When his green truck appears in the driveway-he is scouting the territory, drawing up mental maps-I try to go out and greet the deerslayer. He tells me things about nature I didn’t know. One day he pointed out to me the ugly fungi that grow like monstrous tan brains on the lawn. He said, “Those are called hen-of-the-woods. They grow only in association with oak trees. Very delicious, cut and sliced and sautéed, or put into a spaghetti sauce. Soak it in salt water to get the dirt and insects out. Sometimes you find a salamander or two in there; they don’t do any harm. Here.” And with a black-handled pen-knife, the kind that men used to carry in their overall pockets back in Hammond Falls, John cut a tidy cube of white flesh out of the rumpled brown mass and handed it to me. It was heavier than I had expected, with a pleasant rubbery moisture, like a big art eraser. “Hen-of-the-woods. Not easy to find, and with all these oaks up here you’re surrounded. Tell your missus what I showed you, and she’ll be thrilled, I guarantee.”
Is it my impotent hypersensitivity, or do men keep making overtures to my wife? Am I dead already?
But in truth Gloria was disgusted by the idea, and didn’t even want the pieces I had nicely sliced, washed, and placed in a bowl, covered by Saran Wrap, in the refrigerator. To her, this piece of nature, grown beyond the realm of her garden, was impudent if not poisonous. I tasted a raw piece-it was bland at first, like a firmer tofu or a coconut meat less sweet and crisp, but then the aftertaste had a caustic kick that stayed with me, even after I washed it down with a glass of orange juice. “John says to sauté them in a little butter,” I said, but Gloria forbade it; she didn’t want her kitchen stunk up. Forbidding comes easier and easier to her. It is becoming her métier.
When I venture outside, the sky rushes down at me through the oaks, which have blanketed the lawn and driveway with their leaves. In the woods and along 128, entirely bare trees are appearing: silvery sea-fans-dead or merely asleep, it is not easy to tell. Naked, they reveal their beseeching, striving shapes. The oak trees reach sideways, and the hickories up and down. The ashes are especially tragic in their clustered end-twigs, like snatching, clutching fingers, and the birches in their windswept huddled curves. The leaves were just a cover-up; these colorless warped skeletons are the truth.
In my seaward view, as the sun nears noon, it transforms the sea into a sheet of unalloyed light, cruel to see. The line of the beach is visible through the trees. The autumn’s polychrome sinks toward a brittle rust, broken into a thousand dry facets of reflected sun. My eyes keep going to the charred scar where Mrs. Lubbetts’ beach house had been, like a tongue to a missing tooth. In the other direction, at night, the lights of Haskells Crossing come closer through the stripped trees, like the flashlights of a hunting party. The poor Lynn boys, if the metallobioforms had not shredded them, would have been exposed by this time of year like wood lice when a rotten log is overturned.
On Halloween night, a new intensity of cold has swollen the stars overhead. No child comes to the house. It is too far off the beaten track; the driveway is too forbiddingly long. Gloria and I, faintly disconsolate, make ourselves sick by eating the candy corn and Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups we had laid in. Side by side on the green sofa, we watch a television documentary on the Old West. Still photos of vast stony vistas and of impassive bronze faces: Indian chiefs hounded to a humiliating surrender, after creekside massacres and epic marches through Dakota blizzards to a Canadian sanctuary where the distant queen’s providence declines to forestall starvation; they are driven back to a bitter treaty with the bearded Great White Father in Washington and the barren haven of the reservation. A heap of broken promises, and a pyramidal mountain of the skulls of bison spitefully slaughtered to cut the red man’s ground out from under him. Modern descendants of these routed Native Americans are interviewed in living color. With their ethnically correct long black hair and slow professorial voices, they expound their historical grievances expertly but less affectingly than the witness borne by the silent bronze faces which the triumphant republic, in token apology, placed on its coinage and postage stamps. The Sino-American Conflict, it came to me, could be seen as revenge administered by the Mongolian superpower of that Asian continent from which the North American aborigines had crossed the Bering land-bridge.
We went to bed sickeningly awash with candy and guilt. I followed Gloria into the bedroom that was ours and has become hers. Shyly I watched her make her methodical way through the rites of flossing, toothbrushing, mouthwashing, and applying face cream. She inserted the gel-loaded plastic cooth-guards with which she keeps her teeth the valuable white that my mother had once, not insincerely, appraised as worth investing in. These plastic insertions, though transparent, push her lips out and give her a speech impediment that arouses me, the fraction of me that can still be aroused. A desolate helpless love, as for a child, came over me as she tidily inserted herself into the bed, preparing, with the uncapping of a small bottle smelling powerfully of banana, to replace the paint on her nails. All these rites, I see, are her way of trying to freeze and defeat time, as mine is the writing of these scattered sad paragraphs. Futile, both exercises, but only in the long run. “Shall I stay?” I asked.
“Why?”
“Oh, for coziness. Because we both feel bad and embarrassed about the Indians.”
“I do,” she conceded, “but realistically we just couldn’t let them have the entire country to run around in with their bows and arrows.”
“They had learned to use guns. They were trying to learn our ways. Farming, going to church.” I was stalling, saying anything to postpone the moment of our parting.
She had become intent upon her nails. She is her own innermost garden, needing incessant tending. I was intruding upon a precious moment of peaceful concentration; her pale eyebrows were knit in a small frown of unvoiced irritation.
“I need a hug,” I said.
“Ben. I am doing my nails. You’re making me make mistakes.”
“I miss us” I told her.
She knew what I meant, but did not look or speak. The tiny brush of chemical solvent made its way around the oval nail of her lefthand ring finger with its slim gold band. What would an interplanetary voyager understand of our little symbolic shackles and their invisible chains?
“I can’t do the main thing,” I apologized, “but-”
“You’ll get me and the bed all wet,” she said.
Blushing, I finished, “I need to be touched. Somehow that show frightened me. That whole dreadful century, all that imperialism, and now everybody dead-the winners and losers, the cowboys and Indians, North, South, everybody. And no children in costume coming to the house. I was talking to Roberta today; Jennifer was going out trick-or-treating with Keith dressed as a bug, with those caps with bouncy antennae on springs. Irene told me that Olympe and Etienne got the idea of painting their faces white, that was their only disguise. A sort of portent in that, no? A few more years, they’ll hate me. The white grandfather.”
“Nobody hates you,” Gloria said, concentrating downward on her hands. “Everybody knows you can’t help what you are.”
Hands-how I used to love my own hands. At the ages of twelve or thirteen, sexuality just beginning, and narcissism. Lying on my bed in my tiny dormered room in Hammond Falls, with its slant ceiling and Joe Namath poster, I would stare at my hands and flutter my fingers, and slowly twirl them in the dust-spangled air, the creased palms and freckled backs, and dive-bomb with them and soar, flaring one upward like a space rocket flattening into the stratosphere for its toss to the moon. I would ponder their articulation, their involuntary grace, their jointed sensitivity and prehensile strength. My fingerprints, unique in the world, in all those billions living and dying. When I asked-when that imperious voice enthroned at the back of my skull asked- my hands obediently became little dancing men, or firing pistols, or butterflies, or fists. They were always with me, the closest me I could see at will, without a mirror-emissaries my inner monarch would some day send out to grip and mold the world.