He got up and made himself a cup of instant coffee, took one sip, and splashed the rest in the sink. He took a shower, shaved so he wouldn’t have to do it in the morning, wiped the foam off his face, and stared at the medicine cabinet mirror.
“I can’t remember what Christmas was like,” he said softly, looking into his own hollow eyes. “I know it was good, I have the memories, but the feelings are gone.” He dropped his head, and when he raised it again the face that stared back at him was very pale. “It’s like all those Christmases happened to someone else. Or like they never happened at all.”
The telephone rang in the other room. After staring at himself for a moment longer he went and answered it, and learned that his father had died in his sleep.
* * * * *
“In my bathrobe.”
The words haunted him as he drove back to the hospital in the freezing rain. They haunted him as he stepped through the hospital’s sliding doors. They haunted him in the elevator, in the hallway, in the room with the empty bed.
They haunted him as he reached into his father’s bathrobe, still hung up on the hook in the tiny closet, and slid a hand into the pocket.
They haunted him as he pulled out a piece of paper and unfolded it.
He read the letter in his father’s shaky print, re-read it, put it in his pocket, then went to take care of all the details that suddenly rear up to confront the grieving when someone dies.
* * * * *
On December 25, Paul drove the three hours to Plumville. He rented a room with Mrs. Diller, his old piano teacher who now owned a bed & breakfast, and let her make him a nice lunch. He sat down and ate it in the deserted common room. Then, as dusk began to fall and a few stray wisps of snow took flight on the cold, gentle wind, he donned his hat, buttoned up his coat, and stepped out onto the sidewalks of his old hometown—a tiny Western Pennsylvania hamlet slowly fading away as the abandoned coal mines lost definition and caved in upon themselves, dotting the landscape with sinkholes.
After two blocks he stopped walking. In the light of one of the town’s telephone pole Christmas stars, he unfolded his father’s letter and read it for the tenth time:
Paul,
Go to Plumville. Rent a room with Mrs. Diller, let her make you a nice lunch, then, when night begins to fall, walk over to the old house, up the back yard path, and into the woods. Remember when we used to walk in the woods after Christmas dinner? Once you hit the old train tracks, turn left and keep going till you reach the station house. I bought it years ago. It’s yours, but that’s not the present. Your present is inside. And outside.
Pop
Paul folded the letter again and walked up the driveway of a small, abandoned house, empty ever since his father had moved into the nursing home in Pittsburgh four years before. The windows were broken, black and vacant like empty eye sockets. Inside, the rooms that had hosted his youth lay in deep shadow, wallpaper peeling, floors warping without the century-long treads that once kept them flat.
He walked up the river stone path his father had built by hand fifty years before. Shivering, he stepped under the first of the trees that flanked the end of his old back yard. Deep, deep in on the old trails, then to the rusted tracks and left, on and on, the cold creeping into his blood, the darkness almost alive, the woods immense and silent, everything brooding above the small, warm town below. And then the station house, faded green shingles and wooden slats framing a door that opened like a dark mouth into gloom.
“Why,” Paul murmured, “did he bring me all the way out here?”
He snapped on a flashlight, unlocked the door, and stepped inside.
Dust lay thick on a creaking, empty slat floor. In one corner a small desk stood next to a stuffed outdoor rocking chair. On the wall, above the desk, was a red fuse box. A sign attached to it with masking tape read, “OPEN ME.” Paul did. Inside was a single switch. Paul’s breath smoked hotly on the freezing air and hitched hard in his throat. He flicked the switch up.
The world blazed with light.
It took him a moment to figure out where it was coming from. Then he did.
Paul stepped back outside into a forest of evergreens, each one decorated with thousands of lights, strand upon strand, color upon color, a glowing wonderland in the middle of cold, darkened wilderness. Some of the trees were stately, tall, and full-bodied. Others were younger—smaller, shorter, and more recently pruned.
In the thin winter breeze that moved and shifted the lights in a kaleidoscope of branches, Paul stumbled forward. He leaned down by the base of a particularly large pine and shone his torch on a small brass plaque nailed to a stand.
Christmas 1971, it read.
Paul shook his head. He moved on to one of the smaller trees. It, too, was marked.
Christmas 2000, read the plaque.
He didn’t understand. Blinking rapidly, he returned to the station house to look for a clue. He found it on the table below the fuse box—a thin slip of paper with his name on it, covered in dust.
Written in his father’s hand, but in stronger script, before he became ill, the message was short and simple:
Paul,
These trees grew for me. Now they grow for you. They are all here, always.
Pop
And suddenly a gear clicked into place in Paul’s head and it all made sense. He ran back outside in a fever, cold and warm, jaw slack and tight, slack and tight.
“All our Christmas trees. Every single one. From every year.”
He stared out at the illuminated forest and said nothing else. His father had always brought their Christmas trees home alive, roots and all. No one ever questioned why or what he did with them after Christmas, when the chore of taking down decorations distracted them with melancholy. “Just another late December afternoon,” Paul had thought on such days, “and Christmas so far away again.”
But it hadn’t been. No, not at all.
A gentle snow began to fall. A great deal gathered on Paul’s hat and shoulders before he turned off the power in the station house and hiked back to town.
* * * * *
Mrs. Diller found him in the living room, feet to the crackling fireplace, a mug of hot cinnamon cider steaming gently by the arm of the overstuffed rocking chair.
“Mr. Burton!” she exclaimed. “Oh, I hope you haven’t been alone long. I was over at my niece’s for Christmas Dinner, and time slipped by so fast.”
Paul grinned. “Don’t think anything of it. I made myself nice and comfy.”
Mrs. Burton paused, opened her mouth, shut it, then pursed her lips. Clearly, she wanted to say something. Finally she said it.
“Paul, it’s none of my business, but you didn’t spend Christmas all alone, did you?” Apparently she decided she had gone too far. “No, forgive me, don’t answer that. It’s none of my business. It’s just… family makes all the difference sometimes. Even a quick visit or a phone call. Don’t you think?”
“I couldn’t agree more.”
“Well … I hope you got to see or talk with your family today. Here, I’ll go get us some Santa cookies.” She bustled out of the room.
Paul, staring into the fire, nodded distractedly. “Yes,” he responded once she was gone. The warm room embraced his voice. “I saw them, talked with them. It was quite a day.”
He smiled, raising his mug. “What a gift.”
Steel
In the early dawn light, Jacob Fields felt a hand on his shoulder and rolled over in bed to see what it wanted.
“Five o’clock,” said his father. “Get up.”
“I don’t want to go.”
“You’re going,” he said firmly. “Meet me outside in ten minutes.”
Jacob took his time. He clumped downstairs eight minutes late, eyes sullen and fixed on the floor.
“Too late for breakfast,” his father said from the kitchen. “Gear’s in the back of the truck. Let’s go.”
Outside, Jacob changed into his camouflage jumper and orange vest
in silence. His father looked on appraisingly. They climbed into the truck and his father gunned the engine to rattling, spluttering life.
Jacob’s father had built his house on the edge of a long tract of forest in Western Pennsylvania, three miles from the nearest village and its silent, crumbling coal works. He drove them deeper into the trees, into true, rarified backcountry. The paved road soon turned to gravel, then dirt.
After a long silence, he jabbed Jacob in the side with a stubby index finger. “You like nature, kiddo. You’ll like this. I got a blind nailed up in an old oak tree so hard to find nobody knows where it is except me. Real natural. You’ll see.”
“I’ll sit there but I won’t shoot,” Jacob said softly. “You can’t make me.”
His father slapped him hard across the back of the head. “I want a dead deer, and I ain’t doing no shooting today. Understand? We been through this before. No books this weekend. No goddamn flower walks. Jesus, thirteen years old and you’ve never even skinned a knee.”
Jacob rubbed the back of his head and said nothing.
“Too bad there ain’t a war with a draft on right now,” his father continued. “World War II made men of a whole generation. So did ‘Nam. On and on back, up to now. If I had any money, I’d truck you off to military school. Get your head of out the clouds. But this’ll do just fine, I guess. Nothing quite like a good hunt. You wait an’ see. It’ll open up a whole new world for you.”
Jacob opened his mouth to say something, closed it again, then said, “I never meant to make anyone ashamed.”
His father grunted.
“I do real well in school. Mom taught me every day when I didn’t understand something. I never get in trouble. Last year I won an art contest. They showed my painting at the mall.”
His father sighed. “I don’t mean to talk badly of the departed, kiddo. Your mother was a fine type, even though she treated me so shabby.”
“She did not—”
“You did good by her,” his father cut in, “but all those years without a man in your life—it ain’t natural. Gives you no sense of yourself. You’re getting your ass kicked at your new school twice a week, and we can’t have that, can we?”
“It’ll pass. They’ll get tired of it soon.”
“You need a little steel in your heart, kiddo. Something that won’t bend to everyone else. This’ll help give it to you. It’ll be a start, at any rate.”
Jacob opened his mouth to say more, but noticed that same steel in his father’s face, in his gray eyes and hard mouth. Now, at least for the time being, he chose to keep his silence.
* * * * *
The blind was nothing more than a handful of boards tucked away in the upper branches of an old, lightning-struck oak. Covered with dead branches and camouflage canvas, it smelled of mold, decaying leaves, cigarette smoke, and dried whiskey.
“Now what?” Jacob asked, breathless from the climb up the half-rotten ladder.
“Now we have our quality time,” said his father. “We wait for a deer and catch up on the last ten years.”
But neither volunteered much, and so it had always been, ever since the funeral. Their lives, so different, refused to gel, even when forced to touch. Silence descended like a curtain between them, until the only sound was the ebb and flow of the forest—the minute resonance of flora and fauna that, combined, hum their routines out to the world.
Jacob’s father pulled out a battered pack of cigarettes and flicked open a Zippo. Soon the acrid smell of stale tobacco cut an unnatural swath across the other scents of the wild. To Jacob, it was sickening; his mother had always hated it. Suddenly he missed her terribly, more than he had in the four months since her death, and he started to cry. He tried not to, but he couldn’t help it. Everything was different. Everything was strange.
“Stop that.” His father said it quietly.
He didn’t.
“Stop that,” his father said again. “You’ll scare the deer.”
An open hand cracked across his face. An angry red welt rose to throb tight and hot on his cheek.
Jacob stopped crying.
“That’s what I mean,” his father said, still in that soft, wooden voice Jacob could neither fathom nor penetrate. “Steel in your heart, kiddo. You need more than a little, but you ain’t got none at all. Hey…”
He leaned over the blind, eyes squinted, peering out through the canopy.
“There.” He pointed, then grabbed Jacob’s shoulder and pulled him forward. In a slight clearing of fallen trees, a small doe ate calmly, quietly grazing among the ferns.
“Two-year-old if a day,” his father muttered, reaching for his rifle. “You’ll love the taste, Jacob. Meat tastes different when you kill it yourself. You earn it, then. It always tastes better when you earn it.”
He proffered the rifle to Jacob, who shook his head.
“This ain’t an option, Jacob.”
“I’ll miss on purpose.”
His father’s eyes were like slate.
“No you won’t,” he said. He turned, took careful aim at the deer, and fired. A jet of flame shot from the end of the rifle. The forest shook, the very air traumatized by heat and noise. Beyond it all, Jacob could hear intense silence, and as the echoes of the shot faded away, that silence took over, alive in the vacuum of life holding its breath.
Then, very faintly, leaves crinkled, ferns bent, as a small body fell among them and upon them.
Jacob stared out at the fallen deer. He bit his tongue until he tasted copper.
The deer wasn’t dead. His father had shot it in the back flank, and it had fallen, too stunned to rise. It pawed the air feebly.
“It’s suffering, Jacob,” his father told him. “Let’s go.”
Jacob followed his father down the ladder and across the forest floor. In the clearing, the deer lay in a bed of blood-soaked fern, moaning softly.
Jacob’s father handed him the rifle. He took it with numb fingers.
“You can’t miss now,” his father said. “Finish it.”
Jacob shook his head.
“Finish it.”
“No.” A whisper.
“Finish it, Goddamn it! Finish it!”
Jacob aimed the rifle the way his father had taught him. A sob choked in his throat. He felt faint. Steel, he thought, and the image of his mother appeared behind his closed eyelids.
He fired.
Thunder rumbled across the land. The deer stopped moving.
“You did it!” his father exclaimed. “You did it, Ja—”
Jacob fired a second time. Then again. He riddled the deer’s carcass. He squeezed the trigger, released, and squeezed until the last thunder died away and all the damage he could do was done.
Sounds of life returned slowly to the forest. His father stared at him. “You ruined it,” he said softly. “Metal all through it. No one can eat the damn thing now. Goddamn it, Jacob!” He pulled his fist back to strike, then paused, breathing heavily. After a long moment the hand uncurled and fell to his side.
Jacob opened his eyes. He felt different. No tears welled up to fall. Slowly he bent down and picked a small cluster of yellow wild flowers from the forest loam. Not looking at his father, he placed them by the head of the still, silent deer.
He stood up and handed his father the rifle. Wordlessly, his father took it.
Without looking back, Jacob walked quickly out of the clearing, back to the path that led to the truck. He murmured something in parting.
“What’s that?” his father asked sharply. “What you say, kiddo?”
“Steel,” Jacob said a second time, louder than the first, and continued walking.
An Unknown Shore
It was a passion, and passions can never be fully explained. Why the Civil War? people asked. A hundred and forty years old and not getting any younger. Sure, a visit to Gettysburg is an eye-opener. Antietam Bridge is provocative. Harper’s Ferry? A good way to spend a Saturday if it’s not too hot. But why the full Uni
on uniform? Why live in a tent ten weekends a year? Why the collection of bullets and bayonets, the library stocked with Shelby Foote and Walt Whitman, Sherman’s memoirs and Lincoln’s speeches?
There were many things Tyler Adams could have told them, but if they had to ask, there was no way they could ever fully understand.
But eventually, against all odds, he found a woman who didn’t ask, who didn’t mind pretending to be Clara Barton at reenactments and whose idea of a fun holiday was a weekend in old Richmond followed by a three-week voyage starting at Sumter and ending at Appomattox. Eight months later, Tyler married Paige Sayer and his life was finally full.
The Civil War. It had brought them together: Tyler a born-and-bred Bostonian, Paige a die-hard Savannah belle.
Yet now, ten years into a happy marriage, two weeks into a twenty-day battlefield tour, something happened that had never happened before.
“I think,” Paige said, looking out at yet another of the endless strip malls between Antietam and Fredericksburg, “that I’ve had enough of the Civil War for awhile.”
Tyler almost choked on his granola bar. “What?”
Paige turned and looked at him sadly. “Not forever, mind you. But for a little while. Perhaps a long while. We should spend the rest of our vacation elsewhere—someplace the Civil War never touched. Hawaii, maybe. Or Alaska.”
“Secession!” he exclaimed.
Paige smiled. “Not quite as bad as that. It’s just…” She broke off, face crumpling.
“Oh now,” Tyler said, putting his hand on her arm. He pulled the car over and turned off the ignition.
“I feel… too close,” Paige explained.
“To me?”
“No! Gracious, no. To it. To those four bloody years when the House was divided.”
Tyler was silent. The car ticked in the hot day.
Scaring the Crows Page 9
