HEART SONGS
ANNIE PROULX

Copyright

Fourth Estate

An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd.

1 London Bridge Street

London SE1 9GF

www.harpercollins.co.uk

This Fourth Estate edition published 2009

First published in Great Britain by Fourth Estate in 1995.

Published in paperback in 1996.

Copyright © Dead Line Ltd 1994

A collection of stories, including many from this collection, was published under the title Heart Songs and Other Stories in the United States of America in 1988 in hardback by Charles Scribner’s Sons.

The following stories appeared in a somewhat different form in Gray’s Sporting Journal, “Stone City” copyright © 1979, “The Unclouded Day” copyright © 1985; Esquire, “The Wer-Trout” copyright © 1982, “Heart Songs” copyright © 1986; Harrowsmith, “On the Antler” copyright © 1983; Ploughshares, “A Run of Bad Luck” copyright © 1987.

The author gratefully acknowledges permission to reprint excerpts from: The Golden Casket by Wolfgang Bauer, English translation copyright © 1964 by Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Inc., reprinted by permission of the publisher; and from Love and Protest, edited and translated by John Scott, copyright © 1974 by André Deutsch Ltd, reprinted by permission of the publisher.

Annie Proulx asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this ebook on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins ebooks

HarperCollinsPublishers has made every reasonable effort to ensure that any picture content and written content in this ebook has been included or removed in accordance with the contractual and technological constraints in operation at the time of publication

Source ISBN: 9781857023480

Ebook Edition © JANUARY 2013 ISBN 9780007498314

Version: 2017-01-18

Praise

‘The style of Heart Songs is a long-rhythmed, almost majestic prose that can create images of perfect newness and accuracy … a polished, unflinching work’

The Times

‘Proulx’s descriptive power is such that when you’re not laughing or cringing, you’re gasping with envy’

Independent on Sunday

‘America’s most impressive new novelist … matchlessly capturing the rewards and rigours of life in the rural remoteness of America’s far north east, the stories in Heart Songs focus on characters almost elementally close to harsh landscapes and hard ways of life. Tough knowledgeableness about their circumstances goes along with a style that is elatingly fresh and crisp with sensuous delicacy’

Sunday Times

‘The writing bristles with laconic insights’

Independent

‘Proulx’s prose is monumental’

Observer

‘Proulx does not romanticise her characters, but with the quiet wisdom that informs her novels, encourages us to understand them’

Daily Telegraph

‘The precision of her observation has a large value that implies an entire culture’

Financial Times

‘Proulx’s feeling for the texture of place and characters is impeccable’

Scotland on Sunday

‘These are wilderness narratives, told with sinewy grace and humour’

Sunday Telegraph

‘Proulx is at home in natural surroundings; her gift for description is both taut and unlavish and she shows the true countryman’s respect for hunter and hunted alike. Her people are alive; the domestic detail as sharply defined as in a Dutch genre painting’

Evening Standard

‘These are magnificent wrenching pieces’

Vogue

‘Heart Songs should be bought immediately’

Beryl Bainbridge

‘Proulx peels back the raw emotions of the lost and alone. Most authors would joyously discard a limb or two in exchange for a droplet of Proulx’s lyrical and dense poetry, while the reader can only sit back and lap it up’

The List

‘Powerfully evoked wilderness … monumental prose … the reader experiences Proulx’s humanity, filtered through her controlled compassion … Annie Proulx is an American original: stark, stern, philosophical and funny’

Irish Times

‘Sharp, memorable, utterly original tales of life in rural New England’

Esquire

‘It is Proulx’s particular genius to be able to locate the remarkable within the unremarkable, the tender within the very grim’

TLS

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Praise

ON THE ANTLER

STONE CITY

1

2

3

4

BEDROCK

A RUN OF BAD LUCK

HEART SONGS

THE UNCLOUDED DAY

IN THE PIT

THE WER-TROUT

ELECTRIC ARROWS

1

2

3

4

5

A COUNTRY KILLING

NEGATIVES

Keep Reading

Also by the Author

About the Publisher

ON THE ANTLER

HAWKHEEL’S face was as finely wrinkled as grass-dried linen, his thin back bent like a branch weighted with snow. He still spent most of his time in the field and on the streams, sweeter days than when he was that half-wild boy who ran panting up the muddy logging road, smashing branches to mute the receding roar of the school bus. Then he had hated books, had despised everything except the woods.

But in the insomnia of old age he read half the night, the patinated words gliding under his eyes like a river coursing over polished stones: books on wild geese, nymph patterns for brook trout, wolves fanning across the snow. He went through his catalogues, putting red stars against the few books he could buy and black crosses like tiny grave markers against the rarities he would never be able to afford—Halford’s Floating Flies and How to Dress Them, Lanman’s Haw-Ho-Noo, Phillips’ A Natural History of the Ducks with color plates as fine as if the wild waterfowl had been pressed like flowers between the pages.

His trailer was on the north bank of the Feather River in the shadow of Antler Mountain. These few narrow acres were all that was left of the home place. He’d sold it off little by little since Josepha had left him, until he was down to the trailer, ten spongy acres of river bottom and his social security checks.

Yet he thought this was the best part of his life. It was as if he’d come into flat water after half a century and more of running the rapids. He was glad to put the paddle down and float the rest of the way.

He had his secret places hidden all through Chopping County and he visited them like stations of the cross; in order, and in reverence in expectation of results. In late May he followed the trout up the narrow, sun-warmed streams, his rod thrusting skillfully through the alders, crushing underfoot ferns whose broken stems released an elusive bitter scent. In October, mists came down on him as he waded through drenched goldenrod meadows, alert for grouse. And in the numb silence of November Hawkheel was a deer hunter up on the shoulder of Antler Mountain, his back against a beech while frozen threads of ice formed on the rifle’s blue metal.

The deer hunt was the end and summit of his year: the irrevocable shot, the thin, ringing silence that followed, the buck down and still, the sky like clouded marble from which sifted snow finer than dust, and the sense of a completed cycle as the cooling blood ran into the dead leaves.

Bill Stong couldn’t leave things alone. All through their lives there had been sparks and brushfires of hatred between Hawkheel and him, never quite quenched, but smoldering low until some wind fanned up the little flames.

In school Hawkheel had been The Lone Woodsman, a moody, insubordinate figure prowling the backcountry. Stong was a wiseacre with a streak of meanness. He hunted with his father and brothers and shot his first buck when he was eleven. How could he miss, though woman-raised Hawkheel bitterly, how, when he sat in a big pine right over a deer trail and his old man whispered “Now! Shoot now!” at the moment?

Stong’s father farmed a little, ran a feed store and got a small salary to play town constable. He broke up Saturday-night dance fights, shot dogs that ran sheep and sometimes acted as the truant officer. His big, pebbled face was waiting for Hawkheel one school morning when he slid down the rocks to a trout pool.

“Plannin’ to cut school again? Well, since your old man’s not in a position to do it for you, I’m going to give you a lesson you’ll remember.” He flailed Hawkheel with a trimmed ash sapling and then drove him to school.

“You don’t skip no more school, buddy, or I’ll come get you again.”

In the classroom Bill Stong’s sliding eyes told Hawkheel he had been set up. “I’ll fix him,” Hawkheel told his sister, Urna, at noon. “I’ll think up something. He won’t know what hit him when I’m done.” The game began, and the thread of rage endured like a footnote to their lives.

In late October, on the Sunday before Stong’s fifteenth birthday, an event that exposed his mother’s slovenly housekeeping ways took his family away.

Chopping County farmers soaked their seed corn in strychnine to kill the swaggering crows that gorged on the germinating kernels. One of the Stongs, no one knew which one, had mixed the deadly solution in a big roasting pan. The seed was sown and the unwashed pan shoved beneath the blackened iron griddles on the pantry floor where it stayed until autumn hog butchering.

The day was cold and windy, the last of summer thrown up into the sky by turbulent air. Stong’s mother pulled out the pan and loaded it with a pork roast big enough to feed the Sunday gathering of family. The pork killed them all except Bill Stong, who was rolling around in Willard Iron’s hayloft on a first shameful adventure. The equation of sex and death tainted his adolescent years.

As Stong grew older, he let the farm go down. He sat in the feed store year after year listening in on the party line. His sharp-tongued gossip rasped at the shells of others’ lives until the quick was exposed. At the weekend dances Stong showed up alone, never dancing himself, but watching the women gallop past, their print blouses damp with sweat under the arms, their skirts sticking to their hot legs. At night he walked through town seeing which ones left the window shades up. He went uninvited to church suppers and card parties, winked out juicy tales and stained the absent with mean innuendo. Often his razor tongue stropped itself on the faults and flaws of his dead parents as though he had come fresh from a rancorous argument with them, and at other times he called them saints in a tearful voice.

Stong caught Hawkheel with petty tricks again and again. After Hawkheel started farming, once or twice a year he found mailbox the knocked over, water in the tractor’s gas tank or the gate opened so the cows got onto the highway. He knew who’d done it.

Still, he kept on buying grain at the feed store until Stong told him about Josepha. Stong’s eyes shone like those of a greedy barn cat who has learned to fry mice in butter.

“Hell, everybody in town knows she’s doin’ it but you,” he whispered. He ate Hawkheel up with his eyes, sucked all the juice out of his sad condition.

It was cold in the store and the windows were coated with grain dust. Hawkheel felt the fine powder between his fingers and in his dry mouth. They stared at each other, then Stong scurried out through the chilly passageway that led to the house.

“He’s got something coming now,” said Hawkheel to Urna. “I could wire him up out in the woods and leave him for the dogs. I could do something real bad to him any time, but I want to see how far he goes.”

Stong had sour tricks for everybody. Trade dropped away at the feed store, and there were some, like Hawkheel, who spat when they saw the black pickup heading out of town, Stong’s big head turning from side to side to get his fill of the sights before the woods closed in.

For a long time Urna made excuses for Stong, saying that his parents’ death had “turned” him, as though he were a bowl of milk gone sour in thundery weather. But when Stong told the game warden there was a summer doe in her cellar she got on the phone and burned Hawkheel’s ear.

“Leverd, what kind of a man turns in his neighbor over some deer meat he likes to eat just as good as anybody?”

Hawkheel had an answer, but he didn’t give it.

A few years after Josepha left, Hawkheel began to slide deep into the books. He was at Mosely’s auction hoping the shotguns would come up early so he could get out of the crowd and take off. But it dragged on, hundreds of the old lady’s doilies and quilts going one by one to the summer people. Hawkheel poked through the boxes on the back porch, away from the noise. A book called Further Adventures of the One-Eyed Poacher sounded good and he dipped into it like a swallow picking mosquitoes off the water, keeping one ear on the auctioneer’s patter. He sat on the broken porch glider and read until the auctioneer, pulling the crowd behind him like a train, came around to the back and shouted “Who’ll give me five dollars for them boxes a books!”

Surrounded in his trailer by those books and the hundreds he’d added to them over the decades, Hawkheel enjoyed his solitude.

Stong, too, was more and more alone up at the store as he got older, his trade dwindled to a few hard-pressed farmers who still bought feed from him because they always had and because Stong carried them until their milk checks came in. Listening in on the phone wasn’t enough now; he interrupted conversations, shouting “Get off the line! I got a emergency.”

“You ask me,” said Urna to Hawkheel, “he’s funny in the head. The only emergency he’s got is himself. You watch, they’ll find him laying on the kitchen floor some day as stiff as a January barn nail.”

“When I get through with him,” said Hawkheel, “he’ll be stiff, all right.”

Stong might have fallen to the cold kitchen linoleum with an iron ringing sound, but in his sixties his hair turned a fine platinum white and his face thinned to show good bones. It was a time when people were coming into the country, buying up the old farmhouses and fields and making the sugarhouses into guest cottages.

“Bill, you look like a character out of a Rupert Frost poem,” said the woman who’d bought Potter’s farm and planted a thousand weedy birches on prime pasture. The new people said Stong was a character. They liked his stories, they read morals into his rambling lies and encouraged him by standing around the feed store playing farmer—buying salt blocks for the deer, sunflower seeds for the bluejays and laying mash for the pet chickens they had to give away each fall.

Stong set his tattered sails to catch this changing wind. In late life he found himself admired and popular for the first time, and he was grateful. He saw what the summer people liked, and to please them he carried armloads of canning jars, books, tools and other family goods down from the house to the store. He arranged generations of his family’s possessions on the shelves beside the work gloves and udder balm. He filled the dusty window with pieces of old harness, wooden canes and chipped china.

In autumn he laid in ammunition for the summer men who came back for their week of deer hunting. The sign in his window read GUNS BLUE SEAL FEED WINE ANTIQUES, a small part of what he offered, for all his family’s interests and enterprises were tangled together on the shelves as if he had drawn a rake through their lives and piled the debris in the store.

“They say,” said Urna, “that he’s cleaned out everything from kettles to cobwebs and put a price tag on it. You know, don’t you, that he’s selling all them old books his grandfather used to have. He’s got them out there in the barn, higgledy-piggledy where the mice can gnaw on them.”

“Has he,” said Hawkheel.

“I suppose you’re going up there to look at them.”

“Well,” said Hawkheel, “I might.”

The Stong place was high on a bluff, a mile upstream from Hawkheel’s trailer as the crow flew. To Hawkheel, every turn of the road was like the bite of an auger into the past. He did not remember his adult journeys up Stong’s driveway, but recalled with vivid clarity sitting in the dust-colored passenger seat of their old Ford while his father drove over a sodden mat of leaves. The car window had been cranked down, and far below, the hissing river, heavy with rain, cracked boulders along its bottom. His father drove jerkily, lips moving in whispered conversation with invisible imps. Hawkheel had kept his hand on the door handle in case the old man steered for the edge and he had to jump. It was one of the last memories he had of his father.

The Stong place, he saw now, had run down. The real-estate agents would get it pretty soon. The sagging clapboard house tapered away into a long ell and the barn. The store was still in the ell, but Hawkheel took the old shortcut around back, driving through the stinging nettles and just catching a glimpse through the store window of Stong’s white head bobbing over a handful of papers.

The barn was filled with dim, brown light shot through like Indian silk with brilliant threads of sunlight. There was a faint smell of apples. On the other side of the wall a rooster beat his wings. Hawkheel looked around and saw, behind the grain sacks, hundreds of books, some in boxes, some stacked on shelves and windowsills. The first one he took up was a perfect copy of Thad Norris’s 1865 The American Angler’s Book. He’d seen it listed in his catalogue at home at $85. Stong wanted one dollar.

Hawkheel went at the boxes. He turned out Judge Nutting’s nice little book on grouse, The History of One Day Out of Seventeen Thousand. A box of stained magazines was hiding a rare 1886 copy of Halford’s Floating Flies, the slipcase deeply marked with Stong’s penciled price of $1.50.

“Oh God,” said Hawkheel, “I got him now.”

He disguised the valuable books by mixing them with dull-jacketed works on potatos and surveying, and carried the stack into the feed store. Stong sat at the counter, working his adding machine. Hawkheel noticed he had taken to wearing overalls, and a bandana knotted around his big neck. He looked to see if there was a straw hat on a nail.

“Good to see you, Leverd,” said Stong in a creamy voice. He gossiped and joked as if Hawkheel were one of the summer people, winked and said, “Don’t spend your whole social security check on books, Leverd. Save a little out for a good time. You seen the new Ruger shotguns?” Mellowed and ripened Stong, improved by admiration, thought Hawkheel.

The books had belonged to Stong’s grandfather, a hero of the waters whose name had once been in the Boston papers for his record trout. The stuffed and mounted trout still hung on the store wall beside the old man’s enlarged photograph showing his tilted face and milky eyes behind the oval curve of glass.

“Bill, what will you take for your grandpa today?” cried the summer people who jammed the store on Saturdays, and Stong always answered, “Take what I can get,” making a country virtue out of avarice.

Stong was ready to jump into his grandfather stories with a turn of the listener’s eye. “The old fool was so slack-brained he got himself killed with crow bait.”

Hawkheel, coming in from the barn with book dust on him, saw that Stong still lied as easily as he breathed. The summer people stood around him like grinning dogs waiting for the warm hearts and livers of slain hares.

Stong’s best customers were the autumn hunters. They reopened their summer camps, free now from wives and children, burned the wood they had bought in August from Bucky Pincoke and let the bottle of bourbon stand out on the kitchen table with the deck of cards.

“Roughin’ it, are you?” Stong would cry jovially to Mr. Rose, splendid in his new red L.L. Bean suspenders. The hunters bought Stong’s knives and ammunition and went away with rusted traps, worn horseshoes and bent pokers pulled from the bins labeled ‘Collector’s Items.’ In their game pockets were bottles of Stong’s cheap Spanish wine, faded orange from standing in the sun. Stong filled their ears to overflowing with his inventions.

“Yes,” he would say, “that’s what Antler Mountain is named for, not because there’s any big bucks up there, which there is not”—with a half wink for Hawkheel who stood in the doorway holding rare books like hot bricks—“but because this couple named Antler, Jane and Anton Antler, lived up there years ago. Kind of simple, like some old families hereabouts get.”

A sly look. Did he mean Hawkheel’s father who was carted away with wet chin and shaking hands to the state asylum believing pitchfork handles were adders?

“Yes, they had a little cabin up there. Lived off raccoons and weeds. Then old Jane had this baby, only one they ever had. Thought a lot of it, couldn’t do enough for it, but it didn’t survive their care and when it was only a few months old it died.”

Stong, like a petulant tenor, turned away then and arranged the dimes in the cash register. The hunters rubbed their soft hands along the counter and begged for the rest of the story. Hawkheel himself wondered how it would come out.

“Well, sir, they couldn’t bear to lay that baby away in the ground, so they put it in a five-gallon jar of pure alcohol. My own grandfather—used to stand right here behind the counter where I’m standing now—sold ’em the jar. We used to carry them big jars. Can’t get ’em any more. They set that jar with the baby on a stump in front of their cabin the way we might set out a plaster duck on the lawn.” He would pause a moment for good effect, then say, “The stump’s still there.”

They asked him to draw maps on the back of paper bags and went up onto the Antler to stare at the stump as if the impression of the jar had been burned into it by holy fire. Stong, with a laugh like a broken cream separator, told Hawkheel that every stick from that cut maple was in his woodshed. For each lie he heard, Hawkheel took three extra books.

All winter long Hawkheel kept digging away at the book mine in the barn, putting good ones at the bottom of the deepest pile so no one else would find them, cautiously buying only a few each week.

“Why, you’re getting to be my best customer, Leverd,” said Stong, looking through the narrow, handmade Dutch pages of John Beever’s Practical Fly-fishing, which Hawkheel guessed was worth $200 on the collector’s market, but for which Stong wanted only fifty cents. Hawkheel was afraid Stong would feel the quality of paper, notice that it was a numbered copy, somehow sense its rarity and value. He tried a diversion.

“Bill! You’ll be interested that last week I seen the heaviest buck I seen in many years. He was pawing through the leaves about thirty yards from My Place.”

In Chopping County “My Place” meant the speaker’s private deer stand. It was a county of still hunting, and good stands were passed from father to son. Hawkheel’s Place on the Antler regularly gave him big deer, usually the biggest deer in Feather River. Stong’s old Place in the comfortable pine was useless, discovered by weekend hunters from out of state who shot his bucks and left beer cans under the tree while he tended the store. They brought the deer to be weighed on Stong’s reporting scales, bragging, not knowing they’d usurped his stand, while he smiled and nodded. Stong had not even had a small doe in five years.

“Your Place up on the Antler, Leverd?” said Stong, letting the cover of the Beever fall closed. “Wasn’t that over on the south slope?”

“No, it’s in that beech stand on the shoulder. Too steep for flatlanders to climb so I do pretty good there. A big buck. I’d say he’d run close to one-eighty, dressed.”

Stong raked the two quarters toward him and commenced a long lie about a herd of white deer that used to live in the swamp in the old days, but his eyes went back to the book in Hawkheel’s hands.

The long fine fishing days began a few weeks later, and Hawkheel decided to walk the high northeast corner of the county looking for new water. In late summer he found it.

At the head of a rough mountain pass a waterfall poured into a large trout pool like champagne into a wine glass. Images of clouds and leaves lay on the slowly revolving surface. Dew, like crystal insect eggs, shone in the untrodden moss along the stream. The kingfisher screamed and clattered his wings as Hawkheel played a heavy rainbow into the shallows. In a few weeks he came to think that since the time of the St. Francis Indians, only he had ever found the way there.

As August waned Hawkheel grew possessive of the pool and arranged stones and twigs when he could not come for several days, searching later for signs of their disarray from trespassing feet. Nothing was ever changed, except when a cloudburst washed his twigs into a huddle.

One afternoon the wind came up too strong to cast from below the pool, and Hawkheel took off his shoes and stockings and crept cautiously onto the steep rock slab above the waterfall. He gripped his bare white toes into the granite fissures, climbing the rough face. The wind blew his hair up the wrong way and he felt he must look like the kingfisher.

From above the pool he could see the trout swimming smoothly in the direction of the current. The whole perspective of the place was new; it was as if he were seeing it for the first time. There was the back of the dead spruce and the kingfisher’s hidden entrance revealed. There, too, swinging from an invisible length of line wound around a branch stub, was a faded red and white plastic bobber that the Indians had not left.

“Isn’t anything safe any more?” shouted Hawkheel, coming across the rock too fast. He went down hard and heard his knee crack. He cursed the trout, the spruce, the rock, the invader of his private peace, and made a bad trip home leaning on a forked stick.

Urna brought over hot suppers until he could get around and do for himself again. The inside of the trailer was packed with books and furniture and the cramped space made him listless. He got in the habit of cooking only every three or four days, making up big pots of venison stew or pea soup and picking at it until it was used up or went bad.

He saw in the mirror that he looked old. He glared at his reflection and asked, “Where’s your medicine bottle and sweater?” He thought of his mother who sat for years in the rocker, her thick, ginger-shellacked cane hooked over the arm, and fled into his books, reading until his eyes stung and his favorites were too familiar to open. The heavy autumnal rain hammered on the trailer and stripped the leaves from the trees. Not until the day before deer season was he well enough to drive up to Stong’s feed store for more books.

He went through the familiar stacks gloomily, keeping his weight off the bad leg and hoping to find something he’d overlooked among the stacks of fine-printed agricultural reports and ink-stained geographies.

He picked up a big dark album that he’d passed over a dozen times. The old-fashioned leather cover was stamped with a design of flowing feathers in gold, and tortured gothic letters spelled “Family Album.” Inside he saw photographs, snapshots, ocher newspaper clippings whose paste had disintegrated, postcards, prize ribbons. The snapshots showed scores of curd-faced Stongs squinting into the sun, Stong children with fat knees holding wooden pull-along ducks, and a black and white dog Hawkheel dimly remembered.

He looked closer at one snapshot, drawn by something familiar. A heavy boy stood on a slab of rock, grinning up into the sky. In his hand a fishing rod pointed at the upper branches of a spruce where a bobber was hopelessly entangled in the dark needles. A blur of moving water rushed past the boy into a black pool.

“You bastard,” said Hawkheel, closing the album on the picture of Stong, Bill Stong of years ago, trespassing at Hawkheel’s secret pool.

He pushed the album up under the back of his shirt so it lay against his skin. It felt the size of a Sears’ catalogue and made him throw out his shoulders stiffly. He took a musty book at random—The Boy’s Companion—and went out to the treacherous Stong.

“Haven’t seen you for quite a while, Leverd. Hear you been laid up,” said Stong.

“Bruised my knee.” Hawkheel put the book on the counter.

“Got to expect to be laid up now and then at our age,” said Stong. “I had trouble with my hip off and on since April. I got something here that’ll fix you up.” He took a squat, foreign bottle out from under the counter.

“Mr. Rose give me this for checking his place last winter. Apple brandy, and about as strong as anything you ever tasted. Too strong for me, Leverd. I get dizzy just smelling the cork.” He poured a little into a paper cup and pushed it at Hawkheel.

The fragrance of apple wood and autumn spread out as Hawkheel tasted the Calvados. A column of fire rose in the chimney of his throat with a bitter aftertaste like old cigar smoke.

“I suppose you’re all ready for opening day, Leverd. Where you going for deer this year?”

“Same place I always go—My Place up on the Antler.”

“You been up there lately?”

“No, not since spring.” Hawkheel felt the album’s feathered design transferring to his back.

“Well, Leverd,” said Stong in a mournful voice, “there’s no deer up there now. Got some people bought land up there this summer, think the end of the world is coming so they built a cement cabin, got in a ton of dried apricots and pinto beans. They got some terrible weapons to keep the crowds away. Shot up half the trees on the Antler testing their machine guns. Surprised you didn’t hear it. No deer within ten miles of the Antler now. You might want to try someplace else. They say it’s good over to Slab City.”

Hawkheel knew one of Stong’s lies when he heard it and wondered what it meant. He wanted to get home with the album and examine the proof of Stong’s trespass at the secret pool, but Stong poured from the bottle again and Hawkheel knocked it back.

“Where does you fancy friend get this stuff?” he asked, feeling electrical impulses sweep through his fingers as though they itched to play the piano.

“Frawnce,” said Stong in an elegant tone. “He goes there every year to talk about books at some college.” His hard eyes glittered with malice. “He’s a liberian.” Stong’s thick forefinger opened the cover of The Boy’s Companion, exposing a red-bordered label Hawkheel had missed; it was marked $55.

“He says I been getting skinned over my books, Leverd.”

“Must of been quite a shock to you,” said Hawkheel, thinking he didn’t like the taste of apple brandy, didn’t like librarian Rose. He left the inflated Boy’s Companion on the counter and hobbled out to the truck, the photograph album between his shoulder blades giving him a ramrod dignity. In the rearview mirror he saw Stong at the door staring after him.

Clouds like grey waterweed under the ice choked the sky and a gusting wind banged the door against the trailer. Inside, Hawkheel worked the album out from under his shirt and laid it on the table while he built up the fire and put on some leftover pea soup to heat. “‘Liberian!’” he said once and snorted. After supper he felt queasy and went to bed early thinking the pea soup might have stood too long.

In the morning Hawkheel’s bowels beat with urgent tides of distress and there was a foul taste in his mouth. When he came back from the bathroom he gripped the edge of the table which bent and surged in his hands, then gave up and took to his bed. He could hear sounds like distant popcorn and thought it was knotty wood in the stove until he remembered it was the first day of deer season. “Goddammit,” he cried, “I already been stuck here six weeks and now I’m doing it again.”

A sound woke him in late afternoon. He was thirsty enough to drink tepid water from the spout of the teakettle. There was another shot on the Antler and he peered out the window at the shoulder of the mountain. He thought he could see specks of brightness in the dull grey smear of hardwood and brush, and he shuffled over to the gun rack to get his .30–.30, clinging to the backs of the chairs for balance. He rested the barrel on the breadbox and looked through the scope, scanning the slope for his deer stand, and at once caught the flash of orange.

He could see two of them kneeling beside the bark-colored curve of a dead deer at his Place. He could make out the bandana at the big one’s neck, see a knife gleam briefly like falling water. He watched them drag the buck down toward the logging road until the light faded and their orange vests turned black under the trees.

“Made sure I couldn’t go out with your goddamned poison brandy, didn’t you?” said Hawkheel.

He sat by the stove with the old red Indian blanket pulled around him, feeling like he’s stared at a light bulb too long. Urna called after supper. Her metallic voice range in his ear.

“I suppose you heard all about it.”

“Only thing I heard was the shots, but I seen him through the scope from the window. What’d it weight out at?”

“I heard two-thirty, dressed out, so live weight must of been towards three hundred. Warden said it’s probably the biggest buck ever took in the county, a sixteen-pointer, too, and probably a state record. I didn’t know you could see onto the Antler from your window.”

“Oh, I can see good, but not good enough to see who was with him.”

“He’s the one bought Willard Iron’s place and put a tennis court onto the garden,” said Urna scornfully. “Rose. They say he was worse than Bill, jumping around and screaming for them to take pictures.”

“Did they?”

“Course they did. Then they all went up to Mr. Tennis Court’s to have a party. Stick your head out the door and you’ll hear them on the wind.”

Hawkheel did not stick his head out the door, but opened the album to look at the Stongs, their big, rocklike faces bent over wedding cakes and infants. Many of the photographs were captioned in a spiky, antique hand: “Cousin Mattie with her new skates,” “Pa on the porch swing,” simple statements of what was already clear as though the writer feared the images would someday dissolve into blankness, leaving the happiness of the Stongs unknown.

He glared, seeing Stong at the secret pool, the familiar sly eyes, the fatuous gaping mouth unchanged. He turned the pages to a stiff portrait of Stong’s parents, the grandfather standing behind them holding what Hawkheel thought was a cat until he recognized the stuffed trout. On the funeral page the same portraits were reduced in size and joined by a flowing black ribbon that bent and curled in ornate flourishes. The obituary from the Rutland Herald was headlined “A Farm Tragedy.”

“Too bad Bill missed that dinner,” said Hawkheel.

He saw that on many pages there were empty places where photographs had been wrenched away. He found them, mutilated and torn, at the end of the album. Stong was in every photograph. In the high school graduation picture, surrounded by clouds of organdy and stiff new suits, Stong’s face was inked out and black blood ran from the bottoms of his trousers. Here was another, Stong on a fat-tired white bicycle with a dozen arrows drawn piercing his body. A self-composed obituary, written in a hand like infernal corrosive lace that scorched the page, told how this miserable boy, “too bad to live” and “hated by everybody” had met his various ends. Over and over Stong had killed his photographic images. He listed every member of his family as a survivor.

Hawkheel was up and about the next morning, a little unsteady but with a clear head. At first light the shots had begun on the Antler, hunters trying for a buck to match the giant that Stong had brought down. The Antler, thought Hawkheel, was as good as bulldozed.

By afternoon he felt well enough for a few chores, stacking hay bales around the trailer foundation and covering the windows over with plastic. He took two trout out of the freezer and fried them for supper. He was washing the frying pan when Urna called.

“They was on T.V. with the deer,” she said. “They showed the game commissioner looking up the record in some book and saying this one beat it. I been half expecting to hear from you all day, wondering what you’re going to do.”

“Don’t you worry,” said Hawkheel. “Bill’s got it comin’ from me. There’s a hundred things I could do.”

“Well,” said Urna. “He’s got it coming.”

It took Hawkheel forty minutes to pack the boxes and load them into the pickup. The truck started hard after sitting in the cold blowing rain for two days, but by the time he got it onto the main road it ran smooth and steady, the headlights opening a sharp yellow path through the night.

At the top of Stong’s drive he switched the lights off and coasted along in neutral. A half-full moon, ragged with rushing clouds, floated in the sky. Another storm breeder, thought Hawkheel.

The buck hung from a gambrel in the big maple, swaying slowly in the gusting wind. The body cavity gaped black in the moonlight. “Big,” said Hawkheel, seeing the glint of light on the hooves scraping an arc in the leaves, “damn big.” He got out of the truck and leaned his forehead against the cold metal for a minute.

From a box in the back of the truck he took one of his books and opened it. It was Haw-Ho-Noo. He leaned over a page as if he could read the faint print in the moonlight, then gripped it and tore it out. One after another he seized the books, ripped the pages and cracked their spines. He hurled them at the black, swaying deer and they fell to the bloodied ground beneath it.

“Fool with me, will you?” shouted Hawkheel, tearing soft paper with both hands, tossing books up at the moon, and his blaring sob rose over the sound of the boulders cracking in the river below.

STONE CITY

THE dark-colored fox trotted along the field edge with his nose down, following the woodsline of his property—his by right of use. His smoky pelt was still dull from molting and had not yet begun to take on its winter lustre. A stalk of panic grass shivered and he pounced, then crunched the grasshopper.

He skirted the silver ruins of abandoned farm buildings and spent some time in the orchard eating windfalls. Then he left the apple trees, crossed the brook at the back of the field, pausing to lap the water, and moved into the woods. He want familiarly into the poplars, black ears pricked to the turn of a leaf, nose taking up the rich streams of scent that flowed into the larger river of rotted leaf mold and earth.

1

At the time I moved into Chopping County, Banger was about fifty, a heavy man, all suet and mouth. At first I thought he was that stock character who remembered everybody’s first name, shouting “Har ya! How the hell ya doin’?” to people he’d seen only an hour before, giving them a slap on the back or a punch on the arm—swaggering gestures in school, but obnoxious in a middle-aged man. I saw him downtown, talking to anybody who would listen, while he left his hardware store to the attentions of a slouchy kid who could never find anything on the jumbled shelves.

I made the mistake of saying what I thought about Banger one night at the Bear Trap Grill. The bar was a slab of varnished pine; the atmosphere came from a plastic moose on top of the cash register and a mason jar half-filled with pennies.

I wanted to find somebody to go bird shooting with, somebody who knew the good coverts in the slash-littered mountainous country. I’d always hunted alone, self-taught, doing what I guessed was right, but still believing that companionship increased the pleasure of hunting, just as “layin’ up” with somebody, as they said locally, was better than sleeping alone.

I was sitting next to Tukey. His liver-spotted hands shook; hard to get a straight answer from him or anyone else. They said he was a pretty good man for grouse. They said he might take company. I’d been courting him, hoping for an invitation to go out when the season opened. I thought I had him ready to say, “Hell yes, come on along.”

Banger was at the end of the bar talking nonstop to deaf Fance who had hearing-aid switches all over the front of his shirt. Tukey said Fance had a gun collection in his spare bedroom and was afraid to sleep at night, afraid thieves would break in when the hearing aids lay disconnected on the bedside table.

“God, that Banger. He’s always here, always yapping. Doesn’t he ever go home?” I asked Tukey. In ten seconds I scratched weeks of softening the old man up. All that beer for nothing. His face pleated like a closing concertina.

“Well, now, as a matter of fact, he don’t, much. His place burned down and the wife and kid was fried right up in it. He got nothing left but his dog and the goddamn hardware store his old man left him and which he was never suited to.

“And my advice to you,” Tukey said, “if you want to go out bird shootin’ like you been hintin’ around, or deer or ’coon or rabbit or bear huntin’, or,” and his dried-leaf voice rose to a mincing falsetto, “just enjoyin’ the rare beauties of our woodlands …” He broke off to grin maliciously, exposing flawless plastic teeth, to let me know they had seen me walking in the woods with neither rod nor gun in my hands.

His voice dropped again, weighted with sarcasm. “My advice to you if you want to know where the birds is, is to get real friendly with that Banger you think is so tiresome. What he don’t know about this country is less than that.” He raised the dirty stub of an amputated forefinger, the local badge of maimedness that set those who worked with chain saws apart from lesser men.

“Him?” I glanced at Banger punctuating his torrent of words with intricate gestures. He pointed with his chin and his hands flew up into the air like birds.

“Yes, him. And if you go huntin’ with him I’d like to hear about it, because Banger keeps to himself. Nobody, not me, not Fance, has went out huntin’ with him for years.” He turned away from me. I finished my drink and left. There was nothing else to do.

I didn’t bother with the locals again, except Noreen Pineaud: thirties, russet hair, powder-blue stretch pants and golden eyes in a sharp little fox face. On Fridays she cleaned the house.

She stayed for a cup of coffee and smoked a cigarette one Friday, after I wrote her check. We sat at the kitchen table. She told me she was separated from her husband. That old question hung there. The check lay on the table between us.

I didn’t say anything, I didn’t move, and after a minute she tapped out the cigarette in the aluminum frozen-pie pan that was all I could find for an ashtray. She did it gently to show there weren’t any hard feelings.

I had retreated from other people in other places like a man backing fearfully out of a quicksand bog he has stumbled into unknowingly. This place in Chopping County was my retreat from high, muddy water.

Noreen looked a lot like the kid in Banger’s hardware store. I asked her.

“Yeah, he’s one of my nephews, Raymie. My brother, Raymon’, he don’t want the kid to work for Banger. He’s real strict, Raymon’. Says it’s a fag job. See, he wants the kid to trap or get a job cuttin’ wood.” She turned her sharp face to follow the trail of drifting headlights outside the window.

“Raymon’ made a lot of money with a trapline when he was a kid, and now the prices for furs are real good again. Foxes and stuff. So he got Raymie these twenty-five traps a coupla weeks ago. Now he says Raymie’s gotta set’em out and run the trapline before he goes down to the hardware store in the mornin’. You know how long that takes? Raymie takes after his mother. He like things easy.”

She talked on, uncoiling intricate ropes of blood relationship, telling me who was married to whom, the favorite small-town subject. I listened, out of the swamp now and onto dry ground.

That fall I went alone for the birds as I always had. No dog, alone, and with my mother’s gun, a 28-gauge Parker. Thank you kindly, ma’am, it’s the only thing you ever gave me except a strong inclination toward mistrust. She wrote her own epitaph, a true doubter to the last.

Although I sleep in dust awhile

Beneath the barren clod,

Ere long I hope to rise and smile

To meet my Saviour God

If He exists.

The first morning of the season was cold, the frosted clumps of tussock grass like spiral nebulae. I went up the hardwood slopes, the trees growing out of a cascade of shattered rock spilled by the last glacier. No birds in this grey monotony of beech and maple, and I kept climbing for the ridges where stands of spruce knotted dark shelter in their branches.

The slope leveled off; in a rain-filled hollow a rind of ice imprisoned the leaves, soot-black, brown, umber, grey-tan like the coats of deer, in its glassy clasp. No birds.

I walked up into the conifers, my panting the only sound. Fox tracks in the hoarfrost. The weight of the somber sky pressed down with the heaviness of a coming storm. No birds in the spruce. Under the trees the hollows between the roots were bowls filled with ice crystals like moth antennae. The birds were somewhere else, close hugging other trees while they waited for the foul weather to hit, or even now above me, rigidly stretched out to imitate broken branch stubs in the web of interlacing conifers, invisible and silent, watching the fool who wandered below, a passing hat and a useless tube of steel tied to the ground by earth’s inertia.

What, I thought, like every grouse hunter has thought, what if I could fly, could glide through the spruce leaders and smile down into the smug, feathery faces like an old ogre confronting the darling princess. The view from the ground was green bottlebrushes, impenetrable, confusing, secretive, against a sky the color of an old galvanized pail. No birds.

The dull afternoon smothered a faraway shotgun blast from some distant ridge, quickly followed by another. He missed the first time, I thought. It was less a sound than a feeling in the bone, muted strokes like a maul driving fence posts. I wondered if it were Banger. Banger would not have missed the first shot. It must have been a double.

Even now, as I stood listening to the locked silence, he was probably taking the second bird from his dog’s mouth, fanning the tail, smoothing down the broken feathers and opening the crop to see the torn leaves of mitrewort and wood sorrel spill out. I could imagine him talking to the dog, to the fallen bird, to his shotgun. I felt an affinity to that distant grouse hunter that I could never feel for the downtown talker.

In the weeks that followed I often hunted that ridge where the beech spread into the spruce like outstretched fingers. I heard the increasingly familiar shotgun from the second ridge beyond mine. I put up birds and I took some down.

Too many times I had to crawl on hands and knees through slash where a wounded bird had dropped, praying it hadn’t crept into a stump where I could never find it, where it would die. One I did lose. Five hours of beating back and forth in a swamp, poking into rotted logs, kicking heaps of slash and damning the lack of a dog and my atrophied sense of smell. Again that maul stroke from the second ridge, a single shot, and I envied Banger his dog. I had to leave my bird unfound.

The loss of the bird spoiled that place for me, and I decided to work over to the lean spine of rock where Banger and his dog hunted. I was sure by now that my distant hunting companion was Banger, mythical friend, sprung from the echoes of a firing mechanism, the unknown Banger imprisoned in the loudmouth’s shell.

The first early snows came and melted and we were into Indian summer. The sky was an intense enamel blue, but the afternoon light had a dying, year’s-end quality, a rich apricot color as though it fell through a cordial glass onto an oak table, the kind of day hunters remember falsely as October.

It was a day for birds. They would be lounging in favorite dust bowls, feeding languidly on thorn apples like oriental princes sucking sugared dates. A late patch of jewelweed with a few ragged blossoms in a wet swale caught my eye halfway up the ridge. There was a thick stand of balsam at the far end. The jewelweed had a picked-over look, and the balsams had good ground openings for walking birds. It felt birdy.

I breathed shallowly to keep my heartbeat from vibrating the air. I knew the birds saw me, knew that I knew they were there, and I waited for the wave of adrenaline to pass, for the hot blows of blood to subside. I slid the safety off.

The birds were invisible in the runways under the firs, resting after a morning of snapping off the jewelweed flowers that burst halfway down their throats. Young birds, I thought, into the jewelweed. They would fly up as soon as I took a step forward.

I stayed still, never quite ready, the moment taking me. I waited too long, and a delicate pattering in the leaves of the hardwoods beyond the balsams like the first tentative drops of rain told me the birds had walked away, young tender grouse with pinkish breastbones who might have been flushed, might still be flushed, but who had won this particular encounter. Let them have the jewelweed and the October sunlight this time.

I skirted the balsam stand and came out on the back of Banger’s ridge. When I looked down I saw Stone City.

There are some places that fill us with immediate loathing and fear. A friend once described to me a circle of oaks behind a farmhouse in Iowa that made the hair on the back of his neck stand up. Later he heard that the body of a murdered child had been found there, half-covered with wet soil, a decade earlier. I felt something evil tincturing the pale light that washed my first view of Stone City.

It was an abandoned farm lying between two ridges, no roads in or out, only a faint track choked with viburnum and alder. The property, shaped like an eye, was bordered on the back by a stream. Popple and spruce had invaded the hay fields, and the broken limbs of the apple trees hung to the ground.

The buildings were gone, collapsed into cellar holes of rotting beams. Blackberry brambles boiled out of the crumbling foundations and across a fallen blue door that half-blocked a cellar hole.

I came cautiously down the slope to the fields. The grass hummed with cicadas, crickets and grasshoppers that had escaped the early frosts. The buzzing stopped as I stepped into the field. The soil looked thin. A long backbone of rock jutted from the pasture. Something of the vanished owner’s grim labor showed in a curious fenceline that would stand another hundred years; the fence “posts” were old iron wagon axles sunk deep into holes hand drilled in the granite ledge.

There was no wind. Yellowjackets were at the rotten apples under the orchard trees. The light fell slow, heavy. Inhaling the sharp odor of acetic, rotted fruit I stepped into the honey-colored field. I remembered the feeling I had as a child, of sadness in the early fall.

A bird tore from the apple tree with a sound like ripping silk straight toward the narrow neck of field that closed into trees. Feathers made a brief aerial fountain and I marked the bird’s fall into quivering grass as I dropped the gun. A second, a third and a fourth roar, the air was full of birds, breakers of sound over my head, bird flight and shotgun beating against the walls of hillside and birds falling like fruits, hitting the ground with ripe thumps. Only the first of them was mine.

A bell tinkled and a Brittany came into the field to pick them up. Banger said, “You stepped out just the same time as I did. You the one I hear shootin’ up in the Choppin’ Swamp these past weeks?” He didn’t look at me. The dog brought all the birds to Banger.

“Nice shooting,” I said. The birds were good-sized. “What is this place?” There were three hens and a smaller cock.

Banger looked around and twisted up his mouth a little. He took up a bird and gutted it.

“This place, this old farm, is a place I used to hunt when I was a kid. I was run offa here three times, and the last time I was helped along with number six birdshot. Still got the little pick scars all acrost my back. Old man Stone. Shot me when I was a kid, trying’ to run me off.” He pulled the viscera of the second bird from the hot cavity.

“Place used to be called Stone City. I still call it that. Stone City. The Stones all lived up here—three or four different families of them. Their own little city. Tax collector never come up here. No game warden, nobody except me, a kid after the birds. There’s always been birds here.”

“What happened to the Stones?”

“Oh, they just died out and moved away.” His voice trailed off. I didn’t know then he was lying.

The afternoon sun streamed over Banger’s dog who sat close to his leg. His hand went out and cupped her bony skull. “My dog,” he said. “All I got in the world, ain’tcha, Lady?”

He squatted on the ground and looked into the dog’s eyes. I was embarrassed by their intimacy, by the banal name, ‘Lady,’ by the self-pity in Banger’s voice. No, I thought, there was no way I could be Banger’s hunting companion. He had his dog. So it was a shock when the dog walked over to me and licked my hand.

“My Jesus,” said Banger. “She never done that in her life.”

He didn’t like it.

We walked back past the cellar holes toward the spruce at the end of the fields. Banger’s dog walked beside and one step behind him.

“Give you a ride,” said Banger.

His old Power Wagon was parked on a logging road half a mile below Stone City. It rode rough, bottoming out on hummocks and rocks. Lady sat in the middle and stared straight ahead like a dowager being driven to the opera. Banger shouted at me over the roar and clatter of the truck.

“Old man Stone … meanest bastard I ever … all his sons and daughters wilder … mean … and they was a lot of them.” The gears crashed and Banger wheeled the truck onto the main road.

“They had all these little shacks with broken-down rusty cars out front, piles of lumber and empty longnecks and pieces of machinery that might come in handy sometime, the weeds growin’ up all crazy through ’em everywhere. The Stone boys was all wild, jacked deer, trapped bear, dynamited trout pools, made snares, shot strange dogs wasn’t their own and knocked up every girl they could put it to. Yessir, they was some bunch.” He turned onto a dirt road that ended at the sugarhouse he’d fixed up.

“Should of looked at what I was doin’. Guess I brought you home with me, I’m so used to turnin’ up the hill. Fried bird for supper. You might as well stay.”

He took down four birds from the side of his woodshed and hung up those in his game vest. He wouldn’t let me help pluck the supper birds but waved me into the sugarhouse. Lady raced around him, chasing the down feathers in the rising late afternoon wind.

I looked around inside. There were a few books on a shelf, some pots and pans hanging from nails, the dog’s dish and a braided Discount Mart rug behind the stove. Banger’s cot, narrow as a plank, stood against the far wall. I thought of him lying in it, night after night, listening to the dog’s snuffling dreams behind the stove.

The place was something of a grouse museum with spread pat tails mounted on the walls—greys, a few cinnamon reds and one rare lemon-yellow albino. Curled snapshots of Banger as a young man with grouse in his hands were stapled up beside colored pages cut from hunting magazines, showing grouse on the wing. There were shotguns hanging from pegs and propped in the corners. A badly mounted grouse of great size, tilted a little to one side as though it were fainting, stood on a section of log behind the door, and nests of dried-up grouse eggs on a little shelf must have dated back to Banger’s boyhood collecting days, featherlight shells filled with dried scraps of embryonic grouse.

I lit the kerosene lamp on the table, illuminating a framed photograph in a wreath of plastic flowers, a picture of a girl standing in front of a farmhouse with a sagging roof. She had long hair, the ends blurred as though the wind were blowing it when the shutter snapped. She squinted into the sunlight, holding a clump of daisies hastily snatched up at the last minute for effect. I could see the clot of soil clinging to the roots. Banger’s dead wife.

Lard spattered out of the frying pan and flared, ticks of flame, as Banger dropped in the floury pieces of grouse. He sprinkled salt and pepper, then threw the fresh livers and giblets of the day’s bag to Lady behind the stove.

We ate in silence. Banger’s jaws worked busily on the savory birds. He said nothing for a change. The oil lamp flame crept higher. I thought of wagon axles set in granite ledge and asked what old Stone was like.

“He was the worst of the whole goddamn tribe. Had kids that was his grandkids. Dirty old tyrant, used to whip ’em all, keep ’em in fear.” His fingers drummed a partridge roll on the table. He shouted at the photograph of the girl, continuing an unfinished argument. “The old pig ought to have had nails pounded into his eyes and a blunt fence post hammered up his asshole!” Banger’s voice choked.

I did not see him for nearly a month after that dinner.

2

The dark fox trotted behind the screen of chokecherries along the highway, undisturbed by the swishing roar of vehicles twenty feet away. This was the extreme southern border of his range and he new crossed this road. The corpse of a less-wise raven lay beneath a bush like a patch of melted tar. The fox rolled in the carrion, grinding his shoulders into it. He got up, shook himself and continued his tour, a black feather in the fur of his shoulder like a dart placed by a picador.

As swiftly as though she were pulling grass Noreen plucked the second bird. The other lay on the white enamel drainboard, a dusky purple color.

“Oh, I don’t mind doin’ it. I done hundreds of ’em. There was one or two years when I was a kid, things were real bad up here, no jobs, no money. We lived on pats and fish – trout, suckers, anything. I used to clean the birds.” Her fingers leaped from the small body in her left hand to the pile of feathers in the sink and back again.

“My brother Raymon’ done the fish. He never liked the smell of a bird’s guts, but it don’t bother me. He can skin out or clean any other kind of animal just as fast and good, but not birds. I don’t mind ’em.”

There were five of 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. Seventy-three 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 property!’ 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 made 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.”

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