After my stop at Tripp’s, I drove out into the snowy back roads of New Brunswick, gaining elevation, until I was among the wooded ridges overlooking the lakes. I pulled off in a fresh logging cut and left the truck on a high spot in the clearing. Then I set out for Skeddadle Ridge. It was a six-mile hike into the remote mountain valley of the old ghost town and back. A few families supposedly still lived out here, though I’d never found them. The schoolhouse and the post office once anchoring the makeshift community had long since returned to the earth. Only stone walls and fieldstone foundations remained.
Climbing the tight switchbacks, I pulled my coat close against the wind, which carved over the exposed bluffs in ferocious bursts. I had not brought ice spikes or snowshoes, and my boots slid and skidded in the half-frozen slush, but I traveled on, pushing up through the woods. Civilization fell away. Clouds rolled in over the sun. The gray solemnity of March filled the trees, the cold, dull casing of a winter-blasted boneyard with none of the hints of the transitional season to come. Frogs lay frozen at the bottom of ponds and streams. Bears slumbered. Sap ached to run but waited. I missed the birds most of all, and wished I had heard the news of Lyman’s death a few weeks later, when the world was free and green. I had no idea where I was walking to, precisely, not that I ever much did, the walk up and around Skeddadle Ridge having long been a favorite meditation of mine. The logging road, which had not been used in a decade, rose and turned through the forest until it reached a fork. To the right the road continued up the ridge into the old settlement. To the left a half-mile-long spur led deeper into the woods before opening onto former pastureland and an abandoned farmstead on the western ridge. A steel Quonset hut hunkered at the apex of the two paths, filled with the bones of harvesters and tractors.
Walking, I thought of Virginia Woolf, whose work I had returned to recently after many years, staying up deep into the night reading those circular passages by the light and crackle of the cabin’s woodstove: “. . . and Mrs. Ramsay could not help exclaiming, ‘Oh, how beautiful!’ For the great plateful of blue water was before her; the hoary lighthouse, distant, austere, in the midst; and on the right, as far as the eye could see, fading and falling, in soft low pleats, the green sand dunes with the wild flowing grasses on them, which always seemed to be running away into some moon country, uninhabited of men.” Yes, I thought, there are worlds like that, serene and unoccupied, moon countries upon which snow and darkness fall undisturbed by footsteps, places like this ridge, places like Iapetus, slowly circling Saturn with a clear view of those interstellar rings of singing ice.
Walking, I listened as my body changed the world’s sound. The gusts howled around boulders and barely moaned as they broke about my bones. My boots scuffed dully on rock. Crackled on ice. Crunched through drifts of wet, heavy snow.
Alone with the wind, I grew scared I might never find my way back. So I began to sing, and found in my mind the face of Lyman Creel. I sang old songs of mourning, mercy, and release from bondage that my mother had taught me—“Swing Low,” “Down in the River to Pray,” “Long Road to Freedom.” And even though death was still hanging about me, I began to feel like things might be okay after all.
At the Quonset hut I broke from my usual routine, veering left toward the old farmstead. A few hundred yards down the road there was a chain gate, and I ducked under it and continued on. The air had darkened and grown colder. I’d heard about the homestead, but never visited it. I realized now it was simply an old house, long forgotten. I thought of Molly and Adam Greenwind, who had created a utopia under the harshest conditions in a place not so different. There aren’t really many happy endings in most American lives. There are honest endings, though. Despite the best legal efforts of my uncle Reggie and others, Molly was ultimately convicted of arson. Though the judge reduced her sentence, based on the nature of the act, her rationale, and other extenuating circumstances, she was sentenced to five years in a juvenile facility. Once a month I visited her. We rarely said more than a few words to each other. Sometimes Molly never spoke at all. That was okay too. One day she said, “Thank your mother for me. She listened.”
Then she said, “Do you know what it feels like to stand in a room full of people who hate you?”
I searched all the moments of my life I could retrieve. Of course I did not.
“I couldn’t become another woman who balled her anger up and quietly imploded,” Molly said. “So I did something.”
I nodded.
“You’ve come enough now, I think,” she told me, and I nodded. “Maybe sometime I’ll see you again.”
Then I rose and left the facility for the last time.
After she was released, Molly crossed the bridge over the Penobscot River back to the Penobscot Indian Island Reservation, returning to her people, who helped her walk toward forgiveness. She lives there still and teaches Penobscot language classes to kids. I imagine she has a big garden, can beat any fool up Bald Hill in a footrace, and sees her father as often as she can.
Saplings had begun growing up in the fallow pastures around the house. A barn had caved in on the property, and an outhouse as well. Passing the house’s black windows, I felt watched, not by the structure or the woods or the trees but by time. Behind the house, the road thinned to a trail that wound through a field and then passed into a dense wood of gnarled hemlock trees. I hesitated before entering. No light penetrated the canopy. Patches of orange needles and lush green moss carpeted every rock, trunk, and root. I realized it was a stand of ancient old-growth forest, never touched by human saws. The trees seemed impossibly tall. Lichens spotted their trunks a hairy, fluorescent green. Great webs of moss wove between the canopies like spooky cloaks. There was only a foot or two of space between some of the trees. With each step, the black wood drew down more tightly about me. Overhead I heard the distant song of a raven. Just when I feared I would have to crawl to find my way forward any farther, the woods relented, and I broke through the trees.
Dry wind bit at my throat as my eyes adjusted to the light. Before me was a small frozen pond. I took another step and stopped cold. There was a man standing at the edge of the pond, facing the ice. To one side of him were the embers of a fire; to the other, an overturned rowboat painted white. He was at least six and a half feet tall, standing perfectly straight, with his arms at his sides. He wore black canvas pants and a black T-shirt. A pair of black suspenders slipped off his shoulders and hung down around his hips like folded wings. I was certain the temperature had dropped into the twenties, but he didn’t seem cold at all. His head was bald, and his clothes were far too large for his body, which was corded and stringy with muscle.
“Your singing was off,” he said. The man’s voice was a dry croak. He turned then and said, “I mean no harm. I’m just a tired traveler resting.” I realized he had once been a much larger man. Though something about his body seemed wasted away by time, his features were youthful.
He cleared his throat and continued. “I don’t mean to say I didn’t enjoy your singing. I haven’t heard some of those songs in a very long time. There was just a hesitancy to them, which seems odd to me, considering there isn’t anyone anywhere out here.”
It was true. In a decade of walking these ridges and hilltop woods I had never seen another person. “Except for you.”
The man smiled. His teeth were straight, and so white they looked nearly silver. His skin was immaculately clean. His fingernails, pulling up the suspenders now, were very long and yellowed. “I suppose that’s true.”
I thought about my singing and realized the man was right. “The hesitancy,” I said. “I wasn’t feeling self-conscious. It was more a question of whether I should be singing at all. I’m not sure the man I’m singing for deserves it.”
“I see, then.” He curled his lips into his mouth and then pushed them back out. “That I can understand. Are you hungry, cold? It wouldn’t take much to get the fire going again.”
I thought to ask his name, to ask why he was h
ere, but didn’t. “No,” I said. “Thank you, though.”
“I really don’t mean any harm. This just seemed a nice place to rest for a bit.”
Back among some boulders near the shore stood a stick tent wrapped in a canvas tarp. A clothesline was strung between two oaks. “Looks like a long rest,” I said.
The man scratched his bald head. “I suppose it has been some time,” he said. “Last night I dreamed a boy came down to the pond here. In my dream, he was trying to sing, but there weren’t any words in the air. In the dream everything felt quite cold, and I woke around four in the morning, feeling very sad. I’ve been standing here waiting to see what was going to happen next ever since. I let the fire burn out while I was waiting. And you can imagine my surprise when my dream of a boy who couldn’t sing turned into a man who could.” His voice seemed to be coming from different directions with each sentence. I couldn’t make sense of it. I was staring at his mouth as it made the shapes, but the words rose from the ice at his back and the boulders to his right, from all around. I thought about how ventriloquism was thought to be a spiritual art form, originally practiced by shamans. I was not scared but instead felt a strange, soft comfort. “You aren’t the person from my dream, though,” the man said. “He had different mannerisms.” Suddenly the man’s voice was directly in front of me, hard like a punch to the chest. “He was a child, a pilgrim. So what are you?”
I shivered. I didn’t want to tell him I was a doctor, so I said, “I don’t know. I’ve had loss on the mind. I guess I’m just a man who felt compelled to walk.”
The man looked me over for a long time. Then he gestured to the rowboat. “This boat is for going back and forth. I’d take you across so you could continue your walk, but the way isn’t clear yet. The ice. I was a boatman in the navy once. It was my job to take people from dangerous places to safe ones.”
“Is this a dangerous place, then?” I squinted but could no longer see across the pond. A heavy mist had come out of the ancient woods.
The man shook his head. “I don’t believe so.”
“Have you ever heard of Iapetus?” I asked.
He shook his head. “I haven’t.”
“It’s a moon of Saturn, half white and half black. They say it’s a trick of science, mineral dust settling on one half of the planet while only snow covers the other. It gets stranger. An equatorial mountain ridge circles the entire moon along its center, eight miles tall and twelve miles wide. I keep asking myself what it actually divides and whether we’ll ever know.”
“A natural wall. Eight miles tall rising out into space.”
“Yes,” I said.
“I have seen miraculous things. Awful and beautiful. I’ve ferried and befriended grand people. But when I leave my body for good, I’d like to go to a place like that.”
A great sorrow for all the things I had never experienced in my life filled me then. At the edge of this pond, I felt as small and lonely as a young child. People never talk about the loneliness of childhood. “Today is Good Friday.” My voice didn’t sound like my own. It sounded eerily like the man’s, but perhaps an octave lower.
“So it is,” he said.
“I feel I need to be honest. I’m a doctor.”
“Why.”
“Why what?”
“Why are you a doctor?”
The question gave me pause. “Because I want to understand how things work. Because I want to help people.”
“Empty answers.”
“Most are,” I said. The truth makes itself unutterable: because my father’s body never rose from those waters; because I knew that if it ever did, I had to know how to put it back together or put it to rest; because my world fell over during my youth and set before me two paths, devouring rage or infinite compassion, and I needed to find a way to walk the latter, however hard.
As if responding to my thoughts, the man said, “You wanted to hurt this man once. The one who died. Maybe you even wanted to kill him.”
I remembered Lyman Creel in prison orange on the television, all those years ago. “Maybe,” I said.
“But you didn’t. How come?”
“Because I became a doctor instead,” I said. “Because I learned to see that being alive alone is a fatal condition, so we have to treat it with the utmost attention. Because,” I admitted, unsure whether I should go on, “a part of me loved him too.”
Something about my answer seemed to please the man. “That’s a hard circle to break,” he said. “Anger. They say it’s like the family dog. It holds on and on and on. You should be proud.”
Somehow, I still felt like a fraud and a traitor. The thing is, these generational circles of violence don’t live outside our bodies where we can see them, like a ring of fire, for instance, and simply step around them. They live down inside our cells. We are the circle. To step free is to break away from your people and leave a gap, and I’m convinced it’s this fear of loneliness and displacement and trespass against one’s own that keeps so many forever turning around the same violent track.
“When were you in the navy?” I asked, hoping to shift the subject.
“A long time ago.”
“My father served,” I said.
The man nodded. “It’s a special place here. Though all the earth is a special place, I suppose. An impossible concept that’s somehow possible.”
“You sound like him, my father. He used to say, ‘The earth moves us to dream, but no dream is worthy of the earth.’”
“For all you know I could be him,” the man said, and grinned with those strangely blinding teeth.
Nothing about this notion made sense. But who was I to say that I knew what I was seeing? We stand at a faucet and turn on the water and watch it drain down the sink clockwise. Who’s to say a man or woman, some shaman without a lick of the narrowing trap of public education or societal groupthink, wouldn’t come down out of the mountains, turn on a faucet, and see the water draining down the sink in the other direction?
The man said, “The hardest thing to sustain is a pure heart.”
Then he slipped a card from his pocket and handed it to me. It was slightly smaller than a playing card, and its corners were rounded. It felt quite heavy and warm. One side was solid red, as bright as arterial blood. A pencil-line drawing of the Greek Minotaur against a white background filled the other side. The drawing was a portrait, really. It began at the beast’s chest and moved up to detail its throat, head, facial features, and horns in menacing specificity.
I held the card up and turned it around in the soft blue light coming off the pond. The card contained no words. The image was static, but like the best art it seemed to vibrate with emotion and movement. “What is it?” I asked.
“A card, obviously,” he said. I felt seen through, and it was hard to hold his gaze. “Don’t despair, son,” he said. “The thing about people is that each one deserves to be celebrated, and each one deserves to be mourned.”
I slipped the card into my pocket. “I have a cabin and a small paddock up on a ledge over East Grand,” I said, not knowing what else to say or do. I wanted to hug him, but didn’t know how to ask. “I’ll be there,” I said. “At the cabin.”
The man smiled at me again. “I know,” he said. “I’ll come to you some day. You have to wait for it. And you have to keep singing.”
Aimless and blind, seeing but hardly thinking, I wandered the wooded ridges for hours. Morning curved into early afternoon and then into late afternoon. The sky darkened. A storm was gathering far out to the west in the hills. The temperature dropped below freezing. The wind ignited. In the gray light it began to snow, and I was shaken from my reverie by a momentary glimpse of mortality. I was ill-prepared to be caught out in a New Brunswick snowstorm at night. Of course I hadn’t brought a light, and in the growing dark I treacherously navigated back through the riprap and the ice and the howling pines. Twice I got turned around in the wind coming down. Twice I heard the wingbeats of large birds passing overhead
. Ravens. In their race to get clear of the storm, they didn’t pause to croak down at me. I avoided the route past the pond and the farmstead and the Quonset hut, terrified the man might not be there, terrified really that the whole experience was a delusion, though I believed in its absolute truth, and by the time I made it back to the turnout, a few faint stars were doing their best to mock me from above.
I found my truck already under five inches of fine snow, the keys tucked behind the front tire just like I’d left them. Both my father and my uncle had the habit of simply leaving the keys in the ignition when they ditched their vehicles on the side of some logging road. When Reggie went up to the woods, my father would often drive up after and move my uncle’s car a few miles away, and vice versa. It became an ongoing game, and as a child I often emerged from the woods with either my father or my uncle, only to find our vehicle nowhere in sight. It never caused much issue for Reggie, who never had to be anywhere at any specific time. But my mother would be spinning with fury when Arnoux came home four hours late because he’d lost the car and spent half a day backtracking through the forest. “I don’t care about the time so much,” I remember her once saying. “It’s the fear I can’t do. People die in the woods, Arnoux. And I can’t stand sitting around, wondering if a tree fell on you and smashed that body I love so much into a bloody stump, or if my brother was just flirting with you again and moved the fucking car.”
The Lowering Days Page 23