by Noreen Doyle
The phone wires weren’t down, yet. While I waited for the garage to answer, Harp said, “Ben, I can’t let you walk back in that. Stay over, huh?”
I didn’t want to. It meant extra work and inconvenience for Leda, and I was ancient enough to crave my known safe burrow. But I felt Harp wanted me to stay for his own sake. I asked Jim Short at the garage to go ahead with Bolt-Bucket if I wasn’t there to meet him. Jim roared: “Know what it’s doing right now?”
“Little spit of snow, looks like.”
“Jesus!” He covered the mouthpiece imperfectly. I heard his enthusiastic voice ring through cold-iron echoes: “Hey, old Ben’s got that thing into the ditch again! Ain’t that something. . .? Listen, Ben, I can’t make no promises. Got both tow trucks out already. You better stop over and praise the Lord you got that far.”
“Okay,” I said. “It wasn’t much of a ditch.”
Leda fed us coffee. She kept glancing toward the landing at the foot of the stairs where a night-darkness already prevailed. A closed-in stairway slanted down at a never-used front door; beyond that landing was the other ground floor room—parlor, spare, guest room—where I would sleep. I don’t know what Leda expected to encounter in that shadow. Once when a chunk of firewood made an odd noise in the range, her lips clamped shut on a scream.
The coffee warmed me. By that time the weather left no loophole for argument. Not yet 3:30, but west and north were lost in furious black. Through the hissing white flood I could just see the front of the barn forty feet away. “Nobody’s going no place into that,” Harp said. His little house shuddered, enforcing the words. “Led,’ you don’t look too brisk. Get you some rest.”
“I better see to the spare room for Ben.”
Neither spoke with much tenderness, but it glowed openly in him when she turned her back. Then some other need bent his granite face out of its normal seams. His whole gaunt body leaning forward tried to help him talk. “You wouldn’t figure me for a man’d go off his rocker?” he asked.
“Of course not. What’s biting, Harp?”
“There’s something in the woods, got no right to be there.” To me that came as a letdown of relief: I would not have to listen to another’s marriage problems. “I wish, b’ Jesus Christ, it would hit somebody else once, so I could say what I know and not be laughed at all to hell. I ain’t one for dumb fancies.”
You walked on eggs with Harp. He might decide any minute that I was laughing. “Tell me,” I said. “If anything’s out there now it must feel a mite chilly.”
“Ayah.” He went to the north window, looking out where we knew the road lay under the white confusion. Harp’s land sloped down on the other side of the road to the edge of a mighty evergreen forest. Mount Katahdin stands more than fifty miles north and a little east of us. We live in a withering, shrinking world, but you could still set out from Harp’s farm and, except for the occasional country road and the rivers—not many large ones—you could stay in deep forest all the way to the tundra, or Alaska. Harp said, “This kind of weather is when it comes.”
He sank into his beat-up kitchen armchair and reached for Kabloona. He had barely glanced at the book while Leda was with us. “Funny name.”
“Kabloona’s an Eskimo word for white man.”
“He done these pictures . . .? Be they good, Ben?”
“I like ’em. Photographs in the back.”
“Oh.” He turned the pages hastily for those, but studied only the ones that showed the strong Eskimo faces, and his interest faded. Whatever he wanted was not here. “These people, be they—civilized?”
“In their own way, sure.”
“Ayah, this guy looks like he could find his way in the woods.”
“Likely the one thing he couldn’t do, Harp. They never see a tree unless they come south, and they hate to do that. Anything below the Arctic is too warm.”
“That a fact . . .? Well, it’s a nice book. How much was it?” I’d found it second-hand; he paid me to the exact penny. “I’ll be glad to read it.” He never would. It would end up on the shelf in the parlor with the Bible, an old almanac, a Longfellow, until some day this place went up for auction and nobody remembered Harp’s way of living.
“What’s this all about, Harp?”
“Oh . . . I was hearing things in the woods, back last summer. I’d think, fox, then I’d know it wasn’t. Make your hair stand right on end. Lost a cow, last August, from the north pasture acrost the rud. Section of board fence tore out. I mean, Ben, the two top boards was pulled out from the nail holes. No hammer marks.”
“Bear?”
“Only track I found looked like bear except too small. You know a bear wouldn’t pull it out, Ben.”
“Cow slamming into it, panicked by something?”
He remained patient with me. “Ben, would I build a cow pasture fence nailing the crosspieces from the outside? Cow hit it with all her weight she might bust it, sure. And kill herself doing it, be blood and hair all over the split boards, and she’d be there, not a mile and a half away into the woods. Happened during a big thunderstorm. I figured it had to be somebody with a spite ag’inst me, maybe some son of a bitch wanting the prop’ty, trying to scare me off that’s lived here all my life and my family before me. But that don’t make sense. I found the cow a week later, what was left. Way into the woods. The head and the bones. Hide tore up and flang around. Any person dressing off a beef, he’ll cut whatever he wants and take off with it. He don’t sit down and chaw the meat off the bones, b’ Jesus Christ. He don’t tear the thighbone out of the joint . . . All right, maybe bear. But no bear did that job on that fence and then driv old Nell a mile and a half into the woods to kill her. Nice little jersey, clever’s a kitten. Leda used to make over her, like she don’t usually do with the stock . . . I’ve looked plenty in the woods since then, never turned up anything. Once and again I did smell something. Fishy, like bear-smell but—different.”
“But Harp, with snow on the ground—”
“Now you’ll really call me crazy. When the weather is clear, I ain’t once found his prints. I hear him then, at night, but I go out by daylight where I think the sound was, there’s no trail. Just the usual snow tracks. I know. He lives in the trees and don’t come down except when it’s storming, I got to believe that. Because then he does come, Ben, when the weather’s like now, like right now. And old Ned and Jerry out in the stable go wild, and sometimes we hear his noise under the window. I shine my flashlight through the glass—never catch sight of him. I go out with the ten-gauge if there’s any light to see by, and there’s prints around the house—holes filling up with snow. By morning there’ll be maybe some marks left, and they’ll lead off to the north woods, but under the trees you won’t find it. So he gets up in the branches and travels thataway?. . . Just once I have seen him, Ben. Last October. I better tell you one other thing fast. A day or so after I found what was left of old Nell, I lost six roaster chickens. I made over a couple box stalls, maybe you remember, so the birds could be out on range and roost in the barn at night. Good doors, and I always locked ’em. Two in the morning, Ned and Jerry go crazy, I got out through the barn into the stable, and they was spooked, Ned trying to kick his way out. I got ’em quiet, looked all over the stable—loft, harness room, everywhere. Not a thing. Dead quiet night, no moon. It had to be something the horses smelled. I come back into the barn, and found one of the chicken-pen doors open—tore out from the lock. Chicken thief would bring along something to pry with—wouldn’t he be a Christly idjut if he didn’t . . .? Took six birds, six nice eight-pound roasters, and left the heads on the floor—bitten off.”
“Harp—some lunatic. People can go insane that way. There are old stories—”
“Been trying to believe that. Would a man live the winter out there? Twenty below zero?”
“Maybe a cave—animal skins.”
“I’ve boarded up the whole back of the barn. Done the same with the hen-loft windows—two-by-fours with four-inch spik
es driv slant-wise. They be twelve feet off the ground, and he ain’t come for’ em, not yet . . . . So after that happened I sent for Sheriff Robart. Son of a bitch happens to live in Darkfield, you’d think he might’ve took an interest.”
“Do any good?”
Harp laughed. He did that by holding my stare, making no sound, moving no muscle except for a disturbance at the eye corners. A New England art; maybe it came over on the Mayflower. “Robart, he come by, after a while. I showed him that door. I showed him them chicken heads. Told him how I’d been spending my nights out there on my ass, with the ten-gauge.” Harp rose to unload tobacco juice into the range fire; he has a theory it purifies the air. “Ben, I might’ve showed him them chicken heads a shade close to his nose. By the time he got here, see, they wasn’t all that fresh. He made out he’d look around and let me know. Mid-September. Ain’t seen him since.”
“Might’ve figured he wouldn’t be welcome?”
“Why, he’d be welcome as shit on a tablecloth.”
“You spoke of—seeing it, Harp?”
“Could call it seeing . . . All right. It was during them Indian summer days—remember? Like June except them pretty colors, smell of windfalls—God, I like that, I like October. I’d gone down to the slope acrost the rud where I mended my fence after losing old Nell. Just leaning there, guess I was tired. Late afternoon, sky pinking up. You know how the fence cuts acrost the slope to my east wood lot. I’ve let the bushes grow free—lot of elder, other stuff the birds come for. I was looking down toward that little break between the north woods and my wood lot, where a bit of old growed-up pasture shows through. Pretty spot. Painter fella come by a few years ago and done a picture of it, said the place looked like a coro, dunno what the hell that is, he didn’t say.”
I pushed at his brown study. “You saw it there?”
“No. Off to my right in them elder bushes. Fifty feet from me, I guess. By God I didn’t turn my head. I got it with the tail of my eye and turned the other way as if I meant to walk back to the rod. Made like busy with something in the grass, come wandering back to the fence some nearer. He stayed for me, a brownish patch in them bushes by the big yellow birch. Near the height of a man. No gun with me, not even a stick . . . Big shoulders, couldn’t see his goddamn feet. He don’t stand more’n five feet tall. His hands, if he’s got real ones, hung out of my sight in a tangle of elder branches. He’s got brown fur, Ben, reddy-brown fur all over him. His face too, his head, his big thick neck. There’s a shine to fur in sunlight, you can’t be mistook. So—I did look at him direct. Tried to act like I still didn’t see him, but he knowed. He melted back and got the birch between him and me. Not a sound.” And then Harp was listening for Leda upstairs. He went on softly: “Ayah, I ran back for a gun, and searched the woods, for all the good it did me. You’ll want to know about his face. I ain’t told Led’ all this part. See, she’s scared, I don’t want to make it no worse, I just said it was some animal that snuck off before I could see it good. A big face, Ben. Head real human except it sticks out too much around the jaw. Not much nose—open spots in the fur. Ben, the—the teeth! I seen his mouth drop open and he pulled up one side of his lip to show me them stabbing things. I’ve seen as big as that on a full-growed bear. That’s what I’ll hear, I ever try to tell this. They’ll say I seen a bear. Now I shot my first bear when I was sixteen and Pa took me over toward Jackman. I’ve got me one maybe every other year since then. I know ’em, all their ways. But that’s what I’ll hear if I tell the story.”
I am a frustrated naturalist, loaded with assorted facts. I know there aren’t any monkeys or apes that could stand our winters except maybe the harmless Himalayan langur. No such beast as Harp described lived anywhere on the planet. It didn’t help. Harp was honest; he was rational; he wanted reasonable explanation as much as I did. Harp wasn’t the village atheist for nothing. I said, “I guess you will, Harp. People mostly won’t take the—unusual.”
“Maybe you’ll hear him tonight, Ben.”
Leda came downstairs, and heard part of that. “He’s been telling you, Ben. What do you think?”
“I don’t know what to think.”
“Led’, I thought, if I imitate that noise for him—”
“No!” She had brought some mending and she was about to sit down with it, but froze as if threatened by attack. “I couldn’t stand it, Harp. And—it might bring them.”
“Them?” Harp chuckled uneasily. “I don’t guess I could do it that good he’d come for it.”
“Don’t do it, Harp!”
“All right, hon.” Her eyes were closed, her head drooping back. “Don’t get nerved up so.”
I started wondering whether a man still seeming sane could dream up such a horror for the unconscious purpose of tormenting a woman too young for him, a woman he could never imagine he owned. If he told her a fox bark wasn’t right for a fox, she’d believe him. I said, “We shouldn’t talk about it if it upsets her.”
He glanced at me like a man floating up from under water. Leda said in a small, aching voice: “I wish to God we could move to Boston.”
The granite face closed in defensiveness. “Led’, we been over all that. Nothing is going to drive me off of my land. I got no time for the city at my age. What the Jesus would I do? Night watchman? Sweep out somebody’s back room, b’ Jesus Christ? Savings’d be gone in no time. We been all over it. We ain’t moving nowhere.”
“I could find work.” For Harp of course that was the worst thing she could have said. She probably knew it from his stricken silence. She said clumsily, “I forgot something upstairs.” She snatched up her mending and she was gone.
We talked no more of it the rest of the day. I followed through the milking and other chores, lending a hand where I could, and we made everything as secure as we could against storm and other enemies. The long-toothed furry thing was the spectral guest at dinner, but we cut him, on Leda’s account, or so we pretended. Supper would have been awkward anyway. They weren’t in the habit of putting up guests, and Leda was a rather deadly cook because she cared nothing about it. A Darkfield girl, I suppose she had the usual twentieth-century mishmash of television dreams until some impulse or maybe false signs of pregnancy tricked her into marrying a man out of the nineteenth. We had venison treated like beef and overdone vegetables. I don’t like venison even when it’s treated right.
At six Harp turned on his battery radio and sat stone-faced through the day’s bad news and the weather forecast—“a blizzard which may prove the worst in forty-two years. Since 3:00 P.M., eighteen inches have fallen at Bangor, twenty-one at Boston. Precipitation is not expected to end until tomorrow. Winds will increase during the night with gusts up to seventy miles per hour.” Harp shut it off, with finality. On other evenings I had spent there he let Leda play it after supper only kind of soft, so there had been a continuous muted bleat and blatter all evening. Tonight Harp meant to listen for other sounds. Leda washed the dishes, said an early good night, and fled upstairs.
Harp didn’t talk, except as politeness obliged him to answer some blah of mine. We sat and listened to the snow and the lunatic wind. A hour of it was enough for me; I said I was beat and wanted to turn in early. Harp saw me to my bed in the parlor and placed a new chunk of rock maple in the pot-bellied stove. He produced a difficult granite smile, maybe using up his allowance for the week, and pulled out a bottle from a cabinet that had stood for many years below a parlor print—George Washington, I think, concluding a treaty with some offbeat sufferer from hepatitis who may have been General Cornwallis if the latter had two left feet. The bottle contained a brand of rye that Harp sincerely believed to be drinkable, having charred his gullet forty-odd years trying to prove it. While my throat, healed Harp said, “Shouldn’t’ve bothered you with all this crap, Ben. Hope it ain’t going to spoil your sleep.” He got me his spare flashlight, then let me be, and closed the door.
I heard him drop back into his kitchen armchair. Under too many covers, la
mp out, I heard the cruel whisper of the snow. The stove muttered, a friend, making me a cocoon of living heat in a waste of outer cold. Later I heard Leda at the head of the stairs, her voice timid, tired, and sweet with invitation: “You comin’ up to bed, Harp?” The stairs creaked under him. Their door closed; presently she cried out in that desired pain that is brief release from trouble.
I remembered something Adelaide Simmons had told me about this house, where I had not gone upstairs since Harp and I were boys. Adelaide, one of the very few women in Darkfield who never spoke unkindly of Leda, said that the tiny west room across from Harp’s and Leda’s bedroom was fixed up for a nursery, and Harp wouldn’t allow anything in there but baby furniture. Had been so since they were married seven years before.
Another hour dragged on, in my exasperations of sleeplessness.
Then I heard Longtooth.
The noise came from the west side, beyond the snow-hidden vegetable garden. When it snatched me from the edge of sleep, I tried to think it was a fox barking, the ringing, metallic shriek the little red beast can belch dragon-like from his throat. But wide awake, I knew it had been much deeper, chestier. Horned owl? —no. A sound that belonged to ancient times when men relied on chipped stone weapons and had full reason to fear the dark.