The Leg of a Broken Chair

The first I saw her, the girl had her hair piled helter-skelter, cascading recklessly off the left side of her head. She was commenting to her natty, greying companions about some berries on a big, deciduous tree her group claimed they could also see about two hundred yards distant from the winery’s crowded dining area. I couldn’t tell what their relationship was – just that they thanked her severally – just that I saw disdain flash across her fresh face.

She said the berries were red. I looked up from the Koi pond’s control box and followed their eyes. I couldn’t see any berries at all. I didn’t say anything. I didn’t have to deny seeing her berries. I was just maintenance crew. But they all exclaimed. They said they did! Absolutely. The group discussed the edibility of her berries; they all made guesses at the possible species.

Down near Jacksonville, Oregon, theirs was a grape-arbor-shaded, summer out-door wine-tour gathering at the glamorous old winery. All of the stone structures on the winery grounds were on the National Register of Historic Places. There was even a flamenco guitarist playing for the many diners.

The construction company I was working for had an on-call maintenance contract with the winery. I was called to the winery on a Sunday afternoon to fix a pump motor that supplied a water feature on the big Koi pond that the dining area overlooked. There had been a complaint that the waterfall was “dribbling.” I yanked-on my new Carhartt cover-alls, jumped in the company truck and took off for the winery.

I’d worked on the original pond installation. I went right to the problem. Like I figured, corrosion in the GFCI-protected motor circuit had caused the GFCI to cut the power to the pump motor. When I powered the pump back up, the girl’s fashion-conscious group cheered and said I was a wizard. Every one of them spoke in professional syntax – complete declarative sentences – zero slang; they behaved like that.

She – the invisible-berry girl - said little, but smiled at them some and giggled. And shortly after the plates of cheese and nuts – she sat right then and there, turned away in her chair toward me where I was fastening the cover back on the control box – and flossed her teeth! She sat there and she looked over at me, and with her blue eyes, smiled at me as she carefully worked tooth-to-tooth.

And right there, right then, she gave this self-conscious, graceful little shake of her head! Her golden-blonde hair shimmered. Right there, right then in that single, sublime shake of her head, smiling at me from behind her knuckles, she said a whole body-language paragraph – words to the effect that, “I know I’m flossing in front of everyone and they’re probably all dumb-struck by my cheek, but so what?” Her glowing eyes told me, too, that she highly approved – of me – and that I could say anything I wanted to her. But I froze. When I couldn’t define myself for the group as a carpenter or electrician or working-my-way-through-school, the group’s talk returned to the Standard & Poor’s 500.

But they all seemed as in-awe of the invisible-berry girl as I was. The fact that I responded to the invisible-berry girl with nothing didn’t seem to matter to her; I was just the recipient of her high compliment. I couldn’t think of anything at all to say that might have improved the sublimity of the moment she’d shared with me with a single shake of her head.

Just then though, a man in a black chauffeur’s uniform announced himself to the touring group and they all left for the next winery in their tour. The berry girl walked away with them to their limo.

Before I got back in the company truck, I walked up to the main processing building and went around back and took care of a rain gutter I knew was clogged.

Immediately after that, the construction company I was working for sent me up to the Columbia River Gorge to work on a remotely-sited wind turbine project that tried to push the berry girl out of my head. Up on the rim of the Gorge, we lived in paper-walled single-wides for sixty-two days of grueling twelve-on, twelve off, working two hundred feet off the ground in the middle of a desolate, wind-blown landscape, so finally arriving back down in Jacksonville was heaven except to find out right away that the company had hired a dark immigrant younger than myself and who called himself “Haroon” of all things. He’d only partly assimilated. He insisted on wearing a turban on the job. There were other problems: he was quick to point out that my habit of saying “The way how it turns out” was “very poor” English, plus, I found out he was a trained Electrical Engineer. He said, “I have decided that to thoroughly learn the language, I must accept this type of work for two years.”

*               *               *

Day after I got back from the Gorge, right away, Haroon and I were sent to re-roof the same main processing building at the berry-girl’s winery. He asked me if it would be “copasetic” – I don’t know where he got that antique word – if he practiced “superintending” on me. As soon as we were tooled-up on the processing building roof, he pointed out that we both had smart phones, so we both were “apprised of” the correct time. First day up there, we agreed on only a thirty-minute lunch break. I took my sandwich and I started straight over to see the girl’s berries for myself. I found myself on a mown path. I followed it under the tree’s shade and got quite close before I spotted any berries. I’d begun to feel she’d made it all up. But what bizarre reason could she have had for inventing red berries in a tree at such an unverifiable range?

Once, way back when I’d held an Inland Boatmen’s Union ticket, I’d deck-handed a harbor tug. Somewhere on that steel deck, I’d seen the welded words “Oil Sump” – welded right to the steel deck plate, never to be removed or altered by the scrape of deck-hand boots, dragged chain or towing wire or any amount of time; that’s how the flossing girl’s glowing eyes were adrenalined onto my memory – as she smiled at me over her knuckles – her absolute approval of me - her, well – monkey-business joy.

When on a quest, I get tunnel vision. And I was busy with my sandwich. I didn’t wonder why the mown path led to a manicured lawn under her berry tree. I was looking for her red berries. I was wondering who she was. I was chewing tuna salad.

The tree in question had a corrugated bark much like a Locust. The tree was sixty, seventy feet tall – huge and mature. Her berries were, in fact, red. But when I realized her berries were the size of bird-shot!

I pulled out my phone and checked the time. Fixating on her dinky berries, taking another bite of sandwich, I didn’t glance around enough to realize anyone was near, so to hear a voice was a shock. When she said “I started to doubt you,” I fumbled my sandwich.

Dressed this time in a business-like grey skirt and jacket, her hair grudgingly restrained, her legs folded under her, the bird-shot-berry girl was on her knees. There were several ancient-looking, lichen-studded white marble slab headstones – except for the new one - which was hand-knapped, regional black basalt. Placing a little screw-top Starbucks glass Frappuccino bottle full of tiny blue flowers with a hand spade, the berry girl knelt before the dark basalt which, I read, was the final resting place of centenarian “Mildred.” Born in 1921, Mildred’s last name matched the branding of the old winery’s big, gilt-lettered sign out on the highway. I tried to swallow my tuna salad, but embarrassed by my own intrusion, couldn’t.

 The berry girl didn’t smile. She looked at me steadily, waiting. She watched me pick my sandwich up.

Finally, I swallowed and said, “Those people you were with last time I saw you; I got the drift you didn’t like them.”

You can’t tell about anybody. What I said had an awful effect. Helpless, I watched her eyes tear-up and her chin quiver.

When I didn’t say anything else, her chin steadied and came up and she told me, “My grandmother planted this tree herself – when she was sixteen. When I was sixteen, I heard those same sycophants you saw the day you and I met tell my poor grandmother I’d never amount to anything – and I don’t.”

It was another shock. Why did she tell me such a cruel truth? I didn’t then know why, but it jabbed me to hear the fact of her desolation. I couldn’t stop myself.

“The hell you say!” shot out of my mouth.

“Nobody says that anymore!” she responded grinning, “What does it mean?”

I had to admit that I didn’t really know, but that I liked it and it seemed to fit, but if I had to say, it meant in her case, “Who the hell told you that!”

Her hands were in her lap. She looked down at them. “I guess nobody,” she admitted.

Completely disarmed by her truth-telling, I blabbered. I told her that sure, I was there looking for her berries, but only because I didn’t know who she was and that I had nothing else of her except the berries and I couldn’t forget the shake of her head or the joy in her ear-to-ear smile or the glow of her eyes and that for a whole month after I met her, I walked on air I felt so important.

She just told her hands, “I always frustrated my grandmother. She scolded me bitterly. I don’t know why, but she loved me.”

The invisible-berry girl thought a moment, then added, “When you get to know me, you won’t like me.”

I was so stunned, I couldn’t think. She was an apparition of a person – of a dream girl - and I was just sweating crew. How was I going to get to know her? It was ridiculous. I told her I had to get back to the roof job. She looked directly into my eyes. She volunteered she had “a lot to figure out around here” and that I could find her where we were right then – “about this same time, most days.”

*                 *                  *

So I’m one of these guys – you know us – wherever I am, I’m always by myself out by the centerfield fence gazing up at something in the sky and so it usually turns out everybody else knows what’s going on, but it’s all news to me.

Just after I left her, just as I stepped off the top of the ladder back onto the roof of the main processing building, I started to sweat again right away. I and immigrant, turbaned Haroon were re-roofing with standing-seam steel. Ahead of me on the roof, with a pair of hand-shears, he was cutting the rain baffle for the top of the next course. Without looking up, all he said was, “You are late.”

I told him there were actual graves over under the trees up toward the winery entrance.

“Haroon the Immigrant.” That’s how he used to introduce himself. Always told people, “I am new to this country. I don’t know anything.”

But with the two of us sweating in the sun on the red winery roof, he told me, “Oh, yes. I understand the graves are under that very large tree. Very old. Very old, except for one. The winery owner has just died and willed everything to a mere female descendant who I am told doesn’t amount to so much as the leg of a broken chair. Such is the strange way of things in the United States.”