builders either.

  My move. I adopted his tone, slightly mocking, said, “Can a person sell these, this time of year?”

  Another long silence as we studied the animals. He said, “Well, whoever got ’em must not have been thinking about selling ’em, sir. Whoever got ’em must have been thinking of something to eat, and a pair of house shoes for wintah, and a little ball of beaver wax for baiting later on.”

  I said, “So really, there’s no crime here to speak of. More like just subsistence foraging of the indigenous people.”

  Earl softened too: “Maybe just a little civil disobedience, Professor.”

  I didn’t smile. Earl didn’t smile. We looked at the animals.

  At length, I said, ’You would really eat these?”

  Earl lit up. “Oh, but Professor, it’s delicious meat. As sweet! The Indians used to roast them in their skins on the open fire. The settlers craved beaver meat! And beaver, it was the base meat of real pemmican, yessuh! You’re looking at a week of good chow here. The tail, you slice it this a-ways,” across the paddle, chop-chop with his hand, “and it’s firm, and awful good. And it keeps like nothing.”

  “A meal is a meal, yuh, yuh,” I said, losing track of myself, starting to sound like him.

  He heard it as mocking, looked at me sharply, gripped the two beavers by their tails in one huge fist, rose slowly to his feet, the traps in his other hand, stepped at me, stood too close, leaned into my face, pushed the beavers against my chest, said, “So you’ll sell these to me?”

  I didn’t want to smile, but that’s what my mouth did. I didn’t get the game. Was he offering a bribe?

  Cryptically, he said, “Ain’t worth much, these little ones.”

  “They’re all yours,” I said, backing a step away from him.

  Earl grinned too, stepped back into me, leaned over me. He shook the traps. He pressed the beavers into my chest, a soggy thud. He was enormous. He said, ’Til drop by an appreciation.”

  I said, “No, Earl, I’m kidding.”

  He grinned bigger, like having a wolf smile at you, gave me a wet little push with the beavers, swung them by their tails, then turned abruptly and stomped off through the tall weeds the way he’d come.

  REVEREND PIERCE COULDN’T ANTICIPATE THE BACK-TO-LAND movement (such as it was, and is), couldn’t anticipate the new wave of people it would bring to Temple. And the grandsons and granddaughters of his parishioners didn’t all leave town. Many have found ways to prosper. A community still thrives. But Pierce wasn’t wrong, either: the Temple he eulogized really is dead.

  He called it: today’s Temple is a suburb of Farmington. Temple kids go to school in Farmington, K-12. The last school-house the Reverend would recognize is the one at the foot of Day Mountain Road, now the Temple Historical Society library, at the edge of a small hayfield that borders Temple Stream. Which is all but a brook at that point, pebbled and clear, flowing straight-line from the schoolhouse to the end of the intervale, bounded on one bank by dense hillside forest, on the other by a succession of homesteads, what had been the intervale settlement, the settler houses interspersed now with mobile homes and ranch houses at divergent levels of upkeep.

  Reverend Pierce’s Congregational Church along the way is still a handsome building, well kept and surrounded by tall pines, with the stream bubbling through the backyard. The place has been bought by children of the back-to-the-land generation, an impressive, progressive couple who happen to be nationally known puppeteers, and has evolved from their generosity into a sort of people’s theater. Sunday country-music jams replace Reverend Pierce, and kids learn to walk on stilts: so much for the death of culture. The bell remains in the steeple, and the pews are still in place, but there’s a stage in-side now, and over the handsome old doors there’s a nicely lettered sign:

  TEMPLE STREAM THEATRE

  Upstream from the old church, the Temple flows through crowded boulders over the remains of some of the smaller mills of history, little left to see. I’ve stopped to visit with several older people in houses along the way, people who remember the reverend. Not too fondly, I’m afraid. None of them used the word disaster about the fate of the town, which they have lived to see, though some seemed a little sad about the place, disinclined to talk.

  A fellow in his eighties, standing out in the very dooryard he’d played in as a boy, claimed he knew Reverend Pierce well, used my questions as the occasion to tall-tale me in the classic Yankee manner, said he’d been raised on a coyote farm till his father was eaten, said in those days a family kept the cow in the kitchen and drank from her teats, said it used to get so cold in his house that they’d had to melt their mother’s words over the fire “just to see if we was in trouble/’ He went on for an hour in that vein, had me laughing, but wouldn’t answer any question directly, offered exactly nothing of his real memory of the place. But, oh, yes, he remembered Pierce. He said the reverend would come by on Sunday nights to have his way with the sheep and take the Lord’s name in vain out in the barn. Later, I’m sure, he told his friends about me: nosy rube he’d fooled with his stories. />
  Other older folks I visited said they’d rather not, but then went ahead and talked, used the word suburb with a certain kind of distaste. Still, suburb is accurate enough, even though there’s nothing even faintly suburban about the town, or what we’ve come to see as suburban: neat lawns and paved drive-ways are not a high priority in Temple. It’s simply that most people in Temple arise in the morning and go to work else-where. Some work at home via the Internet. And a few small businesses operate sporadically from the garages and sheds along the stream. But there are no more active farms, none, just a cow here and there, a team of hobby oxen, a goat. The loggers the reverend disdained are still in the woods. Probably there are fewer renters than in his day, and the town meeting is still a lively affair. Temple people go to school elsewhere, and to the grocery store elsewhere, and to the doctor, and to church, and finally to the funeral home: elsewhere. But I’ll bet Reverend Pierce, whatever circle of Hell or precinct of Heaven he ended up in, would be especially happy to see all the children that marched in the bicentennial parade of 2003, some of them on stilts, and pleased to count all the proud adults: the population is growing again.

  Up at the end of the intervale, there’s still a diversion canal evident where Pierce tells us that Temple’s first sawmill stood. Across the road, up on a nice hill at the top of an angled driveway, is the old Oakes house, that tall federal the reverend mentions with admiration. It’s been lovingly restored. The old fields close around it are still in use, filled with ... Christmas trees, cut your own. John Hodgkins is the current owner. We buy a nicely trimmed balsam fir from him every year. He was born at home in Temple, 1935. His grand-uncle was the Hodgkins who purchased Thurston Mills, his cousin Bill runs the general store in town—third generation—so that hasn’t died.

  Meanwhile, the stream emerges same as ever from deep woods where the pavement stops.

  Footnote

  1. Beaver wax is also called castoreum. Castoreum is used in the scent marking of territory as well as for grooming. The source is indeed the castors, two leathery pouches, which are enlarged perineal scent glands, each the size of a small fist, located on either side of the genital openings in both males and females. The stuff is thick, unctuous, redolent. The Indian tribes and settlers alike used castoreum for waterproofing and as medicine for every possible ailment, including insanity (bad cases were actually brought to beaver ponds to absorb the peace—this of all treatments back then probably worked).

  Autumnal Equinox

  OUR GIRL WAS BORN AFTER LONG LABOR ON THE FIRST DAY OF fall, a girl of the equal night. We had meant to call her Daphne, but when we saw her both Juliet and I knew, independently, that Daphne was not her name. The maternity nurse warned us to name her quickly—even suggested a long, impatient list—but we couldn’t, didn’t know who the girl was. We left Franklin Memorial with Baby Girl Roorbach safely in her car seat, brought her home to the dogs and her own little room where my office had been.

  That was the fall of the Supreme Court election. I listened to the radio obsessively as AI Gore went down, held the baby in the darkening kitchen every afternoon while mother Juliet napped, took her out in the yard in her blanket when the alpenglow rose and Jupiter came visible in the eastern sky, followed closely by Saturn and night.

  One morning after no sleep, I put the dogs out in my as yet unused (but ready) studio, slunk back to the house, lay myself down on the couch in the living room to work, and promptly fell asleep, an open master’s thesis (some five hundred pages of good prose from a favorite student) dropping straight onto my face and staying there. Upstairs, Juliet and the baby girl slept too. Perhaps we’d sleep all morning and all the way till two in the afternoon, just as we had the day before.

  Not fifteen minutes later I leapt to my feet at the sound of heavy footsteps on the porch, and then the front door opening, that familiar creak of old hinges. My head swam. And someone huge was standing by the wood stove bellowing at me: “The new fah-tha!”

  “Earl, quiet!”

  “I’ve just a-come to see the baby!” Bay-bay, he said it. And at that he stepped toward me, ducking his head under the parlor beam, this behemoth in overalls, homemade shoes rocking the house with each heavy step. He smiled through his layers of beard grown back and proffered a pink-wrapped present in one of his battered hands. “Saw the Franklin Journal!”

  “Don’t you knock?”

  Fondly, and at volume: “Now, ain’t you ferocious!”

  Upstairs I heard the baby’s cry, that tiniest, most wrenching sound, pulled my face into the sternest shape I’m able, hissed, “Get out!”

  Earl fell back, shocked, wounded. His face fell too; he was genuinely hurt. He composed his face sober, ducked his way back to the kitchen, board-creaking steps in the otherwise silent house. “I’ll put this right here,” he said, still too loud, and put the pink package (cigars, as it turned out) delicately on our sideboard. “And I’ll be on my way, unwelcome!”

  “Earl, I’m sorry,” I said, still angry despite myself. The baby’s wail came again, spiraling louder. I tried to soften, said, “The baby. She’s not sleeping.”

  Earl peered over my shoulder back into the parlor and past that into the living room—empty chairs and couches, silent stereo, silent radio. Pityingly, earnestly, he said, “Where are your people?”

  I begged: “Earl, please, we’re not getting any sleep. Please call before you come. Okay? Thank you for coming. But please call. And please don’t barge in here. Knock on the door.”

  “Where are your people?” he said again, genuinely puzzled. Where are your parents, he meant, where are Juliet’s parents, where are your brothers and sisters, your aunts and uncles, your cousins, your grandparents, and of course your neighbors, and all your many friends and the hundred casseroles and the cheese platter and the bottles of sparkling cider and the rabbis and mullahs and ministers and priests: where are they?

  I TOOK TO DOING MY SCHOOLWORK OUTDOORS IN THE HAMMOCK, where I could intercept the UPS man, or the Jehovah’s Witness gang, or Earl. One afternoon, wrapped in my thick old sleeping bag and swaying in the breeze, I opened my eyes to a shout of hello only to spy a bustling young woman bearing down, tall, purple tank top, bra straps falling off strong shoulders, dark long hair, good jeans, good posture.

  Meghan Bitterauf, our neighbor, come to babysit. I felt a warm surge of affection, thought of her dad: I was a man with a daughter now too. Meghan had been eleven when we first met, her family generous with the new neighbors. They lived a couple of doors up the hill in the handsome old James Butterfield house. I’d heard she’d dropped out of college, the University of Montana.

  There I was, unshaven, sleepy, disheveled.

  Meghan, nonjudgmental, gave me a minute to disentangle myself from the hammock’s old sleeping bag, mark my place in the thesis at hand, get my feet on the ground. She said, 11You name the baby yet?”

  No, we had not.

  And in fact, the baby and Juliet were asleep, golden hour for all of us, no need for a babysitter quite yet, so I suggested a walk. Meghan shrugged, gave me a hand out of the hammock, and we marched down across the fields and to the stream, sat on a nice rock under oak trees over fast water. She had a clean new tattoo needled partway around her wrist, showed it to me first thing: “If it goes all the way around, you know, your soul can’t leave your body when you die, and you’re stuck.” And apropos of that, she said, “Did you hear about the boy who got hit?”

  I felt again the lurch in my stomach, saw that twitching form. I’d sent money to the fund I’d read about in the paper—empty response—felt guilty I hadn’t stopped in to visit his parents, not that I knew them, not that I could offer anything useful.

  I told Meghan what I’d seen, already two months past.

  She said, “They flew him down to Portland in the medevac helicopter. He’s still in a coma.”

  I didn’t understand how he had lived at all, so in a way, the coma was good news. We sat and watched the water. My thoughts went back
to the unnamed baby. Meghan’s thoughts had paddled on ahead upstream. She said, “Isn’t it good down here? Abby and Carrie and I would just tell people: ‘Party on Temple Stream!’ And we’d go up past where the pavement ends? In the afternoon? And we’d set up tents and by night-time sixty people would be there. We’d have a huge fire in the rocks, put music on someone’s car stereo, and shake. Your daughter will do the same thing!”

  We watched the stream some more. I said, “So, what happened to Montana?”

  Meghan tried not to grin: “I kinda flunked a couple of courses? But I had fun! I played folf. That’s Frisbee golf. I loved it there. But I couldn’t stay. Don’t worry—I’m enrolled at UMF. What happened to Ohio?”

  “I’m ‘Not Teaching, on Duty.’ N-TOD, it’s called. I’m reading theses and doing e-mail and stuff. We go back in January.”

  “What? Bizzle! You go back?”

  “We go back.”

  “You shouldn’t go back.”

  “Well, we have to go back.”

  “Just quit.”

  “Meghan, I’m a tenured professor.”

  “But I thought you loved Maine so much.”

  “I do.”

  “I don’t know, Bill. You’d better think about this.”

  Upstream Eight

  End of Pavement to the Poet’s House

  BEFORE JOHN HODGKINS BOUGHT AND RESTORED THE OAKES house at the end of the Temple intervale, the poet Theodore Enslin lived there fourteen years. Bob Kimber had spent winter evenings with Enslin in memorable conversation, and told me the house had been an icebox. But the Oakes place (also known as the Albert Mitchell place, for an earlier owner) had been a step out of the woods for Enslin, who’d been living in isolation a few miles upstream, alone in one of the last of the hill farms. Denise Levertov had lived up that way too, with her husband, the writer Mitch Goodman, whom I knew a little after their divorce and before his death of cancer.