Autumn Imago

by Bryan Wiggins

  “Are you sure you got that lead right, Paul?” Kim asked.

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “I mean you have a pretty selective memory of Dad. I remember the verse you quoted, but you forgot the next one. Every time Dad quoted that verse, he added the one that follows: ‘Do everything in love.’ It puts all that talk about courage and strength in a context I’m not sure you get.”

  “I didn’t forget it. Dad’s strength was how he expressed his love. I wonder if any of you know just how deep it went.”

  Mara got up from her chair. “Will you wait here for a moment?” she asked me, then turned to everyone else. “All of you, please, wait here.” She went to the library door, opened it, and disappeared outside.

  The interruption threw me. I walked across the room and stepped out onto the back porch. The rain had finally stopped, but heavy clouds still hung low over the pond. I watched the wind do its work, pulling at the lacy gray curtains that shifted to hide and reveal the deep pockets of blue-green forest surrounding the water. When I heard the front door of the library open a few minutes later, I went back inside. Mara was holding her purse in front of her. She sat down by the fire and rummaged through it for her wallet. She slipped her fingers inside and withdrew a plastic sheet. When she held it out to me, I saw that it was a laminated clipping from our hometown newspaper.

  “What’s this?” I asked.

  “Just read it.”

  I carried the clipping over to the gas light on the wall to get a better look.

  August 2, 1988, Lancaster, PA

  The driver of a 1985 Toyota Corolla was killed when his vehicle hit a concrete bridge abutment on Route 1 around 2 a.m., last Friday. Police were called to the scene after a passing motorist failed in his attempt to free the single occupant of the vehicle. Lancaster County Fire Department workers were called to use jaws of life equipment to free Norman Strand, of Frazer, PA, who was pronounced DOA at Lancaster General Hospital.

  I lowered the clipping and turned to face my mother. “Why on earth would you save this?” I asked her.

  “Turn it over,” she said. When I did, I saw that the article continued. I read the end of the report aloud.

  Weather conditions at the time of the accident were clear and dry. Investigators found no skid marks at the scene. An autopsy is pending.

  “So?” I asked. “Are you going to tell me that the autopsy came back and showed he was drunk or something? I won’t believe it.”

  “Just the opposite,” said Mara. “He was stone cold sober when he died. It’s the lines before the mention of your father’s autopsy that tell the story of his death. The weather was dry. The road was clear of skid marks. It was no accident.”

  45

  Cold Front

  Kim never liked to fish. But one early summer morning at Baxter when I was five or six, she pestered my father to take her with us when we set out to try our luck at one of Kidney’s outlying ponds. I don’t recall why Mara stayed back at camp that day. What I do remember is standing in my waders in the water off the bank of Rocky Pond with my dad as he worked on the tangled mess I’d made of my line. I can still see the look of concentration on his face as he pulled at the nest of loops, his dark brown eyes flashing with the golden ripples reflecting from the water he worked over. Finally, a length of straight line fell free from his hands and his broad, bearded face split into a wide grin. But in the next moment it faded. “Kim,” he said softly. I turned to follow his gaze to where my sister had been sitting on the bank. She was gone.

  The image that burns brightest from that day is the next expression that played across my father’s face. It was one I’d never seen before. As he scanned the water around us and shouted my sister’s name across the pond, I saw, for the first time in my short life, that my father was afraid.

  He hustled me to the bank and knelt down to look me in the eye, instructing me sternly not to move while he went to search the woods. I watched him disappear between the trees, wondering when he might return, knowing only that his fear had kindled my own. I sat on the bank alone and waited, bathed in the brilliant August sunshine, frozen in place. And even when he emerged from the woods, hugging my weeping sister tightly to his chest as he quietly consoled her, the knowledge that he’d found her to right our small world again couldn’t erase the terrible new realization that there were limits to my father’s power.

  ***

  The night air had gone from crisp to cold. I walked with my hands jammed into the pockets of my fleece jacket, my wool cap pulled low on my head, so lost in thought that I almost walked right past the turn off the tote road that would take me back to Kidney Pond. I flipped through my memories of the year after Jordan’s death, searching for the word or deed that would prove my father would never have intentionally driven into that wall. But the more I thought about those days, the more I heard Tommy’s voice echo in my head:

  Do you remember how many trips we took after she drowned? Skiing in the Poconos, Christmas at Disney World, all those long rides to the Jersey shore, the visits to Philly almost every weekend? It was exhausting.

  Tommy was right; the year had been a blur. Part of that was self-preservation—my mind shrouding everything to protect me from the sting of Jordan’s death. But the picture of that time was also fuzzy because every member of my family was moving so quickly to escape the pain. I stopped in my tracks on the road.

  No. Not everyone. Not Mara.

  I started walking more slowly, remembering. My mother stayed home more often as the year wore on. Did she come with us to Disney World for Christmas? Now I wasn’t sure. As Dad grew louder and faster, adding more dates and destinations to the family schedule, my mother seemed to disappear, growing more silent, more distant. The only thing I remembered of her from those days was the sight of her closed bedroom door. And the sound of my father’s whispers behind it, so at odds with the voice he used to cheer on the rest of us.

  By the time I reached the path to Loon’s Nest, I knew I’d never find the proof I was looking for. But my mind kept working. Something in the newspaper story of my father’s death had been bugging me, a detail of the accident that didn’t fit. It was the car he’d been driving.

  If my dad was going anywhere, it was in his ’85 Dodge Ramcharger. The thing was a beast, capable of swallowing all six of us along with every scrap of supplies we needed for ten days in the woods. He loved the thing, and even if he was only running up to the store for a quart of milk, he’d take the Charger. The Corolla was my mother’s car. I couldn’t call up a single memory of my father driving—or even riding—in the Toyota. But if he was looking to end things quickly at ninety miles per hour, it would have done the job very nicely indeed.

  ***

  I saw the light on in Loon’s Nest and found Cassie inside. She had a fire going and was sitting next to it, working her knife over a block of wood that was shaping up to be one of her larger carved creatures, maybe a deer. There were two Mason jars next to the open bottle of red wine on the card table beside her. One was full, the other nearly gone. She didn’t look up when I came in, but she shifted the block in her hands and changed to longer, harder strokes. “Hello, Houdini,” she finally said.

  I went over, picked up the glass of wine, drained it, sat down, and poured another before I grunted my reply. “Huh?” She placed the knife and wood on the table and turned in her chair to face me. “Paul, if you keep disappearing, I’m going to think you want me to do the same.”

  “Sorry,” I managed, taking another slug of wine. It was good stuff, the last of three bottles Cassie had stocked the cabin with. It was meant to be savored, but I chugged half the glass. I could feel her studying my face as I stared at the small shower of wood shavings under her chair, watching the tiny shadows cast by each chip and curlicue vibrate from the light of the flickering fire.

  “I woke up this morning and you were gone. I walked by the library and saw you having breakfast with your family.”

  “I kno
w, I didn’t mean to. I just—”

  “Are you ashamed of me, Paul?”

  “Of course not.”

  “Then why didn’t you invite me to join you?”

  “After you threw Robert out of the park, I didn’t think Kim would be comfortable having you there.”

  She placed the carving down carefully on the table before she replied.

  “Bullshit.”

  I finished the wine and poured myself a third glass. When I moved the bottle over to fill Cassie’s glass, she put her hand over the top. “Be honest,” she said. “You’re the one who would have been uncomfortable. I’m starting to feel like your dirty little secret.”

  “Robert took care of that,” I said. I took another belt of wine and picked up her carving, turning it over in my hands.

  “At least he had the guts to tell your family about us.”

  “Yeah, he did me a big favor there.” She was quiet for so long I finally looked up. Cassie was wearing a faded flannel shirt, and her ranger cap was tipped back from her chestnut bangs. One of her tiny beaded earrings flashed from green to gold. She looked like the world’s most beautiful tomboy to me, and in that instant I wanted nothing more than to fold her into my arms.

  “You are ashamed of me,” she said. I watched my hand jump up off the table and come down with a crack, the sound so loud we both flinched. I took my hand away from the Mason jar and watched a thin stream of wine snake from its base to the edge of the table.

  “I’m not ashamed,” I said softly. “It’s just that all of this—my family, us—is happening at . . . You just have no idea what’s going on.”

  She moved her chair closer to me and reached over to take my hands in hers. “I don’t,” she said. “So why don’t you tell me?”

  I wish I could have. I wanted nothing more than to unspool the tornado of memories and feelings that had been winding up inside me and invite her in to help make sense of that storm. Cassie waited, but she didn’t press for more. Finally, she took the block from my hands and started carving again.

  I went out to the pond and splashed some of its icy water on my face, came back, and got into bed. She climbed in a few minutes later, taking my hand as the two of us lay side by side on our backs in the dark. After a while, I heard her breathing slow and settle. It took a lot longer for sleep to claim me. The quiet of the night felt cold and empty. Just before I drifted off I realized why. The loons were gone.

  46

  Lupus

  My foot came off the gas, but I kept right on rolling. I hit the brakes, and the car accelerated. I pumped the brake pedal, and the engine whined louder. Soon I was flying across the boulder-studded plateau. I looked up to see Katahdin, then felt a rush of relief when I realized how much open ground lay between it and me. But in the next instant, the world under the car fell away, and I flew off the edge, weightless in free fall. The car tipped forward, its nose centered over a kidney-shaped sapphire shining amid the sea of green below. The pond grew larger, the green retreating from the cold blue target that rushed faster and faster to fill my windshield.

  I woke up holding my breath. I let it out slowly as I waited for my racing heart to settle down. When it finally did, I crept out of my bunk. I didn’t want to wake Cassie, but if I had known what that day held in store for me, I would never have gotten out of bed.

  I dressed in the dim light, putting on my uniform before stuffing a couple of water bottles, some crackers, and gorp into my backpack and slipping outside. I only had a weekend left with my family, but that felt like two days too long. I needed to get away, if only for a few hours, and I craved the physical exertion and clear sense of accomplishment that my job as a ranger could grant me.

  I walked down to check out the morning light on the pond before I left. The sun had barely come up, yet a canoe sat on the landing with its stern in the water. After I’d dragged it and flipped it onto the rack, I switched on my headlamp to check the ground. Same tiny circles. Same inconsiderate dolt.

  I shook my head, detoured to the shed behind Tyler’s cabin, and hit the trail.

  The chainsaw poking out of the top of my pack was a heavy son of a bitch. I could have saved myself some time and energy by driving halfway to Lost Pond. But time and energy were exactly what I wanted to burn, so I cinched my waist belt tighter, pulled the twin straps over my shoulders to lift my load, and stepped onto the trail.

  The day was clear, but the cold had the bite of winter in it. I walked fast to warm up, settling into a steady rhythm by the time I passed the spur to Colt’s Point. My mind turned to Aida, and I thought back to the day she’d first greeted me on her parents’ porch, electric with anger. Though I knew that fury still burned inside her, I now saw it as a measure of Aida’s passion for life. She wanted things her way, but the things she wanted were worth fighting for, whether intimacy from the boy she loved or fidelity from the father she depended upon. And when her family’s world began to crumble, I saw the other side of Aida’s anger: an iron sense of loyalty forged in the same heat that fueled the rest of her fiery spirit.

  I followed the trail through the flat forest separating Kidney and Daicey, listening to the quiet chorus of the birds who wintered over in these woods. The floaty trill of thrush and the high, sweet whistle of warblers were gone, replaced by the rusty squeak of jays and the ever-present two-toned tweet of chickadees. I marched on to their songs, punctuated by the occasional woody knock of a woodpecker’s drill. Underneath it my feet kept time, softly crunching the dead maple, beech, and birch leaves that lined my way.

  After a while I came to the junction of the Appalachian Trail just west of Daicey Pond. I turned south on the path that would lead me to the Lost Pond Trail. I thought of my venture with Aaron as I left the AT behind, reflecting on the contrast between him and his stormy sister. I’d misread Aaron when I first met him too, believing his silence stemmed solely from shyness. But I’d come to know that Aaron’s tongue was stilled less by insecurity than by ideas. And for all his love for the science that aligned the particles and planets in his world, Aaron’s keenest interest was in how those forces shaped the human hearts within it.

  In my niece and nephew, I could feel the same blood that ran through the veins of my parents, my siblings, myself. It was so much easier to celebrate that common ancestry with children free from the currents that pulled at the rest of my family’s past. My thoughts turned to Kim, Tommy, and Mara. I picked up the pace till my pulse pounded in my ears. And when the question of my father’s fate threatened to tease my sanity, I ran.

  I’d been jogging down the Lost Pond Trail for a few minutes when my foot found a rock, and I stumbled forward, spinning my arms and almost falling face down under the shifting weight of the saw on my back. I stopped and bent over, panting, my hands on my knees, gulping in the chilly morning air. When I caught my breath and straightened up, I saw him.

  He was sitting on a boulder framed by a stand of birches farther down the trail. From that distance, he looked as thin and gray as the skeletal beech trees that framed my view. By the time I made my way to him, the beat-up pack at his side with the socks hanging off its back confirmed his purpose in these woods: He had to be an Appalachian Trail through-hiker, about to complete the last half dozen of the 2,200 miles that stretched between Georgia and Maine.

  He looked up to give me the slightest nod as I approached. Even his light blue eyes appeared to be fading to gray, framed in a face that looked like it was etched with a line for every step he’d taken in his trek. His long gray hair was pulled back in a ponytail, and by the length of his snow-white beard, I guessed he must have had it before he began his hike.

  “Good morning,” I offered, as I watched him work. He held one boot in his hand and was stuffing strips of cardboard inside. When he flipped it over to inspect it, I could see the hole worn through its sole.

  “Morning,” he finally responded, keeping his eyes on his work until he finished the job. Only after he put his foot in his boot and began to lace it
up did he look at me again.

  “You know you’re off the AT, right?” I asked him.

  “I do,” he answered, but gave me nothing more. That was all right. I knew about that silence. It came from the woods he’d walked in, and somewhere during my own hike from Springer Mountain to Katahdin, I’d adopted it as well. Words are, after all, human things. There is another kind of communication that happens between a man and the mountains he moves between—a slower, deeper language shared between his spirit and the one that lives in every rock, tree, and other wild thing with whom he shares the trail.

  I was about to leave him in peace when he continued. “Third time I’ve been on this walk,” he said, “so I’m taking a side trail like this one now and then.”

  “You’ve hiked the AT three times?”

  “Done the Pacific Crest too. Continental Divide’s next.”

  “Jesus” was all I could manage in reply. I did some quick math in my head. This old man had put in over nine thousand miles on the trail and was planning to do another three thousand next.

  “I’m Paul,” I said, putting out my hand. “I did the AT once. I thought that was an accomplishment.”

  “Lupus,” said the man, giving my hand a soft shake. I knew that had to be a trail name, but given his resume, the lone wolf moniker was probably a truer badge of his identity than his Christian name. “Good to meet another trail brother,” he continued, and I saw the edges of his beard rise slightly in the shadow of a smile.

  “Well, Lupus, I’m certainly not in your class. Then again, I doubt many are.” He stood up and grabbed his pack, slipping into it with a single flick of his shoulders. It was the kind of swift, efficient movement born from miles on the trail, where a body learns to refine every task to the minimum effort needed. I couldn’t help but admire that kind of hard-earned grace. He grabbed the staff at his feet—no steel-tipped carbon fiber pole, just a long, barkless limb bleached as gray as the man who held it. He tipped his head and took a step.