The Pacific and Other Stories (38 page)

“Yes.”

“You’ll need a good pilot especially now that the hurricane has lifted the river so high.”

“We came through it off the Virginia capes. Worse than rounding the Horn. I’m astounded that we are here.”

The deputy inspector turned to the captain, who continued. “We lost five men, all to deliver bales of china to Albany. I do hope Albany is in need of crockery.”

The deputy inspector shook his head. “Most likely it will be barged through the Erie Canal to find its way west. We’ll open ten bales, please.” He walked down a long row, tapping five bales at random. As the sailors pulled them out he commanded them to go two deep and three deep at each one, alternatingly, to get five more. The sailors, who were English and Irish, understood without clarification, and moved as quickly and efficiently as if they were storekeepers who owned their inventory.

In kerosene light, the willows were cut, and the bales spilled their contents. The china came in sets for sale, each bale having the same number of sets, each set the same number of pieces.

“No serving ware, other cargo?”

“No.”

“I need to count, and then I’ll clean the manifest. I prefer to do that alone, if you don’t mind.”

After everyone had left, he walked slowly down the rows of bales, counting carefully, in the clean scent of willow, his face throbbing gently, his breathing deep. The count was satisfactory.

He left the hold and summoned the captain from his cabin. Better to accomplish the transaction in the open in full view of the crew and not even accept a drink while on board. This payment was by letter of credit. He would carry back no money, only banking documents. It went fast, the stamps were affixed, the papers put in their envelopes, and when he was done he wished the captain a good trip up the Hudson. “When you anchor at night, in the bays,” he said, “if the sky remains clear the moon will be full. They’ll be haying now, so the air should be sweet. I grew up on the Hudson. I love it as if it were woman or child.”

“Why don’t you come with us, then?” the captain asked politely.

“I’ll be back there,” the deputy inspector answered, “soon enough.”

T
HE CURRENT
carried him down the Hudson as fast as a horse could canter, but effortlessly, over sparkling and transparent waters that had the feel of glass and the lightness of air. Slightly melon-green, they were pierced and netted by lines of gold light like fractures in a vein of rock. Having risen, the river was wider, and despite its rapid flow it was flat and tranquil.

With nothing to do but watch, as the air around him was resplendent with sun, and Manhattan seemed to roll from south to north, he felt the charge of the waters that had come down from the place of his birth. He felt their power, their purpose, and their tranquillity. This buoyancy was the after-effect of rain, the clarity an after-effect of storm. Everything seemed perfect in the light. But then he put his hand against his jacket at the solar plexus, where only blue threads attested to the button that once had been sewn on strong. The others were still shining. He kept his hand where it was, close to his heart, as if in salute or blessing, and as the boat raced swiftly downstream, he bowed his head.

C
AMERON PREFERRED
to keep from the eastern border of his land, because it ran along a ridgeline on high meadows that dropped away into the alluring darkness of Sanderson’s pine-filled woods. The terrain was little different on one side of the ridge or the other. Soft clearings floated among the dark evergreens; long meadows on mountainsides stretched for benevolent mile after benevolent mile, covered with wildflowers in spring and deep snow in winter; and mountain streams cut through everything, tumbling down, roaring through small gorges, until they became the calm black water of larger rivers. And if not quite pacified, they were saddened, with the mountains behind them and no more white falls or breathlessly cold channels but just slow water that had run its course through air once blue.

The presence of a fence in such a place was hard to understand, as the land on either side was so much the same, except that one side was Cameron’s and the other Sanderson’s. But, for Cameron, Sanderson’s clearings, meadows, and woods were magically animate and electrified, because he was in love with Sanderson’s wife.

The near and distant forest across the wire was much like Mrs. Sanderson herself—beyond reach, oblivious of what he thought or felt, and extraordinarily, painfully, beautiful. The chance that he would see her on the fence line
was remote: he never had, and expected that he never would. There were too many open miles, and the scale of things in that country, the Stanford Range in British Columbia, did not encourage incidental meetings, though it would have harbored easily a hundred million well protected trysts. It was only that the meadows led to her, the clearings and woods surrounded her, she had ridden through them, and they were hers. Even though he was in his middle age and she not far behind, he loved her without control or dignity, the way he would have loved her had he been nineteen.

Several times a year, Cameron had to repair the fences on the eastern side, because much of the wire was not new, and would rust to powder if left in place. Some of the posts were set in wet ground and tended to rot, staggering like the wounded, tilting the fence and tangling its wires. Sometimes a steer broke through, possessed, perhaps, with madness or fear. And bears tore up the lines, like raiders attacking a railway, so purposefully that their work would have been easy to confuse with that of a man, had they not always left behind their unmistakable tracks.

The eastern side was the higher side. That portion of Cameron’s land rose in the direction of Mt. King George and Mt. Joffre, mountains on which were glaciers and perpetual snowfields. It was the difficult and slow side as well, because it was so inaccessible and high. He had to ride in on horseback and bring the wire along in a coil wrapped in rawhide. Any posts needed for replacement had to be cut on the spot, with an axe. If a hole had to be sunk, he had to do it with a folding shovel, since the gasoline-powered auger he carried in his truck was far too heavy to bring up onto the eastern ridge. All in all, the eastern side was difficult in many ways.

F
OR THREE DAYS
in June, Cameron had ridden the fence—leaving before the sun came up, returning home at dusk—and he had been lucky. There were only a few posts to be pounded in with the heel of the axe; a few dozen slipped wires, fixed with a bent double-headed nail and some hammer blows; and some partial breaks, mostly of the top wire, which was stressed more than the others by temperature contractions or drifting snow.

The fourth day, he judged, would be his last up there, and he might get
home late in the afternoon instead of at eight or nine, knowing that he would not have to go out east again until the fall (to bring in the steers), when he was likely to see Sanderson on the other side of the fence, doing the same thing.

By one in the afternoon, he had risen to the higher meadows, where there were not many trees and he could see just about everything, including the valley that led eventually to Sanderson’s house, and faint trails of smoke from Sanderson’s fire. Or perhaps they were branding, curing meat, or burning deadwood. Ahead for six miles or so was the rest of the fence. It ended in the northeast, flat up against a vertical rock wall half a thousand feet high.

No mountain goat, much less a steer, could have bent his neck to see the top of that wall. Though they had no one to tell them about the danger of falling rocks, or lightning that slithered down the face, and though presumably they had no historical memory and could not conclude by either logic or deduction that it was dangerous, the steers wisely kept clear of the foot of the wall even though the grass there was richer and greener than it was anywhere else. And, for some unknown reason, perhaps because bears in high meadows are happier than bears in the woods, at this altitude they were content to use the baffles, and seldom tore at the wire. The last six had always been the easiest of the miles, and they were surely the most beautiful.

When Cameron was young, when it was still his father’s place, and he had yet to marry, he had loved to finish riding fences at the sheer wall in the northeast corner. At that time, the adjoining ranch was owned by the Reeds, whose son, several years older than Cameron, was killed at Passchendaele.

“You know what?” young Reed had once said to the even younger Cameron. “Everyone’s talking about how dangerous it will be in the war. But I’m not worried about that at all. I’m worried about the fact that a certain number of years after I come back I’ll be so old that I’ll be supposed to die. I don’t like that idea, so I’ve decided that I’m not going to die.”

“Ever?” Cameron had asked, wondering what the older boy was up to.

“Ever” was Reed’s answer. “Or should I say never.” And then he had smiled in such a way as to make young Cameron think that, even if his friend were excessively foolish, he was excessively brave.

Cameron himself had longed to go, but was too young; and, much later, discovered that he had become a man only when he stopped envying Charles S. R. Reed for having been killed in battle. During the First War, and for the many years thereafter until the Sandersons came from Scotland, the eastern side had been for Cameron a lovely isolated place with a life of its own. He would spend days in the forests there, or on the high meadows, and, if the weather was good, he would be taken up entirely by nature.

Fiercely in its grip, in the trance of youth, in the sunshine at eight thousand feet, he could go for days like an animal—not ever thinking, but riding, leaping, plunging into the ice-cold pools and glacier melts, stalking birds and game—with the same eyes and heart as a bear, an elk, or a horse. But only until the weather turned, for when it was gray and rainy, or sleeting in June, or when the great thunderheads with their accompaniment of artillery passed overhead to drench and freeze him, he thought and calculated with a city dweller’s devotion to thinking and calculation. Nothing was what it was, simply, but became instead the symbol or part of something else. Time forced its own consideration. Ambition reigned, as did disharmony. When he was sixteen, eighteen, or twenty, however, such disturbances, like the storms, were dispelled and forgotten in one blue morning.

That was before Reed sold out to the Sandersons, in the middle of the Depression; not because he was hard-pressed but because he had never stopped grieving for his son. “There’s nothing wrong with war,” the senior Reed had said to Cameron, when young Charles S. R. Reed had been five months gone toward Passchendaele, “except that it destroys the ones you love. I fought against the Boer in South Africa—I volunteered to go because I was madly in love and wanted to be worthy. I shouldn’t have spoken of it to my son. But if I hadn’t, he would have gone anyway, for he, too, was in love. I just hope that he comes back to me alive.”

It was said, on no specific authority, that the elder Reed disappeared to some city, where he was bitter and alone; that the Sandersons had paid him a good price; and that Mrs. Sanderson’s family was wealthy enough to have given the young couple a wedding present of a thousand acres of the most beautiful land in the world. Their wealth, however, could not have matched the gossip, since Reed sold off the best three-quarters of his herd, and the
Sandersons lived until the end of the Second World War in a painful frugality that elsewhere might have been called poverty.

But, in Cameron’s eyes, on those thousand acres there was no such thing as poverty, even if the lady of the house possessed only a single dress for summer, and a worn one at that. There was no poverty for them, even if they had few luxuries, no telephone, no electricity. And to wash they had had to take water from a stream, heat it over a wood fire, and pour it into a huge gold-rimmed porcelain bowl that, before it was chipped, had probably been a salad bowl in a hotel or railroad buffet, since on it in ornate gilt lettering were the initials of the Canadian Pacific Railway.

That bowl had come to mean something to Cameron the way material objects do to people in love. He remembered it because she had been standing by it, with her hand touching the rim, the first time he had ever seen her—on a cold mountain-summer morning in 1935.

S
ANDERSON
had been in the mountains for a year or more before Cameron had encountered him on the ridge, mending the fence. Cameron rode up, dismounted, and watched in silence. No matter that for ten miles in any direction they were the only two beings that could talk. Neither spoke.

Every now and then, the recently arrived Scotsman looked up at the man on the other side of the fence, who stared at him in unexplained amusement. But he would be damned before he would speak first to an uncivil Canadian who had lived in the wilderness since birth and probably had little more in his head than would a bear or a wild ram.

For half an hour, Cameron watched his new neighbor diligently mend the fence. Either someone had shown Sanderson how, or he had thought it out himself, but his splices were good and would last as long as the steel. Cameron thought that if he could be forgiven for not speaking, he had found a friend.

Just as Sanderson finished and was about to mount his horse, Cameron said, “Will you send me a bill, then? Or are you a monk from some religious order, doing the Lord’s work in mufti?”

“I beg your pardon?” the Scotsman asked in such a heavy accent that
Cameron immediately realized how he had known about mending fences: he, too, was a countryman.

“I was just wondering if you were a traveling monk.”

“And why would you wonder that?” Sanderson replied coldly.

“It’s either something like that or you’re uncommonly generous. Anyway, you have my thanks.”

Sanderson looked at the fence.

“Right,” said Cameron. “It’s mine.”

“I’ve been working on it for four days now,” Sanderson said bitterly. “Why isn’t it marked?”

“It’s not the custom here. You should have asked.”