A BOAT IN THE PASTURE

By Jim Walker

Imagine my surprise when I looked down the driveway to the front pasture. The fence across the front had been compromised by the bow of a twenty-foot boat. The prow had cut through the fence and about half of the boat now rested within the original perimeter. The sheep were fascinated. The head ewe, hearing me cough (I had been moving dusty hay in the front barn), turned and bahed loudly. The rest of the flock now joined in.

Willow appeared.

“Did you hear anything?”

“No, I was in the barn shifting hay.” I coughed.

“I hear that you were in the barn. Dusty, huh?”

“Yes,” I croaked.

“How do you suppose that boat got there?

“Haven’t a clue.”

“You really irritate me at times,” Willow said. “Something has to be done. We just can’t have a boat in the front yard. In fact, this is one of those times when I regret the fact that we have no police force.”

“True,” I said. “I can’t think of who we can call. The sheriff? But he’s way over in Ellsworth.”

“Well, I can’t think of anyone else, can you?”

Just then we heard a tractor coming down the long hill to the right of our driveway. We watched as it pulled up in front of the boat. Bob, our neighbor, looked down at us and smiled.

“Sorry, folks,” he yelled.

“Your boat?” I shouted back.

Bob now shut off the tractor engine and removed his sound muffs.

“I’m sorry to say it is,” he said in a more normal tone. “Came over that little bridge, and I guess I forgot to put the pin in the hitch and up she came just as I’m passing your house, does a right turn and smack-oh—right through the fence. Which I plan to fix by the way.”

“Definitely an odd situation having a boat in your pasture,” I said.

“Your sheep seemed a little annoyed,” Bob said.

“They tend not to like surprises,” I grinned.

“I thought that I’d just hitch the boat onto the tractor, fix your fence, and be on my way. To tell the truth, I’m more than a little embarrassed to have done such a stupid thing.”

“We thought it was pretty funny,” I said. “I’ll go get a hammer and help you.”

“No, no, it’s my job.” And he immediately set about attaching towing line from his tractor to the boat.

In the meantime, Willow had gone into the house. She reappeared with a camera.

“You don’t mind if I take a couple of pictures, do you? It’d make a real funny Christmas card.”

“Just don’t send me one,” Bob said, but he was smiling. “And don’t let it get around the neighborhood right away, because there’s them as like to tease. Like Jack who lives up at the corner.” He gestured back up the hill. “He’s such an old busybody.” He looked up the road. “Oh God, what color truck does he drive?” Bob asked apprehensively.

“I think it’s blue.”

“So do I,” Bob said. “ Oh, damn and hell!” he added.

It seemed like it was almost immediately that Jack’s blue pickup pulled up alongside. Bob was just getting ready to winch the boat away from the sheep that had remained to observe and make comments with the occasional bah.

Jack is rather large, and it took him a moment to heave himself out of the pickup. “Seems though there’s a little problem with a boat and a fence.” He chuckled happily. “Did you forget to put the pin in the hitch? That’s what’ll happen if you catch my meaning. You always got to check everything at least twice. Now was that you, Bob, who did this foolish thing?” He smiled warmly as if there were now a great joke shared between all of us.

“Yes, damn it, it was,” Bob responded irritably. “Everyone makes mistakes.”

“Oh, I’d be the first one to agree to that,” Jack said with determined good humor. “Seems like the whole world teeters right on the edge of pure disaster, most of the time.” He tested the stern panel of the boat and then went over and wiggled the fence. “Seems like you’re not going about this the right way, Bob. Now I could advise you, if you’d let me.

“I’m pretty sure I can manage on my own,” Bob said through clenched teeth.

“Well, I was just offering.” Jack said. His manner was gooey and sweet.

“Jack, helpful as you are, I wish you would just go away,” Bob said.

Jack shrugged his shoulders. “Well there are always some who don’t want to take advice no matter how well intended,” he said, smiling. “I’m only trying to help.”

He now transferred his attention to me. “Seems like you’re real lucky to have them tame sheep,” he said. “Now most of them critters would be off and gone down across the Great Meadow if a boat came into their yard.”

“No, my sheep are mostly curious,” I said.

“They ain’t very big, are they?” Jack said. “I mean you don’t have a lot of pasturage for them, do you?”

“Enough,” I said. “And besides, Shetland sheep don’t get too big.”

“You must have to lay down a lot of hay for them,” Jack said.

“Some,” I said. “Not a lot.”

“Seems like if you didn’t, you wouldn’t get good meat. Or good wool.”

“I didn’t know you knew about sheep, Jack.”

“I know a little about everything,” Jack said.

“Damned little,” Bob muttered.

If Jack heard him, he gave no sign that he had.

“Well, if I can’t be of any help or advice, I’d best be going,” Jack said. “This’ll make some good story to tell the wife. And my brother, of course. And did you know that my boy built a place just across from us. I was planning to stop by and talk to him, too.”

Jack smilingly and slowly climbed back into his truck and drove back up the hill—the direction of his house. It almost seemed as though he’d just driven down our hill to find out what was going on at Thurston’s Brook Farm.

Willow took a couple more photos. “You really don’t mind, do you, Bob?” She asked.

“Why the hell should I care about a couple of pictures,” Bob said bitterly. “The whole of Brooklin is going to know about my foolishness in a matter of minutes.” He sighed. “And here I was hoping to get this all cleared up before anyone found out.”

But the truth of the matter was that several of the big cedar posts had to be reset, and it took Bob the rest of the afternoon and some of the next morning to finish everything to his satisfaction. He did a fine job, and you would hardly have known that his boat had ever been in our front pasture.

But the story of this event came back to me in several different versions, all of them obviously retellings of Jack’s lively descriptions. The best of these had me holding the ram by his horns while Jack pressed the two torn halves of the front fence together as Bob tore down the hill in his truck.

This was in contrast to Bob’s actual arrival on his tractor.

The truth was probably closer to what Jack’s wife told me later in the week. Her name is Lala, and she and I work together in the same area. We occasionally car pool together and are good talking buddies.

Lala’s oft expressed opinion of Jack is that she loves him because he has a good heart and she’s been with him a long time. She also thinks him a kind of fool—something almost close to being an idiot savant.

She tells the story this way.

She and Jack were in their kitchen drinking coffee. She wasn’t working that day. First they saw Bob driving by in a hell of a hurry. He has that big, heavy-duty pickup with dual rear wheels so that he can carry heavy stuff.

Then about ten minutes later, they saw Bob driving back in the other direction on his old tractor. Very sedate. Not looking left nor right.

“Well, well,” Jack says. “What do you suppose Bob is up to?”

And Lala, thinking it would be nothing except that if Jack went off somewhere, she would have time to just sit and do the crossword puzzle that she is fond of doing, says, “Well, I don’t know, now. Pr’aps you should go and find out.”

“But,” as Lala said to me the next time we were driving to work together, “if I’d known the grand trilogy he was going to make of his part in all of this (which was nothing!), I would never have urged him to find out what Bob was doing.”

It was my turn to drive, this day, and it was threatening to rain so we couldn’t talk about the weather, which we often did, since it was a safe subject. Politics and religion were out, and we carefully avoided our respective spouses for the most part. Except that Lala and Jack were so well established in their format that she could and did voice occasional discontent about him.

“I should not have encouraged him,” Lala said mournfully.

“Well, Bob is a tempting target.”

“Just ’cause he’s got all that money.”

“I didn’t know he was that rich,” I said.

“Goodness, yes! His family owns that whole island out in the middle of the bay.”

“You think that’s why Jack had so much to say about Bob?”

“I bet it has something to do with it,” Lala said. She laughed. “Jack can be wicked, but he ain’t often mean. Unless someone’s been mean to him. I betcha it also has something to do with the time that Jack fell out of the boat. He can’t swim. Poor old Jack was floundering around in the water. Didn’t want to admit he couldn’t swim. Bob made a big to-do about getting Jack back in the boat. Told everyone it had to do with Jack being so stupid as to go out in a boat if he couldn’t swim and wasn’t wearing a life jacket. Well, he made such a fuss and told a lot of people about foolish old Jack falling into the water.”

I slowed down for the final turn into our destination. I would leave Lala here and then would continue up the road a few hundred feet to my job.

“Isn’t that funny,” Lala said, as she was getting out of the car. “I never thought about Bob doing that to Jack until just this very moment.” She stood there for a moment. “Just goes to show, don’t it, that it often takes a wicked long time for things to come back around?”

“Yes, and it all has to do with boats and water, doesn’t it?” I said.







 

 

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