Broken Vessels
Authors: Andre Dubus
Broken Vessels
Essays
Andre Dubus
to Geoffrey Moran and his Grace
I am abidingly grateful to Ann Beattie, E. L. Doctorow, Gail Godwin, John Irving, Stephen King, Tim O'Brien, Jayne Anne Phillips, John Updike, Kurt Vonnegut, and Richard Yates. On five Sunday afternoons in the winter of 1987, they read from their work at the ballroom of the Charles Hotel in Cambridge, Massachusetts, to raise money for me and my family, after I was struck by a car and lost a leg. And I am grateful to all those people who came to the benefit readings and to those who mailed checks to me in the year following my injury, and to Scott Downing and Frieda Arkin. All of this kindness saved me from financially going under, and made me feel, during a very bad time, that I had hundreds of friends I didn't even know
.
Memory, like love, is an act of imagination, an
abandonment and a possession
.
SUSAN DODD,
MAMAW
C
ONTENTS
O
UR FIRST YEAR
in New England we lived in a very old house in southern New Hampshire. The landlord wanted someone to live in it while he was working out of the state, the rent was a hundred dollars a month, the house was furnished, had seven fireplaces (two of them worked), and in the backyard was a swimming pool. There were seventy acres of land, most of it wooded except for a long meadow, hilly enough for sledding. There were also three dogs, eight sheep, and a bed of roses. There was a caretaker too, whom I will call Jim: a man in his early thirties, who lived in town where he did other work and came to the house often to see about the lawn, the pump for the swimming pool, the sheep, and the roses. The landlady wanted the roses there when she came home after the year, and the landlord wanted the sheep. They were eight large ewes, and he bred them.
They were enclosed by a wire fence in a large section of the meadow. They had a shed there too, where they slept. All we had to do about them was make sure they didn't get through the fence, which finally meant that when they got through, we had to catch them and put them back in the pasture. This was my first encounter with sheep. When I was a boy, sheep had certain meanings: in the Western movies, sheep herders interfered with the hero's cattle; or the villain's ideas about his grazing rights interfered with the hero's struggle to raise his sheep. And Christ had called us his flock, his sheep; there were pictures of him holding a lamb in his arms. His face was tender and loving, and I grew up with a sense of those feelings, of being a source of them: we were sweet and lovable sheep. But after a few weeks in that New Hampshire house, I saw that Christ's analogy meant something entirely different. We were stupid helpless brutes, and without constant watching we would foolishly destroy ourselves.
The sheep did not want to leave their pasture, at least not for long and not to go very far. One would find a hole in the fence, slip out, then circle the pasture, trying to get back in. The others watched her. Someone in our family would shout the alarm, and we'd all go outside to chase her. At first we tried herding the ewe back toward the hole in the fence, standing in the path of this bolting creature, trying to angle her back, as we closed the circle the six of us made, closed it tighter and tighter until she was backed against the fence, and the hole she was trying to find. But she never went back through the hole, never saw it, and all our talking and pointing did no good. Finally we gave up, simply chased her over the lawn, around the swimming pool, under trees and through underbrush until one of us got close enough, dived, and tackled. Then three of us would lift her and drop her over the fence, and we'd get some wire and repair the hole. For a while this was fun, but soon our tackling was angry, and some of us punched her in the jaw as we lay on top of her.
One day in that first summer I looked into the shed and saw one of them lying on her side. The others were grazing in the pasture. Next afternoon she was still lying there; I stood at the fence and looked more closely, saw that her mouth was open, her head at a strange angle. I didn't have to look anyway, because by then her stench was on the breeze. I phoned Jim, and he said next day he'd come out and we'd bury her. That evening her smell was in the air over the swimming pool and, closer to the house, it mingled with the aroma of burning charcoal on the patio. So we took the food inside and after dinner I filled a bucket with solid chlorine we sprinkled in the pool. Out in the dark I went through the pasture gate, trying to see the other sheep under the starlit sky. I imagined them huddled upwind from the smell, sleeping out there until someone came and removed death from their shed. The shed was open at its front, but there was a door at the back leading to a narrow platform. I did not want to go through that door, into a place where in the dark I would be alone. I held my breath, opened the door, and stepped in: then the shed was filled with sound and I released my breath, inhaled again in an instant of terror that was suddenly outrage as I saw the other seven sheep rising quickly from where they had been sleeping, around the dead ewe. They ran through the open front, into the light from the sky. They were looking back at me, over their shoulders, and in the pale light their faces looked abject, looked caught, as if they too knew they were more obscene than all the words I was now screaming at them.
When Jim came next day he brought two cigars and we lit them and went to the shed. She was long dead. We both gagged and turned away, then got an old piece of tarpaulin from his pick-up truck. I had phoned him the night before, after going out there and returning to the kitchen and many beers, and said: Jim, let's burn that thing. We need fire. We need
cleansing
. He had brought a mixture of motor oil and gasoline, saying the oil would thicken the gasoline, make it burn longer. We went back to the shed and, puffing cigars and averting eyes, we pulled the ewe onto the tarpaulin. We gagged again, left the shed, then went back in and dragged her far into the pasture, covered her with sticks, then dead fallen branches, then larger ones, and soaked them and her, then threw a paper torch: the gasoline-whoosh, the quick crackling of sticks and small branches, the sudden heat on our faces, and thick black smoke. The smoke stayed in the air for two days; she took that long to burn. When the fire died in daylight, I went out with more branches and the oil and gasoline and started a new one. On the first night we could see the low flames from our windows. By the second night she was gone.
“Probably a fox got her,” Jim said, that morning of the burning. “Or a wolf.”
“No wolves around here.”
“Could be. Anyway, a fox. Come through the fence and bit her and she bled to death.”
There was no blood on the ground, or in the shed, or on the ewe, but I said nothing; the image of a running fox was a lovely one to have that morning, as we sucked on our cigars.
Neither of us had known how long it would take for the ewe to burn. We buried the next one. This was the following spring. They escaped from their pasture in winter too, and wanted to get back to it, and before we tackled them we slipped and fell a lot, and more of us punched their faces as we lay on top of them in the snow and, when we had the strength, we swung them back and forth, holding their legs â one, two,
three
â and flung them over the fence. In spring the roses bloomed and one night all seven sheep got out. We looked from the dinner table and saw them eating the roses, and tenant-fear hurried us outside, to kick and push and pull at those woolly hulks, to shout: No no not her roses. They ran around the lawn while we dived at them, missed them, caught them, pulled them kicking toward the fence, and always they got away. It was a warm night, we were sweating, and we had not finished dinner. We were outnumbered seven to six, and our sixth was four years old. We gave up and went inside to eat. But we kept watching them through the windows.
“They've moved down the lawn.”
“Have they?”
“They've left the roses, they're just eating the grass now.”
“Except one.”
“One?”
“One just went back to the roses.”
I went to my den where a twelve gauge double-barreled shotgun hung on the wall. I loaded one barrel with bird shot, stepped outside, and aimed at the rump of the rose-eater. When I fired she stopped eating and looked at me. Then she looked at her rump. Then she started eating again. The other sheep had looked up too, and were grazing now. I put up the gun and went back to the table, muttering about sheep not even having the sense to know when they're being shot at. After dinner, a child said: “Something's wrong with the one you shot.”
I looked out the back door. The six grazers were still eating grass; the rose-eater lay on her side, one hind leg sticking upward. I went to her, and crouched. There was blood at her nostrils, and she was not breathing.
“God damn you, don't you die. Do you hear me?” I stood and kicked her. “Don't you dare die on me, Goddamnit.” I kicked her again, and she rolled over.
I phoned Jim.
“I'd better come out,” he said.
I waited in the backyard, waited out there with beer and guilt and guesses at how much I was going to owe the landlord for my miscalculation about what a number seven shot would do to such a big animal with all that wool on her flesh. Jim came in his pick-up; his twelve-year-old daughter was with him, and when she climbed down from the cab he held up his hand.
“You better wait here,” he said, and she got into the cab again.
He squatted over the ewe, felt her chest, and told me she was dead.
“We'll bury her in the morning,” he said. “Might's well get the others back in the pasture. Let's drag this one down by the trees.”
We dragged her down the sloping lawn to a small clump of pines. Then he called to his daughter and I called to my family and we caught the others one at a time and dropped them over the fence. Jim found the hole and closed it and went home, and I went inside to explain to children about bird shot and trying to get her away from the roses, and to drink beer with my wife and wonder what we'd tell the landlord and how we would pay him.
Next morning Jim and I dug a grave beside the ewe. The earth was hard, and when we had a hole deep enough for her to fill, we rolled her into it. We covered her with a mound, then Jim said: “Something might dig her up. We can use stones, like they do out west.”
We carried large stones from the meadow and woods until the grave was covered.
“I guess I've got a letter to write,” I said. “And I guess the next one I write will have to include a check.”
“Oh? Why's that?”
I pointed at the grave.
“Oh, no, don't write him a letter, and don't tell it in town either. We're both lucky on this one.”
“Lucky?”
“Sure. I was supposed to have them bred this winter, and didn't get around to it. I'll tell him this was the only one that took, and she up and died in childbirth. The lamb too.”