Those Across the River (7 page)

They had both been gouged.

I mused that in colonial days the great pine forests of the South had been treasuries for resin, pitch, tar and turpentine, but that the British navy held American pitch in some contempt, for it was too hot and burned the ropes. I knew that sap was gathered by making slaves notch the trees on both sides and take from them until the trees died and could be burned to make tar.

These two pines did not bear the marks of agriculture; they had been savaged. Just at the level of a grown man’s trouser pockets. No saw or axe had done this, but I was hard-pressed to say what had. I did not know if the gouges were intended to discourage further exploration, but looking at them gave me a curious feeling in my groin.

I kept going.

Soon after that I lost the trail and stumbled into a patch of nettles. They barbed the hell out of me, even through my pants, before I managed to peel myself free and continue on. I would have to stay more focused; I couldn’t afford to lose time if I intended to find the battlefield, which Lester said his daddy told him was a half mile north of the trail two or three miles past Magi Rock, “in some young birch and dogwoods where they mix up with pine.”

I felt embarrassed about losing the trail. Martin Cranmer was right about my woodsmanship; I was a Chicago boy through and through, awkward and top-heavy in the woods. What’s more, it was no mean feat for me to even enter a forest after the Argonne. I had worked on that in Michigan, taking long walks alone in the woods near Ann Arbor, even if I had to get boozed up to do it; it wouldn’t have done for a grown man to spend the rest of his life getting the tremors every time he was surrounded by trees, afraid the next snapped twig would be followed by the bark of a machinegun nest opening up. By and by it had gotten better.

I thought about Cranmer crouching in the trees near the burntdown house. Or was that a conceit on my part, imagining Martin
had
to crouch to avoid my notice? But then, Lester hadn’t seen him, either. Dora had not seemed to like Cranmer very much. Had she gotten an extra earful of gossip about him when she was in town?

While I was musing on the war, Martin and Dora, I worked at removing a sticker that had gone deep into the heel of my hand. All I did was drive it deeper; I would have to dig for it later with whiskey and a pocketknife.

When I looked up, I saw that I had lost the trail again.

This time was worse because I had no idea how long it had been since I went astray. I turned around 180 degrees and marched with my eyes fixed on the forest floor, hoping I would recognize the trail again when I crossed it. A distressing amount of time passed before I noticed a recession and turned right, praying it would start to look path-like. It did.

I stopped and crouched down on my heels for a moment to rest. I took a long, cool swig from my canteen, delighting in the taste of the iron. I thought back to my days in Glastonbury, England. Somerset County, where clotted cream on a scone was the culinary equivalent of a naked girl in a field of wildflowers.

I had worked several weeks for the gardener at the Chalice Well. Less for the money than for an excuse to linger around that odd little town. The spigot in the well had been made in the shape of a lion’s head, and the water had been clean and cold and rusty, just like the water out of Magi Rock. There was a cat that used to nose my hand as I weeded or pruned, the cat the girl I was sleeping with called Bully because it bore the marks of so much fighting. My own wounds had still been fresh then, particularly those inside, but the waters of the well had helped to make me whole. I believe that. And I wasn’t the only one who thought there was something to the stories about that place. I met other veterans there, too; the Chalice Well called the walking wounded to it. I had been twenty then, and I had liked to imagine the waters of the spring below running over the bones of Arthur and Guinevere, bringing their strength to those who needed it. Twenty years old and through with God—whose ears I believed had numbed with too much prayer, or deafened from the noise of shelling—I had asked that place to heal me, and it had.

Mostly.

This forest was a
place
, too, the way Glastonbury had been a
place
.

There was something powerful here, something beyond the reach of lightbulbs and combustion engines.

It was soon after I got going again that I began to feel watched.

I stopped.

It was around five o’clock. The day’s heat had reached its zenith and was easing off at last. The shadows had just begun to stretch. The feeling that I was being supervised was so intense it made the back of my neck feel warm.

I stopped and opened my mouth, which I often did to help my blighted hearing. I adjusted my glasses. I even tried to engage my nose. Nothing moved. I heard only the cruder noises; birdsong and the screeching of a squirrel warning its neighbors, whether about me or something else, I did not know. I smelled the stone-littered, black soil of the forest, how fecund it was. Trees in all their variety pushed sap, and summer flowers peddled their fragrances to the summer air; the drought that was parching half the state had not come to Whitbrow, as if the tops of these trees gouged the rain clouds and bled them out before they could save the farms over the county line.

I started walking again, minding the diminished undergrowth that comprised the trail, but keeping part of my awareness on the forest around me.

“Goddamnit, someone’s out there,” I mouthed. No one of my senses reported the presence; I simply knew I was not alone.

No. Pigs were not subtle. Pigs did not stalk.

I would have to turn around soon if I wanted to be home by dark, but I was not ready to turn around yet. Some part of me craved confrontation with whatever was out there.

Not far off to my right, crows called and took to their wings.

“Salutations!” I called out.

Was it Cranmer? I didn’t know the man well enough, after all, to know what sort of monkeyshines he was capable of.

“Martin?”

A tardy crow took off from the brush to join its fellows.

“It is I, Nanook of the North, and I come in peace,” I said.

That was when I saw him.

The boy stepped into view. A thin, pale mulatto just entering puberty. I knew this because the boy wasn’t wearing pants. Just a dirty shirt that stopped at his navel.

“Hey there!” I said. “Are you alright?”

The boy said nothing. Just stood there with one hand on a tree, looking intently at me.

“Where are your pants, my friend?”

Silence.

“Fine, that’s fine,” I said, turning my gaze from the boy and continuing down the path. The boy kept his distance but kept pace with me. It was clear that he had not come forward because he had been discovered; it was simply time for me to see him.

The two of us walked for a moment silently, the other keeping about twenty yards off the trail.

I spoke.

“We can play this way if you like. You be the naked lad of the woods, and I will be the dressed man of the trail. Is it that you own no pants, or do you reject the idea of pants altogether? I can’t say I blame you. It is a hot day. Perhaps, if I had any sense, I would remove my pants and cool off a little. The thing is, I know I would feel embarrassed. But look at you; you don’t seem to feel embarrassed at all. I envy you that. Waving your pecker about in the breeze like a primal man, that’s first-class.”

No effect.

I stopped walking now, and so did the boy. I took a big, burlesque step to see if the one in the trees would mimic me, but the other stood still. Another clownish step, and a third, daring the apparition, but it did not move, not until I got fed up and started walking down the path again.

The boy caught up to me easily and regained his measure.

I remembered a French
poilu
who called one light-skinned mulatto gravedigger
café au lait
during those bleak days of the Meuse offensive, how I had laughed with the other soldier just to have someone to laugh with. Besides,
café au lait
would be shoveling dirt over our blanched faces soon enough.
Café au lait.
It occurred to me to shout that at the boy who was stalking me now, and I felt disgusted with myself. How easily the paint of civilization peels off with a little bad weather.

“What do you want?” I said, walking. It was getting late. My guilt at the thought of using a racial slur gave way again to exasperation.

“Just say something!”

I tried to fight back my anger. What if the young man was a deaf-mute, or retarded? No. He had heard every word I said, and there was nothing dull about that gaze.

I was never going to make it back if I didn’t turn around soon. I did not want to be out here in the dark, especially not with that boy. I didn’t want the boy near me anymore.

“Get out of here!” I shouted. “What the hell are you looking at, anyway?”

I stopped, and the other did, too. Yes, here it came. I was losing my temper.

“Say, you don’t mind if I take your picture for the wife? She won’t believe me when I tell her I saw a real, live deranged person in the woods today.”

I lifted the box of the camera to my face. Through the lens, I saw the boy stoop. I snapped the shutter just as the boy threw the stone.

“Jesus!” I said, and nearly dropped the Brownie. The stone had grazed my hand, not far from the knuckle of my ring finger. It would leave a welt.

“You son of a bitch!”

Another rock whizzed down, this one smaller, and I deflected it with the camera. Something cracked.

“I’m just about to slap you shitless!”

My free hand made a fist and I stepped towards the other, who backed up gracefully, not fleeing so much as keeping a precise distance between us. The boy put his arms out, hands open. His face, only too lucid, bore a hint of a smile, and the meaning was clear:
Yes, by all means chase me off the path, and when night comes I will show you other games besides the following and the rock-throwing.

I stopped. The other took up a hurtful-looking flat stone. I backed up to the trail and the other kept distance with me. He threw. I sidestepped it, put the camera down and selected a rock of my own. I did not have the aim the boy had, however, and my missile whacked heavily into a tree that was closer to me than to him. The boy’s fresh throw tumbled, another flat stone, and mercifully smacked my thigh broadside rather than digging in edge-first. It stung, though, and I yelped.

When I looked up, I noticed that the boy had the beginnings of an erection. I stared. Just when I decided that the stone-thrower was a lunatic, the boy did something that disturbed me more than anything thus far.

Though he had no trousers, he mimicked the gesture of a man reaching for something in his pocket. A watch. He opened the pretend pocket watch, looked at it and then looked up at the sky.

The boy smiled fully then.

His teeth had been filed sharp.

N
O MORE STONES followed me out of the forest. I backed away from the stone-thrower, who did not pursue me. I did not have time to decide what I had seen; I could think about that later. I simply backed away from it and it stood there, and, when I had put some distance between us, I turned around and moved down the trail at something less than a run but more than a walk.

I calmed down when I got to the river, although the sun had westered so that it was nearly twilight. I would just make it home if I kept my pace up and did not wander.

But I did not go straight home.

The frogs and crickets were singing in the darkening woods when I got to Cranmer’s cabin. It was only ten minutes from the trail, past a series of little cairns he had left for moonshine buyers to follow. I wanted very badly to talk to someone about the stone-thrower. This was not a confidence I would share with Eudora, and I would never be able to close my eyes if I had to take this quietly to bed with me.

I walked past the odds and ends of Cranmer’s yard; an axe buried in a tree stump, a loose circle of stones describing a fire pit, an old boiler pitted with rust, a dry-rotten saddle and the still Martin had mentioned. It was a great mystery to me how anyone could make liquor out of such an improvised mess; a copper tub, a series of barrels, copper tubing everywhere. Mason jars lay around in disarray. Flies swarmed over a heap of innards and discarded skins set off from the main house.

The windows of Martin’s cabin had makeshift bars across them, bars of scavenged iron through which nothing was getting in or out. As I approached the door I saw a peephole open in it, and then heard the sound of heavy bolts being drawn.

The door opened, and Martin Cranmer came outside, half shutting it behind him. His flannel work shirt was sopped with sweat, and the whole of Cranmer smelled like an old glove.

“What are you doing here?” he said, and when his mouth opened I smelled stale tobacco on top of everything else.

“Taking you up on your invitation.”

“Invitation doesn’t apply tonight. Go the hell home.”

I said nothing.

“Don’t just flap your gills at me, there’s no time. Go home and stay there. And I mean run, don’t walk. Shit.”

“What goes on around here, Martin?”

Cranmer disappeared into his cabin and came out with his rickety bicycle. He took the camera from me, put the handlebars in my hands and said, “Bring it back tomorrow or the next day. Now, if I have to order you off my property one more time I’m going to stuff you and send you back to your wife with a glass asshole.”

The door shut hard.