Chapter Two
Two
Off they went to explore their new world!
The sun had risen on the home of Professor Rumphius, and a chorus of birds serenaded the new arrivals.
From his window, Wesley spotted a deer in the high grass, and called to Olive, waking his father and mother, who gathered with the children at the window, staring in awe at this most common of animals feeding on this most common of plants.
But how grand she was—he, said Olive, noting his expansive antlers—how majestic!
His ears turned this way and that, independent of each other, and then, suddenly, he lifted his great white tail, plush as a drum major’s plume, and, with a bound, launched himself to the right at an impossible angle, then to the left, and then, without effort, vanished over the fence and into the meadow and into the woods.
Well, no one would be going back to bed after that. Not with the birdsong, not with the day ahead of them. And because they were hungry, and because, in their haste, they had not stopped to get groceries, they headed out into rural America at six in the morning on a Sunday to get something to eat.
—
Seventeen miles away, at a gas station, they found themselves in a land of culinary abundance.
What exotic flavors! What strange delectations!
Raised in the land of the unprocessed and organic, attending public schools that maintained their own gardens, never had the children tasted of the Slurpee, the Twinkie, or the Pepperoni Pizza Cracker.
Pringles they knew, but only at a distance.
The friendly werewolf smiling on the chicken-flavored puffs was still a stranger.
Could they guess the central ingredient of the Corn Nut?
Who was this Sara Lee of such extraordinary industry?
Or “Slim Jim,” and why were his meat sticks packaged in the same color scheme as Pennzoil?
The choices! Flamin’ Hot Limón Cheetos beckoned with throbbing colors.
There were Pink Weepers, Jelly Blossums [sic], Real Pork? Krunchers, Jumpin’ Beans as bright as windshield wiper fluid.
Hot dogs the color of an old lady’s nail polish spun gleaming on greased rollers.
And the refrigerator aisle! It was six-thirty, and already one could choose from two dozen different kinds of chicken and tuna salad sandwiches, packaged in perfect little plastic containers, ready to be washed down with wine coolers in kid-friendly hues of pink and lime, or energy drinks with fascist fonts.
Vainly did Kate pull the children down each aisle, past Technicolor promises of gustatory pleasure, to bags of candied fruits and nuts, which included fruits and nuts as their ingredients.
And to think that they had dreamed that they were going to be gathering their own eggs, milking their own goats!
Miles, meanwhile, was sniffing at the eight different flavors of Coffee Drink, settling at last on a mix of hazelnut and cranberry for himself and almond for his wife, which he then doctored with flavored creamers, Irish Crème, and French Vanilla, and Vanilla Crunch.
Why, wondered Miles, ever curious, was it called “Coffee Drink” and not just coffee? And what ingredient distinguished Vanilla Crunch from French Vanilla? And what was this milk that didn’t need refrigeration?
Back in the car, caffeine washing away their headaches, glucose narcotizing the children, Miles took out his phone to see if there were any local attractions and discovered, to his delight, that there was a petting sheep farm just ten miles up the road.
Interestingly, though the city children had never eaten a Slim Jim or a Pepperoni Pizza Cracker back in California, they had in fact once petted real sheep.
Every year, the campus-life organization sponsored a family fun fair, where a Basque man from the Central Valley brought two beleaguered ewes and set up a station by the bouncy house.
That he was Basque was something Miles had discovered on his own, one of the things that Kate loved about her husband and also thought shed great light on why he had not finished his dissertation.
One of the sheep was snapping at the children, and the man was scolding it, and the curses weren’t in Spanish, so Miles had suspicions.
When he was a child, Miles’s parents had had a Basque gardener, a beloved man named Leon, handsome as a movie star in a 1970s French gangster film.
For most of his life, Miles hadn’t registered his Basqueness—Leon was memorable primarily for the desserts he brought the family at Christmas, and for the respect that the Krzelewskis—indeed, all the neighborhood—held for his skill with trees.
But then, in Miles’s sophomore year of high school, his family signed up for a house exchange with a Spanish family, and his parents and his older sister had enrolled in language classes, and Miles, in a classically Milesian fit of erudite oppositionality, had elected to study Basque.
And why shouldn’t he? There were fewer than a million people in the world who spoke Basque, and nearly half a billion who spoke Spanish. Spanish would do fine without him.
I don’t think that is the reason that people choose a language, said his father. Often it is the opposite reason.
Often, but not always, Miles said.
For most children, the desire to learn Basque would have been but a passing fancy—after all, the language was notoriously difficult.
But with a book from the library, Let’s Learn Basque!
, and a bit of conversational help from the delighted Leon, Miles soon found himself with moderate command of functional Basque necessary for any traveler in 1929.
A few words batted about in some far-off room of his brain that day of the Campus Fun Fair, and the sheep handler’s face perked up, after a bit of small talk:
Hello!
What, what the hell?
Hello, I also speak Basque! Isn’t Basque a beautiful language?
You speak Basque? What the…
How are you today?
Good…Mother Mary! How the hell do you know Basque?
High school!
What kind of crazy fucking American high school teaches Basque?
Which Miles didn’t understand, and so they switched back to English, and Miles told him why he had come to speak this most extraordinary language, their beloved gardener, tree whisperer, bringer of intxaursaltsa and goxua.
“Leon? Leon Astigarraga?” asked the sheep handler. Because not only did the sheep handler know Leon Astigarraga, Leon Astigarraga had seduced his sister back in San Sebastián, and got her pregnant, and—
“Yup, that’s probably enough of that story,” said Kate, cutting short the reminiscence there, in the gas station lot, Wesley and Olive trading candied chunks of pineapple and papaya, the car steaming with the scent of industrial vanilla.
The point being, a sheep farm would be a lovely way to spend their first morning in the country.
—
When the invitation had first come from Greensbury, Miles and Kate had taken an afternoon to talk about what the decision would mean for the family, and for Miles in particular.
The concern hadn’t been Miles’s concern—concerns, for better or worse, were rarely Miles’s concerns—but Kate had wanted to make sure that her reasons for going were consistent with Miles’s reasons for going, or, to put it directly: that it wasn’t good in the right way for her while being good in the wrong way for him.
Oh, what she was trying to say was: she knew that he was excited to go, to get away from the day-to-day, to try something different, to have an adventure.
She could use her upcoming leave; she’d love a lighter teaching load, the change of pace.
But she also wondered if there wasn’t a way it might turn out to help Miles, his career.
That is: could he see, stepping back from the various and intriguing topics he had worked on for his many dissertations, how even just a year away might actually be useful? If he could just finish up and get his Ph.D.! That was all—he didn’t need a fancy professorship—
“Like your fancy professorship,” said Miles.
—unless he wanted one, said Kate. Oh, she loved him! But to finish something he’d begun—just think of it! He would get more choice in his classes, wouldn’t always feel that tug on the heart when someone treated him as just her consequence.
“I’m pretty happy to be your consequence,” said Miles.
“You know what I mean.”
“Nothing lovelier can be found / In woman, than…good works in her husband to promote,” said Miles.
“Charming,” said Kate, but she flushed a little, as she always did when Miles quoted the other man in her life.
The funny thing, he said, was that she was trying to convince him, when he needed no convincing. Vermont sounded like a blast.
A blast, yes! said Kate. But also practical! For him! Right? It was very fortuitous, this opportunity. After all, it was difficult to write about the peasantry in Russian folktales if Miles had lived in cities all his life…
Miles’s first chapter was to be about peasants who transform into magical beings, his second chapter about murderous peasants, his third chapter about disloyal female peasants who cuckold their simpleton husbands, the fourth about flying peasants, and the fifth and sixth chapters about folktale theory, none of which he’d read yet.
“I think,” he said, “Vermont is a little different.”
“Okay,” said Kate. “But you know what I am saying. Rural people. Farming people. Country people. It does seem hard to write about the topic when you haven’t lived in the country yourself.”
—
Okay, said Miles, throwing back the last syrupy slurry of Cranberry-Hazelnut. Let’s go and find these sheep.
—