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Good morning, it’s 4:53 a.m. — I brought some wood in from the porch and put it on the fire, and I thought I could make out, in the dimness, a spider or one of those big hopping ants dashing around on the upper surface, trying to escape the heat. But it wasn’t a spider or an ant, it was just a bit of black ash being scooted this way and that by the updrafts. Where do the spiders go? One afternoon back in the fall when it was cold but not so cold as it is now, I put a birch log at the top of a fire. The flames lit the white bark, which crackled and curled, and then suddenly a largeish spider climbed into view, making little nervous sprints in one direction and then another. I went into the kitchen and got a small glass. The spider was keeping still by this point — not terribly big, with a dark motif on his yellow abdomen that looked like something you would see on a biker’s T-shirt. I put the rim of the glass near him and he sensed the nearby coolness and walked onto it; when I righted the glass he slipped to the bottom. Any time he tried to climb up the edge, as I carried him out the back door, I shook the glass slightly so that he fell back. I poured him out onto the woodpile. He crawled over to the edge of some bark, trying to fit under it, but his abdomen was too big to allow him to pass into the shadows. There was a yellowness to the upper segments of his legs, too. “You have fun,” I said to him. It isn’t that I think it’s horrible to kill a spider, just that there are certain things I would rather not do, and one is to watch a spider catch fire.
It’s completely still here. I don’t hear a single car. I can see a little indirect glow of the moon on one of the curtains, and when I type my fingers make patterings, like a squirrel spiraling up a tree. The fire today began with the help of a Vermont Trading Company catalog, and I have at the ready the remains of a thick prospectus for a mutual fund, part of which I burned the other day. The prospectus was made of a kind of onionskin — very strong and thin and noisy when turned. You would think it would burn quickly but it is a sluggish starter. Then it flames up just fine.
The spider makes me think of Fidel, my long-ago ant. We got him because my grandmother wanted to get Phoebe a plastic cooking set for her third birthday. At the store, my grandmother brought the cooking set up to the gift-wrap counter, and while it was being wrapped, she went to shop for something else. When she returned, she was given the wrong box, which she mailed to us. And thus Phoebe opened a birthday present that was an ant farm.
But we were all perfectly happy to have an ant farm, and in time we sent away for the ants and poured in the granules and watched them dig their tunnels. They were doing fine in their farm, and then Claire and Phoebe went away for two weeks to visit Claire’s parents — this was before Henry was born — and I was left in charge. And it got a lot colder. Some of the ants didn’t like the cold and died — when they died they curled up, very conveniently, so that the other ants could carry them to one of two crypts or burial grounds. I kept the ant farm on the mantel, and there wasn’t an awful lot I could do about the cold — that house just got cold. After one very cold night there was a widespread curling up and dying of ants. No droplets of springwater or crumbs of saltine would help. But the ants that remained were hardier. They kept digging. There were better tunnels to be made — or not better, just different. One by one they died, until there were two ants left. And then one evening I came home from work and saw that only one ant was now alive. He had buried his friend.
This final ant, however, was a super-ant. He looked the same as the others, but he kept on going. I named him Fidel. I told Claire about Fidel when we talked on the phone — we had no cat or duck back then, so he was my only companion. Fidel kept alive by working, and he was a good example to me. He would hold still for several hours, napping, and then he would begin digging a new tunnel. His tunnel crossed through what had been a grave site, and as he worked his way through, he carried each curled-up ant to a new, better crypt, at a higher elevation, that he made on the right side of the farm, over the plastic barn and silo. After intense struggle, he succeeded in transferring all his fallen comrades from the left-hand crypt to the new right-hand crypt, and he piled the granules of rock or sand over them.
Fidel old boy, Fidel my pal! I kept hearing cavernous choral music when I looked at his purposeful life between those two close-set panes of plastic. I tried to take pictures of him, but the plastic reflected the flash and I got nothing, just a flare of white and an orange date. I would give him a crumb of saltine, and he would spend half an hour burying it. Some of the ants dissolved and became no more than black stains in the sand, and yet Fidel lived on, slower but still active. He wasn’t sentimentaclass="underline" I watched him uncover a bit of one of his associates — a leg — which he unceremoniously kicked behind him.
My family returned, and I was no longer alone. But lonely Fidel lived on for two more weeks, then three, a month, more than a month—he lived longer alone than he had lived with company. I ran out of springwater and used tap water, and he seemed not to mind. He thrived on tap water, in fact — maybe it was the secret elixir of longevity for him. He knew that nobody was alive to carry his curled-up body to a resting place, so he didn’t die. To him devolved the full responsibility of the farm. He moved his feelers in little circles — he felt everything before he lifted it. Sometimes he worried me because he rested by tucking his abdomen up under himself, and I thought maybe he was winding down, but no — I dripped in a little water, and his feelers began going, and he went into a rain-avoidance routine, hurrying down to a dry tunnel. Or I would breathe on the plastic where he was, and he would sense the warmth and move an antenna, then turn and cling to the fogged-over part of the plastic.
“Is the ant still alive?” Phoebe asked one day. She was wearing two aprons over her dress and a pink blanket over her head, surmounted by a fez hat. I said yes, he was still alive. She said she was sorry that the other ants had died. “When we first got them, they were nice little ants.”
For two days I forgot about Fidel, and then, in the middle of the night, I remembered him. I shined a flashlight on him, sure that I would find that he was no more. He looked dusty. I dripped in some water and a cracker crumb — an earlier crumb had a fine haze of mold on it — and spoke encouragingly to him. And he moved. I was interested by the ends of his legs, which I thought must be wearing away with all that scrambling over sand boulders. He had learned to brace himself against the plastic as he maneuvered an ant body up an incline. Moving ant bodies had become his whole life.
And finally he did die, as every ant will. I kept his farm, however, the legacy of tunnels and graveyards that he had completely rebuilt after he had become the sole representative of his civilization. For two years it stood on a table in my office. When we moved, I packed it in a box, wrapped carefully in white packers’ paper. But I wasn’t too surprised when I unpacked it and saw that all the tunnels were gone — the ant farm was now just loose sand with some dirt specks in it.