There was much of a practical nature in what he read to Ursula. She wanted to hear it. Nate read from the journal of a man called Daniel Harmon, who, in describing an ancient wedding contract, recalled how,
the groom shows his Bride where his Bed is, and they rest together, and continue to do as long as they can agree among themselves, but when either is displeased with their choice, he or she will seek another partner… which is law here…
Ursula liked the idea very much, these proud, independent women, though she confessed she would not share Nate. She said it, reaching for him.
Nate was beyond tears. A great reconciliation was close at hand. He felt the faint creak of his joints as he moved to pull apart the curtain to let the light in.
It was cold here still and would remain so for a month yet, the snow faintly falling. Cold frosted the window. His breath warmed the glass. He made a circle with his sleeve.
He was barefoot, in pajamas with the buttons in the rear. He was no longer the man who had felled trees, the young man who had ventured so long ago into the North. The greater part of his life had been spent here, the sum of all acts great and small amounting to a life. They had slept like bears, he and Ursula, contained and provisioned, their own world organized and managed along a time of plenty and scarcity.
It came as a revelation. The name of the enterprise would be Coureurs de Bois — Runners of the Woods. Those who came would learn, among other things, how to make fire, to erect shelter, to survive those first days of chaos and distress. He could see fear as an approaching reality. He had plans for safe routes, meeting places, points of connectedness for a family to reconvene in Toronto, and stores of dried food. It would call for an outlay and investment, but he had the Organics windfall.
He would preach that it mattered how one accounted for the days and years, for, though a tree might outlive a man, live 100 or 500 years, it did so reliant on wildfires to break open and spread its resin-coated seeds, or the wind, or the pollination of bees. Fate, a thing decided for a tree, whereas a man could just up and leave if he so chose, and this was why God ordained the years were so much shorter for humans, the decisions so much more immediate.
He would begin with the stabbing hurt of mortality, knowing, at all times, not a minute should be luxuriated and wasted. He would rely on the benevolence of a car crash victim. He would ask Ursula to watch the roads, like an eagle soaring above, for what might be scavenged — the fate of one, a donor.
It was gruesome, no doubt, but less so than what was offered in the Philippines.
26
YOU COULD FORSAKE sexuality, or sublimate it to a point where it mattered less and less. It happened eventually, the great suburban rut and the associated purchase of so damn much — washers and dryers and home appliances — the essential lure and eventual containment, so you turned to your side of the bed, seeking the escape of sleep, wondering what had become of your youth, your passions and great expectations?
Norman didn’t believe in the Kinsey Report and the decided swapping out of a politics of economics for a politics of sex. This was part of the great distraction of late modernity. As for his sexuality, well, he would watch out that he didn’t end up strangling kittens, or whatever was said that went on in the minds of the sexually repressed or the sexually confused.
He told Joanne about the kittens, just to be on her guard. She shook his hand, like a deal had been struck. He could trek across the border anytime he felt the need. She had been through enough. She understood that warranties and marriages weren’t worth a damn, not in the way they used to be, and honesty was as rare a commodity as gold.
*
They took a long, meandering journey south to Florida and Disney World, planned by Joanne, for what she called a greater inspiration and view of the world, and, of course, for Grace. They did it on a strict budget. Norman agreed to it and gave Joanne control of the purse strings. In so doing, he bestowed on her a sense of permanence in this new existence.
In the latter stages of the house negotiations, Norman had given Joanne Power of Attorney, after she had insisted she could do better, which she did eventually. She came out almost $6,000 ahead of the initial offer, bargaining hard and holding fast when Norman would have caved in. The great secret to negotiating was not to analyze your own worries, but to assess what the other side gained or lost in walking away from the table.
Joanne, it turned out, had deep insight into how certain aspects of life worked. Norman discharged the debt he had paid off on her credit card. He called it her commission.
*
Joanne was asleep, her mouth half-open in the sunshine. They were across the Kentucky border. Norman tuned the radio to an a.m. station. He came upon the last of the spring baseball games played out in the Arizona Cactus League. He had his hands on the wheel in the earnest way of someone who had mastered a new skill.
It stalked him, that old life, the absence of it made greater suddenly. He recalled a lazy afternoon long ago, Walter drinking cold beer after mowing the lawn, catching the tail end of a game on a small transistor radio. What Walter had loved about the game were the stats and the cluster of the teams with their old-fashioned stripes, knickers and stockings, the antiquated side of it, when, even into the seventies, heroes like Babe Ruth were still revered, despite how in vintage footage Babe looked like a big-diapered baby and was no athlete, or not in the way they were now, but Babe had delivered on what was asked back then. He had swung at dreams, led the way toward manhood with a trot around the bases, his cap tipped, reverent and appreciative of the applause, and the other greats of the game, known ultimately for the gravitas of their courage. Lou Gehrig’s farewell speech at Yankee stadium, declaring that he was the luckiest man alive, and dead two years later, an account his father could not tell without crying.
It was there again. Walter calling the Cubs ‘bums’, the pennant race lost early, his relationship with them contentious, and yet he stuck with them out of loyalty. Walter attentive to the line drives, the walks, the loaded bases and the sacrifice fly — a play that had always smacked of an invention dreamt up by shakedown mobsters, or tied to political gerrymandering, when there was a deep humanity underpinning it. The assumption, that, under certain circumstances, you might be asked to make sacrifices for the team, and that a quirk in the scorecard, in the very game itself, might protect you and allow you to keep the sheet clean. This national pastime, at its essence, it tended toward the appointed time when each man in the wind-up and strike stood alone at-bat.
That was it, when it came down to it. A game that could be communicated in words alone, in the voice of commentary, so it was no great loss if you weren’t there. In fact, it was a game better heard than seen, and decidedly set up that way in the ungodly number of games that constituted a season — the double-headers and clusters of mid-week games — so, in the end, it was TV that diminished the game, exposing the paucity of attendances and the slowness of any real action, an accommodation cameras could never quite invest with an essence of mystery, and even less so with the advent of color, when the texture of reality took from what was and would always be a game of nostalgia and ghosts.
Hours passed.
*
Norman drove deep into the Kentucky Mountains, before descending into an overgrown valley where a shadowy town stood by a carving, meandering river.
Joanne roused, her finger on a map like a field marshal. She denied that she had slept. There were quirks between them, but Norman could see the look on her face, the miraculous sense that you just close your eyes and wake into another world.