George stood a little farther down the slope, knocking the snow from his wind jacket with big slaps.
“You took a beauty, Mike,” he called to Nick. “That’s lousy soft snow. It bagged me the same way.”
“What’s it like over the khud?” Nick kicked his skis around as he lay on his back and stood up.
“You’ve got to keep to your left. It’s a good fast drop with a Christy at the bottom on account of a fence.”
“Wait a sec and we’ll take it together.”
“No, you come on and go first. I like to see you take the khuds.”
Nick Adams came up past George, big back and blond head still faintly snowy, then his skis started slipping at the edge and he swooped down, hissing in the crystalline powder snow and seeming to float up and drop down as he went up and down the billowing khuds. He held to his left and at the end, as he rushed toward the fence, keeping his knees locked tight together and turning his body like tightening a screw, brought his skis sharply around to the right in a smother of snow and slowed into a loss of speed parallel to the hillside and the wire fence.
He looked up the hill. George was coming down in Telemark position, kneeling; one leg forward and bent, the other trailing; his sticks hanging like some insect’s thin legs, kicking up puffs of snow as they touched the surface and finally the whole kneeling, trailing figure coming around in a beautiful right curve, crouching, the legs shot forward and back, the body leaning out against the swing, the sticks accenting the curve like points of light, all in a wild cloud of snow.
“I was afraid to Christy,” George said, “the snow was too deep. You made a beauty.”
“I can’t Telemark with my leg,” Nick said.
Nick held down the top strand of the wire fence with his ski and George slid over. Nick followed him down to the road. They thrust bent-kneed along the road into a pine forest. The road became polished ice, stained orange and a tobacco yellow from the teams hauling logs. The skiers kept to the stretch of snow along the side. The road dipped sharply to a stream and then ran straight uphill. Through the woods they could see a long, low-eaved, weather-beaten building. Through the trees it was a faded yellow. Closer the window frames were painted green. The paint was peeling. Nick knocked his clamps loose with one of his ski sticks and kicked off the skis.
“We might as well carry them up here,” he said.
He climbed the steep road with the skis on his shoulder, kicking his heel nails into the icy footing. He heard George breathing and kicking in his heels just behind him. They stacked the skis against the side of the inn and slapped the snow off each other’s trousers, stamped their boots clean, and went in.
Inside it was quite dark. A big porcelain stove shone in the corner of the room. There was a low ceiling. Smooth benches back of dark, wine-stained tables were along each side of the room. Two Swiss sat over their pipes and two decies of cloudy new wine next to the stove. The boys took off their jackets and sat against the wall on the other side of the stove. A voice in the next room stopped singing and a girl in a blue apron came in through the door to see what they wanted to drink.
“A bottle of Sion,” Nick said. “Is that all right, Gidge?”
“Sure,” said George. “You know more about wine than I do. I like any of it.”
The girl went out.
“There’s nothing really can touch skiing, is there?” Nick said. “The way it feels when you first drop off on a long run.”
“Huh,” said George. “It’s too swell to talk about.”
The girl brought the wine in and they had trouble with the cork. Nick finally opened it. The girl went out and they heard her singing in German in the next room.
“Those specks of cork in it don’t matter,’ said Nick.
“I wonder if she’s got any cake.”
“Let’s find out.”
The girl came in and Nick noticed that her apron covered swellingly her pregnancy. I wonder why I didn’t see that when she first came in, he thought.
“What were you singing?” he asked her.
“Opera, German opera.” She did not care to discuss the subject. “We have some apple Strudel if you want it.”
“She isn’t so cordial, is she?” said George.
“Oh, well. She doesn’t know us and she thought we were going to kid her about her singing, maybe. She’s from up where they speak German probably and she’s touchy about being here and then she’s got that baby coming without being married and she’s touchy.”
“How do you know she isn’t married?”
“No ring. Hell, no girls get married around here till they’re knocked up.”
The door came open and a gang of woodcutters from up the road came in, stamping their boots and steaming in the room. The waitress brought in three litres of new wine for the gang and they sat at the two tables, smoking and quiet, with their hats off, leaning back against the wall or forward on the table. Outside the horses on the wood sledges made an occasional sharp jangle of bells as they tossed their heads.
George and Nick were happy. They were fond of each other. They knew they had the run back home ahead of them.
“When have you got to go back to school?” Nick asked.
“Tonight,” George answered. “I’ve got to get the ten-forty from Montreux.”
“I wish you could stick over and we could do the Dent du Lys tomorrow.”
“I got to get educated,” George said. “Gee, Mike, don’t you wish we could just bum together? Take our skis and go on the train to where there was good running and then go on and put up at pubs and go right across the Oberland and up the Valais and all through the Engadine and just take repair kit and extra sweaters and pajamas in our rucksacks and not give a damn about school or anything.”
“Yes, and go through the Schwartzwald that way. Gee, the swell places.”
“That’s where you went fishing last summer, isn’t it?”
“Yes.”
They ate the Strudel and drank the rest of the wine.
George leaned back against the wall and shut his eyes.
“Wine always makes me feel this way,” he said.
“Feel bad?” Nick asked.
“No. I feel good, but funny.”
“I know,” Nick said.
“Sure,” said George.
“Should we have another bottle?” Nick asked.
“Not for me,” George said.
They sat there, Nick leaning his elbows on the table, George slumped back against the wall.
“Is Helen going to have a baby?” George said, coming down to the table from the wall.
“Yes.”
“When?”
“Late next summer.”
“Are you glad?”
“Yes. Now.”
“Will you go back to the States?”
“I guess so.”
“Do you want to?”
“No.”
“Does Helen?”
“No.”
George sat silent. He looked at the empty bottle and the empty glasses.
“It’s hell, isn’t it?” he said.
“No. Not exactly,” Nick said.
“Why not?”
“I don’t know,” Nick said.
“Will you ever go skiing together in the States?” George said.
“I don’t know,” said Nick.
“The mountains aren’t much,” George said.
“No,” said Nick. “They’re too rocky. There’s too much timber and they’re too far away.”
“Yes,” said George, “that’s the way it is in California.”
“Yes,” Nick said, “that’s the way it is everywhere I’ve ever been.”
“Yes,” said George, “that’s the way it is.”
The Swiss got up and paid and went out.
“I wish we were Swiss,” George said.
“They’ve all got goiter,” said Nick.
“I don’t believe it,” George said.
“Neither do I,” said Nick
.
They laughed.
“Maybe we’ll never go skiing again, Nick,” George said.
“We’ve got to,” said Nick. “It isn’t worth while if you can’t.”
“We’ll go, all right,” George said.
“We’ve got to,” Nick agreed.
“I wish we could make a promise about it,” George said.
Nick stood up. He buckled his wind jacket tight. He leaned over George and picked up the two ski poles from against the wall. He stuck one of the ski poles into the floor.
“There isn’t any good in promising,” he said.
They opened the door and went out. It was very cold. The snow had crusted hard. The road ran up the hill into the pine trees.
They took down their skis from where they leaned against the wall in the inn. Nick put on his gloves. George was already started up the road, his skis on his shoulder. Now they would have the run home together.
Fathers and Sons
There had been a sign to detour in the center of the main street of this town, but cars had obviously gone through, so, believing it was some repair which had been completed, Nicholas Adams drove on through the town along the empty, brickpaved street, stopped by traffic lights that flashed on and off on this trafficless Sunday, and would be gone next year when the payments on the system were not met; on under the heavy trees of the small town that are a part of your heart if it is your town and you have walked under them, but that are only too heavy, that shut out the sun and that dampen the houses for a stranger; out past the last house and onto the highway that rose and fell straight away ahead with banks of red dirt sliced cleanly away and the second-growth timber on both sides. It was not his country but it was the middle of fall and all of this country was good to drive through and to see. The cotton was picked and in the clearings there were patches of corn, some cut with streaks of red sorghum, and, driving easily, his son asleep on the seat by his side, the day’s run made, knowing the town he would reach for the night, Nick noticed which corn fields had soy beans or peas in them, how the thickets and the cutover land lay, where the cabins and houses were in relation to the fields and the thickets, hunting the country in his mind as he went by, sizing up each clearing as to feed and cover and figuring where you would find a covey and which way they would fly.
In shooting quail you must not get between them and their habitual cover, once the dogs have found them, or when they flush they will come pouring at you, some rising steep, some skimming by your ears, whirring into a size you have never seen them in the air as they pass, the only way being to turn and take them over your shoulder as they go, before they set their wings and angle down into the thicket. Hunting this country for quail as his father had taught him, Nicholas Adams started thinking about his father. When he first thought about him it was always the eyes. The big frame, the quick movements, the wide shoulders, the hooked, hawk nose, the beard that covered the weak chin, you never thought about—it was always the eyes. They were protected in his head by the formation of the brows, set deep as though a special protection had been devised for some very valuable instrument. They saw much further and much quicker than the human eye sees and they were the great gift his father had. His father saw as a bighorn ram or as an eagle sees, literally.
He would be standing with his father on one shore of the lake, his own eyes were very good then, and his father would say, “TheyVe run up the flag.” Nick could not see the flag or the flagpole. “There,” his father would say, “it’s your sister Dorothy. She’s got the flag up and she’s walking out onto the dock.”
Nick would look across the lake and he could see the long wooded shoreline, the higher timber behind, the point that guarded the bay, the clear hills of the farm and the white of their cottage in the trees but he could not see any flagpole, or any dock; only the white of the beach and the curve of the shore.
“Can you see the sheep on the hillside toward the point?”
“Yes.”
They were a whitish patch on the gray-green of the hill.
“I can count them,” his father said.
Like all men with a faculty that surpasses human requirements, his father was very nervous. Then, too, he was sentimental, and, like most sentimental people, he was both cruel and abused. Also, he had much bad luck, and it was not all of it his own. He had died in a trap that he had helped only a little to set, and they had all betrayed him in their various ways before he died. All sentimental people are betrayed so many times. Nick could not write about him yet, although he would, later, but the quail country made him remember him as he was when Nick was a boy and he was very grateful to him for two things, fishing and shooting. His father was as sound on those two things as he was unsound on sex, for instance, and Nick was glad that it had been that way; for someone has to give you your first gun or the opportunity to get it and use it, and you have to live where there is game or fish if you are to learn about them, and now, at thirty-eight, he loved to fish and to shoot exactly as much as when he first had gone with his father. It was a passion that had never slackened and he was very grateful to his father for bringing him to know it.
While for the other, that his father was not sound about, all the equipment you will ever have is provided and each man learns all there is for him to know about it without advice; and it makes no difference where you live. He remembered very clearly the only two pieces of information his father had given him about that. Once when they were out shooting together Nick shot a red squirrel out of a hemlock tree. The squirrel fell, wounded, and when Nick picked him up, bit the boy clean through the ball of the thumb.
“The dirty little bugger,” Nick said and smacked the squirrel’s head against the tree. “Look how he bit me.”
His father looked and said, “Suck it out clean and put some iodine on when you get home.”
“The little bugger,” Nick said.
“Do you know what a bugger is?” his father asked him.
“We call anything a bugger,” Nick said.
“A bugger is a man who has intercourse with animals.”
“Why?” Nick said.
“I don’t know,” his father said. “But it is a heinous crime.”
Nick’s imagination was both stirred and horrified by this and he thought of various animals but none seemed attractive or practical and that was the sum total of direct sexual knowledge bequeathed him by his father except on one other subject. One morning he read in the paper that Enrico Caruso had been arrested for mashing.
“What is mashing?”
“It is one of the most heinous of crimes,” his father answered. Nick’s imagination pictured the great tenor doing something strange, bizarre, and heinous with a potato masher to a beautiful lady who looked like the pictures of Anna Held on the inside of cigar boxes. He resolved, with considerable horror, that when he was old enough he would try mashing at least once.
His father had summed up the whole matter by stating that masturbation produced blindness, insanity, and death, while a man who went with prostitutes would contract hideous venereal diseases and that the thing to do was to keep your hands off of people. On the other hand his father had the finest pair of eyes he had ever seen and Nick had loved him very much and for a long time. Now, knowing how it had all been, even remembering the earliest times before things had gone badly was not good remembering. If he wrote it he could get rid of it. He had gotten rid of many things by writing them. But it was still too early for that. There were still too many people. So he decided to think of something else. There was nothing to do about his father and he had thought it all through many times. The handsome job the undertaker had done on his father’s face had not blurred in his mind and all the rest of it was quite clear, including the responsibilities. He had complimented the undertaker. The undertaker had been both proud and smugly pleased. But it was not the undertaker that had given him that last face. The undertaker had only made certain dashingly executed repairs of doubtful artistic merit. The face had bee
n making itself and being made for a long time. It had modeled fast in the last three years. It was a good story but there were still too many people alive for him to write it.
Nick’s own education in those earlier matters had been acquired in the hemlock woods behind the Indian camp. This was reached by a trail which ran from the cottage through the woods to the farm and then by a road which wound through the slashings to the camp. Now he could still feel all of that trail with bare feet. First there was the pine needle loam through the hemlock woods behind the cottage where the fallen logs crumbled into wood dust and long splintered pieces of wood hung like javelins in the tree that had been struck by lightning. You crossed the creek on a log and if you stepped off there was the black muck of the swamp. You climbed a fence out of the woods and the trail was hard in the sun across the field with cropped grass and sheep sorrel and mullen growing and to the left the quaky bog of the creek bottom where the killdeer plover fed. The springhouse was in that creek. Below the barn there was fresh warm manure and the other older manure that was caked dry on top. Then there was another fence and the hard, hot trail from the barn to the house and the hot sandy road that ran down to the woods, crossing the creek, on a bridge this time, where the cattails grew that you soaked in kerosene to make jack lights with for spearing fish at night.
Then the main road went off to the left, skirting the woods and climbing the hill, while you went into the woods on the wide clay and shale road, cool under the trees, and broadened for them to skid out the hemlock bark the Indians cut. The hemlock bark was piled in long rows of stacks, roofed over with more bark, like houses, and the peeled logs lay huge and yellow where the trees had been felled. They left the logs in the woods to rot, they did not even clear away or burn the tops. It was only the bark they wanted for the tannery at Boyne City; hauling it across the lake on the ice in winter, and each year there was less forest and more open, hot, shadeless, weedgrown slashing.
But there was still much forest then, virgin forest where the trees grew high before there were any branches and you walked on the brown, clean springy-needled ground with no undergrowth and it was cool on the hottest days and they three lay against the trunk of a hemlock wider than two beds are long, with the breeze high in the tops and the cool light that came in patches, and Billy said:
The Nick Adams Stories Page 22
