A High New House

by Thomas Williams

  Then the inevitable sequence of hours came through his mind, one after the other, until the afternoon when she was not so brave any more and shook her head back and forth as if to throw off the plastic tube that went into her nose and down, jiggling the clamps and the bottle on its hanger. Tears rolled from the outside corners of her drowned eyes and she cried pettishly, “Help me, help me.”

  She had taken pain better than most, was better at taking it by far than her husband or her children. When she had had the compound fracture of her wrist she had been the calm one, the strong one. And he thought, My God, how much pain she must have if she is caused to do this—if it is Mary who is caused to do this.…

  As they cut nerves, cutting off pain in little bits and pieces, it was as if they cut off her life, too, by shreds—the pain, the possibility of it forever gone; the life forever gone. But new pain took the place of the old. She lived for six months and died almost weightless, ageless, the little lines and wrinkles of her familiar body smoothed as if by a filling pulp. Her arms turned to thin tubes, her forehead waxed as taut, as translucent as a yellow apple. Her eyes, before the final cutting, watched him, blameful as a beaten child’s. She whined for help: “What is happening to me?” And being a man only, he could stand, and stand, and stand, helpless at the foot of her crank-operated bed, the simple handle drawing his eyes, mocking, it seemed to him, telling him to crank, to grasp the handle in his strong hands and crank, sweat at it, crank faster and harder, crank until she is well again.

  He turned and his hand touched the firm, virginal pillow next to his. The linen smelled country new, of washdays and clotheslines.

  At midnight he heard what he first supposed to be a hundred dogs barking in the distance, and as the barking changed on the wind he suddenly knew, in exactly the same way he had known in his childhood, that it was the Canada geese flying over, low here because of the height of the land, streaming over in the darkness. Lorlorn, lorlon, lorlorn, the geese called to each other as they passed. He ran to the window—remembering an old excitement, feet numb on the cold boards—but the geese did not cross the moon. He remembered them well enough that way: the long wavering files of geese, necks thrust out straight, dark wings arcing tirelessly on their long journey over the guns, through all the deadly traps set for them—the weather, the ice, the hunting animals and the traitor decoys. Each one its own warm life deep in the cold sky, and they called to each other, kept close and on course together, facing with disciplined bravery that impossible journey.

  He came awake in the indeterminate time when night was breaking and the small windows were luminous squares upon the wall. He lay on his back and watched the light grow, the corners arrange themselves and the moldings darken, wondering at a curved shape above the closet door. As the morning increased (he heard pans banging down in the kitchen, Nana’s sharp morning voice) he finally saw that the curved shape was a bow hung on pegs. This room evidently had been a young boy’s during the summer: a huge fungus platter hung between the windows and in the back of the closet he had found a fly rod enmeshed in kinky leader. Nana had missed a trout hook crusted with dried worm, stuck high on a curtain.

  Before he went downstairs he remembered the bow, took it down and, wondering at the easy memories of his youth, strung it. He instinctively placed the lower end against the inside of his right foot, and his left hand slid easily up the wood with the string lightly guided by his finger tips. The string vibrated tautly, and he remembered, too, how a bow seemed lighter after being strung, the tense pressure communicating energy to the arm. He estimated the pull at sixty pounds—quite a powerful bow.

  “Oh, you found the bow’n arrow!” Nana said when he came into the kitchen with it. “You going to shoot? Say, how did you cock it?”

  He placed the bow against his foot, pulled with his right hand and pushed with the heel of his left hand, his fingers working the string out of the notch.

  “Nobody could fix it. The children going crazy they couldn’t shoot, nobody could cock it,” Nana said admiringly.

  “Do you have any arrows?”

  The old man had decided to listen. “In the umbrella stand is some arrows,” he said, and Nana rushed out after them. After breakfast she insisted they all go out and watch him shoot, and he was surprised at his own excitement when he fitted the nock of one of the warped target arrows to the string. He drew and loosed the arrow across the thirty yards between the driveway and the barn. Whap as the arrow hit the silvery, unpainted wood of the barn and stuck, quivering. A cloud of swallows streamed out of a sashless window, and shreds of dusty hay fell from between the boards. The old people were impressed.

  As he drew his second arrow the bow split apart above the grip. Arrow, string, half the bow fell loosely over his arms.

  “Ooooh!” the old people sighed. “The wood was too old,” the old man said. “It all dries up and it got no give to it.”

  “I’ll get you another one,” Hurley said. They shushed him up, said it wasn’t any good, that nobody could cock it anyway. But later when he drove his Drive-Ur-Self Chevrolet down into Leah for groceries and the mail, he stopped in at Follansbees’ hardware store.

  Old Follansbee remembered him from the times he and Mary had come up to ski, possibly not from the earlier time when Follansbee was a young man working in his father’s store and Hurley was a boy.

  “Do for you?” Old Follansbee’s bald head (once covered with black, bushy hair, parted in the middle) gleamed softly, approximately the same color and texture as his maple roll-top desk.

  “I’d like to buy a bow—and some arrows,” Hurley added in order to specify what kind of bow he meant. In Leah he had always been constrained to come immediately to the point. The old man led him to the sporting-goods corner where rifles and shotguns, fish poles and outboard motors, knives, rubber boots, decoys and pistols lay in cases, on counters, or were hung on racks. He remembered this part of the store and the objects he had fallen in love with as a boy. No girl had meant as much to him at fifteen as had the beautifully angular lines of a Winchester model 06, .22 pump. He even remembered the model number, but from this distance he wondered how a number could have meant so much.

  He tried out a few of the pretty, too modern bows until he found one that seemed to have the same pull as the one he had broken.

  “That one’s glass,” Old Follansbee said. “My boy says it don’t want to break.”

  “Glass? It’s made of glass?”

  “Correct. Strange, ain’t it? What they can do these days? You’ll want some arrows, did you say?“

  He bought two arrows. When he’d pulled the one out of the barn it came apart in his hands, split all the way up the shaft. He decided to replace it with two, even though he knew the New Hampshire way was to resent such prodigality. He bought a leather arm guard and finger tabs; then he saw the hunting arrows. The slim, three-bladed heads suggested Indians and his youth. The target arrows, beside them, seemed to have no character, no honest function. He bought two hunting arrows, and under old Follansbee’s suspicious, conventional eye, a bow-hunting license, feeling like a child who had spent his Sunday-school money on a toy.

  At the Post Office he found a joint communique from his worried children. “We have decided that it would be best.…” the words went. He sent two identical telegrams: Having wonderful time. Tend your business. Love, Dad. They all believed in the therapy of youth—in this case, grandchildren. He couldn’t think of a way to tell them that he loved them all too much.

  Nana and the old man walked with him as far as the ledges at the top of the wild orchard, careful in their white tennis shoes. Nana stood splayfooted on the granite, queen of the hill, and surveyed the valley and the advancing forest with a disapproving eye.

  “I see Holloways is letting their north pasture go back,” she said, shaking her head. She had seen whole hills go back to darkness, and many fine houses fall into their cellar holes. She turned toward Hurley accusingly, he being from the outside and thus responsib
le for such things. “You got to pay money to have them take the hay!”

  “Tell me it’s cheaper to buy it off the truck,” the old man said. “But I told them it don’t grow on trucks.” He stood beside his tall wife, in his baggy pants and old mackinaw. His new tennis shoes were startlingly white. “I call this ‘the hill of agony,’” he said, winking at Hurley.

  “You see where the deer come down to eat our garden?” Nana said, pointing to the deer trails through the apple trees. “We tell the game warden to shoot. Nothing. They hang bangers in the trees. All night, ‘Bang! Bang!’ Nobody can sleep.”

  “Neither could the deer. They stayed up all night and et my lettuce,” the old man said. He laughed and whacked his thigh.

  “You shoot me a nice young deer,” Nana said. “I make mincemeat, roasts, nice sausage for your breakfast.”

  He had tried to tell them that he didn’t want to shoot anything with the bow, just carry it. Could he tell them that it gave a peculiar strength to his arm, that it seemed to be a kind of dynamo? When he was a boy in these same woods he and his friends had not been spectators, but actors. Their bows, fish poles, skis and rifles had set them apart from the mere hikers, the summer people.

  “I won’t be back tonight unless the weather changes,” he said. The sun was warm on the dry leaves, but the air was crisply cool in the shadows. He said good-by to the old people, took off his pack and waited on the ledges to see them safely back to the house below, then unrolled his sleeping bag and rolled it tighter. The night before he had noticed on his geodetic map a small, five-acre pond high in the cleft between Cascom and Gilman mountains. It was called Goose Pond, and he seemed to remember having been there once, long ago, perhaps trout fishing. He remembered being very tired, yet not wanting to leave; he remembered the cattails and alders and a long beaver dam, the pond deep in a little basin. He was sure he could follow the brook that issued from the pond—if he could pick the right one from all the little brooks that came down between Gilman and Cascom.

  His pack tightened so that it rode high on his back, he carried his bow and the two hunting arrows in one hand. He soon relearned that arrows pass easily through the brush only if they go points first.

  Stopping often to rest, he climbed past the maples into ground juniper and pine, hearing often the soft explosions of partridge, sometimes seeing them as they burst up and whistled through the trees. He passed giant beeches, crossing their noisy leaves, then walked silently through softwood until he came to a granite knob surrounded by stunted, windgrieved hemlock. To the northwest he could see the Presidential Range, but Leah, the lake and the Pedersens’ farm were all out of sight. He ate a hard-boiled egg and one of the bittersweet wild apples he had collected on the way. The wind was delightfully cool against his face, but he knew his sweat would soon chill. At two o’clock the sun was fairly low in the hard blue sky—whole valleys were in shadow below.

  He took out his map. He had crossed three little brooks, and the one he could hear a short way ahead must be Goose Pond’s overflow. By the sound it was a fair-sized brook. When he climbed down through the hemlock and saw it he was sure. White water angled right and left, dropping over boulders into narrow sluices and deep, clear pools. He knelt down, drank, and dipped his head in and out of the icy water. His forehead turned numb, as if it were made of rubber. A water beetle darted to the bottom. A baby trout flashed green and pink beside a stone. It was as if he were looking through a giant lens into an alien world, where life was cold and cruel, and even the light had a quality of darkness about it. Odd little sticks on the bottom were the camouflaged larvae of insects, waiting furtively to hatch or to be eaten. Fish hid in the shadows under stones, their avid little mouths ready to snap. He shuddered and raised his head—a momentary flash of panic, as if some carnivorous animal with a gaping mouth might come darting up to tear his face.

  Following the brook, jumping from stone to stone, sometimes having to leave it for the woods in order to get around tangles of blowdown or waterfalls, he came suddenly into the deep silence of the spruce, where the channel was deep. In the moist, cathedral silence of the tall pillars of spruce he realized how deafening the white water had been. The wind stirred the tops of the trees and made the slim trunks move slowly, but could not penetrate the dim, yet luminous greenness of the place.

  And he saw the deer. He saw the face of the deer beside a narrow tree, and for a moment there was nothing but the face: a smoky-brown eye deep as a tunnel, it seemed, long delicate lashes, a black whisker or two along the white-shaded muzzle. The black nose quivered at each breath, the nostrils rounded. Then he began to follow the light brown line, motionless and so nearly invisible along the back, down along the edge of the white breast. One large ear turned slowly toward him. It was a doe, watching him carefully, perfect in the moment of fine innocence and wonder—a quality he suddenly remembered—the expressionless readiness of the deer. But other instincts had been working on him. He hadn’t moved, had breathed slowly, put his weight equally on both legs. The light sharpened as if it had been twilight and the sun had suddenly flashed. Every detail—the convolutions of the bark on the trees, tiny twigs, the fine sheen of light on each hair of the doe, each curved, precious eyelash—became vivid and distinct. Depth grew, color brightened; his hunter’s eyes became painfully efficient, as if each needlelike detail pierced him. The world became polarized on the axis of their eyes. He was alone with the doe in a green world that seemed to cry for rich red, and he did not have time to think: it was enough that he sensed the doe’s quick decision to leave him. An onyx hoof snapped, her white flag rose and the doe floated in a slow arc, broadside to him, clear of the trees for an endless second. He watched down the long arrow, three blades moved ahead of the doe and at the precise moment all tension stopped; his arms, fingers, eyes and the bow were all one instrument. The arrow sliced through the deer.

  Her white flag dropped. Gracefully, in long, splendid leaps, hoofs stabbing the hollow-sounding carpet of needles, the doe flickered beyond the trees. One moment of crashing brush, then silence. A thick excitement rose like fluid into his face, his arms seemed to grow to twice their normal size, become twice as strong. And still his body was governed by the old, learned patterns. He walked silently forward and retrieved his bloody arrow, snapped the feathers alive again. The trail was a vivid line of jewels, brighter than the checkerberries against their shiny green leaves, unmistakable. He rolled the bright blood between his fingers as he slowly moved forward. He must let the doe stop and lie down, let her shock-born strength dissipate in calm bleeding. Watching each step, figuring out whole series of steps, of brush bendings in advance, he picked the silent route around snags and under the blowdown.

  In an hour he had gone a hundred yards, still tight and careful, up out of the spruce and onto a small rise covered with birch and poplar saplings. The leaves were loud underfoot, and as he carefully placed one foot, the doe rose in front of him and crashed downhill, obviously weak, staggering against the whippy birch. A fine mist of blood sprayed at each explosion of breath from the holes in her ribs. He ran after her, leaping over brush, running along fallen limbs, sliding under low branches that flicked his cheeks like claws. His bow caught on a branch and jerked him upright. After one impatient pull he left it. He drew his knife. The brown shape ahead had disappeared, and he dove through the brush after it, witch hobble grabbing at his legs.

  The doe lay against a stump, one leg twitching. He knelt down and put one hard arm around her neck, and not caring for the dangerous hoofs, the spark of life, raised the firm, warm neck against his chest and sighed as he stabbed carefully into the sticking place. Blood was hot on the knife and on his hand.

  He rolled over into the leaves, long breaths bending him, making his back arch. His shirt vibrated over his heart, his body turned heavy and pressed with unbelievable weight into the earth. He let his arms melt into the ground, and a cool, lucid sadness came over his flesh.

  He made himself get up. In order to
stand he had to fight gravity, to use all his strength—a quick fear for his heart. His joints ached and had begun to stiffen. He must keep moving. Shadows were long and he had much to do before dark. He followed the blood trail back and found his bow and one arrow. He limped going back down the hill; at a certain angle his knees tended to jackknife, as if gears were slipping.

  He stood over the clean body of the doe, the white belly snowy against brown leaves. One hind leg he hooked behind a sapling, and he held the other with his knee as he made the first long incision through the hair and skin, careful not to break the peritoneum. He ran the incision from the breast to the tail, then worked the skin back with his fingers before making the second cut through the warm membrane, the sticky blue case for the stomach and entrails. He cut, and the steamy innards rolled unbroken and still working out onto the ground. A few neat berries of turd rattled on the leaves. He cut the anus and organs of reproduction clear of the flesh, then found the kidneys and liver and reached arm-deep into the humid chest cavity, the hot smell of blood close in his nostrils, and removed the yellow lungs in handfuls. Then he pulled out the dark red heart. Kidneys, liver and heart he wrapped carefully in his sandwich wrappings, then rose and painfully stretched. Goose Pond lay just below; he could see a flicker of water through the skein of branches, and there he would make camp.

  With his belt looped around the neck and front hoofs, he slid the doe down toward the pond. It was dusk by the time he found a dry platform of soft needles beneath a hemlock, next to the water. The doe had become stiff enough so that he could hang it in a young birch, head wedged in a fork. He spread his sleeping bag, tried it for roots and stones, and found none. The last high touch of sun on the hill above him had gone; he had even prepared ground for a fire when he realized that he had no energy left, no appetite to eat the liver of the doe.