On a Sunday morning early in June 1988, both Richard Ford and Tobias Wolff turned up unexpectedly at the Port Angeles home of Raymond Carver and his wife, the poet Tess Gallagher. The two friends of Carver’s arrived independently of each other but still they came to the door no more than a minute apart. When Tess answered the first knock she found Ford standing there holding back the gauze door saying, “Good mornin’, Ma’am,” in that slow southern way of his and then, before she could summon any kind of response or think to check the alignment of her dressing gown, Wolff bounded up the steps declaring, “Hi, y’all.”
Ford flinched and spun on his heel, held his fists bunched at his sides. Wolff stood grinning, his moustache stretched across the width of his face, then some. “Toby,” Ford said, letting one hand go then the other, and throwing his arms around Wolff. He slapped his palms between his friend’s shoulders. “Goddamn you,” he said. “You scared the shit outta me.”
Tess pressed a finger to her lips and motioned toward the inner workings of the house. “Sleeping,” she whispered. She hugged them both and ushered them quietly inside. She led them through into the kitchen that opened out onto the deck. The two men took up positions on opposite sides of the table and sat there grinning at each other.
“Goddamn you,” Ford said again, shaking his head at Wolff who just kept grinning.
Tess lit the stove and set a kettle over the flame. She took mugs down from a shelf and set them on the table. She turned away again, picked up a canister that sat on the bench beside the window and began to spoon coffee out into a stainless steel plunger. Wolff put the heel of his boot on the toe of Ford’s shoe and ground it down hard against the floor. Ford poked his free foot about under the table until he found Wolff’s shin and gave it such a sharp jab with the toe of his shoe that Wolff reefed his leg away, slamming his knee up under the table. The mugs rattled about and Ford quickly rested a hand on them to settle them into place. Wolff gestured apologetically at Tess who shook her head at both of them.
Tess pulled out the lid of the kettle as it began to boil. She cut off the gas and poured the steaming water over the dark grounds. She brought the plunger to the table. “Rough night,” she said. “Ray couldn’t find any comfort. It’s that way more often than not now. Most likely he’ll sleep right through into the afternoon. You’re welcome to wait if you want to, though.” Tess sighed as she poured the coffee. “I could sure do with the company.”
Ford and Wolff both nodded eagerly. “Sure, sure,” they said together.
They all sat at the table and drank their coffee and talked about what they were all working on. Ford was between books, he’d followed up The Sportswriter with Rock Springs, his own collection of stories, and it had sold well enough, the critics liked it too, but he wasn’t sure what he might do next.
“Well I reckon that you,” Wolff said, pointing across the table, “and a character called Frank Bascombe might have some unfinished business to attend to.”
Tess nodded. “He’s right, you know. You might end up pulling a Rabbit out of your hat,” she said.
Ford winced and shrugged. “Maybe,” he said slowly. “May-be. But for now I’ve been thinking that I’d like to do something new. Write something about a child, maybe. A teenager.”
Wolff laughed quietly to himself. He was in town because of a reading he was to give the following night to promote his novella, The Barrack’s Thief. He didn’t want to say so at the time but he was well into a memoir of his own childhood. “Imagine that,” Wolff said to Tess. “Imagine reading about this boy’s life down there in Jackson, Mississippi.”
“Plenty worse things in print right now,” Ford said.
“Maybe so, maybe so,” Wolff said, his voice trailing off. He was thinking about something that had just come to him. “Have you got a loose sheet of paper handy, Tess. I just got to make a few notes.”
“Sure.” Tess got up and handed Wolff a page from a collection of stories an MFA student had left in Carver’s mailbox, hoping that he might have something nice to say about it or perhaps think enough of it to pass it on to his editor. “Here’s something we don’t need right now,” Tess said. “There’s plenty more, too. If you need it,” she added, pointing out a box beside the lounge that was overflowing with manuscript pages.
Nobody said anything as Wolff wrote on the back of the page. They were all writers and, though such a thing might raise eyebrows in mixed company, they knew that these intrusions were an indispensable part of their own lives. Such moments came and went between the hours of thinking and not thinking about the work at hand. But they all knew these moments well. They all craved that certainty that only came when they knew they had it, really had it, that palpable thing in a scene – an image, a gesture, the look on a character’s face, or something one character might say to another, some tangible thing on which they could pin the immense weight of a story in a way that seemed inevitable.
Wolff finished making notes and folded the page in half and half again, creasing the paper with the palm of his hand. Tess topped up their mugs as Wolff slipped the page into his pocket and then he picked up his coffee and drank, and the conversation got going again, moving out from themselves to other writer friends, then further still to other writers they might have only known by name. They kept at it for half an hour or more, all the while talking around Carver until Tess just came out and said, “Have you seen the New Yorker?”
Ford and Wolff both looked over at her. “‘Errand’?” Wolff asked.
Tess nodded and looked across at Ford as he pulled a folded copy of the magazine from his back pocket and laid it out on the table. “It’s good,” Ford said. “He’s good,” he added as matter-of-factly as he could then he bit down on his lip and looked out over the yard. Tess turned too, following his gaze to the yard and Carver’s unkempt lawn.
Out in the yard, the grass was knee-high and densely matted and had pushed it’s way so high up against the fence that it’s weight caused it to curl back over on itself in an improbable wave. “We could see to that there lawn, Tess,” Ford said. “You know we could.”
Tess declined the offer, saying that neither of them was there for that reason nor were they dressed for manual labour. But Wolff chimed in. “It ain’t much, Tess. But it is something we could do while we wait for Ray.”
“Lord’s day, though, ain’t it Toby?” Ford said.
Wolff threw his hands up in the air like he’d forgotten that he was supposed to be someplace else. “Well,” he said. “I guess Tess and me’ll just have to sit out there on the deck and keep an eye on you. Make sure you’re not doing it all wrong, you know, you being from the sowth ‘n’ awl,” he said, dragging the vowels out until Tess reached across the table to slap him on the shoulder. Ford and Wolff laughed out loud and Tess shushed them both.
“Yes, Ma’am,” Ford said.
“I don’t think the Lord would mind if I pitched in,” Wolff said. “As long as I didn’t enjoy it too much.”
“Not much chance of that happening if your anything like Ray,” Tess said, then she put her hand across her mouth as though she’d spoken out of turn. She looked toward the closed door of the bedroom.
Ford put his hand on her arm. “There’s no harm in that,” he said. “Never known a man who did so much dislike physical labour nor so freely admit to it.” Tess nodded and got up from the table. She rinsed her mug and left it in the sink. She went quietly into Carver’s room and retuned with some old clothes of his, pants and checked shirts that Ford had last seen Carver wearing just two years before on a geese-hunting trip to Canada. Tess brought the clothes through to the kitchen and put them on the table, apologising that everything was long-sleeved and long-legged.
“He never was a shorts-and-t-shirt kind of guy,” Wolff said.
Tess pointed down the hall to a room where the two men could change. They headed in that direction and came back a minute or so later. Ford was as tall as Carver, but a little leaner than Carver had been in his hunting days so he’d used his own belt to cinch the pants tightly at the waist to stop them slipping down over his buttocks. He was swimming a little in the shirt but Wolff, who was a couple of inches shorter than both Ford and Carver, but broad-shouldered and heavier set, looked all at sea. The shirt was tight on his arms but the cuffs hung across the meat of his palms, the pants were tight across his hips, which caused the zip to fall half open despite his best efforts, and the leg of the pants extended down over his bare feet.
Tess stifled a laugh. “You don’t have to.”
“No, no,” Wolff said. He sat at the table and rolled up the leg of the pants. “Wouldn’t have it any other way
“There’s shoes by the back door,” Tess said. “They’re all okay to wear out in the yard.”
In socks, Ford and Wolff tip-toed down past Carver’s bedroom and on toward the door at the rear of the house where they then pulled on a pair of shoes. Ford’s feet were about the same size as Carver’s and he stood comfortably in the hallway, gesturing to Tess that they would continue out the back door, but Wolff’s toes had a little too much room and his feet slid about inside the shoes as he followed Ford down the steps at the rear of the house.
They went into the garage, found a rake and pulled the two-stroke mower out into the middle of the yard. It was getting warm out and they’d both broke a sweat already. From the deck, Tess saw them paper-scissors-rocking over the mower. “Damn,” Ford said when he lost the first hand. “Best of three?” Then he lost the other two, and picked up the rake.
Though it hadn’t been used for quite some time, the mower started readily and Wolff began making a series of lunging movements, working the mower deeper into the grass each time, turning all the while in a slow arc so that he soon cleared a crude circle to work his way out from. Ford trailed behind, raking the cut grass into a pile. Wolff paused and wiped his brow with the sleeve of his oversized shirt. He looked at the remaining grass for a moment and then forced his way back into it. It was not going to be easy but he kept at it. At times, when the grass was too dense or Wolff’s desire to have it all over with was too great, the engine would stall and behind him Ford jeered, calling Wolff a ‘city-slicker’, saying that maybe he wasn’t cut out for the wild west.
“Didn’t see you in Viet Nam, cowboy,” Wolff said. Ford stopped grinning. Instead he took to standing there with the sun bearing down on him until Wolff had the mower going again. They kept at it, stopping and starting, for over an hour, and were still yet to make a great impression on the grass when the mower finally gave out. It had stalled in the deep grass and Wolff couldn’t restart it.
Ford looked around at the remaining grass. “Hey, soldier,” he called, tugging at a lock of his own hair. “Got any Agent Orange on you?”
Wolff shook his head, the bare crown glistening with sweat, and he yanked on the mower’s starter cord so hard that it came away in his hand. He just looked at the cord between his fingers and then at Ford who stood leaning over the rake, laughing. “Why don’t you just come give me a hand,” Wolff said. “Soon as you finish breast-feeding that rake.”
Ford straightened up and began striding through the long grass so that it made a fine, irritated noise at his ankles. Wolff took on a boxer’s stance and started cycling his fists about in the space between them. “Come on, cowboy,” he said, more than half-seriously. “Come on.” But Ford stopped and looked up past Wolff to the deck. When Wolff turned, he saw that Carver was there in his white dressing gown watching over them.
The three men stood without speaking. They were all thinking of that photograph of them together after a reading in London, the photograph where they stood with their arms interlocked, holding Carver firmly in the centre of the frame. They were remembering those days together and what Carver had written about it and how much it meant for them all to be friends, how he’d written that at a time like that, at the reading, death was the furthest thing from their minds. They were remembering how Carver had gone on to write about the likelihood, the certainty, that two of the three friends in the picture would, when the time came, have to one day look upon the remains of the third friend. They each knew the inevitability of life, that the only alternative to burying your friends is that they will have to bury you.
These three friends stood, motionless. Carver looked down at where Ford and Wolff stood in his yard, dressed in his old hunting clothes. He could see the inroads they had made into the grass. “How many fucking times do I have to tell you boys to keep off my lawn?” he said finally, laughing just a little before he began to cough. He stopped laughing then, and together Ford and Wolff waded through the long grass, their faces lapsing into awe as they ascended the concrete steps, and they made their way toward Carver, who waited with his arms held loosely out toward them like he was their father, a lesser saint, or some sort of benign ghost.
About Patrick Cullen’s short story ‘Carver’s Unkempt Lawn’
‘Carver’s Unmade Bed’ was was first published in Kill Your Darlings, Issue 1 – March 2010.
Read more short stories by Patrick Cullen