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Today there was ale but no peace.

I sat at the bench and played with the chili, which, like the ale, was good. But as I picked at the bowl, sipped from the glass half-heartedly, my mind was on Missy Hewett. There was Missy in her apartment, a little kid with a brittle hard shell. Missy, who barely had breasts and already hated men, who had reduced them not to a body or an organ but to a single cell. The father of her child was a sperm cell, she had said. The next step was a single strand of DNA.

It was chilling. And sad.

I pictured Missy in a hospital room, one where the only flowers were from the nurses. I pictured her in labor, grunting and crying
and letting out teeth-clenched screams that should not come from a child's mouth. The nurses probably gave her chunks of ice to suck on, cool cloths for her head. Perhaps they had been even more gentle and kind than they were for other mothers, the ones who had men to hold their hands, to awkwardly lead them through the huff and puff learned in childbirth classes. Men to share the joy of a brand-new life.

Missy had given her new life away.

She probably had been right, even noble. Certainly, she had put her child's life ahead of hers, its future before her pleasure. But I wondered for how long she'd relive that moment. Did she hold the baby and say good-bye? Did she give the baby a name in her mind? Did she decide that it had her eyes? Was there a last moment when she gave its tiny hand a squeeze, said a prayer for it to be happy and healthy and content forever and ever?

“Can I get you another ale?” the waitress said.

I looked up, startled.

“No,” I said. “It's just no use.”

9

M
ary Varney was canning pickles. The kitchen was like a spicy steam bath, and the big canning pot was rattling explosively on the stove. Mary worked at the counter, dropping small pickling cukes from her garden into quart jars of brine, screwing on the lids, and whirling to drop them into the boiling water.

“You know any Hewetts in town?” I asked.

“Used to be Hewetts on Knox Ridge,” she said. “Could you go in the pantry there and get me another bunch of dill? It's the long feathery stuff.”

It was Wednesday, late morning, overcast and cool. I was drinking tea with Mary until Clair got back. He had gone into Belfast to get a belt for the mower for his small tractor. Actually, I didn't really need to see him, but it was a gloomy day, and the Varney kitchen was a clean, well-lit place.

“What are these little black things?” I said, putting the dill on the counter.

“Peppercorns,” Mary said. “Why do you think they call them that? They should call them pepper kernels.”

“Too late now,” I said. “So did you know these Hewetts?”

“By sight and reputation, which may or may not have been deserved.”

“Why? Were they outlaws?” I asked.

“No more than a lot of people,” Mary said, wincing as she splashed boiling water on her fingers. “The father never really worked. Took a lot of deer out of season. Did odd jobs. Drank up most of what he made. I think he went to prison for stealing. They had seven or eight kids, something like that. I remember seeing the mother at the store. Poor woman. Her life was one cross after another, stacked up on her back like cordwood. Of course, this is a generation back. Those kids were my age, so they'd have kids by now. You don't hear the name much anymore. Of course, there were a lot of Hewett girls, and they'd be married now, so while the name would be lost, the family would still be around.”

“I met one,” I said. “She's in college in Portland.”

“Well, good for her. That's a first for that family.”

“I don't think she has much to do with any of them.”

“Probably good that she doesn't,” Mary said, filling more jars.

“She seemed like a nice kid, but very sad,” I said. “She had a baby but she gave it up for adoption.”

“In that family, that's got to be a first, too. Babies mean checks from the State every month. A steady income.”

“She said she wanted hers to have a future. A real mom and dad. Not an easy decision to make, I would think.”

“Not easy to do. Not easy to live with after,” Mary said.

She shook her head.

“This girl must be one tough kid,” she said. “It isn't many young women who are able to put their babies first like that.”

“She was in high school,” I said, refilling my cup from the porcelain teapot.

Mary shook her head.

“Somewhere she got some good advice,” she said.

“Probably a good thing for both of them.”

I sipped my tea.

“But not easy,” I said.

“No,” Mary said. “It couldn't ever be easy. Even harder in a small town like this. Everybody knows your business.”

“And everybody has an opinion.”

“Oh my, yes,” Mary said.

By noon, Clair hadn't come home, so I left Mary with her pickles and walked back up the road to home. On the way, one of the college girls stopped her car as she passed me and asked if she could borrow my truck sometime. The car had Maryland plates. Her name was Kippy or Skippy, and she was attractive in an athletic sort of way, like a woman you'd see in the Olympics.

“I found this humongous bureau that I can have if I can get it home,” Kippy said. “I'd just need it for an hour or so.”

“Hey, anytime,” I said. “But if the truck breaks down, just be sure to take the plates with you when you leave it by the side of the road.”

She laughed and gave me what seemed to be a lingering, and even inviting, smile. It seemed like I was seeing that a lot lately. Either I was getting better-looking in my old age, or just plain lecherous. After lunch I would take a walk in the woods and pray to St. Francis to give me strength.

Which I did. Take a walk, I mean. Grabbing my binoculars, I cut through the poplars and brambles for a couple of hundred yards toward the Varneys' until I hit the old logging road that went up the hill to the beech ridge. The road dated back to when they had last cut these woods, which probably was thirty years before. In ten more years, it would disappear completely. I found this very encouraging—that nature had this unrelenting side to it, a tortoise in a race with the hare of paving and cutting. Leave a hayfield uncut for five years and it's well on its way to wildness. Thirty years and it's woods once again.

That's what had happened with these woods, many years ago. Clair Varney said his grandfather had told him how you could come up to this ridge back then and look out in every direction and see nothing but pasture and fields. It had been heartbreaking labor to clear that forest, cutting the trees and pulling the stumps, one by one, year after year, with horses and oxen. The rocks, which grew like a crop unto themselves, were piled in long walls that now snaked through the trees like the vestiges of some long-lost Mayan city.

And in many ways, it was lost, their civilization. The woods had reclaimed the land. The families had left the hardscrabble farms for jobs in mills and factories to the south. It all seemed so futile, but then again, those farmers hadn't cleared that land to build a civilization. They had cut those woods to feed their children. It had been a matter of survival, nothing more, and where disease hadn't sliced through families like a broadsword, the mission, through the mercy of their stern taskmaster of a God, had been accomplished.

But even now, as the trees grew taller in the farmers' fields, the exodus continued. Missy Hewett would not come home. There was nothing in these hills for her. No job. No husband. Not even a baby.

As I walked down the damp trail, I stopped every once in a while to train the binoculars on the flitting shape of a bird. I was in the deeper woods now, out of the tangle of second growth, and the birds were mostly chickadees and nuthatches, bobbing through the trees like bands of tiny Gypsies. I spotted a couple of warblers but they were high in the beech trees, camouflaged in the yellow-green leaves, and I couldn't come close to an identification. I watched them until my arms grew tired and then I walked on.

The path led to the top of the ridge, maybe a mile above the road. My routine had been to follow it until it crested the ridge and then to look for the hulk of an old car on my left. The car was little more than a rusted shell of metal, sprinkled with bullet holes, courtesy of several generations of hunters. It looked like it dated to the 1930s, when it probably was driven or dragged into the back of a field and left like a sunken ship on some ocean floor.

I spotted the car and turned off the path and into the woods. There was no real trail here, but I had walked this way so many times that each tree and deadfall was a landmark. After ten minutes, I turned back to my right, up the ridge and then down, following the contour of the land toward home. I stepped over limbs and around trees, my boots silent on the wet leaves and mosses. At one deadfall, I stepped on a branch and it cracked loudly. I winced and then, some distance behind me, heard another crack and a rustle. A deer? I turned slowly and watched, but there was no movement in the trees. I waited, breath held back.

Nothing. If it had been a deer, I'd missed it.

It surprised me that deer would be up this high at midday. There were deer yards in the cedars down below, groves of Druid trees where the ground was covered with deer droppings, and there were feathers
of deer fur on the branches. I had made it a habit of stopping there until Clair had told me that doing so would chase the deer away. Ever since, I had skirted it by several hundred yards, leaving the deer to their refuge.

I was heading downhill now, bushwhacking in the direction of the road and the house. The mist had turned to light rain and the woods were silent except for the dripping in the trees. And then there was another crack, behind and above. I turned, expecting to see a buck bounding through the trees, but saw nothing.

For the rest of the walk, the woods were dark and deep but not quite so lovely. I fought back the urge to break into a trot and walked, pretending, as do so many people, to have everything under control.

10

I
drove back up to the store in Knox that afternoon, waited a half-hour for Dulcy and the girls to show up in their big truck, and then took them up on their invitation to follow them to see “the pit” where they hung out.

The pit was three miles out Route 137. The entrance was a dirt path cut through the wall of birch and spruce that ran along both sides of the road. We slowed and pulled in and I followed the girls' truck, branches raking my windows on both sides. After about fifty yards, we emerged from the woods into a sandy clearing, rimmed by raw, eroded bluffs which were ringed by a fringe of blood-red sumac.

The place had been a gravel pit, and later, some kind of dump where people had left refrigerators, a couple of stoves, and old cars and trucks that now were flipped over, their rusting undercarriages exposed like the bellies of dead beetles. When we passed close to one truck, an old red Chevy, I could see that its sides were perforated with bullet holes and the bigger, peach-size tears made by shotgun slugs. The place had the desolate feel of a wasteland, which probably was why, in a part of Maine where there were mountain trails, hillside pastures, and majestic ocean views just down the road, the kids had picked it as their refuge.

Bring teenagers to the Louvre and they instinctively will gather in the restroom.

Here, they'd gathered at the far end of the pit, in a small dogleg section that could not be seen from the point where the road first came out of the woods. The girls swung their truck in beside two others, both older models, both lifted high on big tires. One was painted with black primer but had a blue tailgate and blue doors. One was white with gray primer spots and a Confederate flag across the back window.

“Ah,” I said to myself, as I pulled up and shut off the motor. “A Civil War buff.”

Three guys stood between the trucks and all three stared at me, ignoring the girls, who slid down from the cab of their truck one by one. I got out of the truck and walked toward them slowly, but with what I hoped was an easy confidence, the kind you try to exude as you're approaching a mean dog. What was the old saying? He's okay as long as he doesn't know you're afraid.