Maud's House (21 page)

I can dig that, not the praying part, but the shoveling. The solace of physical labor, T-Bone calls it. Sounds rather whimsical for T-Bone. But snow does that to you. It turns us all into blithering poets, cowboy romantics, muscle-bound maniacs. The snow war is an honorable battle. The shovel a noble weapon. The ache in the small of the back from bending and flinging a courageous casualty. When I was painting, back in the pre-George Period, and I got stuck, I’d shovel snow. In the cold quiet of swinging shovel, I cleared my head as I cleared the path, made my mind as blank as the snow. And answers would come to me. Some winters, when questions fell faster than snow and there wasn’t a flake left on the sidewalks and paths, I shoveled the fields. There were paths, thoroughfares, avenues all over our farm for the cows and the cats and the rabbits.

Reverend Swan attacked the snow with vengeance. Apparently, he had a lot on his mind. Mrs. Swan thought he should hire a boy to do the shoveling. You’re sixty years old, she said. When he shoveled, she ran back and forth from whatever work she was doing—ironing, baking, sewing—to the front window. She expected to see him prostrate in the snow bank someday, his heart refusing to lift one more flake.

Hire a boy, she said. Just like the one he once had been in a little town on the New Hampshire-Vermont border. Back then, he shoveled snow to earn money. He bought his first football with snow money, and a scarf for his father, and a new rosary for his mother. It was her birthday. The students at the seminary outside of town made religious articles—rosaries, prayer books, medals, statues for the dashboard—in a manufacturing plant, where they also learned to be priests. For his mother, he chose a rosary with blue beads and inside every bead was a picture of the Virgin Mary. Never had he seen a rosary so beautiful. He asked the seminarian at the cash register to bless it for him. His mother insisted on having the blessing redone, by a “real” priest after Mass on Sunday.

Those beads had come in handy in the following years. He grew up, planned to become a priest/rosary maker, met Mrs. Swan, fell in love, married, and “deserted the church,” as his mother put it. When he became a minister in “that heathen faith,” his mother told him, she prayed for him on her special Virgin Mary rosary. When she died, the undertaker entwined the blue beads about her fingers. They were entombed with her, much as horses and slaves were buried with pharaohs. She would need them in the next world, apparently, to pray for her wayward Episcopalian son.

There was another thing Reverend Swan bought with snow money. Music lessons. His mother never understood the saxophone. She wanted him to take organ lessons, then he could play at Mass. And perhaps, if he had studied the organ as she wanted, he’d still be Catholic today.

For it is from the saxophone that he first learned doubt. Limits, the saxophone said, can be broken. It does not have to be as it always was. You can be free, the saxophone said. You can fly. And it came to be that the saxophone was his belief, that God lived in its clear notes, not in some glass beads.

I stood on top of a frozen snow bank, towering above Reverend Snow, as he finished the end of the sidewalk. Finally, he leaned on the shovel and squinted up at me.

“Maud, I have to confess to feeling out of touch with God lately.”

He thought I might understand, it being an artist thing. Ever since Odie flattened his saxophone, Reverend Swan had been praying, frantically, all the time, everywhere, in hopes of regaining his former spiritual status. He prayed so he wouldn’t think. He repeated prayers from the Catholic missal he had memorized as a child. If he had known Arabic, he would have quoted the Koran. If he had known Hebrew, he would have recited the Torah. Anything to keep his mind from working—alphabetizing, editing, correcting, arranging his being.

At night was the worst time. When he slept, he could not pray, and then his subconscious ran amok. Often he struggled awake in the darkness, sweating, gasping, thinking. And the thought he awoke with always was the same: “What if we really are all alone, and there is no one else out there; what if there never was anyone here but us, and when we go—we’re gone.” Reverend Swan was utterly shocked by the blasphemous train his thoughts had hopped.

Obviously, Reverend Swan needed a Rolling Rock, but today I was without my supplies. I shoved the cinnamon rolls under his nose. “I know what you mean. The feeling of purposelessness can drive you crazy. Cinnamon roll?”

Reverend Swan tugged off a glove and reached for a roll. “I can’t accept the concept of purposelessness,” Reverend Swan said. “We are more important than a particle of space dust. I’d rather become a Hindu and look forward to a life as a worm or a cow than accept it was all for naught.” Reverend Swan paused in mid-chew. “A Hindu! Mother would blister her fingers on the beads.”

I am the resident chief of self-doubt, everyone knows it and so, whenever they’re feeling even the slightest bit diffident they come to me, Mother Cowboy Confessor. My advice is as deep as one of Catfish Joe’s Top Ten.

“You can’t travel through life if you think someone has gone ahead of you and removed all the rest stops,” I said.

“It seems such a cruel trick to play: to make a man a minister and not give him the skills to attend to his people’s needs. Why would God do that? Why don’t I know the answers? Could it be because there are no answers?”

Mrs. Swan stuck her head out the door, “You should hire a boy to do that. Are you two going to eat all those cinnamon rolls yourself?”

Reverend Swan sighed and rammed his shovel into a mountainous bank near the door. It was ready for him there, when the next storm blew through or he needed to find some answers.

The smell of chocolate and marshmallows met us as we clomped into the house. Reverend Swan shrugged off his coat and bent to slip off his boots. When he straightened, his wife stood in front of him holding out a steaming cup. He took it and she kissed him, saying she had some ironing to do. She grabbed a cinnamon roll on her way out of the room.

We eased into chairs at the kitchen table. I chased the marshmallows in my hot chocolate with a spoon while Reverend Swan glanced through the mail. Utility bill, as usual, higher than the month before. Reminder from the diocesan office in Burlington of the annual spring meeting and bake sale. Flyer from a chain of hardware stores: “Fix up, clean up, spruce up for spring.”

And a letter from Brunswick, Maine.

Reverend Swan didn’t know anyone in Brunswick, Maine. Almost cautiously, he slit the envelope and read it.

Slowly his hand began to tremble.

Startled, I grabbed his wrist and whispered his name. “Are you all right? Reverend, is it your heart?”

He shook his head, opened his mouth, closed it. He handed the letter to me. “Read it aloud,” he croaked.

Dear Reverend Swan,

You probably don’t remember me…

I glanced at the bottom of the page. Walter Lamb. It wasn’t a name I recognized.

We came through your way last fall, me and the kids.

The Mainiacs. It was difficult to forget ten kids.

You put us up for the night, and the next morning your good wife cooked us breakfast. When we left your house, we drove on to the address you gave us and your friend there, Reverend Douglass, said he heard the paper mill near Brunswick was hiring. So we drove to Brunswick. And, what do you know, by nightfall I had a job. A man at the mill had an uncle who had a cheap apartment to let. It was small, but the kids got to like sleeping on the floor when we were at your place. Your missus told ’em that’s the way the Chinese sleep and they didn’t mind being Chinese for awhile.

Work at the mill ain’t nothing like work on the farm. Don’t know if I’ll ever get used to working with a roof over my head. The noise of the machines is louder than I ever thought sound could be. It’s nothing like the quiet fields. And beans sure smell sweeter than pulp. But me and the kids decided we could save a little money here. Maybe buy a few acres out of town. I don’t know about growing beans in this sandy Maine soil, but if anyone can do it, I can.

The kids are doin’ fine. They’re all in school. They really like Maine. They like the beach the best. None of us had ever seen the ocean before. The little ones ran right to the edge the first time we saw it, stuck their fingers in it, and ran back. It’s so cold, they said. We just stood there in the wind and watched it for the longest time. No one said a word. Finally, Sally said, “Papa, ain’t it ever gonna stop?” We all laughed. “Darlin’,” I said, “it’ll last longer than all of us.’

“Doesn’t it ever get tired?” Sally asked. No, I said, never.

When I look at the ocean, I think about you, Reverend. I think about what you said about never giving up because I had something to give. Keep going, you said, for the kids. That night after the kids were asleep, I never talked so much before about anything, much less my wife and the farm. But you let me talk. Even after I told you I wasn’t Episcopalian.

You said in this life there was no coincidences. You said I was meant to take those kids and make a new home for them. I don’t think about my wife much anymore, or the way she left us. I think about my kids and the farm we’re going to have someday. I want it to look out on the ocean. Because when I look at the ocean, it gives me the strength to never stop. Just like you did.

The letter was signed,
Walter Lamb.

We sat in the silence left by Walter Lamb’s words. Moments slipped away loudly on the old clock on the wall; the cuckoo bird popped out, just as a jay fluttered to the snow bank outside and squawked. Slowly, ever so slowly, Reverend Swan’s lips curved into a smile.

I handed the letter back to him, “It seems you make a pretty good rest stop. I think I’ll send you all my referrals from now on.”

P
erhaps every town has its dreams.

Just as people do.

Some towns want to grow and grow, big enough to attract a McDonalds, a Pizza Hut, a Kentucky Fried Chicken. They stretch eagerly toward the interstate highway over the hill and the travelers who need to eat and sleep and use the restroom. A four-lane strip of road and an off ramp can be a town’s ticket to life. Life in the fast food lane.

Other places don’t mind being small. They take pride in the fact that nothing has changed since their forefathers bought the land for a bead and a prayer. They’re not afraid to take on the government. To say, “You’re durn tootin’,” when the postal service asks if they
really
need a post office. To say, “No, thank you,” to federal authorities waving emergency funds for snow removal under their noses. “We’re perfectly capable of clearing our own snow, thank you. There was snow before there was matching grants.”

Such is Round Corners.

If Round Corners has a dream, it is one of balance, of not letting the government push it one way and the outsiders push it another. The countryside is speckled with New York stockbrokers raising sheep, corporate vice presidents running businesses by modem, and best-selling authors hunched over wood stoves. They come to Vermont to get away. They want out of the rat race and into nature. They want to live off the land in L.L. Bean boots and cashmere sweaters. They seek self-sufficiency. They write Christmas cards to city friends: “No traffic, no rush, no ulcers, no muggings. Yes, paradise. Am sending under separate cover can of maple syrup I made from sap from my own trees. May your holidays be simple and happy.” The imprint on the back of the card is a designer line of stationery sold only in the most exclusive shops in New York.

They come to escape and end up trying to turn the town into the one they left. They have all kinds of ideas for streetlights and road maintenance. They grow impatient when voters turn down a bond issue to renovate the 74-year-old school but support an initiative declaring the town “nuclear free.” (“How many ships armed with nuclear weapons do we get in Round Corners?” said Sheriff Odie Dorfmann, who opposed the proposal on grounds of absurdity.)

And then there are those who come, never intending to change anything and throw our lives up into the air like a basket of colored balls. When we land, we are mixed up, out of place, looking at things differently and likely to never be the same again.

Thomas tossed the sleeping bag into the back of the yellow van. Again, he surveyed the contents of the van. Again, I asked if he had the computer.

Yes.

And the modem? Yes. The binoculars? Yes. Star charts. Yes.

“Did you fold and pack the clothes that were in the dryer?”

“Yes and I even folded yours; they’re on your bed.”

Thomas was leaving. He had a ticket for Australia in his pocket. An airplane ticket. He could have gone by boat, but after the sinking of the Star in Heaven, the astronomers’ cruise ship, I wasn’t keen on the idea of Thomas traveling by boat. “I’ll worry until you dock in Sydney. I’ll probably need dental work from grinding my teeth. I’ll develop a twitch. I won’t get a thing done.”

T-Bone augmented my arguments with a grisly description of seasickness, which made Thomas’s face turn the color of my van just thinking about it.

“All right,” he said, “the friendly skies it is.”

That was just a week ago, and now he was going. Australia. The southern hemisphere has a whole different sky of stars this time of year, Thomas said, and besides, it’s warmer there. This is summer in Australia.

T-Bone handed Thomas a duffel bag, the last item to be stowed in the van. Thomas carelessly flung it in and turned toward us. “I hate this,” he said, “My mom says departures are tough because luggage reminds people that it’s too late to say all the things they had wanted to say. So they babble inane, stupid stuff.” He grabbed my hand. “Let’s not be inane and stupid. Quick, let’s discuss the meaning of life, why we’re here, where we came from. Anything. A joke. Something that we’ll remember for the rest of our lives.”

I smiled and placed my hand on his cheek, knowing that although he spoke with a teasing voice, Thomas in some small place in his heart really meant it. I wanted to give him that, some profound sentiment to send him off into the sunset. But I couldn’t think of a single thing to say, not even some country western song wisdom. Somehow I knew he’d be all right. I told him once he had the gift of fitting in anywhere, that he was one of those people who created their own opportunities. Finally, I think, he believed me.