The Oregon Experiment by Keith Scribner Read Free Book Online Page A

and a T-shirt, he stood there looking at his house, mostly settled, although a dozen boxes sat unopened in the nursery; they still needed a crib and a changing table, a glider and a mobile. The afternoon before, Naomi had taped paint swatches up on most of the walls. The coffee table was covered with catalogs dog-eared for bassinets, Baby Bjorns, diaper bags, and bureaus.
    She was deep in the forest of primal motherhood. She’d said almost nothing to Scanlon during these preparations, and when he’d tried to sneak into that forest yesterday, patting her butt and saying, “Scratching a nest, building up the twig mound,” she emerged slowly, stepping over gullies and branches, pushing aside ferns. A long moment passed as she chewed a mouthful of peach, then reluctantly lowered the fruit from her face, wiped juice off her chin with her free hand, and said, “This may be the best peach I’ve ever tasted.”
    Naomi had ventured deep into that forest, he knew, because she secretly hoped their baby would ease the distress she’d carried with hersince she was nineteen; she’d had a baby all those years ago, a baby boy she never held or so much as glimpsed. He was swept from the delivery room too fast for her even to smell him. Hours into their first date, Scanlon felt the weight of her anguish over losing her nose, but it wasn’t until weeks later, when she told him about the baby, that he understood how fully she defined herself by loss.
Their
baby, growing in her belly, embodied her chance of recovery—a risky bargain, and he felt sure she wasn’t aware of its likelihood of failure.
    With his cereal and blueberries he moved over to the new chair and sat down. It had turned out well—the angles so key in an Adirondack chair—and Naomi loved it. He’d routed ogees into the edges of the arms and corbels, and sanded the wood as smooth and soft as her skin. He just wished she could smell the cedar.
    His bowl empty, he went back to the kitchen, poured a cup of coffee, and unrolled the
Douglas Union-Gazette
. The lead story was about the war: a surge of troops. Below the fold was a photo of a local collector of Pepsi memorabilia standing proudly before his artifacts, an article about the endangered habitat of the snowy plover, and another about how the state prison medical budget was being sapped by meth mouth. At the back of section C, in “News About Grangers and Grange,” he learned that dogs were doing a great job managing cougars; that the red, white, and blue tennis shoe insurance banquet was a success; that the motivational speaker scheduled for the Elks Club “Sunday Best” pork-loin barbecue didn’t show up. On the op-ed page he skimmed “Dawg Declares,” a column from the point of view of a dog, then on the back of the section he saw a full-page ad for Douglas’s sesquicentennial celebration in October.
    “Listen to this,” he said when Naomi came into the kitchen in her robe. “Craft fairs, face painting, solar- and wind-power exhibitions, hemp spinning, music, drumming, African boot dancers. And there’s a lumberjack contest. Splitting, bucksaw, ax throwing, chainsaw, log rolling on the river. What’s ‘slow-chop,’ do you suppose?”
    But she wasn’t listening. She was dunking a tea bag in a mug held close to her face, breathing the steam. He could tell she was thinking about motherhood, about doing everything exactly right.
    “How’s our little man today?” he asked.
    She looked to be considering this, but then said, “I’m going to take this back to bed,” and brushed past him with her tea.
    According to Naomi, most people relied primarily on sight to orientthemselves, but for her it had always been smell. Once she lost that sense, she felt constantly dislocated, and their cross-country move would only have compounded her unease. He was fascinated by who she once was, by her dormant genius (for which his own nose was a hack stand-in), and he found himself wondering, should it ever come