Hancock Stories: Mr. Squires.
It was the turn of the season and half the leaves had fallen and the low hills and valleys still blazed with color but the sun had lost its bite and now shone soft and yellow during the last warm days.
I pottered in my garden, a man of retirement age not yet ready to lay down, I pottered and I contemplated and moved things around, stones and branches and pulled, uprooted Bishops Weed and made compost piles and felt the earth and thought about planting garlic.
I think he first commented on the garden and how the yard had changed since he'd delivered groceries to the old woman who’d lived upstairs. She worked as a caretaker at that retirement home on the hill when it was a hospital. What happened to her?" he asked.
“She died a while back”, I said.
"You retired?”, he asked and I had to think about that again and realized that in many ways I was and I answered affirmatively but noted I still did a few things. I was hanging on I guess and winter is coming.
He was leaning on his bicycle, a sturdy trail bike with heavy, worn tires. It was luminescent green. He wore his baseball cap low over his blue eyes, the bill curved. He wore a fishing jacket with no sleeves and plenty of pockets over a plaid flannel shirt and blue jeans and sneakers.
"Nice day", he said. "I been riding all over these hills out back of Delhi and then over past the reservoirs and some pretty back roads and lots of game, bucks and a lot of black bear too, I seen em, one o the sons of bitches stood eleven feet tall. But I gotta get goin, got a long ride to go before sundown."
And he threw a leg over the bike and looked up at me, with hands firmly clasped on the handles.
“You know Crocodile Dundee? ‘G’day mate. That’s not a knife’. Paul Hogan. I love that guy, you sound like him. How’s Down under mate?”, and he laughed and went into this routine, quoting from the film which has become iconic and parodies Australia.
When I drove a yellow cab in New York City I took my Aussie Stetson, it lay beside me on the front seat with the tabloids and old casssettes; Robbie Robinson and Einstein on the Beach, Ezra Pound and Ginsburg, I had an archive in a shoe box rattling around and I spent the late nights with them as I drove the cab.
Sweeping up over the hill, with the blond in the back, hair tied back, Manhattan a mountain of steel and gold light, in the crisp freezing night, fills her with fright and delight at the end of her flight.
And sometimes there were some scary rides and that’s when I reached for the Stetson and broadened my accent and became Crocodile Dundee and joked with strung-out hip-hoppers, about “that big knife” and they’d laugh because they’d all seen it.
Aussies are outsiders and insiders at the same time. Transplants, viewed as exotics who speak English yet live far away with strange animals and dangerous snakes, Aborigines, beautiful beaches and the dreamtime.
“I’m half Chippewa”, he said. “I know where all the burial grounds are around here. Oh I know these parts and I seen ‘em changing too. I just came over from Delhi way and I’ll visit my sister down at East Branch and then go over towards Fish’s Eddy on the back roads and then over to Lordville. I gotta a cousin down there, better get going.
“Paul Hogan, how about that guy. I lived around these parts a long time. But it sure is nice out here today, you have a good day now. My name is Squires, English name. Not my Chippewa name. Squires.”
Have a good day Mr. Squires. I didn’t think to ask his Cheppewa name.
The next day I was sipping coffee on the front steps looking at the chili bushes, still green and bushy. I’d already removed the fruit and had a lovely pile in a whicker basket, all kinds, shapes and colors. The thyme was doing well against the rocks in the sun and though this was not a Mediterranean climate by any means, the rocks faced south and held the heat of the day creating a warm growing niche.
And here he was again, Mr. Squires riding back the other way and it was colder this morning and his jacket was buttoned up around his neck and he gave a shake and a shiver when he stopped the bike by the steps.
“Getting colder” he said. Stayed over in Lordville last night at my cousins. He gave me this” and he unzipped a pocket and pulled out a small flash light. “Bright enough to frighten a bear and there’s been a lot around. They come out this time to feed. A lot of black bear out there. I seen em. The leaves are going now”, he said, turning to look at Point Mountain rising behind him.
“The Wedding of the Waters where the rivers meet is down there too. We call in Chehocton. I can walk that land cause I’m Chippewa and there’s an Indian graveyard down there. They can’t stop me. And there’s a big burial ground on the top of Point Mountain for rich people. They moved the bodies out but we used to climb up through it and it’s spooky as hell up there.
“They say there’s a lot of ghosts, oh yeah, you don’t want to go up there. A lot of soldiers died up there in the Civil War and Indians too and they say someone was murdered, up there. Used to be a school house too and there’s gotta be gold and silver medallions from the Civil War. There’s some caves and an old Civil War cannon, they don’t use it no more”
I have climbed Point Mountain a couple of times and knew some of the story and his warnings rang true for I had felt foreboding. There is a heaviness and sadness about the place and it reminds me of the mood in Picnic at Hanging Rock, that Australian film about schoolgirls who disappear in the Victorian bush. (Bring up the music).
“It’s cold riding this morning, my hands, gotta get me some gloves”.
I had a good stock of gloves, left overs from my stone and garden days and decided to give him a pair. I went inside to find them and he followed.
“Coffee would be good”, he said. “I’ll just go around the corner to McDonalds” and he continued and I said why not have one here, let me put one on the stove, and he hesitated and then agreed and continued talking and asking questions about the house.
“Used to be full of antiques you know?” he said.
“Yeah – I heard”, I said, they took them when they sold it.
When Ann and I bought the old Hoban House it was a dilapidated, run down 1880’s farm cottage. Out front was a huge Norway Spruce and across the street, the railway tracks. But it had something. It had good bones. It was solid. Planks of oak eighteen inches wide and broad at the hip held the place together and it sure had character, cottage framed windows, when you looked out the world seem a little wavy in places because the glass was so old.
And it was full of antique furniture. The deal was house and furniture. But they took it. They left a few old coats hanging upstairs and of course Ann rummaged through the pockets and found $600. I think we went to celebrate at the Circle E.
“Their used to be this kid who lived here in the house too”, he said, “and now he lives down on the river catching eel that come all the way from the Sargasso Sea. The eels they swim all the way to the Sargasso Sea and back to Hancock . And this guy eats them, catches them. He built a trap out of river rocks to catch ‘em and he used to live right there upstairs.”
I knew Ray Turner, a curmudgeon, tough as nails, heaving rocks around to build a weir in the river, the smoker out back and the galvanized iron ponds of eels and the smoked salmon and trout and other Delaware riverside country delicacies. Six, maybe five degrees of separation I thought.
When I looked up The Sargasso Sea on Goggle I learned it has no land boundaries; four ocean currents form an ocean gyre, a rotating vortex near the Bermuda Triangle in the Atlantic Ocean. The mix of currents brings great biodiversity as they rub up against each other. There’s always more life on the edge.
“I like to sketch”. Mr. Squires said.
He’d mentioned this a couple of times and offered to sketch me or Aussie my dog but he didn’t have his sketch book and I declined regardless but I had a few spare sketch pads laying about somewhere and I went on a search and found an empty one still with the orange price sticker on it and I gave it to him, and a pencil with an eraser on the end.
So Mr. Squires prepared for departure. He pulled a sharp knife from his jacket and cut the plastic that joined his new gloves. He tried them on and commented what good quality they were, fleece lined and perfect for getting wood in winter. And he crammed the sketch book into his jacket and clipped the gloves together, for now it was warmer and would remain so throughout the day. He said he’d be back over in Delhi by the time the sun went down.
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