Temple Stream Page 22

  The dogs went silent, pressed up to my legs for safety. My heart beat in my throat, my feet seemed to float off the road. Earl twirled the axe, caught its handle, pointed the head at me once more, held it unwavering for ten long seconds, colossal strength, held my eye coldly. ’You are cast out,” he cried.

  At length, he turned and tromped down the hill biblically. We could hear his vest buckles jangling all the way to the tum for the log road that led to the boulder-veiled access to his place. I gave him another minute, then bid my feet move, rushed to the fallen tree, ducked under its thick trunk, ran downstream behind the dogs in the blackness of the new night till we were safely in our truck and rumbling home.

  Footnote

  1. Wolves are big old open-field farm trees surrounded by younger forest grown up around them.

  Winter Solstice

  DOWN TO SOLSTICE CREPT THE SUN. ELYSIA PEARL HAD BEGUN to sleep longer and longer, and Juliet had been able to expand her painting hours. Dog Desmond, ten years our baby, eyed the infant with continuing jealousy, but managed somehow to keep a veneer of civility, at any rate didn’t drag her from her crib. Wally, in love, sniffed her hand, licked her toes gentle-manly, stood guard. The boy who’d been hit by the car had come out of his coma, another miracle, and though perhaps he wasn’t going to be the same again, he was alive, and thinking, and getting better daily, so said the Franklin Journal. We bundled Elysia to John Hodgkins’s place to show her off and cut our yearly Christmas tree streamside. Nancy Prentiss wrote me a note to say that she had started to think that alien plant species weren’t so awfully bad after all. Colleen Callahan, the little neighbor girl who’d found the first bottle (tall and bright, strawberry hair and freckles, buzzing with curiosity), stopped by our dooryard with a serious friend named Gagnon (dark hair and dimples, frank gazes), to see if I’d heard back from any other bottles and was thrilled to learn I had: “Three’s the magical number,” she said, wonderment in her eyes. Gagnon, impressed, thought there’d be one more: I still hadn’t heard from Europe, she said, or places even farther flung.1

  For my part, I did resign my tenured position on the graduate English faculty at Ohio State, a rash move. But I’d been asked to teach a class as a visiting professor at Colby College, near home, and had a journalism assignment or two, and with the additional buffer of scant savings the new little family wouldn’t starve immediately.

  One way to save some money was to continue the practice of making my own repairs around the house, starting with the broken shutoff valve under the kitchen sink. At the hardware store I spied Ms. Bollocks trying to avoid me—I’d know that shaved head and sunken posture anyplace—made some swift moves, cornered her near the power tools, let her know the news: we wouldn’t be needing her services anymore, though of course we’d be glad to help her find a new situation.

  First she shrugged—her roommate Briana had bought a farm, so all housing needs were covered—but then her face brightened with an idea even as her eyes went shrewd: “Well, that’s all fine, Bill, but you people owe me twenty-four hundred dollars.”

  I didn’t even blink, just waited for her logic, and soon it came:

  “It’s four hundred a month, right? Unless you were planning to raise it up this year, in which case let’s say four-fifty. Six months, Bill, multiplied times four-fifty a month, that’s twenty-seven hundred dollars, correct? And if you’re just going to cancel out on me like this, then you can pay it to me right now.”

  “Well, no, no, see here, Ms. Bollocks,” I said reasonably, playing country squire, “it’s you who would be paying us.”

  “Not if I ain’t there, Bill,” she told me, condescending: clearly I just didn’t understand higher mathematics.

  I knew where the cycle of that argument was heading, decided to cut it off with even more formal tones: “But despite all, Ms. Bollocks, my wife and I would like to thank you for all the years you helped us out and especially for the kind gift.”

  Slowly, beaming, trying to keep the ingenuous face, she said, “My kind gift?”

  Beaming myself—I couldn’t help it—1 said, ’Yes, Ms. Bollocks, you know the box you left in my dresser drawer? My penis! It’s almost as big as yours now!”

  At that she let out such a bray of laughter that every head in the store turned our way. And I laughed too, and Ms. Bollocks and I laughed together, and took each other by the forearms—that close to hugging.

  I’D CONFOUNDED BOB KIMBER WITH MY REPORT ON SCHOOL-HOUSEPond, and now he was bound to come with me, the search for the source of the Temple a minor adventure for an outdoorsman nearly seventy who was preparing even then for an expedition up the frozen George River to Ungava Bay, three hundred sixty miles by snowshoe in dead winter with a crew half his age, northern Labrador into Quebec, all of them towing sledges, shooting ptarmigan, dreaming caribou. But my little geographic conundrum mattered to him: this was his home turf. He was waiting for me in his driveway, red rucksack al-ready on his back, trusty old cable-knit fisherman’s sweater on his chest, familiar wool pants, vintage duck boots, watch cap on his head, white hair falling in his eyes. He greeted me shaking his head: hell of a morning to be out stomping around!

  There’d been half an inch of wet snow overnight, and the tracks of every animal that had crossed the settler road were before us: squirrel, partridge, snowshoe hare, fox, coyote, deer, moose, mouse. We left only the prints of people: no dogs this trip. The solstice forest around us stood in bare bones; our boots crunched frost castles that had risen from mud in the night. Quickly—Bob’s pace is prodigious—we reached the knocked-down house. Bob had known the shy man a little, and was dismayed at the ruin, vowed to ask after him in town. After that came the turnoff to Ted Enslin’s mountain house. Bob had known him, too, of course.

  Ted had told me about a milestone marked A and key at the Avon town line, dated as early as 1784, and we looked for it in the leaf litter where the line should have been—couldn’t find it—another thing gone missing since the poet had lived there.

  Bob at one time or another had known most of the people who’d lived up there. I asked if he knew Earl Pomeroy.

  Bob thought a minute, eyeing me through fogged eyeglasses. “Doesn’t ring a bell.”

  “A behemoth in overalls?”

  He tilted his head. Deaf in one ear, he hadn’t heard me, something I’d grown used to.

  I crossed around to his good side as we marched, repeated myself.

  “Ah! Well! Plenty of giants in these woods!”

  We laughed, but I dreaded seeing Earl again, one of the reasons I’d invited Bob along. And I’d hesitated to tell Bob the story of my trespass and expulsion. My trepidation grew as we hoofed closer to Earl’s turnoff, but there was no sign of him, no sound of a motor, no Sasquatch prints in the slight snow. So I kept the story to myself, even as we passed the spot where Earl had felled the large beech over the road. Not hard to do: the tree was gone. The stump had been cleaned up, too, chain-sawed neatly at the ground. The wood had been hauled. The remaining branches had been pulled carefully out of the stream and up into the woods in small pieces—thorough Earl, leaving no sign, wasting no timber.

  Bob and I charged up the eroded hill between magical pools and fallen hemlock, waded through the stream where it had eaten the road, passed through the hunting camp with hellos—one of the guides was there, an elderly fellow with a florid nose, cheerfully cleaning house after his season—and into the forest. Just above the beaver pond Bob pulled up short. I couldn’t stop, plowed into him. A moose stood in the road ahead, contemplated us calmly, brief standoff till he was bored and legged it slowly up into a sloppy cut, stepping over slash, working his antlers between the thousand saplings.

  Bob said, “When Rita and I first came to Temple it was heaven up here. We used to ski, snowshoe, take hikes. There were a lot more moose, for one thing, and there were no bull-dozed roads up here at all, from the Temple side or the Avon side. It was just the sweet old settler road, like it is for a little still. The woods
were in nice shape, a lot of pasture land still showing, still a couple of wrecky houses standing.”

  At the top of the next rise, Bob pointed to a white-painted cross someone had made out of leaf springs from a truck and had nailed to a black cherry tree at an opening in the stone wall. This was the cemetery from the Avon hill settlement. Some good person had come through and cut back the popple scrub, placed little American flags on the graves of the Civil War vets. But someone else had left ten very large stumps—had logged the graveyard, in effect, letting in the light that allowed the popples to grow. A few headstones were standing; many more were buried in the leaf litter and snow, some deeper than that, fallen to time or skidder tire, broken, strewn. We scraped the dirt out of old-fashioned names—Loretta, Marilla, Mehitable, Prudence, Asahel—grew chilly.

  Below us down in the woods the stream tumbled—recent rain and the new melting snow had swollen it, and the flow was emphatic. We’d find the source easily with volume like that. The obvious way, of course, was to simply follow the stream uphill until we found its start. We clambered down off the settler road to the Temple through the thick young woods under the gaze of dead settlers and had a look. Ice knobs had formed on sedges dipping the current, and the multitude of rocks were coated with ice, a lovely, satisfying spectacle. After a minute, we started up through the woods alongside the water. The walking was easy enough around slash and through mixed-species saplings—these had grown at different rates under the shelter of canopy trees some good logger had left. But then we crossed a property line marked clearly and straight as a surveyor’s laser by an impassable forest of birch saplings, no other species, no shelter wood, irresponsible logging, very difficult going.

  In summer we might have used the stream itself as a right-of-way, but the ice made that too difficult. We hacked our way alongside it for a couple of hundred feet but gave up, turned north and deadheaded our way to a wide stone wall atop which we skipped, all the way to its terminus near a basement hole. We poked around those rocks briefly, found iron hoops from wagon wheels and the pothook from a hearth. From these things a farmstead rose before us, hard-won but productive, kids at chores, grown-ups tossing hay, old folks putting up pre-serves, animals grazing, views to mountains on all sides.

  “Let’s skip the scrub and start with the pond,” Bob said. He still didn’t quite believe me. Schoolhouse Pond had no outlet? This seemed impossible, and certainly countered the survey map, which we both trusted implicitly. Had I missed something? At Schoolhouse Pond, we watched the ice floe turn. It had shrunk to maybe a quarter acre in the relatively warm weeks since Wally had ridden it, but new ice was growing in lace at the margins of the water. A breeze rippled the surface, stirred the cedars, chilled my sweat. I pointed across the way to the high butt of the rock wall I’d seen last time.

  Bob squinted, wanting to see the wall, pulled two different pairs of glasses from his various pockets, tried them on, squinted more. “I just can’t make it out,” he said ruefully. Still, he tried, muttering, “My vision was perfect till I was forty.”

  We worked our way quickly through the cedar bog. Just to prove it to himself—no insult implied—Bob crossed back and forth in the snowy leaf litter where the mixed-hardwood forest resumed: no brook of any kind. Together we crossed back and forth in long transects south of the pond: no stream. After a half hour, our morning disappearing, we reentered the birch scrub on a compass point south till we hit the stone wall, followed that west up to the settler road—no stream—then turned around reluctantly and followed the wall the other way, east, slim branches whipping the cold skin of our faces. When the wall ended, we kept going, pushing the slim trees aside, a difficult march. Suddenly, we poked out of the scrub onto the bulldozed road.

  We’d just crossed the whole valley under Schoolhouse Pond from road to road: no Temple Stream. We looked up that logging road, down that logging road, and then we looked at each other. Bob frowned and said, “Where did that friggin’ stream go?”

  We pulled out three maps. The DeLorme Maine Gazetteer, meant as a road map, showed the stream just petering out on Day Mountain. The old fishing-guide map, my original evidence (which had fallen into two pieces at the crease), showed the stream crossing a road about where this road seemed to be and running to a large pond marked Schoolhouse: wrong. Bob pulled out the survey map: it showed the Temple issuing from Schoolhouse Pond, but at least it had the pond right, so mixed marks. Further, it showed a long pond where my beaver meadow had been, no doubt correct at the time the map was drawn, wrong now.

  “We’ll have to call these guys,” Bob said.

  We used our heels to mark the muddy snow where we’d come out of the forest, and I took Bob to my dried-up pond, just as beautiful as when I’d seen it last, those spruce trees ghostly at the bend.

  “How’d I ever miss this?” Bob said.

  It would have been the place for lunch, but a stiff southerly wind had come up (it would bring deep snow that night), damp and claw-cold in our faces. We thrashed up into a section of uncut woods and found a fallen balsam, broke lichened branches to make room to sit. My jeans and T-shirt and socks had gotten damp and I’d taken a terrible chill. In my rucksack, underneath lunch, I had dry socks and a T-shirt, but no trousers. Bob was decked out in wool, mostly, and was dry. His rucksack was heavier than mine, just his routine survival items, things I carried too—lunch, matches, knife, rope, clothing, compass, map—but also a hatchet, a large tarp, several packets of dried food, a first-aid kit, a roll of duct tape, mess kit, space blanket, and who knew what else. If anything went wrong, we had what we needed to live for a few days, depending on injuries. Bob taught by example. Not that that place was remote—we were only a few miles from home—but anyplace in the winter forest can become remote instantly in the event of a bad fall.

  Bob put his folded tarp on the wet snow for me to stand on, gave a happy shrug. “Even half frozen on a soggy day, it’s good to be in the woods,” he said. I changed socks quickly as I could in the cold wind, stripped down to bare chest and put on a new undershirt. Dressed and more comfortable, but unrelievedly conscious of the damp legs of my blue jeans, I sat beside Bob and pulled out my lunch: that hummus sandwich didn’t look big enough by half. My feet were freezing. Bob pulled out his own double-sized Swiss-cheese sandwich and something even more inviting: a thermos of exquisitely hot herbal tea. He handed me the cup first. That warmth, it was like God’s touch, and it brought me life, radiated from my belly, warmed my heart, my blood, which quickly warmed my toes, another Kimber lesson.

  We ate companionably, sharing the thermos, sharing bites of sandwich back and forth, grew voluble, switched places on the spruce trunk to put me on the side of Bob’s good ear. Thinking of Earl (we’d have to walk down past his road on the way home) I asked Bob how he’d gotten along with people in Temple over the years.

  He thought a minute, said, “There was a lot of tension. Especially around the antiwar stuff, which I was into, neck-deep. The thing that really sticks in my memory is the insularity of our little émigré community. In retrospect, I’ve got a very tom feeling about it. There’s a lot I could have learned from the local community, but didn’t. But after all these years, you know, it’s like stones in the bottom of the brook, they rub against each other long enough and the sharp corners get rounded off, they start to fit together. Still, no matter what, even though Rita and I have been here thirty years, to our neighbors we’re always going to be year-round summer people.”

  Bob recalled for me several hunting adventures he’d had in this basin, all the skiing he’d done before the logging began, even a few nights camping with Rita and their son, Greg. And he described again the dense woods he’d found there, days gone. He said, “Places like this don’t have a chance. So many people in the world, needing so much. But I guess I won’t volunteer to die just yet.”

  We talked in that vein, everything an elegy in the woods in late December. I pulled out four bonbons I’d liberated from a Christmas box, and chocol
ate never tasted so good. As we ate, we heard a raven squawking off in the forest, closer, further, closer again, then I spotted it, several hundred yards west of our bivouac, a huge black bird soaring just over the treetops, clacking.

  “Wolves,” Bob said.

  I knew what he meant. We’d both just attended a talk given by a wolf researcher and learned that ravens like to travel with wolves—they scavenge from wolf kills—and apparently the two species have adapted to one another. In wolf country, up in Canada, out west, ravens see the migrating herds of caribou or antelope from the sky, show wolves where to go, join them at the resulting kills. But wolves are extinct in Maine (if perhaps poised for a comeback via Quebec).

  I howled and the raven wheeled, just like that, wheeled back and flew over us in a big, cautious circle, cocking its head to look down upon us. With a disappointed squawk (no wolves to speak of, and the humans not dead enough to eat), the bird flew off to look for other eyes to peck.

  Now we were both getting cold. Thin clouds had veiled the sun and robbed what little warmth it had offered; the air itself seemed frozen. Time to run our engines. We packed up, made our way back to the moose path and into the meadow, struck off through the dried pond, hopping rocks and stumps through the old beaver channel, making our way clear down to the thickness of alders at the far end. We didn’t need to battle through them: we could see an unbroken ridge of land beyond, maybe ten feet of elevation higher than even a full pond would ever attain, proof, it we needed it, that this wet beaver meadow had never been Temple Stream’s source.