by John Yount
He went up the river again to find his shoes and shirt. The blanket was wool, and even though it was a little wet here and there, it was warm, so he took it off only long enough to fold it once, slice its center with his pocketknife just enough to get his head through, and put it back on like a poncho. He wrung out the shirt and undershirt, wrapped them around the wet shoe, and cinched them and the blanket around his middle with his father’s belt. His left shoe was dry, so he put it on. He put the dry sock on his right foot. And he felt almost okay, even a little plucky.
Lester didn’t swim and wouldn’t have wanted to wade such a river. He would have been impressed. And he wondered if whatever he had come here to appease, that imponderable, absolutely just spirit that constantly judged and brooded over him, wouldn’t be a little impressed too. It was a notion that sneaked into his mind sideways, but he knew how inappropriate it was, and he shut it out at once.
He began to climb, feeling all right for a while; and pretty soon the hardwoods, plentiful around the river, began to give way, once again, to pine and balsam, laurel and rhododendron. At first he was warm enough just by being no longer in the river or wet, as though that had stoked the fire in him so high, mere cold air no longer had the power to chill him. But then, because he was wearing the heavy blanket and climbing steadily, he got too warm. He slowed his pace, stopped often to rest, and soon he was cold again, perhaps because he’d broken a sweat and perhaps because he’d gotten higher. When his teeth began to rattle, he stopped altogether and worked at the way the blanket was gathered at his waist, overlapping its edges as much as possible until he got the open spaces under his arms and along his ribs much smaller. He rubbed his hands together to warm them and took off his left shoe to rub his foot, which was much colder than the one with the sock.
Still he felt all right until he realized he couldn’t hear the river anymore. The sound of it had followed him a long way and given him comfort, and he held his breath and listened, thinking that somewhere among the underpinnings of all this silence, he’d be able to pick up at least a murmur of it far below, but he couldn’t, and it unsettled him. Oddly the river seemed a kind of milepost, the last link with anything he knew, as though without it he couldn’t possibly calculate how far he’d come and how far it was home. He listened as hard as he could, but he didn’t hear anything at all except the long sigh of vast and empty space.
He put his shoe back on and stood up, but his courage seemed to have slipped away. All this emptiness, these mountains and woods, did not care for him; he knew that with sudden and absolute clarity. The sun, not so far above the ridge he’d crossed earlier in the day, made him see that, even if he walked very fast, darkness would catch him long before he got home. All at once he felt very foolish, as if this ordeal—no matter how deeply he had felt about it—was to no purpose. A delusion of the silly child he was and always had been. Hadn’t he deceived himself many times that he could be strong and brave and therefore earn a better life for himself, or at least not betray those he cared for? But he’d never once come up to the mark. Not once.
Even the stern guiding spirit, who always haunted and judged him, seemed to grow thin, as though it too might only be imagined, invented, dreamed up. And if that were true, then he was absolutely alone in all this empty space, and there was no remedy for anything, not for his parents, or Lester, or himself. All at once he wanted to run and had to sit down and wrap his arms about his knees and rock himself. If he started to run, he wouldn’t be able to stop. He’d come too far, crossed a river, and come too far for running. But he wouldn’t be able to stop.
MADELINE:
She meant to be very polite when she released him of the bother of thinking about her further, but she was surprised that Leslie didn’t call to apologize and try to make up to her. She expected to be able to tell him that she understood the position he was in, which, she was sure, she absolutely did. Just as she was sure she understood, at last, the position that she herself was in. She simply hadn’t really seen Leslie; she had made him up. She had mistaken three-piece suits, a grand house, and an education for something more fundamental that those things couldn’t alter or even touch. Men were men after all. What was worse, she had used Leslie somehow in order to be able to deal with Edward, who had a prior and greater claim and had to be dealt with on his own. She wasn’t proud of having misunderstood Leslie, but having misunderstood herself shamed her most of all.
So, late in the afternoon when Dorothy signaled to her that she had a call, she had her speech all ready and was lucky she even bothered to say hello when she plucked the phone from her desk.
“James is not with you, I reckon,” her mother said matter-of-factly, as though she and her mother were standing face to face and there was absolutely no reason to identify herself.
“Of course not, Momma,” she said.
“Well I didn’t think so,” her mother said, “but I was just kindly worried.”
“Why?” Madeline said.
“Well he’s gone off somewhere, and his daddy’s been here three or four times today to take him over to see Lester. And … I don’t know … the chile left a little note and missed his dinner.”
“What did the note say, Momma?”
“According to Edward, it didn’t say hardly anything. I just got to studyin about it and thinking how hard all this might be on the boy, and him so quiet; but I imagine he’ll be here by suppertime. I just thought he might have caught a ride over to see you.”
“Now I’m worried,” Madeline said.
“Well it’s foolish,” her mother said. “I just got to studyin on it and got silly. He’s not likely to miss his supper.”
But after Madeline hung up, it nagged her for the rest of the afternoon, and finally she asked her boss for permission to leave half an hour early and drove straight home. Even so, it was fifteen minutes past five when she pulled into the driveway, and since her father, as far back as she could remember, wanted his supper at five, fear flamed up in her when she hurried through the kitchen door and saw that James wasn’t at the table with the rest of them.
“Now honey,” her mother said, “he’ll come draggin in before long, and when he does, I for one just might paddle him good.”
“Where’s the note?” Madeline said.
“Well it’s down to the trailer. Not a soul has touched it,” her mother said as though she’d been accused of something.
But when Madeline turned and went out the kitchen door again, Clara remarked with haughty certainty: “I think he’s run away.”
It wasn’t as if the thought hadn’t tested her once or twice that afternoon, but she hadn’t allowed such a farfetched worry to take root. Still, as she crossed the stile into the cow pasture, Clara’s little pronouncement and the judgment it contained stung her, as though James had good reason after all. And when she stepped into the chilled trailer and snapped on the light, the roses and Edward’s card and James’s clipped little note all seemed part of the same message, as though she couldn’t distinguish between them, as though together they represented some monolithic, utterly male, and finally incomprehensible obligation she could neither escape nor discharge. For a moment she couldn’t seem to move, but then some stubbornly practical part of her brain that was still operative allowed her to open James’s closet and discover that, yes, his clothes were still there. She pulled open his drawers and found his underwear, socks, and everything just as it should be. So. She turned the dial that set the furnace going and heard the small gas ring behind the tin louvers sputter to flame and the small electric fan begin to hum; but she attended to these matters in a daze.
I’m going off to be by myself for a while. How far, and where, was off? How long was a while supposed to be? It was the most inconsiderate message he could possibly have written, and her fear turned to anger before it cooled to fear again. Still, she didn’t think he’d actually run away.
And snuggled among the lovely roses like a thorn, Your Husband. In spite of everything, Your
Husband. And of course it was still true, no matter what she’d gone through, no matter how she had behaved or what her plans and desires were, no matter how deeply she had considered the matter or what she had discovered about herself. It was still legally and inescapably true, and he’d had the bad manners to remind her of it on a card snuggled among six lovely, long-stemmed roses. Oh but there was a god-awful irony in that so large she couldn’t begin to find its limits. Your Husband. Yes and the limits didn’t end with the merely legal either; it was a condition that surrounded her and encompassed her in ways not even a divorce could dissolve, and she supposed she’d known that all along too, although she’d tried her best not to know it. She’d made the mistake long ago when she’d been silly and stupid; how could it be so irredeemable?
Oh James, she thought, and all at once her life seemed so hopeless and unmanageable, she began to weep. What was wrong was so utterly incurable and she had struggled against it so hard, she cried from sheer exhaustion. What was worse, she hadn’t moved one inch from the dead center of her troubles; she’d only managed to pull other people into them with her, poor James, her parents, and even Leslie, who didn’t belong in her life at all.
Sunk into one end of the couch, she was crying without any end in sight when her mother knocked and, a few seconds later, let herself in.
“Did he come back?” Madeline asked.
“No, chile,” her mother said, “but he will,” and she sat down on the couch and took Madeline softly into her arms.
“Oh Momma,” Madeline said. “I’ve made such a horrible mess of everything, I wouldn’t blame him if he didn’t.”
Her mother began to rock her gently. “Shhhh, hush,” she said.
“God, I’ve just been so stupid,” Madeline said.
Her mother nodded against the top of her head. “I expect that’s true,” she said, “but you were as far back as I can remember, even when you were tiny.”
Madeline found herself crying again, but in a different way, as if it were comforting to have her mother hold her and remind her that she’d always been stupid. Somehow the ruin she had brought about seemed a little less profound and complete and a little more ordinary, continuous, and maybe even forgivably human, although it seemed to hurt almost as much.
For a long time her mother rocked her and didn’t say anything else, but at last she added: “To be fair, I always thought in some ways you were the brightest of my children too, but certainly the orneriest and hardest to please.”
Madeline stiffened, but her mother held her in her soft embrace and began to pat her. Finally she laid her cheek against the top of Madeline’s head. “I love you, chile,” she told her, “but Lily wants to come and be with you, and I’ve left all of my chores undone.” Her mother gave her one last squeeze and stood up. She appeared to have something else to say, but she and Madeline merely looked at each other, and whatever it was seemed to come to Madeline through her mother’s eyes, and it was full of comfort and understanding. “You need me, chile, you just holler,” her mother said.
When Lily came in, she said, “Why don’t I make us some coffee?” and without waiting for an answer, she set about opening and closing cabinet doors until she found what she needed. Neither of them said anything—Lily busying herself about the tiny kitchen and Madeline sitting as still as if she were carved of stone, staring at nothing through one of the trailer windows—until the coffee was done and Lily had poured herself and Madeline a cup. “You know, you may have to stand in line to spank that little stinker when he shows up,” Lily told her and set a cup of coffee in her hands.
Madeline looked at the cup as if she didn’t know what it was. “I just don’t know what to do,” she said. “I just don’t know what to do anymore.”
“I think you should call Edward up,” Lily told her. “It’s getting dark, and it’s cold, and there isn’t any reason why Edward shouldn’t be scratching around out there, trying to find where that child has gone off to sulk.”
“I can’t call him,” Madeline said. “He’s everything that’s wrong; he’s absolutely everything that’s wrong with my life.”
Lily’s eyes, magnified by her thick glasses but lovely still, hadn’t the least malice in them. She brushed the back of her fingers gently against Madeline’s cheek. “You know,” she said, “I never thought you understood men very well. I saw a long time ago that they were far from perfect, and just, well, decided to do without. But I like them, you know, for what they are. Anyway, it’s my opinion that Edward is worth two or three of Leslie Johnson.”
Suddenly offended as well as miserable, Madeline drew back from Lily’s caress. “How could you?” she said. “You haven’t a speck of experience with either one of them.”
“That’s true,” Lily said, “but that gives me a certain objectivity, don’t you think? … Oh lamb,” Lily said, “I came down here to give you a hug and see if I couldn’t make you feel better, but certainly not to speak my mind. I don’t suppose you’ll ever forgive me,” she said, “but please try.” Her eyes were large and blue green and guileless. “Whatever else you do, though, you ought to call Edward, don’t you think? James is his son, too.”
“Just go away,” Madeline said, but when Lily turned to go, Madeline said, “no, don’t, please. I’m sorry. I need you to stay with me. I just can’t call him yet. I will in a little while, but don’t go just now. I want you to stay.”
Lily looked at her for a long moment as though she were puzzled, but she didn’t leave. Instead she wordlessly opened her arms and took her sister in.
By dark he’d nearly completed a small lean-to. He’d built it close to the base of an ancient hemlock, and his pocketknife, none too sharp to begin with, was useless by the time he tried to cut some nearby spruce boughs to get him off the ground and make some sort of bedding. The two forked sticks, nearly as thick as his wrists, which stood at the front corners, and the heavy stick between them, which supported the slanting roof, had taken the edge of his knife all by themselves. The lighter, longer branches he’d slanted from the roof beam in front to the ground in back, he’d had to worry and haggle into. He’d meant to weave other, smaller branches from side to side among them to make a kind of latticework roof, but he could see that darkness was going to catch him, and he’d woven in only four of those. To cover the roof he’d used the flat, nearly fan-shaped branches of hemlock, which were slender as pencils where he cut them, but even by that time it was often easier to break them from the tree than to use his knife. By the time he was ready to gather bedding, he put the knife away altogether and broke the spruce boughs.
All his labors, from gathering the dead lower branches of nearby pine trees for firewood to building the lean-to, had been dogged and slow; and when he threw his last load of spruce boughs into his shelter, he slumped down upon them without enough spirit left to build a fire.
His hands were black and stiff with pitch. There were blisters along the thumb and forefinger of his right hand from trying to wring branches through with his dull knife. And he was all over as cold as dead flesh. But he didn’t quite know any of these things. When his panic subsided at last, it took all sorts of other things with it. He had very few thoughts after that, and those he had seemed far away, like the faint glimmer of heat lightning below a dark horizon. He knew he was alone and that whatever he had hoped to appease by coming here had gone away and wouldn’t return. Only if he gave up and went home would it show up to torment him—sure, and be as real as his failure. Maybe it had always been only a way to steer things that couldn’t be steered, a way to earn the respect of something that didn’t even exist to respect or disdain him. He thought none of these things into words, but in some remote and distracted fashion, he knew them. What he didn’t know was if he stayed on out of hopelessness or fear of hopelessness, which had only turned stubborn because there was nothing else to do; they were so nearly the same, he could make no distinction between them.
But after a while it did come to him that his feet were
aching with a cold so intense it reached into sinew and bone. He needed a fire, but when he started to get up he discovered that he was almost too numb and stiff with cold to move. His arms and legs didn’t work very well, and his fingers merely fumbled at gathering the small twigs he needed and fumbled at the matchbox and matches. Still, he was able to strike a flame and kindle a tiny fire, and finally, to nurse it into something worthwhile. Strangely, when he began to get a little warmer, he started to shiver.
He remembered his wet shoe, undershirt, and shirt, and he arranged them by the fire to dry. A little later he took off his poncho blanket and wrapped himself in it, feet and all. The slit he’d cut for his head became two slits when he opened the blanket up to wrap about himself, and they let cold in to steal away half the warmth he was able to shiver up.
EDWARD:
He had just decided to call the Marshalls to see if James had turned up, when Madeline called him. He didn’t know whether to be grateful to the boy or worried, but it didn’t take him nearly as long as it should have to drive down the mountain. He wondered what in hell that kid was up to anyway, but in the next moment he found himself just as interested in exactly how Madeline had sounded over the phone. At least she didn’t sound angry, but he certainly couldn’t call it friendly either, or even exactly distant—hazardous, he supposed, was the way she sounded. Perhaps she hadn’t even had a chance to find the roses or his card. “James hasn’t come back, and I think you should be here,” was almost all she’d said. He’d said, “I’m on my way,” and after a moment he could call neither long nor short, she’d said, “All right,” and then hung up.
