Searching for Caleb

For Christmas they went home to Baltimore. The family was very cautious and tactful, circling widely around all delicate subjects. It broke Justine's heart to see what an effort they made. She worried about Duncan-would he say something new to hurt them? She went to bed each night exhausted. But Duncan was meticulously polite. He passed around the gifts that Justine had made by hand and he even invited the family to come and visit some Sunday. ("Oh, well, but it's so much more comfortable for you to come here, don't you think?" everybody said.) On the fourth day, when he became very quiet, Justine was quick to agree that they should head back early. She felt sad saying goodbye, particularly to her grandfather, but each time now it seemed a little easier than before.

In February, when money was especially tight, Duncan got a part-time job in town reporting for the Buskville Bugle. "But you can't spell!" said Justine.

"Never mind, you can."

For three weeks he ricocheted around the countryside, attending cornerstone layings, turtle derbies, zoning meetings, a Future Farmers contest in parliamentary procedure, a lecture on crop rotation. He enjoyed everything he went to, indiscriminately, and came home full of new scraps of information. "Did you know you can call up earthworms by vibrating a stick in the ground? If you harvest crimson clover too late it will turn into balls in your horses' stomachs. I've learned a quilting pattern from the eighteenth century." But then writing the articles made him irritable. He never did like going at something systematically. He would hand Justine great sheaves of yellow paper all scrawled over and crossed out, with doodles in the margins. When she ran through them with a red pencil, correcting his spelling and slashing through his long digressions, he lost his temper. "Occurrence, o-c-u-r-e-n-c-e," he said.

"Why wreck it up adding extra c's and r's?"

"Because that's how it's spelled."

"A waste of letters. This language has no logic to it."

"I can't help that."

"Why'd you cross out my butterfly paragraph?"

"In an article on potato blight?"

"There happened to be a particularly fine great spangled fritillary sitting on the farm agent's shoulder, totally out of season, ignored by everybody, all the way through the lecture. You can't expect me to overlook a thing like that."

And he would type the article complete and hand it in to the office, where any reference to butterflies was immediately deleted.

"They have minds like a snake's intestinal tract," Duncan said.

The fourth week, he attended an amateur musicians' contest. His article that night began very well, describing the contest's history, its sponsors, and the instruments represented. The next paragraph switched suddenly to first person and related his own impromptu entry with a borrowed harmonica, playing "Chattanooga Choo Choo" for which he won fourth prize. In the third paragraph he reflected on the oddity of the word "impromptu," which could easily be mistaken, he said, for the name of some obscure Rumanian composer.

The newspaper editor said that, actually, they didn't need a new reporter as much as they had thought they would.

By March, Duncan was becoming restless. Justine was not sure why.

Everything was going well, six does had been dried off in preparation for their kidding in the spring. But Duncan rattled around the house like a bean in a box, staring out one window after another, starting inventions he didn't finish, sending off to the Department of Agriculture for pamphlets on all sorts of impulsive projects: angora rabbits, fruit trees, popcorn. He painted half the kitchen yellow and then quit. He brought home a carload of rhododendron bushes with their roots balled up in burlap and he planted them all around the yard. "But Duncan," Justine said, "do you think this is the proper time?" They were still wearing overcoats to bed; the ground was still cold and gray. "Why do I have to do everything properly?" he asked. "Don't worry, I've got a green thumb.

A green hand. I'm a whole green man." And sure enough, the rhododendron took heart and started growing. But Duncan went off and forgot all about it; his strange mood hadn't eased in the least. "To tell the truth, Justine," he said, "this winter business is wearing thin. I imagined we'd be sitting by the stove oiling harness leather or something, but we don't have any harness leather. Don't you feel tired of it all?"

"No," Justine said.

She watched, frowning, while he measured the kitchen for some shelves.

She didn't think he would ever finish them.

In April eight kids were born, all does. "Did you ever see such luck?