Carry Me Home (12 page)

He grimaced. Josh sensed his restlessness, snuggled in tighter, snorted. Wapinski’s mind filled with the image of a tree-lined dirt road surrounded by lush green vegetation. He stares up the road. On the right there is a stone wall, very clear, the stones covered with blue-green lichens. He can see the wall diminishing in the short distance to the forested hill at the end of the road.

He is behind the wall. They are in numerous positions along the wall and the road, dug in, expecting an attack. He has an incredible number of weapons—pistols, M-16s, captured AK-47s, all heaped and loaded—ready. There are boxes of ammunition beside him. Somehow he has moved across the road into a gully on the left side. He is facing up the road, uphill, expecting the attack to begin any moment. He lies in the gully, in fresh orange-brown dirt, focusing on the road. Others are in positions behind the stone wall. At the end of the road, perhaps a quarter mile, there is a crossing road and beyond there is a hill that rises sharply. The hill is alive with movement but he cannot detect anything specific, for the movement is under a thick canopy of oak, ash and maple. Local land. He does not know why he is there but has been told an attack will come from the hill, a human wave determined to sweep over the land.

Wapinski checks his rifles, aims one in on the road. Stacy is behind the stone wall. He can see her crouching silhouette. Slowly the attack begins, the wave rumbles forward, hidden beneath the vegetation. The earth trembles. Still there are no soldiers. The dirt is mud. The vegetation thins. One soldier breaks from beneath the trees, begins his sprint down the road toward Wapinski’s ambush. Wapinski recognizes him. The ambushers are withdrawing. He glances across. Stacy is gone. The sprinting soldier, the attacker, is running down the left edge of the road, a rifle in his hands. His legs churn. The road surface is thick mud. It slows him. He is trying hard but he is slowing. Wapinski is confused. It is Akins. Joe Akins. He aims in on Akins. Why is Akins attacking? Why must he be ambushed? Wapinski centers his bead at Akins’ stomach. If the rounds are high, low, left, or right, he will still have a decent chance of killing him. Wapinski breathes in deeply, begins a long, slow exhale, begins his smooth squeezing, of the trigger, begins—BAM! A round slams into Wapinski’s hip. Before the pain explodes upward into him, he knows it will come. He knows his pelvis is shattered, hears the bones crunch, feels the shards scraping against each other, waits for the pain. BAMTHUD! A round hits his ribs, his chest, rips deeply into him. BAM! Another round. Another impaction. Bam! God! Help! Medic! Stacy! His company, Stacy, completely gone. Medic!

He is cool. The vegetation is gone. He is in a small room, cramped, a hundred masked people pushing, shoving. “Next,” one shouts. “Next,” another answers. “Not him,” Akins says to the corpsman. “Put him—”

Wapinski opened his eyes, bolted up. “Don’t leave me,” he mumbled. He was in his own room, his old room at Grandpa’s. His own voice surprised him. He knew exactly where he was, when it was. “Why the fuck?” he muttered into the dark. Josh lifted his head from where he lay by Wapinski’s legs. “Akins,” Wapinski said. “Of all people, Akins.” Josh wrinkled his forehead, rose further, then again fell back onto the bed. Wapinski swung his feet to the floor, stood, fumbled for cigarettes, lit one, went to the bathroom. Outside it was dark. His head hurt. His hands were sore. The knuckles of his right hand had scabbed over, on his left forearm there was a long abrasion. He returned to bed, pushed Josh over, smoked another cigarette. He did not want to think about the party, the people, the fight. He didn’t understand how the flow of events led to the fight, or even to the debate that had preceded the fight. His head felt dull; his eyes itched. He got up again, put his pants on. He thought about going out for a walk but was afraid the squeaking door hinges and the creaky floor would disturb his grandfather.

It was impossible to sleep. The night was humid. More humid than Nam, he thought. Besides, he thought, Josh keeps hogging the bed. He stared into the darkness. Stacy’s image was there, everywhere, in every corner, on the dark windowpanes. He looked out the window, cupped his hands about his eyes, leaned against the glass. He could see her in the night sky. Behind her image was the bloody face of a foolish boy. Wapinski felt sick. He felt for the bottle in the dimness, drank. The whiskey burned in his throat.

For the second time in his life Robert Wapinski had moved into the farmhouse at High Meadow. And for the second time he fell under the spell of the land and of his grandfather.

He knew—not consciously, not yet, that would take more time—that High Meadow would be a place of healing, a place of new perspectives, new energies, new idealism. But first Robert Janos Wapinski, ex-Army infantry captain and combat company commander, age 23 that summer of 1969, would need to be held in the grip of the land, would need to feel he belonged to that once-scarred and once-rejuvenated land.

The farm at High Meadow wasn’t much of a farm anymore ... no cows, no pigs, only a few chickens, the lower pasture rented out and planted by the Lutz boys in feed corn, the sugarbush and orchard ignored. Perhaps it never had been much of a farm. The soils were thin and the humus scant. A million years earlier the land had been seabed. Sediment had built up year after year, compressing to become the underlying bedrock formation of Pocono sandstone. Then the land had elevated in the geological Appalachian Revolution, then folded and weathered, the impervious Pocono strata fracturing into immense mile-square blocks. When the land receded, successive glaciations scarred and gouged the surface.

For 13,000 years, first microscopic vegetation, then mosses and larger green plants grew, died, deposited their organic materials. Animal life migrated to the area. Then came man. Delaware Indian oral history dates back at least a millennium. Linguistically Algonquin, the Delaware called themselves Lenape, “true, original” people, and the Monsee tribe (Mountain People) called themselves Wolf. They were the fiercest of all the Delaware, though even they did not live on the land. The mountain ridge between Loyalsock and Little Loyalsock creeks, including the land of the future farm at High Meadow, was considered unsuitable.

Europeans first viewed this land in 1681, the year William Penn the Younger acquired all of Pennsylvania from King Charles II. At that time north central Pennsylvania was covered by a forest of eastern hemlocks that rose to 160 feet and stood four to six feet in diameter at the base. In 1743 mapmakers referred to the area as the Endless Mountains and noted the gloom of the forest, the three-inch thickness of the tree bark, the thick carpet of needles on the forest floor, and the wide alleys between the massive trunks.

Prior to the beginning of the American Revolution a band of survivors of the Pennamite War between Connecticut and Pennsylvania took refuge in the area along the Indian trail north of the gap at High Meadow. They lived there for three years until the Wyoming Massacre of 1778 when British troops and Iroquois warriors wiped out the settlement at Wilkes-Barre. Fearing reprisal, the Pennamite survivors moved on.

European settlers moved west and north from Philadelphia but circled the mountain regions. Only after most of America had been settled did farmers come to the Mill Creek delta. Mill Creek Falls was established in 1849 by Raymond Hartley, an Englishman who had fallen out of favor with his wealthy family. He designed the town center, laid out the roads, built the courthouse, hotel and first school. He also established the first industry, a tannery and leatherworks. By 1860 Mill Creek Falls had grown to 800, Heckley County to more than 4,000.

In the 1870s, Williamsport, to the south, became the world’s hardwood center. The demand for wood exploded the region’s population. Capital poured in. Land barons grabbed up huge tracts. Eagles Mere became a fashionable resort, and much of the lumber used for the mansions there was cut from the groves about Mill Creek Falls. After the lower tracts were cut the lumber men moved uphill. Railroads were constructed to transport logs and mill products—lath, barrel staves, wheel spokes, bulk lumber—to Williamsport. In 1888 a branch line reached to Mill Creek where the tannery processed nearly three million pelts each month.

The Endless Mountains region was just moving out of log cabins when in the rest of the country electricity was coming into common use, but business depended upon trees and once the hemlocks were cut they never returned. In the late years of the nineteenth century, with the easy land stripped bare, companies moved to new tracts and pulled most of the people with them.

Then, as the century turned, paved roads and the automobile replaced the railroad. New companies built timber slides to get the highest, the farthest, the last logs. By 1910 more than 95 percent of Heckley County had been deforested. Only on the ridge beyond the gap—a natural steep-sided trough that kept the lumbermen from being able to transport logs across the chasm, the gap that would become the north border of the High Meadow farm—were any virgin eastern hemlocks left standing.

Finally the companies left for good. The people vanished. Clustered shacks rotted, caved in upon themselves during mosquito-infested summers, disappeared beneath the cover of early cycle foliage, plants that would help the earth regenerate in a process that could take 10,000 years.

To this land came Pewel Wapinski. In 1909, at twenty years old, he left his mountain village south of the city of Lwów in Polish Austria, and migrated to the United States. For seven years he wandered the eastern third of America; for seven years he worked at menial tasks, educated himself, dreamed. In 1917 he enlisted in the Army of the United States; was sent to France; fought at Château-Thierry, the first major U.S. combat role of the Great War, where he was wounded. In 1919, after convalescence, he was discharged, still alone, still to wander. On his way from Wilkes-Barre to Williamsport he took a wrong road and found the Loyalsock and Mill Creek Falls. North of the falls he discovered barren, worthless land that could be purchased for next to nothing. In 1922 Pewel Wapinski became a U.S. citizen, met and married Brigita Clewlow. In December of that year, only months after he purchased 143 muddy acres—the top soil washed away in heavy rains, blown away by dry winds, cracked and heaved in freezing temperatures—in that horrible month of that horrible year of mud slides and frozen ruptured scars, Brigita Clewlow Wapinski gave birth to their only child. They named him Pewel for his father but used the English spelling, Paul, for the new country.

For Paul and for Brigita, Pewel first built a small cabin a hundred yards beyond the northeast shore of a muddy swamp. He then tended to the highest pasture spreading clover and alfalfa seed to stop the erosion, then cut drainage ditches across the hills. He dammed the basin’s outlet, built a spillway, planted an apple orchard, set to work on a windbreak along the ridge that in a few years led him to plant seven acres of sugar maple seedlings.

When Paul Wapinski returned from World War II, High Meadow was supporting a small herd of dairy cattle and enough pigs to keep a quarter of Mill Creek in pork chops and bacon. In 1946 Robert Wapinski was born to Paul and Miriam (nee) Cadwalder.

The house Bobby Wapinski moved back into in 1969 was run-down. Perhaps any home in which a man lives alone for fifteen years, alone after his wife’s death, would be run-down. But Pewel Wapinski lost not only his wife in 1954, he lost his grandson whom he and his wife had raised for more than six years as though he were their own son, as though they, late in life, had been given the chance to raise their only son again, a son whose vanishing they did not understand, whose abandonment of his family horrified them. A year later Pewel caught Miriam making the nine-year-old boy eat, without utensils, from an animal bowl on the floor, calling him dog and pig, telling him he would eat there forever until he learned to eat without making noise, eat like his brother and sister who sat respectfully afraid at the table not seeing Rob on his knees, his hands behind his back, licking at his food, trying so hard to be soundless. What else she had done, Pewel did not know, refused to imagine.

Pewel Wapinski had attempted to gain custody but Miriam fought him and the court sided without question with the mother who owned a Victorian in the Lutzburgh section over the old man from the hills, sided with her without even hearing the old man’s story much less what the boy might say. In Pewel’s loss there was despondency. When that passed he could no longer live in the house except to eat and sleep. He rose early each day, spent the day in the barn, in a loft office he built with such intricate precision the woodwork rivaled that in the best homes along River Front Drive or indeed even those in the mansions at Eagles Mere.

The exterior of the house had been neglected. Where the grass around the barn was neatly cut, that around the house grew to its self-limiting height. Where the tree limbs at the barn were meticulously trimmed so that in the strongest storm winds the branches barely reached the roof with the tickle of a leaf, the trees around the house had grown first to brush the sides, then to jam against the roof and windows. And where the barn trim was repainted yearly, even in his eightieth year though he only did the lower sections now and hired various boys from other hill farms to do the second story and gable peaks, the house had not been painted since 1953.

The man Bobby Wapinski returned to was small, wiry, shrunken to five foot seven, only 135 pounds. Yet Grandpa Pewel was still strong, and except for when the arthritis in his shoulders, hips and especially his hands flared, he was spry. And he was happy. Perhaps that was the foundation of his spell.

For ten days Robert Wapinski and his grandfather spoke little, mostly just vague stammerings in the kitchen at the table where Robert had learned to talk.

“Bob,” his grandfather said. He did not call him Rob or Robbie. It was the first evening of July. The house was hot, humid, smelled of mildew even though the old man had cleaned harder than he had in fifteen years. “I imagine, if I’d just returned from a war, if I’d just come back here, I imagine I’d feel a bit of a stranger here. And I imagine I’d be mighty restless, too.”