The Followed Man (13 page)

The hill farmers were not like
those on the rich river bottoms because they were closer to the
wilderness, and also to starvation. They were loggers, hunters and
gatherers, always looking for sustenance wherever they could find it.
Frosts came late and early in these upper valleys. Apples, potatoes,
corn and timber, Shem had told him, were their mainstays, and "They
et a lot of johnnycake." They knew wild food, and blueberries,
strawberries, raspberries and blackberries, in the order of their
seasons. As for game, there were no hours or seasons, and they
counted out their shells and cartridges one by one.

On the way to the brook the road
had been gullied in places to the ledge. All the old waterbars that
Shem repaired each year had been washed away in the spring runoffs,
so instead of being shunt­ed off to the side the rivulets had
taken the road itself for their channel and washed it down to base
rock.

The rush of the still invisible
brook grew louder as he descend­ed. A deerfly found him and
circled his head slowly, with a kind of bullying insistence. He stood
still, waited for it to land and then crushed it against his scalp.
Blackflies, here in the damper shade, had found him too, but they
were not thick enough or ferocious enough on this dry day to bother
him.

He came on the brook sooner than
he had expected to. The log and plank bridge was gone entirely. The
boulders and stone slabs of its abutments, which had been built up
eight feet from the bed of the brook over a hundred years ago, were
still there in spite of the white torrent the brook became in spring,
when the snow melted from the mountain. Then whole trees would come
shoot­ing past like pile drivers, and you could hear and feel the
rumble of boulders hurtling along below.

Now the brook sighed in its
small rapids, was so calm and clear in its pools he could see the
smallest pebbles on the bottom. A small brook trout felt his shadow
and sped across what seemed nothing but air, to hide in a crevice.
Only a slightly more golden tone in that element told him the water
was deep.

The far side of the brook, now
grown up in alders and beyond the alders in gray birch and poplar,
had once been a smooth field called the lower pasture. Downstream,
around a bend bordered by an outcropping of ledge, was the chute and
pool that had been called the swimming hole, though the pool was only
a few feet deep and twenty in diameter. He left the road and found a
way through the trees along the steep bank. The pool was bordered on
one side by ledge and on the other by several loose but immovable
boulders, one as big as a room. The floor of the pool was a smoothed
dip in the bedrock that in flood would scour itself clean of stones
and sand, leaves, waterlogged branches and the remains of all the
living things that inhabited the brook. This early in the summer the
scoured stone was still bright, and the water coming down the stone
chute that used to be his slide entered the pool with a quiet rush
and disappeared except for the large bubbles that rose, wobbling and
silver, back up to the air.

He considered taking off his
clothes and sliding into that clean cold water that was as pure and
enlivening as any he had ever known, but it was cool here in this
dim, mossy-banked place. It would be good to cut out the trees on the
southwestern side and let in the afternoon sunlight. The tall
hemlocks on the eastern bank could stay; their shade and acidic
needles kept the bank on this side smooth and clear of brush. That
thought, and thoughts of a bridge for the old abutments, culverts and
gravel for the road, the clearing of brush so that at this time of
day the sun would slant across long vistas of the green hay he
remembered, gentle and hazy in the summer light, began to work in him
a change he couldn't define, to infect him with a purpose that was
not to be seriously considered.

He took off his boots and socks,
his feet on the hemlock needles feeling tender and unnatural. The
hemlock needles, and a root that emerged and then submerged again,
were cool and harsh to his naked soles. He took off the rest of his
clothes and stretched his air-touched nakedness vertically, like the
narrow bodies of the trees.

When he stepped down to the
stones, they felt harsh yet famil­iar to his feet. The water
seemed cold only at its surface, though almost unbearable there. His
legs, below the nearly invisible sur­face, seemed to belong to a
water organism unconnected to the chilled body above. He started to
shiver violently, then gave it all up and made a shallow dive up
toward the head of the pool. He was warm, numb, cold as refrigerated
meat, slow-jointed. He opened his eyes underwater and seemed to be
swimming in a great golden salver. The invisible turbulence from the
chute was, in its motion, like arms and hands. A silver bubble
touched his thigh and belly as it rose. The energy of the moving
water, its gen­tle yet powerful kneadings of his flesh, seemed a
form of life in connection with him, each shove and pull an opinion
made kinet­ic, like an embrace.

He climbed out of the water
feeling taut and compacted, hard as rubber, his scrotum like cold
boiled eggs, his penis narrow as a bent dowel. He wiped the water
from his body with his hands, then put on his clothes that were now
soft and unsubstantial. His boots felt light and good on his feet. He
was thankful that he'd had the nerve—only it wasn't exactly
nerve, but more a surplus of heat and force, something like the
almost forgotten joy children had in the motions and changes with
which they tested their bod­ies.

This pool, these woods and
disappearing fields, this small arc-fragment of the earth's surface
would, after probate, be his in name. Shem had died intestate but as
far as he knew there would be no other claimants to this land.

He crossed the brook on stones
below the pool, wanting to see what was left of the lower pasture.
There had once been a black­smith shop by the bridge. The stone
walls, some of them five feet across, had been piled by men, oxen and
stoneboat. Before that had been stump fences, stumps piled on their
sides and inter­locked. The walls had sunken and been tumbled in
places by frost. Birch and poplar, pincherry and steeplejack had come
in across the fields, but there were patches of meadow left; it could
be cleared again. He walked across between the saplings, feeling the
once-openness of the place, then remembered his daydream, partly
night-dream, of the field and cabin in cold February moon­light,
the cross-country skis, the one yellow windowlight of the shelter
waiting for his return. In winter the mountain would be ice-white,
and he would hear the sigh of the iced-over brook.

On the other side of a thick
wall to the southwest was a dense grove of spruce in which it was
night. To enter its deep dusk one would need a flashlight, if the
lower branches would let anyone into its mysteries. A red squirrel,
invisible, screamed alarm and outrage at his presence, or at the
presence of some other car­nivore. In a patch of grass, three
yard-long, kidney-shaped depressions in the green were the recent
beds of white-tailed deer, and there were the raisin-like turds one
of them had left as it departed.

An alien, not an alien, he had
company in this wilderness. If he looked he would find the signs of a
thousand animals. At his feet were wild strawberries, so he went to
the ground and searched them out, their tang and sweetness, pale red
washing his fingers. Grasshoppers were down here, and leafhoppers,
and there was a lucky glimpse of a departing green snake. In the
underthatch ran old white-footed mouse passages from the past winter,
when the snow had roofed them over. A broad tailed hawk's plaintive
whis­tle made him look up from the warm grass to where it
patrolled this salient, turning on an invisible plane. A mosquito
sucked the blood of his wrist, proving that at least in some measure
he was ac­cepted by this world and its forces.

On the way back up the tunnel of
a road to his car he heard one more evidence of life. A partridge
drummed, the sound hard to locate, an air-thudding that gathered
momentum until it stopped, leaving an uncertain memory of its
direction or even of its having occurred. But it was there, the large
grouse somewhere in the woods fanning its powerful wings.

When George brought the small
deer chops, a whole platter of them, to the table, he was smiling in
a mysterious, hard to repress sort of way. Then he couldn't resist
and said, "You know where I shot this doe?" Knowing of
course that Luke couldn't guess, he went on. "In Shem's lower
pasture, is where. 'Bout seven o'clock, first day of the season, dry
and noisy. I was about to light my pipe when I heard this
tickety-tick-tick-tick and out steps this pretty lit­tle doe,
free as you please. Now, that don't happen too often in a man's
lifetime! I drew a bead on her neck, she wasn't more than two rods
from me, I was using the old thirty-forty Krag with the iron sights,
and bang she goes down like a sack of meal. Tagged her, cleaned her,
drug her across the brook and up the hill to the truck and I was back
home by nine. She only weighed eighty pounds but I'll settle for
tender meat anytime."

"I saw three beds down
there today," Luke said.

"Ayuh, they come in there,
all right. Popple, old apple trees, sprouts. There's a buck in there
with a track as big as a heifer I'd like to see sometime. You wait
till there's snow on the ground, you see them tracks you wonder if it
ain't a breechy cow got loose from somewheres."

The deer chops were tender, rosy
on the inside, leaving a smooth, tallowy aftertaste that the acidic
dandelion greens cut. George had poured them each a half tumbler of
hard cider that was clear as water and slightly effervescent. He
said, "You want to go easy on that if you're still intent on
drivin' back to Massachu­setts tonight—which you don't have
to, you know."

"We'll be happy to put you
up, Luke, as we already told you," Phyllis said.

"As for me," George
said, "I admit to some common curiosity as to what's inside that
chest we got out in the shed. My program for the evening is we haul
it in here in the light, Luke and me, pry off that padlock and look
inside. Now, we got plenty of cider, which goes good with curiosity
but bad with drivin'." George stopped, and frowned at himself.
"None of my goddam business, of course. What in the bejesus got
into me?"

"Now, George," Phyllis
said.

George's face had turned red and
dark, rigid and unforgiving. Luke hastened to say that he'd like to
do just that. He'd call his real estate man, find out what was going
on, and stay and drink up all the cider in the house. "I'm
curious, too," he said.

George still looked suspicious,
but he did relent enough to take a drink of his cider and offer Luke
another deer chop and some more scalloped potatoes. "I ain't a
bad cook, if I do say so myself," he said. "Though I can't
hold a candle to mother, here, when her arthritis ain't acting up."

"It comes and it goes,"
Phyllis said. "Sometimes the aspirin and a little cider or wine
can handle the pain pretty good, sometimes I just got to sit and let
George do everything for me. He put in the downstairs bathroom there
off the kitchen, plumbing and all, where the pantry used to be, so I
don't have to climb the stairs."

"Hell, I done plenty of
plumbin' in my life," George said, look­ing more cheerful.

After supper George decanted
more cider, then he and Luke cleared the table and went out to
wrestle in the rough wooden chest. "Bigger than a footlocker by
far," George said. In spite of his age at the time, which was
thirty-six, George had gone into the army in World War II and served
in North Africa, Sicily and France in the Engineers.

George had a dolly which he'd
used to carry bricks and cement blocks, so they roped the chest on
that and finally, with much straining and planning about steps, doors
and sills, rugs and an­gles, got the chest into the dining room
next to the table.

"I reckon you got some
slivers out of that session," George said. Luke looked at his
soft white hands and found that it was true— the chest was made
of unplaned oak, though carefully joined. He would have to borrow a
needle to dig out the slivers. George's hands, of course, were tough
as gloves, a matter of pride.

"Now, how we going to get
that padlock off there? I looked the chest over, hoping there'd be a
key nailed on the underside some-wheres, but no luck," George
said.

The padlock looked rugged, one
of the kind made out of layers of steel held together with steel
pins.

"We could pry off the hasp,
I suppose," Luke said.

"You don't want to ruin the
chest," George said. "Let me get a hacksaw and see if it'll
cut the lock. We cut it where the U-bolt goes into the body and it
might want to swing loose."

The hacksaw just barely would
cut the lock bar. They took turns at it and finally cut it through,
though the saw blade was ruined. "Hot!" George said as he
turned the lock open. Luke un­did the hasp and opened the chest,
which had leather straps, cracked though still working, to keep the
cover from falling back against the hinges. Phyllis moved her chair
closer so she could see. On top was a wooden tray a few inches deep,
and in the tray was the gleam of many shades of metals, shapes of
silver and blue-black that at first meant only heaviness and value, a
treasure of tools—brass, steel and smooth hardwood shaped for a
man's hand.

"It's his tools,"
George said. "It's his tools, all right. Shem Carr always took
good care of his tools." George hesitated to reach into the
tray, though it was obvious he wanted to put his hands on the smooth
handles and heft them all. There were chisels, a set of them in
widths from a quarter-inch to two inches, in quarters, each made of
one piece of steel with ash inlays for handles, so they could be used
by hand only or malleted at the butt, wooden and brass mallets and
persuaders, screwdrivers, box wrenches, adjust­able wrenches, an
auger set with bits; burnishers, a small pry-bar.