Howard Norman - I Hate to Leave This Beautiful Place

“It’s been what, about two years since I’ve heard from you?”

“What’s that noise?”

“I’m having a well drilled. I bought a farmhouse here.”

“Nice tone you’re taking with me. I haven’t exactly been getting bulletins of your life. I guessed you were in Vermont. I got your number from Information. They give out phone numbers, they don’t say whether it’s a fucking farmhouse or a fucking outhouse, okay? My big-shot brother the landowner with his farmhouse.”

“It’s not like that. I’ve got a mortgage.”

“Well, let me inform you of something. I don’t own a house. But I can go back to my motel room and stick my face under the bathroom faucet, turn the water on for all day if I want to. I can drown in it. I don’t have to put out money for a well.”

“You sound like you’re in a better mood than the last time we talked.”

“I need you to get me into Canada.”

“What do you mean?”

“Last I heard, Vermont still shares a border with Canada. I need to cross it. You’d be at the wheel. You know, we could talk. We could catch up a little.”

“You want me to slip you over the border so we can have some quality time together?”

“One could go hand in hand with the other is what I’m saying.”

I hung up.

From the farmhouse, you drive down the dirt road past the nineteenth-century schoolhouse, cross the Pekin Brook fire bridge, continue onto Pekin Brook Road, turn left past Calais town hall, and go straight to the four-corner crossroads, Kent Corners. Turn right onto Robinson Cemetery Road and you will shortly come to the old sawmill and millpond, its waterfalls so loud you have to step ten yards back from it to be heard. The pond is now a nature preserve. It’s a modest-size pond, perhaps an eighth of a mile in circumference, and there are trees along the shore and up the surround. For as long as I can remember there have been two resident kingfishers raising families on this pond. It is a peaceful place.

The daughter of friends, Olivia, had come to our house to look after Emma. So, following my brother’s telephone call, I was able to drive over and sit by the pond. A light rain brailled the surface; there was early mist between the cattail stalks; changes in water and air temperature often registered in different mists. Ducks huddled in three separate groups. At the north side of the pond, a kingfisher was diving along its sight line, then returning to its branch, sometimes with a fish — diving, returning, diving, returning.

But I noticed that the kingfisher on the western shore, whose perch was a craggy branch of an old lightning-struck maple, was not sitting upright like an exclamation point, which would be normal. Instead it wobbled, tucked itself between trunk and branch as if to gain balance, before tentatively venturing out along the length of the branch to resume its scrutiny of the pond. Something was a little off there. An hour later, when I mentioned this to the young woman working summer hours at the Maple Corner General Store, Octavia, who was majoring in biology at college, she said, “My uncle takes his lunch break by that part of the pond. Maybe he emptied his flask of whiskey into it.” The local conservation officer, Dave, who had stopped in for a coffee, eavesdropped and took things literally. “Tell him to stop doing that,” he said.

Experienced friends had warned against contracting the Benidini Brothers, but for two weeks after the kitchen faucet started to dribble silt, they were the only well-drilling concern to answer the telephone. I’d read in the Times-Argus that business for well drillers was booming. Our neighbor Scott had unloaded from his pickup three barrels of water for general use. We were taking baths and showers in a house in nearby Plainfield. On my way back from the millpond, I stopped at Legarre’s Produce to purchase plums, melons, peaches, corn on the cob, bottled water, and strawberries. Driving up Peck Hill Road, I saw the top of the well-drilling rig. It towered the way you might see a giraffe’s head and neck in the distance when you enter through the gates of a zoo.

Six men — including three well drillers — stood on the lawn. One was the road commissioner, Roy Bolz, who in height and weathered handsomeness had an uncanny resemblance to the writer Peter Matthiessen. Roy often won backhoe competitions at state fairs; he could set a peach down on a fence post with his backhoe. A videocassette recording of this feat was available for borrowing at the post office, which had an ad hoc lending library, too, mostly used paperbacks, including a couple of books I’d written. The town historian, Earlene Leonard, who kept track of such things, had said to me, “The movie of Roy gets signed out way more often than your books. Take my word for it.”

I walked up to the giant Erector set that was pumping away, slamming into the earth with percussive thuds I’m sure could be heard half a mile away. “They’re at two hundred eighty feet,” Roy said. “My condolences.” The Benidinis charged $2.50 a foot. Eventually, the well went down to 666 feet; to pay for it, I wrote six different articles, one for a magazine in Reykjavík, about having a well drilled.

Roy’s word condolences seemed right; it did feel funereal on the lawn. Then everyone turned almost in unison to see my neighbor Maurice Persons, age sixty-six, who in younger days had worked in a granite quarry in Barre, walking slowly up the dirt road. Maurice had on the black greatcoat he’d worn in the quarry. In the heat-mirage distance, he appeared to have thickened into a bear, ambling in cartoonish ursine fashion as he approached. “He’s got something under that coat,” Roy observed, as if old Maurice were suddenly a menacing, nineteenth-century journeyman assassin for hire. “He’s not that naturally wide.”

When Maurice had gained my yard, he needed a breather. He looked over at the well-digging crew and said to me, “I’ve got a way to get these fellows off your property so we won’t have to hold a wake for your bank account.” At which point he opened his greatcoat like two vast wings, revealing a row of dynamite sticks in loop holders on either side of the lining. “You just toss a few of these into the old well casing, step back, and you have a new well,” he said.

“I don’t know, Maurice,” I said. I had visions of my house collapsing into a sinkhole. “I just don’t know.”

“How old’s that dynamite, anyway, Maurice?” Roy said.

“Good as new,” Maurice said.

“I doubt it,” Roy said.

One of the Benidinis, Jack, had dug a thin, shallow gulley through which sludge the thickness and color of cement runneled down the slope next to the house, and several tributaries had begun toward the flower garden, which I had to stop up with dirt. Jack checked the gauges on the rig; they relayed news from the underground. In an exhibit of annoying talent, Jack then ate an apple without using his hands. The apple turned in his mouth, and this made his brothers crack up with laughter.

Maurice walked back down the road, dynamite intact inside his greatcoat. “At one hundred fifty feet,” Roy said, “they got some water, but it was surface water, it’s called. It came out nice and clear, but it was soon gone. Even if a well’s getting eighty gallons a minute, if the water’s not clear, it’s a bad well. They’re into the kind of rock they like to see, though.” Jack, who had been raking sludge, walked over and said, “The deepest we ever went was six-twenty.”

Olivia, who had been inside with Emma, appeared on the side porch and, making a gesture like she was holding a telephone to her ear, shouted, “It’s for you.”

I went in and picked up the phone and said, “Hello?”