by Jeffrey Lent
“I knew something was wrong up here, Marthe. Something terrible wrong, the last week, ten days. Told myself it was just my imagination. Thought it was too cold to hike up here to see you. Thought you’d come if you needed. I did all those things you do, except to come up here to see after you. Selfish me. Just selfish. Told myself any afternoon, any one of those sunny afternoons, you’d come swinging down the hill all bundled up to see me. Always me. Sit the kitchen with you and drink coffee and watch you tease the girls, fuss over that little feller like you done. So all my knowing, that was nothing next to what I wanted. All I wanted was you. Birthed each and every one of my children. And you, old woman, damn you, always seemed to know just when I needed another soul to come on in my kitchen and set and talk. So old selfish me, never once gave thought to what you needed. Was always you had the answers to my stupid problems. Stupid. Unhh.” And Norman sitting at the table facing the barred door heard behind him his wife strike herself and did not turn but could see her leaning low over the dead woman, still holding the near hand between both of hers, could hear her sobbing. And did not turn. Or speak. Because he knew she would not want or welcome him then.
And heard her, the same words low, over and over, “Marthe, Marthe. Goddammit.”
Quiet then. Norman still at the table, still not turned. Listened to his wife breathing, sobs dry, free of moisture, hard and wracking. Lifted the deer rifle from his lap and placed it along the table edge, parallel to him. And placed both hands over it, one high up on the stock below the barrel and the other low on the butt. His hands loose, just resting there. Waiting in the night for the sound of approaching men.
Henri Ballou was not found until late spring when a fisherman stumbling through a swarm of blackflies in a small bog at the steep head of the gore stepped into the stench and followed it forward to where a brook emptied down the mountainside into the bog and there wedged between two boulders was all that remained of Ballou. Sweet ferns uncurling their heads between his legs, rotten clothing falling away showing the blackened flesh dropping putrid from the bones. A pair of great jet northern ravens rose rasping against the intrusion. The assumption by that time largely placed him thus or fled north to Canada. But the weeks following the discovery of his murdered wife had been otherwise: Ballou was everywhere and nowhere, a goblin of the woods and night. The search parties found nothing or, worse, maddeningly confused sign: a careful scatter of hemlock branches laid to a pattern none could read in a clearing of fresh snow empty of track or trail. The men searching, nervous and gun-happy at first, soon grew languid, halfhearted. None truly wanting to be the one to round a bend and have Ballou step from the evergreen screen. As word went out after Marthe was brought down to the vault, awaiting spring burial in the paupers’ corner of the town cemetery, the grown sons drifted into town and out again, singly and in pairs, none helpful or willing to be for finding their father. None in the town though doubted they saw him. When the last of them went, the youngest and next to oldest, the cabin on the backside of Mount Hunger burned with none there to see the flames. Norman smelled the smoke but resisted going up to watch the blaze. Snow still lay heavy in the woods and the fire made no threat to anything. It was good it was gone.
Within a week they began to lose chickens. Young prime birds gone two and three a night. Norman was amused by Ballou’s fine taste and light touch and alarmed by not so much the proximity as the level of stealth, a sharp danger in the silence employed. Even the mastiff dog belonging to Prudence slept through those first visits. He couldn’t place the man directly as a threat but also knew he didn’t understand the madness of murder and the following winter woods-life but felt there was something too finely pitched in the obvious delight Ballou took in the failure of his pursuit: those hemlock branches laid to a pattern none could read but unmistakable as made by a man. They locked the dog in the barn overnight and at dawn found him moved to the sheepshed, uninjured and happy to see them. Leah was raging and Norman felt played with. That evening just after dusk, when he could no longer be glimpsed from the high ridges, he carried his rifle and a jar of coffee to the main henhouse and sat watch on an upturned crate in the far corner that faced both doors. The gas lamps were off for the night but the stoves were going and he was comfortable. Just after midnight he heard the soft rasp of a latch lifted and brought his rifle up as the door opened. Beyond the door was thin starlight on snow and a figure stepped into the door and paused, sensing or knowing someway something off. Norman spoke. “You step inside the barn I’ll shoot you, Henri.”
No response. The figure didn’t move in or out of the doorway.
“I don’t grudge the food. Woods are lean this time of year. But it was my wife sitting here, she’d of pulled the trigger without a word to you. She was friend to Marthe.”
Thought he saw slight movement at the mention of the name. A light twitching head motion. Still silent. Still not in or out. As if both accepted this neutral area. Or testing. Norman was calm, the rifle steady, his elbows easy as if he could hold the weapon so forever. His finger light with tension on the trigger.
“I could wingshoot you right now, Henri. Kneecap you or shoot you in the guts and haul you to town and hope you lived long enough to answer the questions. Don’t even know why I haven’t yet. You stand there long enough I guess I likely will.”
Still nothing. The figure had relaxed, or settled as if accepting something. Not giving up but given up. Norman not mistaking this for fatigue or acquiescence or least of all a moral weight. At least not the same moral weight would welter him if the two were reversed. Someway curious was the best Norman could believe. Ballou as if not cornered but looking upon a new situation. Wary without fear. Norman thought of him as a wejack, a fisher-cat, a wolverine. And then felt the tension creep his upright arms. Knowing that Ballou was armed, even without the figure showing it. Began to feel he was the one naked, caught and obvious. So he used the only thing he had, no longer sure if speaking was his own set snare or the invisible loop he plunged toward.
His voice was level, what seemed a normal tone. “I’ve thought about it. A terrible thing, Henri. And now, even for someone’s keen to the woods as you, it must ride hard on you. You can go on as you are, a long time likely. Forever even. But it won’t go away. Seems to me, you turned yourself in, at least you’d have the chance to tell your side of things. I’ve thought about it as if it was me.” This was not true. “Seems like, even if you weren’t believed, or as much as you’d like, you’d at least have it told. Out there for all to hear and make up their own minds to. Not all tamped down inside. It’s the part I know would devil me. Right now, all that stands is that you shot Marthe. No one knows the rest of it. And of course there is a rest of it. A thing like that, why any man knows you must’ve been provoked something wicked. In’t that right?”
In the doorway a scrape and sudden flare. Norman nearly shot him. Ballou held the match to his pipe and pulled, the flame rising and falling, showing his face, a map of shadow. Ballou took his time. Norman saw the lifting wreaths of pipesmoke, after a moment smelled the sweet tobacco drift. Then the voice, with staccato lifts and trills, as a voice used to ravens and hemlock, strange near to lost for human register. “You don’t know nothing, Pelham. You think you do but you one idiot man. Thinking, Them dirty Canucks, they all the same. Fuck, fight, breed, eat and die. Same as you, yes? Thinking you got that old truth. But what you got? Provoke? That’s a woman’s job, come to a man. Ain’t you learned that? So. Marthe and you woman, they friends. You ever think about that? Sure you do. Thinking, They same as each other. They the odd ones here, this place. The strangers. So they come together. Nothing odd about that. But Marthe, see, she don’t like women. Never did. Think about that. All them girls, ones come to her with the little same old problem, they think they find a friend. But they not there the house after they gone, not there she turn to me and say, ‘Look there old man, there go another whore for you to rut on. That girl she good for nothing now but to whore.’ So, provoke
you say. That ain’t true. Long time gone I come to peace with her, who she is. Fine I say. Live and let live. But this winter all that changed. Man, I think I be lose my mind. She witched me. First time I understand why we never had no girl babies, raised up all them boys. Me thinking it be what a man-jack I was. But no. One night, still long November, woke up to the ring and clatter of little bones dancing round my bed. Oh. All them children. And the old woman, sitting in the chimney corner, working that cat’s-cradle, fingers flash like sparks of hell, smiling that soft worn-down smile of hers, singing them same lullabies put those boys to sleep years gone. I tell you no lie, me. Wake up, think I’m having a bad dream. But lying there in the bed, them little girl-baby bones still clattering on. Not just girl babies either, but all them little babies she stop come into this world. I didn’t see nothing, no. But that sound. You rattle bones and make a sound like nothing left in this world. Light shake and tremble. But with a gaiety to it. Like they enjoying themselves. Sound like the deer-mice got to the liquor and be dancing reels. Strange a thing as that would be, me, I’d of welcomed it. But she was calling them out. Them old French songs. Oh man. All them little babies. And the old woman sitting there smiling at me like a challenge. Nothing friendly in that smile, I tell you friend. And me, not able to move limb from the bed. So it go like that, you know, off and on, until New Year.
“Ignorant me. Just didn’t think that one out. Man, I put her right where she want to be. House got lively then. Two-three days of that was enough. I got right out of there. Couldn’t do nothing with her anyhow. Ground bound up like iron. Didn’t change even when that moron Howell found her and she got carried down and vaulted. House still going like a wedding party day and night. So I burned her out. Took care of that, yes I did, me.
“Now, you be thinking, man gone off his head. Well, maybe so, maybe no. But I tell you what you don’t know: I was twenty-seven years old, working the lumber camps up the Connecticut Lakes when she come down from the townships wasn’t only fifteen year old. Already knew more than me, and me, I thought I knew the women upside and down. But this girl come into Colebrook and was like she looked the men over and saw me, walked up to me and tapped my chest and just like sheet ice went in wrapped around my heart. And me young fool thought it felt hot. And you thinking, So young Ballou fall in love. But it wasn’t ever no question of that. Huh. Maybe I didn’t have no love in me to give. Maybe that’s what she saw and knew. Point is, even then, the heart was long gone out of her. Ask me why, I couldn’t tell. Something gone on up the townships likely. Maybe just her nature. Maybe the way she born. Who knows, maybe she even some mistake. I don’t know. She learned that business somewhere. So. And she liked woods living well enough or tolerated it or maybe it even suited her. And she left me to my own ways much as I wanted and still enjoyed the bed well as any woman and so for long enough I thought what man could ask for more. Hey?
“So I had to get old, slow enough, maybe even stupid enough to understand wasn’t anything about me. Me, I was just convenience. Just a way for her to finish up, or maybe just carry on, what was all started behind her. Like this: She seen me that first time and knew someway I was a man dead to love and so suited her fine. Because she not just dead to love her own self but wanted it torn away from everbody else. And figured I was too dumb to see her doing that or too ignorant to do anything about it if I did. See, I don’t claim no sainthood, me. Me. I got no regret, Pelham. Seventy-two years old and I lay claim to three free months, three months all my own. Whatever hatred ran her bile, whatever meanness ate her, ate me too. So. This ain’t the story to tell nobody in town is it? Fuck all. Tell the truth, woods ain’t that lean. Sick of chicken.”
And did not step back but was gone from the doorway. As if he stepped aside without moving. Norman sat holding the deer rifle that had come down sometime into his lap. Imagining the figure dark against the snow gaining up the hillside toward the dark of the hemlock and spruce. Or perhaps not even visible from the moment it went out the door. After a time he knew the weight of the rifle and laid it across his knees. There was a draft from the open door and he rose and closed it, not looking outside but to glance once to the house. He had no fear of Ballou. He stoked the stoves and then sat a long while in the dark. He had nothing to report to Leah. He’d not lied to her but in small ways and so determined to spend several more nights in the henhouse and could thus allow that Ballou surely sensed his presence. The chickens were safe. He believed they were all safe if the delicate webwork of day to day could be trusted and there was nothing else he could do. He had nothing to report to Leah.
He had nothing to report to anyone.
So on a wet day the second week of September he drove her, just the two of them, to the Randolph station early in the morning to catch the Boston & Maine that would take her to New York and the Atlantic Coast Line’s Florida train. She’d said goodbye to the children in the daybreak kitchen: Abby sleep-eyed with pretended distraction; Pru erect and stiff within her soft body, worrying over the stove and packing a lunch for her mother; the boy not understanding beyond his own circuit and the gaping maw of mother gone, alternating sullen turned-down face with shrieks of demand to go too. Then they were gone from there in the covered carriage, Leah holding an umbrella tilted to her open right side to catch splash from the road. She was best-dressed in dark violet over white, her hat brim a sinuous drape enfolding the shape of her head. Her dry boots shone as wet. She had three hundred dollars in new bills from the bank in her purse and another hundred in tens folded under the lining of her right boot. They started out the drive with small talk about the children and the farm but this fell away worthless before they even reached the Randolph road and they rode silent. The rain was light and steady and the backs of the horses dappled slowly to deep doeskin red and the world was close. The road was still hardpacked from summer heat and the horses’ hooves clapped a fast tattoo, sounding to Norman something like the drivers of the train they approached. He wanted some fine intimacy with her, some slight tender touch there in those last moments before the town and station. He had no words for it, knew there were none. He took the lines tight in one hand and reached his other hand and laid a single finger against her hands twined together in her lap over her purse. She did not look at him but took the finger between hers, her hands folding palms around the bole as if taking him in. Her hands were cold, moist, then grew warm around his finger.
She would be gone a week, perhaps ten days. Longer only if she found her mother and needed more time. In that event she would telegraph.
The town was early morning quiet and the station was not, as if the town had realigned itself and poured its life down through the streets to this one place. At the north station end the freight dock was beaded with wagons backed in while others waited as the farmer men lifted up their crates of late-season corn and onions and early potatoes and cabbage as well as crates of eggs and others the tall cans of milk to the men above who loaded dollies and handtrucks with the stuffs and wheeled them around the side of the station out of sight to the waiting cars of the B&M morning freight to Boston: this familiar to them; even just the day before Prudence had driven down with the weekend’s worth of eggs and eighteen crates of young roasting chickens to the same end.
Behind the station, down along the tracks, visible, was the locomotive, spewing a low roil of black coke smoke and periodic spurts of steam from the brake valves, the engine a juggernaut of great beauty in the odd way of an ugly thing grown used to, beauty and terror also; just two winters before a train had derailed over the White River near Hartford in February, going off the bridge and crashing onto and then through the ice a hundred feet below to drown people in the frozen waters and the other cars collapsed onto the ice and caught fire and the people there were burned to death. Both Leah and Norman thinking of this as he swept the team into the upper end of the station from the freight docks, here the area clear with only a hotel livery and two private buggies in the ample gravel spread for the travelers. The
stairs to the platform were ensconced with wrought-iron railings and at the top were twin gas globes, squat, onion shaped, the glass the color of milk with vines of balanced slender iron embracing them, holding them in place. Norman was not shy but saw in the eyes of the drummers and sample-case men dressed in their cheap fancy suits and spats the same old quick glances between him and Leah, back and forth and then skimming over him and dismissing him in his rusted black wool suit-clothes before settling on her as she came down out of the carriage. So he stepped quickly around to her side, trusting the team to stay nosed-in as he lifted down her valise and let her take his arm to climb the stairs and so pass the clumped smoking and coughing men, who up close were pasty and tremulous and turned their eyes down or off to one side before his raptor gaze, and so together they passed through them to the station doors, Norman greeting them as a group: “Must be early in the morning for you fellers. But don’t rouse yourselves. I buy no gimmicks nor waste time with spiels. So save the garbage for the unwitting down the track.” He felt their hatred upon him as the doors closed and regretted speaking, wondering already which one of them would avenge himself upon Leah with chatter and innuendo for the trip south, his consolation knowing they were all bound for the next town, or at most the one after that. It was the best satisfaction he could expect of the day.