Church of the Dog (22 page)

“I can’t believe we pulled this off,” I say, looking out over the ranch and then back at everyone. And that’s when I realize I could never sell this place. This ranch is more than land and cattle and my past. This ranch is family and stories and community and who I have become. I look at all my friends and blink back my gratitude. “Thank you all so much for being here. Here’s to you.” I lift my beer.

“Cheers,” everyone says.

I like to think Grandpa is watching and that he’s proud of us.

I assemble my tripod and camera, and this time I jump into the picture with everyone else.

Minda slides a smoked salmon and green onion omelet onto a plate for me. I am going to miss her cooking. Actually, I’m just plain going to miss her. “Are you going to be okay here without us?” she asks.

“Yeah,” I say even though I don’t want them to go.

Paul descends the stairs, drops his bag, and joins us in the kitchen. “Coffee. Must have coffee,” he says like a caveman, and he makes his way to the coffeepot. “Rob! Robert! Roberto! Come on, buddy. The clock is ticking!”

Rob comes down the stairs, sets his bag down near the door, and sits at the kitchen table with us. “Oh, Minda’s omelets! Heck yes!”

“Hey, listen, guys, I have something to tell you,” I say. “I realized yesterday that I can’t sell this place.”

Minda looks down at her coffee cup, Paul keeps his eyes on his omelet, but Rob looks directly at me. “You’d be an idiot to sell this place.”

I smile at him and nod, appreciative of his support.

“Can I come back for branding next year?” he asks.

“I’ll count on it,” I say.

“I’ll come back, too,” Paul says. He takes another bite and says, “Man, we’re going to miss you.”

“Aren’t you going to be lonely here?” Minda asks.

“Sometimes,” I say. “But there’s a lot of people here who care about me.”

“But aside from Mara, I don’t really see any female companion prospects for you here,” she says.

“You mean you’re not going to come back and marry me?” I only half-joke.

“Well, I’ll think about it, but the skiing isn’t very good here,” she says.

“No, not right here,” I admit. “You know, Alaska wasn’t crawling with prospects, either. I think my odds are actually better here. All I have to do is put the word out, and everyone in town would be looking for prospective brides for me.” I laugh just picturing the church ladies calling all their out-of-town relatives to see if they know anyone. It happens.

“If you get lonely, come up and visit us, okay?” Minda says.

“I’ll be up in a month to pack up my room and clean,” I say.

“He’s going to clean?” Rob says, alarmed.

“Dear God,” Paul says with concern and awe.

“I’ll help you,” Minda offers.

“That’s love,” Rob says. “I, for one, will be glad to be on the boat by then.”

“Amen,” Paul agrees.

“We’ll get through it together,” Minda says to me. “Okay, cowboys, time to load up and head out.”

Paul and Rob shove the rest of their food in their mouths, get up, and pick up their bags. I pick up Minda’s suitcase and walk them all to their car. Paul and Rob each give me a quick hug, say good-bye, and get in the car. Minda puts her crutches in the backseat and then gives me her good-bye hug.

“If you need anything, anything at all, don’t hesitate to call me, okay? I’ll be around this summer. I can be here if you need me,” she says.

I kiss her cheek as I let her go. “You’re the best, Minda. Thanks. Thanks for being here.” Then I tousle her hair like I would a little sister. “Go catch your plane.”

“Much love to you, sweet guy,” she says as she touches her heart.

“Much love to you, too,” I say back. I’ve never said
love
to anyone other than my grandparents or parents before. I’m surprised how naturally it came out.

She gets in the car and shuts the door. Rob backs it up, turns it around, and drives away down the driveway. I hold up my arm and wave as they go. My stomach hurts. I want to cry, but I don’t. Instead, I turn around, take a deep breath, and think about chores to distract myself. And for the first time I seriously consider letting the church ladies fix me up.

Something interesting is happening. My students have started traveling with me in the dream realm at night.

Take last night, for example. I don’t know where I was. In my dream I was walking down a busy street in one of those skimpy tennis outfits with my tennis racket on my way to go play tennis. That’s all I remember. It struck me as odd since I don’t play tennis.

I didn’t think much more about it until Emily came in seventh period and said, “Oh, Ms. O’Shaunnessey, I had the funniest dream last night. You, me, Kevin, and Nate were all playing tennis. Then my mom came to pick me up, and I had to go.”

“Was I any good at it?” I ask.

“Well, you and I beat the boys,” she replies, pleased with herself.

I smile. “I had a dream I was walking to tennis courts in a tennis outfit and with a racket. I was walking down a four-lane busy street. Do you know where we were?”

“No.”

“Let’s ask Kevin if he remembers his dream. Don’t tell him about yours until we see what he says.”

A few minutes later Kevin comes to class. “Hey, Kevin, do you remember your dream last night?” Emily asks him.

He thinks, says, “Oh, yeah,” and laughs. “I dreamt I threw a tennis ball at a moose and knocked it out.”

Nate didn’t remember his dream, but I’ve had several travel dreams with Nate in them. Once he even showed up in the Church of the Dog in hologram form in the middle of the night. He never remembers.

In my dream I’m driving this other teacher’s minivan down the road, singing “This Little Light of Mine” at the top of my lungs. I pass a bicyclist and wave. That’s it. I wake up and think what a stupid dream, but when I see that teacher at work, I tell her about it anyway, expecting her to find it funny.

Instead, she looks at me, puzzled, and says, “That’s so weird, because I have this tape of a gospel choir singing that song, and it’s the kids’ favorite. We listen to it all the time in the car and sing along.”

I am eight years old in Dad’s sixty-four green Ford pickup, comfortably squished between my parents. The first snow has begun to fall, coating the icy road that winds around the canyons between Pendleton and Three Hills. Mom begins to sing “Let It Snow” in exuberance because in the quiet winter Dad gets a break from planting and harvesting wheat for two or three short months, and we all get to spend time together.

The snowflakes get thicker, hitting our windshield one after another. Dad creeps along, straining to see through the thick waves of snow. “Oh, God” is the last thing he says before Mom throws herself in front of me. We hit the deer, bounce off, slide and spin on the ice, and then roll over the edge of the highway and down, down, down. Time slows. Mom grips me tighter, sheltering me with her whole body. I smell the carnation perfume Dad and I gave her for her birthday just weeks before. The truck rolls one, two, three, a hundred times before it comes to rest on its roof. I close my eyes and don’t move, still engulfed in my mother’s embrace. My parents are silent and still. I keep my eyes shut.

The next morning I open my eyes to see myself completely covered in blood, though I don’t know whose. Grandpa calls to us from the road high above. This is when I scream. I scream and scream, shaking in my mother’s cold embrace. I don’t remember what happened after that.

It occurs to me that if Mara is right: If this camera is how I relate to the world, maybe I need to go back to that moment when my life changed. Maybe I need to photograph that and make some sense of it.

Today I drive out the old road that goes to Pendleton and stop where we went off the edge. I park on the other side, the side that cuts into the hill. I get out and take a picture of the place. I stand at the top and imagine how Grandpa must have felt looking down at the Ford. I half-run, half-slide down the hill as he must have done, past the shards of our shattered windows, still there after all this time. I see an old tailpipe and photograph it. At the bottom I stop near what was left of the old Ford. They never figured out how to get it out of there.

I sit down for a while and talk to Mom and Dad until I sob. I tell them about all the guilt I’ve had for so long as the only survivor, the one who survived because his mother sheltered him, took the blows for him, gave her life for him.

I tell them how my life has been, how I’ve run away from everything—everything from the circuit finals to love—and how now my life is so empty, and I feel just as numb as I did the moment they left. I tell them how worthless a life like this is to me, and I ask them, if they can hear me, if they would please help me change it, if they would please help me find my way, if they would please help me experience love. I sit, arms around myself, and rock back and forth, eyes closed, remembering how it felt to be with them, remembering their comfort.

After a while—I have no idea how long—I get up, photograph the old Ford from several angles, and finally make my way back up to the road.

In my dream Earl shows up in mechanic’s overalls. “Listen, tell Dan that his problem is his second fuel filter. It’s under the front wheel well. He’ll need a special tool to get to it.”

Whitey and Dan are working on Dan’s Ford pickup. I hear Whitey mumble “dadgum” a lot.

“Hey,” I say. “I had this dream last night where Earl told me to tell you that the problem lies in your second fuel filter. He said it’s under the wheel well, and you’ll need a special tool to get to it.”

Of course they laugh at me. “Second fuel filter?” they say, puzzled. “Ever hear of a second fuel filter?” Lots of head shaking, and then when they think I’m not looking, they check under the wheel well.

Dan is on his way to NAPA to get a new fuel filter for an ’88 Ford 250 and the special tool to install it.

Of all the teachers that intrigue me, I think the kindergarten and first-grade teachers intrigue me most. They are a different breed. They are, more than any others, the teachers of conformity, discipline, and structure. Yet they are also perhaps the most sensitive and kind. While I do not value conformity or structure, and this is an understatement, I believe these people must’ve thrived in it, were successful at it, and want to share the joy of conformity and structure with others. What amuses me is how they are commanding with soft, gentle, patient voices.

Sally is leaving the building at the same time I am. “Sally,” I say, “I’m going to build a Harley, and on the day I retire, I’m going to wear black leather shorts that are entirely too revealing and ride away to Sturgis.” I say
retire
, but I really mean “get fed up and leave this institution.”

“Dean and I had a bike. In fact, we rolled into here on it. It was a Honda. Harleys are too bumpy. When you get to be my age, you think about bladder control and take the smoothness of a bike into consideration. When I think of Harleys, I think of bump, leak, bump, leak, bump, leak.” She giggles at her own candidness.

There is nothing about her Dorothy Hamill hairdo, big glasses, and teacher jumper that prepares me for her biker identity. “Yes, Dean marveled at me as we drove cross-country because he’d never seen anyone sleep on the back of a bike before. I slept through most of Arizona!” She giggles again.

“No way, Sally! You were a biker?”

She giggles and nods.

“Sally, did you sport the black leather ensemble?”

“No, brown.”

“Fringe?”

“Not on my biker coat, but I did have a vest with fringe down to my knees and beads on the ends of the fringe.”

“I have a vest with long fringe on the bottom. I like to wear it while dancing around the house to ‘The Best of War.’ ”

I laugh and she giggles. “Yes, I was quite involved in the anti-war movement. I demonstrated a lot and even got arrested.” She holds up two fingers and says, “Twice.” It’s just what you’d expect from a first-grade teacher, which cracks me up. “I was Jane Doe number thirty-one,” she tells me with a proud, mischievous smile. “Don’t tell. Even my husband doesn’t know.” She grabs my elbow for emphasis.

Being the new person in town is fun. People are relieved to find a secret keeper, someone with no connections, no link to the gossip network. Thus, we newcomers get an intimate peek into the secret lives of small towns.

I look at her jumper with apples on it. Every teacher in America, except me, has a variation of it. I think maybe they are issued with teaching certificates, and I wasn’t sent one due to some processing error. Sally, in her apple jumper, a former protesting biker who spent time in the pokey and wore long fringe. I never, ever would have guessed.

“Have a good night!” she calls to me in her soft, perky, first-grade -teacher voice as she goes her own way. I think she knows she just made my night.

I drive to the church to photograph it from the perspective of an eight-year-old looking up at it from the sidewalk. I walk to the footbridge, photograph it, crawl under it, and photograph my world from there. I walk on across town to the cemetery, see Dawson outside the coffee shop along the way, and photograph him from across the street. I walk up the hill, through the gates, and to the old willow tree I stood under when they put my parents in the ground. I photograph their stone and the tree. I go on to photograph the grave of Grandpa and Grandma, which still doesn’t have grass growing over it yet.

I go on home to develop the film and to make prints.

I look at my prints closely as they hang from clothespins in the darkroom. I study them as if the prints might hold some clue I had never noticed, some clue that would finally make it all make sense. They don’t.

Since the overlapping dream, we all come into seventh period and compare notes about who dreamed what.