Heart Songs and Other Stories

  There were five or six dull pocks as she yanked the difficult wing tip feathers. “Okay, there you are.” They lay side by side, dark cavities between their rigidly upthrust legs. Noreen leaned against the sink, dove-grey twilight washing up around her like rising water. Her russet hair was twisted into curls and there was a downy feather on her cheek. She sang a few words that sounded like “won’t lay down with Cowboy Joe.” The hell with Cowboy Joe, I thought, what about me?

  It wasn’t the first time I’ve been in a bed that turned into a confessional afterwards.

  “You married?”

  “Yes.”

  “Yeah, me too. I knew you were.” The vixen face was pale in the thickening dusk.

  “My brother,” she said. “My brother Raymon’, you know?”

  “Yes.”

  “He ain’t my full brother, see, he’s only my half brother.” Her voice was a child’s, telling secrets. “See, Ma had him before she met my dad, and Dad give him his name.” The bed was a fox’s den, rank fox smell, the smell of earth. She whispered. “I done it with Raymon’”

  “When?”

  “Long ago, the first time, see? He’s only my half brother. That was the only time.” She looked at me. “Now you.”

  “Now me what?”

  “Now you got to tell something bad you done.”

  It stopped being a game. Unbidden, to my mind came childhood crimes and adult cruelties. I was furious to feel prickling tears.

  “Tell me about Raymond.” I said.

  “See, she was goin’ with this guy, he come from a family that used to live around here—the Stones, they don’t live here now—and Raymon’ was on the way, but before they could get married there was some bad trouble so Raymon’ didn’t have a father. It was real love and she almost went crazy. But she met my father, he was cuttin’ wood over here, workin’ for St. Regis. He come from a town up in Quebec.”

  “So Raymond is really a Stone?”

  “Yeah. Well, he never used the name, but that’s his blood. That’s half his blood.”

  I thought of Stone City, the broken shacks, the blue door with its peeling paint, the iron axles, the outlaw hideout.

  “Which one of the Stones was he?” thinking of what Banger said about the old man.

  She got up and began to dress in the faded evening. She smoothed back her hair with both hands. “This is between you and I,” she whispered solemnly. “Floyd. He was the one that got the electric chair.”

  It became a regular thing. Every Friday night was confession night. I heard who killed the kitten, who stole a coveted blouse from a girlfriend. She was absorbed in family relationships. Most of all I heard about young Raymie’s troubles with his old man, Raymon’ the Half-Stone, as I thought of him.

  “Raymie got another beatin’ last night. See, he’s got to run that trapline every twenty-four hours, and he’s suppose to do it real early in the mornin’ before he goes down to the hardware. Well, he forgot and you shoulda heard the way Raymon’ tore that kid up. He’s got a real violent temper. Raymie, he hates trappin’. He wants to get out of here, go to New York, be a rock singer. You ought to hear him.”

  3

  There were only a few weeks left in the season. I did not let my new interest in the confessional break the pattern of birds. I went out every few days, sometimes only for an hour, sometimes until the end of the light. I did not go to Stone City, tinged with Banger’s dark and private hatred. The first staying snows fell; the air hardened and crystallized to winter temper.

  One morning, with the damp smell of coming snow hollowing my nostrils, I found Banger’s and Lady’s fresh tracks in the strip of hardwoods behind my house, bearing south. I took the deliberate trail as an invitation, thinking that perhaps it was the closest Banger could get to asking me to come along.

  He had a good start. It was past noon by the time I reached Stone City. I’d traveled parallel to Banger’s trail, but higher up the mountainside, thinking his earlier passage would have sent the birds sweeping and scuttling up the slope into hiding from storm and man.

  I did well, flushing half a dozen in my slow hunt, for it was not a day when the birds moved easily. I brought one down, a reflex shot through a thick stand of young fir, as thin and crowded as bamboo, despite my cold-numbed thumb that could barely nudge the safety off. It grew increasingly colder and the snow began, serious snow.

  Stone City was a desolate ruin, but Banger had a fire going in the shelter of a crumbled stone foundation wall and was boiling coffee in a small pot. The blue door was covered with snow. The flakes spit as they hit the flames. Banger threw on another silvered board from the collapsed house.

  “Get anything?”

  I held up the bird and described the shot. Banger spread the tail into a lady’s fan, counted the feathers, flicking the two unbarred ones, gave me a look of reproach when he saw I had not opened the crop, and did so himself.

  “Beechnuts. All mornin’ they been gettin’ ’em before the snow covers ’em all up. Every one a these”—he pointed at the four birds lying in a neat row—“was full up with beechnuts. Beechnut birds has got the best flavor.”

  I had never gotten the limit of birds in my life.

  The coffee was hot and good. Banger said he always carried a little bag of coffee and the small pot in his game vest for the cold days. The fire burned down fast into plank-shaped coals. Banger went down into the cellar hole, looking for dry boards. He came out rubbing something on his sleeve.

  “By god, look what I found on the top of the wall down there.” He held it out to me. “That’s old man Stone’s knife.”

  It was a big folding knife with two blades, corroded, rusted. The body of the knife was a mottled yellow celluloid. There were shadowy images under the celluloid, flakes of images that suggested a pirate playing a concertina or a pile of books tumbling from a table while a mad professor grinned. There was a clearer image on the other side. A naked girl sat cross-legged on a beach, looking at the camera with a curved smile like the rim of a wineglass. Her hands patted a cone of sand between her legs.

  I handed the knife back to Banger. It was heavy, as though it had gathered weight with age. Banger kept playing with it, trying to make out the shattered image. “By god, old man Stone’s knife!” He laughed.

  “What’s the story on the Stone that was electrocuted?” I asked. Noreen had never gone back to the subject and a mutual delicacy kept either one of us from returning to that first conversation.

  “Electrocuted? How’d you hear about that?”

  I didn’t answer and he turned the knife in his hands.

  “That was Floyd Stone, the one that brought the whole pack of Stones down. He was a wild one, but not so wild as some of the others.” The fresh planks smoked and then caught, blue flames rose elegantly along the edge of the boards. Lady put her head on Banger’s knee and looked across the fire at me.

  “How’s my girl? How’s my good old girl?” I said in that foolish voice I use with dogs I like. She wagged her feathery tail. Banger tightened his arm around her and I had a guilty rush as though I’d been caught caressing another man’s wife.

  “Floyd Stone. People around here had trouble with the Stones since the town began. Fact, the Stones were the first settlers here, but nobody brags about it.

  “They come up from New Hampshire or down from Quebec, one, I don’t know which. A real old family, and a real bad family. Floyd was just like all his brothers and cousins, had a crazy streak in him when he was drunk; he’d do anything, just anything. Always had a deer rifle with ’em, all of ’em.

  “This one time he was drivin’ up the hill from town, drunker’n a skunk, real hot, but not so loaded he couldn’t navigate that old truck. Gets to the train crossin’, train’s goin’ through. Seventythree boxcars. He counts ’em. Two automobiles come up behind him, one the Baptist minister. End of the train comes. There’s that guy standin’ out on the little caboose porch. He waves to Floyd like them fellows do.

 
“Floyd picks up his .30-.30 quick as a snake and shoots the guy right through the head just like you or me woulda waved back. Shot him dead for no reason. Never even saw him before. Then he took off for up here. Stone City.”

  Banger pried a rusted blade out of the knife’s body. “They come up to get him from all over. Had the state police, the sheriff, couple hundred men from down below, all had guns and anxious to use ’em. It was an army. The crowd was real ugly, had enough of Stones.

  “Old man Stone come out on the porch. ‘Git off my properly!’ he yells like he had a shotgun in his hands. But he didn’t have no shotgun. Guess he would have if he hadn’t been boiled himself. Holdin’ a pitcher, one of them old tin pitchers, sloppin’ full of some kind of homemade jungle juice. Just stood there, swayin’ back and forth, eyes all red, yellin’ ‘Git off a my property!’

  “State police yells back. ‘We have a warrant here for the arrest of Floyd Stone for the willful murder of whoever he was, and so forth. Come on out, Floyd!’

  “Course Floyd didn’t come out. There was four or five houses here, could of been in any one of ’em, could of been in the woods. Then the state police says something to four of his guys and they run right up those porch steps and grab old man Stone and arrest him for obstructing justice. Right there was the porch.” Banger pointed at the blue door.

  “Fight, kick, scream, seventy years old, but that old man flashed out with his long fingernails and cut one of the state police right across the eyeball, fellow lost his eye and had to be pensioned off on full disability.

  “Nobody wanted to go into them houses to look for Floyd. This was before they had mace and stuff that they squirt under doors. Crowd’s ready for action, real savage. Somebody yells, ‘Tear them houses down! That’ll uncover the murderin’ little prick!’ Like I said, there was a couple hundred people there.

  “They swarm all over those houses, pullin’ rotten boards, kickin’ in windows. Somebody got a axe and pried up the ends of the clapboards and ten more would rip it off like it was paper. Stones come flyin’ out of those houses, women, kids, drunk Stones, some old granny, all of ’em yellin’ and cryin’.

  “Well, they got Floyd, too, in about ten minutes. He was layin’ under the bed, hidin’, had his old killer deer rifle under there with him, pointin’ it at the bedroom door. He wasn’t expectin’ to have the whole back wall ripped off real sudden and a dozen guys grab his ankles and yank him out from under that bed. Police took him away—had some trouble to git him away, too—and left the rest of the Stones there with us. Somebody found some roofin’ tar and started gettin’ it hot.”

  I wondered if Banger had been the one to find the tar.

  “They killed all the chickens for the feathers and some geese and ducks too. Then they stripped every one of them Stones except the women and the kids, and they poured that hot old tar right to ’em, went for the privates, and then they dumped on the feathers.”

  The snow drifted and whirled in the rising wind like down, like the flying feathers tossed onto the tarred Stones. A snow devil twisted briefly near the fallen porch. Christ, I thought, what kind of people were these?

  4

  Because of his color the fox rarely crossed open ground in snowy weather, but kept to woods and brush, mouse-hunting on the margins of open land. In the bitter dawn, his muzzle frosted, he headed for a bramble patch at the edge of a deserted field, hoping for a morning hare. Hare tracks ran like cats’ cradles of tangled string, looping through the briars and into the spruce, then fading to nothing in the drifts as though the hare had unfolded strange wings and flown into the trees. Nose down, the fox trotted along, hoping for the warm scent, but there was only an elusive suggestion of hareishness. He was almost on the frozen shape in the snow before he caught the hateful odor of his greatest enemy. At almost the same time he was aware of the fact of death. His heart thudded, and so great was his agitation that he ran across an open meadow, an easy target for a fox hunter, had there been one.

  During the night it turned intensely cold. A gusting wind rattled the windows and drove snow under the door. By Friday morning the snow had stopped but the wind scoured the ground bare in front of the house and built a knife-edged crescent drift across the drive.

  A melancholy inertia, one of the ancient seven deadly sins, took me when Noreen called to say she would not come that day, that her car wouldn’t start. Her voice rushed through the receiver, breathless and guilty. I wondered who she was with, maybe that husband whose name she had never mentioned, whose faults she had never described. Maybe her furious half brother, tainted with the rage of the Stones. There was a sense of mockery, the image of a curving smile and feathers flying in the wind.

  I opened the oven door of the kitchen range for warmth and treated myself to a number of steaming toddies. The wind shook the stovepipe. I was alone, the glass was always empty. I dozed in the stifling kitchen, my head ringing with whiskey and the sound of the circling wind.

  Banger stood in front of me, the kitchen door open, the wind cutting a corridor through the hot room. His bare hands were bent stiffly and his eyes streamed.

  “Lady,” he shouted. “You’ve got her, damn you. Where’s my dog?”

  We had to go through the house from attic to cellar, opening every closet and cupboard door before Banger believed that I didn’t have Lady tied to a hidden water pipe. Noreen’s blue slippers, shiny imitation satin with feathers, gleamed on the floor of the bedroom closet. I gave Banger a drink and listened.

  He had let Lady out the night before despite the snow, he said, snuffling and wiping his nose on the back of his hand. Lady enjoyed an hour or so out on bad nights. He thought she liked it because it made the warm spot behind the stove more pleasant when she came in. It seemed a strangely Puritan attitude for a dog, I thought.

  He had fallen asleep expecting the whine and scratch at the door. But morning came and no Lady. He was too worried to go into town, but spent the morning calling and whistling for her. At noon he headed into the woods, looking for her tracks in the drifting cold and shouting her name. He started to think I had lured the dog away with grouse giblets. She had been gone nearly twenty-four hours when Banger, on fire with suspicion, came through my door.

  At earliest light we cast out in ever-widening circles from Banger’s sugarhouse. The wind was dying and new tracks held. There were no signs of Lady. I thought of Stone City and again saw Banger dropping the grouse viscera in the snow as he told me about the driving away of the Stones. Lady might have remembered where those forbidden morsels had fallen. A quick, guilty trip, a hurried gobbling, then back to scratch on the sugarhouse door and go to the comfort of the mat behind the stove. I guessed she might have run that number on Banger a dozen times.

  “You already check Stone City?” I asked him.

  “No, but she wouldn’t go there unless we was huntin’ birds.”

  “Might not hurt to take a look and be sure.”

  Banger was skeptical, morose, but we turned south, struggling and sinking in the drifts like men in quicksand.

  The red bramble canes in the cellar holes rattled in the falling wind. Stone City was being washed away by waves of snow lapping up onto the random piles of boards, flooding the foundations, erasing the last traces of the Stones. The full tides of winter would drown the farm.

  Banger kicked at the snow where he’d dropped the viscera. There was nothing there except ash from the fire staining the pale snow.

  “Anything coulda picked ’em up—’coon, fox, fisher cat. Lady don’t eat bird guts.”

  We cast around the field and along the brook. Banger called.

  “See? Fox tracks, pretty fresh, too—this mornin’s. That’s what picked up them bird guts.”

  But then Banger was looking beyond the fresh fox tracks to a faint trail in the windswept snow, a shallow depression completely drifted over in the open, and, under the sheltering conifers, little more than a hint that something had dragged through earlier.

  “What mad
e that?” I asked. “Weasel, fisher cat? Something low-slung to make that trough.” Banger looked at me with scorn and bitterness. He had seen that kind of trail before.

  It led to the blackberry brambles that encased the lower Stone hayfields in bristling armor. Banger walked into the stout, thorned canes as though into a field of grass, muttering and talking to himself. I plowed along behind him, not understanding what he already knew with certainty.

  He went down on his knees about fifteen feet into the canes and brushed the snow off the humped form of Lady. There were fox tracks circling the frozen body. Banger lifted the dead dog, but felt the resistance and laid her down again gently. He worked along the chain from the trap that held her right front leg to the snarl of links wrapped tight around the brambles. He opened the jaws of the trap and pulled out the stiff forepaw, then hurled the trap as far as he could into the brambles. It dangled from a thick clump of thorny canes, the chain bouncing in short, jaunty arcs.

  “Banger!” I shouted. “Don’t you want the trap to find out whose it is?”

  His eyes glared from his purple face. He held Lady in his arms, heavy and frozen into a crooked caricature of dog shape. He hadn’t said anything but now he screamed. “I know who done it! Old man Stone. He already done everything to me he could. He run me off here when I was a kid, shot me with a twelve-gauge, burned me out, yes he’s the one burned up my Edie and the boy after I run them all out of Stone City, and now he’s took my dog because I got his goddamn old knife! Here, you Stone, take it. Take it back. I don’t want it.”

  He held the dog awkwardly with one arm while he dragged at his pocket, pulled out the old yellow knife and threw it down. He kicked at it, then started away to the sugarhouse.

  The trap was a number two Blake and Lamb, nearly new. Under the smoked surface the aluminum name tag was still shiny. The stamped letters read “Raymond Pineaud, Jr.” Raymie had again neglected his line. Even to the bastard descendants the Stones were predators. They could not help it any more than Banger, fluttering in suspicious apprehension, could help being their victim.