new ranges of passion, the big door squawked, and Harp
was asking: “Ca’ break down?” I do still think I heard
Leda wail. If so, it ended as we got the door latched and
Harp drew a newly fitted two-by-four bar across it. I
couldn’t understand that: the old latch was surely proof
against any wind short of a hurricane.
“Bolt-Bucket never breaks down. Ought to get one,
Harp— lots of company. All she did was go in the ditch.”
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“You might see her again come spring.” His hens were
scratching overhead, not yet scared by the storm. Harp’s
eyes were small gray glitters of trouble. “Ben, you figure a
man’s getting old at fifty-six?”
“No.” My bones (getting old) ached for the warmth of
his kitchen-dining-living-everything room, not for sad
philosophy. “Use your phone, okay?”
“If the wires ain’t down,” he said, not moving, a man
beaten on by other storms. “Them loafers didn’t cut
none of the overhang branches all summer. I told ’em of
course, I told ’em how it would be . . . I meant, Ben, old
enough to get dumb fancies?” My face may have told
him I thought he was brooding about himself with a
young wife. He frowned, annoyed that I hadn’t taken his
meaning. “I meant, seeing things. Things that can’t be
so, but— ”
“We can all do some of that at any age, Harp.”
That remark was a stupid brushoff, a stone for bread,
because I was cold, impatient, wanted in. Harp had
always a tense one-way sensitivity. His face chilled.
“Well, come in, warm up. Leda ain’t feeling too good.
Getting a cold or something.”
When she came downstairs and made me welcome,
her eyes were reddened. I don’t think the wind made that
noise. Droopy waddled from her basket behind the stove
to snuff my feet and give me my usual low passing mark.
Leda never had it easy there, young and passionate
with scant mental resources. She was twenty-eight that
year, looking tall because she carried her firm body
handsomely. Some of the sullenness in her big mouth
ancf lucid gray eyes was sexual challenge, some pure
discontent. I liked Leda; her nature was not one for
animosity or meanness. Before her marriage the Dark-
field News Bureau used to declare with its customary
scrupulous fairness that Leda had been covered by every
goddamn thing in pants within thirty miles. For once the
bureau may have spoken a grain of truth in the malice,
for Leda did have the smoldering power that draws men
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without word or gesture. After her abrupt marriage to
Harp— Sam told me all this; I wasn’t living in Darkfield
then and hadn’t met her— the garbage-gossip went hastily underground: enraging Harp Ryder was never healthy.
The phone wires weren’t down, yet. While I waited for
the garage to answer, Harp said, “Ben, I can’t let you
walk back in that. Stay over, huh?”
I didn’t want to. It meant extra work and inconvenience for Leda, and I was ancient enough to crave my known safe burrow. But I felt Harp wanted me to stay for
his own sake. I asked Jim Short at the garage to go ahead
with Bolt-Bucket if I wasn’t there to meet him. Jim
roared: “Know what it’s doing right now?”
“Little spit of snow, looks like.”
“Jesus!” He covered the mouthpiece imperfectly. I
heard his enthusiastic voice ring through cold-iron echoes: “Hey, old Ben’s got that thing into the ditch again!
Ain’t that something . . . ? Listen, Ben, I can’t make no
promises. Got both tow trucks out already. You better
stop over and praise the Lord you got that far.”
“Okay,” I said. “It wasn’t much of a ditch.”
Leda fed us coffee. She kept glancing toward the
landing at the foot of the stairs where a night-darkness
already prevailed. A closed-in stairway slanted down at a
never-used front door; beyond that landing was the other
ground floor room-parlor, spare, guestroom— where I
would sleep. I don’t know what Leda expected to encounter in that shadow. Once when a chunk of firewood made an odd noise in the range, her lips clamped shut on
a scream.
The coffee warmed me. By that time the weather left
no loophole for argument. Not yet 3:30, but west and
north were lost in furious black. Through the hissing
white flood I could just see the front of the bam forty feet
away. “Nobody’s going no place into that,” Harp said.
His little house shuddered, enforcing the words. “Leda,
you don’t look too brisk. Get you some rest.”
“I better see to the spare room for Ben.”
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Neither spoke with much tenderness, but it glowed
openly in him when she turned her back. Then some
other need bent his granite face out of its normal seams.
His whole gaunt body leaning forward tried to help him
talk. “You wouldn’t figure me for a man’d go off his
rocker?” he asked.
“Of course not. What’s biting, Harp?”
“There’s something in the woods, got no right to be
there.” To me that came as a letdown of relief: I would
not have to listen to another’s marriage problems. “I
wish, b’Jesus Christ, it would hit somebody else once, so
I could say what I know and not be laughed at all to hell.
I ain’t one for dumb fancies.”
You walked on eggs, with Harp. He might decide any
minute that / was laughing. “Tell me,” I said. “If •
anything’s out there now, it must feel a mite chilly.”
“Ayah.” He went to the north window, looking out
where we knew the road lay under white confusion.
Harp’s land sloped down the other side of the road to the
edge of mighty evergreen forest. Katahdin stands more
than fifty miles north and a little east of us. We live in a
withering shrink-world, but you could still set out from
Harp’s farm and, except for the occasional country road
and the rivers— not many large ones— you could stay in
deep forest all the way to the tundra, or Alaska. Harp
said, “This kind of weather is when it comes.”
He sank into his beat-up kitchen armchair and
reached for Kabloona. He had barely glanced at the book
while Leda was with us. “Funny name.”
“Kabloona’s an Eskimo word for white man.”
“He done these pictures . . . ? Be they good, Ben?”
“I like ’em. Photographs in the back.”
“Oh.” He turned the pages hastily for those, but
studied only the ones that showed the strong Eskimo
faces, and his interest faded. Whatever he wanted was
not here. “These people, be they— civilized?”
“In their own way, sure.”
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“Ayah, this guy looks like he could find his way in the
woods.”
“Likely the one thing he couldn’t do, Harp. They never
see a tree unless they come sout
h, and they hate to do
that. Anything below the Arctic is too warm.”
“That a fact . . . ? Well, it’s a nice book. How much
was it?” I’d found it secondhand; he paid me to the exact
penny. “I’ll be glad to read it.” He never would. It would
end up on the shelf in the parlor with the Bible, an old
almanac, a Longfellow, until someday this place went up
for auction and nobody remembered Harp’s way of
living.
“What’s this all about, Harp?”
“Oh . . . I was hearing things in the woods, back last
summer. I’d think, fox, then I’d know it wasn’t. Make
your hair stand right on end. Lost a cow, last August,
from the north pasture acrosst the rud. Section of board
fence tore out. I mean, Ben, the two top boards was
pulled out from the nail holes. No hammer marks.”
“Bear?”
“Only track I found looked like bear except too small.
You know a bear wouldn’t pull it out, Ben.”
“Cow slamming into it, panicked by something?”
He remained patient with me. “Ben, would I build a
cow-pasture fence nailing the crosspieces from the outside? Cow hit it with all her weight she might bust it, sure. And kill herself doing it, be blood and hair all over
the split boards, and she’d be there, not a mile and a half
away into the woods. Happened during a big thunderstorm. I figured it had to be somebody with a spite ag’inst me, maybe some son of a bitch wanting the prop’ty,
trying to scare me off that’s lived here all my life and my
family before me. But that don’t make sense. I found the
cow a week later, what was left. Way into the woods. The
head and the bones. Hide tore up and flang around. Any
person dressing off a beef, he’ll cut whatever he wants
and take off with it. He don’t sit down and chaw the meat
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Edgar Pangbom
off the bones, b’Jesus Christ. He don’t tear the thighbone
out of the joint. . . . All right, maybe bear. But no bear
did that job on that fence and then driv old Nell a mile
and a half into the woods to kill her. Nice little Jersey,
clever’s a kitten. Leda used to make over her, like she
don’t usually do with the stock. . . . I’ve looked plenty in
the woods since then, never turned up anything. Once
and again I did smell something. Fishy, like bear-smell
but— different. ”
“But Harp, with snow on the ground— ”
“Now you’ll really call me crazy. When the weather is
clear, I ain’t once found his prints. I hear him then, at
night, but I go out by daylight where I think the sound
was, there’s no trail. Just the usual snow tracks. I know.
He lives in the trees and don’t come down except when
it’s storming, I got to believe that? Because then he does
come, Ben, when the weather’s like now, like right now.
And old Ned and Jerry out in the stable go wild, and
sometimes we hear his noise under the window. I shine
my flashlight through the glass— never catch sight of
him. I go out with the ten gauge if there’s any light to see
by, and there’s prints around the house—holes filling up
with snow. By morning there’ll be maybe some marks
left, and they’ll lead off to the north woods, but under the
trees you won’t find it. So he gets up in the branches and
travels thataway? . . . Just once I have seen him, Ben.
Last October. I better tell you one other thing first. A day
or so after I found what was left of old Nell, I lost six
roaster chickens. I made over a couple box stalls, maybe
you remember, so the birds could be out on range and
roost in the barn at night. Good doors, and I always
locked ’em. Two in the morning, Ned and Jerry go crazy.
I got out through the bam into the stable, and they was
spooked, Ned trying to kick his way out. I got ’em quiet,
looked all over the stable— loft, harness room, everywhere. Not a thing. Dead quiet night, no moon. It had to be something the horses smelled. I come back into the
bam, and found one of the chicken-pen doors open—
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tore out from the lock. Chicken thief would bring along
something to pry with— wouldn’t he be a Christly idjut
if he didn’t . . . ? Took six birds, six nice eight-pound
roasters, and left the heads on the floor— bitten off.”
“Harp—some lunatic. People can go insane that way.
There are old stories— ”
“Been trying to believe that. Would a man live the
winter out there? Twenty below zero?”
“Maybe a cave— animal skins.”
“I’ve boarded up the whole back of the bam. Done the
same with the hen-loft windows— two-by-fours with
four-inch spikes driv slantwise. They be twelve feet off
the ground, and he ain’t come for ’em, not yet. . . . So
after that happened I sent for Sheriff Robart. Son of a
bitch happens to live in Darkfield, you’d think he
might’ve took an interest.”
“Do any good?”
Harp laughed. He did that by holding my stare,
making no sound, moving no muscle except a disturbance at the eye comers. A New England art; maybe it came over on the Mayflower. “ Robart he come by, after a
while. I showed him that door. I showed him them
chicken heads. Told him how I’d been spending my
nights out there on my ass, with the ten gauge.” Harp
rose to unload tobacco juice into the range Are; he has a
theory it purifies the air. “Ben, I might’ve showed him
them chicken heads a shade close to his nose. By the time
he got here, see, they wasn’t all that fresh. He made out
he’d look around and let me know. Mid-September.
Ain’t seen him since.”
“Might’ve figured he wouldn’t be welcome?”
“Why, he’d be welcome as shit on a tablecloth.”
“You spoke of—seeing it, Harp?”
“Could call it seeing . . . all right. It was during them
Indian summer days— remember? Like June except
them pretty colors, smell of windfalls— God, I like that,
I like October. I’d gone down to the slope acrosst the rud
where I mended my fence after losing old Nell. Just
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Edgar Pangbom
leaning there, guess I was tired. Late afternoon, sky
pinking up. You know how the fence cuts acrosst the
slope to my east wood lot. I’ve let the bushes grow
free— lot of elder, other stuff the birds come for. I was
looking down toward that little break between the north
woods and my wood lot, where a bit of old growed-up
pasture shows through. Pretty spot. Painter fella come by
a few years ago and done a picture of it, said the place
looked like a coro, dunno what the hell that is, he didn’t
say.”
I pushed at his brown study. “You saw it there?”
“No. Off to my right in them elder bushes. Fifty feet
from me, I guess. By God, I didn’t turn my head. I got it
with the tail of my eye and turned the other way as if I
meant to walk back to the rud. Made like busy with
something in the grass, come wandering back to the
fence some nearer. He stayed for me, a brownish patch in
them bushes by the big yellow birch. Near the height of a
man. No gun with me, not even a stick . . . Big shoulders, couldn’t see his goddamn feet. He don’t stand more’n five feet tall. His hands, if he’s got real ones, hung
out of my sight in a tangle of elder bushes. He’s got
brown fur, Ben, reddy-brown fur all over him. His face,
too, his head, his big thick neck. There’s a shine to fur in
sunlight, you can’t be mistook. So— I did look at him
direct. Tried to act like I still didn’t see him, but he
knowed. He melted back and got the birch between him
and me. Not a sound.” And then Harp was listening for
Leda upstairs. He went on softly: “Ayah, I ran back for a
gun, and searched the woods, for all the good it did me.
You’ll want to know about his face. I ain’t told Leda all
this part. See, she’s scared, I don’t want to make it no
worse, I just said it was some animal that snuck off
before I could see it good. A big face, Ben. Head real
human except it sticks out too much around the jaw. Not
much nose— open spots in the fur. Ben, the— the teeth! I
seen his mouth drop open and he pulled up one side of
his lip to show me them stabbing things. I’ve seen as big
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as that on a fuli-growed bear. That’s what I’ll hear, I ever
try to tell this. They’ll say I seen a bear. Now, I shot my
first bear when I was sixteen and Pa took me over toward
Jackman. I’ve got me one maybe every other year since
then. I know ’em, all their ways. But that’s what I’ll hear
if I tell the story.”
I am a frustrated naturalist, loaded with assorted facts.
I know there aren’t any monkeys or apes that could stand
our winters except maybe the harmless Himalayan langur. No such beast as Harp described lived anywhere on the planet. It didn’t help. Harp was honest; he was
rational; he wanted a reasonable explanation as much as
I did. Harp wasn’t the village atheist for nothing. I said,
“I guess you will, Harp. People mostly won’t take
the—unusual.”
“Maybe you’ll hear him tonight, Ben.”
Leda came downstairs, and heard part of that. “He’s
been telling you, Ben. What do you think?”
Visions of Fear - Foundations of Fear III (1992) Page 29
