Raymond And Ann

I discovered “Raymond and Ann” years ago, in an old issue of Harper’s. I was deeply moved by the poem; a tattered copy is still in my drawer.

I didn’t know then that “Raymond and Ann” is part of a larger work, an epic narrative that David Budbill has been writing for twenty years. Collected now in one volume, the Judevine poems are the saga of the inhabitants of an imaginary village in Vermont, though it could be any poor town in rural America. By turns bleak, humorous, and lyrical, Judevine is an unsentimental yet loving meditation on the hardships of country life and the tenacity of the human spirit. Told in simple but powerful language, it reads almost like a novel. A stage version of Judevine — which has been compared to Under Milkweed and Spoon River Anthology — has been produced around the country.

— Ed.

I

Raymond and Ann kept to themselves and because of that
some people thought them snooty and aloof. It wasn’t true.
Other people theorized perhaps there’d been
some great pain in their lives, more than
the stillborn child buried on the knoll
above their house, that kept them from the usual
sociability. No one knew. Personally, I think when they came
to this mountain fifty years ago they wanted
only silence and each other and having found
these things they were happy.

Raymond was God’s gardener. He grew the best of everything,
his garden always free of weeds, rows so straight
it seemed he planted with a transit.

Although they were poor and everything about the place
homemade, their farm had neatness and an order
reflective of people who know what to do and how to do it
and who do not overstretch the limits of their land
or themselves.

By the time I knew them they were old and didn’t have a team,
only Sandy, middling size, mostly Belgian, who weighed
maybe seventeen hundred pounds and was so intelligent
if she’d had hands she would have harnessed herself,
intuited the day’s work and done her jobs unattended.
I always had the feeling that, though there were other animals —
cows, chickens, sheep, a pig — there was an absolute equality
between the man, the woman, and the horse.

Raymond was tall, angular and bony.
He carried himself upright to his dying day.
He cackled when he laughed and when he told a joke
he always laughed before the punch line
so he could be the first.

Ann was slim and quick, full breasts and hips,
and although her face was plain, she was to me
unspeakably beautiful. She wore her white hair
and wrinkled skin the way a summer flower wears its bloom.
And in her eyes, even at the age of seventy, burnt a fire
so bright and fierce, a passion so intense,
it made me feel old and worn. In her presence
I was sick at the slackness of my life.

II

Every afternoon after dinner Raymond and Ann
lay down together on the large sofa in the living room,
wrapped themselves around each other and took a nap.

Sometimes they slept, sometimes they only lay
in the stillness listening. In summer they listened
to the wind and the birds’ songs. In winter
they listened to the wind and the mute birds — little feet
scuttling across the feeder on the windowsill. Often
they fell into a half-sleep in which they dreamed
waking dreams or they let their minds go still as the room.

They napped like this each day because it was a time
when they could come together, these two distinctly separate
people, touch each other and be very nearly one being
in that place.

They had an unspoken understanding that during these times
they wouldn’t talk, but one day Ann said: You know,
we’ve been more than fifty years, doing the same things
day after day, changing only with the seasons and I’ve never
got tired of it, oh, angry and frustrated, plenty,
but never tired. I wonder if we ever will.

Raymond chuckled: Well, we had better get to it
if we’re going to; we don’t have much time left.

They both saw clearly and briefly then
the end of their lives and they laughed quietly
and held each other.

III

I was thinking just now, Raymond said, about that time,
years ago, after we built this place. I could see the two
of us lying on the sofa and I remembered clearly how we looked
and what I thought. We were young and new and I held you here
as we are now and I was thinking, I wonder what it will be like
to be here when we’re old, the two of us in shrinking bodies
wrapped around each other. I think I knew then, fifty years ago,
pretty clearly what it would be like today. I knew
how it would feel. Do you think that means our lives
have been too predictable?

Why should it?

Well, to see that far ahead and then get to where you saw
and look back and see you were right
seems so strange, predictable. 

Have you enjoyed it? 

You know I have.

I have too.

IV

Toward the end of the sixties and into the early seventies
every summer there was what Antoine called a “hippie invasion”
around here. Young people from the cities poured into
these hills. I remember one spring Antoine saying:

Watch out! boys. Dere really caumin’ in dis summer.
Dere’s gonna be a million of ’em wash in here like a tidal
wa’f. Dis place use’ to be more caows ’an people,
now we’re gonna be more hippies ’an caows!

Raymond and Ann became mentors to them,
elders with Confucian knowledge, replacements
for the parents the kids had left behind.
Raymond and Ann were visions of another way of life.

But the influence went both ways and Raymond took
to working in the garden barefooted,
then he went shirtless and got a summer tan,
then he removed his cap and the traditional
bronzed forehead with abrupt demarcation
between the sunburn and the ashen skull disappeared.
It was the talk of the town. What was he doing
at sixty-something acting like a kid?
It tickled Ann, and what other people said
didn’t bother her at all. It never had.

One summer afternoon Raymond came in from the garden,
approached Ann from behind, put his arms around her middle
and kissed the back of her neck. Then his forearms touched
her breasts dangling unsupported beneath her shirt.
And her shirt was open from the top a few buttons. 

Goodness, what is this?

What is what?

This.

His hands moved to her breasts and held them.

Well, maybe you shouldn’t be thinking you’re the only one
can learn from hippies. If you go around with half your clothes
still on the hook, I guess I can leave half mine in the drawer.

Well, I guess you can!

Raymond rested his chin on her shoulder
and gazed down her shirt.

Does it feel good?

Sort of strange would be more like it. 

Do you like it?

Some.

Would you go out in public the way you are right now?

Raymond Miller, you know I’m not a hussy!

V

They were under the dooryard apple tree at the summer table
shelling peas when they heard the noise.
Early July, the height of summer, clear and warm
and a light breeze to stir things, cool things,
an idle day filled with ease, gentle and sweet
and a rarity in this ungentle place.
A half-dozen days a year like this, no more, the others
always with some kind of edge to them, a harshness,
which makes it all the more wonder-filled that this place
could yield two people such as Ann and Raymond.

At first a dull roar in the distance, then closer and louder
until when it passed through the sugarbush just down the road,
it had to it the sound of war. Then they were there:
four of them. Four steel helmets gleaming black,
four faces with dark glasses, four faces pale, ashen, as if
they had been powdered. In black they came:
black leather jackets, leather pants, leather boots,
leather gloves with gauntlets to the elbows and silver rivets
gleaming everywhere, their bikes black and silver too —
choppers, handlebars in the air, seats leaning back —
they roared into the lane and toward the house and garden.

The chickens scratching in the dooryard screamed
and ran away; Sandy reared and bolted, broke through the fence
and disappeared into the woods.

In black they came, into the garden, into the rows of corn,
over tomatoes, down rows of broccoli, through the fence of peas.
They wheeled and turned and came again, through the garden flowers,
over squash and cucumbers, dill and thyme, carrots, potatoes,
beans. One rider singled out an errant hen and ran her down.
They came again through the garden, their tires
churning and digging the earth, spewing soil and broken plants
into the air. They roared toward the two old people
then veered away, down the lane, down the road,
over the hill and away.

VI

After supper on a summer evening.
They were sitting in the cool house, she in his easy chair.
She looked up at him quizzically; already she had left him,
was in a strange place, alone. He watched the life
drain from her face. She said nothing —
not even good-bye.

He sat for a time in the growing dusk and stillness.
Then, as the sun headed down behind the mountains,
he scooped her into his arms the way you would a child
fallen asleep somewhere away from its bed and laid her down
on the sofa where she liked to nap.

He went to the barn and finished chores,
then stepped into the evening and felt the cold air
spilling down the sidehill all around him. He listened
to the crickets, the barred owl and white-throated sparrow,
the wood thrush. Then he came inside and went to bed.

In the first light of morning he dug a grave on the knoll
behind the house next to the child’s grave, then went to the barn
and built a box of rough pine boards from his store of lumber.
He harnessed Sandy and she drug the box to the knoll
and with her help he lowered it into the grave.

He went into the house and picked her up. He wrapped his arms
around her middle and carried her upright, her head rising above
his head because she was stiff.
He put her in the box, put on the lid and nailed it down.
He covered her over. He filled the grave.

He sat down on the freshly mounded earth
and began rocking slowly back and forth.
And then he wept.
His tears poured down. He moaned and wailed.
He rolled his head and wept.
He shook his fist at heaven. He rose and paced and wept.
He held his face in his hands. He clawed his pants,
tore at his shirt. He stomped the earth and smashed a fist
into an open palm. He turned his face toward heaven
clinched his teeth
and screamed.

When there were no tears left, when he was weak and trembling,
he led Sandy to the barn, unharnessed her,
turned her out to pasture
and went into the house.

He stood at the window then, looking at the mountains,
and he wept again,
this never-ending, accumulated grief
for the inevitable.