Chapter 2.
"A Letter for Emily"
Chapter 2. The Farm.
It had been cold that July but Wednesday, the weather relented and he knew again the joys of accelerating along the Northway on a clear road, the wooded hills streaming by, the glassy Lake settled in the distance.
Emily.
Little Emily, it was.
He had to snicker stupidly as the scented wilderness passed.
Such a work was Emily: nine and three. Women were funny like that, as if two statistics could encompass a new life.
Nine and three: twenty-one inches.
As if she were a gobbler.
And this was all he knew at that point. The Olympics were televised but she could not recall any event but her own, for which, to all who knew her, there could be no doubt as to the Gold.
Emily Rose. Nine and three. Twenty-one inches. These three facts would come to outshine the others. What had happened, had happened and was a matter for the past.
Now there was Emily.
The bright white Super Beetle decelerated at the turn, halted and jumped up again, heading down the road to Warrentown.
Through the cathedral of pines arching up from both sides of the state road, past nodding meadows bursting with summer blossoms and green from recent storms. Past the village with its used car lots and shop signs.
Mother had mentioned Grand Union, and he took her advice, pacing the aisles, settling for a chicken and a pint of designer ice cream. The good stuff. Where? From Vermont, he told himself scrutinizing the label while waiting in line, the adult portion of his attention attracted by Dolly on a tabloid and the child looking at the chocolates aimed low.
Two pounds, six, twelve inches, he observed as the roaster was slopped into another bag. It would be just a few minutes to the farm.
The weather was finally warm enough, and he had parked the car with its convertible top back. Facing in the adjoining parking space, a woman sat, sunglasses shining, in a recent version of the same convertible and she liked his car. He could see that. His immaculate rebuilt white Super Beetle Champagne Edition drew comments where ever it was seen.
It was as if, in the years between high school and his reincarnation as Unca Pete, the passing glances from women finally returned. He knew the look. Used to be, he didn’t need the car.
Any car.
* * *
Someone ahead on the road annoyed him. For no reason other than the driver ahead had chosen the same road at the same time and had the temerity to be driving ahead, not behind him.
The other drove briskly, past the speed limit and in no way impeded his birthday deliveries. Two pounds, six. Twelve inches.
With no small relief, he watched his unknown nemesis roll away when the Potterbrook Road turn came up and his VW swung easily through the narrow curves where the Hudson was a shallow brook shimmering across rock fields and pebbles in the late afternoon sun.
From the heights of a barren trunk, a silhouette stood sentry, not bothering its feathery head as the Beetle passed beneath toward The Farm.
Somewhere.
He remembered the entranceway but this seemed years gone when the snow and ice and salt rumbled inside fenders, and the trunks in the forest has stood like inky hulks.
The curve inclined gently upward and the lay of the land was as familiar in summer as in the icy months. A break in the tree cover appeared just ahead on the left, and there would be placards posted nearby warning away hunters.
And the pebble and stone drive would set his suspension to motion, to dip and rise at the heavy timbered bridge where familiar gurgling of the Potterbrook passed beneath and rustled the lily stalks growing in the bog.
The Forest Primeval, he called it.
The copse thickly shaded with pine that, year upon passing year, improved the carpet under foot, the fragrant decay of tar black ooze in the gullies, and here and there, an outcropping of immovable granite.
Across this emerald expanse, the box frame house rose, the last incomplete remnant of landscape so perfect, so tidy, so artfully trimmed to appear nothing but an extension of the pristine forest that crept to its edge, surrounding the clearing.
And the grassy rolling slopes from the road toward the marsh seemed no more contrived than velvet-covered rocks or tawny needle beds with which the grass mingled and the trees gave cover and darkness.
Save old paneling and the look of renovation, the farm house had the grandeur of some baronial estate enriched by the force of nature, each season in turn. Not a haphazard wilderness of burnt or decayed deadfall struggling with fierce new growth, but a peaceful, silent refuge.
Yes, he could see where nature hardly intruded and where civilization modestly claimed place.
The crunching stone beneath the tires ceased and the engine wound down, leaving no echo but wind combed by pine boughs and the echoes of wildly flowing water reflected by bark and branch.
* * *
“Hullo!” Trapp grinned. Unca Pete was aware of the motions of a man happily interrupted in his work. The wiping hands, the agreeable smile at seeing another human face, the cautious but unrestrained stride of a workman on break.
“Trapp!” Pete acknowledged.
He leaned in and reached down within the open-topped convertible, and drew out a paper sack, offering it for Trapp’s amused curiosity.
“Don’t tell Ellie,” Pete cautioned with the intensity of mischief and he knew from the merry redness of Trapp’s weathered smile, the taut lines focusing his eyes, that he wouldn’t.
‘She’ll love the cheesecake,” gurgled Trapp, glancing toward the farm house where a figure appeared at the door and strode petulantly over.
“Do you want to go to the dam, Pete,” she insisted. Here it came. She sucked nervously on the tip of a cigarette, eyes in the glint of darkened glasses. The lenses seemed to cause her eyes to retire as she stepped into the sunlight.
Pete grinned, hands behind his back, momentarily concealing something from her view.
“Here Ell, catch it now,” he shot her, pausing an instant to watch that she saw the roaster sailing against the sky in her direction. Wild swans flying, he thought.
She abruptly held the cigarette taut with lips as she crouched, poised, caught off guard but not awkward, and clawed down the bag from its arc.
“Hey…,”she marveled with equal parts acknowledgement, protest and approval, rolling the bird around in her grip.
“Ell, I have to put another coat on this finish,” Trapp explained nearby, and Unca Pete could see how amusing he found the flight. As brother and sister walked slowly toward the house, Trapp chuckled at the way they eyed each other with wariness. Cheesecake was Ellie’s favorite, too.
Unca Pete looked upward as his sister carefully tucked the roaster into the icebox and held the cigarette in her teeth while rinsing her hands.
“Got to be real careful. Trapp got sick a month ago. Some bad chicken.”
But her eldest brother was looking above and past the lenses of his own glasses at the ceiling above the tiny kitchen.
“Ells, the ceiling is spectacular. You two have been busy since I was here last.”
“Yeah,” she sighed noncommittally. “And we have to wipe everything down and be careful about the knives.”
“Potatoes”” he asked.
“Huh?”
“I didn’t bring potatoes.”
“Oh,” she replied, interrupted in her lecture on botulism. “Bottom of the stairs.”
Pete eased down the few steep steps, coming to rest close to the clear plastic sheet that insulated cellar from upper floors and bending down, rooted in a bag containing potatoes the size of eggs. Tiny.
“How many, Sis?” he shouted up the stairs, toward the clattering noise from the kitchen.
He returned with two clutches of potatoes spreading his broad hands, Ells had vanished and Trapp appeared at that moment from around the corner. Pete nodded toward a recess in the opened freezer where Trapp had forced his face to spot the ice cream, and nodding, looked pleased at the dinner in store for them.
With mock stealth, Pete opened the upper cabinets to reveal the strawberry cheesecake Trapp could almost taste. Cheesecake without her birthday candles, as had been the custom for a few years.
“Let’s go to the dam. C’mon, all of us. Trapp?” she nagged from nearby, knowing he had heard her previous five demands. “Peter, are you going with me, or not? I’m going.”
“Sure, Ells. Actually, I had hoped to come up for a little peace and quiet. Gracey’s has been, well, you know. Thought I’d do a little writing while I was up,” explained her brother patiently.
“Yeah. Sure. We can fix up a place and get your things together. But I’m going to the dam. Are you coming? Now?”
By the time he had turned, Trapp had disappeared into the darkness of his studio.
“Trapp? Trapp!!” she whined.
“I’ll be there in a little while,” Trapp muttered down at his work with the slightest trace of annoyance.
She was already stomping across the grassy knoll while Pete resigned with a shrug and trotted off as his sister marched along with steps of determination. Toward the Forest Primeval. The walking tour with her running commentary on each footfall, the life cycle and progress of the dam, the bridges, the pond continued. The pond that had dried up. The pond that had overflowed. The pond that, made deep during the warm months, froze for skating when the temperature dropped.
Was it the fourth time or fifth time she’d said how much Sammy loved to skate?
He turned at the top of a shaded rise, and stared at the forms and features of the underbrush, the fallen decay, stump sprouting wood fungus-like pale flesh ears, and the frothy fern brake that veiled the carpet, adding prehistoric mystery to its coolness.
Looking ahead, he marked the figure of his sister wading into muck with a pail, the deeply stained tannin-orange waters enveloping her limbs. As if they weren’t pale enough, he observed. She was not smoking just then.
She was mucking.
“C’mon in, Brother,” she demanded as if her vigor might entice him.
“Looks like fun,” he said quietly, trying with all his good nature to rise above sarcasm.
“Really,” she said disappointed he hadn’t yet shed his shoes. “We’ve got to muck out the pool. The dam burst and…”
Her tone was swallowed by the hushing spout of spring waters filling in the head of the pool and causing the level to rise among boulders just ahead of her. The stones had been washed into a pile but without mud, the water coursed by. He spun a few stones into the cataract.
“Why not pull deadfall around where it would do some good?” he asked. “I could help with that.”
Ellie sputtered with effort, hefting bucket upon bucket up out of the murkiness, onto the rampart where massive stone blocks peeped up out of the detritus. The muck left no traces of color or texture, no sign of pebbles or twigs, just the grainless black velour of microscopic fineness.
“C’mon, Pete. Lazy?”
“Thanks for the invitation, but I wouldn’t deprive you.”
“Oops.”
He nearly crushed the deadly white fungus sprouting from the needle bed as he heard the continuing slop of Ellie’s pail.
It never occurred to him to ask why his sister, this sister one year younger, was bailing the slime on the dam that would hold the creek enough for skating in the months ahead.
Long after he was gone.
“Sammy loves it up here,” she asserted, somewhat annoyed her brother took less delight in wallowing for good cause.
He counted six.
“You haven’t seen Emily yet?” he ventured.
“Trapp and I go this weekend. You know that,” she accused him.
“Nine and three,” he whistled, thinking of the roast simmering back in the stove. “Poor girl.”
“I know,” she replied with disgust. “Me and Mom were there the night she was born.”
Touché.
He had forgotten. Slipped his mind that, sleeping in the empty house, keeping watch over little Sammy, he barely remembered the way the door to his guest bedroom had opened near midnight and Richard’s soft voice had informed him in the harshly struck light, they were leaving for the hospital. And this time, it was real.
“I had forgotten. Grace was happy you two could be there,” he added.
More mud flung angrily downward.
Trapp came trudging up the path beneath the sighing pine boughs and the late afternoon sun underlit the lawns, the ferns, glinted off leaves and spattering waters and he was alone with the sucking bucket sounding behind him and the twig-snapping footfalls that grew louder as Trapp picked his way around pine roots through which the path was so well worn.
Trapp stopped a moment, hands in his pockets and the two men looked at each other, then both heads turned as one toward the pool.
“How many years have you lived here, Trapp?” asked Pete, momentarily alarmed by his own booming voice in the green silence. No, just quiet. That’s all.
As he listened to Trapp’s voice, he looked through the interstices in the canopy upward to a craggy hulk and remembered. The nest.
“How are your hawks this year?” continued Unca Pete glance fixed above into the nest tree.
Trap murmured in his rumbling voice, “They moved last season. Over near the gravel pit. Yeah, we see them all the time.”
This famous sculptor of the North Woods, rugged in his check shirt and shaggy moustache, stood by as if posing.
He couldn’t have picked a better brother-in-law. Unless it was Richard.
Moments later, the three had nearly arrived back at the farm house at Potterbrook Farm when Pete began to catch a scent on the breeze, of roasted chicken browning in the oven…