Maud's House (22 page)

I hugged him. He sighed and swallowed, so did I. Finally, sniffing, I pushed away.

“I’ll send you photos. Pictures of me in a bush hat. Of kangaroos.”

I smiled shakily.

Again, Thomas checked the van: sleeping bag, duffel, computer, binoculars, cassette player, painting. It was a self-portrait. The first one I’d ever tried. It was small, the right size for a traveling man, just as he requested. In the painting, I’m hugging Milky Way. Both of us are wearing big smiles. The cow’s bridgework looks like something out of an editorial cartoon of Jimmy Carter.

Thomas studied the pile. His worldly possessions were exactly as he had left them. Nothing had jumped out of the van while his back was turned. He would not have to go through the indignity of dragging a duffel bag, kicking and screaming, back to the van or bribing a computer cable into behaving with a call to the local bulletin board. He couldn’t put it off any longer.

He turned and shook hands with T-Bone, the man who’d taught him everything he’d ever need to know about the end of a cow, and then some.

“Take care of yourself,” T-Bone said.

“Take care of her,” Thomas said nodding toward me.

“Go,” I said, pulling his head down and kissing his cheek.

Thomas nodded again then climbed into the van. It started on the fourth attempt. Then, with a grin and a wave, he was off, a bright yellow dot buzzing down the snow-packed road. We stood in the cold, shivering, watching the yellow van out of sight. A junco in the maple overhead chipped. T-Bone stamped his feet.

“He’s smart to get out before the thaw.”

“Yes,” I said. “Mud season does crazy things to a person.”

Harvey Winchester finally called at seven.

“Where are you?” Wynn cried.

“Still at work,” he said. The last real snowstorm of the season, the last humdinger, had downed trees which in turn had dropped powerlines. “There’s not a lick of light on the whole campus. We’ve got to remove those trees so the linemen can get to work. Every building, including the dormitories, is pitch dark. Who knows what those kids are up to?”

“Probably trying to stay warm,” Wynn said.

“That’s what I’m afraid of,” Harvey said.

“But what about the Lamaze class tonight?”

“Go ahead without me,” Harvey said. “And take notes.”

Wynn hung up on her husband and headed for the Round Corners Restaurant. There she whined over her second piece of German chocolate cake, “
He
was the one who liked going to classes.
I
only put up with all that panting nonsense for him. And now
he’s
out in the cold coaching linemen instead of me. This is the rehearsal of the birth of his own child, for gawdsake.”

The clock said seven seventeen. Even if he left that very minute, Harvey wouldn’t make it on time. The college was a thirty-mile drive, and tonight the road was swarming with snowplows. Wynn jammed her arms into Harvey’s big, old down parka. She couldn’t zip hers anymore. Harvey’s parka was too old, too worn, even for Harvey, a fashion illiterate if there ever was one. He offered to buy Wynn a new coat. But, she said, don’t waste the money. She didn’t care how she looked. She glanced at her reflection in the window. She looked like shit in hunter’s green.

She squared her shoulders the way martyrs of all time have prepared themselves. I took one look at her face and relented, “All right, I’ll coach you tonight. So will T-Bone.”

“Me?” T-Bone choked on his coffee. He spun around on his stool and gaped at me.

“Well, you have more experience than I have. At least, you’ve helped cows give birth.”

“I don’t know…”

“Oh, please,” begged Wynn; she liked the idea of having an authority consulting on her case.

T-Bone led us to his pickup truck, keeping a light grasp on Wynn’s elbow as we crossed an icy patch. He helped her into the cab, tucked a blanket around her, and asked if she was warm enough. “Yes,” said a surprised Wynn. Harvey, even in his heightened state of prenatal awareness, never offered a wrap.

I climbed in beside Wynn as T-Bone limped around the front of the truck to the driver’s side. I noticed T-Bone didn’t offer me so much as a dishcloth.

Lamaze classes were in the basement of the library. There were four couples, including the Winchesters. The instructor was a former obstetrics nurse. She was enthusiastic, supportive, perky. And skinny.

“She makes me want to throw up,” Wynn said. “Harvey, of course, thinks she’s wonderful.”

We began with massage. “Remember coaches a relaxed mother is a calmer mother,” said the nurse. Enough said to the coaches, who jumped to stroking their partners. Apparently none of them wanted an hysterical fat woman on their hands.

I reached for Wynn. “No, let T-Bone,” Wynn said, closing her eyes and laying flat on a mat, pillows propped under her knees and head.

I stared at T-Bone archly. He blushed and tentatively touched Wynn’s arm.

“I won’t break,” Wynn said.

T-Bone stole a look at the couple on the next mat. He tried to imitate the father-to-be, working joint by joint, muscle by muscle, down to the toes. The father-to-be kept up a constant patter of soft, reassuring whispering.

I knew what Wynn was experiencing. T-Bone has gentle hands, soothing hands, hands accustomed to calming creatures. He doesn’t grind or poke or punch, like some sadistic Swedish masseuse. Wynn relaxed. The tension poured out of her in buckets.

“What do I say to her?” T-Bone asked me. “Somehow ‘Cold enough for you lately?’ doesn’t cut it.”

I shrugged. “Tell her what you know.”

So T-Bone talked to Wynn of his farm and his cows, the way his land rolls from boundary to boundary and how he knows every bump. Soon, he told her, water will ripple through the hills. When the snow melted, his whole farm trickled with little streams, tiny waterfalls, microscopic rivers.

“I like to drive into the meadows and fields and see the earth waking up from winter. It makes me want to dance.”

“Dance?” Wynn said, sleepily.

“Celebrate. Feel alive. Grow peaceful and whole, yet excited. As if the rivers are bubbling inside me. Life rushing to the surface in me.”

“Yes,” Wynn mumbled, “like knitting squares for a baby’s blanket.”

I leaned back and closed my eyes, my only contact with the world T-Bone’s mesmerizing voice. I thought of granny blanket squares, fitting together so perfectly, so prettily. There was Wynn, needles in hand. Look at her knit. She is incredible; she can’t make a mistake even if she tries. Everyone wants an afghan by Wynn. People call her designs divine; surely that combination of hunter’s green and azure blue is inspired, they gush. “It’s nothing,” Wynn says biting the yarn with her teeth, “simply an old parka I found lying around the house and worked into the pattern of the afghan.” Then she cavalierly tosses a scarf over her shoulder, lowers the hood on the hairdryer and returns to her knitting, looking for all the world like a grounded Amelia Earhart getting a perm.

Such daring, her fan club whispers.

I turn away. I could do that. I could be daring and courageous. I left the beauty shop, saddled up my cow and headed home to my studio…

“Maud. Maud! Will you wake up? We’ve got a situation here.”

“What?” I rubbed my eyes then pried them open.

Wynn sat up holding her stomach. She looked as if she had just swallowed a half-baked doughnut.

“Is she sick?”

“We were starting the breathing exercises, whatever they are, and she grabbed her stomach.”

“I’m conscious. You can talk to me.”

“Well, what is it?” I said irritated. Cows in my dreams always made me grumpy.

“I think it’s the baby.”

“Now!” T-Bone gasped.

“Now!” I shouted.

We made the twenty-minute drive to the hospital in 13.5 flat, hitting only one tree on a slippery curve west of town. As the orderlies wheeled Wynn’s gurney away, she shouted, “Maud, call Harvey and tell him fuck the trees. Get his ass here now.”

Harvey made it in time for the birth of his 7-pound, 4-ounce girl with thick black hair and fantastic eyelashes. At least, I think that was him, a blur flying through the waiting room, a chainsaw extension cord trailing behind him.

T-Bone and I waited to see the baby. She didn’t have any neck and she looked rather worn and wrinkled. She seemed to cry a lot. She needed a shampoo, blow-dry, and style. In short, she was beautiful.

T-Bone drove home slowly. The sun was just coming up. The weatherman on the radio forecasted a thaw. Just in time for Town Meeting Day. That’ll be a picnic. At T-Bone’s, we wearily milked the cows then crawled into bed with our clothes on. We held each other and waited for the same old dreams. But they didn’t come. We slept in peace as did the tired Winchester Family.

R
ain.

Nature carved the snow banks with rain.

Whittled out monsters and animals and voluptuous women.

The frozen earth beneath the snow could not absorb the slicing water. So the water skated. Down the mountain, through the woods, across the pastures, over the roads. All the way to Lake Champlain. Everywhere in Round Corners patches of earth appeared. Dark spots dappled the snow, like the coat of a Holstein cow. People discovered they had yards and fences and had forgotten to take in the rake last fall. Sheriff Odie Dorfmann’s wife stared out her kitchen window at dozens of softballs, a stadium of softballs.

It rained through the night and the dawn. The people of Round Corners got up, looked out the window, and shrugged. It didn’t matter. Today was Town Meeting Day.

And the people of Round Corners loved Town Meeting.

By ten o’clock, the gymnasium of the Round Corners Elementary School was full of folks in galoshes and slickers. Rain was, at that very moment, eating away at the white calling card of the snowstorm seven days ago, the storm that kept Harvey Winchester from attending his beloved Lamaze classes but couldn’t keep him away from his daughter’s birthing room, the storm that introduced T-Bone and me to the calm, watery world of human babies.

The townspeople left cellars full of mud and drove roads almost impassable from high water to get to Town Meeting: “Didn’t think I could get here,” one man told another, “and don’t know if I’ll get home.”

In the back of the auditorium, the parents association was doing a brisk business this cold, wet morning in coffee and hot chocolate. Cake doughnuts were on sale for those who missed breakfast or needed something to stuff in the mouths of bored babies or loquacious orators. Proceeds were earmarked for new playground equipment, a contraption that looked part-tree and part-ship and was called In The Swing of Things.

The purpose of Town Meeting was not only to put the town’s business in order, but to restore and renew friendships frozen in place by the long winter. It was no fluke that Town Meeting was scheduled in March. News pushed forward, like a crocus in the snow, at Town Meeting. Friends, who had seen little of each other during the cold months, caught up on the events in their lives: the grandchildren who had been born, the sons and daughters who were away at college.

In one of the most independent forms of government, everyone was given the opportunity to have his or her say. Town Moderator Frank Snowden saw to it. He and his gavel kept the meeting running according to schedule and parliamentary procedure. Frank was known for his firmness, fairness, and a sense of humor capable of defusing hot situations. This meeting the people elected Frank to his tenth year as moderator. Ella, sitting in the front row, smiled: She’d told him he was a shooin.

Round Corners residents plowed through the agenda, loudly and clearly exercising their rights of free speech. The farmer with five hunting dogs objected to the proposed leash law. The woman sitting next to Reverend and Mrs. Swan set aside the dress she was hemming to ask several specific questions about the town budget. “Look at those numbers on page five, Herb. They just don’t add up.”

Herb the town clerk punched out a symphony on the calculator. “There’s a mistake all right.” The woman sighed in satisfaction. “Haven’t you ever made a mistake, Louise?”

“Not that I remember,” Louise said, “but if’n I did, I wouldn’t advertise it in the town budget.”

Round Corners people believed in stating their views simply and bluntly. Opposition was not taken personally. “With all due respect to my neighbor,” said one man, “he doesn’t know what he’s talking about.”

I perched on a cold metal folding chair in the back of the gym beside Freda Lee. The chair on the other side was empty, saved for T-Bone. Every time the side door of the gymnasium swung open letting in latecomers and cold wind and rain, I strained to see if T-Bone was among them.

In the row in front of us were the Winchesters, holding hands and cradling sleeping Baby Winchester. Odie approached the podium and Wynn turned around and winked at me. Behind the podium was a huge object draped in a white sheet.

“Too bad Thomas isn’t here. He would have loved this,” Freda whispered.

“Yes,” I said.

The painting was as big as a queen-sized bed. Thomas measured the space in the town hall, three times. “It’s got to be this big,” he said, showing me the numbers on a scrap of paper.

“That’s too big,” I said.

“No, it’s not.”

“I can’t do it.”

“Yes, you can.”

Thomas really ought to be here with his bowls of soup (“Not cream of celery again.”) and his nagging about sleep and work and baths. No one, except T-Bone, had ever taken care of me like Thomas had. But Thomas was in Australia. According to his postcards, he was “chasing girls and building houses.” The last card, sporting a koala clinging to a tree, said simply: “Well, what do you think?”

Not did you finish it? Or how’s it going? The idealism of youth. The faith of Thomas.

Where was T-Bone? I squirmed in my seat.

All right, this is the absolutely first and last analysis of the painting. From here on out, I’m turning strictly stoic, cowboy tight-lipped, forget all this deep psychological symbolism shit. I’m not answering any questions after this. Picasso had his blue period. This is my talkative period. Catch it quick; it’s going to last two minutes.