by Max Brand
The moon, throwing aside the clouds like bow waves from the prow of a silver ship, drove suddenly near, and Louise Lombard felt the brightness enclose her. The Yorktown, lifting her stem still higher, was running downhill toward her grave.
EAGLES OVER CROOKED CREEK
TWO EAGLES WERE fighting at the head of the canon, and the wind blew them and their screaming out over Crooked Creek, so that everyone looked up from the streets and some of the younger lads even took random shots at the pair. But the people were glad, really, to hear the screeching of the eagles, because it meant that winter definitely had left the mountains, and the spring was there to stay. Men thought of taking off flannel underwear; women thought of cleaning house. Young Chuck, coming up the trail into Crooked Creek for the first time in two years, proud of his seventeen years and his new horse, divided his mind between the eagles and the town itself. It seemed to have shrunk; the weight of the winter had pressed the buildings down and narrowed the streets. He was half way into town before he saw anyone he knew, and that was old Ben Whalen, his uncle’s partner. Ben stalked down the middle of the street, leading that ancient horse, Pepper, which still showed his name in the arch of his scrawny neck and the flattening of his ears, but Time was the permanent famine that roached his back and tucked up his belly. Old Ben Whalen was among men what Pepper was among horses, loose-kneed, gaunt, with the hanging flesh of his face tucked up at the corners of his eyes and his mouth.
“Hey, Ben!” called Chuck, and galloped his piebald up to the old man. Pepper began to prance without going any faster. Ben Whalen sluiced himself around and squinted over his shoulder. “Don’t go knockin’ your dust over me, young feller,” he said.
“Hey, Ben, don’t you know me?”
“Why, you kind of appear like little Chuck,” said Ben. “What you taken and done? Growed up?”
“I kind of been growing,” admitted Chuck. “Where’s Uncle Cal?”
“Yeah, you’ve taken and growed up on us,” said Ben, as they reached the foot of the canon where the road turned up among the rocks.
“Where’s Uncle Cal?” repeated Chuck.
“No use you riding up this trail,” answered Ben. “Cal always was a loon, and he’s gone and spent the winter over by the Sugar Loaf. He got a dream that the Sugar Loaf was all veined up with gold, and he’s gunna get at that gold as soon as things thaw out, so’s to be ahead of the rush.” Ben spat, then he laughed and smoothed his chin with his whole hand, a careful gesture which he inherited from the days when he wore a full beard. He repeated, as he turned up the canon road: “There ain’t any use you coming. You won’t find Cal up there no more.”
“I’ll come anyway,” said Chuck.
Ben stopped short, and Pepper bumped his nose on the shoulder of his master. “What for would you be such a damn’ young fool?” asked Ben. “Cal ain’t up there, and I ain’t one for much company.”
“I’d like to see the old shack anyways,” said Chuck and laughed.
Ben Whalen mounted Pepper and slumped into the saddle. There was a jingling of tin cans from the pack which sat over the hips of the old horse.
“How’s Pepper’s sight?” asked Chuck. “Can he see pretty good now?”
“He can’t see nothing no more,” answered Ben. “Why else would I’ve been leading him through the street? But he knows the three miles of the canon trail like it was wrote out on the palm of his hand.”
“How old is Pepper?” asked Chuck.
“Don’t be chatterin,’” said Ben. “They don’t raise up boys with no manners these days. They all keep squawkin’ like them eagles up yonder.”
So Chuck was quiet, unoffended because he knew Ben from of old. For that matter Uncle Cal was as silent as any sourdough, but for Chuck this trip was a return to something more than people. It was a voyage back into his childhood, where even mountains and rocks possess a living spirit that changes. And all the way up the canon he watched with admiration how the old horse, Pepper, followed the sharp windings of the path that followed the twists and the leapings of the creek. There was never a misstep all the way. Only when they came to the head of the steep way, Pepper tried to veer off to the left instead of going straight on toward the shanty. Ben Whalen cursed the old gelding, and kicked him, and reined him the right way, but to the last step Pepper continued to sag to the left.
“Growed out of his good sense, the old fool,” commented Ben, and began to unstrap the pack.
Chuck carried it into the shack in his strong young arms. It was the same flimsy structure, built of wide, warped boards with cracks through which the sunshine striped the floor with fuzzy yellow lines of light. The winter had blown through those crevices enough snow dust to paint the stove all over with a new coating of red rust, but there was little else in the single room that could take harm. More perishable stuff, of course, would be lodged in the small cellar through the winter.
“You tell me where, and I’ll put things away,” said Chuck.
“You take yourself off and leave me be,” said Ben, leaning on his rifle and staring gloomily around him.
So Chuck went outside. Pepper was no longer standing in front of the shanty. He had gone off to the side, and there he hung his head and switched his ragged old tail at the flies which swarm thickest and bite deepest in the early spring. The grass stood up quite high in the place where Pepper was standing, and yet it was not for the grass that the gelding had gone there. He did not crop a blade of it, but hung his head as though he were tethered to a hitching rack.
Chuck sat down on the door sill. The little house was just the same, except that like everything else it had shrunk. The canon, too, was narrower, and the walls no longer lifted so high, and the water roared neither so musically nor on so deep a note. It seemed to Chuck that, as one grows older, the world sifts away through the fingers, so what could remain inside the gaunt hands of old men like Ben or Uncle Cal? He turned and looked toward the great Sugar Loaf, frosted with blue and white toward the summit. Then he looked back down the canon. It was not only smaller, but it was changed, for surely in the old days he had been able to look past more than two bends of the walls. There had been a rift, an outlet, and the eye was not stopped by the two joining sides of rock.
Chuck stood up and drifted to the side. The piebald, noisily ripping at the grass and jangling its bit, nevertheless followed him, and this warmed his heart. Now, as he passed to the right, Chuck saw that the canon in fact opened a little. It was exciting. It was as though a door were swinging wide in his mind. He found the exact point from which, he could have sworn, he used to look down the narrows of the ravine. He could see past the second bend and caught a glimpse beyond the third, a narrow slot of blue sky that let the eye shoot onwards. That, as he remembered it, was exactly what he used to see from the threshold of the old shack.
He turned, bewildered, and saw that the shanty stood, in fact, well over to the right. But Pepper was exactly in line with him and that glimpse through the third bend of the ravine. There was something ghostly about it that brought a chill into his blood in spite of the strong mountain sunshine. He went up to Pepper, and the old horse jerked up his head and flattened his ears. He walked in front of Pepper. The ears and the pinched nostrils showed anger, but the filmy eyes showed nothing but the endless twilight within the mind. Stepping back, Chuck’s foot sank into a hole. He looked down and saw, where the grass was beaten down, that the lips of the little depression made an exact square, like a posthole filled up. But no posts had ever stood near the old shack, none at all except the two of the hitching rack! An idea stranger than life or death made Chuck shuffle back and forth through the grass until he found, eight feet away, another square hole exactly like the first.
He took off his sombrero and rubbed the sweat from his face. The wind came off the mountains and blew his head cold, but the blood in his body was already well iced. For here, where he stood, the hitching rack of the shanty once had been!
He moved back through that taller gra
ss, still scuffing with his heels, and again he found a depression. It was not a narrow hole mouth, this time, but a long line. Still scuffing, he traced a depression inches deep which turned at four corners and outlined a space ten feet long.
“By the jumping thunder,” said Chuck, “this is where the shack used to stand. Those were the postholes. This is the old cellar that’s been filled in....”
“What you doin’ over there?” shouted Ben Whalen. “What’s the matter with you, over there?” He stood in front of the shanty with his rifle at the ready. “Come here!” called Ben. “Come on over here! What you doin’ there?”
Chuck looked with yearning toward the piebald horse which still followed at his heels, but he was not even tempted to jump for the saddle, because he could remember Ben Whalen’s talent for putting bullet holes through tin cans flung as high as one pleased. If the grass had been a little taller, Chuck would have dropped into it and tried to disappear like a mole. Instead, he had to walk stiff legged because his knees were rigid with terror toward the old man on the threshold of the cabin.
“What you doin’ over there, anyway?” asked Ben Whalen.
“I dropped a coupla dimes outa my pocket,” said Chuck. “I dropped ’em out when I pulled out my sack of Bull Durham. They went flip off into the grass, and I started kicking around in it to find ’em.”
“Why for would you kick around in the grass if you wanted to find something?” asked Ben. “There ain’t any sense in doing that.... I got an idea that you’re a liar, Chuck, like your pa and your Uncle Cal and your grandpa all was liars before you!” He grew very angry. “You hear what I’m saying?” shouted Ben.
“Hey... don’t swing that gun around,” said Chuck. He threw up his hands in a gesture that was purely instinctive. Then desperate fear tempted him, and he caught at the end of the rifle barrel.
“Will you? Will you?” screeched Ben Whalen. He jerked back on the gun. The front sight ripped half way across the palm of Chuck before his grip held fast. He flung his other arm around Ben and hugged him close. It was like embracing a skeleton, and all the strength went out of Ben in a moment. His hands left his rifle. As Chuck jumped back from him, holding the rifle, old Ben simply leaned against the side of the door with a hand pressed to his side, panting. His mouth was open, sagging the lines of his face longer and longer.
“What’s the matter with you, Chuck? You gone crazy or something?” asked Ben.
“I’m crazy enough to go and dig up that whole place!” shouted Chuck. “I’m crazy enough to dig clean to the bottom of the old cellar yonder, till I find out what you were coverin’ up! I’m just crazy enough for that.”
“What cellar?” asked old Ben.
“There! Right yonder where the house used to stand.”
“What you mean, Chuck? Who’d take and move a house? Who’d have such a loony idea as that?”
“You took and done it yourself,” said Chuck. “Post by post and plank by plank, you took and done it your own self. I’m gunna find why, if I have to dig right to the bottom of the cellar.”
“Don’t you do it, son,” said Ben. “That ain’t a cellar no more. That’s a grave!”
A voice that Chuck never had heard before came out of his own throat: “Uncle Cal! It’s Uncle Cal!” he was crying “Yeah. That’s where he lies,” said Ben. “Maybe you’ll be wanting to take me back to town, Chuck?’’
He mounted the blind horse, and, while Chuck rode behind with the rifle at a balance across the pommel of his saddle, Pepper went down the slope with his absurd prancing.
“It was Pepper that showed you the way, wasn’t it?” asked Ben.
“Yeah. Pepper showed me.”
“Dog gone his old heart,” said Ben. “I guess he’s gunna outlive me, after all.”
“Ben, will you tell me how it happened?” pleaded Chuck, looking with pity on that bent and narrow back.
“I dunno,” said Ben. “I guess I’ve got kind of old and cranky.”
He looked up where the two eagles, after giving up their battle for a time, had joined combat again in the middle of the sky. They seemed higher now, but their screaming came plainly to the ears of Chuck. Old Ben kept staring upwards while the blind horse carried him with careful feet down the trail.
HONOR BRIGHT
ADRIENNE STEPPED INTO the library through the French window — her family’s garden adjoins mine — and sat down in the red tapestry chair near the fire. My Adrienne — your Adrienne, every man’s Adrienne — selected that chair because it made a perfect background for her black velvet evening wrap, and she wanted to be near the fire so that the bright blaze of it would throw up little golden lights into her hair. I got up and poured her favorite drink, which is a bit of plain water without ice, just stained with Scotch.
“This is very pretty, Adrienne,” I said. “With your profile just so and your head leaning a little, you look like a child.”
“When you know the truth, does it matter how I look?” she said. “How is your poor back, Uncle Oliver?”
I had been moving some great heavy pots of hydrangeas a few days before on the terrace and had given myself a wrench, but it was not sympathy that caused Adrienne to ask that question; something in my speech had annoyed her, and she wished to remind me, in her sweetly poisonous way, that the first sign of age is weakness in the small of the back.
“I’m perfectly well,” I said.
“I’m very glad, darling” said my Adrienne, “but don’t insist on being so strong and manly just now, dear.”
I looked up from filling my pipe and waited.
“You know you prefer cigarettes,” she explained.
I put the pipe aside without a word and picked up a cigarette.
Adrienne rose and came, rustling, to stand over me with her fragrance while she held the lighter. “Isn’t that the wrong end, dear?” she suggested.
I reversed the infernal cigarette, and she lighted it. These near approaches or forays of Adrienne’s often make me nervous, and of this truth she is exquisitely aware.
“Are you angry?” she asked.
“Just enough to give you my full attention,” I told her.
“It’s your usual system.”
“But I don’t come here to annoy you, do I, Uncle Oliver?” she wanted to know. “You don’t really feel that I come here to annoy you, Uncle Oliver?” she said sadly.
“You come here to think out loud, because I’m so old and safe,” I answered.
“Oh no; not really so safe,” she said.
“Well, well! Who is it this time?” I asked.
“Something terrible happened,” she told me.
“What’s his name?” I asked cannily. “And who is he?”
“It’s not so much a ‘who’ as a ‘what,’” decided Adrienne. “Will you help me, dear Uncle Oliver?”
“I suppose so,” I said.
She went back to her chair and held out one hand to be gilded by the firelight, yet I felt that only part of her attention was being given to the composition of this picture and that she was in real trouble. I was astonished and touched.
“I have an appointment for eight o’clock,” she said. “You won’t let me be late? It’s frightfully important.”
“Very well,” I answered. “I won’t let you be late. But now let’s get on with your problem. What’s his name?”
“Gilbert Ware,” she said.
I felt a shock of loss and regret. For years I had realized that my Adrienne was growing up, but still it had remained easy for me to think of her in short skirts and with her hair in braids. A child belongs to every man; a woman belongs to one only; and so my heart shrank at the name of Gilbert Ware. He filled both the imagination and the eye. If he was not one of the richest ten men in the country, he was not far behind them. On his mother’s side he went back to the best of Massachusetts, and by his father he was Old Virginia; placed in the diplomatic corps by the Ware dynasty, he had tasted the best the world offers by the time he was thirty; and
finally he had the beauty, together with the raised eyebrows, of one of the Founding Fathers. I daresay that he was the catch of the whole country. Such a man did not waste his time on children, which meant that my Adrienne was now a woman.
She explained, “He gave a week-end party at his house in the country, and I was there.”
“At his country house?” I said. “Why, Adrienne, you really are getting on.”
She did not answer but continued to look sidelong thoughts, so that I understood she was about to tell her story. I took my drink in hand, comforted my sight with her, and prepared to listen. Of course, “uncle” is merely a title that she chose for me, but I have watched Adrienne and listened carefully for several years without coming to the end of her. She is strangely combined of warmth and aloofness. Not even her school friends could nickname her “Addie,” and no one fails to put the accent on the last syllable of “Adrienne” because she seems, if not a Latin, at least very different. Actually, her blood is mostly of the far north — Norwegian, I think — and those people of the endless nights have gifts of deep brooding and long, long dreams.
Adrienne is continually in and out of love like a trout in sun and shadow, but the net never seems to take her. When I thought of the name and place of Gilbert Ware in the world, I wondered if this might not be the time. I wondered also how much truth might be mingled in this story with the fictions of Adrienne, for, though I hope she is not a deliberate teller of untruths, she is at least a weaver who loves to have many colors in her web. With the question there came to me a sudden surety that tonight, at least, I should hear nothing but the truth. Also I knew, for no proper reason, that she was to speak of a great event. At this point in my thoughts she began to talk in that voice so light and musical that more than once, it surprises me to say, she has talked me to sleep.