A Clearing in the forest (3 page)

“What do things look like down there? I heard she's gettin' a little funny living all by herself,” his mother asked, and then, noticing his book, “What's that you're holding?”

Wilson started. He had forgotten to hide the book before he came in the house. “Just something on geology Mrs. Crawford gave me to read.” He carefully laid the rabbit down on some old newspapers and started for his room.

“Let's see it.” His father held out his hand.

Wilson turned over the book. His mother walked over to the kitchen table and stood looking soberly over his father's shoulder as he turned the pages.

“Wilson, I don't want to see you with anymore books that talk about the earth being millions of years old. That goes against what we believe in this house and you know it.” His dad slammed the book shut. “That's just nonsense. How does anyone know what happened that long ago? The devil could have put those fossils there just to mislead us. I want you to take that book back to Mrs. Crawford tomorrow.”

“Dad, what if I was to go to college? I'd be seeing books like that all the time.” Wilson saw his mistake as soon as the words were out of his mouth.

“That's just why you
aren't
going to college. What's the point getting a lot of education? You read all the time about young kids coming out of college and ending up waiting on tables. You can make all the money you want working for me.”

His mother never liked to hear people arguing. “You get upstairs now,” she said to Wilson, “and get yourself cleaned up. Dinner will be ready in half an hour and it's pot roast.”

Once he had shut his door behind him, Wilson felt better. He thought he could probably get through anything if he could just know that at the end of it he would be all alone in his room or out in the woods by himself with a chance to think over what had happened.

He picked up a coffee can full of Petoskey stones and dumped them onto his bed. You could find them all over the northern part of the state. It was a rather nondescript rock which came in all sizes, brownish gray with a pattern of little hexagons that were anywhere from a quarter of an inch to two inches across. Each hexagon had a slightly pitted center. After you polished the rocks, the little centers of the hexagons stared out at you like a lot of shiny eyes. All the kids collected Petoskey stones. The stores in town had them made up into jewelry and sold them for high prices.

Wilson looked through Mrs. Crawford's book. There they were. The book said the stones were fragments from the ancient Devonian coral reefs that had existed 400 million years ago when a great salt sea had covered the whole state. Each one of the hexagons was a small animal; each shiny eye a mouth. He decided that when he returned Mrs. Crawford's book to her, he would take along his collection of rocks. He could see her sharp bright eyes looking at him, wanting to tell him—what?

4

The moment she heard the car approach, Frances Crawford escaped through the back door, stopping only long enough to pick up her berry basket. Peering out from behind a tree at the top of the bank, she saw the man knocking at her front door. He seemed to be acquainted with the dog; in fact he was giving the dog something to eat and the dog was fawning all over him in gratitude. Disgraceful! Frances turned away and headed into the woods, noting with distaste how a motorcycle had beaten down a path through one of the small stands of maidenhair fern.

When she came to the meadow, she found that the handsome flowers with ugly names were in bloom: ragwort, boneset, and viper's bugloss. She hunched down over what appeared to be a copse of diminutive cedar and pine trees, none of them more than ten inches high. They were
Lycopodi
, descendants of the ancient tree club mosses. Four hundred million years ago they were giant trees rising a hundred feet into the air. Unable to survive as large trees, they modestly reduced their size. And here they were.

A black flower beetle, glistening like a chip of coal, lumbered through a forest of slender green stems. Each stem supported a cluster of wild strawberries. Frances sat down and began to gather the berries. It was the only way to pick them. If you stood up and looked down, the tiny fruit disappeared beneath its leaves.

Her hands grew red; so did her mouth. Red stains covered her slacks and shoes as she inched her way from one patch to another. While she picked, she was in a green room with walls of bracken and a moss floor. The ceiling of maple and oak leaves produced a filtered light, dim in the early morning hours, and then, as the sun moved overhead, dazzling. Ants came to investigate the strawberry juice on her knees.

Around noon, certain the man would have tired of waiting, she started back to her cabin only to find that he had outwaited her. He sat peacefully looking out at the river from her lawn chair. Before she could turn back, the dog, who had been sleeping at the man's side, saw her and raced up the bank. There was nothing to do but go down and have it over with.

The man placed a long leg on either side of the sling chair and stood up. He had not been prepared for someone so old. With her wrinkled face and small trim body, Frances Crawford looked like the little dolls his grandmother had fashioned from shriveled apples. But he was only momentarily disconcerted. He knew he had a way with the ladies, never mind what their age.

“I guess you were hoping I'd get tired and go away,” he said. “I'm Clyde Looster, the pen pal been sending you all the notes.” A big smile followed each sentence. “I guess you know I'm with the Hutzel Seismological Survey Company.” He handed her his card, which she took without wanting it. “We'd like your permission to do a little surveying of your land.” He illustrated his speech by holding out the township map. An inked line ran between the river and her east-west boundary. He patiently shifted his weight a few times while she tried to study the map, but without her glasses it was fuzzy.

At last she looked away. “Certainly not,” she said.

He decided to change his tactics. “Well, look at that, you've been picking berries. I don't believe I ever saw such little ones. Where I come from, it'd take a dozen of those to make one berry.” Another smile.

She knew all about these people who worked for the oil companies. Since the discovery of oil in the area two years before, they were all over the town. They filled the two motels, and an overflow had settled into a mobile-home park, referred to as “oil city.” Their trucks and cars had license plates from Texas and Louisiana and Oklahoma. Their wives could be seen in the supermarket, slim and friendly, calling out to one another across the aisles in girlish Texas drawls that sounded exotic in this northern state. The supermarket now carried collard and mustard greens, okra and black-eyed peas.

The children of the oil people were instantly identifiable by their good manners. Because it was so pleasant to be called “ma'am” and “sir” and have students stand up when you addressed them, the local schoolteachers forgave the children their frequent absences. When the yearning came to go back home for a visit, it was not unusual for a family to leave on a Thursday night, drive the thousand miles each way, and return early Tuesday morning. The exhausted children sat nodding sleepily at their desks, their faces sunburnt, fresh mosquito bites on their arms and legs.

The parents were strict with the children. Talking back could mean an instant reprimand, but no one else was encouraged to discipline them. A school-bus driver who had pushed one of them around for misbehaving had been taken off the oil-city run because the father of the child threatened him with a shotgun.

“My, you've got a beautiful place here.” The man continued to grin waggishly at her. “I hope I didn't take a liberty by sitting on that chair there.” The dog had settled down on the ground and was resting his chin companionably on the man's boot. The man reached down and thumped him.

“I don't know that you've got any right to be here at all.” Frances was tired from being out all morning. Her knees ached and threatened to give out altogether. Her nose was running and she had nothing to wipe it with. When she tried to look up at the man's grinning face, the sun shone mercilessly into her eyes.

He moved a half turn so that he would face the sun. “Ma'am, it's a real pleasure to meet you. I suppose you know your husband's some kind of legend in town. They say Doc Crawford birthed over a thousand babies around here.”

Tom would have taken the man in stride, had him in for a beer, found out where he came from, how many children he had, what church he attended and who he had supported in the last presidential election. He knew how to separate the enemy from the man without losing either of them. Once she let the man emerge, she lost the enemy, a dangerous risk in a war. “I suppose you've got a little speech to make to me,” she said in a cold voice. “You go right ahead and then you can be on your way.”

For an instant his smile went from high to low simmer. “I just wish we could be friends, Mrs. Crawford. I don't see but what we could do each other some good.” He knew that she scraped by on almost nothing to keep hold of her property. His company made a point of seeing that the local banks got some of their business. Ralph Tondro, the manager at the Oclair Bank, had told him all about the Crawfords.

Dr. Crawford had been well liked in town, but he'd never made much money. During the depression years he was paid in cabbages and eggs, or if it were a big operation, a quarter of beef. When things got better and he might have earned more, he had come down with a crippling disease with a long name. Mrs. Crawford used to put him and his wheelchair in the back of their pickup and drive him around to make house calls. There he'd be, sitting in the back of the truck, waving to everybody.

The man smiled down at Mrs. Crawford. “What we want to do is make you a little gift, Mrs. Crawford, just for testing the property. And if we find something interesting, the company that will be drilling will be prepared to do more for you. Now we don't
have
to do anything. Since you don't own the mineral rights to your property, the oil company can come in anytime they want to, but we prefer to do things in a friendly way. We want you to be happy.”

As Clyde Looster saw it, that was the crux of dealing with people. Find out what they wanted—often as not it was surprisingly little—and give it to them. Get them smiling. He prided himself on being able to make friends with anyone, never mind how mad they might be at the beginning. He had never had a man walk away from him without shaking his hand.

Frances decided further conversation with him would be interpreted as bargaining. “The only way you can make me happy is for your whole outfit to leave me alone. I do not want an oil well anywhere near this river.”

Clyde Looster understood how she felt, but he had a job to do; if he didn't, someone else would. “You got to understand my company cares just as much about the river as you do,” he told her. “The company is committed—” he disliked the word “committed,” which he considered an affectation, but it had proved to be the right note on occasion “—committed to protecting the environment. We wouldn't dream of hurting this purty river.”

“You weren't so committed when you drilled a well over at Sickle right in the middle of a bunch of sinkholes and didn't put down enough casing.”

He flushed. Sickle had been front-page news for weeks around here. Gas had escaped and had come bubbling up like a witch's brew into a stream. There were explosions. The foundations of houses had collapsed and a major highway had buckled. The entire population of the town had been evacuated to protect them from poisoned water wells and foul odors. But it turned out that the company that had drilled had done nothing illegal. The state had no ruling about using casing at the time, and so the company had done what it wanted to, taking risky shortcuts.

“We wouldn't let a thing like that happen again, Ma'am. There are specifications now to protect you. Anyhow, this is just to test for oil. Chances are we won't find a thing.”

She absolutely had to get inside to wipe her nose. “I don't want to have anything to do with your company, and that's final.” The dog was lying on his back, ready to have the man scratch his belly. She gave the dog a kick and turned on her heel.

Once inside the cabin, she considered calling one of the real estate people. Let them come in and divide the riverbank into fifty-foot lots—the heck with the whole thing. She saw that she still had the man's card in her hand, and anxious to get rid of it, she opened a cupboard and was ready to toss in the card when five orange and black butterflies flew out, viceroys,
Limenitis archippus
. She remembered collecting the cocoons in the fall, cutting them off a willow. She had a tendency to act like a first-grader bringing things to school for the nature corner. After pitching the cocoons into the cupboard, she had forgotten all about them. Now the butterflies, newly hatched from the cocoons, dipped and fluttered around her like maddened maypole dancers.

One settled on her shoulder. She took it as a good omen and was beginning to feel better under this new and fragile protection when the dog, who had been watching a butterfly hover over his nose, snapped it up and swallowed it, dusty wings and all.

5

By early evening she was ending the day as she began it, picking berries. The Juneberry bushes by the edge of the river were heavy with a rich purple fruit that made a delicious preserve. It was her best seller. Flocks of black-masked cedar waxwings and female rose-breasted grosbeaks had been at the bushes, but they ate only the berries at the top, leaving the rest to her.

When it became too dark to see the berries, she decided to do a little fly fishing. Since the dizzy spell she'd had the day she met Wilson, she had given up wading the stream and had cleared a spot along the bank of overhanging branches so she could cast without getting her line tangled in the trees. As people played a smaller part in her life, the stream became more important to her. The first thing she heard in the morning and the last at night was its unobtrusive ripple.