by W. T. Tyler
“I had the impression you’d retired,” Squires continued, almost accusatorially.
“I suppose I did—in a way. How about you?”
“Just back from Malta. So where are you these days?” Squires’s voice was terribly loud.
“Over at Defense,” Nick whispered, his cheeks flushed. The Pentagon was anathema to a diplomat of Squires’s pretensions.
“Defense?” Squires boomed, very shocked. “At Defense! With those chaps! You’re not serious!” Squires had been a diplomat with great dramatic flair, superb style, but little substance, Nick recalled—the Douglas Fairbanks, Jr., of the European Bureau, his detractors said. General Gawpin, having followed Nick out, had now circled somewhere to the rear, eavesdropping out of view. Nick felt his hostile presence.
Two naval officers in white caps left the diplomatic entrance and hurried toward the curb.
“I have to catch the shuttle,” Nick said apologetically. “It’s the last one.”
“The shuttle? But look here, we should get together. Where can I get in touch with you? The Pentagon, you say?”
“I’m in the book. Why don’t I give you a call?” An Army officer jogged past. “I have to run, Hank. Sorry.”
“We’ll get together,” Squires shouted. “You’re in the Pentagon book?”
“That’s right.” Nick turned away and trotted quickly down the drive and out into the street. The Pentagon shuttle, an olive-green van with white letters on the side, moved toward him through the dusk. The five waiting passengers had already queued up and were boarding one by one as Nick desperately searched his wallet for his Pentagon pass, still conscious of General Gawpin’s hovering presence. He was alone now, standing in front of the open door, still searching frantically for his Pentagon ID. He couldn’t find it. The black driver waited impatiently. The seated passengers watched him in disapproval. Their car pools were waiting.
“Come on, man,” the driver called out. “I ain’t got all day.”
Nick found the plastic I.D., but as he plucked it from his wallet the contents scattered across the asphalt. Bending quickly to retrieve them, he saw a few credit cards scattered under the van, and lifted his head toward the driver in a silent plea for patience. The door closed, the engine throttled forward, and the van crept away—not to enable him to recover his cards, as he’d thought, but to continue down the street. It turned the corner and disappeared into the darkness.
He retrieved the last of his possessions and stood up, face burning. The last shuttle was now gone and he crossed the boulevard without turning. Taxis would be impossible to find, so he plunged down the hill, across Constitution Avenue, and moved on through the darkness—past the Lincoln Memorial and out across Memorial Bridge, beyond which there were no footpaths, no walks, just the unending stream of cars moving past, their headlamps reflected against his anguished face like the bright shuttling windows of a speeding passenger train passing across an abandoned station, now black, now white, now black again.
It was there, at the far end of the bridge, that he finally stopped, unable to go farther. He struggled to get his breath, struggled to get control of himself, and as he did, plagued these last few days by some inner agony, by some forgotten guilt that evoked childhood illnesses and sickroom claustrophobia, he knew how fatally he was divided within himself and that something was terribly, terribly wrong.
8.
Haven Wilson drove to Ed Donlon’s two-hundred-acre farm in Shenandoah County that Saturday morning. The autumn light had the deep tarnished luster of old pewter and the color was dying on the hills except for the dull coppers of the ancient oaks. A brisk wind drove broken cumulus from the north. He was alone in the station wagon. Nick Straus had begged off apologetically, remembering he had to complete a draft paper for a Monday deadline at the Pentagon. Betsy had shown no interest at all. “It’s a little chilly today; maybe next time,” she’d said, the way she usually did.
Much of the westbound traffic that morning was made up of vans and pickup trucks, some with camper shells in their truckbeds. Decals of ducks or of bass breaking water decorated their aluminum sides, with an occasional owner’s name on the back in magnetic tape: Bob and Nell, Hank’s Hideaway, Furman’s Folly. Hunters and fishermen owned many of them, suburbanites headed for their A-frame cabins and prefabricated bungalows in the mountains. After two hours he climbed into the Shenandoah valley and turned south along the interstate, where traffic was heavier. Tractor-trailers rumbled past, down from the Pennsylvania Turnpike and headed south. Sedans and station wagons with Pennsylvania and New York license plates crept by, luggage under canvas on their roof racks and their backseats piled with cartons and plastic coolers, bound for jobs in the Sunbelt or late autumn holidays on the Florida beaches.
Ten miles south, he glided off the ramp and followed a narrow state road parallel to a spine of hogback mountain along a wide, shallow creek, heavy with autumn rains. White water boiled over the limestone ledges. He cruised through Tolerance, an unincorporated settlement where mud-scabbed pickups sat in front of weathered clapboard houses and cabins along the hollow. The hulks of abandoned school buses and logging trucks lay rusting in the autumn weeds behind boarded-over service stations, garages, and tabernacles. Smoke lifted from a few paintless cabins, where a neat back-stoop woodpile or wash on the line showed a woman’s presence.
Two miles beyond, he turned west into the valley leading to the Donlon farm. The property line commenced a few hundred yards up a narrow gravel lane from the secondary road. Half the farm lay in woods up the mountain, the lower half was partially fallow in rolling meadows gone to clover, weeds, and wild blackberries. The best pasturage was along the floodplain of a wide creek on the eastern boundary, where the cattle belonging to a neighboring farmer, Ish Hopkins, cropped the winter fescue. The old barns and lowing sheds were in ruins, but the graceful two-hundred-year-old house was intact, as sedate as a Richmond dowager on the green damask shoulder of hillside between woods and pasture, facing south along the valley. The winding wagon road that led to it was once semi-paved but now had crumbled to gravel as it climbed from the stunted pines and cedars of the secondary road across open hillside, through cross-fenced fields, and into the ancient grove of hickory and oak.
He entered the old house through the kitchen, carrying the groceries to a crude plank table in front of a smoke-blackened fireplace. The dim aroma of scaling carbon and soot-impacted brick from the wood fires of the past greeted him, bringing back ghosts from his childhood, of stories told him in a house similar to this down in southwest Virginia. It was his grandfather’s house, where he’d spent the summers as a boy, the same old house from which his great-grandfather Carver Wilson had been summoned on a warm summer evening in 1865, five months after Appomattox, and had walked out to the gate under the pear tree, his napkin still in his hand, his wife and children left behind at the supper table, summoned by those mounted figures at the gate who claimed they’d come to join the Tazewell County scouts organized under his command to end the brigandage and horse thievery in the region. It was near dusk. Some of the mounted men were in gray, some in blue, some in mountain linsey-woolsey, his wife had said. She’d watched from the window. They weren’t mounted volunteers but marauding guerrillas from the mountains, who’d heard of his boasts. They’d shot him down under the pear tree.
The old pear tree had still been there during his boyhood, unpruned, the bark coarse, the fruit so hard it slashed his gums, drawing blood. Carver Wilson’s oil portrait still hung in the parlor; the story of his murder drew his great-grandson to the pear tree evening after evening during his first summers there. The memory haunted him as he lay upstairs in the feather bed at the top of the rear stairs, the house in darkness, time stopped, memory stopped, his own heart stopped as he reconstructed the summer evening in 1865. It was his first encounter with history, the first taste of that long, dark chronicle that had spilled family blood, but at the time it was only a darkness where his mind and imagination hovered, sens
es denied him, trapped in a past he couldn’t understand at all. The war was over, his great-grandfather had returned from Shiloh and Cold Harbor, had sat for his portrait in Roanoke, and then these men had come. Who were they, these guerrillas from the mountains?
For his grandmother and his great-aunts, the moment had long since faded into lavender and musk, the memory perished in those brittle lines of newspaper verse published by the county poetess the month after his great-grandfather’s death and kept by his grandmother in the family album, like scraps of yellowing lace:
The body on the knees was found,
The head reposed low on the ground,
No more to fight guerrilla bands,
In Tazewell’s vales and hilly lands,
Where Godless rebels kill and thieve,
Leaving widowed hearts to grieve.
His own memories had never been surrendered in that way. The mystery was the same now as it had been then, as he lay upstairs in the summer darkness and watched the heat lightning shimmer across the valley, or heard the reverberations of an August thunderstorm which brought those marauding voices nearer, standing just below the open window, but this time calling his name through the August darkness: Haven Wilson! Haven Wilson! We’ve come for you. Your turn now!
These familiar ghosts survived in the musk of Ed Donlon’s smokeless chimneys. The old brick house in Tazewell County was gone now, like the great-aunts, the grandmother, his mother and father. “Sometimes I think you’re only a family memory, Haven,” Betsy’s father had once told him, “but I suppose that’s typical of Southerners. The tradition seems to be passing, doesn’t it?”
He inspected the empty rooms, as he always did, examining the windows, the ceiling for seepage, the wiring. Except for the kitchen, no furniture remained. Jane Donlon had withdrawn the antiques after Brian’s death. The old pine mantels and the banister that rose three floors from the downstairs center hall were all of value that remained, and were sought by antique dealers and by the thieves who plundered unoccupied old houses.
He had a solitary lunch on the side gallery, sitting with his back against the bricks, out of the wind. The day was darker now, growing more overcast. He would have felt a little foolish had anyone found him there, even Betsy, contemplating fields he didn’t own, pastures needing lime and re-seeding, fences needing new locust posts, thickets needing bush hogging, and sheds and barns requiring new beams and roofs if their decay was to be stopped. He knew how he would do these things, where he would begin and where he would end, just as he knew what it would look like after three or four years.
But the fields faded, he felt the wind, and was conscious of the rough mortar against his back. Betsy would never live out here. The silence would make her uneasy and in the end she’d fall prey to her solitude, terrorized the same way Jane Donlon had been after Brian’s death.
He lifted himself from the gallery deck and gathered up the wax papers and beer can. As he turned toward the door, he saw a group of forgotten objects on the stone coping below the window—a plastic guitar pick, a broken string, and an old medicine bottle with a few dried flowers stuck in its throat. They’d been left behind by Brian Donlon and Sue, his live-in companion, who’d once sat on this same gallery in the evenings and played their guitars.
He took them back to the kitchen and left them on the mantel.
In the drive, he filled the chain saw from the gas can and carried it back along a fence toward an old red oak that had lost two of its lower limbs during an ice storm. As he approached the tree, the silence was broken by the crack of a rifle from high up the mountain.
He stopped, head lifted. Two more shots followed. Deer season hadn’t opened yet. Rifle fire this time of year came from either poachers or the beer-drinking gun addicts from Tolerance or Henshaw. A handful of young drifters and dropouts had settled in both communities, most of them self-styled hippies ten years behind the times, some with long hair and beards, others with shaved heads or scalp locks, Mohawk fashion, indifferent to organic gardening and communal effort, devoted instead to guns, beer, pot, and souped-up cars. They trapped or snared fox, raccoon, and quail illegally, flashed deer by night with their pickup trucks and 30-30s, and grew marijuana in hidden meadows high up the mountain for high school and college consumers in the larger towns and the urban suburbs. One group lived in an abandoned schoolhouse near Tolerance—the ones Brian Donlon had fallen in with during his final stay at the farm.
Theirs had been the trucks and Mustangs Donlon and Wilson had found in the drive that Saturday morning they’d arrived with the new chain saw Ed Donlon was eager to try out. Their empty beer cans and roach-filled ashtrays covered the kitchen table, the chairs and hearth; their reeking bodies were sprawled in the front two rooms, sleeping off an all-night beer and pot party, sexes still intermingled under musty blankets.
Wide awake, freshly shaven, wearing his new Bean’s brier-proof pants and an Irish hat, Ed Donlon, the country squire, was outraged. His son wore a wispy golden beard, was barefooted, his stringy hair matted. Over his thin shoulders was a soiled scrap of Navajo blanket. Sue, the thin redheaded companion, joined them sleepily in the kitchen, also barefooted. For Donlon, the experiment was over, his patience exhausted. He was furious. Brian had less and less to say. Pink-eyed, embarrassed, and confused, he finally lit a cigarette, took a puff, and passed it to Sue. Then, still listening to his father, he’d wandered to the refrigerator, removed a can of beer, and popped the lid. His father reached him in two steps and knocked the can from his hand. It was nine o’clock in the morning.
Haven Wilson turned and left. He walked back to the lifted trunk of the BMW, where the new chain saw lay, and stood looking at it, ashamed. He could hear Ed Donlon’s shouts from the kitchen. He closed the trunk, but a few minutes later Donlon came out of the house, grabbed up the chain saw, and headed for the woods. Wilson went back to the house, but Brian had gone upstairs with the girl and he followed Ed Donlon instead. When the two men returned from the woods just before lunch, the house was empty, the potted marijuana plants had disappeared from the kitchen windowsills, and Brian and Sue had vanished in her yellow Volkswagen.
Father and son had had disagreements before, but none as final as that one. At the beginning of his sophomore year at Haverford, Brian had left school to find secret refuge on his father’s farm, living first in the house and then in a small cabin he’d built in the woods higher on the mountain. Haven Wilson had stumbled upon it not long after Brian’s death, a small, crudely built shed constructed from boards salvaged from a partially collapsed barn. A few forgotten books lay moldering on the rough shelf—a book of Sufi, Tagore, Herman Hesse, and a water-marked Gordon Lightfoot songbook. On the plank sills sat the ubiquitous medicine bottles with straw flowers stuck in their throats. To the side of the cabin lay an overgrown plot, hacked out by hand, where Brian had cultivated his marijuana plants.
After Brian had run out of money that first autumn, he’d telephoned his mother, who secretly sent him money orders from a Washington post office. When the first snows came to the valley, he returned to his parents’ house and he and his father reached a temporary understanding. He lived in the Georgetown house and found work as a dishwasher in a restaurant on Pennsylvania Avenue behind the Capitol. Waiting tables at the same restaurant was a young woman a year older, also a college dropout, but more traveled. She’d tended goats on a communal farm in Idaho, picked peaches in Oregon, where she’d studied art, and owned a battered yellow Volkswagen with Colorado license plates.
That February Brian moved in with her, sharing a two-room basement flat on Capitol Hill. The two drove to the Shenandoah farm a few times that winter, helping Ed Donlon with the restoration of the house. After Brian lost his job and couldn’t find another, he’d gone to his mother with a proposition. He and Sue would move to the farm and help with the restoration until autumn, when they both planned on returning to school. They had ideas for an herbal garden and a goat house, and would earn extra money selling herbs
and feta cheese to Washington restaurants. Ed Donlon was skeptical but Jane was enthusiastic. She was a potter and sculptress and had had plans drawn up for converting one of the outbuildings into a studio-workshop. Instead of hiring a carpenter from Tolerance to begin construction, she offered the project to Brian at ten dollars an hour.
Brian and Sue moved to the farm in May. By midsummer the shed that was to become a studio-workshop was still in ruins. The lumber delivered from the sawmill near Fenshaw lay weathering in the high weeds near the barn. A few fields had been partially cleared but the blackberries were reclaiming them, as tangled as the abandoned herbal garden on the hillside above the silo. The most well-traveled path was the one across the pasture and up the mountain to the cabin where the marijuana grew in luxurious solitude, nourished by the thick compost brought up through the woods by Brian and Sue from the floor of the ruined silo.
Haven Wilson and his youngest son, Paul, occasionally joined the Don-Ions during their Saturday renovations. They seldom saw Sue, who would melt away with the Donlons’ arrival, retreating up the pasture toward the hidden cabin, not to return until dusk, when supper was being cooked on the charcoal grill. Ed Donlon had spoken no more than a dozen words to her. Jane Donlon’s attempts at conversation—family, school, her future plans—were turned away with the vaguest of answers, but Jane seemed to understand. She was a dreamer, like her son, drawing substance from silence.