Maud's House (17 page)

Hollywood turned Round Corners upside down and inside out. Ella refused to be one of the carolers, because Frank was leading the group. Wynn, who had been wearing Harvey’s parka because it was the only coat she could find that buttoned over her growing stomach, said she wouldn’t be filmed in Army green; finally the script woman (a size 18) lent Wynn a pink ski jacket. And Thomas said forget about the Peace Corps; he was considering a career as a beer commercial director.

The film crew arrived in town a week ago and hired everyone in town to play the crowd scenes. Equity pay scale, George. Yes, for everyone, except Odie. He landed a speaking role as the sleigh driver. What does he say? “Whoa!”

I’m sure you would have been a better sleigh driver, George.

We’ve been rehearsing all week. No, not because Odie can’t remember his line. It’s difficult working with animals. It just takes longer dealing with pet stars. How many? Well, there’s the horses and the dog. I didn’t mention the dog? I know that’s a detail. The dog has a crucial role. He runs along beside the sleigh, barking happily, welcoming his family home after a long day cruising around in the snow spreading holiday cheer.

The problem? Well, it seems the dog doesn’t like Odie. He keeps lifting his leg when Odie is around. Odie has warned the dog boy, that’s the kid in charge of seeing that the dog has everything it needs, that he’ll run him in on a misdemeanor (mishandling of toxic wastes or MTW in Wisconsin Dell’s lingo) if he doesn’t keep his pooper-scooper handy.

Yes, George, the dog would have loved you. I recall you were a friend to the entire animal world. St. Francis of Round Corners’ wild kingdom.

That afternoon we filmed.

The scene featured a group of carolers, led by Frank Snowden and accompanied by Reverend Swan on the saxophone. Take after take, we sang the same song, “Jingle Bells.” The afternoon wore on and the temperature dropped and the cold carolers began to shuffle their L.L. Bean boots. The director begged us to be still; the sound man complained that his high-tech equipment picked up every creak and groan.

Finally, we sang a perfect “Jingle Bells” and were allowed to go home and warm our toes by the fire. Reverend Swan carefully packed away his saxophone and leaned it against a tree by the curb. He mingled among the professional musicians, hired and bused in from Burlington by the director. He was totally enamored of those show biz types.

“Tomorrow we’ll shoot the scene in front of the Crawford’s place,” the director told Odie.

Odie nodded. “I’ll be there bright and early for my makeup call.”

“Good,” the director said, “because someone’s got to take down all those goddamn birdhouses. There must be ten of them in the Crawford’s yard.”

“The birdhouses?”

“They’re ruining the shot. Too tacky. Tacky as plastic flamingoes.”

“Tacky!” roared Odie. “One of those houses is an exact replica of the Babe’s home. Babe Ruth, y’know, the world’s greatest baseball player and home run hitter of all time.”

The director wasn’t listening. “Thank God, the Crawfords didn’t put up some of those cardboard figures of fat farmwives bending over the garden picking tomatoes and showing their pantaloons.”

“Cardboard farmwives?”

“The birdhouses go. See to it, will you, Sheriff?”

Odie stared at the director, who already had moved on to brief the camera crew about tomorrow’s schedule. Odie’s face reddened, his eyes bulged; it was like looking at Wylie Coyote after he swallowed a stick of TNT. Not aware of the impending explosion, Ella approached Odie about buying a Christmas wreath for the county jail. Ella’s book club, a group of elderly women who got together once a month to discuss books and exchange recipes, were making and selling wreaths as a fund-raiser for the library. Odie ignored Ella, sidestepped around her, and stalked to his police car. The engine roared and the car spun 180 degrees, backed into a tree, and peeled out in a shower of snow. “That man is getting nearly impossible to talk to,” huffed Ella.

I spun on my heel, hearing running footsteps behind me, crunching the snow. “Oh, no,” Reverend Swan cried. Reverend Swan knelt by the tree Odie had just creamed. Both hands clawed frantically at the trunk. Finally, they peeled away a layer of leather and metal, some compacted cartoon of Reverend Swan’s saxophone.

“Oh, no,” I said.

I walked a silent Reverend Swan home, handed him over to Mrs. Swan, explained about the saxophone lying in his arms like a broken child. Reverend Swan didn’t answer his wife when she called his name. His eyes were blank and unblinking. I shivered, probably suffering from too many takes of “Jingle Bells,” I said. Gently, Mrs. Swan wrapped her arm around her husband and led him into the house. Before she closed the door, I heard her say, “This can be fixed. The Lord doesn’t give us anything that can’t be fixed.”

Unlike Mrs. Swan, I don’t believe life comes with a warranty. As the eloquent say, “Shit happens.” Things get broken. Humpty Dumpty, promises, cups in a china shop on the New Madrid fault. You can fix them, but they’re never the same. They have hairline cracks. Disaster waiting to happen.

After George died, T-Bone insisted I install a telephone in the studio. “What if you fell in a bucket of paint and drowned,” he said. “You could lie in a puddle of purple mountain majesty, semi-gloss, for days and no one would know.”

If I had a phone, he said, he could check on me.

So, I bought the damn phone.

And now, he doesn’t use it.

I skidded the van to a stop in T-Bone’s yard and rammed the gear stick into park. I hadn’t heard from T-Bone in two days, since he got off the crutches. Thomas said not to take it personally. “He’s getting accustomed to the cane,” Thomas said. I was spoiling for a fight, cripple or not.

The day T-Bone finished with the crutches he told Thomas he could manage the milking by himself now. Fine, Thomas said. But the next morning, out of habit, Thomas drove over to T-Bone’s. As soon as he pulled into the yard, he heard the cows bawling. It was close to seven, and they hadn’t been milked yet. He found T-Bone asleep in bed.

I jumped out of the van, slammed the door, headed for the barn, then skidded to a stop. Music drifted from the barn. Music, I smiled. I pictured T-Bone waltzing between the stalls, the straw acting as rosin. His feet were machines, tireless. Tapping and tapping and tapping.

I imagined his lithe figure swirling and dodging among the cows, like Farmer Fred Astaire, and forgot about being mad at him. One year the college where Harvey Winchester grooms the lawns and shovels the sidewalks sponsored a Fred Astaire film festival. Twice a week for a whole month, T-Bone and I motored twenty miles to the college to see movies such as
Silk Stockings
,
Daddy Longlegs
, and
Funny Face
.

T-Bone loved to watch Astaire dance with brooms and firecrackers and magical shoes. I preferred Astaire solo, when his only prop was his body, a loaded gun ready to shatter the continuum of space and light. Run away and come back. It was a game. One moment he appeared fighting for control, the next gliding on glass. Run away and come back. It was an art. His body loved to move, as did T-Bone’s.

I heard the music and gave a skip. The old T-Bone was back. It feels good, surprisingly good. It feels like coming home. At last, I thought, we can go back to the way we were.

Inside the milking parlor, the temperature is kept at a constant winter temperature of forty-five degrees Fahrenheit. T-Bone said cows cannot be expected to give their best milk when you have to knock the icicles off their udders. I love T-Bone’s barn. The warmth wraps around you like wet wool.

I paused in the doorway of T-Bone’s barn, grinning. I had to force myself to be quiet, I was so excited. Maybe I could catch him dancing, sneak a few moments of just looking at him, of observing the ebb and flow of his dancing body.

I silently stepped into the big barn.

Slowly, the smile slid from my face, like a single melted tear.

T-Bone stumbled. He shuffled, his joints stiff, his balance precarious, his body leaden. The flirting game between man and gift was gone, taken by an ax on a chilly afternoon. His beautiful body would not cooperate. It refused to shape the light. Space slipped through its grasp, like sand through spread fingers. Gravity in the barn seemed to have doubled, tripled.

I could taste frustration in the barn, growing, rising with the music and the missteps, filling to the rafters, reaching into the cobwebbed corners. “T-Bone,” I cried, but no words passed my lips. I watched helplessly for what seemed like hours. Finally, T-Bone gave up. He stood in the middle of the cows, shoulders slumped, hands clenched in fists. He sighed and flung back his head, as if seeking divine intervention. Instead, he got me.

“Can I buy you a beer?” I asked, stepping out of the shadows. I approached carefully. He watched me, not bothering to dash a tear from his cheek. I stopped a breath away from his cheek. “With chips.”

“No Doritos.”

“No Doritos,” I said, tiptoeing to wipe the moisture from his cheek.

Suddenly he grabbed me and wrapped me in a mighty bear hug. He burrowed his head in my shoulder and whispered over and over, “What am I to do? What am I to do?” His arms were so strong and so desperate. I wanted to give him everything then, every piece of light in the world. Perhaps he had always needed me like this and I didn’t realize it. Perhaps I had always needed him.

T-Bone’s bedroom. The colors are so solid here, so deep. Forest greens and burgundies hold secrets and safety. Woodland colors. It seems natural to be here, T-Bone gripping my hand in his sleep. I am a sucker for vulnerable men. My father who could never figure out one end of a Picasso from the other. George who could only be hurt by non-performance, by the stillness of a paintbrush, by people who gave up. Thomas who feels so out of place here and so at home talking to the night stars.

Love really is like a country western song. In every toughness there is weakness. In every icicle there is the essence of glacier. We live for momentous sparks. For nanoseconds of invulnerability. But we are loved for the little things, the way we wear green suede cowboy boots, the way we see potential in an old gutted van in a field of trillium, the way we help a neighbor stack his woodpile.

The air is cold. I am good at putting off that mad race against the cold to the wood stove, that fumbling with iron door and heavy wood while bouncing from one cold foot to another. T-Bone sighed in his sleep and mumbled, “I have always loved you, y’know.” I threw my leg over T-Bone’s and snuggled closer. In the shadow of T-Bone’s warmth, I tried to forget the sound of Odie taking an ax to the birdhouses at the Crawford place. The Crawford place is five miles away. Funny, how I still can hear the ax; the jingling harnesses of bored, restless horses; how I can hear a man’s heart break.

In every toughness there is weakness and that weakness, Hollywood, is the stuff of art.

C
hristmas draws a full house at the Church of Our Lady of Perpetual Savings. Only Easter beats it for numbers. People feel the need to get their spiritual houses in order at the end of the year, Reverend Swan says.

Sandwiched between T-Bone and Thomas, I feel at peace, more content than I have felt in a long time. Both T-Bone and Thomas were there under duress. Thomas wanted to stay home and watch a PBS show on black holes and comets, and T-Bone just wanted to stay home period. I leaned closer to T-Bone; our thighs touched. I enjoyed T-Bone’s warmth, running like a stripe down the side of my body.

Thomas flipped through the hymnal. On the way to church, all three of us scrunched in the front seat of Thomas’s yellow van, Thomas described some of the churches from his travels. “Some wouldn’t be considered churches in Round Corners. One was just an adobe box with a flat roof. Inside were candles and incense burners and pictures of Buddha and Christ. I suspect divinity diplomas were sold out of the room in the back.”

“Our Lady of Perpetual Savings does not have a degree program,” I said.

“Probably not,” Thomas smiled. “Its foundation is rock and prayer, its architecture purely Puritan. Notice how it’s built, in such a way as to direct everything—eyes, thought, soul—upward. The windows are high; the suffering of the saints depicted in stained glass let in nothing of brightness—neither sunlight nor inspiration. Steps lead up to the sanctuary. White steeple leads up to heaven. Nothing encourages a person to look to the side, not in actuality nor philosophy.”

“Aw shit,” T-Bone said, “this is going to be one of those philosophical days, I can just feel it.”

Thomas viewed Our Lady much as American tourists considered European cathedrals—more attraction than place of worship. “Holy places,” he said, “are the forests and jungles and deserts.”

Maybe he was right. Sometimes it is difficult to believe that God would prefer a place like this—with its hard seats and stark white walls, its threadbare rug and loud bells—to the meadows and the ever-changing sky, the soft grasses and the musical breezes. God wasn’t dumb.

With a crowd like the one at Our Lady on Christmas morning, any other minister would have been happy. Not Reverend Swan. He peered out at all those faces in horror. Later, he confessed he didn’t recognize a single one, not even his precious wife, Mrs. Swan. He squinted and ducked his head as if looking into a bright light. He knew Mrs. Swan was out there somewhere; they drove to church together. He’d forgotten to warm up the car. The heater couldn’t do much in the short distance from their house to the church. Sitting in the little metal container with bucket seats and vinyl upholstery (the most economical, stripped down model the Swans could find) was like riding in an ice cube tray.

Reverend Swan thought of tiny people crowded into ice cube trays coasting up and down the Green Mountains. He mumbled something about Ethan Allen and his boys freeing this country in horse-drawn ice cube trays. T-Bone and I exchanged uneasy glances. Members of the congregation began to whisper; they shifted uncomfortably in their seats.