Fifty Acres and a Poodle

by Jeanne Marie Laskas

  And, anyway, when I get anxious, I buy electronics. Stereos or speakers or computers or little hand-held gizmos that store phone numbers. Electronics calm me down. The more complicated, the better. When the world feels like too much, when friends are betraying you or family is all worked up over who should be doing what, or what it means if what happens to whom, there’s nothing like installing a new hard drive in your computer to calm you down. There’s nothing like A plugging into B and making C happen. It works! Something works. Something you can understand and touch. Electronic things offer the most concrete opportunity I know of taming chaos.

  So of course, as this whole farm dream started gathering steam, I went on an electronics binge. I got a new two-line telephone with dual keypad and caller ID and a digital answering machine built in. I got a personal photocopier. I got a new color printer. I got a color scanner. I got a new electronic personal postal system and an Iomega Jaz drive capable of storing one gigabyte per each removable cartridge. I’ve convinced myself that these are things that will make my home office a more productive place. I will get more writing done if I have these things. Well, maybe not the scanner. Why exactly do I need a color scanner? Um. Well, I can take pictures of Bob and scan them and then e-mail them to people! Yeah, that’s it. And who exactly will I e-mail pictures of Bob to? Well, I don’t know. In any case, it will be nice to have pictures of Bob in my computer. I can have Bob wallpaper on my Windows 95 desktop! I can have little Bob icons everywhere, and I can print out Bob greeting cards and Bob thank-you notes.

  See, there are a lot of things to do with a scanner. More to the point: There are a lot of ways of keeping Bob alive. I miss Bob. I need to bring Bob down here as soon as possible. At the moment he’s safe and sound at the South Side house, under the careful watch of Helen, the old lady across the street, who stops over to pet him and remind him how special he is. Helen is so great that way. As soon as I get this place organized, as soon as I actually move in here, I’ll bring Bob. I should bring Helen down, too. It will be a shame to move away from Helen.

  Anyway, electronics. I was talking about electronics. The electronics are a comfort. And out here on this farm, I think they’ll be a whole new kind of comfort. The idea of living in the country and having the environmentally friendly use of electronics bringing the world closer, but not really closer, is about the most perfect relationship to solitude I can imagine. I feel lucky to be making this move just as the Internet is coming into its own. It’s weird to think that I can be out here in the land of Joe Crowleys, and I can still have instant access to my editors in New York, the babes in Pittsburgh, my family in Philly, and all the libraries of the world.

  In fact, as soon as Alex gets these phone lines hooked up, the libraries of the world will be closer than my own mailbox. Well, our mailbox. Our mailbox is a half-hour walk away, all the way at the end of Wilson.

  I love the sound of that. “Our mailbox.” I’ve never had an “our mailbox” before. So many of life’s adventures are in the words.

  “I’m going to take Betty on a walk to our mailbox,” I say, grabbing her leash.

  “You and Betty have your own mailbox?” he says.

  “No, ours,” I say. “Yours and mine.”

  “Oh. Well, I love the sound of that,” he says.

  “Me, too!” I say. “I was just thinking that.”

  “No, I was.”

  “No, I was!” I say. “I thought it first.”

  “Well, I thought it yesterday.”

  “Well, I thought it five years ago.”

  “You did?”

  “Actually,” I say, “actually, yes.”

  He smiles. He smiles a fifty-acre smile. “But what about Marley?” he says.

  “Huh?”

  “The mailbox,” he says.

  “You want a mailbox for Marley?”

  “No. The walk. Aren’t you going to take Marley?”

  “Oh, they’ll just get tangled up in the leashes,” I say. “I hate that.”

  “You think you really need leashes out here?” he asks.

  “I don’t want the dogs to run off.”

  “All right,” he says. “Leave Marley here to help me with the phones.”

  “Come on, girly girl,” I say to Betty, clicking on her red leash with the reflector stripe. She looks at me. She looks at me like “You’re kidding, right?” She looks at me the same way I scowled at my mother when I was forced to wear one of those huge puffy orange life preservers before even getting in the car to go to the lake.

  “Betty, heel!” I say, as we head up the hill. Oh, this is fun. Are we going to yank our whole way to the mailbox? I should get a longer leash. I should get her a fifty-acre leash.

  BOOM!

  Okay, this is getting old.

  Betty ducks, makes herself short, and runs between my legs.

  “It’s all right, girl.” Poor Betty. She is not cut out for the firearm life.

  That gunfire sounds a lot closer than surely it must be. Surely there are laws keeping hunters a safe distance from people’s homes.

  Betty and I make it to the top of the hill. The booms have encouraged her to stop pulling on the leash. Funny how the sound of battle makes the troops huddle together. We pass through the upper gate. We take the left onto the dirt road, which is now more mud than dirt, more mush than dust, and soon the woods opens up like a picture window to the Scenery Hill scene. All brown now, it looks like a bowl filled with butterscotch squares and brownies. The cloud cover has flattened the light so this really does seem more 2-D than 3-D. It reminds me of something. It reminds me of being in my parents’ living room as a little girl. I am on the floor, lying on the scratchy rug. There is a flimsy movie screen towering over us. My parents are showing a slide show of their recent trip to England. We kids are trying to appreciate these sights, really trying. We must have been so very trying. We are sticking our hands up into the light, making hand puppets on the screen.

  Standing here with Betty, I do it. I put my hand up in the sky, waiting for the shadow to appear.

  But no shadow appears.

  “This is real, all right,” I say to Betty. “Can you believe this? Can you believe this is now the background of our lives?” But she seems a lot more interested in the foreground. She is sniffing uncontrollably, as if vacuuming the road.

  “Betty, look at this view!”

  Roo roo roo roo! she shouts. She senses something up ahead. Smells something? A rabbit? A groundhog?

  “Betty, heel!”

  Just then, from around the bend, comes the none-too-subtle object of Betty’s barks: two guys in orange. Orange hats, orange suspenders, orange overalls, orange everything. And guns. Guns strapped all the hell over them.

  Well, wow. Why do I suddenly feel like I’m a tourist in Bosnia having made a very wrong turn? Why do I feel like Gilligan stumbling into some scary native village where everybody has painted faces? (“We come in peace!”)

  The men approach.

  “Hey,” one says. “Where is your orange hat?”

  “Hey,” I say. It seems to be the way people greet one another around here.

  Roo roo roo roo, Betty is saying. She is embarrassing me. This is horrible. She is not showing off her princess-self.

  “Quiet, girl. Quiet!”

  “What are you doing out here without orange?” the one man says.

  “Um”

  “You want to get shot?”

  No, I don’t. And I’m trying not to stare at the big knife attached to his belt, either.

  “You can’t walk around here without orange.”

  But this is my road. My property is on either side of this road. Does he mean to say I can’t walk around my home without worrying about getting shot? Wasn’t that supposed to be an inner-city kind of worry?

  Betty has quieted. But she is sniffing the men. They are trying to figure out what to do about her.

  “Her name is Betty,” I say. “She won’t bite.”

  “Is she sick
?” one says.

  “Huh?”

  “Why does she need to be on a leash?” he says.

  “Well, um.” And I can feel Betty looking at me. I can feel her saying See?

  “Pretty eyes,” the one hunter says, bending over to pet her.

  “Oh, she’s a movie star,” I say. “Can’t you tell?”

  He smiles.

  “Ma’am,” the first one says, “you really should wear orange if you’re going to walk around like this.” He extends his hand. “My name’s Joe,” he says. He is a tall, grandfatherly man with beautiful chiseled cheekbones and a wide brow. He has the markings of the Eastern European men I know so well and trust. Lithuanian, I think. “And this is my son, Joe,” he says.

  More Joes? Just how the hell many Joes live in this place? (Am I on Candid Camera or something?)

  “Are you the new people?” Joe, the son, asks. He doesn’t look like his father. He has jet black hair and a jet black beard neatly trimmed to give his features an English tidiness.

  I nod and point toward the farm, even though apparently he and everybody else around here already knows where I live.

  “You picked a beautiful spot,” he says. “We’ve walked about every inch of your land.”

  They have? What for?

  Betty is sniffing again. Joe gets on one knee and strokes her ears. “A movie star, eh, girl?” he says.

  “Did you ever watch Gilligan’s Island ?” I ask.

  “Huh? Well, um. Sure.”

  “Well, doesn’t she remind you of Ginger?”

  “Um,” he says. He smiles. “Sure she does.”

  It’s beautiful, I think. It’s just plain beautiful how 1960s TV can form a bond between even the most diverse cultures.

  “The people who used to live here,” the father says, finally, “they never minded if we hunted.”

  He looks at me. He seems to know this is a sensitive subject. He says, “So, um, you mind if we hunt on your property?”

  Our property? But …we live on our property. Or we’re going to. Our property is for people. Surely there must be laws about not hunting where people live. Where, exactly, does hunting occur? Isn’t it something that goes on somewhere else? Plus, I mean, dead animals? Doesn’t he know who I am? Or who I used to be? I mean, there is no way. There is no way I am going to let anybody stalk God’s innocent little creatures on my property. Mine is to be a safe haven, a sanctuary, a place of love and happiness for all living things. I mean, hunting? On my property. On our property? I’ll have him know that I am, or I was, a crusader for the eternal life of all animals. I blessed myself, in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, every time I saw a dead animal on the side of the road.

  I’m not sure how to explain all of this.

  So I say, “My property?” It comes out like a chirp.

  He says it’s one of the best spots around. “Do you know how many deer we pulled out of there over the years?”

  No, I don’t. I ask him how come there are so many deer there.

  “Because of the multiflora, probably,” he says.

  “The what?”

  “The multiflora rose bushes,” he says. “You got the most around.”

  We do?

  Multiflora rose, he explains, is a prolific thicket of flowers and thorns. A menace to farmers that also happens to provide a lush habitat for deer, birds, rabbits, and many other of God’s innocent little creatures. Apparently, our farm is covered with it. I had sort of noticed it before. I mean, it’s part of the green. Part of the postcard. Maybe a little darker shade of green when you look from far away. I just figured it was something you mowed in the spring.

  He laughs. “You can’t mow that stuff,” he says, pointing to a bush, which is about ten feet tall, on the side of the road. He notes the thorns, the angriest thorns, half an inch long spread an inch apart on a long, slender branch that looks like a whip. He notes the tears all over his hunting jacket from these thorns.

  “So how do you get rid of it?” I ask. (I have dancing visions of all-new tractor attachments in my head.)

  “Multiflora?” He shakes his head, looks down. “Heh heh.”

  His son says, “Heh heh.”

  I tell him, well, my plan is to put sheep on the fields. Perhaps the sheep will eat it.

  He says, “Where are you from, ma’am?”

  I point north. Way, way north. “The city,” I say.

  “Ah,” he says. “That explains a lot.”

  And so I listen for a long time while he offers multiflora advice. He tells me about poisons. He strongly suggests I seek professional help. He is a very nice man. We talk about tractor parts. We talk about sheep. He offers a dead deer in exchange for the privilege of hunting on my property.

  “Ah,” I say. Now, there’s something I hadn’t figured on. I wonder if any of the babes have ever been offered a dead anything in exchange for anything.

  A dead deer. Hunters on my property. It occurs to me that I am really not prepared for this discussion. Up until a day ago, I’d never even known anyone who hunted. Up until a day ago, I’d never even considered the possibility of meeting a hunter.

  I stand here thinking I should speak my mind. Because there is no way. There is no way I’m going to allow hunting anywhere near me. And I am a woman of the 1990s, active and independent-minded, fully in charge of my life. It is so important to me that I stand behind my beliefs and be heard, be known. This is a golden opportunity for me to spread my magnificent wings and soar.

  I say: “I’ll have to ask my husband…” It comes out like a series of chirps, dying bird chirps.

  “Well, heck, we’ll just stop on by and meet your husband sometime,” Joe says.

  “That will be … nice,” I say. And soon we say our good-byes and I head home, opting not to bother with the mailbox. Because now I’m worried about getting shot. Now I’m worried about stumbling on a dead deer. Now I’m worried about turning into a wussy woman who hides behind a husband she doesn’t even have. “Betty, come!” I am saying. Now it’s me yanking her along. “We have to hurry, girl.” I need to get out of here.

  By the time I get back to the house, I’m itching like crazy. Alex is in the driveway talking to two men. “This is Joe Crowley,” Alex says to me. “He’s come to look at the driveway.”

  “Hey,” he says.

  I look at the other man.

  “And this is his assistant, Joe Crowley,” Alex says.

  “Oh,” I say. “Um. Wow.” Joe brought his dad? What is going on?

  “We’re no relation,” the first Joe Crowley says. “He just works for me sometimes.”

  I stand there doing Joe Crowley arithmetic in my head.

  “Joe is the son of Joe the mechanic,” Alex says, pointing to the second Joe Crowley. “The one with the divorce papers?”

  “Oh,” I say. Alex is looking awfully at ease with this Joe Crowley proliferation.

  “I have a friend,” the first one says. “I’m going to bring him over.”

  “A friend?”

  “He sells limestone, too,” he says.

  “Another Joe Crowley?” I ask.

  “What?” he says.

  “Oh, I wasn’t sure what we were talking about.”

  “My friend has been hauling a lot longer,” he says. “I’m just getting started, and I’m not sure how much to bring. This is a big job.”

  “Oh,” I say.

  “Well, then,” Alex says.

  And so Joe and Joe hop in Joe’s white truck, which has a red hood apparently transplanted from another truck, and they roll down the driveway, toward the hills, back into the mystery that they emerged from.

  “Don’t you think the first Joe Crowley would have told us he also had a son Joe Crowley?” Alex asks.

  “He does?”

  “Yes. That short one was Joe’s son.”

  “He was?”

  “Yes! Aren’t you following?”

  “Not even a little bit. But speaking of Joes …
” I tell him about Joe and Joe the hunters. I tell him that if any hunters stop by, he should pretend he’s my husband.

  “Huh?” he says.

  “Just cover for me, okay?” And then I tell him about the multiflora, which is an even more complicated story. I tell him the take-home message of this day, thus far: “We are stupid.”

  “Oh,” he says.

  “Really stupid.” And this multiflora is a symbol of our stupidity. We bought fifty acres of thorns. Thorns we can’t get rid of. Thorny weeds that attract both wild animals and bloodthirsty hunters.

  “Oh, come on,” Alex says. “I’m sure we can get rid of it. How hard can it be?”

  He heads into the barn. He gets out a rake. A rake? “I want to see something,” he says. He goes over to a bush, a great towering thicket of thorns nearly twice his height. He pushes back the branches with the rake and looks at the base of the plant. It’s thick. It’s, like, a foot thick.

  “See that?” he says, like he’s got it all figured out. “Wait here.”

  And in a few moments he is back with the chain saw. The chain saw? He’s gonna cut these things down one by one? There is an entire forest of these things.

  “Okay, now you hold the branches back with the rake, and I’ll crawl under there and cut it down,” he says.

  “Right-o.”

  I hold the rake while he tries to get the chain saw started. I’ve never actually been this close to a chain saw. There is an actual chain on that saw. Fancy that. Who in the world would ever have thought that a chain would be a good cutting mechanism? I have no urge to try the chain saw, or even figure out how the chain saw works. I am quite surprised at how little interest I have in all this mechanical gear. This is not like me. I must really be overwhelmed.

  Zzzzzzt. Zzzzzzt. Alex gets that monster running. He grits his teeth holding this chain saw. This chain saw seems to awaken a whole new manliness in him. Maybe this is what chain saws are for.

  Zzzzzzt. Zzzzzzt.

  Nothing. I’m here holding this bush back with this rake, and he’s lying down there on his belly with this monster machine with spinning teeth and—nothing. The chain saw does not seem able to cut through the multiflora trunk.