The Followed Man (30 page)

Eph let the loader idle and
climbed down. "That ought to do it," he said. "Looks
like a hell of a mess, but you can't make gravel stand on end."
The cellar hole looked a bit like a bomb crater, but it was deep
enough and wide enough. A drilling rig could drive right in on the
south side and make his well.

"You get Marple to come in,
set the forms and pour you your footings," George said. "No
sense trying to do it by hand, less you want to."

"You think the bridge is
strong enough for a cement truck?" Luke asked.

"Shuh!" Eph said. "If
it worries him you can cut an upright for the middle of it, set it in
the brook. After two or three years, I'd begin to wonder myself, but
right now, hell, we had five yards of gravel on the Mack and it
didn't hardly budge, did it?"

Eph drove the loader back up the
hill, its engine roaring and its appendages nodding violently on the
uneven fresh gravel. Tillie and Luke rode with George. The gravel was
loose, but it would settle down and harden as it found itself. George
suggested that he'd need some waterbars here and there to keep the
freshets from washing straight down the road and taking the gravel
with it.

At the farm, Eph had already
begun to push the fallen house into the cellar hole, making a slanted
pile like cards fallen over. Fi­nally he stopped, moved the
loader away from the pile and turned the engine off, saying he'd had
enough for the day and he'd come back in the morning. In the meantime
he suggested that Luke throw a few old tires underneath the pile and
burn up what was there, so there'd be more room for what was left,
including the sheds and junk and parts of the collapsed barn. "You
won't need no permit. The lookout's left the mountain, gone down to
his cab­in to make his supper. Besides, it's going to rain. Light
her up. Throw some kerosene on some of them old tires and let burn
what'll burn. If it worries you, I'll call up the Fire Warden and
tell him what you're up to. Fred Wilson, you know him? He'll bitch
about a permit but it won't do him much good."

Luke offered them something to
drink. Tillie had a small juice glass of straight Canadian whiskey,
and Eph and George each took a beer. They watched him roll four
ancient tires from the sheds and shove them into the interstices of
the pile. It would burn, and it would frighten him a little, that
niggling bit about the permit, and the name, Wilson—a relative
of Lester?—and the general old fear of forest fires everyone
had been brainwashed into by Smokey the Bear. But the hell with it,
he decided nervous­ly, let her burn. He tucked some old, fairly
dry newspapers into the tires, poured kerosene on them and lit an
edge of the paper. Thick orange flame grew smoothly.

They watched as the flame grew
silently at first; then, as the tires heated and curled, it screeched
like kittens below the black smoke that raced straight up. It was
soon a roar and a heat that made them back up toward the tent. The
fire seemed to have no limits to its energy, an accelerating
explosion that fed itself and might start the whole town to burning—a
terror. Luke thought of the small paper match that had been the se6d
of this violence, and how he had lit that match. Black smoke and
twisting orange flame shot up a hundred feet, then turned to roll to
the east in whorls of dense black. It was as if he were responsible,
suddenly and disas­trously, for this holocaust everyone in the
state of New Hamp­shire must be seeing with horror and
disapproval.

He got himself a beer, his hands
actually trembling with an ap­prehension he knew was unnecessary,
because after a time the fire would reach its highest intensity and
then it could do no more. And soon it did, though it still screamed
and billowed and made the air violent and soiled. But he could see
that it no longer grew, and would not destroy the world after all.

Eph and George sat on kitchen
chairs, sipping their beer and watching. Tillie stood next to Luke,
tall and bony, her shoulder bones apparent through the clean blue of
her workshirt.

"Now it's lost its anger,"
she said, "and it will grumble."

It will grumble, he thought. She
said it that way: it will grumble.

Tillie said, "Is that your
dog? That hound?"

He looked back where she was
looking, but his eyes were some­how seared by the fire and for a
while he couldn't seem to focus on brush, grass or shadow. "There,"
she said.

The dog was near the road,
unmoving, wondering at these peo­ple and the fire, trying to
decide whether he should come forward and be recognized, or
disappear. When Jake saw that Luke was looking straight at him, the
white tip of his tail moved in a small circle, once; in the eyes, in
the set of the long ears, in the position of the leading foreleg—the
one that would take the first step for­ward if forward was the
way to go—in the set of the body and in the angle of the body
to the direction of inquiry, Luke could not help reading the dog's
thoughts exactly. "Jake," he said above the fire's
grumbling and cracking, and Jake came up to him and nosed his leg,
though still a little worried about the others, Luke read in the
angle of Jake's tail to his spine. "It's okay, Jake," Luke
said. "Though, man, I don't need the complications."

"That Lester Wilson's
beagle hound?" George said.

"I'm afraid so."

"I guess he took a shine to
you," Tillie said. "They do that."

"He come around often?"
George said.

"He came back the night
before last."

"You feeding him?"

"Well," Luke said, "I
figure that's between me and Jake."

"And Lester Wilson,"
George said. "That shithead. Pardon me, Tillie."

Tillie smilled and said to Luke,
"Why don't you buy him from Lester?"

"Easier said than done,"
George said.

Eph didn't seem to be listening
to all this. "We'll take the Mack, leave everything else here
tonight. You ready, Tillie? Got to help Mickey with the milking."
He looked at the sky over the moun­tain. "Rain soon. If it's
raining tomorrow we won't be back. If it's done raining, we'll be
back to finish up."

When they'd gone Luke gave Jake
a can of Alpo in the old blue-enameled pie plate. Lester Wilson could
do what he wanted; it was up to him this time. There seemed to be
some kind of flaw in this logic, but he didn't want to think about
it. He had studying to do. He got out
Architectural Graphic
Standards,
a quarto volume that contained all sorts of technical
information about building.

For supper he had ham and eggs
and a fried tomato, did his dishes and lit the Aladdin lamp when dark
clouds came over the mountain ahead of the rain. That evening, with
the rain tapping and tightening the canvas of the tent, Jake curled
and breathing at his feet, he studied what his heart desired.

Next morning the rain had
stopped. The cellar hole still smoul­dered and the house had
sifted down into it. The old wood-oil range stood shoulder high in
gray ash. He'd thought briefly of sal­vaging it, but it wasn't
the stove he wanted in his cabin and life was too short to start a
salvage operation. Bury it all.

Eph and Tillie arrived at nine
o'clock in an old Buick that must have scraped a lot on the road in.
Before Eph could start the gaso­line starter motor on the loader
it began to rain again, so Luke made a pot of coffee and they sat in
the tent around the old kitch­en table, waiting to see if it
would stop. About nine-thirty Jake, who had been gone since daylight,
came in sopping wet and asked Luke to do something about it. Luke
gave him the same towel he'd given to Louise Sturgis and Jake spread
it out, more or less, on the ground and rolled himself fairly dry on
it.

"You knowed that dog long?"
Eph asked.

"For a week or so. He just
turns up here," Luke said.

"I was wondering. I'll tell
you a story about your uncle, Shem Carr, and me when we was about
your age. Of course Tillie's heard it before, and she most likely
knows it better'n I do myself. She'll correct me if I disremember,
exaggerate or tell a lie; the next bar I go before, being as I'm an
old atheist, as Tillie can tell you, though she disapproves, is what
I conceive as The Court of Worms, so maybe it don't matter if I do
lie. But while we're wait­ing for the rain to stop, and drinking
your good coffee, I'll tell you some ancient history.

"This was the year nineteen
thirty-six, the year before you come to live with me, Tillie,
bringing the precious gift of yourself to my life, for I was a
worthless, brawling, drunken whoremaster, though I worked hard, you
got to grant that.

"Now, Luke, you want to be
careful what you say about the dead, so I'll stick to the truth. Your
uncle, Shem Carr, was one heller when he got in a mood. They used to
say that was how he killed all them Huns in the war—he just got
in a mood. And when he got that black look to him you never knew what
was making him go. I suspect it was a kind of terrible honor and
justice the rest of us only think about sometimes, maybe in our
dreams, and forget in our regular lives 'cause it's easier to trim
and hedge and give a cynical shrug, so to speak, or scream and roar
and hit your fist on a wall and get rid of your poor rage that way.
Men, in their wisdom, make laws for all men to follow, and the law is
like a weight on most men, but not on all men. 'A law unto himself'—you heard the words—was Shem Carr when something got to him
deep enough.

"Now, if Shem Carr had
anything like a best friend, I was that friend. As a child I was
mortally afflicted with a tongue that never would be still, so I
learned to fight early on in my life, but I'd al­ways rather talk
than fight, so I never meant to hurt, just make them quiet so they
could listen, cause for me that was the proper way of things—me
talking and the others listening to what my fancy spun out on the end
of my cursed and blabbing tongue. I'd feel these dark and wonderful
shapes coming to me in my head, and they was the shapes of words and
stories that was sweeter to me than meat and drink, peace and
dignity.

"Shem kind of liked to hear
me talk, and he had no need, like some of the others, to prove me an
ass. He never said much him­self, or if he did it was straight to
the point, leaving out all the sounds and shapes that was more
interesting to my ears than how many nails in a keg.

"As I say, the year was
nineteen hundred and thirty-six. Shem was born in eighteen
ninety-four, so that'd make him a young man of forty-two or so. I was
three years younger, hadn't been to the war like Shem."

Eph poured himself some coffee
and spooned in some of the white powder that did Luke for cream,
giving the bottle a wry look as he screwed on the cap. Tillie sat
straight and quiet in her chair, as though she didn't want Eph to
know how carefully she was listening. Eph paused to sip his coffee,
and Luke thought: 1936. The first thing you did with a year in your
own lifetime was to set yourself in it. He was alive then, four years
old. He may have had memories of that year, but he couldn't be sure.
Shem and Carrie were running the farm. Samuel was fifteen. His own
father was twenty-seven, his mother twenty-five. It was the
Depression, the source of myth and admonition that had instruct­ed
his childhood, though he could never remember it as they'd told him
it was.

"That was during the Great
Depression," Eph said, "though we never noticed it much
around here. We had plenty to eat 'cause we grew and fed up our
critters, we had our gardens like always, we slaughtered and pickled
and preserved, and there wa'n't no mortgages like out West, or few of
them, and we never did have much cash money laying around. Drank hard
cider, burned wood, sweetened our gruel with maple or birch syrup.
Hell, we hardly knew there was a depression on. You had to go to the
city to find out what all the commotion was about—though I
believe the state went for Roosevelt that year. I was always a
Democrat and a Freethinker myself. Wait till the next depression,
though. All the farms are gone and you can't eat wood. I won't be
around to see it, maybe, so it's no skin off the back of my neck, so
to speak, but it surely is a pity folks these days is so Allmighty
dumb.

"Anyway, the dog there
minds me of a beagle hound Shem once owned, name of Heidi, smartest
little bitch you ever saw— for a beagle, that is. Nose on her
you could hardly believe, she never run a back trail, never stopped
to dig—and we had all kinds of coney rabbits in them days,
they'd go to ground, or in a stone wall, and most of your beagles'd
just dig and wail. Not Heidi, she'd pick herself out a jackrabbit and
stay on it till you got it. Only dog Shem ever had he'd let in the
house. He thought a lot of that dog. Pretty little thing, too, all
satin black along her back, like that one there, then a tan like
buckskin and pure white on her chest and belly. She had a kind of
high, yippity voice, was the only fault she had, that never carried
around corners too well, it seemed like.

"One time Heidi, she was
about ten years old, a little past her prime but smart—a
professional, Shem called her more than once—so smart you kind
of forgot she was a dog and considered her another person you was
hunting with, well, me and Shem was hunting way over to Switches
Corners and Heidi got on this old ridge runner of a jack he'd go
clean over a mountain, hours be­fore you'd hear that little
yippity-yip way off on the ledges some­place and then it was gone
again. All day long we was slogging up and down and across and over
and we never could figure out where that goddam straight-line
jackrabbit was going to come out. He'd go a mile straight before he'd
turn, I swear to God. Finally it got dark and no Heidi, so we come
back to Shem's pickup truck—a '34 flathead V-8, went like hell,
by the way, which is what got Shem in trouble in the first place with
Wallace Ellis, but I'll get to that.