The Followed Man Read online

  He took off his boots and socks, his feet on the hemlock needles feeling tender and unnatural. The hemlock needles, and a root that emerged and then submerged again, were cool and harsh to his naked soles. He took off the rest of his clothes and stretched his air-touched nakedness vertically, like the narrow bodies of the trees.

  When he stepped down to the stones, they felt harsh yet famil­iar to his feet. The water seemed cold only at its surface, though almost unbearable there. His legs, below the nearly invisible sur­face, seemed to belong to a water organism unconnected to the chilled body above. He started to shiver violently, then gave it all up and made a shallow dive up toward the head of the pool. He was warm, numb, cold as refrigerated meat, slow-jointed. He opened his eyes underwater and seemed to be swimming in a great golden salver. The invisible turbulence from the chute was, in its motion, like arms and hands. A silver bubble touched his thigh and belly as it rose. The energy of the moving water, its gen­tle yet powerful kneadings of his flesh, seemed a form of life in connection with him, each shove and pull an opinion made kinet­ic, like an embrace.

  He climbed out of the water feeling taut and compacted, hard as rubber, his scrotum like cold boiled eggs, his penis narrow as a bent dowel. He wiped the water from his body with his hands, then put on his clothes that were now soft and unsubstantial. His boots felt light and good on his feet. He was thankful that he'd had the nerve—only it wasn't exactly nerve, but more a surplus of heat and force, something like the almost forgotten joy children had in the motions and changes with which they tested their bod­ies.

  This pool, these woods and disappearing fields, this small arc-fragment of the earth's surface would, after probate, be his in name. Shem had died intestate but as far as he knew there would be no other claimants to this land.

  He crossed the brook on stones below the pool, wanting to see what was left of the lower pasture. There had once been a black­smith shop by the bridge. The stone walls, some of them five feet across, had been piled by men, oxen and stoneboat. Before that had been stump fences, stumps piled on their sides and inter­locked. The walls had sunken and been tumbled in places by frost. Birch and poplar, pincherry and steeplejack had come in across the fields, but there were patches of meadow left; it could be cleared again. He walked across between the saplings, feeling the once-openness of the place, then remembered his daydream, partly night-dream, of the field and cabin in cold February moon­light, the cross-country skis, the one yellow windowlight of the shelter waiting for his return. In winter the mountain would be ice-white, and he would hear the sigh of the iced-over brook.

  On the other side of a thick wall to the southwest was a dense grove of spruce in which it was night. To enter its deep dusk one would need a flashlight, if the lower branches would let anyone into its mysteries. A red squirrel, invisible, screamed alarm and outrage at his presence, or at the presence of some other car­nivore. In a patch of grass, three yard-long, kidney-shaped depressions in the green were the recent beds of white-tailed deer, and there were the raisin-like turds one of them had left as it departed.

  An alien, not an alien, he had company in this wilderness. If he looked he would find the signs of a thousand animals. At his feet were wild strawberries, so he went to the ground and searched them out, their tang and sweetness, pale red washing his fingers. Grasshoppers were down here, and leafhoppers, and there was a lucky glimpse of a departing green snake. In the underthatch ran old white-footed mouse passages from the past winter, when the snow had roofed them over. A broad tailed hawk's plaintive whis­tle made him look up from the warm grass to where it patrolled this salient, turning on an invisible plane. A mosquito sucked the blood of his wrist, proving that at least in some measure he was ac­cepted by this world and its forces.

  On the way back up the tunnel of a road to his car he heard one more evidence of life. A partridge drummed, the sound hard to locate, an air-thudding that gathered momentum until it stopped, leaving an uncertain memory of its direction or even of its having occurred. But it was there, the large grouse somewhere in the woods fanning its powerful wings.

  7.

  When George brought the small deer chops, a whole platter of them, to the table, he was smiling in a mysterious, hard to repress sort of way. Then he couldn't resist and said, "You know where I shot this doe?" Knowing of course that Luke couldn't guess, he went on. "In Shem's lower pasture, is where. 'Bout seven o'clock, first day of the season, dry and noisy. I was about to light my pipe when I heard this tickety-tick-tick-tick and out steps this pretty lit­tle doe, free as you please. Now, that don't happen too often in a man's lifetime! I drew a bead on her neck, she wasn't more than two rods from me, I was using the old thirty-forty Krag with the iron sights, and bang she goes down like a sack of meal. Tagged her, cleaned her, drug her across the brook and up the hill to the truck and I was back home by nine. She only weighed eighty pounds but I'll settle for tender meat anytime."

  "I saw three beds down there today," Luke said.

  "Ayuh, they come in there, all right. Popple, old apple trees, sprouts. There's a buck in there with a track as big as a heifer I'd like to see sometime. You wait till there's snow on the ground, you see them tracks you wonder if it ain't a breechy cow got loose from somewheres."

  The deer chops were tender, rosy on the inside, leaving a smooth, tallowy aftertaste that the acidic dandelion greens cut. George had poured them each a half tumbler of hard cider that was clear as water and slightly effervescent. He said, "You want to go easy on that if you're still intent on drivin' back to Massachu­setts tonight—which you don't have to, you know."

  "We'll be happy to put you up, Luke, as we already told you," Phyllis said.

  "As for me," George said, "I admit to some common curiosity as to what's inside that chest we got out in the shed. My program for the evening is we haul it in here in the light, Luke and me, pry off that padlock and look inside. Now, we got plenty of cider, which goes good with curiosity but bad with drivin'." George stopped, and frowned at himself. "None of my goddam business, of course. What in the bejesus got into me?"

  "Now, George," Phyllis said.

  George's face had turned red and dark, rigid and unforgiving. Luke hastened to say that he'd like to do just that. He'd call his real estate man, find out what was going on, and stay and drink up all the cider in the house. "I'm curious, too," he said.

  George still looked suspicious, but he did relent enough to take a drink of his cider and offer Luke another deer chop and some more scalloped potatoes. "I ain't a bad cook, if I do say so myself," he said. "Though I can't hold a candle to mother, here, when her arthritis ain't acting up."

  "It comes and it goes," Phyllis said. "Sometimes the aspirin and a little cider or wine can handle the pain pretty good, sometimes I just got to sit and let George do everything for me. He put in the downstairs bathroom there off the kitchen, plumbing and all, where the pantry used to be, so I don't have to climb the stairs."

  "Hell, I done plenty of plumbin' in my life," George said, look­ing more cheerful.

  After supper George decanted more cider, then he and Luke cleared the table and went out to wrestle in the rough wooden chest. "Bigger than a footlocker by far," George said. In spite of his age at the time, which was thirty-six, George had gone into the army in World War II and served in North Africa, Sicily and France in the Engineers.

  George had a dolly which he'd used to carry bricks and cement blocks, so they roped the chest on that and finally, with much straining and planning about steps, doors and sills, rugs and an­gles, got the chest into the dining room next to the table.

  "I reckon you got some slivers out of that session," George said. Luke looked at his soft white hands and found that it was true— the chest was made of unplaned oak, though carefully joined. He would have to borrow a needle to dig out the slivers. George's hands, of course, were tough as gloves, a matter of pride.

  "Now, how we going to get that padlock off there? I looked the chest over, hoping th
ere'd be a key nailed on the underside some-wheres, but no luck," George said.

  The padlock looked rugged, one of the kind made out of layers of steel held together with steel pins.

  "We could pry off the hasp, I suppose," Luke said.

  "You don't want to ruin the chest," George said. "Let me get a hacksaw and see if it'll cut the lock. We cut it where the U-bolt goes into the body and it might want to swing loose."

  The hacksaw just barely would cut the lock bar. They took turns at it and finally cut it through, though the saw blade was ruined. "Hot!" George said as he turned the lock open. Luke un­did the hasp and opened the chest, which had leather straps, cracked though still working, to keep the cover from falling back against the hinges. Phyllis moved her chair closer so she could see. On top was a wooden tray a few inches deep, and in the tray was the gleam of many shades of metals, shapes of silver and blue-black that at first meant only heaviness and value, a treasure of tools—brass, steel and smooth hardwood shaped for a man's hand.

  "It's his tools," George said. "It's his tools, all right. Shem Carr always took good care of his tools." George hesitated to reach into the tray, though it was obvious he wanted to put his hands on the smooth handles and heft them all. There were chisels, a set of them in widths from a quarter-inch to two inches, in quarters, each made of one piece of steel with ash inlays for handles, so they could be used by hand only or malleted at the butt, wooden and brass mallets and persuaders, screwdrivers, box wrenches, adjust­able wrenches, an auger set with bits; burnishers, a small pry-bar.

  Luke recognized some of them, seeing the old-fashioned one-piece screwdrivers, for instance, in Shem's big hand. There was a small square with its spirit level, the bubble in its yellow oil still free to find the center of the earth. Luke picked the tools out, one by one, and handed them to George, who hefted them, named them, then replaced them with the reverent attention given to ob­jects on an altar. There were pliers with various jaws, a bolt-cut­ter, cold chisels, a ballpeen hammer and a balanced carpenter's hammer for common nails. No rust was anywhere, just a film of light oil on the metal that was browned with age, or citizen's blued, or of the silver revealed in the steel by a finishing whetstone. There were stones, too—aluminum oxide, fine and coarse, Iwashita, India, Arkansas soft and hard, each in its wooden box. A short-bladed but long-handled bench knife suggested the power of a muscular hand, given leverage.

  Luke said, "Shem told me once when I was about ten that it was better to walk fifty yards to get the right tool, then walk all the way back, even if you had to climb two fences on the way, than to mash up what you were trying to fix. I remember that as if it were yes­terday."

  "Amen," George said. He was examining a small, fine-toothed cabinetmaker's saw that had its own canvas sheath. There were also a set of spade drills, a spokeshave, calipers and Allen wrenches, thread pitch gauges, a set of three wooden planes, clamps, tin snips, a miter saw and coping saw, a drawshave and more wrenches, including an eighteen-inch pipe wrench.

  When they had looked at all the things in the tray they lifted it off to find another tray of the same size, but this one was compartmented and lined with green velour, and it held guns and their accessories—ammunition, cleaning equipment and gunsmith's tools. First was a single-barreled, single shot Harrington and Rich­ardson twelve-gauge shotgun. Luke remembered it; he had been allowed to shoot it once, and remembered the kick. He took the forearm off the barrel, put barrel and action together, snapped on the forearm and held the assembled gun in his hands. It seemed much smaller now, which wasn't strange.

  "Barrel's sawed off a few inches," George said. "Makes it cylinder bore instead of full choke. Handier. I recall when you could buy one of them brand new for under twenty dollars." Next was a Marlin lever action .22 rifle with the old square bolt and an adjust­able tang sight.

  What they found after that made George sigh. In matching fleece-lined cases were what looked at first like matched .45 auto­matic pistols. Luke put them down side by side. One was marked U.S. and was the M1911 Al army issue Browning, but the other, though the same size and weight, was chambered and barreled for the .22 long rifle cartridge. It was made by Colt and had, on closer inspection, a slightly lighter, smoother job of blueing.

  "Look at that!" George said. "I bet that one cost an arm and a leg. The other one, Shem probably got in the first war and then sometime he got the other one made up so's he could shoot the smaller shells. Damn." He picked up the .22 and looked it over. "Don't see how a .22 long rifle cartridge would have the power to blow that action back. Maybe it's a single shot, or you got to pull the slide back by hand each time." He took out the clip. "Clip's made for the .22 all right. Wait, now. Hold on here a minute. Seems the slide's lighter, made of an alloy. 'Course, the barrel's got to be heavier 'cause it's got so small a hole in it." He picked up the regulation .45. "Near the same weight overall, almost the same balance. That's pretty slick. Now, that ain't no barrel insert, that's a whole barrel just made for that gun." He looked at the .45 again. "That ain't the regulation sight, neither. It's your wide Patridge. He must of had that done, too."

  There was the one holster, marked U.S. on the full flap, that fit both guns, and an issue webbed belt.

  "I carried a .45 for a while in Korea," Luke said.

  "Not much different from that one, I imagine. I carried one in Africa and Europe, and then about twenty years ago I got one, surplus, through the NRA for fifteen bucks. I can't afford to shoot it much, not at a quarter a goddam round, or thereabouts. My son Bill brought me a case of shells, once, he liberated from the army, but we went to the dump and wasted most of 'em on rats. I got maybe fifty rounds left in case they come and try to take my guns away from me."

  "That's why George has all his guns," Phyllis said, "so they can't come and take them away."

  "This ain't goddam Massachusetts," George said. "Not yet, any­ways. We always had our guns and we're always going to have our guns, and no holier-than-thou goddam liberals going to say we can't, 'less they want their goddam legs blowed off." George's voice had turned ominous. "Goddam busybodies. What am I sup­posed to do, some crook comes to the house, call Lester Wilson? He's chief of the whole police force, which consists of himself, and he drives one of them souped up supercars, which makes a noise like a wood chipper and half the time has a dead battery anyways. Not to mention Lester couldn't hit the broad side of a barn and I never seen him yet he didn't have most of a six-pack under his belt. He's about thirty years old. No, sir, I got my .45 up by the bed and loaded, and by the Jesus, mother, you can say what you like!"

  "It's all right, George. It's just that I'd hate to see you shoot somebody."

  George calmed down and shook his head in mock frustration. "Well, I never meant to go on about it, but by God, Luke, it does fry my ass."

  They looked over the ammunition, and George recommended that he throw out the old .22s and if he shot the .45s he'd better clean the pistol well because it looked to him they might be so old they'd have the old, corrosive mercuric primers. "They'll shoot all right, probably, but you want to clean her right away."

  Under that tray was the body of the chest, and here they found, among other things, a block and tackle with old, slivery hemp rope on it, an adz, a broadax with no handle, a double-bitted ax, a set of iron wedges, a splitting maul, a sledge, two steel squares, hand auger bits and handle, extra ax handles, a Hudson Bay ax, a glass jar of blasting powder and eight feet or more of fuse, a tin box full of fishing equipment including rod eyelets and tips, hooks, swivels and an ancient Hardy trout reel, a can of Dupont FFF black powder, several cans of number nine percussion caps, a sewing awl and waxed thread, a roll of thick tanned leather and a ball of oily rawhide, a sight level and other bottles and cans of nails, screws, washers and bolts.

  "Damn," George said. "I'd say you were pretty well equipped, Luke, I don't exactly know what for."

  Phyllis said, "What are you going to do with your life, now, Luke? I know you always sort of gravit
ated toward the city, with your writing and all."

  "I've got to finish the assignment I told you about, but then I don't know." He looked from one to the other, and found them curious, sympathetic, a little avid somehow—at least Phyllis was. She had something in mind for him. George evidently knew about it and, though curious, he disapproved of it, or at least washed his hands of it. He poured them more cider and sighed at the devious schemes of women.

  "I mean, are you going to spend some time here in Cascom af­ter you get your assignment done?" Phyllis said.

  "I wonder what Shem was doing with that triple F powder and them number nine caps," George said. "He must of had a muzzle loader at one time."

  "Weren't you going to call about your house?" Phyllis said.

  It was ten o'clock. George pulled out his pocket watch and looked at the time too.

  "I guess I'd better call. I'll charge it to my own number," Luke said. He went into the front room and sat at Phyllis's desk to phone. George came in and turned on the television, the volume hardly audible; he must have had a program he wanted to see at ten, and that accounted for his looking at his watch. While Luke waited for someone to answer at Ham's house he glanced at the television, a large old black and white console, and saw that the program was a documentary on the battles of World War II. That was George's war and in a sense his youth, as it had been Luke's youth, too, having dominated so much of his thoughts in gram­mar school and high school.