The Night of Trees Read online

  The Night of Trees

  Thomas Williams

  Dzanc Books

  Dzanc Books

  1334 Woodbourne Street

  Westland, MI 48186

  www.dzancbooks.org

  Copyright © 1961 Thomas Williams

  All rights reserved, except for brief quotations in critical articles or reviews. No part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without prior written permission from the publisher.

  Chapters 5 through 10 were first published in Esquire Magazine for May, 1960, in a slightly different form under the title “Waiting for the Moon.”

  A part of Chapter 17 was published in Good Housekeeping for October, 1961, under the title “Christine.”

  Published 2013 by Dzanc Books

  A Dzanc Books rEprint Series Selection

  eBooks ISBN-13: 978-1-938103-20-9

  Cover by Awarding Book Covers

  The characters and events in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.

  Contents

  Part One

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Part Two

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Part Three

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  PART ONE

  Why should men love

  A wolf more than a lamb or dove?

  —HENRY VAUGHAN

  1

  HE HAD started from New York late in the morning, buzzed along over the wide turnpikes through Connecticut and Massachusetts, and now, on the long hill above Leah, New Hampshire, stopped to put up the top of his new little car. The sun was about to go below the hills, and October began to make itself felt again after a bright day. It was as if October and New Hampshire meant the same bright coldness; the sun went quickly toward the hills, and the horizontal light itself seemed cold against the vivid hills to the west, on which, even though they had lost most of their leaves, the hardwoods stood orange and black, struck out against dark green pine and spruce and hemlock, the green of these dark and yet so bright they amazed the eye, for behind them was a bank of cloud as black as the deepest part of the night. Not a speck of dust softened the air, and each tree a mile away, each bird shaking on the wind was all sharp edge; even the border of the cloud was honed sharp against the blue.

  Night came with the shutter of the black cloud, and as he drove down into Leah, into an autumn as precisely right among the old New England houses and the fountaining elms as childhood’s pure memory of autumn, huge clean dollops of rain splashed against his windshield and cleaned it of the acid grime that he had, it seemed, been living in all year until now.

  He had owned the little car a week, and though they had told him that it was a racing car, not anything like the large sedan he had been used to, and that it might “bite” him, he didn’t worry about that. He was a careful man, careful in the sense of preparation and research—not in the pursuit of limits. He drove fast, and used the machine according to the specifications of its maker. He had no desire to race: the little car was a present to himself of honesty and predictability, a reward, in a way, for prolonged confusion and unhappiness. His wife had left him. His son had quit school and was about to be drafted into the army.

  But he was not a man enmeshed in lies, a man who considered himself betrayed. Rachel, his wife, to the best of his perceptions, had not lied herself away from him. If he yearned for honesty, it was more an understandable simplicity, perhaps, than honesty, that he wanted in her and in his son, Murray. He was not, and he knew he was not, a simple man. He had always been able to cope, able to see the complexities of life in such a way that they became, if not simple, at least understandable. He was a man capable of making up his mind.

  And so he had given himself presents—the Arnolt-Bristol roadster, a new rifle from Abercrombie & Fitch, a new wrist watch—all expensive. There was no reason why he shouldn’t. He had never collected things, had few of the intense and fashionable hobbies of the well off—no hi-fi, no sailboats, no horses, no other highly intricate sporting equipment. He had worked hard; he was forty-five years old, and his business, in which he was an equal partner with his father-in-law, seemed just now to run itself with an almost human instinct for gain. It consisted of ten dry-cleaning plants, two in each of the five boroughs of New York City, where the fallout of industrial soot was constant and profitable.

  Now, in the sudden night, he drove toward the quiet center of Leah, the cockpit of the buzzing car functional, plain, yet illuminated by the glowing faces of the dials that were at the same time sensuous, warm, without the slightest lack of honesty and precision, telling him of his control, of the machine’s faithfulness. Foolish, he knew, to depend upon a machine—and yet, why not? Machines could not love you, it was true; but how rare was honesty, cold but absolute; if the machine stopped, you opened it up and looked inside, and there was the simple trouble.

  He had two weeks in which to hunt and, he hoped, to try to understand his son. Murray was still at Dartmouth, and hadn’t yet said definitely whether he would come to the lodge or not. But if he would, perhaps the things they had in common might lead to a solution of other problems. Richard had always tried first to simplify, then to include the necessary complications. He could not dive into the emotions, tears and loving gestures scattered God knew where. He was an effective man; a good shot, for instance, and he was a good shot because he took careful aim. He would plan and wait and see.

  They knew he was coming at the lodge—Shim Buzzell and Shim’s father, Zach—but he stopped at the Welkum Diner to call and make sure. Shim answered right away and said come on up, and Richard decided to have a cup of coffee while three boys in black motorcycle jackets went out to look at his car, then came back in to look at him, their faces hard and full either of respect or of possible mayhem. He couldn’t tell, but drank his coffee and let them look. Either a hero driver or a fancy pants, he thought; he looked young for his years, and rather dignified in a large, lean, yet somewhat overclean way, like one of the models in magazines who tried to make long cigars seem highly respectable in their tapered, immaculate fingers. Like most healthily vain men, he knew what he looked like, and how he looked was odd in Leah, New Hampshire. A handsome man with a black mustache (his father’s, worn as a memento, a bit of continuity; it was identical to the one in the old albums), and above the black mustache his bony British Grimald nose; above the high cheekbones pale, cold eyes of the color of robins’ eggs. He never had to speak in order to be highly noticeable—even, sometimes, he felt, a little frightening.

  The juveniles waited until he was through with his coffee, and casually followed him out. He was sure they liked the sound, and he enjoyed, with a certain amount of embarrassment at his own childishness, his fairly expert speed shift into second gear. The motor could seem nicely angry if one played with it. The juveniles, with delinquent tendencies now, leaped to their motorcycles, followed him for a few miles until he turned off the tar onto the gravel, and then turned back.

  In New York he had been conscious of the murky air—part irritation, part his business—but there was no such fallout—at least no visible fallout—on this New Hampshire mountain. His headlights shone on the dark spruce and turned them from black shadows into cle
an, lush green. The last few pretty leaves of late October’s hardwoods, the leafy hummocks beneath the trees, jumped into light; sometimes little eyes, deep in under, stared him by. The wind blew; a sudden curtain of rain fell, and stopped completely, as if it had been tossed from a bucket. In front of him the little dials signified the temper of the machine as it sped upward on the mountain road, and told him that all was well. All was well, and the toy comforted him the way a toy might comfort a child who faced the coming of inevitable grief: a child lived in present time, and could not conceive of the end of any time longer than moments. He could, of course, knowing how short a time forty-five years had been. Yet it worked, this present to himself, and it did take just the sharpest edge away.

  Bemused thus by the instruments of the car, he nearly hit the buck. Fortunately he looked up from the tachometer in the last possible moment, put his brakes full on, and stopped—in a straight line, he was pleased to see, even on the loose gravel of the mountain road. The buck, himself bemused by the headlights that held him so vividly against the dark trees, stared calmly down upon the little car. His thick brisket higher than the car’s roof, he turned his tined antlers, his great head and all so easily, so smoothly it seemed to Richard that the huge complexity of armor and sense he carried on his neck was somehow suspended from above. Still he didn’t move out of the road, and Richard’s eyes moved over the deer with conscious avidity, as if he might collect and own such graceful strength and dignity. “Oh God, oh God, oh God!” he found himself whispering. Steam shot in narrow streams from the black nostrils, light collected in the wild eyes; the belly, flag, and chest were absolutely clean and white. The immaculate presence of the buck transcended his obvious stupidity in the face of danger, but of course the animal, on his nocturnal business, was helpless in the sudden, alien light. Richard watched, and watched, and then, with reluctance overcome by a feeling akin to sacrilege, switched his lights off, then on again. The buck was gone.

  His panic stop (he had felt no panic—this term was one of many he had scrupulously learned before he bought the car) had stalled the engine. Or perhaps his unfamiliarity with the disciplines of clutch and brake had caused it. But now he was in the woods, having seen so closely the greatest prize of the woods, and he was eager to get to the lodge and tell about it, to remember it, and to get ready to hunt. He started the engine and drove on.

  He must look for Buzzell’s sign, and take a smaller, steeper road to the left. And there it was, the sign, very high on its pole—he remembered it as it usually was, in the winter when he and Rachel and Murray had come up to ski, when the snowbank pushed up by the plow had nearly covered it. Now it seemed alone and out of season, and awkward, like a pile at low tide. The sign said: SKI, white letters on a graying board, the board nailed to a narrow hemlock pole, the pole, here on the ledge, held up by a small cairn of stones. SKI. The sign neither asked for patronage nor gave quite enough information—an affectation, maybe, of Shim Buzzell’s. Another bit of consciousness revealed in that white paint: if the board had been new and yellow (it was pine) when the paint went on it, Shim knew how a few weathering days and nights would turn the wood dark gray against the white, the way a photographer, also expert in his subject, would know how dark could turn, with science, into light.

  The road to the lodge, though narrower, was in better shape than the town road; the water bars were unbroken, the turns were carefully banked. Shim, although he used town gravel, had famously told the town road agent to keep his goddam grader off it. Since he lived there all year round, legally the town should have maintained the road, and could never, legally, have “throwed it up.” But Shim said, always with contempt: “Look at the town road. Turns into a squirrel track and runs up a tree.”

  He followed the single lane and turned, trembling a little as he thought of the deer, into the small clearing next to the big white house. Beautiful! he could hear himself saying of the deer; and Shim Buzzell, who would ordinarily sneer at such a word, might even use it himself when talking about a white-tailed buck. When Shim spoke of deer, something in his crouched, feral look called for abstractions. He liked them big and he liked them to eat, but he also liked them dead, so he could run his hands along their flanks.

  Richard parked his car next to the barn that had been converted into sleeping lofts for skiers, took part of his baggage from the rack, and walked across the yard toward the big old house. Built above high pastures, it now found itself in the middle of the wilderness; it had outlasted nearly all its fields, and stood among the tall trees that had usurped its land, even most of its lawn. The pine and spruce came close, even touched in places the old narrow clapboards. The house was four stories high and had twenty-five rooms. Now most of its narrow windows looked straight into the darkness of the woods.

  A bare light bulb hung swaying over the kitchen door, and as Richard came under its harsh light the door opened. Zacharia Buzzell, Shim’s father, motioned him in with a shiny, arthritic hand, and without saying anything turned and stiffly walked back to his chair between the water-heater tank and the oil-and-electric stove. The copper pipes to the tank passed between the rungs of Zach’s chair, an upright wooden chair, armless and painted blue. In it Zach sat bulky and straight. The pipes had been brazed on with the chair in place, and they always made Richard think of old barbed wire in the woods which sometimes passed straight through the trees that had grown around it.

  He put down his bags and was about to speak to the old man, who had now settled himself in his chair on what appeared to be the same gray feather-leaking pillow he had used two years ago, but Zach shook his head. He didn’t want to talk. He looked much older, and the first startling thing Richard noticed was a plastic bag hanging from a strap around Zach’s neck. Zach pointed to it and again shook his head. In spite of his chunky body the old man looked more and more fragile, less dense, in a way; age had turned his skin pearly, translucent, babier than a baby’s. The thin tendon of his nose seemed naked, flecked only with the wan, light blemishes of age. His white hair was like fine smoke over the slightly yellow skull, seeming to hover half an inch over the skin, and he seemed to have no beard at all.

  Suddenly Zach’s thin lips, speckled with brown, opened too wide, like those of a fish. “Huchl” he said, inhaling, gulping the word. “Operation. Hough! Got to talk. Huch! In a belch. Hough! Ain’t wuth it.” The words were made of air and hollow places, like the words of a ghost. After speaking, Zach turned straight ahead in his chair, the gesture suggesting a kind of inanimate arrangement, as if he had turned himself into a statue. He shook his head once more and was still. An old farmer and woodsman—in New Hampshire one was always both—Zach was not too different from many old men Richard had seen, silent beside a stove, in his overalls and leather slippers, his Carter’s blue work shirt washed nearly white.

  “Where’s Shim?” Richard felt he had to ask. Zach motioned toward the mountain, Cascom Mountain, invisible but heavy above them. Then, without turning his head, he grinned, showing the edges of his perfect plastic teeth. But the little grin was evidently private, and lasted only a moment. Then he was still again.

  Beside the modern restaurant sink, on the cork bulletin board, Richard found a note from Shim:

  BUZZELL’S SKI LODGE

  LEAH, N. H.

  25 Oct.

  MR. GRIMALD:

  Hello. You get the room at the top of the stairs next to the new bathroom. Opal is in town (I married her this spring) and Zach does not like to talk. He has a laryngectomy now and has to suck wind, which he does not like. The little bag on his neck is for spit. You will get used to it. I will be back around ten.

  SHIM B.

  Richard wondered who Opal was. He knew many people in Leah, but no Opal. And as far as Zach’s little bag offending, the old man seemed much too washed and pure in his age to be offensive in any animal way. If a little bag were now part of his plumbing, his metabolism, so be it. He took his suitcases up the narrow staircase to the high, familiar bedroom. It was
like going back in time; he remembered brass bedsteads, nostalgically sagging, and thick white pitchers and bowls on turned-legged, spindly bedside tables in his Midwestern youth. Then his father might have stood tall and fit in such a room, and unpacked his celluloid collars. He had none of those—just beautifully expensive Abercrombie & Fitch hunting clothes. But he looked into the oval mirror, the frame painted bright red, and saw the father he dimly remembered, mustache and all.

  “Mr. Grimald,” he said, then did not wish to fool with the idea. Such almost frightening whimsicality was inconsistent with his image of himself. Seemed to be, at least. He did not want to fool with equilibrium, a thing that had always seemed to him to be hard-earned and precariously kept in this world.

  He washed next door in the new bathroom that was all lavender tile, the toilet seat also lavender with a little hooked rag over the cover, like a tea cozy. Two years ago the room had been a closet.

  Relaxed and conscious of his leanness, he put on a soft flannel shirt and khaki pants. As he went back down the narrow stairs, his knuckles touched the wallpaper. Zach decided to speak again.

  “Letter. Hough!” Zach must have had the first bubble of air prepared. “On the board.”

  That would be from Murray. With a feeling of excitement that was almost painful, Richard went quickly to the board and searched for the letter. He resented the power the boy had over him—and then, as the word “resent” occurred to him it turned to love. Murray, his son, to a man who liked craft and perfection in things, was the only perfect thing he had ever seen. And whether or not Murray would come, the letter would be modest and affectionate. He found it and sat down at the kitchen table to read:

  DEAR OLD MAN,

  I can see why you are somewhat worried about me, but don’t be. I’m not flunking out or anything, as you know—really just a leave of absence. I have no honey I’m hot to trot either (at least outside of dreams), so don’t get worried about that. Actually, I like it here. I suppose most professors are pretty dim everywhere, but there are a few good ones, and for that I’m thankful. It’s not that, either. And of course I like to show off at sports. (If you think you’re worried, you ought to see Coach Brackett!)