Wild Mountain

by Nancy Kilgore

  They pulled off the exit at Montpelier. A drizzling rain had begun to fall, and State Street looked drab, the hand-lettered signs in the art stores and restaurants attempting a jaunty attitude but managing only to look bedraggled. Frank had been in Montpelier just once before, and was struck again by how small the state capital was—a small town, really.

  The car slowed down, and on the sidewalk, a group of about ten people carrying umbrellas and signs marched toward the statehouse.

  “Doesn’t look like much of a rally,” Frank said.

  “Vermont’s not a big state,” said Jake. “Montpelier is the smallest state capital in the country. And its other distinction,” he said with a grin, “is that it’s the only state capital with no MacDonald’s.” Erica turned the steering wheel and pulled over to park.

  They stepped out of the car and into the spitting rain, and Frank unzipped his hood, pulling it up over his cap. Erica opened a black umbrella and Jake held it over the two of them as they approached the statehouse, its gold dome glistening in the rain. The plaza in front of the statehouse, like the building itself, was grand and expansive, with wide stretches of lawn, flowerbeds now sprouting hundreds of bulbs, and broad, paved avenues leading to the steps and the entrance. The small clumps of people milling about or standing in groups holding umbrellas looked scruffy and dwarfed by the grandiose setting.

  One group carried signs saying Stop the Hate, Leave Our State and Accept Me for Me, Free to Love. Across from them stood another group led by a middle-aged woman with a livid face, their placards proclaiming One Man, One Woman and God Hates Fags. With loud, angry shouting, they sang, to the tune of “God Bless America,” “God Hates America.”

  Frank stopped and stared. “God hates America?”

  “Because America is even considering allowing equal rights to the ‘fags,’” Jake explained.

  The three of them moved to the left, where a crowd was gathered around a speaker. And there, on the platform, short and round in a red poncho, stood Roz Allingworth, her fist raised. “No more hiding in fear or shame about who we are and who we love,” she shouted. “We Vermonters were the first to pass civil unions, and now it’s time that all of us citizens of this forward-thinking state should have the right to marry.” Applause and shouts accompanied her speech.

  “Not in my Vermont,” a deep voice declared from behind Frank. Frank turned to see a tall, blond man with a scowl carrying a sign that read Keep Marriage Sacred. He looked familiar. And then Frank remembered. Town meeting. He had been one of the people cheering on Charlie Perry.

  “Aren’t you from Wild Mountain?” Frank asked.

  “Acheson Levy.” The man nodded. “And you look familiar, too.”

  “Frank MacFarland,” he said.

  Acheson’s pale eyes twinkled. “You’re the guy got stuck on the river.”

  “Yes.” Now he noticed someone standing slightly behind Acheson: Heather Brae, his “angel,” bright and beatific in a red wool jacket and an enigmatic smile. He smiled at Heather and turned back to Acheson. “So, I take it you’re against gay marriage?”

  “I hope so.”

  “Don’t you think people of the same sex should be allowed to have a loving, committed relationship?”

  “Well, they can, but you can’t call it marriage,” said Acheson. “That’s clear and simple in the Bible. Marriage is between a man and a woman.”

  From across the plaza came the sounds of singing and shouting back and forth between the two groups of demonstrators.

  “You’re a Christian?” Frank asked, and Acheson nodded. “So am I,” said Frank. “And I believed that marriage was sacred, too. But then my wife left me.”

  Acheson’s face twisted into several different emotions, then he reached out and patted Frank on the arm. “I know what you mean, buddy. My wife left me, too.” He pursed his lips, as if damming up a flood tide. “She left me for another woman. I still can’t get my head around it.”

  “Tough times,” Frank said. “By the way, do you know Heather?” He reached out to take Heather’s hand and bring her closer. “She’s my guardian angel. She brought me soup and sympathy after my accident.”

  “Oh, sure, hello. Heather’s son is the same age as my daughter. They used to play together.” He smiled at Heather. “I know, you’re divorced, too.”

  Heather took a deep breath. All around them, people shouted back and forth, but within this small circle of three, there was silence. “Well…” she said.

  “Don’t tell me—you’re gay?” Acheson asked, incredulous.

  “Well, yes,” she said, in a quiet, breathy voice.

  Acheson looked confused and lowered his sign. “Well, you know, this is nothing against you.”

  “But it is against me,” she said softly. “My girlfriend and I and my son are a family. We believe we have just as much right to be a legal family as other people.”

  Acheson’s eyes were wet, and he shook his head. “I don’t know. It’s just not biblical,” he said, and walked away.

  Heather’s face was red, and her hands were trembling. She looked up at Frank, then down at her feet. “I don’t usually do that.”

  “That was brave.”

  “More than you think. I’ve never come out like that to anyone in Wild Mountain. Roz is the one who wants to shout it from the rooftops, and I haven’t let her. But of course, everybody knows anyway.” Her smile seemed to drift and evanesce into the atmosphere. “Acheson must be the only person in Wild Mountain who didn’t.” She glided away and toward the podium.

  After the rally, Frank, Erica, and Jake decided to go to Sarducci’s, an Italian restaurant off Main Street that Jake said was a Montpelier tradition. They sat down at a table in a large low-ceilinged room ringed by windows, and the whole place was abuzz with conversation about the Freedom to Marry bill. Jake looked at the menu, then jumped up and strolled across the aisle to greet a group of young people at a neighboring table. When he sat back down, he suddenly exclaimed, “Pat Leahy!” and jumped up again, almost knocking over the water glass in front of him. He bounded across the room, notebook in hand, toward the tall, white-haired senator sitting with another distinguished-looking man at a table for two. When Jake came back, his eyes were shining. “The senator thinks the bill has a chance of passing.”

  By the time they got back to Wild Mountain and Frank’s cabin, Frank had decided that Jake might be okay. Maybe a little too smooth, a little too charming, but his heart was in the right place. On the way home, they’d talked about gay marriage, the Iraq war, and Vermont senators Leahy and Sanders, and Frank was impressed by how well-informed Jake was on the issues and how much they agreed. He watched as Jake and Erica drove off in Jake’s car, Erica with her overnight bag. She’d be all right. He hoped.

  19

  WHEN MONA STEPPED INTO THE GREENHOUSE, Heather was standing in the middle of the room holding up a brown hose. In her green T-shirt, and with her hair pulled into a ponytail, pale curls and tendrils sprouting around her face, she looked like an Irish fairy about to go cavorting on the Emerald Isle.

  Mona took off her jeans jacket and breathed in the humid air of this womb where Heather nursed her seedlings. She could almost feel the growth and expansion of the tender shoots crowded into flats and trays on the long tables. Little waving grasses and spiky sprouts, heralding the beginning of something new in the world, like the rush of excitement at the beginning of a relationship, like what she was feeling with Frank.

  Heather poked the soil around the seedlings in a flat labeled haricot beans, and looked up. “Seen Frank again?” she asked, as if reading Mona’s thoughts.

  Mona smiled and tied the sleeves of her jacket together around her waist. “No, but—”

  Heather poked at a tomato plant and looked up. “Thinking about him, huh?”

  “Yeah, thinking about him.”

  “I mean, what’s not to like? He’s a little goofy, but his heart’s in the right place. If I were straight, I’d go for the guy.”
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  “Yeah, I think you’re right. I don’t need to keep the barriers up for the rest of my life.” She noticed that she was still smiling, and that she’d had this wide grin on her face since Frank’s name had come up.

  Heather touched a tiny yellow flower bud on the tomato plant. “The Early Girls are already a foot tall,” she said proudly, almost to herself. She picked off some brown leaves, sprayed the plants with her mister, and turned the nozzle to give the soil a shower. She moved in a rhythm, a continual dance of to and fro, humming and singing snatches of words and phrases like a child, with no particular song in mind, until her humming mutated into “Down by the Riverside.”

  “People wonder how I get such strong and healthy plants so much earlier than anyone else,” she mused. “Ha. If they only knew.”

  “The singing?”

  “Yup. Hymns and folk songs mostly, sometimes chants and plainsongs from my chamber singing group. They prefer lullabies on stormy days, but when it’s calm and sunny like today, the lively songs help them grow.” She lifted the hose up high, tipping the spray nozzle over the hanging petunias, their bright blossoms pink and purple, and started to sing, imitating Buffy Sainte Marie’s tremolo in “Cripple Creek.”

  Heather put down the hose, took off a glove, put a finger in her mouth, and made a popping sound. She hummed like Buffy on the jaw harp, then put the glove back on, laughing and skipping around the flat to the next row.

  The sound of clapping came from the other end of the greenhouse. “Brava!” shouted Roz. Heather looked up, froze, then turned away and lowered her head, picking at a parsley plant while Roz stood in the doorway, erect, radiating might and power like a statue of Athena guarding the courts of justice. Neither of them spoke. Mona, puzzled, glanced from one to the other. What was going on? Embarrassed, she picked up a tray marked lavender and sniffed the gray-green seedlings. Since Heather had come into Roz’s life, these two women had always exuded such confidence in their life together—the consummate life of a Vermont citizen on the family farm, the perfect match of politician and earth mother. But today, the air between them vibrated, the tension like a tightly-wound violin string about to snap.

  “Come into the house,” Roz called. “People will be arriving soon.” Roz had invited “a bunch of people” to the house for a pot-luck, a rally for the “gay activists in Wild Mountain,” a phrase that to Mona sounded like an oxymoron. How many people, she wondered, would actually show up? She picked up the tote bag she’d left at the door, with her bag of chips and container of guacamole.

  As they stepped outside into the mild air and its intimation of spring, Heather, released from the mysterious standoff with Roz—or perhaps disregarding it—pulled into herself and started to sing: “Dream Angus,” a balmy, Celtic-sounding folk song.

  Suddenly, from outside, another voice rang out, singing the refrain; and Heather stopped, one rubber glove half off her raised hand. She opened her eyes wide and looked around.

  In the doorway stood Frank MacFarland, beaming. Heather blushed, glanced at Mona, and then continued singing, tentatively at first, then more fully, as Frank’s sweet tenor cajoled her song into a plaintive call and answer.

  Mona felt the song wash over her body like the sunshine on the purple and yellow crocuses at her feet, the purity of the air, and the peaceful llamas beside the fence. Frank’s voice surrounded her and entered her, rooting her into her body and skin, and this spot on the earth. If only she could stay right here forever.

  Heather stripped off her gloves and wiped her hands on her T-shirt, which was already smudged with dirt. “My father used to sing me that lullaby.”

  “And me old Scottish mum, me,” said Frank, still beaming and clearly enjoying being the only man in a group of women. He looked big and generous, as always, but there was something professional about him today, too. Maybe it was the briefcase—a worn leather satchel, like a fishing bag, slung over his shoulder. Mona, drawn by some unconscious magnet, began to step closer to him, then bit her lip and stopped. Really, she didn’t know him all that well. Then she shook her head. What are you so scared of? she asked herself.

  How could she have such different and opposing feelings all at once? On the one hand, she’d have liked to jump all over him, like Heather used to do with Roz, and at the same time, she was hesitant and tenuous, and wanted to retreat into her shell. Frank smiled again, clearly happy to see her, oblivious to her hesitation. Mona straightened up and threw back her head. When the going got tough, she could get going.

  They walked to the house on the bluestone pavers that formed a path to the porch steps. On either side of them, lily-flowered tulips in red, pink, yellow, and orange swayed in the crisp air like woodland flags. Before Heather had come, this lawn had been a hardscrabble patch with no flowers at all; but now it, like the rest of the house, had come alive.

  Frank stopped on the stairway. He was studying one of the blocks of stone on the house front, stroking the rough surface with his fingers. “What kind of stone is this?” he asked.

  “Granite!” called Roz, who was already on the porch.

  “But very special granite,” Heather said. “It came from a quarry right here on Wild Mountain.”

  Frank bent closer to the stone, then brought his head back. “Look at how the light bounces off it. It sparkles. Almost as if it’s alive.”

  “That’s why it’s special,” Heather continued. “This granite has more quartz in it than what you get almost anywhere else. The Native peoples believed it had a spiritual quality. It makes the mountain a sacred place.”

  Frank stared up into the sky. “Yes, I believe it is a sacred place.” He stood still, uncharacteristically quiet and dreamy.

  He was so earnest, and as Mona watched him, her emotions swung back on the pendulum to the place where she had wanted to hold him close. How could she not love a guy who really got it—who understood that Wild Mountain was not just a piece of earth that stuck up from the land?

  Now that she thought about it, that’s exactly the way Cappy had talked about the mountain: as a thing. A sensate thing. Cappy was sensual, sexy, and dependable—and that combination, along with the fact that he wasn’t available, had made him irresistible. But Cappy hadn’t had a sense of this other dimension, the spiritual side of life—and Frank did.

  She looked him in the eye and broke into a big smile. As if caught out, Frank blushed and gave her a tentative, hesitant smile back. “There’s another interesting part of its history,” she said. “People used to hold séances up on Wild back in the early 1900s. They were into spiritualism, a kind of religion or something through which they tried to make contact with the dead.”

  “Oh yes, spiritualism,” Frank said.

  “I think that’s where Gus got the idea that he could communicate with the hanged woman.”

  The three of them stood silent on the steps, Frank watching Mona and absently stroking the stone, Heather looking pensive.

  Roz opened the porch door, looked at them, and rolled her eyes. “Okay, folks, heads out of the clouds. Back to politics.”

  As she stepped onto the porch, Mona realized that the tension she had been feeling was gone, and she looked fondly around the wide verandah with its collection of bamboo furniture and Victorian plant stands. “Politics,” she said. “I remember when the Allingworths used to have political parties on this porch. All the bigwigs in Vermont would come.”

  Heather grinned. “I don’t think we’ll get any bigwigs today.”

  “But you should have seen Roz back then, this feisty little blonde kid. One time, she picked a fight with the governor.”

  “Cool,” said Frank. “What was it about?”

  “Uranium mining,” Roz said. “I wanted him to veto the uranium mining bill.”

  “Uranium mining in Vermont?”

  “Yes, they had a bill written up for it. Nineteen seventy-nine, I believe. And Governor Snelling was on the fence about it. But we won. He did veto the mining.” Roz, perched on the arm of a
heavy bamboo-sided sofa, smiled serenely. “And,” she declared, “we can beat this homophobic petition and win Freedom to Marry, too.”

  “I don’t know.” Heather shook her head. “I haven’t seen people so fired up against anything since civil unions.”

  “And we won civil unions,” Roz said triumphantly.

  They progressed through the porch, with its ghosts and memories, and into the house. The massive table in the center of the room held a restaurant-sized coffeepot, percolating noisily, and a platter of lumpy cookies. Mona put down her bag of corn chips and container of guacamole as Heather hurried through the room and ran up the stairway. Roz hefted a log onto the fire at the other end of the room. The fireplace, with its deep, wide opening almost as tall as Roz, looked like it should contain a hanging pot of stew.

  Above the fireplace, a black-and-white photo of Mr. and Mrs. Allingworth held center stage. They stood at a fence surrounded by sheep: he trimming one of them with a sheep shearer, while she, the wind blowing her dress—one of those shirtwaist dresses women used to wear in the sixties—tied a bandanna on her head. They looked happy. Had they really been happy? Mona had thought so, but she’d been a dewy-eyed teenager then. Since Roz had come back from California and they’d rekindled their friendship as adults, she’d learned a bit more about Roz’s parents. The Allingworths were politicians, after all, so they were good at showing the rosy side of themselves.

  The door creaked open, and Bea Vargas, hunched and frail, walked into the room. She put a covered dish on the table. Frank went over to her, lifted the yellow dishcloth, and peeked into the bowl. “Mmm, asparagus soup—asparagus from your garden?”

  “Yes.” Bea’s smile was wide and earthy, and her white hair seemed to fly around her head like a tornado. She must have been at least ninety-four by now, but she emanated such vigor that Mona felt a zap of energy moving through the room. Bea sat down in a chair by the fire. Behind her, in the bookcase, Mona spied an ancient Gulliver’s Travels, a big heavy volume, its green-and-gold spine worn and faded, probably the same 1940s version that she remembered from the late sixties.