Tibetan Peach Pie: A True Account of an Imaginative Life (6 page)

Today, my voice sounds as if it’s been strained through Davy Crockett’s underwear. While to my mind’s ear, I might sound like an Oxford-educated intellectual, I have only to hear myself on tape to realize that in actuality mine is the voice of a can of cheap dog food -- if a can of cheap dog food could speak. It’s a Skippy voice. Not even that, a
generic
brand with a plain brown label. Thanks, at least in part, to the jeerers and sneerers of Urbanna, I’m going through life with a voice that might be visualized as something scraped off the kitchen floor of a fast-food restaurant by a pimply teenage dishwasher at closing time on Friday night. Or else that little pile of smashed potato chips left on the rubberized seat cushion of a motorized wheelchair belonging to a 365-pound retired female professional wrestler named Grandma Moses. Or else . . . well, you get the picture.

In one of my early novels,
Even Cowgirls Get the Blues,
the protagonist, Sissy Hankshaw, is born with abnormally large thumbs. Rather than submit meekly to the deformity, she elects to turn the tables on it, exploit it, have fun with it, make an art of it, ride it all the way to glory. I’m not as wise as Sissy, but I
have
in recent years come to accept my voice, even cheerfully embrace it -- although there are delusional moments (usually while lecturing or reading aloud in public) when I’m still convinced I’m sounding a lot like Jeremy Irons.

There’s an area of tidewater Virginia known widely and semiofficially as the Northern Neck. It is, indeed, a “neck” of sorts; which is to say a peninsula: bordered on the south by the Rappahannock River, on the north by the Potomac, terminating at the Chesapeake Bay. There are four counties in the Neck, each just far enough downwind from Washington, D.C., to escape moral contamination.

Kilmarnock is the largest town in the Neck; Warsaw the most vibrant, though “vibrant” may be too fancy a word for any community in this region of farmers and fishermen. Our family alighted on Kilmarnock like flies landing on a horse biscuit, shooed away by the swishing tail of circumstance before we could savor a proper taste. Our home there, for the few months it lasted, was a plain single-story clapboard cottage, bereft of marble, of ornament, of any upper chamber where a sexy Samaritan might assist in the tonsorial hygiene of needy gentlemen.

The house was situated at the far end of town, piney woods behind and on one side of it; on the other side, a vacant field. The only neighbors were across the road and we rarely saw them, so it was months before I learned that my sixth-grade teacher lived there, the very one who slapped my face for “sassy” behavior. (I suspect that I, a devotee of atlases, had corrected her none too diplomatically in front of the class for some shocking display of geographic ignorance, à la Sarah Palin.) Moreover, our house sat back quite a distance from the road, so overall it’s fair to say we were a trifle isolated, a fact that made Mother uneasy, especially since Daddy was usually only home on weekends. No doubt it was due to Mother’s nervousness that on weeknights she, my twin sisters (then age four), and I all slept in the same smallish bedroom.

Late one night (it was past my bedtime at any rate), Mother thought she heard a noise outside. When she slipped into the darkened living room to investigate, she saw that a car was parked in our long dirt driveway. Its engine wasn’t running and its headlights were off. She watched the car for five or ten minutes. When she returned to our bedroom, she was carrying a butcher knife.

It was a mild Indian summer night (since, technically, Indian summers can only occur after there has been a frost, it was probably toward the end of October) and the bedroom window was raised. The window was, however, permanently screened. Pointing to the window, Mother handed me the knife. In a low voice she instructed me to await her signal. When and if it came, I was to slice open the screen, lower Mary and Marian outside, follow them out, lead them quickly away from the house, and hide.

Zing!
Adrenaline shot through me like a crystal meth espresso through a break-dancer. I was scared, to be sure, but equally elated, fairly throbbing with anticipation. I’d been reading
The Three Musketeers
that same week, and the moment my hand closed around that knife handle I was transformed into d’Artagnan. “All for one and one for all!” I exclaimed, a trifle too loudly to suit Mother’s mood.

Before she tiptoed back to the living room, she put a finger to her lips, then gestured for me to rouse my sisters. “There’s a bad car in the driveway,” I said as I tugged at their bedclothes. “Who in tha car?” mumbled Marian, barely half awake. “Cardinal Richelieu and his lieutenants,” I replied, still tugging. They gazed at me without an atom of comprehension.

Herded to a place by the window, the twins, who heretofore had been too sleepy to do more than whimper a little, now commenced to actively whine. “Hush,” I cautioned. “There’s a car out there full of escaped maniacs. Do you want them to come kill us and eat our brains?” Evidently, the girls did not. They became saucer-eyed and silent, though now they were shaking like cherubs on an ice floe. “Don’t worry,” I said, “I’ll protect you.” Cleverly, they responded in Morse code, tapped out with their teeth.

Since I was seven years older than my sisters and a boy to boot, my attitude toward them had naturally been one of indifference. Benign neglect. Now, however, having suddenly been put in charge of their physical survival, I was totally prepared to shepherd them into the forest and shelter them there; to guard those girls all night if necessary. All night? Maybe several nights. Hey, maybe a week! Who knew how long the fiends in that car -- be they slobbering maniacs, a band of robbers, or, more likely, Japanese spies (the war in the Pacific was raging then) -- would occupy our home? At some point, I might have to sneak into the house and cut Mother free of the ropes with which they’d surely bind her, particularly if, while stealthily foraging for food scraps in the garbage can out back, I should detect sounds of torture, a situation that might necessitate hand-to-hand combat.

Armed with a dull kitchen knife and a keen imagination (the wild horse was out of the chute now and good luck to the cowboy who’d try to break it or the rodeo clown who would distract it), I was projecting one heroic scenario after another onto the screen of my mind, reminding myself that I was born for adventure.

It was right about then that Mother returned to announce that the car had started up and driven away. “Maybe they’ll come back,” I said. Judging from the scowl on Mother’s face, she was all too aware of the note of hope in my voice.

Though she never said as much, our intruders probably had been young townspeople in immediate need of a secluded spot to swallow alcoholic libations, each other’s saliva, or both. It would be a few years before I learned that illicit drinking and making out were also adventures of a sort, ones for which I had alarmingly more aptitude than for the thwarting of Japanese spies.

9

fright or lite

One Halloween midnight when my father was in his early twenties, he and some buddies went to the home of a slightly older, recently married friend, quietly dismantled the fellow’s new Model T Ford, climbed up and reassembled it piece by piece on the roof of the house. (Cars were not so complicated in those days, but it was still quite a feat.)

The following morning, as the distraught groom was telephoning the Blowing Rock police to report a grand theft auto, a wildly gesticulating neighbor rapped on the window and beckoned him outside. As the men stared up at the shiny black vehicle, perched now like Edgar Allan Poe’s nightmare between two chimneys, they could only shake their heads and mutter, “Halloween.”

If in their voices there was consternation, there was also resignation and even a poorly disguised trill of admiration: it had been a daring, perfectly executed whopper of a prank on a night consigned to pranksters, a night ruled by the Lord of Misrule, a night when unsettled spirits of the dead squeezed through a crack in the space-time continuum, demanding notice and a bit of mischievous fun, often temporarily occupying the all-too-willing bodies of young Western males.

Nowadays it’s Halloween lite, all treats and no tricks, the dead driven back into the underworld by candy companies, liquor stores, Hallmark-card sellers, costume merchants, and understandably concerned owners of vulnerable private properties. Believe me, I’m seldom one to pine for the “good old days,” but when I was growing up much mischief was afoot on October 31, and ol’ Jack was alive in the lantern. Privies would be overturned, gates unhinged, penned chickens liberated, tires deflated, doorbells mysteriously rung, lawn shrubbery festooned with toilet paper, homes pelted with eggs; and every shop window in town thickly soaped, generally with pseudocryptic graffiti resembling today’s adolescent “tags.”

With long roots in antiquity and the human psyche, Halloween was the one night of the year when humanity openly acknowledged universal dread, honoring the departed even as it trembled at the rattle, real or imagined, of their bones; a celebration in which populations came together to sing “Happy Birthday to Death.” A Halloween without fear is a Christmas without cheer, an Independence Day without freedom, a luau without aloha, a corrida without
olé
.

By the twentieth century, the old terror, if not erased, had been significantly suppressed; and once-sanctioned communal anarchy reduced to a temporary tolerance of the kind of soft vandalism previously described. And in century 21, the Feast of the Dead is primarily represented by tutu-clad children on tooth-decay missions, by young adults dressed up as cultural icons in the hope they won’t be recognized when they make inappropriate sexual advances and/or get falling-down drunk.

Now, as a property owner, not to mention “senior citizen” (talk about a scary epithet), I can’t say I’d prefer those Halloweens of yore, yet I can’t help but feel that something has been lost: something transformative, something central to our story, something secretly nourishing to the soul. And, to be perfectly honest, I wouldn’t mind awakening one November 1 to see my neighbor’s Toyota on top of his house.

As a teenager in Warsaw (the Virginia village where I finally got over my homesickness for Blowing Rock), I was to be found every Halloween among the group of boys that gathered after supper in the center of town, intent on mischief, percolating with an unconscious longing to invoke and flirt with those fearsome forces that haunt the mortal shadows of being. On the other hand, it may just have been a bunch of bored kids looking for a break in small-town routine, looking to cut loose for a night, looking for a little excitement, for kicks. Despite their rowdy nature, these rallies were fundamentally devoid of malice, were reflective of an actual kind of innocence; yet, as I can report firsthand, they did not always produce a happy ending.

As we boys, armed with bars of soap and rolls of bathroom tissue, milled about Warsaw’s main intersection, waiting for Clanton’s Drug Store to douse its lights and close for the night (the intersection’s other businesses had gone dark at six), we were inevitably joined -- or, rather, confronted -- by an adult male in a suit and tie. That would have been Mr. Willy Jones, the commonwealth attorney for Richmond County, a jowly, humorless middle-aged man whose fairly affluent residence was a scant two blocks away. Jones would puff himself up, survey us disdainfully, and address us in a painfully slow Southern accent so swimming in hog gravy that it elicited giggles from us boys, even though all spoke fluent Dixie save I, who, as aforementioned, sounded like an Oklahoma bug doctor trapped under a spud truck. “I am orderin’ y’all,” Willy Jones would announce, “to deesperse this assembly immediately or I will prosecute ever lass one of y’all to the fullest extent of the law.”

Jones’s threat would be greeted with hoots and jeers. He would then repeat it, emphasizing the prosecute part; and gradually, in pairs or groups of three or four, boys would peel away from the main body, only to regroup (though we always lost several ’fraidy cats) around the corner and down the street in front of the B&B poolroom, the only establishment in town aside from the movie theater and the Negro-friendly Texaco station to remain open after eight. It was a yearly ritual: Willy Jones would strike a vocal blow for the rule of law and the forces of good, then we frankly laughable representatives of the Dark Side would scatter, later to slip and sneak around the residential streets banging on doors, tipping over garbage cans, wreaking very minor havoc. One October 31, however -- it was my senior year in high school -- the routine took an unfortunate left turn, paving the way for the end of Halloween Fright and the advent of Halloween Lite in Warsaw forever.

Wishing perhaps to put some distance between ourselves and Willy Jones (Warsaw’s sole cop always seemed to conveniently vanish at Halloween), eight or nine of us found ourselves a half mile or so from the heart of town, out where residences petered out and croplands began. Be it by chance or subliminal design, we were gazing across a field at a large white farmhouse occupied by an unmarried schoolteacher and her bachelor brother. Andrew Garland, a gruff old bird, had retired from surveying to devote all of his time to the farm. His sister, Claude, a severe, stout woman who had been teaching typing, shorthand, and bookkeeping at Warsaw High School since practically the demise of clay tablets, was known to everyone, young and old, as “Miss Claude.”

Motivated by no spoken plan, we advanced to within forty feet of Chez Garland, finally pausing beneath a black walnut tree, very tall and likely older than all of us put together. The actual black walnut nut, hard and dense of shell, is contained inside a thick, pulpy husk about the size of a handball: a perfect size, alas, for throwing. As there were walnuts aplenty on the ground, it wasn’t long before, silently, spontaneously, our puppet strings pulled perhaps by the spirits of Halloween -- ancient, autumnal, arboreal -- we commenced to hurl the walnuts against the side of the house.

So far so good. We seemed to be successfully creating the very kind of loud, hopefully scary, ultimately harmless racket that was ever our goal on these annual nights of fright. But then . . . But then there was a new sound: a
clink!
followed instantly by a cascade of icy tinkles, as if a cheap music box had imploded inside a freeze locker. The noise was repeated. Over and over. Encore! Encore!

From inside the house, there came a sound disturbingly akin to a scream. Abruptly, the tinkling stopped. We froze. The night, the earth, the universe slammed on its brakes. Time sucked on a chloroform Popsicle. We gaped at one another, neither in triumph nor terror, neither with bravado nor indifference, but with a peculiar kind of disbelief. Then, like a flock of starlings, we whirled as one and took off for town.

Our young legs covered a lot of ground quickly, but the news of our foul deed got there ahead of us. By the time we reached the B&B poolroom, Lester Scott’s father and Bernard Packett’s older brother were already sitting out front in their pickup trucks, engines idling, and less than a minute later, Lester and Bernard were hauled away. When we looked up the street and glimpsed Willy Jones conferring with our local lawman beside his patrol car, the rest of us developed a sudden yearning for the comforts of hearth and home.

Each upstairs window in the Garland house comprised a dozen nine-by-eleven-inch panes. How many of these were shattered, I couldn’t say. Reports later ranged from five to twenty-five, depending on who was talking -- and none of us boys was talking much at all. The number, however, was not really the issue. The more relevant question was “Why?”

Cap’n Andrew, as he was called, wasn’t the most gregarious of men, but certainly none among us bore him ill will. As for Miss Claude, she had a reputation at school as a stern disciplinarian, but nobody ever called her unfair or unkind. Moreover, not a boy in our party had taken one of her classes. Her mission for at least two decades had been to prepare local girls for office work, one of the very few jobs available to young women at that time and in that place. Had we ever given it a moment’s thought, we’d have let out an ecstatic rebel yell that it was the girls, not us, who faced a future of balancing ledgers and taking dictation.

No, it was neither personal anger nor general resentment of authority that prompted our walnut barrage, nor can it be traced to any inherent meanness; and let’s not get carried away with blaming the demonic agents of Halloween, though our assault never would have occurred on any other day of the year. In the end, I suppose it was the confluence of boredom, hormones, and chance opportunity that led to the broken glass, an impromptu teenage reach for fresh thrills in small-town postwar America.

In any case, for days thereafter, all of Warsaw was abuzz with talk of the Halloween caper. Everywhere, we were regarded with curiosity and/or disgust. Commonwealth Attorney Jones was hell-bent on “prosecutin’ ever lass one” of us to the fullest extent of the law. Rumors of impending reform school were widely circulated.

Several of our parents got together and hired a lawyer, and I was among those who were deposed in his office. Eventually, restitution was paid, individual letters of apology written, Miss Claude forgave us, and within a month the evil pumpkins of Halloween had been safely baked into Thanksgiving pies, although there were a few of us who would never quite sponge ol’ Jack’s tainted smudge from our ledgers.

Now, an octogenarian writer looking back on his life, I find my list of regrets a short one: shorter, no doubt than it has any right to be. Near the top of that list, however, ahead even of a couple of ill-advised marriages, is the part I played in the breaking of Miss Claude’s windows. If there is an afterlife, a dimension resembling Judeo-Christian fantasies of heaven, I take some solace in the conviction that the good Miss Claude is busy there, occupied with helping God update His office skills in case He should finally get around to correcting all those obvious mistakes in the Bible.

Apparently, my seasonal interest in the Feast of the Dead mythology was squelched neither by maturity nor middle age (the two being by no means synonymous), because I was a tick past forty on the Halloween when three friends and I ingested a sizable (though less than heroic) dose of so-called magic mushrooms (
Psilocybe semilanceata
) and set out to make credible contact with the spirit realm.

The most favorable spot for such an encounter (location, location) seemed to be a graveyard, one well away from traffic and city lights. Thus, Pleasant Ridge Cemetery seemed ideal. Several miles from La Conner as the vulture flies, reached only by a two-lane country road, it was unlit, unguarded, reasonably isolated, and regularly enveloped in Pacific Northwest mist. Any bag of bones tempted to rise from the grave could scarcely ask for better conditions.

By the time we reached Pleasant Ridge, the fungous psilocybin had begun to kick in. The caul of civilized conditioning was falling away from our eyes, and our central nervous systems were vibrating at a frequency that seemed to be perfectly synchronized with both the rhythms of wild nature and the music of the spheres. It was the necromantical numina of the netherworld we were courting, however, and they proved to be reluctant guests.

Time is decidedly relative when one is in the thrall of the mushroom elves, but I’m guessing we sat among the tombstones for no more than thirty or forty minutes before concluding that such close proximity was likely inhibitive to the wakeful dead; whereupon we moved across the narrow road and repositioned ourselves inside a thickish grove of alder and second-growth fir. There we not only had a clear view of the cemetery without being intrusive, but were concealed should a car happen by, and moreover, were in a relationship of sorts with the (not-exactly-primeval) forest.

A bank of clouds foreclosed on the moon. Dark pillows smothered the stars. A thin silvery rain began to fall. Still, we sat. We watched. And we giggled. And giggled and giggled. We were cold, wet, scratched by twigs, uncomfortably seated, and in a lonely, spooky place miles from the costume party our peers were enjoying at the tavern in town. So what was so damn funny?

Well . . . everything. Everything! Raindrops running off Roseanna’s nose were funny. Victor’s fit of sneezing was funny. Aurora’s unsuccessful attempt to form a coherent sentence was funny. The moss was funny, the ferns were hilarious, every third tree was a stand-up comedian. From the perspective afforded by psilocybin’s psychoactive alkaloids, existence itself was so amusing it was a wonder anyone could take it seriously for half a minute. In our altered state of consciousness we seemed to be fortuitously in tune with those Asian “crazy wisdom” sages who have defined life as “the beautiful joke that is always happening”; with the avatar Ramakrishna who, after achieving ultimate enlightenment, returned to say that what Nirvana most closely resembled was laughter.

Well and good, yet it was our comic sensibility that may well have been the rubber fly in our Halloween ointment, that may have been precisely why we failed to access the Other Side. When we finally gave up and drove back to La Conner, it was starting to occur to us that séance and silliness might not mix, not even in a remote rural graveyard on the thirty-first of October with an elfin choir of sacred toadstools singing in one’s blood. Life may be a joke all right, but the dead are not easily amused.