Eggs
Part I
Chapter 1
Only later in life did she learn that chickens are the closest living relatives to dinosaurs. She found it hard to accept thinking we certainly aren’t obligated to believe everything science tells us. It was anyway hard to imagine a dinosaur while watching a chicken eating scratch in the barnyard.
However, not quite as deep into the well of the past a small girl named Catherine was sitting on a milk stool in her grandparents’ barnyard in Montana studiously watching chickens. She was in the second grade and had volunteered to write a report on the bird. Her classmates thought this was ludicrous. Why not report on horses or cows? Anything is more dramatic and interesting than an ordinary chicken. Families even kept chickens in the small village where Catherine lived only a half dozen miles from her grandparents’ farm. Sometimes Catherine walked the six miles, mostly cross-country, to study the chickens. A seven-year-old girl wouldn’t be allowed such a journey nowadays but back then it wasn’t extraordinary. Boys played baseball all summer long into the evenings without organized teams or cute little uniforms. Girls went camping and fishing which they liked as much as boys, or rode their nags for long miles cross-country to go swimming. Parents didn’t micromanage their children.
Catherine had three horses partly because of their need to keep one another company and partly because when it came to Catherine her father was a soft touch. They were kept at her grandparents’ and to her disappointment the horses didn’t care for chickens. They especially disliked the rooster Bob, who was arrogant and charged them crowing. He also charged Grandpa who kicked at him but rarely made contact because Bob was so deft. He was generally pleasant to Catherine seemingly thinking she was part of his brood.
Her grandmother was a bit capricious ordering chicks the post office delivered in a big box. Grandmother liked colorful feathers in her barnyard though she would get ordinary leghorns for reliability. The eggs were always white which Catherine’s aunts favored. Her daffy older brother wouldn’t eat eggs, odd for a farm kid but then he was a problem in every respect. That’s why her father treated her like a son. Her grandpa’s farm dog, a collie, used to retrieve the cows every day but thoroughly ignored the chickens though he would growl at the rooster if he approached which frightened the rooster. Grandpa only liked to eat brown eggs thinking they were healthier but then he was full of errant theories. Her father who was the banker in town said that this was because Grandpa was a Swede, and Swedes are known for their eccentricities. There were Rhode Island Reds and Plymouth Rocks for brown eggs, a few Golden Comets, a scattering of Anconas, and French Marans for variety and color. If you’re a farm woman you struggle for anything different from the farm routines.
Catherine’s father was American and grew up on the farm, while her mother was English. After he graduated from college he got a job with a big New York City bank with an office in London. He met her mother at a dance hall and he said that it was “love at first sight.” Her mother was younger and impulsive and desperately wanted to live on a farm and he lied saying that that was where he lived though he had no intention of returning to farm life. So they married in England and came back home to Montana. She was plainly furious when they reached Montana and moved into a grand nineteenth-century home in the village. She simply asked, “Where’s the farm you promised?” and he ignored her. She was already pregnant and knew she had to take his lie calmly.
When her parents quarreled which was frequently her mother would go out to his parents’ and sleep in the small quarters she had organized for herself up in the cold attic in winter. She’d take Catherine along when she was small. In the winter she’d carry a large stone she had heated on the stove up to the attic, wrapped in a blanket to keep their feet warm. Everyone knew that if your feet were warm the rest of the body was easy with enough blankets. Of course by 5:00 a.m. their feet were cold but that’s when her grandparents got up for breakfast to start the day. Catherine liked being with Grandpa at the kitchen table when he would sit waiting for it to get light outside, a very long wait in the winter but then the kitchen was warm from the wood-burning stove. Grandpa would invariably eat a half dozen brown eggs, ham or bacon or pork chops, and fried potatoes, also a bowl of Wheaties with pure cream. It doesn’t sound healthy but he worked on the farm until he was ninety. He wouldn’t have a tractor, believing that motor exhaust poisoned the ground, but plowed and cultivated with two large Belgian draft horses. Once when Grandpa had pneumonia her dad plowed the thirty-acre plot and was a physical wreck for a week. He was so proud that he had done it and her mother had to take many photos of the banker behind the plow yelling “gee” and “haw” so the horses would turn at the end of the row.
Catherine was a dutiful daughter, if generally ignored as her parents hopelessly tried to manage her brother. She went to Sunday school voluntarily. Her parents were members of the Methodist Church in Livingston but never attended except at Christmas and Easter. She had a good teacher who had told her to pick the same place to pray each morning. She couldn’t quite manage it. At home in town she’d go out to a thicket of Russian olive and aspen trees or, if the weather was too bad, down to her secret place in the basement where she had an altar covered with her favorite stones, arrowheads, a pretty white coyote skull, and her first teddy bear. She loved the Gospels and read them often and still did. At the farm she’d say her prayers in the henhouse. She prayed that her parents would stop yelling at each other and her father would stop drinking so much. Nothing happened and the teacher said it must be God’s will which puzzled her about the effectiveness of prayers like it does many.
Although she didn’t want to, Catherine’s mother helped her shovel snow off a big patch of ground outside the henhouse so the chickens could go outside on sunny winter days. Bob the rooster seemed infuriated by his confinement and attacked her mother chasing her across the yard. She was embarrassed to run from a chicken. Catherine rescued her by shouting and waving her arms for Bob who ran back to the comfort of a crowd of hens.
“I’m going to kill that bloody rooster,” Mother screamed. Catherine had never heard her mother use that dread word. She had tears of fury in her eyes while Bob was quite happy back annoying the hens.
Catherine had a friend, Laura. They would ride horses together. Laura was slow, or so everyone thought. Then one day when they were feeding the chickens Laura said calmly in a voice different from her usual one that she could actually read and write and that she only acted retarded because it made life easier. Both of her parents were severe alcoholics and were nicer to her under the assumption that she was “out to lunch.” Catherine understood because drinking was behind many of her parents’ quarrels too. The only one that knew Laura’s secret was their cranky family doctor who not oddly approved of her behavior.
The small town had three churches, Lutheran, Catholic, and Methodist. All of the Norwegian farmers and ranchers were Lutherans. If you had a big place it was a ranch, and a smaller one was a farm, often originally part of an early homestead that had been carved up and sold off because it was too much land for a single farmer just trying to get by. It was muttered that the Catholics did well as they had so many children, hence free labor. The Norwegians usually had smaller places and the largest spreads of all were owned by the white Anglo-Saxon Methodists who had moved in with money in banks in the mid-nineteenth century in hopes of getting rich raising cattle. It didn’t happen though there had been boom years around the First World War and would be after the Second.
Catherine’s brother Robert ran away when he was fifteen and she was nine, still fascinated by her grandparents’ chickens. Robert sent a number of postcards from Los Angeles where he said he worked in a Standard Oil station and had started taking drugs. Their father flew out once to look for him but failed. Robert told her years later that he had seen Father from a distance and hid in a car behind the gas station. Father had relentlessly bullied Robert to make him into his own image.
Meanwhile, her parents went through a period when they were sure they had failed as parents and were especially nice to her. They diminished their late afternoon cocktails to a single martini. When they had had several they used to yell at Robert who was brilliant but made poor grades. Their father thought Robert’s downfall was his reading. In his early teens Robert had read Dostoyevsky, James Joyce, and many French poets which his father felt had altered his behavior in negative ways. It later occurred to Catherine that if great literature changed your behavior then so what? Their father was unable to see that his bullying led to Robert’s rebellious nature. He did not spare the rod. It was also hard on Mother, which was why she would retreat to the farm so often. She was painfully homesick for London, altogether logical since she’d moved to raw Montana on the basis of the lie that she was going to be a farmer’s wife. She had a housekeeper named Gert who worked for the family and became a confidante. Later on when Catherine was eleven Gert explained to her that the fundamental problem of her parents’ marriage was this lie about the farm. Since childhood her mother had fantasized about being a farmer’s wife and perhaps taking the farm over when her husband died. Gert advised Catherine, “A man will tell a hundred lies to get into your pants.” Catherine was a late starter and didn’t quite understand why a man would want to get in her pants. What would he do there? Soon afterward her mother gave her her first sex lecture which she found stupid and embarrassing. Later on in the spring a boy in the field behind the school took out his hard penis, pointed it at her, and yelled, “Bang.” It was the silliest thing she had ever seen, even sillier than Grandpa’s pigs screwing, or Bob mounting a hen for a few seconds. Catherine knew that her friend Laura would pick up change from boys for lifting up her dress and showing herself bare. Laura had told her that boys were dumb as male dogs for anything sexual and she needed a little money because her parents never gave her any. They spent every spare penny on drink.
At the farm Catherine would ride on the horse-drawn stone boat, jump off, and gather rocks. Grandpa would stop the team when a rock was too heavy for her and pick it up in his massive hands. Her hands and arms grew strong from the early farmwork so that in the fifth grade when a boy pushed her down she was able to slam him against the wall and choke him. The teacher had to rescue the boy. He warned Catherine about “farm girls” misusing their strength.
One morning in Catherine’s eleventh year Mother announced the good news. Her father in London was sending her and Catherine tickets on the Queen Mary to visit in England for a year. It was a troublesome time in the world, a scant month before World War II broke out as it turned out, though they didn’t expect it when they went. Her father looked happy to see them go. Catherine knew that her father frequently visited a divorcée across town who lived next to Laura’s family, which Laura had told her, but her mother didn’t know. Of late her mother had been drinking nearly as much as her father which worried her but Catherine thought if she and her mother could just go to the farm, or stay away from town, everything would remain as it was. And she was ecstatic about visiting England on a great boat, said to be the largest in the world that carried passengers.
In early August Catherine said goodbye to her chickens, the only things she regretted leaving behind except her grandparents and Laura. They took a long three-day train journey to New York, stopping for a night in Chicago where her mother had English friends she said were “posh.” They certainly were, living in a brownstone downtown near Lake Michigan. Catherine had never seen such furniture and when they arrived from the train station a uniformed man was polishing the doorknob that looked golden though her mother said it was brass. Her mother and the woman of the house were old school friends and laughed a lot. The husband was what was widely known as a “pain in the ass.” He had too much to drink at dinner and railed loudly that bankers had gotten a “bum rap” for the Depression. It was obviously a performance for the benefit of a new audience, Catherine’s mother Alicia. It became unpleasant though the roast beef was the best she had ever had. The man lurched to his feet before dessert and they heard him crash to the floor with a roar in the den. Servants came running but his wife merely shrugged and smiled and said, “It would be very nice for me if he would break his fucking neck.” Catherine’s mother and the wife laughed loudly although Catherine worried that the man might be injured.
Breakfast next morning before their noon train was pleasant as the man had long gone off to work.
“You’re going to be very lovely. Take care in your choices. You can’t be too cautious about who you marry. I’ll probably see you in London for a visit,” the woman said to Catherine as they said goodbye.
To Catherine the three days in New York City were fine, especially the Museum of Natural History and the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The hard part was her mother’s interminable shopping. Catherine wasn’t fascinated by clothes the way some girls her age were, in fact she simply didn’t care much about them. Her favorite thing to wear was her overalls out on the farm, just like Grandpa’s. Her mother, however, had inherited some money from a maiden aunt in Hereford, England. Her father thought that they should buy a new Ford roadster with the money, but her mother had brought the money along in traveler’s checks to keep him away from it.
The voyage was utterly grand to Catherine. They had middling tickets, not first class but certainly not steerage. She didn’t really know the difference and didn’t care. She was completely untraveled and New York City had been stunning in terms of the people she saw. The ship was the same but because it was confined she was able to wander around and study the variety of people as if she were studying her chickens.
The only thing irritating to Catherine was that there was a certain kind of older man who would stare and wink at her. In truth despite her ignorance of sexuality she was a little early in her pubescence and had begun to have breasts. She was five-foot-nine and graceful with big eyes and certain men have a taste for the too young. To Catherine these men were no different from the boy behind the school who had aimed his hard dick at her and yelled, “Bang.” She wanted to continue being a girl and had no interest in becoming a woman which she could see was a disadvantage, in Montana and maybe everywhere else. In school even the teachers fawned over the boys who were star athletes. A mere perfect student like herself was largely ignored except by one or two. Luckily her Sunday school teacher Mrs. Semmes had taught her the value of humility which allowed her not to become angry about those conditions she couldn’t change. Several years later some girls she knew asked her to join them on the cheerleading squad but frankly she hated the idea of yelling, maybe because of her father who did so much though never at her.
She immediately loved London and her grandparents though she grew quite tired of accompanying her mother on her visits to old friends. Mother treated her as if she were a trophy which she disliked and Catherine was at a loss for anything to say to her mother’s schoolmates. Finally she relented and let Catherine take walks with either of her grandparents. They lived about a block off Cheyne Walk in a house that came to them through her grandmother’s parents, otherwise it would have been too expensive for them in that lovely neighborhood. They would walk along the Thames and Catherine thought there was no substitute on earth for a big river. London was simply a fabulous walking town and they strayed far in the short time before the war started. It was pretty much all that anyone talked about.
They were there six months when there was a wire saying her mother had to go home because Catherine’s grandmother on the farm had died and her father was ill from a possible stroke. Catherine didn’t think her mother cared about her father but there were many things to be sorted out that required her at home. She had trouble booking passage as there were so many people trying to get out of England in fear of the possibility of a German attack. Finally Grandfather got her aboard a big yacht returning to Newport, Rhode Island, in exchange for his wangling enough gas for them to reach port. Grandfather had been very high in the civil service, basically looking after all transportation in the London area. Catherine deduced later that this must have been how he wangled gas for the yacht. Her grandfather was called in for many civil defense — type meetings during the war, some at their home during which she had to go up to her room. Secrets were being told and she shouldn’t know them. She liked this air of intrigue having read mystery books.
Alicia pretended that she wanted to take Catherine back home with her but Catherine doubted her sincerity. She was still angry about losing her brother and was quite critical as a young woman can be. Catherine’s grandmother was dead and her grandfather was ill and she was afraid he’d die and she’d never see him again. Her English grandfather assured her that the Germans would never dare attack “mighty England” as he called it. Then scarcely ten days after they said goodbye to her mother the London Blitz started.
All the nights of the Blitz were spent down in the local subway stop, called the Tube over there. Because of her grandfather’s importance he had a little office toward the end of the stop as he needed safe access to a phone. MI5 also gave him two very large guards which consoled her grandmother who lived out the Blitz in a state of relentless fear. They stood right outside the door all night long. Catherine often worried about their families but they had been sent to relatives in the country early on. They were also visited once a day before dinner by grandmother’s French cook and his wife Nina. They had a hot plate in the office and Patrice would cook whatever he could scavenge that day from the markets. Grandfather refused to use his importance to get better food than the rest of the city could get because of rationing, but sometimes when Patrice got something particularly good and nondemocratic Grandfather would pretend he hadn’t noticed while eating his sacred lamb chop or whatever it was. There was also an open toilet bowl and sink in the office and an electric transformer against the wall which kept them warm on cool nights. They slept with blankets on thin mattresses that would be rolled up and stuffed under the desk during the daytime. So Catherine couldn’t complain that her family suffered like thousands of others in the Blitz. At first it embarrassed her to go potty in front of others but when you are hearing the thunder of bombs and the walls are shaking you learn to adapt.
The barrage called the London Blitz continued for fifty-seven nights in a row. Even if you didn’t hate Hitler at the beginning you would be insane with rage by the end. Catherine read later that it had killed forty thousand innocent civilians and severely injured about that number. Her birthday fell in October and Patrice managed to make her a cake on the hot plate which made her quite happy, a nice chocolate cake with chocolate frosting.
Catherine felt cheated of the night. She had always loved to walk at twilight and see nightfall, hear the nighthawks and whippoorwills, then stumble home in the dark. Mother would make her take a flashlight but she never used it. The flashlight seemed vulgar in the beauty of the night. She missed most seeing the moon. Grandpa knew this and the evening of the full moon he daringly took her to the top of the stairs to see it. Frederick, one of the guards and a huge Jamaican, escorted them. The moon was distorted by all of the smoke in the air but still beautiful. There were fires all over London from the bombs. They stared at it but suddenly the Luftwaffe dropped the first bombs of the evening not a quarter mile away. Frederick put himself in front of them but Catherine saw the moon turn bright orange from the firestorm. She was both awed and horrified.
Grandpa took her for a walk in the station every afternoon so she could get some exercise. That was when there were the least people in the station. Many left during this time to scavenge for food and to go to the toilet on the streets, as the public toilet in the station was in disrepair. The Red Cross began bringing food which was much appreciated but never enough. Then Patrice was shot trying to steal meat. Nina was bereft but brave and stayed on with Catherine’s grandparents until they died. Way into the time of the Blitz one day MI5 sent a small truck that picked up Grandma and Catherine. Grandmother was very ill at the time and the war effort couldn’t afford to let Grandfather go with them. The truck, manned by a nice American from Missouri, drove them through the rubble of London. There was a special insignia on the side of the truck and no one tried to stop them. The man from Missouri, named Ted, drove them way out a couple of hours from London to Truro, in Cornwall, to Grandma’s brother’s small farm. Grandma wept when she saw the farm because she had been raised and given birth to Catherine’s mother there. Catherine’s heart soared when she saw a big gaggle of chickens in the yard. As soon as she got out of the truck she walked among them crying and speaking soft loving words. A rooster pecked her leg before she could push him away with a foot. It was a solid peck and hurt but she didn’t care. Her great-aunt Winifred, called Winnie, made them an early supper because Ted had to drive the truck back to London before nightfall. Catherine would always recall it as the best supper of her life. Great-Aunt Winnie made an enormous omelet with her homemade cheese and served it with a big plate of very red garden tomatoes. Despite what Patrice came up with Catherine hadn’t seen an egg in a month and a half because eggs were very precious and she thought she had never tasted anything as utterly delicious in her life. Winnie gave her an Easter basket and it was her job to feed the chickens and gather the eggs as she had done back home in Montana. Most people don’t care for chickens, looking at them as food-bearing pests, so everyone was happy when Catherine took over the job. She knew what grand creatures they were and she was pleased to do it. At eighty-five Catherine would still be taking care of her own chickens. When they ate a stewing hen Catherine knew her private name for her. It didn’t bother her. It was just part of life.
Chapter 2
Catherine graduated from Barnard in New York City, the female adjunct of Columbia, in 1952. Her mother had a New York apartment (lavish at that) at the same time and relentlessly stuck her nose in Catherine’s business whenever possible, which was a problem. She spent an entire winter in New York not calling her mother a single time. Alicia pretended to be bereft.
Mother divorced Father after the war and married the man who owned the yacht that had taken her from England to Newport during the war. Catherine came to suspect it didn’t take her mother long to seduce him. She had also discovered another secret about her father aside from his affair with the divorcée, whom she’d seen and didn’t think very attractive. Maybe she was nicer to him than her mother, who was rarely acidic with her children but could be merciless toward her husband, particularly when they were drinking. On pleasant summer mornings Father would have his coffee out on a picnic table in the backyard under an oak near the hedge. He always took along his red journal or notebook and didn’t want to be disturbed. One morning when Catherine was in her last year at Barnard he rushed off and forgot the journal on the table and she noticed it when she went out to the hedge to check a yellow warbler nest. It was wrong but she couldn’t help snooping. To her shock the journal was full of poems he had written. What an unlikely poet this small town banker and bullying father was, she thought. She saw that most of the poems were imitations, not very good, of the English Romantic period of Wordsworth and Shelley but a few terse short ones were fair to good. In general, however, he was too flowery and should read Wallace Stevens, she thought, or William Carlos Williams, a personal favorite of hers.
She wondered how often people had secret obsessions that never saw public daylight. Who acted less “poetic” than her father? Did anyone know besides him? She doubted it. She later read a writer who said, “There must be freedom before there can be freedom.” It sounded like nonsense but she thought she understood that we must be ready for our obsessions when they arrive. Like her own interest in chickens. Mother once told her that when she was about two she put her down in the yard while she was hanging wet clothes on the clothesline. She turned to check on Catherine and a hen was sleeping on her lap and she was petting the cozy hen with her tiny hand. She dated this as the beginning of Catherine’s chicken obsession but Catherine herself viewed it as far more gradual. And her first move in the barnyard when she first learned to walk was to follow the chickens, getting their poop on her baby shoes. Grandmother tried to stop her but she became distraught so they bought tiny rubber boots they could wash off with the hose. In her eighties she still enjoyed tottering out to feed her hens. They pretended they were interested in her until she threw their food, the scratch, and then they only chased their meal. It was the same when she fed the pigs or calves skim milk, which was left over after the cream when they put milk through the hand-cranked separator. The pigs would watch her approach with eager pig smiles and then she’d pour the skim milk into their trough and they’d be all business. The calves in their pen would mooch up to her like long-lost friends, licking her arms with their rough tongues, and then she’d pour the milk and they’d be at it though not nearly as sloppily as the pigs. Calves would at least look up and around during their meal but not pigs. Compared with both, the chickens were methodical but diffident eaters with more faith apparently in future eating.
Her clue to Father’s poetry writing was books. When she and her brother Bobby were quite young her father had given them a set of the twelve-volume My Book House saying rather obliquely that books had meant a lot to him as a child. She knew his own childhood library was still in his room in a glass-fronted bookcase so she wondered why he just didn’t give them his books, but stayed shy of asking the question guessing there was some kind of emotional involvement as we have for our few precious things.
The twelve volumes of My Book House were geared to gradually ascending age beginning with nursery rhymes like “Pease porridge hot, pease porridge cold, pease porridge in the pot nine days old.” Catherine ignored the logic of this progression and read them straight through at age ten, though the late volumes were a little difficult at the time, full of involved folklore and world mythology. The set also fueled her interest in American Indians and one of her own precious things was the small collection of arrowheads and three spear points she had found on the farm. Catherine felt sure reading had fed her father’s early interest in poetry. What schizophrenia must have been involved in his later career in economics and banking, but then he had always seemed a man whose character was composed of carefully separated slices. His children and wife never received the tenderness he showed to his English setter bitches Lisa and Clare. Only once had he owned a male bird dog, named Bozo, a rambunctious nitwit who hurled himself over a line of bushes out near the quarry, plummeting downward more than a hundred feet. Father said that only a male dog would jump over something without knowing what was on the other side. After Bozo he owned only females.
But what ultimately carried a man who spent a lifetime writing poetry in secret? We are a mystery. At Barnard and enmeshed in the speedy life of New York Catherine found that around Easter she still believed in the Resurrection as if she could still see the contrail of Jesus rising from death to the heavens. And on spring vacation rather than go to a seaside rental with her wealthy friends she went home to work on her term paper on Kierkegaard and to feed chickens.
It was sheer paradise in England to be out of the Tube station and on a farm. At Grandma’s request she’d go next door nearly a mile and read to a farm couple’s son who as a Francophile had signed up early in the war and lost a hand and a leg and had his vision impaired in the defense of Paris. Catherine would read to him for an hour or so and then have a cup of tea or a glass of beer and chat for a while with him. He didn’t want to hear English classics which he knew but French and some American novels when she could find them. Luckily a rich nobleman near the local village heard about their book plight and gave them access to his library. Her wounded neighbor didn’t care for Hemingway but loved Faulkner’s Light in August or the sonorities of Absalom, Absalom which made her breathless to read. The young man Tim was understandably embittered, a farmer’s son who would never be able to effectively farm himself. One day when his parents were gone he asked to see Catherine in the nude. She was nearly fourteen at the time and had been in England for several years now. She considered his request and thought there was no reason not to so she quickly stripped but then he started crying. Later, when he had calmed down with a large whiskey he tried to explain himself, saying that he felt “dismembered” and that sexual love was forever out of his range. Catherine was a young innocent and disagreed saying, “I thought you just needed that one thing to make love, a penis,” and he laughed at her matter-of-factness. He said that losing a hand and leg meant that he could never be a real farmer, or a real lover. That was that. She could see that it was a matter of shame more than anything else.
After the bombings ended Grandma had returned to London to be with Grandfather and the years rolled on slowly with the entire world at war. It was consoling to live on the farm. Her mother would have preferred she come home, but transatlantic travel was now impossible and Catherine was enrolled in a British school and thriving. As an American she was also worried about the Japanese while the local English were obsessed with the possibility of a German invasion. At their dawn breakfast each day her great-uncle Harold, Winnie’s husband, was glued to the radio listening to war news. One morning he beamed at her and yelled, “Thank God for the Yanks.” The American forces had managed to make a German invasion of England unlikely indeed. Catherine was in love with Winston Churchill’s resonant voice whether he was saying something important or not.
One day Catherine got some mail from her grandparents in London who were so pleased to be home and out of the accursed underground. When they had reached home some squatters were in there but it was only a young teacher, his wife, and their baby. Their apartment two blocks away had been utterly destroyed so her grandparents allowed them to make their quarters in a couple of back rooms for the duration of the war. They all liked each other a lot and the young man was skilled enough to replace some windows on the east side of the house that had been broken by the blasts of bombs. The young wife was good in the kitchen, never Grandma’s strength, and Grandma loved the little baby boy. Her grandparents were able to visit the farm once in an MI5 vehicle driven by the huge Jamaican, Fred. They ate eggs for three days and returned to London with several dozen, some cleaned chickens, and a few rabbits Harold had raised. The scales finally tipped a bit with the Normandy invasion but it wasn’t until the liberation of Paris that many people felt any confidence. Catherine heard later that Hitler had demanded that his officers engineer the burning of Paris but they had refused to do it. This was a late in the game relief for her because she had wanted to go to Paris ever since she had known it existed.
Finally the war was over and it was time for her to go home. With her parents separated and divorcing there was no real home for her to go to but she intended all along to live out on the farm. Still she was reluctant to leave England and stayed an extra month in London. She liked the young couple very much and their little boy made her want to have a baby. She was only sixteen but it seemed logical, if you wanted a baby, to go ahead and have one. For that reason she made one more trip after the war out to see Harold and Winnie. She went directly to Tim’s house next door while his father was haying and his mother was in town grocery shopping. She took off her clothes in his bedroom, flopped on the bed bare-assed, and demanded sex. He was utterly surprised because she hadn’t called to say she was coming, but he didn’t seem surprised by her capricious behavior. He took a condom from the desk and came to the bed with his crutches. “I’ve been thinking about this,” he said. With only one hand he couldn’t put on the condom by himself so Catherine hurriedly helped, doing a sloppy job so it would leak and she might have a baby. His member was large and she wondered if it would hurt. It did a little but she didn’t care because this was her heart’s desire. It was over quickly. They lay around for a while and then she raised his interest with her mouth, not something she especially looked forward to but it worked. She got on him again before he could ask for a condom.
She didn’t get pregnant. She was aggrieved. She was in tears for a month.
Seventy years later Catherine found it all comically absurd. She had been willful indeed. She had truly been a sexual person only periodically. It had been grotesquely hard in her life to find a good man. Besides, she had never wanted to be married.
She returned from England on the boat and then a train to Billings, Montana, and another home. She arrived early the next morning and Catherine impulsively went straight to the farm and unloaded all of her luggage. Her grandpa was still alive, if barely, and she wanted to take care of him and help him with work. When she arrived he was having an early afternoon snooze on the couch with the Detroit Tigers ball game on the radio. He opened one eye and said to her, “You’re home,” and went back to sleep. He looked very old but then she had been gone for five years. In the kitchen the cook Bertha was cleaning green beans. She looked at Catherine and smiled broadly.
“You’re here! Now I can quit, your grandfather is an ass.”
Catherine merely nodded. She put on her coat and swiftly walked out.
She made the obligatory drive to town to say hello to her father. She was dreading it. Mother had said in a letter that he had been in a bad way since the divorce. She noticed that the bank was closed early in the afternoon and the shades were drawn but then remembered it was Saturday.
The front door was open at their house and her father sat at the dining room table with a glass and half a quart of gin and his journal in front of him. When he saw her he broke into tears. She didn’t remember ever seeing him weep before except tears of rage over her mother or Bobby. It all must have been terribly hard on him, she thought. He had spent his life studying and playing with money and now his wife had run off with a man of ponderous inherited wealth. He had found no way to counter these thoughts except with the emotion of jealousy, gin, and occasional weeping.
“Bobby stopped by while driving someone’s car to Chicago. He looked good but wouldn’t talk to me. I said you were in England and his mother had left and filed for divorce. He only said, ‘Good’ and walked out with some of his wretched books.”
When she left soon after, the divorcée was coming up the walk with a paper sack, likely another quart of gin. She nodded and Catherine nodded back. At least he had someone but sometimes someone can be less than nothing. A few years later when she discovered her father’s poems she thought the better ones were written after her mother left. They were less flowery.
The farm was her home, simply enough. All through high school Catherine helped her grandfather feed and water the cattle and exercise the horses, and the chickens were her special domain. When he saw her off to college Grandpa said to her, “Don’t stay too long. This farm is yours now.”
After she got home from Barnard, her grandpa was nearly ninety and facing the prospect of selling his cows which was a blow to his morale. He couldn’t bear the idea of selling the horses for fear they wouldn’t be taken care of. Occasionally, for reasons of sentiment, Catherine would help him harness the team of horses and ride the stone boat while they dragged him through the far pasture. The horses would automatically stop when they saw a big stone. This very old man would get off the boat and wrestle the stone on, to be unloaded later into a pile behind the barn. A friend of his was the local stonemason and would come out to pick up a load now and then and he and Grandpa would share a pint of whiskey.
Later, in the fifties, the farm behind them to the west came up for sale at $25,000 for 120 acres, a price that Catherine was largely considered a fool for paying at the time, but she never regretted it. She installed a hired man, Clyde, and his young wife in the farmhouse on the new acreage. The wife Clara wept uncontrollably. She had been raised in a trailer and they now lived in a small trailer down the road and despaired of ever living in their own house. Catherine was overwhelmed and had her young lawyer in town cut out the house and five acres and deed it to Clara personally so she would stop worrying that her husband could get fired and she’d be homeless again. Catherine had borrowed the money from her mother to buy the additional farm and she had said to consider it a gift, but Catherine intended to pay it back. Beef prices were fairly high and the pasturage was good on the new place so she would get a lot more feeders in the spring. Clara worked for her two days a week and would bring her little girl Laurel who truly enjoyed the chickens. She would sit on a milk stool in a daze watching them with one of the bird dogs, Belle, who belonged to Catherine’s father, sitting beside her. Catherine borrowed the dog because it didn’t look like it was being fed enough, but told her father that she was thinking of taking up bird hunting. Grandpa had an old shotgun which her father described as a menace and lent her one of his, a pretty little English gun she knew was worth a lot so she vowed to be careful. He wanted to give her lessons but she demurred for the time being, not wanting to hunt with someone full of gin. Meanwhile Clara would always make something for dinner. She was a good cook and after a successful deer season for her husband she made an old-fashioned venison mincemeat pie which was delicious.
Chapter 3
Catherine disliked her neighbor who owned a big ranch to the east. It was the early 1960s and her grandfather had died three years before. Running the farm without him was lonely sometimes but she enjoyed it. The neighbor was a lawyer from Dallas and when he drove into her yard he laughed at the chickens she was raising. That embedded him in the mud forever as far as she was concerned. What a motormouth big shot, she thought. When they were raising money for the library he donated a thousand dollars, more by far than anyone else, so Catherine donated two thousand that she couldn’t afford just to bust his balls. He had built a pointlessly large house with pillars in front, an imitation of a television program. His wife disliked Montana, and his son and daughter preferred to stay in Texas. His loutish friends and business associates came up to fish for trout and to hunt birds and elk. One of them had paid five thousand to a relatively poor kid for a giant bull elk to take back to Texas pretending he had shot it himself. She had once run into the whole group, the Dallas lawyer and his friends, in the grocery store buying a case of liquor and whining about the lack of fine brands. She was wearing a pair of cotton bib overalls which were admittedly tight across her striking butt. Out in front in the parking lot when she leaned over to put her groceries in the car one of the lawyer’s friends whistled and she turned and yelled, “Go to hell, you old creep.” The man blushed and his friends laughed.
In early 1962 she visited her mother in Palm Beach. It was a monochromatic place. Everyone was rich except for the legion of mostly black servants. She didn’t care for the place except for her long morning walks. She was thoroughly bored but read a lot, occasionally worrying about her chickens back home being cared for by Clara. After a few weeks of this her stepfather, Jerry by name, an odd name for a rich man she thought, took her fishing in Key West well to the south. They flew down in a private jet he leased. He said that flying commercial made him nervous. Her mother had refused to come along because she had to attend a Red Cross ball. Jerry had bribed a young man down the street to take her. Catherine had noted that they had many charity balls in Palm Beach and she joked that they were planning a proctology ball. Her mother didn’t think it was funny but Jerry laughed hard. He was a tad silly but saved from his emotional density by a fine sense of humor. Their fishing guide, a handsome fellow she thought, picked them up at the airport and delivered them to a waterfront hotel. Jerry made much of his claustrophobia and always took a suite. She had an adjoining room and sat at the window for an hour having a margarita and staring out at the ocean. She felt an odd sexual tingle which she attributed to the intensity of the sunlight in the tropics. She thought how chickens needed light to urge them to lay eggs though any kind of light would do. She had made contact with a Barnard friend who was living in Key West with a writer. Jerry had told her that writers came to Key West to misbehave in peace and without criticism. On the way to the hotel Jerry asked the guide to drive them past Hemingway’s house which meant little to her. She liked the stories about Michigan and A Farewell to Arms but his reputation as a bully and alcoholic reminded her uncomfortably of her father when she learned of it. Young men she had known in college who loved Hemingway had taken absurd steps to act manly. All of which was beyond her own comprehension. Farmers were manly without thinking about it. In fact she had never heard one mention the idea. College itself was so mechanistic that maybe the young men were only seeking a release.
She dozed at the window for a while and then Jerry came in dressed spiffily and said he was having dinner with a friend. She was amused later when walking downtown to a bar to see him on the patio of a restaurant with a hand on the hand of an attractive woman. Evidently deceit was part of being a man. Her friends had a nice little local house, called a conch house, near the Key West cemetery, a charming old place. Her hosts had a party with a half dozen writers from thirty to sixty, very busy drinking and talking about themselves. She had noticed this quality of writers who visited Barnard, the relentless struggle to get the conversation back to them. She never figured out the why of this problem. Of course, it wasn’t a problem for them, only their listeners.
She liked one of the writers at the party better than the others. He was half French but currently lived in the United States. He wrote mostly about sport, hunting, and fishing, but there was also a novel about growing up in the Normandy countryside that had done well. She was feeling faintly dizzy from too much wine and the thick cigarette smoke in the room. She decided to take a walk and the French writer offered to go with her. This put the others in a snit as she was evidently the prize of the evening.
They walked slowly in the cemetery in the light of the half-moon which made it hard to see and walk without stumbling. It was wonderfully eerie and when she did stumble he caught her and didn’t let go. They necked for a while and since her desire had never felt so strong she encouraged him. They tried to make love against a monument to a rich dead man but it didn’t work so they ended up with her bent awkwardly over an ordinary gravestone. She tried to read the name upside down while making love but there wasn’t quite the light. She lightly traced the engraving with her fingers and came up with “Burke” or “Bruce,” probably Bruce. They went on for a fairly long time and she thought it quite wonderful. Afterward they talked a little when they could catch their breath.
“Are you going to put this in a novel?” she asked.
“I don’t know. Maybe,” he laughed. “I’ll call you Mildred not Catherine.”
“I don’t like Mildred. Make me Italian, call me Lucina.”
“Write your own novel,” he said seriously.
“I can’t. I’m just a farmer. You know, cattle and chickens, a few pigs, wheat and corn, hay.”
“That’s hard to believe.”
“Suit yourself.” She went back into the party and was teased a little for her messy hair and crumpled skirt. She wanted to go back to her hotel room.
“That guy you walked with is married.”
“I don’t care,” said Catherine. Then he came in and part of his shirttail was sticking out of his fly. The men laughed. He took her home and they arranged to have dinner the following evening.
She got up very early and Jerry looked bleary and tired but was cheerful. They were running late and after a hasty breakfast they met their guide at the marina. From that point on the fishing day was totally unlike anything she had known or expected. She had thought in terms of rowboats on quiet northern lakes and catching bluegills and perch with her grandfather for dinner. Early on when her father was still trying to make her into a boy he had taken her trout fishing on a big river but it frightened her. She didn’t know how to swim yet and feared drowning. If she died, who would feed the chickens? Later on when she had become a good swimmer she swam in the same turbulent river with aplomb, feeling the glory of the rushing current.
That day they fished out of a speedboat-type craft and traveled northwest very quickly to a place Jerry called the “backcountry.” They only saw one other boat, a sponger harvesting sponges with a long pole. Jerry had lost his fatigue and was now excited. He told her the ride out here had filled him with “good ole oxygen” as if it were comparable to booze. Jerry cast his big fly rod to several schools of permit but they wouldn’t bite. He was nevertheless very happy and Catherine was quite transfixed by the beauty of the turquoise water fading to the brown of sand in the shallows. There were many small mangrove keys breaking up the scenery to the east. They were plainly uninhabited and looked like floating thickets. The two men were looking the other way and Catherine yelled, “Fish!” to alert them as they had taught her. Jerry quickly cast and hooked a big bonefish which they had to chase in the boat so it wouldn’t reach a channel and be nailed by a shark. The fish was landed and then released, a lovely act. It was thrilling but not as much as when Mark the guide saw an osprey struggling with a fish it had caught near the mangroves. The fish was too large for the osprey to fly away with it and she feared the bird might drown with its talons stuck in the fish. Mark used his push pole and glided the boat slowly toward the bird. Jerry acted frightened so Catherine made ready to help. Mark put on a pair of gloves but still received a nasty peck in the arm that bled. She managed to hold the bird’s wings tight to its body while Mark detached the fish from the talons and threw it into the mangroves. He took over holding the wings and tossed the bird high in the air. It flew off with a backward glare as if they had ruined its meal rather than saving it from drowning. Jerry clapped and laughed which startled her. She felt good that they had managed to save the bird and that she had been a part of it without really knowing how.
It was time to make the long drive back to Key West. First they each had a small rum and Coca-Cola, a drink she’d never cared for but that day it tasted fine and she semi-dozed on the way back.
Chapter 4
That evening they ended up having a room service dinner on the patio of Jerry’s suite. Catherine’s new friend François joined them and didn’t object that they stayed in as she was tired from the sun and heat. They had several drinks including a bottle of good champagne, and she fell asleep in an easy chair after dinner. Jerry and François helped her into her bedroom. She later remembered that Jerry left and François helped her out of her clothes until she was nude, saying, “A wonderful body,” and then leaving.
She woke after midnight angry with herself. How was she going to get pregnant if she slept through a splendid love opportunity? She wasn’t used to a daylong boat ride in the hot sun. In the morning she called François to apologize and they arranged to meet at the marina when she got back in. François said that he was a friend of the guide and would have him bring them in before five. He would meet her at the marina while she was still awake, he teased, and they could have dinner at his place.
The next day they fished out near Boca Grande Key from which she could see the Marquesas. It looked so lovely in the distance that she wanted to go there but Mark said the channel was too rough today and they would have miles of the choppy water “beating the living shit out of us.” Jerry caught a few small tarpon on the edge of the channel, lovely silver acrobatic fish, and then he hooked one that was large. This fish weighed at least a hundred pounds and it jumped half a dozen times with its gill plates rattling, dragging the line in a wide circle with Jerry shouting and his reel screeching. He fought the fish for a half hour and he was soaked with sweat. It traveled south a mile or so out toward the Gulf Stream when Mark suddenly cut the leader when it was close to the boat. He pointed at a very large hammerhead shark coming toward them, drawn into a meal by the struggling tarpon. The tarpon surged off with the hammerhead giving close chase but the tarpon was well ahead in shallow water and the hammerhead turned around. Jerry and Mark were wound up with the fish and chatted about a past experience when they hadn’t cut off a tarpon soon enough and a bull shark had made a “bloody mess.” All of Catherine’s limited fishing experience had been about catching supper. This was something else entirely — the men called it “pure sport” but she wasn’t sure. To be pure why not leave the fish alone and just look at it rather than make it fight for its life? she thought, then chided herself for casting judgment. If people wanted to box, let them box and live with their concussions.
François was waiting at the marina and she walked off with him without comment. He had talked with Mark but Jerry kept interrupting with one of his incessant dirty jokes which embarrassed her, not because it was dirty but because he was imbecilic.
She had a good evening and night with François. His rental had a small pool and she immediately shed her clothes and took a dip. François quickly followed with a primitive hard-on. He tried to put his mouth on her underwater but it was awkward. They made love at the shallow end of the pool which was also awkward but more than passable. They made love again on the sofa while waiting for a chicken to roast — butter, garlic, fresh tarragon. She found out that François lived in Palm Beach with a rich wife only two blocks away from Jerry on Sea Breeze Avenue. She said nothing, certainly not that it was the silliest place she had ever seen on earth. All of those rich people jammed together in one place. Why not a farm or ranch?
After dinner and too much fine wine they made love once more desultorily in bed. She fell asleep by ten, utterly fatigued and a little sore all over by the sweet battering. She awoke close after dawn and there were high winds and a tremendous thunderstorm coming in from Cuba, a scant ninety miles to the south of Key West. François drove her to the hotel so she could make a polite appearance for Jerry. He was wandering around in his usual expensive robe talking on the phone. He winked at her and hung up the phone.
“You look rode hard and put away wet,” he laughed.
“Some morons say that every day in Montana.” Even saying “Montana” made her homesick. What in God’s name was she doing in this so-called tropical paradise? She was sick of all things Floridian and wanted to be home feeding her chickens. It was also time to buy a dog not that she was confident she was settled in her life. The only thing that could justify this absurd trip was if she was pregnant. If so there was no way she’d ever tell François. She didn’t want a husband or a steady lover, just her farm and chickens, cattle and pigs, a horse or two. She certainly no longer wanted a mother, or father for that matter.
She went into her room to dress and heard Jerry back on the phone and then there was silence. Her door was open a crack and she saw the shadow of Jerry obviously peeking through the crack to see her dress. She poured it on and mooned the door, thinking, what a pathetic fool. She felt a vacuum in her soul where the love of men should have been but the only two she could think of with true fondness were her grandfathers. Had everything gone wrong in the world or was it her? Was it something odd in her strange upbringing that made men uniformly suspect? François was fine but she didn’t actually know him very well and there might be something rotten in his heart. She remembered with grief an episode several weeks before when she told the school’s young handsome soccer coach to stop by and pick up some eggs. She had thought of seducing him but told him if she was way out back she’d leave two dozen in the mailbox. But she was in the kitchen watching out the window while he wandered around the barnyard and quizzically Sally, a fat hen, was following him. Sally had this irritating practice of pecking at the back of your leg in hopes it would bring food. It was only slightly painful like a quick pinch. Suddenly the soccer coach turned and kicked Sally far in the air. She lay prostrate on her back. Catherine was out of the kitchen in a second, screaming as she came out the back door. The man turned in alarm.
“Why are you kicking my chicken? I think she’s dead.” She stopped next to Sally and turned her over. The chicken’s eyes were sightless. “You killed her you miserable fucker.”
“It’s just a chicken. I’ll pay you for it,” he said lamely.
She stood, holding Sally by the feet and slapping the man’s face with the chicken. “Get out of here! Now! Go away!” She was sobbing.
He slumped off carrying his presumed innocence like a boy. She was still wild with heart-thumping anger and was glad she wasn’t holding a pistol or she would have shot him.
Now in the Key West hotel her stomach soured with homesickness. The weather was clearing and they drove to the airport before noon to catch Jerry’s plane home. They met Mark for a quick lunch. She was famished and ate both a grouper sandwich and an order of fresh shrimp while staring east at the ocean.
Back in Palm Beach her mother was happy they were home a day early because there was an “important” ball that evening. Jerry gasped and Catherine only wanted a nap, mostly because she had had a huge Bloody Mary for lunch while Jerry drank two martinis. First she called home and Clyde told her there had been a big snow although it was late April. She was irked because she was missing the fresh snow on the Crazy Mountains east of the farm. She imagined the creamy white mountains in the moonlight.
Who am I and what am I doing? She wasn’t used to asking herself such questions. The memory of a depression during her freshman year of college horrified her. The problem, or so she thought, was that New York City had no “outdoors,” no snowcapped Crazy Mountains or endless plains. She needed to see a bear that was not in a zoo, or a moose eating water weeds. She escaped this depression by interminable walking, at least four hours a day. She would walk the length of Central Park and back and in every botanical garden in the New York City area. She’d walk along the Hudson and also the East River. When her depression lifted in a couple of months she had lost fifteen pounds she didn’t need to lose. Her short and plump Jewish roommate taught her the pleasures of herring and she couldn’t get enough. Because she intended to live in Montana she would have to learn how to make her own. The girl also took her downtown to Katz’s which immediately became her favorite restaurant in the city.
She had to take a photo of her mother and Jerry before they went to the ball. Her mother, she had to admit, looked lovely in her absurd Pierre Balmain dress. Jerry had all the spark of a dog turd in his tailored tux. He rolled his eyes for the picture which later made Alicia angry when she saw it. She always called him darling which made him beam even if she was angry.
What she had learned about Jerry on their fishing trip raised questions in Catherine’s mind about the whole reality of inherited wealth and so did Palm Beach itself. Jerry’s father and grandfather had made a great deal of money in the early electronics field. Jerry’s father had been a terminal alcoholic and syphilitic giving Jerry zero instruction or guidance in life. His father and grandfather were pure unadulterated spenders who were so drunk and disorganized that his family freed him of the money and put it in a trust at J.P. Morgan. Only the interest could be spent. Jerry showed good signs early on and graduated from Yale with honors. But then he discovered the ocean which required boats and he ended up with a fleet and many employees including one who did nothing but help him with his travels. He would go to Europe with twenty pieces of luggage and this required someone to oversee it. He had a great fear of leaving something unspecified behind. He was a grand sucker for luxury hotels. Before Catherine’s mother he had had an apartment way up in the Carlyle Hotel because he liked the room service. The expensive secret power it had was to give him lots of bacon on his order.
Jerry was an expert in the fields of anthropology and ornithology. No place was too far to go see a bird. In his Rhode Island house he kept drawers full of thousands of dead birds, bought from a European collector and smuggled in on the yacht including a unique specimen that he shared with no one but willed to Harvard on his death. What’s the hurry? he thought. A few years before Catherine’s mother showed up he had been married to a French actress for a scant five months. He had taken her down to Cannes to the movie festival and this seemed to make her less popular. He had been married a total of four times and his ironclad rule was no children. He considered himself to have greatly suffered in childhood and would wish it on no one else. His family fortune was aimed at a not very significant college in Ohio. On one of his early, random cross-country drives he had stopped in the college town for the night and liked its aura and the fresh, hardworking people. The college as of yet didn’t know he existed and he didn’t realize that his money would destroy the charm of the place. He was almost a nitwit but not quite.
Chapter 5
Catherine left Palm Beach several days later and didn’t get home until midmorning a day late. The plane had had a long delay in Denver with a driving rain that turned into driving snow. She got to Billings late, picked up her car, and drove up to Roundup because she wanted to head home on Route 212 which to her was the ultimate Montana road because it reminded her of the old Montana of her childhood before so many rich people moved west. “All hat and no cows,” as people said. She stayed in a scummy little motel where perhaps drunk truckers had pissed on the rug. She was famished having skipped the loathsome airline snacks. There was an open bar and she hoped for a single hamburger. It turned out that they had passable small rib steaks of which she wolfed two. Two polite cowboys at the bar made equally polite passes at her. “If you don’t got a place to stay I have a clean bunkhouse.” She danced with one who smelled slightly of manure and horses but not offensively. She could really cut a rug but held back from showing off. As a senior at Barnard she had a little apartment down in the Village with a Puerto Rican girl Josita who loved dancing. They danced together insatiably with Josita in drag. They won a number of dance contests with the judges perceiving that Josita was also a woman — her ass was too shapely to be male. One night when drunk they slept together but Catherine didn’t care for it. As stupid looking as they were she still preferred dicks.
She couldn’t hold back and the cowboy was breathing hard. There was applause and then drinks from a table of old ranchers. They slow danced to Patsy Cline singing “Crazy” and he blushed deeply.
She bought a pint and went to her motel, pouring a big one because she was still jangled from Florida. In bed watching the late news she recalled there was one other man she actually liked aside from her grandfathers. That was wounded Tim who lived next door to Great-Uncle Harold and Great-Aunt Winnie just near the Cornwall border. Her grandmother had written that he was finally making some progress with prosthetic devices which he had refused to try for a couple of years but then his goofy grandmother had taken to praying on their stone driveway on her knees in all weather so he caved in. He could now shuffle along passably with his big walking stick and when he fell he was strong enough to shimmy up the stick with his good hand and the artificial one. Anyway he was the third man she admired and she very much wanted to make love to him and hopefully become pregnant. She was past thirty and felt time slipping away. He was so bitter about the severity of his injuries she doubted he would ever let her close.
She awoke early and figured out the room coffeepot. She felt slow-witted and wondered if she was losing her mind, a concept she had always disagreed with. How could you lose your mind? It was always there though it could be in severe disrepair. She felt mired in random thoughts such as realizing she shouldn’t have fired the lawyer who when working on her will had laughed when she insisted her cremated ashes should be strewn on the floor of the chicken coop.
Chapter 1
Only later in life did she learn that chickens are the closest living relatives to dinosaurs. She found it hard to accept thinking we certainly aren’t obligated to believe everything science tells us. It was anyway hard to imagine a dinosaur while watching a chicken eating scratch in the barnyard.
However, not quite as deep into the well of the past a small girl named Catherine was sitting on a milk stool in her grandparents’ barnyard in Montana studiously watching chickens. She was in the second grade and had volunteered to write a report on the bird. Her classmates thought this was ludicrous. Why not report on horses or cows? Anything is more dramatic and interesting than an ordinary chicken. Families even kept chickens in the small village where Catherine lived only a half dozen miles from her grandparents’ farm. Sometimes Catherine walked the six miles, mostly cross-country, to study the chickens. A seven-year-old girl wouldn’t be allowed such a journey nowadays but back then it wasn’t extraordinary. Boys played baseball all summer long into the evenings without organized teams or cute little uniforms. Girls went camping and fishing which they liked as much as boys, or rode their nags for long miles cross-country to go swimming. Parents didn’t micromanage their children.
Catherine had three horses partly because of their need to keep one another company and partly because when it came to Catherine her father was a soft touch. They were kept at her grandparents’ and to her disappointment the horses didn’t care for chickens. They especially disliked the rooster Bob, who was arrogant and charged them crowing. He also charged Grandpa who kicked at him but rarely made contact because Bob was so deft. He was generally pleasant to Catherine seemingly thinking she was part of his brood.
Her grandmother was a bit capricious ordering chicks the post office delivered in a big box. Grandmother liked colorful feathers in her barnyard though she would get ordinary leghorns for reliability. The eggs were always white which Catherine’s aunts favored. Her daffy older brother wouldn’t eat eggs, odd for a farm kid but then he was a problem in every respect. That’s why her father treated her like a son. Her grandpa’s farm dog, a collie, used to retrieve the cows every day but thoroughly ignored the chickens though he would growl at the rooster if he approached which frightened the rooster. Grandpa only liked to eat brown eggs thinking they were healthier but then he was full of errant theories. Her father who was the banker in town said that this was because Grandpa was a Swede, and Swedes are known for their eccentricities. There were Rhode Island Reds and Plymouth Rocks for brown eggs, a few Golden Comets, a scattering of Anconas, and French Marans for variety and color. If you’re a farm woman you struggle for anything different from the farm routines.
Catherine’s father was American and grew up on the farm, while her mother was English. After he graduated from college he got a job with a big New York City bank with an office in London. He met her mother at a dance hall and he said that it was “love at first sight.” Her mother was younger and impulsive and desperately wanted to live on a farm and he lied saying that that was where he lived though he had no intention of returning to farm life. So they married in England and came back home to Montana. She was plainly furious when they reached Montana and moved into a grand nineteenth-century home in the village. She simply asked, “Where’s the farm you promised?” and he ignored her. She was already pregnant and knew she had to take his lie calmly.
When her parents quarreled which was frequently her mother would go out to his parents’ and sleep in the small quarters she had organized for herself up in the cold attic in winter. She’d take Catherine along when she was small. In the winter she’d carry a large stone she had heated on the stove up to the attic, wrapped in a blanket to keep their feet warm. Everyone knew that if your feet were warm the rest of the body was easy with enough blankets. Of course by 5:00 a.m. their feet were cold but that’s when her grandparents got up for breakfast to start the day. Catherine liked being with Grandpa at the kitchen table when he would sit waiting for it to get light outside, a very long wait in the winter but then the kitchen was warm from the wood-burning stove. Grandpa would invariably eat a half dozen brown eggs, ham or bacon or pork chops, and fried potatoes, also a bowl of Wheaties with pure cream. It doesn’t sound healthy but he worked on the farm until he was ninety. He wouldn’t have a tractor, believing that motor exhaust poisoned the ground, but plowed and cultivated with two large Belgian draft horses. Once when Grandpa had pneumonia her dad plowed the thirty-acre plot and was a physical wreck for a week. He was so proud that he had done it and her mother had to take many photos of the banker behind the plow yelling “gee” and “haw” so the horses would turn at the end of the row.
Catherine was a dutiful daughter, if generally ignored as her parents hopelessly tried to manage her brother. She went to Sunday school voluntarily. Her parents were members of the Methodist Church in Livingston but never attended except at Christmas and Easter. She had a good teacher who had told her to pick the same place to pray each morning. She couldn’t quite manage it. At home in town she’d go out to a thicket of Russian olive and aspen trees or, if the weather was too bad, down to her secret place in the basement where she had an altar covered with her favorite stones, arrowheads, a pretty white coyote skull, and her first teddy bear. She loved the Gospels and read them often and still did. At the farm she’d say her prayers in the henhouse. She prayed that her parents would stop yelling at each other and her father would stop drinking so much. Nothing happened and the teacher said it must be God’s will which puzzled her about the effectiveness of prayers like it does many.
Although she didn’t want to, Catherine’s mother helped her shovel snow off a big patch of ground outside the henhouse so the chickens could go outside on sunny winter days. Bob the rooster seemed infuriated by his confinement and attacked her mother chasing her across the yard. She was embarrassed to run from a chicken. Catherine rescued her by shouting and waving her arms for Bob who ran back to the comfort of a crowd of hens.
“I’m going to kill that bloody rooster,” Mother screamed. Catherine had never heard her mother use that dread word. She had tears of fury in her eyes while Bob was quite happy back annoying the hens.
Catherine had a friend, Laura. They would ride horses together. Laura was slow, or so everyone thought. Then one day when they were feeding the chickens Laura said calmly in a voice different from her usual one that she could actually read and write and that she only acted retarded because it made life easier. Both of her parents were severe alcoholics and were nicer to her under the assumption that she was “out to lunch.” Catherine understood because drinking was behind many of her parents’ quarrels too. The only one that knew Laura’s secret was their cranky family doctor who not oddly approved of her behavior.
The small town had three churches, Lutheran, Catholic, and Methodist. All of the Norwegian farmers and ranchers were Lutherans. If you had a big place it was a ranch, and a smaller one was a farm, often originally part of an early homestead that had been carved up and sold off because it was too much land for a single farmer just trying to get by. It was muttered that the Catholics did well as they had so many children, hence free labor. The Norwegians usually had smaller places and the largest spreads of all were owned by the white Anglo-Saxon Methodists who had moved in with money in banks in the mid-nineteenth century in hopes of getting rich raising cattle. It didn’t happen though there had been boom years around the First World War and would be after the Second.
Catherine’s brother Robert ran away when he was fifteen and she was nine, still fascinated by her grandparents’ chickens. Robert sent a number of postcards from Los Angeles where he said he worked in a Standard Oil station and had started taking drugs. Their father flew out once to look for him but failed. Robert told her years later that he had seen Father from a distance and hid in a car behind the gas station. Father had relentlessly bullied Robert to make him into his own image.
Meanwhile, her parents went through a period when they were sure they had failed as parents and were especially nice to her. They diminished their late afternoon cocktails to a single martini. When they had had several they used to yell at Robert who was brilliant but made poor grades. Their father thought Robert’s downfall was his reading. In his early teens Robert had read Dostoyevsky, James Joyce, and many French poets which his father felt had altered his behavior in negative ways. It later occurred to Catherine that if great literature changed your behavior then so what? Their father was unable to see that his bullying led to Robert’s rebellious nature. He did not spare the rod. It was also hard on Mother, which was why she would retreat to the farm so often. She was painfully homesick for London, altogether logical since she’d moved to raw Montana on the basis of the lie that she was going to be a farmer’s wife. She had a housekeeper named Gert who worked for the family and became a confidante. Later on when Catherine was eleven Gert explained to her that the fundamental problem of her parents’ marriage was this lie about the farm. Since childhood her mother had fantasized about being a farmer’s wife and perhaps taking the farm over when her husband died. Gert advised Catherine, “A man will tell a hundred lies to get into your pants.” Catherine was a late starter and didn’t quite understand why a man would want to get in her pants. What would he do there? Soon afterward her mother gave her her first sex lecture which she found stupid and embarrassing. Later on in the spring a boy in the field behind the school took out his hard penis, pointed it at her, and yelled, “Bang.” It was the silliest thing she had ever seen, even sillier than Grandpa’s pigs screwing, or Bob mounting a hen for a few seconds. Catherine knew that her friend Laura would pick up change from boys for lifting up her dress and showing herself bare. Laura had told her that boys were dumb as male dogs for anything sexual and she needed a little money because her parents never gave her any. They spent every spare penny on drink.
At the farm Catherine would ride on the horse-drawn stone boat, jump off, and gather rocks. Grandpa would stop the team when a rock was too heavy for her and pick it up in his massive hands. Her hands and arms grew strong from the early farmwork so that in the fifth grade when a boy pushed her down she was able to slam him against the wall and choke him. The teacher had to rescue the boy. He warned Catherine about “farm girls” misusing their strength.
One morning in Catherine’s eleventh year Mother announced the good news. Her father in London was sending her and Catherine tickets on the Queen Mary to visit in England for a year. It was a troublesome time in the world, a scant month before World War II broke out as it turned out, though they didn’t expect it when they went. Her father looked happy to see them go. Catherine knew that her father frequently visited a divorcée across town who lived next to Laura’s family, which Laura had told her, but her mother didn’t know. Of late her mother had been drinking nearly as much as her father which worried her but Catherine thought if she and her mother could just go to the farm, or stay away from town, everything would remain as it was. And she was ecstatic about visiting England on a great boat, said to be the largest in the world that carried passengers.
In early August Catherine said goodbye to her chickens, the only things she regretted leaving behind except her grandparents and Laura. They took a long three-day train journey to New York, stopping for a night in Chicago where her mother had English friends she said were “posh.” They certainly were, living in a brownstone downtown near Lake Michigan. Catherine had never seen such furniture and when they arrived from the train station a uniformed man was polishing the doorknob that looked golden though her mother said it was brass. Her mother and the woman of the house were old school friends and laughed a lot. The husband was what was widely known as a “pain in the ass.” He had too much to drink at dinner and railed loudly that bankers had gotten a “bum rap” for the Depression. It was obviously a performance for the benefit of a new audience, Catherine’s mother Alicia. It became unpleasant though the roast beef was the best she had ever had. The man lurched to his feet before dessert and they heard him crash to the floor with a roar in the den. Servants came running but his wife merely shrugged and smiled and said, “It would be very nice for me if he would break his fucking neck.” Catherine’s mother and the wife laughed loudly although Catherine worried that the man might be injured.
Breakfast next morning before their noon train was pleasant as the man had long gone off to work.
“You’re going to be very lovely. Take care in your choices. You can’t be too cautious about who you marry. I’ll probably see you in London for a visit,” the woman said to Catherine as they said goodbye.
To Catherine the three days in New York City were fine, especially the Museum of Natural History and the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The hard part was her mother’s interminable shopping. Catherine wasn’t fascinated by clothes the way some girls her age were, in fact she simply didn’t care much about them. Her favorite thing to wear was her overalls out on the farm, just like Grandpa’s. Her mother, however, had inherited some money from a maiden aunt in Hereford, England. Her father thought that they should buy a new Ford roadster with the money, but her mother had brought the money along in traveler’s checks to keep him away from it.
The voyage was utterly grand to Catherine. They had middling tickets, not first class but certainly not steerage. She didn’t really know the difference and didn’t care. She was completely untraveled and New York City had been stunning in terms of the people she saw. The ship was the same but because it was confined she was able to wander around and study the variety of people as if she were studying her chickens.
The only thing irritating to Catherine was that there was a certain kind of older man who would stare and wink at her. In truth despite her ignorance of sexuality she was a little early in her pubescence and had begun to have breasts. She was five-foot-nine and graceful with big eyes and certain men have a taste for the too young. To Catherine these men were no different from the boy behind the school who had aimed his hard dick at her and yelled, “Bang.” She wanted to continue being a girl and had no interest in becoming a woman which she could see was a disadvantage, in Montana and maybe everywhere else. In school even the teachers fawned over the boys who were star athletes. A mere perfect student like herself was largely ignored except by one or two. Luckily her Sunday school teacher Mrs. Semmes had taught her the value of humility which allowed her not to become angry about those conditions she couldn’t change. Several years later some girls she knew asked her to join them on the cheerleading squad but frankly she hated the idea of yelling, maybe because of her father who did so much though never at her.
She immediately loved London and her grandparents though she grew quite tired of accompanying her mother on her visits to old friends. Mother treated her as if she were a trophy which she disliked and Catherine was at a loss for anything to say to her mother’s schoolmates. Finally she relented and let Catherine take walks with either of her grandparents. They lived about a block off Cheyne Walk in a house that came to them through her grandmother’s parents, otherwise it would have been too expensive for them in that lovely neighborhood. They would walk along the Thames and Catherine thought there was no substitute on earth for a big river. London was simply a fabulous walking town and they strayed far in the short time before the war started. It was pretty much all that anyone talked about.
They were there six months when there was a wire saying her mother had to go home because Catherine’s grandmother on the farm had died and her father was ill from a possible stroke. Catherine didn’t think her mother cared about her father but there were many things to be sorted out that required her at home. She had trouble booking passage as there were so many people trying to get out of England in fear of the possibility of a German attack. Finally Grandfather got her aboard a big yacht returning to Newport, Rhode Island, in exchange for his wangling enough gas for them to reach port. Grandfather had been very high in the civil service, basically looking after all transportation in the London area. Catherine deduced later that this must have been how he wangled gas for the yacht. Her grandfather was called in for many civil defense — type meetings during the war, some at their home during which she had to go up to her room. Secrets were being told and she shouldn’t know them. She liked this air of intrigue having read mystery books.
Alicia pretended that she wanted to take Catherine back home with her but Catherine doubted her sincerity. She was still angry about losing her brother and was quite critical as a young woman can be. Catherine’s grandmother was dead and her grandfather was ill and she was afraid he’d die and she’d never see him again. Her English grandfather assured her that the Germans would never dare attack “mighty England” as he called it. Then scarcely ten days after they said goodbye to her mother the London Blitz started.
All the nights of the Blitz were spent down in the local subway stop, called the Tube over there. Because of her grandfather’s importance he had a little office toward the end of the stop as he needed safe access to a phone. MI5 also gave him two very large guards which consoled her grandmother who lived out the Blitz in a state of relentless fear. They stood right outside the door all night long. Catherine often worried about their families but they had been sent to relatives in the country early on. They were also visited once a day before dinner by grandmother’s French cook and his wife Nina. They had a hot plate in the office and Patrice would cook whatever he could scavenge that day from the markets. Grandfather refused to use his importance to get better food than the rest of the city could get because of rationing, but sometimes when Patrice got something particularly good and nondemocratic Grandfather would pretend he hadn’t noticed while eating his sacred lamb chop or whatever it was. There was also an open toilet bowl and sink in the office and an electric transformer against the wall which kept them warm on cool nights. They slept with blankets on thin mattresses that would be rolled up and stuffed under the desk during the daytime. So Catherine couldn’t complain that her family suffered like thousands of others in the Blitz. At first it embarrassed her to go potty in front of others but when you are hearing the thunder of bombs and the walls are shaking you learn to adapt.
The barrage called the London Blitz continued for fifty-seven nights in a row. Even if you didn’t hate Hitler at the beginning you would be insane with rage by the end. Catherine read later that it had killed forty thousand innocent civilians and severely injured about that number. Her birthday fell in October and Patrice managed to make her a cake on the hot plate which made her quite happy, a nice chocolate cake with chocolate frosting.
Catherine felt cheated of the night. She had always loved to walk at twilight and see nightfall, hear the nighthawks and whippoorwills, then stumble home in the dark. Mother would make her take a flashlight but she never used it. The flashlight seemed vulgar in the beauty of the night. She missed most seeing the moon. Grandpa knew this and the evening of the full moon he daringly took her to the top of the stairs to see it. Frederick, one of the guards and a huge Jamaican, escorted them. The moon was distorted by all of the smoke in the air but still beautiful. There were fires all over London from the bombs. They stared at it but suddenly the Luftwaffe dropped the first bombs of the evening not a quarter mile away. Frederick put himself in front of them but Catherine saw the moon turn bright orange from the firestorm. She was both awed and horrified.
Grandpa took her for a walk in the station every afternoon so she could get some exercise. That was when there were the least people in the station. Many left during this time to scavenge for food and to go to the toilet on the streets, as the public toilet in the station was in disrepair. The Red Cross began bringing food which was much appreciated but never enough. Then Patrice was shot trying to steal meat. Nina was bereft but brave and stayed on with Catherine’s grandparents until they died. Way into the time of the Blitz one day MI5 sent a small truck that picked up Grandma and Catherine. Grandmother was very ill at the time and the war effort couldn’t afford to let Grandfather go with them. The truck, manned by a nice American from Missouri, drove them through the rubble of London. There was a special insignia on the side of the truck and no one tried to stop them. The man from Missouri, named Ted, drove them way out a couple of hours from London to Truro, in Cornwall, to Grandma’s brother’s small farm. Grandma wept when she saw the farm because she had been raised and given birth to Catherine’s mother there. Catherine’s heart soared when she saw a big gaggle of chickens in the yard. As soon as she got out of the truck she walked among them crying and speaking soft loving words. A rooster pecked her leg before she could push him away with a foot. It was a solid peck and hurt but she didn’t care. Her great-aunt Winifred, called Winnie, made them an early supper because Ted had to drive the truck back to London before nightfall. Catherine would always recall it as the best supper of her life. Great-Aunt Winnie made an enormous omelet with her homemade cheese and served it with a big plate of very red garden tomatoes. Despite what Patrice came up with Catherine hadn’t seen an egg in a month and a half because eggs were very precious and she thought she had never tasted anything as utterly delicious in her life. Winnie gave her an Easter basket and it was her job to feed the chickens and gather the eggs as she had done back home in Montana. Most people don’t care for chickens, looking at them as food-bearing pests, so everyone was happy when Catherine took over the job. She knew what grand creatures they were and she was pleased to do it. At eighty-five Catherine would still be taking care of her own chickens. When they ate a stewing hen Catherine knew her private name for her. It didn’t bother her. It was just part of life.
Chapter 2
Catherine graduated from Barnard in New York City, the female adjunct of Columbia, in 1952. Her mother had a New York apartment (lavish at that) at the same time and relentlessly stuck her nose in Catherine’s business whenever possible, which was a problem. She spent an entire winter in New York not calling her mother a single time. Alicia pretended to be bereft.
Mother divorced Father after the war and married the man who owned the yacht that had taken her from England to Newport during the war. Catherine came to suspect it didn’t take her mother long to seduce him. She had also discovered another secret about her father aside from his affair with the divorcée, whom she’d seen and didn’t think very attractive. Maybe she was nicer to him than her mother, who was rarely acidic with her children but could be merciless toward her husband, particularly when they were drinking. On pleasant summer mornings Father would have his coffee out on a picnic table in the backyard under an oak near the hedge. He always took along his red journal or notebook and didn’t want to be disturbed. One morning when Catherine was in her last year at Barnard he rushed off and forgot the journal on the table and she noticed it when she went out to the hedge to check a yellow warbler nest. It was wrong but she couldn’t help snooping. To her shock the journal was full of poems he had written. What an unlikely poet this small town banker and bullying father was, she thought. She saw that most of the poems were imitations, not very good, of the English Romantic period of Wordsworth and Shelley but a few terse short ones were fair to good. In general, however, he was too flowery and should read Wallace Stevens, she thought, or William Carlos Williams, a personal favorite of hers.
She wondered how often people had secret obsessions that never saw public daylight. Who acted less “poetic” than her father? Did anyone know besides him? She doubted it. She later read a writer who said, “There must be freedom before there can be freedom.” It sounded like nonsense but she thought she understood that we must be ready for our obsessions when they arrive. Like her own interest in chickens. Mother once told her that when she was about two she put her down in the yard while she was hanging wet clothes on the clothesline. She turned to check on Catherine and a hen was sleeping on her lap and she was petting the cozy hen with her tiny hand. She dated this as the beginning of Catherine’s chicken obsession but Catherine herself viewed it as far more gradual. And her first move in the barnyard when she first learned to walk was to follow the chickens, getting their poop on her baby shoes. Grandmother tried to stop her but she became distraught so they bought tiny rubber boots they could wash off with the hose. In her eighties she still enjoyed tottering out to feed her hens. They pretended they were interested in her until she threw their food, the scratch, and then they only chased their meal. It was the same when she fed the pigs or calves skim milk, which was left over after the cream when they put milk through the hand-cranked separator. The pigs would watch her approach with eager pig smiles and then she’d pour the skim milk into their trough and they’d be all business. The calves in their pen would mooch up to her like long-lost friends, licking her arms with their rough tongues, and then she’d pour the milk and they’d be at it though not nearly as sloppily as the pigs. Calves would at least look up and around during their meal but not pigs. Compared with both, the chickens were methodical but diffident eaters with more faith apparently in future eating.
Her clue to Father’s poetry writing was books. When she and her brother Bobby were quite young her father had given them a set of the twelve-volume My Book House saying rather obliquely that books had meant a lot to him as a child. She knew his own childhood library was still in his room in a glass-fronted bookcase so she wondered why he just didn’t give them his books, but stayed shy of asking the question guessing there was some kind of emotional involvement as we have for our few precious things.
The twelve volumes of My Book House were geared to gradually ascending age beginning with nursery rhymes like “Pease porridge hot, pease porridge cold, pease porridge in the pot nine days old.” Catherine ignored the logic of this progression and read them straight through at age ten, though the late volumes were a little difficult at the time, full of involved folklore and world mythology. The set also fueled her interest in American Indians and one of her own precious things was the small collection of arrowheads and three spear points she had found on the farm. Catherine felt sure reading had fed her father’s early interest in poetry. What schizophrenia must have been involved in his later career in economics and banking, but then he had always seemed a man whose character was composed of carefully separated slices. His children and wife never received the tenderness he showed to his English setter bitches Lisa and Clare. Only once had he owned a male bird dog, named Bozo, a rambunctious nitwit who hurled himself over a line of bushes out near the quarry, plummeting downward more than a hundred feet. Father said that only a male dog would jump over something without knowing what was on the other side. After Bozo he owned only females.
But what ultimately carried a man who spent a lifetime writing poetry in secret? We are a mystery. At Barnard and enmeshed in the speedy life of New York Catherine found that around Easter she still believed in the Resurrection as if she could still see the contrail of Jesus rising from death to the heavens. And on spring vacation rather than go to a seaside rental with her wealthy friends she went home to work on her term paper on Kierkegaard and to feed chickens.
It was sheer paradise in England to be out of the Tube station and on a farm. At Grandma’s request she’d go next door nearly a mile and read to a farm couple’s son who as a Francophile had signed up early in the war and lost a hand and a leg and had his vision impaired in the defense of Paris. Catherine would read to him for an hour or so and then have a cup of tea or a glass of beer and chat for a while with him. He didn’t want to hear English classics which he knew but French and some American novels when she could find them. Luckily a rich nobleman near the local village heard about their book plight and gave them access to his library. Her wounded neighbor didn’t care for Hemingway but loved Faulkner’s Light in August or the sonorities of Absalom, Absalom which made her breathless to read. The young man Tim was understandably embittered, a farmer’s son who would never be able to effectively farm himself. One day when his parents were gone he asked to see Catherine in the nude. She was nearly fourteen at the time and had been in England for several years now. She considered his request and thought there was no reason not to so she quickly stripped but then he started crying. Later, when he had calmed down with a large whiskey he tried to explain himself, saying that he felt “dismembered” and that sexual love was forever out of his range. Catherine was a young innocent and disagreed saying, “I thought you just needed that one thing to make love, a penis,” and he laughed at her matter-of-factness. He said that losing a hand and leg meant that he could never be a real farmer, or a real lover. That was that. She could see that it was a matter of shame more than anything else.
After the bombings ended Grandma had returned to London to be with Grandfather and the years rolled on slowly with the entire world at war. It was consoling to live on the farm. Her mother would have preferred she come home, but transatlantic travel was now impossible and Catherine was enrolled in a British school and thriving. As an American she was also worried about the Japanese while the local English were obsessed with the possibility of a German invasion. At their dawn breakfast each day her great-uncle Harold, Winnie’s husband, was glued to the radio listening to war news. One morning he beamed at her and yelled, “Thank God for the Yanks.” The American forces had managed to make a German invasion of England unlikely indeed. Catherine was in love with Winston Churchill’s resonant voice whether he was saying something important or not.
One day Catherine got some mail from her grandparents in London who were so pleased to be home and out of the accursed underground. When they had reached home some squatters were in there but it was only a young teacher, his wife, and their baby. Their apartment two blocks away had been utterly destroyed so her grandparents allowed them to make their quarters in a couple of back rooms for the duration of the war. They all liked each other a lot and the young man was skilled enough to replace some windows on the east side of the house that had been broken by the blasts of bombs. The young wife was good in the kitchen, never Grandma’s strength, and Grandma loved the little baby boy. Her grandparents were able to visit the farm once in an MI5 vehicle driven by the huge Jamaican, Fred. They ate eggs for three days and returned to London with several dozen, some cleaned chickens, and a few rabbits Harold had raised. The scales finally tipped a bit with the Normandy invasion but it wasn’t until the liberation of Paris that many people felt any confidence. Catherine heard later that Hitler had demanded that his officers engineer the burning of Paris but they had refused to do it. This was a late in the game relief for her because she had wanted to go to Paris ever since she had known it existed.
Finally the war was over and it was time for her to go home. With her parents separated and divorcing there was no real home for her to go to but she intended all along to live out on the farm. Still she was reluctant to leave England and stayed an extra month in London. She liked the young couple very much and their little boy made her want to have a baby. She was only sixteen but it seemed logical, if you wanted a baby, to go ahead and have one. For that reason she made one more trip after the war out to see Harold and Winnie. She went directly to Tim’s house next door while his father was haying and his mother was in town grocery shopping. She took off her clothes in his bedroom, flopped on the bed bare-assed, and demanded sex. He was utterly surprised because she hadn’t called to say she was coming, but he didn’t seem surprised by her capricious behavior. He took a condom from the desk and came to the bed with his crutches. “I’ve been thinking about this,” he said. With only one hand he couldn’t put on the condom by himself so Catherine hurriedly helped, doing a sloppy job so it would leak and she might have a baby. His member was large and she wondered if it would hurt. It did a little but she didn’t care because this was her heart’s desire. It was over quickly. They lay around for a while and then she raised his interest with her mouth, not something she especially looked forward to but it worked. She got on him again before he could ask for a condom.
She didn’t get pregnant. She was aggrieved. She was in tears for a month.
Seventy years later Catherine found it all comically absurd. She had been willful indeed. She had truly been a sexual person only periodically. It had been grotesquely hard in her life to find a good man. Besides, she had never wanted to be married.
She returned from England on the boat and then a train to Billings, Montana, and another home. She arrived early the next morning and Catherine impulsively went straight to the farm and unloaded all of her luggage. Her grandpa was still alive, if barely, and she wanted to take care of him and help him with work. When she arrived he was having an early afternoon snooze on the couch with the Detroit Tigers ball game on the radio. He opened one eye and said to her, “You’re home,” and went back to sleep. He looked very old but then she had been gone for five years. In the kitchen the cook Bertha was cleaning green beans. She looked at Catherine and smiled broadly.
“You’re here! Now I can quit, your grandfather is an ass.”
Catherine merely nodded. She put on her coat and swiftly walked out.
She made the obligatory drive to town to say hello to her father. She was dreading it. Mother had said in a letter that he had been in a bad way since the divorce. She noticed that the bank was closed early in the afternoon and the shades were drawn but then remembered it was Saturday.
The front door was open at their house and her father sat at the dining room table with a glass and half a quart of gin and his journal in front of him. When he saw her he broke into tears. She didn’t remember ever seeing him weep before except tears of rage over her mother or Bobby. It all must have been terribly hard on him, she thought. He had spent his life studying and playing with money and now his wife had run off with a man of ponderous inherited wealth. He had found no way to counter these thoughts except with the emotion of jealousy, gin, and occasional weeping.
“Bobby stopped by while driving someone’s car to Chicago. He looked good but wouldn’t talk to me. I said you were in England and his mother had left and filed for divorce. He only said, ‘Good’ and walked out with some of his wretched books.”
When she left soon after, the divorcée was coming up the walk with a paper sack, likely another quart of gin. She nodded and Catherine nodded back. At least he had someone but sometimes someone can be less than nothing. A few years later when she discovered her father’s poems she thought the better ones were written after her mother left. They were less flowery.
The farm was her home, simply enough. All through high school Catherine helped her grandfather feed and water the cattle and exercise the horses, and the chickens were her special domain. When he saw her off to college Grandpa said to her, “Don’t stay too long. This farm is yours now.”
After she got home from Barnard, her grandpa was nearly ninety and facing the prospect of selling his cows which was a blow to his morale. He couldn’t bear the idea of selling the horses for fear they wouldn’t be taken care of. Occasionally, for reasons of sentiment, Catherine would help him harness the team of horses and ride the stone boat while they dragged him through the far pasture. The horses would automatically stop when they saw a big stone. This very old man would get off the boat and wrestle the stone on, to be unloaded later into a pile behind the barn. A friend of his was the local stonemason and would come out to pick up a load now and then and he and Grandpa would share a pint of whiskey.
Later, in the fifties, the farm behind them to the west came up for sale at $25,000 for 120 acres, a price that Catherine was largely considered a fool for paying at the time, but she never regretted it. She installed a hired man, Clyde, and his young wife in the farmhouse on the new acreage. The wife Clara wept uncontrollably. She had been raised in a trailer and they now lived in a small trailer down the road and despaired of ever living in their own house. Catherine was overwhelmed and had her young lawyer in town cut out the house and five acres and deed it to Clara personally so she would stop worrying that her husband could get fired and she’d be homeless again. Catherine had borrowed the money from her mother to buy the additional farm and she had said to consider it a gift, but Catherine intended to pay it back. Beef prices were fairly high and the pasturage was good on the new place so she would get a lot more feeders in the spring. Clara worked for her two days a week and would bring her little girl Laurel who truly enjoyed the chickens. She would sit on a milk stool in a daze watching them with one of the bird dogs, Belle, who belonged to Catherine’s father, sitting beside her. Catherine borrowed the dog because it didn’t look like it was being fed enough, but told her father that she was thinking of taking up bird hunting. Grandpa had an old shotgun which her father described as a menace and lent her one of his, a pretty little English gun she knew was worth a lot so she vowed to be careful. He wanted to give her lessons but she demurred for the time being, not wanting to hunt with someone full of gin. Meanwhile Clara would always make something for dinner. She was a good cook and after a successful deer season for her husband she made an old-fashioned venison mincemeat pie which was delicious.
Chapter 3
Catherine disliked her neighbor who owned a big ranch to the east. It was the early 1960s and her grandfather had died three years before. Running the farm without him was lonely sometimes but she enjoyed it. The neighbor was a lawyer from Dallas and when he drove into her yard he laughed at the chickens she was raising. That embedded him in the mud forever as far as she was concerned. What a motormouth big shot, she thought. When they were raising money for the library he donated a thousand dollars, more by far than anyone else, so Catherine donated two thousand that she couldn’t afford just to bust his balls. He had built a pointlessly large house with pillars in front, an imitation of a television program. His wife disliked Montana, and his son and daughter preferred to stay in Texas. His loutish friends and business associates came up to fish for trout and to hunt birds and elk. One of them had paid five thousand to a relatively poor kid for a giant bull elk to take back to Texas pretending he had shot it himself. She had once run into the whole group, the Dallas lawyer and his friends, in the grocery store buying a case of liquor and whining about the lack of fine brands. She was wearing a pair of cotton bib overalls which were admittedly tight across her striking butt. Out in front in the parking lot when she leaned over to put her groceries in the car one of the lawyer’s friends whistled and she turned and yelled, “Go to hell, you old creep.” The man blushed and his friends laughed.
In early 1962 she visited her mother in Palm Beach. It was a monochromatic place. Everyone was rich except for the legion of mostly black servants. She didn’t care for the place except for her long morning walks. She was thoroughly bored but read a lot, occasionally worrying about her chickens back home being cared for by Clara. After a few weeks of this her stepfather, Jerry by name, an odd name for a rich man she thought, took her fishing in Key West well to the south. They flew down in a private jet he leased. He said that flying commercial made him nervous. Her mother had refused to come along because she had to attend a Red Cross ball. Jerry had bribed a young man down the street to take her. Catherine had noted that they had many charity balls in Palm Beach and she joked that they were planning a proctology ball. Her mother didn’t think it was funny but Jerry laughed hard. He was a tad silly but saved from his emotional density by a fine sense of humor. Their fishing guide, a handsome fellow she thought, picked them up at the airport and delivered them to a waterfront hotel. Jerry made much of his claustrophobia and always took a suite. She had an adjoining room and sat at the window for an hour having a margarita and staring out at the ocean. She felt an odd sexual tingle which she attributed to the intensity of the sunlight in the tropics. She thought how chickens needed light to urge them to lay eggs though any kind of light would do. She had made contact with a Barnard friend who was living in Key West with a writer. Jerry had told her that writers came to Key West to misbehave in peace and without criticism. On the way to the hotel Jerry asked the guide to drive them past Hemingway’s house which meant little to her. She liked the stories about Michigan and A Farewell to Arms but his reputation as a bully and alcoholic reminded her uncomfortably of her father when she learned of it. Young men she had known in college who loved Hemingway had taken absurd steps to act manly. All of which was beyond her own comprehension. Farmers were manly without thinking about it. In fact she had never heard one mention the idea. College itself was so mechanistic that maybe the young men were only seeking a release.
She dozed at the window for a while and then Jerry came in dressed spiffily and said he was having dinner with a friend. She was amused later when walking downtown to a bar to see him on the patio of a restaurant with a hand on the hand of an attractive woman. Evidently deceit was part of being a man. Her friends had a nice little local house, called a conch house, near the Key West cemetery, a charming old place. Her hosts had a party with a half dozen writers from thirty to sixty, very busy drinking and talking about themselves. She had noticed this quality of writers who visited Barnard, the relentless struggle to get the conversation back to them. She never figured out the why of this problem. Of course, it wasn’t a problem for them, only their listeners.
She liked one of the writers at the party better than the others. He was half French but currently lived in the United States. He wrote mostly about sport, hunting, and fishing, but there was also a novel about growing up in the Normandy countryside that had done well. She was feeling faintly dizzy from too much wine and the thick cigarette smoke in the room. She decided to take a walk and the French writer offered to go with her. This put the others in a snit as she was evidently the prize of the evening.
They walked slowly in the cemetery in the light of the half-moon which made it hard to see and walk without stumbling. It was wonderfully eerie and when she did stumble he caught her and didn’t let go. They necked for a while and since her desire had never felt so strong she encouraged him. They tried to make love against a monument to a rich dead man but it didn’t work so they ended up with her bent awkwardly over an ordinary gravestone. She tried to read the name upside down while making love but there wasn’t quite the light. She lightly traced the engraving with her fingers and came up with “Burke” or “Bruce,” probably Bruce. They went on for a fairly long time and she thought it quite wonderful. Afterward they talked a little when they could catch their breath.
“Are you going to put this in a novel?” she asked.
“I don’t know. Maybe,” he laughed. “I’ll call you Mildred not Catherine.”
“I don’t like Mildred. Make me Italian, call me Lucina.”
“Write your own novel,” he said seriously.
“I can’t. I’m just a farmer. You know, cattle and chickens, a few pigs, wheat and corn, hay.”
“That’s hard to believe.”
“Suit yourself.” She went back into the party and was teased a little for her messy hair and crumpled skirt. She wanted to go back to her hotel room.
“That guy you walked with is married.”
“I don’t care,” said Catherine. Then he came in and part of his shirttail was sticking out of his fly. The men laughed. He took her home and they arranged to have dinner the following evening.
She got up very early and Jerry looked bleary and tired but was cheerful. They were running late and after a hasty breakfast they met their guide at the marina. From that point on the fishing day was totally unlike anything she had known or expected. She had thought in terms of rowboats on quiet northern lakes and catching bluegills and perch with her grandfather for dinner. Early on when her father was still trying to make her into a boy he had taken her trout fishing on a big river but it frightened her. She didn’t know how to swim yet and feared drowning. If she died, who would feed the chickens? Later on when she had become a good swimmer she swam in the same turbulent river with aplomb, feeling the glory of the rushing current.
That day they fished out of a speedboat-type craft and traveled northwest very quickly to a place Jerry called the “backcountry.” They only saw one other boat, a sponger harvesting sponges with a long pole. Jerry had lost his fatigue and was now excited. He told her the ride out here had filled him with “good ole oxygen” as if it were comparable to booze. Jerry cast his big fly rod to several schools of permit but they wouldn’t bite. He was nevertheless very happy and Catherine was quite transfixed by the beauty of the turquoise water fading to the brown of sand in the shallows. There were many small mangrove keys breaking up the scenery to the east. They were plainly uninhabited and looked like floating thickets. The two men were looking the other way and Catherine yelled, “Fish!” to alert them as they had taught her. Jerry quickly cast and hooked a big bonefish which they had to chase in the boat so it wouldn’t reach a channel and be nailed by a shark. The fish was landed and then released, a lovely act. It was thrilling but not as much as when Mark the guide saw an osprey struggling with a fish it had caught near the mangroves. The fish was too large for the osprey to fly away with it and she feared the bird might drown with its talons stuck in the fish. Mark used his push pole and glided the boat slowly toward the bird. Jerry acted frightened so Catherine made ready to help. Mark put on a pair of gloves but still received a nasty peck in the arm that bled. She managed to hold the bird’s wings tight to its body while Mark detached the fish from the talons and threw it into the mangroves. He took over holding the wings and tossed the bird high in the air. It flew off with a backward glare as if they had ruined its meal rather than saving it from drowning. Jerry clapped and laughed which startled her. She felt good that they had managed to save the bird and that she had been a part of it without really knowing how.
It was time to make the long drive back to Key West. First they each had a small rum and Coca-Cola, a drink she’d never cared for but that day it tasted fine and she semi-dozed on the way back.
Chapter 4
That evening they ended up having a room service dinner on the patio of Jerry’s suite. Catherine’s new friend François joined them and didn’t object that they stayed in as she was tired from the sun and heat. They had several drinks including a bottle of good champagne, and she fell asleep in an easy chair after dinner. Jerry and François helped her into her bedroom. She later remembered that Jerry left and François helped her out of her clothes until she was nude, saying, “A wonderful body,” and then leaving.
She woke after midnight angry with herself. How was she going to get pregnant if she slept through a splendid love opportunity? She wasn’t used to a daylong boat ride in the hot sun. In the morning she called François to apologize and they arranged to meet at the marina when she got back in. François said that he was a friend of the guide and would have him bring them in before five. He would meet her at the marina while she was still awake, he teased, and they could have dinner at his place.
The next day they fished out near Boca Grande Key from which she could see the Marquesas. It looked so lovely in the distance that she wanted to go there but Mark said the channel was too rough today and they would have miles of the choppy water “beating the living shit out of us.” Jerry caught a few small tarpon on the edge of the channel, lovely silver acrobatic fish, and then he hooked one that was large. This fish weighed at least a hundred pounds and it jumped half a dozen times with its gill plates rattling, dragging the line in a wide circle with Jerry shouting and his reel screeching. He fought the fish for a half hour and he was soaked with sweat. It traveled south a mile or so out toward the Gulf Stream when Mark suddenly cut the leader when it was close to the boat. He pointed at a very large hammerhead shark coming toward them, drawn into a meal by the struggling tarpon. The tarpon surged off with the hammerhead giving close chase but the tarpon was well ahead in shallow water and the hammerhead turned around. Jerry and Mark were wound up with the fish and chatted about a past experience when they hadn’t cut off a tarpon soon enough and a bull shark had made a “bloody mess.” All of Catherine’s limited fishing experience had been about catching supper. This was something else entirely — the men called it “pure sport” but she wasn’t sure. To be pure why not leave the fish alone and just look at it rather than make it fight for its life? she thought, then chided herself for casting judgment. If people wanted to box, let them box and live with their concussions.
François was waiting at the marina and she walked off with him without comment. He had talked with Mark but Jerry kept interrupting with one of his incessant dirty jokes which embarrassed her, not because it was dirty but because he was imbecilic.
She had a good evening and night with François. His rental had a small pool and she immediately shed her clothes and took a dip. François quickly followed with a primitive hard-on. He tried to put his mouth on her underwater but it was awkward. They made love at the shallow end of the pool which was also awkward but more than passable. They made love again on the sofa while waiting for a chicken to roast — butter, garlic, fresh tarragon. She found out that François lived in Palm Beach with a rich wife only two blocks away from Jerry on Sea Breeze Avenue. She said nothing, certainly not that it was the silliest place she had ever seen on earth. All of those rich people jammed together in one place. Why not a farm or ranch?
After dinner and too much fine wine they made love once more desultorily in bed. She fell asleep by ten, utterly fatigued and a little sore all over by the sweet battering. She awoke close after dawn and there were high winds and a tremendous thunderstorm coming in from Cuba, a scant ninety miles to the south of Key West. François drove her to the hotel so she could make a polite appearance for Jerry. He was wandering around in his usual expensive robe talking on the phone. He winked at her and hung up the phone.
“You look rode hard and put away wet,” he laughed.
“Some morons say that every day in Montana.” Even saying “Montana” made her homesick. What in God’s name was she doing in this so-called tropical paradise? She was sick of all things Floridian and wanted to be home feeding her chickens. It was also time to buy a dog not that she was confident she was settled in her life. The only thing that could justify this absurd trip was if she was pregnant. If so there was no way she’d ever tell François. She didn’t want a husband or a steady lover, just her farm and chickens, cattle and pigs, a horse or two. She certainly no longer wanted a mother, or father for that matter.
She went into her room to dress and heard Jerry back on the phone and then there was silence. Her door was open a crack and she saw the shadow of Jerry obviously peeking through the crack to see her dress. She poured it on and mooned the door, thinking, what a pathetic fool. She felt a vacuum in her soul where the love of men should have been but the only two she could think of with true fondness were her grandfathers. Had everything gone wrong in the world or was it her? Was it something odd in her strange upbringing that made men uniformly suspect? François was fine but she didn’t actually know him very well and there might be something rotten in his heart. She remembered with grief an episode several weeks before when she told the school’s young handsome soccer coach to stop by and pick up some eggs. She had thought of seducing him but told him if she was way out back she’d leave two dozen in the mailbox. But she was in the kitchen watching out the window while he wandered around the barnyard and quizzically Sally, a fat hen, was following him. Sally had this irritating practice of pecking at the back of your leg in hopes it would bring food. It was only slightly painful like a quick pinch. Suddenly the soccer coach turned and kicked Sally far in the air. She lay prostrate on her back. Catherine was out of the kitchen in a second, screaming as she came out the back door. The man turned in alarm.
“Why are you kicking my chicken? I think she’s dead.” She stopped next to Sally and turned her over. The chicken’s eyes were sightless. “You killed her you miserable fucker.”
“It’s just a chicken. I’ll pay you for it,” he said lamely.
She stood, holding Sally by the feet and slapping the man’s face with the chicken. “Get out of here! Now! Go away!” She was sobbing.
He slumped off carrying his presumed innocence like a boy. She was still wild with heart-thumping anger and was glad she wasn’t holding a pistol or she would have shot him.
Now in the Key West hotel her stomach soured with homesickness. The weather was clearing and they drove to the airport before noon to catch Jerry’s plane home. They met Mark for a quick lunch. She was famished and ate both a grouper sandwich and an order of fresh shrimp while staring east at the ocean.
Back in Palm Beach her mother was happy they were home a day early because there was an “important” ball that evening. Jerry gasped and Catherine only wanted a nap, mostly because she had had a huge Bloody Mary for lunch while Jerry drank two martinis. First she called home and Clyde told her there had been a big snow although it was late April. She was irked because she was missing the fresh snow on the Crazy Mountains east of the farm. She imagined the creamy white mountains in the moonlight.
Who am I and what am I doing? She wasn’t used to asking herself such questions. The memory of a depression during her freshman year of college horrified her. The problem, or so she thought, was that New York City had no “outdoors,” no snowcapped Crazy Mountains or endless plains. She needed to see a bear that was not in a zoo, or a moose eating water weeds. She escaped this depression by interminable walking, at least four hours a day. She would walk the length of Central Park and back and in every botanical garden in the New York City area. She’d walk along the Hudson and also the East River. When her depression lifted in a couple of months she had lost fifteen pounds she didn’t need to lose. Her short and plump Jewish roommate taught her the pleasures of herring and she couldn’t get enough. Because she intended to live in Montana she would have to learn how to make her own. The girl also took her downtown to Katz’s which immediately became her favorite restaurant in the city.
She had to take a photo of her mother and Jerry before they went to the ball. Her mother, she had to admit, looked lovely in her absurd Pierre Balmain dress. Jerry had all the spark of a dog turd in his tailored tux. He rolled his eyes for the picture which later made Alicia angry when she saw it. She always called him darling which made him beam even if she was angry.
What she had learned about Jerry on their fishing trip raised questions in Catherine’s mind about the whole reality of inherited wealth and so did Palm Beach itself. Jerry’s father and grandfather had made a great deal of money in the early electronics field. Jerry’s father had been a terminal alcoholic and syphilitic giving Jerry zero instruction or guidance in life. His father and grandfather were pure unadulterated spenders who were so drunk and disorganized that his family freed him of the money and put it in a trust at J.P. Morgan. Only the interest could be spent. Jerry showed good signs early on and graduated from Yale with honors. But then he discovered the ocean which required boats and he ended up with a fleet and many employees including one who did nothing but help him with his travels. He would go to Europe with twenty pieces of luggage and this required someone to oversee it. He had a great fear of leaving something unspecified behind. He was a grand sucker for luxury hotels. Before Catherine’s mother he had had an apartment way up in the Carlyle Hotel because he liked the room service. The expensive secret power it had was to give him lots of bacon on his order.
Jerry was an expert in the fields of anthropology and ornithology. No place was too far to go see a bird. In his Rhode Island house he kept drawers full of thousands of dead birds, bought from a European collector and smuggled in on the yacht including a unique specimen that he shared with no one but willed to Harvard on his death. What’s the hurry? he thought. A few years before Catherine’s mother showed up he had been married to a French actress for a scant five months. He had taken her down to Cannes to the movie festival and this seemed to make her less popular. He had been married a total of four times and his ironclad rule was no children. He considered himself to have greatly suffered in childhood and would wish it on no one else. His family fortune was aimed at a not very significant college in Ohio. On one of his early, random cross-country drives he had stopped in the college town for the night and liked its aura and the fresh, hardworking people. The college as of yet didn’t know he existed and he didn’t realize that his money would destroy the charm of the place. He was almost a nitwit but not quite.
Chapter 5
Catherine left Palm Beach several days later and didn’t get home until midmorning a day late. The plane had had a long delay in Denver with a driving rain that turned into driving snow. She got to Billings late, picked up her car, and drove up to Roundup because she wanted to head home on Route 212 which to her was the ultimate Montana road because it reminded her of the old Montana of her childhood before so many rich people moved west. “All hat and no cows,” as people said. She stayed in a scummy little motel where perhaps drunk truckers had pissed on the rug. She was famished having skipped the loathsome airline snacks. There was an open bar and she hoped for a single hamburger. It turned out that they had passable small rib steaks of which she wolfed two. Two polite cowboys at the bar made equally polite passes at her. “If you don’t got a place to stay I have a clean bunkhouse.” She danced with one who smelled slightly of manure and horses but not offensively. She could really cut a rug but held back from showing off. As a senior at Barnard she had a little apartment down in the Village with a Puerto Rican girl Josita who loved dancing. They danced together insatiably with Josita in drag. They won a number of dance contests with the judges perceiving that Josita was also a woman — her ass was too shapely to be male. One night when drunk they slept together but Catherine didn’t care for it. As stupid looking as they were she still preferred dicks.
She couldn’t hold back and the cowboy was breathing hard. There was applause and then drinks from a table of old ranchers. They slow danced to Patsy Cline singing “Crazy” and he blushed deeply.
She bought a pint and went to her motel, pouring a big one because she was still jangled from Florida. In bed watching the late news she recalled there was one other man she actually liked aside from her grandfathers. That was wounded Tim who lived next door to Great-Uncle Harold and Great-Aunt Winnie just near the Cornwall border. Her grandmother had written that he was finally making some progress with prosthetic devices which he had refused to try for a couple of years but then his goofy grandmother had taken to praying on their stone driveway on her knees in all weather so he caved in. He could now shuffle along passably with his big walking stick and when he fell he was strong enough to shimmy up the stick with his good hand and the artificial one. Anyway he was the third man she admired and she very much wanted to make love to him and hopefully become pregnant. She was past thirty and felt time slipping away. He was so bitter about the severity of his injuries she doubted he would ever let her close.
She awoke early and figured out the room coffeepot. She felt slow-witted and wondered if she was losing her mind, a concept she had always disagreed with. How could you lose your mind? It was always there though it could be in severe disrepair. She felt mired in random thoughts such as realizing she shouldn’t have fired the lawyer who when working on her will had laughed when she insisted her cremated ashes should be strewn on the floor of the chicken coop.
Part II
Chapter 6
When she got home and took in her luggage there was a note stuck on the door from her father which she put off reading because she was moving her camping cot out to the chicken coop. She meant to spend her first night home in the company of her beloved chickens, a somewhat eccentric means of returning to normal.
She read her father’s note with a luncheon tuna fish sandwich mostly because he hated tuna. The note was a shock and written on Best Western stationery because he was staying there until he found a place. Her brother Robert had stopped for a visit while hitchhiking from Los Angeles to New York City. The visit was “highly wretched” and “insulting.” Robert warned him that he was going to burn the house down. “I said but you left a whole room of your precious books here. That seemed to give him pause so I didn’t call the police about it. We drank a whole bottle of gin together and things further degenerated. That night he did burn the house right to the ground. I barely got out alive but was awakened by the heavy odor of gasoline. I got both dogs out but lost my precious collection of shotguns and antique maps. The police found Robert asleep in a ditch about ten miles east of town. He is now incarcerated in the county jail. I asked the prosecutor to press all charges. He should be locked up for life. Sad to say this grand home would have been yours when I am deceased.”
She called the jail in the county seat about twenty miles distant in Livingston. Yes, she could visit Robert until five that afternoon. She had actually always disliked the house. It had been owned by a minor railroad baron. There’s nothing new, she thought, about “conspicuous consumption,” as Thorstein Veblen called it. Her friends thought it was haunted. It was dour, gloomy, and even smelled ancient. When young she had found a small secret room in the basement which was a fine place to hide her pathetic secret belongings though no one was looking.
Her night on the cot in the chicken coop was very pleasant. Of course it smelled of chickens and chicken shit but she was used to that and had missed it. She brought out a book to read but didn’t touch it. She just wanted to be in the dark hearing the soft murmur of clucking hens. Were it not for the beauty of the ocean and the fishing she certainly wouldn’t think of Florida again. She had long been curious about France and also Mexico. If she went to France she could stop in London and see her grandparents, also drive up to see Harold and Winnie and of course Tim. But for now it was so nice to be home she doubted she’d want to leave again.
She petted a couple of chickens that came close out of curiosity about their guest. She dropped off into the deepest of sleep and when she woke at dawn two were roosting down by her feet on the cot. She was utterly charmed and laughed at which point they stared at her. It was so pleasant to be totally accepted by other creatures. Once she had met a man who had raised an Alaskan brown bear since infancy. Even when the bear was in its late teens it still had to be hugged at least twice a day. It had died recently at the weight of fifteen hundred pounds. She had a photo on her bulletin board of them hugging, the bear’s massive head at least five times the size of the man’s. The bear seemed to be smiling. She went inside and prepared to drive to Livingston to see Robert. There was a note from Clara, a message from the family doctor that her father was in the hospital and was quite ill. She called in and discovered he had had another stroke and was not expected to survive. She felt a bit of relief as his life depressed her. He did nothing but walk his dogs a short distance and drink a quart of gin every day. He was kind to her now but they had no real conversations. She called her mother in Palm Beach who said she was not coming back to Montana at “gunpoint” to see her dead ex-husband.
“He’s not dead yet,” Catherine said.
“He is to me,” she said, hanging up. She called back immediately. “I’m so sorry but it’s been wonderful being rid of that pompous wanker. It was only good when you and I were out on the farm without him. Meanwhile I want to go to France and Jerry doesn’t want to. Will you go with me? It would be free for you.”
“I’ll think about it. I have a farm to run.” Catherine had always wanted to go to Paris but her first impulse was that traveling there with her mother would be insufferable. Catherine didn’t want to go but then she didn’t have much in the way of spare money. The money her father should have left her had all been spent or drunk away.
Chapter 7
The trip to see Robert in jail didn’t go well. It was a forlorn and ugly place. She was escorted by a deputy and when the prisoners made smutty remarks as they passed he would smack on their bars with a nightstick. She sat on a folding chair and watched Robert doze on his cot. He awoke slowly glancing at her as if in disbelief.
“When you get out of jail you’re welcome out at the farm,” she said.
“You’re the farmer not me. I’m a city-billy.”
“I got you a good lawyer.”
“Don’t bother. I already saw the jerk. Don’t spend your money. I’ll get a public defender.”
“They’re talking about a three-to-five-year sentence.”
“I’ll commit suicide before I go to prison.” He didn’t seem unhappy announcing this.
“Don’t say that Bobby.”
“It’s true. It seems like we were okay until all of that yelling and boozing started.”
“Our father is on his deathbed right now.”
“Good. It’s too bad he didn’t die when we were kids. What an asshole. I’m sorry I burned your house down.”
“I don’t care. I never liked that house. I think my marble collection is still in my room in the basement.”
“They might be okay. I don’t think marbles burn. I want to go to South America.”
“Why?”
“I want to go to the pampas where there are no people and kick this drug thing. Maybe chase cows on horseback.”
“I’ll loan you the fare,” she said, her heart wrung with despair. He seemed small and pathetic in the jail cell. “You burned up your books in the house. That’s too bad.”
“I don’t want to read anymore. I’m going to write a book called O Mein Papa.” He laughed.
When she left the jail she wanted to vomit over what fathers and mothers did to their children. How had she escaped? Her chickens helped.
Chapter 8
One afternoon a few months later she got home and heard a cow bellowing in distress in the far pasture near the woodlot. She trotted way out there as quickly as possible noting near the horse trough that all that was left of her precious dead hen was a clump of feathers. A present to the ubiquitous coyotes. She made a mental note to call about getting an Airedale from a farmer who raised them. A big male would keep the coyotes out of the barnyard before they got bold enough to start picking off chickens in the daylight.
She reached the bellowing cow along the creek and saw that her calf was stuck in the mud in an eddy of the creek and on the verge of drowning. She jumped in without a thought and wrestled the little calf up onto the bank. The calf licked her face then started nursing from its mother who had trotted over. Catherine had trouble getting out of the mud herself and lost a tennis shoe. She walked all the way home with one foot bare and quite sore by the time she reached the pump house attached to the back door. She remembered that early every summer it took a few weeks for bare feet to toughen up before they were comfortable, and she supposed she was getting an early start.
She impulsively called an ob-gyn doctor she knew quite well in Livingston. She kept thinking about pregnancy but maybe she was fallow and incapable of being a mother. Was this why it hadn’t worked before? There was a cancellation early the next morning and she promised to be there. If she could be fertile all she needed was the right man or at least an acceptable man. She knew above all else it was wounded Tim over in Cornwall but then his sensitivities prevented him from being counted on. They corresponded now and then in letters that were decidedly nonromantic. He felt good that he had lost his left hand rather than his right so he could still write a letter. He never mentioned that he was using the prosthetic devices that her grandmother had spoken of in her note. When she made the mistake of mentioning Tim to her father once, he judged that losing a limb would always be an embarrassment. He said that it “unmanned” him. This concept missed her as a woman but then so-called male pride had been one of her father’s most obnoxious shortcomings.
She had a difficult night full of baby dreams and woke asking herself was she daft? Something in her answered no. It was an inexplicable urge. At the doctor’s office she was roundly teased by her ob-gyn friend for bringing her a dozen eggs. She explained that she wanted a baby but no husband. She could afford it.
“What if it’s a little boy who needs a daddy to teach him baseball?”
“I can play baseball. I’ll teach him.” In fact Catherine was a good athlete. “I can also teach him to hunt.”
“Have you chosen your rooster yet?”
“No, that’s the problem. Finding a father.”
“So I noticed.” Liz the obstetrician was perpetually in search of a new man in her life. She was more than a bit stocky which didn’t seem to help. She kept a fireman and a carpenter on a sexual string by cooking grand meals for them. She knew very well that dieting might help but she was a fine cook and looked at food as the only compensation for her wretched life far from her homeland of Chicago. The town was a bit scandalized by her behavior but she was the best obstetrician around, and one of the few women in the field in the entire country.
Catherine had gone on a three-day trip to Chicago with her the year before. It was hard to wedge in everything that needed eating from delicatessen food to outsize rib steaks. Catherine had to pass on the last dinner and it was a full week at home before she had fully recovered. That last evening alone had been lovely. It was April and stayed light fairly late. They had a small suite at the Drake and she could see wondrous Lake Michigan out three different windows. She had always meant to drive around it. She merely sat in an easy chair gazing at it until she slept.
They sat and chatted, Liz explaining the technical aspects of conception from zygote to blastocyst. When the doctor mentioned eggs Catherine was visibly startled.
“What’s wrong?”
“I haven’t thought consciously about my eggs since high school.” It unnerved Catherine to know that the eggs she hadn’t appreciated might now prevent her from having a baby.
They laughed but Catherine felt a nonspecific unrest that continued as she drove home. Before she went into the house she fed the chickens a goodly amount of late afternoon scratch. She didn’t want to think about eggs so she naturally thought about eggs. She thought about eggs through a long sleepless night. At 5:00 a.m. she poured herself a big clear glass of wine and sat by the window and waited for the reassurance of dawn. Her father’s doctor called as early as was permissible to say her father had died in the night. She felt nothing. The death didn’t stop her from thinking about eggs and she was beginning to feel cursed so she took a very long walk at dawn. At the far end of the west pasture there was a good-size rock pile that reminded her of a heap of eggs from a distance. Eggs again. She thought of riding on the stone boat behind Grandpa’s team gathering rocks years before.
On her way back to the house she admonished herself for this silliness about eggs. That helped as recognizing absurdity lightens its load. She pondered the brutal simplicity of the human body, at the same time its intricacy. Liz had said that her only religious feelings came directly from her work. How could it all be an accident? Catherine couldn’t relate. She had prayed back during the Blitz that a bomb wouldn’t land on her head and it hadn’t. It seemed fair to pray for others but not yourself. She had prayed back in Sunday school that her father wouldn’t hit Robert but that prayer hadn’t been answered. She had so dreaded his funeral that she was tempted to call the funeral home to say she was ill and couldn’t attend. No one would be there except the divorcée and a few old hunting friends, she had thought. Then she remembered that it was the opener for trout fishing and the weather was fair so those men would likely be fishing. It saddened her that her father had had so few people to draw around him.
She was having a rough day and napped for a half hour after her long walk. Unfortunately a nightmare came with the long nap. She was in a great marble hall and the floor was covered with eggs. The floor was tilted slightly and the eggs were rolling slowly and gently toward an altar she must reach. She stepped on a few and the crackle under her feet was repulsive to her in her sleep. She slipped and fell and broke a dozen more.
She awoke in a sweat and quickly dismissed the idea of making an egg salad sandwich for lunch. Farm people were forever trying to use up their extra eggs, even in their potato salad, but not today. She drew a chuck patty from the freezer and also a rib steak to thaw for dinner. The beef came from a prime steer they had butchered last December. The meat was wonderful and she split it with Clyde and his wife and children who were thrilled. Truly fine beef is out of nearly everyone’s range. Her butcher had space to hang the carcass for forty days which increases flavor and all the shrinkage is only water. She was still full of agita about eggs which gave rise to the idea of getting a hysterectomy and living and dying childless. Instead she called her travel agent and booked a plane passage to England for March, to see her putative lover. He certainly didn’t think of himself that way.
She was getting forgetful as if she were far older than she was. She had reserved a puppy and then neglected to pick it up at the owner’s. She knew she should have waited until she got home from England to get the pup but she also knew the owner wouldn’t tolerate further delay. She had read altogether too much on the subject of puppy raising and she knew she should be present for the first few weeks to properly imprint it but then she wanted a dog not a science project. She would have accepted her father’s Belle but he had left the dog to a sporting friend.
When she got to the dog owner’s house the pups were in a small pole barn to protect them from rain. The mother wagged her tail in friendly greeting but Catherine’s choice, a male, rushed out as if to tear them apart. He was defending his two little sisters, or so he thought, against humans. The man picked him up and gave him a little shake, then held him for a minute. He handed the dog to Catherine and he growled lightly then flopped back in her arms and closed his eyes, another male sucker for a hugging.
“I’ve been calling him Hudley or Hud. You know, after the movie when Melvyn Douglas says to his son Paul Newman, ‘Hud, you’re no damn good.’ Of course now he’s your dog so you can call him what you like.”
“I think Hud is a good name,” she said. She was a little embarrassed because the dog was getting a tiny erection.
“He never does that with me,” the man laughed. “It’s interspecies love.”
Hud resisted being put in the crate for the ride home and wailed when they were in motion. About a mile down the gravel road she pulled over and let him out. He scrambled into the front seat and glared as if to say, “This is where I belong.” She could already see he wasn’t going to be easy though he sat on the front seat like a gentleman, short of snarling at some cows they passed. At home she fed the chickens which he ignored. The owner had had chickens and said that he had been trained to leave them alone. The exception was that the rooster strutted up and pecked him in the ass. This meant war. Hud growled and attacked. The rooster escaped by flying over the fence and landed at the edge of the water trough. She grabbed the pup, swatted him on the ass, and said, “No” loudly. He lay in the dirt obviously feeling wronged. She took him to the pump shed attached to the back door of the house which she had planned as his quarters. There were several old blankets and pillows arranged in a corner. She fed him a large bowl of puppy chow which he wolfed then arranged him on his bed. He promptly went to sleep as if he had done a long day’s work.
She made her own dinner of fried breaded pork steak with cayenne and garlic in the flour. It was a distinctly lower-class dish which she had always loved. She also made broccoli in penance but did it Oriental style which made it nearly edible. Later that evening she was rereading some Evan S. Connell when Hudley starting howling on the back porch. She went out and said, “No” and slammed the door. Soon enough he resumed his howling and she called the owner in desperation. He admitted that all the pups had regularly slept on his daughter’s bed. “You’re going to have to gut it out,” the owner insisted, and he would finally learn to sleep alone. The owner put Catherine on the line with his daughter which led to nothing. The daughter finally said, “What’s wrong with Hud sleeping with you? You aren’t married, are you? He wants companionship. Don’t you?” Catherine let that one pass. The pup howled intermittently until midnight when Catherine quit reading and decided on bed. Tomorrow she would take Hud on a very long walk and tire him out. She would exhaust him and then he would sleep normally.
The minute she got into bed he started the worst howling yet. She figured he had seen the crack of light under the door of the dining room go out. She lasted only about ten minutes until she went out and got him and plopped him on the bed. He had an air of victory and she thought you asshole. It might be difficult to have a male houseguest. He snuggled up against her chest uncomfortably like a baby. He was immediately asleep and in the morning was in the same place snoring softly. She eased out of bed and he quickly followed her into the kitchen. She made herself two boiled eggs and cracked two for Hud which she mixed with his puppy chow to give him a shiny coat, as the puppy book encouraged. He ate his breakfast in seconds and slumped down in the blankets of the pump house and fell back asleep. Evidently the place was good enough for naps. She tiptoed out and went to the kitchen table and read poetry for half an hour, a long-held morning habit. She was currently reading an anthology of Chinese poetry. She had long loved Chinese poetry because it soothed her in a way other poetry didn’t. For instance Auden but especially Wallace Stevens could trouble her. Read them in the morning and then you had to carry the puzzle with you all day.
Her good intentions double-crossed her again. She walked Hud on a long circular route out through the pasture. She estimated she had walked him five miles in two hours before he collapsed on the ground. It took a few minutes for her to figure out that he wanted to be carried which was awkward though they made it to the rock pile for a rest. He saw a black snake and he was immediately enraged, pursuing the snake until it disappeared within the rocks. She yelled, “No.” There were no rattlers on the farm but enough in the rock cliffs two miles behind it that she wanted to discourage any interest he had in snakes. Many people had lost small dogs to rattlers though a big dog could usually withstand the bite of a western diamondback. Her father had always carried a small.22 pistol loaded with magnum BB shot to plug them in the head but then she didn’t want to kill anything. It made more sense to train the dog to keep away from them. He ignored the cows, probably thinking that they were too large to be understood. It was quite funny when curious cows followed him until he was batty with anger. The cow and puppy were nose to nose with the cow ignoring the snarls with no idea that she might be under attack from a thirty-pound puppy.
They were still a mile from home when Hud nestled in the grass demanding to be carried. He truly was still a baby, she thought, picking him up in her arms. When she reached the water trough she dropped him in because he was soiled from rolling in the dirt and manure in the pasture. He was furious paddling around growling. When she lifted him out and put him down he ran into the barnyard and rolled in dirt and chicken shit until he was suitably soiled and smelled interesting on his own terms. She knew that a daffy woman in the county seat had an obedience school for dogs and it was obvious that Hud should be enrolled. She got him in the pump house and washed him off with two wet, hot washcloths telling him, as he growled out of dislike for being washed, that if he was going to sleep with her like any male he couldn’t be a stinker. When she was little her brother Robert screamed and cried when Mother washed his hair. Now Robert was doing three to five in the Deer Lodge prison. She had gotten him a good lawyer but he had been impertinent and insulting to the judge, not a good idea. She remembered with amusement the story of an old cowboy down the road who had been arrested for drunk and disorderly yelling at the judge, “Kiss my ass you bald-headed son of a bitch. Come down off that bench and I’ll kick your ass all over the courtroom.” He did extra time but was much admired by the many louts in the area.
Hud slept off his hike and Catherine made a beef stew with a lard crust. Her grandmother had taught her the crust for stews, pie, and her signature chicken potpie which Catherine hadn’t quite mastered and often craved. The only ones that had come close were in Jewish delicatessens in New York City. She would treat herself to one when she had the New York City blues from too little sunlight and too many people. Another option when she was feeling lethargic was to take the subway with her Jewish roommate down to Houston Street and go to Russ and Daughters for half a dozen pieces of herring then walk awhile, then down the street to Katz’s for a monster corned beef, tongue, or pastrami sandwich. Compared with Katz’s they simply didn’t know how to make a sandwich in Montana.
A month later she had her hired man Clyde come in the kitchen for a meeting. He was nervous and fretful so she put his mind at ease explaining that she had to go to England so it would be better if he stayed in the house rather than his wife since she now had Hud who could be unmanageable. He had been a champ in his obedience classes but saw no application of what he learned there to his life at home. He had killed a woodchuck out by the barn and hidden it in a very thick grove of lilacs in front of the house. She had tried to crawl in to get the woodchuck away from him but failed. The woodchuck stank and Hud seemed prepared to run with his prize. Right now she was irked at the way Hud was fawning over Clyde’s leg as if he were a long-lost cousin. It was an absurd case of male bonding. Clyde said that he would be glad to stay here and look after Hud and then they took off for a stroll around the barnyard.
Catherine took a hasty shower and noted in the bedroom’s full-length mirror that she was becoming a little thin. That wouldn’t do because she knew Tim didn’t like skinny women. It was a week before her departure and she vowed to load up on fatty pasta recipes. When she saw a pregnant woman at the grocery she was shot full of jealousy. She came home and put a pork shoulder in a pot of marinara sauce with lots of garlic to slow cook so that the meat and fat would soften making a wonderful pungent sauce for rigatoni. She had learned the recipe from a rather tubby red-haired Italian in New York who worked as a chef. He was an energetic lover but she had to ditch him because he drank too much and she had the horrid memory of her parents. She stuck to modest amounts of wine herself, white in the summer and red when the weather cooled. She naturally worried about addiction. Look at her miserable brother and drugs. He had merely stepped across the abyss of his parents’ alcoholism to narcotics.
Chapter 9
When she landed at Heathrow via Chicago her grandfather was waiting with the same big Jamaican driver from his job. She was tired but quite happy. On the way to his home they stopped at the Tube station where she had spent the Blitz so she could take a look. All the memories depressed her though she was now over thirty and that had been when she was twelve. A memory returned of a man holding a knife to her and making her blow him in a dark corner one day while the night guards were off duty and her grandparents were away. She gagged on his penis then vomited after he ejaculated. She had told no one and tried to repress the memory, not wanting to cause more trouble than they already had. Now when she saw the dark corner again she felt cold sweat rising to the skin of her forehead.
She had a pleasant five days with her grandparents who looked awfully old and she promised to stop back after she visited Harold, Winnie, and Tim. Her grandmother understood but her grandfather worried that she would break her heart over the amputee. She rented a car and drove out to Cornwall with no difficulty on a beautiful sunny day. Grandmother had made her a brisket sandwich with horseradish, one of her favorites, and she pulled off on a side road and ate while staring at a field of just-sprouted oats on the side of the road and horses on the other including some rambunctious fillies to whom her stopping was an important event. They ran up to the stone fence and she touched their little noses and warm necks. She was thrilled to the point of shivering. She had talked on the phone to Clyde who had had no trouble with Hud. His behavior had been perfect except he had killed the rooster after it pecked at his face. The rooster was an asshole like all his predecessors so Catherine didn’t really care. She would get another one when she needed chicks. Hud had run into the lilac thicket with his kill but Clyde had retrieved the rooster and stewed it. He told her that while he was growing up in a big poor family his father had a connection for cheap roosters, and as a little boy he’d learned to pluck them. They were a tad gamier than hens but certainly edible, especially stewed with biscuits on the side.
She spent a couple of days at Harold and Winnie’s, all the while staring at Tim’s place a mile down the road. She had confided in Winnie who was sympathetic. “The point is if you can afford a baby,” Winnie had said. “Why have a husband when they love to act like they don’t have wives when they’re away?” She finally called Tim early the next morning. He hadn’t answered her last two letters but she knew it was hard for him. The phone rang six times before he picked up and she thought of him shuffling to answer it on crutches. He sounded melancholy indeed but said this was a good day to visit because his parents would be away for their annual quarrel with the tax assessor.
She put on a short skirt in hopes of sexually intriguing him but then it seemed too obvious and in the end she went for a skirt that was a little longer. It was nearly a half hour walk. Her feet got wet and she had to wind her way through two thick hedges and crawl over an awkward stone wall. Their sheepdog came out halfway and happily greeted her after a single bark. He bore a striking resemblance to the dog years before who thought he was Tim’s guardian. All the way on her walk she became more and more angry about the irrationality of war. The more than eight hundred thousand casualties at Verdun. A whole generation of young French had passed on and England also came close to losing a generation. She had grown up in the shadow of the two world wars and she sometimes could not bear to read the poets. “I have a rendezvous with death” indeed. Millions died.
Tim was shy and withdrawn at first as she sat on a swing on the back porch. His arm stump fitted in a slot on the crutches and one of his legs was pegged. She sat facing him listening to the chattering birds and sipping coffee and trying to use her bare legs to advantage. He relented and they made their way into his bedroom. In the next six days they made love a couple of times a day. His parents at first pretended not to notice her presence and then welcomed her warmly. On her last day he looked at her oddly.
“You look a little smug.”
“I’m trying to get pregnant by you.” And then she confirmed everything.
“But why me? Find yourself a husband.”
“I don’t want a husband except you. I just want a baby to raise.”
He was overwhelmed and began weeping, and barely uttered, “I don’t want you to spend your life taking care of me.”
“But why, if I love you? I want to marry you this afternoon.” Her voice quivered never having said “I love you” before.
“Everybody’s sympathy wears out,” he choked.
She kissed him and walked home where she had a stiff drink of Harold’s whiskey. God damn the world and its wars, she thought. Those who start the wars never die in them. She packed hastily, had supper with Winnie and Harold, read, and went to sleep, getting up early for the drive to London. Winnie got up and made her breakfast and a sandwich for the trip. Country people everywhere were suspicious of restaurants with many stories of a fly in the soup.
When she reached London her grandmother was off shopping for dinner and her grandfather looked at her quizzically, saying, “You look blue.” It came out in a rush from her sexual abuse in the subway to Tim’s refusal to marry her. Her grandfather did the best he could to soothe her. Way back then her abuser had been a braggart and Frederick the Jamaican found out and had pushed the man in front of a train. She was stunned, wondering if the man deserved to die for his sins. She was not a vindictive person but maybe it would save other girls. She and Frederick agreed not to tell anyone else. About Tim her grandfather said, “One of the ironies of war is that it makes the severely wounded feel worthless. There is no reward for them.”
Catherine took a long walk. There was still stray rubble here and there from the Blitz but in general the city was in good shape. She loved walking along the Thames, however dirty. She noted that many of the mansions along Cheyne Walk had been totally reconditioned by the magic of lots of money. She chided herself for her hopeless guilt about war and history and being a woman not called to help or protect Tim in battle. Now they could have nothing.
Chapter 10
Catherine was home on the farm for a month before the momentous discovery that she was pregnant. She danced and shrieked in the obstetrician’s office. The doctor was amazed and happy for Catherine.
At home although it was a cool day she danced herself into a sweat while feeding the chickens. Hud ran around barking and snapping at her heels. He clearly disapproved of this behavior that had nothing to do with him. Dogs prefer that we behave the same way every day. If we don’t, maybe we’ll forget to feed them! Even the hens scattered in alarm. She had to acknowledge it was pleasanter without the rooster.
When finished with her dancing Catherine knelt and comforted Hud and then threw the hens extra scratch for putting up with her. She took Hud for a little walk about a hundred yards behind the barn to a small pond and a bone pit where her grandfather had dragged the carcasses of dead animals, cows and pigs. Hud loved the pile of ancient bleached bones still with their scent of meat. He had also eaten a muskrat from the pond. Catherine couldn’t catch him and he wasn’t about to give up a trophy merely because she said, “Drop it.”
She had some worries about pregnancy and child care despite the stack of books she had accumulated. It was easy to recall that books and classes hadn’t helped with Hud. He would heel when they walked the gravel road and a vehicle was coming but then there was a real urgency in her voice. He greeted “come, sit, stay” with a yawn. Dogs are good judges of intention in the voice. Also he had a terrier’s bad temper and sometimes a “come” would cause him to glare at her and back into the shrubbery. Yelling didn’t help. It seemed to him to mean that he had won the round. He was a free radical, pure and simple. He was wildly appreciative when she returned from the store or wherever as if he might have been abandoned. The most effective command was “cheese” because he loved a piece of cheddar.
The idea of eggs had followed her ever since her second-grade report on chickens and not always pleasantly. Eggs were the fundamental fact among all females in the mammalian and most other species. One of hers was currently fertilized for better or worse though it was what her heart wanted. Her old school friend Laura now had three children. She had once admitted in high school to Catherine that her cousins were always screwing her. But she was rather homely and was still faking mental problems so the high school boys ignored her. The point was that cousins were better than nothing, or so she said. This appalled Catherine who was a virgin at the time. When she even touched a boy’s penis he was always shooting all over the front seat and making a mess. Laura seemed to have turned out okay, or perhaps Catherine just wanted the children her friend and her husband had, seemingly without effort.
Catherine had figured out early on that people were primitive right below the surface. She remembered Gert telling her at eleven, A man will tell any kind of lie to make love to you. She couldn’t quite figure out her mother. When Catherine was a little girl they would drive out to the farm singing songs all the way. They were truly happy which made the decline more upsetting when her mother began drinking right along with her father in the late afternoons and early evenings. While Catherine was living in England Winnie told her how happy her mother had been when they became engaged. She would finally move from crowded London to an actual farm. Winnie said Alicia had spent most of every summer with her and Harold and worked like a man. She was born to be a farm girl and when she found out that he was lying the disappointment was fatal. And now she was in Palm Beach and Oyster Bay, the least farmlike places imaginable except the heart of Calcutta. The message to Catherine had been to go it alone as much as possible. Jerry’s lavish gifts had been very helpful but he didn’t know how helpful they were. Once when passing through by chartered jet, for he refused to fly commercial except to Europe, Jerry had stopped by for lunch and suggested to Catherine that he try to buy out her blowhard Texas neighbor. She asked him to wait as she wasn’t sure she could run such a large ranch.
Catherine took Hud for a little walk to shake off her dark mood and was amused when he hopelessly chased a jackrabbit that was much faster than he was. He finally slumped to the ground and looked like he was feeling sorry for himself after his failed game of catch, kill, and eat. It seemed that her life was accelerating in a direction she had chosen but at a speed she couldn’t quite emotionally encompass. Her mind felt quivery but tentatively sane. It reminded her of her junior year in college when she thought she was going nuts. Since she passably read Spanish she had agreed for a poetry class to write an essay on Lorca’s Poet in New York which was still fairly new at the time, maybe ten years since its publication shortly after the poet’s murder which had dumbfounded her. The project was unwise as the book drove her batty. She had loved Lorca’s Gypsy Ballads but had in error assumed this was the same kind of book, far indeed from the truth of the matter. What was a girl from Montana to make of a section named “Landscape of a Vomiting Multitude”? She tried to back out of the essay but the professor wouldn’t allow it because he was interested in what she had to say about the surrealism of the book. He was in his late sixties but was obviously sweet on her and said she must write the paper as he was curious about what she thought. In his office she sat in a low easy chair which she figured he had in order to look up the legs of girls, so she showed a lot of leg to tease the wicked old lecher.
What saved her on this project whose horrors had been exacerbated was the essay on duende that Lorca had written, which her professor encouraged her to read alongside. The essay made clear for the first time why she loved the kind of music and poetry she did. The art she loved had cante jondo, a ghostliness that drew out one’s most deep-seated emotions. It didn’t matter if it was Beethoven or Carlos Montoya simply playing the guitar which at one point had made her sob. Stan Getz would later touch her the same way. Perhaps it was strange in retrospect how utterly infatuated she had become with the poet after reading Gypsy Ballads. She had fantasies of making love to him on the bank of a river in Andalucía, then she discovered that he had been born gay and now was dead at the murderous hands of Franco’s men in Granada. She felt foolish for her heartbreak but then there are no limits to the emotional life.
Chapter 11
Her pregnancy was difficult. She had interminable bouts of morning sickness and after two months there was a horrifying letter from Winnie in England beginning with the ominous, “Tim’s parents asked me to write this letter.” Tim had committed suicide. What had happened was that Tim had taken a long walk and fallen half in the creek and couldn’t get up out of the mire.
A search party looked for him all night and only found him in the morning. He contracted severe pneumonia and was hospitalized. I visited him and he was proud to have made you pregnant. I helped him get a lawyer so he could provide for you and leave his armed services pension to the child. The pension is small but better than nothing. It helps that we have one from Harold’s perilous service in World War I. He still has difficulties from the mustard gas. Anyway, Tim was getting better but then he got a severe case of flu from the hospital air. He shrank to nothing. He saved up his pills in secret, took them all at once, and committed suicide. It was too much to ask him to stay alive. He was suffering horribly. I’m sorry to have to tell you this. He gave me this little note for you.
Winnie had enclosed the note which read, “I’m so happy that you are pregnant. I am sorry I won’t see the child. Maybe in the afterlife if there is one. I could no longer bear life as it is given me. I love you. Tim.”
She sat in the barnyard on the milk stool and wept for an hour or so which also made Hud moan and wail. She finally stopped and took him for a walk out in the pasture where he touched noses with the calves. They both seemed to enjoy this. Then he reverted to his true character and killed a harmless garter snake and ate it with evident relish. She would have to redouble her efforts to train him away from snakes.
She hoped to have twins and get childbearing over with in one effort. Two was the perfect number of children. François came out from Florida in the early fall. He was mortally disappointed that there would be no lovemaking for the time being. He said that he had driven two thousand miles for nothing to which she answered, “You might have called first.” She told him the whole story and broke down again at Tim’s suicide. He was consoling. He had brought along two female English setters, both spayed, and Hud was frantically interested but they both bit him, their “keep away” signal, and he seemed puzzled and hurt to have his affection painfully rejected. François had fine hunting for Hungarian partridge, sharp-tailed grouse, and a few ruffed grouse. They ate very well though she couldn’t drink any of the case of wine he brought aside from a sip or two because it made her queasy. He was a fine cook and she acted as sous-chef playing Mozart as always as she cooked. He stayed five days and she knew that she could make love but she had a terrifying fear of miscarriage. When he left he promised to visit every fall which made her happy.
She entered a long period of lassitude caused by the constant morning illness. She did nothing but read, and of late she reread the novels of Lawrence Durrell and Malcolm Lowry, two of her current favorites, and she continued with her many anthologies of Chinese poetry. She liked the Chinese notion that the most fortunate life was one in which nothing much happened. She liked to sit at the kitchen window and watch dawn arrive in the barnyard, pleased that the baby was making her fatter. She had been moderately slender and it was interesting to develop large breasts. She looked at them in the mirror and thought it would be nice to keep them around after the baby but such wasn’t possible. Jerry had offered to send her to any graduate school she wished if she wanted to become a lawyer or doctor. When she said she only wanted to be a farmer, he couldn’t quite believe this lack of ambition though all he himself had ever done was spend money. Ambition didn’t really trouble Catherine. Since earliest childhood she just wanted to be on a farm, like her mother except that Catherine had succeeded. Jerry every year was written up in socialite magazines as a high-net-worth individual but in Catherine’s mind that didn’t seem to do her mother any good, at least not as much as feeding the chickens did for Catherine. It was an antique question at best but the significant thing in life was whether or not your soul was at peace. Catherine felt hers was and now it looked like she was going to get to raise the child she so much wanted.
Chapter 12
In late fall Catherine’s mother showed up on only a few days’ notice, she said to “help with the baby” though it wasn’t due for another couple of weeks. Catherine was appalled at the presumption but prepared the upstairs bedroom her mother favored. Catherine had a very early memory of loving sleeping upstairs with her mother, how the stones she would heat up in cold weather would warm the bed. They would get up at 5:00 a.m., do chores with Grandpa, and then eat a big breakfast in the warm kitchen beside the wood range her grandparents cooked on. Catherine liked it best when Grandpa would squirt milk directly from the cow’s udder into the open mouths of the barn cats. She wanted to learn this trick as a little girl but her hands only became strong enough to milk a cow when she was older.
That first evening was enervating. She could see her mother’s depression through her face tight from plastic surgery. Earlier she had watched the sun go down through the kitchen window.
“This was what I always wanted and didn’t get.” Her voice was muted and without its usual hardness.
“It’s not too late. You’re only in your fifties,” Catherine replied.
Her mother gave her the look of one who had driven into a deep gully and never considered any alternatives for getting out. Like many women growing older she was an utter fatalist.
“I wrote many times to Robert in person apologizing and he finally answered saying he forgave me. But I’m unsure about forgiveness. Look what we did to him.”
“I’m unsure of why I survived and Robert didn’t. Dad picked on him and ignored me until Robert ran away. Then it was too late. When a child learns mistrust it’s hard to overcome it.” Catherine felt tears form in her eyes.
Her mother took a vodka shooter out of her purse and finished it in one swallow. “I still haven’t quit though the doctors said I must,” she said.
“Why do they want you to?”
“My liver is a mess among other things.”
“You better quit. It’s hard for a liver to recover.” Her mother actually looked very good for her age.
“I keep myself slim but what else can I do? We have servants for everything. Jerry hates it when I do dishes.”
“That’s absurd.”
“I know it. He grew up with a critical mother. He’s so worried that I might complain about something. I told him I was coming out here to help with the baby and buy a farm to fulfill my girlhood ambition. He said, ‘Go ahead.’ You of course know that your father broke his promise to me that we would live on a farm. He wanted to wear a tie and work in a bank. He said that he was belittled in school for being a farm kid.”
“I doubt that. What else is there around here but farm kids? A few army brats. Gas station owners. Grocery store owners and clerks.”
“I learned never to believe anything he said. Your grandfather despised him, said he was a chiseler. His own son. How could it be that his own son could redefine ineptitude?”
“Well, he wasn’t about a great hero, but. .” Catherine was uncomfortable speaking ill of the dead.
“When you two kids were little I should have grabbed you and run for it. It was cowardly I didn’t.”
Later that evening when Catherine went up to bed she wondered if her mother might be ill and had come on this visit to Montana as a last chance to ask for forgiveness. Catherine didn’t know what to think. She saw life as more of a constant whirl in which people often behaved horribly. What was the point of forgiving the early whirls? She knew she would forgive her if her mother asked, however, thinking there was nothing else to do. The past lives on in all of us. No matter how wronged we were the offenses were only the beaten-up junk of memory, pawed over until they were without color if still somehow alive. Late that evening her mother began weeping, she said over Robert in prison, but Catherine doubted it, thinking that it must be the entirety of life.
“We had such fun when I brought you out here as a little girl. At the time you treated the chickens as if they were the biggest mystery in life.”
“Maybe they are, along with humans. I liked going out to the dark barn with Grandpa at five a.m. Then when it got fully light I’d feed the chickens. I guess at heart we all like to be useful. Even now Hudley likes his breakfast early. If I don’t feed him by seven he starts barking like crazy.”
After her cereal next morning Mother took Hud for a walk to his beloved bone pile out behind the barn. Hud already adored her and they settled into a routine where she’d take him for his early morning walk. In the evenings he slept at the end of Alicia’s bed and warmed it up which meant she didn’t have to carry the warm stones up the steep stairs, but Hud would bark if she didn’t. It also meant that he no longer expected to sleep with Catherine which was a relief. He would trot up and down the stairs with her under the illusion that he was helping. She wouldn’t allow Catherine to give her a hand, saying her legs needed the exercise.
One morning while they were out Catherine called Jerry. He was appalled that her mother hadn’t told her yet that she had ovarian cancer and he hoped she would last long enough to help Catherine with the baby. After the baby was born they would meet at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota, to try and prolong her life. Jerry had hoped to help nurse her too but she said she was overrun with help. He hinted he would like to be invited out for a visit. Catherine said, “Come ahead,” and he was there in a few days. He came by private jet and they picked him up at the Texan’s landing strip next door. She still disliked the neighbor but money knew how to talk to money apparently.
Jerry was an immediate pain in the ass insisting that he have a new house built for Catherine and the baby. Catherine simply enough didn’t want it. She liked the old one but settled on Jerry having a master bedroom wing built with an adjoining room for the baby. The contractor was there in the morning. By the looks of Catherine’s belly time was of the essence so Jerry offered the contractor extra money for speed. The contractor broke into an easy smile seeing Christmas come early.
Jerry was so overbearing in looking after her mother that it drove both women batty. Luckily he became quite bored with the farm and said at the second dinner that he needed to fly to Key West. Catherine assumed it was to see his girlfriend. Jerry had drunk most of a bottle of Scotch that late afternoon and his slurred speech grated on her nerves. They were both enormously relieved in the morning when the Texan’s hired hand picked him up for his plane with its twelve seats and leather sofa. He was gaining a lot of weight and Catherine watched from the window as he waddled to the car. Catherine knew that he never read and wondered what he and her mother talked about. Recent purchases? She could see that age would eventually make him disgusting but with ovarian cancer her mother wouldn’t see it. She had obviously had bad luck with men when you overlooked Jerry’s wealth. Money was nearly meaningless to Catherine even though she knew she would enjoy a big bedroom and a baby room attached to the house. The door would be off the kitchen, her favorite room. She used to play cribbage at the kitchen table with a maiden great-aunt who lived her last year with the grandparents. She worked in Chicago as a young woman and when they played cards the radio in the evening was tuned to a station there. She nattered constantly about the beauty of Chicago and made Catherine promise to go there when she grew up. Catherine was even now embarrassed that when she had visited Chicago she stayed in the Drake where her maiden aunt had worked.
Of late Catherine who was not of a religious bent wondered what became of Tim after suicide. Christians would say that suicides went directly to hell, wherever that was. It was left over from Sunday school she supposed. Catherine was unsure of hell or an afterlife but thought his lifelong pain should count for something. She had watched a local man limping on the sidewalk. He had lost his toes to the cold in Korea. It could have been worse and local lazy people envied his disability payments. Something for nothing was the ultimate good as far as they were concerned. War was hardly nothing. She regretted not being able to help Clyde load the hay bales onto the wagon and then into the barn because of her pregnancy.
Mother wept for a couple of days and then in a torrent of garbled language apologized to Catherine for the abuses in her raising. The first duty, she said, of a mother is to protect her children, even from her husband. Her own husband had never gotten out of himself for even a moment. Once assured of Catherine’s forgiveness her mother declined dramatically as if this forgiveness had been her life’s work. Catherine called Jerry in Key West saying that the situation was serious. Jerry said he’d try to get away. She thought, From your fishing and adulterous fucking. Meanwhile, she had to get her mother several appointments with a psychiatrist in the county seat because she was plainly becoming daft. She would sit on the front porch talking to Robert who was obviously not there. She drove her mother the two hours to the prison to visit Robert but her mother couldn’t complete the mission. She vomited in the parking lot seeing the walls and razor wire fencing. She was catatonically angry. “Why put him here just because he burned that piece of shit house?” Catherine had tried to explain Robert’s refusal to fight for himself. By the time of the fire her ex-husband’s illusions had plainly gotten out of hand. He was pretending he was “old money” living in a grand home though he was borrowing gin money from hunting acquaintances. Catherine figured that his delusions came from a lifetime of hard drinking.
Chapter 13
Catherine drove Jerry and her mother to the Texan’s landing strip. The Texan had only dropped Jerry off the day before in his new Jeep Wagoneer. No one local would use a six-thousand-dollar vehicle to roam his ranch. Catherine was glad to see them leave, flying east to Rochester, Minnesota, to get her mother admitted to Mayo. Her mother sobbed piteously while boarding the plane because she couldn’t stay to help with the oncoming baby. Help by being a relentless pain in the ass? Catherine thought wryly. You couldn’t miss Jerry’s self-importance in boarding a private jet.
She daily felt heavier and more awkward but was pleased when the baby kicked in her womb. She could barely make her morning stroll with Hud out to the pond and boneyard behind the barn. One day it was cool and rainy and she refused to go and he actually wept until she relented, bundled in a sweater and raincoat. She reminded herself of the perils of starting habits with dogs. In the big pasture they had to go back every time to the rock pile where he had once almost but not quite caught a big black snake. He was obviously goaded by his failure.
Near the pond she sat on a big rock with a peculiar resemblance to a monster stone egg. It had been Catherine’s “magic” place since early childhood. When she frequently visited the farm with her mother she’d walk out to her stone egg when she was disturbed by anything and the stillness of the scene pacified her. How can you draw pure energy from a stone? It was possible for her. Later in life it occurred to her that in the serenity of the place she had arrived at a point of child meditation where her mind emptied itself of its enervating trash and she could identify with the pond and big pile of white cow bones. Now it amused her when Hud tried to pick up the pelvis of a cow skeleton. His jaws weren’t strong enough yet to pick it up but he had slowly dragged it about halfway to his trophy hideout in the front yard lilac grove. Such extreme effort for his own private reasons. Like a child he had his own collection of “stuff” whose importance was clear only to the owner.
She sat there on the stone egg and was flooded with rare sympathy for her mother. Her father’s promise of a farm in Montana was an outrageous lie and it was obvious that he’d never had any intention of keeping that promise. Her grandfather in England told her that her father was a “scoundrel.” Who in his right mind would rather run a tiny bank than be a farmer? This was during a long conversation during the Blitz. Her grandparents had urged their daughter early on to leave the bastard but along came Robert and her. Even his own parents were not that fond of him, preferring the company of Catherine’s mother. She was always absolutely welcome at the farm but it would have been a small town scandal had she moved out there permanently. Now Catherine believed that she should have. What did it really matter if her mother had embraced her singular desire? It was a brutal lesson indeed to both mother and daughter. To live at a distance of a half dozen miles from where your heart was.
As she sat there scratching Hud’s ears which he loved the worry about Tim was nagging at her, this idea that suicides must go to hell. It was maddening to worry about a person already dead and she couldn’t quite believe that God would add to the suffering of someone who had already suffered so much. To her the suicide had been an act of courage. To deny the self further existence when the self had been so rended. War waits to kill some.
She wanted to examine her religious beliefs and discard the ones that no longer made sense but it seemed difficult when she was this pregnant. She also perceived that to discard them wouldn’t be all that easy or simple. They were ingrained. When she was passionately religious as a young girl she read the Gospels over and over. By contrast the Old Testament was mean and foreboding. Why did King David so desire Bathsheba and send her husband away to be killed in battle? That seemed very mean-minded to her and Laura had agreed. And why did this great man peek at Bathsheba while she was bathing? This was definitely a sin she supposed. Even now she said her prayers before bed in the evening though they were quite abbreviated. She kept recalling her disappointment as a girl when she prayed that her parents would quit getting drunk and it hadn’t happened. She still believed devoutly in the Resurrection partly because it was such a glorious, magical idea to rise from the dead with the spike scars in your hands and feet. She knew that a belief in magic was quite common among her friends, even her Sunday school teacher who claimed to have seen several ghosts.
Now to Catherine the magic of life was in the spectacular assortment of species. Even at this moment she saw the nose of a muskrat rise above the surface of the pond. Hud also saw it and sitting beside her quivered with excitement but then he was thinking of a wild meal. She had read that some people ate muskrats from the river in Detroit, Michigan, but then she had also read that poor people in the Southwest ate donkeys during the Depression. Why God had decided not to stop her parents’ drinking was the early question that stuck with her. It seemed a simple request but then that was long before she knew anything about addiction. She herself had been truly drunk only once on her college graduation night and felt badly for three days which prevented her from doing it again. It had competed with the preposterous discomfort of being nearly nine months pregnant. She had read once about a woman who bore eighteen children which now seemed thoroughly incomprehensible even if she had been a cow.
Chapter 14
Catherine summoned Clyde one Sunday morning for a somewhat formal meeting on the farm after her walk. She needed him to spend more time around her place in case she fell and delivered the baby on the ground. The obstetrician had warned her to be more cautious about her walking for the time being.
In fact Catherine was finding walking difficult now. Her legs and feet hurt from the extra weight. She thought now that one baby would certainly be enough. She kept recalling how she had ruined walking for a while way back when she was doing the Lorca project in college. The poet had obviously spent a great deal of time walking around the city for Poet in New York and her plan was to imitate the tactic. One morning she started out on 112th Street and walked all the way to Washington Square in the Village where she felt lucky to hear a very good violinist play a Paganini piece that was a little beyond him but not by far. He smiled as spectators filled his open violin case with money. A dapper old man dropped in a twenty and the musician broke into a grin.
Now back at the farm Clyde seemed nervous like all of the poor about a good job. He finally blurted out that when Jerry was here he had stopped by and asked Clyde if he thought he could handle managing the Texan’s ranch in addition to Catherine’s farm. Clyde thought it over briefly and said yes because the Texan’s ranch was a basic cow operation where you turned bulls loose every year and then waited to see how many new calves you got. Of course there were a thousand somewhat complicated details but none that Clyde couldn’t handle.
Catherine felt up in the air about the whole business though she knew it would be good for Clyde making him a big shot manager of a large ranch. The poor are always saying, “I’d like a break that is not my neck.” So she told Clyde she was pleased for him. She couldn’t add that she could barely stand the sight of Jerry. But then she predicted to herself that he wouldn’t be out that often. His sport was buying, not maintaining what he bought. He might go to one Cattlemen’s meeting to strut a bit and that would largely be it. She told Clyde to make sure he kept a good set of books because the rich thrive on the suspicion that they are being swindled.
Chapter 15
When she went into labor Clyde drove her to the new little hospital in Livingston (her mother had insisted she go to the big hospital in Bozeman but as usual she ignored her). The pains were still far apart and she noticed that it was December 7, the anniversary of Pearl Harbor. If it was a daughter maybe she should name it “Pearl” but then she never had cared for the name. Catherine had been so consumed by the Blitz she never thought about Pearl Harbor except once she had seen a photo of a big ship the Japanese had sunk and couldn’t imagine it on the ocean floor.
It was a long delirious day until early in the evening when she gave birth, a difficult breech birth, to a boy. She held the homely little runt for a few minutes and thought of the William Blake line, “Little lamb, who made thee.” She was still possessed with some of the horrifying aspects of giving birth, hallucinating herself as a huge, opening tropical flower with a fatally injured core. She wondered if that meant she was dying and she would see Tim in the afterlife but was quite relieved when it didn’t happen and they brought her the cottage cheese she had requested. Birth was hard work and she was hungry. She recalled when she finally reached Greenwich Village one day on a particularly long hike for Lorca she went to a little Italian place she knew and had pasta with marinara and one big meatball. She relished it. Typical of her obstinacy she turned around and walked all the way back, the last hour in a steady chilly rain so she returned to the apartment with aching legs in the guise of a wet dog. Her roommate was appalled and put her to bed after a bowl of chicken soup. She woke the next morning with shin splints, unable to walk to class. There’s something in cement that doesn’t love a foot, she thought, but New Yorkers must get used to it. You certainly don’t get shin splints walking in a pasture.
She called her mother. Alicia wasn’t doing well at all according to Jerry who answered the phone. She told him she had named the baby Tim. He congratulated her and her mother came on the line for a few minutes and in a weak voice said, “I wish I were there to help you.”
Chapter 16
It was a tough winter with the baby who had colic. Only dancing would slow his crying. She questioned her indomitable will to reproduce deciding its origins were too far beneath the skin to comprehend. Clyde’s wife Clara and her two daughters came over and stayed a couple of weeks to help out. The older daughter Laurel said she didn’t like babies but she turned out to be the most helpful with little Tim. He had lost the red face of a newborn and now was pale with black hair like his father. Catherine had given the baby all that she was and then some. As she had with Tim. She felt unbearably depressed, the so-called “baby blues,” so she took a lot of vitamins and made sure she at least walked out to the pond and back every morning. It seemed to improve slightly with the solstice and on sunny winter days, of which there are many in Montana, she clocked the ever so slight increase of light with the specific shadows of the barn. She remembered from her childhood that after the hard work of autumn, harvest and butchering, everyone became happier after the solstice and the long, sure trek toward spring. Her solstice reverie was interrupted by a big blizzard at Christmas and she was relieved she was well stocked with groceries and didn’t have to drive anywhere. She felt especially sorry for those who felt compelled to make long driving trips for Christmas.
Nursing was a great pleasure. She was becoming too thin and devised ways to make up for it. She mentioned aloud that she so missed the sausages of her grandparents who were fine sausage makers, burying their product in a huge crock of pig fat to preserve it like the French do their confit. Clyde told her there was a new, cranky young butcher in Livingston. The roads were still bad but she had bought a big diesel pickup for the farm and he returned with five pounds of sausage and a big beef roast for Christmas dinner. It was a happy occasion and Catherine made Yorkshire pudding as her mother had done. Her mother had been a deeply mediocre and hasty cook, and her ability further declined the more she drank. Catherine had noticed that the good cooks she knew saved their drinks for after the dishes were prepared except men at the barbecue, a great deal easier than any of them were prone to admit. Following a few principles they managed even when half drunk.
Jerry called to say Mother had died Christmas Day at Mayo. This was three days later but he said he hadn’t wanted to ruin her Christmas. They might have been able to prolong things a little longer but she had a horror of oxygen and feeding tubes and had asked them when it reached that point to “pull the plug.” Jerry also said she had written a note asking that her ashes be strewn on the pond behind the barn, and that she wanted Catherine to do it.
Unlike with her father Catherine wept for a while. When she was a little girl she and her mother would have picnics on the pond, squinting their eyes and pretending it was a big lake. On the especially hot days of summer they would bathe in the pond which was sandy around the edges. Only when not around her husband could her mother be utterly pleasant. Catherine mourned what might have been. She was convinced now that her mother should have taken her and Robert back to England and raised them in London. Her parents had offered to take them in, she later told Catherine, which was what led to their visit before war broke out.
Her obstetrician had sent her an antique Lakota papoose for Christmas and she packed Tim warmly inside for morning walks. Her neighbor had cleared her driveway with his tractor and plow and she had him scrape out an area to throw feed to the chickens. She had a small stroller for Tim and shoveled a path from the house for the stroller. By March Tim’s first laughter had been at the chickens. Hud, who was getting much larger, would sit beside the stroller as if he were a guard, typical of the breed, and growl deeply at approaching chickens who feared him.
In April on a warmish day the snow seemed to be melting. Catherine was out in the barnyard with Tim having a sandwich and feeding him a jar of pureed peaches, watching the nearly mature hatchlings driving each other batty. Tim watched them closely and didn’t stop smiling. She held him up at the fence so he could touch the soft noses of the horses and a single very docile calf. Clyde had come by with three piglets to raise good pork for the two households. She had long figured out that supermarket pork wasn’t nearly as tasty as what her grandfather had home raised and butchered. It would cost money to feed them as you couldn’t grow corn easily in this high, dry climate. Hud growled and the piglets shrank back in the pen. Tim reached out for them but Catherine held him back thinking they might mistake his little hand for food. Three days later one of the piglets got out but only trotted over to nibble corn scratch with the chickens. Tim was gleeful and Hud furious. She said, “Hud, no,” to his growling. She was able to pet the piglet and scratch its ears, both of which it liked. Tim was so delighted to touch its ears and the piglet sniffed his hand.
In grade school the boys who all dressed like junior cowboys had called her a “wimp” for her tenderhearted view of the lowliest creatures. Her mother had given her Charles Roberts’s The Naturalist’s Diary for her birthday. Her concern was widespread and it seemed that every boy craved to shoot a deer, elk, moose, bear, anything would do in the local ethic. Only one mannerly boy was interested in bird dogs and hunting for Hungarian partridge and sharp-tailed grouse with his father. She had a crush on him but he ignored girls. Catherine’s mother was also softhearted about animals. She convinced her to let go a turtle she had caught in the cattails at the edge of the pond. Her mother’s point was “Why should the turtle’s only life be to amuse you?” Her mother had studied biology in England but was largely unaware of American wildlife. On an early trip south to Yellowstone her parents had seen a sow grizzly kill an elk. Her father thought they were lucky to see it but her mother was totally repelled and had grizzly nightmares. The junior cowboys loved to scare each other and the girls with stories about rattlesnakes and grizzlies. A boy in her sixth-grade class was bitten in the arm by a baby rattler in the school woodlot. His arm had become horribly swollen but they got him to the hospital in time for the antivenom to be effective. She was shocked and told her father about it at dinner. He laughed saying that boys get bitten because they’re always fooling with snakes to show their daring, same as when he was young. This was why she was trying to aversion train Hud to rattlers. She had used a choke collar for a few weeks whenever they saw snakes and now on the rare occasion when they saw one on a walk he would shrink back and whine. There were no grizzlies in the Crazy Mountains nearby but there were some in the Absaroka Mountains less than fifty miles to the south. There was a written record of Lewis and Clark killing one locally when they passed through. Catherine had hiked with friends in the Absarokas but had never seen a grizzly and hadn’t wanted to see one.
Jerry called to say that he was sending her mother’s ashes by Purolator courier adding that she should go ahead and distribute the ashes by the “lake” as he had an important business trip to make for several weeks in Key West. It took her breath away. The heel. He couldn’t be bothered. She felt a flash of anger that upset her stomach.
The next day the ashes arrived and along with them a check for fifty thousand dollars with “Tim’s education” written in the memo field. She guessed Jerry was buying off his conscience. She didn’t care. Did he have to fly to Key West to get laid? Surely someone closer to New York would make sense, or the summer place in Rhode Island where the entryway was cold marble. She would put the money in the bank where it would reproduce and Tim could go off in eighteen years in new clothes. What more could she want of life? She had no lover but certainly didn’t want one for the time being. But she had a farm, a few horses, about fifty cattle, three piglets, and of course the beloved chickens, also a tiny boy who seemed to like them too. The other day she stupidly ran to the house for the phone and left Hud to guard Tim. When she returned a hatchling was nestled in his diaper and he was smiling from ear to ear while Hud growled at it. Catherine had taught Hud to stay clear of the hatchlings though it enraged him when they pecked at his feet. With one hand Tim brushed the feathers with little coos.
Another piglet escaped, and she called Clara who caught it with difficulty, finally offering it more scratch which it ate out of her hand.
“Doesn’t make you want to eat pork, does it?”
“No!” Catherine laughed. It was best not to name a pig or cow who would end up as meat. The piglet squealed in anger when Clara put him back in the pen and plugged up the escape hole. He simply wanted to wander around freely.
Chapter 17
The parents of a ten-year-old Mexican girl had died locally in a car accident and the township was looking for a foster parent who spoke Spanish to take care of her until relatives came from Mexico to retrieve her at the end of the summer, some months away. It was commonly known that Catherine was the only white person in the area who spoke Spanish and she had a decision to make. A recent cold snap had left snow on the ground and Catherine shivered on her way to meet the girl, Lola, and a social worker at the drugstore for a chocolate sundae. The girl held Tim and then quickly changed his diaper on the counter. Her deftness won Catherine’s heart. She spoke soft sibilant Spanish to Tim who enjoyed it. At dinnertime the social worker brought Lola out to the farm. Hud had taken off across the pasture that afternoon and not come back but she couldn’t look for him with the girl arriving. She was sure he’d be all right. Lola had a pathetically small amount of belongings. Her English was fair and full of American slang. She was amused by Catherine’s Spanish and called her “profesora.” Catherine put her into her old bedroom adjoining the new addition so she could hear Tim.
The next morning it felt as warm as a Chinook wind as she looked out at the distant Crazy Mountains, named for the woman who had gone fatally crazy there. Catherine remembered the Chinooks of her childhood fondly. Once it was only ten degrees in the early morning and by noon it was sixty. Kids at school loved them and ran around in shirtsleeves.
Lola looked after Tim, playing with him on the living room rug where he shrieked with laughter, while Catherine carried her mother’s ashes out behind the barn across the lingering snow. She sat on her egg rock holding the box of ashes inside of which was a lovely urn, no doubt Jerry’s idea. There was a thin lid of ice on the pond which was quickly melting. She cast the first handful of ashes out on the ice feeling with her fingers and seeing small bits of bone which was eerie. She was able to take off her coat in the warm wind. She continued to toss handfuls of ashes saying, “Goodbye, Mother.” How could her mother become ashes? She reminded herself of the ways of the earth.
When she finished and the ashes were sinking into the water she thought about how much her mother loved this place and all of their early little picnics. Now the two horses and a calf and a cow were watching her over the fence with curiosity. She would try to keep Tim off of horses for as long as possible. The area was full of the maimed and injured from horseback accidents. Other places boys wanted to be football and basketball stars but here they wanted to be heroes of rodeo, much more dangerous even than football.
Suddenly, with both her parents gone she felt like an orphan and missed her grandparents in London. When she had called her grandmother about her mother’s death Catherine kept sobbing and whispering, “It’s not fair.” Of course it wasn’t. It had been more than a decade since she had turned to her parents for anything. So many people she knew carried their parents around in emotional backpacks. Her own story was largely unknown to anyone but herself and Robert in prison whose sentence had recently been lengthened for beating up a guard. This was plainly the curse of the father. She herself felt no curse and had often thought that her early trip to England to see her grandparents had successfully detoxified her life. She would fly over this summer so they could see their great-grandson and she would also visit Tim’s family. They were getting very old and had just lost their only child. She planned to take Lola with her to help with the baby.
Thoughts of Robert reminded Catherine of another childhood experience that had started as a truly horrid summer evening. Her father had been drunk and raged about stock market losses which he blamed on the “Jews.” Catherine and her mother didn’t believe anything he said and ignored him so he fixed his anger on Robert. They had been eating at the picnic table in the backyard and her father had fallen down twice trying to chase Robert. Robert was much faster which further enraged him. He demanded Robert stop so he could beat him but Robert cut through the hedge and was headed downtown. After dark he came home and thought it was safe because peeking through the window he saw his father was asleep on the den couch. Robert came up to Catherine’s room and said that he was running away at dawn. She said she wanted to go along. She got up and made several peanut butter and jelly sandwiches to take. Robert filled his Boy Scout canteen, packed a day pack with warm clothes, and rolled up his summer sleeping bag. After midnight Father awoke, went to Robert’s room, and beat him. Catherine’s mother tried to stop him and he pushed her to the floor. Robert’s lip was cut from a punch and there was blood. Catherine went into the room and screamed, “Daddy, stop that!” The scream was so penetrating that he stopped and walked out the door. That cinched their departure.
They left in the first scant light of dawn walking north to a big woods to conceal themselves if they were being followed. By midday they were lost despite Robert’s Scout compass. They were headed toward Martinsdale where Robert had a friend. Their feet hurt and they spread the sleeping bag and slept a couple of hours in the heat of the afternoon. They hogged their sandwiches but were still hungry. Robert judged that they were too high in the foothills of the Crazy Mountains. They continued to walk, refilling their canteen in a safe-looking creek. They both knew the danger of giardia from animal waste in the water. Late in the afternoon she was sure she recognized parts of the landscape. She mentioned this to Robert who became angry realizing that like many lost people they had walked in a big circle and they were now about two miles behind Grandpa’s farm. They had circled all the way back to the southeast.
When they reached the pond Robert built a small fire and they heated a can of baked beans, all that was left of their food supplies. She ordinarily didn’t like them but on this evening they were delicious. They snuggled up in the sleeping bag near the fire where Grandpa found them at dawn.
Catherine remembered this fondly twenty-five years after the fact. Mother drove out to pick them up. She had a black eye. Dad had pounded on her until she called the deputy who hauled Dad off to the jail in Livingston where he would be spending a second night. He never forgave her for the public shame of this.
Catherine tilted the urn to the side and dumped out the rest of the ashes into the water. Her finger touched what was obviously a piece of vertebra and she felt a chill. She felt oddly serene sitting there until she thought that she must go back to the house and feed Tim his lunch. Hud was asleep, tired from his night of wandering. She would have Clyde build a pen to contain him at night when he wasn’t sleeping inside because of bad weather. He was having a pretty good life with her and little Tim and now Lola who was obsessed with sweeping the floors. Hud already fawned over Lola and Catherine remembered the man’s joke about interspecies love as she passed the chicken yard. There she had sat in the second grade, making notes outside the henhouse while sitting on the milk stool.
Chapter 6
When she got home and took in her luggage there was a note stuck on the door from her father which she put off reading because she was moving her camping cot out to the chicken coop. She meant to spend her first night home in the company of her beloved chickens, a somewhat eccentric means of returning to normal.
She read her father’s note with a luncheon tuna fish sandwich mostly because he hated tuna. The note was a shock and written on Best Western stationery because he was staying there until he found a place. Her brother Robert had stopped for a visit while hitchhiking from Los Angeles to New York City. The visit was “highly wretched” and “insulting.” Robert warned him that he was going to burn the house down. “I said but you left a whole room of your precious books here. That seemed to give him pause so I didn’t call the police about it. We drank a whole bottle of gin together and things further degenerated. That night he did burn the house right to the ground. I barely got out alive but was awakened by the heavy odor of gasoline. I got both dogs out but lost my precious collection of shotguns and antique maps. The police found Robert asleep in a ditch about ten miles east of town. He is now incarcerated in the county jail. I asked the prosecutor to press all charges. He should be locked up for life. Sad to say this grand home would have been yours when I am deceased.”
She called the jail in the county seat about twenty miles distant in Livingston. Yes, she could visit Robert until five that afternoon. She had actually always disliked the house. It had been owned by a minor railroad baron. There’s nothing new, she thought, about “conspicuous consumption,” as Thorstein Veblen called it. Her friends thought it was haunted. It was dour, gloomy, and even smelled ancient. When young she had found a small secret room in the basement which was a fine place to hide her pathetic secret belongings though no one was looking.
Her night on the cot in the chicken coop was very pleasant. Of course it smelled of chickens and chicken shit but she was used to that and had missed it. She brought out a book to read but didn’t touch it. She just wanted to be in the dark hearing the soft murmur of clucking hens. Were it not for the beauty of the ocean and the fishing she certainly wouldn’t think of Florida again. She had long been curious about France and also Mexico. If she went to France she could stop in London and see her grandparents, also drive up to see Harold and Winnie and of course Tim. But for now it was so nice to be home she doubted she’d want to leave again.
She petted a couple of chickens that came close out of curiosity about their guest. She dropped off into the deepest of sleep and when she woke at dawn two were roosting down by her feet on the cot. She was utterly charmed and laughed at which point they stared at her. It was so pleasant to be totally accepted by other creatures. Once she had met a man who had raised an Alaskan brown bear since infancy. Even when the bear was in its late teens it still had to be hugged at least twice a day. It had died recently at the weight of fifteen hundred pounds. She had a photo on her bulletin board of them hugging, the bear’s massive head at least five times the size of the man’s. The bear seemed to be smiling. She went inside and prepared to drive to Livingston to see Robert. There was a note from Clara, a message from the family doctor that her father was in the hospital and was quite ill. She called in and discovered he had had another stroke and was not expected to survive. She felt a bit of relief as his life depressed her. He did nothing but walk his dogs a short distance and drink a quart of gin every day. He was kind to her now but they had no real conversations. She called her mother in Palm Beach who said she was not coming back to Montana at “gunpoint” to see her dead ex-husband.
“He’s not dead yet,” Catherine said.
“He is to me,” she said, hanging up. She called back immediately. “I’m so sorry but it’s been wonderful being rid of that pompous wanker. It was only good when you and I were out on the farm without him. Meanwhile I want to go to France and Jerry doesn’t want to. Will you go with me? It would be free for you.”
“I’ll think about it. I have a farm to run.” Catherine had always wanted to go to Paris but her first impulse was that traveling there with her mother would be insufferable. Catherine didn’t want to go but then she didn’t have much in the way of spare money. The money her father should have left her had all been spent or drunk away.
Chapter 7
The trip to see Robert in jail didn’t go well. It was a forlorn and ugly place. She was escorted by a deputy and when the prisoners made smutty remarks as they passed he would smack on their bars with a nightstick. She sat on a folding chair and watched Robert doze on his cot. He awoke slowly glancing at her as if in disbelief.
“When you get out of jail you’re welcome out at the farm,” she said.
“You’re the farmer not me. I’m a city-billy.”
“I got you a good lawyer.”
“Don’t bother. I already saw the jerk. Don’t spend your money. I’ll get a public defender.”
“They’re talking about a three-to-five-year sentence.”
“I’ll commit suicide before I go to prison.” He didn’t seem unhappy announcing this.
“Don’t say that Bobby.”
“It’s true. It seems like we were okay until all of that yelling and boozing started.”
“Our father is on his deathbed right now.”
“Good. It’s too bad he didn’t die when we were kids. What an asshole. I’m sorry I burned your house down.”
“I don’t care. I never liked that house. I think my marble collection is still in my room in the basement.”
“They might be okay. I don’t think marbles burn. I want to go to South America.”
“Why?”
“I want to go to the pampas where there are no people and kick this drug thing. Maybe chase cows on horseback.”
“I’ll loan you the fare,” she said, her heart wrung with despair. He seemed small and pathetic in the jail cell. “You burned up your books in the house. That’s too bad.”
“I don’t want to read anymore. I’m going to write a book called O Mein Papa.” He laughed.
When she left the jail she wanted to vomit over what fathers and mothers did to their children. How had she escaped? Her chickens helped.
Chapter 8
One afternoon a few months later she got home and heard a cow bellowing in distress in the far pasture near the woodlot. She trotted way out there as quickly as possible noting near the horse trough that all that was left of her precious dead hen was a clump of feathers. A present to the ubiquitous coyotes. She made a mental note to call about getting an Airedale from a farmer who raised them. A big male would keep the coyotes out of the barnyard before they got bold enough to start picking off chickens in the daylight.
She reached the bellowing cow along the creek and saw that her calf was stuck in the mud in an eddy of the creek and on the verge of drowning. She jumped in without a thought and wrestled the little calf up onto the bank. The calf licked her face then started nursing from its mother who had trotted over. Catherine had trouble getting out of the mud herself and lost a tennis shoe. She walked all the way home with one foot bare and quite sore by the time she reached the pump house attached to the back door. She remembered that early every summer it took a few weeks for bare feet to toughen up before they were comfortable, and she supposed she was getting an early start.
She impulsively called an ob-gyn doctor she knew quite well in Livingston. She kept thinking about pregnancy but maybe she was fallow and incapable of being a mother. Was this why it hadn’t worked before? There was a cancellation early the next morning and she promised to be there. If she could be fertile all she needed was the right man or at least an acceptable man. She knew above all else it was wounded Tim over in Cornwall but then his sensitivities prevented him from being counted on. They corresponded now and then in letters that were decidedly nonromantic. He felt good that he had lost his left hand rather than his right so he could still write a letter. He never mentioned that he was using the prosthetic devices that her grandmother had spoken of in her note. When she made the mistake of mentioning Tim to her father once, he judged that losing a limb would always be an embarrassment. He said that it “unmanned” him. This concept missed her as a woman but then so-called male pride had been one of her father’s most obnoxious shortcomings.
She had a difficult night full of baby dreams and woke asking herself was she daft? Something in her answered no. It was an inexplicable urge. At the doctor’s office she was roundly teased by her ob-gyn friend for bringing her a dozen eggs. She explained that she wanted a baby but no husband. She could afford it.
“What if it’s a little boy who needs a daddy to teach him baseball?”
“I can play baseball. I’ll teach him.” In fact Catherine was a good athlete. “I can also teach him to hunt.”
“Have you chosen your rooster yet?”
“No, that’s the problem. Finding a father.”
“So I noticed.” Liz the obstetrician was perpetually in search of a new man in her life. She was more than a bit stocky which didn’t seem to help. She kept a fireman and a carpenter on a sexual string by cooking grand meals for them. She knew very well that dieting might help but she was a fine cook and looked at food as the only compensation for her wretched life far from her homeland of Chicago. The town was a bit scandalized by her behavior but she was the best obstetrician around, and one of the few women in the field in the entire country.
Catherine had gone on a three-day trip to Chicago with her the year before. It was hard to wedge in everything that needed eating from delicatessen food to outsize rib steaks. Catherine had to pass on the last dinner and it was a full week at home before she had fully recovered. That last evening alone had been lovely. It was April and stayed light fairly late. They had a small suite at the Drake and she could see wondrous Lake Michigan out three different windows. She had always meant to drive around it. She merely sat in an easy chair gazing at it until she slept.
They sat and chatted, Liz explaining the technical aspects of conception from zygote to blastocyst. When the doctor mentioned eggs Catherine was visibly startled.
“What’s wrong?”
“I haven’t thought consciously about my eggs since high school.” It unnerved Catherine to know that the eggs she hadn’t appreciated might now prevent her from having a baby.
They laughed but Catherine felt a nonspecific unrest that continued as she drove home. Before she went into the house she fed the chickens a goodly amount of late afternoon scratch. She didn’t want to think about eggs so she naturally thought about eggs. She thought about eggs through a long sleepless night. At 5:00 a.m. she poured herself a big clear glass of wine and sat by the window and waited for the reassurance of dawn. Her father’s doctor called as early as was permissible to say her father had died in the night. She felt nothing. The death didn’t stop her from thinking about eggs and she was beginning to feel cursed so she took a very long walk at dawn. At the far end of the west pasture there was a good-size rock pile that reminded her of a heap of eggs from a distance. Eggs again. She thought of riding on the stone boat behind Grandpa’s team gathering rocks years before.
On her way back to the house she admonished herself for this silliness about eggs. That helped as recognizing absurdity lightens its load. She pondered the brutal simplicity of the human body, at the same time its intricacy. Liz had said that her only religious feelings came directly from her work. How could it all be an accident? Catherine couldn’t relate. She had prayed back during the Blitz that a bomb wouldn’t land on her head and it hadn’t. It seemed fair to pray for others but not yourself. She had prayed back in Sunday school that her father wouldn’t hit Robert but that prayer hadn’t been answered. She had so dreaded his funeral that she was tempted to call the funeral home to say she was ill and couldn’t attend. No one would be there except the divorcée and a few old hunting friends, she had thought. Then she remembered that it was the opener for trout fishing and the weather was fair so those men would likely be fishing. It saddened her that her father had had so few people to draw around him.
She was having a rough day and napped for a half hour after her long walk. Unfortunately a nightmare came with the long nap. She was in a great marble hall and the floor was covered with eggs. The floor was tilted slightly and the eggs were rolling slowly and gently toward an altar she must reach. She stepped on a few and the crackle under her feet was repulsive to her in her sleep. She slipped and fell and broke a dozen more.
She awoke in a sweat and quickly dismissed the idea of making an egg salad sandwich for lunch. Farm people were forever trying to use up their extra eggs, even in their potato salad, but not today. She drew a chuck patty from the freezer and also a rib steak to thaw for dinner. The beef came from a prime steer they had butchered last December. The meat was wonderful and she split it with Clyde and his wife and children who were thrilled. Truly fine beef is out of nearly everyone’s range. Her butcher had space to hang the carcass for forty days which increases flavor and all the shrinkage is only water. She was still full of agita about eggs which gave rise to the idea of getting a hysterectomy and living and dying childless. Instead she called her travel agent and booked a plane passage to England for March, to see her putative lover. He certainly didn’t think of himself that way.
She was getting forgetful as if she were far older than she was. She had reserved a puppy and then neglected to pick it up at the owner’s. She knew she should have waited until she got home from England to get the pup but she also knew the owner wouldn’t tolerate further delay. She had read altogether too much on the subject of puppy raising and she knew she should be present for the first few weeks to properly imprint it but then she wanted a dog not a science project. She would have accepted her father’s Belle but he had left the dog to a sporting friend.
When she got to the dog owner’s house the pups were in a small pole barn to protect them from rain. The mother wagged her tail in friendly greeting but Catherine’s choice, a male, rushed out as if to tear them apart. He was defending his two little sisters, or so he thought, against humans. The man picked him up and gave him a little shake, then held him for a minute. He handed the dog to Catherine and he growled lightly then flopped back in her arms and closed his eyes, another male sucker for a hugging.
“I’ve been calling him Hudley or Hud. You know, after the movie when Melvyn Douglas says to his son Paul Newman, ‘Hud, you’re no damn good.’ Of course now he’s your dog so you can call him what you like.”
“I think Hud is a good name,” she said. She was a little embarrassed because the dog was getting a tiny erection.
“He never does that with me,” the man laughed. “It’s interspecies love.”
Hud resisted being put in the crate for the ride home and wailed when they were in motion. About a mile down the gravel road she pulled over and let him out. He scrambled into the front seat and glared as if to say, “This is where I belong.” She could already see he wasn’t going to be easy though he sat on the front seat like a gentleman, short of snarling at some cows they passed. At home she fed the chickens which he ignored. The owner had had chickens and said that he had been trained to leave them alone. The exception was that the rooster strutted up and pecked him in the ass. This meant war. Hud growled and attacked. The rooster escaped by flying over the fence and landed at the edge of the water trough. She grabbed the pup, swatted him on the ass, and said, “No” loudly. He lay in the dirt obviously feeling wronged. She took him to the pump shed attached to the back door of the house which she had planned as his quarters. There were several old blankets and pillows arranged in a corner. She fed him a large bowl of puppy chow which he wolfed then arranged him on his bed. He promptly went to sleep as if he had done a long day’s work.
She made her own dinner of fried breaded pork steak with cayenne and garlic in the flour. It was a distinctly lower-class dish which she had always loved. She also made broccoli in penance but did it Oriental style which made it nearly edible. Later that evening she was rereading some Evan S. Connell when Hudley starting howling on the back porch. She went out and said, “No” and slammed the door. Soon enough he resumed his howling and she called the owner in desperation. He admitted that all the pups had regularly slept on his daughter’s bed. “You’re going to have to gut it out,” the owner insisted, and he would finally learn to sleep alone. The owner put Catherine on the line with his daughter which led to nothing. The daughter finally said, “What’s wrong with Hud sleeping with you? You aren’t married, are you? He wants companionship. Don’t you?” Catherine let that one pass. The pup howled intermittently until midnight when Catherine quit reading and decided on bed. Tomorrow she would take Hud on a very long walk and tire him out. She would exhaust him and then he would sleep normally.
The minute she got into bed he started the worst howling yet. She figured he had seen the crack of light under the door of the dining room go out. She lasted only about ten minutes until she went out and got him and plopped him on the bed. He had an air of victory and she thought you asshole. It might be difficult to have a male houseguest. He snuggled up against her chest uncomfortably like a baby. He was immediately asleep and in the morning was in the same place snoring softly. She eased out of bed and he quickly followed her into the kitchen. She made herself two boiled eggs and cracked two for Hud which she mixed with his puppy chow to give him a shiny coat, as the puppy book encouraged. He ate his breakfast in seconds and slumped down in the blankets of the pump house and fell back asleep. Evidently the place was good enough for naps. She tiptoed out and went to the kitchen table and read poetry for half an hour, a long-held morning habit. She was currently reading an anthology of Chinese poetry. She had long loved Chinese poetry because it soothed her in a way other poetry didn’t. For instance Auden but especially Wallace Stevens could trouble her. Read them in the morning and then you had to carry the puzzle with you all day.
Her good intentions double-crossed her again. She walked Hud on a long circular route out through the pasture. She estimated she had walked him five miles in two hours before he collapsed on the ground. It took a few minutes for her to figure out that he wanted to be carried which was awkward though they made it to the rock pile for a rest. He saw a black snake and he was immediately enraged, pursuing the snake until it disappeared within the rocks. She yelled, “No.” There were no rattlers on the farm but enough in the rock cliffs two miles behind it that she wanted to discourage any interest he had in snakes. Many people had lost small dogs to rattlers though a big dog could usually withstand the bite of a western diamondback. Her father had always carried a small.22 pistol loaded with magnum BB shot to plug them in the head but then she didn’t want to kill anything. It made more sense to train the dog to keep away from them. He ignored the cows, probably thinking that they were too large to be understood. It was quite funny when curious cows followed him until he was batty with anger. The cow and puppy were nose to nose with the cow ignoring the snarls with no idea that she might be under attack from a thirty-pound puppy.
They were still a mile from home when Hud nestled in the grass demanding to be carried. He truly was still a baby, she thought, picking him up in her arms. When she reached the water trough she dropped him in because he was soiled from rolling in the dirt and manure in the pasture. He was furious paddling around growling. When she lifted him out and put him down he ran into the barnyard and rolled in dirt and chicken shit until he was suitably soiled and smelled interesting on his own terms. She knew that a daffy woman in the county seat had an obedience school for dogs and it was obvious that Hud should be enrolled. She got him in the pump house and washed him off with two wet, hot washcloths telling him, as he growled out of dislike for being washed, that if he was going to sleep with her like any male he couldn’t be a stinker. When she was little her brother Robert screamed and cried when Mother washed his hair. Now Robert was doing three to five in the Deer Lodge prison. She had gotten him a good lawyer but he had been impertinent and insulting to the judge, not a good idea. She remembered with amusement the story of an old cowboy down the road who had been arrested for drunk and disorderly yelling at the judge, “Kiss my ass you bald-headed son of a bitch. Come down off that bench and I’ll kick your ass all over the courtroom.” He did extra time but was much admired by the many louts in the area.
Hud slept off his hike and Catherine made a beef stew with a lard crust. Her grandmother had taught her the crust for stews, pie, and her signature chicken potpie which Catherine hadn’t quite mastered and often craved. The only ones that had come close were in Jewish delicatessens in New York City. She would treat herself to one when she had the New York City blues from too little sunlight and too many people. Another option when she was feeling lethargic was to take the subway with her Jewish roommate down to Houston Street and go to Russ and Daughters for half a dozen pieces of herring then walk awhile, then down the street to Katz’s for a monster corned beef, tongue, or pastrami sandwich. Compared with Katz’s they simply didn’t know how to make a sandwich in Montana.
A month later she had her hired man Clyde come in the kitchen for a meeting. He was nervous and fretful so she put his mind at ease explaining that she had to go to England so it would be better if he stayed in the house rather than his wife since she now had Hud who could be unmanageable. He had been a champ in his obedience classes but saw no application of what he learned there to his life at home. He had killed a woodchuck out by the barn and hidden it in a very thick grove of lilacs in front of the house. She had tried to crawl in to get the woodchuck away from him but failed. The woodchuck stank and Hud seemed prepared to run with his prize. Right now she was irked at the way Hud was fawning over Clyde’s leg as if he were a long-lost cousin. It was an absurd case of male bonding. Clyde said that he would be glad to stay here and look after Hud and then they took off for a stroll around the barnyard.
Catherine took a hasty shower and noted in the bedroom’s full-length mirror that she was becoming a little thin. That wouldn’t do because she knew Tim didn’t like skinny women. It was a week before her departure and she vowed to load up on fatty pasta recipes. When she saw a pregnant woman at the grocery she was shot full of jealousy. She came home and put a pork shoulder in a pot of marinara sauce with lots of garlic to slow cook so that the meat and fat would soften making a wonderful pungent sauce for rigatoni. She had learned the recipe from a rather tubby red-haired Italian in New York who worked as a chef. He was an energetic lover but she had to ditch him because he drank too much and she had the horrid memory of her parents. She stuck to modest amounts of wine herself, white in the summer and red when the weather cooled. She naturally worried about addiction. Look at her miserable brother and drugs. He had merely stepped across the abyss of his parents’ alcoholism to narcotics.
Chapter 9
When she landed at Heathrow via Chicago her grandfather was waiting with the same big Jamaican driver from his job. She was tired but quite happy. On the way to his home they stopped at the Tube station where she had spent the Blitz so she could take a look. All the memories depressed her though she was now over thirty and that had been when she was twelve. A memory returned of a man holding a knife to her and making her blow him in a dark corner one day while the night guards were off duty and her grandparents were away. She gagged on his penis then vomited after he ejaculated. She had told no one and tried to repress the memory, not wanting to cause more trouble than they already had. Now when she saw the dark corner again she felt cold sweat rising to the skin of her forehead.
She had a pleasant five days with her grandparents who looked awfully old and she promised to stop back after she visited Harold, Winnie, and Tim. Her grandmother understood but her grandfather worried that she would break her heart over the amputee. She rented a car and drove out to Cornwall with no difficulty on a beautiful sunny day. Grandmother had made her a brisket sandwich with horseradish, one of her favorites, and she pulled off on a side road and ate while staring at a field of just-sprouted oats on the side of the road and horses on the other including some rambunctious fillies to whom her stopping was an important event. They ran up to the stone fence and she touched their little noses and warm necks. She was thrilled to the point of shivering. She had talked on the phone to Clyde who had had no trouble with Hud. His behavior had been perfect except he had killed the rooster after it pecked at his face. The rooster was an asshole like all his predecessors so Catherine didn’t really care. She would get another one when she needed chicks. Hud had run into the lilac thicket with his kill but Clyde had retrieved the rooster and stewed it. He told her that while he was growing up in a big poor family his father had a connection for cheap roosters, and as a little boy he’d learned to pluck them. They were a tad gamier than hens but certainly edible, especially stewed with biscuits on the side.
She spent a couple of days at Harold and Winnie’s, all the while staring at Tim’s place a mile down the road. She had confided in Winnie who was sympathetic. “The point is if you can afford a baby,” Winnie had said. “Why have a husband when they love to act like they don’t have wives when they’re away?” She finally called Tim early the next morning. He hadn’t answered her last two letters but she knew it was hard for him. The phone rang six times before he picked up and she thought of him shuffling to answer it on crutches. He sounded melancholy indeed but said this was a good day to visit because his parents would be away for their annual quarrel with the tax assessor.
She put on a short skirt in hopes of sexually intriguing him but then it seemed too obvious and in the end she went for a skirt that was a little longer. It was nearly a half hour walk. Her feet got wet and she had to wind her way through two thick hedges and crawl over an awkward stone wall. Their sheepdog came out halfway and happily greeted her after a single bark. He bore a striking resemblance to the dog years before who thought he was Tim’s guardian. All the way on her walk she became more and more angry about the irrationality of war. The more than eight hundred thousand casualties at Verdun. A whole generation of young French had passed on and England also came close to losing a generation. She had grown up in the shadow of the two world wars and she sometimes could not bear to read the poets. “I have a rendezvous with death” indeed. Millions died.
Tim was shy and withdrawn at first as she sat on a swing on the back porch. His arm stump fitted in a slot on the crutches and one of his legs was pegged. She sat facing him listening to the chattering birds and sipping coffee and trying to use her bare legs to advantage. He relented and they made their way into his bedroom. In the next six days they made love a couple of times a day. His parents at first pretended not to notice her presence and then welcomed her warmly. On her last day he looked at her oddly.
“You look a little smug.”
“I’m trying to get pregnant by you.” And then she confirmed everything.
“But why me? Find yourself a husband.”
“I don’t want a husband except you. I just want a baby to raise.”
He was overwhelmed and began weeping, and barely uttered, “I don’t want you to spend your life taking care of me.”
“But why, if I love you? I want to marry you this afternoon.” Her voice quivered never having said “I love you” before.
“Everybody’s sympathy wears out,” he choked.
She kissed him and walked home where she had a stiff drink of Harold’s whiskey. God damn the world and its wars, she thought. Those who start the wars never die in them. She packed hastily, had supper with Winnie and Harold, read, and went to sleep, getting up early for the drive to London. Winnie got up and made her breakfast and a sandwich for the trip. Country people everywhere were suspicious of restaurants with many stories of a fly in the soup.
When she reached London her grandmother was off shopping for dinner and her grandfather looked at her quizzically, saying, “You look blue.” It came out in a rush from her sexual abuse in the subway to Tim’s refusal to marry her. Her grandfather did the best he could to soothe her. Way back then her abuser had been a braggart and Frederick the Jamaican found out and had pushed the man in front of a train. She was stunned, wondering if the man deserved to die for his sins. She was not a vindictive person but maybe it would save other girls. She and Frederick agreed not to tell anyone else. About Tim her grandfather said, “One of the ironies of war is that it makes the severely wounded feel worthless. There is no reward for them.”
Catherine took a long walk. There was still stray rubble here and there from the Blitz but in general the city was in good shape. She loved walking along the Thames, however dirty. She noted that many of the mansions along Cheyne Walk had been totally reconditioned by the magic of lots of money. She chided herself for her hopeless guilt about war and history and being a woman not called to help or protect Tim in battle. Now they could have nothing.
Chapter 10
Catherine was home on the farm for a month before the momentous discovery that she was pregnant. She danced and shrieked in the obstetrician’s office. The doctor was amazed and happy for Catherine.
At home although it was a cool day she danced herself into a sweat while feeding the chickens. Hud ran around barking and snapping at her heels. He clearly disapproved of this behavior that had nothing to do with him. Dogs prefer that we behave the same way every day. If we don’t, maybe we’ll forget to feed them! Even the hens scattered in alarm. She had to acknowledge it was pleasanter without the rooster.
When finished with her dancing Catherine knelt and comforted Hud and then threw the hens extra scratch for putting up with her. She took Hud for a little walk about a hundred yards behind the barn to a small pond and a bone pit where her grandfather had dragged the carcasses of dead animals, cows and pigs. Hud loved the pile of ancient bleached bones still with their scent of meat. He had also eaten a muskrat from the pond. Catherine couldn’t catch him and he wasn’t about to give up a trophy merely because she said, “Drop it.”
She had some worries about pregnancy and child care despite the stack of books she had accumulated. It was easy to recall that books and classes hadn’t helped with Hud. He would heel when they walked the gravel road and a vehicle was coming but then there was a real urgency in her voice. He greeted “come, sit, stay” with a yawn. Dogs are good judges of intention in the voice. Also he had a terrier’s bad temper and sometimes a “come” would cause him to glare at her and back into the shrubbery. Yelling didn’t help. It seemed to him to mean that he had won the round. He was a free radical, pure and simple. He was wildly appreciative when she returned from the store or wherever as if he might have been abandoned. The most effective command was “cheese” because he loved a piece of cheddar.
The idea of eggs had followed her ever since her second-grade report on chickens and not always pleasantly. Eggs were the fundamental fact among all females in the mammalian and most other species. One of hers was currently fertilized for better or worse though it was what her heart wanted. Her old school friend Laura now had three children. She had once admitted in high school to Catherine that her cousins were always screwing her. But she was rather homely and was still faking mental problems so the high school boys ignored her. The point was that cousins were better than nothing, or so she said. This appalled Catherine who was a virgin at the time. When she even touched a boy’s penis he was always shooting all over the front seat and making a mess. Laura seemed to have turned out okay, or perhaps Catherine just wanted the children her friend and her husband had, seemingly without effort.
Catherine had figured out early on that people were primitive right below the surface. She remembered Gert telling her at eleven, A man will tell any kind of lie to make love to you. She couldn’t quite figure out her mother. When Catherine was a little girl they would drive out to the farm singing songs all the way. They were truly happy which made the decline more upsetting when her mother began drinking right along with her father in the late afternoons and early evenings. While Catherine was living in England Winnie told her how happy her mother had been when they became engaged. She would finally move from crowded London to an actual farm. Winnie said Alicia had spent most of every summer with her and Harold and worked like a man. She was born to be a farm girl and when she found out that he was lying the disappointment was fatal. And now she was in Palm Beach and Oyster Bay, the least farmlike places imaginable except the heart of Calcutta. The message to Catherine had been to go it alone as much as possible. Jerry’s lavish gifts had been very helpful but he didn’t know how helpful they were. Once when passing through by chartered jet, for he refused to fly commercial except to Europe, Jerry had stopped by for lunch and suggested to Catherine that he try to buy out her blowhard Texas neighbor. She asked him to wait as she wasn’t sure she could run such a large ranch.
Catherine took Hud for a little walk to shake off her dark mood and was amused when he hopelessly chased a jackrabbit that was much faster than he was. He finally slumped to the ground and looked like he was feeling sorry for himself after his failed game of catch, kill, and eat. It seemed that her life was accelerating in a direction she had chosen but at a speed she couldn’t quite emotionally encompass. Her mind felt quivery but tentatively sane. It reminded her of her junior year in college when she thought she was going nuts. Since she passably read Spanish she had agreed for a poetry class to write an essay on Lorca’s Poet in New York which was still fairly new at the time, maybe ten years since its publication shortly after the poet’s murder which had dumbfounded her. The project was unwise as the book drove her batty. She had loved Lorca’s Gypsy Ballads but had in error assumed this was the same kind of book, far indeed from the truth of the matter. What was a girl from Montana to make of a section named “Landscape of a Vomiting Multitude”? She tried to back out of the essay but the professor wouldn’t allow it because he was interested in what she had to say about the surrealism of the book. He was in his late sixties but was obviously sweet on her and said she must write the paper as he was curious about what she thought. In his office she sat in a low easy chair which she figured he had in order to look up the legs of girls, so she showed a lot of leg to tease the wicked old lecher.
What saved her on this project whose horrors had been exacerbated was the essay on duende that Lorca had written, which her professor encouraged her to read alongside. The essay made clear for the first time why she loved the kind of music and poetry she did. The art she loved had cante jondo, a ghostliness that drew out one’s most deep-seated emotions. It didn’t matter if it was Beethoven or Carlos Montoya simply playing the guitar which at one point had made her sob. Stan Getz would later touch her the same way. Perhaps it was strange in retrospect how utterly infatuated she had become with the poet after reading Gypsy Ballads. She had fantasies of making love to him on the bank of a river in Andalucía, then she discovered that he had been born gay and now was dead at the murderous hands of Franco’s men in Granada. She felt foolish for her heartbreak but then there are no limits to the emotional life.
Chapter 11
Her pregnancy was difficult. She had interminable bouts of morning sickness and after two months there was a horrifying letter from Winnie in England beginning with the ominous, “Tim’s parents asked me to write this letter.” Tim had committed suicide. What had happened was that Tim had taken a long walk and fallen half in the creek and couldn’t get up out of the mire.
A search party looked for him all night and only found him in the morning. He contracted severe pneumonia and was hospitalized. I visited him and he was proud to have made you pregnant. I helped him get a lawyer so he could provide for you and leave his armed services pension to the child. The pension is small but better than nothing. It helps that we have one from Harold’s perilous service in World War I. He still has difficulties from the mustard gas. Anyway, Tim was getting better but then he got a severe case of flu from the hospital air. He shrank to nothing. He saved up his pills in secret, took them all at once, and committed suicide. It was too much to ask him to stay alive. He was suffering horribly. I’m sorry to have to tell you this. He gave me this little note for you.
Winnie had enclosed the note which read, “I’m so happy that you are pregnant. I am sorry I won’t see the child. Maybe in the afterlife if there is one. I could no longer bear life as it is given me. I love you. Tim.”
She sat in the barnyard on the milk stool and wept for an hour or so which also made Hud moan and wail. She finally stopped and took him for a walk out in the pasture where he touched noses with the calves. They both seemed to enjoy this. Then he reverted to his true character and killed a harmless garter snake and ate it with evident relish. She would have to redouble her efforts to train him away from snakes.
She hoped to have twins and get childbearing over with in one effort. Two was the perfect number of children. François came out from Florida in the early fall. He was mortally disappointed that there would be no lovemaking for the time being. He said that he had driven two thousand miles for nothing to which she answered, “You might have called first.” She told him the whole story and broke down again at Tim’s suicide. He was consoling. He had brought along two female English setters, both spayed, and Hud was frantically interested but they both bit him, their “keep away” signal, and he seemed puzzled and hurt to have his affection painfully rejected. François had fine hunting for Hungarian partridge, sharp-tailed grouse, and a few ruffed grouse. They ate very well though she couldn’t drink any of the case of wine he brought aside from a sip or two because it made her queasy. He was a fine cook and she acted as sous-chef playing Mozart as always as she cooked. He stayed five days and she knew that she could make love but she had a terrifying fear of miscarriage. When he left he promised to visit every fall which made her happy.
She entered a long period of lassitude caused by the constant morning illness. She did nothing but read, and of late she reread the novels of Lawrence Durrell and Malcolm Lowry, two of her current favorites, and she continued with her many anthologies of Chinese poetry. She liked the Chinese notion that the most fortunate life was one in which nothing much happened. She liked to sit at the kitchen window and watch dawn arrive in the barnyard, pleased that the baby was making her fatter. She had been moderately slender and it was interesting to develop large breasts. She looked at them in the mirror and thought it would be nice to keep them around after the baby but such wasn’t possible. Jerry had offered to send her to any graduate school she wished if she wanted to become a lawyer or doctor. When she said she only wanted to be a farmer, he couldn’t quite believe this lack of ambition though all he himself had ever done was spend money. Ambition didn’t really trouble Catherine. Since earliest childhood she just wanted to be on a farm, like her mother except that Catherine had succeeded. Jerry every year was written up in socialite magazines as a high-net-worth individual but in Catherine’s mind that didn’t seem to do her mother any good, at least not as much as feeding the chickens did for Catherine. It was an antique question at best but the significant thing in life was whether or not your soul was at peace. Catherine felt hers was and now it looked like she was going to get to raise the child she so much wanted.
Chapter 12
In late fall Catherine’s mother showed up on only a few days’ notice, she said to “help with the baby” though it wasn’t due for another couple of weeks. Catherine was appalled at the presumption but prepared the upstairs bedroom her mother favored. Catherine had a very early memory of loving sleeping upstairs with her mother, how the stones she would heat up in cold weather would warm the bed. They would get up at 5:00 a.m., do chores with Grandpa, and then eat a big breakfast in the warm kitchen beside the wood range her grandparents cooked on. Catherine liked it best when Grandpa would squirt milk directly from the cow’s udder into the open mouths of the barn cats. She wanted to learn this trick as a little girl but her hands only became strong enough to milk a cow when she was older.
That first evening was enervating. She could see her mother’s depression through her face tight from plastic surgery. Earlier she had watched the sun go down through the kitchen window.
“This was what I always wanted and didn’t get.” Her voice was muted and without its usual hardness.
“It’s not too late. You’re only in your fifties,” Catherine replied.
Her mother gave her the look of one who had driven into a deep gully and never considered any alternatives for getting out. Like many women growing older she was an utter fatalist.
“I wrote many times to Robert in person apologizing and he finally answered saying he forgave me. But I’m unsure about forgiveness. Look what we did to him.”
“I’m unsure of why I survived and Robert didn’t. Dad picked on him and ignored me until Robert ran away. Then it was too late. When a child learns mistrust it’s hard to overcome it.” Catherine felt tears form in her eyes.
Her mother took a vodka shooter out of her purse and finished it in one swallow. “I still haven’t quit though the doctors said I must,” she said.
“Why do they want you to?”
“My liver is a mess among other things.”
“You better quit. It’s hard for a liver to recover.” Her mother actually looked very good for her age.
“I keep myself slim but what else can I do? We have servants for everything. Jerry hates it when I do dishes.”
“That’s absurd.”
“I know it. He grew up with a critical mother. He’s so worried that I might complain about something. I told him I was coming out here to help with the baby and buy a farm to fulfill my girlhood ambition. He said, ‘Go ahead.’ You of course know that your father broke his promise to me that we would live on a farm. He wanted to wear a tie and work in a bank. He said that he was belittled in school for being a farm kid.”
“I doubt that. What else is there around here but farm kids? A few army brats. Gas station owners. Grocery store owners and clerks.”
“I learned never to believe anything he said. Your grandfather despised him, said he was a chiseler. His own son. How could it be that his own son could redefine ineptitude?”
“Well, he wasn’t about a great hero, but. .” Catherine was uncomfortable speaking ill of the dead.
“When you two kids were little I should have grabbed you and run for it. It was cowardly I didn’t.”
Later that evening when Catherine went up to bed she wondered if her mother might be ill and had come on this visit to Montana as a last chance to ask for forgiveness. Catherine didn’t know what to think. She saw life as more of a constant whirl in which people often behaved horribly. What was the point of forgiving the early whirls? She knew she would forgive her if her mother asked, however, thinking there was nothing else to do. The past lives on in all of us. No matter how wronged we were the offenses were only the beaten-up junk of memory, pawed over until they were without color if still somehow alive. Late that evening her mother began weeping, she said over Robert in prison, but Catherine doubted it, thinking that it must be the entirety of life.
“We had such fun when I brought you out here as a little girl. At the time you treated the chickens as if they were the biggest mystery in life.”
“Maybe they are, along with humans. I liked going out to the dark barn with Grandpa at five a.m. Then when it got fully light I’d feed the chickens. I guess at heart we all like to be useful. Even now Hudley likes his breakfast early. If I don’t feed him by seven he starts barking like crazy.”
After her cereal next morning Mother took Hud for a walk to his beloved bone pile out behind the barn. Hud already adored her and they settled into a routine where she’d take him for his early morning walk. In the evenings he slept at the end of Alicia’s bed and warmed it up which meant she didn’t have to carry the warm stones up the steep stairs, but Hud would bark if she didn’t. It also meant that he no longer expected to sleep with Catherine which was a relief. He would trot up and down the stairs with her under the illusion that he was helping. She wouldn’t allow Catherine to give her a hand, saying her legs needed the exercise.
One morning while they were out Catherine called Jerry. He was appalled that her mother hadn’t told her yet that she had ovarian cancer and he hoped she would last long enough to help Catherine with the baby. After the baby was born they would meet at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota, to try and prolong her life. Jerry had hoped to help nurse her too but she said she was overrun with help. He hinted he would like to be invited out for a visit. Catherine said, “Come ahead,” and he was there in a few days. He came by private jet and they picked him up at the Texan’s landing strip next door. She still disliked the neighbor but money knew how to talk to money apparently.
Jerry was an immediate pain in the ass insisting that he have a new house built for Catherine and the baby. Catherine simply enough didn’t want it. She liked the old one but settled on Jerry having a master bedroom wing built with an adjoining room for the baby. The contractor was there in the morning. By the looks of Catherine’s belly time was of the essence so Jerry offered the contractor extra money for speed. The contractor broke into an easy smile seeing Christmas come early.
Jerry was so overbearing in looking after her mother that it drove both women batty. Luckily he became quite bored with the farm and said at the second dinner that he needed to fly to Key West. Catherine assumed it was to see his girlfriend. Jerry had drunk most of a bottle of Scotch that late afternoon and his slurred speech grated on her nerves. They were both enormously relieved in the morning when the Texan’s hired hand picked him up for his plane with its twelve seats and leather sofa. He was gaining a lot of weight and Catherine watched from the window as he waddled to the car. Catherine knew that he never read and wondered what he and her mother talked about. Recent purchases? She could see that age would eventually make him disgusting but with ovarian cancer her mother wouldn’t see it. She had obviously had bad luck with men when you overlooked Jerry’s wealth. Money was nearly meaningless to Catherine even though she knew she would enjoy a big bedroom and a baby room attached to the house. The door would be off the kitchen, her favorite room. She used to play cribbage at the kitchen table with a maiden great-aunt who lived her last year with the grandparents. She worked in Chicago as a young woman and when they played cards the radio in the evening was tuned to a station there. She nattered constantly about the beauty of Chicago and made Catherine promise to go there when she grew up. Catherine was even now embarrassed that when she had visited Chicago she stayed in the Drake where her maiden aunt had worked.
Of late Catherine who was not of a religious bent wondered what became of Tim after suicide. Christians would say that suicides went directly to hell, wherever that was. It was left over from Sunday school she supposed. Catherine was unsure of hell or an afterlife but thought his lifelong pain should count for something. She had watched a local man limping on the sidewalk. He had lost his toes to the cold in Korea. It could have been worse and local lazy people envied his disability payments. Something for nothing was the ultimate good as far as they were concerned. War was hardly nothing. She regretted not being able to help Clyde load the hay bales onto the wagon and then into the barn because of her pregnancy.
Mother wept for a couple of days and then in a torrent of garbled language apologized to Catherine for the abuses in her raising. The first duty, she said, of a mother is to protect her children, even from her husband. Her own husband had never gotten out of himself for even a moment. Once assured of Catherine’s forgiveness her mother declined dramatically as if this forgiveness had been her life’s work. Catherine called Jerry in Key West saying that the situation was serious. Jerry said he’d try to get away. She thought, From your fishing and adulterous fucking. Meanwhile, she had to get her mother several appointments with a psychiatrist in the county seat because she was plainly becoming daft. She would sit on the front porch talking to Robert who was obviously not there. She drove her mother the two hours to the prison to visit Robert but her mother couldn’t complete the mission. She vomited in the parking lot seeing the walls and razor wire fencing. She was catatonically angry. “Why put him here just because he burned that piece of shit house?” Catherine had tried to explain Robert’s refusal to fight for himself. By the time of the fire her ex-husband’s illusions had plainly gotten out of hand. He was pretending he was “old money” living in a grand home though he was borrowing gin money from hunting acquaintances. Catherine figured that his delusions came from a lifetime of hard drinking.
Chapter 13
Catherine drove Jerry and her mother to the Texan’s landing strip. The Texan had only dropped Jerry off the day before in his new Jeep Wagoneer. No one local would use a six-thousand-dollar vehicle to roam his ranch. Catherine was glad to see them leave, flying east to Rochester, Minnesota, to get her mother admitted to Mayo. Her mother sobbed piteously while boarding the plane because she couldn’t stay to help with the oncoming baby. Help by being a relentless pain in the ass? Catherine thought wryly. You couldn’t miss Jerry’s self-importance in boarding a private jet.
She daily felt heavier and more awkward but was pleased when the baby kicked in her womb. She could barely make her morning stroll with Hud out to the pond and boneyard behind the barn. One day it was cool and rainy and she refused to go and he actually wept until she relented, bundled in a sweater and raincoat. She reminded herself of the perils of starting habits with dogs. In the big pasture they had to go back every time to the rock pile where he had once almost but not quite caught a big black snake. He was obviously goaded by his failure.
Near the pond she sat on a big rock with a peculiar resemblance to a monster stone egg. It had been Catherine’s “magic” place since early childhood. When she frequently visited the farm with her mother she’d walk out to her stone egg when she was disturbed by anything and the stillness of the scene pacified her. How can you draw pure energy from a stone? It was possible for her. Later in life it occurred to her that in the serenity of the place she had arrived at a point of child meditation where her mind emptied itself of its enervating trash and she could identify with the pond and big pile of white cow bones. Now it amused her when Hud tried to pick up the pelvis of a cow skeleton. His jaws weren’t strong enough yet to pick it up but he had slowly dragged it about halfway to his trophy hideout in the front yard lilac grove. Such extreme effort for his own private reasons. Like a child he had his own collection of “stuff” whose importance was clear only to the owner.
She sat there on the stone egg and was flooded with rare sympathy for her mother. Her father’s promise of a farm in Montana was an outrageous lie and it was obvious that he’d never had any intention of keeping that promise. Her grandfather in England told her that her father was a “scoundrel.” Who in his right mind would rather run a tiny bank than be a farmer? This was during a long conversation during the Blitz. Her grandparents had urged their daughter early on to leave the bastard but along came Robert and her. Even his own parents were not that fond of him, preferring the company of Catherine’s mother. She was always absolutely welcome at the farm but it would have been a small town scandal had she moved out there permanently. Now Catherine believed that she should have. What did it really matter if her mother had embraced her singular desire? It was a brutal lesson indeed to both mother and daughter. To live at a distance of a half dozen miles from where your heart was.
As she sat there scratching Hud’s ears which he loved the worry about Tim was nagging at her, this idea that suicides must go to hell. It was maddening to worry about a person already dead and she couldn’t quite believe that God would add to the suffering of someone who had already suffered so much. To her the suicide had been an act of courage. To deny the self further existence when the self had been so rended. War waits to kill some.
She wanted to examine her religious beliefs and discard the ones that no longer made sense but it seemed difficult when she was this pregnant. She also perceived that to discard them wouldn’t be all that easy or simple. They were ingrained. When she was passionately religious as a young girl she read the Gospels over and over. By contrast the Old Testament was mean and foreboding. Why did King David so desire Bathsheba and send her husband away to be killed in battle? That seemed very mean-minded to her and Laura had agreed. And why did this great man peek at Bathsheba while she was bathing? This was definitely a sin she supposed. Even now she said her prayers before bed in the evening though they were quite abbreviated. She kept recalling her disappointment as a girl when she prayed that her parents would quit getting drunk and it hadn’t happened. She still believed devoutly in the Resurrection partly because it was such a glorious, magical idea to rise from the dead with the spike scars in your hands and feet. She knew that a belief in magic was quite common among her friends, even her Sunday school teacher who claimed to have seen several ghosts.
Now to Catherine the magic of life was in the spectacular assortment of species. Even at this moment she saw the nose of a muskrat rise above the surface of the pond. Hud also saw it and sitting beside her quivered with excitement but then he was thinking of a wild meal. She had read that some people ate muskrats from the river in Detroit, Michigan, but then she had also read that poor people in the Southwest ate donkeys during the Depression. Why God had decided not to stop her parents’ drinking was the early question that stuck with her. It seemed a simple request but then that was long before she knew anything about addiction. She herself had been truly drunk only once on her college graduation night and felt badly for three days which prevented her from doing it again. It had competed with the preposterous discomfort of being nearly nine months pregnant. She had read once about a woman who bore eighteen children which now seemed thoroughly incomprehensible even if she had been a cow.
Chapter 14
Catherine summoned Clyde one Sunday morning for a somewhat formal meeting on the farm after her walk. She needed him to spend more time around her place in case she fell and delivered the baby on the ground. The obstetrician had warned her to be more cautious about her walking for the time being.
In fact Catherine was finding walking difficult now. Her legs and feet hurt from the extra weight. She thought now that one baby would certainly be enough. She kept recalling how she had ruined walking for a while way back when she was doing the Lorca project in college. The poet had obviously spent a great deal of time walking around the city for Poet in New York and her plan was to imitate the tactic. One morning she started out on 112th Street and walked all the way to Washington Square in the Village where she felt lucky to hear a very good violinist play a Paganini piece that was a little beyond him but not by far. He smiled as spectators filled his open violin case with money. A dapper old man dropped in a twenty and the musician broke into a grin.
Now back at the farm Clyde seemed nervous like all of the poor about a good job. He finally blurted out that when Jerry was here he had stopped by and asked Clyde if he thought he could handle managing the Texan’s ranch in addition to Catherine’s farm. Clyde thought it over briefly and said yes because the Texan’s ranch was a basic cow operation where you turned bulls loose every year and then waited to see how many new calves you got. Of course there were a thousand somewhat complicated details but none that Clyde couldn’t handle.
Catherine felt up in the air about the whole business though she knew it would be good for Clyde making him a big shot manager of a large ranch. The poor are always saying, “I’d like a break that is not my neck.” So she told Clyde she was pleased for him. She couldn’t add that she could barely stand the sight of Jerry. But then she predicted to herself that he wouldn’t be out that often. His sport was buying, not maintaining what he bought. He might go to one Cattlemen’s meeting to strut a bit and that would largely be it. She told Clyde to make sure he kept a good set of books because the rich thrive on the suspicion that they are being swindled.
Chapter 15
When she went into labor Clyde drove her to the new little hospital in Livingston (her mother had insisted she go to the big hospital in Bozeman but as usual she ignored her). The pains were still far apart and she noticed that it was December 7, the anniversary of Pearl Harbor. If it was a daughter maybe she should name it “Pearl” but then she never had cared for the name. Catherine had been so consumed by the Blitz she never thought about Pearl Harbor except once she had seen a photo of a big ship the Japanese had sunk and couldn’t imagine it on the ocean floor.
It was a long delirious day until early in the evening when she gave birth, a difficult breech birth, to a boy. She held the homely little runt for a few minutes and thought of the William Blake line, “Little lamb, who made thee.” She was still possessed with some of the horrifying aspects of giving birth, hallucinating herself as a huge, opening tropical flower with a fatally injured core. She wondered if that meant she was dying and she would see Tim in the afterlife but was quite relieved when it didn’t happen and they brought her the cottage cheese she had requested. Birth was hard work and she was hungry. She recalled when she finally reached Greenwich Village one day on a particularly long hike for Lorca she went to a little Italian place she knew and had pasta with marinara and one big meatball. She relished it. Typical of her obstinacy she turned around and walked all the way back, the last hour in a steady chilly rain so she returned to the apartment with aching legs in the guise of a wet dog. Her roommate was appalled and put her to bed after a bowl of chicken soup. She woke the next morning with shin splints, unable to walk to class. There’s something in cement that doesn’t love a foot, she thought, but New Yorkers must get used to it. You certainly don’t get shin splints walking in a pasture.
She called her mother. Alicia wasn’t doing well at all according to Jerry who answered the phone. She told him she had named the baby Tim. He congratulated her and her mother came on the line for a few minutes and in a weak voice said, “I wish I were there to help you.”
Chapter 16
It was a tough winter with the baby who had colic. Only dancing would slow his crying. She questioned her indomitable will to reproduce deciding its origins were too far beneath the skin to comprehend. Clyde’s wife Clara and her two daughters came over and stayed a couple of weeks to help out. The older daughter Laurel said she didn’t like babies but she turned out to be the most helpful with little Tim. He had lost the red face of a newborn and now was pale with black hair like his father. Catherine had given the baby all that she was and then some. As she had with Tim. She felt unbearably depressed, the so-called “baby blues,” so she took a lot of vitamins and made sure she at least walked out to the pond and back every morning. It seemed to improve slightly with the solstice and on sunny winter days, of which there are many in Montana, she clocked the ever so slight increase of light with the specific shadows of the barn. She remembered from her childhood that after the hard work of autumn, harvest and butchering, everyone became happier after the solstice and the long, sure trek toward spring. Her solstice reverie was interrupted by a big blizzard at Christmas and she was relieved she was well stocked with groceries and didn’t have to drive anywhere. She felt especially sorry for those who felt compelled to make long driving trips for Christmas.
Nursing was a great pleasure. She was becoming too thin and devised ways to make up for it. She mentioned aloud that she so missed the sausages of her grandparents who were fine sausage makers, burying their product in a huge crock of pig fat to preserve it like the French do their confit. Clyde told her there was a new, cranky young butcher in Livingston. The roads were still bad but she had bought a big diesel pickup for the farm and he returned with five pounds of sausage and a big beef roast for Christmas dinner. It was a happy occasion and Catherine made Yorkshire pudding as her mother had done. Her mother had been a deeply mediocre and hasty cook, and her ability further declined the more she drank. Catherine had noticed that the good cooks she knew saved their drinks for after the dishes were prepared except men at the barbecue, a great deal easier than any of them were prone to admit. Following a few principles they managed even when half drunk.
Jerry called to say Mother had died Christmas Day at Mayo. This was three days later but he said he hadn’t wanted to ruin her Christmas. They might have been able to prolong things a little longer but she had a horror of oxygen and feeding tubes and had asked them when it reached that point to “pull the plug.” Jerry also said she had written a note asking that her ashes be strewn on the pond behind the barn, and that she wanted Catherine to do it.
Unlike with her father Catherine wept for a while. When she was a little girl she and her mother would have picnics on the pond, squinting their eyes and pretending it was a big lake. On the especially hot days of summer they would bathe in the pond which was sandy around the edges. Only when not around her husband could her mother be utterly pleasant. Catherine mourned what might have been. She was convinced now that her mother should have taken her and Robert back to England and raised them in London. Her parents had offered to take them in, she later told Catherine, which was what led to their visit before war broke out.
Her obstetrician had sent her an antique Lakota papoose for Christmas and she packed Tim warmly inside for morning walks. Her neighbor had cleared her driveway with his tractor and plow and she had him scrape out an area to throw feed to the chickens. She had a small stroller for Tim and shoveled a path from the house for the stroller. By March Tim’s first laughter had been at the chickens. Hud, who was getting much larger, would sit beside the stroller as if he were a guard, typical of the breed, and growl deeply at approaching chickens who feared him.
In April on a warmish day the snow seemed to be melting. Catherine was out in the barnyard with Tim having a sandwich and feeding him a jar of pureed peaches, watching the nearly mature hatchlings driving each other batty. Tim watched them closely and didn’t stop smiling. She held him up at the fence so he could touch the soft noses of the horses and a single very docile calf. Clyde had come by with three piglets to raise good pork for the two households. She had long figured out that supermarket pork wasn’t nearly as tasty as what her grandfather had home raised and butchered. It would cost money to feed them as you couldn’t grow corn easily in this high, dry climate. Hud growled and the piglets shrank back in the pen. Tim reached out for them but Catherine held him back thinking they might mistake his little hand for food. Three days later one of the piglets got out but only trotted over to nibble corn scratch with the chickens. Tim was gleeful and Hud furious. She said, “Hud, no,” to his growling. She was able to pet the piglet and scratch its ears, both of which it liked. Tim was so delighted to touch its ears and the piglet sniffed his hand.
In grade school the boys who all dressed like junior cowboys had called her a “wimp” for her tenderhearted view of the lowliest creatures. Her mother had given her Charles Roberts’s The Naturalist’s Diary for her birthday. Her concern was widespread and it seemed that every boy craved to shoot a deer, elk, moose, bear, anything would do in the local ethic. Only one mannerly boy was interested in bird dogs and hunting for Hungarian partridge and sharp-tailed grouse with his father. She had a crush on him but he ignored girls. Catherine’s mother was also softhearted about animals. She convinced her to let go a turtle she had caught in the cattails at the edge of the pond. Her mother’s point was “Why should the turtle’s only life be to amuse you?” Her mother had studied biology in England but was largely unaware of American wildlife. On an early trip south to Yellowstone her parents had seen a sow grizzly kill an elk. Her father thought they were lucky to see it but her mother was totally repelled and had grizzly nightmares. The junior cowboys loved to scare each other and the girls with stories about rattlesnakes and grizzlies. A boy in her sixth-grade class was bitten in the arm by a baby rattler in the school woodlot. His arm had become horribly swollen but they got him to the hospital in time for the antivenom to be effective. She was shocked and told her father about it at dinner. He laughed saying that boys get bitten because they’re always fooling with snakes to show their daring, same as when he was young. This was why she was trying to aversion train Hud to rattlers. She had used a choke collar for a few weeks whenever they saw snakes and now on the rare occasion when they saw one on a walk he would shrink back and whine. There were no grizzlies in the Crazy Mountains nearby but there were some in the Absaroka Mountains less than fifty miles to the south. There was a written record of Lewis and Clark killing one locally when they passed through. Catherine had hiked with friends in the Absarokas but had never seen a grizzly and hadn’t wanted to see one.
Jerry called to say that he was sending her mother’s ashes by Purolator courier adding that she should go ahead and distribute the ashes by the “lake” as he had an important business trip to make for several weeks in Key West. It took her breath away. The heel. He couldn’t be bothered. She felt a flash of anger that upset her stomach.
The next day the ashes arrived and along with them a check for fifty thousand dollars with “Tim’s education” written in the memo field. She guessed Jerry was buying off his conscience. She didn’t care. Did he have to fly to Key West to get laid? Surely someone closer to New York would make sense, or the summer place in Rhode Island where the entryway was cold marble. She would put the money in the bank where it would reproduce and Tim could go off in eighteen years in new clothes. What more could she want of life? She had no lover but certainly didn’t want one for the time being. But she had a farm, a few horses, about fifty cattle, three piglets, and of course the beloved chickens, also a tiny boy who seemed to like them too. The other day she stupidly ran to the house for the phone and left Hud to guard Tim. When she returned a hatchling was nestled in his diaper and he was smiling from ear to ear while Hud growled at it. Catherine had taught Hud to stay clear of the hatchlings though it enraged him when they pecked at his feet. With one hand Tim brushed the feathers with little coos.
Another piglet escaped, and she called Clara who caught it with difficulty, finally offering it more scratch which it ate out of her hand.
“Doesn’t make you want to eat pork, does it?”
“No!” Catherine laughed. It was best not to name a pig or cow who would end up as meat. The piglet squealed in anger when Clara put him back in the pen and plugged up the escape hole. He simply wanted to wander around freely.
Chapter 17
The parents of a ten-year-old Mexican girl had died locally in a car accident and the township was looking for a foster parent who spoke Spanish to take care of her until relatives came from Mexico to retrieve her at the end of the summer, some months away. It was commonly known that Catherine was the only white person in the area who spoke Spanish and she had a decision to make. A recent cold snap had left snow on the ground and Catherine shivered on her way to meet the girl, Lola, and a social worker at the drugstore for a chocolate sundae. The girl held Tim and then quickly changed his diaper on the counter. Her deftness won Catherine’s heart. She spoke soft sibilant Spanish to Tim who enjoyed it. At dinnertime the social worker brought Lola out to the farm. Hud had taken off across the pasture that afternoon and not come back but she couldn’t look for him with the girl arriving. She was sure he’d be all right. Lola had a pathetically small amount of belongings. Her English was fair and full of American slang. She was amused by Catherine’s Spanish and called her “profesora.” Catherine put her into her old bedroom adjoining the new addition so she could hear Tim.
The next morning it felt as warm as a Chinook wind as she looked out at the distant Crazy Mountains, named for the woman who had gone fatally crazy there. Catherine remembered the Chinooks of her childhood fondly. Once it was only ten degrees in the early morning and by noon it was sixty. Kids at school loved them and ran around in shirtsleeves.
Lola looked after Tim, playing with him on the living room rug where he shrieked with laughter, while Catherine carried her mother’s ashes out behind the barn across the lingering snow. She sat on her egg rock holding the box of ashes inside of which was a lovely urn, no doubt Jerry’s idea. There was a thin lid of ice on the pond which was quickly melting. She cast the first handful of ashes out on the ice feeling with her fingers and seeing small bits of bone which was eerie. She was able to take off her coat in the warm wind. She continued to toss handfuls of ashes saying, “Goodbye, Mother.” How could her mother become ashes? She reminded herself of the ways of the earth.
When she finished and the ashes were sinking into the water she thought about how much her mother loved this place and all of their early little picnics. Now the two horses and a calf and a cow were watching her over the fence with curiosity. She would try to keep Tim off of horses for as long as possible. The area was full of the maimed and injured from horseback accidents. Other places boys wanted to be football and basketball stars but here they wanted to be heroes of rodeo, much more dangerous even than football.
Suddenly, with both her parents gone she felt like an orphan and missed her grandparents in London. When she had called her grandmother about her mother’s death Catherine kept sobbing and whispering, “It’s not fair.” Of course it wasn’t. It had been more than a decade since she had turned to her parents for anything. So many people she knew carried their parents around in emotional backpacks. Her own story was largely unknown to anyone but herself and Robert in prison whose sentence had recently been lengthened for beating up a guard. This was plainly the curse of the father. She herself felt no curse and had often thought that her early trip to England to see her grandparents had successfully detoxified her life. She would fly over this summer so they could see their great-grandson and she would also visit Tim’s family. They were getting very old and had just lost their only child. She planned to take Lola with her to help with the baby.
Thoughts of Robert reminded Catherine of another childhood experience that had started as a truly horrid summer evening. Her father had been drunk and raged about stock market losses which he blamed on the “Jews.” Catherine and her mother didn’t believe anything he said and ignored him so he fixed his anger on Robert. They had been eating at the picnic table in the backyard and her father had fallen down twice trying to chase Robert. Robert was much faster which further enraged him. He demanded Robert stop so he could beat him but Robert cut through the hedge and was headed downtown. After dark he came home and thought it was safe because peeking through the window he saw his father was asleep on the den couch. Robert came up to Catherine’s room and said that he was running away at dawn. She said she wanted to go along. She got up and made several peanut butter and jelly sandwiches to take. Robert filled his Boy Scout canteen, packed a day pack with warm clothes, and rolled up his summer sleeping bag. After midnight Father awoke, went to Robert’s room, and beat him. Catherine’s mother tried to stop him and he pushed her to the floor. Robert’s lip was cut from a punch and there was blood. Catherine went into the room and screamed, “Daddy, stop that!” The scream was so penetrating that he stopped and walked out the door. That cinched their departure.
They left in the first scant light of dawn walking north to a big woods to conceal themselves if they were being followed. By midday they were lost despite Robert’s Scout compass. They were headed toward Martinsdale where Robert had a friend. Their feet hurt and they spread the sleeping bag and slept a couple of hours in the heat of the afternoon. They hogged their sandwiches but were still hungry. Robert judged that they were too high in the foothills of the Crazy Mountains. They continued to walk, refilling their canteen in a safe-looking creek. They both knew the danger of giardia from animal waste in the water. Late in the afternoon she was sure she recognized parts of the landscape. She mentioned this to Robert who became angry realizing that like many lost people they had walked in a big circle and they were now about two miles behind Grandpa’s farm. They had circled all the way back to the southeast.
When they reached the pond Robert built a small fire and they heated a can of baked beans, all that was left of their food supplies. She ordinarily didn’t like them but on this evening they were delicious. They snuggled up in the sleeping bag near the fire where Grandpa found them at dawn.
Catherine remembered this fondly twenty-five years after the fact. Mother drove out to pick them up. She had a black eye. Dad had pounded on her until she called the deputy who hauled Dad off to the jail in Livingston where he would be spending a second night. He never forgave her for the public shame of this.
Catherine tilted the urn to the side and dumped out the rest of the ashes into the water. Her finger touched what was obviously a piece of vertebra and she felt a chill. She felt oddly serene sitting there until she thought that she must go back to the house and feed Tim his lunch. Hud was asleep, tired from his night of wandering. She would have Clyde build a pen to contain him at night when he wasn’t sleeping inside because of bad weather. He was having a pretty good life with her and little Tim and now Lola who was obsessed with sweeping the floors. Hud already fawned over Lola and Catherine remembered the man’s joke about interspecies love as she passed the chicken yard. There she had sat in the second grade, making notes outside the henhouse while sitting on the milk stool.
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