Coop_ A Year of Poultry, Pigs, and Parenting - Michael Perry [69]
“You OK?”
“I got some bad news…,” I say, and then the choke in my throat turns to tears. When Anneliese and I were married, Swiftie made the trip. Flew transatlantic cattle rate just to land on Thursday and leave on Sunday. The day he arrived, we spent the night in a tiny shack in the middle of forty acres near my beloved New Auburn. The next day we copiloted my old International pickup down here to Fall Creek to prepare for the wedding. The morning of the outdoor ceremony Swiftie helped my father-in-law Grant and me set up the chairs and then take them all down and reset them in the tent when the weather turned to rain. After we finished I headed to the house for a shower, and, looking back, I saw Tim at the edge of the lawn beneath the tent, smoking a hand-rolled cigarette and looking out across the sweep of the valley below. His free hand was in his pocket, and he was rocking one knee, the way he always did when he was relaxed and taking something in. How many times I had seen him in that stance, raising and dragging at the cigarette without hurry. He’d keep the knee going and bend at the waist a little, like he was working up a bow, but then in the end he’d just muster a faint smile, his lower lip slightly pouted, his eyes squinting as he raised the cigarette again. This morning when I read that e-mail, the first image that flashed—even before I looked to the photo on the wall—was of Tim on the hill there, quiet, alone, content.
I wonder if he knew.
Experts say the honeybees are disappearing, so it’s nice to see them busy at the bush beside my office door in the early afternoon. I cannot identify the bush—it verges on shrubbery—but on this the day of my friend’s death it is in bloom, the modest yellow blossoms waxy in the sun. Noon has passed, lending the light just enough postmeridian slant so when the bees buzz by, their minuscule shadows trace across the window screen like silhouette radar. It’s a gentle sight, enhancing the sun and easy breeze. The bad news from England has had the immediate effect of compressing the world and time. I’ve kept at my work, but am continually drawn down memory’s kaleidoscope wormhole. Feeling the need to walk in open spaces, I leave the desk and head for the ridge.
Sylvia said Tim came back to his boyhood bedroom to die. I know the room. I can go there in my head. I bunked in the bed there sometimes. I suppose he did it to spare his young daughter Amy and wife Claire. I don’t know. His Amy was a toddler last I saw her. I’m walking and walking, farther and farther back on the property, into a valley not visible from the house. The air is warm. Deep in the trees, the air smells of duff and thaw. I wish he had called me.
He wanted you to remember him as he was, it said in the e-mail. When I spoke with Sylvia this morning, her words were exactly the same: He wanted you to remember him as he was. I think of him in the yard with that cigarette and how much I could read from just the jiggle in his knee, and yet our span of two decades was built on less than a hundred days spent in common company: there are implicit questions of depth. By the end he had become successful in his field, managing international projects for one of the largest engineering firms in the world, but only once did I see him at work; I was caught off guard by the man in the tie and white hard hat. He oversaw a tunneling project beneath the English Channel, and ramrodded another in which slurry was pumped at extremely high pressure into miles and miles of abandoned underground coal mines. Once the pipeline blew and took off a man’s arm. Tim hit the kill switch and grabbed the arm. Another time he got a frantic call from the manager of a high-end car dealership