box held: a wig, a pair of false eyelashes, a pair of large-sized shoes. In what possible world is it okay?
* * *
I had found the ad in the Kennebec Morning Sentinel, back in 1991. Golden Retriever pups, it said. AKC certified. Weaned and wormed. $50. Call Ruben Flood at the Bacon Farm.
I loved the Morning Sentinel, read it cover to cover every morning. My favorite column was the “Police Log,” which was a daily summary of criminal activity in Kennebec County, Maine. One such entry read, Officers summoned to Davis Launderette. Man found wearing only plastic garbage bag. Officers issued a warning. And suggested next time man not wash the clothes he was wearing.
I got a pen and circled the classified ad for the golden retriever puppies.
Deedie was away that summer, in grad school at the Smith College School for Social Work. We’d moved into our new house in Belgrade Lakes that May, and even though we had barely unpacked our boxes, soon it was time for her to head off for the summer session at Smith. It seemed cruel that the two of us, having found each other after no small measure of loss in both of our lives, would find ourselves torn apart again so soon.
And so off she had headed for the green pastures of Northampton, leaving me alone in our new house—alone, that is, except for the flatulent Alex, who by now spent most of his days lying on his side, dreaming softly of Zero and the green fields of Syracuse. I watched her drive away, the both of us crying, and then I went back inside. I went up to the second floor and opened the window. Then I climbed out onto the roof and followed it up to the ridge and sat there with my back against the chimney.
It was so quiet in Maine. Our house had a big green lawn, maybe three acres in all, and the house was set well back from the road. A stream rushed just beyond the tree line to the right. And on all sides were the thick trees, untamed forest in which dwelled coyotes and eagles and moose.
The moose would occasionally lumber into our backyard—always a cow, never a bull—and they would stand there chewing moss. We didn’t see them that often, but we knew they were there. We’d hear the sound as they crashed through the thick, tangled forest.
I sat there in the June sunshine with my back against the chimney. Not far from where I sat was a weather vane we’d purchased at a lawn sale, a copper moose upon an arrow that twisted with the wind. My heart had pounded in my chest as I’d screwed it into the ridge a few weeks before. I could see the driveway below me as I worked, and I suddenly understood how precarious my position was, how just a few inches separated me from a long drop down to the earth.
* * *
I was greeted at the Bacon Farm by Ruben Flood, an enormous man wearing a pair of worn denim overalls and no shirt. His chest hair curled upon the generous mounds of his pectorals like pieces of shaved coconut upon an elaborate human cake.
Mr. Flood led me past the sties and barns filled with oinking and squealing. At the time I had forgotten exactly how large hogs could grow, if you gave them half a chance. But once reacquainted with this fact, I have never forgotten it. According to my records here, there was once a pig named Reggie at the Iowa State Fair in 2012 that tipped the scales at 1,335 pounds. Although that was still in the future, in the new century that even in the 1990s still seemed unimaginable, like something out of a science-fiction movie.
There’s nothing subtle about a pigsty, and the smell of the marshy, fetid quagmire where the hogs of Ruben Flood resided was enough to set a person back some. Ruben didn’t seem affected by it, though. He just kept waddling past the sties until we arrived at a stone building not so unlike the milk house up in Earle’s Woods, where once Lloyd Goodyear and Playboy and I had stumbled upon the lesbians and their Harley. Inside was a small pen, and in the pen, all alone, was a small yellow puppy. She was standing when we entered the outbuilding, but when she saw us, she sat down and raised her head hopefully.
“She’s the lahst one,”