In the Fall

by Jeffrey Lent

  His words hung out there and fell away and he’d already stepped down off the granite and was climbing the sharp bank to the sheepfence when her words came but he didn’t need them and didn’t want them, the wait long enough to tell him all he needed to know. Gripping the post and feeling the wire cut against the hard sole of his foot as he stepped up onto the fence to swing his leg over. Too late for that. She guessed. Walking alone, scattering the sheep, he wondered why she had to guess. Fucking women. Trying to be kind. Running through the woods toward the house, his sobs ratcheting for breath, wanting just to gain the house and clothes and leave from there, to be gone. Sure now her guess was a kindness, some gentle setting down of him. He wanted out of there. She’d been beaten before and he thought it likely she’d be again. But it wouldn’t be him. The morning’s fear of him in her eyes. It would not be him.

  She sat in the sun until she heard the sound of the Ford leaving, perhaps half an hour. She sat watching the river run by. She guessed she would be nostalgic for this place but sitting waiting she would not think of it, just sat watching the water. She waited until she could no longer hear the car and then waited ten minutes more before she stood and walked up to the house. She did not know how she was to get where she was going. She’d refused to make a plan until the moment unfurled because until it happened she’d not been able to say for sure what she would do. Then the moment came and she told him it was too late for that, the words coming out of her almost as random choice. She failed to trust Edgar Sloane as much as she’d wanted Jamie to believe. She was absolutely without belief in love. She had eight, maybe ten years to trade upon, was what she believed, and what occurred during that time would set the course for the rest of her life, one way or another. It had not been so much a career singing she’d implied when she spoke of taking the risk. And Jamie. Jamie would not be alone long. Beyond his looks plenty of girls would peel out of their skins for that taint of danger he carried, that spread out from him like a sun-basking snake. She did not fear him and did not know why she’d told him that. Because she knew it was the one threat he could not counter. It was true that she did not know him, as true as how she felt of herself. She did not trust anything, least of all herself.

  At the house she dressed and brushed out her hair and considered the closet and took out only a small valise that held another pair of high-buttoned boots and one of slippers and three dresses and a single gown and changes of underclothing and then a small box of earrings and bracelets and her one single strand of baby pearls that had once been her mother’s or perhaps her grandmother’s. She was not discarding but being practical. This time of day there would be plenty of traffic on the meager highway running from Crawford Notch up into Bethlehem and she had no doubt of catching a ride. With the summer vacationers the odds were against being picked up by anyone she knew but she did not want to appear a burden to anyone or make memories. Just a girl with a grip trying to get to work.

  She went to the barn and saw he’d been using the spade and knew what for and went out into the woods and dug up not the gold but one of the mason jars of rolled banknotes, money as much hers as his, and she left the hole dug up with the empty jar beside it and went back into the house and buried the roll down into her underclothing. She did not want the gold. She knew she could leave it here and it would stay here. She might live to old age away and Jamie marry some woman and raise children and die and she knew the tea canister of gold pieces would stay right where it was until the canister rotted away in the ground and there would only be the ancient thick wafers of buttery gold lying out there unknown in the leaf-mold. It was better than a bank. It was better than taking it with her.

  Then she was done and meant to walk right out the door with the valise and up the sand track to the highway. Instead she sat at the kitchen table. The summer smell of kitchen garbage, fetid dishes in the sink. The odor of decaying wallpaper paste. She recalled the morning she’d left Saint-Camille with her mother. The trains south where there was no choice but to go. The lawyer McCarson. Edgar Sloane was no McCarson. And who precisely had her mother thought McCarson was that morning they set off on those southern trains into another country? The balm of sun and river water gone now and only the ache of sex left, her thighs stretched and her breasts tender within their coverings. Her mother died, finally. She’d become a whore and life had whored upon her. Joey knew the difference between them was that her mother considered herself accidental. As if life had conspired against her more so than anyone else. Not fate but some abuse from God. Some way she’d abused her God and He’d responded in kind. A grand fearsome kind her mother thought she deserved. When all it was, Joey believed, was every one has good and bad to them but no one is willing to face the bad head-on and take it as part of themselves. There might be that bravery somewhere. She might have it. She might have a little. Edgar Sloane might have it. He was precise, focused, nerved-up and steady. A man in his fifties. Perhaps it was that. His confidence came off him like aftershave. But it remained that he was on vacation. And there was only the one way to know him otherwise.

  She sat at the table and cried a little. For a short time she cried because she had to and then because she thought she should and when she knew that she stopped and dried her face on one of the towels and stood and found a box of cigarettes and lighted one, intending to smoke it and calm herself before walking up to the road, to let her eyes dry and lose whatever swelling might be there but as soon as she had the first smoke in her lungs she couldn’t stand to be in the house any longer so she lifted the valise and walked out into the afternoon up the track and smoked as she went and when she came to the highway she walked west toward Bethlehem, waiting for a ride.

  Jamie stopped at the hotel to speak with his nightshift bartenders and the hotel manager and went on to Littleton where he took a room at the Thayer, paying for a week and ignoring the aslant eyes of the desk clerk, a man he knew from somewhere but could not say how. Things would proceed fine without him, the time short or long. Offhand he could name a dozen men eager or willing to try to take his place. So he’d gone as far as he thought wise. He sat in his rented room in an armchair throughout the remainder of the afternoon and watched the slow northern evening come over the town and then dark and still he sat. He had no appetite for food or drink. He sat smoking.

  For the five years since the night they fled Barre he’d always one way or another been able to place her, to locate her, in his mind if not some actual structure. He’d always been able to imagine her. And now he could not do that. She was gone. Anything he thought was a warped thing, an approximation: she and Sloane in bed at the Maplewood; eating dinner there; already on a train south in the dining car; in a Pullman; in his motorcar, something better than the Ford with maybe even a driver while Joey and Sloane sat in the deep cushion of the rear compartment eating something out of a wicker basket and drinking champagne. He could see all this. He could not help but see it. And all of it, however close, he knew was wrong. He sat smoking. Like the man-jack felling trees who gauges and understands everything about the tree and then finds himself pinned beneath the fallen trunk, his legs crushed and dead already but holding the rest of him down into the snow to die slow. He did not understand how he had come here. It was all clear—this had led to this—but it made no sense.

  By midnight he could not endure it. He walked down and in the quiet weeknight cranked the Ford and drove with enough moon to not need the headlamps along the spread valley between the mountains to the Profile House in Franconia where the waitress Alice refused to speak with him, where the bartender served him a single watered drink before the bar closed and occupied himself counting the till and had no inclination for conversation. And Jamie then went back to the Thayer where the night clerk was sleeping sprawled forward in his chair so Jamie slipped his knifeblade into the kitchen door and worked the lock and had cut slabs of ham and was frying them up with eggs when the clerk stepped into the kitchen and Jamie turned and waved a free hand indicating what wa
s cooking and told the clerk to put it on his bill. The clerk backed out of the kitchen nodding his head and reaching behind him for the door and was gone before Jamie realized the hand he waved still held the knife he’d sliced through the ham. He held on to the knife and used it to slide the ham—and then the eggs on top—onto a plate before setting the knife on the counter. Wiped it first with a rag. Tore a large heel from a loaf and sat at the butcher table and ate the food. Three-thirty in the morning. Wherever she was she was twelve hours gone. He wondered if the rest of his life would be like this.

  It was ten days before he went back to the house. He mostly stayed in the room at the Thayer, taking his breakfast in the hotel dining room. Before that he would go out and get shaved. Then long hours alone in the armchair next to the window of his room gazing down onto the street without making note of any passing thing. Each night he would drive out to Bethlehem and spend a couple of hours at the Sinclair locked in his office going over the books and writing out orders or amending those already made and reviewing time sheets and suchlike. He would send out an order for a dinner to be brought to him and he would eat it there alone with the office door locked after the girl had brought the plate of food. Whosoever knocked upon his door otherwise would only be one of the nightshift bartenders or the hotel general manager and these times few and the problems brief and minor but someway needing his approval or words of confirmation. And any of these men would meet his eye while speaking and then look away from him and he did not want to know what the talk was, what was being said, what people believed of him or did not believe. Finished with that he would drive back to Littleton and the third-floor room where he would wash his face in the basin and turn off the hanging single electric light bulb, watching the filament burn a slow orange disappearance in the dark and would lie in the bed, sleeping or not, dreaming or not, all through the night. He rose each day not rested but further abraded as if the sheets and the hours in the armchair worked at the thin layer of skin over him that was daily nothing more than a sack to hold his stranded heart.

  He ignored his liquor business. If men ran short they would only appreciate him the more when he reappeared. There was no other ready source, not for a few days of dry. They could buy it bonded like all the rest meanwhile. But one afternoon he left the Thayer just after lunch and went looking for Estus Terry.

  As much as his character would allow admiration for a man he felt it for Terry. If a model might exist, not for means and methods but for essence of a nature it would be Terry he’d look to. He did not believe Joey’s telling that Terry was displeased with him. But he wanted to be in straight with Terry. Who he knew understood the beating of the Canuck cook. That was the business.

  Terry owned a one-story single-room house free of civilization built by a hermit called Bliss in the decade before Jamie was born in the untouched forested land north of Bethlehem where the Ammonoosuc turned north in a big bend. Surrounded by stacks of uncut firewood piled tepee style. The sides of the house year round summer and winter banked waist high with raked-up leaf mold and woods trash and the whole anchored in place with cut hemlock boughs stacked one over the other intertwined. Like a burrow with not a piece of windowglass set into it. A single rotting stovepipe rising askew like a hand waving for help or goodbye. The place an indication not of economic condition but of the soul. A place no woman had ever walked.

  There was no reason to expect Terry to be there in the peak of summer with the traveling he did—he covering the lumber camps of northern Vermont and New Hampshire while partner Aaron Wells did the same for the vast lonesome tracts of most of Maine. He bumped the Ford slow down the track rutted deep by the teams of heavy horses and the giant wheels of stout freight wagons, the wood’s growth on either side of the way running overhead and so closeby that the motorcar was swathed. He came into the clearing where midday summer no smoke rose from the pipe but the front door was ajar and a pair of big roan Belgian horses with speckled rumps grazed free on the spare grass of the yard like a pair of watchdogs, the horses without halter or tether, neither one bothering to raise heads at the sudden loud approach of the car. Road-broke.

  A small-framed man, Terry showed himself in the doorway and stepped back into the gloom briefly before coming out into the yard. In that brief half-lit moment Jamie saw the dark length of a rifle barrel down alongside Terry’s leg. The weapon gone with the man out in the sunlight, Terry in gray wool woods-pants and a boiled white shirt too bright it seemed to have come out of that house. He went to one of the horses and stood with his hand on its withers while Jamie shut down the car. The horse lifted its head and lipped the pants-leg beside him and then dropped back to crop the grass.

  “Pelham.” Terry had several days’ growth of a white speckled beard but his hair was combed, slicked back off his high forehead.

  “Estus. Didn’t mean to sneak in on you.”

  Terry spat. “I heard you coming. It’s not many would risk a shiny thing like that machine to this road.”

  Jamie grinned. “Federal men maybe.”

  “Federal man can’t find his ass with both hands, I tell you what.”

  “You need to get yourself two-three of these rigs, Terry. Get out of the horse business. Speed things up.”

  Terry worked his hand on the horsehide. “Not come winter it wouldn’t. Although that day’ll come I expect. But it’ll be a younger man than me. I’m used to the pace of a team.”

  “Don’t talk like a old man. You change with the times; there’s always an easier way to get things done.”

  Terry shook his head. “Tell you what. There’s always some younger fella coming around with some faster smoother way and it’s them you need to watch out for. Times, those fellas can be too fast, too flashy. I got some money for you.” He snaked a purse on a chain from a front pants pocket.

  Jamie put his hand up. “I don’t want it, Estus. I heard you got him doctored. There wasn’t any call for you to do that.”

  “Shit boy, he’d already paid me what he owed when you thrashed him. That’s what there wasn’t a call for.”

  Jamie shook his head. “Last I’d heard, he owed. And even not, it’s not a good idea people think they can be slack. With me. Or you.”

  “There’s a difference between making a point and meanness. What I saw how you left him was plain meanness. I don’t like it.” Terry looking now full at Jamie, his face hard cast like something from a furnace. Terry went on. “He was other than who he was I’d cut you loose. Liquor’s like spring water in the north country, you know where to look. You get over sure of your importance you’ll fall flat. Or worse will happen. You got to keep in mind there’s far more people aware of you than you might care to think. Once you get outside the lines you got to walk it straight and tight. You got to remember you’re not the first pup with a bright idea. Not the last either. You keep that in the front of your head you’ll be all right. Now here, you take this and we’re square and we go on from here.” And unzipped the purse and counted out banknotes from a roll and held them out.

  Jamie stood very still. “No. I screwed up it shouldn’t cost you money.”

  And Terry stepped away from the horse and came very close to Jamie and reached up gently and slipped the folded notes into Jamie’s shirt pocket and leaned his face close and said, “You fuck with me I’ll pound you into the fucking ground you hear me.” And then stepped back and locked his hands behind his back, studying Jamie.

  Jamie stood a long moment his eyes on Terry’s. Then looked away. Took cigarettes and a box of matches from his trousers and lit one and blew the smoke off into the yard, aside from Terry. Then said, “It’s a pretty day.”

  Terry said, “I heard your piece of tail run off on you.”

  “Well. She’s gone.”

  “Chasing bigger fish I hear. Well, you’re better off. They’re fun when they’re young but they get older they turn into one bit of nuisance after another.”

  Jamie nodded. “She tell you she was going?”

&
nbsp; Terry looked at him again, his face opened now. “Me? I haven’t spoke to her. Haven’t seen her since I was last out to your house there on the river. Back in the spring. May, wasn’t it? Blackflies terrible bad I recall.”

  “That’s right,” Jamie said. “It was May. But it was her told me you’d paid to repair the French Canadian. Said you’d told her.”

  Terry shook his head. “It wasn’t me. She just heard it around I guess. She’s the kind that hears things.”

  “I believed her,” Jamie said. Not contradicting Estus Terry.

  Terry said, “A woman’ll lie as it suits her. It must’ve suited her. Now, I got some bottles of beer lowered into the springhouse. That sound good?”

  He resumed in the liquor trade—acutely aware it was summer where the bulk of the year’s profit tallied. He made his rounds as usual with the exception of Laird’s after-hours dive where he had no desire to see anyone or be seen and so went there afternoons on his way to the Sinclair when Laird was still puffy and distempered from sleep and skull-rockets. He called upon Binter, hanging around after his business concluded to make conversation that was little enough, and so oddly and sweetly just right. A place free of associations. With motion once more, he could not understand his just-ended inaction. As if he had lost himself. What was frightening was he’d acted far different than he’d have predicted for himself. Drifting. A thing undone.