Each and All by John Kuti
Chapter 10
That Christmas at the farm was like a blown glass decoration rolling unsteadily between the opposite edges of a table, between joy and sadness, celebration and loss. It was almost certainly the last holiday that the Van Fleet family would share with their father. The simple traditions and decorations, the food and the presents and the music were all informed with the clear light of finality. Death had its hand on everyone’s shoulder, taking each member of the family aside as they reached for a husband, a father and a grandfather that they loved. For some, the hand of death moved their heart’s balance to joy and celebration, for others the balance moved to the weight of sadness and loss.
Christmas morning was the great gathering. Son Jonas, the Christian monk, had come days early from the West, but all the other grown members of the Van Fleet family came late on Christmas morning, having had their own family’s Christmas with their own children and their own particular traditions. Lucy had gone very early in the morning to pick up Christa at the private psychiatric hospital and everyone was relieved that she was in a calm place between the ecstasy and anguish they had all come to fear. Some of the birth parents of the Van Fleet children came on Christmas day, responding to the invitation they received for every family holiday gathering. Usually it was only on Christmas that birth parents came to the farm, yet even that wasn’t a common occurrence, and there was an underlying tension and sadness that came with them that no gracious welcome ever seemed to relieve. The great farm and the enormous happy mixed family seemed to overwhelm the small birth families that came to visit. It seemed difficult for them because they were lifted and carried away by the momentum of the family traditions and celebrations. It was also difficult to face the fact that they seemed to have actually done their children an incredible favor by giving them up, Eugene and Sharon had done so much better by their children than they could have possibly hoped to do. At least that seemed to be the common, unspoken feeling.
Muffins and milk and tea and coffee were the traditional light morning breakfast before the gathering in the coffee house where presents were exchanged. The Van Fleets had, in fact, almost completely removed the commercial aspect of Christmas gifts. Presents were exchanged only between Eugene and Sharon and they with each of their children. The only exception was the gifts that were exchanged between a child and his or her ally, the brother or sister who was their assigned defender. At Christmas, all gifts between allies had to be personal creations, something made with the hand and the heart and the mind, a painting, a sculpture, a story, a song or a poem. One of the best parts of Christmas presents was making or creating something on the farm in secret, a surprise where it was so difficult to keep secrets and surprises.
Where Christmas was kept almost pure of commercial considerations, birthdays were permitted to be an unlimited excuse to shower the birthday boy or girl, man or woman with presents. Birthdays were meant to remind a person how glad everyone was they been born. Christmas and birthdays bore different kinds of gratitude.
Tom and Amanda arrived before her parents and Ann Marie, even though they set out somewhat later because of their visit to Amanda’s friend Kara. Laura had insisted that Ian drive below every speed limit, because she was still very anxious riding in a car.
The McCalls pulled into the parking lot at the farm and they were immediately uncomfortable with the fact that they had come bearing no presents. Except for highway gift shops, nothing was open on Christmas day. They would arrive with empty hands. The only parcel in the car was the box of letters that Ian had packed in case Eugene had had second thoughts about his gift to Laura. Carrying them back to the farm had in fact been the first thing that made Laura realize how excited she was at the idea of doing a book of short stories from them. She realized that giving back something that had been hers for only one day felt as if she would be giving back a part of herself.
The McCalls were met and welcomed at the front door by Tom and Amanda who were waiting for them in the big wicker chairs by the front porch fireplace. It was strange to be greeted with kisses and hugs by their own daughter and her boyfriend.
Tom led them into the house and through to the coffee house where the family was gathering. The farm was transformed by the smells and colors and shapes of Christmas celebration. There were huge butter bowls piled high with fruit, Cedar boughs draped and decorated, big baskets of pine cones decked with ribbons, and an eight foot high balsam tree shining under tinsel and lights and antique blown glass decorations on the coffee house stage.
It was all bathed in the smell of food for the Christmas feast. Strangely, Christmas morning was one of the few times no one was singing or playing music on the stage. Eugene and Sharon were sitting at the head of the table near the stage where the tables had all been pushed together in a long line to serve for the holiday.
Eugene and Sharon seemed to be like magnets that would pull children and grandchildren from near and far for brief moments and longer talks. Hands full of muffins and drinks, eyes full of delight and mischief and joy, everyone dressed in pressed holiday clothes, the Van Fleet family moved in the convective currents of simple family pleasure.
As usual, the McCalls made their unexpected, unintended entrance. It was the hair. Laura’s beautiful blond hair was brown stubble; Amanda’s was cut chestnut perfection. Amanda walked into the room like a new woman. Laura saw faces staring at her as if she were a strange kind of refugee. Every eye turned, every conversation stopped. Even the children in the currents of excitement were slowed and silenced. Laura was carrying the shoebox containing the letters of Arthur and Laura Lee and everyone was stunned to see it.
Everyone knew all about the terrible things the McCalls had endured: the car accident, Amanda’s rape, even Laura’s affair with their uncle George. They were like romantic characters from a soap opera that was only too agonizingly real. Seeing them walk into the room made the reality immediate and strangely discomforting.
Sharon rose from where she was sitting the instant she saw the McCalls enter the room and went to them and greeted them with hugs and kisses. She held Amanda so close and so long that Laura realized she had probably never held her own daughter with the same simple intense affection she saw coming from a woman who had known her daughter for only a few short weeks. Sharon greeted Ann Marie warmly and told again how they would take some time alone and talk. Ann Marie said she would enjoy that and told Sharon the news that her son Wayne was going to help contact her daughter runaway to the cold streets of Vancouver. Sharon pointed to where Wayne was sitting with Charles, and Ann Marie couldn’t help herself, she excused herself and went to Wayne, floating on the swift currents of hope.
Sharon led the others to the head of the table where they greeted Eugene and were introduced to their daughter Christa sitting quietly holding her father’s hand, staring at it with a strange Mona Lisa smile. She didn’t get up. Christa only said hello, but there was a stillness in her whole being that made her seem both beautiful and unapproachable. Looking into Christa’s eyes was like looking into the cut crystal of Eugene’s. Her fair skin and hair reminded Laura of Eugene as he had been when she had known him so long ago. Looking in Christa’s eyes, Laura searched for the common ground only two women who have been stunningly beautiful can know. She found none.
Laura’s touched Eugene’s shoulder and felt his eyes reach into her as they always had done and she thanked him for the shoebox of letters.
“I’m so touched that you trust me to read them. We have to talk about them later.” Laura said, sounding nervous and tentative.
Sharon insisted that the McCalls sit with them and told Tom to save Ann Marie a seat beside him. Sharon saw the intention in Eugene’s eyes and asked Amanda if she would like to sit across from Eugene. Amanda looked into his eyes and realized for the first time that a complete stranger could look at her with love. It was an undeniable look of love. There was absolutely no doubt in her mind. He didn’t even
Then came the small talk between guests and hosts. It was strange only in the fact that Eugene’s eyes were included in everyone’s conversation. As each person spoke, their eyes invariably found Eugene’s. They were the magnets that no one could resist. When Amanda told the story of the wedding rings her parents had exchanged after all these years and she took her mother’s hand and held it in the air, it was Eugene’s eyes each one of the McCalls sought in reaction. Only Amanda realized what his widened eyes reflected. With great effort, Eugene lifted his arm to show the wedding ring on his own hand.
Again it was Amanda who understood his intention.
“I think he’s saying that wedding rings are great.” Amanda said into the silence. Eugene’s eyes blinked once. Sharon told the McCalls that one blink meant yes.
The other Van Fleet children kept coming up to the McCalls and wishing them a happy holiday. Wayne returned Ann Marie to her seat and the younger Van Fleet girls kept coming up to Amanda and telling her how they loved her hair. There was also the look of nervous fear in each of their eyes seeing someone they knew who had been brutally raped looking so unaffected and lovely. They were also nervous and afraid looking at Laura, the middle-aged mother looking like she’d come from a trendy concentration camp. When they wished Laura merry Christmas, it was easy to hear the nervousness they were feeling in the younger children’s voices. The romantic character of Laura Lee that they had identified with her became an even deeper identification because of the mystery of her missing hair.
Then came the presents. Until that year the Christmas gifting tradition of the Van Fleets was always the same. Two by two each child and ally would go to the front of the stage. Sharon would retrieve each child’s present from under the tree as the children retrieved their presents for their parents. Until that year Sharon and Eugene would open each child’s present for them and there was always a great fuss because each child was allowed to spend up to a thousand dollars on their parent’s gifts. Because Eugene and Sharon also had the same spending limit, the presents the children opened were also truly impressive. Very early on, Sharon and Eugene had agreed that they would make Christmas the time to indulge their children and let their children indulge them in pure material excess. Young children loved the grand material expression of their feelings for and from their parents. The hardest part was finding a suitable expensive gift. After the video cameras and the digital wonders had run out, it took far more thought to buy a big present than a little personal one.
That year was different because Eugene was paralyzed. Nothing expensive seemed appropriate. Everything seemed poignant and ironic. That was why the children asked to change the tradition and pool their resources to make Eugene his Christmas gift.
A huge television and a digital recorder were wheeled into the center of the stage and Tom explained that he and his younger brothers and sisters had produced a movie, a little travel documentary. Tom started the show and everyone became silent watching the television monitor.
What followed was made exactly in the style of a travel documentary in which a narrator led the viewer around the significant sites of some exotic location, the voice-over explaining the meaning and significance of the things the camera displayed. The exotic location was the farm. Each child took turns being the narrator of the travelogue, and what made the tour so fascinating and personal was each child led the camera to places where incidents had occurred that meant something personal to that child. At one spot Eugene had taught a son to ride a bicycle, at another spot he had bandaged a hand. Here had been the site of the terrible water pistol war. There was the place that a daughter first had the courage to put her hand in his. Here birthday fireworks burst in the sky. Here was the seat of the beautiful Mercedes where they would sit quietly while their father drove them swiftly through a quiet, dark, starry, starry night. Every one of the children would bring the camera to view the empty seat of the Mercedes under the opened Gull Wing door.
One after another the children led the camera to places that held memories that held a place in their heart that would last forever. One after another, the children simply described ordinary acts and incidents that bound a father and a child forever. There were few great dramatic incidents, the deepest memories of time seemed so ordinary, but listening to them described in a child’s unbroken voice, one after another, made the tour of invisible moments heartrendingly beautiful. There were tears running everywhere.
When Tom, as the last of the younger children on the video watched himself in an empty field describe how it felt the first time his father let him put down the big plow into the soil behind the tractor, and how he felt the heavy pull through his whole body, everyone was absolutely silent with their own memories of invisible time in visible places. And when Tom’s voice coming from the television speaker said that the feeling in his body of pulling a plow through the earth was the way he felt when his father hugged him, it was one of those common experiences each of his children recognized as the perfect metaphor for their father’s life. The last child in the tour was the youngest child David who was unable to speak or communicate, and so his brothers and sisters had led him around the farm and told their own memories of what they had seen, watching David and his father together. Listening to each child described Eugene with the son who could not speak or respond was, in a way, like describing how they had been when they first had come to the farm. Each child had known the fear and doubt that they could love or be loved. Each child had come to the farm like David in a way, and their descriptions of seeing him with Eugene were even more poignant than their own personal memories of how he had been with them. The irony was that the young boy who would never be able to communicate with the world would come to have more in common with his father than any of them. It became more and more obvious in each memory each child described. Unlike everyone else who always tried to talk to David, Eugene had invariably spent his time with his son following wherever David led, crawling through flower beds, pouring fruit from baskets and bushels, milling about with the two big old dogs, walking aimlessly from one place to another. Watching the invisible Eugene with his invisible son David, made almost everyone realize how much they missed seeing their father move independently through space and time. His words had been special luxuries he offered. Seeing him move was a simple sustenance they had all taken for granted and almost completely forgotten.
When the movie was over and the television was a black screen, all the adults in the room got up to applaud the younger children. There were blushes and giggles as Tom went to the stage and turned off the television set and asked his younger brothers and sisters to come up on stage to receive the appreciation of the rest of the family. Tears were pouring from their parents eyes.
After the tour of invisible memories, all the other gifts were anticlimactic. The books, the rare vinyl records, the clothing, the jewelry and the pieces of art that came to Sharon and Eugene from her their children, and even the ones that were exchanged between each child and their ally seemed to have a dull luster compared to the shining video.
Amanda watched with pride as Tom exchanged presents with his ally, his sister Lucy. She gave him a drawing she had made of Tom with his arms around the necks of two beautiful Wolves. He had given her what seemed to be a dull little necklace made of black beads. It was only when he closed the clasp at the back of her neck and she smelled the roses all around her that she realized what a special gift it was.
“The beads are made of ground up rose petals.” Tom explained, “The smell should last a lifetime.”
Lucy kissed Tom and thanked him, and wherever she went the smell of ros
After all the gifts were opened, except for two small parcels lying in the branches of the Christmas tree, Sharon asked Tom to retrieve them for her. They were the presents she and Eugene would exchange.
She opened his present for him from her first, and when she held it up for the family to see there were some gasps when they saw it was a Day timer. Then, as she took it and held it in front of Eugene’s eyes and began to turn the pages, she explained that each day was marked with a memory, something she had written down from the same day in the previous year. Each day began with a memory of hers that she wanted to share with him that had come while he had lost his ability to speak. She read the example from the last New Years Eve.
“When the clock struck midnight everyone screamed Happy New Year and you tried so hard not to look tired, then all your children got in a long line and kissed you and said Happy New Year and it was absolutely quiet except when each of them spoke to you. You whispered, Happy New Year. “Sharon read from the book and every one of his children remembered the last New Year’s Eve, and remembered that it was one of the last times Eugene was able to speak intelligibly.
Sharon kissed Eugene and then with his eyes he indicated that she should open her own gift. Only Wayne and his father knew what was in the parcel. Sharon was surprised that, as she was opening it, Wayne had passed along a magnifying glass for her to use.
“It must be a diamond if I’m going to need a magnifying glass.” Sharon said, just before she opened the small jewelry box and saw the necklace inside. Hanging on a beautiful gold chain was a walnut miniature pendent about an inch in a half square representing the big family tree in the dining room. The trunks that represented each member of the family were perfectly reproduced. The brass mailboxes with each of their names that held the stories of their family’s generations were there in miniature. From where he sat, Wayne explained that she needed to look through the magnifying glass, and with it she saw each of the names on the little brass plates, and she saw each of the branches with the minutely carved names of each and all of their ancestors. She could see the veins in each leaf on the tree just the way it was in the enormous one in their home. Wayne explained what his mother was seeing through the magnifying glass and explained how it was made by one of the greatest craftsmen in China from a piece of walnut from their own forest, and it had taken a year to complete.
Sharon sat for a long moment looking at her present and she was fighting back tears when she said it was the most beautiful gift she’d ever seen and passed it with the magnifying glass to Christa who was sitting beside her.
“There has never been a more beautiful gift in this world.” Sharon said, as she kissed Eugene on his unmoving lips.
Almost no one spoke as the necklace passed from hand to hand around the table until everyone had touched it and looked at it through the magnifying glass. Everyone watched each person’s reaction as they looked for their own names and histories. When it finally came back to Sharon, she turned her head so that Christa could close the clasp of the necklace at the back of her neck. From that day onward, every time Sharon sat down for a meal with her children she would put on her last perfect Christmas gift from her husband.
Ann Marie whispered to Laura, “These people make me feel like I totally screwed up my life.”
“I think everyone that comes here must feel like that.” Laura whispered into her friend’s ear. “Too perfect is too perfect.”
Ann Marie looked across the table into Christa’s eyes and had no idea that the stare she was facing was actually a Lithium haze.
After the presents, the Christmas feast was served. Unlike the rest of the year when the younger children served the adults, at Christmas all the younger children and grandchildren sat and the adults set the table and brought the food and cleared the dishes and washed them and dried them and put them away. Sharon and Eugene and guests were the only adults not expected to participate in preparing and serving and clearing the feast.
The McCall’s were stunned when Wayne and Charles brought in the thirty-five pound turkey.
“It’s the size of a Volkswagen.” Ian exclaimed.
Wayne carved with an electric knife as one enormous serving bowl after another found its place on the table. Christmas was the ultimate potluck dinner. It was the only time the grown children ever brought food to the farm.
Ian couldn’t help saying how impressed he was with each of the Van Fleet family Christmas traditions. Every event and every relationship seemed to be considered and precious.
“You should write a book about the practical side of family relationships.” said Ian, enthusiastically to Sharon.
Both Laura and Ann Marie heartily agreed.
“Maybe I should. But the practical side of family relationships means that I don’t really have a lot of free time to write books. Besides every family is different.” Sharon replied.
“And you’d have to go on a book tour.” Amanda added, and Sharon rolled her eyes back in her head at the very thought.
Laura was surprised as how different the Van Fleet family was at their holiday table. The biggest difference seemed to come from the way Jonas, still dressed in his Trappist monk’s robes, dominated the conversation with stories everyone seemed to be longing to hear because he was such a master of comic description and timing.
Everyone was roaring with laughter as they ate while Jonas described the Trappist version of Charades, acting out the syllables of Guiuseppe Roncalli or the seven deadly sins.
“Watching Brother Paul do lust is worth the price of admission.” Jonas said, then proceeded to describe in detail his fellow brother’s attempt to be suggestive without being suggestive as the other monks wrote their guesses on slate boards.
“For a long time, all he would do was point in the general direction of various people’s naughty bits. After the finger gestures for shame-shame didn’t work, brother Paul laid down on the floor and started to thrash about, and after some guesses involving various types of possession by the holy spirit, he got fed up and did the most wonderful impression of someone having sex. Marcel Marseux would have been proud. By this time everyone was laughing so hard and guessing such ridiculous things like thigh master and slinky toy, poor brother Paul looked like he was going to have a heart attack.”
Coming from a young man in religious habit only made the story funnier. Only the Van Fleet Van family would have a Trappist monk who was a raconteur.
Even with the entertaining conversation, the second enormous turkey dinner in less than a day had the poor McCall family feeling heavy and sleepy and overwhelmed with the luxury of taste and the mass quantities of food. When conversation finally broke into smaller isolated pockets around the table, Ann Marie excitedly told about her talking with Wayne about his friend who would try to find her daughter Megan.
“When I asked Wayne how his friend made contact with a runaway child on the streets, Wayne said his friend used the one thing no teenager could resist, shopping. His friend tells them honestly that he works for an organization that tries to help young boys get off the streets and asks his new contact to help him find a present to lift the spirits of the latest boy he is trying to help. He uses one child to help the other, and it’s in the compassion and concern for another person with the same problems that both eventually get the strength to try to get their lives together. What Wayne’s friend then does is help them re-established contract with their parents, if that’s possible. He becomes the intermediary asking the runaway child if it’s all right if he drop their parents a little note every day telling them that their child is all right. Alright! Can you imagine? He also encourages a parent to respond every day, telling about their own thoughts and activities. He’s the only way the child and the parent can talk to
Even Ann Marie, who had expected to be enduring the worst Christmas of her life was filled with the tingling nervousness of life’s possibility.
Then, after the feast, Eugene was taken back to his bed so that he could rest. The adult children cleared the table and did the dishes while the children talked and played and some visited with their birth parents. Tom and Amanda offered to give Ann Marie the quick tour of the farm and Ian asked if it would be all right if he joined them. Laura said that she would prefer to let her dinner settle and so stayed sipping wine with Sharon. When there were alone, Sharon asked Laura about her hair.
“It was like tearing your clothes in grief at a funeral. With all the horror that we’d been through the vanity involved in dealing with my hair was just more than I could stand. The feeling of my hair coming away in my hands with every slice of the scissors was what life felt like.”
“Did you throw it away? They make wigs for people in chemotherapy out of hair people donate.” Sharon responded.
“I knew that. I should have her remembered. It went out in the trash, I’m afraid.”
“That’s all right. You had your heart ripped to shreds. How are you doing? It’s hard to believe, but Amanda looks wonderful.”
“It’s Tom. He’s truly a beautiful boy.” Laura replied. “It’s hard to believe anyone that young can be so strong.”
“He’s our Puritan boy. He only believes in ideals. These days, it’s really quite lovely.”
Laura then told Sharon that she had to talk to her about the box of letters Eugene had sent to her for Christmas.
“I don’t know whether Tom told you but I have quit my job and until those letters, I had absolutely no idea what I was going to do with myself. I talked to a publisher a while back because I thought it was such a wonderful idea to turn them into a book, and I hoped that Eugene and you might consider having them published, but my publisher friend said the idea of letters was too Victorian, people didn’t communicate that way anymore. In the car today, thinking about those letters and Arthur and Laura Lee, I started to think that maybe each pair of letters would make a beautiful short story. After their first dreams and their separation, maybe they never knew their dreams continued. There would be no letters. Arthur and Laura Lee never knew about each other’s dreams, only the narrator and the reader would know about their incredible connection.” Laura explained.
“I don’t understand. It’s very different than what the letters are, maybe it would be even more poignant in a way if two people could be so connected and not even realize it. You should talk to Eugene. If I know my husband, he’d do almost anything you asked. I was always sorry the only writing that he ever did were those letters. It would be nice to see the best part of his imagination survive him. You should talk to him. Why don’t you and Amanda consider staying for the week? It’s her school holiday. You could spend some time with Eugene and maybe he could help you to turn those letters into stories. I think it would be wonderful if he had a last purpose to make him feel like he wasn’t completely in the last infantile stage of his disease.”
“It’s very tempting. I’ve always been able to write, I just never had anything to say, no story to tell. I’ve only been good with words. I had no idea that Eugene had the imagination he does, he always seemed like such a practical, sensible person.” Laura replied.
“He’s one of those strange people that really thinks about everything that he says. He’s also the best listener I’ve ever known. He’s one of the few people who seems to value every word people say to one another. The kids always listen to everything he says. He certainly is proof that words connect people.”
“It depends on what you’re connecting, I suppose.” Laura replied, “That’s what I spent my working life doing, using words to connect people. But he wasn’t connecting dreams and money. City life is a cell phone. It would be great to connect something to something that mattered for once in my life.”
“Talk to Ian. Talk to Amanda. You’re certainly welcome here as long as you wish to stay.”
Laura didn’t know why Sharon was so reluctant to talk about the letters, but she ignored it.
“I don’t understand it.” Laura continued. “I don’t know why I just can’t say yes, and stay. It’s like I can feel the enormous vacuum of the city pulling me back. I’ll talk to Ian.” Laura’s eyes were alive with nervous excitement. Sharon could see them dancing with interest, almost frantic with the idea of a decision that might make her life mean something, something she could be proud of having done.
Outside, Tom and Amanda had began the tour by getting Ann Marie to climb up into the steam engine where it was Ann Marie’s turn to jump a foot in the air when Ian pulled on the steam whistle cord.
The scream was like a celluloid memory ripped from the soundtrack of Dr. Zivago. The sound of steam screaming in steel felt like the release Ann Marie had felt since the night before, and since she had talked to Wayne, since she had let herself release the feeling of love she had for her daughter, the daughter she had been unconsciously preparing to mourn.
When Tom opened up the family vault underneath dense rambler roses, Ann Marie was absolutely taken with the idea of having a private place to keep psychic treasures, a place that was safe and strong and impregnable.
“You have any idea how wonderful and therapeutic an idea this is?” she asked, “I’m going to suggest to my patients that they find a strong box of some kind to keep their own journals and the private and precious things from their lives. This is wonderful!”
Tom agreed that he loved the idea of bringing things to his own safety deposit boxes. He also said he liked the idea that the rest of his family had their most precious possessions stored all around his own. He did not mention that the vault always felt, to him, like a living crypt where living memories of living people rested in solemn silence.
Amanda was taking the tour with new eyes. The places she had seen as a guest and a visitor suddenly seemed to have become extensions of her own life. Somehow her bond with Tom made the things and the places she saw feel like things that belonged to her, like shadows of things in her own room. There was a strange feeling of possession and being possessed, a strange feeling of belonging where she was a stranger. It was as if time and space had become something that existed in the connection she felt in the distance between her soft hand and his.
The breathless feeling for Amanda, as she toured the buildings on the farm, was that she was helplessly aware that she might be looking at her future. Would this be her life? Would she belong here? Would she belong with him? Or would they actually create another copy of the farm among people she didn’t know, people that didn’t even know they were coming, people of a race that might see her as an outsider. In a strange way Amanda, walking with her hand in her boyfriend’s hand, was kicking the tires of her future.
Ann Marie didn’t say very much as she walked beside Ian, following Tom and Amanda as they led them through the garages and the art studio and the furniture shop. Christmas was one of the very few times that any of those places were still. Ann Marie’s mind took in the impressive things that she saw, but her feelings were back in the farmhouse anticipating a chance to talk once more with Wayne, to finger the irregular outlines of hope.
When they were walking back to the farmhouse, Ann Marie said just what Ian was thinking as they watched Tom and Amanda in big coats walking ahead of
“Those two look like they’ve been together for their whole lives.”
“I know. It’s terrifying.” Ian replied, and he truly was frightened and awed by what was so obviously set so deep and so hard. Yet looking at them, they seemed to be not much more than children. Both Ian and Ann Marie had learned that the impression was completely false.
In the coffee house, the long table was cleared except for the big platters of baked goods that had already been seriously plundered. After the big meal, everyone but the young Van Fleet children were mellow and content and moving on to the coffeehouse. Already the younger children were near the stage listening to Martha playing her guitar and singing. It would be after dark before the adults would join in the music. Holidays were the time for the family to gather and talk and touch and understand how things could stay the same as life went through its inevitable changes.
Before long, Laura noticed little David in his fresh dress slacks, sweater, shirt and tie hovering nearby. As soon as he had been released from where he was sitting at the table, he had drifted straight to Laura. It wasn’t like he was staring at her. It was more like he was watching her in fascination from the corner of his eyes. Sharon of course noticed that David had actually focused his attention on one person for a significant length of time for perhaps the first time that she could recall. Usually his attention span was very short. He was always in motion. His interests moved over the places and things of the world with only a fleeting caress. In the little spaces of his conscious attention and reaction, he was rarely happy or exuberant, rarely frustrated or angry. He was more like an infant that looked like a boy, an infant boy who could move his big empty eyes with infinite curiosity, without any apparent understanding.
When David finally moved to the space beside Laura and stood looking at her with his baby blue eyes, Sharon was quite amazed. She said nothing as she ran her fingers through her son’s golden curls. Finally David’s stare sank into Laura’s conscious awareness and she looked at him and said hello.
“Ike… ife.” David said in his guttural way.
“David, this is Laura. Laura.” Sharon said to him. And her mouth almost fell open when she heard him reply, “Or. Ore.”
Sharon praised him and repeated Laura’s name three times. “This is Laura. Laura. Laura.”
And in almost the same cadence he repeated his attempts at her name, “Or. Ore... Oar.”
Sharon swept him into her arms and hugged him and kissed him, much to the surprise of everyone except her own family.
“That’s the first time that David has ever used language. That was the first word he’s ever spoken.” Sharon raised her voice and got the attention of the whole room and told them what had happened. The room went surprisingly silent.
“Or. Ore. “ David said and everyone clapped and the beautiful boy’s face reacted as little to the applause as it had to the silence. David squirmed from his mother’s grasp and took his place on the floor beside Laura’s chair, looking at her steadily.
“The only words, the only sounds David has ever consistently made was the one he said to you just before he said your name. Sometimes the younger children call him Like Life because that’s the way it sounds. Ike.. ife.” Sharon continued explaining.
“Ooooar.” said David, drawing out the simple word. His mother praised him again and repeated Laura’s name over and over until Laura finally couldn’t help it and ran the back of her fingers over his lily soft cheek.
From that moment on, David became Laura’s tenuous shadow. He didn’t follow her so much as gravitate to her as if he could not resist the implacable gravity of her pull. It would be a long time before it stopped making her vaguely uncomfortable.
It was after the excitement with David that Tom took Amanda around the room and introduced her to all the people she still hadn’t met. She was delighted and embarrassed when he told everyone about her Christmas present to him. Some of the children soon came up to Tom and asked him if they could listen to Amanda’s CD. They were delighted when he told them it was in his winter coat pocket and so they ran off to fetch it and take it to the music room. For the younger children, Amanda was almost a star, a romantic ideal they could touch, someone who knew love and tragedy and rebellion and beauty. For them, she was truly the daughter of Laura Lee. It would be later that evening, when everyone was gathered around the stage, that Tom would play the piano, and Rosie would play the drums and Sara would play her guitar and Amanda would sing a song from her own CD. Laura and Ian were silently awed and proud of her. Tom was worse. He was in love and his eyes pushed the stars out of a deep invisible sky.
It was later in the afternoon when Laura had Ian alone for a moment that she told him about Sharon’s invitation for her to stay and work on a book of short stories that might come from the letters Eugene had given her. She told him how she imagined the structure of the stories. She told him how it would be a lovely monument to Eugene. She told him it might have a wonderful potential. What she didn’t say was that she really had nothing else to do with her life. He knew and she knew that she was trying to sell him the idea. It was only when she realized that she was selling it that she knew how much she really wanted to do it. As nervous as it made her, she couldn’t resist the feeling that the book actually might give her life some real meaning.
Ian had never discouraged Laura in anything she had ever chosen to do. It was ironic that the first time that he would do so would be over something she felt was so vital.
“A book takes so long. How long would you stay? When would I see you?” he asked after the long pause that came after she had finished talking. “What about Amanda? The connection you two have made in the last weeks is so good. We both need you at home. We both want you at home.”
Laura was obviously disappointed. She knew he was absolutely right. She had no right to separate herself from her family when it finally seemed to have really found itself.
“You’re right. I’ll work on it at home.”
Ian was completely torn in half. He knew the atmosphere of the farm would give her the strength to risk rejection and failure. He knew how hard it would be for her to work quietly alone every day. Laura had always needed the stimulation of other people. She had always hated being alone. As always, when Ian faced hard decisions, he tried to find a reasonable compromise. He always wanted both sides to win. He didn’t like to face the fact that what that usually meant was that both sides had to agree to a loss, to something less than they had hoped for. The thing Ian hated most in life was being the cause of anyone’s disappointment.
“Maybe you could come up on weekends with Amanda when she comes to see Tom?” he offered.
“It’s a thought.” Laura said half-heartedly. “I’m not sure how she would feel about that, and I’m really not sure how she’d feel if I was here even more than that. It’s probably a lousy idea.”
That was how they left it and Ian was surprised that, under his relief and appreciation of Laura’s loyalty to himself and her daughter, there was the undeniable guilt that perhaps he was denying her the possibility of creating something truly beautiful. In a way he felt he was denying both his wife and Eugene a small, sweet sliver of immortality. He was sorry that he didn’t want to let his wife come to work with this man who was dying, who so obviously loved her. He wished he could tell her how he felt, but he just didn’t dare.
Ian was relieved when Tranh came up to the two of them to introduce his wife and wish them a merry Christmas. Suddenly, small talk felt lovely to both the McCalls. Decisions and disappointments were never their strong suit.
Tranh’s wife Elaine said that Christmas day was very hard for her husband because he usually went to bed after four in the morning. They were surprised to learn that Tranh was an amateur astronomer who spent almost every dark night searching for comets and asteroids. He joked about saving the world someday, and when he said that only a small percent
“An asteroid big enough to cause catastrophic climatic change happens once every million years or so. So we’re long overdue.” Tranh said seriously. “If a comet hit, it would even be worse. A comet is moving so fast that it would cross Canada in about a second and a half. And, if it hit, well, you can imagine.”
Both Tranh and his wife seemed to be curious about Ian and Laura. As Ian questioned Tranh about his telescopes and found out that they took up the upper half of the house they had built to house it, it was obvious that, as Ian talked, both he and his wife were trying to make some kind of assessment of the McCalls. Tranh and Elaine quickly replied with questions about Ian’s work, but they discretely avoided asking Laura about hers. The family grapevine had spread Tom’s information very quickly. The security of small talk quickly made both couples comfortable with each other and so it was then that Ian asked the question everyone always wanted to ask Tranh.
“I understand you’re also a stock market genius.” Ian said after he finished describing the type of cases that he usually worked in his practice.
“The last ten years it’s been like shooting fish in a barrel for anyone, I suppose.” Tranh replied.
“Does it take a lot of time and research.” Laura asked.
“Not really. I have only held eighteen stocks, most of them, for many years.” he replied.
“Eighteen! How did you ever choose those eighteen?” Ian asked, incredulously.
“Toys, technology and fun. When I came to this country I couldn’t believe that all anyone cared about, all anyone wanted was to have toys and fun. I bought stock in companies that made the biggest toys and the most fun. Mercedes, Lexus, Sony, Disney, Apple Computers, IBM, and I also bought stock in companies that made the toys work, Microsoft, Intel, G.E. Toys, tech and fun.”
“It can’t be that simple?” Ian said with a look of absolute wonder on his face.
“The annual return has been in the high thirties. Things have flattened out a little because everyone now sees the primary importance of toys and fun in this world. I’ve actually been thinking of changing my portfolio to focus on pills and trucks, or just cash out like Elaine wants. She thinks the stock are now just about greed.” Tranh replied.
Ian and Laura were fascinated by the idea that getting rich, disgustingly rich could be based on such a ridiculously simple principle.
“Why pills and trucks?” Ian asked, ignoring Tranh’s cautionary remark.
Medicine and instant markets are the two next great opportunities. No matter what happens in genetic research, somebody’s got to make pills from the findings. And the more connected the world becomes with on-time inventories and far-flung warehouses, somebody’s going to have to deliver the goods. Pills and trucks.
“My question is,” said Elaine, “How much money is enough? I have been hoping that Tranh would cash in before all this greed makes everyone sorry. Our children and our grandchildren will always be secure. There’s something about sitting home and doing nothing and getting rich that makes me very uncomfortable.”
“You’re in the distinct minority” Laura replied. “But the question is a good one, how much money is enough?”
“Money is opportunity.” Tranh replied. “It is strange that in North America where most of the world’s money resides, so few people appreciate that. Live in a poor country like Vietnam for a while and it will teach you to respect the opportunities that come with money.”
“Toys, tech and fun, what would we do without them?” Laura added.
“To me, you have too much money when you no longer appreciate what you buy with it.” said Tranh. “My problem with toys and fun is that they often become like a room that you don’t use or a garage full of junk. It isn’t surprising to me that so many people find a materialistic life unsatisfying. Subconsciously, I think people feel they’re wasting their life’s opportunities.”
“But toys and fun have produced most of the wealth the rest of the world envies. Maybe they should get on the bandwagon.” Ian said mischievously.
“Maybe you’re right. Industry and infrastructure aren’t very exciting.” Tranh replied.
“The way it looks to me, the world has already gotten on the bandwagon.” Elaine interjected.
“I know something about bandwagons.” Laura added, “And I think you’re exactly right.”
She knew everything about bandwagons except how to get off. But there she was at the side of the road wondering where she would go and what she would do without her toys, searching for something that was more than just fun. She was consciously aware she was wasting her life’s opportunities. She had almost infinite choices, yet a shoebox of fictional letters seemed to be her one chance in life. But Ian was right. She should do right by her family, the people who loved her.
The conversation turned when Jonas joined them. He too wanted to take the measure of the McCalls, because it was only in the past few days that he even knew they existed. Yet since he had arrived home, it seemed that all anyone wanted to talk about was the McCall family. It was romance and drama and mystery and tragedy cascading from his younger brothers and sisters. When he had heard that morning that his father had given Laura the letters of Arthur and Laura Lee, it had stunned Jonas completely. That a stranger should be given the most precious icons of his childhood was beyond understanding, if one didn’t understand the overwhelming power of love. Jonas understood it. He had been stunned because he had no idea that he shared that knowledge with his father.
Completely candid in everything but his own personal emotions, Jonas went the right to the core of the question.
“Why would my father give you Arthur and Laura Lee’s letters? Those letters are the myths every one of us carries in our subconscious.” he said, seriously.
Laura was taken aback almost as if she was being accused of deliberately taking them away from the Van Fleet family. Coming from a man in a monk’s habit, it was almost intimidating.
“I mentioned once or twice that I’d love to help to see them published, but I never asked or imagined Eugene would give them to me. If they’ve made so powerful an impression on everyone in your family, perhaps it would be wonderful if you could all share them with the world. I’ve been thinking that the way to make them a little more accessible is by changing them into short stories, but I would only do that with your father’s permission and help. It may come to nothing, but I think it might be a wonderful thing to try to do.” Laura replied
Jonas was satisfied with her answer. He smiled and his eyes warmed and for a moment the caress she felt from them had the same softness as David’s cheek had felt under the back of her fingers.
It was odd, but in that inexplicable moment, of all the wonderful Van Fleet children, with Jonas, Laura felt like she had a friend, an ally, someone who would understand her best intentions, even when she wasn’t aware of them herself. It was what made Jonas a wonderful priest. Like father, like son.
The rest of the afternoon, the McCalls watched the younger children moving constantly among the siblings they didn’t see everyday. There were so many things to report, changes to be recognized, things to be praised, things coming out of memory for display. It was show and tell and tell and tell. Christmas was the best day of the year for such giving and receiving, and for feeling their reciprocal natures.
Later in the afternoon, Amanda asked Tom why none of the children spent very much time with their sister Christa. Christa seemed to be on a very short leash attached to her mother.
“Everybody’s kind of afraid of Christa. You never know if what you say is going to make her breakdown crying. Lately it’s been better because of the drugs she’s taking. She used to tell these terrible stories about people being tortured or abused or dying of terrible diseases. She would stand there and cry and cry like you were supposed to do something to help her stop it. At least she
“Wow. She looks so quiet and gentle. She’s so incredibly beautiful.” Amanda replied.
“The family beauty. You want to go and talk to her?” Tom asked gently.
“Not unless you do.” she answered, and it was obvious that what Tom had told her had made her decidedly nervous.
“I don’t think she’ll do anything. Maybe we’ll go over later.” he said.
It was the first time that Amanda had ever seen anything but absolute courage in Tom. That was what made her nervous. If he was afraid, there was something to fear.
For Ian, the rest of the afternoon was rather strange because everyone in the Van Fleet family seemed to think that he and Laura and Amanda somehow were fascinating characters, but it was he who found them to be unique and exciting human beings. Even the younger children were like no other children he had ever met. They were an odd mixture of lightness and enthusiasm, talent and confidence. The adults all seemed to carry a level of contentment in their eyes and in their movements that was very strange to a city person. These were really just simple farm folks, but above the simplicity were absolutely extraordinary lives. It ws actually their simplicity that made them extraordinary.
Ian wanted to know who was responsible for the grand vision of the farm. He wanted to know what part Sharon had in the creation of such an amazing environment, and he wanted to know what part of it belonged to Eugene. He wanted to know what he could never know from direct observation, the character and the personality of the man locked in the prison of his body. As it happened, he did have an occasion to ask the person who probably knew best. It was before Eugene had returned from his long afternoon nap that he found himself for a few moments sitting with Sharon and her quiet daughter Christa.
“So who was responsible for all the different businesses that you have here at the farm?” Ian asked Sharon.
“The lumber and wood business came because Eugene has an addiction for property. When we were younger we’d spend whatever free time we had tripping over tracts of land that were for sale. He loved forests, probably because of the one his grandfather planted. He started buying land so we could have the forest or to have land to plant more walnut trees for the children. It was just a small step to managing the forest and taking out lumber and firewood, and before long we saw that we could do much better if we milled the timber ourselves. Then, when Tranh finally started making us all rich, Eugene just couldn’t resist more land.” she explained. When she saw that Ian’s eyes were asking her to continue, she went on and explained that the car restoration business had come first, as it was Eugene’s great love.
“The antique reproduction business came because of Wayne’s antique store in Toronto. The foster families that come in the summer were my idea. They make really good money here and work together as a family. That’s really my baby.”
Christa spoke for the first time. “What our family does is give people that live in cities the things they miss out of life. We give them the smell of firewood. We remind them that ordinary people have histories. We give them classic cars that remind them of when they were young. My dad once said that our family lives on the nostalgia that city people have for a past they don’t remember. I never forgot that.” Christa added, and Ian could tell that Sharon had never heard this from her daughter before.
“That’s true, in a way.” she agreed.
As Ian thought about it, he realized that that was what made the farm so strange and so wonderful, the past was everywhere, the place was like an immovable foundation that just grew and grew. He could feel the generations in which they were embedded and he could feel the generations that would rise above them.
“Tell me about Eugene. He seems like a man of insatiable interests. I admire his ambition and confidence. Was he always like that?” Ian asked, and for the first time he could see a real interest in the moment focus in Christa’s eyes. Her father was a subject powerful enough to make her swim up through the mist of her drugs. Christa cut off her mother, who was about to speak.
“My dad thinks that if somebody else has proved something is possible, it’s possible to do again. ‘If somebody’s done it before, why can’t you?’ he would always ask us. My favorite thing about my dad was not the things that came from working hard. My favorite thing was when he brought home the vault and gave us all safety deposit boxes to keep the things we really treasure, the things that were private and precious. We’d see him taking his journals out to the vault and bringing in Arthur and Laura Lee’s letters, and it made us all want to have secret precious stuff of our own. I loved that he was such a pack rat. I loved that he would stop at farms and buy huge old boulders from farmers and bring them home on the lumber truck.”
“Was he always so intense?” Ian prodded.
“That’s the funny thing, the older he got the more intense he became.” Sharon added. “When we were first married he seemed so laid-back. The only thing he really loved was old cars. When we first met, I was the one with the ambition. I was the one pushing him to make his car restoration business something bigger. It was my idea for lifetime maintenance. It was my idea to advertise. Little did I know what this place would become after the kids arrived. I wonder what he thinks of the person he was before all this. I wonder what he thinks about the person your wife knew.”
There it was. That was the question. Ian would have loved to know the answer to that as well. He would also have loved to know the answer to what Laura felt about what Eugene had become. Ian wondered if Laura had been a very different person when she was a girl, before she had work and responsibilities and status. He was imagining the innocence of first love and feeling an upside down envy at what must have been between two such extraordinary human beings, before anyone knew, before even they could have known what they might be. The foundations of the human heart are mostly buried in the seasons and floods of experience, and like a long-standing house, the foundations are usually examined only when they have been put under enormous stress or when fractures appear in the rooms above.
When Ian saw Laura returning to the table and again felt the small shock of what she had done to her hair, he wondered about the foundations of her life. Who was the girl who could become the woman that life had broken. He wondered if the damage went as deep as the person she was when she had long ago first come to the farm. After Laura joined them, Sharon asked her if she would like to come with her when she went to see if Eugene was ready to return to the celebration.
“I could leave you alone together for little while so you can talk to him about your thoughts about doing a book of short stories from his letters.” Sharon said.
It was obvious to everyone that Laura was undecided about how to respond to Sharon’s suggestion. No one could have guessed that her reluctance came from being nervous about being left alone with Eugene. Even more than Sharon, Laura was afraid that she would not be able to stand up to the power and the force of Eugene’s presence.
“Go.” Ian said enthusiastically, “He’d be delighted to know that you’re excited about doing something with his letters. Go.”
“Right now?” Laura asked.
“Sure. This is probably the best time.” Sharon added and got up from her chair and led Laura away.
Eugene was already awake looking almost inanimate on his propped up bed. Sharon took his hand as she most often did when she was beside him and started to rub his skin, letting him feel the strong simple touch of someone who loved him.
“Laura wants to tell you about an idea she has to make a book of short stories from Arthur and Laura Lee’s letters. Are you feeling up to it?” His eyes blinked once.
“Come and sit beside him on the bed. It’s the best way to see the monitor when he’s talking.” Sharon continued, “I always pretend that it’s like talking to someone while you’re watching a movie. If you like, we can bring you some popcorn.” she added, jokingly.
Laura crossed to where she could sit down on the empty space beside Eugene on the big bed. It was a strange feeling to be sitting beside him looking at a television monitor. It was like the tiniest interactive Cineplex theater. It was strange to talk and not look in Eugene’s eyes.
She thanked him again for the gift of the wonderful letters and told sincerely how it was the most beautiful present she had ever received in her life. Words started forming on the screen and they told her so much more than she expected from his reply. He told her that he hoped that those letters would remind her of when she was young, when she was like her own daughter.
“I can’t wait to read them.” she answered, “There is something so fundamental about who we are when we’re young, and I’m guessing by your relationship with your children, that you’re one of the few adults who understands that. I certainly don’t.”
The words on the screen slowly said to her, ‘There Is a Door to Innocence Most People Forget Is There.’
“I don’t think it’s likely that I’ll ever find the way back to that. I’m not even sure if I ever had one.” she replied.
You’re Looking At It, the television said and Laura was confused about what he meant.
“Do you mean you or those letters?” Laura asked, and it was strange that she actually felt afraid, as if she was standing at the door through which might become the person she had once been.
Both.
The single word on the screen looked as simple and bare as a doorknob.
“This isn’t about me.” Laura replied, “ This is about a chance that the two of us can create something beautiful that might really last.”
Our Baby.
“Yes. In a way I suppose that’s true.” Then Laura realized the profound and perfect irony of what they were doing. She remembered again the dream they had shared. The dream they had shared when they were in high school, the same dream, the same circumstances, the same details of a dream in which she walked down a street knowing that she was carrying a child, his child. It was he who had first told her about his dream, seeing her walk down her street knowing she was pregnant. It was she who had pressed him for every detail to find their congruence, and it was only then that she told him simply that she had had the same identical dream. They took it as a warning but the two identical dreams became reality a month later as Laura walked down the street in her dream deciding what to do about her unwanted pregnancy. She had never told Eugene that dreams sometimes came true. She had never told him that she had conceived his child. Eugene would never know that he might have been the birth father of at least one beautiful child of his own, another invisible movement of a simple twist of fate.
It all came back to Laura and her mouth was dry with fear. The two dreams said there really was a particular destiny. The logical conclusion was that destiny had led her once more to share Eugene’s bed in this sad way. The enormous implications of the thought made her body feel hard and infinitesimal, like a stone being pushed by some monumental cold glacier of fate. If there had been no dreams that they had shared, there probably would have never been the letters, and if there had been no letters she wouldn’t be sitting where she was. Laura sat there silently frightened and stunned by her own thoughts. Once again the things that she knew were things she could never tell Eugene. This baby they would deliver together if they completed the book of short stories would come to term perhaps only if he survived long enough to help her through its gestation. It was Eugene whose labored breathing would be the background for whatever they would create together.
Letters appeared on the screen as Eugene continued to speak to Laura, but her eyes were glazed and unable to see or understand. Out of her fear and the feeling of the enormous weight of destiny pushing her came the feeling that the book they might create might be important to their lives.
If the fates could take decades to bring her to the place and the circumstances of her present life, perhaps that place and those circumstances might have a meaning far beyond anything she would ever be able to understand.
When she thought of the implications of destiny, it tore into her heart like a nail. Her affair with George, the death of the boy, the rape of her daughter were then all necessary events to bring her to where she sat so quietly. That fate could be so cruel and brutal made existence drip with the bitter terrible bile of horror. That fate could connect two people separated for decades, insisting on a purpose neither could ever appreciate or understand, was overwhelming. The question became far more than the matter of creating a book. The question became why was she there beside Eugene, and ultimately why was she there at all. She wanted to know if it was her own desire or the force of destiny that made her recognize that she was breathing hard, made her realize how much she wanted to do the book with Eugene. When Laura came back to herself and finally read the words on the television monitor, it was as if Eugene had been reading her thoughts.
Perhaps This Book Is Meant To Be. Why Don’t You Stay For a Week Or So And We Could Try The First Story Together.
“I can’t tell you how much I wish I could do that.” Laura replied, “But I can’t leave Ian and Amanda. If I stay for a week and the first story works, how many weeks will I have to stay before we’re done?”
Bring Amanda With You. She Could Go to School Here.
Lying there paralyzed, Eugene still thought anything was possible, anyone could do anything that was possible. Laura turned from the television screen and looked into Eugene’s eyes. She saw the clear and simple confidence and optimism that just accepted or ignored adultery and dead boys and rapes. It was then she understood why Eugene understood young people so well. In the face of the most obvious evidence, he still believed in romantic ideals and possibilities. She would need him to help her understand the beautiful irrationality of youth. She would need him because it was something that she had never known. The look in his eyes and the look in hers was very much like the one they had shared the moment when he had once asked her to marry him. There was the same pregnant pause and virtually the same answer. She wondered if he had any sense of how ironic it all was.
“I can’t. I just can’t do that.” Laura said to him.
You Don’t Have to Decide This Minute. Eugene replied.
“You really want to do this? I feel terrible that I’ll be disappointing you.”
Then Don’t.
“You’re the hardest person to say no to that I’ve ever known. The best I can do is the old easy answer that I’ll seriously think about it.”
Back in the coffeehouse sometime later, Eugene was in his chair beside Laura watching everyone connect and reconnect, and the eyes that seemed to watch his family’s simple activities with such obvious fascination could not help drifting back again and again to look at Laura. In his chair, Eugene had no way to communicate except with his eyes and occasional hand gestures. Both Ian and Amanda noticed that there had been some kind of change in Laura. There was a quiet focus, a stillness, a sense of heavy calm that seemed to have fallen over her like a mist. Both Ian and Amanda could sense the gathering darkness.
The adults prepared leftover turkey sandwiches, and more great platters of finger food appeared on the long table. The younger children sometimes gathered on the stage to sing a song or two, but the music of Christmas was simple and random songs happening spontaneously when one or more of the young children was bored with conversation. It was early in the evening when the music became more serious and organized. Unlike most Saturday night coffee house singing, the Christmas concert was very low-key and quiet, songs were usually ballads accompanied by one or two instruments. The songs were invariably one person singing alone.
Amanda sang a Beatles song she said was for her mother and father, John Lennon’s In My Life. There were places to remember, people gone and not forgotten, forever, not for better. It was clear when Amanda sang the song that it was meant for someone so much older than she was. It was also unc
When the older children began to take their turns on the stage after Amanda had sung, Sharon suggested that the McCalls and Ann Marie stay the night.
“All the cabins by the Lake are cleaned and made up with fresh linen. The wood stoves are all burning so they are toasty and warm. They are there for anyone who wants to stay over.
Ian was obviously having such a good time that he truly wanted to stay but he felt uncomfortable saying it. It was Eugene’s eyes asking Laura the same silent question that decided the answer.
“I think it would be lovely to stay.” said Laura, “But I think it should be up to Ann Marie.”
“I’d love to do that but Wayne and Charles already have offered to drive me home to Toronto tonight. I really would like to spend some more time talking to Wayne, and the long drive would be the perfect time. So there’s no need for you to leave because of me. Stay.”
Amanda squealed with delight when Laura spoke for her family and said that they would be delighted to stay the night.
Birth parents and their children said their tenuous goodbyes, and it wasn’t very much longer before the grown children had to take Eugene and Sharon’s grandchildren home to bed. Hugs and kisses and goodbyes made successive little swarms around Eugene and Sharon, and soon the high fine voices of small children were gone again from the room. Shortly after the young children left, Lucy came for Christa to drive her back to the psychiatric hospital in Kingston. It was obvious how difficult it was for Sharon to embrace and release her troubled daughter. The sweet and gentle kiss Christa left on her father’s cheek was tenderness itself, so much emotion suddenly real and surprising after Christa’s flat demeanor from the rest of the day. It was with some relief that Amanda realized that Christa was leaving before Tom had a chance to take her to talk to his sister.
After Wayne and Charles had sung the only duet of the evening, they came to say goodbye to Wayne’s parents and the McCalls and gather Ann Marie for the trip back to Toronto.
“We’ll walk you to the car.” Ian said warmly.
He wouldn’t listen to any protests to the contrary and so when Laura got up, Amanda did not know whether she was included, but decided from her own heart that her she wanted to walk with Ann Marie to say a more intimate goodbye.
When they all stepped out of the house, Ann Marie stopped still, looking stunned in surprise, frozen in space and time looking up at the clear country sky blazing with white stars and constellations. It was all so enormous and beautiful.
“My God.” was all Ann Marie said, and everyone stopped and looked up. All the city folk stood stunned for a moment under the blanket of stars that they never saw where they lived. They faced the black gallery of the universe and it’s distant suns and felt small and lovely and close, together.
At the car, there were embraces among people who had done life and death battle with and for one another, and under the cold sky each one of them felt stronger and more alive than they ever imagined they could feel that Christmas day.
An hour later, Eugene was ready to be taken to bed. Laura said goodnight and kissed him almost exactly as Christa had done. She told him she was still thinking about his request. His eyes had blinked once.
Tom was waiting at the door in his red Volvo and drove the McCalls to the little cluster of cabins by the lake. When he turned off the motor and they got out into the absolute stillness and the smells of pine and cold sand, their family seemed very tiny indeed coming from the enormous hearth they had just shared.
Tom led them into the cabin, and the coal oil lantern burning there filled the room with a warm wonderful glow shimmering on every object inside the gray walls of log. He pointed out the loft where the mattresses were made up and showed them the cupboard for water and tea and coffee, and the other cupboard where the dishes were clean and ready for their use. He showed them their towels and nightshirts. He showed them the big iron kettle warming on the trivet on the stove and the basin and washstand nearby. It was obvious Tom had done this many, many times before. Ian teased him by saying that he was so thorough and gracious that he should seriously consider a career in the hospitality industry.
Amanda walked Tom back to his car after he had said goodnight to her parents. It had been the first time he embraced both Ian and Laura with unselfconscious depth of feeling. He had kissed Laura’s cheek and let his body convey his respect and affection. Outside, by the car, the embrace and the kiss of the young lovers under the star dust of love made both of their hearts race along side one another, made their memories trace the feel of their lips and store it in the vault of life’s meaning. Long and tender and sweet and soft, their kiss in the darkness was so strange. When it broke at last, Amanda had to say the perfect truth.
“This is the second time you have given me the most beautiful day of my life.”
“There’ll be a whole lot more I hope.” he said, and obviously meant it. And she believed him.
When Amanda returned to the cabin, her parents had already put on their night shirts and had crawled up to the loft and were cuddling under the soft goose down duvet. She quickly undressed and followed them up the ladder to the single bed that was made up and turned down and ready for her.
“This is just like the Walton’s.” Ian said in the soft shadows.
“Goodnight Amanda Sue.” Laura said in a nasal southern accent.
“Goodnight Mom. Goodnight dad.” she replied and seeing the shadowy lump that was her parents touched her so deeply that she tried to make sure to remember all the details of that moment.
They were all absolutely wide awake and so Ian led the voices in the darkness, talking about the grown-up Van Fleet children and the impressions they each had of them. They compared notes about Jonas and Christa, Tranh’s wife Elaine and Rosie’s wife Connie. They all agreed that Connie was the only member of the family who was difficult to talk to. She seemed to carry a barely concealed anger that didn’t seem to come from anything that was apparent. They talked and talked and it was sometime in the second hour that Laura mentioned that Eugene had asked if she and Amanda wanted to stay the week while she worked with Eugene on the first story of Arthur and Laura Lee.
Amanda sat bolt upright. “Oh my God! You mean we’re staying the whole week?” The excitement and delight exploded in her voice.
“I told him I’d have to talk to both of you. I told him I’d think about it seriously.” her mother answered.
“Please! Oh please! It would be so fantastic! It’ll be forever before Tom and I have the chance to spend another week together. Oh, please! You have to do it! You can’t tell me we’ve been invited to stay and then say we can’t.”
Ian felt like the boy left out of the game. He could hear in Laura’s voice, and of course in his daughter’s response; that they really wanted to stay. With all the time that he had taken from work, it wouldn’t be possible that he’d be included. He’d have to go home to the empty condominium and learn once more what it was like to be lonely. The feeling in the pit of his stomach in that moment made him realize how hard it would be.
“Of course you both have to stay. You’ll get an absolutely wonderful start on your book.” he said to Laura.” And Amanda, you won’t have another chance to get to know Tom’s family as you will this week.”
“Couldn’t you stay too?” Amanda asked him, suddenly realizing that he would be leaving without them.
Ian told her he couldn’t afford to take another week away from work. He almost insisted that they should stay. “I’ll just have the boys over for poker and sports and wild women every night. I’ll never get another chance like this again.” he said. The joke wasn’t funny at all.
“I guess we’re staying.” Laura said and Amanda screamed as she tore herself from under her covers and flew across the loft and fell onto h
Amanda even kissed her parents cheeks, one and then the other, and said thank you to each one of them before she crawled away and went back to her bed. Ian and Laura lay their savoring the memory of their daughter’s embrace, both of them remembering the little girl who used to crawl into bed with them in the middle of the night. They said goodnight once more and finally they were warm and quiet in the pure stillness of the log cabin. And strangely, in only a few minutes they were all fast asleep.
As she would many times, for decades to come, Amanda awoke in the middle of the night screaming from the recurrent nightmare of her rape. Almost convulsing in terror, it took five minutes of Laura holding her daughter close to her body before she calmed down. Laura said nothing, holding close and quiet to her own agony. Ian said nothing as he lay awake for the rest of the night feeling so far, so far away. Laura stroked Amanda’s soft hair for long quiet moments and when she finally asked Amanda if she was okay, Amanda whispered, “Could you please stay?” Laura answered by crawling under the covers with her daughter and laid there holding Amanda’s hand and smelling her hair beside her on the same pillow until they both finally slept.
In the morning they all slept very late and when they got up they were starving because their stomachs were aching from having been stretched by the masses of food they had eaten the previous day. Ian tried to ask Amanda about her nightmare but all she said was, “You know.”
The cabin was filled in a radiant heat that came from the wood stove, the radiant heat that made every object feel warm and soft to the touch. They all stayed in bare feet and night shirts as Ian filled the copper kettle and started it boiling on the stove. Ian loved replenishing the fire with the split dry logs from the log carrier by the door and he reminded them of the time when Amanda was seven years old and he had talked them into taking a week’s vacation in a little cabin near Great Slave Lake. It had taken all of his powers of persuasion to get Laura to agree, but finally he had prevailed because he insisted that Amanda should see nature in its absolute unspoiled abundance when it would make an impression on her that would last for the rest of her life. It had been an unmitigated disaster. They had all got sick from the water. They were trapped indoors by billions of insatiable black flies. The solitary confinement they endured for that week had been in a cabin very much like the one in which they now stayed.
“That’s when I knew that you’d never have a career in the hospitality business.” Laura said, teasing Ian.
“What do you mean? I promised you a vacation you’d never forget for the rest of your life. Amanda, did we ever have a more memorable vacation?”
“I thought it was fun. We never played Barbie dolls together after that.”
“I suppose it’s too late now.” he answered.
“They’re all in my closet at home. If you want to bring them when you come to get us next week, we could see.”
Ian’s heart sank from being reminded that he would soon be leaving his family behind.
In the cupboard, with the tea and the coffee, Amanda found a big tin box filled with fresh muffins, and so they sat in the reproduction arrow backed chairs and ate muffins quickly, and drank the fresh coffee that filled the room with its unmistakable sweet acid smell.
It was almost noon before they had dressed and walked up to the farmhouse. Jonas was sitting on the front porch with Tom and Sharon enjoying the wood fire. Everyone looked tired from the intense emotions and activities of the previous day. More coffee, more muffins and desserts leftover from the previous day served as an impromptu lunch. The day after holidays everybody was responsible to feed themselves. All the sensible dietary rules that applied the rest of the year were suspended. Everyone was allowed to go into the kitchen whenever they were hungry and eat absolutely anything.
The old dogs got up to make their greetings and Amanda went and sat beside Tom as her parents pulled up wicker chairs and poured themselves another coffee.
Sharon told Amanda that the younger children had been playing her CD all morning in the music room and it was definitely the biggest hit to ever appear at the farm.
“You’ll be having to sign autographs soon.” Ian teased her.
“You’ll have to go everywhere with your belly button showing.” Jonas added.
Amanda was obviously embarrassed.
“Amanda, you shouldn’t be embarrassed, you have a perfectly lovely little naval.” her mother said, joining in with the teasing.
Amanda didn’t know what to say or how to respond so she asked Tom to help her. He didn’t. He just laughed good-heartedly.
Sharon told the McCalls the rules about everyone finding their own food the day after a holiday and encouraged them not to be shy about going into the kitchen and helping themselves to anything that took their fancy. Ian rubbed his hands together in exaggerated delight.
Laura then announced the decision they had made the night before, that she and Amanda would be pleased to stay the week and accept the Van Fleet’s generous hospitality. Amanda couldn’t restrain a squeal and Tom punched the air with a long sibilant “Yesssss”. Sharon said the whole Van Fleet family would be delighted to hear it, especially Eugene.
Jonas also said he was delighted to hear it because he would be staying until a few days past New Years and they would get a chance to get to know one another. Laura was secretly pleased that he thought so. She had an undeniable sense of contentment and self-confidence when she looked into Jonas’s eyes.
Over coffee and wood smoke smells, Ian, in his gentlest cross-examination technique, found out a little more about Jonas’s background. He had gone to university in Rome at the Canadian Vatican College. He had written a book just after he was ordained a priest while he was working at the Vatican newspaper, a book that got him into a great deal of trouble.
“It was called the Papal Bias. It was about the misconceptions that people have about the Papacy, and also the biases that Popes have had about their role as head of the Church. Even the Pope was mad at me. He invited me to dinner. We had a big fight. He said some things. I said some things. I ended up with a parish in Newfoundland. It was supposed to be my penance for excessive pride. It was the best thing that ever happened in my life except for coming to live here.”
Ian tried to get Jonas to elaborate, but he said that it was a very long story and he tried not to tell it because he felt tempted to anger when he told it.
“How did you get from a parish in Newfoundland to a Trappist monastery out West?” Laura asked.
“That too is a long story, involving even more of the seven deadly sins. But I’ve always been interested in the Trappists simply because they worshiped without words. Words have always been my best thing. When I became a priest I imagined that I would become a Jesuit scholar. I always loved the history of ideas. I never imagined that I would have a calling to parish service, but I loved it, and the more I loved it, the more it seemed to me that words were only really effective when you spoke them to people who knew you and understood who you were. It completely shook my faith in written scholarship. It ultimately shook my faith in ideas. The written word is very much over rated, I think.” Jonas explained seriously.
“But, why would you give up speaking and join the Trappists?” Ian pressed.
“Another long story. In the beginning was the Word, and in the end it’s just words. Life can even be so much richer without them.” Jonas replied cryptically.
“What do you mean?” Laura asked. Her imagination was running with the bare bones of Jonas’ personal history.
“Sometimes simple conversations can make you realize you love someone more than you ever dare to say.”
“You fell in love with someone.” Amanda interjected.
“I did.”
“Joining an o
“Partly. Mostly I hope it’s meant to serve to make me realize what lies beneath the words and beneath the ideas and beneath the feelings that connect human beings to one another, and ultimately to God.” Jonas replied, sounding almost sad.
Laura then told Jonas that she still had hope for the written word, for ideas and feelings to connect people who had never even met one another.
“The letters of Arthur and Laura Lee. They are just written words and ideas. You said yourself they are the most powerful icons of your whole family’s subconscious.” she pointed out.
“That they are. But you have to understand that their greatest power may be in the fact that the words in those letters were spoken aloud by our father. It was sitting listening to him read them to us that was as powerful as the stories they contained. I don’t mean to discourage you. I think you and Dad could create something truly beautiful that would touch many, many people, but I think, for my family, nothing could come close to meaning as much as hearing his voice say the words in those letters.”
“It’s an interesting idea.” Ian interjected, “The only thing really left of oral tradition is music.”
“Rap music. I hate it! “Laura added.
“That’s because it’s so angry. Just imagine when Rap stops being angry. Young people will speak and listen in poetry. Won’t that be something?” Jonas replied, earnestly.
Amanda flashed back violently to the night and the man in the scream mask of latex and the power of his words cutting into the crowd of dancing people. She shuddered and said nothing. Tom saw the look in Amanda’s eyes and asked her if she wanted to go for a walk and her eyes thanked him as she held out her hand as she got up to go. It was the signal for Ian to confess his hunger and he offered to bring snacks from the kitchen.
“That would be great.” said Laura, “I’d love something. I’ll trust you.”
Ian left for the kitchen and then it was Jonas’s turn to reach into Laura’s past. For him the idea of the past seemed to be different than it was to most people, he didn’t seen interested in incidents but rather the circumstances of her past life.
“Were you and my dad once in love?”
He went right to the point.
“The way teenagers are, I guess. You know.” she replied nervously. Sharon’s eyes got wide and very interested at the new direction of the conversation.
“What were you like? Why were you attracted to my dad?” Jonas pursued.
“Well, it was entirely superficial. He was gorgeous. He had that incredible car. I was just your typical empty headed teenager, I’m afraid.”
“Now why would you want me to believe that?” Jonas pressed. “The first-time you were alone with my father all that would have meant very little. What did you two talk about?”
“That was so long ago. How could I possibly remember?”
“What did you do on dates?” Jonas continued,” If you remember the incidents, you remember the way you were. Did my dad talk about cars?”
“Jonas, maybe Laura isn’t comfortable talking about all that.” Sharon interjected. Laura looked uncomfortable but it was also obvious that Sharon was completely comfortable with the questions. She was being considerate of Laura’s feelings. It was Sharon’s look of calm that settled Laura’s anxieties.
“Your father talked about his childhood more than anybody I’ve ever known. He made me talk about mine. It seemed easy for him, even though he had a much more difficult time with his parents than I did. His mother and father were pretty angry people, if I recall. I had different problems, different expectations. We talked about that a lot. We did do a lot of car stuff, races in Shannonville, long drives on back roads in the Mercedes. What is it you want me to tell you?” Laura finally asked.
“I’m interested in your roots. And I suppose my dad’s roots, and I guess by implication my own.” he replied, with complete directness.
Laura almost never thought about her own roots. She had never understood why Eugene had been so interested in his childhood and hers. It seemed that he passed his fascination on to his son and all those many years later she was again finding it difficult to understand the point of it all and so she asked him.
“I don’t understand the fascination with the past you all seem to have. All a person’s roots do is decide the place you begin. There are thousands of things that can grow out of those roots. Even trees of the same species don’t end up much alike.” Laura replied.
“I used to think that was true. I used to believe in choices. Now I believe that the only people with real choices are the coaches who can see both teams on the field, the ones who can see the whole game being played. The players are too involved in every play. Single trees never know what it means to be a forest, and understanding a forest means you have to know that every tree is bound to its roots.”
“That’s too many mixed metaphors for me.” Laura replied.
“Describe how you’re different than you were then?”
“I have shorter hair.” she replied, and that said everything she wanted to say.
He took her seriously. Sharon did too.
“I can see why my dad was attracted to you.” Jonas replied. Sharon was beginning to see it too.
The day Christmas fell that year was perfect. The day after Christmas was a Saturday and so Ian would have that whole day and Sunday and the boxing day Monday before he had to go back to Toronto. He spent most of those days sitting just as he was by the fire. Sharon would leave occasionally to tend to tasks and to Eugene.
Ian and Jonas got to know each other quite well and would move from the fire to long walks out along the unfrozen dark lake. It was hard to feel alone on the farm and before the weekend was over, Ian felt he belonged there, like an old shoe in a closet.
Before they slept each night, the McCalls would have their Walton moments, talking in the shadows about the people and the day gone by. Laura was interested in Jonas, and in a way she envied the time that Ian had to spend with him. She was interested in the stories that Ian brought about Jonas’s life in the Newfoundland out-port. She was interested in the little theater that he and his best friend from the Vatican college had built, the best friend who had followed him there to create the little theater for the local people. When he left to join the Trappists, he had left the theater and his friend behind with the woman the friend had married, the woman that was the apex of the twin secret triangles that involved Jonas, the woman, the friend and Jonas’s implacable God. In leaving, he had hoped to break at least one of the triangles. There were love stories everywhere on the farm; difficult, unfulfilled, intense little love stories.
Amanda also had information to share. It seemed that Rosie’s wife Connie was the one person who truly resented the farm. She had reluctantly agreed to let her children come to school there and she saw her life as an ongoing battle to try to keep her children from being swallowed up by the farm the way she believed it had swallowed her husband and everyone else who had ever come there.
“Tom says that she calls the farm the good Jonestown. She thinks Sharon is like some kind of cult leader. She doesn’t seem very controlling to me.” Amanda said sounding troubled by such an idea.
“She’s hard to resist.” Laura replied, “It is interesting. I’d like to talk to Connie sometime.”
Ian defended Sharon. “She knows what she believes. She lives by what she believes. People who don’t may feel they are being controlled because of that. With all the kids and all that goes on at this place, somebody has to be in charge. It doesn’t sound like Eugene was the in-charge kind of guy.”
“The Eugene I remember certainly wasn’t. But Sharon said that she and Eugene used to fight a lot. That’s certainly not the Eugene I remember. He got his way by just being so earnest. She’s certainly his match in that.”
Laura spent most of tha
Tom and Amanda spent every moment of the weekend together until he left her each night on the steps of the cabin where she slept with her parents. She helped him with his regular chores and they listened to music and were dragged into the coffee house by the younger children so Amanda could sing songs from her CD.
Sunday night after dinner, Ian managed to talk Laura into going for a walk along the beach. In a big borrowed Pea coat and woolen mittens, Laura was already warmed by the long walk from the farmhouse to the beach, when Ian took her hand in his. He had no idea how powerfully the gesture made her flash back to her youth. Another hand, another moment, another kind of distance. Flecks of star light scratched the surface of the big lake as it scratched the surface of her heart as she walked without speaking, having come so very far to feel the sand once again giving away beneath her feet. They walked slowly to the old black Willow that had fallen forward into the water and Ian only had to give Laura a slight lift and she was sitting securely on the deep ribbed bark of the horizontal trunk. He sat down beside her and they looked at the beautiful shoreline, listened to the wavelets gently slapping the shore as if they were keeping time for the music that lay in the silence. It had been many, many years since they had such a moment to themselves where their lives had given them a measure of peace that they could see and feel with their eyes. It had been a very long time.
Monday morning Amanda went to school with all the Van Fleet children. Two days was the longest holiday they were ever allowed away from school. Winter and summer, school was every weekday between eight and twelve o’clock.
That month they were reconstructing the life of a woman named Leona Gilmour who had lived in Halifax at the turn-of-the-century. The sepia photo was of a woman in her mid thirties surrounded by her seven children. The photo was taken outside a store with big windows and a sign above that said Leona’s Fabrics and Millinery.
Amanda worked with Tom and Martha who were trying to reconstruct the inside of the store, the fabrics and patterns, the prices, the fixtures and the findings. Very quickly, Amanda learned that her task involved a need she always had completely taken for granted, the need to have suitable clothes. Clothing was now a matter of style whose only cost came in dollars and a few impulsive moments of time. She was learning how clothes were made from fabric. Amanda loved opening up the old tissue paper patterns and she was absolutely amazed that all the lines on all the pieces could come together as a dress.
The four-hour class went by before she had even become comfortably familiar with all the things that Tom and Sarah had collected. Somehow a school project at the farm seemed to be more than just another make-work project that was irrelevant to anything in real-life. The faces in the picture, the look of the store made it somehow real. And there was something about the farm that made Amanda feel a personal connection to those people and that time. During lunch, Amanda bent her father and mother’s ears about Leona Gilmour and her store. She told her mother about dress maker patterns and wanted to know if it was still possible to buy such things.
“I don’t know. I suppose so. I don’t know who would bother.” her mother replied.
“I think it’s so neat that clothes are just like a big jig saw puzzle. Mom, did you ever know how to sew?” Amanda asked, excitedly.
“I’m afraid my mother always used a seamstress. I think I once learned how to do a hem in home economics class in high school.” Laura replied.
“What’s home economics?”
Ian burst out laughing. “It’s where nice girls learned the hem and muffin business.” Ian teased. “It was the girls version of Shop.”
“What’s Shop?” Amanda asked, understanding her question was also going to be seen to be funny.
“Shop was where boys were first introduced to big tools.” Jonas interjected and the whole table exploded in laughter.
After dinner on that Boxing Day Monday, Ian got ready for the drive back to Toronto. The clothes that he borrowed from the great walk-in closet, he brought back to the laundry room with those Amanda and Laura had worn the day before. He went to the car wearing the same clothes he had worn on Christmas day and it felt strange and incongruous to be in dress slacks and jacket.
It was only Laura and Amanda who walked him to the car. He had whispered to them that he was going and didn’t want to make a fuss. The only goodbye he made was to Sharon and he held her like his dearest friend.
In the cold, in big coats, the little McCall family hugged and kissed and separated once more. He told both his ladies to enjoy their week and told them he loved them and his body felt stiff and nervous as his women let him go.
That night Laura went to Eugene’s bed. She came with pages and pages of notes she had made in a big spiral notebook Tom had given to her. Tom had also lent her his laptop computer so that she could begin to transcribe each pair of letters into their own individual files.
And every day after that Laura would come to Eugene just before ten and they would work on the first story for an hour or more, until Laura could see that Eugene was too tired to go on. The only exceptions to their daily meetings came on weekend nights. Saturday night Eugene would join the coffee house gathering. Sunday night Sharon, as she had every Sunday night since he had moved to the bed in the sunroom, would come to sleep fitfully beside her husband in his big elevated bed.
But that Monday, the first time that Laura had come to talk to Eugene about the book, she got right to the point. “I’m going to make a digital copy of everything I’m doing so you can look at it on your own computer if you want to.” Laura began, “There are forty one stories and that’s just way too many, so the first really hard thing will be to pick ten or twelve stories to make up a book. I thought that was going to be relatively easy. It’s not. I have a suggestion. I’ll make a list of all the stories and if you can pick a dozen or so, and I’ll do the same and we can see how much we agree. The first story of course has to be about how Arthur and Laura Lee fell in love and had the same dreams and were separated after they found the wine treasure. And the most important thing is a story to finish the book that brings Arthur and Laura Lee back together. I hope you’ll agree to try to do that.”
Laura waited for his reply. It came in one word. Sure.
Laura went on to explain that she would have the entire list of stories transcribed by the next day but she wanted to read him the list from her notes to refresh his memory. The computer screen told her that he knew them by heart.
Laura talked excitedly for almost an hour before she stopped to ask Eugene if he had any questions or had anything he wanted to say about what she had said about her intentions and approach to the book.
“Sounds Good. Can’t Wait!” he said.
Laura read the words and for the first time she gave him her beautiful smile in return for his invisible one. His eyes lock
The strange and lovely thing that happened later that night occurred after Amanda came home to the cabin where her mother was already snuggled away in bed. Amanda said hello and was quiet as she undressed and put on her nightshirt and came up to the loft to bed. She had crawled over to her mother and Laura smiled into the serious eyes of her daughter before Amanda leaned down and kissed her.
“Would it be too weird if I crawled in and slept beside you? I’m really scared of the dreams.” Amanda said softly.
“Of course you can. After what you’ve been through, it isn’t weird at all.”
Amanda crawled in to the space where her father usually slept, and Laura felt her daughters hand reach up from under the covers and stroke the soft hair on her skull. Laura reached until she found Amanda’s hand and held it to a place under her breast.
“I loved holding your hand last night.” Laura whispered, and her small voice in the wood loft was as clear as the ring of a Symphony triangle.
The next day Laura knew that her task of choosing a dozen stories from the forty one pairs of letters was going to be one of the most difficult tasks she would have. From her master list she could remind herself of each of the stories and the subjects they dealt with them, so basic and powerful as they portrayed the almost powerless people who were the protagonists in the stories. The one she was absolutely certain would be included was the story of Emily Dickinson and the day she refused to stand up in church to ask to be included among those who would be saved. The moral force of society and friends and family that fell upon her was complete and unanimously hostile. The young girl of sixteen who already spoke with angels in her garden made her act so much more powerful than an act of teenage rebellion. Remaining in her place in her pew was standing up to a God who would pick and choose among people Emily must have been insisting should be valued as equals.
Having to put herself in the place of someone of such absolute and pure principal would have been impossible for Laura if she did not have the guidance and sympathy of Arthur and Laura Lee as they met and comforted Emily. Laura knew that if she was going to do justice to the story, she would have to have a sense of ideal righteousness that didn’t exist any longer as either a part of religion or culture or friends or family or her own nature.
One after another, Laura thought about the themes in each of the letters and realized how completely Eugene had fashioned a handbook that dealt with every difficult social and moral question that a young person would face as they got older in life.
A boy knowing he would go to his death in a Nazi crematorium faced the absolute question of pure evil and absolute injustice. Other stories dealt with abandonment. Others dealt with handicaps, mental and physical and emotional. There was John Merrick, the elephant man, as well as a boy who was institutionalized for being retarded, even though he was only the victim of the sensory deprivation that came from the physical isolation he had suffered at the hands of his parents. Other stories dealt with life and death decisions, the choice of risking one’s own life for a loved one or a stranger or a dog. There were stories about misunderstanding and disrespect, and a number of stories about young people with the most beautiful natures, being treated worse than dirt.
About half of the stories dealt with the dark side of life. The other half dealt with the best feelings that might exist in the human spirit. They dealt with love and generosity and compassion and determination. These Laura saw as the up-lifting stories, the ones where tragedy did not prevail. There was Einstein as a sullen boy, and Mark Twain, and Joseph Fell, a fourteen year old boy who worked in an infirmary hospital in 1800 in Philadelphia tending to the victims of yellow fever, and a girl whose mother worked in a dance hall in the Yukon gold rush who became rich by learning how to make miners laugh so hard that they would reward her with gold that had just come out of the ground. These were some of the stories she would have to cull or keep.
The last group of stories Laura saw as a sub category of those stories that dealt with the best aspects of the human heart. These were the six love stories. Boy meets girl. Girl meets boy. The fear, the desire, the feelings kept secret, the feelings finally told, hope and misunderstanding and jealousy and heartbreak and love at first sight that could absolutely alter a person’s life forever, these were the themes that Laura also had to choose among.
It was then, in a flash, that Laura realized the one thing that was common to all the stories was that each character was almost completely helpless. The pain they suffered and rose above, the satisfaction and accomplishment they achieved, they had felt and done while they were virtually alone. The only help any of them had come from their dreams and their invisible friends Arthur and Laura Lee. And when she remembered her own youth and thought of her own daughter, Laura realized that helplessness was something they had both known only too well. No one had been there for her in a way that would have mattered. She had not been there for Amanda. It was a bitter thing to realize that feeling helpless was so common to so many young people. How ironic it was that it had only been since they both had become connected to the farm, when they had both undergone the most horrible, helpless tragedy of their lives that help had come to them in such a powerful way from Ann Marie and the whole Van Fleet family.
Even the constant background music of the farm had invaded Laura’s consciousness. She kept hearing Neil Young’s song, Helpless Helpless Helpless playing in her head as she went through the days and walked up to the farmhouse for meals and showers and her meetings with Eugene.
By the time she had gone to see Eugene on the first Tuesday night, she had only been able to choose four stories that she was absolutely certain she wanted to include. He had not been as successful as she had, having chosen only three stories that he was sure he wanted. The only one in common with Laura’s list was his story of Emily Dickinson. Choosing the parts of life to leave out of the book seemed almost impossible to do. They were both embarrassed to admit they had not been able to do it.
In Toronto, Ian was haunted by the emptiness of his home. The brief hours his family had used to touch and pass in a day were enough to fill the rooms with their common presence. It wasn’t the quality time he missed, it was the ordinary times of coming and going and passing one another on paths of differing purpose. Their beautiful condominium was where every road began and ended, and it didn’t matter so much that they rarely traveled the same path together. What Ian also realized was that the common road they had traveled in the last few weeks was the first one that they had traveled together that went very far, and it had taken them deep into the heart where they had shared the most bitter and beautiful experiences they had ever known in their lives. Ian felt, sadly, that he was back on his own solitary path while Laura and Amanda continued together on the one that went down deep into the heart. His own heart felt as lonely as it ever been. Making dinners alone, listening to music alone, watching television alone, he thought constantly of Laura and Amanda together. They had become and were becoming a part of the farm and he was stuck in the city.
On the farm, Laura and Amanda rarely saw one another, except for meals, and when they slept close, and rose together in the morning. They both knew they were on paths deep into themselves that would lead to who they would become, and they both knew that they traveled two different crossed roads that were called Tom and Eugene. Amanda knew her heart would become more and more inextricably bound to the path she was choosing, but Laura had no idea of where she was going or what was happening to her every day.
Laura usually missed lunch, intent as she was on her work. When she was too emotionally or intellectually tired from working, she would refill the wood stove and replenish the wood carrier from the big stack of split logs against the wall of the porch. Getting ice clear water from the hand pump outside was simple heavy work she came to enjoy. Leaning into the pump handle and seeing the bright water finally heave into her white porcelain jug was like pumping someth
As hard as Laura worked, Amanda was even working harder. It was the hardest she had ever worked in her life. Between Christmas and New Years the Van Fleet family had to get ready for the second biggest party of the year that came on New Year’s Eve. Nearly two hundred people would greet the New Year in the coffee house. Friends and foster families and personal connections everyone had accumulated over the years were invited to celebrate the New Year with the Van Fleets.
The decorations went quickly, but the mass quantities of food and beverages that had to be prepared meant everyone, including Amanda worked very hard in the enormous kitchen preparing to feed so many people.
Amanda loved it. The excitement of the holiday built with the frenzy of work and preparation. It was like a giant living collage made of fruit and flour and vegetables and meat arranged on serving dishes of all kinds. The smells of cooking in the farmhouse from the day before had barely faded before the new smells began to permeate the rooms. The huge plastic crates of cut-up chicken that would be breaded and fried the day of New Year’s Eve seemed to Amanda like a soft wet mountain of pale flesh and skin. Tom explained to her that the meat came from a local farm that raised fryers. It was the only time they ate meat they hadn’t raised themselves. Tom said he remembered the last time they had used their own chickens and how the death and cleaning of those chickens had made both Christa and Wayne and Lucy become vegetarians.
“Christa cried for two days and wouldn’t come out of her bedroom. It was after that she started to do strange things and cry all the time.” Tom told her as they carried a bushel of potatoes from the root cellar.
“I can see how it would be hard to kill an animal you know. But I think killing is part of everybody’s nature. There isn’t anything that doesn’t kill.” Amanda replied and she realized that she wouldn’t have felt that way a few weeks before. She didn’t know if her heart had hardened or if it was just more comfortable with the hard reality of life. By the time four o clock quiet hour came that day, Amanda could barely calm down from the excitement, and when everyone including Tom disappeared to their own private place, Amanda was left feeling very lost and alone indeed.
Everyone left her with barely a word. Tom suggested she spend the day finding a private place for herself where she could spend the hour alone. It was clear by his tone that he wasn’t prepared to even consider letting her join him in his tree house. Almost immediately, she thought of the place where she had felt safest and most protected on the farm and knew it was the place she would want to spend an hour in silence by herself.
The week between Christmas and New Years that Ian had to work, was actually only two and a half days long. Like almost everyone else, he left the office early on the day of New Year’s Eve and was on the road by three o’clock crawling through the congestion of the superhighways congealed with people just like him, leaving early, going home or away.
Every night he had talked to Laura on her cell phone and it only made him feel more lonely and sick at heart. But the excitement of seeing them and joining them on the farm was balanced by the sad knowledge that he was going there to bring them home. Ian had never known such enormous mixed feelings in his life. Having his wife and daughter come home was a deep and selfish desire, and he knew that only they could break the crushing loneliness that had filled his home. Yet bringing them back from the farm and all that it offered them was like denying them the best part of life.
He began to fantasize about quitting his job and asking for work on the farm. He imagined himself working in the sawmill or as a car mechanic or doing antique furniture reproductions, and it seemed so much more wonderful than the law, but he knew he had virtually no experience or aptitude with his hands. He remembered the humiliation he suffered from his peers in high school shop classes.
And he knew Laura’s stay on the farm was only temporary at best. It was Eugene and the book and nothing else that made her want to be there. Quitting his job was absurd. She’d come home as soon as the book was done or Eugene succumbed to his disease. He faced the realization that his little family would soon be together, one-way or another, back in the city where they belonged. It made him feel better and worse. As soon as he was released from Toronto traffic, he pressed down on the accelerator and didn’t care whether he got a fat ticket or not. He missed his family so much he had to turn up the volume of the CD player playing his own daughter’s voice on the CD copy Tom had made for him before he had left the farm.
Everyone was already sitting down to dinner when Ian arrived. He actually had to let himself in because no one answered when he knocked on the porch door. Seeing his wife and daughter sitting at the big table made his heart flip in a sentimental vertigo that caught in his throat. He kissed the top of their heads and touched their shoulders as he made his greetings and Sharon asked that a plate be brought for him.
The cold salmon and wonderful vegetables salads were an unexpected delight, and as Amanda went on about her week, Ian felt like a lost boy who had been found. After dinner, the whole family went to the coffeehouse where, as they did at the end of each month, the adults and babies watched as the younger children of the family gave the hour and a half long presentation for that month; Leona Gilmore, her life and times.
First came her history and what they had discovered of it. Her husband dead in the mines, the shop that was left to her by her widowed aunt. Somehow Leona’s children and their children’s children were tracked down and described. The Depression, it seemed, had moved almost all of the Gilmours to Ontario. It was strange to think that some of Leona’s great great-grandchildren might be people they passed on the street.
Then came the details of daily life for someone in Leona’s class and circumstance. The house she lived in, the furniture, the clothes and the dishes were described or shown by picture or example. Recipes were collected and described, as were the sources and varieties of the food they ate.
Then came the economics of life for Leona. Her budget for clothes and food and taxes and heat as well as the economics of a little fabric shop that supplied every cent she had was explored and quickly described in a chart.
Then it was Tom and Martha and Amanda describing the store and the quality and variety of the goods Leona would have sold. The prices and the findings and the kind of displays a person might expect to be in such a store were all described concisely.
A day in the life that would have been so unremarkable when it was lived was fascinating to see recreated in the invisible complexities of time and culture. It was obvious that the children had the system of re-creating life down pat and the McCalls were amazed at the anthropological detail.
Finally, as it was with every presentation, the description of the Gilmour’s church and religion moved quickly to examples of hymns. These lead immediately to the popular songs the family would have known and sung. The children picked up their instruments and played and sang examples of the hymns, and then played examples of the ordinary music of that particular time.
The family’s applause at the end of the presentation was gratifying for the children who had made it, especially Amanda who, like her paren
When Ian asked Tom how they did such a tremendous job of research, he told him that since the Internet the family had become regular visitors to virtually every historical archive in the world.
“It used to take a whole lot longer to find out about somebody’s life.” he said, seriously.
After the dinner was the mad house of getting ready for the New Year’s Eve dance. Each of the McCalls was shocked to learn that it was to be in semi-formal dress.
Ian had not even considered bringing a suit. Laura’s evening dresses were all at home. The last formal dress Amanda owned was from the junior prom and would never have even fit her.
As always, the great walk-in closet was the answer to their dilemma. There was a fine wool pin striped suit in Ian’s size that he actually quite liked. His ladies had a much more difficult problem. Going through the formal dresses, most of which had come from secondhand stores where they had been left by many brief bridesmaids were not really to either of their tastes.
But it was only for one night, and so they chose dresses neither of them would have been caught dead wearing in Toronto. They both went with simplicity, and so Laura in magenta and Amanda in teal really did look quite lovely after they had done their makeup and found shoes to match. Laura in her close cropped hair looked strange and lovely but Ian thought his ladies would more than hold their own. What none of them knew was that being the only formal dance of the year, the financial resources at the Van Fleet’s disposal made the fashion display that evening as spectacular as a Hollywood premiere. The city ladies looked like hicks.
The band arrived from Montreal and set up on the stage. The little big band came every year with strings and brass and woodwinds and drums and a singer with a great whiskey voice. New Years Eve was the only Van Fleet party where not one of them lifted a finger or a voice in song.
Christa was there from the psychiatric hospital and came wearing the same dress she had shed the previous year standing outside in the rock garden that grew over the root cellar. The dress was cut down the middle and up on the side nearly to the hip and was made of gold sequins and was about the sexiest, most spectacular dress Laura or Amanda had ever seen in the flesh, and flesh was the operative word. Beautiful Christa looked almost surreal in the gold shimmer hanging over her translucent skin. For the McCalls, as it was for everyone else, it was hard to just stop staring at her. Laura remembered when she was young and could do the same thing to a room.
Wayne and Charles had joined the McCalls at their table and they were both thrilled to hear that Wayne’s friend had managed to establish contact with Ann Marie’s daughter and that Megan was coming to see him every day to give advice and to talk with the boy they were trying to get to leave the street. Ann Marie was most thrilled when she got the email message from Wayne’s friend telling her that her daughter wanted him to say that she missed her mother and hoped her holiday wasn’t too sad. Ann Marie had written back a long, long reply telling about Amanda’s rape and how Ann Marie had helped her come back to the world, telling about her own wonderful Christmas Eve and day with the McCalls and the Van Fleets, telling how much she wished that Megan could have been there to share it with her.
Wayne had invited Ann Marie to come back to the farm for New Year’s Eve but she declined because she said that she wanted to be near her computer, just in case there was another secondhand message from her daughter. The one thing that she had not included in her first long letter was what she wanted to say most of all to her daughter. She wanted to tell her that her life was completely empty without her. She didn’t dare say that for a very long time.
The New Year’s music, as usual, went through the generations and during one slow song Tom shocked Amanda by asking her if she knew how to fox trot.
Although it sounded complicated and she worried about humiliating herself, brave girl that she was, she simply told him, “No, I don’t really know how to do any slow dances, but I’ll try.”
“It’s easy.” he said, as he took her into his arms and, as the two them looked down at their feet, Tom counted time and showed her the steps as he began very slowly, and then slowly let her follow, again and again, and then he began to move faster and faster, and in a few short minutes Amanda was dancing like a debutante. At least that’s how it felt to her. Soon she wasn’t looking, and before long she wasn’t even thinking, as Tom led her around the dance floor.
“You make me feel like a princess.” she whispered into his ear.
“You make me feel like a natural man.” Tom replied in a funny, affected baritone growl and smiled and looked in her eyes and as always, when he did that, when he held hers in his, it would wring her heart like a sponge.
People began to arrive and soon the coffee house was bursting with people and food and great bowls of sangria and cases and cases of near beer on ice.
Seeing his daughter dancing like a sophisticated woman made Ian wanted to take her in his arms himself, and so when Amanda and Tom came back to their table, he took her right back to the dance floor.
“I’m starting to feel like a wall flower.” Laura said to Tom and so he reached out his hand and the problem was solved as he led her to the dance floor and they joined the movement and color and texture of the dance.
“You make me feel so young.” Laura said to Tom as she followed him with the skill she had learned when she had dragged Ian to ballroom dancing lessons years ago.
“Why is that?” Tom asked.
“It’s not that often that middle-aged ladies have a young partner who really knows how to dance.”
“We all learned to dance in our school. You should see the Van Fleets do the Charleston.”
“I’ll bet that’s something.” Laura replied, “I have never really thanked you for everything you’ve done for Amanda.” she continued, “It’s interesting that you’d be attracted to such a city girl and that she’d fit in so well here at the farm.”
“She’s so great.” was Tom’s succinct reply.
Laura wouldn’t let him get off so easy. She was interested in the city mouse/ country mouse clash of cultures that had produced such friction in her and Eugene and seemed to reproducing nothing like it in her daughter and his son.
“Why do you think Amanda fits in so well here at the farm?” Laura asked.
“Maybe because she’s such a curious person. Maybe it’s because everybody likes her.” Tom replied, then added, “Maybe because she likes sharing it with me.”
“Young love.” Laura agreed, but it sounded more condescending than she had intended.
“Jonas told me that my dad once said that no matter how young people are, love is always old.”
“I guess your father really believes that.” Laura answered.
“I think it’s true.”
“Most young people do.”
“My dad believes it.”
“Does your mom?” Laura asked, and Tom had to think about it for a while before he said that he didn’t really know.
The woman singer with the band came to the end of Stardust and the music faded and Tom walked Laura back to her chair and waited quietly for a moment until Ian and Amanda joined them.
David, in his new suit and his perfect halo of golden Harpo Marx hair was, as usual shadowing Laura. He had watched her intently from the side of the dance floor as big bodies brushed past him and blocked his view. As Laura had gone back to the table with Tom, she stopped and offered David her hand and with a simple nonchalance he gave it to her and followed her back to the ta
At about ten o’clock Sharon announced that everyone should get their coats and move outside for the fireworks display. And it took nearly half an hour before everyone was bundled outside by the pasture, and Tranh and his helpers began the fireworks display that accompanied Beethoven’s fifth Symphony.
It had taken Tranh most of the day placing the skyrockets with the number sequences that they would follow. Timing was everything, especially among the clusters that he wanted exploding together. The consideration and planning that went in to his choices about the types and patterns of the skyrockets he wanted to go with the music was something he worked on for months. Seeing him move like a dancer, his arms conducting his two helpers with their torches moving between the skyrockets was a show in itself.
Against the stars of the universe and the deaf master’s music, yellow chrysanthemum constellations collided with spiral galaxies of blue. Suns exploding in perfect breathless red patterns and hot yellow tinsel falling back from the black night brought silent gasps from the children who no longer had any trouble staying awake. Eugene and Sharon watched from behind a glass patio door feeling the muffled music from the other side of the pane.
Tom held Amanda in his arms in front of him, smelling the perfume she had borrowed from his sister Lucy while Ian stood beside Laura holding her hand in its soft mohair glove.
Thousands of dollars reached up and fell back from the darkness, the whump of ignitions followed by screams of acceleration, followed by explosions of color and texture and intensity that lasted less than a breath. The primary colors of explosive delight fell with the burning showers that died in the silence of the space where they fell.
The distant fire of the universe behind the great flares of what human joy could be were connected briefly in the black of the night.
By the time the first movement of the fifth Symphony was done everyone was saturated and overwhelmed by the spectacular display they had seen and felt. Young love, true love filled with such emotion. Tom kissed the crown of Amanda’s soft, beautiful hair. And it was over. Ten minutes before midnight the bandleader asked everyone to open the bottles of Champagne chilling in the middle of their tables. Before long the room was laughing in the tremendous cross fire of corks and reports and white foam hastily gathered in plastic glasses, and when the glasses were all charged, Sharon proposed the toast.
“Thank you all so much for coming and sharing our New Year’s Eve. Last week I asked Gene how the last year had been for him and he told me it was the hardest and happiest year of his life. I think our whole family and some of its new adopted members have experienced the incredible depth of the human heart this last year. When I thought about the happiness I’ve felt myself, I realized that it had no real beginning or end. Our ability to feel happiness in our own special way is always with us and I believe it can last as long as consciousness survives. That’s why this year I would like to propose that the New Years toast be to happiness, without beginning or end. To happiness without beginning or end.”
To happiness without beginning or end, all but one of the voices in the room echoed as everyone raised their champagne glass and sipped from it and then countless plastic glasses ticking and touching spattered around the room. It was then that Sharon surprised everyone by asking Amanda to come to the stage and sing Auld Lange Syne when the New Year arrived.
Amanda was stunned and surprised and desperate because she could barely remember any of the words and her terrified eyes found Tom’s and she told him under her breath why she couldn’t do it.
“I’ll write them out for you. It’s okay.” he said and quickly went to a cupboard and took a pen and a piece of paper and quickly wrote down the words to the song as everyone waited. Tom came back and handed them to Amanda and walked her to the stage with barely a minute to spare. Everyone watched the big clock on the wall and when it got to ten seconds from midnight everyone started to countdown; ten, nine, eight, seven, six, and the band started to play and it was …five, four, three, two, one. Happy New Year! The voices exploded in the room and people hugged and kissed and Tom kissed Amanda and the band leader motioned to her and she quickly began to sing Auld Lange Syne.
Lest old acquaintance be forgot, in days of Auld Lange Syne
We’ll raise a cup of kindness yet to those days of Auld Lange Syne.
For Auld Lange Syne my dear, for Auld Lange Syne,
We’ll raise a cup of kindness yet, to those days of Auld Lange Syne.
Amanda sang and led the whole room and her heart felt like the white foam that had fallen from the necks of the champagne bottles as she stood beside Tom who held her by the waist, and everyone sang from their full throated hearts, everyone except for Eugene, of course, and when Amanda saw him and realized he was the only one who wasn’t singing, tears started to pour from her eyes as he gave her the look that he seemed to save only for her. She couldn’t help it; she had to turn away.
Tom took her in his arms again and they kissed once more. He kissed her cheek and tasted the salt of the last of her tears and had no idea of why she was crying. Tom then took her hand and Amanda could see that all of the Van Fleet children and grandchildren were lining up to wish Eugene Happy New Year. One by one they filed up to him and Tom insisted that Amanda join the line with him as all his other family members had done, and following Tom, she bent and kissed Eugene and told him, “Happy new year Mr. Van Fleet. I love you.” The last three words caught in her throat, but the last thing she wanted to do again was cry so she forced a smile onto her face and she left him there to greet the next member of his family.
After the immediate family, in a less organized way, virtually everyone in the room made their way to wish Eugene a Happy New Year. Amanda was pleased that Ian had taken Laura’s hand and was one of the first ones to approach Eugene. In the music and the loud conversation it was impossible to understand what her parents said as she watched as Ian spoke to Eugene for a moment, as he held his weak hand, and Amanda didn’t know that as Laura bent down and kissed Eugene she whispered to him, “My partner.”
Later, when Ian was dancing with Laura, he told her he loved Sharon’s New Years toast.
“If we hadn’t been through what we’ve been through, I don’t know if I would have ever experienced the happiness I’ve felt in the last month. I’ve never seen Amanda so transcendentally happy, after what she’s been through and the nightmares she must have. How about you?”
“I just can’t trust happiness. I’m really excited about the book. I’m thrilled that Amanda is still whole and she’s grown-up so fast, so beautifully.” Laura replied
“How is it you can’t trust that happiness?” he asked, seriously.
“Maybe it’s only going to take a little time.” she answered.
“What’s to trust? If Sharon’s right and the things that make us happy are always a part of us and won’t every change, what’s to trust?” he pressed her.
“I think she’s wrong. You’ve been unhappy. I’ve been unhappy. Amanda’s been unhappy. Where did all the happiness go then? The best things in life pass away. You could have spent the last month visiting your wife and daughter in a psychiatric ward. I don’t know how Sharon can deny the most obvious evidence of what life can do to you. Just look at Eugene for God’s sake.”
Ian had no answer to what mortality did to happiness, but it was obvious to him that both Sharon and Eugene had understood or come to terms with mortality and loss in a way that neither he or Laura could really understand.
“Let’s just dance.” Laura said with a sigh and she pressed her head next to her husband’s and they moved with the slow silent grace of their bodies.
New Year’s Day, Ian woke up early and went down and re-charged the stove and got dressed and made himself a coffee and sat on the old sofa and listened to the wind begin to howl outside. He looked at the still life of Laura’s work o
The longer he sat, the more restless Ian felt. Everyone except him had found some purpose on the farm, and he felt more anxious than jealous, because his had always been the role of the organizer who maintained the busy mechanism of his family’s life. For the first time his role was forgotten. Aside from going to work and bringing home the paycheck, he had no real function in his family’s new temporary little home. Quietly, he put on his coat and gloves and opened and re-latched the big wood door and left the cabin and walked out to the farmhouse, hoping people were awake and there might be something he might be able to help in doing.
It was six o’clock in the morning and people were already in the kitchen preparing breakfast for the regular seven o’clock deadline.
Ian had come through the door without knocking as he always would after that weekend and when he came in to the dining room he looked through the sliding glass doors to where Eugene lay in his bed. Sharon was there, already dressed and ready for the day, doing the physical therapy that was necessary to keep Eugene’s muscles from wasting anymore than his disease demanded.
Sharon didn’t see him and so he made his way to the kitchen where he offered his services and he was amazed how he was quickly drafted to try his hand at his own variation on masses of fried hash brown potatoes that would go with the Canadian bacon that was being sliced and prepared for frying on the huge commercial stove.
Ian was surprised when Amanda arrived in time for breakfast and it was so different for him serving her as part of a large family gathering. There was something about a large gathering in the morning that made a person feel they were a part of something much bigger than their own life. The members of a family were like pegs holding down a tarpaulin against the winds of the day. Ian felt his family was like three little tent pegs, there was always a corner of life that seemed to be flapping violently, wanting to be free. After breakfast Ian and Amanda both helped with cleaning up after the New Year’s Eve party. There were dishes to be done and bags of paper plates and plastic glasses needing to be gathered.
Laura came from the cabin at noon for her first meal of the day and when she came through the door her coat was caked in a soft layer of delicate wet snow. She had come with the wind at her back and when she turned around she was like an all-white silhouette. After lunch the family gathered on the front porch by the fire and Amanda watched the big cement bird feeder that served as a birdbath in the summer. She was fascinated by the delicate contention and aggression of the beautiful little creatures. The fox sparrows, the juncos muscled their away among half a dozen mourning doves whose wings snapped and flashed the color of iridescent blue. A pair of Blue Jays soared in to take sunflower seeds back to the branches of the Walnut tree nearby. To Amanda, watching the fox sparrows with the little black hearts on their chests was like watching the children of a family clamoring over a great picnic feast.
The steady wind and the snowstorm had quickly buried the farm in wet heavy clots of snow, the cedars and the rose canes already bending under their weight. Watching the big tumbling flakes of snow was like watching a dazzling meteor storm blaze past the windows. Everyone seemed warm and content, enjoying the storm outside.
Laura had to be dressed in a bigger coat and a balaclava and big boots before she was allowed to make her way back to the cabin and her work. As she pushed her way into the wind and felt the repeated hits of the spit of the white flakes on her face, she stared through eye holes, and breathed hard through the mouth opening of the white balaclava covering her head and she felt the surge of panic she had felt struggling through the wind to the dead boy in the snow. If she had passed the tendrils of a red osier dogwood, it would have completely unhinged her heart. For Laura white snow would forever be spattered with blood. The snow soaked fields were cold and heavy inside her, and the throat of the wind would forever scream when she stopped and remembered hoarrrr...whorrrrr ...horrorrrr. The only place she was at peace with winter was on the everchanging shore where the three traveller stones made a Zen garden in white ice.
By the next day the farm was buried in wind and white and the red Massey Harris tractor with the big snow blower had to make runs every few hours to keep the lane ways and buildings of the farm open and accessible.
The McCalls had retired early to their cabin and listened to the snow slide off the steel roof falling with a whomp in front of the porch, so that in the morning they would have to cut a doorway through it into the white floating world.
They had all spent the hours before they went up to the sleeping loft, drinking tea and reading the letters of Arthur and Laura Lee, and it was then that both Ian and Amanda understood how beautiful they were. Amanda especially would sit with her feet curled under her and wipe away tears as she read the most private thoughts of the loved and lost and lonely and the real and imaginary connection she had to people who had once lived in the world or only in Eugene’s imagination.
When they were under the covers, the McCall family had no gossip, no thoughts or words to share that night. They lay awake in the warm throat of the cabin listening to the winter in fury. Ian wasn’t sure of it, but he thought that perhaps if Amanda had not been an arms length away, that he and Laura might have made love tenderly and quietly, that night. When he thought about the fact that they would soon be back in their own beds in the city, he felt strange pangs for a loss that would come with regaining their own lives.
He would lose Amanda most weekends to Tom before he lost her forever. He would lose Laura for weekends until her book was finished or Eugene was dead. What he gained was what he was losing. What he wanted was just out of his grasp and slipping slowly away. He kissed the nape of Laura’s neck and she made a gentle moan that brought her back from the roads they would soon travel when they went back to this city, back past the place where a hand-painted marker of love and remembrance was nailed on a fence post nearest to the spot where the soul of a son and a brother had suddenly left the earth.
By Sunday morning, the storm had come and apparently gone. From the end of the cleared lane way, the county roads had been plowed and connected again to the highway that led back to Toronto. Laura insisted they leave early Sunday after breakfast, because she wanted to be sure they would have the light of the day when they could make their way slowly by the longer route that wouldn’t take them past the place Laura dreaded so much.
The Lexus was dug out of its deep crusts of snow and the frost on the inside of the windshield was running and dissolving and disappearing in the fan of hot defroster air as the back window opened to the heater elements embedded in the glass. By the time the car was ready for travel the whole Van Fleet family, except for Eugene, had gathered around it to say goodbye to the McCalls.
The McCalls had never had such a send-off, they had never left feeling and seeing such sadness as they went. Ian watched Amanda being hugged and kissed over and over and watched Laura, in her turn, touched and held as he himself felt one body after another embrace him warmly. He had steeled himself for separation and withdrawal but he wasn’t prepared for the looks on the faces of the two women he loved. Amanda’s last embrace was with Tom. Laura’s last embrace was one that she initiated when she bent down to the ground and lifted David into her arms and kissed his soft white cheek.
Ian knew he was only postponing his loss. He was taking his family away from where they needed to be to heal from what they had suffered and realizing that, he realized that it was the one thing about leaving that neither Laura nor Amanda probably consciously understood.
Ian went back to Sharon and hugged her once more and asked her softly if Amanda could stay and join the school with her own children. Sharon’s eyes looked back into his to try to understand th
Laura bent down and looked in the window.
“What are you talking about? You hate space. Why are you doing this? Quit kidding around” she said and sounded completely confused.
By that time Amanda was at the driver’s window and when she asked her father what was going on, he told her that he decided that it was time that she made her way in the world and he was going to withdraw her from school the next day. “You have to stay here and learn some kind of productive behavior.” he said mischievously as Amanda just stood there stunned.
“You’re joking. It’s not funny, if you’re joking. It’s really not funny.” Amanda said.
“I’m not joking. This is where you need to be for now. Sharon said you’d be welcome to join their home school. This is where you need to be for now.”
The look that he shared with his daughter was unlike any he would share with her in his life. She not only understood his gift to her, she could see in his eyes the loss he was feeling in the same gift.
“I really want to come home with you.” she whispered to him.
“I’m glad. But can you honestly tell me this isn’t where you feel you belong, right now?” Ian replied softly.
Amanda said nothing as she tried to gather the spinning vortex of her heart and what finally came from her throat was just a simple, “Thank you.”
“Shouldn’t we have talked about this.” Laura said across the roof of the car to Amanda.
Ian answered from inside the car. “It’s decided. You’re staying. Now be a good girl and write a great book.”
Ian shouted goodbye to everyone and slid up the windows of the car like two transparent walls that enclosed him in the emptiness of the car, and when he backed away and then moved forward out of the paddock and down the lane, everyone was waving and he could hear Amanda’s voice shouting something he couldn’t make out.