“I’m just going through my own shit. I need a real change, a major change. Maybe move off the farm. Get my own place up where my work is, not come down so much.”
I rocked back a bit, taking it like a punch.
“It’s okay for a guy to move on in life! Sometimes you get to a place where”—he gripped the air, fists full of tension—“something’s got to give.” He looked at me, asking for understanding. “Something’s just got to change.”
In my head I came up with a dozen arguments against his moving: What will Jim do? You’re his dearest friend, he’s not over Diz yet, he needs your company! And who will fix the equipment? He can’t afford to pay anyone! What, you’d live in Chittenden County, with the malls and parking lots? You hate it up there!
But all I said was, “Whatever it is, moving won’t help. It’ll come with you. Trust me.”
He bobbed his head as he thought that over. “Probably true.”
We sat there staring at the fire. If somebody had come upon us, they would have seen a large man in work-sweated, wood-dust-covered clothes, and a smaller female figure in manure-smeared coveralls, sitting on opposite sides of a campfire with their elbows on their knees. If the two had been closer to each other, you’d think they were leaning over a chessboard, utterly still as they pondered their next moves.
But there was no calculation going on. We just hung in a stasis of irresolution.
After a while, pressure grew in me, just as it had in Earnest: “See, where I’m at,” I blurted, “I’ve been trying … this whole thing”—I gestured around me, at the woods—“is me trying to be who I am and accepting who I am. Really accepting who I am. But I don’t feel like I’m getting there these days. It’s like I’m keeping secrets from myself.”
He nodded deeply.
Another long silence. Then he said, “Show me your tree before it gets too dark.”
We bushwhacked to the big birch. Its main trunk remained intact, but the age-rotted stumps of its branches had broken off when it fell. Earnest stroked its bark, inspected the various animals’ holes, walked along it to the broken forks so he could look at the branches. At the breaks, its wood had the strength and texture of stale bread.
“I hate to see these go,” he said. “Habitat trees. Where are all these critters going to find another home before winter?”
We talked about how to cut it and move it and where to put its pieces. I wondered aloud whether maybe some of its residents could return to their homes if we set the pieces nearby, but Earnest said that if they lived too close to the ground, they’d become little snacks, canapés, for bigger creatures. We figured we’d bring the Ford up with the bucket on the front, and Earnest’s biggest chainsaw.
With that settled, he said he should call it a day and get some shut-eye. I offered to walk him partway down, and he assented. We walked in silence. Our conversation had been all fits and starts and confessional blurts, but I felt lighter. Just talking about something personal, for the first time in quite a while—maybe it had broken the ice; maybe we could talk together again soon and figure out what was ailing us. Surely he wouldn’t leave the farm, I told myself. Of course he wouldn’t. Would he?
About midway down, I thanked him and said goodnight and went back up to my clearing. I could just make out the great birch, lying like a beached whale among the brambles. The place had taken on a lonely feeling again, after just those few minutes away.
Chapter 58
Sept. 14
I am sitting on my log near the fire, which tumbled by increments and is now nothing but a nest of embers. Still, it puts out a good heat, and anyway it’s a warm night for mid-September. Earnest visited and left and tomorrow we’ll cut up the huge birch that fell across the upper end of the clearing yesterday. He says he might leave the farm.
I have a poem going round and round in my poor stupid head, one of Lewis Carroll’s pleasing, absurd follies I memorized when I was, what, ten? in Mrs. Griffith’s class.
“The time has come,” the Walrus said,
“To talk of many things:
Of shoes—and ships—and sealing-wax—
Of cabbages—and kings—
And why the sea is boiling hot—
And whether pigs have wings.”
Why is it torturing me tonight? Because your life, Ann, has become a catalogue of absurdities and follies? Because your pratfalls aren’t funny anymore? Yes, but no. Because the time has come, Ann, to talk of love and loneliness, of woods and farms and yearning, and why your blood is boiling hot and what you’re going to do about it.
You’re talking about this on a paper page because you’re scared to talk about it in your heart.
And as for loneliness: You’ve become an expert. Now you know there are several kinds. There is the beautiful big kind, where you feel yourself to be a unique thing, a bright singular moment in a vast world—that’s frightening but exhilarating. I could not know of it without having lived in these woods, and knowing it makes me wiser and stronger and I wish I’d felt it much earlier in my life. Thank you, my dear hill, my dear woods.
Then there’s the curled grub of sad scared loneliness, missing everyone, feeling left out and left behind, unsafe, cold, quivering, shivering lonely. Not being whole and sound in the beautiful woods, just lost in them. So much of that since losing Mom and Pop and breaking up with Matt.
No. I had so much of that. I haven’t felt it for a long time, with Erik’s coming, all the people of Brassard’s farm. But now a third kind has taken its place, Ann, which is what’s killing you right now.
What’s it like? It’s not cold, it’s hot. Sort of like the brilliant hot circle you make by angling a magnifying glass toward the sun. Focus it on a dry leaf, and the leaf blackens and begins to smoke and then ignites. And the reverse of that bright spot hovers in your eyes for hours.
It’s focused loneliness. Loneliness for just one thing, one person. That focus burns and you are burning, Ann Turner. Accept yourself. Tell yourself your secret.
Chapter 59
That night I lay in my tent listening to summer in the woods. I have told you how this symphony plays: As the light fades, quiet near sounds and very distant sounds come to the fore in a complex weave. The veery elects to be the last bird of the day, singing that most liquid and supple song. It seems the forest’s watchman: All’s well, it says, hereafter is night, and fare thee well. All to your nests, all to your rest. It sings the day creatures’ lullaby and for me is synonymous with the arrival of night.
The blue evening dark slips and seeps in, and things go still. The rustlers come awake and move among the trees and low growth: my neighbors the bears and porcupines and deer and perhaps crepuscular creatures no one has ever seen or heard of, who are unique to late twilight and so subtle they have passed unnoticed by mankind forever.
But I felt no tranquility. I lay in my tent, on my cot, twisting in the sheet I had spread over me—it was too warm for the sleeping bag—unable to sleep, unable to think, unwilling to. The tangle and knot came from my belly, my spine, my thighs. I felt surges and fires, tides and flares, at once unbearable and irresistible.
The night was so fine that the air was silk. The moon had come over—half-moon, the gentle sort, neither the assertive full moon nor the insufficient, wary crescent—and I rose on one elbow and looked through the tent screen to the clearing, lit opalescent, cool and too empty.
I was in an agony you can understand only if you have felt it. I was as twisted as my sheet, I had a knot in my middle, the lines of my life were tangled and snarled and resistant. The feeling was as ancient and certain as the fear of night, tidal in its power. I looked to my memory, to my lessons here in the woods and on the farm in the past few years, and to my life before, and at first I thought they offered no answer to this state.
I could see that the past two years showed a through line, but that I had been, for
all my divergence and contrariness, a creature of convention.
I felt an explosion of rebellion against being this dull-witted creature and against this state of tension and paralysis and cowardice. There was an answer to this state: You are strong enough. Accept yourself.
I flung aside my wadded pillow and extricated myself from my sheet. I stood inside my tent, shivering from the vital awakening in me. I was wearing only my pajama bottoms and a T-shirt and I didn’t care and I unzipped the tent and stepped outside into patient moonglow. It was not so bright that it hid the stars above in the darkness. With the light of both, I could see my way as I started down the track to the farm.
If you have lived in the woods, you know that holding a flashlight or lantern does not help you see. In fact, it’s self-imposed blindness that makes all near things too bright and all distant things too shadowed—turn your eyes to one side for a moment and you are sightless. If you have walked in the night, you know that you can indeed see, that even simple starlight can be enough, especially when your feet are bare and can feel the subtle textures on the path and remember the contours of the land. On this night, the path was clear to all my senses.
I left my campsite clearing at the downhill end and entered the deeper tree shadows. Here, the moonlight fell through leaf shadows, turning the woods into an impressionistic landscape in which distances were defined by degrees of dappled bright and dark. My body knew these trees, this track, these turns, and gravity told me the way down.
I was just past the first bend when I saw a dark shape moving below me, a shadow detaching itself from the tree shadows. For a moment, I was startled breathless. And it came closer, silent but solid dark, and it frightened me until his voice came from the shadow: “Ann! Where are you going?”
I was no doubt also a shape, suddenly there, pale in my nightclothes, and my pale shape said, “I was coming to meet you on the path.” Which I hadn’t known until that moment.
And there he was before me, the shadow shape moving purposefully up my track. And if I’d been able to hear anything but my own startled heart beating, I know I would have heard his.
When he reached me, we turned and walked up, back toward my tent, his weightless but solid shadow next to mine.
He said, “I—”
And I said, “I couldn’t either.”
I could bide no longer alone. I couldn’t deny it anymore. I couldn’t endure it anymore. I don’t care if it’s impossible.
Side by side, not touching, we came into the moonlight of my clearing and said nothing, because all had now been confessed, admitted, and needed no elaboration.
There was the tent and inside was the bed and there we knew we would end up, but here was the pale moonlight and the smooth air and the first delicious moments of acknowledgment. There had been long courtship here, and there would be chivalry now. We stood facing each other, holding each other’s hands on each side, thinking we should speak, but failing, simply moving, very slightly, in tandem. At intervals, our chests collided and I felt his strength and his honesty. This was not postponement, this was fulfillment fully taken and fully savored. We moved together there in my clearing. I felt a bubble straining in my chest, a laugh of joy that celebrated relinquishing a burden, accepting the improbability and rightness and inevitability of this. He fitted his hands to my waist and lifted me as if I had no weight at all, as if he were wishing me flight, wishing me to touch the moon. He held me over his head as I balanced straight-backed, arms out to each side, legs together straight behind me. We spun that way. The first time Earnest ever kissed me was as he held me above him and placed his face against my belly and kissed me there.
And after a time, we went into my tent, my transient little house, and made our bed upon the floor, improvised but not hurriedly so.
And thereafter, that night, it is only mine and Earnest’s to know and to remember.
Chapter 60
I don’t know whether you think it most improbable that we came together despite nineteen years’ difference in age, or find it incredible that we took such a long time to acknowledge something so clearly apparent. Earnest and I marveled at both, but in fact we talked very little about it; it was as moot as moot can get.
For me the greatest irony was that I thought I’d learned that love will most likely come to you in unexpected forms, from unexpected angles. But I hadn’t entirely believed it. Still stuck in my wretched brain was some childish mythology about love. It belonged in the same category of notion that made me expect my land to be spacious eighteenth-century English woods, full of wealthy scions but devoid of biting insects and bad weather. The same expectation that small farm life was about happy horsies and piggies but not about overworked people and money problems and cows that actually pooped.
So it took me a while to recognize that for me love was an Oneida tree surgeon built like a bear, no taller than I am, and nineteen years older. Recognize and give myself permission. Took me that long despite the obvious fact that we had fallen into step beside each other within the first week, more than two years before. That from the start we had spoken the same language with such fluency, understood each other’s inflections of irony and humor and affection and intention.
Two days later we got to work on that fallen birch. We didn’t talk about nineteen years, because it was already so long ago that we had largely forgotten it.
Mainly we talked about the moose we saw in the clearing when we came out of the tent that morning. He was an adult bull, so gigantic he seemed an animal that belonged in Africa, among elephants and giraffes, not here. His antlers spanned at least six feet, and I could have walked beneath his dewlapped, bearded chin without stooping. He regarded us with regal curiosity and a touch of skepticism. We stared in awe. After about a minute, he lifted his nose and must have snagged some signal out of the air, because he turned on his long legs and strode unhurriedly back into the woods. I would have thought that a creature that big, with those antlers, would thrash and clatter through the saplings that bordered my clearing, but he didn’t. He slid into and through them smoothly and quietly, neat as a playing card slipping back into the deck. Earnest said seeing him was a good omen.
We talked about the moose only intermittently, between periods of Earnest’s chainsawing and my driving the Ford and scooping huge rounds of spongy trunk and taking them away. We had fun disposing of those wheels. We rode together to my western slope and let them roll downhill for the fun of watching them go. Some careened and bounded practically out of view; some smashed into trees and fell over as mounds of fibrous chunks. The critters would feast on the bugs and grubs in there.
I used our rest breaks to ask him some questions. We snacked and drank spring water. For miles around us, the leaves were coloring, and the air seemed infused with the scent of their hues.
I was trying to figure out something about Earnest that I couldn’t quite get my mind around. Essentially, it boiled down to this: How could he be so perfect?
“Perfection is in the eye of the beholder,” he cautioned me. “You need to watch your expectation management, Pilgrim.”
I kept at him: How could he arrive in my life at his age, at my age? How could he be so good and so wise without someone else claiming him long before?
We both were in the best possible mood, further buoyed by the dry clarity of the September sun and the wind rustling the leaves in rushes and sighs.
“I am pretty cool, aren’t I? Here’s my secret: It’s totally self-interest. Speaking to a middle school teacher here, it’s about my self-esteem and other sensitive stuff.”
“Self-interest.”
He continued with some reluctance: “Kind of person I am, I remember everything? Especially things to my discredit? I remember unkind things I said to my mother! I said things that hurt girlfriends. A couple of times in the Army I beat up on guys more than was needed for situation control. I remember swatting a dog when I
was fourteen for chewing up one of my comic books!”
We had that penchant in common.
“I bet most of the people you think you hurt don’t even remember,” I told him.
“Probably not. But I do. Those things stay with me. They come back and hurt me. At some point I decided I didn’t need to inflict any more pain on myself. So I got … nicer. That’s all there is to it. Self-interest.”
We got quiet again, both of us tilting our faces into the sunlight.
“How about you?” he asked.
“What—how do I manage to be a tolerable person? I’ve never had it that together, the way you describe. Never anything so conscious. I’ve always just been winging it. You know what I mean? Always winging it into whatever.”
I stopped and reconsidered for a moment. “Actually, by the time I got here, I was barely even winging it. At best, flying on a wing and a prayer.”
He kept eyes shut and his face to the sun, in no hurry to hear more or to respond. It occurred to me that perhaps moving more slowly with people, allowing more silence, was an important part of being nicer.
“I always liked that expression,” he said amiably. “In your case, what exactly was the wing and what was the prayer?”
“That kind of question is why Erik calls you ‘heavy.’”
He tossed his head, shrugged.
“The wing,” I said, “was getting the damn work done. And the prayer was you.”
We drank some more water, stretched, then got back to cutting and hauling away the old birch. It was tricky working among the brambles and we both got scratched up despite wearing coveralls. I felt bad about crushing so many of the blackberry canes, but I knew that by next year they’d be back with no trace of our tractoring.
A little later, having cut the last segment into movable chunks, Earnest shut off the chainsaw and wiped the sweat and sawdust from his face. “Actually,” he said, “that wasn’t the whole truth.”