Bitch Creek

by Tapply, William

  So Calhoun gave Ralph a rawhide bone for companionship, tucked Lyle’s gazetteer under his arm, carried his Coke and apples out to his truck, and headed for Keatsboro.

  CHAPTER

  EIGHT

  THEY’D RELEASED Calhoun from the VA hospital five years earlier, on a bright Thursday morning in late March—spring in Virginia already. He’d headed instinctively north on Interstate 81 in his new secondhand Ford pickup, drawn by the Maine images that ricocheted around in his brain. The grass along the highway in Pennsylvania was so green it hurt his eyes. Shrubs were flowering and dandelions bloomed and woodchucks sat up on their haunches in the fields, and he was so eager to get there that he stopped only twice—first outside of Scranton and then again somewhere in Connecticut, for gas and coffee and a couple of Hershey bars.

  He’d taken the first exit off the Interstate as soon as he crossed the bridge over the Piscataqua River and entered Eliot, Maine. It wasn’t as if he’d planned to take that exit or had any conscious reason to. Nothing in his brain actually told him to click on his directional signal, slow down, turn the steering wheel. He’d had no specific destination in his mind—just Maine.

  He’d followed secondary highways and then back roads, meandering through the countryside in a more-or-less northwesterly direction.

  The Maine meadows were still winter-flattened and brown. Patches of old snow huddled in the woods and along the stone walls, and the ice in the ponds had not yet melted.

  In the late afternoon he drove through Berwick and Sanford and Alfred and Shapleigh, sometimes not even knowing what town he was in, and then he came to a stop sign at a crossroads. A white Congregational church in need of paint hunkered on one corner. In front of it stood a big glass-faced bulletin board with the message: CHRIST THE LORD IS RIS’N TODAY. ALLELUIA. EASTER SERVICES, 10:00 SUNDAY.

  Beside the church sat a ramshackle mom-and-pop store with gas pumps out front and an old Coca-Cola sign over the door. A big square fieldstone building stood diagonally across from the church. A sign over the door read DUBLIN TOWN HALL.

  Calhoun knew, although he didn’t know how he knew, that he’d come to the end of his journey and the beginning of his own resurrection. This town felt like home.

  He’d pumped himself a tankful of gas at the mom-and-pop store, then went inside to pay. A bell dinged when he opened the door. Coming out of the brilliant afternoon sunshine, it took his eyes a minute to adjust to the dimness inside. It smelled oddly familiar, a nostalgic combination of vinegar and sharp cheddar cheese and propane, and he flashed on a kitchen, a white-haired woman in a flowered apron standing at the stove, children seated around a bare wooden table . . .

  “Help you, son?”

  Calhoun blinked. Behind the counter a bald man in a blue flannel shirt and red suspenders was perched on a stool eating a donut. He was old—somewhere in his late seventies, Calhoun guessed—but he had alert, intelligent eyes.

  Calhoun went over, took out his wallet, and gave the man a twenty-dollar bill. He’d paid for the pickup with the bank check and arranged to take his change in cash. Now he had a wad of bills worth fifteen thousand dollars in his pants pocket and nine hundred more in his wallet. “I filled it up,” he said to the man. “Eighteen dollars’ worth.”

  The old man cocked his head and peered at Calhoun through his steel-rimmed glasses. “You ain’t from around here, are you?”

  “No, sir,” Calhoun said. “My name’s Calhoun. They call me Stoney.”

  “I’m Jacob Barnes.” Barnes opened his cash register, put Calhoun’s twenty in, and removed two ones, which he slapped down on the counter. “They was some Calhouns had a farm up on the county road,” he said. “Got burnt out in the fire, never come back. That was before your time, I reckon.” He laid his forearms on the counter and leaned forward.

  “When was the fire?” Calhoun said.

  “October of forty-seven.”

  “That was before my time, all right. Different Calhouns, I guess.”

  Barnes shrugged. “I expect so. It warn’t much of a farm to start with. They raised chickens and pigs and kids, all of ’em running around up there in the mud so’s you couldn’t tell which was which.”

  Calhoun smiled. “That does sound like my family,” he said, although in fact, he had no particular reason to think so. “Can you direct me to a real estate agent?”

  Barnes jerked his head in a northerly direction. “Talk to Millie Dobson. She’s the only realtor in town. You lookin’ to buy?”

  “Yes,” he said, although until he’d said it, he hadn’t known that it was the truth.

  Calhoun had followed Jacob Barnes’s directions and found Millie Dobson’s gray-shingled bungalow squatting close to the roadside. The sign out front read M. DOBSON: REAL ESTATE, TOWN CLERK, NOTARY PUBLIC, FAX. A green Jeep Cherokee sat in a small pea-stone parking area, and he pulled his truck in beside it.

  He climbed the front steps and rang the bell. Some kind of loud rock music was playing inside, and he waited several minutes before the music abruptly stopped and the door opened, revealing a woman with short black hair, dark eyes, a lean, angular body, and a towel around her neck. She was wearing sweatpants and a powder-blue T-shirt that bore the message DUBLIN FAIR 1997—THE WORLD’S BIGGEST PUMPKIN. She was, Calhoun guessed, around forty.

  “Exercising,” she said. “I’m Millie Dobson. What can I do for you?”

  “My name’s Calhoun,” he said. “I’d like to buy some land.”

  She pulled open the door. “You came to the right place, Mr. Calhoun.” She laughed. “Hell, you came to the only place. Come on in.”

  Her living room doubled as her office and exercise studio. Against the front wall stood a big oak desk with a computer and fax machine. It was flanked by a pair of shoulder-high file cabinets. A bookcase in the corner held a CD player and a television with a VCR, and beside it was a treadmill and a rowing machine.

  She brought them coffee and fetched a thick photo album from her desk drawer, and they sat side by side on her sofa.

  Calhoun told her he’d come from Virginia with all his savings in his pocket, hoping to buy a secluded piece of property to build on. He made it up as he went along, since he wasn’t sure what he really wanted, but trusted that what came out of his mouth would be true.

  “Why here?” she said. “If you don’t mind me asking.”

  He shrugged. “I like this part of the world. Small towns. Maine. Away from the seacoast. Always have.”

  “You’re from away,” she said. “I hear it in your voice. I’m from Madrid originally.” She pronounced it with the accent on the first syllable. MAD-rid. She smiled. “That’s the town in Maine, not Spain. How about you?”

  “South Carolina,” he said.

  She nodded as if she knew he was hiding something and it was all right with her. “Can you describe what you have in mind?”

  “Something in the woods. With water. It’s got to have water.”

  “Pond or stream?”

  “Either one’s fine with me.”

  She frowned. “Lemme think for a minute . . .” Then she snapped her fingers. “There’s a piece of land few miles north of here, been sittin’ there for ages. Nice little brook runs through it. The folks who had it got burned out, and no one ever rebuilt on it.”

  Calhoun remembered what Jacob Barnes had said about a family of Calhouns being burned out in a fire and abandoning their place. “This place wouldn’t be on the county road, would it?” he said.

  Millie Dobson gave him a little frown, then said, “Yes, as a matter of fact, it is.”

  “Can I see it?”

  “Well,” she said, “people from New Jersey own that piece now. Don’t know as it’s even available. But I could check. Who knows? The right offer . . .” She shrugged. “Let me change my clothes, we’ll go have a look at it.”

  Fifteen minutes later they had parked Millie’s Jeep at the end of an old overgrown tote road and begun walking. The roadway wound through several hundr
ed yards of second-growth hardwood forest and ended at an old cellar hole. The fieldstone chimney was still standing, and the granite foundation looked solid. A pair of ruts led down the slope beyond the cellar hole to a pretty spring-fed brook, stopped at a burned-out bridge, then continued into the forest on the other side.

  Millie said you wouldn’t find it on any map, but the local folks called the brook Bitch Creek. The story was, someone had named it after a trout fly, Millie said, though she personally figured it was just some man naming it after his wife.

  From somewhere in the recesses of his chaotic memory, Calhoun remembered a fly called the Bitch Creek Nymph.

  If that were true, it probably meant there were trout living there. He liked that the little brook had a name. That seemed to give it a history. Calhoun was interested in history.

  In fact, he liked everything about the place. He wanted to buy it. He felt like he’d come home.

  He told Millie he’d tear down the old chimney and put it back together with the same stones. He’d build his house over the old foundation. He’d do the work himself, he said.

  She asked if he was handy, and he said, “Yes,” and after he said it, he believed it was true.

  Millie dickered with the people from New Jersey, and three weeks after leaving the hospital in Arlington, Virginia, Stoney Calhoun owned forty acres of overgrown farmland in Dublin, Maine, along with several hundred yards of Bitch Creek, a good fieldstone foundation, an almost-passable tote road, and what felt like a future.

  For the first few months, he’d lived in a tent on the site of his new house. He woke with the birds every morning and worked until sunset. He cleared the tote road with a chain saw so delivery trucks could bring in lumber, and he opened up the hillside where his house would sit so the morning sun could stream in through the front windows and he’d be able to glimpse the silvery ribbon of Bitch Creek at the foot of the hill. Its gurgle was loud enough for even a one-eared man to hear, and it kept him company while he worked.

  Gradually his hospital-softened body grew hard and lean. His thoughts became sharp and decisive, and now and then a piece of memory would fall into place.

  He was burning slash on a misty afternoon late in May, leaning on his garden rake close to the smoke where the blackflies couldn’t get at him, when an old Dodge Power Wagon came rumbling into the clearing.

  The Power Wagon pulled up beside Calhoun’s pickup, and a longlegged kid stepped out, lifted his hand in greeting, and sauntered over to where Calhoun was standing.

  “Good day for burnin’,” the boy said.

  Calhoun had nodded, squinting at his fire.

  “Guess you’re Mr. Calhoun,” the boy persisted. “I’m Lyle. Lyle McMahan.” He held out his hand.

  Calhoun glanced at it, then grasped it. “Didn’t ask for any company that I recall,” he said.

  Lyle McMahan had a ponytail and an earring, and he towered over Calhoun. “I used to catch trout from there,” he said, jerking his head toward Bitch Creek.

  “Well, you can’t anymore.”

  The kid shrugged. “I’ve got plenty of other places. You’re planning to build here, I understand.”

  “That’s right.”

  “Lot of work for one man.”

  “I’ve got a lot of time,” said Calhoun.

  “If I owned that water,” said Lyle, “I wouldn’t let anyone fish in it, either. Tell you the truth, I wouldn’t fish in it myself. I’d just keep it, appreciate it, take care of it. I never kept any of those trout. I’d catch a couple, put ’em back, then quit. Native brookies. Pretty special. They’ve been here since the glaciers moved out, or at least their ancestors have. You aren’t a fisherman, then.”

  Calhoun had turned and smiled at him. “No, I’m a fisherman, all right. And I go fishing every day in that little creek. I don’t bring my rod, though. I just sit on a rock and watch ’em. Try to figure out what they’re eating, or why they aren’t eating, or just generally ponder it. I appreciate a good mystery, and trout always give a man something to think about.”

  Lyle had moved to the slash pile, dragged some branches over, and thrown them onto the fire. Then he’d picked up a hoe and shoved at the dirt around the edges.

  And by the end of the afternoon, Calhoun had hired Lyle McMahan to help him build his house in the woods.

  Calhoun and Lyle took down the old chimney stone by stone, and they patched up the granite foundation and made it plumb. Calhoun figured he must have built a house before, although he couldn’t remember where or when, because he found that he knew how to erect beams and sills and joists and bearing walls. He and Lyle fit stones, laid pipe, and strung electrical wire, and by the middle of July they had the place framed in and Calhoun was sleeping on the floor in what would be his kitchen.

  The two of them found a natural rhythm working together. Calhoun didn’t need to tell Lyle what to do. The boy always had the right tool in his hand, and he’d lug over the right piece of lumber just at the moment when Calhoun needed it. Hours would pass when neither of them would speak. Calhoun had power lines strung in to run the tools, and he kept a radio tuned to the classical station out of Portland. Lyle seemed to like that music as much as Calhoun did.

  When they talked, it was usually about fishing. And sometimes Calhoun called it quits early and the two of them piled some gear into Lyle’s old Power Wagon and followed back roads to bass ponds and trout streams deep in the woods, or headed for the coast to try for striped bass in the estuaries and along the rock-strewn coastline.

  That first summer, Lyle was between his sophomore and junior years at a small college in Vermont, which he’d chosen, he said, because it was near some nice trout streams and grouse covers. He’d grown up in Fryeburg, up to the north and west of Sebago Lake, and had spent most of his life in the woods. He was majoring in history. He wanted to teach high school. He said he’d learned a lot of history by wandering around the woods. He liked to read stories off toppled, hand-etched gravestones in overgrown family plots. He could reconstruct several generations of family history by the stone walls and tote roads and caved-in cellar holes and well stones he found while hunting deer or tracking down a new trout pond.

  Lyle always made a point of talking with local old-timers, collecting their stories. He was writing them down, he told Calhoun that first summer when they worked together, and one day he might try to put them into a book. Lyle believed that this generation of old-timers—the men and women who’d scraped a living from the stingy Maine soil, who’d raised pigs and cows and chickens and had poached deer and ducks to feed their families, who’d survived the Second World War and the Great Fire of ’47 and whose sons and grandsons had died in Korea and Vietnam—they represented the end of something. “It’s got to be preserved, Stoney,” Lyle had said more than once. “If it isn’t written down, it’ll be gone forever.”

  But as interested as Lyle was in history and stories, he never inquired about Calhoun’s personal history, which saved him the trouble of telling the boy that he didn’t know much about it anyway.

  After Calhoun began working for Kate Balaban and she’d decided to start offering guide trips, it was natural enough that he’d suggest they hire Lyle McMahan.

  He was good at it—enthusiastic, knowledgeable, and easy with people. Lyle was a natural teacher. He could identify every species of bird and wildflower and insect native to Maine, and he liked to share his knowledge of local history with his clients. He could spot the flaws in anybody’s fly-casting technique, and he knew how to offer suggestions without giving offense. He was especially good with kids.

  Lyle liked everybody, and he had no trouble winning over even the crustiest client who might be inclined to mistrust a gangly college kid wearing a ponytail and an earring.

  Calhoun was proud of Lyle McMahan, proud that he’d “discovered” him, and proud to have him for a friend.

  These were the thoughts that bounced through Calhoun’s head as he drove to Keatsboro, heading for the X on Lyle’s
topographic map, the secret trout pond that Fred Green—or whatever his name really was—had wanted to fish.

  Calhoun absolutely believed that he, Calhoun, Lyle’s best friend, was solely responsible for whatever had happened to Lyle.

  CHAPTER

  NINE

  AN APPLE ORCHARD AND A COUPLE of dairy farms, widely separated by dense pine forest, were the only signs of human activity along the dirt road, which twisted through the rolling countryside to the single dotted line that led to the penciled X on Lyle’s topographic map. Calhoun drove slowly, studying the old tumbledown stone wall that kept appearing and disappearing in the woods along the right-hand side of the road, and when he came to a wooden bridge spanning a brook he knew he’d gone too far.

  So he turned around and headed back, and this time he spotted the break in the wall where an old tote road had once cut into the woods. He pulled to the side, got out, and looked around.

  Tire tracks in the hardened mud led off the road to the opening in the wall. Someone had recently turned in here. Crushed weeds showed where the vehicle had parked behind some trees, hidden from the sight of anyone passing by.

  Lyle always tried to hide his truck. Lyle believed—and Calhoun agreed with him—that there was no sense spending a lifetime collecting secret trout streams and bass ponds and grouse covers and then giving them away to some passing out-of-stater by leaving your vehicle in plain sight.

  Only a big old truck with four-wheel drive—such as Lyle’s Power Wagon—could have made it through the mud and over the rocky ruts to the hiding place behind the screen of pines. Calhoun doubted a rented Taurus could’ve negotiated the deep ruts that far off the dirt road without ripping away its undercarriage.