I Hate to Leave This Beautiful Place

by Howard Norman

  “Ten years.”

  I hung up, or he did.

  In the middle of July I went to an owl conference held in Wolcott, Vermont. Owl specialists from all over the world attended. In the evenings, and through the night and early-morning hours, some participants went out looking for owls in nearby Great Bear Swamp. All the heavy-duty flashlights had been bought up from local hardware stores. One ornithologist from Japan bought a miner’s helmet, and its beam funneled yellow-white light up into the trees.

  On the second afternoon of the conference, a Frenchwoman, Dr. Joubert, gave a lecture with a title she said had been inspired by François Villon, “In the Darkness Where the Dreaming Begins,” in which she described what was for her the dreamlike quality of seeing owls on a moonlit night. Her paper also contained esoteric references, but it distinguished itself by its ethereal tone, especially since the majority of lectures were incredibly dull. Still, even in the paper titled “Parasites in the Great Horned Owl” there was something interesting to learn. Besides, it wasn’t every day you got to be with people obsessed by owls.

  After Dr. Joubert’s lecture, a picnic dinner was served on the newly mowed common, big as a football field, at Craftsbury Common. It proved to be a beautiful evening and night, a vast array of stars with a gibbous moon presiding. After dinner, a dozen or so conferees, a veritable parliament of owl aficionados, slathered in mosquito and blackfly repellent, set out for Great Bear Swamp. I stopped at the library of the Center for Northern Studies to take my temperature. For some reason, it had spiked to 101.5. But the later and cooler it got, the more the night air would be a balm, and anyway, I was eager to see owls.

  On another day, breakfast at the local diner. A meandering drive on back roads. Working on a new novel during hours that the Marshfield Library is closed, with Emma napping in the portable car seat in the children’s books section. Crows in the conifers across the street. The phone rings in the library’s empty office. Many paragraphs typed on the Olivetti manual, a few kept. Everything I loved most happened most every day. With the exception that, when I got home, I found a note: Your brother called. Wouldn’t leave a return number. Will call later.

  At dusk, the barred owl flew out the door of our three-story barn, glided over the near field, then disappeared toward the lower field and woods. I don’t know what was behind my impulse to name this owl, but I named her Gertrude. (In 2003, I named her successor in the barn Edna.) That evening, after watching the “Forever Free” episode of The Civil War, I could not sleep, so I went outside and walked to the two-lane, Route 14, where usually I’d go up the curving road in order to look back, my favorite view of the house. I stopped in front of Maurice and Kay Person’s red ramshackle house with its slumping porch. The lights were out. (Maurice once admonished me for leaving too many lights on in my house at night. “Electricity adds up,” he said.)

  The night was very still. I heard a loud rustling of some sort—raccoons, I thought, but then there was a rush of air, then nothing. I swept my flashlight beam across the open garage adjacent to the house. There was Gertrude, sitting on a wooden shelf above Maurice’s black greatcoat on its nail; she had a vole dangling from her beak, a trickle of blood on its fur. I never realized before just how enormous a bird this was. I turned off the flashlight and immediately Gertrude whooshed past less than a foot from my head. It made me duck and throw my hands in front of my face. Off she went as if following the moon-illuminated dirt road up to our barn. I knew that this would never happen again. But part of what I loved most every day was thinking about this incident every time I walked or drove past Maurice’s house. Yet another place along this dirt road had become a mnemonic.

  The next morning, another neighbor, Allison, dropped by to say that their grey-and-white cat, Pemberton by name, had gone missing. “She’s disappeared for days on end before,” Allison said. “But we’re asking people to keep a lookout. She’s got a collar with a nametag and phone number and everything.”

  The Independence Day parade in Cabot. The Bread and Puppet troupe lead things off, with its founder, Peter Schumann, dressed as Uncle Sam on stilts, and timeless antiwar slogans in ten-foot-wide sheets held between poles by giant, doughy-headed puppets. Ironically, next in line came a dozen World War Two veterans. The breast pockets of their ill-fitting uniforms draped with medals, these elderly men walked slowly and waved to the crowd on either side of the street.

  I’m eating a cherry-cheese danish at Rainbow Sweets Café, talking about books and Russian classical music with the proprietor, William Tecosky. Gabrielle Deitzel up on a ladder at the back of the farmhouse, taking down last year’s paper wasps’ nests to use for an art project. Standing in the waist-deep water of the creek at the bottom of the dirt road, fingerling trout brushing past your knees. Kestrels, hawks, crows, sparrows, robins, towhees. At night, fireflies hover above the garden along the stone wall. I look out over the field and see thousands more. The eyes of deer rising and falling in the near dark. The radio tuned to the BBC at midnight, but of course there’s the overseas time difference. Which means the European workday has already arrived at my house. Time travel by radio.

  I thought back to the last day of well drilling: the giant rig with its insatiable thirst in the drizzling rain. The well diggers, on lunch break, had gone to the diner in Hardwick, a depressed little town but with a lovely bookstore and a café. I put on my raincoat and went out and measured the old well by dropping a flat stone on the end of a thread, then measuring the thread. In about an hour the diggers returned and bivouacked under a tarpaulin. The noise of the equipment was muffled by the rain. Inside on the kitchen table, Jane had left a note: Handel’s “Water Music” on VPR tonight. I could almost laugh. Rain on the roof in a soporific cadence. I wanted to take a yearlong nap.

  The telephone rings.

  “It’s mail fraud and tax evasion.”

  “You’ve been busy.”

  “What they call white-collar crimes.”

  “Will it be Terre Haute prison again if—?”

  “If what? If you don’t take me into Canada if. That’s the only if you should be thinking about.”

  “I have to say no. I’ll drive you to a border crossing. It’s on a back road. But I won’t take you over. Anyone asks, I can say I didn’t know you were, um, under legal duress.”

  “Since you were a kid, you thought if you used words cleverly, people would think you’re clever.”

  “I don’t think anything of the sort.”

  Then, out of nowhere, he said, “I read fifteen poems by Robert Frost last week. Doesn’t sound like me, does it? Fifteen. And after fifteen of them, I thought, Robert Frost is loyal to things. He’s loyal to the truth. And I further thought, If Robert Frost had a brother in need, he’d fix up a horse and sleigh and take that brother through hellfire and ice storms into Canada. He lived in Vermont some of the time, in case you didn’t know.”

  “What would you do in Canada?”

  “Not live in the U.S.”

  “Meaning they won’t extradite you for the kind of thing you screwed up with.”

  “So my attorney tells me.”

  “You have an attorney?”

  “I call him that. He studied law in Terre Haute, the prison library. He’s more a legal adviser, I suppose. I advise him about certain things in return.”

  “I bet. Well, why not advise him to drive you into Canada?”

  “What happened to us, anyway? We use to be so close when you were three and I was six, remember?”

  Early on the evening of July 20, feeling somewhat better, I drove to Plainfield to have dinner alone at a café. I sat by a window and looked out at the Plainfield United Methodist Church across the street. Restaurants and cafés had come and gone in Plainfield, and this present one struck me as doomed, but the food was good. Olivia had come to the house to babysit while Jane worked on some writing for a couple of hours. The evening before, we’d watched the “Simply Murder” episode of The Civil War.

  In the c
afé I ordered cold cucumber soup and bread. There was only one other customer, a woman in the volunteer ambulance crew out of Marshfield. She was eating the cucumber soup with bread, too. We nodded hello and she went back to reading her magazine. My table was in the path of a floor fan, which helped, but I was definitely feverish again. After a few spoonfuls of soup, I picked an ice cube from my water glass and rubbed it on my forehead. This fever thing was getting scary. Casting over my unscientific inventory of worst-case scenarios, I decided I had tetanus, but couldn’t remember whether I’d stepped on a nail earlier in the month out in the barn or just dreamed it. I wrote a few letters by hand. I jotted something in a notebook. Then I stared out the window for a while. The waitress had nodded off at a corner table; neither of her customers had any need to wake her. The radio was playing the soundtrack from The Civil War, which had become popular.

  At dusk I watched as the AA meeting let out from the church basement. It was a Thursday; everyone knew that’s when the AA meeting took place. Most of the AA people seemed reluctant to leave and stood around talking, lighting cigarettes in the courtyard inside the stone wall. It was at that moment I saw—or thought I saw—a Confederate soldier who was in the Civil War documentary. This couldn’t be true, but I didn’t immediately credit my fever with making it seem true. I was too lost in his face. And what was stranger yet was the fact that I knew the exact photograph he had appeared in, one taken by Alexander Gardner. In that photograph, a Rebel soldier—this same man—sat in haggard despondency near a stone wall as Union soldiers stood nearby in a tight circle smoking cigarettes, their bayoneted rifles propped against the wall not ten feet from their prisoner.

  The man I “recognized” broke from the AA group and, with a slight limp (I thought, “war wound”), sauntered across the street and stood in front of the café window, where I got a closer look at him. He was probably in his late forties, with deep crow’s-feet at each eye. He was tall, with a gaunt face, wispy beard, and unusually thick eyebrows. He stood there for about ten minutes. While the other dozen or so AA participants got into cars and drove off, this man walked from town up toward Maple Hill. As it happened, our waitress had woken up and come over to ask if I needed anything else. She had been born and raised in Plainfield. “Sandra,” I said, “did you see that guy smoking a cigarette just now, right out front here?”

  “Of course I did. He was right on the sidewalk. Sure, I saw him.”

  “Do you know his name?

  “He’s not from around here, at least not Plainfield. Did he come from the AA meeting?”

  “Yes, he did. Definitely, he did.”

  She set down my check and went back to the kitchen.

  I continued to frequent the millpond, sometimes three times a week, and had alerted people at the Nature Conservancy and other environmental organizations about the peculiar behavior of the kingfisher. I was certain it was in trouble. When I didn’t get much response from those sources, I telephoned a friend who worked in the ornithological laboratory at Cornell University. She listened to my description of the kingfisher’s behavior and said, “Well, it’s still alive, which means it’s catching fish. It’s surviving so far. That’s good. My guess is some sort of parasite.” She called the Vermont Agency of Natural Resources, and two state biologists met me a couple of days later at the millpond. While waiting for them, I took my temperature—100—and stripped down and took a quick swim, then saw their truck coming up the road.

  The two biologists, a man and a woman, introduced themselves. The woman climbed right up the lightning-struck maple and, using specially made padded tongs, clasped the weakened kingfisher and gently brought it to ground. “Obviously, I couldn’t have caught this bird if it was in tiptop shape,” she said. “We’ll run some tests and get it back here as soon as possible. There’s a hawk and a crow ahead of it in the lab, but it won’t take but a day or two.” Off they went in their truck.

  I kept my sightings of the Confederate soldier to myself—after all, it was my dispute with reality—but I saw him on the following dates: July 23, walking past Country Books in Plainfield, near Plainfield United Methodist Church; July 27, dressed in the same clothes{{DEANNE: reader should know what he’s wearing; I asked this earlier and got no response}} he had on the evening of the AA meeting, and smoking a cigarette in front of the Plainfield fire station; and July 29, walking out empty-handed from the Plainfield post office. That same evening, I saw him walk by the front of the café in Plainfield and again head toward Maple Hill; this time he was wearing a Confederate soldier’s cap. (I thought, Yeah, but so what? I’ve seen those for sale at the army-navy store on Route 2.) I’d noticed a Goddard College student sporting one just a few weeks earlier. Still, I made an appointment with a psychotherapist in Montpelier.

  Lost Cat notices with a photograph of Pemberton were displayed on every general store, post office, and food co-op bulletin board in the area—cats can wander surprising distances. Rural Vermont cat stories could fill a thousand-page anthology. There was a story about a cat in Woodbury that had leaped into the back of a UPS truck only to be discovered when the driver was unloading boxes 150 miles away. Another story told of a cat in Danville that had somehow wedged itself into a cubbyhole in an enormous barn; its owners could hear it yowling, but because of the peculiar acoustics of the barn—this also occurred during days and nights of thunderstorms—could not find the cat itself. A full week passed, and the voice of the cat grew weaker. Early one morning, the family’s fifteen-year-old daughter looked up and saw a cat’s tail waving out from a hole. The cat had somehow positioned itself so as to flag its location.

  Yet another cat story: A cat had wandered away from a campsite in Groton State Forest. Its owners, a young couple, saw it scamper up an oak tree, and they walked along below it, following the cat as it leaped from tree to tree at various elevations for a good long way. Then it disappeared in the treetops. The couple moved their campsite. For two days and nights they did not see the cat. After searching for another full day, they decided to go to the general store in Marshfield to get some food and bottled water. Not about to give up hope, they returned to their original campsite and set up their tent there. In the morning, the woman opened her eyes to find the cat sitting on her chest.

  Then there was the Russian blue communally owned and cared for by the fire department of a small town in southern Vermont. The cat had curled itself up inside the folded American flag that was raised every morning on the pole in front the station. When a rookie fireman raised the flag, the cat, its claws clinging to the cloth, went up with it. The rookie figured that all he needed to do was lower the flag and the cat would be rescued. By now the entire fire crew was watching, along with various townsfolk. When the rookie began to lower the flag, the cat removed itself to the rounded top of the flagpole, precariously holding on for dear life. But the moment he saw the cat transfer itself to the pole, the fire chief ordered his crew to hold trampoline-like safety nets around the pole, and just in the nick of time, because the cat plummeted, landing uninjured on one of the nets, at which point it jumped from the net, walked into the fire station, and began to drink from its water bowl.

  From my first appointment I decided that the therapist would not be much help. I doubted that I actually wanted to get to the heart of the mystery. Moreover, I think I wanted the Confederate soldier to be some sort of representation, or verification, of the astonishing sadness my neighbors, my family, and I felt while watching The Civil War.

  “We see what we wish to see sometimes,” Dr. ____, the therapist, said after I’d described my Confederate ghost to him.

  “If that’s the case, it’s about time I had a wish come true,” I said. I felt as if I were channeling my older brother’s snide tone, his predisposition toward a lack of basic civility.

  “Okay,” he said, undaunted. “Here’s an idea. Why not go looking for this man. This Confederate soldier. Set up a kind of surveillance, dedicate yourself to finding him like a detective might. Or hire a d
etective. I could give you some names. Track this man down, and if you find him—according to your many recent sightings he’s in the Plainfield area. If you find him, just ask him his name. He might be offended, but he might be . . . civil.”

  I didn’t laugh at the pun.

  “Despite the two of us being total strangers,” I said.

  “Well, he has become quite familiar, though, hasn’t he? Though it’s one-sided.”

  “I could say, ‘You are the spitting image of a Confederate soldier in the Ken Burns documentary about the Civil War.’”

  “Yes, be direct. He might be interested. What’s the worst that could happen?”

  “Well, I imagine . . .”

  “Let me put it differently. What would you like to happen?”

  “I’d like him actually to be a Confederate soldier.”

  “All right. All right, well. Yes, that would explain why he’s at an AA meeting. Post-traumatic stress disorder—from, say, Gettysburg. Didn’t you say that in the photograph he was a prisoner of war?”

  “Poor guy. First he had to travel north to Vermont, then he had to wait until Alcoholics Anonymous came along. I think you’re humoring me.”

  “On the contrary. I’m trying to find a way to talk about this.”

  “Me too.”

  “Why else, do you imagine, would you want him to be the real thing? Maybe because—and I’ve been watching it, too—the documentary is all photographs and the disconnected voices of the narrators. Yet you saw an actual physically present person outside the café, correct?”

  My time was up. With the little I had left over from paying the Benidini Brothers, I paid for this session—things are done informally in Vermont—with an envelope of cash. That seemed fine all around.