Richard Ford - The Lay of the Land

In due time, the lady friend—“a completely good and decent woman”—got tired of life on Mull as a crofter’s companion and returned to her job and husband — likewise a professor, in Ohio. A couple of local lassies moved in and, in time, out again. Wally got used to living semi-officially in the manager’s stone cottage, scrubbing the loo, restocking the fridge with haggis, smoking fish, burning peat, reading The Herald, listening to Radio 4, snapping on the telly, sipping his cuppa, keeping his Wellies dry and his Barbour waxed during the long Mull winters. This was the wee life, the one he was suited for and entitled to and where he expected his days to end amongst the cold stones and rills and crags and moors and cairns and gorse and windblown cedars of his own dull nature — here in his half-chosen, half-fated, half-fucked-up-and-escaped-to destination resort from life gone kaflooey.

Enter then the Internet — in the form of the old laird’s young son, Morgil, who’d taken the reins of the property (having been to college at Florida State) and who’d begun to suspect that this lumpy American in the manager’s accommodation was probably other than he’d declared himself, was possibly an old draft dodger or a fugitive from some abysmal crime in his own country, from which he’d exiled himself, some guy who dressed up in clown suits and ate little boys for lunch. The standard idea of America, viewed from abroad.

What young Morgil found when he checked — and who’d be shocked? — was a “Wally Caldwell” Web site the old Lake Forest parents had erected as a long last hope, or whatever inspires Web sites (I don’t maintain one at Realty-Wise, though Mike does, www.RealtyTibet.com, which is how Tommy Benivalle found him). No outstanding warrants, Interpol alerts or Scotland Yard red flags were attached to the site, only several sequentially aged photos of Wally (one actually in a Barbour) that looked exactly like the Wally out planting spruce sprigs and pruning other ones like a character out of D. H. Lawrence. “Please contact the Caldwell Family if you know this man, or see him, or hear of him. Amnesia may be involved. He’s not dangerous. His family misses him greatly and we are now in our eighties. Not much time is left.”

Young Morgil didn’t feel it would be right to send a blind message out of the blue — that a cove of Wally Caldwell’s general description was working right on old Cullonden, on the Isle of Mull, under the name of Wally Caldwell. It’d be better, he gauged, to tell Wally, even at the risk of its being sensitive news that might wake him up from a long dream of life and dash him into a world he had no tolerance for, send him screaming and gibbering off onto the heath, his frail vessel cracked, so that all his ancient parents would have to show for their Web site was a pale, broken, silent man in green pajamas, who seemed sometimes to smile and recognize you but mostly just sat and stared at Lake Michigan.

Morgil tacked a note to Wally’s door the next morning — a color printout of the Caldwell home page — the computerized middle-aged face side-by-side with a yearbook photo from Illinois State (“Call me Mr. Wall”). No mention was made of Sally, Shelby and Chloë, or that he’d been declared expired. The only words it contained were his parents’ tender entreaties: “Come home, Wally, wherever you are, if you are. We’re not mad at you. We’re still here in Lake Forest, Mom and Dad. We can’t last forever.”

And so he did. Wally crossed the sea to home and the welcome arms of his mom and dad. A changed bloke, but nonetheless their moody, slow-thinking son, all things suddenly glittering and promise-laden, whereas before all had been a closed door, a blank wall, an empty night where no one calls your name. I know plenty about this.

Which was the strange tableau my unsuspecting wife walked in upon, carrying her suitcase and lost memories, expecting only a “drinks evening” with the in-laws, followed by some whitefish au gratin, then early to bed between cold, stiff sheets and the next day making nice with elderly strangers at the Wik-O-Mek, trying patiently, pleasantly to re-explain to them exactly who she was (a former daughter-in-law?). But instead, she found Wally, bearded, older, fattish, balded, gray-toothed, though still innocent and vague the way she’d once liked, only dressed like a Scottish gamekeeper with an idiotic accent.

She was surprised. We were both surprised.

When she’d told me this whole preposterous story, it’d long gone dark in the house. Chill had filtered indoors off the surface of the moonlit sea. She sat perfectly still, peering out at the high tide, the fishermen vanished to home, a red phosphorescence seeding the water’s swell. I left and came back with a sweater I’d bought years before in France, when I’d been in love in a haywire way (my then-beloved is now a thoracic surgeon at Brigham and Women’s), though my love story, then, had an all-round satisfactory end that left life open for new investigations and not obstructed by problematical, profoundly worrisome insolubles.

Sally put on the sweater Catherine Flaherty had settled into on cold French spring nights facing the Channel. She hugged her arms the way Catherine had, burying her cold chin into the crusted, musty-smelling nap, giving herself time to think a clear thought, since Wally was in Lake Forest and I was here. All the safety netting of our little life was still up to catch her, and she could — as it seemed to me she should — just forget the whole commotion, writing it all off as a dream that would go away if you let it. My heart went out to her, I’ll admit. But I also understood there could be no tweezing and tracing of slender filaments back through the knot to make loose ends become continuous and smooth. They weren’t loose ends. These were what I called my life. And even though they were short, blunt and more frayed than what I’d rather, they were still what I had. If I’d known what awaited me, I might’ve phoned up some boys in Bergen County who owed me a favor and had ’em fly out and perform a penitential errand on Wally’s noggin.

There are many different kinds of people on the planet — people who never let you forget a mistake, people who’re happy to. People who almost drown as children and never swim again, and people who jump right back in and paddle off like ducks. There are people who marry the same woman over and over, while others have no scheme in their amours (I’m this man. It’s not so bad). And there are definitely people who, when faced with misfeasance of a large and historical nature, even one that needn’t cloud the present and forbid the future, just can’t rest until the misfeasance is put right, redressed, battered to dust with study and attention so they can feel just fine about things and go forward with a clear heart — whatever that might be. (The opposite of this is what the Permanent Period teaches us: If you can’t truly forget something, you can at least ignore it and try to make your dinner plans on time.)

In Sally’s behalf, she was dazed. She’d gone to Illinois and seen a ghost. Everything in life suddenly felt like a cold higgle-piggle. It’s the kind of shock that makes you realize that life only happens to you and to you alone, and that any concept of togetherness, intimacy, union, abiding this and abiding that is a hoot and a holler into darkness. My idea, of course, would’ve been to wait a week or two, go about my business selling houses, book a Carnival Cruise vacation to St. Kitts, then in a while nose back in to see how the land lay and the citizenry had re-deployed. My guess was that with time to reflect, Wally would’ve disappeared quietly back to Mull, to his spruce and cairns and anonymity. We could exchange Christmas cards and get on with life to its foreshortened ending. After all, how likely are any of us ever to change — given that we’re all in control of most things?