Hugh never saw the note, though Joanna had repeated a couple of phrases from it, such as “a good time to make the break,” and he knew his mother kept it among her papers and photographs in a file box.
He had got lousy grades the rest of that term, because his mother had kept him out of school by any means she had, usually by having a crying jag at breakfast. “I’ll come back, I’m just going to school. I’ll be back at three-thirty,” he would promise. She would cry and beg him to stay with her. When he did stay he did not know what to do with himself but read old comic books; he was afraid to go out and afraid to answer the telephone in case it was the school attendance officer calling; his mother never seemed to be glad to have him there. That summer they had moved for the first time, and she had got a job. Things were always better for a while at first in the new places.
Once she had started working she could cope with daytime all right, and he finished school without any problem. It was the night, the darkness, that she still couldn’t handle, being alone in the dark. So long as she knew he was there she was all right. Who else did she have to depend on?
And what else did he have but his dependability? Anything else he might have thought he was or was worth his father had pretty well devalued by leaving. People don’t leave necessary things, or valuable things. But though he understood well enough what Cheryl had felt like, like shit, that ought to be got rid of, he wasn’t going to do anything about it, as Cheryl had tried to do, because in one respect he was valuable, useful, even necessary: he could be there when his mother needed somebody to be there. He could take his father’s place. Sort of.
When he had to go out for track in spring in tenth grade, he broke his ankle pole vaulting the first day. He was never any good at sports. He got big and tall, but heavy, with soft muscles, soft skin.
“Hey, I’m going to get one of those cute red suits and start running up and down the street too,” Donna said. “Where’s your spare tire gone to, Buck?” He looked down at his belly self-consciously but saw that maybe it did look better than it used to. No wonder, since every morning before work he got in a long fast walk plus something like ten or twelve hours of hiking and swimming and not eating very much. Getting enough food into the evening land was a problem which he solved mainly by going hungry there.
His first explorations farther upstream had been tentative and short. He was afraid of getting lost. He bought a compass and then discovered he did not know how to use it. The needle flittered and veered at every step, and though it seemed most of the time to indicate that north was across the creek (if north was the blue end of the needle) he would need a bit more than that to get back to the gateway clearing if he got deep into the hills upstream. There were no stars or sun to take directions from. What did north mean, here? The trees grew close enough that walking could never be straight for very long, and he found no open viewpoint, no way to get an idea of the lay of the land. So he explored the paths and thickets, hollows, glades, side valleys, hillside springs, windings and turnings of the forest on both sides of the creek upstream from the willow place. He learned that piece of wilderness. He had a lot to learn. He knew nothing about wilderness, woodcraft, plants. Trees with cones were pines. Trees with drooping stringy branches were willows. He knew oaks, there had been a huge oak on the playground of one of his high schools, but none of the trees in this forest looked like it. He got a book on common trees and succeeded in identifying several: ash, maple, vine maple, alder, fir. Everything he saw and all that came under his hand interested and occupied him, here. He thought also about what he did not know and had not seen. How far did the wilderness, the forest, go on? Was there any end to it? He had gone several miles now along the creek and there was no change, no slightest track or sign of mankind. Even the birds and beasts were all but unseen; he followed the faint paths of the deer but never saw one, found sometimes an old bird’s nest fallen, but never, in the changeless time and season and the weather without change, heard an animal cry out, or a bird sing.
The creek, his companion and his guide: what of it? It must join a river, or become a river, downstream, and large or small it must run at last into the sea.
His breath caught. He stared blankly at his fire, his mind held by that thought: the sea that lay beyond the coasts of evening. The darkness to which this living water ran. White breakers in the last of dusk and out beyond them the depths, the night. The night, and all the stars.
So vast and dark was that vision, so terrible the thought of the stars, that when it left him and he looked around again at the familiar rocks, sandbars, trees, branches, leaf patterns of his camping place, everything seemed small and fragile, toylike, and the flat, bright sky was very strange.
He often called the country the evening land in his mind, because of the eternal twilight, but he now thought that name was wrong. Evening is the time of change, the threshold of night.
The soft wind blowing down the valley of the creek roughened the surface of the pool. The vision touched him again: the broad dim step, the threshold land, and this silver stream across it running downward into darkness from what heights, what eastern mountains of unimaginable day?
He sat again bewildered in the twilight, feeling that he had known for a moment why he held that water to be sacred.
“I ought to go on,” he said under his breath. Every now and then he spoke, half aloud, alone; a word or a sentence once in a whole stay.
He had been shaving, and he got on with it. What seemed a day and a night’s worth here might be less than an hour in the daylight world, but his beard kept his time, not the clock’s. It would have simplified life to let the thing grow—though at eighteen he had worried about it, it was thick, vigorous, and brassy now, so that his mother was always telling him he needed to shave—but employees of Sam’s Thrift-E-Mart were not permitted to wear beards. He had had enough hassle about keeping his hair where he liked it, down about to his collar. So the last of his ritual at the willow place, before he packed up and hid his gear, was the shave. Sometimes he heated water, but if his fire had gone out he used cold water, clenched his teeth and scraped away; even then the touch of that water was kindly.
On Saturday night he told his mother he would be gone all Sunday morning on a long hike “in the country.” She complained again about the noise he made getting up early, but was not otherwise interested. He left at five in the morning, with a packet under his arm of expensive dried and freeze-dried food to transfer to his pack. He intended to stay a while in the twilight land, to leave what he knew, to go on.
He had never found but one path that seemed to be a real path or way: the one that led out of the beginning place, directly away from the gateway. He crossed from rock to rock at the ford, went past the dark bushes that the girl had stepped out of, a long time ago now, weeks, and started up the slope out of the valley of the creek. The path climbed, winding a bit but keeping on the axis vertical to the creek, the one direction he hoped to be able to keep. He had found that, even when momentarily disoriented in the woods upstream, if he stopped and let it come to him he had a general sense of where the gateway was—behind him, to the left, over that rise, or whatever—and this sense had not yet played him false. He had no plan now but to keep the gateway directly behind him if he could, and to go on until he was tired of going.
Up on the crest of the ridge the air seemed lighter. On the far slope the trees were tall and sparse, the ground between them open, without underbrush. Faint but clear enough to the searching eye, the path ran straight on down. As he followed it over the ridgetop he lost for the first time the sound of the creek, the voice that blessed his sleep.
He walked for a long way, steadily and rather doggedly, taking some pride and pleasure in his body’s ready endurance. The path grew no clearer but no less clear. Other ways branched off from it, deer trails most likely, but there was never any doubt which was the main one. He knew that if he turned around this path would take him straight back to the beginning place. His s
ense of where the gateway was seemed almost to sharpen as he went farther from it, as if its psychic law of gravity were the opposite of the physical one.
After crossing a creek somewhat smaller than the gateway creek he sat down near the noisy water and had a bit to eat; when he went on he felt cheerful, resolved to trust his luck.
All the folds of the land ran across his way. The valleys were dim; in the depth of the dimness always there was the voice of a spring or stream. The slopes were not difficult climbing but they got larger and higher as he went on, the upslopes always longer than the downslopes, as if all the land was tilted. When he came to a third big creek he stopped to have a swim, and after swimming decided to call it a day. He liked the phrase. It was perfectly accurate. He could take any piece of time he liked and call it a day; another span and call it night, and sleep it through. He had never (he thought, sitting by the coals of his brushwood fire on the shore of the creek) experienced time before. He had let clocks do it for him. Clocks were what kept things going, there on the other side; business hours, traffic lights, plane schedules, lovers’ meetings, summit meetings, world wars, there was no carrying on without clocks; all the same, clock time had about the same relation to unclock time as a two-by-four or a box of toothpicks has to a fir tree. Here there was no use asking, “What time is it?” because there was nothing to answer for you, no sun saying “Noon” and no clock saying “Seven-thirty-eight and forty-two seconds.” You had to answer the question yourself and the answer was “Now.”
He slept, and dreamed of nothing, and woke slowly, so relaxed he could hardly raise his hand at first.
From this third creek on, the land got rougher. The tilt of it was all up, and the tiny streams now chased downward beside or across the trail. The trail itself was clear. Whoever had made it, whenever it had been made, there was no litter, no sign of any recent passer, but the way was unmistakable, going up easily and purposefully, turning back and forth on the slopes but always heading the same general direction. Its purpose was all he had; he let it lead him. The forest had thickened, massive stands of fir, where the twilight lay heavy. There was no sound but the soughing of wind in the firs, an immense quiet noise. He crossed the small trails of rabbits or mice or other shy wood creatures, once he saw a tiny broken skull near the path, but he saw no living creature. It was as if each here kept its own solitude. The sense of his solitude came on him now as he climbed the long, dim slopes in the unchanging quiet. He saw himself, very small, walking through the wilderness from no place to no place, alone. So he might walk on forever. For the time beyond the clocks is always now and the way to forever is now.
Hunger broke his trance of walking. He stopped to eat; when he went on he felt less dreamy, more alert. The trail now got so steep in places that he leaned forward on both hands to rest, and he felt the mountain press against his hands, the bulk and depth and strength of the earth, her grainy skin rough with rocks and roots. For a long time the trail had been going somewhat left of the gateway axis. Now it turned back towards the axis and leveled out. He could stand straight and walk freely, and the easier rhythm was a relief. The firs crowded thick, high, and dark, the air under them was dark, but as he looked ahead he saw the clear breadth of the trail, almost a road here. And in the dry air he caught, once, once again, the faint scent of woodsmoke.
Now he walked steadily, alert, intent.
The road swung in a long rising curve, on and on. The slopes to the right below it steepened and began to drop away so sharply that the trees below the road no longer blocked the view. He could for the first time in this land see for a long way. He saw that he was on the side of a mountain. To his right and ahead, beyond a falling sweep of treetops, the rim of a farther mountain stood dark against the clarity of sky. He walked on more slowly, a little dazed, feeling himself as if floating between the vast, obscure valleys and the vast gulfs of the sky. He looked along the road as it turned again, and saw nestled against the mountain shoulder the roofs and chimneys of a town, the gleam of a lighted window in the cold dusk. There was home, and he walked towards it, and came down the street between the lamp-lit windows, hearing a child’s voice calling words he did not understand.
4
In daylight he did not look so big, and he was younger than she had thought, her own age or younger, a heavy, stoop-shouldered, white-faced boy. He was stupid, not understanding anything she said. “I need to come back,” he said, as if asking her permission, as if she could or would permit him. “I’m trying to warn you,” she said, but he did not understand, and she could bear it no longer. She had walked from Mountain Town to the gateway and was tired from that and from the anger and terror of this confrontation with him, and she had to go on and get home, clean up, eat, get to work—Patsi would be asking where she’d spent the night—it was broad daylight, Wednesday, she had promised to take her mother’s stuff to the dry cleaner’s. He stood there, the charcoal of her sign smeared on his face, the contemptible enemy, and she had to leave him there and go, not knowing if she would find the way open to her when she came back.
It was earlier than she had thought. She got to the apartment a little after six. Rick and Patsi had not been talking to each other for a couple of days, and she got included in their vindictive silence, so no questions were asked about where she had spent the night. When she got back from work that evening, Patsi continued to interpret her night’s absence as a sign of disloyalty, and loftily ignored it; Rick alluded to it only for his own purposes—“Shit, what does anybody want to sleep here for?”
She had been glad to move in with Rick and Patsi last fall. They were generous without overdoing the sharing bit, and liked the place clean enough to live in but not clean enough to drive you up the wall. Her paying a third of the rent was important to them since Rick wasn’t working. It had been a good arrangement, and still would be, except that Rick and Patsi were breaking up, and so no arrangement that involved them as a couple could be good. The worst of it now was that Rick wanted to use her against Patsi, and her staying out a night and offering no explanation gave him the idea that she might be available for more than a phony pass. All she had to say was that she’d spent the night at her mother’s place, but she didn’t want to stoop to lying to him; he no longer deserved the honor of a lie. He kept trying to come into her room and talk. On Thursday night he kept at it, it was serious, he said, they had to discuss the future, Patsi wasn’t willing to talk seriously but somebody had to. Not me, Irene thought. Rick, a thin fellow of twenty-five covered with reddish, curly hair like a well-worn Teddy bear, stood with lounging persistence between her and the door to her room. He wore only a pair of jeans with the worn-through knees gaping open weirdly. His toes were very long and thin. “I don’t feel like talking about anything specially,” Irene said, but he went on, talking through his nose about how somebody around here had to talk sometime and he wanted to explain some things about him and Patsi that Irene ought to know.
“Not tonight,” Irene said, slamming a kitchen drawer, and bolted past him into her room and shut the door. He lounged around the kitchen for a while swearing and then slammed his way out of the apartment. Patsi, in the other bedroom, slammed nothing, maintaining a righteous silence.
Irene sat on the edge of her bed with her shoulders hunched forward and her hands between her knees and thought, This can’t last. End of the month, we’ve had it. Then where?
She had been lucky, being able to stay out here near her mother and paying only one-third rent. She had been able to pay off the car, which her job for Mott and Zerming depended on, and pay for a brake job and two new tires. She could afford to pay more for rent, but not as much as an efficiency out here would cost. The thing to do would be move into the city, downtown, and pay about half as much, but then her mother would worry about her getting raped and hassled; and it would take half an hour or forty minutes to get out here, so she would worry about her mother. If only she would call when Victor got drunk. But she wouldn’t call.
&nb
sp; Irene got up and went out, slamming the front door a little, and walked over to see her mother.
It was a hot, still night. A lot of people were out. Chelsea Gardens Avenue was a roar of cars gunning, idling, drag racing, cruising. At the farm, Victor had rigged up a floodlight so he could work on his car in the front yard. There was no reason why he should do it at night, he had the whole day and was no good at fixing cars anyhow, Irene had taken auto shop and knew twice as much as he did about engines; but he liked to be in the spotlight. He had a wrench in one hand and a beer can in the other and was yelling at the boys, “Get the fuck away from those tools, you little bastards!” Two or three of his sons, Irene’s half brothers, rushed past her through the glare and darkness of the yard. They paid no attention to her arrival, but the dogs did, the three little dogs yapping hysterically at her ankles and the crazy Doberman that Victor kept chained up choking off his terrible bark by lunging on his chain. Irene’s mother was in the cavernous kitchen with Treese, the four-year-old. Treese was at the table eating chocolate-flavored cereal from the package while her mother moved slowly about collecting the dinner dishes to wash. It was nine o’clock. “Hello, Irena my darling,” Mrs. Hanson said with a slow, happy smile, and they hugged each other.
The Beginning Place Page 7