Collected Short Stories: Volume II

by Barry Rachin

  “It’s just a maple leaf,” Angie flexed her shoulders. The pack felt comfortable, not too heavy.

  “Aspen,” her mother corrected, indicating the serrated points arranged symmetrically across the leaf. “From the genus, populus. Throughout high school she had dreamed about becoming a botanists or, perhaps, an ornithologist. Plants and birds. Somewhere she got sidetracked.

  “The flattened leafstalks,” She held it up for her daughter to see, “make the leaves tremble at the slightest breeze. A very noisy plant.” She let the leaf slip from her fingers. With the sun drooping over their left shoulders, they looked north toward the summit of Mount Katahdin in the far distance. “Let’s go!” They struck off down the trail at a loping gait with Angie bringing up the rear. A half-mile down the rough trail they came to a pond, edged by thick stands of beech with a smattering of hemlock and white pine.

  Except for a few gray squirrels, they saw no animals. Passing through an open field at the far end of the pond, Grace pointed out the variety of wildflowers. An endless succession of lady’s slipper with their pouchy lips, black-eyed Susan and meadow lily. “That a jack-in-the-pulpit.” She pointed to a leafy plant. “Also known as Indian turnip. The local natives ate the roots as a main part of their diet. Some old-timers probably still do.”

  Around six, though the sun was still high, they stopped for supper. Using water from a nearby stream, Grace boiled a pan of whole grain, basmati rice over an open fire. As it cooked, the rice released aromatic, nutty odor. In a separate pan she sautéed onions and green peppers. Other hikers passed on the trail. A young boy waved and his father tipped his hat. Everyone seemed intent on getting to his or her destination before the light bled out of the sky. The temperature had dropped a few degrees, but it was still warm. “We’ll camp here for the night,” Grace announced. “I’ll put some coffee on before we unpack.”

  Angie took the blackened pan down to the stream, rinsed the last few grains of rice away and filled a canteen with fresh water. When she returned to the campsite an elderly man with a white beard and rickety legs was sitting on a stump. “Mr. Anderson,” Angie’s mother announced, “will be joining us for coffee.”

  The old man smiled displaying an expanse of pink gums and not very much in the way of teeth. Reaching into his pocket, he withdrew an ivory flower surrounded by red berries. “For the girl.”

  “Dogwood?” Grace said. “They seldom flourish this far east.”

  The old man nodded. “Some people call them bunchberry, but it’s just a different name for the same plant.” Mr. Anderson wore a tan-colored hearing aide and his left hand trembled when he rested it in his lap, but it was unclear if he suffered from a chronic illness or was just tired. Despite the warm weather, he wore a long sleeve flannel shirt buttoned at the wrists. Grace fixed the coffee and passed around sugar cookies.

  The old man’s wife had passed away the previous spring. The year before she died, they hiked the Appalachian Trail as far down as Hump Mountain along the Tennessee-North Carolina border, crossing through rugged hill country where several inches of snow had fallen the previous day. “Toes got frostbitten, but it still turned out okay.” Mr. Anderson took a sip of coffee and sloshed the dark liquid in the warm, tin cup. “Met some real decent folk, along the trail.”

  He threw the last of his coffee into the fire sending up a fitful tongue of orange sparks. The more he lingered the more melancholy the old man seemed. Angie no longer noticed the huge gaps between the teeth that were and the teeth that might have been, as they rested by the campfire. The songbirds had bedded down for the night, their incessant trilling upstaged by the rhythmic clatter of crickets and bullfrogs. “Tell you a funny story before I go,” Mr. Anderson said. He rested his good hand over the other and the trembling momentarily subsided.

  “A boy wakes up one morning to find his faithful dog missing. He fashions a sign on a piece of cardboard. The sign reads: Lost Dog. Walks with limp - got run over, sideswiped by tractor-trailer last spring; gimpy hind leg; cataracts both eyes, left ear chewed off in mishap with homicidal pit bull.” The old man paused for dramatic effect. “ Answers to the name Lucky.”

  Answers to the name Lucky.

  The two women waved as the old man disappeared down the trail into the darkness. Grace understood perfectly well that most people, regardless of outward appearances, were chewed up and run over by the vagaries of life. You could have a hearty laugh while sitting at a campfire; the trick was to maintain one’s composure after leaving the solitude of the Maine woods and rejoining the money-grubbing rat race. “That’s our destination tomorrow,” Grace pointed at a bright star above a ridge of spruce. “Polaris, the North Star. It hangs like a jewel on the end of the Little Dipper and points the way to Mount Katahdin.”

  “I’m going to bed,” Grace said. She wondered if Mr. Anderson’s left hand had stopped trembling. And did he yearn for his soul mate when he lay in his sleeping bag? Did he dream of their wintry exploits on Hump Mountain? He wouldn’t have to worry about frostbite tonight. Around midnight, Angie heard her mother stir. She rolled out of the sleeping bag and went outside. “What’s the matter?” Angie asked when she returned.

  “Had to pee.” Grace crawled back into the sleeping bag and lay still.

  “I hope Mr. Anderson’s all right,” Angie whispered. “I mean, what if something happened to him?”

  Her mother reached out and brushed the girl’s cheek with her fingertips. The gesture felt like a benediction. “Angie, you are a precious child. And I’m proud to call you my daughter.”

  A few minutes later, Grace could hear her daughter’s steady breathing. Somewhere deep in the woods an owl let looses with a prolonged, resonant hoot deep as a foghorn. The crickets and frogs were unimpressed. Mr. Anderson was probably also fast asleep, dreaming about his lost youth and all the wonderful adventures that still awaited him on the A.T..

  In the morning Angie woke to find her mother’s sleeping bag empty. Grace returned before her daughter had wrestled her hiking boots on. “Come with me!” She dragged Angie down the trail past the stream, then down a narrower footpath. At the bottom of the gravelly trail, the trees fell away to reveal a sandy pond rimmed with hawthorn and Canadian yew. “A blizzard of rainbow trout! Look for yourself.”

  Angie stood with her boots nipping the water and watched as a steady procession of speckled fish cruised in and out of the shallows. “There’s enough food to feed an army.”

  “Or a hungry Indian tribe,” her mother interjected. Grace began pulling her clothes off, flinging her blouse, bra and shorts in a pile.

  Angie’ face flamed brighter than a sugar maple in late October. “Are you nuts!”

  “It’s seven o’clock in the morning. No one’s probably been by this pond in weeks. Most of the hikers won’t be back on the trail for another hour or two.” Her mother waded into the water up to her knees and, bending low, began slapping water on her arms and breasts. Grace’s body was still strong and athletic, prettier than most women’s her age; not that she ever used her attractiveness to gain an unfair advantage.

  If anyone had suggested a mere five minutes ago that Angie would find herself skinny-dipping with her mother in the boondocks of Maine, she would have rolled her eyes and deemed them certifiably insane. The young girl pulled her T-shirt up over her head in one smooth motion. “How’s the water?”

  “Warm as a bathtub.” Her mother was floating on her back toward the middle of the pond. Angie could feel a scaly body brush up against her calf as she waded into the shallows.

  They reached the base of Mount Katahdin in the early afternoon, but the weather had turned gray and heavy rain pummeled the trail into a muddy mess. “This certainly isn’t fun,” Angie grumbled. A group of hikers returning from the summit looked beleaguered, worn out and miserable. Her mother spoke with one of the climbers. “It’s tough going. There’s a raw wind and, without sun, a good twenty degrees colder.”

  They went and huddled under a lean-to with a dozen o
ther campers. Half an hour later the rain was still pelting the ground with relentless force. “We’ll climb tomorrow,” her mother announced. “I’ll go pitch the tent and we’ll make do until this awful weather breaks.”

  “Everything soaked. There's no a decent place to pitch a tent.”

  “We’re all in the same boat.” Grace gestured at the rest of the hikers. “You’ll just have to make do.” She left Angie crouched under the lean-to and went off to see about the tent.

  Angie began to cry but nobody noticed. They didn’t notice because all the hikers were soaked to the bone and her tears just looked like so much extra precipitation. Here we are in the middle of nowhere. We can’t even go to a motel because our stupid car is twenty stupid miles away. We’re gonna have to make do with salami and cheese and sugar cookies. How appetizing! A regular gourmet spread!

  A half-hour later, Grace returned. She managed to pitch the tent beneath a large fir. The ground was covered with a bed of pine needles, which held up reasonably well under the rain. Angie crawled into the tent and unwrapped her sleeping bag. Then she slithered in, zipped it up around her neck and, with the rain mercilessly slashing the canvas at a forty-five degree angle, went to sleep.

  No matter that it was two in the afternoon and that she hadn’t bothered to change out of her damp clothes or eaten anything since breakfast. Angie dozed and when she woke, she slept again. She snoozed through eleven straight hours of rain and when she woke, the sun was shining, she felt refreshed and sublimely happy. Her mother was already cooking up a pan of fried salami. She handed Angie a cup of coffee. They ate quickly without much conversation, and were back on the trail within an hour.

  “Tuckahoe,” Grace indicated a plant growing in the cleft of a lichen-stained rock. “Also known as Indian bread. The roots are quite tasty or at least some Native Americans think so.”

  They reached the summit of Mount Katahdin by early afternoon and lingered for an hour with a dozen other hikers. On the way down they recognized Mr. Anderson. The grizzled veteran gave them a toothless, thin-lipped smile as he plodded past. He wore a knapsack without a frame and a knobby walking stick. “Traveling light in his old age,” Grace observed.

  “How old do you think he is?”

  “Hard to say. Eighty give or take a decade.” Angie couldn’t be sure if her mother was pulling her leg. What would make an old man in poor health want to be out in the wilderness alone and unprotected? The same torrential downpour that trapped them for most of the previous day had menaced him, too. But the adaptable and resilient old man had made it through with his sunny disposition intact.

  Grace suggested that they head south until the setting sun got caught up on the treetops before pitching camp. They had been moving slowly down a rutted path when Angie grabbed her mother’s arm and brought her up short. A hundred feet away in a secluded pond stood a full-grown moose. The large, palmate antlers showed that it was a male. He dipped his head beneath the water and, when the broad muzzle reappeared, it was full of soggy plants ripped from the muddy water. They stood and watched the animal forage its way downstream before moving off down the trail.

  Later that night after they had eaten their whole grain rice and vegetables followed by scalding coffee and sugar cookies, Grace said, “I would tell how much I love you, darling daughter, but something essential always gets lost in the unwieldy fabric of language,... the wordiness.” She took Angie’s face in her callused hands and planted a moist kiss on either cheek. “Better that we should muck about with the likes of Mr. Anderson or watch a bull moose at dinner.”

  “Or skinny-dip with rainbow trout.”

  Grace’s sly smile was wasted on the darkness. “Yes, that too.”

  Part II

  “We’re going to try something a bit different today,” Grace announced. Already off to a bad start, she had inadvertently slipped into ‘the voice’, that stilted, high-pitched inflection that drove her daughter crazy.

  Okay. Take a deep breath and start again.

  “I want everybody to come and sit here on the floor in a circle. Right now. Let’s move, move, move!”

  That got their attention. The class rose from their seats and sashayed toward the front of the room. “Take a look at this box.” Grace held up one of Carl’s latest creations, a poem box done in contrasting light and dark woods. “Samantha,” she turned to a tall black girl with cornrow beaded hair, “Lift the lid and tell us what you find inside.”

  The girl propped the box on her lap and opened it.

  “We are each of us angels with only one wing

  And we can only fly by embracing one another.

  Luci,… Luci …”

  “Luciano de Crescenzo,” Grace refused to get bogged down in incidentals. She waved a fist in the air. “What’s the lady with the exotic name trying to tell us? She scanned the room. “Samantha, what does the poem mean to you?”

  “I dunno.”

  A commotion erupted in the hallway. Grace could hear Principal Skinner reprimanding a student late for class. What if he burst into her English class and found the class scattered on the floor? “We are each of us angels with only one wing.” Grace stomped back and forth like a wild woman. “What good is a deformed angel?”

  There are no takers. I’m losing them. This is worse than Gray’s Elegy. A blade of terror shot through Grace’s viscera. She had the momentary urge to cut and run, bolt for the classroom door and never look back. “Come here!” She grabbed the black girl by the arm and yanked her to her feet. “Raise your left arm straight out. You’re damaged goods,... a wounded bird”

  “Rebecca.” She gestured toward a freckle-faced girl with braces. “Stand here.” She positioned her to the right of the dark-skinned girl. “Did you feel that?”

  “Feel what?” the freckle-faced girl looked muddled.

  “A hunter just mistook an angel for a mallard and blasted your left arm,… wing with buckshot. You’re in worse shape than Samantha.”

  “Teacher’s loosing it,” somebody whispered amid nervous giggles. Resurrected from the dead, the class was actually paying attention.

  “Now put your broken wings around each other’s waste, and let’s see if we can’t fly from here to the coat rack.” Grace started waving her own arms up and down pantomiming an injured bird in labored flight, as she moved off in the direction of the coat rack at the rear of the classroom. The twosome followed, tripping over their feet, fluttering their free arms and laughing like fools.

  “Pair up! Pair up!” Grace commanded, insisting that the class choose partners. “Picture yourselves as the Wright Brothers at Kitty Hawk.”

  “Wright Sisters,” Samantha cried and shot off in another direction with her lopsided partner in tow.

  Five minutes later when the hysteria died down, Grace sent them back to their seats. “Alright, so we had a little fun, but what did you learn about the human condition?” Grace pointed at a boy in the front row wearing an Adidas sweatshirt. “We are each of us angels. What’s the underlying message?”

  The boy crooked his head to one side and tapped a pencil listlessly on the desk. “Angels are special. Everyone, not just rich people or movie stars, is unique.”

  Grace raised her right arm and fluttered it back and forth. “In the poem everyone is missing a wing. What’s going on here?”

  “People,… all of us,” a girl with her blond hair tied back in a French braid, responded, “are imperfect, ...mortal.”

  “Mortal. I like that word. Nobody’s perfect. We all have failings and shortcomings, but if we band together, embrace each other, we can do amazing things.” Grace drifted over to the blackboard and in cursive script wrote: SYNERGY.

  “Synergy - the interaction of two or more agents so that their combined effect is greater than the sum of the individual parts.” Several students were copying the definition off the blackboard. The poem had finally hit them where they lived, blossomed and come alive.

  “Since we’re on the subject of angels”, Gra
ce glanced up at the clock. In ten minutes the bell would send them scurrying to their next class. “The Talmud is a book of Jewish wisdom, clever sayings, advice and teaching. It’s written in the Talmud that every blade of grass has an angel that hovers over it and whispers, Grow! Grow!”

  The children were staring at her with rapt expressions. This wasn’t school. It was pure magic. Educational sorcery with no Kenny ‘the comedian’ Kirkland to ruin the moment. “I need a blade of grass,” Grace bellowed. “Grass? Grass?” A tentative hand lifted chest high. The boy, Lester Boswell, was small in stature and rather scrawny. Because of a pronounced stammer, he was seeing both the speech therapist and school psychologist, Dr. Rosen. “Lester, come sit here in the front of the room.”

  “Okay, class, forget about your former classmate. Lester Boswell doesn’t exist anymore.” A barrage of laughter rumbled through the room and several boys hooted. “What we have now,” Grace ignored their foolishness, “is a single, solitary blade of grass. According to the Talmud every single blade of grass has its own angel to nurture and protect, and I, coincidentally, just so happen to be a grass angel. “Grow!” she chanted. “Grow! Grow! Grow!”

  The children picked up the incantation which, quickly swelled into a thunderous wave of unsolicited affection. Midway through the chorus, Grace raised Lester Boswell to his knees, full height and, finally, up on his toes in a symbolic gesture. Everybody cheered. Bedlam ensued. The bell rang. In the far corner of the room, abandoned and shoved up against a slightly bedraggled coat rack on the refurbished, wheat-colored floor lay Carl Solomon’s box.

  ******

  In the morning when Grace went out to retrieve the Sunday paper the house was covered with egg. The slimy yolk and brittle shells reached as high as the second level with an ugly yellow streak smeared across the picture window. She went back in the house and called the police. A patrol car drove up ten minutes later. The officer was the same man she had spoken to at the station.

  “What a mess!” The officer tilted his neck so far back his mouth hung open. “Any idea who might have done this?”