Chapter Twenty-Three

June 1986 Herb
When Herb died we had literally just got back from the Live Oak festival; Jim and Betsey had received the call about two hours earlier and when they heard the band were back they sent their stockist racing over at 9 at night to tell us. It was still light but we didn’t want him getting lost in the dark so I drove him home to Fern Valley and stopped by the newspaper to make a reservation for Geordie. It turned out we had just enough time to get him on a flight through New York, and so we hurried the kids back into the truck and dashed over the mountain. George had had time to wash and change, while I was gone, but the rest of us were still in our summer camping clothes. He was pretty even-minded about it all, his quietness the only sign of emotion. We made our rushed good-byes and saw him off in the dark. It was three in the morning by the time we got home.

Geoff met him at Manchester, as before when Anne died, and they shared a flask in the carpark, getting their bearings, even though it was not yet lunchtime and George was in a really bad way, exhausted from no sleep and jet lag. Geoff was in a bad way as well, all his old anger coming out. He exclaimed, ‘Shit! The old bugger! Leave it to him to die on us with everything hanging out.’ Not simply their relationship, though that was bad enough, but the glebe was in very bad shape, despite the young curate who had been assigned there and a housekeeper who was brought in; they couldn’t work on the rectory, cut the lawn, or see to the interior, or the paperwork of the church, or Herb’s affairs. All were in huge disarray.

They got to the glebe and the kids – Harriet and George’s namesake – were watching the telly in the lounge with the sound off. Dorey was in the kitchen with the housekeeper, cooking like a demon for the reception, while the curate was trying to tidy up the office in advance of a visit by the bishop. George said that it was very odd to have strangers in the house, and a housekeeper especially. It made the glebe much more like an old Victorian rectory, not a family house, which it had been for so long. The reality of having to divest the place of everything belonging to their family was brought home and he began to see why Geoff was so cheesed off. Herb never threw anything out, and never organised it, so they had to go through everything now. So they did, working like navvies for the whole time George was there and for weeks afterward.

At the end of the first day, George walked alone over to the church, where his father lay in state, a barely recognizable shrunken mass from the big man he had been. He had had liver cancer and no-one knew it, for he wouldn’t tell. George said it occurred to him what pain Herb must have stoically endured. He pulled a chair in from the sacristy and sat before the coffin, contemplating the old church dispassionately before turning to the old man. It was a fairly handsome old granite building, with nice walnut paneling and old pews. The paint was peeling, and the floors needed refinishing, but it was a good old place – which he would never have to see again after tomorrow. Once he stepped out of it, he was free of the Church of England forever. There was such relief in the thought. The burden of all those years of services five times a week was lifting.

‘Stubborn old bugger,’ he said to his father, when his roving gaze fell on him at last. ‘Never let anyone love you or look after you, to the last. Stoicism is a Christian virtue, me arse! Well, you know better now, don’t you?’ Tears came. ‘You’d better be listening to Ma there and doing what she says and treating her right now! I wish to hell I knew why you were such a hard ass, what made you that way…. Do I? Maybe not…. Yes, I do!’ He gripped the edge of the coffin, leaning to look at the yellowed old face. ‘Why did you shut everyone out, even her? Why could you not believe in a God of love? What made that so impossible, you old Puritan? I wish to hell you could tell me! I’d sure like to understand you.’ He shook his head, wincing at tears. ‘But I can’t…. But I’ll tell you this, old man, and this only: my boy knows that we love him, and for that I have you to thank, because I know what it means not to know. So you’ve given that to Geoff, even if you never knew or could accept it.’

He sat then and wept, for all the things that were, and never were. It was growing twilight by the time he was finished with it all, and the vigil would soon begin. Indeed, the curate was coming in to light the candles.
'Mr. Gregory! I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to intrude.’
He turned. ‘No, it’s all right. You are not. I’ve been here for some while….’ He got up. ‘You‘ve got matters to attend to, so I will go visit my mother, I think.’
‘Your – Oh…’ The curate said, colouring. ‘Yes.’

He went out and hunkered down in the graveyard for a little, looking at the neat white little marker over Annie’s grave. Beloved Wife. What mystery lay there! He missed her very much. Since she had died, the lack of her lively, witty newsy letters was keenly felt. Dorey wrote, and Geoff, and Herb had once in a blue moon. But it was not the same. Wellspring indeed, of the family. He thought of the pictures of her from her youth. She had been a fetching lass, bonny; if that was all right to say of your own mother! He knew very well what had attracted Herb to her, but what about she to him? He shook his head. ‘I can’t see it, Ma,’ he said. I wish that I had asked you….’

At the vigil there was a surprise, and not a pleasant one: Laney. The hateful aunt. She was a Thatcher clone now, the Iron Lady, and he managed to avoid her until the reception queue, when for some reason known only to her, she stood next to him.
‘So, you’re a Yank now,’ she said.
‘More or less,’ he said evenly. ‘Haven’t become a citizen. Don’t see the point.’
‘Well that’s something…. ‘ She glanced at him sidelong. When the well-wishers had dispersed, she turned to him fully, saying, ‘Your father was broken-hearted to see you galavant off with your heiress.’
‘Excuse me?’ Everything she had just said was so preposterous.
‘You heard me,’ she said, with the same put-on RP tones of the PM.
‘Well it’s news to me. He never said a word. And for your information, we do not live off Claire’s money; it’s in trust our grandchildren.’
Laney harrumphed. ‘Well, he wouldn’t. But you should have known.’
‘In God’s name, how?’ He looked over at Geoff, who was talking with the curate beside the baptismal font. ‘He never said anything to us that wasn’t criticism.’
‘You should have known,’ she repeated coolly. ‘Eldest son. He wanted you to follow him.’
That was too much! ‘What, into the church! Oh come off!’
She nodded. ‘Even though he hated it himself, he felt it was the right thing to do, a proper job for a man with a family. He wanted to do right by you.’ She looked at him squarely, ‘and what did you do but reject everything from the time you could talk, and run off to some bohemian life with an heiress….’

Well, he had wanted to know.
But not like this.
Shit.
‘Excuse me,’ he said to Laney and stalked over to Geoff and dragged him into the sacristy, telling him in a few words of the conversation.
‘Crikey!’ exclaimed his brother. Then, ‘Bloody hell!’
He nodded. ‘Explains a hell of a lot.’
‘I’ll say it does.’ Geoff agreed. ‘I’d like to know what the hell else he wanted to do.’
‘So would I!’
‘Can you ask her?’
He shook his head. ‘I’m not talking to that bitch again if I can help it.’
Geoff frowned. ‘Let me ask Dorey, she’s good at worming things out of people.’

Sure enough, the next day at the reception Dorey sat down with Laney and under the pretext of chronicling it all for the family got down to what Herb had wanted to do with himself: He had wanted to be a sailor. See the world. Ports of call. Adventure. Freedom. And when his father squashed that and made him take up orders, he did so swearing that he would never rise in the church as the old man wanted. He would remain low church forever. Out of spite. But there was more: the whole reason the bonny fetching lass and jack tar married at all was that she was up the spout. The child was stillborn. But born.

‘Be respectable. Cut your hair. Get a job.’
All the pieces fell into place.

What is more, there were pictures to prove it, that neither he nor Geoff had ever seen: after the war, of that tall lanky young man and the fetching lass, at dances, at clubs, laughing, drinking, dancing. Herb had been like them, he and Geoff. A wild youth. And that was why it rankled that they were wild: reminding him of what he had been, the life he had loved, that was cut from under him by circumstances.

It didn’t make up for all the years of emotional and often physical abuse. But it helped. It did help.

1987-1992 Geoff’s mishaps
The kids learned to climb as soon as they had the strength to do so, on the boulders at County Park and at Suicide. Sas was nimble and limber and we joked about her prehensile toes, for she clung to everything like a monkey, but with Geoff we learned that we had to top-rope or tie him in to everything under any circumstances, even hiking, because he was rather uncoordinated and would fall off anything without warning. Not, we discerned after watching him for a while, because he was physically inept or particularly unbalanced – he didn’t have an unsteady gait or one shoulder higher than another- but because he frankly didn’t pay attention. His mind was somewhere else, most of the time, and it caused him to fall off, stumble or outright crash and burn. We got used to saying to him, ‘Geoff! Focus!’
George said, shaking his head, ‘I wouldn’t let him belay. He’d kill someone.’

One of Geoff’s mishaps happened when we were fishing at the lake when he was seven. We wanted the kids to know how to look after themselves in the wild, and so even if we didn’t eat fish, we thought it would be a handy skill for them. After some while, when attempting to re-bait his line, Geoff reached out and grabbed the fishhook from the end of the line, and tore a great long gash in his finger. That was the end of our placid fishing day. We wrapped his finger tightly in duct tape and hurried home, where Geordie sewed him up.
In the kitchen they sat at the table, with a packet of sutures I had from Shirley. But we hadn’t any lidocaine. George still had a horror of injectibles. There was no way that he could stitch Geoff’s hand without it, as the kid was wiggling and crying as it was. Geordie looked up, tossing his hair from his face.
‘Get the whiskey,’ he said quietly to me.
I stared at him. ‘You’re going to use our good scotch on him?’
‘Yes.’
I got it, and George poured out about a gill, more than we drank in a year, into a glass.
‘Bottoms up, boy.’ He said to Geoff. ‘Time to be a man.’
I stood in amazement. ‘You’ll make him sick.’
‘Probably,’ George agreed.

Geoff didn’t like it, didn’t want it, but he stopped complaining under that stern, watchful gaze, and drank about half of it. George nodded, and used the rest as a local anaesthetic, on a wad of cotton wool. I sat with Geoff in my lap, because he could hardly sit up straight, and George stitched the long gash very neatly.
‘Don’t look,’ I told Geoff, but myself watched very closely, marvelling at the good work. Geordie would often do his own mending, and always repaired the tent or rucksacks, but this fine skill was something else.
‘It’ll be something to tell his grandkids,’ George smiled, when he was done.
We bound the wound in lamb’s ear and gauze and carried Geoff, now sleepy, to his bed.
‘You never cease to amaze me,’ I told Geordie, ‘with the things you know.’
He chuckled. ‘Half the time I have forgotten that I know them, until something comes up.’ He looked at Geoff. ‘He’s going to have a massive hangover.’

A more serious mishap came in June when he was ten, before the Midsummer festival. We were all out working in the garden. Sas was tending to Nancy the goat, George and I were staking beans, and Geoff was watering the roof. Commonly, he was not allowed up on the roof, but was taught to move the ladder a couple of times and stand as far down as possible, because we didn’t want him falling off. Well, that day, he did just that.

‘Okay, give me another,’ George was saying of the stakes, and I lunged back to the pile and handed over another 2-by. We were pounding it in, swinging and swaying in tandem like navvies, when we heard a cry, and them a thump. George raised his head, scowling.
‘Jesus!’ he exclaimed.
Geoff had fallen off the roof. He lay in a heap by the corner of the house, at weird angles. We ran over. He was bleeding and unconscious, very pale, with a great knot on the back of his head, and when George looked at his eyes they were white.
‘ O God,' George murmured. We looked at each other, and my heart was hammering. George was pale too. He checked the boy’s pulse and it was very thready and his heartbeat was slow.
‘Sassa!' he bellowed at the child, ‘Get the keys!’
She sprang up like a gazelle and sprinted into the house.

We hurried as quickly as we could down the path, glissading half the way, to the truck, Geordie carrying Geoff. In the truck we wrapped him a blanket and I held him while George drove like mad down our road. We got to the ER in Palm Springs – a journey of fourteen miles on narrow mountain roads that commonly took an hour at best – in twenty minutes and thank God they had the good sense to take us in right away.
After the initial exam and while they were setting up the x-ray, the in-charge asked us for Geoff’s information. We were fine with age, weight, date of birth, but when it came to allergy to medications, things got a little strained.
‘We don’t know,’ I braved the storm. ‘He hasn’t had any.’ I doubted he would count herbs.
The resident – a big blond man – looked at me incredulously. ‘He’s never had antibiotics, or anything?’
I shook my head.
He frowned at us. ‘When was his last check up?’
‘When the midwife came after he was born,’ I said. It was the truth.
The resident exploded. ‘Do you mean he doesn’t have a medical record?! He’s never been immunised? What about for school?‘
‘We don’t believe in that,’ George said quietly, looking at Geoff. They were covering him with the protective drapes now. ‘Call it religious exemption.’

The resident paused, thought a moment, then asked, ‘Are you Christian Scientists?’
We shook our heads.
‘Jehovah’s Witnesses?’ he looked doubtful of this.
We shook our heads again, and the resident looked at us with contempt, as we stood there in dirty gardening clothes and flip-flops.
‘Well, you sure as hell aren’t Mennonites or Amish!’ he exclaimed. He shook his head. ‘Hippie freaks!’ He wrote on his intake sheet. ‘I should report you,’ he said coldly at last looking up.
‘It’s not illegal to refuse allopathy on religious grounds,’ George said calmly.
‘It’s child abuse!’ the resident yelled. ‘That kid has never seen a doctor!’
‘It is within the law; we have not refused basic necessary care.’ George murmured steadily, unmoved. Oh, he was magnificent! The resident was freaking out and the technician was staring and people were poking their heads in to see what all the noise was about, and he just stood there, like a rock, despite his own worry and fear.
‘We’ll see about that.’
The tech finished the x-ray and we went with Geoff back to the examining room to wait the results. It took a while, so, without permission, I went into the waiting room where Sas was all by herself and brought her in.
‘She can’t be in here,’ the nurse said to me.
I said nothing. It was not challenged.

There wasn’t any brain swelling, and no fractures, so they figured that Geoff only had a concussion, but they still wanted to keep him overnight, hook him up to IV, and give him a sedative. We refused. He had come to by the time we got to the x-rays, and his eyes were clear and his pulse and heart rate normal. Oh, there was an unholy row when we said, very politely, that we would take him home and look after him! There were three nurses and two doctors haranguing us to ‘co-operate’. Finally, a little nurse came in, in blue scrubs, with a piece of paper in her hand. She handed it to us. It was the statute in the state constitution regarding religious exclusion:
‘Nothing in this act shall be so construed as to inhibit service in the case of emergency, or to the domestic administration of family remedies…Nor shall this act be so construed as to discriminate against any particular school of medicine, surgery, or osteopathy, or any other system or mode of treating the sick, or afflicted, or to interfere in any way with the practice of religion…’
The mob ranged against us could do nothing further. They could not hold Geoff or us against our will. The little nurse and an orderly helped us out to the truck with Geoff and she said to us before we got in,
‘I was raised as a Mennonite. And I want you to know that I find what you did in there to be a powerful witness.’ Her eyes filled with tears. ‘God bless you.’
I gave her a hug.

August 1992
The death of Fergus
Our Ferg had lived a long time, much longer than even the oldest collies anyone had heard about. In the summer of 1992, he was an amazing twenty years old, sleepy, arthritic, and as gently loving as ever. It made Geordie very sad, and he would sit with him, brushing him, and I often heard him say’ I know you’re winding down, old friend.’ But he couldn’t bear to have him put down, as some well-meaning people had suggested.

It was one of Geoff’s jobs to help look after him, to chop up his veg very fine and mix his soft rice with brewer’s yeast, because Ferg had lost most of his teeth, to bathe him and brush him. This last was not a strenuous job, only twice a week, but when Geordie, Rob and James went climbing for a fortnight in August, Geoff bugged, and didn’t brush him at all. I assumed that he was doing it, and was not alert to the scene until one evening when Ferg lay on his bed, whining. I put down my knitting and went over to him.
‘What’s the matter, old boy?’
He looked up at me with such sad eyes, and thumped his tail a little.
‘Poor old darling,’ I said, running my hand over him. ‘Are you hurting tonight, lovey?’ And I saw it – a couple of patches of scabies on his tum. It stopped me cold. I examined him thoroughly then, in a panic, and discovered small patches all over him, a crust beginning on the edges of his ears.
‘Oh my God.’

The kids weren’t home, they had gone down to the lake with the Burkes, so I put a pot on to boil, filled it with lavender, and bathed the poor old darling as gently as I could. By the time Geoff got home, I had Ferg mostly dried off and had changed the cover on his bed. I sat with him in my lap, rocking him like a baby.
Geoff started at the door and stopped, feeling the vibe.
‘Oh Geoffy, Ferg is very sick.’ I said, and the tears came. ‘You didn’t brush him.’
He turned pale, and backed up, poor little thing. ‘I forgot, Mommy.’
I wiped my face and held out my hand to him.' Come here, kiddo.’ He came, warily, and sat beside me. I showed him the spots of mange on the old dog’s body and ears.
‘He’s hurting Geoffy. He’s got bugs and they’re eating him up. Maybe they’re inside him now. Oh, baby.’
‘… Is he going to die, Mommy?’ Geoff asked, stricken.
‘I don’t know,’ I said miserably.
‘Dad will be mad.’ Geoff said. I choked on tears. More than that. Oh more than that.

Geordie was, needless to say, beside himself. He laid into Geoff like I had never seen him do with anybody, swearing and pacing and yelling, for God’s sake.
‘Damn it, Geoff! I ask you to do one simple thing while I’m gone and you blow it! Why the hell don’t you pay attention!' He gestured at the dog. ‘He’s old, boy! He’s weak. If he were a person he would be about a hundred and fifty! Oh just look at him, he’s a mess, my poor old Ferg.’ He was crying now. ‘I’ve had him since he was a puppy! I knew him at Findhorn before his eyes were open! Hamish gave him to me when he was barely weaned! How could you be so cruel to a helpless animal!’ Geoff cowered in the chair at this unprecedented display. But I remembered Thor. ‘Get out of here!’ George commanded. ‘I don’t want to see you!’ Geoff slunk off to his room like a bad dog.
George sat down and cried all over the poor old dog, who licked his face with sad eyes.

We hadn’t very long to wait. We kept the poor old darling as comfortable as possible, but there really wasn’t much we could do; he was so very old and weak. It was four days later when we sat through the night with him, Geordie and Sas and I – Geoff hid in this room, crying - we petting him gently and breathing loving-kindness to him, to send him on his way to Valhalla. He breathed his last as dawn drew near, and poor Geordie broke down and cried in great gulping, wracking sobs. Geoffy crept in to our sad little circle and put his arms around George.
‘I’m sorry, Daddy,’ he murmured, crying with us.
‘I am too, son,’ George managed. ‘I am too.’

We buried him at the edge of the garden, under the tree beside the hammock, where he had used to love to sit. The kids made a marker for him, a stone from the lakeshore, which read simply, ‘Fergus, our beloved friend.’

I had never seen Geordie low. Even when his father died, he was philosophical and shed no tears. But now, for a week, he could not eat and would break into tears at odd moments, could not play music, and wrapped himself around me at night as if his own life depended on it.
Another week passed, and he was a bit better – I had coaxed him to some calming tinctures – but he was still despondent and very, unnaturally quiet. Sas followed him around like a shadow, and cried with him often, as much in sympathy as grief I think, for it was shocking to them to see him – always so cheerful and calm and strong – in this state.

At the weekend, the kids went to the Oldfields’ to swim, and when they got back, Sas came in to the bedroom where we were reading Othello, and said,
‘Daddy, can you come here?’
He looked up and took off his reading glasses. ‘Eh?’
All arms and legs and summer blondeness, still in shorts and her bathing suit, Sas crooked her finger, and George got up to follow her.
In the common room was Geoff, holding a little rough collie puppy, a tricolour with a brown and white face and little white paws. It looked as if it was barely weaned.
‘He’s for you, Daddy,’ Geoff said, holding him out. ‘Mike gave him to me. Somebody at the shop had a litter.’ Poor little bean, he looked so scared that Geordie would cry or yell at him again. Well, he did cry, but with a big smile and a hug for poor Geoff and the pup. They sat down on the floor and looked the little one over, making much of him. Geoff was so happy, telling about how he had confessed to Mike about what he had done, and Mike going over to the phone and ringing up one of his neighbours. They went down the road right then, and picked out the little one from the litter. Geordie kissed the boy and put his arm around him.
‘Thank you, Geoffy. Thank you!’
George called the dog Boswell, and trained him up with much love and care and patience, which made a lasting impression on the children. Boz, as he quickly became known, grew into a dear friend.