by Amy Hempel
While Dave heated coals Dr. Bob took the smaller boys off to the pond with nets. Just at dark, the boys began scooping up fish—tiny, flipping like silver dollars.
“My mother used to fry everything she found,” Dr. Bob was telling the boys. “She’d throw a hundred of these into the pan, but everything always tasted like bacon,” he said.
The shirkers got up a volleyball game while Pete and I got the bonfire going. Even with the fire, we had to put on sweaters, a fact that had Pete looking ahead already to fall. “The first cold snap,” he said, “I get in my car and drive south till I can roll down the window.”
Ben studied the steak he was asked to do black and blue for Jeff Taylor’s date, a woman who showed real estate and who kept up her nails. She had brought a locally baked boysenberry pie and, inexplicably, a bag of candy corn, which I saw some of us bite off white-orange-yellow, and others of us bite off yellow-orange-white.
Two grills over, Dave turned hamburgers and suffered the children’s humor, evinced in sidesplitting riddles such as this: What do you have if you have fourteen oranges in one hand and eight grapefruit in the other? and the children’s shrieking laughter all but drowning out the answer, which was, I believe, “Big hands.”
“I love barbecue sauce,” Dave was saying, “especially when it’s homemade.”
“Yeah, that’s right,” Fay said. “I just put it in this Kraft’s squeeze bottle for convenience.”
Fay turned to one of Dr. Bob’s flock. “How much you want on that chicken leg, Will?”
“Not too much,” Will said, holding out his paper plate. “Just enough much.”
The fire was drawing some notice by then. Jeff Taylor, a kidder you could count on at holiday time for gifts of coasters that said “Eat, drink, and remarry,” announced that later in the evening we would gather around the fire and sacrifice a virgin, amending his remarks after the requisite silence to “sacrifice an old maid” instead.
That late in the season we had our timing down. We were the model of capable neighbors, filling our plates in an orderly manner, then scrambling for places in the sand close to the flames.
Dr. Bob waved Dave and Fay over to a pot of steamers.
“I didn’t know you brought steamers,” Dave said. “I’m warning you all, I inhale these things.”
“Don’t worry,” Fay said, securing a few of the clams for herself. “I can stand on my own two feet and fight for what is mine.”
A call went out to Dr. Bob to please start up a sing-along. Dr. Bob protested. “I couldn’t carry a tune if it had handles,” he said.
“Then come here by the fire and tell the kids a ghost story,” Dave suggested.
“I don’t want to scare anybody,” Dr. Bob said.
“You already have!” said Will, and the other children screamed their approval.
Dr. Bob was something of a medical inventor, esteemed by every one of us although we could not say exactly what it was he had invented. He was the one who had tended to Fay two summers earlier after her horse, spooked by an umbrella over a roadside farm stand, threw her into a ditch.
Fay had complained only of a headache where her head had hit the dirt, but Dr. Bob knew to take her in fast. In his car, Fay’s eyes had crossed. Asked for her name, Fay gave her maiden name. By the time they got to the hospital, Fay’s speech was down to sounds—the sounds of crows and owls.
There were lessons to be learned wherever one looked, which is not to suggest that those lessons were learned. Witness the Henkins’ boy, Bill, who left a party drunk, then discovered he had left his glasses behind only after he had pulled out of the drive and was headed for the highway home. Rather than return for his glasses, he later explained he had driven home really fast so that he would make it back before he had an accident.
That was something I remembered when Caitlin told us what else the psychic had said, which was that, as a fox, Caitlin had been killed when she was struck by a speeding car on the beach access road. What Caitlin wonders now is, What if she hits a fox with her car?
Then Dave said, “Remember the deer?”
“Jesus, Dave,” Fay said, and got up and walked in the dark direction of the ocean.
Dave dropped the subject, but everyone knew the story as vividly as if we had been the one who hit the deer, then knelt by the side of the road and held the deer’s dying head in our lap, and shielded with one hand the eyes that blinked at each pair of passing headlights, affording the animal that tiny measure of relief until a state trooper showed up with a gun.
In what she must have perceived as an awkward silence, Jeff Taylor’s date jumped up and began to collect our empty Coke and beer cans, stuffing them into a plastic bag for trash.
Then we heard Fay calling out to Dave to hurry. Dave threw his paper plate into the fire and all of us took off running toward the shore.
We found Fay standing in the surf, surveying a rare phosphorescence in the tide. She took a step and scattered sparks, then bent over and shook her flat hands underwater like a miner at a watery mother lode panning for gold with her hands. We watched Dave run into the glowing shoals and take hold of his wife from behind. We watched both of them go over so that they were sitting on the rocky bottom. When a stray beach dog ran in to join them, we could see—phosphorescence clinging to his fur—the outline of his legs as they paddled underwater. When Dave and Fay stood up again, holding on to each other, the sudden phosphorescence was gone.
What was left of the summer passed quietly, as if in deference to that night as one befitting summer’s end. It was a time when the only pain was inflicted by bees, and an easy remedy—three kinds of weeds pressed together and rubbed on the sting—was right in your own backyard.
Tumble Home
Weekend
The game was called on account of dogs—Hunter in the infield, Tucker in the infield, Bosco and Boone at first base. First-grader Donald sat down on second base, and Kirsten grabbed her brother’s arm and wouldn’t let him leave third to make his first run.
“Unfair!” her brother screamed, and the dogs, roving umpires, ran to third.
“Good power!” their uncle yelled, when Joy, in a leg cast, swung the bat and missed. “Now put some wood to it.”
And when she did, Joy’s designated runner, Cousin Zeke, ran to first, the ice cubes in his gin and tonic clacking like dog tags in the glass.
And when Kelly broke free from Kirsten and this time came in to make the run, members of the Kelly team made Tucker in the infield dance on his hind legs.
“It’s not who wins—” their coach began, and was shouted down by one of the boys, “There’s first and there’s forget it.”
Then Hunter retrieved a foul ball and carried it off in the direction of the river.
The other dogs followed—barking, mutinous.
Dinner was a simple picnic on the porch, paper plates in laps, the only conversation a debate as to which was the better grip for throwing shoes.
After dinner, the horseshoes were handed out, the post pounded in, the rules reviewed with a new rule added due to falling-down shorts. The new rule: Have attire.
The women smoked on the porch, the smoke repelling mosquitoes, and the men and children played on even after dusk when it got so dark that a candle was rigged to balance on top of the post, and was knocked off and blown out by every single almost-ringer.
Then the children went to bed, or at least went upstairs, and the men joined the women for a cigarette on the porch, absently picking ticks engorged like grapes off the sleeping dogs. And when the men kissed the women good night, and their weekend whiskers scratched the women’s cheeks, the women did not think shave, they thought: stay.
Church Cancels Cow
Pheasant feathers in a plastic jack-o’-lantern—this is the way people decorate graves in October across from my house. In winter they tie wreaths to the stones like evergreen pendants in December. The halved-apple faces of owls on a branch will spook you, walking at dusk as I do with my dog who fi
nds the one real pumpkin, small on a stem, and carries it off and flings it and retrieves, leaving on the pumpkin the marks of her teeth, the only desecration in these rows of tended plots.
Or not, according to the woman at the wheel of the red Honda Civic that appears from behind the Japanese maple and proceeds past the hedge of arborvitae where she slows and then rolls down her window to say, “You should keep that dog on a leash.” She says, “That dog left faces on my mother’s grave.”
When I realize she means feces, I say my dog didn’t do it. She says yes, my dog did it. I say, “Did you see this dog leave feces on the grave?” She says, “I found faces on my mother’s grave. I had to clean them off.” I say there are other dogs that walk here. I say my dog goes in the woods before the place where the headstones start.
I leave her talking to me from her car. I walk away with my dog in the direction of my house, and she follows in her car so I turn back around and lead her through the cemetery and sit down on a random grave and take a wire brush from the pocket of my coat and begin to groom my dog, brushing slowly from the ends up to the skin so as not to tug and hurt her. I stay where I am until the woman drives away, and I stay until she reappears. When she leaves the second time, she leaves rubber in the road.
For days I see her car across the street, parked on the little-used access road, her at the wheel just watching my house where my dog patrols the yard, unmistakable dog. I write down her license plate number, so what. I pull weeds with my back to her. And after thoughts of worse things than bricks coming flying through the windows of my house, I pull off grass-stained gloves and cross to her car and say, “You know, I’m on your side about this. I have relatives buried here, and I don’t want to find faces on their graves.”
She says, “You have relatives buried here?”
For peace of mind I will lie about any thing at any time.
In fact, she says, she has counted three dogs the other day from her car. Like counting cows, in the game I played in cars when the family went out on long drives. My brother and I were told to count cows in the fields we passed along the way, me counting cows on one side of the road, my brother counting cows on the other. But if we passed a church, the person on whose side the church appeared had to start their count over again.
Why did church cancel cow? The question was not a question back then, and when I try to think why, the best I can guess is—because we were having fun? Until I mention it to my brother who says, “Don’t you remember? You don’t remember. It was cemetery, not church, that cancels cow.”
And why it comes to me now.
The Children’s Party
“Bye-bye,” the baby said, his voice a little bell. “Bye-bye,” he waved, as we arrived for the party at the lake.
We were stiff after driving from our house hours south in a town overrun by tourists. We put gifts on a table in the hall. The three children all had birthdays the same week.
The baby’s father showed us to the porch. He poured us drinks, said, “This’ll change your handwriting.”
The others were friends from across the lake who came up for a month every summer, tying their bull’s-eye or turnabout to a cleat and hopping out onto a dock.
Between the back porch and the lake was a well-kept lawn with a grill, coals just lit, and a large decorated paper-bag piñata strung up in a shimmering willow. The baby’s mother and a woman I didn’t know called me over to join them beside the piñata. The woman I didn’t know asked if I had a match. I didn’t see the cigarette she held, and thought she meant to light the piñata. I told her, and we all doubled over picturing melting gummy bears dripping like hot wax onto the outstretched hands of the blindfolded children beneath it.
“Some little boy’s scrotum get nailed to a tree?” asked one of the children’s fathers from the porch. “I see three women laughing like this”—he bent over, knees pressed together, and held his crotch—“I look for a scrotum nailed to a tree.”
Farther out, naked children pushed each other off a dock into the bracing lake. At the far end of the dock was a small child’s slide poised above deep water. “I just put it there to scare his mother,” said the baby’s father, chuckling diabolically: “Look—he can go in by himself!”
Tony Peebles—handsome, hearty next-door neighbor—still had not arrived.
“Heart attack,” someone said.
“Car wreck,” someone else said.
“Heart attack then car wreck,” came a chorus.
“Talking to someone at the store,” said his wife. “He went there an hour ago. I was telling Judy, he goes to pick up the steaks, there could be a stuffed effigy of the butcher behind the counter, Tony’d engage it in conversation.”
Only a couple of us knew what was taking so long. The children’s dog had been killed the month before. The children felt it would be unfair to get another dog—unfair to their former dog. The children were in pain, and I felt I knew what to say. I said to their father, quoting a lovely poem, “Tell them this: ‘The need for the new love is faithfulness to the old.’”
He said, “That’s what I used to tell myself when I cheated on my ex-wife.”
But he had agreed, and the men were picking up the children’s new dog, a pup from a nearby camp.
“I hope none of you are allergic,” said the baby’s mother, moving aside a vase of wildflowers to make room for a cake on a plate. “It’s an allergy-fest out there.
“This cake, by the way, is real chocolate,” she assured us. “I’m sick of trying to force carob on you, and all of you spitting it out behind my back.” Yet we saw that our health-conscious hostess was still serving the dreaded organic fig bars from the health food store in town. “Colon blasters,” we called them. The baby’s father had said that Colin Blaster sounded like the name of an English soccer coach.
“Tony’s not back yet?” one of his friends asked.
“And he made Bruce go with him,” Bruce’s wife said. “Tony probably told him there was something in town he had to show him, and he took Bruce to town and the thing he had to show him was a stop sign.”
We ate deviled eggs while we waited for Tony and Bruce to return with the steaks. On the drive up, I told a friend, we’d seen blueberries wild by the side of the road and birch bark peeling from the trunks of trees with towering crowns, but so far we’d seen no moose.
“If you come out with us in the canoe tomorrow, you’ll see plenty of moose,” she said. She described the stretch of river we would travel and the numbers of moose we would see. “But no males with antlers. They’re shy. You have to wait. You see them come out to look for females in the fall.”
The children called for us to watch them play with eggs. It was the game wherein you toss a raw egg gently to your partner a few feet away. Your partner tosses it back, and you widen the gap between you. The toss and retreat is repeated until all but one of the pairs has broken their eggs.
We watched, sipping drinks, until the baby’s father called, “Eyes right!” and appeared in the yard to the right of the house carrying a baseball bat. The children screamed with laughter as they took turns pitching raw eggs.
“Jackpot!” they screamed, as the baby’s father connected, splattering them all, including the neighbor’s dog who had stopped by to cruise the grill.
Mr. Howell, emboldened by the display, retrieved from his car a sack of sheathed hunting knives. But other of the parents blew the whistle on this—high-stakes pin-the-tail-on-the-donkey not the same as batting eggs—and we strained to hear his gnarly utterances as he returned the knives to his car.
“Deadlines,” one of the birthday girls announced, excusing herself from the games. “I have deadlines,” she said soberly, inexplicably adjusting a gorilla mask over her face.
On the porch, in a high chair, the baby sent a bowl of Cheerios sailing off the tray.
“Dinner is shoved,” said his mother, kneeling to wipe up the mess. She returned from the kitchen with a jar of baby food and a clean spoon. “What�
�s he eating now?” asked the baby’s father. He picked up the jar and mimed alarm as he “read” the label: “Deadly poison?!” This made the children spit potato salad till their parents said get a grip.
Down on the dock, a brother and sister began yelling at each other until the girl ran to their mother crying, “Dan hit me back!”
“Dan has a temper. He takes after me,” said their little brother sagely.
“You mean you take after him,” said their mother. “He was here first.”
The baby’s mother picked up a small inflated raft in the shape of a giraffe. She pointed the long spotted neck at her husband and winked at him through the two small holes in the seat. “Imagine being able to fit your legs through these,” she said.
“I thought they were for your breasts,” her husband said.
Bruce’s wife shushed him. We heard the distant, slightly hysterical cry of a loon on the lake.
“People think they’re related to ducks,” said a local for our benefit, “but they’re really much closer to penguins.”
“You go in the lake,” said Mr. Howell, “watch out for leeches. Giant leeches. I had to nudge a moose this morning with my boat—he was eating the lily pads I planted, and he didn’t move when I yelled at him to stop. When you ram a moose from behind, you got to be prepared for more than contact. He had a row of leeches on his butt swung like fringe.”
“You see the fox last night?” a neighbor asked.
“I seen a fox grab a leech off a moose’s butt—” said Mr. Howell before we could shut him up.
In the absence of Tony and Bruce and the steaks, we refilled our glasses and shared the children’s hot dogs. I heard the baby laughing from inside the house, and followed the sound to where he was having his bath. His mother made an ice-cream cone of suds and pretended to lick it. “Aaaagh!” she said, and the baby laughed again. I knelt beside the tub and scooped up a handful of suds. I brought it to my mouth and licked. “Aaaagh!” I sputtered to the baby’s delight, squinching my face in dismay.
