399: In the years ...
Herb ’n’ Lorna, Chapter 20 continues
In the years that followed, the Punta Cachazudans tried to confine their secret to the town, to protect their art and industry from an uncertain reception outside, but there was in them that urge to tell, and now and then one or another gave in to it, and the secret spread somewhat, underground, whispered or mumbled. The farther it spread from Punta Cachazuda, the more preposterous it seemed, and so there were no southward swarms of the curious and salacious except for a small flock of young people inspired by a mention in the second edition of The Whole Earth Catalog:
If you’re going to be in the area, you might want to check out a neo-Transcendentalist erotico-artistic community in west coastal Florida called Punta Cachazuda. I didn’t have a lot of time to really get to know the place, but I got a lot of good feelings about it when I was there. These people are old, but a lot of them are into some interesting ideas in collaborative art and city planning, and I think there’s some kind of pan-linguistic movement going on here, too, like home-grown Esperanto or something. Check it out. — Allspice
That, however, was a passing curiosity, and the widespread recognition that Punta Cachazudans simultaneously feared and desired didn’t come until recently. We’ll get to that in a moment, but to be faithful to chronology I have to tell you what happened next.
Herb had never really been healthy after he and Lorna reached Punta Cachazuda. He was bothered by a flurry of minor ailments, and they left him weakened and wary. Then one evening, after he had finished teaching a class in the articulation of hip joints, he had a heart attack. It struck him while he was sitting quietly in his easy chair, reading the latest issue of Amateur Mechanical Engineer. The attack scared the hell out of Herb and made Lorna so solicitous of him that he couldn’t help laughing at the way she bustled about, doing for him. Her own heart ached with concern for him. She couldn’t stand being out of reach of him, and the possibility of losing him seemed to be dwelling in their little cement-block house like an unwelcome guest. At night she often found herself awake, murmuring a plea to this presence, this possibility of death, to get out of her house, to go visit someone else for a while, to go, go away. After a while, Herb’s fear began to wane, and he began to make light of the first attack, calling it, as many of his Punta Cachazudan cronies did, “his warning.” Lorna began letting him out of her sight again, and she began to feel that the possibility of death had moved on, was visiting elsewhere for a while. When she returned from a shopping trip one morning, Herb was dead in his easy chair.
One glorious fall day, years later, I gained, accidentally, an understanding of how Lorna must have felt then. I was driving alone along a country road, feeling an exhilaration that sometimes comes to me on a fine fall day and at no other time. It is due, I think, partly to the vestigial rhythm of the academic calendar, which makes spring a time of anxiety and fall a time of rebirth, new opportunities, a clean slate; it is also due in part to the crisp weather, of course, and the autumn colors in the countryside. In the road ahead of me was a dead male pheasant. He was lying on his side, with his neck extended and one wing in the air. At the side of the road was a female pheasant, his mate. She approached him, calling, not keening, but calling out. Then she turned away, began to walk away, turned back and called out again, turned away, turned back, and so on, as if confused and almost annoyed, as if she were saying, “Come on now, get up. Quit fooling around. We still have a long way to go, a lot to do. Don’t lie down now — we have a long way to go together.” I stopped the car and watched her in painful fascination. I couldn’t have driven on anyway; my eyes were full of tears.
Lorna stayed on in Punta Cachazuda for a couple of lonely years, but then the house where she and Herb had lived together in Babbington came back on the market, and Lorna bought it, for cash, and returned to Babbington. Everything that she and Herb had had in the house had been lost in the warehouse fire, so Lorna lived with secondhand furniture that she and Ella picked up in a week of rapid shopping, which Ella enjoyed enormously but Lorna thought of as something she wanted to get through as quickly as she could. Ella had been attracted to new Colonial-style things, but Lorna had wanted to duplicate as closely as she could the feeling the house had had when she and Herb had lived there, when it had been furnished with things that Herb had made and things they’d picked up here and there over the years, and so she avoided stores that sold new furniture and steered Ella toward secondhand shops. The house was furnished, and looked cozily cluttered, but there was a hollow in it, a rarefied pocket where Herb should have been.
Of Lorna then, May said:
Well, after he died, I mean, after Herb died — Well. Oh, Lorna and I still had some grand times — No. No, we didn’t. Not really. I tried to play Lorna to her May — cheer her up, make her look forward to something — but she was just coasting after Herb died, you know. Just coasting.
[to be continued on Friday, December 9, 2022]
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