Ellis Island & Other Stories (10 page)

“Oh,” I said.

On a bluff high above a rushing river, we pulled into a shed at the end of a long snow-covered road. The river forked above my grandparents’ land, and came together again south of it. In winter, one could not cross the boiling rapids except by a cable car, which went from the shed to a pine grove behind their barn. The cable car was cream-colored and blue, and had come, we were told, from Switzerland. The two hundred acres were a perfect island.

This island was equally divided into woods, pasture, and lakes. The woods were evergreen, and my grandfather picked up fallen branches whenever he came upon them (for kindling), so that the floor was open and clear, covered only with pine needles and an occasional grouping of ferns. The pines were tall and widely spaced. Horses could gallop through the columned shadows. The chamber formed by these trees extended for acres, in some places growing very dark, and to walk through it was fearsome and delightful. Always, the wind whistled through the trees. If you looked around and saw only this forest, it seemed as if you were underground. But a glance upward showed sky through green.

The pastures were fenced with split rail and barbed wire, covered with deep snow, spread about in patches of five or ten acres in the woods and on the sides of hills. They rolled all over the island and were host to wind and drifts; they were the places to ski or go race the horses on trails that had been packed down by daily use. Half in woods, half in pasture, was the house—white frame with black shutters, many fireplaces, and warm plank floors which gave off resinous squeaks. Between the house and the river was the barn, in which were two horses, a loft of clean hay, a workshop, and a pair of retrievers—one gold and one black—whose tails were forever waving back and forth in approval and contentment.

At the island’s center were two lakes. One, of about five acres, lay open to the north wind and was isolated from the winter sun by a pine-clad rise to its south. This lake froze so that its surface was as slick as a mirror. When it was not covered with snow, it was the perfect place to skate. The second lake was no more than three acres, and it lay in the lee of the rise, open to the sun. A salt spring dropped water to it over falls of ten or fifteen feet. It was bordered by pines and forest-green rocks on the north, and opened to a pasture below. This lake was nearly hidden, and it was never completely frozen.

After a few trips in the cable car, we got the provisions and supplies into the house and spent a long time unpacking and putting away what we had bought. My grandfather and I took turkeys, hams, chickens, roasts, and wheels of cheese into a cold smokehouse. When he lit the fire there, I was poised to run from a great conflagration, and was surprised that it crept slowly, with hardly any flame. That night, we smelled not only sweet fires in the house but a dark, antique scent from chips smoldering under hanging meat and fowl.

Our room was in the attic. It had a big window through which we could see mountain ranges and clouds beyond the meadows. At night, a vast portion of sky was visible from our bed. When I opened my eyes after being asleep, the stars were so ferociously bright that I had to squint. They were not passive and mute as they sometimes are, but they shone out and burned like white fire. I have never fallen asleep without thinking of them. They made me imagine white lions, perhaps because the phosphorescent burning was like a roar of light. A fireplace was in the room; a picture of Melville (the handsomest man I have ever seen, surely not so much for what he looked like but for what he was); wooden pegs on which to hang our goose vests and Christmas hats; shelves and shelves of illustrated books. Most remarkably, the ceiling was painted a deep luminous blue.

As the days became calibrated into wide periods of light and dark, we lost track even of the weeks, much less the hours. Later, when I was wounded in war, they shot me full of morphine. The slow bodiless breathing was just like the way time passed in that crystalline January.

We were possessed by the flawless isolation and the numbing cold. Perhaps we lost ourselves so easily because of the exquisite tiredness after so many hours outdoors, or perhaps because Julia and I had been waiting tensely and were suddenly freed. In the days, we rode the horses, and the dogs followed. At first, the four of us went out, with the children sitting forward on the saddles. Soon, though, I did my own riding. My grandmother and Julia would go back into the house and I would mount their horse. Then my grandfather and I galloped all over the island, dashing through the pines, crossing meadows, riding hard to prospects overlooking the thunderous white forks of the river. Much work was needed just to take care of the horses, to curry, to shovel, to fork down their hay from the loft. We split wood and carried it into the house, stocking all the fireplaces every night for at least one good burn. We baked pies according to a special system, in which my grandmother made pie for the grownups and we followed her, step by step, with a children’s pie, which, no matter what we did, always looked like a shanty. My sister kept the house completely free of dust. It was a game for her, and she polished everything in sight. “It’s sad,” said my grandfather.

“Why?” asked his blue-eyed wife, still strikingly beautiful.

“The child is so upset that she’s become obsessed. Today, she was dusting for two hours, telling herself stories and singing. She’s afraid to sit still.”

“She’s as happy as she can be in the circumstances.”

“I don’t know,” he said. “How do you reach a child caught up like that? You can’t just talk to her.”

“All we have to do is love her, and that’s easy.”

In late afternoon as it grew dark we would come into the house and read, or be read to, until dinner. After we had cleaned up, we had a fire in the living room and read some more. An old radio brought in a classical station which sounded so far away that it seemed to be Swiss. Sometimes we took walks in the moonlight, and sometimes we stayed out for as long as we could and looked through a telescope at the moon and planets. By about eight, we were always so tired that we hardly moved, and just sat staring at the fire. Then my grandfather would throw on some logs and say, “Enough of this nonsense! Are we sloths? Certainly not. There are things to do. Let’s do them.”

In a sudden burst of energy, my grandmother would go to the piano, he would return to his book, Julia would pull down the watercolors, the fire would blaze, and I would become hypnotized by Hottentots and Midwestern drainage canals within the dentist-yellow
National Geographies.
Then we would go to bed, as exhausted as if we had just spent time in a great city at Christmas. Sleep came easily when the nights were clear and the sky pulsed.

But the nights were not always clear. In the middle of January, we had a great blizzard. We could neither ride, nor ski, nor walk for very long with the snowshoes. High drifts made it extremely difficult just to get the wood in. The sky was gray; my grandfather’s bad leg made him limp about; and we all began to grow pale. Instead of putting more logs on the fire and waking up, we let the flame go into coals, and we moved slowly upstairs to sleep. The blizzard lasted for days. We felt as if we were in the Arctic, and we learned to wince slightly at the word “Canada.” I wondered if indeed all things came to sad and colorless ends.

Then something happened. One night, when the wind was so fierce that we heard trees crash down in the forest, we were just about to get into bed, and my grandfather had turned out all the lights and was coming up the stairs. From high above in the swirl of raging wind and snow came a frightening, wonderful, mysterious sound.

Neither of the nightingale nor of the wolf but somewhere in between, as meaningful and mournful as a life spent in the most solitary places, strong and yet sad, as clear as cold water and ever so beautiful, it was the cry of the loon. It sounded for all the world like one of Blake’s angels, and as it hovered above our house, circling our bed, we thought it was God come to take us. My grandfather rushed to the landing.

“They’re back!” he cried.

“It can’t be,” said my grandmother, looking up. “Not after ten years. They must be others.”

“No,” he said. “I know them too well.”

The sound kept circling and we listened for many minutes with our heads thrown back and our eyes traversing to and fro against the pitch of the roof. Then there was quiet.

“What was it?” I asked, noticing for the first time that my sister had grasped my waist and still held tightly.

“Arctic Loons,” he said. “Two Arctic Loons. Isn’t it a beautiful sound? I’ll tell you about them.”

“When?”

“Now,” he said, and went to light the fire.

My grandmother dragged in a chair, and she and my grandfather sat facing us. We were propped up in bed, covered by a giant satin goose blanket. It was very late for my sister, and she looked drugged. But she was terrified, and she stared ahead without a blink. She wore a white flannel gown with tiny blue stars all over it. My grandmother rocked back and forth, hardly ever taking her eyes from us. My grandfather leaned forward as if he were about to enter communion with the blazing fire.

Then he turned with startling concentration. My grandfather was six and one-half feet tall and as thin as a switch. He was rocking back and forth, and he mesmerized us as if we were a jury and he a great lawyer of the nineteenth century. The fire roared upward at the stone, diverging into ragged orange tongues. “What is a loon? What is a loon? What is a loon?” he said, so that our mouths dropped open in astonishment.

“You heard it, did you not? Can you tell me that the creature has no soul? Doesn’t it sound, in its sad call, like a man? Did they not sound like singers? Remember, first of all, that we have our idea of angels from the birds. For they are gentle and perfect in a way we will never be. For more than a hundred million years they have been soaring. They found the union of peace and ecstasy so long ago that we cannot even imagine the time. But that does not answer your simple question.

“A loon is a bird. Tomorrow, you will see it. It is extremely fine to look at, so sleek and clean of line that it puts an arrow to shame. It is circumpolar, which means that it lives in both the Eastern and the Western hemispheres. It can swim on the water and under it, and it is a strong flier. Tonight we heard two Arctic Loons. When winter comes in the polar regions, they go south. But rarely do they appear on the Atlantic Coast, and when they do they winter on the sea, where the water, though cold, is not frozen, and where there are plenty of fish.

“When I came back from the First War, your grandmother and I bought this place and began to spend the summers here. The house was up, but most of the pasture was not cleared, the barn had yet to be built, and the only way over the river was by a cable ferry on which everything got a thorough wetting. For years, we were here only in the summer, but one winter I came to stay alone.

“It was almost impossible to cross the river on the ferry. Had it capsized into the freezing waters, I would have drowned. The sheriff of the county advised me not to cross, but I did, and soon I was snowed in and everything was completely quiet. In those days, I was trying to write my dissertation. Before you become a professor, you have to write a book which is boring enough so that even you cannot bear to read it over. Once you have done this, you are free to write as you please, but can’t. After I had been in the war, it was hard to write such a book because, well, I was so happy just to be alive—so happy that for years afterward I often did crazy things.”

My grandmother glanced leftward into the darkness above the roof beams, conveying both skepticism and amusement. But, when she returned her gaze to my grandfather’s face, she seemed almost bitter.

“For example,” my grandfather continued. “In Cambridge, Harvard students were supposed to be afraid of the town toughs, who always gathered in large groups at street corners. Though I knew my way around (after having been there for ten years), I would sometimes approach such a group and say, ‘Which one of you duds knows enough words to direct me to Kirkland Street?’ That, believe me, took courage. And then, once, I stood up in a crowded lecture and asked the professor: ‘What is the difference between a mailbox and the backside of a hippopotamus?’ He immediately said, ‘I don’t know,’ to which I answered that I would be glad to mail his letters for him. I believe it was the shock of war. I hope it was the shock of war. It took me a while to straighten out.

“After a few days in the house, struggling to write my chapters, I grew restless and began to walk around in the woods. We did not have horses then. I went to the big lake and found that it had a snowless surface. I skated there for a week before I went to the little lake, to see if perhaps I could skate there, too. When I saw that it was clear of ice, I remembered that it was salty and sheltered. As I was sitting, skates hung over my shoulder, my face to the sun, a fleet of birds sailed gracefully from under a rock ledge to the center of the lake. There were at least a dozen loons—paired up, healthy, unaware of my presence. I moved back so that they would not see me, and when I left I resolved to watch them in secret.

“This I did, and soon learned their habits. Early in the morning, the first flight—as I called it—would take off from the lake with great effort. It was so hard for them to get airborne that it seemed as if they would crash against the opposite shore, but they rose just before the land and flew southward. This they did two at a time until about noon, when the first pair returned. The last flight returned just at darkness. Then they would go up on the bank and sleep in nests they had made of fern, pine needles, and reeds.

“Though their transition to flight was awkward, they flew magnificently—as I learned later, up to sixty miles per hour. Because of their great speed, I was at first unable to follow them. But one day I was in town and had just stepped out of the post office, when I saw two of them flying by in the same direction as the road. You can imagine the surprise of the sheriff when I jumped into his idling car and ordered him to follow the loons. He did, and we discovered that they fed in a wide section of the river, where there were many fish but where the loons could not have lived because the water ran too fast. I watched them over time and found that they lived in mated pairs, that they kept faith, and that they showed great concern and tenderness for one another. In fact, their loyalty and intimacy were as beautiful to observe as their graceful bodies of brown, white, and gray.