I Hate to Leave This Beautiful Place

by Howard Norman

  For a while we listened to music and news on the post office’s shortwave. “Radio from the cities,” he said. He closed his eyes and dozed off in his chair. I sat watching him sleep. His electric guitar—he played both guitar and drums—was propped against the wall, plugged into a small speaker. I thought back ten years, trying to recall what he looked like. And then he nodded off for about an hour—expert, it seemed, at sleeping in chairs. When he woke he pulled out a flask, took a deep pull, and said, “You remember Mrs. Amorak at all? Lucille?”

  “Of course I do. I think of her often. I know she died.”

  “Oh, yeah, that’s true. She crossed over into the old Eskimo place, like we say. So did her sister and brothers. Natural causes—nobody fell through the ice or nothing.”

  He smiled. “Want to see a picture of my daughters?”

  We exchanged billfold photographs of our daughters. “Mine were taken by a cheap camera,” he said. His daughters were six and four.

  “They’re so beautiful,” I said. “Lucky they don’t look anything like you.”

  “Yeah, right right right, ha. Their mother’s down in Winnipeg. One-way ticket, eh?”

  “Sorry to hear that.”

  “But Lucy Amorak. I put some of her poems into songs, and some parts of the stories she told, you know?”

  “I’ve got all of her poems, Tommy. I read them all the time. I don’t talk about it much, but I read them.”

  “Listen to this.” He picked up the guitar, adjusted a few dials, tuned it, and tore into some Eric Clapton–style licks for about a minute, then sang: “I like the wind in my hair, I like the sun on my face, the airplane’s waiting on the dirt runway, but I hate to leave this beautiful place.” More guitar for a couple of minutes, then the refrain: “This beautiful place, this beautiful place, this beautiful place. I hate to leave this beautiful place.”

  Kingfisher Days

  IN 1990, THE SECOND FULL summer in our 1850s farmhouse in Vermont, everything I loved most happened most every day, with exceptions. For one thing, I ran a fever of between 99.5 and 102 for nearly three months. A doctor in Montpelier said of my condition, “I’m not alarmed. Probably it’s a strain of flu. Or a low-grade infection. But tests proved inconclusive. Overall, though, you’re able to function normally, right?” I didn’t quite know how to answer. Also of concern that summer, my older brother was on the lam again and telephoning at odd hours, trying to get me to smuggle him over the Canadian border. And another thing: our well went dry. And another: a resident kingfisher at a beloved sawmill pond about ten minutes’ drive from my house was exhibiting a progressive malaise. This was strangely disturbing. I visited this pond almost daily. On the cover of my journal I’d written “Kingfisher Days.” I kept suspecting my fever of imposing a kind of unreality, also radical shifts of mood. I’d purchased three different brands of thermometers, perhaps hoping that one would render me fever-free.

  According to my journal, it was three P.M. on June 22 when my brother telephoned. I took the call in the kitchen. My wife, Jane, had a diagnosed flu. She was listening to NPR and not in bad humor—it was just very hot outside. Our daughter, Emma, a little over two years old, was taking a nap. She had a slight flu as well. It was difficult to separate the heat and humidity of the air from that of the body. The region was suffering a drought; so far, fifty-nine days without rain. “Look, buddy,” my brother said, “I’ll ask about other things later. But right now I have an urgent situation. What’s that noise I’m hearing?”

  “It’s been what, about two years since I’ve heard from you?”

  “What’s that noise?”

  “I’m having a well drilled. I bought a farmhouse here.”

  “Nice tone you’re taking with me. I haven’t exactly been getting bulletins of your life. I guessed you were in Vermont. I got your number from Information. They give out phone numbers, they don’t say whether it’s a fucking farmhouse or a fucking outhouse, okay? My big-shot brother the landowner with his farmhouse.”

  “It’s not like that. I’ve got a mortgage.”

  “Well, let me inform you of something. I don’t own a house. But I can go back to my motel room and stick my face under the bathroom faucet, turn the water on for all day if I want to. I can drown in it. I don’t have to put out money for a well.”

  “You sound like you’re in a better mood than the last time we talked.”

  “I need you to get me into Canada.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Last I heard, Vermont still shares a border with Canada. I need to cross it. You’d be at the wheel. You know, we could talk. We could catch up a little.”

  “You want me to slip you over the border so we can have some quality time together?”

  “One could go hand in hand with the other is what I’m saying.”

  I hung up.

  From the farmhouse, you drive down the dirt road past the nineteenth-century schoolhouse, cross the Pekin Brook fire bridge, continue onto Pekin Brook Road, turn left past Calais town hall, and go straight to the four-corner crossroads, Kent Corners. Turn right onto Robinson Cemetery Road and you will shortly come to the old sawmill and millpond, its waterfalls so loud you have to step ten yards back from it to be heard. The pond is now a nature preserve. It’s a modest-size pond, perhaps an eighth of a mile in circumference, and there are trees along the shore and up the surround. For as long as I can remember there have been two resident kingfishers raising families on this pond. It is a peaceful place.

  The daughter of friends, Olivia, had come to our house to look after Emma. So, following my brother’s telephone call, I was able to drive over and sit by the pond. A light rain brailled the surface; there was early mist between the cattail stalks; changes in water and air temperature often registered in different mists. Ducks huddled in three separate groups. At the north side of the pond, a kingfisher was diving along its sight line, then returning to its branch, sometimes with a fish—diving, returning, diving, returning.

  But I noticed that the kingfisher on the western shore, whose perch was a craggy branch of an old lightning-struck maple, was not sitting upright like an exclamation point, which would be normal. Instead it wobbled, tucked itself between trunk and branch as if to gain balance, before tentatively venturing out along the length of the branch to resume its scrutiny of the pond. Something was a little off there. An hour later, when I mentioned this to the young woman working summer hours at the Maple Corner General Store, Octavia, who was majoring in biology at college, she said, “My uncle takes his lunch break by that part of the pond. Maybe he emptied his flask of whiskey into it.” The local conservation officer, Dave, who had stopped in for a coffee, eavesdropped and took things literally. “Tell him to stop doing that,” he said.

  Experienced friends had warned against contracting the Benidini Brothers, but for two weeks after the kitchen faucet started to dribble silt, they were the only well-drilling concern to answer the telephone. I’d read in the Times-Argus that business for well drillers was booming. Our neighbor Scott had unloaded from his pickup three barrels of water for general use. We were taking baths and showers in a house in nearby Plainfield. On my way back from the millpond, I stopped at Legarre’s Produce to purchase plums, melons, peaches, corn on the cob, bottled water, and strawberries. Driving up Peck Hill Road, I saw the top of the well-drilling rig. It towered the way you might see a giraffe’s head and neck in the distance when you enter through the gates of a zoo.

  Six men—including three well drillers—stood on the lawn. One was the road commissioner, Roy Bolz, who in height and weathered handsomeness had an uncanny resemblance to the writer Peter Matthiessen. Roy often won backhoe competitions at state fairs; he could set a peach down on a fence post with his backhoe. A videocassette recording of this feat was available for borrowing at the post office, which had an ad hoc lending library, too, mostly used paperbacks, including a couple of books I’d written. The town historian, Earlene Leonard, who kept track of such things, had
said to me, “The movie of Roy gets signed out way more often than your books. Take my word for it.”

  I walked up to the giant Erector set that was pumping away, slamming into the earth with percussive thuds I’m sure could be heard half a mile away. “They’re at two hundred eighty feet,” Roy said. “My condolences.” The Benidinis charged $2.50 a foot. Eventually, the well went down to 666 feet; to pay for it, I wrote six different articles, one for a magazine in Reykjavík, about having a well drilled.

  Roy’s word condolences seemed right; it did feel funereal on the lawn. Then everyone turned almost in unison to see my neighbor Maurice Persons, age sixty-six, who in younger days had worked in a granite quarry in Barre, walking slowly up the dirt road. Maurice had on the black greatcoat he’d worn in the quarry. In the heat-mirage distance, he appeared to have thickened into a bear, ambling in cartoonish ursine fashion as he approached. “He’s got something under that coat,” Roy observed, as if old Maurice were suddenly a menacing, nineteenth-century journeyman assassin for hire. “He’s not that naturally wide.”

  When Maurice had gained my yard, he needed a breather. He looked over at the well-digging crew and said to me, “I’ve got a way to get these fellows off your property so we won’t have to hold a wake for your bank account.” At which point he opened his greatcoat like two vast wings, revealing a row of dynamite sticks in loop holders on either side of the lining. “You just toss a few of these into the old well casing, step back, and you have a new well,” he said.

  “I don’t know, Maurice,” I said. I had visions of my house collapsing into a sinkhole. “I just don’t know.”

  “How old’s that dynamite, anyway, Maurice?” Roy said.

  “Good as new,” Maurice said.

  “I doubt it,” Roy said.

  One of the Benidinis, Jack, had dug a thin, shallow gulley through which sludge the thickness and color of cement runneled down the slope next to the house, and several tributaries had begun toward the flower garden, which I had to stop up with dirt. Jack checked the gauges on the rig; they relayed news from the underground. In an exhibit of annoying talent, Jack then ate an apple without using his hands. The apple turned in his mouth, and this made his brothers crack up with laughter.

  Maurice walked back down the road, dynamite intact inside his greatcoat. “At one hundred fifty feet,” Roy said, “they got some water, but it was surface water, it’s called. It came out nice and clear, but it was soon gone. Even if a well’s getting eighty gallons a minute, if the water’s not clear, it’s a bad well. They’re into the kind of rock they like to see, though.” Jack, who had been raking sludge, walked over and said, “The deepest we ever went was six-twenty.”

  Olivia, who had been inside with Emma, appeared on the side porch and, making a gesture like she was holding a telephone to her ear, shouted, “It’s for you.”

  I went in and picked up the phone and said, “Hello?”

  “The Vermont-Canadian border is ninety miles,” my brother said. “Lots of opportunity there.”

  I hung up.

  This was the summer that our neighbors who didn’t own a television set would walk up the road on some evenings to watch the Ken Burns documentary The Civil War. They would arrive with strawberries or rhubarb pie or sweet breads. We were all mesmerized by the episodes. They were titled “The Cause,” “A Very Bloody Affair,” “Forever Free,” “Simply Murder,” “The Universe of Battle,” “Valley of the Shadow of Death,” “Most Hallowed Ground,” “War Is All Hell,” and “The Better Angels of Our Nature.” The heat was relentless, but we had fans set up to create a cross-breeze and made iced tea.

  The documentary’s soundtrack was all haunting fiddle and accordion music and ghostly voice-overs. Many letters from soldiers were read; the epistolary life during the Civil War, in sheer numbers of letters, endless ghastly anecdote, and tone of bewildered homesickness, was immeasurably heart-wrenching. Each line of printing or cursive shown in close-up on the screen, each of the hundreds of black-and-white photographs, contained history. Many of the photographs depicted battlefields, often with numerous bodies strewn in twisted, agonized configurations that made for a kind of hieroglyphics of corpses, a forensic alphabet, especially when photographed from a hill or rise. Some of the individual dead looked as though they were merely sleeping. The voice-overs, the actual words of the soldiers, both Union and Confederate, got to me as easily as the photographs. The voices: each episode felt like a séance organized and directed by Ken Burns, and during my hours of watching, a powerful melancholy presided. Those photographs, though. The photographs were saturated, of course, with the sadness of a war that divided and ultimately defined us as a nation, but within that context also intensified our understanding of the uncanny power of photographs to haunt us.

  Then, after a couple of hours, in the somewhat cooling air, the neighbors would set out up the road for home, a quarter of a mile away. It was as if we had all entered the mid-nineteenth century, the only ambient light being the moon and stars and the oil lanterns they held to see by. One morning at the post office, my neighbor Mark said, “Things in my house are getting strange. Allison and I stare out at the back field and imagine a battle going on.”

  The well took three full days to complete, and was, up to that time, the third-deepest private well in the state. I was writing those articles about having a well dug as fast as I could. I’m smiling as I write this now, but talk about pouring salt on the wound: When the Benidinis got to 620 feet, at about four P.M. on the third afternoon, I was looking at them through the lace curtains of my living room. It was like having my view filtered through a past century, as the lace was antique. I watched the oldest Benidini brother, Toby, strip off his T-shirt, walk to the auxiliary tank of water (used to reduce friction), pick up an plastic container, fill it from the tank, and empty it over his head. He then took out a bottle of shampoo—the kind you get in hotel rooms—and proceeded to shampoo his hair, then rinse it with what water was left in the container. Taking a comb from his back pocket, he styled his hair into a duck’s-ass. I must’ve been at wits’ end, because his casual use of water set me off, to the point where I was going to comment on it through the window screen. I have no earthly notion what I would have said, but I never got around to it, because the telephone rang.

  “I really need to get into Canada,” my brother said. “I saw a suspicious car in the motel parking lot. A man got out and walked to a diner. I went over for a look at his car. There were binoculars on the front seat. Believe me, he didn’t look like any bird watcher.”

  “You’re having paranoid delusions.”

  “I understand you haven’t heard from me for a couple of years, but you’re hearing from me a lot already this summer. See? People can change.”

  “You’re putting me in a very difficult position, here.”

  “The problem with you is, you can’t grant your brother a simple favor. Know what I’m doing right now? I’m closing my eyes and seeing us crossing the Canadian border.”

  “You’ve got movies in your head.”

  “How about this for an idea? A picnic a hundred yards before Canada. Little Emma points and says, ‘Dada, what’s that?’ And you say, ‘Honey, that’s the Canadian border. After our picnic is over, your uncle Mike is going to walk right across it. Won’t that be fun to watch?’ Let me add something to the bargain. I give you full permission—and I’d sign a piece of paper to this effect—full permission to use this incident in a novel.”

  “So you’re providing me with ideas now.”

  “Somebody has to.”

  “I try to do that for myself.”

  “Good luck. I still hear those well diggers in the background. Which reminds me, know what’s weird? Whenever I try talking sense to you, I get parched. This amazing thirst. When I hang up I’ll probably drink ten glasses of water in a row. Have you thought about my offer?”

  “Stop calling collect, okay?” I hung up.

  Then the Benidini Brothers started
to dismantle their giant Erector set. Just like that, it was over. I went out onto the side porch and said, “What’s going on now?” Toby said, “We’ve stopped at five gallons per minute. But it’ll improve as things open up even more where we’ve cracked rock deep down.” It took the next two hours for them to dismantle the rig, load it on the flatbed. The last thing Toby said was “We’ll accept payment in three installments. You didn’t ask for that arrangement, but this hole went very deep. You know, we’d rather have something in pocket right up front.”

  I wrote a check for the whole amount. The next morning I went into town to get new typewriter ribbons. Two of the articles on well drilling were due in ten days.

  Conversation with my brother, June 27:

  “It’s four A.M.” I said.

  “Oh, sorry. It’s only two where I’m calling from.”

  “That narrows your location down to the western United States.”

  “You don’t sleep much anyway,” my brother said, “if memory serves.”

  “I take it—in the legal sense—someone is looking for you?”

  “Nice to be wanted, isn’t it?”

  “That would make me laugh if it was funny.”

  “So here’s my offer. I come and spend some quality time with my new niece, whom I haven’t yet seen. Then one night you drive me up to Canada. I’ll fall right out of my bind.”

  “Well, have you given any thought to the fact that I’d be aiding and abetting a criminal? You want my daughter to have a father in jail? That’ll make me an absent father. I’m not in that family tradition. What is your legal bind, anyway?”

  “The less you know the better. I’ll pay for a full tank of gas, don’t worry about that. How long do you need to consider my offer?”