George said, “Alfalfa?” Then he suggested we buy, or maybe it was borrow, some of his sheep to do the mowing for us. He made the point that nobody around here mows grass just for the sake of mowing. “Put your land to use,” he said. The concept had never occurred to us. We bought a view. We bought a postcard. We hadn’t really considered much beyond the looking at it.
“Sheep,” George said. “Yeah, sheep would work good on your fields.” Intrigued, we agreed we’d stop by his house to discuss details. We showed up one night with some peaches off our tree, just to be neighborly. We asked about maybe signing a contract, or was there insurance involved, or what, exactly, was required of this sheep transaction? George, a round man with an even rounder belly and a ring of tobacco juice around his mouth, just shrugged. He said, “I open the gate, you stand there and steer the sheep onto your place.”
“Right …”
Soon his wife, Pat, appeared. I’d never even waved at her before. She was a tall woman with a square jaw and a tidy, thick mop of white hair. She had a tray of coffee and some German chocolate cake cut up. Pretty soon we were all eating cake and sipping coffee and looking at photos of their five daughters standing on navy ships.
The next time we saw George, he was dropping off a mineral feeder at our place and giving us a lecture about magnesium, and he told us he was dipping the sheep’s feet in anti-fungal solution for us, and as soon as he was done with that, he’d send over 150 of them.
“How much is all this going to cost us?” I asked George, but he never managed to answer.
And so this, we figure, must be why George has asked to come over. He finally wants to deal with the financial matters.
We put the dogs in the basement, as we usually do when we know company is coming, so as to avoid the whole “Get down!” thing.
Soon enough George is rolling up in his navy-blue Chevy. And Pat is with him. We watch them negotiate the ice on the driveway, a situation for which I feel I should run out and apologize, but then I figure they must be pretty used to the terrain and conditions of driveways around here, seeing as George was born here and Pat has been here since she started having his babies, six in all.
“Well, hello!” George says when he finally reaches our porch. He looks different than I remember him. He looks … scrubbed. Or shaven? There is something considerably less scruffy about him. Well, I guess he’s not always a farmer.
Come to think of it, he’s also president of the local school board, and he’s also a coal miner. So I guess he has a lot of looks.
“How do you do?” Pat says. She’s wearing a nylon jacket with “Bentworth School District” printed underneath a picture of a Bearcat, the school mascot. She’s carrying a white package with the words “ground beef” written on one side. “Our gift,” she says.
“Our beef,” George adds. (He has cattle, too.)
“Well, thanks,” I say, as we all head inside. “Oh, this will go so nicely in our new, um—” See, I’m catching myself as I say this, but it’s too late. “… in our new side-by-side refrigerator.”
Whew. I am new at this.
Inside I take coats, offer coffee, offer pie. Pat makes herself comfortable on the couch, next to Stevie, one of our cats who does not so much as show a hint of interest in any of this, while George perches himself on the edge of a wooden chair. It’s the kind of posture you’d expect of a man who has something on his mind.
So here we sit, four people with half-smiles on our faces, each of us anticipating something. Or nothing?
“Ahem,” Pat says.
“Yeah, the dog man was out to our place,” George says finally, folding his arms over his round belly. “He come over here, too?”
“Um, no,” I say, at least I don’t think so. “The dog man?”
“The warden,” George says. “He’s concerned about a bunch of dogs running around. I got a shot at one of them.”
I feel my stomach sink. In this horrible split second I am putting two and two together.
“There’s a Saint Bernard running around,” George says.
“A Saint Bernard?”
“A wild Saint Bernard,” he says, punctuating each word with a bob of his head.
“Well, that’s kind of … hard to believe,” I say. I mean, that’s sort of like saying there’s a wild poodle running around. There are certain breeds that don’t, you know, just run around.
Pat nods, shrugs.
“Well, I’ve never seen one either,” George says. “But this, I’m telling you, it’s a wild Saint Bernard. Then there’s three black dogs with it. I got a shot off at the one, I think I hit it.”
“Oh.”
George says he lost six ewes to the teeth of dogs in the past week. Dogs are a menace to sheep farmers. Dogs will chase sheep to their deaths. It happens all the time, at least according to local legend. And this is the two and two I’m now putting together. Obviously, this is why George has asked to come over. Dogs are killing his sheep. We have dogs. George wants to shoot our dogs. He wants us to shoot our dogs?
I drop my gaze to the floor. “Well, that’s awful,” I murmur, about the ewes he lost. And I mean it. Of course I do. Poor lady sheep. And how in the world is he expecting to put sheep on our fields when he knows we have three dogs? Not that our dogs have ever shown even a tiny bit of interest in his sheep. And I walk them by George’s field all the time, on our daily walks to the mailbox. I don’t believe they’ve ever even noticed George’s sheep. Wilma is too busy throwing one of her various happiness attacks. Betty is too busy thinking about not getting her dainty little feet dirty. And Marley? Well, Marley appears to have smoked way too much dope as a kid, as is evidenced by his slacker attitude toward anything except, perhaps, killing and devouring groundhogs, which is another whole horrible story I don’t care to go into.
Alex is sitting there stabbing his fork in his piecrust. He tosses me a glance. I can tell he knows what’s about to happen, too. This man in our living room is about to ask us to, um, cancel our dogs.
I’m bracing myself. I’m preparing my response. I’ll just tell him no. I will say, “No, and thank you very much, but we will not permit you to kill our dogs.”
“I tell you about the electric fence?” George says, after a fairly long silence.
Um, no. And what does it have to do with shooting dogs?
Nothing, as it turns out. George is leaning back in his chair, way back, with his feet on the ottoman and his hands behind his head, and he’s telling electric fence stories. The stories go on a long time before I finally catch on. Oh, we are changing the subject. George is not here about dogs at all. Pretty soon he’s into a whole Great Moments of Almost Getting Electrocuted by the Electric Fence saga. He is one hell of a storyteller. He says once he was holding his fence-tester near a fence wire when a snake appeared and up and bit George’s finger and the tester, uniting the snake, George, and the fence in an electrical current that could have lit up a shopping mall.
He also says kids make great fence-testers. “Yeah, I paid my kids a quarter per hit,” he says.
“It’s all true,” Pat says.
Okay, then. Um. But this has nothing to do with the reason they’ve come over to our house, correct? What exactly is the purpose of this visit? And how exactly do you ask this? How do you turn to a person sitting in your home and say, “So why are you here?”
Alex attempts to steer the conversation back to sheep. He seems convinced this is a business meeting. He says, “George, about those sheep.” He says, “How much are you charging?”
Well, that was blunt.
George laughs. “Oh, heavens,” he says. “I should be paying you for all that alfalfa my girls are going to get to eat.” He says he’s going to put his sheep on our fields in the spring, let them eat away until fall, at which time he’ll take them back. “You don’t want to winter sheep,” he tells us. “It’s a pain.”
Right, then. So nothing is required of this transaction. Absolutely nothing. But it doesn’t seem a
s though he has come to tell us this. This seems to be more of an underlying-assumption type thing.
It goes on like this, until nearly ten o’clock. The evening just goes on and on willy-nilly, never settling into theme or form or reason. George has headed off into a fairly animated lecture about hoof-and-mouth disease. Pat listens, as she has listened all evening, and does not seem even a little bit bored. Finally George turns to Pat and says, “Well, Mother, we don’t want to overstay our welcome.” And Pat says, “Yes, George, we better get you to bed,” and George and Pat stand up, shake our hands, and say, “Good night, now.”
Then they are gone.
Alex and I clean up the pie plates and ask ourselves, now what in the name of anti-fungal solution was that about? Why did these people come over and entertain us with dog and snake stories on a Sunday night?
We think of a few other neighbors who have, in the time we’ve lived here, stopped by without much warning. These are the few chance encounters we’ve thus far had. Most of these people brought small gifts, a plant, a hat. They chatted and left. Why did they do this, and why did we then never see them again?
“Because we never visited them?” I suggest.
We are not used to a social fabric woven this way. We are used to the other way around. In the city, hosting someone in your home is an act of kindness, an invitation into the dance of friendship. In the country, visiting is. I am just coming to realize this. Out here, where there are more acres than people, people are like little treats. It’s exciting to see them. They break up the monotony of green, brown, blue. And so a visit is a favor. Something that, in the dance of friendship, you are expected to return.
When we stopped by George’s with our peaches last fall, we must have inadvertently started the dance. And George and Pat have just officially kept it going, with a pound of ground beef to seal the deal.
Standing at the dishwasher, Alex and I are coming to this conclusion at about the same time. “Oh!” we say, stacking our pie plates next to the silverware. George and Pat are our friends.
It feels like a revelation, sure as alfalfa.
Much of our time out here at the farm has been filled with small revelations like this, each in its own way oddly exhilarating. And baffling. It’s as if you’re repeatedly tripping over a loose board on your floor. Your feet go flying out from under you. You stand up, think: What just happened?
In this case: friends. Two friends just happened. Well, that’s a nice moment to be in. Even though I suppose I am technically only in its echo.
As we get ready for bed, I try to explain to Alex what happened to me earlier today at Sears.
“Maybe I was making light of it earlier, but I’m serious. The happiness, it hit me. I was really happy. I mean, in that moment, entirely happy.”
“That’s wonderful,” he says.
“It is.”
“Your Maytag epiphany,” he says.
“Something like that.”
“It’s good to stop and notice something like that,” he says.
“It is. Because you don’t get happy moments all the time. Most of the time you’re flooded with all kinds of conflicting feelings.”
“You mean feelings of being unhappy? Are you unhappy?”
“No more than anybody else.”
“You’re unhappy?”
“No, no, no!” I say. “I’m happy! I’m happy! Everyone has little sniggly things.”
“Sniggly?”
“Is that not a word?”
“I’m pretty sure it’s not.”
“You know what I mean.”
“I think so …”
“I’m happy,” I say to Alex. “I’m madly in love with you. I often feel like the luckiest person alive to have this life.”
“Me, too,” he says.
“Plus we got a refrigerator that spits crushed ice.”
“Happiness overload!” he says, climbing into bed. “Hey—who called?”
“Huh?”
“The answering machine. Did you check the messages?”
“You know what, I completely forgot.”
It’s blinking over on the bureau. I climb out of bed, push the button.
Beep.
“Ah, Jean Bean, it’s your father.” Well, that’s weird. My father is not a phone kind of guy. “It’s about noon. Would you call me, please? It’s about your mother. I’m afraid she’s going to have to go to the hospital. She’s having some trouble walking. I mean, she can’t—walk.”
I look at Alex. My mother is a healthy seventy-five-year-old woman who has never had trouble walking.
“… I’ve called for an ambulance,” my father says. “I’ve left word with your brother to meet me at the hospital. But I just wanted you to know what is going on.”
Alex gets out of bed, comes over closer to the answering machine. We’re both staring at it with our eyes scrunched up, trying to understand. There is another message.
Beep.
It’s John, my brother. “I’m at the hospital with Dad,” he says. “It’s about two here. Where are you? Dad’s fine. Mom is, we don’t yet know much. There seems to be some paralysis.”
What?
“… I’ll call when I know more,” my brother goes on. “Claire’s on her way.” Beep.
Another message. It’s Claire, my sister. “Dear?” she says. “Why aren’t you answering? I really need to talk to you. Can you pick up please? Deeear, pick up!”
There is a long silence.
“Okay, well, it’s about four o’clock,” Claire says. “I’m with Johnny and Dad. Mom is, well, she is, you know what, you need to know she is paralyzed. But there is something going on with her breathing now. They are moving her to ICU. I will call you back.”
What?
One more message.
Beep.
It’s Kristin, my sister in New York. “What is going on? Did you talk to Johnny? Did you talk to Claire? Do you know what the hell is going on?”
CHAPTER THREE
Is this what labor feels like, from the baby’s point of view? It’s like, come on already. I’ll never get out of here.
“Canceled,” the woman at the US Airways counter says when I finally reach her, reach her like she’s the only one who can rescue me from this situation, which she is. But no. “That flight is canceled due to fog,” she says.
I can’t believe this. I can’t believe this! I am stuck in the Bradford airport, a tiny airport on the northwest border of Pennsylvania—the exact opposite direction from Philadelphia, where my mom is, where I’m trying to get to. It’s now Tuesday, two full days after she went into the ICU, and I’m not there yet. I can’t believe this. This is like one of those dreams where you’re running and running and running but it turns out the whole time your feet have been carrying you backward.
I book myself on the two o’clock flight, leaving me four hours to kill in Bradford. Four hours to sit here and think about things, think about my mom, think about getting to my mom. This must be what labor feels like, from the baby’s point of view, except, of course the baby is trying to get away from the mom and I’m trying to get to mine. But still. It’s the stuck feeling.
My mother is paralyzed. Okay. My mother is paralyzed, and no one knows why. The story is, she woke up just like anybody wakes up, tried to get out of bed, and fell over. “John,” she said to my father. “My legs don’t work.”
I come from a family of doctors. My brother, who is fifty-two, has a dermatology practice that grew out of my father’s dermatology practice. My sister Claire, forty-one, is a pediatrician. My older sister Kristin, a forty-seven-year-old television producer, is the only one besides me who followed in my mother’s English major path. Three of us, three of them. This is how my family is divided. And the three of us depend on the three of them when it comes to matters of aches and pains and itches.
When they wheeled my mom into the Emergency Room, none of the doctors in my family—nor, for that matter, any of the doctors at the Emergency Roo
m—had the foggiest notion what was going on with my mother. Paralyzed. Her legs were paralyzed. As the day progressed, so did the paralysis. It was moving up her body. In just hours her torso, her fingers, her shoulders, her neck, her smile were losing contact with her brain. By nightfall, it appeared her lungs were shutting down, too. That’s how she ended up in the ICU.
I have been receiving this information in bits and pieces, phone call by phone call, on my bright red cell phone programmed for no reason to ring with the Mexican Hat Dance song, Dee dump, dee dump, dee dump, de diddly dump dee dump, and which I’m carrying in my hand in case the song should suddenly play again.
I shuffle through the Bradford airport’s so-called terminal—a room with a coffee shop attached. I plop my bags and miserable self into a booth. Alex is back at the farm. I told him it would be easier if I just went alone. For a week. Maybe more? Well, I had no idea how long I would need to be in Philadelphia with my mom. But Alex could take care of the farm, the dogs, the cats, the horses. I would have a thousand less things to worry about.
I should get coffee. No, I should get juice. I should get eggs and juice. I should get a sandwich. Is it lunchtime yet?
“Some fog,” says an old man seated in the adjacent booth. He’s got both his hands wrapped around a cup of coffee. He’s wearing a US Airways cap and a work shirt with a patch that says “Mountain Pilot.”
“Ain’t no airplanes leaving this airport today,” he says with a smile.
Gee thanks, buddy. I smile at him anyway, as you do to strangers. “Well, fog burns off,” I point out.
“In these mountains? With these ponds?” He laughs.
I smile again, thinking: Why is this man torturing me?
“Do you work here?” I ask.
“Naw,” he says. “I’m just the mascot.” He tells me he likes hanging out here. “It’s better than a bar,” he says. He tells me he has a small airplane in a hangar out back, and on clear days he likes to take people, “usually females,” for rides. “But it’s a small plane. So if a fat one comes along, I have to say I’m sorry.”
“Right,” I say.
“You might want to have a look at this,” he says, handing me a computer printout he just got from a fellow pilot. It has a lot of Doppler radar lingo on it, and then: WARM FRONT IS WEDGED AGAINST THE WRN RIDGE OF THE MNTNS AND WILL MOVE LITTLE TODAY.
The Exact Same Moon Page 3
