Mr. Beaty is back! His shack at the end of our road has been forlorn all summer in its emptiness. The grass has grown tall around his rusty old Ford Gremlin, and the cats have scattered to the barn across the street.
In June, he called Andrea Cunningham to say that he’d lost his legs and couldn’t walk. She brought him to the hospital and they in turn sent him all the way to Hartford where he had four disks removed from his back. In Hartford few came to see him. He was far from family and friends.
I visited him once in Hartford and brought him strawberries from my garden. He was in a room on the fourth floor with three other old men and by far, he was the most crotchety of them all. In his stubborn way, he’d decided that this was the end of the road for him. He’d never walk again, and he sure as hell wasn’t going to a nursing home! He refused all therapy in the hospital, and he cussed at the nurses with a twinkle in his eye.
He did go to his son’s home after three weeks, and we all thought that to be the end of Mr. Beaty. He hates plumbing, and civilization, and most of all dependency. Living on the third floor of a house in the middle of Webster was enough to rile him to the point that he cussed at his son and threw shoes at his grandchildren. All he wanted was the shack. He didn’t understand why they wouldn’t let him go back there to die.
Mr. Beaty is only 77 years old, but he thinks he’s a hundred by the way he grumbles through life. His daily uniform consists of a pair of blue denim overalls, plaid shirt and a farm visor cap. Except for the skimpy hospital johnny, and his red union suit long john’s, I’ve never seen him in any other attire. Once I asked him why he only wears overalls, and he told me that twenty or thirty years ago he got dressed up in a suit to go out. His wife had made a jealous remark about him getting so dressed up, and he vowed from that day on to never wear anything but overalls. So be it, the decree was written in Stone by a stubborn Yankee.
In spite of, or perhaps because of his crotchety old ways, he has endeared himself to our neighborhood, and our extended community. One fall when he had cataracts removed from his eyes, we rotated shifts of bringing him food, and putting eye drops in for him. We spent a Saturday morning, five families, splitting and stacking wood for the winter. (He has electricity, but no plumbing. He heats and cooks on a wood/gas combination stove.)
Besides having a bad heart, cataracts, diabetes, and now back trouble, Mr. Beaty has Parkinson’s disease. Over the years it has progressed so that his right arm and hand shakes constantly. Sometimes his head will set to knocking from side to side. This gives him an almost puppet-like appearance, especially when the light catches his blue eyes which sparkle more since the cataract operation.
One Solstice eve, I hired Sammy Rich and his Ox team to take us caroling. We piled all the kids in a hay wagon and we walked along side with lanterns and candles. There was a gentle snow falling in very large flakes. When we got to Mr. Beaty’s, one of the children ran to the door and knocked. He came to the door dressed in his red one-piece union suit and stood there like a cock-eyed Santa Clause while we sang “We Wish You A Merry Christmas”. His mouth was ajar, and a tear streamed down his cheek and glistened in the soft light. We convinced him to get dressed and join us, and we lifted him onto the wagon with the kids. That was the best Christmas ever.
This summer just wasn’t quite the same without Mr. Beaty around. I kind of missed his un-welcomed comments on how I ought to mow the blueberries, or the way we put our livestock fence up on the wrong side of the posts. He would make his comments with great authority and indignation. Sometimes I would get irritated (nosey old fart!). But just the same, I’d pick him up on the way to the dump to come along for the ride.
Last Thanksgiving we invited him to dinner with our parents. We made a harvest feast. My mother brought a turkey to make my father and Mr. Beaty happy, while we ate tofu. We brought in the picnic table, which took up the whole length of our kitchen. I had recently been given a horse, which hadn’t arrived yet, so we all had visited him earlier that day. Mr. Beaty sat there at the table, slurping gravy on his chin, and told everyone what a mistake that horse was. “You see the way his eyes bulge out and he lays back those ears? Can’t trust a horse like that…he’ll buck and spook at anything…”
I could see Michael’s very citified parents stiffen up. They knew horses were evil, and that I must be crazy. My father, who knows horses well, listened to Mr. Beaty, but trusted his daughter enough to be quiet.
I went to see Mr. Beaty last night after supper. I brought mashed potatoes, squash and brussel sprouts from our garden. Surprisingly, he was in a t-shirt and cotton pajamas. He hobbled to the door with a walker, down the narrow path in the front room of his shack. The shack has two rooms. It is a long and narrow shanty, formerly a bunk house for the Cunningham farm, when Mr. Cunningham had cow-hands working at his cattle auctions. The front room is mostly storage. It is piled high on either side of the aisle, with cardboard, apple crates, garden tools, boxes of nails, returnable cans and bottles and rags and string. At the end of the aisle is a refrigerator.
A heavy old curtain is hung in the doorway of the back room where Mr. Beaty lives. One does not walk around this room. There is very little floor space. The linoleum is old and cracked, scattered with braided rugs. To the right of the door is a narrow bed. It is surrounded by photos of grandchildren, birthday cards, Christmas cards and valentines. There is a picture of him sitting on a park bench, framed in gold. It is summer, and his blue denim overalls stand out in the midst of the green backdrop. There are ribbons won at County Fairs by his son’s Draft horses.
Above the head is a dominating picture of Jesus, looking very fair and Caucasian, staring off in the distance.
There is so much stuff in this tiny space. A man’s lifetime memories crammed into a closet. In this sense, he reminds me of Claude MacDaniels, who has not removed a newspaper from his house in thirty years.
A dresser under the west window is piled high with papers and pictures. A cupboard in the corner is covered with a curtain, behind a colored TV. which rests upon a plastic stool. A huge old wood/gas stove dominates the south wall. It is also a receptacle for pots and pans. Beneath the east window there is a white enamel sink. It has a plastic pipe which leads to the outdoors. There are plastic jugs of water everywhere. Wood is drying in the oven which is gaping open. A large easy chair is plunked down in the middle of the tiny room right in front of the TV.
In the corner to the left of the door is an oval kitchen table with a gray Formica top and chrome legs. There are two kitchen chairs usually littered with newspaper. The table is absolutely covered with bottles of pills, old mail and newspapers and always a box of doughnuts or cheap muffins or cookies. There are boxes of cereal and bananas and cups and bowls…saucers…piles of paper plates, aluminum pie plates, paper cups, Styrofoam cups, plastic forks and napkins.
I don’t know how he keeps the pills he has to take straight. They sit on his table lined up like soldiers in some unknown order, and he takes different ones at different times of the day. Some have blue caps; some have white, some for morning, some for night.
In the fall, Mr. Beaty has always visited his old buddy Bob Joyce who has an apple orchard and keeps a herd of miniature deer. He returns with crates of apples he couldn’t possibly eat up himself. His house is then perfumed by wood smoke and apples. It is incense which hides the mildew and the staleness of old age. He has no way to take a bath, but does shave and wash up his face before leaving the house. I have waited to bring him to appointments while he meticulously shaves with a trembling hand.
I am glad Mr. Beaty is back. I have missed seeing him sitting in his car, or plugging along the back roads in search of beaver. Sometimes he goes to the Hampton General store, and gets a grinder and a cup of coffee, and then he drives to the beaver lodge on Stedson Rd. He parks there and watches those beavers for hours, as they carefully place twigs down a vertical cone to block water from leaking through the culvert. We have agreed it is the most artistic dam in N.E. Ct.
Once, there was a beaver family on Faye Rd. It was right down the street from us. Every night folks in the neighborhood would gather on the edge of the flooded pond at dusk to watch the fat and brazen beavers at work. They were used to the audience and would work within inches of human feet. There was reverence in the air. Holiness in our appreciation for the crepuscular beaver. Mr. Beaty religiously visited the pond each morning and night to pay homage.
Then, a grouchy neighbor down the road called up the town to complain that the pond was going to flood the road if those beaver weren’t removed. The highway department came with picks and shovels daily to dismantle the dam. At night we would watch triumphantly, rooting for the beaver as they mended the hole. This went on for weeks, the highway men getting more vehement in their destruction of the beaver dam, and the beaver more determined to do their instinctive job. We expected the highway department to call in the National Guard, plant mines, or nuke the dam.
Instead, they called Don Prussia, our local friendly Game Warden. Don set up a “Have-A-Heart” trap to catch the beaver and take them to a pond deep in the state forest.
One evening after a dinner party, we walked our friends to the pond for the evening show. We stood in the twilight watching rings of water move with the v-shaped wake. Don Prussia came by and accused us of springing his trap. He said that for several nights the trap had been sprung. We told him it wasn’t us. We understood he was doing the right thing, that if he didn’t trap the beaver and remove them, someone would shoot them. He was trying to save their lives.
“Do you know who’d be springing my trap?” He asked almost accusingly.
We politely said no. But I suspected Mr. Beaty might have something to do with it. Experienced in hunting and trapping, he now prefers to watch animals, fascinated by their habits.
One day I stopped by to say hello, and Mr.Beaty was crying. He was so upset with himself. During the middle of the day he came down the hill on Faye Rd. and before he could stop at the bottom where the pond is, a beaver ran out in front of him. Of all the people to run over a beaver, it had to be him. He sat slumped and helpless in his car as if he’d murdered a child. The beaver’s mate came and sniffed at the body in the road.
Now Mr. Beaty says that his own days are finished. He just wants to finish up in the shack. He really is in terrible shape. He can barely walk. When I arrived in the crisp cool darkness, and knocked on his door, there was a septic smell from nearby. I noticed a white 5-gallon bucket full of human waste, uncovered next to the door. He hasn’t even been able to make it to the outhouse. I covered the bucket and waited for him to hobble to the door with his walker. He looks so powerless and feeble without his overalls. He sits on the bed with Parkinson gestures like a spastic marionette.
He is saddened by the way his life has taken convoluted turns and made him dependent upon others. In the past he has threatened to blow his brains out if it should ever come to this. If he hangs on, winter will be hard. His wood is not split, and it will be difficult for him to manage an arm-load of wood with stiff and weakened legs.
Sitting there in the mustiness of the room which was closed up all summer, I had the sense that his threadbare life was unraveling. His stubborn independence has kept him going, but now it may be a stumbling block. I don’t respond when he says it is the end. It may well be. He has been depressed before though, and I a solemn listener have let it be.
I hope he doesn’t blow his brains out, and that it won’t be me who finds him frozen stiff when I drop by with coffee or a sandwich. I am numbed by his incapacity.
Two years ago, I brought Mr. Beaty to Claude MacDaniels to introduce them. They hit it off fine. Being the same age, they knew some of the same old timers dead and gone, and they gossiped about old Mr. Cunningham who ran a cattle auction right here in the Elliot section of Abington. They talked of how the cows were driven from the old train station. They came on stock cars all the way from Canada, and were driven in herds from the Elliot Station to the cattle barns on Faye road.
When we left Claude in the barn, and got out of ear shot to the car, Mr. Beaty commented on how old and feeble Claude was. “Poor old feller.” he said, “It’s a shame an old feller like that’s gotta live alone…he’s too old to do all that work. Don’t he look awful!”
A week later, I visited Claude and he said to me as he leaned forward on his pitchfork…”That feller Beaty sure is old ain’t he? Never seen a man shake the way he does. Poor old guy.”
They were both 75 at the time. Not so old. There are older grandmothers climbing mountains in search of “Yellow Bellied Sap Suckers”, and smooth skinned retired professors pushing their thoughts around with a pen. But they are of a different class, and they have aged differently. Their faces have not been hardened by the seasons, nor their bones forged and frozen by the cold into bent and crooked shapes. They have not had to fight the weather to borne a calf, or save a crop from frost. They have not been molded into stubbornness, watching the world pass by with what they could not have. Perhaps more indicative of their agelessness, is the fact that they chose not to go it alone.
Claude and Mr. Beaty stand alone. Their struggle is their own struggle, un-shared. I’m not sure it was choice. I think life just slipped them a mickey and they woke up with it having passed them by.
Claude
would not have chosen to end up alone, had he time to think about it between
milking. And Mr. Beaty? Well he has often confessed how he regrets
the path he fell into. He could have had
so much had he been able to stay with his family. But there was a wild streak in him. A rebel that makes him spit in the eye of
authority even now. He asks forgiveness,
and wonders why he let life escape him without his permission. His loneliness is a dichotomy; a love/hate
relationship with the world. It has been
a down-hill spiral into old age. It is
the sudden crash of the stock-market of virility and independence.