Leave Her to Heaven

by Ben Ames Williams

  Harland chuckled. ‘This sounds like a meeting of hardened criminals, discussing their enemy, the law,’ he protested, and turned the talk to other things.

  After breakfast they set out for Back of the Moon. They took the familiar road through the forest to Cherryfield, and turned north then for ten or twelve miles — the way was rough and rutted, and Richard drove slowly, easing the car over every irregularity — and so came to Joe Severin’s farm, where the wood road to the camp began and where Leick was waiting.

  On the way, Harland at the wheel listened smilingly to Danny’s eager and excited voice as the youngster pointed out to Ellen familiar sights and scenes; and again and again Danny appealed to him for confirmation of some statement he had made, crying: ‘Remember, Dick?’ or: ‘Isn’t that so, Dick?’ or: ‘We did, Dick, didn’t we?’

  Harland always agreed, till Ellen said gaily: ‘You’re in a conspiracy, you two; just a team of great big liars backing each other up! I don’t know which of you is worse.’ And she told Harland: ‘You’re as bad as he is, Richard. You act about two years old.’

  ‘I warned you,’ he reminded her. ‘I’m a different man up here.’

  ‘I don’t want you to be a different man,’ she assured him. ‘You suit me very well as you are.’

  They turned into Joe Severin’s farmyard — Harland always parked his car in Joe’s shed when he went in to camp — and Leick and Joe himself and Joe’s two sons, brawny young men who had near-by farms and families of their own, were waiting to meet them. Joe was a little Frenchman with the longest legs and the shortest body that were ever mismatched to make a man. He was not much more than five feet tall, but his shoulders were tremendously wide and he had a merry mouth and twinkling eyes. His wife, beaming on them from the kitchen doorway, was as tall as her sons, with the flaxen hair and the clear complexion of her Scandinavian blood.

  Harland looked first to Leick, for it was almost two years since they had met; but his first greeting was for Joe and the two tall sons, before — keeping the best for the last — he turned to Leick and their hands clasped in the silent pressure of long understanding. Danny, shouting with glee, not waiting for help, launched himself out of the car and took his crutches, and Joe turned to touch him — softly as a woman — on the shoulder and to say how he had grown in these two years, and Leick went to Danny too; and then Harland saw Ellen still in the car, holding herself aloof, watching his proud delight at this reunion with old friends, her brows faintly narrowed in a frown; and he called Joe and Leick to meet her, and chuckled inwardly at the quick appreciation of her beauty in Joe’s eyes. With Ellen and Danny and Leick, the three people dearest in the world to him, now at last brought together, he was a happy man.

  He left them by the car and went to give Mrs. Severin a hug and a smacking kiss, and she insisted that they stop long enough for a bite — a cup of coffee, oatmeal, a hot doughnut — while Joe and Leick hitched the horses to the buckboard. So Harland led Ellen proudly indoors, and Danny was nimble on his crutches, his cheeks bright, his eyes dancing with happiness. For a while they stayed in the immaculate and sunny kitchen, and Harland saw regretfully that with Ellen Mrs. Severin was not at ease; that Ellen too was restrained. He left them together, hoping Ellen would know how to win the other woman, returning presently with a secret excitement in his tone to call to Danny:

  ‘Come along, m’lord! Your carriage waits!’

  As Danny came out, Joe’s sons brought from the barn a comfortable armchair on each side of which two iron rings had been bolted to hold spruce carrying poles; and Danny, when he saw it, shouted with delight. ‘Oh, that’s swell, Dick!’ he cried. But his eyes filled even while he smiled, and Harland knew that this more than anything that had gone before had brought home to Danny his own helplessness.

  ‘Try it for size,’ he directed, and Danny took his seat and declared the chair was perfect, and Leick met Harland’s eyes and wiped his mouth with his hand and Harland knew that Leick too understood Danny’s sudden shocking realization of his disability; and he remembered how in the past Danny had taken the trail from here to Back of the Moon at a jog trot, tirelessly pacing off the miles, and he swallowed hard.

  To cheer Danny and himself he hurried their departure. He would drive the buckboard — or walk and lead the horses, if the road became too rough. ‘ You can ride or walk as you prefer,’ he told Ellen. She elected at first to ride with him, and they set out, the four men carrying Danny in the chair and making the pace.

  Harland, once they were under way, forgot his sadness of the moment that was past; yet he felt restraint in Ellen still. ‘Does it scare you?’ he asked gently. ‘It’s fine when we get there.’

  ‘I don’t think I’d quite realized how hard it will be for Danny,’ she said. ‘There’ll be so many things we’ll do together which he can’t do.’

  ‘We’ll just do things we can all do,’ he assured her. ‘I’ve sent up an outboard motor and one of those light speedboats for him to run around the lake in. I haven’t told him yet. It’s a surprise. And he can paddle a canoe, and we’ll concentrate our good times around the lake shore, so he can share them.’

  She looked at him briefly. ‘I suppose we can order our lives to his,’ she agreed, and added: ‘It’s as though we were all three — crippled, isn’t it? Because he goes on crutches, so must we.’

  He felt the bitterness in her tones and spoke in quiet warning: ‘We’ll have to be careful not to let him think he’s cramping our style.’

  ‘And of course,’ she suggested hopefully, ‘if we wanted to take a trip — go to New Brunswick after salmon, for instance — we could leave him with Leick and he’d be all right.’

  He hesitated, said slowly: ‘I’m afraid I’ll never go fishing without Leick. He’s a habit with me.’

  ‘He and Danny both!’ she commented in a dry tone.

  ‘And now you,’ he reminded her, refusing to hear the rancor in her voice. ‘Three mighty happy habits, it seems to me.’

  They left the buckboard, after five or six miles, at the spring where the wood road ended, and went on afoot. The trail followed the stream’s cascading course upward toward the pond from which it flowed, and Harland pointed out places where Leick had widened or improved the path, to make it easier for the chair to pass.

  ‘And he’s done the same thing at camp,’ he explained. ‘Put in some zigzags, eased the steep pitches, so Danny can get from the cabin down to the boathouse on his crutches. Maybe not just at first, but when he’s stronger.’

  ‘I can help him, of course,’ she agreed, in a flat submission; but he was too happy to heed. From the top of the first ridge he pointed out to her the roof of the cabin on the flank of the lofty hill ahead and still a fair mile away.

  ‘You can just make out the break in the trees where the sunny ledgeslare,’ he said, and told her where to look. ‘And there’s a high rocky shoulder on the northeast face of the hill, not far above the cabin, where you can see all over the pond, see for miles.’

  They were well ahead of the others when they reached the foot of the pond and the boathouse beside the dam, built of logs and two stories high. ‘I’ve a study upstairs there where I work,’ Harland explained. ‘But we won’t stop to inspect that now.’ The cabin was a hundred yards, and a hundred feet of altitude, above the water; a long, low structure to which — the freshly peeled spruce logs were evidence of this — a new wing had been added. The central living room ran from front to back, and the kitchen and storeroom were on the northeast side. Their bedroom and Danny’s were side by side in the new wing, with a screened porch for sleeping in the open air when the weather made it more pleasant to do so.

  Before the men arrived with Danny, Harland had time to show Ellen the little there was to see. ‘I had Leick build this new wing,’ he explained. ‘Danny and I had just the one bedroom, of course.’ He looked at her hopefully. ‘Like it?’

  ‘It’s very nice,’ she assented in a flat voice. The wall between their room and Danny’s
was a single thickness of smoothed boards. ‘If Danny wakes in the night and needs us, we can hear the slightest sound.’

  He understood what she did not say. ‘It’s pretty close quarters, of course,’ he admitted apologetically. ‘We won’t have much privacy. But we’ll be out of doors most of the time when the weather’s fine.’

  ‘Where does Leick sleep?’ she asked, like one making polite conversation. ‘Off the kitchen, where we can hear him too?’

  He tried to laugh her out of this humor. ‘Now, now!’ He put his arm around her; but she freed herself, moving toward the door, and he said: ‘No, he has a room down in the boathouse.’

  ‘Here they come,’ she remarked. He heard the voices of the men outside. ‘I’ll put Danny right to bed.’

  Harland followed her out to meet the others, watching her with unhappy eyes. He had looked forward to their arrival here with the eagerness of a boy, anticipating Danny’s delight, tasting beforehand the happiness of showing Ellen this spot which meant so much to him; but now her disappointment was so plain.

  She and Leick helped Danny from his chair; and despite his Insistence that he was not tired, they led him indoors. Harland stayed to thank Joe Severin and his sons for their help; and Joe must have read his troubled thoughts, for the little man said reassuringly: ‘Let her get settled and used to it here and she’ll like it fine.’

  Harland was astonishingly grateful. Joe and his sons departed, and Leick presently came out and said, looking toward the cabin: ‘Time she gets to work fixing things to suit her, she’ll feel different.’ Both Joe and Leick had read her well, but Harland had learned long ago not to be surprised at the understanding hearts of simple men.

  – V –

  During the first days, Harland saw how skillfully Leick woke in Ellen the homemaking instinct which lies dormant in every woman. That first afternoon, the woodsman went to her with a question. ‘I didn’t put up any pegs in your bedroom, ma’am, because I didn’t know just where you’d want them. What would you think of here behind the door?’

  So she consulted with him, and when that problem was solved he proposed another, till she began to have ideas of her own. Leick, who with an axe, a draw shave, a ship auger, and a few nails could work miracles, placed shelves and pegs where she wished them to be, built a rustic table and some chairs, delighted her with his capacities. Harland let Leick work his magic upon her, remembering how often the other had solved for him problems which seemed insoluble; and he never made any comment to Ellen, suspecting that to do so might make her recognize her own surrender and fight against it. But more than once he spoke of her to Leick.

  ‘She’s happy here now all right,’ he said, at the end of the first week, triumphantly.

  ‘She is so,’ Leick assented. ‘Making over the place to suit makes it seem like her own. That’s the way you get to like a place, or a man; doing things for them. We’ll want to keep her busy.’

  ‘She’s wonderful, isn’t she?’ Harland’s pride needed sharing.

  Leick’s eyes twinkled. ‘She thinks you’re hung to the moon.’

  Harland said soberly: ‘I know it. I’ve got a full-time job, living up to what she thinks of me.’

  ‘It would suit her a lot better if there was just the two of you here,’ Leick reminded him. ‘It ain’t any picnic for a pretty woman, hid away up here with two men and a lame boy, and no outside good times at all.’

  Harland acknowledged that this was true; but he had no long misgivings, for their days soon settled into a pleasant routine. They rose at dawn, waked usually by the sounds Leick made in the kitchen; and Harland and Ellen raced down to the boathouse for an early dip in the cove, where morning mists might be curling up from the shallow water which in the cool dawnings seemed so much warmer than the air. By the time they returned, Leick would have helped Danny dress; and they breakfasted together, sometimes indoors, sometimes on the screened veranda which caught the early sun. Harland spent the mornings at his desk in the study above the boathouse; and Danny conscientiously made his way down to the wharf, using the easy grades of the new path, and grew stronger all the time. Usually he and Ellen in the late forenoon swam in the shallow cove; and when he was upborne by the buoyant water, his disabilities were no longer so obvious. If the day were fine, he swam again in the afternoon, Ellen and Harland with him. Sometimes they took canoe or rowboat — Harland had here two canoes and a flat-bottomed skiff which Leick had built to bring firewood from along the shore, as well as the frail speedboat to which the powerful outboard could be attached — and went exploring the lake. At its farther end, as distant as possible from the boathouse, there was a sandy beach so smooth and level that a hundred yards from shore the water was still no more than shoulder-deep, and they often chose to go there. Harland was a strong though not a skillful swimmer; but Ellen swam as easily and as beautifully as a seal, slim and graceful and completely at home in the water; and Harland and Danny watched her with an equal delight.

  Sometimes they spent an afternoon sprawled together on a broad ledge beyond the cabin, talking little or not at all, baking in the sun, letting it touch them where it would; and Harland and Danny were soon brown as leather from head to heel, while Ellen’s shoulders and legs and back acquired a warm and tawny hue which Harland thought delicious. At dusk they were always sleepy, and as often as not the late sunsets saw them already abed.

  Harland was completely happy. Ellen seemed to him more beautiful than ever, and to touch her hand, to hear her voice, to meet her eyes could make his throat fill and his cheeks burn. She wore a sleepy, sultry indolence, smiling at him through half-closed eyes; and whenever he touched her she was warm as a sunned cat, and his days were rich with joy in her. Also, his work went well, and he was filled with a sense of good achievement. Often, after their noonday meal, he read to them what he had written. Danny had always approved what Harland wrote with an uncritical pride. Ellen was less interested, and she listened lazily, watching Harland with hungry eyes, so that if he looked up from his manuscript and met her glance his pulses quickened leapingly. Once, when this happened, he said in laughing accusation:

  ‘You’re not listening!’

  ‘I’d lots rather watch you than listen to stories about other people,’ she told him in teasing flattery. ‘Did you know your ears wiggle when you read?’

  Rarely she had comments, but they were always personalized, as though everything he wrote were directed at her. Thus once she said, drawling sleepily:

  ‘You’re one of those men who think women’s place is in the home, aren’t you? Just good plain cooks? Is that what you want me to be, Richard?’

  He laughed, uneasy under her smiling mockery. ‘Well, something besides just a cook!’ he admitted.

  She touched his hand. ‘You’re such a boy! See him blushing, Danny! Mothers too? When I have a baby, will you be happy?’

  ‘I’m happy now,’ he assured her, and read on. He made one of his characters remark that a man needed contact with his fellows to toughen his fibre, and she said laughingly:

  ‘You’re a fine one to preach that, when you hide yourself away here all summer long, see nobody at all.’

  ‘Oh, a writer’s different,’ he argued. ‘He needs to get away by himself, to see things in perspective.’

  ‘But mustn’t he mingle with crowds to learn to know people?’

  ‘I don’t like crowds.’ He chuckled. ‘People in crowds seem to me like perambulating eggs. I want to crack a shell here and there and sample the meat inside.’

  ‘You can’t go around cracking human eggs, of course,’ she warned him. ‘So often you find them soft-boiled. They’d spill all over you.’

  They had many such drowsy afternoons, talking slow talk together, so absorbed in each other that they sometimes forgot Danny was listening. If he slept for a while, to compensate for some unusual exertion, they slipped away like truants, wandering through the forest or drifting quietly along shore in a canoe. They liked to go without him to that beach at th
e pond’s farther end, and Ellen, as she had warned Harland long ago, could be as pagan as he, so that sometimes as they sported in the clear, warm, shallow water, their laughter rang through the still hot afternoons till Leick, busy about his small tasks at the camp far away, might hear. From these adventures they came demurely home, sleek and serene.

  But there were other hours when it seemed to Harland that a cloud shadow passed ominously across their world, and there were hours when he seemed to hear warning thunder far away. Once when he had been reading aloud to them she said drily: ‘Your hero doesn’t think much of women, does he?’

  ‘He hasn’t met the right one yet.’

  ‘He’d better do it soon, if you expect women to read your book.’

  ‘I thought women were interested in men?’

  ‘That’s what they tell men, but actually they’re a lot more interested in other women.’ She smiled. ‘Poor darling, you don’t know much about women, do you?’

  ‘I’m learning,’ he assured her. ‘You teach me new things every day.’

  She looked at him thoughtfully. ‘You’ve a lot to learn,’ she said.

  He tried to laugh. ‘Oh, I don’t find women so mysterious!’

  ‘You don’t know enough about us — even about me — to know how little you know,’ she told him, and there was no smile in her voice nor in her eyes. Harland, uneasy without reason, looked at Danny and saw the youngster watching her with a grave attention, as though trying to appraise her tone.

  – VI –

  The pond was crescent-shaped, curving around the base of the hill on the flank of which the cabin was set. The ground rose steeply for the first two hundred feet above the water, then ascended more gradually to a ridge that ran southwestward. From the northern base of the hill a narrow point of land, no more than two or three rods wide, littered with great boulders and grown thick with young spruces, extended half across the pond. Late in July, Danny swam from the cove inside that narrow point of land to the opposite shore. Ellen accompanied him in the flat-bottomed skiff, and they told Harland in advance nothing of their plans. They left the wharf one still warm morning two hours after breakfast, and Harland, at his desk in the room above the boathouse, heard them row away; but he was absorbed in his work and did not speak to them, and their voices were hushed so as not to disturb him. He paid no particular attention till, his day’s stint done, he realized that they had not returned; and he took the speedboat and went roaring off to find them.