“Marijuana! They saw it from the helicopter.”
“Okay, I remember that helicopter.”
“Yeah.”
“So you decide to barge in here like some TV cop.”
“Well, you never know,” says Lonny, complacent and not at all defensive.
“Never know what? You’ve known us since you were a little boy. And you think we turned into drug lords?”
“It does pay,” Lonny says. “And they saw this woman out there.”
“It was me,” I say, “I was picking these blackberries!” I raise my dripping spoon. “For this jam!”
Lonny, confused now, snaps the holster on his gun and walks back out to the car to reconnoiter with the squawk box. For a while, as the two of us veer between outrage and amusement, and as I keep stirring the berries, we hear the staticky burps of conversation from the open car window. Suddenly Lonny puts his siren on again and bucks off, speeds away, up the road. Apparently he’s been instructed to harvest the crop, for perhaps an hour later, just as we’ve got used to the silence and started the rest of our day, the siren wails again. He gets so few opportunities to use it! Down the hill flies Lonny, and we jump to the window in time to see that the trunk of the police car is tied shut over a huge pile of what must be marijuana plants. As he bumps over the frost heaves in the gravel road bed, the tall fronds of the plants bob and wave, spilling out the sides of the trunk’s lid.
“So then, who planted it?” I ask Elsie. “Are you holding out on me?”
“Kit Tatro planted it,” she says. I’m surprised she knows this. But she goes on to say that she’s noticed him popping in and out of the woods across the field.
“I thought he was hunting,” I say.
“You don’t keep track of the hunting seasons, do you?”
I guess not. Tatro seems so much a part of the woods around here, almost part of the scenery, that I’ve never questioned much about his comings and goings. With a sigh and a little whoosh, the blackberries boil over the pot’s rim and cascade across the white enamel of the stove.
My father would have made a great thing of how Lonny burst into our kitchen. There would have been a hue and cry at the next town meeting. Delicious outrage. Letters to the Editor. There might have been a lawsuit. We just let it go. In the same way, we do not bother the spiders. I leave them alone. Father once had them sprayed to death, but they came right back. Look and observe, he said to us, pointing out the spiders, the wolf spiders and the flies—one and the same—the devoured becomes the devourer. He surrendered the field to the spiders, but continued to enforce his boundaries with nature selectively, kept birds from nesting in the eaves, but allowed cats to wander in and out of the loose rocks of the foundation. That was another thing my parents fought about. The cats. Elsie spayed. Father let them go feral.
These things may seem trivial, but they grew mighty. Great fury composed of need, duty, competition, sexual ambivalence, and pride existed between my parents. My father used his achingly snobbish sensitivities, his depressions, his startling sweetness, exactly the way trainers of horses use reins and whips in clever ways. It always astonishes me that relatively small humans can control horses weighing a ton and a half. Likewise my mother’s power, which has since shown itself to be considerable, was somehow channeled by means that were nearly invisible. Some days he just seemed to wear her out with his small naggings, other days it was the big thoughts that flummoxed her and bent her to his will. In the case of the blue enamel kettle, it was not the money alone he objected to, it was that she had spent a great amount upon a pot that was just shy of being the best pot. There was, he knew—although pots were more in her line of expertise—a sort of pot made only in one tiny village factory somewhere in Portugal. Not France, he shrieked. To have spent this amount of money on a pot that wasn’t quite the best that could be found was cretinous.
Cretinous was lighter fluid, the word I mean. Flames shot to the ceiling when my father said it. Other words they used in arguments had similar effects. They always used elevated words for simple insults. Neanderthalic for stupid, myopic for shortsighted, petulant for mean, and so on, as if they paged through Roget’s before they fought. We learned a great deal of vocabulary from their fights. Arrogate, obfuscate, phantasmagoria, stipple, hirsute, quell, atrophy, craven, natter, gnomic, pornographic. These were not words ordinarily encountered on grade school vocabulary tests, but I, at least, began to use them in my everyday writing assignments and soon enough was treated differently, as though I was really smart.
Brush jewelweed and its seeds pop six feet. Orb weavers make a very distinctive seam down the center of their webs. The juicier the berry, the sharper its thorns. What’s the difference between smart and self-protective? They are the same, I think. Only when you are secure enough not to fear immediate survival can you display creative intelligence in anything you do. For instance, once we had enough money to live comfortably, my mother proceeded to make us almost wealthy by dealing boldly in the most extraordinary rugs. She foraged for rugs in the dry, rotting attics of down-at-the-heel scions of Yankee landowners, scrounged for rugs at neighborhood yard sales, hassled over rugs that came from overseas in bales smelling of sheep fat and burnt dung. She slipped out of rummage sales with Navajo rugs woven with careful flaws to let the bad spirits out of the design. She bought the rugs and sold them and bought them again. To her, it was a dance of happy shadows, and sometimes the money was abstract, or even distracting, as was she, the buyer. It was the rug itself that chose its place in the world. She told me this with the same gravity my father used pronouncing on his book. I didn’t take it the same way, though, because the notion made her happy. She believed in it the way she believed in blue.
There was a blue she worried over then, and covets even now. She still regards blue objects with ferocity, assessing and comparing their blueness to the particular hot blue she claims made queens of courtesans and fools of kings. A dye of indigo and radioactive cobalt. A blue of furious innocence within the ochre of the pattern and the cinnamon and the dried blood of the other wools. It is a blue so intense it looks as though it were made on another planet. It is the blue behind your eyelids when you press past the yellow lights. It is the O.D. blue, I tell myself, of ecstasy and death. I’ll avoid it, thanks anyway. I’ve survived that blue and I will not look upon it anymore.
Oh yes, and my father also had blue eyes, though his were paler and a bit washed-out, with amber flecks.
“Between the eater and the eaten,” said my father, absurd when drunk. “Perfect unity. I have proved it with a mathematical formula.” We nodded. “I’m glad someone understands how faith eats reason and becomes a new beast. Or some two.”
He liked to work in his upstairs office after dinner, and we sneaked past him, or tried to be in bed before he came down the stairs. Still, I remember him always holding hard to the stair rail, blurred and loquacious. This one night, he’d caught us and so we sat on the bottom step with him, ready to bolt. He talked to us and praised us and compared our looks and held our hands. He tried to teach us how to whistle by putting our fingers between our teeth, but couldn’t do it himself and dribbled spit, which I pointed out. He kept trying to whistle in novel, boyish ways until at last he grew furious at our polite silence and we jumped up and ran.
“Get back here, you little shits!” he yelled as we leapt up the stairs. “If I really am your dad, and I’m not sure I am your father, why don’t you little twats tell me to go to hell?”
“Shut up,” said my mother, charging down toward him, for once forgetting that they fought with elevated diction.