Temple Stream

by Bill Roorbach

  It’s a tough old house with a couple of venerable trees in the dooryard. I rest a moment, looking at it from the rear, a view its owners probably don’t expect to offer. I start to think of the shabby backside of my own house, but am interrupted by a hellacious diesel roar ahead, followed by such an enormous report—like a cannon fired—that the dogs scoot back to me. Desi cowers and shakes. Even Wally finds my shadow, steps on the backs of my skis as I hurry forward.

  Suddenly the empty hills echo a shout: “Merde!”

  My head fills with moving pictures: A logger’s been crushed. I’m yanking the starter cord on the guy’s chain saw, cutting a broken body free from tangled branches. First aid—I know what to do, don’t I?—and then what? Does he have a radio? Do I cover him and ski up to the Paine homestead for help?

  I’m skiing among the large rocks of the stream above the pond—a long riffle in summer, now all ice chocks and wind ridges and surely weakened ice. The dogs follow in my tracks. I have to wave my pole back to remind Wally to stay off the butts of my skis. I climb up onto the bank, ski up into the huge trees there, make my way around two blind bends in the stream.

  It’s an accident all right: an enormous orange skidder is cocked sideways, two tires of near my height still on the steep bank, two tires down in the stream, broken through the thick ice at the edge of a pool. The tires are encased in huge chains, hand-size links threading great rings of steel. And unmistakably, standing out on the ice assessing the problem, hands on hips, an enormous figure, a skidder of a man in outsized insulated coveralls, hunting cap, ear protectors: Earl Pomeroy.

  Still in rescue mode, I ski down the bank and onto the ice. Too much speed! I skim right behind my man, keep going, ten feet, twenty, till I hit the opposite bank. Earl Pomeroy gets the dogs first; they yelp and jump in the air as they skid around him barking, whining, leaping once more as I come into his vision.

  “Goddamn dogs!” he cries as I slide up to him.

  ‘You okay?”

  “Goddamn skiers, too! Sneaking up on a man!” Quickly his anger at the skidder gets aimed in my direction.

  Preemptively I say, “Earl Pomeroy.”

  He looks hard under the bill of my hat. “Oh, it’s you,” he growls. “Say a prayer to the Virgin, and what does She send? The Professor!”

  “You’re stuck?”

  “Stuck? Stuck? No, Herr Doktor, I am not stuck. I am not anything. The skidder is what’s in trouble, and the trouble has nothing to do with being stuck.”

  We look at the leviathan a long minute. I can’t think what to say. Earl Pomeroy is embarrassed, and embarrassment tends toward attack. As the only available victim for such an assault, I slide back a discreet few feet on my skis. We keep staring at the machine. It’s huge, mostly tires and engine, with a black seat up top inside a low steel cage. Rammed into the cage and safely broken off are several fragments of branches big enough to kill someone—the cage seems a sensible idea. At the front of the machine, a grader bar for smoothing twitch roads, moving rocks, pushing logs. At the rear, an enormous eye of steel into which the hook of a heavy tow-chain has been inserted. The chain is tied around what Earl would call a log, but which is the entire trunk of an old white pine, shorn of all encumbering branches, a thick bole of about forty inches diameter, the whole near fifty feet long. The snow behind this concatenation of tree and machine is scraped to earth. Earl, it seems, has been trying to get the skidder aimed back up the hill and onto the rudimentary road he’s made. In the woods well above us, I spot his truck, a splash of orange and black like some monstrous oriole. It looks to me as if Earl has driven his skidder too close to the edge, and that the bank—frozen sand, for the most part—has simply given way. There won’t be much water underneath at this temperature—but I hear a distinct trickle down there. The machine has fallen into a void. Its angle is extreme, one degree from rolling. The tremendous old white pine chained behind has perhaps acted as a lucky brake.

  Earl has settled down some. He mutters, “Not stuck, gorry!” and puts a thick hand to his chin. “Precariously balanced, that’s the term! I been a-driving this bank all week—but it crumbled on me here.” Great puffs of steam come with his every breath. His beard is made of frost—his mustache is icicles, like mine.

  More troubled silence. The dogs grow bored. Desi picks a refined forepaw up off the ice—too cold for standing around. Wally lays himself down, goes to work pulling ice chunks out from between his furry toes.

  Earl says, “It’s just tilted s’hard I’m afraid to pull it out. But, hell, you shoulda seen me climbing out of that cage! Another nudge, it could go over.” He gives it another long look. “Or, on the other hand, it could just wheel straight out. What I need is another skiddah. You don’t have a skiddah, do you?”

  No, I do not have a skidder.

  More thought and Earl says, “Hell, yes, I’m thinking I could drive it straight out. I’m eighty-five percent on that.”

  Long pause. I say, “That leaves a kind of tough fifteen percent, don’t you think?”

  “Yessuh—that’s the fifteen that puts you in the flowers. Dead as a can of corned beef!”

  I say, “Now, listen. I could ski out and call someone for you.”

  “Oh, hell, no, Professor. Between my education and your muscle, we can do this.”

  I laugh. Bad manners, apparently. Earl stares me down. We go back to appraising the skiddah. My feet are aching with cold and I feel the first chill as the sweat from my pond run sublimates through my clothing, which is too light for standing around.

  “Alors. The problem be that if I try to drive out and the machine goes, my cockpit gets crushed, and you’d have a hell of a time extracting my remains for the funeral. But I don’t actually think it’s going to go over. Still. What we need to do is ... I could stand on the box there.” Earl points to a gray patch of nonskid paint on the steel bodywork beside the cockpit. “I could reach in and set it going forward. Couldn’t steer it quite, but just ease it yup-so onto the ice and drive it right out.”

  I point at the front of the skidder. “Isn’t that a winch there?”

  “A wench, yes, it is—but that’s not gonna work. It’s but one hundred feet of cable and there’s no suitable anchor that direction, see, not till that hophornbeam tree, which isn’t big enough by half, and too far.” He points to a squat, lonely, shaggy-barked specimen back up the hill toward his truck, the only tree he’s left standing.

  So no wench. And I’ve offended Earl with my suggestions. He stiffens perceptibly, looks in my eye: “If the old girl tumbles, you see, I jump off.”

  “Jump off?” The next sentence, were I speaking to a friend, would be, What are you, fucking nuts? But I hold my tongue.

  My tone is sufficient. Earl strokes his beard, breaking icicles. He looks at the sky a long time. “Snow in an hour,” he says to himself.

  He gets busy suddenly, climbs up the bank, clasps the taut chain connecting the great log to the skidder. With colossal strength, he frees the huge hook from its huge eye. I can only watch, wanting badly to leave. The dogs have taken to poking around in the woods above us, keeping their engines warm, chasing chickadees, the only other moving things in the world.

  Once the log is free, Earl rummages around in a toolbox built into the abdomen of the skidder. From my vantage point, I can see what he cannot: small spills of sand dislodging from the stream bank. He rummages with no particular caution, comes up presently with a huge, heavy coil of thick rope. This goes over his shoulder, and he signals me to him. I hesitate, but step out of my skis, stab my poles in the ice, and climb up the bank, slipping in my hard-soled ski shoes.

  A little desperately I say, “How about I’ll go call somebody for you?”

  And he says, “No, no, I got this rope here.”

  “Oh, man. That’s not going to hold anything!”

  “It’ll hold me, Professor!”

  Next thing I know I’m helping him uncoil yards of the heavy rope. When we get a free end he goes back
to the skidder and dislodges a heavy stick of popple jammed into the cage. He ties the rope to this stick, gestures at me—stand back!—then he throws repeatedly and mightily up into the branches of the maple tree above us.

  I say, “And just what are we doing, monsieur?”

  He says, “We, sir, are making a belay.”

  I know what a goddamn belay is from terrifying rock-climbing experience, and begin to get the picture, a picture I want no role in.

  He tries four times, five, six, finally gets the stick to fly over the heaviest, lowest branch, about twelve feet off the ground, twelve more from the skidder, dragging the rope behind it. The dogs see the game in progress, rush down through the trees, pull up yipping and leaping under the branch. ’They’re right full of it,” says Earl ambiguously, not so much as a nod in their direction.

  The stick finishes several feet out of Earl’s grasp, but no problem, he just yanks another branch off the skidder cage (and the whole skidder shifts a tick), uses it to reach up, and up, kind of dancing on the toes of his rude, thick boots, flanked by the dogs. Rope in hand, he pulls the throwing stick out of its knot, draws up some slack, then quickly ties himself into a nice bowline under his armpits.

  “I’ll set her rolling from outside the cage,” he says. “If she goes over, you’ll have me, see? If she stays outta trouble, you feed rope. That’s all, Professor.”

  “Oh, Captain, I don’t know.”

  “Oh, friend, ya gotta. Eliminate the fifteen percent for me.”

  The frenchified way he says percent catches my ear and stops my caviling. It’s fascinating how he doesn’t stop, once the game plan is in place. Next thing, I’m standing there holding the rope with him on the other end, only a thick maple branch to help me with the belay.

  “Pull her to,” he says, and I pull till the rope is tugging at his armpits.

  “Pull her tight-to,” he says.

  And I pull her tight-to, about to keelhaul this near stranger.

  Suddenly, to test his arrangement, Earl pulls his legs up, and he’s swinging, and I’ve got him, his weight nicely moderated by the maple branch. The dogs stand back, enthralled. Earl swings a few long seconds, no smile, drops his massive legs. “That’s all ya gotta do,” he says. “Unless she drives—then you pay out rope, “out?”

  “Oui,” says I. Ten below and I’m perspiring again. I feel it dripping down my sides, freezing on my ribs.

  And Earl leaps up on his machine, climbs into the cage further than I would advise if asked, depresses the mighty clutch with one outstretched boot, holds button one, pushes button two to start the thing, lets the clutch out very slowly. The same second the big tires start turning, the skidder lurches sideways and falls, rolling over upside down onto the ice with a tremendous crash. The dogs race away, back toward the millpond, terrified.

  I’ve got pressure on the rope, but the rope simply pulls me off my feet and into the air, slides down the maple branch to the notch at the trunk, where it catches with a snap that makes me let go. I return to earth, find my feet, find the rope, grab hold, only then look: Earl is on his butt on the bank, suspended by the armpits in a high sitting position. I hold that rope, but don’t really have to—the tree has got Earl firmly caught, has saved him.

  “Merde!” he roars.

  The skidder is upside down, still running, all wheels slowly rotating, its cage pushed down through the ice, well crushed. I whip and snap the rope till it disengages, and Earl plumps down on his butt upon the broken stream bank. Wally and Desi rush back to him, lick his face.

  He pushes them away, not unkindly. To me, he says, ‘You done good.”

  I rush to him. ‘You okay?”

  “Only but lost my shoe.”

  And it’s true—his huge boot is missing, along with whatever sock he had on. His foot looks surprisingly pink and delicate, human, no bigger than my own, nails nicely clipped.

  He stands slowly, won’t put weight on the foot, as if the problem is only that the ground’s too cold, but I can tell he’s hurt.

  “I’ve got socks,” I say, and tumble down to the frozen stream, where I rifle my rucksack. The Nike swoosh emblazoned upon them looks foolish suddenly, but I rush back to Earl, hand them over. He tugs them on one over the other, wincing.

  His skidder starts to smoke, then stalls.

  “Diesel in the glow plugs,” he mutters.

  The silence is sharp.

  “Earl,” I say. I can’t think what else.

  ‘You did that perfect,” he murmurs, in the manner of a man who seldom gives or hears praise. “If you hadn’t gone gradual like that, you would have torn my foot off. And if you didn’t stop me cold when you did, I would have dove into the ice with the cage. And you can see how that woulda been.”

  We look at the skidder a long, long time. His boot is killed under there somewhere. I’m shivering. Earl is shivering too. The dogs too. It’s cold as outer space if you stop, even for a second.

  “Well, it was the tree that saved you,” I say. ’’You set it up just right.”

  He breathes in a rapid ’’Yuh, yuh, yuh,” says, “Would be better if it had worked. I were too anxious.” He looks me in the eye for the second time, says, ’’I’m a little off my stumpage here.” It’s a surprising confidence, one I know I am not to repeat: stumpage is the right to cut trees on someone else’s property, bought and sold like mineral rights. Earl has crossed a boundary line; in effect he’s stealing that huge pine.

  He stands, clearly hurting. At length, he says, “Back tomorrow with a second machine, get her up and out of here in no time. You, Professor, you better get moving—linger longer, your dogs’ll freeze and we’ll have to boil’em in cat grease to get ’em barking again!” No trace of a smile.

  He collects his rope and limps up the hill away from me and the dogs on the path his skidder has made. A very fine, dry snow has started to fall. I watch him all the way to his truck, listen for it to start, then hurry to my skis, get them on, and ski myself warm again, then sweaty, sprinting back on the millpond ice in increasingly heavy snowfall (elementary sheaths, dentritic crystals, hollow bullets, bundles of elementary needles, plates with sectorlike extensions), speed to my own truck, then home.

  Vernal Equinox

  THAT FIRST WEEK BACK IN COLUMBUS, JULIET AND I DUTIFULLY examined ovulation sticks. A blue line on a Monday morning led to a hasty but vivid conjoining in the minutes before I had to get in the car and drive to the airport for a trip to Chicago on university business. Juliet, pantsless, waved goodbye from our dark Ohio porch as I drove off mussed and without my briefcase, suit bag, or reading glasses.

  But we’d done it. By March she was two months pregnant, queasy and cantankerous yet glowing. We didn’t know the gender, of course, but both had the strong intuition that it was going to be a boy. We got cute, called the new agglomeration of cells Dersu Uzala for the hero of the great Kurosawa movie by that name, which was based on the book by V. K. Arseniev—Russia’s own Meriwether Lewis—and which we’d just seen at the screening room on campus. Dersu, a Goldi tribesman, had been Arseniev’s guide and savior and beloved friend, an extraordinary woodsman and visionary;

  The potential cost of our own Dersu through college and a wedding brought up a small and familiar problem—money. Ms. Bollocks hadn’t sent one of her signature postal money orders in February, and none had been forthcoming in the new month. Her rent, modest as it was, was part of the delicate house of cards that was my and Juliet’s monthly financial picture.

  I detested calling the woman, but did, leaving a pleasant message on my own answering machine in Maine, after her greeting (which no longer gave our Ohio number to stray callers, violating yet another long-standing agreement): “Ms. Bollocks, hello ... it’s Bill and Juliet. We’re looking for your rent from February, and now March—and we do need that money to pay our bills. Also, could you please put our Ohio number back on the answering machine?”

  At that, she picked up, juggling the phone against something hard.


  “Hello, Bill!” she cried. “How is things home there in Ohio!”

  She always made a point of calling Ohio our home. I held a long breath, let it out, made small talk: “Good, thanks. All’s well. We’ve got crocuses and even some daffodils here. But it’s certainly not home.”

  “Oh, nothing like that here, Bill. Winter’s too hard here! You’re in the right place, all right. My house is fine. I had to get up on the porch roof and chip ice, how-some-ever. Put the axe right through the sheet metal! And we have had some snow! But don’t you worry—I’ve been plowing.”

  “Well, thank you for all that. I’m calling about the rent—you’re a little bit late.”

  “And then there was a ghost. I’m dead serious, Bill. I saw a ghost in the hallway just at the bottom of the stairs. Cold chill and a kind of misty-mist, Bill, and she was beckoning to me!”

  “And we really need it—we’re in danger here of not making our own bills.”

  “So, naturally, Briana won’t go upstairs anymore, so we’re sleeping in Juliet’s studio, if you don’t mind.”

  Briana? That was the first I’d heard of any Briana. I swallowed my curiosity, stayed firmly with the business at hand: “So, I need to know when you can send some or all of what you owe us. It’s getting up there, as you know.”

  “And Bill, the electric, it’s too high. I think your refrigerator is faulty, Bill, I hear it running right now! Listen to this.” And suddenly she was knocking the phone against something that did indeed hum.