Sourland (40 page)

If she'd known: that Matt had slipped out of bed in the middle of the night. That he'd spent hours on the tax forms, instead of waking her and asking her to take him to the hospital.

Had he known how serious the
fibrillation
was? Or had it steadily worsened, while he'd worked on the tax forms?

She couldn't bear to think
He risked his life for something so trivial! For our financial well-being. For me.

 

Now he was gone from the house. The husband was gone, the husband would not return. Yet a dozen times a day she heard his voice—not as it had been on the morning of his departure but as it had been, before—nor did she hear his labored arrhythmic breath that had so terrified her—though the house was empty, deserted.

Except for the
surviving spouse
, the house was deserted.

The husband had vanished utterly in the way of the incinerated. Made not into soft powdery ashes but into coarse-grained ashes and bone-chunks “buried” in an aluminum container in a cemetery several miles from their house where for years they'd walked—for they were frequent walkers, hikers, bicyclists—they'd loved the outdoors in its more benign weathers—admiring the older, eighteenth-century gravestones and giant aged oak trees buttressed by iron rods like the fanciful drawings of invading Martians on the paperback cover of H. G. Wells's
The War of the Worlds.
How innocent they'd been in those days! You could say how blind, how stupid. How utterly oblivious. Walking in the cemetery with no regard for what lay moldering beneath their feet.

Now, they'd been punished for their blindness. The
deceased husband
, the
surviving spouse.

In a haze of anesthetized grief she'd purchased a plot in the quaint “historic” cemetery. At the open grassy area at the rear, where new graves were dug. Fresh graves, unrelenting. Matt's “remains” were set beneath a small rectangular grave marker the crematorium provided. Set in frozen grass in what was called a
double plot
for which she barely recalled writing a check. In a kindly avuncular voice the funeral director had urged
You might as well secure a double plot, Mrs. Quinn This is a practical step.

The widow wished above all to be practical. You don't want to embarrass, upset, or annoy others. You don't want to become a spectacle of pathos, pity. The widow resolved that grief itself might become practical, routine. Though at the present time her grief was slovenly and smelly as something leaking through a cracked cellar wall.

Also her grief was demented. For often in the night she heard her husband. He'd risen from their bed in the dark, he'd slipped from the room. Possibly he was using his bathroom in the hall just outside their bedroom. Every sound of that bathroom was known to her, they'd lived together in this house for so long. In her bed on
her side
of the bed her heart began to pound in apprehension waiting for him to return to bed with a murmured apology
Hey! Sorry if I woke you.

Maybe, he'd have called her
Sophie. Dear Sophie!

Maybe, he'd have brushed her cheek with his lips. His stubbled cheek against her skin. Or maybe—this was more frequent—he'd have settled back heavily into bed wordless, into
his side
of the bed sinking into sleep like one sinking into a pool of dark water that receives him silently and without agitation on its surface.

Often in the night she smelled him: the sweat-soaked T-shirt, shorts he'd worn on that last night.

4.

Soon then
Kolk
entered her dreams. Like the rapid percussive dripping of thawing icicles against the roof of the house. As she was vulnerable to these nighttime sounds so she was vulnerable to
Kolk
by night.

In her dreams he was a shadowy figure lacking a face. The figure in the photograph, hand uplifted.

A greeting, or a warning.

She had believed that the man was dead. The actual man, Kolk.

In their few encounters in Madison, Wisconsin, many years before they'd spoken little to each other. Kolk—was his first name Jeremiah?—had been one of Matt's political-minded friends but not one of his closest friends and Sophie had never felt comfortable in his presence. There was something monkish and intolerant in Kolk's manner. His soot-colored eyes behind glinting wire-rimmed glasses had seemed to crawl on her with an ascetic disdain.
Who are you? Why should I care for you?

He'd never cared enough to learn her name, Sophie was sure.

It was said of Kolk that he was a farm-boy fellowship student from Wisconsin's northern peninsula who'd enrolled in the university's Ph.D. program to study something otherworldly and impractical like classics but had soon ceased attending classes to devote time to political matters exclusively. It was said that Kolk had an older brother who'd been a “war hero” killed in World War II. Among others in Matt's circle who spoke readily and assertively Kolk spoke quietly and succinctly and never of himself. He had a way of blushing fiercely when he was made self-conscious or angry and often in Sophie's memory Kolk was angry, incensed.

He'd quarreled with most of his friends. He'd insulted Matt Quinn who'd been his close friend.

He'd called Matt
fink, scab.
These ugly words uttered in Kolk's raw accusing voice had been shocking to Sophie's ears. Matt had been very angry but had said
We have a difference of opinion
and Kolk said sneering
I think you're a fink and you think you aren't a fink. That's our difference of opinion.

Sophie recalled this exchange. And Sophie recalled a single incident involving her and Kolk, long-forgotten by her as one might forget a bad dream, or a mouthful of something with a very bad taste.

Or maybe it was excitement Sophie felt. And the dread, that accompanies such excitement.

Matt hadn't known. Sophie was reasonably sure that none of their friends had known. For Kolk wouldn't have spoken of it.

They'd been on a stairway landing—the two of them alone together—the first time they'd been alone together for possibly Sophie had followed Kolk out onto the stairs for some reason long forgotten but recalled as urgent, crucial. And Sophie had reached out to touch Kolk's arm—Kolk's arm in a sleeve of his denim jacket—for Kolk was upset, to the point of tears—his face flushed and contorted in the effort not to succumb to tears—and so Sophie who wasn't yet Matt Quinn's young wife but the girl who lived in a graduate women's residence but spent most of her time with Matt Quinn in his apartment on Henry Street reached out impulsively to touch Jeremiah Kolk—meaning to comfort him, that was all—and quickly Kolk pushed Sophie away, threw off her hand and turned and rapidly descended the stairs without a backward glance and that was the last time she'd seen him.

So long ago. Who would remember. No one!

Sophie had been conscious of having made a mistake, a blunder—following after Matt's friend, who was no longer Matt's friend. Why she'd behaved so recklessly, out of character—why she'd risked being rebuffed or insulted by Kolk—she could not have said.

Of course, it was Matthew Quinn she'd loved. It was Matt she'd always loved. For the other, she'd felt no more than a fleeting/disquieting attraction.

Not sexual. Or maybe sexual.

Who would remember…

After they were married and moved away from Madison, Wisconsin, and were living in New Haven, Connecticut, in the early 1970s—Matt was enrolled in the Yale Law School, Sophie was working on a master's
degree in art history—rumors came to them that Jeremiah Kolk had been badly injured in an accidental detonation of a “nail bomb” in a Milwaukee warehouse.

Or had Kolk been killed. He and two others had managed to escape the devastated warehouse but Kolk died of his injuries, in hiding in northern Wisconsin.

No arrests were ever made. Kolk's name was never publicly linked to the explosion.

All that was known with certainty was that Jeremiah Kolk had never returned to study classics at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, after he'd dropped out in 1969. Long before the bombing incident he'd broken off relations with his family. He'd broken off relations with his friends in Madison. He'd disappeared.

Years later when they were living in New Jersey, one morning at breakfast Sophie saw Matt staring at a photograph in the
New York Times
and when Sophie came to peer at it over his shoulder saying, with a faint intake of breath, “Oh that looks like—who was it?—‘Kolk'—‘Jeremiah Kolk'—” Matt said absently, without looking up at her, “Who?”

The photograph hadn't been of Kolk of course but of a stranger years younger than the living Kolk would have been, in 1989.

5. APRIL

Her April plans! Now the
surviving spouse
was sleepless for very different reasons.

Thinking
It will be spring there, or almost. The worst of the ice will have thawed.

These were reasonable thoughts. There was the wish to believe that these were reasonable thoughts.

From Newark Airport she would fly to Minneapolis and from Minneapolis she would take a small commuter plane to Grand Rapids and there Kolk would meet her and drive her to his place—not
home
but
place
was the word Kolk used—in the foothills of the Sourland Mountains. By his reckoning Kolk's
place
was one hundred eighty miles north and west of the small Grand Rapids airport.

By his reckoning it would take no more than three hours to drive this distance. If weather conditions were good.

Sophie asked if weather conditions there were frequently
not-good
in that part of Minnesota.

Kolk said guardedly that there was a “range” of weather. His jeep had four-wheel drive. There wouldn't be a problem.

Several letters had been exchanged. Sophie had covered pages in handwriting, baring her heart to Jeremiah Kolk as she'd never done to another person. For never had she written to her husband, always they'd been together.
The person I am is being born only now, in these words to you, Jeremiah.

Kolk had been more circumspect. Kolk's hand-printed letters were brief, taciturn yet not unfriendly. He wanted Sophie to know, he said, that he lived a
subsistence life, in American terms.
He would not present himself as anything he was not only what he'd become—
A pilgrim in perpetual quest.

In practical terms, Kolk worked for the Sourland Mountain State Preserve. He'd lived on a nine-acre property adjacent to the Preserve for the past seven years.

Speaking with Kolk over the phone was another matter. Sophie heard herself laughing nervously. For Kolk's voice didn't sound at all familiar—it was raw, guttural, oddly accented as if from disuse. Yet he'd said to her—he had tried to speak enthusiastically—“Sophie? That sounds like you.”

Sophie laughed nervously.

“Well. That sounds like
you.
”

After years of estrangement, when each had ceased to exist for the other, what comfort there was in the most banal speech.

They fell silent. They began to speak at the same time. Sophie shut her eyes as she'd done as a young girl jumping—not diving, she'd never had the courage to dive—from a high board, into a pool of dark-glistening lake water. Thinking
If this is happening, this is what is meant to be. I will be whoever it is, to whom it happens.

Kolk had invited Sophie to visit him and to stay for a week at least and quickly Sophie said three days might be more practical. Kolk was silent for a long moment and Sophie worried that she'd offended him but then Kolk laughed as if Sophie had said something clever and riddlesome—“Three days is a start. Bring hiking clothes. If you like it here, you will want to stay longer.”

Sophie's eyes were still shut. Sophie drew a deep breath.

“Well. Maybe.”

They would fall in love, Sophie reasoned. She would never leave Sourland.

She wanted to ask Kolk if he lived alone. (She assumed that he lived alone.) She wanted to ask if he'd been married. (She assumed that he'd never been married.) She wanted to ask how far his
place
was from the nearest neighbor. And what he meant by saying he was a
pilgrim in perpetual quest.

Instead—boldly—impulsively as she'd reached out to touch Kolk years ago when they'd both been young—Sophie asked Kolk what she might bring him.

Quickly Kolk's voice became wary, defensive.

“‘Bring me'—? What do you mean?”

She'd blundered. She'd said the wrong thing. With a stab of dismay she saw Kolk—the figure that was Kolk—at the other end of the line in remote northern Minnesota—a man with a shadowy half-hidden face and soot-colored eyes behind dark glasses watching her as if she were the enemy.

“I meant—only—if you needed anything, Jeremiah. I could bring it.”

Jeremiah.
Sophie had never called Kolk by this name, in Madison. The very sound—multi-syllabic, Biblical and archaic—was clumsy in her mouth like a pebble on the tongue. But Kolk laughed again—after a moment—as if Sophie had said something witty.

“Bring yourself, Sophie. That's all I want.”

Sophie's eyes flooded with tears. To this remark she could think of no adequate reply.

Of course she would tell no one—not her closest friends, nor those relatives who called her frequently because they were worried about her—of her plans to fly a thousand miles to visit a man she had not seen in a quarter-century. A man whom she'd never known. A political-radical outlaw believed to be dead, who had died twenty years before in the clandestine preparation of a bomb intended to kill innocent people.