Heart Songs and Other Stories

by Annie Proulx

  In the kitchen he unpacked his supplies. There was only one chair and he wondered what had happened to the others. The cloves and peppercorns spilled by the vandals broke underfoot like hard-backed beetles. He swept up the painted buds from the smashed plates, a round cup handle that lay like a china monocle over a staring knothole in the floor. As the flame seized the blackened lamp wick a yellow glow like a sense of well-being rose up the walls and there was the smell of burning dust and hot metal.

  The next morning he awakened in ringing silence. The hairpiece lay like a sleeping marmot on top of his folded clothes. His feet recognized the familiar floorboards and in the kitchen, cool, pure light flowed over his hands like water. He heated stew in the can and ate pale bread, for there were no pots and pans, no toaster.

  Outside he studied the camp, the stains, the cracks, the curling shingles. He could make these faults over. He would come back in the summer with Grace and Bonnie. Bonnie would sleep on the cot in the loft. He wrote a list of what must be done in the notebook that was always in his shirt pocket.

  There was a small cliff behind the camp. He walked to the edge and looked down at chair legs sticking out of the snow, the curve of a griddle like a black rising moon. The forks and knives had all disappeared down narrow, deep holes, like silvery snakes.

  It was the morning’s work to drag the snow in the pit with a garden rake, discovering piepans, the old dead dog’s dish, a pair of sugar tongs. The holes he made in the depths of the snow were a deep, unearthly blue. The rake snagged a rusted quart milk can, and as he knocked the snow from it, a double image sailed into his mind like a pair of pirate ships: the man on the bicycle—Mr. Fitzroy holding the milk can.

  In those childhood days his father had driven down to Fitzroy’s barn every evening for sweet milk dipped from the tank, the shuddering liquid releasing a smell of torn grass and rain. Mr. Fitzroy handed the can to Blue. A tight metal cap fit over the neck and as the metal chilled a fine silvery dew formed; in it he traced his evanescent name with his fingernail, drew pictures of mountains and flags and the triangular faces of cats.

  Mr. Fitzroy washed his hands by darting them into the stream of scalding water that gushed out of the milk room spigot. After the milking was done he sat beside his wife on the porch and played “Lady of Spain” on the accordion. Mrs. Fitzroy cut and whittled. There were her wooden animals on the windowsills, a dog with a curved tail, a figure with an unfinished face. At night the light quivered behind them and they seemed to shrink from the assaults of moths on the glass. Blue and his father listened, sitting in the car with the windows down and slapping mosquitoes with a sound like sparse applause.

  Blue guessed now that the old lady had died, and Mr. Fitzroy gone down to the bottle.

  He made his list: get the electricity turned on, call Grace in Las Cruces, three panes of glass, glazing compound, scouring powder, sponges, Murphy’s Oil Soap, a new broom, hooks to rehang the pots and pans. The festering, cracked linoleum around the sink caught his eye and he wrote “tiles, adhesive, trowel.” There was time enough to do these things.

  On the main highway the resentful landscape showed itself to him, a stiff, hard country with rigid trees, frost-shattered masses of rock and shadowy gorges. The road to the shopping mall in Canker looped and doubled like intestine, ran between a stream and the leaning cliffs. Ravens flew up from crushed mats of fur and gristle at the rushing approach of his car, and dropped again before he was out of sight. The sky was filled with raw, bunched clouds. He crossed a bridge where a bicycle leaned against the guardrail like a tired animal.

  Mr. Fitzroy, wearing old-fashioned overalls with wide, simple legs, was a mile farther on, his hand uplifted at the sound of Blue’s car. Blue stopped and opened the door.

  “Hello, Mr. Fitzroy. What’s wrong with your bicycle?”

  “Nothin’. Always hitch this part. Steep hills.” He was not surprised at being named by an apparent stranger, didn’t look at Blue, but stared fixedly down the highway in the direction of the shopping mall like a compass needle straining toward the north. They rode in silence. At the shopping mall Blue said, “I’m going back up to the camp in an hour. If you want a ride, I’ll leave the door unlocked.” The old man mumbled, “Obliged,” and headed for the revolving “Harry’s Bottle-O-Rama” sign.

  It was much more than an hour. The New Mexico call was a long one. Everyone missed him, said Grace, but she heated up when he told her not to send the special drawings Bonnie was making for “Gramma.”

  “She isn’t very grandmotherly, Grace.” He didn’t say the photographs were still in his suitcase, that his mother hadn’t seen the color prints of Bonnie in her little yellow bathing suit, of Bonnie on the spotted pony. He didn’t mention the cup on his mother’s shelf, talked instead about repairing the camp.

  “What kind of camp is it?” She seemed to be picturing Boy Scouts and sing-alongs.

  “Our old camp, where we used to go in the summers.” The tough edge in Grace’s voice kept him from saying they could use the camp in the summers.

  “It seems funny,” said Grace, “to go way back east just to fix an old camp for a woman who doesn’t seem to care about her only grandchild.” She put Bonnie on the line. Blue promised to bring her two presents.

  “I like it when you’re gone,” said Bonnie, “because we have fried chicken every night.”

  “Well, I have Dinty Moore stew,” he said, and the last thing he heard, after Grace said goodbye, was Bonnie screaming for dinty soup.

  He made his way back to the car through the frozen grocery carts that stood scattered across the lot like beasts on the winter prairie. A heavy cold descended as though some hand had cranked the mottled sky down on bent figures in quilted coats and shuffling foam boots.

  “God, I about give up on you,” said Mr. Fitzroy, each word afloat on curling fumes of liquor. Blue started the car, thinking that if he struck a match there would be a flash fire. It was only a little past four, but twilight fell hard into darkness before the lights of the shopping center disappeared behind them.

  “You look like I ought to know your name, but I forget it,” said Mr. Fitzroy. Blue said his name, reminded him of the milk can and the accordion, mentioned Mrs. Fitzroy in the sad voice he reserved for speaking of the sick and dying. “I remember she used to carve figures.”

  “You don’t know the half of it,” said the old man. He took a carton of orange juice from the bag at his feet and poured some into a half-empty whiskey bottle, shook the bottle gently and offered it to Blue, then drank himself.

  “I’m livin’ down in the milk room these days.” he said. “The house burned couple years back, seemed like the milk room was good enough. Cows gone, sleep late, watch the television, take it easy for a while, and you know what, I got sick of it. People here are no good, all these new people from down below always goin’ off the road and want you to pull them out for nothin’ with the tractor. Think it runs on prune juice. Think if you got a tractor you’re dyin’ to get out there and pull people out of the ditch.”

  He shook the mixture in the bottle until it frothed, and drank. “The accordion got burned up in the fire. I’m surprised you remember that. But I wish that milk room was bigger. I got pretty steady company now. I see on the teeve they want a place to stay for those fellas just got out of prison and no place to go. I write them a letter, say what I got ain’t much, but I’m willin’ to share it.” His voice strengthened with self-appreciation. “See, I’m not one of them that holds a man’s past against him. Anyway, they leave it up to the fella that’s gettin’ out if he wants to try it. I’ve had a few stay. Got one there now, Gilbert, him and me get along pretty good.” He looked at Blue out of the corners of his wined eyes. “I don’t hold the past against nobody.”

  Blue stopped at the bridge where Mr. Fitzroy’s bicycle still leaned on the rail. He hoisted it into the trunk and tied the lid down with a stretch cord.

  “What I want to do,” said Mr. Fitzroy, moving the bottle gen
tly in a circle so the liquid inside formed a whirlpool, “is sell my place and get out of here. Me and Gilbert want to go out west and pan for gold. Look at this.” He struggled to get his wallet out of his pocket, opened the glove compartment, and by its tiny light, searched until he found a bit of paper. Blue saw the words “YOUR OWN LAND IN COLORADO $39.50 PER MONTH.”

  Mr. Fitzroy leaned close to the paper and recited with the smoothness of a hundred readings,“ ‘No down payment, no interest, your own spread on Wild Buffalo Mesa. Get away from it all. Come to the big sky country where wild horses roam free among the sagebrush and breathe the unspoiled air.’”

  “What do you get for water rights?” asked Blue.

  “Water rights! Just drill a deep well if you got to, or find a fresh spring. Track them wild horses, see where they drink, and that’s your water.”

  “Um,” said Blue, thinking of the parched, pale land and the tufts of bunchgrass spaced far apart like the repeated pattern on wallpaper, the place where land without water was worthless, and there was a lot of worthless land.

  Light was shining out of the milk room window, and Mr. Fitzroy went in, leaving the door open, while Blue pulled the bicycle free.

  “Come in and say howdy to my partner,” shouted the old man.

  The big stainless steel tank was gone, replaced by odd pieces of furniture, a frowsty bed, a table with bulbous legs. On the table in a welter of newspapers, beer cans and dirty plates was a gleaming toaster with a fleur-de-lis design on its side, and he knew it immediately. It was their old toaster from the camp.

  Once he had tried to grill a cheese sandwich in that toaster and the bread caught fire, black smoke as though from burning tires billowed out of the chrome. His parents shouted. His mother flapped the air with a towel and screamed, “You damn little fool to try to make a sandwich in a toaster!” and his father hurled words like clods of dirt. “What do you expect, the kid has never seen any kind of food fixed except cornflakes and canned soup.” She threw the toaster as hard as she could, and his father caught it, hot and smoking, strings of cheese looping across the floor. Blue ran up to the loft where he cried for the cheese sandwich as though it were the last one in the world, and the shouting below went on and on, and then the brown sofa creaked as though they were tearing it apart. The next day his father’s hands were bandaged, but the toaster still worked and they had kept on using it.

  “Meet Gilbert,” said Mr. Fitzroy. The lamp was behind the seated figure and he seemed, for a minute, to be edged in a rim of fire, with round eyeglasses glinting like circles of steel. Then Gilbert teetered on his chair legs and looked to the side. His crimpy, tan hair was arranged in three large standing waves across the top of his head. His face was the color of a cracker, as stiff as if it had been baked, his eyes like a hen’s, yellow and ignorant.

  Gilbert put out a limp, hot hand. He was wearing fancy cowboy boots with bright green heels, probably the first things he had bought when he got out of prison. Blue knew how to size up failures like Gilbert in a minute.

  “What took you so long,” said Gilbert in a rattling, tinny voice to Mr. Fitzroy. “I got no bike or car so I’m just suppose to sit here and wait, whatever you want to do is suppose to be fine.”

  Mr. Fitzroy’s voice was gentle. “Don’t make a fuss, because I’m back now. How about a nice little beer?” Gilbert put out his hand for the foaming can. The old man held another up for Blue, but he said he had to go. There was everything to do at the camp.

  Blue closed the door on the toaster, glad to get away from the stifling milk room with its squalid proofs of failure.

  But he couldn’t sleep that night. The wind in the pine trees sounded like breathy harmonica music. He started to drift off, then heard the papery rush of mice overhead in the loft and the toaster shot into his mind like a chromed comet, then came a plan to finish off the raw, sad loft as a little studio apartment. Then the toaster again. He imagined Gilbert dropping the plates on the floor, excited by the act of fracturing, stealing the toaster. There was a kind of person who had to break things for pleasure. The loft could be made into a bedroom, a living room and kitchenette, cupboards and closets. The walls had to be sheetrocked and painted cream color, a roof skylight set in; there had to be a brass bed with a blue coverlet. Gilbert had taken the toaster because it was shiny, not because he wanted toast, Blue thought, remembering how grandly it sat on the table where the light could play on its curves. He told himself, at last falling into sleep, that it probably reminded Gilbert of the stolen hubcaps of his youth.

  The next day the rankling thoughts of the toaster receded as he set panes of glass, scrubbed the floors. He spent hours rubbing the black, dented pots with steel wool, raising the old metal to a dull gleam like the pewter surface of a twilight pond.

  A few days went by, the snow slumped in the sunlight while Blue repaired steps, painted shutters, nailed new shingles to the roof. He trimmed and pruned away the lower branches of the trees around the house.

  A faint thread of unease stitched his work. The bright nails seemed sometimes to sink deep with a single powdery blow as if the underlying wood was rotten; the dry old shutters were as light as cardboard; he patched the bright shingles onto wracked and splintered neighbors that might not last; the heartwood of the tree branches he sawed was black. But in the end the camp was transformed. He couldn’t get enough of looking at the place.

  When only a few days were left before his flight home, the radio droned news of a storm corkscrewing up the coast with gale winds and heavy snow. The Carolinas were frozen to the heart, the storm already lashed New Jersey and trains were stalled in great drifts. A sharp and pleasurable excitement rolled over Blue. The storm would test the camp, would measure his sufficiency in danger. He made a list of things he needed to weather it out. The first word he wrote was “toaster.”

  He could smell the storm coming, a metallic odor like wet copper. The natural light was grey and coarse and when he switched on the electric bulb over the sink the weak incandescent glow drained away like dirty water.

  He rushed along the path to the car, anxious to get back before the snow began.

  He knocked on the milk room door and waited a long time before Mr. Fitzroy opened it. The old man’s eyes were as red as a St. Bernard’s, his mouth slack. He was wearing a long green flannel nightgown.

  “I want the toaster.” said Blue. His voice was firm, but not hard, full of the quiet strength learned in the Strength Through Will seminars. He tried to look in Mr. Fitzroy’s eyes, but they stared away at some ghostly thing in the trees.

  “I’m not going to say anything to the sheriff about how Gilbert messed up our camp unless I have to, but I want that toaster.” said Blue. He tried to step into the milk room, but Mr. Fitzroy set his hands on each side of the doorframe and blocked him, still staring out and away as if directions for what to do next were printed in the sky. Blue pulled at the old man’s arms. They were as corded and hard as alder branches. He heaved and twisted, first at one arm, then the other, until he pried Mr. Fitzroy loose.

  “Gilbert,” called the old man in the mangled voice of someone having a nightmare. But Gilbert slept like a dead hog under the covers of the bed he and Mr. Fitzroy shared, nor did he move when Blue seized the toaster and carried it to his car. Light glinted on the old man’s wet lip.

  At the supermarket Blue bought all the things he should not, marshmallows and cocoa mix, cream-filled pastries, almond tarts, frozen lemon pie, bread, butter and a jar of strawberry preserves for the toast.

  The snow pecked at the car on the way back, thickened and clogged the windshield wipers. The car slid on the corners and he was trembling when at last he reached the track to the camp. Snow hissed in the spruce needles and rattled against the grocery bags in his arms as he tramped back to the camp.

  In the snug kitchen he plugged in the toaster and inserted slices of bread, stoked the fire and pulled his chair up to the stove. The storm slashed at the windows and he made piece after piece
of toast, stacking them up on a plate. He set out the almond tarts, mixed the cocoa and put the lemon pie beside the stove to defrost. But his willpower allowed him only two dry pieces of toast while clear drops like tears gathered on the surface of the shriveling meringue and opaque skin sealed the cocoa.

  The grey hours deepened in tone as the snow changed, first to enormous pinwheels of matted flakes, then to silvery, slanted lines of sleet. By night, rain streamed down the windows, tangled strings of wind wound the house. He thought he heard a loud drip beat on the floor of the loft as though the roof leaked, but when he went upstairs and shone the flashlight around the empty space he could see nothing but dry dust and orderly shadows. The camp was sound.

  He packed his rucksack the next morning, swept the floor and adjusted the dish towel on the bar to hang evenly. He piled the stale, untasted sweets and cakes onto a plate and strode out into the sunlight pouring through a rent in the sky’s fabric. The rain had washed away the snow except for the drifts at the foot of the ledge and sodden grey shawls under the trees.

  He pitched the pastry away, watched the lemon pie fall and break in smears of cloudy gel where the sun ignited the coarse snow into a white blinding pit. The almond tarts skittered like crabs, the stiff bread pinwheeled.

  In the pit, brittle rods of light broke off the curved chrome side of a toaster stamped with a design of wheat sheaves, still half-sunk in the drift. It was their old toaster, looking as hot and glittering as the day it was hurled across the kitchen and he could not understand how he had mistaken another for it.

  The Wer-Trout

  SAUVAGE and Rivers are neighbors for a year before they meet. Sauvage and his wife live in a trailer a mile beyond the Riverses’ house. Rivers has noticed the wife driving the Jeep up from the mailbox at the base of the mountain, her animal-brown hair long and tangled, shooting away from her head like dark, charged wires, her beaked nose, bloodless lips, black eyes like wet stones. The invisible husband, Sauvage, is away at work early and late, the soft purling of his truck’s descent half-heard an hour before dawn, the nocturnal return a fiery wink of taillights from the kitchen window before he turns the curve and vanishes into the tunnel of trees above. Rivers often waves at the woman, thinking of country neighbors, of a little mountain gossip, and maybe of something more. She never waves back; her black eyes are locked on distant sights.