Bitch Creek (9 page)

Calhoun guessed that somebody—probably the farmer who had lived on the hilltop, if he was a farmer—had built himself a milldam on the stream that ran through the marshy area, creating a little pond—perhaps for power, perhaps to collect water for his livestock, or maybe both. He'd built a bridge over the dam, so that he could drive his tractors and trucks all the way in from the dirt road to his place on the hilltop.

Most farmers built close to the road for the obvious practicality of it. But this one had chosen to locate himself as deep into the woods as he could get. Taking into account all of its twists and turns, the trail from the dirt road to the top of the hill would be about a mile long, Calhoun estimated—half a mile to the stream, and another half mile to the dwelling. It was a lot of road to keep open in the wintertime and in mud season, a lot of work for a notoriously pragmatic Yankee farmer. In fact, another town road ran along behind the hillside where the house had been built. A driveway out to this road would've been just a couple hundred yards long. But there was no indication of any old driveway on the map.

Calhoun took off his glasses and rubbed his eyes. He was not particularly interested in the man who lived—or used to live—on the hilltop a mile from the road. He was interested in the whereabouts of Lyle McMahan.

He shut the gazetteer. Ralph, who had been lying by the door, lifted his head and looked at him.

“Sorry, pal,” said Calhoun. “I'm leaving, and don't know where I'll end up or how long I'll be gone. You stay here and answer the phone.”

Ralph dropped his chin back onto his paws, sighed, and closed his eyes.

Calhoun snagged a Coke and a couple of apples from the refrigerator. He considered bringing a fly rod. If nothing else, he could give Fred Green's secret trout pond a try.

But he had no heart for fishing. Not this time. This was a hunting trip.

If he were headed for the big woods up north, he'd bring his compass and waterproof matches and maps and a sidearm. But there were no big woods around Keatsboro. It was all old farmland, intersected with roads, some paved and some dirt, studded with apple orchards and cornfields and farmhouses and pretty New England village greens, more or less like Dublin. Even a flatlander from New Jersey or Connecticut would have trouble getting seriously lost in the woods of southwestern Maine.

So Calhoun gave Ralph a rawhide bone for companionship, tucked Lyle's gazetteer under his arm, carried his Coke and apples out to his truck, and headed for Keatsboro.

T
HEY
'
D RELEASED
Calhoun from the VA hospital five years earlier, on a bright Thursday morning in late March—spring in Virginia already. He'd headed instinctively north on Interstate 81 in his new secondhand Ford pickup, drawn by the Maine images that ricocheted around in his brain. The grass along the highway in Pennsylvania was so green it hurt his eyes. Shrubs were flowering and dandelions bloomed and woodchucks sat up on their haunches in the fields, and he was so eager to get there that he stopped only twice—first outside of Scranton and then again somewhere in Connecticut, for gas and coffee and a couple of Hershey bars.

He'd taken the first exit off the Interstate as soon as he crossed the bridge over the Piscataqua River and entered Eliot, Maine. It wasn't as if he'd planned to take that exit or had any conscious reason to. Nothing in his brain actually told him to click on his directional signal, slow down, turn the steering wheel. He'd had no specific destination in his mind—just Maine.

He'd followed secondary highways and then back roads, meandering through the countryside in a more-or-less northwesterly direction.

The Maine meadows were still winter-flattened and brown. Patches of old snow huddled in the woods and along the stone walls, and the ice in the ponds had not yet melted.

In the late afternoon he drove through Berwick and Sanford and Alfred and Shapleigh, sometimes not even knowing what town he was in, and then he came to a stop sign at a crossroads. A white Congregational church in need of paint hunkered on one corner. In front of it stood a big glass-faced bulletin board with the message:
CHRIST THE LORD IS RIS
'
N TODAY
.
ALLELUIA
.
EASTER SERVICES
, 10:00
SUNDAY
.

Beside the church sat a ramshackle mom-and-pop store with gas pumps out front and an old Coca-Cola sign over the door. A big square fieldstone building stood diagonally across from the church. A sign over the door read
DUBLIN TOWN HALL.

Calhoun knew, although he didn't know how he knew, that he'd come to the end of his journey and the beginning of his own resurrection. This town felt like home.

He'd pumped himself a tankful of gas at the mom-and-pop store, then went inside to pay. A bell dinged when he opened the door. Coming out of the brilliant afternoon sunshine, it took his eyes a minute to adjust to the dimness inside. It smelled oddly familiar, a nostalgic combination of vinegar and sharp cheddar cheese and propane, and he flashed on a kitchen, a white-haired woman in a flowered apron standing at the stove, children seated around a bare wooden table . . .

“Help you, son?”

Calhoun blinked. Behind the counter a bald man in a blue flannel shirt and red suspenders was perched on a stool eating a donut. He was old—somewhere in his late seventies, Calhoun guessed—but he had alert, intelligent eyes.

Calhoun went over, took out his wallet, and gave the man a twenty-dollar bill. He'd paid for the pickup with the bank check and arranged to take his change in cash. Now he had a wad of bills worth fifteen thousand dollars in his pants pocket and nine hundred more in his wallet. “I filled it up,” he said to the man. “Eighteen dollars' worth.”

The old man cocked his head and peered at Calhoun through his steel-rimmed glasses. “You ain't from around here, are you?”

“No, sir,” Calhoun said. “My name's Calhoun. They call me Stoney.”

“I'm Jacob Barnes.” Barnes opened his cash register, put Calhoun's twenty in, and removed two ones, which he slapped down on the counter. “They was some Calhouns had a farm up on the county road,” he said. “Got burnt out in the fire, never come back. That was before your time, I reckon.” He laid his forearms on the counter and leaned forward.

“When was the fire?” Calhoun said.

“October of forty-seven.”

“That was before my time, all right. Different Calhouns, I guess.”

Barnes shrugged. “I expect so. It warn't much of a farm to start with. They raised chickens and pigs and kids, all of 'em running around up there in the mud so's you couldn't tell which was which.”

Calhoun smiled. “That does sound like my family,” he said, although in fact, he had no particular reason to think so. “Can you direct me to a real estate agent?”

Barnes jerked his head in a northerly direction. “Talk to Millie Dobson. She's the only realtor in town. You lookin' to buy?”

“Yes,” he said, although until he'd said it, he hadn't known that it was the truth.

Calhoun had followed Jacob Barnes's directions and found Millie Dobson's gray-shingled bungalow squatting close to the roadside. The sign out front read
M
.
DOBSON
:
REAL ESTATE
,
TOWN CLERK
,
NOTARY PUBLIC
,
FAX
. A green Jeep Cherokee sat in a small pea-stone parking area, and he pulled his truck in beside it.

He climbed the front steps and rang the bell. Some kind of loud rock music was playing inside, and he waited several minutes before the music abruptly stopped and the door opened, revealing a woman with short black hair, dark eyes, a lean, angular body, and a towel around her neck. She was wearing sweatpants and a powder-blue T-shirt that bore the message
DUBLIN FAIR
1997
—THE WORLD'S BIGGEST PUMPKIN.
She was, Calhoun guessed, around forty.

“Exercising,” she said. “I'm Millie Dobson. What can I do for you?”

“My name's Calhoun,” he said. “I'd like to buy some land.”

She pulled open the door. “You came to the right place, Mr. Calhoun.” She laughed. “Hell, you came to the only place. Come on in.”

Her living room doubled as her office and exercise studio. Against the front wall stood a big oak desk with a computer and fax machine. It was flanked by a pair of shoulder-high file cabinets. A bookcase in the corner held a CD player and a television with a VCR, and beside it was a treadmill and a rowing machine.

She brought them coffee and fetched a thick photo album from her desk drawer, and they sat side by side on her sofa.

Calhoun told her he'd come from Virginia with all his savings in his pocket, hoping to buy a secluded piece of property to build on. He made it up as he went along, since he wasn't sure what he really wanted, but trusted that what came out of his mouth would be true.

“Why here?” she said. “If you don't mind me asking.”

He shrugged. “I like this part of the world. Small towns. Maine. Away from the seacoast. Always have.”

“You're from away,” she said. “I hear it in your voice. I'm from Madrid originally.” She pronounced it with the accent on the first syllable.
MAD-rid.
She smiled. “That's the town in Maine, not Spain. How about you?”

“South Carolina,” he said.

She nodded as if she knew he was hiding something and it was all right with her. “Can you describe what you have in mind?”

“Something in the woods. With water. It's got to have water.”

“Pond or stream?”

“Either one's fine with me.”

She frowned. “Lemme think for a minute . . .” Then she snapped her fingers. “There's a piece of land few miles north of here, been sittin' there for ages. Nice little brook runs through it. The folks who had it got burned out, and no one ever rebuilt on it.”

Calhoun remembered what Jacob Barnes had said about a family of Calhouns being burned out in a fire and abandoning their place. “This place wouldn't be on the county road, would it?” he said.

Millie Dobson gave him a little frown, then said, “Yes, as a matter of fact, it is.”

“Can I see it?”

“Well,” she said, “people from New Jersey own that piece now. Don't know as it's even available. But I could check. Who knows? The right offer . . .” She shrugged. “Let me change my clothes, we'll go have a look at it.”

Fifteen minutes later they had parked Millie's Jeep at the end of an old overgrown tote road and begun walking. The roadway wound through several hundred yards of second-growth hardwood forest and ended at an old cellar hole. The fieldstone chimney was still standing, and the granite foundation looked solid. A pair of ruts led down the slope beyond the cellar hole to a pretty spring-fed brook, stopped at a burned-out bridge, then continued into the forest on the other side.

Millie said you wouldn't find it on any map, but the local folks called the brook Bitch Creek. The story was, someone had named it after a trout fly, Millie said, though she personally figured it was just some man naming it after his wife.

From somewhere in the recesses of his chaotic memory, Calhoun remembered a fly called the Bitch Creek Nymph.

If that were true, it probably meant there were trout living there. He liked that the little brook had a name. That seemed to give it a history. Calhoun was interested in history.

In fact, he liked everything about the place. He wanted to buy it. He felt like he'd come home.

He told Millie he'd tear down the old chimney and put it back together with the same stones. He'd build his house over the old foundation. He'd do the work himself, he said.

She asked if he was handy, and he said, “Yes,” and after he said it, he believed it was true.

Millie dickered with the people from New Jersey, and three weeks after leaving the hospital in Arlington, Virginia, Stoney Calhoun owned forty acres of overgrown farmland in Dublin, Maine, along with several hundred yards of Bitch Creek, a good fieldstone foundation, an almost-passable tote road, and what felt like a future.

For the first few months, he'd lived in a tent on the site of his new house. He woke with the birds every morning and worked until sunset. He cleared the tote road with a chain saw so delivery trucks could bring in lumber, and he opened up the hillside where his house would sit so the morning sun could stream in through the front windows and he'd be able to glimpse the silvery ribbon of Bitch Creek at the foot of the hill. Its gurgle was loud enough for even a one-eared man to hear, and it kept him company while he worked.

Gradually his hospital-softened body grew hard and lean. His thoughts became sharp and decisive, and now and then a piece of memory would fall into place.

He was burning slash on a misty afternoon late in May, leaning on his garden rake close to the smoke where the blackflies couldn't get at him, when an old Dodge Power Wagon came rumbling into the clearing.

The Power Wagon pulled up beside Calhoun's pickup, and a longlegged kid stepped out, lifted his hand in greeting, and sauntered over to where Calhoun was standing.

“Good day for burnin',” the boy said.

Calhoun had nodded, squinting at his fire.

“Guess you're Mr. Calhoun,” the boy persisted. “I'm Lyle. Lyle McMahan.” He held out his hand.

Calhoun glanced at it, then grasped it. “Didn't ask for any company that I recall,” he said.

Lyle McMahan had a ponytail and an earring, and he towered over Calhoun. “I used to catch trout from there,” he said, jerking his head toward Bitch Creek.

“Well, you can't anymore.”

The kid shrugged. “I've got plenty of other places. You're planning to build here, I understand.”

“That's right.”

“Lot of work for one man.”