“A quickie?” he suggested, wondering too if this problem could have instigated her visit: was she fishing for money to hire someone? More seriously, however, a kid or boy of twenty or so was straddling the rooftree of the main house and wouldn’t come down. Singing, hooting, crying, he was having a nervous breakdown, she thought, but because of their aversion to established authority the others at the commune weren’t calling the cops or for an ambulance. Let him express himself, do his thing, et cetera. He’ll wear down, he’ll sleep it off.
“Is he high?” A fire truck could handle this but Press knew hippies who swallowed LSD might behave like that, and people wouldn’t call for help for fear of drugs around and other legal implications for themselves.
“No, no, no.” She explained how he was somebody’s troubled kid brother and so had not been kicked out for previous oddities, and was on medication. But certain individuals liked the pills he’d been prescribed—another reason not to have told him to hit the road—so he wasn’t actually even getting all of those. “What should I do?”
They sat indoors, a site for grave discussion, while the kids bathed, played, explored, and swung on the tire hanging from the maple tree outside. No, no, she insisted, she hadn’t driven to his house so he’d get in trouble with the commune for making the call. “What should we do? The cops know that we eat our placentas or all that crazy stuff on the rumor mill. So either they’ll take this kind of thing too seriously, or not at all.”
Press disagreed. A policeman as competent as Karl would home in on exactly what to do. Carol dithered—if only the kid would leave, he’d be his parents’ responsibility.
“What would your father do?” Press challenged her, which threw her for a loop. She asked him to go back with her and try to talk the poor boy down.
“Your father could. I’m blind.”
“Should we call?”
“Is he threatening to throw himself off?”
“No, he’s cantering, he’s in heaven, enjoying himself.”
They broke out the ice cream for the kids and ate too much themselves. Yet the image of a boy flipping out on a ridgepole could not be ignored. Nor did a phone call to Ten Mile Farm for the latest bulletin relieve their anxiety. They drove, and found that he was off the roof—reportedly asleep in his pup tent or tepee or treehouse. So Carol brought Press to her cabin, fed everybody spaghetti, and let him into her bed with all his clothes on, but put a nipple in his mouth because “You’re so good.” She told him about a trust-fund freak in another town who’d built a heated swimming pool that any girl could use if she wore no suit. Of course one reason the cops so seldom hassled the hippies was that so many of them had rich pops who could sue the cops.
She couldn’t fall asleep easily, however, after watching the boy straddling the rooftop, talking in tongues. “That would be murder,” Press obsessed, “if he killed himself because your people stole his medicines for themselves.”
Carol stiffened in surprise but not anger. “We’re not a monolith.” They did go to sleep, loosely clasping each other, and in the morning she got the kids to the school bus and Press to his house.
Hours later, he was cozily ensconced in great Mozart and Bach performances on the radio when startled by a pounding on his door. It was Carol in tears.
“He hanged himself! Overnight! From his treehouse! While we were sleeping.” The sheriff was there; his parents flying from Cleveland; his brother—the regular commune member—vomiting, first food, now blood.
Press had once participated in a brokerage meeting on Sixth Avenue where a Merrill Lynch man at the long table had suddenly collapsed next to him and died on the floor. They caught his hands to settle him, to no avail.
Press phoned his wife, as he vividly recalled, hugging Carol. “I’m so sorry. But you didn’t do it.”
She lay on the couch, breathing heavily though waving her finger to prevent him from turning the music off. He pictured what she was picturing. No, she elaborated, she hadn’t seen the body hanging, only his poor body brought to the farmhouse afterward, where the medical examiner took testimony.
“So much craziness! I’m sick of it,” she pronounced, which he understood to mean in such anarchy how could you distinguish real distress? Press refrained from any obvious finger-wagging about the pilfered pills, but did gently murmur that her father’s as well as Dorothy Day’s Christianity drew “precious boundaries” that sectarian communes didn’t have.
“Yes, people OD at these places and not at Dorothy Day’s. But this wasn’t OD’ing, and I do remember somebody knocking himself off even at the Maryhouse, our Catholic Worker place.”
“It wasn’t OD’ing,” he agreed. Yet weirdos turned up off the road so often at the commune—having heard about it—that you couldn’t nurture all of them, especially with no creed in common. He was glad he knew so few up on that hill, and comforted her by touch and hug. She stayed till school let out, then returned so that the family could spend the night with him. The kids however had not been shielded from the news; had heard about the hanging from other commune children at school, and were asking how it was possible to kill yourself that way, and why.
Press treated everybody to a feast at a lakeside restaurant twenty miles away he hadn’t been to since Claire and Jeremy and Molly were here.
Wine or Shirley Temples, with lobsters trucked by Carol’s Arkansas friend from Maine. He played devil’s advocate for a while, suggesting that collateral damage was inevitable in a social experiment like Ten Mile Farm, and a vulnerable soul such as the boy who had hitchhiked to join his brother there might have done the same thing elsewhere. Carol interrupted abruptly in distress because this was a well-heeled family and she recognized the surviving son sitting at another table with, no doubt, his distraught parents. He had an overnight bag beside his chair, she said, as if he might be leaving Ten Mile Farm for good.
That might be for the best, but my god the grief. “And he’s looking at us!” she whispered. “Eatin’ a lobster, boiled alive.”
A jumbo guilt trip. After the school week, the three of them would drive downcountry to Granddad’s, the kids were delighted to hear. But the choices Carol could discuss, she observed to Press sotto voce, were limited ones. She had picked a father for her children who lived on the Hudson with another woman and preferred she stay off in Vermont. And she had copied her father’s livelihood of stained-glass art, but if you weren’t a well-known church-window craftsman and devout like him, there was no living in it. All food stamps, instead, and Aid to Families with Dependent Children—the latter requiring you to name the father, if you were a single mom, which she was unwilling to do. A sympathetic female bureaucrat had put down “Unknown” on the form for her.
“List me,” Press joked, although that would only lead to being sued.
The dead boy’s family left for whatever hotel would contain their grief for tonight, which lightened the atmosphere enough for Press, as the non-driver, to grow tipsy. The kids were toying with extra desserts and Carol felt too buried in reflection to hurry them up.
Chapter 8
Karl succumbed at home without Press realizing he had returned there. At his own request of course, and the house was filled with the town’s solid citizenry when the Clarks informed Press what had happened. Legionnaires, fire chiefs from hither and yon, women bearing casseroles and fresh baked breads. He felt welcome but superfluous and kissed Dorothy and left.
Blindness he had noticed brought you back to basics, so he sorted through his larder for last-ditch foods. Raisins, bananas, cans that you could open without cooking the contents, because he didn’t trust himself around the stove anymore. Isolated, vulnerable, he wanted to pay for Melba’s car to be repaired and registered immediately and maybe to install a phone for her. He handled innumerable cans but needed somebody to separate the peaches from the corn, the pears, the peas.
The Clarks had heard also about the commune suicide. EMTs and deputies had trundled up the hill to witness the naked boy disp
layed in all his frailty. Having jumped from the tree limb with a noose around his neck, his hands, as one guy told Darryl, still gripped the rope, as though he might have changed his mind but not been strong enough to pull himself back up.
The Clarks wanted their Solid Rock Gospel Church to hold a service of some sort for the dead hippie, since Press confirmed that after the body was surrendered by the police to his parents, probably no religious memorial would occur on the hill. “They have a bunch of spiritualities, from Buddhist to Hindu,” he explained. “But they would just have buried him there.”
“A hodgepodge,” Avis said. But the minister wouldn’t consent because no one, including Press, had even known the erring soul. And Karl’s death in the meantime distracted everybody. In their living room, Press knelt with the Clarks to pray for the boy and other searchers up the hill. They pumped Press for further information about “the cult,” as they dubbed the commune, but he called it a counterculture instead and doubted Karl’s white-collar son was the one who had dumped their daughter at the altar, a continuing peeve but no one mentioned that. It was a time for forgiveness.
While Carol was gone, the Arkansas man—actually from San Diego he said—knocked on the door to propose Press take the ride to Portland with him. And Press liked the idea. He seemed more worldly than the other “freaks,” had been to New Orleans, Seattle, and Mexico, and didn’t hit Press up for any money. In fact he’d been to Germany in the military and so was more informed, less knee-jerk anti-war than other hippies. He gave his name as Chuck and said he’d been at Ten Mile’s sister commune in Arkansas for the pussy, but left in order not to step on anybody’s toes. “You know how that is.” They sat in Press’s Adirondack chairs on the lawn so that, inside, he couldn’t case the joint, so to speak. His acquaintance with Carol did not predate arriving here and yet already he patched her roof’s leak, he said; he’d come because a pal of his had had this fish-run gig before. Pipe fitting was his trade. Wanted to go to Saudi Arabia but in Maine he should find work.
Press wondered what he looked like. Rawboned and burly, wiry? And when he smiled, was it a smirk or grin, frank or sly? Press decided to wait and talk to Carol before embarking on a trip.
At Karl’s funeral there were testimonials recounting barn fires and Karl’s saving the church steeple. With his hands clasped by numerous unknown individuals, he realized his condition enabled him to cross social barriers like summer person versus year-rounder, hippie versus Bible-believer, white-collar and hardscrabble. Dorothy wasn’t the only woman who kissed him, for example, and somebody offered him board and lodging for a modest stipend. The state, indeed, paid private families to house indigent oldsters and autistic adults.
Carol had returned so the children wouldn’t miss school, but wasn’t cheery. Her father had stabilized her mood about solving any problems. That is, you can’t save everyone who wants to die, and art is not for making money. Uncle Sam was feeding her, a single mother, so for the year ahead she could explore her talent for jigsawing glass—he’d provided boxes of it. She shouldn’t kick herself because the commune was dysfunctional. Be upright in your own life. Did every church he worked in uphold the Golden Rule? Greedy people gazed at his windows from the pews. The sexual license prevalent among Carol’s sixties generation was deplorable, but no more than predatory Capitalism, with cruel slums alongside absurd affluence: affluence which paid for his depictions of the Holy Family as a form of expiation. Love was the basis for what he believed. Promiscuity certainly violated that polestar, yet caring for others, even in “fooling around”—which was not to justify it—topped dog-eat-dog Capitalism.
“He sounds centered. Terrific,” Press told her. “I’d like to meet him. He must love the children, you’ve done so well with them.”
“You bet.”
Not lovey-dovey, she vanished for a few days to realign herself at Ten Mile Farm, where people might have been ignored as part of freedom’s ideology. When the rubber hit the road, freedom had its complications.
Press lay low for a while too, letting Dorothy’s bereavement proceed with her daughter who had flown from California, and her high school friends for company. After arguing aloud with the chat show personalities, he stuck with the French bands on the radio. His dependence on the Clarks for shopping errands was a balancing act. Too much would strain their patience. They believed in tithing energy as well as money, 10 percent in good works—far more than most folks budgeted for kindness—though they couldn’t fill in for his daily lunch at Dorothy’s.
Hearing about the two deaths, Melba turned up, “like a bad penny,” she joked, and fried him an egg and roasted a chicken, besides scrubbing the house. “Still looking for where you hide your money!” But in the meantime she told him she’d gotten the inspection sticker for her car, with his money, partly because the garage guy’s father stepped in for her.
“You helped his father lose his cherry too?”
“You think your hippie friends invented giving good head? I used to have a doctor treat me free so he could feel me up.”
Without needing to discuss it, their new notion of the frequency and duration of her visits jibed. She bought him fruits and salads, being familiar from hotel work what people like him ordered. Then might tell him, as an aperitif, how when she cleaned rooms at a downscale motel, she used to jump in the swimming pool in her blouse when she got sweaty but continue working with it clinging to her breasts for all to see.
“Great!” he muttered, while munching red and green peppers on a plate of greens.
She identified painfully, though, with the dead boy’s parents, her own son having been about the same age when he went missing in the Absaroka mountains, “looking for,” as she put it, his father. Not that that reprehensible guy had actually been there, but imitating what he conceived his “mountain man” dad to have been like. “God, I was in a tailspin. A year, two years, like a vacuum.”
* * *
Press went to Dorothy’s occasionally for tea instead of lunch, when she found she missed their routine. She had writer’s block, she said, so talking with him in a civilized fashion might break her into fluency, not just the old beaver trappers who were dropping in with their condolences. Press suggested them for a column, the bear-hounds men, fur buyers, and fire-ladder men who’d loved her husband.
Yet all was not peaceful. He heard voices from the trail to the swamp again, and a car maybe meeting them at the head of his drive. “Snitches get stitches and end up in ditches,” he recalled from a radio program, and so his dilemma was unchanged from months ago. It even rattled his trust in Melba. Had she been planted to observe him? Next time she showed up, with brie and Camembert and classy crackers, squash soup and French tarts from the market, he was disarmed as she unloaded her bags of goodies.
He did mention the voices, but Melba replied, “A hundred fucking years ago there were scumbags on that path.” She paused. “No, I’m not moving in with you. I like my trailer and the horses at the window.”
“I didn’t ask you to.”
“No, you’re not that desperate, with those thugs in the swamp.” She laughed.
“Rich people are thuggish too, you know. I’ve dealt with some. Or their trust fund is as holey as a sieve and they’ll call you from Bali.”
“Bali beats Vegas.”
“I had them in Vegas too, till you have to cut them loose and they wail and whine like Mommy died all over again.”
“What a downer. I’ve walked out on a few like that.”
He biked over to Dorothy’s the next day, who was stewing a bit with all of Karl’s clothes laid out to be stored or else disposed of. The radio scanner was off, and there’d been a fistfight at the firehouse. “Karl would turn over in his grave if he knew that.” Those men “had your back.” And the animals missed him. Even the crows flying over hollered for an answer. Their rapport felt gummed up, however, without Karl’s presence as a lubricant. Talking across him in the kitchen had emphasized what they had in common. She trea
ted Press a little like the summer campers she’d sold cottage cheese to in her youth.
He found a note wedged in his door, in block letters yet exasperating because he couldn’t read it—called Cos Cob to be sure no family emergency was involved. He laid it on the table and listened to Virgil Fox exulting on the organ, king of instruments, then napped, dreaming of a craggy trail with figures descending toward him.
Knocking woke him. The Arkansas character—“I go by Chuck”—presumed Press had read the note and was fetching him “to the healing ceremony.” Amenable as usual, he climbed into the truck and felt the road curve appropriately up toward Ten Mile Farm. Hands led him to the big meadow and seated him in the grass—was he to be healed? He smelled barbeque sauce. By and by somebody handed him a hot dog on a fork and a can of beer as families gathered and dusk fell. A circle formed. The cooking fire rose into a bonfire.
He waited for Carol. She did materialize and took his hand, as another woman did on the other side. Beyond Carol, he heard Chuck’s voice, but she was distracted. “Things are falling apart. I want to suggest something,” she murmured confusedly. A man was rhythmically pronouncing the Zen chant “Om.”
Press had figured out that the healing ritual he was now a part of was for the commune as a whole and therefore concerned the poor youngster’s suicide. He also knew she disliked speaking publicly, yet did she mean things were falling apart personally or for the group? The nervous pulsing of her hand gripping his asked for moral support. “Rules, we need rules.”
“A very bad thing happened three days ago. We have to reckon with it, cleanse ourselves, and mourn,” The Dad announced. A silence followed, until a scattering of voices began recalling the boy’s month-long stay. Such a mishap was “the cost of freedom,” someone said.
In the Country of the Blind Page 13
