Part II/10

 

The day Emma goes back to school, Joe sits Sophie down and tells her what the detective said.

“He didn’t suffer! What does that mean?” She darts around the kitchen, slapping the counter. The slip she wore to bed has a torn lace hem. “Don’t talk to me about this. You don’t know what to say.”

“All right, Soph. I won’t.”

She dashes up the stairs, pounding the wall with her fist as she goes. 

Later, on the way to the farm, he is mired in numbness, mired in the slog he has to make every morning just to get to the breakfast table and run an errand or two. He told Emma he would be in Michigan for a week. He has to make decisions out there: vetch or clover, that sort of reasonable, manageable decision. An armchair gardener for years, he has prepared for this without knowing why. Reading Rodale books. Organic Gardening.  As if it’s in his blood: vestige of the old country. Liz might come out and lend a hand. She better – he needs her. 

Over and over, he hears Franny Ryan’s words. The aorta. The spleen. He pictures that blood on Sophie’s sweater. He saw it in the trash the next day. That torment wears thin and he recalls every time he was short with Chanti. Put out by his presence. For no good reason. Old sour grief over his brother’s death is turned up like an archeological find on the tines of a pitchfork. The Cubs are in Pittsburgh, but the radio picks up more static than commentary. He punches it off with his thumb. I-94 and the billboards sap the beauty from the piney woods along the interstate. The brutality of commerce hits him.

The Skylark brings to mind Sylvia. Beautiful Sylvia in a taut, white one-piece bathing suit, the Rosenbergs, Sylvia’s mother’s arm tattooed with a row of numbers from a Nazi camp. Like teeth marks. Sylvia herself had been sent to live with relatives in Evanston at the start of the war. Whatever happened to Sylvia? Sunshine. It’s not that Sylvia was more right for him than Emma; so why in God’s name does Sylvia keep coming to him like a wraith?

He galvanizes. Change the goddamn subject. And Liz, dear Lizzie, is what he settles on.  Nosing down Uncle Mort’s driveway in the Skylark, Joe vows to telephone Lizzie tonight. To keep in better touch: that’s what a daughter needs from him. 

As if it were his due, a young man sits in a band of sunlight near the barn door, reading a paperback. A grizzled golden retriever lies nearby, chewing on a shoe. A pickup, copper-brown 1968 Dodge behemoth, is parked in the drive. A campfire smolders. Blackened camp pots and a backpack and a puffy down sleeping bag hanging on the clothesline complete his domestic tableau.

When Joe gets out, he hears the game emitting from a transistor radio. The kid rises up to meet him, to shake his hand. “Damon Ray Dillon,” he says. “I’m waiting for Mort.”

He has the longest hair Joe has noticed on a young man in years, carroty and straight as pencil lead; it falls nearly to his ass. Insolent kid, or worse. Joe nods at the little yellow radio. “What’s the score?”

The kid says, “Cubs’re leading by two.”

A breeze blows spent dandelions, a flurry. The green world seems to invite Joe to open his eyes wider. “Mort passed away,” Joe tells him.

Damon Ray Dillon steps back, tilts his head and frowns. “Passed away?”

“Right before Christmas.”

Damon Ray turns, frowning, in a half-circle, as if to ward off the news. He shakes his head and it feels to Joe that the kid has either never faced death before or he is contaminated with a history of death. Like himself. His intuition functions, too, he wants to say to Emma. I knew something about that kid. Right off the bat. He wants to prove something to Emma: she thinks he’s sometimes dense. She thinks he’s old.

Damon Ray says, “I wish I’d known.”

“I’m Joe March. His nephew. This is my place now.”

“Pleased to meet you,” Damon Ray says. “Isn’t that weird? My mother trained me to be polite, but I’m not pleased to meet you. I thought any minute Mort would come down the drive.” 

“What did you want with Uncle Mort?”

“I’m his hired hand.” The dog slips up to them and sticks his crown against Damon Ray’s palm for petting. “This’s Mother Jones.”

“You named your dog for Mother Jones?”

“You know about her?”

Joe shrugs. “I know a little. Why’d you name her that?”

“Mort always says . . . that socialism – as a concept and social movement – has played a vital role in our society. A voice in opposition to class and sex exploitation. Race and Ethnic hatreds. Imperial cupidity.  That’s a favorite phrase of his. Imperial cupidity. He says it’s all right to remind ourselves of the virtues and heroes of socialism in any way possible. Including naming our beloved pets.”

“Is that right.” Joe thinks, He’s a blabbermouth.

Damon Ray kneels down and says wonderingly to the dog, “Mort’s gone.” He squints up at Joe and says, “I wish I’d had a chance to say goodbye. How did it happen?”

“He passed away in his sleep. It was probably just his time.”  He surveys the yard. Then: “Did you see a cat around here?”

“Nope.”

“This place needs a cat.”

“Mother Jones is cool with cats.”

Hired hand sings out to Joe from all this blather. He says, “Do you want to work for me?”

“I might as well. It’s what I planned to do.”

“What did he pay you?”

“Organic experience. And my meals. At the end of the season he usually gives me a check that pays for my textbooks, a new squeezebox, and the occasional pitcher of beer. And then, there’s the time off. I’m in a band and I have to be able to get away.” He shoves his hands in his jeans’ pockets. “Basically I live here and help out. It’s not about the money.”

“You can stay in the house.”

“Thanks, but I want to live in my tent.”

“Suit yourself.”

“It’s clean dirt out here,” Damon Ray says. He shoots a glance at the house and grins. “In there – whoa – I’m afraid I might catch something.”

Joe sleeps in the back seat of the Skylark. Once he wakes up from a dream: his own hand reaching high behind the Casey Stengel shadowbox. The moon sets like a buttery bowl above the orchard. He casts the dream away like mental trash. Allows the moon, the lake-borne wind, to lull him back to sleep. His joints ache in the morning, but he likes waking up to the sunrise.

Every day he works on the house, starting with the front bedroom where Mort slept. Later in the summer he will want the room hospitable. To start with, rather than sort through everything Mort owns, Joe packs it all in liquor boxes – the accumulation of a lifetime that a bachelor might keep in his bedroom, down to smog-colored telegrams with crumbling edges, gift neckties still in their boxes (who had given him neckties?), salves and ointments in oily creased tubes, ballpoint pens from banks, stained flannel pajamas, empty cigar boxes ornamented with Cuban women in full skirts and espadrilles, all of it bearing the stale odor of decades – and he stacks the boxes in the hallway. There might be family history in those boxes, but he can’t face that right now. It’s a new start he aims for, not thorny feelings. Not memories. He has enough of those. The bedroom is nearly empty: comfortable. He sweeps up dust bunnies and wipes down the baseboards. He brings in sheets and a duvet brought from home. He pictures Emma in the bed with him. The built-in clock on the maple headboard works and he sets the time. The closet smells like mothballs and cedar. Joe hangs his bathrobe there on a wire hook. He takes down Uncle Mort’s one effort to decorate the room – a framed campaign poster of Eugene Debs.

When Damon Ray spots the poster on the veranda, he says, “I’d sort of like to have that. Debs is one of my heroes.” With one Red-Wing boot up on a step, his arms flung open, Damon Ray quotes Eugene Debs, who ran for President from a prison in Kentucky after being convicted of treason in 1920. “’Wars throughout history have been waged for conquest and plunder. That is war, in a nutshell. The master class has always declared wars. The subject class has always fought the battles.’”

Joe likes him after that. He’d be good for a heated discussion or two. Something to keep his mind off all that plagues him. And one plus-feature, Joe tells Liz on the phone: he’s a Cubs fan.

 

 

Chapter 11

 

I’ve left out Liz, for the most part, but she has chosen to isolate herself. If you want to know more about Liz and Tommy and Neil, before they take their marks again on stage, see the Outtakes. I can tell you that she hates Sophie. There are many misdeeds against Sophie, but the one Sophie cannot forget is the time Liz cultivated one long, purple, Goth-type fingernail – she was fifteen – and in a quarrel she scraped Sophie’s forearm and left an ugly scar.  She has never apologized.  She hasn’t been a member in good standing of the family in quite a while. She fears being subsumed. She loathes playing second fiddle to her beautiful, talented sister. She, too, wants to be the sole protagonist in her life’s journey. But anytime you give or receive love, autonomy – bluebird of happiness – flies out the window. In a weak moment, you give love and then you spend years retrieving who you were.  Liz is mellowing; she feels an almost abiding tenderness for her father and Tommy, the boy. Happy trails.

 

 

Chapter 12

Damon Ray Dillon has five sisters.

He was the baby.

What he learned from them – and from his mother – comprises a plenitude of knowledge about women. His guy friends always ask, “What was that like, having five sisters?” And Damon Ray will say, “Great, man. It was a blast.” Damon Ray Dillon and his sisters grew up in a wheezy Victorian in Evanston, a half-mile west of Lake Michigan. The radiators hiss and clank all winter; the ceiling fans shimmy all summer. His mother has always worked at a natural foods store; they sell everything from organic chickens to Tibetan prayer flags; she has held different jobs there, in produce, at the deli, and now she’s a manager; she teaches yoga on the side. His father was a women’s basketball coach and when Damon Ray was five years old he died of an aneurysm – a weakening of his blood vessels from not enough alkali in his diet. So goes the family legend.

Fine-tuning her diet – and her children’s diets – is always on his mother’s mind, and Damon Ray grew up struggling to get to and hoard his comfort foods, which his mother tries to strip away. For his own good. It’s always for his own good. He loves mac and cheese and Golden Grahams and mashed potatoes with the skins mashed in, salted butter, ice-cream with bits of toffee throughout. A shot of Drambuie if he’s out on chilly Nordic trails. He struggles with whether to be a carnivore; pepperoni pizza and pork tenderloin sandwiches still bewitch him. The trouble with his mother’s food regimen is that if you eat what she wants you to, you won’t have room for what you really want to eat. This is one reason he likes to be nearby his mother and sisters, but not, he would say, in their armpits, during summer vacation. He wants to be able to drive into the city to see them, but he doesn’t want his eating habits controlled.

All men have to let go of their mothers, he reminds her; she herself taught him this. She also taught him the value of a gentle nature, to celebrate the solstices, how to make pie crust, how to keep his runners from stinking, how to pet cats, and why the use of force to solve problems is a failure of imagination. Among other things. His mother is a goddess, a queen.

When he was a boy growing up around all those women Damon Ray was little man, baby cakes, sweet pea, honeybunch, big guy, sugar pie, love bug, cuddle bug, buddy boy, angel, munchkin, and kidlet. Doted on, adored, and encouraged, he understood that he might hitch his wagon to any bright star in the sky. He spent his youth reading biographies of great men – Edison, John Muir, and Gandhi make his Top Ten List – and listening in on his sisters’ endless conversations, their celebrations, their female woes and lamentations.

His oldest sister was eighteen when he was four; she fell in love with the mandolin player in an Irish band; Damon was carted around to various outdoor musical venues summer of 1987 and he was imprinted, he always says, with Irish music, the way baby ducks get imprinted with their mothers. Songs like “The Galway Shawl” and “Whiskey in the Jar.” He begged for a concertina; his first one was cheap, made of celluloid.

Her boyfriend went the way of many boyfriends. What it came down to, from Damon’s purview, is that they didn’t quite treat his sisters right. There were expectations. Expectations concerning the revelation of feelings and dreams. Footwear was an issue; the boyfriends were expected to wear loafers or oxfords on occasion. They had to be willing to buy sandals. Did they know how to iron their own shirts? Could they eat a vegetarian meal without complaining? Were they curious? Were their tastes in movies varied? After a few months, did they lose interest in kissing and cuddling? Did they take responsibility for birth control? Their attitudes toward their mothers and small children came into play. Madden Football and all cyber-sports were frowned upon; but on-the-field participation in any sport was held in high esteem, especially 16-inch softball. Over the years he and his sisters and their boyfriends had belonged to 16-inch softball teams sponsored by O’Reilly’s Funeral Home, Athena’s Tavern, Jiffy-Lube, and Sugar Magnolia Vintage Clothes – all optimistic losing teams. His sisters are married now, but in those days there was a steady parade of boyfriends. It was a pursuit Damon Ray observed keenly, from behind comic books. His mother – dicing onions or stirring honey into a pitcher of iced tea – would sing a song that her mother had sung to her:

Oh, I had someone else before I had you

and I’ll have someone after you’re gone.

Streetcars and sweethearts never worry me –

there will be another one along.

You needn’t stay.

Go any day.

My heart has a swinging door

And it swings either way.

The mandolin player bought a stout raincoat and a one-way ticket on the Empire Builder to Seattle, but the Irish music became a fixture in the Dillon household, like the smell of garlic or his mother’s favorite cologne. When he was fourteen he started a garage band – Hoolinaires – and, in spite of his on-going formal education, which takes him to Northern Michigan University every August through April, Hoolinaires manages a gig at least once a month, sometimes twice a month, in dotty little taverns out of time along the northern shores of the great lakes, in towns like Bliss and Charlevoix, taverns where the soup is homemade, the Scotch eggs crisp, the locals restless, and Damon Ray is a year shy of being able to order a beer.

He has four concertinas now, heirloom instruments – squeezeboxes, he calls them. He earned a portion of the money for the concertinas by working three summers for Morton Svizi. He did whatever the old man wanted him to. Much of organic gardening takes place on your hands and knees, Morton Svizi told him when they first met at the Town Hall Tavern in South Haven, and in his ninth decade Mort’s knees began to rebel, particularly in wet weather. On his hands and knees, Damon Ray pinched potato beetles from potato plants and doused them in a can of kerosene. He picked strawberries until his palms were pale red.

The old man gardened in his birthday suit, but around what he called supper time Mort would put on a wrinkled shirt and khakis stained with beet or dirt or grass and he would cook for the two of them. They would sit on the veranda in metal motel chairs and watch the sun go down through the fir trees, like a woman you want to know, Mort was fond of saying, coming through the trees in a loud dress. Damon Ray would eat whatever Mort had prepared. The healthiest food you could imagine. Soups made of three veggies. Peanut butter cookies fortified with wheat germ. And Mort’s homebrew in blue-and-white speckled tin coffee cups.

Later on he would squeeze out tunes on the concertina while the old man smoked a cigar and Mother Jones alternately sighed and chewed on a rawhide bone. Fireflies blinked in the near dark. Damon Ray’s voice was not the strongest of the Hoolinaires, but on those sultry Michigan nights he would manage to sing with only a smidge of self-consciousness. They never stayed up late; before ten o’clock Damon Ray would slip away to his tent, divest himself of the soiled clothes he’d worn all day, and crawl into his sleeping bag, with barely a wisp of thought before sleep.

His mother, although she works at the natural foods store and teaches yoga, always tries to sweep her counter-culture roots under the rug. She does not want Damon living in a tent all summer, even though she lived in a felt yurt when she was a girl. At a civil rights demonstration in the nation’s capitol in 1964, Damon’s grandparents fell in with anarchists who wanted to start a back-to-the-land community and grow their own food and marijuana. They were under the sway of Tolstoy, who wrote, Damon Ray learned from his grandfather, “The anarchists are right in everything; in the negation of the existing order, and in the assertion that, without authority, there could not be worse violence than that of authority under existing conditions.” With the highest untried hopes, twenty of them pooled their resources and bought bottom land, 80 acres, in a scab rock canyon west of Spokane and south of the Spokane Indian Reservation. Damon Ray has seen the photos of his bare-breasted grandmother forking hay into a flatbed, his grandfather bottling beer, his twelve-year-old mother in ragtag clothes, her white-blond hair tangled, running feral with other children. Her name is Caitlin, but for a while she changed her name to Larkspur. Caitlin Dillon will not speak of it now. If Damon Ray asks questions, she frowns and changes the subject. She moved into Spokane when she turned eighteen, went to community college, and that’s where she met Damon Ray’s father, who gave her all she had been longing for. Respectability. A reliable car. Constant hot water. Winter clothes that didn’t come from the St. Vincent DePaul thrift store. A savings account. Babies. And a move to another state.

Anarchy and socialism swirl in Damon’s mind like tablature he’s trying to learn. He wants instruction: what do they mean now, anarchy and socialism? There has to be more to anarchy than pirating pop music off the Internet.

Damon Ray’s grandparents don’t live on the anarchist farm now. They settled on a quiet organic wheat farm not far from a shallow, carp-rich hook in the Columbia River. He’s a farm hand and she’s a harvest cook. Once winter hits, they pack up their three dogs in an RV named Guthrie (for the elder, not Arlo), and they drive to Todos Santos, Baja; they send postcards of kayakers and gray whales, pelicans and Western tanagers.

Damon Ray has been to visit the organic wheat farm. He slept in a room that had once been a pantry, with cornflower blue curtains at the one cracked window. He heard his grandmother singing when he awoke: a folk song, “Long Black Veil,” and he thought, astonished, There are people who live like this! There are people who get up every morning driven to provide the food we eat. We still have to eat in the information age. We eat and shit. We’re still animals. The fields were tawny and lush, rippling with wheat. The air crackled with the energy of harvest, house-high combines, their reels clacking musically, the red trucks grinding toward the grain elevators, the workers at the long table every morning and night, devouring his grandmother’s biscuits, her stews, their faces dusty, the seemingly permanent dust laid down in the wrinkled tracks of their faces and necks, their bandanas soaked with sweat; it came to him, this is serious business: organic farming, the purest life, abiding and humble.

Bread is the food all people feel bereft without. Wheat was first domesticated 6000 years ago. Ancient Egyptian writings list the breads available then. White and crumbly. Fragrant and date. Sourdough, breakfast, hardtack, stamped. Obelisk-shaped. Obelisk! He read the story of a baker in Uzbekistan who prays over his dough every morning and burns a handful of wild rue on his tandoor to purify it. Wild rue! Damon Ray does not know wild rue from marigolds but he imagines it to be powerful, pungent. “Wild rue’s in Shakespeare, son,” Mort told him. “Richard III.” And Damon Ray in his innocent vivacity said, “Let’s plant a bank of rue to bless our ovens! Our parsnips! Our borage!” Whenever he goes into a grocery store and buys a loaf of organic whole wheat bread, he pictures those men and women in the wheat fields, he hears his grandmother’s voice singing like a crystal vase trembling in a china closet when a train goes by and he tells himself: that’s what I want. Enlightenment at the end of a gardening spade.