The plane came free of the dock. The lake roiled now, gray and ominous with the approaching storm. We headed into the oncoming waves for several minutes, gained speed finally, bumped twice, then rose. The first wisps of cloud caressed the ridge tops. Snowflakes fell.
Around me, the talk was of the hunt to come. I tuned it out and looked down, trying to identify the various trees by their crowns: Red pine, poplar and, in the wetland bottoms, ash and willow. Where the leaves had fallen I could make out the faint lines of game trails and my eyes became hazy, closed, then opened and shut again as I thought of being in the big woods again, slipping quietly after a deer, after a memory.
It was the day after Thanksgiving, almost two years prior to the flight. I was home at our town house in Boston’s Back Bay, preparing leftover turkey sandwiches for my kids. Though I had willed myself over the years to rarely think of my father, when I did, it was of the eventuality of his passing and how I’d react. I used to tell myself that the time apart would lesson its significance. But, as is often the case, the stories we tell ourselves disintegrate under the hammer of reality.
“This Diana Jackman?” the man with the Down East accent asked.
“Yes.”
“Been hard to find you. Got bad news. Your father’s passed on. Been dead two days up in the woods there nor’ east a Baxter Park. Hunters found him laying next to a giant twelve-pointer. Biggest deer I’ve seen in years. The boys drug it in to show everybody.”
I had already faded into the shadow world that comes after someone you know dies. “Heart attack?” I asked.”No, ma’am, sorry to say, but appears a suicide,” he said. “And, sorrier still, but the coyotes been at him. We need you to identify the body.”
I summoned all my strength, got directions and hung up. Kevin looked up at me from the kitchen table, where he was trying to get Emily, my younger child, to stop playing with her sandwich. He still had the lank blond hair I remembered from college. He still had that long, slender body that begged for fashionable clothes.
“I have to go to Maine,” I said.
The shock must have shown in my face, because Kevin got up fast and walked toward me. “Why? Did someone die?”
I answered without thinking. “My… my father.”
“Your father?” His bewilderment was total. “I thought your father died years ago. Diana?”
The room around me whirled, but I managed to make it stop. “He did die years ago. At least to me. And that’s what counted.”
Now Kevin’s angular face twisted from puzzlement to anger. “You’ve lied about this all these years?”
“Mommy lied!” Emily yelled from the table. “She doesn’t get her allowance.”
“Shut up, Em!” said Patrick, my firstborn, and the worrier in the family. He could see how off balance I was.
“Diana, why would you do this?” Kevin demanded.
The room whirled again and I stuttered. “I don’t know. I have to go to Maine.”
“I’m coming, too,” he said. “I’ll call my mother. She’ll baby-sit.”
I shook my head. “You never knew him and neither did the kids. I’d like to keep it that way. I’ll explain when I get back.”
You’ll be surprised to hear that my father was a doctor, a good one, which in some ways, makes our story all the more tragic. But I’m getting ahead of myself. Suffice it to say, he knew where the vital organs lay. And I believe he knew I’d be the one to come to identify him. Who else? I was his only child, the last of his line. I’m sure he put a bullet through his chest to do the job correctly, and yet to lesson the impact a head wound would have had on me.
My father’s face had not been touched by the scavengers, and I know this sounds awful, but I almost wished it had, for when they drew back the sheet I saw how old he’d become in the intervening years, and despite my effort at steely detachment, I began to choke. His once-bushy black eyebrows had gone sparse and white. His hair was pale, too, and longer than I remembered it. His flesh was creviced with wrinkles. His cheekbones stuck out and made me wonder how much he’d been eating lately.
I couldn’t bring myself to place my hands on him, to stroke his skin, to call him Daddy. I just nodded my head to identify him, then walked out of the coroner’s office where the wind picked up and swirled until the road grit got into my eyes.
After making the funeral arrangements, I drove to the big white Victorian north of Bangor that my parents had raised me in. I stood on the porch for a long while, getting the strength to enter.
I looked down the hill to the ice forming on my mother’s heart-shaped pond and I choked again; she’d been dead fifteen years and yet he’d kept her precious gazebo repaired and freshly painted. A memorial to her.
My father’s lawyer, a young preppie named Wilson, pulled into the driveway and made it easier for me to go inside. We walked through the house together the way you would walk through a furniture store, seeing but not seeing. So much of my life here I’d locked away in closets, hidden from my husband, hidden from myself. I was determined not to let my father’s death open them again.
Wilson and I reviewed the papers my father had left behind at the dining room table. I got everything. The house, the cabin up by Baxter, the land, the securities, the money, everything. I told him to sell it all and place the money in a trust for Patrick and Emily.
“You want nothing?” Wilson asked, incredulous. “There’s a lot here.”
“A few minor things, but nothing important,” I said, knowing that Kevin would be enraged; my husband, despite his many admirable qualities, was a spendthrift, always looking for new infusions of cash to keep up with the lifestyle we led but couldn’t afford. But in this instance, Kevin’s needs would have to be subordinate to my own.
“Are we done?” I asked.
“Almost,” the attorney said. From his pocket he drew an envelope. It was addressed to “Little Crow” in my father’s handwriting.
My head came up with a snap.
The Otter lurched from side to side, then dropped fifty feet through a vacuum pocket in heavy turbulence. The plane shook and rolled right and fell again, this time for two hundred feet. Then it leveled and the horrible vibration lessened.
“Oh, God!” Arnie yelled. He dug through the pocket on the seatback in front of him, got out the plastic bag and retched.
“There you go. What’d I say?” Phil said, pointing his finger at Butch. “Fan belt starts to whine, the doc falls to pieces.”
Over the speaker, the pilot yelled: “Hold on, now! It’s gonna get tight.”
The vibration returned and got worse as we descended through the clouds. Arnie groaned. I gripped the arms until I could no longer feel my fingers. Kurant, the redheaded guy, was staring at the ceiling. Lenore Addison was cool, working at her red fingernails with an emery board while Earl gritted his teeth. Finally, when I thought I couldn’t take it anymore, the bouncing and dropping stopped and we broke free of the clouds.
There was a long, narrow lake and, beyond it, a broad expanse of ridges, parks and flats extending for miles in every direction. The highlands were mostly coniferous, spruce and pine varieties. And to the north there were dozens of openings in the forest.
Griff yelled to the pilot: “It’s been logged.”
“For the deer, eh?” the pilot responded. “Some are clearcuts. Others are fields old man Metcalfe had planted for the deer — clovers, oats, alfalfa, rye grass, winter wheat and a bunch of other exotic high-protein stuff.”
He held up his hand before Griff could ask him another question. He pressed forward on a lever to the right of his seat. The engine grumbled in protest and then we were whizzing down over the lake. The snow fell heavier here. Blue fog from the cooling water hung in the trees on the shoreline. Beyond, a flat of several miles. And beyond that, like inverted thunder clouds, opaque, mutating and dangerous, the shadow of ridges.
The plane made the final ten-foot drop, then heaved into chop that spun the Otter sideways. The wing tip cut waves
and threatened to dive. The pilot fought for control, righting the wing at last and straightening the fuselage. He trimmed the throttle. We coasted in a slow, undulating taxi through the rough water. We all sighed with relief.
Now I could make out a dock jutting into the lake and, beyond it, a multistory log lodge with a front gallery set back in a grove of ponderosas. A set of elk antlers hung above the stairway. Stretched along the shoreline were eight smaller renditions of the great lodge. Smoke puffed from every chimney.
“Welcome to Metcalfe,” the pilot said as we pulled up to the dock. “Sorry for the ride, but I figured it was better than sitting back in town, eh? Given the weather forecast, there’s no way I would have got you in here for at least another week.”
“Just get me out of this thing,” Arnie said, sweat running down his pink cheeks
“Not before me,” Earl croaked.
I got to the plane door to find a wiry fellow with a closecropped beard holding his hand out for me. He wore a denim jacket and pants, a down vest and a fluorescent orange cap that read “Metcalfe Trophy Hunts.” He introduced himself as Mike Cantrell, outfitter and lead guide. I was somewhat surprised that he had an American, not a Canadian, accent.
Out on the dock, Cantrell called our names and gave us cabin numbers. I would take Cabin Four. Dinner was at five-thirty, but Cantrell wanted us all in the main lodge a half hour early to go over logistics. He jerked a thumb toward a young man stooping on the shoreline next to five wooden handcarts. “Grover will show you where you’re bunking. He’s a little slow upstairs, but he’s been here for years and is about the kindest guy you’ll ever meet.”
I moved to one side as the others hustled toward shore. After the flight, I wanted to be still for a moment or two. I closed my eyes and breathed in the spicy pine smoke wafting from the cabins and wondered at the tingle of new snowflakes on my skin, not knowing that in the coming days I would grow to fear the sensation.
The pilot, who had been checking the struts, called out to Cantrell, “I’m gonna be moving along now, before the storm sets in and I end up trapped.”
“See you in ten days, then,” Cantrell said.
“Yeah, I’ll try to be out here around nine A.M. on the twenty-sixth. Oh, before I forget: I got a message from Curly, the security guy with Metcalfe Timber. if an old trapper named Pawlett wanders in, to have him call out. He keeps tabs on the logging camps for the company this time a year and was due for a check-in nearly ten days ago.”
“Will do,” Cantrell promised.
The pilot got back in the plane, waited until Cantrell had thrown off the dock lines, then taxied away. By then, the Addisons and the three Pennsylvania hunters had gone behind Grover toward their cabins.
I lugged my bags to shore, where Griff gave me a hand loading them on one of the carts. Kurant was snapping photographs of the floatplane taking off, with a camera mounted with a large telephoto lens. Cantrell came up toting a big brown canvas bag.
“Here’s your bag, Steve. But I can’t seem to find your weapons case,” Cantrell said.
“Because I haven’t got one,” Kurant replied.
Cantrell set the bag down hard on the last of the carts. “I don’t understand.”
“Actually, I’m not here to hunt, Mr. Cantrell,” he said. “I’m working on a story about the culture of hunting for Men’s Journal. Since whitetail deer hunting seems to be the only portion of the hunting community in America that’s growing, not shrinking, and the late Mr. Metcalfe was one of the world’s greatest whitetail hunters, my editors and I figured what better place to profile the subculture than his estate as it opens to the first paying customers.”
Something unspeakable came over Cantrell’s face. His lower lip bunched. The quiver in his voice betrayed great effort at control. “Couldn’t you have been up front about this? You posed as a regular client… booked a hunt… aw, pinch my nuts!”
“Calm down, now,” Kurant said, his own face reddening.
“I, we… the magazine… wanted to be treated like any other guest, so we just booked it straightforward. You have no reason to be upset.”
Cantrell growled, “Some goddamned reporter sneaks in here, looking to do a hatchet job on hunting, like that’s unusual, and I have no reason to be upset? You’re right — look at me — I’m cheery!”
Kurant pointed at the outfitter. “Mr. Cantrell, I don’t do hatchet jobs.”
Cantrell threw up his hands. “Tell it to the trees. You writers are all the same: lackeys for knee-jerk feelings. No connection to nature.”
“Think any way you want,” Kurant replied. “I’ve paid my seven thousand dollars to be here. You’ve cashed the check. I expect to be treated like any other guest.”
“My other guests hunt.”
“Fair enough,” Kurant said. “I’ll hunt with my camera, sit in a tree perch, or whatever you call them, all day.”
Somewhere in the clouds over the lake, the floatplane banked south. Cantrell searched the sky for it. The buzz of its engine faded, leaving nothing but the wind and the snow and the slap of the lake against the dock.
Cantrell stared hard at the writer. “What other choice do I have now? But I’ll tell you something straight: you start upsetting the others, I’ll confine you to camp. Clear?”
Kurant forced a smile. “Perfectly.”
“Good; now, I’ve got a lot to get done before nightfall.” Cantrell strode off, shaking his head and muttering to the sky.
Kurant looked at me and then at Griff. “Guess I won’t be getting his perspective.”
“Wouldn’t expect so,” Griff said. “And you won’t get it from me or anyone else here if you go on being sneaky. Understood?”
There was a moment between them and then Kurant said, “Understood.”
Grover shambled down the hill, whistling. He’d turned his orange cap backward on his head, exposing a doughy, contented face. He had smooth pink skin and ears that stuck out from the sides of his head. His jacket was unzipped to reveal gray wool pants too big for his waist; he’d cinched them to himself with a wide black belt.
“Hello, hello!” Grover said.
“Hello, hello yourself,” Griff replied. “You’re a happy guy.”
“Grover’s always happy at the lodge, eh?” He beamed and tugged at his earlobe. “Three years not hearing the loons sing or the wolves howl or watching the big deer run. Sure Grover’s happy now; he’s home! Come on, then, let’s show you the cabins.”
Grover tugged at his earlobe again and let loose with another of those beaming expressions. You knew something wasn’t right with him — the way he always referred to himself in the third person and that faraway cast to his gentle eyes — but like a yellow lab puppy, he made you feel as if you knew him the second you met him, that his heart was good, that there was nothing contrived about him.
He gently pushed me aside, got behind the handle of my cart and urged it up the embankment. I hurried after him. Kurant called out, “Cantrell said you’ve been here a long time. How long, Grover?”
The cabin boy’s face bunched up as if that question had an obvious answer. “Born here. Momma was Mr. Jimmy’s cook. Grover and Momma spent six months, ice-out to end of deer season, here. Mr. Jimmy fished in the summer and hunted bird and deer in the fall. Grover listened to the loons.”
“And what else?” Kurant asked.
“What else what?”
“What else does Grover do?”
“Hauls the wood to the cabins and ice from icehouse to kitchen and bags from the dock to the lodge. He unloads the supply plane. He helps peel potatoes and tends the summer garden. At night he watch the moon. The lodge is a happy place to be.”
“Does your mom still cook here?” I asked.
The beam dimmed. “Momma died the year before Mr. Jimmy disappeared. So Grover spent all the time in the apartment the company rented him in town. Till Mr. Cantrell come looking for him last summer. Now Grover’s home.”
He was radiating goodwill again.
“Disappeared?” Kurant said. “I thought Metcalfe died up here three falls ago.”
Grover’s head bobbed. “Must be, eh? After Momma died from the stomach cancer, Mr. Jimmy got a big ache in his stomach all the time, too. He never ate much anymore. His eyes got all black and dull, you know — like they do on the big deer when they hang ‘em on the meat pole? One day in early December, after all his friends went home and the deer, they headed to the wintering yards. Mr. Jimmy gave Grover a long hug and walked out on the ice. He never came home.”
Kurant stopped and looked back at the lake. “They never dragged it, looking for the body?” he asked.
Grover gave him a queer look. “Mr. Jimmy loved the lake. Why disturb him when what he loves is giving him a big hug, eh? Besides, I figure he’s with Momma now.’’
Grover stopped in front of a little log cabin with a front porch loaded with split cordwood and kindling. “This one’s yours, Miss Diana. Them next two are for you sirs. Now listen up. We got no electricity in the camps, just the lodge. All the lamps are gas, so you got to light ’em. They make a pop and a hooooo before they light. And don’t worry when you’re out hunting, eh? Grover keep the stoves going. And remember: meeting’s in an hour.”
“We won’t forget,” I told him.
“Okay, now,” Grover said. He waved and left.
Griff and Kurant pushed off toward their cabins. The screen door to mine sagged open. The inner, hardwood door had an iron latch system that squeaked when I thumbed it.
It was murky and fire-smelling inside, warm with the dry heat of the Ashley stove on the far side of the main room. I drew back green drapes at the front window and surveyed my home for the next ten days. Oiled spruce logs shone in the dwindling light. A finely crafted wooden table and two chairs pressed against the wall by the window. An overstuffed leather chair and ottoman occupied the corner below one of several gas lanterns. A good whitetail buck with eight long antler points peered down from the rear wall. Below the deer head was a gun rack and to the rack’s right was a still-life painting of a game dinner: a pheasant stiff-legged in death, grapes, a shank of venison arranged on earthenware with potatoes and carrots, a half loaf of bread on a board, apples in a wicker basket and a bottle of wine. All set on a wooden table against a black space that seemed infinitely deep. I didn’t know the painter, but the work struck me as vibrating between desire and denial, between mortality and the chill breath, a synergy approaching the sacred. I couldn’t look at it for long.
The Purification Ceremony Page 3