Crossing to Safety

  Astonished, I keep my peace. Also my cane. As a matter of fact, I rather like the feel of it. But then, nobody is making me carry it.

  On a stone wall, with dense smells of growth and mold and an autumnal tartness of vegetable decay in our nostrils, we sit and let Wizard crop the roadside grass. There is a drowsy sound of bumble-bees and flies. Brown crickets hop and crawl around our feet. On our left begins a dim track, more like a bay or opening in the woods than a road, that closes in after a hundred feet or so. A stone wall runs along it, disappearing into chokecherry and popple and mountain ash. Out of the scattered stones of the wall grow trees as thick as my thigh. Down the shaded opening where it deadends against woods in a patch of sun there is a quivering that might be a will-o’-wisp but is more likely a cloud of gnats.

  Sid is telling me that during the Revolution, forces under Generals Bayley and Hazen cut a road through this wilderness from Newbury, on the Connecticut, to the flank of Jay Peak, on the Canadian border. The intention was an invasion of Canada that never came off. The result was a track that, like the Wilderness Road across the Cumberland Gap, became a road of settlement once the Revolution was over.

  Some parts of the old Bayley-Hazen Road have been obliterated by modern highways, some have been used for generations as farm roads, some have been lost in the woods. Sid thinks this opening here, bordered by stone walls that nineteenth-century farmers built along it to fence fields long since gone back to trees, is one of the lost stretches.

  On the map he shows me where the trace was cut up through Peacham, Danville, Walden, Hardwick; how it bent around Battell Pond and over the hill to Craftsbury; how it crossed the Black River Valley and the Lowell Mountains and entered the main range by way of Hazen’s Notch.

  All this is news to me. For me, roads of settlement have always run east to west, and my private interest in them never took me east of Bent’s Fort, Colorado. But this history, and this country romantically returning to wilderness, speaks to Sid like bugles. He could not be more eager if the woods across there hid the sources of the Nile.

  While he talks, he keeps looking back down the road to where Charity and Sally are coming. As usual, they pause now and then to ponder weeds, bugs, berries, or ferns. “Come on, come on!” Sid says in a voice like a crow’s; and then, looking at me sharply and laughing in an awkward insincere way, “She’d botanize on her mother’s grave.”

  He is still sore from that scene at the loading, his nose is still bloody. But notice: When they are within a few hundred yards he stands up and goes along the wall picking late raspberries and ripe chokecherries, and when they chug up, pink with exercise, exaggeratedly puffing, he goes to them, Charity first, and holds out his handful of berries as if expiating something.

  “Why, thank you!” she says, extravagantly pleased. “Oh, don’t they taste good, and natural? I love their pucker.”

  In a few minutes we start again, Charity now in front with Sid, Sally and I leading Wizard behind. But as we begin to move, Charity notices a lack. “Where’s your cane? Have you left it somewhere? Already? Oh, Sid!”

  Sally and I walk the trail that the two ahead have made through the wet grass. Our hips bump. I put my arm around her. “Ready to plunge into the pathless woods?”

  “Oh, yes! Isn’t it great?”

  “Now that we’re sure we’ve got our tea.”

  Her eyes flash up, her lip curls. “Wasn’t she preposterous? But she knows it. She’s sorry.”

  “She ought to be.”

  Sally stops, and Wizard, walking in his sleep, almost runs over us. “Larry, let’s not let it spoil things. It’ll blow over. It already has.”

  “She acts like his mother, not his wife. If she’d treat him the way she treats, for instance, you and me, everything would be dandy.”

  “Friends come first, family comes last. She treats him the way she’d treat herself.”

  “Oh no no no no no.”

  “She’s the most generous person I ever saw!”

  “That’s not what I mean. I mean she wouldn’t treat herself or anybody else the way she sometimes treats him. She has to be boss. Maybe she tells him when to wash his hands and brush his teeth. I don’t suppose she can help it, but she’s as blunt as a splitting maul.”

  She thinks about that, walking again. “I don’t think she can help it. She grew up in a family where her mother was boss, and she got both the genes and the example. She told me that the only thing her father ever said about her marriage was to advise her against it. ‘He’s not strong enough for you,’ he told her. Poor man, I guess he knew all about it.”

  “Off to your think house,” I say. “Out of my parlor.”

  We laugh, kicking the wet grass. “Did he tell you about his poems, and the fuss they had yesterday?” Sally says.

  “No. What poems?”

  “I guess there were several. You know how she’s been riding him to finish those Browning articles. Well, he’s been writing poetry instead. He sent some to some little review and they took a couple. He was so pleased he couldn’t keep it secret, and she blew up. He didn’t tell you about that?”

  “Not a word.”

  “She told me just now, while we were walking. I guess she was ashamed about this morning, and wanted to explain. She says she absolutely knows Wisconsin won’t promote him on the basis of poems, and he absolutely must write something scholarly. She says the department only values what it can do itself. But then he sneaks off and wastes his summer, as she thinks, and she got mad. They had a real quarrel, I guess, and she was still mad this morning. That’s why she had to prove him wrong about that tea.”

  I stop in the trail and wrap my arms around Sally and give her a big smack. She laughs. “What’s that for?”

  “That’s for being a sensible woman. That’s for not getting sore if I sell something to a magazine. That’s for valuing what I do. My God, why shouldn’t he take an hour off now and then to do what he most loves to do? You’d think she’d caught him in the pantry with the maid.”

  “She says after he gets tenure, then he can do what he wants.”

  “Then she ought to write his Browning articles for him.”

  “Why? Have you seen them? Has he finished any?”

  “He’s finished two, and already got one back from PMLA. Did she mention that? I suppose he hasn’t dared tell her. Right away it came back, right back in his face.”

  “Oh,” Sally says, “that’s bad! You mean they aren’t any good?”

  “Not very. Informed. Uninspired. A-minus term papers.”

  “Did he ask you to read them? What did you tell him?”

  “What could I tell him?”

  Just talking about it makes me angry at myself, because the fact is, I didn’t have the nerve to tell him what I thought. I wish he had told me about the poems. I would have made him feel good about those, instead of guilty.

  “What’s the matter with them?” Sally asks.

  “Nothing in particular. Everything in general. His heart isn’t in them. Only her heart is.”

  “But what will happen to him, then?”

  “Yeah,” I say. “What will? I suppose they’ll either promote him because he’s so good with students and such a good guy, or they’ll ding him because he hasn’t published enough. Or they could promote him to assistant professor, and then bust him when he comes up for tenure. That’d be worse. He won’t decide his own fate, anyway, and neither will Charity. Departmental politics and the departmental budget will. My guess is they’ll agonize and string it out. They won’t find it easy to let him go, because he’s rich, and popular, and Rousselot likes him, and Charity is such a force in Madison. But they could.”

  Walking along with her lower lip thrust out, Sally raises her eyes to watch Sid slashing away with the machete up ahead, where the bushes have almost closed our dubious road. Charity is behind him, out of the way of his swings. “She’d just die,” Sally says. “Could you be wrong about his articles? You’re not very sympathetic to sch
olarly writing. Maybe the department will like them better than you do.”

  “I hope they do. PMLA didn’t, though. Hell, what do I know? They fired me after one year. But you should see what he’s been doing. Browning’s use of music. Browning’s debt to Vasari. Those aren’t what a scholarly journal wants. Those are Charity’s notion of what makes an article. Maybe she wrote term papers on those topics at Smith. Why is she so hot for promotion and permanence anyway? Sid might be a lot better off in some small college where publications don’t matter and teaching does, some place where he could be Mr. Chips. For that matter, if they want to stay in Madison, they could stay whether he gets promoted or not.”

  “She’d be ashamed.”

  “She’d be. I doubt that he would, or only if she was. What he’d probably like best of all would be to move up here the year around and write poems and dig in the local history and folklore and jot down in his journal when the Jack-in-the-pulpit and Calypso orchids come out, and how the crows get through the winter.”

  “His New England conscience would bother him if he’d failed.”

  “His conscience or her pride?”

  We swish through the long wet grass. Sally says, “If it were Charity bucking for promotion, she’d make it.”

  “You bet she would. But she’s crazy if she thinks she can make him make it against his will. When you’re nailing a custard pie to the wall, and it starts to wilt, it doesn’t do any good to hammer in more nails.”

  Now I have made her angry. “You can’t possibly think he’s a custard pie!”

  “She’ll make him one if she doesn’t let up.”

  When Sally is annoyed, she seldom flares up; she smolders. Well, let her smolder. I have said nothing but the truth, which I would be as happy to see changed as she would. We walk in silence. Up ahead, Sid is slashing again. Charity follows behind like a dutiful subservient wife. Is she doing penance?

  I swing my cane. Sally says, with a look out of the corners of her eyes, “You seem to like that walking stick.”

  “A touch of class.”

  “So Charity is right sometimes.”

  “Charity is always right.”

  Walking with her body twisted sideways, she studies my face. Finally she says, “Neither of you would win any prizes for self-doubt.”

  I am surprised. How did I get into this discussion? We were talking about the Langs.

  “You can’t stand to see anybody else with that sublime selfconfidence,” Sally says. “I suppose it’s what makes you both what you are. But it shouldn’t make you self-righteous about people who don’t have it. Poor Sid doesn’t have any at all. He ought to, but he doesn’t. Maybe that old Presbyterian banker of a father. Maybe marrying a woman as strong-minded as Charity. Anyway, can’t you see how much worse it must be for him, knowing she’ll be devastated if he doesn’t make it in her terms?”

  “I thought that’s what I was saying.”

  “No, you were being superior, you were being scornful of both of them. It’s sad, that’s what it is. She wants to be proud of him in the sort of disparaging way she’s proud of her father or Uncle Richard. But she’s getting afraid, and the more afraid she gets, the more she tries to put her will into him.”

  Wizard stumbles over a root, and a surprised whoof comes out of him. The woods whisper and hum, my face prickles with spider webs, light winks off globules of water in a patch of ferns. “Well,” I say, “let’s not spoil the trip arguing about something we can’t do anything about.”

  “No.” Then, after a pause, “Promise me something.”

  “Maybe. What?”

  “Don’t challenge her on this trip. On anything. I know you both sort of like those arguments, but this isn’t a good time. She’s afraid the summer’s been wasted. So don’t get your back up, even if she’s outrageous. Just be nice.”

  “Have I sassed her? I never said a word, even during that scene this morning. I’m as nice as old Sid himself. Yes, ma’am. No, ma’am. Very good, ma’am.”

  “You watch it,” Sally says. “Honestly.”

  I watched it, naturally. But the day that had started crooked insisted on going crooked, like a cross-threaded screw.

  The Hazen Road turned out to be something less than a turnpike. The guiding stone wall vanished in the woods within a half mile. Then we got into a swamp where beavers had dammed a brook and flooded several acres. Drowned trees stood up bleached and bare out of brown water and hummocky grass. The ground we tried to make our way across was more liquid than solid. When we finally decided to make a wide circle around all that, we found ourselves in a blowdown where a wind from Hudson Bay or somewhere had laid down trees the way a scythe lays grass.

  Hot, tired, mud-footed, and mosquito-bitten, we fought our way through and around that, and discovered when we came to clear solid ground that we were lost.

  Or not really lost. We just weren’t quite sure where we were. Our USGS quadrangle map told us that we wanted to come out just where the brook that we had left backed up behind the beaver dam met a country road leading to Irasburg. The brook was north of us, the road west of us. We could either bear right and hit the brook below the beaver dam, and follow it down to the road, or we could take a compass course due west (Pritchard had told Charity to bring a compass) till we struck the road. Sid and I were for working back to the brook, along which fishermen would probably have beaten a path. Charity was for the compass course. Guess which we did.

  And guess what it got us into. After floundering a half mile through heavy woods, we came to a blowdown worse than the one we had had to circle earlier. Trees lay crisscrossed, down and half down, their trunks leaning, their root tables on edge above torn pits masked by raspberry vines. It was impossible for poor Wizard. He got into a hole where he might have broken a leg (and how would we have got him to wedge his heel in a forked tree and throw himself backward?), and after we had hauled and pried him out we decided once again to go around. It took us three hours to make what looked on the map like a mile and a half, and it was only by the grace of God that we didn’t all come out on wooden legs.

  The road, when we finally hit it, was a welcome pair of little-used ruts. Turning right, we came in a short while to a plank bridge across the brook. Sid got the canvas bucket off the load and dipped up a drink for Wizard, who couldn’t get down to the water. Charity sat on the bridge and took off boots and socks and stuck her feet down into the brown stream. I raised Don Quixote’s battlecry, Dulcinea del Toboso!, and Sally, who read my mind, gave me a warning look. So I made no remarks to the brookside about doing things the hard way. It was never Charity’s habit to do them the easy way. Most of the time she preferred to set a compass course (adopted sometimes from eccentric authorities) and follow it, whatever it led her into. Once or twice that day I wondered if she hadn’t secretly, under an assumed name, written Pritchard’s book.

  Leg-weary, we pursued the remnants of a sultry afternoon down the easy going of the road. We bought a couple of chickens from a farm wife who talked a blue streak while she swiftly beheaded, plucked, and gutted them. From that same woman we bought ten ears of sweet corn. About five o’clock, two more miles down the road, we fell into camp on the little lake that I will always remember as Ticklenaked Pond, though that wasn’t its name, that’s another pond altogether.

  It was sunk in woods, the late sun glared off the water, there was a clearing with decent grass for Wizard and with room for spacing our pup tents. We unloaded Wizard and picketed him out and poured him some oats and fell into the lake, which was shallow and warm. Three of us just floated around on our backs and looked at the blue overhead and sighed with beatitude. Sid, charmed by the camp and as vigorous as a spaniel, swam all the way around a little island that sat offshore in the oval pond like the pupil in a cocked eye.

  Revived, we came ashore. I dragged in wood and Sid built a fire and we put water on for the corn. Charity and Sally took a while, sitting on a log and combing their hair like mermaids, leaving Sid and me to un
load the hampers and set out plates, knives and forks, bread and butter. While we were still unpacking, the girls went off together into the woods.

  Among the things I took out of my hamper was the package of tea Sally had gone to get that morning. Halfway down the hamper I found another of the same.

  Sid was feeding the fire. “Look,” I said.

  Squatting in the smoke, he looked. Then he stood up quickly and came over and took a package in each hand as if comparing their weights. Almost furtively he looked from them to me. “Well,” he said, “since we aren’t a York boat that will be out for months, we shouldn’t need more than one, do you think?” He set one package on the log we were using for a table, and threw the other in the fire. There was a strong herbal smell, but by the time Charity and Sally returned, it was gone.

  The fire was ebbing to good hardwood coals, the water was boiling, I had the corn stripped and lying on a bed of husks, Sid had split the chickens down the middle with the axe. “How long on these?” he said. “I understand steaks, I never barbecued chickens.”

  Before anyone else could venture a guess, Charity jumped up, intensely smiling. “Let me look,” she said. “Pritchard has a chapter on outdoor cooking.”

  That name was a spell that immobilized us. Sid squatted by the fire and waited. Sally and I carefully avoided letting our eyes get entangled. Charity sat down on a rock, her combed wet hair hanging down on both sides of her face, and consulted her bible. She turned pages, stopped, read, flipped another page, read again.

  “Ah, here! ‘First rule for camp cooking: better underdone than overdone. Three minutes to a side, over good hot coals, is about right for any camp-cooked meat.’ ”

  I took that in, but I couldn’t keep it in. “He’s talking about hamburgers.”

  “No, he says any camp-cooked meat.”

  “They’ll be raw.”

  Charity raised her head and looked at me. The morning was still with us. It was her against the world, or at least against me, since I was male, and Sid’s coadjutor. She had learned nothing by following her compass course. “Well, I’m going to have mine three minutes to a side. The rest of you can have yours any way that suits you.” She said this smiling.