The Followed Man (21 page)

His tasks now had no hurtful or
pleasurable significance to any­one else; they were his
alone—finite, immediate, once done, done. Memories came to him
at will, many in Shem's voice: "A softwood log peels in spring.
You can run a spud right down the length of it slicker'n goose
grease."

He bought a chainsaw, a Homelite
with a sixteen-inch bar at Follansbees' in Leah. He'd used one years
ago, most recently help­ing a friend remove a tree blown down on
a suburban lawn, but he read the directions carefully. So much power
to cut was there in the light machine, its engine not much bigger
than his two fists, his hand on the grip and trigger throttle causing
it to roar and heave with torque. Its teeth didn't know what they
cut.

At first he stayed at the Hi-Way
Motel in Leah, ate breakfast at dawn at the Welkum Diner and drove to
the farm. In the evenings he drew tentative plans and calculated the
number of spruce logs he would need. He would cut at least half again
as many as his vague dimensions called for—another message of
Shem's from long ago: "If it's wood, get once and a half as much
as you think you need. If it's stone, double that and add a third
more. If it's shit, don't worry, you'll have plenty." He picked
out the straight-est spruce, each a foot or more in diameter at the
base, cut and limbed with the snarling saw, then peeled them using
the chisel end of his car's lug wrench. The sap was thin, hardly
sticky, and the bark that looked so rugged on the outside was
skin-smooth and slippery beneath. The logs lay white and naked
through the spruce groves, smelling fresh and sweet for a day or so
until the watery sap dried. His hands blistered, cracked and
hardened.

Phyllis and George Bateman would
know he was in town, so af­ter a few days he stopped in to see
them.

"Been cuttin' wood, have
you?" George said. "I see you got wood chips in your
bootlaces. Spruce, by the looks of it."

Phyllis nailed him to a date for
supper with the interesting new people she'd mentioned before. He
could find no way to refuse. Her arthritis was better, so she could
get around in the kitchen and do the cooking she wanted to do. "No
saying how long it'll last," she said. "I just know you'll
like these folks, Luke."

George was interested in the
woodcutting, so Luke told him he was building a camp, which was
almost not a lie, out of logs.

"Lots of tricks to a log
house," George said. "You know how to do it?"

"I'm going to study up on
it as soon as I get my logs peeled."

"Cut a half more than you
think you'll need," George said. They went to the shed to Shem's
wooden chest, and while Luke selected an ax, ax handle, wedges, a
peavey head, a tape measure and folding rule, they talked about it.
They sat, smoking, until it was supper time and Luke had to stay for
supper.

George said he had an old
twelve-by-twelve tent Luke could use, if it wasn't rotted out. It
hadn't been used in ten years. So they went to the shed loft and
found the big bundle of khaki canvas with its ropes wound around it,
and five wooden poles.

"If it's rotted, burn it,"
George said. "Don't give it a thought. But it seems to me I
dried it out good before I put it away, so it might do to keep the
rain off. No sign of mice in it I can see."

They put the tent and poles in
Luke's car, and then, that bundle of canvas suggesting that he would
actually set up his camp in the wilderness, Luke went back to Shem's
chest and opened it to the shelf containing the guns. He took out the
.45 automatic, its hol­ster, a cleaning kit and two boxes of the
old ammunition. The .22 version was still there, so he took it in to
George, who had gone back to the house.

"This is yours, you know.
Did you try it?" he said.

"I tried it, and I been
studying up on it. That ain't a Colt con­version unit, you know.
Some hotshot gunsmith did that special and it's probably worth a
fortune. It works like a charm."

"Well, whatever it's worth,
it's yours."

"Don't know as I can accept
it."

"I'll take it out in trade.
I want you to teach me how to lay up stone."

"That's some camp you're
going to build, anyway," George said, which was at least a
partial acceptance of the gift.

They'd discussed location,
foundations, roofing materials. Luke brought up solar orientation,
which George wasn't much interest­ed in. He liked double-hung
windows and not very many of them.

After supper they sat at the
table having coffee.

"I'll show you how to lay
up stone," George said, "but it ain't something you can
learn right off, you know. You got to look right into a stone to find its proper face, and some don't even have a face. You can turn
'em over a thousand times and you still won't find a face. Some of
'em have false faces that'll trick you if you don't know stones. As I
say, it ain't something you learn right off." His gray skin and
gray eyes seemed to have been coated with a fine oil.

Phyllis said, "When you get
sick of your own cooking up there, you come for supper anytime.
There's always plenty here."

"Thanks, Phyllis,"
Luke said. "Anyway, I'll remember next Sat­urday. Don't
worry about that." He felt the vague dread again about new
people.

That night at the motel he drew
plans for a cabin, finding that it kept getting larger. Too many
aesthetic ideas of space and design kept getting in his way. He
should begin again with the smallest space he needed, the minimum
number of cubic feet to heat and care for. But there was that
baronial vision of cavernous beams and a tall stone fireplace column,
the lone romantic figure by the great fire while in the eaves the
wind howled its white fury across the mountains. "... A crag of
a wind-grieved Apennine ..." Tennyson? Wordsworth? Beyond the
general condescension he had been taught in school, why shouldn't
that vision have its ap­peal?

He folded his sketchy designs
and dropped them in the plastic wastebasket. The motel room was
smooth, carpeted, polished at the factories that had made its parts.
As soon as he had the tent up and a few more things he needed he
would leave.

He was well-tired by physical
work, with a sense of the shapes of his muscles. His upper arms had
grown larger, hard to sleep on. His waist felt slimmer, his hips and
thighs indicating to him their unity of nerve, tendon and bone. He
took a shower and slid like a muscular eel into the cool sheets.

He would have thought of a
woman, then, except for the wom­an who was dead, who had been the
shape and color and presence of the woman he wanted. While Helen was
alive he had occasion­ally lusted after other women, but now he
was only curious about the impotence of his imagination. He brought
Marjorie Ruther­ford into the room and had her sit down, there,
on the bed beside him, her large healthy body wanting his, her
handsome face curi­ous and willing. Then Jane Jones—pretty,
ambivalent, fierce; she would reach a long arm down over his belly to
test her effect on him.

He had lost that urgency, but if
the sense of its loss were lost, where was the loss? Friendliness
remained, and care remained, but the center would not gather its
force. The object of love could not be the object of lust. All was
diffused, spirit, memory, grief-shrouded, gratitude-shrouded, flesh
no longer.

In the morning after breakfast
he went to the Leah Post Office and made out a card to have his mail
forwarded from Wellesley. He knew he had decided not to write the
piece for
Gentleman,
but he still felt responsible. No, he
didn't know what he'd decided, so he should keep in touch with that
world. His hardened hands seemed not made for writing. The Post
Office ballpoint pen was fragile in his stained fingers, and his
printing was crude.

He drove to Cascom, up the
mountain road to the farm and parked near the sunken house. His
temporary camp, for conven­ience, would be up here while he
cleaned up the junk around the house foundation, sheds and barn.
Another day or so and he would have all his logs cut and peeled. Then
would come more work and planning. He would have to clear the road
down to the brook and make a bridge in order to get his materials to
the field. He would need a machine to snake out the logs, carry sand,
stone, mortar, water, lumber and roofing. There would be nails,
hard­ware, glass, stain, paint, and he was starting with so
little. There was also the foundation excavation—a backhoe
would have to make it down the hill and across the bridge, the
unbuilt bridge. Eventually would come the equipment to make him a
well. And he would want REA electricity for its power to preserve
food and run tools; at least four more poles would be needed past the
one at the farm. He would want auxiliary power, too, for the winter
ice storms that would take trees down upon the main line up the
mountain.

There was so much to do, now
that he'd begun to think more about it. Just the traveling to supply
and lumber companies would take a lot of time. But he would do it
all, beginning right now. This was what his time was for, all that
his time was for.

He had a great deal of money now
and could buy any truck, tractor or crawler he wanted. Death had
profitted him and would profit him even more, probably, when the
final decisions on com­pensation were made. It was only money,
not anything but money, and he could buy what he wanted with it.
Reflex—the reflex of the dutiful middle class—had made
him take care of his taxes, his books, his debits and credits and
interest in April when the season for that sort of thing had come,
but then the large figures had meant nothing but arithmetic, squared
green num­bers on a calculator. There was nothing he wanted then
that money could buy.

On the way through the leaved
tunnel of the road to the brook he heard a strange sound from down
there, a cry that made him stop, put down his saw, tools and gas and
oil cans. It was high and fluty, but not like the call of any bird or
animal he knew. Without quite thinking that the sound was human he
turned, a chilly place between his shoulders, went back to his car,
got the .45 automatic and holster from under the seat, loaded the
clip and chamber and put the weapon on his belt. This sudden turn
toward caution, or even fear, angered him and made him walk quietly
as he re­turned. He left his equipment and went carefully toward
the sound, which came again in undulations that rose and were cut off
as though breath ran out at their highest pitch.

Whatever it was seemed to be
right at the brook, below the old bridge abutments, probably at the
chute and pool. The water would mask his noises as he felt his way
down through the hem­locks. The nearest the sound came to any
animal cry was the near­ly hysterical whining of porcupines as
they argued with each other in a den, but this sound was more
breathless and sporadic, not a dialogue.

As he slowly descended the hill,
keeping trees between himself and the pool, the cry seemed that of a
young child who had been hurt, but still he could not believe it
human. Then, through the hemlocks' green fronds, he saw a white thing
move, a small plane of white. There was a gleam of bright red, too,
though this was stationary and separate from the moving white. He
pressed slowly through the young hemlocks, the cry growing louder and
more convincing, even though he could still hardly believe it; if it
had stopped and nothing were there at the pool but an early turning
maple branch and a reflection on the water of the gray-clouded sky,
he would still be able to believe it had been the call of a bird of
some kind—say a hawk's strangely lamenting complaint, and in
its complete absence wonder if he had really heard it at all.

He moved closer, the cry so near
and real something had to be there, just below him. He had been in
the woods enough in his life to know that he might find nothing at
all, the crier flown. He pressed himself forward between two small
hemlocks whose branches intertwined, the needles soft against his
face, until their hazy greenness grew thin, like disappearing fog,
and there was the chute and the pool. The whiteness was a naked young
woman standing thigh deep at the pool's edge, and the cries came from
a black-haired child she now picked up and stood on a rock, a boy
about four or five years old. The red he had seen was a packframe and
bag on the opposite bank, next to the clothes they had re­moved.
The boy was crying and sputtering; he had water in his nose, and she
was trying to soothe him, kissing his chest as he waved his arms and
howled, then sneezed and gasped for breath before howling again.

They were no more than ten yards
below him. She stood straight as she held the boy steady on the rock,
her small slim body shining, whiter in bands around her breasts and
below, where she had worn a scant bathing suit in the sun. She was so
familiar to him that at first, staring at her breasts and thighs, it
didn't seem improper that he observe her nakedness; she had Helen's
body when Helen was in her twenties, and Helen's dark blond hair. Her
pose was one Helen had often assumed, holding a child out like that
at arms' length, her own small body proud, slim and athletic.

He was so shocked by her
perfection he was out of breath. He might have been prepared to see a
woman and a child, but not these, and not here at his childhood pool.
Helen and Johnny had been here with him, and Helen had stood just
there one summer afternoon long ago.

She was talking to the child,
crooning words to him; her face was not Helen's but seemed lively and
sweet, her eyebrows darker than her hair, her lips thin, with a gleam
of small teeth. Her waist was Helen's, the lateral rise of muscle
below the small of her back Helen's, but one buttock, that
approximation of roundness that was so complicated and precise it
hurt him, was signed near the cleft with a brown mole the size of a
penny.