Teaching a Stone to Talk (14 page)

I

I
AM HERE
against my good judgment. I understood long ago just what it would be like; I knew that the weekend would be, above all, over. At home at my desk I doodled on tablets and imagined myself and the child standing side by side on the riverbank behind the cottage in the woods, standing on the riverbank and watching the blossoms float down, or the dead leaves float down, or just the water—whatever it would be—and thinking, each of us: remember this, remember this now, this weekend in the country. And I knew that instead of seeing (let alone remembering) the blossoms, or the leaves, or whatever, the child and I would each see and remember some
dim picture of our own selves as figures side by side on the riverbank, as figures in our own future memories, as focal points for some absurd, manufactured nostalgia.

There was no use going. At best, we would miss the whole thing. If any part of the weekend should prove in the least pleasant, and worth trying to remember on that account, or on account of its never-to-be-repeated quality, it would be unbearable. Who would subject a child to such suffering? On the other hand, maybe it would rain.

I decided, in short, not to go. The child is nine, and already morbidly nostalgic and given to wringing meaningful moments out of our least occasions. I am thirty-five; my tolerance for poignancy has diminished to the vanishing point. If I wish, and I do not, I can have never-to-be-repeated moments, however dreadful, anywhere and anytime, simply by calling that category to mind.

 

But we are here: the child, and I, and the dog. It is a weekend in mid-July. We will leave here Sunday morning early.

 

The cottage is in the Appalachians, in a long-settled river valley. The forest is in its ninth or twelfth growth: oak-maple-hickory, with hemlock and laurel in the mountain gorges. It is the same everywhere in the Appalachians, from Maine to Georgia. There is no place else in the fifty states where you could build a 2,050-mile linear trail through country that changes so little.

The ridges are dry—blackjack oak, berry bushes, and pine—and steep. Near here there is a place on a steep
mountain called Carson's Castle. One summer many years ago a neighbor, Noah Very, took me and my cousins on an outing to this Carson's Castle. It is nothing but a cave in the mountaintop with a stone ledge in front of it. The ledge overhangs the next valley so far that you have to look behind you, between your feet, to see the stream far below. In the eighteenth century, this stream became part of the state line.

Mr. Very walked us children up there and told us that when the Indians chased Mr. Carson—some time ago—he ran up the mountain and hid in the cave. And when the Indians, who were naturally conducting their chase Indian file, attained the cliff edge, each paused to wonder where Mr. Carson might have gone. Mr. Carson took advantage of their momentary confusion by pushing them, one by one, from the ledge—from the ledge, from the mountain, and as it would happen, out of state. He pushed them until there were none. That, at any rate, is the legend. An old Indian legend, I believe.

Literalist and begrudger as I was and am, I expected to see a rather fancy castle on the mountaintop that day, and was disappointed. But now I choose to remember this outing as a raging success, and am grateful to “Count” Noah Very, and intend to bake him a cake while we are here, although he has long since turned into an old, disagreeable coot.

 

The ridges are dry, I say, and the bottomlands are wet. There are sycamores on the riverbanks, and tulip poplars, willows, and silver maples; there is jewelweed in the sun and rhododendron in the shade. The cottage is in a small clearing in the woods on a riverbank.

The child has discovered the blackboard in the children's room. She wheels it into the living room where I sit and writes on it, “I love Francis Burn.” She says that Francis Burn is a boy in her school, going into the sixth grade. When I ask her what it is about Francis Burn that she loves, she answers that he is cute.

 

Once I knew a woman, who has since died, whose field was German philosophy. When I knew her she had just been widowed. Her husband—an old man, remote and stern—had held a university chair in intellectual history; between them they had written a dozen books. Once, when the woman and I were alone, she broke down. She broke down in grief, and cried in my arms, and repeated into my shoulder, “He was so cute!”

The child wheels the blackboard against a bare wall, to serve as our mural or graffito for the weekend. She is nine, beloved, as open-faced as the sky and as self-contained. I have watched her grow. As recently as three or four years ago, she had a young child's perfectly shallow receptiveness; she fitted into the world of time, it fitted into her, as thoughtlessly as sky fits its edges, or a river its banks. But as she has grown, her smile has widened with a touch of fear and her glance has taken on depth. Now she is aware of some of the losses you incur by being here—the extortionary rent you have to pay as long as you stay. We have lived together so often, and parted so many times, that the very sight of each other means loss. The ever-taller embrace of our hellos is a tearful affair, aware as we are of our imminent parting; fortunately the same anticipation cancels our good
byes, and we embrace cheerfully, like long-lost kin at a reunion.

 

I have not been here in years. I think of it, though, when I cannot sleep; I stand on the bank and watch the river move, and watch the water's speckled reflections jiggle on the overarching boughs of sycamore, and jiggle on the sycamore's trunk, and on the bottoms of its leaves. Across the river I see pasture veined by the thin paths of cows. The cowpaths wobble over the floodplain and cut around the junipers and clumps of thistle or rose; they climb a close-cropped slope whose every bump and ripple shows, a slope which is actually the foot of a wooded mountain. The pasture ends, and the forest begins, in a saggy wooden fence.

Personally, I find the keeping of golden Guernseys rather an affectation. But the actual cows themselves, I allow, are innocent. The actual cows themselves, in this soporific vision of mine, are splayed about the landscape, lending solid areas of warm color to a field otherwise pallidly, sentimentally, green. Behind their pasture is a border of woods, a sloping cornfield, and beyond, rolling ridges.

 

When we opened the cottage over an hour ago, I found a note taped to the icebox door. It read: “Matches in the tin box on mantel. Do not eat purple berries from bush by porch. Bulbs of creek grass OK, good boiled. Blue berries in woods make you sick.” Accompanying the text were careful schematic drawings of the plants in question: pokeberry, something I do not recognize, huckleberry. Huckleberries are perfectly edible. Many
people have used this cottage over the years—including, I suppose, grouches with sour stomachs, and hoaxers. If I were interested in such things, I would have to do all the research again. I am not interested in such things. It has been quite a while since I sampled bits of the landscape. I have brought a box of groceries from home.

 

It is all woods on this side of the river—woods, and a surprising number of paved roads. A steep driveway leads from a hill down to the cottage; you park beside the cottage on the grass, on that thin, round-bladed, bluish grass that grows under trees. The cottage rests on cinder blocks; a sort of yard slopes to the river's edge.

In the 1920s, American manufacturers started prefabricating summer cottages; this cottage is one of the first of those. It does not look prefabricated. It is just on the fussy side of idyllic—white frame, two bedrooms, a big screened porch, and lots of painted latticework. When you lie in bed you can see the big bolts in the ceiling that hold the house together. The bolts are painted white, like everything else.

 

You know what it is to open up a cottage. You barge in with your box of groceries and your duffelbag full of books. You drop them on a counter and rush to the far window to look out. I would say that coming into a cottage is like being born, except we do not come into the world with a box of groceries and a duffelbag full of books—unless you want to take these as metonymic symbols for culture. Opening up a summer cottage is
like being born in this way: at the moment you enter, you have all the time you are ever going to have.

 

The child maintains—she has always maintained—that she remembers being born. It is a surefire attention-getter. “I remember,” she says, “the light hurt my eyes.” Many of her anecdotes are literary like this, and more than a little self-pitying. Should I stop hugging her so much?

 

Filling the window's frame, crowding each of its nine square panes, is the river, moving down.

The yellow afternoon light has faded from the water and the blue evening light is fading; the sycamore branches over the bank are flattening and growing dark. I see the sky on the running river. Blue, it shatters and pulls; blue, it catches and pools behind a rock. The sun is down behind the mountains, but not yet down behind the world.

The child and I go to play in the water. We leave the cottage, crouch on the bank, and send sticks down the river. Soon the night is too dark for us to see. We fetch some candle stubs from the house; we fetch some flat kindling from the woodpile; we light the candles, stick them to the flat wood, and launch them into the river. The river and the sky are just visible as blueness, bordered everywhere by indecipherable black. Now we can see the candle flames mark their own passage. We watch them wander above the water; we watch them wobble downstream and gutter out, one by one, just before they would have rounded the black, invisible bend.

“You cannot kill time,” I read once, “without injuring eternity.” Our setting the candles afloat down the river—
was this not a pretty thing to do? Why, when we were actually seeing the candles wobble down the river, did I think, this should be better? It seemed both to take too long and end too soon. As a memory, however, it is already looking good.

In bed I stare at the painted bolts in the walls. I hear the river outside the window, if I remember to listen. I read a magazine which contains instructions for jumping from a moving train:

I cannot remember to listen for the river. Some elation keeps me from sleeping. I leave the bed and move to the porch, and stand in the open back door. There is a whippoorwill; there are stars over the pasture. It occurs to me to try to step down from the porch, which is moving in orbit at 68,400 miles an hour. I plan to take huge, leaping steps in the air. It will be, I realize, a rare thrill, but unfortunately I cannot find a landing space that looks soft.

II

Saturday morning, and all is changed. Sunlight on the table and on the shining wood floor is bright; the child and I walk around squinting and eager for action. How could I ever have wanted to read? I can scarcely credit
that we played cards on this table last night, almost whispering, in a circle of lamplight not four feet across. Who, on a Saturday morning, would think of reading or playing cards? We are as changed from evening to morning, and as careless of yesterday, as if we had flown overnight to Nepal.

 

The child has found a bicycle under the porch; she wants to ride it. Incredibly, there is a bicycle pump half buried in the dry dirt beside it—a pump which works, once I scour and oil the shaft and screw dirt from the nozzle with a paperclip. I drag the bike out and stand it in the bluish grass at the foot of the driveway next to an apple tree. Pump the tires. I find a wrench to adjust the seat, find some WD-40 to loosen the bolt; lower the seat. Adjust the handlebars. Oil the chain and the steering column. Wash the seat, the handgrips, the fenders while I'm at it.

Throughout these tasks, which occupy the morning, the child and I are singing some old Dixieland standards: “The World Is Waiting for the Sunrise,” “Cherokee,” “Basin Street Blues”—most of which we have sung often before. When the bicycle is ready to roll, it is almost time for lunch. The child mounts the bike and wobbles up the driveway. She takes a right, turns down the hill, and vanishes, singing at the top of her lungs.

On the bluish grass under the apple tree are two wrenches, a can of WD-40, a hammer, a scouring pad, a straightened paperclip, a pile of dirty paper towels and sponges, a pail of dirty water, and the child's sweater. I am hungry. In all the history of the world, it has never been so late.

I do not know when the child will be back, or if she will want to take a walk. I haul out my notebooks and sit at the table.

The child bursts in, hale and enthusiastic. She has discovered a long loop route around which to ride. While she talks she reaches into the table's drawer and finds the deck of cards we brought. She sits at the table, rummages through the deck, and asks if we have any clothespins.

I am always amazed at how straight she sits in a chair, at how touching is the sight of her apparently boneless hands, and at how pleased she herself is with those hands, how conscious of them. She asked me once if she could insure them. Do we have any clothespins?

She wants clothespins to fasten some cards to her bicycle so that when the wheels turn the cards will slap in the spokes. She pulls from the deck a pair of aces and a pair of eights.

Last night we played poker, the two of us. We got popcorn butter on the cards; we used aspirin tablets as chips. In the course of the play I showed aces and eights—“dead man's hand”—so I told her about that. I told her we call aces and eights “dead man's hand” because Jesse James was holding them in a poker game when he was shot in the back. I no longer rememeber precisely why someone shot Jesse James in the back, but I made up something I hope she forgets before she passes it on.