The Country Ahead of Us, the Country Behind (13 page)

There came to me flickerings of my grandfather as I went, though, disturbed as I was by the old man in the Vaughan Road—they come to me now: shreds of things that perhaps add up to nothing more than nostalgia and self-deception—of searching on our knees, he and I, for the chuck key of a drill on the floor of his toolshed—the one trailing image I have left of his face, which was open and gentle and gaunt like my father’s as his huge magnificent hands roamed among the spiraled bits rolling over the packed dirt floor; of stalking his wide back through the pine woods beyond his haybarn
(This here was an apple orchard
, he’d pointed out, drawing himself up in the soughing breeze of that spring day—
growed over now with all this here white pine. Warn’t no good anyway … too sandy … apples had a tinny taste to ’em—pie apples, mostly. Right off down there? You see where I’m a pointin’? That ol’ bog? That was a pond oncet, Ezra. Can you make it out? We dug it ourselves, set by it summers … by God, by God … this right here was all apples oncet, though.… )
In his cellar were tools no one makes any
more—an adze, a froe, a peeler spud turned by hand—the cellar itself he’d dug after the house was up, by moonlight and the odor of wick oil and without missing church while my father hauled barrows of earth and stone and root to dump in the woods. In his spare time he’d been a rabble-rouser, so they said, Ezra Harper, at the mills and town meetings; he’d shot himself in the knee once with a squirrel gun; he’d flung a man through the window of a tavern one night. He’d told stories—about a man named Flinch and his water wand in a time of drought, about lovers who stole his apples one autumn when Truman was on the stump, about a night’s drunk, a clay jug, a battle in the woods—all with a tuck of deception at the corner of his mouth as he spun his sternly told yarns. And as I tracked along toward work and the old ones that morning I saw him as clear as clear water one ragged autumn in a deep place in the woods, miles and miles back in a place of frozen mud where leaves crunched into powder beneath your footstep—up knobs, through swales, amid bogs with their stale effluvium of death where weedy cottonwoods grow in silence—and he’d stopped, Grandfather Harper, somewhere in the perpetual forest, stamping his boots speculatively and pointing a finger at a line of curious stones. “I buried your grandma there,” he’d said, matter-of-fact, plain speaking, and the two of us had waited in a silence as difficult as any I have ever known, stood there before the row of real stones watching until he scratched his head and stamped his boots again and led on through the dark forest to a place where spring water rose from a cleft in the roots of a chestnut.

*  *  *

EDWARD STONE
it read in black paint on the mailbox, on Saturday morning, in a placid, mute snow that had only just begun to fall tentatively. And the old man trudged out toward me as I came up the dirt path to the cabin—moss-backed bleached siding, lattice-framed porch, drifts of gray chimney smoke furling over a high gable—a thick coil of manila rope slung over one shoulder and the ever-cold, ever-emberless pipe veering slantwise now, aiming west as he came north by northwest to front me at the corner of the covered garage.

Ed Stone’s wasn’t much of a spread. His farmhouse was gone, near-obliterated and fell-to-ruin—charred floor joists stubbornly parallel; a broken granite footing scattered now in among black riddled plumbing pipe warped and tempered in the sear of a firestorm; a haphazard square of dark rubble and cloven rock and scored chunks of beam heaped on the last vestiges of a hearth that had crumbled; and a tumbling half-wall of chimney stones. Two out-barns were stripped to the rafters, their siding strewn in among surrounding pines, the home pasture grown over with seedlings and wild stickerbrush and falling away to the south now in disarray, abandoned utterly to time and the seasons. As for the pineboard cabin—built on a regrade that sloped to a vale of ice and grim maple third-growth—it stood darkly back in shadows, tiny square windows opening out over lost pasture and the crossbuck door opening out onto stubble and ruin.

Dusting the snow from my shoulders I fell in and followed Ed Stone—
up this a way, Harper, now step along
—past his woodshed and barren chicken coop among pines until, twenty-five feet beyond the gable end of his home, he drew
up and pointed ninety feet into the fragile, reaching branches of an American elm snapped like a pencil fifty feet up and slanting another forty into the forked branches of a slender tamarack: where it waited, wavering, half-toppled and leafless, for another storm wind to send it hurtling down like a battering ram launched by the gods to split asunder Ed Stone’s dark cabin.

In the half-light of morning—outlined against the pines and the gray geometry of his ruins—the old man looked as twisted and tremulous and inexorably muted as the lost trodden silent figures I moved among for pay at the shadowed Burrillville Sanatorium. His spectacles were askew and the checked mackinaw buttoned unevenly so that one side of the collar rode higher than the other, absurdly prominent. Ed Stone stood half-bent-over backward, dark spittle frozen at the corner of his lips, the skin of his neck translucent, cold-blue, his hollowed face worked tight against the tiny stabbing needles of new snow, and peering, pipestem wavering, breath wheezing forth like dust from a clogged bellows, up through spotted glass at the broken shaft of the elm hung high above, one unlikely horizontal—a ford-bridge spanning far reaches of the trees—in a grove of true vertical pines.

“Trick is,” he said, freeing his arm from the coil of manila rope, “to get that thing down ’thout caving the house in ’ta same time.”

And with that he commenced to render his plan in the hard language of oratory—as though, instead of pulling back and toppling over a jammed windfall, we were preparing to cross the Delaware and meet the Hessians at Trenton on Christmas Day. When he ceased I dropped the coil of rope over my neck and climbed through the branches of a
pitch pine per instruction, sculpted a weight-knot and flung it out over the bole of the elm in question, watched it unravel earthward—Ed Stone lashing a second coil to it fifty feet down—reeled both back in like well cable and ran the free end over the opposite side. The double rope hung now with both ends at ground level, draped over the shaft of the elm, and Ed Stone crafted some kind of hitch in it unsteadily while I wrestled my way out of the pitch pine and glanced out over the chaotic pasture and the trapezoidal jumble of bleak farmhouse ruins.

Snow, like a film of white dust, had begun to gather in arcs and depressions, wherever the canopy of branches overhead did not shield and sift, along the pathway that ran from the ruins to the crossbuck door and then to the covered garage, in chalklines over the spines of green exposed branches and on the steep-pitched roof and highest chimney stones of the dark cabin, and in a spangling bright coat over the surface of the ruins, the scattered, skewed footing and naked, dancing pipe, the coal-black, charred beams, the rails of joists, the remnant-rafters and chunk-wood cluttering the last of the cold stone hearth. The earliest, true, unfailing snow of winter had begun in earnest, picking up as the gray light it fell out of rolled along the backs of the clouds, slowly grew, and refracted back into the heavens again—a suggestion of earthly, naked and familiar light only beyond the crowns of Ed Stone’s trees.

I didn’t see it—though I have seen it in memory—when the old man took his tumble at the cornerstone of his implacable ruins. I’d left him behind me in his grove of dark trees and gone down to bring his pickup around according to our prospectus for battle—left him paying out rope, backing up stiltingly between the pines with his head cocked
toward the gray light, the rude hitch he’d built flowing up toward the bole of the elm, flowing at first and then floundering and wobbling at a shallower slant as he hobbled backward: finally, unwitnessed, the fall itself, a chance, solitary thing, and then—muffled and powerless—his cry in the snowfall.

I turned and wheeled up the path again, alone with a suddenness that made my breathing seem to echo inside my ears, and found Ed Stone pawing at the edge of his farmhouse ruins, a grimace of astonishment and rue and self-exacerbating vexation sculpted onto his drawn features, his steel-rims cockeyed, haywire, his familiar pipe—as much a part of him as his fingers and hands—nowhere to be found, and the manila rope, like a pendulum dying out, swinging at the merest arc ten feet in front of him through the snowfall. Grimly, obscenely determined, awkward and grotesque—like a plowhorse who has snapped a foreleg and, writhing, lathered, cannot accept or understand the meaning of proneness, of gravity and earth pounding him down—the old man waggled upward, clenching bits of jagged stone between his gloved fingers and rising, flopping, searching inwardly for a way to find a foothold and stand upright. A new look came over him, a seizure of pain engulfed him, lit his eyes and face—old fool that he was, he’d brought his weight down on the left fibula, the bone he’d cracked going over backward—and Ed Stone slipped down on his side, folded together like brittle paper, and clutched his broken leg tightly and cried without shame where he lay amid the old snowy ruins.

I lifted him gently—light as a newborn calf—and carried him, cradled him like a lamb, one arm across the backs of his knees and the other under his shoulder blades, careful
of the leg turned unnaturally outward, up toward the warm heart of his cabin. Through the clean smell of snow his close, pungent smell came at me: the leaves of an old book, Mason jars in a cellar, dried mushrooms and toothpaste. The old man whimpered and wept tears that touched me with a perplexed guilt and shame, not two feet from my face as I held him in my arms, his eyes spinning wetly behind their thick lenses, weeping without courage of any kind which seemed then incomprehensible, impossible.

Inside the stove was nearly out, the cabin dark as a cave, bitter with the acrid smell of wood smoke. I let the old man slowly down on the sheets of his unmade bed in the corner alcove of the single room, where he fell limp, breathing roughly, and gazed up stiffly at the black soot that lay like paste over the ceiling beams. I rang up the doctor in Wilkes in a time when house calls were still possible, and yelled into the receiver—which crackled back at me—and then I hung up and waited without words for what had happened, listening to a clock somewhere that kept deafening time—
click-clack, click-clack
—and stoking the stove with sticks of maple.

“Do you want a blanket on?” I asked when the fire was drawing good.

“No. I don’t need any blanket.”

“You need anything?”

“Go on home, boy. Job’s finished.”

I sat down at his dining table.

“Doctor’s coming,” I said. “I’ll wait ’til then.”

The old man grunted and lapsed into silence in his corner.

Fifty minutes later Doc Schofield set the leg. Around noon Vic Crowell showed from up the Vaughan Road and pulled the snapped elm over with his snowplow. It hammered
down into the ruins and I brought out the old man’s chainsaw and bucked it up into lengths for the fire.

At two-thirty Ed Stone’s son pulled in from West Putnam, Connecticut, where he was chief of the fire department. He asked me what happened. I told him everything. He gave me five dollars and I trudged home through the gray light of the woods.

Spring came, not dolorous and unassuming as it comes where I live now, but delirious and ravenous and unbridled, with blaring sunlight.

At the sanatorium the response to this change was minute, a meditation only on light and leaf buds and green thrusting grass, on wind as ally now and not enemy. All sense of the celebratory was muted by a felt continuity in all things, for life there was beyond the seasons, or so it appeared to me, wheeling my charges out to the shore of Harrow’s Pond where the green bloom of marshweed and the sun on black water seemed to speak to me alone among the silent old ones. Leaves returned to the trees one day when no one watched, the earth softened, larks fluttered over the surface of the pond, but the marks of passing time there remained constant, fixed in perpetuity, ignorant of season and of the trajectory of sunlight. Someone died in bed, like Mrs. Curfall, who slept with her needleworked handbag at her side, curled beneath the sheets no larger than a ten-year-old child; or someone transferred quietly to a hospital in Boston, like Mr. Oslough, whose goiter strangled him with every utterance, maliciously; or someone else achieved a small victory like an arrangement of flowers or
a painting of the pond or a group completed a long tournament of canasta and drank tea with mock-smiles on their faces; or, like Mrs. Tullis—who was taller than I in her eighties and nearly hairless, grave-faced and mute—someone died abruptly, pitched forward and did not rise again while the rest looked on without words for what they had seen. And thus time marked itself at the sanatorium, elegiacally.

It was a bright keen morning in late May when I saw Ed Stone again, five months after his sudden fall at the corner of the old ruins. I stood beside Mrs. Kennaugh at the shore of Harrow’s Pond, where she slept profoundly in her wheelchair with her mouth dropped open—eyeballs leaping behind their pasty lids, her endless knitting, needles embedded eternally, dangling from her lap—and Ed Stone, Jr., fire chief from West Putnam, wheeled his old father down the path that wound through the pine grove and ended at pond’s edge. He stopped, and drew the brake up, and stood behind him and beside me, arms snugly crossed, feet planted wide, while the old man, expressionless, with a face blank as slate, sat with his shoes askew on the footrest and looked out over the black water. “Storm coming,” the son said—old himself from where I looked on, burly and kind-faced, with a belly like a cast-iron stove—and pointed—jammed—a finger into the west where thunderheads were piling up on the horizon. The light over the pond fell full and golden, a lucid, towering radiance as though bits of the sun itself were bursting out of the sky overhead, but in the west, far enough off so that it appeared to be something of a mirage, a grayness was gathering.