Last things first: One day I saw a pair of cardinals in our backyard. By the time I retrieved my camera, they were gone. I am a budding bird kook. By request, Dad got me a bird book for my birthday and when there hasn't been a bird in the area to identify, I have been reading about greater wing coverts and eye rings vs. orbital rings in the introductory portion of the book. Anyway, lately I have noticed the breathy yodel of a cardinal most times that I walk out the backdoor before noon. Yesterday I was late on my way to serve lunch at ncd's school when I spotted the crimson source of the sound in a tree next door. Remembering my missed opportunity to photograph the couple, I rushed back into the house for my camera. This morning as
I returned from dropping ncd off at work, I discovered the cardinal in an even more flattering light. Along the side, yesterday's photo of the cardinal, the tree, and today's photo of the cardinal in the same tree.
You'll be pleased to hear that I did find a way to get quarters on Monday. That load of laundry is still downstairs in the laundry room. Perhaps some other resident has moved the clothes from the dryer into the bright green basket, but it's slow progress thus far does not bode well for a timely folding and filing. Perhaps I should invest the time in making a coat rack to store the clothes.
Just before leaving for the Y on Monday evening, I went to turn on the
grow light that's installed in a lamp by the bed. The lamp has endured many moves and one of the tabs that makes the connection between bulb and electricity is no longer soldered as it should be. As usual, I turned the bulb until it caught on the tab. Usually the bulb flickers on, and stays put to give the plants a few extra hours of "sunlight". I did this on Monday and a single, tiny, sparkler-like star jumped away from the lamp in an arc. It was one of those moments when one is forced to acknowledge the ridiculousness of a minute, idiotic daily routine. "Well, der I wasn't going to be able to jimmy this thing day after day without burning the bulb out 'before it's time'." Then I looked up and without really having any proof, realized that I had just blown the fuse. Sure enough, no clock on the stereo, no light in the carbon monoxide detector. And then I remembered that when we moved in ncd said, "We have to remember to get some fuses because it isn't a circuit breaker down there--it's old school." Having belabored the beginning of the story, I will now summarize the consequences of my minute idiocy. Ncd went out to get a fuse: it didn't fit. The next day (Tuesday) I went to return/exchange the fuse, didn't have ncd's credit card, had to go to school and get that, got the new/correct fuse: it didn't make a difference. That afternoon I went to another hardware store and got the 15 amp version that's in all the other apartments' boxes (ours had two 20s for some reason): that didn't work either. Now, the power is fine in the east half of our apartment, it's just the bedroom, bathroom, and one wall of the kitchen that don't work so we're not in too big a hurry to get this figured out. Last night, we blew the fuse for the east half of the apt. When I went down to replace it (now an expert), I realized what I had begun to suspect after multiple examinations of the fuses: while this fuse was clearly blown, there is NOTHING wrong with the fuse for the west half of the apt. What, exactly, did I do to the electricity in the back half of our house? It remains a mystery, but is probably much more serious than a fuse. "Wow," I think to myself now, "It was totally worth it to jimmy that lamp instead of taking 90 seconds to tinker with the tab to make it stay put." But then, we live in an apartment and therefore someone else will ultimately pay for my lazy negligence...so there's that.
On the bright side, on Tuesday I also had an interview for a long-term sub position at a high school. This interview wasn't stunning, but it was definitely better than the last one. Working to my advantage was the fact that there were no other candidates for the position and the woman I'm replacing is scheduled for a C-section in about a week. Therefore, I walked into the brand spankin' new school at 2pm where I checked in at a desk that was dwarfed by the atrium that soared up about 3 stories to a glass ceiling. I was ushered out of the interview at about 2:45 and was still driving home when I got a call offering me the job. Tomorrow I'm spending the day observing classes and I start on 3/16 and go through the beginning of June. I only teach 1st-4th period, but the dean of students at my interview said that with spring sports in full swing, I should be able to substitute the last couple of hours most days. Sweet!
Also, though not physically nervous, I'm clearly anxious to start as evidenced by the fact that I ate pancakes for breakfast...and lunch yesterday. There is something fascinating about a pool of liquid that turns into a delicious pocket of steaming, bread-like deliciousness that can be plucked directly from the pan and eaten plain. I'm over it, though, I think. Yesterday's 2-batch frenzy did it. I had some coffee and oatmeal for breakfast this morning.
The whole episode reminds me of a scene from the book I'm reading right now, T.C. Boyle's World's End. I don't know if I've mentioned my attraction to T.C. Boyle's writing, but let me explain. Almost every single time I start one of his books I think, "There is no way that he's gonna pull this one off." He often creates sort of loser main characters, anti-heroes whose redeeming qualities are only debatably redeeming. Usually the characters are some combination of politically radical, dirty hippie, socially uninterested and uninvolved, morally ambiguous drug doing, random sex having wackos. Boyle rarely makes me identify with these characters. He doesn't even try that hard, I've realized. Instead, his novels are just so interesting, his sentences so crafty, that I keep reading. It's also partly a gawker syndrome: "This is so gonna be the one that crashes and burns". That makes the moment (which always comes) when he somehow ties all his outlandish strands together so pleasurable. It is like the moment Houdini emerges from the submerged box and the straight jacket bound by locked chains: "No. Way." I would say that Drop City and Friend of the Earth are the two books I've read which most adhere to this brilliant formula.
World's End shares some of the characteristics, but the real "no way" factor comes from the fact that there is a full cast of characters that he's following in the seventeenth century, and two generations of characters in the twentieth century who are all connected (over FIFTY of them). Even though I don't necessarily empathize with the characters, I realize that Boyle is telling the truth when he exposes these people to trouble (sometimes of their own meeting) and shows their lamenting, ignoring, pushing through, stubbornly persisting, or succeeding by pure accident. How he creates such a neat story while leaving the characters such a mess is beyond me, but it is fascinating.
And now, the passage that reminds me of my pancake frenzy.
Near the beginning of the book, Walter Van Brunt, one of the present-day characters, remembers this experience:
His grandmother had got up from her potter's wheel to fix his lunch and tell him the story of Sachoes' daughter. Shachoes, as Walter knew from previous episodes, was chief of the Kitchawanks, the tribe that was flimflammed out of its land by the founders of Peterskill--the-Hudson back in the days of the Colony. At that time, the Kitchawanks, who were, generally speaking, a lethargic, peace-loving, oyster-eating clan of layabouts and bark-hut builders, owed fealty to the fierce Mohawk to the north. Indeed, so fierce, so savage, so warlike and predetory were these Mohawk that a single brave could be sent down to collect tribute, and Manitou have mercy on the tribe that failed to feast him like a god and laden him with wampumpeak and seawant. Kanyengahaga, the Mohawk called themselves, people of the place of flint; the Kitchawanks and their Mohican cousins called them Mohawk, people who eat people, a reference to their propensity for roasting and devouring those who failed to please them.
Well. White bread was laid out on the plate, tomatoes were sliced, a cellophane-wrapped tube of liverwurst produced from the refrigerator. He had a daughter, Walter's grandmother said, and her name was Minewa, after the goddess of the river who hurled thunderbolts....
...One laze August afternoon a Mohawk brave strode into the village, naked but for his breechclout and painted like death and the devil. Tribute, he demanded in a tongue that sounded like the thrashing of adders, and then he fell down in a swoon, blood pouring from his mouth and ears, and the pockmarks standing out on his face. Minewa nursed him. If he died there would be no more oyster eating, no fooling around in bark canoes and plucking the sweet white meat from the cavities of blueclaw crabs: there would be no more Kitchawanks. The Mohawk would see to that.
Minewa succeeds at nursing he Mohawk back to life and he demands Minewa as tribute. If he is denied her, he will return with "a raiding party and cut up the Kitchawanks like dogs"...
...Sachoes, who was shortly thereafter to be hoodwinked by the Dutch trader who founded Peterskill on the sacred rock where the chief's forefathers had watched Manitou's big woman descend to earth, said "Sure, take her."
Two weeks later a party of Kitchawanks was combing the adjoining valley for acorns, chestnuts and rose hips when they came across the smoke of a cooking fire. With stealth, with courage and curiosity and not a little audacity--Manitou knows, it could have been the devil himself cooking up a plague--they approached the clearing from which the smoke rose into the sky like a capnomancer's dream. What they saw, Walter's grandmother said, spreading mayonnaise, was betrayal. What they saw was the Mohawk and Minewa, what was left of her. She was nothing from the waist down, his grandmother said, setting the sandwich before him--liverwurst, the texture and color, the very smell of flesh--nothing but bone. (Boyle 4-5)
Several chapters later, Boyle introdces the Van Brunts, Walter's ancestors in the 1700s. They are sharecroppers or indentured servants with the task of making money out of a wild part of the patroon, Van Wart's, property which is the ancestral land of the Kitchawanks. They work hard and begin to succeed, and then...
"Outwardly, life had never been better: trees were falling, the woodpile growing, the fields knee-high with wheat and the smokehouse full...
...It began with Harmanus. He came in from the fields one night and sat down at the tablewith an appetite so keen it cut at him like a sword. While Agatha busied herself with a hutspot of turnips, onions, and venison, she set out a five-pound wheel of milk cheese and a loaf of day-old bruinbrod, hard as stone. Flies and mosquitoes hung in the air; the children, playing at tag, shouted from the yard. when she turned around, bread and cheese were gone and her husband sat contemplating the crumbs with a strange vacant gaze, the hard muscles working in his jaw. "My God, Harmanus," she laughed, "save something for the children.
It wasn't till supper that she became alarmed. Besides the stew-it was enough for the nextthree days, at least--there was a game pie, another loaf, two pounds of butter, garden salad and a stone jar of creamed fish. The children barely had time to fill their plates. Harmanus lashed into the eatables as if he were sitting down to the annual Pinkster eating contest at Schobbejacken tavern. Jeremias and Wouter ran off to kick a ball in the fading light, but Katrinchee, who'd stayed behind to clear up, watched in awe as her father attacked the pie, shoveled up the creamed fish with a wedge of bread, scraped the stewpot clan. He sat at the table for nearly two hours and in all that time not a word escaped his lips but for the occasional mumbled request for water, cider or bread.
In the morning it was no different. He was up at first light, as usual, but instead of taking a loaf from the table and heading out with axe of plow, he lingered in the kitchen. "What is it, Harmanus?" Agatha asked, a trace of apprehension creeping into her voice.
He sat at the crude table, big hands folded before him, and looked up at her, and she thought for a moment she was looking into the eyes of a stranger. "I'm hungry," he said.
Harmanus continues to eat. Agatha remembers a time in her childhood back in Holland when a baker when mad and would eat nothing but cherry tarts. She knows this is different, but can't figure how.
Around nightfall, Harmanus began to toss on his pallet. he cried out in his sleep, moaning something over and over. Agatha gently shook him. "Harmanus," she whispered. "It's all right. Wake up."
Suddenly his eyes snapped open. His lips began to move.
"Yes?" she said, leaning over him. "Yes, what is it?"
He was trying to say something-a single word-but couldn't get it out.
Agatha turned to her daughter. "Quick, a glass of water."
He sat up, drank off the water in a gulp. His lips began to quiver.
"Harmanus, what is it?"
"Pie," he croaked.
"Pie? You want pie?"
"Pie."
It was then that she felt herself slipping...
Once every bit of food is gone, Harmanus disappears and then he's found:
...There he was. Harmanus. His big head and torso throwing macabre shadows against the ghostly twisted trunks of the white birches behind him, a joint the size of a thighbone pressed to his face. They stepped closer. his shirt was torn, stained with blood and grease; gobs of meat--flesh as pink and fat-ribbed as a baby's--crackled above the flames on acrude spit. And then they saw it, lying there at his feet: the head and shoulders, the very eyes and ears, the face with its squint of death. No baby. A pig. A very particular pig. Old Volckert Varken, Van Wart's prize boar...
...Harmanus was docile, a babe himself, as Agatha drew his wrists behind him and cinched the ehmp cords she'd stuffed into her apron half an hour earlier amid the wreckage of the kitchen. Then she looped a halter around his neck and guided him home like a stray calf. (Boyle 21-25
He continues to request pie. At this point, the family calls Mohonk, a Kitchawank, who calls his mother. She says that the cabin "had been erected at precisely the spot where the hunting party had found Minewa." (Boyle 27) The curse expands and affects the entire Van Brunt family and is passed down through the generations to Walter.
This is what I'm talking about. Boyle has no problem making up tribes, mingling them with real tribes that really existed, making up a historically plausible settlement, then conjuring a magical affliction connected to a sadistic incident which Boyle has Walter's grandmother recount while serving a liverwurst sandwich. He himself refers to this book as "an historical fugue". (author's note) Wait until you see how he proceeds, tracing the habits, afflictions, and mindsets of the living generations of Peterskill residents back to their ancestors while illustrating their ignorance of history and their connection to each other. Plus, the parts I quoted are in the first three chapters and he's already introduced a theme that connects land/property and a destructive, insatiable hunger (Minewa/Mohawk, Harmunus). I promise you, if this is anything like Boyle's other books, he will not fail to deliver on this theme and the others he promises when he dedicates the novel, "In memory of my own lost father," and kicks off the book with a quote from T.S. Eliot's "Gerontion": "After such knowledge, what forgiveness?".
It was relatively early in this book when I thought, "Holy what? He's gonna pull this off and somehow manage to make me keep all 50+ characters more or less straight" (maybe the eighth chapter or so). I'm only about halfway through, but the fact that World's End is a winner of the Pen/Faulkner Award for American Fiction does not surprise me and confirms my faith in T.C. Boyle will make sure I emerge from the story uttering some admiring expletive.
Boyle, T.C.. World's End. New York, NY: Penguin Books, 1987.
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