Maud's House (12 page)

“You don’t have to make all that noise. I know I forgot the birds.”

“And the cows.”

“And the cows.” T-Bone sighed, rubbed his unshaven face, and focused on me with bleary eyes. He shoved himself to a sitting position, dislodging the cat. Cat leapt to the table knocking over several beer bottles, then to an old leather wing-backed chair, its chair.

I passed T-Bone a Rolling Rock. He twisted the cap off and tossed it on the floor. I opened my beer, lifted the cat, and placed it on my lap. T-Bone said I was the only one who could do that—separate Cat from chair—without losing an arm. The birdhouse outside the window was vacant, the residents packed and moved south for the winter. The bird feeder, however, was still doing a brisk business. Winter birds were like skiers: always hungry. Cat, perched in my lap and watching the birds, licked its chops.

I motioned toward the cat. “Does she need food, too?”

“She takes care of herself.”

I sighed.

“Don’t look at me like that, Maud.”

“Like what?”

His eyes dared me to pity him. My glance skittered away, jumping from T-Bone’s books to his desk and computer to the bird feeder outside.

“You know, when I got the call from the hospital and they told me George was dead, I went up to the studio and drew a cow. A fucking cow. I spent hours on that cow getting it just right.”

“You never did.”

“Nope.”

“It could have had something to do with the number of legs.”

“You think because you’re a dairy farmer you’re so smart.
That
was an abstract cow.”

“I don’t feel like arguing art with you, Maud.” T-Bone sighed. His beautiful body was propped against the couch like a cane against the wall. He seemed stiff and uncomfortable under my gaze. There was no music playing in the house, yet his good foot tapped the air. He crushed the beer can with one hand and motioned for another. I tossed one to him. He caught it, kicking the crutches further under the sofa with his tapping foot.

In a few weeks, the doctor said, T-Bone could look forward to a cane. T-Bone took the news with the good humor of a rattlesnake caught in a trap.

“I heard you cut off your whole leg,” I said.

“Bet I know where you got that information.”

“Amos and Bartholomew,” I nodded and swallowed. The beer stung the back of my throat. “If the politicians pass another safety law, Amos and Bartholomew will blame you.” I recalled the debate over T-Bone’s disability.

Bartholomew said, “I heard T-Bone chopped off his big toe.”

“Naw,” said Amos, “it was the whole foot.”

“It was a
very
big toe,” insisted Bartholomew.

“Those boys in Montpelier get wind of this and we’ll be wearing steel-pointed boots,” said Amos. “It was incidents just like this that led to that damn law requiring us to wear those damn things on our heads.”

“Earphones,” Bartholomew said.

“Earphones,” Amos said with disgust.

“That’s a fact,” Bartholomew said.”

“Two toes.” T-Bone lifted his beer in a mock toast. “It could have been worse.”

I shrugged. “As Amos and Bartholomew will tell you.”

We sat in silence. The wood settled and snapped in the stove. Afternoon came and grew darker. I broke open another six-pack, as well as potato chips, pretzels, and corn chips.

T-Bone shook his head. “You can keep the Doritos.”

Cat jumped from my lap and patted at the plastic six-pack rings piling up by my chair. I popped the top on another beer, spraying her. She took refuge behind the stove. I leaned my head against the back of the chair.

“I read some conservation group is sending volunteers to clean up the trash on the mountain tops,” I said. “They hauled tons of garbage—tents, stoves, oxygen tanks, cans, food wrappers, clothing, six-pack rings—off of Everest. Can you believe it?”

“Sure.”

“Remember when we used to go hiking? You always were a stickler about trash. I’d come off the mountain with my pockets full of papers and cans.”

“I sold the cans to the recycling center. Paid for our gas.”

“Why did we stop doing that?”

“You married George.”

“That’s right.”

I sighed and cradled my beer bottle. “Now, people spend their vacations scrounging for diet soda cans on the Alps and granola bar wrappers in the Machu Picchu ruins of Peru. I wonder what Machu Picchu is like. Let’s go and see. When your foot gets better, we’ll take a sanitation vacation. We’ll pack our hiking boots and collect high-altitude garbage for a week.”

“I’ve never taken a vacation.”

“You’ll be in heaven.”

T-Bone finished off the potato chips. He rubbed his eyes.

“How about if I fix us some real food?” I asked.

“You and what cordon bleu cavalry.”

“You need something else in your stomach besides a bunch of worthless calories.”

“Don’t worry about my calories.”

“Someone’s got to.”

“You know I never knew this before, but you can be a real nag, Maud.”

“Who do you think I learned it from?”

T-Bone groaned, lifted himself up from the sofa, and hobbled to the bathroom. He avoided using the crutches whenever possible, whenever there were plenty of available walls and doorjambs to catch himself on and plenty of time in which to get where he was going. I jumped up from my chair to help. He glared at me. Finally, he turned and I stuck out my tongue. While he was in the bathroom, I pulled the shoelaces from my Nikes and tied his crutches together. He returned and carefully levered himself back on the couch.

He studied me and frowned. “Well, I’m not going to worry about you anymore. You look prettier than I’ve ever seen you.”

“Thanks, that’s a really rotten thing to say.” I leaned over him. “Don’t you want to know if I’m sleeping at night?”

“No.”

“Don’t you want to know if I’m working too hard?”

“No.”

“Don’t you want to know about the painting?”

“No.”

That did it. I strode to the kitchen, grabbed my coat from the hook, and shoved my arms through the sleeves. I stalked back into T-Bone’s office. “For your information, I can’t sleep worth a damn in that god awful pale bedroom. I’m working like a dog. And the painting is shitty. The colors are all wrong. The animals don’t have the right number of legs and all the people look pregnant.”

“I don’t want to know!”

“Fine.”

“Fine.”

I turned to leave, then stopped and gave him a sweet smile. “Oh, and by the way, Thomas will be over in the morning to help you milk the cows.”

“I don’t want him on my goddamn property.” T-Bone struggled to his feet. He rummaged under the sofa for the crutches. “I’m warning you, Maud, you tell that kid if he comes on my land, I’ll shoot him on sight.”

“You don’t own a gun.” I headed for the kitchen. I could hear T-Bone struggling with the crutches. He knocked the cans off the coffee table and cursed. “Maud, what have you done to my crutches? Come back here, Maud!“ T-Bone bellowed. “I own an ax… and a chainsaw. I’ll saw that kid in half. After I saw these damn shoelaces.”

“You’d probably miss him, considering your current accuracy with sharp implements.”

“Maud!“

“He’s only going to help.”

“I don’t need his goddamn help.”

“Well, you’re getting it anyway. Because I don’t like cows.”

T-Bone screamed. “Goddamn, Maud.”

As I slammed through the back door, I heard T-Bone yell, “That goddamn van is pinging again. Have the kid listen to it. Before it breaks down on you somewhere.”

“What do you care!”

“Do it, Maud.”

Thomas could call up the automotive encyclopedia on his computer, get some idea of what the problem was. T-Bone was not mechanically inclined. He was not inclined toward anything anymore—a situation I personally was familiar with but had never identified with T-Bone.

I took the road home slowly. The mile between T-Bone’s and my place had never seemed so long. The road was empty. Waiting. I passed my drive, carefully reversed, and turned. I parked the van sideways, climbed out, and approached the faded painting of Milky Way. Suddenly the Rolling Rocks and my argument with T-Bone got to me. I was so tired. My legs gave out and I decided to sit. That’s where Thomas found me when he came out for his nightly sky watching, asleep on the cold ground. He lifted me into his arms and carried me into the house. I opened my eyes and smiled at him.

“You’re a funny kid. Do you have any information in that computer of yours on Machu Picchu?”

C
ountry western music poured out of the radio in the studio. The theme was lovesickness, as usual. I thought of T-Bone. He was milking the cows again. Thomas’s presence had a stimulating effect on him, as I knew it would.

“I go to work in the middle of the night,” he warned Thomas that first morning.

“So do astronomers,” smiled Thomas.

To his surprise, Thomas liked working with the cows. He’d never had much experience with anything bigger than a dog before, anything that stepped on your feet one minute and licked the hat off your head the next. He was accustomed to animals whose shit fit in a pooper scooper. He said he was learning valuable things. He had given up the life of a protester and was now leaning toward the Peace Corps.

Thomas explained the intricacies of a milking machine to anyone who would listen. Today it was Wynn, as she trimmed his hair by the sink in my studio. An old paint rag was draped around his shoulders like a beautician’s cape. It was pinned at the neck with a clothes pin. I watched Wynn snip at Thomas’s blond hair and wondered if she was doing her pelvic squeezes.

Wynn said she could do twenty pelvic squeezes while she was curling Marie LeBeau’s hair. Marie, a schoolteacher, had short, black hair. She liked the curl tight, close to her head. Every time she came in, she said to Wynn: “Give me a do those kids can’t undo.” Marie taught ninth grade English. (She told every new group of kids: “Please don’t tell me about your love lives in the first personal essay. Give me something to look forward to.”) Wynn said the squeezes went like this: She wrapped a strand of Marie’s hair around the hot curling rod, held it for a moment just as she held her pelvic muscles, then released both her bottom and Marie’s curl.

Wynn purchased a book that gave instructions for all kinds of exercises for pregnant women. She performed her exercises daily. Whenever she had the chance, she squeezed, lifted, or tightened something. The book said if she did the exercises faithfully, her delivery would be easier and she would regain her shape more quickly after the baby was born. Harvey said he couldn’t understand it: First, she couldn’t wait to get fat enough for maternity smocks and now she was worried that she’d need them for life. Wynn told Harvey he knew nothing about prenatal care.

“This will fall right in shape for you,” Wynn told Thomas as she combed and clipped. “No fuss. No muss.”

“Just right for my busy lifestyle,” Thomas said.

I dabbed sienna on the canvas. I finished sketching Wynn shortly after Thanksgiving, yet she continued to stop by more days than not. The smell of paint no longer affected her like a rocking boat; she and the baby were cruising through the second trimester. She seemed more contented here than at the shop. She always brought something to eat, a cake, a pot of chili, a casserole. I tried to ignore the chocolate chip cookies on the table.

Wynn told Thomas, “I have known Maud all her life—did she tell you we were in geography together?—so I know about creative urges. They are special things. You can’t just shut them off when you want to. They possess you. It’s a craziness in you. You wait and see. Maud’ll forget to eat and sleep and change her shirt. She’ll come into the Round Corners Restaurant looking deader than yesterday’s meatloaf. It used to drive George nuts. We’ve got to take care of her.”

Thomas said he would.

“I couldn’t do what Maud does,” said Wynn, tilting Thomas’s head forward to clip the little hairs along his neck.

The phone rang. I concentrated on the sienna and ignored the phone. Thomas started to get up, but Wynn shoved him back in his seat.

“Maud, will you get that, please?” Wynn said. “We’re busy here.”

I wiped my hands on a cloth and grabbed the paint-speckled telephone. It was Ella Snowden. She didn’t even say hello, just launched into some story about losing the notebook in which she was writing the poem to go with the mural. It was to be the epic saga of Round Corners and its residents. She’d searched the house, the car, the entire post office.

“It’s not like me to misplace anything, no matter what Frank says, and especially not a notebook. Frank says I’m the most disorganized woman in Round Corners; and if I lost one of my notebooks, it was my own fault and no reason to take it out on him.” Ella sniffed. “It’s amazing how you can be married to a person half your life and they still know so little about you. You don’t get to be an employee of the United States Postal Service by losing things.”

Ella has been writing poetry for forty years. She has never been published. The closest she ever comes are the little rhymes she writes at the bottom of her Christmas cards. The people of Round Corners like Ella Snowden’s “verses”; some even admit they look forward to them Christmas after Christmas.

Each year Ella took one week of paid vacation from the United States Postal Service and attended a writers conference in Middlebury. Also, each year Frank tried to talk her out of it. I miss you too durn much, he said. But Ella wouldn’t give up those seven days for a chance to meet John Keats, Emily Dickinson, and Robert Frost at the same cocktail party. Now, if you threw in Allen Ginsberg, she might be tempted. “That Ginsberg fellow is somethin’,” Ella says.

At the writers conference, Ella pretended she was not an old woman running a rural postal route, threatened every year by budget cuts. She mixed with the young people and listened to their ideas and loaded her notebooks with thoughts. And she wrote poetry entirely unlike the poetry she penned in Round Corners.

Conference poetry was about politics and loneliness, about war and fear, about the land and love. She wrote all night at conference. She wrote while miles away Frank snored and dreamed. In the morning, the young students found her asleep, bent over a notebook on the table, her gray hair wild from scraping fingers. They hesitated about waking her but knew she would be upset if they didn’t.