A North Country Life

by Sydney Lea

  Under the cubs was a wad of gray stuff that John used to patch a seep, because she wouldn't give this cup up for her life. Getting it fixed, even rough as this, was one of the few things she just forced him to do, because their Sammy had made it when he was about eight. He worked it from a jar of clay she bought him. There weren't going to be any more Sammys. No more cups. No more floating bears.

  Sammy and Herbert were born in the new house, but she rode clean to Calais to have her daughter, who just wouldn't come out on her own. That was in an A-model Ford, older than God, but it had been the only rig around anyone believed would last the trip. Mr. Patcher kept it nice. John started crying as if he was the baby, leaning in from the rumble seat so she almost went deaf with the roar of him. As if she didn't have plenty to put up with anyhow—more than thirty-six hours' worth before she so much as got into that Ford.

  Old man Patcher had gone away in his younger days and made some money in a trucking business. He was a fine old fellow, she had to say. Drove his car right along that night, never a word, determined. Thirty-three miles of frost heaves and ruts, and Mattie's bottom about falling out.

  Then came the chloroform that smelled like death even days after. They dropped the cloth over her nose, and it wasn't a minute until she saw a bunch of lumberjacks rise right up in the air, but not a one with a face she could recognize.

  I heard about this dream many times; it had a hold on her, and why not? It does on me. The woodsmen floated toward the sky, and then all of a sudden their clothes fell off. They were nothing but skeletons underneath, the bones all blue, and down on earth was her dead mother, shouting about it all from the far side of the river, calling Mattie to her.

  It didn't make any sense. Only a dream. Her mother was home and well when Em was born. She wouldn't die for quite a time. Yes, Florida killed her, Mattie swore. Nobody went away in the winter. Not in those days anyhow. Some did now, but they never lasted if they stayed down there. It wouldn't be long before their kids were getting themselves to Florida on a bus to drive their parents' car back north, hauling the ashes to the town graveyard.

  Oh yes, that was some trip to the birthing room. If she ended up in hell, Mattie told me, she'd be ready for it after the labor and the ride in the old car and the feeling when she woke up with a gash in her so big you'd think a pole axe made it. They cut her daughter out of her, is what. Yes, she'd be ready for hell, even if what she already had in late years was not your bed of roses like they raved about in songs.

  I was a grown man that morning, but a young one, and I just didn't know from Toby's ass, as he might have said, what to do with John these days. And I couldn't think of a way to cheer Mattie up either.

  John had drunk all his life. There weren't many loggers who didn't, only those with sugar, and even some of them were pretty quick to pull a cork. They liked their tea, as Mattie put it, and more than liked it in quite a few cases. There wasn't too much you could do about the matter if they got that way. She'd learned that much. And she learned a woman looked out for herself, because nobody else meant to do it for her.

  She'd say this for John: he never harmed her, never so much as slapped her, and not just because he knew she wouldn't be one to take things exactly like a lady. The hardest part, as she said to me early on— and I knew what she meant, odd as some might find it—was that John quit telling stories once the liquor took over. It surprised even her to miss them, because she'd already heard every last river tale known to man, especially his.

  The one about Eddie Stamford and that same old man Patcher was among her favorites, and mine too, though you really couldn't call it a lot more than a one-line joke.

  Eddie and his family lived at the top of the only real hill in the village, up where the fire tower still stands. The tower went out of use quite a while back, only a place for kids to climb to the cabin, just to say they did it, maybe to smoke a cigarette or drink a beer someone bought them.

  Eddie made the river drive for many a year too, and his wife Bess didn't feel any more kindly about it than Mattie did. John always said he was a good hand on the trip, but the minute he got home he'd take to drinking again. There went most of the river money. Once upon a time, John judged him for that. What would he say now, Eddie long gone, his liver bigger than a backhouse seat? John wouldn't have much room to look down on him.

  Eddie was doing some work for the town, repairing the wharf on the lake. As John told it, he somehow drove a six-penny nail right through his boot and through the meat, clear to the wharf's planking. He had to be pretty full if he could manage that, you'd imagine.

  This was in the Depression, and Mr. Patcher still the only man with a car that could be counted on to run—not the same one as when he rode Mattie and John so they could cut the little girl out of her, but a good one too. Now Mr. Patcher was a fine man, but he had a little of the Devil in him too. After Eddie made his way to the old fella's place, all the way up that same awful hill, there was blood just sloshing out the hole in his boot. He knocked on the door and pointed down when it opened up.

  "Look here, Ben Patcher," he said, "I run a spike through my toe out to the wharf. You got to take me downriver for a doctor or I'll get the lockjaw sure as hell."

  The old man stared Eddie dead in the eye. "Look here, Eddie Stamford," he said. "You get back to the job. I'll put a chair to watch you, and the minute your jaw starts to set, I'll run you right in."

  Just as I say, no better a story than a lot of others: it was really how John told this one, or the next and next, that tickled Mattie, me, or anybody who heard it. He had Eddie and Ben Patcher right pat; if you closed your eyes, you'd imagine each one of them right there.

  But you never wanted to close your eyes, because it wasn't just a voice John could imitate; he noticed little details, like how Ben squinted one eye when that Devil was in him, or Eddie gave a little hitch at his belt with his wrists about every third sentence, as though his drawers would slip off if he didn't.

  And John got even more inspired when there was an animal in the story. He had a gift of looking like any critter he named. If he spoke of his childhood bull terrier, you saw that dog, all nerve and shiver. He'd do an eagle staring down on a lake, a treed bobcat, a swimming deer, anything. John just knew how to live inside what he described—hard to explain.

  No, he never laid a finger on Mattie, never so much as shouted at her, not even when she figured he almost had a right to. Her tongue flapped like a raven's as a young woman, and she'd admit it. There was even a time or two when she hauled off and laced him. He only stood and took it.

  When the drink got hold of him in his seventies, which seemed like overnight, he didn't get cross, just quiet, run out of things to say.

  Sometimes he scarcely talked at all for days and days, fussing around in that damned shop, or bouncing along some old skid road at five miles an hour, or moping around the cemetery till he passed dead away. He'd freeze out there one night if he kept at it.

  I went on telling myself my own tales about Mattie, trying to gain some sense of what she was going through. I hated this whole drunken business with John, but not as much as she did. I'd idolized the man, but no, I wasn't married to him.

  It hurt me to think of Mattie as merely putting in time, killing off hours, because that had never been like her, any more than John seemed like the old John these days. Lately, if they did go visiting or out in the canoe or just to see some fish hawk or eagle nest or raspberry tangle or the sun going down on one of the lakes, he was like a ghost. She might as well be on her own, she claimed. It seemed as if he'd found some girlfriend and couldn't quit thinking about her.

  That other woman never used him right, but she stayed on his mind. No, not she: Just a damned jug.

  Time went by like a short night's sleep. Here it was 1933, and Mattie, all out of breath, telling her mother: "I'm over to marry John" and running out of the house like a hen on a journey. Her mother didn't like that. Always a funny duck, or why else would she wander off to a pl
ace full of snakes and alligators? But Mattie was eighteen, so Ma couldn't do much but watch her bang out the door and wobble across the bridge on her boughten high heels.

  And then here it was sixty years later, and all that business no more than a memory. Here she sat, drinking electric tea out of a half-broke cup.

  Mattie and John are gone, along with so many of their generation—all, in fact. But I still imagine her in her chair that morning, in what turned out to be John's last year and her next-to-last. She may suddenly have tasted something salty and found, to her astonishment, that she was weeping. Maybe she called herself foolish, right out loud in her kitchen.

  But how am I to know, even if I think I do? Say I have some nerve to make that claim, and I won't contradict you; I guess I do have nerve, but I can't help it. You tell yourself things, and you hope they make sense. What else can you do?

  Maybe she peeked out the shop-side window and saw him, or what was left of him, hair all anyhow on his head, blinking like an owl.

  That was a man who hewed thirty-two A railroad sleepers in one day. His shirt shone white as his teeth. He wrapped her up in his hard arms all night long, even in a nasty, leaky old tent.

  Now look, I hear her say.

  The Turkey Cure

  By middle spring, nearly every time I walked down our road with my pointers, we flushed the broad-winged hawk that nests in the same tall pine each spring. She's been a genie of renewal, and the life force in me surges to study her tail as she flies, the severity of its black and white bands somehow standing for the distinction between seasons. Dark winter. Bright spring.

  This year, thanks to last autumn's bountiful mast, the chipmunk and red squirrel populations had apparently grown threefold, a great thing for a hawk, of course, and for all the other predators—fox, coyote, fisher, and so on—whose energies have thrilled me from boyhood.

  And yet this time around, such tokens of rebirth and others, the loosing of freshets, budding of shad and thorn apple and chokecherry, ruckus of peepers, chatter of kingfishers, all failed to inspire me. My tendency to construct fancy poetic resonances in nature, however irresistible, struck me as more than ever inaccurate, in fact as absurd. The very idea of finding allegory in a hawk's tail like that, for the love of God!

  Surely it was the suicide, not even a year old, that had me down all through the winter. This beautiful boy, my oldest son's bosom friend, had fallen into a contemporary trap called crack, and ended up with a homemade noose around his neck out in California.

  But if this horror had proved a motive for my long despondency, I might have chosen from others: the obscene death by cancer, say, of my father-in-law, who got too weak at the last even to cough for himself. A bright, handsome, volatile man, he'd stuck to being a journalism professor, loathing the job for the final decade, waiting out retirement, at which he was diagnosed all but instantly. No time for his writing aspirations, none for the book-length project on that Cape Breton copper mine, on its place in the history, sociology, mythology of the region, which he'd never get to visit after all. His idea died when he did.

  Or I could batten onto my mother's life-threatening aortal operation, from which she did recover, but which forecast the closing of a crucial cycle: she who'd borne me would leave me. Years before the surgery, I'd had an odd vision. Standing on the stoop of my Maine river camp, I looked upward and imagined the heavens' vault closing itself like a womb after birth, killing any dream of reversion to that snug lair, which all through life a child will crave, however unconsciously, when comfort seems otherwise impossible.

  Closed out. The world blank as a sheet of paper, as the sheet unmarked by my wife's father, in which blank realm my role would be methodically to evaluate students' papers, mostly poems and fictions, not to write any more of these myself, not to write anything at all. Rather, I'd continue to take my turns fetching and carrying our kids but would be no proper father, down in the mouth all day and night, nor a proper husband to my excellent wife, who deserved worship, probably, but at the least some friendship.

  My agenda? Cook my share of so-so meals. Do my share of dishes. Watch the years mount, the yellow leaves of spring becoming the yellows of autumn overnight; the hare going white from brown in a blink; warbler ceding to snowbird; my body slumping. My fifties would be my sixties would be my seventies. Tomorrow.

  Attending all this was a changed regard for hunting, which, however inexplicably to some, had had so much to do with my self-regard all life long. I'd considered myself, particularly, one of the better grouse men around, but by virtue of a chainsaw accident that radically cut my leg and my woods time in the preceding fall and a rock-bottom bird population in the past few years, the tasty little monuments to success lay sparse in our freezer. It was also hard to make a young dog under these circumstances, and a made dog has forever been a far more important sort of monument.

  I began in fact to surmise that my skills in this crucial portion of my existence were dying, like too many men and women around me. If there'd been a time when I seemed a person, as one of the great Aldo Leopold's students once marveled about him, to whom the game just seemed to come, that time looked to be fled.

  The first morning of Vermont's turkey season, I had a time of it just to coax myself out of bed in the pitch dark. Uncharacteristically, I sensed failure before the fact, anticipated my fatigue, which would set in by noon and put me behind in my journeyman jobs. I'd have felt contempt for such tiredness, of course, in my naive youth, when a duck blind at dawn segued into six hours afield behind a pointer and then into an evening's carousal until the small hours.

  I did have to acknowledge that the hardwoods looked beautiful at the top of the first ridge, their leaves pastel, their every story melodious with migrants. The abandoned twitch roads were so thickly clotted with bluets that they seemed still to be snow-covered. Frogs croaked in the spring pools. Wakerobin showed in wet gullies.

  A lovesick barred owl called not far off. No tom turkey answered that sound, however, or my own imitation of it. For a month, there'd been turkey sign all over the four ridges I meant to roam that opening morning: I'd seen a gobbling jake in our very dooryard; I'd heard other toms uphill from the west bank of our pond. But on this day, no response. None, that is, save that owl's. Defying its reputation for wisdom, the bird coasted silently, inches over my head, and perched a spell in a gall-sick butternut. Moments passed. The bird went on disenchanted. And so, given the late drift of my spirits, it was too easy to construct crude allegory: the world had ceased answering me, or answered now in unsuitable ways.

  I trudged home well before the law said I had to.

  Work, appointments, and travel conspired to keep me off those highlands for almost ten days. I felt a bizarre gratitude for these obstacles, because I could moan with self-pity over being deprived, but with no obligation to take up the thing I was deprived of. For someone as mixed up as I, that meant the best of two bad worlds.

  And yet at length I did feel an old obligation, or a trace of it anyhow. I would mount the hills again after all. It seems my better self had retained some flicker of longstanding hope, in however obscure a guise. And that self had its reasons: on reaching the granite table that caps the first ridge, I was immediately greeted with a gobble.

  The call must have blotted out my melancholies. Or at least I don't remember them from the ensuing hour or so. I do recall surveying the terrain, simultaneously judging with my ventriloquizing, gun-ruined ears the location of the tom. I would need to drop to his elevation if I hoped to call him in.

  Well, I knew the country if anyone did. I turned directly away from the gobble, which now came with a heartening frequency, doglegged to a woods road that ran under a knoll to the west, and then crept back, the knoll covering me until the road petered out by the red oak stand in which I guessed my turkey strutted.

  The guess proved pretty accurate: he was moving among those woods, just on the other side of a horseback, some two hundred yards from where I quickly set up, m
y back to a lichen-swathed slab, my right foot pointed in his direction, Browning on my cocked left knee, veil drawn over my face.

  For a start I tried no more than a soft whimper and chirp. It was early, the sky just pearling. The turkey yammered right back at me, or so I believed, and I whiffed that ozone scent that I needn't describe to any hunter of wary game; my heart beat in a shirt-stretching cadence, and— despite the chill of a north-country dawn—tiny drops formed on my cheekbones. I slightly lessened the crook of my left leg, to see if it would hold more steadily in a different position. It did.

  Everything felt right. And yet, rather than coming my way, the tom started working south, climbing up one more elevation. I was patient. I didn't over-call or hasten to relocate. Minutes crept by, the bird's voice fading by degrees, before I took stock of the land again. At last I stood, then circled back to the east, because I knew another hill-hidden trail, the beat of deer and hare, that would provide quiet and easy travel and would put me at the bird's level again, about parallel, I believed, to where he now sang.

  Again and again I established myself at what appeared optimal places. Again and again I heard the gobble go dim and dimmer, always to the south. In fact and in honesty, then, there were moments when my mopery did return. Everything, I told myself, seemed auspicious about this hunt, except that I didn't have the requisite skills anymore to end it as I wanted.

  Still I rallied from these instants of despair. I had enough experience to realize that if the problem lay only in my calling, this tom, spooked, would long since have quit his gobbling. He must already be with a hen, I figured, and perhaps more than one. If I were to get a look at him, it would not be by way of deception but of ambush. Unable to turn him, I'd need to head him off.

  Most of the ridges on our property run north and south, but one is perpendicular to these. Turkeys often describe a circle in their morning rambles, so it occurred to me that this tom and his coterie might well come to that odd ridge out, turning east along it to regain the highest ridge of all, the one where they'd probably roosted. If that bet proved right, he'd eventually be traveling an almost knife-thin granite strip some hundred yards above the pond, a good lie for me.