Spoonwood (6 page)

My last week in the house of correction, the superintendent resigns his position for coddling or cuddling prisoners, maybe both, or so the rumors go. The word goes out that the farm part of the jail will be phased out. Hard time ahead. I should be grateful that I'll be out before the new punishment regimen, but something in me thinks hard time could save me.

4

BABY IN A DUMPSTER

I
t's 9
AM
on the day of my release from prison, the weather warm and sultry, and my mother shows up with the Ford to bring me back home. Home? My parents' place has never been home. She has the baby with her, which disappoints me. On the way I tell my mother about the agreement with Mrs. Salmon. I am too ashamed to mention the money.

“She can do a lot more for him than we can, that's for sure,” my mother says, her voice breaking at the edges.

In the rear is Birch, strapped into a car seat. At the moment I am no longer thinking of him as “Birch,” as “my son.” He's an alien, put here to make me crazy and unhappy.

“You think I'm doing the right thing?” I ask. I don't really care what my mother says. I'm just trying to sound concerned.

“I don't know, Freddie, I just don't know. You think she'd let us come and visit? I mean, Birch is family.”

“I imagine so,” I lie.

“I'm going to miss him. I love him. Don't you love him?”

I won't say what I am thinking, which is that I don't love anybody. Instead, I say, “Of course I love him. I'm just trying to do what's best for him.”

“Of course you are,” she says.

I'm wondering whether now she's the one lying or whether she's just gullible. Either way, I wish she hadn't spoken, and I wish I didn't have a mother to make me feel so ugly inside.

“I want to be there this afternoon when you meet with Mrs. Salmon,” my mother says. “I want to scope her out.” She hurries her words now.

I have never really understood my mother, which seems like a task worth pursuing. “What do you mean, Mom?”

“I always wanted to snoop in that house,” she says, unaccountably silly and malicious now.

“Everybody has a false face,” Old Crow says. “Even Elenore. Don't you just hate her? Don't you just hate them all?”

“What was that?” my mother says.

“Nothing—nothing,” I say.

Minutes later I'm home, but it doesn't seem real to me. I feel weightless; I'm hyperventilating.

“What's the matter?” Elenore says.

“Bit of an anxiety attack,” I say.

“A what?”

“Never mind, Mom. I have to go somewhere and think.” I hurry out of the house.

I drive my pickup to the liquor store in Keene with an idea to buy a bottle of the warm brown stuff I am so fond of, but I settle for a half gallon of Uncle Fred's vodka because it won't show on my breath. I don't even wait until I'm out of the parking lot before tipping the bottle and sucking out a corner of it. Another. I'm waiting for the feeling. And it comes. Food has let me down, people have let me down, weather has let me down—but never Old Crow, even in his potato incarnation as Uncle Fred. I wait.

I'm driving five miles under the speed limit. I take another long pull, stop the bottle (still in the brown paper bag), and shove it under the seat. In a few minutes I'm in that easy state between mellow and cross-eyed. I think about the money.

I show up at my parents' place a few minutes before Howard and Pitchfork arrive unexpectedly for lunch. Usually, they eat on the road.

“Pitchfork, you can get along without me this afternoon for a couple hours,” Howard hollers up at the cab after he's stepped down. “Drive slow now.”

My brief good humor vanishes. “Don't you think this is hard enough for me without the entire family on hand to witness it?” I say.

“Not nearly as hard as it should be,” Howard says through a crook in his lips.

My father has lost all respect for me. Suddenly, my protective anger falls away and I am outside of myself, and I see Howard's slight limp where he favors his bad leg, then the bouquet of wildflowers Elenore has picked and put in a vase, no doubt in honor of my return. I can't bear it, a little thing like this sending me plummeting to my depths. Because of my son I don't even have the luxury of committing suicide. The best thing I can do for him and my family is to disappear entirely, like my sister Sherry Ann. This sudden concern for others upsets me. It's as if without my anger I'm not me. I try to blink it away. I want desperately to watch TV, to finish my drunk, to go back to work in the fields at the House of Correction, anything to keep from seeing. I struggle inside to find my wonderful, armor-plated anger.

“Don't I get to eat?” Pitchfork hollers down from the high-horse of the cab, his voice like the bray of a blind goat trying to mate.

“Not from up there you can't,” Howard says without rancor or humor.

Pitchfork hesitates, dismounts.

After lunch the Honeywagon roars off with Pitchfork behind the wheel, gears grinding, tires kicking up pebbles and dust. Pitchfork is about as emotionally solid a citizen as you can find in North America, but he's a wild man behind the wheel. Howard cracks a little smile and mutters, “Ignoramus.”

I'm happy to go for a ride, not realizing of course that my fate is about to be decided. We leave in tandem, Grandpa Howard and
Grandma Elenore and me in the Ford wagon and Dad in his pickup.

“We're going to lose them both—I can feel it,” Grandma says, voice flat. “The Salmon woman gets Birch, and Freddie will just bug out.”

“Like Sherry Ann,” Grandpa says.

“What is he looking for? What does he want?”

“Beats me. Maybe he's just sensitive.”

“That don't tell me anything.”

“Well, I don't know anything, okay? I don't understand any of our kids. Sherry Ann was the one that seemed so happy-go-lucky. Why'd she run off? Why do they all run off?”

“They're not running, Howie. They're moving away, for opportunity and to escape memory and cold weather. I love all our grandkids, but this one”—she pats me on the head—“he's such a treasure. Special circumstances baby. I expect Mrs. Salmon will do a better job raising him than us.”

“You believe that?”

“No.”

“Mistake I made with Freddie is, unlike the girls, I berated him.”

“Someday he'll wake up and realize you're just a horse's ass, Howie, an easy fault to forgive. You know what bothers me the most?”

“Birch won't be raised Catholic.”

“He's not even baptized. You know what that means?”

“Heaven's a long shot?”

“Yes, that's what it means.”

Dad lags behind us two or three minutes. We wait in the car for him to show. Grandma Elenore is excited by the sight of that great big beautiful house. By contrast, the house has a dampening effect on Grandpa. He goes suddenly shy. Me, I'm taking mental snapshots for later retrieval. The gardens are all grown over, and the trees—once famous for topiary—are shaggy. The smell of cut grass is in the air. The house is stuccoed a tan color, with big windows and a red terracotta roof.

“This place is more run down than I remembered,” says Grandpa Howard.

“It's beautiful,” says Grandma Elenore. “Looks like a villa on the Mediterranean Sea.”

Except for one New Hampshire touch, a row of lilac bushes that you planted, Mother, only hours before I was born and you died. Did you really want me? Why did you go up to the ledges? I refuse to think the worst of you. You had reasons, and I have faith.

Dad arrives and we all meet at the grand entry of red paving bricks underfoot. At each end of the big doors are huge pots sprouting geraniums.

Grandma Elenore says, “This may be the last time we're together as a family.”

We're met at the door by a pretty dark-skinned woman, who smiles and leads us through the echoey hall to the drawing room, with its huge fireplace, chairs and couches with bowed legs, long mirrors with little gowns on the frames, and a couple of bookshelves for show.

The house changes my state of mind somewhat. For one thing the vodka I've been nipping away at is having its effect. I'll be pleasantly detached for a while. I just wonder what I'll do when phase two of my drunk sets in. Something else, a tug of nostalgia and familiarity. After Persephone left for Tasmania, I lived here with Lilith in this house—she regarded it as her house, not her mother's—and something about the place still feels like home. This relatively pleasant mood vanishes the instant the door opens. Standing in a poised, almost arrogant fashion, is the woman I met a month or so earlier on the roadway. I resent her for the simple reason that she's not Lilith.

“How do you do, I'm Katharine Ramchand, Mrs. Salmon's niece and personal assistant,” she says politely in that accent I can't place. “Mrs. Salmon and Attorney Prell will be right with you. Please come in and have some tea?”

“Tea—wonderful!” Elenore says in a tone a little too friendly to suit me.

Howard bobs his head “yes yes yes” even though he doesn't drink tea. He's intimidated by this place. I want to shake him and tell him to be himself. At the same time I'm secretly gleeful that he's showing weakness.

“Do you remember me?” I say to Katharine as she walks us in.

“No, should I?” she says.

“You stopped and asked me directions a little more than a month ago.”

“Oh, yes, the trash man,” she says, only slightly flustered.

That's the way it is when you do the route. Everybody needs you, but they don't see you.

We arrive in the living room. I sit on a clawfoot chair outside of the target zone of the conversation area, two couches that face each across a coffee table of curly maple cut on the trust lands. My parents and Birch take seats on one of the couches. Lilith and I often built big fires in the fireplace, and then we would make love on a couch or even on the floor.

Persephone bursts into the room. She's wearing a solid-colored tan skirt and one of her signature high-collar white blouses. She's bent and frail, slightly round-shouldered. By contrast, Garvin, the picture of health, stands behind her with Monet, who is smoking a meerschaum pipe. Garvin is carrying a briefcase. Persephone turns to Garvin. “My word, but he's brought the whole tribe.” She turns away from Garvin to me. “Look at him, just a perfect little creature. I'd weep if I had a tear duct left.”

Persephone has a way of talking that puts a twist of mockery in everything she says. She could tell you it was a nice day and make you hate yourself.

Persephone holds her arms out and Elenore, as if hypnotized, hands Birch up to her.

Grandma Persephone smells like soggy, spoiled spinach and cigarettes. Her hands are like a hawk's claws that threaten to drop me for their awkwardness. She nuzzles me with her mouth. Prickles of mustache hairs scratch my neck, and little teeth probe my flesh like a vampire's searching the right place to sink the
fangs. I love the embrace, so much more daring than Grandma Elenore.

Still holding Birch, Persephone sits on the couch beside my mother. I'm hot, not perspiring, the heat going directly to my core.

“Wouldn't you just die to have skin like that?” Persephone says.

“I don't know's I'd go that far,” Elenore says.

Katharine returns with a tray of cookies. “Folks, you've met my niece, Katharine?” Persephone says. “Doctor Ramchand recently received her Ph.D. in geology. She has a grant to study New England rock walls and cellar holes. Is that correct?”

“Quite close,” Katharine says.

“Katharine is a citizen of Trinidad,” Monet says.

“Actually, I have dual citizenship. My mother was an American.”

“Katharine is my late sister's child. Katharine, this is Elenore Elman, her husband, Howard, and their son, Frederick. And this squirmy handful must be . . . Raphael?”

“We don't call him that. We call him Birch,” Elenore says.

“A birch boy in a family of elm men—this is too good,” Persephone laughs, looking at Garvin as if he were the only one who could appreciate her sense of humor. And maybe that is the case.

Katharine slips out of the room.

“The name comes from Lilith's favorite tree,” I say.

“Her favorite tree was the mountain laurel,” Persephone snaps.

“I guess we could disagree about that,” I say.

“I imagine she told everybody a different story,” Howard pipes in, momentarily stopping all conversation.

Persephone, who is one given to sudden unnaccountable bursts of laughter, breaks the silence with a short ha-ha, then turns to Garvin. “Do you want to hold the baby?” She doesn't wait for his answer but hands him over.

Garvin pumps Birch above his head as if he were part of his weight-training program. Birch smiles big, which magnifies my envy and hatred.

“He looks more like Garvin than anyone else in the room,” Persephone mutters to Monet, but I hear her because Persephone is not good at muttering. It's suffocatingly hot.

Garvin goes to hand Birch back to Persephone, but Elenore snatches him away.

“I'll take him—please,” Persephone says, the “please” drawn out and pleadingly insistent in the way of the Upper Darby elite, a slightly superior smirk on her dry lips.

Howard suddenly comes alive. “We won't stand for this,” he says. “Freddie, don't give this baby to this woman. She'll ruin him.”

“He's not giving him to me. I'm adopting him and paying your son a considerable sum of money for the privilege.”

Howard is taken aback, but only for a second. He looks at me. “Well, I guess we should hear the particulars.”

“Fifty thousand dollars,” I say.

“I don't like this, not one bit,” Elenore says. “What are you going to do for his religious education?”

Persephone doesn't answer. She's too busy stifling a laugh, the result being that her facial muscles go into convulsions. Birch starts to cry.

“We'll give you fifty-five thousand dollars for him,” Elenore says. “We have the money.”

“I don't think we should get into a bidding war; it's unseemly,” Persephone says. “But if I have to I will.”