by Annie Proulx
She saw the landscape changing. Ronnie was right. Everything was changing. Brush growing up. She was critical when the road crews cut overhanging limbs from the maples. Tears streamed when they cut the trees themselves to widen the highway, hardtop now all the way to the Post Road. The village grew unaccountably, men sawed down the yellowing elms, tore up stumps with great corkscrew machines. The street spread like unpenned water to the edges of the buildings. Metal roofs glittered. At the dump, heaps of broken slates invited potshots from rat shooters, then sent the bullets ricocheting back. The town sold off the timber in the watershed above the valley and for two years endured the nasal moaning of chain saws. The clear-cut left the hills as bare as the side of a scraped hog. The old common became a park with walks and concrete benches already crumbling in their second spring. A War monument, an awkward artillery gun plugged with more concrete, pointed at the Methodist Church. It peeled to rusted metal in a year. She hated the way boys spun their bikes on a bare dirt patch where the old bandstand had teetered, its fretwork a tease to look at.
New people. New people owned the general store, started new stores, turned barns into inns and woodwork shops. They moved into farmhouses hoping to fit their lives into the rooms, to fit their shoes to the stair treads. She thought they were like insects casting off tight husks, vulnerable for a little while until the new chitin hardened.
The local people who used to be good at something worked out now. Robby Gordy, who made a maple chair of simple but satisfying shape, strong as iron, worked in the new tennis ball factory. Yet this young fellow, Hubbardkindle, moved up from Rhode Island and began sawing out clumpy pine chairs. Charged an arm and a leg for them and got it. He had a clever sign in the shape of a chair that hung out front, put ads in the paper. You had to know Robby Gordy to know he made anything at all.
She was alone for the first time in her adult life, alone in a solitude that tasted like a strange but sweet tropical fruit. The big meals three times a day, the twice-weekly baking, were the first to go. She ate scratch meals, cold potatoes, leftover soup, sandwiches that Mink had hated as ‘city food.’ The huge loads of Monday wash no longer sloshed around in the wringer machine. She slept until six in the mornings.
Nor did the silent rooms bother her. She closed the doors, one by one, keeping just the kitchen and the spare room for sleeping. The night of the day they told her about Mink she got her pillow from their bed and took it into the spare room with its iron bed painted white, its flowery coverlet, the braided rug in all colors. The bed was hard, but its strangeness seemed correct. Silence deep as coal. When she woke in the morning to the pattern of light on the faded wall, the scent of sachet from the little embroidered bag under the pillow, she was already in her different life.
22
The Dermatologist in the Wild Wood
DR FRANKLIN SAUL WITKIN, forty-seven, stoop-shouldered, urban in habitat but haunted from childhood by fantasies of wilderness, sat on the stone wall staring into the chaos of his purchased landscape. There was too much to look at. Knotted branches. The urgent but senseless angular pointing of tree limbs. Grass the color of wafers. Trees lifting soundless explosions of chrome and saffron. Mountains scribbled maroon, riven by mica-shot cliffs. The yelling light. He looked up and the sky filled with swarming points. If he walked into the woods, land tilted, trees thronged like gnats, the air turned sallow and he was lost. He always came back to the wall for his bearings, finding in its linear perseverance, its lichened stones, a rope in the wilderness.
Soon after he bought the property he drove up to plan the hunting camp. The idea of a hunting camp had come to him when he was fourteen, studying photographs of Teddy Roosevelt in some log room decorated with the heads and skins of animals. He called his dream camp ‘Woodcroft,’ believing a croft was a kind of lair.
‘It won’t be just a hunting camp. It’s a weekend camp for all of us,’ he told Matitia. She came up with the twins twice or three times. But his half brother, Larry J., a New York gallery owner, a man with a hundred interests and a thousand friends, was excited. Larry was seven years older, the son of his father’s first wife, Jolana. They did not know each other, had met only at their father’s funeral. Who had told Larry about the property? His New York voice on the phone talked of shooting weekends in the autumn, deer season, about lovely dogs who might range and cast before them. Neither had ever hunted.
‘It’s curious, really. Neither of us knows anything about the woods. Neither of us knows anything about the other. Yet we both love this place. We both dreamed about huts in the forest when we were kids.’ Larry stood among the trees, fallen leaves washing around his ankles, not looking at Witkin. ‘It’s a different thing than coming up for the skiing or staying at a Woodstock inn, or even visiting friends or taking a house for the summer. That someone in the family owns this land—.’ They were awkward, describing their feelings. The property was like an ear trumpet through which they could understand each other.
The first time Witkin came up to take possession of the property he came with his wife and children, past the swaybacked farmhouse halfway up the hill, the tumbled heap of beams and stone that marked the old barn, through the fields and into the leafy maples.
He’d had an idea they could fix up the old sugarhouse on the property, but it was far gone. Spotted light dappled the caving walls. The door was buried in the earth. The sills, gnawed by porcupines, rotted, and shingles lay across the floor like a hand of cards. The only sound wood was in the two-by-six wall studs.
They pitched the new tent on a level under the maples and made a ring of stones. Slowly the light faded under the trees, the darkness settled around them. The tent glimmered. Kevin and Kim kept flicking their flashlight beam through the woods, the circle of light bouncing through the trees like a living thing.
‘You two. Quit it or you’ll wear out the batteries and have to sleep in the dark.’ They sat late around the fire. When twigs snapped in the woods Witkin told them not to worry, there were no dangerous animals, but he thought of bears with fear. None of them had slept outdoors before. Kim wet her sleeping bag because she was frightened in the night.
‘I heard something big breathing right outside.’
‘It was just us, our breathing.’
‘No, no. Your breathing is quiet, see? This was a big, terrible breathing. Like this.’
Witkin could not bear to hear the imitation of his sexual huffing coming from the innocent throat of his daughter. For after the twins slept Witkin had made struggling, excited love to Matitia, the sleeping-bag zipper gnawing at their arms. The new smell of the tent, the whimpering dreams of his children thickened his blood. He braced against the hard ground. The wind stirred the trees, he grasped his wife’s living hair and panted at its phosphorescence.
He woke many times during the night to sounds outside the tent but, kneeling in his underwear at the zippered screen door and shining the light into the darkness, he could see nothing. When he switched off the flashlight the darkness seemed immense and ageless.
In the morning Matitia wanted to go back.
‘Because of Kim’s sleeping bag. Because I need a bath. Because I hardly slept. I’m wrecked. Later on,’ she said. ‘Later on, when the camp is done and we can sleep indoors. The tent is creepy and the kids aren’t old enough yet. And I smell like a smoked herring.’
‘I am old enough,’ shouted Kevin.
‘Not yet, Sweetheart,’ said Matitia.
‘We’ll come back,’ said Witkin. ‘Don’t worry, Babbety babbety babybye.’
‘Don’t call me that! I hate that baby name!’
But they did not come again and so he went with the half brother. In the drizzling rain they tore the sugarhouse down and burned the punky boards. Larry opened the champagne and they staggered around the stinking fire.
‘Woo-woo-woo,’ said Larry. Mud smeared his stiff jeans. His Camp Mocs slipped on the wet leaves. Witkin saw something of his father in Larry’s black hair with its reddish tint,
the small fat lips like two pink capsules. But nothing of himself. They might have been acquaintances.
All week Witkin talked with patients about flaking skin, moles that winked in creases of the flesh, the highway worker’s reddened cancerous ears, rashes and itches, hives and shingles, port-wine stains, and while he talked, he sketched at his desk behind the shelter of the photograph of Marina and Kevin and Kim in the hinged three-part frame. He was drawing a rustic log cabin with small-paned windows. He wanted a porch the length of the place, the porch on the east side away from the heat of the setting sun in summer afternoons, but cheerful in the mornings, a place to drink coffee. Here a boot scraper. He already had the boot-scraper in the garage, unused for years, waiting for a wooden porch. Carefully he drew the butt ends of the logs with dovetail notches. Two steps leading up to the porch. A plank door with a wrought iron latch. He drew in two spruce trees, one on each side of the cabin, even though the site was in the maple woods. The spruce were on the other side of the ridge where there was no road.
Drawing the inside was wonderful. He sketched beams, a fireplace with flames, a coffee table made from thick wood. Over the fireplace he hung a 10-point rack, a rifle, and to the side he put a painting of two hunters in a canoe drawing a bead on a moose.
Larry smiled when he showed him the sketches. But his face was not unkind.
‘Where’s the kitchen? No sink, no refrigerator, no cupboards. This is a little impractical, Frank. I love the fireplace, but you can’t cook in a fireplace unless you put everything on a spit. Did you ever try pancakes on a spit? What we need here is a stove. You’re not going to believe this, but I’ve got a stove. It’s a beautiful thing, square, a dark green enamel cube. It’s an art piece. Came from Darmstadt. A dealer in Darmstadt sent it to me. I asked him to send a piece by this very strange guy, Joseph Beuys. I have – had, I should say – a client, collects German postwar art, heard of Beuys, wanted a piece by Beuys, anything at all, ship it straight over. But didn’t know anything about the man’s work. The stove, this is what the dealer sent. It’s packed with big cakes of suet. The man works in suet, fat. So I had it delivered to the client’s apartment. She’s in Boca Raton. The next week the phone rings. She’s back and she’s furious. What is this smelly thing full of fat doing in her foyer? I explain that’s her art piece. She says it’s repulsive. She had her cleaning lady take all the suet out and throw it away, I should come get the stove. So I did. And there the damn stove sits, in the gallery, a ruined work of art. It’s a very expensive stove and we might as well use it.’
On Friday mornings in Boston Witkin got up before light, thinking of the drive north, the feeling of climbing up some great slope as though the north was higher in altitude. It was higher, he knew it. He loaded the station wagon before Matitia was awake and was at his office at eight. The last patient came at noon and then he was on his way. But once at the camp he felt uncertain. It was as if the road between his two lives was the realest thing of all, as if the journey counted more than arriving at the end.
23
Ott’s Lots
BUT, PULLING ONTO the home road on a November payday afternoon, a paper carton of chop suey on the floorboards, the radio trilling with Organ Interlude, Jewell looked up at Loyal’s – now Ott’s – field and caught her breath.
The evening shadow moved up the field, caught low sloughs and extended the darkness of rocks beyond their corporeal forms, closed like a pincers from the low ground and from the wood at the top until only a fan of sunlight lay open. The cold light streamed across the raw bulldozed roads that had not been there in the morning. Back and forth, up and down, roads divided the field into forty half-acre lots, too small for anything but cemetery plots thought Jewell.
As she drove past the Meld toward the house, trembling with anger, the fan of light blackened and disintegrated like burned paper except for the ridges of earth thrown up at the edges of the fresh roads. The metal gate to the field was gone, and in its place was the raw, open mouth of the entrance and a sign made from a single sheet of plywood. OTT’S LOTS & MOBILE HOME PARK. A painted phone number in big red numerals. Not Ott’s number. Ronnie Nipple’s.
24
The Indian’s Book Again
HE HAD WRITTEN a question in the Indian’s book, a warped, spiral-bound notebook with stippled orange covers. Was everything all right with him before Billy? And knew the dirty answer.
III
25
Garden of Eden
YARRA WAS EXCITED. ‘He sent it. I know he sent it. Goddamn, there’s a check in there, I didn’t think he’d send it. But he did. That was a good list of names. Wasn’t that the list where the woman sent a hundred? Sure it was. A good list.’ His tan porkpie hat was tilted aggressively down over his nose so he had to tilt up his chin when he looked at Dub. The jaws worked on the everlasting invisible piece of gristle.
‘You open it?’
‘No, course I didn’t open it. Got your name on the front, think I open somebody else’s letter?’ He flapped the envelope virtuously in front of Dub’s face.
‘So how do you know there’s money in it?’ Dub felt like he was underwater. The motel walls were the blue of swimming pools. On the rickety desk his bottle of whiskey, roll of stamps, the ballpoint pen, the packet of envelopes, the tablet of crinkly letter paper, lists of addresses and replies. He could whip those letters off.
Dear Mr. Randall,
Your name has been given to me as the name of a man who can be trusted and who would be interested in an excellent money making opportunity. I will come right to the point as I know you are a busy man, and tell you that due to no fault of my own, I am at this time a political prisoner in a Mexican jail. Things are done very different here than in the U.S.A. and it has been made known to me that if I can raise the sum of $300 I will be released from this prison. Liberty! The sweetest words on earth! Naturally I am not asking you to contribute $300 to me as a risk, but I can tell you in all confidence that I have a Large sum of money, close to $350,000 buried in the U.S.A. in a spot known only to me, and if I can get released from this place, I will split that sum with the man who befriends me, half and half. The money is of no use to me here in this terrible prison. The rats are very bad. If I could get at it I would be free in a minute. But I know you are a fellow American who can be trusted, and if you remit the $300 to insure my release I will contact you at once on my release and we will go together to where I have hidden the Large sum. You as the good Samaritan will get back five hundred times your investment. Because it is risky to try and send a letter across the border I have arranged a special hand delivery arrangement. Send the money in a plain brown envelope or a money order addressed to Mr. Marvin E. Blood 1408 Lily Garden Ave., Miami, Florida. He will pass it on to a trusted friend who will soon be in Mexico on business.
Yours sincerely,
Joseph W. MacArthur (a distant relation of Gen. Douglas MacArthur)
Some job.
But this was the place, Florida, this was for him, the lush brightness, the spiciness and fast-thinking people. He felt alive here. He’d never go back north.
‘I held it up to the window. I could see a money order form.’
Dub slit the envelope with his jacknife. A money order for five hundred dollars did out of a folded letter.
‘Jesus! We hit the jackpot. This guy sent two hundred more than I even asked for. Listen to this. Listen.
“Dear Mr. MacArthur. Maybe I am crazy to take a chance on you but I’m going to risk it. I think you will pay me back. I have been down myself. Enclosed please find the $300 to get you out of the ‘Mexican prison’ and another $200 to help you get started in some legitimate calling. I hear men can make fortunes in Florida real estate and callings associated with the tourist industry. Perhaps this will start you out. Sincerely, J. J. Randall.”’
‘Hey, he knows it’s a con.’
‘Yeah. And he sent it just the same. That’s a hell of a nice guy.’ Dub floated in a sea of good luck.
‘Yeah. But maybe just a guy wants to give somebody a hand. Or some rich guy never even notice five hundred. There’s people like that. Over at Palm Beach they’re like that. That’s the address we got on Randall, Palm Beach. You can’t even go on the streets at night unless you got a pass. Those are rich, rich people.’
‘They hold on to it, too. Palm Beach. Where the rich families dump their retards. Pick a warm climate so the dummies don’t freeze to death they don’t know how to make a fire.’
‘Hey, don’t be so sour. Let’s go. Cash this thing.’
‘I want to buy the best dinner in town, steaks with onion and mushroom, get the hell out of this dump. How about Los Angeles? Get out of this dump.’ A little life comes into Yarra’s lumpy face, complexion like an unbandaged foot.
‘I’m thinking.’
‘Think on the way. Let’s go.’
‘Anyway, I rather have one of them Cuban sandwiches, I love them things.’
Dub read the letter again while he ate, cramming in the spicy pork. The crust sawed the roof of his mouth. The letter. What the hell, real estate. He hadn’t thought about doing anything since the piano tuning. Just swindle letters. Dumb!
‘Yarra, you know I started to be a piano tuner once?’
‘Yeah? What happened?’
‘Nothing. Nothing.’ He was thinking. It didn’t have to be real estate. He could be anything. He tried to think of occupations, but all he could come up with was waiter, restaurant manager, post office worker, motel keeper, ideas he got by reviewing the day. He didn’t want to do any of that. Where the hell did you find out about ‘callings’?
