Crossing to Safety (21 page)

Then Sally saves the day, saying quietly, “I’ll just go get some.” She starts toward the Big House. In the gray morning we stand around pretending nothing is the matter, there is only this trifling delay.

Very soon Sally is back with a box of tea bags. I cram it inside the top edge of my hamper, and we hook the hampers back over the saddle. Then the pup tents, sleeping bags, ground cloths, oats, axe, bucket. Then the covering tarp. Looking impenetrable, Sid throws a tense diamond hitch over the load. He has been practicing in his study when Charity thought she had him pinned down to scholarship.

“Are we finally ready?” he asks. “If we are, for God’s sake let’s go.”

“You go on,” Charity says. “We’ll catch up. We have to give the babies a hug that will last a whole week.”

“Couldn’t you have been doing that while we repacked?”

She chooses not to notice his surliness. Having won whatever it was she thought she had to win, she indulges what probably strikes her as his childish resentment, she sends him off with little business-like pats. “Wait for us at the Hazen Road,” she says, and then she notices the canes hanging from the limb of a maple. Sid and I hung them there an hour ago hoping to forget them. But Charity, smiling her most brilliant smile, unhooks them and hands them to me. “Don’t go off without your
protection.
”

The canes are bent willow things with spikes in their ends and
Lauterbrünnen
carved on their shafts. Charity must have bought a gross of them in Switzerland on their wedding trip, for the Madison house has a half dozen in its hall closet and every cottage in the compound has several. On this trip they have been declared compulsory. Pritchard, whose book on the outdoors Charity has been reading in preparation for the trip, recommends walking sticks, blackthorns, alpenstocks, or some other support for rough terrain and as a protection against hostile dogs.

Other suggestions of Pritchard’s include instructions on how to make a wooden leg out of a forked branch if you sprain your ankle or break a leg in the woods. Also instructions for what to do if you must set your broken leg before hobbling out on your forked stick. The thing you do is find a tree with a crotch a few feet above the ground, wedge the heel of your broken leg in this crotch, and throw yourself backward. This is like the old method of pulling a tooth by tying one end of a string to the tooth and the other end to a door-knob, and slamming the door. Sid and I had a good deal of fun with Pritchard while we packed last night. But here we are with our canes.

We walk two or three hundred yards before either of us speaks. Finally I say, “Sorry about the tea. I just must have mislaid it. I know we had it last night.”

“We had it this morning. But Charity goes by the book. And what a book!”

A western buckaroo, I share his scorn for people who go camping by the book, relying on the authority of some half-assed assistant scoutmaster whose total experience outdoors probably consists of two overnight hikes and a weekend in the Catskills. But we have just had that confrontation. The one who goes by Pritchard’s book is Sid’s wife, and I am wary. It is not my expedition. I am a guest here.

Still, I can’t help saying, “I have to admit I was hoping she was wrong.”

He gives me a strange look past Wizard’s ewe neck and bobbing head. “She’s never wrong,” he says.

At the four corners we turn up a dusty secondary road. Dust has whitened the ferns along the roadside, gypsy moths have built their tents in the chokecherry bushes, the meadow on the left is yellow with goldenrod, ice-blue with asters, stalky with mullein, rough with young spruce. Everything taller than the grass is snagged with the white fluff of milkweed. On the other side is a level hayfield, green from a second cutting. The woods at the far edge rise in a solid wall. In the yard of an empty farmhouse we sample apples off a gnarled tree. Worms in every one. But Wizard finds them refreshing, and blubbers cider as he walks.

We come up a long hill onto high ground just as the sun edges out of the clouds and touches a green whaleback ridge ahead. Beyond that, more hills, and beyond those the main range, gray-violet with haze. Almost as if making sure he is free from supervision, Sid sneaks a look back down the road we have come. I look too. Charity and Sally have just come into view at the corners, tiny at the end of the white road.

We turn back to the view ahead. “Too bad we couldn’t have waited to do this till October,” Sid says. “Some year we’re going to stay on through the color if I have to resign from Wisconsin to do it. In October those hills must be something.”

Slouching in his faded khaki, a lunch pack on his back and a machete at his belt, one hand holding Wizard’s lead rope and the other stabbing the cane’s spike into the gravel, he intones to the horizon:

“There is something in the autumn that is native to my blood, Touch of manner, hint of mood . . .”

How does it go? You don’t know it?

“And my lonely spirit thrills
To see the frosty asters like smoke upon the hills?”

Kind of a nice poem, one of those
Vagabondia
ones of Bliss Carman’s. Proper for the country and the occasion.”

He squints, remembering lines.

“There is something in October sets the gipsy blood astir.
We must rise and follow her
Where from every hill aflame
She calls and calls each vagabond by name.”

As I dream of a jail sentence, he dreams of vagabondage and irresponsibility, which would probably drive him crazy as fast as jail would drive me. But it is a fine morning for fantasy, and I say, “Why don’t we just keep on going?”

“Ha, wouldn’t I like to!”

“I’ve got forty dollars. The grub box is full. We could eat Wizard if we ran short. You could give poetry readings in the villages and I could write travel articles. We’d be like those traveling colonial painters who used to paint the children for a weekend’s room and board. And Charity’s got Pritchard in her pack to tell us how to survive in the wilderness.”

Mistake. He makes a sour face. Vagabondage has become bondage again.

We move to the side of the road to let an approaching pickup go by. Two heads show over the cab—a couple of kids standing up to stare, and why not? Here are two dudes with canes, leading a horse as high and humped as a camel. To them, we must look like something out of Exodus.

They rattle by, their dust swirls around us. The boys, hanging on to the cab top, are half-turned, still staring. Their teeth flash, they caper and make derisive gestures. I wave at them, but Sid stops, holding his cane as if it were a wet horse-biscuit somebody just handed him. He barks out a one-note laugh.

“Good God! To see ourselves as others see us. A couple of goddamned British gentlemen. All we need is gaiters.” He lifts the cane in the air. “Oh,
bugger
Pritchard and his bloody book!” He throws the cane fifty yards into the goldenrod.

Astonished, I keep my peace. Also my cane. As a matter of fact, I rather like the feel of it. But then, nobody is making me carry it.

On a stone wall, with dense smells of growth and mold and an autumnal tartness of vegetable decay in our nostrils, we sit and let Wizard crop the roadside grass. There is a drowsy sound of bumble-bees and flies. Brown crickets hop and crawl around our feet. On our left begins a dim track, more like a bay or opening in the woods than a road, that closes in after a hundred feet or so. A stone wall runs along it, disappearing into chokecherry and popple and mountain ash. Out of the scattered stones of the wall grow trees as thick as my thigh. Down the shaded opening where it deadends against woods in a patch of sun there is a quivering that might be a will-o’-wisp but is more likely a cloud of gnats.

Sid is telling me that during the Revolution, forces under Generals Bayley and Hazen cut a road through this wilderness from Newbury, on the Connecticut, to the flank of Jay Peak, on the Canadian border. The intention was an invasion of Canada that never came off. The result was a track that, like the Wilderness Road across the Cumberland Gap, became a road of settlement once the Revolution was over.

Some parts of the old Bayley-Hazen Road have been obliterated by modern highways, some have been used for generations as farm roads, some have been lost in the woods. Sid thinks this opening here, bordered by stone walls that nineteenth-century farmers built along it to fence fields long since gone back to trees, is one of the lost stretches.

On the map he shows me where the trace was cut up through Peacham, Danville, Walden, Hardwick; how it bent around Battell Pond and over the hill to Craftsbury; how it crossed the Black River Valley and the Lowell Mountains and entered the main range by way of Hazen’s Notch.

All this is news to me. For me, roads of settlement have always run east to west, and my private interest in them never took me east of Bent’s Fort, Colorado. But this history, and this country romantically returning to wilderness, speaks to Sid like bugles. He could not be more eager if the woods across there hid the sources of the Nile.

While he talks, he keeps looking back down the road to where Charity and Sally are coming. As usual, they pause now and then to ponder weeds, bugs, berries, or ferns. “Come on, come on!” Sid says in a voice like a crow’s; and then, looking at me sharply and laughing in an awkward insincere way, “She’d botanize on her mother’s grave.”

He is still sore from that scene at the loading, his nose is still bloody. But notice: When they are within a few hundred yards he stands up and goes along the wall picking late raspberries and ripe chokecherries, and when they chug up, pink with exercise, exaggeratedly puffing, he goes to them, Charity first, and holds out his handful of berries as if expiating something.

“Why,
thank
you!” she says, extravagantly pleased. “Oh, don’t they taste good, and natural? I love their
pucker.
”

In a few minutes we start again, Charity now in front with Sid, Sally and I leading Wizard behind. But as we begin to move, Charity notices a lack. “Where’s your cane? Have you left it somewhere?
Already?
Oh, Sid!”

Sally and I walk the trail that the two ahead have made through the wet grass. Our hips bump. I put my arm around her. “Ready to plunge into the pathless woods?”

“Oh, yes! Isn’t it great?”

“Now that we’re sure we’ve got our tea.”

Her eyes flash up, her lip curls. “Wasn’t she preposterous? But she knows it. She’s sorry.”

“She ought to be.”

Sally stops, and Wizard, walking in his sleep, almost runs over us. “Larry, let’s not let it spoil things. It’ll blow over. It already has.”

“She acts like his mother, not his wife. If she’d treat him the way she treats, for instance, you and me, everything would be dandy.”

“Friends come first, family comes last. She treats him the way she’d treat herself.”

“Oh no no no no no.”

“She’s the most generous person I ever saw!”

“That’s not what I mean. I mean she wouldn’t treat herself or anybody else the way she sometimes treats him. She has to be boss. Maybe she tells him when to wash his hands and brush his teeth. I don’t suppose she can help it, but she’s as blunt as a splitting maul.”

She thinks about that, walking again. “I don’t think she
can
help it. She grew up in a family where her mother was boss, and she got both the genes and the example. She told me that the only thing her father ever said about her marriage was to advise her against it. ‘He’s not strong enough for you,’ he told her. Poor man, I guess he knew all about it.”

“Off to your think house,” I say. “Out of my parlor.”

We laugh, kicking the wet grass. “Did he tell you about his poems, and the fuss they had yesterday?” Sally says.

“No. What poems?”

“I guess there were several. You know how she’s been riding him to finish those Browning articles. Well, he’s been writing poetry instead. He sent some to some little review and they took a couple. He was so pleased he couldn’t keep it secret, and she blew up. He didn’t tell you about that?”

“Not a word.”

“She told me just now, while we were walking. I guess she was ashamed about this morning, and wanted to explain. She says she absolutely
knows
Wisconsin won’t promote him on the basis of poems, and he absolutely
must
write something scholarly. She says the department only values what it can do itself. But then he sneaks off and wastes his summer, as she thinks, and she got mad. They had a real quarrel, I guess, and she was still mad this morning. That’s why she had to prove him wrong about that tea.”

I stop in the trail and wrap my arms around Sally and give her a big smack. She laughs. “What’s that for?”

“That’s for being a sensible woman. That’s for not getting sore if I sell something to a magazine. That’s for valuing what I do. My God, why shouldn’t he take an hour off now and then to do what he most loves to do? You’d think she’d caught him in the pantry with the maid.”

“She says after he gets tenure, then he can do what he wants.”

“Then she ought to write his Browning articles for him.”

“Why? Have you seen them? Has he finished any?”

“He’s finished two, and already got one back from
PMLA.
Did she mention that? I suppose he hasn’t dared tell her. Right away it came back, right back in his face.”

“Oh,” Sally says, “that’s bad! You mean they aren’t any good?”

“Not very. Informed. Uninspired. A-minus term papers.”

“Did he ask you to read them? What did you tell him?”

“What
could
I tell him?”

Just talking about it makes me angry at myself, because the fact is, I didn’t have the nerve to tell him what I thought. I wish he had told me about the poems. I would have made him feel good about those, instead of guilty.

“What’s the matter with them?” Sally asks.

“Nothing in particular. Everything in general. His heart isn’t in them. Only her heart is.”

“But what will happen to him, then?”

“Yeah,” I say. “What will? I suppose they’ll either promote him because he’s so good with students and such a good guy, or they’ll ding him because he hasn’t published enough. Or they could promote him to assistant professor, and then bust him when he comes up for tenure. That’d be worse. He won’t decide his own fate, anyway, and neither will Charity. Departmental politics and the departmental budget will. My guess is they’ll agonize and string it out. They won’t find it easy to let him go, because he’s rich, and popular, and Rousselot likes him, and Charity is such a force in Madison. But they could.”