Apart from that, the goat wasn’t much trouble. Mick didn’t even have to build a house for her because the goat immediately seized on the empty chicken house and claimed the laying shelf for her own. She spent most of her time eating the flowers and shrubs out of the backyard—the chickens had already pulled up most all of the grass—but when she got tired she’d go in the chicken coop and hop up on the laying shelf for a nap. Mick was out back trimming what was left of the shrubs one afternoon and missed Dylan. He’d last seen him going into the chicken coop, so he went down there and found Dylan and his doat curled up together on the shelf, sound asleep.
He got a great picture.
17
* * *
Spring break.
IT RAINED during spring break. When the clouds finally broke Mick threw the kids out of the house and they brought that red Georgia mud back in with them. He made a mental note to take a jar of mud with him the next time he went to buy carpet, and color-match it.
He’d been home for several months by then, and his sanity was starting to slip. He’d always had a boss, all his life. Half the time his boss had been a nut bag, but he was still the boss. There had always been clearly defined goals complete with blueprints, and they were always at least somewhat predictable. He knew when he went to work in the morning that he would be tying down a slab, or building columns, or flying in I-beams that day.
But now everybody was his boss—including his wife, three kids, a dog, a goat and a bunch of chickens. He never knew from one minute to the next what kind of madness lay around the corner. He drank his coffee in cold half cups and couldn’t remember eating lunch. Sometimes he’d find a moldy half cup of coffee sitting on a shelf where he had set it down when he stopped to pick up the shards of a picture frame smashed by a stray football three days earlier.
There was one particular day when Mick got up at six thirty, got dressed, made coffee, started Layne’s oatmeal, and then picked up a basket of dirty clothes and headed for the laundry room. On the way past the living room he spotted a pair of socks in the floor—probably Toad’s—so he put the basket down in the foyer by the front door and went to pick up the socks.
Since he was already in there by the desk, he checked the e-mail because sometimes the lawyers at Layne’s office changed her plans in the middle of the night and sent her off to do some of their legwork. The dial-up was painfully slow, and while it was still bonging and hissing he heard Layne calling to him from the bedroom door. There were no towels. He ran to get one out of the pile he’d washed the day before, still in the laundry room.
On the way back through the kitchen he noticed the oatmeal was boiling over. By the time he gave Layne her towel and cleaned up the oatmeal mess, Ben and Toad were up, in their pajamas in the middle of the den, fighting over the remote. While he was settling the fight he happened to look out through the sliding glass door and noticed that during the night Andy had brought home a sizable chunk of a deer’s hindquarter in a fairly advanced state of decomposition, and dragged it up onto the deck. He put his shoes on and went out to deal with the deer carcass. While he was out there he noticed he had forgotten to put the sealer on the new section of the deck.
Between meals and floors and dishes and juice cups and spill control, he dipped a drowned rat out of the pool, sprayed weed killer on the poison ivy, filled in the hole Andy dug under the fence, cut the grass, hauled the garbage out to the road, finished building the new steps to the deck, fertilized and bug-sprayed the flower beds, fixed the latch on the back gate, went to the building supply place for sealer, the pool place for chemicals, and the grocery store for something to cook for supper.
When Layne got home from work, supper was on the stove and Mick was helping Ben with his history project. School was starting back in a couple days and Ben had waited until the last minute to tell his dad he was supposed to be using some of his vacation time to build a replica of the Merrimac. Mick, of course, went overboard. In the beginning he was just going to cut out a piece of quarterinch plywood for a base, but then he got carried away.
Ben finally brought him back to earth when he rolled his eyes and said, “Dad, it’s just a report. The cannons don’t have to have real smoke coming out of them.”
Layne, just coming in from work, hanging up her pocketbook and pulling off her earrings, wanted to know why the phone had been off the hook all day.
Mick looked up, puzzled. “Oh yeah,” he said absently. “The e-mail.”
“And why is there a basket of dirty clothes in the foyer?”
“I was on my way to the laundry room with them.”
“But dear,” she said patiently, “that basket of clothes was sitting right there in that same spot when I left the house this morning. What have you been doing all day?”
* * *
The weather turned off gorgeous on the last day of spring break. The kids watched Wanda’s World that morning while they slopped cereal on the carpet. Wanda was one of those irritatingly perky moms who grinned all the time and constantly looked surprised, as if her eyelids were stapled to her forehead, and she flitted from project to project like a hummingbird on speed. She made Martha Stewart look like a slug, and she made Mick wish he was still an ironworker. That morning, after demonstrating “How to build an herbal terrarium from the weeds in your yard,” “Forty-nine fun things you can make from a broken umbrella,” “How to make a battleship out of toilet paper tubes,” and “Paris—an origami replica,” she explained how you could keep your kids from soiling Aunt Minnie’s fine upholstered dining room chairs by sewing ribbons to the corners of a handkerchief to make a seat cover and using a pillowcase to cover the back. Somewhere in the middle of all that she showed the kids how to make a kite out of a Hefty bag.
They’d had kites before, but Layne always just took them to Wal-Mart and bought the ones with cartoons on them—Spiderman and Sponge Bob. In Mick’s day they used to make kites all the time out of paper grocery sacks, so he knew more or less how to go about it. He found some stiff plastic tubing and a big roll of construction twine among the junk in the garage, and they put it all together with duct tape. Ben kind of did his own thing, but Mick had to help Toad and Dylan build theirs.
“I really need to aerate the lawn and throw some seed,” Mick said, looking up at the sky. “I finally get a couple days of decent weather and here I am, building kites.”
He did resent it a little. There were things he really needed to get done, but with three kids demanding his attention he never seemed to know from one minute to the next what he was going to be doing. There were days, still, when he just didn’t want to be a mother. He wanted his old life back.
Toad was down in the floor putting a cross of duct tape in the middle of a bag, getting ready to punch holes for the braces, when Mick snapped at her for about the fourth time because she was doing it all wrong. She stopped and looked up at him with an earnestness that only a seven-year-old girl can own, and said, “Dad, you just don’t know how to have fun, do you?”
“Maybe not,” he muttered, feeling a little ashamed. “Not sure I remember it.”
He took them up to the big field on the other side of Hap’s place to fly the kites. The first half-hour was a backbreaker because the wind was too strong and the kites kept nose-diving into the ground. There were three kids and only one dad, so he spent a lot of time sprinting to whichever kid squawked the loudest and getting his kite airborne again. He finally sent Ben back to the house for some old pantyhose to make tails out of. Later in the day, after Layne got home, he found himself wishing he’d paid closer attention when Ben came running back into the field with a big handful of pantyhose. If he’d been on top of things Mick would have asked Ben exactly where he got them from. But he didn’t. Though they did seem remarkably runless for ragbag pantyhose, the honest truth was that he was too busy to notice it at the time. He cut them in half with his pocketknife and knotted them together. It took three or four lengths to keep a kite straight in that wind, but then i
t worked great.
The kids had a blast. They cut sticks for handles and wound the strings around them, then flew their homemade kites all the way out to the end of the string and held onto the stick, arms bobbing, for a half hour or so. Mick kept looking at his watch, thinking about the lawn.
When Dylan let go of his stick—which was inevitable, really, just a matter of time—Mick got a little irritated. He’d spent all morning helping build that kite, and then Dylan let it go, just like that. But there was nothing he could do about it, so he said nothing.
“Look at that!” Ben cried. “It’s gonna go right into the stratosphere!”
He was right. With a long pantyhose tail and fifty yards of string anchored by a stick, the kite was incredibly stable. It sat there steady as a rock, facing into the wind without a twitch, climbing serenely away.
Then he saw the second kite pulling away, with its string hanging down, an untended stick twirling slowly at the end of it. Toad had let go. Thirty seconds later there were three, as Ben liberated his kite, and they formed a staggered line up into the blue. For Mick, it was frustration cubed. He couldn’t quite understand why they’d put so much work into something like that and then just let it go.
But then he looked at Dylan’s face.
His mouth was open. His hands were clasped in front of him and he actually shivered with excitement, watching that thing climb like a helium balloon. Toad and Ben were caught up in it, too.
He’d almost forgotten the camera. He’d already taken a couple long shots of the kids with the kites, but he knew they weren’t any good; the perspective was all wrong. Then he saw those faces, looking up at the sky, watching the kites.
There was magic in their faces, he just hadn’t noticed it before. All three of his kids were up there, right then, in that moment, with those kites. They were soaring. They could feel the cold high wind on their faces, and they could see the quilted farmland passing beneath them. He shot the whole roll, tight on their faces. When he ran out of film he looked up at the kites—just dots now, high and far—and suddenly he was there, too, like an ant perched on the nose of the kite, feeling the hum of dead-center perfection.
They jumped in the truck and roared down dirt roads chasing the kites until they disappeared. The last they saw of them there was a star-crossed buzzard circling the little formation as it climbed out of sight over the expressway.
In the truck, chasing kites down the wind with three children, laughing and pointing, Mick kept thinking about what the Man With No Hands said to him.
“You don’t know what the day will bring.”
Sometimes the day brought magic.
* * *
When Layne got home and saw her underwear drawer still hanging open, plastic eggs halved all over the floor and her new pantyhose missing, the shriek from the bedroom brought Mick back to reality. And Ben, of course, threw him under the train.
“Dad told me to,” he said—the little traitor.
Mick opened his mouth to argue, but then he recalled that he hadn’t specifically told Ben to get the ones from the ragbag. It was his own fault. He drove Layne to the department store after supper and entertained the kids while she restocked her hose drawer. While he was waiting he dropped off the pictures he’d shot that afternoon. She was a little upset about the pantyhose at first—it had been a long day—but when he showed her the pictures of her kids she melted.
A few pairs of pantyhose was a small price to pay.
18
* * *
Aubrey’s notion.
ONE EVENING after the kids went back to school Mick took several rolls of film over to Aubrey’s and helped develop them. Aubrey was impressed. He kept going through them, studying them with a magnifying glass.
“I see you were paying attention,” he said, and there was a weight to the way he said it. “These aren’t perfect, but they’re pretty good.”
Mick had gone back to the kudzu shack early one morning and shot it in ground fog. This time he bracketed the exposures and apparently got some of them right, although it was still hard for him to tell the difference. Aubrey liked those a lot, and he also said good things about the ones Mick took of an old barn listing ten degrees to starboard in the process of collapsing, but the ones he kept going back to were the prints Mick had already gotten developed—the pictures of the kids watching their kites. He raved about those.
“Technically, these aren’t landscapes, but they’re still good,” Aubrey said. “There’s just a couple things,” he said, still going over them with his magnifying glass. “Do you have a tripod?”
“No, why?”
“Because they’re not razor sharp. Close, but close isn’t good enough. You’re great with composition and you’re getting better with light, but you can’t hold a camera still enough in your hand. Not if you want your photos to be up to contemporary professional standards.”
“It’s a hobby, Aubrey. It’s just something I do to keep from . . . disappearing. I mean, why do I need to be up to contemporary professional standards?”
Aubrey lowered his glass and stared. He looked puzzled, as if Mick had missed something obvious. “I don’t think you realize how good these are, Mick. If you’ll fine-tune a few details your pictures can hang with anybody’s. And I mean anybody. Start shooting with a tripod. Bring me perfection and I’ll get you a show.”
“A show?” Mick had no idea what he was talking about.
He nodded. “I’m on the board at Arts Clayton, the art museum in Jonesboro. They have a juried show every summer with judges from all over. It’ll be a great experience for you.”
While he was talking Aubrey pulled a tripod down from the shelf and handed it to him. “Use this. And start using fine-grain film—it’s good for landscapes. Bring me perfection and I’ll show you what to do with it. What you have, Mick, is not a hobby. It’s a gift.”
Closed up, the telescoping tripod was about the size of a loaf of bread. Mick pulled out one of the legs, fidgeted with the knobs. Matte black finish, precise fits—everything Aubrey owned was top quality.
“I, uh . . .”
“Keep it. I have another one,” Aubrey said. “And shoot more pictures. Film is relatively cheap, and a good photo—a really great photo—is always one part preparation and one part blind luck. Give yourself a chance to get lucky.”
He was starting to like Aubrey in spite of himself.
19
* * *
Self portrait.
ONE EVENING after supper Mick went over to Hap’s to do some welding. Hap had contracted to build a couple of engine pullers for a trucking place and he wanted the welds to look professional. Hap could weld, but he couldn’t make it pretty.
While Mick welded the frame together, Hap sat on a milk crate and made small talk.
“So how’s things goin’, old buddy? You ’bout to get used to not workin’?”
Mick raised his hood, shook his head. “I don’t know, man. I think I’m starting to understand what Bangles Gruber was talking about when she said it was hard.”
Hap’s brows furrowed, confused. “Hard. Ain’t nothin’ hard about it that I can see. Heaviest thing you got to lift is a laundry basket.”
Mick clamped another rod in the stinger, flipped his hood down, struck an arc, and ran another bead. In a few minutes the nervous blue glow ceased, he raised his hood and slung the spent rod from the stinger.
“It’s not the same kind of hard, Hap,” he said. “It’s not like swinging a pickaxe in August, but see, when a man puts the pickaxe down at quitting time, he’s done. He kicks back and relaxes, and he’s entitled to it because he’s working. What a housewife does isn’t hard—none of it’s hard—but it never stops. It’s all day long, every single day, and all night, too. No holidays or sick days or vacations. If the baby gets sick she stays up all night tending him, and tries not to wake up her husband because he’s working and he needs his rest. It’s not hard—it just never stops. And there’s no dignity in it.”
Hap eyed him suspiciously. “Old buddy, you ain’t turnin’ feminist on me, are you?”
“Nah.” Mick snapped his hood back down and his voice echoed from behind it as the blue arc flashed and he started another bead. “I just feel a little hollow sometimes, that’s all.”
* * *
That hollow feeling might have had something to do with what happened in the parking lot at McDonald’s the next day. It was Tuesday. They left the therapist’s office at lunchtime and Dylan kept fussing about being hungry, so Mick pulled into the burger joint just short of the expressway. He was waiting in line with Dylan up on his shoulders, minding his own business, when a bunch of ironworkers came in for lunch and lined up behind him. One of them started right away mouthing off at the girl behind the counter, griping about the long line. Mick thought he recognized the voice, so he looked over his shoulder.
Sure enough, it was Randy Tewksbury, a guy he’d worked with in his crew a time or two. Tewk was a pretty good hand, but he’d always been an obnoxious pain in the butt. The last time Mick saw him was the day he fired him for cussing Mick out in front of the crew. Tewk thought he was a tough guy. He liked to play the part, wearing a confederate do-rag and sunglasses, indoors or out, and he always cut the sleeves off his T-shirt to show off his tattooed shoulders. Mick didn’t say anything at first, but about the third time Tewk popped off at the girl he could see it was getting to her, so he turned around and stared.
“Why don’t you lighten up, Tewk? It’s not her fault the place is crowded. It’s lunchtime.” Mick said it as politely as he knew how, but as soon as Tewk recognized him that smirk spread over his face and he started bobbing his head, all cocky.
Summer of Light Page 15
