judy’s rainbow

by Reg Darling

One fall in the mid-1970s, Hartwell impulsively seized an opportunity to acquire a young beef cow, with the intent of raising it for meat. He had no idea what he was getting into. When acquiring any animal, one must consider with ruthless objectivity the question of how much it will shit and where one might put that shit. He kept her in the old, gray-shingled garage across the one-lane, dirt road he lived on. He named her Jean.

By spring, analogies to the Augean stables seemed less poetic every day. Hartwell’s labor had become genuinely Herculean for a man with a challenging job, a household with three children, a wild heart, and friends like me who thought the whole mess was funnier than it really was.

As spring blossomed into warmth and greenery, Jean, the cow seemed to sense her impending fate and grew restless. She escaped several times and rampaged through the village, tearing up lawns, trampling gardens, and mightily resisting Hartwell’s efforts to herd her back home to her eventual dark fate.

On Jean’s final escape, Hartwell lassoed her with a rope attached to an old tire, to slow her down. When he caught up, he hooked his arm through the tire, slung it over his shoulder, and began leading the cow back toward home. Jean had a sudden change of heart, bolted, and dragged him, flailing, struggling, and cursing through weeds, brush, briars, and a neighbor’s vegetable garden. By the time he finally managed to coax, pull, and prod the recalcitrant beast back to the garage, my father had arrived, having been summoned by Hartwell’s wife, Judy. He handed Hartwell a pistol, pointed an index finger at his ear, and said, “It’s time.”

Hartwell didn’t hesitate. He stuck the pistol barrel in the cow’s ear and pulled the trigger. She dropped to the ground instantly. One hind leg twitched briefly. Hartwell’s beef experiment was over but for the butchering and the ton of densely compacted manure in the garage. He had an abundant garden the following year.

The labor of cleaning out the garage focused Hartwell’s attention on the old, weathered building. He had often joked that he could live there if Judy ever threw him out. Using salvaged materials and hand-me-down furniture, including a castoff wood stove, the cow’s walled-off third of the garage was gradually transformed into a camp next door to home. The other two-thirds of the garage remained rough—a place for deer butchering, car repairs, and lawn mower storage. When drinking beer in the winter, one could piss into a hole in the plank floor of the unfinished section instead of wading through snow to the weeds out back.

For a close circle of family and friends, “The Garage” became the place they went to hang out with Hartwell. During hunting seasons, it was a place of stories, shared knowledge, and the ancient camaraderie of hunters gathered around a fire. For those who consciously lived with one foot in the Pleistocene, it was that throughout the year. Some understood, some got it without knowing they got it, and many didn’t get it at all.

The aura of mysterious synchronicity that hovered around Hartwell led the constantly evolving circle of people in his orbit to develop an intuitive sense of when to head for The Garage. Unannounced gatherings became commonplace. This was often seriously inconvenient for Judy, but she, more than anyone, understood the crazy genius of his charisma.

Though most of the gatherings were impromptu and seemingly random, the fourth of July evolved into an annual event. After Hartwell died on Earth Day, 2003, his son, Jon, with collective support from the extended family who gathered at the garage, decided to continue the tradition. Every year since, folks have gathered at The Garage on the weekend closest to July fourth for the Hartwell Road Archery Shoot. Something bizarre always happens—always—every year and it always involves both tragedy and laughter. One or more people experience a sudden expansion of their self-awareness.

Luke came to the 2007 shoot. Luke and Hartwell had worked together at the hydroelectric generating plant where Hartwell had been a control room operator, and they became frequent hunting and fishing partners. Though I didn’t know him well, Luke seemed like one of the good guys—a true friend. One could look into his eyes and see past the unspoken damage to a good heart. He seemed aware of the world’s wild, ironic poignancy.

So, I was more than a little taken aback when Luke guzzled more than a dozen beers in an hour and got shit-faced-weird. After he fell several times trying to traverse twenty yards of grass from his lawn chair to the garage, intent on more beer, the adult males surrounded him, confiscated his truck keys, and persuaded him to lay down on the couch.

Shortly after we stoked the campfire and began settling in for an evening of firelight and conversation, we heard a crash in the garage. Luke had fallen trying to get more beer and stuck his head on the corner of the wood stove. He was bleeding profusely and still as drunk as one can get and remain conscious. Rich, Hartwell’s nephew, whose father-wounded and testosterone-addled ego could often push hard on the elastic limits of bearable abrasiveness, won my heartfelt respect as he took control with gentle, but firm, authority. He tended to Luke’s wound, determined by consensus among all the adults present that stitches weren’t needed and that Luke showed no signs of neurological impairment beyond a toxic degree of inebriation. He also won Luke’s partial, difficult cooperation in maintaining pressure on the wound.

When the bleeding was stopped and his wound bandaged, Luke demanded more beer and grew belligerent when it was denied. My own anger was already rising, and when Luke directly threatened me, the whole dynamic kicked into overdrive. My inner Mr. Hyde woke up and asked to take the wheel. I wanted Luke to throw a punch and told him to go ahead and try it. The fearlessness I had learned in competitive fencing kicked in, and I was almost eager to step into whatever he could throw at me and put his sorry ass on the ground. Luke was considerably larger and probably stronger, but belligerent drunks jumpstart my fight/flight response. In redneck culture, that can be seen as manly, but it is merely dysfunctional. In my case, it is post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).

Fortunately, Rich, Jon, and Rick (Hartwell’s son-in-law) summoned me to confer with them outside, which afforded me an opportunity to step back into conscious behavior and recognize that handing Luke’s ass to him was not a desirable outcome for this situation. A phone call to Luke’s wife was received with shocking indifference, and she declined to retrieve him. When we returned to the garage, Luke had somehow obtained another beer.

After we got Luke settled onto the couch again, I thought it safe to leave and seek my own bed. As I was loading gear into my truck, Luke staggered out of the garage in his underwear, muttering that he had to piss, fell, staggered to his feet, and got belligerent again. A surreal choreography of me confronting him with double fists and firm coaxing from Jon and Rich herded him back to the couch. He had pissed himself by the time he arrived. I drove home in a weird, exhausted reverie, pondering the legacy of familial anger buried in my heart.

When I returned the next morning, Luke was still there looking bedraggled and humiliated. He apologized with what seemed like genuine contrition. I accepted his apology, but added, “You always speak with great reverence for Hartwell, but last night you pissed on his memory—don’t ever do it again.” I also told him he should get counseling, though I doubted he would heed my advice. He walked to his truck and drove away.

The balance of the day was filled with wonderful, modest pleasures: shooting our bows, good food, drinks, conversation, laughter, camaraderie, breezy sunshine, and a many-layered ambience of shared memories.

On the last day of the gathering, a late-afternoon conversation with Kelly, Judy, and Hartwell’s daughter turned serious. She had, in recent years, buried her considerable physical beauty in tragic obesity and continued to smoke cigarettes at a vigorous pace. When she said, “I wish I could see Logan Falls again,” I told her that she could, in a year, if she wanted it badly enough; that if she became physically able, I would take her there. Stirred by loving concern and admittedly still wired into tough aggressiveness by my collision with Luke, I said, “You’re committing slow motion suicide, and I just don’t get it. Look around you—you’re surrounded with bright, extraordinary people who love you. We all wonder why we aren’t enough to make you want to live, and it hurts.”

She wept, and I wondered if I had truly helped or if I was merely stuck in angry, self-righteous, asshole mode, or perhaps, I was multi-tasking and doing both. When I told Judy about the conversation, she assured me that my harsh, loving words had been necessary. The apparent depth of Kelly’s emotional reaction gave us a welcome glimmer of naive hope.

A few days later my son and I shot through the archery course, taking down the targets as we went, oblivious to intermittent rain. After we stowed the targets in the attic of the garage and began loading our archery gear into my truck, we looked up to see a bright rainbow spanning the valley. I called to Judy. She exited the house and walked hurriedly down the long, wet, muddy driveway in her socks, exclaiming her delight—a true Hartwell moment. Life was good.

Photo of Reg Darling

BIO: Reg Darling lives in Bennington, Vermont. He is the author of six books, the most recent of which is I Would Prefer Not To: Life and livelihood in the Confluence of Bureaucracy, Healthcare, and Politics. His essays have been published in Awakened Voices, The Chaos Journal, Sky Island Journal, The Dr. T.J. Eckleburg Review, River Teeth Journal, Rivet Journal, Timberline Review, Whitefish Review, and others.