John Lee Babcock, November 12, 1948. Phooey!
Good for you, John Lee Babcock. “Phooey” is right. Phooey on the whole thing. Phooey, too, on the twenty-five years between you and Seth Hamble. But—how could the house have stood unattended for that long? How could any house have thumbed its nose at erosion and storm and snow—and animals and vandals—and not have a beam fall, or a floorboard crack, or the roof leak, or the whole thing burn down?
The question answered itself right off. It could. This house could. This house could stand a thousand years unattended because, for some unworldly reason, not only could it do without humans—it thrived without humans.
And it hit him. Christ! And he slapped his forehead as the realization took sudden hold. It was all a joke. A beautiful, elaborate, well-conceived practical joke. Some weisenheimer, alone and in the area, fresh from tromping ye olde Appalachian Trail, had crafted the whole thing in just one night before the fire, a can of beer in one hand, a penknife in the other. “April Fool, traveler—joke’s on you. Try some real American Graffiti.”
A better variation on the practical-joke theme was that there were more than just one person involved—there were many, as many as those names appeared on the plank, each one adding his own little fillip to the continuing leg-pulling. That would certainly explain why the carved words varied in character and depth from person to person. It was a collective practical joke, like a chain letter. And those people did not even have to know one another to pull it off. Nor were they required to use their real names. They made up names. All the names and events alluded to on the old plank were fictitious. Ha-ha. How dopey of Austin to not have seen through it right off. Ho-ho.
He read on, smiling, for he had cracked the code, figured out the caper. These Maine cats, as symbolized by Jack Meeker—they all sure did have a finely honed sense of humor, a-yuh and yessirree-bob.
All smug self-satisfaction with his newfound intelligence exploded and dispersed when he came upon the next and final set of words.
Maynard Whittier took occupancy of this house on October 7, 1968. He left to serve with the U.S. Army, January 14, 1971…
Scratch one happy rationalization. And fasten the seatbelts of your mind, because here comes bad news. Maynard was no practical joke and no practical joker. Maynard was real—had been real. Austin was struggling to string it together into some kind of sensible image when his eye went to the last line that Maynard had carved into the wood with such precision and finality.
I fear that I may not return.
A spasm took hold in Austin’s stomach as big and as grabby as an undulating catcher’s mitt. He tried to intellectualize Maynard’s clairvoyance. After all, any man leaving for war might well experience such a foreboding. It had occurred to Austin himself that he might not come back. Statistically, one in twenty men was either killed or wounded in combat. Was it not perfectly reasonable, then, that the same thought might also have occurred to Maynard? Especially after having lived in that house, looking at that pine board every day, influenced by the desolate mood of it, picking up the dark vibrations of it—it was natural, almost proper, that Maynard set down so dire a closing statement.
Beneath that last inscribed thought was the usual horizontal cut. And beneath that—nothing. No room for any further carved words. No room for Austin to add his thoughts if and when, like all those before him, he might choose to carve them onto the plank. And it rankled him that he was being excluded. And he wondered if that exclusion was by happenstance or design.
He straightened up, stepped back from the board and tried to rethink the whole thing. A conclusion was floating around somewhere, an explanation. He would find it—and yet, it seemed to be defying him.
He sat on the rocker. People on rockers always thought more clearly. He sat on the rocker and thought. Since its construction, God knows how many years ago, the house had been empty more years than it had been lived in, its occupants frightened off with an almost predictable regularity. Added to that was something Jack Meeker had said—about the foundation being older than the house itself, perhaps by two hundred years. Also: “Used to be, they’d burn down a witch’s house all the way—to purify the area…If the house didn’t burn completely, it was allowed as to how the witch might still have possession—from the othah side.”
Swell house, Austin thought. Nice place. Cozy. Charming. And now it was his. Austin Fletcher’s. And who the hell was Austin Fletcher? How many people were there who could attest to whether or not he was real or imagined—fact or fiction? Who could tell, in this house, which end was up, or what witch was which? Or which witch was who? And—the one overriding question of them all, the question that could never be answered by anyone in this world—what happened in this house three hundred years ago?
Again Austin felt the cold sweat, clammy, crawling. He reached for his parka and slipped into it, all the while aware that, though it still carried on in the stove, the fire was no longer warming him. He tossed in more logs, leaving the stove door ajar so that he could hold his hands closer to the warm flames.
He was tired. Easy enough to understand when considering that he really hadn’t slept since leaving Vietnam, not deeply, not without interruption. Yet sleep and he had parted company long before that, patrols and skirmishes preventing the pair of them from hooking up for longer than three or four hours at a time. So lack of sleep was not the cause of his fatigue.
Nor could he readily attribute his weariness to the house and its misshapen history, for he had never been one to place much store in haunted houses and the like—not yet, at any rate. So the house wasn’t it, either.
Nor was he willing to concede that Maynard had been so dominant a force in their brief relationship that just being in what had once been Maynard’s house could assert that dominance anew. Actually, if the truth were known, Maynard had been a nondominating companion, Sphinxlike and cryptic, seeming to know a great deal about much, yet actually displaying precious little knowledge about anything—beyond his house and the general area in which it stood.
His mind was convoluting, searching for a bit of applicable wisdom through which he might be able to explain away the nagging uneasiness. But none was forthcoming. Worse, his fingers felt suddenly on fire, and he recoiled from the stove, angrily kicking the stove door closed, causing the ashes inside to shift grumpily, like a big animal that had been dislodged and that you would hear from shortly. So he latched the stove door. Anything inside would thus stay inside.
The room was once again warm. The threat, if that was the word, had passed. The house was just another compilation of timber standing mindlessly in the middle of just another Maine winter. And the once-ominous pine board was but a chunk of smooth wood, carved with the overdramatic ramblings of people either frightened or playful and now dead.
But the beans—ah, the beans. And the pickles—oh, the pickles. And the grapefruit juice, and the coffee, and the Dr. Jekyllish formulation of all that Austin had so cavalierly tossed into his maw left no doubt in his head that nature was not only calling—she was screaming bloody murder.
He made for the door and, opening it, squinted out toward the backhouse. It was still there, a silent sentinel to man’s desire to cloak his natural acts with secrecy. And it wasn’t all that far—though it might just as well have been a mile, for there was no path to it. Only untouched snow. Drifts of it. Three to five feet high in places. It was a job for snowshoes.
He ran to the wall where Maynard’s snowshoes hung. He grabbed them, hurried back to the door, slipped into them, and took off, waist-high across the snow. Next trip to the backhouse he’d have to remember to not cut it so close. Certain things, like good wine, should not be hurried. Good wine and dashes to the backhouse…
He used his entrenching tool laconically, picking at the earth and shoveling it aside almost sleepily, because he was in no great need to utilize the latrine ditch immediately upon completing it. Alongside him, Maynard was in a similar non-hurry, though other men had a
lready assumed the position—looking more like khaki hens over nests than heroes over trenches.
“Well, I tell ya, Austin, in the summah it’s no particular problem. But in the wintah? In Maine? There’s a bowel-movement equation, goes somethin’ like this: the depth of the snow multiplied by the distance to the backhouse divided by the urgency to go equals the allotted time to get there.”
“I understand.”
“And that is divided by two if ya run into a bear.”
He thrashed on to the backhouse, feeling as though he were flying across the snow at a pace that would have matched that of Little Eva skipping over the ice floes, whereas, in actuality, thoroughly impeded by the huge snowdrifts he had to flail through, he was covering the distance about as quickly as a tortoise on flypaper.
By and by reaching the backhouse, he grew understandably ill at the tableau before him. Snow, a six-foot-high pile of it, was leaning against the old door like a drunken polar bear. It would be a battle against the clock. The door or his bowels—something had to give.
No Alpine rescue team ever worked with greater fervor. Throwing, kicking, shoveling with his hands for minutes that played as hours, he eventually cleared the door, only to see leaning innocently against it, standing there like the Planters Peanut Man as if to say, “Hi, what kept you?”—a shovel.
There was no time to reflect on how much easier it all might have been had the shovel taken the trouble to reveal itself sooner. And there was no energy available for cursing or crying or sweating and saying “Whew.” The door stood before him and the door had to be opened. It was as simple as that.
He found the rusted handle and pulled on it, but, as seemed to be the case with all the doors in Maine, it resisted, not caring to discuss the matter any further. He picked up the shovel and slammed it smack against the unyielding door—but it stood its ground like Leonidas at the Pass.
He stepped back to reassess the task, time running out in his innards. Then, stepping back some five feet farther so as to afford himself the required distance, he launched himself into a running block that would have delighted Vince Lombardi. Head down, torso extended horizontal with the snow, his shoulder slammed against the door with a dashing determination, ripping that weatherbeaten old thing from its hinges, causing it to fly apart into the three single boards it had once been. The castle thus breached, Austin tumbled inside.
But the battle was not yet over, for everything beyond where the backhouse door once stood was overlaid with a vinelike vegetation as impenetrable as a steel jungle. And somewhere buried within all the tangle was the object of Austin’s charge—a one-holer, loyal to civilization, and waiting to be freed.
He fought the cabled Medusa, again with his bare hands, his stomach trumpeting the attack, and he prevailed. For it soon revealed itself, with a bucket of ashes and a scoop at its side—a grateful one-holer, looking up at him like a black moon. No Holy Grail was ever more adored or more quickly utilized.
The seat was cold. But temperature and wind velocity and cloud formations and bird calls were not the issue. The issue was time, and Austin had come in under the wire. That knowledge warmed the seat, and he sat there where very probably Jason Booth Adamson himself once sat, and he felt at one with nature.
A thick Sears, Roebuck catalogue dangled beside his head like a hung man, making half-turns right and then left at the will of the wind.
Closer examination of the catalogue revealed it to be the 1970 edition, fairly recent, current and provocative reading—though, for Austin, it began on page 353, the preceding 352 pages having evidently been pressed into service for the good of mankind at an earlier time and, presumably, not all at once.
The doorless backhouse commanded a fine panoramic view of his land, evening beginning to glint on a hilltop, conferring a dab of mauve to the canvas, a touch of gloam to the frame. And in that gradual waning, trees were browner and grayer, bushes and pines greener, irrepressible winter blooms pinker—the entire day, so harsh white and ice blue theretofore, was suddenly sprung with color.
The two front windows of his house caught the low sun and played it back at him as twin crimson carpets that unfurled to a stop only inches short of his boot tips. And a gentle splash of white-speckled beige was moving about near his porch, on his porch, and then off, like a big caramel sundae sprinkled with mini-marshmallows. A deer.
Curious perhaps at the smoke coming from the chimney—and hungry, judging from the way its ribs protruded from its thin flanks—the deer was considering the door to the house, which Austin, in understandable haste, had left open.
It sniffed at the snow on the porch, burying its muzzle in it. It placed a foreleg again on the porch—only to withdraw it. It was painfully tentative, instinctively afraid to go farther. But it was also close to starvation, and, drawn on by the lingering fragrances of Austin’s adventurous dinner, it was prepared to take the risk.
“Hello, Bambi,” Austin called out from where he sat—softly, for he didn’t wish to alarm the pretty thing. The deer stiffened at Austin’s voice and froze, as in a calendar picture. But it did not bound off as it always does in woodland tales, for it was too exhausted to run, too hungry to take cover. Instead, it turned its head and looked back at Austin, its ears bristling, its nostrils flaring in hopes of picking up and identifying Austin’s scent.
“Nobody’s home, Bambi.”
Confused, probably closer to death than Austin had at first realized, the deer moved inexplicably toward him on wobbly legs, and Austin was glad it was a deer and not a lion. A lion and he’d have stood up, pulled up his trousers and jumped for cover—into the only place in the backhouse that afforded cover. So he was certainly glad it was a deer.
All the same, it was moving toward him and looming larger—and no longer did it look so delightfully Walt Disneyish. Austin tried to wave it off. “Hey! That’s close enough, will ya! Beat it!”
But the deer kept coming, its nose vacuuming the snow, its spindly legs quavering. Austin reached for the door, to pull it closed. But the door wasn’t there anymore and he began to feel rather ridiculous, sitting there as he was, half expecting a crowd of people he knew to appear and fall over hysterical at his situation. Aunts, uncles, coaches, ministers, girl friends, all splitting their collective guts at his humiliation. He windmilled his arms. “Shoo! Beat it! Fuck off!”
But the deer continued to advance, never pausing, never quickening or slackening its pace. And Austin became fascinated, wondering just how close the animal would come before thinking better of it and bouncing off in terror.
The answer was—all the way. And soon the deer’s sweet face was protruding into the backhouse where Austin sat like Lincoln on on his monument. Its nostrils were semaphoring, its huge sable eyes filling with awe at seeing, up close, the King of the Woods, Austin Fletcher—also known as the Dean of the Latrine.
Austin’s mind slot-machined frantically, spinning wildly in hopes of coming up with something winningly amusing, some point of view that might make his situation either humorous or acceptable. He wasn’t frightened, but neither did he have a plan of action. And he certainly did not feel compelled to reach out and offer an upturned palm of peace to the hungry animal. So he tried to strike a bargain. “Listen, the house is open. Go on in and help yourself. Tell ’em Austin sent you.”
The deer deliberated, hardly moving and barely breathing. The voice of man seemed to hold no fear for it, and so it sashayed right up to where Austin sat, until the pair of them were literally nose to nose, Austin able to feel the animal’s hot breath and wet fur on his bare knees. Man and beast, partners in No Man’s Land, they continued to eye each other, the deer looking even less delicate than ever. And less cute. And less loving. It looked pretty damned large and menacing, and its nose hairs, so gossamer in children’s books, looked more like steel brushes. It began to probe its rough nozzle into Austin’s crotch, furrowing for a meal, any kind of meal—even that odd carrot.
Austin slammed his legs together, smash
ing his knees rather painfully while still trying to speak to the deer as he thought Albert Schweitzer might have. “That’ll be enough of that, sir.”
The deer kept probing and Austin grew more concerned. He had no weapon other than the scoop in the bucket of ashes. Yet how many times in how many movies had he seen a man armed with far less turn defeat into stunning victory? But in a backhouse? On a crapper? Not once. Not Cagney or Bogart, and certainly not George Brent, had ever come up against so challenging a situation. There was no precedent for Austin’s doing anything beyond saying, “Don’t do that. That’s not nice. Shame on you. Tsk-tsk.”
The deer looked up at Austin and then backed off slightly, its rump very much outside the backhouse, its unblinking eyes fixing on Austin’s as it wondered just what lunatic ravings the creature had lapsed into.
Seeing the effect that mellifluous human speech was beginning to have on the animal, Austin continued to talk, for he certainly did not want to risk panicking the deer by making any move that it might interpret as a provocative act. And he certainly did not have the heart to either toss ashes at the starving creature or bonk it on the snout with the scoop. “That’s a good fella. That’s a nice Bambi. Just you keep on backing out—nice and easy. Now, as I told you, I’m a little busy at the moment, but the house is open and…”
Obediently, the deer backed off farther and, turning, made straightaway for the house, bounding up and onto the porch, and from there going right in.
My God! thought Austin. I can talk to the animals! I’m—Dr. Doolittle!
From within the house there shortly came a collection of noises that fell hard on Austin’s ear. The deer was knocking things about, helpless things like cans and jars and dishes.
Maynard’s House Page 8
