by Mark Helprin
FOR THREE DAYS in June, Cameron had ridden the fence—leaving before the sun came up, returning home at dusk—and he had been lucky. There were only a few posts to be pounded in with the heel of the axe; a few dozen slipped wires, fixed with a bent double-headed nail and some hammer blows; and some partial breaks, mostly of the top wire, which was stressed more than the others by temperature contractions or drifting snow.
The fourth day, he judged, would be his last up there, and he might get home late in the afternoon instead of at eight or nine, knowing that he would not have to go out east again until the fall (to bring in the steers), when he was likely to see Sanderson on the other side of the fence, doing the same thing.
By one in the afternoon, he had risen to the higher meadows, where there were not many trees and he could see just about everything, including the valley that led eventually to Sanderson’s house, and faint trails of smoke from Sanderson’s fire. Or perhaps they were branding, curing meat, or burning deadwood. Ahead for six miles or so was the rest of the fence. It ended in the northeast, flat up against a vertical rock wall half a thousand feet high.
No mountain goat, much less a steer, could have bent his neck to see the top of that wall. Though they had no one to tell them about the danger of falling rocks, or lightning that slithered down the face, and though presumably they had no historical memory and could not conclude by either logic or deduction that it was dangerous, the steers wisely kept clear of the foot of the wall even though the grass there was richer and greener than it was anywhere else. And, for some unknown reason, perhaps because bears in high meadows are happier than bears in the woods, at this altitude they were content to use the baffles, and seldom tore at the wire. The last six had always been the easiest of the miles, and they were surely the most beautiful.
When Cameron was young, when it was still his father’s place, and he had yet to marry, he had loved to finish riding fences at the sheer wall in the northeast corner. At that time, the adjoining ranch was owned by the Reeds, whose son, several years older than Cameron, was killed at Passchendaele.
“You know what?” young Reed had once said to the even younger Cameron. “Everyone’s talking about how dangerous it will be in the war. But I’m not worried about that at all. I’m worried about the fact that a certain number of years after I come back I’ll be so old that I’ll be supposed to die. I don’t like that idea, so I’ve decided that I’m not going to die.”
“Ever?” Cameron had asked, wondering what the older boy was up to.
“Ever” was Reed’s answer. “Or should I say never.” And then he had smiled in such a way as to make young Cameron think that, even if his friend were excessively foolish, he was excessively brave.
Cameron himself had longed to go, but was too young; and, much later, discovered that he had become a man only when he stopped envying Charles S. R. Reed for having been killed in battle. During the First War, and for the many years thereafter until the Sandersons came from Scotland, the eastern side had been for Cameron a lovely isolated place with a life of its own. He would spend days in the forests there, or on the high meadows, and, if the weather was good, he would be taken up entirely by nature.
Fiercely in its grip, in the trance of youth, in the sunshine at eight thousand feet, he could go for days like an animal—not ever thinking, but riding, leaping, plunging into the ice-cold pools and glacier melts, stalking birds and game—with the same eyes and heart as a bear, an elk, or a horse. But only until the weather turned, for when it was gray and rainy, or sleeting in June, or when the great thunderheads with their accompaniment of artillery passed overhead to drench and freeze him, he thought and calculated with a city dweller’s devotion to thinking and calculation. Nothing was what it was, simply, but became instead the symbol or part of something else. Time forced its own consideration. Ambition reigned, as did disharmony. When he was sixteen, eighteen, or twenty, however, such disturbances, like the storms, were dispelled and forgotten in one blue morning.
That was before Reed sold out to the Sandersons, in the middle of the Depression; not because he was hard-pressed but because he had never stopped grieving for his son. “There’s nothing wrong with war,” the senior Reed had said to Cameron, when young Charles S. R. Reed had been five months gone toward Passchendaele, “except that it destroys the ones you love. I fought against the Boer in South Africa—I volunteered to go because I was madly in love and wanted to be worthy. I shouldn’t have spoken of it to my son. But if I hadn’t, he would have gone anyway, for he, too, was in love. I just hope that he comes back to me alive.”
It was said, on no specific authority, that the elder Reed disappeared to some city, where he was bitter and alone; that the Sandersons had paid him a good price; and that Mrs. Sanderson’s family was wealthy enough to have given the young couple a wedding present of a thousand acres of the most beautiful land in the world. Their wealth, however, could not have matched the gossip, since Reed sold off the best three-quarters of his herd, and the Sandersons lived until the end of the Second World War in a painful frugality that elsewhere might have been called poverty.
But, in Cameron’s eyes, on those thousand acres there was no such thing as poverty, even if the lady of the house possessed only a single dress for summer, and a worn one at that. There was no poverty for them, even if they had few luxuries, no telephone, no electricity. And to wash they had had to take water from a stream, heat it over a wood fire, and pour it into a huge gold-rimmed porcelain bowl that, before it was chipped, had probably been a salad bowl in a hotel or railroad buffet, since on it in ornate gilt lettering were the initials of the Canadian Pacific Railway.
That bowl had come to mean something to Cameron the way material objects do to people in love. He remembered it because she had been standing by it, with her hand touching the rim, the first time he had ever seen her—on a cold mountain-summer morning in 1935.
SANDERSON had been in the mountains for a year or more before Cameron had encountered him on the ridge, mending the fence. Cameron rode up, dismounted, and watched in silence. No matter that for ten miles in any direction they were the only two beings that could talk. Neither spoke.
Every now and then, the recently arrived Scotsman looked up at the man on the other side of the fence, who stared at him in unexplained amusement. But he would be damned before he would speak first to an uncivil Canadian who had lived in the wilderness since birth and probably had little more in his head than would a bear or a wild ram.
For half an hour, Cameron watched his new neighbor diligently mend the fence. Either someone had shown Sanderson how, or he had thought it out himself, but his splices were good and would last as long as the steel. Cameron thought that if he could be forgiven for not speaking, he had found a friend.
Just as Sanderson finished and was about to mount his horse, Cameron said, “Will you send me a bill, then? Or are you a monk from some religious order, doing the Lord’s work in mufti?”
“I beg your pardon?” the Scotsman asked in such a heavy accent that Cameron immediately realized how he had known about mending fences: he, too, was a countryman.
“I was just wondering if you were a traveling monk.”
“And why would you wonder that?” Sanderson replied coldly.
“It’s either something like that or you’re uncommonly generous. Anyway, you have my thanks.”
Sanderson looked at the fence.
“Right,” said Cameron. “It’s mine.”
“I’ve been working on it for four days now,” Sanderson said bitterly. “Why isn’t it marked?”
“It’s not the custom here. You should have asked.”
“Reed told me that I had to keep up the southern and western fences.”
“No,” Cameron said, shaking his head. “South and east. When you get into Alberta, the custom changes. There are people straddling the provincial border who don’t have to worry about any fences: they’re on the line where ways of doing things meet, and they reap the b
enefits. Of course, it could have been just the reverse, too, and I’m sure that in some places there are those who have to tend their wire in all directions. We’re both lucky, though, in our way. We share the north wall. I’ve got a lot of river on my property as well, and there’s no fence like a fast deep river.”
“Now I know,” Sanderson said. “You can take over from here. Maybe I will send you a bill.”
“You can send it if you’d like. Doesn’t mean that I’ll pay it.”
“Don’t worry about it,” Sanderson said, and got on his horse. Although Sanderson appeared to be in no mood to talk, Cameron believed that there was never a better way for a man to make a friend than in a fight of little consequence.
“OUR EASTERN FENCE is mended, all but the last easy six,” Cameron announced to his wife at dinner that night.
“How so?” she asked.
“Sanderson did it. He thought it was his.”
“Did he put in much wire?”
“Plenty. I haven’t seen it all, but he replaced it, just as I do, not only where it’s broken but where you can tell it’s going to break.”
“You ought to give him back what we’ve gained.”
“He didn’t have to put it there.”
“I’ve heard that they’re having a hard time,” his wife said. “Why don’t you bring him some wire, and some beef, since they probably can’t afford to slaughter their own animals.”
“I suppose I could do that. He seems like a nice fellow. There’s probably a lot he can learn from me.”
“He may not think of it in quite that way,” Mrs. Cameron said.
“I don’t see why he shouldn’t. Our family has been here more than half a century—he arrived a few months ago. It shows. He spent four days fixing a fence that didn’t belong to him. But all right. When I go there,” he asked, “do you want to come with?”
“No. But tell me about Sanderson’s wife. If she seems nice, then I’ll ride over, too.”
The next day, Cameron found himself in front of Sanderson’s house, screaming “Hallo!” to no avail. Though a rich volume of smoke issued from the chimney, no one answered. They were away and had left far too big a fire burning unattended, or they wanted nothing to do with him. And he had ridden almost twenty miles, carrying heavy coils of wire and another big package, and to go visiting had put on his best riding boots and a new Black Watch shirt.
He decided to leave the wire on the porch and the meat just inside, away from raccoons and bears. He wanted to write a note, and thought that they might have a pen or pencil somewhere near the door. He wouldn’t have to go all the way in.
He took the leather off the coils of wire and carried them up onto the porch. When he stepped into the shade, he realized that on his way over he had been pleasantly sunburned by the June sun and the snowfields. “Hallo!” he said, rapping at the door. When there was no answer, he opened the latch and looked in.
The fire was ablaze. A large iron kettle hung over the flames, and was just beginning to steam. There must be someone here, he thought. And then, as his eyes fully adjusted to the light and he looked about the room, he saw that there was.
SANDERSON’S WIFE, her left hand clasped against her chest in fright, stared at him from across a wooden table. She was wearing only a slip, that was a pearly salmon color with a gray metallic sheen. To have been polite, Cameron should have turned away. To have been wise, he might have left for good.
But he couldn’t take his eyes off her. “I called and called,” he said. “Didn’t you hear me?”
As if to establish his credentials, he pointed at the coils of wire on the porch and held up the large package of steak. “I’m your neighbor. I’ve brought your husband some wire and some beef. I wanted to leave a note, but I didn’t have a pen, so I just stepped inside.”
As he waited for an answer, he was free to look at her. She remained motionless, her right hand gripping the side of the bowl with the golden rim. Just her arms, hands, and fingers were enough to mark her as a beauty. Her eyes were lucid and green, and the thick soft hair that was piled atop her head and fell about her face in long wisps and exquisitely curling locks was a matte red so rich and subdued that it made him giddy. And her complexion, which showed, too, on her shoulders and chest, was a cross between mottled red and ivory. Cameron’s paralysis was not lessened by her gorgeous expression of surprise, by her silver and gold rings, and by a light gold neck chain splayed across the lace trim of the slip.
She motioned for him to go outside. He moved back and looked at the bowl, trying to remember its smallest detail, down to the curl of the letters, for he wanted to be able to recall the scene with the power to renew it. Then he went out onto the porch, shut the door behind him, and stepped into the sunlight.
He wished that when she joined him in the daylight she would be ugly, and that the way she had struck him as so beautiful would prove to have been an illusion of the dim light—this for the sake of his lovely wife, whom he loved and did not want to wish to abandon, and because he was not suitable for Mrs. Sanderson. He imagined that a man suited to her would have to be many ranks above him, though Sanderson, it seemed, was not.
Since he could never have her, he would have to hate her for it. Even had she and he been unmarried, having her would have been out of the question. But, then, what about Sanderson? He was not a god. Perhaps she was as beautiful as she appeared to be only to Cameron. Perhaps, given time, she would leave her husband. Or, given more time, he would die. Perhaps, Cameron thought, his ride over the snowfields in the strong sun had been too rapturous. Then he remembered her face.
Having lost this debate with himself, he stamped his foot against the boards, sorry that he had ever seen her, bitter about the imbalance that the sight of her made clear to him, and angry that he felt so low when just that morning he had ridden across the high meadows, in sight of a line of snowy peaks to the north, feeling that there was no place higher that he or anyone else would want to go. As he was turning to leave, she walked onto the porch. She was in an old-fashioned flowered dress, and the sight of her made Cameron wish for Sanderson to come galloping in and distract him from her lacerating and untouchable beauty, which was even finer in the daylight than it had been in the dim interior of the house, where there had not been any of the blue glacial light that seemed to lift her off the earth and make her smile something not of this world.
She carried pencils and paper. “I don’t need that now,” Cameron said. “I was going to leave a message only if no one was in.”
She shook her head to say no, smiled, and pointed to herself.
She’s crazy, he thought.
Then she raised a hand perfectly adorned in rings, and tapped her left ear. When next she put her index finger across her lips twice in succession, he understood.
“You can’t hear,” he said, already moving his lips more deliberately, so that she might understand.
She nodded.
“You can’t talk.”
She sat down on the step in the sunlight and made room for him to follow. “I can talk,” she wrote on the pad, in a firm but delicate hand, “but they say it doesn’t come out very well, so I prefer to write.”
“Do you talk to your husband?” he asked.
“Yes,” she wrote. “Only to him and to my parents, who are in Scotland. I also talk to the animals, since I am told they sound even worse than I do.” She smiled. “Please,” she continued, as he drank in every movement of her hands and eyes, “don’t mention this to anyone. In all of Canada, you are the only one who knows.”
“Why?” he asked.
“I am ashamed,” she wrote. She indicated emphasis and nuance with the pen (by writing very fast or very slow; by bearing down hard; by returning to underline or circle; and by drawing the letters one way or another, to look shaky, flat, tired, or animated) and with her facial expressions.
“There’s nothing to be ashamed of,” he told her, “nothing.”
“That may be so,” she wrot
e quickly, “but long experience has shown me that it’s best this way. I’ve always preferred to keep to myself.”
“But what if you have to go into Invermere? They’ll know then.”
“I’ve been there only once. If we have to, we go to Calgary to shop. It’s bigger, and no one knows us there.”
“Calgary is a long way off,” he said.
“Invermere is small,” she wrote back.
“Well, I can’t dispute that,” he answered.
“Are you married?” she wrote.
“Yes.”
“Then,” she put down, “please don’t tell even your wife. If I could hear and talk like everyone else, I would talk no end to other women, and I suspect that I’m not unusual in that desire, except that I don’t get to realize it.”
“She wanted to visit,” Cameron said. “When the pass is open, it’s not that far on a good horse. Would you enjoy that?”
“No” was the written answer. “Or, rather, yes. But, again, my experience tells me that it would not be a good idea.”
Cameron took a chance. “Because of me?” he asked bluntly, wondering if she knew the effect of her beauty.
Evidently she did, for she nodded, and then, as if for emphasis, wrote, “Yes.”
“Isn’t that a lot to presume?” He was bluffing. It wasn’t anything at all to presume, but he thought she might become interested in him if she imagined that he, of all men, could not see or did not care about her beauty.
“Experience,” she wrote.
Because Cameron looked dejected, she added, “If you feel distraught, don’t worry. It will pass.”
“I don’t think it will.”
“Don’t be silly.” Her hand flew across the pad. “A man doesn’t have his head turned forever. After all, you don’t know me.”
“And if I did?”
“I won’t demean myself. But I do tend to draw men to me very strongly at first, only to see them drop away much relieved and delighted to go.”