Books by DAR

Small Family With Rooster

Excerpts: Growing Things at Bad Luck Pond
(First published in Southern Review)

When the two of them had finished planting the white crab-apple tree they went back to the screened-in porch and rocked on rockers in opposite motion and kept an eye on the tree. Then the father said, "There we go, now -- a sparrow's lighted on one of the branches." In his view of things that meant it was a bona fide tree now, something they had started that had managed to take on a life of its own, and also, therefore, that it was about time to get busy again. The son had to move his head this way and that in order to make out the brown flickering bird through the screen, his eyes weren't as good, but at last he saw it, too.

"How about that!" said the father.

"Pretty good," the son said lamely.

"Pretty good?" said the father. "Hell, I'd plant fifty of 'em!" This meant he thought the planting was more than pretty good.

"I just love to see things grow," he told his son with authority. "The first thing your mother and I did when we bought this place was to put in the garden. O course, we didn't know anything about gardening then, not one thing. I remember on our way up here for our very first weekend we stopped at a hardware store in Charlottesville. Your mother waited in the car and I walked inside and I picked up a packet of corn seed and I asked the clerk, 'What does it take to raise this stuff?' and he answered, 'Just dig a little hole and drop in the seed and cover it over and make sure it gets some water and some sunlight and up it'll come.' And I said, 'Up it'll come?' and I remember it struck him, too, all of a sudden, what a miracle it was. Corn! And so simple! We both of us stood there shaking our heads in wonder."

The father inhaled deeply and trembled with the beauty of that breath.

"When was that?" inquired the son. But the father pretended not to hear, for he considered the question mundane. He liked his weekends away from his Richmond newspaper to be perfect.

The April noontime was bright; white light streaked the grass all the way down to the dirt road below the two males, red flowers lit up the shady wooded embankment that rose behind them.

"It's nice up here," the son said.

"That's what I call a good morning's work," interrupted the father. "And I thank you for your help. We can get a lot done when we work together. How's that ankle of yours?" he asked.

The son stopped rocking to lift his ankle experimentally.

"It hurts," he admitted.

"The swelling seems to be down some."

"Yes, sir; now it's throbbing," said the son.

"Well, make up your mind. Do you want us to head home for a doctor or not?" the father asked.

"Not really."

"Then don't complain," said the father. "If a person is willing to stick something out, then he sticks it out."

The son postponed rocking.

"You don't stick it out and then complain the whole time."

"Um."

With a shrug the father went out of the porch and into the little kitchen of the mountain cottage. He was a practiced cook, since his wife had died young -- not talented but practiced. From the shelf he took down a packet of dried mushrooms.

The clanking from the kitchen put the son in a drowsy mood. He leaned back in his rocker to rest both his legs on the leather hassock and he sighed with disgust. A sprain would take weeks to heal. It would interfere with his livelihood: Who ever heard of a public-opinion pollster who limped? His father would have to do all the driving hack to Richmond and then he'd have to support him up the steps to his crummy little apartment. He cursed his ankle to hell. The air was fragrant and layered cool and warm. He dozed.

The son was soon to he a father himself. His wife, back in Richmond, had learned a couple of weeks ago that she was pregnant. That was good. That was as it should be. But in his vulnerable, dependent state, laid up with a bum ankle in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia, the thought was vertiginous. The son dreamed he was falling off the ladder again. He dreamed he was falling off the mountain itself. He was holding on but someone was prying his hands loose. Horses reared over him; black skinny cannibals danced around a fire, their teeth were spears close up. Himself a father!

The son awoke to the sound of fierce, fast chopping outside, tree after tree cracking; his father was mastering the forest. A bowl of mushroom soup sat cold on the floor a few feet from the son's rocker and near it, a stale sandwich. The light through the screens had changed. It was golden and sharply reproachful: late afternoon light. He limped outside to meet his father.

The father was shaving the hairs off his face, a thing he'd done twice a day for years and years, and still the procedure was amazing to him. It was stupendous that the beard should grow up so, on and on! But shaving was also rather peculiar.

Here is why it was peculiar. The father thought when he was twenty years of age, certainly when he was twenty-five, that he knew all he needed to know about shaving his beard. But this was not the case. The father was still learning at fifty-one -- new way to apply the lather, a new place to rest his index finger for better-balanced strokes. So far so good. But the father, standing at the ancient kitchen sink of his mountain cottage with evening coming on, realized it was possible that he had already known where to place his index finger and had forgotten -- during his life he had forgotten and relearned many things. Even words. He had memorized the word "redolent" at fifteen and had had to look it up again just last week. So there were many deaths in life. Many rebirths, too ...

He came out of the kitchen and tacked toward his son on the porch, turning on lamps a little prematurely. He stood over his son a moment, cracking his knuckles.

The son looked up. "What say we get drunk," he said. "Just the two of us."

"I'd say you're unsteady enough as it is," said the father. "How about we make a cane for you instead? There's a perfect branch I noticed out by the well."

"Ah, never mind about It," said the son.

"Why? It'd be a cinch to make!"

"I'll just hop," said the son. He stifled a violent yawn. Then he looked up again and inquired, "How's the newspaper business these days?"

"Fine."

"Think the price of paper will hold steady?"

"Of course not."

"Oh. No?"

The father began cracking his knuckles again.

"The light is fading," said the son. But when he saw that this, also, his father dismissed, he cocked his head and said, "Did you hear that?"

"Hear what?"

"I just heard a couple of bullfrogs in the direction of the pond."

"It's too early yet for bullfrogs," said the father. "Bullfrogs won't be out till May at least, maybe even June."

"I'm sure there was at least one bullfrog," said the son. "Come on," he said, rising unsteadily and hopping for the door, "I'll show you. We can watch the sun going down, too."

"Well," said the father dubiously. "As long as we're going, I'll get the goblets."

It was a family custom to drink water from the pond below the dirt road when the sun went down. Then, when the sunset was done, the goblets -- they were manufactured by a family cousin and weren't particularly gorgeous -- would he thrown far out into the water where they'd sink, a kind of homage.

The son hopped the first, grassy part of the descent, but it was tiring and he had to limp when he reached the stones in the dirt road. Balanced wearily on his good foot in the middle of the road, he could see beneath them, laid out like a stained-glass window in the burning sky's reflection, Bad Luck Pond, the cleanest and coldest body of water in the region. "Hear that?" he said, panting. "Bullfrog!"

"Couldn't be a bullfrog," said the father.

The land fell off steeply now, but by careening crazily from boulder to tree trunk, the son instantly delivered himself to the water's edge.

"Looky here," he said, pulling twigs from his hair and staring. "What'd I tell you. A bullfrog."

"Well, how about that," said the father, stepping behind him. "I'll be!"

It was a tremendous dark-green bullfrog, a sensational bullfrog, positioned like a monarch with only his front feet in the water, and he wasn't daunted by the son's proximity, though he kept stock with one sage eye.

"You'll scare him off," warned the father.

"No, I won't," said the son. He dangled his bad foot in the grass against the side of the bullfrog's abdomen but still he didn't budge.

"That's one brave bullfrog," conceded the father. He started to step next to his son but the bullfrog vanished beneath the surface of the water.

"Jesus Christ," said the son contemptuously.

"What'd I do wrong?" asked the father.

"You tried too hard."

The father thought for a moment. Then he said something in a voice that he reserved for his talented but crazy brother, for his talented but crazy sister, for pushy panhandlers, for reporters he was forced to lay off and who were looking for someone to blame, for anyone at all who came at him with unsteadiness -- a polite and measured voice. "If the world were a bullfrog, you could be king," he said, and then he took a long, appreciative sip from his goblet. The son watched him drink.

"Sun's down," said the father. He reached back and tossed his glass far into the air. After a while the son threw his glass too, but his strength was diminished now and it was a short throw. The bullfrog hadn't returned.

"It's beautiful and it's mysterious," the father said with boldness. "You want to go back to the house?"

"I don't think so," said the son.

"Either you do or you don't," said the father.

"I don t think so," repeated the son carefully.

"That's what we like over in the publishing club," said the father. A young man with his mind made up."

The son forgave him again with silence. The sky grew darker with tips of the evergreens stuck to it.

"You've got a fine woman for a wife," the father said.

"Thanks."

"A real lady."

The wind rustled the dead branches on the far shore.

"What are your thoughts on becoming a father?" asked the father.

"It hasn't really sunk in yet."

"I see."

"It baffles me," said the son. "Its wondrous."

"Well, don't let tour wonder slow you down."

"No, sir."

The father cleared his throat. "It's going to be a clear night," he said. "You want to go back for supper?"

"If you do."

"This is a beautiful, restful place to escape to," said the father. "But it's no place to live year 'round. It's more a place to come for a rest after working hard all week in Richmond."

The son thought about that for a minute. Then he said, "I'm not asking you for this place."

The father smiled wearily in the darkness. "But I wish I could offer it to you," he said.

"Why?"

"Because I know you love it here. And you hate living in Richmond. You hate the grind, and you hate the rat race, and you hate committing yourself, and you hate proving yourself, and you hate your job."

"Such as it is," volunteered the son.

"Such as it is," agreed the father.

The son felt he wasn't supposed to say anything more, but he took a breath and said, "Then why won't you offer me this?"

"Because I want you to make it on your own!" said the father. "I want you to stand on your own two feet and be able to look anyone in the eye and yell 'I made it in the real world. Not in the bullfrog world. The real world!’"

When these words had settled down across the water the son said, "You want to have supper now?"

"No!" cried the father. "No, I don't, damn you!" He grabbed hold of his son's head and he squeezed it into his shoulder and he stood there hugging him like that for a long time on the shore of the pond.

The stars were showing, and the glossy moon. In the steadfast light of the moon the leafless Blue Ridge Mountains rose nude from the black water, slow and shadowless; it was like being given a glimpse of the earth's private life -- the mossy felled trees, the fir saplings, the upholstery of brown leaves -- its at-home side, the earth in robe and thick, ragged slippers.

And that's not all, said the earth; look around gentlemen, and see the life you're leading, it's in the moonlight revealed, your past and your future and all the lives you'll ever lead, all luminous, how you came this far and where you must now go, gentlemen -- revealed to you like a maze seen from above.

Indeed it was like that for a minute or more before it was over.

A slow, ghostly breeze came off the fresh water and lifted the father's hair off his brow, and let it fall again. Reluctantly he let go of his son's warm and tousled head.

"Let's have some supper," said the father hopelessly. In the streaming moonlight they climbed back to the cottage and had an early supper and said good night to each other and turned in.

At two in the morning the son got out of bed and flew back down to the pond. There! Was! The! Frog!