Crossing to Safety (22 page)

Walking along with her lower lip thrust out, Sally raises her eyes to watch Sid slashing away with the machete up ahead, where the bushes have almost closed our dubious road. Charity is behind him, out of the way of his swings. “She’d just die,” Sally says. “Could you be wrong about his articles? You’re not very sympathetic to scholarly writing. Maybe the department will like them better than you do.”

“I hope they do.
PMLA
didn’t, though. Hell, what do I know? They fired me after one year. But you should see what he’s been doing. Browning’s use of music. Browning’s debt to Vasari. Those aren’t what a scholarly journal wants. Those are Charity’s notion of what makes an article. Maybe she wrote term papers on those topics at Smith. Why is she so hot for promotion and permanence anyway? Sid might be a lot better off in some small college where publications don’t matter and teaching does, some place where he could be Mr. Chips. For that matter, if they want to stay in Madison, they could stay whether he gets promoted or not.”

“She’d be ashamed.”

“
She’d
be. I doubt that he would, or only if she was. What he’d probably like best of all would be to move up here the year around and write poems and dig in the local history and folklore and jot down in his journal when the Jack-in-the-pulpit and Calypso orchids come out, and how the crows get through the winter.”

“His New England conscience would bother him if he’d failed.”

“His conscience or her pride?”

We swish through the long wet grass. Sally says, “If it were Charity bucking for promotion, she’d make it.”

“You bet she would. But she’s crazy if she thinks she can make him make it against his will. When you’re nailing a custard pie to the wall, and it starts to wilt, it doesn’t do any good to hammer in more nails.”

Now I have made her angry. “You can’t possibly think he’s a custard pie!”

“She’ll make him one if she doesn’t let up.”

When Sally is annoyed, she seldom flares up; she smolders. Well, let her smolder. I have said nothing but the truth, which I would be as happy to see changed as she would. We walk in silence. Up ahead, Sid is slashing again. Charity follows behind like a dutiful subservient wife. Is she doing penance?

I swing my cane. Sally says, with a look out of the corners of her eyes, “You seem to like that walking stick.”

“A touch of class.”

“So Charity is right sometimes.”

“Charity is always right.”

Walking with her body twisted sideways, she studies my face. Finally she says, “Neither of you would win any prizes for self-doubt.”

I am surprised. How did I get into this discussion? We were talking about the Langs.

“You can’t stand to see anybody else with that sublime selfconfidence,” Sally says. “I suppose it’s what makes you both what you are. But it shouldn’t make you self-righteous about people who don’t have it. Poor Sid doesn’t have any at all. He ought to, but he doesn’t. Maybe that old Presbyterian banker of a father. Maybe marrying a woman as strong-minded as Charity. Anyway, can’t you see how much worse it must be for him, knowing she’ll be devastated if he doesn’t make it in her terms?”

“I thought that’s what I was saying.”

“No, you were being superior, you were being scornful of both of them. It’s sad, that’s what it is. She wants to be proud of him in the sort of disparaging way she’s proud of her father or Uncle Richard. But she’s getting afraid, and the more afraid she gets, the more she tries to put her will into him.”

Wizard stumbles over a root, and a surprised
whoof
comes out of him. The woods whisper and hum, my face prickles with spider webs, light winks off globules of water in a patch of ferns. “Well,” I say, “let’s not spoil the trip arguing about something we can’t do anything about.”

“No.” Then, after a pause, “Promise me something.”

“Maybe. What?”

“Don’t challenge her on this trip. On
anything.
I know you both sort of like those arguments, but this isn’t a good time. She’s afraid the summer’s been wasted. So don’t get your back up, even if she’s outrageous. Just be nice.”

“Have I sassed her? I never said a word, even during that scene this morning. I’m as nice as old Sid himself. Yes, ma’am. No, ma’am. Very good, ma’am.”

“You watch it,” Sally says. “Honestly.”

I watched it, naturally. But the day that had started crooked insisted on going crooked, like a cross-threaded screw.

The Hazen Road turned out to be something less than a turnpike. The guiding stone wall vanished in the woods within a half mile. Then we got into a swamp where beavers had dammed a brook and flooded several acres. Drowned trees stood up bleached and bare out of brown water and hummocky grass. The ground we tried to make our way across was more liquid than solid. When we finally decided to make a wide circle around all that, we found ourselves in a blowdown where a wind from Hudson Bay or somewhere had laid down trees the way a scythe lays grass.

Hot, tired, mud-footed, and mosquito-bitten, we fought our way through and around that, and discovered when we came to clear solid ground that we were lost.

Or not really lost. We just weren’t quite sure where we were. Our USGS quadrangle map told us that we wanted to come out just where the brook that we had left backed up behind the beaver dam met a country road leading to Irasburg. The brook was north of us, the road west of us. We could either bear right and hit the brook below the beaver dam, and follow it down to the road, or we could take a compass course due west (Pritchard had told Charity to bring a compass) till we struck the road. Sid and I were for working back to the brook, along which fishermen would probably have beaten a path. Charity was for the compass course. Guess which we did.

And guess what it got us into. After floundering a half mile through heavy woods, we came to a blowdown worse than the one we had had to circle earlier. Trees lay crisscrossed, down and half down, their trunks leaning, their root tables on edge above torn pits masked by raspberry vines. It was impossible for poor Wizard. He got into a hole where he might have broken a leg (and how would we have got him to wedge his heel in a forked tree and throw himself backward?), and after we had hauled and pried him out we decided once again to go around. It took us three hours to make what looked on the map like a mile and a half, and it was only by the grace of God that we didn’t all come out on wooden legs.

The road, when we finally hit it, was a welcome pair of little-used ruts. Turning right, we came in a short while to a plank bridge across the brook. Sid got the canvas bucket off the load and dipped up a drink for Wizard, who couldn’t get down to the water. Charity sat on the bridge and took off boots and socks and stuck her feet down into the brown stream. I raised Don Quixote’s battlecry,
Dulcinea del Toboso!,
and Sally, who read my mind, gave me a warning look. So I made no remarks to the brookside about doing things the hard way. It was never Charity’s habit to do them the easy way. Most of the time she preferred to set a compass course (adopted sometimes from eccentric authorities) and follow it, whatever it led her into. Once or twice that day I wondered if she hadn’t secretly, under an assumed name,
written
Pritchard’s book.

Leg-weary, we pursued the remnants of a sultry afternoon down the easy going of the road. We bought a couple of chickens from a farm wife who talked a blue streak while she swiftly beheaded, plucked, and gutted them. From that same woman we bought ten ears of sweet corn. About five o’clock, two more miles down the road, we fell into camp on the little lake that I will always remember as Ticklenaked Pond, though that wasn’t its name, that’s another pond altogether.

It was sunk in woods, the late sun glared off the water, there was a clearing with decent grass for Wizard and with room for spacing our pup tents. We unloaded Wizard and picketed him out and poured him some oats and fell into the lake, which was shallow and warm. Three of us just floated around on our backs and looked at the blue overhead and sighed with beatitude. Sid, charmed by the camp and as vigorous as a spaniel, swam all the way around a little island that sat offshore in the oval pond like the pupil in a cocked eye.

Revived, we came ashore. I dragged in wood and Sid built a fire and we put water on for the corn. Charity and Sally took a while, sitting on a log and combing their hair like mermaids, leaving Sid and me to unload the hampers and set out plates, knives and forks, bread and butter. While we were still unpacking, the girls went off together into the woods.

Among the things I took out of my hamper was the package of tea Sally had gone to get that morning. Halfway down the hamper I found another of the same.

Sid was feeding the fire. “Look,” I said.

Squatting in the smoke, he looked. Then he stood up quickly and came over and took a package in each hand as if comparing their weights. Almost furtively he looked from them to me. “Well,” he said, “since we aren’t a York boat that will be out for months, we shouldn’t need more than one, do you think?” He set one package on the log we were using for a table, and threw the other in the fire. There was a strong herbal smell, but by the time Charity and Sally returned, it was gone.

The fire was ebbing to good hardwood coals, the water was boiling, I had the corn stripped and lying on a bed of husks, Sid had split the chickens down the middle with the axe. “How long on these?” he said. “I understand steaks, I never barbecued chickens.”

Before anyone else could venture a guess, Charity jumped up, intensely smiling. “Let me look,” she said. “Pritchard has a chapter on outdoor cooking.”

That name was a spell that immobilized us. Sid squatted by the fire and waited. Sally and I carefully avoided letting our eyes get entangled. Charity sat down on a rock, her combed wet hair hanging down on both sides of her face, and consulted her bible. She turned pages, stopped, read, flipped another page, read again.

“Ah, here! ‘First rule for camp cooking: better underdone than overdone. Three minutes to a side, over good hot coals, is about right for any camp-cooked meat.’ ”

I took that in, but I couldn’t keep it in. “He’s talking about hamburgers.”

“No, he says
any
camp-cooked meat.”

“They’ll be raw.”

Charity raised her head and looked at me. The morning was still with us. It was her against the world, or at least against me, since I was male, and Sid’s coadjutor. She had learned nothing by following her compass course. “Well, I’m going to have mine three minutes to a side. The rest of you can have yours any way that suits you.” She said this smiling.

What Sid slid onto our plates a little later had been cooked exactly six minutes by the watch. It was barely seared, still bleeding internally, tough as life in a Vermont barnyard.

I tried, though I am a rotten-roasted westerner and hate raw meat. I suppose the others tried too. We sat there on our rocks and logs in the late thin sun, with the heat of the fire in our faces and the growing coolness at our backs, and did our best. When I couldn’t cut my chicken with the table knife, I used my Swiss army knife. That cut all right, but what it cut could hardly be chewed. After a couple of mouthfuls I fell back on the corn, which was marvelous.

I was already on my second cob when I heard a clank down the log. Charity had set her plate down hard. “Oh,
phooey!
” she said. “It
is
raw. You were right, three minutes aren’t
nearly
enough. Now why should a man who writes books on camping be as wrong as that?”

“Never trust people who write books,” I said. “We’re all a bunch of liars.”

“Well, anyway, I
apologize,
” she said. “It was going to be such a nice dinner, and I spoiled it. Here, give me your chickens and I’ll do them right.”

Sid stood up without a word and started raking the coals together, but she chased him away. “No,
I’m
going to do it. I deserve some penance for being bullheaded and not listening to Larry.”

Listening to Larry. I approved of that, but I thought it might have been a good time to bring up that second package of tea, so that Sid could get some vindication too. He was at least as well worth listening to as Larry was. While we were at it, we might have discussed the dangers inherent in conducting your life according to rules whimsically adopted from some book, and ignoring the testimony and experience of the people around you.

I’ll tell you who she reminded me of—a desert tortoise I once had, an armored hero named Achilles that my father had picked up in the Mojave. There was quite a fad of keeping them in the twenties. People painted their shells blue and red and gold, even painted their toenails. We used to call them Hollywood Bedbugs. This Achilles friend of mine was an amiable fellow—slept all winter in a closet among the shoes and gave no trouble. But when he came out in the spring he had one thing on his mind, and he went looking for it. Food. He loved lettuce, string beans, broccoli, cabbage. He went sedately nuts over strawberries. It got so we teased him, setting out something he liked and watching him make a beeline across the lawn to it. He would get stuck in the bushes and flowerbeds, sometimes for ten or fifteen minutes, but eventually he would break through and make his ponderous, slow-motion rush to the table. Put a book in his way, he would never go around. He went over. Put two books, he would still go over. Put three, he would push them out of his way. Put something immovable like an automobile tire in his predestined track and he would butt up against it and stay there, pushing and spinning his wheels. Come back an hour later and he’d be half dug in, still trying.

Now here we had evidence that Charity was not quite as Achilles-like as I had thought. She could change her mind, given incontrovertible evidence. She could be sorry for being bullheaded.

Everybody felt better for her conversion. We gave her our raw chickens and she finally got them broiled, about fifteen minutes more per side, and cheerfully served them up. We gnawed the last cobs of corn and had an orange apiece and some chocolate for dessert. I dug a hole and buried the garbage while Sid washed the dishes and the girls dried them and put them away. The sun over the pond was red, the water was red, the little island was black. Black woods surrounded us. Off at the edge of the clearing Wizard clinked his halter rings and cropped the grass. The sound of his hoofs as he moved was more a vibration through the ground than a noise. It gave him a heavy solidity out there, though as the light faded he became only a shadow.