On the other side of the creek, I could hear crickets and grasshoppers, and small things whirring in the grass. I went up the bifurcated hill; crows took off from the alfalfa, screeching, their bodies like flak, like ashes in the air. Sweat dripped into my eyebrows, and I felt my shirt clammily adhering to my sides. I thumped down into the dip and then began to rise again, walking toward the trees.
This was where she had twice led me. Birds twittered, darting through branches far above. Light came down in that streaming way it does only in forests and cathedrals. I watched a gray squirrel race out onto a slender branch, bend it under his w, and then transfer to a lower, stouter branch like a man stepping out of an elevator. When the ground began to alter, so did the trees; I walked on spongy gray mulch between oaks and elms; I skirted pines and conifers and felt thin brown needles skid underfoot. As when I lay on the polished floor, I waded through high leafy beds of ferns. Berries crushed against my trousers. A lightning-blasted old ruin of an oak lay splintered and jagged in my path, and I jumped on top of it, feeling the softness of rotting wood. Filaments of green snagged and caught in the eyelets of my boots.
Going as I had gone in vision that night, I passed the thick unmoving trees until I saw where they seemed to gather like a crowd at an accident: I slid through a gap, and was in the clearing. The sunlight, after the filter of the network of the leaves, seemed violently yellow and intense, lionlike, full of inhuman energy. Tall grass tipped under its own w. Insect noises hovered in vibrato over the clearing. A chirring unmoving noise.
At the center, in the charred place, the ashes showed a still red core, like the ashes in Rinn’s old woodstove. It had Alison’s warmth. Galen Hovre was wrong about Duane and my cousin. Or Duane, all those years ago, had lied.
Oddly, perhaps predictably, when I had dreamed about walking up into the woods the journey had a direct, palpable actuality, and when I actually went up there it felt like dreaming. I thought, almost fearing it, that I would sense some deeper closeness to Alison Greening if I approached the clearing where I had met her dreadful apparition in my vision; that space was hers, and I thought of it as the source of the chill which penetrated the old farmhouse. If there is another world, a world of Spirit, who is to say that its touch may not shake us to our boots, that its heat may not come to us as the cold of quarry water? But discounting that nightmare vision of Alison as a creature stitched together from leaves and bark, indirection brought me closer to her, evoked her more satisfactorily, than a crude search through the woods and clearing. I had begun a memoir, a task she had motivated (I could remember her telling me, one high summer day when we climbed the hill behind the valley and, carrying shovels, searched for Indian mounds, that she was going to be a painter, and I a writer), and it seemed to cement us even further, since — at the most obvious level — it meant that I thought about her even more than I might otherwise. She was the groundbass of what I wrote. It was as though I were reeling her in, sentence by sentence. And then, one morning after suffering through a breakfast presided over by a Tuta Sunderson who had accepted seven one-dollar bills from me and then wordlessly handed back two as if they represented an immoral suggestion, I had driven the Nash loaner over the Mississippi bridge on Highway 35 — a wonderful American sight, those islands showing their wooded backs like green water buffaloes in the brown river — to Winona, Minnesota, looking for the, records necessary to the Alison-environment. If I’d had to, I would have gone all the way to Minneapolis, Albums on the Pacific label from the ‘fifties are rare items. An initial glance through the racks in a Winona record store unearthed none, but then I saw the sign saying Second Hand Department Downstairs, and went down to flip through, in a basement illuminated by a single bulb, crate after crate of albums with worn sleeves and crumbled spines. Surrounded by cast-off Perry Comos and Roy Acuffs and Roger Williamses, two records shone like gold, and I grunted with such loud approval that the owner appeared at the top of the stairs to ask if I were all right. One was an old Dave Brubeck record I remembered Alison telling me she had loved (Jazz at Oberlin) and the other — -well, the other was a true find. It was the Gerry Mulligan quartet album on Pacific which Alison had urged me to buy, the one with a cover painting by Keith Finch. Finding that record was like finding a message from her scrawled on a page of my manuscript. It was the record, above all others, which evoked her, the one she had most cherished. The owner of the record store charged me five dollars for the two records, but I would have paid twenty times that. As much as my writing, they brought Alison nearer.
“What is that stuff you play all the time?” asked the Tin Woodsman. She was standing on the porch on Saturday night, peering in through the screen door. “Is that jazz?” I put my pencil into my manuscript and closed it. I was sitting on the old couch downstairs, and the kerosene lamps shed a muted orange glow which softened her features, blurred already by the mesh of the screen. She wore a denim shirt and trousers, and looked more feminine, in that soft light, than I had ever seen her. “Look,” she said, “it’s okay. I mean, Dad’s in Arden for some kind of meeting. Red Sunderson called him just before dinner. All the men are talking about something. They’ll probably be at it for hours. I heard you playing that record the other day. Is that this kind of music you like? Can I come in?”
She entered the room and sat facing me from a wooden rocker. On her bare feet were tan clogs. “What is it, anyhow?”
“Do you like it?” I really was curious.
She lifted her shoulders. “Doesn’t it all sound sort of the same?”
“No.”
“What’s that instrument playing now?”
“A guitar.”
“A guitar? That’s a guitar? Come on. It’s a… urn, a whatsit. Some kind of horn. A sax. Right?”
“Yes. It’s a baritone saxophone.”
“So why did you say it was a guitar?” Then she smiled, seeing the joke.
I shrugged, smiling back.
“Shit, Miles, it’s cold in here.”
“That’s because it’s damp.”
“Yeah? Hey Miles, did you steal out of Zumgo’s? Pastor Bertilsson’s telling everyone you did.”
“Then I must have.”
“I don’t get it.” She looked around the room, shaking her head, her jaws working on a piece of gum. “Hey, you know this room looks really neat this way. It’s just like it used to be. When I was a little kid and Great-Gramma was still alive.”
“I know.”
“It’s neat,” she said, still examining the room. “Didn’t there used to be more pictures? Like of you and Dad?” When I nodded, she asked, “So where are they?”
“I didn’t need them.”
The gum snapped. “Boy, Miles, I don’t know about you. You’re really superstrange. Sometimes you remind me of Zack, and sometimes you just talk crazy. How did you know where everything went in here?”
“I had to work at it.”
“It’s sort of like a museum, isn’t it? I mean, I almost expect to see Great-Gramma!”
“She probably wouldn’t like the music.”
She giggled. “Hey, did you really steal from Zurago’s?”
“Does Zack steal?”
“Sure.” She made her seawater eyes very wide. “All the time. He says you have to liberate things. And he says if you can take things without being caught, then you have a right to them.”
“Where does he steal from?”
“Places where he works. You know. Stuff from people’s houses, if he’s working for them. Stuff from the gas station, if he’s working there. You mean, you’re a college professor and all and you steal things?”