“Anyway,” George is saying to me, “as far as that goes, you could say a drought is better than a flood!” He’s laughing. Oh, he’s been going on for quite some time here about how he’s absolutely convinced we’re heading into a drought, which isn’t funny at all, of course—but somehow the idea of drought has led him into a riff of flood stories, including the one he’s just finishing about two of his lady sheep thinking they were on dry land, but actually they had stepped into his canoe, and eventually the water rose and got so high the canoe got loose, and there was his neighbor calling to say, “Your sheep just went floating by.…”
“Oh, golly …” he’s saying, wiping his eyes with the back of his fist, his laughter fading.
Then he says, “I’ll bet you’re happy we’re heading into a drought.”
“Well—”
“I mean, I’ll bet you curse every time it rains, what with that basement of yours.”
“Actually—”
“Matter of fact, I’ll bet you’re cursing the guy who put in that basement of yours.”
Um. Not really. But should I be?
See, another story is coming. Probably a big one, from the sound of the way George is setting it up. Oh, I know the signs by now. Question after assumption after question. It’s the rhythm that sucks you in. It’s like a vacuum cleaner turning on. This is almost always how the stories start.
George is smiling. His gaze has moved to the floor. He’s nodding, staring at that floor as if searching for the exact plot points he will now put forth.
I sit patiently, as you do waiting for a movie to start. I should have popcorn. Here comes the feature presentation, folks. Actually, this time I feel a bit more like a zoologist waiting for the antelopes to make love. You know, I’m sitting here thinking I should make a little study of George’s storytelling. How does he do it? And where did he learn the craft? Is there some sort of tall-tale trade school here in Scenery Hill? Sometimes I think so. Sometimes I really do. George is one of the best, but George is only one of the story machines roaming this land. There is, for example, also Billy, the bulldozer driver, the man who cleared our fields and rebuilt our barn and who also found us our wedding mule. Like George, Billy has a story for every visit and then some. But with Billy—well, with Billy, it got so his tales were so tall, so full of swagger, I stopped believing them. I’ll never forget the day he was over here telling me that he was drinking horse medicine. Hell, it had worked on his horse’s tumor, so why not his? He said he had quit going to his doctor for his cancer because the horse elixir was all he needed. I sighed. I said, “Okay, Billy.” I really figured that was it for Billy. His stories had gotten the best of him. You can’t tall-tale your way out of a tumor. But now it’s three years later, and Billy is healthier than ever. So I don’t know.
Anyway, George. You never know where George is going to take you. I wish Alex would get off the phone. He’s going to miss the show. George has gotten himself good and comfortable, his legs opened like a soldier at ease. His T-shirt clings to his belly, clings like plastic wrap. “Old man Collins,” George says. “Yeah, Red Collins. He’s who lived here when I was a boy, and he’s the man who conceived of your basement.”
Is that a fact? George has already told me plenty of stories about Red Collins and his wife Marie, but that doesn’t stop him from introducing his main characters properly.
“Now, old Red, he had a wife,” George goes on. “Marie was her name. Marie didn’t want a basement. She liked the house the way it was.”
“You mean the basement was put in after our house was already built?” I ask, to clarify.
“That’s exactly true,” George says. “And the way Red was, he could have dug it with his bare hands. Because Red was huge. Over seven foot tall, feet as big as tennis rackets. People throughout the valley said they could feel the earth shake just from Red walking. He played for the Steelers, you know. Red could tackle a guy with just his hip. He could just pitch his hip and send guys sailing twenty yards.”
Now, literal-minded people might think it’s a mistake to exaggerate while telling a story. They think, Oh, I’ll lose my credibility. This, according to the George method, is incorrect. A good storyteller knows that exaggeration is key and that exaggeration is worthless unless it’s extreme exaggeration, and that it doesn’t work unless you, as the storyteller, begin to actually and truthfully ninety-nine percent believe in it.
“But the basement?” George says. “I’m serious. Red could have dug it with his bare hands, his hands were so huge. You see my hand?” He stops, holds up his hand. “My hand is like as big as a catcher’s mitt. It’s why I can shear three sheep in under fifty-five seconds. But Red’s hand? His was three times the size of this hand of mine.”
He holds his hands higher so I can fully examine their monumental massiveness. But these are really just a prop. A prop enabling him to insert into his story a good, prolonged silence, which is the best tension-builder God ever invented.
“Now, old Red was tough,” George goes on, shaking his head as though he can hardly believe it himself, so he’ll understand if you don’t. “Grown men were afraid of him. He would kill a pig with just his hands. He would hang it up for slaughter, and do you know what he would do next?”
No, I really, really don’t.
“He would tilt his head back and drink the blood pouring out of that pig.”
Note the delivery here. Because George doesn’t say, “HE WOULD TILT HIS HEAD BACK AND DRINK THE BLOOD POURING OUT OF THAT PIG!!!!” No, George just lets the pig-blood fact pour out of him like, well, blood out of a freshly slaughtered pig. This right here is a crucial key device and most certainly requires a lot of practice.
But the really interesting thing I have to note is that, technically, George hasn’t even started his story; up till now it’s all character development, and yet I’m not sitting here wishing he would move on, I’m not saying “Uh-huh” a lot, nor am I saying “So what happened next?” rushing the story along. A storyteller who hears these sorts of responses should definitely take the hint and be merciful on his audience and say “Never mind” and maybe just go make dinner or something.
Instead, and here’s the real magic, I’m hardly here, at all. I’m actually years and miles away from George. I’m here with Red and Marie. I’m trying to figure out what Marie sees in Red. I’m trying to find a nice way of asking Red and Marie why they put all this dreadful paneling up in this house. George is going on and on, and I’m here daydreaming, loving George for bringing me where he has brought me. This is what impresses me. What is a story if not a legitimate, sanctioned escape from the here-and-now? A new here-and-now to climb into, like the basket of a hot-air balloon. A free vacation! If I learned nothing else from my time at my mother’s bedside, I learned that living your entire life in the here-and-now isn’t a worthwhile goal at all. The trick is learning how to find it so you can be in it, leave it, come back to it at will. The trick is in the recognition, and the muscle of choice.
“So old Red, he did want a basement,” George is saying, making his voice low and thunderous, like drums announcing the important part of a song. “And sweet Marie, she refused him again and again. She said, ‘Red, we don’t need a basement.’ Red stewed on this point for many years. One day he waited until Marie went off to work. He said, ‘Well, good-bye, Mother.’ And he ran. He ran and he ran. He ran four miles up to the coal mine. And there he retrieved for himself seventeen sticks of dynamite.”
George stops, looks me in the eye, gives me the time and space to imagine what happened next. Because time and space are what the imagination feeds off of. Time and space, I tell you, are the actual Kibbles’n Bits of the imagination.
“So old Red,” says George. “He stuck those seventeen sticks of dynamite here and there, all around this house we are standing in today. He then ignited the dynamite.” George throws his arms high in the air, makes his eyes as wide as Rhode Island. “BOOOOM!” he shouts, in such a way as to shake the lampshades
.
“So that explains the stream in your basement,” he says, bringing the story all the way around, because the circle is the storyteller’s infinite and everlasting most sincere responsibility. “Red blasted through a seam of limestone that was holding back a few springs. It’s a wet basement, as I understand it.”
“It is,” I agree.
George looks down at his shoes. Then he glances past my shoulder, says, “If you could please ask Alex to meet me down at the barn, I have some sheep to check on.”
In other words, “The end.” Because even if this story is true, we are teetering right on the tippy-tippy edge of believability, which of course is the most vital and exciting place for a story to sit. A lot of people have trouble leaving a story here. A lot of people would go on and on about what happened to Red when Marie came home, and what happened to Marie when she discovered the foundation of her life … missing, and some would even go into a big explanation of basement construction fundamentals. This would be a violation. This would be like a light going on in a rocket ship flashing ABORT ABORT ABORT and the rocket ship doing a nosedive into the bottomless sea.
So, normalcy. My life back at the farm. Betty and Marley and Cricket and Sassy and Skippy and Maggie and all the gang. A whole brood of healthy, happy creatures. And my garden full of slugs. And work in my dusty office. And my satellite dish. And laundry drying in the cellar. And broccoli steaming on the stove. And the tick-tock of my kitchen clock that somehow doesn’t seem nearly as loud as it once did.
Everything looks so different when you return home. The things you used to complain about seem to hardly bother you at all. And the things you were thinking about while you were away seem almost adorably funny or at least irrelevant. Right now it seems like years since I stood in a pet shop with a Chihuahua running loose. A Chihuahua running loose that I came to understand as something in me running loose, yes, something in me that was now unleashed and there was no containing it.
The Chihuahua was, of course, contained that night. He was put right back in his cage. A few weeks later, when I went for one of my regular visits, he was gone. The clerk said an old man had come in with his son. The son had been trying for months to get his lonely old dad to agree to get a dog. But the right dog never seemed to materialize. Not until the old man met the Chihuahua. The clerk gave me the old man’s phone number. I sat down to make the call, I really did. I wanted to tell the old man how much I loved the Chihuahua; I wanted to hear something in his voice that would tell me that he too loved the Chihuahua; I wanted him to put the phone up to the Chihuahua’s giant pink ear so I could say, “Hey Chihuahua! I’m so happy for you!”
But then I decided it really was best to let it go.
As for my mom, well, things are slowly improving. She can sit up on her own. We all gathered around and applauded the first time she did that. She’s moved well through the acute phase of the disease, which means she’s out of danger and doesn’t need the medical attention she once did. But she’s not nearly strong enough for the rigors of a rehab hospital. When she’s ready for it, she’ll need months in such a facility. And so for now she’s living on the fifth floor of Riddle Village, in a special nursing-home section of the retirement village where we moved my dad three months ago. Just four stories up from the new apartment. A mere elevator ride away. My dad is able to wheel my mom around the place, even down to their apartment; he shows her where all her stuff is, gets her opinion on where to move lamps and pictures. My sisters and brother and I are somewhat dumbfounded to see how this has worked out; if my parents still lived back at the old house at Springton Lake, there would be no way they’d get this time near each other. My mother would likely be spending these transitional months in a nursing home with virtually no connection to a place she would be able to think of as “home.”
“Can you believe this?” my mom said to me the other day on the phone. “Can you believe that I’m now relieved that your dad brought me to the funny farm?”
I told her that now, more than ever, she would need to stop referring to the place as a funny farm.
“All right,” she said. “You’re right.”
Her mood has improved considerably, thanks in large part to finally getting out of the hell that Room 109 had come to represent, but thanks in larger part to her priest—and Alex. The priest did a miraculous thing. He taught her a prayer she could say: “I will be faithful.” He said she didn’t need to pray any more than that. Just work on that one. She told me that that one simple prayer provided a kind of tether to God. And thus came grace.
It must have seemed ironic, or at least strange to my mom, that Alex would turn out to be yet another trusted guide. He is, after all, Jewish. To a Catholic, especially a devout one, this can mean you are on the other side of a very important fence. It can mean “What is the matter with you that you haven’t chosen to live over here?” It can mean “You can’t possibly understand me.”
I don’t know what exactly transpired between my mom and Alex. His visits to her hospital bed became more frequent when her depression began to deepen; she rapidly progressed to full-blown panic attacks. He would hold her hand, sit right next to her bed, close to her ear. “Just listen to my voice,” he would say, and then nod in my direction so I might give them privacy. I’d leave the room, wait for the door to open again. Sometimes it would take an hour. Somehow each time Alex was able to bring my mother’s mind back. I’d go in, and she’d be laughing, she’d be joking about having a bad hair day or expounding on the virtue of patience.
He also taught the rest of us how to deal with her panic attacks so that we weren’t inadvertently making them worse. He explained how, if you try to talk someone who is terrified out of the thing they are afraid of, it just reinforces their belief that the thing exists. So we learned to redirect her thoughts rather than challenge them. And she learned to tell us to go away so that she might close her eyes and employ one of the tricks Alex had taught her.
I really don’t know what the tricks were, or how Alex taught them to her. I only know that when it’s your time to be sucked into madness, you’re very lucky if you have someone with the courage to sit with you—really sit with you—on the edge of that pool. That person is the reason you can let go, plunge, get it over with.
My mom and Alex now have a date. She’s vowed to be well enough to dance at Christmas. She’s reserved the first dance for him.
So, normalcy. My life back on the farm. Alex and George. They’re down at the barn, and last I checked they were all involved in some anti-fungal campaign with the sheep feet. The morning is long gone, and so, it appears, is my husband.
I’m sitting on the porch. Oh, good. I can see Alex starting to say good-bye to George. Sometimes it takes a long time to say good-bye to George. George has one foot in the door of his navy-blue pickup, the rest of him out. Alex is nodding, scratching his chin, nodding. Finally, a laugh. George always leaves you laughing. He drives off, finally. And Alex comes up to the house.
“Did he tell you about drought?” he asks.
“And the sheep canoeing by?”
“Yep.”
“Yep.”
“George. You ready for our walk?” he says. He’s wearing khaki shorts and a T-shirt advertising Canada.
“Oh, you still want to go?”
“I think we should. While we have our nerve up.”
“All right. But let’s put the dogs in. We don’t want to be showing up with three maniac dogs jumping and slobbering.”
“They’re not that bad,” he says. “I know, but—”
“No, you’re right,” he says.
“What?”
“I said, ‘You’re right, dear.’ ”
I smile, raise my chin like a famous movie star. We both have a thing about being right, Alex and I, and feel it’s important to stop and notice whenever one of us gets to be it.
“Ta dum!” he says.
“Thank you.”
“I’ll put the dogs in,” he says.
>
Our walk today isn’t really a pleasure walk. Or it’s only incidentally for pleasure. We’re going to visit the old lady who lives down the road. We’ve never met her. We don’t even know her name. Everyone around here just calls her “the old lady.” As in “Stay away from the old lady. She’s wacky.” And “Stay off the old lady’s land.” And “Don’t even make eye contact with the old lady if you happen to see her out in her yard.”
Ordinarily we would heed the advice, but as it happens, we need the old lady. She owns a piece of land we want. Just a small chunk, a few acres at most, a narrow strip that abuts ours. It’s an utterly useless piece of marshland—except to us. Owning this piece would give us the room we need to one day build up the dam that forms our pond. It’s something we’ve talked about doing ever since we moved here. Build up the dam, and the pond could be raised a good six feet—which translates to a pond that grows from one acre to about six. A giant pond! Oh, we have dancing visions of canoes in our heads. And a sandy beach with willows hanging down.
The pond project is probably years off. But we’ve been advised to ask the old lady now. She’s probably on her last legs. And her heirs are reputed to be even crankier than she is.
And so it is with some trepidation that Alex and I head down the driveway, dogless. We make a right onto our dirt road.
The dirt is reddish brown, and it’s so dry we can hear our feet crunching over it. The towering hardwoods are in full splendor, providing a cool tunnel of shade. “Hey, girls,” Alex says to the neighbor’s cows as we pass. He always does this, sort of tips an imaginary hat to them. One answers with a pause in her cud chewing and a glance in our direction; the rest keep their heads down, their tails swishing. At a time like this you appreciate that your neighbor has chosen to breed Holsteins; nothing says “cow” like the black and white kind, and nothing says “farm” like the sight of a cow set against the greenest grass—with a crooked red barn in the background.
The Exact Same Moon Page 9
