Crossing to Safety

  The morning after I arrived, I found Sid’s shop already piled with the gear he was assembling and mending and adapting. We would take a packhorse to carry most of it. We would be out a week. We would walk a hundred-mile circuit by the remotest back roads Sid could find on the map. We would sleep beside mountain brooks, or on the shores of little, still lakes buried in the woods, and if the weather was bad, in the lofts of friendly barns. It would be a last burst of freedom before we had to divide and go our separate ways, Sid and Charity back into the teaching suit and the departmental politics and the house-building in Madison, we to Boston or wherever the path of least resistance led.

  We did walk some overgrown back roads, leading a horse named Wizard. There were days of rain, days of sun, nights of stars and storms. We met gnarled old couples on back farms, men with weathered faces and veiny rough hands, women with washed-out blue eyes and a passion for talk. We ran into French Canadians fresh down from Quebec who stopped their plows—one of them was plowing with oxen—and drowned us in a rush of joual that none of us could understand, not even Charity, who had spent three years in French and Swiss schools.

  We ate our lunches in the yards of abandoned schoolhouses, and among the rank roses and heliotrope and goldenglow of abandoned cemeteries, and under the dooryard maples of windowless farmhouses. Sleeping in meadows, we were awakened by the snuffling of grazing cows. Sleeping in a hayloft, we were bombed by swallows disturbed by our flashlights.

  Everything was as green as a salad, but with hints of fall— occasional maples burning, ferns blackened by a hard frost. We were reddened by sun and stung by yellowjackets, we ate dehydrated soup and peanut-butter sandwiches and raisins and chocolate, and once, after we passed through a village, a tough steak, and once, after we passed a farm, some tough and memorable chickens.

  That trip was indeed what Sid planned it to be, the crown and climax of summer. We came to the sixth day of it rejuvenated, swearing that next year we would walk the international border from Beecher Falls to Lake Memphremagog, or do a backpack trip, without benefit of Wizard, on the Long Trail from Middlebury Gap to Jay Peak.

  I remember, it seems, every detail of it until the end, when it falls apart in the memory as it fell apart in fact. The end I will have to get to, but everything that led up to it tempts me more.

  It didn’t begin promisingly. It began, actually, with a clash of temperament and will, a flare-up over trivialities, like a wink through the shutters showing fire inside the house.

  Morning light, without gleam or glare. The rented horse stands patiently in his aristocratic bones, a superannuated Irish hunter seventeen hands high, fallen from the days when he used to jump hedges and ditches with a pink coat aboard him. The bare wooden saw-buck of the packsaddle demeans his bony elegance and emphasizes his patience.

  On the ground, spread out on a tarp, is what we intend to put on him—sleeping bags, pup tents, canvas bucket, axe, coils of rope, a half sack of oats, and two big pack hampers crammed with food, utensils, sweaters, slickers, and extra socks. Sid tightens and tests the cinch. Vicky, with the two infants in their shared buggy, and Barney and Nicky held back by the hand from tearing onto the tarp and disturbing its careful order, stands back with Charity and Sally. The babies are only recently weaned, and their mothers are nervous about leaving them. Aunt Emily circles, getting us into a snapshot.

  Sid grabs a hamper, I grab the other, and we heave them up and hang them over the forks of the saddle. But Charity, who has been giving Vicky last-minute instructions written out on two sheets of paper, looks up just then and cries out, “Wait. Wait! We have to check the list.”

  With his hand on Wizard’s neck, Sid says in his light, musical voice, “Larry and I checked it when we packed, last night.”

  “Ah, but Pritchard says always doublecheck.”

  Incredulous, he stares. “You mean take everything out and repack it?”

  “I don’t know how else we can be sure.”

  “Then why did we pack it all last night?”

  “I’m sure I don’t know. You should have known we’d have to check.”

  He starts to answer, but says nothing. But old Larry, frisky and full of morning, and believing that she can’t be serious, puts in his nickel’s worth. “Sitting Bull no check-um on Little Big Horn. Have-um good chiefs, trust-um catch Custer.”

  Charity has a way of smiling more strenuously when challenged. Her color comes up, she is good-naturedly scornful. “Look who’s talking! The man who only last night, with approval, was quoting Artemus Ward: ‘Trust everybody, but cut the cards.’ Well, I took you seriously. Let’s cut the cards. Anybody can make a mistake. What if we got out fifteen miles from anywhere and found out you’d forgotten the matches?”

  “Rub-um sticks together.”

  She is impatiently patient with my nonsense. Sid says, “We haven’t forgotten the matches. There’s a whole waterproof jar of them in there.”

  Smiling, she looks at him. “Just the same.”

  Incredibly, it has become a confrontation. You can feel the stubbornness in the air. It will show up in the snapshot that Aunt Emily is taking from the corner of the garage. The peripheral image I have of her over there, bending over her box Brownie unwittingly recording tension, brings to my mind another scene, also involving a camera—the scene Comfort was telling us about the other night, reporting with amusement and sisterly malice a morning in the little inn called La Belle Helene, near Agamemnon’s tomb in Mycenae.

  The sisters sit at the breakfast table ready for a day in Agamemnon’s city and beehive tomb. Charity has on the chair beside her the product of her constructive daydreaming: camera, binoculars, guidebook, notebook, Greek for Travelers, a knitted woolen Cretan bag containing Kleenex, aspirin, antacid tablets, sunglasses (the November light across the Argive plain is diamond-bright), flashlight (the tomb may be dark). The honeymoon journey is two months old. Comfort joined it two days ago, in Náŭplion. The three of them are the only guests at La Belle Helene. The table is littered with the crumbs of their breakfast rolls, their coffee cups contain the sludge of their coffee. In the doorway the proprietress lurks, listening with Greek xenophilia to their conversation.

  Eventually Charity looks at her watch. “What on earth can be keeping him? We don’t want to lose the whole morning.”

  “Didn’t you say his hay fever is bothering him?”

  “He likes to make the most of that. Maybe I’d better . . .”

  At that moment he appears. He has his handkerchief in his hand, and he sneezes three times crossing the dining room. His eyes are red, and he sniffles. Charity bursts out laughing.

  He looks annoyed. “What’s so fuddy?”

  “You are. You look so lugubrious.”

  “I feel lugubrious.”

  “Well, you can’t,” Charity says. “You’ll just have to brace up, because we’ve got to see everything here today if we’re going to Pylos tomorrow.”

  He continues to sniffle and wipe his eyes. The proprietress comes and pours coffee and goes away again, heavy in black dress and slippers. Comfort says sympathetically, “You sound terribly stuffed. What could be blooming, this time of year?”

  He shrugs. “I do’ doe. Idsect spray, baybe. Roach powder? The place is crawlig with roaches.”

  “You’ll just have to get on top of it,” Charity says. “Have some coffee. Eat something, you’ll feel better. Oh, come on! Don’t be such a baby! Here, I’ll take your picture and you can carry it around to remind you how not to look on your honeymoon.”

  She picks up the camera and points it at him. He frowns, shaking his head, and turns his face into his handkerchief to sneeze again. When his face comes up, the camera is still aimed at him. “Don’t!” he says sharply.

  And there it is. Confrontation. Challenge and response. “Why, of course I will if I want to,” she says.

  His voice rises. “I’m asking you, don’t snap that thing.”

  She puts her eye to the finder, aims, and click
s the shutter. Furiously he stands up. For a moment he seems to grope for words. Then he goes out, back toward the room.

  Comfort says nothing. Charity, though she smiles, is a little tight around the mouth, and her cheekbones are pink. “He’ll be back,” she says. “Anyway, I didn’t take it. There’s no film in the camera. But I couldn’t let him get away with that, telling me what I can and can’t do. Could I?”

  The moral, Comfort says, is not to accept an invitation to any honeymoon except your own. But the instant, fighting assertion of will that Charity has demonstrated is something Comfort knows from way back. It is what she grew up with as Charity’s younger sister. It is what caused so many clashes between Charity and Aunt Emily. It is what shows now while Wizard waits patiently to be loaded.

  For a second or two Sid stands looking at the ground, his eyes veiled. Then he unhooks the hamper from his side of the saddle. I do the same. We spill the painstakingly packed contents onto the tarp. Expressionless, Sid turns his hamper upside down to show that it is empty—a little angry showmanship there. Charity gets out her stenographic notebook and a pencil. Sally discreetly gives her attention to the babies side by side in their buggy.

  For the next half hour I hand things to Sid one at a time and he repacks them while Charity checks them off. Aunt Emily says her good-byes and leaves—time to get George Barnwell fed and off to his think house. Finally the tarp is clear except for tents, sleeping bags, axe, oats, and ropes. Consulting her pad, Charity asks, “Where’s the tea?”

  An extraordinary expression passes over Sid’s face—defeat? outrage? resignation? the wish for resignation?—and he says, “In here. You just checked it off.”

  “No, I didn’t.” Then, when he starts to speak, “I’m sorry, Sid, I didn’t.”

  “I called it out.”

  “You can’t have.”

  I expect him to call on me to back him, and there is nothing I would so happily avoid. But he says nothing. Stalemate. At last he says, almost surlily, “What if it isn’t there? Let’s get started. Do we need tea? We’ve got coffee.”

  “Tea is lighter to carry,” Charity says, as if reciting a lesson. “You can take enough tea for months and only add ounces to your load. Pritchard says the Hudson Bay York boats never carried coffee, only tea. They stopped to boil the pot every noon. Tea kept them going.”

  This extraordinary speech we all greet with silence. The silence lengthens while Sid stares at her. Finally he says, “Are we going in a York boat? Are we going for months? Will it help the weight problem to carry tea if we’re taking coffee too? Anyway the tea’s in there, I know it is.”

  “Then why don’t I have it checked off ?”

  The answer to that is unthinkable. Standing on the sidelines, I have the impression that somebody should laugh. Me? No. Charity has to know how preposterous she is being, but having said what she has said and taken the stand she has taken, she is planted, she will not budge. Somebody else can budge, and if Sid does, we’ll be unpacking and repacking those hampers all over again.

  Then Sally saves the day, saying quietly, “I’ll just go get some.” She starts toward the Big House. In the gray morning we stand around pretending nothing is the matter, there is only this trifling delay.

  Very soon Sally is back with a box of tea bags. I cram it inside the top edge of my hamper, and we hook the hampers back over the saddle. Then the pup tents, sleeping bags, ground cloths, oats, axe, bucket. Then the covering tarp. Looking impenetrable, Sid throws a tense diamond hitch over the load. He has been practicing in his study when Charity thought she had him pinned down to scholarship.

  “Are we finally ready?” he asks. “If we are, for God’s sake let’s go.”

  “You go on,” Charity says. “We’ll catch up. We have to give the babies a hug that will last a whole week.”

  “Couldn’t you have been doing that while we repacked?”

  She chooses not to notice his surliness. Having won whatever it was she thought she had to win, she indulges what probably strikes her as his childish resentment, she sends him off with little business-like pats. “Wait for us at the Hazen Road,” she says, and then she notices the canes hanging from the limb of a maple. Sid and I hung them there an hour ago hoping to forget them. But Charity, smiling her most brilliant smile, unhooks them and hands them to me. “Don’t go off without your protection.”

  The canes are bent willow things with spikes in their ends and Lauterbrünnen carved on their shafts. Charity must have bought a gross of them in Switzerland on their wedding trip, for the Madison house has a half dozen in its hall closet and every cottage in the compound has several. On this trip they have been declared compulsory. Pritchard, whose book on the outdoors Charity has been reading in preparation for the trip, recommends walking sticks, blackthorns, alpenstocks, or some other support for rough terrain and as a protection against hostile dogs.

  Other suggestions of Pritchard’s include instructions on how to make a wooden leg out of a forked branch if you sprain your ankle or break a leg in the woods. Also instructions for what to do if you must set your broken leg before hobbling out on your forked stick. The thing you do is find a tree with a crotch a few feet above the ground, wedge the heel of your broken leg in this crotch, and throw yourself backward. This is like the old method of pulling a tooth by tying one end of a string to the tooth and the other end to a door-knob, and slamming the door. Sid and I had a good deal of fun with Pritchard while we packed last night. But here we are with our canes.

  We walk two or three hundred yards before either of us speaks. Finally I say, “Sorry about the tea. I just must have mislaid it. I know we had it last night.”

  “We had it this morning. But Charity goes by the book. And what a book!”

  A western buckaroo, I share his scorn for people who go camping by the book, relying on the authority of some half-assed assistant scoutmaster whose total experience outdoors probably consists of two overnight hikes and a weekend in the Catskills. But we have just had that confrontation. The one who goes by Pritchard’s book is Sid’s wife, and I am wary. It is not my expedition. I am a guest here.

  Still, I can’t help saying, “I have to admit I was hoping she was wrong.”

  He gives me a strange look past Wizard’s ewe neck and bobbing head. “She’s never wrong,” he says.

  At the four corners we turn up a dusty secondary road. Dust has whitened the ferns along the roadside, gypsy moths have built their tents in the chokecherry bushes, the meadow on the left is yellow with goldenrod, ice-blue with asters, stalky with mullein, rough with young spruce. Everything taller than the grass is snagged with the white fluff of milkweed. On the other side is a level hayfield, green from a second cutting. The woods at the far edge rise in a solid wall. In the yard of an empty farmhouse we sample apples off a gnarled tree. Worms in every one. But Wizard finds them refreshing, and blubbers cider as he walks.

  We come up a long hill onto high ground just as the sun edges out of the clouds and touches a green whaleback ridge ahead. Beyond that, more hills, and beyond those the main range, gray-violet with haze. Almost as if making sure he is free from supervision, Sid sneaks a look back down the road we have come. I look too. Charity and Sally have just come into view at the corners, tiny at the end of the white road.

  We turn back to the view ahead. “Too bad we couldn’t have waited to do this till October,” Sid says. “Some year we’re going to stay on through the color if I have to resign from Wisconsin to do it. In October those hills must be something.”

  Slouching in his faded khaki, a lunch pack on his back and a machete at his belt, one hand holding Wizard’s lead rope and the other stabbing the cane’s spike into the gravel, he intones to the horizon:

  “There is something in the autumn that is native to my blood, Touch of manner, hint of mood . . .”

  How does it go? You don’t know it?

  “And my lonely spirit thrills

  To see the frosty asters like smoke upon the hills???
?

  Kind of a nice poem, one of those Vagabondia ones of Bliss Carman’s. Proper for the country and the occasion.”

  He squints, remembering lines.

  “There is something in October sets the gipsy blood astir.

  We must rise and follow her

  Where from every hill aflame

  She calls and calls each vagabond by name.”

  As I dream of a jail sentence, he dreams of vagabondage and irresponsibility, which would probably drive him crazy as fast as jail would drive me. But it is a fine morning for fantasy, and I say, “Why don’t we just keep on going?”

  “Ha, wouldn’t I like to!”

  “I’ve got forty dollars. The grub box is full. We could eat Wizard if we ran short. You could give poetry readings in the villages and I could write travel articles. We’d be like those traveling colonial painters who used to paint the children for a weekend’s room and board. And Charity’s got Pritchard in her pack to tell us how to survive in the wilderness.”

  Mistake. He makes a sour face. Vagabondage has become bondage again.

  We move to the side of the road to let an approaching pickup go by. Two heads show over the cab—a couple of kids standing up to stare, and why not? Here are two dudes with canes, leading a horse as high and humped as a camel. To them, we must look like something out of Exodus.

  They rattle by, their dust swirls around us. The boys, hanging on to the cab top, are half-turned, still staring. Their teeth flash, they caper and make derisive gestures. I wave at them, but Sid stops, holding his cane as if it were a wet horse-biscuit somebody just handed him. He barks out a one-note laugh.

  “Good God! To see ourselves as others see us. A couple of goddamned British gentlemen. All we need is gaiters.” He lifts the cane in the air. “Oh, bugger Pritchard and his bloody book!” He throws the cane fifty yards into the goldenrod.