One morning in late November a faint snow came flailing lightly, dusting the hard fields with a coat like powdered sugar but, unable to pierce the stark branches of the silent trees, leaving the woods dry and bare. At just under two miles in my journey I crunched over a hayfield and crossed the old Vaughan Road, a narrow paved lane that cut along the banks of lonely ponds, intersecting the township from northeast to southwest, writhing in among the silver maples and leaning oaks of the third-growth forest. Thinking on it now—snow twirling, gray sunlight expansive over frosted pastures—I must have seen him first from a distance of a hundred yards, moving laterally through my frame of vision along the Vaughan Road and against the backdrop of still, frozen trees. My memory—my memory I say—is of stepping up onto the fixity of pavement and eyeing covertly a bent and weathered little man in steel spectacles who clutched fiercely the tip of his pipestem between teeth yellow as pine pitch; who wore a duck hunter’s cap like my own with the bill turned up and the flaps turned down and the buckle strapped and denting a chin like a red potato; who seemed to be cursing, muttering and nattering at the ground as he jounced over the Vaughan Road, looking up now and then out of eyes hard as granite, glaring more or less, keeping friends and enemies at a distance from them—halting the swing of my lunch bucket from thirty yards—a man who, when he held his head up, the strain ran through his neck, the Adam’s apple rose like a strawberry in the crease of the throat, the temples—veined inkwell blue, protuberant—leapt out at me as the head fell forward; and then afterward the back of him, the stride game but broken, the old back heaving under a red-and-black-checked mackinaw and the spine itself knobbed and torqued, inhumanly twisted, a history of sweat mapped out in joints and cartilage (while the weight shunted from side to side as he thrust out his hard black Hitchcocks, the gloved hands felt the air, the pant legs gathered and ungathered smoothly over the spindly thighs, the whole of him barreled and bobbled—a slow barreling, a slow bobbling—over the chipped, worn pavement)—and finally the dark, delicate lines of the woods once more, seven-eighteen by my Grandfather Harper’s tarnished pocket watch, the tiny weight of my compass lodged beneath my glove, wavering toward north in its dark place and the old early sojourner—a glance through the clean, acute trees—nothing but wisps of smoky breath, a pock over the surface of the Vaughan Road.
A sharp clash of sticks stirred one evening in early December—the second week it must have been: red, blue and muffled yellow lights laced the fretwork of the bakery—and in the night the wind slammed beneath a shimmering half-moon, the lightning cracked wide the blackness, the thunder rocketed off the rooftops of Wilkes and the high branches of the trees swirled madly beyond the gloss of street lamps that flared at the corners of our building on Main Street. In the morning—wind blowing now like a thin, cold sheet, the backside of the storm hurrying past to catch up with the turmoil at the heart of it—I tramped out toward the sanatorium past blowdown snags and cracked green windfalls that had barberchaired and crashed to the hard earth in the night, past split branches trashed up against mounds of underbrush, mangled and twisted and the brush swept south by the cutting edge of the north storm. I flung myself over the rail fence at the hay pasture on the Vaughan Road and clipped on toward work and the old ones with the wind flitting low now, skimming around my knees and ankles, and the sky overhead shot through with hard-riding clouds. I kept my head cocked downward; brush snapped behind me in a swale as the wind blustered through it, sounding like secrets the woods told themselves.
And there he was again: there he was again like some apparition—like a presence in some tale my Grandfather Harper might have conjured forth on an evening in winter long ago—in the guarded light and fleeting wind of morning tottering toward me over the fissured pavement, one brittle, almost transparent, liver-spotted hand anchored to the bowl of his cold pipe, and the buckle of his duck hunter’s cap dangling down past his chin, tapping against his Adam’s apple as he foundered over the road, keeling as he went like an ancient ship in a shiproad. “Hold up there, boy!” he shouted, at ease with commands, like a general of troops—the side of his mouth twisting open and the words tumbling out into the light and wind. “Hold up there! Whoa!”
I held my ground, the fingers of one hand curled under the handle of my lunch bucket, the palm of the other cupped to my compass, balanced that way and watching him come at me with whatever strange thing it was he wanted driving him on. For his part, he drew himself up when there were two good yards of road left between us—the regional courtesy, that; a metaphor for the kept-distance between human beings in our township—and yanking his pipe free so as to aim the cracked tip of its stem at the bridge of my nose, narrowed his eyes behind the thick glass of his spectacles and said, “What in the hell do you think you’re doing, boy? What in the hell, boy? You answer me that!”
I took a step sideways, backing off imperceptibly, groping but at a loss for an answer that was not as ridiculous or abstract as the old man’s question. In the precarious silence, like a hammer, the pipe fell downward and then flashed again, and the old man’s face seized up in anger.
“What’s your fambly name, boy?”
“Harper, sir.”
He poked his pipe between his teeth and mulled. “Bak’ry Harpers? Is that what you be?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Granddaddy Ezra Harper? Hay farmer up here?”
“Yes, sir. Only he passed on a few years back.”
He slid a tattered tobacco pouch from the pocket of his mackinaw. And he began to knock his pipe against his hipbone now, holding the bowl up to the light every so often and peering up into it critically, blinking and grumbling in the bottom of his throat. “How many times you figure you crossed my field there—” pointing with the round of his chin toward the hay pasture, his pipe held trembling in the air “—in the last month or so, young Harper—speak up!”
But I couldn’t. “I don’t know,” I stammered faintly, and the pipe came down once more and lodged, finally, in the tobacco pouch.
“Well, I do,” the old man said, digging absent-mindedly, bits of dark makings blowing out behind him over the road. “Twenty-three times—now don’t deny it—I been countin’ ever last one. ’Crost land ’tain’t yourn, too, boy. Mine instead. You understand me?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Yes, sir, hell,” he boomed. “You kin ‘yes, sir’ me all day, boy—’twon’t come to naught,” and he pulled his lips tight while the wind rose up and blustered across his cheeks and spectacles. “Now listen here: I’m liable to run you in, Harper; don’t care two nickels for trespassers—no, sir, I don’t. Don’t care for ’em a ’tall.” He slipped his loaded pipe between his lips, thumb pressed over the bowl like a cork, and let it totter up and down while he spoke. “Your granddaddy don’t care for ’em, neither,” he threw in. “Not that I know of, leastwise. Surprised he don’t warn you off from the likes of trespassin’. Don’t make much sense. You sure you’re a Harper?”
“I’m one,” I said. “Same name as him, sir. Ezra.”
The old man shook his head, dismayed.
“Well, I guess it don’t matter now,” he sighed. “You and me as best get on to the subject of reparations, boy—you know ’bout reparations? Says just what it means. You done some damage and now you’re agoin’ to repair it. Dispel that notion I’ve taken to run you right along in. Fair is fair, see. I figure a full day’s worth of chores might ’bout do it far as I’m concerned. ’Taint much for ever step you tramped ’crost my field, now is it, Harper?” He dug a wooden kitchen match from the breast pocket of his mackinaw, struck it—one trembling swipe—across the seat of his pants, then frowned while it flared and snuffed out in the wind, cursed and tossed it and struck another—the same scenario precisely this second time, only the muttered curses newly sonorous, increasing in breadth and acidity—blamed wind! friggin’ blast from hell! be damned!—while the lit match died between his blackened fingers. With the opposite hand he plucked his cold pipe free a
gain, smacked his lips soundly and said, “ ’Taint no perticular directions to give—fust place up the road here quarter-mile back—pineboard farmhouse, covered garage out front—leave you your own choice of days, boy, but Satidays is most always best—early Satidays don’t you know; you got anything to say for yourself, Harper?”
But again, I didn’t. “Be prompt then, boy, Satiday morning”—the old man said it like a reprimand. And I agreed to it all by not disagreeing and slipped off through the motionless black oaks of the forest, heading for the Burrillville Sanatorium.
There came to me flickerings of my grandfather as I went, though, disturbed as I was by the old man in the Vaughan Road—they come to me now: shreds of things that perhaps add up to nothing more than nostalgia and self-deception—of searching on our knees, he and I, for the chuck key of a drill on the floor of his toolshed—the one trailing image I have left of his face, which was open and gentle and gaunt like my father’s as his huge magnificent hands roamed among the spiraled bits rolling over the packed dirt floor; of stalking his wide back through the pine woods beyond his haybarn (This here was an apple orchard, he’d pointed out, drawing himself up in the soughing breeze of that spring day—growed over now with all this here white pine. Warn’t no good anyway … too sandy … apples had a tinny taste to ’em—pie apples, mostly. Right off down there? You see where I’m a pointin’? That ol’ bog? That was a pond oncet, Ezra. Can you make it out? We dug it ourselves, set by it summers … by God, by God … this right here was all apples oncet, though.… ) In his cellar were tools no one makes any more—an adze, a froe, a peeler spud turned by hand—the cellar itself he’d dug after the house was up, by moonlight and the odor of wick oil and without missing church while my father hauled barrows of earth and stone and root to dump in the woods. In his spare time he’d been a rabble-rouser, so they said, Ezra Harper, at the mills and town meetings; he’d shot himself in the knee once with a squirrel gun; he’d flung a man through the window of a tavern one night. He’d told stories—about a man named Flinch and his water wand in a time of drought, about lovers who stole his apples one autumn when Truman was on the stump, about a night’s drunk, a clay jug, a battle in the woods—all with a tuck of deception at the corner of his mouth as he spun his sternly told yarns. And as I tracked along toward work and the old ones that morning I saw him as clear as clear water one ragged autumn in a deep place in the woods, miles and miles back in a place of frozen mud where leaves crunched into powder beneath your footstep—up knobs, through swales, amid bogs with their stale effluvium of death where weedy cottonwoods grow in silence—and he’d stopped, Grandfather Harper, somewhere in the perpetual forest, stamping his boots speculatively and pointing a finger at a line of curious stones. “I buried your grandma there,” he’d said, matter-of-fact, plain speaking, and the two of us had waited in a silence as difficult as any I have ever known, stood there before the row of real stones watching until he scratched his head and stamped his boots again and led on through the dark forest to a place where spring water rose from a cleft in the roots of a chestnut.
* * *
EDWARD STONE it read in black paint on the mailbox, on Saturday morning, in a placid, mute snow that had only just begun to fall tentatively. And the old man trudged out toward me as I came up the dirt path to the cabin—moss-backed bleached siding, lattice-framed porch, drifts of gray chimney smoke furling over a high gable—a thick coil of manila rope slung over one shoulder and the ever-cold, ever-emberless pipe veering slantwise now, aiming west as he came north by northwest to front me at the corner of the covered garage.
Ed Stone’s wasn’t much of a spread. His farmhouse was gone, near-obliterated and fell-to-ruin—charred floor joists stubbornly parallel; a broken granite footing scattered now in among black riddled plumbing pipe warped and tempered in the sear of a firestorm; a haphazard square of dark rubble and cloven rock and scored chunks of beam heaped on the last vestiges of a hearth that had crumbled; and a tumbling half-wall of chimney stones. Two out-barns were stripped to the rafters, their siding strewn in among surrounding pines, the home pasture grown over with seedlings and wild stickerbrush and falling away to the south now in disarray, abandoned utterly to time and the seasons. As for the pineboard cabin—built on a regrade that sloped to a vale of ice and grim maple third-growth—it stood darkly back in shadows, tiny square windows opening out over lost pasture and the crossbuck door opening out onto stubble and ruin.
Dusting the snow from my shoulders I fell in and followed Ed Stone—up this a way, Harper, now step along—past his woodshed and barren chicken coop among pines until, twenty-five feet beyond the gable end of his home, he drew up and pointed ninety feet into the fragile, reaching branches of an American elm snapped like a pencil fifty feet up and slanting another forty into the forked branches of a slender tamarack: where it waited, wavering, half-toppled and leafless, for another storm wind to send it hurtling down like a battering ram launched by the gods to split asunder Ed Stone’s dark cabin.
In the half-light of morning—outlined against the pines and the gray geometry of his ruins—the old man looked as twisted and tremulous and inexorably muted as the lost trodden silent figures I moved among for pay at the shadowed Burrillville Sanatorium. His spectacles were askew and the checked mackinaw buttoned unevenly so that one side of the collar rode higher than the other, absurdly prominent. Ed Stone stood half-bent-over backward, dark spittle frozen at the corner of his lips, the skin of his neck translucent, cold-blue, his hollowed face worked tight against the tiny stabbing needles of new snow, and peering, pipestem wavering, breath wheezing forth like dust from a clogged bellows, up through spotted glass at the broken shaft of the elm hung high above, one unlikely horizontal—a ford-bridge spanning far reaches of the trees—in a grove of true vertical pines.
“Trick is,” he said, freeing his arm from the coil of manila rope, “to get that thing down ’thout caving the house in ’ta same time.”
And with that he commenced to render his plan in the hard language of oratory—as though, instead of pulling back and toppling over a jammed windfall, we were preparing to cross the Delaware and meet the Hessians at Trenton on Christmas Day. When he ceased I dropped the coil of rope over my neck and climbed through the branches of a pitch pine per instruction, sculpted a weight-knot and flung it out over the bole of the elm in question, watched it unravel earthward—Ed Stone lashing a second coil to it fifty feet down—reeled both back in like well cable and ran the free end over the opposite side. The double rope hung now with both ends at ground level, draped over the shaft of the elm, and Ed Stone crafted some kind of hitch in it unsteadily while I wrestled my way out of the pitch pine and glanced out over the chaotic pasture and the trapezoidal jumble of bleak farmhouse ruins.
Snow, like a film of white dust, had begun to gather in arcs and depressions, wherever the canopy of branches overhead did not shield and sift, along the pathway that ran from the ruins to the crossbuck door and then to the covered garage, in chalklines over the spines of green exposed branches and on the steep-pitched roof and highest chimney stones of the dark cabin, and in a spangling bright coat over the surface of the ruins, the scattered, skewed footing and naked, dancing pipe, the coal-black, charred beams, the rails of joists, the remnant-rafters and chunk-wood cluttering the last of the cold stone hearth. The earliest, true, unfailing snow of winter had begun in earnest, picking up as the gray light it fell out of rolled along the backs of the clouds, slowly grew, and refracted back into the heavens again—a suggestion of earthly, naked and familiar light only beyond the crowns of Ed Stone’s trees.
I didn’t see it—though I have seen it in memory—when the old man took his tumble at the cornerstone of his implacable ruins. I’d left him behind me in his grove of dark trees and gone down to bring his pickup around according to our prospectus for battle—left him paying out rope, backing up stiltingly between the pines with his head cocked toward the gray light, the rude hitch he’d built flowing up towar
d the bole of the elm, flowing at first and then floundering and wobbling at a shallower slant as he hobbled backward: finally, unwitnessed, the fall itself, a chance, solitary thing, and then—muffled and powerless—his cry in the snowfall.
I turned and wheeled up the path again, alone with a suddenness that made my breathing seem to echo inside my ears, and found Ed Stone pawing at the edge of his farmhouse ruins, a grimace of astonishment and rue and self-exacerbating vexation sculpted onto his drawn features, his steel-rims cockeyed, haywire, his familiar pipe—as much a part of him as his fingers and hands—nowhere to be found, and the manila rope, like a pendulum dying out, swinging at the merest arc ten feet in front of him through the snowfall. Grimly, obscenely determined, awkward and grotesque—like a plowhorse who has snapped a foreleg and, writhing, lathered, cannot accept or understand the meaning of proneness, of gravity and earth pounding him down—the old man waggled upward, clenching bits of jagged stone between his gloved fingers and rising, flopping, searching inwardly for a way to find a foothold and stand upright. A new look came over him, a seizure of pain engulfed him, lit his eyes and face—old fool that he was, he’d brought his weight down on the left fibula, the bone he’d cracked going over backward—and Ed Stone slipped down on his side, folded together like brittle paper, and clutched his broken leg tightly and cried without shame where he lay amid the old snowy ruins.
The Country Ahead of Us, the Country Behind Page 10
