A Clearing in the Forest

by Gloria Whelan

  An elevator without any floor or sides, Wilson thought gloomily. He could tell Lyle was enjoying the effect his words were having.

  “Never expected to see you here,” Lyle said. Didn’t think you were the type.”

  What type did Lyle mean? All kinds of men worked on the rigs.

  For a while Wilson had owned his own motorcyle, a battered job he had rebuilt from an abandoned wreck. Lyle had tried to talk him into joining up with his gang, but Wilson had refused. Since then, Lyle wouldn’t have much to do with him. More than once Wilson had seen Lyle’s name in the Oclair Tribune for things like “drunk and disorderly behavior” or “careless handling of a motor vehicle.”

  Wilson understood in part what bugged Lyle. Until the oil boom, jobs had been scarce. There was no industry. All you could do in summer was wash dishes in the restaurants—and even for those jobs there was plenty of competition. You watched the summer kids walk around with their tennis rackets or flash through town in fast cars. In winter even the movie theater closed down. All you could do was go into Oclair and watch the level creep up on the big snow gauge in the middle of town. There had been times when Wilson himself had done things he later regretted, just because he was so bored.

  He decided that as long as they were working together, they might as well be friends. “Do we bring our own lunch or what?” he asked Lyle.

  “You can if you want, or there’s a truck comes by with sandwiches and pizza.”

  “I’ll see you at lunchtime, then,” Wilson said and walked toward the engine shed. After the climb up the rig, the mud oozing up around his boots was wonderfully reassuring.

  Inside the shed, there was a pleasant smell of machine oil. On the wall a huge hand-lettered sign read: IN THE EVENT OF A BLOWOUT ALL ENGINES MUST BE SWITCHED OFF IMMEDIATELY.

  These were the biggest engines Wilson had ever seen. But, even for such monsters, one of them was vibrating too much. He looked for a wrench and found one beneath a label that said “wrench.” Pete must have been here.

  When Ferrelli came in, he saw a boy hanging over the number one engine, tightening up a bolt on the bedplate, a smile on his face.

  9

  Frances Crawford counted seven men, a car and a truck. On the back of the truck was stenciled in large red letters the word EXPLOSIVES. The men scrambled out of the cars and, lugging their equipment, headed north through the woods along a cable line laid earlier in the week. Every one hundred feet they drilled three six-foot holes. The dynamite men came along behind them and placed charges in the holes. Then, using a shooting box, the men set off the explosives. By monitoring the sound waves from the explosions as they bounced off rock formations thousands of feet below ground, a computer could estimate whether or not there was a chance of finding oil there.

  The little army advanced efficiently, not stopping to rest until its men came to the riverbank, where they had to decide the best way to cross. One man pointed toward a shallow spot in front of Frances’s cabin, but the others shook their heads. Instead, they took off shoes and socks, rolled up pant legs, and waded across a somewhat deeper spot, holding their equipment out of the water. The stream’s iciness surprised them and they laughed and shrieked like school children.

  On the other side of the river, they stopped to dry off. A couple of the men knelt down to drink the clear water from the stream. Finally they picked up their gear and disappeared into the woods.

  Frances had been at the window all morning. Now she knew how the early settlers who loved the woods must have felt when the landlookers and cruisers came through the countryside buying up whole forests for the lumbering companies to cut down. The dog, hackles up, ran back and forth, yelping nervously each time a charge went off. When the explosions were no longer audible, she left the window and hurried outside.

  She expected some drastic change—bits of the earth’s crust scattered over the ground, a fire, craters. However, apart from the trampled bracken and some bare spots about the size of a saucer where the charges had been exploded, there was nothing to see. Perversely, it was not what she wanted. She would have been pleased to find beer cans, trash, dead birds and animals, the earth ripped open, anything to justify the rage she felt over the assault on her land.

  But nothing was there except a July day full of yellow flowers. Goldenrod was in bloom, as was the St.-John’s-wort, with its butter-yellow petals. The mullein blossoms had begun their long climb. Cinquefoil trailed along the ground, and beside the stream was a stand of jewelweed where dragonflies came and went.

  Frances walked along the river, telling herself nothing would come of the tests, confident the river would contrive some spell to throw the machines off. She saw men in Texas puzzling over the computer results, “Look here, look at what that tape does when we get near the river, certainly can’t be any oil there. We’ll have to try elsewhere.”

  Her fantasy was interrupted by a rustling on the ground: a meadow vole after last fall’s acorns. She passed some sickly chokecherry trees, shrouded with deserted-tent worm webs. The milkweed growing along the trail gave off a cloying smell. She stopped to pick some blueberries which grew on the steep bank. A white-throated sparrow sang from the top of a nearby pine. As she stopped picking to listen, the dog trotted by and upset her berry basket.

  Reaching out to save the basket, she let go of a sapling she was holding onto to keep her balance on the bank. A rock under her foot gave way and she slipped down the hill, her arms and legs scraping against sand and sharp twigs. She tried to catch hold of a branch, but she was moving too fast. When she finally came to rest at the bottom of the hill, the basket lay empty a few yards beyond her. The dog had taken off after a chipmunk.

  She tried to sit up, moving with great care. Her arms and one leg seemed to be all right, but the other leg was twisted under her body. There was a sharp stab of pain when she tried to move it. She felt it carefully. There didn’t seem to be any break. Possibly it was no more than a bad sprain. Even so, it would be difficult to get back to the cabin.

  She heard the voices of men calling to one another. At first she felt relief at the possibility of help. Then it occurred to her it must be the team from the survey company returning to their truck. It was insupportable that they should find her sprawled here, helpless. But how to get away? On her hands and knees? They would overtake her. She decided to stay perfectly quiet. If they discovered her, she would pretend nothing was wrong. She retrieved her basket with a stick so they would think she was picking berries. As she tried to get into a more comfortable position, a searing spasm shot through her leg. It was all she remembered until she came to, cradled in the arms of the large man who had drilled the holes for the explosives.

  “Are you all right?” He sounded nervous, like someone who has just had a strange baby thrust into his arms. “I felt your leg before I moved you and I don’t believe there’s anything broken, but you should see a doctor.” The other men were gathered around her, peering down, worried looks on their faces.

  She felt like a senile Snow White surrounded by outsized dwarfs. And the clumsy oaf had had the impertinence to feel her leg! “Just put me down,” she told him. “I can manage the rest of the way myself.”

  “I don’t think you ought to put any weight on that foot, ma’am. It looks pretty swollen.” The man was frowning.

  When she began to wriggle in his arms, he reluctantly lowered her. The other men moved back as though she might explode when she touched ground.

  And she did. She yelped with pain. Two of the men made a sling with their arms and silently waited. Without a word she lowered herself into it and put a reluctant arm around each man to steady herself. The procession moved toward the cabin.

  “How did you know where I lived?” she asked.

  “They briefed us before we came out. This was volunteer duty, like cleaning out a machine-gun nest. They said you might take a potshot at us,” The big man laughed; the others grinned.

  She felt better. She might be helpless now, but
she had made them think twice about tramping through her property. “I don’t suppose you can control the results of your tests, what they say?” For that she would be happy to play the pathetic old lady and even whine a little.

  “No ma’am,” the man said apologetically. “We don’t have nothing to do with the results. They go right into a computer and then we send them off to the company. We never see the results.”

  So much for that.

  They were at the cabin. “Can we call the doctor for you? Or we could bring the truck over and take you right to the emergency room at the medical center.”

  The thought of riding into town in one of their trucks was odious. “Thank you just the same, but I don’t have a phone. If you’ll put me down in a chair, I’ll be fine. I feel much better.” And then, with a terrible effort, she added, “I’m glad you gentlemen came along. There’s some lemonade in the icebox if you’d like some.” But the men seemed anxious to be on their way. Did they imagine that she had booby-trapped the icebox, she wondered, or put rat poison in the lemonade?

  She hobbled over to the window and watched them squeeze like Keystone Cops into the small car and the truck and take off. What angered her most was that having tramped that land for fifty years, winter and summer, she had believed there was nothing she did not know about it. Now they had come with their fancy paraphernalia, and the fickle land had immediately yielded secrets she would never learn.

  10

  While Frances made a grumbling recovery from her sprained ankle, Wilson brought groceries to her and took over the delivering of her preserves to Elkins’ Market. Even after her ankle had healed, he found himself turning down the sandy, rutted trail that led to her cabin. His days were spent at Mrs. Crawford’s and his nights on the rig. He was amazed he could pass so easily between two such different worlds.

  Today Wilson and Frances were sitting at the kitchen table. Spread out in front of them were some fossils he had found in the gravel pit and a pile of her reference books. Holding the fossilized pieces of coral in their hands, they tried to imagine from the illustrations in the books what the land had looked like millions of years ago covered by a sea of salt, a sea crawling with undulating animals that looked like exotic flowers.

  “We’re drilling through salt right now,” Wilson told Frances. “My wrists and ankles are raw from the brine they’re bringing up.” This tangible evidence of ancient seas had been a revelation to him. Suddenly he remembered something, and with a pleased look dug a small fossil from a pocket. It looked like a pair of wings turned to stone by an evil spell.

  “Microspirifer,” Frances told him. “You don’t usually find them around here. I don’t think I have one myself.”

  He held the fossil out to her. “Do you want it for your collection?”

  “No.” She looked at him hard. “I thought you were going to do some fishing.” She began piling up books. It was too much to become attached to someone new. She wouldn’t have it. Hers was a time of life when you ought to begin to pull away from people. And until Wilson had come along, she had done just that. In India people her age slipped off into the countryside to live a solitary life. Those left behind had the wisdom and delicacy to let them go.

  Wilson, not understanding why Frances seemed angry all of a sudden, was grateful to tug on Dr. Crawford’s waders and head for the stream. But before he could climb into the river, she was coming toward him with a cottage-cheese carton full of worms.

  “I found them in the compost pile,” she said proudly.

  Wilson couldn’t help laughing at her. With her small tan face cocked to one side and her short white hair standing up like feathers, she looked as if she could have pulled the worms out of the ground herself.

  He knew she meant the worms as a peace offering. She wanted to let him know she didn’t mind his fishing for the trout with bait instead of artificial flies. When he had first started fishing there, she had told him how Dr. Crawford couldn’t stand bait fishermen in the river; “plunkers” he called men who fished with worms. Anytime he saw one wading the stream, he would put on an old khaki army shirt and a tin badge from the dime store, get into his waders, and stomp into the river carrying a folding rule and a pad of paper. He’d give the man a big smile and introduce himself as someone from the conservation department who was assigned to measure the depth of the river.

  Keeping a few feet in front of the infuriated fisherman, he’d plunge his yardstick here and there, giving special attention to the holes where there might be a big fish and generally muddying up the river and scaring away the trout for miles around.

  Eventually the conservation department had designated a stretch of the stream for “artificial flies only.” But evidently the men in the department had never fully appreciated the doctor’s impersonation of them; when the signs had gone up, the Crawfords had discovered the “flies only” stretch had ended at the beginning of their property.

  Wilson left the worms on the bank and eased himself into the water. The current tugged at his legs as he made his way slowly over the slippery rocks. He picked out a fly cleverly fashioned from feathers and horsehair into a small green grasshopper. He dressed the fly with grease, as Frances had taught him to do, so it would float in a natural way on top of the water. Finally he stripped off some line from his reel and snapped the line upstream. He knew Frances was watching approvingly from the bank.

  The fly bobbed along a riffle and disappeared in a little whirlpool. He retrieved it, false cast a few times to dry off the fly, and sent it down the same waterslide. Even in midsummer he could feel the icy water through his waders.

  He rounded a bend in the river and was out of sight of the cabin. The bank on either side was lined with tag alders and willow, and behind the shrubs were tall pines. Wilson felt he was wading through a green tunnel. A mink swam by to have a look at him, his sleek brown body making parabolas. Mink were fearless; this one circled around Wilson, staring him straight in the eye.

  He was so fascinated with the mink he nearly forgot his line until he saw his fly sink beneath the water. He set his hook gently. In a minute a trout rose about fifteen feet from where he was standing. Wilson gave him a little line, watching him swim one way and then another trying to shake off the hook. Little by little he reeled in his line until the trout was close enough to scoop up with the landing net. The trout was good-sized, fifteen or sixteen inches, his side dappled with speckles of pinkish gold and purple.

  By suppertime he was back with four trout. He cleaned the fish, and together he and Frances examined the contents of the trouts’ stomachs to see what they were feeding on: grasshoppers mostly, and one had a partially devoured crayfish in his craw.

  After a dinner of trout grilled with bacon strips over an outdoor fire, Wilson and Frances started off into the woods for a walk, leaving by the back door of the cabin since a rather testy colony of yellow jackets had taken over the front entrance and resented anyone coming near their home. Wilson had offered to remove the papery gray nest that hung down like a pendulous balloon from the eaves, but Frances wanted to see how large it would get.

  Since Wilson was due at the rig in an hour, they headed for Deland, only a short distance from the cabin. On their way they passed hundreds of rotting stumps nearly hidden in the second growth of maple and oak. At the turn of the century Deland had been a lumber town, complete with churches, hotels, taverns and even a sawmill. Trains arrived night and day to carry out logs which had been floated down the river from the lumber camps. One by one the huge white pine trees had been timbered. Some had reached up a hundred and fifty feet into the air. “Higher than a derrick,” Frances told Wilson, pleased that nature had outdone man.

  Now there was nothing where the town had been but a few old foundations grown over with brambles, and a lilac bush that still bloomed every spring. The site of the old town fascinated Wilson. He felt as though he could close his eyes and hear wagons rolling down the dirt streets and the rasp of the sawmill.

  “It
will be that way when the oil goes the way of the timber, Wilson,” Frances said. “The men will pull out, taking their trailers with them, and not even a foundation will be left to mark where they lived. Chances are, down in oil city, some woman has already planted a lilac bush that will outlast us all.”

  By the time they walked back to the cabin, little puffs of ground fog like balls of cotton had begun to roll over the water. On the opposite bank, fireflies signaled one another. The only sound was the deep overhead note of nighthawks plunging toward earth. Wilson watched as the birds stopped abruptly in mid-flight and then soared upward again as though some invisible barrier they could not penetrate lay between heaven and earth.

  “Chordeiles,” Frances said. “Greek for evening lyres.” Wilson made no comment. Frances expected none. The better they knew each other, the oftener they lapsed into these silences. Once Wilson had confided to her that sometimes when he was with people he had nothing to say, but they still expected him to go on talking. If you didn’t they thought you didn’t like them or wished you were someplace else.

  “I’ve felt that way, too, Wilson,” she replied. “I didn’t even know those voices existed until I married Dr. Crawford and moved up here from the city. For years he was the only doctor for miles around, and he was often gone all day and part of the evenings. Living here in the woods, I was lonely and then I began listening to everything around me. To what the woods had to say and to my own thoughts as well. I found out that everything in nature has something to say, Wilson, even if it doesn’t make a sound. Never be afraid of silence.”

  But tonight the silence was broken. Just behind them they heard a loud noise, something between a snort and a hiss, followed by a rustling noise and the sound of hooves thudding away. “What was that?” Coming as it did out of the stillness of the woods, Wilson thought he had never heard anything as frightening.