Having Everything Right (16 page)

“Lots of homesteaders came who never stayed. Rain gets to you, mold in your socks. Fog so thick, babies cut their teeth on it. And one man, after years of trying to prove up his claim by Lily Lake, left the country without telling a soul. When the neighbors came by in the morning, his cabin was empty and that was all.

“Folks called his place the Red Bungalow—one big red-walled room, with a little sleeping room off the back. Right away it was the community's gathering place. That's where people came for parties. We could set up table and share a meal, then push everything out of the way and dance. Someone always had a fiddle: fire up the chimney, forget your troubles, and dance. Pretty soon, kids would be asleep in the back room, and then you may as well dance till dawn. No reason to risk your neck on the mud road by dark.

“One night when I was a kid, I woke up when something stopped the music. I came out into the big room rubbing my eyes. All the big folks stood there listening, looking at the ceiling or the fire, and some had moved to the open door or out onto the porch. I got out there too, before my mother could see me, and standing by the rail I could hear some pain squall way out across the water. There wasn't any storm, but it was blowing like it usually does, and a little rain, so you couldn't hear real clear, but something was pretty sorry out in the dark. First you'd hear wind buffet the roof, and then little waves slap the lake edge, and then that sound.

“I heard a man say it must be bear in a trap—that's about the direction where the Mercer boys ran their line. It must have been around
midnight, and too dark to go chasing bear. ‘Best let her be till light,' the man said. And pretty soon, the fiddle killed that sound, and everyone went in to dance some more.

“I got my blanket out on the porch and sat there listening. I'd doze a while, and then the wind or the fiddle would die away enough to wake me with that sound. It had some anger in it, but mostly plain sorry. In my head half asleep I could see the bear stop to listen to our fiddle, and stand up like we did to hear him cry. I saw him prance around, but I was sleeping. Once I heard people calling my name, but when my mother found where I was, she just bent down over me, left a taste in the air between whiskey and a rose, and went back to the dance. Long night then. The fiddler got drunk and the music changed. A man on an errand fell shouting in the lake, and seemed like some folks wore different clothes than they started with. The dancing faltered. It was still plenty dark, but everyone started packing to go home and milk the cows.

“Once the dancing really stopped, we heard the bear calling all the time, and it seemed to get on people's nerves. When one of the Mercer boys showed up with a gun, the other kids woke up. The Mercer boy's eyes were wild and happy, and the kids were all crazy to go with him. Someone picked up a fatwood torch. We started off slow, stumbling in the dark, then getting so close to the kid with the torch we nearly got singed. We went half around the lake, and came on the bear thrashing in a big dished hole he'd dug. We were pretty close and we could taste the bear smell that spooks horses. Then his eyes glittered. The trap chain hung shiny where he'd gnawed it, and the tree was stripped white. His right front paw was limp inside the jaws. Then he stood up.

“I had seen my father stand like that—when a stump would not come free from earth, or when a calf died for all the help he gave it. There was something in the bear's shoulders, though, besides fatigue. Something I wanted. Maybe every kid there felt the same, but I saw the bear looking at me alone.

“The bear turned to the one with the gun, and the Mercer boy put a bullet through its face. The bear dropped like a sack and lay still. For some reason, I was holding a stick, and the boy told me to go see if the bear was dead. I took the torch in my left hand, the stick in my right, and eased up toward the bear's wallow from the side. It was flattened in the shadow there. As I came up, it lay sprawled on its back like a furry open hand. I could see the wet glitter of one eye, one eye on me. Then it clouded, a sheen went out of it. I sat down on the edge of its grave. That's all.”

Years after I heard that story, my sister camped by Lily Lake. She didn't know about Grizzly Bear, or the Red Bungalow, then long sunk to earth. She had heard other stories. She had heard that a lonely woman guarded the place, and blew out the tires of trespassers with telepathy. She had heard only travelers with respect might stay past dark. My sister had heard enough to brighten her mind through a long night. Maybe this helped her hear the stamping, the chain of the dancer. It wasn't surf pounding to the west, she told me. Not her heart that woke her first. She looked into the moonlit face of her companion. Both knew it. Something irrepressible was trying to be remembered.

East, up Separation Creek in the Three Sisters Wilderness, my wife and I met a thin summer bear the second day of our honeymoon. We were in the sweet daze of that event, sidling along with packs too heavy and heads too light. How many bottles of wine does it take, how few words? We grazed on huckleberries as we went. And here came a bear doing the same. We passed each other on that fragrant trail in sun. We held a trust, a kinship in that month. Berries and honey, woman and bear—the world fit.

I think now of that mythic room in the voice of Louisa Smith, and the fog-walled room at Lily Lake. By such stories, we keep listening to the world itself. Next time we invite the bear to dance, neither partner needs to die.

My brother taught me the last story. Hiking the Three Sisters Wilderness alone, he saw the amorous bears rolling about in that meadow up by Lauder Mountain—the lupine crushed, Indian paintbrush flattened in their loving swathe, how he nibbled her ear and she smacked him with her paw, there in the fall of fat September. My brother crept away on hands and knees into the hemlock thicket, left them be. Sunlight struck the dancing bears, apart from our human way: this wearing of shoes, and words, and nations.

T
HE
B
ARN AND THE
B
EES

My parents and I were driving along Boone's Ferry Road early one Sunday morning with a ripe load of horse manure in the back of the family station wagon when we saw a hand-lettered sign nailed to a telephone pole: “2 × 4 is 25 cents, 2 × 6 is 50 cents.” There was so much fog on the glass we had to open the side window to see an arrow in red crayon pointing up a road to the west. Even the steam from the hot stuff behind us couldn't blunt the chill that went through me. Up that road was a barn I had admired since I was a child, and I knew it had fallen. In the same moment I felt the thrill of honest greed.

Twenty minutes later I stood alone in the fumbled ruin of red boards, straw, and the sweet stink of old dairy. No one was around, except the swallows careening overhead where the eaves had been and
their nests hung once. Like me, they clung to the vacancy of the familiar. Blackberry vines had held the barn upright for years, and now that it was down the vines trailed over the tangle, dangling in a veil from the south and east walls that still stood crooked somehow. I scrambled up a slanted timber wedged into the pile to survey the place. The deep litter I stood on had a fragile architecture to it, not quite fallen clear down in a crisscross balance of long sagging rafters propped in chaos, with bent tin roofing over half-collapsed rooms where the side bays had been, the rusted stanchions wrenched into twisted contraptions, and everywhere tangles of baling wire and splintered fir siding. The heap made a ticking sound as it settled in the heat. There seemed to be too much light on it all, the fragrant old mystery bleached away and done. Then I heard a low hum from the dark southeast corner.

Lifting a jagged sheet of tin aside, I clambered into the long tunnel of slanted posts and rafters down the nave, stepping from one nail-studded board to the next, putting my body through a snake's contortions without a snake's grace, every pop and squeak of wood on wood a warning, every ping of corrugated tin in the deadfall. I passed a boat filled with hay, its bow beached on a bale that sprouted green, its keel turned to earth. I passed a wagon with no wheels, split in half where a beam had dropped through its bed to the floor. Mice scattered before me, and a bumblebee struggled out from a ball of wool, its nest that had fallen gently to a new niche in the rusted skull-hollow of a drinking pan. I had to inhabit what was left of this palace before it came all the way down, and the bees were beckoning me from their half-shattered hive now thirty feet ahead.

Others were in church. I was in a trance. In the honey-sweet gloom of the back corner I stepped up onto a patch of floor. This dusty vestibule had the privacy of prayer, the solitude of visible history. The combs hung down from a four-by-four rough-cut brace on the wall, and the bees massed quietly there, working. The small back door opened onto
acres of blackberry, and a thorned vine held it ajar with a double turn around the knob. Inside, a scatter of oats glittered on the threshold. A wheelbarrow stood mounded with jars. A currycomb worn down to nothing hung from a nail on the wall where each knot-hole was mended with the rusted lid from a tin can. If I stirred, my boot would crush broken glass, so I held still and watched the bees climb each others' backs to toil, to turn over pollen and flower-sap in their mouths in a flurry of wings and touch. The blunt, heavier shapes of a few drones waited among them to be fed—so inept they could not lick their own food from underfoot. The queen must have been on the inner combs, laying like mad at this season for the main summer honeyflow. From one mating flight, one meeting with a drone, she bore children all her life. If I stood in the dark, they would not bother me. It was light and work each gave her custom to, spinning out through the open door on the quickly tightening spiral of her errand.

I crawled out and away, the fragrance of the hive, the quiet of that dark corner filling me. Across a field, in what must originally have been the farmhouse, a neighbor of the barn in a heap gave me its owner's phone number, along with a sad look. “They finally got it,” she said through the screen door, as she brushed a wisp of hair aside. “I was hoping they'd forget to.” She was going to say more, but a child shouted and she closed the door instead. Back home, I called and asked for Peter. I knew it was best not to talk about money at first.

“Howdy,” I said. “I was wondering about your plans for the scrap from that barn off Boone's Ferry Road.”

“Yeah?” he said. “Well I don't want anyone in there, the shape it's in. On account of my liability.”

“I can understand that,” I said, “but I noticed some boards piled out in front, and there
was
a sign about it.”

“Sign? I didn't put up any sign. Must have been the guy I hired to tear it down. We're stalled on account of some bees in there.”

“I can take care of those bees for you.”

“Listen, you take care of those bees, and you can take anything you like. I've got to get everything out of there. Some guy complained to the County about it being a fire hazard, and they gave me a week. But do you really think there's anything worth saving? What do you want it for?”

“I want to build a barn.”

In the short light at five a.m. I was there in my bee-gloves and veil, mechanic's coveralls and tall rubber boots, threading my way down the tunnel of boards and tin by memory and luck. I carried a hive-box and a spray bottle of water and a soft brush. Bees never sleep, but they generally don't fly when they're chilled before dawn. I found them as they would be at that hour, packed together on the combs with a low, sociable hum. Once the sun hit that wall behind them, they would fly to work.

I stepped on the wrong board, the architectural balance above me groaned and shifted, a dozen bees lifted off with an altered pitch to their buzz, and the whole hive quickened. In their sudden, ordered turmoil, I was seeing a mood-change inside a friend's brain, something naked and fair. I waited without a word. Bits of straw flickered away as the guard-bees settled back onto the wall and climbed into the mass that quieted with their return. The warm scent of wax and honey came my way. Through the doorway, mist settled over the gray sweep of the blackberry meadow. It was in full blossom, and the bees must have been working it hard. I could see the white wax over capped honey cells whenever the mass of bees parted like a retreating wave from the comb's upper rim. There would be sweet enough to keep them alive once I dampened their wings, carved away the comb entire, and swept the chilled bees into the hive-box I carried. Through my veil I saw them in the cleft they had chosen, their little city compact with purpose in a neglected place.

By dawn I had them boxed, sealed tight and humming in the shade beside my car. A few had escaped my work, had followed me, then doubled back with the buzz of anger sinking to a different note. No one is quite sure what stray bees do when the home hive is destroyed and the swarm disappears without them. They might follow other bees to a foreign hive and try to take on its scent and be admitted. Or they might hang around the old vacancy, working the local blossoms and resting under a leaf until their wings are too frayed to hold in the air. Bees die when they sting, or when steady work finally shatters their wings.

Several days after the wall that had harbored the hive came down, I would still see a few bees hovering precisely where the combs had been. At mid-afternoon I would turn over a board with the print of wax across its grain—some panel or brace that had boxed in the hive—and find a solitary bee fingering the pattern like a disbelieving relative reading by Braille the name new-carved on a tombstone. I shared their nostalgia for a shape in the air. And so did others, in their own ways. As I worked on that tangled lumber pile, neighbors came by in little groups or alone to leave with me some story about the barn, and to seek some scrap of it to carry away.

First came three boys to watch me work, to pick their way around the heap so glorious with its ramps and tunnels, its pedestals of triumph and hollows of secrecy. When the pile shifted under them, they leaped off and skittered away, then came back with their father from across the road. They wanted a treehouse made, and he wanted to see the barn. He was in his yard-work clothes, not in a hurry.

“You know, the woman that used to live in that old farmhouse and own this barn was a strange one,” he said to me, while the boys scattered again toward the ruin. “She'd show up at our place every fall to trade walnuts for whatever we had to trade. We always took the unshelled ones, her hands were so dirty. Or maybe they were dark from the hulling. She had gunny sacks tied around her feet with baling wire.”

“When was this?” I asked.

“Before they were born.” He gestured toward the three boys now waltzing along a beam thrust like a bowsprit from the pile. “Looks like I'd best get them home.”

The four of them went away carrying the small roof from the ventilator cupola. It had somehow stayed intact, riding the whole structure down as it fell, and ending perched on top of the heap. As they drifted across the road, they looked like four posts under the Parthenon.

Next came a gentleman in pressed yellow slacks and a shirt with a little alligator over his heart. His hands were clean and thin. He watched me labor for a while in silence.

“Hard work for a Sunday,” he said. I stood up and let the sweat cool on my face.

“Well, I wanted to save some of these boards,” I said. “The barn's gone, but there's some lumber left.”

“Eyesore. I'm glad to see it finally come down.” I looked at the mouth that had said this. I had nothing to say. Away across the pasture a solitary maple stood dark in its neglected shade.

“But say,” he said, “I need a board to repair the rail on my deck—two-by-four, about twelve feet long. . . .” He skirted carefully around the perimeter of the pile, picking at the ends of likely boards clinched firmly into the weave of collapse, now and then looking my way appealingly. I knew who had called the County about the fire hazard, about the old barn settling too slowly deeper into moss and blackberry, the stack rattling in winter storms and the tin roof pinging through each summer's heat. I pulled an eighteen-foot clear-grained length of fir from the stack I had plucked of nails, and he went off with it at an awkward march, holding the board far out to the side of his body with his fingertips. Soon I paused in my work to hear the whine and ring of his power saw toiling through the wood. I counted seven cuts, then silence.

The woman who had bought the farmhouse, who had given me the
owner's name, came down to offer a glass of lemonade. The cold sweat from the glass ran down my wrist.

“I never let my kids go inside.” She squinted into the patches of darkness where walls still leaned together. “They get into enough trouble as it is. But I always felt we owned the barn, along with the house—even though we didn't. You should have seen the place when we moved in: a car in the back yard filled with apples; a drawer in the kitchen packed with red rubber bands, and another with brown ones; mice in the walls and a possum in the attic. The house had been empty a long time too.”

I set the glass down, and bent to my work, wrestling heroically with a long two-by-six mired deep in the hay.

“Are you going to keep these Mason jars?” She nodded toward a dozen blued quarts lolling in the grass.

“You'll use them before I do.” I shook the sweat out of my eyes to watch her cradle eleven of them somehow in her arms, with one clenched tight under her chin. She started out with a crooked smile to walk hunched and slow up the lane toward a yard littered with bright toys.

“I'll come back for the glass,” she called over her shoulder. Then she turned slowly, like a ship halfway out of harbor. “Or bring it up to the house for a refill.”

The afternoon was a long season of history, a plunge into the archeological midden of my own Midwestern ancestors, a seduction of my hands by wood the flanks of the milkers polished. What was a stall of straw but a nest for stories, even under the naked, open light of the sky? Burlap lace around a jar blue with time held something without a name but kin to pleasure. I had to stop, I had to walk away from it, to visit the outlines of the pasture and the farm, to carry the glass to the farmhouse so I could know the rooms of its people, to walk again and rest from the persistent unity of the ruin, to lie down in purple vetch and listen to bee-women sip and dangle on the small blossoms. When the sun woke me and I stood up, there was a shape of my own dwelling in the grass.

By now I had a stack of white, six-by-six posts that had held the stanchions in a row, a heap of two-by-fours in random lengths dried hard as iron, twenty-four sheets of tin rusted on the bottom side from generations of cattle-steam and piss in hay, a whole raft of two-by-sixes in twenty-foot lengths, each dried and set precisely to the same roof-sag. When I built my barn, I would turn them over so the roof began with a slight swell. Over time, they would sag back flat and right.