Peter Loon (4 page)

“Peter,” she said, and the use of his name sounded strange from his mother. “Peter.”

“Yes, Ma.”

“There is something you need to do,” she said. Then she said, “There is something
I
need you to do.”

This seemed stranger still, his mother needing anything from him. “Yes, Ma,” he said.

“I need you to find your uncle.”

Peter thought about this. As far as he had ever known, his mother had been an only child, and his father's brothers were all dead. “Uncle?”

“I need you to find your uncle,” she said again. She was fully dressed and there was the scent of some autumn flower about her. She had just come in from one of her walks by moonlight. Peter could see a sliver of milky light lying on the floor beyond her.

Peter thought it polite to sit up, but he did not want to close space with her. His father was dead; his father's body lay on the table in the next room. His mother stood over him in the middle of the night demanding that he find an uncle of whom he had no knowledge. “My uncle?” he said finally.

“Your Uncle Obed,” she said. “I need you to find your Uncle Obed.”

“Who is Uncle Obed?” he asked.

She did not answer but lifted an arm to show him that she held his clothes. “You can eat before you leave,” she said.

He sat up then, blinked, and looked more closely at her. “But they'll be burying Pa.”

“Your Pa would want you to find your uncle.”

“I expected I'd be needed here,” said Peter in his confusion. “I expected I'd need to dig a place for Pa.”

“The neighbors will take care,” she said.

Peter's youngest brother stirred in the bed next to him. His mother shook the clothes at Peter just once and he complied by putting them on. He found his tall moccasins by the bed and tied them on. They were narrow for his feet and he had slitted the outsides of them. He followed his mother out to the main room where his father's remains lay on the table covered by a sheet, then to the back of the house where the one fireplace barely glowed.

“You better eat first, then bring this with you,” she said, pointing first to a plate of victuals on the plank table, then a cloth sack.

Peter peered into the sack, and from the light of the lantern he could descry some hard biscuits and apples. “Am I leaving now?” he asked.

“You'd better get a push on before first light,” was all she said. She sat opposite him.

The truth was, he hadn't eaten much for dinner, and guilty as it made him feel with his poor father in the room behind him, his stomach felt empty. He'd eaten through about half the plate when another question occurred to him. “Where is he?” His mother's face was hidden behind the glare of the lantern on the table, and when she didn't speak, he leaned to one side and said, “Where is this Uncle Obed?”

“I'll show you,” she said. “Eat your breakfast.”

Peter didn't know if it was breakfast or dinner, yesterday or tomorrow, but he finished what had been put in front of him with rather more relish than he would have guessed. When he was done, his mother brought him his father's coat and hat, then led him outside. Peter insisted on stopping at the table in the parlor and paying last respects to the man who had sired him and given him every advantage in his power.

Peter Loon felt oddly aware, pinned like tailor's work to the hour. A half-remembered moment of tenderness from his father rose up like a grasping hand and clutched Peter's heart and his throat, and he backed away, almost frightened by the fierce emotion that threatened to overtake him.

“Peter?” called his youngest brother Amos from their bed. It seemed hard, leaving his brothers and sisters like this. He sensed that they found him a comforting presence, with their father gone and their mother so ghostlike. “Peter?” came the voice again and Peter answered with a quieting
hush
.

He stepped out of the house, onto the short porch. Rosemund Loon–still holding onto her beauty despite her thirty eight years, most of which had been spent in this hard wilderness–tugged at her husband's coat so that it snugged more closely around her son's shoulders. She snatched the hat from his hand and put it on his head.

“Where . . .” he began.

With a ruthless sort of grip upon his shoulder, she turned him quickly about, and pointed south and east. “He went in that direction.”

“My uncle?”

“When he left, he went in that direction,” she said again.

“But when?”

“There can't be that many people in the world,” she said. “You're bound to find him, if you look. He went south and east. He could be in the next settlement, for all I know, but I don't think so. His name is Obed Winslow.”

“Winslow?” Peter had not lost that sense of complete awareness born at his father's silent side. He drew himself up to his height. “How Winslow?” he said. “What name is Winslow to us? The Winslows in the bottomland over that way?” He pointed west. His sister Sally Ann had taken visits from a young fellow named Job Winslow from that farm.

“He is an uncle by marriage,” she said. There was a helpless look in her eyes that he had never seen before and he turned away.

“Obed Winslow,” he said.

“I need you to find him.” She leaned forward and hugged him with uncharacteristic fervor. “You're a good boy,” she said, which struck him like a blow to the head. “You've always been a good boy, and I know you'll do well.” Then she turned away, walked in to her dead husband and shut the door behind her.

Going back into the cabin was impossible. Following her was impossible. Peter was confounded. He struggled to hold onto that awareness he had felt beside his father's body. He looked southeast; he glanced over his shoulder, but the gable end of the house obscured the moon. It was a chilly fall night, and his breath formed before him in puffs. The sky was cloudless, and what stars or planets there were, gleaming despite the moon, shone like sharp bits of ice. About twenty or so rods to the southeast lay the shadow of the forest.

Peter had only been to the next settlement, Davistown, half a dozen times in his life, and to Patricktown–further away and more or less directly south–only once. He considered going to the neighbors in the other direction and asking their help to sort things out. Everyone knew his mother was a little mad. Some thought
he
was a little mad, as well, though he wasn't supposed to know that. People, he understood, could only keep a secret so long.

Then who is Obed Winslow?
“Uncle Obed,” he said, trying out the name. That sharp, almost painful, awareness seemed to call him from the line of trees to his south. He stepped down from the porch and walked into the moonlight. His father's coat was warm.

Out in the stump-strewn field, he stumbled once against an old furrow. Something stirred ahead of him, a small animal, a mouse or a mole, mingling with the remnants of hay, frightened by his unexpected presence. He turned around only once and was urged on by the suspicion of his mother's face in the single window facing east. In a moment he found the old path in the moonlight and vanished into the forest, hardly knowing what he ventured.

He was almost glad to quit the cleared plot of land; even he who had lived all his life among acres of stumpage could imagine, in the dark, limned by the moon, that one out of many of those low-lopped trunks might be instead a figure crouched and watching.

THE FOREST WAS THE ENTIRE WORLD; IT WAS ALL THAT PETER KNEW.
He might, in his life, have seen a score of cleared acres in one place, but they would have been cleared acres surrounded by trees and wooded hills and populated by stumps and the charred remains of brush piles, and in the midst of any such clearing was at least one building fashioned of trees in next to their natural state.

He knew Sheepscott Great Pond, of course, and the settlement there, but the pond and the settlement were similarly encircled, and the forest, and the tiny patches of hard won ground in the midst of the forest, and the lake in the midst of the forest, and the hardscrabble settlement with its spireless church were all that Peter had ever known, though he had heard tell of deserts and oceans and grassy plains. A neighborhusband two or three farms away–miles away–had once sailed for the British Navy, and he had tales to tell of islands of rock in the South Seas and cities that stretched over hill and valley as far as the eye could see. But forest was all that Peter could reasonably expect to find in his mind's eye when it was all that he had ever known.

He was accustomed to little more than moonlight after dark, and along a moderately well marked trail he was able to move, hardly breaking his stride. Some of the hardwoods had shed their leaves, and the glow of the moon, hanging between nadir and zenith, made the shadows of roots look like holes in the ground, and pale granite and lucid quartz like basking faces.

The wind held a distinct note when the still-clinging leaves had turned and dried, a reeding
hush
that rose and fell like a breath; and where certain groves of oak and sugar maple were losing their foliage, soft dry veterans of summer brushed past his face like bat wings or drifted without noise onto his father's hat. Trees squeaked and grunted in the wind. Now and then the echoes of animal calls drifted among the trunks and aging fern. He walked quietly and naturally, laying his feet down with ease without sacrificing his pace.

After a time, he sensed the large swamp to the west, some distance away–a presence marked by a change of air and sound that filtered through the trees. Beyond the swamp would be Great Pond and one little settlement further still.

When he did not look directly in front of him, the path almost glowed. Above him, the occasional breaks in the trees–a blink of starlight–led the way. The land rose and fell, rose and fell; the path plummeted occasionally and he was warned in time only by the sense of space yawning below him and the wind gathered, as in a great room. Streams trickled across the way, or the way met with one of these rills and followed it to the next little dale. The path widened as it gathered with others like it, or followed an ancient animal run; it wound round the feet of scarpy slopes and followed the course of least resistance between twin hills.

Peter thought of his little brother Amos waking to find him gone, and he felt a stab that was joined to his leaving with nary a goodbye or even a good notion where he was going. Peter was so long and Amos was so small that the little brother could sleep cradled against the big brother like a pea in a pod.

Peter heard the
breent
of a nightjar nearby and thought he caught the glimpse of something wing past a fleeting pool of open sky. He had no idea what he was about, walking the woods in the middle of the night, but he did not find them unpleasant, at first, these immediate sensations.

It was not long, however, before another reality of life, as he understood it, imposed itself–and that was the fact of uncanny things in the forest, the knowledge of curious and perhaps malicious disembodied minds lurking in the darkness between the trees. A moth of panic flickered against his chest and a hymn sprang quietly to his lips. Suddenly the shadows of roots, like holes in the forest floor, looked as if they gaped a little wider, and the pale faces of granite and quartz appeared more aware of him.