Archangel (2 page)

He propped himself against a speed-limit sign in the slush at the side of the road. Then he waited for someone to come, listening above
the waterfall noise of the wind through the pines for the grumble of an engine. The cold walked up to him and sat down beside him and laid its hands on his goose-bumped flesh. Soon he was shivering out of control. He began to think he might have preferred to stay in the woods instead of lying there like some possum, road-killed on the verge.

Twenty minutes later, when he heard a truck coming, his hands were so numb that he couldn’t switch on the flashlight. The high-beams of the truck burned through the forest and splashed across the road. Suddenly Mackenzie was trapped in their fire. It was too small for a logging truck. Too big for a jeep. He raised the light and waved his ice-cut hands and shouted.

The machine slowed. Its gears downshifted. Mackenzie could see the red-and-white sign of the Sparks and Loftus Dairy.

It was Barnaby Sparks in the truck, returning from Skowhegan after dropping off milk at the dairy. He was drinking from an old army canteen into which he had poured cream and vodka and coffee liqueur to make himself a White Russian cocktail. When he saw the man, he stamped on the brakes, which squealed as they brought the heavy Mercedes truck to a stop. He could make no sense of it—a man out here in the middle of the night. In a panic, he wondered if it might be a police trap, to catch him driving-while-intoxicated again. He opened the window and threw out the canteen. Then he reached into his pocket and ate a roll of mints, gouging them from the packet into his mouth one after another with his thumb, hoping to hide the smell of alcohol. He crunched them and swallowed the gritty fragments. They went down his throat like pieces of broken china.

Mackenzie heard a door open. Boots thumped the road as the driver jumped down. “By Jesus, what’s going on?” asked Sparks. He moved with the same heavy plod as his cows.

“It’s me,” Mackenzie said. “I’m all fucked up,” he whispered.

“What are you doing?” Sparks’s thin face crumpled as he recognized Mackenzie. In the headlights’ glare, Sparks’s tight blond and receding curls made a fuzzy halo around his ears.

Mackenzie lowered his gaze to where his leg had been. “Look what I had to do,” he said. The bone glimmered green-white and the torn skin was so pale it looked like carved alabaster.

Sparks fainted. His eyes rolled back into his head until they looked like two peeled hard-boiled eggs. He pitched facedown into the snow.

“No!” Mackenzie bashed Sparks on his springy-haired head with the flashlight. “I didn’t come all this way to die at a road sign. Not with you lying there right in front of me. No!”

After a minute, Sparks raised his head. His eyebrows were crusted with snow. When it looked as if he might pass out again, Mackenzie hooked his finger under Sparks’s jaw and kept it there, sunk deep into the man’s throat, until his fluttering consciousness returned. “I swear to God,” growled Mackenzie, “that I will take you with me you goddamned milkman if you don’t get us both back to town.”

“By Jesus,” Sparks said, as he dragged Mackenzie to the truck, hands tucked under the man’s armpits, “I never seen anything like it. There I was and here you are and the leg and, by Jesus, I can’t even say.”

Mackenzie smelled the sour milk on Sparks’s hands and the syrupy sweetness of the White Russian on his breath. The whole truck carried a yogurtlike sourness to it, which caused people in town to hold their breath in the gust of wind whenever the truck rumbled past.

“OK,” Sparks announced when he had them both in the truck. “OK,” he said again, and slapped the large black ring of the steering wheel, a confused look on his face, as if he had suddenly forgotten how to drive.

“Look, Barnaby.” Mackenzie’s jaw trembled with the cold. “After you get me to a doctor, can you go up the logging road until you find my truck?”

“Yes.” Sparks nodded, bracing himself, hands clasped on the wheel, but still unsure how to set the truck in motion.

“And can you get my leg and bring it back?”

“By Jesus,” said Sparks, and fainted again. His head cracked down on the steering wheel.

As soon as Mackenzie realized what had happened, he reached across and grabbed the white cloth of Sparks’s overalls at the back of the neck and heaved the man across his lap. Then Mackenzie shoved Sparks headfirst into the passenger-side seat well and slid himself across to the driver’s seat. With his good leg, he revved the engine
high in neutral, then slipped it into drive. As Mackenzie rode into town, he gripped the wheel to fend off the pain that mauled him each time the truck bounced over a pothole. Nausea churned his stomach, hoisting the cold coffee into the back of his throat.

Then, for the first time in his life, Mackenzie began to pray. He prayed to stay alive, clouding the windshield with his breath.

Sparks groaned in the seat well. The first lights of houses slid past.

At last Mackenzie felt shock overtake him. His nerves retreated deep inside. The outside world was vanishing like smoke. He stopped at the Four Seasons diner, its windows blurred with condensation and the shapes of people at their tables more ghostlike than real.

Mackenzie could go no farther. He lowered his head onto the silver half-moon bar of the horn. As his muscles relaxed, the weight of his skull set the horn’s long wail sounding across the town and out into the hills around Abenaki Junction. It was the last thing he remembered from that night.

He would not pray again for many years. Not until the moment of his death.

A decade passed before Mackenzie’s chain-saw dreams finally left him alone. It was as if his debt to them had at last been paid and they evaporated into the same red cloud of thought in which they had been born.

Sometimes he would wake in the night and feel the leg in its casing of dull pain. He would place his hands down hard, fingers spread, on the place where the leg should have been, and touch nothing but the wool of the blanket and the hard mattress underneath. But he could feel it, as if the leg existed on another plane of being and would always be there, even though he could not see or touch it, or walk without the heavy plastic limb which he placed at his bedside each night, sock and boot attached, its colored plastic chosen to match the opalescent chalkiness of his other leg. He strapped on this prosthesis every morning with the same unthinking precision with which he strapped on his belt and shaved and brushed his hair.

He didn’t worry anymore about what people thought of him, the way he had in the first struggling years of running the company. Now people stood in awe of Jonah Mackenzie, believing that a man who
had done this much damage to himself and survived would be left alone by bad luck and disaster from then on. So far, it seemed to be true. Since he had turned to clear-cutting the forest, his profits were far greater than his father’s had been. Mackenzie’s whole life had been shoved into the same charmed and half-real world that his old leg seemed to inhabit.

This all changed one morning in early June, when Victor Coltrane arrived at the Mackenzie mill, bringing news of a death in the forest. Coltrane was Mackenzie’s company foreman. He had been around since the days of Mackenzie’s father. Mackenzie watched him coming down the corridor. He saw the hard sinews of muscle wrapped around Coltrane’s arms and the way he wore his shoulder blades like medieval armor on his back. His neck and legs seemed built to take the shock of a danger that hadn’t yet arrived.

Mackenzie sensed disaster coming, the way he recognized miniature tornadoes of dust in the millyard as signs of an approaching storm. Coltrane stopped in the doorway to Mackenzie’s office. The knit of Coltrane’s sleeveless sweater expanded and contracted across his chest as he caught his breath. For a moment, the two men just looked at each other, one standing and the other sitting behind his custom-made black-cherry desk, its wood dark amber and glowing.

Then Coltrane spoke. “Get down to the car,” he said. “Something terrible has happened.”

Without a word, Mackenzie stood, picked his black-and-red plaid jacket off a wooden peg and put it on. Then he took up his walking stick, its top a plum-sized ball of walrus ivory, and, stiff-legged, followed Coltrane out of the office. People turned to watch them go, secretaries and mill workers and a man who’d come to restock the Coca-Cola machine. Mackenzie did not return their stares.

On his way to see the accident, Jonah Mackenzie caught a glimpse of his own reflection in the Range Rover’s window. He raised one hand and touched the mirror image of his eye. It bothered him, but he didn’t know why. Then he focused past his face to the ranks of young pine trees that grew beside the road. The pines had been planted in such straight lines that the empty avenues between them seemed to race away like frightened animals. Mackenzie vaguely recalled what this place had looked like before he clear-cut the land, not unlike when the French and English settlers used the gently sloping ground
on the banks of Pogansett Lake as a place to trade with the Abenaki Indians. Guns, knives, beads, pots and pans for beaver and muskrat pelts. Mackenzie’s family had been here since 1790, almost as long as the town. His ancestors had helped to drive out the Indians once and for all. Mackenzie used to tell Alicia, who quietly endured his repetition, that if it weren’t for him Abenaki Junction would be swallowed by the forest. The scouting vines and sapling trees would spread their stubborn tangles through abandoned buildings, across the rusty railroad tracks and down the potholed main street until nothing remained of the town.

On any other day, to see the landscape ordered in this way would have filled Mackenzie with a calm that moved like sleep through his nerves. Tabula Rasa, he thought. Clean Slate. Sweep the forest aside and start again with himself as supreme architect. Tabula Rasa. He loved the way those Latin words rolled off his tongue. The finality of it. The absoluteness. Its purity was almost sexual. The trees in their planted rows appeared to rise in obedience to him. He thought how much he had changed since leaving Yale thirty years before and returning to the north Maine woods to work for his father. He had found himself in the middle of a war against the other logging operations—Deschamps, Mottet, Ruger. The Mackenzies had outlasted them all. It was also a war against faulty machinery, against dishonest employees and wasted time. Once a month Mackenzie went through a day with a stopwatch, marking down whatever he did at fifteen-minute intervals, to see if he was working as efficiently as he could. It was also a war against the forest for taking his leg and leaving him to pace through his life with a cripple’s awkward gait. It would not end until each thing that grew in the wilderness and could be useful to man was spread out in vast, worshipful columns around the town of Abenaki Junction.

As Coltrane drove, he told as much as he knew. Some loggers had been cutting into trees just south of the Canadian Atlantic Railroad. The chain saw being used by a young man named James Pfeiffer had snapped its blade, which whipped back in Pfeiffer’s face and killed him outright. Pfeiffer had come to Abenaki Junction a year ago. Before that, he had worked on a fishing boat out of Newport, Rhode Island. As soon as he made enough money, Pfeiffer had planned to go back to the coast and buy a boat of his own. Mackenzie had liked the
boy. He spoke softly and straightforwardly. He wished it could have been someone else, if it had to be anyone at all. There had been accidents before at the company, but never an on-the-job death. A placard on the gates of the Mackenzie Company listed the number of days without an accident. Mackenzie went out each morning to slide the black numbers into place. Today it had been 137. As soon as we get to the mill, Mackenzie thought, I’ll take down the placard and wait a while before putting it back up. Of all the bad-publicity ways to go, Mackenzie thought. Killed by a goddamned chain saw.

Chain saw. The words interrupted his thoughts. Chain saw. Chain saw. They repeated in his head as if he had never heard them before. Once more he felt the buzz of the blade through his leg. He closed his eyes and gritted his teeth.

Coltrane turned off the road and the Range Rover began moving along a gravel track that led up to the Algonquin Wilderness. Mackenzie had just purchased logging rights for 50,000 acres from the government. By the time the news was made public, the clear-cutting had already begun. He had nine months to finish the job, after which the area would be declared a permanent wilderness preserve. Mackenzie thought the idea was ludicrous. By the time I’ve finished with the Algonquin, he told himself, there won’t be any wilderness left to preserve. But the price is good. Timber’s good. I’d be a fool to turn down the offer. Someone else would take it instead. Some of the forest had never been cut. It had that rare name “old growth” attached to it, which struck Mackenzie as a challenge he could not turn down. He thought the idea of old growth was stupid. The Forestry Service would replant the area and in twenty years the land would be ready for cutting again. “If anybody needs a better reason than that,” Mackenzie had told his wife, “they can go to hell and I’ll join them there at my convenience.”