“The time has come, flock,” William T. said.
He made shooing motions with his hands, the way Eliza used to do when something annoyed her.
“Go.”
The pigeon cocked her head and ruffled her feathers, then smoothed them down again. She had once had a broken wing: the Miller boys and their stones. But she could fly now; William T. had once seen her. The duck appeared to be sleeping, her wings tucked close to her sides. The eggless chicken pecked listlessly at a kernel of clean yellow corn, and the goose jerked his head back on his long neck as if to say something.
“Go forth and be free, flock. Multiply if you want to.”
The eggless hen stopped pecking and bobbed over to the pile of swept debris. William T. picked up the industrial broom that Burl must have brought down from the garage and poked it at the goose.
“Go!” he yelled.
He shoved the eggless hen in the rear end and she squawked into the air, feathers ruffling and flapping. The pigeon stared from her perch on the ground and William T. pushed at her with the broom and knocked her into the duck. The goose hissed and extended his dark neck. William T. moved into the barn behind them and used the broom to shove and scoop them out into the gray day.
“This is what it’s like!” he said. “Now you see!”
He waved the broom in the windless air, encompassing the sky with its enormity of unshed water, the dirt road where the red spruce used to stand tall, the Adirondacks to the north, waiting for the comfort of snow, the way its whiteness obliterated the memory of a summer gone to flame. Then he turned around and closed and latched the front double doors.
“All this time you could have been sitting out in the pen I made you, out in the sun and the fresh air,” William T. said. “You could have been admiring the red spruce. Your chance came and went and you never even knew it.”
The flock huddled in disarray just outside the entrance to the barn, their tiny eyes darting about. William T. saw their fear, and his heart clenched.
He headed down the dirt road.
Peter had come with his grinders and his chippers and pulverized each stump along the way. The dirt road was not a road anymore. It was more of an indentation in the middle of scarred hillside, faint tracks on either side of a hump. In the absence of trees the grayish light hung in the air. The lilac bush was half-dead, bent and twisted in some mistake of a bulldozer’s blade.
The stump that had marked the fork in the dirt road was gone, too, wood chips flung every which way, no sign of where it had once been.
William T.’s body turned by instinct to where the boulder used to be, the sitting rock, but it also was no longer there. Where had it gone? Who would want it? In William T.’s mind a bulldozer went grinding along the trail, pushing a boulder before it, the big rock tumbling and skipping as though it were nothing but a pebble. He looked back from where he had come and saw his house, closer than he had ever imagined it would be, and the broken-down barn, too, little lame cousin.
William T. looked up to see dark specks circling, swooping without sound. He had not thought of that. He had not thought of the nests that had been built each spring in the trees. He closed his eyes quickly so as to block out the image, but there was no blocking it out: cradles of twig and leaf and milkweed fluff, the occasional string of yarn, fragments of broken shell from last spring, come tumbling from the sky.
Above him silent birds circled and turned.
William T. turned left at what used to be the fork before the woods but was now all naked land and went on among the hillocks of frozen swamp, the dead leaves that in spring would become skunk grass and jack-in-the-pulpit and bloodroot, over the broken-down wooden bridge, and came to the far meadow.
Peter had followed his directions.
The biggest spruce stood tall and lonely, dwarfed by the surrounding emptiness. Stumps were everywhere here in the meadow. No need to grind them down. This wasn’t a Utica subdivision. No houses were going in here. No winding streets named Spruce Drive and Spruce Trail and Spruce Circle and Spruce Crescent and Spruce this and Spruce that would be laid and paved. Trees had been taken out, but nothing would take their place.
William T. walked over to his big spruce and crouched down. He imagined its roots, creeping beneath the surface of the earth day after day, year after year for fifty years. The crown of the spruce spread motionless above him. How many of the finest soundboards could be made from a single, perfect fifty-year-old Adirondack red spruce?
Eliza was sitting on the front steps when he made his way back up the driveway. She was buried in the sister’s shapeless coat. Was it or was it not puce? William T. got out of the truck and stood in front of his wife, whose entire body was drawn up into the coat.
“Is that color puce?” William T. said. “Because if it isn’t, it should be.”
“You’re not answering your phone,” she said. “I unplugged it.”
She looked up at the sky beyond him, the silent gray sky. With her chin lifted and her eyes far away she looked like a girl again, like the girl William T. had gone to a party hoping to see. He had been seventeen. He had drunk a beer or two and he was not used to it. She sat across the room choosing records with her friends. With a beer or two, he had thought, he might be able to make his way across the room. No such luck. She wouldn’t look at him. Then the party was over and it was one o’clock on a summer night and his truck had a flat tire on Star Hill. William T. had abandoned ship and set out on foot for home, a lone wayfarer in the dark Sterns Valley.
Stars had crawled in slow circles above his head in the night sky. The Buchholzes’ barn had been a point of light miles ahead, appearing and disappearing through the pines that lined the road.
William T. had veered into the weeds that lined the ditch to avoid the headlights of an oncoming car. He had crouched behind the tall bobbing stems of Queen Anne’s lace and closed his eyes. With his eyes closed he couldn’t tell how close the car was. Its journey down Star Hill had seemed endless. There was a final approaching hum and the car swished past, leaving the lacy tops of the moonlit flowers to weave and duck in the wind of its passing. A faint sound had ridden the night air back to him, a girl’s voice he knew, her voice: William T.? Is that you? Something in her voice, something that hung in the air.
William T. looked at his wife—ex—and saw that she seemed to have grown smaller.
“Are you eating?” he said. “Is that sister of yours feeding you?”
Bowls of oatmeal, no cream, no sugar, no milk even. That was all he could imagine for Eliza. Day in and day out, she sat in a silent house up in Speculator. William T. pictured the sister’s oilcloth-covered square kitchen table. Coffee without caffeine, the kind that came in light brown powdered lumps out of a small glass jar and was spooned into hot water. Skim milk.
Did they ever talk? The sister had never liked him. He laughs too much, William T. had once overheard her say after dinner the night before they got married, he brays like a jackass.
Eliza had said nothing. He talks too loudly and he’s always so damn happy, the sister had gone on. My God, she’s marrying a human exclamation mark.
“You look thin,” William T. said. “Scrawny even. Eat more.”
“I just have one question,” Eliza said. Her foot in a shapeless old moon boot pushed itself into the concrete step. She looked up at him again.
“Did you tell me the truth?” she said.
“About what?”
“About that day.”
She looked straight up at him. He said nothing. She watched him. He had to sit down. She moved over an inch or two, just enough to give him room.
“Did you?” she said. “I want to know.”
She kept looking at him. Her eyes were brighter and brighter. She drew herself up into her coat.
“Just tell me,” she said. “Did he mean to die?”
“Eliza.”
“Because you were there,” she said. “You were the one who was there. I wasn’t there. I wasn’t w
ith him.”
He watched her, her bright unblinking eyes, her arms crossed across her thin chest.
“I just want to know.”
“Do you?”
She stared at him and nodded, then her eyes brimmed and overflowed and she shook her head. No. No. She pulled her arms out of the sleeves of the too-big coat and brought them up to her neck, her hands emerging from the collar to cover her ears. He started to speak, but she shook her head again: No. Her hands were jammed tight against her ears. He wanted to pull them off, but he was too tired.
The flock refused to be free.
They huddled at the latched barn door entrance. Fear shimmered out from their fluffed feathers and their nervous darting beaks. They did not raise their stricken eyes to the cloud-massed sky. Had the snow that should have fallen on Sterns started to fall right then and there, they would have ducked their heads against its white coldness. They would have denied its very existence, this substance foreign to those who willingly spent their lives penned inside.
William T. gazed at them.
“Did I fail you?” he said. “Was it something I did that turned you into a flock of cowards?”
He unlatched the door, and they skittered inside to their familiar darkness. He gave them their food, their water, spilling it into their trough in the heedless way they were used to. William T. put the buckets down in order to latch the barn door shut again. He turned to see Sophie standing before him. The dormant field spread out behind her like the background of a painting: browns and grays and what used to be green but was now too tired and old to be any color at all.
“Look at that, Sophie,” William T. said. “It’s the kind of scene they have hanging down at Munson-Williams-Proctor Museum of Art. Can’t you imagine it? Winter in the Mohawk Valley.”
Sophie gazed before her. What did she see? Did she see anything?
“Except that there’s no goddamn snow.”
“I’m working on my essays, William T.,” Sophie said.
“Essays? Plural? Jesus, Sophie. You only have to do one.”
“I figure I better do them all. For practice.”
“How the hell are you going to do them all? Essay number one, for example: Discuss the significance of education using examples from travel, clubs, and organizations. You don’t belong to any clubs and organizations. You’ve never traveled.”
“Sure I have.”
“Where? Where have you traveled?”
She spread her arms out to the north, where the mountains rose up indistinguishable from the clouds. What, Star Hill? No. No way did that qualify. Jesus Christ. He, William T., could do a better job on essay number one than Sophie could. As far as he knew, she had never even been out of Sterns County.
“Sterns County does not qualify as travel,” he said. “You live in Sterns County. California, now that would qualify as travel.”
He pointed to the western sky, where if it were a normal season the sun would be setting below the distant hills. Sophie’s eyes followed his finger to the pine-rimmed foothills beyond. William T. pressed his gloved hands against his eyes and conjured a woman in an admissions office, her clipped nails and extraordinarily sharp pencils. He opened them to see Sophie watching him, a look on her face.
William T. waited.
“Did William J. love me?” she said.
William T. felt his stomach lurch. Sophie stood there in her sneakers that so recently had been white but now were not.
“Did William J. love you?”
She nodded. She waited. William T. sent the question out to his son telepathically. William J., did you love your wife? Behind the latched door of the barn William T. could hear the flock clucking and scratching. If he opened the barn door right this minute, they would be gathered around the feed and water. All day long the back of the barn was open, open air beckoning the flock to the outdoor pen he had made for them, and all day long they huddled in clumps near the gloomy entrance. He had booted them out by force, and they had passed a day and a night in terror, in fear for their lives, afraid to venture one step away from the familiarity of their broken-down barn. Had they no curiosity at all?
“Hear them scratching around in there, Sophie?” William T. said. “Fowl are not the brightest candles on the cake. Keep that in mind for future reference. Just in case you ever have it in mind to start a little flock of your own.”
She stood in the fading light, watching him.
William J., did you love your wife?
Should he say more? He remembered that day on the railroad track, his wild run from tie to tie to tie, the sound of the train hanging in the air around him.
William T.’s eyes began to ache again, and again he pressed them shut with his palms. When he opened them, the outlines of Sophie’s slender body were softening in the growing dusk.
Behind the latched barn door the flock was still scratching away. Tomorrow would come and they would again ignore the air and light waiting for them at the other end. William J. was in a world unknown to William T., and somewhere else beyond both William T. and his son, Sophie was trying to place pattern to her life.
“Yes, Sophie. He loved you.”
“Thank you,” she said.
Thank you? Is that what you say when someone tells you your husband loved you? Sophie appeared in his mind the way she sometimes did these days, a girl from ten years ago. Brushing her hair out of her eyes. Laughing the way she laughed, way back then.
“Because sometimes I wonder,” she said. “I never did, ever before, but once in a while now the thought comes to me.”
They stood together in silence for a minute, the flock clucking softly behind the closed barn door, and then Sophie turned and started down the driveway to Route 274 and Sterns Valley Road.
BARS CROSSED AGAINST EACH OTHER ON THE abandoned fire tower bolted into the bare rock on the top of Star Hill, narrowing as they climbed into the sky. Above William T. were thousands of feet of stacked whiteness. He reached into his pocket and pulled out William J.’s first wind chime, made of a knife and spoon, and tied it to the bottom of the steel support beam. It hung motionless in the still air.
A narrow ladder snaked its way from bottom to top. William T. placed one foot on the first rung and the other foot on the second rung and began to climb. His knees ached in the cold.
Fifty years, the same age as his red spruce had been.
If he turned around, was there a view to be had yet, of the Adirondacks unblanketed by snow, naked in the middle of an aborted winter? Were the distant lakes visible, frozen into gray patterns, the islands in their midsts ringed by pines?
In days past William T. had often climbed Star Hill to see the sunset with his wife and son. In days past he had had a routine, one he had loved, one into which his days fit like dominoes, carved and precise.
How did Eliza move through the days now? How did she manage to rise in the morning and make it through all the minutes until bedtime, all the dark night hours when she dreamed about a boy on a train track trying and trying and trying to untie his shoelace? Thin and quiet, she eluded the questions that haunted her in a way that was so unlike the Eliza of his youth that William T. caught his breath and ground his forehead into a frozen steel bar.
William T. reached for the next rung and hauled himself up. Onward and upward. World without end. Around him pines rose as he rose, but he was now approaching the very tops of the tallest.
William T. climbed on.
His leather-gloved hands clung to the rungs above him and his foot searched for purchase on the slippery frozen rung beneath him. Eliza sat miles away, hunched into the sister’s coat on the front steps of their house. Good-bye to that girl.
William T. was flush with the tallest of the pines now. One more rung and he would be rising above it.
One more rung.
Through the thick leather of his gloves the cold of the steel rungs seeped in.
William T. stopped and pressed his face against the vertical ladder. He wanted to He
down and feel the weight of his own body, pressed against the ground. The cold would creep through the layers of his clothing. It would draw the warmth of his blood and flesh out of him until gradually, gradually, William T.’s body would have given up its heat to the earth.
The air was as still as the cold, each equaling the other. There had been no wind for a thousand years. William T. pressed his forehead against the frozen steel bar and remembered how, at the beginning of his long suffering, he had sat up all night long and watched the stillness of the air outside pass from black into a shadeless gray. The phone next to him had rung and rung, and the answering machine had clicked on each time. Greetings! You have reached the home of Genghis Khan, king of cats! The voice had been William T.’s, disconnected from his corporeal self and drifting without aim through the rooms of his home.
William J. walked backward down a train track on a bright spring day.
William T. closed his eyes and stretched down from the full length of his arms. He leaned his back out, away from the ladder, and hung unmoving. The muscles in his arms pulled unbearably. How had the weight of his body become such a burden? William T. had once been a boy. He had swung out on a long rope that belled over the dark water of Deeper Lake, himself the clapper. His foot had hovered over the thin ice of a November morning mud puddle. He had flung himself from tie to tie on a railroad track, trying and trying to reach his son.
He opened his eyes. Ahead of him were the unsnowable clouds, pressing down on him in their silence.
William T. pulled himself up another rung, and then he was bent under the weight of something on his head. The ladder curved to the side, and there was the top of the fire tower. William T. stepped around to the side and climbed the last few stairs to the platform.
He pulled his cap tight over his ears and reknotted his scarf about his throat. Every muscle in his arms was sore. Cold seeped through the thin plywood floor of the tower, through the rubber outer of his boots, through the first felt liner, and the second, through his outer wool socks, through his thin silk inner socks, into his flesh.
Was It Beautiful? Page 14