I Hate to Leave This Beautiful Place (16 page)

Six men—including three well drillers—stood on the lawn. One was the road commissioner, Roy Bolz, who in height and weathered handsomeness had an uncanny resemblance to the writer Peter Matthiessen. Roy often won backhoe competitions at state fairs; he could set a peach down on a fence post with his backhoe. A videocassette recording of this feat was available for borrowing at the post office, which had an ad hoc lending library, too, mostly used paperbacks, including a couple of books I'd written. The town historian, Earlene Leonard, who kept track of such things, had said to me, “The movie of Roy gets signed out way more often than your books. Take my word for it.”

I walked up to the giant Erector set that was pumping away, slamming into the earth with percussive thuds I'm sure could be heard half a mile away. “They're at two hundred eighty feet,” Roy said. “My condolences.” The Benidinis charged $2.50 a foot. Eventually, the well went down to 666 feet; to pay for it, I wrote six different articles, one for a magazine in Reykjavík, about having a well drilled.

Roy's word
condolences
seemed right; it did feel funereal on the lawn. Then everyone turned almost in unison to see my neighbor Maurice Persons, age sixty-six, who in younger days had worked in a granite quarry in Barre, walking slowly up the dirt road. Maurice had on the black greatcoat he'd worn in the quarry. In the heat-mirage distance, he appeared to have thickened into a bear, ambling in cartoonish ursine fashion as he approached. “He's got something under that coat,” Roy observed, as if old Maurice were suddenly a menacing, nineteenth-century journeyman assassin for hire. “He's not that naturally wide.”

When Maurice had gained my yard, he needed a breather. He looked over at the well-digging crew and said to me, “I've got a way to get these fellows off your property so we won't have to hold a wake for your bank account.” At which point he opened his greatcoat like two vast wings, revealing a row of dynamite sticks in loop holders on either side of the lining. “You just toss a few of these into the old well casing, step back, and you have a new well,” he said.

“I don't know, Maurice,” I said. I had visions of my house collapsing into a sinkhole. “I just don't know.”

“How old's that dynamite, anyway, Maurice?” Roy said.

“Good as new,” Maurice said.

“I doubt it,” Roy said.

One of the Benidinis, Jack, had dug a thin, shallow gulley through which sludge the thickness and color of cement runneled down the slope next to the house, and several tributaries had begun toward the flower garden, which I had to stop up with dirt. Jack checked the gauges on the rig; they relayed news from the underground. In an exhibit of annoying talent, Jack then ate an apple without using his hands. The apple turned in his mouth, and this made his brothers crack up with laughter.

Maurice walked back down the road, dynamite intact inside his greatcoat. “At one hundred fifty feet,” Roy said, “they got some water, but it was surface water, it's called. It came out nice and clear, but it was soon gone. Even if a well's getting eighty gallons a minute, if the water's not clear, it's a bad well. They're into the kind of rock they like to see, though.” Jack, who had been raking sludge, walked over and said, “The deepest we ever went was six-twenty.”

Olivia, who had been inside with Emma, appeared on the side porch and, making a gesture like she was holding a telephone to her ear, shouted, “It's for you.”

I went in and picked up the phone and said, “Hello?”

“The Vermont-Canadian border is ninety miles,” my brother said. “Lots of opportunity there.”

I hung up.

 

This was the summer that our neighbors who didn't own a television set would walk up the road on some evenings to watch the Ken Burns documentary
The Civil War.
They would arrive with strawberries or rhubarb pie or sweet breads. We were all mesmerized by the episodes. They were titled “The Cause,” “A Very Bloody Affair,” “Forever Free,” “Simply Murder,” “The Universe of Battle,” “Valley of the Shadow of Death,” “Most Hallowed Ground,” “War Is All Hell,” and “The Better Angels of Our Nature.” The heat was relentless, but we had fans set up to create a cross-breeze and made iced tea.

The documentary's soundtrack was all haunting fiddle and accordion music and ghostly voice-overs. Many letters from soldiers were read; the epistolary life during the Civil War, in sheer numbers of letters, endless ghastly anecdote, and tone of bewildered homesickness, was immeasurably heart-wrenching. Each line of printing or cursive shown in close-up on the screen, each of the hundreds of black-and-white photographs, contained history. Many of the photographs depicted battlefields, often with numerous bodies strewn in twisted, agonized configurations that made for a kind of hieroglyphics of corpses, a forensic alphabet, especially when photographed from a hill or rise. Some of the individual dead looked as though they were merely sleeping. The voice-overs, the actual words of the soldiers, both Union and Confederate, got to me as easily as the photographs. The voices: each episode felt like a séance organized and directed by Ken Burns, and during my hours of watching, a powerful melancholy presided. Those photographs, though. The photographs were saturated, of course, with the sadness of a war that divided and ultimately defined us as a nation, but within that context also intensified our understanding of the uncanny power of photographs to haunt us.

Then, after a couple of hours, in the somewhat cooling air, the neighbors would set out up the road for home, a quarter of a mile away. It was as if we had all entered the mid-nineteenth century, the only ambient light being the moon and stars and the oil lanterns they held to see by. One morning at the post office, my neighbor Mark said, “Things in my house are getting strange. Allison and I stare out at the back field and imagine a battle going on.”

 

The well took three full days to complete, and was, up to that time, the third-deepest private well in the state. I was writing those articles about having a well dug as fast as I could. I'm smiling as I write this now, but talk about pouring salt on the wound: When the Benidinis got to 620 feet, at about four
P.M.
on the third afternoon, I was looking at them through the lace curtains of my living room. It was like having my view filtered through a past century, as the lace was antique. I watched the oldest Benidini brother, Toby, strip off his T-shirt, walk to the auxiliary tank of water (used to reduce friction), pick up an plastic container, fill it from the tank, and empty it over his head. He then took out a bottle of shampoo—the kind you get in hotel rooms—and proceeded to shampoo his hair, then rinse it with what water was left in the container. Taking a comb from his back pocket, he styled his hair into a duck's-ass. I must've been at wits' end, because his casual use of water set me off, to the point where I was going to comment on it through the window screen. I have no earthly notion what I would have said, but I never got around to it, because the telephone rang.

“I really need to get into Canada,” my brother said. “I saw a suspicious car in the motel parking lot. A man got out and walked to a diner. I went over for a look at his car. There were binoculars on the front seat. Believe me, he didn't look like any bird watcher.”

“You're having paranoid delusions.”

“I understand you haven't heard from me for a couple of years, but you're hearing from me a lot already this summer. See? People can change.”

“You're putting me in a very difficult position, here.”

“The problem with you is, you can't grant your brother a simple favor. Know what I'm doing right now? I'm closing my eyes and seeing us crossing the Canadian border.”

“You've got movies in your head.”

“How about this for an idea? A picnic a hundred yards before Canada. Little Emma points and says, ‘Dada, what's that?' And you say, ‘Honey, that's the Canadian border. After our picnic is over, your uncle Mike is going to walk right across it. Won't that be fun to watch?' Let me add something to the bargain. I give you full permission—and I'd sign a piece of paper to this effect—
full permission
to use this incident in a novel.”

“So you're providing me with ideas now.”

“Somebody has to.”

“I try to do that for myself.”

“Good luck. I still hear those well diggers in the background. Which reminds me, know what's weird? Whenever I try talking sense to you, I get parched. This amazing thirst. When I hang up I'll probably drink ten glasses of water in a row. Have you thought about my offer?”

“Stop calling collect, okay?” I hung up.

Then the Benidini Brothers started to dismantle their giant Erector set. Just like that, it was over. I went out onto the side porch and said, “What's going on now?” Toby said, “We've stopped at five gallons per minute. But it'll improve as things open up even more where we've cracked rock deep down.” It took the next two hours for them to dismantle the rig, load it on the flatbed. The last thing Toby said was “We'll accept payment in three installments. You didn't ask for that arrangement, but this hole went very deep. You know, we'd rather have something in pocket right up front.”

I wrote a check for the whole amount. The next morning I went into town to get new typewriter ribbons. Two of the articles on well drilling were due in ten days.

 

Conversation with my brother, June 27:

“It's four
A.M.
” I said.

“Oh, sorry. It's only two where I'm calling from.”

“That narrows your location down to the western United States.”

“You don't sleep much anyway,” my brother said, “if memory serves.”

“I take it—in the legal sense—someone is looking for you?”

“Nice to be wanted, isn't it?”

“That would make me laugh if it was funny.”

“So here's my offer. I come and spend some quality time with my new niece, whom I haven't yet seen. Then one night you drive me up to Canada. I'll fall right out of my bind.”

“Well, have you given any thought to the fact that I'd be aiding and abetting a criminal? You want my daughter to have a father in jail? That'll make me an absent father. I'm not in that family tradition. What is your legal
bind,
anyway?”

“The less you know the better. I'll pay for a full tank of gas, don't worry about that. How long do you need to consider my offer?”

“Ten years.”

I hung up, or he did.

 

In the middle of July I went to an owl conference held in Wolcott, Vermont. Owl specialists from all over the world attended. In the evenings, and through the night and early-morning hours, some participants went out looking for owls in nearby Great Bear Swamp. All the heavy-duty flashlights had been bought up from local hardware stores. One ornithologist from Japan bought a miner's helmet, and its beam funneled yellow-white light up into the trees.

On the second afternoon of the conference, a Frenchwoman, Dr. Joubert, gave a lecture with a title she said had been inspired by François Villon, “In the Darkness Where the Dreaming Begins,” in which she described what was for her the dreamlike quality of seeing owls on a moonlit night. Her paper also contained esoteric references, but it distinguished itself by its ethereal tone, especially since the majority of lectures were incredibly dull. Still, even in the paper titled “Parasites in the Great Horned Owl” there was something interesting to learn. Besides, it wasn't every day you got to be with people obsessed by owls.

After Dr. Joubert's lecture, a picnic dinner was served on the newly mowed common, big as a football field, at Craftsbury Common. It proved to be a beautiful evening and night, a vast array of stars with a gibbous moon presiding. After dinner, a dozen or so conferees, a veritable parliament of owl aficionados, slathered in mosquito and blackfly repellent, set out for Great Bear Swamp. I stopped at the library of the Center for Northern Studies to take my temperature. For some reason, it had spiked to 101.5. But the later and cooler it got, the more the night air would be a balm, and anyway, I was eager to see owls.

 

On another day, breakfast at the local diner. A meandering drive on back roads. Working on a new novel during hours that the Marshfield Library is closed, with Emma napping in the portable car seat in the children's books section. Crows in the conifers across the street. The phone rings in the library's empty office. Many paragraphs typed on the Olivetti manual, a few kept. Everything I loved most happened most every day. With the exception that, when I got home, I found a note:
Your brother called. Wouldn't leave a return number. Will call later.

At dusk, the barred owl flew out the door of our three-story barn, glided over the near field, then disappeared toward the lower field and woods. I don't know what was behind my impulse to name this owl, but I named her Gertrude. (In 2003, I named her successor in the barn Edna.) That evening, after watching the “Forever Free” episode of
The Civil War,
I could not sleep, so I went outside and walked to the two-lane, Route 14, where usually I'd go up the curving road in order to look back, my favorite view of the house. I stopped in front of Maurice and Kay Person's red ramshackle house with its slumping porch. The lights were out. (Maurice once admonished me for leaving too many lights on in my house at night. “Electricity adds up,” he said.)

The night was very still. I heard a loud rustling of some sort—raccoons, I thought, but then there was a rush of air, then nothing. I swept my flashlight beam across the open garage adjacent to the house. There was Gertrude, sitting on a wooden shelf above Maurice's black greatcoat on its nail; she had a vole dangling from her beak, a trickle of blood on its fur. I never realized before just how enormous a bird this was. I turned off the flashlight and immediately Gertrude whooshed past less than a foot from my head. It made me duck and throw my hands in front of my face. Off she went as if following the moon-illuminated dirt road up to our barn. I knew that this would never happen again. But part of what I loved most every day was thinking about this incident every time I walked or drove past Maurice's house. Yet another place along this dirt road had become a mnemonic.