Foxie

Borne to Be Wild

I have to confess I name some of my house plants. Elspeth, the cyclamen, has shared my little bungalow for years.  I’m attached to Elspeth’s green and gorgeous self, having nursed her back from many a near-death experience, the most recent an attack of scaly parasites.  But domestic animals like cats? No thanks.  My allergies preclude familiarity.  And ok, ok, I’ll leash up a friend’s dog for a bounce along a breezy boulevard, but don’t expect any cute pet names. Dogs be dogs, cats be cats; rats be rats. In the words of an old polka, “I don’t want ‘em, you can have ‘em, they’re too tame for me.”

But wild things?  A completely different story.   If something pounces, plunges or prances, and can fetch its own supper, sign me up. When I lived in a little house on Beacon Hill in Seattle, I had no car, so I often hoofed my way home up the hill from downtown and the International District. I’d linger at the top, watching the hawks circle the cliffs over I-5 while bumper to bumper traffic inched its way home on the highway below.  One summer day a large hawk caught my eye. Alfred? Round and round Alfred flew, he and his buddies, in beautiful hovers over the freeway. O to fly, to be so free, so magnificent, while the rest of the world twiddled its thumbs in a traffic jam.  That day, hot and happy, I trotted the last mile home.  But when I stuck the key in the door, something swooped in on me like a jumbo jet, ruffled my mop, then ascended skyward in an explosion of feathers.  Alfred? Holy shit! You followed me home?

I was young then, perched at the beginning of a new life. Now I’m so much older and drive up to my sister’s cabin to get my kicks in the Wisconsin woods.  These days, there’s Owl Boy, wings silent as the holy ghost, gliding in over my baseball cap and snowshoes, exchanging hoots with a mate over the frozen swamp—or sitting with his barred back to me on a low branch, like some priest all dressed up to say mass.

And Foxie. Dear, dear Foxie. There he was one day his tiny paw prints coming and going from an abandoned truck in a snowy gulch.  Didn’t Bonnie and Clyde shove this pickup, riddled with bullet holes, over the side of the hill?  Foxie scampered out from under a mossy fender, disappeared over the bounding snow, his bushy orange highness waving bye-bye, baby. Ha, ha, I am wild and you are not, free and you are not, City Girl!

I know, I know.  I anthropomorphize. Mercilessly.  And these creatures have boys’ names.  I am a lesbian.  I am a feminist. Why not Gertrude? Billie Jean? Was Jung right? My anima needs its animus? Are these guys the brothers I never had?

Foxie.  I looked for Foxie the rest of that Wisconsin winter.  Had he moved on to the next town, the next hen house looking for work?  Owl boy still glided through the trees in majestic splendor.  And wasn’t it Owl boy hooting far off in the treetops as I sat in the hot tub, the Big Dipper chiming over my head? But Foxie? Where have you gone, my darling young fox?

One day in early spring, he showed up again on the side of a dirt road, unperturbed as a Buddha, ears tilted, head cocked to one side as snow melted around him into puddles in the gravel.  Hello my dear, how you been? So nice to see ya, City Girl. 

Had he watched me trudge through the woods on the days below zero, his impish self studying my unsteady gait?   Had I somehow passed the test? Had he catalogued my human scent as a friendly one?

So began, in all kinds of weather, our trysts among the maples and sumac as I made my solitary way through slush and underbrush and ticks. Even when the “cabin” and its five bedrooms and bathrooms brimmed with family and friends, even when the hot tub bubbled with communal congeniality, I took a solitary hike. Me and him were pals, weren’t we, a slice of Mona Lisa smile curling his lip before His Orangeness shot off into the luminous void, my heart thrilled once more with the visitation.

“Foxie?”  my sister Gloria asked.

“Foxie. Lives down by Bonnie and Clyde’s truck, across from the Himmelman’s.”

“Bonnie and Clyde?  Like your bear up in the tree?”

“Hey, there was a bear. In the oak tree by the swamp. Way up. Looking down at me. We communed. “

“Yeah, yeah.”

“We did.” The bear had been super-dopey, a real yawner, just emerging from her winter sleep, arms plopped over a high branch.  For a half hour, I took her in through my binocs. Neither of us blinked.

“Yeah. Yeah, sweetie. You know, you need a cell phone.  Get a picture next time, ok? Bear in a tree?”

“Bear in the tree.   And Foxie.”

*                                  *                                  *                           *

A year after my younger, sweetest sister, Nancy, dies, the family  blows in from all parts of the country to celebrate Labor Day weekend at the cabin–Nancy’s husband and daughters and kids, Gloria’s husband and sons and grandkids, Marlene and hubby, a  passel of  friends.  As usual, we eat our hearts out, swim, whack tennis balls, hot tub, kayak, water-ski, ping-pong, pontoon in a boat delicately balanced to prevent capsizing, chicken and pillow-dance to the squeezebox. Pillow dance? One day at the cabin, Nancy’d grabbed a pillow from the couch while I played a lively klezmer tune on the accordion and did her own little dance, balancing the pillow on her head. Voila, the birth of another silly tradition, a new piece of family shtick. After that when we all convened, whirling dervishes honored Nancy by putting couch cushions on their heads, elbowing and jousting for supremacy on the dance floor. We even managed to find enough pillows at nephew Patrick’s wedding reception at the country club, mouths agape in the next room, “For heavenssake, who let these people in?”

This Labor Day I take off again midafternoon. Yes, I treasure my family, the chaos, the noise, the sheer exuberance of life at full tilt.  But…. But how delicious to breathe, to set my own pace, take a deep breath.  And who knows whom I might see?  Owl boy? Foxie? I love these guys.

I am about to cross G, head up 280th past Tanya’s house and her brand new wooly dog when I see him—splayed at the edge of the road, blood on the gravel under his lips.  Foxie!  Foxie! Get up! Get up wild thing! Run!

Get up!  OMG!  Pistol whippers blast you in the quarry? Bear Woman and her hounds of Baskerville hunt you down? A pickup truck bounce you from its fender after closing time at the County Line Tavern? Were you transmuted painlessly to heaven? Or did you lie here in the gravel for hours, slow, solemn mortality clawing its way into your heart? Foxie!

I touch his fur. Still warm.  Taken down in the morning fog.  Who are his friends?  Who will bury him?  I can’t just leave him out here or roll him in a ditch to be pecked clean by crows and turkey vultures. No! My sister’s body, I never saw it again after my last trip out to D.C., her dying the very next weekend, the room, I’m told, erupting in a sea incarnadine as her body exploded, burnt remains sent back to us in a cardboard box.

Foxie must have a proper burial. Blood drips from his jaws, stains the sleeve of my hoodie.  Blood? So what. In the end, in the final days, everything will be washed away, be made clean.   Do I still believe this?

Foxes are heavy.  Who woulda thunk it, their lithe bodies slicing like comets through the trees.  His corpse tugs my arms out of the sockets. How will I do this?  Can’t I just leave him in the woods, cover him with leaves? That should be enough. That would show respect.  But no. No.  I will do this   I will carry him home.   Who is he to me that I should care for him? Foxie.

I walk and walk and walk, shift Foxie from one quivering arm to the other.  The way out seemed so easy, the way in so difficult. Is this the way life works?  So easy to enter, so difficult to leave, memories tagging the soles of our shoes?

On and on and on I trudge. Foxie’s tail is not orange, is it?  More blond than orange. Did I ever really see him? See him as he was? Do we ever really see anybody as they are?

We pass the pond where in spring the froggies sing and pond water swamps the road.  On and on and on.  How can a wisp of finite being be so frigging heavy?   “He ain’t heavy, he’s my brother?”  Huh! We pass the white pine where I saw another bear, 60 feet up, ears puffined like couch pillows over the branches. Did I ever tell anyone?  No.

I set Foxie down for a moment by the hillside quarry.  It was here that the pistol guys once invited me to shoot.  “Thanks so very much, fellows, but not today.” I pick up my load and move on, passing the low branch on which Owl Boy sat so breathlessly still, my face close enough to breathe in the hot feathers on his back.

I climb the final hill to the cabin.  Home.  Finally.  I am exhausted. I am bloody.   Home.  I turn into the cabin road, pass the garage and tennis court, set Foxie down on a bed of needles under the pine trees.  I want to tell someone how much Foxie means to me, gather the clan for words.

Some friends of a nephew come up the walk from the cabin door, their little daughter walking between them.

“What?  A dead animal?  Where did this come from?”

“Me. It’s Foxie.  I carried him over from G.”

“You carried a dead animal all the way from County Road G?” says Mom, picking her daughter up and pulling her close to her chest.

“I need to bury him.”

“Bury him? Here?  There are children.   There could be disease.”

“Foxie is not diseased.”

“You know that?”

“Got hit by car.” How can I tell her that Foxie is no ordinary fox, that I have bonded with him and cannot leave him for maggots in a ditch? How can I say, “I anthropomorphized a fox.  Forgive me for being so foolish, but I love this animal.” Don’t other folks love their cats and dogs to death, the docile creatures who people their lives?

I hear the speed boat out on the lake.  Behind it, tiny kids will be whirling in a neon saucer, my sisters Marlene and Gloria eyeing the wake to make sure the toddlers are safe. Four tennis players wend their way up the brick path to the garage, take in my carcass.

“You carried it with your bare hands?  Really?  No gloves?”

I have blood on my hands, on my hoodie.  My sister is a doctor.  There are many doctors in residence here for the weekend who in their daily lives pull on latex gloves to examine the next patient.  I schlepped in an animal carcass and dropped it into the middle of their holiday festivities?  Who carts a dead body into a celebration? Am I nuts, for pete’s sake?  Yes, I am nuts.

There will be no eulogy, no words of praise for Foxie’s swiftness, coyness,  or beauty.  The thing must be removed, all traces of blood washed away. What was I thinking?

The tennis players grab racquets from the garage.  I grab a shovel and a large black trash bag.  I shovel the body into the bag.   I hose down the bloody grass, squirt and squirt until I drive the offending stains out of sight and into the woods. Lavabo me! I pile dirt on the site of carnage, rake in more pine needles until everything looks normal again. Normal?

I drag the plastic bag to the woods across the road. Foxie will be planted under the piles of kitchen scraps and compost that so annoy the neighboring cabins, “Bears! You’re attracting bears!” Apple peelings and pea-pods and oatmeal mush might not belong here, but Foxie does. These are his woods, his wild animal dirt, not ours, though we own the deed to it.  The earth will take him back, remember his fleet, waggish self.

I toss branches, piles of twigs, cabbage leaves, corn husks up into the air.  How can there be so much stuff?  Out damned stuff!   Where the heck is the dirt under all this gluck?  Finally, I clear a single square of earth. I dig and dig. My shovel only nicks the surface. This is clay. Hard, red clay. My shovel strikes rocks and stones and trees and roots. My shovel is a teaspoon.  I am a teaspoon.  Oy, Sheboygan, this will take forever.  I am exhausted.  My arms throb; my back aches.  And I am alone, digging a grave for a bloody fox in a garbage bag.  Tennis balls ping and pong on the court across the road, “40 love, second serve.” With all my heart, I want 40 love, second serve.  Where are my people?

I dig. I am a machine. But all is shallow.  I can’t do this alone.  Animals will scratch him up, scatter his remains to the four winds.  I must go deep and deeper.  I lean on my shovel.  Red starts warble in the leafy canopy overhead, flit from branch to branch, tweet, “Be happy, Susie Q, happy.”

But then there is Gloria with a marigold in her hands, its roots dangling.  And there is a strong, young nephew and two shovels.  My people.

Gloria is the golden girl of the family, her svelte frame sheathed by classy outfits that I’ve borrowed and sometimes never returned.  She could go after me for that, but only laughed when I showed up wearing her silk and cashmere sweater at a theater event we both happened to attend. Me?  I changed her diapers when I was six, protected her from the bullies on the block.  Isn’t that worth something?

“Can we help?”

“Yes!”

We shovel and shovel our way to China, create a deep, long trench. Piles of red clay ring the hole.

“Phew.”

“You said it.”

“We done it,” says Patrick.

“Yup.”

“You ready?” says Gloria.

“Guess so.”

I lift the garbage bag, spill its stiff cargo into the grave, kneel to arrange Foxie’s feet and arms on the clay.

“Foxie?” asks Gloria.

“Foxie.  Hit out on G where we found that snake.”

“We left the snake.”

“The snake was a stranger. Foxie is no stranger.”

“Foxie is no stranger,” intones Patrick.

“Want his tail?  To remember him by?” asks Gloria.

“No.  Let’s keep him in one piece. He’ll be running with a bunch of other Foxies on the other side. Needs his swag.”

“Makes sense. Say goodbye?”

“Yes. Goodbye my dear sweet Foxie.  I will miss you. Miss you terribly.”

We shovel clay over the body, fill the hole to the brim. Then Patrick is off. Will he hit tennis balls with me before sunset?  He is a doctor and runs me all over the court, but I don’t care. I need to hit tennis balls. Tons and tons of tennis balls.

“Want to plant your flower?” I ask.

“Can we wait on Patrick?”

Patrick returns, dragging a large rug he’s fetched from the garage.

“Neighbors sure aren’t going to like this,” says Gloria. ”First the compost and now this rug.  O well. We have to.  Animals will dig him up. Or the kids’ll get into it.”

“A rug out here?  Over him?”

“We have to.”

“He won’t be able to breathe.”

“He’s dead, honey.”

I take a deep breath as Patrick spreads the large, dirty rug over the grave.  I will not have an asthma attack.  I will not. I take a deep breath.

Gloria digs a hole for the marigold, plants it in front of the rug.

“To the sweetest, slyest, most beautiful fox in the whole world,” I say.  “So long.”

“So long, Foxie,“  says Patrick.  “Happy trails.”

“Happy….”

“And Nancy?”  says Gloria. “What about our…. Nancy?”

“Nancy?”

“I miss her so much!”

“Last year she……”

“This place feels so….. empty. So….. “

“Auntie Nancy!  We love you!”

That night after the final chicken and pillow dances, everyone piles into Jeeps, Subarus, Volvos, and Toyotas for the two- hour drive back to the city.  I wait until the cars back up the dirt road and crunch down the hill.

In twilight hush, the marigold gleams. I try to lift the rug from the grave to let in some fresh air, but it is too heavy.

“Goodbye my sweet fox.  Goodbye my sweet sister.   Goodbye.”

*                   *              *                   *                    *

It’s 2017, three years since Foxie got picked off. The rug is still there, the marigold long gone. This weekend my women friends come up to kayak and swim and hit tennis balls. And fish.  We dig around the rug looking for some good angle-worms. Our shovels go deep and deeper.  These women are strong.  I want to ask them to lift the rug.

But I don’t.  Everything will remain as it was and ever will be: Nancy in pigtails riding her red and yellow bike on the smooth sidewalk by the church of the Holy Rollers, Foxie caroming through the trees, and Albert, in a rapture of feathers, swooping in over my head, the jet ski roaring out on the lake.