“I don’t know why I’m doin’ this,” she said. And yet she finished carefully, sweeping the last dust clumps and food crumbs into a piece of newspaper and dumping them on the fire. Then she set the broom by the door to go.
One last time she put Hildie to bed on the mattress on the floor and lay down beside her to wait for her to go to sleep. The child was excited, and uneasy at the emptiness. “How could you think we’d leave you, my sweet one,” Mim crooned. “It’s on your account we’re goin’.”
But she held the child too tightly and only upset her more. “Why is it again we’re goin’?” Hildie asked.
“Shhh,” Mim said and lay still.
She heard the door open and shut downstairs, and thought that John had started to load the truck. But she listened on and on, and did not hear him come in again. Presently Hildie fell asleep in her arms and still Mim did not move. She lay on and on, aching at the necessity, ever, of releasing the small limp body that, given up to her like this, filled her with such peace.
12
There was a moon, the shape of half an orange. The wind which seemed as solid as a living body did nothing to dim its light. Presently, stumbling up the familiar road, his flashlight in his belt, more for protection than for light, John grew accustomed to the dimness and began to detect the boulders and felled branches before the toe of his boot struck them. Carefully he climbed down into the old house foundation and plunged his arm into the leaves clogging the old dairy shelf. When his bare hand struck the unnaturally cold metal, he cringed.
He pulled the gasoline can out and put his gloves back on. The journey was four and a half miles by the road, and more by the old logging trail and the brook where the footing was so bad. He hadn’t gone through the woods in decades, not since the year he had attended high school. Then the bus had let him off in the Parade, and sometimes, for variety, he had walked home through the woods. Never at night though. And never in winter either.
Now he took the heavy gas can and headed down the road. He passed his own house and gazed at the yellow light in the kitchen, wondering if they’d missed him yet and feeling shut out, the rhythmic crunch of his feet on the dirt road lost on the whine of the wind. He headed across the garden, his footsteps muffled now by the dead vines, and down the old path that passed the place where they raked away the lily pads and arrowheads to swim in summer. He paused at the edge of the pond.
There was always a lightness over the pond. Sometimes in the dark still nights of summer, way back when everything had been new to him, he had swum there with a girl—first with wild Hattie Shaw, who had had the idea, and then later, at his own insistence, with Mim when she was fourteen, then barely fifteen, shunned by his mother, and shy, but willing for him. They couldn’t quite see each other, but the lightness over the pond, even on the darkest night, had been enough to assure him of the milky fact of her beside him, bending to set her clothes on the fallen pine log, then moving into the shallow water and sinking, with barely a ripple, the pale shadow of flesh. Afterwards, his own fingers puckered from the water, he touched the wet new skin, rough as his own with chill. He touched and she ran. He sat on the log and shivered until she came back. Then he took her tightly by the elbows and she let herself be forced onto the blanket he had spread.
John shifted the heavy gasoline can from one hand to the other and walked. The loss. You couldn’t stop it. Not with laws or holding or thinking. They hadn’t been swimming at night since long before Hildie was born. He thought about the stinging bugs now. He didn’t want anything now the way he had wanted the slightest thing then. The way he needed the land was a different thing, a holding fast against more loss than he could bear. The need for the land was more like a retreat than a driving force.
The pond was frozen in ridges to about four feet out. The wind-thrashed water gurgled and sucked at the lip of ice, keeping abreast of him, a familiar presence, as he made his way along the rough path at water’s edge. He stopped at the mouth of the brook. The night had unstrung him. The night and the weight of the gasoline can dragging on his shoulder. He could have clasped the pond in his arms. He put the can down and stood looking out over the pond once again, waiting for it to turn time aside for him the way it always had.
But finally, distracted, he turned and headed uncomforted into the dark woods, and followed the bed of rocks where, in spring, the brook rushed, and even now, beneath the high wind, a tongue of water rang against the scoured stones like the wooden clapper in a bell, warning that they were slippery. Twice he stepped on what looked like a windswept stretch of earth and crashed through ice up to his shin—both times with his right foot. Soon he had a cold foot and a warm foot as well as a free shoulder and a captive one, so that he felt unbalanced as he moved.
The distance was greater than he remembered, but eventually the bed of the brook grew indistinct. He worried about missing the stone wall, about turning off at the wrong wall, for walls, he knew too well, crisscrossed the woods like the paper chains on a Christmas tree. The right stone wall was the one that crested the hill and ended at the old logging road that would take him out behind the Parade. The road was bulldozed fresh the year he was in high school, but perhaps by now it would be so grown in he wouldn’t be able to follow it even if he found it. The water was gone completely from the creek bed now, and the woods were growing darker. If he turned on the flashlight, it would light a narrow path for his boots but black out everything around so that he would be more than ever likely to miss the wall.
Quite suddenly, a low branch reached out and caught in the handle of the gasoline can, yanking John off his feet. He fell full length on the ground. The can struck a rock with a loud clang, and the gasoline splashed around loudly inside. He lay listening until it was still, feeling his bruised knee. He got to his knees and felt for the can. A paddy bird roared up from almost underneath him, the squeaking of wings as loud as any motor. John let out a yell that startled him still more, and settled back on his heels trembling to listen for an answer. An owl hooted not far away, and then there was nothing again but the sporadic wailing of the wind.
He no longer felt alone. But it would not be a man, not here. Only, perhaps, a deer, or even a bear, more afraid of him than he of it. Or worse, a fisher cat or a big dog gone wild. John took the kitchen knife and the flashlight from his belt. He pushed the switch on the flashlight and the woods lit up in glistening black and white. Slowly he swung the light all around him, squinting to see beyond the end of its beam. He caught the lichen on the sides of trees, the heavy ridges of fungus on a broken branch, like tumors stretching skin. And then, almost beyond its reach, the light bounced off something pale and shiny and as big as a head, and after a gasp John remembered the great chunk of quartz that marked the wall he wanted. It was behind him. He had passed it. It was the marker stone he had felt as company.
He took up the gas can and, using the light now, headed out along the wall. He moved more quickly now. He would know the old road, when he came to it, by the break in the wall. And, if he could still follow the road at all, it would take him out where he wanted to be, or close enough.
The wind still howled from the northeast. It would be at his back once he swung around onto the old road. Hour after hour it had been blowing like that, and suddenly John was struck by the thought that it could not go on like that forever. He hurried, stumbling, beginning to be afraid.