Wallflowers (11 page)

“Meet me tonight at seven?”

“Where?”

“Lane’s Meadow. By the bee balm.”

“Which is the bee balm?”

“The red ones.”

ONE

Natalie found the first beads beside the tree trunk. Chinese porcelain—stick letters shaped like tents and Shanghai suns, inked below glaze. She had been scouring the forest floor for fiddleheads. The two beads sat on a bed of wet clovers and pine needles, and she collected them in her palm. Then she saw another a few feet away, and another, so she stuffed the baby ferns into the back pocket of her cut-offs and followed the beads off trail. The fifth was egg shaped and painted with a blue lily, and the sixth had a fishtail. The seventh bead, a crane, perched beside a pine cone on the edge of the crag. She pocketed it and searched the rock for more, wiped her fingers through crevices, lifted loose stones—and then she saw the cradle. It had washed up below, on a reef that tongued from the side of the cliff. Woven cedar, a broad hood, empty; the tide rocked it against the barnacles. A nut-brown bundle bobbed in the surf beside the reef.

She sank to her butt and shimmied down the crag, tennis shoes dangling, her fingers curled around grooves of stone until she could jump to the shore. She tiptoed along the reef to the bundle. When she reached it, she could not look. She stretched her hand toward the water with her eyes shut. Her fingers grazed a stiff stream of hair, then the blanket, which felt like wet suede, buckskin maybe, and she tugged it, bent into the surf to gather the bundle in both arms. She opened her eyes because it felt too light. Tucked inside was a cedar doll—lips painted with salmon eggs, a horsetail braid, and abalone eyes that shifted like oil puddles. She hugged the doll and felt her heart pound into the wood. She pretended it was the other way around.

Her canvas shoes were grey with sea water, and she felt something under her heel—an eighth bead. She spotted the spinning top after the next wave. A stringy bark cone pierced with a stick, which swirled in a puddle of yellow foam and sea ribbons. She rescued it and stepped into the water. The cold gnawed at her ankles, but she plucked through the seaweed for more items. Between crushed clamshells and pebbles she found something shaped like a thumb-sized boomerang, carved from bone and etched with black dots. She clenched it in her fist and gazed at the shore, at the trees that feathered from the cliff. That’s when she saw the canoe. It jutted from a pine bough, and might have passed for a dead branch if not tilted to show it was a dugout. Natalie waded to shore and up the rocks until she stood directly under the canoe. Suspended in pine, the wood silvered, it looked like a vessel errant from Nod, swan nosed and lined with eiderdown, ferrying heavy-lidded children between dreams.

Roadnotes

SEPTEMBER 29

Spencer,

I have quit the library and quit town. My plan is to pursue autumn. To track the metamorphosis of deciduous woodlands. Where the leaf turns, there turn I. My first destination: the Laurentians. Mont Tremblant. La Symphonie des Couleurs. Southwest on Highway 40 to Montreal, then the Trans-Canada all the way up. From the Laurentians I will follow the colour south. The Green Mountains of Vermont, the Kancamagus Scenic Byway in New Hampshire, down, down, down, until pigment leaves the leaves, until winter strips the branches bare.

I have brought: a road map of the United States Eastern Seaboard, the
Complete Field Guide to Fall Foliage
, and Mom’s lime MB roadster, which has not seen asphalt since the third impaired-driving charge. She told us if we had two pennies left in the world, we should buy a loaf of bread with one and a lily with the other. This is my lily.

Affectionately yours,

Sid

OCTOBER 1

Spence,

Yes, the colours are a symphony. I write from a ski suburb beside Tremblant called Petit Rocher. (I found accommodation outside town because town makes me feel trapped inside a Styrofoam city plan.) We are in what is called the “first wave.” The yellow wave. Saffron leaves grope the birches like a thousand rubber gloves. Which reminds me—I found Mom’s lambskin gloves on the back seat. The ones that snap at the back of the wrist, that she wore for “Sunday spins” around the countryside. What I remember is she never needed to remove them to count quarters for parking.

After a late lunch I poked around a Tremblant souvenir shop. They sell metal spouts and hand drills for tapping. The romance of the idea overcame me. I bought one of each, then drove for an hour until every tree was a sugar maple. (There is a chapter on tree identification in my fall foliage guide, with leaf silhouettes on the pages like ink blots.) I pulled over and selected a tree close to the road. The instructions said to drill on an incline for the sap to run down, so I did. Then I tapped the spout through the bark with the handle of my drill. I had forgotten to buy a collection pail, so I used my Snapple bottle from lunch. I was crouched nose to spout at the foot of the tree, Snapple bottle thrust under the tap, waiting for the thing to leak, when I heard a cough. A Hyundai had parked behind the roadster, and inside the Hyundai was a family of three. Their windows were rolled down and they stared from yellow, orange, and red visors. The woman in the passenger’s seat (yellow visor) rested her elbow in the window frame and held binoculars. She told me that tapping season begins in February.

The Snapple bottle reminds me of my first and last ballet class, when I needed to bring a water bottle and we didn’t have any so Mom sent me to the studio with an empty mickey of gin.

Next stop: Kancamagus Scenic Byway.

From Rocher with Love,

Sid

OCTOBER 3

Spencer,

On the drive to New Hampshire I tried to pinpoint the rupture of Mom’s sanity. I couldn’t. I think this means either A. she was born a lunatic, or B. wrongly committed. I lean toward A. Thoughts?

Reasons why A.:

I’m in Newport, N.H. The centre of town is an opera house, which I think is an idea that should prevail more in urban design.

Had to buy a fresh battery for the roadster in Montreal, but she’s purred ever since. Also picked up a copy of the
Chronicle-Telegraph
and read the obituary. I liked how you began with “Once upon a time.”

Living Free or Dying in New Hampshire,

Sidney

OCTOBER 6

Spence,

The Kancamagus Scenic Byway is a three-hour drive on a postcard. I arrive with the prologue to the second wave: leaves the colour of canned salmon. Clouds streak the sky like lawn mower tracks, and the air is warm and thick with the scent of fermented apples. En route to the byway I passed Santa’s Village, which is home to an “electro-animated jingle jamboree” and a giraffe-sized drummer boy. Larger-than-life seasonal statuary discomfort me.

Do you remember the December we got the blue spruce? We returned from the ballet and she let me light the bottom candles, but when I stretched for a higher bough, my velvet jumper caught fire. You came running and she leaned against her armchair with eyes as grey and cold as nickels. On Christmas morning she cooked ricotta pancakes and poached pears, but for herself only took a cigarette and mulled wine from the night before. And on Boxing Day, she locked herself in the attic with the phonograph and
Madama Butterfly
, then emerged three afternoons later in her cotton peignoir and walked to the riverbank to collect snowdrops.

Honestly, Spence? That Christmas I wanted to buy her the asp.

Sidney

OCTOBER 7

I’m sorry I never went to the funeral.

OCTOBER 10

Spence,

Happy Thanksgiving. It’s nine o’clock and the moon is sickled enough to hang a coat. I’m in Cavendish, Vermont, which is a town entirely unremarkable save for the man with a metal rod in his head. (Phineas Gage. Railroad worker, 1848. Google him.)

Dinner was a can of rice pudding from an AM/PM in Ludlow. The cashier had cream soda breath and Caesar bangs (you know the kind that bisect your forehead like saw teeth?), and when I made him break a twenty, he called me a “leaf peeper.”

I can count the number of times she hugged us in the last two decades. Twice. Jean-Baptiste Day, 1990: I successfully smoke like a lady. March 1992: you get into her old art school.

Haven’t reached mecca yet. (Mecca, for leaf peepers, is the Green Mountains.) I spent the afternoon driving through central Vermont, and skipped the World’s Largest Filing Cabinet for a town named Barre (granite capital of America and source for most of the tombstones). In Williamstown I toured Knight’s Spider Web Farm, which is run by a bald veteran with webs tattooed on his elbows. He cultivates spiderwebs, then sprays them white and lacquers them onto black boards. This kind of art makes me think that if you stare at the sun long enough, you’ll see rainbows.

Tomorrow: Mecca. Then New York.

Never moon a werewolf,

Sid

OCTOBER 11

Spencer,

An hour into the Green Mountains I passed a blackcurrant bush and stopped the car in the middle of the road. The berries uneaten by birds were plump and overripe, and I peeled them in clusters from the vine. My lips and nails are violet with juice and it’s the closest I’ve felt to gleefully carnivorous.

Some things I miss:

On my last visit, she didn’t speak. Not even when I told her you finished the sunflower series. And when I mentioned I had memorized all hundred divisions of the Dewey decimal system, she didn’t even roll her eyes. You should have come with me.

I’m spending the night in Albany at a pie shop that moonlights as a motor inn. An elephantine sassafras grows in the parking lot. We don’t have many sassafras trees up north. Their leaves have broad, rounded lobes that are layered like a wedding cake tall enough to conceal a stripper. I’m going to lie under the boughs and see if I can’t get myself entirely buried.

Love Sidney.

OCTOBER 13

I’m in Auburn, N.Y. There aren’t many leaves here, but there are crows, which from a distance look like leaves, especially when you cross your eyes.

There really are a lot of fucking crows. They line the chimneys and telephone wires and the awning of Curley’s Restaurant opposite my window. The concierge says they arrived early this year. Every autumn since 1993, a murder of fifty to seventy thousand crows descends upon the ancient Aboriginal burial ground and proceeds to the town centre to roost.

They remind me of the baby crow Mom saved after Jacques-Joseph shot its mother with a pellet gun. Do you remember how she wanted to teach it to speak, so she clipped the tongue, and then it couldn’t eat and starved to death? I think that incident neatly paraphrases our childhood.

The crows look finest when they fly. They take wing en masse and sweep through air like a hand-held fan. And when you bend your neck back to see only up, the sky looks like paper that a child has spattered with ink. The town hates them. They tear apart dumpsters and caw till the cows come home. And apparently by winter the volume of excrement is a biohazard. But I think they’re magnificent.