James set two mugs, a jar of jam, and platter of toast, all ends cast off from otherwise eaten loaves, on the sturdy drop-leaf table. Idle gossip had been brewing along with the coffee, woodstove warming the A-frame against a steady drizzle damp, low clouds still funneling through the pass.
Passing the toast to Jo, he apologized, “I eat so simply now; it’s such a bother to haul a lot of food out here. Got my dried bulk items, and learned to like cabbage. I do miss the rhubarb. Died off this year. The chickens give me plenty of eggs. Mostly I drink water.”
Pausing to stoke the stove and light a bowl in a pale, stone pipe, he returned to his rambling monologue on the exhale, grateful for an audience after a stretch of solitude.
“Just look at my skin. It’s the diet, the pure water. Still so clear, and at my age. And the sauna, to help flush the toxins, sweat them out. You’ve got to flush those toxins, honey. Eat simply, drink lots of water, and cleanse; cleanse the colon, cleanse the liver, cleanse the blood, cleanse from the inside out. Honey, just let it go.”
“Here I am, late summer again,” Jo mused, “still just a weekend visitor, taking refuge from the city, fleeing another disaster with a woman who doesn’t get me.” She looked around, relaxing into the familiar surroundings. Underfoot, signature fragments of blue circle and red stripe speckled the hardwood floor, courtesy of the school gym rebuild. A seated Buddha surveyed the scene, complacent and inscrutable as usual, from a perch atop the spiral stair. Behind the old cast-iron stove, stacks of cups, plates, and jars, waiting for the eternal backlog in the enamel sink to clear out, buried a wooden counter.
“I could give you a hand with those dishes,” she offered, accepting pipe and lighter from her host.
“They can pile up a bit more; it’s not yet worth heating water,” he replied.
As soon as the summer swelter set in back east, she had started longing for this place. She missed seeing timberline on a regular basis: somber conifer spires breaking up the bright mass of birch and aspen leaf. She missed the cabin under the contours of that beloved rock face, daubed all muted orange, rose quartz, and dusty yellow, crevices filled with clumps of mossy tundra jagging down from ridgeline. But an unexpected loneliness confronted her when she arrived.
“Seems like half the state cleared out with the crash,” Jo reflected, passing back the pipe. “Anchorage feels so empty.”
James agreed. “Hardly anyone there worth visiting.”
He poured himself a cup of coffee.
“Yeah, I guess the half that stayed is sticking close to home, putting down roots, digging in, just trying to get on with things,” said Jo, spreading jam on a slice of toast.
“I’m spending less and less time in town myself, nowadays,” James explained. “I go in for the laundry run, try to pick up the food drop, mostly for other folks out here in need. I do what I can. So many just barely making it these days.”
“Looks like you finally got that bulb wired to the solar panel,” Jo noted, refilling her own mug.
“Should give me light through October and again come February,” James acknowledged proudly. “Sun won’t be clearing the ridge mid-November.”
“Mid-November I’ll be deep in my big city routine, riding the F between Brooklyn and the East Village,” she laughed. “Hard to believe that’s real when I’m here.”
“I’m thinking of spending the winter outside again; plant another crop of garlic on the family land in Alabama. Last year’s crop paid for the trip, with a little left over. Organic garlic is fetching a good price these days. Got to get that greenhouse started. Still hoping to put in tulips this year. Lots of tulips. If only I could get ahead for a season, I know this land could pay for itself,” he sighed, lighting yet another bowl.
Over the years James had remodeled the place, starting by digging out the cabin floor several feet down, and adding a root cellar under the kitchen, accessed though a trap door. He pushed out a wall upstairs, creating an alcove with a dormer window, to let in light as well as free up some headroom. Downstairs, he set in a small octagonal picture window to catch the view up valley. An extension to the original arctic entryway served as storage space for just about anything that could handle freezing. A wooden deck off the west side, out the sliding glass doors, invited summer guests to look out over sunsets and the brackish water of Dragonfly Pond.
“Always so many chores waiting,” he continued. “Haul, build, split, lay in, mend, feed, stack. Envy those damn cats, always napping when there’s work to be done.”
As the pipe changed hands again, talk turned steamy, moving beyond the new root cellar and leaky roof to the running feuds, both domestic and neighborly. Who left who, why, when, and how. Deals and hearts broken. Convoluted disputes over property lines and rights of way. Custody suits and court proceedings, escalating beyond divorce.
Fueled by a full pot of caffeine, the rumor mill churned. James loved to test, needle, and bait, whether bantering and bitching in the kitchen or working the massage table. He could be catty, even vicious when jealous, detecting a sore spot, honing in on the vulnerability, and digging hard. Jo had watched James burn the bridge to his last long-term lover this way, when he showed up with a woman, suspected to be a girlfriend in the making. James knew how to out that screamer of a spot inside the big toe, or the knot hiding under the scapula, that possessive streak, that lurking hang up over body image, that trip about sexuality, that nagging doubt about being woman enough, or man. Most of the time he knew when to back off; after preying on the pain a while, he’d admonish, “Stop holding on, that’s baggage you don’t need, honey, get it out of your way, let it go.”
So why couldn’t she shake her ex’s edict: half and half, could swing either way women were a waste of time. Only real dykes from now on, she had said. If not being 100 percent lesbian 100 percent of the time made her suspect, she was better off on her own. She didn’t like seeing herself as a potential traitor to the lesbian nation. She felt unfairly disqualified, cast into a limbo land of in between and nothing at all. It hadn’t threatened her last boyfriend that she was also into women, so why couldn’t the women in her life be just as open?
James interrupted her brooding, unexpectedly veering onto raw emotional turf of his own.
“The grandmother, that bitch, went and called DFYS. All over a little weed. And my thing for men.”
Jo had never met the child, just seen photos. James and Benjamin outside the cabin. James and Benjamin going to town. James and Benjamin smiling for the camera.
“Don’t make me no pederast. Men aren’t boys. We’re talking about a two year old.”
There it was again. Prejudice. Making a whole class of people guilty by default, that deep-rooted assumption that gays are up to no good whenever children are involved.
“When are people going to wake up?” she scoffed in his defense. “Where are the stats on guys messing with underage chicks? Look at Annie, felt up by her mom’s new squeeze. Did some time, and he’s back on the scene, still lusting after those new teen tits.”
James shook his head. “Too much hot-blood in that Harley-riding man.”
Jo tried to piece James’s life together, getting nowhere figuring out her own. He was notorious for lying about his age, getting caught in inconsistencies from one rendition to the next. But by her best estimate he was more than twenty years her senior; pushing fifty to her still twenty-something. Upstairs, in the strictly shoes-off loft, carpeted thick and kept uncharacteristically clutter-free, a large painting capturing him as a much younger man, joyfully nude, hinted at a life left somewhere behind. On one of her early visits, James had shared the contents of a flimsy cardboard box tucked in the upstairs dresser: Kodak memories dating back to the days of black-and-white glossies.
“They’re calling it neglect, abuse, child endangerment,” James continued.
A strapping fresh-faced Marine posed on a public lawn somewhere in Kerouac’s America: perhaps a clue to the undesirable discharge that first redirected his career, long before Stonewall, long before AIDS, the Gay Men’s Health Crisis, and Silence = Death.
“The mom entrusted me with him; I relieved her of a burden she was not ready to bear. I could see she couldn’t cope.”
During his bohemian Atlanta days, in shorts and an unbuttoned polo shirt, he tossed thick, curly hair, flaunting the taut, tanned body of which he remained so vainly proud, warmly greeting bee-hived young women and mod young men at the door of a bustling coffeehouse. Again too alternative for the time and place, he had to move on; that time anti-war activity got him run out of business and town. “Surely he’d already suffered enough discrimination for one lifetime,” Jo thought. “Surely it could stop now. All of it. Surely all narrow-mindedness keeping people out, keeping people apart, stopping gay men from parenting, dumping bi people in one closet or another, could just stop.”
“She was too young; she had no support. No father in sight. And where was the grandmother then? I’m the only parent that child has really known.”
A brief relocate to the Haight took him west, but finding that mecca already on the wrong side of trendy, he left. He wanted to go to India, but that required too many vaccinations and visas, so he headed north instead, looking for land to go back to, seeking freedom and peace, self-reliance and community away from it all. Winding up in Anchorage, he fell in with the start-up health food crowd, established a massage business, and bought property in the Talkeetnas, complete with blueberry bog, forested acreage, and an eroding bluff overhanging a braided meander and flood of a glacial river.
“I took on that child when no one else wanted him. I gave him love no one else had to spare. It was the right thing to do. It was something I could do.”
With the right company he’d sashay to Leonard Cohen until the cassette player batteries died. With the right weather, he’d go about all his chopping and sawing, baking and planting buck naked, reveling in his best birthday suit, so out of place there was no question he belonged.
“So I have got to defend myself in court. Against projections and conjecture. Justify myself. That’s all the thanks I get. Because now she wants him. I don’t know if I’ll ever see that child again.”
Jo searched for something worth saying. “It’s so unfair. Court sounds kind of scary.”
“She doesn’t have a case, really. Nothing but hearsay. Another reminder that this is all temporary anyway. Attachment brings suffering. That’s the human condition. Best get on with those chores before we lose any more of the day. We can fire up that sauna later, put on a pot of soup.”
With conversation and coffee drained to the dregs, damper closed, and pain set back on its shelf, James pocketed the pipe, absent-mindedly stashing what was left of the weed behind a jar of Granola. Leaving the cabin unlocked, tended by a host of Ganeshas, Shivas, Buddhas, and the stray Devata, collected from import shop, thrift store, and garage sale, he loaded up rototiller and chain saw, to lurch on up the dirt road, shifting beat-up green pickup into low for the steep climb: a fading Southern queen keeping the homestead dream alive, just barely in the bush, highway hum always drifting down valley with the clouds.