Idyll Banter: Weekly Excursions to a Very Small Town Read online

  Marshall was not the sort who would ever have pointed out to me the tremendous amount that--to paraphrase Disney's Pocahontas--I didn't even know I didn't know.

  Instead, when it was clear that my wife and I were buying his house, he phoned the cubbyhole I was renting in Burlington one September evening and asked, "You lived in New York, right?"

  "Right."

  He then extended to me one of the most important invitations I've ever received in my life: "Want to come down here Saturday? Have a glass of cider and some doughnuts? This house runs pretty good, but there are a few things I can show you."

  I don't know if my wife and I would have survived our first winter here without that autumn Saturday. I still have the yellow legal pad filled with my notes about the furnace and the kitchen heater, the water tank and the fuse box. I still have memories of those doughnuts, my first in the fall in Vermont.

  And I still have--and will probably have always--the sense, thanks to Marshall, that houses have histories. Sharing his with me was not merely a pro forma part of the process of selling a house.

  It was a ritual of transition. A gesture of hospitality. It was his way of welcoming me to Lincoln.

  Chapter 3.

  AN ELEGY FOR THE STATE'S FINEST RED SOX FAN

  VERMONT'S--PERHAPS New England's--greatest Red Sox fan died the other day.

  He died at the age of eighty-one, as peacefully as anyone can who has watched an endless litany of pennants and titles and world championships slip away.

  His name was Ken Hallock, a farmer from Waltham who lived the last fifteen years of his life up in Lincoln. He was certainly not the most famous Red Sox supporter, nor was he the most articulate when it came to that special, heartbreaking kind of masochism that links the fans to the team. You won't, for example, find his poems about Fenway Park in collections with Donald Hall, nor will you find his essays about the game reprinted with those of Bart Giamatti or George Will.

  But he was aware without question that to root for the Red Sox--to root with knowledge and passion and patience--is to root as an act of faith. It is to love people who you know will disappoint you, but to forgive them and to love them just the same.

  It is to know people are human.

  I met Ken Hallock when I sat behind him in church. My wife and I had arrived in Lincoln only three days earlier, and she steered us to the pew behind the "nice older couple" who had brought her a Christmas cactus our first day in town. He spoke to me at the end of the service, after the minister had given the benediction. Taking my hand and shaking it vigorously, he exclaimed, "God loves you, and so do I!"

  The jaded New Yorker in me said--for lack of anything better--"Thank you." But I was nonetheless touched and flattered to be accepted without judgment by both him and his God.

  When I learned from Mr. Hallock that he was a Red Sox fan, I wasn't at all surprised--not because he was a native New Englander, but because of his confidence that the meek someday will indeed inherit the earth. I only knew Mr. Hallock from church, and I only knew him in the context of church, but I believe the same optimism that served as the foundation for his faith in God, served also to buoy him through the hard times with the Red Sox.

  I know, for example, that every year he would make a pilgrimage down country to watch the team play, and almost every time it lost. Sometimes in the last inning.

  I know that although he listened religiously to their games on the radio, it was not uncommon for the reception to disappear. Usually in the midst of a rally.

  And I know how well he handled what had to have been the most astonishing Red Sox collapse of his life: the 1986 World Series loss to the New York Mets. He was undaunted. He was completely undaunted, even though the team managed to let its first title in almost seventy years slip away when it was only one out from victory. One out! A cluster of bloop singles and a ninety-foot squibber was all it took to dash the team's--and Mr. Hallock's--dreams of a championship.

  From the pew behind him, I witnessed Mr. Hallock bear this defeat with his customary courage. The Sunday after the Red Sox had lost he turned to me and said, "As awful as that was, it'll only make next year even sweeter when they win!" And if I had any doubts about the sincerity of his faith, they were dispelled by the way he sang our last hymn, raising his arms and uttering and repeating the words, "How great Thou art, how great Thou art."

  Ken Hallock was buried in a small family plot in Waltham, wearing the Red Sox warm-up jacket that helped him to remember that no cause, not even the Red Sox, is so irrevocably lost as to be beyond hope.

  Chapter 4.

  HOW A FAMILY COPES

  WITH LOSS: BUILDING LOVE ON LITTLE WHITE LIES

  THE WORLD IS rich with elegies for mothers, so I will spare you one more. Besides, my mother was never particularly good with good-byes ("See you," with a small salute was about as good as it got), and I believe she would prefer that the idiosyncratic privacies of our parting and her death were preserved.

  But amidst those moments last month, her last in this world, was one that will endure for me as both a wondrous illustration of the love my family shares, and the weird ways our little clan functions. Or malfunctions. Or--to take grammatical license with an especially popular little adjective--dysfunctions.

  On July 5, my father was flat on his back in a Florida hospital, awaiting an angioplasty. My mother was home alone with her cough, hoping desperately that the hack was the result of radiation, pneumonia, or a virus that had besieged her body after months of chemotherapy.

  At that point she had been battling lung cancer for eight months, and she still clung to the dream--evaporating a bit with each rasp--that she was getting better.

  My mother's oncologist was making his rounds at the hospital that morning and saw my father. He shared with him some bad news: The X-rays he'd taken of my mother's lungs the previous week showed, to use his words, "a significant infiltration." He wouldn't know for sure until a CAT-scan was done, but the prognosis was bleak.

  My father had been an extraordinary cancer coach: part dietitian, part nurse, part-Knute Rockne. The day after my mother had been told of her cancer, he'd bought a Vita-Mix blender for broccoli shakes and carrot juice. When my mother decided she'd prefer not to wear wigs, he bought her hats and scarves and turbans with the care he had once reserved for blouses and jewelry on her birthday.

  He called me from his hospital bed with the news, unwilling to share it with my mother on the phone, but unable to keep it solely to himself. The doctor had said he would tell my mother some version of the truth that afternoon when he was scheduled to see her in his office to discuss the X-rays. He had added that he would be gentle, possibly evasive, and my father needn't fear my mother would get the worst of the news while he was unable to comfort her.

  My brother and I agreed we would leave for Florida: He'd leave immediately from New York, and I'd fly down the next day.

  My father's angioplasty was not scheduled until the evening, and so he called again that afternoon. He sounded tired but peculiarly happy: He must have misunderstood the oncologist that morning, he said. My mother had just told him of her meeting with the doctor, and while there was a spot on the X-ray, it might be just a pneumonia scar. They'd do a CAT-scan to be sure, but we needn't despair just yet. More important, he said, I had to get a message to my brother, who was 35,000 feet off the ground, and tell him that he should not convey to our mother our fear that her time might be short.

  I said I would. I was surprised my mother's doctor had painted so rosy a picture, but I assumed he knew what he was doing.

  My father had the angioplasty that night, and by July 6, we were together as a family. We all took comfort in the idea there was still room for hope, and I know at least twice I said something to my mother about "that pneumonia scar in your lungs."

  I didn't believe for one moment it was a pneumonia scar, but I did believe this was what she had been told. I was wrong: My aunt told me later that given the questions my mother had asked the
doctor that day in his office, he had decided to be candid about the progress her disease had made and honest about her chances. He had told her that afternoon what he had told my father that morning.

  And so when I spoke to my mother of pneumonia, we'd come full circle: She had lied to my father so he would have one less thing to worry about in the hospital; he--at once hopeful and disbelieving--had passed the story along to me; and my brother and I had then brought it back to her. As a family we've never been particularly good communicators, but it has never been for want of love.

  My mother never had that CAT-scan, because her lungs filled so quickly with water. By the time she went to the hospital, her cough prevented her from lying flat enough for the machine to record an image of the intruder inside her.

  She died in the hospital on a Sunday morning in July, moments after my father arrived. Her nurses were astonished that she had made it through the darkest part of the night, and said they thought she had hung in there for her husband. She died in his arms, a small smile in this case a surrogate for her salute.

  Chapter 5.

  FARMERS FLETCHER AND DON BROWN KNEW HOW TO GROW COMMUNITY

  EARLY DURING THE morning one day last month when Fletcher Brown, eighty-six, was going to be buried in Lincoln, his son-in-law, Claude Rainville, wandered past the cemetery and noticed an excavator beside his father-in-law's plot.

  The hole beside the machinery was massive, and for a moment, Rainville smiled at the notion that his father-in-law, with pharaoh-like preparation, was going to bring his beloved John Deere tractor from this life into the next.

  Of course, it was merely a boulder the size of a Volkswagen that was the reason the excavator was parked there that morning. Nevertheless, Fletcher had loved the time he spent on his tractor mowing the fields around town, moving great piles of earth and carting colossal tanks of sap to the family sugarhouse through snow and mud in the spring.

  And though Fletcher had been too sensible to have that tractor buried with him, he had allowed himself a bit of levity when he was planning his funeral: His coffin was a John Deere shade of green and the casket was festooned with the company's iconic leaping stag on the brass plates on the corners.

  Often the funerals for the very old are intimate affairs because so many friends have passed away, and there are only children and grandchildren and a smattering of acquaintances in attendance. This was not the case at Fletcher's service last month--nor was it the case last year when Fletcher's brother, Don, died. That funeral, too, was an uncommonly crowded event.

  Though the Browns had outlived many of their friends, it was a testimony to the way they had lived their lives that the church sanctuary was packed when it was time for us to bid them farewell.

  A village loses something when people like Fletcher and Don pass away. We lose the tangible immediacy of their stories, such as that moment five decades ago when Robert Frost tried desperately to convince Fletcher to sell him his farm with its panoramic views of Mount Abraham. That tale, and the details of their conversation, will soon fade into myth.

  We lose the knowledge of how life has changed: what farming was like before bulk tanks, what Lincoln was like before electricity. Don Brown remembered well what it felt like to bring in a wagon of hay when the wagon was pulled by a pair of field horses, and he would stand atop the bales with the animals' long reins in his hands.

  Fletcher and Don were not simply good men--generous with their time and their wisdom, their personalities rich with the irony and wit that can only come from decades of winters in this New England tundra--they each understood the value of community.

  Fletcher Brown loved that tractor of his, but he loved it most when he was using it in service to his neighbors: excavating the dirt around the foundation of the Old Hotel, for example, when his friends Dave and Donna Wood were renovating the inn in Lincoln last year. Don Brown savored his years owning the Lincoln General Store, but he once told me that what he enjoyed most was the opportunity the job gave him to see his neighbors daily.

  When Don's son, Jim, was eulogizing his father last year, he wore his father's sports jacket because of the metaphoric significance the blazer held for him: A torch was being passed from one generation to the next.

  Community is a word that has meaning because of people like Fletcher and Don. When we worry that the threads that link our communities are fraying, it is often because individuals like the Browns have passed away, and we--younger generations--have become so absorbed with ourselves that we have forgotten our friends and our neighbors.

  The Browns let no one around them remain a stranger, including this urban emigre from Brooklyn, and they left no friend alone who needed help. That is a wonderful legacy to leave a town.

  Chapter 6.

  A FAMILY'S FAREWELL TO TIGER

  IN THE WOODS beside the Gale family's sugarhouse is a small paddock, empty now for almost a month. On a particularly glorious Saturday in October--the leaves on the sugar maples glowing neon yellow in the sun, a dusting of white at the top of Mount Abraham, the sky above both a crisp and deep blue--the horse who'd called that paddock home died between a lone rock and a tree in a nearby meadow.

  The earth here in Lincoln is probably filled with the bodies of old Appaloosas and Morgans, and I imagine there was somebody present at the very end to grieve for them all. In the case of Tiger--Gumbo Tiger Lily C, to be precise--there was Jennifer Gale, the horse's thirteen-year-old owner, caretaker, and friend, as well as Jennifer's parents. I think the fact Tiger had mourners is important, but it isn't unique.

  What might be rare, however, is the affecting ritual that Jennifer offered her horse and her family at the end, the moving and meticulous ways she marked Tiger's passing. If a horse has to die--and, according to the veterinarian, it was indeed time for the sickly twenty-eight-year-old to be given her rest--it is good to go the way Tiger did.

  There was the public farewell party Friday afternoon, one of those occasions the soul craves because the emotions are deep and complex: It's possible to juggle sorrow and joy when the horse that will die tomorrow is surrounded today by the children she's known the last years of her life.

  There is young Lynn Sipsey, a seven-year-old whom Jennifer taught to ride atop Tiger. There is nine-year-old Prudence Meunier, who's been friends with Tiger since they were photographed together one day. And there, in a crowd of boys and girls between the ages of six and thirteen, is Nugget Meg, a horse-friend of Tiger's who's come by for one final visit.

  Yet this isn't a dirge-filled, pre-death vigil. The children are dangling from trees, they're jumping from the loft of the Gales' barn, they're racing Tiger and Nugget Meg. They are eating absolutely massive amounts of apple cobbler.

  Are they sad? No doubt; they understand what will happen tomorrow. But they are also raucous and loud and giggling sometimes, such as when Tiger tickles the palms of their hands as she munches the carrots they offer.

  Jennifer's carefully choreographed celebration of Tiger's last afternoon might have made the almost preternatural quiet that filled the next morning somewhat easier for her to bear. The next day, she walked her horse the three-quarters of a mile to the meadow she'd chosen for Tiger's last home and waited there alone for her parents--Don and Jodi--and the veterinarian to arrive.

  Tiger, a leopard Appaloosa, wore a pine bough wreath around her neck.

  As the pair waited, three horses walked by along the road beside the pasture. Two were chestnut and one was white with black speckles. Tiger was pretty near blind at the end, so she probably didn't see them. But she heard them or smelled them or sensed them. She knew they were there. And so she whinnied a greeting of sorts in their direction, and the riders slowed their animals and waved. For a moment they watched the girl and her horse in the field, and then, perhaps sensing their presence was an intrusion, they quickly rode on.

  When the veterinarian reached the meadow, he stood for a long time with a syringe the size of a thermos in his hand. If Jennifer might have prefer
red his hiding the needle until it was time, she kept the notion to herself; she might have suspected this was no easy task for the vet either.

  Tiger went fast, her body collapsing atop her legs like the canvas seat on a director's chair once the braces have been unclasped. Jennifer stayed with her a moment, her cries considerably softer than her mother's.

  But as Jodi murmured, her words rich with pain and love, "It's easy for her to be strong. She doesn't have to see her daughter's heart breaking."

  *

  PART VIII

  BRIEF EXCURSIONS

  AWAY FROM

  LINCOLN

  Chapter 1.

  UNTETHERED IN SPAIN, SET FREE

  ON ROUTE 66

  WHEN I WAS TEN, my mother slept with two male strangers on an overnight train between Malaga and Madrid. She was always a very sporting woman.