In the Fall

by Jeffrey Lent

  “It was my father’s,” Foster told him.

  Aiden looked away from Foster. “Changed the oil for you. Looked her over good. Other than the oil, she’s set to go.”

  “Well I appreciate that. Hadn’t thought about the oil.”

  Aiden nodded. “Yuht. People don’t.”

  “I keep an eye on the water and tires.”

  “Change that oil often enough, she’ll go forever.”

  “I’ll keep it in mind.”

  “Sorry to hear about your father.” Aiden looking away, off across the street.

  “It’s all right,” Foster said. He lifted his wallet from his hip pocket. “How much for the oil and all?”

  Aiden looked at him. “Nothing,” he said. “It’s no charge for that.” Foster looked back at him. “They don’t give that oil away.”

  “That’s all right.”

  Foster paused. Then said, “You mean a kindness I suppose.” He unfolded the wallet and took out a dollar bill and held it. “But Pop, he was a little more than a couple quarts of oil.” He let go of the bill then. It sailed out, rocking in a small sashay toward the ground.

  In a narrow empty lunch counter he ate a hamburger sandwich and a slab of pie made from tinned cherries and drank coffee thick with cream and sugar. In a hardware he bought a new collar for Lovey. Her old one was pocked and frayed from where Glow would lie against her and chew on it. He thought maybe Glow was over that now. The new collar was beautiful. Double-stitched fine supple harness leather with a brass buckle, it lay in his hand limp and soft, the weight of it countering the pliability: a thing that would last. He bought gun oil and a chamois polishing leather.

  Back on the street he paused and looked around him. The light aslant with early fall midafternoon shadow, everything delineated. He was distracted, buoyant, restless. Himself. He felt confident that he could meet all things head on and remain himself. He wanted the woods. He recalled what Connie Clifford had told him of Leah Pelham owning the world. And thought perhaps this certainty was some small click passing down to him from his grandmother. And smiled with this idea. As if she had survived all things to come to rest within him. Why not? was what he thought. He was sixteen years old and bold as a rivet bolting together a pair of steel plates.

  He filled the woodshed side of the entry way with split stovewood, five tiers running from the outer door all the way to the wall of the house where three steps led up into the kitchen, the tiers stacked to the shed rafters. So when you walked in you passed alongside a dense wall of wood, the smell fresh and sharp against the old must and machine oil of the shed. Not even a quarter of the stacked cordwood behind the house but all there was room for. The other side of the walkway, beside the workbench with the old tools oiled and hung each in its place on the wall, he sat afternoons to whet the axe bits on the grindstone, pumping the treadle, the stone whirling roughly in place as he held the bits against the edge, his fingers knuckled back to keep them from the wheel. The water in a slow drip from the thin spout over the wheel, the smell of wet stone and steel. The bit when he turned it over a fine bright crescent shaved down to a wafer edge. The day he carried in the last armload of wood to stretch up and cram in against the rafters he sat afterward and sharpened the axe a final time and with a rag spread a thick coat of oil over the sharpened double bits and set the axe up in a corner by the door, the handle against the wall, the oiled head resting off the ground on a block of wood. So whoever used it next would find it ready.

  Using his grandfather’s tools, looking around for the ways and methods for their care, finding what he needed, he was surprised by what he knew. His own father’s tools had been few, ordinary everyday hammers and screwdrivers with no particular attention paid. Yet he possessed understanding of these older, more dangerous tools. As if it were passed down without language. He realized you might know something without awareness until the knowledge was called for.

  This was not so different from the woods. Peering close at each leaf fall, each white bird-spoor splash on the duff, as at the same time hearing the wind move through the trees, seeing the angles of light change, imprinting without effort the terrain ahead; all these things marked the way you turned and walked, not only the direction taken but where you’d come from. Seeing behind and ahead at once. Because, when the hunting was done you had to find your way home.

  Pru was up in the sheep pasture picking the early apples from the three old big trees and he hiked up to help her, the dogs loping out and back as he called to keep them close, to not worry the sheep, who were bunched together higher up, watching the dogs. She had a pair of round-bottomed bushel baskets and a yoke to carry them with. The apples were rust-red, scabbed, small, knobbled. Flesh bright white stained pink and sweet and crisp. He worked alongside her for a time. Ducking under the heavy branches hanging with still-ripening fruit. All they gathered were the early windfalls. It would be another week, ten days, another frost before the rest were ready. But Pru was after some cider, maybe even a pie.

  He told her, “I was asking Abby about Grandmother. About her time down there in North Carolina. Not about when she went back there but before. Before she met Grandfather. Abby just waved me off.”

  Pru was bent after apples. She grunted, a sound of disdain. Her fingers worked through the grass, cupping one, two, three apples.

  Foster went on. “Seems like, whatever happened when she went back down there, the key to it all had to be from the time before. What was the name of those people there?”

  She straightened up, studying him. A breeze off the ridgeline ran over them, a freshet of air, tugging the short grass back and forth. She said, “Except for how she came to leave there she never talked about those times. Not even so much with Father, not that he ever told us. Not any stories that would explain anything to anybody. After she died Father talked some about traveling there to try to learn what he could.”

  “Why’d he not?”

  She looked at him a long time. Then asked, “Why’d you not stay over there to the White Mountains? Try to unravel what might or might not have happened to your father?”

  Because I was scared to, he thought. And said, “Because it wouldn’t have changed anything.”

  She nodded. “That’s right. Mother would still have been dead.” She paused and then added, “Perhaps some part of him was afraid to go, also. Afraid of what he might find. When he was old, the last year or two, and not so spry as he’d been and his mind would slip around with him, times then he’d talk about it. How he should’ve done something, gone down there.”

  Foster was quiet a time. Then he stepped around her and still wordless bent to the work. Apples into the baskets. They worked until the ground was clean and then Foster hooked the harness ends into the basket handles and slipped the yoke over his bent head, reaching up to settle it across his shoulders. He turned to start down the hill.

  She said, “People’s name was Mebane. All I know’s the boy she thought she killed, his name was Alex. Alexander. Mister Lex she called him. Mister!” She spat in the grass.

  “Mebane,” he repeated. Then, “Where?”

  “Name of the town’s Sweetboro. That’s all I know.”

  “It’s a pretty name.”

  She started down ahead of him, not waiting. Her voice came muffled with the breeze. “Nothing pretty about it.”

  Up in the burying ground under the starlight. Full of pie and boiled beef. A hard freeze coming down. The sky jellied with light. Little sips of whiskey. The old dog pressed against one thigh for warmth, the pup sitting high up on her haunches at the gap in the stone wall, surveying the star-soaked pasture for movement. An owl moaned mournful up on the ridge. Another sip of whiskey. Shaking his head. The owl not mournful at all, just an owl, the voice of night. Sitting with his head resting against one of the stones, some Pelham. He could see both stones of his grandparents. He no longer expected anything magical, any sudden burst of understanding. Because if those old bones told him anything it was that understan
ding was slow.

  He wept. He missed everything of his old life. Not only his father anymore but the articulate parts and pieces of everyday. The things he had not even known he could count upon. It was beautiful weeping: quiet, absent of self-pity. He took it as a measure of rightness that his dogs no longer grew alarmed when he wept. They were a comfort except for the fact that he also felt they were clear-headed judges. His old dog took her head off his thigh and tucked it down into her own shoulder. Likely only cold. He reached down and stroked her.

  There was a final cigarette in the box that had belonged to his father. He wanted it but did not smoke it. He sipped again and corked the bottle and slid it behind the headstone and rose to walk to the wall and gaze down over the speckled meadow as he peed, Glow leaning to sniff where his pee steamed. He buttoned his flies and traced his way along the rough wall, one hand running up and down over the uneven hard-laid slabs. Came to the gate into the pasture and looked down at the quiet farm. The dogs out before him, ranging easy in the pasture dark. He went down the hill.

  Another afternoon he lifted out the backseat of the Chrysler and removed the L.C. Smith from its case, ran a rag with a fine smear of oil over the gun and put a handful of shotshells in his coat pocket. He hiked up the woodsroad through the old sugarbush and began to climb up through the mixed hardwood and evergreen draws, the dogs both out before him now, serious, quartering back and forth the ground before him, tails working, heads out like drawn bows. Time to time he could hear one or the other pulling air in great snorting bursts, eating scent off the air like food. As the cover thickened they began to bust birds. He waited until Lovey locked up a bird and Glow slammed up behind her mother, honoring the point. He spoke a soft warning to both dogs, stepping past them. The partridge went up, a sudden burst of speckled animation that hit a long going-away glide down the mountain and he passed the splendid moment where his mind left him and was all out ahead of him, pinned down only on the flying bird as the gun came up. Then there was a pinwheel of feathers and both dogs broke past him and he was back. He knelt and took the partridge from Lovey’s mouth gentle as lifting an egg. He spread the tail: a young cock. He held it between both hands for Glow to bury her nose in the feathers. Only for a moment. Then stood, reaching behind him to put the bird in the pouch on the back of his coat. For a few feet Glow stayed behind him, bounding to bounce her nose against the bulge in the coat. He said nothing, just walked on. Lovey already back out hunting. Soon enough Glow went after her.

  He came down off the mountain in a pale dusk under a sullen changed sky with three birds swelling the game pouch and a four-month-old puppy who thought she understood everything about the triangle formed of herself and the birds and the boy with the gun— the pup dancing back and forth in the sheep pasture, nosing the ledges, making half-assed points at mullein stalks or milkweed pods, stopping to gobble sheep pellets, her eyes rolling toward him.

  Prudence was still in the barns. A pale shimmer of lantern light through those windows. In the kitchen he and Abby worked together at the soapstone sink, dressing and plucking the partridges. “Young birds,” was all she said, an approval. Then sent him below the barns to the garden where by lantern light he cut the green leafy heads from young turnips. He came back and found the partridges cut into quarters, the pieces in a bowl of milk. Prudence was in from the barn then and the sisters worked together over the stove: Prudence whisking egg whites to peaks and slowly turning the whites into a bowl of cornmeal batter with the backside of a spoon, then dropping the batter onto baking sheets for the oven; Abby cooking cut-up Hubbard squash in a small amount of water at the side of the stove, the lumps of squash slowly softening and settling into a mass. She took the greens from him and rinsed them and chopped them fine and added them to boiling water. She cut a thick wedge from a side of bacon and minced the wedge to slivers and added those to the greens and covered the pot and moved it also to the side of the stove.

  Foster sat at the table watching them, the broken-down shotgun over his lap as he cleaned and oiled it. Outside a wind had sprung while he was in the garden and now it was raining, water aslant driving hard against the side of the house. The dogs under the table, shivering with the smell of food.

  Abby cut slabs from a brick of lard and melted them in a deep skillet. Prudence mixed flour in a bowl with dried herbs and spices shaken out of cans, adding and adjusting by bringing her nose close to smell the mixture. Foster watched them. He understood that his seat at the table, his dogs under the table, all of that was understood and accommodated within the pattern of their movements.

  Abby turned and said, “Most times, we have this meal springtimes. When there’s young roosters to spare. Then it’s dandelions instead of the turnip greens. We never got in the habit of fall greens. The turnips are for the sheep, come winter. But it comes down from Mother. It’s not a meal you’ll have had before, I tell you that.”

  She turned back and lifted the quarters of partridge from the milk and dredged them in the flour and let them go into the hot grease. They sank popping and then came back to the surface, swimming with the heat as they cooked. When they were all in, she moved the pieces back and forth with a long-handled fork. Newspaper was laid out on the counter beside the range to drain the bird-parts on. Prudence opened the oven and lifted out the sheets with the high delicate corn puffs. Drained the water off the greens and added butter and cream to the squash. All this set before him. He rose and stood the shotgun in a corner and called the dogs out from the table into the woodshed. Then sat back down. The women seated, looking at him. Their faces bright, shining. He understood behind that love was a tremble, a quiver of expected rejection. And he was no longer sure of the night before him, not so sure he could announce himself. He took up a piece of partridge and his teeth broke through the hot savory crust and the sweet meat came off the bone clean into his mouth. He smiled at them. “Oh my,” he said, “that’s some good.” And they got busy passing bowls around and he helped himself. They ate, all shy, not talking, eyes skittering away from the others. And he ate the lovely food with his heart hurting in his chest. All the way through the meal the two women throwing their eyes over him as if casting hopeful broken nets. All the time turning his eye to what he could not see, toward what he wanted to stand and walk to and study again: the oval portrait of his grandparents in the parlor.

  Supper was over and cleaned up and he’d taken the dogs out, running bent over through the rain to the barns to lead them down to the sheepfold and their bed and then back to the house where he stripped off his soaked coat and hung it on the back of a chair near the range to dry. The women were in the parlor. He stood over the sink and drank two glassfuls of water, then passed through the door into the hall and down to join them.

  They’d laid a fire in the stove against the wet and he stood by the mantel for a moment with his fingertips resting up there as if he were warming himself as he studied again the man and woman in the portrait. And he believed now he understood the arch of their gazes; what he wanted to find was some fragment of the tender world they’d held between them. He turned to the room and held his hands together before him.

  Abigail spoke. “Did you graduate your high school? Over there to the Whites?”

  He’d been about to speak. He paused, knowing he was frowning a little in response. He put his hands in his pockets. “No, ma’am. I’ve a year to go.”

  Prudence said, “It’s September already.”

  Abigail looked at her. As if reminding her of some agreement they’d made. Then she looked back at Foster. “You were a good student?”

  “I guess I was. Got good grades.”

  “Well then. It’s not too late. You’d catch up soon enough.”

  “Abby,” he said. “I’ll not go back there.”

  Prudence said, “No one was suggesting you return over there and live alone.”

  Abby looked at her sister. Prudence said, “I’m quiet.”

  “We agreed—”

  “You
’d talk. Why don’t you go on then and do that. Me, I’m not saying a thing.”

  Abby held her gaze a little longer. Then to Foster: “Sister and I’ve talked this through. We don’t offer this lightly. If you were to stay here, finish your high school in Randolph, then you’d be prepared to go on to college.”

  Gently he interrupted her. “The truth is, I’ve got most of my course work done. For a diploma. Mostly I’d be sitting killing time.”

  One side of her mouth tightened and relaxed. She smiled. “So you’re a better student than you let on to be. There’s nothing wrong with that. But still, it’s too late for you to get into college for this year. So you might as well sit through that last year and get your diploma like everybody else. And perhaps spend some of that time thinking about where you want to go, what you want to do there. Now the university to Burlington’s a good school, is what I hear. But it’s only one of many. You could go anywhere you want. Down there even to Harvard College in Massachusetts. There’s Dartmouth too, not so far away. Or anywhere at all. Anywhere you wanted. Off to California, you wanted.”

  “Well,” he said. “I don’t know. I hadn’t thought about that.”

  And she heard his hesitation and went ahead. When she spoke he saw a triumph in her eyes, a fierce pride. “Mother knew the value of money. More than Father ever did. She knew that freedom is only a word without money. Freedom is assumptions but money is actuality. That was why she cared for it. Not for any everyday thing. Even though she was a woman could dress herself in style. But that was all going to town. Around here she was happy in wore-out old clothes. Barefoot frost to frost. It was two things she understood: that the only hope in this world was money. And education. You put those two together and the world opens up for you ways it will not, cannot, otherwise. The point is, there is money in the bank. Money and then some to send you to the best school you can or want to attend.” She paused again and held up a hand as if foreseeing protest and said, “And it is not something you should feel is being given for free. A part of it is yours. A part of it always belonged to your father. The same way a part of this farm did, and so belongs to you. But you’re no farm-boy. That’s clear. Now, Sister and I live here and will until we die. But we’ve no great need for the money, not much of it anyhow. So. There is more than enough. For you to go ahead any way you want.”