Temple Stream Read online

  Evenly, with an effort at a tone of amusement: “Well, the refrigerator is fine. If you don’t want your food cold, don’t use the refrigerator. The electric bill is the same as it’s been every month forever.”

  “No, it’s high. I called the Electric and said I was you and made complaint! They won’t talk to me unless I’m you, you know, Bill. So I gave them my low William F. Roorbach voice and told them, You can keep your buttfucking bills if they’re going to be so cocksucking high.’”

  “Ms. Bollocks. Your job is to look after the house, pay the bills, water the plants, mow the lawn in spring, keep the roof clear without putting holes in it, keep the driveway plowed without killing the trees. That’s all. That’s why you have the reduced rent—you are housesitting.” How many times had I repeated this? Why did I sound exactly like my father? “The bills are no different from any other year. And we agreed that you wouldn’t pile up shutoff notices.”

  “Now, wait just a minute here, Bill: I’m not the one sends you shutoff notices! You call the Electric if you want to stop getting shutoff notices! I’m just a little strapped right now, Bill. But next week I get paid for the job I’m doing this week; I’m building a sweet little set of bookcases in Fran Bodley’s place, just up toward Anson there. But she ain’t the cash for the materials, so I had to front that, which was one hundred and fiftysix dollars, Bill. I’m using just number two pine and finish nails, but it’s a lot of shelves. And I did borrow your Sawzall to open the wall there for her—you know, the chuck on that thing is no good: you’re missing the ferrule, you know?”

  The Sawzall was a relic of my days in construction, a powerful bayonet saw, great for demolition and old work. I said, “The ferrule’s not missing from my Sawzall! And I asked you not to use it after what happened last year.”

  The year previous she claimed to have left my Sawzall on a job where it had been stolen. To my face, she had told me this, examining my eyes to see if I believed her—she was such a bad liar. I told her I was shocked that a person could steal that saw, and held her eye and interrogated her with every ounce of my slim reportorial skill, got the name of the job she’d supposedly been on. Right in front of her I dialed the police. She told me, Wait, wait. That’s all, just, Wait. And the Sawzall magically turned up on my porch that very evening.

  Still, somehow, perversely, we were fond of her.

  She said, “Are you getting mad, Bill? Why would someone with such a good job as you get mad over a Sawzall ferrule—how much could that cost? And a pack of blades? Anyway, as I’ve been trying to tell you here for ten minutes, I’m going down to Pennsylvania for a job in a couple of weeks—tons of money, since that’s all you ever think about!”

  “Ms. Bollocks. You are not to take the cost of the ferrule and pack of blades out of the rent. You lost the ferrule, you used the blades up, using the saw without my permission. And in any case, this isn’t the point. The point is, you are behind on your rent, and I can’t wait for your chimerical trip.”

  “Nice language, Bill! Do you talk to your mother with that mouth? So: I’ll send two hundred thirty-six next week. Less the ferrule and blades, of course. And less the hundred bucks the Electric wants extra. I’m telling you, it’s the refrigerator.”

  “Please send eight hundred—that’s what you owe. And no deductions, you hear me?”

  “How do you figure eight hundred?”

  “February. March. Four hundred dollars a month, as agreed. Split it with this Briana, why don’t you?”

  She put on a kind of schoolteacherly condescension, spoke slowly, as if to the class dunce. “Now, Bill. Just wait a minute here. What month are we in?”

  “It’s March, Ms. Bollocks.”

  “And how much do I owe you for March, Bill?”

  “Four hundred dollars, Ms. Bollocks.”

  “So it’s four hundred bucks, correct?”

  “That’s correct, Ms. Bollocks, plus four hundred bucks for February.”

  “No, no, now wait, Bill. This is March. And I owe you four hundred dollars for March, correct?”

  “Correct.”

  “And February is February, correct? And February is over, Bill. It’s all done with. So, consequentially, I owe you four hundred dollars.”

  “Ms. Bollocks. You didn’t pay rent in February. I should have gotten on you much sooner. I mean, come on, all the breaks we’ve given you! Your February rent is four hundred dollars. Your March rent is four hundred dollars. The total is eight hundred dollars, which I would like you to remit immediately.”

  Tenderly, as if holding the hand of a small child: “But, Bill ... okay, listen. This is March, correct?”

  “Haven’t we done this already?”

  “And I owe you how much for March?”

  “Ms. Bollocks ... please. Put eight hundred dollars in the mail, okay? Or do I have to drive back up there and find a tenant I can trust?”

  “Four hundred dollars, okay, that’s how much for March.”

  “And four hundred for February.”

  “But, William F. You are not a good listener. This is March!”

  FOR SPRING BREAK WE’D PLANNED A TRIP TO SEE JULIET’S PARENTS in New York and mine in Connecticut, so it was no big deal for me to add seven solo hours to the eleven we’d driven already and go see for myself what was happening in our house, perhaps prevail in person on Ms. Bollocks for some rent before it was April.

  I left the Upper West Side at three in the morning, last day of winter 2000, got to Mercer, Maine, at ten, dropped my suitcase at our sweet friends the McNairs and continued on to our place. There’d been a deep, wet snow in the area (while in New York it had rained the previous couple of days), and the new covering made everything look clean and inviting in the bright March sun. Already exhausted, late morning, I drove by our house four times: reconnaissance. It looked the same—scruffy, compact, cute really, and cozy. The driveways were neatly plowed out. On the fifth pass I pulled in, steeled myself, sauntered up the perfectly shoveled walk to the porch door and knocked, looking in: nothing amiss.

  A shade answered the door, and it was not Ms. Bollocks’s hallway ghost. “Oh,” the apparition said when I introduced myself, no surprise in its face. No emotion at all, in fact. She wore an apron covered with flour, but didn’t seem to be baking. Her hair hung down to her knees, brushed one hundred strokes. Her hand rose slowly to cover her eyes: I was too much even to gaze upon. “Come in,” she said, but stood in the way.

  “You’re Briana,” I said. “I am Bill. I am looking for Ms. Bollocks.”

  “She’s in Pennsylvania,” Briana said, still hidden behind her hand.

  “I was just in town and thought I’d stop in.”

  “She didn’t leave any money, if that’s what you’re after.” She peeked at me through long fingers.

  I shook my head, she shook hers: we both knew what Ms. Bollocks was like. With that small commiseration, Briana moved aside, let me walk in. The house was tidy but unrecognizable, interloper’s furniture everywhere among our own, chairs and couches and coffee tables squeezed into the parlor, where the wood stove burned too hot, almost glowing. There was the smell of bacon and maple syrup—nice, but not our own.

  Briana gazed at me, neutral. Perhaps she’d been pretty once.

  “Mind if I ski out back?" I said.

  “Snow’s rotten,” she said.

  “Snowshoe, then?”

  In the barn I climbed over half a year of garbage in bags and found my wooden snowshoes, put them on. I missed the dogs—those lucky guys were staying with a slightly wild grad student in Columbus: two A.M. walks, exciting parties, dozens of pretty girls scratching their ears. I missed Juliet, too, but she had it as good as the dogs, warm and well coddled, gazing out over Central Park while she gabbed with her mom and old friends about cribs and changing tables.

  The temperature had come up dramatically in a mere hour or so, and all that new snow was melting fast. I was dressed for cold, stomped bigfoot into the woods, tamping the rotting s
nowpack of our unused trail: you’d flop and founder in normal shoes. The snowpack had started to thin and the world had begun to show, scruffy. The compost heap by the stone wall at the verge of the woods had emerged too, frozen rinds from my and Juliet’s sweet autumn, frozen peelings and stalks and cuttings and food scraps from each month since—Briana and Ms. Bollocks—all of it soon to gather ecumenically as proper worm food, food for bacteria, too. By the time Juliet and I returned in June—as quickly as that—it would all be rich black soil. Red knobs showed in the dirt where the rhubarb would rise. Green hands reached up everywhere from tulip and narcissus and crocus and snowdrop and hyacinth bulbs, stuff I’d planted in various bursts of hopefulness, blooms coming soon for the pleasure of ungrateful tenants .

  . . . I enter the woods and in minutes begin to sweat. Easy enough to stop and strip out of my jacket, hang it in a tree. Minutes more and I leave my sweater, then my flannel shirt, then my tee, arrive at the stream bare-chested but overheated nevertheless, stand in the sun as on a tropical beach.

  The balsams drip, the rocks drip. Everything is a-drip, and not only I. In the naked branches of the black cherry over my head the chickadees sing their plaintive song with evident pleasure, minor key: it-is-spring, it-is-spring. A savannah sparrow clambers up from the depths of the tangled alders, takes up a perch in hot sun and lets his song go full whistle. Across the stream in a low branch a male cardinal sets himself up on a good high branch and belts it out with a Maine accent (that is, sings a regional song, distinctly different from cardinal song in, say, Columbus, Ohio), still hoping to impress his mate despite being her life partner: chew, chew, chew, woody, woody, woody, chew.

  I forget about Ms. Bollocks. I forget about ghostly Briana. I forget that in the morning I’m going to have to drive back down to New York. I forget that in a few days, it’s back to Ohio. I forget everything. I’m just happy to be in the woods again. And suddenly, it’s spring. The sun burns my chest.

  Down in the stream, the mysterious beavers have left signs that they are venturing forth: clean-gnawed, waterlogged branchlets in pick-up-sticks piles wherever there’s a little free water along the banks. I stomp down the edge on crumbling corn snow and fish a staff out of the shallows, enjoy once again the feel of smooth-peeled wood, examine once again the pointed record of decurved incisors. The hairy woodpecker has left large wood chips on the ground by the big rock—he’s chiseling a house from the trunk of a popple half killed by the success of a tinder polypore (which is a common fungus, a conk with fruiting bodies like so many horses’ hooves kicking out of the bole of the tree).

  The sun on my chest sets oceans flowing under my skin. Trickles form under the snowbanks all around me, meet one another and become rivulets. I hear the burbling and my heart pumps harder: I’m a stream again, and no longer ice. Underneath the birdsong is watersong, everything gurgling with melt. The temperature has passed seventy degrees: I’m still sweating, standing still in snowshoes.

  The sun gets hotter. The stream ice gives a loud groan and heave. A skin of clear water flows from a new fracture, eats the snow in front of it, gathers force. The whole surface of the ice lifts slightly, drops. The Temple is under there, impatient. It boils up out of fissures, spouts alongside rocks, flows at the stream edge. Ice breaks free, flips, makes a dam, gathers water, bursts in a wave that melts still more snow. After an hour of suspense—grinding, subtle movements in the ice—there’s a roar upstream, then a clapping sound, enormous dominoes, and suddenly around the bend a prodigious wave arrives: a large ice dam has broken. The wave lifts the ice below me three feet in a single heave, breaks it in huge pans that want to move downstream too, lifts whole sections twenty feet square and two feet thick, forms a new dam.

  The upstream ice keeps coming—large floes and pans bumping and thumping till they meet the blockade at our bend, where they tilt and flip and add themselves to its mass. The water rises fast, thrusting new pans on top and adding whole trees. Then higher, raising the dam till abruptly the last piece comes into place, an enormous pan that flips and breaks against all that’s already in place just below our bluff and vantage point, blocking the stream utterly to a height of ten feet or more. The water rises fast—a foot a minute, huge pressure building—overflows the lower field. Ice pans like loose diving rafts drift out where cows used to stand, pushing over the for-giving streamside alders till there are no alders in sight, bashing the bark off hardwoods twelve feet up their trunks (those scars will be puzzling in summer—what man or beast or little brook could reach so high?): the lowest field is flowing.

  Now the stream mounts more slowly, filling a basin of dozens of acres till finally it crests our high bank. I back away reluctantly, not wanting to miss the show, aim my snowshoes toward home, ready to trundle for my life. A pressure bulge grows in the dam, like a balloon inflating, a balloon made out of plates. Upstream, a large new floe gets stuck, flips like a boat capsizing, makes its own dam, one that briefly impounds the stream behind it. Under that force, the great floe explodes into fragments, unleashing a wave. Suddenly, with a sound like close thunder, the dam cracks and opens and climbs up on it-self, gargantuan pans of ice pushing up into the lower branches of the streamside trees and onto the banks.

  In seconds, all the millions of pounds of backed-up water roar through, extraordinary violence, sticks and logs and rocks and ice floes and bigger pans and muddy water roaring down-stream to the next pool, the solid old ice on top of which simply folds up, no match for the onslaught, folds up and forms a slow, roaring accordion pleat in front of an eight-foot-high wall of debris. Within a minute or two the whole mass rounds the bend a couple of hundred yards away, leaving ice chunks in all the fields like bridge sections high and dripping.

  Within half an hour the stream is gently flowing in its bed as if the season were autumn, muddy but mild, utterly free of floating ice, its banks strewn as far as I can see, the alders crushed and buried, the sweepers gone, the hard-won beaver dam absent, branches and old leaves and mud and dripping blocks of ice everywhere in the tropical sunshine, enormous marooned ice pans settling like dynamited bunkers, breaking on each other, the whole looking like the doused remains of a tenement after a catastrophic fire, winter washed away in under two hours’ time.

  I snowshoe-jog back to the house in a heat, anxious to share my experience: the power of nature! There’s Briana in the yard, collecting sticks. “The stream!” I cry. “The fields! All the snow! Washed away at once!”

  “Ice-out,” Briana says, her voice a shrug, and continues her tidying up.

  Upstream Four

  Twin Bridges to Russell’s Mill

  SPRING DIDN’T COME TILL APRIL THE YEAR EARL DROPPED HIS skidder on the ice. And Good Friday was good indeed that spring: fifty degrees, comparatively balmy, each breeze carrying a scent that was a memory, every new bit of green an inspiration. I was a bud and opened, too, quit work early, ten A.M. I collected my fly rod and drove just a mile downstream, parked by the Twin Bridges (once two identical covered bridges, now just a single cement span augmented where the old twin had been by an eight-foot-diameter flood-stage pipe, fraternal twin at best). I scrambled down the high bank to the streambed and walked through the tunnel the huge pipe made, whistling to hear the echo.

  I made my way downstream, nymphing on the faulty theory that above the millpond in early spring there’d be large trout on the move. (In fly-fishing parlance, nymphing is the use of a specialized lure, or fly, which amounts to a lot of thread and fur and tinsel tightly wound on a hook to resemble the larval stage of several common stream insects. You let the nymph—a woolly bugger, a hare’s ear, a stonefly—bounce along the bottom with the hope of attracting the interest of a hungry fish.) The going was tough and the fish weren’t biting (or weren’t there to begin with), so I turned back exactly where Earl had crashed—no obvious sign of the disaster now, just a quiescent pool with one sandy bank caved in. On the way back upstream I stopped fishing altogether and simply enjoyed the rock hop, concentratin
g so hard on my footing that I didn’t realize I was back at the Twin Bridges, and didn’t see the person till she spoke:

  “Another little boy with his fishing pole.”

  Startled, I peered into the dimness of the huge pipe.

  “Never fear, I’m just a little wood sprite,” she said. Her voice echoed eerily off the corrugations of the galvanized metal, gained volume, but was still the wavering voice of an old woman and no sprite, as sprites are ever young. As my eyes adjusted to the dark in there I saw she was standing at the other end of the tube in dead water to her bare knees, holding up a long skirt. My own feet were cold in boots and I hadn’t touched the water.

  She said, ’You didn’t ask, but I’m considering this pipe.”

  I walked on through to her end on a rim of sand and stones. Standing on a big riprap rock, I loomed over her. She looked up at me with clearest brown eyes, held her skirt, wicked little smile; she could have been ten years old. But she was at the other end of things—very old, it looked. Her hair was a rinse-white puff, her face nicely creased from smiling, her skin dark. She seemed to tilt a little to starboard, wore a neat little gray cardigan over a ruffled blouse, and out of her sleeve stuck a nice wad of tissue, which she pulled out at that moment for a dainty sneeze.

  “Pine pollen,” she said.

  “It gets me, too,” I said.

  “Just look how this pipe-way is gathering sand,” she said. “It’s thirty feet long, at a guess, and if you look, you’ll see that the latest flow made three turns in that length.”

  I looked, looked again, saw only slowly that the stream, long receded, had pushed up several sandbars, leaving a sinuous track through the pipe.

  “Rather beautiful,” she said.

  I agreed.

  She was encouraged by my interest and continued: “It’s just as if the corrugations of the pipe weren’t there at all—the water is ignoring the pipe absolutely. You know, they always talk about flood stage clearing the pipe-way, but it doesn’t happen in these low-incline installations. The water considers this overflow a back channel and wants to fill it.”