Heart Songs and Other Stories

by Annie Proulx

  The hardware store was closed, then sold. I heard that Banger moved to Florida, to Arizona, to California, all earthly paradises to Chopping County. Raymie left on the bus for New York, his trapline rusting at its sets.

  In the spring I sold my house to a retired couple from New Jersey. They were innocently enthusiastic about the country. While we were in the town clerk’s office recording the sale, I asked, out of curiosity, who owned Stone City. The clerk searched it out.

  “William F. Banger. He bought it years ago for the back taxes. He still owns it.”

  She was wrong. The Stones owned it and they always would.

  The bastard fox loped smoothly down the hillside to the abandoned farm, carrying something delicately in his jaws. The den was a new one, an enlarged woodchuck hole that ran under a cellar foundation, the back entrance half-covered by a faded blue door.

  The fox gently released his prize among his cubs. Despite its broken wing the year-old cock grouse tried to fly, but the smashed muscle and bone dragged and the bird rolled to the ground like a feathered pinwheel. The wooly cubs, still in milk teeth, cowered from the flapping terror. The bird ran, nearly gaining the brambles before the old fox caught it again, broke one leg and returned it to the cubs.

  At last a small, ash-dark vixen, bolder than the others, darted for the bird and leaped away with a few blood-dabbled feathers.

  Bedrock

  MAUREEN split wood in the bare yard, surrounded by a circle of broken bark. A blue sheet of cloud marbled with heat lightning lay against the horizon.

  From the spare room window Perley watched his young wife’s braid of hair bounce with each stroke of the axe, her supple arms rise, the blade gleam like a sardonic smile in the air. She set a forked chunk on the block and scraped the earth with her foot. The axe rose and fell, the riven wood burst into two pieces with a ringing beat as though she had struck the stone shield beneath the earth.

  Through the flawed window glass the field behind her seemed a piece of yellowed paper, poplar seedlings slashed across it like vertical pen strokes. This was the second season he’d missed the mowing. Perley looked at the field a hundred times a day. It was his habit to imagine how it might have been in other times; the primeval trees, the slope rough with smoking stumps, and wolves skulking through the dimmed landscape toward the emptier north. Now the tawny grass, streaked with milkweed and purple vetch, came halfway up Netta’s stone that showed at the top of the hill like the white rising moon.

  Maureen glanced over her shoulder and Perley jerked back. Missed him again, he thought; he was still quick. He shuffled away in his creased leather slippers, down to the kitchen to start supper. His sunburned farmer’s color had faded months ago, and his pale, silver-stubbled face was as empty as the cat’s licked saucer.

  At supper Maureen and Perley sat at the table, an empty yellow chair separating them. The forks stood tines up in a Sur-B-Gud coffee can. He wanted to get the right one. Maureen didn’t like him to use the new forks with the stamped pattern of beaded roses and rampant vine.

  She helped herself to the porkchops while Perley rested his hands on the tablecloth, smoothing the wooden handle of his knife. His mouth watered as she cut thick curls of butter. She looked at him, eyes the color of bluestone, signaled him to go ahead. He sawed the pale meat from the bone, the rivets in the handle of the knife winking in the light from the unshaded bulb. Maureen swallowed mouthfuls of the dark Brute potatoes. He wouldn’t eat a blue potato. She could not make him do that.

  After supper they watched static-streaked television until it was time to go up to the bedroom. He lay on his side of the bed in an old man’s flickering sleep, watching the dry cracking of lightning without rain and the nervous green bursts of firefly incandescence across the fields. Maureen’s breath was as slight as the new-risen wind in grass. Down along the river luminous cones of light spilled out of the summer houses. He watched the tangled skeins of lightning flush the hillside with a dead glare. Only when the blunt crumps of thunder moved on did the rain fall.

  The farm was a thin mantle of soil that lay over granite bedrock scarred by glaciers and meteorites. The wineglass elms, the beech, the pad of stubbled grass, the interknotted roots, could all wash away again. Another deluge, he thought, would strip the rock bare, uncover the hard pit of the earth’s core.

  Atoms of this granite whirled in his body. Its stony, obdurate qualities passed up through the soil and into plant roots. Whenever he took potatoes from the heat-cracked bowl, his bones were hardened, his blood fortified. But Maureen, he knew, was shot through with some wild astral substance so hard and dense that granite powdered into dust beneath her blows.

  When Netta died Perley split stone from the ledge behind the rock garden, striking the chisel over and over, hooking out the floury stone dust from the narrow holes. He set the shims and wedges, pounded them in until the stone broke from its bed with a dry, mild sound. He chiseled her name.

  He hauled the finished marker up to the top of the field with the tractor. But when his daughter Lily saw it, she said the letters were too rough. They should have ordered a good polished stone carved with a verse and a design of flowers. She had clipped a poem out of a newspaper a few years ago and saved it for some reason. Now she knew why, she said.

  Living by himself loosened him from his life. Once or twice in the kitchen he thought he heard Netta’s low, dry voice asking him if he wanted ham for supper or not. The cat clawed her shriveled houseplants out of the pots to get at the dirt, and the crumbs of soil, sprayed over the carpet, seemed terrible to him in some obscure way.

  It was Samuel, Lily’s husband, with large heavy-lidded eyes like those of the marble busts of Roman emperors, who put the seed in his garden.

  “You could marry again, you know.”

  They were mending fence, and the taut wire hummed as Samuel pounded in the staples. The fresh wind slapped against the crushed fields.

  “Quite a few marry again. Been over a year. You’re not throwed down in the weeds yet, Perley. You’re still of an age where things can happen.”

  The women thought so, too. They brought casseroles and pies, jars of pears with cloves drifting like drowned men through the cloudy syrup. Selma Ruth, stuck with bringing up her wayward daughter’s children, came with bread.

  “I’ll be darned if I let the state bring up any grandkids of mine,” she said, limping away from his porch, the fresh-baked loaves lying on his outstretched palms like two sweet pillows. He imagined himself sitting at a table with children who rolled their peas around the racetrack of the plate rim. He wondered if he should tell them to stop or hope they’d grow out of it. Lily and Samuel had no children.

  It was a very sharp, clear day when he began to lose the farm. Blackened weed stalks lay stiff on the frosted earth, brittle fallen leaves rolled in the shifting wind.

  He recognized Bobhot Mackie’s truck coming up from the river road, an old red Chevy with juddering fenders and bald tires, the splayed sides held in with a come-along. He went down the steps to see what Bobhot wanted, to keep him from getting out of the truck and running his hot, glaring eyes over the farm, looking for things to pick up later. Maureen, Bobhot’s young sister, got out.

  “Come to clean up for you, do some home cookin’.”

  Bobhot put his clubby elbow in the window and laughed, a sniggering bark, and the girl switched her long braid. Perley tried to say that he got everything up good by himself, but Bobhot took off, tooting the horn in bold blats, leaving her there.

  The girl came to him that night, her unbraided hair heavy and hot. She was knowing, but meek, and her limbs folded into yielding positions at his lightest touch. The guilty scents of willow pollen and the river in spring flooded the room, the looming shape of the past was suddenly uncovered like a hand pulled away from a face. He seemed to feel drying mud beneath his nails.

  They were married a month later during a snow squall, wind resonating the bell with a confused humming. He wore a white suit.


  Lily had said. “This is disgustin’. It’s the bride who wears the white, not a old man marryin’ a girl four years younger than his own daughter.”

  The suit was the dense, slippery white of lard, and hung in caressing folds about his knotted legs when he tried it on in the store. But in the cold church it clung like wet plastic.

  He stood again on nearly the same floorboard as during his first wedding. Then he had worn a black suit. Then it had been late afternoon in August, the beer-colored light falling through the same dusty glass; the silence, except for a wasp against the window, as thick, as felted as mullein leaves. That heat, the yellow light, Netta’s blunt hand, the scent of musty piety seemed more real than the chilly ceremony that now bound the girl, Maureen, to him.

  Lily and Samuel did not come to the wedding. “What a family you are bringin’ into this one,” Lily cried. “You have done the worse you could do.” Only Bobhot was there, red and drunk.

  Maureen scorned a honeymoon. She repapered the farmhouse with patterns of flowery trellises for the bedrooms, red teapots in the kitchen. She twisted up her long braid and painted the kitchen chairs yellow, the old oak table a cold green, like grass in the rain. Curtains printed with scarlet hibiscus hung in the lean farmhouse windows. Yet there were piles of dirty dishes in the sink, the grimy towel hung askew on a nail.

  Bobhot came for dinner, ate hotdogs, one after another, his scalding eyes roaming around the room, lighting on the wallpaper, the clock shaped like a scottie dog, the plastic fern on the windowsill over the iron sink. He ate his Jell-O and left, and for long minutes they could hear the red Chevy rattling away down the river road.

  Perley grew Green Mountain potatoes, the waxy yellow flesh very much to his taste. He had tried other kinds, Mortgage Lifter, Russet, Rose King, but never Brute. Never a dark blue potato, an inky, poison-looking thing.

  “I’ll have Bobhot send us over some seed potato,” said Maureen in April.

  “Don’t need to, I got plenty stored.”

  “But not Brute.”

  “Green Mountain. I always grow Green Mountain.”

  “I like Brute. They are the best tastin’ potato. I wouldn’t give dirt for a Mountain.” There was a bold note in her voice that astonished him. He laughed in disbelief.

  “On this farm we grow Green Mountain.” He was innocent of what would happen next.

  Fire cracked in her eyes. She hit him on the cheek with a full, swinging blow that knocked him against the wall. She smashed his nose while he was still trying to stand up and catch his breath with the outrage of it. She was all over him, pummeling, hair-pulling, digging her knees into his kidneys. She rolled him onto his back and slapped openhanded.

  “Say ‘Brute.’” she panted, punching him in the ribs with hard, bruising blows. He could not hit her back. He got her wrists and held them with all his strength until his arms trembled with the strain. He felt her shift and force her knee between his legs. She doesn’t care what she does, he thought, and he said “Brute’

  He stayed out in the burn until late that night, until the cold sent him into the house. He went up the back stairs to Lily’s old mom and lay under the chenille spread. Dim starlight sifted into the darkness He heard the floorboards whine. She came into the bed, naked, her braid undone.

  “Mr. Perley.’ she whispered. Her hot breath scalded his sore face. Her fingers slid up and down his body until he rolled onto her with a groan of self-hatred. Before he fell asleep he promised to plant Brute potatoes.

  After the gardens were in he took the stepladder into the orchard to thin out the June apples and was up in the dark leaves and spurred branches when she knocked the ladder out from under him.

  “You old bastard.” she said, watching him fall. “Why didn’t you let Bobhot borrow the brushcutter?” He lay on the ground among the hard green apples and thought it was useless to tell her how Bobhot came to help himself to the brushcutter the night before, his truck parked down the road, slipping silently into the shed. Perley had heard the gas can go over, and when he went out with the flashlight. Bobhot’s eyes shone in the dark like red studs.

  Perley begun to watch out for her, as wary as a cat that is sometimes smoothed, sometimes kicked. He couldn’t hit her; he deserved what was happening.

  A feeling grew that something was misplaced, and he looked vaguely through drawers and cupboards. In the kitchen he found a stack of yellowed recipe cards written out in Netta’s familiar hand. He thought of biscuits, tried to make some, leveling the cup of flour with the knife blade as he had seen Netta do a hundred times. Times smell of baking had its comfort.

  More and more Maureen was the one who split wood, hammered at the broken door hasp on the shed. In the yellow field dark bramble patches boiled up.

  Bobhot came often, to help Maureen, he said, then sat in the yellow chair between them eating pot roast. Once he fell asleep at the table, his mouth hanging open to show dark shreds of meat in his teeth. Maureen woke him and sent him up to the spare room, and Perley saw that he found his way easily.

  “Be dangerous for him to drive back—hit some car full a kids,” she said. All night long he heard Bobhot’s snorts and breathing behind the wall, felt the red eyes looking through the headboard and thought of the bristly, full cheek, like a side of ham, rubbing against the white pillowship.

  On a September morning Bobhot came early, his truck clanging with a jumble of iron sounds. The sky was smooth as a washed stone. Bobhot put down the tailgate and pulled out metal pipes.

  “He’s goin’ to paint,” said Maureen. “This house is all peelin’ away.”

  Bobhot twisted and pounded the pipes into connectors until scaffolding rose against the back of the house. Perley looked up at him, high under the eaves, standing on a plank. There was a sucking sound as Bobhot pried the lid off a paint can.

  Perley started up the hill, punishing his breathlessness by walking faster. The cat picked through the wet grass, following him. In a few hundred feet she gave up and cried after him in her narrow voice.

  Behind Netta’s grave a section of the old stone wall had spilled onto the ground. Milkweed, bladder campion and goldenrod grew here. To the east lay the Presidential Range, a pale jagged edge against a paler sky, like a strip of torn paper. Wilter, the mail carrier, had told him there were still lynx in the mountains. Perley pictured them, their long, serious faces and muttonchop whiskers framed by drooping tamarack branches as they stood on shadowy limbs, their feet bunched together and their backs, arched like bows. He looked down at his house, small and low, the scaffolding like black wire, Bobhot like an ant. The new paint was the coarse yellow of highway signs.

  He worked on the wall, chinking the dark crevices. The rough granite stones locked into one another, their strength in their passive weight.

  When he came down at noon he looked critically at Bobhot’s work, saw missed strokes, drips on the window glass. The wind was up and carried hundreds of balloon spiders into the glaring yellow.

  Painting the house gave Bobhot a position. He came now for breakfast, looked around, his eyes pulling at things. He dulled the chain saw, ran the lawnmower over a rock, stacked wood so the pile collapsed and left it that way. He was always in the yellow chair, taking any fork he liked.

  At night Perley said to Maureen, “I don’t want Bobhot to come here so much.” Maureen’s arms legs stiffened.

  “He’s helpin’ us. He’s the only one gets anything done around here. Now shut up and be glad you got help. He’s gettin’ somethin’ done on this place while you just moon around.”

  Perley got up before daylight the next morning. He picked half a bushel of late string beans and two bushels of tomatoes and set the baskets in the kitchen for Maureen to can. In the shed he sharpened axes, grass clippers, the nicked lawnmower blade, anything that would take an edge. He hitched the brush-hog to the tractor and began to grind away at the hillside. The blade tore at the young seedlings.

  The sun beat a quick, ceaseless tempo. He had forgo
tten to wear his billed cap and felt his face burning, his lips cracked and dry. He glanced down at the house often, thinking Maureen might bring his cap and a jar of cold water dashed with vinegar.

  At noon she got into the truck. His eyes followed the plume of dust down the river road, watched it turn toward Bobhot’s place. At once it was lonely in the field, a pointless kind of loneliness. He stopped the tractor and walked down to the house for a drink. His swathes lay even across the hillside, curved to fit the contour of the hill like the sweep of a comb over a skull.

  The kitchen was as cool and dark as a cave. He drank cold water from the faucet, let the liquid run across his mouth and sunburned face. He sat in the yellow chair, his legs trembling. The beans and tomatoes were still where he had set them, each with a halo of flies.

  He went upstairs, gripping the bannister, to the spare room. It had been his room when he was a boy, and later, Lily’s room. The large square floor was painted the shining grey of Job’s tears. The ceiling was a narrow rectangle clamped between slanting knee walls, the distortion forced by the roof pitch. On the bed the pink chenille spread was turned down, showing the pillow cover cross-stitched with Dutch girls. He lay down, emptied of every feeling but tiredness.

  The pulsing sound of the tractor coming off the hill woke him. White sunlight slammed through the window in a solid hot ray. His headache beat in rhythm with the engine. Bobhot, finishing the job for him.

  Halfway down the stairs he had a dizzy spell. Tub water was running in the bathroom. He could smell Maureen’s bath oil. In a minute his head cleared, but there was a sugary taste under his denture.

  From the porch he looked up at Bobhot’s crooked rows, saw the half-peeled saplings jutting from the soil like random-thrown lances. He couldn’t see Netta’s stone.

  The pickup strained on the steep rise and he threw it into four-wheel drive, going straight up. It was what he thought. Bobhot, trying to mow around the stone, had angled the brush-hog awkwardly. The stone lay broken, the fresh fracture as white as teeth, her name facedown on the ground.