In the Country of the Blind

by Edward Hoagland

“Never heard that one. Sounds like a senator’s moniker. Although I do admit that when some red-haired trucker gives you a lift from Elko to Council Bluffs, what are you gonna offer him? If that counts.” She began to work like a beetle. “Depends what counts,” she added. “These rich ladies that marry money—what are they doing? Or this hippie I hear is hauling your ashes?”

  “I wish.” He laughed. He liked Melba, and pumped her for more information about Rupert and Rog than the Swinnertons or Clarks had provided. Did they prey on widows, for instance?

  “Well, we’re all widows nowadays,” she answered sarcastically. “No, Rupert was a nicer guy than Rog. He liked horses, he liked old things. Had a whetstone of mine back in the woods. His idea of a square deal might not have been yours, but it wasn’t a scam. And you’d like his younger son, Al. He hauls the cows down to Springfield to the knackers. Gives them their last ride. But up in front he’ll have a hippie with him sometimes that wants a lift closer to the cities. From Springfield they can catch a bus to Albany or Bridgeport or Boston or wherever their folks live. He’s not prejudiced against strangers like the rest of these Woodchucks, or some. I’m a Woodchuck too. And he’ll tuck some pot in with the cow shit for them, because the cops don’t inspect a cow truck.”

  But when he pushed for more, “Ask your girlfriend where they grow it,” she told him. “Rog is not the worst in the world either. He’ll spring for a loan, although like anybody, depends on who you are.”

  Press recited a few dicey aspects of the fix he was in, and his father’s death from bowel cancer last year, to persuade her of a sympathetic ear should she open up her litany of woes the Clarks had hinted at. She just murmured “Funerals,” however, as if that covered it.

  Hated to see a front-end loader. A son of hers had been riding for fun in the bucket of a tractor his father was driving and flipped out when it hit a bump. Her footsteps—the very shape of her body in relief against a window—changed as she recounted it. He didn’t mention that he’d heard wild gossip that she’d had a baby killed by a pig, but did tell Melba that he had skied at Aspen and visited Yellowstone, so knew the big skies she must love.

  “Yeah, no, these people don’t know shit,” she said. “Some of them have never seen the Atlantic Ocean in Maine or a mountain worth the name.”

  “It’s lonely, huh?” Press agreed, though maybe less so when all was said and done. Sleeping on a bed of canned foodstuffs beneath the springs, with three unsold Wyoming broncs nosing at the window for company. Hard-bitten, indeed.

  “Critters help.” She liked orange cats. But when he used that opening to bring up the sounds from the swamp, she interjected, “Critters are pretty vocal if you’re not accustomed to them. They go north and south. We even get seagulls that fly all the way in to scrounge at the river or the dump.”

  “But I mean, not animal.”

  “Well.” She hesitated. “You’re an innocent bystander. You’re not responsible for what you don’t know.”

  “Should I call the cops?”

  She chuckled. “You’d lose that status, wouldn’t you then, in every direction?” She had no phone, she added, when he asked about calling her. And Rupert was not a law and order man either. “But who’s going to bother a blind guy, anyhow? He’d sell you a pistol!” She reminded him that since Karl knew the swamp best, “Why not ask him? Isn’t life mostly grinning and bearing it?”

  Press produced a bottle of vodka—“against my better judgment”—and tonic water to share with her before she left; it did break some ice. “You’re not in AA, are you?”

  “Hardly.” Though Melba didn’t unburden herself of family memories, she spoke about how measly it had felt to work making beds in a gambling town like Reno or Las Vegas where high rollers, mobsters, and businessmen were throwing money away like confetti, while the cowboy she was partnered with busting his butt for a third-place purse.

  He bemoaned missing the childhoods of Jeremy and Molly, but Melba said, “They’ll love you when they know you.”

  * * *

  “This is your big day. You’re in luck,” Carol announced, showing up with Tim and Christie in the car on Saturday. He climbed in when invited to.

  “We’re going to The Farm,” she finally disclosed as they arrived. Other kids greeted hers, and led Press, curiously, carefully, to a homemade-feeling rocking chair on a porch.

  “Everybody wanted to see what a stockbroker looked like. I’ll bring you some tea. And let me know if you need to pee. I’ll be with friends.” She disappeared.

  So there he sat. People coming and going said hello. It seemed a central domicile, of two stories, by the clump on the stairs inside and clink of kitchenware. Children whose voices he didn’t recognize brought him some flowers to smell, telling each other he was blind—then snapped at a kid who apparently was planning to test him with a bit of chicken shit.

  A tyke climbed into his lap. Carol had told him earlier that hard-core commune ideologues believed all of the children here belonged equally to all of the adults. One extremist even thought the same about getting pregnant she said; or maybe simply wanted to insure that no man would ever come knocking on her door someday demanding visitation rights. She organized a sort of circle-jerk at her house, where five reasonably agreeable guys jacked off, whether one by one or all together, into a salad bowl, and she stirred the resulting stew of jism with a turkey baster to fertilize herself. “You should have been there. You could have made a little Prescott, and no child support. Just a community mom.”

  People stopped to tell him they knew his place, or had passed him on his bike, and were glad he was visiting. Was he staying for the sweat lodge? “Saturday nights is Sweat Lodge.”

  “Sure,” Carol informed him when he asked, bringing him a glass of tea and chunk of jack cheese in a hamburger bun. Also she took him to a patch of brush behind the farmhouse to piss, holding him by the arm as he did so.

  “Show it to me,” she said. “I’m going to see it anyhow tonight.”

  He heard another person moving beside them, afterward, and when he’d sat down again, a woman pulled a chair over and chatted with him for a while. From Chicago, a leather maker, she checked his politics, educational level, age, immediate history, and social status and asked about how he had gone blind. Saying she was going to sew a belt for him, she had him stand and pinched and plumbed his waist and elsewhere.

  “Handsome” was her verdict to Carol. “Cheers for you. And I kind of like that he’s blind, if not hereditary.”

  Men talked to him as well, confirming perhaps that he truly couldn’t see and wasn’t just a narc in disguise. A black-bearded fellow he understood to be the leader, “The Dad,” squatted and gripped Press’s knee strongly while quizzing him about being a “moneyman,” before chuckling and deciding he could stay, at least for today. Besides the commune’s leatherwork, there was a potter who had a kiln, and two men who logged with local outfits in the woods. Other members commuted to earn wages nursing, waitressing, carpentering, or whatever.

  Carol returned and led him toward the former dairy barn, now compartmentalized into a dozen living quarters, high and low. Her children were playing outside, when not running back to the house or up a dirt track to somebody else’s log hut, tent, wigwam, or dome, as she described it. He could see the outline of a tepee, himself.

  “Let’s go see your friend,” Carol said. “By the way, it occurred to me, aren’t you afraid your kids may inherit eye problems like you?”

  “No, no. It’s called serpiginous choroiditis and is episodic; it scars your retinas. It’s not from your genes.”

  Within the murmurous old barn—homey conversations left and right from the relic hayloft up above—she steered him to a wooden ladder. “Now climb. I’m right behind you. You’re safe.”

  He didn’t feel safe, although she patted his ass and though the woman who had questioned him on the porch said from the top, “Right as rain. All ready for you.” As she was, gripping his hands as he drew close, while C
arol gently teased his balls from below to keep him progressing without pause. “Good boy.”

  It was a flat floor with no rail he could distinguish, so he stayed on all fours, groping forward, and they let him, their legs directing him, upright on both sides, till he met a pile of quilts and comforters and pillows, and stopped. “Yes,” Carol assured him. “Wasn’t so bad. You made it. Be comfortable. The scary part’s over.”

  The two women, flanking him, sat cross-legged, and talked in normal tones about commune news, who was heading for New York or arguing with the Athol school board. Maybe half an hour of gossip went by before he felt his pants unbuttoned and skinned off. “Is he wired for a nipple?” the other woman said. Carol laughed. “You’ll see.”

  He could hear their smiles form as his wiring proved apt. A hard cock, and he smelled Vaseline, and somebody rubbed it with that.

  “Isn’t it funny how forty years after they suckled, it’s still so central to them. I should rent him out. This lady wants a baby without the hassle,” Carol explained to Press. “The state pays for it, and there’s no lug around. We’ll babysit. An Ivy League father, no less.” But such practical talk didn’t short-circuit his mounting her ample friend and beginning to pump.

  “Sweet boy.” Carol was touched. “You don’t have to satisfy her. Don’t worry, it’s the delivery that counts.” He felt his back stroked and his buttocks gripped in silence by the lady under him. It was fast, like a stolen quickie in a closet, but as intense as bright light shearing off sheet metal; when Carol recognized he was about to come, “Give it to her! Give it to her!” she urged, like a jockey. “Deep in, deep in. Stay with her. Let ’em swim! Please stay in,” she repeated when he felt ready to withdraw.

  The lady, still nameless, stayed put when Press sat up. Carol produced a Hershey bar for him, and brewed hot chocolate on a hissing Coleman stove while he caught his breath. She joked with her friend about a lesbian commune, over a few of Vermont’s hills from them, which had imported a presentable young man somebody knew to do the same for all of them, then “let him go,” so that they could all experience pregnancy, childbirth, and motherhood together.

  She touched Press affectionately and handed him his pants. They lingered, resting from their secret adventure, in the dimly filtered sunlight, listening to the nesting swallows, nesting rodents. He was sworn to confidentiality.

  Eventually they went to supper at the farmhouse, separately, so that Press wouldn’t pick up further clues about his paramour’s identity. Rice and salad, and everybody holding hands in a circle before and after eating. The bread of course fresh from the oven, and a flock of chickens had provided an egg custard enriched with maple syrup. The meat-eaters had some venison they’d fried, but Press pretended to vegetarianism, like the majority. On the porch outside, again he rode with the flow in his rocking chair, except for turning down the tokes that were proffered, but not asking to be driven home.

  Bonfires had been lit. It was Sweat Lodge Night, the kids were perfectly in their element, running from family huddle to family huddle in the sunset, welcome everywhere, penned in nowhere, and a donkey brayed, between giving them rides. He heard a softball game going on, but Carol led him to the creek near where the sweathouse was to laze because she liked the swirl of running water, though this was not her own. “If you’re scared, you can go,” she promised again, “otherwise, it’s so warm we could be here till dawn.” Her kids were on a sleepover.

  “No, I’m with you,” he pledged, “yummy.” She napped, arms outflung, the temperature was so inviting, then supervised three dog-paddlers in the stream. Men were heating the stones to dump into the chute that created the sweathouse steam, so she crawled inside after stripping, with Press holding onto her ankles, through the claustrophobic igloo-style entrance hole. But he panicked inside. Would it grow unbearably hot, or the plywood structure even catch fire? And since he couldn’t see, how could he escape? But she’d sensed his fear and directed him out, whereupon he couldn’t find his clothes. A stranger had to give them to him, sans wallet, which turned out to have fallen on the ground.

  When Carol emerged at last, as wet as a seal with sweat, she cradled him—“Old man left his comfort zone!”—and pulled him into the creek with her.

  “So,” she asked, “Home? Soaked. Scared?”

  “I’d be so lonely,” he said. “But yes.”

  “Doesn’t want to go home, but’s scared of these wild hippies. Okay, I’ll draw you, like I thought. I was in art school, you know.”

  She took him to her cabin, lit the kerosene lamp and candles. “Okeydokey, clothes off again, sir. Like a lost little sheep. You’re not on Wall Street anymore. You’re in the hands of a bossy artist.”

  Possibly a couple of hours passed in being sketched. He couldn’t view the results, however, but fell asleep on her couch until she delivered him to his house en route to retrieving her family from their sleepover. The morning light was lovely, and the solidity of a real, hundred-year-old, single-family home seemed priceless, before he sensed—realized—recognized that somebody had been inside during the night. The refrigerator had been raided and food left about, the telephone disturbed in its location, and he fingered the imprint of a burly body marked in the leather chair. Yet not a robbery. The drawers weren’t pulled out; no creepy feeling upstairs, just downstairs, as if somebody had hiked up from the swamp, made a call, fortified himself with sandwich meat, and moved along.

  Gracious, if only Carol had shared his discovery, helped him search the house and outbuildings—suppose it became sort of a depot? He might have called his neighbors promptly, except he would have needed to explain he’d been away spending all night with the hippies. Calling 911, though, would put the incident on the radio scanner and also into Karl and Dorothy’s living room. “Think a while,” he told himself. No malice, no personal acquaintance was indicated; nothing broken, no harm done. It could have been a stranger passing through, assuming this was just a summer person’s empty hideaway. On the other hand, some Ten Mile Farm commune druggie, noticing him there, might have arranged a pickup from Canada while Carol had him in tow. Actually, Melba was the one he wanted advice from, but, like Carol, she had no phone. Would she suggest he buy that pistol from Rupert, or rent the upstairs for protection? A blind man shooting at sounds would be bad news.

  He calmed down, biked as usual to the Swinnertons’ for lunch, but although loose lips sink ships, over the rhubarb sauce, he couldn’t keep his buttoned. Karl’s reaction to what he blurted was “People now!” Dorothy sounded less surprised, and took up his idea of a housemate; “You could advertise.” Neither rudely asked where Press had been, but it occurred to him that a renter upstairs would cramp his style when Carol dropped in. Having a live-in housekeeper for companionship had crossed his mind as an option his income might warrant. He’d postponed the thought.

  “I’d like to lie there with a rifle,” Karl said. “If anybody plans on coming back. But I think I’d ride with it for now.”

  He sat with them for a long time, collecting aplomb, not least because Karl began spinning tales of the Abenaki Indians here. Their arrowheads and pestles could be found at campsites left behind. And Rogers’s Rangers raiding Canada in the French and Indian War had dashed down through the swamp. Also high-quality Scotch being smuggled to the fanciest clubs in New York City or Washington, DC, during Prohibition in the 1920s, then draft dodgers escaping conscription to Vietnam via the ten-mile trek to Canada quite recently. And barracks remained from when timber jacks extracted cedar oil or telephone poles, hemlock logs or white-pine flooring.

  “Birch, spruce, fir,” he said, as if demystifying the place for Press.

  They strolled outdoors to change the subject, visiting Karl’s Percheron in the pasture, with endearments and some oats, plus the heifers he was raising for a friend. Dorothy’s cat had followed them, hunting mice in the sun.

  “Yep. I’m staying,” Press decided, especially after calling Merrill Lynch ex-colleagues. Not that he coul
d have returned to lunching at the Oyster Bar in Grand Central Station and hustling thousand-share lots to customers without being able to read the research materials—but the stress vibrating in these conversations reminded him of a job for which he’d been a square peg in a round hole, though slated to stay forever. This adventure wasn’t preferable, but he wasn’t so nostalgic for the job, just Jeremy and Molly and their family life.

  When Press asked Darryl whether he had ever been robbed, “Everybody keeps a gun,” he said. The Clarks would have called the sheriff, so he bit his tongue about the home invasion, holding them in abeyance as a resource, during the next church and market excursion they treated him to.

  “I bet I could live in your barn, it’s so peaceful. The smell of the hay, the cows munching or chewing their cuds a little, stirring around so comfortably, mooing to each other. Even the milking machines lull you if you’re sitting.”

  “If you’re not workin’,” Avis answered. “But sit there till you’re cured.”

  “We got a mongoose working for us. Pops in and out of the bales. Kills more than the cats do, and they can’t catch him,” Darryl put in.

  He meant a weasel, Avis explained. But at the church, Press wondered irrationally for a moment if he was being observed, and by whom, and as at the commune, then who he was holding hands with when the service was over.

  To Melba, however, Press blabbed everything out, his worries and speculations, hoping her upside down worldliness might jigsaw into alignment with his. She disliked the hippies and sheriffs in equal measure, but did not demonize them. “The mobsters in Vegas, they don’t kill the little people,” she said. “Or those rotgut smugglers that were here, when they were kings, driving like mad. If you’re just a disabled guy that draws walk-around money every week from the teller at the bank, who wants to hurt you? You don’t keep your money in a sock, like the rest of us do.”

  “I’m not sure they’re that logical.”

  “No. I guess not. Someone oughta live with you, but I don’t want to.” He hadn’t asked, but nor would Carol probably. Tough it out? Man up!