In the Country of the Blind

by Edward Hoagland

  Press kept scrambling upwards, alongside, to explore the creek, and how could you get lost; just follow it down. But one day a tiff between his benefactors, the Clarks and Swinnertons, soured his mood. That is, listening to it, which didn’t merely involve Bible-believing versus free-thinking, but a Swinnerton son, now grown and gone. In the Clarks’ minds he had done their only daughter wrong. Shifting back and forth between the kindly households got somewhat claustrophobic. And Karl was developing emphysema or something that worried Dorothy and left him breathless on fire calls. Financially worried also, not eligible yet for Medicare, they had preoccupations at property tax time. Heat from the woodstove was free, and milk, eggs, and garden produce, not to mention the wild meat and fish he shot or caught, but living cashless was increasingly uneasy. No monthly milk check from the wholesaler, no boarder or baking income except for Press, hound and bird-dog training petering out as Karl lost interest in catering to the clientele. For Karl, Press was a client, for Dorothy a chum, for the Clarks a project, and he was grateful for his luck in neighbors, but the daily hammer of his handicap needed more of an outlet. On the phone he was exhausting the free time of his old friends, even long-lost ones, who might suspect he was angling for an invitation to be taken in.

  Impulsively, therefore, he pushed on upstream one afternoon after a gloomy lunch at Karl’s, who’d been complaining that the new loan officer at the bank, for the first time, was a woman, who was also the branch manager. Talking to a woman you barely knew about urgent personal needs bothered him, though in principle he said he didn’t oppose women’s rights. So, lonely-ish, with the white birch bark beckoning and a winter wren’s intricately repeated call, Press grabbed outcroppings and windfalls along the water’s way, careful not to twist an ankle. But he’d kept his body shipshape, was not winded or at a loss for where to go—just stay next to the dry side of the bed the rustling stream had carved for itself.

  It popped, plopped, silkenly rushed, or raucously collided with subsided rocks and boulders and fallen trees. He could see the pewtery, silvery, greeny, amber, or foamy white colorations also, reflecting the trunks and crowns of a forest so mature that he could see its shapes. Even a diving frog or twirling trout registered, and the blue sky. Stepping stones choreographed his ascent as well as the water’s hop yard by yard down toward the swamp, past soft leaf beds under smooth-skinned beech, fragrant basswood, then spiky spruce and pine. After resting on a cushion of moss he scrambled on until a particularly inviting pothole struck him as deep and placid as a bubbly bathtub, under what sounded like a sort of ladder of little falls. He was tempted to stop and skinny-dip before perhaps turning back, but was startled to hear a woman’s angry shout from above, not just that he was beginning to take his clothes off but was here at all.

  “Keep away from him! Who is he? Why is he here? Get out of here!”

  Press realized the woman might be speaking to her children, so trod cautiously, buttoning his shirt again and waiting to answer her by announcing he was blind, as it occurred to him that she might be bathing herself. Kids were approaching, remarking to each other that no, they didn’t recognize him—who was he? Turning to their voices, he said his name and “How are you? Any place to swim?”

  A boy and girl, they didn’t answer, but shortly shouted uphill, “Mom, he’s blind!”

  She sounded incredulous, torn between extreme suspicion and wanting to react as if to an automobile accident. “Bring him up here,” she said; then countermanded herself, maybe remembered hearing about a blind man living on Ten Mile Road. “Are you lost?”

  “No. Just exploring,” he explained in an ordinary tone to allay her fears, and as she waved her hands in front of his eyes when she got near.

  “How are you going to go home? I’ll take you home,” she suggested.

  In his loneliness, Press didn’t simply introduce himself but a capsule of his life’s situation. And Carol gingerly let down her guard, taking his arm to help him to her car. The kids interrupted, taking his hands to have the fun of leading him; then complained they hadn’t gotten in their wash or swim. “The Tubs” was the name of this stretch of creek and since their cabin had no hot water, they indicated, this was better than a sponge bath out of a pail at home. Press offered to sit down somewhere while they did that, and everybody joked about whether he was “blind enough” to be allowed to “watch.” Carol asked for more details of his condition.

  The trio did skip back to Jack Brook to finish their ablutions while he waited thoughtfully on a log. When they were through and she had confidently grasped his arm again, Carol (he liked the name) asked whether he’d ever read “Hansel and Gretel”—whose witch would have thrust him straight into her oven after she lured him into her hut in the woods.

  “Little did you know!” she exclaimed. “But I’m an artist. I won’t. I’ll render you in another way.”

  He could distinguish the outline of her log cabin with a car in front and hoped to be ushered in. She told him water for her sink ran winter and summer through a hose from the brook, cold enough for a cooler and drinkable. But she put him in the car instead and drove him back to his house, coming inside to “case the joint.” The kids had stayed on the mountain, “Though they’d love it,” she said, tramping upstairs and down; a ladder led to the attic.

  She opened the refrigerator. “So you have food.” And switched the lights on and off, laughing because he didn’t need any, whereas they, living off the grid, had none. She wouldn’t stay and brew tea, as he suggested, but told him again, “I’m an artist. You worked with money. So I want you to sculpt me in your mind’s eye, like for practice.” Then rather than hug him politely good-bye, she took his hand and cupped it over her breast. “Remember. Sculpt me,” she said again—“Be an artist,” before driving off.

  That night he did what Onan did, if that properly counted, and tried to remember if Carol had ever divulged her last name, so he could try Information. But since she lived without electrification, presumably she had no phone line either. Nor had he seen the route by dirt road to where she lived, or her face and clothing in detail. Her kind clutch on his arm while steering him from what she called Jack’s Brook to her cabin was inerasable however as a memory, and her hair, long enough to swing as they walked and touch him occasionally too. Was she a hippie? He knew the term, of course, but his sight had dimmed before they became omnipresent, at least in the quarters he’d frequented, suburban Connecticut, uptown New York. Even the Clarks and Swinnertons knew next to nothing about the nearby commune, only the farm family who’d sold them their land—which Karl had hunted and trapped on since boyhood until now. Benny, the junkyard man with the telescope, who wrestled the boulders out of Press’s spring-hole, was the only one who’d been up their drive, because the men bought car parts from him. Their barn had been carpentered into apartments, he claimed, and the farmhouse resembled The Old Woman’s Who Lived in a Shoe and had so many children she didn’t know what to do. The school bus driver thought so too. Yet they had phones and electricity, while Carol’s was like another century—or maybe an artist’s retreat, since that’s what she said she was.

  She seemed to want him where she wanted him, if she wanted him pining for her; Karl and Dorothy could shed no light on the mystery of Carol’s identity, or which hippie was which, and their warren of bungalows and huts. “Don’t get into drugs,” Karl warned tersely. “They have their own trails into Canada, Benny thinks, over the mountain.” Obviously nobody was tipping off the Feds, and it was not like people-smuggling through the swamp. More highbrow? as Press joked to himself, so many hippies supposedly were college grads.

  Carol did show up, kids in tow, three days later. “Did I see hamburger in your freezer? If you’re not busy, we came to mooch.” They were already exploring; she must have told them about the attic ladder and a tire hanging from the maple bough in back.

  “What do you look like?” he asked. “I’ve been trying to imagine.” They both laughed.

  “You mean you
won’t feed us if I’m not good-looking? Next time, if you’re good, I might cook for you. In fact I’ll do it now—stay away from that stove—after my bath. And no, you can’t watch. But since you can’t watch, you can keep me company,” she added.

  “For my sculpture?”

  They laughed again. She told him she worked in stained glass, like her father, a church-window creator.

  It seemed so improbable for an apparently hippie woman to have a father doing Virgin Mary and Christ Child scenes in churches and she, too, crafting beautifully colored glasswork in these woods of a remote corner of Vermont that Press wondered whether he might be scammed. Was she using her kids as a cover to case and rob his house? No valuables, no money to speak of hidden around because a teller he trusted at the bank ladled out the petty cash he needed when the Clarks drove him into town. As if sensing that his enthusiastic welcome was cooling, however, Carol remarked laughingly, “No, not on a first date. You can’t come in the bathroom when I’m bathing,” but started running the tub.

  “We’re Catholics,” she said—her father and her, the whole big family, eight siblings.

  He waited out her lengthy bath. “Delicious!” she yelled from the tub. “Thank you. I’m taking my time.” The children had found the banty rooster, hens, chicks, and eggs in the barn, and Karl’s Percheron in the pasture, along with half a dozen heifers he was boarding for a friend; the bantys could fly and pretty much feed themselves all summer.

  Carol microwaved the ground meat that was in its packet and explained that she had come north to the country from Dorothy Day’s communitarian Catholic Worker movement on the Lower East Side in New York, where she’d helped in the soup kitchen, dormitory arrangements for homeless people, hospice visits, office cleaning, et cetera, with a guy from this commune, who was not the father of her children. No, Ten Mile Farm, as they called themselves, was not Catholic, she chuckled. “But we’re doing our own thing.”

  He’d warmed to her again, hungry for a hug. And she divined this, and obliged, also explaining that she employed the techniques her father had taught her to fashion medallions, window hangings, and the like to sell at tourist stores or craft fairs, cutting her lovely supply of glass into shapes which were then soldered together with strips of lead.

  “You can watch,” she suggested, before catching herself and hugging him again.

  “Am I an object of Christian charity?” he teased.

  “Sure. By all means. And since I’m broke I am too. Like two peas in a pod. And I don’t mind a lech as long as I can get away from him,” she said, stepping aside from his groping hands. “Do sit down. I’ll make burgers. I found frozen peas and corn. Supper’s in half an hour.”

  The kids were now glued to the TV, another treat, yet amused and sorry at how close Press needed to kneel to look at the screen. This rigmarole had become an anguishing demonstration for his two at home. Carol vs. Claire: Too bad their names were so similar, but whoa, were they different! Claire, status-conscious, perfectionist, a statistician, Ivy-oriented, aiming for the top for her offspring. He enjoyed the school-talk and the meal, staying off communes or Catholicism, or anything else that might rock the boat. He was very happy, and when she’d washed the dishes and he’d dried them and she extracted her reluctant youngsters from the TV room, Press felt vaguely frantic to nail down another day when she’d return. Calmly, Carol wouldn’t, though kissed him once she was back in the car.

  “But how will I sculpt you?” he begged at the window.

  She laughed. “In your mind’s eye. Or else get clay, or use, maybe, rubber bands and a pillow.” She took pity however and placed one of his hands on her breasts; then drove away.

  Neighbors notice cars in your driveway, so Press had to parry the Swinnertons’ curiosity. Did he have a cleaning woman? No? Did he want a cleaning woman? They recognized Carol’s car as local, not a visitor’s from his previous life, remembered his questions about an unknown woman, but tactfully did not connect the dots, except for Karl’s twitting Press about the possibility he would quit eating his lunches with them.

  “No, no.” Press looked forward to his wobbly bike rides—though the landscape had become impressionistic, eliding realistic detail—and being nuzzled by Sheila, their setter bitch, who unlike the hounds wasn’t chained, and Dorothy’s main flock of chickens clucking around the porch, a pet goat butting him deliberately, gently, and the two talkative pigs being raised for pork. Lolling in a sling chair, he’d let her draw him onto subjects like how New York had changed since she sold Christmas trees on the sidewalk at Twenty-Third Street, or what it felt like to first land in Paris on a vacation. Quebec City, not so far away, had sparked that dream. She wanted his problems solved, as did Karl, except the physical was so central to Karl that when you lost your “wind,” as he called his growing emphysema worries, related possibly to firefighting, although he smoked as well, or for Press, your sight, hope was gone; you were a casualty. Because they cared, perhaps, they wondered for his own protection, about the advent of a hippie car in his drive. He didn’t tipple at lunch in their house—did he drink or do something else at other hours? Karl had been through AA himself after the war, and knew about fraternizing with exotic locals. He was not a prude, but wasn’t Press a sitting duck for somebody? Rich guy to gull.

  Gull me, thought Press, when he heard the term. And Carol showed up briefly, as if bush telegraph had burned her ears. “Did I tease you too much? Did we eat up all your food?”

  “No, no, I want to be teased.”

  She just brushed his cheek with a kiss. “I was a model in art school for years, so maybe I’m turning the tables. Naked man thinks of his girlfriend. I’ll draw you some time if you’re good.” But unsexily she piled him in her Ford, drove him to market to replenish his groceries according to what he dictated should fill the cart, and ensured he got proper change for a fifty-dollar bill. Only back home did she revert to type for a moment. “Mew like a kitten,” she said while restocking his fridge and shelves. He wanted her to cook, so she did, but as further reward brushed his hand across her breasts again. “I’m your siren. Think about it.”

  The public sighting reached the Clarks’ ears, who worried less for his purse than his soul. They hoped the car was a cleaning woman’s—he needed one—even if she were a hippie as Avis Clark put it, though like the Swinnertons, they didn’t personally know the Ten Mile Farm hippies, except for selling them milk or picking up a hitchhiker. Preferring not to think ill of new neighbors, they had reported at the church that the young folks up the hill were trying to find themselves, and “counterculture” was a sensible word, all things considered. Who, if they thought about it, at the Solid Rock in sincere attendance, wasn’t also? Yet Avis had placed Press on her personal prayer list of eight people she mentioned to God at several junctures every day. She wanted him cared for as darkness descended upon his life. Housework, cooking, cleaning—it should be a local person known for a hard-work ethic and honest with money, but who was this youngish lady nobody knew ferrying him shopping, which they’d usually done?

  Darryl felt the same, although his idea of who to suggest was different. At church, nobody had volunteered for a daily commitment, partly because husbands didn’t want their women working for a single man, so Darryl suggested an old crone named Melba, penniless in old age but an “adventuress,” as Avis deemed her. She’d been in the West, but had returned to wind up in a trailer on the property of Rupert, an auctioneer and cattle dealer whose mistress she had once been, maybe as far back as school. For all Avis knew, Darryl might have lost his cherry to her too. Rupert had a wife and was retired, having given the auction barn and commission sales enterprise to his son Rog, but at the far end of his land he let Melba inhabit a dented house trailer hired hands had made the best of through many years. He gave her lifts to town to fill her larder, mad as his wife was about it.

  “She can scrub,” Darryl said. “And it’s so close she can use that unregistered car she’s got. No tags but nobody’ll
see it.”

  True. And she’d lost her looks long ago. Rupert himself probably didn’t fancy her now either, though when she’d left Athol she’d been his agent out West, shipping him carloads of Herefords or broncs to sell here. But she’d long since fallen on hard times and Avis was against siccing her at poor Press. Darryl was set on Melba earning some pocket cash, so long as they could kind of ride herd on her, so they compromised by tipping Melba off to Press’s situation without accompanying her as guarantors when she tried to sell herself.