It's Beginning to Hurt: Stories (27 page)

At one point they found some large rocks.

“We’ll use these too,” Craig said.

He and Luke braced themselves against the rocks, maneuvering them into the middle of the path.

A little farther along they saw a tractor tire lying by a gate at the entrance to a field. They heaved it up on its edge. It was enormous, almost as wide in diameter as Luke was tall. Together they rolled it into the path, where they tipped it over, water splatting from a gash in its side as it fell.

“Okay,” Craig said. “That should do the trick.”

They walked on along the flat, stony path. After a while Luke began lagging behind.

“Wait for me!” he shouted.

“Keep up,” Craig called back. “We have a ways to go.”

It was another half hour before they arrived at the first
ber-gerie.
The four cars were parked in a line at the top of the steeply sloping meadow, in the middle of which stood the small domed and arched sheepcote and shepherd’s hut. A group of people stood outside, gathered around a large woman in an outfit of mauve tweed.

“I’ll wait here for Luke, shall I?” Caitlin said at the entrance to the meadow. The boy had fallen back again. Craig shrugged, then walked on down.

She watched him approach the buildings. Several faces from the group turned toward him with smiles of greeting, and she watched his tall, straight figure stride past them into one of the buildings without so much as a glance in their direction. She couldn’t see his face, but she knew the severe expression it would be wearing. A familiar half-fearful, half-admiring feeling came into her as she pictured it. She found it so difficult herself to judge other people’s behavior, even when she could see it was wrong. But Craig regarded it as an obligation. He had told her once that if he’d been born in a time when it was possible to believe in a god, he would have felt compelled to become a preacher. He had gone into furniture making instead, but even this he had turned into his own kind of crusade, with his recycled materials, his all-natural stains and varnishes, his rejection of all elements of ornamentation and superfluous comfort from his designs. “It’s what Jesus would have done if he’d stuck to carpentry,” he liked to joke. Or not joke exactly, just say with a glint in his eye that you felt you were permitted to take as humorous. She’d never been with a man quite like him before. She didn’t love him exactly, not in the usual way of wanting to be always kissing and fooling around together. She didn’t even like him, she sometimes thought, observing his cold manner with people he disapproved of, which was most of the human race. But he had engulfed her somehow, taken up resi dence in her imagination like some large, dense, intractable problem that had been given to her to solve.

By the time Luke caught up, the group had begun walking back up toward their cars. The woman in the mauve outfit was talking to them in English, with a French accent:

“What you will see at the next
bergerie
will be a completely different technique of construction. Instead of the vaulted ceilings we have here, you will see that it will be built in the tunnel style ...” The people were mostly middle-aged, some of the men wearing ties and sport coats under green waterproof jackets, the women in wool and tweed outfits like their guide, though in more subdued colors. They looked like professors, Caitlin thought. They smiled at her, and she smiled uncomfortably back, wishing that she weren’t having to encounter them like this, in person.

The guide gave her a polite nod as she passed. Her eye lingered a moment on Luke. Caitlin looked back and saw that the boy had lifted his T-shirt over his large belly, which he was scratching vigorously. It was a bit embarrassing, but she didn’t feel it was her place to tell him to stop. Up beyond him the people were climbing back into their cars.

Craig emerged from the dark interior of the sheep shelter. He stood in the entrance, watching the cars as they set off in a line along the footpath, heading for the second
bergerie.

“I was thinking,” he said, “if they were in wheelchairs or something, that might be an excuse, but really 1 don’t even believe that. It’s not like if I was old or disabled, I’d feel entitled to be driven places off the road that I couldn’t walk to. Anyway, those people are perfectly capable of walking. They’re just lazy and selfish.”

They wandered through the buildings. Craig explained how the arches and domed roofs were built without any tools or cement, just with the careful piling and balancing of all the flattest stones the shepherds could find in the area. There was a rare note of approval in his voice, and Caitlin brightened, as she always did at such moments. He loved this kind of patient, anonymous craftsmanship, and his enthusiasm when he spoke about it made her want to cheer him on even though she didn’t find it that exciting herself.

After they had finished looking, they went back to the path and started walking to the second
bergerie.
The boy was scratching himself again.

“What are you doing?” Craig asked.

“It itches.”

“Leave it alone. What is it, a mosquito bite?”

He peered at his son’s stomach. “I don’t see anything. Except too much of this.” He grabbed the roll of fat on Luke’s belly. “Come on, let’s burn some off.”

He set off at a brisk march. The boy soon started lagging behind again.

“Wait!”

Craig turned. “Keep up, kiddo. And stop the scratching.”

The boy was panting when he caught up. His face was mottled pink.

“I can’t walk this fast,” he said. He was scratching his forearms now, clawing them with his plump, nail-bitten fingers.

“What is going on?” Craig said.

“I don’t know.”

“Well, stop scratching. And try to keep up.” He tousled the boy’s hair. “You want a nature quiz?”

No.

They walked in silence along the path. The sun had dropped below the other side of the ridge, and they were in shadow now. Here and there pale cocoons hung in the pines above them, stretched and bulging in a way that made Caitlin think of something hawked up from a lung. She tried not to look. Before long the boy had fallen behind again.

“Wait for me!” he wailed.

This time when he caught up, his face was an angry red and there were yellowish welts standing out on his arms.

“My God,” Caitlin said, “are you okay?”

He ignored her, as usual. Craig examined his arms.

“It looks like hives. He gets allergies sometimes. You didn’t touch one of those caterpillars, did you? With your skin?”

“No.”

“Well, listen, we’re not halfway yet. We have another couple hours’ walking. Think you can make it okay?”

“I don’t feel good.”

“I know. We’ll get you some antihistamine when we get back. But you’re okay to go on, right?”

“I’m tired.”

“I could take him back the way we came,” Caitlin heard herself say, “I mean, if you want to go on . . .”

“No!” the boy said, clinging to his father.

Craig opened the map. He didn’t say anything for a while.

“How much shorter would it be?” Caitlin asked.

“To go back?”

“Mm.”

He looked at her; a faint sardonic light in his eye, as if in acknowledgment of some small but unexpected challenge.

“A bit. Yeah, I guess it would be quite a bit shorter.”

He looked again at Luke. The boy seemed dazed. The soft flesh around his eyes had begun to swell up, and the eyes themselves were bloodshot.

“All right,” Craig said, folding the map away. “We’ll go back. We’ll go back the way we came.”

And so they turned around and started walking back along the trail the way they had come. This time they moved at Luke’s pace; it took them a good twenty minutes to reach the
bergerie
again, twice as long as it had coming.

“Can we have a rest?” the boy said as they passed above the buildings. He was panting heavily.

“No. We should keep going now.”

“But I’m tired. My eyes hurt.”

“Come on.”

The boy stood still on the path. “I can’t!” His lip trembled. “I’m not walking anymore!”

Craig stared down at him. “Okay,” he said. “Get 011 my shoulders.”

He stooped down, and the boy climbed on his shoulders. Slowly, with a slight backward lurch, Craig stood up, his thin frame looking perilously top-heavy under its burden.

“Christ,” he muttered.

They walked on along the path, their progress even slower than before. Luke huddled over his father, resting a swollen cheek on his head. The air was cool, but after a while beads of sweat began to slide down over Craig’s face. A vein stood out on his forehead. He looked at Caitlin. “I’m not going to be able to carry him all the way.”

She nodded, saying nothing. There was nothing she could think of to say.

A few minutes after this she heard the cars, returning along the trail behind them. She had been listening for them, but even so, a feeling of dread came into her. It seemed to sink through her, twisting slowly as it fell, like some heavy object drifting down through oil. As they drew near, Luke raised his head and turned back groggily to look. His eyes were thin red slits in the cushions of flesh around them. Craig moved to the side of the path but went on walking steadily forward, acknowledging nothing.

It occurred to Caitlin that he wasn’t going to be able to ask the people for a ride. She could feel, as if she were him for a moment, the impossibility of it. He couldn’t carry the boy all the way, but he would break his back trying rather than ask these people for help. At the same time he must have been able to see that that would solve nothing. Dimly it seemed to her that somewhere in the stubborn grid of his thoughts there must be a calculation that she would do the asking, that if she did, it would be possible to accept. A part of her rebelled at being counted on like this. For a moment she was tempted not to play along, just to see what he would do. But even as she tried to assume the necessary attitude of indifference, she knew that his calculation was correct: that she didn’t have the heart for it. She turned to face the cars, smiling helplessly and putting out her hand to stop them. As it happened, they were stopping anyway, and the driver’s window of the front car was sliding down. ’

“II est malade, le petit?
” came the voice of the guide.

“Excuse me?”

“Your child is sick?”

“Yes, yes, he’s sick!” Caitlin said, then shouted: “Can you help us? Craig! Stop!”

Craig swung slowly around, his face streaming sweat now.

The guide got out of the car, looking up at Luke.

“What happened to him?”

Caitlin answered: “We don’t know. We think some kind of allergy . . .”

“I thought this when I saw him before. Did he go near to some of the caterpillars who make these nests?” She pointed up into the trees.

“He was near them, but he didn’t touch them.”

“You don’t need to touch. Even if you just go near to them and breathe the air, it can be dangerous. Especially for the eyes.” She came close to where Craig stood with the boy on his shoulders. “Ah! But you must bring him to the hospital immediately! Come with us. We’ll drive you.”

Craig said nothing, but he lifted Luke from his shoulders. The guide took charge, installing the three of them in the backseat. A gray-haired couple moved over to make room for them. In the passenger seat in front was a man with a shrewd, pointed face. He and the couple made sympathetic noises to Luke as the woman led the convoy off again. The boy buried his head in his father’s shoulder.

“WTiere are you staying?” the guide asked. She was driving fast, much faster than she had before.

Caitlin named the farm.

“Ah. This side of the mountain. The hospital is on the other side. You’ll have to take a taxi after you—”

She slammed on the brakes:
“Mais c’est quoi—?”

They had come to the tractor tire.

“I’ll move it,” Craig said, opening his door. Passengers got out of the cars behind. Caitlin thought she should stay in the car with Luke, even though the boy wriggled free when she tried to hold him. She watched the people help Craig move the enormous tire, laughter and puzzlement on their faces as they returned to their cars. She heard someone say a farmer must have dropped it. Craig climbed back into his seat and stared fixedly out through the window. Caitlin’s heart was beating fast, almost fluttering in her chest, as the car started up and they sped off once more.

“Are you all professors?” she asked. “Is that why you’re—”

“Heavens, no!” The man in front chuckled.

The woman of the couple spoke: “We’re members of a rural preservation group from Suffolk. We go on a jaunt somewhere abroad every year.”

Again the guide slammed on the brakes.

“Mais... !”

They had come to the rocks.

Craig was out of the car almost before it had stopped. Others got out to help him once again. This time there was less laughter. The man in the front seat looked at Caitlin in the mirror. She turned away, blushing. He said something very fast in French to the guide as they set off again. The woman looked disbelieving, but at the first of the fallen trees she stopped more gradually, as if half expecting it. Craig jumped out, and this time only a couple of people from the cars behind came to help him. At the next tree nobody came. The four cars stood with their engines idling while he dragged the heavy, skeletal trunk back into the woods. Then they rolled slowly forward to the next, where he got out again. He was armoring himself, it appeared, in a kind of stoical detachment. But for Caitlin the situation was unfolding with excruciating vividness. She watched him get out and move the remaining obstacles, one after another. Alone on the path he seemed to her a strange, parched, remote, beleaguered figure. His face was expressionless, but the straining muscles at his neck and the sweat on his face as he dragged the dead trunks across the dust and stones gave him an agonized look. She felt a desire to comfort him, even though she knew he would have repudiated any hint of pity Climbing back into his seat after the final tree, he took out a handkerchief and mopped his face. The guide looked at him in the mirror.