“‘And?’” He laughed and shook his head at my stupidity. “I want to get laid! Jesus H. Christ!” He stood and looked at the ceiling and spread his arms like an opera tenor belting out his passion. “I want to get laid!” he bellowed to the gods. “I want a woman!”
When I stopped laughing I told him I couldn’t help him there. “Unless … maybe you and Cat? I mean she showed a certain—”
“Cat? Cat? Get real! Cat’s been my other big sister since I was ten years old. Hey, I can get a little kinky, but not that kinky!”
“I can’t think of a local source for available women your age. They don’t carry them down at the feed store.”
“I’m hip. So what are my options? Where are the good bars within a fifty-mile radius?”
“You’re asking me? I haven’t been in a bar in years.”
At that, he frowned. “Speaking of which. A subject in its own right.”
“What?”
“What about you? I never saw you as the nun type. You’ve been up here how long now? Two years? And you don’t want some romance?”
“I came off a really bad one, Erik. I’ve been giving it some time.” This conversation was getting uncomfortable for me—I didn’t need a reminder of the void in my life. “That said, yes, I want some romance. But it’s different with me now. I’m older. I want different things from a relationship.”
He kept a suspicious frown on me. “Not sex?”
“I didn’t say that. Just not only. For you it’s simpler.”
“What about Will?”
“Huh?”
“He’s got a little something going for you. Haven’t you seen the way he looks at you when we’re all together? Very attentive? Responsive?”
“I haven’t noticed,” I lied. “Has he said something to you?”
“No,” he admitted. Then he went on, picking up momentum: “But he’s good-looking, seems like a decent guy, and he’s close to hand—”
“We were talking about your love life, not mine.”
“He told me his divorce has come through.”
“I heard. Let’s get back to bars within a fifty-mile radius.”
“How about Burlington? College town, right? They say college girls go wild for ex-cons.”
We laughed. Who knew? Maybe they did. I couldn’t help him with this, but I was beginning to suspect I’d be seeing less of him.
We both were yawning by the time we finished the dishes that night. I figured Erik would head over to his side, but instead he sat at the counter again with a small, thoughtful frown.
“What we were talking about earlier. Can I tell you something?”
“Of course.”
“It’s something Pop once said. A man-to-man comment, not the father-son wise advice thing? Just an observation. About women.”
“Okay …”
“This was before I left home, I was what, seventeen. We were going on some errand, nice day, spring. Yeah, that’s right, I was on my way outta there, and he wanted to buy me a watch, like a goodbye present? We stopped to get ice cream from a woman who had a cart there; then we sat on a bench and ate our cones. Pop watched the ice cream woman as she served other people. She was late twenties, early thirties, an old lady by my standards at the time, but I couldn’t take my eyes off her, either. She seemed to glow. I mean, she was sort of pretty, but when I did that kind of assessment a guy does, you know, up and down, the inventory, like hair, breasts, hips, legs, checking off the … her …”
“Virtues.” I was enjoying his difficulty explaining this.
“Yeah, virtues. She was pretty, but you couldn’t say what ‘part’ of her was pretty. The checklist didn’t apply to this woman. And anyway, she was wearing a big apron so you couldn’t even get, you know, a good sense of … But she was sexy and alluring as hell. Totally alive in her moment. What’s the word? Vibrant, that’s it. It was in the way she smiled when she talked to her customers—she meant it! The way she rang up a purchase and handed back the change. You wouldn’t think serving ice cream is sexy, or like ballet, but every move she made was beautiful. Opening the lid of the freezer, for Chrissake!”
“So you two were gawking at her. And Pop said …?”
“We weren’t gawking! We were appropriately surreptitious. But we were spellbound. Pop said, ‘You know, that kind of beauty, I’ve seen it before. That effulgence.’ I didn’t know what effulgence meant, so he explained it was like radiating, burgeoning, blooming. ‘And every time I’ve seen it, it’s from a woman who has come into a certain moment of her life. She’s sending out rays. Every time, every time a woman like that is ready to take a man and have a baby, her aura, that strength, is sending out a signal. She’ll have a baby within a year.’”
“How would Pop know!”
“He said Mom had been that way and he came to her ‘like a moth to a porch light.’ Then he named a woman he’d known in college, and the daughter of one of his friends, then one of his colleagues at work. He’d noticed their ‘effulgence’ and before long they’re shacked up with some guy and pregnant. He said Mom had noticed it, too.”
I tried to picture my father talking this way. He would never have been so forthcoming with me, but that was reasonable—this was one man to another. And he knew Erik was leaving soon; he probably wanted to connect intimately with his soon-to-be-gypsy son. I wasn’t scandalized that he’d been talking about a woman twenty years younger. He’d said nothing prurient or lecherous. I couldn’t see it as sexist, either, one of those elbow-in-the-ribs comments about the amusing peculiarities of the weaker sex. Pop was not at all that kind of man. It struck me as honest admiration of a natural phenomenon, and an observation made from experience.
“Was he maybe warning you that if you encountered a woman like that, like ‘be careful unless you want a kid’?”
Erik thought about it. “No. He was just appreciating the whole thing. He thought it was a beautiful fact about life. We finished our ice cream and went on our way. Never mentioned it again. But I’ve seen it myself since then. He was right. There comes a moment.”
I would have asked him about that—had he seen that moment in his girlfriends, his wife?—but he yawned and looked weary and I figured I should let him go to sleep.
“Nice story,” I said. “Dear Pop. Our dear Pop.”
He roused as if he’d forgotten why he brought it up. “Right. Annie, I don’t know if you feel it, or know it, but you’re there. You are effulgent. You’re putting out that signal. You’re … effulgent.”
“Go to bed,” I ordered him.
He shrugged, kissed me goodnight, and went out the door. I heard him moving in the next room over as I got ready for bed and turned off the lights.
Chapter 42
For the next few days I checked to see if I felt effulgent—a rather ugly word for a beautiful phenomenon, lending the whole premise a somewhat comic quality that Erik and I joked about. I kind of knew what he meant. But I had known women of every age, very young and very old, who seemed to overflow with vitality, to exude burgeoning energy and magnetism; surely it was not only linked to readiness to take a life mate or have a child.
Still, coming so soon after my discovery that I wanted a child, his comment seemed to warrant serious consideration.
My assessment: Compared to the wreck I was when I first came, I was certainly better. Whereas before I’d been a black hole, emitting no light or energy, I did feel as if I possessed some degree of luminosity again. I felt a strand of resilience inside, strong yet supple, in body and psyche, as if I’d been at least partly woven back together. I was conscious of being fertile—the word wouldn’t have occurred to me if I hadn’t been working the soil and using the word as a farmer does—a new awareness, almost a sensation, like a sphere of potential I carried, cradled between the bones of my hips.
But sometimes I still curled grublike around
loneliness at night, one spoon alone in a drawer without a fellow spoon to nestle into. I realized that the nighttime physical proximity of a loved one provides an existential reassurance in ways that daytime company can’t. Your mind may be far away in dreams, but your sleeping body absorbs the warmth of the other, unconsciously counts your bedmate’s heartbeats and breaths, and these provide deep and timeless affirmations.
And I was working on a dairy farm. I figured it was hard to feel effulgent or come across as effulgent when you’re wearing knee-high rubber boots covered with cow manure, layers of dirty, fraying jackets, a man’s knit cap, oil- and shit-stained leather gloves. But when I mentioned this to Erik, he said it didn’t matter. To a man feeling those rays, that kind of thing contributes to the effect.
Another puzzle, maybe more about men than about effulgent women. In any case, I was usually too busy or too tired to give it much thought.
The first snowfall set the hop yard into sharp relief. The shadows of the poles doubled the effect of the rows: hundreds of horizontal stripes converging with vertical ones. They confused and dazzled the eye. But they served as marvelous solar clocks. As the sun crossed the sky, the forest of shadows swung across the ground, pointing west in the morning, straight uphill in the middle of the day, and east, toward the farmyard, in the evening. As the solstice grew nearer and the sun sank lower, the bars of blue dark grew longer and longer.
As I predicted, Erik spent less time at the farm. He didn’t tell me of his adventures, or where he spent nights when he didn’t return. I deduced that he had acquired at least one steady date, because he often drove up to the ridge to make calls on his cell phone. We had no phones in the bunkhouse, but he could have used Brassard’s landline; the conversations he was having must have needed privacy. At times I worried about his falling into the bad habits and bad company that had landed him in Elk Ridge, or making other mistakes of judgment a college town and a pretty face can induce. But I didn’t probe him and saw no outward indication of it.
Every day, I joined Lynn and Robin for milking and cleanup, then did manure management, scraping the aisles with the skid-steer, pushing poop soup into the grate that pumped it to the lagoon. I shoveled dirty bedding sawdust out of the stalls and replaced it, moved hay and corn silage to the feeding alley. Between daily chores, I plowed snow off the driveway and farmyard and raked it off the eaves of the house and chicken coop apartments, shadowed the vet on her occasional visits, kept track of supplies and drove to town on shopping runs—there was plenty to keep me occupied.
By the second week of December, Earnest still hadn’t returned from his southern swing, and I started to worry about him. I left messages on his cell answering service but didn’t get a call in return. I imagined run-ins with rednecks who objected to his skin color or police who weren’t as accommodating as Officer McGillicuddy. But then one day, his big stake-side rolled into the farmyard, and there he was, climbing out of the truck, that wonderful barrel-bear-shaped form, stretching and rolling his neck to work out the kinks, looking around to check on things.
“Everything okay here?” he asked when I went out to greet him.
“It is now,” I told him. “We were getting worried! I left half a dozen messages. Why didn’t you call?”
He fished in his jacket pocket and brought out his cell phone. It was broken nearly in half, shedding bits of screen and electronic guts. “Fell out of my pocket and I dropped a chunk of log on it, ka-smack. I kept it for a souvenir.”
I took his elbow and we headed for the house.
“Jim’s good?”
“Jim’s okay. Still gets pretty blue, but he’s surviving. He’s inside.”
“What about Will?”
“Seems fine.” In fact, since our dinner together I hadn’t seen that much of him. He had started another big project and usually came home too late to help with afternoon milking or even to join Brassard and me for dinner. Also, I suspected he’d stayed more embarrassed than necessary about the brucellosis video.
“And your brother? He’s good?”
“Erik’s not around that much, but he seems to be doing well.”
“Women,” Earnest stated.
“How’d you guess?”
We went into the mudroom, stomped off, hung up our jackets. Through the doorway, I saw Jim Brassard standing up from the kitchen table, smiling at the return of his friend.
“What’re you two chucklin about?” he asked as he shook Earnest’s hand.
“Erik,” I told him. “And women.”
“Well, maybe he’ll bring somebody home,” Brassard said. “We can always use the extra help.”
Chapter 43
A couple of weeks later, I was puzzled to see Earnest standing at the end of the driveway, inexplicably sending semaphore signals with his arms. As I headed toward him, I spotted a white car at the top of the hill, descending at a rate that suggested uncertainty. It sped up when Earnest stepped into the road and waved his arms more vehemently.
“Old friend,” he said. “Haven’t see him in quite a while. He’s not good with directions.”
The car pulled in and parked, and a man about Earnest’s age climbed out. From his copper skin and the planes of his face, I could see that he was an Indian, but he was Earnest’s physical opposite: tall, slim, narrow shoulders—the shape of a man used to an ergonomic office chair. He wore a blue nylon windbreaker insufficient for the weather.
The two men hugged and then turned to me.
“This my friend Larry Hoskie,” Earnest said, beaming.
“Lawrence,” corrected Lawrence. Bob the dog moseyed out to nose his crotch, and Lawrence scrubbed him around the ears.
“Hi, I’m Ann,” I said.
“Ann! The Ann? I’ve heard a lot about you!” We shook hands.
“Yes, Earnest has told me about you, too,” I lied. Earnest had never mentioned him, hadn’t even told us he’d be having a visitor.
“Larry is one of these high-tech nutcases,” Earnest explained. “Computer-programmer type.”
“Lawrence,” Lawrence said.
“See what I mean?” Earnest said.
“So,” I said, “you’re an Oneida, too?”
“Fuck no,” Lawrence said. “I’m Diné. Navajo. We were both in the army but didn’t cross paths over in ’Nam. We had the misfortune to serve on the same base back here in the States.”
“I was in mess and I saw this guy, the only one who had the same … complexion as me. But it turns out he’s Navajo.” Earnest said the tribal name with a disappointed and disapproving inflection. “You know what I mean?”
“Asshole,” Lawrence said to me. “You know what I mean?”
They were both grinning broadly, and I recognized this kind of reconnection. With deep friendships, years apart make no difference. You start up right where you left off. There may be plenty of new detail to relate—the life you’ve lived since you saw each other last—but the fundamentals remain unchanged.
Earnest swatted him on the rear to head him toward the house, and we went in to sit at the kitchen table. Earnest and I drank coffee; Lawrence wanted only tea. “I’m the high-strung type,” he explained. “That stuff makes me want to jump out of my skin.”
They spent some time catching up. Lawrence said he had come within two hundred miles of Earnest only because his company had secured a contract with a Boston firm and he had flown out to meet their people. He liked the gig because he could still live on the rez and do his work entirely via the internet.
“Navajos, they’ve got it knocked,” Earnest told me resentfully. “Reservation the size of New England. We ended up with a postage stamp in the middle of Wisconsin. And another token patch in New York.”
“I’m guilt-tripped, okay, Earn?”
“Earnest,” Earnest said. “With an ‘A’ in it.”
“I’ll try to remember,” Lawrence
said.
We drank our hot beverages and I learned some of Lawrence’s story: After the army, he went back to Ganado, on the “Big Rez,” for lack of other great ideas. He attended Diné College, the Navajo community college up in Tsaile, got his associate’s degree, then moved on to Northern Arizona University for his bachelor’s. Computers were not a happening thing yet, so he studied electrical engineering. “I figured someday we’d get electricity on the rez,” he said drily, “and such skills might be needed.”
He met a girl at NAU, got married a couple of years later, and had three kids.
“My oldest daughter, she’s thirty. We had another daughter and a son, a few years apart. Out of the house now, but they kept me busy for twenty years.”
“Remind me, what’s your son’s name again?” Earnest asked, baiting him.
Lawrence sighed. “Earnest,” he told me reluctantly.
“With an ‘A’ in it?” Earnest asked.
Lawrence ignored him and showed me a family portrait that, from the age of the kids, had to be a decade or more out of date. They were posed in front of a smudged backdrop in a photographer’s studio, dressed up for the shot. His wife was a plain-faced woman, uncomfortable in front of the camera’s merciless eye, but the daughters had vivacious smiles and young Earnest struck me as a happy-looking knucklehead.
Earnest asked about reservation life. Lawrence said it was coming along.
“It’s not as poor as when I was a kid, not even as bad as when you were out last time, Earn. We got some of the mineral rights worked out in the last few years, collected some major back-due royalties. Lined the pockets of the politicians, even had some left over to build some new housing and water infrastructure. It says something that a guy like me can make a living out there now. There’s broadband in Window Rock!” He shrugged and his enthusiasm deflated. “Of course, along with came a heapin helpin of modern America’s problems.”
I suspected that the men wanted time together alone, and there were chores waiting, so after a few minutes I shook Lawrence’s hand and excused myself.