The Followed Man (12 page)
Authors: Thomas Williams
She was a reader, though she
hadn't been able to go to college—that wasn't a possibility
her family would have considered then. Six years ago, when he had
been here last, she and George were having a garage sale and among
the items were three hundred paperback books at a nickel each.
Before her marriage she had read all of the books, every one, in the
little brown granite Carnegie Free Library across from the church.
She had told him six years ago how she waited for the Bookmobile
before Nixon vetoed Federal funds for such things. And in this
room books were everywhere, though there weren't any bookcases
in the house, as far as he could see. Books were piled along the wall
beside the sofa, piled on top of the rolltop desk. Her books, from
libraries or her own, fiction and non-fiction on any subject at all,
were mostly piled on their sides, rarely on end, though here and
there two piles formed bookends for a few upright ones.
"So you come to see us,"
Phyllis said. "It's been a long time, and all the terrible
things that happened. You know you're always welcome here with
us. We can put you up in the spare bedroom if you're staying over.
Will you have supper with us?"
"I'd like to have supper
with you, but I've got to go back tonight. I'm selling my
house."
"You mean you can, or you
can't?" Phyllis said.
"I mean I can, but I can't
stay the night."
"Well, why didn't you say
so right out? George, get some deer chops out of the freezer. We'll
have the little carrots . . . any size to 'em? And dandelion greens,
bread-and-butter pickles, heat up the rest of the scalloped potatoes.
. . ."
"Now, Mother," George
said, "don't you get all heated up. You just order what you want
and I'll take care of it."
"Luke hasn't had a good
meal in months, I can tell. He's been eating restaurant junk. Look at
his eyes, George."
George shrugged and glanced
apologetically at Luke's eyes.
Luke said, "Before supper
I'd like to go to Leah and pick out a stone for Shem's grave. I was
there around noon and forgot all about it. Anyway, is there anything
I can get you while I'm over there?"
George frowned and looked
embarrassed. "Well, now, Luke, you know . . ." he said,
then paused for a while to think. "The Buzzell-Nadeau Post and
the VFW, we kind of got together and bought Shem a stone a couple
months ago. Concord granite, kind of plain, but a handsome piece of
stone, if I do say so. Weighed over five hundred pounds, two by three
by eight inches, what's sticking out of the ground. I tend to think
you'd approve of it."
Luke didn't know how to cope
with George's embarrassment. George evidently felt that he'd been
responsible for butting in on a family affair.
"George, I'm grateful to
all of you," he said. "You've got to let me pay for'it,
though. All right?"
George seemed relieved. "You're
not offended we went ahead on it, now?"
"No, I'm not. I'm grateful,
and that's all. I just want to pay for it."
"Well, nobody's going to
have no objections to that." George thought for a moment. "Maybe
we was a little hasty. We should of known you was going to take care
of it. But Shem was the oldest living vet in town, you know. He had
quite a record in the first war, I don't know how much your family
told you, in the Argonne and all. Now, that wasn't my war, nor yours,
but the boys take it pretty serious. Shem Carr was a cantankerous old
cuss, but he was pretty well respected, just the same."
That was a lot of words for
George, and he seemed to be thinking over what he'd just said
and trying to figure out if he'd said the right thing.
Phyllis changed the subject. "So
you're selling your house in Massachusetts."
"Yeah," Luke said,
nodding.
"Where you going to live,
then? You going to the city?"
"I don't know yet."
"You going to sell the
farm? Land prices are out of sight, as they say. Pretty near
ridiculous, to tell the honest truth."
"No, not until the taxes
get too bad, anyway."
Phyllis turned to George. "You
going to get those deer chops out of the freezer? Give 'em some time
to thaw if we're going to pan fry 'em. I'll take care of the carrots
and. ..."
"You'll take care of
nothing," George said. There was an edge of anger in his voice
that seemed excessive for what he'd just said, but it was probably
his continuing embarrassment about having butted into someone else's
business.
"You got your country
clothes on," Phyllis said, changing the subject again. "You
intend to look at the farm, or you just wear your boots when you come
to New Hampshire?"
"I wasn't slumming, if
that's what you mean."
Phyllis laughed and then
grimaced; her neck hurt when she raised her chin. "George, go
get them chops out of the freezer," she said in a voice that
meant there had been enough discussion of that subject. George went.
"Now, Luke," she said.
"You want to go see the stone that caused all this nervousness.
Shem's in the old high cemetery, you know. You can stop on the way to
the farm, if that's where you're going. We'll eat kind of late, say
seven-thirty, after the TV news, so you got time enough to look
around. I don't know why I kept you standing up all this time when
there's a perfectly good sofa right there beneath the books. And if
you change your mind about staying over, why that's fine. Now get
along. We'll see you at supper." She waved him away with a bent
hand that was painfully shiny at the finger joints.
He took the Cascom Mountain
road, the rounded mountain itself appearing time and again,
always a little startling, as if it had a tendency to move to
different points of the compass. Its top, at about three thousand
feet, was bare granite, though not above the timberline at this
latitude; a forest fire in the 1880's had burned its humus into dust
which had blown and washed away. The trees, hardwood changing to
stunted spruce and small white birch, had been slowly climbing back
since then.
The narrow asphalt road turned
and climbed, crossed beneath a power line, passed the houses of
several old, grown-over farms, summer places now. Just before the
high cemetery, the road turned to gravel, and his own dust moved over
him as he stopped. The cemetery was small, about an acre in all, and
he found Shem's stone with no trouble. Even though he had been here
as a child, and would always remember the odd thoughts he'd had then
at seeing this place of the dead, he was surprised to find so many
Carrs here, the earliest death 1834, the latest Shem's. There were
more of the Biblical names, those ancient Hebrew syllables—Hepzibah,
Ezekiel, Japhet, Amos, Ezra, Rachel. And Shem Gorham Carr, 1894-1977.
Shem's son, Samuel Gorham Carr, 1921-1949, had a small stone near his
father and his mother, Carrie Watson Carr, 1900-1960. Samuel was the
strange son who had never married, hardly ever spoke. Luke had
never heard how Samuel died.
The sun seemed hotter over the
graves. Shem's gray granite stone was more modern than most; the
earliest were black slate. Small American flags, the size of dollar
bills, faded in cast iron holders at the graves of the veterans. The
bodies, half-imagined, seemed to suck the sun down into the lush,
uncut grass. Once elms that spread in the air like great fountains
had shaded this place, but now their stumps were moldering at the
stone walls, losing definition.
He went back across the grass
and through the opening in the stone wall to his dusty car. The road
rose as it followed the Cascom River, rapids visible here and there
through the dense leaves. The brook that flowed through Shem's farm,
Zach Brook, was one of its tributaries. There was a Carr Brook, too,
but it was named after another branch of the family, and emptied into
another small, rocky river in the next valley, though they all fed
Cascom Lake in the main valley below.
The road left the Cascom River,
climbing more. On steep stretches his tires bounced on the washboard,
gravel ticking on the car's gas tank and fender wells. Here the trees
sometimes covered the road, and the air grew cooler. At one
point the road was actual ledge. The only houses he saw were two
small hunting camps with slab siding and rusty stovepipes, side by
side in a small opening.
A half-mile farther and he came
to the side road, grassed in the middle, that descended through deep
spruce toward the farm. Under the trees, if he looked closely enough,
he could see large stones, vaguely rectangular in pattern, that had
been the foundation of one of the fourteen schoolhouses that
Cascom had once supported. Shem's father had attended that school.
Now the only school in Cascom was the one-room grammar school down in
the village.
The wire from the power pole at
the road disappeared overhead in branches that should have been
brushed out long ago. At the small frog pond beside the road he
bottomed in a deep puddle; a culvert was needed here, and a few
loads of gravel. Then he wondered why the maintenance of this road
seemed that immediate a responsibility.
The road emerged from the dark
spruce, as if that cool, primitive shade had been a tunnel, an
entranceway into a lighter world, because he was out of the twilight
into saplings and steeplejack, with patches of juniper and even
tasseling hay. There should be the cellar hole, where the driveway
was still clearly open among poplar and gray birch sprouts. Ghost
images from childhood flickered upon the green. The garden had been
there, the barn there, with its slough of manure flowing down the
barnyard slope, then the connecting sheds leading from the barn to
the white clapboard farmhouse. It was hardest to visualize the lush
pastures that once spread far back over the hummocky slopes behind
the house and barn to what had been the edge of the sugarbush. The
old maples were still there, higher and darker than the saplings that
had grown up to them, but all that open distance had gone.
A light breeze came from the
west, from the mountain that seemed improbably close here, as if this
must be the only real view of it. Weather had always come over the
mountain. He remembered those summer storms that built and
rolled up from the west, the ominous turbulence over the mountain,
then the gray rain approaching, ridge by ridge as each shuttered out
and then the almost horizontal sheets flashing across the barn and
house. Thunder echoed from the mountain so that each crack or rumble
was double or quadruple. Blue arcs would climb, as if on invisible
stairs, from the transformer on the pole across the road.
He walked up the drive to the
cellar hole. One squared corner of the kitchen still rose from it at
an angle, like the bow of a sinking ship, the rest submerged and
going down. The wood of the corner trim was still flecked here and
there with eggshells of paint, but the gray wood was damp and limp,
all the life gone out of it. He pulled a rusty nail from the soggy
wood with his fingers, and it came out as easily as if from clay.
Wood lasted forever unless water got to it. At what point in
Shem's life had he stopped making, because of infirmity or not
caring, the small repairs that would have kept his house alive?
One of the connecting sheds
rested upon Shem's '41 Chevy pickup truck, a dark caul over the
sinking machine. The truck's rusted wheel rims had pressed through
the tires and into the earth. A two-gallon motor oil can, among many
cans and sheets of steel or iron worn thin by rust, seemed kept alive
by its contents.
Amalie.
Odd bottles had turned lead-colored
and untransparent in the rain and dust. None of the rafters of the
sheds or the hewn sills and beams of the collapsed barn were
salvageable, though their former symmetry and strength could be
remembered. He had jumped from the barn's thick beams and cross
members, when they were square and sound, into sweet dusty hay.
Somewhere in the brush and saplings would be a hayrake,
stoneboat, cutterbar, harrow, manure spreader, maybe even the old
John Deere somewhere with a poplar as thick as his leg growing up
between its axles. Once they had all been greased and oiled,
silver in their moving places, but now the keepers and protectors of
this place were all dead, a civilization gone and its relics and
monuments going down under humus, becoming humus. He felt like
an archaeologist who had come upon his own bones.
The breeze died for a moment and
the leaves of the poplar, or aspen, green coins unstable in the wind,
gradually stopped their quaking and rustling. A breath that continued
was the distant rushing of the brook, a few hundred yards down the
slope to the west. The road by the house had once continued down that
slope to a log and plank bridge over the brook and then two miles or
more up the mountain to the cellar holes of other farms abandoned
long before his memory. He found the road, now canopied by branches,
grown up in basswood, or witch hobble, as Shem had called it, and a
grass that seemed aquatic in its wide-bladed greenness, whose
name he had never been told. As he pushed his way down toward the
brook, thinking of the lush and nameless grass he realized how much
he had learned in those summers, how Shem had always taken great
pains to teach him the names of things—plants, tools, parts,
animals, machines—and he seemed never to have forgotten the big
man's instructions, though Shem had always half-frightened him. He
remembered one time in the barn when Shem and his quiet son, Samuel,
were milking and he was sitting on the barn sill watching. "Look
there," Shem had said. "See the snake." He thought
Shem was trying to scare him, but Shem pointed over the stanchion to
a joist and there, along the crack between the joist and the barn
floor above was a black, brown and tan patterned snake about a yard
long.
"Milk snake," Shem
said. "Only he don't drink milk, he eats the goddam mice, is why
he hangs around the barn." Two scrawny barn cats were sitting
next to Shem hoping for a squirt, and Shem gave them a couple of
squirts that plastered their faces. They both contentedly stroked
their whiskers with their paws and licked off the warm milk. "King
snake's the right name for him. A lot of shit-for-brains farmers'd
kill him on sight."
