Into Woods Page 5

  On our land, the rusting hulks of two ’30s Ford coupes still hunker in the brush by the stonewall under apple trees, hunker there along with a considerably newer VW bug body. A third old car was towed out of there by a gentleman who said he “Couldn’t help but notice.” Couldn’t help but notice an old hulk rusting under mounds of vines out of sight of the road? And then there was the wringer-washer, a Kenmore, an artifact too, but too bright white and too glaringly visible under the vines. This I apologetically escorted to the Farmington dump, which has, by the way, the best view from any dump in New England, and is now a transfer station only.

  Dear old Mrs. Thompson across the street has since passed away, but when we moved in, that spry old surveillance expert still lived across the street from us in the aforementioned double-wide. Juliet and I threw a neighborhood party our first spring (no one would have come before we gained resident-alien status by lasting through the winter), and Mrs. T drove her Subaru wagon 150 yards to come see us. She stayed barely long enough to say our cheese tasted funny and to tell us she had lived in our house just after her wedding. Oh! we said, thrilled, and the other guests gathered around, ready for a charming tale.

  “I always hated this place,” she croaked. “Awful, awful place! Drafty! Drafty! Water in the basement, rats in the roof, those brittle locust trees always crashing down, dandelions, pink clover—you still have pink clover in the lawn.”

  Up the hill and spread through the Temple Stream valley are several Thompsons descended from Frank A. Thompson and his brothers, Thompsons everywhere, in various-size houses and various apparent levels of wealth. One meets them in the neighborhood, good people all.

  But Moonrobin. Tom Moonrobin was gone from the neighborhood, and his name with him. I knew that odd name before we even moved into the house from folks around who, when I told them exactly which house I’d bought, would shake their heads fondly and say “The old Moonrobin place.” (That if they didn’t shake their heads dismissively and say “The old Thompson place.") And always the person would add a warning: “I hear that place is sinking,” or “That place has a cracked foundation,” or “That porch Moonrobin built will have to come down,” or “You bought yourself a project, yes-you-did, yuh.”

  Oh, a project indeed. My buyer’s remorse was mighty in the days after we moved in. But our yard fell away to the south and was bathed in sun and the trees were beautiful—October light—and we owned them. Our first land, our first house. It didn’t take a week for the flaws to recede and for pure puppy love to commence. I stood out in the untravelled road at night and just gazed at our house: Is a very, very, very nice house. I dreamed up all the remodeling projects and yard projects that are finished now—by my hand, by Juliet’s, with my father’s help and that of friends and well-paid helpers: windows repaired, everything repainted, new bathroom, new kitchen, new plumbing, new electric, new basement stairs. Stop me or I’ll go on. Stop me or I’ll list the next ten years’ worth.

  But what I loved most at first were the ramshackle outbuildings, three of them pressed right against the west property line, forming something of a barrier between Dennis’s overgrown barnyard and our undergrown lawn (yes, full of pink clover, dandelions, too, and a dozen other plants that take to mowing, some resembling grass). Lowest on the south-running hill was a little hut that we thought might eventually be a guest house or writing studio. We kept stuff in there that we couldn’t quite yet part with—old chairs, broken fishing rods, dented filing cabinet, six bags of hardened mortar mix, one rotting suitcase. Before us the little building was the Johnson girls’ playhouse. In fact, it was the darling sight of those girls in there playing cards around a child-size table that sold me on the Moonrobin place. It was as if I were peering into the future, seeing those children there.

  After we moved in, we found notes written in the very smallest corners of the eaves on the wallpaper in our bedroom. We cut them out when we remodeled—still have them, little squares of ancient wallpaper, elegant girlish handwriting:

  Missy Johnson.

  September 30, 1992

  Lived it and loved it.

  Tina Johnson.

  September 30, 1992.

  Lived it and loved it too.

  In this hut were twenty sugaring pails and a muscular old Glenwood woodstove too big to hug, tall as a sixth grader, squat as a fireplug but purpose opposite.

  Slightly uphill from the playhouse and toward the road was a tenuous, sprawling shack held up by cedar trunks and framed in scrap wood. Add some corrugated sheet metal and old window sashes, tie the whole thing together with cables and turnbuckles and more nails than you’d believe (try getting a board off the wall!). A great place to stand in the rain, big open doorway, raindrops drumming on tin. My dad named this one the Shack, and it’s attached to the old garage he and I restored into a shop. He named the lowest building the Sugar House, naming so we could communicate. Where’s the hammer? Shed? Shop? Shack? Sugar House?

  That garage was the first project. We’d need a good shop, a place to cut wood, to repair window sashes, to make dust, to make a mess, to splash paint, to keep the house itself as livable as possible as much as possible. Trouble was, when you put your hand on the leeward wall the whole garage swayed a foot to the northwest. You’d walk to the other side and push and it would sway a foot back to the southeast, stopping only when the cable (heavy linesman’s cable that someone with a taste for the halfway had strung from the northwest eave to a leaning box-elder tree) went taut—sproing—went taut and caught the building from falling. Inside was junk. I’d begged the Johnsons not to worry about all that—to leave it. Mr. Thomas C. Moonrobin had left it for the California Couple after all, and the California Couple had left it for the Johnsons. But I, unlike those other Moonrobin successors, have uses for junk. I love junk. And if anything had impressed me more than the sweet little girls playing cards in the Sugar House—loving and living it—it was the sight of all that tumbled junk, that rusting stuff, that collection of manufactured castoffs so crowded that you could hardly pick out individual items, so dense that you could not enter the garage.

  First day in, October 1, 1992, I marched around the yard a dozen times, halting for the view of our four hills and Mount Blue not far distant. I inspected each tree, walked the stone walls, found grapes, found raspberry bushes, found apples. Birds, birds everywhere. I admired the garden plot, the single pumpkin left behind. I inspected the car bodies, the dump-bound old washing machine. Behind the stone wall I found the base of an old boiler, found a witch’s cauldron, dragged them up to the lawn, stacked them, made a sculpture. My heart filled, my remorse fled, the sun beat down. I looked in the playhouse, looked in the barn—junk everywhere—checked out the storage shack. I fought my way into the garage, started picking through the debris Moonrobin had left. No one had disturbed any of it.

  First clue: a set of vintage dog tags, complete with chain. Moonrobin, Thomas Q. His serial number. His rank: PFC 4. I began to sort, heaving anything rotted or rusted or broken or otherwise useless straight out the big sliding garage door into the back of my truck: leather horse traces, blacksmith’s apron, worm-growing medium, World War II vintage jeep windshield, rusted steel bucket filled with rusted HO-scale traintracks, portional roof antennae, seventy small plastic jars with red tops in a single grocery bag, rolls of kraft paper, wet.

  After a long afternoon of work I got to the workbench, an astonishingly oily setup made of old two-by-twelves, ten feet long, much chopped and gashed and beaten and gouged—hand of the worker made visible—hand of the child, too: a hundred headless nails protruded and many screws and three broken-off drill bits. The workbench was piled high with more and more and more detritus. In coffee cans were gaskets from various engine types. To the dump. Hanging from hooks were more gaskets from even more engine types. To the dump. Cans of screws. Keep. Boxes of recycled nails. To the dump. Jars of bolts. Keep. Envelopes of instructions for long-gone appliances and tools. To the dump.

  There were toolbox
es, some of them just fine. In one was the missing sprayer from our kitchen faucet set, never installed (but it would be). In another, more gaskets, lots more gaskets, gaskets for every possible fitting on every year of VW bug back through time to the Stone Age. To the dump. But in a heavy old box I found a glorious assortment of rat-tail files, twenty files with no handles, all sharp, all as oily as a Texas well and thus preserved.

  And calendars, keep. Calendars turned forever to specific months—the march of time: May 1955, the month my sister Carol was born; December 1960, the Christmas I got my red bike. On the back door into the shack: August 1969. Woodstock! My sixteenth birthday! Good omens. Keep, keep. There were license plates to predate the calendars, the oldest a Maine trailer license dated 1954. High on the wall, a burn-craft plaque, boxy letters:

  Tom Moonrobin 1957

  But the timbers and siding were all much older than that—this Moonrobin had built the place with used wood, perhaps from a garage that had predated this one.

  And tacked to the wall over the workbench was a little cutout from the Lewiston newspaper which I have since lost, but will boldly paraphrase from memory:

  Driver of VW spared in Train Collision

  Kelly Moonrobin, 17, of Farmington, was spared when his Volkswagen sedan was hit by the Clark Mill train and crushed at the Anson Road crossing.

  “She darn it stalled at the worst place you could think,” said Mr. Moonrobin. The southbound lumber freight, according to police, hooked the VW’s bumper and dragged the vehicle two hundred yards before a signal pole forced its fender under the locomotive, which was traveling all the while at approximately fifty miles per hour.

  “It was a bad ride,” said Moonrobin, who was miraculously unhurt, having been thrown clear of the wreckage.

  “God has pity on drunks and fools,” said Engineer Ernest Melton, of Peacham, Vermont, who was unable to halt his train more quickly. Mr. Moonrobin was cited for driving while under the influence of alcohol and was released into his father’s care.

  In the next toolbox was an empty fifth of Blunt’s Gin, not the last I would find, not the last by many dozens. Father or son? To the dump. In the next, six oily box wrenches—useful. In the next—a big, dented workbox, very heavy, locked—something grand, I hoped: an hour looking for my hacksaw in all our packed U-Haul cartons still in the living room, five minutes sawing, and I’d found Moonrobin’s archives: Every bill he’d paid in forty years, it seemed, mostly insurance on a succession of VW bugs, but insurance too on a Jeep, and later on a station wagon. Pension papers from the Army. Phone bills for four dollars, complete.

  Somewhere in the middle of the pile I happened on the photo of a smiling young woman: really very pretty, hopeful and happy, ripe and plump. On the back in a looping hand:

  Tom my secret, Tom my love.

  Later I’d find a bottle of Hai Karate cologne, still some left, still fragrant, purposefully hidden in the eaves above the workbench. Father or son?

  I kept digging. What had kept the floor from rotting out under the buckets of rain that got through the mossy roof was oil, lots of it—motor oil—leaked from the pans of a succession of VW bugs over the years, splashed during years of do-it-yourself repairs. Useless spare parts dominated my finds: three VW hubcaps spray-painted gold (those old moonies with the logo in the center), VW mudflaps, two rearview mirrors, a heater hose, a glove-compartment door, thermostats, carburetors, axle parts, u-joints, taillights, headlights, parking lights, horns. I could have built a bug.

  Some of the stuff had nothing to do with cars: lots of woodstove parts, a cigar box containing exactly six guitar picks and a pocket knife, the temperature gauge from a sugaring boiler, a homemade ice-chopping tool, two street signs (JCT ROUTE 56, snaky curve icon), a fishing reel and part of a rod, a handkerchief, one pair of coveralls, two broken Christmas-tree stands, a violin bow, two boxes of books, a virtual encyclopedia of home repair. Also, much evidence of children: on the barn-style door (which depends from wheels that roll on a well-greased track) four names at four heights, spray painted in the handwriting of four different school ages: Kelly, Tim, Mark, Leslie. Humble Tom didn’t go for juniors.

  My neighbor Dennis Lucky stopped over to stare awhile, said he remembered when this garage held a rock band made of Moonrobin sons and the Thompson kid from up the hill. “Loud as hell,” he said. “And bad.” And he remembered when Mrs. Moonrobin died. He said he thought maybe, well you could never know, but just maybe, that’s why Tom had moved. And yes, the Volkswagens, the many many Volkswagens, and the noise Kelly made working on them, the famous train accident.

  I cleaned and organized and cleaned some more, made four trips to the dump, then rebuilt that garage with my dad’s help—replaced the roof, shored up the walls, cut the cable that had held the poor building up these many years. And in some kind of gesture to the past I closed Tom Moonrobin’s dog tags into the wall, just nailed them to a stud and covered them with insulation and drywall. And so they remain, hidden and benignly powerful, ticking in there like some telltale heart.

  A couple of years passed. Everywhere, Moonrobin clues: a Club magazine from 1978, graphic snatch shots on cheap paper, unfaded, hidden in the knee wall of the attic room. Son, I’m guessing. Mason jars with collected bugs sealed inside and a Barbie slipper. Daughter. And, hell if I haven’t found every possible sort of faulty amateur repair: one electric circuit with a heavy screw jammed where the fuse should have been accounted for all the electric outlets and lights in the house. The kitchen sink drained into the side yard rather than into the septic tank. A leaking valve buried in the driveway connected to a defunct water system. Thomas Q. Moonrobin. All fixed now.

  And, you know, you dig a hole in the yard and find part of a fishing rod. You use a file and realize as you rasp away that it’s Moonrobin’s file. You finally get around to installing a sump pump in the little basement, and find everything you need—including the pump and fifty yards of black coiled p.v.c. pipe and clamps and electric bits—in pieces all around the house and grounds, all stuff too good to throw away, all collected decades back for a purpose. Moonrobin had meant to get around to the sump pump, too.

  One fine weekday my third fall here, I was working in the yard, propping up the little oak trees that the Johnson girls had planted (these are thirty feet tall now—amazing growth), and up pulls a car. Oh, brother. Jehovah’s Witnesses? The building inspector? Some former student? Another Republican hopeful in the wrong place? And a large man gets out. A very gentle, large man, you can see the gentleness from the first second in the way he carries himself, like a mail sack full of dainty, fragile figurines. He’s apologetic in his every wiggle, hurries to me in my yard. He says, “Pete? Pete Johnson?”

  “No,” I say, carefully reserved, “But he lived here once.”

  “You bought from him!”

  This, of course, is nobody’s business. I just gaze at this man, liking him despite the interruption, and of course not realizing who he is.

  “Tom Moonrobin!” he says. “I used to live here!” He can’t contain himself. He’s beaming, he’s growing misty, he loves me for living here. He’s maybe seventy, big but not terribly fat, ironed shirt, polyester pants, clean socks and Birkenstock sandals, hairy arms, bald head, hairy neck, hairy chest, all hair white, skin of his face robustly pink and healthy, soulful eyes, brown.

  “Hi!” I say. I’m catching his emotion, his exclamation points.

  “Oh Lord!” he says.

  Now the woman gets out of the car. She’s younger than he, built large, lots of dark hair, pretty. Suddenly, Tom Q. Moonrobin is in tears. The woman comforts him and pats his back and nods her head. She’s warm and sweet and big as he is. “I’m Tom’s wife,” she says.

  “She’s a minister,” Tom blubbers.

  “I’m pastor of the Stonecoast Methodist,” she says without undue pride.

  “Oh Lord!” Tom says again.

  His wife pats him. “He hasn’t been back,” she tells me. “This is his first ti
me back.”

  “We better go,” Tom blubbers. “We’re bothering you.”

  “Oh, no, no, no.” I say. “Look around.”

  “You’ve fixed it up,” Tom says, still blubbering.

  “Not only I,” I tell him, wanting to be like his wife—no undue pride.

  He asks my name. I give it. He tells me he’s heard of Pete Johnson, knew the California Couple to whom he’d sold in such a hurry had sold out quickly thence, but this! A new owner! He composes himself, smiles broadly, embarrassed. “You love this place!” he says.

  “I do,” I say, and it’s true: I love it with all my heart.

  “Oh, Lord! My wife passed away here!” he says abruptly, and breaks down into sobs once more.

  “This is very important to him,” his new wife says, somewhat chagrined. She pats him. “You’re very kind,” she says.

  “I’m just here,” I say.

  “We’ll go,” she says.

  “No, let’s look around,” I say.

  “Oh, Lord!” Tom wails, a plaint for all humankind, for all history. But he’s stopped crying.

  “I’ll wait in the car,” his wife says, the minister. “This is for you, darling.”

  So Tom and I walk the grounds. It’s terrific; he knows all the answers. He slowly contains his emotion: “Those trees? I planted them! They were only just this high!” Now the row of balsam firs looms forty feet in the air, too close together, grown solid into the windbreak he’d pictured. “That was the sugar house,” he says pointing at the Johnson girls’ playhouse. “I built it of wood from the stable, which we tore down—’twas right here!”

  A stable explained all the horseshoes.

  “Our pig was here!” Thomas C. Moonrobin says. He’s grown plump. He reminds me of my dad. He’s sweet like my dad where I’d pictured from the evidence a tough guy. He’s so happy to be here. He’s exorcising his horrible grief. He’s newly wed, he tells me. She’s a minister, he tells me again. “I’ve never got over it!” he says. “How I loved this place!” He says, “I never ever thought I’d leave it ever!” He points to the larch tree, a tamarack, in the side yard, and says, using the local name, “That’s my rackmatack! Kelly and me, we ...,” and he’s a fountain of tears. “Oh, I’m sorry,” he moans.