The Pacific and Other Stories (40 page)

He tied the posts up in two bundles and dragged them out of the woods. Then he slung them over his saddle and walked the horse back to the break. If the break had occurred sooner, steers might have passed through, though it was early in the season for steers to have reached this altitude. But even then it would hardly have mattered. Sanderson would have pushed them back over, as he would have done for Sanderson’s animals, with nothing said between them. In the twelve years since he thought one day that he had found a friend in Sanderson, he had seen him only half a dozen times along the fence or in Invermere, where Mrs. Sanderson had been forgotten and it was generally assumed that Sanderson lived alone.

Mrs. Cameron’s warm invitation, a week in the mail even though the lands adjoined, was never answered. Now that his children were old enough to ride by themselves wherever they wanted, Cameron feared that they might ride east on some adventure and discover the great secret of his life. But, being young, they would not have been able to see her in the way that he had seen her. Perhaps no one did, although she had implied that at least some had; and she had known immediately that, as she put it, his head had been turned. Perhaps she had had children, had aged, and lost her beauty. He wished that she had, but knew that no such thing could ever happen to her. That her features had, accidentally, been fine and unusual had little bearing on the woman herself. If she had lost the accidental beauty of her form, it would only have served to accentuate the substance that form had been privileged to convey.

One of the things that hurt him most in his speculations east was the possibility that she had died or gone away, and that, without his knowledge, his life had been rendered meaningless. And he didn’t know her name, something that was difficult to bear in light of the way he loved her.

After several years, he did not think of her very often. By the time England was again at war (this time he was too old), it seemed almost as if he had forgotten her. After all, his wife, too, was a beauty, with a softness that
Mrs. Sanderson did not have, and the luck of a pretty face and a graceful body. But she was not as deeply faulted as Mrs. Sanderson, or quite as radiant. And it had been the fault—not the deafness but the mistaken, unnecessary shame—that had driven deep into Cameron’s heart.

As the years went by, he put her more and more out of his mind. But time proved immaterial, for suddenly, in the midst of a false peace, he would dream of her, and for weeks thereafter suffer intense desire. Then the desire would slowly fade, and he would continue getting older, waiting for the next potent and surprising reawakening. Were it not for this, he would have been a happy man. Perhaps he was a happy man even so.

T
HE POSTS
had to be placed in rocky soil, and in sinking them he strained like the soldier he had never been, breathing hard and evenly, sweating, taken up by his love of the work, for only work could conduct away his unfortunate passion. Because of the new spacing, four or five new holes had to be made, and a similar number of broken pieces extracted from the ground. Some were easy, some not easy at all. How fine the task, though, of building back this fence, with all his strength, discipline, and experience. It was for the sake of the lovely woman he had married, for the children they had had, for Sanderson, for Mrs. Sanderson, and for himself—though he couldn’t see exactly how it was to his benefit unless it were purely a matter of honor.

He pounded in the posts until they flattened against the underlying sheet of rock. His strokes and timing with the heel of the axe were perfect, and each downward blow married solidly with the posthead.

The second and last time he had seen her had been in Vancouver, during the war. The disarray of the cattle market had brought him to the coast seeking a better price for his beef. He never got it, and he never found out what she had been doing there, apart from bowling on the green, in a formal white suit, in the company of a lot of pretty old ladies who took the game very seriously.

He was resting in Stanley Park, at midday, watching the old ladies at their game, when she appeared and took her turn. A long time passed before he was able to believe that it was actually she, and then to summon the
courage to rise. But when he did approach her, it was easy. He almost floated across the green, hypnotized, pushing the carefully placed shots all to hell with his feet.

She recognized him immediately, and when she turned to face him fully her expression was reminiscent of those days when strong sunshine and deep shadow alternate in silent breathtaking contrast. The emotion that swept across her face told him that he was not the only one to have spent the years in longing.

They stood in the center of the bowling green, oblivious of a growing stream of reprimands—she because she could not hear them, and he because he didn’t care. The old ladies were incensed: not only had their game been spoiled, but they had been ignored. So they returned the fire and resumed play, paying no attention to the two wickets who stood, apparently insensate, staring at one another in the middle of the contest. Balls began to whiz about like shrapnel.

They didn’t notice; they couldn’t look away. With no words spoken, all custom was shattered as he put his hands on either side of her white waistband, touching her gently. She extended her arms, and they found themselves in a subdued embrace appropriate to a crowded Vancouver bowling green. But everything was said, at last, and in the silence that she had always known.

A ship began a series of powerful whistle blasts as it coasted through the inlet on its way to the war at sea. This, the deep steam whistle, was the one thing she could hear, or, rather, feel—a symphony for her, the one precious rumbling sound of the world. It pushed through her chest and took her by surprise, moving her by its suddenness and power. She held up one of her hands and spread her fingers to see them vibrate, as the air itself was shaken from its sleep. He had told her that he loved her, and admitted it finally and forever to himself. At least he had done that.

A
FTER THE POSTS WERE UP
, Cameron began to string the wire. Not only had it been broken, but he himself was obliged to cut it in the stringing, and to replace rusted lengths that likely would not stand being stretched onto a
new arrangement of posts and baffles. The skill with which he wielded the splicing tool was something of which he did not think to be proud. But he had the sure facility of a fisherman minding his nets, or a woman with years at the loom, and there was no tentativeness in his movements, which seemed to pull his hands forward as quickly as they would follow.

As he worked, his thoughts turned to Mrs. Sanderson. There were things in the mountains to make up for a love that was unfulfilled. When his tongue was tied, when he could not act, or in the punishment of forever parting, he had found compensations. And if the discipline that kept him from her had not been so sweet in itself he would long ago have jumped his horse over the fence and ridden down to the house at the base of the thin column of smoke. But having what he desired was not important, for the mountains would remember, and, once, in Vancouver, he had been lucky.

When he finished, the sun hovered red and gold above a sharp and distant ridge. The new wire looked like lines of silver and platinum, and the pine posts were solid and black. A pool of meltwater had formed in the middle of a patch of snow about a hundred feet from the fence. Cameron took off his clothes, walked across the snow, and threw himself in. The water was even colder than he had expected, but, wanting to get clean, he thrust his head under and rolled himself over. The pain of doing such a thing was pleasant, for, afterward, when he rose slick and sparkling from the ice water, he was warm and relaxed, and he could reflect pleasurably upon the half a minute or so of breathless cold when his discipline had kept him under and served him well. After he had dressed, he threw the saddle on his horse, cinched it up, and put back the bit. When his tools were gathered and tied on, and the rifle chamber emptied, he mounted. The wind was clean and cool.

He walked the horse from the first splice to the last, and swept his eyes over each new post and twisting of the wire, up to the rock wall itself. Then he veered across the meadow and wound down through patches of snow now blood-red with the declining sun. Several hundred yards west of the fence, he reined the horse around to face what he had done. It was a good piece of work, and undoubtedly it would hold. The wires now glowed like molten metal.

He was not a stupid man. He knew what he was about to do, he knew
very well, and he finally felt a deep brotherhood with young Charles S. R. Reed, who had gone to Passchendaele of his own accord, and who, in his lack of wisdom, had perhaps been wise.

Cameron realized that the horse would want to canter, and that he would have to kick him into a gallop. As they crossed the quiltwork of snow and grass, the horse would begin to tense for the jump, and his rider would have to let out the reins. They would take the fence quite easily.

Whatever he did, his heart would be half broken. That was what Reed had risked at Passchendaele, for he had not gone to war except to come back to love.

Like the soldier he had never been, Cameron spurred his horse toward the ranks of glowing wire. They took the fence. They cleared it by at least two feet, and left it behind in the sunset, a very sad thing.

E
VERYONE HAS HEARD
of Rabbi Smilksteen of Pokoik. Everyone has heard of Rabbi Merman, the
Gaon
of Vitebsk. Everyone has heard of Rabbi Grittle of Havemayer. Everyone has heard of Rabbi Blottis of Geldenhorn. These were famous men, they wrote long books, they had followers, they occupied positions and directed institutions, they were sheltered by buildings, and cooks brought them food. But who has ever heard of Jacob Bayer, who walked thousands and thousands of versts and taught thousands of students, and slept on the hard wooden benches of the
hadarim
? Nor was he entirely unknown, although how he became slightly famous and what happened subsequently have not been recorded and are bittersweet, as events that are largely forgotten often are. If he had not been physically so huge, perhaps the biggest person in the Baltic and White Russia, no one would know about him at all. But when Jacob Bayer walked into a town, even horses turned their heads.

Before he came to Koidanyev he had been employed in a small
heder
in Pahzhilski-Dominitzin, which was one hundred twenty versts to the west of Minsk, whereas Koidanyev was to the east. The rabbi of Pahzhilski-Dominitzin had gone to check on the class and had come to an empty room. Running about in the summer heat with the physical symptoms of a panicked
intellectual, he found Jacob Bayer and his students gathered at a fence that had been almost completely subsumed in dangerous brambles. Grasped in the fingers of each boy was a rose held as gingerly as if it were a bomb.

“What is this?” the rabbi asked, feeding delightfully on the shock of discovering an irregularity.

“What is what?” Jacob Bayer asked in return.

“These boys are holding roses!”

“Yes?”

“Why?”

“As we were reading the passage about the rose of Jericho, it became clear that none of them had ever held a rose. I’m teaching them the meaning of the word.”

“By standing near a dangerous bush?”

“Rabbi Bing-trellis,” said Jacob Bayer, “the word for rose was written to turn us to the rose itself. Without knowledge of the rose itself, the word is meaningless.
Vered
, as it is written, is beautiful, but the rose is more so.”

The rabbi was so enraged and confused by this arrogant concretism and its resulting action—boys holding roses, by the thorny stems, in the sunshine—that the blood stayed in his head and made him the color of the roses themselves, though his neck was thicker than their stems, even if not by much. And although Jacob Bayer had been happy in Pahzhilski-Dominitzin and had begun to awaken in his students the love of truth, he was gone that night, heartbroken at yet another failure, another alienation, another expulsion, another going out. But as he walked under the summer stars—of June, 1913—his memory of the redness of the rose made his heart as light as moonlight, and floated him above all disappointments.

J
ACOB
B
AYER
had been told by his father that Koidanyev was a pious and interesting place of low hills and tall pines, with a clear river that rushed through it freshening the air. In summer, people swam in the river, and the town that had formed along the banks was wealthy and beautiful. It had been known as the Switzerland of White Russia. Its metal and tile roofs, glinting above the blue-gray water, were famous throughout the pale, and
the hills of Koidanyev caught the wind and afforded views over light-filled plains in all directions.

After a week on the road, a sunburned and lean Jacob Bayer encountered three Jewish peasants fixing an irrigation gate.
“Erev tov,”
he said, using Hebrew to impress them. “Where is Koidanyev?”

“Koidanyev! Everyone wants to go there,” said one, quite sullenly, “because, because. … You see, in the distance, that flash of light? That’s it.” Five or six versts away, the goldenness of the town caught the sun.

Though most settlements of the pale were arranged along the road like the branches of a tree, not Koidanyev, because of its relation to the river. From the main highway a spur led directly to its heart. You entered upon this road and left on it. The road was bisected by the river, against which the citizens of Koidanyev had retaliated by bisecting the river with a bridge. When Jacob Bayer came to this bridge he saw two guards dressed in policemen’s caps. They wore belts from which hung pistols, and they were sorry, they said, but Koidanyev was full.

“Full of what?” he asked.

“Of people who have come to get rich. The rooms are taken, the streets are crowded, the restaurants are stuffed.”

“Then there will be many children who will need teachers, and rabbis who will need assistants.”