The Country Ahead of Us, the Country Behind (12 page)

“No, ma’am,” I said, and I looked back down into the pan of chili.

“He did,” my mother’s hard voice said. “He aimed his rifle at me. Drunk and brave and home from the hills. Right here in this kitchen.”

I lowered the flame and went over to the table, where my mother picked bitterly at a thumbnail, and I sat in the chair across from her.

“Mom?” I said.

She looked up, but her eyes gave nothing. They were like shields.

“I can’t stop thinking about them,” I told her. “I’ve been thinking and thinking about them and I can’t stop.”

My mother glared down at her thumbnail again and made a show of complete concentration.

“There are evil men in the world,” she said. “Do you think you can change that, Roy?”

American Elm

I
grew up in Wilkes, Rhode Island, where the light in early winter seems to roll off the backs of the clouds and ignite along the waters of ponds and millstreams, and the cold rot smell of the barren forests comes ghostly out of the tough earth, and the gold air and sky have a muted volume of both space and spirit broken only by the reach of church spires, soft-white and giant against the slow maple hills. My father, gaunt-cheeked and patient of hand, was proprietor of the Wilkes Bakery, a dark windowfront on Main Street with a faint, tarnished sleighbell tied inside its door and a deep odor of hot glaze and butter gentled by the calm warmth of its ovens and the soft silver of its racks and pans. Rooted in his quiet kitchen my father worked like someone in a dream, wasting no part of himself on hurry, imparting the meditation of his work to the familiar recipes so that what came forth from his hand carried with it, in its cast on the lips and tongue, a residue of his inner peace. At dawn, in the first
pale light, my sister Ruthie and I chipped and scrubbed the long baking sheets and yellow mixing bowls. My mother stood behind the cash register, hair bound to the top of her head with dark pins, and bagged Persian buns and fried doughboys for the early millworkers who were our neighbors, the people of Wilkes. We lived over the bakery in rooms of aged and intricate woodwork, and the warm air of the ovens floated up through the floorboards, and there were lace doilies shaped like snowflakes on all the tabletops, and an oak rocker by a tall window through which that spacious light swarmed in early winter, a tender, fragile light that no longer seems to be in the world I live in today, though perhaps it is here and I no longer know how to look for it or see it, twenty years and thousands of miles from Wilkes as it once was.

In the summer of that year I write of now I made bales in the hayfields all up and down the township, and in the fall, my first of no school, I felled black oaks and sugar maples along the backsides of pastures, making firewood in the sharp sun while twisting leaves blew past the long arc of my splitting maul. In November, when north winds rattled away the last leaves and sent them skittering across the ploweddown fields, I found a new job in the Burrillville Sanatorium. Here, from eight until five, I washed the hands and feet and faces of the old of our township, and fed them cream of wheat and beet soup from small spoons pressed against their lips; I carted dinner trays and spray-cleaned bedpans and, bundling them up against the frost and cold, wheeled the old ones out to the riffled shore of Harrow’s Pond where they would look out over the water and trees and sky in ponderous silence while I watched for shiners or for the ripple of bass in the marsh and lily pads.

It was eight miles from Wilkes and the bakery if you cut from the main route and, following the millstream, trudged your way over the Quampus Lake Road to Harrow’s Pond and the border with Massachusetts, where the Burrillville Sanatorium lay shadowed in a thicket of pines. It was three and a half miles if, lighting out true north from directly behind the Wilkes Baptist Church, you took to the woods and pastures and, keeping your bearing accurate, twisted among the etched and lifeless trees and hopped the strewn rock walls dividing nothing any longer in the gray pallid light of the forest until, traversing a gradual knoll overgrown with furrowed slippery elms, you walked out onto the frosty, ordered grounds beyond the conclave of high brick buildings that housed the sanatorium.

Following quietly the mist of my breath I hiked with my lunch bucket each morning through the thickets and fields, the flaps of my duck hunter’s cap turned over my ears and my compass inside my left glove. I scared up pheasants—a wicked, stick-crackling, wing-filled explosion out of deep brush that stopped your heart, and then a drilling, a buzz, as the fiery bird spluttered its way through trees to a deeper hollow. Without stopping for a moment I threw stones to crack the ice in ravines I crossed, and slipped under fences to walk the empty hayfields and silent apple orchards, swinging my black bucket as I went. At the sanatorium I hung my mackinaw over a hook, tucked my lunch in a corner, and ran warm water over my fingers before going up to the rooms and wards where the old people waited in the soft, waxen light that filtered through the pines beyond their windows. Afterward, in deep dusk—the woods too black to walk in—I rode back to town with Sam Mathers in his chopped and blocked blue-waxed Ford, slapped up the
stairs behind the darkened bakery to eat supper with my family while the stars blinked on and spread themselves out across the valley and the white North Star, already steadfast over the steeple of the Wilkes Baptist Church, pointed the way back again to the Burrillville Sanatorium and the waters of black Harrow’s Pond.

One morning in late November a faint snow came flailing lightly, dusting the hard fields with a coat like powdered sugar but, unable to pierce the stark branches of the silent trees, leaving the woods dry and bare. At just under two miles in my journey I crunched over a hayfield and crossed the old Vaughan Road, a narrow paved lane that cut along the banks of lonely ponds, intersecting the township from northeast to southwest, writhing in among the silver maples and leaning oaks of the third-growth forest. Thinking on it now—snow twirling, gray sunlight expansive over frosted pastures—I must have seen him first from a distance of a hundred yards, moving laterally through my frame of vision along the Vaughan Road and against the backdrop of still, frozen trees. My memory—my memory I say—is of stepping up onto the fixity of pavement and eyeing covertly a bent and weathered little man in steel spectacles who clutched fiercely the tip of his pipestem between teeth yellow as pine pitch; who wore a duck hunter’s cap like my own with the bill turned up and the flaps turned down and the buckle strapped and denting a chin like a red potato; who seemed to be cursing, muttering and nattering at the ground as he jounced over the Vaughan Road, looking up now and then out of eyes hard as granite, glaring more or less, keeping friends and enemies at a distance from them—halting the swing of my lunch bucket from thirty yards—a man who, when he held his head up, the strain ran through his neck,
the Adam’s apple rose like a strawberry in the crease of the throat, the temples—veined inkwell blue, protuberant—leapt out at me as the head fell forward; and then afterward the back of him, the stride game but broken, the old back heaving under a red-and-black-checked mackinaw and the spine itself knobbed and torqued, inhumanly twisted, a history of sweat mapped out in joints and cartilage (while the weight shunted from side to side as he thrust out his hard black Hitchcocks, the gloved hands felt the air, the pant legs gathered and ungathered smoothly over the spindly thighs, the whole of him barreled and bobbled—a slow barreling, a slow bobbling—over the chipped, worn pavement)—and finally the dark, delicate lines of the woods once more, seven-eighteen by my Grandfather Harper’s tarnished pocket watch, the tiny weight of my compass lodged beneath my glove, wavering toward north in its dark place and the old early sojourner—a glance through the clean, acute trees—nothing but wisps of smoky breath, a
pock
over the surface of the Vaughan Road.

A sharp clash of sticks stirred one evening in early December—the second week it must have been: red, blue and muffled yellow lights laced the fretwork of the bakery—and in the night the wind slammed beneath a shimmering half-moon, the lightning cracked wide the blackness, the thunder rocketed off the rooftops of Wilkes and the high branches of the trees swirled madly beyond the gloss of street lamps that flared at the corners of our building on Main Street. In the morning—wind blowing now like a thin, cold sheet, the backside of the storm hurrying past to catch up with the
turmoil at the heart of it—I tramped out toward the sanatorium past blowdown snags and cracked green windfalls that had barberchaired and crashed to the hard earth in the night, past split branches trashed up against mounds of underbrush, mangled and twisted and the brush swept south by the cutting edge of the north storm. I flung myself over the rail fence at the hay pasture on the Vaughan Road and clipped on toward work and the old ones with the wind flitting low now, skimming around my knees and ankles, and the sky overhead shot through with hard-riding clouds. I kept my head cocked downward; brush snapped behind me in a swale as the wind blustered through it, sounding like secrets the woods told themselves.

And there he was again: there he was again like some apparition—like a presence in some tale my Grandfather Harper might have conjured forth on an evening in winter long ago—in the guarded light and fleeting wind of morning tottering toward me over the fissured pavement, one brittle, almost transparent, liver-spotted hand anchored to the bowl of his cold pipe, and the buckle of his duck hunter’s cap dangling down past his chin, tapping against his Adam’s apple as he foundered over the road, keeling as he went like an ancient ship in a shiproad. “Hold up there, boy!” he shouted, at ease with commands, like a general of troops—the side of his mouth twisting open and the words tumbling out into the light and wind. “Hold up there! Whoa!”

I held my ground, the fingers of one hand curled under the handle of my lunch bucket, the palm of the other cupped to my compass, balanced that way and watching him come at me with whatever strange thing it was he wanted driving him on. For his part, he drew himself up when there were two good yards of road left between us—the regional courtesy,
that; a metaphor for the kept-distance between human beings in our township—and yanking his pipe free so as to aim the cracked tip of its stem at the bridge of my nose, narrowed his eyes behind the thick glass of his spectacles and said, “What in the
hell
do you think you’re doing, boy? What in the
hell
, boy? You answer me that!”

I took a step sideways, backing off imperceptibly, groping but at a loss for an answer that was not as ridiculous or abstract as the old man’s question. In the precarious silence, like a hammer, the pipe fell downward and then flashed again, and the old man’s face seized up in anger.

“What’s your fambly name, boy?”

“Harper, sir.”

He poked his pipe between his teeth and mulled. “Bak’ry Harpers? Is that what you be?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Granddaddy Ezra Harper? Hay farmer up here?”

“Yes, sir. Only he passed on a few years back.”

He slid a tattered tobacco pouch from the pocket of his mackinaw. And he began to knock his pipe against his hipbone now, holding the bowl up to the light every so often and peering up into it critically, blinking and grumbling in the bottom of his throat. “How many times you figure you crossed my field there—” pointing with the round of his chin toward the hay pasture, his pipe held trembling in the air “—in the last month or so, young Harper—speak up!”

But I couldn’t. “I don’t know,” I stammered faintly, and the pipe came down once more and lodged, finally, in the tobacco pouch.

“Well, I do,” the old man said, digging absent-mindedly, bits of dark makings blowing out behind him over the road. “Twenty-three times—now don’t deny it—I been countin’
ever last one. ’Crost land ’tain’t yourn, too, boy. Mine instead. You understand me?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Yes, sir, hell,” he boomed. “You kin ‘yes, sir’ me all day, boy—’twon’t come to naught,” and he pulled his lips tight while the wind rose up and blustered across his cheeks and spectacles. “Now listen here: I’m liable to run you in, Harper; don’t care two nickels for trespassers—no, sir, I don’t. Don’t care for ’em a ’tall.” He slipped his loaded pipe between his lips, thumb pressed over the bowl like a cork, and let it totter up and down while he spoke. “Your granddaddy don’t care for ’em, neither,” he threw in. “Not that I know of, leastwise. Surprised he don’t warn you off from the likes of trespassin’. Don’t make much sense. You sure you’re a Harper?”

“I’m one,” I said. “Same name as him, sir. Ezra.”

The old man shook his head, dismayed.

“Well, I guess it don’t matter now,” he sighed. “You and me as best get on to the subject of reparations, boy—you know ’bout reparations? Says just what it means. You done some damage and now you’re agoin’ to
repair
it. Dispel that notion I’ve taken to run you right along in. Fair is fair, see. I figure a full day’s worth of chores might ’bout do it far as I’m concerned. ’Taint much for ever step you tramped ’crost my field, now is it, Harper?” He dug a wooden kitchen match from the breast pocket of his mackinaw, struck it—one trembling swipe—across the seat of his pants, then frowned while it flared and snuffed out in the wind, cursed and tossed it and struck another—the same scenario precisely this second time, only the muttered curses newly sonorous, increasing in breadth and acidity—
blamed wind! friggin’ blast from hell! be damned!
—while the lit match
died between his blackened fingers. With the opposite hand he plucked his cold pipe free again, smacked his lips soundly and said, “ ’Taint no perticular directions to give—fust place up the road here quarter-mile back—pineboard farmhouse, covered garage out front—leave you your own choice of days, boy, but Satidays is most always best—
early
Satidays don’t you know; you got anything to say for yourself, Harper?”

But again, I didn’t. “Be prompt then, boy, Satiday morning”—the old man said it like a reprimand. And I agreed to it all by not disagreeing and slipped off through the motionless black oaks of the forest, heading for the Burrillville Sanatorium.