Hand-Me-Down Love (14 page)

One afternoon, when
Sean was thinking about making camp for the night, he heard a noise
on the trail. He stopped, listening. There was a rustling noise up
ahead. And then a black bear was on the trail, looking at him. It was
February, but it was a warm February and black bears would come out
of their sleep on warm days. Panicked, Sean tried to think back about
everything he knew to do. Make a lot of noise, he remembered. He
picked up rocks from the side the trail and beat them together,
yelling at the top of his lungs at the same time. The bear looked at
him, unmoving. Sean pulled off his backpack and opened the pocket
that held his food. He grabbed packets of dehydrated fruit and ripped
them open. The bear had not moved—yet. Sean threw the fruit to the
ground as the bear began to lumber his way. He grabbed his backpack
and went off the trail, deep into the woods.

When he had moved a
hundred feet, Sean looked back. The bear was eating the fruit he had
dropped. He stayed where he was and a minute later the bear moved off
into the woods on the other side of the trail.

It seemed that every
day on the trail, Sean thought about something different. He was
thinking in themes, time periods, people. He reached the spot where
he was going to finish the trail, the place he and his friends had
ended their hike over a decade earlier. But he kept going. He had a
lot more to think about, and he kept going. He had two weeks worth of
food and he had been on the trail for a week.

On his seventh day
on the trail, he thought about Meredith getting sick and dying. He
couldn’t stop his mind from recalling all of the painful details.
Her chemo and radiation. Watching her rally earlier on, when he
thought she was going to be all right. Then watching her decline. And
finally, watching her die. He stopped on the path and wept. He cried
out for Meredith as he sat on the lonely trail. He cried out for her,
begged her to come back to him. Birds sang in the woods, but Meredith
did not return to him.

On his eighth day,
Sean thought about Marla. Sweet Marla. He loved her, he knew that as
sure as he knew anything. He loved her like he loved Meredith. He
loved them both. But he knew they were different. Marla looked a lot
like Meredith with her blond hair and her facial features. But her
eyes were a golden color, not blue as the sky like Meredith’s. She
was sweet like Meredith, but she was different. She didn’t have a
biting sense of humor like Meredith, for one thing. But she did have
a sense of humor and laughed a lot. She found humor in life, and Sean
appreciated that about her. He did too, once upon a time.

What did Meredith
mean when she asked Marla to look after him? Was it just her dying
wish or was it something more than that? Did she intend for Sean and
Marla to get together, as they had? Did she know more than they knew?

Sean’s legs had
grown strong on the hike. He no longer felt pains in his legs and
shoulders. He could carry the backpack and walk the trail without
pain. On the ninth day, he saw a wooden sign posted to a tree.
McGinley’s Gap, it read. Hiker’s hostel, food, showers. Sean took
the trail and a few miles later walked into the town in the valley of
the mountains. Signs led him to the hostel, where he got a bed and
unloaded his backpack. There were showers down the hall from the room
areas and he stood in one for a long time, letting the warm water
pour over him. He washed his hair and put his face in the water. When
he got out and dried off he looked in the mirror. He hardly
recognized himself. His hair was almost to his shoulders, but the
most startling difference was the beard and mustache covering his
face. The man looking back at him was a different man. He wasn’t
sorry about that. He
was
a different man.

He walked into the
main hall of the hostel and there were a couple of wooly looking
hikers standing around.

“
Hey,” a
red-bearded man said to Sean when he walked in.

“
Hey,” Sean
said, not at all sure about the etiquette on the trail.

“
There’s a
buffet down the street. All you can eat. Wanna go with us?”

An all-you-can-eat
buffet was just exactly what Sean needed. He needed some company too
after nine days on the trail only seeing the occasional hiker going
the other direction. Sean walked with the fellow hikers down the
street to the buffet. They filled their plates with fried chicken and
spaghetti and vegetables and mashed potatoes with gravy and sat at a
big table. All of the men started eating and no one spoke for a few
minutes.

“
This is a lot
better than that freeze-dried crap I’ve been eating for a week,”
one of the men said. Sean held up his fried chicken leg as a salute.
All of the men held up pieces of chicken in a toast. “To fried
chicken,” they said.

Everyone started
talking after they had eaten a full plate of food and went back for
another. The wooly brothers, as Sean was thinking of them in his
head, said they had started the trail in Maine six months before.
They were thru hikers, a feat very few accomplished. Sean was
impressed at their tenacity.

“
We’ve only got
about sixty miles to go when we hit Georgia, and then we’ve made
the whole trail,” Gary, the one with red curly hair and a beard to
match, said. Sean congratulated the men. He told them that he’d
only gone a section of the trail, about sixty miles—as far as they
had to go. The men exchanged stories about the trail, what they’d
seen, what they’d experienced. Sean told them about meeting the
bear. They all nodded in appreciation.

“
You did the right
thing,” Rufus, a gray-headed man, said. “You don’t wanna mess
with the bears. Just get outa their way.”

The men walked back
to the hostel after stuffing themselves and finishing the meal off
with banana pudding and peach cobbler.

“
Nice to meet
you,” Gary said. “Good luck to you.”

“
Good luck to
y’all too,” Sean said. “And congratulations for making it
through.”

When he sat down on
his bed, Sean sent his photos to his mother and Marla. He hadn’t
had cell reception for the nine days he’d been on the trail and he
knew his mother and Marla were worried about him. He called his
mother, who cried when she heard his voice.

“
I’m fine, Mom.
I don’t want you to worry. I’m fine.”

“
When are you
coming back,” she asked him.

“
I’m not sure,”
he said. “I went a lot further than I expected, but I’m not ready
to leave yet.”

After hanging up
from his mother, he called Marla. Like his mother, she cried when she
heard his voice.

“
It’s okay,
Marla,” he said. “I’m okay. I sent you some photos I took on
the trail. Did you get them?”

“
Yes,” she said,
sniffling. “I got them. It looks like an amazing place.”

“
It is amazing,”
he said. “The photos don’t really do it justice.”

“
Are you coming
back?” Marla asked. “I miss you, Sean.”

“
I miss you too.
You don’t know how much I miss you. But I don’t know when I’m
coming back. I think I’ve still got some things to work out.”

She didn’t say
anything. “Marla?” Sean said. “Are you working things out too?”

“
I guess so,”
she said. “I guess I’m thinking about things a lot. Is that what
you mean?”

“
That’s what I
mean,” he said. “Marla, I think about you all the time. I want to
be there but I know I need to be clear about everything. We need to
be clear.”

“
You keep using
that word, “clear,” she said.

“
I know. It seems
to be the right word. I can’t think of a better word.”

“
It just hurts so
much for you to be gone.”

“
I’m sorry,”
Sean said. “It hurts me too, but we’ve got to get strong.” They
talked a few more minutes, and when they hung up, Sean lay back on
the first bed he’d been on in nearly two weeks. He fell asleep
instantly.

The next morning,
Sean knew he wasn’t ready to get back on the trail. He decided to
stay another night at the hostel and visit the all-you-can-eat diner
for lunch and supper. Gary and Rufus, the men he’d met the day
before, had already moved on by the time he woke up.

He was like a
bottomless pit when he visited the diner, filling his plate twice at
lunch and then at supper. He couldn’t get enough of the chicken and
dumplings and meatloaf and green beans and corn. He stuffed his face
with yeast rolls spread with butter.

“
Did you get
enough?” the waitress asked him when she came to his table. She had
long dark hair and a smile on her lips.

“
I think so,”
Sean said, laughing.

She picked his
plates up. “There’s a bar right down the street from here.
Billy’s. If you’re interested in that.”

“
Okay, thanks,”
Sean said, thinking he might be interested in that. He paid his bill
and left the waitress a good tip.

“
Just turn left
when you leave here and you’ll see Billy’s,” the waitress
called to him as he was opening the door. Sean did take a left and
about a block down saw a neon sign flashing Billy’s Brews and Food.
He pushed the door open and was greeted with country music from a
jukebox. He sat at the bar and ordered a beer.

When he was on his
second beer, an old man sat down at the stool next to him. He looked
at Sean and nodded his head. Sean nodded back.

“
Pete Warner,”
the old guy said extending his hand to Sean. “Sean O’Connell,”
Sean said shaking his hand.

“
You a hiker?”
Pete asked.

“
Yeah, I’ve been
on the trail for nine days. Taking a break now.”

“
I used to walk
the trail, every fall and every spring, back in my younger days,”
Pete said taking a drink from his mug. “It gets in your blood, the
trail does. I don’t go anymore since I’ve gotten too old, but I
still like to come to Billy’s and meet the hikers, hear their
stories.”

Sean and Pete talked
through the night about the trail, and then about their lives. Pete
said his wife had died ten years ago and he’d never gotten over it.
Sean couldn’t believe it, but he told Pete that his wife had died
less than a year ago.

“
It’s the
hardest thing,” Pete said. “One day they’re there and you’ve
been living with ‘em, lovin’ ‘em, and then they’re gone. You
don’t know what to do with yourself. Where do you put your love
after that? It’s a terrible thing.”

As it got close to
midnight, Pete said, “When’re you getting back on the trail?”

“
I think I’m
through with the trail,” Sean said. “I’m not really sure where
I’m going. I’m kind of at loose ends right now.”

“
Do you want to
work?”

“
I’d be willing
to work, sure,” Sean said, finishing off his beer.

“
The reason I ask
is that every now and then a hiker stays around for a while, working
on the timber. What did you say you did for a living?”

“
I was a banker,”
Sean said.

Pete looked at Sean,
his eyes moving from his long hair to his full beard. He laughed long
and hard. Sean laughed with him. “I’ve got a silver BMW back
home,” Sean said, and they laughed even harder.

“
If you’re
interested in doing some hard physical labor, I might be able to hook
you up.”

“
I’m
interested,” Sean said.

“
An old friend of
mine, Marty Rutherford, runs his family’s lumber business. It’s
been around since eighteen hundred and something, when the
Rutherfords first came to this area.” Pete took another drink from
his mug. Sean signaled the bartender to bring two more.

“
Thank you
kindly,” Pete said to the bartender when he put a fresh mug in
front of him.

“
Anyway, the
family owns thousands of acres of timberland. The reason it’s still
successful is that early on old man Rutherford made sure he replanted
with seedlings whenever he cut. Kept it going for generations. Marty
still does it the same way today. ‘Replenish,’ he says. ‘Give
it back.’”

“
What kind of
timber is it?” Sean asked, not that he knew much about timber.

“
It’s mostly
white pine. A lot of that around here.”

“
So, what’s the
job?” Sean asked.

“
I think it’s a
little bit of everything. What Marty does is selectively cut his
trees, and then he takes the logs over to his mill where he finishes
them for log cabin kits. He doesn’t make the kits himself, he ships
the logs out. The log cabin companies make a big deal out of the way
Marty treats his timber, green they call it.”