Autumn Imago

by Bryan Wiggins

  “I thought you were off duty,” I said.

  “Tyler radioed. He was worried about the crew in cabin 6.”

  “Bad?” I asked.

  “Not really. They were pretty drunk but quieted down as soon as I showed up. I’m just babysitting here for a bit while they pass out inside.”

  “Tyler should have handled it,” I said.

  “He’s green. He’ll learn.”

  “Maybe,” I said.

  She moved over to give me a seat next to her on the tabletop. I looked down to see the small block of pine she cupped in her hands. It was the start of one of her wood carvings. I’d seen her work around the park before. It was good. Most of the ranger cabins I walked into had at least one of the animals she’d carved, and there was a whole menagerie of deer, fox, and loons crowding her desk at Abol, the campground a few miles down the road from mine. She held up the piece she was working on.

  “What’s this look like?”

  “Another loon?”

  “Yeah, but when I get to the head, a duck, I hope. I’ve never done one before. Isn’t that funny? This little girl in the campground, maybe four or five years old, is crazy about them. She keeps asking where they are. Everyone else wants to see a moose. Which is another one, believe it or not, that I haven’t carved yet. But for her, it’s a duck.” She tipped her head toward the cabin across the field. “I should’ve brought my knife to make the most of my time while those animals settle down.”

  I reached for the leather sheath at my hip, undid the brass snap, and held my knife out to her.

  She took it, then touched a button on her headlamp and began to examine it carefully, turning it over in her hands. “Nice. Hand forged, full tang. What’s the handle, deer antler?”

  “Yep.”

  She slid her index finger under the spot where the blade met the handle. The knife hovered level in the air. “Beautifully balanced too. There’s gotta be a story behind a blade like this.” She took it and began carving the block of wood, delicately curving it around the nub at the end that would become the duck’s head. I watched thin yellow curls of shavings fall from the knife into the shadows underneath us for a moment before I replied.

  “There is. It was my father’s. My grandfather, Pop, made it for him after a hunting trip he took my dad on as a child. He’d just given my dad his first rifle. They were in the Poconos. Pop shot a fourteen-point buck but didn’t kill it. The thing charged, but when my grandfather pulled the trigger again, the rifle misfired. The buck was almost on them when my father shot it, dead center, right between the eyes.”

  Cassie whistled. “Damn.”

  “Yeah. Anyway, Pop made the knife out of the buck’s rack and gave it to my dad.”

  “Was he a blacksmith?”

  “A bible salesman, if you can believe it. But he was one of those guys who could make anything. He wanted to make the knife, so he just learned how to do it.”

  Cassie laughed. “So you’re descended from a badass bible salesman?”

  “That’s as good a definition as any for my grandfather,” I said. “He could call upon God’s mercy in one breath and his hellfire in the next.”

  We sat there in the silence for a moment while she whittled away. The crickets had started singing and the first few fireflies winked in the field. After a while, Cassie put the carving back in her pocket and handed the knife back to me.

  “You off duty?” she asked.

  “Till Wednesday, but I thought I’d stick around for a while to fish.”

  “Well, I’m going back off after I leave here. I got a bottle of single malt in my cabin. Want to come by for a nightcap?”

  The crickets kept singing while I thought about how to respond. I liked Cassie. I liked her a lot, and from the things other than words that passed between us, I think she knew that too. But I sure as hell didn’t want to screw things up between us or make a mess in our pristine workplace. Finally, she just shook her head and laughed.

  “Jesus, Paul,” she said, hopping off the table and smacking her palms against her thighs to clear the last of the wood shavings. “It’s only a drink. I wasn’t asking you to the prom.”

  “I know, Cassie; thanks, it’s just—”

  “I get it,” she said, shaking her head with a smile. “I’m on the radio if cabin 6 starts acting up.” She gave me a long look before she turned to go. “Good luck with the fishing. Tough with the weather so warm, but if you do land one I’m sure it’ll be safe.”

  “Why’s that?” I called after her. I could just make out her words as she walked away.

  “Because you, my friend, are the absolute master of catch and release.”

  4

  Summer Sunrise

  I didn’t wake up the next morning, because I never really slept the night before. Since I was off duty, I was camped out in the bunkhouse behind the ranger’s cabin. It wasn’t that the beds in there weren’t comfortable—I can pass out on a rock after a full day outdoors. It was because of the thoughts that circled through my head instead of dreams that night. They were a crazy collage of musings and memory, leading me everywhere from where that missed drink with Cassie might have led to the dark days between the deaths of my sister and my dad.

  I stepped outside to take a measure of the morning. Only the birds were up. It was Labor Day, and our guests seemed to be taking advantage of the holiday to sleep in. My plan was to steer clear of the traffic that would soon be on the ponds and target the streams instead.

  But before I started the patient business of fishing, I needed to clear the cobwebs. I went down to the water to begin what had become a somewhat regular routine: a paddle out and back across the full length of the pond.

  My campground sits at its northwestern end. Colt’s Point is the hump of land along the southwestern shore that juts in to give Kidney its name. The longest line across the water is from the landing by the cabins to the pond’s southeastern tip, a course I often took to start my day. Sometimes I raced it—raced myself, really. My best time for the mile and a quarter round trip was twenty-three minutes, on a dead calm day with no breath of wind. The air was still that morning, but more than most, I knew just how quickly those waters could change.

  I dragged the canoe to the shore, pushed off, and paddled. After a while I found my rhythm, bending and stroking till I felt the first prick of sweat beneath my arms. By then I was out in the middle, and I let myself drift for a moment to take in the day.

  I looked to the long blue massif beyond the pond and followed the ridge east to Katahdin and the rising sun, then I paddled port before turning broadside to see Doubletop towering behind me to the north. I thought about the forces circling me on the water and the ones that shaped those great behemoths beyond. The only thing that separated the molten granite eruption of the mountains’ birth, the glacial grind of ice that shaped them, and each tiny heart that beat in the verdant world they had created was time.

  Time. I stared into the dark pines in the distance and considered how my own short span of days fit into that larger story. My mind skipped backward through the scenes that marked the milestones of my life: inspecting my uniform in the mirror on my first morning as a ranger; placing a stone atop the cairn on Katahdin’s summit to mark the end of my solo five-month journey along the Appalachian Trail; telling my boss at MattaByte I quit; watching my mother’s face fall when I told her I was done trying to hold our family together and would fly to California the next morning; staring at the policeman who stood in our doorway with the news that my father was gone; catching my father’s face in the rearview mirror as he drove us through the gates of Disney World to reveal the destination of the surprise road trip he took us on after Jordan’s death; listening to the echoes of my mother’s sobs across the water on that awful morning on this very pond.

  I started paddling again, letting the work purge the anger that rose when I thought of everything that had been lost, everything I watched my father fight to hold together in the year between the day Jo
rdan died and the night a senseless crush of steel and concrete took him away as well. I bit the water with my blade at each memory of my failure to fill his shoes: the calls to Kim at college to draw her home; the battles with my mother’s new hippie boyfriend, Campbell, to drive him away; the family stories I sought to revive with my mother, which were met only by silence; every stab I made at trying to save Tommy—until the day I saw the first faint line of a needle track on his arm.

  I reached the far shore, turned, and pointed back home. Home was here now, years and miles from my past. As I headed for the shore, my anger cooled to certainty. The distance that stood between my family and me had been their choice, not mine. Now they were only a coin that flipped through my mind at times, one side shining, the other tarnished. And on a silver morning like this one, I did what I usually did; I let the coin fall to rest so that only the bright side of our distant past shone.

  I slowed my pace and filled my lungs with a big, clean breath. The air, water, and land around me vibrated with the warmth of summer sunshine. This world was the one that sustained me now—my family of flora and fauna. It was their kinship I could count on. I may not always find the fish I hunt, but I know they’re there, gliding silently beneath me under every kind of sky, present even under the ice when the long, hard winter comes to still this wilderness, and the trees that cover it remain faithful, ever green. I know that every time my eyes point east, I’ll find Katahdin, rising above the horizon like the distant dream that led me back to this place. For me, the mountain will always be the long-forgotten lodestone that pulled me two thousand miles north—to live my life in the shadow of the silent sentinel that keeps me forever anchored to this land.

  5

  House Call

  I’d just hooked a monster when I heard someone shout my name. I looked up from my line, surprised to see I’d fished my way back to the bridge to Kidney. Tyler was on it, waving his cap in the air. I’d let the line go slack with his call, and whoever was on it took the opportunity to spit the hook and slip away.

  “Sorry,” said Tyler, after I’d made my way to the bridge, “looks like you were doing pretty good.”

  “I was.” I forced a smile. Tyler was still getting used to the job. He might need a season to figure out that he could handle most problems himself without pestering one of his off-duty peers. And if he didn’t, he’d probably realize he wasn’t cut out to be a ranger. The trouble he told me about next, though, was nobody’s business but my own.

  “The gatehouse at Togue Pond radioed,” he said. “Your sister’s trying to reach you.”

  “Any details?”

  “I think the words they used were family emergency. They said she wants you to call right away.”

  I thanked Tyler, and he walked back up the road toward the campground. I took a last look down the river, shook my head, and began stowing my gear. It looked like rain was coming anyway.

  ***

  One day when I was about seven or eight years old, I got off the school bus and discovered that my sister Kim had never got on. When my mom drove us back up to school to look for her, we found her crying at the curb. It took Mom a while to calm her down enough to get the story. She’d seen a school bus crash on the news the night before and thought the same thing might happen to her. Kim’s always been a worrier, so as I got into my truck, I was skeptical about just how dire a situation might have to become to earn “emergency” status in her mind.

  But even though we’d only spoken a dozen times in half as many years, she was still my only connection to my family. My mother and I didn’t talk, and I doubted either of them had any more idea than I did about where the hell Tommy was. Despite the distance between us, however, I was still my father’s son. Even if I no longer had a relationship with my family, the one thing I did retain was some small sense of duty toward them.

  It’s eighteen miles from Kidney—most of it over the slow and dusty tote road—to the nearest pay phone at the Trading Post outside the park. But there’s a closer option that works once in a while. We called the open space in neighboring Abol Campground the “phone booth,” because when conditions are right you can get a bar or two on your cell there. I drove over, parked my truck, stepped out, and sniffed the air before placing my call. It was quiet. Even the air was still, but it had a charge to it. When I pulled the phone out of my pocket, I could see the hairs on the back of my arm standing straight up. Kim answered on the third ring.

  “Paul?”

  “Yep.”

  “Thank God you called. I didn’t know how long it might take to track you down. I wasn’t even sure you were still working for the park.”

  “What’s up?”

  The line went quiet for so long that I had to pull the phone from my ear to see if I’d dropped the call. There was a crack of thunder, and I just had time to make it back into the truck before the sky opened up. The rain pounded against the roof so I jammed the phone against my ear. It was still silent. Finally, Kim spoke.

  “Well, hello to you too,” she said.

  Another silence stretched between us. I watched the view outside dissolve behind the cascade running down my windshield. I had the urge to jump out of the truck and stand in the deluge, letting the cold, clean water wash all over me.

  “Paul?”

  I straightened up in my seat and got back to business. “Kim, what’s the emergency? Did you lose your car keys or something?” I winced as soon as the words left my mouth.

  The silences were now starting to get longer than our exchanges. When Kim broke the next one, her voice was level and cool.

  “No, Paul, I’m pretty good at keeping track of important things—like our mother. You remember her, don’t you? The woman who raised us, the one I took in, the one with the Alzheimer’s disease that’s not just going to go away?”

  I closed my eyes and forced myself to let out a long, slow breath before I replied. “Kim, just tell me what happened.”

  When she answered, her tone was softer, and between her words I could sense just how much had happened to make my sister sound so defeated and tired. “Not much,” she said, “just a little problem in the kitchen. Mom almost burned the house down.”

  6

  Foreign Soil

  The next morning, I did a little horse-trading with Tyler to cover my shifts before driving over to park headquarters in Millinocket. Luckily, my boss didn’t grill me on the details of my personal life when I told him I needed to tend to a family matter. It would have been a long story, and I had a six-hour drive ahead of me to reach Kim’s home in Dover, Massachusetts.

  I don’t recall a single scene outside my window that whole trip south. The only place I do remember traveling to after I pulled onto I-95 was my past.

  There wasn’t some cataclysmic event that led to the years-long silence between my mother and me. There’d been plenty of drama before I left home for the West Coast, but we still talked for a while after that. The nature of those conversations had started to change when I first left home for college. It began when I started calling my mother by her given name, Mara. I came home from Drexel one weekend and said it as a kind of bad joke. I could tell she didn’t like it, but by then both of us were smart enough to pick our battles. After I moved out west, the calls I took from her—and on rare occasions even made—became shorter and shorter as we found less to say. One day I got an e-mail from her filled with the same talk we’d been recycling for years. We switched to that medium for a while, but even those exchanges grew lean—two or three lines of text floating in a big, empty box on my screen. We were down to holiday cards these days, and every time I wrote one I struggled to put anything above my signature at the bottom—even the word “love.” Maybe especially that word.

  I wasn’t completely blind to the conflicts that distanced me from my family. The lightning rod for the earliest storms had been Mara’s live-in boyfriend, Campbell, the self-proclaimed “free spirit” she met at some kind of retreat a couple of years after my father di
ed. He was everything my father wasn’t, a guy so terminally laid back that I could never tell whether he was baked on the weed he smoked regularly or not. I couldn’t wait to escape to college, but I kept coming home to check in on Tommy. He certainly didn’t have a problem with Mom’s new stoner stud.

  I don’t remember Kim ever coming back after she left for Boston University. I even drove up to see her once, but every time we talked that weekend it was like we were having two different conversations. Mine was about trying to save our family. Kim’s was about trying to save my soul. And since she didn’t share any sort of “mountaintop moment” that had led her to God, I drove home wondering how she found her way there.

  We’d trailed my mother dutifully to the big, noisy Presbyterian church in our town ever since we were small. Sometimes she even got my father to come. I had warm memories of the place: familiar hymns, Christmas pageants, juice and cookies at coffee hour, but as I grew older, I began to sense that those were really the things we were there for, that the place was really a big, happy social club we went to because my mother thought it would be good for us. A quick grace at dinner was about the only overlap I could see between First Presbyterian and our home.

  Somehow, Kim caught the Holy Spirit at BU. When she began talking about divinity school afterward, even my mother expressed concern about making a career in ministry at a time when fewer and fewer people were finding their way through church doors. Of course when Kim met her future husband, Robert, in her junior year, the problem of eking out a living from saving souls was solved. They married after graduation. Robert went right to work in his father’s insurance company. Judging from the size of their wedding, there was plenty of family money to bankroll Kim’s path through divinity school after that. I guess God provides.

  ***

  For Kim and Robert Fell, the Lord seemed to be providing very nicely these days, indeed. The triple-dormer Colonial Cape with wraparound porch that I drove up to was in immaculate condition. There wasn’t a blade of glass out of place in the huge front lawn, and the pillows and knickknacks gracing the porch furniture looked like they’d been arranged for a magazine spread. I caught sight of a high fence behind the house from the driveway. There was probably a pool out back too. I rang the bell and heard a series of chimes followed by the echo of running feet.