Cold Quiet Country (18 page)

“I’m going to leave you for the wild dogs,” he said. “The coyotes.”

I bolted into the woods. The first couple steps were awkward, on someone else’s legs, but I got my stride, and after twenty steps, I hadn’t heard a sound but my footfalls on snow-covered leaves, and I glanced backward quick. Burt was still there at the edge of the field, hunched, grinning.

“I’m going to find you at Haynes’s, boy! An’ run you through a grinder!”

I ran until my lungs burned and I had to stop to get my bearings. I’d never been in that neck of the woods before, and though I knew there was a lake somewhere, and I was headed roughly toward town when I set out, the woods jumbled my cardinal directions and I stopped to find the sun. There was no sound save my breathing and I thought about Burt’s threat to find me at Haynes’s and all the havoc a madman could wreak with a meat-cutting bandsaw and a couple of cleavers—but in the end, if two men go at it in the butcher shop, you just want to avoid being the one who dies first. Same as anyplace else.

The other thing I thought while I caught my breath was that Burt would take his frustrations out on Gwen. Maybe that afternoon, maybe that night. He’d tell her I was gone forever; he might hint I was dead.

Sometimes a man has to trust that the person he can’t communicate with knows his heart, and that he’ll come through. She’d already told me to leave once, and instead, I came for her with a ring. She was cool enough to keep her mouth shut and weather whatever storm came her way. I just hoped her heart was strong enough to remember that I wouldn’t abandon her. I don’t know how it works when a girl is abused, whether she gets stronger or weaker. I bet some go stark raving mad. I had to trust that for Gwen, her trials had made her tougher.

After I had my wind and a good sense of location, I made a line for Haynes’s. If Burt was there waiting, I’d face him, but meantime there was no sense in thinking about it. I had to consider my next move: rescuing Gwen.

I decided I’d gather what little I owned, carry it back to the woods, and wait for nightfall. Then I’d rouse her at her window, and if she wanted to take off, we’d leave right then. If not, I’d do what she asked. If winter was too forbidding and she didn’t want to head to town and catch a bus with barely enough money to cross a couple states in style, we’d wait. But it was going to be her choice. She was the one that was suffering because I’d felt obliged to ask Burt’s permission.

Haynes’s shed used to be for tools and general mechanical repair purposes. It came furnished with a workbench I’d cleared off for a hotplate and some things I’d accumulated. Below was a canvas bag stuffed with wrenches that smelled of old oil, rust, dirt, and some kind of hardy mildew. I emptied the corroded tools and turned the bag inside out and knocked the dirt from it. I had a couple extra sets of underclothes, and a copy of Bartleby that I’d picked up for a nickel a few weeks before. I rolled them into a blanket and stuffed it into the bag. If Gwen was desperate enough to run under these circumstances, then I was desperate enough to go with her, and even steal a satchel, but it wouldn’t be me doing the providing. You can’t put yourself in a situation that bad and not bank on a little help from the Almighty.

Whether He’ll ante up is the thing you never know.

I cooked some side meat and filled up on that and a can of pork and beans. Everybody knows there’s no pork with the beans. I thought afterward maybe I should have thought of a different meal. If Gwen went with me, she’d soon second-guess herself on account of my smell. But deep down I figured she wouldn’t go with me into the cold. She wouldn’t want to leave everything she knew, bad as it was.

Leaving was more difficult than I’d have imagined just a year ago. Of course, when I learned about my father, I was ready to go find him.

I was nineteen years old. Mister Sharps told me he’d been waiting for me to go. He wasn’t quite so blunt. I’d been helping out around the Youth Home, and Mister Sharps had become my father like he was father to fifty or sixty other boys. Though he took interest in my welfare, his love was assailed every day by dozens of greedy boys who would improvise attention-getting tricks. Toby habitually killed frogs and planted them throughout the schoolhouse where their stink would generate the most frustration and remain longest hidden—heating vents, or behind a teacher’s desk drawers, so that every time she sought a pencil or tape, she about gagged. That was Toby. George, a small fellow, started fights. His motto was to attack, and while he started out getting licked all the time, he became a dangerous foe, from sheer practice and meanness. Another boy, Eddy, was a master nose-picker. The rumor was that the
Guinness Book of World Records
had a two-inch booger in it, and Eddy sought fame as the mucus-mining boy who could top it. Dried evidence of his dedication decorated the bottoms of several school desks, the restroom, and the chain-link fence outside the play area. He kept a pint Ball jar on hand to preserve any boogers he thought might earn a place in
Guinness
’s hallowed pages.

Rarely would a family come to Mister Sharps and request a boy, and when they did, it was the youngest that went. Most of us grew up without hope and without needing it but nonetheless hungry to feel something we’d only been able to imagine. It was toughest for the boys who arrived after family misfortune. One, Henry, arrived shortly before I left. He’d lost his arm and his parents in an automobile accident when he was ten and lived with his grandmother until she died. At twelve, he joined us. He sat in the play yard and brooded over an open book. I watched. He never turned the pages. Being older and somewhat in charge, I sat beside him, and eventually, since I didn’t say anything, he said to me, “How old were you when you came here?”

“Zero,” I said. “My mother gave me to Mister Sharps directly.”

“If someone cut your arm off, you’d know it.” I thought he was getting fresh but before I put him in check, he continued. “You don’t know what to miss.”

“I got an idea,” I said.

“That isn’t the same.”

He turned the page of his book. I patted his shoulder and left, but what he’d said stayed with me.

Mister Sharps gave me the idea of what I’d missed.

He taught me to shoot a .22 caliber rifle and showed me how to bag a gray squirrel or rabbit every time I drew a bead. He relied on me to bring in game, and graduated me to hunting deer with a .308. But I only hunted what was in season and meticulously stayed within the bag limits. Mister Sharps didn’t have a shotgun, so he taught me to hunt grouse and ringneck with the .22 short. I was never so proficient that I took a bird on the wing with every shot. But one out of three? Maybe.

Not entirely bad, Sharps said.

He also taught me to drive his car, but never in an official capacity, or with a license. Since I was useful around the Youth Home, bringing in a steady stream of game and doing other chores, and being a cooling influence on the younger boys, and also because I kept out of trouble, Sharps let me linger long after the usual age for boys to go. At seventeen, many joined the military. By eighteen, most every one had finished school and wanted a job, and a few even went to college by way of scholarships. Sharps encouraged me to apply to the finest universities, said it would be the greatest waste of a brain he’d ever seen to have me hunt animals and read library books the rest of my life—and besides, there wasn’t a book left in the orphanage I hadn’t read other than that blessed
Moby Dick
. He said a man owed his best achievements to himself first, and if he didn’t have any personal ambition, ought to be productive to improve society—and if neither compelled him, he was useless as goose poop on a pump handle, and there was nothing to be done for him.

Finally, Sharps sat me down in his office one day last summer and said, “Gale, it’s time for you to make your life. It’s time for you to go.”

“I want to know about my mother,” I said.

Sharps removed his glasses. Pinched the bridge of his nose, but I saw the frown behind his hand. “Is that really important, Gale? When you have your whole life ahead of you?”

“I want to know why I’m here. Someone made a decision.”

“The circumstances? Is that it? You want to know why?”

“That’s right.”

“If you would have made the same decision your mother made, would your life have more value?”

I shook my head. “I want to know. That’s all.”

“I’ve seen it go both ways,” Sharps said. “No matter what I tell you, you came from the same place, and you have the same bright future. Why does it matter? In my years here, many young men have asked for their stories. I’ve always believed in telling them, because a man’s history belongs to him. But if you can, I’d like for you to forget that you want to know. Does the bear cub care that his father wandered in from another county? These things are immaterial.”

“Did you know your mother? Your father?” I said.

“I did.”

“Were they immaterial?”

He looked out the window for a long time. I didn’t let up on gazing at him, knowing that if I turned away, he’d feel less pressure. But as long as I stared, he was on the spot. No matter how he wriggled, I wouldn’t let him off without confessing my past.

He finally met my eye.

“I will tell you what I know, Gale. But I fear you will take an incomplete story and fill in the blanks with your imagination, and you will invariably guess wrong. You will fill in the blanks with everything that could hurt you instead of everything that adds meaning and promise. We remember the bad, and if we don’t remember, we invent. So before I tell you, promise me you will always favor yourself with absolution for wrongs which were not yours and for which no one holds you accountable.”

“I promise.”

“You are bound to this promise. It is your word. Even if your spirits are down, even if you are tired, you are bound to your word.”

“My origin must be a very bad story.”

He waved his hand. Looked away. Paused.

“An unsubstantiated story. Your mother was a good woman who didn’t cause the trouble she found herself in…and did her best to be responsible. She was a good woman.”

“Tell me.”

“I’ll tell you some.”

“Tell me all.”

“You tell me when to stop.”

“Please…”

“She came to me with a baby swaddled in her arms. She passed this child to me. I was surprised, thinking she only wanted to ask questions, and here a baby brayed in my arms. You were a noisy one. A hellion, Missus Sharps said. Blue-faced from yelling. Some children are quiet for years, and when they learn to talk, they are never again quiet. You were the opposite. Always irritated and ever willing to make sure we knew. But when you learned to talk, you ceased communicating. You were indrawn and—”

“Who was she?”

“I can’t tell you her name. I don’t recall.”

“Gary,” I said. “You have to know her name. It has to be on a form or something.”

He studied me. I’d never said his first name in nineteen years. No boy ever said his first name, even behind his back.

“The laws are clear, Gale. I cannot tell you her name. And she doesn’t live around here anymore. She placed you in my arms and disappeared.”

“Who was she?”

“I don’t know anything but what she told me. She was poor, and alone, and from the East. She was passing through on her way to California, where she hoped family would help her get established in life.”

“Passing through and decided to drop off her baby?”

“Not exactly. She was passing through when she got pregnant and stayed in the area until she delivered you.”

“And then she moved on.”

“Right.”

“Why would she do that?”

“She had no intention of getting pregnant, and the family that awaited her…they wouldn’t have understood.”

“What family doesn’t understand being in a family way?”

“I can’t describe them. I don’t know. I’m telling you what she told me. It wouldn’t have been fair to you as a baby for me to argue with your mother when she’d come to find a better future for you. Her actions…were an unselfish act of love.”

I nodded. “Who was my father?”

“Your mother didn’t tell me. She only said she was passing through a neighboring town and was hauled into jail for being a tramp. And it was there, she said, that a man…took advantage of her.”

“Rape?”

His eyes flashed to the wall, then the window.

“I’m the son of a rapist?”

“I don’t know that. She might have been trying to save face. The social pressures on an unwed mother—”

“She said she was raped?”

“That’s what she said.”

“Who?”

“I don’t recall.”

“She told you a name!”

“I don’t know.”

“WHO?”

“Gale, dammit, I can’t tell you. Why? What will you do? Revenge? It doesn’t matter. You’re here. You’re talented and smart and will have whatever success in life you choose. You can start a business. Learn a trade. Be a teacher. You can do anything. The man who made you isn’t you.”

“But I’m him!” I said, and stood. “I’m him. Who am I?”

Sharps pushed back on his chair and leaned forward so that his elbows found support on his knees. Shaking his head, he said, “Who runs a jail, Gale?”

“What town?”

“Bittersmith.”

* * *

I waited in the woods where Burt had planned to brain me with a log. When dark came I had a little fire going under a rock overhang in a hollow. Pine trees muted the wind. The stone wall reflected the heat and by the time the smoke bent up around the four-foot-wide rock roof and drifted through the grove, it was so diffuse no one would ever suspect where it came from. Not that anyone would be out after dark on Christmas night into the woods, miles from any home but the Haudeserts and the Sundays. Everyone was with family, eating ham baked with nutmeg cloves, and mashed potatoes drowning in sweet ham gravy.

It would be several hours before the Haudeserts bedded down, when it’d be safe to approach the house. I scavenged wood to keep the fire bright and hot and sat on a rock with my feet close to the coals, drying my boot leather. You can go a while with good leather before the ice and snow work through the polish, but once your feet are wet they’re cold.