A Clearing in the Forest

  As Clyde Looster saw it, that was the crux of dealing with people. Find out what they wanted—often as not it was surprisingly little—and give it to them. Get them smiling. He prided himself on being able to make friends with anyone, never mind how mad they might be at the beginning. He had never had a man walk away from him without shaking his hand.

  Frances decided further conversation with him would be interpreted as bargaining. “The only way you can make me happy is for your whole outfit to leave me alone. I do not want an oil well anywhere near this river.”

  Clyde Looster understood how she felt, but he had a job to do; if he didn’t, someone else would. “You got to understand my company cares just as much about the river as you do,” he told her. “The company is committed—” he disliked the word “committed,” which he considered an affectation, but it had proved to be the right note on occasion “—committed to protecting the environment. We wouldn’t dream of hurting this purty river.”

  “You weren’t so committed when you drilled a well over at Sickle right in the middle of a bunch of sinkholes and didn’t put down enough casing.”

  He flushed. Sickle had been front-page news for weeks around here. Gas had escaped and had come bubbling up like a witch’s brew into a stream. There were explosions. The foundations of houses had collapsed and a major highway had buckled. The entire population of the town had been evacuated to protect them from poisoned water wells and foul odors. But it turned out that the company that had drilled had done nothing illegal. The state had no ruling about using casing at the time, and so the company had done what it wanted to, taking risky shortcuts.

  “We wouldn’t let a thing like that happen again, Ma’am. There are specifications now to protect you. Anyhow, this is just to test for oil. Chances are we won’t find a thing.”

  She absolutely had to get inside to wipe her nose. “I don’t want to have anything to do with your company, and that’s final.” The dog was lying on his back, ready to have the man scratch his belly. She gave the dog a kick and turned on her heel.

  Once inside the cabin, she considered calling one of the real estate people. Let them come in and divide the riverbank into fifty-foot lots—the heck with the whole thing. She saw that she still had the man’s card in her hand, and anxious to get rid of it, she opened a cupboard and was ready to toss in the card when five orange and black butterflies flew out, viceroys, Limenitis archippus. She remembered collecting the cocoons in the fall, cutting them off a willow. She had a tendency to act like a first-grader bringing things to school for the nature corner. After pitching the cocoons into the cupboard, she had forgotten all about them. Now the butterflies, newly hatched from the cocoons, dipped and fluttered around her like maddened maypole dancers.

  One settled on her shoulder. She took it as a good omen and was beginning to feel better under this new and fragile protection when the dog, who had been watching a butterfly hover over his nose, snapped it up and swallowed it, dusty wings and all.

  5

  By early evening she was ending the day as she began it, picking berries. The Juneberry bushes by the edge of the river were heavy with a rich purple fruit that made a delicious preserve. It was her best seller. Flocks of black-masked cedar waxwings and female rose-breasted grosbeaks had been at the bushes, but they ate only the berries at the top, leaving the rest to her.

  When it became too dark to see the berries, she decided to do a little fly fishing. Since the dizzy spell she’d had the day she met Wilson, she had given up wading the stream and had cleared a spot along the bank of overhanging branches so she could cast without getting her line tangled in the trees. As people played a smaller part in her life, the stream became more important to her. The first thing she heard in the morning and the last at night was its unobtrusive ripple.

  She chose an artificial fly, as close in pattern as possible to the caddis flies twitching over the surface of the river. During the summer the larvae of the caddis lived on the bottom of the stream in cases fashioned out of tiny pebbles. You looked down in the water at what you thought was a pile of small stones, and it began to walk away.

  Except for a band of red at the horizon, darkness was flowing from the woods into the sky. The trout, rising for the flies, made little plopping noises like fat raindrops falling on the water. From somewhere downstream she heard the primitive bag-piping of a loon. Although it was only fifty feet behind her, the lighted cabin seemed to be in another country.

  She stood on the bank, soothed by the rhythm of casting her line and retrieving it. The ground fog rose over the banks and tumbled around her feet, soaking her shoes. The loon was silent. She was puzzling over the way the red glow was growing in the sky when she felt a sharp tug on her line. She was confused. The fly didn’t seem to be in the water; it was somewhere in the air. The tension eased and the line went slack, but the next second it was yanked in another direction. The tugging became frantic. She heard desperate squeaking noises, hoarse and sharp at the same time.

  Something flew at her. She had hooked a bat. It had mistaken her artificial fly for a real one. She wanted to drop the pole and run for the cabin, slamming the door behind her. She considered cutting the line, but she couldn’t let the bat fly off with a hook in its throat. She might remove the hook, but the thought of reaching into the small red mouth and past the nubbin tongue and the fine ridge of sharp teeth was unthinkable.

  She got a good hold on her fish pole and walked slowly to the woodpile, exploring with her hand until she felt a small log. Slowly she began to reel in, feeling the tug of the hook in her own throat. Terrified, the bat arched back and forth in diminishing circles around her head. She could feel the flutter of its wing close to her face. She set the line and threw the pole on the ground. The bat flopped helplessly on its short tether. She brought the log down hard, missing the bat the first time, but the second time she felt the small body collapse.

  Once inside the cabin she wondered why she was so shaken; she had made harder compromises in her day. She took out her kettles and jars and set to work with great energy. The kitchen became pleasantly warm. On the stove, the Juneberries, mixed with sugar, surged up into a translucent red whirlpool, their skins popping open to release a rich fragrance. She filled the jam jars, covered the tops with paraffin, and put on her special labels. Then, accompanied by a little cloud of companionable fruit flies, she tackled the dirty kettles, scrubbing hard at the red stains. When she had finished, she placed the jars next to those of the wild strawberry jam she had made earlier, setting two jars aside in the unlikely event that Wilson would stop by again. In the morning she would take the rest of the preserves into town, where the specialty-food market which catered to the tourists sold them for outrageous prices.

  Before heading for the stairway and bed, she turned the television to the local news. On the screen were pictures of a roiling fire, the flames billowing out like scarves of orange silk blowing in the wind. The announcer spoke in an excited voice. An oil well had exploded in the next county, sending flames three hundred feet into the air.

  “The heat is so intense,” the announcer was saying, “it could burn a man’s skin at a hundred feet.” He introduced a man who had been flown up from Texas to put out the fire. The man’s face flashed onto the screen. “I’m gonna cap that son-of-a-gun,” the man said. “I’m gonna take a walk into hell. Don’t anybody pray as much as I do.”

  The reporter was clearly impressed. “How will you keep from being burned?” he asked.

  “You have to know how to treat a fire,” the man said. “You have to handle it with tender loving care, like she was a new bride.”

  Frances walked over to the window. The red line on the horizon she had seen earlier had grown, and now the whole sky was flushed with a red glow that rose and fell as though the fire were breathing in and out. Although it was ten miles away, its eerie light had stained the river a pale coral. Frances thought of the man who had come earlier that day with his request to probe her land for
oil. How long would she be able to hold him off?

  6

  Wilson watched the last cloud of smoke from the oil well fire dwindle to a wisp and then disappear altogether, leaving the summer sky a clear blue. The famous man from Texas had capped the well, but not before the fire had complicated Wilson’s plans.

  When school let out, he had started to work for his dad. The Thrangs’ bulldozer had broken down, and Wilson’s dad was glad to have his assistance. It had taken them nearly a week to get it going. Working under the hood of the big yellow machine, Wilson felt he had his head in the mouth of a dinosaur.

  At the end of the week his dad had reached into his pocket, pulled out the wallet Wilson had given him for Christmas, extracted some bills, and handed them to Wilson, who was too embarrassed to do more than glance at the money in front of his father. Later in his room he counted out the bills, and it took him such a short time he knew he’d never be able to save enough to get to college by working for his dad. He was too proud to ask for more money, and he was pretty sure that even if he did, this was probably all his dad could afford.

  Since his meeting with Mrs. Crawford, he hadn’t been able to get the idea of college out of his head. In his early years, after he had been so sick, something in the way people regarded him led him to believe he didn’t have many options. Life itself was gift enough. Now he was no longer satisfied to let his life drift.

  Twice he had gone to the library and looked at college catalogues, as someone hungering for travel looks longingly at pictures of distant places. All the details: the descriptions of the classes and the dorms, the diagrams of the campuses, the qualifications of the professors, even the history of the schools excited him.

  But when he saw how much college would cost, he knew the only way to get that kind of money was to work on the oil rigs, as his brother-in-law did. When he learned from Ron that the oil companies were hiring, he had told his parents what he meant to do.

  They had divided up their objections like a debating team. His dad argued against his going to college; his mother took on the risks involved for the men who drilled for oil.

  “I don’t want you taken in by any of those fool ideas professors hand out these days,” his dad told him. “You’ll come back with your hair in some kind of ponytail, spouting a lot of fool ideas. I didn’t even finish high school and I’m doing fine.”

  His mother had dropped out of school to take care of her brothers and sisters when her own mother had been taken ill. As a result, she had difficulty reading. She counted on Wilson’s dad to tell her what was in the newspapers, and sometimes she would ask Wilson to read a recipe to her on the pretense that she had mislaid her glasses. Wilson suspected that she would secretly be rather pleased if he were to go on to college, but not at the cost of working for the oil company. Two men from their town had been killed in accidents while working on the rigs.

  But if she would have had any intention of siding with him, the pictures on TV last night of the burning oil well would have been the last straw. She had turned on Wilson. “Over my dead body will you get a job where everything could just blow right up in front of you!”

  Wilson knew that beneath all his parents’ words was the desire to keep him from leaving home. Ever since he had been sick, they never quite believed he could get along on his own. They had to have him where they could keep an eye on him.

  Guiltily, Wilson admitted to himself that their need to watch him all the time was one of the reasons he wanted to get away from home. Some time or other he was going to have to live a life of his own, just like everyone else. What he would never admit to them was that the thought of working on the rigs scared the pants off him.

  And yet here he was. After breakfast with his grim-faced, silent mother and his dad, who had pointedly ignored him, he had given up the idea of asking for the car, and was looking for a hitch into town so he could apply for a job with Ffossco Corporation.

  He stood a little distance from his yard, with its jumble of wrecked automobiles. Any suggestion of the violence in which they had once been involved was softened by the hundreds of field daisies beginning to blossom around them, making the rusting hulks look like nothing more than another crop.

  Wilson had just started to walk in the direction of town when Frances Crawford’s old truck labored to the top of the hill. He could see her sitting stiffly upright, the dog, ears erect, on the seat beside her. A lethal rasping noise was coming from the motor. Wilson stuck out his thumb.

  The truck lurched to a halt and stood shaking itself while Wilson hoisted himself up onto the front seat next to the dog. As he slammed the truck door shut, he could see his mother watching from the window.

  “Well, Wilson, what brings you into town this morning?” Mrs. Crawford was sitting on an old bed pillow so she would be high enough to see the road. Each time the pickup jolted over a bump, a little shower of feathers exploded from a hole in the pillow. He was surprised to see she was wearing a dress and had slicked down her hair into a sort of bathing cap arrangement.

  “I’m going to apply for a job on the rigs. I figure if I work for a year, I’ll have enough money to go to college.”

  But Mrs. Crawford was not as pleased as he expected her to be. She sat in silence for several moments as they drove past weather-beaten log cabins, battered shacks, and basements connected to the world above ground by stairways that rose up like periscopes and ended abruptly in a door. The people who moved to the northern part of the state were exhausted or desperate after a narrow escape from the city and glad to crawl into any burrow.

  Uncomfortable about Mrs. Crawford’s silence, Wilson said, “Your truck sounds terrible. Sounds like a flywheel is busted.”

  “I’m just hoping the truck hangs on as long as I do, Wilson, but it’s going to be touch and go. How much would a flywheel cost me?”

  “If you take it into town to be fixed, plenty. But I think we’ve got an old Chevy truck behind the shed. I’ll bring the part out and do it for you. I want to get in some fishing and I got something to show you.” Wilson stuck his arm out the window and held on to the roof of the truck to steady himself. The dog had now worked his way onto Wilson’s lap so that he could put his nose out the window. “You could use some new shocks, too, but I wouldn’t be able to do that.”

  “I don’t mind the jolts, Wilson, they keep me awake. What did you want to show me?”

  “I was over at Billins’ gravel pit. Found a Bryozoa subretepora.” He pronounced the Latin correctly, catching her reaction out of the corner of his eyes. “I identified it in your book, but I got to give the book back to you before it gets wet.”

  “Wet?”

  “I’ve got it hidden in one of the wrecks.”

  “Why hide it?”

  “It’s my folks. They were upset about the book. They don’t want me to read books that say the world is older than five thousand years.”

  “If God could make the universe, surely he could make it as old as he wanted to. You must remember that the men who wrote the Bible weren’t geologists. They were holy men and poets. I’m sorry if I got you into trouble, though. Do you want me to talk to your parents and explain the book was my doing?”

  “That’s all right. I can handle them. Right now they’re more upset about my wanting to work on the oil rigs.”

  “Wilson, I’m glad you’re thinking of going to college. It’s just that I’m not too enthusiastic about the oil companies these days.” She told him about Clyde Looster’s visit. In the middle of the story she stopped the car abruptly and pointed to plastic streamers knotted on wooden stakes and around the branches of trees. The streamers marked the trails of the teams exploring for oil.

  “You can’t go into the woods or even down into the swamps,” she said, “without running into those plastic red and yellow ribbons. Next thing you know they’ll be declaring them the state flower. But I suppose I shouldn’t complain, Wilson. After all, I’m burning gasoline right while we’re talking, but I don’t wast
e it like a lot of people do. Like that motorcycle gang, for example, that rides around my woods all day frightening off every bird and animal in sight.”

  Wilson knew Lyle Barch has been harassing Mrs. Crawford. He had heard Lyle call her an old witch and brag about how he had made her so angry by riding up and down her drive with his gang that she had run out of the cabin shaking a broom at them. “Just like a witch,” Lyle had laughed. Wilson knew he should have stood up for Mrs. Crawford, but the truth was he felt a little embarrassed about being friends with her.

  “Still, Wilson, if someone has to work on those rigs, it may as well be you. If it helps you go to school, at least some good will have come of the darn things.”

  They were approaching town. On either side of the highway were supplies of stockpiled pipe, and yards where heavy machinery and oil tankers were parked. The storage yards extended to the edge of the road without a tree or bush to hide their ugliness. Next month a refinery would start its operation. What had once been a quiet resort village was now a boom town.

  Frances knew it meant jobs for a lot of townspeople who badly needed them. But, sighing deeply, she said, “If I wasn’t so old, Wilson, I’d head into Canada as far as a road would take me—and maybe farther.”

  The modern brick and glass building that was Ffossco’s new headquarters came into sight, and Wilson said, “Here’s where I get out. I’ll see you soon.”

  All his attention now was on getting up enough nerve to go through the two heavy glass doors in front of him. His brother-in-law, Ron, had let him hang around the oil rig he worked on so that when he applied for a job he could say he knew something about drilling procedures. Ron had even let him study a manual which the company had put out for the men on the rigs. Wilson had not been reassured by what he read. The work was hard and dangerous; in some ways he hoped he wouldn’t get the job.