The Hearts of Men

by Nickolas Butler

  By eight o’clock, dusk is descending over the forest, the sun low over the western horizon, where it drapes the treetops in layers of pink, purple, and orange. Nelson removes the cobblers from the dutch oven, wraps them carefully, and stows one in the bag.

  BACK AT HIS TENT HE DRESSES NEATLY, as if off to a Scouting soiree. He takes great care with his uniform, polishes his boots until they shine a dull brown. Combs his hair, cringes at the state of his eyeglasses, the cuts and scrapes still adorning his face. Leaves the cobblers inside his tent, where he’ll collect them before leaving.

  He walks to his father’s tent, where Clete Doughty lies on his cot, snoring lightly.

  “Dad?” he says, slipping through the unzipped tent flaps.

  The soft snores continue.

  “Dad,” Nelson says a little more loudly.

  His father stirs, rubs at his nose, then pushes up on one elbow. “Nelson?”

  “Dad,” Nelson begins again, “I promised Scoutmaster Wilbur that I’d help him carry some things to the mess hall tonight. I guess they found some old silverware in the basement of the canteen that Wilbur wants to put into circulation. I was wondering, will you be here tonight, at the campfire?”

  His father stares at him with dull, tired eyes. “Why?” he asks, almost irritably.

  “Just that it’d be nice,” Nelson says, “to sit by the fire tonight, before we have to head back home. Our last night together and all.”

  His father coughs twice, itches the back of his scalp, yawns. “Thing is, Nelson, some other fathers and I might visit another troop’s campsite tonight. Apparently one of the men’s got a very fine old bottle of Scotch.” He pauses. “It might be good for business if I went along. Do you understand?”

  “Dad,” Nelson says again. “Please. Stay in camp tonight. I have something I need to get off my chest.”

  “Go on now, Nelson, before Wilbur thinks you’ve forgotten. And I’ll think about staying put.” He clasps his hands behind his head, purses his lips. “You’re a good boy,” he says finally. “Now go help Wilbur.”

  Nelson makes one other stop before marching to Wilbur’s cabin.

  “Anybody in there?” he says, outside Jonathan’s tent.

  “Hold on,” Jonathan says, “let me put on a shirt.” It’s a few seconds before the older boy unzips the tent and stands before Nelson. “What is it?”

  “I just wanted to warn you, that, well, if you were planning on leaving camp tonight to smoke a cigarette, I would highly recommend that you don’t.”

  “What are you talking about, Nelson?”

  Nelson feels his hand reaching out to touch Jonathan’s shoulder. “Please,” he urges. “Just don’t go out tonight. Stay in your tent. Trust me.” It is possible that Jonathan is the closest thing to a friend Nelson has, and he has no interest in potentially submarining Jonathan’s Boy Scout career.

  “Everything okay, old chum? Are you feeling all right? You seem a little . . . odd, you know?”

  “I’m fine,” Nelson says. “Good night, Jonathan.”

  “Good night, Nelson.”

  He leaves the campsite quietly, and no one pays him any mind. Holding the Dutch oven before him, he might have been taking it to a new neighbor’s home, a welcoming present. Not a single Scout does he encounter on the path to the parade ground; but, then, some of the troops, he knows, are gathering around a telescope out on a dock by Bass Lake tonight for a tour of the galaxy, there to practice identifying heavenly bodies, participation required for the Astronomy merit badge. Others, no doubt, are packing up gear before their imminent departures tomorrow night or Saturday morning.

  Monday, Nelson thinks, seems so, so long ago.

  16

  WILBUR SITS AT A SMALL TABLE INSIDE HIS CABIN, and from the relative darkness outside Nelson watches him a moment, through the screen door. The inside of the cabin is spartan: a few framed photographs, some fly-fishing rods and wicker creels hanging from the wall, a wide bookshelf. A lantern glows on the table beside Wilbur, and Nelson is quietly pleased to see it is a forest-green Coleman, same as his. The old Scoutmaster appears to be writing a letter.

  “Come in,” he says, without turning.

  Startled, Nelson opens the door. The back wall of the cabin is two large picture windows that look out over the lake. In the middle of the cabin is a great fieldstone fireplace. Nelson cannot see Wilbur’s sleeping chamber.

  “How’d you know I—”

  “I could smell you coming, Nelson, for one thing. Do you normally sneak up on people carrying peach cobbler? You would make a terrible spy. A soldier, perhaps. A good soldier, I reckon.”

  The boy squeaks out a laugh. It feels about the first time he has smiled in a week, and it almost hurts, feels like the laughter could spill right over into tears, a total collapse. He fixes his eyes down at the floor of the cabin.

  “So you brought me dessert. That was kind of you.” The old man is looking at him now, doling out his words evenly, calmly.

  “No,” Nelson says quietly. This is the moment. After this, he may never want to return to camp, may never again be welcome here. “Scoutmaster Wilbur, I have to tell you . . . I was invited by one of the counselors to take these cobblers to a party tonight.” He swallows his budding Adam’s apple, re-grips the Dutch oven in his sweaty hands.

  “Yes?”

  A clock ticks in another room.

  “It’s a secret, the party. Out in the old amphitheater.”

  Wilbur sighs, sets his pencil on the table beside a pocketknife and a small pile of shavings. “Sit down,” he says.

  “I’m supposed to be there at nine,” Nelson explains.

  “Sit down,” Wilbur says more firmly. He moves a chair away from the table with the toe of his boot so that the seat faces the boy. “And set those cobblers down by the door, why don’t you.”

  Nelson does as he is asked, sits down, clears his throat, laces his fingers above his lap, shuffles his feet, as if about to suffer through what may be a lengthy sermon. He feels Wilbur’s eyes on him.

  “You have two choices now, Nelson,” Wilbur says. “You can come with me to this, this party, and everyone will know what you’ve done. You won’t make any new friends, I can assure you of that. You may even suffer unforeseen consequences when you return home, tribulations that I cannot protect you from.”

  Nelson thinks of his father, the belt. Were he to rat out several dozen campers, it certainly wouldn’t do his father any favors in drawing new clients. He thinks of his mother, and how she might be punished, too, for simply trying to intercept his father’s inevitable assault. They will both be beaten, and after he’s been finished with, he’ll have to listen to her cries from behind his parents’ locked bedroom door.

  “Or,” Wilbur continues, “you can simply go back to your tent, and tomorrow morning, the whole camp will be different, and while it may be that boys will suspect that you were the informant, I will deny it. I will tell the guilty parties that I saw you walking down the path with those cobblers and when I asked you where you were going, you would not tell me and I grew suspicious, and it was only when I threatened to punish your entire troop, to send you all back home and inform all your parents, that you volunteered to take the blame. I will paint you as a martyr, in fact. It may be that the Scouts at this party are released without punishment. But any participating counselors and camp employees will then of course be summarily fired.

  “In any case, and no matter your decision, I’m indebted to you, Nelson, for this gesture. I just can’t believe I was so blind. Scouts do bad things every summer, without fail. But it was the counselors that I could not believe, wouldn’t believe were mixed up in something abhorrent. Oh, Nelson. Thank you, son, for this. I hope you will feel comfortable in asking me for whatever recommendations you need. I know the headmasters at many fine preparatory schools around the nation, and not a few politicians and businessmen in high places as well.”

  Wilbur shakes his head.

  “Those boys, t
hey gave me such smiles each time I departed their company. I thought their hearts were really into it, the work. But I was deceived, I suppose, like some senile old grandfather.”

  Now even the sun’s afterglow has blued to dark. The smoke of a dozen campfires hangs in the air over the lake.

  “What will we find out there?” Nelson asks. “I mean, what do you think they’re doing?”

  “I don’t know, son. Ascribing to a code isn’t convenient. What we should be trying to impart upon you boys is a lifelong commitment to a set of virtues that will guide you throughout your days. The teenage years are difficult, there is no doubt. But they’re certainly no more difficult than being a father, or a husband, or leading men into war . . . no more difficult than being responsible for hundreds of employees.

  “What is happening out there tonight, I can assure you, is not congruent with the Scout oath or laws. I don’t need to tell you that.”

  Nelson nods his head slowly.

  “What’s your decision, then?” Wilbur asks.

  “Can we hope we’re mistaken?”

  “It is good of you, to want to believe the best of your peers,” Wilbur says, rising from the table. “And I wouldn’t want you to lose that optimism, either. But don’t allow yourself to be made a fool, Nelson. Now, what is your decision?”

  “I’ll come,” the boy says, stepping into the current.

  THEY SPEAK NOT A WORD to each other as they walk deep into the woods, Wilbur moving effortlessly along the old path, no need for any maps, no need even to check for the old blazes painted or scarred onto tree trunks. Nelson struggles to keep up, one Dutch oven heavy and still warm in his hands, the other borne upon his back, like some iron baby in a strange papoose.

  Even from five hundred yards, they can hear laughter, can make out the dance of flames. And there is something else. Something seems to flicker out there, in a steady click of beats, some softly mechanical cricket-whisper Nelson half-recognizes but cannot quite place . . .

  “Hold on,” says Wilbur quietly. “Stay right here. I want to have a look around before barging in there. Some of these folks are likely to skedaddle, and I’ll want to see their faces before I accuse them of something—before I have to fire them.” And, like that, he is off again, disappearing into the underbrush, quiet as a deer. Nelson kneels down on the trail, closes his eyes, concentrates on that sound. What is it?

  This kind of focus is crucial in ornithology, when, waking early in the morning, a person cannot see the birds they are so eager to catalog. And so, to learn everything he can, Nelson has stood in a forest more than once before the break of dawn, joined by a group of older women and older men, binoculars resting on all their chests, who advised him to listen, strain his ears, and isolate the songs filtering down out of the treetops. Patterns, that is what they are, after all, patterns of sound and song, certain notes repeated, certain pitches, imitations, rifts, calls and repeats.

  A Mrs. Patton it was who kindly leaned down beside him and enumerated the invisible birds he was hungry to identify. “Anyone can identify a bird with a guide and a pair of binoculars,” she said. “We’re teaching you to identify something in the dark, you see.

  “There,” she whispered, then, a moment or two later, “hear that? A good place to start. That’s Carduelis tristis, the American goldfinch.” They listened. “Boy, long-winded this morning, isn’t she? Still, a beautiful bird, and of course, they’re everywhere. Some folks call them wild canaries. I don’t know which I like better, goldfinch or canary—both magnificent names.”

  She paused, and they listened again.

  “Now listen carefully. Hear that? Whata-cheer-cheer-cheer . . . It’s a good one to know, and you’ll never forget it. Easy-to-remember Latin name, too, Cardinalis cardinalis.” She smiled sweetly. “We take them for granted, because they’re common enough in Wisconsin, but you bring a European into your backyard and they’ll be amazed at the color of our birds. Cardinals and blue jays, and orioles, indigo buntings and scarlet tanagers and pileated woodpeckers . . .”

  And suddenly it comes to Nelson, the sound—from all the dozens and dozens of matinees he’s sat through in Eau Claire, at that old movie house, that sound over and behind his shoulder, sputtering but steady; just faintly filtered through the forest the sound of a reel-to-reel movie projector is impossible to mistake as it trickles toward him. The ferns shake and then part and Wilbur is back beside him again, slightly out of breath, wiping his brow with an extra bandanna he keeps in a back pocket. Nelson can’t recall ever seeing Wilbur sweat before.

  “They’re watching a movie,” the boy says quietly.

  Wilbur purses his lips. Scratches at the trail with a pointed finger. “You’re going to see something,” he whispers, “that I suspect you’ve never seen before, and I apologize for that. What is happening over yonder, is, well, not in keeping with any Scouting law. It is an abomination, Nelson, and . . . Well, I’m ashamed to have you here right now.” He pauses. “Anyway, you were right. Counselor Tim is amongst them, as are many of my finest counselors. There are many Scouts out there as well, many so-called fine boys, not a few of them appearing to be quite drunk. I just don’t understand . . .”

  Nelson says nothing.

  Through the darkness comes Wilbur’s hand, reaching out for the boy’s shoulder. “I’m sorry, son. Just know you’ve done well. In fact, perhaps you would make a good spy.”

  “I wish,” Nelson tries, “I wish . . . I’m sorry, sir.”

  “You were loyal to me, Nelson, and you were reverent. So, now you just need to be brave, all right? Keep your chin up, look into their eyes, and forget about what you see. Look without seeing, if you can manage it. I hope you never have to go to war, but if you do, then . . . that is what will perhaps keep you sane, looking without seeing.”

  He draws the boy up, dusts off his knees and elbows. “You go first, now,” Wilbur advises. “I’ll be behind you in a bit. Perhaps they’ll believe I followed you here, and not fault you. All right. Go now.”

  NELSON WALKS THE PATH through the darkness holding the Dutch oven ahead of him, moving toward the sound of the movie projector, the peals of laughter, the increasing pungency of cigar, pipe, and cigarette smoke. There are other strange fragrances in the air, too, scents of skunk or pine. Tin cups kissing in toast, backslapping, hearty guffaws. It sounds like fellowship, fraternity, the very kind of male community and camaraderie Nelson has so often sought during his days, years, at this camp. And then, thirteen-year-old Nelson Doughty, carrying his perfectly baked peach cobblers, emerges from the forest.

  Emerges to what seems like sincere welcome! Cheers! Every face turns to smile at him; nor are the smiles contrived, that much is plain to see. Boys who have never spoken to him, boys from his own troop, turn from their conversations to wave at Nelson, wave at him! And there is Jack Lovell, Jack-the-Ginger among them, gesturing him over as he removes an improbable cigar from his mouth and yells, “Nelson! There’s our boy!” Jack reaches into his breast pocket and holds up a fistful of cigars for Nelson to see, as if a proud new celebratory father looking to spread the mirth.

  A set of hands take the Dutch oven from him now, slide the backpack off, and suddenly, a cold steel can is in his hands, all the colder for the warm dish he’s been clutching for how long—twenty minutes? He brings the can to his lips, as he’s seen his father do at barbecues, and family reunions. The smell is interesting enough, sweetly pungent . . . but the taste of the liquid itself is terrible. Rot and gym socks and old wet corn. Beer, he thinks, stunned slightly. My first beer. He glances at the movie screen, which is, in fact, a giant white sheet stretched between two white pines, or rather several bedsheets sewn or stitched together. It might be twenty feet long by twelve feet tall. Nelson gulps down another swig of beer, holding on to the cool sweat of that aluminum can for dear life.

  There, up on the bedsheet is a young woman, the most beautiful woman he’s ever seen, with dark, silky Audrey Hepburn hair and skin pale as milk—the film
is black and white, but the shades of gray are so fantastically subtle, so shiny, nuanced, shadowed, inviting. And she is stark naked, reclined on a davenport, her arms moving languidly, as if part of some agonizingly slow swim-dance. Her mascaraed eyelids are exquisitely shut, and then suddenly open, staring right out at Nelson. Averting his gaze, he turns now to the audience. Where rows and rows of boys watch, mouths agape, eyes wide open, some hands digging into bowls of popcorn, or taking pulls from bottles of beer, or tin cups of what he imagines must be whiskey or brandy. Some of the boys touch contemplative fingers to their lips, as if NASA engineers, struggling with some impossible mathematical conundrum, while across their faces, infantile happiness spreads easily across shiny lips.

  The young woman on-screen rearranges herself, as if she were fluffing cushions or folding some throw blanket, and now she is on all fours, laughing at the camera that films her, laughing at all those collected boys in this Wisconsin forest, so intoxicated by her beauty, so breathless. Nelson is suddenly dimly aware that someone is trying to speak to him.

  “Nelson!” It is Counselor Tim. He is shaking the boy’s shoulders, grinning so wide Nelson might have thought he’d just hit a home run in the bottom of the ninth inning to extinguish the New York Yankees from the World Series. He closes his eyes, tastes the beer on his palate, at the back of his throat. He feels sick, confused . . . at once happy, sad. It will all end soon enough . . .

  “Nelson! I’ve been standing here for a whole minute, trying to get your attention, man! What? Never seen a girl naked before? Hey, how’s your beer? Say, I’ve got your money, by the way, right here, just like we talked about.”

  Tim holds the dollar bills out for him to take, but Nelson isn’t interested in touching anyone’s hand. All he wants is to look up at the night sky, the gently undulating leaves of the maples, like so many sequins shuffling against each other . . . And yet . . . His eyes keep drawing back to the woman. Now there seems to be a man on top of her, his muscles, all of them, bulging as he sweats, thrusts. He is covered in dark hair: his buttocks, his ankles, his shoulders. The woman is shaking her head, tousling her hair, sucking at her own fingers. Nelson cannot decide if it’s pain she is in, or some kind of bright ecstasy.