LOVE NOTE Chapter 15: August 16-19, 1988. Part ii.

August 19 I lay against my over-sized peach pillows, legs spread and penis big in my hand, a perfect fool holding his pulsing tool. Arthur, Arthur. I'd had a particularly beautiful day, even facetiously imagined myself taken care of by unseen forces. By day as by night?

I'd smoked before I left the house about 1 P.M. Usually at the road, just twenty feet in front of the old farmhouse so changed in the past twenty years, I turned left toward town. What a beautiful day! I turned right. Cottage Hill Road was winding and hilly between town and the aging commune. Past it, in the direction I turned, it was more so. Sparky, the older of Brian's dogs, joined me, trotting stiff-legged and looking neither left nor right. He was 5-years-old, brown and black, self-absorbed as a cat and undemonstrative as a Vulcan. I was nothing to Sparky.

The steep hill to the schoolhouse began a tenth of a mile east of the farm, past the burnt-out Morgan house. I paused beside it and remembered November 1979, Story come to threaten and cajole, his body twisted from back spasms so he couldn’t stand straight; we had walked out together the hour of his arrival and he had left the road here and limped toward the already long-abandoned house as I had waited, the sky azure, the day crisp, cool, and sunny. I thought of the night the house had burned, the farm's first hippie summer, 1970, and the volunteer firemen coming and, with them, the crowd that had thought it was the hippies' house on fire, not this, the only other house it could have been.

My wheelchair climbed the hill easily. It was a good chair and I was used to it now, had had it nine months, but I was still careful on hills. Ten months ago I had taken my previous chair up the Cottage Hill, the steepest hill toward town, and at the top it had blown a fuse. Powerless, the chair had immediately swung round and begun to free-wheel downhill; to the left was a 30-foot drop, to the right a shallow ditch and the face of a low cliff; fortunately, the chair had kept on swinging round and soon, before seriously picking up speed, gone off the right side of the road and into the ditch; I was still in the chair, unhurt. If my new chair blew a fuse or I turned off its power its motors locked in gear, a significant design improvement.

The fields today were violet and golden and the trees would soon be turning. The road went straight almost to the top of the hill, then curved sharp right. To continue straight would put me on Burns Road, which was unpaved and led in about two miles past Hettie's and Angus' land, where they hoped to build (they began this year, 1996, moved-in in October 1997, had me to dinner for the first time in May 1998) and had had a fireworks display this past July 4. To the left before Burns Road was the 1-room schoolhouse Angus' father Babe, now eighty-four, had attended early in the century.

I turned right up the last 100 feet of hill, its steepest part. At the top there were woods to the left and, to the right, a rock-strewn field going back to pine that fell away gradually into a 100-acre field of corn where no rocks remained except one large ridge that there had been no moving. This was the other side of the hill I looked at from my home when I looked east and south. All this land, left and right, belonged to the Honeys, Wurts Farm's nearest neighbor in 1970 after the fire at the Morgans’. The hill that led to the Honeys' house descended in two sections connected by a brief level stretch under an old white oak. There were few big oaks left and most of them, like this one, seemed sick, many of their leaves already turned to tan.

"Be good, Sparky," I said; "you good dog." Sparky had been known to chase cows, a major offense, and I'd had my doubts about coming this way when he'd joined me; had Spot been with me I wouldn't have, would immediately have gone toward town. "I shouldn't have come this way with you," man said to dog. Dog ignored him, toenails clicking on the pavement. "You good dog, yes; you good dog Sparky."

I sat at Chapel Corners, the T where German Settlement Road met Cottage Hill Road. When Babe had gone to school at the schoolhouse a chapel had been here, but it had burned to the ground about 1930. To proceed further on Cottage Hill Road would be more dangerous but also more adventurous than to turn right onto German Settlement. My first powerful electric chair, when it was new, had been strong enough to climb the upcoming Cottage Hill Road hills; then it hadn't, nor had the next. With this chair, I hadn't yet tried. The very first slope, immediately ahead, was, I thought, the steepest of all, probably too steep for me, and if I couldn't make it up and the front of my chair swung round, as it probably would, I would have to avoid several potholes, each deep enough to perhaps tip the chair onto its side. If I could make it up this rise, though, new miles would open to me, and, although I didn't seem to be looking for new roads to travel, the option tempted me.

The Storris' Zoo was to the right and there was a hill on the way that I hadn't tried alone since last summer's blown fuse. I had descended it once this summer, with Faith and Throck the day we bug-bombed the house, but that day Faith had served as my emergency brake. Another time this summer I'd reached the forbidding hill's brink alone but had decided against risking the descent.

I decided to continue on Cottage Hill Road and began the ascent of the first sudden rise. That night, making Tape 6A in front of the mirror, I described my adventure: Me, up the steep left fork of Cottage Hill Road. Too steep. I turned around and started back down, skidded, let go of the throttle to slow and stop the skid, kept skidding, felt a sharp sudden pain under my left shoulder blade, and finally stopped scant inches from a pothole. (Spread, tumescent, I was speaking softly above the tumult of what I felt.) Before I'd started up the hill a half a dozen sulfa butterflies had flown round me. (I had no butterfly net, as the child I'd been likely would have, nor had I a snake-catch bag or .22 as, older, I might have. Older still, thirteen, fifteen, seventeen, I would've had binoculars. I'd a pair on my footrests now but rarely used them because when I did, leaning on my right elbow, the fingers of my left hand, with which I held them, partially covered one lens; I couldn’t effectively focus them, either. The sulfas had hovered close to my head, then, as a group, flown on.) I thought of me, alone, surrounded by the fields and all the yellow butterflies. (I stifled a love groan.) Sitting at the edge of the deep pothole where my chair's skid had fortuitously ended, I’d felt wonderful.

My writing is so sensually weak. Where in it are the meadows, the hillsides, the sunsets; the smell of manure, the cries of loon?

I feel, I feel intensely; but I have spent years emotionally benumbed, as when in the first roadworthy chair I had, in 1978, I drove alone ten miles to Alexandria Bay knowing, as I whistled, as I sang, how beautiful it was that I was on this road alone freed to this new extent, but knowing, too, I was not joyous and must not pretend--at least to myself--that in fact I was.

Still, I thought, I’m here, and this solitudinous unnecessary ride on a hot straight empty road through open fields, this exotic aloneness like none I’ve known in fif-teen years, is cause for joy. I knew that it was better I could do it, was doing it, than it had been when I couldn't. I'd write about it, I thought, some day, perhaps when I was writing well, and I would be moved, again, at my intense acceptance of my lot and my refusal to deny it as I found it.

Today I imagined standing by the road and watching from far away approach in a little cart a man in a pin-striped long-sleeved shirt, his legs (wrapped in a white sheet and resting on a blue sheepskin) stretched straight before him, a green towel in his lap, a dog beside him.

Back at Chapel Corners I paused, pondered, and then turned toward Storris' as Sparky trotted back toward home. A car descended the hill I was about to climb and passed me. Two little girls waved to me through its rearview window. The children had loved seeing me; everywhere they do. At the corner, about to turn up German Settlement towards Will Storris's, I felt a prick under my left shoulder blade like that I’d felt minutes ago as I'd skidded toward the pothole. So it would have felt, I thought, had my guardian hooked an astral crook under my shoulder blade to stop my skid. I'd remembered only after I had stopped that to stop the chair abruptly I had not only to let go the throttle but also push the on-off switch, turn off the power, and thought what a foolish mistake I'd made not doing so, how lucky I had been.

I lay in bed, remembering, recording, feeling.

German-Settlement up from Chapel Corners began with a rise so steep I always wondered if I'd make it, though I always had. That hill behind me, I knew the chair wouldn't be seriously challenged till the descent of the big hill in about a mile. Woods were on my left, to my right the Honeys' big field (in which, I realized in 2002, bobolink were breeding) beyond which, over the hill, lay Wurts Farm. I was soon where the road bisected the top of a vast flat rock a hundred yards to a side. On my left, back from the road, was a house abandoned in the 1960s. Beyond it was a dirt road I'd never taken, which I thought led to the Indian River. Going down the steep hill, the one I haven't dared go down alone, I skidded--and remembered, as I wouldn't have had I not so recently forgotten, to turn the power off to stop the skid. I’m not watched over? I found Will and his wife sitting on their front porch, Alice Catherine in heat and roaring.

I drove home from the zoo after a few chess games, worried I'd not make it. The batteries were badly drained and I'd had Storris call ahead so someone would look for me on the road were I not to appear in the next hour. Will pumped my tires up before I left his house. One had been flat enough to make the chair skid more than usual, and I was relieved on the way back that the traction seemed better. Not reassuring was hearing a tire lose air on the first long hill down from the zoo and then lose more on the first hill up. Also alarming was the energy gauge. When the chair was fully-charged the gauge showed ten lighted rectangles, three green, four yellow, and three red; it showed just the three red as I ascended the first hill, and as I began the next ascent, still two miles from home, just two remained, ominously blinking on and off. To my left was an old apple orchard, the trees small and most of them no longer bearing. I was relieved when the blinking stopped and the third red light reappeared as the road leveled; going down the next hill two yellow lights came on. I stopped at the foot of the 2-tiered hill between Honeys' and the schoolhouse, stopped again halfway up to give the batteries time to recharge; just the two red lights flashed on each ascent. Home at last, only one red flashing light remained; I needed help from Faith to make it over the back door’s threshold.

I felt, lay silent with my afternoon’s story told, then spoke again. I invited P. to draw me tonight, as she'd said night-before-last she’d thought of doing. I told her that as she drew I hoped I’d talk of what I'm doing here. She said she didn't feel inspired tonight but that if her mood changed she might come in. Before talking about inviting P. to draw I'd not been very hard, but now as I speak of the invitation my penis stiffens and jumps, another linkage of my thoughts and my erection. I was a scientist reporting from a little-known front. Now I'll close my eyes, to feel.

I later talked to Lee, said more, much more (and used it here until, a piece at a time, I cut it all). When I opened my eyes to see if I was still as stiff as I felt, I found I wasn’t. I said nothing for a minute, maybe two, then the last words of 6A: Hard again, searching with my thumb for my clitoris.

Arthur at work. I thought of reincarnation, of having been a woman time and time again. This life of mine was hers and hers and hers, theirs, the women I'd forgotten being and the women I would be. I felt too good to stop, pulled up, switched to side B, did another line and smoked a hit of pot, lay back again to feel what I never would have felt without the white betrayer.

Faith had come in one last time. I was still recording when she left, still as erect as I had been when she'd entered. My voice was hoarse. I spoke again, enunciated clearly, felt my words, returned to favorite subjects, spoke and felt. Eventually I turned off the recorder, but fresh thoughts came to me and came to me and again and again I turned the recorder on, the last time saying: Being is free, and this is how free feels!
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