by John Crowley
“It’s probably nothing, isn’t it?” she said; she tossed down her cigarette and stepped on it carefully. And went with Pierce out to the top of the yard, from where the field beyond could be seen. Bird and Warren came up after her.
“Oh hell,” she said.
A long time afterward, Pierce asked his cousin Bird if she thought they had really set a forest on fire, or whether only a few acres of brush had burned.
“I think it was big,” she said. “Sure it was. It must have burned a hundred acres at least. I know it burned all the way up over Yokun’s place, because it burned up his fence, and he wanted Daddy to buy him a new fence. But his was an old broken-down rail fence that he never fixed anyway, and he wanted a new fence with like nice posts and bobwire! And it burned all the way to the river. I remember them saying there was no way to stop it, but that it would stop anyway when it got to the river. I guess it did.
“There were always fires in those days. You remember. The sun in the summer if it was dry was a lot of times hazy and red. Smoke from some fire, somewhere.”
In the years of the postwar mining boom the prop-cutters sent out by the mine-owners cut over thousands of acres; paid by the piece, the cutters had pulled out what was easy and left the rest—cut tops and shattered detritus and good long logs as well, too hard to extract and left behind. The woods beyond Sam Oliphant’s hillside were a weird wilderness of cull and old stumps, the hollers filled with tumbled logs like great dropped jackstraws, dryrotting to tinder, awaiting Pierce’s match. Bird remembered—though Pierce didn’t—how after the red sun set she and Hildy and Joe Boyd (Bird and Hildy’s older brother, who hadn’t been at the fire’s birth) climbed out onto the roof through the window of the second-story closet—a window in a closet, Pierce had wondered when he was first shown this trick, but why—and sat in the ashy-tasting dark watching the slow crawl of their fire through the holler and over the mountain.
If it was a forest fire it didn’t look like one; didn’t look like the fire that devastated Bambi’s home, and drove the frightened animals before it. It wasn’t a space of living orange flame but a line, a dull-russet smoking frontier between the burned and the unburned: not different really from the fire in the grass where it had started.
“Your daddy’s going to have to pay for that,” Joe Boyd said to Pierce, smug in the security of innocence, burning trash not being one of his chores.
“That’s not fair,” Hildy said.
“It’s true,” said Joe Boyd. “When a little kid does something, or something? The little kid can’t pay, but his daddy is responsible. He has to pay.”
Pierce said nothing, unable to imagine the cost Joe Boyd meant. A mountain, two mountains? They seemed to Pierce’s mind either invaluable or valueless.
“It wasn’t his fault,” Bird said, though often enough when Joe Boyd announced awful facts like that he turned out to be right; Bambi’s mother (though Bird covered her ears not to hear him whisper it to her) had really died. “Besides, his father’s in New York. And he’s poor.”
She didn’t add that it wasn’t Pierce alone who set the fire, but all of them: the Invisible College, working together, pledged to one another. And that being so, Joe Boyd was guilty of it too: for Joe Boyd was himself Permanent President of this Kentucky branch of the College, duly elected by the membership. Bird didn’t say any of that, because saying it meant revealing to Joe Boyd the existence of the College and the secret of his Presidency: and that was the deepest of the many secrets the Invisible College was sworn to keep.
“Not my daddy,” Joe Boyd said, to be sure no mistake would be made about this. “Your daddy.”
Pierce Moffett’s wasn’t the only fire burning that night in the mountains, nor the only one not put out. The Cumberlands had been burning for years, and there had never been anyone to put them out. Not only the trees that covered them: once the mountains themselves had used to burn, set afire by the dynamite used to loosen the seams of coal like teeth; the seams would ignite, and the mountain burned, smoking out of fissures, parching its earth. A hot bitter breath could be felt coming from the mine’s driftmouth then, and on the mountain’s back the stones under bare feet were warm as flesh.
Slate dumps built beside the coal-tipples used to burn too: fires starting deep down from the pressure of tons of rock on the coal fragments and dust, and issuing up through fault lines in the slate and shale, to spit and smoke in long creeping veins. Now and then the bosses would set teams of men to following these fire-lines and smothering them with ashes; the men worked a day or two days, climbing over the heap like attendant devils in a little hell, only putting fires out and not stirring them. It didn’t work for long; the fire only crept elsewhere, and found other outlets. Some of the slate fires burned for years; some that were burning in 1936 when Sam Oliphant, newly Dr. Oliphant, first came to the Cumberlands were still burning when he brought his family back there after the war.
His was a family of doctors. When old Doc Oliphant had died, Sam’s older brothers had taken over his practice, leaving Sam to find a practice of his own. Instead, and without giving it a lot of thought, Sam had answered an ad for Public Health doctors in Kentucky, was accepted gratefully, and set out South in his father’s Olds, part of his share of a small estate. In this car he came to ride a wide circuit, like a traveling preacher; in a country of old Fords it earned him both respect and suspicion, until it had acquired a few dents and the dusty roads had permanently dulled its lacquer.
Wild, wild and strange he found the mountain country to be, his circuit of towns and coal camps with their simple utilitarian names, Cut Shin Creek, Stinking Creek, Black Mountain, Big Sandy River—names having been given only to places that needed them, and not out of any ambition of permanence or glory, no classical evocations, no biblical names either, no Bethel, Goshen, Beulah: maybe because the founders were unlearned even in the Bible, or maybe because however beautiful and vast their mountains were they had not believed this was God’s country, nor ever mistaken it for the Promised Land. The people Dr. Oliphant preached to (how was it they didn’t know how to build a proper privy, or how to put food safely by?) filled him with stories that his Westchester relatives would find hard to swallow; Sam refined them and polished them over the years, and his children refined them further in their own retellings. Sam on his first tour, examining a girl of fourteen, who’s feeling peaked. His consternation: the girl’s clearly pregnant.
Child, did you know you’re going to have a baby?
Wide eyes astonished: Ain’t so!
Well it is. Do you know how it happened? How you get a baby?
A solemn nod, reckon I do.
Well, what happened? You can tell me. Were you raped?
Oh doctor (a sigh of cheerful resignation), it’s been nothn but rape rape rape all summer long.
His people, their lives harsh and poignant as their fiddle laments; his dawn journeys along pea-vine roads that skirted deep glens and crossed crackling brooks (hollers and cricks, he would learn to say); the morning smoke of hidden rivers rising through the timberlands, drifting with the soft curl of smoke from cabin chimneys; even the smell of his Olds and its upholstery, the taste of his Camels and his coffee, all of it came soon to be colored for Sam with love. Love would be the reason he remembered it so fondly, and why, when a widower with no reason to remain, he lived there till he died.
Opal Boyd was a schoolteacher, a child of the Western farmlands of the state and like Sam a recruit of the decade’s hopes for progress. She wore her ash-blond hair in two long braids wound on her head in a pale tiara; she wore cotton shirt-waist dresses with woven belts, which she bought on a yearly trip to Louisville or Chicago. In her rented room in the house of the county clerk there was a tennis racket in a wooden press. Hopeful and useless and brave in that valley, the tennis racket too was touched for Sam with love.
When Opal married Sam and conceived a child, she began to see the ravaged mountains differently. They went North to have the baby, th
ey went to the great World’s Fair in New York and saw the future, they decided not to go back. But the established practice on Long Island that Sam bought into with all of his and Opal’s savings proved to be not very large or very lucrative, and by the time he returned to it after four years of war, he found that it had in effect disestablished itself, divided among two doctors who had elected to remain at their necessary work rather than enlist as Sam had done. In the same medical journal where he had once found the ad wanting Public Health doctors in Kentucky, Sam saw that a small Catholic mission hospital in the town of Bondieu, Breshy County (a town he could not remember ever having passed through), was offering a good salary for a chief physician, more by quite a bit than he ever seemed likely to make among the potato farmers and oystermen; and some ten years after he and Opal Boyd had left the Cumberlands they came back, with four children, not to stay forever but only long enough to build a little capital for starting over elsewhere.
“I suppose it was a sudden decision, and I suppose it wasn’t a very smart one,” he wrote to his daughter Hildy a long time after, in the last months of his life. Hildy was the child he could talk to most easily, but even she was surprised when she began getting letters from him, and she started laying plans to get home quickly. “I’m sorry that I never made much money, or accumulated much of an estate to leave you and the others. Doctors now are assumed to be well off, and I guess I should be ashamed I’m not; but you know in the years when I went to medical school we really didn’t expect to make a lot of money. Most of us did in the end—things changed in medicine—but we didn’t expect it, like the med students now do. So I don’t feel so much like a failure that I didn’t. Only I am sorry for this damned impulsiveness I’ve always had, that I never thought through the big decisions. I think maybe I’ve passed that on, with the no money that goes with it. Any talent for good sense you’ll have to thank your mother for.”
Opal hadn’t liked Long Island; she thought maybe it was the salt fogs that brought on her headaches. Sam believed, though he didn’t say, that she brought on her headaches herself: and though he knew himself to be a good doctor, and knew also not to charge himself with failure if he’d done all that his knowledge and skill could do, he was sorry ever after that he had thought so. They had just set up house in Bondieu—in the largest house in town, the old Hazelton place, bought for them by the hospital—when Opal’s tumor was discovered.
Pierce, who had been eight years old that year, always remembered—perhaps because it was the first time he had ever seen her weeping openly—coming upon his mother, Sam’s sister, with Sam’s letter crushed in her hand, in the kitchen of their Brooklyn apartment. Ailanthus grew so close to the windows of that kitchen that sometimes it came right in, as though to look. “Poor Sam,” his mother was saying, her eyes squeezed shut and fist pressed against her brow. “Poor Sam. Poor, poor children.” And even after long acquaintance with Sam and with his children, all tough nuts and not always friends of his, the memory of Winnie’s tears for them could raise a lump of awful pity in Pierce’s throat.
One year later, Winnie put Pierce aboard a bus and took him with her to Pikeville, Kentucky, the town nearest to Bondieu for which she could get a ticket. There Sam picked them up in his huge Nash bought not long before for the big trip South, and brought them to Bondieu, and Winnie settled in to be his housekeeper and stepmother to his four children. She had always loved, even worshipped, her older brother, and she did deeply grieve for the children: but those weren’t her reasons for leaving her husband in Brooklyn forever. And despite the abiding antipathy she felt for Bondieu, her never-shaken sense of the unlikelihood of her being there for good, she had not regretted her decision: she had had nowhere else to go.
“It wasn’t like now, then,” Winnie said to Pierce in Florida. Pierce sat with his feet up on the rail of the deck, a can of soda warming in his hands. “Now you’d have so many ways to proceed, ways to feel about it. So many. Then you only had a few. So you picked among the ones you had, and were glad for the safety. I couldn’t get a divorce, and couldn’t have made a living by myself—anyway I didn’t think I could. I guess I’m trying to explain. I won’t apologize.
“It’s hard to imagine now, how shocked you could be, now when it seems so ordinary a thing. I mean look at Key West for heaven’s sake. But it wasn’t ordinary then; it was like—well it was like finding a breach in nature. I couldn’t share a bed with him then, could I? And I had to get you away from him; that just seemed self-evident, like snatching you away from a fire.
“But you know, the sad thing,” Winnie said. She laughed, chagrined. “He really was such a good father, in his way. I’m sorry, Pierce.”
TWO
I It had been fall when Pierce came to Bondieu to live. It happened that about the time he and Winnie settled in, the storm windows were taken out of the garage and piled on the porch to be put up; nobody finished the chore, though, and for a long time the storm windows lay there on the porch in two long rows. For a reason he could not afterward remember (he could only occasionally remember the interesting sensation of it, which was perhaps itself the only reason), Pierce had carefully and deliberately stepped in every pane of these windows, each of which bore his weight for a moment before crashing like thin ice over a dried puddle. When what he had done was discovered, he denied having done it, though it was obvious enough to Sam that it had been he. There was no real proof, though, and Pierce didn’t feel he needed to confess without it. He was made to anyway.
And hadn’t he always been a denier of what he had done, a denier too of what had become of him; a liar in fact? Had his mother actually been a denier too, only with the handy quality of actually forgetting the things she had done, and being left only with the reasons, the good reasons, she had done them?
He thought that what had made it so hard for him to admit what he had done was that Sam’s next question would have been Why, as in many later instances it was; Why, not unkindly meant, but leaving Pierce no recourse at all, because he didn’t know why. He had no reason. When later on he carried Sam’s tools into the woods and left them there to rust, unable to remember that he’d borrowed them; when one winter afternoon he cut the telephone line into Sam’s bedroom with his knife; when he took from Sam’s bureau drawer his dead wife’s engagement ring: he had known (at the time, anyway) why he had done so—crises faced by the Invisible College had demanded it. But his lies in those instances had the same logic as the first instance, the storm windows, that if he confessed to what he’d done he’d be asked why. And he couldn’t answer. So he denied he’d done it.
“What on earth were you thinking of?” Sam asked, holding Pierce’s shoulder, pointing his nephew’s head down at the shatter and ruin.
“I didn’t.”
“You did! Don’t insult my intelligence. I just want to know why.”
“I didn’t.”
Sam always insisted (and Pierce doubted) that Pierce’s offenses bothered him less than Pierce’s willingness to outface him. He devised mild but ingenious punishments for Pierce designed to impress on him the unreasonableness of his lying, punishments that Pierce took, though deeply aggrieved that Sam thought he had the right to inflict them. But they didn’t change him.
Had he really thought he could get away with the outrageous lies he told? It was as though he thought he really was invisible, that he left no trail others could follow, that nothing could be pinned on him because he wasn’t really there at all.
“Lives in a world of his own,” Sam said to Winnie; though the opposite always seemed as true to Winnie, who knew him better: that Pierce lived in a world not his at all.
The house built on a rise above the town of Bondieu by old man Hazelton (himself a doctor around the time of the First World War, then a politician, then a speculator in coal leases, then a bankrupt, then a suicide) had two distinct parts: a big, square two-story place of dingy clapboard with a pillared front porch, and a low bungalow of four rooms in a row, connected to the bi
g house by a trellised breezeway. Bird told Pierce that the little house had been built as a gift for the Hazeltons’ only daughter and her husband, so that she wouldn’t leave home, a motive that Pierce could not then credit. Bird had the first of the four rooms for herself, and Hildy the second; the third was the daughter’s kitchen, and the fourth a tiny windowed sitting-room or sun-porch where an old couch moldered.
Upstairs in the big house Sam and Opal Boyd had had their bedroom, and a small connecting room was Warren’s. Joe Boyd had another to himself, and a fourth was empty. That was the one Winnie took. Into it went her marble-topped dresser, and atop the dresser the silver-backed brushes and mirror she never actually used, and the silver-framed photographs of her parents; into it too, borne in somehow on these things, went an odor of Brooklyn and his infancy that Pierce could detect there even years later.
Where was Pierce to go? The first plan was that he would share with Joe Boyd, but Joe Boyd set himself so adamantly against this that no one, not Sam, not Winnie, not Pierce certainly, wanted to try converting him. So Hildy moved in with Bird, and Pierce took her room next to the kitchen of the bungalow. (When Joe Boyd at length left home, Pierce was offered his room in the big house next to Sam’s; but he preferred his room in the girls’ wing. Hildy took it instead.)
