The Farmer's Daughter (10 page)

She began a letter to Alfredo in geometry class which was childish compared to what her father had taught her years before, and continued in chemistry class (her father had hung up a poster of the periodic table when she was ten). At the school lunch of fetid Spanish rice she sat as usual with Terry and Marcia. They wondered where she had been the two previous days and she would only say “camping out up the canyon.”

After school it was the first day of outdoor track practice though the weather was cloudy and in the midthirties. She was delighted to put on her sweat suit and after a few laps on the cinder track she and Marcia vaulted one fence and then another and ran down a long pasture with two little bull calves running along beside them for no apparent reason with their quite exhausted mothers following up in the rear.

When she got home she begged off having dinner with Frank and Lolly saying she wasn't feeling well. She picked up a letter from Peppy and Lolly gave her a container of veal stew in case she got hungry which she already was. The letter from Peppy was typically inane but she cautioned herself remembering that Frank had said that Peppy had done well in academic subjects but the nature of her family had closed all of the windows to the world.

Sarah spent a long evening intermittently working on her letter to Alfredo and reading in the three botanical texts he had given her. She liked best The Biology of Horticulture but Introductory Plant Biology was also fascinating. It all seemed quite exotic compared to her life above the forty-fifth parallel where bird and flora species are slim indeed compared to farther south.

The letter was hard going. By late evening she had five pages which she thought was too long and edited it down to three by midnight. She was amused by the irony of saying, “Not much is happening around here except for the long wait for true spring.” Not much, that is, if you exclude shooting a carton of cartridges at a rapist.

Some of what she wrote intrigued her in the act of writing what she actually thought. “I so wish that I were on the piano seat with you feeling the notes of Schubert in my body.” Or, “Staying with Rebecca was to enter an entirely new world which makes me wonder how many hundreds of worlds there are to which I have only gained entry by reading?” Or, “Whatever happens I feel much better about life having met you.”

After she turned off the lights and put her hand on Rover's chest to get the calming sense of a heartbeat she worried that she might be delusional like her mother Peppy. Peppy had said in her note that she had called Giselle who told her that Frank had found “another.” She was grieved because she thought that one day she might return to her loving family. This had momentarily stunned Sarah and so did the statement “Older men aren't very affectionate.”

Her hand actually trembled when she dropped the letter in the mail slot the next day. It was nine days before she got an answer which was like nine days in a dentist's chair but then she had had so little experience writing and receiving letters she didn't know what to expect. Meanwhile she and Marcia were running five miles every late afternoon and in the evening she was playing the piano for so long that Rover would beg to go outside.

When Alfredo's letter finally came she drove up to the canyon to read it. He was profuse in his apologies. His daughter had been kicked out of private school in Los Angeles for smoking pot and her mother was in Italy. It had taken him nearly a week to find another school that would accept her. He asked Sarah's forgiveness for sharing such “grim” news. After that he was quite romantic saying how much he missed her and that it seemed impossible to fall in love in two days but it had happened. Did she think that it was mostly the piano? A thought that had actually occurred to her but then time would certainly tell. His father was a “large-scale” farmer and neither rich nor poor. His family had sacrificed with no complaint to put him through Juilliard and then Cornell but he had graduated summa cum laude and graduate school had been on ample fellowships. He finished by saying that he wished that they were in each other's arms which made Sarah feel faint. On a silly impulse she smelled the letter and then looked down at her feet where the first shoots of green grass were emerging on the south-facing side of the canyon.

Chapter 14

After the slowness of letters they began talking on the phone every other day and he sent her many new pieces of music to learn. Frank confronted her with the phone bill and she untypically fell apart and then admitted she was in love with a professor. He just as untypically laughed, gave her a hug, and said he had wondered when she would find someone to care about. She was irked at dinner one night when Lolly told her that she was fifteen going on thirty-five. She said she was nearly sixteen and went outside and stood in a May shower until she cooled off.

Luck arrived in the last, slow-motion, dreary days of school. Rebecca wrote to say she had to go to Chile in July for her observatory work and was there any chance that Sarah could come early? Sarah began packing the day after graduation. Alfredo offered to fly up to Montana and drive down to Arizona with her. He felt that it was proper for him to meet her father.

It was three days short of her sixteenth birthday when Alfredo arrived. Lolly decided to cook an elaborate Italian dinner and Marcia and Terry were invited. The Bozeman airport had a better connection and Sarah was tremulous during the three-hour drive. Alfredo had said that before the summer ended they had to fly to Guadalajara to meet his parents. Rebecca had agreed to go along as a chaperone or duenna or his parents would have been scandalized. In Bozeman the plane was a half hour late and when Alfredo came down the long stairway from the boarding area they kissed for the first time.

Out in the sunny parking lot his eyes swept past three mountain ranges to the east and south still with snow on their peaks, the Bridgers, the Gallatins, and the Spanish Peaks. They held hands near her pickup.

“We don't know what we're doing or do we?” she said shyly.

“Well, we have our music and it seems to be spreading through us, doesn't it?”

“Yes,” she said, terribly certain of herself.

Brown Dog Redux

Part I

Brown Dog drifted away thinking of the village in the forest where the red-haired girl lived. When she had served them pie and coffee at a diner and a chocolate milk and cookie for Berry he had teased her by saying, “Cat got your tongue,” when she didn't respond to his flirting. She had gestured to her mouth indicating that she was mute and when he hid his face in his hands in embarrassment she had come around the counter and patted his head and laughed the soundless laugh of a mute.

Now he was waiting for Deidre in a very expensive coffee shop in downtown Toronto in which he felt quite uncomfortable. He was nursing a three-buck cup of Americano, more than a six-pack of beer back in Escanaba where in some places a cup of coffee was still a quarter. He much preferred the diner with the red-haired mute girl up near Gamebridge where a kindly social worker had taken him and Berry for a Sunday ride in early March so that they finally could have their first trip out of the city in months. They had a fine walk on a snowmobile trail through a forest while Berry had run far and wide as fast as a deer over the top of the crusty snow. Berry's legs were getting longer and when they visited nearly every day the lovely winter ravines in Toronto she'd run far ahead of him.

Now it was early April and he was getting an insufferable case of spring fever. The proprietor of the coffee shop, a big strong woman, was staring at him as if he was a vagrant. He avoided her glance by eagerly looking out the front window hoping to see Deidre, though his errant mind was back at Moody Bible Institute in Chicago thirty years before where in a dark hallway there was a painting called Ruth Amid the Alien Corn. At the onset the painting irritated him because it was obviously wheat, not corn. Ruth, however, was lovely and fine-breasted looking into the somber distance with teary eyes. Once while he was looking at the painting one of his devout teachers, Miss Aldrich, had happened along and explained that Ruth had been exiled and was terribly homesick thus the wheat or corn was “alien.” Brown Dog in Alien Toronto didn't have a ring to it but it was on the money.

Finally Deidre appeared at the window and waved to him. Brown Dog was startled because she was talking to a man he recognized as her husband. They had all met two weeks before at the Homeless Ball, a fund-raiser for the indigent. The man, Bob by name, had a peculiar shape what with being thin from the waist up with a silvery goatee, and quite large down below with a big ass that even now forced the tail of his tweed sport coat out at a sharp angle. The question was, why was he here? He sat himself down at a table twenty feet or so away and glared at B.D. with the usual sullenness of a cuckold.

Meanwhile Deidre sat down all flash and bustle with the usual merry smile and began to unwrap her ten-foot scarf. When she ordered her double-decaf soy-milk latte with a pinch of sassafras pollen, B.D. momentarily forgot the glowering husband thinking that he would get stuck with the bill which would equal a good bottle of whiskey. The coffee fetish that was sweeping North America left him restless and puzzled. Like his uncle Delmore, B.D. would often use the same grounds for two pots.

Brown Dog was wise enough to understand that the presence of Bob meant that their two-week affair with a mere four couplings was over. He wasn't really listening to Deidre as his mind rehearsed the four: once in his room while Berry was at speech therapy, twice in a modest hotel, and once in a snow cave he and Berry had carved into a hillside in the Lower Don Parkland. They screwed while Berry was running in the distance. The snow cave had been awkward because B.D. had to back in first and then Deirdre backed partway in and pulled down her trousers. There was very little room to maneuver and she was a big strong girl so that he was driven breathlessly into the narrow back wall of the cave freezing his own bare ass.

“Are you listening?” She waved a hand in front of his face. “I was saying that I think I must have taken an extra Zoloft by mistake. Bob made me a gin fizz before putting his salmon soufflé in the oven. Suddenly I became dizzy and weepy and just plain spilled the beans. Of course Bob was outraged and wanted the details. He thought it was strange that I was fucking a proletarian which is his professor language for a workingman. Anyway, we had it out and when we were finished the soufflé was ready to eat, an odd coincidence, don't you think? You could use a shower.”

“I've been shoveling snow since seven this morning so I worked up quite a sweat in nine hours.” There had been a few inches of dusty snow and B.D. had wandered the streets of a wealthy neighborhood near the curling club. He would shake a little cowbell and those who wanted their walks cleaned would come to their front doors. This system had worked well the entire winter and he had made enough money to support himself and Berry in their ample-sized room in an old Victorian mansion in an area gone to decay.

“I have the distinct feeling you're not listening to me,” said Deidre in a huff.

“You're saying that our love is not meant to be,” B.D. said seeing a wonderful piece of ass disappear into the usual marital void. He could feel her heat across the table. She was a real burner and in the ice cave he had marveled at the heat her bare butt had generated during its strenuous whack-whack-whack. She seemed fit as a fiddle though she claimed to have allergies to peanuts, dairy products, and latex so that she carried nonlatex condoms for emergencies in a secret compartment in her purse. One afternoon they were at a sports bar watching football and he had eaten free peanuts while she went to the potty and when she came out she shrieked, “You could kill me.” If he so much as touched her arm, with peanut oil on a finger he could kill her, or so she said. His uncle Delmore was always watching the Perry Mason repeats on television at lunchtime and this peanut thing seemed like a good plot though B.D. regarded Perry as one of the most boring fucks in Christendom.

Suddenly Bob was at the edge of their table and B.D. slid his chair back in case the dickhead made a move. “You cad,” Bob said, grabbed his wife's arm, and then in a miraculous act grabbed the check for the Americano and the double-decaf soy-milk mocha latte with a pinch of sassafras pollen (two bucks extra). Despite being called a cad which he thought might be an old-timey swear word B.D.'s heart soared when Bob picked up the check which meant that he and Berry could eat out rather than cooking something in the electric fry pan in the room. How could he be a cad when it was Deidre who'd instigated the affair after they had fox-trotted in a dark corner at the Homeless Ball and she had been delighted when his wanger got stiff as a rolling pin?

On the way out of the coffee shop he discovered that someone had stolen the snow shovel he had left tilted against the building near the doorway. Maybe this was a good omen, a sign that it was time to somehow leave Canada? The blade was made out of plastic anyhow and didn't make the old-fashioned grating noise on cement. After Deidre had slumped forward steaming in the snow cave she had said, “It's so primeval,” and B.D. had began quoting Longfellow's “Evangeline.” “This is the forest primeval. The murmuring pines and the hemlocks . . .” As a high school teacher Deidre had been impressed but then B.D. told her the story of how in third grade he and five other skins, three mixed and two purebloods, had been forced to memorize the first pages of the poem for the school Thanksgiving program but on stage his friend David Four Feet had made loud farting noises instead. The assembly fell apart, laughing hysterically, and the teachers and principal ran around slapping as many students as possible. David Four Feet was severely crippled and got away with murder because none of the teachers wanted to beat up on a cripple. Since B.D. was David's best friend he offered an alternative for their anger.

B.D. waited outside the lobby door until Berry's speech therapist appeared with Berry leaping down the last flight of stairs crouched like a monkey. The therapist was terribly skinny and B.D. had the fantasy of fattening her up to a proper size. There was the old joke of getting bone splinters while screwing a skinny girl. He doubted that this was an actual danger but it was easy to see that this young woman was about thirty pounds on the light side. He thanked her profusely even though Berry hadn't learned a single word. Berry was his stepdaughter and the victim of fetal alcohol syndrome due to her mother's voluminous drinking of schnapps during pregnancy.

They made the long twilight walk to Yitz's Delicatessen with growing hunger. More than ever before Brown Dog felt on the lam. Five months before, their entry into the safety of Toronto had been nearly jubilant. Their contact, Dr. Krider, who was a Jewish dermatologist, had taken them to lunch at Yitz's and B.D. had eaten two corned tongue sandwiches plus a plate of beef brisket for dessert while Berry had matzoh ball soup and two servings of herring during which she made her perfect gull cries as she always did when eating fish. The other noontime diners were startled but many of them applauded the accuracy of Berry's gull language. Dr. Krider for reasons of historical and political sympathies was an ancillary member of the Red Underground, a loose-knit group of activists on both sides of the border and extending nominally to native groups in Mexico. In recent years any action had been made complicated by Homeland Security to whom even AARP and the Daughters of the American Revolution were suspect. Dr. Krider had found them their pleasant room and had B.D. memorize his phone number in case he was short of sustenance money. B.D. had assured the good doctor that he had always been able to make a living which was less than accurate as this often meant the forty bucks he could make cutting two cords of firewood which he would stretch out for a week of simple food and a couple of six-packs in Delmore's drafty trailer. The escape from Michigan into Canada had been occasioned by the state authorities' impending placement of Berry in a home for the youthful mentally disabled in Lansing. B.D. and Delmore had made the eight-hour drive south from the Upper Peninsula to Lansing only to discover that the home and the school in which Berry would be stored was profoundly ugly and surrounded by acres of cement, an alien material, and thus the escape plan was made. Gretchen, B.D.'s beloved Sapphic social worker, had driven them over to Paradise on Whitefish Bay where they had boarded a native fishing boat, a fast craft that was sometimes used to smuggle cigarettes into Canada where they were eight bucks a pack. In the coastal town of Wawa they were met by a kindly, plump middle-aged Ojibway who was traveling to visit a daughter and drove them the two days to Toronto in her ancient pickup. The woman named Corva had drunk diet supplement drinks all the way and B.D. and Berry had subsisted on boloney and white bread because Corva had been forbidden by the Red Underground to stop for anything but gas. Since they were used to eating well on venison and trout and illegal moose and the recipes from B.D.'s sole printed volume, Dad's Own Cookbook, they were famished when they reached Toronto, and Yitz's was their appointed meeting place. It wasn't until they passed the Toronto city limits that Corva turned to him and asked, “Are you a terrorizer?” and B.D. replied, “Not that I know of.” The few members of the Red Underground he had met in Wawa were terse and rather fierce and it had been hard to feel what Dr. Krider had called “solidarity.” Dr. Krider had said to him, “The weather has beaten the shit out of you,” and B.D. had replied that he had always preferred the outside to the inside. It was so pleasant to walk in big storms in any season and take shelter in a thicket in the lee of the wind. Once he and Gretchen had taken Berry for a beach walk and a violent thunderstorm from the south on Lake Michigan had approached very quickly so that they took shelter in a dogwood thicket. Berry had what Gretchen called “behavioral issues” and kept running around in the storm despite Gretchen calling out to her. Lightning struck very close to their thicket and in the cold and wet Gretchen came into his arms for a moment. She said, “How can you get a hard-on during a lightning strike, you goofy asshole?” and he didn't have an answer though it was likely her slight lilac scent mixed with the flowering dogwood plus her shimmering wet body, the thought of which drove him sexually batty.

Now the air was warmish in a breeze from the south in the twilight and walking through a small park Berry incited a male robin to anger by making competitive male calls. B.D. held up his hand to protect them from the shrieking bird and said, “Please, Berry, your dad is thinking,” which was not at all a pleasant process. As they neared the delicatessen, he remembered two rather ominous things. In their good-byes Corva had said, “Don't hurt no innocent people. You're with a rough bunch.” And Dr. Krider had told him, “Since you entered Canada illegally you'll have to leave Canada illegally. You don't have any papers so you're limited to odd jobs.” The latter part of the admonition didn't mean much because all he had ever done was odd jobs except for cutting pulp for Uncle Delmore, a job abbreviated when a falling tree bucked back from the spring in its branches and busted up his kneecap.

This hard thinking made B.D. hungry so he ordered both a corned tongue and a brisket sandwich plus a plate of herring and potato salad for Berry. Berry refrained from her gull calls waiting for this old man to enter wearing his Jewish black beanie. They would spend a few minutes across a table from each other exchanging different birdcalls. The old man was some kind of retired scientist and tricked Berry by doing a few birdcalls from a foreign country which at first puzzled her but then made her laugh. B.D. watched them at play pondering the obvious seventy years' difference in their ages. He wondered where the word “Yitz” came from because he associated it with one of the best things in life, good food. It wasn't like one of those Michigan diners with a barrel of generic gravy out back connected by a hydraulic hose to the minimal kitchen which heated up grub from a vast industrial food complex named Sexton. B.D. could imagine the actual factory with cows lined up at a back door waiting patiently to become the patented meat loaf and their nether parts stewed into the barrels of gravy.