Driftless (40 page)

“You do?”

“Since my wife died I’ve lived like a ghost.”

“A ghost?”

“It feels like I’m never really here, or anywhere. Some part of me shows up to stumble through, but something else is always missing, and the missing part is worth more than the other.”

Winnie stared at him, drank the rest of her tea, and put down the cup. Her mind raced from one incomplete thought to the next, looking for one that would both hold her feelings and explain them. She’d lived like a ghost all her life, and was living like one now. She’d come to accept that ghost-living defined the normal, shared human experience. But when Jacob spoke of it, it didn’t seem fair, or right. It seemed unnecessary that he should live that way. And if it was unnecessary for him, it was also unnecessary for her, and the compelling immensity of these twin unnecessities caused her to turn directly toward him and meet his eyes fully. When she spoke, her voice came out of her in such a gentle and unsure manner that she hardly recognized it. “Jacob, I experienced Oneness, once,” she said.

“What does that mean?”

“There was one time when I didn’t feel like a ghost. I experienced the unity of all things, last fall. I felt it and saw it. I want to tell you.”

“I don’t understand.”

“I know you don’t and I wish you could,” she said, her words coming faster and faster. A glow kindled inside her face. “It would give you the same comfort it gives me. There is a bigger world that holds this one inside it.”

“How?”

“The way an oak tree holds an acorn. This world and all we know of it is that acorn, and from inside it we marvel at how such a wonderful acorn universe came to be here, strewn with galaxies and abounding in complexity. For the most part we remain unaware of the branch from which we are hung, the leaves that process the light, the wonderful trunk that connects us to the ground, the roots that burrow after water and nutrients; instead, we calculate the odds of our acorn springing to life on its own, unconnected to a tree. The uniqueness of our acorn world astounds us—when in fact there are ten thousand acorns on our tree, ten thousand trees in our forest, and ten thousand forests. And all the forests and all the trees and all the acorns are only one single thing, grown up from a single acorn. We are not separate, and I want you to know that. We are all part of one thing, and nothing good has ever passed or can ever pass away. There is no way out, but there is a way in, and when one person feels lonely like a ghost it touches us all.”

Jacob smiled. “I can’t tell you how much I enjoy talking to you. It seems I never talk with anyone, not about anything real. No one I know has anything to say. Let me get you more tea. You have no idea how much this means to me.”

Winnie returned his smile, but before she could say anything more, she completed a thought that condemned her in her own mind.

At first it seemed to be someone else’s thought, but she soon recognized it as her own and a quick terror found her. She wondered if Jacob had motile spermatozoa.

“I must go,” she said, standing up.

“You haven’t finished your tea,” said Jacob. He stood up and extended one of his thick hands toward her.

Winnie backed up. “I’m sorry. Please, just give me a minute,” and
she walked into the kitchen area, struggling to gain control over her emotions.
Stop it. Stop trying to make me run away. You always do this to me. Stop it.

She stood by the kitchen table and slowly began to feel better. She allowed the fingers of her right hand to touch the back of the chair she had earlier been sitting on when she was eating the squash soup, and she concentrated on the sensation. Her anxiety abated as the texture of the wood against her fingertips came into focus. Her breathing came easier.

Then she noticed a corner of notepaper sticking out from under the computer’s keyboard, and the handwritten word S-M-I-T-H. The fingers on her right hand continued toward the paper and nudged it out from its hiding place enough to reveal a second word, C- A-R-L.

A cinch fastened around her heart, and tightened. There were ten thousand explanations for how these words could have come to be here, but they were powerless against the raw horror evoked by the sight of them. Questions formed in her mind, but when she tried to consider them they dissolved.

She looked at Jacob and he immediately rose to his bare feet.

“Winifred, what’s wrong?”

“I must leave,” she said, walking quickly to the closet, taking her coat from a hanger, and noticing a huge military weapon standing in the corner.

She pulled on the door but it did not budge. Her heart beat in her throat.
He locked it.
She pulled again, and again the door refused to open.

“You have to push down, Winifred,” said Jacob. “The frame is warped. There.”

As soon as it opened she bolted through it, threading her arms through the sleeves of her coat on the way to her car. Her shoes splashed through pools of melted snow.

HUNTING

R
USTY CLIMBED OUT OF BED BEFORE FIRST LIGHT AND DRESSED in the same clothes he had worn the night before. He went downstairs, filled a thermos with coffee, and packed two sandwiches inside a paper sack. In the basement he loaded his rifle, pulled his winter coat around him, and walked out beyond the barn.

Starlight streaked raggedly through the sky, a threadbare satin sheet hastily flung over the dark heavens.

He chose a spot overgrown with brambles and brush, with a view of the back of his barn and the slowly descending wooded valley. A stump left over from a black locust harvested for fence posts and firewood served as a stool. From this partially hidden position he could watch the cougar return to or depart from his barn, and shoot it.

As he waited, he drank from the thermos of coffee and thought about his brother.

One memory after another visited him, and Rusty subtracted from them everything that did not bear directly upon his brother, until his recollections of walking to school with Carl, falling asleep in their shared bedroom, and running together through the sandy fields surrounding the quarry yielded only the essential, unmitigated, taken-for-granted feeling of Carl’s presence—the steady, minute- by-minute awareness of him.

A cardinal called in the distance and several small brown and white birds flew up the valley, stopped, and moved on. Minutes later he heard another scolding cardinal voice, this time closer, followed by fleeting sounds, the breaking of small branches, crushing dry leaves.

The sounds grew louder and Rusty searched from one side of the narrow valley to the other, trying to locate the source. The muscles in his neck tightened as he realized the cougar was not on the ground at all, but leaping from tree to tree, coming forward in the haphazard
and galloping manner of a squirrel. Hidden in the branches, the animal would be hard to see. Rusty slid the top cartridge from the magazine into the firing chamber and nudged the safety into the Off position.

The sounds seemed to be coming mostly from his left, and he half raised the rifle to his shoulder when he saw what looked like a shadow moving through the trees about a hundred yards away. The shadow floated from one limb to the next, gathering more shape and solidity, moving with an unconscious, rapid ease that implied deep familiarity with the valley.

About thirty yards away the large cat jumped to the ground and froze, then looked quickly from side to side. Something like a haunch of venison hung from both sides of its mouth. Its long tail waved slowly from right to left, and it looked at Rusty as though anticipating his presence.

Rusty pulled the rifle snugly into his shoulder and took aim through the iron sights. The color of the animal impressed him. It seemed like nothing he had ever seen before—this kind of bright black. It drew all other colors to it, like water into a drain. The animal possessed a darkness even beyond black, with two glowing eyes as yellow as stars.

The cat bounded forward, covering twenty or twenty-five yards in four leaps. It sprang into the maple growing next to the barn and scrambled up the thick trunk in less time than it would take for a man to run through a room. From one of the limbs, it launched itself onto the barn roof, tearing loose several shingles. It leaned over the edge, leaped again, scrabbled against the weathered barn boards, and disappeared into the small high square window, which swallowed it like a shadow swallowing a shadow.

Rusty lowered the rifle and reset the safety. He didn’t know why he hadn’t taken a shot. He simply didn’t. And to keep from thinking about it any longer, he committed himself to shooting it at the next opportunity. Sooner or later the animal would climb from the barn window, and he would be waiting.

The valley was now saturated with new light, and he took a drink of coffee and bit into one of his roast beef, lettuce, and mayonnaise
sandwiches. It had been some time since he’d eaten outdoors and he revisited the experience of food tasting different in the open air. Its flavor changed. Neither better nor worse. Different. Good different. Brightened somehow. He and Carl had often eaten outdoors. His brother, more than himself, had loved natural things, bitterly disliked school and being indoors.

Then Rusty heard more sounds coming up the valley and soon recognized them as boots moving through snow, leaves, and brush. Birds scattered ahead of it, and a human shape finally came into view, walking slowly between the trees, pausing frequently, looking up. A man wearing a light brown leather jacket and khaki pants.

As he came closer, Rusty became convinced that he did not know him: an older man, about Rusty’s age, height, and weight. In many ways he resembled Rusty, or rather resembled the way Rusty might have appeared to others if instead of working like a hungry dog all his life he had been born into a family with money and connections, with self-confidence, and had become a professional hunter, acquired the most expensive sporting clothes and a custom-built rifle with a thumb-hole stock, engraved barrel, German laser night-seeing sights, and loaded with 150-grain partition bullets.

As a way of announcing himself, Rusty stood up.

“Morning to you,” said the stranger, walking slowly toward him. He spoke quietly, with an almost aristocratic air, and his lips and thick gray mustache did not appear to move when he spoke.

Rusty nodded.

“You must have seen him,” he said, inspecting the sides of the barn.

“Who?”

“That cat. Trailed him three times last week. Curious. Each time he comes here.”

Rusty thought about his brother. He remembered Carl sitting up one cold night in the middle of winter, feeding the stove. After he’d put a new log inside the firebox, he’d return to breaking open hickory nuts with a hammer, picking out the nut meat inside and storing it in a Mason jar.

“This animal some business of yours?” asked Rusty.

“Some of the folks around here put up a reward.”

Rusty thought for a short while about people offering to pay someone to kill an animal that was currently living in his barn and pulled at the bill of his old cap.

“Did you see it?” the stranger asked again, still looking up at the high window in the barn.

“See what?”

“The cat.”

“Who are you?”

“Name’s Arthur Lode. I understand they call you Rusty.”

“Some do.”

As though to offer contrary evidence, in the distance the door on the back of Rusty’s house banged shut and Maxine called, “Russell, Russell.”

“You see it or not?”

“What I saw was someone named Lode walking onto my property. What I expect to see now is him walking off it.”

Rusty stood a little to the side, a movement that repositioned the barrel of his rifle so it pointed to the ground directly between them.

The man smiled easily. “Sure thing, old man,” he said, turning around. “Only a matter of time.”

He walked back in the direction he had come from.

Rusty watched until he disappeared, stood for several minutes longer, and returned to the house.

July Montgomery’s old white pickup was parked in the driveway, and inside the house he sat beside Maxine at the kitchen table. They were drinking coffee. July hadn’t taken his jacket off, and Maxine wore a cotton print dress with a sweater. The furnace was running.

Rusty joined them. Maxine handed him a clean cup and he poured the last of the coffee from the thermos into it.

“You’re not going to shoot that animal, are you, Russell?”

Rusty glared at July and he smiled sheepishly and said, “Sorry. I just assumed you’d told her.”

“Don’t know yet what I’m going to do,” said Rusty. “I don’t know
why he’s up there. It don’t make any sense. Nothing for you to worry about, though.”

“Maybe it will just leave on its own,” said Maxine. “Doesn’t seem to be hurting anything.”

“That animal’s a killer,” said Rusty. “It’s eaten several steers already.”

“We have too, Russell. Does that make us killers?”

“Those steers belonged to someone!”

“Don’t raise your voice.”

“How does it get into the barn?” asked July, unzipping his jacket.

“Climbs through the upper window in back.”

“Tell you what, Rusty. I got to thinking about this last night. We’ll wait until it leaves and I’ll climb into the mow and close the window—nail it shut.”

Rusty drank the rest of his coffee, set the cup down, and said, “He probably won’t come out until near dark. I know he saw me and there was someone else tracking him from down the valley. Probably spooked him some.”

At dusk, Rusty and July waited for the cougar to come out. Hidden behind a long row of stacked firewood, they talked in whispers.

“Did Jacob find that information you wanted about your brother?”

“Yup.”

“Not good news, I take it.”

“Nope. How about yourself? Do you have a family?”