Leah, New Hampshire Page 2

  The motto of Leah is “Don’t patronize me.”

  In the thirty-some years since the earliest story in this collection was written, Leah has changed, but not as much as have the towns to the south and east. There are a few condominiums on Cascom Lake, a shop in town called Woks of Life, and an industrial park containing long metal buildings with signs on them like Zeta/Seal, Camtec, and Intertone. The tannery is gone, its owners having chosen to move rather than stop polluting the Cascom River. Herbert Woolley’s yarn mill is still operating, but the two red brick woolen mills have become a condo complex and a discount outlet. There is only one shopping mall, always with a unit or two empty. The population has grown about a third, but many hill farms have gone back to the twilight of the woods, so more people live in the “built-up” town itself. Around the town, on old asphalt and dirt roads, are tar-paper shacks, and moldy house-trailer slums; in New Hampshire the brush and the trees grow quickly and screen these places from those whose theories, political, economic, and aesthetic, would be damaged by too much ugliness.

  There are reports of vandalism and theft by young men. Restaurants and stores can’t find enough help. Last week a cow moose was seen near the bridge to Wentworth Junction, and a European wild boar, escaped from a private park, was shot on Cascom Mountain—reddish eyes, a hairy face, and tusks like yellow fingers.

  The mode of Leah, to which there are disturbing exceptions, is inner, reflecting an outer world governed generally by rational pragmatism, the kind we live with while trying to forget the decrees of the famous, whom power has driven asinine.

  Since these stories were written over such a long time, from the fifties to the eighties, they may seem to be by different writers who happen to bear the same name. The person I am now may have changed a word or a punctuation mark here and there in this book, but not anywhere the number my present eye and ear find strange. At sixty-one I don’t think I have the right or the temperament to correct that fellow in his twenties who, in “Goose Pond,” entered the psyche of what he thought to be an ancient man of fifty-eight. I can correct neither his style nor the conclusions he reached. And there is the stylistic exuberance, or the simple colors, of “The Buck in Trotevale’s,” a story which seems strange to me now. Not wrong, but slightly odd, and which, perhaps too fecklessly, or bravely, approaches sentimentality, the death of force.

  Two of the stories here, in different form, were small parts of novels. I include them because of their separate and balancing views of the town.

  I hesitate to say more about the stories themselves because in reading what writers have to say about their own work, I find that they are nearly always wrong. Since many of these are writers I trust and admire, I suspect it is also true of me. The area in which a writer becomes new, and original, is to the practitioner terra incognita. Literary theory is an interesting game in itself, all but separate from the problems a writer tries to solve. Theory can be dangerous to art because theorists have a tendency toward dogma. A new theory must destroy the old and all perceived children of the old; there is no fine scientific or revolutionary purity about evolution, or synthesis. I think I know what I want to do—to populate an imaginary world with real people, and to cause the identification with others that is the best, the life-giving, talent of our race. I want to do this, and though I, too, am obviously haunted by theory, it is left behind at the moment when the white page is covered by shadows.

  Themes and tendencies, however, may be perceived afterwards. The rational child in the power, benevolent or otherwise, of irrational adults. Captives taken into exile. Loss, the purest of our emotions, so pure it has a clear, lunar beauty not subject to rationalization, as are hope, despair, anger, joy, love, and all the rest, though they have their moments.

  A while ago I was driving north on Route 4, and came up behind a very old couple in an ancient Ford Fairlane with New Hampshire plates. The old man was driving at thirty miles an hour in a fifty-mile-per-hour zone, and as I watched he carefully and evenly took an off-ramp the wrong way, toward a new section of superhighway. If you are going north and you want to go west, you take a left, up the perfectly geometrical curve according to some ancient map you have in memory. Only now do I ask myself why the two old people had to go west, toward Concord. The Department of Motor Vehicles is there, and perhaps it had to do with the validation of his license demanded periodically at his age. Somehow, in here, the idea of story begins. Their old moss-colored Fairlane is not used for long trips these days, especially not on improved highways. He can remember when Route 4 turned left to go west, when it sometimes went between houses and barns. If you live into your eighties you can’t have been stupid. Think of all the strategies against accident and death you’ve conceived of and acted upon. Think of the thousands of things you know—practical things, such as the names and functions of the parts of the engine that moves you along. Also the names of harnesses, trees, grandchildren, guns, animals, and tools. Think of history, all of it dangerous and unexpected when it was new, and he and his wife have survived it all until this moment when he carefully feeds them into what must seem to him a field of artillery fire, in which every missile comes toward him, in all lanes, at sixty-five and seventy miles an hour, each one imperiously and stupidly arrogant about the right-of-way. So now, if they survive, he is cursed as a freak and an incompetent. And then there is the business of the renewal of his license.

  This seems to be the way a story begins for me—at least this as yet unwritten one. I’m not sure what it will be about, either, but I’m almost certain it will have in it names like pinery hook, crupper, planetary gear, whiffletree, and magneto, and that it will take place in Leah.

  Thomas Williams

  Durham, New Hampshire

  October 1988

  Goose Pond

  ROBERT HURLEY’S wife died in September, and by the middle of October he had more or less settled everything. His son and daughter were both married and lived far away from New York; his son in Los Angeles, his daughter in Toledo. They came east for the funeral and each wanted him to come and visit. “I’m not about to retire. I won’t be an old man in a guest room,” he told them, knowing the great difference between the man he looked at fifty-eight and the man he felt himself to be. It had taken Mary six months to die, and during the last few of those months he began quietly to assume many of her symptoms. The doctors noticed it and understood, but his children, accustomed to a father who had always been to them a commonsense, rather unimaginative figure, were shocked by his loss of weight, by a listlessness as unlike him, as unsettling to them as if the earth’s rotation had begun to slow down.

  But he would do no visiting, even though his business did not need him. “I know what visiting is,” he wrote to his son. “I don’t do it very well. Please don’t call so much. You know how to write letters.” “Daddy,” his daughter said, long-distance. “The children are crazy to have their grandfather come and see them.”

  And he thought, there is one place I would like to go, and there are no children I know there. “I’m going to New Hampshire, to Leah,” he said.

  “All by yourself? What for?” She began to get excited, almost hysterical. He could see her biting her lower lip—a habit of her mother’s. Afterwards she would be calling Charles in Los Angeles.

  “I was born there. Your mother and I lived there before you were born. Do I need any other reason? It’s October. Anyway, I’ll be back in a couple of weeks.”

  “But, Daddy, we felt that you shouldn’t be alone….”

  “I haven’t been alone for thirty years,” he said. “I want to try it again. Now go back to whatever you were doing. I can hear a baby crying in your house. Go take care of it. I’m going to stay with the Pedersens. Do you remember the old people in the big house on the mountain? If they still take boarders, that’s where I’ll be.” If they’re still alive, he thought. He wanted to walk in the woods again, but he had other reasons. The sight of his grandchildren, the hundred times a day when their small
disasters caused screaming, tears; he couldn’t stand it. They were always about to hurt themselves, they nearly fell so many times. They had so many deadly years to make. Automobiles, knives, leukemia, fire.…On the afternoon of the funeral he had watched his granddaughter, Ann, and suddenly he saw her having his wife’s senseless pain, saw her crying not because of a bumped knee, but at more serious wounds. And the Pedersens? They were so old, they had somehow escaped, and as he remembered them they lived dried-up and careful, in a kind of limbo. He would go to the Pedersens, on Cascom Mountain.

  Nana fussed with the Edison lamp, turning the white flame up in the mantle, moving the broad base across the crack made by the table leaf; then with the side of her hand she wiped the shiny surface of the table where it had been. The light shone past the tinted shade, up the glass chimney, and sharpened her old face, made her glasses glint for a second until she moved away, tall and always busy, her small eyes always alert. She rarely sat down, and even then seemed poised, ready for busy duty. The old man settled himself cautiously, as he did now, one piece at a time. Nana had his zither out of its case, the light just right; made sure he had his hearing aid, his pick, an ashtray near. In spite of his age, he smoked cigarettes.

  Back in the shadows, between a lacy, drooping vine and the narrow window, Nana’s older sister, blue dress and high black shoes, composed and fragile face, sat in a rocker and never spoke. Nana herself was seventy-nine. For forty years she had bossed the seven-mile trek down to Leah in the late fall, back up the mountain again to this high old house in the spring. It was Nana who dealt with the world, who shut the windows when it rained, herded great-grandchildren when the family came in the summer, locked the house for the winter. In a few weeks they would be going down to their small apartment in Leah, to take their chances on another winter.

  The old man tuned his zither, humming in a dry, crackly falsetto and turning his wrench as he picked the short strings. Tuned against the windy old voice, the crisp notes of the zither were startling, clear and metallic. There seemed to be no connection between the voice and the sounds of the strings, as if the old man heard other notes, the sounds of memory to check his instrument against.

  “German concert zither,” Nana said proudly, still hovering over the lamp. She rearranged his cigarettes, the coffee cup. She spoke from behind him, “He don’t hear so good,” nodding vigorously. “But he got the hearing aid.” She pointed into his ear, where the pink button shone like a flower against brown freckles. “He don’t wear it all the time, like he should.” She moved quickly away on some sudden errand, and the old man looked up and winked at Hurley.

  “Sometimes it makes too much noise,” he said, smiling benevolently at his wife. She began to move the table. “It’s all right. It’s all right!” he said. In his fifty years in America he had mastered the sounds of English, but the rhythms of his speech were Scandinavian. “I’m going to play first a Norwegian song.”

  Nana poised herself upon a chair, folded her hands firmly, set herself for a moment, and then began energetically to smooth her apron down her long thighs. The old lady against the wall stopped rocking. It always startled Hurley when, out of her silent effacement, she responded.

  The old man bent over his zither, his shiny face as ruddy as a baby’s. His mottled, angular fingers worked over the strings; he swayed back and forth to keep time and snorted, gave little gasps and grunts he evidently did not hear himself, in time with the music. Beneath, occasionally overcoming the sibilant, involuntary breaths, the music was poignantly clear, ordered, cascading, vivid as little knives in the shadowy room. At the end they all applauded, and the old man bowed, very pleased.

  That night Hurley climbed the staircase that angled around the central chimney, an oil lamp to light his way, and entered his cold room in moonlight almost as bright as the lamp, but colder, whiter against the lamp’s yellow. Two little windows looked down across the old man’s garden—“Mostly for the deer,” the old man had said of it—then over the one still-mown pasture left to the farm, down the long hills silvery in moonlight to Cascom Lake in the valley, white among black surrounding spruce. Behind, on the other side of the house, he could feel the dark presence of Cascom Mountain.

  He wondered if it would be a night for sleep. He was tired enough. In the last few days he had taken many of the familiar trails, especially following those that he remembered led through hardwood. Although the leaves had turned and mostly fallen, here or there one tree flamed late among the bare ones, catching light and casting it in all directions as if it were an orange or soft red sun. He stopped often in the woods, surprised by each molten maple branch, even the smallest bright veins of each leaf golden and precious against a gnarled black trunk or the green twilight of a spruce grove. He walked carefully, resting often, sampling the few cold, sweet apples from the abandoned mountain trees, eating Nana’s sandwiches a little at a time. He wanted the day to last as long as possible. At night he thought of his wife.

  The high, sloping bed was wide and lonesome as a field of snow. During his wife’s illness he could not sleep in their own bed, but slept every night on a studio couch where he could reach the sides, hold himself down, and remember exactly where he was and why she was not beside him. If he woke in the night and for a second forgot, he had to learn over again from the beginning that Mary was going to die. It was always the first time over again, when they had left the doctor (the poor doctor, according to Mary) at the cancer hospital and walked together to Grant’s Tomb. Mary finally said, “You know? They should pay a man a thousand dollars a minute for having to say those words.”

  Then the inevitable sequence of hours came through his mind, one after the other, until the afternoon when she was not so brave anymore and shook her head back and forth as if to throw off the plastic tube that went into her nose and down, jiggling the clamps and bottle on its hanger. Tears rolling from the outside corners of her drowned eyes and she cried pettishly, “Help me, help me.”

  She had taken pain better than most, was better at taking it by far than her husband or her children. When she’d had the compound fracture of her wrist she had been the calm one, the strong one. And he thought, My God, how much pain she must have if she is caused to do this—if it is Mary who is caused to do this.…

  As they cut nerves, cutting off pain in little bits and pieces, it was as if they cut off her life, too, by shreds—the pain, the possibility of it forever gone; the life forever gone. But new pain took the place of the old. She lived for six months and died almost weightless, ageless, the little lines and wrinkles of her familiar body smoothed as if by a filling pulp. Her arms turned to thin tubes, her forehead waxed as taut, as translucent as a yellow apple. Her eyes, before the final cutting, watched him, blameful as a beaten child’s. She whined for help: “What is happening to me?” And being a man only, he could stand, and stand, and stand, helpless at the foot of her crank-operated bed, the simple handle drawing his eyes, mocking, it seemed to him, telling him to crank, to grasp the handle in his strong hands and crank, sweat at it, crank faster and harder, crank until she is well again.

  He turned and his hand touched the firm, virginal pillow next to his. The linen smelled country-new, of washdays and clotheslines.

  At midnight he heard what he first supposed to be a hundred dogs barking in the distance, and as the barking changed on the wind he suddenly knew, in exactly the same way he had known in his childhood, that it was the Canada geese flying over, low here because of the height of the land, streaming over in the darkness. Lorlorn, lorlorn, lorlorn, the geese called to each other as they passed. He ran to the window—remembering an old excitement, feet numb on the cold boards—but the geese did not cross the moon. He remembered them well enough that way: the long wavering files of geese, necks thrust out straight, dark wings arcing tirelessly on their long journey over the guns, through all the deadly traps set for them—the weather, the ice, the hunting animals and the traitor decoys. Each one its own warm life deep in the cold sky,
and they called to each other, kept close and on course together, facing with disciplined bravery that impossible journey.

  He came awake in the indeterminate time when night was breaking and the small windows were luminous squares upon the wall. He lay on his back and watched the light grow, the corners arrange themselves and moldings darken, wondering at a curved shape above the closet door. As the morning increased (he heard pans banging down in the kitchen, Nana’s sharp morning voice) he finally saw that the curved shape was a bow hung on pegs. This room evidently had been a young boy’s during the summer: a huge fungus platter hung between the windows and in the back of the closet he had found a fly rod enmeshed in kinky leader. Nana had missed a trout hook crusted with dried worm, stuck high on a curtain.

  Before he went downstairs he remembered the bow, took it down, and, wondering at the easy memories of his youth, strung it. He instinctively placed the lower end against the inside of his right foot, and his left hand slid easily up the wood with the string lightly guided by his fingertips. The string vibrated tautly, and he remembered, too, how a bow seemed lighter after being strung, the tense pressure communicating energy to the arm. He estimated the pull at sixty pounds—quite a powerful bow.

  “Oh, you found the bow ’n’ arrow!” Nana said when he came into the kitchen with it. “You going to shoot? Say, how did you cock it?”

  He placed the bow against his foot, pulled with his right hand, and pushed with the heel of his left hand, his fingers working the string out of the notch.

  “Nobody could fix it. The children going crazy they couldn’t shoot, nobody could cock it,” Nana said admiringly.

  “Do you have any arrows?”

  The old man had decided to listen. “In the umbrella stand is some arrows,” he said, and Nana rushed out after them. After breakfast she insisted they all go out and watch him shoot, and he was surprised at his own excitement when he fitted the nock of one of the warped target arrows to the string. He drew and loosed the arrow across the thirty yards between the driveway and barn. Whap as the arrow hit the silvery, unpainted wood of the barn and stuck, quivering. A cloud of swallows streamed out of a sashless window, and shreds of dusty hay fell from between the boards. The old people were impressed.