Maud's House (14 page)

Odie taxied motorists to service stations, called for tow trucks, carried booster cables in his trunk. Wisconsin Dell Addleberry’s car was dead more than alive. She always needed a ride to work. He told her she ought to scrap that pile of junk. She said it worked fine in summer. Summer? he said. Vermont had no summer. It had winter and Fourth of July, a small patriotic thaw about the size of a melting popsicle. If it had any summer, it was Indian summer. This was no place for Wisconsin Dell’s Florida Ford.

Odie stopped in and said hello to Old Ed on Mountaintop Road. You need anything? he asked. No, Old Ed said, staying close to the stove. Odie loaded his big arms with firewood at Old Ed’s woodpile, carried the wood in, and stacked it neatly by Old Ed’s stove.

Coming down the mountain, Odie switched on the radio.
They lost their minds today
, Odie sang with the Everly Brothers.
They threw their love away. They act as if they were born yesterday.
Odie would not have lasted two seconds in a barbershop quartet. As he sang, his head bobbed and his fingers tapped. The rest of him, squeezed into the squad car, was immobile. He was bundled up to about the size of a polar bear, a heavy coat buttoned over his huge chest.

Odie rocked on until he came to Beaver Creek Road. Just passing the snowy avenue made him growl. The sign was gone again. But that was not the real reason Odie lost the beat of the song. I live on Beaver Creek Road, and I’m still holding out for a reprieve on the painting. The last time he nagged me about it, I slammed the door in his face. I told him I’d have it done by Town Meeting, good-bye. Bang. Almost broke his nose.

Odie shook his head and chewed his gum. “Artists are the most absurd people on this earth. No offense, Maud. But we pamper the artists in this country. All those grants we give them and look what they do with the money—they create pornography. They can’t handle life like the rest of us. They’re soft. Thank God they don’t run the country.”

“Oh, I don’t know, Odie, it seems to me… “

Wisconsin Dell Addleberry’s voice screamed at us over the police radio, interrupting the Everly Brothers.

“Calling car four-zero-niner. Four-zero-niner come in, please.”

“Four-zero-niner, I mean, Sheriff Dorfmann here.”

“Good afternoon, BM. I got an SM—Stranded Motorist— on Highway 100 two miles out of town. Called it in himself on his car phone.”

“This is the day for the automotive unlucky. Call him back and tell him I’ll be there right after I drop Maud off at the restaurant.”

Pause. Odie and I heard the sound of papers being shuffled. Dell cleared her throat. I saw Odie brace himself. Dell did not put off things. She functioned on the principle that you might as well take the medicine and get it over with. Whenever Dell stalled, it did not bode well for Odie. He chewed faster.

“What is it, Dell?” Odie coaxed.

“I’ve got another B and E.”

“Ah, shit.”

“BS ain’t all you’re going to say, BM.”

“Give me the location, Dell.”

“The B and E—Breaking and Entering—was reported at Thirteen Snowflake.”

Silence.

“BM, are you there? BM, answer me. Omigod, I think he C and B’ed—Crash and Burned. BM? BM!”

“Would you repeat that address, Dell?”

“Thirteen Snowflake.”

“That’s my house, Dell.”

“Yes, sir, your wife just called it in.”

Odie stepped on the gas and we bobsledded down the mountain, taking the curves sideways, using the snow banks to keep us from flying off into the pine trees.

Sheriff Odie Dorfmann wandered around the remains of his garage in a daze. He picked up a screwdriver and laid it down. He hunkered before the little electric space heater he used when the weather turned cold, flipped it on, saw the coils begin to redden, and flipped it off. He lifted a tiny chimney into the air, squinted his eye at it, and returned it to the table. His wife said she never heard of a birdhouse with a chimney.

“I’d planned to build a tiny woodpile on the porch of the house. I figured it would make a nice perch,” Odie said.

The old roof of Odie’s garage had collapsed under the weight of the recent snowfall, crushing Odie’s birdhouses like an avalanche. Apparently, Dell had been trying to say BD—Birdhouse Disaster—instead of B and E—Breaking and Entering, but just got her abbreviations confused in the gravity of the moment. Dell, more than anyone else, understood the scope of this catastrophe. Odie was devastated. The man who had created a whole other city above Round Corners, a tiny town in the sky, a winged village, was lost.

Odie stepped over shattered bird-size A-frames, ranch houses, and ante-bellum plantation mansions. He stood at the window, his shoulders hunched, watching the birds fight at the feeder. Snow fluttered down on his head through the missing roof.

“The cardinals like the sunflower seeds. Sunflower seeds are more expensive, but I think the cardinals are worth it. They’re a baseball bird. I love baseball birds: cardinal, oriole, blue jay. Well, not so much the jays, they’re pesky. Precocious, really.”

A blue jay dive-bombed the feeder scattering titmice and sparrows everywhere. “Just like they horned in on the World Series. Who would have ever thought a Canadian team would win the greatest of American games? Absurd. The Communists probably put them up to it.”

A woodpecker rapped in the pines. Odie smiled sadly. “I left that one dead pine there just so the old boy had something to bang his head against. Arlene’s terrified that dead tree is going to fall on the house one night in the middle of an ice storm. Wives can be absurd.”

I exchanged a glance with Arlene. She shrugged and blew her nose in a wadded tissue.

“I took the top off that tree long ago. If it did fall, the most it would get was a corner of the back bedroom, the one Arlene’s mother sleeps in when she visits.”

Suddenly Odie picked up a bucket of softballs and a bat from the corner of the garage. He rested the bat on his shoulder and waded through the deep snow in the backyard. When he reached the middle of the yard, he dropped the bucket of balls and hefted the bat. He hit a ball, then another, ball followed ball. Like a lonely boy popping pebbles into a lake with a stick. Each time he tried to hit the ball farther. It was easier to measure distance in the snow than it was in a lake. The balls plopped, sinking two or three feet in some cases. Impressions in the snow represented singles, doubles, triples, home runs.

Eventually, there were so many impressions, they became muddled. Balls were lost. I stood in the doorway of the ruins of the garage and watched Odie swing the bat again and again. He should have painted orange stripes on the balls, I thought. Now he won’t find those white balls until spring. One afternoon during the thaw Arlene will look out the back window and see a field of softballs growing, probably think it was hail. Hail in mud season.

Sheriff Odie Dorfmann, champion pitcher of the Round Corners Royals, paused for a moment, looked up into the sky, at the snowflakes peacefully dropping to earth. He wiped a hand across his eyes, then shrugged and stepped back into the batter’s box.

This is why I never had the desire to paint George. The canvas hasn’t been made yet to contain his ego. I ought to tell him I saw Odie cry that day he popped a bucket of fly balls into the snow. That would crush him. George wouldn’t believe it. Their friendship was built on a garish, fake jewel foundation of male bonding, both so afraid of showing softness to the other.

I forgot there was softness in Odie until I saw him step into the snowy batter’s box, just as I tend to forget there were places that could be hurt in George, too. Maybe that’s what went wrong with George and me. Those last years he was so strong, his life so together, while mine was a 500-piece jigsaw puzzle being assembled by a toddler.

What am I painting? This, George, is the map of the road to insanity or inspiration. Another name? Odie.

I know it looks like a cow wearing a holster and gun. It’s still evolving. Evolution into a brighter, better species is not a dime store magic trick. It takes time. And a lot of paint.

When I think back to the days that followed the destruction of Odie’s birdhouses, it is like looking at a Jackson Pollack. I see colors whirling and mixing. I see chaos, growing, exploding, flinging trouble a million different directions.

Maybe it was the season, that pre-holiday depression Wynn reads about in her magazines. Or maybe it was something in the atmosphere, something Thomas couldn’t spot with his telescope but was still there entering our hearts and minds like space dust.

Whatever it was I didn’t like it—that craziness in the air. Suddenly I wasn’t the town wreck anymore. Others were gaining on me in that department.

T-Bone grew a beard. Instead of updating the health records of his herd, he played video games on his computer. He made an effort to look after the cows, simply because he couldn’t have Thomas showing him up in his own backyard, but he no longer truly
cared
for them. He couldn’t feel the special bond they once had. He hobbled around the house with his cane, not even trying to walk on his own. When he planted himself in front of the computer, his fingers danced on the computer keys. The tap-dance of the barn had been replaced with the ballet of Pac-Man and Donkey Kong.

Wynn stopped doing her pelvic squeezes. Her husband Harvey hadn’t opened a baby book in weeks. They seemed to argue about the most insignificant things, such as who put the ketchup in the refrigerator. Apparently, in the Winchester household dipping hot French fries in cold ketchup was a major offense.

Ella refused to send out Christmas cards until the Postal Service gave employee discounts for bulk mail. Everyone knew it was an excuse. She hadn’t written poetry, not one line, since the disappearance of “Howling Mad Home.” A Christmas card from the Snowdens wouldn’t be the same without Ella’s verses.

And Odie continued on his law and order rampage. He ran in every drifter that crossed his path. Everyone arrested was subjected to the same treatment: no telephone calls, no food, and no water until after interrogation. Odie grilled his prisoners mercilessly under the glare of a single sixty-watt bulb. What, he demanded, size shoe do you wear and are you afraid of heights? The bulb was Wisconsin Dell Addleberry’s idea.

The prisoners stood up well under questioning. They thought the heat from that sixty-watt bulb felt wonderful. They turned their frozen faces up to the light, as if it were Florida sunshine. Odie was forced to drag some of them away from the interrogation room. “Didn’t bring you here to get a tan,” Odie growled. As for the denied telephone call, that was okay, too. Few of them had friends who owned homes much less phones. Even fewer had a lawyer on retainer. But the food and water were another matter. They had been living on stale saltines and catfood stolen from camps and were ready for gourmet fixings on the county’s bill. They grew loud and demanding. To get rid of three particularly demanding suspects, Odie paid for bus tickets to Boston out of his own pocket.

T-Bone prayed as he never prayed in a pew at Our Lady of Perpetual Savings. He prayed as he had as a child. The only way to pray when one has left spiritual matters too late: desperately. As I leaned against the wall of the barn and listened to T-Bone and the vet examine the sick cow, I thought of T-Bone’s story about his sixth birthday. When he was six, the parish priest, Father Julian, gave him a medal of the Virgin Mary blessed by the Holy Father himself. And when T-Bone wanted something, he would lie in bed at night and rub the medal between his fingers like a rabbit’s foot. Once his brother caught him at it and teased him until T-Bone threw the medal out the window just to show how little it meant to him. The next day, when no one was looking, he went out and pawed in the snow, but T-Bone never found the medal.

The veterinarian rose from his stooped position over the cow lying in the stall, wiped his hands, shook his head.

“You almost lost this one, T-Bone.”

T-Bone nodded.

“How’s your milk production?”

“Low,” T-Bone said.

“But she’s the only one down?”

“So far.”

“I’ll give her an injection, and we’ll change her feed. I’ll look at the rest, while I’m here.”

T-Bone nodded.

“You should have called me earlier,” the veterinarian said.

Once T-Bone would have noticed a problem long before the cow went down, would have seen the indications, perhaps even known a cow was feeling poorly from the look in its eyes. How close a farmer gets to his animals when he loves his work. But T-Bone no longer knew his cows. He looked at them and saw strangers. There was no rapport; their care had become a chore. T-Bone was ashamed of the estrangement.

A farmer lived with death but he did not like it. And when he lost, because of his own negligence, a half-ton of prime milk machine, a beast that had put food on his table and clothes on his back, a creature that had depended on him for the simplest of kindnesses—a little attention—which he had failed to give, a man didn’t stop kicking himself for a long time.