
I’ve been following the progress of these seed/fruit/knob objects on our trees since early summer. There hasn’t been any. They look pretty much the same now as they did six months ago. Same size, slightly different color. I’m tempted to say that their number has remained constant, too, but anyone can see that two out of five of the stems above are vacant. I suppose this tree fruit is working the way all tree fruit does: an inveiglement to birds, bears, and humans to propagate progeny. But these trees are terribly patient in their seduction.

Yesterday morning I took the opportunity of misdelivered mail to stroll about my neighbors’ property with camera in hand. I was heading vaguely in the direction of the right mailbox, hoping to cross paths with the mail lady on the way–our friend Carla Long has moved in with us, and now Patricia Long’s mail was showing up in our box (Patricia lives up the road). I envisioned a winter of schlepping mail from one box to the other if the confusion wasn’t sorted. The light was sporadically bright and shaded, leading to little photographic surprises.
This fence post is staking up one of James and Becci’s trees. I showed the photo to Jeanne just now and asked her, “What are the colors in this picture?” She said, “Nice.” I said, “No, what are their names?” She said, “Olive, cerulean, and peachy…but I don’t know if you want to say ‘peachy’.”
She went on to say that olive and cerulean adjacent are her favorite adjacencies, and kind of rare. But she is now walking around the house pointing out all the places we have olive and cerulean adjacent, so I’m thinking “not that rare.”

The mail lady pulled up in James and Becci’s driveway while I was capturing these bright red bird inveiglements. She sat in her little right-handed jeep blowing the horn. I knocked on her window and she rolled it down a crack. She had a package for Becci but is afraid of Becci’s dogs, who were arrayed in high bay around us. I exchanged my misdirected mail for the package. I’m in cahoots with the USPS.

Dying leaves have a weight and dignity. They seem to have gathered a lifetime of living in one summer.

Earlier in the morning, a man rang our doorbell. Eight is early for doorbell ringing–we were still in coffee and corn chex mode. He’d been stabbed and beaten, run across the marshy field from his assailants, and taken a seat on our porch. He asked to use our phone. Jeanne let him in, he went down on one knee, looking shocky, she suggested he sit on our stairs, he said he didn’t want to get blood on the carpet. We could see the long puncture in the back of his shirt, with a spreading circle of blood. His face was pulped, a swollen flap of skin hanging from his cheek. He held his heart. I said to Jeanne, “Call 911.” He said, “No.”
He used Jeanne’s cell phone to call a friend, asked that friend to tell another friend that he’d been beaten up. He asked me to take him to his car. I said okay, grabbed a towel to put over the seat of my truck, and we were off. Before we were out of the driveway, I said, “You need to go to the hospital.” “I will,” he said, “but first take me to my car.” It was several miles away. “What’s your name?” I said. “Rob,” he said. I said, “You’re going into shock, let’s go to the hospital first.” He said, “OK.”
“Is that the field you ran across?” I asked. “Yes,” he said. “So you were beaten up where, right about here?” I said. “I don’t know Lee’s Summit that well,” he said. “One of them was my friend, I thought, the other one had a gun, and I’d just gotten paid. They were trying to get my money.” “Did they?” I asked. “No, I fought them,” he said. Then, “There they are!” He pointed to an SUV coming down the hill in the opposite lane.

I could see that the SUV was driven by a late-middle-aged woman. “Her?” I said. “No,” he said, “but that’s the kind of car they are driving, a Ford Escape.” “How are you doing?” I asked. “Why are you holding your heart?” He said, “Because it hurts. Where’s the hospital? Hurry up!” I’d been driving the speed limit, observing the stop signs. “The hospital’s just around the corner,” I said–it was, I could see it. We had a couple more stop lights to go and I wondered if I should run them. The light changed, we pulled up to the ER door, saw a cop car there. “This is going to be good,” he said. He got out, I went to park. Blood had soaked through the towel and made a big wet stain on the seat.

My cell phone rang, from a number I didn’t recognize. One of Rob’s friends had called Jeanne back, she’d given him my number, he wanted to know where I’d taken Rob. I said, “We’re at St Luke’s East in Lee’s Summit.” He said, “I know right where that is,” and hung up. I went in, saw Rob sitting in a chair, went to the admitting nurse. She asked, “Are you with him?” I said, “Yes, I brought him here.” A couple of nurses came and fetched Rob into a wheelchair. I asked the admitting nurse, “Have you called the police?” She said, “We need to call the police.” One of her colleagues said, “They’re already here.” A policeman came out of a door marked “Security” and asked me to wait.

A young man in a hoody came through the door from the outside. I thought he said to the admitting nurse that a friend of his had been brought in. While they were talking, a second policeman came out with the first policeman and asked me how I knew the man I’d brought in. I said, “I met him when he rang my doorbell a few minutes ago. But I think that’s his friend right there.” The two of them asked the young man to go into a back room with them. I got a magazine out of the rack.

I remembered that while I was talking to Rob’s friend on my cell phone, there’d been a call waiting from my son, Jake. I called him back. He was home for Thanksgiving and had been up on the landing watching Jeanne and I talk to Rob in our entryway. After I drove away with Rob, it had occurred to Jake and Jeanne that I might be entering into a dangerous situation. So Jake had got into his car to follow us. All they knew was that I was taking Rob to his car at 291 and Chipman, so that’s where Jake had headed. Now I called him back and said I was at the hospital and was fine.

A third policeman–a detective–came into the room and asked me more questions. Did I know what Rob’s car looked like? How did Rob get the four or five miles from his car to my doorstep? Did he describe his assailants? Where did the attack occur? Where has Rob’s friend gone to? The friend had slipped out of the ER after being questioned. Both he and Rob didn’t want to talk to the police. Things were getting curiouser.

I was the only one who would talk, so they talked to me. That drying blood on my truck seat had come to mind. Jeanne said ice cold water will get it out, but it’s best to do it before it dries. She came to swap our car for the truck so she could work on cleaning it up. A fourth policeman–“the sergeant”–showed up and asked me more questions: “Where is the vehicle you brought him in?” “My wife just came and took it, to clean the blood up.” Kyra Sedgwick in “The Closer” entered my mind, saying, “You, sir, have tampered with my crime scene.” The sergeant didn’t say that, only nodded as if cleaning up blood while it was still wet was a good idea. My truck wasn’t really the crime scene, I reasoned, more like an ambulance–and they could get more blood from Rob if they needed it.

“What kind of shirt was the stab hole in?”, the sergeant asked. “Like a thermal underwear shirt,” I said. From the moment Rob rang our doorbell, I had been trying to pay attention, imagining that I might need the information later. Now I realized that I wasn’t even sure about the shirt, which I had looked at very closely several times. I could envision the slice in it and the spreading blood, but the color of the shirt and its texture were lost to me. “Did he have blue jeans on?” he asked. I didn’t know. I said, “He’s still here, can you look?” The sergeant said yes, but he hadn’t been able to see him yet. “Is there anything else you can think of to help us?” I could think of lots of speculation, but nothing more I had observed.

They let me go home. I don’t know what happened to Rob or any of his friends after that.