I Live With You (25 page)

In the evening she rolls me out on the rickety dock away from under the trees so we can see the stars. My God, stars so dazzling and dizzying…. It looks as if any minute you’ll fall right off the earth into them. She knows them all: Cassiopeia’s Chair, Betelgeuse, Aldeberon, the Teapot, the Swan….

Next morning she pushes me out on the porch so I can watch her as she rows herself out in the old flat-bottom boat. She catches a sunfish and a pike.

That evening we sit on the porch and listen to the birds settling down for the night. We watch the sun setting over the lake. First comes the wishing star and then more. Here on the porch, complete stillness, but all sorts of rackets going on outside, rustlings and tweetings, peepers peeping, bullfrogs karumphing.

Days pass like this. Soon I’m well enough to take little walks.

She hasn’t been teasing me lately. Or, rather, her teasing is more playful. Even her warnings make me laugh. (“Watch out for the bears.” “Watch out for rattlesnakes.” “Watch out for roots that trip.” “Watch out for ground-hornet’s nests.” “Watch out, watch out, watch out.”) Then she’ll put my dilapidated boater on my head, always at a rakish angle. “And don’t step on any wild strawberries.” I’m beginning to love a life like this. I’d like to learn to drop a worm into the water. How hard could that be? I’d like to pick gooseberries. First though, I’ll dust this place. Josephine isn’t going to do it. She doesn’t seem to notice. I’m the one sneezing all the time.

I notice she has her parasol here, just in case of a slack wire. It suddenly appeared, crosswise on the antlers along with the fishing poles. It reminds me how much I miss Josephine’s act. It’s nice seeing birds perching on her head and feral cats coming when she calls but not as nice as that balancing act of hers.

We have our rituals: our cleaning of the lamp chimneys, our lamp lighting, our last cup of tea before bed, Josephine patting the neck of the deer head and giving it a goodnight kiss, sawdust dripping out every time.

My leg is better when the Administrator finds us. I’m able to hobble with my cane almost as well as usual. I’ve cleaned up. I’ve fished and picked berries. I’ve chopped wood and gathered kindling. We’ve been out with a flashlight and caught frogs for frogs legs.

By now we’re so used to our wind and water sounds, our wind chimes, our screeching pump, that we hear him right away and from a long ways off. We look at each other over our lunch of crawdads and miner’s lettuce. There’s a sudden panic. We see it in each other’s eyes. We’re like children, caught in an act of mischief. Of course at first we don’t know it’s the Administrator. What we know is, this can’t be good. Then, through the trees, we see the big black car the Administrator always drives.

I say, “Where?”

She says, “Follow me.”

But I change my mind. I say, “No, we’re grown-ups.”

I’ve taken my usual role. Exactly what Josephine doesn’t like about me the most.

“You
may be,” she says and is gone.

He comes alone. Black suit, striped tie and all—even way out here in the woods. He has a pistol in his belt. I can’t imagine why, what with two (probably more addled than we think we are) old people.

I step out to meet him.
Bang!
goes the screen door. (I’m usually good at remembering to be careful.) I hold out my hand but he ignores it. “Well, well,” he says. “Well, well, well.” He looks all around: our shed, our paint-peeling cottage, our rickety dock. He can’t stop saying, “Well.”

Then we hear singing—raspy, wobbly, old lady singing. We look up and there’s Josephine. Talk about not being a grown-up! She’s dancing … I can’t believe it, first across the cottage roof, holding her pink parasol for balance. Then … I can’t believe it even more. My God, she’s stepping out on the wire where electricity used to come into the house long ago when the electric bill was paid for. She’s in no hurry. She turns, scarves twisting, goes back and forth, gives a little jump. We’re mesmerized—as we always are when she does her act. After a minute or two of this, she goes off along the wire, and when a good tree comes along with nice straight branches, she hops out on those and then over to another tree and another. A scarf floats down. We lose sight of her after that.

If he takes me away, what will happen to Josephine? She won’t stay here without me. She’ll come back to the Home of her own accord. Is that what he’s counting on?

I surmise… many surmises I had not surmised before. I couldn’t stand the Home if Josephine wasn’t there. She and I… once I really think about it, we both love being outside day or night in any weather. I didn’t realize it but I loved chasing after her. It was our excuse for a little bit of freedom and adventure. I loved the responsibility and Josephine loved the misbehavior.

The Administrator looks at me in such rage! As if it’s all my fault,
all
of it.

He shouts warnings and her name, and, “You’d better this or that, or else this, that, and the other.” And then he shoots in the air.

I say, “You can’t scare her. She doesn’t scare,” so he turns and points the pistol at me.

“Maybe I can scare
you.”

“Maybe.”

He shoots in the air again. “Take me to her.”

“No.”

I couldn’t anyway. God knows what hiding places Josephine has out there in her woods, and I don’t know a single one.

He makes a barking sound then turns and shoots out our front window. I hear something fall inside. From the sound of it, bull’s-eye. The deer head has gone down. I can’t say I’m sorry. That deer head never did approve of me.

He puts the pistol down at his feet. I think to grab it. I could run… hobble…. Perhaps I can run faster than I think. Throw the pistol in the lake. But as usual I deliberate too long. He takes handcuffs out of his pocket, puts one cuff on my wrist and looks around for someplace good and solid to handcuff me to. There’s no place. Finally he handcuffs me to the pipe that takes the water from the well in to the kitchen pump.

“At least
you’re
not going anywhere.”

He reloads and off he goes, following the wires, but first he shoots one more shot—at our jay. Misses. (That jay perched on Josephine’s head almost every time we left the cottage.)

I fear for her, but I fear for him, too.

I try to squeeze out of the cuff until my wrist is raw. I move the cuff up and down the pipe.

And then, thump, here is Josephine, right beside me, dropped from the roof. She gives me such a smile! As if she’d heard the shots and thought to find me lying dead and yet here I am alive. “Thank, thank, God, God, God, God!” she says. She throws her arms around me and kisses me hard right on the lips. This time there’s no irony in it.

She didn’t have to come back. She could have stayed lost in the woods. I’ll bet she has dozens of hiding places. I wouldn’t be surprised if she didn’t nest in the trees as chimpanzees do. I wouldn’t be surprised if she didn’t eat all sorts of leaves. We’ve already dined on nettles.

She gets a wrench from the kitchen and twists at the joint where the pipe enters the cottage. It’s so rusty it won’t move, but it does break and she slides the cuff off the end and I’m free.

She says, “Nobody knows he’s here.” There’s that sly look again.

“Are you sure?”

“Why else would he come alone? And with a pistol? He wants me. You he’ll kill and throw in the lake.”

Just what I was thinking to do with him.

“He used to come to me at night until I started running away.”

I’m shocked. Except…. Well,
maybe
, but it could be as ridiculous as that filthy fountain of youth.

“This is the perfect place for him. He’ll tie me to the bed and come here every weekend. Feed me nothing but oatmeal. I know him.”

Oatmeal—that part I know is true. It’s our usual breakfast at the Home.

“I couldn’t tell about it back there. Everybody thought I was too addled. They’d never believe me.”

That’s true, too. Even I don’t know what to believe.

We hear shots close by. And then a squawk. Might be one of our ravens that we’ve been putting food out for. (I know it’s only a raven, but it makes me angry. I may not be able to be as impartial as I wish to be.) Another shot, then lots of squawks. They’re defending their own. I’ve a good mind to head off in that direction and help them.

Josephine must see it on my face. She says, “Go.” I go. Weaponless except for my cane. Off into the woods with no sense of direction except raven calls. Like it or not I will be … I
am
her hero.

I tramp on mayapples and wild strawberry plants, mushrooms (toadstools I suppose), pass by a puffball and think, must remember where it is. The ravens stop. I stop. I listen. Without the ravens I have no direction to go in.

Yet I go on, more slowly now, listening between each step. I come upon a hut of leaves and branches, floor covered with a bed of ferns.

But why isn’t anything making any noise? Why not even the ravens? There’s just a stirring of leaves and the easygoing lapping of waves somewhere over on my left.

Then I hear him crashing towards me. I hunker down and wait and wonder what to do with no weapon except a cane. I think maybe crook it round his neck or trip him….I think how he’s a much bigger man than I am. Younger, too.

Instead of him I see a doe leap past. I hear a shot from right behind her. I’m thinking this is not a doe. Her mate was mounted on the wall and now lies on the floor. That deer head has looked at me with such suspicion all this time. I don’t know where these thoughts come from. I know that can’t be true. But then I see the glint of gold. Is the doe really wearing a long dangly earring or is it a trick of sun rays coming through the leaves in little spots of light? Did she wink? Or, rather, blink at me as she dashed by?

After the doe, here he comes. I no longer wonder if I should do this or that. I grab his leg as he goes by. I make him miss his second shot. How dare he! How dare, and even if the doe isn’t Josephine? How dare? And in our forest! I’m on top of him, fearless. There’s one more shot. First I’m thinking: Missed me! Then I’m thinking: He did it to himself.

It seems to me Josephine somehow choreographed the whole thing on purpose. Sent me off, then risked her life for… I don’t know what. Me I suppose.

By the time I find my way back to the cottage it’s dark, but, as I enter the clearing, it’s a dazzling, shiny dark with Josephine—my God!—above me, on the telephone wires again dancing to a background of the constellations, skirt and scarves billowing out, parasol…. Quite extraordinary. And dancing better than I ever saw her dance. It would have been a joy to everybody back at the Home. Alas that only I am here to see it.

“My love.” I finally dare to say it. “My only, ever and always love.”

She hears. She says, “I am your heart’s desire.”

Is that yet another joke or irony? But of course it’s simply real and true. I answer, “Indeed.” Indeed.

WISCON SPEECH

T
HIS IS MY FAVORITE
convention. No other like it. It’s the funniest.

These days I feel I should do a political speech. Or ecological speech, but I can’t do that. Maybe China will do it. This is all about me and some about writing.

(Sort of ad-libbed until here.)

I’ve heard three or four speeches here. I can’t remember exactly, but it seems like all those writers were good students. Well, now you’ll hear about a bad student. All my life a bad student. And I hated writing most of all. It was too hard.

One reason I was such a bad student is that, as a kid, I went back and forth to and from France. For a while it was back and forth every other year. I was eight-years-old in France, nine and ten here, then eleven in France, twelve back here … etc.