I said my kids are asleep and tonight I just waited for them to go to sleep so that I could have a drink.
You said okay.
You said what else.
I said well, I was never a big drinker before, isn’t that enough, and you said, I don’t know is it?
I said it’s too dark here, where I’m sitting. I really hate my life and there are reasons why. Some of the reasons I can’t bring myself to say, but here are some and I started listing. Their combined weight made me nauseous while I listened to myself. I felt charged, opening up, but it wasn’t all that pleasant. I hadn’t talked to a grown-up about anything real for days, and worried I might be rambling.
I said I have to get it together, I’m a mother, this isn’t good enough, and you said, okay, good enough for what? I said my kids. You said you’re an amazing mother. I said I wasn’t this morning, and you said
you make a very good case against yourself, it’s incredibly convincing
I said what do you mean and you said, what I just heard is you putting yourself on trial and assuring me that you’re guilty of an awful lot. It’s like you’re talking from a script you’ve written, do you know what I mean, and I said yeah but I have no new material.
How do I fix myself, I asked. We talked a long time, with Lady Liberty shining over there to remind me why my sublet was priced so high.
It’s risky when you call someone in that state. When I left my daughter’s village in Ethiopia I needed to talk to someone. The experience was so unhinging that I felt drugged, my head was bobbing around as I replayed it all, and I rested the side of my face against the car window and asked if we could stop to buy a phone card so I could call the States. When my father answered I just started talking. I only have eleven minutes on this phone, I said, and he called to my mother to pick up the other line. They listened so beautifully. My mother with her gentle amazement and my father who was so present, I wish there was a word for impossibly present; there was no small talk from him, no perfunctory exclamations. In every silence I knew he understood. I knew the expression on his face after we hung up. He would lie in bed that night and think of nothing else. It sounds like a small thing but it was fathomless, how connected I felt to him during that call. I knew I’d never be the same again after what I’d seen that day and I needed a particular pitch of listening and he hit it. He met me there fresh and followed, voice full of emotion. There was none of me alone while I stood on that dirt road in Africa, the Bale monkeys jumping through the trees above my head.
I remember your voice that night. You were so sane and male, and I needed a man’s voice. You said two things, you said “you need to lay off yourself, just for a day, can you do that?” I said maybe, I’ll try and you said, yes try. Then you said to do you a favor and write down some things that are good and send them to you. You said you did that every morning before you got out of bed, you’d lie there, “clearing the cobwebs out” and ridding yourself of grudges. Ending wars you were ready to fight, mostly against yourself. I said how come some people do this to themselves and you said hey, I get halfway through every day and I want to blow my fucking brains out. I want to drive off a bridge. I can taste the bitterness when it seeps across my tongue, making me feel dry and unlucky. I’m telling you, you said, I just want to break something, but then I ask myself
What can I do? How can I be of service to someone or to this moment, what can I do to help
You said, what the hell, who doesn’t understand self-loathing? You have to get it out, even as a joke. Stuffing it all the time makes you explode later, and who doesn’t understand feeling really hopeless? Seriously fuck anyone who doesn’t understand, you said, everyone gets to feel bad.
I get that you don’t fully know how great a man you are. I know enough of what you do in the course of a day to be massively impressed. You are a good husband and father and you don’t put yourself first, which makes you fairly rare. Despite your never advertising it I’ve discovered how honorable you are. You started fighting self-destruction around the age when most guys are hitting impressive levels of indulging it. It sounds like you went through the kind of stuff when you were a kid that a lot of people use as an excuse their entire lives. They whip it out like a get out of jail card, the fact that they had to endure this or didn’t get enough of that. From you, though, I keep noticing a lack of blame.
I said okay, now that I’ve laid out the ugliness in me you’ll never have an impure thought about me again, and you said fuck no, I’m having one right now. I asked you about my friend I said how is she I wish I could visit her; I miss her. You said you know what? That woman? She’d go into battle for you. She loves you so much and so do I, so you have that going for you.
I said thank you. I will try not to, I said, but if I need to, can I—
You didn’t make me say the word you said, yes call, please, that actually helps me. It’s good for me. Call. I said okay. I hate it when I have nothing positive to say and you said, “Fuck, I hope that doesn’t hold for me because if I call you and just leave a message saying, hey it’s me, I hate myself so much right now, are you gonna, what? Hang up on me and say that guy’s weak?” I said please, and you said I didn’t think so, go write that list. I said thanks, really, I’ll talk to you later and you said sleep tight, I’ll leave my phone on.
Dear Neighbor,
“What I do is, I take the thing.”
“The honeycomb?”
“Sure, the honeycomb.”
“How big?” I ask you.
“I don’t know, like,” you hold your rough laborer’s hands about six inches apart from each other to show me, “about like this, and I dip it in the jar of honey. I hold the comb in the air so they find me.”
“Wow. Okay. And then you . . . what?”
We are sitting on my screened-in porch. You are looking past that tree, to where the quarry is.
“I go where the worker goes, and sometimes I might start a little fire.”
“With what? How big?”
“Matches, it don’t matter, just . . . small, you know. The bee flies away from the smoke toward the hive.” You shrug. “Sometimes I throw a little flour on them so they are easy to spot?”
“Okay. Then you, what, catch it?”
“The worker? No, hold on.” You hold up one finger. “I follow the smoke, because the bee makes a line, a straight one, and I follow it.”
I slap the pillows on the daybed where I am sitting. “Shut up. You follow it? Where?” I am laughing because I can’t believe you actually do this and that you know how. You are laughing, too. You are leaning forward, hitting your knee with your fist and you laugh so hard that you take off your hat. You put your hand on your stomach and take a breath.
“Aw, jeez, well, the worker.” I am still giggling a little. “Stop,” you say, “you’re going to start me going again. Anyway, the bee gorges itself on honey and I follow it awhile until I lose it. I mark the spot and come back and repeat the whole thing all over. Can you believe it? I must seem real simple to you.”
“Not simple,” I say, shaking my head in true amazement. “You are like a freaking Grizzly Adams. So when does it end?”
“Well, that depends, see it’s just—” You stop, giving me a look like you are sorry I have to listen. “Do you really want to hear this?”
“Are you out of your mind,” I say. “Look at me, this is better than Gone with the Wind, I am riveted.”
You take off your hat and rub your eyes. You have been up since four this morning and fed all the animals. Already been to town to check on one of your job sites.
“Aw, I can’t be that interesting, you’re just being nice,” you say.
I stick out my tongue and say come on, finish, what happens to the beeeeeeeee.
“Okay, well, I have to tell you, last week,” your voice drops to a whisper, “I ended up in an abandoned house because the hive was in the wall!” You end with a shout, like the wall was the punch line, and I am laughing too, but not complet
ely sure why.
I make you tell me the whole thing; how you found the house and what the owners said when you told them you wanted to buy not the house, but that one wall. Tearing it down yourself, you raked in about thirty pounds of wild honey. Real wild honey, not what you buy at the store that says “wild honey,” but isn’t wild at all.
“I gave them a tub of it too, them owners, and they were so stinkin’ happy.” You take a sip of coffee.
“You did not!” I say. “That’s . . . wow. You are off the charts.” You shrug. “Can I heat that up?” I point to his coffee.
“No, I’m good, I’ll take another one of these, though, if you got any?” You hold up the last corner of a muffin, a little sheepishly, and I hop up, giving you the stop sign so you’ll pause the story until I come back. I take three steps and come back for your coffee anyway. “I’ll get you a new one,” I say, taking the cup. “You want jam?”
“Heck no, your muffins don’t need no jam, girl.” You touch the top of the large iron crucifix on the bench next to you. “That’s real pretty,” you say, more to the cross than to me.
I go in the kitchen and start the steamer for the milk. Out the enormous back window in my kitchen there are trees painted on the sky in more shades of green than I realized existed four years ago. You taught us the names of those trees and paid my kids a dollar when you tested them and they were correct about which was which. That’s just one chapter of country life you opened up to us. The pages of our index before you were mostly empty.
“Oh, thank you,” you say, as I hand you the muffin, which is steaming from my warming it. “Will you look at that. You spoil me. I don’t deserve this.”
“I put in molasses and almond meal,” I say, wishing we could spoil you as much as you do us. We try to refrain from calling you, but the fireplace, the carpenter ants, someone got a suspicious bite; so many things seem to occur outside my wheelhouse and you are fluent in the languages of trees and bugs. Wood. You never let me feel like we’re a bother, and partly that’s because of your wife, who greets us with hugs in our communal garden or a wave from her front door. She steps out mid-conversation, with her thick red hair shining and her constant coffee mug: “They said you had a thing going on with your sink?” Or “Did you get the garlic we left in the barn?” She knows country life has endless moving parts to keep in order. She tells me about books she’s reading, and I give her an apple pie when she brings us the poppy seed bread her daughter just made. “Still hot!” She says, “You can’t believe how good, taste it, you’ll want to shoot me for bringing it.”
When your pond freezes over we bundle up and the kids put on skates. Your son teaches them hockey with you lying down on the ice in front of the net to catch the puck. We make a bonfire in the tepee that smokes so furiously your wife and I can’t stay in there without tearing up. The kids roast marshmallows and stay up too late. When I go in later to make sure they are sleeping soundly, one of them will have a stripe of marshmallow still spackled across their chin.
“They won’t ever forget these times,” you say, and I know you’re right. Sometimes I worry we are like the bees you tell me about. The kids are always swarming around you, a constant drone of “When can you tie the sleds to the four-wheeler and pull us?” or “Will you jump in the pond?”
You make gallons of wild honey each year and collect it yourself, despite being allergic to bees. “Aw, I just wear a suit,” you say. The wild hives that you track are a whole process. It can take days, with you baiting and following the worker twenty feet at a time.
“Once I track the hive they lead me to, I find the queen. She’s easy to spot, because she’s tall like you, and moves to different music. It’s like she’s listening to jazz while the workers are on their heavy metal.” You laugh and shake your head. “Pretty dumb, right? I don’t know, they been doin’ it for thousands of years though, and that’s why they say ‘a beeline,’ that’s where that comes from.”
“So you find the tree with the hive and then what do you do?” I ask. “Chop it down?”
“Aw no, I just mark it,” you mime carving your initials in a tree, “and then it’s mine.” You shrug again.
“And that’s it?” I wonder how you keep track of all your trees.
“That’s it. I don’t do nothin’ with it. It’s just I had the patience to go that distance. The honey stays. This is just so, I don’t know. I can find quiet, and follow through with something. Me and the trees, you know.”
“Okay,” I say, trying to imagine myself spending that kind of time to find something, only to leave it with a mark. To carve that moment into a length of bark that someone might run their fingers over one day, wondering who I was.
• • •
When my friends come to visit, they are mystified. They love that your friends just wander in and out, like Uncle Charlie with his many stories, who is not your uncle, and Papa Bob with his endless energy, who is not your papa.
“Jesus,” said my friend Debra, “it’s so familial. Maybe you can be cousin Zsa Zsa.” She ran her hand over the wall of your root cellar and marveled at the fact that you built it yourself from scraps of metal and brick you saved from a worksite. No one can believe that you make everything and share it with people you’ve just met. When you come in to say hello, you give her bottles of maple syrup and little bags of garlic from the garden. It’s always Christmas, you say.
Later on I’m puttering around making cookies and I almost don’t hear you knock. When I go to the front screen door I see you on the other side of it, holding up a six-foot black snake.
“Look who I found,” you say, lifting the snake by the neck. “I was coming up your front steps and he was on his way right to you.”
I shriek. You caught my snake, or actually, you caught the one I saw and now you have him captive.
“You’re a snake charmer too?” I ask him.
“Oh, stop,” you shoo me away, but like any man, you are happy to be the one who caught something he was chasing, and like certain women, I am happy for a man to find something that was about to hurt me and grab it by the neck.
I step out and touch the snake. He is so black that he shines green in the light. Coming closer I see he has bits of yellow. “Isn’t he a beauty?” you say.
“That’s the one,” I say. “How did you know he was coming for us?” Yesterday the babysitter called you because we saw him in the driveway. She turned white as a sheet and body-blocked me from going to take his picture. I wanted to see if it was listed in the poisonous category, but she’d screamed like a lunatic and pulled at me, stuttering that “They fly, some of them! No, really, I’m so for sure some fly! Like, into your face, fly!”
You were over in two seconds on your four-wheeler with a rifle. Ready to slay the flying snake that I think the babysitter had confused with the cartoon of the squirrel, because as you pointed out, they don’t fly. You couldn’t find the snake but came back the next day because, well, you weren’t sure why, but there he was. You must have been tuned in to that frequency that doesn’t display on my XM.
“Sometimes I just get a feeling,” you say, shrugging, which turns out to be an adorable gesture when one is holding a six-foot snake. It occurs to me that you’ve been through enough in your life to not be daunted by a serpent. Losing your two-year-old son to a drowning accident you said put you low enough to shake the devil’s hand, and you won’t be venturing that way again. That kind of grief must make a snake look silly.
“Is he poisonous?” I ask. Rendered powerless, its attack face looked a little desperate, like it would be willing to cut a deal.
“Nah, he’s afraid of you. Sure he’ll attack, but only if threatened. He’s important ’round here though. Kills the mice. Listen, though, you might want to think about cutting this maple down. If there’s a storm it’s gonna fall on your roof.”
I look at the tree. It doesn’t yield much syrup anymore but I still hate to fall it.
“Are we tapping on Valentine’s Da
y this year?” I ask.
“Yes indeed,” you said. “Are you still my assistant?”
I nod. “I live to hang those buckets,” I say. The sound of syrup doing its plunk-plunk and plinkity-ploink is an orchestral drumbeat that brings me a kind of quiet. It’s like a bizarre meditation to sit and listen. The first day you taught me to hang a bucket and drill into a maple, you waited until you’d found the perfect spot and made me sit there, eyes closed. I was surrounded by the sound of sweet draining from trees and falling on century-old tin.
“That’s a music you don’t hear in the city,” you told me. I opened my eyes after a few minutes and gave you the thumbs-up. The sun moved out from behind the clouds and you looked up. “Now do like this,” you’d said, taking my chin and turning it into the sunlight, saying, “Close your eyes again,” and I did and you asked, “You feel that? You feel that warmth on your face?” I said I did, and you said
That’s the hand of God there, touching you
We will probably hang a couple hundred buckets this winter. Last year I spent too much time making lunch for everyone and trying to get the kids’ snow boots on and off. This year I don’t want to miss it. We ride around in your pickup and tap trees for folks who have maples on their property but can’t tap themselves. We ride with the windows open listening to The Bridge on Sirius XM while the buckets slap against the side of your truck. I come home worn out and feeling like a regular pioneer, someone who could churn butter.
Right now I watch you climb back into your truck. You wave and shout over the engine. Thanking me for the morning, you say
I learn so much when you are listening, thank you
I wave and go onto my porch. I look across the creek where my new barn will be. I count the sugar maples in my yard and watch you grow smaller as you leave slowly down the hill, driving with your one free hand while out the open truck window the long black snake hangs, swaying.
Dear Gem,
Dear Mr. You Page 12
