Chapter 16
. . . How gladly would I meet
mortality, my sentence, and be earth
insensible! how glad would I lay me down
as in my mother’s lap!
mortality, my sentence, and be earth
insensible! how glad would I lay me down
as in my mother’s lap!
John Milton, Paradise Lost
I lived that last year in two worlds. Our daily tasks went on as always, as if they would never end.Yet I knew a full stop would close the book of our life together in the winter of 2000. I had no idea of how I would get from here to there. When I tried to imagine Guy walking out the door for the last time, then what I would do after that, I found myself thinking:Maybe he will change his mind. Even on that last morning as he darted about the cabin packing, talking quietly about how he was going to stop and get a paper to see how the Dartmouth women’s ice hockey team did in their game the previous day, I half-expected his next sentence to be: “I’ve changed my mind.”
The only way I could handle the fact that my husband was going to commit suicide was by keeping on living the way I was living. The work at Barra had always sustained me. I found comfort and purpose in the routines of making bread, tending the garden, sawing wood in the afternoon in the woodshed with Guy. Telling Guy about an encounter with a chickadee, him telling me the temperatures at 7:00 a.m., 1:00 p.m., and in the evening again at 7:00. Nevertheless, our last year together was a conscious process of saying good-bye to the life we’d created and lived in this seasonal round, each step evolving out of the one just taken. By saying good-bye to the land, we were saying good-bye to each other.
I could not see what lay ahead, but I knew I could rely on myself. I had begun to learn this lesson when I was twelve and realized I couldn’t count on my alcoholic father. This lesson continued to be driven home when I started climbing. I could see how the hard move would start but not always how I’d get through it. The sequences became clear only by committing to the rock, only by starting upward. Reaching the summit was a matter of trusting myself, my strength of body as well as of mind. The difference with the climb that lay ahead of me now—the exit cracks aswirl in mist—was that when we reached the top and untied the rope, instead of walking back down the mountain together as we always had, Guy would turn in one direction and I would head in the opposite.
That March of 1999 we were engaged in sugaring the same as ever, and we were both keenly aware that it was our last time. I wanted to let myself feel the finality of each day, but in such a way that thoughts of what I was about to lose would not overwhelm my pleasure in the work. I wanted also to enjoy our many visitors, who, as they mushed about the sugar bush on snowshoes, bringing in pailfuls of sap, had no thought that they too were doing this for the last time.
During this last sugaring, Twin Firs Camp, with bunk space for six and room for children in the tiny loft, was rarely empty. Our guest quarters had been ten years in the building. We’d spent over half that time taking down the softwood for logs: white pine, spruce, hemlock, and balsam fir. We stripped off the bark in spring, when peeling logs is as easy as removing your winter underwear. We looked for logs with interesting twists in their branches and for trunks with burls—anything that would be both decorative and functional. In the early 1990s, even before it was finished, Twin Firs Camp opened its doors to our overnight visitors.
During this last sugaring season friends piled packs on the bench under the sign that read: Twin Firs Camp: Dedicated to Our Welcomed Guests. They spread their sleeping bags on the bunks and hung parkas, shirts, and snowshoes on the branch stubs we’d left on the logs to use as handy hooks. After supper, as the heat of our cabin, full stomachs, and a good day’s work began to produce more yawns than conversation, Guy slipped out and lit the candles, the two by the doorsill lighting the way up the low granite steps. As the snow melted and this last sugaring season wore on, the sight of the candlelight mellowing the log walls and the spurts of laughter coming from Twin Firs became more and more precious, and we gazed from our bedroom window until the last candle was snuffed and all was silent.
When Guy and I were by ourselves and weren’t too busy, we often alternated mornings at the sugar shed. This gave Guy a chance to work up wood at the cabin, for me to make bread, or for either of us to put in a morning of writing. We had located the sugar shed, an open-front log structure we’d built in the mid-1970s, on a gentle knoll in the middle of our sugar bush about a tenth of a mile from our cabin.
Whenever I was working down there by myself, I was conscious of storing up how everything felt so I would never forget: the slant of April light as it glanced off the flat needles of the hemlocks; the smell of bubbling sap thickening to syrup and sweetening the air;the rasping sound the bowsaw made as I worked it through the piece of rock maple across the sawhorse. I took note of the snow as it pulled back from the trees, revealing a widening circle of damp leaf mold. I marked the long vertical frost crack in the trunk of a nearby yellow birch and heard the pileated woodpecker drumming on the decaying beech seventy-five feet downhill of me. Always my eyes returned to the sugar buckets hanging from our maples. Most of all, I wanted to etch in my memory each of our faithful trees—Speckled Red, Athos, Porthos, Lady Walshingham, and Dame Quince—and all the others I could see from the sugar shed, proud with their buckets that we had painted green. I was aware of the snow melting, the quality of the sap changing as the season moved along. These things that in the past had only marked the turn of the season were now imbued with the passage of time itself. Time ticking, time moving toward conclusion, each stroke louder, more insistent than the last. The only way I could keep in balance was to let myself be caught up in the process of syrup making, working with Guy as we always had for the past twenty-six seasons.
Guy, whose daily presence felt like an extension of myself.As for missing him, that would be with me for the rest of my life. Though deep down—too deep to pull to the surface then—was that feeling of relief, the same kind of relief I felt when he was away on a solo mountain trip and I was alone at Barra.
On the last day of boiling, April 2, 1999, as we walked away from the sugar shed carrying the last of the syrup, we impulsively turned and looked back. Only a small stack of wood remained. The fire was down to coals, and the air smelled heavy with the damp smoke of a dying fire. We looked into each other’s faces, and I saw that Guy’s eyes were wet. Of all our tasks at Barra, sugaring went the deepest. It required that we give our hardest work, our strongest care. Once again we had made our syrup for the year. We were saying good-bye.
Two days later we washed up our buckets at the stream. The afternoon was cold, in the forties, and blustery. The path between the sugar shed and the stream was slick with ice, and the water was a degree or two above freezing. Later that afternoon I found an envelope addressed to me on my side of the table. It was from Guy (of course!), and upon opening it I read that I had received the coveted PITFOCH Award—Perseverance in the Face of Cold Hands. The award’s committee included the Antarctic explorers whose spirit we admired and whose books we enjoyed: Scott, Shackleton, Amundsen, and Cherry-Garrard.
At the end of April we put in the pea trellises. We planted lettuce, spinach, arugula, chard, kale—our favorite greens. In early May we moved on to the onions, broccoli, cauliflower, cabbage, and our beloved Brussels sprouts, three twenty-foot rows of them. These last were a staple of our fall diet; I steamed them with heaping amounts of garlic and ginger that had even the confirmed Brussels sprout haters among our guests asking for seconds. The secret wasn’t in my recipe but in the fact that these sprouts were picked a half-hour before we ate them. The carrots and beets followed, then potatoes planted from our own seed crop. We finished off with the “freezables,” as we called them: cucumbers, summer and winter squash, pumpkins, corn, beans—pole and bush—as well as dry beans (for which we used our own seed) and the annual herbs, dill and basil. Marigolds, nasturtiums, zinnias, and cosmos we sowed along the borders as companion plants. We ended by setting out transplants of melons and tomatoes, the only plants we started indoors. Guy dug the hole, and I planted the final seedling. Then, down on our knees, we mulched it with grass clippings pushed close around the slender stem. Our garden, this on-the-ground mosaic that took seven weeks to plant, was complete.
We cleaned off our tools. In fall we would again fork in wood ash and manure and plant the cover crop of winter rye, but this was the last full growing season at Barra for Guy and me. I let the finality of this fill my thoughts. I felt it was important to look it in the eye, then to place it to the side—not out of sight, but far enough away that I would have to turn my head to look at it.
Collecting our wood for the year began in May and ended just before Thanksgiving. The trees we felled—sugar maple, hop hornbeam, white ash, beech, and red oak—wouldn’t be burned until 2001 and 2002. But during 1999 Guy spent many afternoons in the woodlot by himself adding to these stacks and creating new ones. When Guy split and stacked wood on a daily basis at the house, he stockpiled more than usual, though I didn’t let myself take in the full meaning of this until the summer was well along. “There’s so much wood in the shelter, Guy,” I finally said.
“It should take you well into March after I’m gone,” he replied.
One day late in the fall, when we were working in the woods, Guy hung up a spruce.As it fell its branches became entwined in another tree, making it very difficult to pry free. This can happen to woodsmen now and then, and often we could work together with the peavey, ax, and saw to get the tree down. But on this day Guy seemed compelled to attack the spruce with everything he had in him. I stood by, ready to be helpful, but the way Guy handled his ax, the strokes pelting down, the muscles in his forearms standing in cords, let me know there was no room here for me.
That awful morning I felt such anger at Guy—all unspoken, all pushed down. The next time he acts like this, I said to myself, I’m walking off the job. I mulled on this for several days, wondering if I could actually do it. It was a thought loaded with disloyalty. One of the team members refusing to play the game. But deep down where I didn’t want to look, it was a liberating thought as well.
A week later Guy hung up a branchy white pine. He became distraught and whaled away at it with his double-bit ax. I kept on limbing the tree I was working on, but Guy’s anger at himself crowded me out; it made me feel so miserably helpless that the work I was doing felt useless to me. He’s out of control. I said these frightening words to myself for the first time. This is no place for me. I reached for my ax and saw. Then stopped. I couldn’t do this. We had work planned for this morning. I knew how important, how driving, this was to Guy. I would be sabotaging everything by walking off the job. I would be adding to Guy’s pain.
He was so horribly in pain. Chips from the white pine were flying in all directions. His violence was terrifying to me. Why did he have to withdraw into this awful place? It made me angry that he couldn’t get a grip on himself. I grabbed up my ax and saw and strode back to the house.
After a while Guy found me sawing wood in the woodshed. He slowed his step as he came in, ducked his head, and looked at me with bleak eyes. I saw the pain, the sadness, the shame, the blame, and as always my heart went out to him. All my anger dissolved. He offered me no explanation. I didn’t ask for one. Yet I had acted. Though nothing changed between us—nothing was any more out in the open—I was glad I had done what I did.
A day or two later Guy said, “I know my moods are hard on you, Laura.” He had said this before.
And I answered, as always,“No. It’s all right.”
Why didn’t I leap, this time, for the opening Guy was giving me? I could have said, “Yes. Your moods are horrendously hard on me.Your rage is frightening.All you’d done was hang up a tree.Anyone can make a mistake like that. But something snapped; you went berserk. It made me angry to watch you act like a four-year-old in the throes of a temper tantrum. Why are you so hard on yourself, Guy? It feels so self-destructive.”
I didn’t say any of that. I didn’t even think it. Always foremost in my mind was: I can’t tell Guy that his moods hurt me. For nearly twenty years I had schooled myself not to cause Guy pain. Even though Guy had opened up the subject, my reaction had become instinctual. I was mired in the useless habit of silence, of acquiescence.
More and more he spoke to others about his “moods.”
“Laura has to live with my bad moods. Laura’s the only one who sees my bad moods,” Guy said.
“Bad moods” was Guy’s term for something much worse than a spell of ill humor or the blahs or simply a bad day. Is there no way out of the tormented pathways of the mind?
To keep out from under his “bad moods,” he needed to keep himself under control. When Guy hung up those trees, I saw what happened when he lost control. He had developed an arsenal of tactics—his three-by-five cards only one of them—that effectively kept the demons out and himself organized, ordered, on track, and reined in.
Counting the blueberries. It was a joke. Guy knew it was silly, and he made the most of it, played it for laughs. It showed a charming eccentricity. Everyone who came to Barra during blueberry season entered into the whimsy of the thing: this counting of individual berries Guy had turned into a game.
I see now how dead serious Guy was. Counting berries wasn’t just about keeping a life list for each blueberry bush. It was about keeping within bounds the thing that lurked below the surface, trying to break the chain. “The amazing thing about Guy,” our friend Doug Mayer later said to me, “was that the mechanisms he used to control his demons were the very same he used to turn work at Barra into play.”
All the record keeping, all the routines, were something I needed to buy into if I was going to make a life with Guy. It was easy for me to do that. It happened as soon as I saw (without seeing anything) that if I wanted to be with Guy Waterman—no question about that!—I needed to get up in the dark so he could be climbing in the dawn’s light, every weekend. I was willing. It was fun. But if I had wavered, I believe our budding love would have died then and there, right at the beginning. Guy needed to be in this kind of climbing routine that had less to do with climbing than with feeding the rats that lived in his basement. The ones that he let no one see but that could drive him into a blind rage, like the rage I witnessed against the white pine. Or over a lost Forest and Crag note. Or over the typing errors, when I feared he was going to pitch the machine through the glass. Or over a carpentry project gone amuck, when he just needed to hit and keep on hitting the goddamn nail until the board was pocked with hammer blows.
A few years after we moved to Barra, I lost my temper over some carpentry job the way I’d seen Guy do. I kicked the board and shouted “Fuck” two or three times. I was copying him.
“Never do that, never say that again.” Suddenly Guy’s face was in mine, his voice low but very, very insistent. I got control over myself.Acting like this felt self-indulgent, even childish. It was unfamiliar territory, but now I was mad at Guy. It didn’t seem fair to ask me not to lose my temper if he couldn’t keep control of his own. Yet I never questioned him, even though in the way he’d said, “Never do that . . .” I heard something I didn’t understand. Instead, I made sure I never lost my temper like that again. Years later I came to see that my behavior was frightening to him because it was so like his own.
Observant friends no doubt saw how Guy used his three-by-five cards to keep order in his life and may have wondered whether I felt controlled by this or just entered into the spirit of the thing, or did a little of both.
The part nobody saw—and the part I told nobody about—was Guy losing his temper, losing control. I mentioned to a few very close friends that Guy couldn’t talk about the things that troubled him most. I always said “couldn’t.” I never said “wouldn’t.”And I never mentioned that I felt abused by his temper or by his silence because I had never said that word to myself. Abused. It began that night in the tent on Lou Cornell’s lawn in 1981. If you don’t talk, the other person will never know just how filled you are with blame, shame, anger, regret, remorse. How crammed with self-hate. In fact, what a terrible person you really are. This was what Guy had to keep under wraps. No matter what the cost to himself or to others, he had to never, never let those thoughts out.
I pushed against this, but not too hard. After all, I knew how to live with what I was living with. I knew how to keep silent. I understood at some inarticulate level about complicity. I knew how to exist in an atmosphere of terror caused by the people I loved most. I was an expert at keeping the waters smooth. I knew all this because I had graduated summa cum laude from the rigorous school of my alcoholic family.
What everyone saw was that we were a united couple—idyllic, really —who lived in a kind of Garden of Eden. Guy and Laura. Laura and Guy. At the beginning the idyll was really true. For a long time after that I could convince myself that it was true. Near the end I saw how important it was to Guy to keep the cracks plastered, and I was willing to help wield the trowel. What no one saw was how my shit, as they say, fit perfectly with Guy’s. This was the other side (the murky underside) of our perfect match.
Not only were we saying good-bye to Barra, but Guy was saying good-bye to friends and family. None of them knew this.
In the heat of summer, when I could talk myself into thinking these days could never end, it was easy to put these thoughts aside. But as the months wore away I became acutely aware that we were often with friends for the last time.
For me the most symbolic good-bye came on New Year’s Eve 1999. We had long celebrated the turning of the year with the same three couples, and always at Barra. It was our tradition to end the evening with “Auld Lang Syne,” Guy at the keyboard, the rest of us standing in a circle, hands joined, singing this simple Scottish air we had all learned as children.
Should auld acquaintance be forgot,
And never brought to min’?
And never brought to min’?
Should auld acquaintance be forgot,
And days o’ auld lang syne?
And days o’ auld lang syne?
Guy’s face was in shadow as the rest of us swayed to the music under the glow of the kerosene lamps. Our eyes met and held as we gazed back and forth across the circle. If our friends saw emotion in mine, I saw the same in theirs. This was, after all, the turn of the millennium. There was a palpable feeling of time passing, which carried for me a layer of meaning the others could not know. I could see into the future. One member of our little band was leaving soon. This was the last singing of “Auld Lang Syne” at Barra. The last time they would hear Guy play. Dan and Natalie were leaving in a few days for an eight-week hike on the Appalachian Trail; they would work south from where Dan had left off the previous winter, deep into North Carolina. Dan and Nat would not see Guy again. But even so, I took pleasure in this gathering of friends who were held together by countless days spent in the mountains and at Barra. I knew my friendships with all of them would continue into the new millennium, even as I was conscious of Guy pouring his soul into the keyboard, “Auld Lang Syne” ringing out into the starry winter night.