The Man in the Woods

by Rosemary Wells

  May Miss Lucy rest in peace forever in the proud and grateful hearts of all Valdostans, this brave and unsung heroine of the War for Southern Independence.

  There was a silence following the reading, broken only by the violent rattling of Pinky’s imagination, which Helen alone could hear.

  “You can write your story now,” said Helen’s father. “Your Elizabeth Fairchild has nothing to fear, Sweet Pea. Leave out the part about the husband dying in the fire if you wish. Lorenzo may not have intended that. But he saved his daughter’s life, didn’t he? She was a traitor to everything he believed in, she stole Union Army weapons, and she would have been hung or shot for it, so he wiped out every trace of her and let her go in peace to the South.”

  “He did?” Helen said, then added in a murmur, “A house, with a basement, at the end of a railroad line that no longer exists.”

  “Where has your lovely brain gone to?” asked her father, impatiently slapping his thigh. “Lucy was running guns to the enemy, smack in the middle of New Bedford, one of the biggest Union strongholds in the war. If she’d been found out to be a spy—worse than a spy, a collaborator—she’d have been put in front of a firing squad for high treason! And every widow and mother and sister and lover in the state of Massachusetts who’d lost a young man in the South would have gladly pulled the trigger on her.

  “Lorenzo gave her safe passage down to Georgia. Then he wiped out every shred of her memory so she could live the rest of her life as Lucy de Vivier, not Lucy Fairchild. He made sure no one knew what she’d done so she wouldn’t have to live out her days in fear someone would sneak up behind her and shoot her.”

  “I understand, Dad,” said Helen, but she was repeating his last words to herself, Sneak up behind her. Sneak up behind her.

  Aunt Stella stood in the doorway and waved good-bye under the same tireless flapping moth. As she did, she sighed and said, “Who would have thought they took the Civil War quite so much to heart down South?”

  Squares of light from the streetlamps flickered onto Pinky’s face, a mask of urgency.

  “They’ve been microfilming the files every night for a week in the Preservation Society. They started when I was looking for the doctor’s papers. Let’s hope they’re still open,” Pinky said.

  “If Oliver Jenkins isn’t there,” Helen asked, “do you know where to find the railroad maps?”

  Pinky nodded. “I think so. In one of the big flat wooden drawers on the back wall. The railroad spur!” he went on and pounded his fist like a ballplayer into his other hand. “If only I’d remembered. I remembered the indoor plumbing, the gas lamps, the oil refining, even the long pants Asa told us about. But I forgot the railroad spur. I guess maybe because I didn’t believe there really was a Lucy’s house till now.” Helen gazed at the photostat of the Georgia newspaper. There was a picture of Lucy on it; the face was half eclipsed by bad printing, but the same mesmerizing black eyes that had glowered at her from Lorenzo’s official portrait stared back from this very elderly Lucy. The same determined mouth, only on a woman’s face. Helen felt a small rush of air, soft as a sigh. Through the screen that divides the dead from the living Lucy slipped without warning. For a tick of a second her eyes held Helen’s, lively as a heartbeat, and seemed to signal her desperately. But was it to keep going or to keep back?

  Oliver Jenkins had not been pleased to allow Pinky and Helen into the file room after hours and while the photographers were busy microfilming all New Bedford’s written records. He had said he was going home to dinner and bed, and if anything was damaged or out of place, he’d call the principal of the high school on Monday morning and see to it no students were ever again allowed in the file room.

  Helen and Pinky loaded the big oak table with railroad maps. On the end wall of the room a clock in an oak case ticked loudly and made a whirring noise every time its big hand advanced. The photographers making microfilm in another room clicked and thumped and buzzed away. A fire engine squealed by outside, and the light patter of rain drummed on the windows.

  “Remember,” said Helen, “we have only until ten o’clock. Dad’ll be in front of the theater on the dot.”

  Half an hour ticked by on the clock in the oak case.

  “It’s only a maybe,” Pinky reminded her. “We may find nothing. But I’m betting old Lorenzo would have had to have an army of printers to change the maps of the railroad company itself. They built the spur line, and they would have put it on their maps.”

  Finally he found a chart of the eastern seaboard entitled New York, New Haven, and Boston. Central Railroad Projected Lines and Service. The title was lettered in shaded brown calligraphy, handsome and perfect. The brown crosshatching showed the railroad as it existed in 1859, just before the Civil War. The track came up from somewhere south of New York City, ran north, hit New Haven, and curled up the coast to Providence, Boston, and beyond to Maine. A spidery branch ran eastward from Providence to New Bedford and on to Woods Hole at the shoulder of Cape Cod. There was no familiar canal at the beginning of the Cape. Not for fifty years more would there be one. Helen bent over the map. The lines were distorted by creases in the paper. She shook her head in exasperation. “Pinky, go see if they have a magnifying glass in there. Maybe a pair of glasses, anything!”

  Pinky returned after a lot of irritated discussion with the photographers. In his hand was a round convex lens. “They want it right back,” he said.

  Helen held it under her eye above New Bedford on the map. The lens blurred everything to extinction except in its very middle, and there, leading straight from the center of town up into the woods where Route 6 had been built a hundred years after the map had been drawn, ran a short spur line. At the end of the line was a tiny ink oblong labeled F. CHILD.

  “Is it enough, Pinky?” Helen asked as he squinted down through the lens. “Can you find it in the woods?”

  “It’s very near where you chased him,” said Pinky. “We’ll find it.”

  The photographers began shutting up shop for the night. One red-bearded man looked curiously at Helen and Pinky as he wheeled three klieg lights through the room and up a ramp. “You gotta leave now too. We gotta lock up!” he yelled.

  Helen and Pinky sat, gazing wide-eyed at each other across the table, as if only they could hear the strings and woodwinds of some invisible orchestra.

  “Damn!” said Pinky when they’d walked out into the rainy street. “We should have taken Stella’s umbrella. What’s your father going to say when he sees us come out of the movie soaking wet? We’ll have to wait for him outside the marquee in the rain.”

  Helen popped a quarter into a newspaper vendor. They spread the Post-Dispatch above their heads, each holding a side.

  The rain spattered in torrents all around them. It poured in swift gulleys down the gutters and sluiced fiercely out of the eaves of houses like a running bath. The streetlights hovered eerily in oval white mists. Ahead were the red parking lights of the photographers’ van.

  Hand in hand Helen and Pinky walked toward the movie theater under the soggy canopy of the evening paper. Helen fretted over how many hours she could get away with being in the woods the next day. Pinky muttered his mental maps of trails and deer paths.

  It began suddenly, as if someone had set off an alarm. “Climb Every Mountain” was the name of it. Helen had heard it a hundred times on the radio, in stores. Now it came from just around the corner, a throaty double-note whistling, pure as an oboe.

  Helen dropped the newspaper. Pinky had already bolted in the direction of the whistling. Helen followed him, and together they hit an enormous black, dense shape. There was a sound like a Christmas ornament breaking. A voice rang out. “Stupid, clumsy kids! You’ve broken my bulb! That’s a hundred-dollar klieg light you busted. Never think of anybody but yourselves!”

  Pinky tried to disentangle himself from the wires and the legs of a tripod. It was too late. The photographer marched off yelling, “Stupid, clumsy kids!”

  The d
im window lights of Perry and Crowe illuminated a selection of porcelain farm animals behind the steel security grilles. Helen and Pinky stood on the corner, shedding water like statues in the park, trying to listen through the clamorous tucketing rain, but the whistler had vanished into a maze of side streets up ahead.

  Chapter 11

  “I HOPE YOU’RE NOT thinking of going to a football game on a day like this,” said Aunt Stella, peering into Helen’s room and seeing her at the window.

  Helen’s thoughts were not on football. They were far in the woods where Pinky and she were going to find Lucy’s basement. “It’s the biggest game of the year, Aunt Stella,” she said.

  “I don’t care if it’s Notre Dame playing Harvard,” said Aunt Stella. “You’re staying home, and that’s final.” She flounced down the stairs muttering about Helen’s coming home last night as wet as an eel.

  Helen pressed her forehead against the cold pane. Angry tears seeped out of her eyes. Pinky, free Pinky would not have to stay home. He would go and do a little exploring on his own in the woods. She knew it. She fought the tears, but they were as unstoppable as the rain outside.

  Pinky, dressed to the gills in surplus Navy gear, ambled up the front walk at noon exactly. Once in the house, he shook himself off like a Labrador retriever. “Bad news,” he said before Aunt Stella could make a suggestion about the Monopoly set she’d dragged out of the closet. “No football game today. At least no game for Helen and me.”

  “Well, I should think not,” said Aunt Stella. “Come in and have some blueberry muffins and cocoa.”

  “Wish I could,” said Pinky seriously. “Sorry, Aunt Stella. We’ve got an emergency at the Whaler.” Helen had just come down the stairs. “You know all those flats you pasted up last week?” Pinky asked.

  “Yes,” said Helen. “What about them?”

  “All pasted up wrong,” said Pinky. “Jerry Rosen is furious. You have to do the whole job over today in four or five hours or you’re off the Whaler. You have to pay for the wasted materials. Come on. My mom’s getting the car gassed up at Hobson’s down the street. I’ll go help you with them.”

  Helen turned the color of cream.

  “That is very nice of you, Pinky,” said Aunt Stella. “Helen, I knew your other work would suffer because of all this galavanting around to historical societies. This is a disgrace! You’ll have to pay the Whaler back out of your own allowance.”

  Helen pulled on her boots and rain gear with angry jerks. Aunt Stella passed Pinky a bag of blueberry muffins in case they got hungry. “That’s what happens when you think you’re too good for a job,” she huffed at Helen. “And don’t you start up crying again as you’ve been doing this past hour.”

  If there’d been a roll of industrial-strength nylon-reinforced packer’s tape around, Helen would have pasted a strip of it over Aunt Stella’s mouth.

  She followed Pinky miserably out the door, stamping in every puddle on the walkway, kicking a stone across the street.

  “These are very heavy for blueberry muffins,” said Pinky, twirling the bag. “She must use steel blueberries.”

  Helen didn’t answer. She wished New Bedford would be invaded by boa constrictors. She wished twenty of them would wrap themselves around Jerry Rosen’s throat.

  “Where’s your mom’s car?” asked Helen when they had arrived at the gas station. Pinky handed Helen the muffin bag. He opened a small umbrella that was lying on a stack of tires and whipped a plastic sheet off his motorcycle. “Get on,” he said.

  “But we can’t go to school on this,” said Helen. “We have to go through the middle of town and—”

  “We’re heading for the woods,” said Pinky.

  “But the flats! What about Jerry?”

  “Lies. All lies,” said Pinky, grinning. “I knew Stella’d never let you out of the house for a football game on a day like this. I figured the only chance to get you out of there was to use a little guilt. Guilt and shame always work.”

  Pinky ran the motorcycle over the edge of the curb and onto a sandy path that ran alongside the road. Helen sat behind him, holding the umbrella over both of them. She was happy. Amazed and speechless and happy for several minutes, until the houses thinned. She felt a growing cramp and weakness in her gut. Supposing he was up in the woods too? Supposing he was following them? She glanced back down the highway. No cars were in sight. Still she began to think she should call someone. Mr. Bro or Sister Ignatius. Just in case. “Could we just stop at a gas station?” she asked Pinky. “I have to go to the bathroom.”

  “Jeez Louise,” said Pinky. “Wait till we get to the woods. You can go in the woods. I go in the woods all the time.”

  “You’re a boy.”

  “There’s not that much difference.”

  “There’s a huge difference!”

  Pinky pulled over to a small, run-down gas station. “Oh, all right,” he growled. “Girls have bladders like mice.”

  Helen tramped off. “Just because I’m not like some man who goes against the side of a tree like a dachshund!” she shot back.

  “Think of the Indian women!” Pinky trumpeted. “The woods was all they had!”

  Helen did not think of the Indian women. She was looking for a telephone. She could see that the gas station had long been abandoned. The ladies’ room door hung ajar on one creaking hinge. Grass grew in cracks in the pavement. The telephone had been ripped out of the wall and hung uselessly on its cable.

  She went back to Pinky and got on the motorcycle again. “There’s a dead rat in the toilet,” she said. “I’ll use the woods.” In the deserted office she had thought she saw something move. But how could anything move in an abandoned office? Her world was too full of shadows, and she was afraid of every one. She ignored the commonsense voice that told her, Turn back. Wait until Monday. Let Mr. Bro call the police. Let the police find the Thurber.

  In a way Pinky seemed to read her thoughts. “If we find the Thurber,” he said gleefully, “it’ll be full of fingerprints. Nothing like a typewriter for fingerprints.”

  “Do you think the cops will listen?” asked Helen. “Do you think they’ll come?”

  “Are you kidding?” Pinky answered. “That basement’s got to be chock full of Civil War guns and ammunition. If they don’t come for the fingerprints, they’ll sure as hell come for the guns. They’re not going to leave hundreds of guns and bullets up there for some nut to use.”

  Helen was about to argue the point when she became aware that the ride was no longer so bumpy and that the branches were too high off the ground to reach and throw rainwater at them, as they’d done in the lower scrub woods.

  The narrow trail twisted and wove around vine-threaded ashes and oaks, all the different leaf colors muted in the lime-green haze.

  “This is it,” whispered Pinky almost reverently. “This is where the tracks ran.”

  Helen wondered how long ago it was that the old ties had been prized up. Lorenzo himself must have had it done. If a rattling locomotive had ever disturbed the peace of this woods with its spewing black smoke, there was no echo or sign of it now. The rain had stopped, and the woods were dead quiet, as if in waiting for the birds to come out. Helen recognized the path. She had veered off it to hide under the stump. He had strode along the path whistling.

  Pinky stopped the bike, not far from the stump, and hid it. “We have to get as far as that cliff up there,” he said, pointing. “That’s where the map shows the site of the house.”

  Deeper into the woods they walked. They could see a short six inches ahead. That was all. A warm, dense ground fog had followed the rain. It thickened by the second until it wrapped them and everything in the woods to the tops of the trees in an endless silver-green mist. Pinky’s eyes darted and squinted, trying to make sense of the surroundings. Helen felt his hand close over hers reassuringly, but no electricity or pleasure emanated from it into her. There was only the listening, the utter concentration on the sounds in the woods, and like the tr
ees the sounds were hidden all around them.

  The rock face was just as she remembered it the day of the accident, covered with nettles and poison ivy. Pinky didn’t seem any more anxious to touch it than she. They circled the ledge for a time until Pinky found a foothold and they were able to hoist themselves to the top of it.

  “Perfect site for a house,” said Pinky expertly. “Good view. Good foundation rock.” He pulled a heavy trowel out of his slicker pocket, handed it to Helen, and using an identical one himself, began to dig. “There should be a floor under here,” he said. “I bet there was an access depot to the rail line down there against the face of that rock somewhere. I’d look for it except for that poison ivy.”

  Helen scraped away at various points. They were enclosed by a circle of fog. Below them only the tops of some juniper trees showed above the blanket of mist. God did not feel close by. Nor did her mother. The fog would protect them, she reckoned. If anyone came, they could hide in it quickly. Lucy, who had been so close last night, was now no nearer than God. She did not guide Helen’s hand or linger at her side. She had been there only for the time it takes a star to wink. Then she’d gone back.

  Pinky struck bedrock four inches beneath the sandy soil in ten widely scattered places, Helen in six. He tore a limb from a tree, sheared off the twigs, and hammered it deeply into soil with a rock. The branch broke. He tried again with another and then another. He cleared the earth from several holes he and Helen had made. There was no floor, no foundation, no cellar. There was nothing but granite, old as the crust of the earth itself, laced with flaking layers of mica, thin as airmail paper.