A North Country Life

by Sydney Lea

  It happened that Harry and Charles were hunting on a certain day, and no matter it was May. This was early times, Bill pointed out. If it wouldn't've been for fish in the water and critters on the ground, I imagine folks would've starved. No, as a rule the old ones didn't wait for some season to arrive; they shot and jigged and netted all year round.

  That morning, a thunderstorm raced in from nowhere, the downpour something ferocious. Harry and Charles took for a thicket of cabbage pine, which clumped in an old burntland that another lightning storm had fashioned long before, eliminating what few larger standing trees there may have been. Boughs grew dense enough in that tangle to keep the men fairly dry. They scooched inside to wait on the weather.

  Then one of them looked out and noticed the corpse.

  No, not a corpse, but only the bottom of one bare foot, which glowed with each bolt from the sky. The two hunters knew of course there had to be a body too; they just couldn't see it. Whenever it fell, it must have dropped right over the near bank of the stream, that bone-white sole the one thing left to show. The men might easily have missed it if they'd sheltered elsewhere. They told Bill they wished they had.

  The two hunters didn't speak for a while, but each of them knew what the other must be thinking. Neither liked the idea of what they'd find by that little stream but when time arrived they'd by God have to go find it. You couldn't just walk away, although both admitted to Bill that they might have done so if there hadn't been the two of them. They was each other's conscience, Bill said.

  In any case, they stayed under those scruffy pines long after the storm moved on. Whoever he was, after all, would be in no hurry now himself. The men left him resting right there until they could puzzle out what on earth to do about him.

  What those old poachers did do at length—well, for whatever reason, in Bill's retelling that was a bit of a blur. No doubt they contrived to paddle him out at length. But what he more clearly remembered was their coming out of the shelter when it faired, and suddenly noticing a twisty but thick-trunked small tree: a pear, of all things.

  Now so far as anyone ever knew, this godforsaken spot had not been a settlement, not even for tribal people; there wasn't enough solid or level ground. There were no white man's cellar holes either, no remnant fire pits. Nothing for miles but marsh and wind, with here and there a horseback of land to tread on. The fruit tree, just into tiny leafage, was the only indication that the place might have been lived in after all. And how had the pear tree survived the fire that had swept this solitary patch of solid ground?

  How, further, unless a seed had been carried by a bird or an animal (from where?), and unless it had been dropped just here, was a pear standing on its spot at all? The only answer seemed that someone, in some dim time, had made a dwelling. Could there have been a dooryard, could this tree have been one of many that amounted to an orchard? If so, why pears? Bill also wondered how they'd identify a tree so rare in those parts anyhow. He wouldn't have been able himself.

  It was barely true spring, the pear's petals just fallen. A few ribbons of ice held out along the water's edge where it ran under alder shade. The corpse lay in that darkness. That fringe of ice chilled the hunters' souls, they said.

  The story still chills mine, though that's to describe its impression too simply.

  The hard gully-washer from which they'd sought refuge in the green-growth had splattered mud on the dead man, but sodden pear flowers too, which at first they took for old snow. The poor fellow lay naked otherwise, no sign of clothes anywhere they looked.

  And the dirt-and-blossom trousers, the mask and cap, as one of the woodsmen told Bill, They wouldn't make no difference to him now.

  Bill White, who taught me the art of handling gun dogs and who told me this yarn.

  Daybook, Mid-April

  I set out a while ago up an abrupt hill, a favorite of mine. Now a muted glow in the air makes my climb worth the effort.

  At the modest summit, a raven, old familiar, scolds and swoops, protecting the nest she keeps each year in the very same slope-side pine. I'm frustrated: I wish I could simply tell her I'm harmless as always. I'm not even looking up at her anyhow, but down to where the spated river sluices past its banks, whose grasses are slower to green, it seems, than usual.

  Two yearling deer stand, pastern-deep, on flooded ground that will soon be broken and planted. Come fall, shivering cornrows will wait out there for the thresher.

  But I guess I'd have to admit to the hen raven that some moments back I did in fact look up. I'd settled down on the earth, face skyward, feeling in my bones that the life I led still had a fair share of future in it.

  The turkey vultures didn't think so. There never used to be vultures this far north. Everything is change. Climate. Custom. Demography.

  Three of the vultures glided low; I could stare right into their eyes. I'd been dreaming how wide the world was, even this small portion I hid in and claimed for my own, so I stood up to scare them off, along with the thoughts such creatures can bring, disconcerting and banal at once.

  But now I keep watching the edgy deer. They feed and startle, feed and startle, trotting a few quick yards, all splashes, then pausing again to look over their shoulders. They can't know where I am or who, up here in this all-subsuming shine, staring down at them, their hides silvered as the sun is silvered by the river's mist. Silvered like the galvanized domes of silos on the Gales' failed farm. Silvered like that commonwealth of blackbirds, which gleam from the farm's heartbreak hedge of tall dead elms.

  Now Look

  What follows, I confess right off, is far more tale than report, however firmly I may have founded it on things Mattie told me. It doesn't mean to speak ill of her husband, a beloved mentor of mine, after all, who told me many a story of his own. But I loved Mattie too, even if in her later years we stopped talking the way we once did. I hope she didn't think of me as a contributor to John's decline, though I suspect she did—as perhaps, unwittingly, I was. I know less, not more, about such matters as I move along in life.

  How accurate can it be, then, my vision and version of her on the day I remember? I imagine her scowling at my back through the bedroom window, right up to the point where I cross the Tannery Bridge and disappear on the other side of the river alders. Having found her man asleep in his stalled truck, I've just rolled him onto a ratty cot in his shop. I'm headed back to my camp for my last day here of the summer. I'll be driving home when the sun comes up tomorrow.

  It's getting on daylight, and Mattie can see that the back lot's maples already have a touch of flame. Winter's around the corner. She has testified more than once to how she loves this time of year, or used to, that little hint of color, and the wind coming soon to streak the northward lake with foam-lines. The salmon moved into the shallows in late September, and she'd stand on the bridge as a girl, dropping pebbles into the river, just to watch the fish shoot out into quicker water, then sidle back under the cutbanks.

  That wind has stiffened up just now. I watch a pair of ravens fight it to get upriver, gaining two yards and giving back one, flopping around like laundry on a line. Mattie's mountain ash berries aren't even red yet, but the cedar waxwings were still mobbing them as I walked out of her dooryard. How she adores the light off those birds! She's told me so.

  "You don't have to live with that old man," Mattie growls at where I just stood. Or something like it, I'd bet.

  But enough of this contrivance, this present tense. Years have gone by since that dawn.

  John had been a hero of mine, but also of Mattie's in a much different way, back when they were courting, when weather meant a different thing or two. As soon as the deer came into rut, the town was all women in daylight. She missed her husband then. She missed him a lot of the year. He was the best-looking of the bunch, no two ways about it. He'd get done in the woods on Saturday evenings, and the two of them would go somewhere: maybe only a walk, or sometimes a canoe ride, or even a dance if there was one.

  It d
idn't matter, dancing or walking or paddling, he was always turned out nice. How on earth could some bachelor get his shirt that white? You saw it, plain and crisp, even after dark. Same with his teeth. He had them all in those days, and they'd almost blind her in sunlight, even if he did chew like so many of those hardhead lumberjacks. Handsome enough to make a mare eat her own bedding. I remember her using that expression, as if she couldn't help it, then blushing ever so slightly.

  But it wasn't all how John looked, she insisted. He could just do things. He drove logs in April, first one hired, best paid but Biscuit the cook, who'd been doing the drive since John was a baby. That river scared Mattie half to death until he quit, too old for it, he said, at forty.

  In winter, when he cut railroad sleepers, he was top hand as well. The woods boss would go bunk to bunk every evening, taking tally. "Fourteen ties," someone would say, and that would be pretty consistent, give or take one or two, right down the line. But it'd be twenty-two for John, or twenty-four, even thirty-two once, after someone tipped him off that a younger fellow named Billy Gibbon meant to beat him on at least a single day. John just worked himself almost off his feet for a week or so, a proud man. Billy couldn't stay with him, went right back to the pack after that spell.

  And every one of those sleepers was an A. You got a quarter for an A, fifteen cents for a B. Of course this didn't seem like money now, Mattie admitted, but that was then. There wasn't enough decent cedar for this sort of chopping anymore, and Lord knows what people used for railroad ties; seemed there was scarcely a train left in the country. But in those days plenty of good trees stood right below town, so John could be home nights, not like during the spring river drive.

  He went away on that drive the very first year they were married, which was when she really learned what lonesome meant. She couldn't sleep for the thought of him treading around among those logs. How could he claim to love such a business? Making ties, he left early, but she could get up with him, she'd wait for him all day, and at least his Sundays were free. There was plenty to do while she waited, of course, especially after their first child Sammy came, but tending the baby or keeping house or chunking up the furnace or splitting kindling—no matter what, she'd be thinking of evening.

  Now look. I heard Mattie say that a hundred times if I heard it once.

  As I hiked down to camp on the early morning I recall, I imagined her, all slept out, a lot bearing down, especially the one memory—or three. The children, each of them dead before twenty. But that's another story. There was John out in the shop again, not even knowing he was in this world. He wouldn't know until eight o'clock, or even later.

  Mattie had taken to wearing a pair of wool trousers. His. He was skinny by then, and she gone a bit to girth, though she didn't care about that a particle. She put on an old shirt, his too, not white. Then she made herself trot downstairs. The way to keep going, her mother always said, was to keep going, and she knew what she spoke of: Ma shingled her own roof as an old woman, and it never leaked a glassful, even though she moved out that same year.

  Old? Sixty-five is all her mother was when she did that roof job. She had a little income from the Navy people, after Mattie's father got himself killed in the first war, and it just barely paid her way down to Florida. Mattie told her not to go, but she did. Stubborn, forever stubborn.

  Mattie argued with her. You need something besides sunshine every last day of the year, she said. Fair weather and nothing else, except maybe one of those hurricanes, and they could kill you dead as a smelt—none of that can be healthy, Mattie told her. But Ma went along anyhow, never listened to a word.

  Mattie wanted to be like her in some ways, but she also wanted to live a quarter-century longer anyhow. Seventy-nine now, so she guessed she was on her way, because her mother had only been seventy-five when she passed.

  Mattie always meant to have Ma's drive but live to a round hundred.

  Come to think, though, why would she want that now? There was a time she pitied her poor mother, all those years without a man. Did the pity still make sense?

  Any way you sliced it, if John woke up sober enough to speak, even he would tell you a fellow could play checkers on his wife's shirttails. Well, that's me, Mattie always said. She couldn't change if she wanted. Or maybe she was changed already; she didn't like to think so.

  Now I see her standing in the kitchen, doing nothing, only studying the electric teakettle, that drooling bastard. There was a crack in the spout: you'd lose a cup for each you boiled. She meant to find herself a new one, because John wouldn't get around to fixing things, not the way he acted lately. He wouldn't even drink coffee anymore, too busy drinking another cup.

  The electric kettle sat next to the range top.

  Electric kettle.

  Range top.

  All kinds of things changed, some for the better.

  It was still nice to fire up their old wood-burner cook stove now and again in fall or early spring. Take a little chill off, save on oil. Not for old times' sake, though. Old times? Try making cedar chips on the kindling floor first thing if you forgot the day before or you were just too beat to do it then. She told me they called it killing floor down south. She couldn't remember who taught her that, but it was a better name, especially if she had the morning sickness, the way she always did so bad with both boys and especially with little Emily, God love her.

  You'd get the stove het up with the cedar, then slide in a few sticks of whatever hardwood lay to hand. She was always quick about it, same as she was with anything, but it was still half an hour before the kitchen felt near comfortable.

  Washer-dryer.

  Water heater.

  Lord in heaven.

  Maybe she hooked up the kettle and found a teabag and a bottle of molasses. That was her habit. They'd claim there was nothing in it, she said, but she always felt better for the molasses, and others could think what they thought. Pregnant or not, she never put much else inside her in the morning.

  John lay out there in his bedroll, or maybe just in his clothes, on top of that stinking cot she'd burn up if she had a chance. Mattie was proud to say she hadn't been inside the shop two dozen times since they moved out of it into the big house, and that had been a long, long stretch. She could barely lay her eyes even on the outside of the shack, no matter she'd been the one to build it. That was in their first married year.

  Sometimes, she swore, she could still feel the cold of that fall; a drop in the thermometer would bring the feeling on. Weather came early and rough, a foot of snow by Thanksgiving, and her in the dooryard bare-knuckled, putting in studs and joists and stringers, fitting the little windows that old man Patcher gave them for their wedding. They needed a real place to live now, not some canvas tent, summer all gone. John did as much on the place as he could, but he was in the woods more than he was out, so yes, a lot of the job fell to her.

  She nailed on the waney-board siding, the only kind of lumber they could afford. She mightn't have looked at the shop so meanly if John would prise those ratty wanes off and put up some clapboard, or just some butted planks. She was damned if she ought to be the one to do it; she'd done her share, and some. But he was always too busy in the old days. And now look.

  It could be she wiggled her fingers that morning, just to thaw the memory. She'd always do that when she spoke of those days. She even confessed to me how one morning, while she was building, she felt something strange down below, and came to find out her backside was held together by her own frozen sweat. She had to dip her hands in a water pail before she could tend to herself. I could see the minute she told me she was sorry she'd shared a thing that personal with a man not even kin. Good old days? she scoffed. Don't ask her about that!

  It was nicer to look out the other side from the shop anyhow, past Addy Benson's house to the sidehill, which had seen a lot of changes since the burn, Lord, thirty-six years back. After the fire, the popple took over for fair there. Those trees looked white as birch in winter, then
lovely yellow on top in spring, then all the leaves riffling in summer whenever a breeze blew. Money trees, some called them, not because the wood was good for anything beside excelsior but because when those leaves went down in October they looked like coins on the ground. The hill was all stunt pine now, hardhack in the clear spots. A popple didn't live long; most of them grew, fell, and rotted in what seemed to her like a few recent months now, not years.

  That blasted shop could rot too, and Mattie wouldn't care. It made a start for them once, but good riddance after they got the real house up. There were a lot of better days in the new place, which they still called it. The territory got known for bass in the lakes, and when they paved the road into the village, John actually made a dollar or two off the sportsmen. He took them to cast for smallmouth and he looked after their summer places. The sports were the real money trees. You just put up with some of them, but there were a decent few, she allowed.

  I hope she included me, hope at least she knew I meant well. She may have wondered why I couldn't save John, but I just couldn't, not for all the money trees on earth. No one could. That's just not the way these things work. I wish it were.

  John did all right with the guiding, and every little inch he stood off from a falling or especially a floating log was a good inch, far as Mattie was concerned. And it wasn't just the danger: when he only worked as a guide, they could spend more time together, as a married couple ought.

  Those good years lasted a long while, but they didn't last forever. What in creation did?

  Did the teapot spit on the oilcloth? I know it never whistled a note, and Mattie complained on that, said it was a nuisance. She was the one to have burned the hole in it, though, so she said she shouldn't complain. One day she put it on the stove, same as you would a regular.

  Did she yank the plug and fill that cup with the two cub bears on the outside of it? The bears were looking down from a pine for the first few years she owned it, but the tree part wore off, and the bears seemed to be flying. Angel bears, she called them, not trying to be funny.