“‘IT IS A TRUTH universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.’”
Gypsy sat at the kitchen table in the number 8 Outlaws jersey Earl No Pearl had given her, homeschooling E.A. from the classics. They had just started Pride and Prejudice, and E.A. could already tell that it was likely to be heavy sledding. Gran would have rescued him. Gran hated the classics, every last one of them. But she was sleeping in, recuperating from the Red Sox’s loss to New York the day before.
Gypsy took a sip of coffee from the sixteen-ounce plastic cup Earl had brought her with the picture of his eighteen-wheeler, which had Gypsy Lee’s name embossed on its side in red. Earl hauled the Green Mountain Rebel factory’s genuine, real-wood, white ash baseball bats to unlikely-sounding places like Muncie, Indiana, and Tupelo, Mississippi. Besides the personalized thermal coffee cup, he’d brought Gypsy all kinds of other souvenirs from the open road, including several belt buckles as big as saucers, in the shapes of leaping deer, crossed shotguns, and more eighteen-wheelers, which Gypsy wore with her size-two jeans; baseball caps embroidered with the names of truck stops from coast to coast; and tapes of Gypsy’s favorite singers. Earl No Pearl had promised to take E.A. on a cross-country road trip with him in the Gypsy Lee when he turned twelve. “We’ll have us a time, I and you,” he’d said, winking at E.A. and looking at Gypsy out of the tail of his eye. “See some good country, listen to the ball games over the radio. Get us some of that Californy poontang.” E.A. wasn’t sure what Californy poontang was but he looked forward to the trip with Earl, seeing good country and listening to baseball as they rolled west.
“Ma, is Earl in possession of a good fortune?” E.A. said.
Gypsy laughed. “Earl still owes forty-nine thousand, eight hundred, and seventy-four dollars on the Gypsy Lee. He isn’t in want of a wife, either. He’s already paying alimony to two that I know of.”
“Speaking of Earl, I thought maybe you’d throw me a little BP this morning.”
Gypsy ruffled E.A.’s hair, the same fire-engine red as hers. “What morning when the temperature’s over twenty below don’t you want me to throw you a little BP, sweetie? Okay. We’ll compromise. How about a little field trip? A little nature walk, get some life science in. What do you say?”
“Throw fingers? You win, we take the nature walk. I win, you pitch me BP.”
“Okey-dokey,” Gypsy said. “Rock beats scissors, scissors beats paper, paper beats rock. Ready?”
E.A. nodded.
“I’ll count,” Gypsy said. “One. Two. Three.”
On three she threw three fingers, and E.A. one. Three—paper—covered one, rock, so she won. Gypsy was a veteran sleight-of-hand artist, like Gran before her. She’d wait a split second to see how many fingers E.A. was throwing, then throw whatever beat him. She was so quick he could never catch her at it. She did the same at cards. Nobody could cheat at high, low, jack, and the game as skillfully as Gypsy Lee.
Still, it was worth trying. “Cut the cards? All or nothing?” E.A. offered.
“Sure,” Gypsy said. “High card wins.” She shuffled the worn deck of Playmate playing cards Earl had brought back from the P and K Service Center in Reno, Nevada. She handed the deck to E.A., who shuffled, set it on the table, and cut. He drew the jack of diamonds he’d spotted shuffling. Pretty good. He handed the pack to Gypsy, who drew the queen of hearts. E.A.’s face fell.
“Hey,” Gypsy said. “Look. Who says we can’t have our cake and eat it, too? Let’s take our coffee up to our special place, do a little field-tripping, then, when the grass starts to dry out in the meadow, I’ll pitch to you. Okey-dokey?”
E.A. grinned. “Okey-dokey.”
They started up the path beside the barn where E.A. had seen the drifter the night before. This morning that seemed like a dream. Gypsy, barefoot, still in her Outlaws jersey, went ahead of him a few steps. She’d brought along her old Gibson in case she was inspired to do some composing. E.A. considered telling her about the drifter. But somehow he wanted last night to stay between him and the stranger.
Above Old Bill the hired man’s trailer they passed through the piney woods, which smelled green and fresh in the early dew, though the season was too far along for many birds to sing, just a lone ovenbird. They came out of the pines into the maple orchard, overgrown with brush, the tops blown out of many of the larger trees.
Their special place was just above the maple orchard and just below the first steep pitch of the mountain. It was a clearing in the woods about the size of a baseball diamond, which Bill called the high mowing meadow, though no one had mowed there in years. From here, on clear summer nights, Gypsy had taught E.A. the names of the stars and constellations. She’d explained the Big Bang theory and told him the old Greek myths about the constellations. Looking over at the Presidential Range of New Hampshire’s White Mountains from the high mowing meadow, he’d learned the names of the early presidents—Washington, Madison, Jefferson. Gypsy had told him about Thomas Jefferson’s beautiful slave mistress, Sally, who was also his deceased wife’s half sister. And about George Washington’s wooden false teeth. For a time when he was small, E.A. thought the jagged peaks with snow on them eleven or twelve months of the year actually were the presidents.
On mornings like today, when the dew was heavy, E.A. and Gypsy sat on a gray boulder in the shape of a crouching lion at the top of the meadow. Gypsy had explained that the lion-shaped boulder had been deposited there ten thousand years ago by the Great Wisconsin Ice Sheet. E.A. was the only eight-year-old in Kingdom County, homeschooled or otherwise, who could tell you the difference between an esker and a drumlin. When Gypsy first read him “The Fall of the House of Usher” and came to the part where crazy old Usher’s house collapsed into the tarn, he’d known what a tarn was.
Gypsy Lee Allen was as smart as a whip. She knew all about things like the Great Wisconsin Ice Sheet and Edgar Allan Poe because she had gone away to the state university on scholarship for a year before she got pregnant with E.A. and had to come home to support him and herself with Gypsy Lee’s RFD Escort Service, Inc. She’d even written a country song called “Knocked Up in Vermont.” Then, guessing that nobody would buy another song with the word Vermont in the title after “Moonlight in Vermont,” she’d changed the title to “Knocked Up in Knoxville.”
As the sun came up behind the Presidential Range, Gypsy strummed her guitar and sang a few bars.
“Knocked up in Knoxville;
Made up in Memphis;
Hitched up in Nashville,
Tennessee.”
Gypsy had a clear, strong voice, with every bit as much vibrato as Loretta Lynn’s, and E.A. thought the title change was a good one. Even so, he couldn’t imagine Music Row buying a song that began “Knocked up in Knoxville,” or WSM, the Voice of the Grand Old Opry, playing it over the American airwaves. But the crowds at the bars and roadhouses where Gypsy sang loved it no matter how many times she performed it for them. She’d dedicated “Knocked Up in Knoxville” to E.A.
They watched the sun light up Kingdom County. It sparkled off the village church steeple and the slate roof of the courthouse. It brought out the emerald of the grass in Gran’s meadow and the sheen of the river and the silvery blue surface of Memphremagog, the big lake to the north that stretched twenty miles into Canada between tall peaks.
The rising sun lit up the yellowing tops of the sugar maples below them, and it glinted off all the glass and chrome and shining metal of the old cars and pickups and cranes and logging skidders and dozers and backhoes and draglines and tractors in Devil Dan Davis’s Midnight Auto Junkyard.
Gypsy hummed a new song she was working on called “Nobody’s Child.” E.A. looked off at the September snow on New Hampshire’s Mount Washington. Gypsy had told him that the highest wind in the world had been recorded there, 231 mph, in 1934.
“Look, hon.”
Near the edge of the maple orchard a woodchuck had popped out of its hole. E.A. put his fingers in his mouth and whistled. The chuck swiveled its sleek head around and whistled back. E.A. made an imaginary rifle with his hands. Bang. He and Gypsy had shot more than one hundred chucks this past summer with Grandpa Gleason Allen’s 30.06. Orton and Norton Horton, the state boys who lived with Devil Dan Davis and his wife, R.P., called E.A. a woodchuck because his family ate them, just as they ate muskrats and crawfish and whatever else they could shoot or catch. Chucks from the mountain meadows of Kingdom County had a diet of clover and wild grasses and were as flavorful and clean to eat as western beef, but that didn’t cut any ice with Orton and Norton.
Gypsy stopped picking her guitar. She nudged Ethan and grinned. Gypsy Lee Allen was twenty-six, but when she grinned at Ethan, she looked about fourteen. A low-flying gray hawk, a male harrier, was gliding over the field, tracing the contours of the ground, occasionally dipping down so that its wings nearly touched the grass to see if he could flush out a mouse or a snake for breakfast. The chuck sat in the sun with its back to the approaching hawk. Gypsy nudged E.A. again.
The harrier made two strong wing beats and picked up the woodchuck, struggled to rise, couldn’t, dropped the chuck. The chuck froze for a moment, like a runner caught napping off first base, then dived into its hole.
Far below, Devil Dan came out of his house, wearing his fedora, and went into the machine shed near the entrance of Midnight Auto. Norton and Orton appeared a minute later, carrying R.P.’s wash out to the clothesline. A growling cough, followed immediately by a deep rumbling, emerged from the shed. Devil Dan appeared in the glassed-in cab of his D-60 bulldozer, headed across the flats toward Gran’s meadow.