Republic of Dirt (14 page)

E
ustace seems to think I’m too sick to function and it’s driving him crazy that he hasn’t been able to take over at the farm because another local vet suddenly closed up his practice and referred all his clients to Eustace, who was already run off his feet tending to an outbreak of strangles among local horses. My overweening boyfriend is now doing the work of two and is busy from early morning until late at night. And yet we continue to make progress in various areas without his help.

Allow me to be more specific. In my efforts at building bridges, I’ve learned that Sara’s father, Mr. Spratt, is more than just an unhappy, unpleasant person.

During my awake and lucid moments, I wracked my brain about how to accidentally on purpose run into Mr. Spratt. Then I remembered that I have connections in the local taxi industry. When I first arrived at Woefield, six months ago, I was driven by Hugh, from the Cedar Cab Company. He’s a stellar person and he insisted on carrying all my luggage, which was extensive even though I’m not much of
a materialist. Since then, he has given me numerous rides because our truck only works intermittently.

He wouldn’t think it odd for me to call and ask for a pickup and I knew he’d be able to give me some idea about what hours Mr. Spratt worked, since they were both in the taxi business.

Hugh picked me up and drove me to the Country Grocer and waited while I went in and got our supplies. When I came back, I asked him casually if he knew Dean Spratt.

“He that guy who calls himself Yellow Point Taxi Service?” asked Hugh.

“Yes.”

“Why do you want to know about that guy?” asked Hugh as he stood behind the car and organized my shopping bags in the trunk so there would be room for the bags of feed we’d be picking up from Buckerfield’s.

“His daughter used to live with us. We miss her. I just wanted to touch base with her dad. Ask him how she’s doing.”

“He’s not a good driver. Gets lost and falls asleep. He makes the customers put their own bags in the car.” Hugh shook his head, clearly disgusted with Dean Spratt’s lack of professionalism. “Got a speeding ticket the first day on the job! Yellow Point Taxi Service is probably not going to last.”

Hugh drove us the fifty-ish yards into the Buckerfield’s parking lot.

“Bad driver!” repeated Hugh, looking over his shoulder at me and slamming on the brakes just before we crashed into the side of the farm and garden supplies store. “Don’t drive with him!” he warned. “I’ll drive you when your truck’s not working.”

I got out, slowly and carefully because we were wedged in extremely close to the vehicles on either side.

“Okay?” said Hugh.

“Perfect. Thank you, Hugh. I’ll be back soon. Is there room in the trunk for a bale of hay?”

“We will make room!” he said. “I’ll come in with you. Carry the stuff.” But he couldn’t get the driver’s door open wide enough to get out.

“I’ll wait here for you,” he announced, sinking back into his seat.

By the time Hugh dropped me back at home, I knew what I had to do. Hugh had told me that Dean Spratt usually worked early mornings until late afternoons. I would call first thing. After I put our groceries away, I had Seth carry the bags of grain and supplements for Lucky and Bertie over to Earl’s cabin, where they would be transferred into rodent-proof aluminum bins, and then had him wheel the bale of alfalfa I picked up for a treat for them over to the garden shed for safekeeping. I made Swiss chard and rice, took my thyroid supplements and went to bed at 6:00 p.m. I woke up at 4:30 a.m. and called the Yellow Point Taxi Service dispatch number. A man’s voice answered after the second ring.

“Yellow Point Taxi.”

“I’d like a pickup at 2210 Woefield Road.”

“Name?”

“Prudence Burns.”

A hesitation. “What time?”

“As soon as possible,” I said.

A grunt and then he agreed.

I was hand-feeding Bertie and Lucky grass through the fence when the cab turned into the driveway. Yellow Point Taxi Service consists of a Prius that has been in a serious motor vehicle accident that causes the front end to make a terrific rattling noise even when
the car is in silent mode. The car is painted an otherworldly shade of green and the company name appears to have been lettered using one of those stencil kits. In short, Mr. Spratt’s Yellow Point Taxi Service makes Cedar Cabs look like an elite car service catering to Fortune 500 executives.

I expected Mr. Spratt to semi-ignore me or say I was violating some rule by contacting him. But he didn’t. He got out of his cab as though pulled by a magnetic force until he stood, entranced, in front of our red mule.

“By god, aren’t you a handsome fella?” He held out a hand and Lucky sniffed it.

“I got a glimpse of him at the school but there was so much going on, I couldn’t really get a good look. He can sure move, though.”

I’d never heard Mr. Spratt so chatty. Maybe he was a morning person.

“This is Lucky. He’s our new mule. Well, we’re actually borrowing him. To see if we can work with him. It’s not going great so far,” I said, not sure why I was telling him about our troubles. “We don’t know anything about mules.”

Dean Spratt was scratching Lucky’s big head and the mule seemed to be in heaven.

It was just after five on an October morning and rain threatened from low clouds. We were making small talk about a mule in the dark and there was something fine about that. I felt alert for the first time in days.

“I worked summers as a mule skinner in high school and university. Near Lillooet, Lytton, into the Fraser Canyon country,” said Mr. Spratt in the friendliest tone he’d ever used on me.

“Is that right?” My mind was alert to the possibilities. “So you know about mules? About training mules?”

“I should have stuck with mules. Skipped the accounting.”

So Mr. Spratt wasn’t a morning person. He was a mule person.

I looked more carefully at him while he was busy cuddling Lucky. Sara’s father had always had the complexion of a man about to lose his temper and this morning he was ruddy, but he also seemed pale and threadbare. He wore an old man’s cardigan and cheap dress pants and no-name running shoes. I wondered how old he was. Mr. and Mrs. Spratt were the kind of unhappy that erases age. Theirs was a timeless discontent, the kind that shifts people into ugly middle age the minute they pass twenty-five.

“Like I said, we’re pretty inexperienced and don’t really know what to do with him. We may have to give him back.”

Lucky was snuffling Dean Spratt’s ear. The two of them were practically making out.

“Sara was helping us, but she’s new to mules, too.”

“Mules take practice,” said Mr. Spratt. “A mule can tell when he’s in good hands.”

He slid his gaze to me, his meaning clear.

“We need to learn to work on catching and leading him. At the very least. He costs a lot to feed.”

“Ground manners,” said Mr. Spratt. “That’s what you need before anything else.”

“Right. His ground manners. Ultimately, we want to train him to pull a plow.”

“I bet he’d make a fine riding mule,” said Mr. Spratt. “And he’d look good in harness.”

“Oh?”

“Good conformation. Strong back. Some withers. He’d be a fine all-rounder. In the right hands, mind you. Appaloosa mules are rare.”

“I see,” I said. “We’d be very interested in getting some help with him. Finding someone to train him
and
us.”

Mr. Spratt stepped away from the fence, still staring at Lucky.

“Where you heading this morning? I have other pickups.”

He began walking back to the battered Prius.

I walked quickly after him.

“Going to Hemer Park. To see the trumpeter swans.”

He had just opened the driver’s door and he turned to me as though I’d said something bizarre. Which I guess I had. I doubt many people take cabs to the park at five in the morning to see the swans.

I got in the backseat. After a pause, he got in the front and shut the door and started the engine and the car clattered to life, sounding like a bag of tin cans being thrown into a recycling truck.

“I’m serious about us needing help with Lucky.”

“I work twelve-plus hours a day. Got a kid at home. At least two weeks a month I do.”

I had to handle this carefully.

“Is she at home alone right now?” I asked.

I saw his eyes in the rearview mirror and I offered up a conciliatory, nonjudgmental smile.

“She can get herself to school in the morning. It’s a five-minute walk. Closer than from your place.”

“Of course,” I said. Then, after a pause, “I’d hate for us to ruin our mule.”

“Damned right,” muttered Mr. Spratt. “That would be a crime.”

“My thoughts exactly. Helping us with Lucky would be like preventing a crime.”

“Lucky?” he said. “Who the hell named him that?”

“He came with it.”

“Any mule that ends up with a bunch of amateurs is no kind of lucky,” grumbled Dean Spratt.

“We could change his name,” I said. “We’re open to suggestions.” I watched the barely visible outlines of trees flash by on the side of the road as he drove. “So are you quite busy in the early mornings?”

He turned onto Woobank Road. We were only a couple of minutes from the entrance to Hemer Park.

“Some airport runs. I drive a few guys who lost their licenses who need to get to work.”

“What if you came and worked with Lucky after your shift sometime? Whenever you want, really. We’d watch but we wouldn’t get in your way. Then you’d have access to a mule whenever you wanted.”

I could tell from the angle of his head that he was listening.

“Do you know how to teach a mule to drive?” I asked.

Slowly, he nodded. “Yeah. Did some selective logging with our mules. Put them in competitions. Took ‘em to Mule Days in Bishop, even.”

“Mule Days!” I said. “In Bishop!” I had no idea where that was, but I loved the sound of it. “How wonderful!”

But before my enthusiasm could rub off on him, we’d pulled into the dirt parking lot at the entrance to Hemer Park.

“Five bucks,” he said. But I saw from the meter that it was actually $8.50.

I handed him a ten and told him to keep the change.

He stared at the bill.

“You must really like swans.”

“I feel about swans the way you do about mules,” I said, although in fact I had no direct experience with swans.

“Want me to wait?”

“No. That’s fine. I can make it home on my own.”

“Is this about Sara?” he said.

“We miss her very much. We want you and her mother to know that if we’re able to spend time with her again, we will take better care of her.”

He nodded. “We shouldn’t have left her with you for so long. It was irresponsible of us. I know you didn’t mean no harm, but that situation could have been serious.”

My heart plunged. He was absolutely right. We’d made a bad mistake and Sara could have paid the price.

“We’re so sorry,” I said.

“So are we,” said Mr. Spratt. “Between the two of us, her mother and I should be able to take care of one kid. It’s just that we can’t seem to get along. We’re worse with our kid than you are with that mule.” Dean Spratt expelled a long, early-morning sigh. “I guess we’ll just see what the social worker has to say. We agreed on that and we should stick to what we say for once.” He turned the car on. “Enjoy the swans.”

I stepped away from the cab and it clattered off to greet the day.

It took me over an hour to walk home and I had to go straight to bed, but it was worth it.

I
should renumerate the things I am dealing with at this point. Is
renumerate
the right word? I don’t know and I’m too lazy to look it up. Anyway, to paraphrase the great Jay-Z, most metal of rappers, at least in terms of sheer cool:

99 Problems & the Playhouse Is One

We miss Sara
.

We don’t seem any closer to getting her back
.

From her sickbed, Prudence continues to devise a variety of impossible tasks for Earl and me to accomplish. There is nothing unusual about her giving us work, in fact that’s her main joy in life, but her obsession with renovating the world’s ugliest playhouse is so pointless it must surely cross some workers’ rights line. A part of me feels like we should be able to handle the job because it is just a playhouse, albeit one that looks like it was designed by a drunk German elf. The part of me that is sane recognizes that we were barely
able to build a chicken coop to Sara’s specifications. If she hadn’t pushed us to get it right, it would have been a poultry death house, with weasels coming in the holes in the floor, and rats through the chinks in the roof
.

I have serious concerns about Earl being the man in charge while Prudence is out of commission. Yesterday, the guy Prudence hired to build the barn dropped off a load of used bricks, half of them busted. The day before, he delivered four unpeeled logs that looked like they’d come out of a slag heap somewhere. That’s the total of our building supplies thus far. Earl hasn’t confronted the kid about the random loads of salvaged materials and I think it’s because Earl doesn’t actually know whether the supplies are legit or not. I sense disaster. The only confidence-inspiring thing about the kid is his truck, which has to be worth $75,000
.

Eustace is working about twenty-two hours a day due to some horse pestilence that’s going around and because another vet came to his senses and fled the profession. Eustace is so busy, he’s barely even able to take time to listen to me complain on the phone, which is a real inconvenience for me
.

The drama teacher. The drama teacher. As noted in a cliff-hanging way in my last entry, she showed up. Here. At my place of residence. And things got weird. Weirder. Let me explain
.

When the drama teacher showed up at the farm, she pretended not to know me.

She greeted Prudence in her slightly dumpy yet highly sexualized way. The contrast between the two of them was stark. Prudence was
all efficient practicality in denim overalls and tidy kerchief around her hair. The drama teacher wore a pilled, bagged-out black pantsuit ensemble. Prudence, even struggling with her Japanese glandular disorder, was lean and toned thanks to a steady diet of ancient grains and other things that are not delicious. The drama teacher seemed to be composed mostly of hips and thighs and breasts squished into a too-small bra. How do I know about the bra? In the old days, her bras were always a couple of sizes too small and a bit tattered. Damn, she was a sexy beast. Like an old she-cat who has been prowling around for years, initiating all the neighborhood tomcats into the ways of the world. That’s probably reductive and sexist. So sue me. I’m a product of my time and the Internet. I will just say that she looked mad, bad and dangerous to know. Not to mention hot.

What the fuck is wrong with me? I’m pretty sure I’m a bad person.

The drama teacher spoke only to Prudence.

“I see you’ve been bagging your greens,” she observed in that voice that sounds like Darth Vader after a Fisherman’s Friend lozenge.

Prudence lit up. Nothing makes my boss and landlady happier than selling the things we’ve grown. There are probably people who’ve organized mergers between major corporations who feel less satisfied than Prudence after she unloads a few wormy radishes or an acorn squash on an unsuspecting consumer. The average smallholder is every bit as fiercely capitalist as the worst developer in the local Chamber of Commerce. If you doubt me, just look at the way those farmers eye each other at the markets.

“Yes!” said Prudence, beaming, proud. “We’re just picking and sorting them now. I’m so pleased you’ve heard of us.”

The drama teacher gave Prudence her best Mona Lisa, not quite
a smile, not quite a frown. It was a look that said she’d memorized the Kama Sutra and made some additions.

“How much for a bag?”

“Five dollars,” said Prudence. “Same price as Sleepy Slope.”

The drama teacher’s face changed almost imperceptibly the way it always did when she thought a comment was dumb. I remembered talking to her about my hopes and dreams, which I will not share here because I am now in possession of a modicum of self-esteem, and feeling proud when I didn’t get the look. It meant she thought I was a creative, worthwhile and non-frivolous person. It meant she thought I was worth taking seriously.

I hated to see her use the face on Prudence.

The drama teacher looked strange standing near the raised beds. The farm is not exactly an idyllic tourist destination but it looks immeasurably better than when we first started. The fence posts are upright. The house and porch are painted. Everything is trimmed and watered and weeded and things are growing, even this late in the fall. It’s not a total embarrassment to be associated with the place. There is a neatly stacked rock pile the size of an African elephant in the far corner of the field. Prudence thinks we’re going to make stone walls with the endless supply of rocks that burp spontaneously out of the ground. Prudence is out of her mind. But back to the drama teacher.

There was something a little unhealthy, even malignant, about the drama teacher in that setting, but she emanated sex appeal like a fresh Glade PlugIn. I was reminded, as I so often am, of “Free Fallin’,” that Tom Petty song about nice girls. A little unhealthy can be a very compelling thing.

“Do you have change?” the drama teacher asked Prudence, pulling a wrinkled twenty from the gaping maw of her purse, which was a leather
patchwork job in shades of dead-body blues and bad-bruise purples.

“How many bags would you like?”

“One should be plenty,” said the drama teacher. She still hadn’t looked at me. We hadn’t spoken since the text fight the day of the parent-teacher interview. But she hadn’t been far out of my mind. Black hole suns don’t need to look at people to get their attention.

“Let me just pop inside and get you some change,” said Prudence. She plucked a bag of greens from my arms and handed it to the drama teacher. “Soon our farm stand will be open. It’ll be in that building at the end of the driveway.”

The drama teacher stared at the dilapidated pink shack at the edge of the road and another look flitted across her face. “Huh,” she said. “Drive-through lettuce.”

“I know!” said Prudence. Then she dashed into the house to get change, leaving me alone with the drama teacher.

“I’ve been waiting to hear from you,” she rasped.

“Yeah,” I said. “About that. I’m uh …”

“You’re afraid,” she said. “Of me. Of us.”

If by
us
she meant her pest situation, she was absolutely right. And I was also a little afraid of her.

She absently scratched her inner wrist against her own right breast. Something about the gesture felt like a sexual challenge.

And then, because Prudence is nothing if not speedy, even when she’s sick, she was back with fifteen dollars AND a receipt book.

The drama teacher waved a hand at the receipt book. “That’s okay,” she said. “We don’t need to tell Revenue Canada about this little transaction.”

Prudence snatched another bag of greens from me and handed it over.

“Two for one on your first visit,” she said, smiling broadly.

The drama teacher finally smiled. “Like a crack dealer looking for new customers,” she said. Then she walked back to the dented blue Aerostar.

Those greens would probably get tossed on the floor of the backseat and stay there until they turned into a puddle of dragon snot.

I went in the house and used all the room I had left on my credit card to order bedbug supplies: an industrial-strength steamer, how-to video and booklet, talcum powder–lined trays for under the legs of furniture.

Then I used the errand as an excuse to ask Eustace to drive me to a hardware store in town. I’m well aware that he only took time out of his insanely busy schedule because he wanted to pump me for information about how Prudence is holding up without him and because he wanted to issue more detailed instructions about all the things I should do to help her out. None of that was very enjoyable, but sometimes a person needs his sponsor around when he’s doing terrifying things, such as buying diatomaceous earth, which is supposed to be deadly to crawling insects. I bought double-sided tape and two cans of spray-on carcinogens aimed at household pests. I asked the sales guy if he had any over-the-counter DDT on offer and he gave me a lecture about birth defects. When I said I didn’t plan to serve it in cookies for pregnant ladies, he shook his head.