by Monica Wood
He turned his cup over and she poured. “My uncle. My mother’s uncle, actually. We were really tight.” He tapped the calendars at his elbow. “I think you’re in here.”
He opened the final calendar, which he’d removed from the door going down to the cellar. He showed her the weakly rendered, cryptic messages: November 1: Deer in north field. November 2: Iris brought soup very tasty. November 3: Stayed in bed cats not happy. Then, on November 4, the last entry, like dying words: Take care.
“He died on the tenth,” Iris said, puddling up. “I checked on him after he’d missed too many breakfasts. I took him to the hospital, and that was that.” Iris had a sweet, unlined face and wide gray eyes; Kenny wondered if his great-uncle might have been a little in love with her. She turned the calendar back a month and traced her finger over Ellery’s last weeks, a chronicle, as in years past, of the change of season: the death rattle of a few undropped leaves, the hailing cry of red-tails overhead. On October 31 he’d written: Ermine in the woodpile today happy halloween.
“What’s an ermine?” Kenny asked Iris.
“A weasel, basically. They turn white in winter. You want some breakfast?”
Kenny nodded, deciding not to admit he thought an ermine was a type of ladies’ coat. He tried to divine a philosophical context for an ermine in a woodpile. Beauty? Survival? But he knew nothing of ermines: perhaps they were ugly creatures, near extinction.
When Iris came back with a stack of pancakes, she studied him for a moment or two. “If Ellery was your mother’s uncle, how come your name’s Lydon and not something else?”
“My father took my mother’s name,” Kenny said, blinking slowly, amazed at his sudden capacity to lie on the fly.
“He did?”
“He’s a sculptor.”
“No kidding. We got a few artists living up here. What kind of art does he sculpt?”
“Crap, mostly. He welds these gigantic Tinkertoys out of sheet metal just so he can show off for the college girls.”
She looked interested. “Do they fall for it?”
“My stepmother did. She’s no girl, though. She just acts like one.”
“You should show more respect, Ellery,” she said. “How old are you? Fifteen?”
“Twenty-one.”
She laughed. “If you’re twenty-one, I’m a supermodel.” She pulled a set of keys out of her apron pocket. “These are yours, I guess. Ellery asked me to keep an eye on the place till somebody showed up. He was typically tight-lipped about who. You owe me for December’s bills. January’s haven’t come in yet.”
“How much?” Kenny asked, alarmed.
Iris shrugged. “Not much. Ellery was frugal as all get-out. Course, you would know that, being his namesake and all.” She looked him over. “Anyway, he was a nice man. We used to go bird-watching together.”
Kenny glanced outside as if a bird might be winging by, but all he could see was the neon beer sign in the window of the Pick-and-Pay. Francine had been right, it was no wilderness; but it would do. To partake of the world’s worst temptations—super-stores, restaurants and bars, twelve-screen multiplexes—Kenny would have to drive a very long distance, and of course he didn’t have a car.
“Thanks for looking in on my place. I figured it was the lawyer.”
Iris thought this was hilarious, and laughed until Kenny wished she’d stop. “Oh,” she said. “Oh, aren’t you the funniest thing.” She put her hands on her hips. “You know, I think you might look like him a little.”
“My mother said that once.”
After that Kenny ate in silence, sifting through the calendars. The morning’s snowfall had brought him nothing beyond the simple facts of snow and shovel, facts already recorded in a calendar thirty years old. So far, the unadorned motions of his great-uncle’s routines defied interpretation. When Iris came to clear his plate, he asked for another order of pancakes, not wanting to leave. She raised her eyebrows.
“Man’s gotta eat, Iris,” he said, words that sounded like something his father would say to this very waitress, hoping she might catch a whiff of double meaning, not that his father would have the slightest interest in a woman like Iris, but he would want her to want him, to think it fleetingly possible, then he would saunter out under the delicious fading heat of her eyes. That these words had come from his mouth sickened him, and he instantly told Iris his real name.
“Kenny Love?” she said. “Really?”
He nodded contritely. “I’d rather be named Ellery Lydon, to be honest. It was kind of hard to resist.”
“Is that an apology?”
He nodded.
“Then I accept,” she said, sitting down, her perfume a lilac that Kenny found shockingly attractive. He hoped what he felt at this moment—a deeply ambiguous longing for entirely the wrong person—did not descend from his father.
“Did you go to the funeral?” he asked.
“There wasn’t any,” she said. “He’s buried up at St. Joe’s.” Her bright eyes shone down on him.
“I just met him once, actually,” he admitted. “I was eight.” He looked up. “What happened to the cats?”
“I took the young ones. The old ones I had put down.”
“You the one who washed the dishes?”
She nodded.
“Do you know what a red-tail is?” he asked.
“It’s a hawk.”
“They’re in here a lot,” he said, his hand on the calendars.
“Ellery was a nature boy. You want to know what’s in the air or under the ground, you ask Ellery.” She smiled sadly. “Not that anybody did. He was kind of shy.”
“I’m like that,” Kenny said quietly.
“That’s all right, Ellery,” she said. “Extroverts are overrated.” He waited for her to bring the second round of pancakes, glad that he’d told her his real name and that she’d called him Ellery just the same. The pancakes were surprisingly good. The world, as it turned out, was full of surprises.
Kenny had not counted on the sprawling length of days spent alone. At the end of each day his most vivid recollection was chatting with Iris in the diner way back at breakfast time. “Every damn morning,” Iris said after the second week. “I thought the point was solitude.” He ate his morning pancakes despite her chiding, and only mortification prevented him from returning for lunch. He could not help wondering how Ellery had braced himself against the winter silence, the early dark, the absence of human voices. He read sections of Walden until he had them by heart, but felt each day as a kind of loss. His job at the VideoMart had been simple, mindless in ways, but there was always someone to talk to. And though his father spent most of his time brooding, Francine was never short an opinion, and Cindy’s foamy exclamations had a way of filling a place with sound.
The truth was, he missed talking. All he’d managed to add to Ellery’s sightings were a few sightings of his own: on day twelve he’d spooked a flock of tiny, quarreling birds he couldn’t name. When he tried to pry from their erupting flight a poetic line for his white, white journal, what popped into his head was the formula for instantaneous velocity. In his old life he might have spent some long, thick hours with a calculator, but here, where the theoretical predictions of calculus resided so far from the visible world, he could only look at these birds and envy them their voices.
Ellery’s final calendars darkened with bad news: December 27, 1997: Fred’s funeral down to Rockland. August 30, 1998: Sadie Hoffman another one gone.
Kenny read them through, thinking that Thoreau had had it easy, following no footsteps but his own. In his two long weeks of solitude Kenny had become convinced that the last, ardent message, Take care, had been written expressly to him. In his head Kenny ran Ellery’s messages together: Take care good boy. In answer, he watched light change over the short course of a winter day; in answer, he walked the fields and roads in the cold; in answer, he read endlessly about solitude and still waters and the glory of a reddening sky.
On day ninet
een, Kenny took Ellery’s binoculars from a hook near the kitchen door and clomped out to gaze down the long back field the way he imagined Ellery had. He scanned the wood-pile for an ermine. He’d forgotten to ask Iris how big an ermine might be—he imagined a squirrel-sized animal, but realized with no small trepidation that an ermine might be groundhog-sized, maybe bigger. He checked the sky for hawks, then set out to patrol the fields for animal tracks till his toes went numb. He found path upon path of prints, some deep and cloven, some light and starlike, others no more than a breath of air on the snow. All these separate journeys, crossing back and forth over each other, begot in him a type of happiness that felt perilous, vaguely ill-gotten. Take care good boy. Yes, he wanted to. But his great-uncle’s house was plumb and well-kept, with nothing so much as a loose window sash for a hungry young man to apply himself to. Ellery’s sightings, transcribed almost verbatim into Kenny’s journal whether Kenny had observed them or not, bore the alarming mark of completeness.
As he neared the house again, he saw what he thought might be a woodchuck, or perhaps an ermine after all, sitting on a bristly hillock in the east field. He lifted the binoculars. The creature—which was not a woodchuck, not at all—stilled his blood.
It was an owl. A big owl. A tremendous owl, with a thick helmet of a head, a face framed by a dark, delicate parentheses of feathers, and savage, mean-gleaming yellow eyes staring straight through him.
“Holy,” Kenny whispered. “Holy, holy.” He became aware of an almost otherworldly silence, then realized that the bird feeders had been abandoned utterly.
He eased into the house and the owl stayed where it was, composed and silent. Kenny grabbed a field guide, raked through the pages, and found it—a Great Gray Owl, which according to the book belonged at least a thousand miles from Ellery Lydon’s east field. Kenny flipped through every February since 1945—nothing. He sprinted down to the diner.
“Have you ever seen a Great Gray Owl?” he asked Iris.
She laughed. “In my dreams.”
“There’s one in Ellery’s field.”
She paused a long time, while he listened to the clatter of spoons. “It’s probably a Great Horned.”
“It has yellow eyes.”
She paused again, scanning the room, counting tables. “Look, I have to finish up here. You go back and keep an eye on it.”
“Is this a big deal?”
“Not if it’s a Great Horned. Now go.”
He went home. The owl had moved from the east field into the back, and waited, immense and still, about thirty yards from the kitchen door. It seemed to watch him. The earth fell quiet, and the most dire loneliness Kenny had ever known fumed geyserlike in his chest. To his amazement he began to weep, not because he was lonely, but because he had always been lonely, and because there existed in the world legions of creatures and plants and cloud formations that he had never once noticed, or, worse, never even thought to look for. He had been far too busy consorting with temporary friends, listening to music with crummy lyrics, fumbling with any girl who would let him, resenting his father, memorizing formulas, and hating the entire country of England because his mother had chosen to live there. He had been sound asleep for seventeen years, and this errant creature seemed to know it, staring and staring with those yellow, yellow eyes.
Finally Iris arrived, swaddled in a blue pea coat with a pair of expensive-looking binoculars hanging from her neck. She looked skeptical, but Kenny could see the pink of expectation in her cheeks.
“Right there,” Kenny said, leading her out back.
She lifted the binoculars. “Jesus, Mary, and Joseph,” she said. “Oh, I don’t believe Ellery’s missing this.” She turned to him, her smooth cheeks spotted with cold. “Listen to me,” she said, sounding like an emergency worker at an earthquake. “I’m going to put the word out. You’ll have the local bird nuts here within the hour. After that it’ll be Grand Central for days, birders from as far south as Philadelphia.”
“You’re kidding, right?” Kenny asked.
Iris shook her head. “They had a Boreal owl in Damariscotta about ten years ago and had to put a cop on traffic detail.”
“Whoa.”
She laughed again. “Oh, Ellery must be so mad.” She laid her hands on Kenny’s arms. “Listen to me, Ellery. You’ll just have to enjoy it for him. Lap it up.”
He stood alone for the next fifteen minutes watching the owl in the cold. At one point it raised its ponderous wings and lifted from the earth, drifting down a few feet to the west. “Stay, stay,” he whispered, wholly believing he’d been summoned to this place by a dead man to witness a marvel in his stead. He remembered being shown this very field, white with potato blossoms, on that long-ago visit. Looking at the owl, he felt something closing behind him, profound and irreversible. He went back into Ellery’s house and called London.
“You’re living there?” his mother said. “You moved in?”
“Do you remember when we visited here? I was eight.”
“Weren’t you scheduled to start classes this term?” The way she said “classes” annoyed him. His mother had been placing “ah”s in words like class since she’d landed on English soil to buy a new life with her alimony checks.
“Mom. The visit. Do you remember it?”
“What is your father saying about all this? Why didn’t he call me? That man never tells me anything.”
“Mom, listen. When we visited Ellery.”
She sighed. “Kenny, I don’t know. I don’t remember. What are you doing for money?”
“Mom.”
Another sigh. “What.”
“Aren’t you sad, even a little, that he died?”
“Well, of course I’m sad. He was a nice man.”
His mother floated at the other end of the line for a few seconds, an ocean away. He could barely conjure an image of her face. He tried to imagine the young wife about to leave her sculptor, bringing the boy to see her uncle. The good boy.
Then he knew.
“You asked him for money,” Kenny said.
“Who?”
“Ellery. When you brought me here. You came for money so you could move to goddamned England.”
He heard her light a cigarette. “Your father was screwing college girls, Kenny,” she said. “Somehow this is all my fault?”
“Was he supposed to see how mature I was? How well I could handle being left?” When she didn’t respond, he added, “You didn’t tell him about Francine, did you? He never even knew you had another kid.”
“This is none of your business, Kenny.”
“Well, Francine did fine,” he said, hoping to hurt her. “You should see how she’s glommed onto Cindy.” He waited a moment to calm down, and the owl helped, that imperious presence in the back field. Finally he asked his mother, “Were you close? You and your uncle?”
His mother laughed her sad London laugh. “Oh, Kenny. Nobody in my family was close.”
When he hung up he glanced around Ellery’s kitchen, at his herb pots on the windowsills, all his simple goods. Now Kenny saw this place as an apology. Money had changed hands, his mother had fled, and Ellery was the kind of man who would have felt sorry for the good boy left behind. And if he’d known about the good girl, the four-year-old girl his mother hadn’t mentioned? Something twisted inside him, a physical hurt which he took for the spiritual waking he had so wished for. If this place was an apology, then Francine deserved it, too.
Outside, two cars pulled up, expelling big-eyed people in bright parkas carrying all manner of optics, looking up, around, then starting uncertainly down his vacant drive. Iris pulled up behind them and leaped out, directing the little band like a tour guide. They were chatty and animated, like the birds, ambassadors of the teeming world. He opened the door and waved, shrugging on his great-uncle’s field coat. In his head he was already interviewing deserving buyers, gentling the house into another man’s care, splitting the proceeds with Francine. He would keep the pipe and the as
htray stand and the soft winged chair. He would twine the calendars and his own pallid notebook into a keepsake bound with ribbon or string. He would return to the enraged town where he did not fit in, and leave again when it was time.
The bird-watchers had gathered out back. One of them squealed with discovery, her mitten lifting like a flag. Kenny opened a tin of coffee, stacked ten cups—all he had—on the table, took some muffins from the freezer. Time felt short and tottering. He pulled on Ellery’s boots and went out to greet them, then showed them the exact spot where the owl first appeared. He swept his hand over Ellery’s generous land, a gesture rich with love and knowledge, one he hoped a good man might recognize.
Solidarity Is Not a Floor
Francine Love, student and community volunteer
On the first day of spring, Francine Love asks to ride in to work with her father.
“What for?” he asks. He looks up from his paper—not a regular newspaper, with the regular front-page news of the strike, now in its fourteenth month. No. Francine’s father, who is trolling for tenure, takes The Chronicle of Higher Education with his morning coffee.
“She doesn’t need a reason, Bruce,” Cindy says. “She’s your daughter, it’s a Saturday, she’d like to ride in with you.”
“I need something from the library,” Francine explains.
Her father—not a papermaker, not on strike, not interested in matters of social justice except for the occasional policy change at Blaine College that might directly affect him—says, “You’re in the eighth grade, Francine. What could you possibly need from a college library?”
“What does she have to do, Bruce?” Cindy asks. “Fill out an application? Take her, for crying out loud.”
He looks annoyed, then ashamed. Francine is used to these rearrangements of his face. “Sure, all right,” he says. “I’ll take you in.”
Francine pretends to forgive him, to have no idea why he wants to go to work on a Saturday.
It is noon, a soupy rain befalling the town, by the time they finally leave. Cindy waves from the doorway, haloed by fluffy, reddish-blond hair, so beautiful and sweet that Francine cannot imagine what in the world her father could still be looking for. They’ve been married three years—the best three years of Francine’s life, so far.
