My father didn’t like that my mother had spent so much money on it. And yet she made most of the money in the family—her business was well run even then. She even met my father through the business—he was there when she came in to assess the contents of his mother’s house. They married quietly. He was fascinated with her background, I think, as though she had some mystical connection to the natural world that he lacked and loved. That was, perhaps, true enough. Their main pleasure in their first years was planting, gardening, digging wells, ponds, making patios, and setting up benches where, still, one can sit and watch the fireflies signal. I came along and surprised them, and my sister a little more than two years after. Although she was younger and followed me everywhere, her personhood was always stronger than mine. Netta had all of the sandy-haired sun in our joint personality. She burned hot. She was just my opposite. Where I was quiet, neat, untiring when it came to detail, Netta was bold and impatient; she could be careless and even cruel.
When she was still six and I had just turned nine we caught fireflies in Mason jars. We wanted lanterns, so we filled the jars with at least a dozen bugs each, then lay in the backyard across an old car blanket and played a game of memory, our favorite game that summer. We played with three decks, the cards spread facedown all around us. By dusk and by firefly light we matched the cards slowly, one to the next, concentrating fiercely on the placement of each. I think that early training is the reason I remember anything at all. The lights ebbed and burned, but at last the fireflies seemed to tire. We gathered up the decks of cards and secured them with a rubber band. I let my fireflies out and watched them waver into the cool weeds and willow bushes that bordered the yard. Then I turned to see where my sister was. Netta had smashed her fireflies onto her face and chest so that she glowed in the dark. She ran, danced, an eerie slash of heat.
Our father was an underpaid professor of philosophy, endlessly reworking his thesis on Miguel de Unamuno into a book on faith and science. He commuted thirty miles to the college town, but only three days a week. He had a way of alternating vast musings with petty concerns, announcing that the mind is a wolf and explaining how our illogical longing for a life after death is an animal hunger, and then stopping to castigate Elsie’s blue pot. He’d light on me and my sister. Your mother is the Renaissance and I am the Reformation, he’d explain. That’s why you are reasonable children. Who’s the most rational today? She gets the last cookie. Both of us would reply. He would pick only one. He was very clever at setting us against each other—choosing me, then my sister, or my mother as his favorite. I remember the heat flooding into my face as he pointed out and laughed at my drooping socks or the expression on my face, and the slick black joy when he praised me at my sister’s expense.
He was a striking man who cultivated a wild professorial mop of hair. Grayed prematurely, as if by the conflict of his thoughts, it flopped in long curls down either temple. When he was in a good mood, he let us brush it and arrange it and mother took pictures of him with a head full of plastic barrettes. He didn’t mind looking absurd as long as he was prepared for it and was in charge of the circumstances. Caught off guard in a mistake or foolishness, he would lash out. Scream. His hair would fly around his face. On campus, no one dared touch his famous hair. I remember one trip to his office, watching from a high window as he appeared, hair first, a puffed mass that bobbed as he threw himself across the paths of the central lawn. Physically, he was a graceful man with a scholar’s bowed shoulders and bloodless hands. He dressed like a forgetful monk, but he was no saint, in fact he was a liar and he was frightening—he would repeat things I said and they would be wrong. I remember that. His pants were just a bit too short, and his socks often did not match, even though my mother bought many pairs of one color to prevent this.
I’ve inherited the slender bones of his face, the delicate chin and severe, pale mouth, and perhaps his dark striving for explanations. But my sister had a happier love for inquiry, or would have. She was a questioner, could never get enough of things. And they looked alike, too, even though I had his features. She had his hair, only pale brown, and all of his expressions. She had his hands. She had his unmatching socks and distracted frown. She was like a whippet, and very strong. They had the same frame, Elsie said.
As I stare into the melt of blackberries, I remember my father’s habit of folding his metal-rimmed eyeglasses down his nose while looking at me keenly. It was a gesture I found both sweet and stodgy. He was not a person you could feel one way about. Because like my sister, he had a cruel streak that came out in surprising ways, because he managed somehow to control my mother and sometimes exerted upon us all a disfiguring attention which set us against one another, I came to realize, even back then, that we both loved and faintly disliked him. Pop wisdom has it that the unpredictable parents hook you deepest with intermittent reinforcement; you become that rat who presses the lever a thousand times for a kind word, a gesture of love.
When he died, mother gave away everything he’d owned down to the last paper clip in his office, which has since remained an unused room except for storage. It is filled with boxes that we never open, things that we don’t want to look at. The blue pot escaped the purge and reminds me of him, though.
As I am standing there stirring down the blackberries and remembering my father, a siren, strange and alarming, goes off at the turnoff to our road. Our first instinct is to worry that our neighbors have suffered some calamity, and to stare out our window where soon, as the sound enlarges, we expect to see the squad car hurtle past. But the revolving white blue flashers and the wailing noise halt in front of our windows. I’m still stirring, mesmerized, as our town police officer, Lonny Germaine, emerges from the car, from which a magnified radio distorted voice carries. The electronic voice gives indecipherable orders and Elsie, who has stopped her singing, says, “He’s drawing his pistol from the holster!”
I remove the dripping spoon from the berries and hold it over the kettle as Lonny rushes to our door, which we can see through a side window. We crane to watch him invade our house. With a mighty swing of his booted foot, Lonny kicks in our door, which gives so easily that he stumbles into the entryway, then rights himself and walks bent-kneed into the kitchen with his gun out two-handed, police fashion. Elsie gasps. “For heaven’s sake, Lonny, the door wasn’t locked! Put that down!”
All I can think of is that he’s come for the stolen drum. I am found out. I am finally exposed. I cannot move. Lonny gapes at us and then lowers his gun. He mutters foolishly. Outside, the radio-voice squawks like some great, hungry bird. I am released from my fear.
“Lonny Germaine,” I sound like a fussy schoolteacher, “would you care to explain?”
Lonny puts his gun into its hip holster, his fair cheeks suddenly mottled by embarrassment. He is a milk-white and black-haired transplanted French Canadian with round blue eyes and a pink bud of a mouth. He would perhaps have been a heartthrob in some past century, but for these times his looks are unattractively lush.
“The state police,” he says.
I cry out, suddenly, like a suspect in a crime drama. “Where’s your warrant?”
Lonny puts up the palms of his hands. “They said I should use extreme caution, use police procedure upon entering. They said there was a big patch—biggest ever in this part of the state—right out back of your place in a clearing in the woods. And you”—Lonny nods his head earnestly at me—“or some other lady was out there harvesting it.”
“Patch of what? Who?”