Every Last Cuckoo (6 page)

Sarah stared at Lottie and Charlotte as if into a time-lapse mirror. Her own face at fifteen, and at forty-six. She caught her breath, caught herself suddenly tapping rapidly at her breastbone with her fingertips. Her hand knocked at her heart; her heart knocked back.

Charles moved his chair closer and casually slung an arm around her shoulder.

Tom asked Lottie, “What happened? How was Tess trying to protect him?”

“She made him take the car,” Lottie said. “He had to go out late at night, and there had been a bunch of muggings in their neighborhood. He wanted to walk but she made him take the car. Then he got carjacked. He probably resisted, and that's when he got killed. Shot. They never caught who did it. Or found the car.”

Vermonters were used to different hazards altogether—ice, cold, dangerous roads, even deer ticks. Human violence rarely threatened, except in close quarters made tense by winter, poverty, or alcohol.

Sarah ventured. “When did this happen?” She'd finally identified what puzzled her about Tess. It was as if she didn't fully inhabit the space in which she moved. This seemed less strange now, given the startling news.

Lottie answered. “I think Hannah was still a baby. It's been a couple of years.”

“Does Tess have family?” Vivi asked.

Sarah spoke about the close-knit clan Tess had described. “I wonder whether that's when she went back to the Quakers. I wonder what her husband was like. Ian.”

Charles answered. “He owned a small computer company. Troubleshooting, systems management, bunch of services. But his passion was music. He played piano—jazz, blues, classical.” Seeing Sarah's surprise, he said, “Tess told me this afternoon, before we left the house. She didn't tell me how Ian died, only that she couldn't have survived another loss.”

T
HAT NIGHT, BEFORE
C
HARLES
came to bed, Sarah sat on the window seat recalling her assumption that David and Tess's story would gradually emerge over the long holiday weekend. Instead, only this grim tale of murder was out. She shuddered and remembered as well the simultaneous birth and death of Andrew, her first son. It had happened a month after Charlotte started kindergarten, while she was still thrown by her daily separation from Sarah. Stephie was an adventuresome four-year-old, a handful for Sarah, who was tired before she even
rose in the morning. Her pregnancy was hard. Nausea dogged her throughout, along with spotting, cramping, and shortness of breath. Charlotte grew more demanding, even as Sarah lost patience and energy. She was no help to her daughter. Instead, she had sown the first bitter seeds into the ground of Charlotte's being.

The landscape between mother and daughter had changed as the seeds put forth their shoots, and it seemed from then on as if every small misstep on either side nourished a crop of frustration and misunderstanding. Sarah realized that her memories exaggerated the early disaffection, but she knew as well that small rifts do grow large over time, fed by any incident that furthers the pain of the first one. Through the years there had been many such incidents. Charlotte took everything to heart, and Sarah's efforts to comfort her and heal the rift met with failure every time. Eventually a pattern formed and seemed indelible. By now, neither Charlotte nor Sarah could break out of the role each had taken with the other.

Yet Sarah could bring to mind whole scenes from her past with Charlotte, capturing them in greater detail than she had in years. She remembered seeing in her newborn daughter's face those of older generations, which passed fleetingly over the tiny new features like the shadows of high summer clouds. Later, she and the toddler Charlotte had delighted passionately in each other, mother and firstborn, utterly in love. Their connection seemed telepathic, especially at night, when Charlotte would awaken just as Sarah was dropping off to sleep, as if the child could not bear for her mother to go beyond conscious reach.

Sarah never thought about the end of her troubled third pregnancy without mourning as well the loss of her closeness with
Charlotte. Memory would simultaneously place before her the image of her daughter's scowling face at age five and the sorrowful sight of her motionless infant son. The nurses had tried to whisk the baby away, to keep Sarah from seeing his lifeless body, but she howled at them to let her hold him. They consulted Charles, a doctor they knew well, and he instructed them to comply, even as he absorbed the loss himself, haggard and grieving.

Finally the nurses cleaned Andrew up, wrapped him in a blue blanket, and laid him in Sarah's arms. They invited Charles into the delivery room, but he declined. He had seen his dead son as the nurses were swaddling him, and he thought Sarah needed to be alone with the small body. For hours after Andrew had died on his way into life, she felt powerfully that he had come from unreachable realms with knowledge she needed urgently to learn. Yet there he lay, swaddled in her arms, looking entirely at peace and not at all like a failed emissary. His face was closed; she could read nothing in his blank, perfect features except her own loss. She had given birth to death, and she felt its claim on her. She held Andrew until he was cold and his chill entered her body and heart.

Charlotte turned with ever greater need toward her father after the loss of Andrew. Charles at first tried to revive Sarah's attention to their bewildered daughter, but soon he simply gave in and turned toward Charlotte with an eagerness of his own. He had never before been the primary parent.

Stephie entirely ignored Sarah's coldness, bringing her small body close as if to warm her mother. She asked many questions about baby Andrew and where he had gone, and then she went about her childish life as happily as before.

Sarah grieved a long time for her lost son, barely getting out of bed for weeks and forcing herself up after that. Unmoved by her daughters, she was finally reborn as a mother when David arrived, squalling and robust, just over a year later. She had not planned that pregnancy and did not believe in it. She and Charles had made love so seldom, and with such tepid ardor, that the pregnancy seemed without substance. Evanescent. But when David lay in her arms, she finally woke up and was herself again, if more inclined to bouts of dread—she, who had grown up free and fearless, even in hard times.

T
HE REST OF
T
HANKSGIVING
weekend was quiet. An old friend of David's dropped by on Saturday. Peter and Vivi came and went. Charlotte and Tom showed up, too, running from Lottie and Luke. “Honest to God,” Tom said. “They ignore each other when they're home alone. I know that because neither one is dead when we get back. They save their constant bickering and snarling for our loving ears.” Charlotte elbowed him when he added, “Kids are overrated. Nobody tells you that while you still have a choice.”

The next morning, Sunday, Hannah sat in Sarah's lap during a late family breakfast, displaying a sudden affection that pierced Sarah with sweetness and regret. David and Tess were leaving that afternoon, and she hated seeing them go.

An hour later Charles and David went out to stack the last of the green, split wood that would dry over the next year. The house was heated by a room-size, dual-unit furnace that could burn either wood or oil. Sarah and Charles used wood almost exclusively when heating oil costs were high, as they were now. This year's fuel supply, ten cords of hardwood, was dry and
ready inside the barn. David and Charles were stacking next year's wood outside. Charles loved the sight of a perfect woodpile, squared at the ends and flat on top, covered with sheets of tin, its quartered hardwood sections forming a handsome mosaic along the face.

Standing inside the porch door, Sarah was pleased to see Charles and David laughing and talking volubly. This change in their connection seemed miraculous, yet it made sense. She would never forget the look David had given to his father as he took Hannah from him, wrapped in his coat. Sarah had not seen her son's face so naked since he was younger than Luke—not even when his ex-wife sliced him up and laid the strips to dry like jerky. That had toughened David, but now, near the end of this visit, he seemed easy in his skin. He'd looked at Charles with an open adoration he had not bestowed in thirty years. He had broken the ice and found warm currents underneath.

T
HE FIRST BIG SNOW
came down in the middle of December, taking out trees and power, often simultaneously, as when a tall old maple or fir, rotten at the center, fell over onto electrical lines with a slow creaking and a final crash. Anyone who lived in rural Vermont lived also with the sound of trees falling in the forest. Wind, wet snow, age, or disease downed them, especially in dense stands where overcrowded hardwoods grew to fifty feet without roots deep enough to support their nearly branchless heights. Many of these trees fell with a breath of wind; others were cut deliberately. They all made the same heavy sound as they came down.

A century earlier, 80 percent of Vermont had been clear-cut for pasture and farming. Now the proportions were reversed, reflecting changes in regional economies and demographics. The trees had simply grown wherever the cleared land was no longer needed, and the result was miles of dense young woods. In time, nature took care of the crowding by taking out the weaker trees. Charles, however, had been unwilling to wait.

In the forty-three years that he and Sarah had occupied their acreage, Charles had thinned several acres of their woods, providing the household with firewood in the process. He'd had an old pickup truck with a winch that he used to engineer the fall of each tall tree that he culled from its fellows. He told Sarah you could plan which way a tree would fall if the trunk was thick enough. You made your cut, and as you deepened it you inserted wedges that would force the fall in the direction you wanted. But these spindly trees allowed no such control. So Charles wrapped the trunks with chains he attached to the winch cable. He secured the chains above the site of each cut. Then, when he made the cut and turned the winch on, the cable pulled the tree over within a few feet of the spot he had chosen. Sometimes he had to angle the cable around another stump or a boulder to control the tree through its dreamlike, slowly accelerating fall. Sarah watched, in the earliest years, and thought of Charles as the choreographer of a large, lumbering ballet. She had liked that word,
lumbering.

Eventually she grew so accustomed to the sound of trees falling and chain saws whining that she scarcely noticed. The racket became her children's lullabies on summer nights, when Charles could work in the woods until well past nine. He would come home from his office by six, sit down for dinner, and then rattle the junky truck down the meadow to whatever section of woods he was thinning. He would limb the trunks of the felled trees, remove smaller branches from thicker ones, and haul the bare lengths out with the winch to be bucked into sections and split. He piled the brush in gullies or under large outcroppings of rock, leaving it behind as winter cover for small creatures before it rotted slowly back into the forest floor. Today the trees he had
left uncrowded in the light had thick, strong trunks. Their broader branches started lower to the ground and spread more widely. Their canopies were lush, their shapes graceful.

Sarah knew how much pride Charles took in husbanding the forest well. It was not what he'd been raised to do. He had been born into a wealthy Boston family that had sent generations of sons to Harvard and then into commerce, law, or politics. He had even been named for the city's famous river. But he had spent his childhood summers in New Hampshire and Maine at rented cottages with his mother and sister. His father would come on weekends. On Friday evenings Charles would watch him wash the urban grime away in whatever sparkling lake they were visiting that year. On Sunday nights his father would head back to the city, his eyes reclaimed by anxiety or a distant cogitating look. Charles had often told Sarah how it had saddened him to watch this, but how it pleased him to see the changes in himself when he was outside more than in, when he could learn the names of birds, trees, animals, and insects.

Charles slowly pulled back from his striving peers and family as he came to feel increasingly at home in nature and taught himself more about it. He read, observed, and explored. Finally, in his high school years, when his mother rented the same large cottage three summers in a row, Charles found a mentor, a farmer and town clerk near the Connecticut River, a man only a decade older than himself. Bony, slow-moving, wry Albert Graves had taught Charles how to shear sheep, card and spin the wool, milk cows and goats, make cheese, tap a sugar maple, build a barn, drive a tractor, harvest corn and hay, cut down trees, and split wood. In his apprenticeship to Albert, Charles not only learned a lexicon of skills but came to learn and love
his own body, its sliding wiry muscles, its sweat, its smells, its strength, and its surprising intuition about tools and their uses. He did not make the leap to a career in medicine until he fought and was wounded in a devastating war—until he saw firsthand how bodies could be split like firewood or torn like a bobcat's prey and sometimes, miraculously, made whole again. He had told this to Sarah the first time they slept together, when she first saw the shrapnel scars on his back.

Those high school summers displaced Charles's thoughts of Harvard farther north to Dartmouth, where he could stay close to woods and mountains and could now and then visit Albert on his farm across the river. Soon Charles was unfit for the partnership his father had planned for him in his law firm. He meant, instead, to teach history and run his own small farm. Above all, he wanted to escape the moral imperative of his parents, which, as he had explained it to Sarah, was to make a lot of money and do a little politically expedient good. After history gave way to medicine and Charles opened his practice in this small, poor state, he reversed that equation. He felt he did a lot of good every day but never got rich doing it. From the beginning, patients without money or insurance paid him in whatever currency they could. Charles would take anything—tires with decent tread, a cord of wood, a cement mixer. Even if it was not of value to him, he would find someone who could use it. All he really wanted, in a material way, was to provide for his family and permit himself the twenty-two acres that recalled his youth.