Maud's House (4 page)

The song slipped onto a breeze headed west, and in the ensuing silence I was glad I had chosen the Reverend to play instead of letting Sergeant Whatsisname talk me into a kid with a trumpet. Reverend Swan had to struggle to return mind and soul back to the cemetery. As Reverend Swan became conscious again of his surroundings, his tall, skinny frame, so elastic in performance, straightened, grew stiff. That far-off look left his blue eyes. He slicked back the tufts of hair on the sides of his bald head with long fingers. Returning to reality, obviously, was a Herculean task. The kid with the trumpet and his music would have never left the cemetery. The end would have come in a snap, with a click of the heels.

Finally composed, Reverend Swan approached me, took my hand in both of his, the way preachers always shake hands, sandwich-style, and said, “What did you think?”

“I think George would have said you’ve never played better.”

“He did like my horn.”

“That was George, patron of the arts.”

The Reverend gently turned me away from the casket. “Maud, you know, if there’s anything I can do…”

I almost giggled again. Reverend Swan was an ineffective man for a preacher. “He has absolutely no powers of persuasion,” George used to say. But I’ve always thought that was Reverend Swan’s charm, so I smiled and gently recaptured my hand. “Anyway,” I said, “the saxophone was good.”

“I’ve never used it before, in this manner.”

“You ought to keep it in the act.”

“You think so?”

“Absolutely.”

His face burst into a happy grin, then quickly sobered. He nodded and left me to field condolences. Everyone stopped and offered a word of sympathy. They did their best to protect me. No one mentioned the crumbled car full of clothes and baseball shoes.

No one mentioned the house.

We are like that: a family. We are entwined, locked together in life and death like battling stags. We have known each other since the first wind blew through Round Corners. They used to save their leftover house paint for me, for my house. Other people’s leftovers were part of those pictures that had captivated Raj, my father, even George at first. Other people’s leftovers, colors they liked, colors they’d once chosen. A strange bond, leftovers. One not easily or lightly broken.

Freda offered to stay with me. But I pointed her toward her car. Go on, I said; I knew she was scheduled to work a double shift, lunch and dinner, at the Round Corners Restaurant. Freda Lee couldn’t afford to miss out on the gratuity windfall that came with the autumn tourist trade. She supported three children and a hypochondriac husband on her meager wages and tips.

“Go on,” I told Freda. “I’ll be all right.” The restaurant would be packed that night with flatlanders, who had come to see the leaves peak. Out-of-staters were big tippers. This time of the year there were school supplies and winter coats to be bought and, of course, a Christmas present for husband Lewis Lee. I can’t remember the last time Lewis Lee bought Freda a gift, a
real
present, not one of those things he whittles out of clothespins. Freda says she gets all the gifts she needs every night in bed with Lewis Lee. I’m glad the guy is good for something.

Everyone offered their sympathies. Frank and Ella Snowden were the last.

Frank ran Snowden’s Store, and Ella was the local postmistress. Both store and postal station were located in a blue wooden clapboard building down the street from the Round Corners Restaurant. It was a convenient setup. In one stop, you could take care of all your shopping needs from soup to stamps.

Ella was the romantic one. She wrote poetry during slow periods at the post office, which were many. After all, how many stamps can you sell to a town of five hundred people?

“Reverend Swan’s saxophone was a nice touch, Maud,” said Ella.

“The sax was off-key,” Frank said.

Frank would know about the sax since he sang in the barbershop quartet. The quartet practiced every Wednesday night and had gone to state competition twice.

“You think you know everything about music, Mr. Barbershop Quartet,” Ella said. “What did you think, T-Bone?”

T-Bone said it might have been a bit flat.

“Well, I don’t care,” said Ella. She turned to me. “Don’t you think there is something so forlorn about the sound of a solo saxophone? It’s as if it is trying to communicate with us.” She opened her big purse and began rummaging through its contents. “Now, where did I put that notebook? We better get going, Frank. I can feel a poem coming.”

Frank rolled his eyes. “I’ve got some peas to shelve.”

Since neither hired any help, they had closed both the store and the postal station to attend George’s funeral. Wherever he was, I bet George was preening: He had done what the great Martin Luther King couldn’t do—shut down a U.S. Post Office without a squawk.

Not bad, George.

The telephone rang. I pushed myself off the porch.

It took a moment to locate the phone. The place has been a mess ever since George left. George was neatness personified. Nothing ever seemed out of place around him. He was like that little boy in the comics who walks around perpetually enveloped in a whirlpool of dust—only just the opposite. George was enclosed in an invisible neatness layer. You could have performed surgery in his office amid the ledgers; it was so sterile. Unlike George’s secretary, I had not been encouraged to go there.

I found the telephone jack and reeled in the phone like a catfish.

It was Wynn Winchester.

“Oh, Maud, I probably shouldn’t be talking to you in my condition. You know these first months are the most important. That’s when the brain forms. Harvey said you would just be thinking about George today. But I told Harvey I’m going to be by Maud’s side, figuratively speaking, of course, no matter what morbid vibes might race along the telephone wire and try to tunnel through my uterine wall.”

“You’re a good friend, Wynn.”

“Well, Maud, we
were
in geography together.”

Wynn is the only beautician in town. She prides herself on being a career woman, an entrepreneur, and a future working mother. Besides owning her own business, she is three months, one week, and three days pregnant. The countdown is posted daily on a huge chalkboard in the beauty salon. She and Harvey have wanted children practically from the day they met in ninth grade. This is the closest they have come, and the whole town is holding its breath.

For awhile, during a two-month spat with Harvey in our sophomore year, she scared me by dating Odie Dorfmann. She was a mousy-brown cheerleader then; now she’s a redhead. Odie was three years ahead of us and, in my opinion, too big to date. A football coach’s dream, they called him. I never felt safe around Odie; it was as if he might step on me by mistake.

In the end, my intuition was on target: I should have been wary of Odie.

“Well, what do you think of Odie’s plan?” Wynn said excitedly. I could almost see her bouncing on the sofa, her red curls bobbing.

“I’m trying not to.”

“It’s just what you need. Everyone thinks so.”

“Everyone ought to mind their own business.”

“Now, that’s a ridiculous thing to say; you know it’s impossible for us to keep our noses out of your business. We just want to see you happy. We had to do something, Maud, we’re your friends. This blockage has gone on too long.” Blockage. Sounded intestinal.

Wynn, who not only reads several magazines from cover to cover but watches every talk show zinging across the airwaves, considers herself fluent in all dialects of medical and psycho babble. Death, disease, and dysfunction fascinate her.

“The only blockage is in your head. I don’t paint anymore, Wynn. And that’s it.”

“Now, Maud, don’t be that way. Actually,” Wynn’s voice became softer and less certain, “I thought maybe you might need a model. Do you think there’ll be a pregnant woman in your painting, Maud?”

“There
is
no painting, Wynn.”

“I could look much more pregnant than I am. We could use pillows or something. Well, you think about it. I don’t want to push you. You’re the artist.”

I sighed, swished the beer can into the trash basket, and pulled another from the fridge.

“Are you still making booties?”

Wynn had won every prize in the county for her knitting. Harvey’s sweaters were prettier than Bill Cosby’s, people said. It never failed: Every autumn some tourist from New York City ambled into her shop, tripped over her knitting basket, and offered her hundreds of dollars for the sweater she was knitting. Well, Wynn would say, it
was
to be for her husband (who already had a severe case of wool overload). The tourist always left with the sweater, at twice the original offer. Easy Christmas money, Wynn called the negotiations.

She had one particular pair of knitting needles passed down from her grandmother that she called her lucky needles. I could hear them clicking over the phone. Only lucky needles were to be used on the baby’s clothes. This baby was so long awaited (Wynn had miscarried twice) that Wynn was giving anything that smacked of bad omen—ladders, black cats, broken mirrors—a wide berth.

“Oh, I’ve finished those. I’m on to leggings now. I’m trying to steer clear of the basic blues and pinks. Babies are so unpredictable.”

“So I’ve heard,” I said.

I stepped over dirty clothes, newspapers, cups of cold coffee, beer cans. It looked as if a whole family was camped in the living room instead of one woman. I shrugged and headed upstairs to the bedrooms. My western boots clicked on the hardwood floors. George had hated these boots. I wore them with my jeans stuffed in the top so he had to look at the fancy stitching on the olive green suede. I used to wear this shirt to bug him, too. It’s a bright blue Hawaiian shirt with yellow parrots on it. George didn’t like parrots; they reminded him of jungles and Vietnam and enlistment, which he considered his one big mistake in life (although he never admitted it to best friend and fellow veteran Odie).

There at the end, I probably did a lot of things to irritate George.

As I climbed the staircase, I sipped another Rolling Rock. The beer was sharp and good. It smelled of the back seats of boys’ cars. The radio, as usual, was tuned to Catfish Joe’s Morning Show. Despite his name, Joe had a good ear for country music. I began to hum.

Why couldn’t the world be like country music: Things happened to you, you hurt, you cried, then you got up and started living again. There was endless love and forbidden love and doomed love in country music, but not talked-about love, not taken-apart love, not psychoanalyzed love. Country music came from the land, where everything was simple and straightforward, where mystery was a gift.

I hated the way I’d begun analyzing everything. I hated psychology. People who see motives in everything get on my nerves. Like Wynn. She insisted there had to be a
reason
for everything. She had a whole theory about George and me and the house.

The bedrooms were pale places now. No puffed-up Picasso bulls. Women in soft, sheer gowns would sleep in such rooms. Women who would dream pretty dreams, who never woke in a sweat. No wonder I’d begun sleeping downstairs on the couch, in my clothes, with beer on my breath.

From the bedroom window I stared at the faded picture of Milky Way on the barn. The morning sun shone like a spotlight on the old pet’s portrait. Egged on by a northern wind, the leaves gossiped on the branches all the way to Lake Champlain, saying a thousand good-byes to each other.

Up and down the one-hundred-mile lake sailors are pulling their boats up on shore, readying them for winter. In a few months the lake will freeze. The ice fishermen will drive their trucks out on the frozen water and position their funny little huts where the boats had been. The snowmobilers will rip across the glassy surface. The skaters will click and clatter and thump above the fish.

So long summer. So long George.

I wish.

S
ome mornings I push the hangover aside, crank my cold van to life in the dark, and drive the one mile to T-Bone’s farm—to watch him dance.

Jacques Leon Thibeault, dairy farmer and dancer, never sleeps in. Every morning at four o’clock T-Bone steps out of the house, steaming mug in hand. He crosses the yard in darkness, heading for the circle of warm, welcoming light cast by the lamp over the barn door. Inside the barn, he flips on more lights, hangs his denim jacket on a hook, and drains his coffee cup. He switches on the radio.

The milk room, where the milk is stored and waits to be transported to the dairy for processing, smells of pine, ammonia, linoleum, and starched linen. Nurses’ shoes would squeak across the smooth concrete floor. Everything in the room—bulk tank, sinks, jars, buckets, milklines—is either glass or stainless steel, sparkling glass and spotless stainless steel. A germ could see itself in the shiny surfaces.

Through a door on the far side is the main section of the barn, a cavernous open area filled with bawling bovines. This is a clean place, too, although it doesn’t smell like it. Once a reporter from Burlington wrote an article on: “The Vermont Dairy Farmer: A Dying Breed?” The writer made much of the muck and mud, the plodding progress of owner and beast, and the aroma of the barn. He wrote of being “slapped by the smell of cow.” T-Bone loves that pungent punch. It is home hitting him in the face.

Like a doctor, T-Bone begins by making rounds. He whistles as he strolls between the rows of stalls. Occasionally, he stops and talks to a cow, examines it more closely, his calm hands traveling knowledgeably over neck and flank, then with a pat on the rump, he continues to the next cow. When he has traversed the whole of the long barn, is satisfied with the health and happiness of his sixty head, he begins hooking up the milkers.

Other farmers’ cows let down their milk when they hear the bawl of a calf or the hum of the milking machine. T-Bone’s cows become stimulated at the sound of his tapping boots. Shuffle, kick, shuffle, kick, udders tingle. Shuffle, kick, milk rushes to the teats.