Carry Me Home

by John M. Del Vecchio

  “Yeah, sure. Like the one you had in California.”

  “Something simpler.”

  “You ever play bladderball?” Tony asked.

  “Huh?” Bobby focused on him, unsure he’d heard.

  “It’s a Viet Namese game played with a pig’s bladder,” Tony said. “Your grandfather had pigs, right?”

  “Ye—”

  “Jimmy once wrote about it. You take a pig’s bladder and blow it up. The kids play soccer with it.”

  The night did not end. “Guy once said to me,” Bobby said, “‘if you don’t plan your life, someone will plan it for you. And he isn’t interested in your best welfare.’ Something like that. There’s five billion people on earth, Man. A billion more than a dozen years ago. As the number goes up, as the species becomes more successful, the individuals lose value. Those that survive will be those that take charge of themselves.”

  As the sky lightened Tony Pisano and Bobby Wapinski were back to talking about layers in reference to the theory of expanding beyond the self. The idea fascinated Tony. “Maybe it’s like stages. You have to go through the first to get to the second. But you’ve got to delaminate for the self to be stable enough to be the foundation for the expansion.”

  “Yeah,” Bobby said. “That’s the challenge. That delamination. That becoming unstuck. We’re all affected by it. The whole country. We’ve got to decide right here and now. We’ve got to have the courage to decide, the discipline to try, the perseverance never to give up.”

  “Driven by elation.” Tony chuckled.

  “Yeah,” Bobby said. “And it’s urgent. Life is urgent. Me, you—we don’t have the right to waste it. We’re stuck because we don’t know. We’re stuck on unfinished business. Were we hoodwinked? Used? And if we were, does that negate the cause?”

  “Um,” Tony nodded but he wasn’t certain he’d followed Bobby’s line of thought.

  “We went,” Bobby said. “We fought. I saw it as an ethical obligation. But was it really right? Or was it wrong?”

  “I don’t know,” Tony said. He rose. Shook out his bag.

  “What could have been?” Bobby said.

  “What should have been?” Tony countered. “Or should be now?”

  “Yeah. Let’s make a vow,” Bobby said. He too rose. The fire was out. The bottle was a misshapen ugly gray form amid the ash.

  “I vow,” Bobby began, “to make the effort, to expend the energy, to discover the truth about—”

  “No ...” Tony interrupted. Bobby paused, frowned at him. “I ... can’t. Not just yet. There’s ... there’s something I got to find out first.”

  October 1984

  IN ANOTHER WEEK OR so it will be eight years since the first Fire Circle, since the true beginning, for me at least, of community, of a return to brotherhood, of the outset on the journey to the high meadows of the mind.

  By the end of 1976 Bobby had received dual degrees in civil and design engineering, and by March 1977 he had his general contractor’s license and his plumbing I and II licenses. Sara had obtained her Pennsylvania teaching certificate, and Linda was back pursuing midwifery certification. I’d enrolled in a correspondence course in sustainable farming and had received my first certificate. I also began courses in veterinary medicine and economics. Farming is much more than dirt and seed, plowing, soil erosion, planting and reaping. It is more than irrigation and fertilization, pesticides, fungicides, herbicides and cultivation. It is more than potassium, phosphorus and nitrogen; more than chores and tractors, barns, crop rotations and winter covers. Farming includes tax preparation, crop per dollar per acre ratios, marketing, advertising, distribution, labor laws, personnel management, EPA regulations and retirement annuities. I’d just scratched the surface and Bobby was pushing me to expand beyond the farm, pushing me to vow to discover ... to become unstuck ... to grow beyond the self to the community.

  He and I busted our butts preparing for the personnel expansion. We installed a new septic system—tank, drywell, distribution box and leaching fields—out beyond the little barn. (He’d wanted it closer in but all I could think of was gallons of cold urine collecting in my still-secret bunker, so I convinced him closer was ideal for the basketball court he wanted.) He paid to have a new well pounded and refracted. We cleaned the old pig barn, roughed in a kitchen, a shower room and a two-holer bath. The guys, we figured, could make finishing it their project.

  It was during this time that the small array of solar collectors on the roof of the White Pines Inn really began to pay dividends. Aaron Holtz did for High Meadow and Environmental Energy Systems what ten grand in advertising dollars could never have accomplished. “C’mere.” He’d grab lunchtime clients, dinner patrons, evening drunks. “Feel this.” He’d grab their wrists, turn on the “cold” water tap before the dishwasher, and warm or scald their hands depending on that day’s solar insulation. “Saving me a ton of money,” Aaron would say.

  From Aaron came the Bancroft job, our first solar collector implant retrofit. Others followed. Aaron had to wait in line for Bobby to schedule his home—a retrofit remodel with Trombe wall, greenhouse, rooftop array, and six-thousand-gallon basement heat-storage unit, EES’s largest to date.

  Suddenly there was money for tools—the break, the slitter, chop-saws, ladders.... Maybe it was the money, or luck, or fate, but in early January Jeremiah Gallagher of Williamsport and George Kamp of Towanda arrived; then ten days later came Tom Van Deusen from West Virginia. Each time one came Bobby treated him like he was a ’cruit entering basic training. He’d rant about urgency, about lost years and not becoming a lost generation. Then he’d give them to me and I’d tell them they could sleep for a week but then it was time to get-to, to work. With each of them I pretended to be unstuck. With each I judged the stage of the journey, the rest-stop at which they’d taken refuge.

  High Meadow was becoming an institute. Grandpa’s office bookshelves were moved down to the main floor of the big barn—into what had once been a workshop and toolroom. The place was sanitized. Additional shelves were built until, in the coming years, the walls would be completely lined. Farming books and journals occupied one section; another was devoted to solar technology and design; a third to light reading—novels, mysteries, westerns, even comic books; a fourth to Southeast Asia, to the war, the history, the people. In a subsection were Bobby’s first books on veterans, their experiences, their adjustment problems. Here he had Robert Jay Lifton’s Home from the War, and works by Charles R. Figley, Seymour Leventman, John Helmer, and Gloria Emerson. In each, in the margins, in his neat hand, were Bobby’s comments and reactions, his agreements and often scathing criticisms. Bobby consumed these books, digested them, assimilated the nutrients and excreted the waste. And he encouraged every vet that came to High Meadow to do the same. Over the years the history section on the war in Viet Nam, Cambodia and Laos expanded to more than three hundred volumes; the fiction and memoir section to two hundred and sixty; the PTSD (psycho-socio analysis, help and self-help) to one hundred ninety. Wounds of War by Herbert Hendin and Ann Pollinger Haas became almost mandatory reading, as did (when it was published in ’78) M. Scott Peck’s The Road Less Traveled, which has nothing—and everything—to do with the combat veteran’s experience. By the end, in 1983, this private library, including children’s books and all the medical texts, had grown to nearly five thousand volumes. It became the legacy of one four-word question: How do things work?

  An example: Do you recall Bobby and the different crystalline structures of ice? One cubic centimeter of water at one degree Celsius releases one calorie of energy when it drops to water at zero degrees Celsius. One cubic centimeter of zero-degree water releases eighty calories as it transforms into zero-degree ice. It is this quality of material state transformation Bobby and EES soon began to use in designing thermal storage systems for retrofits and new construction.

  How things work. It came to pass that Bobby saw the release and absorption of energy at phase change, or state transfo
rmation, as analogy, as a property of humanness. “When one transforms,” he would say, “from a state of egocentric indulgence or a state of being stuck on the self, to a state of expanding beyond the self to mate, to family, to community, energy is released. This energy can be absorbed by others. This is the essence of leadership. This is the essence of all healthy relationships.”

  With the energy tax credit passed by Congress during the Carter administration, EES was flying, overwhelmed with business, and making a fairly decent profit to boot. Only Cheryl, Joanne and Miriam were displeased. Miriam challenged Bobby on the expenses for the new well, the septic system, etc., saying they were neither business costs nor necessary capital improvements.

  Perhaps they were not the only ones. In the theory of the self one comes to recognize that those who have not expanded beyond the self, those who have remained self-centered or who have returned to a state of seeking self-fulfillment, are energy-absorbers, energy consumers. Parasites. Exactly as I was for almost a decade. Focus on the self is self-defeating. The absorber/consumer ultimately becomes chronically depressed, is always stuck, often manifests a need for punishment or humiliation, at times coupled with a public vengefulness that can appear either sociopathic or altruistic.

  I have not been here continually but have left to resupply, to meet with the principals.

  26

  HIGH MEADOW, THURSDAY, 3 February 1977—Tony’s thoughts ran foul. Gallagher was being a pain in the ass. Kamp was so stuck he could barely drag his butt from his rack to the shitter, much less work. And Van Deusen, though he was energetic and enthusiastic, was so scattered he put all his energy into going nowhere. They were all in their late twenties, yet all acted like pubescent teens. Worse than FNGs. Worse than cherries. Rawer than the rawest ’cruit.

  It was snowing. They were supposed to be keeping the drive clear for the delivery of the slitter—that machine that could take a ten-foot length of sheet metal and pull it through its rolling cutter in less than two seconds. They were supposed to have cleared the barn floor earlier, too, but Tony had done it, seething, grumbling, cursing under his breath.

  That was only the tip of the foul iceberg. On Tuesday, the Pisanos and Pellegrinos had had Father Tom down at St. Ignat’s say a memorial Mass for Jimmy, now seven years dead. It had not been like the one-year requiem. Only Aunt Isabella and Uncle James, and Jo, John Sr., Nonna, and Tony had come. When Tony called Linda, afterward, she told him she’d forgotten. But John Sr. hadn’t forgotten. Nor had John Sr. forgotten that Tony had “chosen” to live in a barn instead of with his wife and daughters. It had been easier for his father to accept Tony’s absence—his living homeless in California—than this nearby “nonexistence.” “I’m sixty years old,” he’d said to Tony after Mass. “Sixty. I never thought I’d live to so hate one of my sons. That’s what you’ve done to me.”

  “Pop ...” Tony had begun, but he’d been overwhelmed. Overwhelmed by his father’s anger.

  “He doesn’t mean it,” Jo had whispered to Tony. “He loves you just as much as I do. He just doesn’t understand.”

  “I ... Ma ...”

  “You don’t have to tell me,” Jo had said. “I don’t understand either. Linda’s so beautiful. But you gotta make your own way.”

  “Get the fuckin lead out!” Tony barked at Van Deusen.

  “Sure. Sure. Sorry. I was just coming back for a shovel.”

  Tony slapped his head. “Geez! You guys got the tractor with the plow blade. He’s gonna come in a big truck. He’s not walkin.”

  “Oh. Sure. Of course. Sorry.”

  Tony sighed. “Look, Tom, forget the ‘sorries.’ Did you clean that section of wall ...”

  “Oh! I forgot. I’ll do it in a minute. Let me tell Jer and I’ll be right back.”

  Then: “Hey! Hey! I know you.” It was the truck driver. He’d backed the semi with its forty-foot trailer all the way up the long drive, up through the gates, as if he’d delivered to High Meadow a hundred times.

  “Huh?” Tom Van Deusen looked up to where the driver was standing in the trailer. Tony, Jeremiah Gallagher and George Kamp had just twisted and rocked the box with the cast-iron base onto a skid so they could use the tractor to pull it into the barn. All three were leaning on the crate.

  “No. You.” The driver pointed. “Yeah, it is ...” He pointed at Tony, leaped down. “Ay! Ay Sarge! It is you. Sargeant Pizo.”

  Tony remained leaning on the crate, but turned his head up, sideways.

  “Augh, you don’t remember me.”

  Tony stared, searched the bearded face.

  “Thorpe,” the man said. “I was a newby. Fuck a duck, Man. You don’t remember.”

  “Jim Thorpe ...” Tony said tentatively.

  “Yeah. Dennis. You called me Jim cause at Dai Do, Man, you remember that bad motherfucker, cause you said I ran like I was after the gold.”

  “Shee-it!” Tony laughed, straightened. “How the fuck you been?” He still didn’t recognize this man.

  “Ha! See, you do remember.”

  “Sure,” Tony said. “You joined us ...”

  “Yeah, right there. Fer all a six days. Until I got hit.”

  “Yeah, that’s right, huh? I remember ... didn’t you ...”

  “Just before you left I came back. Just before Loon. But shit. I’ll never forget you and Dai Do. Man, you saved my ass. Hey—” Thorpe looked around, “your place?”

  “Naw,” Tony said.

  “Nice place,” Thorpe said. The slitter and cast-iron base were off. He was ready to go.

  “You remember Dai Do, huh?” Tony now said. Then to the others, “You guys get this thing in there. You don’t need me.” And to Thorpe, “Wait a minute. I gotta talk to you.”

  It did not take long to get reacquainted. They had not known each other well. “Naw, Man,” Thorpe was saying. “I’m just a temp. These guys are so busy they picked up a few of us. But they’re cheap, Man. We got no bennies. And soon as they don’t need us, they let us go.”

  “Maybe that’s not so bad. No ties, no hassles.”

  “Yeah. I got no ties.”

  “Married?”

  “Separated.”

  “Me too.”

  “Yeah. I got a kid,” Thorpe said. “Down in Hagerstown. He was born crippled. Right hip was almost backwards. Left arm ... ah fuck it. I couldn’t handle it. Fuck em if they can’t take a joke.”

  Tony chuckled. “I’ve got two girls. They’re okay. But I couldn’t ... Hey do you remember the dink with the belt?”

  “Dink with a belt?”

  “At Dai Do. At that hamlet that afternoon. When that mama-san and her kids got wasted?”

  “Oh. Oh shit, yeah. You mean the ones that dink fuckin stitched up the back?”

  “Yeah. I ... I been tryin to think, you know, about that time.”

  “Yeah,” Thorpe said. “I remember. You were really pissed. That was the shits. Really a rat fuck.”

  “Yeah. I think maybe I shot em.”

  “You?!”

  “Yeah.”

  “No way, Sarge. Don’t you remember, you were down tryin to draw a bead on the dink with the belt but they were in the way.”

  “Yeah, but I fired. I must a hit em.”

  “You didn’t fire, Man. Don’t you remember?”

  “No. I ... I remember hearin my weapon ...”

  “Naw, that was me. I was across the trail from you. Like six feet away. I was behind that hump in the ground. I couldn’t see the dinks but when that dink opened up I emptied a clip like straight up. I figured it’d maybe scare him.”

  “I thought I fired ...”

  “Naw, Man. Don’t you remember Samuels teasin you cause you didn’t return fire and that was like twice in one day and him sayin, ‘Fuck the line of fire. Fuck the line of fire.’ I was going to pound his head because he got so annoyin with that ‘Fuck the line of fire.’ You were really upset.”

  “Ha! Yeah, huh?” Tony laughed. “Yeah. ‘Fuck the line of fire.’
Ha! Ha! Hahaha ...”

  Now Thorpe began to laugh too. “And Maxwell kept yellin at you, ‘What’re you teachin the newby?’”

  “Oh yeah.” Tony was laughing almost uncontrollably. “I didn’t fire. I didn’t fire.”

  “Geez, Man,” Thorpe said. “How could you forget that?!”

  Friday night, 25 March 1977—Noah was asleep. Bobby was reading the local paper. Josh was on the floor by his feet. Rain was coming in sheets, hitting the windows on the south and west sides of the house masking the TV voices. Between gusts there was a constant tatter on the tarps where the roof was still open. “Idiots,” Bobby blurted. He sniffed, swallowed. His nose was red, sore from blowing.

  Sara was watching TV. They had barely spoken all day. “Who?”

  Bobby dropped the edge of the paper. He was angry about Sara’s low-level yet increasing bitchiness. He was sure it was because he’d said they didn’t have the money to visit her folks and grandparents at Christmas but she denied it, passed it off to cabin fever. He didn’t believe that. Her behavior fit the pattern of several case studies he’d been reading about enablers—cases where the attraction died when one partner, the enabled, began to expand, to become independent. With the Larson job completed, Sodchouski’s underway, and Marrion’s signed up; with the barn becoming a factory; with the vets cooking in their own bunkhouse; and with grumpy Tony, believe it or not, actually singing and smiling and doing the craziest little jigs, Bobby increasingly thought Sara needed to tear him down, to make them all dependent, again, on her.

  “The town.” Bobby did not want to confront her.

  “What now?”

  “They want to build an eighteen million dollar sewer plant on the crik below The White Pines.”

  “Doesn’t that make sense?”

  “That’s more than six thousand dollars per house.”