The Taker-Taker 1

  He twisted his mouth but offered up nothing.

  “Don’t tell me you’ve been lonely all this time? That would be too sad.”

  “Well, I wouldn’t say lonely. You’re rarely alone if you’re a doctor in these villages, everyone needs your attention and they’re happy that you’re there … I was always being invited to eat with them, attend their observances. Partake of their lives.” His eyes dipped closed for longer and longer instances, and a languor settled on his face. I took a lap robe and spread it over him. He opened his eyes for a brief moment.

  “I’m going back to Maine. I want to see it again. That’s why I looked you up, Lanny. I want you to go with me. Will you?”

  I had to fight back tears at the prospect of returning home with Jonathan. “Of course I will.”

  FORTY-EIGHT

  We took one of those gigantic Airbus planes for the trip back to America. From New York we took a commuter plane to Bangor, then rented a sport utility vehicle to drive north. I hadn’t seen this land for two centuries and, crazy as it may sound, there were stretches that seemed to have changed very little. For the rest of it, there were asphalt roads, Victorian farmhouses, immense fields of neatly tended crops, the spindly towering inchworms of irrigation pipes off on the horizon. Seen from behind the windshield of this big plush vehicle, it was easy to fool myself into thinking that I’d never been there. Then the road would cut off the farming plains, into the Great North Woods. We’d plunge into the cool dark of the forest, flanked by row after row of outsize trunks, the sky obliterated by a blanket of green. The car dipped and climbed to follow the rise and fall of the land and swerved around boulders pushing their way up out of the earth, now mossy with lichen. All this I remembered. I saw the trees and was taken back two hundred years, flooded with the recall of my first life, my true life, the one that had been taken away from me. It had to be the same for Jonathan.

  We sensed our home getting closer. The trip passed quickly in an automobile. The last time we had made this trip it was weeks in the carriage, Jonathan in shock from what I’d done to him, barely speaking a word to me.

  We were speechless on the approach to town. How everything had changed. We couldn’t even be sure that this road, the main road cutting through the middle of town, was the same small dusty wagon trail that led to the fledgling St. Andrew two hundred years ago. Where was the church and the graveyard? Shouldn’t we be able to see the meeting hall from here? I rolled the car down the street as slowly as possible so we could try to transpose the town we remembered over the one in front of us.

  St. Andrew hadn’t become like many towns in America, where every store, restaurant, and hotel is the product of a multinational corporation and generic the world over. At least St. Andrew had some individuality, even if it had lost its original purpose. It was no longer industrious. The sprawling farms were gone and there had been no sign of the logging business for the past ten miles. The business of leisure had taken its place. Wilderness outfitters lined both sides of the main street, businesses where well-scrubbed men in rugged clothing escorted other men and women through the forest or down the Allagash in canoes. Or took them into the middle of the river in hip waders, casting all day for the fish they would release once they had been admired. There were craft stores and inns where once there had been farmhouses and barns, Tinky Talbot’s forge and the Watfords’ general store. We were amazed to figure out, finally, that the congregation hall must have been demolished and that the center of town was now occupied by a hardware store, an ice-cream shop, and a post office. At least the graveyard had been undisturbed.

  This new generation of inhabitants surely thought it pleasant enough, and if I hadn’t known what it was like two centuries ago, I wouldn’t have objected. But the town now made its living catering to the whims of strangers and seemed degraded, like finding your childhood home had been turned into a bordello, or worse, a convenience store. St. Andrew had traded its soul for an easier way of life, but who was I to judge?

  We checked into a sporting lodge outside town. Dunratty’s was like an old motel, shabby from an unavoidable neglect, that catered to the seasonal hunters and fishermen and so a certain austerity was expected. There was a set of ten or so rooms making up one unit, attached to the office. We asked for a cabin, the one set farthest into the woods. The caretaker said nothing, merely looked discreetly for the presence of rifles or fishing poles and finding there were none, went back slowly and resignedly to his task. He did ask if we were married, as though he minded that one of his murky cabins would be used as a love shack. The place was empty except for us, we were told; it would be very quiet. He would be available at the house if we needed anything—and he pointed off in some indiscernible direction—but otherwise we could expect to be left alone.

  It was dismal, all four walls lined with cheap paneling, the roof merely covered in plywood. The space was dominated by two beds—slightly larger than single beds, neither as large as a double, with Depression-era metal rail frames—set apart by a small dresser put in the place of a nightstand, and topped with a ceramic lamp. Two threadbare upholstered chairs faced what looked to be a thirty-year-old television. To one side was a small, round table accompanied by three armless wooden kitchen chairs. Through a doorway I found a small, functional kitchen, and through a second doorway, a slightly mildewed bathroom. I laughed when Jonathan threw the suitcases on one of the beds. “We’re staying?” I asked, incredulous. “There must be someplace nicer. Maybe in town …”

  Jonathan said nothing but stood before a set of sliding glass doors. Beyond a plain wooden deck were the woods; great thick trunks towering above us, creaking in the wind. We opened the door and stepped into the middle of the forest, and clean air licked over and around us. We stood on the modest square of the deck and looked into the endless forest for an immeasurable amount of time. This was the home we had known. It had found us. “We’re staying,” Jonathan replied.

  We left the cabin about five that afternoon, anxious to look around a little more before the sun set. It was difficult to make our way, though; roads we expected to lead in one direction ended up taking us to another place entirely, as the area had been shaped and reshaped over time. The current grid of roads had been laid down by the modern logging companies and went through mile after mile of forest for no apparent reason, leading straight to a highway, which in turn would take us to the juncture of the Allagash and St. John Rivers. After two false starts, we found a road that reminded us of the carriage trail that had led out to Jonathan’s house, and it was with a silent nod from Jonathan that we pursued it to its end.

  We burst through a tunnel of overgrown trees onto a cleared swath that had once been hayfields in front of the St. Andrews’ house. The road had been moved—it no longer swept through the gully by the icehouse and then up to their big house—but I recognized the shape of the land. Now, a dirt logging road cut to the right of the house, which still stood on the bluff. We sped up a little, anxious to see it again. But as we got closer, I let up on the pedal. The house was still standing, but only someone who had once lived there would have been able to recognize it.

  The once glorious house had been left to rot. It was like a corpse that had been exposed to the elements, a skeleton with every feature by which you’d known the person fallen away. The once grand house sagged, stripped of paint, missing slate tiles upon its head, slats from its torso. Even the stand of pines that had formed a windbreak in front were failing, spindly and unloved, the kind of trees you find in a graveyard.

  “It’s abandoned,” Jonathan said.

  “Who would have thought,” I offered, not knowing what to say. “Oh, well, Jonathan … at least they left it in its spot. You saw where my family’s house would have been—nothing but a crossroads now. The world moves on, doesn’t it?”

  Jonathan fell quiet in response to my attempt at cheerfulness. We turned the car around and headed back toward town.

  We went to a small restaurant in the center of t
own that night for dinner. You could call it a restaurant in that it was a place where meals could be purchased, but it didn’t resemble the sort of restaurant that I was used to patronizing. It was more like a diner with a dozen laminate-topped tables, each surrounded by four metal-tube chairs. The tablecloths were oilcloth, the napkins paper. The menus were covered in yellowing plastic, and it was a safe bet that the menu had not changed in twenty years. There were five customers, including Jonathan and me. The other three were all men in jeans and flannel shirts and some kind of cap, each sitting at a separate table. The waitress was probably also the cook. She looked at us critically as she passed us menus, as if there was some question of whether she would serve us or not. Country music played sweetly from a radio.

  We ordered food that neither of us had seen in a long time, if ever, living abroad: fried catfish fillets, chicken and dumplings, food that was almost exotic in its strangeness. We lingered over bottled beer and spoke little, under the joint impression that the other patrons were watching us. The waitress—hair like coiled wire and determined sags cut into her face—looked pointedly at the half-eaten meals before asking us if we wanted any dessert. “Pie is good,” she deadpanned, as if making a general observation.

  “Was it disappointing, to visit your home?” I asked, after the waitress had brought over two more beers. Jonathan shook his head.

  “I should have expected it. Still, I wasn’t prepared.”

  “It’s so different, but in some ways, so much the same. I feel disjointed. If you weren’t with me, I’d leave.”

  We left the diner and walked down the street. Everything was closed, except a tiny bar, the Blue Moon to judge by its neon sign predictably shaped like a crescent moon. It sounded romantic, but through the plate-glass front I saw it was completely full of men, truckers and loggers watching a sporting event on the television. After the commercial part of town had petered out, we came upon the churchyard. There was just enough moonlight to wander among the headstones.

  It had become wild and overgrown. Wild berry bushes and nettles had reclaimed the stone wall, shrouded the twin columns that had once flanked the entry, and swallowed up some of the markers. Years of frost heaves had thrown some of the gravestones out of their places; other headstones were eroded by time or had been broken by vandals. I picked my way through the graves quickly, not anxious to visit my former neighbors in this way, while Jonathan made his way from graveside to graveside, trying to read the names and dates, pulling at weeds that had sprung up around the stones. He seemed so sad and wounded that I had to quash the urge to make him leave.

  “Look, it’s Isaiah Gilbert’s marker,” Jonathan called out. “He died in … 1842.”

  “A respectable amount of time. A good long life,” I called back from the spot where I stood, smoking and weaving from remembrance and vertigo.

  By then Jonathan had turned to another tombstone. He was crouching, on the balls of his feet, looking around the churchyard. “I wonder if everyone we knew is here, somewhere.”

  “It’s inevitable that some of them left. Have you found any of my family?”

  “Wouldn’t they be in the Catholic cemetery on the other side of town?” he asked, walking down an aisle, looking from headstone to headstone. “We can go over there next, if you like.”

  “No, thanks. I’ve no curiosity left.”

  I knew Jonathan had found someone significant when he knelt next to a large double marker. It was rough stone and pitted with age, its broad, flat back to me, so I could not read the inscription. “Whose is it?” I asked as I walked over.

  “It’s my brother.” His hands were running over the engraved words. “Benjamin.”

  “And Evangeline.” I touched the other side of the tombstone. Evangeline St. Andrew, beloved wife. Mother of Ruth.

  “So they married.”

  “Family honor?” I asked, brushing off the letters with my fingertips. “It doesn’t look as though she lived long.”

  “And Benjamin was buried beside her—he never remarried.”

  In the next hour we found most of Jonathan’s family—his mother and eventually the daughter Ruth, too, the last St. Andrew to live in the town. Jonathan’s sisters were missing, though, which led Jonathan to hope they’d married and left town, to raise happy and successful families somewhere else and be buried beside their husbands in more cheerful surroundings. He wanted to believe they’d escaped all the melancholy of St. Andrew.

  I took Jonathan back to the cabin. I’d smuggled two bottles of an extraordinary cabernet all the way from France in my suitcase. We pulled the cork on one and let it breathe on the counter while we lay in bed together. I held Jonathan against me until the chill had left his body and then I undressed him. We lay in bed between the aged and softened white cotton sheets, sipping the cabernet in tumblers and talking about our childhood, the brothers and sisters, friends, and fools; the closely held long dead, decomposed and inert matter in the ground while we were still inexplicably alive. I could not bear to tell him the truth about Sophia. Instead, we spoke of each cherished one until Jonathan lapsed into sleep—and then I cried for the first of many times.

  FORTY-NINE

  There were no more excursions to relive the past: no more visits to graveyards, no retracing of paths in the woods at once familiar but now barely evident and ghostly. We walked along the Allagash, sighting moose and deer and admiring the light from the full Maine sun sparkling on the current, rather than reminiscing about events that had transpired on this spot or that. The rest of the time was spent quietly in each other’s company.

  Time spent together became like a drug I couldn’t get enough of, and I began to think maybe we could get lost here, where we had started together. We wouldn’t have to live in St. Andrew proper; since the town had changed so much, it might be disconcerting to stay. We could find land in the woods and build a cabin, where we’d live apart from everybody and everything. No newspaper, no clock, no insistent ticking of time tapping us on the shoulder, reverberating in our ears. No running from the past every fifty or sixty years or so, to emerge as another person in another land, or rather pretending to be a new person, as new as a chick just come from the egg, but inwardly feeling like the person I was and could never get away from.

  We were out one night on the deck behind the dilapidated cabin, wrapped in our coats, sitting on two folding chairs, drinking wine from glass tumblers and looking up at the flat moon. Jonathan steered our talk to the past and it made me uneasy. He wondered whether Evangeline had had a hard, unhappy life after he disappeared and whether he had been the cause of his mother’s early death. I said I was sorry over and over, but Jonathan wouldn’t hear any of it, shaking his head and saying no, it had been his fault, he had been terrible to me, taking advantage of my obvious love for him. I shook my head, placing a hand on Jonathan’s forearm. “But I had wanted you so much, you see,” I told him. “You weren’t entirely to blame.”

  “Let’s go out there, again,” Jonathan said, “to that place in the woods, where we used to meet, the place with the vault of birch saplings. I’ve thought of them often, the prettiest spot on earth. Do you think they are still there? I’d hate it if someone has cut them down.” Tipsy and warm from drink, we climbed into the SUV, though I had to go back inside the cabin for a blanket and a flashlight. I held the open wine bottle to my chest as Jonathan maneuvered the vehicle through the woods. We had to leave the sport utility on the side of the logging road and travel the last half mile on foot.

  We managed to find the glade though it had changed. The saplings had grown but only to a certain size, then stopped. Their tallest branches now touched each other, closing over the hole in the canopy, overshadowing the seedlings that had tried to follow their example. I remembered this glade where we had met as children to laugh and tell each other stories from our lonely lives, but time had taken away its unique beauty. The glade was no longer blessed and graceful; it was as any other patch of forest, no more and no less.

/>   I spread the blanket on the ground and we lay on our backs, trying to see through the foliage canopy to the night sky above, but there were only a few spots where the stars were able to peek through. We tried to believe that it was the same place where we had met but both knew it could have been five paces to the west, or a hundred yards to the left; in short, it was as good as any place in the woods, as long as there was a thinning of the treetops, as long as we could lie on our backs and see stars.

  Thinking of our childhood reminded me of the burden I’d been carrying all this time. The time had come to tell Jonathan the truth about Sophia. Old secrets have the greatest strength, though, and I was terrified of how Jonathan would react. Our reunion could be over tonight; he might banish me forever from his life this time. These fears almost made me retreat, again, but I couldn’t continue to have this hanging over me. I had to speak.

  “Jonathan, there is something I must tell you. It’s about Sophia.”

  “Hmm?” He stirred next to me.

  “It was my fault that she killed herself. My fault. I lied to you when you asked if I’d gone to see her. I threatened her. I told her she would be ruined if she had the baby. I said you would never marry her, that you were through with her.” I’d always thought I’d burst into tears when I made this confession, but I didn’t. My teeth began to chatter, though, and my blood was cold in my veins.

  He turned to me, though I couldn’t make out his expression in the dark. A long few seconds ticked by before he answered. “You waited all this time to tell me this?”

  “Please, please forgive me—”

  “It’s okay. Really, it is. I’ve thought about it over the years. Funny how you see things differently with time. Then, I’d never have thought my father and mother would have let me marry Sophia. But what could they have done to stop me? If I’d threatened to leave the family to be with Sophia and the child, they wouldn’t have disowned me. They would have given in. I was their only hope to keep the business going, to have someone to take care of Benjamin and the girls after they died. I just didn’t see it then. I didn’t know what to do, and I turned to you. Unfairly, I see that now. So … it’s as much my fault as anyone’s that Sophia killed herself.”