Peter Loon

by Van Reid

  In later days, many in the settlement were sure that, had Rosemund found courage to speak, she would have married Obed. It may be that some decisions in life should not be left to chance, or a strong arm.

  2

  Of Rosemund Loon’s Strangeness, and Silas Loon’s Death, and How Their Son Peter Was Sent in Search of an Uncle “By Marriage”

  ROSEMUND WAS ONLY JUST SEVENTEEN WHEN HER AND SILAS’S FIRST child was born. It was a difficult confinement, and the neighborwives attending thought she might die. One of them wetnursed the child, who was named Peter, while Rosemund hovered in and out of the grave for three days. She did recover, but seemed more puzzled than pleased with the baby.

  Silas Loon, despite pride in his own claim of land, had never been able to ask his wife to leave the Black homestead, and so had sold his own place for livestock and feed and commenced married life on his wife’s property. Despite his presence, and his improvements, Silas’s new home was always known as the Black place. Obed Winslow’s cleared land and cabin were squatted by a new family soon after Obed left Sheepscott Great Pond.

  It seemed as if Obed had never left, his continued presence at the Black homestead was so real to Silas. It might have been as real to Rosemund, but she never spoke of it; she never spoke Obed’s name once he was gone, and rarely spoke Silas’s name as long as they were married.

  The husband was ever conscious that Rosemund might have had Obed for a husband, but for chance or the Grace of God, and mindful that she might have been better off. Consequendy, there was nothing denied her, and gifts were given and favors performed that she had never asked for or imagined. Her father had treated her as an equal as long as she could remember; and others, daunted by her beauty, had deferred almost reverendy to her. Now her spouse treated her as more than equal, and suspected himself less than equal to the honor of being her husband.

  Rosemund was not so much unkind as she was simply unaware; and eventually folks decided that she was touched. Such beauty came with a price, it was said, and no wonder she could look at her reflection in the pond and be a little mad. People did not think poorly of her, exactly. Once, a year or so after Peter was born, she was out walking in the forest, which was her wont, and she was attacked by a man who thought she was a wood nymph, she was so beautiful. She managed to brain him with a rock before he much had his way, and folks said she had grit, but she remained unaffected by the encounter. The man was thrown into a makeshift jail and died there soon after.

  Other children came. Some survived birth and some of those survived infancy. Rosemund did as she pleased, which sometimes included fierce hard work in the gardens and fields, but as often took in a walk along the stream below the house or a visit to the hill her father had pointed out to the surveyor. She met Indians sometimes, and could speak more of their tongue than most settlers thereabouts. She wandered off with some Indian women once and Silas and his neighbors had to go looking for her. She never showed more than a passing sort of interest in her children. She was touched, folks were sure, and signs of her queerness only seemed plainer as the years passed. She had strange humors about her; she kept her children from church, disdained talk about land, and would sometimes laugh at jests that no one else understood.

  The Loon children never heard of Obed Winslow. Peter and his brothers and sisters grew up in the presence of a pipe dream, it seemed. Some mothers, they knew, could be hard where life was so hard, but Rosemund Loon was like a ghost in the house. She might pick up a crying child and dust him off, but there was always the sense that she was merely quieting him for her own sake, for the sake of the dreamlife she lived, beyond the experience of those around her. Some thought that her first born, Peter, shared some of his mother’s othermindedness.

  A new century was born. When he was seventeen, Peter wasted no time cleaving from his family, but went north of his father’s interrupted homestead of years before, where a new family had recently taken up living, and began to clear his own acres. His father came to help him after the harvest, and one bright October day a twisted hackmatack swung to the wrong quarter as it fell and it crushed Silas. Peter got his father home, carrying him the entire way, and Rosemund tended the man until he died the next morning.

  To his brothers and sisters, Peter seemed more like his mother than ever as he stood out on the porch after their mother broke the news to them. He seemed confused, unable to decide between falling down or fleeing. His father had always been good to his children when he had the opportunity to deal with them at all. He had been the steady influence in their lives and it was difficult to make sense of their fate, now that he was gone.

  The next night, long before sunrise, Peter woke to find his mother standing by his cot, looking down at him. There was a lantern in her hand, the light of which must have wakened him; it lit her face from below so that she seemed almost sinister. Peter wondered if she knew he was awake and tried to pretend otherwise, but she spoke in a near whisper.

  “Peter,” she said, and the use of his name sounded strange from his mother. “Peter.”

  “Yes, Ma.”

  “There is something you need to do,” she said. Then she said, “There is something I need you to do.”

  This seemed stranger still, his mother needing anything from him. “Yes, Ma,” he said.

  “I need you to find your uncle.”

  Peter thought about this. As far as he had ever known, his mother had been an only child, and his father’s brothers were all dead. “Uncle?”

  “I need you to find your uncle,” she said again. She was fully dressed and there was the scent of some autumn flower about her. She had just come in from one of her walks by moonlight. Peter could see a sliver of milky light lying on the floor beyond her.

  Peter thought it polite to sit up, but he did not want to close space with her. His father was dead; his father’s body lay on the table in the next room. His mother stood over him in the middle of the night demanding that he find an uncle of whom he had no knowledge. “My uncle?” he said finally.

  “Your Uncle Obed,” she said. “I need you to find your Uncle Obed.”

  “Who is Uncle Obed?” he asked.

  She did not answer but lifted an arm to show him that she held his clothes. “You can eat before you leave,” she said.

  He sat up then, blinked, and looked more closely at her. “But they’ll be burying Pa.”

  “Your Pa would want you to find your uncle.”

  “I expected I’d be needed here,” said Peter in his confusion. “I expected I’d need to dig a place for Pa.”

  “The neighbors will take care,” she said.

  Peter’s youngest brother stirred in the bed next to him. His mother shook the clothes at Peter just once and he complied by putting them on. He found his tall moccasins by the bed and tied them on. They were narrow for his feet and he had slitted the outsides of them. He followed his mother out to the main room where his father’s remains lay on the table covered by a sheet, then to the back of the house where the one fireplace barely glowed.

  “You better eat first, then bring this with you,” she said, pointing first to a plate of victuals on the plank table, then a cloth sack.

  Peter peered into the sack, and from the light of the lantern he could descry some hard biscuits and apples. “Am I leaving now?” he asked.

  “You’d better get a push on before first light,” was all she said. She sat opposite him.

  The truth was, he hadn’t eaten much for dinner, and guilty as it made him feel with his poor father in the room behind him, his stomach felt empty. He’d eaten through about half the plate when another question occurred to him. “Where is he?” His mother’s face was hidden behind the glare of the lantern on the table, and when she didn’t speak, he leaned to one side and said, “Where is this Uncle Obed?”

  “I’ll show you,” she said. “Eat your breakfast.”

  Peter didn’t know if it was breakfast or dinner, yesterday or tomorrow, but he finished what had been put
in front of him with rather more relish than he would have guessed. When he was done, his mother brought him his father’s coat and hat, then led him outside. Peter insisted on stopping at the table in the parlor and paying last respects to the man who had sired him and given him every advantage in his power.

  Peter Loon felt oddly aware, pinned like tailor’s work to the hour. A half-remembered moment of tenderness from his father rose up like a grasping hand and clutched Peter’s heart and his throat, and he backed away, almost frightened by the fierce emotion that threatened to overtake him.

  “Peter?” called his youngest brother Amos from their bed. It seemed hard, leaving his brothers and sisters like this. He sensed that they found him a comforting presence, with their father gone and their mother so ghostlike. “Peter?” came the voice again and Peter answered with a quieting hush.

  He stepped out of the house, onto the short porch. Rosemund Loon–still holding onto her beauty despite her thirty eight years, most of which had been spent in this hard wilderness–tugged at her husband’s coat so that it snugged more closely around her son’s shoulders. She snatched the hat from his hand and put it on his head.

  “Where . . .” he began.

  With a ruthless sort of grip upon his shoulder, she turned him quickly about, and pointed south and east. “He went in that direction.”

  “My uncle?”

  “When he left, he went in that direction,” she said again.

  “But when?”

  “There can’t be that many people in the world,” she said. “You’re bound to find him, if you look. He went south and east. He could be in the next settlement, for all I know, but I don’t think so. His name is Obed Winslow.”

  “Winslow?” Peter had not lost that sense of complete awareness born at his father’s silent side. He drew himself up to his height. “How Winslow?” he said. “What name is Winslow to us? The Winslows in the bottomland over that way?” He pointed west. His sister Sally Ann had taken visits from a young fellow named Job Winslow from that farm.

  “He is an uncle by marriage,” she said. There was a helpless look in her eyes that he had never seen before and he turned away.

  “Obed Winslow,” he said.

  “I need you to find him.” She leaned forward and hugged him with uncharacteristic fervor. “You’re a good boy,” she said, which struck him like a blow to the head. “You’ve always been a good boy, and I know you’ll do well.” Then she turned away, walked in to her dead husband and shut the door behind her.

  Going back into the cabin was impossible. Following her was impossible. Peter was confounded. He struggled to hold onto that awareness he had felt beside his father’s body. He looked southeast; he glanced over his shoulder, but the gable end of the house obscured the moon. It was a chilly fall night, and his breath formed before him in puffs. The sky was cloudless, and what stars or planets there were, gleaming despite the moon, shone like sharp bits of ice. About twenty or so rods to the southeast lay the shadow of the forest.

  Peter had only been to the next settlement, Davistown, half a dozen times in his life, and to Patricktown–further away and more or less directly south–only once. He considered going to the neighbors in the other direction and asking their help to sort things out. Everyone knew his mother was a little mad. Some thought he was a little mad, as well, though he wasn’t supposed to know that. People, he understood, could only keep a secret so long.

  Then who is Obed Winslow? “Uncle Obed,” he said, trying out the name. That sharp, almost painful, awareness seemed to call him from the line of trees to his south. He stepped down from the porch and walked into the moonlight. His father’s coat was warm.

  Out in the stump-strewn field, he stumbled once against an old furrow. Something stirred ahead of him, a small animal, a mouse or a mole, mingling with the remnants of hay, frightened by his unexpected presence. He turned around only once and was urged on by the suspicion of his mother’s face in the single window facing east. In a moment he found the old path in the moonlight and vanished into the forest, hardly knowing what he ventured.

  He was almost glad to quit the cleared plot of land; even he who had lived all his life among acres of stumpage could imagine, in the dark, limned by the moon, that one out of many of those low-lopped trunks might be instead a figure crouched and watching.

  3

  Of Peter Loon’s First Night in the Forest

  THE FOREST WAS THE ENTIRE WORLD; IT WAS ALL THAT PETER KNEW. He might, in his life, have seen a score of cleared acres in one place, but they would have been cleared acres surrounded by trees and wooded hills and populated by stumps and the charred remains of brush piles, and in the midst of any such clearing was at least one building fashioned of trees in next to their natural state.

  He knew Sheepscott Great Pond, of course, and the settlement there, but the pond and the settlement were similarly encircled, and the forest, and the tiny patches of hard won ground in the midst of the forest, and the lake in the midst of the forest, and the hardscrabble settlement with its spireless church were all that Peter had ever known, though he had heard tell of deserts and oceans and grassy plains. A neighborhusband two or three farms away–miles away–had once sailed for the British Navy, and he had tales to tell of islands of rock in the South Seas and cities that stretched over hill and valley as far as the eye could see. But forest was all that Peter could reasonably expect to find in his mind’s eye when it was all that he had ever known.

  He was accustomed to little more than moonlight after dark, and along a moderately well marked trail he was able to move, hardly breaking his stride. Some of the hardwoods had shed their leaves, and the glow of the moon, hanging between nadir and zenith, made the shadows of roots look like holes in the ground, and pale granite and lucid quartz like basking faces.

  The wind held a distinct note when the still-clinging leaves had turned and dried, a reeding hush that rose and fell like a breath; and where certain groves of oak and sugar maple were losing their foliage, soft dry veterans of summer brushed past his face like bat wings or drifted without noise onto his father’s hat. Trees squeaked and grunted in the wind. Now and then the echoes of animal calls drifted among the trunks and aging fern. He walked quietly and naturally, laying his feet down with ease without sacrificing his pace.

  After a time, he sensed the large swamp to the west, some distance away–a presence marked by a change of air and sound that filtered through the trees. Beyond the swamp would be Great Pond and one little settlement further still.

  When he did not look directly in front of him, the path almost glowed. Above him, the occasional breaks in the trees–a blink of starlight–led the way. The land rose and fell, rose and fell; the path plummeted occasionally and he was warned in time only by the sense of space yawning below him and the wind gathered, as in a great room. Streams trickled across the way, or the way met with one of these rills and followed it to the next little dale. The path widened as it gathered with others like it, or followed an ancient animal run; it wound round the feet of scarpy slopes and followed the course of least resistance between twin hills.

  Peter thought of his little brother Amos waking to find him gone, and he felt a stab that was joined to his leaving with nary a goodbye or even a good notion where he was going. Peter was so long and Amos was so small that the little brother could sleep cradled against the big brother like a pea in a pod.

  Peter heard the breent of a nightjar nearby and thought he caught the glimpse of something wing past a fleeting pool of open sky. He had no idea what he was about, walking the woods in the middle of the night, but he did not find them unpleasant, at first, these immediate sensations.

  It was not long, however, before another reality of life, as he understood it, imposed itself–and that was the fact of uncanny things in the forest, the knowledge of curious and perhaps malicious disembodied minds lurking in the darkness between the trees. A moth of panic flickered against his chest and a hymn sprang quietly to his lips. Sud
denly the shadows of roots, like holes in the forest floor, looked as if they gaped a little wider, and the pale faces of granite and quartz appeared more aware of him.

  One such pale visage brought to mind his father, lying in the dark in their home. He thought of Amos again and what the little boy would do without his big brother to pilot him around the strange still presence in their midst. “Where’s Papa?” Amos had asked when their father’s body had been laid out in the midst of the room.

  Peter stopped and considered what he was doing, what had brought him here, who had brought him here. What would the neighbors think when he was not at hand for his own father’s burying? What would his mother say if he turned about and went home? She had been so strange, so insistent. Maybe his father would have wanted him to find this Uncle Obed. Peter considered the moon, its disc cleft, in his view, by a single bare limb. He looked forward and was conscious of his own dim shadow stretched ahead of him. How many people were there in the world? How would he find one Obed Winslow? Would he stop from stoop to stoop asking after the man?

  A friend of his, one or two years older, had left Sheepscott Great Pond when he was fourteen, saying he was going to sea. He had not been heard from since. Had the world swallowed him up?