SoC 2:4

Glen's Vintage Tin

 

... no longer exists—at least, not under that name. The big rolling field littered with old cars is still there, and so is the Quonset-hut backdrop, but not the black and white sign that was large enough to be read from the road. The expert sign-painter (Glen) had stenciled huge, bold, clean letters onto the side of the shell of an old red truck that sat twenty or thirty feet up in the air atop a stout white pole:

GLEN’S VINTAGE TIN

The pole is still there, but there is no more truck and, so, no more sign.

“How many passing motorists do you suppose pointed at that sign before it came down?”

“Lots. Glen was in business for more than forty years.”

“What happened to him?”

Pearly sighed, made a sound like a car running down a road, and used his own thick right index finger to chart its progress. “Last October, he sold the business—his house, too—kit and caboodle. Bought an Airstream and took to the open road.” He made the noise and the finger movement again. “He’s living in a trailer park in Florida now.”

Over my shoulder, I could see the metallic red, white and blue tape around Pearly and Bobbie’s garden. As the wind moved the tape, it glinted in the sun. Three weeks earlier, Pearly had told me that his friend and my landlord, Harvey Houghton, a wildlife biologist, had told him that the tape would keep the deer out.

“Does it?”

“Yep. Not the turkeys, though.”

“What can you do about those?”

“Not much.” Then, he winked and made a thumb-and-forefinger shooting gesture. “Good eating.”

“Yep,” said Bobbie, wagging her big head.

“But can you shoot them now? Aren’t they out of season?”

“Oh, you can, you can. No one’s going to mind.”

“No one’s going to say anything,” Bobbie agreed.

I looked across the highway to the “for sale” sign on the big white farmhouse. It had belonged to Bobbie and Pearl until they sold it to the present owners ten years ago. Bobbie had told me more than once what good neighbors these people were, and Pearl had nodded vigorously when, each time, she would add the hope that the new owners would be as good.
Bobbie and Pearl—Schofield—in their sixties or early seventies, now lived in a spiffy double trailer with a big garden, a big garage, and a big mowed field, all set back from the tarred road. The three of us sat on big Adirondack chairs under an old tree (big) halfway between road and trailer. It was about 4:40, and I knew I should leave soon so Bobbie could go in to make supper for her mother, an Alzheimers’ sufferer who likes to eat no later than 5:30.

“Harvey’s maple tree lost a branch in that storm the other night,” I said. “The one right next to the house. Old age, I guess.”

Pearl stared at me with feigned alarm, then leaned over and clasped my shoulder in his strong hand. “My gosh, Dave!” he said. “Do you think that’ll happen to us?”

I’m fifty-one. Bobbie and I—and Pearl, too— laughed hard.

“Why’d Glen leave?”

“Same as a lot of the other old folks around here: couldn’t take the winters anymore,” Pearl explained.

“Did Mrs. Glen go with him?”

“Well,” he said, “there is no ‘Mrs. Glen.’ At least not for the last thirty-five years.”

Bobbie grinned. “Nancy. She ran off with an all-female band.”

“What kind of band?” I quipped. “Heavy metal?”
Bobbie gave me a “those men!” look, and Pearly, bemused, glanced back over his right shoulder. I looked that way, too, just in time to see their black-and-white cat duck into the tall weeds beside the garage.

I know a bit about Maine and Florida. A lot of Mainers relocate to Florida, mostly in or near the Panhandle, to fish and play golf with each other. Those with money keep two places and become snowbirds; those without—like Glen, presumably—just move.

“By now, I bet he’s realized he can’t take the Florida summers, either,” I said. “You ever been down there in August?” There was nothing anyone could say to that.
Soon I stretched, made noises about getting home, and accepted three huge zucchinis, which Bobbie went and got from the trailer while Pearl and I strolled back to my car. They said their “come agains,” I said my “come up for a beer and a sunset.” Then, I started back through town toward the long hill that led back to all that empty space and time.
Space: Harvey’s ramshackle old farmhouse is situated in the middle of a state park on a large cleared field surrounded by woods. During the 30’s, when the federal government bought out all the local hardscrabble farmers, including Pearly’s dad, Harvey’s late father had been the only owner not to sell. The cause of this apparent exception was that Harvey’s dad had been not a farmer, but a writer, a Depression-era refugee from New York, and his was the only place not buried under a mountain of debt. The Feds had subsequently given the land over to the state, stipulating that it be set aside for public use. The Houghton farmhouse backs onto a spectacular view of five or six spectacular mountains, and Harvey only rents it to me because he needs to pay the taxes. My motives are that it is cheap and wonderful. My only regret is that I have to kill several dozen mice during those summers when they decide to come inside. My wife and I have been coming here for six years now.

Time: Jean, my wife, was in Vermont visiting the kids (two) at camp, and would not be back for two more days. Meanwhile, my responsibilities consisted of heating up the food she had left and driving down to the lake in the late afternoon to swim for about twenty minutes, then to read on the grass until the mosquitoes and black flies closed in. It was early August already, but the hot, humid weather had given the biting insects an extra lease on life. After Jean got back, we would still have more than three weeks here. (You guessed it: we’re teachers.) There would still be empty time, but we’d spend it together. You may have inferred why the kids, nine and eleven, opted for the full eight weeks of camp. The pattern began four years ago, after the first summer of whining and the second planning a complicated schedule of visits for them to other people—with children—some of whom returned the visits, which Jean and I agreed was very unfair of them.

As I headed up the hill, just after I passed the turn where tar gives way to dirt, I had an odd premonition: the house had been robbed or vandalized. I bumped along the washboard a little faster than usual, but, when I turned from the driveway onto the field, I could see that my premonition had been wrong. At the top of the field on its little rise sat the old farmhouse, looking shabby, as usual, but unmolested. Above it, and the mountains, clouds raced about their business across the dark blue sky. Maine, the way weather should be—and still is, sometimes.

Another year passed, and we were back in Harvey ’s house. I managed to climb out of the deck chair, which was under the tree with the lost limb, and to get inside in time to catch the phone. (Actually, I made it by the seventh ring, which probably meant I had four or five to spare.) I had been reading a book about central Asia, and did not mind being interrupted, even though I was in the midst of yet another gory massacre.

It was Pearly, calling for the first time ever. Until then, we had been on a drop-in, and invited-to-drop-in, basis. I had sat under his tree twice so far this summer.

“Dave? Pearl Schofield.”

“Pearly!”

After we had checked each other’s well being, he got right to the point.

“When’s the good wife due back?”

“Tuesday.” She was visiting the kids again.

“Well, Bobbie’s afraid you might starve, so how about coming down here for supper tonight?”

“Sounds very good. What do I wear?”

He laughed. “Come as you are. But wash your hands.”
We briefly negotiated the other terms: six o’clock, and I would be permitted to bring a bottle of wine I already had—white, since Bobbie was roasting a chicken—plus a cottage cheese-containerful of raspberries Jean had picked and left for me with the admonition, “You don’t have to bake, or anything, Dave, but don’t let them go to waste.” Part of that was sarcastic: I don’t bake. But I had only eaten about an inch of raspberries since she had left, so there were still plenty to bring.

The terms set, I was ready to sign off, but first Pearl said,

“Oh, and there’ll be a surprise guest, too.”
The anomaly of the invitation had made us both a bit awkward, and I wondered if the "surprise guest" was a way to deal with this awkwardness. I surmised that it would just be Harvey, who lived forty minutes away in a biggish town for this part of the world, Farmington.

***

Farmington was right, Harvey wasn’t. It was Glen. Back.
When I arrived at six on the dot, Glen was already there. Like Pearl, Bobbie and me, he looked scrubbed and brushed for the occasion. He was a long grizzled fellow with a little mustache and dark, cracked, leathery skin. He wore brown hush puppies, jeans and a faded blue work shirt. Pearl introduced us, we shook hands, and I said I had heard a lot about him, which prompted an “Uh oh!”

We sat right down at the big Formica table in the dinette. I had only been inside the trailer once, and that had been to use the “facilities,” which were on the left end behind the door next to the washer, drier and freezer. Now I was surprised by how roomy the trailer seemed.

We ate a delicious meal, most of it local—from their garden (green beans and salad) and well (water), the village bakery (bread and cookies), nearby farms, which sold in the village once a week (potatoes), Harvey’s berry bushes (the raspberries), and the nearest supermarket, in Farmington (coffee, ice cream, milk and the chicken). Actually, the chicken had probably been an out-of-towner, since all the local chicken industry-workers have switched to processing credit-card transactions at MBNA, a converted shoe factory on the highway east of Farmington. (The "M" does not stand for "Maine." It used to stand for "Maryland," but no longer stands for anything.) There was also my wine, from Chile, also via the supermarket

“Where’s your mom, Bobbie?” I asked, as we tucked in. I had only seen the old woman once, when she had been outside when I arrived one afternoon, and I had gotten a nod for my “Hello.”

“She’s in Holton with my sister for the week.” Bobbie tried not to look indecently happy.

“So you couldn’t take the Florida heat, eh, Glen?” was my opening gambit.

“Nope,” he said, his mouth full. He chewed, swallowed, then added, with a wink at Pearly, “plus I already missed the Maine winter.”

“There wasn’t much of it to miss,” Bobbie said.

“Were you back in time for the blizzard, though, Glen?” Pearly asked. There had been four inches of snow May 14th.

“Yep. I got out my old snowshoes and tramped around in the woods.”That was about how the conversation went. Glen and I took to each other. I found him easy to talk to, and, if I read him right, beneath his polite inquisitiveness, there was that mild condescension tinged with jealousy so common among rural Americans toward people foolish—and rich—enough to live in cities. Most of what I told him about myself and my family proceeded from Pearl’s or Bobbie’s initiatives.

“He’s a school teacher,” was one.

“What age do you teach?” Glen asked. When I told him—college—that led to another joke. “Well, you’re lucky it’s not high school. He doesn’t have to deal with the likes of us, eh, Pearly?”

“Oh, I wouldn’t say that, Glen. We were the two best students in our whole graduating class, Number One and Number Two. Which of us was first again now, Glen? I can never remember.”

“You. Of course, there were only eight graduates that year.”

“And, a year later, they shut the school down and began busing the students to the new one,” Bobbie said. “That’s where I went.”

“We broke the mold,” Pearly added.

And more of the same.

The most interesting parts of the conversation concerned Glen’s livelihood—or livelihoods. Starting in high school, he had been a seasonal blueberry worker and had also shown an aptitude for tinkering with car and boat engines. After school, he had gradually worked his way toward “Glen’s Vintage Tin,” which fixed up and sold used cars, including some old ones: the Model "A" is the “vintage tin” of choice in this area. For forty years, he had also bought, sold and swapped used car parts. I realized from all these facts that Glen had been a competent, trustworthy businessman. He had one other vocation.

“Art,” Pearly proclaimed, after Bobbie had failed to draw it out of Glen, himself, with, “Come on, Glen, tell him what else you did.”

“Rode snowmobiles? got drunk?—once or twice. Played bingo? I don’t know what you mean, Bobbie.” But, of course, he did know.

We had reached the coffee-and-dessert stage. The best way to describe the way Pearly pronounced “art” is to say it was somewhere between “at” and “aht.” It turned out Glen had made just about all the most beautiful signs in the area between Farmington and our village, including his own sign, of course, plus other kindred masterworks, such as the big map of the area’s lakes, roads and mountains. This, he had hand-painted on a piece of plywood, which he had then framed, lacquered and fixed to the side of the village general store. Every car or pick-up truck that has arrived at the store for the past twenty years has nosed to between either one or two, or twenty or thirty, feet (depending on which parking space they take) of Glen’s map. Of course, it is the lake, mountains, and quiet, unassuming, friendly competence of the inhabitants that make people like me—and the inhabitants, themselves—love the village. But Glen’s map is certainly at the top of the list of the minor wonders of this part of the world. Another topic of conversation was Glen’s health. I don’t know if “topic” is accurate, though, since it crossed the table only once before it was dropped. Pearl and Bobbie had already been in contact with Glen, and they would not go deeply into this subject in front of a relative stranger, but Glen’s appetite lagged far enough behind the rest of ours’ that I sensed something was wrong with him even before Bobbie asked her question:

“Have you seen the man in Skowhegan yet, Glen?”

“No use,” was all he said. “I told you, the Florida quacks were sure.”

“I see,” Pearly said. Bobbie’s mouth was moving as she played with her dessert spoon. I just sat there, trying not to make eye contact with anyone or to avoid it too obviously. Through my mind flashed what might have been said if Glen had already left.“I guess he wanted to see one more Maine winter, after all,” I might have said.

And would Bobbie have added: “At least he doesn’t have to worry about losing a limb”? No, I doubt she would have said that.

In actuality, two or three quick jokes—nice, neutral ones— took us back to happier ground. By then, it was getting toward seven-thirty, which meant it would be dark sometime between ten and thirty minutes from now, depending on your elevation and whether or not you were in the woods or the mountain shadows.

“Well,” Glenn said, looking at his watch, “better get on the road soon,” and with a few age and eyesight jokes, an exchange of “pleased to have met you’s,” a compliment for the cook, and some hugs and handshakes, he was gone. I should say that his own piece of vintage tin—at least, that night—was a red sixty-six Dodge Dart. It was, as they say, a real cream puff.

Bobbie, Pearl and I stood in the driveway together, and it was good to be outside. I must say that ninety minutes in the trailer, big and comfortable as it was, was enough for me to think I understood why they spent so much time under the tree waving to their numerous passing friends and acquaintances.

“It sounds like he’s ... not a well man,” I said, after Glen had pulled out of the driveway.

‘He’s got that fast-acting kind of lung cancer,” Bobbie said.

“From smoking?” Glen had not smoked or smelled like a smoker that evening, but he had the look.

“Well, no,” Pearly explained. “He always was a smoker, but the ‘quacks,’ as he calls them, told him the kind he has doesn’t come from smoking. More likely, it was from the way they used to burn off the blueberry fields every other year, back then, and dust them with fertilizer from big trucks. No one wore proper masks or anything.”

“I see,” was all I could say.

It quickly became clear that this was not a good time to be outside because, as Pearly put it, as soon as they got us on their radar screens, the mosquitoes and black flies would do to us what we had done to the chicken and ice cream. So I made some noises about heading up the hill, myself, and began my valedictory “Thank you’s.”

Pearl interrupted. “Let me tell you one last ‘Glen’ story before you go, Dave. It will give you a better measure of the man.”

“Sounds good,” I said lamely.

“Well, you know this story, Bobbie, don’t you—Harvey and the stock car?—so I hope you’ll forgive me. Or, maybe, you want to go back inside.”

Bobbie smiled. “Yes, I know the story well,” she said, but she made no move, and, as her husband told the anecdote, I could tell that she still enjoyed it.

“Well, Dave, by now you must realize