The Followed Man Read online

  He would have thought of a woman, then, except for the wom­an who was dead, who had been the shape and color and presence of the woman he wanted. While Helen was alive he had occasion­ally lusted after other women, but now he was only curious about the impotence of his imagination. He brought Marjorie Ruther­ford into the room and had her sit down, there, on the bed beside him, her large healthy body wanting his, her handsome face curi­ous and willing. Then Jane Jones—pretty, ambivalent, fierce; she would reach a long arm down over his belly to test her effect on him.

  He had lost that urgency, but if the sense of its loss were lost, where was the loss? Friendliness remained, and care remained, but the center would not gather its force. The object of love could not be the object of lust. All was diffused, spirit, memory, grief-shrouded, gratitude-shrouded, flesh no longer.

  In the morning after breakfast he went to the Leah Post Office and made out a card to have his mail forwarded from Wellesley. He knew he had decided not to write the piece for Gentleman, but he still felt responsible. No, he didn't know what he'd decided, so he should keep in touch with that world. His hardened hands seemed not made for writing. The Post Office ballpoint pen was fragile in his stained fingers, and his printing was crude.

  He drove to Cascom, up the mountain road to the farm and parked near the sunken house. His temporary camp, for conven­ience, would be up here while he cleaned up the junk around the house foundation, sheds and barn. Another day or so and he would have all his logs cut and peeled. Then would come more work and planning. He would have to clear the road down to the brook and make a bridge in order to get his materials to the field. He would need a machine to snake out the logs, carry sand, stone, mortar, water, lumber and roofing. There would be nails, hard­ware, glass, stain, paint, and he was starting with so little. There was also the foundation excavation—a backhoe would have to make it down the hill and across the bridge, the unbuilt bridge. Eventually would come the equipment to make him a well. And he would want REA electricity for its power to preserve food and run tools; at least four more poles would be needed past the one at the farm. He would want auxiliary power, too, for the winter ice storms that would take trees down upon the main line up the mountain.

  There was so much to do, now that he'd begun to think more about it. Just the traveling to supply and lumber companies would take a lot of time. But he would do it all, beginning right now. This was what his time was for, all that his time was for.

  He had a great deal of money now and could buy any truck, tractor or crawler he wanted. Death had profitted him and would profit him even more, probably, when the final decisions on com­pensation were made. It was only money, not anything but money, and he could buy what he wanted with it. Reflex—the reflex of the dutiful middle class—had made him take care of his taxes, his books, his debits and credits and interest in April when the season for that sort of thing had come, but then the large figures had meant nothing but arithmetic, squared green num­bers on a calculator. There was nothing he wanted then that money could buy.

  On the way through the leaved tunnel of the road to the brook he heard a strange sound from down there, a cry that made him stop, put down his saw, tools and gas and oil cans. It was high and fluty, but not like the call of any bird or animal he knew. Without quite thinking that the sound was human he turned, a chilly place between his shoulders, went back to his car, got the .45 automatic and holster from under the seat, loaded the clip and chamber and put the weapon on his belt. This sudden turn toward caution, or even fear, angered him and made him walk quietly as he re­turned. He left his equipment and went carefully toward the sound, which came again in undulations that rose and were cut off as though breath ran out at their highest pitch.

  Whatever it was seemed to be right at the brook, below the old bridge abutments, probably at the chute and pool. The water would mask his noises as he felt his way down through the hem­locks. The nearest the sound came to any animal cry was the near­ly hysterical whining of porcupines as they argued with each other in a den, but this sound was more breathless and sporadic, not a dialogue.

  As he slowly descended the hill, keeping trees between himself and the pool, the cry seemed that of a young child who had been hurt, but still he could not believe it human. Then, through the hemlocks' green fronds, he saw a white thing move, a small plane of white. There was a gleam of bright red, too, though this was stationary and separate from the moving white. He pressed slowly through the young hemlocks, the cry growing louder and more convincing, even though he could still hardly believe it; if it had stopped and nothing were there at the pool but an early turning maple branch and a reflection on the water of the gray-clouded sky, he would still be able to believe it had been the call of a bird of some kind—say a hawk's strangely lamenting complaint, and in its complete absence wonder if he had really heard it at all.

  He moved closer, the cry so near and real something had to be there, just below him. He had been in the woods enough in his life to know that he might find nothing at all, the crier flown. He pressed himself forward between two small hemlocks whose branches intertwined, the needles soft against his face, until their hazy greenness grew thin, like disappearing fog, and there was the chute and the pool. The whiteness was a naked young woman standing thigh deep at the pool's edge, and the cries came from a black-haired child she now picked up and stood on a rock, a boy about four or five years old. The red he had seen was a packframe and bag on the opposite bank, next to the clothes they had re­moved. The boy was crying and sputtering; he had water in his nose, and she was trying to soothe him, kissing his chest as he waved his arms and howled, then sneezed and gasped for breath before howling again.

  They were no more than ten yards below him. She stood straight as she held the boy steady on the rock, her small slim body shining, whiter in bands around her breasts and below, where she had worn a scant bathing suit in the sun. She was so familiar to him that at first, staring at her breasts and thighs, it didn't seem improper that he observe her nakedness; she had Helen's body when Helen was in her twenties, and Helen's dark blond hair. Her pose was one Helen had often assumed, holding a child out like that at arms' length, her own small body proud, slim and athletic.

  He was so shocked by her perfection he was out of breath. He might have been prepared to see a woman and a child, but not these, and not here at his childhood pool. Helen and Johnny had been here with him, and Helen had stood just there one summer afternoon long ago.

  She was talking to the child, crooning words to him; her face was not Helen's but seemed lively and sweet, her eyebrows darker than her hair, her lips thin, with a gleam of small teeth. Her waist was Helen's, the lateral rise of muscle below the small of her back Helen's, but one buttock, that approximation of roundness that was so complicated and precise it hurt him, was signed near the cleft with a brown mole the size of a penny.

  He had never been jealous of a child with a woman, but now, perhaps because he didn't know her and might never know her, he at least understood the possibility of that feeling in a grown man. She kissed the child's forehead, then his nipples, then his navel, and then, the child responding with a sudden laugh to all these kisses, she knelt lower and kissed his small, cold-rigid penis as he laughed and turned, wanting back into the clear water.

  Luke stood like a stone with eyes as they waded and swam in the water that was so clear its surface could be discerned only by opti­cal distortions of their nakedness—an arm foreshortened, her hips wide, then flattened, then a submerged squiggle of flesh color. As she surfaced and stood, gooseflesh erected her nipples. She held the boy in the heavy flow from the chute while he yelled with excitement and a little fear. The longer Luke watched the more he seemed to be taking something from the young woman he didn't deserve. His eyes almost cruelly searched out her colors and proportions. She noticed that the boy's lips were getting blue, though he didn't want to leave the water, and she picked him up under her arm and carried him to the bank. As she bent to her pa
ck, Luke's probing eyes saw the down on her coccyx, her pen­ny-sized mole like the mark of one of his fingers, her anus the warm color of tea and her water-pointed brush. They were not given for him to see and thus violate, because she didn't know he was there. But all the time he stared, keeping nothing from his eyes.

  Kneeling beside the boy, she wiped him with her shirt, then dressed him, sat him on a stone and put on his stockings and shoes while he pulled her wet hair over her eyes. When he was dressed and impatient she squatted briefly to urinate, then splashed her­self with a handful of water from the brook. She put on her wet cotton shirt, her jeans and stubby, professional looking hiking boots. Her red nylon pack and frame looked fairly heavy, with a rolled sleeping bag tied on top, but with good strength she swung it to her shoulders, worked her arms into its straps and settled it on her back. She looked around carefully to see that they hadn't left anything, and then she and the boy went on down the other side of the brook among the alders and were gone.

  The water rushed down the stone chute and submerged into it­self, the silvery bubbles wobbling to a surface that instantly re­ceived them into nothingness—air into air. The tawny pool was clear and empty, as he might have found it in spite of the flute-like cries, its deep turbulence hardly visible. He had seen the two deli­cate creatures at play here, a scene innocent and ephemeral ex­cept for his presence. At least he thought he had seen them, not a memory fleshed out by his mind. There was the mole, and the child's black hair, but imagination had the talent to convince itself by adding surprising and disarming details. Maybe he had imag­ined, if the mind was the last to know of its own instability, some­thing of what had been lost. A version of his loss.

  He went on down to the pool, crossed on the stones below it, and looked for a footprint in water on a stone, or a splash that wouldn't have been caused by the brook itself, but found none. She had dressed the boy here, sat him on that stone to put on his shoes, and squatted to urinate there. That last would be all the evi­dence of her existence an animal would need, and since he was an animal in some doubt he knelt, put his face down to the musky leaves and received with the most primitive of the senses the sea-briny proof of her.

  Later, in the black and green spruce grove, the saw snarled as it ripped the heavy limbs from the spruce, exposing jagged light wood where the teeth raked. More of the pale logs lay drying in the openings they had once filled as thickly branched trees.

  He could think while cutting spruce of the scene at the pool, which was clear, cool and separate from the hot blast of his saw, but the scene faded in the repetition of memory. He'd cut and stripped the long slabs of bark from so many logs today he was quite certain he had enough and more, but he would have to count them and do his figuring later. The imperatives of the hard, noisy physical work made that sort of calculation impossible until he could stop, calm down and let his ears clear of the rip of explo­sions.

  He peeled the last three logs he had cut. Flayed, they were too slippery to move with his hands, but he cut an ash sapling and made a handle for the peavey, then lifted and rolled them up on their own piled branches to dry. He went through both of the spruce groves he had worked, counting logs. The cabin, he thought, would be about twenty by thirty feet, with fairly low eaves—although those dimensions were the largest he had consid­ered. The logs, over their useful length, averaged about eight inches in diameter. Lengths varied, but his rough calculations, not taking door and window openings into consideration, indicated that he could build two such cabins with what he had. This seemed wasteful to him, and he promised himself he would be a great deal more precise with bought lumber and sash.

  When he had finished counting the logs and measuring them with Shem's folding wooden rule, it was six o'clock and he was hungry, tired and happy—the feeling there in the finished task; now the air and sun would work for him every clear day. This day it would soon rain, if he could read the sky over the mountain as he could as a boy. It was his luck that the rain had held off for so long, and he didn't want to leave the place of his work, where he had changed the woods. These trees would be his house, a mira­culous change he would continue. But it would rain, so he gath­ered up his pistol and the rest of his equipment and lugged it all back up the hill to his car and the big tent, which loomed there like a surprise.

  This would be his last night in the motel. In the morning he would buy what he needed to set up camp in the tent. Then he would begin clearing up the collapsed buildings here, salvage what he could, clear the old dug well and put up a base near the tent for the electric meter and have it connected. What he wanted left of the farm buildings was smooth earth, green meadow, where the granite foundation stones, ancient ruins here on the edge of the wilderness, could weather in the manner of Easter Is­land or Stonehenge. Then Shem's ghost would be free of oilcans, bottles, rusted iron and junk, and memories of the working farm could recede gravely, with dignity.

  He would need a truck. Now it became more serious—as if he weren't serious before. A Ford F-100? A Chevy, a Dodge, a Jeep, an International? Stick shift, six-cylinder, four-wheel drive? Half-ton or three-quarter? When, not thinking why, had he studied these things? Though he might not know enough about anything, he knew more than he thought he did. It was as if, in all the pro­jects, assignments, and in the various jobs he'd held in his life, he'd been picking out certain kinds of information and storing it away. Ballistics, for instance, or the names of trees, the qualities of wood, the nature of torque, leverage, tensility and mass. He had been many things—that is, he had done certain jobs for money and thus "been" a carpenter, a welder, a plumber, a sawyer and planer, a painter, a bulldozer operator, a truck driver, a mechan­ic, a janitor, a rifleman. He would study the tangible and useful, like an auger, a beam, a chainfall or a truck.

  In bed in the motel, his bones and muscles said to him as they grew heavy and calm that they had labored and would rest.

  He slept, then in the beginning of dawn he woke, full of the strange memories of sleep. His thick left arm, swollen taut from wielding the saw, was uncomfortable to sleep upon, and it was that which woke him, as if the strange hard arm belonged to someone else.

  He'd had a dream about Helen, though she hadn't seemed to have been in the dream, just him alone in a canoe on a swift river with high smooth banks, the water green and folding in an insane silent run. A quarter of a mile ahead the river turned and de­scended like a chute, gathering speed, and he didn't know what rocks and rapids, or even waterfalls, were down and around that turn, just that there was no way for him to stop, no way at all, and fear took his breath. It was the silence and speed of the green wa­ter that was so ominous. In the dream he thought, as if he were speaking to Helen, How tough the body is, how hard to dismem­ber or crush, yet life goes out of it so easily.

  12.

  Follansbees' store was an anachronism in Leah. It had escaped the great fire of 1958 when most of the business section of the town had burned, and stood alone. It was three stories high, clap-boarded, white with green trim. A fixed beam with a pulley pro­truded from the gable in order to lower kegs of nails and other hardware from its attic storerooms. This vertical use of space, along with the store's carrying everything from fresh meat and groceries to plumbing supplies and oakum, was part of the ana­chronism; in the new shopping malls to the north of town all was horizontal, acres of floors of merchandise under uniform fluores­cent light.

  After a hundred and twenty years, Follansbees' was still owned and run by the Follansbees, a family that must have had some sort of genetic fix for storekeeping, which included knowing exactly where everything could be found and how it worked. There were Follansbees who knew all the trades and tackle, who knew meat, guns, masonry, glazing, pickling and roofing, baking and fishing, plumbing and sewing, soldering and painting.

  From one of these enthusiasts, a young, balding Follansbee Luke thought he remembered from six years ago as a thin ap­prentice with much hair, he bought the supplies on his list and also a fifty-round
box of new .45 ACP cartridges. The young Follansbee helped him carry everything to his car, which was still full of the things he'd brought from Wellesley, and immediately su­pervised the rearranging and loading. "There you go," he said when all was properly stowed.

  "Thanks," Luke said, and the competent young Follansbee nod­ded in the manner of his ancestors.

  Luke stopped at the Post Office to find that his mail hadn't yet been forwarded, a small reprieve, then drove to Cascom and up the mountain to the farm, passing through the quiet spruce into the light again.

  After pulling the small trees and brush from the tent floor he smoothed the dirt and grass down as much as possible and un­loaded most of the things from the car. When the tent was reason­ably settled he took the box of new ammunition, unloaded the old shells from the pistol's clip and put seven of the bright new ones into it against its spring, slid it up into the pistol handle until it locked, then pulled the slide back and let it go forward again. The pistol was now loaded. He let the hammer down on half-cock and placed the pistol in its holster.

  From his briefcase he took a sheet of typing paper and drew a circle on it with a felt marking pen, then filled it in, a black dot about as large as a fifty-cent piece, and tacked the paper to a rot­ten barn board. He paced off twenty yards and turned, the pistol large in his hand, bigger than he remembered the gun to be, as though his hand, or his indifference to violence, had diminished since his war. The .45 had been called "a hand cannon," or "pock­et artillery" often enough, and the myth—or perhaps it was the truth—about it was that its cartridge had been designed specifical­ly to stop suicidally charging Huk tribesmen. The .45 ACP bullet, which was almost twice as heavy as a military rifle bullet, extin­guished such passion. The gun itself was originally designed by John Moses Browning, that odd genius responsible for so many weapons. Luke had seen at least four of his inventions firing at the same time—this pistol, the Browning automatic rifle, the .30 caliber light machine gun and the .50 caliber machine gun. And there was the 37 millimeter antiaircraft gun, the Browning and Rem­ington semiautomatic shotguns—legions of animals and men had fallen before his barrels, cams, inertia sleeves, extractors and feeders.