We talked about the moose only intermittently, between periods of Earnest’s chainsawing and my driving the Ford and scooping huge rounds of spongy trunk and taking them away. We had fun disposing of those wheels. We rode together to my western slope and let them roll downhill for the fun of watching them go. Some careened and bounded practically out of view; some smashed into trees and fell over as mounds of fibrous chunks. The critters would feast on the bugs and grubs in there.
I used our rest breaks to ask him some questions. We snacked and drank spring water. For miles around us, the leaves were coloring, and the air seemed infused with the scent of their hues.
I was trying to figure out something about Earnest that I couldn’t quite get my mind around. Essentially, it boiled down to this: How could he be so perfect?
“Perfection is in the eye of the beholder,” he cautioned me. “You need to watch your expectation management, Pilgrim.”
I kept at him: How could he arrive in my life at his age, at my age? How could he be so good and so wise without someone else claiming him long before?
We both were in the best possible mood, further buoyed by the dry clarity of the September sun and the wind rustling the leaves in rushes and sighs.
“I am pretty cool, aren’t I? Here’s my secret: It’s totally self-interest. Speaking to a middle school teacher here, it’s about my self-esteem and other sensitive stuff.”
“Self-interest.”
He continued with some reluctance: “Kind of person I am, I remember everything? Especially things to my discredit? I remember unkind things I said to my mother! I said things that hurt girlfriends. A couple of times in the Army I beat up on guys more than was needed for situation control. I remember swatting a dog when I was fourteen for chewing up one of my comic books!”
We had that penchant in common.
“I bet most of the people you think you hurt don’t even remember,” I told him.
“Probably not. But I do. Those things stay with me. They come back and hurt me. At some point I decided I didn’t need to inflict any more pain on myself. So I got … nicer. That’s all there is to it. Self-interest.”
We got quiet again, both of us tilting our faces into the sunlight.
“How about you?” he asked.
“What—how do I manage to be a tolerable person? I’ve never had it that together, the way you describe. Never anything so conscious. I’ve always just been winging it. You know what I mean? Always winging it into whatever.”
I stopped and reconsidered for a moment. “Actually, by the time I got here, I was barely even winging it. At best, flying on a wing and a prayer.”
He kept eyes shut and his face to the sun, in no hurry to hear more or to respond. It occurred to me that perhaps moving more slowly with people, allowing more silence, was an important part of being nicer.
“I always liked that expression,” he said amiably. “In your case, what exactly was the wing and what was the prayer?”
“That kind of question is why Erik calls you ‘heavy.’”
He tossed his head, shrugged.
“The wing,” I said, “was getting the damn work done. And the prayer was you.”
We drank some more water, stretched, then got back to cutting and hauling away the old birch. It was tricky working among the brambles and we both got scratched up despite wearing coveralls. I felt bad about crushing so many of the blackberry canes, but I knew that by next year they’d be back with no trace of our tractoring.
A little later, having cut the last segment into movable chunks, Earnest shut off the chainsaw and wiped the sweat and sawdust from his face. “Actually,” he said, “that wasn’t the whole truth.”
“What wasn’t?”
“The origins of my being such a great guy.”
“Oh?”
He got a little shy. “Around you, I was always on my best behavior. Seriously. I wanted to impress you.” He looked thoughtful for a moment. “‘Impress’ is probably not the right word. But you know what I mean.”
“What, back when you showed me how to seal the seams of my tent?”
“As a matter of fact, yes. Yeah.”
That pleased me enormously. I brushed chips out of his hair and off his shoulders.
“Why’d you want to impress me so much?” I asked, fishing.
He gave me a raised eyebrow and said, negligently, “I’ve always had a weakness for beautiful women. Putty in their hands. Sad, really.”
I’d take that, I decided; I didn’t mind that.
After a while I had my own clarification to make. “I wasn’t just winging it, that’s not all there is to it. If I seemed like a tolerable person, it was because whenever I was around you, I felt good. I just always felt … better. Happier. Always, Earnest. It’s very easy to be tolerable when you’re feeling good. To be an okay person.”
“That’ll do it, too,” he said, serious, meaning it. And then something like a vow: “I will make every effort to keep it that way.”
Chapter 61
There’s no happy ending to my story, because there is not yet an ending. That is, it ain’t over till it’s over, and it’s never over, as my father liked to say.
I didn’t really understand what he meant until now. It will
