I leaned across and threw my arms around her. It was a long time before I let go. Then we both gazed at the whirligig. I wiped my eyes and watched the whale spout. I glimpsed a smile on my grandmother’s mouth. I felt it leap, like a spark, to mine. I turned off the car’s engine and rolled down all the windows. I have no idea how long we sat there.
“Everybody Swing!”
Though his last name was Bishop, Brent felt like a rook, riding north on I-95, making another end-to-end chess move along the country’s perimeter. He traversed the Alligator, Plantation Tour, and Robert E. Lee belts, then tried to sleep through Washington, Baltimore, Wilmington, Philadelphia, and Newark, the steaming streets and long skeins of graffiti magnifying his yearning for Maine. He transferred in New York at the Port Authority—the one place his father had urged him to avoid—and managed to hold on to his wallet and his life. The bus rolled past the exit for Milford, Connecticut, where he’d lived for two years. He looked out but didn’t recognize anything, then forgot to get off in New Haven and call his grandmother, as he’d promised he would. He changed buses again in Boston, where he had an aunt and uncle and cousins, none of whom he desired to see. They were his past. The bus crossed a bridge, high and arched like a silver rainbow. A sign welcomed him to Maine. Brent stared out. This was his present. He stepped off into it in Portland.
It was 5:00 P.M. He strolled Congress Street and found his way to a bed-and-breakfast, the first he’d ever stayed in. He was primed to like it, but found it too similar to a small dinner party with strangers, his overly sociable hostess interviewing him about his trip with great interest and trying to get him to converse with the other guests at breakfast. The simplest questions forced him into lies. He preferred the less demanding social life of the bus and restaurants and motels. He’d have rather been out in the country as well, waking to the ocean instead of to the garbage truck below his window. He decided to move on, got a ride with one of the guests who was heading north, glimpsed a billboard for a campground on Casco Bay, and climbed out in the village of Weeksboro.
A series of signs led him toward the camp, taking him past a small grocery, where he stopped to replenish his food supply. He came to the Town Hall, then the village green, and stopped before a poplar tree, its leaves shaking and shimmering in the breeze, the ancestors of all whirligigs. Nearby stood a statue of a Civil War soldier. Brent approached as if he’d been summoned and found himself reading through the list of Weeksboro’s fallen Union soldiers. The past was palpable here, a feeling that deepened when he detoured through the cemetery and found a slate headstone dated 1798. People, he noticed, had died young in the past. He thought of Lea. Many graves belonged to children. Pushing on, he passed between two white churches glaring at each other across the street, then turned left onto Bolton Road, and half a mile down reached Howlett’s Campground. It was privately owned, a fact made obvious by the continuing parade of hand-painted signs:
“Welcome! Glad You Found Us! —Cliff & Vera.”
“Free Firewood, Showers, and Ping-Pong. Also Free Fog, Rain, and Mosquitoes.”
“Park At Any Unoccupied Site, Then Check In At Office.”
“Office Hours: From Whenever We Feel Like It Till Whenever We Don’t.”
He looked at the Prussian blue sea while he walked, half surprised it wasn’t labeled with a sign. Striking out down a path to the water, he surveyed a sandy cove, then returned and passed through a grassy camping area with many free spots but no privacy. He continued on and found a site more to his liking among the trees, with a table, a barbecue, and seclusion. He could see none of the other campers. There would be no need to hide his work, a physical and psychological luxury.
He pried off his pack, dug out his tent, and strung his rope between a tree and a table leg. The tube of orange plastic hung on this, becoming triangular when he climbed inside and unrolled his sleeping bag. He lay down, listening to the wind and the waves. Strange, he thought, that he’d kept to the coasts. Lea’s mother hadn’t required this. Was it because he’d come from Chicago, near the center of the country? He’d certainly fled as far as he could, turning his gaze away, out to sea. Each of his four vantages had been different. He inhaled the air, delightfully cool and sharp-tipped with evergreen scent. “I’m in Maine,” he said aloud, then confirmed this astounding fact by naming in order every city he could remember on the four bus trips that had brought him there, his geographical Genesis.
He walked to the office to check in. It was empty. The date, tide times, and weather report had been written on a chalkboard. Past issues of the Portland Press Herald lay on a table next to a sign reading: “Please Place Most Recent On Top.” Brent began to wonder if the Howletts’ small universe was entirely self-service. He opened a paper to the weather page, studied the national map, then checked the details for Seattle, San Diego, and Tampa. He pictured his whirligigs in their respective weathers. He almost felt he could look out through them and see people passing and birds overhead. He moved on to other distant scenes—postcards sent by previous campers. They were tacked to a corkboard, overlapping like shingles, many with their messages facing out. He read them all, sampling other lives, hoping for a hint on where to point his own. Nearby was a shelf marked “Book Exchange,” another camera obscura offering views of the campers’ lives: Getting Organized, All for Love, The Best of Charlie Brown, Codename: Attila. He was leafing through the latter when a white-bearded man in overalls strode in.
“Put one in, you can take one out. Anything else I can do for you?”
Brent savored his strong Maine accent. “I just came to check in. I’m in number 18.”
“Back among the spruces.”
Brent had thought they were pines. He made a note of this.
“That’s a real good site for building your wrist muscles.”
Brent was baffled.
“From slapping mosquitoes.” The man opened his registration book. “That table there in 18 is new. The old one had more names on it than the Constitution. Went to the dump and found half a dozen perfectly good two-by-eights. Just needed a few rusty nails pulled out. The Lord doth provide. And the dump’s where He does it. Most folks don’t realize that.”
Brent signed in. The man glanced around.
“I built half my house and all of this office from what I picked up there. Right down to the doorknobs.”
Brent looked but could find no sign of the room’s Frankenstein-like origins.
“Helps keep the price down. Ten dollars a day. How long would you be staying with us?”
“Three or four days.”
“All summer, you mean.”
Brent stared. The man gave no sign of jesting.
“No, just a couple of days.”
“In Maine, lad, a couple of days in July is summer, beginning to end.”
Brent ambled back to his camp, noticed the table’s fresh coat of red paint, and vowed to be careful with his drill and saw. He felt anxious to start. He made a sandwich, decided to pick his next project while he ate, then couldn’t find the whirligig book. Three times he checked all his pack’s compartments. He’d been reading it coming into Portland. He realized he must have left it on the bus. He pictured it traveling on without him, crossing into Canada perhaps, inspiring someone to build a string of whirligigs that Brent would never know of.
He ate. Without the book he felt abandoned. Searching for it, he’d found he was very low on hardware as well as wood. A blue jay perched nearby, raucously panhandling him. He threw it some bread, thinking of fairy tales in which generous deeds are rewarded tenfold. No mountain of building supplies appeared. But in his mind there materialized the notion of a whirligig all his own, its plan found in no book in the world, its ingredients his remaining scraps and whatever he could scavenge, as the campground owner had. Surely there would be wood on the beach. He emptied his pack so as to use it as a carrier and marched toward the water.
The tide was out, its wares spread on wet sand. He picked up shells, fishing line
, a length of rope, but little usable wood. The air was brisk. Two kayakers passed. He followed them enviously with his eyes and scouted the islands on the horizon. Coming to the end of the cove, he clambered up onto great slabs of granite and crossed them until he reached another beach. Here he gleefully picked through a long bargain bin of driftwood. He salvaged what he could from an old lobster trap, then discovered a pair of sand dollars, and was so intent on looking down that he didn’t notice the woman seated against a rock until he’d almost tripped over her.
“Sorry,” he said. Then he saw she had a watercolor set and was painting a crab shell beside her. “That’s great,” he added.
“Thanks.” She brushed aside a long strand of gray hair and smiled up at him. “I’m not so sure it has the proper ness. What do you think?”
“What’s ‘ness’?” he asked.
She cleaned her brush. “Well, in the case of a crab shell, it would be roughness to the touch, lightness, hollowness…”
Brent bent down and judged. “Definitely.”
“You think so? I’m glad.” She glanced at him. “Do you paint?”
“Not really. Just a little bit, sort of.” He thought of his recent efforts—oversized eyes, drips running down the wood—and watched in wonder as she somehow ferried the crab’s qualities to paper.
“A sort-of artist? That’s me, too.”
She was small and tanned, dressed in jeans and a moth-gnawed blue sweater. Brent thought her thick gray hair beautiful and wondered why his mother dyed hers.
“When I was your age I honestly dreamed of painting world-famous masterpieces.” She mixed a pale orange. “Now I just paint.” She did so in silence, then turned toward Brent. “This morning they played some Corelli on the radio. Composed in 1681. Don’t you find it amazing that we’re still listening to it, whole centuries later?”
Brent wondered how long his whirligigs would last. “I guess so.”
“Amazing, and rare. The darkness swallows up most of us.” She swirled her brush in a jar of water. “Not that he could know we still play it.” She gestured toward a house, tall and white as a lighthouse, out on a point. “I very nearly walked outside and called, ‘Hello, Arcangelo Corelli!’ as loud as I could across the water. Is that crazy? Have you ever wanted to do that?”
He liked the way she spoke to him as to an adult. “I wouldn’t call it crazy.” He noticed that tied to her belt loops were short strips of bright fabric.
“What are those for?”
“Just for color,” she said. “Why not? It’s so dreary so much of the year here.” She looked up. “What sort of art do you do?”
“I make whirligigs.” The words had come out without his permission. He wanted them back, then decided they were safe with her.
“Really. How unusual. And how wonderful.” She studied him, grinning, her green eyes bright. “Perhaps you’ll become their Arcangelo Corelli.”
He smiled in return and sat on the sand. They talked for an hour, watching the gulls drop shells onto the rocks to crack them, then went their separate ways. By the time Brent returned, his pack was as full as Santa Claus’s sack.
He laid his finds on the table and circled it. Ideas for whirligigs streamed through his mind like clouds, in constant metamorphosis. He scrutinized, weighed, and considered his ingredients while the sun dipped behind the trees. The mosquitoes emerged. He kept them at bay with a fire, then boiled water in his pot and dumped in half a bag of noodles. He poured off the water once they were done, sliced slivers of cheese on top with his knife, and felt himself a true French chef.
When the sky overhead became black, he left the woods in search of the stars. The main camping area flickered with fires. Two children were playing badminton by lantern light. Brent walked to the cove. He turned his head up and smiled, as if stepping into a party. The faces there were familiar. He’d missed them. The past several nights had been cloudy. He noticed at once how much higher the Big and Little Dippers were. Riding north from Florida, he’d covered twenty degrees of latitude. Part of the tail of Scorpius was now hidden below the southern horizon. He wondered what new stars he’d gained to the north. He slipped the red cellophane over his flashlight, opened his book to “Circumpolar Stars,” and availed himself of his new view.
At dawn, a barking dog woke him up. He gazed toward the east out the tent’s open end. Ten different reds quickly came and went, as if the sky were showing color samples. He studied the clouds’ calligraphy, their foreign alphabet indecipherable. Then a dam of light burst and flooded the east, the sun rose, and the dawn display ended. It had all gone too quickly, like a dazzling amusement park flying past the bus window. “The darkness swallows up most of us.” He heard the words spoken in the painter’s voice, and suddenly saw his whirligig whole.
He started in then and there, and labored for three and a half days on it. He played his harmonica when he felt like a break and one day walked to the fabled town dump, returning with a small junk shop in his pack. The weather held clear. Each morning he woke to the purring of the lobster boats and each night went to sleep with Two Years Before the Mast and his flashlight. After lunch, he stopped in at the office and consulted the shelf of nature guides, searching for shells he’d found or birds he’d seen and writing their names in a notebook. In this way, he knew it was a black-capped chickadee that seemed to be chattering its congratulations at the moment he finished the whirligig.
He contemplated his work over lunch. It was three times the size of the others he’d built. The pinwheels on the front, snipped and fashioned from soda cans, stood becalmed. Likewise the dozen propellers made from golf-motif coasters, linoleum scraps, license plates, and lobster-trap slats. On the blades of one four-bladed model he’d painted Lea’s four-part name. He considered the plywood rendition of her face. It was the most faithful of the four he’d made. For the first time, he’d given her a slight smile, painstakingly copied from her photograph. The head was large, giving him room to glue sea glass and red reflectors in her hair. Her skin glistened. Because it was Maine, he’d given the wood an extra coat of varnish. He’d drilled holes in shells and made her a necklace, hanging it over her head along with a set of wind chimes he’d rescued from the dump. Maine summers, like dawn colors, were brief. Darkness and winter predominated. Lea’s life had been similarly short. But his clacking, flashing, jingling memorial would give off sound and color all year, holding back the tide of death. It was a kinetic gravestone, painted in ever-blooming greens and yellows and reds. Lea would not be swallowed up.
He walked to the cove. He wanted it mounted there and liked the idea that the first winds to come ashore from the Pacific, Gulf, and Atlantic would turn his whirligigs. He spent an hour hunting for a site that was far enough above high tide as well as safe from campers. There weren’t any suitable trees available. He wondered if the campground owner would let him sink a pole in the ground. Then he looked across the water to the south and had a better idea—the painter’s house, perched above the water on a treeless point, with no high tides or falling limbs or campers to worry about.
The whirligig was heavy, awkward to carry, and conspicuous in the extreme. He ignored the stares he drew in the campground, decided it would be easier to take the road, and was the cause of much braking and head-swiveling. The day was hot. His arm muscles burned. He shifted the contraption onto his head just as a breeze flowed over him, setting it ringing and spinning. It was engaged with the wind as if by a gear. Making his way up a hill, he listened to his respiration, his own wind surging in and out, and felt at one with the whirligig. The breeze picked up as he neared the woman’s house, increasing the clatter and motion overhead. He spotted her weeding and supposed he must look like a demented relative of the Wright brothers. Nervously, he awaited her head’s turning.
“Oh, my!” was all she could say at first. She got to her feet, jeans damp at the knees. Her agile eyes took in his strange cargo. Brent feasted on her smile of delight.
“It’s wonderful! Tr
uly.” She stroked the chimes. “It makes me feel like a little child. And what painter in the Louvre wouldn’t envy that power.”
Brent rested it on a metal chair and watched her roam it with her eyes. A gust set it and the strips of bright fabric on her belt loops fluttering. He realized that they hadn’t exchanged names. He liked the way she put important things first and left trivialities for last. He was glad he’d come.
“It reminds me of those Tibetan flags that flap in the wind, sending out prayers.” She flicked a propeller and admired the sea glass. “It’s a one-man band for the eyes. Bravo!”
“Thanks.” Brent cleared his throat. “Actually, I was wondering if I could put it up here. If you wouldn’t mind.”
“You don’t want to keep it?”
“I can’t. And I made it to be here in Maine. By the coast.” He stopped before he said more than he wanted to.
“I’d be thrilled. And honored.” Her eyes sparkled. “Where do you think it ought to go?”
They strolled her grounds and toured her garden, discussing sites and a dozen other topics. An hour later Brent had removed a decrepit birdhouse from a metal pole and mounted the whirligig in its place.
“I promise you, no birds used that house,” said the woman. “And when it goes to the dump, it might be just what some sculptor needs.” They were drinking lemonade on the porch, both of them facing the whirligig and the long view up the coast. Cicadas droned in the sultry air.
“Now tell me—or don’t, you’ve a perfect right not to. Is the woman someone real? I noticed the name.”
Brent sipped. “She was.” He sipped again, then held the icy glass to his cheek, partially hiding his face.
Whirligig Page 9
