Joe Burke's Last Stand.

by John Moncure Wetterau.

1

"My rig's a little old, but that don't mean she's slow--Batman--that don't mean she's slow." Joe Burke was singing, driving south. His rig was a blue Ford pickup with a battered cap on the back. Batman, all six inches of him, was propped upright on the dash.

Joe followed signs to the Weston Priory, climbing through woods and out onto an open plateau. A cl.u.s.ter of wooden buildings stood near a pond.

A monk was raking leaves from a path that curved around the pond like a trotter's track. Joe got out, stretched, and entered a gift shop by the parking lot. A middle aged woman seated next to the cash register closed her book.

"Where is everybody? Rehearsing?" She smiled slightly and remained silent. "Lovely day," Joe said.

"Yes, isn't it."

He bought a ca.s.sette made by the monks. "A bit stagy, Batman," he said climbing into the truck and closing the door. "We must continue to seek truth and contend with the forces of evil." Batman stared resolutely ahead.

Joe cut over to the interstate. When he reached the highway, he played the ca.s.sette: resonant voices and a single guitar, encouraging.

"Sappy," Ingrid had declared impatiently. Joe smiled. She was free of his taste in music now--had been for a year and a half.

At Brattleboro, he turned off the highway, rented a motel room, and walked into town. He found a brew pub where he sat at a corner table with a pint of ruby brown ale--cool and fresh, the malt veiled with lacy astringent hops. He had another and watched the bartender talk on the telephone, her elbows and b.r.e.a.s.t.s on the bar, a vertical worry line dropping between her eyes. She was about his daughter Kate's age. The room began to fill, the nasal sound of New York mixing with flat New England tones. The Connecticut River valley narrows in Brattleboro, a gateway to upper New England for New Yorkers. He was going through in the other direction, trying to figure out what to do next. What do you do at 52 when the kids are grown? The same things all over again?

He took out a notebook and remembered the drive--the blue sky, the red and gold ridges, small fields tilting greenly in their arms. On such a day, one could almost be forgiven, he wrote.

A blonde woman with a wry smile, an experienced charmer, sat down at the next table. He considered having another ale, making friends with her and starting a new life in Brattleboro or over the mountain in Bennington, but he knew that he was fooling himself. It was too familiar; he might as well have stayed in Maine.

"Gotta go," he said to her sadly. She raised her eyebrows, acknowledging the human condition, and he walked back to the motel. At the edge of town, trees were dark behind a body of water that was platinum and still. Fish broke the surface with soft slaps in the centers of expanding circles. Ansel Adams might have caught the many shades of silver just before the lights went out.

The next afternoon Joe was across the Hudson, driving through the mountains on roads that were more crowded than he remembered. There were many new houses and the trees were larger. He stopped on the hill by his grandparents' old house in Woodstock. Captain Ben had retired during the depression to that rocky hillside and made a homely paradise of gardens and fruit trees. A slow silent job. Emily was beside him, canning, cooking, and mothering. They said you couldn't grow pears around there. We ate a lot of pears, Joe thought. And plums, apples, rhubarb, strawberries, asparagus . . . The house smelled of geraniums from the solar greenhouse that his grandfather built onto the dining room long before anyone ever heard of a solar greenhouse.

Captain Ben was a son of an old Virginia family who in better days had owned Monticello. _Lee's Lieutenants_ lined a living room shelf.

n.o.blesse oblige came with mother's milk. You are born privileged; you have an obligation. He had a company garden when he was serving in the Philippines--men who got out of line did time weeding and afterwards ate fresh vegetables. Once a year he would go to town and whip the touring chess master who was playing 20 people at once. "p.a.w.n to King's four," he taught Joe, "control the center." Joe opened with p.a.w.n to Queen's knight four, bringing a smile. "Learn the hard way, huh?"

He died when Joe was in seventh grade, and Joe spent his high school years with his grandmother, well cared for, but living more or less alone. She remarried about the time Joe graduated. The new husband moved _Lee's Lieutenants_ to the attic and Joe moved out. The house that Joe remembered had disappeared inside a gaudy renovation, but the mountains hadn't changed. What is it about land, Joe wondered. It gets inside you, deep as your loves, maybe deeper.

He ate dinner in town. He saw Aaron Shultis across the street, but Aaron didn't recognize him after twenty-five years. Joe drove back into the hills and parked by a narrow lane across from the one room schoolhouse where he had gone to fifth grade. He fell asleep in a cradle of memories: f.u.c.king Sally in this very spot . . . apple fights, BB gun fights, the sound of the schoolhouse bell calling them out of the woods after a long recess.

A steady rain was bringing down the leaves when Joe woke up. He drove over to Morgan's house and pounded on the door. When Morgan opened, Joe could smell breakfast cooking.

"Joe, well, well. What brings you out in the rain?"

"Hey, Morgan, bacon! They say you're cooking bacon."

"They're right. Come on in."

"Remember that time you were hitching to Florida and you met those guys heading for Georgia because they'd heard that a Salvation Army cook was serving meat?"

"Some trip that was." Morgan was grayer but still powerful. "So, what are you doing?"

"Starting over. I've been saving since Ingrid and I split up. I put a bed in the back of the truck, got rid of a bunch of stuff, and here I am."

"When did you leave? You want some eggs?"

"Three days ago. That's affirmative on the eggs," Joe said. "I've had it with computer programming. Jamming all that stuff in your head messes you up. You wake up at two in the morning and start working."

"Good money," Morgan said.

"For good reason."

"Did you sell everything?"

"Just about. Kept my tools, a couple of boxes of books, some clothes.

Kept the cat, Jeremy, but he jumped ship on Deer Isle at my father's.

Oh yeah, my notebooks, a footlocker full--I was wondering if you'd stash them for me. I'd hate to lose them; they go all the way back."

"Sure. Maybe you'll write a book one of these days."

"I don't know; all I ever do is look at things and try to describe them. Should have been a painter like my father. No talent, though.

Anyway, after I took off, I went up to see him and Ann on Deer Isle. He gave me a painting for Kate."

"How is he?"

"Going with his boots on. Just before I left, he gave me a drink from his stash of Laphroiag in the barn. We had a country music toast.

'Younger women, faster horses, older whiskey, and more money,' he said.

I asked him if 'children, old dogs, and watermelon wine' wouldn't cut it."

"Tom T. Hall songs," Morgan said.

"Right. My father just laughed. I think he was trying to tell me something but didn't know how."

"Hard to communicate at this point, I suppose," Morgan said. "What's next?"

"Drive out and see Kate. Me and Batman--he's riding on the dash." Joe gave Morgan the ca.s.sette from the Weston Priory. "Try this some stormy night."

"O.K.," Morgan said. "The d.a.m.nedest thing . . . I bought a tape of Chesapeake Bay sea chanteys a while back. One of the voices was familiar. I looked on the picture of the group and there was Jason! I hadn't even noticed."

"Best banjo player I ever heard," Joe said. "He disappeared into the world of big biz. What a waste. I thought he'd given up on music."

"Why don't you take it? I'll pick up another."

" Good deal, a trade. So, how's Daisy doing? I was thinking of dropping in and saying h.e.l.lo."

"She's in France. She's fine." Morgan took a piece of bacon. "She and Wes have stuck together. Of course it helps if you can nip off to Provence whenever you feel like it. Their daughter, Yvonne, just got married. Jake is in New Zealand, I think. Nice kids."

"New Zealand? That's where Max is, Ingrid's son." Joe hesitated. "I remember when Daisy was choosing. She said, 'I feel happy and excited when I'm with you, and I feel warm and safe when I'm with Wes."' Joe shook his head. "Knowing what I do now, about women that is, I'd say she made the mainstream choice. She'd have had rice and beans with me."

"Red beans and rice aren't bad," Morgan said.