by Jeffrey Lent
“Huh! I told her.”
“Well girl. Told’s one thing, knowing’s another. One fine day you’ll learn that firsthand I’d bet.” Sweat burned his eyes each forkful lifted up.
“Me? I’d know better. All last winter I told her. I said, Have your fun but don’t be making plans out of it. That Dan Martin’s eyes wander too fast too far. Horizon he sees don’t begin to rest on these piddly hills. Shoot, I told her, it don’t even start there. She said, Yes, Daniel has ambition. I said, Ambition’s not the start of it. He dreams on things you and I can’t hardly imagine. You know her, placid little spitfire turned on me and said, Don’t be telling me what I can’t dream of too. So I shrugged that off. And besides that, what I didn’t tell her was her lovely old Dan didn’t mind wasting his time running his eyes on me. Think about that. But I tried. Tried to tell her.”
“She’s learned it I’d speculate.”
“Not any too fast, seems to me.”
Norman walked along, forking up a bit. They came to a windrow end and paused while the team rounded the headland and then started down the field again. In the bright afternoon light the windrows seemed rich rolled bundles of summer standing against the shorn pale stubble. Dark and fragrant, each with its own small shadow running alongside. Norman began to fork up again. The load was growing, the lift greater. He said, “Don’t make too small of it. Love’s a wondrous thing. Most honest people, it’s almost all keeps them going. Otherwise you get pale imitation, some business scheme, some meanness to other folks, maybe bypassing it all and handing it up to Jesus. All that’s good I guess, I mean maybe not good but necessary. But you love someone, find someone loves you back, that can’t be beat. Now it happens, happens often too, one loves more than the other. Maybe all the time it’s like that. Just depends on how great the gap is. Your sister—well, she found too big a gap. Like I said, that happens all the time. Mostly, all it does is teach us better what to look for.”
She was high over him now, a figure backlighted by the lowering sun. “That happened to you? Some girl? Before Mother?”
Slow and thoughtful he said, “No.” Then a pace or two along he said, “It might’ve. But that age, all I had was a war to worry over. Then I met your mother.”
“Yes.” She laughed down at him. “The rest is history.”
“History to you.”
Fast back she said, “You bet. At least part.” And was quiet then a bit and finally spoke again. “Well you don’t have to worry about any of that with me. I plan to stay right here and die of old age.”
“Think so?”
“No man’ll be coming around chasing after the likes of me. I’m nobody’s fool.” Wiped her face with the back of her hand. “But I spect I’ll make a fine old maiden aunt to Abby’s babies. And little firecracker’s too, his time comes.”
The back of Norman’s head ached down into his shoulders from the sun and the lifting. He guessed she knew herself exactly and the ache in his head ran through him for her. Light and swift he said, “Ten dollars is what it’ll cost you, the day you come singing a different tune to me over some boy.”
She grinned down at him, her teeth a flash in the dark halo of hatted head. “Fine with me. Just don’t be trying to pay no taxes with it before it comes.”
Evening dusk of late August. Not the long soft dusk of summer but the short blue cool twilight of autumn. Where the fall began. Still the girls were out on the lawn playing croquet, the passion of Abigail learned the summer before and not abandoned the evening in June she came home and announced she was through with Daniel Martin, the only information she shared. As far as Norman knew, with any of them. It was possible Prudy knew more, either directly or through her divination but as could be expected she would share complaints with him but not intimacies. Nothing from Leah either, and here he knew it was because she lacked any more knowing than he held. He held anger toward the boy but useless without specifics, the same rage as when Abby came home tearstained from her first day of school. He sat now in the comb-back rocker by the window and watched them: Abby intent and serious, deadly with her mallet, Pru careless and idle between turns, watching the bats slipping from the barn eaves, her mallet held over her shoulder like an axe. Before him on the carpet his son belly-down up on his elbows over a magazine. Norman did not know the extent to which he read but knew he spent a great deal of time page by page. Beyond the boy Leah sat on the sofa, hands holding each other on her lap, her knees drawn together, back up, her face alert, curious, determined. Also, alarmingly, kind, as if holding great patience toward his final understanding. He was wasting his time, what that look told him.
Because of the boy he was congenial, conversational in tone but the boy lay away from him and so Norman was free with his face. He scowled at her and mildly said, “No.”
She lifted both eyebrows and said, “Didn’t ask yes or no from you. Unless you weren’t paying attention.”
Again he said, knowing already he was saying it to hear himself say it, to know he had done that much at least, “No.”
“Norman.”
“Well it’s a crazy idea. Craziest thing I ever heard. All these years worrying and watching out and then like that—bam—you’re wanting to go back there. Now you tell me, how does that make sense?”
“Good lord, I stopped worrying about anybody chasing me down years since. Don’t tell me you’re sitting there and been worrying on it every day since 1865. You know’s well as me that time’s long behind us.”
“I worried about it. I thought about it. Truth to tell, with the years and these children and just plain getting used to having you around, there’ve been times it bothered me more than it ever used to. Just the thought of it. Thought of losing you. So don’t sit there and tell me what to think.”
“I’m not telling you what to think. Just telling you what I’m doing. What I got to do. You think about that. Put yourself in my place.”
“I can’t do it. I can’t make sense of it. Some things, it just seems to me, have to be let go. You have to look around at what’s here, here now, solid and sure. Ask yourself, Can I risk all that?”
“I don’t believe I’m risking much. It’s twenty-five years and I’m just going in and out. You got to recall, I’m not going to stick out there like I do here. Plus, I know what I’m looking for and what I’m not looking for. I know that place.”
He heard the creep of uncertainty there and did not move in the rocker but to take up his pipe and tamp it and strike a match. Sucking, he looked out the window. It was a purple pane, with the lamp reflected in waving duplicate. Still, beyond he could see the girls. Playing on until dark. Like the young, he thought, to ignore night when it came. Again, and he sensed it would be the last time, he had the poor pleasure of saying, “No. You don’t know anything about it. Whatever idea you have is bound to be wrong. That much time, what they been through, it’s all changed. It could be worse, even worse. You don’t know.”
“Norman. I’m talking about my mother.” And on this last her voice came up and then down hard, hard enough so the boy looked up from his magazine to study his mother and glance over his shoulder at his father. The both of them sat through this. When his head went back down Leah went on, her calm and tone regained. “You could understand that. I made problems for you and your mama, no denying it. And you wanted you could blame me even for her choosing to be distant from you, from all of us, right here, her right in this same town. But Norman, it was you went down the hill to be with her that time she was so sick. You could do it. And it was you that next spring who carried her up here to see the little boy named after your father. And was you helped shoulder her coffin from the church and stood there while it rained down onto her open grave. I don’t know and never will what I cost you from her but I know I never cost you those things. Never once cost you what you had to do. So allow me the same.”
Norman pulled on his pipe. The girls were in the kitchen now, eating something. Smoke like fluid ran out into the room, curling aro
und the heat-draft from the lamp chimney. The world had just tilted a degree off true, everything etched vivid, precarious, delicate. He felt it in him precise as sorrow. Already knowing she’d deny and all the reasons for it, he offered a final quiet amendment. “I’d go with you.”
And knew then the true reason for the kindness in her face, knew she also felt that sorrow. Her smile broke him. He felt held static by everything—her need, the children there around them, everything surrounding him. As if all conspired to hold him there motionless and voiceless, unable to change a thing: unable, finally, to help her. She smiled sad and kind. “I know you would. But you can’t.”
It had been a hard year. A hard winter and spring, a spree of events that seemed to Norman at the time to conclude by coincidence in June with the failure of Abigail’s year-long courtship to end in engagement. At the time he was disappointed for her but not displeased; the young man struck him as the type as likely to rack a string of failures as to succeed. Now it seemed the summer might become merely an interlude of peace, perhaps even bittersweet, as clearly as he saw disintegration ahead. Some lying there waiting for him to notice and some coming surely with Leah’s journey. Graduated, Abby talked of finding work as she drifted through the summer and he knew she would soon, either in the village or farther away. He did not know her mind. And Abby would not be long without a man, he was sure. Even Pru had just a year of school left and for all her talk of staying on the farm he mistrusted this also. With her, he knew at least a part of her wanted that; it was the other part of her he suspected might spring to wild and sudden flight. And hoped for that even as he hoped against it. So the summer hadn’t even truly ended yet and already he was feeling it as the pain of a long-lost tender time slipped away forever. He thought he might be growing sentimental with age but knew better; he’d always been that way. And wondered if it was truly sentiment that allowed him to recognize the small reprise of grace after the sour and frightened winter.
Which began late in January when Hiram Howell became turned around in the depths of the small gore behind Mount Hunger in a snow squall while tracing a gut-shot deer. The storm was sudden and brief, lasting no more than an hour, but whited him out and left all backtrack or blood-spoor lost in snow cover, left him in the steep reach of the gore already gone to twilight even as the sky above streamed with mare’s tails bright in the winter sunlight. Fearing the night and the cold that would split trees, he took fast bearing off the feathered clouds, the way the sun struck them, and made the choice to climb the steep east side of the gore with hope to reach before dark the low Ballou house tunneled back into the mountainside. Norman knew what that climb would be like, in waist-deep snow going near straight up all the way; even with a good crust to the snow a man would break through where the spruce grew close or the granite outcropping above held briefly to reflect the midday warmth. He knew the temptation to panic and move too quickly as evening fell and so risk footing on a boulder ice-cap and go down to fracture anything. Giving up, as the cold slipped a sleep over you, a gentle sleep sweet with relief.
But Howell didn’t slip and made it up onto the blessed shoulder of the mountain just as night came on and found the track and Ballous’ almost right before him, as if he’d been led there. For, as he told and retold, when climbing from the gore he had no certain notion of where he might come out and worried all the way up how to make the choice of right or left to find that shelter. The house was dark and the chimney cold but as he said it didn’t concern him at first for with people like that you could never count on them being or doing any one thing at any given time like anyone else. He knew also that no one, perhaps least of all these wood-folk, would mind a lost man at dusk coming in to warm himself and spend the night, to even eat what provender might be had. At least, he’d told himself, pausing by the shut door, there would be tea to warm him and, as likely, something harder than that to heat him. So he lifted the latch and pushed the door open and went into the dark house from the dark woods.
Even with the leveling effect of the deep cold he smelled it as soon as he stepped into the dark house. Smelled it and yet, as he seemed to enjoy telling over and again, was not overly paused by it, thinking it just a condition of the dwelling, the aroma spread of those who lived there. So got his mittens off and dug through his opened coat to his waistcoat and found his match-safe and struck a match to find a lamp and took up the grimed chimney and twisted up the wick and lighted it. And there, then, in the slow flickering spread of light began to know he was not alone. In the low rope-strung bed lay Marthe Ballou, face up and, strangely, atop the covers. It was only when he lifted the lamp and went close that he saw the blown hole in her forehead, twisting up her face as if in protest, the hole ringed with a ridge of crusted frozen blood. One arm thrown up backward as if it once had grasped or tried to grasp the newel post of the headboard. The skin of her face odd to him, strange in lacking the ambered cast he knew to contrast with the splay of white hair spread around it, the hair, now as always, waxen and coarse. Instead she was pale as if drained finally of the taint turned upon her, her skin like apple flesh married to high-winter twilight blue. He stood over her a long moment before he understood that the white was frost settled upon her, raised in fine rimes along the hairs of her upper lip and eyebrows. Bedecking her nostrils.
What he did then he did not tell but was easily and correctly parsed: He turned from the dead woman still holding the lamp and returned to the table, where amongst the squalor was a demijohn of applejack. When he heisted it, it proved half full. He was chilled through, tired, shocked. He shut the door left open and keeping his back to the dead woman made a fire in the stove. Then sat at the table, his back still to Marthe, and let himself warm as the stench rose. During that he worked at the applejack. The woman was dead and so nothing could be gained by rushing things and more importantly he felt himself if not near-death then terribly fraught with his afternoon and the climb out from the gore. So he sat and drank and then, head down on the tabletop, slept. To wake in a scant few hours with his head a miserable thing, sitting atop his shoulders with all the malice and panic of a carrion crow. Suddenly and acutely aware not so much of the absence of Ballou himself as his presence. He poured a kettle of thawed water into the firebox of the stove and stepped out into the winter night lighted vague but clear enough by a sickle moon to lift his narrow long Green Mountain snowshoes from the snowbank he’d stuck them in earlier and set off. Leaving behind his own hunting rifle, which was free of incrimination by being one of the newer lever-action .30-.30s and so clearly not the murder weapon. And made his sick puking way around the mountainside breathing all the way not the frozen night air but the stench of death that rose off him clear as his own vomit, all the way around the mountain until finally he came out on the far side and there was able to pause and breathe deep the keen fresh night into himself. And decided he was done with deer hunting. Then made his way downhill toward the valley until he came to the first farmhouse, where he beat on the door and roused Leah first and then Norman. His panic so acute at that point that he sounded reasonable and calm, as if relating events happened to another.
Much later, in those bleak endless days of early November when with a fervency never known Norman wished he was out of his head, that all that had passed was a midday recollection of a single nightmare image, when he would once more try to unravel the unknowable down to a single thread or moment where his doing or saying something other than what had been done or said would’ve reshaped the world to come; then he would trace back and come down to that midnight clamor of Hiram Howell, the news he brought. He could go no further back, could not allow himself that, could not allow the jump back to before he knew her and she him, because to do that was to make clear irrefutably some meaningless measure she’d attached to the twenty-five years side by side. So he determined, once and forever after, that it was the murder of Marthe Ballou that turned something in Leah, something sinister and unknown, something greater than any simple human hope or d
esire or struggle to live, the bit unraveled that brought the whole net to collapse. As if she were to blame for Marthe.
It was Abby drove the sleigh on the hard snowpack to carry Hiram Howell with his tale to the village constable, Pru left at the house with the sleeping Jamie, while Norman followed Leah up and around the mountain on snowshoes, Norman carrying his deer rifle. He finally getting ahead of her as they approached the cabin, quiet and dark, the door open to the night. Norman lit the lamp and Leah went to Marthe. Norman stood over the table a long moment, then swept his eyes over the dark reaches of the cabin and, without speaking to Leah, went to sit vigil outside, squatting against the dark side of the house, away from the lighted door. The table had been swept clean, a rubble pile of dishes and debris on the floor to one side, only the applejack jug and Hiram’s .30-.30 left tabletop, the rifle balanced upright against the jug, pointing at the open door. Not the work of Hiram Howell. Norman sat with his deer rifle across his knees, letting his eyes roam the reach of light and dark—snow lying between spruce and hemlock, the stark boles of hardwoods, the darker upthrusts of granite—watching for movement, the simple flex of a treetrunk or boulder as his eyes passed over it. He had no distinct sense of being observed yet knew Henri was out there, perhaps out of sight of the cabin, perhaps not. After a while of seeing nothing, his leg muscles began to cramp and he rose and walked a long loose semicircle before the cabin, once glancing back at the door and then advancing steps into the woods before standing still. There was no noise, no scent, nothing. He spoke into the dark. “It’s Pelham, Henri. Just me and the wife. Others’ll be up soon though. You might’s well come on in and set and wait. No sense staying out there. No need carrying this any further, is there now? Come on and set, Henri.”
Stood like that. Knowing his voice, even low, carried well into the woods. Feeling the cold settle through his bare neck. There was no sound, nothing at all. He had no idea if he’d been heard or not but felt he’d done what he could. He turned and went to the cabin, pulled the door shut and dropped the inner bar into its brackets, to wait then for those coming from the village. He sat at the table, his back to where Leah sat with Marthe. Coming in he’d seen her, sitting the edge of the bed, holding the dead woman’s hand between her own. He sat facing the door. Studied briefly again the arrangement of rifle and whiskey and then took Hiram’s rifle and laid it flat on the table, pointing away from the door. It was bad enough without that flaunt of malice. With no idea why he was covering anything for Henri. So sat and waited, listening to the monologue as conversation occurring behind him.