It was just a few days before the Cronin’s Memorial Day Barbeque and the opening of swimming season. From my kitchen window, I watched my next door neighbor George Cronin kneel down to collect a sample from his pool. He held onto the ladder pole and guided himself to the deck in jittery increments. Everything George did took a long time these days. The sun had risen over the magnolia tree and was reflecting off his gold eyeglasses and bald head. George resembled a softening candle, wick aflame, blurry and bright. I couldn’t make out his features but it was easy to imagine his disgruntled expression, thin pressed lips, and one suspicious open eye, as he measured the chlorine level.
Recently, I had also watched George’s newest son-in-law John, a hulking man, six and a half feet tall, break the rules and swim laps before the levels were right, and heard George reprimand him from his back steps after John reached for the wall, gasping for breath.
“Get out of the water,” George yelled, hoarsely, straining.
John’s chest heaved as he gulped for air.
“I will not,” he said, finally. “If you think I’m going to let this beautiful day pass without a swim you’re crazy.”
George, who was standing on his back porch, level with my kitchen window, frowned, speechless for a change.
“Nor tomorrow,” John continued. “Nor the next day, nor the day after that, if it’s nice out. Why do you think I made an honest woman out of your daughter?”
“The water’s not ready.”
“Water, daughter, I don’t care,” John said and pushed off the wall to cover a third of the length with a whale-like plunge that sent waves sloshing onto the pool deck.
When John did the crawl with his huge back, wide shoulders and great churning arms, he needed only eight strokes per length and didn’t bother breathing. Done, he would hang off the wall chuffing like a beast. When he swam butterfly it was awesome and set the water to a furious boil; anyone in the way would have been in trouble.
I first thought John’s give-no-quarter attitude was a signature development in George’s domain which, navy man that he was, he commanded like a ship’s captain. His pool. Mutiny. Yet those two often barked at each other with unabashed challenge and incipient delight. It would take at least four frail Georges to make up one John. George’s other sons-in-law were quieter men who kept to themselves, an accountant, a dentist, a trumpet in the city symphony.
“I married Georgeanna, not you,” John yelled to George.
“You don’t listen to her either.”
“We decide things together. Weird, isn’t it?”
“What are you doing this Friday?”
“Nada. It’s the holiday weekend, remember?”
“Be here bright and early in work clothes and with work gloves. Eight, at the latest. And bring Warren with you. I’ll pay him but I won’t pay you. As much as you eat and as much trouble as you are, I might as well get some work out of you.”
“Aye, aye, captain.”
And be there Big John would, tossing paving stones around like paper plates and sacks of concrete like feather pillows.

All five of George’s daughters were married now. In John, the strapping Georgeanna, George’s youngest, had met her match, in heft, in length, in spirit, in forthrightness, in defiance of and alliance with her father. John was a high school psychologist and guidance counselor, a dictionary lover, who introduced the word “irascible” into the family vocabulary, and now Georgeanna used it every chance she got. Irascible old man, like that. All in good fun, mostly.
The summer before, when John and Georgeanna were living together but not yet married, at the party celebrating George’s wife Mama Anne’s retirement as a principal, I witnessed John’s awesome cannonball from the diving board that soaked every schoolteacher on the deck. Screams, laughter and reprimand followed, plus a secret thumbs up from Georgeanna to her father as he sat in the pagoda with a bottle of wine.
For years, I had watched George get the pool ready for swimming season and the Cronin’s ritualized celebration of family and America: Memorial Day opening barbeque, Fourth of July fireworks extravaganza and children’s parade with brass and percussion from the city symphony playing Souza for the flag waving kids marching around the pool, the wistful Labor Day closing party, to all of which my wife Sandy and I had standing invitations and would sometimes go. We might as well, it was so boisterous and loud over there, and went on long into the night, until the only ones left were teenagers, subdued now that the adults and younger children were gone, drinking beer and smoking joints, talking, laughing and making out with their boyfriends or girlfriends on the lounge chairs or in the pool illuminated by underwater lights, life renewed through young love and lust, a strangely, beatific scene.
Around the pool, the Cronins celebrated new grandchildren, birthdays, engagements, graduations, championships, awards, trips abroad, homecomings, campaign victories, reunions and the various other events and rites of passage bound to strike a boundless clan. Every week something special went on. There had to be close to thirty in the immediate family, with George and Mama Anne presiding in their different ways over their large Victorian four gables house with wrap-around porch, its pool house with a better kitchen than the main house, and most importantly over the in-ground, vinyl-surfaced swimming pool, the center of their world in the summer, and what the women lived for after the busy school year. Except for George, who had owned and run a lumberyard, and also Georgeanna, who took it over, the Cronins were a family of educators.
They had been increasing for a long time, but this summer everyone was aware that grievous loss was coming since George’s cancer diagnosis, so these months were to be especially poignant ones from which they wanted to squeeze every drop, even if George stayed apart in the pagoda, drinking wine and watching the goings on like a king in his court. It was all for him, the whole show. He was more present at the parties by his absence from them, a sharp whiff of the future. George, his own man to the end, accepted a first but not a second round of radiation and refused chemotherapy. He would not go out in such a way.
George was losing weight, reddening, yellowing and graying at the same time, his movements slower and less steady. Though he was ill, he carried on with the pool maintenance, mostly. George told me down in his basement distillery that he had never once actually been in the pool, in the water that is, because while it was being built he did go down to inspect the vinyl. He also revealed, after a few glasses of wine, that he hated the pool like a servant hates a cruel master. Like a master, like the navy had been, like his family, the pool was George’s love and nemesis, protector and commander, fate and duty, and he served it loyally and well though often with an ambiguous look on his face, as if he were happy to be angry about it.
Many years ago, he and Mama Anne struck a bargain. He would build an in-ground pool, maintain it and its complicated equipment and elaborate surrounding area, make sure that she and their girls had everything they needed for a thriving social life with family, friends, church members, Democratic party volunteers, endless school staff, classmates, basketball, football, soccer and field hockey teams, distant relatives, people from out of town etc., numbering in the hundreds and Mama Anne, in turn, would leave George be, unbothered at home or in the shade of the pagoda, not having to talk with anyone if he didn’t feel like it, to drink the wine he fermented and bottled in the basement of the house, a consistent prize winner at county fairs, the very best white I have ever tasted.
“You can either have a pool or have a life,” he said with his quirky finality. Sometimes George spoke in potent sayings and wisecracks gleaned from living, adages and proverbs. He could be terse or he could be voluble, depending on the time of day, as the sun went down so did the wine.
“But you seem to have both.”
“Yes, I do.”
George designed, set up and supplied, through his connections in the building trades, a galley kitchen in the pool house, three sinks, two refrigerators, a deep freezer, a dishwasher and professional gas stove.
George paved the outdoor cooking patio in red brick and cement no weed could penetrate and equipped it with a pair of immense hooded grills facing each other like competing altars or jet planes with their immense wing spans. In any case, they were huge and formidable and I couldn’t help but be impressed with the grills’ bearings as they reflected my gaze with blurred, stainless steel indifference. The grills and grilling patio were commanded by the accountant and the dentist facing off like gunfighters at high noon, hanging with steel utensils. No one else was allowed on the patio. Everyone had to line up for meat along the sliding doors of the pool house, paper plates in hand. The smell of charred flesh often hung over our neighborhood.
George had built the pump shed and maintained the finicky pump motor, which kept the water circulating as it must to be up to code, through an intricate arrangement of PVC pipework, hoses and clamps, switches and valves, resembling on a larger, cruder scale his winemaking equipment, and on a smaller one the engine room of the navy cruiser he was a seaman on during the Korean War. As life went on, George said, his fate became clearer to him in repeating images of motors, pumps and duct work, different kinds of water from sea water to pool water to distilled water for winemaking, the chemistry of chlorine and the chemistry of the grape, schoolteacher daughters and rather formal, hard to fathom sons in law, until big John arrived on the scene.
“You can trust him to hear what you have to say and never once shudder and never once blink, and to tell you exactly what he thinks, every time. He never plays his cards close to the vest. He doesn’t even have a vest.”
George tested the chlorine level every day and handled the noxious chlorine powder, wearing gloves and a respirator.
George tended to ‘Creepy’ an electronic vacuum whose slow-moving head crept along the pool bottom like a snail or catfish sucking off green algae. Often Creepy would get stuck in a corner and have to be set free with a yank on its plastic tube. John or Georgeanna or Warren, John’s son from his first marriage, did that now George was ill, and also wielded the long handled leaf skimmer he could no longer manage, to keep the water clear of leaves, clippings and whatnot, and also of the dead insects that escaped the notice of the bullfrog which had learned to use the pool ladder to enjoy a nightly feast of drowned bugs and then would croak out his appreciation through the night. The children loved the frog which didn’t seem to mind being caught in their flashlight beams. The teenagers rooted for the frog to find a mate.
George and I had always gotten along pretty well. He could be moody but my appreciation of his delicious wines, my visits down to the basement distillery for yearly tastings of new vintages, my willingness to lend a hand when more manpower was needed and especially my rare attendance at the pool parties, all helped. However, George thought of me as a man who had not struck the correct balance with his wife as he had, not given her children, and that she and I were headed for trouble someday.
“Watch out, Jack, watch out,” he said, after a few glasses. “It’s at his peril that a man refuses what his woman holds dear.”

The Memorial Day quarrel between George and me happened when he decided to add one more level, variously called terraces, pavilions, decks or tiers, to the others he had built over the years to accommodate his burgeoning tribe. Let’s go with terraces. Over time, George built a series of terraces along two sides of the pool which, at the bottom of the slanted backyard, resembled the stage of an amphitheater surrounded by raked seating. Backstage, so to speak, was the glass-doored pool house, in one corner the grilling patio and the pagoda in the other. The raked, paving-stone terraces were connected by short staircases and furnished with chairs and tables so people could eat or drink or rest up there and watch the play down below instead of having to be in it, personal balconies of relative peace and quiet. It wasn’t all that big a yard, George said, and he judged the terraces necessary to fit everyone and better serve the non-yakkers in attendance, George said. He also told me that a deep level of hell must be reserved for having to make eternal conversation with elementary schoolteachers, no alcohol, not a man among them.
On the other hand, Mama Anne thought the whole terrace thing absolutely megalomaniacal, but had long understood how the terraces resembled the decks of a ship and all that that implied. For her husband to take on building one more terrace now was completely crazy but she didn’t protest since John and Warren were there to do the heavy lifting while George supervised.
Our quarrel happened on Friday evening, actual Memorial Day, though the barbeque wasn’t until Sunday. After a few hours of grading finals, I was in my study, headphones on, listening to Bach fugues, when my wife Sandy blew in like a dark cloud about to burst. I thought she was still in spin class. I hated when she snuck up on me when I was doing nothing, listening to music, daydreaming, playing blackjack on my laptop or crumpling up papers and listening to them untick in the trash can. Lingering in my mind was the suspicion that I was a disappointment to the woman I loved with my failure to be more than I was. We had reached the marital stage where, without children, some renewal, greater than a date night, dancing lessons or a dog, was called for, to shake up the comfortable yet tangled familiarity we were both aware of. Sandy wanted a child, I didn’t, yet. I still fantasized travel, grants, a job change, a book contract. Or okay, Sandy was an actress in community theater, maybe I would write her a play, a new form for me. Or gardening: Taking out the two scrub trees at the back of our yard would expose a big swath of ground to the path of the summer sun. Or magic mushrooms, and an all night ecstatic soul exchange and renewal of our vows. Or the humiliation of couples counselling. Something.
I took the headphones off.
“Don’t you see what they’re doing out there?”
“What’s that? Out where?”
Her eyes flashed with anger that I didn’t know what or where.
“Out there,” she said, frustrated, her arms flying upward.
“Okay.”
“Our trees!”
My beautiful Sandy stamped her foot. She shut the screen of my laptop, blowing papers off my desk and violently pulled the cord to raise the venetian blinds covering the back window but she didn’t know how to secure them and they fell with a fluttering clunk, and then one more time.
I stood and put a hand on her slender, sweaty forearm to let her know I would take care of the blinds.
“Let me, Sweetie,” I said, calmly.
Sandy found my calm infuriating and threw my hand off her. She seemed pretty upset but I sensed that the actress in her was also aware of the startling affect of her voice and gestures. Part of her was entertaining herself with her anger, riling up everything, feeling good and powerful. It might have been gone another way if she had not just come from spin class at a high endorphin level; my wife had reached that paradoxical plateau where you can fully be yourself and fully watch yourself at the same time.
“They’re killing our trees!”
We exchanged a long frozen look, her big brown child-like eyes glassy and triumphant, my face unnaturally composed. It was how I got when she was upset, though I felt terribly hot inside and at fault. I refused to let her get the rise out of me she wanted. In being for and against this rise, we were utterly opposed to each other.
The rise I felt was not the one Sandy wanted. What a tiger. She was sweaty and dressed in a thinning black leotard that swooped down to where her breasts started to swell from her chest. The way her flesh pressed weightedly into the elastic material turned me on. I could almost see through it, a faint hint of olive, and feel her breasts’ lovely weight with my eyes. I could smell the dark, bitter almond odor of her skin, and her sweat mixed with a faint tinge of musk. I wanted to pull the leotard all the way down from her shoulders to her waist. But, of course, I secured the blinds and looked out into the backyard.
“Look! Look at him! With an ax!”
Big John was standing, legs spread apart, in a large, just-dug hole near the fence, swinging a long-handled ax over his head down onto something I couldn’t see but could hear when the blade struck, something hard and then soft, krk-uhh, krk-uhh, and eventually a splintering sound. His ax was definitely having at the roots of our pine trees which were planted nearby along the fence. The blows registered on Sandy’s face as if her bones were being struck.
Because Sandy felt a deep nostalgia for her childhood, when we bought the house she insisted that pine trees be planted in the back for privacy, she said, from the goings on at the pool. The pines resembled those in her parents’ backyard just as the Japanese maple she had planted out front matched the one in her parent’s front yard. I didn’t want any trees, thought they’d just add more yard work but kept it to myself. I was a city kid so what did I know.
The trees were doing well, the maple spreading out in softly cascading maroon waves, the pines growing tall, straight and strong. You could easily rake up the leaves and pine needles in the fall when it was brisk out and invigorating. You could lean against your rake and watch your lovely wife plant more bulbs, tulips and daffodils, lilies and irises, bordering the walk and in front of the porch trellises, and feel life was good. As in many instances in our marriage, the things I didn’t want initially turned out to be some of the best things, like moving back East and out from downtown, buying a house with a yard, even taking a yoga class, and maybe a spin class and a kid, eventually.
John took a break. Swinging an ax into tough tree roots was hard work for a guy who sat around too much, even if he was the size of Paul Bunyan. George was standing outside the hole leaning on his elbows against our shared fence with a white towel over his head. Also leaning there were two shovels and a pick, their wooden handles smooth and sweat-polished to a deep taupe from George’s work over the years, plus a machete, bow saw, hatchet, and pruner. On the other side of the fence about four feet away in our yard stood our dignified pines, silent and defenseless. John stepped out of the hole and walked down to the pool house so it was just George now, as still as the leaning tools, as still as the trees.
“Go down there and stop them, right now!”
“George is sick,” I reminded her.
“That doesn’t give him the right to kill our trees.”
“Sure, I’ll go talk to him,” I said with as much confidence as I could muster.
“Stop them.”
“Just let me get a shirt and my shoes on.”
I smiled at Sandy but it felt more like a wince and transparent exposure of all my doubts.
“No more axing!” she said and stormed off to the shower.

“Hi, George,” I said, coming up behind him after walking down the yard.
George turned and yanked the towel off his head. He looked skeletal, gaunt with red-grayish-yellow waxen skin melting from his jaw and chin in folds, a large, inflamed wattle, sunken, pink-rimmed eyes, and yet he smiled, baby-bird like with a prominent beak and open mouth, his false teeth preternaturally white. He was holding a glass of wine. It was almost six o’clock of a warm, pleasant evening.
“Hi Jack, happy Memorial Day.”
“Happy Memorial Day to you. What are you guys doing over there?”
I leaned over the fence and looked down into the hole which was about ten feet long and five feet wide, their day’s work. I saw the round white flesh of large chopped off roots in the newly exposed dirt wall just below the fence. I saw many small, angular white chips littering the hole. The chopped roots and chips gave off a lemony odor. I saw also that there were more roots to be chopped, hanging there like gigantic nerves into the hole.
“We’re building a terrace. It may not be ready by Sunday but we’re going to try, probably pour concrete tomorrow.”
“Haven’t you got enough terraces already?”
“What do you mean?”
“Sandy is very upset, George.”
“Why?”
“About you guys chopping the roots of our trees.”
“She sent you down here, didn’t she?”
“No.”
“Yes, she did. Look here, Jack,” George said. His commanding voice rattled now, following its rough course over a pink gravelly streambed. “I know lumber and I know trees. Trust me. Trees have been insulted by far worse injuries than this, lightning strikes, wild fires, gaseous volcanic clouds, droughts, blights of all kinds, gypsy moths and locusts, toads and tornados, and survived and thrived to become the bones of the houses we live in in this country, our protectors. We nest inside trees like the birds do. Hard to imagine birds without trees. Hard to imagine man without houses. Hard to imagine houses without lumber. Trees take our insults and still give shelter. Thank the trees, Jack, thank the trees.”
“I like trees too,” I said, stupidly.
George cleared some gunk from his throat, spat into the hole, then slugged the wine in his glass. He was feeling good, it appeared.
“Your trees will be all right,” he said. “They’ll recover. Trees learn and your trees will learn to grow other roots in other directions that won’t crack my goddamned concrete. You ought to thank me because shallow-rooted evergreens growing in this direction would have run out of ground in a few years so it’s better for you that they learn to go elsewhere and not fall on your house in a high wind. Elsewhere, you hear me trees, elsewhere. There, Jack, happy? I reasoned with the trees, now you go reason with your lovely wife.”
“She’s very upset George. Throw me a bone, here, will you?”
“John, John,” George called out. “You have to hear this. Where are you?”
“I’m indisposed.”
“What, say?”
“I’m defecating,” came John’s voice from the pool house.
“I don’t want to think about that,” George said to me. “In the navy, we used to call guys like him goldbrickers, but he can sure dig a hole and swing an axe. Look, Jack, I gave you the score that your trees will be all right, so there’s that you can tell her. All true. From an expert. Of course, she won’t listen to reason so I’m sorry to have to say this but, bottom line, your roots are on my property so I can do whatever the hell I want to them. That’s the law.”
“Fuck, George. Damn it.”
“I guess you don’t want to go home now, do you?” He laughed. “How about a glass of wine?”

George started down the terraces, one stair at a time; step down with one foot, step down with the other onto the same stair, steady, rest and repeat. I hopped the fence, a shovel keeled over and I set it right. While resting on a stair, George managed to get the white towel back on his head, a difficult balance of achieving shade while still being able to see. I stopped behind him, listening to his deep wheeze, startled by how bent over he looked under the towel, a pilgrim, his empty wine glass held out in front of him like an offering.
I tried to imagine how all this might appear to Sandy looking out the back window. She must be thinking well of me at this point. No more axing, at least. But what would happen if she finally found out the sad truth? Why was our emotional terrain a minefield of unsolvable dilemmas? There were no good choices, and the choice I wanted to make, obeying the law, would not please her.
Going down behind George took a long time. Immediately, it reminded me of being with my mother in the supermarket check out line in Florida recently while she, insisting on paying for the groceries with a check, went through her purse searching for her checkbook, an act which inwardly seemed to last an eternity. I could have used my credit card but, protective of my mother’s dwindling sense of competency, I chose not to, and suffered the looks of the people behind us in line, as Mom piled stuff on the counter, a hanky, another hanky, a pack of Kleenex, an emery file, a box of Chiclets, a squeeze ball, a compact, her inhaler, etc, in her search for the checkbook, who pays with a check anymore?, and after finding it, shakily writing the check, tearing its perforations and handing it over. Okay but then, still oblivious of everyone, outside of time, she filled in her check register and painstakingly did the balance. Shame on me, as my mother might say, that I had felt ashamed.

George, Big John, and I sat in the pagoda, drinking George’s delicious wine from bottles on ice in a large plastic cooler. We were facing the pool, water shimmering with the sun setting behind us, shadows rising from the ground, the wine level falling first in one bottle and then another. The atmosphere in the pagoda was both peaceful and potent, as if we were in a tent or a cave.
“I can appreciate your dilemma,” John said to me. “It’s one of those things, you know, one of those things in life without a good answer.”
“Rock and a hard place,” said George.
“Soft place and a hard place. Have you seen his wife’s mammary glands?”
I burst out laughing.
“She’s been over here swimming a few times,” George said, chivalrously.
“Having to deal with his wife and having to deal with his irascible next door neighbor,” John said. “But you have to ask yourself, Jack, is this the hill you want to die on?”
“I never got that,” George said. “Never got it at all. ‘Is this the hill you want to die on?’ You mean a man gets only one. Now that is very poor battle planning.”
“It’s a metaphor, you idiot. Not literal,” John said.
“Schoolteacher,” George spat.
“I give up,” said John. “He marries a school principal, has….”
“She wasn’t a principal when I married her.”
“Right, to my point, she was a schoolteacher.”
“Who distinguished herself, and became a principal. God love her.”
“He marries a schoolteacher, has four schoolteacher daughters and yet he can’t think of a better epithet than ‘schoolteacher’ to throw around every chance he gets. It boggles the mind and freezes the senses.”
“No, it makes perfect sense. My girls needed me to be tough, just so. They needed me to be who I am so that they could become who they are.”
“’Try a little tenderness,’” John sang, loudly and badly.
“Oh, I knew their mother would take care of that part.”
“Don’t lie to me, George,” John said. “Don’t lie to me.”
“What?”
“Isn’t it a little late for such mendacity, such prevarication, such fraud and frivolity?”
“The dictionary runs amok,” George said.
“Mama Anne is a softhearted, tough cookie,” John continued. “I’ll grant you that, but Georgeanna told me that when she got in that trouble and Mama Anne wanted to kick her out of the house when she was seventeen, you fought to give her one last chance among endless other chances, and that chance saved her, and then, then, you bought her an automobile, on the sly.”
“That old thing.”
“Come on, George, come on,” John said. “Let it go, will you?”
“I hated seeing them go at each other like that. It’s not for me. It’s not for me, that feeling. Tore me right up.”
Those words, spoken at a higher pitch, hung in the air a while.
“You saved her, George. You saved her, Georgeanna told me. You know how? It wasn’t the new last chance or that stupid automobile. It was that she understood how you had her back in your fashion, even in her own nonsensical, utterly insane, completely predictable and inane, sexually transmitted disease teenage impulsiveness and rebellion, and that she couldn’t let you down. Ask her sometime.”
“I will not.”
“Suit yourself.”
“Schoolteacher,” George said, resigned.
It got quiet again.
“I never got that one either,” I said, breaking the silence. “Just like I never got that other one. You can’t have your cake and eat it too. You just get a bigger cake.”
“Another literal idiot,” John said.
“Do you know what’s wrong with schoolteachers?” George said, hanging on to it. “Bottom line, wrong with them? They think they have something to teach somebody and yet if you try to tell them anything they say, ‘What makes you think I don’t know that?’”
“Pedantic, pompous and punctilious,” John said. “Hey, I’m a schoolteacher too.”
“No, you’re not.”
“Close.”
“The trouble with schoolteachers is they can dish it out but they can’t take it,” said George.
“You should talk.”
“What do you mean?”
“You speak in rules, George, in proverbs, adages and sayings.”
“I have to agree with John there,” I said.
“I do not.”
“You’re always thinking you have something to teach somebody,” John said. “You’re a schoolteacher, George.”
“Get the fuck out of here.”
“What you refuse to see in yourself, you see in other people. Pure projection.” He paused. “Hey, you’re a schoolteacher too, aren’t you, Jack?”
While John kept leaning back easily on two legs of the molded plastic chair, smiling about his instigating question, I felt envious of his physical ease and comfort in himself, a gently prodding giant.
“College,” I said.
“There you go, George. A college professor. Another one of the accursed tribe.”
“I never let that bother me about him.”
“Thanks, George,” I said.
“Live and let live is what I say.”
“There you go, another adage. You’re Ben Franklin in a sailor’s cap. But what you don’t know about yourself could fill volumes.”
“I know myself,” George said. “I know myself. In fact, it was the goddamned navy that taught me about myself but not how you think. But you know, I have to say, that there is something deeply stupid about the navy.”
“Arcane, archaic, hierarchical structures,” John said.
“Deeply stupid but it taught me myself. When I was a seaman, I hated it. I only joined because my daddy made me and if that isn’t the stupidest thing in the world I don’t know what is.”
A Labrador retriever, large but still very much a puppy, bounded down the yard and into the pagoda, John and Georgeanna’s young dog Claire. The dog charged her master and thumped into him with its wagging body, knocking him over onto his back with a crash that shook the entire structure. John laughed as the dog whined wagged and licked his face and flung his eyeglasses up in the air with its snout but enough was enough.
“Claire, off. Off. Off and lay down,” John boomed.
Amazingly, after giving George and I brief sniff each, Claire did what her master commanded, laying down near the pagoda entrance with a disgruntled groan that ended in a long whine. In two minutes, the dog was asleep.
“Georgeanna has arrived,” John said, on his back from the floor.
John stayed down, content for a while, subsiding on the floor. The darkness had mostly taken over in the pagoda. I couldn’t see John’s round face but imagined a drunken, Buddha-like expression. There was a new edge of coolness to the evening and, with the sun almost down, distant fireworks started, muffled and irregular, the sounds of celebration, the sounds of war and the end of war.
“There’s a bird’s nest up there. Listen, you can hear the nestlings peeping,” John said.
I could hear the faint peeping from the rafters, new voices added to the choir of crickets and birds in the trees, and the fireworks’ percussion. I listened and everything seemed of a piece, woven together by a consciousness which included my own yet ignored me. I was pretty toasted, my problems distant but still needing solutions, with answers large and small. Sandy, next door, must be wondering what had happened to me. More than anything, I wanted peace in my unsettled household but it felt wonderful not to go home.
John kicked his chair away and rolled onto his side with a groan. He got up on one arm, grabbed the pagoda railing and pulled himself to his feet. He was so big he blocked out half the world. He lifted the chair upright and sat. The dog, after raising her head, correctly assumed that nothing needed her attention, set it back down.
“Pass the wine,” John said.
We each poured ourselves a glass. This was the fourth bottle, I think, that George had dispensed from the cooler, just as delicious as the first.
“To the lovely Georgeanna, just arrived, a toast,” John said.
We drank to Georgeanna.
“To Joanne, Maryanne, Luanne and Carol Anne.”
We drank to Joanne, Maryanne, Luanne and Carol Anne, George’s other daughters.
“Georgeanna, now I get it. You got tired of waiting for a son,” John said. “A son was going to be George just like your father was George.”
“Family tradition.”
Georgeanna came down the yard and climbed the steps into the pagoda. The dog hardly stirred as her mistress stepped over her.
“Hi, Daddy, Sweetie, Jack,” Georgeanna said, in a gentle, musical voice belying her physical stature. “Lovely night.”
Georgeanna, who had taken over running the family lumberyard, was almost six feet tall, a handsome woman of about 40, with broad shoulders, a big chest and strong shapely legs. Her pretty face was a bit worn and older than her years, marked by the trouble she had been through before she straightened herself out. She jostled the shadows in the pagoda like silent waves as sidled up to her husband and nestled into him. Big John put his arm around her waist.
“Mine, all mine,” he said.
“Not yet,” George said, mysteriously. “Yes, there is something stupid about the navy, I tell you. Deeply, deeply stupid.”
“Uh oh,” Georgeanna said. “I see what’s going on here. Wow. I think I’ll go up to the house and see what Mama’s doing.”
“No,” said John. “Stay.”
“But you guys are…”
“Stay,” John said loudly.
Claire lifted her head again. That was stupid, the dog must have judged, I was already staying.
“Stupid, deeply stupid, the navy,” George said, took a swallow and cleared his throat. “One night, there was a terrible storm, big black rolling waves, and then troughs, terrible troughs, one following the other, like a roller coaster, so you couldn’t walk, so you had to hang on for dear life, so your brain was in your stomach, so the seamen in the hold were twisted up in their hammocks like butterflies in cocoons and just slept like that if they could sleep at all and some of them would never sleep again.”
“Tempestuous,” said John. “Homeric.”
“It was so very stupid to be at sea in a storm like that, when they had radar, when they had radio weather reports, and no one but the stupid United States Navy would sail into such a blow. I blame them for what happened. They should have known. They had warning. They had time. They should have long brought us to safe harbor. It didn’t have to happen.”
“What didn’t have to happen, Daddy?”
George raised his hand for silence.
“Navy regulations read that during a ship’s entire commissioned life, it will ‘Always’ have sailors on watch. It’s in the book with ‘Always’ capitalized. Could be doomsday. Could be Armistice Day. Could be Jesus Christ walking on the water.
“I had the Second Dog watch at the bow. The bow, the bow, worst watch of all in a storm like that, vibrating like a cold gong, absorbing every rise and fall and roll of the ship before anyone and harder than anyone, rain coming at you like ice picks. I held on the ship’s rails with frozen hands. Me out there by myself, nonsensically, unnecessarily on Second Dog watch. Because what am I going to watch? Who am I going to see? The enemy? More likely than not get tossed overboard. Cold as hell and totally dark, yet every once in a while I saw a white albatross fall down a shaft of air into nothingness. And then the ship exploded…”
“What say?” said John. “Say what?”
“The ship exploded, engine room at the back, one hundred forty four men lost their lives, but because I was up front I was one of the dozen who lived…”
“Oh, Daddy…You never…”
“I didn’t want, I didn’t want…” George interrupted her sharply. “People died, I lived. The storm quit, a miracle, quit just like that soon after and we were four days on the water in a lifeboat So, why me? I wondered. Why me? When all those other good sailors drowned or were blown to bits. Why me? I don’t know. I don’t know. God had nothing to do with it, I knew that. It was totally impersonal and insignificant, dumb luck, but in that lifeboat I decided that I would make it significant by how I lived my life, if I lived, thus and so.
“I’m on borrowed time anyway and I know I’m not going to make to the 4th of July, and I’m okay with it, children, I’m very okay with it.”
“Oh, Daddy…”
“Don’t touch me,” George said, and slowly stood, and slowly walked, no one else moving in the least and, in an awful ceremony, went down the stairs one at a time into the night, until the darkness closed around him like a cloak.
John, Georgeanna and I stayed silent a long time. Not a word, not a sigh, not a tear. Perhaps we were all hearing the world in a new way, the way a dead creature hears it.
After Georgeanna went inside, I asked John if he would, kindly and quietly, saw off rather than chop off the remaining tree roots. John understood and said that would not be a problem, though some of the angles were tough. He would get Warren to do it that very night.
I went home, wobbly, around the fence not over it again. I decided to lie to Sandy that the problem had been solved, no more axing, and reap my reward, lovemaking I hoped, and that it would have the result nature intended.