Wild Life (36 page)

“Your boys have come through it,” Stuband said again, leaning in to me so closely and folding my fingers into his hands. But I could not stop weeping, bending lower over my knees, and he leant too, still holding my hands, and kissed my stubbly head or caressed it with his cheek, and said, “Charlotte, come, come now, it's all right, be still now,” until I became aware of the voice and his hands, the warmth, and I raised my head and saw him through the tears, so close, his long sagging mustache not completely white after all but streaked with ruddy brown and bluish black like the brindle coat of a dog or a dun horse, and the irises of his sorrowful eyes utterly black, black as a night-dwelling animal.

People in the salon were watching us—of course, they had been watching me all along, the wolf-woman with her bald head and mean scars, her shapeless tent of a dress and her splayed and ugly bare feet—but I remembered with a sudden stricken weariness that it was not human to make a public display of tears. I put my hands over my
face like a child, and Stuband gave me a handkerchief, which I used to wipe my nose and my eyes. After a while we stood up and went out onto the deck again, where it was coming toward evening and the wind had gotten colder. There he told me all that he knew: The diphtheria had formed a leathery false membrane over the larynx, which had been removed only with difficulty by the surgeon, leaving a raw wound and extended paralysis of the voice. More would be known in another month, and no reason yet to give up hope—considerable reason to think Jules might regain the faculty of words. (Of course, I was mute myself once, and I remember it as a resonant stillness—remember that its very formlessness had been a kind of articulation. How to say this to Jules?) Of my five children, Stuband said, it was only Jules and Frank who had been taken ill. Edith had put the two sick boys into her own bedroom, where she and Otto stood watch around the clock (and I think Stuband too, though he did not say so) through the long bout of fever and malaise. George meanwhile conducted himself entirely like a man. He kept himself and Oscar and Lewis healthy by means of strict quarantine and scrupulously boiled water, the three of them spending a tortuous fortnight isolated in the house and reading every book upon the shelves. (And while the boys had been sick, the dreaded word had come down: the search given up for their mother. I knew this without Stuband saying so.) But it was “all over,” he told me again and again, and I shouldn't worry.

A pair of wood ducks rose up out of a mud islet and beat across the water, their loud, distressed
wh'eek
piercing my heart. I followed them over the bottomlands into the eastern sky, where a ribbed white cone of a mountain was sliding luminous through the dark light. I wanted to ask Stuband what was the name of this mountain, for I had no recollection of it, but the boat followed the river's turning until the high hills had closed off the view, and the words would not shape themselves in my brain.

I had forgotten how thickly settled was this country. In my childhood, timber grew to the water's edge all along the river, and the early loggers had but to tip the trees into the water and float them to market. But the conquest of the natural world has been the ruling passion of this modern society. Now, in every level embayment there was a house standing in a field of stumps, and every little while a whole town was set down around the mouth of a creek. The deer and the
elk, I knew, had been mostly exterminated, and the fish nearly so, which was the cause of Wes's bankruptcy. (I remember times when the silver bodies of sturgeon were piled up as high as a man's hips on the cannery wharf, but it is the same story now as once on the Atlantic: overfishing and damming of the rivers, poor logging practices and wastes from the mills.) I had meant not to think about such things, but here it came: no secret dark hiding places for giants along this part of the river, none for many years. And I stood there wondering how long before the whole of this country was tamed and hedged about, emptied of the last of its mysteries, and the connection between ourselves and the wild world irrevocably broken.

If we had been in the local boat, we'd have put in at Stella, which town was named, I think, for a postmaster's daughter. But the
Lurline
has a high opinion of herself and does not trouble to stop at every village and hamlet. When I saw that we were steaming past the little island at the mouth of Germany Creek, I turned to Stuband and said, “Do you remember? Wes's body washed up here in the year Jules was born.” Of course I expected to shock him, but I was surprised in this. He has always had a habit of shyness, an unwillingness to look straight at the person he's speaking to, but he looked directly at me then. “You never wanted to think so,” he said very quietly, to which I could make no reply.

Here is another bit of news he told me later, without the least understanding of its meaning: Almon Pierce—this was the young cinnabar miner who had gone up into the woods with my party, and did I remember him?—had put himself entirely into the search for Harriet, and for me, but after all hope was given up, he went home with his brothers, sat down on his bed, and cut his throat from ear to ear.

On getting this news, I had a sudden glimpse of the younger Pierce, his face flashing crimson when we met alone in the woods—and the whole affair in the tent, the groping hand—all of it sweeping through my body like a volcanic wind. (Memory is an odd thing—how you can recall something, bring it into your mind with accuracy, and yet it does not live, is thought only; and another time a door opens and it is all right there; you step through and you are feeling it again, living it again.)

Stuband's gaze was fixed on the darkening eastward sky. He and
I had pulled up deck chairs to sit aft of the cabins, while most all of the crowd had gone forward to view the spectacular sunset over the bow. “He was subject to moods,” Stuband said softly, “and took everything too serious, I guess. Nobody knows what was in his mind—whether it had anything to do with you and Harriet being lost—so you shouldn't concern yourself too much.” He went on a good while thinking these words over, and then he softly added the useless anthem which I had heard a dozen people repeat to him at his own wife's funeral: “There was nothing you could've done.”

I am writing these lines while he dozes in his chair beside me. He is swaddled to the chin in blankets, and his face, though quite long and boned like the face of a greyhound, seems childishly soft—girlish—as men's faces do in sleep. His weaknesses and sorrows never used to go to my heart, but now the planet has shifted on its axis—I am afraid of people, so much so that I fear I shall always go on like this; and he is custodial, thinking he should not startle me too much. Once, when the deck became crowded, I leaned against him and reached for his arm, which did not surprise him. I find I am comforted by the simple physical fact of his presence, and he is tender and tolerant of me, unperturbed by my silences. I have begun to remember that he is a quiet sort himself, and that I am not the only one who has lived through storms.

 

Horace Stuband

 

The man stood in his yard pitching the ball to himself and swinging at it and walking out to the fence to collect it from the long grass and pitching it again from there, hitting it toward the house and then walking in, hitting it out again, back and forth. He wore several paths in the grass, which at the next rain would puddle and become chutes of mud. When the summer season began, it would be apparent again that he was a decent hitter but could not be hurried running the bases. His legs were long, but there was something lacking in his mainspring: he had failed to find the ground or basis by which the game would assume importance. His neighbors understood this about him, understood that he had experienced a tragedy, or several related tragedies, and therefore they looked on him with a certain forbearance. They always hoped for a hit that was high and deep, over the fence, so that while he trotted around the diamond on his long legs, unhurried and easy, the fielder would be kept busy running down the ball in the brush.

The bat he had whittled and sanded himself from a piece of hard yew was fairly well balanced, a decent bat, but the ball he pitched to himself was made of rags tied up very tightly with string, and it flew unpredictably and made a disappointing pulpy sound when hit; nevertheless he went on using it without thinking of the advantages of practicing with a real ball. He was of a stubbornly sensible mind, his forebears all frugal Danes.

Certain of his neighbors believed him a carrier of bad luck, which was something of which he was unaware. In a small community deeply dependent on the traditions of neighborliness, people found ways to avoid him. A neighbor who had been hoping to ride by his house quickly had once blurted out to him in a fluster, “Can't stop to talk now, got to get the doctor for the wife's mother, she fell and must've broke her arm.” The man had immediately gone up to the old woman's place to see what he could do and found her sweeping the kitchen floor, no arms broken. This had baffled him for a while. But though he hadn't seen what was meant by it, he had understood correctly that there was no malicious intent. When he went in to his meeting of the Skamokawa Tribe, Improved Order of Redmen, he had shaken hands with this neighbor and hadn't mentioned the man's mother-in-law or her unbroken bones.

He carried about his person a faint corona, like a lunar halo, an aureola of somberness, which was not grief but its old abraded shadow, and which drew certain kinds of women to him, and children, but kept many men from seeking his company. He was aware of the serious view he had of the world, and the world of him, but not aware of many other aspects of his situation. He believed himself held in the embrace of his community.

In the summer to come, as in summers past, townspeople would charter the
Julia B.
to carry them over to Clatskanie or Rainier or Stella of a Sunday afternoon to play baseball. The man's wife had used to enjoy such outings, but she had been dead now for some time, and it had been a long while before her death that she had stopped enjoying such things. In recent years the man had taken up the habit of bringing along on these trips the sons of a widowed neighbor. He would row himself down to the landing early and tie up his boat and walk to the Methodist church wearing his suit, and then change in the meeting room of the Redmen Lodge and meet the boys at the
Julia B.
and follow them aboard with his bat resting across his shoulder and the homemade ball bulging from the back pocket of his baseball uniform. Coming home late on the boat through the summer darkness, the younger boys would sleep flanking him on the bench with their heads resting hot and damp, one on each of his thighs. He had never had the company of his own children but believed that his neighbor's children, requiring little from him and unencumbered with responsibility, must still resemble what he was missing. When he was alone, he had an anxious awareness of his solitude.

The oldest boy came across the field now, tossing a baseball up and catching it in his gloved hand as he came, and so the man left his rag ball lying in the sodden grass, and they began to play pitch-and-catch in the light drizzle, he and the boy, calling out to each other from time to time. The boy, who had just begun to get his height and his sinew, believed himself to be a wise old man, serious-minded, and in truth he carried about his body an aura of somberness, a faint grayish corona, which the man would one day soon, on a summer baseball field, glimpse and briefly recognize with a start of surprise.

After a short while they took to running bases. Once, sliding in the wet grass, they fell together and sat laughing, their trousers striped with mud. Their laughter, rising and floating across the pastures, was heard by other children in the near woods, who were drawn to the sound as iron filings to a magnet. The configuration of their game would soon shift in much the same way celestial charts must be redrawn upon the discovery of new moons; but for a few minutes more the two of them went on playing, unaware, and the other boys, as they were crossing to them over the field, heard their two voices calling back and forth in the simple language of the game.

 

In the popular domestic fictions of my childhood, the heroine always had suffered a great loss that led to her being alone in the world: in those books, the girl's mother or father, or both, always were dead, missing, or damaged. The heroine, having suffered and survived, and now living as somewhat of a social outcast, was often of robust physique, had a will to independence, a desire for education, and the ability to earn a living on her own.

Such heroines have become quite out of fashion today, replaced by the dainty young thing who faints away at the sight of a six-shooter, squawks when she is startled by a garter snake, and blushes if she catches the eye of a man. It's only in the precincts of the lowbrow scientific romances and western romances that the occasional heroine continues cool under fire; which, if asked, is my rationale for writing them.

A paralyzing apoplexy struck my father down in his own yard when his two children were no more than babies. My mother, who could not lift his weight, raised his head and shoulders out of the mud and propped him against a rock before running to the neighbor's for help, though he drowned anyway, facedown in our flooded pasture, which always has left me wondering if he meant to spare his wife from countless years of caring for an invalid husband. My little brother, Teddy, was killed by typhus when he was but twelve, and Mother herself was killed when I was seventeen, aboard the overloaded
Gleaner,
which sank while crossing the icy river between Deep River and Astoria. When his business failed, my husband went off to the City without his family, and has not been seen again, which left me to raise our five children alone, the youngest of them at the time still an infant at my breast.