The Reserve

by Russell Banks

  “You ever do this before?” Jordan asked.

  “What? Bury somebody in the Reserve?”

  “No. But, yeah, that, too. I meant, you ever dig a grave before?”

  “Not in the Reserve. But yes, a couple times I’ve had to dig a grave.”

  “Who for?”

  “For the family,” Hubert said. “My family. In the old family plot off Hitchcock Road.”

  “Who’d you bury?”

  “My old man. Then my mother.”

  “What about your wife?”

  Hubert was silent for a moment. “She’s in the town cemetery.”

  “You ever shoot anybody before?”

  “I didn’t shoot her, Jordan. The answer is no.”

  “What about in the war?”

  “I was only seventeen, and I had to take care of my mother. So I stayed out. My brothers went over.”

  “Oh. Too bad. You would’ve been a good soldier,” Jordan said.

  “Why do you say that?”

  “You’ve got all the necessary skills. You’d have made a good sniper. And you don’t rattle easily when someone gets shot.”

  “Go to hell, Jordan. I didn’t shoot her.”

  “She didn’t shoot herself.”

  “What about you? You ever shoot anybody in the war?”

  “I was a flyer. I shot at other airplanes, not people.”

  “There must’ve been people in those planes, though.”

  “True enough, Hubie. True enough.”

  “Did you shoot any of those airplanes down?”

  “Two. I made two kills, both on the same day. April 4, 1918.”

  “So you shot people, then. You killed people.”

  “Yes. Germans. But I didn’t have to bury them.”

  The moldering, sunlit bed of fallen needles quilted the ground. The view of the lake and mountains was blocked by trees, Vanessa noted, but it wasn’t a bad place to be buried, she thought. Daddy might even have preferred having his ashes up here instead of in the lake. A light wind slipped delicately through the tall pines above, and sunlight fell in patches between the feathered branches of the trees and warmed the ground where she sat. She wondered if she could trust the two men equally. She decided that, under pressure, Hubert would crack before Jordan. Hubert St. Germain was a local, however, and a guide, a man more trusted by the authorities than Jordan Groves, the Red, the artist from away. They’d probably go easy on Hubert, take whatever he said at face value and search for Vanessa’s mother elsewhere. They’d check her bank records, interview the cook and housekeeper and gardener in Tuxedo Park and the doorman and housekeeper in Manhattan, they’d call all her known friends and ask them if they’d heard from Mrs. Cole in the weeks since she was last seen by Russell Kendall at the Tamarack Club going in to the Cole family camp at the Reserve with her daughter. Jordan Groves, the artist from Petersburg, they’d have no reason to question, so he’d not have to lie or cover up. Unless, of course, someone heard or saw him fly in this morning or sees or hears him flying out later today. But she wasn’t worried about Jordan. He was used to lying, despite the fact that he claimed to tell the unvarnished truth, regardless of the consequences, in those travel books of his. They were probably mostly lies, too.

  Hubert was a different sort of man, however. It wasn’t that he so much loved telling the truth as that he hated lying. Keeping silent, saying no more than necessary, that was his way of avoiding both. The sheriff, or maybe a police inspector from missing persons in Manhattan, would ask him when he last saw Mrs. Cole, and he’d say the date. Where? they’d ask. Out at the Cole place. Did he see her leave the camp? No. Did he see the daughter there? Yes. Did he see the daughter leave the camp? No. Were they both still at the camp when he left? Yes. Thank you very much, Mr. St. Germain.

  Vanessa doubted they’d even bother to go to the trouble of rowing out to inspect the place. Russell Kendall might send someone from his staff to Rangeview to check around for signs of anything suspicious; but he’d probably send Hubert St. Germain, since the guide knew the place so much better than anyone else and had keys to all the doors.

  When the hole was nearly five feet deep and difficult to dig any deeper without needing a ladder to climb out of it, the three returned to the lake for the body. Again, Vanessa stood off a ways and watched as the men worked. They wrapped the body in the white, red, and black Hudson Bay blanket from the bedroom where Evelyn Cole had been imprisoned, making a shroud of it by tying the blanket at the ends and the middle with rope—the same pieces of clothesline Vanessa had used to bind her mother’s ankles and wrists when she was still alive. Then Hubert and Jordan grabbed on to the ropes and carried the body of Evelyn Cole, like a log, up the slope behind the compound to the grave, for it was that to them now, a grave, not a hole in the ground. They walked slowly and stayed silent, as if the two men were pallbearers and the woman coming along behind were a priest or minister.

  With the body wrapped in the blanket, they could no longer see the dead woman’s face and the ugly wound in her chest and the blood, distancing them somewhat from the violence of her death and bringing them closer to the inescapable fact of her death, its finality.

  That would be the hardest thing for Jordan and Hubert to lie about, Vanessa realized. The actual fact of her mother’s death. It would be far easier to lie about how she died.

  Vanessa herself would have no difficulty claiming that her mother had simply disappeared, that’s all. There is no explanation for it, she’d say. The woman has vanished. One can speculate about why or how for as long as one wants; but the fact, the only fact that counts, is that the woman is gone. Vanessa would have no trouble forgetting all other facts and concentrating on that one alone, until it became the only fact that mattered. Absent a sure sense of the necessary and essential nature of the truth in all things known and unknown, it’s actually difficult to lie. It may even be impossible. In that sense, Vanessa was not a liar. She knew the meanings of the words true and false and was adept at distinguishing between a person who was a liar and one who was honest—Jordan was the first, Hubert the second—but she herself was neither. Her understanding of the truth of a given event was less of a concrete thing existing in the world—whether revealed or concealed, known or not—than of an incidental attribute. For her, the truth was more a coloration of reality than the organizing principle of its underlying structure. For her, it was utterly, and merely, contingent. Thus the truth was somewhat transient and changeable, one minute here, the next gone. It was something one could assert and a moment later turn around and deny, with no sense of there being any contradiction. Merely a correction. For Vanessa, the truth was like a bird that flies from tree to tree, so that the statement, The tree has a bird perched in it, referred to this nearby tree, then that, as the bird flew to the next tree, then that, and on through the entire forest of trees, and from there to the next forest, until the bird had flown around the globe, tree to tree, forest to forest, and had come full circle and could perch all over again in this tree nearby. By then, however, people had lost interest in the bird and its location.

  The men solemnly lowered the body into the grave with two pieces of rope and when it was down dropped the ropes onto it.

  “Do you want to say anything over her?” Jordan asked Vanessa.

  She stood at the edge of the open grave and looked down into the darkness. “Don’t make me talk, or I’ll start crying. I don’t want to cry over her. Or Daddy either. Not yet,” she said and stepped away.

  “But you will?”

  “What?”

  “Cry over them.”

  “Yes.”

  “What about you, Hubert? You want to say a few words over her?”

  “I can’t tell if you’re joking or not,” Hubert said.

  “I’m serious enough. I’m not religious myself, but I thought maybe one or both of you might be.”

  “I guess I’m not especially religious, either. Not in a churchy way, anyhow. But it seems a shame to just bury her
like this. Like she was a dog that got put down or something.”

  “That was my thought,” Jordan said, and it was. He hadn’t been joking.

  Vanessa said, “Will you two stop! Just put the rocks into the hole, and shovel the dirt back in.”

  “Hubert? You want to say the words?” Jordan asked.

  I really ought to do it, the guide thought. Of the three, he was the one most responsible for her death. But he shook his head and said, “No. You say the words, Jordan. You’re better at talking.”

  Jordan nodded and stood at the foot of the open grave and addressed the dead woman. “Mrs. Cole, Evelyn, Mother. This is not easy. I speak for all of us. We are truly sorry. We’re sorry that, for reasons no one could have anticipated, we were unable to prevent your accidental death this morning. No one of us wished you dead, especially by such violent means. We’re also sorry that we were unable to provide you with a proper funeral and that we cannot comfort your many friends and acquaintances from all—”

  “Jordan! For God’s sake, stop it!” Vanessa shouted. “You’re making a mockery of her!”

  Hubert said, “No, he isn’t. He’s just saying the truth. Except he’s not saying that I might have prevented her death, if I hadn’t tried to take the gun out of her hands. He should say that, too. Go ahead, Jordan, and finish.”

  “We’re sorry, yes. We’re sorry that we can’t comfort your many friends and acquaintances, because we have promised to protect your daughter, Vanessa, from being charged with kidnapping and confining you against your will and possibly even charged with your murder. Although we all know that your death was an accident. It’s not her fault that a family quarrel got out of hand and ended tragically like this. It’s not my or Hubert’s fault, either, that we found ourselves witnesses to your unfortunate demise.”

  “You see, Hubert? He is mocking her. And us, too. You and me. Are you through, Jordan?”

  “Yes, I’m through. We can bury her now,” Jordan said.

  When they finished filling the grave with large rocks and had shoveled back all the dirt they had taken out of it, they tamped down the low mound and scattered a thick layer of pine needles over it. They took dead branches from the trees nearby and raked over their tracks, and when they were done it was midafternoon and the forest had been restored to its former condition.

  At the shore of the lake they tossed the bloodstained rocks and clumps of moss and sod into the water. Jordan wondered about the gun. He told Vanessa that Dr. Cole’s shotgun should disappear, too.

  “Take it with you when you leave in your airplane. Drop it in the lake.”

  “Sorry. I’ve committed all the crimes I’m going to commit today.”

  “Do you want it?” Vanessa asked Hubert. “I know you admire it,” she said, thinking that possession of the gun would tie him even more closely to the shooting, making him a more trusted ally in this—trusted to lie about the whereabouts of Evelyn Cole and how she came to be there.

  “It’s a good weapon. But I’d have to explain how I came by it.”

  “You can say I gave it to you. As a remembrance of my father and in gratitude for all the years you worked for him as a guide and hunting companion. I would have given it to you yesterday, if I’d thought of it. If I’d known it was there.”

  “Too bad you didn’t,” Jordan said. He stripped off his bloodstained shirt and squatted at the water’s edge to rinse it clean.

  Vanessa glared at his bare back for a second, then smiled, because his back was pretty and because he was right and was bold enough to say it. She liked that about him—his willingness to say out loud whatever he thought was the case.

  “This isn’t working,” he said and stood and shook out the shirt. “I’ll have to burn these clothes when I get back to my studio.”

  Hubert scanned the lake and saw a guide boat putting out at the Carry, a pair of fishermen in it. “We got company,” he said.

  Quickly, Jordan ducked behind a ledge a few yards from the shore, well out of sight of the fishermen. “This means I’m stuck here till they go in,” he said, more to himself than to the others. Jordan was not eager to go home and face Alicia again. For a few hours he had succeeded in not thinking about her, in spite of Hubert’s presence, which had briefly released him from the dark, painful grip of his busted marriage. At the same time, however, he wanted to leave this place and put this particular mess behind him. Also, he believed that as soon as Hubert was gone and he and Vanessa were alone, she would begin to weep over the death of her mother—he suspected she was saving her tears for the occasion—and he would have to comfort her. One of the things that had most attracted him to her from the beginning and especially today was her refusal to be comforted, and he didn’t want that to come to an end. Being swept up by a woman’s unfocused anger was new to him and had a fresh, erotic charge to it. Jordan Groves was used to responding to the sadness of women, not their anger, and in recent years that had grown old and tired.

  “I don’t think they saw you, Jordan,” Hubert said. “But if we can see them,” he said to Vanessa, “they must be seeing me and you standing here like dummies.”

  “That’s all right. It’ll only corroborate that you were at the camp and Mother and I were here together. So go ahead,” she said. “Leave now. Don’t forget the gun.”

  Hubert said, “All right, I’ll keep the doctor’s shotgun and say you gave it to me as a remembrance.”

  “It’s the truth. Daddy would have wanted you to have it.”

  He pushed the boat into the water and saw the pool of blood in the bottom. Without comment he rocked the boat and dipped the near gunnel into the lake, letting a few inches of water in. Then he drew the boat back onto land, turned it over and emptied it. Gently, he wrapped the shotgun in his jacket and lay it and the oars in the boat and pushed the boat into the lake again. He seated himself in the stern and took up the oars. “Against the rules, you know, for a guide to be carrying a shotgun or rifle in the Reserve. Only the clients. Handgun’s all right, though.”

  “Don’t hurt yourself thinking about it too much, Hubie,” Jordan said. “Just remember, you don’t have to lie. All you’ve got to do is leave a few things out. Like the fact that you saw me out here.”

  “There’s a few other facts I got to leave out.”

  Vanessa said, “Can you see who that is?” She shaded her eyes with the palm of her hand and gazed at the fishermen, now in the middle of the lake.

  “I think it’s Ambassador Smith and his guide, Sam LaCoy. They’ll probably fish till five or so and then head back to the clubhouse, so as to get there before dark. Ambassador Smith, he always stays at one of the clubhouse cottages.”

  “Tommy’s a friend of my parents. When you pass near, tell him that Mother and I want to be alone, okay?”

  Hubert nodded and without saying good-bye commenced to rowing across the lake, toward the Carry. He kept the boat on a line that would bring him close enough to the other boat to be heard, close enough to give Ambassador Smith and Sam LaCoy the message from Miss Cole, who was staying at Rangeview with her mother to mourn the death of Dr. Cole in the place he loved best. As he rowed, Hubert began gradually to feel that he was no longer a partner in crime with Jordan Groves and Vanessa Cole; he was a loyal Adirondack guide again, a man with a known role in life and fixed protocol, and was relieved by it. He thought about the hand-tooled Belgian shotgun wrapped in his wool jacket in the bottom of the boat. A beautiful weapon, he said to himself, almost calling it a beautiful animal. To him, guns were living creatures, and he was going to enjoy keeping company with this one, admiring it with his eyes, holding it in his hands, walking in the woods with it, using it to hunt down and kill other living creatures.

  ALICIA KNEW JORDAN WASN’T IN THE HOUSE—HE HADN’T COME up to bed, and she’d heard his airplane take off at dawn—and did not know when he might return or what he would say or do then. She did not yet believe that their marriage had ended. Because of the boys, he would not ask for a divorce, she
was sure of that much. Jordan would never leave their upbringing to her and was incapable of raising them alone. And he was not in love with anyone else. He wouldn’t leave Alicia for another woman. Not even that Von Heidenstamm woman. And because Jordan was a sexually confident man, sure of his power to attract all types of women, he was not likely to be threatened by the fact that his wife had slept with Hubert St. Germain, who was not a sexually confident man. She did not think Jordan would become violent, even though he was known for his occasional outbursts of violence. There were men whom she might have slept with, she thought, men who might have made him lash out physically against them and against her as well—famous artists, rich men, politically committed men of the left, like Dos, who actually had once suggested to her that they become lovers. But, no, now that she thought about it, not even the rich and famous author John Dos Passos had made Jordan Groves jealous. She had told Jordan that Dos had invited her to meet him secretly for the purpose of making love—waiting before she told him until after Dos and Katie had gone back to New York, explaining that Dos had been drunk and probably would have propositioned any halfway attractive woman in the room that evening. Jordan had found it funny and faintly ridiculous. “Dos? The little rascal,” he’d said. “I didn’t think he had it in him.”

  Jordan competed with every man he met, whether in arm wrestling, making art, politics, money, or gathering the attention of women, but he seemed jealous of no man. Jealousy was close to envy, however, and Alicia knew that there were certain men her husband envied. But as types rather than as individuals. That may be the difference between the two emotions, she thought: one felt jealous of individuals, but one envied types. And she knew, as only a wife can, that her husband secretly envied, not men like John Dos Passos, but the poor. Especially the poor working-class men and women of his town. Her husband wished that he could be the famous artist Jordan Groves and yet also be one of them, one of those he perceived as the oppressed, the downtrodden victims of the rich and powerful. And it wasn’t just the poor, out-of-work, white Americans of his town, but also the Eskimos he’d lived among for months in Greenland and the Inuits of Alaska, the Negro field hands he’d drawn and painted in Louisiana, the Cuban sugarcane cutters, the Indians in the Andes silver mines, and most recently the peasants and workers fighting against the Fascists in Spain. He wanted to be one of them. He envied their powerlessness. To him, their powerlessness signified an innocence that he had abandoned long ago, when, after he’d come home from the war, he’d refused to work alongside his father, the carpenter, and had left his war bride and gone east to New York to become an artist.