Spoonwood (18 page)

I decide that we should tour the Big Bend country. It's beautiful and practically empty of people. I'm thinking that maybe this is it, maybe this is going to be our home, because after the information from Cooty it's clear we can't go back to New Hampshire, let alone Forgot Farm.

“Dad, what is it like to watch TV?” Birch asks.

“It's like watching Cooty's aquarium.”

“When I was watching the fish, I remembered . . . I remembered.” Birch can't seem to get the words out.

“Yeah,” I say, encouraging him with a pat on the head.

“I remembered watching the fire when we were living at Forgot Farm.”

“What did you see?”

“I saw my mother.”

“She was in the fire?”

“No, behind it. She was safe, I was safe, but . . .” I fight back tears.

“But I pulled you away.”

“It's all right, Dad,” Birch says. Just then I spot what looks like a rental car in my rearview mirror. It's coming up on me fast. Up ahead is nothing but road as far as the eye can see, but I do spot a ranch road that appears to wind up into the mountains. The car pulls up beside us. The driver is a big man, the front-seat passenger a bigger man. In the rear is Garvin Prell. He's motioning me to pull over, and hollering something. Since my windows are rolled up to keep the air-conditioning in, I don't hear him.

I cut sharp onto the dirt ranch road and step on it. The car rockets past and the driver has some trouble with the U-turn, getting his wheels caught in some soft sand. He's spinning round and round, kicking up dust while I drive fast. The road grows considerably more bumpy and narrow. Three miles later the road dead-ends in a box canyon.

Birch and I get out of the van, and I grab my knapsack.

“Let's go,” I say, and we start up a foot trail. It too comes to an end. Hundreds of feet below I can see the car pulling up behind my van. I don't feel trapped or afraid or angry. My emotion is relief.

I sit down on a rock and Birch sits beside me. He senses my peculiar mood. I start making a speech. Even though I haven't thought about what I'm going to say, the words come out with inevitablity.

“This is probably the last time I'll be seeing you for quite a while,” I say. “You'll have new teachers, I'm sure. Make the most of your opportunities. Walk down the trail with your hands over your head. Garvin won't hurt you. You're too valuable to him.”

“What are you going to do, Dad?”

“Something I've been thinking about for a long time, since we left New York, actually.”

Birch starts walking down the trail with his hands up. I watch him until he's out of sight, then I reach into the knapsack and pull out a bottle of Old Crow. I unscrew the cap and take a long pull, and it's as if the last five years of abstinence was prepartion for this moment, this wonderful, serene moment.

I manage to get through a third of the bottle before Garvin arrives. I screw the cap back on, put the bottle in my knapsack, and greet him with a handshake. It's a surreal scene, not only because of my state of mind but because of the landscape—desert, big western sky.

On the return trip, Birch rides with the two bounty hunters; I ride in my van, shackled to a waist restraint on the passenger side. Garvin drives. Between us is my knapsack. For hours we say nothing to each other. We come out of the mountains on the flats, and I see pump jacks working the desert for oil.

“Permian basin,” I say.

“If you say so,” Garvin says.

“Don't you think that pump jacks look like dinosaurs?”

“I suppose.”

“Garvin,” I say.

“Yes.”

“I've been wondering for a long time.”

“Wondering what?”

“When Lilith and I started to get involved and we had that fight, she went to you, didn't she?”

“Maybe.”

“What do you mean, maybe?”

Garvin doesn't answer.

“Garvin, did you and Lilith—you know?”

“What difference does it make?”

“It makes a lot of difference and you know it. Birch—who does he belong to?”

“If you were in doubt all these years why did you spirit him off, why did you—how can I put this?—take pretty good care of him?”

“I'm not exactly sure. Strange, selfish needs maybe. Did you make love to her? Tell me the truth. You owe me that.”

Garvin hits the brakes and the van skids to a halt half on the shoulder, half on the road. Garvin unlocks my shackles. He starts shouting, not in anger, more in hysteria.

“I wish I knew, okay?” he says. “Okay! Listen, this thing has bothered me as much as it's bothered you.”

“I don't think so,” I snap back. “What do you mean, you wish you knew?”

Garvin settles back in the seat, raises his head, then drops it, burying it in his hands.

“Something was bothering her, she wouldn't tell me what, but it was more than you, okay?” Garvin says. “Me, I was in a bad state because my father had just died in my arms. In my arms! Okay? Lilith and I were drinking heavily and I'd taken some pills too. We made out, I know that much. When I woke up, I was hung over and she was gone. There's a big blank spot in my memory. Okay? Look, Katharine Ramchand and I are engaged to be married. I don't need any of this. As far as I'm concerned, you can have the kid.”

“Then why did you come after me?”

“For Persephone, to save her—understand? To save her.” He thumped himself over the heart.

The horror is that I do understand. Persephone and I both need Birch to stay sane. In which case she's been insane all these years. Now it's my turn.

“Garvin, I want you to do me one small favor.”

“Okay, what?”

“Let me have my bottle. It's in the knapsack.”

At that point the bounty hunter car has doubled back. The men come out of the vehicle with drawn guns.

“It's all right,” Garvin hollers. “We were just talking.”

Garvin puts the shackles back on my wrists but doesn't tie them down to my waist-restraint. He removes Old Crow from the knapsack, unscrews the cap. “Here,” he says. With two hands, like a baby at his bottle, I bring Old Crow to my lips. Birch, still
in the car, chooses that moment to turn his head and look at me. I don't care. I just want to kiss Old Crow.

The charges against Dad include income tax evasion (Dad kept no records, but Brewster Wiley did), child endangerment, failure to register a minor for education, and illegal woodcutting on the Salmon Forest Trust Conservancy. The Statute of Lamentations never expires.

Dad pleads guilty to all charges. He's forced to pay his taxes and a fine, reducing his finances to zero. In addition, he's sentenced to nine months in a minimum security prison. “I must be pregnant again,” he tells the judge. Or so I was told, because I was not allowed to attend the trial. Dad is barred from making contact with me until I am eighteen years old, and then it will be my decision if I want to see him.

I go to live with Grandma Purse and her niece, Katharine Ramchand, who is now Assistant Professor of Social Geology at Keene State College. Grandma Purse and her lawyers fought to gain custody of me over Grandma Elenore and Grandpa Howard. The judge allows me one day a week with the Elmans—Sundays. It's kind of interesting to be the center of attention, but I wouldn't want to go through that experience again. You see, unlike everybody else I love, I an not—repeat,
NOT
—mad at anybody.

Everything is different for me. Instead of living on the road in a black van with crazy F. Spoonwood Latour, I'm in a mansion with crazy Persephone Butterworth Salmon. This is the part where the poor little rich boy is supposed to get all sad, but it isn't like that at all. I love my mansion. I love Grandma Purse—she's good to me. And she's fun. She drives so fast that our gardener, Roland LaChance, wears his sleep mask so he doesn't have to see the road. Grandma Purse likes to speed whether behind the wheel of her vintage Bronco or of the snowmobile she owns with the souped-up carburetion.

When I saw Dad drinking again I lost contact with Dad's thoughts. During the nine months Dad is in prison it's as if he does not exist in the material world but is only a collection of my memories. My therapist believes my recent change in thinking represents progress. I guess I don't know what progress is. Mother, I'm lonely sometimes, empty in a strange way. I don't miss Dad. I miss myself. I'm not all there.

Upper Darby has changed in the years Dad and I were on the road. Many local people have left town to start new lives in new places. Nearly all the farms on River Road have been sold to make way for house lots. Darby Depot's shantytown has mutated into a trailer park. In Upper Darby the old family estates have been subdivided, the big houses remodeled or even torn down and new ones built by new people. For example, the Prell property is no more since Garvin was killed on his bicycle by a hit and run driver. Dad was in jail at the time—pretty good alibi; even so, Grandma Purse believes that somehow he did it, hired a hit man or something. Of course I know Dad didn't do it, because I know how he thinks. I wonder if you and Garvin see each other in heaven.

My granduncle, Monet Salmon, tore down his old estate and built what Grandma Purse scornfully refers to as a post-maudlin house. It looks like a giant New England farmhouse collided and merged architecturally with a Victorian house and a modernist house. It has fake Greek pillars, lots of skylights, and wild colors—pink, purple, yellow. Inside everything is painted white, except the hardwood floors. Granduncle Monet Salmon appears to be the only Upper Darby scion who is richer now than he was ten years ago. He says he's been lucky in the stock market. Grandma Purse thinks that his wife, who is from Brazil, is the real moneybags behind Monet's success. At any rate the source of Granduncle Monet's money is a question mark.

Granduncle Monet is second in command to Grandma Purse on the Salmon Forest Trust Conservancy Governing Board. She's the chair, he's the vice-chair, and everybody else on the board is a flunky. I don't know much about what goes on at the meetings,
but I know that Grandma Purse has no use for Granduncle Monet and vice versa. She calls him “Fuckbump.”

Grandma Purse and Granduncle Monet do have one thing in common. They both have spouses living south of the equator. Granduncle Monet is a frequent flyer to South America, where his wife operates an import-export business. Two or three times a year Grandma Purse hops a jet to Tasmania to be with her second husband, Professor Hadly Blue. I stay behind with Katharine.

Our house, the Salmon mansion, is still the biggest in Darby. It's hotel-sized, “restored to its former glories,” in Grandma Purse's words. She and her lawyers found a loophole in the charter of the trust, and she sold off all of Grace Pond and its environs to an international conglomerate, which established an entirely new part of Upper Darby—Blue Heron Village. A hundred or so homes were built in the woods overlooking the pond. Lot owners pay to maintain the roads, get rid of the trash, etc. Only certain designs and color schemes are allowed, and trailers and junked cars are banned. Despite the rules and dues, people flock to buy up these lots and build their dream houses.

My mansion is gigantic, with separate entrances, so days go by when I don't see Katharine. Besides teaching she's writing a book about stone walls. She tutors me twice a week in math and science. My therapist says I am not ready to play with other children. Dad brought me up to be suspicious of the younger generation, and I have to admit that on this point I think Dad was right on. The behavior and thinking apparatus of young children appall me.

I love my mansion. Every room is an adventure, beginning with the library. I am determined to read every book. I like the pool room too, where in olden days the men would retire to smoke cigars and play with their balls. It has great big parlors with fireplaces wide enough to burn four-foot-long cordwood. In those “days of yore,” as Grandma Purse puts it, the mansion was maintained by a staff of more than a dozen people. Grandma Purse has a staff of three. Soapy Rayno is our cook; her husband, Roland LaChance, is our gardener and handyman; and Katharine
is Grandma Purse's personal assistant. Katharine has her own suite of rooms on our bedroom level, floor two, but Soapy and Roland live on the third floor in what used to be the servants' quarters—small, cramped rooms, but a lot of them. Once a month a custodial crew from Keene shows up and cleans the place. Even with a reduced staff, the house is expensive to keep up. Heat alone costs a small fortune. The property taxes are high, and there is always a carpenter or a roofer or a plumber or an electrician or a house painter on the premises to keep up appearances.

My room is on the second floor beside Grandma Purse's. It had been your dad's room. I like the huge desk, the surprisingly small bed, the bookshelves, and a closet big enough to park the Bronco or a bronco in. On the dresser is a picture of your dad. It's easy to see why local people called him the Squire. He was tall, handsome, square-jawed, and square-shouldered, wearing country casuals. Grandma Purse says I am the spitting image of him, but I don't see any resemblance. I discover a secret compartment in my room behind the bookshelves. Inside is a safe. I apply mind over matter to open the safe but have no luck.

I don't have a shaving horse in my room, but I do have a couple of knives and a spoon gouge that our gardener found for me, and I carve spoons when I can't sleep. The work is not the same without Dad to encourage me. It's just a habit. I don't finish the spoons, because Dad never told me his secret oil/wax formula. I keep the spoons in a dresser drawer. Maybe when I'm eighteen and can see Dad again I will give him my spoons to sell.

Grandma Purse says I can do whatever I want with my room, so I draw a submarine across one wall—about twelve feet long—and paint it yellow. Instead of drawing a blue ocean as a home for the submarine I draw some hardwoods, green in high summer—birch trees, maples, red oaks. There's a song about a yellow submarine, but I don't want to hear it because I'm afraid it would ruin my own idea that the yellow submarine is a reminder of the good old days at Forgot Farm, when Dad and I lived in harmony and happiness in a yellow school bus.