Back to Nature(Barry) Janet Fenton stopped by Lois’ house unannounced. “Went to see how Ned was doing.” Ned Barstow’s wife, Amy, passed away less than six months earlier from a chronic heart condition, and rumor had it the middle-aged man was not taking widowhood well. “The front door was ajar so I let myself in.” Janet dabbed her eyes fitfully with a Kleenex. A redhead in her late forties, Janet had been married and divorced three times. Over the years too much gourmet food and hard liquor had taken its toll her flawless figure and good looks. “On the kitchen table was a huge rifle and collection of high-caliber shells.”

“Oh dear!” Ned’s main passion in life was gardening. Lois doubted that, even as a youth, the soft-spoken man owned a Daisy Red Rider BB gun much less weapons of mass destruction. “Ned was in the back yard tending to his vegetable garden and never knew I was there.”

“Let me grab a sweater and car keys,” Lois said.

* * * * *

When they arrived, Ned was right where Janet had left him gazing up into an eight foot bean stock. “Ever seen a peach tree that bears vegetables instead of fruit?” A pleasant looking man in his early fifties with a bushy walrus moustache and hazel eyes, for someone on the verge of committing suicide he seemed in a peculiarly chipper mood.

Lois gazed up into the peach tree at a scattering of eggshell-white blossoms.

“Those are pole bean flowers,” Ned explained. “The tendrils reached across and grew up into the tree. If you look closely,” he chuckled good-naturedly, “you’ll see a handful of tiny beans hanging down from the lower branches.”

“Earlier in the season,” Ned rambled on, “I had a ton of blossoms but no pods whatsoever so I researched it and, wouldn’t you know, we had that awful heat spell where the temperature climbed up over ninety for five days in a row.” He ran his fingertips over the delicate blossoms, where a mass of rambunctious bumblebees was collecting pollen and nectar. “The intense heat makes it difficult for bean plants to survive so the flowers fall off. No pods can grow in extreme weather.”

Neither Ned’s good humor nor lengthy dissertation on vegetable husbandry did anything to dispel Lois’ increasing agitation. “There’s a rather large gun on the kitchen table.”

“Yes, the rifle,” he replied absentmindedly. “It’s a Tikka T3x… lightweight and very smooth trigger action with a large ejection port for reliable cycling.”

Neither woman had a clue what he was talking about. “You’re not going to hurt yourself, are you?” Janet blurted.

“Hurt myself?” Ned’s breezy attitude became muddled. “Come with me.” He led the way back into the house through the deck slider. “What’s that?” He pointed at a metal hunting scope attached to the top of the rifle directly above the trigger mechanism. “If I was planning to stick the goddamn muzzle into my mouth and blow my brains out, I wouldn’t need a scope.”

Janet immediately burst into tears and began apologizing profusely. When the commotion subsided, Ned picked up the gun, threw back the bolt and sighted down the barrel. “It’s a hunting rifle.”

Lois eyed the bullet casings splayed across the table. “What are you hunting?”

“I dunno… deer, moose. Bear is good meat but doesn’t really appeal to me.” “I’m selling the house,” Ned announced brusquely shifting gears. “The ‘For Sale’ sign goes up the beginning of the week.”

“What about your friends?” Janet pressed.

“Half my friends won’t even talk to me anymore due to my conservative politics,” Ned shot back. “The country’s falling apart and everybody knows it. After the election in November I wouldn’t be surprised if regions secede from the union or civil war breaks out.” Ned glanced at Janet, a sardonic smile hovering about his lips. “Our constitutional republic is on life support, a historical artifact.”

Ned’s somber mood darkened noticeably. “A few years back Amy and I bought that rustic cabin in northern Maine near Arcadia. We planned to retire there… drop off the grid and go back to nature, but then she took sick so now there’s absolutely nothing holding me here.”

“What about heating the place in winters?” Lois asked. “There’s no central heat.”

“I purchased a twelve ton, hydraulic log splitter that can handle wood a foot and a half long, eight inches in diameter” “You go out every night after supper for an hour or so in the spring and early summer… chain saw limbs and split logs. In a handful of months you’ve got enough wood to last through the most frigid north-country winter.”
Ned shook his head up and down energetically as though confirming the truthfulness and efficacy of what he was telling the women. “Hardwoods like oak and maple generally burn hotter and longer than softwoods… produce less smoke and creosote, making them ideal for sustained heating.” “Of course, it’s best to let fresh-cut lumber properly dry.”

“Don’t you have a lot of pine on your property?” Lois noted.

“Softwoods like pine and spruce ignite easily and burn quickly. They’re excellent for staring fires or use on milder spring days when less heat’s needed.” Ned assured her that there were solutions for every conceivable problem. “The Indians lived quite comfortably off the land for centuries long before the white man arrived.”

“Yes, but the early colonists had a rough time of it,” Lois countered.

“By the late sixteen hundreds they caught their stride and began to prosper,” Ned argued. “I’ll do the same. It’s just a matter of figuring things out as I go along.” He momentarily disappeared into a small closet tucked away off the kitchen and emerged clutching a rough-hewn, wooden contraption with a three-foot pole sticking out the top. “Know what this is?” he asked Janet.

“No idea.”

“A homemade butter churn. I cobbled it together over a weekend last August.” He raised and lowered the handle, and they could hear the hidden disk sliding up and down the rounded shaft. “Amy could make a week’s worth of homemade butter in an hour.

Lois gestured at the frame. “How did you negotiate the curve?”

“Each of the twelve slab has two sides angled at fifteen degrees,” Ned explained. “Fifteen times two is thirty; Thirty times twelve is three-hundred and sixty, a perfect circle.”

Lois stared at the ungainly contrivance. “A butter churn,” Lois chuckled thoughtfully. “How wickedly clever!”

The room fell silent.

“A week ago Tuesday,” Ned noted almost as an afterthought, “I finally got around to cleaning out Amy’s side of the closet. Threw away all the old and tattered clothes and took what remained to the Goodwill Thrift Shop.”

* * * * *

On the ride home, Janet sat tight-lipped and badly frazzled. “The man’s lost his mind,” she muttered as they neared her neighborhood. “Ned Barstow’s become a totally crackpot!”

Lois dropped Janet off at her apartment and drove home. Pulling into the driveway, she shifted the car into park but never shut the engine. Twenty minutes passed. A dark-skinned woman living in the house across the street descended the front stairs with a toddler. The family was Somali, five years now in the country. They spoke Arabic in the home and had little to do with neighbors. Lois greeted them cordially when they first arrived in the community, but there was something standoffish, xenophobic about the young couple. Welcome to the land of Lincoln, Jefferson, Martin Luther King, et al! Welcome to the great American melting pot!

Shifting the car back in gear, she eased out of the driveway and headed back to Ned’s house.

“This feels like déjà vu,” the widower quipped when he opened the front door.

“Come with me,” she said in a humorless tone drained of any pleasantries or social banter.

“Where’re we going?”

“My house… there’s something a need to show you.”

On the short drive Ned sat quietly in the passenger seat; Lois never took her eyes off the road or spoke. Only when they were standing in the living room did Ned press the issue. “What did you want to show me?”

“Amy was my closest friend.” Lois sidestepped the question. “When she died it hurt something terrible.” She wandered over to the bay window and stared out at the redbud tree on the front lawn, where a profusion of pinkish blossoms littered the lawn. “A husband and wife are one thing but two women, best friends…” She never bothered to finish the thought. Grabbing a Kleenex from the end table, Lois blotted the moisture gathering in the corner of her eyes.

“Amy talked constantly about the beauty of the foliage in Northern Maine… the Douglas fir, ponderosa, hazel alder and moosewood. She told me about the wild fruit all summer long – black chokeberries, highbush blueberries and beach plum that she simmered on the stove and made into wonderful jams, jellies and sauces.”

“She told you all this?”

Lois nodded. “A few months before Amy took ill she mentioned your plan to sell the house and move away – move away not just physically but philosophically as well. I envied you, was thoroughly jealous… even visited the local library and started collecting information about living off the grid.”

For the first time since setting foot in the house Ned cracked a terse grin. “You can’t be serious!”

“Started reading Thoreau then transitioned over to the Wilderness Essays by John Muir, where he insisted that closeness to nature rather than artifice and civilization was what really mattered.”

“Dear God!” Ned shook his head, trying to absorb what she was confiding. “Did you share any of this with Janet?”

Lois breathed out abruptly through her nostril making an unfeminine snorting sound. “As a card-carrying member of the casserole brigade, Janet’s searching for husband number four; communing with the nature is not terribly high on her bucket list.” Lois’ head cocked to one side as her expression abruptly soured. “One night when we were getting ready for bed Jim noticed me browsing through a copy of the Mother Earth Catalogue.” “‘What’s that?’” he asked.

“When I told him, my husband threw his hands up in the air and bellowed like a hyena… claimed he’d never heard anything so ridiculous.”

“He wouldn’t even consider the possibility?”

Lois snorted a second time but not so distastefully. “He said the notion that I would sacrifice all the comforts we built up over the years for a pocketful of nuts and berries was utterly asinine. Then he simply killed the light and drifted off to sleep.”

Somewhere close by neighbors were barbecuing and the rich odor of meats, herbs and aromatic spices floated in the late summer air. A lawnmower fired up and just as quickly conked out. On the third try the motor caught and produced a healthy thrumming sound. After a brief silence, Ned tugged her back to the issue at hand. “There was something you wanted to show me.”

“In here.” Lois led the way into the bedroom. She opened a closet door and flicked on the fluorescent overhead light. “What do you see?”

Ned was momentarily confused. “I dunno… some blouses, skirts, a cotton sweater plus a mishmash of woman’s shoes scattered on the floor.”

“And over here?” She shifted to a slightly smaller closet at the far end of the adjacent wall. “What do you see?” Ned’s face dropped. The space was filled to the brim with nothingness. “My husband was apparently having an affair with the secretary at work. A month and a half ago he ran off and left me.”

* * * * *

On the ride back Ned asked, “Still teaching?” He sat, hands folded in his lap staring out the passenger window at the foliage.

“Fifth grade… preadolescents. They’re still modestly manageable but only until the hormone kick in.”

“Future plans?”

“Don’t have any. Jim’s departure turned my life upside down.”

Ned ran a thumb and index finger across his top lip smoothing the bristly, salt-and-pepper moustache that seemed to have an unruly mind of its own. “There’s a small den off the living room in the cabin that could be converted into a cozy bedroom, if you wanted to visit over weekends and holiday breaks… an opportunity to put your John Muir and Whole Earth Catalogue to good use.”

Lois eased the car into the driveway and shut the motor. She lowered her eyes and spoke in a barely audible, hushed tone.” And what if I took a liking to a no frills, country life?”

“Moving north… it’s a work in progress.” Ned showed a faint hint of a smile. “And I would view your presence as tender tribute to Amy’s memory.”

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