"Well, I want that, too."
"Looks like the boy's made up his mind, George," Eph said, laughing. Hearing the smooth laughter, Luke thought how close to death Eph must be. In their wrinkled green uniforms both he and George looked like veterans of some long-disbanded army, one that had a code of conduct he wasn't quite sure of. He wondered if either of them believed he had the knowledge, the skills and the industry to build what he said he wanted to build.
Tillie had brought cups and a large thermos of lemonade down with her so while the loader idled they drank and discussed drainage, cellar walls, footings, waterproofing, the necessity for a cellar in the first place, bulkheads, windows, vents, the insulating value of earth—sand, clay, loam, gravel, hardpan; here, where the brook had worked across the narrow valley since the last ice age, the subsoil would be largely gravel, with plenty of rocks and boulders.
Should he build forms and pour the foundation walls, use cement block, or stone?
"Not stone," George, the stonemason, said. "For your footings you want concrete or cement block." Foot-ins, George pronounced the word.
The lemonade was the taste of Luke's childhood. He wondered if he had ever liked it, or if it were a potion that had simply been there, like iodine, or calamine lotion. Now it was mixed with nostalgia, whether he wanted to remember or not. These people were of older generations in which his relatives had lived and died. Eph had referred to him as a "boy," and now he was an apprentice to their years. It was good, only good. It had been so long since he was a student. He would build well, partly to please them. They might not approve of some of his dimensions, or even materials, but he would work hard to make them approve of his joinings.
They cut saplings to sight upon, white blazes in the dark bark of pin cherries, and measured the hole Eph then dug with both ends of the loader. Large boulders, three or more feet in diameter, Eph pushed in among the spruce on the north side, where the years would gray them into the shadows.
This cabin would work. It wouldn't leak, cellar or roof or chimney. His house in Wellesley, planned by an architect and built by professionals, leaked chronically in all three places. An east wind, with rain, even a small buildup of ice at the chimney cricket, or a soaking rain of any kind, and the house wept in its joints and invisible channels, around the edges of flashing—maybe by osmosis, God knew. Both Ham Jones and the buyer, Clifford Ruppert, knew of it, but the leaks were small and seemed normal enough to them. They never had to him. A house should not leak. Wood and water did not mix and for once in his life he was not going to accept a compromise.
But how much were the complications of the material and technical, when it came to actually building, changing his desire for a wooden cabin and a warm fire? Plastic, asphalt, steel, mastic, silicone, copper, fiberglass (for the toilet, a system called a Clivus Multrum), triple-glazed glass, circuit breakers, pumps, resistance coils, solar collectors and emergency generators; were these part of his romantic vision of a solitary man in "a crag of a wind-grieved Apennine"? Yes. He knew how cold it could get, how the frost crept in and broke pipes and bottles, froze ink, turned oil to cement, canned goods into mush, split flashings and let in the rot. What we knew, we used. If he built an outer wall of stone, he would build it of two faces with four inches of styrene insulation in the middle, the faces held together at intervals by hidden steel bolts. If he wanted for some reason to leave the cabin for more than a week or so in the middle of the winter, he would turn a few valves, empty two or three traps, store his perishables in a specially insulated basement room that utilized from below the unfreezing constant heat of the earth itself. This cabin was where he would live, and maybe, if this joy continued, where he might even work. He wanted right now to be sweating, smelling clean wood as he shaped the skeleton of his house, wired into it its arteries. The winter sun would enter a great southern window to heat an internal wall of stone that would also contain chimney flues, so the wall would be heated from within and from without, forming a reservoir of warmth. At night, or when the sun was not visible, insulated internal shutters would close the window off.
Eph let the loader idle and climbed down. "That ought to do it," he said. "Looks like a hell of a mess, but you can't make gravel stand on end." The cellar hole looked a bit like a bomb crater, but it was deep enough and wide enough. A drilling rig could drive right in on the south side and make his well.
"You get Marple to come in, set the forms and pour you your footings," George said. "No sense trying to do it by hand, less you want to."
"You think the bridge is strong enough for a cement truck?" Luke asked.
"Shuh!" Eph said. "If it worries him you can cut an upright for the middle of it, set it in the brook. After two or three years, I'd begin to wonder myself, but right now, hell, we had five yards of gravel on the Mack and it didn't hardly budge, did it?"
Eph drove the loader back up the hill, its engine roaring and its appendages nodding violently on the uneven fresh gravel. Tillie and Luke rode with George. The gravel was loose, but it would settle down and harden as it found itself. George suggested that he'd need some waterbars here and there to keep the freshets from washing straight down the road and taking the gravel with it.
At the farm, Eph had already begun to push the fallen house into the cellar hole, making a slanted pile like cards fallen over. Finally he stopped, moved the loader away from the pile and turned the engine off, saying he'd had enough for the day and he'd come back in the morning. In the meantime he suggested that Luke throw a few old tires underneath the pile and burn up what was there, so there'd be more room for what was left, including the sheds and junk and parts of the collapsed barn. "You won't need no permit. The lookout's left the mountain, gone down to his cabin to make his supper. Besides, it's going to rain. Light her up. Throw some kerosene on some of them old tires and let burn what'll burn. If it worries you, I'll call up the Fire Warden and tell him what you're up to. Fred Wilson, you know him? He'll bitch about a permit but it won't do him much good."
Luke offered them something to drink. Tillie had a small juice glass of straight Canadian whiskey, and Eph and George each took a beer. They watched him roll four ancient tires from the sheds and shove them into the interstices of the pile. It would burn, and it would frighten him a little, that niggling bit about the permit, and the name, Wilson—a relative of Lester?—and the general old fear of forest fires everyone had been brainwashed into by Smokey the Bear. But the hell with it, he decided nervously, let her burn. He tucked some old, fairly dry newspapers into the tires, poured kerosene on them and lit an edge of the paper. Thick orange flame grew smoothly.
They watched as the flame grew silently at first; then, as the tires heated and curled, it screeched like kittens below the black smoke that raced straight up. It was soon a roar and a heat that made them back up toward the tent. The fire seemed to have no limits to its energy, an accelerating explosion that fed itself and might start the whole town to burning—a terror. Luke thought of the small paper match that had been the se6d of this violence, and how he had lit that match. Black smoke and twisting orange flame shot up a hundred feet, then turned to roll to the east in whorls of dense black. It was as if he were responsible, suddenly and disastrously, for this holocaust everyone in the state of New Hampshire must be seeing with horror and disapproval.
He got himself a beer, his hands actually trembling with an apprehension he knew was unnecessary, because after a time the fire would reach its highest intensity and then it could do no more. And soon it did, though it still screamed and billowed and made the air violent and soiled. But he could see that it no longer grew, and would not destroy the world after all.
Eph and George sat on kitchen chairs, sipping their beer and watching. Tillie stood next to Luke, tall and bony, her shoulder bones apparent through the clean blue of her workshirt.
"Now it's lost its anger," she said, "and it will grumble."
It will grumble, he thought. She sa
id it that way: it will grumble.
Tillie said, "Is that your dog? That hound?"
He looked back where she was looking, but his eyes were somehow seared by the fire and for a while he couldn't seem to focus on brush, grass or shadow. "There," she said.
The dog was near the road, unmoving, wondering at these people and the fire, trying to decide whether he should come forward and be recognized, or disappear. When Jake saw that Luke was looking straight at him, the white tip of his tail moved in a small circle, once; in the eyes, in the set of the long ears, in the position of the leading foreleg—the one that would take the first step forward if forward was the way to go—in the set of the body and in the angle of the body to the direction of inquiry, Luke could not help reading the dog's thoughts exactly. "Jake," he said above the fire's grumbling and cracking, and Jake came up to him and nosed his leg, though still a little worried about the others, Luke read in the angle of Jake's tail to his spine. "It's okay, Jake," Luke said. "Though, man, I don't need the complications."
"That Lester Wilson's beagle hound?" George said.
"I'm afraid so."
"I guess he took a shine to you," Tillie said. "They do that."
"He come around often?" George said.
"He came back the night before last."
"You feeding him?"
"Well," Luke said, "I figure that's between me and Jake."
"And Lester Wilson," George said. "That shithead. Pardon me, Tillie."
Tillie smilled and said to Luke, "Why don't you buy him from Lester?"
"Easier said than done," George said.
Eph didn't seem to be listening to all this. "We'll take the Mack, leave everything else here tonight. You ready, Tillie? Got to help Mickey with the milking." He looked at the sky over the mountain. "Rain soon. If it's raining tomorrow we won't be back. If it's done raining, we'll be back to finish up."
When they'd gone Luke gave Jake a can of Alpo in the old blue-enameled pie plate. Lester Wilson could do what he wanted; it was up to him this time. There seemed to be some kind of flaw in this logic, but he didn't want to think about it. He had studying to do. He got out Architectural Graphic Standards, a quarto volume that contained all sorts of technical information about building.
For supper he had ham and eggs and a fried tomato, did his dishes and lit the Aladdin lamp when dark clouds came over the mountain ahead of the rain. That evening, with the rain tapping and tightening the canvas of the tent, Jake curled and breathing at his feet, he studied what his heart desired.
Next morning the rain had stopped. The cellar hole still smouldered and the house had sifted down into it. The old wood-oil range stood shoulder high in gray ash. He'd thought briefly of salvaging it, but it wasn't the stove he wanted in his cabin and life was too short to start a salvage operation. Bury it all.
Eph and Tillie arrived at nine o'clock in an old Buick that must have scraped a lot on the road in. Before Eph could start the gasoline starter motor on the loader it began to rain again, so Luke made a pot of coffee and they sat in the tent around the old kitchen table, waiting to see if it would stop. About nine-thirty Jake, who had been gone since daylight, came in sopping wet and asked Luke to do something about it. Luke gave him the same towel he'd given to Louise Sturgis and Jake spread it out, more or less, on the ground and rolled himself fairly dry on it.
"You knowed that dog long?" Eph asked.
"For a week or so. He just turns up here," Luke said.
"I was wondering. I'll tell you a story about your uncle, Shem Carr, and me when we was about your age. Of course Tillie's heard it before, and she most likely knows it better'n I do myself. She'll correct me if I disremember, exaggerate or tell a lie; the next bar I go before, being as I'm an old atheist, as Tillie can tell you, though she disapproves, is what I conceive as The Court of Worms, so maybe it don't matter if I do lie. But while we're waiting for the rain to stop, and drinking your good coffee, I'll tell you some ancient history.
"This was the year nineteen thirty-six, the year before you come to live with me, Tillie, bringing the precious gift of yourself to my life, for I was a worthless, brawling, drunken whoremaster, though I worked hard, you got to grant that.
"Now, Luke, you want to be careful what you say about the dead, so I'll stick to the truth. Your uncle, Shem Carr, was one heller when he got in a mood. They used to say that was how he killed all them Huns in the war—he just got in a mood. And when he got that black look to him you never knew what was making him go. I suspect it was a kind of terrible honor and justice the rest of us only think about sometimes, maybe in our dreams, and forget in our regular lives 'cause it's easier to trim and hedge and give a cynical shrug, so to speak, or scream and roar and hit your fist on a wall and get rid of your poor rage that way. Men, in their wisdom, make laws for all men to follow, and the law is like a weight on most men, but not on all men. 'A law unto himself'—you heard the words—was Shem Carr when something got to him deep enough.
"Now, if Shem Carr had anything like a best friend, I was that friend. As a child I was mortally afflicted with a tongue that never would be still, so I learned to fight early on in my life, but I'd always rather talk than fight, so I never meant to hurt, just make them quiet so they could listen, cause for me that was the proper way of things—me talking and the others listening to what my fancy spun out on the end of my cursed and blabbing tongue. I'd feel these dark and wonderful shapes coming to me in my head, and they was the shapes of words and stories that was sweeter to me than meat and drink, peace and dignity.
"Shem kind of liked to hear me talk, and he had no need, like some of the others, to prove me an ass. He never said much himself, or if he did it was straight to the point, leaving out all the sounds and shapes that was more interesting to my ears than how many nails in a keg.
"As I say, the year was nineteen hundred and thirty-six. Shem was born in eighteen ninety-four, so that'd make him a young man of forty-two or so. I was three years younger, hadn't been to the war like Shem."
Eph poured himself some coffee and spooned in some of the white powder that did Luke for cream, giving the bottle a wry look as he screwed on the cap. Tillie sat straight and quiet in her chair, as though she didn't want Eph to know how carefully she was listening. Eph paused to sip his coffee, and Luke thought: 1936. The first thing you did with a year in your own lifetime was to set yourself in it. He was alive then, four years old. He may have had memories of that year, but he couldn't be sure. Shem and Carrie were running the farm. Samuel was fifteen. His own father was twenty-seven, his mother twenty-five. It was the Depression, the source of myth and admonition that had instructed his childhood, though he could never remember it as they'd told him it was.
"That was during the Great Depression," Eph said, "though we never noticed it much around here. We had plenty to eat 'cause we grew and fed up our critters, we had our gardens like always, we slaughtered and pickled and preserved, and there wa'n't no mortgages like out West, or few of them, and we never did have much cash money laying around. Drank hard cider, burned wood, sweetened our gruel with maple or birch syrup. Hell, we hardly knew there was a depression on. You had to go to the city to find out what all the commotion was about—though I believe the state went for Roosevelt that year. I was always a Democrat and a Freethinker myself. Wait till the next depression, though. All the farms are gone and you can't eat wood. I won't be around to see it, maybe, so it's no skin off the back of my neck, so to speak, but it surely is a pity folks these days is so Allmighty dumb.
"Anyway, the dog there minds me of a beagle hound Shem once owned, name of Heidi, smartest little bitch you ever saw— for a beagle, that is. Nose on her you could hardly believe, she never run a back trail, never stopped to dig—and we had all kinds of coney rabbits in them days, they'd go to ground, or in a stone wall, and most of your beagles'd just dig and wail. Not Heidi, she'd pick herself out a jackrabbit and stay on it till you got it. Only dog Shem ever had he'd let in t
he house. He thought a lot of that dog. Pretty little thing, too, all satin black along her back, like that one there, then a tan like buckskin and pure white on her chest and belly. She had a kind of high, yippity voice, was the only fault she had, that never carried around corners too well, it seemed like.
"One time Heidi, she was about ten years old, a little past her prime but smart—a professional, Shem called her more than once—so smart you kind of forgot she was a dog and considered her another person you was hunting with, well, me and Shem was hunting way over to Switches Corners and Heidi got on this old ridge runner of a jack he'd go clean over a mountain, hours before you'd hear that little yippity-yip way off on the ledges someplace and then it was gone again. All day long we was slogging up and down and across and over and we never could figure out where that goddam straight-line jackrabbit was going to come out. He'd go a mile straight before he'd turn, I swear to God. Finally it got dark and no Heidi, so we come back to Shem's pickup truck—a '34 flathead V-8, went like hell, by the way, which is what got Shem in trouble in the first place with Wallace Ellis, but I'll get to that.
"Shem says, and I can remember it to this day, 'First time I ever got skunked with Heidi, but it ain't her fault,' he says. 'Fact is, she don't have no faults to speak of.' Shem was staring up at Blue Peak where we last heard Heidi more'n an hour before. He took off his coat and laid it down beside the road so's Heidi, when she got done chasing that rabbit, would know where to wait till morning, snuggled up in her master's hunting coat. I could see Shem was worried, afraid at her age she might have a heart attack after all that running.
"Anyway, Shem went back in the morning, got there at first light to find Heidi laying on his coat all right, but she wa'n't in too good shape—half her head was blowed off and she was dead.
"Shem come by my place on the way home, I was up milking, and helps me finish up, not saying anything. Then he takes me out to his truck, pulls off some old burlap bags and there's his canvas hunting coat all brains and blood and the little dog all wrapped up in it. 'Who do you think done it?' he says. 'I don't know,' I says, but inside my head I'm thinking Wallace Ellis. One thing, he lived on that same road. I'm trying to look kind of blank, but Shem he just looks at me and says, 'So do I.'
The Followed Man Page 22
