Maynard’s House

by Herman Raucher

  His woodshed was nothing more than an asbestos-covered platform supported by poles. The poles were of differing heights, giving the shed a lean-to construction, thus minimizing the obvious peril that tons of snow would present to any flat-topped edifice. Heavy tarpaulins hung down on all four sides to ward off winter drifts and summer squalls. It was, all in all, a rather serviceable affair if not something worthy of The Architectural Digest.

  Neat piles of wood cut into stove lengths lay awaiting their fate, while nearby a sturdy chopping block and a variety of bladed instruments were readily available for duty. Axes, saws, files, knives, hatchets, plus tools old and new. And cans of rusted nails. And coils of wire. And a confused bag of screws, nuts, bolts, tacks, glass and jars. It could all have been construed as junk were it not for Maynard’s having stacked, hung and labeled everything with consummate affection and care.

  With hammer and nails, and hinges and screws, Austin repaired his backhouse door. Yes, Maynard might have done the job better and neater, but Austin was not a complete nincompoop in such endeavors, and he viewed his accomplishment with the same glow of satisfaction that an ancient Venetian artisan would have basked in upon rendering an urn, or a fountain, or a glass chandelier. Also—he was hungry.

  Back at his house he selected from his larder a saner meal than his helter-skelter dinner had proven to be. Powdered eggs, crackers and coffee. It went down easy and caused no furor.

  He shoveled a path to his icehouse, a much more substantial building than his woodshed. It was stone on the outside and brick on the inside, six inches of air probably in between for maximum insulation. The door was also doubled and took no small effort to dislodge from its sluggishness. Inside, heavy burlap lay on thick butcher-block wood as sterile sheets would lie on an operating table. And everywhere sawdust. No ice, but Austin hadn’t expected any. There were, however, implements with which he might avail himself of ice. Picks, tongs, groovers, saws and a pung. The latter being a long, low-slung sleigh with two sets of steel runners, the front set being on a pivot so that a sharp turn could be more easily executed. It was perfect for hauling, and that was what Austin had in mind for it.

  From where he stood on the frozen pond, the forest was more luxuriant than ever, blue-tipped trees spilling down rugged crests to flood the rich valleys. Junipers and spruces everywhere, many of them bravely shouldering their way through minute crevices to come up gasping for sun. All the land encircling him, lake-studded and rock-fringed, was ablaze with a sharp light that summer could never match. And above his head a formation of honking geese sailed by, their wings pounding loudly, like a ship’s canvas in a gale.

  It was stupefying to witness, the shine and the glass of it, the primeval pull of it, and he let loose a shout, adding his own noise to that of the geese and the quail and the sparrows and the hawks. “Yaaaaa-hooooo!” he cried, feeling brother to the wind and cousin to the sky. “Yaaaaa-hooooo!”—and his voice bounced all over that wooded wilderness of loons and trout and beaver and fox, and never in his life did he feel more at the core of things and more hopeful for the world.

  With groover and saw he carved from the lake top three blocks of ice, each measuring two cubic feet. As hard as the carving had been, the loading was even harder, for the ice blocks tended to slide off the pung’s lacquered surface. Of course, he should have brought with him some of those burlap blankets he had seen hanging in the icehouse, but he hadn’t, and there was no sense in crying over spilt ice. In any event, to avoid the constant on-again, off-again of it all, he packed the ice blocks with snow, on all sides and in between. And it worked, as mortar with bricks, and he headed back to his icehouse where he would hoard his big diamonds until he and the summer would chip away at them with ice pick and heat.

  Something faint caught his ear. A new sound and not a forest sound. It came again, at random, without pattern as with a butterfly trail—the laughter of children or the call of some bird. In, out—gone.

  It came again and again, intermittently, Austin unable to set his ear so that he might anticipate and thus identify it. He could not define whether it was real or imagined, animal or human, bird or breeze. It simply played the wind and floated off. Now you hear it. Now you don’t.

  His ice blocks eventually wrapped in burlap and vouchsafed, his icehouse door pressed firmly shut, he next set to the task of digging a series of crisscrossing paths in the snow that would link the house, the icehouse, the backhouse and the woodshed. The completion of it took longer than he had reckoned on, but when the trench-digging was done he took pride and assurance in the knowledge that he had quick and easy access between his four buildings—come what may, eat as he would.

  The only thing really wrong that he had done that morning was to leave his wet clothes to dry on the porch railing. For they had not so much dried as they had frozen stiff, and he collected them from their perches as if they were linoleum samples. Inside his house he spread and bent the board-stiff clothes over his stovepipes, where they steamed and sizzled and smoked like fish, and generally sagged themselves back to life. He was learning. He knew it. Everyday he was learning.

  Wearing snowshoes, he walked out to where there were no paths at all. He was just reconnoitering, checking out his land, of which there were eleven acres though most of them would have to wait till spring. And as he sloshed he heard it again—high-pitched and funny. And there was no mistaking what it was. It was the wind-carried giggles of children, and it was all about him, like the delicate thrustings of an expert duelist. It was in front of him and then behind him, blocking his path, spurring him on.

  He kept walking, not wanting to appear unsettled by the taunting laughter or frightened by whoever or whatever was creating it. He passed a large flat rock, about the size of an oval tabletop. Clear of snow and highly polished, it picked up the sunlight in gauzy patches, giving the appearance of a large jewel set in white gold. And all about the immediate area were signs that someone or something had been there since the snow last fell.

  There were footprints merged with one another so tightly that the snow looked to have been stamped down almost into a carpet. The footprints had been made by small feet. Two pairs of them. One small, the other smaller.

  He examined the rock more closely, removing a glove and running his fingers over the glazed surface. He could almost see his face in it, distorted to be sure, but mirrored there just the same. And as he peered into his own eyes in the mirroring rock it came again, the laughter, almost as though it was his own reflection that was causing it. And it was closer by than before. Much closer. And he looked up quickly to see—

  Two heads, multicolored and large-eyed, popping up over a snowy crest, prismed within a hovering cloud of their own breath. But they were gone almost as soon as he saw them, only the vapor of them remaining, and only for seconds.

  Unable to figure it, and uncertain as to whether or not he was being “funned” or “taunted,” he moved on across the snow. In short time he came again upon his witch’s tree, more spookily provocative than the first time he had encountered it. No foliage, no snow on its charred branches, its gnarled roots holding to the ground tenaciously, as if to defy anything to cause it to relinquish its grip.

  He looked to see if it cast a shadow. But as he did, the sun ducked into a gray overcast, and nothing had a shadow, not even himself. There was, however, a strangeness at the base of the tree that he had not noticed before. A yellow fluid bubbling, almost imperceptibly. And he wouldn’t have noticed it even then had he not been aware of the terrible odor it emitted, an odor so foul and offensive that he almost toppled.

  And then the laughter came again, as if in conspiracy with the sun’s capriciousness, and he was beginning to fail to see the possible humor of it all.

  He walked on, with a snowshoe rabbit hopping across his path, kicking up a skitter of snow before losing itself in a series of cleverly executed right-angle leaps. Up ahead was his postbox, camped on a thick stump and sticking out of the snow like a small cover
ed bridge. The name on the box read “Maynard Whittier,” and just beyond it Austin could see the tire tracks of what had to be Jack Meeker’s jeep, dawdling over what had to be the road back to Belden.

  He smiled, because it meant that civilization was not all that far away. It was the first time in his life that he had ever attached such happy significance to tire tracks. They were as twin arteries, available to him for sustenance, support and good fellowship. As such, they were a welcome sight, as welcome to him as the note within the postbox, pinned to the bulky package.

  Some sausage, ham, bacon and other meats. Also some cigarettes, hope they’re your brand. Pencil and paper, too. Write what other things you might be needing. Guerney’s betting a dollar and a quarter you’re out of there inside of two weeks. No takers. Best to you.

  JACK MEEKER

  Austin reached inside and found the promised pencil and paper. And he wrote a note that he would leave for Jack.

  Could use some detergent and margarine. Please keep a tally of what you’re laying out. Are there any books on Minnawickies? I think I may have a nest of them. Thank you.

  AUSTIN FLETCHER

  Placing note, pencil and paper back in his postbox, Austin turned again for his house. He passed the witch’s tree and the sun went in and he walked a little faster. He walked another fifty yards, turned to look, and the tree was bending in a wind—though there was no wind where he was standing, and no sound of wind anywhere.

  Walking more quickly, if that were possible, he passed the Devil’s Dancing Rock—for that’s what it was and he had might as well face it. And there was something new about it. In the snow, some words had been fingered. And before the words, and after—a star. And between the words, a slash. Like so:

  *ARA/FROOM*

  The sun was swarming all over the day when he reached his house. He clomped up the porch and in, carrying Jack Meeker’s care package while balancing some additional food for thought.

  9

  Austin sat looking at his fire, the air in his house dry and motionless though the outside wind shook his interior beams and caused his stovepipes to sway like suspension bridges. The sun had left town at 4 P.M., not unusual for a Maine winter, when the days were often like long twilights and the nights dictated that all activity end by five.

  He had stored his new meats, smoked four of his new cigarettes, had cleaned his guns, waxed his snowshoes, fed his fire and swept his floors. His house was providing him with the solitude he wanted, but the price he was paying for it was being calculated in boredom. He had been there but one day and the old urge to cut and run was rising in his blood. Emotion said, “Go.” Logic countered with “Go where?” Pragmatism summed it all up with “Give it a shot. What do you have to lose?”

  Maynard’s books appeared as though they might offer some diversion. By lantern light they looked most inviting, like invaluable archives—the wisdom of great men, the knowledge of the ages. Ideas, opinions, visions, summations, the collected spawnings of the human mind. In short—nothing that he really cared to read.

  The essays of Mencken, plays by Wilder and Morley, Gide and Camus, all of them packed solid like irregular bricks in a patchwork wall. Thackeray, Fielding, Stendahl—had Maynard actually read them? Gorky, Tolstoy, Joyce, Auden—touching shoulders in an array of intellect that had to flatter the old house. And a section on humor. Thurber, Perelman, Bill Mauldin, H. Allen Smith. And the complete works of Henry David Thoreau.

  This last volume lay on a lectern, apparently having received much attention from Maynard. Austin opened it and found, just inside the front cover, a handwritten note:

  Maynard Whittier—1969. I come from little and figure to amount to less. But rather than disappear and leave no mark, I have tried to make myself a part of this house as others have done before me. Most of what I believe can be found here, in Thoreau, a man who knew there was more to living alone with nature than in the company of a near-sighted civilization. My own notes, for whatever they’re worth, are in the smoke closet. I’m not sure they’ll ever serve any great purpose, but they do pertain to this house and this area, and they now belong to whoever comes across them.

  Austin stepped back from the lectern and wondered aloud. “That’s swell, Maynard, but where the hell’s the smoke closet? Better question might be, what the hell is a smoke closet?”

  He was aware that he was talking to himself. He had done it a few times that day and it concerned him, because he normally adhered to the school of thought that believed that people who talked to themselves were wacko. But with no one around to pass such judgment on him, and with very few sounds abounding that might serve to keep his eardrums in shape, and with the lingering suspicion that if he didn’t talk aloud he might just lose his power of speech altogether, he had taken to talking to himself. Also, it made him feel less alone, the sound of his own voice in an otherwise soundless void coming as undeniable proof that he was there. It was a self-deception, of course, and he knew it, but he needed that crutch, at least in the beginning. When the time came that he could throw it away and walk without it, he would do so.

  It was late. So he banked his fire, said good night to himself, and slid—a bit uneasily—into his second night’s sleep in the first house he’d ever owned.

  It was a good night’s sleep, deep and uninterrupted. Ten full hours of it. And he awoke rejuvenated, his eyes and ears reporting that morning had sprung with a clangor, another sortie of geese pelting the sky with their wings, creasing the day with their honking. His squirrels were busy above, and some mice were roller-skating below. It was, all of it, such a sudden whir of noise that he was caused to leap from his bed and question where he was for a good five seconds.

  Later, a mug of coffee in his hand, he gave serious effort to finding his smoke closet. “Smoke closet, smoke closet. Where would I be if I were a smoke closet?”

  To the stove: “Are you a smoke closet, sir?”

  To the cellar: “Hey—you happen to see a smoke closet around here?”

  To the flue: “I’m looking for my smoke closet. If you happen to see it, let me know. Big reward.”

  But as he was sticking his head up the flue, he noticed how the chimney continued straight on through the low ceiling. It would emerge on the roof, to be sure, but to get there it would have to pass through the squinchy little attic he had seen on his first appraisal of the house. And, wedged into the ceiling, just to the left of where the chimney went through, he saw a wooden square about the same dimensions as those of his cellar’s trapdoor.

  He pulled up a chair, climbed upon it, pressed at the square, lifted it, balanced it on all ten fingers, raised it higher and flicked it aside. The attic was open to him.

  He hauled himself up into the cramped crawl space, and 322 startled squirrels made for their emergency exits. “Douse the butts, fellas—fire inspector.”

  Two grease-caked windows, though facing south in the early day, provided him with enough light to see what he was doing. On all fours he poked about, keeping his head down because too many sharp beam studs were there to rake his scalp if he made one false move.

  The chimney indeed went up and through. But enough of it, about three feet of it, was very much in the attic. And set into one of the brick-faced sides was a small iron door hung on batten hinges. “Smoke closet. Sonofabitch. How do you do?”

  He lifted the latch and slowly, respectfully, coaxed the iron door open. “Come out, come out, wherever you are.”

  Nothing came out and so he peered in. It was much too dark for him to see what, if anything, was inside, so he reached in with his right arm. “Just call me Lefty.”

  A mouse catapulted out and took off, which could only mean that the smoke closet was not quite airtight, and that anything in it, papers or such, might well be little more than a pile of ashes.

  Austin groped within and came up with something that had bulk. He drew it out. It was a looseleaf notebook, eight and a half by eleven inches, and some three inches thick. He bellied over
to the windows and lay the book down and open. There were many pages, all of them in a clear script that Austin recognized as Maynard’s handwriting. Maynard had utilized the book’s inside front cover as an index page, and Austin’s eye traveled it from top to bottom:

  Uninhabitable areas

  Great Northern Paper Company

  Mount Katahdin

  Baxter State National Park

  Millinocket

  Belden

  The seasons of Maine

  Summer equipment

  Winter equipment

  People of the area

  Animals and wildlife

  Firewood and materials

  Tools, utensils & supplies

  Natural forest woodpiles

  Early thaw

  Old stone walls

  Foot stoves and bed warmers

  Thieving animals

  Burning trash & compost pile

  Birdlife and bird calls

  Indigenous Indians and campsites

  Thoreau

  Rivers, ponds & lakes

  Bears

  Minnawickies

  Devil’s Dancing Rock

  Buttoning up for winter

  Item 25 drew him back. “Minnawickies! You know it!” But almost as soon as his index finger struck that number on the page, he heard the laughter again. Outside somewhere. Drifting up at him like noisy smoke.

  Peering through one of the grimy windows, he saw them, whizzing through his snow trenches—two small hurrying figures. Scampering and laughing and tumbling and chasing each other as in a fun house.