It was difficult to concentrate on spiritual matters inside my house, what with my sister banging out scales on the piano, my mother vacuuming, and my brother shouting at the umpire on t-v every five minutes. I’d taken my usual refuge in the old sandbox at the far corner of the backyard and was just getting into Christina Rossetti’s exquisite longing for her dead lover when the stray mutt loped in from the street and lay down beside me.
He smelled awful. Not just the usual dog breath and damp-pelt odor that Gypsy, our Dalmatian, had and that the cleanest pets were never without. This dog reeked a combination of athlete’s foot toe-rot and dentist-drilled tooth decay.
He was a large dog, but scrawny. His coat had the markings of a beagle, though he was built like a German shepherd. Mange had shorn a big patch on his right flank, leaving his pink skin obscenely visible.
I couldn’t help but pity the miserable beast who had so rudely pulled me away from the pure realms of poetry, but I wasn’t so moved that I wanted to help him or even put up with his silent companionship.
I tried to shoo him away, but he wouldn’t budge. My sister, who sometimes seemed more wild animal than human herself, would, no doubt, have already been running around bringing the mutt food, bathing his rash, and trying on names for him.
I am not a dog lover, though my family has always kept dogs, and I’m a little afraid of them besides. The size and stubbornness of this dog were discouraging. I stood up and began to walk reluctantly back to my noisy house. The mutt followed. Just then my mother came outside to empty the vacuum cleaner bag into the trash can.
My mother is not what can be called a quick study, but she has an abundance of common sense, a stock of all-purpose philosophical sayings, and a matter-of-fact, peasant fearlessness that allows her to act speedily and effectively in situations that defeat brighter or more refined people. She sized up my distress immediately, put down the vacuum cleaner bag, and waving her arms over her head like a cheerleader, she flew screaming straight at the mutt. (Had she come upon my sister in exactly the same circumstances, she would have unerringly devised a quite different reaction, probably producing from some voluminous apron pocket a clean white towel and a tube of veterinary ointment.)
The dog and I were both stopped short by her performance. He judiciously turned and trotted out of the yard as fast as his limp could carry him, with only one backward glance. He tried to look imploring, but you could tell he knew it wasn’t worth his best effort.
“Where’d he come from?” my mother asked, taking up her interrupted chore as if her banshee outburst had never happened.
“I don’t know,” I answered. “I was reading.”
“Of course,” my mother said.
My mother didn’t understand my passion for books, especially poetry. She bought me a book exactly once. Little Women was on sale for 69 cents at the supermarket as a promotional offer for a series of children’s classics. Mother couldn’t resist the bargain.
She was proud of my good English grades, but she couldn’t see where it all might lead. She imagined I could become a teacher if I wanted (which I didn’t), but that didn’t console her because the only teacher of her acquaintance was our neighbor across the street, Miss Coleman, and Mother was of the firm opinion that Miss Coleman’s was an abnormal and pale, though thoroughly respectable, existence.
To me, Miss Coleman dwelt in a rarefied world that I coveted. She was answerable to no one, distracted by no one. Though I’d never been inside her home, I pictured it crammed with books, an easy chair and a good reading lamp in every room. In my imagination, I gave her a wide, antique desk, creamy vellum writing paper, and silver fountain pens with gold nibs.
I was convinced she wrote poetry, beautiful, tragic sonnets most likely, but tragic only in their topics, like lost or doomed love or early death or the mindless power of Nature. Under Miss Coleman’s hand, I was sure, such subjects would be ennobled. She would find their meanings and share them with those of us living in more clamorous environments than hers.
My mother had known Miss Coleman when she was a girl. They were contemporaries, though I could never think of them as alike in anything, even in something as simple as age. She’d told me Miss Coleman was a strange child, keeping to herself, her nose always in a book, play-acting alone in her yard while the other children raced past on skates and bikes. She never answered their calls, so after a while they stopped inviting her to join their games, though they still envied her her yard, the largest in the neighborhood, with good climbing trees and bushy nooks perfect for forts and hide-aways.
High school didn’t change Agnes Coleman, Mother said. Plus, by then, her widowed mother had become ill with rheumatoid arthritis. The running of the house fell to Miss Coleman. Later, when many of the other girls on the block, Mother included, were getting married and having babies, Miss Coleman was commuting to City College to get her master’s degree in English literature, then teaching, and throughout caring for her mother, who became more and more disabled.
I have the vaguest memory of old Mrs. Coleman as a scarecrow-like figure parked in a wheelchair in the shade of the biggest tree on her property, a massive weeping willow, her daughter reading aloud to her from a nearby garden bench. She died when I was only five years old.
It was Miss Coleman’s skill at reading aloud that started all my fantasies about her and that led me to register for her honors English class in spite of her reputation as strict and demanding.
We have a lot of relatives in town, and it seemed every year some cousin was graduating from high school, so I had sat through a lot of commencements. The custom is that a faculty member reads a poem as part of the ceremony. They take turns. Usually it’s something like Rudyard Kipling’s “If” or, when the teacher wants to be lighter-veined, a poem by Eugene Fields or Edgar Masters. One year a young science teacher thought she was being really daring by reading Emily Dickinson.
Anyway, last June, right before we had to turn in our final course choices for the fall semester, I attended my cousin Emma’s graduation. Miss Coleman was the faculty reader. Though she was our neighbor, I knew her only to nod at on the sidewalk. She kept to herself as she always had.
She was very tall, almost six feet, but this did not cause her to slouch as it did my friend Claire, who was only 5 foot 6. In fact, Miss Coleman not only stood with soldierly erectness, she wore two-inch high heels and dresses with shoulder pads. Her light brown hair was flecked with gray and brushed back in soft waves from her dour face. Thick lenses in plain wire rims glinted over intense blue eyes. In winter, Miss Coleman wore a full-length fur coat of an almost edible shade of cocoa brown.
That day at the graduation, she seemed to tower above the audience in the crowded auditorium. It was easy to mentally summon up the trepidation she must inspire in any unprepared student in her class. Then she began to read. Edna St. Vincent Millay’s “Ballad of the Harp Weaver.” (My mother later commented it didn’t seem quite the thing for the occasion, though she could not find fault with the sentiments expressed about the sacrificial nature of mother love.)
Miss Coleman reading was Miss Coleman transformed, or, more precisely, Miss Coleman transcendent. And she took us all along with her. She spoke slowly, and most of the time she looked right at the audience, as if she had memorized the poem, or as if the words were her own, being born right there before us out of some undreamed of private place. Then, after a long pause at the end of the poem, during which I heard a few sniffles from different parts of the room, she began another recital. This was unprecedented. The teachers usually appeared grateful when their duty had been fulfilled and they were able to return the lectern to the principal.
Miss Coleman’s second poem was Tennyson’s “Lady of Shalott.” That clinched it for me. First thing Monday morning, I signed up for her class. I looked forward to a whole year of thrilling recitations.
Though the school term was only three weeks old, Miss Coleman had not disappointed me. Recite she did, during the last 10 or 15 minutes of almost every class, and never was the magic any less than at the first time I’d heard her. In return, I didn’t want to disappoint her, so I kept up conscientiously with her difficult assignments and reworked every paper three or four times before turning it in.
Now, my mother and I watched the mongrel dog make his unsteady way toward Miss Coleman’s back door. Both our house and the Coleman place were on corners. Our front door faced one street and Miss Coleman’s the other. From our side yard, we could see the whole length of her house as well as her huge backyard.
“He’ll get no comfort there,” Mother predicted. “But I guess even a dog’ll try any port in a storm.”
“Well, at least Miss Coleman won’t get rid of him the way you did,” I said, feeling my idol needed some defending and ignoring the fact that my mother’s behavior had been a rescue effort on my behalf.
Characteristically, Mother let my injustice pass unremarked. I could see by a brief knitting of her brows that she had noticed it but had chosen not to rebuff me. I was immediately repentant.
“Do you think you could help your brother with a book report tonight, Susan?” she said.
I stifled a sigh. My penance was being laid neatly before me.
“Has he read the book?” I asked suspiciously.
“Yes,” she said confidently. Then with more misgiving, “Most of it, I’m sure.”
Before entering my house, I glanced over at Miss Coleman’s. The brazen mutt was actually scratching on her back door with his uninjured paw, for all the world like he had a right to be let in.
Spread over the entire surface of the ancient maple table in Agnes Coleman’s kitchen were appeals for money. Agnes hated paying bills. Taking over the household accounts was the first responsibility she’d assumed for her ailing mother. At sixteen, Agnes was already overly serious; and the task had made her feel heavy and old.
The kitchen was shadowy even though daylight savings time hadn’t yet ended and it was only 4:30. Ivy covered the outer walls; vines had crept across the tops of many windows. Agnes cut back the tendrils that twined over the sills and inside the house, but she didn’t bother about the rest, even after a neighbor’s gardener informed her that rats liked to nest in ivy.
Short of an annual clean-up of the yard, for which she employed a few of her students each fall, Agnes “let things go,” as her mother used to say. Keeping disorder at bay mattered to her only in certain areas: her school papers, her personal appearance, her bills. She was comfortable with clutter elsewhere. In fact, it gave her a kind of pleasure. It said to her that she was mistress of her own fate, maker of her own rules.
Agnes got up from the table to empty the full ashtray and refill her coffee cup. The “La Boheme” tape she’d been playing finished just then, so she noticed the scrabbling sound at the door right away. The thought of a plump, possibly rabid ivy rat fleeted across her mind, but she easily threw it off. She’d always had a fanciful mind, a “dream-weaver” her mother had often called her, but her imagination didn’t run to dark fears. She took wonder in the world, even though she participated in it to a limited degree, and she approached most situations with the curiosity and trust of a precocious child.
When Agnes opened the door, the dog was just turning away, having relinquished any expectation of a response. His bony hindquarters were closer to her than his head. He looked back over his shoulder, as if he were sizing her up. The calculating intelligence in his eyes amused Agnes. The animal licked his jowls with a surprisingly long tongue, emitted a great yawn, and circling twice, flopped down on the stoop as if to say, “Your move. I can wait.”
Agnes had never had a pet. Nor wanted one. The death of her father in a boating accident when she was ten and the invalid state of her mother throughout Agnes’s teen years and young adulthood had impressed her with the frailty of life. She didn’t want the weight of another existence, for that’s what a pet meant to her.
The pitiable creature at her feet aroused something in her, however. Despite his sorry state and obvious beggar’s soul, he exuded self-reliance and dignity. He made no excuses for himself. He left it up to her to determine what she would make of him. Agnes felt that whatever her reaction, she would be judged by him as surely as she was now appraising him. Or, she thought, shaking her head at herself, perhaps I am simply grateful for a diversion from paying bills.
At any rate, she resolved to take the dog in, not for good, but long enough to get his afflictions attended and his belly full. Then she’d leave him to his own considerable resources again. She decided to call him Flush, after Virginia Woolf’s dog.
I couldn’t believe Miss Coleman took in that mutt. Mother said it was only natural, Miss Coleman being such a lonely sort. Mother didn’t understand romantic temperaments like Miss Coleman’s or she couldn’t say such things. To Mother, a woman was never alone by choice. I guess she figured that a loyal dog could be a satisfactory substitute for a husband.
I would have thought that if Miss Coleman wanted a dog, she’d have picked something elegant like an Afghan hound or a Weimaraner. I could just picture her in her beautiful fur coat walking through the falling snow on a moonlit night with such a dog on a long leash of Spanish leather.
Instead, there was Flush (at least his name fit my ideas about Miss Coleman), with no leash at all and certainly no pedigree, lording over Miss Coleman’s wild yard as if he’d been born there. He kept the place clean of cats, rabbits, and squirrels, and, if Mother’s hints were to be believed, of robbers and rapists, too. Mother was sure that solitary women were not only lonely, but also sitting ducks. This, in spite of the fact that no one had ever broken into Miss Coleman’s house in all the years before Flush lived there.
Still, I was grateful to Flush for one thing. Because of him, Miss Coleman actually entered our house. It was early one Saturday morning several weeks after the dog’s arrival. Thank God I’d already taken the curlers out of my hair when Miss Coleman came knocking. Mother answered, but I was right there in full view on the couch. I hoped Miss Coleman would notice that I was reading, though I wasn’t positive she’d exactly approve of Gone With the Wind. Maybe, I thought, she’d just see that it’s a really fat book. I laid it in my lap so she couldn’t read the title.
In truth, Miss Coleman barely glanced at me, only acknowledging my presence to be polite. She was too distraught to do more. Miss Coleman distraught was a disturbing sight. I had never seen her in an emotional state before, not counting the dramatic renderings she gave to the poems she read us in class. Her hair was pulled back in a low ponytail, very undistinguished, and she was actually wearing jeans and a plaid flannel shirt. On her feet were old loafers with ripped seams.
Mother wasn’t fazed by Miss Coleman’s attire, nor by her unprecedented appearance at our door. In her own way, Mother believed that in life anything was possible, so you might as well be prepared for it. This meant that she was never surprised at anything anyone did, or, at least, that she wouldn’t show it.
“Why, Agnes, good morning,” Mother said, as if Miss Coleman stopped by every Saturday.
“I’m sorry to bother you, Vera. I just don’t know what to do. Flush is gone, run off. I meant to give him a bath today. The vet recommended it once a week until his skin rash cleared up. But I can’t find him anywhere. I’m worried he’s been run over or stolen.”
“Well, that’s possible,” Mother replied with, I thought, cruel candor. “But not likely. More probably he knew he was to get a washing and decided to go AWOL. I’ll send my kids around on their bikes to look for him. You just go on home and see if he doesn’t show up when he gets hungry.”
Miss Coleman seemed a little calmed by Mother’s speech. At any rate, she could tell she’d been dismissed, so she turned to go.
“And Agnes,” Mother stayed her, “when he does get back, you’d do well to tie him up or pen him in. A dog like that never loses his taste for wandering.”
“Oh, I couldn’t do that,” Miss Coleman said.
Mother lifted her hands in a fatalistic gesture. “Then,” she concluded, “you must just not care so much when he goes.”
Miss Coleman nodded, as if she saw the wisdom of this, but her expression said she would never put the homely advice into practice.
Flush, infuriatingly true to Mother’s predictions, continued to disappear every couple of weeks, sometimes staying away for two or three nights. Each time, Miss Coleman was convinced he’d not return, but each time he did, either of his own accord or brought in tow at the end of a length of clothesline by my brother.
Karl had found a steady job in hunting down Flush for Miss Coleman. She paid him two dollars just to look for the dog, and five if he found him. But she did tell Karl that he was not to force Flush to come back if he really resisted. Karl said Flush never made a fuss. On the contrary, Karl avowed, Flush usually appeared glad to be led home. I supposed the dog didn’t like to admit he might be settling down after a career of roaming; perhaps playing the role of a captive helped him save face.
The first time Agnes saw the man, he was in the park across the street from the drugstore. And the next time also, two days later. “Hanging out” her students would have called it; “vagrancy” their parents might have said. To Agnes, he seemed more purposeful than either of those designations suggested, as if he were waiting—patient, sure he’d be met, aware that he’d arrived early. Paradoxically, there was no anticipation in his easy slouch. He didn’t strain toward the meeting or seem to wish it on. He inhabited the wait. Agnes guessed he inhabited every time so.
He was rangy, like a movie cowboy, slim, hard, weathered. The clerk in the drugstore remarked to Agnes that he’d been in to buy sodas and that he spoke slowly with a definite accent, though she couldn’t place it.
The third time Agnes saw the man, he was at her back door.
“Evenin'”, he nodded when she answered his rap late on an October afternoon. “I’ve been studyin’ your place, and I thought you might be ready to get some things done.”
Close up, he was younger than he’d appeared in the park and not as toughened or unusual. Agnes judged him to be fortyish, about her age. And obviously, he was simply a man looking for work in a strange town.
She glanced at his hands. They were thick-fingered and callused, a workman’s hands, and the first two fingers on his right hand were tobacco-stained.
“What do you mean, studying?” Agnes asked. A keen observer herself, she didn’t like the idea of her house being looked over and evaluated.
“This could be a grand place,” the man said, “if you’d let me take a spade and rake to the yard. That stone wall at the far end has crumbled in several places. The ivy ought to be pared away from the windows. The trim needs painting. Bet there’s enough sun in that corner there for a fine vegetable garden come summer.”
Agnes put up her hand to stem his litany. She looked quickly around at everything he had pointed out. Though she saw his assessments were correct, she didn’t really care whether any of the work was done. As long as the house didn’t leak and there was a cleared path through the yard from both doors to the street, she was satisfied with the state of things. Besides, she thought defensively, Flush likes the yard this way—it suits his wild nature.
“’Course,” the man added, “if you don’t mind living in the house of Usher, then I guess there’s no work for me here after all.”
Agnes considered him more closely. The reference to Poe put her off-balance. She was embarrassed to admit that her first reaction to it had been quite snobbish, that is, genuine surprise that this kind of man would use literary allusions in casual conversation. She realized she really didn’t know what kind of man this was at all.
“Well, Mr. …” she said, a little flustered. “Perhaps I should get some work done. I assume you do have experience in the projects you’ve suggested?”
“Jackson,” he replied. “Just Jackson. I’ll be back.”
He ambled down the brick path toward the street, his head down. Agnes supposed he was examining the uneven lie of many of the bricks and mentally adding another chore to his list. She felt unaccountably shy about asking him for references or what he’d charge or even how to contact him should she need to. Her reticence derived from the chagrin she still felt about her intellectual prejudice against him, as if she’d insulted him aloud and had to make amends.
At the curb, Jackson turned around. A smile snapped across his face, as if he’d just recalled a joke. Agnes felt oddly included in his good humor, perhaps because his grin was so open and guileless.
“Do you have tools?” he inquired.
“Yes, but I can’t swear to their condition. Some of them haven’t have been used in years.”
“I can make do. Anyway, good tools last even through neglect. Not like people.”
Jackson stooped and plucked up some mint that was growing at the edge of the brick path. Biting off a couple of leaves, he lifted the sprig for Agnes to see.
“Makes good tea,” he said.
Without further comment, he stepped out of the yard and walked off down the street. Agnes went to the sidewalk to watch him go. He was headed for the edge of town, where the woods and fields began.
“I’m Agnes Coleman,” she called, wishing to instill some businesslike form into this haphazard arrangement.
Jackson didn’t look back, but he waved his hand over his head to indicate that he’d heard her.
Agnes picked a branch of mint and took it inside.
My friend Claire didn’t have Miss Coleman for English. She was smart enough for the honors class, but she said she didn’t want the extra work. She probably thought I was crazy to have taken it on, but she never said so.
“I can get into college without that,” she’d declared. “Anyway, I’ve hardly got time for my own life as it is, without school cutting in any more than it already does.”
It always amazed me to hear Claire say things like “my own life.” I knew what she actually meant by it was dates with her boyfriend Eddie, who was equipment manager for the soccer team, and shopping trips with her sorority sisters. Not my idea of a life. Still, I was impressed. There was nothing in my daily routine that I’d venture to call a life, let alone go out of my way to preserve time for. Except my reading. And that was more stepping into other people’s lives.
“Going to the Sadie Hawkins dance?” Claire asked me one afternoon as we were walking home from school.
“Of course not,” I answered as derisively as I could.
“Why do you say it like that? If you want, Eddie can check out some of the guys on the team to see if they’d go with you—so you won’t have to be embarrassed to ask them.”
“I’m not embarrassed,” I protested. “I’m just not interested.”
Claire shrugged, and I knew she wouldn’t belabor the topic. Neither of us ever questioned or pushed the other too much. It kept us from being best friends, but it kept us friends.
“Who’s that in Miss Coleman’s yard?” Claire asked when we got to my house.
“I don’t know,” I said, hiding my curiosity. “Some workman, looks like.”
A thin man in gray work pants and a brown wool sweater with a big hole in one elbow was clipping Miss Coleman’s hedge. He was whistling, the melody quick and complicated. When Claire passed, he nodded and lifted his clippers in answer to her lilting “good afternoon” without breaking the tempo of his song. Claire grinned back at me over her shoulder.
I refused to return her smile. It was irritating how automatically Claire turned every encounter with a male into something silly. She even flirted with Karl sometimes.
It was things like that, from Claire and from other girls I saw operating in the halls and in the cafeteria at school, that made me want to avoid the Sadie Hawkins dance. I didn’t want anyone thinking I had that kind of nature, a sort of nervous alternation between stalking and mooning about.
I sat across the Thanksgiving table from my cousin Emma and her steady beau last year. It was like a little dance, the way she dipped her head when she spoke to him, the way he stretched after dinner and reached around behind her chair to squeeze her shoulder and pull her towards him so that she had to put down her glass to keep from spilling, the way she looked at the side of his face when he was talking to someone else, and the way he once, when he thought no one saw, slid his hand into her lap and ran it up and down her thigh in one smooth movement.
“Maybe next year, you’ll have a special guest, too,” Emma had said when she noticed me looking. I didn’t stare at them again after that remark.
Watching Emma and Claire, you’d get the impression that love was a game, risky and fascinating and complicated, but still only a game, with as many regulations and conventions as Monopoly or Charades. And to observe my parents, you’d think it was a friendly, convenient contract in which each side made accommodations and, in return, won freedom from pain. But the love I read about, the love Miss Coleman declaimed in her recitations, was both more straightforward than Emma’s and Claire’s posings and more bold than my parents’ timeworn communion. Unfortunately, I had no direct experience of my own.
I stood listening to the man in Miss Coleman’s yard a couple of minutes before I went inside. He had his back to me. I was glad he hadn’t stopped whistling to say hello to Claire. I felt somehow I’d won something from her.
Agnes sat grading papers at the new picnic table under the recently pruned dogwood tree. Every once in a while, a red and orange leaf would float down onto her work. If it were a particularly pretty one, she’d place it carefully in the back of the big dictionary on the bench beside her.
The beauty of the day filled her with happiness. The air was crisp and bright, the sun warm and comforting. From the far end of the yard came the smoky smell of burning leaves and the regular thwacks of Jackson chopping firewood. Flush trotted blissfully between the two busy humans, as usual spending longer intervals with Jackson than with Agnes.
At first Agnes had been a little jealous of Flush’s devotion to Jackson. It appeared so much more whole-hearted and spontaneous than the animal’s attachment to her. She had had to earn Flush’s affection, while Jackson had seemed to elicit it immediately, as if the dog had tuned in to an intoxicating scent from the man. It was definitely a case of love at first sight. Indeed, adoration was not too mild a word for it. But Agnes had come to love Flush too much to begrudge him the pleasure of a new friend. Besides, Agnes liked to think of Jackson as her friend, too, and the three of them as a little mutual admiration society.
She picked up the next paper and sighed. It belonged to the class troublemaker from third period. It was bound to be full of misspellings, run-on sentences, and excerpts from Cliff’s Notes. Hidden among the chaff would be a few grains of interesting, original thought, but she didn’t feel ready to tackle the winnowing task just now.
She picked up her pack of cigarettes and matches and walked to where Jackson was working. Lighting up, she sat down on a broad stump to watch him. Flush, who’d been standing beside Jackson just out of range of his swinging arms, moved to the stump and lay down at his mistress’s feet. She scratched behind his ears. Jackson gave Agnes only a sidelong glance and said nothing so as not to break his rhythm. She didn’t feel slighted. She appreciated his concentration and the economy of his movements.
A pattern had evolved during the weeks that Jackson had been working at the Coleman place. Agnes would appear at his work site, sometimes as a break from her paperwork, sometimes as an activity in its own right, and Jackson, when an opportunity for pausing arose, would stop and share a smoke with her.
The first several times, they’d discussed the progress of Jackson’s work, what he planned next, what supplies he might need. Then one damp Saturday morning, Agnes had been reading in front of the fireplace when she looked up from the page and noticed a fine gray drizzle on the panes of the ivy-free windows. She thought of Jackson re-organizing the tool shed. She slid her book into the large pocket of her oversized sweater and went into the kitchen to brew a pot of coffee. She carefully carried two steaming mugs across the wet lawn to the shed. Her canvas slip-ons were soon soaked through.
Agnes found Jackson sharpening a chisel on an old foot-pedaled grindstone. The shed was inviting despite the gloomy weather. Jackson had cleaned and lit three kerosene lamps. A scrap lumber fire burned in the small woodstove. Flush was asleep on a rag rug under a table; he emitted occasional doggy moans from his dreams.
Jackson flashed Agnes his incomparable smile. Though it had become a familiar sight, it never failed to make her catch her breath with the feeling that a lavish and unexpected gift had just been dropped in her lap.
“You read my mind,” he said, spying the coffee cups.
Agnes hesitated unreasonably at the doorway. She and Jackson had never been together in an enclosed space before. She felt as if something were about to change.
“Come in,” he encouraged.
Smiling at her own foolishness, Agnes had entered and handed him one of the mugs. She leaned against a sawhorse and sipped her coffee while she scanned the little building to see what Jackson had been doing. All the dusty shelves were empty. Various piles of sorted objects were scattered about, cans of paints and brushes, hammers, jars of nails and screws, gardening implements.
“You might want to check this stuff,” Jackson said, waving his hand to encompass the piles. “To see what you want to keep and what not. I don’t like to make that choice for you.”
“Oh, go ahead. Your decisions are bound to be better than mine. ”
“What’s that?” Jackson asked, nodding at her.
Agnes looked at a clutter of rasps and planers near her feet. She wondered what he was referring to. Returning her gaze to Jackson, she saw he was pointing to the book jutting out of her pocket. She pulled it out and gave it to him.
“Rilke,” he read from the spine.
Abruptly, Jackson offered the book of poems back to her.
“Read to me,” he said.
Agnes had just stared at him. Certainly, she wasn’t timid about reading aloud; she was aware of her talent for it and the effect it had on people. But, as at the door of the shed, she hesitated. Jackson didn’t lower his arm. He observed her calmly, with no sense of hurry or embarrassment.
It was such a simple thing, really, this request of his. But Agnes had always known that the undersides of simple things often hid unanticipated complications. Like the first bowl of water she’d given Flush. Now here she was, counting on the dog to greet her when she arrived home, worrying when he disappeared for a day or two, talking to him almost as if he were a person.
“Please,” Jackson coaxed, with the smallest hint of a smile.
Agnes took the book and opened it at random. She began to read. At first, her voice faltered a little and she spoke softly, but she was quickly caught up in the power of the language. She read more strongly, even pacing back and forth through some parts. After the first poem, she leafed through the book and selected some of her favorites to read. Once or twice Jackson asked her to repeat a particularly beautiful passage.
Since that morning, a new intimacy had cloaked the visits between them. They still talked about his work, but only as an opening gambit. She often brought books and read aloud to him. They discussed what she read and then ranged off from there to many other topics. They exchanged only a little information about their personal histories. Agnes described the years she had cared for her mother, and Jackson mentioned some of the places he had passed through in his life on the road. She still didn’t know where he was living now.
Often, they shared companionable silences, as they were doing now while Jackson chopped wood. They had leapt into a way of relating that usually only comes to friends who have known each other for years, who have shared good times and bad times, and who no longer need to ask about motives and intentions, preferences and sticking points.
It was nearly Thanksgiving. I was walking home from the library, where I’d been working on a paper I wanted to finish before the holiday weekend. It was only about 5:30, but it was already dark. I tasted winter, metallic and clean, in the night air for the first time that season.
All the leaves had dropped from the big sycamore in our yard. I stood under it and peered through its bare branches at the starry sky. I wanted to delay my entry into the house, which I knew would be bustling with pre-dinner activity. I’d been two hours in the padded silence of the overheated library, and I needed to let a little more cold seep into my limbs, to keep my mind blank a little longer, to feel alone for a few moments in the wind and the night before I engaged my family.
That’s why I witnessed the good-bye. I heard Miss Coleman’s back door open, and I looked over expecting to see her let Flush in or put out the trash or something like that. Instead, I saw Jackson. (He’d told all the neighborhood kids to call him that, and we did, though Mother said it wasn’t being respectful to our elders). He came out of Miss Coleman’s door and down one step and then turned immediately around. Miss Coleman followed right after and stopped, so that she was on the top step and he one step down from her. Flush was beside her. He lay down just inside the doorway, his head on his front paws. They were easy to observe because the light from inside the house flowed out over the steps and into the yard. It was like they were on a little stage.
Jackson took both Miss Coleman’s hands in both of his hands and held them for a long time. At least, it felt like a long time to me because by then I was keeping very still so as not to be seen by them. I didn’t want it to appear I was spying. I wished I’d gone right into my house. Then at that moment I’d have been setting the table instead of holding my hand over my mouth to hide my pale breaths on the November air.
They didn’t speak, at least not loudly enough for me to hear even the murmur of their voices. They simply stood staring at each other’s faces and holding each other’s hands. Then, as at a signal, they released each other. Jackson took off down the walk at a rapid pace, hunching his shoulders against the brisk wind, and Miss Coleman turned back into her house. Flush scrambled up and cast a quick look after the departing man before the door closed. The light that had been illuminating the little scene went out.
When Jackson rounded the corner at the end of the block, I left the shadow of the old tree’s thick trunk and hurried inside. I didn’t know exactly what it was that I had learned, but I felt saddled with knowledge nevertheless.
I told no one what I’d seen. I thought that would make me feel better about it, that I would feel honorable and grown-up to be keeping a confidence and protecting Miss Coleman from misunderstanding minds. But somehow it didn’t work that way. I felt guilty, as if I had purposefully done Miss Coleman some undeserved mischief. And I felt disappointed, though I didn’t know in whom or what.
That night I was up until nearly 1:00 working on my paper. It was about Cortez in Mexico. As a rule, I didn’t care much for history, but the relationship between Cortez and the fantastic king Monteczuma intrigued me. I tried to imagine what each man had thought of the other in his inmost heart and what each man had believed to be his duty to his people and to his own destiny. It was a way of thinking I had learned in Miss Coleman’s class, putting yourself inside a character to see the world with other eyes.
When I found myself staring blankly out the window over my desk while I doodled spirals in the margins of my notebook, I knew I had worked enough for one night. I turned out my lamp and stood up, stretching my arms above my head and spreading out my cramped fingers.
I was still facing the window, which gave out onto the street, when I heard the clip of quick footsteps outside. I leaned forward to see who it might be. Ours was a quiet, out-of-the-way neighborhood; few strangers passed through it, and the residents were rarely out late.
The lean figure of Jackson came into view. Flush was loping alongside, turning his face up to the man repeatedly, as if questioning the meaning of their late excursion.
Jackson paid the dog no heed. In fact, the man gave such an impression of utter solitariness that I felt a sudden pang of loneliness myself. I felt, too, embarrassment, because for the second time that night I had stumbled upon what appeared to be extremely private business.
I heard Jackson’s hard knock at Miss Coleman’s back door. A light went on in an upstairs window. I presumed it was Miss Coleman’s bedroom. The shade was drawn down. Miss Coleman’s shadow moved rapidly back and forth behind it. I imagined her dressing hurriedly, combing her hair, smoothing sleep out of her eyes. I thought of that song about a man who sees the silhouettes of two lovers against a window shade and rushes to his girlfriend’s house “with wings on his feet,” and I wondered if Jackson had been driven to Miss Coleman’s by a similar longing. Certainly, only lovers or criminals would be about at such an hour in our mundane, respectable neighborhood.
I forced myself to move away from the window before Miss Coleman answered her door. I went to the bathroom to get ready for bed, and when I returned to my room, I got directly into my bed, which was set against the wall opposite the window. I even put a pillow over my head so I wouldn’t inadvertently hear anything from across the street. And I crossed my fingers for Miss Coleman, the one person I knew who’d understand how to meet real love.
The next day was Saturday. Mother let me sleep in, as usual. An inveterate early riser herself, feeling cheated if she didn’t get to see the sun rise, she seemed to understand as well the luxurious feel of “laying abed,” as she called it. It was nearly noon by the time I had dressed and breakfasted.
“Go out and help Karl rake leaves,” Mother told me when she saw me heading for the bookcase. “You could use the air.”
Mother believed that growing children, like plants, needed certain minimum amounts of sunshine and water. I knew there was no arguing with her.
Though I wouldn’t admit it to Mother, I actually enjoyed raking leaves that day. I had been very sedentary the day before, and the scenes I had observed the previous night still weighed upon me, making me feel foggy-brained. While I was raking, I didn’t think. I simply stretched the rake out in front of me and gathered leaves toward me over and over until I had amassed a pile level with my knees. Then I moved to another area and did the same thing again. The crisp air held a hint of rain and smelled of electricity. The leaves made pleasant rasping sounds against one another. My body felt strong and alive. I even joined in when Karl started singing “I’ve Been Working on the Railroad.”
I was so intent on my work I didn’t notice Miss Coleman enter the yard. Karl greeted her first. I stopped raking and looked up.
Miss Coleman was standing on our walkway with her arms full of dog paraphernalia. She held a big bag of dry food in the crook of her left arm, and from her right hand dangled a stainless steel water bowl, a leather collar, and a rawhide bone.
“I thought you could use these things for your dog,” she said to me.
“Has Flush run off again?” I said. “I’m sure he’ll be back soon, Miss Coleman. The nights are awfully cold now.”
“Want me to go look for him?” Karl asked, dropping his rake.
“No,” she said to both of us. “Flush is gone for good this time.”
Karl ignored Miss Coleman and ran off to get his bike from the garage. But I noticed a seriousness in her voice that made me look more closely at her. She wasn’t wearing her glasses, which was unusual, and her eyelids looked puffy. Perhaps, I thought, they always look like that.
I don’t know quite how to describe it, for there wasn’t any other remarkable physical thing about her, but she seemed to me soft and vulnerable, yet at the same time brave and hardy, like the crocuses that push their blossoms up through the last spring snows.
“Flush will be back,” I repeated, not knowing what else to say.
“He’s gone all right. He followed Jackson last night and wouldn’t be chased back,” she said. She seemed to be searching my face for something.
“I couldn’t imagine who was pounding at my door in the middle of the night,” she continued, speaking rapidly. “Jackson was good enough to bring the dog back. He knows what Flush means to me.”
She smiled then, and it was the kind of smile that makes you want to cry to see it.
“I told Jackson to keep him. They’re great friends, you know. Two of a kind, you might say. So they’ve gone together. A new town somewhere with new gardens to cultivate and new walls to build. It’s the right thing.”
She held out the things in her arms to me, and I stumbled forward to take them. It occurred to me Mother would be cross that I’d impolitely let her hold them so long.
“Thank you,” I said.
She smiled that same wrenching smile once more and left. She never came to our house again.
I took the things inside and dumped them on the kitchen table. Mother turned from the counter where she was rolling out a piecrust.
“What’s all that?” she asked.
“Miss Coleman brought them over. She says Flush has left for good. Gone off with Jackson.”
I went to the refrigerator and opened the door. I stood peering inside it as if I were trying to decide what to eat, but really I was hiding. I knew my voice hadn’t sounded right, even though I had phrased my words as nonchalantly as I could. My face was hot, and I felt that if Mother questioned me I might shout at her.
But Mother didn’t question me. She didn’t even scold me about keeping the refrigerator open so long. I could tell without looking at her that she hadn’t returned to her piecrust, but was meditatively regarding the things on the table and slanting scouting glances toward me.
“Well,” she sighed at last, as if speaking to herself, “I guess it’s better to have loved and lost…”
Then I heard the thump of the rolling pin and knew she was at the crust again, her back to the refrigerator and me. I grabbed an orange from the middle shelf and escaped the room without comment.
I never did find out if she had meant Flush or Jackson, or if she knew the whole quote. It was more than enough to have found out that my ordinary, unimaginative mother owned a wise familiarity with turnings of the heart that were only just beginning to be revealed to me.