by Jeffrey Lent
“Jeeter? What christly kind of name is that?”
“I don’t know. A nickname of some sort maybe? I never gave it a thought.” At the end of the drive he turned east toward the tight gap of Crawford Notch.
“What’s wrong with him, he’s not in circulation? Is he locked up?”
“In a way I guess. To a man like me he is. I always thought you had to be either desperate or have it someway in your blood to farm.”
“What kind of farm?”
“This and that. Milking cattle. Some sheep. I don’t know. A farm.”
“What kind of cows?”
“Brown ones.”
“Jerseys.”
“And some splotched white and brown, reddish brown.”
“Guernseys.”
“I guess. Cows.” Some part of him thinking someday likely he’d pay for this pretense of ignorance.
“Seems to me odd some neighbor girl wouldn’t have snagged him, he’s such a fine catch.”
“Could be one will. But he doesn’t know many folks, I guess. Not even so many of the neighbors.” Guessing with Binter dead that would change and hoping not too much. He said, “He’s up from Vermont somewhere.”
Now she shifted, turned away from the open window and slipped her back against the door, twisted on the seat to face him. “Where’s this farm at, anyhow?”
“Down to Franconia. Out Easton. You ever been out there?”
“No,” she said. “But I know it’s opposite of the way we’re going.”
He pulled off the road into the parking area at the head of the notch. To the left the auto road dropped down from sight into the deep narrow gorge of the notch; to the right the rail line ran along the side of the southern flank, a sinuous break descending into the trees, the sides of the notch rising sharp and steep, as tight and precise as if cut by a lightning bolt. Other motorcars were parked here, some vehicles from the hotels. People stood against the rail, gazing east.
They remained in the car. She said, “He’s from Vermont, why’s he got himself a farm here?”
Sharp enough, he decided. “Him and me are kind of partnered up.”
“I figured that someway. But, a farm?”
“Well, there’s more to it than that.”
“I guess likely.”
“Whatever you’ve heard about me’s likely only half true. But. Anybody’ll tell you, I’m straight. What I say is what I do. What I thought is we could sit here and talk a little. Then, you wanted, we could ride down to Easton and see the place. Meet the fellow, you cared to.” When the fast cloud-shadows moved over the car it was cool, then warm again with the sun. She looked away from him, watched the tourists gaping at the notch. For a moment he thought he’d lost her. Then she turned back.
“It’s not my business and I’ll not say it but once. You’re more in need of a woman than some young jasper’s probably still needing to look close each time to decide which edge of the razor to use. How it strikes me, anyhow.”
He was quiet a moment. Then said, “I’ve got no urge.”
“Didn’t say you did. But want and need, now that’s two different things.”
He looked at her. Big blousing girl. Looking right at him. After a time he said, “I’ve got this boy. He’s the only need I know.”
She reached and touched his arm where his wrist lay over the wheel, her fingers just grazing him. His skin lifted under her touch. Then her hand was back in her lap. The cool of clouds ran over the car. She said, “I don’t like sitting here like a gawk. We rode over to Easton, you could tell me what you wanted to. Since we’re out for a drive anyhow.”
November. The world gone gray. Some wet dull mornings the brightest things the paper birches luminescent among the other trees of the woods, the mountainsides. Jamie already feeling the pull toward the holidays, the first year passing. As if with his head tipped back to take scent off the air. Some taint of dread. Trying to measure himself and Foster, the year of the two of them against what might have been for the four of them. Unfathomable, as if trying to chart out a different life. Empty hands.
He’d paid fifteen hundred dollars cash money for the hundred and eighteen acres of pasture and meadow and small plot of bottomland along the Gale River, the steep rising sheep pastures up the ridge toward Landaff and the woodlots above that. He drove the Binter wife to the Littleton station for the train taking her to her sister and the family awaiting her. Some other life. She worked her hands together in her lap, her face straight ahead as if not seeing, not wanting to see any of it, for the last time. He wished he could do her a kindness, say something. The best he could do was be silent. He sat with her in the station until the train came and stood then on the platform as it pulled away. Not watching the windows for her face, lifting no hand. Just standing watching.
Bottling in the rented basement room in Bethlehem with Carrick. A single electric bulb, the window boarded over inside and out. Daytime, with Foster in school. A four-by-four dropped into angle-irons against the oakplank door at the bottom of the dormer, the dormer doors closed and padlocked from the inside. Jamie tense as could be, always during this operation. This part, this setup, he felt the weak link. The distillery was good, proved. Carrick was in check, thus far. His contacts, his ability to read them, he felt confident about. Making the runs, the deliveries, was dicey only for the unexpected development—the flat tire in the wrong place, that sort of thing. It was only here where he felt vulnerable, and no talk, no grease, could change how it was, how it would appear. To the wrong eyes. And no way to know where those eyes might be. So he worked with a tin funnel and a box of corks and the empty wooden crates at one side, a pile of straw to stuff in around the bottles as the cases were filled. His upper and lower teeth moved back and forth in a small sliding motion, a faint click in his jaw, running up into his head.
Carrick said, “That Amy. She’s a pistol.”
Jamie said nothing. Working.
Carrick said, “A firecracker, that’s what she is.”
Jamie sighed, let himself be heard. Said, “That right?”
“You know it’s right. You must’ve known.”
Jamie didn’t like this course. “Seemed a sensible girl. Head on her shoulders.”
“Oh she’s sharp enough I guess. A little pigheaded even. Blunt. But I like that. Says what she means.”
“Yuht.”
“But I tell you.”
“Jesus, don’t.”
“I mean it. My ears are dried off and then some. I’ve had my share. You know how these hotel girls are.”
“I guess.”
“Most of them anyhow. They want it, you know. Now that was a surprise to me.”
“Sure.”
“But this Amy. Jesus.”
“Well, I’m glad for you.”
“She does this thing. I never been done like that.”
“Jeeter.”
“What?”
“Leave it be.”
“What I keep thinking is, how did she learn it? How did she know?”
“It’s just men and women, Carrick. They didn’t figure out how to make each other happy, maybe none of us would be here.”
“You gotta tell me.”
“Tell you what? Nothing to tell.”
“What she does is, she takes me with her mouth. Now I’ve had that before and never did mind it, I tell you. But this thing she does, when she’s got me most all the way there—”
“Stop, Carrick. I don’t want to hear it. You understand that? It’s not of interest to me.”
“You never had this happen to you? When she knows I’m right there next to it she drops her mouth all the way down and bites me. Real hard but quick. So it’s come and gone before I know what she’s up to. Jesus man, it’s like my balls blow up. Tell me. You ever had that?”
Trying to recall. The shitsucker lawyer that had Joey’s mother bottled up over there in Barre, Vermont. McCullen. McCarson. McSomething. And Claire. Two Claires now he would never know. That lawyer. Rec
alling Joey tell of biting him, biting his prick. She a child, little more than Foster’s age. Three years perhaps. Not, he knew, that this mattered. But he wished there was someway, any trade at all he could make, to get to that little girl, pick her up, carry her out of there. As useless as any other what-if and so the one he preferred. Something pure. Something he’d not known.
And wondered if that twelve- or thirteen-year-old girl, if when she bit the prick of the lawyer, wondered if he’d come in her mouth then. Could see thick suet fingers wrapped tight in the child’s roped curls, lifting her scalp.
She had never done him that way.
Less and less could he sleep. Even less wanted sleep. Could not stand returning out of those short brutal dreams.
In later years, Foster would recall his boyhood in three distinct levels, phases as sharply delineated as the separate stories of a house—with the first, the lowest, a place of murk, broken images, memories of his mother and sister, but also of something else, some sense of continuity, as if life briefly assumed a guise of sense. He suspected this was true of all childhood and he merely owned an abbreviated version of this falsehood. Still it lay within him and by adulthood it was not the melange of imagery that would provoke him but some ordinary thing, something everyday that for a moment could seize him and hold him with its own inestimable sadness: a certain windless hotday drift of pine resin, the berry scent of jam spread on toast, a certain winter twilight, the smell of someone passed by in a crowd, the first breaking of the peel of an orange. Freshly washed woman’s hair. Whippoorwill at dusk.
Then following were the three or four years where he was unowned. Where the first of the dogs came into his life, the dogs he grew to trust more than any other creature. More than people. Where he was woodsbound, always, each day someway even if only at a school desk watching out the window the heavy flakefall and seeing clearly how it accumulated and lay in this or that part of the woods and meadows and old overgrown orchards he knew as his own. Knowing how the snow would drift around the trunk of a certain tree, leaving one side open bare down almost to the ground. How on sunny days in February small enclosed south-facing enclaves would melt down to the ground and he’d bend close on hands and knees and smell the wet earth, study the dried stalks of weeds bared. The world, the dog and the woods, and himself out in it all. The dog leading the way no more than he did, just each of them always knowing where the other was and where they both were. Never lost. And the presence behind him of his father. If the dog and he were magnets to each other then his father was the greater magnet that would draw him in. Even those nights when ghosts walked the house and he would not sleep but lay in his bed curled tight to the sleeping dog, always there was the comfort of the hugeness of his father asleep right under him, separated only by thin floorboards. On those nights he’d hear his father rise and he’d rise also, pulling on clothes in the dark, the dog already up, and then the both of them down the stairs and out to ride along. Hurrying always, even after he understood with nothing said that his father would wait for them, would not leave without them. Expected them. Riding through the night, sometimes sleeping, crunched down in the seat with the dog, almost always before waking knowing where they were, even the odd places—the little haymeadow carved out of the woods above Franconia, the swamp road up toward Whitefield, the pull-off near Twin Mountain where once waiting they’d seen a bear— in those places meeting a man or men, impatient, hurried, polite. Almost always, pausing to speak to him before they opened the rear door and unloaded out of the backseat. Other things also: the rides home, summer nights with the top down, the sounds of peepers rising from the passing roadside ditches, or the winter nights when the snowpack was high with a moon out, the road a clear dark-laid ribbon before them, where his father would turn off the headlamps and they would drive for miles in the dark as if it were a secret way to journey. His father pounding the wheel of the car as if there was not enough speed in the world for them. Throwing a cigarette out the window to shower sparks behind them. Lighting another. The world all gone, belonging to them. As if they would not, could never, stop.
Then the last part. He was fourteen, fifteen years old when it began. Or when he became aware of it. And even while it was new to him, he believed there was no surprise in it for his father. As if his father had seen it coming. Or expected it. Or expected nothing less. But it was later that Foster understood this much. Because what he had learned in the woods was that everything new is only a shift in what is already known. Some shift of the familiar. A new pattern, nothing more than that. The world was knowable. He knew that much. He was fourteen. He had smoked. Drank, more than once. A good afternoon he could go out and come home with a couple-three partridge. Some timberdoodle. The dog Lovey was a part of him. The world radiated. He’d not yet been laid. But he had ideas about that, also.
Estus Terry died the winter of 1927. Someone, Jamie never knew who, had hiked in during the March thaw and found the corpse, already well gone. Terry had broken a leg, hauled himself back to the house and lay there in the bed and starved to death or froze to death or both. There were signs about the house that he’d tried to make do. A rude crutch fashioned of a branch. Some utensils strewn. Empty meat and bean tins lined alongside the bed. The woodbox empty. A hundred unreachable feet away a dozen cords of wood stacked inside the unused horsebarn. Mice or a weasel had been at work on his face and hands, through the socks over his one unbooted foot.
Jamie drove his year-old Chrysler the first day of April to Whitefield for the service. A Congregationalist minister spoke not of Terry—whom he’d not known—but vaguely of the dire condition of man and the glory of God. He read the Twenty-third Psalm. The service was concluded. There were not quite a dozen people there, among them the Federal marshal Patrick Jackson. It was a billowy day. Spurts of rain lashing the clear-paned windows of the small church. Then bands of weak light lying across the pewbacks. Jamie sat wrapped in his overcoat three pews from the back on the aisle. Jackson’s broad back stretching tight his own overcoat, upright, unmoving through the service, seated in the front row alone. Jamie watched him and Jackson did not bow his head for the concluding prayer for all their souls. Jamie wondered if he watched the minister or the plain wall behind him.
The group milled briefly in the stiff mud before the church and then broke apart. As if they would not speak to one another willingly. All knew the others and all had known Terry and someway each wanted to be private and alone there. Except for Patrick Jackson and Jamie knew it and did not wait but approached him first.
“Jackson.” Followed the name with a tight nod.
“It’s a crummy day for it, idn’t it? Not that Estus would’ve cared. I don’t think there was a weather he didn’t like. Never heard him complain winter’s too long, mud’s too deep, a summer day’s too hot. Know what I mean?”
Both holding the other’s eyes. Neither hostile nor friendly: regarding, taking measure. Jackson was a big man. Jamie felt someway that was to his favor. He said, “It was what he feared. Dying slow. Laid up.”
“It’s what we all fear though, don’t you think? Any of us had a choice in the matter. It wasn’t likely so bad; the cold would’ve got a pretty strong hold of him. Not that he hadn’t plenty of time to know it was coming. But still the cold’ll lift the worst of it away from you. Is what I hear anyhow. He was fond of you.”
“We got along. I didn’t see him all that much. Maybe not even as often as you got out there.”
“Yes,” said Jackson. “I’ll miss those visits. But christ it was a trek in there.”
Jamie made a slight smile. “That road.”
“Wasn’t a road, man. That was a footpath with ambition.”
“I’d guess you see plenty like it.”
“Well yes. But those others you don’t pay so much mind to. Too busy keeping an eye on where it might end. You’re the invisible man these days, Pelham.” As the humor rose in Jackson’s voice his face compensated, growing more grim.
“I’ve
got a quiet life.”
“I’m glad to hear it. Wish there was more men content with quiet lives. But then, if there was, maybe I’d have to pay more attention to them.”
“To read the papers, seems like you’re busy enough.”
“We keep at it. Border country’s big with every little river or woods road a highway these days. And it’s not like it used to be—some fella just trying to save a few dollars on the tax. There’s organization to it. Twenty men working for every one of mine. It’s a big business.”
“I wouldn’t know.”
“That’s right. The quiet man.” Jackson tilted his head, scanned the broken skies. “Well, Estus Terry. We’ll not see his like again. You run across a man named Pompelli in your travels?”
“Can’t say I have.”
“I’ve not yet either. I don’t know what he is, a greek or a wop or what. But he’s the little kingmaker is what I think. You keep running up against the same name and you haven’t got a face to put to it, most likely he’s your man. He could be in Boston for all I know. Could be he’s just the money behind it. But I’m thinking, that was the case, he’d have a man standing up for him, local. There’s plenty men working but they’re the roughnecks. Somebody’s in charge. I’d be curious to meet him.”
“I’d guess you would.”
“Well now,” Jackson said. “Mostly if I can manage it I like to stay around the house on a Sunday. You’re ever up to Colebrook of a Sunday stop in to visit. Anybody around can tell you how to find the house.”
“I know where it is.”
“It’s the hard thing about this business, Pelham. Remembering to look over your shoulder time to time.”
“Estus said much the same to me once.”
“Is that so?” Jackson’s face opened a little now, faint surprise. “Tell you the truth, I was talking about myself.”
Driving away, raining once more, Jamie thought Now what the fuck was that? Another warning? An offer of some sort? And who the fuck was Pompelli? The only thing he knew for certain was there hadn’t been a single thing Jackson said by accident. There were large amounts of bootlegged whiskey being run through the area out of Canada. He knew he’d lost some trade because of it. But he’d thought most of it was not stopping but going south to the cities. And when he lost custom he let it go without the fight he’d have waged ten, even five, years ago. Whatever loss he had he still felt he was holding his own. All he wanted. And Carrick: Carrick was quashed both sides, front and rear, Jamie content with how things stood and Amy Hewitt, Mrs. Carrick now, knowing her husband well enough to know Jamie understood the business in ways Jeeter never would. And they had three children. These and the farm were Amy’s fortress. Jeeter like a rabbit in May clover lacking any sense of the hawk spiraling overhead. And Jamie, driving, wondering now where his own unseen hawk floated.