Wonder Boys - Michael Chabon [68]
“Don’t hold your breath,” I said. “This is a farm like I’m an English teacher.”
“Look,” said James, in a contradictory tone, pointing to the pair of milk cows who were, along with an irritable yellow gelding, the sole current occupants of the restored barn. “Cows.”
“Don’t they have those around Carvel?” I said, touched by the childish ardor with which he returned the charitable gaze of the cows. “I thought it was a pretty small town.”
“Not all small towns have cows.”
“True,” I said. “The yellowish one’s a horse.”
James said, “Yeah? I’ve heard of those.”
“They’re good eating,” I said.
I parked the car behind Emily’s Bug, in the intermittent shade of a horse chestnut tree, and we climbed out. The tree was some eighty years old and in leaf now; in another few weeks it would be crawling with spidery white blossoms. In the front garden of the McClelland Hotel there’d been just such a high, spreading, oval-shaped horse chestnut. As I stepped out of the car my cheeks were tingling, my ears were ringing with wind, and my hair felt permanently blown backward, like the streaming chrome hair of a hood ornament. My ankle had stiffened in the course of the drive and I found that I could barely stand on it.
“Check that out,” I said, pointing to the lawn that lay beyond the handsome old tree, where there stood a ragged stonehenge of whitewashed rocks. Beneath each of these rocks, I explained to James, lay the skeleton of a Warshaw family pet, buried, in the Egyptian manner, along with its rhinestone collars and plastic T-bones or catnip-filled mice. Most of the names painted onto the rocks had long since washed away, but you could still make out the inscriptions on the final resting places of the bones of Shlumper and Farfel and Earmuffs the cat. Off to one side stood a large, jagged molar stone, all by itself. This one marked the grave of a schnauzer bought to console Emily after the drowning of her older brother, the summer that she turned nine. She’d insisted on naming the puppy after him, and when it died, Sam’s name went onto the whitewashed stone, where it remained, faded but still legible. The bones of Sam the boy lay under a bronze tablet in Beth Shalom cemetery, in the North Hills, by the corner of Tristan Avenue and Isolde Street.
“I had fish when I was a kid,” said James. “We used to just flush them.”
“Oh shit,” I said, “Emily’s flowers.” I leaned over into the back of the car and discovered that in the course of our journey the wind had reached in and plucked bare every last rose. We must have left a trail of petals along the highway from Pittsburgh to Kinship. It was just a six-dollar arrangement padded with baby’s breath and bear grass but nonetheless at the loss of it I felt disconcerted and somehow disarmed.
“Oops,” said James, looking at me with an expression halfway between pity and disapproval, the way you look at a drunken man who stands up to find that he has been sitting for an hour on his hat.
“This way,” I said carelessly. I tossed the ruined bouquet onto Sam’s grave. “And don’t forget your knapsack.”
I limped around to the laundry-room door and showed James into the house. Nobody ever went in by the front door. We passed through the warm sugary smell of the clothes dryer and came into the steam-filled kitchen, and I caught a look of disappointment on James’s face. I supposed he’d been expecting a country kitchen, pine and burnished copper, lace in the window, but Irene had remodeled at the peak or nadir of the 1970s, and her kitchen was a veritable fiesta of goldenrod and avocado and burnt orange accents, her cabinets clad in walnut Formica, adorned with elaborate gilt handles. The air smelled of scorched butter and caramelized onion and a gunpowder tang that I recognized as the smoke from Emily’s Canadian cigarettes. Emily herself was nowhere to be seen. Irene and Marie, Philly’s wife, stood at the stove, with their backs to us, launching raw matzoh balls into an iron pot. As we came into the kitchen they both turned around.