A Clearing in the forest (11 page)

He studied the picture. “Well …” Turning to the operator of the bulldozer, he asked, “What about if we leave that corner there where the pine is and they can squeeze the tanks over in this direction?”

The operator shrugged.

The man turned back to her. “But the other trees got to go. We're already keeping the space more tight than we should. It's for your own protection, ma'am. If a fire gets going, you dont' want any trees close by.”

She remembered the red glow in the sky last spring and nodded.

Then the frieze of men came to life. Bulldozers rumbled back and forth for three days, shouldering down the trees; only the largest were accorded the dignity of being individually felled. They were cut down on the second day. She had sat in the cabin listening to the whine of the chain saws. By five o'clock she could see a pile of logs heaped up high as a house, all cut into two-foot lengths. A half hour later when she looked again, they were gone.

She was out of the house and into her pickup. It took her nearly ten minutes to catch up with the big truck, but once she saw it, she gained on it steadily. It was big and cumbersome and the heavy load of logs slowed it down. Steal her trees, would they! She passed it on the crest of a hill, edging an oncoming car and its terrified driver off onto the shoulder. Once in front of the truck, she screeched to a halt, blocking its path.

She jumped out and stamped over to the two men in the cab, who looked down at her and listened to what she had to say with stupified expressions. For many years they had worked with tough men, doing rough work. They had struggled with frozen equipment in below zero weather and once they had spent the better part of a day pulling a capsized trailer out of a mud bank in the rain, but even in their extremity they had not had recourse to so rich a vocabulary. The summary of Frances's various suggestions and remarks was that they should turn their truck around forthwith and deliver the logs to her cabin door.

When they arrived, they found her plans for them included stacking the wood. Otherwise, she told them, the sheriff would be called in. (“My good friend, the sheriff” was how she had put it.) There were eight cords of wood, and they finished stacking it by moonlight. When they were through, she gave them each a glass of cider and told them they had done a nice job.

After that, the crew was never out of her sight. Each morning she measured the distance to the river with a ball of string to be sure they had not edged closer.

In the daytime, when the bulldozing crew was there in front of her and she could confront the enemy, it was tolerable; in the evening, when they were gone and she stood looking across the three acres that had once been forest and were now nothing more than a flat stretch of naked sand, she was desolate and could think of nothing to say to the river.

Then the derrick took over the empty space. For days trucks rolled in and out, dragging long trailers loaded with lengths of steel. What had once been a footpath through the woods became a roadway thirty feet wide. An enormous ditch stood ready to hold the brine and drilling compound. Another ditch was excavated for innumerable black plastic bags of cans and paper that seemed to accumulate endlessly. At one end of the clearing two house trailers had been set up.

The dog was delighted with all the activity. Each morning he was anxious to be out on his rounds of the location and had long since made friends with the drillers. He begged scraps shamelessly from their lunch each noon, and in the evening when Wilson arrived for the night shift, he bounded over to greet him.

Finally, two days ago, at four in the morning, the engines had been switched on and the drilling began. Sometimes the sound of the engines was like a surf rolling in; at other times there was an urgent bleating noise, accompanied by black puffs of smoke. More irritating than the noise was the suspense. If they found oil, the site would be enlarged and a moonscape of holding tanks, pumps and heaters would go up. Day and night, machinery would run and oil tankers would lumber in and out.

Because he knew how anxious Frances was, Wilson had managed to be assigned to the rig so that he could report to her. He did it with a high sense of drama, calling in from obscure phone booths and lowering his voice as though someone might be following him. The men who worked on the rig weren't supposed to give out any information which might alert other oil companies with property nearby. He had told her that if his calls were discovered, he could lose his job. What he hadn't told her was that much of his secrecy was to keep his parents from knowing that he was still in touch with her.

Early in the afternoon Frances heard a truck pull into her road. Since the dog wasn't barking, she guessed it was Wilson. He climbed out of the front seat, grinning. From the doorway she watched him heave the carcass of a deer out of the back of the pickup.

She saw from the size of its antlers that it was the old buck. She told herself there was no point in mourning his passing. The herd was large this year. They were predicting a bad winter with the kind of snow that immobilized deer. Certainly a shot was better than slow starvation. She consoled herself with Wilson's triumphant look and the thought of how good a haunch of venison would taste. But with the buck dead, she wondered who would help her watch over the land.

17

When she looked out of the window and saw the snow whipping into migrating drifts, Wilson's mother begged him to stay home. “Call them and tell them you're not feeling well,” she said.

But Wilson could imagine what T. K.'s response would be to that. “First little bit of weather we get and the boy cops out,” he'd say. “When you goin' to hire on some real men, Pete?” If the weather was bad tonight, it would be a lot worse before the winter was over. Once they started drilling a well, they didn't stop until they finished. The rig cost thousands of dollars a day; to let it stand idle would have been wasteful. It ran twenty-four hours a day, twelve months a year.

When Wilson reached the site, the earlier shift was leaving. “Don't envy you,” one of the men called out to him. “That pipe's colder than a well-digger's bottom.” Wilson's heart sank when he saw they hadn't finished sending the pipe down and his shift would have to complete the job, struggling with the cold metal in the snow and high winds.

Pete sent Wilson up to the platform. “You can start off up there,” he told him. “If it gets too bad, holler, and I'll send Barch up to trade off with you.”

Wilson fastened on his safety line and slowly made his way up the snow-covered scaffolding. Climbing the open ladder was bad, but riding the block up was worse. You stood there suspended from the giant steel weight, moving unprotected through the air.

He eased himself onto the platform's slippery metal slats. The wind and snow slashed at his face. Snow accumulated in heavy flakes on his eyelashes, making it difficult to see, and fell on his nose and mouth. He ran his tongue around his lips and tasted the snow. In other years the first big snowfall had been reason for celebration; in this work it was nothing but a nuisance.

A hundred feet below, Lyle, manipulating the drawworks, had sent the block shooting up through the derrick's open center, and Wilson reached out to attach the first piece of pipe. The block was barely within reach. Wilson had to stretch dangerously close to the edge of the platform. Since he had been chased off of Mrs. Crawford's property, Lyle had done everything he could to make Wilson's work as difficult and dangerous as possible. Wilson thought Lyle suspected him of telling Pete and T. K. about the hornet's nest. He hadn't. Even when Lyle had turned up at work covered with red welts, Wilson had said nothing. Maybe that was what had really angered Lyle: Wilson's silence. It gave him a kind of power over Lyle.

Wilson shook the snow from the top of the pipe and made the connection. In weather like this everything took twice as long. They wouldn't be breaking any records tonight. Wilson's first half hour on the platform seemed like a week. He thought of calling down and exchanging jobs, but he didn't want to give Lyle the satisfaction of seeing him give up.

From his perch on the platform, the river below him was little more than a black ribbon winding between the white, snow-covered banks. He thought of how different it had looked a few months ago and remembered a day in August when he had fished one of the small feeder streams. To take his mind off of the wind and snow, he tried to summon back the summer afternoon.

The wet sand along the low edges of the bank had been covered with a filigree of woodcock tracks and tunneled with muskrat holes. There were spikes of scarlet cardinal flower and the grass-of-Parnassus was just starting to bloom. Where the land had been burned off, silt had washed into the stream and the water all but disappeared. He had to wade through swales of tall sedges, soft mud sucking at his feet.

Water striders swam upstream in little jerks, stopped, and were carried downstream again, each time gaining half again as much distance as they had lost. Their shadows moved with them like black flowers, each one with a large center and four smaller surrounding petals.

It was nearly impossible to cast without snagging his line in the tag alder and willow branches that stretched like a green canopy over his head. The trout here were small and wary, skittering off at the least movement.

Behind him he saw how the path he had made through the tall marsh grass allowed the current to flow more quickly. In the small feeder streams, unlike the river, where a hundred men coming and going would make little difference, one person passing through the tiny creek could cause an irreversible change. For this reason the small stream seemed more human than the river, more vulnerable.

About twenty feet upstream a cloud-shaped mass moved over the water. It was nearly ten feet across, much larger than a swarm of bees. It dipped over the stream, rose, and dipped again. He hurried to investigate. As he got closer, he could see the cloud was made up of shiny green fragments, thousands of migrating dragonflies—green darners. They were driven by an instinct that made no sense. He knew dragonflies rarely migrated. They would die before the season was over, so why did they bother to leave their breeding ground? The shimmering green cloud bannered out and disappeared, leaving him with the loneliness of one who had seen a vision—something that no one could ever share with him.

A cold gust of wind scattered the images of the summer's day and Wilson, feeling the sharp chill of the steel through his gloves, swung out the last length of pipe. He started down the ladder, only to find it was nearly impossible for him to keep his balance on the snow-packed rungs. He would never be able to make his way down. Below him through the white streaks of snow, he saw Pete wave his arms and motion toward the block. Wilson guessed he was telling him not to try decending the ladder but to ride the block down.

When it reached the platform, Wilson forced himself into the open elevator that dangled from the block. It was like standing up in a swing one hundred feet in the air. The snow and wind came at him from all sides, each flake highlighted in the glare of the floodlights. Below him he could make out T. K.'s red parka and Lyle at the drawworks controlling his descent. From this height they looked like midgets.

It seemed to him that Lyle was bringing him down too fast. He felt himself dropping toward earth as though someone had pushed him out of a window or the door of an airplane. He was nearly even with the roof of the doghouse and he waited for Lyle to slow the block down, but the ground rushed toward him. Then it slammed against his body.

18

In the early hours of that November morning Frances dreamed she was walking in the deep forest where the thick trees screened out the sun. Enormous white triangular forms sprang up in front of her. They were the skeletons of icebergs, their bones ice-encrusted steel. A wintery gale pushed and tugged at the huge shapes until they began to sway and groan. Animals raced past her to escape the teetering giants. As the winds howled, the skeletons crashed to the ground, one by one, crushing the fleeing animals beneath them. It was their frightened screams that awakened her. Then the animals shrieks became a siren—something real.

Frances extricated herself from the tangle of sheets and blankets she had woven with her tossing and turning. The siren was coming from the well site. The lights of the rig were visible through the white snow that sliced the black sky. Her first thought was that the well had caught fire. She looked for flames rising in the darkness, but there was only the usual cold white glare of the fluorescent lights that made the site look like an operating room. The sirens faded. Since Wilson was working on the night shift, he'd be able to tell her what had happened.

Although it was only six o'clock, she dressed hurriedly, anxious to get out of the room where she felt that pieces of her nightmare were still bumping about in the darkness. There was a lovely early-morning farm program from the state college on television. The people appearing on the program were exactly like the people she used to know fifty years ago. Only their clothing had changed.

Frances turned on the porch light before letting the dog out and saw a huge gray shape leave the ground, circle the cabin, and fly away. A small mangled animal lay a few feet from the door; beneath it the snow was red. An owl had been tearing at something. For the last week the tracks of a snowshoe hare had cut through the yard. Last night she had thrown out some old apples and greens for the hare. Instead of it having been a kindness, she had made the hare move into the dangerous open space where an owl had been watching.

Stupid and thoughtless she had been. The trouble was that in winter she felt deserted when raccoons and porcupines curled up in trees and snakes and worms twined together underground. There was nothing for company but birds.

She scolded herself for sounding like a petulant old lady. She had her books, and Wilson managed to stop by each week. Together they were charting the drill's progress as it passed through shale, where cold water was trapped in pools, down into rock that had once been covered by inland seas, and into the salt beds. Wilson had brought some of the salt for her. It had given her a strange feeling to taste salt from her own land and know that it was millions of years old. “Don't worry,” Wilson kept assuring her, “they aren't going to find any oil. I won't let them.”