by Alice Munro
The Last of a Breed. Local Free Spirit Shares Stories and Insights.
He climbs out of the dump laboriously, as if he felt obliged to have a little conversation.
“You going to be taking them trees out?”
Roy says, “I might be.” He thinks Percy may be after a donation of firewood.
“Then you better hurry up,” Percy says.
“Why’s that?”
“All of this here is going under contract.”
Roy cannot but help gratifying him by asking what contract this might be. Percy is a gossip but not a liar. At least not about the things he is truly interested in, which are deals, inheritances, insurance, house break-ins, money matters of all sorts. It is a mistake to think that people who have never managed to get hold of money aren’t busy thinking about it. A surprise, this would be, to people who expect him to be a philosophical tramp, all wrapped up in memories of olden times. Though he can shoot off a little of that too when required.
“Heard about this fellow,” Percy says, drawing it out. “When I was in town. I don’t know. Seems this fellow runs a sawmill and he’s got a contract to the River Inn and he’s going to supply them all the wood they want for the winter. Cord a day. That’s what they burn. Cord a day.”
Roy says, “Where did you hear that?”
“Beer parlor. All right, I go in there now and again. I never have no more than a pint. And these fellows I don’t know who they were, but they weren’t drunk neither. Talking about where the bush was and it was this one all right. Suter’s bush.”
Roy had talked to the farmer just last week, and he had thought he had the deal pretty well sewed up, just to do the usual cleanout.
“That’s a pile of wood,” he says easily.
“It is so.”
“If they mean to take it all they’d have to have a license.”
“You bet. Unless there’s something crooked,” said Percy with intense pleasure.
“None of my business. I got all the work I can handle.”
“I bet you do. All you can handle.”
—
ALL THE WAY HOME Roy can’t keep himself from thinking about this story. He has sold some wood now and then to the River Inn. But now they must have decided to take on one steady supplier, and he is not the one.
He thinks about the problems of getting that much wood out now, when the snow has already started. The only thing you could do would be to pull the logs out into the open field, before the real winter got under way. You’d have to get them out as quickly as possible, make a big pile of them there, saw them, and chop them up later. And to get them out you’d need a bulldozer or at least a big tractor. You’d have to make a road in and pull them out with chains. You’d need a crew—there was no way this could be a one- or two-man operation. It would have to be done on a big scale.
So it wasn’t sounding like a part-time enterprise, the kind he carried on himself. It could be a big outfit, somebody from out of the county altogether.
Eliot Suter had not given any hint of this offer when Roy was talking to him. But it is quite possible that an approach was made to him later and he decided to forget the casual sort of arrangement that had been put forward by Roy. Decided to let the bulldozer go in.
During the evening Roy thinks of phoning up and asking what is going on. But then he thinks that if the farmer has indeed changed his mind there is nothing to be done. A spoken agreement is nothing to hold to. The man could just tell him to clear off.
The best thing for Roy to do might be just to act as if he has never heard Percy’s story, never heard about any other fellow—just go in and take what trees he can as quickly as he can, before the bulldozer gets there.
Of course there is always a possibility that Percy may have been mistaken about the whole thing. He isn’t likely to have made it up just to bother Roy, but he could have got it twisted.
Yet the more Roy thinks about it the more he comes to discount this possibility. He just keeps seeing in his mind the bulldozer and the chained logs, the great log piles out in the field, the men with chain saws. That is the way they do things nowadays. Wholesale.
Part of the reason the story has made such an impact is that he has a dislike for the River Inn, which is a resort hotel on the Peregrine River. It is built on the remains of an old mill not far from the crossroads where Percy Marshall lives. In fact the inn owns the land Percy lives on and the house he lives in. There was a plan to tear the house down, but it turned out that the inn’s guests, having nothing much to do, like to walk down the road and take pictures of this derelict building and the old harrow and upturned wagon beside it, and the useless pump, and Percy, when he allows himself to be photographed. Some guests do sketches. They come from as far away as Ottawa and Montreal and no doubt think of themselves as being in the backwoods.
Local people go to the inn for a special lunch or dinner. Lea went once, with the dentist and his wife and the hygienist and her husband. Roy would not go. He said that he didn’t want to eat a meal that cost an arm and a leg, even when somebody else was paying. But he is not altogether sure what it is that he has against the inn. He is not exactly opposed to the idea of people spending money in the hope of enjoying themselves, or against the idea of other people making money out of the people who want to spend it. It is true that the antiques at the inn have been restored and reupholstered by craftsmen other than himself—people not from around here at all—but if he had been asked to do them he would probably have refused, saying he had more than enough work to do already. When Lea asked him what he thought was the matter with the inn, the only thing he could think of to say was that when Diane had applied for a job there, as a waitress, they had turned her down, saying that she was overweight.
“Well, she was,” said Lea. “She is. She says so herself.”
True. But Roy still thinks of those people as snobs. Grabbers and snobs. They are putting up new buildings supposed to be like an old-time store and an old-time opera house, just for show. They burn wood for show. A cord a day. So now some operator with a bulldozer will be levelling the bush as if it was a cornfield. This is just the sort of high-handed scheme you would expect, the kind of pillage you might know they would get up to.
—
HE TELLS LEA THE STORY he has heard. He still tells her things—it’s a habit—but he is so used to her now not paying any real attention that he hardly notices whether there is an answer or not. This time she echoes what he himself has said.
“Never mind. You’ve got enough to do anyway.”
That’s what he would have expected, whether she was well or not. Missing the point. But isn’t that what wives do—and husbands probably the same—around fifty percent of the time?
—
THE NEXT MORNING he works on a drop-leaf table for a while. He means to stay in the shed all day and get a couple of past-due jobs finished. Near noon he hears Diane’s noisy muffler and looks out the window. She’ll be here to take Lea to the reflexologist—she thinks it does Lea good and Lea doesn’t object.
But she is heading for the shed, not the house.
“Howdy,” she says.
“Howdy.”
“Hard at work?”
“Hard as ever,” Roy says. “Offer you a job?”
This is their routine.
“I got one. Listen, what I came in here for, I want to ask you a favor. What I want is to borrow the truck. Tomorrow, to take Tiger to the vet. I can’t handle him in the car. He’s got too big for the car. I hate to have to ask you.”
Roy says not to worry about it.
Tiger to the vet, he thinks, that’s going to cost them.
“You weren’t going to need the truck?” she says. “I mean, you can use the car?”
He has of course been meaning to go out to the bush tomorrow, providing he got his jobs done today. What he’ll have to do, he decides now, is get out there this afternoon.
“I’ll fill it up with gas for you,” Diane says.
As soon as they are out of sight and he has things cleaned up, he gets into the truck and drives out to where he was the day before. He thinks about stopping by and questioning Percy further but concludes that it would not be any use. Such a show of interest might just get Percy inventing things. He thinks again about talking to the farmer but decides against it for the same reasons as last night.
He parks the truck on the trail that leads into the bush. This trail soon peters out, and even before it does he has left it. He is walking around looking at the trees, which appear the same as they did yesterday and don’t give a sign of being party to any hostile scheme. He has the chain saw and the ax with him, and he feels as if he has to hurry. If anybody else shows up here, if anybody challenges him, he will say that he has permission from the farmer and he knows nothing about any other deal. He will say that furthermore he intends to go on cutting unless the farmer comes and personally tells him to get out. If that really happens, of course he will have to go. But it’s not likely it will happen because Suter is a hefty man with a bad hip, so he is not much taken to wandering around his property.
“…no authority…,” Roy says, talking to himself like Percy Marshall, “I want to see it on paper.”
He’s talking to the stranger he’s never even seen.
The floor of any bush is usually rougher than the surface of the surrounding land. Roy has always thought that this was caused by trees falling, pulling up the earth with their roots, then just lying there, rotting. Where they had lain and rotted there would be a mound—where their roots had torn out the earth there would be hollows. But he read somewhere—fairly recently, and he wishes he could remember where it was—that the cause was what happened long ago, just after the Ice Age, when ice formed between layers of earth and pushed it up into odd humps, just as it does today in the arctic regions. Where the land has not been cleared and worked the humps remain.
—
WHAT HAPPENS TO ROY NOW is the most ordinary and yet the most unbelievable thing. It is what might happen to any stupid daydreamer walking in the bush, to any holidayer gawking around at nature, to somebody who thought the bush was a kind of park to stroll in. Somebody who wore light shoes instead of boots and didn’t bother to keep an eye on the ground. It has never happened to Roy before in hundreds of times of walking in the bush, it has never once come near to happening.
A light snow has been falling for some time, making the earth and dead leaves slippery. One of his feet skids and twists, and then the other foot plunges through a cover of snowy brush to the ground, which is farther down than he expected. That is, he steps carelessly—is thrown, almost—into the sort of spot where you should always step testingly, carefully, and not at all if you can see a nearby place that is better. Even so, what happens? He doesn’t go down hard, it’s not as if he has stumbled into a groundhog hole. He is thrown off balance, but he sways reluctantly, almost disbelievingly, then goes down with the skidding foot caught somehow under the other leg. He holds the saw out from himself as he falls, and flings the ax clear. But not clear enough—the ax handle hits him hard, against the knee of his twisted leg. The saw has pulled him over in its direction but at least he hasn’t fallen against it.
He has felt himself go down almost in slow motion, thoughtfully and inevitably. He could have broken a rib, but he didn’t. And the ax handle could have flown up and hit him in the face, but it didn’t. He could have gashed his leg. He thinks of all these possibilities not with immediate relief, but as if he can’t be sure yet that they have not happened. Because the way this started—the way he skidded and stepped onto the brush and fell—was so stupid and awkward, so hard to believe, that any preposterous outcome could follow.
He starts to pull himself up. Both knees hurt—one from being hit by the handle and one from coming down hard on the ground. He gets hold of the trunk of a young cherry tree—where he could have bashed his head—and pulls himself up gradually. Tentatively he puts weight on one foot and just touches the ground with the other—the one that skidded and twisted underneath him. In a minute he’ll try it. He bends to pick up the saw and nearly buckles again. A pain shoots up from the ground and doesn’t stop till it reaches his skull. He forgets the saw, straightens up, not sure where the pain started. That foot—did he put weight on it as he bent over? The pain has drawn back into that ankle. He straightens the leg as much as he can, considering it, then very cautiously tries the foot on the ground, tries his weight. He can’t believe the pain. He can’t believe that it would continue so, could continue to defeat him. The ankle must be more than twisted—it must be sprained. Could it be broken? In his boot it doesn’t look any different from his other, faithful, ankle.
He knows that he will have to bear it. He will have to get used to it to get out of here. And he keeps trying, but he does not make any progress. He can’t set his weight on it. It must be broken. A broken ankle—even that is surely a minor injury, the sort of thing old ladies get when they slip on the ice. He has been lucky. A broken ankle, a minor injury. Nevertheless he can’t take a step. He can’t walk.
What he understands, finally, is that in order to get back to the truck he’s going to have to abandon his ax and his chain saw and get down on his hands and knees and crawl. He lets himself down as easily as he can and hauls himself around into the track of his bootprints, which are now filling with snow. He thinks to check the pocket where his keys are, making sure it’s zipped. He shakes off his cap and lets it lie—the peak interferes with his vision. Now the snow is falling on his bare head. But it’s not so cold. Once he accepts crawling as a method of locomotion it’s not bad—that is, it’s not impossible, though it’s hard on his hands and his good knee. He’s careful enough now, dragging himself over the brush and through the saplings, over the hummocky ground. Even if he gets a little bit of a slope to roll himself down, he doesn’t dare—he has to guard the bad leg. He’s glad he didn’t track through any boggy places and he’s glad he didn’t wait any longer before starting back; the snow is getting heavier and his prints are almost blotted out. Without that track to follow it would be hard to know, at ground level, whether he was going the right way.
The situation, which seemed at first so unreal to him, is getting to seem more natural. Going along on hands and elbows and the one knee, close to the ground, testing a log for rot, then pulling himself over it on his stomach, getting his hands full of rotten leaves and dirt and snow—he can’t keep his gloves on, can’t get the proper hold and feel of things on the bush floor except with his cold bare scratched hands—he is no longer surprised at himself. He doesn’t think anymore about his ax and his saw back there, though at first he could hardly pull himself away from them. He scarcely thinks back as far as the accident itself. It happened, no matter how. The whole thing no longer seems in the least unbelievable or unnatural.
There is a fairly steep bank to get up, and when he reaches it he takes a breather, relieved to have come this far. He warms his hands inside his jacket, one at a time. For some reason he thinks of Diane in her unbecoming red ski jacket and decides that her life is her life, there is not much use worrying about it. And he thinks of his wife, pretending to laugh at the television. Her quietness. At least she’s fed and warm, she isn’t some refugee shuffling along the roads. Worse things happen, he thinks. Worse things.
He starts up the bank, digging in his elbows and his sore but serviceable knee where he can. He keeps going; he grits his teeth as if that will keep him from sliding back; he grabs at any exposed root or halfway-sturdy stem that he can see. Sometimes he slides, his hold breaks, but he gets himself stopped and inches upwards again. He never raises his head to judge how far he still has to go. If he pretends the incline goes on forever, it�
��ll be a kind of bonus, a surprise, to get to the top.
It takes a long time. But he pulls himself onto level ground at last, and through the trees ahead and the falling snow he can see the truck. The truck, the old red Mazda, a faithful old friend, miraculously waiting. Being on the level raises his expectations of himself again and he gets onto his knees, going easy, easy on the bad leg, rises shakily onto his good leg, dragging the other, swaying like a drunk. He tries a sort of hop. No good—he’d lose his balance that way. He tries a little weight on the bad leg, just gently, and realizes that the pain could make him black out. He sinks back to the old position and crawls. But instead of crawling through the trees towards the truck he turns at right angles and makes for where he knows the track to be. When he gets there he begins to make better time, crawling over the hard ruts, the mud that has thawed in the daylight but is now starting to freeze again. It’s cruel on the knee and his palms but otherwise so much easier than the route he had to take before that he feels almost light-headed. He can see the truck ahead. Looking at him, waiting for him.
He’ll be able to drive. So lucky the damage is to the left leg. Now that the worst is over a lot of vexing questions come at him, along with his relief. Who will go and get the saw and the ax for him, how can he explain to anybody just where to find them? How soon will the snow cover them up? When will he be able to walk?
No use. He pushes all that away, raises his head to get another encouraging look at the truck. He stops again to rest and warm his hands. He could put his gloves on now, but why ruin them?
A large bird rises out of the bush to one side of him and he cranes his neck to see what it is. He thinks it’s a hawk, but it could be a buzzard. If it’s a buzzard will it have its eye on him, thinking it’s in luck now, seeing he’s hurt?
He waits to see it circle back, so he can tell what it is by the manner of its flight, and its wings.
And while he’s doing that, while he’s waiting, and taking note of the bird’s wings—it is a buzzard—he is also getting a drastically new idea about the story that has preoccupied him for the last twenty-four hours.
