Sherman Teeter, a bearded state senator from Burlington, raises his hand and says, "I don't think the people of this state want another three hundred to five hundred opportunities to
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clean toilets for minimum wage. I'm all for creating jobs, but not this low-end, dead-end, service industry slop."
Before I can respond to Teeter, Reedy jumps to his feet from his seat about six rows ahead of me and a dozen seats to my left.
"Scottie," he begins, "Even if these jobs had any value, do you really believe the expansion will result in three to five hundred of them? You keep saying the resort believes this. The resort believes that. What do you personally believe?"
I fold my arms across my chest and smile, stalling, preparing my answer. Before I have to swallow my soul and respond, however, Reedy is undone by his own followers. In the pause that occurs as I stand naked before the hearing, the Copper Project swells into life.
"Cop-per, Cop-per, Cop-per!" a small group begins to chant, as others quickly, almost instantaneously join in, "Copper, Cop-per, Cop-per!"
A ski instructor begins to respond, pounding his hand into his fist as he yells, "Pow-der, Pow-der, Pow-der!" The resort's groundskeepers, the seasonal men and women who run lift lines and fit ski boots, the family that runs the series of concession stands in the base lodge, join the instructor.
"Pow-der! Pow-der! Pow-der!"
The assembled groups stand, facing off against each, trying to drown each other out. Someone begins to shout, "Jobs! Jobs! Jobs!" and someone else shouts back something about "Rape!" but the rest of his chant is lost in the chaos of hurrahs, huzzahs, and howls.
Somewhere very far away Liza Eastwick is hitting the card table with a book, trying to regain a semblance of order, while beside her the two men yell something about quieting down or settling down, but none of them have a prayer of getting through.
And still standing in front of me and to my left is Reedy McClure, staring at me with a smile on his face that says more
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than all of the voices around us. You lucky bastard, his smile is saying. You lucky bastard.
First come the fire trucks, new ones polished to a red brighter than ripe tomatoes, and old ones that are smaller, perhaps a bit tired looking, but with a clunky, antique charm of their own. There are in this year's parade fire trucks from the nearby villages in the county, including Danville and Plainfield and Cabot, and a contingent of fire and rescue vehicles from the state capital: huge sausage-shaped silver pumpers, jeeps, vans, ambulances, and the sort of honest-to-God, almost urban fire engines with hoselines preconnected to the trucks themselves.
Landaff may be small, but it is well situated for a first-rate parade: It is right in the center of the county, and fairly close to Montpelier, the state capital.
From the high front seats of the fire trucks, volunteer firefighters throw handfuls of candy to the small children lining Landaff's Main (only, really) Street.
Peter DuBois was wrong at the Governor's press conference: It will not rain on our parade. It hasn't rained this morning, and it won't rain this afternoon. And the sun is as hot as ever. For better or worse, the Fourth of July is another hot sunny day in Vermont, in a summer in which day after day is bright and clear and dry.
''How many butterflies will there be?" I ask Laura, trying to see down the road past the marching band from the high school, and the fellow leading a llama on a leash.
"Many. It's a downright migration."
As late as yesterday afternoon, Sunday, Laura was assisting the Brownie troop leader and the dozen or so little girls in her troop to sew and stitch and glue felt butterflies together.
"But," she continues, "I was made an honorary troop leader for my service."
"I'm impressed."
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The llama stops dead in his tracks in the middle of Main Street, causing the rest of the parade to come to a halt as well. The llama's owner, a heavyset man with a beard who I believe works for Michael Terry's well crew, tries to yank the animal forward, but he won't budge. And then, with an audience of hundreds and hundreds of spectators on both sides of the road, the llama begins to pee. With something that I assume is the equivalent of a llama smile on its face, the animal begins to empty what must be a bladder the size of a small automobile.
"They're going to be there a while," Laura says, as the yellow stream begins to run down Main Street, down the slight incline toward the float with a half-dozen cows and a milking machine built by the Landaff Historical Society, ("We Love Our Dairy Farms: Let's Milk the Past for Our Future!").
Seconds pass, and grow into minutes. We crane our necks to see past the float from the Historical Society, past ones built by apple growers and the Humane Society and a local shade tree nursery, and there, perhaps seventy-five yards away, is the vanguard of three troops of Brownies. Little girls in shiny brown shoes. Waiting. Like a radioactive cloud the urine approaches, winding its way slowly toward them. They know it is coming, and they know there is nothing they can do.
When it arrives, however, when the llama urine becomes more than warning and stench, when it becomes a tangible river of pee bisecting their two lines of marchers, they begin to squeal. And while Cynthia Woolf is able to rally her troops and prevent a full-scale retreat, for one long moment the little girls fall out of formation, dancing and jumping and oooing and laughing and pointing their fingers at the stream, as they try and avoid what they are probably calling the single most gross thing they've ever seen in a parade.
But the little girls regroup and they rally. When the llama is finished he agrees to move on, and the parade resumes.
The Brownies, some on foot and some in a hay wagon
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pulled by two majestic Vermont Morgans, are surrounded by their arts and crafts butterflies. There are hundreds of them, some with wingspans as small as inches, some that are as wide as a yard. There are yellow ones and blue ones and orange and black ones; there are ones with psychedelic colors that I cannot imagine have ever been found in nature; some of the butterflies have safety pin wings that move and flutter, while others are glued to coat-hanger stanchions and fly over the hay wagon like medieval pennants.
The little girls wave, some continue to giggle, and some stand at the sides of the hay wagon, fanning the air with purple and green butterflies the size of throw rugs.
Miranda, along with two other little girls at the front of the wagon, is not wearing her Brownie uniform. She is dressed instead as a human-sized butterfly, with a black leotard, wide pink wings made of gauze, and felt antennae that bob and twist as she ripples her wings in slow motion.
"Why butterflies?" a woman beside Laura asks, as the little girls begin to pass by.
"Watch," Laura says, motioning toward the banner on the side of the wagon.
"Brownies," the banner reads, "Ready to Shed Our Cocoons and Fly!"
We sit on our porch the day after the parade, and watch what's left of the sun fall behind Camel's Hump and Mount Mansfield. Even this summera summer of ninety-degree days and a sun that won't cease to shineit cools off a bit in the evening. Tonight, it will probably fall into the high sixties.
Laura puts her feet up on the porch railing, her white sneakers brown with dry dirt from her garden.
It's no longer a garden of mud, even after watering it again today with the hose. It's a garden of dry dirt. The corn is sick, the peas are lame, the tomato plants are tiny.
"The wedding will look pretty weird without any grooms-
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men," Patience says, standing by the screen door, aimlessly picking at the flecks of white paint on the porch table. "Can't you talk some sense into Reedy?"
I swirl the ice cubes in my coffee. "You sound like Goddard Healy," I tell her. "You both think I have some control over the man. I don't."
"I just can't believe he's being so stubborn!"
The clouds in the valley over Montpelier are almost pink now, each on
e ringed by red along the bottom edges.
"You're both pretty stubborn," Laura reminds her sister.
"Because I want bridesmaids and Reedy refuses to have groomsmen?"
"That's only one small example."
"How many bridesmaids are you having?" I ask Patience. "Including Laura and Miranda."
"Six."
My wife and my daughter do not share an equal enthusiasm for the actual, planned wedding ceremony of Patience Avery and Reedy McClure. Laura, who is matron of honor, is appalled that at the age of thirty-nine she will be dressed as a bridesmaid, one of a half-dozen essentially identically clad women. Miranda, on the other hand, is absolutely thrilled with the whole idea of being one of her aunt's bridesmaids, and genuinely flattered. This is extremely grown-up stuff to our nine-year-old: a fine gown, flowers in her hair, marching up the aisle of the church, for one brief moment the center of attention.
Miranda is many things, but she isn't shy.
"I'll be honest with you, Patience," I say, "even if I thought for one moment that Reedy would listen to me, I probably wouldn't tell him to go find some groomsmen. Personally, I think he's right. He is too old for groomsmen."
"Are you suggesting that I'm too old for bridesmaids?"
Laura rolls her eyes. "It's not an issue of age," she jumps in, although that is indeed part of it. "It's the fact that this is your third marriage. Think about it: Don't you believe six bridesmaids is a little inappropriate for a third wedding?"
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"It's an important part of the ritual," she says, as her nails scratch against the tabletop. She actually sounds more hurt than angry. "The bridesmaids and groomsmen support the couple getting married. Look at where they stand in the ceremony. They provide a literal phalanx against cynicism and doubters, they"
"Who are the other bridesmaids?" I ask.
A pair of bats streak past the barn, darting by the front doors, and then fly up and over the weather vane at the peak.
"The core group," she answers, irritated with me for interrupting her. "Same women as last time. Except, of course, Miranda's joining us."
"The core group," I say, repeating the words as images of the women flash through my mind. I recall them from Patience's second wedding, some from both Patience's first and second go-rounds.
All of these women are, of course, dowsers, and all of them have dowsing specialties. Sas Santoli is a psychic healer, with her own radio program in Pittsburgh. She says that she dowses human energy fields to find what she calls "the sickly imbalance."
Carpe Tiller is a graduate of the University of Metaphysics in Los Angeles, who works now with her father as a private detective in Las Vegas. She finds runaways, stolen goods, adulterous husbands, wives, and lovers.
One bridesmaid is a physician, a graduate of Harvard Medical School, who specializes in dowsing her patients' gene maps. Dr. Katherine Whiting practices in Montpelier, so that she is able to teach two days a week at the Green Mountain School of Earth Science.
And another bridesmaid, a virtual neighbor who lives up in Danville, is currently obsessed with dowsing labyrinths to find a new world order. The woman, who at some point in her life changed her name from JoAnn Pomerleau Brandy to Angel Source Brandy, told me at the rehearsal dinner before Patience's second wedding that she onced dowsed a dog to discover its past lives.
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Each of these womeneach in her own way a self-proclaimed feminist, hypnotist, spiritualist, cosmologist, astrologist, psychotherapist, each in her own way a student of esoteric science, a believer in sacred spaces, in wholeness, in apartness, in auras, in anything mythic, lithic, and runicmake Patience appear stable, serene, and steadfastly normal.
"Yup, all of your favorite women will be there, Scottie," Patience says sarcastically, as a smile begins to form on her face. "Maybe if you behave yourself at the wedding and treat Dr. Whiting real nice, she'll be willing to dowse your genes and tell you exactly what illnesses and infirmities you can look forward to as you grow old."
On Wednesday night Ian Rawls sits beside me on the Quarry Men bench, after grounding out to second base. He wipes his forehead with a terry cloth towel.
"When's your 'secret' lunch with Liza?" he asks after catching his breath, referring to the chairperson of the local environmental commission.
"They're voting Tuesday night. So I'm seeing her on Monday."
"Want me to join you?"
I don't, but I also can't offend Ian. "You're more than welcome. But I don't think it's smart. Ethically, she shouldn't even be seeing me. The only reason she agreed to is because we went to college together. But in theory, we won't even discuss Powder Peak."
"But of course you will ..."
"I assume so."
"In that case, I probably won't join you. It doesn't sound like you need me to bring it up."
One of the younger men on the team smashes a line drive just over the third baseman's head and down the left field line. Reflexively we both stand and cheer, as Clinton Willey, the elementary school teacher on our team, races all the way home from first base.
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"Joel will start running one of the lifts this season," Ian tells me, pointing at the fellow who hit the line drive, standing now on second base.
"I thought he had a year-round job at a ski company. Down in Montpelier."
"He got laid off," Ian says, as we sit back down.
"Joel Stebbins? I didn't know he was part of that group."
"Yup. Thirty-six employees. Out of a work force in the neighborhood of ninety-five people. Just over a third of the factory was let go."
After slapping a variety of palms, shoulders, and bottoms, Clinton Willey joins us on the bench.
"A two-base knock does the soul good. Joel really needed that."
"I was sorry to hear he got laid off," I tell Clinton. "Ian just mentioned to me what happened."
Clinton, who lives in the same part of Barre as Joel, shakes his head. "Yup. He was pretty depressed. He's not even sure where to begin to look for work. He says nobody's hiring in the ski industry."
Ian frowns. "Well, nobody is on the manufacturing side. But he's joining us up on the mountain from November to April. He'll be running a chair lift."
Hugo Scutter lofts a shallow fly ball just over the shortstop's head that drops in for a single, giving us runners on first and third.
"That was pathetic," Ian says, referring to the droopy base hit.
"Is the ski industry really as deep in the toilet as the newspapers say it is?" Clinton asks.
Outside of softball, I do not know Clinton Willey. I do not know the name of his wife, I do not know if he has or wants any children. I don't even know what grade he teaches in elementary school. Consequently, my immediate reaction is to give Clinton some sort of polite but evasive answer, to tell him that things aren't terrific, but they're not all that bad either.
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Perhaps because I am sitting beside Ian Rawls, however, a client and the managing director of one of the state's largest ski resorts, I take a deep breath and begin to proselytize.