Northern Borders (34 page)

“Helen, you stay here and keep an eye on her,” my grandmother said as the two attendants carried her out of the house on a stretcher. She meant Old Josie, who continued to wring her apron and invoke the assistance of the Holy Family on behalf of my grandmother. So while my great-aunt baby-sat Josie, I rode to the hospital in the back of the speeding ambulance with Gram and the volunteer fireman from the village who was administering oxygen to her.

At the hairpin bend partway down the Fiddler's Elbow, where years ago Theresa Dubois had lost her silver dollar in a snowbank, my grandmother grasped my wrist.

With her other hand she lifted the oxygen mask. “Tell the driver to slow down, Tut. There's no need to kill us all.”

The ambulance driver, a man with dark jowls and a put-upon expression, cranked his head around for a fraction of a second. “What'd she say?”

“Step on it,” I told him. “She said step on it.”

He nodded and slued the ambulance out of the switchback at the foot of the Elbow. On the flats approaching the Currier farm I looked over his shoulder at the speedometer. The red needle was vibrating just under one hundred. Out the window, Ben Currier came chugging down his roadside hayfield on his ancient green Allis-Chalmers tractor. As we went screaming past him he started to lift one gloved hand, then dropped it to the tractor steering wheel again, as though unsure about the protocol of waving to an ambulance carrying one of his neighbors to the hospital.

Now we were shrieking along the edge of the central green in Kingdom Common; now racing up U.S. Route Five toward Memphremagog at a flat one hundred and ten miles per hour. Shimmering heat mirages danced on the highway ahead of us, imparting an air of unreality to the morning and the ambulance ride. How could any of this be happening to my indomitable grandmother? I felt as though I'd stumbled into another dimension, one from which I might never return.

In a matter of minutes we skidded up to the emergency entrance of the Hospital of Mary, Blessed Queen of the Border Country: the hospital my Little Aunt Klee had selected for my grandmother a year ago, after Gram had sustained a gall bladder attack. But today my grandmother was having none of the Blessed Border Queen. Looking out of the ambulance window and seeing the serene, blue-robed plaster statue over the emergency door, arms extended in benign welcome, she brushed the oxygen mask aside again and said distinctly, “County.” Meaning that she was to be taken to the county hospital on the other side of town.

And that is pretty much the way the relentlessly hot and arid summer of 1959 had gone for the Kittredge family.

 

Back in June, when my grandmother's gall bladder threatened to act up again, my Little Aunt Klee arrived from New York where she and Freddi were pursuing their Off-Broadway acting careers by working as counter girls in various Off-Broadway cafeterias. Immediately the entire household had been thrown into the state of tumultuous disarray that inevitably accompanied Klee's visits. In 1959, besides a nearly round-the-clock regimen of papering and painting several remote upper bedchambers that no one had slept in regularly for twenty-five or thirty years, Klee fought tooth and nail to get Gram to allow electricity to be installed at the house as a labor-saving device to prevent her from working herself into the ground, as Klee put it. Of course my grandmother refused even to consider such an innovation. In the first place, she had worked herself into the ground all her life and was not about to stop now. Moreover, she harbored a deep fear of burning up in her bed in a fire caused by faulty wiring, and had not one good word to say about either electricity or any electrical appliances. In desperation my little aunt paid for the wiring herself, but my grandmother had the last word after all by refusing to allow anyone to use it after it was hooked up.

My grandfather, in the meantime, was retreating further each week into the isolation of his work in the woods. Once again this summer he and I were cutting brush off the clearing marking the American-Canadian Line along the northern border of Kingdom
County. After Klee's arrival he stayed overnight in Labrador more often than not.

Not that Gram didn't have plenty of help at home if only she could be persuaded to avail herself of it. My Great-Aunt Helen, whose husband had died the previous year, had more or less moved in that summer. Dad faithfully drove up from White River Junction once a week, and of course there was always Old Josie.

Old Josie, for the record, was the most recent of a succession of housekeepers hired by Dad and my two little aunts since Gram's first gall bladder trouble. I remember them now as a featureless string of widowed and maiden women in their fifties and sixties, smelling faintly of sweat and strong yellow soap, with names as drab and sad as their personal histories: Mrs. Brown, Mrs. Gray, Mrs. Quick—here was a misnomer if one ever existed—and Old Josie, whose last name I don't believe I ever did know. They were supposed to prevent my grandmother from working herself into the ground, but didn't, for the simple reason that she refused to allow them to do a tap of housework.

“Whatever else she may be or may not be, Old Josie is no housekeeper,” my grandmother had said with a heavy sigh several times a week since Josie's arrival. “She is thoroughly incompetent.”

How Gram knew this was beyond me, though, since she continued to insist on doing every last stroke of housework herself. Yet in the end, I have no doubt that, more than any other factor, it was the onslaught of the cluster flies that resulted in her heart attack.

First singly, next by the dozens, finally in vast legions, a veritable plague of them came swarming out of the walls of the old house, starting in early August, soon after Little Aunt Klee's return to New York. Slightly smaller than an ordinary housefly and slightly darker, they began to emerge about eight o'clock in the morning. By noon you could hear their maddening buzz from any place in the house. They congregated by the thousands on the inside windowsills and along the wide baseboards; even after my grandmother had swept up the last invaders of the day, around six in the evening, we could hear their incessant humming from somewhere deep within the walls of the farmhouse, like an alarm clock someone had forgotten to shut off in some faraway upper chamber.

To repel this scourge, my grandmother resorted to every conceivable stratagem. She stopped up the cracks in the window casings and along the baseboards with pliable felt weather stripping, which proved to be no deterrent to the flies at all. From the hardware store in the Common she purchased a bright green, pump-handled bug sprayer, which Aunt Helen promptly dubbed the Bomb. The Bomb held three full quarts of a popular DDT solution. Armed with this virulent infusion, my grandmother saturated the windowsills and baseboards with the dispassionate ruthlessness of a veteran crop duster. She retraced her path of destruction with broom and dustpan, sweeping up thousands of victims, whose tiny corpses she consigned to the outside burning barrel. Yet invariably, by the time she completed bombing the farthest-back bedroom, fresh reinforcements of cluster flies were overrunning the kitchen. For weeks on end the entire house reeked of the sweetish, lethal odor of DDT, but the flies kept coming, numberless as the hordes of Genghis Khan.

Not that my grandmother was ever less than a formidable adversary, her gall bladder troubles notwithstanding. Some years earlier she had waged war with glorious results against an army of shiny black carpenter ants that had filed in endless procession out of the woodshed, across the kitchen floor, and under the door of Egypt, only to disappear there beneath the floorboards. Equipped with a treacherous homemade decoction of rose water laced with arsenic, which the Borgias themselves might have coveted, my grandmother quickly thinned down the ranks of the ants to a few stunned survivors.

Over the decade that I had lived with her and my grandfather, Gram had also put to rout a dynasty of white-footed field mice, several swarms of irascible blue hornets, and an untidy colony of little brown bats, not to mention half a dozen wintering red squirrels that had taken up residence in the attic some years ago.

No matter. Unimpressed, the cluster flies just kept coming. I suppose it was ironical, if you could only look at it that way. Here was my grandmother, unvanquished by the Depression and its interminable aftermath in Kingdom County, unvanquished by the border country's notorious seven-month winters, unvanquished by the ongoing ordeals of alternately nurturing and chivvying her family
through every imaginable vicissitude of rural life and by forty years of unabated rivalry with the meanest old bastard in Kingdom County, about to be brought to her knees at last by a swarm of little flies.

“To win is all, Tut,” my grandmother had told me many times. Now she seemed on the brink of losing one of the great battles of her life.

Apparently the cluster flies had been there in the walls of the farmhouse all along, biding their time like seventeen-year locusts. It was as though they had been waiting, like the instruments of some malevolent and unfathomable design, until my grandmother was at her weakest, worn down by the years and by her troublesome gall bladder, by Little Aunt Klee's recent visit, by Old Josie, the housekeeper whom she refused to allow to keep house, by the unprecedented three-month hot spell in which the fields turned brown in June, the river dwindled to a small stream by July, and the spring that supplied water to both the house and barn was now threatening to run dry for the first time since Sojourner Kittredge discovered it in the summer of 1775. Only then did the flies issue forth, rarely flying anywhere at all but rather reclining on their backs with their legs in the air and buzzing like swarming bees until we imagined that we could hear them not only all day but all night as well, whether we actually did or not.

After the failure of the felt weather stripping and the Bomb, Aunt Helen somehow prevailed upon Gram to avail herself of the electrical outlets my Little Aunt Klee had caused to be installed earlier in the summer, and the Hoover vacuum cleaner my little aunts and my father had purchased for her soon after the arrival of the flies. The Hoover, as we called it, was a gigantic old-fashioned floor model with a heavy canvas dust bag the size of a tackling dummy. Gram had not used it once, of course, any more than she had used a lamp or toaster or any other appliance powered by the invisible current she believed would inevitably result in a fire that would burn up the house and us in our beds along with it. Now, in desperation, she turned to the Hoover as a last resort.

Seventy years old, weighing no more than ninety pounds, still
recovering from her latest bout with her gall bladder, my grandmother charged through the house with the vacuum cleaner, from downstairs to upstairs and back downstairs again, in relentless pursuit of her tiny adversaries. Overnight, to Hoover-up became a common verb in our family. All day long my grandmother Hoovered-up flies. The infernal machine weighed a ton, and although I lugged it up and down the stairs for Gram when I was around, I all but had to wrest it out of her hands to do so.

Please, could I Hoover-up the flies? Hardly. I had my sashaying grandfather to keep track of. Couldn't Aunt Helen? Preposterous. Aunt Helen, though younger than my grandmother and in excellent health, was getting on in years. The heat of the dog days might do for her; how would we feel then?

Well, what about Old Josie? Old Josie, her quaint cognomen notwithstanding, was scarcely fifty, and as strong as most men. Wasn't housecleaning what Gram had hired her to do? Out of the question, Tut. For whatever else she might or might not be, Old Josie was no housekeeper. Old Josie was thoroughly incompetent and everyone knew it. Even Old Josie herself seemed to be in no doubt at all about her unmitigated incompetence, since each time my grandmother made this declaration, Josie wrung her apron and nodded her head in sad concurrence.

To this day I can see the four of us. My grandmother in the vanguard, manhandling the Hoover along with its business end roaring like some horrendous implement of war. Next comes Old Josie, kerchiefed and aproned—Why? My grandmother never permitted her to so much as boil water for coffee or swab out a frying pan—trailing along in the Hoover's wake, fingering a string of rosary beads of a sickly-pink hue. Here I am, bearing yards of extension cord, since there were no outlets upstairs. And finally my merry great-aunt, rolling her eyes and inclining her head at the same time that she was scared to death that my grandmother was about to have a heart attack.

“For God's sake, Mom, can't you ease up?” my father said one afternoon when he arrived from White River in time to witness this memorable procession returning to the kitchen from a futile Hoovering-up expedition.

“No, I cannot ease up,” Gram said. “Not until every last cluster fly is eradicated from this house.”

This, then, is how matters stood on the steamy August morning when my grandfather and I got back from the village with a new chain saw blade and I went inside for a glass of water before I headed back to the woods with him, and met my grandmother hell-bent for election on her way out of the kitchen with the Hoover. According to Aunt Helen, who told me the whole story afterward, Gram had been in the summer kitchen slicing com off the cob for canning when, in a horrible moment of epiphany, she had somehow or other divined that the perpetual night-and-day buzzing of the flies must be coming from the farmhouse attic.

The attic! Without hesitation she lugged the Hoover through the house and upstairs. One step at a time, she heaved that behemoth of a vacuum cleaner up the winding attic staircase, with me unwinding the extension cords behind her, and Old Josie hovering at the foot of the stairs next to Aunt Helen with her hands over her eyes, beseeching the Holy Family for protection. My grandmother took one quick look at the high attic windows under the east and west peaks of the roof. The panes were blackened with cluster flies and the floor beneath was crawling with them.

She switched on the Hoover and made straight for the nearer, west window. Past the ruined horsehair sofas and heaps of disabled wooden chairs and tables. Past the antiquated foot warmers and bed warmers and the porcelain washbasins and pitchers and the vast old chamber pots my grandfather insisted on calling thunder mugs. Past the boxes of children's books I now considered myself too grown-up to read, until, just a few feet from the window, my grandmother stopped short and, unaccountably, turned back.