Who Are You, Calvin Bledsoe? Read online

8.

  To Recognize Warmth

  Thank you, dear readers, for all your many consoling and comforting words about my mother’s passing. I appreciate them. My mother would have appreciated them, too. My mother was a minister, after all, and she believed that God put us on this earth to console and comfort each other.

  The pellet stove industry, of course, also believes in consolation and comfort! There are more and more of you satisfied pellet stove owners who know this to be true, and with help of new government green initiatives (like the two-thousand-dollar rebates on all the new Jutsol and Ironhorse superconductive models!), the pellet stove is more affordable than ever! In fact, my long-lost aunt Beatrice, who came to my mother’s—her sister’s—funeral and has decided to stay me for a while is so enjoying the US Defender that she just asked how much it costs. The question was idle, I think, but once she heard how low the purchasing price and how high the energy savings, well, it won’t surprise any members of my virtual pellet stove posse to hear that I think she’s strongly considering buying one of her own!

  9.

  Religion is rules, of course, and so is sports, and so is blogging for the pellet stove industry. Those rules dictate that I title my blogs and that I use exclamation points when writing about the pellet stove industry, or pellet stove models, or any happy feeling one might derive from a pellet stove. The rules dictate that I am allowed to use anecdotes about my family life as long as they are somehow related to the pleasures of the pellet stove. The rules also dictate that I never, ever, admit or indicate that I am merely writing into the void, but on the contrary act as though I have a large audience of readers, and that I begin my posts by referring to my readers formally as “dear readers,” but then by the end of the post refer to them more familiarly as “my posse,” and that I also refer to their kind correspondences even though I have never received one of these correspondences—kind or otherwise. Readers would know this, of course, because there is a comments section at the end of each post, and not once has anyone left a comment. But of course you’d have to read the post first to know that no one has left a comment.

  So no one had ever left a comment. But at least I knew now that I had one reader: my aunt. She’d told me that she’d read my blog! And then she’d left without telling me where was she staying, when I would see her again, if I would see her again. That’s why I wrote the post, in my car, on my phone, right there in the cemetery. At the time I chose not to wonder why I was writing these things, these lies. After all, I lied in my blog all the time. That was another rule: to think of lies as enhancements and not lies. But I know now why I lied. So that Aunt Beatrice would realize that she’d left without telling me where she was staying. So that she would know that I was wondering when I would see her again.

  10.

  It was eight o’clock as I made my way home through Congress. Let me tell you about the town, then, as I drive through it in memory now. The cemetery was behind the Congregational church. That was my mother’s church. It was modestly steepled, white, clapboard. A church that would have been unassuming had it not been high on a hill, perfectly positioned to look down at the rest of the town. I took a left out of the cemetery, down the hill, and went past the ancient stone public library with its limited hours; past my father’s school and its playing fields; past the charcoal plant; past the lumberyard; past the boat launch to Lake Congress; into the center of town itself, which consisted of a town green, in the center of which was a gazebo and also a monument to our Soldiers and Sailors, and on the periphery of which were ten houses, all also white clapboard, and on the periphery of those houses were maybe a two dozen more houses, houses that used to be white clapboard but now were white and off-white vinyl siding.

  There. I’ve told you about the town. Everything else in the town was actually outside the town, and everything outside the town was more or less the same as the things that are outside every town that more or less resembles the town of Congress.

  11.

  My parents’ house was right on the green. I say “my parents’ house,” but except for my four years of college and then my two years of marriage, I’d lived there, too, and now that my mother was dead, I lived there by myself. I got out of my car and stood there on the porch, looking out on the green and listening to the town’s nighttime chirpings and the faint motorboat noises coming off the lake. In her famous book my mother suggested that people in small towns were closer to God than people who lived in cities or in the country because at exactly this time of night, before they went to bed, they could sit out on their porches and sense the fine fellow feelings of their neighbors while at the same time appreciate the goodness and immensity of the natural world. I supposed that might be true, but it was also true that our neighbors seemed most prone to conduct their loud domestic arguments at dusk, and in fact once from this very porch I watched in the firefly-flicked gloaming a man chase his elderly father across the green and onto the gazebo steps, which is where the man caught and tackled his father and then beat him unconscious with a full plastic bottle of laundry detergent.

  12.

  Charles Otis. That was the name of the son. The father’s name was Leland Otis. After Charles was done beating his father, he walked back across the green, past my house. As I said, I was standing on the porch. Charles saw me. But he didn’t acknowledge me and kept walking. Several minutes later his father walked past my house, too. He was staggering, bleeding from the top of his bald head and also carrying the bottle of detergent, which, like his head, was dented. He also saw me and also, like his son, didn’t acknowledge me. And why would they? And for that matter, why would I acknowledge them, what they had done, what I had seen? What was there to acknowledge? Because I already knew everything about them: they were Charles Otis and Leland Otis. And they already knew everything about me: I was Calvin Bledsoe.

  13.

  Anyway, I was thinking of this incident with the Otises, and of my mother, and of my father, and of my aunt, and of the empty green in front of me, and of the empty house behind me, when my cell phone rang.

  14.

  Earlier I mentioned Dawn, the other blogger for the pellet stove industry. It is time to admit that Dawn was the wife from whom I was separated. As my father had predicted, we’d gotten divorced, and then she’d moved away to Charlotte, North Carolina. But she still called me, pretty much every night. All that I had not mentioned. Because you cannot mention everything at once. This is yet another rule of blogging for the pellet stove industry.

  “How was it?” Dawn asked. She was referring to my mother’s funeral and burial. But her voice was pinched in a way that let me know that she already knew how it was. Dawn and my mother had not been friends. My mother tended to refer to her as “your scowling wife” and then, later, “your scowling ex-wife.” For her part, Dawn hated my mother’s sermons, and her book, which she thought was condescending in the extreme. According to Dawn, my mother’s attitude toward grace suggested that we all want to be good people, or at least the best of us do.

  “It was all right,” I said, and I could picture Dawn scowling. “All right” was, according to Dawn, my favorite expression, and it was no coincidence that it was Dawn’s least favorite expression. “My aunt Beatrice was there.”

  “Since when do you have an aunt?”

  “She was my mother’s twin.”

  “Since when did your mother have a twin?”

  Since birth, I wanted to say. But I knew from long experience that it was useless to argue with Dawn. Not because I couldn’t win, although I couldn’t, but because Dawn didn’t necessarily want to win either; she just didn’t want the argument to end. She wanted it to go on forever. You’d think that divorce would have put an end the argument, but no.

  I’m afraid I’m making Dawn seem awful. In fact, she mostly was. But still, since she’d moved to Charlotte, she sometimes appeared to me, the way God is supposed to. She didn’t appear to me whole, but in parts. Her hair, for instance. Dawn had great hair. S
pectacular locks. Many reddish coils springing from her head like ideas. Or her boots. Dawn liked to wear knee-high leather boots, riding boots, although she didn’t ride.

  15.

  I say that we divorced. But in fact, it’s Dawn who divorced me, because I wouldn’t move with her to Charlotte in first place. This infuriated her. Dawn thought, what was the point in having a job that you could do from wherever you wanted if you all you wanted was to do it from where you were? In her kinder moments Dawn thought I didn’t want to move to Charlotte with her because I didn’t want to leave my parents and then, after my father died, my mother, in Congress. In her less kind moments she thought I didn’t want to leave my parents and Congress and move with her to Charlotte because I was, in her words, “a big pussy.” Now that my parents had died, she thought I would no longer be a big pussy and would finally leave Congress and join her in Charlotte.

  “I’m wearing shorts,” Dawn said. Like a lot of people who have moved from cold to warm places, Dawn liked to talk on the phone about how little she was wearing. This wasn’t seduction. It was incredulity: Dawn couldn’t understand why I wasn’t living in a warm place from where I could then call people in a cold place and tell them that I was wearing shorts, too.

  “I’m wearing shorts, too,” I said.

  “To your mother’s funeral,” Dawn said. I could hear typing noises, and I wondered if she was working on her blog. I could picture her curls fighting against the oppression of her headset.

  “I changed.” I hadn’t; I was still wearing my gray funeral suit. I had left the porch and was now walking through the house. There, in the mudroom, were framed pictures of my father and his players in their official team photos. There, in the dining room, over the fireplace, was a painting of John Calvin, a portrait done by one of his contemporaries, which had been a gift from one of my mother’s acolytes and which was worth more than the whole house. There, in my mother’s study, on the north wall, were framed jackets from all the domestic and international editions of her famous book; on the south wall, her framed divinity degree. There, in the living room, on top of the piano, was a photo of the three of us taken right after my baptism. That was the only picture of the three of us on display in the house. Who knows why? Maybe more would have been considered idolatrous. But I knew that my mother kept a photo album in the piano seat. I opened it, and yes, there it still was. I flipped through until I found a picture of my teenaged mother in tennis shoes, and her parents (whom I’d never met—they’d died before I was born), and a teenaged girl also in tennis shoes. It was clearly Aunt Beatrice—even then her face was sun crisped, her black hair swept dramatically over her forehead. But my mother, when I’d asked her once who the girl was, had told me it was a distant cousin and to put the photo album back in piano bench, hurry up, we have to go to the field, or the court, maybe it was to the church, I can’t remember which, and I can’t remember if my mother had told me her cousin’s name or, if she had, if she’d said it was Beatrice or made up a different name. In any case, it was definitely my aunt Beatrice. She wasn’t wearing sunglasses either: her eyes were blue, I could tell that even with her squinting into the sun. And she was smiling. It was the same smile but less wolfish, more wholesome. Back then, she still had her tooth.

  “When are you coming to Charlotte?” Dawn wanted to know, and I told her what I’d been telling her in the days since my mother died: that I needed to clean up the house, fix what needed to be fixed, put it on the market. I would come to Charlotte just as soon as I sold the house.

  But the truth was that I wasn’t going to do any of that. The truth was that I was never going to move to Charlotte. I was going to stay in my house in Congress. Alone. Forever. Earlier I’d wanted to say to my aunt that I felt alone. But that was all right with me. I wasn’t afraid of feeling alone. I’d always felt alone. I’d felt alone when my parents were still alive, and I’d felt alone when I was married to Dawn, and I would feel alone if I moved to Charlotte to be with Dawn. The difference was, when you are alone with other people you have to pretend that you don’t feel alone, the way a blogger for the pellet stove industry has to pretend he isn’t writing into the void. I had to pretend to be a blogger. Other than that, I didn’t want to pretend anymore.

  16.

  After I said good night to Dawn, I turned off the lights and went to bed. Several hours later I found myself awake and standing at the window, and I didn’t know what I was doing there, but I was scared.

  “I’m scared,” I said to no one. Just then I heard several popping noises, and I realized that was what had gotten me out of bed and brought me to the window: I’d heard popping noises. The popping noises got louder and closer, and then I saw a skunk waddling down the middle of the street, and behind it were my neighbors, Charles and Leland Otis. They were holding BB guns and they were firing the guns at the skunk. Charles, the son, was wearing an oversized hooded sweatshirt, as usual, and Leland, the father, a flannel shirt, also as usual. Leland was very thin, and Charles was very fat—so very fat that I sometimes wondered if Charles was that fat on purpose; I sometimes wondered if his obesity was an intentional rebellion against his very thin father. I didn’t wonder why they were shooting at the skunk: I’m sure the skunk had offended them in some way, because the Otises were always quick to be offended. I did wonder why the skunk didn’t spray them. Maybe it already had. Maybe it was all sprayed out. The skunk went under my car, which was parked on the street, and the Otises kept firing and I heard the ping ping of the BBs hitting the car, and then the skunk emerged from the car and the Otises were pretty much on top of it by now and I could see the skunk lurch to the left and stumble and almost fall, but then it didn’t fall; it managed to disappear down a storm drain, and then the Otises fired a few more rounds into the storm drain and then they strolled back across the green, past the gazebo, laughing and twirling their Daisys around their index fingers like gunslingers. As they walked past my house I could have sworn both Otises looked at my house, looked up toward my bedroom, saw me standing there, stared at me staring at them. Then they kept walking. There was a thick fog rolling in from the lake, and the Otises disappeared into it. A second later I heard another gunshot, and then I heard one of the Otises howl and then the other one laugh, and then the phone rang. I knew it was Dawn—she sometimes liked to call me in the middle of the night, when I was most likely to be confused and vulnerable—and in my confused, vulnerable state I thought there was a connection between the phone call and Otises; I thought that Dawn had hired the Otises to scare me. To scare me away from Congress and toward Charlotte. And it had worked. They had scared me so much that I was ready to say right then to Dawn on the telephone, I will move to be with you in Charlotte. It is the wrong thing to do, but I will do it because I’m scared.

  “I’m scared,” I said into the phone, and for several seconds I heard nothing, not even breathing, and I took the phone away from my ear and looked at the screen and saw the words Unknown Caller, and when I put the phone back to my ear, an automated man’s voice said, “Clear sailing,” and then he hung up.

  Three

  17.

  As I said, in my middle-of-the-night muddledness, it seemed as though there was a connection between the Otises shooting at the skunk and the phone call. And in fact there was a connection. But I had no way of knowing what it was at the time.

  18.

  I woke up at nine in the morning, five hours after the phone call, feeling as though I were responsible for murder—my own or someone else’s, I couldn’t tell which. I sat up, sweating. My head was full of weapons: BB guns, of course, but also lasers, machetes, bazookas, coiled phone cords long enough to strangle someone. I don’t only mean that my head was full of the thoughts of these things; I also mean that it felt as though these weapons were in my head, and they and their wielders were trying to get out. As though the Otises had turned their guns around and were with the gun butts trying to pound their way out of my forehead. Pounding, that’s all I could feel and
hear, pounding and more pounding, and then I realized it wasn’t only coming from my head: someone was pounding on the front door.

  I scrambled downstairs, opened the door, and there was my aunt standing there on the porch. She was wearing her sunglasses and the same very white sneakers. The rest of her clothes were only somewhat different from the ones she’d worn to my mother’s funeral: her pants were green, her sweater blue, her turtleneck a lighter shade of blue. I had the distinct impression that my aunt had a closet full of clothes that were different from one another only in their primary colors. Behind her I could see the truck and, in the bed, her dog, standing, pointed in my direction, alert.

  The sun was dazzling and made my head feel even worse. I envied my aunt her sunglasses. She seemed, from behind those glasses, to be sizing me up. I realized that before I’d gone to bed I’d taken off my suit jacket and tie and shoes but had managed to fall asleep in my suit pants and my dress shirt. I must have looked like a dissipated businessman. Hotel rooms. Minibars. Rumpled sheets. I fought off the urge to tell my aunt that I rarely drank alcohol and that I never, except for today, woke up later than six thirty in the morning.

  “I didn’t sleep well last night,” I explained to my aunt, then told her the story of being woken up in the middle of the night—first by the Otises shooting at the skunk and then the phone call from the automated man’s voice saying “Clear sailing.” My aunt seemed interested in the story. She adjusted her glasses and adjusted them again, and for a moment I thought she was going to take them off, but she didn’t. Instead, she asked me to tell the story again. I did and added in this retelling that I’d told whoever was on the phone that I was scared, and I also mentioned Dawn, mentioned that I’d been on the phone with her before everything else had happened. I didn’t tell my aunt that Dawn was my ex-wife, or that she was also a blogger for the pellet stove industry, or that she lived in Charlotte, or that she wanted me to live in Charlotte, too. I figured I’d save those details, and if my aunt asked me to tell her the story again, I’d add those details later. This is something else I’d learned blogging for the pellet stove industry: if you have to say something three times a week (I blogged three times a week), then you need to save some of what you have to say for the days when you have nothing to say.