Living at the End of Time

by John Hanson Mitchell

  “Sure. It’s a cold day.”

  “No, I mean it. I want you to accept my apology.”

  “Right,” I said. “I accept.”

  “No, I want to apologize.”

  “It’s all right, really.”

  “Bad day here. I got a kid, you know. He lives in Leominster. Son of a bitch kicked me out. He remarries, and she says ‘no room,’ but I want to apologize to you.”

  “I understand,” I said. “You’re doing all right.”

  “You bet, Jack. Cops come by again last night. I told them to get lost. Who needs that stuff.”

  “You’re doing all right as you are.”

  “You bet. I raised that kid, know what I mean? You know what it is to raise a kid? And anyway, it isn’t him. It’s her. The bitch. French-Canadian.”

  “Maybe you should go back?”

  “I do go back. Sometimes I go there when she ain’t around. He says it’s okay, come back. I say . . . You know what I say to them?”

  “What?”

  “No, seriously, you know what I say?”

  “What?”

  “I say I’m happy like I am. I don’t want to live in no house anymore. Too hot. All that talk. Sometimes it used to be too much. Yap, yap, yap. I say ‘shut up or I’m leaving,’ and they say ‘so leave.’ The sons of bitches. I’m sixty-two years old.”

  “You’re better off this way.”

  “Damn right.”

  “I just wonder how you get through these zero-degree nights. I’m cold where I live, and I’ve got a stove.”

  “Let me tell you something, kid. You get used to it.”

  Mr. Benson, who eschewed alcohol his entire life, who would work steadily from the time he got up in the morning until he went to bed at night, with perhaps a short break for an afternoon nap, was in far better shape than Prince Rudolph, even at ninety-four. I went down his road on a warm day that month to look for him and found him in an alcove of his house, steadily chopping an old crate into kindling wood. We went through the business of reintroduction, and then, after it became clear that he did indeed remember me, I asked him how he was doing.

  “Not too well this year, I’m afraid. I’ve been in the hospital.”

  He tapped his chest, and to spare him a recitation of the gory details, I changed the subject. He seemed cheery enough and quite alert that day, so I asked him if he knew my friends Higgins and Jane.

  “Jane? Well, I don’t know, maybe, I meet so many people.”

  As far as I knew, except for his nephew, myself, Higgins, Jane, and the mailman, no one else ever came down his driveway.

  “Jane is interested in your stories about the river here,” I said.

  “Yes, well, it was very interesting here. There used to be more river traffic than there is today. There was once a fire, you know, down at the boathouse.”

  I knew about that fire. The blaze had occurred in about 1922 and had destroyed all the rented canoes, rowboats, and steam-powered launches that used to come up the river past Benson’s place. He would tell me about it almost every time we met.

  “That’s the kind of thing we want to hear about,” I said.

  “Well, I can tell you about that.”

  “We want to get your story on film.” I was certain he had never heard of a video camera.

  “Well, I don’t know about film.”

  “It’s nothing really.”

  “Well, I don’t have much to say.”

  “That’s all right. We just want to hear about your life here and the old days.”

  “Well, I can tell you about that I suppose. But one year is just like another, don’t you know. You plant, and you weed, and you harvest. There was a flood one year, 1938 I believe.”

  “That’s good.”

  “It was a hurricane.”

  This too was a story I had heard before. The sun was beginning to set and it was getting colder, so I extricated myself and promised to come back in a week or so to introduce him to Jane. He seemed in fine health that day. I didn’t know his clock was running down.

  I used to know an old man who lived on one of the farms to the west of the ridge on which my cottage was located. He said he loved to sit at his window at night and look east to the black line of the ridge in winter. “The trees there were so dark,” he told me. “They made you think that something could happen in there.”

  Henry Potter was a wealth of information on that part of the world. His great-grandfather had moved to the place early in the nineteenth century, and he had another relative, a carpenter, who had kept a diary of his daily life for a few years. Potter used to tell me about Indians. He claimed his great-grandfather had had trouble with marauding crop thieves.

  “Mind you,” Potter said, “Indians were wiped out a hundred years before, but the old man still believed they were there. They used to hide out on the ridge, he said. ’Course I don’t believe that. But if there were Indians around here still, given present conditions, that’s where they would go.”

  This was about four years after I had last seen Bill, the Green Man, and I risked telling Potter about my adventures with this modern-day version of a hunter-gatherer.

  “Well, it don’t surprise me none. Earlier times you had strange types living back there in the hollows. Old Man Jensen used to see people all the time.”

  Jensen was a farmer who, in the early 1920s, had gone crazy, burned down the local one-room schoolhouse, and then shot himself behind one of his barns.

  “That’s what sent him over the line, you know. He saw Indians in the woods back there. He thought they were out to get him.”

  I was thinking of this conversation during that month. Higgins and I had taken a walk on the ridge in the middle of a snowstorm and had gotten lost. There had been a few flurries starting up when we left, but after half an hour or so, when we were deep inside the forest, the flurries had increased to a driving snow which started to obliterate our tracks. We turned around to go back as soon as we realized the intensity of the storm, but for some reason failed to find familiar landmarks—a large boulder shaped like a whale, the old oak tree on the carriage road, and similar navigation points. We were still able to pick up our trail, though, and we kept going, sure that in time we would pass something we recognized. After about another half-hour or so, we came to the realization that we were going around in circles.

  “What do you think?” I said.

  “Let’s go around again and watch for the spot where we started into the circle. There’s got to be a straight line somewhere.”

  “Provided the snow hasn’t covered it yet,” I said.

  We started walking fast so as to find the spot before the snow covered it entirely. I felt a little foolish getting lost in my own backyard, but then I was forever getting lost there. We came to a likely-looking place in the circle—not a clean track of footprints by any means, but simply a narrow groove winding off through the forest. It seemed to me to be heading in the wrong direction, though.

  “You’re lost,” Higgins said. “This has got to be it. Nothing else out here makes tracks that deep.”

  I turned around to see how fast the track we had just made was filling up and, about twenty yards back, saw a man standing by one of the oaks, his hand resting on the side of the trunk. He didn’t move when I spotted him; he stood there watching us. I thought it was Bill, come back. He was wrapped in some kind of brown robe that, from where I was standing, looked to be made from fur or skin, and he had on one of those round fur hats that trappers in the American West used to wear.

  “Higgins, look at this,” I said.

  He turned around and stared back along the trail.

  “Look at this guy back here. He’s been following us.”

  Higgins looked, shaking his head.

  “Where?”

  I raised my arm to point. There was a gust of wind. The trees shuddered and dropped a branchload of snow somewhere nearby. I turned to look, and when I turned back, the figure was gone.

&n
bsp; “You’re losing it,” Higgins said.

  “Maybe so.”

  I wanted to go over and look for tracks, but Higgins insisted we follow what we presumed to be our trail before it too filled with snow and left us stranded there for the night. I followed him, and in time we got to the hemlock grove and were able to follow the stone walls out to my cottage. We made tea and took a snort of Stolichnaya.

  “Maybe it’s all true, Higgins. Maybe there are bears and Indians and ghosts and murderers living back there in the hollows.”

  “Maybe you need a break,” he said.

  10

  Life on Earth

  AS THE WINTER DEEPENED, living in the cottage became increasingly difficult. If I spent a night or two away, as I sometimes did, I would return to find the house stone cold, the water frozen in the urn. I would have to spend an hour or so shivering by the stove while I built up the fire. Even when I hadn’t been away, the chill mornings made me stiff and achey until I could get the fire churned up and brew some hot coffee. I was also tired of brushing snow off my various woodpiles, and then having to clean up the mess I made hauling in the wood.

  I had come to appreciate my small life in spite of these inconveniences. It was essential living, as Henry used to say. I found that sitting outside, even in cold weather, was not uncomfortable. The trees sheltered me from the winter wind, and whenever it was sunny, which it often is in New England in January, I could make tea on my terrace and relax in a chair, reading in the sun, feeling a little like a nineteenth-century tuberculosis patient. Nevertheless, during February that year I took Higgins’ advice and left the cabin for a week.

  I had long been interested in the radio telescope at Arecibo, Puerto Rico, in the hills not far inland from the northern coast. A friend who used to work there told me stories of the beautiful landscape in the region and of the curious ideas people there had about the telescope. The radio telescope was surrounded by small subsistence farms, and many of the farmers were suspicious of the strange device. Some were convinced, she told me, that the telescope was communicating with the spirit world or was being used for black magic. Others believed that it was a landing place for aliens. Strange entities had been seen in the hills, according to a few of the local farmers. Devil children had been born to some of the women. Cows had died mysteriously; goats behaved in an odd manner; and one night a thing with red eyes appeared in a barn among the goats, carrying a headless chicken. The people had heard unearthly barks and howls emanating from the valley where the telescope was located.

  I thought this had the makings of an interesting article, and that winter I got an assignment from a magazine to go to Puerto Rico to do the story. I flew down on a Sunday in the middle of February, just in time to escape a terrible ice storm that swept through New England. I rented a car in San Juan and drove inland to spend the night on a coffee plantation in the center of the island. The next day I drove to the hills around the radio telescope, stopping often at local cantinas to eat and talk to people. I was in no hurry to get to the observatory, since part of my story—the major part in fact—was about the local reaction to the telescope.

  I had a few contacts on the island, one of whom was an older North American woman who lived alone on a mountain top on a small coffee plantation. She turned out to be a spirited old leftist, politically active in both Puerto Rico and the States. She and her husband had bought the plantation some twenty years earlier as a vacation spot, and after her husband retired the two of them began to live there year-round. He died shortly after they settled in Puerto Rico, but she carried on by herself, alone on her mountain top, surrounded by small vegetable plots, old coffee trees, and tropical birds. She had a wonderful view of the surrounding mountains from her place—wild, rounded hills, a flowing tropical sky, and dark, shadowy valleys. As we ate lunch on the terrace, she told me that what my friend had said about the telescope might not have been quite accurate.

  “The issue with the observatory, if there is an issue, is that people around here think it might have something to do with the military,” she said. “That’s the real story. I can give you names. But I’m not sure you’ll find any truth in all this. People around here are quite afraid of American military installations. Properly so, of course, but I don’t think Arecibo has anything to do with ‘Star Wars,’ and I don’t think you’ll find anyone who believes the place is involved with black magic.”

  The next day I drove inland toward the observatory from the city of Arecibo, along ten or twelve miles of narrow, winding roads that cut through the bizarre karst country of the north coast. Because of the natural erosion of the limestone outcroppings, the countryside has been reduced to a series of sharp green hillocks, some with sheer limestone cliffs overhung with luxuriant tropical vines. As the narrow road snaked inland away from the brighter, more developed coast, it passed through small green villages with open-air bars or grocerias, where the men of the village would be standing around talking. I would stop and talk with them. They were friendly and happy to chat, but I could not find anyone who believed that there were spirits emanating from the crater in which the radio telescope was located. Most of them, I decided, were too young and cynical to believe in spirits anyway. Some had been to New York City and had relatives there.

  I drove on, dodging the cows and chickens wandering in the road, stopping often to ask more questions. The air was filled with the rich sounds of tropic life, distant drumming, bird song, the lowing of cows, and everywhere the whistlelike call of the coqui, a small tree frog that is an integral part of the folk life of the island. At one place I came to a crumbling chapel just off one of the back roads, and as I walked around, an old priest came out and blessed me.

  “What do you know of this observatory, Father?” I asked. “Is it a good thing?”

  “Good perhaps, and bad perhaps.” He tipped his hand from side to side with a shrug. “People talk about it. Visitors come from the coast to see it. But look at my church. What can we do?” There were fissures in the stucco walls of the chapel and grass growing in the cracks of the cement courtyard in front of the entrance. In back a broken window overlooked a small, untended garden.

  I had heard that there was a small village very near the observatory where a group of families lived without running water or electricity, in the very shadow of one of the most sophisticated electronic devices in the world. I tried to find the place but became hopelessly lost. At one point the road I was on seemed to give out altogether. I turned back, and on the way out saw an old man with a narrow, hatchetlike face standing barefoot in a shallow swale, his pants rolled up. He held a homemade vine rope in his left hand, and at the other end of the rope was a handsomely patterned heifer. Both were staring at me.

  “Do you know how to get to the observatory from here?” I asked, after proper introductions.

  “No,” he said.

  “You have heard of it?”

  “Yes. Much.”

  “Maybe I should continue back this way?” I asked.

  “Maybe.”

  “You have been there?”

  “Not me.”

  He was about seventy or eighty years old, but with the healthy nut-brown skin and bright black eyes of a younger man. I changed the subject and asked him about his cow, and he became more talkative.

  “She is a good heifer,” he said. “Tinta is her name.” He yanked her over to him and scratched her neck.

  I introduced myself and explained my mission, and he told me his name was Ramón Gonzales and he had been born in this valley seventy-six years ago. Ramón had a farm near the swale. When he grew too old for heavy work, he turned the farm over to one of his sons, who eventually went off to New York. A younger son took over and Ramón stayed on, daily taking Tinta to the high meadows to graze.

  “I am waiting for entry into heaven,” he said with a smile.

  I asked him again if he knew anything about the observatory. “What do they find there, I wonder?”

  “Stars and moons,” h
e said authoritatively.

  “Planets?”

  “Yes, planets. And moons. Stars and other things—things people cannot see. These they can see.”

  He shifted his stance and waved his arm in the direction of the observatory and nodded slowly.

  “They see many things there. You should be careful. Don’t ask too many questions when you get there.”

  He came up out of the swale drawing Tinta after him and stood closer to me, taking my arm.

  “Where are you from?” he asked.

  “Boston.”

  “I have no cousins there,” he said. “Why is it that you want to know about this observatory?”

  “I have heard that other things happen there that they don’t talk about. I heard this from a friend, and I’m curious about it.”

  “You should be careful.”

  “I know.”

  “Maria Puente? Do you know her?”

  “No.”

  “She was pregnant and lost the child. Later she went to the front gate and shouted at them and cried. Guards came out. Police came and took her away.”

  “Why did she get angry? What did they do to her?”

  “It was not them. It was the machines. You be careful. Just when you get there, don’t ask too many questions. Just be careful.”

  He pulled Tinta away from some weeds she was eating and for some reason became annoyed with her.

  “Vaya!” he shouted. “Vaya, vacita!” He pushed her toward some other plants and came over and took my arm again.

  “I know the purpose of that place,” he said. “They tell us here on the island that they are looking for stars, but that is not true.”

  “What are they looking for?”

  He glanced over his shoulder.

  “Buscan la cara de Dios” he said intimately. “But I will tell you this. They send out to search for God, but what they attract to the valley are spirits. Bad spirits. They give you tours of this place. The people go there. But there is one section where no person from the islands can ever enter. Dogs are there, as high as Tinta.”

  He raised his arm to his shoulder. I had heard this story before, in one of the cantinas where I had stopped. But the man who told me was drunk. Ramón was not drunk.