Solomon's Oak

by Jo-Ann Mapson

  Think about that idea for a while, and then try going back to regular life. Things you thought were pretty, such as a horse eating its alfalfa or how yellow daffodils are growing around a white farmhouse will never be just flowers. After Mary and Jesus and Michelangelo, get ready for the worst headache ever. Because from that moment forward not only will you wonder how other people see the things you see, including basic stuff like the color blue, but it will occur to you that maybe you’re the one seeing things wrong. How is that art? It’s just messed up.

  If everything in the world means more than one thing, how do you ever know what is what?

  And what if you don’t?

  Then all the true stories could be false. The world might not be the planet we think it is. Earth could just as easily be a tennis ball being chased by some giant random dog, running ultra-slo-mo across a gassy galaxy that is really only someone else’s side yard, a part of something so big you can’t take it all in.

  This is why when you go to take a photograph, the first thing you learn isn’t how the camera works. It’s about accepting that the picture you end up with will never be the picture you were trying to take. Right off you have to be okay with that or don’t bother. Like say you were taking a picture of a rose in bloom and just when you press the shutter, a bee flies into the picture. What’s your picture of then?

  JTM: I see you working your brain muscles here! Good work. Keep it up and you may get through high school yet. —JCV

  Chapter 9

  GLORY

  The morning of February 27 Glory sat in her closet with the door open, staring at her unmade bed. Tomorrow was the one-year anniversary of Dan’s death. He had slept next to her for almost twenty years, and counting the days he was in the hospital up to now, she had now slept without him for 367 days. Last night she’d had a dream about Joseph Vigil that would have made Lorna Candelaria blush. A person could chalk that up to the body crying out to have its needs met, but Glory had to admit Joseph Vigil made her feel—comfortable? He was a good sport when Dodge tried to hump his leg, just pushed the dog away and continued talking. He worried about a dusty old rug and asked for help with it. It wasn’t so much that he said surprising things, because he was a quiet man, but in his photographs he was clearly saying much more than could be spoken aloud. She had known him four months and he was leaving in two and suddenly that bothered her.

  Dan had been her world. She shut her eyes and shook her head.

  Out of nowhere, Edsel leapt up on her, causing empty hangers to crash and several to hit her in the head. She wanted to scream at him, but the poor dog only wanted his breakfast. Her outdoor animals had ESP as to when she woke up. Cricket began that panicked neighing she did every morning as if the dreaded day had come when that flake of hay would fail to materialize. Her last-chance dogs had learned too well that life wasn’t always fair. They waited as excitedly for breakfast as the horses, but if the food didn’t arrive, they’d let the matter go.

  Juniper liked to make her own breakfast, sickly sweet cereal and gobs of real butter on dark toast. Was Glory supposed to force-feed her steel-cut oats? Quiz her on the food pyramid? Being a mother to a daughter was like boot camp. Some days, like today, even though the pangs of hunger torqued Glory’s own stomach, she could not bring herself to swallow food. Only coffee.

  With her robe tied tight around her and her feet in rain boots, she fed the animals, checked on Nanny, the goat that would soon deliver, made coffee, and took a cup back to her bedroom closet. She shoved the fallen hangers aside. By now she had a comfortable pillow in here and an old quilt to wrap herself in. She sat down next to the box of Dan’s clothes and put her arm around it. In several places the cardboard was smooth from her rubbing it.

  “Explain something it to me,” she said, as if Dan could somehow hear her. “You wouldn’t let so much as a bookend go out of your workshop unless it was sanded to perfection, buffed with beeswax, and had your signature on the backside. You couldn’t tolerate a dripping faucet for a minute before you got out the wrenches. So why couldn’t you take care of yourself like you did everything else? Look at what you left behind for me to do! How am I supposed to manage? I swear, if it wasn’t for the animals, I’d set fire to the place and be done with it.”

  She pictured blue flames, white at the core, devouring the shingles, blowing out the sticky windows, blackening the bathtub with its rusting faucets and chipped enamel revealing crumbling cast iron. The cobbled-together fence that blew down once a week? Let it blaze. In her mind, what was left when the smoke cleared was empty land ready to launch someone else’s dream, the same as Joseph’s cabin. Except for the chapel. Oh, the beams might scorch, but oak that thick was slow to burn, and the stones used in the walls would take one look at the fire and say, “Please. Can’t you do any better than that?”

  When Dan died, Glory’s plan had been to stay here until she drew her last breath. Why? She woke up every day in a lumpy, old bed. Sure, she’d made love with her husband there, shared twenty years of dreams, but now she slept with a dog that wanted his breakfast by eight A.M. and didn’t mind walking across her face to let her know he was hungry. Every morning she got up and walked barefoot down the hallway and what did she see? The oak tree, first thing, from her kitchen window. And what good had it done her? After a few minutes of musing that over, she made coffee and waited for Joseph to drive up in the yellow Toyota and trudged through another day. The reward? Witnessing the look on Juniper’s face when Joseph brought her something, even if it was just a library book on Ansel Adams.

  But Joseph was leaving in April, and soon it would be March. Thirty-one days and he would be gone.

  Lorna had assured Glory that when a year had passed, she would look at the world with new eyes. That she’d find strength in herself to go on. That she was young; another life was waiting for her out in the world. Caroline Proctor said that missing Dan would always hurt, but life didn’t give a hoot about grief. It went spooling along; that was how foster children had to look at things or they’d curl up and die. Halle thought Glory should sign up with eHarmony and find another husband. She’d left three messages this week alone, and Glory had ignored every single one of them.

  Hey, Sis. How about meeting me at Macy’s? They’re having a trunk show …

  Glory? Any chance I can hire you to make a cake for Bart’s secretary? She loves anything Juicy Couture. I can e-mail you a picture of her handbag.

  Have you used your gym gift certificate yet? Call me back.

  Before Glory lost her nerve, she telephoned Lorna.

  “Feel like lunch tomorrow?” Glory asked when she picked up.

  “So long as I don’t have to make it.”

  “I could pick up some Chinese food. Moo shu or fried rice?”

  “Either sounds good. Don’t forget the fortune cookies. Ask for extras.”

  “I thought you were on that diabetes diet now.”

  “A cookie or two isn’t going to kill me. In fact, get some of those almond cookies, too. For Juan. You know how he loves them.”

  Glory knew that one cookie would turn into three or four cookies, and that five cookies would lead to ten. But why not eat what you love and die early? Hadn’t life proven itself fickle and sour as all get-out? One minute Lorna would be there and then the next she wouldn’t. No more taking orders from smart-mouthed kids. A chance to put her feet up for good. Glory would lose her corporeal friend, but in all other ways Lorna would be with her, just as Dan was. That feeling of him alongside. Maybe this was how life was supposed to work. People came into your life and made you fall in love with them so that when they left, you never stopped appreciating them.

  “See you around noon tomorrow,” Glory said, and hung up. She wondered why she didn’t hear the noise of Juniper’s morning shower. Usually she wouldn’t get out of it until Glory knocked on the bathroom door, reminding her it took twenty minutes before the water heater filled back up and other people wanted to take showers, too. She tapped, then ope
ned the door to Juniper’s room. The girl was sprawled across her bed, snoring, Cadillac beside her. He thumped his tail hopefully.

  “Go eat your breakfast,” she said, and shooed him outdoors where his kennel was open, his dish inside.

  The clock was on its side on the floor. Juniper was supposed to set her alarm for eight and to be ready for homeschooling by nine. Glory did the morning farm chores; Juniper tended to the evening feedings. Joseph promised to show Glory how to manage homeschooling before he left so that she could step into the role comfortably. Or uncomfortably. One thing was for certain: Juniper was not returning to public school.

  “Hey, Juniper, get up and dressed,” Glory said, giving her shoulder a shake. “Joseph will be here any minute.”

  Chapter 10

  JOSEPH

  T. S. Eliot had declared April to be the cruelest month, but Joseph knew better. February was the worst, with that awful sweetheart holiday tucked in the middle, mocking all the people who weren’t in love. Also, it was short on days, moving up his deadline for leaving.

  “Joseph is doing this out of the goodness of his heart,” Glory whispered to Juniper, who stood there yawning. “No more sleeping late. Tomorrow you get your butt out of bed earlier and be ready to work, and I mean it.”

  Joseph stacked the homeschooling books on the old picnic table. Glory was snorting like the old bull on his father’s farm, way past doing anything about whatever made him mad, but clinging to habit. How could she be this angry when spring was just around the corner? It was the first dry day in a week. The rain had beaten down so hard that part of the Oak Shore’s hillside had slid away, exposing the foundations to several of the fancy lake houses. The developers were more preoccupied with reinforcing things with rebar and concrete block than they were with tearing his cabin down. But with the bitter came the sweet.

  Everywhere Joseph looked, flowers budded and bloomed. A sweet taste was on the wind that rustled through the greening tree branches. Cadillac was rambunctious, racing around the property when Juniper was occupied with her studies, not above bringing the girl “gifts” in a plea for attention. He dragged fallen tree limbs up to the table and stood there panting, waiting for praise. He regularly found dead things to roll in; he was thrilled with the baths that followed, but the worst thing ever was the day he ran up to them with a hunk of a cow’s jawbone, teeth intact, in his mouth.

  Juniper screamed and screamed, convinced it was human, even though the teeth were immediately recognizable to Joseph as used for grinding grasses into cud.

  Cadillac, so proud of his find, would not let it go for a piece of lunch meat, his beloved Frisbee, or his favorite treat, a “bully stick,” a more socially acceptable term for what it was, which was a steer’s penis.

  Glory, the luckiest woman on the planet, had been off working at Target that day, which left Joseph to deal with the hysteria, so he went onto Wikipedia to look for an anatomical illustration of a cow’s skull, intent on proving to Juniper that it was a bovine mandible and not a human’s. But try finding a lateral view that showed enough of the Margo interalveolaris to convince her that it was part of a larger structure. The Internet often disappointed him. It was either too easy or lacking. He thought fondly of the bookmobile that drove up to his elementary school once a week and wondered where those old blue vehicles had gone. Car heaven. Scrap metal.

  Home school. He’d assured Glory that she’d be able to take over when he left, that it was manageable, when in fact every day seemed to include one commotion or another. The A Plan often went awry, and sometimes the B Plan did, too. Frankly he couldn’t imagine Glory coping with it day after day.

  At the end of one especially grueling day he’d opened the door to the Land Cruiser to find Dodge in the passenger seat. Joseph tried to shoo him out, but the dog was having none of that. “Fine,” Joseph said, “but don’t expect the kind of life you get here.” He took him home.

  Dodge insisted on a walk around the lake every day, and a swim. Joseph could only make it so far—but indeed, a little farther each day—before he had to stop and wait for the clutching pain to release his muscles. On the days he homeschooled Juniper, Joseph brought Dodge along and tried to convince him it was a better deal all around to relocate back to Solomon’s Oak, but at the end of every day the dog was waiting in the car for him.

  “You probably think that Joseph’s such a nice guy he’ll let you slide,” Glory said that sunny morning of February 28. “Trust me, Juniper. You’re going to earn your high school degree. By doing the work.”

  The kid was learning when to keep her mouth shut—around Glory. Everyone else Juniper had problems with, which meant Joseph, which meant he had to find a book on etiquette, and that was no easy endeavor in the year 2004. Joseph began to think that every high school teacher deserved a six-figure salary and free spa treatments for life.

  Glory put her hands into her pockets. “After I finish my errands I’m going to have lunch with Lorna. You behave yourself. I will call every hour to check in.”

  Juniper, stone-faced, folded her arms across her chest.

  “Say good-bye to your mother,” Joseph said.

  “Buh-bye, Mrs. Solomon.”

  Glory huffed, “That’s right, be snarky. Fools that we are, we’re only trying to save your educational life. Joseph, call my cell if there’s any problem, no matter how small.”

  Juniper said, “I still don’t get why I can’t have a cell phone if you can.”

  Looking as if she might snap in two if a good wind blew through, Glory turned her back on them and walked toward her truck. Edsel, that teaspoon of a dog with the goofy outfits and toys, howled like a monkey when Glory left, and Cadillac joined in. Outdoor-dog rules did not apply to that dinky pup. Personally, Joseph thought the dog could use more dinner—his ribs showed—and the opportunity to urinate on trees. It made Dodge happy to leave his calling card on every leaf or bush or rock bigger than a baseball. “Joseph’s dog,” Glory called Dodge now, even though the dog minded only Glory.

  Juniper tapped her pencil against her open notebook. “Did you get a good look at Mrs. Solomon? How much weight she’s lost? Seriously, what if she’s sick?”

  “Only kind of sick she is, is sick of your shenanigans, and guess what? Me, too. Open your Spanish book. Let’s get started.”

  “You know what she does at night?”

  “Juniper, focus. Your Spanish book.”

  “She’s back to sitting in her closet every night. Cries really quietly. For exactly ten minutes. Isn’t that weird?”

  “That’s her business.”

  “You’re wrong. It’s your business because she’s your friend. Isn’t she?”

  Joseph turned the chair around and straddled it so he could stretch his back while he worked. “Did you think having to take you out of high school before you got expelled was her dream come true? She had to do some fancy talking to keep the school from pressing charges. What were you thinking?”

  “They totally overreacted. A plastic cafeteria knife would break if you stabbed real human skin. It’s physics.”

  “Actually, it’s intentional assault, and the knife qualifies as a weapon. Haul in the history of your fights with this girl, present your case in adult court, the DA could argue premeditation. These days plenty of judges try juveniles as adults. Come to think of it, you’d look great in an orange jumpsuit.”

  “Lois says that you making fun of me isn’t good for my self-esteem.”

  Joseph looked toward the barn, envying the animals living la vida sencilla, the simple life. When he’d researched homeschooling, he’d become a vocal convert as soon as he read John Holt’s words: Learning is not the product of teaching. Learning is the activity of learners. Now he’d like to dig the man up and have him try to work with Juniper.

  “Okay, forget about the knife for a second. What did you say to her, your exact words?”

  Juniper liked saying it: “ ‘You’d be a really great person if there was someone there to kill
you every day of your life.’ ”

  “That’s a threat.”

  “It’s not a threat, it’s kind of from a Flannery O’Connor story.”

  “No matter who said it, when it comes out of your mouth, it’s a threat.”

  “She deserved it.”

  “So tell the principal what she said to you.”

  “I don’t feel like it.”

  Joseph sighed. “Do you know how lucky you are, chica? I know kids in Albuquerque who went to juvie camp for less. Terrible shit happens there.”

  “Terrible shit happens everywhere! I never heard you swear before. Why now?”

  “Some situations require it. Now open your Spanish textbook and vamanos or I’ll make you run hills.”

  Juniper sighed, groaning dramatically at how heavy the book was and how many pages there were to read through. “What’s Spanish good for besides bossing your maid around if you’re rich, which I’ll never be? I can order a taco dinner and cuss in Spanish already.”

  Tempting as it was, Joseph refused to take the bait. “Do you know who Ponce de León was?”

  “Not really.”

  “He brought the Spanish language to America.”

  “Big deal. Someone was bound to, eventually.”

  “The deal is big. In fact, it’s muy grande. From 1990 to the year 2000, the number of Spanish speakers in America grew by sixty percent. It’s the fastest-growing ethnic group. It’s estimated that by the year 2010, over thirty-five million Americans will speak Spanish.”

  “So? That’s only ten percent of all the people who live in the U.S.”

  Joseph rubbed his jaw. “Do the math. How many Spanish speakers will that make a hundred years from now? By the way, if you were trying to hurt my feelings by disrespecting my heritage, you failed. Sticks and stones, that’s the biggest lesson you need to learn. Now turn to lesson four and read the dialogue.”