The Spirit Wood (4 page)

“Looks all clear on my side,” said Meg.

“Except for that,” said Peter, and Meg turned to see what Peter was referring to—a man, small and swarthy, emerging from behind the car to the left. He was wearing a canvas fishing hat squashing down tight on his head and black rubber boots with the buckles unclasped. He appeared to be about fifty, with a thick fringe of gray beard, and walked slightly stooped over, with an odd kind of sideways gait.

“The caretaker?” Meg suggested.

“You must be Nikos,” Peter called to him, stepping out of the car.

The man looked up from beneath the brim of his cap, raised his hand, but said nothing. His baggy khaki pants, held up by red suspenders, flapped loosely around his legs.

“I'm Peter Constantine. This is my wife, Meg. I hope you were notified we'd be coming out.”

The head nodded vigorously, and the man wiped his hands, front and back, on his trousers.

“Nikos,” he said, introducing himself. Peter put out his hand, but rather than shaking it in the usual fashion, Nikos reached out with a straight arm and grasped it from above. He squeezed it with surprising strength and, looking up at Peter, smiled broadly; his face was creased and weather-beaten, and his eyes a deep, rich brown.

“My wife, Meg,” Peter said again as Meg came around to their side of the car.

“We were paying attention to your instructions,” Meg said, “and staying in the car.”

“The dogs—Fifi and Fritz—they were running loose. I had to call them in and tell them who you are.”

“I hope they took the news okay,” said Peter, smiling. Nikos shrugged and said, “With dogs, who can tell?” Meg and Peter laughed.

“So,” said Nikos, scratching his beard and casting a quick eye around them, “you came here from New York City, yes?”

“No, from New Jersey,” Peter replied. “A little town called Mercer.”

Nikos nodded his head, but without appearing to have really registered the information. It seemed to Peter that he was waiting for something. He appeared nervous, and his dark eyes never rested anywhere for more than a second. Finally, as if he couldn't wait any longer for what he'd hoped would come up unsolicited, he glanced up and, with just a hint of wounded pride, said, “And so, what do you think of it"—he gestured with a sweep of his short, muscular arm— “the house? Your grandfather, he was very proud of this house—the plans for it, he made them all up in his own head,” he said, tapping his hat for emphasis. He gazed across at the house with evident satisfaction, and Peter and Meg felt obliged to do the same. That his grandfather had arranged for the house to be built came as a great surprise to Peter; it meant that the place couldn't possibly be more than fifteen or twenty years old, though it looked as if it had stood there for centuries. And it wasn't just the archaic, jumbled design that gave that impression; it was the dour, dilapidated look of the stone, the way that the fluting on some of the columns appeared to have been worn away by decades of rain and wind, the cracks and crevices in the steps, distinguishable even from across the drive. The casement windows, in black lead frames, appeared to have been set there forever, like
so many blank and unwinking eyes. The doors, two massive black panels—Peter couldn't be sure, but they appeared to be made of some sort of metal rather than wood—had a dull, antique patina to them and looked as if they were no more meant for use than the iron doors of a mausoleum.

“Your grandfather,” said Nikos, as if the old man were somehow present in the house still, “he was a great man. But yes, you know that?” he asked, half, it seemed, as a question, and half a challenge.

Peter cleared his throat. “I never really had the chance to meet him. Until a few weeks ago, I didn't even know he lived here.”

Nikos shook his head sadly while looking at the ground, as if he couldn't understand how such things could occur in a family. As he did so, he uneasily shifted his weight back and forth from one leg to the other, once or twice suddenly stepping backwards to regain his balance. Meg wondered what exactly was wrong with his legs; the pants were so baggy it was impossible to guess.

“I hope we're not interrupting your work,” she said, thinking he might be in pain and want to go and sit down somewhere. “If it's all right, we could just wander around on our own for a while. There isn't any quicksand or anything to watch out for, is there?”

The joke was lost, because the term clearly meant nothing to Nikos. “Sand?” he said. “No, there is no sand. Just rocks, down at the water. At the boathouse. Did you want to go down there?” he asked, as if the request was not what he'd expected.

“Well, no, not particularly,” Meg said, “not if it's a problem, certainly.” She laughed self-consciously and looked to Peter for help. “I don't think I even remembered there
was
a boathouse.”

“We just thought we'd spend a couple of hours poking around the place,” Peter stepped in. “You
know, seeing what my grandfather had built here, how he lived.” He thought a bit of reverence toward his forebear might impress Nikos. “I'd like to get to know him, as much as I can, from looking around the grounds and"—he paused, not sure how Nikos would react, then was suddenly irked with himself for needing a caretaker's approval—"the house itself. We'd like to look over the house, too.”

Nikos, to Peter's relief, appeared pleased. “Yes, good,” he said. “But can I ask you, can you wait for just another hour or so before you go inside? My daughter, Leah, she's been cleaning, putting things right. I think she would like to finish what she's doing and show you everything the way it should be. Can you wait that long?”

Peter and Meg raced to assure him that was fine. Meg, for reasons she couldn't exactly pinpoint, wanted to get away from him; at first she'd thought it was concern over the old man's discomfort—funny, she caught herself thinking of him as old, even though he wasn't really—but then she realized it was something else. He was being perfectly pleasant, even accommodating; he'd given her absolutely no reason to take offense or to be uneasy. And yet, she was. She felt, inexplicably, the way she had when she was a little girl and her father had taken her for a pony ride at a carnival. The pony was beautiful, her father had said, the pony was her friend. But when she'd looked into the pony's lowered eyes to judge the safety of climbing onto its back, she'd seen no expression there, no welcome—only great, bulging eyes that glistened wetly, observing her, waiting for her. It was the first time in her life she remembered experiencing something as distinctly “other,” something that was large and alive but unutterably foreign, not to be communicated with in any way she knew. Not, above all, to be trusted. She rode the pony that day—her father had
hoisted her up before she knew it—but she never did again.

“Me, I don't move so good,” Nikos was saying. “I get trouble in my legs. Go, look around. I will find you later. And anyway,” he confided, “I like in the afternoon to take a little rest. Your grandfather,” he said, smiling and wagging one finger at Peter, “he used to say to me, ‘Nikos, I can never find you in the afternoon. Where do you go to—you are nowhere.’ “

“Where
do
you go?” said Peter, striving for the same light tone.

“Everywhere,” said Nikos, beaming and opening his arms. “I go everywhere.” Then he added, “But mostly, my house. Over there,” he said, pointing vaguely to the west of the main house. “You will see it. If not, I will show you. Later. Now, go on,” he said, shooing them away. “While there is so much sun.” He turned and sidled off across the drive, his boots scraping small bare patches in the loose gravel. As if he knew they were watching him still, he waved one hand behind him. “Go on. Go look around.”

Peter smiled and turned to Meg. “What a character,” he said in a low voice. “What do you suppose happened to him to make him walk that way?”

Meg looped her hair back behind her ears. “I don't know—maybe polio? An accident?”

“But how about those rubber boots? On a day like this?”

Meg shrugged, as if uncurious; in fact, she was. But Nikos had already made such a profound, and troubling, impression on her, that all she wanted was to put him out of her mind again, before the day was altogether ruined for her. Pushing her hands down into the back pockets of her jeans, she turned in a slow, full, wondering circle. “Isn't it amazing,” she announced, having taken in a 360-degree view, “to think that you can actually own things like this? Trees and rocks and
land . . . that everything you're looking at actually
belongs
to you, just like something you'd buy in a store.”

“Are you implying there's something wrong in ‘owning’ a part of what God has given to all mankind?” said Peter, facetiously.

“Three weeks ago, if you'd asked me that question, I'd have said no. But now,” she debated, squirming as if in mild discomfort, “I guess I'd really have to say—no.” She laughed, and when Peter did, too, she said, “A fine pair of bleeding-heart liberals
we
make.”

“Après nous, le déluge.”

“Would you care to show me around the place, Louis?” She took him gently by the arm. “Which way would you recommend?”

“What difference does it make? Like Nikos,” Peter declared, “I go everywhere.” He laughed again.

Skirting the house, which loomed above them like a great gray cliff—Peter couldn't resist reciting the appropriate lines from Wordsworth's
The Prelude
—they discovered they were at the top of a long and gentle rise, at the foot of which, hundreds of yards below them, they saw a long wooden pier extending out into the bay and a ramshackle boathouse painted green and white. Halfway down the incline, off to the left, was a small, vine-covered gazebo with a cupola top.

“Oh, look at that,” exclaimed Meg, bounding off across the vast, unkempt lawn. Taking hold of one of the wooden posts, she swung herself up into the little round enclosure and plopped down on the rough-hewn bench inside. Peter joined her, and together they gazed up between the posts to the house above them. From the rear, it presented an equally sullen and uninviting view, the central block dominated by what appeared to be a single long chamber. Between the two short wings which extended down the hill, there was an ornamental stone fountain with a statue that shot a sporadic,
feeble jet of water a few feet up into the air. What the statue was, they couldn't make out from such a distance.

“That poor girl,” said Meg.

“What girl?”

“Leah, or whatever her name is—the one who's in there trying to clean that monster all by herself.”

A gentle breeze rustled the new leaves overhead. Meg leaned her head back against one of the posts and closed her eyes; Peter absentmindedly rubbed his arm and rested his elbows on his knees. A cloud passed in front of the sun, leaving the house suddenly an even more somber gray. Peter thought of his grandfather, the fat man with the bushy white hair, wearing the black overcoat, standing at the foot of the grammar school steps. The only other thing he could really remember of him was the feel of his hand as it held his own on the brief walk home; it was bigger and thicker than any hand Peter had ever held until that time. It was strong and all-encompassing, but at the same time warm and slightly damp. Peter had thought it felt like the inside of his Batman puppet, wet and tight, but also slightly grainy.

And from that, he thought, comes this. From that one short encounter, this estate. This fortune, assuming Kennedy was right and the IRS left something. This day. He glanced at Meg, her eyes still closed, her breathing as soft and regular as a child's. He suddenly felt for her an overwhelming sense of pity, tenderness . . . and fear. He was afraid for her, afraid that by binding her life to his own she'd committed a terrible mistake that someday she'd be sure to discover. Afraid that when she
did
discover it, she'd leave him. Afraid that his work, his career—the presumption of the word made him uncomfortable—would never amount to anything and that she would be there to witness his failure.

Afraid, too, that she wouldn't be there.

Her hands lay on top of each other in her lap. Her fingers, surprisingly thick and strongly boned, were also uncustomarily white; they had lost the redness and the rough patches that they'd always had when she was busy with her pottery and sculpture. He hoped the pottery co-op would find another wheel for her soon. He hoped she could go back to that carefree happiness that had first so attracted him, before, he believed, his own malign star had begun to exert its influence. With one finger, he hooked a stray wisp of hair behind her ear, just as she always did. She smiled, her eyes still closed.

“Penny for your thoughts,” she murmured.

“They weren't worth it.”

“Want to know mine?”

“Sure.”

“I'm starved.”

On their way back to the car to get the sandwiches, they took a short ramble through the woods. Here and there, they found narrow pathways that as often as not ended abruptly in tiny glades, or simply stopped altogether for no apparent reason at all. Sometimes Peter forged through the brambles to make a new path of their own; sometimes they just turned around and doubled back. It was like a maze, he thought, with its twistings and turnings and sudden dead-ends. But it differed from any traditional maze he'd been in—come to think of it, the only one he'd ever really tried was at Hampton Court—in that there seemed to be no formal design to it, and certainly no single points of entry or escape. The confusion seemed entirely random and, at the same time, somehow premeditated. When they finally broke out into the open again, they found themselves covered with burrs and standing at the far end of the drive, across from the house. The car glinted in the afternoon sun.

“I just had a terrible thought,” said Meg. “I think I left the sandwiches broiling on the back seat.”

The roast beef, they discovered, still passed muster; the ham and Swiss they decided not to risk. The Coke in the plastic thermos was tepid.

“Why don't we take what's edible around back,” suggested Meg, “and eat it by that fountain?”

As they went around the wing of the house, Peter thought he caught a glimpse of someone inside—the girl, no doubt—passing through one of the rooms. Nothing else was really visible—it appeared to be dim, and probably rather cool, Peter guessed.