The Mist (2 page)

 

“Jeee-pers,”
Billy said.

He was standing by the fence that separates our property from Norton's and looking down our driveway. The driveway runs a quarter of a mile to a camp road, which, in its turn, runs about three-quarters of a mile to a stretch of two-lane blacktop, called Kansas Road. From Kansas Road you can go anywhere you want, as long as it's Bridgton.

I saw what Billy was looking at and my heart went cold.

“Don't go any closer, champ. Right there is close enough.”

Billy didn't argue.

The morning was bright and as clear as a bell. The sky, which had been a mushy, hazy color during the heat wave, had regained a deep, crisp blue that was nearly autumnal. There was a light breeze, making cheerful sun-dapples move back and forth in the driveway. Not far from where Billy was standing there was a steady hissing noise, and in the grass there was what you might at first have taken for a writhing bundle of snakes. The power lines leading to our house had fallen in an untidy tangle about twenty feet away and lay in a burned patch of grass. They were twisting lazily and spitting. If the trees and grass hadn't been so completely damped down by the torrential rains, the house might have gone up. As it was, there was only that black patch where the wires had touched directly.

“Could that lectercute a person, Daddy?”

“Yeah. It could.”

“What are we going to do about it?”

“Nothing. Wait for the CMP.”

“When will they come?”

“I don't know.” Five-year-olds have as many questions as Hallmark has cards. “I imagine they're pretty busy this morning. Want to take a walk up to the end of the driveway with me?”

He started to come and then stopped, eyeing the wires nervously. One of them humped up and turned over lazily, as if beckoning.

“Daddy, can lectricity shoot through the ground?”

A fair question. “Yes, but don't worry. Electricity wants the ground, not you, Billy. You'll be all right if you stay away from the wires.”

“Wants the ground,” he muttered, and then came to me. We walked up the driveway holding hands.

It was worse than I had imagined. Trees had fallen across the drive in four different places, one of them small, two of them middling, and one old baby that must have been five feet through the middle. Moss was crusted onto it like a moldy corset.

Branches, some half-stripped of their leaves, lay everywhere in jackstraw profusion. Billy and I walked up to the camp road, tossing the smaller branches off into the woods on either side. It reminded me of a summer's day that had been maybe twenty-five years before; I couldn't have been much older than Billy was now. All my uncles had been here, and they had spent the day in the woods with axes and hatchets and Darcy poles, cutting brush. Later that afternoon they had all sat down to the trestle picnic table my dad and mom used to have and there had been a monster meal of hot dogs and hamburgers and potato salad. The 'Gansett beer had flowed like water and my uncle Reuben took a dive into the lake with all his clothes on, even his deck-shoes. In those days there were still deer in these woods.

“Daddy, can I go down to the lake?”

He was tired of throwing branches, and the thing to do with a little boy when he's tired is to let him go do something else. “Sure.”

We walked back to the house together and then Billy cut right, going around the house and giving the downed wires a large berth. I went left, into the garage, to get my McCullough. As I had suspected, I could already hear the unpleasant song of the chainsaw up and down the lake.

I topped up the tank, took off my shirt, and was starting back up the driveway when Steff came out. She eyed the downed trees lying across the driveway nervously.

“How bad is it?”

“I can cut it up. How bad is it in there?”

“Well, I got the glass cleaned up, but you're going to have to do something about that tree, David. We can't have a tree in the living room.”

“No,” I said. “I guess we can't.”

We looked at each other in the morning sunlight and got to giggling. I set the McCullough down on the cement areaway, and kissed her, holding her buttocks firmly.

“Don't,” she murmured. “Billy's—”

He came tearing around the corner of the house just then. “Dad! Daddy! Y'oughta see the—”

Steffy saw the live wires and screamed for him to watch out. Billy, who was a good distance away from them, pulled up short and stared at his mother as if she had gone mad.

“I'm okay, Mom,” he said in the careful tone of voice you use to placate the very old and senile. He walked toward us, showing us how all right he was, and Steff began to tremble in my arms.

“It's all right,” I said in her ear. “He knows about them.”

“Yes, but people get killed,” she said. “They have ads all the time on television about live wires, people get—Billy, I want you to come in the house right now!”

“Aw, come on, Mom! I wanna show Dad the boathouse!” He was almost bug-eyed with excitement and disappointment. He had gotten a taste of poststorm apocalypse and wanted to share it.

“You go in right now! Those wires are dangerous and—”

“Dad said they want the ground, not me—”

“Billy, don't you argue with me!”

“I'll come down and look, champ. Go on down yourself.” I could feel Steff tensing against me. “Go around the other side, kiddo.”

“Yeah! Okay!”

He tore past us, taking the stone steps that led around the west end of the house two by two. He disappeared with his shirttail flying, trailing back one word—“Wow!”—as he spotted some other piece of destruction.

“He knows about the wires, Steffy.” I took her gently by the shoulders. “He's scared of them. That's good. It makes him safe.”

One tear tracked down her cheek. “David, I'm scared.”

“Come on! It's over.”

“Is it? Last winter…and the late spring…they called it a black spring in town…they said there hadn't been one in these parts since 1888—”

“They” undoubtedly meant Mrs. Carmody, who kept the Bridgton Antiquary, a junk shop that Steff liked to rummage around in sometimes. Billy loved to go with her. In one of the shadowy, dusty back rooms, stuffed owls with gold-ringed eyes spread their wings forever as their feet endlessly grasped varnished logs; stuffed raccoons stood in a trio around a “stream” that was a long fragment of dusty mirror; and one moth-eaten wolf, which was foaming sawdust instead of saliva around his muzzle, snarled a creepy eternal snarl. Mrs. Carmody claimed the wolf was shot by her father as it came to drink from Stevens Brook one September afternoon in 1901.

The expeditions to Mrs. Carmody's Antiquary shop worked well for my wife and son. She was into carnival glass and he was into death in the name of taxidermy. But I thought that the old woman exercised a rather unpleasant hold over Steff's mind, which was in all other ways practical and hardheaded. She had found Steff's vulnerable spot, a mental Achilles' heel. Nor was Steff the only one in town who was fascinated by Mrs. Carmody's gothic pronouncements and folk remedies (which were always prescribed in God's name).

Stump-water would take off bruises if your husband was the sort who got a bit too free with his fists after three drinks. You could tell what kind of a winter was coming by counting the rings on the caterpillars in June or by measuring the thickness of August honeycomb. And now, good God protect and preserve us, THE BLACK SPRING OF 1888 (add your own exclamation points, as many as you think it deserves). I had also heard the story. It's one they like to pass around up here—if the spring is cold enough, the ice on the lakes will eventually turn as black as a rotted tooth. It's rare, but hardly a once-in-a-century occurrence. They like to pass it around, but I doubt that many could pass it around with as much conviction as Mrs. Carmody.

“We had a hard winter and a late spring,” I said. “Now we're having a hot summer. And we had a storm but it's over. You're not acting like yourself, Stephanie.”

“That wasn't an ordinary storm,” she said in that same husky voice.

“No,” I said. “I'll go along with you there.”

I had heard the Black Spring story from Bill Giosti, who owned and operated—after a fashion—Giosti's Mobil in Casco Village. Bill ran the place with his three tosspot sons (with occasional help from his four tosspot grandsons…when they could take time off from tinkering with their snowmobiles and dirt-bikes). Bill was seventy, looked eighty, and could still drink like twenty-three when the mood was on him. Billy and I had taken the Scout in for a fill-up the day after a surprise mid-May storm dropped nearly a foot of wet, heavy snow on the region, covering the new grass and flowers. Giosti had been in his cups for fair, and happy to pass along the Black Spring story, along with his own original twist. But we get snow in May sometimes; it comes and it's gone two days later. It's no big deal.

Steff was glancing doubtfully at the downed wires again. “When will the power company come?”

“Just as soon as they can. It won't be long. I just don't want you to worry about Billy. His head's on pretty straight. He forgets to pick up his clothes, but he isn't going to go and step on a bunch of live lines. He's got a good, healthy dose of self-interest.” I touched a corner of her mouth and it obliged by turning up in the beginning of a smile. “Better?”

“You always make it seem better,” she said, and that made me feel good.

From the lakeside of the house Billy was yelling for us to come and see.

“Come on,” I said. “Let's go look at the damage.”

She snorted ruefully. “If I want to look at damage, I can go sit in my living room.”

“Make a little kid happy, then.”

We walked down the stone steps, hand in hand. We had just reached the first turn in them when Billy came from the other direction at speed, almost knocking us over.

“Take it easy,” Steff said, frowning a little. Maybe, in her mind, she was seeing him skidding into that deadly nest of live wires instead of the two of us.

“You gotta come see!” Billy panted. “The boathouse is all bashed! There's a dock on the rocks…and trees in the boat cove…Jesus
Christ!
”

“Billy Drayton!” Steff thundered.

“Sorry, Ma—but you gotta—wow!” He was gone again.

“Having spoken, the doomsayer departs,” I said, and that made Steff giggle again. “Listen, after I cut up those trees across the driveway, I'll go by the Central Maine Power office on Portland Road. Tell them what we got. Okay?”

“Okay,” she said gratefully. “When do you think you can go?”

Except for the big tree—the one with the moldy corset of moss—it would have been an hour's work. With the big one added in, I didn't think the job would be done until eleven or so.

“I'll give you lunch here, then. But you'll have to get some things at the market for me…we're almost out of milk and butter. Also…well, I'll have to make you a list.”

Give a woman a disaster and she turns squirrel. I gave her a hug and nodded. We went on around the house. It didn't take more than a glance to understand why Billy had been a little overwhelmed.

“Lordy,” Steff said in a faint voice.

From where we stood we had enough elevation to be able to see almost a quarter of a mile of shoreline—the Bibber property to our left, our own, and Brent Norton's to our right.

The huge old pine that had guarded our boat cove had been sheared off halfway up. What was left looked like a brutally sharpened pencil, and the inside of the tree seemed a glistening and defenseless white against the age-and-weather-darkened outer bark. A hundred feet of tree, the old pine's top half, lay partly submerged in our shallow cove. It occurred to me that we were very lucky our little Star-Cruiser wasn't sunk underneath it. The week before, it had developed engine trouble and it was still at the Naples marina, patiently waiting its turn.

On the other side of our little piece of shorefront, the boathouse my father had built—the boathouse that had once housed a sixty-foot Chris-Craft when the Drayton family fortunes had been at a higher mark than they were today—lay under another big tree. It was the one that had stood on Norton's side of the property line, I saw. That raised the first flush of anger. The tree had been dead for five years and he should have long since had it taken down. Now it was three-quarters of the way down; our boathouse was propping it up. The roof had taken on a drunken, swaybacked look. The wind had swirled shingles from the hole the tree had made all over the point of land the boathouse stood on. Billy's description, “bashed,” was as good as any.

“That's Norton's tree!” Steff said. And she said it with such hurt indignation that I had to smile in spite of the pain I felt. The flagpole was lying in the water and Old Glory floated soggily beside it in a tangle of lanyard. And I could imagine Norton's response: Sue me.