The Night of Trees Read online

  As you could see in my letter, and did see, I’m not too hot for hunting at the moment. Maybe I feel like hunting something else, or maybe I feel, right now, what with the army after me, like I’m the one being hunted. But I’ll come for a week and try to get back my old itch for birds and bucks. Maybe Thursday. Are there many partridge this season?

  About mother. We can talk about that later. But I suppose we won’t. Maybe I can see some reason for it. Maybe I can’t. All I know is, it doesn’t seem right. Actually, it rocked me. But I’m old enough, I guess, to know that whatever the reason is, it’s your problem—yours and hers, and that I didn’t see it coming. It’s like the sun, maybe—what if it began to dim? We measure everything by it, don’t we? Your family is like that. Mine was, anyway. I didn’t see it going bad. How’s old Shim the Silent? (I just heard of an Anglo-Saxon king named Aethelred the Unready, but that wouldn’t apply to Shim.) I always felt that he went out in the woods—way back—and screamed. And then, of course, brought back the biggest buck in Leah. Which shotgun did you bring for me? The 16? I hope so. See, maybe I am getting the itch again.

  Shoot straight (I know you do, O.M.),

  MURRAY

  So he would come. And now that one problem was solved, Richard began to plan for the next. If he could perhaps talk Murray out of this ridiculous idea of a trip around the country, or at least find out just why the boy must quit school and take off on his own, without even a friend along—that would be the next. The army had given him a month. One month. To a twenty-year-old, he supposed, that would seem to be a long time. Of course, he could remember in himself that itch for adventure, but now, with Rachel’s defection, he wondered with a kind of desperation if all people were meant, for reasons just beyond his ken, to leave him, or to disregard his loving plans for them. He was not a man to feel left—he never had been—and therefore he did not waste his time on self-pity or his energy on fear. He planned. That was the business of a father; not to rule, but to plan, and it was the business his own father hadn’t had the time to do.

  Zach breathed gently in his niche between the stove and the hot-water tank, a slightly moist, insistent noise accompanying the metallic tick tick the tank made, as if it were squeezing little bubbles to death. It must have been intolerably hot there, but there was no sign of sweat on Zach, who stared into his private evening—perhaps, Richard thought suddenly, with some envy of Zach’s placidity, of fields and oxen and stone walls long ago. Evidently Zach no longer smoked his pipe. He just sat, and it did seem logical that a man who must always be conscious of his flues and openings would not fill them up with smoke. Richard, who could act upon any reasonable evidence, hadn’t smoked for two years.

  He put Murray’s letter in his breast pocket (he would read it again) and went out to the car to get the gun cases and the liquor. The car, so gleaming and pretty, cheered him up, and when he came back to the kitchen he got out a bottle of bourbon and held it out to Zach: a question. The old man nodded and carefully walked to the cupboard over the sink. He got down a tumbler for Richard and a juice glass for himself; then he took a can of grape juice from the refrigerator and put some in his juice glass, his glassy fingers steady but seeming to hinge only at the first joints. Richard filled the juice glass with bourbon, then made himself a highball with ice cubes and water. Zach nodded and sipped his purple drink.

  “Hough!” he said. “Ain’t nothing. Huch! Wrong with. Hough! My hearing. Huch! Speak out.”

  “I know how you feel, though,” Richard said. “I never like to have a dentist talk to me when I can’t answer.”

  The old man, back in his chair again, nodded solemnly. “Huch! Huch! Pain in the ass.” He nodded again and sipped his drink, the purple like ink on his pale lips.

  Things had changed at the lodge in the two years since Richard had seen it. Like the lavender bathroom, the new built-in refrigerator and sink, here the modern was superimposed piecemeal upon the old. The house was very old, and except for a picture window in the living room through which Richard, wandering around with his drink, could barely see in the darkness some attempt to clear the trees between the house and a view of the mountain, the windows were narrow and small, built at a time when heat came from wood alone, and was precious. A modern, plastic-covered divan sat between two end tables of dark plain pine, luminous and dented. The little lines of dots from a tracing wheel upon their tops showed that they had once been used for sewing. Shim had taken out the partition between the parlor and living room, and now the room was long and high. The stone fireplace was new, as were some of the mounted deer heads along the walls. Most were old. The glassy eyes were dusty and dull on some, and the hair dull, as if they had grown gray and patriarchal there upon their mounts. Even the neck hair seemed darker on those great bucks shot by Zach before the First World War. From their plaques of varnished birch they stared with great dignity over Richard’s head.

  The lighting of the room, consistent with the somehow pleasing hodgepodge of furniture, seemed western: all down the long room wagon wheels fixed with shaded bulbs hung from the ceiling. Only the two near the center were lighted, and the deer looked upon them with their usual gravity, mixed, too, with a suggestion of fright in those wide eyes and stiff ears, the antlers pointing heavily forward and up into the cobwebby darkness of the ceiling.

  A car turned into the yard, its lights bright for a moment against a white birch, and he went closer to a window to see it. At first he thought of Murray, but Murray wouldn’t come until Thursday—if then. It was a Jeep station wagon, and that must mean Shim’s new wife. He hadn’t liked his immediate and irrational thought that it might have been Murray, and he was slightly irritated with himself as he went back to the kitchen. As he entered the room she was at the door, and as it opened to the noise of paper bags he thought, with surprise at his own surprise, Shim was married? This with his first sight of Opal, nearly hidden behind her shopping bags. His first impression, before he realized that she was very small, was that to carry such large bags and still have a finger or two to open the door, she must be very strong—and as Shim’s wife she might have to be. But she was small, less than five feet tall, and the bags took on their proper size. Her heels hit the floor with a crack crack crack as, with a small woman’s jauntiness, she marched in. She had to bend backward in order to raise the bags to the table. As she turned to look at him her coat flared open, rather gracefully, and she stood with her high heels firmly on the floor and said: “You must be Mr. Grimald. I’m Mrs. Buzzell. New here,” she added in a cool, schoolish little voice, and he saw that she faced him, and perhaps the house and the old man, to whom she had nodded over the groceries, with some defiance. Richard asked if he could get anything else from the car, and she said yes, there were two cases of beer, “But I could get them all right.”

  “I’ll get them,” he said. She didn’t smile. She was very dark, almost olive in complexion, with a soft, rounded little face. She seemed younger than Shim—in her twenties—and yet her rimless glasses were surprising, and predicted elderliness. So it was a surprise to see her move as she took off her coat, and to see the precise good taste of her clothes and the gracefulness (he was surprised at his thought) of her little body. She was not chunky, but somehow narrow-boned, as if she were all in miniature.

  “Thank you,” she said unwillingly.

  As he went out to the jeep he decided that he didn’t like her very much. She gave him the impression of an old-maid schoolteacher, for midgets. Then he remembered who she was, Opal Perkins, and that she had been a schoolteacher. She’d taught Murray high-school English that winter they’d lived in Leah. She must be nearly thirty, then; not so much younger than Shim. They made strange mates, but then he couldn’t think of Shim having anything but a strange mate. And she, no doubt, was the genius of the lavender bathroom.

  When he came back with the beer he saw that she had moved his four gun cases over to the wall, where they stood in geometrical order, evenly spaced, short to tall, with no chance
of their falling over.

  “Would you like a drink?” he asked.

  “No, thank you,” she said rather primly. She had put on an apron and tied it tightly around her tiny waist. The word “jaunty” occurred to him again, this time as her perfect little rump bounced, and her smooth little ankles flashed as she put away the groceries. She seemed a funny little bird, fascinating as a bird might be, not quite believable, with something about her of the quick-quick-stop, and when stopped, the total immobility of a bird. Then trot-trot-trot again as her sharp little heels jabbed the linoleum.

  He made himself another drink, intending to take it up to his room, where he would read Murray’s letter again. By then she had put away the groceries, and she said, “But I’ll have a cup of coffee with you in the living room.” Her eyes, although it may have been a glint from her lenses, barely flicked toward Zach, then toward the coffeepot. “On this stove we have a quick-heat unit. Infrared.” She turned a knob, and the coffeepot seemed immediately to be sitting on red fire. “Extremely quick,” she said, and it was.

  Holding her cup and saucer in both hands, she led him into the living room where, with remarkable strength, she adjusted a great birch slab of a coffee table with one hand. She sat down on the plastic-covered divan and had to adjust three throw pillows behind her back so that her feet could at least hang over the edge.

  “Well!” She stopped to reach for her coffee—a sitting-up exercise, her knees straight. To give her credit, he thought, she did not seem to want to be cute; in a world slightly too large for her she had to be pretty limber.

  “I’ve never met you, but I remember your son…Murray?”

  Slightly fake, he thought; she did feel defiant.

  “A very bright student,” she said.

  “Yes, I remembered that you taught in Leah high school.” He sat down at the other end of the divan, and for one giddy moment it looked at least ten feet long.

  “Shim says he’s an awfully good athlete at the college. He reads about that sort of thing in the paper.”

  “He seems to be good at everything he tries,” Richard said.“He’s quite a boy.” And he thought’ What a foolish thing to say about Murray’ about Murray, and what a sardonic grin Murray would have for such a statement. “Obviously a chip off the old bone,” Murray would say, or something like that. He seemed, at least at present, somehow steadier and more purposeful than anyone, in spite of his desire to take off. His letter (at that moment Richard wanted to go up to his room and read it again) did show such wise and easy toleration of his parents’ troubles. He didn’t want to sacrifice a week of his trip, either, and yet he would come. Suddenly Richard wondered if Murray might be coming, not just to humor him, not just to reassure a father of his son’s sanity, but to console a man who had been deserted by his wife. He felt a great weakness at the thought. He didn’t want to think such things.

  He hadn’t been listening to Opal, and she had formally taken her turn to talk. He smiled, hoping it to be an answer, and she looked a little surprised. Her little red lips came open, and he had a glimpse of a white tooth, lined delicately with gold. But he never did find out what she’d said, because just then they heard the kitchen door close and Shim’s soft, inflectionless voice.

  “Seena cah, Pah,” Shim said in the kitchen. Richard could almost see his meaningless, but rather nasty grin: he had told his father that he had seen Richard’s car, and therefore knew that he was here, and implied that the fancy foreign car was exactly what he might expect Richard to be driving. Shim was, really, fairly literate. He had gone to Dartmouth after the war, and graduated.

  Opal scooted herself off the divan, and Richard followed her into the kitchen, taking one step to her three. Shim bent over the sink, washing his hands and face with Boraxo. He wore his usual uniform of green chino—he didn’t like to be seen in the woods. His hair, cropped close, was all reddish gold, and tawny, and he looked around as he wiped his head dry, grinning—his most characteristic expression—as if everything in the world were just slightly smutty.

  “What you got for guns?” he said to Richard. They would examine the guns. From Shim’s hip pocket protruded the stock of the tiny Stevens single-shot .22 he always carried, with which he had shot, among other things, two wildcats. This he pulled out and unloaded; then, his grin unchanging but his yellow eyes straight upon Opal, he presented it to her. She backed away, a watchful look on her face. Shim placed the pistol on the edge of the table. The old man watched, it seemed to Richard, with eagerness. As he unzipped his gun cases he glanced up at the people by the table. Zach had hitched forward in his chair, and Opal watched Shim. She stood close to him, but with a certain alertness, as if she were afraid she might touch him inadvertently. Shim’s yellow eyes were for the guns, and Richard brought them forth one at a time.

  “Ah,” Shim said. He had never seen Murray’s 16-gauge Browning over-and-under, and he took it in his rough but thin hands and swung it to his shoulder. As if one quick sight down the barrel had been enough for his imaginary bird, he put it down upon the table—one smooth motion. There was no sound as it came to rest upon the formica table top. He had seen Richard’s double-barreled 12-gauge, and this he merely opened and shut, listening appreciatively to the solid click of the English locks. Murray’s rifle, the Mauser, had always pleased him. He ran his fingers down the receiver over the stamped swastika and wings, and pulled the bolt back slowly, his ear to it as if he were bowing a long note on a violin. Murray had shortened the barrel and refinished the Wehrmacht’s laminated stock, but had deliberately left the rifle its military character. “I like the irony of it,” he’d told Richard—this at seventeen. “Irony is a very nice word.”

  Shim’s comment would have pleased Murray: “Ugly, ain’t it?” he said, his face showing nothing but aesthetic delight. He admired the new rifle Richard had bought (“Five hundred bucks?”) at Abercrombie & Fitch. It, like Richard’s shotgun, was English. But he went back to the Mauser. “Those krauts!” he said admiringly. He himself used a military rifle, a shortened Arisaka he had converted to .30-06. This he brought out from the hall closet and placed next to the Mauser.

  They all stood back to look at the guns. Upon the bright table their long, blue-black barrels and ugly, honest actions manifested a kind of darkness in the mind. Such perfect tools they were, so adequate, so startling and honest in a world complicated by ambivalence. Murray had written a poem in college about that same simplicity, and Richard remembered the lines,

  No ambivalence can trifle

  A mind as simple as a rifle.

  If he could, in the week ahead, simplify and rest his own bothered consciousness, perhaps it would be like a sleep, and when he awoke the answers would be clear to him. He thought of Rachel—saw her clear and beautiful for one second—then deliberately attended Shim, who had taken the Mauser and who now held it out to Opal. She didn’t back away, but wouldn’t raise her hands to take it.

  “Take it,” Shim said. “See if you can heft it.” He grinned, and the pupils of his eyes, to Richard’s quick glance, might have been slit vertically. Opal seemed to hide behind her immobile, dark little face. Her mouth was a little open, and she breathed through it.

  Finally she said, in a practical, rather harsh voice, “You know I don’t care for guns.”

  “Take it anyway.”

  The rifle was awkward in her little hands, as if she held something as long as a ski. She quickly put it down on the table and went to the sink to wash her hands. “Oily, greasy things,” she said.

  “You ought to git to like them,” Shim said, his voice still soft and monotonous. He turned away to grin.

  Richard surprised a little smile upon the old man’s face, but it quickly went away.

  Breakfast would be at six-thirty, and he would try his double on the ruffed grouse. One more drink had made him drowsy, and he lay in the hammocky big bed listening to the wind down from Cascom Mountain hiss slowly through the pine beside his window. Now he should sleep, and not pl
an, and not remember. He heard Shim and Opal use the bathroom, then go on down the hall to their own room. Zach slept downstairs. The house, moving according to its own rhythms, sighed now and again.

  He should not think of Rachel, and yet he kept building upon what had been an obvious little dream—kept inventing little details. Rachel, Rachel, he called, seeing her as he had often, lately, in his mind, her back turned to him as she walked sadly away. He called, loving her, but she did not understand his language. Murray is here, with me, he called, but she would not understand. He called again, and finally she turned and in a thick Yiddish accent he had never heard her use—was sure she couldn’t even imitate—said, Vatchu vant! It wasn’t his beautiful Rachel at all, but an old Jewess with a mustache, busy with her business, busy with troubles he would never understand.

  2

  HE WOKE up hungry, to the delicate scent of the morning woods, as if the clean air had washed every old taste out of him. He went to his little window and stuck his head out. The October sun was bright and cold where the trees let it cross the house, and the few leaves left on the maples turned dryly in it, reflecting and filtering it, yellower than the sun where the sun touched them, red-speckled in places as if they had just been sprayed with blood. The black arms of the pines moved slowly as their pale, dusty green needles swayed in the wind.

  It was six o’clock. No one had called him; his eagerness for this day had awakened him. “I can hunt,” he said out loud, and he knew just where he would go—up the right side of the open slope next to the rope tow, where blackberries grew alongside a deep grove of spruce, up into the taller spruce, and then where the birds led him. His limit was three, and they would be quick, difficult shots in the deep thickets where the partridge hid.