NOTE: If you haven’t been following this from the beginning, and if you want to know the full sequence of events, start with the introduction. Click on Archives on the right.
Steve Strether is stroking his beard as he looks down at flowers growing in front of Lou’s place on Bails lane.
“Steve, why are you looking at those weeds so intently?”
“See those pinkish blue flowers?”
“Yup, with floppy leaves.”
“Well you’re on to something. It is characteristic of Virginia Bluebells.”
“Natives!”
Diddlie told me to look out for them, Mertensia virginica, or Virginia bluebells.
“Too many names!”
“Fred, they come out around here in early Spring and soon disappear.”
“How is Lambert, by the way?”
Steve shakes his head, and looks at me.
“Fred, we lost Lambert in February, after 17 years and 11 months.”
He rubs his face with his left hand. His right is in is pocket.
“Ouch! That’s why I haven’t seen you and bel around lately.”
“Yeah, he took us out regularly.” He looks back at the ground and kicks a twig out of the way.
“So that drip you set up didn’t save him?”
“It did for about three weeks. Then he faded again, and another blood test
showed he didn’t have long.”
Steve looks up at me again.
“We had to let him go.” Steve takes off his glasses and rubs his left eye.
All he did was sleep and he could hardly get up and walk around.”
“What did he die of, Steve?”
“Kidney disease.” He puts his glasses back on, looking down at his feet as he hooks them over his ears. There’s a gust of wind high in the trees and some dried leaves float down on to us.
“Sad day for you and bel. I miss him too, I mean I don’t think I have ever seen you out here without him.”
“No you wouldn’t have. In fact he was around that time I first met you, remember? outside the Pie Shop.”
“Right! We went up to Artie’s studio and you introduced me to her … and Bounder, wasn’t he down there too?”
“Yeah, I think Bounder was pulling up daffodils or something … you know Fred, I still look for Lambert when I get up in the morning.”
“A friendly face!”
“That’s right, in fact when his tail gets going it’s as if he is speaking with his whole body.”
“I know. He had such expressive ears too. They went down when you touch him and back up again when he couldn’t feel you hand anymore.”
“Bel says she often looks for him around the house. It’s like a reflex.”
Some more leaves and twigs fall out of the nearby white oak, and land around us.
“Look at that up there.” Steve is pointing directly above our heads.
“You mean the squirrel’s drey?”
“Oh, I though it might be an eagle’s nest.”
“An eagle’s nest! where? where?”
Lark is standing next to us. We hadn’t noticed her coming along.
She is carrying something rolled up in her hand.
“There isn’t one Lark, Fred mistook that squirrel drey up there in the white oak.”
“Oh, is that the same as a squirrel’s nest?”
“The same.”
“Yeah, see them all over the place.”
Lark unrolls the papers in her hand, and gives us each a flyer announcing the Democracy Spring demonstration in front of the Capitol.
“Is Lou home?”
“I don’t know Lark.”
“Fred, you two are buddies aren’t you? I mean I thought you were on your way in, but you haven’t moved.”
“No it’s the Virginia bluebells that got this group started.”
“Well come on Steve, let’s rouse him!”
Lark starts towards Lou’s door with its big pewter door knocker and a tall window on each side like flat columns.”
The door opens before she gets to it, and he steps out.
His hair is pointing in all direction and he squints from under wild black eyebrows without glasses on. He has no belt in his jeans. He is bare foot with an old paint stained t-shirt on.
“Okay, what did I do now?”
“Looks like you just woke up!”
“Yeah, I fell asleep on the sofa last night watching the primaries. The wife is away on business. I woke up and looked outside and saw this gang approaching.”
Lark steps forward, offering him a flyer.
“Here Lou, you woke up at the right moment!”
“What you got there, Lark … You got a permit to carry those things?”
“The flyer is its own permit Lou.”
“Not where I come from, and any flyer in your hands Lark, is bound to be dangerous!”
“Well it’s an election year and I know you guys are all Bernie supporters!”
“Not me kid!”
“Lou, we need to talk!”
“Well okay Lark, but I don’t think the guy has a hope, and his program is going to be DOA at Congress anyway, if, God forbid, he should end up in the White House.”
“Lark goes in and Lou walks forward towards Steve and me, still squinting. His face dark with a day’s heavy beard.”
“Fred, Steve, what you standing out here for?”
“We are checking out the bluebells.”
Lou looks down at them on both sides of the path and spreading out at the road-side.
“We used to call them cowslip.”
“No cattle around here now.”
“No Fred, it’s been sixty years since the dairy farm was sold for real-estate.”
He bends down to examine the plants more closely, pulling out an ivy vine.
“You know, my daughter planted these before Iraq.”
He straightens up and brushes them with the sole of his bare foot.
“They spread don’t they.”
He rubs his eyes, turns and heads back inside, only to stop and turn around.
“Come in for coffee, when you’re through.”
He goes in and pulls his door to. Then he reappears, just his head, and a hand pushing his hair to one side.
“You trying to ring those bells or what?”
Lou doesn’t wait for a response.
“What do you think Steve, would you like to go in?”
“I have time, sure.”
We go through into the foyer, closing the door, and then there’s a beeping sound.
“What’s that Steve?
“I don’t know. Did you bump into something?”
“No, it sounds like a smoke alarm.”
Lou walks fast down the passage from the kitchen towards us, sliding on a small rug across the polished floorboards towards the wall. He lifts up a framed print of Vermeer’s View of Delft, at eye level. It seems to be hinged to the wall at the top. He punches a button on a recessed panel hidden underneath and then pulls his phone out of his back pocket and starts messaging.
“Go on through guys. I’ll be right with you.”
We walk over to find Lark standing in the kitchen looking at a tall ficus tree reaching for the skylight. It has some Christmas balls still hanging in it high up.
Lou is soon with us, behind the counter, and making coffee in a large glass Chemex coffee maker with brown filter paper. He is boiling water in a battered saucepan with blackened bottom and an ill-fitting lid. Sun from the skylight gleams on his polished granite counter top. Lark’s flyers lie slightly curled in front of her. She is opening a five-pound Snaz Super Store pack of sugar. She pulls a tab on top but nothing happens.
“What’s with the sugar Lou?”
“Ah, we shouldn’t be using it.”
“I know, but you got it out, so I thought you wanted it opened.”
“Well, I thought you might like some in your coffee.”
“Yeah okay … ah, thanks Lou. I pulled this tab, but it isn’t opening.”
Lou grabs the pack with a grin. Then he puts it down again.
“Excuse me.”
Lou walks out of the room. Steve and I sit down on stools on either side of Lark facing towards the stove. Lou comes back with his black framed glasses on with his eyebrows curling over the top. He squints at the counter top.
“Sorry about the strong reflection here.”
He turns back and flips a switch on the wall under the cabinets.
“I just put in this nifty gadget to take care of …”
The switch activates a motorized shade in the skylight and the defused light evens out all over the room. He picks up the sugar packet and opens it with a pair of scissors.
“Lou we need to talk about money in politics.”
“We do?”
“See, the flyer made specially for folks around here who don’t always find stuff on line.”
“Yeah, so what about it?”
“Will you join us?”
“Ah, probably not. I mean we wouldn’t have any politics without funding.”
“Right, but funding is out of proportion. Rich people and big companies dominate the process.”
“You mean Lee Leavenworth Knox’s supporters?”
“Could be Lou, but he is only one of many with rich backers.”
“Like the Orange Delft PAC.”
“What’s wrong with that Steve?”
“Lou we both know that Orange is really the Dordrechts Group.”
“Oh you mean Platitudes for Plenty, and Prune Stone Group.”
“Steve, they are all mixed together in complicated ways.”
“One thing I can tell you is that Orange and Delft have nothing to do with CUPA, but Prune stone and Platitudes, both support CUPA.”
He starts pouring water from his battered pot over the coffee.”
“Lou, why don’t you get a kettle?”
“That’s a long story Steve, but the short version is I prefer this. For one thing it isn’t Snaz.”
“Makes a change, everything seems to be Snaz now.”
“So that’s it Lou! Prune Stone, or one of them, is paying Albrecht!”
“Yeah, he’s an activist, probably, Fred.”
“Lou, I have been wondering about the source of his income for a long time.”
“You remember that party I had a few years ago with all that speech trucked in here?”
“How could I forget a political party like that?”
“Well I went to one last month, over in the District, with more than twice that much speech. They had four eighteen wheelers parked there, fully loaded.”
“That’s what the Citizen’s United case has done Lou. Our votes don’t mean much against money like that.”
“Lark, I am no Knox supporter, but he has brought a lot of business and prosperity our way.”
“Well Lou, let’s talk about Democracy Spring! See it on the flyer I just gave you?”
Lou starts pouring coffee in the mugs he put on the counter in from of us; an orange one with a big handle and several odd ones from the Elegant Ostrich’s porcelain cartoon collection. One with a caricature of Sen. Knox sitting on top of Fort Knox juggling gold bars, mine shows the Queen of England knighting Mickey Mouse and a fourth mug with Two Washington Monuments supporting a billboard with a picture of Osiris Tarantula outside her New York boutique
Lou fills his own orange mug last and raises it as if in a toast.
“Here, drink…sorry no creamer but, there’s five pounds of sugar.“
He picks up the flyer to read.
“You mean these folks walked 130 miles?”
“Right Lou, from Philly, we want big money out of politics.”
“That’s like taking the gas out of a car!”
“It shouldn’t be Lou. The voters should be in power.”
“Lark, no one gets into Congress without the votes, one way or another.”
“I know, but once they get there…”
“They need sugar for their coffees!”
“Steve, there’s all kinds of powerful sweeteners on the Hill.”
Lark grabs the sugar bag and folds the opening over, and holds it closed. “And Lou, we want to end gerrymandering, and reinstate mechanisms from the Voting Rights Act.”
Steve looks up from his copy of the flyer with his Knox mug in hand.
“Sure I agree with that!”
