Leah, New Hampshire

by Thomas Williams

  His life and his despair were on another plane altogether, and she was just furniture. They never even slept together anymore, not for months.

  Today a young policeman she doesn’t know brought back his shotgun and put it, which was kind of him, in its rack. She didn’t want to touch it, although God knows it’s innocent enough, a machine that only does what it’s told.

  She’s looking through Ray’s old magazines. The oldest is an issue of Life from 1963—the year they were married. Maybe he thought that was the last year he was a great young writer, before he got married and settled down to mediocrity, his wife a millstone around his neck. There’s Natalie Wood, as a starlet; he used to say she looked like Natalie Wood. Natalie Wood is dead.

  On the other hand, she herself probably has another forty years of stumping and squatting through the world, doing little good, filling space with ugly flesh. The question is, why not get it over with? No, really, seriously. How about it? There are three boxes of twelve-gauge shells on the shelf below the gun rack, and she knows how to break the gun, insert a shell in either barrel, close it, and push off the safety. Then it’s ready to go. There were always guns around her family’s house. Would that be too violent? What’s violent when you’re dead?

  She actually takes two steps toward the gun, her hand actually held out to grasp it, and before she stops she has a feeling of marvelous and dirty freedom. Then she stops.

  Well, there’s Leonard, who is seriously depressed and needs help, for one thing. Of course, if you’re dead you don’t care. You don’t care if you ate a whole German chocolate Sara Lee layer cake, half thawed, as she did a little while ago, either. But there is Leonard, and they’ve looked at each other as if through a window intelligence opens only to its own, a small thing among the thoughtless cruelties of the universe.

  Certainties

  ONCE, WHILE hunting ruffed grouse on our mountain, I came gradually but certainly to the conclusion that I was not where I was. I’d crossed Carr Brook, in a steep little valley, and climbed up through great beech and yellow birch into land which was unfamiliar to me. I’d been through it years before, but each depression, or each large boulder, didn’t strike me with the kind of maplike solidity it would have on more familiar land. When I came back down to my brook again, it all seemed new and strange, and I had convinced myself that I was a ridge away, on another brook. I wasn’t more than a mile from the cabin, standing at a little pool I’d fished through not more than a couple of months before, and yet I was absolutely certain that I was, in fact, on Brock Brook, a half-mile away.

  It is the nature of this certainty that fascinates me. Something happens in the wilderness, where there are no straight lines, where the land is owned and stabilized and changed only by the weather and the trees, that is unsettling and at the same time intensely pleasurable. I remember portaging with my father in the Arrowhead Country of northern Minnesota, when I was nine or ten. I came to the edge of an uninhabited lake and saw a house—windows, roofline, and chimney—made in my selective consciousness out of the random crisscrosses of branches and the trunks of trees. The house was there and yet, as I approached, the branches sorted themselves into wilderness again, and the huge and comforting house vanished. Vanished like smoke, and nothing was left of it—not one sawn board, or shingle, or pane of glass. That hollow feeling, of aloneness, even of abandonment, was the nearest thing to nightmare I’d ever experienced while awake. And yet after that courted the experience, and looked for more of those houses among the trees, just to see them swirl off into emptiness again, and once again feel that deep pang of loneliness.

  My experience on the brook reminded me of this compulsive game I’d played as a child, because when I climbed up out of the brook’s gorge I came to a place on the Clark Trail I knew very well. An hour before I’d sat on that rock and smoked cigarette. There was the apple tree, bent and blasted, yet still alive somehow, hung with its own dead limbs. I’d eaten one of its wild apples, and left the core. There in the damp moss was the butt of the cigarette I (I?) had smoked. But I could believe none of this, because first the world had somehow to jar itself back into place, and my certain knowledge that I could not be there had to fade away into the fragments of hallucination really was. For a moment I was in a wholly imaginary country—truly lost, nowhere. It wasn’t until I had returned to the cabin (was it really there?), and traced my probable route on the geodetic map, that my certainty began to fade out like the memory of a dream. I had to go to the map—wanted to—in order reassure the civilized part of me that was truly offended by such disorientation. Yet the memory is deep and good.

  I think of those primitive maps made by explorers in galleons, who saw whole shores of terra incognita pass by their landward boards—maps strangely certain in their inaccuracies, in the hard, jagged corners of things. Why did the cartographer’s hand carve out that imaginary bay, on that imaginary ocean full of carplike fish bigger than ships? I have the feeling that it was more than inaccuracy, even more than fakery. That is the ocean of absolute certainty, and has nothing to do with astrolabes, sextants, or lead lines.

  A couple of years ago I had the opportunity to examine such a map, this time made in similar wonder and discovery, of our own mountain, and to test its accuracies against the geodetic map I go by. It was made by a nine-year-old boy, and of course to him—against his certainties—the geodetic map was interesting but confused.

  One August morning, around seven o’clock, someone began tapping rather diffidently on the back door of the cabin. The door is big and heavy, made out of two-inch hemlock planks, but my wife heard, and got up to answer. When she opened the door, there were two boys, aged nine and seven, who politely asked how to get to Leah. Now, by road, Leah is about twenty miles, and by the Clark Trail, which runs by our cabin, it’s about six miles, over the top of Cascom Mountain. My wife at first assumed that an adult was out on the trail, and the boys had been sent to the door to ask directions. But then she began to suspect that they were alone, and had them come inside. Well, yes, they were lost, they guessed. The older one, whose name was Mark, had that wide, dreamy face I always associate with Finns, or Lapps. They were both pale and blond. Mark introduced his brother, David, and my wife made them some breakfast, while our two children sat and stared quietly at these travelers.

  Neither was scratched, or particularly dirty, and yet they’d spent the night alone on the mountain. Their family had camped on the Leah side, near the summit (actually within the township of Northlee), and the boys had been given permission to climb to the fire lookout tower if they’d come right back, because supper would be ready soon. When they got to the summit, which is bald granite, the world, somehow when they weren’t looking, turned itself around 180 degrees, and they came down the east side instead of the west. We figured this out from what they told us between mouthfuls. David at one point endeared himself to my wife by changing the subject and saying our cabin was nice. I told Mark that I’d better take them down to the Appalachian Mountain Club lodge so we could telephone their parents.

  “Oh, they won’t be up this early,” he said. “They never get up before nine.”

  I wonder if I’m right in finding here the peculiar aura of hallucination caused by the wilderness. Mark, it turned out, was very observant. When he came by with his family a couple of weeks later they brought presents for our children that were right for their ages and sexes—although no words had passed between them while they ate their breakfasts. And his descriptions to his father of our cabin, and our car, were very accurate. He was a bright and very thoughtful boy. But they had been in the deep woods, not in civilization. I can’t imagine him saying such a thing if, for instance, they had stayed out all night in the city. This was different. His father, I found out later, lost fifteen pounds that night, and I suppose Mark later began to realize that this was possible.

  I asked him where they’d slept, and Mark said matterof-factly that when it grew dark and they couldn’t see, they simply lay down
and went to sleep. David said, “I slept on my brother’s back “—a casual bit of information that still causes emotion in me.

  The mountain on this side could be extremely dangerous; there are sheer cliffs, clefts in the granite a boy could slide into and never be found, literally impenetrable islands of dwarf spruce, whose dark passages are deceptively welcoming at first, then turn into interlocking and diminishing traps. All around a small forest called Cathedral Spruce, tall trees have blown down crisscrossed, eight or ten feet deep; they came through that maze, too, by the narrow cut trail which weaves and winds between the piles of trees. But they lay down and went to sleep.

  When I got down to the Appalachian Mountain Club, among the excitements of organized search and rescue—wardens, state police, two-way radios, weary hikers who had been searching all night, even a helicopter fluffing its way across the peak of Firescrew—Mark began to realize that something rather enormous had occurred, and he turned quite thoughtful. When I left the boys with the very weary Art Costin, then the manager of the lodge, and the forest warden who would drive them the twenty miles to Leah, Mark sat picking at his second breakfast and staring out the window toward a face of Cascom Mountain that was now steep and bright in the morning sunlight.

  It was a couple of weeks later, when the boys came back with their parents, that Mark showed me the elaborate map he had made, which traced in loving detail the landmarks and contours of the strange country that they had traveled through.

  “There’s where we crossed the second brook,” he said, pointing to this document. “And we slept below this cliff, where we heard the bear.” There was the bear, its fangs and claws.

  “I think that you probably crossed Carr Brook twice,” I told him. “Let me show you on the geodetic map.”

  He looked at it with polite interest for a moment, then turned back to stare dreamily into his own map, at that country of experience whose certainties were deeper than any map of mine.

  “I love the woods,” he said. “I love to go out in the woods.”

  To be lost? I wondered. “Weren’t you scared up there when it got dark?” I asked him.

  “I was scared, all right,” Mark said. “Everything was black.”

  “You did the right thing to lie down and try to sleep.”

  “It was David made me do that,” he said. “He just wouldn’t move in the dark. He said he wouldn’t take one more step.”

  David was running around, playing with our children, who were, as usual, screaming and yelling with every breath. Mark didn’t seem to notice all that racket. He sat at the plank table, quiet, thoughtful, enjoying his fearful memories.

  There are few dark places left on our maps, and we need that dark, if only to leave behind us all our rigid, belittling geometries, signs, and boundaries—certainties that diminish us, that tell us by the numbers exactly where we are, and that things are merely what they are, not what they can seem.

  The Dzanc Books eBook Club

  Join the Dzanc Books eBook Club today to receive a new, DRM-free eBook on the 1st of every month, with selections being made from Dzanc Books and its imprints, Other Voices Books, Black Lawrence Press, Keyhole, Disquiet, and Starcherone. For more information, including how to join today, please visit http://www.dzancbooks.org/ebook-club/.

  All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  “The Fisherman Who Got Away” was first published in Seasons of the Angler in 1988 by Weidenfeld & Nicholson, edited by David Seybold.

  “The Orphan’s Wife” was originally published in somewhat different form under the title “Another Country, Another Time,” Saturday Evening Post, May 25, 1963. The lines quoted in “The Orphan’s Wife” from “The Hollow Men” by T. S. Eliot are reprinted from Collected Poems of T. S. Eliot by permission of the publisher, Harcourt, Brace & World, Inc.

  These stories originally appeared in the following publications: “The Snows of Minnesota,” The New Yorker, February 12, 1966; “Paranoia,” Esquire, November 1970; “Goose Pond,” Esquire, November 1957; “Certainties,” Esquire, December 1965 ; “The Survivors,” The New Yorker, August 21, 1965; “The Skier’s Progress,” The New Yorker, February 2, 1963; “Horned Pout Are Evil,” Esquire, December 1966; “The Old Dancers,” Saturday Evening Post, November 14, 1964; “All Trades, Their Tackle and Trim,” Esquire, November 1965; “The Buck in Trotevale’s,” Esquire, August 1958. Copyright © 1957, 1958, 1963, 1964, 1965, 1966, 1970, 1989 by Thomas Williams.

  Copyright © 1992 by Elizabeth Williams, Executrix of the Estate of Thomas Williams

  Cover by Awarding Book Covers

  978-1-4804-7799-5

  A Dzanc Books rEprint Series Selection

  Dzanc Books

  1334 Woodbourne Street

  Westland, MI 48186

  www.dzancbooks.org

  Distributed by Open Road Distribution

  345 Hudson Street

  New York, NY 10014

  www.openroadmedia.com