Steven Bauer
Writing
From Fence, a novel
1.
I’ve seen enough to know that everyone in the wide world has troubles of one sort or another--it doesn’t matter what your circumstances are, where you live, whether you’re a girl or a boy, a movie star or a bum. Misery doesn’t discriminate and it’s not even-handed; at least that’s what my mom says when she’s trying to stop feeling sorry for herself. But just understanding that other people are unhappy about their lives doesn’t make you feel any better, and when you’re fifteen and living at home with your mom and her crummy boyfriend, you can find a lot to complain about.
Still, I try to stay positive. I figured out not too long ago that the way you look at things is mostly under your control, and that having confidence in yourself is a good head start to getting where you want to go.
And after all, the funny thing is that most days start out fine. I make my way up past shreds of dreams like I’m coming to the surface from being underwater at the quarry. It’s always early, and when I open my eyes, still dark. I can’t see anything at all, and the world inside my head and the one outside are the same for a moment.
Anything’s possible.
I think, Maybe I’ll stop biting my nails today, or meet someone new who will change my whole life.
Eventually I take my comforter and pull it around my shoulders like a cape and kneel on the end of my bed and look out my window. Here in Vermont, in the first week of June, it’s still pitch-black at five forty-five, so I could be anywhere, really--in the desert in Africa, or the rain forest in Brazil, or staring out over the ocean for the first time in my life, even though I know this is Somerset, where I’ve lived since I was born.
Everything’s sweet until the sun rises and you bump up against the hard edges of what’s real.
*
It must be a little like watching the world come into being. In the Bible it says the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. I know it’s just a story, but still, I think a lot about that moment--about how God looked out over all that water and made decisions. The elephant would have a trunk, the zebra, stripes, the leopard, spots.
He could have decided to let dogs talk or to make a tree that blossoms into chocolate squares, but he didn’t. Personally, I’d have done a lot of things differently--I don’t mean just spots and stripes--and each time I sit here I think of what it would be like if today the world that appears is not God’s world, but mine. I close my eyes and wish. And I whisper
Let there be light. And there is.
Not all at once, of course. At first I can see very little, even after my eyes have adjusted. The sky is blue-black at its height with just the darkest hint of ridgeline to the east. There are a few bright dots here and there and the faint glow of North Chester to the south.
But we’re enough in the sticks that it really is dark, and it isn’t until the sky starts to rinse with color that you can begin to tell one thing from another, be able to pick out the old apple tree at the end of the berm, or the birdhouse hanging from that tree, or the wild roses (which not even I could improve on.)
Or the house that stands between where we live and where the land falls away sharply toward the valley floor.
*
That house has been empty for almost eighteen months now, since Mrs. Gartner got even more crazy and her sons put her into a home. She was a strange old woman, mean as a cornered raccoon, and ready to fly out the door the minute you set foot on her land. It was like she spent all her time spying on me in case I ever decided to trespass, and when I did, out she came in a blue flannel housedress with a hockey stick left over from her kids’ childhood.
“Get off my land, you tramp,” she’d yell, “or so help me I’ll call your father.”
My father was dead. Mrs. Gartner knew that. And I’m not a tramp, not even remotely.
She took to throwing empty cans and bottles out the window onto the side lawn. She played loud symphony music late at night. So I wasn’t so sad when she went away, leaving the house empty.
But it’s not her big old house, with its white clapboard and slate roof, I care about; it’s her land.
Mom says the Gartner place was built on the edge of an apple orchard as a summerhouse for the orchard’s owner. The orchard is long gone, most of the trees dead and cut down for firewood, though a few still bloom and produce stunted fruit. Where the orchard was is a huge field, level and clear except for some ledge that breaks the ground. It’s bordered by woods on both sides--mostly maple to the north, pine to the south. It’s crossed by a stone wall and a path that spirits you right to the lip of the plateau. From there you can see the whole valley, see the Mettowee glint in the sun or the flash of light off windshields ten miles away or watch a hawk hang in the high eddies and then plummet like a meteor.
The house I live in was slapped together for the help hired to pick the apples. It sits on a thin scraggly strip of brush and dried goldenrod, scrunched up against the western hillside. Of course the two houses aren’t on the same property any more. The dividing line is about thirty feet from our front door, and though you can‘t see it, I know it‘s there, and it used to hurt me in the heart that I wasn’t supposed to cross it.
But then Mrs. Gartner got put away.
Suddenly all that land right to the plateau’s edge was mine, and my fantasy was ruined only when the realtor came with a new prospective buyer and I’d hide and watch them and send them telepathetic messages Don’t buy it don’t buy it. For a long time, nobody did. Mrs. Gartner’s sons were greedy and were asking a whole lot more than people wanted to pay, especially when the house was so close to our place. Who wanted to spend that kind of money and then be pushed up against woodchucks like us?
So I helped things along. When Gary ordered me to take the trash cans around back out of sight, I’d fidget and procrastinate. I’d leave my bike leaning against that sickly hackberry, with the other wrecks--Gary’s rusted-up Toyota pickup and my Mom’s beige Ford Fiesta. The woodpile looked ragged enough without any help from me. During the winter our windows are sealed with heavy plastic, and the house needs paint bad. The color is a little like dried moss mixed with cat pee.
What kept the land mine was how undesirable we were as neighbors.
Until two months ago, at least. In a few days the moving van will come and the land won’t be mine any more.
I’ve had two months to get used to it so I’m better about it now, but I’m still sad. I’m afraid it’ll go back to being the way it was when the old witch lived there.
Well, I lived through that too.
*
I bugged my mom until she finally called the realtor. The new people live in Mendham, New Jersey. She says we’ll like them a lot and get along fine, but what is she supposed to say? Mr. Spenser teaches history in a private school. Mrs. Spenser is a potter. They have a ten-year-old son and a two-year-old daughter.
The good news is that, because of Mr. Spenser’s job, they’ll be summer people, and after Labor Day, I’ll most likely have the land to myself again. The bad news is that they have to be rich in order to buy a second house in this town.
Somerset is what’s known as a resort community, with lots of summer houses. It has marble sidewalks lit at night by old-fashioned gas lamps, and a village green planted with petunias and geraniums. The village that time passed by.
Here, July and August are not too hot during the day and always cool at night. You can walk to the post office and, if you can afford it, to the small market with its fresh ground coffee and smoked Scottish salmon, farmstead goat cheese and New York bagels. You can walk to the Three Maples Inn or the field club.
When school starts in the fall, the summer people will close up their houses and move back to where their kids go to school, in Connecticut or New Jersey or Westchester County. During leaf season, the town will fill up again with tourists who’ll jam the roads for the color. In November, before the snow, the older rich people will move to their winter homes in Florida or the Caribbean. Then, the skiers start appearing, in their massive 4-W-D SUVs. It’s only during mud season, the ugliest time of the year, that Somerset will belong to us locals again who, then, would rather be anywhere else.
*
Still, right now, not just the plateau, and not just Somerset, but the whole awakening world belongs to me, even if it’s God’s world and not the one I would have made. And it’s still a beautiful thing to watch, on a clear morning, as the light spreads out in a fan from Bevis Mountain. I can pick out the splintered edges of the slates on the roof next door. The red bricks of the chimney squat there like an odd toadstool.
The day will be fine--the sky is a high blue fading to white near Bevis. Not a cloud in sight.
When the tip of the sun appears, it almost blinds me.
a chapter from Satyrday
G.P. Putnam, 1980
It was just past midnight and the air was filled
with wings. An army of ravens came out of the west like a cold black
storm. Leaves rustled in the deepening chill, and over the ground
a wind rolled, a darkly visible tumbleweed of air.
But in the sky was a rumble such as a distant earthquake might have made. The moon was startled by the sound. The night had been peaceful, its curved sweep studded with stars. Above her, their sharp sparks bristled. She had followed this course forever, her bright edge unfolding until a pale medallion hung full in the sky. Balanced between the earth and the pincushion of stars above, she remained pleased with herself, the axis of night, the interlocutor. But now she was waning, past half, growing weaker with the loss of light. And this rumble behind her was frightening.
Over her shoulder the moon watched the ravens approach. They came like a rippling sheet, its slow waves caused by unseen hands, the fury of its organization apparent even at this distance. In an instant the ravens were cawing. The first hoarse streaks of sound reached the moon and multiplied until their monotonous echoing rattled the night. Crauk. Cr-r-cruk. It came from everywhere, its hard consonants scratching at her, and under the surface a denser noise, the violent reverberations of their wings.
The moon thought the whole of creation was screaming. The earth disappeared. Ravens swooped under her, so thick she could see only her own dim light flung back at her by their glassy blackness. Thousands still flooded from the west, a turbulent stream of feathers unfurling from the horizon. Beneath her, the stream curled in a sudden arc and the bright red darts of the ravens' eyes pushed past her face, in front of her.
Only then did she see the net. Hooked in the ravens' talons was a fine gauze, black as their wings, hardly visible in the reflected light. As the birds whirled around her, the net caught the horns of her crescent and stuck, drawn ever more tight. She was imprisoned by layers of gauze; she was strangled by them. The hoarse screaming of the birds grew, pulsing through her until the cawing seemed to be coming from inside.
She could see nothing more. She felt herself stiffen, the sudden onset of vertigo releasing into the certainty of fall, and she groaned as the ravens wrenched her free from her path over the earth. Her fire went out. The night filled with a horrible rush, the dissonant flapping of thousands of wings, the hollow suck as she left her orbit, and the creeping cold of the wind which took her place.
Raid on the Inarticulate
from Daylight Savings
Gibbs Smith, 1989
In their village words are stolen
from the children's mouths
before the first
howl.
Their warriors travel
to
our territory and gather
all we have said,
hanging in the air like smoke
or
fallen underfoot.
This is a tale the elders tell
when embers burn to ashes and the dark
claps our ears like a shell
roaring the inexpressible.
We have been taught to hate
these people who grunt
and snuffle,
to fear them as roebucks fear tigers,
the elders death. Soon they will dam
all streams leading to our village
and the fish will gasp on the still beach,
opening and closing their mouths,
no sound.
We are girding for battle. My brothers
scratch their faces with roots, tie
bones in their hair, for bone
is the totem of word and the captives
will rise to the stockade's top
and wait for us. I am going too.
We are going tomorrow when the sun
touches the forest's lip.
We are walking. The women
are coming with us, they sharpen
spears they will carry, they sharpen teeth.
We are going on a journey.
We are going to bring back the word.
We have things to say.