Outer Banks (10 page)

With a shudder, I decided it didn't matter what happened so long as anything could happen. I took another step, then yet another, and gradually, as I neared her, she lowered the barrel of the gun until, by the time I could reach out and touch her shoulder, it was pointing at the ground. With my left hand I took the gun from her, and with my right I reached around her shoulders and drew her to me.

Suddenly she was sobbing, her bony, fragile shoulders hunched and twitching with the sobs. And then it all came out, what he had said in his answer to her letter, what her letter had said about her mother, A.'s first wife, until finally she was blubbering wetly against my chest. “Oh, I don't understand, I just don't
understand!
Why does he have to be that way, why is he so
awful? Why?
”

I sighed. It was not going to be easy for me to explain. After all, she was his daughter, his only child. And she loved him.

 

Event
#3: (From the
New York Times,
Wednesday, May 1, 19———.)

I read the article with slight, barely conscious interest, prodded by my daily habit of reading every article in the newspaper from beginning to end diligently, regardless of the content, but perhaps also prodded by the vaguely familiar tone of the somewhat cryptic remarks attributed to the old man, an assertiveness tempered by a strangely familiar form of personal humility, a kind of matter-of-fact pride and wisdom that I had not heard in many years. There was a small wirephoto of the graybeard above the article, and when I studied the blurred face, I recognized, in spite of the long beard, the hair, the stooped posture and the obvious aging that had taken place, my friend of long, long ago. It was A.

And thus, once again, after a lapse of what seemed an entire lifetime, I began thinking obsessively about the man. “
Where did he come from? What kind of life did he lead that brought him to this end?
” I chuckled to myself at the poor, befuddled reporter's questions and imagined A. frustrating the fellow with half-truths and outright lies, flattery and aggression. The reporter should not have been talking to A., I snorted, but
me
! He'd never learn the truth from A., not in a million years.

 

B
ELIEVING AS
I did that each of the above three events, taken separately, could explain A.'s peculiar (to me) absence that Sunday
afternoon in February 1975, I had reached a point in my relation to him where almost anything could happen and where whatever did happen would be believable. It would seem “natural,” “right,” consistent with all I had known of him before. In other words, the man had become sufficiently real to me that I could, and therefore should, write a novel about him.

 

I
T WAS ALMOST
four o'clock by the time I arrived at my home in Northwood. The sun was setting coldly behind the low hills, dragging a darkening gray blanket across the snowy fields and woods while the temperature tumbled fast toward zero and below. Then, as the sun dropped wholly behind the farthest hill, leaving only a sky fading from red to peach to sooty gray to deep, starry blue, a low cold wind cruised across the snow, from the colder, eastern horizon to the slightly less cold western, as if following the waning light. Then the wind was gone, like a pack of silent dogs, and the night settled motionlessly down to its business of making the icy lakes creak and boom, of making the trees snap, the streams whimper, the hibernating animals underground turn worriedly in their sleep, of making the rocks beneath the snow concentrate their mass.

Inside my house, as soon as I had built the fire to blazing in the library, I sat down at my desk, plucked my pen from the holder, and, opening a blank notebook before me, wrote in large letters on the first page,
HAMILTON STARK, A NOVEL
. I turned the page, and continued to write.

1

How far back in time is it reasonable to push, before one detaches himself from the near bank and poles himself, guiding the drift back downstream, home again, by straddling the current at midstream, stroke over stroke down to the present? Eh? Back there the stream had narrowed, had run with a swiftness that increased geometrically with each mile as one returned to the source. There were rapids, low overhanging trees with dangerous strange beasts residing among the dark foliage; there were hidden shoals, sudden waterfalls, mythical creatures drinking at the edges of eddies and pools, caves along the banks, dawns savagely bright and silent, dusks that fell in seconds and released at their fall the cacophony of nighttime hunts. And the farther back one poled his fragile craft, the closer one came to the source (that high clear spring where a mountain toad bejeweled by sunlight squats upon a thick pelt of moss and sleeps), the more trivial seemed whatever quandary, shame, or project that characterized one's present.

How, then, to justify the well-known practice of understanding one's present by going into the past, when the farther into the past one travels, the more trivial seems the present? For if such understanding is available there, its nature at bottom would seem to be that the present is of no special significance. Why
stay down there, it (the past) asks you, in that mucky, mosquito-infested, broad delta region where the muddied waters mix turgidly with the green and blue of the sea? Why indeed, when you have seen the flumed waterfalls here inland, the crystalline streambed glittering in noontime sunlight, the exotic beasts and highland orchids where the stream curls farther and farther into the mountains, through the mists to the mossy crags and the lichen-covered high plateaus?

For just look at where we, reader and writer of this book, stand now. Look at our quandary, our shame, our project. A mere crank, questions of his intentionality, of the quality of our love for him and possibilities of his love for us—that's what's got us down! A rube! A citizen of the provinces, a man whose life may well be incapable of offering posterity a single slice of cheese more than his particular sociology! How mere. Especially when to speak of love, or of cruelty, or of “demons” and the possession thereby (as indeed we must and shall), we are in all probability speaking solely from our private and peculiar, narrow versions of our very own lives. Worse, of our lives as
children
! Brats, puling, polymorphously demanding dependencies, social and genetic accidents dropped into an inappropriate time and place. We are so used to our own whining about how we never
asked
for our parents, their limitations and friends, that we forget how little our parents and their friends had to do with requesting
us.
We weren't exactly what was wanted—unteethed, limp-limbed, blind, bawling, caul-wrapped, hungry and without gratitude. What would any poor people, poor and therefore leisureless, in bad health and nasty-tempered, want with children? Or at least with children such as we were? A poor people, if, as a consequence of the quick and cheap pleasure of copulation with sick and tense bodies, it must produce children, wants them to be born fully grown, strong, intelligent, useful and filled with abiding gratitude. No people is in such dire need of a healthy slave population as a poor people in a poor land. But one of life's great
ironies is that all these people get are children, and more of them than anyone else. If the reader does not yet agree, let him read some population statistics. It's enough to make a sensitive man weep and think longingly of infanticide.

But despite the irrelevance and the triviality of the place where we are standing now, it does have historical background. This poor mongrel has a pedigree. Several of them, in fact. We might prefer running with a blooded hound, but we cannot have one; perhaps we'll accept the run with our own mangy cur, even learn to admire him, if we can know something of his ancestry. For it is true that—though he may seem it and though we sometimes despise him for seeming it—he does not come wholly from nowhere out of nothing.

 

H
E SPRINGS FROM
the Valley of the Suncook, so named for the ululating river meandering gently southerly and westerly to the Merrimack, which is, in turn, a larger, coarser stream that poles the region south of the granitic mountains and widens and fills across bumpy flatlands all the way to the sea of Massachusetts, where at last it empties its finely ground contents onto the outflowing tide and adds yet another petulant lip to the North American continental shelf. To speak solely of the Suncook River, however, is to speak, at its head, of a man-stride-wide rill that breaks across boulders thrown in springtime thaws and by snowmelt from the sides of glacial morraines. It is to speak then of a confluence of brooks, streams, creeks—the Webster, the Perry, the Crooked Run—all of them southern outlets of muskegs, ponds, small lakes, with names like Halfmoon and Brindle, Huntress, Upper Suncook and Lower Suncook. Thus, in referring to the Valley of the Suncook, and specifically to its northern terminus, one is referring to the beginning of a system, if he follow nature's path, and the end of a system, if he follow a manmade map, which inevitably traces the path of white settlement. These two paths, that of nature and that of white human settlement
and the particularities thereof, are what determine the affective history of a people springing from that region, or any region, for hundreds of years afterward, long after the paths have been worn smooth and straightened with machinery, widened and bridged, overpassed, clover-leafed and median-stripped.

It is tempting to make much of the observation that the essential movements of nature here have been from north to south, while those of white neo-European society have been from south to north. Regard the prevailing wind and water systems, the tendency of erosion to flow inevitably to the sea. What are now called the White Mountains were then ten-thousand-foot-high upthrust blocks of granite, stocky mountains in the prime of life, the craggy head of the robust Appalachian chain. In the blond valleys and sun-warmed plains below the peaks, herds of gigantic bison with horns like barrel hoops grazed peacefully, while lions the size of modern horses loped lazily along behind, keeping to the shadows of the briars and the low nut trees, waiting hungrily for a straggler or a fat calf to wander from the herd's protection. So far as is now known, this was a region without bipeds, human beings.

Then the first signs of the glaciers—lingering winter snows, each summer shorter than the one before, streams and lakes that fail one spring to boom and break from ice to water and thus they complete a full year icebound, and winds, high, relentlessly cold winds, carting across the mountain barrier moisture-laden clouds from the snow blanket of the farther north, blotting out the sun for month after month, then year after year. The herds shift the loci of their grazing circles farther south, on to the Carolinas, and even through the gaps and west into the Valley of the Mississippi. Until there comes a time when the hard icy tongue of the glacier has carved a notch in the mountain wall and has extruded enough of its body through that notch into the soft valleys beyond to drag with it a never-melting pelt, finally covering even the very peaks with a mantle of ice, accelerating its
march now by making its own weather unimpededly. And as the glacier, conjoined with several separate glacial forays from the two far sides of the mountains, crunches its way across those upthrust blocks of granite and the bumpy flats beyond, great wads of earth are scraped away, huge chunks of stone are ripped free of the mountain wall, deep trenches are gouged through the effluvial plain, and all the matter, stone, till, boulders, billions of tons of black earth, all of it, is plowed ahead or is eaten by the ice and as if being digested is passed along and ground finer and finer as the head moves southward and is at last spat out at the sides or lodged deeply beneath the grinding white belly. What escapes being eaten by the glacier gets shoved ahead of it, all the way to the sea, where great blocks of ice laden with soil and rock torn from the continent hundreds of miles away crack and break of their own weight and fall tremendously into the storm-tossed sea, where as icebergs they bob and float southerly, gradually diminishing in size, eventually melting, crumbling apart like saturated lumps of sugar somewhere off Hatteras.

The glaciers are not driven back from the south. No, under the influences of forces centered deeply behind them in the arctic thermal systems, they retreat. This is not the nice distinction employed by military strategists trying to save face with an angry and hurt civilian population from which future infantries must be drawn, but rather, in the case of glacial movement, “retreat” is a scientifically descriptive term. For, truly, what could stop a glacier's scourging march across a whole continent if it did not entirely of itself slow its march, hold, and then begin to withdraw? So, too, with the glaciers that covered what is now known as New England. Simply, they began to retreat, and as they did so the skies began to clear, for weeks, then whole months at a time, while below, dark patches of wet ground showed, and then whole soggy regions, vast swamps near the coast, huge deltas, and above the deltas, gradually rising fields stuffed and swollen with smoothly ground boulders, stones, streams of gravel and
sand. In the low places, there were deep cold lakes filling rapidly with fresh icemelt, spilling over the till deposited like dams at the ends, making streams that gushed with clear waters toward the plains and the sea. And as the sullen glacier moved still farther back, beyond Massachusetts, deep furrows and mile-high moraines were revealed, here and there an isolated monadnock, dripping wetly in the sunlight as if just disgorged, too tough to chew and too bulky to swallow whole. Until, finally, the White Mountains themselves stood revealed, humbler now, lower, scraped clean and smoothed, gouged with new deep valleys and notches, yet still obdurate, still planted deeply below the earth's crust, altered, yes, but not moved. While beyond the mountains, its noise daily diminishing, the glacier still retreats, leaving behind long lakes, swamps, rivers, a tough-skinned corrugation of hills and low mountains, a topsoil of gravelly land and a subsoil of boulders, clay, sand and shale. The winds die down, and for the first time in ten thousand years there are low and warm winds for a full half-year. And then the grasses appear, the low berry bushes, the fruit and nut trees, and the taller, straighter conifers. Come the forests, come the birds and beasts of the forests, for now there is plenty again—the fruits and the sorrels, the produce of the yamboo, the blooms of the yulan, all the bear-loved blood-gutted berries and wrinkled cresses, whole heavy branches of juice-slimed sloes and ferns, whortles and plums, the speckled eggs of daws, the roe of the dee, the milk of the dameen. Thickly mottled with dark shapes are the skies, for now have arrived the crested cormorant, the heron, the melancholic loon, the sharp-eyed hawk and the eagle, the sun-blotting geese, the grackle, the starling, the lowly wren, the jay, and the chickadee. Chuming silver are the waters of the lakes and the streams, for now spawn the salmon, the blood-flecked pike, the turgid bass, the muscular trout. Great-bodied shad surge upstream from the low warm waters near the sea, followed by waves of alewives, bream and pout. Flushed are the dark new forests with the foot
fall, bark and cough of the brawny bear, the roar of the urinating cougar of the claws and fangs that rend, the pad and nighttime howl of the timber wolf, the scowl of the badger, the sneak of the lynx. Add to these the fox who deceitfully reasons and stays forever hungry, the dutiful beaver, the martin, otter, muskrat and mouse—all the wee new beasties of the wood. Add to these the white-tailed deer, the rabbit, the moose with gobs of saturated moss dripping from its great jaws. Add to these the names of the hundreds not named, and fill the air with the buzz of bees, hornets, deerflies, blackflies, butterflies, the nighttime moths, dragonflies, and below, all the newts, toads, grackles, salamanders, snakes and centipedes that populate the ground beneath the great trees and the grasses, stones, logs and sweetly moldering leaves.