by Monica Wood
Take Care Good Boy
Kenny Love, student and searcher
Kenny Love sauntered home from his shift at the VideoMart to find the kitchen lights on and his father and stepmother looking at him as if he’d just walked off a spaceship. His father announced, “Your mother’s uncle died.” This would be Uncle Ellery, his mother’s only relative.
Before Kenny could decide how he felt about his great-uncle’s passing, his father handed him a letter—a dry boilerplate explaining that Ellery Lydon had bequeathed to Kenny Love his house in Long Ridge, all its contents, and nine thousand dollars to do with as he wished. He could take possession, if he so desired, on the seventh of February. The remainder of the estate was going to an outfit called Feathered Friends.
Kenny stared at the letter. He had met his great-uncle only once, when he was eight, just before his mother left. They lived in Connecticut then: he remembered a long car ride to Maine, his mother steering with one hand and with the other punching the buttons on the radio.
“Is this a joke?” he asked. His father could not be trusted even in minor matters.
“What it is, Kenny, is an opportunity,” said his father, a hawk-nosed ectomorph who liked to display his long, artistic fingers by draping them over chair arms. “You can sell the place and put the money toward your tuition.”
“I’m keeping it,” Kenny said, deciding on the spot. “I’m moving there.”
His father went on as if he hadn’t heard. “You’ll work at that video joint till next fall, just as we planned, and then honor your commitment to Harvard University.” The way his father always added “University” to “Harvard” made Kenny, a devout pacifist, want to rip his father’s lungs out through his throat.
“I don’t have a commitment.”
His father’s eyes went steely. “If you think I’m going to let you sidewind your career at Harvard University just because of this goddamned Thoreau kick—”
“It’s not a kick,” Kenny said. “I told you fifty times I wasn’t going.”
Now Cindy chimed in: “Why didn’t Faye’s uncle leave the place to Faye?”
“He left the bulk to a bunch of birds, all right?” his father said. “Old bachelors go funny at the end.”
His father’s words hurt. Kenny lifted his fist, in which the letter crackled agreeably. “Wasn’t this addressed to me?” he asked, tight-lipped.
“It was from an attorney-at-law, Kenny,” Cindy said. “Your father had to open it.” She said “attorney-at-law” as if she were reading him a scary story.
“Thoreau went to Harvard,” his father said.
Kenny narrowed his eyes. “He refused to accept his diploma.”
After a long, melodramatic argument in which Kenny held fast, his plan forming beautifully in his head, his father concluded feebly: “You’ve got a mind for math, Kenny, not philosophy. This is a stupid, kid stunt.” His mouth continued to move, but he was psychologically hog-tied and he knew it.
Kenny felt hot with power, giddy with it. He was no kid; he was a seventeen-year-old man about to graduate from high school an entire semester early, working thirty hours a week for road money. In truth he hadn’t expected to save enough for the sort of wilderness experience he had in mind. He’d thought of trekking through Alaska, exploring the Amazon, camping on the banks of Lake Victoria, some form of extended meditation that would require a Thoreauvian purity of body and soul that he did not expect to encounter at a dorm party. Now, amazingly, God and his great-uncle had dropped a ready-made meditation into his lap at the eleventh hour. He saluted his father and Cindy, then spun out the door.
Throughout that long, cold, meaningful evening, Kenny sat on a bluff overlooking the smelly Maine town his father had settled him in. Kenny hated this town, which had the nerve to call itself a city. For going on a year now, the place had been tense and coiled and strike-ravaged. His small group of friends, normally placid and aimless, had divided into passionately separate camps—scab sons against striker sons—leaving Kenny, the sole professor’s son, floating out on the fringes, irrelevant, which is how he’d felt in every place he’d ever lived.
It was Thoreau who had saved him, who had painted a romantic halo around the razored edges of his aloneness. He would make his cash bonus last two years, the same amount of time Thoreau had taken to find his soul. He would live in Ellery Lydon’s house—he remembered it as a simple cabin surrounded by firs—freed from the small-minded politics of so-called civilized life, freed from the caprice of so-called friendships. He would ponder his place in the universe, something his father seemed utterly incapable of despite those drapey fingers.
In the end it was Cindy who drove him northward to his inherited house. She took a day off from her flower shop and added a basket of red carnations to the few things Kenny had packed into the trunk. From day one Cindy had been bribing Kenny and Francine with good deeds and floral arrangements. Francine had fallen hard; their mother had been gone for many years and Francine, who was thirteen and fat, didn’t appear fussy about who might take her place. “You don’t have the constitution for this, Kenny,” Francine said, hopping into the front seat. Apparently Cindy had invited her along. “Wilderness experiences test your grit.”
“Talk like a normal person, Francine,” Kenny told her.
Francine folded her arms, haughty as a schoolmarm. “I’m just saying, you weren’t raised gritty.”
Cindy started the car. “Experience increases our wisdom but doesn’t reduce our follies,” she said, quoting, as was her wont, from her daily planner. At the last possible second, Kenny’s father strode stone-faced to the car and they shook hands through the window—a mulish formality, since they had not spoken a civil word for weeks.
The ride to Ellery Lydon’s house took three hours. A light, dry snow fell briefly, the Christmasy kind that made Kenny feel like a character in a movie, a man on his way to boot camp or a gold rush, leaving the womenfolk behind. The house, a well-appointed bungalow with black wooden shutters, sat at the end of a bleak, sparsely inhabited outskirt road. Empty fields fell away from both sides of the house, and the lot resembled one of those grief-stricken landscapes from a Wyeth painting. Away down the back field, the terrain rose sharply to a four-mile crew cut of firs that gave Long Ridge its name.
“This looks cozy,” Cindy said, pulling over. Though the house was missing the tight circle of trees Kenny had added to his memory, the inside was almost exactly as he remembered it: spare, pleasant rooms scented with pipe tobacco. His father’s house, with Cindy’s frothy touches, seemed silly and irrelevant by contrast. As Cindy and Francine helped bring in his things, he tried to remember more of his visit here: a smallish man with enormous hands; birds ribboning around the yard; ginger ice cream. His mother, tall and jittery, smoking a cigarette, staring out the kitchen door at the broad back field.
“Some wilderness,” Francine said from the parlor. “The phone works.”
“It’s a rotary,” Cindy said. “Isn’t that precious?”
Indeed, everything worked. Nothing had been turned off or shut down, as if Ellery had been loath to let an inconvenience like his own death mar the running of his household. Kenny offered Cindy and Francine a drink of water from the kitchen tap—his kitchen tap. The water ran cold and clear. “Kenny,” Francine said, gaping at him, mournful as a puppy. “Why didn’t he leave me anything?”
“Probably he didn’t know about you,” Kenny said. “Mom’s not big on updates.”
“Oh, Kenny,” Cindy said, “I’m sure that’s not true.” She rested her hand on Francine’s shoulder. “Your great-uncle probably thought you were too young for an inheritance, honey.”
But Kenny knew better. Their mother had dumped the two of them with no ceremony—no tears or parting words that Kenny could recall—to move to London, England, in the hope of taking up a new life. She called the two of them once a year on her birthday, a thread of contact between their brief summer visits to her depressing apartment in the theater dis
trict, where she edited copy for a science magazine.
Suddenly Kenny felt sentimental, remembering how Francine had followed him like an imprinted gosling in the months and years after their mother left. Evenings, their father out somewhere and the rented house quiet, Francine liked to pull up her own chair next to Kenny’s bedroom desk as he labored over vocabulary words and long division, or, later, algebra or chemistry or world history, her cheek resting on one plump hand, her watchful eyes tracing the jottings of his pencil. He always let her stay there, understanding even as a younger boy that his sister felt safe in the warm circle of light from his desk lamp, that the sound of his pencil felt pacifying, a steady presence. From time to time he would look up from his homework and encounter his sister’s face, as sweet and round as an apple; she waited for him to smile at her, and he did. She didn’t ask for or seem to require anything more than his knowledge that she existed. In the three years since Cindy’s arrival, Francine had stopped trailing her brother, in fact had started second-guessing his opinions, bestowing unwanted advice, reading his favorite books for an alternate interpretation; but he liked to think of his sister’s impudence as another form of worship.
He was just beginning to imagine a tender good-bye wherein he parted the flat planes of his baby sister’s hair, the better to see tears silvering beneath her sad, oversized glasses—but Francine’s mood had changed utterly. “You’re a coward for leaving us,” she told him in a soft, quavering voice, and then she called him a rotten lousy yellowbelly in a voice that could start a tractor, and then, having stomped down the front steps toward the car, she turned in her tracks to inform him in another voice altogether—an eerie, otherworldly voice as creepy as a sleeping snake—that Henry David Thoreau’s sister had come for her brother’s laundry twice a month and that his mother brought him meals.
“That’s not true,” Kenny said, shocked. But it probably was. Even angry, Francine never lied.
“Look it up, Brother,” she snapped, and that word, Brother, left him feeling slapped and stunned.
“She’ll get over it,” Cindy assured him, and it occurred to him then that he’d been stolen from, that Cindy had taken the one thing he’d always been able to count on. She left the carnations on a chair and flurried after Francine. “Francine,” Kenny called after her. “Francine, come on.” From behind her closed window Cindy shook her head at him, helpless. The car ground into gear and they were gone.
Kenny stood on his doorstep in the cold, listening to the car engine fade into the white silence of road. This was solitude. It was he who had gone. The burden of his family seemed to lift like the smallest wings at his back.
He walked out to the road, turned around, then reentered his new house, alone. He spent the afternoon tracking over the bowed floors, dragging his fingers over his great-uncle’s dusty things. Certain items amongst the clutter struck him as richly weighted: a pipe cocked into the steel dimple of an ashtray stand; cat dishes stacked into the dish drainer; a pair of gum boots set a stance apart as if intending to walk off by themselves. The stairs to the second floor were steep and bare, the one bedroom a perfect square with a single bed in an iron frame and a bedstand spilling over with the reading matter of a man who loved the world.
Around suppertime he walked a scant ten minutes to the town of Long Ridge—a flattened break in the landscape with one intersection, a diner, a grocery store, and, he was vaguely humiliated to note, a laundromat. He bought some groceries at the Pick-and-Pay with the first fifty dollars of his nine thousand. He carried his groceries in a backpack down the flat, woods-scented road, waving mightily to a neighbor, who responded with a puzzled bob of the head. Though it was a far cry from a trek through Thoreau’s woods, to Kenny, who had been dragged by the hand from one town to another since he was old enough to walk, a trip to the grocery was the equivalent of killing and eating a bear.
When he approached the house again, seeing its odd, ladylike shutters and surrounding fields, he felt changed. Trusted. Or, more precisely, entrusted to. He found a bag of bird seed in the shed and filled Ellery’s barren feeders, and before long the four corners of the house thronged with tiny, garrulous birds. When the time came he took his place at Ellery’s kitchen table, set down his steaming plastic tray of Stouffer’s chicken with mushroom sauce, cracked open a ginger ale, and nearly wept with happiness.
His plan was to write a memoir, to surprise himself with what he might glean from nature’s relentless rhythms. His secret hope was for young men generations hence to seek the contemplations of Kenny Love for inspiration and reassurance, the way he turned to Thoreau. His lofty goal embarrassed him a little (he imagined the title: Essays of a Man) but not enough to be turned from the task. He rummaged through his duffel for his brand-new journal, a hardbound tablet with gauzy pages meant for his new fountain pen. He fit some wood into the parlor stove, settled into Ellery’s wingbacked chair, and placed his feet on Ellery’s strange, tasseled hassock. Once, twice, he tried lighting Ellery’s pipe, then abandoned it to the ashtray stand. On the first page of his journal he wrote, February 7: Kenny’s life begins.
The mantel clock ticked portentously, but what it portended Kenny could not imagine. The quiet felt like a dead man’s wish; it unnerved him, rattled his confidence. The page before him seemed to whiten as he ruminated on the fact that he’d never loved a girl, that he claimed no true friends, that the town he’d left was inflamed by passions he had no access to, and that the night drifting down on his great-uncle’s home was vast and grave and moonless. He picked up the phone and dialed Francine, who was always good for an argument, but she refused to speak to him and he had to listen instead to Cindy’s fulminations on the special sensitivities of thirteen-year-old girls.
The night persisted, thick as lint behind the plain blue curtains. Ellery had no TV, and Kenny had left behind, in his old life, his computer, his stereo, even his calculator. The predictions of calculus would do him no good here. He went upstairs to unpack his clothes, hanging his shirts among Ellery’s in the cedar closet. Here he found the calendars.
There were over fifty of them, calendars of the sort meant to hang on kitchen doors. From the wild variety in theme—Tripp’s Farm and Feed 1948, Tropical Flowers 1963, Kliban Cats 1978—Kenny discerned that his great-uncle had made his annual selections solely for the amount of white space in the daily squares, which were crowded with notations in robust handwriting that became weak and spidery over the years. Ellery had come back from the Second World War with a bum leg and a passion for all things living, despite losing a sweetheart to his high school rival. These facts Kenny gleaned by sifting through the earliest calendars, in which Ellery recorded visits from friends, the exertions of his many cats, the inching progress of the yard and garden, and almost nothing of his work as a plumber. In time, people dropped out of the entries one by one, and the calendars became less a journal than a collection of field notes about birds and wood-chucks and weather and the ever-present cats. In July 1978 Ellery had required five squares to describe a robin stabbing a caterpillar to death under the rose trellis.
This was more than Kenny could have hoped for: his great-uncle had been a modern-day Thoreau. There wasn’t much in the way of embellishment, but then his great-uncle’s gift was for observation; Kenny himself would supply the philosophy. He would begin tomorrow, February 8: armed with notations from more than fifty February eighths, Kenny would walk his uncle’s winter fields in search of the mackerel sky from 1956, the lone robin from 1967, the collapsed fox den from 1981. In his current state of spiritual blindness, approaching the world with another man’s eyes seemed an idea blessed by God.
He returned to the pipe-scented hold of his great-uncle’s chair and spent the night’s quietest hours there, searching. Long after midnight he found a notation for July 11, 1990: Faye stopped by with her boy a good boy. Instantly Kenny remembered Marmalade, the heavy orange cat that had crept down from the jam closet to fill up his great-uncle’s arms. He remembered a big, unexpe
cted, booming laugh, and his mother’s awful pacing. Except for that one maddeningly brief notation, he found no other reference to his mother or himself, nothing to account for his inheritance.
A good boy. Ellery Lydon had seen something in little Kenny Love all the way back when he was eight. Something—and what could it be?—that impelled him to leave his home to a boy he barely knew. He looked around at Ellery’s things in the quiet of the waning night. He put on the woolen overalls hanging by the back door. He tried the gum boots and walked up the stairs and down. He read twenty pages of one of the books on Ellery’s night-stand, Birds and Their Ways. Then he made up his great-uncle’s bed and slept fitfully, waking for good at dawn.
It had snowed overnight, an airy shawl of the bitterest white covering Ellery’s morning fields. Kenny shoveled the walk, urging his back and shoulders into every heft. On February 8, 1965, Ellery had done this very thing, probably with this same shovel. After he finished, Kenny gathered up some calendars and walked in his great-uncle’s boots to the Long Ridge Diner, troubled by a mysterious longing and wishing he could remember what he’d done to be marked down as a good boy.
The diner was warm and bright, filled with the sound of cheap crockery and human voices. He smiled up at the waitress, a fading, middle-aged redhead whose uniform fit her like a sausage casing. “What’ll it be, kiddo?” she asked him, balancing a coffeepot in one hand, the other hand fisted against an impressive shelf of hip.
“Name’s Ellery,” Kenny said abruptly. “Ellery Lydon.” Then he noticed her name tag. “Your name Iris?”
“Actually, it’s Lady of Spain. I just wear this tag for yucks.” She set the coffeepot down. “Any relation to the Ellery Lydon on the ridge road?”
