One of them belonged to the young carpenter, moved to North Sterns from southern Pennsylvania. He had built himself a one-room log cabin. William T. gazed at the clearing in the wood. Smoke rose from the chimney. The windows were darkened depressions in the logs, unreflecting of a sun that wasn’t there, and there was no sound. William T. stood by a sugar maple and waited.
The door opened and Sophie emerged. She was carrying a manila envelope.
“Morning, Sophie J.”
She froze in the cold still air. Silence. The clearing held itself still, stiller than the air but for the puff of smoke wisping into the sky and losing itself in the grayness. Together they stood in the clearing, a few yards apart. William T. gazed at her, Sophie, the girl he thought of as his daughter. Her sneakers had turned muddy and grayish, the elastic along the sides beginning to separate from the canvas material. She stubbed one toe repeatedly against a rock and gazed back at him.
A memory of voices rose around William T., displaced from somewhere and falling about his ears. Ally ally all’s in free. A cornfield in late August appeared to him, the sound of leaves brushing on skin, feet sinking into soft earth. William J. and Sophie, calling to each other, voices rising like birds in the twilight air. The sun slipped below the crowns of the red spruce and darkness fell upon the summer sky, purple like a days-old bruise. She came running out of the cornfield, her hair falling around her shoulders, William J. a minute behind her. Laughing. About them the grass had been greener than William T. could imagine now, and above them the sky had darkened moment by moment, easing into a night that was differentiated from day by color and depth and the appearance, one by one, of a thousand stars.
“Sophie. Sophie.”
She lifted her eyes to his. Her cheeks were flushed and her hair tumbled about her face.
“Remember how you used to play hide-and-seek with William J. in the cornfield?”
“I remember.”
The toe of her grayish sneaker was brown now, from her repeated stubbing at the earth-encrusted rock.
“Would you have them back if you could, those days?”
“I can’t.”
“If you could. If.”
She took a few steps toward him and hunched her back into the parka. There was no movement from the cabin. William T. took a wind chime from his pocket, an old tinny one, and draped the string over one of the bare branches of the young sugar maple. In the still chill air it made no sound: lifeless strips of abandoned tin cans.
“True or false: A wind chime hanging from a tree on a windless winter day is still a wind chime.”
“True,” Sophie said.
“False,” William T. said. “The sound of the chime is what defines a wind chime. It’s not the wind chime’s fault that there’s no wind, but still, no wind equals no chime equals no purpose in life for the would-be wind chime.”
“Where do you come up with these things?”
“Do you like them?”
“They sound good, the things you come up with,” Sophie said. “But do they make any sense? When you think about it, I mean.”
She reached out and flicked her finger at the dangling wind chime, which gave forth a rustling whisper of sound.
“There,” she said. “Does that count?”
“No,” William T. said.
“Why not?”
“It’s a wind chime. It needs the wind, Sophie.”
“Not everything is true or false, William T.,” Sophie said.
“William J. wouldn’t agree with you.”
“True or false was his game, not mine. There’s no reason for you to keep on playing it.”
There was a movement at the window of the cabin, the curtain pulled aside for an instant, then dropped back down again. William T. was conscious of his voice in the clearing, the smoky puffs of his and Sophie’s breath hanging and dissolving in the air. Where did his breath go when it disappeared like that? Did it become one with the surrounding air? How was it that he didn’t know something that was surely so elementary?
“Your boyfriend’s peeking,” William T. said.
Sophie glanced at the window and back again at William T. She stood her ground. She didn’t move from where her sneakers were planted in the brittle stalky grass of the clearing. The curtain at the window moved again, a barely perceptible flick and drop. Sophie’s sneakers looked smaller than they usually did. Was she shrinking?
“You should be wearing boots,” William T. said. “Those sneakers are not going to keep you warm.”
He nodded at the manila envelope in her hand.
“What’s that?”
“My application.”
“Filled out?”
She nodded. “Aren’t you going to ask me what I wrote about?”
He shook his head.
“I’ve been saving something for Genghis,” she said. “I keep forgetting to bring it by.”
She reached into the pocket of her jeans and extracted a Slim Jim.
“A North Sterns cat who’s going to eat like a human should be able to enjoy a Slim Jim once in a while, don’t you think? Wayne thought it was a good idea, too.”
She drew her shoulders up in a Wayne Brill-like manner.
“‘Say hi to William T. for me then, Sophie,’” she mimicked.
William T. turned around and looked back down Sterns Valley Road. Sophie came around to face him, a look on her face.
“Hey,” she said. “William T.?”
She wiped his tears away with her mittened thumbs. He looked down the road where his red spruce had been. Fifty years old, time to come down. Had one of them been turned into the finest piano soundboard known to man?
“Sophie.”
“What?”
“Genghis is dead.”
She stared at him.
“It was a bear,” he said. “It came out of nowhere. It was about four hundred pounds bigger than Genghis.”
Her head, back and forth.
“Jesus Christ,” she whispered.
“You’re starting to sound like me,” he said. “Jesus Christ. Christ almighty. Godammit, etc.”
She pressed her mittened hands over her eyes.
“Poor little Genghis,” Sophie said. “Poor Genghis.”
“I buried him beneath the big spruce,” William T. said.
William T. had felt the empty feed and water buckets drop from his hands. The bear had slowed and then stopped fifteen yards away, gazing at William T. with his small black eyes. William T.’s eyes had been blinded with sudden tears. The bear tilted his head and watched William T. as he took a step down the hill in the direction of his unmoving cat. Behind the barred door the flock had honked and screeched and beat their wings.
William T. had chipped away with the pitchfork for a while. Little clods of frozen dirt broke away from the surface of the earth and went flying. He forged onward with the pitchfork but got no deeper than an inch or so. Chip.
Chip.
Chip.
Boiling water?
Steam had billowed up from the broken surface of the frozen earth. By rights the ground should not have been visible, back in December. That black soil should have been white, crystallized water blanketing the earth. William T. had poured another stream onto the steaming earth, ice crystals already forming in the pockets of dripping mud. He took up the pitchfork again and dug. The earth gave. Down he forced the fork, pushing and prodding with his booted foot until again he struck the frozen rim. A few inches at a time he had forced the earth upward, away from where it wanted to be. He had to chop through a few of the spruce roots and with each hack he asked his tree to forgive him.
When he had a two-foot depth overturned, William T. had lain Genghis in the hole. The blackness of his fur had been hardly visible against the dark, half-muddy, half-frozen earth.
William T. had kicked the dirt back into the hole.
Sophie reached over to him, took his hands between her own, kneaded them as if she were a kindergartner kneading clay. He pictu
red her as a child, with a single maple-syrup braid.
William T. reached into his breast pocket, behind the Slim Jim, and pulled out the folded slip of paper that his nephew, Peter, had given him.
“You’re going to do something with your life, Sophie,” he said.
Her mittened hands were back in the parka’s deep pockets, and he pulled one of them out and tucked the paper into it.
“What’s this?”
“Tuition.”
She opened the check, looked at it, and took a deep breath. “Where did this come from, William T.?”
He shook his head. She followed his gaze down the dirt road and he watched as her face changed, began to crumple.
“Your trees,” she whispered.
He shook his head again. “It was time, Sophie.”
She stamped her foot in its dirty white sneaker and screamed up at the dirty white sky. “Goddammit it, William J.! Goddammit! Do you see what you’re doing?”
“Sophie.”
“He should have known what this would do to you!”
“What what would do to me?”
“Dying! He should have thought of that before he did it!”
Then she was on her knees in the frozen dirt, rocking back and forth, her head clutched between her hands. “You sold your trees,” she whispered. “You sold your trees.”
William T. knelt next to her, his knees aching from the effort and the cold, and wrapped his arms around her. Sophie, his baby. His girl.
“I didn’t know you knew,” he said.
“Knew what? That he meant to die? That he killed himself?”
He nodded.
He held his arms around her as tightly as he could and waited, waited until her shoulders stopped shaking. Waited until she was quiet.
“I would’ve learned sign language,” he said. “Would you?”
She lifted her head and stared up at him, her eyes red and sore.
“Of course I would have,” she said. “Of course. But people don’t kill themselves because they go deaf, William T.”
“I know. But still. I would’ve learned sign language. Burl, too, no doubt.”
“We all would have, William T. There’s not anything that any one of us wouldn’t have done.”
BURL AND WILLIAM T. STOOD AT THE TOP OF Panther Mountain. The air was cold and motionless, scented by frozen fallen leaves. Under the gray sky the lakes visible from the peak took on a slate sheen. This was Burl’s place, his favorite mountain. They used to climb Panther together at night when they were in high school, flashlight beams making crazy arcs in the darkness. When they came down they would sit by the edge of the lake, the distant dip and splash of the loons and the call of the whippoorwill reminders that they were the only human beings there.
At the very top, past the false summit, William T. picked his way out onto the ledge and stood for a minute. He steadied himself by placing a hand against one of the trees that grew upward at an angle. He tried not to put pressure on it. Poor little guy, sinewy and tough, trying to scratch out a life on the side of a mountain. He turned his head to look back at Burl, standing safely by the granite outcropping.
“William J. and Sophie planned to build a place up near here,” he said. “Did you know that?”
“He told me.”
“Sophie’ll be moving down to Utica now, she says.”
“Did she tell you what she ended up writing about for her essay?”
“She chose number four, that’s all I know.”
“She wrote about you,” Burl said. “You and your flock.”
“The flock? What the hell does the flock have to do with essay number four? That was the person place or feeling one, as I recall.”
“You were the person. You and your reject animals.”
William T. studied the blue-gray mountains rising in the distance.
“There was a bunch more,” Burl said. “How you took care of them just for the sake of taking care of them. It was an essay about you, William T. A damn good one, too.”
“Jesus Christ, Burl, did you just say damn?”
Burl smiled his Burl smile. William T. pictured five-year-old William J. on Burl’s front steps, surrounded by Burl’s giant lilies. He remembered a baby wrapped in a blanket and lying in a bureau drawer, strapped into the passenger side of his truck. That was the way he used to cart William J. around. Car seats be damned.
“Remember that old bureau drawer I used to strap William J. into?”
“That thing was dangerous as hell.”
“Burl. Did you just say hell? That’s two curses in less than five minutes. What would God say?”
“I’ll find out someday,” Burl said.
“You’re a believer, aren’t you, Burl?”
“You need to believe in something, William T. There’s got to be something to hang on to in this world.”
“Like what?”
“Something.”
“Don’t talk to me about God, Burl. I am a churchless man.”
“Maybe you ought to broaden your definition of church,” Burl said.
Burl didn’t speak about his religion. He just went to church. Every Sunday, there was Burl, walking into church, walking out of church.
At the base of the fire tower that day Burl had stood next to William T., one finger pushing the spoon and knife wind chime back and forth. Burl’s red and swollen eyes were on him. He would not stop watching William T.
“He’s everywhere I go,” William T. had said, trying to explain. “I can’t get away from him. I can’t go anywhere where William J. isn’t, but he isn’t anywhere.”
“I know,” Burl said. “I know. We all got a little bit of William J. that we carry around with us, William T. We’re the ones who knew him.”
William T. had watched him, his dark hair awry, not combed as it always was, carefully and straight down. It had been Burl who first took William J. hiking up Panther Mountain. It had been Burl who had taught William J. to swim, in the cold water of Deeper Lake. Burl had shown the boy the difference between white birch and poplar, guided the child’s hand on a beech tree’s smooth bark. Burl had sat silently with William J. on the shore of the lake until a loon’s lonely wail broke the silence. William T. had watched Burl twirl maple seeds, those little helicopters, into the air in autumn to make the boy laugh.
William J., you were my church.
“Burl, I used to lose my temper once in a while with William J.,” William T. said. “That’s something I regret. That’s one of the things I regret.”
“I never saw you lose your temper with him, William T.”
“I did, though. When he was a kid. I used to yell at him sometimes when I was throwing him balls.”
William J. used to swing for hours with a lightweight bat while William T. pitched high balls, low balls, straight-on balls to him. William T. pictured how William J. had bent his knees, turned sideways, gripped the bat lower and tighter. He had tried to do it right.
“When you’re a kid you don’t know that half the time that yelling, it’s just pretend,” William T. said to Burl. “You’ve got to grow up a long time before you know that. Do you think William J. knew that? He was only twenty-seven.”
“William J. had no fear of you, William T. You know that.”
“Let me ask you something, Burl. Do you think William J. was at peace when he did it?”
Burl looked away down toward where the lake lay flat, gray as the granite.
“I think William J. is at peace now,” he said after a while.
“Burl, is there a God? Is there really a God up there right now, and is he with my son, and is he taking care of my son, and is my son happy? Is he happy?”
William J., are you happy?
Burl gazed up at the heavens with their weight of snow, snow that would not fall. The familiar Band-Aids covered his reddened hands.
“You want to know what music was playing when he died, Burl?”
Burl shook his head.
“You. Tha
t tape they made the time you auditioned with the New York City Men’s Chorus, the time they offered you the job.”
He should have been a singer, Burl, he should have taken the job when they offered it to him, he should have toured with that New York City chorus, he should have sung on a stage in California, he should have left no musical note unturned, he should have tried and tried and tried.
“Why didn’t you go with them?” William T. said. “You had the chance.”
“Because,” Burl said. “I didn’t want to go away and miss seeing William J. grow up.”
The day that William J. had died, Burl stood on his front concrete stoop, surrounded by his towering lilies, and William T. had watched his mouth open, a sound he had never heard before clawing its way out of Burl’s throat.
“Sing for me, would you, Burl? One of your hymns.”
Burl shook his head.
“Please.”
Shake. Shake. Shake. Metronomic.
It came to William T. that Burl would not sing again. That this was his private punishment. William T. might ask him why, but Burl would not be able to give him an answer.
William T. aimed his voice at the heavens.
“Are you up there?” William T. called. “Can you hear me?”
In an ordinary time his voice would coax an echo, haunting back out of the stillness. Mountains ringed the horizon, dark and indistinct. William T. closed his eyes and imagined himself standing among his red spruce. Far above him green crowns waved in the wind but he could not see them from where he stood under the canopy. All about him red spruce started to creak and whisper, and he did not understand their language, the language of wood and wind. Genghis conjured himself before William T.’s eyes, arrowed his small body into a black streak and went tearing down the dirt road toward four hundred pounds of fury. William T. watched his old cat racing by him, a spill of black heedless of memory, heedless of age, heedless of anything that might have made him hesitate, that might have filled him with fear or the anticipation of regret.
Burl’s hand was on his arm then, and a sound filled the silence of the mountains.
Wind.
Wind, sweeping in from afar.
Was It Beautiful? Page 17