I Hate to Leave This Beautiful Place

by Howard Norman

  Late one very hot morning, I was driving, Emma in her car seat, to see if the kingfisher had been returned to the millpond when, up ahead on Pekin Brook Road, I saw a car pulled over to the side, near the creek. The trunk was open, the spare tire was on the ground, and the man, who turned out to be my new therapist, was studying a sheet of paper, presumably to learn how to work the jack and lug wrench.

  I pulled up behind his car, turned off the ignition, got out—Emma had dozed off—and said, “Hello, Dr. ____.”

  “I’ve got a bad back,” he said. “Ruptured a disk some months ago. Would you mind?”

  “Not at all, not at all. Glad to help.” I got the car jacked up, changed the tire, put the lug nuts on finger tight, lowered the car, fully tightened the nuts, and tossed the jack and the flat tire in the trunk. “That’s that,” I said. I didn’t mention that I was the least mechanically adept person I knew. Still, I could change a tire.

  “Thank you. You weren’t by any chance heading over to Plainfield, were you? To look for your Confederate soldier?”

  “Not today. But I think your idea is a good one. I’m going to follow up on it.”

  “Make another appointment if you’re so inclined.”

  Next, I stopped to watch Viiu Niiler and Chet Cole blow glass, shaping it into vases, plates, and decorative sun catchers. I sat on the steps of their studio and we had a conversation while they worked. Then I stopped in at Country Books, where I discovered that a friend of mine had sold to the proprietor, Ben Koenig, a rare two-volume set of the paintings of Matisse, with commentary by the French poet Louis Aragon. I had loaned these book to the friend a month earlier, because she had wanted to study Matisse’s paintings for inspiration for her pottery. I bought back the two volumes. A week or so later, Ben informed me that my friend had dropped by to “study” the Matisse volumes. “I trust you didn’t tell her I bought them,” I said. “She’d be embarrassed.” Yet I could see from the look on his face that Ben had told her; etiquette is different for different people.

  I next stopped at Cabot Greenhouse and purchased six Japanese crabapple trees. While running errands at two general stores, a gas station, a hardware store, and Legarre’s Produce, I saw Lost Cat notices for Pemberton. I took my temperature about a dozen times during the day; it ran the gamut between 99 and 102. Now that I think about it, it must’ve looked odd to customers at Rainbow Sweets Café: here was a man with a piece of poppyseed cake and a cup of coffee on the table in front of him, reading a book of poems by W. S. Merwin with a thermometer in his mouth.

  That evening, during dinner at Roy and Gabrielle’s, Jane jokingly said, “We’ve been getting along really well with our fevers.” Later, everyone watched the “War Is All Hell” episode.

  “Hello.”

  Silence a moment. Then my brother said, “I don’t hear the noise anymore. That well must’ve run you into the thousands. What’s the worry, since your last book made millions.”

  “Sure, right, of course it did. A fledgling literary novel set in northern Manitoba. It was ten weeks on the northern Manitoba bestseller list.”

  “Per word, what do you make, approximately, per word?”

  “It doesn’t work that way.”

  “That’s too bad. A dollar a word, say, would be pretty good. Though you’d have to learn to write long books, right?”

  “Right.”

  “There’s only an hour’s time difference between us now.”

  “I take it you’re in the Midwest.”

  “See, right there, what you just said. Very astute. You should write a detective novel. You’d probably make some real money. I’ve had certain experiences. I could be your ghostwriter, I think they call it.”

  “No, a ghostwriter is someone who actually writes the whole book but remains anonymous. They put somebody else’s name on the cover.”

  “That wouldn’t bother me.”

  “Which way wouldn’t bother you—if you were the ghostwriter or you were the one taking credit?”

  “Holy God in heaven, how does your wife put up with you more than an hour at a time? You have to dissect everything like it’s a frog in high school biology class. What a dunce. If there was a stool in the corner of Vermont, you should go sit on it with your dunce cap on.”

  “It’s five A.M. and you called collect.”

  I hung up and drove to the millpond.

  On an evening in mid-August, the Confederate soldier and I were the only customers in the café in Plainfield. He was already sitting at a table when I arrived. He had his visored military cap on. It freaked me out, I have to admit, seeing him like that. I might have turned around and fled but for the fact that Sandra, the waitress, said, “Hey, I told this guy you’re a local writer. He’s a Civil War buff and I directed him over to Country Books.” She turned to the Confederate soldier. “Right?”

  “That’s right,” he said.

  I sat down at my table.

  “This cap must look kinda stupid,” he said. “I’m trying to stay connected to my son.”

  “How’s that?”

  “Well, I’ve rented a place up Maple Hill here. My son is eighteen and his summer job is being a Civil War reenactor down in Virginia. He’s learning a lot and we get to talk about that. He’s dying once a day, twice on Saturdays and Sundays, for the tourists. But I think the job’s getting to him. It’s sinking in what actually went on during the Civil War. It’s getting to him.”

  “I’ve been watching the Ken Burns documentary.”

  “Me too.”

  “I saw you earlier this summer, over in the church courtyard across the street.”

  “Oh yeah? I go to meetings there.”

  “I thought—this will sound crazy. I thought you were right out of the Ken Burns documentary. You bear a striking resemblance to a Confederate soldier in it.”

  “The mind plays tricks, huh?”

  “You aren’t kidding.”

  “And then you find out my kid’s doing reenactments. Synchronicities or what?”

  “Synchronicities. By the way, I’m Howard.”

  I walked over and we shook hands. “St. John Holman,” he said.

  I left the café without ordering a meal. Later, it was as if I knew the exact moment my fever broke. It was about one A.M. I was in the kitchen listening to the BBC. I took my temperature: normal. I took it again at two A.M. and right after waking at six-thirty A.M.: normal.

  Earlier in the summer, back at the owl conference in Wolcott, at about three or four o’clock in the morning, the group scattered out in the swamp, quiet, listening for owls. I was standing with a Frenchwoman named Dr. Ponge when she brought her flashlight close to my face and said, in a thick accent, “Do you mind if I . . . ,” and placed the palm of her hand on my forehead. “I think you have malaria,” she said. Malaria was obviously a stand-in for a high fever; she didn’t mean malaria literally. “I’ve been looking at you, and your eyes look . . . rheumy. I think you should go home and lie down. You live in Vermont—you can come to this place anytime, yes?”

  I took out my small leather case that had the thermometers inside. Standing in the muck, surrounded on all sides by an international array of owl obsessives, I took my temperature. “Let me read it,” Dr. Ponge said. She studied the thermometer. “Oh, okay—okay, not good. Not good.”

  I walked out of the swamp, got in my car, and drove to the main building of the Center for Northern Studies. I took two bottles of spring water from the small refrigerator and drank them both in short order. I lay down on the cot in the auxiliary room and fell right to sleep. When I woke and looked at the clock on a nearby worktable, it read 11:05 A.M.—I’d slept for approximately seven hours.

  When I made my way to the conference room, I found Dr. Ponge and five or six other people looking at photographs of Asian fishing owls. “Oh, we had a doctor come out—do you remember?” Dr. Ponge said. I said I didn’t remember that at all. “Yes, he examined you and took your temperature. It was down to almost normal. So he sa
id to just let you sleep. And by the way, I spoke with a young woman who answered your telephone. Olivia. I told her you were sleeping and there were a lot of people here, and that there was nothing to worry about. Olivia said she’d give the message to your family, okay?”

  “Well, thank you so much for looking after me. I didn’t mean for that to happen.”

  “No problem,” she said. Then everyone went back to the photographs.

  “Did you see many owls last night?” I asked.

  “Yes, quite a few,” Dr. Ponge said. “It was very satisfying.”

  Late in the evening on the day the owl conference ended, I went into my barn after dinner and, on the hay-strewn floor of the upper level, beneath the rafter beam on which Gertrude could most often be observed, I discovered Pemberton’s nametag.

  This was really confusing. Looking up at the rafters, I imagined the bones of Pemberton, his skull perhaps, and tufts of fur; in the past I’d climbed up there and seen the skeletal remains of mice, wood rats, snakes, hares, fish, toads, and birds. Allison and Mark had two young sons; the family adored Pemberton. How could I tell them? Should I tell them? What was the right thing to do in these circumstances? Mark worked for the Nature Conservancy; that he surely knew all about predator-prey relationships was one thing, but that their beloved pet had been lifted into the air, carried aloft to the rafters of my barn, and eviscerated by a sharp beak and talons was quite another. I’d had the passing thought, too, that the boys, who each owned a .22-caliber rifle, might naturally seek revenge on Gertrude. In every important regard they were solid boys, but still, one could hardly blame them.

  In the end I never uttered a word. In subsequent years my family lost several cats, who simply never came back from nighttime wanderings. After each disappearance, all of us were broken-hearted. I wondered if Gertrude had anything to do with those cats, but I stayed out of the barn for weeks, not wanting to know. And many times I’d see Gertrude flying from the paneless topmost window of the barn at dusk, and return at first light.

  By the time I was exhausted from writing the next-to-last article on having a well drilled, I started the last one, for a magazine in California. I was allowed twenty pages. Reading that piece over now, I realize that to some extent it evokes a lot of the anxiety of that summer. The first sentence was “We had set aside enough money to get through the summer but suddenly needed a new well dug, which meant we had not set aside enough.” In the course of this article I shamelessly depicted the Benidini Brothers as deviously clever white trash, and suggested that people were at their “mercy” in every aspect of well drilling, from the location of the well itself to taking their word for “reading the water,” as it was called, meaning its volume and clearness. Of course, all of that was simply my response to the nonscientific aspects of the profession of well digging. What is more, I inserted a dream about a neighbor’s cat falling into a well. I also referred to another dream I’d had, of seeing Noah’s Ark on the Winooski River, which ran through Montpelier. In the dream, Noah’s wife was taking Noah’s temperature with a modern thermometer. In rejecting the article, the editor of the magazine politely wrote, “These dreams are extraneous to the subject at hand.”

  Therapist: So, your fever broke right after finding out the Confederate soldier was not a Confederate soldier?

  Me: Same night.

  Therapist: No coincidence, then. There’s much to talk about.

  Everything I loved most happened most every day. While examining me again late in August, my physician said, “Just wanted to mention that I did some research into that mysterious fever you had. Not yours exactly, but mysterious fevers in general. I ran across one account of a man who had a temperature of a hundred and one for about twenty years, and one day it just dropped back down to normal. It was interesting reading. I have you to thank for that. Hope you’re not disappointed, though, not getting into the Guinness Book of World Records or something. Okay, we’re done here. You’re good. Temperature’s normal. Everything looks good.”

  I drove to Country Books. Ben Koenig’s assistant said that St. John Holman had left town, but before he did, he purchased over five hundred dollars’ worth of books about the Civil War, also a number of Civil War–era photographic postcards. “I helped carry it all to his truck,” the assistant said. “Go back and look for yourself if you want. There’s three completely empty shelves.”

  I went and looked. When I stepped up to the counter again, he said, “Know what else? I bought his hat from him for ten bucks. He got the good deal there.” This assistant, who was about six feet tall, with a mountain-man black beard, who normally preferred to be inconspicuous, happy to labor away in silence back in the stacks, jauntily placed the Confederate soldier’s cap on his head. It looked really stupid on him. “If you’re looking for Ben, by the way, he’s taking some time off. With that big sale, he might go to Paris.”

  On Vermont Public Radio, every forecast on the “Eye on the Sky” weather report dedicates itself to elaborate language, which some of my friends suggested was overkill. I didn’t feel that way at all. I loved descriptions such as, “Southern portions of Quebec province sponsored last night’s rain, and the same can be said about today’s light showers throughout the broadcast area. Late-afternoon and early-evening water spouts might hazard small craft on Lake Champlain. One farmer near Peacham reported geese had shown up in his barn. I suppose we shouldn’t be surprised that even water fowl sometimes need to get out of the rain. Tomorrow, more rain. Temperatures will range between eighty and eighty-five in the lower elevations.”

  I stopped at Jules and Helen Rabin’s house to pick up two loaves of bread they had made in their medieval stone beehive oven. On my way home I listened to Tom Slayton’s excellent review of the latest collection of poems by Hayden Carruth and a retrospective of Carruth’s writing life, and then switched off the car radio the moment I recognized the insufferable voice of Willem Lang, about to deliver a sanctimonious editorial. Then I noticed an enormous, prehistoric-looking snapping turtle crossing Route 14. I stopped the car, broke off a small branch from a fallen tree ten yards from the road, and approached the turtle, which spun to face me, hissing. The thing to do was get the turtle to lurch its accordion neck forward and bite the branch, then drag the whole contraption into the wet gulley alongside the road and run like hell. This worked out fairly quickly.

  Late at night, I ate strawberries and cream, then watched the “Better Angels of Our Nature” episode. And I thought, This summer I’ve experienced my better and worse angels equally, and the summer isn’t over yet.

  By the end of August the kingfisher was back on its tree. I contacted the state biologist who had originally captured it. She said, “Yeah, just as I suspected, it was a parasite. It should be fine now, except sometimes just a short time away from home like that disorients a kingfisher. It might choose to change its tree. Which might not sound like much, but for a kingfisher it’s major. Keep me posted. I’d be interested to know what’s going on there.”

  Back at the millpond, I sat and watched both of the resident kingfishers. Splash to the west, then splash to the north, a kind of contrapuntal ornithology, and both birds were having much success. Then I saw that the kingfisher on the north side of the pond was in fact “teaching” a juvenile, perched on a nearby branch—I had read about but never observed this—to hunt. The way it works is that the parent bird will kill a small fish, then lay it on the surface of the pond. The offspring will then attack the fish, often missing it entirely, but occasionally spearing the fish successfully with its bill. This apprenticeship may go on for weeks and weeks. On this late-August day, the juvenile kingfisher was both picking up its mother’s leavings and separately nabbing its own fish. I sat there for most of the afternoon. I wrote letters, read part of a friend’s novel, took a nap, ate peaches. I hated to leave that beautiful place.

  “I have only about three minutes,” my brother said.

  “Put in some more coins, then. Or—go ahead, call me co
llect. I don’t care.”

  “No, I mean I’m allowed only three minutes. Get it?”

  “Where are you?”

  “Terre Haute, Indiana.”

  “I was wondering why I hadn’t heard from you.”

  “There was a hearing. I didn’t contest anything. They had me ass to ashes.”

  “I’ll visit.”

  “It’s for eighteen months. Definitely eighteen months.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “I was wearing you down there, though, wasn’t I? I could tell by your voice I was starting to work the magic. I mean, you’d agreed to take me to the border, if not across. Another week or two would’ve done it. I’m pretty sure.”

  “Maybe so.”

  “But be honest—you’re kinda relieved it didn’t come to that, right?”

  “I don’t know. What does it matter, anyway?”

  “I haven’t met your wife. I haven’t met your daughter.”

  “When you get out, I’ll come drive you to Vermont. You can visit us. I’ll take you across all the state lines between Indiana and here. We can drive at night if it makes you more comfortable. That’s about all I can offer, given the present situation.”

  “Time’s almost up. I’m getting the look from the guard.”

  “Okay. Call collect next time if you want. Hope you’ll be all right there.”

  “How all right can a person be in federal prison, ask yourself that. Though they do have—I mean, it’s white-collar crime, minimum security. They do have therapists, priests, rabbis—they’ve got movies on one of those old-fashioned projectors. I’m thinking of doing some writing.”

  I had one last therapy session. “Do you want to continue to try and figure out the whole thing with the Confederate soldier?” Dr. ____ asked.