Coop_ A Year of Poultry, Pigs, and Parenting - Michael Perry [73]
By the time I head back up to the office, the stack is such that I must steady it with my chin.
It’s a fine line that separates wallowing from remembrance, but as I listen to the music for the rest of the day and into the night, I don’t care. Track by track, I am back with Tim, riding shotgun in the left-hand passenger seat, strap-hanging on the Tube through London, or simply scuffing home from the local. It’s a mind trick, and I’ll take it. When the three-chord stomp of “Rollin’ Home” comes thumping from the speakers, we are together again, driving back from a Status Quo show at the National Exhibition Centre, smiling young men on the road to who knows.
He wanted you to remember him as he was. A clichéd phrase intended only for my comfort, I thought when I read it in the e-mail and heard it on the phone. But the music is working on me, and I’m beginning to understand. I’m thinking of Tim, dying in that room I knew so well. How in all our years of coming and going, we made it a point to never say good-bye. He knew if he called me about the cancer I would want to come over. If I had come right away, there might have been time for a few more nights, or a few more miles, but it would all be building to the inevitable stilted good-bye, my very presence reminding him he was bound to die. If I had gone over in the later stages, he would have been too far gone, in too much pain, and I would have done him little good. If I was unprepared for his death, I am just now realizing he wanted it that way. Tim fooled me. Fooled me beautifully, and gently. He wanted you to remember him as he was, and I will, and do, because he gave me no other choice. He did not choose his death, but he chose his exit.
In a feeble effort to hold up my end of the domestic partnership, I am doing the dishes after supper and notice Amy wandering out the driveway with the dogs. In ten minutes she returns. Standing with the door open, she says, “Do ants have protein?”
“Yes, they do,” I say, turning from the sink to look at her. “Why?”
“Because I ate one.”
“Really!”
“It tasted sour.”
So she chewed it, then.
The days have cycled through. The maple buds have unbundled. The hills are a green divan buttoned with clusters of bloom that foam up apple-tree pink and chokecherry white. After lunch I am trying to allow Anneliese a nap. She is upstairs, and I am downstairs with Jane across my lap. The deadlines have stacked up, so I am also trying to write, the computer balanced on my knees. But of course I can do little more than study the baby. Her sleepy tics, her bursts of rapid eye movement, her bow-perfect lips, her candy-floss hair glinting auburn in the sun. Her nose is resting on her knuckles, and her head rocks slightly with each breath drawn. I am playing music on the laptop: Innocence Mission. The volume is way down. The song sounds tinny and faint. I am studying Jane’s impossible ear—this perfect miniature conch, a leaf just partially unfurled—when the final chorus repeats, barely audible: “this is the brotherhood of man…this is the brotherhood of man…this is the brotherhood of man…” When I turn my eyes to the valley below the big window, it is beautiful for a moment and then all the blooms and green dissolve in a watercolor wash.
After a suitable interval, the guinea pig whistles and flips his purple plastic igloo.
CHAPTER 6
Today a dog bit me grievously upon the ass. I apologize for the salty talk, but it was a galvanic moment.
I was wrestling a pig at the time.
So—two firsts in one day.
I have had my heart set on owning pigs for a while now, but as with so many of my projects, reality has taken a backseat to cogitation. A lovely thing, to sit back and ponder what One Shall Accomplish without having to actually lace one’s boots. To price sausage makers prior to carrying a single bag of feed.
Farmers though we are, my family is short on