The Followed Man Page 9

  "Well, well, it's Luke Carr," she said. "You think I wouldn't know you after all these years, when I used to take care of you and change your diapers?"

  "I'll bet I was too old for that," Luke said.

  "No, you weren't. When you was three and four you used to have accidents. Maybe it wasn't diapers, but it was six of one and half a dozen of the other."

  She looked at him excitedly and fondly. Her face was puffy, soft white, her hair in a loose bun and half gray. He always remem­bered her absolutely black hair, so black and lusterless it seemed all one piece. He remembered one time when he must have been five or six, and she twenty or twenty-one, when he was staying overnight one summer at her parents' farm on the River Road, and she'd let him climb into her bed and stay. Her belly and smooth white sides were snowfields, heaven and sin to slide him­self against. That fresh cool skin he could touch, nothing else, but at that time it was all he could imagine of pleasure. Now that same girl was sixty years old, but as she smiled and nodded and moved her swollen hands, the flesh of her forearms swinging loosely on the bones, he saw her as she had changed, becoming the old wom­an but still being that unmarried young girl, Phyllis Follansbee, bored with her life, who would every once in a while go into a sad, staring mood and give a great romantic sigh.

  She was a reader, though she hadn't been able to go to college—that wasn't a possibility her family would have considered then. Six years ago, when he had been here last, she and George were having a garage sale and among the items were three hundred pa­perback books at a nickel each. Before her marriage she had read all of the books, every one, in the little brown granite Carnegie Free Library across from the church. She had told him six years ago how she waited for the Bookmobile before Nixon vetoed Fed­eral funds for such things. And in this room books were every­where, though there weren't any bookcases in the house, as far as he could see. Books were piled along the wall beside the sofa, piled on top of the rolltop desk. Her books, from libraries or her own, fiction and non-fiction on any subject at all, were mostly piled on their sides, rarely on end, though here and there two piles formed bookends for a few upright ones.

  "So you come to see us," Phyllis said. "It's been a long time, and all the terrible things that happened. You know you're always wel­come here with us. We can put you up in the spare bedroom if you're staying over. Will you have supper with us?"

  "I'd like to have supper with you, but I've got to go back to­night. I'm selling my house."

  "You mean you can, or you can't?" Phyllis said.

  "I mean I can, but I can't stay the night."

  "Well, why didn't you say so right out? George, get some deer chops out of the freezer. We'll have the little carrots . . . any size to 'em? And dandelion greens, bread-and-butter pickles, heat up the rest of the scalloped potatoes. . . ."

  "Now, Mother," George said, "don't you get all heated up. You just order what you want and I'll take care of it."

  "Luke hasn't had a good meal in months, I can tell. He's been eating restaurant junk. Look at his eyes, George."

  George shrugged and glanced apologetically at Luke's eyes.

  Luke said, "Before supper I'd like to go to Leah and pick out a stone for Shem's grave. I was there around noon and forgot all about it. Anyway, is there anything I can get you while I'm over there?"

  George frowned and looked embarrassed. "Well, now, Luke, you know . . ." he said, then paused for a while to think. "The Buzzell-Nadeau Post and the VFW, we kind of got together and bought Shem a stone a couple months ago. Concord granite, kind of plain, but a handsome piece of stone, if I do say so. Weighed over five hundred pounds, two by three by eight inches, what's sticking out of the ground. I tend to think you'd approve of it."

  Luke didn't know how to cope with George's embarrassment. George evidently felt that he'd been responsible for butting in on a family affair.

  "George, I'm grateful to all of you," he said. "You've got to let me pay for'it, though. All right?"

  George seemed relieved. "You're not offended we went ahead on it, now?"

  "No, I'm not. I'm grateful, and that's all. I just want to pay for it."

  "Well, nobody's going to have no objections to that." George thought for a moment. "Maybe we was a little hasty. We should of known you was going to take care of it. But Shem was the oldest living vet in town, you know. He had quite a record in the first war, I don't know how much your family told you, in the Argonne and all. Now, that wasn't my war, nor yours, but the boys take it pretty serious. Shem Carr was a cantankerous old cuss, but he was pretty well respected, just the same."

  That was a lot of words for George, and he seemed to be think­ing over what he'd just said and trying to figure out if he'd said the right thing.

  Phyllis changed the subject. "So you're selling your house in Massachusetts."

  "Yeah," Luke said, nodding.

  "Where you going to live, then? You going to the city?"

  "I don't know yet."

  "You going to sell the farm? Land prices are out of sight, as they say. Pretty near ridiculous, to tell the honest truth."

  "No, not until the taxes get too bad, anyway."

  Phyllis turned to George. "You going to get those deer chops out of the freezer? Give 'em some time to thaw if we're going to pan fry 'em. I'll take care of the carrots and. ..."

  "You'll take care of nothing," George said. There was an edge of anger in his voice that seemed excessive for what he'd just said, but it was probably his continuing embarrassment about having butted into someone else's business.

  "You got your country clothes on," Phyllis said, changing the subject again. "You intend to look at the farm, or you just wear your boots when you come to New Hampshire?"

  "I wasn't slumming, if that's what you mean."

  Phyllis laughed and then grimaced; her neck hurt when she raised her chin. "George, go get them chops out of the freezer," she said in a voice that meant there had been enough discussion of that subject. George went.

  "Now, Luke," she said. "You want to go see the stone that caused all this nervousness. Shem's in the old high cemetery, you know. You can stop on the way to the farm, if that's where you're going. We'll eat kind of late, say seven-thirty, after the TV news, so you got time enough to look around. I don't know why I kept you standing up all this time when there's a perfectly good sofa right there beneath the books. And if you change your mind about staying over, why that's fine. Now get along. We'll see you at supper." She waved him away with a bent hand that was painfully shiny at the finger joints.

  He took the Cascom Mountain road, the rounded mountain it­self appearing time and again, always a little startling, as if it had a tendency to move to different points of the compass. Its top, at about three thousand feet, was bare granite, though not above the timberline at this latitude; a forest fire in the 1880's had burned its humus into dust which had blown and washed away. The trees, hardwood changing to stunted spruce and small white birch, had been slowly climbing back since then.

  The narrow asphalt road turned and climbed, crossed beneath a power line, passed the houses of several old, grown-over farms, summer places now. Just before the high cemetery, the road turned to gravel, and his own dust moved over him as he stopped. The cemetery was small, about an acre in all, and he found Shem's stone with no trouble. Even though he had been here as a child, and would always remember the odd thoughts he'd had then at seeing this place of the dead, he was surprised to find so many Carrs here, the earliest death 1834, the latest Shem's. There were more of the Biblical names, those ancient Hebrew syllables—Hepzibah, Ezekiel, Japhet, Amos, Ezra, Rachel. And Shem Gorham Carr, 1894-1977. Shem's son, Samuel Gorham Carr, 1921-1949, had a small stone near his father and his mother, Carrie Watson Carr, 1900-1960. Samuel was the strange son who had never mar­ried, hardly ever spoke. Luke had never heard how Samuel died.

  The sun seemed hotter over the graves. Shem's gray granite stone was more modern than most; the earliest were black slate. Small American
flags, the size of dollar bills, faded in cast iron holders at the graves of the veterans. The bodies, half-imagined, seemed to suck the sun down into the lush, uncut grass. Once elms that spread in the air like great fountains had shaded this place, but now their stumps were moldering at the stone walls, los­ing definition.

  He went back across the grass and through the opening in the stone wall to his dusty car. The road rose as it followed the Cascom River, rapids visible here and there through the dense leaves. The brook that flowed through Shem's farm, Zach Brook, was one of its tributaries. There was a Carr Brook, too, but it was named after another branch of the family, and emptied into another small, rocky river in the next valley, though they all fed Cascom Lake in the main valley below.

  The road left the Cascom River, climbing more. On steep stretches his tires bounced on the washboard, gravel ticking on the car's gas tank and fender wells. Here the trees sometimes cov­ered the road, and the air grew cooler. At one point the road was actual ledge. The only houses he saw were two small hunting camps with slab siding and rusty stovepipes, side by side in a small opening.

  A half-mile farther and he came to the side road, grassed in the middle, that descended through deep spruce toward the farm. Under the trees, if he looked closely enough, he could see large stones, vaguely rectangular in pattern, that had been the founda­tion of one of the fourteen schoolhouses that Cascom had once supported. Shem's father had attended that school. Now the only school in Cascom was the one-room grammar school down in the village.

  The wire from the power pole at the road disappeared over­head in branches that should have been brushed out long ago. At the small frog pond beside the road he bottomed in a deep pud­dle; a culvert was needed here, and a few loads of gravel. Then he wondered why the maintenance of this road seemed that immedi­ate a responsibility.

  The road emerged from the dark spruce, as if that cool, primi­tive shade had been a tunnel, an entranceway into a lighter world, because he was out of the twilight into saplings and steeplejack, with patches of juniper and even tasseling hay. There should be the cellar hole, where the driveway was still clearly open among poplar and gray birch sprouts. Ghost images from childhood flickered upon the green. The garden had been there, the barn there, with its slough of manure flowing down the barnyard slope, then the connecting sheds leading from the barn to the white clapboard farmhouse. It was hardest to visualize the lush pastures that once spread far back over the hummocky slopes behind the house and barn to what had been the edge of the sugarbush. The old maples were still there, higher and darker than the saplings that had grown up to them, but all that open distance had gone.

  A light breeze came from the west, from the mountain that seemed improbably close here, as if this must be the only real view of it. Weather had always come over the mountain. He remem­bered those summer storms that built and rolled up from the west, the ominous turbulence over the mountain, then the gray rain approaching, ridge by ridge as each shuttered out and then the almost horizontal sheets flashing across the barn and house. Thunder echoed from the mountain so that each crack or rumble was double or quadruple. Blue arcs would climb, as if on invisible stairs, from the transformer on the pole across the road.

  He walked up the drive to the cellar hole. One squared corner of the kitchen still rose from it at an angle, like the bow of a sink­ing ship, the rest submerged and going down. The wood of the corner trim was still flecked here and there with eggshells of paint, but the gray wood was damp and limp, all the life gone out of it. He pulled a rusty nail from the soggy wood with his fingers, and it came out as easily as if from clay. Wood lasted forever un­less water got to it. At what point in Shem's life had he stopped making, because of infirmity or not caring, the small repairs that would have kept his house alive?

  One of the connecting sheds rested upon Shem's '41 Chevy pickup truck, a dark caul over the sinking machine. The truck's rusted wheel rims had pressed through the tires and into the earth. A two-gallon motor oil can, among many cans and sheets of steel or iron worn thin by rust, seemed kept alive by its contents. Amalie. Odd bottles had turned lead-colored and untransparent in the rain and dust. None of the rafters of the sheds or the hewn sills and beams of the collapsed barn were salvageable, though their former symmetry and strength could be remembered. He had jumped from the barn's thick beams and cross members, when they were square and sound, into sweet dusty hay. Some­where in the brush and saplings would be a hayrake, stoneboat, cutterbar, harrow, manure spreader, maybe even the old John Deere somewhere with a poplar as thick as his leg growing up be­tween its axles. Once they had all been greased and oiled, silver in their moving places, but now the keepers and protectors of this place were all dead, a civilization gone and its relics and monu­ments going down under humus, becoming humus. He felt like an archaeologist who had come upon his own bones.

  The breeze died for a moment and the leaves of the poplar, or aspen, green coins unstable in the wind, gradually stopped their quaking and rustling. A breath that continued was the distant rushing of the brook, a few hundred yards down the slope to the west. The road by the house had once continued down that slope to a log and plank bridge over the brook and then two miles or more up the mountain to the cellar holes of other farms aban­doned long before his memory. He found the road, now canopied by branches, grown up in basswood, or witch hobble, as Shem had called it, and a grass that seemed aquatic in its wide-bladed green­ness, whose name he had never been told. As he pushed his way down toward the brook, thinking of the lush and nameless grass he realized how much he had learned in those summers, how Shem had always taken great pains to teach him the names of things—plants, tools, parts, animals, machines—and he seemed never to have forgotten the big man's instructions, though Shem had always half-frightened him. He remembered one time in the barn when Shem and his quiet son, Samuel, were milking and he was sitting on the barn sill watching. "Look there," Shem had said. "See the snake." He thought Shem was trying to scare him, but Shem pointed over the stanchion to a joist and there, along the crack between the joist and the barn floor above was a black, brown and tan patterned snake about a yard long.

  "Milk snake," Shem said. "Only he don't drink milk, he eats the goddam mice, is why he hangs around the barn." Two scrawny barn cats were sitting next to Shem hoping for a squirt, and Shem gave them a couple of squirts that plastered their faces. They both contentedly stroked their whiskers with their paws and licked off the warm milk. "King snake's the right name for him. A lot of shit-for-brains farmers'd kill him on sight."

  The hill farmers were not like those on the rich river bottoms because they were closer to the wilderness, and also to starvation. They were loggers, hunters and gatherers, always looking for sustenance wherever they could find it. Frosts came late and early in these upper valleys. Apples, potatoes, corn and timber, Shem had told him, were their mainstays, and "They et a lot of johnnycake." They knew wild food, and blueberries, strawberries, raspberries and blackberries, in the order of their seasons. As for game, there were no hours or seasons, and they counted out their shells and cartridges one by one.

  On the way to the brook the road had been gullied in places to the ledge. All the old waterbars that Shem repaired each year had been washed away in the spring runoffs, so instead of being shunt­ed off to the side the rivulets had taken the road itself for their channel and washed it down to base rock.

  The rush of the still invisible brook grew louder as he descend­ed. A deerfly found him and circled his head slowly, with a kind of bullying insistence. He stood still, waited for it to land and then crushed it against his scalp. Blackflies, here in the damper shade, had found him too, but they were not thick enough or ferocious enough on this dry day to bother him.

  He came on the brook sooner than he had expected to. The log and plank bridge was gone entirely. The boulders and stone slabs of its abutments, which had been built up eight feet from the bed of the brook over a hundred years ago, were still there in spite of the whi
te torrent the brook became in spring, when the snow melted from the mountain. Then whole trees would come shoot­ing past like pile drivers, and you could hear and feel the rumble of boulders hurtling along below.

  Now the brook sighed in its small rapids, was so calm and clear in its pools he could see the smallest pebbles on the bottom. A small brook trout felt his shadow and sped across what seemed nothing but air, to hide in a crevice. Only a slightly more golden tone in that element told him the water was deep.

  The far side of the brook, now grown up in alders and beyond the alders in gray birch and poplar, had once been a smooth field called the lower pasture. Downstream, around a bend bordered by an outcropping of ledge, was the chute and pool that had been called the swimming hole, though the pool was only a few feet deep and twenty in diameter. He left the road and found a way through the trees along the steep bank. The pool was bordered on one side by ledge and on the other by several loose but immovable boulders, one as big as a room. The floor of the pool was a smoothed dip in the bedrock that in flood would scour itself clean of stones and sand, leaves, waterlogged branches and the remains of all the living things that inhabited the brook. This early in the summer the scoured stone was still bright, and the water coming down the stone chute that used to be his slide entered the pool with a quiet rush and disappeared except for the large bubbles that rose, wobbling and silver, back up to the air.

  He considered taking off his clothes and sliding into that clean cold water that was as pure and enlivening as any he had ever known, but it was cool here in this dim, mossy-banked place. It would be good to cut out the trees on the southwestern side and let in the afternoon sunlight. The tall hemlocks on the eastern bank could stay; their shade and acidic needles kept the bank on this side smooth and clear of brush. That thought, and thoughts of a bridge for the old abutments, culverts and gravel for the road, the clearing of brush so that at this time of day the sun would slant across long vistas of the green hay he remembered, gentle and hazy in the summer light, began to work in him a change he couldn't define, to infect him with a purpose that was not to be seriously considered.