Year of the Dog (18 page)

I leaned against him, my head on his shoulder, so he wouldn't have to feel I was watching his face while he told me what had to be difficult to tell.

“The thing was, they got married. My real mom and dad. After they had me,
they got married.
And had
two more kids.
It like to cracked my skull open, getting that story, when I'd sort of come to terms with the breaks I'd got. How Norma'd done the best she could for me. It knocked me flat, the idea of this couple having me, then getting legal and having a couple more kids.”

“How could they not have come back for you?” Or had
they tried, and couldn't locate him? He must have thought that, too, or hoped that. Had Norma changed his name to plain old Martin so the woman who gave him up couldn't find him again? Did the woman cry every night, while he was growing up with Norma, a marginal person doing her best? I could feel his body shake against me, and it made my chest tight thinking about both sides of it, wondering which was worst.

He calmed himself for a minute, then went on, deep in the story and not realizing how in the wind our feet were gradually turning to ice. “All I could think at the time she told me was the man didn't want the baby. Maybe he wasn't sure it was his, maybe he wanted them to start over clean. My dad. That's who I figured didn't want to keep it.
Me,
he didn't want to keep
me,
is what I thought.”

Give away one baby and then have two more? Who could do that? I guess I'd always thought of adoption, if I'd given it much thought, as the big stork flying over the home of the couple who'd been longing for a kid and leaving them one in the cucumber patch behind the cottage under the hollyhock. Dumb, but what did you know, what could you imagine, if you hadn't been there?

We took turns using the rest stop, then stood a minute more by the car, while he wrapped a muffler around his neck and then around mine. “I went overseas that summer, after she died, picking The Netherlands, I guess, so I could look for my name. I never went back to Jimmy Martin. I never went back to who I used to be. I never went back.”

I was trying to take it all in.

“What your dad said over there Christmas, it really got me to thinking.”

“My daddy.” That still seemed hard to believe.

“It got me to look at it in a different way.”

When we'd given Beulah a little praise for being a Big Dog
and getting busy in a strange place in fresh snow, I said, “At the house you told me you thought you'd found your real dad.”

He scowled, “I could've said anything at your place, seeing you hanging out on the porch with those apes.”

“Come on, they helped me trap yellow cat.”

“I guess.”

“James—.”

We had turned out of the rest stop parking lot, and were heading north, back to town, the clouds low, the wind blowing needles of snow straight at us. He kept his eyes on the road as he told me, “I looked up all the Maartens, my spelling, on the web, that's what I've been doing, and then the date they got married, if I could find that, and where they lived. You can get a lot if you know how to look. There's one Maarten married the summer after I was born, and one that married that fall. Right now I'm working on their wives' names. If I get a Lucille, maybe I'll write. Maybe I'll send an email on my
birthday
—.”He made a groan. “You know, the date'll be at the top. Say, ‘Greetings to you both today.'
”

He turned to look at me. “Do you think?”

It made me so excited my stomach did flips. Could he really do that? It sounded to me like finding them was finding a needle in a whole Kansas-size field of hay. “When is your birthday?” I asked, to defuse it a little, and because I realized I didn't know.

“March twentieth,” he said, flushing, as if he didn't like to think about that.

“Beulah's is the Ides, the fifteenth. We'll have a party.”

Then, after we'd got back to the edge of town and had listened to a little radio, I asked, “James, are you scared to death about this?”

“Out of my gourd.”

“But you
know
you'll find them.”

30

MOM LEFT A message saying she never got around to telling me the interesting events on the phone, since in the evenings Daddy was always listening in, so she was taking this opportunity while he was at the hardware, hoping to catch me for a little private talk.

“I bet you are wearing warm clothes up there, we see on the news you are having bad weather. We didn't quite get it, that white picture you sent, but your daddy says it shows you can't tell where the land leaves off and the water begins.” She made a sigh that meant she was trying to cut it short. “I know you carry that thing with you, so if you see a light blinking or something, I hope you pick up this call, because it will cut me off if I try to get into any gossip. The main thing to tell you is I'm sending you some
green presidents
to cheer you up, which I bet you need up there, that I should have sent for President's Day or Valentine's, but Mardi Gras is as good a time as ever to get yourself a nice treat.

“I don't know what to write to my blood-kin in her fine house anymore, because that is a sad situation about her and that writer. As you understand from your own recent experience, women and men do not see eye to eye on the matter of dancing with the one who brought you, if you get my meaning.

“
Would you please answer this call?
”

31

MY PRIMARY FOCUS had been getting Beulah ready for the coming Companion Dog Trials. But the sudden snow melt with its promise of clear roads lured me back to Charlotte. I hadn't got out of my mind the scene at Aunt May's house when everyone sat still as stone as the door opened, hoping for Bert Greenwood, Mom forgetting to breathe in her anticipation, and then sinking back in disappointment at the sight of the small, quite pretty historian. Or my sense that maybe the author
had
joined us after all.

Happening upon a steady stream of young cyclists pedaling single-file on the narrow back road in their bright, tight bikers' outfits, skimming along in a line which curved out of sight over a hill, caught me quite by surprise. It felt as if I'd walked straight into
Charlotte Ruse,
and, settling Beulah on the floor of the car, I went into town, thinking about that disturbing story. The Judge is having his morning coffee and listening to the locals who are arguing about whether the cyclists are vagrants who sleep in empty fields and steal apples, or whether they're athletes whose spring arrival adds a positive presence to the town. Then, just as he's about to head to work, someone remarks about what a terrible thing, old Donnelly siccing his dogs on his
own son.
The farmer looking out his back window sees two boys prop their bicycles against his big
basswood tree and sneak into his barn. Angry at the notion they mean to have themselves a free night's sleep in his hayloft, he pours himself a bedtime nip of whiskey and sets the dogs on them. He's listening to the yelling and barking, when he hears a boy cry out, “Dad, it's
me.
”

How much an echo of Kitty Boisvert's life that seemed.

For a long time, I stood in the parking lot of the Old Red Brick Store, eating the last of a currant scone and trying to explain it all to Beulah, while I watched the young cyclists pedal past us up the steep hill, then curve through town toward the highway heading south and the bridge to New York.

* * *

Dear Mom,

I'm sorry you haven't received any photos from me for a spell, but now that the roads are clear again, today seemed a fine time to take Beulah on a drive down to Charlotte. We had a nice surprise, as we pulled off onto Apple Orchard Lane to have a stroll, at the sight of scores of cyclists racing along the back road. As you can see from the pictures, they made a very colorful procession.

I know you've been blue since your visit up here before Christmas, but don't blame Aunt May. You know writers are reclusive. I'm sure that Bert Greenwood is working on a new mystery right this minute, and that she'll send it to you when it is finished, so you can be ahead of everyone in reading it.

I hope you like this note card with the watercolor of purple mountains done by my friend Sylvia. Please take care of yourselves and tell Daddy that James says hello.

Love,
Janey

32

THE APPROACHING EQUINOX brought us warmer weather, early mornings, long twilights, and gorgeous orange-red sunsets spreading across the ridged back of the Adirondacks. What the locals called mud season arrived, and we saw the yard once more: grass, crud from four months of snow on the ground, crocus, if not in our small plot greened up by Beulah's business and seeded by the wild bird food, at least in our neighbor's yard. Crocus purple and white, their stalks pale sunless shoots.

James called me in early morning from his car and I answered from the backyard where I was putting out a pie tin of water for the thirsty birds. So I was holding the phone with one hand, in just a sweater, nothing on my head, trying to set the pan down without spilling it and without letting go of Beulah's leash, all the while sniffing the air for a whiff of something blooming.

“Hey,” he said.

“Hi,” I said.

We'd been talking like that, checking in a lot, feeling needy and trying not to drive ourselves mad with uncertainty, as we headed for the major matters of the Future of Good Dog and the Search for the True Father.

“Pete and I are taking the kids to the hydro-electric plant,”
he said, “this morning. Remember, I told you? We're doing mill towns, getting the kids to understand how all the old towns were mill towns, you see it everywhere in Europe where we take them, some kind of old important mill. But the plant here's special, it's got
Sulzer Escher Wyss
turbines, and I thought, you know, maybe your dad would like to have a couple of pictures. That I'd take a camera. What do you think?”

“Absolutely.” I nodded my head and smiled. Trying to imagine Talbot Daniels in the hardware store, saying to himself,
How about that Big Daddy of a German turbine, would you look at that.

“You oughta come with us,” James suggested.

“We have a bad connection here,” I said, getting the water pan located where dog and person wouldn't trip over it.

“I mean it,” he persisted. “Bring Beulah.”

“She's lukewarm about hydroelectricity.” I gave her head a rub.

“Say you were a blind person's dog in a burning building—.”

“What a bad idea.”

“—and you had to get your woman down the stairs, the elevators not working. They've got three flights of metal stairs in this plant. Plus the noise of the turbines. Tremendous racket. If she can handle this, the screening trials will be a piece of dog bone.”

“James.”

“I'm out in front of your house.”

“Really? I'm out back.”

I led Beulah up the driveway, cars now parking on the street again, and persuaded James to come in a minute. In the kitchen, we had some holding and nuzzling for a spell, and then I showed him the fresh coconut cake I'd made. For us to celebrate tonight—his 28th birthday and that of Year Old Dog!

“Listen, you oughta bring her and come with me,” he said, looking at his watch. “I need to go.”

“What exactly is a turbine?”

He made sounds that suggested he was thinking. Then attempted to explain. “Kind of, umm, a revolving wheel that goes through—.” He made gestures in the air, one at waist level, the other sketching turning motions in the air.

“A huge German screw.”

“Okay, you're making fun. But, no kidding, the Sulzer Escher Wyss really is beautiful. I thought maybe your dad, I mean somebody who wanted to be an engineer—.”

I bent and discussed the idea of ordeal by hydro-electric plant with my faithful friend while I ran my hand down her smooth back and then rolled her over and rubbed her belly. When I put on her orange vest and working leash, she stood at attention, looking up at me with a resolute face which clearly said:
If you have a need to see heavy machines, I'll be glad to take you, just call me Escort Dog.

James drove along the back side of the university, then down a road that connected with Riverside Drive, which followed the swift-running Winooski River. Crossing the bridge, we parked and walked along a steep street by an enormous red-brick building: the former woolen mill. At the bottom of the hill, the study-abroad students waited for us in a cheerful clump, the day bright and cloudless.

A techie who looked younger than we were, red-faced from the wind, declared himself our guide and pointed out the dam over which the river now plunged, then took us down an outside flight of stairs to show off the workings of the fish trap, which caught walleye and trout in the spring and landlocked salmon in the fall, transporting them on tank trucks upstream to their spawning grounds. We saw a display that showed the mill and the information—new only to me—that
winoskik
had been an Abenaki Indian word for
wild onion land.
I felt
proud to see the way Beulah trotted carefully ahead of me down the steps without even an eyeblink of hesitation. And not at all surprised that the boys who knew us, Cubby, Wolf and Lobo, turned out to have real names (Samuel, Joshua, Joel), or that they needed to show the rest of the group that they were tight not only with teacher's girl, but also with teacher's girl's dog. While I watched, they did rounds of
Hey, hey, Beulah,
to which she responded by gazing up at each of them in recognition.

With the techie leading us, we all rode down an elevator in the main mill building which now housed the generating plant.
Elevator,
a new dog experience. A real trouper, she rode stock still by my left knee, not making a sound as our stomachs came to rest a slight beat after we did. Then James and the techie led us into the control room, where James gave his talk about how people since the beginning of settlements had located on the banks of rivers, which served as a source of power once people had learned to turn wheels with running water. “All communities,” he concluded, “began as mill towns.”