Maynard Whittier took occupancy of this house on October 7, 1968. He left to serve with the U.S. Army on January 14th, 1971. I fear that I may not return.
“Left a little mess there, Maynard.” Jack was leaning over him, and then, kneeling alongside him, he picked up the small knife and simply blew away the residue of shavings. “Just about run out of room on that wood, ain’t ya?”
He walked as far away from the plank as he could, his ankle hurting just enough to keep him aware of it. Then, leaning against a wall at the other side of the room, he asked Jack, “What day is it?”
“Day? Thursday.”
“No. I mean the year.”
Jack looked at him curiously. “Nineteen seventy-one.”
“And the date?”
“January fourteenth.”
“Which is why I wasn’t allowed to leave five days ago, when I wanted to.”
“How’s that?”
He smiled knowingly at Jack. “A witch has a sense of orderliness. Things happening on specific dates, by the numbers, according to schedule. Didn’t you tell me that?”
“Never had to. Figured ya always knew it, Maynard.”
“And why do you call me Maynard?”
Jack was no longer smiling, the question so puzzling as to make him wonder why it had ever been asked. But the answer came soon enough, and without a word from Jack. Shifting his weight because his leg was still nagging him, he was aware that something was behind him, emanating cold, and he wheeled to face it. It was a mirror.
And though he knew his own face to be bearded and grimy, the face in the mirror was not. It was clean-shaven and youthful, with hair the color of wheat and pale eyes that riveted, and a quizzical smile that ingratiated. Maynard.
But though the face was Maynard’s, its emotions were quickly Austin’s, for it immediately mirrored Austin’s panic, its eyes widening, its mouth grimacing, its hands reaching up to touch Austin’s hands, all four hands meeting at the mirror’s surface—two in reality, two somewhere else.
And a sound came out of the twisting mouth as it struggled to form words that Austin, on his side of the mirror, was not forming. And it was an awful sound, like the sandpapered whisper of a man without a larynx struggling to make himself heard across an abyss. Hoarse and harsh it pressed out, mouth straining, veins bulging, until the words passed through the mirror to fall on Austin’s ear as a rasping contortion of five convulsive words: “I…told…you…to…run…”
And he was stuck there, his fingers affixed to those in the mirror, and he could not pull free. And in the soul of him he knew that if he could not break the suction of those other hands, he was doomed to go flying beyond the looking glass like smoke up a flue, to somewhere from which he would never find his way back. So, balancing himself on his toes, he leaned forward, his fingers made to bend contrary to nature, building enough coil and strength to sever the suction and catapult himself away from the mirror and back into the room. He staggered backward as he broke from the mirror, his wheezing lungs struggling for any lumps of air they could sift past his gritted teeth.
Four, five reeling, gasping steps he took, his shoulders slamming up against the far wall, hard. He flattened himself against it, like a man trying to eliminate his shadow, half expecting to be boomeranged back into the mirror. But he was evidently far enough away from the detestable glass for it to no longer have any hold on him.
And he stayed there like that, pressing himself shadowless, for how long he did not know. Long enough to feel a part of that wall—until, finally, his body unclenched and proper breathing returned, and his ankle no longer hurt.
He looked over at Jack, who, apparently, had taken no notice of the incident. “Maynard, ya miss that train and ya AWOL ya first day in the Army.”
“What if I don’t go?”
“What?”
“What if I don’t go?”
“Ya have to go. Ya know that.”
“I don’t know that.” He could see his feet firm on the floor, yet felt himself slipping. He was still Austin Fletcher, but he was running out of identity. Even his voice, though familiar inside his head, seemed no longer his own.
“’Course ya do,” said Jack, “It’s ya duty.”
“No. I don’t know that.” He was losing hold and he knew it, all life running out of him, as though an exchange of blood was being made, as in a transfusion, his going to somewhere else, someone else’s pumping into him, his veins filling with another’s genes and chromosomes, another’s intellect and experiences.
“Ya all right, boy?”
“I don’t think so.”
“It’s only natural. Happened to me in World War Two. Every man feels it.”
“Feels what?”
“Fear, I guess.”
“Tell me the day again.”
“Thursday, January fourteenth.”
“And the year.”
“Nineteen seventy-one.”
“Austin Fletcher.”
“What?”
“Austin—”
“Who?”
“—Fletcher.”
“Don’t know him.” Jack was at the door, holding it open. “Now let’s go.” He tossed the little overnight bag across the room, and the younger man caught it and followed Jack out onto the porch, stopping there to take one last look back into his house before closing the door.
“Ya’ll come back to it, Maynard.”
“A-yuh. I think I will.”
“Goin’ to lock it?”
“Nope. Never lock it.”
They headed out across the snow, passing the witch’s tree and the Devil’s Dancing Rock, and the postbox with the name “Maynard Whittier” painted on it. And it occurred to the younger man that he never did get around to changing the name on the postbox. Change it to what? He couldn’t remember.
He followed Jack to where the jeep stood idling, puffing exhaust smoke like a little train, and he ran his hands over his beardless face, though he couldn’t for the life of him, remember having shaved that morning. And he heard a voice, not his, not anyone’s he knew: “A house is a place to go back to, to regroup in. A house is a kind of a special corner of the universe.”
“Ya say somethin’, Maynard?”
“Nope.”
They climbed up and into the jeep, and Jack threw the feisty thing into gear. It took to the road cruelly, as if on octagonal wheels, Jack mumbling something about rough spots, though the younger man wasn’t listening, an earlier speech of Jack’s rolling around in his head—“A witch can occupy a house and do things to ya if ya cross its threshold. It can be layin’ in wait for ya, baitin’ a trap.…A witch can make ya wish ya never came near it.”
They drove on down the company road to Belden, to where the train would take him to whatever adventures the U.S. Army had him scheduled for. He would miss his house, yet somehow knew he’d be back. In the meantime, he had left his icehouse stocked, his root cellar full, and a shovel leaning against the backhouse door in case of snow. The birds would miss him, for they relied on him so. Still, they’d adapt, as would the little creatures under his floors. It was Brownie who worried him. That crazy deer stood a good chance of starving to death if he couldn’t get his regular handouts. Oh, well, he thought, nature will provide.
As to his dogs, he had left them in the care of those two kids. Ara and Froom, they said their names were, and they claimed to be Minnawickies. Minnawickies indeed. In any case, they promised they’d be looking for him and would hold on to his dogs until he came back.
He had been the perfect choice and he’d walked right into it, just as Maynard had said. Nor should it have come as a surprise, for wherever he went in life he was never missed when he left. He made no imprint, not in Cincinnati, not in the Army, and probably not in the snow. Like the witch’s tree, he cast no shadow. No pencil would write him down. No girl would remember making love to him. No house would accept him.
The house had loved only Maynard. None of the others, for they had all feared
the house, himself included. Whereas Maynard loved it. “It’s the nature of a house to absorb its occupants, kind of keeping them forever alive. In particular, that applies to those who loved that house without reservation and stuck with it through whatever tests and obstacles arose.”
Still, he had enjoyed it all, damn it. And given the same set of circumstances, he’d do it again. He’d walk over the snow, and contend with witches, and turn himself inside out for a girl with gray eyes—for he had pulled more living out of his dying than he ever would have harvested from the Biblical three score and ten. As such, his days had been well spent. As such, he’d do it again—somehow.
The jeep plowed along, leaving the house farther and farther behind. And he sat there, his overnight bag on his lap, unable to look back. But ahead of him, on the road and in time, he caught a fragile glimpse of someone else—a friend, who would come to the house from somewhere else and who, before leaving, would embrace Thoreau as would no other man…
“…I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could learn what it had to teach—and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.”
24
The train aimed itself devotedly along, nudging snow from the beckoning rails while the vanishing point ahead kept retreating like a playful Lorelei. On straightaways the engine displayed a joyful confidence, accelerating at times to ten miles an hour. But on turns it grew cautious, and in tunnels it groped, and on bridges it quite simply held its breath.
It was the Bangor & Aroostook Railway—hauler of potatoes and occasional passengers, picking its way over the little spur line that linked Millinocket with Belden, carrying its horizontal red, white and blue stripes into inexorable and wobbly extinction. In a few years it would be no more. All of this in Maine, in the winter of 1972–73.
Inside, turtle-sunk in the parka that had warmed him for one and a half Vietnam winters, Austin Fletcher amused himself by watching the steam of his breath disappear as soon as he created it. The train was unheated and no other passengers abounded. Nothing for companionship but his duffle bag: FLETCHER, A. G., US 51070406. It sat beside him on the seat, embracing everything he owned in the world. As such, and in more ways than one, it was all he had to lean on.
He was a young man, in his twenties, physically unremarkable and possessing no particular characteristic that anyone might notice beyond a certain impish smile that seemed never to fade. He had come a long way to this place so far from his native Cincinnati, but he had made a friend a promise and he was very big on keeping promises. Besides, he had always wished to be alone somewhere, and here was a perfect opportunity to do so.
He took the paper from his pocket, reverently, as if it were centuries-old papyrus. Yet it was only blue-lined notebook paper, dogeared and sweat-stained, hardly the kind one would choose to record his last will and testament on. Still, it meant that he owned a house, Maynard’s house. And he owed it to Maynard to at least have a look at it.
The train slowly came into the station, and Austin looked out the window at the little depot. BELDEN, the sign read, and Belden it was, and he hoisted his duffle bag to his shoulder and made his way through the car to the exit door.
Stepping down from the train and onto the snow-shoveled platform, he saw only a handful of disinterested people milling about, mostly unloading freight, and mostly wearing plaid mackinaws as if that were the uniform of the day.
He peeked through the window of the depot house, where a big man in a shaggy sweater sat very officially at a desk, though it was apparent that the man had very little to do except keep his eye on the coffeepot and on the bacon and eggs jumping in the pan.
He found himself lingering on the platform, though not knowing why. It was not his style to linger. It was his style to find a local and arrange for transportation to Maynard’s house, wherever the hell it was, and get on with things. And yet he was lingering, which he thought odd.
Disjointed thoughts shuffled about in his head, like memories not his own. They were there and then gone, in and out the window, never quite taking hold. It had been like that the entire way from San Francisco. Actually, it had been like that his entire life—nothing solid in it, anything of value he ever had being either borrowed or bestowed upon him, temporarily or against his will. Why should this house be any different?
He looked away from the depot, at the low snowy hills beyond, as though looking for someone but not knowing whom. And there, perhaps thirty yards away, atop a small hill and beside a strange sled, stood a boy about twelve, sullen and stolid, and a girl about sixteen, as pretty as a picture, with a bright scarf going twice around her neck. They were both looking back at him, each holding a leash that restrained a large dog—but not for long.
For upon seeing Austin, both dogs broke free, running directly to him, yelping happily and arriving heavily to jump all over him, almost knocking him to the snow.
Taking their cue from the dogs, the boy and the girl advanced, though more sedately, to where Austin stood patting both dogs. The boy was not special, he was simply a boy. But the girl looked at Austin with eyes of such a glittering gray that, for the longest time, he could not look away.
And while he was transfixed, no words coming to mouth or mind, the boy ran off, returning with the sled, upon which Austin knew to place his duffle bag. The three of them then hauled the sled to the top of the hill and climbed aboard, straddling the duffle bag as if it were a rocket. And down the hill they went, laughing and shouting, the dogs giving chase, never far behind.
A hundred hills they traveled, dragging the sled up and riding it down, before the little house revealed itself, tucked away as it was against a hill of its own, like a cat snoozing.
And they coasted down that last hill, right to the house’s porch, the dogs giving chase, sliding and tumbling like seals in a barrel. And they entered the house, all of them, putting a fire into the stove and waking old beams, setting animals to scurrying in the ceiling and beneath the floors.
And once in the house, he sat down on the old Boston rocker and wondered—was there any ice still in the icehouse, and any crackers for the deer? And was the shovel still there at the backhouse door?
And outside, though none of them saw it as it ducked out from behind the chimney and scooted about on the roof, was a witch’s hat, empty of everything save a small, tight laughing, which it indulged itself in—over and over and over.
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Maynard’s House Page 24
