Collected stories, p.26
Collected Stories, page 26
The bay of meadow slipped behind; the woods came close again, beeches and maples leaning inward, black spruces edging into the narrow way. A dead-windowed house stared at them suddenly from a clearing; across the road a barn had collapsed in a spiral of timbers and twisted roof.
They nosed on across the almost-wiped-out opening and into more woods, where hazel scrub scraped the sides of the car and poplars made yellow intervals like sunlight. The road went steadily up, gullied by rains. It bore only wagon tracks now; the automobile tracks had stopped with the first barn they had passed.
On the left a barbed-wire fence came out of the brush and paralleled the road. Through the thinning woods something glittered in the direct sun, and as they pulled out into another farmyard Margaret saw that there were tin patches on the barn’s roof like bright metal teeth in a mouth, and that the gray side of the barn was streaked with new yellow boards. The slanting gable window of the house was stuffed with burlap bags, but there were signs of busyness around the yard: a homemade saw rig with an old car hooked on for power, and under the loft window of the barn a new homemade hay wagon with automobile wheels and two flat tires.
Ross stopped. A woman and a child were already on their way out to the road. The woman wore burst and run-over shoes, and her hair needed combing, but she had a rather sweet, serene face. The child was wizened, sharp-featured; she hugged her skinny elbows as she walked along beside her mother.
For an instant Margaret had an almost shamefaced image of how she and Ross must appear to these isolated farm people—the expensive glitter and shine of the car, the hand-blocked yellow scarf around her own hair, the silver watch band on Ross’s wrist.
“Hello,” she said, and smiled.
The woman smiled back. “Guess you folks are lost.”
“Not exactly,” Margaret said. “We were driving around and found this road and decided to see where it went.”
“Used to go on over to Island Pond.”
“Doesn’t it any more?”
“Runs smack into the woods and stops!” the child said.
The words came in a burst and ended in a startled hiccup of laughter. Looking closer, Margaret saw that the girl was not a child at all. She couldn’t have been five feet tall or weighed more than eighty pounds, but her face, when you looked at all closely, was not a child’s face. It would have been impossible to say how old she was. But the thing that burned behind the pinched features and the shy eyes was no child’s spirit. It was sharp and tart, medicinal as woods’ herbs.
“What’s happened on this road?” Ross said. “People all move away?”
The woman bent forward, her arms folded conversationally “Seem’s if they did. We ain’t been here but three years ourselves. We lost our other place, over by Willoughby—it was three years, wa’n’t it, Sary? Your last year in high school, and while you was goin’ out. Yes, three years. Seem’s if we hardly moved in. The road was closed long before we come. Used to be a carriage road run from the four corners, where you folks turned off, clean into Island Pond. We’re the only folks on it on this side any more. Us and Will Canby’s boy, back down a piece.”
“How far on can we get?” Margaret asked.
“Maybe a half-mile. Up to the schoolhouse anyway.”
“Past that,” the girl said. “Up to the orchard.”
“You sure, Sary? In a car?”
An expression that was almost disdain crossed Sary’s face. “I know, Mumma. We used to go up there when I was goin’ out.”
“That was a year,” her mother said doubtfully.
“ ’Tisn’t changed,” Sary said.
The mother regarded her daughter briefly with an expression that seemed to Margaret at once anxious and complacent. “Sary had a disappointment,” she said mildly. “For over a year she was a-goin’ out …”
“Oh, Mumma!” Sary said, and swung half around. There was a pause.
“I’m sorry my mister’s not home to meet you folks,” the woman said. “He went in to see if he could get some kind of a gear for his car. He’s had it all over the shed for two weeks—ain’t been able to get together all the parts.”
“Maybe we’ll have another chance,” Margaret said. “We’re staying through the winter. My husband’s a painter, and we’ll be driving all over after pictures.”
“Well, now,” the woman said.
She stepped back as Ross shifted gears, and she and her daughter stood together looking after the car. Margaret waved, and they both lifted their hands. Then a lane of ancient maples, lopsided and burly and with leaves that stained the sun into puddles of red and gold, cut them off.
“I gather we’re going on to the head of navigation,” Ross said.
“Just to see,” she said. “Doesn’t it give you a funny feeling to think that twenty or thirty years ago this was a carriage road with farms all along it, and now it’s just a dead-end ghost road in the wilderness?”
“Ghosts are only interesting up to a point,” Ross said. “I’d rather paint people than ghosts.”
“Even funny little people like those women?”
He gave her a straight, surprised look. “What was funny about them?”
“I don’t know,” she said, feeling obscurely rebuked. “Maybe they weren’t.”
In the dooryard of another abandoned farm, just above the boarded-up shell of a one-room school, a tall elm had split and blocked the road. Below the house they looked down a gentle slope through gnarled apple trees to a multiple fold of the hills.
Against the crawling edge of woods and the eyeless emptiness of the farmhouse, against the whole irrational patternlessness of decay, the orchard kept its design. Though the tops were unpruned and overgrown, the trunks marched where a farmer’s hands had set them to march, and among the thinning leaves hung an unbelievably heavy crop of runty apples, reddening for no harvest.
Ross sat still a moment, looking, and then with a grunt reached into the back seat for the easel and water colors.
While he painted she took a walk up past the split elm, up the road which had once been the street of a little village of a half-dozen houses. There was a church, as blind-windowed as the schoolhouse down the road, one corner of its steeple collapsed so that the squat spire tilted drunkenly forward. There were four houses scattered up the road for a quarter of a mile, all of them gutted, their shingles overgrown with moss, their sheds sagging open. In an old sugarhouse she found, stacked carefully on a landing above the rusty pan and arch, several dozen old-fashioned wooden sap buckets, handmade, hooped with twisted pliable wood rather than with iron. They seemed as ancient as artifacts out of a buried city; she took a pair of them along for flowerpots.
At the head of the village she came through a broken rail fence into the burying ground. A half-dozen graves had pretentious monuments above them; most had only rounded headboards of stone or wood. There were dates as early as 1778, but the latest date she found was on the grave of a child who had died in 1914.
In the open sunlight she sat on a gravestone and thought how it might have been to be the last family left on such a road, and to bury your child among the dead who had been gathering for a hundred and fifty years, and then to move away and leave the road empty behind you. She imagined how it might have seemed to some old grandmother who had lived in the village for eighty years, watching the hill farms go dead like lights going out, watching the decay spread inward from the remote farms to the near ones, to the place next door.
There would have been attempts to bring farms back; the banks would have found renters. But after a while the renters would be gone too. There would be auctions and then empty barns, empty houses. There would be a day when you would come to your door and see nothing alive, hear no human sound, in your whole village.
She stood up uneasily. A hawk was methodically coursing the meadow beyond the graveyard. It was very still. She felt oppressed by the wide silent sky and afraid of the somehow threatening edge where meadow met woods, where not a leaf stirred but where something watched. The thought of Ross painting down in the orchard, abstracted, his pipe in his teeth, was like the thought of home on a cold night. She went back down the blighted road carrying her archaic sap buckets. On every house and building she passed, failure and death were posted like contagion warnings.
The moment she got where she could see him at his easel down in the orchard everything was safe again. She turned off and came through the old trees, running her fingers over the welted scars of prunings, picking a runty apple and rubbing it on the sleeve of her flannel shirt. It took a lovely waxy shine, for all its warped shape, and she experimentally bit into it, half expecting the woody bitter pucker of a wild apple.
Instead, the flesh of the apple cracked firmly, and juice spurted out onto her chin—sweet, golden, with a strange wild tang.
“Ross,” she called. “For heaven’s sake, you know what?”
She gathered some of the apples and took them over to him, talking as she came, eating her apple and waving it. The whole performance was a gabble.
Ross laughed at her. “Somewhere I’ve read about this,” he said. “An excited woman with an apple.”
“But just taste one!” she said. “They’re wonderful!”
“That’s what the other woman said.”
“Oh, get excited for once,” she said, and threw an apple at him. He made a gagging face and bit into it.
“Isn’t that delicious?” she said.
His munching paused, and he leered. “Suddenly,” he said, “I perceive that you are naked. Go find a fig tree.”
“Oh, hush! You know what I am going to do? I’m going to fill the whole back end of the car with these, and we’re going to take them down and have Robidoux make them into cider.”
Ross threw the gnawed core away and wiped his fingers on his jeans. “Okay. Make that your project for the afternoon.”
“You’re about as sensitive as an oak burl,” she said. “Who ever told you you should be an artist?”
“It was my father’s dying wish,” he said.
She took her two sap buckets and went to picking, staggering the full buckets up to dump them into the turtleback and then going into the orchard for more. The sun was mellow through the gnarled trees, the air was winy with apples. She entirely forgot her ominous sense of being watched, and in the orchard’s ripe warmth she did not remember that she was still on the road of failure and decay—not until she looked up from pouring a bucketful of apples into the car and saw with a jarring shock the thin girl from down the road. In the moment of irritation that followed the shock it seemed to her that the girl had a face like a jackal—something that sniffed around dead campfires and rocked-over graves.
“Look’s if you was takin’ home some apples,” the girl said.
“I hope nobody minds. We took it for granted nobody picked them any more.”
“Nobody minds,” the girl said. “They just fall off and rot, mostly.”
Margaret picked up her buckets and started back. The girl came along. They started picking from a tree behind Ross, and the girl looked curiously at the picture growing on the easel. With her starved collarbones and peaked face, she herself was part of the general decay, and Margaret asked a question that might have been unfortunate.
“How do you like living up here? Isn’t it sort of haunted, living near a dead village?”
The girl’s eyes flashed up, quick and shy. “ ’Tisn’t haunted. I used to come up here considerable with my young man when I was goin’ out.”
“Really? You mean you had dates up here, in this place?”
“Went out for near a year,” the girl said, and her look touched Margaret again, an odd look of importance or pride—the look a little girl might wear when showing off her dolls. “He was real interested. Mumma says she never saw a young man more interested.”
Down at the easel Ross turned half around to listen. For some reason Margaret felt that she should move slowly and speak quietly, as she would around a nervous horse. “Don’t you go out with him any more?”
The girl’s thin lips closed down; her eyes were on Margaret’s face as if watching the effect of her words.
“I had a disappointment,” she said flatly.
“Oh, I’m sorry,” Margaret said.
The girl went on busily gathering apples. “Went and got married.”
“He did? To someone else?”
“That’s what.”
“Where has he gone to now?”
“Hasn’t gone nowhere. Lives right down below us there.”
“And he’s still your only neighbor?” Margaret said. “That must be terribly hard.”
The girl’s glance was direct, a little puzzled. “We still neighbor,” she said. “Won’t for long, though. He’s aimin’ to get another place.”
“And then you’ll be the only family on the road.”
“E-yeah,” the girl said.
Margaret went on picking, watching the girl sidelong. Like a little brown bird hopping in a garden after all the other birds have gone south, she went around under the gnarled trees—reaching, stretching, tiptoeing for apples free from worms—and for a moment she seemed the saddest thing on the whole sad road.
The leaf-stained sunlight tranced Margaret’s eyes, and she saw the orchard and the old buildings on a summer night, a chilly Vermont summer night after chores—the dim flare of northern lights in the sky and the blackboard darkness at the edge of the woods scratched with chalk lines of light by the fireflies.
She saw this girl and her young man under the old orchard trees, the only young things in a place of age and death. Especially, and with pitiless clarity, she saw this girl, too frail for love, too childish or too prematurely old, too skimped and bony-chested, lying in his arms with her peaked face upturned for kisses and her scrawny little body quiet under the farm boy’s big hard hands.
The single chance that her lifetime would offer her, the one moment when pollen might blow from stamen to pistil, when the accident of fertility might cheat a sterile heritage. And something had gone wrong. She wondered what. Any trivial thing might have done it. Probably the girl herself didn’t know. Perhaps it was only that she herself wasn’t adequate, that skin and bones and an eagerness for love were not enough.
Ross’s picture was finished, and as he stepped back Margaret saw that he had moved the house down into the orchard for dramatic contrast, to get the sagging corner, the broken window, the gaunt decay of the entrance, into the same composition with the fruited orchard retreating in perfect order to the edge of the folded hills. The girl came close to look.
“It’s real like,” she said. “A body’d know it in a minute.”
With difficulty Margaret shook herself out of the mood.
“I wonder how long,” she said, “how many years an orchard like this will go on living and bearing?”
“Years and years,” the girl said. “It’s wonderful how apple trees hang on sometimes.”
Wiping a brush, Ross turned his easy warm smile on her. “How is it in the spring? Pretty?”
It was surprising how responsive her wry little face was. “Oh, land, just like a posy bed! It don’t have very big apples any more, but it’s a sight in the spring.”
She stood with folded arms, as her mother had stood by the side of the car in the farmyard. Margaret, for all her watching, could find no trace of bitterness or frustration or anger in the girl. Starved as it was, the gnomish face was serene.
“Springtime, we used to come up here most every night, when I was goin’ out,” she said.
The Blue-Winged Teal
Still in waders, with the string of ducks across his shoulder, he stood hesitating on the sidewalk in the cold November wind. His knees were stiff from being cramped up all day in the blind, and his feet were cold. Today, all day, he had been alive; now he was back ready to be dead again.
Lights were on all up and down the street, and there was a rush of traffic and a hurrying of people past and around him, yet the town was not his town, the people passing were strangers, the sounds of evening in this place were no sounds that carried warmth or familiarity. Though he had spent most of his twenty years in the town, knew hundreds of its people, could draw maps of its streets from memory, he wanted to admit familiarity with none of it.
Then what was he doing here, in front of this poolhall loaded down with nine dead ducks? What had possessed him in the first place to borrow gun and waders and car from his father and go hunting? If he had wanted to breathe freely for a change, why hadn’t he kept right on going? What was there in this place to draw him back? A hunter had to have a lodge to bring his meat to and people who would be glad of his skill. He had this poolhall and his father, John Lederer, Prop.
He stepped out of a woman’s path and leaned against the door. Downstairs, in addition to his father, he would find old Max Schmeckebier, who ran a cheap blackjack game in the room under the sidewalk. He would find Giuseppe Sciutti, the Sicilian barber, closing his shop or tidying up the rack of Artists and Models and The Nudist. He would probably find Billy Hammond, the night clerk from the Windsor Hotel, having his sandwich and beer and pie, or moving alone around a pool table, whistling abstractedly, practicing shots. If the afternoon blackjack game had broken up, there would be Navy Edwards, dealer and bouncer for Schmeckebier. At this time of evening there might be a few counter customers and a cop collecting his tribute of a beer or that other tribute that Schmeckebier paid to keep the cardroom open.
And he would find, sour contrast with the bright sky and the wind of the tule marshes, the cavelike room with its back corners in darkness, would smell that smell compounded of steam heat and cue-chalk dust, of sodden butts in cuspidors, of coffee and meat and beer smells from the counter, of cigarette smoke so unaired that it darkened the walls. From anywhere back of the middle tables there would be the pervasive reek of toilet disinfectant. Back of the counter his father would be presiding, throwing the poolhall light switch to save a few cents when the place was empty, flipping it on to give an air of brilliant and successful use when feet came down the stairs past Sciutti’s shop.
