In his T-shirt, even William T. was cold.
He stepped backward, out of the barn, into the flat December light.
Did you get a load of that crow, Genghis? God almighty
But Genghis, still intent on his phantom enemy, paid him no attention. William T. shoved closed the heavy barn doors and latched them with the old board. Inside, in the gloom, the flock was no doubt still pecking away, the crow and his desperate search for freedom already forgotten. Come nightfall, the old chicken and the pigeon would lug themselves in their awkward semiflying way up to the shelves they roosted on. The orphaned gander would strut his way about, master of the barn.
The dark night hours would pass. Midnight would come and go, unheralded by any chime.
Another day begun.
Another invisible sun inching up above the clouds, behind the red spruce across the field from William T.’s bedroom window.
Another bucket to fill and spill, feed to fling.
The very thought of it wearied William T. beyond all knowing.
William T. raised his eyes to the cloud-deadened sky.
“Snow, goldsmith,” he said, and shook his fist at the heavens. Pain like lit matchheads prickled up and down his arm and he winced.
The cat was still and focused.
I’m a freedom fighter, Genghis. I fought for the freedom of that crow. Don’t ignore me.
The cat refused to budge.
What, you’re deaf now, too? Mute wasn’t enough for you?
William T. straightened back up and frowned at the sky. The face of his son appeared to him, part of the clouds, peering over the edge of the horizon. This had happened several times since he died. William J. stared at his father, an unreadable expression on the angular planes of his cheeks, his mouth set in a long sad line, the curve of his top lip an exact match of his mother’s. His eyes were wide set, a depthless hazel.
Since his son died William T. had found himself speaking to William J. telepathically, as he did with Genghis. Why? He did not know. It made no sense. But now he craned his head, afraid to move or make a loud noise in case his son’s face should disappear, and sent his thoughts skyward.
William J.? You got something to say to me?
William J.’s eyes stared back at him, then the image faded into the surrounding low mountains, waiting patiently for the snow that should already be whitening their shoulders. William T. looked down to see Genghis intent on something ahead of him, belly slung low to the ground, eyes unblinking. Had Genghis seen William J., too?
But the cat paid no attention.
What is it? A mole? Give it up. You’re too goddamned old.
The night of the day William J. died was a silent, starless night.
Eliza had been in the house, surrounded by a crowd. Word had gotten around immediately. William T. had climbed into the truck and belted Genghis in. Genghis was used to the seat belt now and didn’t blink an eye. He was even starting to like the crumbled-up saltine William T. always brought along for him, lapping at it with his raspy tongue.
At the top of Star Hill William T. had shut off the engine and listened for a moment to its ticking. Then he had climbed one-handed up the old fire tower. With his other hand he had held Genghis to his heart, wrapped in his blue blanket. He had lain on his back on the platform, Genghis a soft, warm weight on his chest.
Can you hear me?
William T. had sent the thought into the dark night sky.
Are you out there?
Genghis stirred and poked his head out of the blue blanket. Sophie had made the blanket, her first and only attempt at knitting. It was one foot wide at the top and at least a yard at the bottom.
Genghis had opened his mouth and stretched his throat up. William T. laid the backs of his fingers against the fur of his cat’s throat and felt the strain in his muscles. Are you talking to him, too? he asked Genghis telepathically. The cat strained his throat again, trying for sound.
Genghis had not ever given up. Genghis was not a quitter.
That had been a black and silent night.
Next to him the cat stiffened suddenly, his tail swelling into a fury of raised black fur. William T. saw Genghis’s throat straining, his mouth opening over and over. Eighteen years and still he tried. Still he would not settle for a life of silence. William T. bent down to his cat, intent and focused on some enemy that was invisible to William T.
Genghis, he thought, you are truly the king of cats.
Then a huge, moving shadow emerged from the red spruce lining the dirt road, tumbled across the creek, came toward them with a rolling gait full of restless power.
“Jesus H. Christ!”
William T. heard his own words hanging in the air, slower by far than the cat, a streak of black darker than the mass of bear now making his way up the dirt road in the direction of the broken-down barn. William T. stared at the bear, part of his mind slowing down, noting the rolls and shelves of muscle underneath the heavy fur, the rest of him backing instinctively toward the barred door. Behind it the flock was going wild, a frenzy of fear. The bear loped steadily up the hill.
“Genghis!”
His voice ripped its way out of his throat, driving the word down the slope in the direction of his old cat. A tuft of black leaped and hissed at the feet of the bear, who didn’t bother to stop but cuffed a heavy paw once, sending Genghis rolling into a clump of lilac and withered blackberry canes.
WILLIAM T. WOKE IN THE KITCHEN CHAIR, Genghis’s old blue blanket across his lap. It was a night without wind, absolutely still.
The house was cold. Jesus Christ, he could see his breath in his own kitchen.
The last of the wood had nearly extinguished itself and William T. did not have the strength to try to coax more flame into being. He had meant to chop his winter’s supply of wood last summer like always, but then the weeks had blurred into months and here he was, an empty porch and no strength to drive up north with his worn-out old chain saw. He had wanted William J. to go with him, help him pick out a new one. William J. had said he would.
William T. gazed out at a sky that showed no signs of dawn. Soon it would be time to feed the flock, waiting in their scolding way down in the broken-down barn.
Cold. So goddamned cold.
Did the oil furnace even work anymore?
He should have been cutting and splitting and stacking all this time. But the fall had come and gone, and now it was what should be winter but without snow was not, and there was no wood; no wood stacked in neat rows on the porch, no wood thrown into the pen at the back of the broken-down barn, waiting to be sledded to the house if the porch supply ran low. In years past William T. had spent weeks up in the Adirondacks, going from tree to tree that the rangers had spray-painted with a big orange X. William T., alone in the woods with his chain saw, his old chain saw that was worn out now and needed replacement.
In days past William T. had loved waking before dawn. He had risen quietly so as not to wake Eliza. He had pulled on his boots and jacket and gone out to meet the pink and orange streaks of sun stroking their way up above the long ragged line of red spruce across Route 274 from his house. Then he had gotten in his truck and driven on up to Remsen and waited with the engine idling outside the apartment where his son, William J., and his daughter-in-law, Sophie, lived. When William J. emerged they had driven down to Sterns together, to Crystal’s Diner, had some eggs and an English muffin.
Maybe French toast, if they were so inclined.
And then back to the house. If William J. had no carpentry work he might come on in with his father, sit at the kitchen table, have some coffee in his favorite yellow mug, tease his mother. William J. was the only person Eliza would allow to tease her. Anyone else got the look. But William J., he had a papal dispensation.
The last time he’d seen her, a month ago, Eliza had been standing in the kitchen of her sister’s house. William T. had come at her invitation, the sadness in her voice over the phone making his heart clench. He’d gott
en into the truck and driven the forty-five minutes north to Speculator. Silent sweeps of white pines rose on both sides of Route 28 and made William T. want to point them out to someone, someone who loved the woods like he did, someone who would appreciate their beauty, someone like his son. He had started humming to will away the thought of William J., a hum without melody or rhythm, a hum that would have annoyed Eliza.
William T., you’re no Gregorian monk, she’d said on more than one occasion.
“My dear, I don’t give a damn,” he had responded, standing in a doorway the way he imagined Rhett Butler standing had Rhett Butler been a northerner living in the Adirondack Mountains of New York more than a hundred years after the Civil War.
But he had. He had minded.
Was his humming unbearable to the ears of those around him, and if it was, how come he had never known?
“How’s Genghis?” Eliza had asked when he arrived and knocked on the sister’s kitchen door.
She was being polite. She had never cared much for animals. Genghis, the flock, the long-ago pigs, the someday calves in the sturdy barn—they were William T.’s domain.
“Genghis is the king of cats, Eliza.”
William T. watched Eliza as she lit the gas burners. She was heating water for tea, or trying to, but the pilot lights on the sister’s stove sputtered and would not catch. The propane must be out, William T. thought, had probably been out for days, but the sister must be thinking that somehow, magically, the tank would refill itself and she could save herself a few bucks.
Eliza kept trying, though. Her fingers were as graceful as ever, holding the match next to the pilot. But no dice. He himself would have burned his fingers immediately and cursed. This was so clear to him that he could actually feel the scorched tingle in his thumb and index finger.
“Jesus Christ,” he had sworn softly.
“Stop it,” Eliza said.
“But I was just—”
“Don’t take the name of the Lord in vain.”
William T. looked at her, his wife, ex-wife, trying in vain to light a gas stove that the gas had run out on. Have you lost your mind? he wanted to say, but resisted.
“I’ve been taking the name of the Lord in vain all our lives, Eliza.”
William T. had looked across the room at the pantry of Eliza’s sister’s house. A place for everything and everything in its place. Bags of dried peas and lentils, boxes of noodles and cans of tuna. Row upon row of jarred tomatoes, thousands of them it seemed.
“Why does she need so many tomatoes, do you think?”
“Because people are going hungry in the world,” Eliza had said.
“And a thousand jars of your sister’s canned tomatoes are going to make the hungry of the world less hungry?”
“Listen, William T. I don’t have time for this. I just have one question.”
She had laced her fingers together. She was thinner, William T. noticed. Her sweater hung off her shoulders, and her breasts made barely any impression underneath the wool. He supposed she was wearing a T-shirt underneath the sweater, maybe a turtleneck on top of the T-shirt. That was her traditional stave-off-the-cold method, and it was freezing, always freezing, in the sister’s house. Maybe she was taking a hot-water bottle to bed. William T. hoped the sister had a hot-water bottle that Eliza could borrow. If not, he himself would go out and buy her one.
“William T.?”
“That’s me.”
“Why did you take William J. up to a railroad track?”
“What the hell—what the H—is that supposed to mean?”
She looked at him, her arms curving themselves around her chest the way she did when she was cold, and she was always cold.
“What in God’s name does your sister have against heat?” William T. said.
He wanted to sweep his arm across the neat shelves of preserves and canning, crash all the sister’s jars to the floor and watch the bright colors bleed into one another on her swept linoleum.
Eliza said nothing. Her fingers emerged from her long sleeves and she rubbed her hands together. William T. closed his eyes. He could not bear to watch her do that. All their lives he had kept the house warm for Eliza so that she would not have to be cold. How she hated being cold. All the wood he had chopped, all the nights he had stoked the fire and gotten up early to make the kitchen warm by the time she woke. And now look at her.
“William J. was deaf, William T. Did you forget that?” she said. “It wasn’t safe. I just want to know why you had to take him up there to a train track, where it wasn’t safe for a deaf person to be.”
“Eliza. You could drop a jar of these tomatoes and your sister could slip on them and break her neck, and I wouldn’t accuse you of being unsafe.”
“You know what I mean. Were you really watching him the entire time?”
“Yes.”
“Did he fall on the track?”
“I don’t know,” William T. said. “I was trying to yell to him but he couldn’t hear me. I was waving my arms. Then the train came and I couldn’t see.”
“But do you think he might have lost his balance and fallen?”
“Eliza. I told you I don’t know.”
“Because Cogan’s syndrome can also cause imbalance, you know.”
She had looked at him, an un-Eliza look of helplessness in her eyes.
“It can,” she said. “Any disturbance of the inner ear can. Did you know that?”
“I read the same books you did, Eliza. I sat and listened to the same doctors you did.”
He wasn’t sure he could keep looking at her. Small sharp objects were poking his eyes from behind and he could feel them filling.
“Why weren’t you standing right next to him, so that you could catch him if he had an imbalance?” Eliza said. “Did you think of that?”
“Eliza. It was an accident. He was deaf. He never heard it coming.”
“But you just said you didn’t see. He might have fallen and gotten his foot stuck in a tie. He might have known that the train was coming and been trying to get his foot unstuck. Maybe he was trying to untie his sneaker and he was trying and trying and trying and then he just ran out of time.”
Her face was crumpled and shrunken the way it had been that day.
“Because I keep dreaming that,” she whispered. “That’s what I keep dreaming.”
Her fingers played up and down her arms. Her face was pinched and white with the cold. Eliza. Come home. I’ll keep the house warm for you. I’ll stoke the woodstove as high as it’ll go. He remembered then that he had not cut any wood. He was facing a winter with no wood.
“Eliza,” he said.
But nothing else had come out. William T. turned and walked out of the sister’s kitchen. Got into his truck and leaned his head on the steering wheel and felt his throat close up with pain. He could not get his breath. The familiar twisting in his gut came, and he ground his face into the center of the wheel.
The mountains rose steeply north of Sacandaga Lake. The horizon was gray-blue, diffuse under the sky with its weight of unshed snow. The cab was frigid, the seat cushions icy on the backs of his thighs. Ahead of him, Route 8 curved around a stand of white pines and disappeared.
Weariness prickled its way through William T.’s bones. It was not yet four in the morning and he knew that sleep would elude him for the rest of the night. He squinted at the unused thermostat to the oil furnace. Another day like this and the pipes would freeze. He would have to go out and split some wood.
But he was tired.
So tired, and the rest of the night and the day after it and the night after that stretched themselves before his vision and wearied him beyond all knowing. Night into day into night into day, world without end. God almighty.
William T. opened the kitchen door to the porch, expecting to see the leavings of last year’s wood, twigs and moldering leaves and scraps of lichen-covered bark illuminated in the porch light. But there in the corner was a heap of oak and maple. Stack
ed in a beginner’s way, the way of someone who didn’t understand that the ends of the stack needed to be placed crisscross, needed to be all of the same size, needed to rise straight into the air, bowing neither out nor in, a structure that could contain the weight of all the misshapen in-between pieces.
Who might the amateur stacker have been?
Burl?
The night was the sort of black that with neither wind nor stars nor moon took up all the available air and made it hard to breathe. William T. picked up the red canvas wood carrier that Sophie and William J. had given them one Christmas. He filled it with the misshapen chunks of wood. He crumpled up an old Observer-Dispatch and tossed it into the drum of the woodstove, then stripped some bark and loose wood off the stack he’d brought in and laid it on top of the paper. He added some of the bigger chunks and opened up the dampers and touched a match to the paper. He sat in the chair in the darkness and listened to the ticking of the stove as the paper inside caught and gave fire to the makeshift kindling.
The bigger wood hissed and spat: wet. Unseasoned.
Jesus Christ.
William T. listened to the hissing and spitting, imagined the steam released into the tight airless black of the drum, and pictured Burl trying to split wood. He would have thought it through, Burl. He would have been methodical, just as he was when he sorted the mail at the Remsen Post Office into separate piles, rubber-banding each for good measure. Burl would have chosen a stump of the right height and width. He would have put on safety glasses, bought new at Agway. He would have put on gloves. He would have heaved the maul in the air and brought it down onto the log, but would the log have split?
The log would not have split. The log would have lain there, taunting Burl with its unsplittability.
Burl would have stood there, contemplating what he might have done wrong. He would have tried again, thinking his way through the process step by step.
By the end of the day a small pile of awkward chunks would have lain by the base of the stump.
William J., no doubt this will not come as a surprise, but our favorite postman is no lumberjack.
Was It Beautiful? Page 3