by Jerry
He wasn’t the only dark-skinned child in the group but he was—it’s hard to describe—the blackest-looking. I don’t mean color, because that was more gray-blue than black, at least in the fluorescent light of the bus depot. I guess you could say he was the most primitive-looking of the bunch. I thought he looked like an Australian bushman, an aborigine.
They’d asked Tally and me if we had any negative feelings about a dark child and we said no, of course not. We didn’t tell them Tally has Seminole blood in her and is named for her maternal grandmother’s home town,
Tallahassee.
A man from the Summer Residents organization was with the kids and we got his attention. He was sweating from the strain of matching his young charges, who ranged from about eight to 12, with their sponsors.
To make identification easier I was wearing a name tag from a seminar I’d attended at U North. The man said: “MacSwan, right. You’ve got Pirt and one valise tied with rope because the hinge busted. Sign right here for them. Say hello to Mr. and Mrs. MacSwan, Pirt, and have a wonderful summer here in the beautiful St. Lawrence Valley.” He sounded like one of our radio promos.
Pirt and I shook hands. He had a strong grip. Tally bent down and gave him a hug, which left him impassive. I couldn’t blame him, getting shunted from stranger to stranger far from home and signed for like luggage.
He was about three feet tall and the Summer Residents man told us he was small for his age, which turned out to be a big understatement.
The papers that came with the boy said he was eleven and that his name was Pirt Avila, son of Marcia Avila and Father Unknown, from Inner City, U.S.A., land of the huddled poor. I’m changing names and disguising things, of course. I’ve also rearranged some of the geography and geology. But by and large things happened the way you’ll hear.
We looked forward to a summer of seeing Pirt grow some in our clean country air and teaching him a few things in a painless offhand way. Like improving his accent, maybe. We imagined he’d speak with a typical big city slum accent but as yet he hadn’t favored us with many remarks.
We took him up the long slope out of the village toward our year-round house on Higley Flow. There aren’t too many places that have flows instead of lakes. The only other one I can think of is Scapa Flow in the Orkneys. Our flow used to be a cranberry bog. Now it’s a lake the power company created when it backed up the Raquette River behind the hydro dam at Colton. Our house is an overgrown camp on the water south of there. Camp is what we north country people call a vacation cottage—it could be anything from a crude shack to a palatial spread. Ours is a six-room house.
Friends used to kid Tally and me about how quiet it was at Higley, during the week anyway when the waterskiers were otherwise occupied. A literary friend made up this rhyme for us:
“How are things at Higley Flow?
. . . Slow . . . slow . . .”
To get there you go south out of town and on a long rising road you pass an old wooden water tower. I call it the nineteenth century spaceship because it looks like a Fourth of July rocket standing on end, or one of those props from an old George Melies film.
Going the other way on a clear morning, heading toward town and the radio station, it’s glorious to have it all laid out before you, thousands of acres stretching into another country. It sets your imagination going and that’s one reason I love this land so much.
This is the country where rivers flow north to the St. Lawrence which itself flows north and east into the Atlantic and where you can’t dig very far without encountering sand. The whole country was once a vast prehistoric sea. Parts of it make me think of the dead sea bottoms of John Carter’s Barsoom and of adventures astride six-legged beasts galloping off to rescue Martian princesses.
Of course I know that any ancient civilizations here have evolved into traffic jams amid stretches of discount stores and fast food places and that the nineteenth century spaceship is just a water tower abandoned by the power company. But there’s something prideful in being nearly as far north as you can get in this country. That tends to set us apart. Our borders are prodigious—the broad St. Lawrence to the west and north, the vastness of Canada beyond, the high wilderness of the Adirondacks to the southeast and an awful lot of the rest of the country to the south.
Within these mighty boundaries are things peculiarly our own: Joe Indian Pond. North Arabia. The Phantom Snowmobile Rider. Evidences of the ice age. Sunday Rock.
Going south on Route 56 you turn off at Colton for our place at Higley Flow but if you stay on the highway you head up into the Adirondacks, the Great North Woods. The north woods are south of us and south is up from here because the road climbs through our foothills past Sunday Rock, which used to mark the end of civilization and the beginning of wilderness. A special breed of loggers worked the forest in the old days and lived their own undisciplined life, especially on their day off, and there used to be a saying, “There’s no law south of Sunday Rock.”
Sometimes we’re conscious of not being big time, but our pride lies in sharing the enduring qualities of the land. We survive the long, fierce winters. We know who we are and who we’ve been. We’re the simple people who are worth a hill of beans because beans are eternal and we’ll be here when some people are not because they’ve messed it up and we’ve held on.
Once in a while, of course, we’re put down by the Canadians who point out that to them we’re not north at all, but south.
Pirt didn’t open up to us easily. He didn’t talk much about himself and his background. Asked about his mother once he said “A mother’s a mother,” and about the place he came from he said “A ghetto’s a ghetto.”
We found we didn’t have to teach him good English; I don’t know where he got his learning but he spoke a lot better than I do sometimes. It was hard to get used to—this little squirt of a kid, barely bigger than a two-year-old, with a tiny monkey face, talking in a childish lisp but in complete sentences, with a vocabulary bigger than that of some of the college kids who work at the radio station, and a sophistication that was more than big-city street-wise.
Tally said she didn’t know whether to cuddle him or treat him like the more than half-way grownup he obviously was, entitled to a certain amount of freedom and unsupervised time.
Before he began wandering around by himself I took him to South Colton, to show him how steeply the Raquette River descends from the mountains on its way past Higley Flow to the ocean. I’d forgotten that upriver from the dam the river disappears for a while.
Pirt felt sorry for the river when I showed him where it had been taken from its bed and squeezed into big pipes. He was sad even after he saw it spume forth at the lower side of the hydro plant.
“You see, there it is again, Pirt,” I said.
“No,” he cried. “That’s just water. It isn’t a river now.”
He made me feel that the Raquette had been degraded. I decided not to tell him how many times the river suffered this indignity between its source in the Adirondacks and its outlet in the St. Lawrence. Seven, I think.
Pirt stood out in town and country, as he wandered more or less at will, by the combination of his lowbrow head and highbrow conversation. Come to think of it, and I’m kind of ashamed of myself for the part I had in this, Pirt’s conversation wasn’t always that highbrow.
It was to be expected that as he got to be seen, in town and out, people became curious about him and it wasn’t long before a reporter approached me. The occasion was a party at our place and for some reason a bunch of the men had drunk more than we usually do. Maybe because it was a hot night. At any rate it was getting late and some of us were on the screened porch listening to Roy Dalton tell bawdy stories. Pirt was in a dark corner, taking it in. He hadn’t been drinking, as far as I know, but he might have sneaked a couple. I heard him snicker once or twice but not loud enough to cause Roy to moderate his language.
Melodie Murchison, the arts editor of the Northland News, poked her head aro
und the corner and caught one of the punchlines. “I guess this is where the action is,” she said. Melodie writes a selfconsciously cultural column called Northern Notables.
She got nothing but foot-shuffling silence as she looked around, noticing Pirt in the process. “So you let him hang out with the big boys, Mac?” she said to me. “Isn’t that refreshing. I’d like to do a piece on him.”
“Why don’t you ask him?” I sort of muttered.
Melodie went on talking over Pirt’s head, which wasn’t hard to do if you meant only literally. She said: “I see him as a sort of Art Linkletter kid. You know? Out of the mouths of babes kind of thing?”
Pirt piped up then. He said he was going to peepee on the peonies to save wear and tear on the septic tank. Whoever wanted to join him was welcome. He said he guessed his invitation applied only to our male guests, for anatomical reasons. He mentioned something about the glint of the full moon on intersecting streams. Surprisingly, to me, a quorum of our male guests expressed interest. Maybe they just wanted to get away from Melodie but one said he didn’t see why the lady shouldn’t join us in what was essentially a botanical experiment.
Melodie, who had been listening with what she must have imagined to be amused tolerance, put on her driving glasses, which made her look schoolteacherish and disapproving. She said she had second thoughts about the interview—maybe she should do a piece on parents in general and their influence on young and impressionable Summer Residents like Pirt. She said I could leave a message for her at the city desk any time. I guess she meant if I wanted to aplogize. She drove off.
We tried to look ashamed of ourselves but as the sound of Melodie’s Toyota died away we broke into snickers and went with Pirt to pee on the peonies. It had clouded up so there was no glint of moonlight on intersecting steams. Somebody’s aim was bad and I got a wet sock.
Tally heard about it before the party ended and was angry because one of her guests had been insulted. Then she laughed. But she said to me later: “You wash your own socks for a while.”
Pirt wasn’t usually mean to the ladies. Nor was I. There’s a young-minded lady of 79 who telephones me every week or so to comment on what she’s heard on WNOR. Her name is Miss Loretta LaJoie, pronounced, please, La-zhwa, and she’s a fiend for dates and other facts.
Each June Loretta calls on the Friday before Father’s Day to remind me that the observance was begun in 1912 by Mrs. Maude Ellison of nearby Winthrop—though there’s some dispute about that in other sections of the country.
Late in November she tells me it would be in bad taste for WNOR’s announcers to say Xmas instead of Christmas. “Let’s keep Christ in Christmas if for no other reason than a philological one,” she said once. “I’m a Freethinker myself, but one should adhere to certain norms.
“Now what’s this about Pirt being a hairy throwback? Is that just people gossiping, saying Pirt’s a caveman? There’s talk by the checkout lady at the supermarket, by the drug store man, about what Pirt buys, what he eats.” Loretta
LaJoie went on a bit longer. I told her I’d heard no gossip but that Pirt’s eating habits were like any active young boy’s—voracious.
“Another thing,” Loretta said. “I want to know more about those people who call themselves the Awaiters. Is Bernie O’Neill going to tell us? I wish you had Bernie on all the time instead of that dimwit who thinks news is pronounced nooze and noon nyoon. If I hear him say ‘Here is the nooze at nyoon’ one more time I think I shall expire—but not, I assure you, before I turn my dial to the Ogdensburg station.”
I explained to her that Bernie couldn’t be on the air all the time because he’s an investigative reporter and the other is a studio announcer and d.j., not really a newsman.
She rang off then to listen to the noon news. Ours, I hoped.
Tally says that when she listens to these cassette tapes I do on Pirt they start out straightforward and factual and then begin to sound like a storyteller’s tale. She finds herself listening to hear what will happen next even though she’s lived through it all.
I’ve been a wire service reporter and a radio newscaster so I know how to put down facts but I’d forgotten that for a while in the midwest I narrated a radio show called Tales from the Chimney Corner. So if I get a little dramatic now and then you’ll have to forgive me—whoever you are other than Tally; I don’t consider the tapes to be of broadcast quality, and I don’t mean just technically. This is a story we’d best keep in the family.
But I’d better back up a little and tell about Busky Kimp and the Awaiters.
Busky Kimp was a local ne’er-do-well, often in trouble with the law, landlords and loan companies. Banks had long since stopped doing business with him.
During the height of the snowmobile craze he’d owned six of the machines, bought one after another on the installment plan as their predecessors broke down. Now they’d all been repossessed and he was behind with the mortgage payments on his house.
Busky had worked at many trades, including money-digger. In that line of work he followed an old York State calling, tramping the county looking for treasure. His brother-in-law, a sometime printer, and a nephew were members of Busky’s team. When they found a likely place they’d seek out people to finance their dig. Sometimes they located the backers first, then worked up a treasure site.
Along with the site they showed their investors maps and other papers that documented the presence of money, jewels or rare minerals. The papers were usually quite old, or appeared to be. I don’t say they were forged but I repeat, Busky’s wife’s brother had worked in a print shop and still had access to it and to its many varieties of paper.
The license plate on Busky Kimp’s aging car was 497-BIW, which he told people meant Back in the Woods.
It really stood for Bigelow, a township, and he was no hick; far from it.
I knew Busky from years back and once he had come to me at the radio station with a proposition. This was that WNOR help finance an expedition to locate buried treasure. The Lost Cache of the French Pretender, I think he called it.
Busky was vague about details and gave me only glimpses of documents and maps. But he told me that in addition to being allowed to invest, the station could have exclusive broadcast rights.
Actually there had been a French nobleman in the North Country, a refugee from the Terror. He and his followers had bought a huge tract of land south of us and planned a colony, or at least an enterprise, called Castorland. Castor is French for beaver and the idea was to raise the animals in vast numbers for their pelts. The beaver would be the basis of their economy.
The scheme never got off the ground but obviously a lot of money was involved. And here was Busky Kimp telling me he had a good idea where the French treasure had lain hidden for nearly two centuries.
As a money-digger, the descendant of a long line of treasure seekers, some honest, Busky didn’t use the old-fashioned paraphernalia—hazel rod, Ouija board, globe of divination. He was right up to date with the scientific marvel of the age, a digging tool par excellence that sliced through our sandy soil like magic. So secret was the device that he couldn’t show it to me until I had invested.
For a few minutes I was tempted. Visions of royal jewels and golden coins twinkled in my head. Why not put in with him? The amount he asked was relatively modest—a few thousand. It would not be unheard of for a communications company to help sponsor an expedition in exchange for broadcast or publications rights; I remembered the New York Times and the Loch Ness monster.
Then I came back to reality and turned him down. I couldn’t let Kimp use WNOR’s name as he went around soliciting other funds. I told him we’d gladly give him news coverage if and when his treasure hunt turned up something tangible.
I didn’t know then that Busky Kimp had joined the Awaiters, the sect that talked to other-worldly spacemen, who promised to save them, and only them, when the Earth was destroyed. The Awaiters had a name for their spacemen-saviors. They called them the
Benign Visitors.
At first the Awaiters were a purely local sect. I assigned Bernie O’Neill to the story and from him I began to get reports of people coming into the county in small groups from all over. Many were families. They pitched tents in the sandy semiwilderness I call North Arabia or set up Hoovervilles in the sparse woods near the dump or moved in with people already living in the poorer sections of town along the river.
But the newcomers were not all poor. Many came in late-model cars or pickup trucks. Most of them were well-dressed and all were clean. Only their housing was makeshift, temporary.
Bernie recalled others who had come to the county in the recent past—hard-working young people who’d heard that we had some of the last cheap and wide-open real estate in the country, and the Amish who brought their skills and dedication to our short growing season to revitalize what others had abandoned as farmed-out land. But these newcomers were not like that. They slipped in unobtrusively and, for the most part, kept out of sight. “It’s as if they’re here on a stopover to someplace else,” Bernie told me. “All kinds of rumors are going around. I get the feeling they’re making a pilgrimage and we’re a way station. Reminds me of the Underground Railway or the Exodus, with people fleeing bondage or persecution, except—”
“Except what?”
“Well, I’m no anthropologist but all these people, at least those I’ve seen, appear to be . . .” He trailed off.
“Come on,” I said. “You’re not on the air. You can talk plainer than that.”
“So far I’ve seen only white, Anglo—Hell, Mac, it just seems that there isn’t a black or a Jew among them.”
“Okay, Bernie, thanks. And no Orientals or Arabs?”
“No.” He laughed. “No Eskimos or Hispanics either, as long as we’re getting ethnic.”
“We’re getting the facts, that’s all.”
In days and weeks to come Bernie kept an unobtrusive eye on the incomers, on WNOR’s time and his own. He also dug into the background of Busky Kimp, who was a frequent visitor at the shantytowns and tent cities proliferating in the odd corners of our land. Kimp’s moneydigging had taken a back seat.