Local Souls

  International decoy dealers set up rusticated booths in an ocean-view ballroom. Midsummer, its cloakroom wasn’t needed for men’s camel hair, ladies’ furs. So that space got commandeered by a covey of kingly silver-haired duck carvers flown in by private Lear.

  Most decoys for sale were very old, priced accordingly. Roper, uninvited, wandering the great hall, soon asked dealers many smart young-man’s questions. He proved one real quick study. People enjoy sitting beside a handsome doctor at a black-tie dinner; especially if such people have family heart histories and are over fifty-eight. Particularly if that doctor stands six-foot-two, is funny, and a Yalie still visibly in love with his very first wife.

  Roper hadn’t been stalking the ballroom long before organizers introduced themselves. They squired him toward the holders of the major antique decoys. Roper explained he was a virgin, at least to this. Gosh, there seemed a lot to know! The three rarest birds displayed had all been carved by one Josiah Hemphill, 1790–1842, Marshfield, Mass. Short lines formed to see those.

  Doc soon learned Hemphill’s big knack was a more “naturalistic” shaping, the bolder use of buttermilk paint. Hemphill had worked days as Latin master at a boys’ academy. But post-declension, after refighting Caesar’s wars one hill at a time, the glad ole bachelor was found paddling every Saturday and all summer with his blunderbuss and water spaniels. Hemphill, plump, gout-prone, sat amid a boatload of false ducks he carved, then floated. Wood ones lured the live ones into musket-range. You had to know how each duck species splashed down in its very own formation. Since live things naturally magnetize to copies of themselves that look super-pretty, you rope your fake-outs into just that pattern.

  Buttermilk paint gave the Latin master’s birds such high-gloss feathering. And three centuries upstream, their colors still looked as bright yet crackled as a Rembrandt landscape. (At the country club bar I listened hard to a subject not as personally interesting as congenital heart disease. Odd, though, it held me.)

  Up close, the birds appeared no better than old paint-daubed wood. But if you squinted down, as Doc was taught, if you imagined yourself two hundred feet up, you sensed how Josiah’s wide brushstrokes worked magic on the weary homesickness of passing cousin ducks. As they sought rest, their nightly berth seemed sweetened by that many family-resemblances horseshoed below.

  Soon Doc was stepping onto one provided footstool; he squinted down on duck-backs laid across a ballroom carpet very very patterned.

  “Aha,” he said. “This Josiah’s excellent, okay. Hell, he’s so good I feel my own landing gear coming down.”

  Well, this crack drew lots of nods, off-colored yuks. Doc’s quip would be quoted that whole Bermuda week among the real mover-shakers of Decoy World.

  Over dinner, they told Roper how the Smithsonian owned six Hemphill curlews. Josiah’s sole snow goose had just flown off the auction block into the Met Museum’s American Wing. But Doc (self-knowledge always his RX specialty) confessed to feeling less a collector, more a hands-on type. “Owning bores me, basically. Doing . . . less.” So his new collector-pals just walked him to the carvers.

  One cloakroom had been lined with plastic sheeting to catch cedar shavings already ankle-deep and fragrant. From the look of these guys’ hacked-out starter-ducks, Josiah Hemphill had long-since left the building.

  Doc said he met an ex–one-star general, two forced-retirement GM veeps. Their greetings sounded jolly as their politics soon proved strictly anti-immigrant. (Spoken by a man carving a duck, the word “wetback” seems a species name.)

  ONE MINT-CONDITION Hemphill—a bird that floated around in Marshfield’s salty bogs not many years after our nation flew the coop of English taxation—it could set you back twenty-nine to thirty-six thousand. And that was your bargain Hemphill.

  Whereas a regular living guy could buy himself a pine “blank,” insert a couple 10mm glass eye inserts using two-step epoxy, then shape his very own mallard for under forty bucks! “Now, that’s ‘a deal for real.’ —Hell, let me try that.”

  Home, Doc explained to the few of us still bunched at our bar called Hole Nineteen, there are still only sixty authenticated Hemphills in captivity. “No lie?” I said, sounding false and spurned, though feeling not unengaged.

  4

  A FIRST FATHER-SON office visit and Roper had just fed us its complicated name. I swear he recognized our exact sickness in like two minutes. Diagnosis shushed both Dad and me. And our fair-haired boy-doctor used even this pause. He actually wrote out the name of our condition on the back of a prescription pad. He passed it to Red.

  A gent, Doc guessed my dad might need to see then silently sound-out our fate one letter at a time. “Fam-il-ial hy-per-cholester-ol-emia?” My father had to hold it some distance off between weathered hands. “Let’s see here. That nice little opening, the ‘family’ part? I do get. But the next word’s being this long, looks to me, sir, like a big ole coiled black snake.”

  “Wish I could say you’d got that wrong, Red.” Dad admired how Roper gave it to us straight. Afterward we would live in treatment. Doc’s good company helped. But our Mabry bodies kept hoarding both kinds of lethal fatty juices. Doc called those “lipids.” There’d been a recent horror movie at the Bijou. Called The Day of the Triffids, it concerned future-trees that can walk around and eat the people of the future, see. Sounded like we each had one of those growing hungry inside us. And I had taken Red to see the film.

  ONCE MY FATHER made this green zone my address, I sure tried blending in. Doctors’ notes excused me from gym class to the school library I soon loved. Up ahead I would qualify as in-state and entitled to our fine university. At Chapel Hill I got twenty-one A’s. But it’s only thanks to Red that I can pass today. Not coursework, either. Pass as a townie. (And surely with Doc’s help in learning the ropes.)

  Yes, by now I get regularly mistaken—when noticed at all—as someone born to own the third-biggest half-timbered manse set along The River Road. I’ve actually become the fellow wearing Saturday chinos paint-stained seemingly-on-purpose, too thrifty to throw them out, too rich to care about personal appearance while seen in a house that looks this fine. Being a six-footer of a certain silvered vintage, I appear almost natural, stretched out in a Smith & Hawken chaise longue, reading my twentieth seafaring Patrick O’Brian from our public library on this teak deck nearly seaworthy.

  I greet by name our neighbors’ pretty grandkids paddleboating past. I get a singsong, “Ahoy, Mister Ma-bry.” Still, during one encounter in six, I expect to be challenged yet. A cringe waits half-sprung. At this age, I feel almost eager to be found out: yet another closet hick with no claim whatever to choosing hand-blocked William Morris wallpaper, upgraded to this town of nearly seven thousand!

  If I still tend to hero-worship certain folks hereabouts, that habit started in my cradle. My parents spread cheesecloth over-top it, keeping off barnyard horseflies, wasps. But sometimes the white would peel away to show pure sky. Then I lay looking up at a man’s auburn fringe poking out beyond his head like ropy sun rays. I kept studying a smile that couldn’t help but show—in Red’s own raw delight with fatherhood—his every crooked witty tooth.

  GOOD THING MY folks shoehorned me into city schools early as third-grade. See, schoolmates still remember me as just one more familiar river rock, as having always lived, if hushed, among the Fallen.

  Come breakfast the opening day of class, Mother asked if I really planned to wear that. See, I’d picked a favorite maroon cowboy shirt Pop had bought me at Myrtle Beach. Stitched right in were broncos, stars, plus cacti. Mom wondered aloud if I might save that back. “Maybe start out in plain black pants and your nice white church shirt? Just till we see how fancy doctors’ kids dress weekdays. My way of thinking—a person can make one real loud mistake just by walking in, son. Your dad, now, he is ever a show unto himself. Short man, humongous spirits. But you and me? Though taller, we’re, well, till we warm-up-like—I reckon we’re more hiders.” I nodded, unsnapping my who
le shirtfront.

  Mom squired me toward a sunlit yellow classroom. I’d dressed as plain as Mother wished. From the hallway, we peeked in at other children’s sporty costly clothes. Nothing looked homemade. Soon as the last bell rang she drove our Studebaker straight downtown. Mom bought me everyone else’s kind of blue Keds shoes, boys’ same red-striped soccer shirts.

  At age eight I still fixed my hair like the country kid I was. We then called it a “ducktail.” You greased it right-good all-over, then combed not just the top but both streamlined car-detailing sides. You coiled each combful inward using a tricky wrist motion I bet I could still manage, allowed sufficient time and hair. Finally you’d give the very back a flippant up-yours turn.

  Mother soon asked if I shouldn’t start using less Wildroot Cream Oil. Maybe try a side part. But no, till turning fourteen, I held to my own kick-ass punk-country Future Farmers of America styling. Some Riverside girls even got around to thinking it was kind of cute! I kept smoothing my blond hair back over either ear with that Edsel-like up-swerve behind. It made me feel some kind of rural hoodlum, little Elvis come to town on market day. But my secret outlaw-pride seemed lost on the golf-crazed Fallen. Here I’d been feeling s’proud, thinking my hair made me the real stand-up reb among Riverside’s club kids. No one noticed.

  My sixth-grade progress note I can still quote you from memory:

  Though Bill has kept unusually silent his first few years in a town, he cannot hide being basically kind and, certain tests show, not-unintelligent.

  “But, honey, that sounds real GOOD,” Mom, my fellow hider, lifted one hand to almost pat my cheek.

  I already knew their discount code for me.

  OF COURSE DOC was manually skilled. For a half-century the man had always been a carver. Our Caucasian backs and fronts provided him so much practice suet. Roper’s hands, three octaves wide, stretched like some Russian pianist’s. He had played center for Davidson. Maybe Doc’s roundball-sense in the pivot helped him see things (and patients) spatially?

  Our very lack of scars, from block to Riverside block, gave surest proof of Roper’s subtle digits. Everyone’s beautiful glass-shattering children had been returned to them unmarred. Looking down at their youngsters’ beauty, they first saw their own, then—saving—his.

  In Bermuda he’d got pronounced a prodigy at seventy. Veteran carvers doubted Roper could be as new to this as he swore. Doc simply scratched the back of his fine head. Doc loved playing the rube. (Jimmy Stewart was actually a Princeton trust-funder; Will Rogers prepped at military school.) Roper lowered his eyes now, joshing, “No, I swear, fellers, this one with you tonight, it’s my very firstesth . . . duck.” Laughs.

  You soon heard—through our almost-too-gossipy Riverside optometrist—how Doc had already made a normative mallard. Kind of “lifelike.” Correct patchy colors, mail-ordered amber eyes, orange matte feet. Roper then elevated his subject matter to wood ducks, probably the most beautiful American waterbirds. Little stunners. You’ve seen them in calendar photos, their markings crisp as tux shirts. Small-sized, crested, jewel-colored. (Cooked wood ducks are said to be very “tasty.” But I’d as soon eat a bald eagle or my namesake grandson.)

  We learned Doc had already developed a new paint. He was trying to copy the iridescent band of blue-green-black peculiar to wood duck males. A UPS truck twice daily crowded the narrow River Road. When Doc still doctored, working to improve us, his supplies all got delivered to his clinic on South Main. Today the delivery truck blocked half our drive (not that we were due anywhere). But what was he out there signing for, joking on a first-name basis with the boy in brown shorts?

  BEHIND THE ROPERS’ big split-level, a barn overlooked his three hundred feet of river frontage. Their son had used this as his ham-radio clubhouse; the girl later made it a dance-palace for teen sock hops. Now Doc was getting it remodeled into what he called his “studio.” (Folks felt like “workshop” might’ve been a term a bit more masculine.)

  The place now featured glass on three sides’ cathedral river-views. Floor-to-ceiling windows 20 feet-tall got webbed across with narrow blond-maple shelving. Slots enough to hold a second lifetime’s flock, whatever he seemed bent on making out there by his lonesome.

  Wouldn’t Doc miss Falls’ charming talking-back people? Did he not feel half-deaf off-duty without that attractive after-hours stethoscope bunched under his jacket collar? Who else had guessed Dad’s and my obscure ailment in two minutes flat? We’d expected he would now go and volunteer in Darfur. Doc Without Borders. Roper and Marge flying off and healing the Third World. That’d prove a more suitable, fame-making Phase II. On her summer internship to Africa, a local high school girl—idealized as her age group’s Marion—she had just drowned, upsetting every Riversider very much.

  Doc often skinny-dipped in our river just past dawn. Nobody was awake at that hour. Except restless me, of course. I’d have taken my round of morning meds. I’d often be seated on our deck, nursing my mug of decaf (Roper’s orders). As he padded barefoot bare-assed to their dock, I could see the white towel just around his shoulders. He’d plunge right in, any weather. With a nerve unknown to heart patients. I’d sit here still wearing pajamas and slippers with maybe an overcoat pulled on, winter mornings. In half-light I’d enjoy the splashing of his crawl most of a mile upriver then back, his return hardly slower than the first lap. Sometimes it seemed my doctor was exercising for me. And, as he stood drying beside the Lithium, seeming fully unaware of me, I did know this: if my chest seized up, assuming I could somehow make myself heard, he’d jog my way so quick.

  If not exactly emotionally close in any way a fellow could quantify, at least we had proximity. For a lifetime, while he went around saving lives, I at least sold those lives their life insurance. If Doc walked through most doors into rooms that rose for their beloved, I could still slide in (out) barely noticed.

  I still felt myself the ducktailed farm boy come to enter his calf into state fair competition but lacking the social skills to even go find a registrar. Doc proved the Fallens’ most essential unit.

  Me? a longtime voter who’s served as poll watcher since age twenty-two. And I accepted our different roles. There would always be the imbalance. By now I was truly fine with it.

  But ducks? Wooden wood ducks? in lieu of human lives to save? Seemed to Jan and me a step down. Inventing creatures wholesale was probably nice work if you could get it. But how entertaining? I mean, where are the surprises, your birds held together with three-inch decking screws? Chopped from cedar (soft enough to carve while staying bug-resistant)?

  Still, in this second career, he must appreciate how his new patients would never beg for free drug samples. Plus there’d be no waiting for payment of their outstanding bills. Bills!

  5

  NAKED OR NOT, you step out onto your farmhouse porch, no one gets to see you but maybe two crows and a half-blind hog. Here? in this town of 6,803? eyes everywhere, ears pressed to phones, mouths describing your simple walk to school. Every time you stepped aside to comb your hair back nice? that’d been your Broadway audition! Each restaurant offered Mabrys, via the plain act of getting food from plate to mouth, a hundred bladed mistakes waiting. Even Falls’ waiters seemed tennis line judges calling our soup-eating foul or fair.

  Red insisted that we go to Chez Josephine because it was right here and, people promised, French. (Well, Belgian, really.) Brave, Red ordered, “We’ll take us a load of snails, fer the table.”

  When those sad buttered critters arrived, Dad looked sick while winking: “You first, son. They sure look . . . educational. Let me see you eat at least one.”

  He enjoyed daily walks past Riverside’s most beautiful homes. He invented “historic names” for his six favorites. Palladian windows sure beat his boyhood’s vista, the crescent moon cut into a two-holer-outhouse door. Red loved speaking with our owning-class neighbors: his concerns regarding future River Road drainage problems. “What if some freak water came surging through here
, why . . .” Once home, just recounting the exchange sent him into a kind of grinning sleepiness. “Was just explaining to young Ashton, told Ashton as how . . .” This bushed look of Red’s, lids half-shut, always seemed to follow his widest smiles.

  My poor father’s heart was so deformed, happiness cost him most.

  MOST RIVERSIDE MONEY still gets siphoned from farmland surrounding us, pay dirt assumed. People admitted to fortunes made “in tobacco” but you didn’t want to be caught wearing denim near a field of your stuff. If our river looks clouded brown with lithium, our land comes so packed with iron it is as red-orange as my late father’s hair. Fertile crops start easterly at Falls’ infamous (Fridays topless) Starlite Bar. Due west, crops edge up, then box in our Dairy Queen’s parking lot. By August you eat your fast-melting ice cream out there surrounded by three green walls, beautiful shoulder-to-shoulder tobacco plants, triffids—rising silent, freakish as the National Basketball Association.

  The Mabrys had forever farmed. They belonged to a dunkers’ church that baptized the saved in a tributary of the sacramental Lithium itself. Yes, Red might’ve looked cowlicked, all but defaced by freckles. True, he appeared every inch the Hiram Hayseed. But inside there lived someone surely sleeker, paler, more refined. He’d spent his boyhood striding muddy furrows behind two mules. But his true yen always ran toward fresh-hosed sidewalks, electric-lit store windows. He praised lip-rouged marcelled town women who, as he said with some ob-gyn implications, “keep theirselves all sweet ’n nice.”

  Red was eager not to stay agricultural for life. He explained how persons that farm: They are really very different from you and me. He resented the stubborn meanness required to do battle with weevils, hookworms, floods. He explained family pride, folks being county-famous for growing one admired crop better than all others. He had competitive second cousins envied as “the Peanut Mabrys”; but he himself, as his mother never quit telling him, hailed from one uncle’s branch of cousins even snobbier, “the Sweet Potato Mabrys.”