Too Much Happiness (30 page)

He has felt himself go down almost in slow motion, thoughtfully and inevitably. He could have broken a rib, but he didn’t. And the ax handle could have flown up and hit him in the face, but it didn’t. He could have gashed his leg. He thinks of all these possibilities not with immediate relief, but as if he can’t be sure yet that they have not happened. Because the way this started—the way he skidded and stepped onto the brush
and fell—was so stupid and awkward, so hard to believe, that any preposterous outcome could follow.

He starts to pull himself up. Both knees hurt—one from being hit by the handle and one from coming down hard on the ground. He gets hold of the trunk of a young cherry tree—where he could have bashed his head—and pulls himself up gradually. Tentatively he puts weight on one foot and just touches the ground with the other—the one that skidded and twisted underneath him. In a minute he’ll try it. He bends to pick up the saw and nearly buckles again. A pain shoots up from the ground and doesn’t stop till it reaches his skull. He forgets the saw, straightens up, not sure where the pain started. That foot—did he put weight on it as he bent over? The pain has drawn back into that ankle. He straightens the leg as much as he can, considering it, then very cautiously tries the foot on the ground, tries his weight. He can’t believe the pain. He can’t believe that it would continue so, could continue to defeat him. The ankle must be more than twisted—it must be sprained. Could it be broken? In his boot it doesn’t look any different from his other, faithful, ankle.

He knows that he will have to bear it. He will have to get used to it to get out of here. And he keeps trying, but he does not make any progress. He can’t set his weight on it. It must be broken. A broken ankle—even that is surely a minor injury, the sort of thing old ladies get when they slip on the ice. He has been lucky. A broken ankle, a minor injury. Nevertheless he can’t take a step. He can’t walk.

What he understands, finally, is that in order to get back to the truck he’s going to have to abandon his ax and his chain saw and get down on his hands and knees and crawl. He lets himself down as easily as he can and hauls himself around into the track of his bootprints, which are now filling with snow. He thinks to check the pocket where his keys are, making sure it’s zipped. He shakes off his cap and lets it lie—the peak interferes with his vision. Now the snow is falling on his bare head. But
it’s not so cold. Once he accepts crawling as a method of locomotion it’s not bad—that is, it’s not impossible, though it’s hard on his hands and his good knee. He’s careful enough now, dragging himself over the brush and through the saplings, over the hummocky ground. Even if he gets a little bit of a slope to roll himself down, he doesn’t dare—he has to guard the bad leg. He’s glad he didn’t track through any boggy places and he’s glad he didn’t wait any longer before starting back; the snow is getting heavier and his prints are almost blotted out. Without that track to follow it would be hard to know, at ground level, whether he was going the right way.

The situation, which seemed at first so unreal to him, is getting to seem more natural. Going along on hands and elbows and the one knee, close to the ground, testing a log for rot, then pulling himself over it on his stomach, getting his hands full of rotten leaves and dirt and snow—he can’t keep his gloves on, can’t get the proper hold and feel of things on the bush floor except with his cold bare scratched hands—he is no longer surprised at himself. He doesn’t think anymore about his ax and his saw back there, though at first he could hardly pull himself away from them. He scarcely thinks back as far as the accident itself. It happened, no matter how. The whole thing no longer seems in the least unbelievable or unnatural.

There is a fairly steep bank to get up, and when he reaches it he takes a breather, relieved to have come this far. He warms his hands inside his jacket, one at a time. For some reason he thinks of Diane in her unbecoming red ski jacket and decides that her life is her life, there is not much use worrying about it. And he thinks of his wife, pretending to laugh at the television. Her quietness. At least she’s fed and warm, she isn’t some refugee shuffling along the roads. Worse things happen, he thinks. Worse things.

He starts up the bank, digging in his elbows and his sore but serviceable knee where he can. He keeps going; he grits his teeth as if that will keep him from sliding back; he grabs at any
exposed root or halfway-sturdy stem that he can see. Sometimes he slides, his hold breaks, but he gets himself stopped and inches upwards again. He never raises his head to judge how far he still has to go. If he pretends the incline goes on forever, it’ll be a kind of bonus, a surprise, to get to the top.

It takes a long time. But he pulls himself onto level ground at last, and through the trees ahead and the falling snow he can see the truck. The truck, the old red Mazda, a faithful old friend, miraculously waiting. Being on the level raises his expectations of himself again and he gets onto his knees, going easy, easy on the bad leg, rises shakily onto his good leg, dragging the other, swaying like a drunk. He tries a sort of hop. No good—he’d lose his balance that way. He tries a little weight on the bad leg, just gently, and realizes that the pain could make him black out. He sinks back to the old position and crawls. But instead of crawling through the trees towards the truck he turns at right angles and makes for where he knows the track to be. When he gets there he begins to make better time, crawling over the hard ruts, the mud that has thawed in the daylight but is now starting to freeze again. It’s cruel on the knee and his palms but otherwise so much easier than the route he had to take before that he feels almost light-headed. He can see the truck ahead. Looking at him, waiting for him.

He’ll be able to drive. So lucky the damage is to the left leg. Now that the worst is over a lot of vexing questions come at him, along with his relief. Who will go and get the saw and the ax for him, how can he explain to anybody just where to find them? How soon will the snow cover them up? When will he be able to walk?

No use. He pushes all that away, raises his head to get another encouraging look at the truck. He stops again to rest and warm his hands. He could put his gloves on now, but why ruin them?

A large bird rises out of the bush to one side of him and he
cranes his neck to see what it is. He thinks it’s a hawk, but it could be a buzzard. If it’s a buzzard will it have its eye on him, thinking it’s in luck now, seeing he’s hurt?

He waits to see it circle back, so he can tell what it is by the manner of its flight, and its wings.

And while he’s doing that, while he’s waiting, and taking note of the bird’s wings—it is a buzzard—he is also getting a drastically new idea about the story that has preoccupied him for the last twenty-four hours.

The truck is moving. When did it start? When he was watching the bird? At first just a little movement, a wobble in the ruts—it could almost be a hallucination. But he can hear the engine. It’s going. Did somebody just get into it while he was distracted, or was somebody waiting in it all the time? Surely he locked it, and he has the keys with him. He feels his zipped pocket again. Someone stealing the truck in front of his eyes and without the keys. He hollers and waves, from his crouched position—as if that would do any good. But the truck isn’t backing into the turnaround to drive out; it’s bumping along the track straight at him, and now the person driving it is honking the horn, not in a warning but a greeting way, and slowing down.

He sees who it is.

The only person who has the other set of keys. The only person it could be. Lea.

He struggles to get his weight onto the one leg. She jumps out of the truck and runs to him and supports him.

“I just went down,” he tells her, panting. “It was the dumbest damn thing I ever did in my life.” Then he thinks to ask how she got here.

“Well, I didn’t fly,” she says.

She came in the car, she says—she speaks just as if she’d never given up driving at all—she came in the car but she left it back at the road.

“It’s way too light for this track,” she says. “And I thought I might get stuck. But I wouldn’t’ve, the mud’s froze hard.

“I could see the truck,” she says. “So I just walked in and when I got to it I unlocked it and got in and sat there. I figured you’d be coming back soon, seeing it’s snowing. But I never figured you’d be doing it on your hands and knees.”

The walk, or maybe the cold, has brightened her face and sharpened her voice. She gets down and looks at his ankle, says she thinks it’s swollen.

“Could have been worse,” he says.

She says this was the one time she hadn’t been worried. The one time she wasn’t and she should have been. (He doesn’t bother telling her that she hasn’t shown worry about anything for a matter of months.) She didn’t have a single premonition.

“I just came to meet you to tell you,” she says, “because I couldn’t wait to tell you. This idea I got when the woman was working on me. Then I saw you crawling. And I thought,
Oh my God
.”

What idea?

“Oh that,” she says. “Oh—well, I don’t know what you’ll think. I could tell you later. We gotta get your ankle fixed.”

What idea?

Her idea is that the outfit Percy heard about doesn’t exist. Percy heard some talk but not about some strangers getting a license to log the bush. What he heard was all about Roy himself.

“Because that old Eliot Suter is all big talk. I know that family, his wife was Annie Poole’s sister. He’s going round blowing about the deal he got and added on to it quite a bit and first thing what have you? Ends up the River Inn for good measure and a hundred cords a day. Somebody drinking beer and listening in on somebody else drinking beer and there you are. And you have got a kind of a contract—I mean you’ve got an agreement—”

“It may be stupid all right—” Roy says.

“I knew you’d say that but you think about it—”

“It may be stupid but it’s the same idea I had myself about five minutes ago.”

And this is so. This is what came to him when he was looking up at the buzzard.

“So there you are,” Lea says, with a satisfied laugh. “Everything remotely connected with the inn, it just turns into some big story. Some big-money kind of a story.”

That was it, he thinks. He was hearing about himself. All the ruction comes back to himself.

The bulldozer isn’t coming, the men with the chain saws are not converging. The ash, the maple, the beech, the ironwood, the cherry, are all safe for him. For the time being, all safe.

Lea is out of breath with the effort of supporting him, but able to say, “Great minds think alike.”

This is not the moment to mention the change in her. No more than you’d call your congratulations to somebody up on a ladder.

He has knocked his foot hoisting himself—and partly being hoisted—into the passenger seat of the truck. He groans, and it’s a different kind of groan than would come out of him if he was alone. It’s not that he means to dramatize the pain, just that he takes this way of describing it to his wife.

Or even offering it to his wife. Because he knows that he isn’t feeling quite the way he thought he would if her vitality came back to her. And the noise he makes could be to cover that lack, or excuse it. Of course it’s natural that he’d feel a bit cautious, not knowing if this is for good, or just a flash in the pan.

But even if it is for good, even if it’s all good there’s something more. Some loss fogging up this gain. Some loss he’d be ashamed to admit to, if he had the energy.

The dark and the snow are too thick for him to see beyond the first trees. He’s been in there before at this time, when the dark shuts down in early winter. But now he pays attention, he
notices something about the bush that he thinks he has missed those other times. How tangled up in itself it is, how dense and secret. It’s not a matter of one tree after another, it’s all the trees together, aiding and abetting one another and weaving into one thing. A transformation, behind your back.

There’s another name for the bush, and this name is stalking around in his mind, in and out of where he can almost grasp it. But not quite. It’s a tall word that seems ominous but indifferent.

“I left the ax,” he says mechanically. “I left the saw.”

“So what if you did. We’ll find somebody to go and get them.”

“And there’s the car too. Are you going to get out and drive that and let me take the truck?”

“Are you insane?”

Her voice is absentminded, because she is in the process of backing the truck into the turnaround. Slowly but not too slowly, bouncing in the ruts but keeping on the track. He is not used to the rearview mirrors from this angle, so he lowers the window and cranes around, getting the snow in his face. This is not just to see how she’s doing but to clear to a certain extent the warm wooziness coming on him.

“Easy,” he says. “That’s it. Easy. Okay now. You’re okay. You’re okay.”

While he is saying this she is saying something about the hospital.

“… get them to take a look at you. First things first.”

To his knowledge, she has never driven the truck before.

It’s remarkable the way she manages it.

Forest
. That’s the word. Not a strange word at all but one he has possibly never used. A formality about it that he would usually back away from.

“The Deserted Forest,” he says, as if that put the cap on something.

Too Much Happiness

Many persons who have not studied mathematics confuse it with arithmetic and consider it a dry and arid science. Actually, however, this science requires great fantasy
.

—Sophia Kovalevsky

I

On the first day of January, in the year 1891, a small woman and a large man are walking in the Old Cemetery, in Genoa. Both of them are around forty years old. The woman has a childishly large head, with a thicket of dark curls, and her expression is eager, faintly pleading. Her face has begun to look worn. The man is immense. He weighs 285 pounds, distributed over a large frame, and being Russian, he is often referred to as a bear, also as a Cossack. At present he is crouching over tombstones and writing in his notebook, collecting inscriptions and puzzling over abbreviations not immediately clear to him, though he speaks Russian, French, English, Italian and has an understanding of classical and medieval Latin. His knowledge is as expansive as his physique, and though his speciality is governmental law, he is capable of lecturing on the growth of contemporary
political institutions in America, the peculiarities of society in Russia and the West, and the laws and practices of ancient empires. But he is not a pedant. He is witty and popular, at ease on various levels, and able to live a most comfortable life, due to his properties near Kharkov. He has, however, been forbidden to hold an academic post in Russia, because of being a Liberal.