Earnest had been clanking at some machine in the old barn, but he came to find me as I finished purging the milk pipes.
“Your brother sure knows how to make a dramatic entrance. Quite a splash. I think he’s left us all a little breathless.” He put a hand on my shoulder, looking at me in a way that told me he was concerned for me and, I could tell, for the farm. “Think he can make something like that work?”
“I have no idea,” I said.
Chapter 39
Sept. 17
I am writing by candlelight in my tent home. Cat returned to Boston today, forgiven, and Erik is sleeping out in the woods somewhere nearby. Another clear night, not particularly cold, silent but for the occasional falling leaf sliding down my tent fly. I’m exhausted but can’t sleep—the day cranked up the voltage of my nervous system and now I can’t dial it back down.
Erik and I headed back up here at sunset. The light was not splendid, because a thin overcast had dulled the sky, like your breath on a windowpane. As we got the fire going, lit some lanterns, I really went at Erik.
“Why didn’t you contact me? How could you do that to me?”
“I was ashamed,” he said simply.
“What,” I said, “I’d find it so morally reprehensible that you’d grown pot? I wouldn’t care! Half the people I know smoke now and then—myself included, back in Boston!”
“No,” he said. He seemed close to tears. “No. For being asshole stupid for so many years. Getting arrested was just the cherry on top. Pop said I was wasting my talents. You said it! You all said I could do better than the buddies and girlfriends I chose to hang with. I grew pot and I also did a little on-and-off dance with H, okay, I fucking wasted how many years of my life? And, trust me, putting on the ol’ orange jumpsuit really brings that shit home to you. I wasn’t going to do you much good for twelve years anyway.”
“You’re my brother,” I reminded him.
“I was fucked up and it was all coming at me faster than I could handle it and by the time I got a grip I was like two years in and it was a habit—being alone.”
“You’re my brother!”
And he said, “What can I say? It’s done. It happened the way it did. I’d love it if we could leave it there. Leave it back where I’m trying to leave a bunch of other stuff.”
I could see that. Given that I am trying to leave a bunch of other stuff “back there,” too.
He seemed to read my mind: “When are you going to tell me what happened to you? Because some shit happened, that much I know.”
I told him I wasn’t up for it right now. I made a big omelet for each of us, eggs folded over cheddar and diced tomatoes and onions. We ate in silence.
When he talked again, he told me more about why he’d felt compelled to leave the coast. The only reason he hadn’t gotten a longer sentence, the way he’d avoided implicating his partners, was that he’d done a plea deal in which he revealed instead the location of the “different kind of ponytail” guys back in California. For which he felt no remorse at all. But when he got out, his former partners said they’d heard rumors that the guys still “on the outside” had long memories and vengeful souls. Also, upon returning to his old friends, Erik discovered that his wife—had he mentioned he’d gotten married?—who was one of the partners, lived with another of the partners and had had a kid with him. Cute little girl, four years old now. And while he understood—after all, seven years is a long time—it was the first he’d heard of it, which he kind of resented and anyway it would have made working together pretty tense.
I asked him what it was like in prison. He said Elk Ridge was not what you’d call a spa but not the kind of place where you had to worry about bending over to pick up the soap in the shower. Still, it behooved one to stay in shape, so he’d worked out in the gym every day.
I assume this was more of that wry understatement, but can’t be sure. I asked, “But how about your mind? Morale? How’d you … a person like you, especially, how’d you stay sane?”
“What is a person like me?”
“You know what I’m talking about.”
“Yeah, well, it was touch and go sometimes, he admitted, especially around the third year. They’d been long years and I thought I still had nine to go. That’s when I got my first tattoo. Tattoos, it’s one of the things you do to fight boredom. This one I did at that low point. And it actually helped.” He unzipped his jacket and rolled up his shirt and yes, as Cat said, he is muscled, slim but rock hard. Over his heart he had tattooed “I Am Free.” He explained that that was his heart talking, reminding him every day that no matter what, it would never be imprisoned, not in Elk Ridge or anywhere. “The one on my arm, that one I did later when I knew I was getting out. By way of explanation, I guess.”
After a while, he went off to sleep in the woods again. “As you can imagine, I’m enjoying the hell out of open spaces,” he explained. The absence of walls.
I heard his harmonica for
