Lime Creek (2 page)

And I just remember saying, Well then, with the doorknob still in one hand and my hat in the other. And without thinking, or perhaps a bit stunned too along with everything else, I open and close the door behind me lurching down the stairs and back out into the night. And with the wind driving the snow under my open coat
and my hat still clutched in my hand as I lumber off into the darkness, I wonder what in God’s name had I just done.

I shared rooms with Geoffrey Stuart Coolidge III, and he lends me his old Plymouth, pressing the keys into my hand and telling me that I don’t have to take a train to my own damn wedding. This is early in the spring, in April, and there’re already buds in the trees. And I remember thinking how back home there’s still at least another good month of winter to go. April the tenth.

I leave Cambridge early in the morning with my plan already in hand. For the day before, as I’m studying Coolidge’s roadmap, I notice the name a little ways north of New York City. And the symbolism of it or irony or whatever somehow beckons me because I really had no idea where we should do this thing. Elizabeth is watching for me out the window, and as I pull up in front of the house she comes down the walk with a little overnight bag and a coat over her arm. And wearing that same green sweater. Which made me glad when I saw it. Because it helped me forget some of my own nervousness as I recalled her setting up on that corral rail in the last of the twilight when I’d gotten that two-year-old colt gentled and tentatively under control.

As planned, neither of her folks nor her sister were home, and so we were off and headed for western skies. She gets in and hugs me around my neck, tipping my hat off and into the back seat where she’d placed her things. Coolidge had made me wear one of his fine suits, with a necktie and vest, but still permitting me my boots and hat. So at least I’d have something I was used to and familiar with to fall back on in case the realization of what was about to take place started me to doubting either myself or my prospects.

But Elizabeth is just plain excited, with her arm through mine and pressed up beside me as I drive on. With both of my hands gripping the steering-wheel like it was a life-preserver. And watching straight ahead. And hoping to God that we’re doing the right thing. Even though I knew all the way back in September when I said it to my ma that we were.

We pass a signpost directing travel toward New York City and go off on a different road. Elizabeth asks me if I know where I’m going and I say, I think so. And she says, Where? And I say, Valhalla. Real serious-like, as if it were the standard and expected destination for anyone bound on such a mission as ours. And she says, Valhalla? And I say, Yes’m, Valhalla New York. For this is probably the single most foolhardy if not to say risky undertaking
of my young life. Even considering all the other unpredictable and untamed animals I’ve ever been associated with. And Valhalla I read somewhere is where they take the dead heroes.

We arrive early in the afternoon and I remember thinking again how mild it was. For I just naturally compared all weather in its season and all fixtures of geography wherever I happened to be to what it would be like if I were back home. Anyway, we drive on to where someone directed us to the town hall. We go into the information office and the woman there sends us over to the revenue office. The clerk doesn’t look up from his desk until I say, Excuse me, I’d like to buy a license. And he says, What kind? Dog, fishing or marriage? For he sold them all. And I say, No, marriage.

And then I ask him where I can find a justice of the peace. And he says, There’s only one. And he’s the presiding judge at the trial. He’s the justice of the peace too. And it’s this address. He writes something on a slip of paper and hands it to me and says, It’s walking distance. And as we leave and proceed toward the main entrance he calls after us, Good luck.

It was one of those big county co-op stores that seem to have a little of everything. Burlap sacks of feed and seed and shelves of hardware and paint. And along
one side, utensils and brushes and brooms and shovels. And then more shelves of canned goods amongst bins of nails and tools and probably whatever else you could think of too. But for the most part, the floor had been cleared and then rearranged with parallel rows of folding-chairs. Like in a theatre, with an aisle down the middle. And it looked like the whole town sitting there.

We were holding each other’s hand as we stepped inside and everyone turns around to see what had just come through the door. Because apparently the trial was just then right at the height of its emotional intensity. And the judge, a little man with a bald head and a modest mustache and spectacles, looks up at us from the table where he’s sitting way down front and says, Whatta you want? Some truckdriver had accidentally killed a woman in the wintertime and he was on trial for causing her death.

We’re standing there with our backs against the door like a couple of greenhorns. Young and obviously uninitiated still in the rigors and snares and burdens of it all. And Elizabeth squeezes my hand and presses into me as I look down this blank sea of grim faces all turned about and staring at us. And the little man, who’s obviously in charge, leans over his hands and peers over the top of his spectacles and with a trace more of impatience and sternness too he says once again, What do you want?

And I remember thinking how the smell of linseed oil and turpentine is the same everywhere. From that place where I’m standing and where I’ve never been before, all the way back to home. And maybe a little too loudly when it comes out I answer, We wanna get married!

And once again in almost perfect unison, the faces all turn back around to the front. Their questioning and perhaps disapproving frowns transforming instantly, and however reluctantly, to the unmistakable beginnings of smiles for which they’d had no reason during all the prior proceedings. The judge nods his head one time and says, Okay. And then drawing back from the table and standing he says almost gently, Come down here young people.

We walk down the center aisle through all those strangers, still holding hands. There’s sawdust on the floor and what looks like a spill of flour and the definite smell of brine from where two great wooden barrels sit behind the judge’s table. And I think I can also smell that dry sharp taste of fresh cheese, for along with everything else I’m also powerful hungry.

And somehow the moment has overtaken both of us so we each know right there and then that we are absolutely and unquestionably where we are meant to be. With all our nameless neighbors in their crowded pews.
And with the judge, who we found out later was really a furniture salesman, waiting for us with his open hands raised and held out before him like a kindly shepherd of the flock ready to send us off in the right direction. And with the blessings of all who are assembled.

For something has transformed the congregation too. One moment, and for three hours previous, at a murder trial. With one of their own accused and aggrieved along with the victim’s bereaved family. And with the opening and closing of a door, and the entrance and procession of two very young and somewhat abashed strangers who have appeared inexplicably in their midst and for some reason that is only their own, unexpectedly they have now also become witnesses at a wedding. Thrusting them instantaneously from the dull somber consideration of death to the happy acknowledgment of the unlimited potential of life. From despair unto hopefulness. Like the passing of angels.

Elizabeth presses up against me as we proceed down the aisle, but before we reach him the judge leans forward and says something to someone on either side of the front row. And so the prosecuting attorney stands up beside me as my best man, while the defense attorney rises and stands beside Elizabeth as her full-bearded maid of honor.

The judge instructs each of us in turn. And then digging into my pants-pocket and finding only keys, I experience a moment of real panic that disappears when I find what I’m looking for on my other side. And I give it to him, and then he gives it back to me. And as I turn to Elizabeth, she turns too, and I slide the silver ring onto her finger and continue to hold her hand in mine to steady it, both my hand and hers.

The judge speaks again as we face him. And then turning back to one another we embrace and kiss. And that whole courtroom of strangers, including accused and accuser, still probably more than a little stunned at their unexpected change of perspective, suddenly erupts in a din of applause and cheers as now-wedded and still holding hands we flee back up the aisle and out that same door through which we had first entered.

Angels.

There were summer evenings I remember coming up from the barn after the long day’s haying, Spencer says. And seeing Elizabeth through the trees before she could see me. Her apron still about her waist, sitting on the porch steps, and with the warm wind blowing through that beautiful straw-colored hair of hers as she watched at the sky already darkening in the east with that faraway look on her face. As if she could still hear the rising and falling tide that she had grown up with washing up against the bank of the lower meadow.

And I never asked her, for I was shy of her answer
and maybe even a little afraid too of what she might say. Because I always knew in my heart, as the brutal winters wore on, that she suffered us our way of life. And maybe not the way of it so much as its grinding harshness.

That second winter with that filly of hers. I tried to make her understand well before the mare dropped the foal how it was too late in the year in our country for something to be born. Too late for the little one to be able to gain enough strength to make it through the winter. And how when such a thing happened, it was always best for both the mama and the little one to do away with the baby. So the mother could recover herself before the really bad cold set in. And not prolong the life of the little one, for no matter how strong it seemed at birth it would fight a painful battle with winter and lose. For the cold is always that much more powerful than the warm, than the fragile heat of life.

But no, she absolutely refused to hear of it, refused to even consider what I wanted her to understand. Which at the root of it was the very law of the land. Red or one of the other hands happened to be around the barn when the mare went down, shaking and all sweated through. She’d begun to tie-up, which is caused somehow by the muscle enzymes going haywire, and for any number of different reasons. And being pregnant, with
her hind end suddenly one big contraction, it had thrown her into labor too although she was still a couple of weeks early.

We finally get ahold of Stony Walls, our vet, just coming in to his dinner, and he comes and goes to work on her. But it seems as if one bad thing follows another. The mare can’t really help herself, with her muscles seized up like that, and to top it all off the baby’s gonna come breech. Which is when the butt is positioned to deliver first instead of the head.

Stony’s up inside her trying to get the foal turned around, but it’s just no damn good. And all the while Elizabeth’s kneeling close to the mare’s head and rubbing up and down her neck whenever she quiets down some, thrashing about and making these godawful groaning sounds and then resting back down again. Stony gets the little one’s rear legs started, with the smoke rising off his bare arms, and then Red and I take over for him so’s he can have a breather. We sit with our knees against each other pulling steadily on the foal’s legs until we can finally see it’s a filly for sure, but it seems to hang up on something inside the mare who continues to thrash and grunt against the bed of shavings where she lies.

Elizabeth, I say as I move her hair out of her face, you be right careful for the poor thing’s having an awful
rough time. And then for one second, the way your mind does, her hands on that distressed animal remind me of my mother’s hand on my forehead when I was a little boy and had to stay home from school. And then that image jumps all the way into the future and turns back into Elizabeth’s hand again but this time on the forehead of one of our own children who as far as I know hadn’t even gotten started yet.

Stony gets between Red and me once again, nudging us off to either side, and reaches back inside the mare until he gets the foal’s one foreleg that was bent and holding it back freed up the way it needs to be. He continues to pull against its hind legs until suddenly the baby rushes out of her, knocking Stony on his back and lying on top of him. He finally straightens up with the baby clasped in his arms and just sits there like that.

You alright? I ask him. And he tells me he wants whatever blood that’s left in the placenta to get into the foal before he cuts it loose from the mama. The mare lies back with her head stretched out and Stony ties off the cord and then carries the foal into the next stall. Elizabeth’s brought him a couple of blankets and he kneels in the corner with the baby beneath them and his arms around it like before, with its head over his shoulder. And I can still see its lovely little face with its big eyes
blinking with wonder in the gloom of the barn as if it were thinking to itself, So this is life. So this is what the fuss is all about.

Elizabeth stays with the baby, and Stony draws off the mare’s first milk and then tube-feeds it into the foal through its nostril to be sure she gets all of it into her stomach. It’s past nine o’clock and I send Red home for he’s got a full day in the morning, and of course I do too. But as it turns out, the night has just begun.

When an animal ties-up like that, its kidneys will eventually shut down which will lead to its death. So our only chance of keeping the mare alive is to keep running fluids into her until she’s urinating normally, which should indicate that her kidneys are still OK. But then it’s still a damn crapshoot, because if there’s been too much muscle damage she wouldn’t be any good for herself anyway.

Stony had come prepared for the long haul when we’d described to him over the phone what was happening. And so he’d brought with him several cases of those electrolyte fluid-bags along with a week’s supply of milk-replacement for the baby. And he gets himself all set up like he knows that tomorrow’s a hell of a long ways off but he still intends to be there with the mare alongside him and that they’ll both see the morning together.