Spoonwood (29 page)

“I don't know but I have my suspicions. Monet's wife is very connected in Colombia.”

“Back when I was hanging out with Tubby McCracken, I heard rumours about a big-time local drug lord,” Latour said.

“This is all loose talk,” Elenore said. “There's no proof, right?”

“No proof,” Persephone said.

There was a long moment of unease in which time appeared to stop and no one could think of anything to say. Finally, Howard shook the room with a large rueful laugh, and the clock of Darby began to tick again.

“Well, I guess we all confessed our sins today,” Howard roared. “Better run and get those rosary beads, Elenore.”

“Put a sock in it, Howie,” Elenore said.

Persephone was pleasantly confused now. She didn't understand these exasperating people and they didn't understand her, but somehow because of Birch they would get along.

“I almost forgot,” Persephone said. “I have a couple presents for you.” She went out to the car and returned with two hastily wrapped oil paintings.

She gave one to Elenore and Howard, Rachel Bloom's painting of Birch staring into the fire, the other to Latour, the one of his hand holding Birch's hand holding a spoon. Elenore hung the painting in the living room beside the Jesus print.

“How did you come by these?” Latour asked, his voice soft and full of regrets.

“In Perth. I hadn't see my husband in ten months. We were on holiday. I had the paintings shipped to the states.”

“Did you meet the artist?” Latour asked. “I owe her.”

“I did, a remarkable woman. She remembered you and Birch with . . . well, I don't know if it was fondness, but it was with clarity. Last I heard she was cohabitating with an Aussie sculptor.”

Missy Mendelson had known about Birch Latour's injuries and she had emoted greatly at the news, but inside she couldn't quite bring herself to believe that something was really wrong with Birch. Part of her thought that having toes removed and “brain dysfunction,” as her father put it, were theatrical effects when it came to Birch Latour, not really real—those were the words in her mind, “not really real.” When Birch, who had always been athletic as a monkey, staggered awkwardly toward the car, she'd thought he was making a joke. But after he started to speak in his halting way it began to dawn on her how damaged he was. Her realization made her feel fiercely defensive on his behalf. She would protect him against the world.

Later that day they left the house and went outside, where they discovered that each, unbeknownst to the other, had taken up smoking. They smoked.

“When you were, like, in the snowbank, what happened?” Missy asked.

Birch took a moment to gather his thoughts, and when he spoke his voice was normal.

“At first it was awful. The cold hurt, but then I wasn't cold anymore and suddenly I could see my mother, I could reach her, I almost touched her.”

“Was she all there? I mean could you, like, talk to her?”

“Not exactly. I could read her thoughts and she could read mine. I telepathed her the big question.”

“Why she went up to the ledges to have you.”

“Right. Say my mother's name.”

“Lilith.”

“You like saying it?”

“No.”

“Me neither. Lilith twists my tongue. Her father named her that because he liked the ledges and he read someplace that Lilith
means woman among the rocks. She was a daddy's girl. In her mind, she was always ‘woman among the rocks' because her daddy told her so.”

“Your mom died because she had a lousy name.”

“You like your name, Missy?”

“I do. You like yours?”

“I do. A person has to have the right name.”

4

A SURPRISE FOR LATOUR

NEW YEAR'S EVE 1998

I
t was late in the afternoon, already getting on toward dark. The bank thermometer said fourteen degrees. Katharine Ramchand, back two days from her annual holiday trip to Trinidad, had just completed her shopping, and she drove to a renovated mill building. Outside, a couple of men in parkas and a woman in a cloth coat and a bright red and green scarf stood around and smoked cigarettes.

The woman recognized Katharine and said, “He's inside. I'll get him.” She flicked the cigarette into the street. One of the men opened the door for her.

A minute later Latour came out. He always dressed up for AA meetings. Today his outfit consisted of pressed khaki pants, a dark green and black Pendleton shirt with a bright yellow tie, and a Tweed jacket. He managed to look both stylish and ridiculous at the same time. Persephone had encouraged him to help himself to the Squire's wardrobe. He'd resisted at first, but only for show. Despite his peculiar lifestyle, Latour was vain about his appearance.

She moved to the passenger side and he took the wheel; he kissed her lightly on the lips, put the car in gear, and drove off.

“Man, am I glad to get out of Keene. I hate New Year's Eve,” he said.

“Is it the reminder of drink and revelers?”

“It's that, the biggest amateur night of the year, but mainly I hate to see so many people at once.”

“A man who can't stand a crowd, how did I manage to find you?”

“Anything more than you and me and I get jumpy.”

She smiled. He was romantic in his own way. They indulged themselves in the easy chatter of intimates. She regaled him with office gossip at Keene State College, where she was Associate Professor of Social Geology, and she talked about visiting her sisters in Trinidad. One made costumes for Carnival and the other managed a taxi business with her husband. They ate roti and dove through the surf at Maracas Beach. Katharine would miss her sisters, but not the heat. She was glad to be back in the cold. Latour talked about how pleased he was at the reconciliation between Persephone and his own family. Birch was going to spend a month with the Elmans while Persephone visited with her husband down under.

It was a forty-minute hike to Latour's shanty. They walked by starlight on a few inches of new snow that came in after the thaw departed.

Latour built up his fire, and the shanty was soon warm. They made love, then had something to eat. Latour laid out the stick table with cloth napkins, cooked hot sausages on the outdoor grill, serving them with good, crusty bread and a salad. She drank chardonnay, which she'd brought with them, and he Ovaltine.

“You shouldn't drink that stuff,” she said. “It's loaded with sugar.”

“So's your white wine.”

And they made love again.

Afterward, Latour said, “Admit it, you like it out here?”

“I like it for sex and relaxation—it feels cozy and private; but I couldn't, that is definitely would not, live like you do. What
would it take to move you into the mansion with me?” she asked.

“I love you, Katharine, but I'm in these woods until the next ice age,” Latour said. “This is the only way I know how to live. It's not a matter of choice.” He picked up one of his wooden spoons.

“I guess I knew that,” she paused, and started again, “Latour?”

“What is it, Katharine, what is it you want from me?”

“I want to have your baby.”

5

THE TRUST

DECEMBER 2005

K
atharine Ramchand—full professor, author of
Society and History in Stone Walls
—began her lecture by lifting a rock the size of a grapefruit over her head and displaying it for her students. She said nothing for a minute and then she put the rock down beside her notes on the podium and began to talk.

“Your assignment over the holiday break is to find a stone from your hometown and bring it back to class for analysis,” she said. “My hope is that you will become very intimate with that stone and in the end will know more about its origins, its eventual fate, and its implications and influence upon the kind of person you are in the world you live in.”

Professor Ramchand commanded the attention of her class not only with the content of her course but with her voice, where one could hear the nuances of her complex heritage—England, France, South Louisiana, New England, the Caribbean, India, Africa, China. It was said that when Professor Ramchand talked about rocks she could make poetry out of them with the sound
of her voice: quartz, barite, molybdenite, chalcopyrite, galena, fluorite.

“This particular rock beside me on the podium comes from a wall on the Salmon Forest Trust Conservancy in Upper Darby, New Hampshire,” she said. “I will return the rock to the place where I found it. Why? Because the wall has become a cultural icon as well as a land form . . .”

For an hour she talked about the rock, its origins in ancient volcanic times, its transformations by natural forces through the eons, its similarities to rocks found on the British Isles, and finally how the rock played a role in the settling of North America by Europeans and today how the rock had found its way into the psyche of the people who inhabited its environs.

She dispelled some myths—for example, that the first New England colonists struggled with stony soil. Not true: the soil was deep and fertile. The stones lay well beneath good workable soil and rose into the loam through natural processes created by the clearing of the forests. “Indeed,” she said, “Puritan farmers worried that they had offended the Almighty when they saw stones suddenly appearing in their fields after half a century working their lands.

“Another myth was that farmers built walls as fences to keep stock in or to use as boundary lines. In fact, most walls were built simply to clear the fields. The result: 240,000 miles of stone walls in New England. Perhaps if we realign the walls carefully we can walk beside them to the moon.

“The appearance of stones changed the character of New England. The walls became land forms, affecting agriculture and even climate; by now they have achieved the status of monuments. They are part of the identity of the region and the people. Nowhere else in the world does one find miles and miles of stone walls meandering through second-growth forests.”

At the end of her day, Katharine carried the rock with her to her new Ford Explorer and put it in the rear. She would return the rock to its place on the wall that went through what had once been the commune where she'd spent part of her childhood. She had mixed feelings about the place. She remembered the joy, the
music, the natural world, the feeling of being one with so many other people. But she also remembered rash acts, her mother's life cut short by her excesses. Katharine would not recommend commune living to her own children.

Her daughter, Persephone, was born a year before the woman she was named after died of lung cancer. “Sephy” would start school in the fall of next year. Katharine's son, Nigel, named after Katharine's Trinidadian father, was three, a handful. Katharine picked up her children at day care and drove on. She worried about the future, how to explain to her children the peculiar living arrangements of their family, she and they in the Salmon mansion with their half-brother, Birch, while Latour, their father, lived in primitive conditions in various places according to his whims.

Birch Spoonwood Latour and Melissa “Missy” Mendelson hiked to the tree house, not an easy walk for Birch with his bad feet. Every summer he and Missy and Bez made improvements to the structure. The ladder was now a staircase that wound around the tree and was protected by a railing. The deck had been widened and each of the two rooms expanded, with standard windows installed. The tree house was now fully furnished with comfortable chairs, a propane refrigerator and cookstove, and a wood-fired Franklin fireplace for heat and meditation.

Birch was home from Dartmouth College, where he was majoring in environmental studies. Missy was a physics major at Wesleyan University in Connecticut. They saw each other almost every weekend. The elders in both their families puzzled over the nature of their relationship. They seemed to be siblings; they seemed to be lovers; they seemed to be best friends; they seemed to be business associates; they seemed to be comrades in arms in ideological struggles known only to themselves. The young people did nothing to advance or retard the theories about them. They preferred to keep their elders guessing. Birch would be turning twenty-one in the spring, when he would take his place as chair on the trust governing board. Or would he? The current chair,
his granduncle Monet, had his own ideas about how the trust should be administered.

Missy poured glasses of wine, and while Birch built a fire in the Franklin stove she scanned the trust through the window with binoculars. “I swear I can see somebody at the apple orchard,” she said.

“It's Dad.”

“How do you know?”

“I don't know how I know what I know. Even in school I get these funny feelings about Dad.”

“Memories.”

“No, it's like I'm in his thoughts and he's in mine.”

“Weird.”

Once the fire was going Birch and Missy sat on the stick couch in front of the stove, close to one another but not touching, and they smoked cigarettes and looked at the fire.

Birch was good-looking in a delicate way, but he never came close to measuring up in stature to his famous grandfather, the Squire. He took after his grandmother Elenore, and he still wore braces. They would not come off for another year. Because of frostbite injuries to his feet, his natural walking gait was awkward, as if he were dragging a ball and chain. He compensated by walking very slowly with his head bent down and his hands behind his back, like one in deep thought. If he had to walk fast, he would straighten his back and square his shoulders, not to help him move but to appear dignified, if not natural. He had learned to walk in this special way from his stepmother, Katharine Ramchand, who of course learned it in Trinidad. Despite his modest physical attributes, Birch Latour exuded confidence. He was never drunk, never out of control. He might be a worrywart, but he was without fear. His friends looked to him for leadership, which he was happy to provide.

At six feet in height Missy was two inches taller than Birch. The awkwardness of her early teens had vanished. She'd found contact lenses she wasn't allergic to, and she wore very subtle make-up. Wherever she went she turned heads; she walked with a natural grace, an effortlessly beautiful woman.

For a minute or two they said nothing, content to sip the wine and gaze into the fire. Then Birch stood and went over to the window.

“I can see the ledges from here,” he said.

“Do you really remember being born there?” Missy asked.

“I do. I remember everything.”

“That's so weird.”

“It's even weirder than you think,” Birch said. “For the first six years of my life I not only remember what I was doing and thinking, I remember what Dad was doing and thinking. You know that old saying about being of two minds? Well, I was of two minds. Unfortunately, I was going for a third, but I never did reach her.”

“Your mother.”

Birch nodded, came back from the window, and sat beside Missy, closer now, so at times they brushed up against one another.

“Maybe you did reach her but she made sure you forgot,” Missy said. “You know, like, because it was necessary for you to be here and not with her.”

“I like that idea, Missy. I like it a lot. I'm not a loner like Dad. I'm Catholic in more ways than one. I enjoy the company of people. I need people and they need me. I believe in the Communion of Saints and in my own memories as far as they go. We're all part of God—you, me, every little ant; this pine where we've built our refuge, that's my mother. The deer we jumped on the way here, that's her, too.”

“You're part Catholic and part pagan, Birch. It's kind of mysterious and a little bit funny to me.” She paused. “You think Monet's branch of the family is going to try to take over the trust?”

“They already have, Missy. Monet wants to sell off the rest of the trust to the Heron Village people.”

“That's illegal.”

“It's a murky area. Persephone was able to sell the Grace Pond watershed. Monet and his son will use the precedent. You follow? And it's all going to blow in three years.”

“The twenty-fifth anniversary of the Salmon trust.”

“Yes, the charter comes up for a self-review and renewal.”

“It's going to be a war. You have three years to prepare yourself.”

Birch held up his arm, like a police officer halting traffic. “No,” he said. “I will not go to war with anyone. I will find a way without war, even metaphorical war.”

“You're a dreamer, Birch.”

“That's what Grandma Purse used to say.” Birch took a long drink of wine.

“You miss her, don't you?” Missy said.

“She taught me so many things. I wish she were here to help me work out my philosophy. I don't really know what I believe. I don't even know if I want to keep my name. Inside”—He thumped his chest—“I'm half Elman, half Latour, and half Salmon.”

“You have a math problem.”

“Yes, aftermath. I was going through some of the family papers, and you know what I found out? The original pronunciation of Salmon is not
Sahlmohn,
it's
Saminn,
the way Grandpa Howard says it in mockery.”

“And then there's—Birch. Your dad named you after your mother's favorite tree, right?”

“Right. Except he was wrong. My mother's favorite tree was the lilac. She planted a bunch of them the day she died.”

They were quiet for a while, then Birch continued talking about what he was going to do when he took over as chair of the trust.

“People have been poaching deer, firewood, even saw logs. Damn dirt bikes tear up the trails, and there's litter everywhere. I'm going to hire a trust cop, the baddest SOB I know.”

“Our old pal Bez.”

“Right. He knows the trust and all the dirty poacher tricks.”

They finished the wine and started back for the mansion, listening to their own footfalls, the creak of a tree in the wind, the squack of a crow. Finally, Missy spoke. “Birch, you don't have any
big ideas, but I do.” She paused and delivered her last words in that tone that told Birch she was serious. “I have a plan,” she said.

“Really.”

“Your house—it's, like, gigantic. Even with Roland and Soapy and your family, you still have, what, fifteen or twenty rooms you never use.”

“Twenty-two,” Birch said. He was thinking of his mother's room, which he had left preserved just as his grandmother Persephone had left it. He was thinking now of his grandma Purse, picturing himself in her bed beside her as she taught him his lessons. He shut his eyes. Missy knew that when Birch shut his eyes he was going back in time and she should leave him alone until he returned to the present moment.

Persephone wants to die in Tasmania, but the cancer has other ideas and she can't be moved from the medical center in Keene. Birch sits beside her bed, moistening his grandmother's dry lips with a sponge on a stick. She opens her eyes briefly and looks at him in the old ironic way of the atheist. Her hand quivers, and he understands that she wants him to take the hand.

He envelops the tiny, bony hand in both of his own. The hand is ice cold. Her body shudders and shakes, and then she is still and he knows she is dead. At that moment energy surges through the hand right into Birch. It spreads into and across his body, a warmth. She is leaving him her strength.

Birch opened his eyes, and Missy went on with the conversation as if no break in time had occurred.

“You, me, our friends, we don't have anything in common with our parents or anybody,” Missy said. “We don't know what we're going to do when we get out of college. How about we start a commune right here? Everybody lives in your house or on the grounds someplace. The trust lands, they'll be our experiment.”

“Experiment in what?”

“I don't know right now, environmental something or other. Government, God—so many things in the world are all fucked up. We have more than a year to figure it out.”

“Right,” Birch said. “I get it—yes, I get it. Right. A commune. We'll start with you and me and Bez—and Spontaneous Combustion.”

“That cat must be ancient.”

“Thousands of years old.”

They were both excited now. They would talk some more about how young people can make a better world. All they needed was a philosophy, a religion, cultural institutions, an economic system, a government that worked for everybody, and of course a cat.