A North Country Life

by Sydney Lea

  The candy still tasted sweet; he simply licked the dark streaks from his tiny fist and palm and forearm.

  That power of recalling a day or a season's conditions, along with a few other endowments, is about gone. I am quicker to summon the elements from a morning many years back, like that one on Freeze-to-Death, than from a few hours.

  But whatever gifts I own or lack, I'll never forget how the afternoon of your funeral shaped up: it was very like that hour of the geese, but this time the nasty conditions, rather than appropriate to a moment of glory, seemed the opposite. The moment marked for me an end to a crucial discipleship, friendship, even son-ship. I watched the chill earth close over all that.

  The old saw claims that time heals our wounds, but it's not so much that we're healed as that the wounds become part of us, along with the joys and frustrations and pleasures of any life. They sink deep inside our beings, components now of what people describe as our characters.

  In certain moods, the day of that service in '76 seems to have become a perennial one, a present full of sideways sleet and wind. We mourners dodge strips of shingle, tarred paper, and tin, torn by the gale from the Passamaquoddy shacks. Sand and salt blow off the road and sting our eyes as we file into the reservation's small Catholic chapel. The congregation is about a quarter tribal, three quarters white.

  It's February, but Big Lake is pocked with open water in the strange winter thaw. Whitecaps show in the gaps, sloshing up and over the ice. Haggard dogs shiver, pressed against the leeward wall of a maintenance shed. I notice a poster flapping from another wall. I can't read it in the blow, but I know what it says: KEEP MAINE'S FORESTS GREEN. It doesn't seem possible they'll ever be that again.

  The power has failed clear to the coast.

  Though I don't know her, a Native woman limps to my side and tells me she can't for all her many years remember anything like this late-winter weather. She grimaces, sneaking a tea bag under her lip against the pain in a dark tooth, which she keeps touching, as if she had a tic, but it's only that she's unsettled, as we all must be, at least in some measure.

  In the brush that borders the parking lot, I see the rusted head of an axe. Fox, vole, and deer tracks meander among the weeds that poke through ugly snow by the path to the church. Two barred owls start yammering at one another, midday dark as dusk. Once you likened that racket of owls to a good pack of hounds. Perfect. I remembered, and remember now, the yaps of my last beagle down in a black swamp. Every sensible detail starts a recollection.

  All this turmoil—high water and wind and loss of electricity—seems to settle on our group; we mill, uncertain where to go in the dim sanctuary, with its incongruous whiff of incense. Your wife, not you, was the Catholic, and even in death, as in life, you oblige her. The weather, so gloom-ridden and wild at once, settles on Peter Dana Point, this thumb jabbed into the rumbling belly of the lake. I'd like to ask the old Native woman how she knew you, but I don't.

  No, I can't imagine suitable elegy for you, for your father Frank, for my own father and brother, for your uncle George, for anyone gone from my brief life. Elegy feels like posture, pretense, artifice.

  It would be good to hold something lovelier in mind: your camp, say, on the point. A quiet July night on the lake. This far north—flat country under wide sky—there's still enough light at nine of a mid-summer's evening to look cross-lake. We've strolled east a few hundred yards just to look for what we can, but in the twilight we hear before we see that cow moose and her twin calves wading, all a-clatter, from the Middleground out to Prune Island.

  Despite their considerable distance from where we stand, even the younger animals seem monumental, like figures in a procession that could have begun a thousand years ago. It's as if the moose represent something, though I couldn't say just what; after all, they're only seeking a place where the mosquitoes are thinner than on the mainland. There's the barely audible luff of a blue heron's wings overhead as it coasts into the marsh behind us. Then a long and wordless hush.

  You were eight years younger than my father, and you were both, tragically, about the same age when you died in your late fifties—far, far too young. I'd just turned twenty-three when his coronary killed him, thirty-three when yours killed you. In between, you had taken over in many ways, giving me a sort of graduate education in the things he started for me: woodcraft, hunting, canoeing, pursuits that have ever since constituted the rhythms of my life, even when I'm merely sitting at a desk as now.

  Inside the wintry church, I pick out certain crucial visages: dear Earl, who for some reason always called you Gus, as you called him too; Lola, the masterful Passamaquoddy basket-maker, a little your senior; your sweet younger sister Annie. I don't yet know that Earl will live to ninety, and Annie almost that long, that Lola will make it to a hundred or thereabouts. I don't know that my firstborn son, your five-year-old namesake, will have children too, much less that his younger sister will have twins, her baby boy likewise taking the name Creston. I don't know that I and the wife who walks beside me to the pew will walk our separate ways in a short half-decade.

  I don't know much of anything.

  It's late afternoon now, thirty-five years later, and I lean on my elbows. Out in the shed, I have a couple of ruffed grouse brining, which I mean to smoke for Thanksgiving. There's a good bed of coals in the woodstove beside my desk, though it's not quite genuine cold time yet. Through the study window, I watch a pair of hooded mergansers dip and surface on our pond, dip again and surface. Time may be a perpetuity, I dream, things repeating and repeating themselves. There may be a brighter side after all to that perennial today I imagined a moment ago. The water is cuffed by wind, the minor version of that high-handed blow on Big Lake so long ago.

  I could write your name into any of those sentences I've just composed, your human nature so enmeshed with nature proper that I still find it hard to segregate the two when I think of you. I glance briefly at a photograph on the desk; it shows you holding up an imaginary shotgun and aiming on an imaginary flight of waterfowl.

  The afternoon ebbs, and through the glass door of the stove I watch the fire wane too, its glow taking me back to many an outdoor blaze's end. We sat before those flames, swapping tale after tale, you, at my insistence, providing the greater number. It didn't matter whether or not I'd heard a story before; each was new and familiar at once, same as the fires.

  In that place of countless waters, the murmur of waves and the lisp of currents furnished insistent under-song to our conversations, and just now the stove's radiant embers and the slaps of wavelets on the pond send me back to a certain early spring.

  You and I have just dipped these smelt from one of the local brooks; I can't remember which. We've labored to pull driftwood out of a half-frozen sand spit and kindled it with birch bark, which browned and curled back on itself like some old letter. The heat has galloped across its spectrum. We cook the little fish and eat them right out of the pan when it cools some, fingers for implements, trousers for wipes. Steam rises from our boot leathers.

  We finish, and turn attention to a red squirrel and raven as they scrabble over bones and heads we've chucked into the brush. We laugh at this comical skirmish until we nearly weep. Or perhaps it's just the smoke in our eyes, the breeze having shifted. The smoke smells sweet, and the water bears an equally fragrant whiff of tannin, so typical of these red wetland waters. You remark that the bark of the squirrel and the growl of the raven are rough as a stub fence. There's a paradoxically honeyed quality to the comment.

  I have no choice these years later but to accept, even to affirm, such bittersweet gifts of another weather, late fall this time, the air turned so suddenly clear at dusk that the only haze is inward. It prevails for a moment. Then, through it I discern more fish, native brook trout, curling too. They're that fresh. Another pan-full. The trout's gorgeous flank-spots slowly fade.

  Out on the lake, all done with her own fishing, a loon calls out for wind. Without it she'll have nothing to lift her
. Darkness floats down. It's time for all of us, loon included, to make ready for night.

  An American poet, to whose work I often resort, in one of his most noted and most misapplied poems, "The Road Not Taken," speaks of "knowing how way leads on to way." I know a lot about that too: once my mind gets started in retrospective mode, this path seems to branch onto that one, that onto another, on and on until only sleep, and at times not even that, stops my rambling. A person's memory can and will go anywhere, everywhere.

  Now sunset conspires with the deep orange shimmer of the stove in transporting me to the summer of 1964, when my immediately younger brother and I followed you to Scraggly Lake. It was something of a production to get there in those days, all the way up West Grand, then through Junior by canoe. Not so long after, the timber operations would cut roads to virtually every beautiful place in the territory. Plans are afoot to put four-hundred-foot wind turbines on a ridge above that cherished body of water. But Scraggly was remote territory then.

  Once the sun went good and down, at your instruction we took nets and headlights and filled a bucket with frogs from the shores of Jake's

  Island. Next morning, we'd hook the little creatures through their lips and toss them out for bass. When our bobbers twitched, we'd throw the bails of our spinning reels and let the fish go until they stopped, then we'd set the hooks.

  The bass would be large and stout-hearted. That next night, though, I lay awake for a long time, picturing the poor frogs as they raked their mouths with their front feet, a gesture pitiably human. When slumber did come, I'd dream of an immense frog, wearing a porkpie hat and sunglasses, puffing on a thick cigar. He sat manlike on the aft seat of a square-stern canoe, clutching me. I'd wake up just before he ran the hook through my lips.

  Your apparent indifference to the frogs' desperate gesture and my revulsion from it, which made me vow right then I'd never use this method again, indicated some pretty basic differences in our cultures after all. You were, especially then, far more a part of nature than I, and nature, as another poet insisted, is red in tooth and claw.

  All of this now tells me nothing so much as that some deeper bond made our differences unimportant in the end. I wonder if my brother's turning to vegetarianism shortly after that trip had anything to do with our day of cruel angling. It never occurred to me to ask him when he was alive. I call up yet another line of poetry, terse, poignant, by the late Donald Justice: "So much has fallen." The poem is entitled "Absences."

  Way leading on to way, I contemplate yet one more absence, one more late poet, your uncle George, who would be more than one hundred and twenty if he were still with us. No one took greater delight in his performances than you did. You had most of his songs and poems by heart, and I see, just as if you were here with me, the glee in your eyes as you recite this one or that.

  In George's era, more even than in yours, the village made its own entertainment. There would be variety shows in a building, gone before my time, out by the ball field. I vividly remember when young people from the village played against young Passamaquoddy on that field. I especially recall the Socabesin brothers, Patrick and Ray, the first a ferocious slugger, the other a dazzling pitcher. The field hasn't been used in almost a generation, at least not for sporting events. The mating woodcock don't whistle up and tumble back to its spring grass anymore. There's an annual craft fair there now, a nice enough event but a different matter altogether.

  Back, however, to those old shows. They usually involved musical acts and skits, and as fellow townsmen worked to change sets, George would stand before the curtain and entertain the audience. His pieces of poetry, as he called them, were ordinarily satiric of people, places, and things in town, though at times they could be wonderfully tender.

  I once asked George to write down one of my favorites, which lampooned each member of the Boston-based crew that took the better jobs when the new schoolhouse, a WPA project, was built in the '30s. George worked on the assignment at the table in my river camp, gripping the pencil stub like a dirk knife, tongue poking out, eyes squinted.

  After twenty minutes or so, he said, "To hell with it!" Writing was something he could do—and almost never did. "Sit down," he almost barked at me. "I'll give it to you." I took the pencil and we finished in fairly short order.

  That morning I recognized more clearly than ever how rooted George was in a living oral tradition. He composed all those poems and songs in his head, not on paper, and like any made up by his family or neighbors, and there were a lot, they followed variations on one format: a four-stress line, followed by a rhyming one in three stresses.

  I'm sure that my poetic inclinations to regular meter and rhyme as means to lodging verse in a hearer's memory must owe something to your Uncle George, as to other fabulous locals. I take no part in the endless and stale debate between proponents of free and formal verse; it's only that I do seem to be all about memory, and always have been, even back when, relatively speaking, my store of it was pretty slight.

  You and I sit inside your father Frank's camp on Wabassus Lake, which he and George shared in trapping season as young men, and where your dad lived all but year-round to a ripe old age. George told me how the paper company once demanded a lease payment from the brothers for this property, despite their having used the camp for years and years. Somehow the two found a way not only to dodge the payment but also to procure an actual deed to the land.

  I can't remember the details of how they managed that trick, but I do remember the poem he or Frank or both put together in response to the company's demand. At my request, you've recited it for me over and over, until it's something I have by heart too, though I ache to hear your better voice, and George's even better one, recite it. Part of the ballad goes like this:

  We've hunted on the ridges,

  We've trapped along the shores,

  And we pray we may continue

  Till St. Regis locks the door.

  St. Regis thinks it owns the land

  Where we hunt the ducks and geese.

  St. Regis must be gettin' poor:

  They want a dollar's lease.

  We'll see they never get that fee;

  We've got things well in hand.

  And St. Regis may be told one day

  The MacArthurs own the land.

  There's poetry in the very names of the places the older MacArthurs owned in their fashion. Slewgundy Ridge. Jones's Mistake. Dawn Marie Beach. Bear Trap Landing. Pocomoonshine Lake. Porcupine Mountain. Big Musquash Stream. Flipper Creek. Buck Knoll. Slaughter Point.

  We were a pair of outdoor companions too, though for far less time, and like those magic elders, we beheld these landmarks in each other's company, and to that extent may have felt we owned the land in a comparable way. I won't pursue this line of reverie, because my thoughts, as they touch on matters that are after all spiritual, will either grow impossibly vague or pretentious—or both.

  I look through my study window. Our pond has stilled.

  It must be mere coincidence that when we file out after the service, we all notice that the wind across Big Lake has quit dead too, its absence as deep as was its rage. Those places and days blow softly through the churchyard instead, each like a consecration. You have your elegy; the old names deliver it rightly. You knew what they meant; you touched them all—boot, paddle, and pole.

  I realize more strongly than ever how lucky I was to know them too. With you. At least a little. It is not enough, but it is far, far better than nothing, the fact that I must settle just now for repeating the names of your ancestors' haunts, which we saw in all weathers, as we did the ones I've mentioned sharing with you. Freeze-to-Death Island. Prune Island. Scraggly Lake. Jake's Island.

  It would take a lifetime to include them all; in fact it has.

  Creston MacArthur, my chief and beloved mentor in everything having to do with woods and waters.

  Daybook, February

  I looked this morning at one of my older journal entries. Sho
uld I be concerned or impatient that I more and more indulge in retrospection? Even if so, there's nothing to be done; I'm helpless.

  The entry, recorded on February 18, 1971, reports that I climbed the small, pointed hill that faced the decrepit yellow house in which my first wife and I then lived with our infant son. I remember that hill as a sort of children's book illustration, a simple, symmetric triangle.

  "A hard job to get across Trout Brook," I wrote. "The stream virtually all open even in February, or else covered by treacherous drum ice. What I value now has a lot more to do than it once did with pleasures of the hearth, but there are moments like today when my deepest wish would be to have some natural landmark—hill, mountain, brook, whatever—named for me on a map. The place would prove difficult enough to reach that it would never be 'improved,' say, by some house-builder intent on The View. No one would go there save those who, like me, wanted just to be there, with no thought of putting the surroundings to some fancied use."

  Today I smirk a little at the man, not yet thirty, who rhapsodizes, however tersely and in fact untruthfully, on having settled for domesticity, and I wince a bit at his longing for a landmark in his name. Of course I'm a bit nostalgic for that young man's capacity to feel such vainglorious longing, the one who imagined immortality, even of such a minor sort, within his reach.

  That writer was surely motivated, to defend him in a modest way, by his reverence for the old woodsmen and -women, in whose names there were indeed places, however obscure, on maps or at least in local parlance.