The Solitudes

by John Crowley

  Goshen. West Goshen. East Bethel. Bethel. A choice between Stonykill, three miles, and Fair Prospect, four, they chose Fair Prospect, good. I wish I were here right now, in Fair Prospect in the Faraway Hills: and there, or nearly there, he was, only a quarter-century later.

  But something meanwhile seemed to have gone badly wrong with the bus he rode. It was laboring to complete a long curving climb less steep than many it had already swept over; somewhere deep within it there was a hard basso rhythm, as though its heart were pounding at its ribs. The noise subsided as the driver sought a gear it could be more comfortable in, then began again as the way steepened. They had slowed to a creep; it seemed evident they would not make the grade, but they did, just barely, the bus snorted and blew like a spent horse, and there was the fair prospect, framed by a dark side-wing of heavy-headed trees like a landscape by Claude: a sunlit foreground, a zigzag silver river greenly banked, a humid distance blending into pale sky and piled cloud. Leaf shadow swept over them, and a terrible jolting twang shook the bus—a torn ligament, a stroke, they had not made it after all. The bus shuddered all along its length, and the engine ceased. In silence—Pierce could hear the hiss of the tires on the road’s surface—it coasted down the far side of the hill and into the village at the bottom, some stone and frame houses, a brick church, a single-span bridge over the river; and there, before the interested gaze of a few folks gathered on the porch of the gas station-general store, it came to rest.

  Well, hell.

  The driver let himself out, leaving his passengers in their seats, all still facing front as though traveling, only not traveling. There were sounds without of the engine compartment being opened, looked at, tinkered with; then the driver ducked into the store, and was gone some time. When he returned, he slid again into his seat and picked up his mike—though if he had faced them the fifteen or so people on the bus could have heard him well enough, maybe he was embarrassed—and said metallically, “Well, folks, I’m afraid we won’t be going any further on this bus.” Groans, murmurs. “I’ve called down to Cascadia and they’ll be sending on another bus just as fast as they can. Be an hour or so. You’re free to make yourselves comfortable here on the bus, or get off, just as you like.”

  It had always astonished Pierce how, no matter what inconveniences they thrust on you, buses and their minions never let drop the pretense that they were offering you comfort, luxury, even delight. He thrust his book of Solitudes into the side pocket of his bag, shouldered the bag, and got off, following the driver, who intended it seemed to hide out in the store.

  “Excuse me!”

  What a day this was though, really, what a day! The real air filling his lungs as he drew breath to call again was odorous and sweet after the false air of the bus. “Excuse me!”

  The driver turned, raising his eyebrows, could he be of any service.

  “I have a ticket to Conurbana,” Pierce said. “I was supposed to catch a connecting bus at Cascadia. Will I miss it?”

  “What time?”

  “Two.”

  “Looks like it. Sorry to say.”

  “Well, would they hold it?”

  “Oh, I doubt that. Lots of folks on that Conurbana bus, you know. They got to make their connections too.” A small smile, facts of life. “There’s another though, I believe, from Cascadia, about six.”

  “Fine,” said Pierce, trying not to get testy, not this guy’s fault as far as he knew; “I have an appointment there at four-thirty.”

  “Hoo,” said the driver. “Hoo boy.”

  He seemed genuinely grieved. Pierce shrugged, looked around himself. A breath of breeze lifted the layered foliage of the trees that overarched the village, passed, and restored the noontide stillness. Pierce thought wildly of hiring a taxi, no, there would be no taxi here, hitchhiking—he hadn’t hitchhiked since college. Reason returned. He walked toward the store, rooting in his pockets for a dime.

  Up until this summer, Pierce Moffett had taught history and literature at a small New York City college, one of the little institutions that following the upheavals of the sixties had come to cater chiefly to the searching young, the scholar-Gypsies who had seemed then to be forming into a colorful nomadic culture of their own, Bedouins camping within the bustle of the larger society, striking their tents and moving on when threatened with the encroachments of civilization, living hand-to-mouth on who knew what, drug sales and money from home. Barnabas College had come to be a caravanserai of theirs, and Pierce had for a time been a popular teacher there. His chief course, History 101—nicknamed Mystery 101 by his students—had been heavily subscribed at the beginnings of past semesters; he had the knack of seeming to have a great, a terrific secret to impart to them on his subject, a story to tell that had cost Pierce himself not a little in the learning, if they would only sit still to hear it. Lately, it was true, fewer and fewer had been sticking to the end; but that was not, or not chiefly, the reason Pierce would not be returning to Barnabas College in the fall.

  Peter Ramus College, where he had been headed, was a rather different affair, as far as he could judge; an aged Huguenot foundation that still enforced a dress code (so he had been told, it couldn’t be so), inhabiting smoked stone buildings in the suburbs of a declining city. Its picture was on the dean’s letter, which Pierce pulled, somewhat crumpled and sweat-stained, from his pocket, the letter inviting him for an interview there: a little steel engraving of a domed building like a courthouse or a Christian Science church. Pierce could imagine the new poured-concrete dorms and labs it was now immured in. Below the picture was the college’s phone number.

  A tin sign advertising bread, the blond girl and her buttered slice much faded, was attached to the screen door of the little store; Pierce hadn’t gone through such a door with such a sign on it in years. And inside the store was that cool and nameless odor, something like naphtha and raisins and cookie crumbs, which is the eternal smell of stores like this one; stores in the city that sold much the same goods never seemed to have it. Pierce felt swept into the past as he dialed the number.

  There was no one alive at Peter Ramus at this August noon hour except other people’s assistants; no one would reschedule his appointment, but he didn’t dare cancel it outright; he left a number of vague messages that were only half-heartedly accepted, said he would call again from Cascadia, and hung up, in limbo.

  By the front counter of the store he found a soda cooler, one of the sarcophagus kind that had used to stand in Delmont’s store in his old hometown: the same dark red, with a heavy lid lined with zinc, and inside a dark pool of ice and water and cold bottles that clanked cavernously together when he chose one. He took a pair of dark glasses from a card of them by the roundel that held postcards; he considered buying a copy of the local paper, also piled there, but did not. It was called the Faraway Crier. He paid for the Coke and the glasses, smiling at the placid child who took his money as she smiled for him, and went back into the day, feeling weirdly at liberty, as though he had been set ashore, or had struggled ashore. He donned his new dark glasses, which turned the day even more into a landscape by Claude, amber-toned and richly dark: serene.

  He had broken his journey, and with a lot maybe at stake, and a lot no doubt to pay for it in tedium or worse; it didn’t matter, he couldn’t for the moment care, since he neither much desired to go where he had been headed, nor much desired to return where he had started out from. If he wanted anything, it was simply to sit here at this wooden picnic table in the shade, to be not in motion, to sip this Coke and the deep peace of what seemed a still and universal holiday.

  Serenity. Now you could wish for that, naming no conditions: a permanent inner vacation, escape made good. To somehow have this motionlessness that he drew in with the sweet air he inhaled for his inward weather always.

  But there were problems too with wishing for moral qualities, serenity, large-mindedness. The interdiction (which Pierce thought obvious) against wishing for such things as artistic abilities—s
it down at the piano, the Appassionata flows suddenly from your fingertips—applied in a way to wisdom too, to enlightenment, to heart-knowledge, useless unless earned, the earning of it being no doubt all that it consisted of.

  The best thing. Pierce breathed deeply, he had come to these conclusions before. The best thing would simply be to refuse the offer altogether. Thanks but no thanks. Surely he was already wise enough—or at least well-read enough—to know that there was very likely something corrosive to common happiness in the very nature of granted wishes. He did know it. And yet. He could only hope that when the wishes came he would be wise, and not yearning; in good case; not transfixed by some object of desire; not in some dreadful circumstance from which he desperately needed relief: not, in other words, just now. Then, even if he could not refuse altogether, he might at least be able to take the next-wisest course, an option he had long since worked out that was sensible, usually all too sensible for him: and that was, his first two practical wishes for health and wealth having been asked and granted, to use his third wish simply to wish that he might forget the whole thing had ever happened; his safety and ease magically assured, to forget he had ever known wishes could be granted, to be returned to his (present) state of ignorance that such irruptions of power into the world, power placed at his unwise disposal, were really truly possible at all.

  Really truly actually possible at all. Pierce drank Coke. From a side road beyond the church, a sheep wandered out onto the highway.

  And of course it could be that just such a thing had already happened. That wisest set of wishes might right now be in the works, already granted, the genie having retreated into his lamp and the lamp into the past and the whole process into oblivion, Pierce ignorant now of his great good fortune and still toying with possibilities. On the face of it it seemed unlikely, considering his joblessness, and his mental health, which did not seem to him ruddy—but there would be no way to tell. He could have been visited this very morning. This day, this blue day, might be the first day of his fortune, this moment might be the first moment.

  Several more sheep had come out from the side road and were wandering along the highway, huddling and bleating. One of the locals from the porch, who had seemed immovable, got up, hitched his pants, and walked out onto the highway to stop traffic, waving a warning hand at a pickup truck that was just then approaching, stay there, be patient. A dog circled the flock, barking now and then in a peremptory way, guiding the sheep (there were dozens now, more and more coming out from the side road as though conjured) toward the bridge over the river, which they seemed reluctant to enter upon. Then there strode out, amid the rear guard of the flock, a tall shepherd, crook in his hand, broad broken straw hat on his head. He looked toward the impatient pickup, grinning, as though not displeased to have caused this fuss; he crooked back into his fold a lamb that had thought to flee, and marshaled his charges with a call, bustling them over the bridge.

  Pierce watched, aware of a chain of associations taking place within him without his choosing, inner files being gone through to a purpose he didn’t know. Then the conclusion was abruptly handed to him. He rose slowly, not sure whether to believe himself. Then:

  “Spofford,” he said, and called: “Spofford!”

  The shepherd turned, tilting his hat up to see Pierce hurrying after him, and one black-faced sheep turned too to look. The driver of the bus, coming out of the little store to gather and count his belated flock, saw one of his passengers wander off, meet the shepherd in the middle of the bridge, and fall suddenly into his arms.

  “Pierce Moffett,” the shepherd said, holding him at arm’s length and grinning at him. “I’ll be damned.”

  “It is you,” Pierce said. “I thought it was.”

  “You come to visit? Hard to believe.”

  “Not exactly,” Pierce said. “I didn’t even plan to stop.” He explained his predicament, Conurbana, thrown rod, canceled appointment.

  “How do you like that,” Spofford said. “Buswrecked.”

  “I seem to have blown it,” Pierce said cheerfully. They both looked toward the beached bus, whose other passengers milled aimlessly around it.

  “Hell with it,” Spofford said suddenly. “Leave it. Come visit. I’m not far. Stay awhile. There’s room. Stay as long as you like.”

  Pierce looked from the bus to the meadow across the river, where now the sheep were spreading out, chewing contentedly. “Stay?” he said.

  “We’ve got to catch up,” said the shepherd. “The old alma mater. The old neighborhood.”

  “I’ve left them both.”

  “No shit.” He gestured with his crook toward the lands beyond the rise of the meadow. “My place is up,” he said. “Around the mountain.”

  What the hell anyway, Pierce thought. A runaway mood had been in him all day, all week; all summer for that matter. He had got this far toward Duty and the Future and been thrown off course, no fault of his own. Okay. So be it. “What the hell,” he said, a strange and sudden exhilaration rising from his breast to his throat. “What the hell, why not.”

  “Sure,” Spofford said. He whistled a note that set the sheep in motion and took Pierce’s arm; Pierce laughed, the dog barked, the whole straggling line of them left town.

  This Spofford had once, some years before, been Pierce’s student; he had been, in fact, among Pierce’s first students at Barnabas College, trying out education on the GI Bill or its Vietnam equivalent. Pierce remembered him sitting in History One earnest and attentive in his fatigue jacket (SPOFFORD on the white tape over his breast pocket), seeming displaced and unlikely there. He was only three or four years younger than Pierce, whose first real gig that was (“gig” they called it in those days; Pierce had been doing a long gig in graduate school while Spofford did his gig in Vietnam). With the same GI money, Spofford had opened a small joinery shop in Pierce’s low-rent neighborhood, doing fine spare pieces with a skill that Pierce envied and enjoyed watching. They’d become friends, had even briefly shared a girlfriend—quite literally one night, a night to remember—and though radically different in many ways, had, while drifting away from each other, never quite drifted apart. Spofford soon quit school, and then the city, taking his skills back to his native country, and Pierce would now and then get a letter in Spofford’s miniscule and perfectly legible hand, noting his progress and inviting Pierce to visit.

  And here at last he was. Spofford, nut-brown and hale, ragged straw hat and crook, looked well, suited; Pierce felt a surge of something like gratitude. The streets of the city were littered with Spoffords who had not escaped. When he grinned sidelong at Pierce—no doubt assessing Pierce in return—his teeth shone white in his big face, save for one central upper, dead and gray. “So here you are,” he said, offering his world with a sweep of his arm.

  Pierce looked over where he was. They had ascended the meadows of a tall hill’s folded basis; its wooded heights rose beside them. The valley and its twinkling river lay below. There is almost a music in such summer views, an airy exhalation of soprano voices; Pierce didn’t know whether the music that always used to accompany the opening scenes of pastoral cartoons, Disney’s especially (music that the animated hills and trees sang, dancing slightly), was a transcription of this music he seemed now to hear, or whether this music was only his own memory of that. He laughed to hear it. “Nice,” he said. “What river is that?”

  “The Blackberry,” Spofford said.

  “Nice,” said Pierce. “The Blackberry.”

  “The mountain is Mount Randa,” Spofford said. “From the top you can see over into three different states, up into New York, down into Pennsylvania, over into New Jersey. A long view. There’s a monument up there, where a guy had a vision.”

  “Of three states?”

  “I dunno. Something religious.”

  “Hm.” Pierce could see no monument.

  “We could climb it. There’s a path.”

  “Hey, may be,” said Pierce, his breath already short
from this gentle incline. The dog, Rover the drover, barked impatiently from on ahead: his four-legged charges were getting on all right, his tall ones were malingering.

  “Are these guys yours, by the way?” Pierce asked, amid the sheep, looking down into their silly upturned faces.

  “Mine,” said Spofford. “As of today.” He tapped the hind legs of a laggard with a practiced motion of his crook’s end, it bleated and hurried on. “Did some work for a guy this summer. Raising a barn, carpentry. We made a trade.”

  “You needed sheep?”

  “I like sheep,” Spofford said mildly, surveying his own.

  “Well, who doesn’t,” Pierce said laughing. “All we like sheep.” He sang it out, from Handel’s Messiah: “All we like sheep. All we—like—sheep. …”

  Spofford took up the tune (he and Pierce had sung it together in a come-all-ye version one winter in the Village) and so they went singing up the meadow:

  All we like sheep

  All we like sheep

  Have gone astray; have gone astray

  Every one to his own way.

  TWO

  The Blackbury River (not Blackberry, as Pierce heard it) arises as an unpromising stream in the Catskills in New York; fed by kills and brooks, it surpasses or incorporates its fellows and becomes a river as it nears the border, where it debouches into a mountain reservoir round and silver as a nickel, and called Nickel Lake for that reason or a different one. In Nickel Lake it cleanses itself of the silt gathered on its New York journey, and when it exits from the lake refreshed, it falls broadly over a series of stony rapids and low waterfalls amid the aspen woods that foot the northern Faraway Hills. In the long central valley of the Faraways it finds itself; when people speak of the Blackbury, they mean this river, widening and stretching and slowing to a stroll as it meanders across its pleasant floodplain. It has made a few shortcuts through this valley floor over the centuries as it matured; in 1857 folks found, after a week of violent spring rains, that it had broken right across one great curve of itself, leaving an oxbow lake behind and cutting two miles off the boating trip from Ashford Haven to Fair Prospect.