Firebird (The Flint Hills Novels) (32 page)

"I'll make sure to get it to her."

"I'd appreciate that."

He didn't linger, simply went back out and down the walk, fixed his hat on his head and climbed in his truck.

From the doorway Tom Mackey watched as the truck pulled away.

"What is it?" Betty Sue asked as she came in drying her hands on a dish towel.

"Something Ethan brought by. It's for Katie Anne."

He gave the package to his wife and looked out at the dust trail left by Ethan's truck.

"God bless his soul," Tom sighed, and he shut the door.

Chapter 32

From the window of the American Airlines jet Ethan could see Kansas City sprawled below him, but then the city passed from view and below him stretched a bank of green treetops with the contours of clouds. His own land was barren now, the color of rust, deep coppery red against the bluest of skies, the color it took on every autumn.
Just a little darker than desert sands,
he thought. He'd never been to the desert, but the photos he'd seen had the same flow of land, curves of copper that fell away into darkness where the hills dipped away from the sun; a landscape of black and gold rippling below, dreamlike in its endless repetition and modulation; so immense it slowed your body, your thoughts. It was pointless to rush somewhere else. There was nowhere else.

Ethan didn't travel much, and every time he did he was struck by how different people looked. Differences made him uncomfortable. He loved the sweeping harmony of his land and the way you had to be a deep observer with a deep map, and then the prairie yielded its secrets. He'd dislodged spearheads chiseled in the days when the Romans were invading Britain and Christ hadn't yet been born, and he'd cradled in his hands the fossils of tiny sea creatures that had swum in the prairie when it was the Permian Sea, although there were no humans to name it then. But the diversity of humanity jolted him, and he saw the journey ahead of him as an ordeal. When he changed planes in Chicago, he found an airport bar and drank two Buds before his flight was called.

He didn't think he could manage his legs tucked into a tiny space for six hours, so he'd paid a stiff price for business class on British Air to London. The advantage was that the drinks flowed freely and he had his own flat bed. Ethan generally preferred his beer to hard liquor, but the gin looked nice in the hand of the woman seated across the aisle, red nails and diamond ring glimmering underneath the tiny spot of light, and so he ordered one of his own.

They took off in darkness, rumbling with great speed until they lifted into the air and the roar gradually dimmed to a heavy hum. The darkness hugged him, and his own gin-and-tonic swam around tinkling ice that fell soft on his ears. The anxiety he had felt in the airport slowly receded and the alcohol numbed his mind.

He was served dinner on a linen-covered tray and the flight attendant smiled warmly as she refilled his wineglass. He stretched out on his bed and fell asleep partway into an English film about a mad English king and awoke when the stewardess was setting up his breakfast tray and daylight was creeping in around the drawn shades of the portholes.

As he waited for his suitcase at the baggage claim with a crowd of smartly dressed businessmen in suits and Italian dress shoes, his brand new chocolate brown alligator boots all of a sudden seemed very out of place. A wave of self-consciousness washed over him. He took his suitcase and followed the stream of passengers heading toward customs, all the while searching the crowd to see if there were other people who dressed like him.

He shouldn't have eaten breakfast; it was the middle of the night to him and now he felt sick to his stomach. He felt better in the taxi. He could sit in obscurity and watch London pass by through the window. Hide his pointed-toe boots under the seat in front of him.

The train station was more than he'd bargained for. He tried to get his ticket from a machine but finally gave up and waited forever in a line at customer service. It seemed there were works on the train lines, and the man at the ticket counter said Ethan would have to change several times. Ethan could make out about half of what the man said, but he only had twelve minutes to make the train, and he hurried away with a smile and his ticket, and not a clue as to where he was going.

When he finally boarded his train, he was sweating. Beads of perspiration hung on his brow and lip and his armpits swam underneath his oilskin coat. He found his compartment, and struggled out of his coat, then settled into his seat and tried to catch his breath. Almost immediately the train pulled away from the station, and he sat stiffly with his briefcase on his wrinkled khakis, hugging the smooth worn leather that carried, among other precious things, his Lonely Planet guidebook of England. He had planned to read the section on the Lake Region during the journey. Now he was too self-conscious to pull it out.

He was so anxious about missing his connections that he drowned himself in coffee to stay awake, and when he finally made it onto the last leg, he ate a tuna sandwich and drank a beer at his seat, and then fell fast asleep to the sway and rumble of the train.

Ethan awoke with a start and looked out the window. He was stunned to see his hills. Rockier perhaps, and rising higher to mountains in the distance, and too green for this time of year, but his hills nonetheless. People were standing in the aisles, taking down their luggage from overhead racks. When he asked where they were, a lady replied, "Windermere. End of the line."

He stepped off the train and followed the flow of passengers along the platform toward the exit. Many of them backpackers and hikers in walking shorts with walking sticks and cameras. Sturdy robust creatures and nothing remotely poetic or romantic about them. He'd come for Wordsworth, Coleridge and Southey, not cell phones and cameras. He stood on the street with his suitcase in his hand, thinking how naïve he'd been to expect anything different. He wondered if the whole trip would be like that. Failed expectations.

He'd called the inn earlier in the day, and they said they'd send someone to fetch him. Now he caught sight of a red-haired young man standing in front of a Range Rover, holding a sign with his name on it. The young man shook his hand, and he took Ethan's suitcase and slung it into the back of the Rover.

Once out of Windermere, the road, bordered by a low stone wall on each side, curved steeply up into the mountains. Ethan found a map in the side pocket, and he opened it and followed their route. The land here had its own vernacular, and the names struck Ethan's ear like little mysteries. Pike How and Middle Dodd, Rydal Fell, Caudale Moor, Caiston Beck, and Hagg Gill.

It was getting close to evening and the sky was a bank of pale gray. Gray mist lingered on the land, and the fellsides, clothed in a mosaic of pasture and woodlands, breathed a green breath that swam in his nostrils. It smelled as it looked, a heavy blue-green, thick with moisture and black soil. Sheep grazed the land.

* * *

Ethan had tried to get accommodations in Grasmere, Wordsworth's home, but there was nothing available on such short notice, and so he booked a room at an old coaching inn named the Drunken Duck. The young man said it had been built in the seventeenth century for travelers going through the long and steep Kirkstone Pass on their way to the northern boundaries of England and on to Scotland. One Christmas morning, the landlady had opened her door and found three ducks lying dead on her doorstep. She thought it provident and awoke her young daughters to help her pluck the ducks for a grand Christmas dinner. The creatures were almost plucked bare when one of the ducks lifted its head and, in a swift retaliatory blow, bit the younger daughter on the wrist. Terrified, the little girl flung the duck into the air and it came down, featherless and infuriated, into the arms of her mother. It seems the ducks had wandered into a pool of beer leaked from a broken barrel and they had paddled and drunk their way to near death. Once she got over her disappointment at not having roast duck for Christmas, the landlady, distressed at the sight of the naked ducks, set about knitting sweaters for them until their plumage grew back. The ducks enjoyed immunity after the incident and died of old age.

"And to this day," the boy said as he wrapped up the story, "you'll never find duck on the menu."

He was a local boy, and Ethan could tell he loved telling the tale, and so Ethan told him a few of his own, and by the time they arrived he was beginning to think the Drunken Duck would be a fine place to stay after all.

The inn stood high on a hill, surrounded for as far as the eye could see by nothing but gently rolling fells ridged by meandering low stone walls. It was miles away from everything, but from the moment he set foot inside, he was comforted by a sense of home. A fortress home—an outpost where humans took refuge against windblown rain and fierce snows and bitter cold. At the entrance stood a boot rack full of muddied walking and hiking boots just recently removed, and above it hung an assortment of hats—old straw fishing hats, felt hats, tweed caps. There was a stand for umbrellas and another for walking sticks. To the right was the pub, and through its open door Ethan heard the hum of laughter and talk; he glimpsed a roaring fire in a massive stone fireplace, and a high wood-beamed ceiling darkened by smoke. Rows of bottles of liquors rose behind the bar, shimmering colors against the backdrop of a huge mirror. It was a Saturday night; light was fading from the sky and the pub was full.

For most of the evening Ethan was able to forget his worries, caught up as he was in the hum and chatter of the Drunken Duck. He drank a very good lager the bartender recommended, and he ate his beef and potatoes in the dining room and had his first taste of English trifle. He hadn't eaten much all day and the food and drink calmed him.

His room had all the quaint oddities of an old coaching inn, a low-beamed ceiling and stained-glass windows, and a bed that stood hip high. The place had been bought in the twenties by a retired colonel who had spent his entire career in India, and now each room had a selection from the colonel's extensive library. Ethan opened a biography about a late Victorian explorer by the name of Burton, and he read until almost three in the morning. Before closing the shutters, he threw open the window and leaned out to catch a bit of the air. The sky had cleared slightly, and a new moon cast faint light across the dark hills.

At that moment there swept through him an incredible nostalgia for this land, a longing for an England he'd never known. Perhaps one that had existed only in his imagination. But he was connected to it nonetheless. He knew then that when he returned home, were he never to travel again, he would never be the same.

He lay in the high, strange bed with his eyes wide open, staring at the dark ceiling, and listening to the absolute silence of the night.

Chapter 33

Ethan was driven back into Windermere the next day, and he waited all afternoon, greeting every train that arrived from London, but Katie Anne wasn't on any of them. Between trains he sat at the White Hart across from the station, a pub with an astounding collection of stuffed animals, and read his guidebook, and some brochures about Dove Cottage.

On the second day he became restless, and between trains he explored the streets of Windermere. It was Monday and the weekenders had gone, and the village was quieter and more manageable. He bought himself a handsomely bound edition of Wordsworth's poetry along with a complete collection of Coleridge's works, and he settled himself back at the White Hart, where he drank his lager and waited for Katie Anne beneath the frozen stares of foxes, boar and roe deer. His heart sank when the last train pulled in and she didn't get off. He decided he'd walk back, to shake off the despondency, so he struck out along a walking trail that led back to the Drunken Duck, but his new boots were hurting his feet, and he ended by hitching a ride up the road with a delivery truck headed for the inn.