Hamilton Stark (36 page)

Far out at the center of the river, where beneath the ice the water ran deepest and coldest, there were several clusters of tiny windowless huts. Inside each hut, a fisherman sat hunkered over a head-size hole cut in the ice, drinking whiskey and warming his red hands over an oil heater, each man closed into his own kerosene-lit world, as shut off from the others by the cold and the wind as planets in separate solar systems. And though their huts were clustered together in the same galaxy, the fishermen were together for no reason of comfort or sociability, but only because here, in this region, the river ran deepest and coldest and the fish would take the bait.

A little farther on there is a place, where the river is at its broadest and makes a long, slow sweep around a gently rounded plain, that has been marked by a plaque placed by the state historical society beside the road as it curves along
the arm of the river. The plaque tells the traveler that there, in the spring of 1703, the first party of settlers in the town of B. spent their first night in the valley. There, on this slight swell of land, they made camp, and the next morning, as dawn broke and the mist lifted from the river and the trees turned gold in the hazy sunlight, the settlers were surprised by a war party of Abenooki Indians and in the ensuing battle lost one of the original incorporators, a man named Lemuel Stark.

By the time I reached the outskirts of the village, where the river narrows to rapids and the mills were built, the grist-mill, the sawmill, and later, in the nineteenth century, the shoe factory, now a storehouse for a local well-drilling company, the snow had started to fall densely, in semitransparent curtains down and across my field of vision like veils dropping away first to reveal a face and then to cover it.

At the Parade, the large common square of ground at the center of the town, as I approached the Congregational church and the turnoff to Blue Job Road, I saw the police chief’s car, Chub Blount’s Plymouth station wagon with its blue glass bubble on top, come out of Blue Job Road, turn onto the main road, and pass swiftly by me, heading in the direction I had just come from. The snow was falling too heavily now for me to have seen his face as he passed, but I recognized his white Stetson hat and saw that he was alone. A few seconds later, I was passed by another car with a blue glass bubble on the roof, this one driven by the chief’s assistant, Calvin Clark. I assumed that the two had come directly from A.’s house, and I responded to the fact that they both were alone with a peculiar mixture of relief and disappointment—relief that they apparently had not found A., or if they had, that they had not arrested him; and disappointment because, if
they
had failed to locate him at his house, then how could I expect to succeed? Of course, it was also possible
that they
had
found him after all, had found his body, that is, and thus had no reason not to be alone as they drove back to town. But then, I reasoned, I would have seen only one of the two police officers, for surely Chub would have left Calvin back at the house to watch over A.’s body and to make sure no one tampered with or accidentally disturbed the evidence.

But evidence of what? I asked myself. How do I know a crime’s been committed? Maybe nothing unusual or disastrous had happened to
anyone
—not to Dora, not to A., not to Chub Blount, not even to
me
—and maybe the chief and his assistant had not even been at A.’s house in the first place but had been out on Blue Job Road this snowy morning on some other and wholly unrelated police business. Quickly, I ran down the bits of evidence—the three bulletholes in the car window, the strange circumstances of the car’s presence and A.’s absence, with all the doors of the house locked, the gate closed, and even though yesterday had been a Sunday, week’s end, the absence of any freshly tossed out trash at the edge of the field in front. Yes, it’s true, I thought. It’s true. The evidence points with equal force to numerous conclusions, and many of the conclusions do not constitute crimes or disaster or even anything especially unusual whether in A.’s life or Dora’s or Chub’s, or my own. As I slowed the car to make the turn at the church onto Blue Job Road, I finally admitted to myself that, yes, I may have made the whole thing up. I may have imagined everything.

But then, as soon as I was on Blue Job Road, I started to laugh at myself, not out loud, but with a low, ironic giggle. An hour before I had been wondering seriously if the whole thing, this very thing I was now afraid I had imagined, had been engineered by A. I felt light-headed, almost giddy. This was self-mockery taken to the edge of hysteria.

By then the snow had covered the road sufficiently to
obliterate any trace of its surface, and I was only able to keep to it by following the high banks of old, ice-hard snow on either side. The windshield wipers clacked back and forth, cutting a pair of half-moons for me to peer through. In a few seconds I entered the short stretch of the road where the conifers grow to the very edge of the road, their branches interlacing between them and across the road above me, making a rough, dark tunnel and it seemed suddenly that it was no longer snowing and a great arching space had opened around me. The woods here, most Scotch pine and dark spruce, grew scruffily into the shaggy wall of an outdoor cathedral, and I remembered then that it was there, just yesterday afternoon, that I had looked hopefully for the figure of Rochelle, as if she were a sister or daughter whose recent death I still mourned and had not yet accepted as real, whose familiar form and hair and green, hooded loden coat my eyes still habitually searched for.

Then, as quickly, I was out of the wood and into the snowstorm again, peering anxiously through half-moons, aiming the car rather than driving it, for the road was slightly slippery under my tires. I passed several battered house trailers and tarpaper-covered shacks, the homes of A.’s neighbors, barely glimpsing them through the falling snow, noticing only that, covered with the layer of fresh snow, the buildings and the cluttered yards looked cleaner, more orderly, as if the snow could tend to them more capably, more energetically, than could the inhabitants.

A few seconds more, and I slowed the car and turned onto the lane that led to A.’s house. I glanced over at the large, hummocky field in front of the house and saw that it, too, had been transformed by the fastidious care of the falling snow, had been made over to look more like a natural, cleared meadow in winter than an open dump, a private trash receptacle.

When I drew up to the gate and prepared to stop so that I could get out and open it, I saw, with surprise, that the gate was wide open already. Hadn’t I remembered to close it the day before? It was enough of a habit that I didn’t have to think consciously of it in order to close it after passing through, therefore I couldn’t be sure. Was this “evidence” of anything—-that the gate, normally closed, was now invitingly wide open? I looked up the long driveway to the house and garage. Everything was as I had seen it yesterday afternoon—A.’s Chrysler parked facing the closed garage door, the house darkened and apparently empty, the large expanse of smooth, freshly whitened yard encircling the house from the fence down in front to the woods in back, and beyond those woods, the rising shape of the mountain. No, except for the new pelt of snow and the open gate, everything was the same. Everything.

Very slowly, the snow creaking under my tires, I drove up to A.’s car and parked directly behind it. Then I got out of my car and walked around to the window at the driver’s side of the Chrysler. There they were, the three bulletholes connected by a network of tiny cracks, like spider webs. I touched each of the holes with my finger. One of them unexpectedly crumbled at the edges from the pressure, and my finger poked into the cold interior space of the car, startling me. Frightened by something nameless, I quickly withdrew my finger and nervously yanked on my gloves.

It was totally silent, windless, the snow falling straight down, as if being drawn to the ground by the ground itself in some guilty need to hide itself. I left the car and checked the garage door, which was locked. Then I crossed the yard to the front door, determined that it was locked, went up to the side porch and yanked on that door too. Leaning close to the glass to block out my reflection with my shadow, I peered into the
kitchen. It was dark inside, but when my eyes had grown used to the darkness, I could see the outlines of the stove, sink, refrigerator, and the small, wooden table and single stool A. had built to replace the Formica-topped table and chairs he had once owned with Dora and that now lay beneath a foot or more of old snow in the field in front, the chromium legs rusting, padding from the seats spilling from rips torn one afternoon last April by high-powered rifle slugs. I could see the calendar on the wall near the telephone. Below the four-color photograph of an oil burner was the sheet for the month of February, for the year 1975—just as it should be. Yet somehow I was surprised. Somehow I had expected to see some other year, some other month. The house seemed to have been deserted long, long ago.

Slowly, I stepped down from the porch and took a few steps into the yard. The only sound was the constant rattle of my own voice inside my own head. The snow was still softly falling, and I couldn’t see clearly more than a few feet in front of me. There was nothing left for me to check, I thought, except the footprints, and that was quite impossible now. Everything was buried under several inches of soft, fresh snow, so that the only footprints I could see were my own. They dribbled along behind me, tiny, crumbling craters slowly filling with new snow. I knew that in a few minutes even these, my own tracks, would disappear. And that would be the end of the “evidence.” Any further pursuit of A. would have to be based solely on abstract reasoning, speculation, empty theory. Or else I simply would have to
guess
at his whereabouts, randomly placing him here and there, then rushing to seek him here and there, and if he was not to be found at either place, to guess again. I did not want that. No man wants to believe that his life has finally gotten so out of his control that he either must theorize about it or else be forced to
guess
at its
nature. He’d rather believe in magic, fetish objects, totems, dreams. This is how a real life becomes a fiction, I thought, dismayed.

Suddenly, as if remembering a scene from a dream, I remembered driving through the cathedral-like woods on my way over this morning and how, for a few hundred yards, where the branches of the trees wove themselves together overhead, the snow had seemed almost not to be falling. If there had been old tracks on that ground, I thought, footprints laid down beside the road yesterday or the day before, anytime back to the last heavy snowfall, then they would still be visible. Like the faces of type in a printer’s matrix, they could be returned to after the type itself had been destroyed and read again. With a matrix, yesterday’s or last week’s newspaper could as well be today’s or tomorrow’s.

Stepping quickly, almost bounding, around the side of the house to the back, where the second barn and an old chicken house and tool shed were located, I reasoned that if A. or anyone else had decided in the last few days to walk into the woods, for whatever reason, his tracks would probably still be visible near the trees and would remain so until the wind came up and blew the new snow into obliterating drifts. I knew that A.’s habits and routines seldom led him into the woods, so I knew that any trail I saw would be a sign that something out of the ordinary had occurred—and I desperately needed just such a sign at that moment to break the impasse, the painful balance that hung between all the signs of normalcy and all the signs of variance. Of course, I also knew that his habits and routines led him at least once a week to walk up the path to the top of the mountain, so any variation from the tracks that the habitual walk up and back ought to have left would be meaningful, too.

With a hunter’s eye, I scrutinized the exposed, old, packed
snow that lay in corrugated sheets beneath the tall pines, cedars and spruce growing along the cleared ground behind the barn and outbuildings. Nothing. Several times I walked back and forth along the edge of the clearing, looking into the woods. Nothing. An occasional rabbit’s trail, the scattered scratches from birds, the small spirals left by squirrels—that was all. Then, as my spirits sank, I came to the path, the narrow defile between the trees and bushes that slowly switch-backed up the gradually rising incline all the way to the top. And there they were—A.’s tracks, his easily recognizable 13 EEEs, each one a yard from the next, leading swiftly from under the smoldering blanket of new snow on the yard directly into the woods and on. This I had, of course, fully expected to see, especially after a weekend, when I knew that A. had made his weekly trek to the top of his mountain, Blue Job, two thousand feet or so above sea level, a huge lump of granite and glacial till that had been his family’s property since the days of the earliest white settlement in the valley. It comprised almost the whole of seven hundred acres for which they had been taxed these two hundred years, that mountain and the three- or four-acre apron at the base of its south face, where the house and fields were located. Except for its lower half, where every fifteen years or so timber could be harvested, the land was not arable. The upper thousand feet of its height, at this latitude, was so close to the tree line and so free of loose soil that it was almost completely clear of vegetation—a gray gnarl of rock and bony plate and crevice.

I took a short step onto the path, and the snow suddenly seemed to cease falling. My vision cleared as if a screen had been removed from before my eyes. I straightened and peered around for the second set of tracks, A.’s return set. But there was none! How could that be? If he’d gone up, then he must have left tracks coming down. There was no other route for
him, up or down, especially at this time of year. The northern slope was precipitous and notched with crevices and sheer drops of hundreds of feet onto ledges and broken shards of stone. The east and west slopes, once you got off the knob, no easy descent, and entered the trees, were practically impenetrably dense with low scrub brush and face-whipping birches left from the last timbering. Besides, they eventually flattened into fields that were owned by other people, people A. had refused to permit to trespass on his property. He was not very likely to trespass on theirs, not unless he was in the direst of circumstances, and probably not even then.