—God's House—
By S. Dorman
Copyright 2011 Susan C. Dorman.
Digital ISBN: 978-1-4660-7807-9
Smashwords Edition
Dormannheim
P.O. Box 172
Greenwood, ME 04255
USA
This book is a work of fiction. The names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the writer's imagination or have been used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to persons, living or dead, actual events, locale or organizations is entirely coincidental.
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God's Twilight
History in Gottheim
Balder's Love
Doing Business in the House Of God
Family Secrets, Secret Family
Thinking God's Thoughts
God Takes Care of God's Creatures
The Gott'im Epistles
Jasper Mary
The Common
Dedication
To Ron, who makes everything possible
"One thing have I desired of the Lord, that will I seek after; that I may dwell in the house of the Lord all the days of my life, to behold the beauty of the Lord, and to inquire in his temple."
— Psalms 27:4
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God's Twilight
Elda stepped down from the dark kitchen doorway onto the hewn granite stoop, into predawn stillness. She stood there, almost as though to lift her nose to morning's scent, so poised was she to receive the strange day. She strained for a sight of Posey through the encroaching woods, where spindly trees grew thick and tall. Twilight filled woodland and the small clearing with nebulous shadow. It made a mist of existence, as though all things were dissolving. Elda associated twilight with Norse mythology and her grandmother's tales. It was all there in the immigrant Embla's old stories from a half-century ago, the '30s. Niflheim and Ginnunga were the source of these impressions, fathomless places of creation's inception. The cold of the abyss, of vapor and darkness, merged into a mist of sea smoke that writhed about tall teeth of ice.
In the early stages of tumbledown, tangled in budding foxgrape and woodbine, Elda's house hunkered below a fir-bound ridge. It faced south, as though its long-dead builders had been concerned to catch as much light and warmth as possible in these cold Meguntic Mountains of Western Maine. They trusted a crop of rocks to sprout through the thin soil each spring, pushed up by frost. Farming won't be easy here, said these Yankees, but the land is free. Over the run of those settlers' first century, the house was cobbled together, spreading on either side of its gray granite cellar hole foundation: compounded of hewn logs, timbers and clapboard; of casements, posts, glass panes and various kinds of shingle. Asphalt roofing crumbled on the east and west ends, causing the connected barn to cant and the roof of the attached children's house to rot.
Thirty odd years ago, Everett, Elda, and their baby Balder lived in the children's house, so-called because the newlywed children of each passing generation set up housekeeping there. The extended Simon family was immense, intertwined, spread now throughout the Meguntics like the tendrils of bindweed and virgin's-bower—creepers groping along roadsides and through cutover woodlots. The rock and conifer ridge above was called Simons Ledge after the early family and its descendants of the original proprietors. The house, in its turn, had been named for the ledge. And over them all, settlers, house, and ledge, soared Jasper Mountain.
Balder was the only human left that Elda knew intimately. Everett, Balder's father, was also gone, along with Everett's father, his mother and grandmother: All once lived in this old house. But Elda's once-crowded life as young farm mother in an extended family was seldom called to mind. In some ways her life was truly crowded still because she cared constantly for what she called "the critters." So life now seemed only full and without noise in comparison to her young adult life when people were everywhere about the house and farm.
Posey must not be in those tall encroaching thickets or she would've drifted out. Elda could not now see them with definition, but she ever sensed the trees' presence. Soon the house would be engulfed in them, but Elda was pleased by the thought. She loved the tangle that most Mainers worked to keep back. Elda had once seen the word "arboloco"—a term invented for the Civilian Conservation Corps during the Great Depression to describe the depression of young plainsman who had been transported to the Ozarks for government jobs. The exaggerated academic term made her chuckle but it fit Balder's Yankee farmer ancestors perfectly and she appreciated the respect it accorded to trees. Anyone who ever got turned around in the woods would recognize the tribute.
She kept to the path on her way to the barn, fearing the interior passages that connected the house, ell, shed and barn. She did not like to meddle with all the doors. Something might fall, the barn might tumble to timbers. Balder had inspected it since snow's passing, pronouncing it "safe'n habitable fah your crittas," but she could never trust tilted appearances. Balder had the mind of an engineer. He could believe in, admire, tune, even design machinery, but his mother was hopelessly unmechanical. Metal and mechanisms were less substantial to Elda than the inner essence of a beast.
Was it brightening? She looked toward the treetops. The bristly tips would catch light soon. Then the gods' twilight would be gone till evening. Later, in sun, Elda would go abroad, seeking animals and the impending spectacle of an eclipse. Her aging eyes could deliver that much still, surely. But first there were creatures' needs to tend.
She fingered the small plastic bottle in a pocket of her worn woolen sweater, making sure of it. Her pale veined hand reached out then, pushing a bit on the heavy barn door, sliding it aside. So slight was Elda that a crack was all she needed to slip within. The dank hay- and animal-dropping smell took hold of her. A mingled scent of skunk and bear cub permeated the cavernous place. She felt for the switch that Balder had installed: A powerful 500 watt light cut a dusty swath through the gloom, reflecting from a multitude of wild eyes.
She made the rounds, working from bins in a former tack room and from the old refrigerator where she kept meat. Working around the shored interior of the old barn, Elda fed, watered, inspected, and nursed her current menagerie, everyone in some state of recovery. Here were perched birds and furry animals caged behind fencing. There was also the reptile silent in a tank beneath a heat lamp.
Rounding the corner of one tank, Elda entered a workroom. Light was beginning in wire-screened windows silhouetting a great horned owl. Perched behind chicken wire, its huge talons were locked around a T-bar. She looked a touch too alert. The woman dug in her pocket for the plastic vial containing a dark powered root. She poured the premeasured amount of valerian and worked it into a piece of raw cube steak, rolling it up along with the bony carcass of a mouse into a sticky ball. The owl was her current dangerous case, a villainess with front-facing yellow eyes, feathered tufts jutting from its fierce brows, and a wingspan reminiscent of eagles. Even though the owl was in here out of sight, its presence made the other animals uneasy. Rabbits, a woodchuck, skunk, partridge, one racoon with kits, an orphan bear cub: All were unsettled and restive.
They should worry, thought Elda....once its wing mends. This mighty-legged, three- and a half-pound bird had scooped up a nine pound village dog, and punctured Asa Bartlett's head with its two-inch talons. A regular dosing from Elda's herbal pharmacy kept the edge off its ferocity, giving her a chance to check the progress of its wounded wing. Even so, Elda would wear safety glasses from Balder's shed and speak softly while treating this great female. And she would hood the owl when it was ready for her to inspect the wound.
Seeing Elda, the great horn became watchful. Then it eyed the meat, complete with a dangling mouse tail. Elda donned a gauntlet for protection and opened a small feeding gate, extending the doctored meat. The owl snatched and downed the offering.
"Back soon," murmured Elda and turned away. She turned back into the barn and began cleaning out cages.
It was still early when she went outside to look again for Posey. Silent sunlight touched the naked red-tinged twigs of the treetops. The woodland bordering the weedy dooryard was still... and apparently empty of critters. When would Posey show? Elda sighed, taking the morning in on a breath.
She would look for the deer when she climbed the ridge to seek out the eclipse.
Noon was on its way as Elda climbed Simon's Ridge. May sun shed its welcome warmth on her flannel-clad back. Taking hold of budded saplings, her joints and limbs aching, she pulled herself upward. Elda's worries bunched in her mind, clustering like flowers soon to emerge on the moose maples where she climbed.
Posey had not shown at the house and, so far, was not to be seen on the mountain. Of mornings the doe would come as on tiptoe, silently stepping, a swollen shadow in the grey half light. Was she hurt somewhere—or just sore over the owl?... Even Balder had not been home. Now that was not usual!
No one was steadier than Balder. He had a regular job and also did odd mechanical and carpentry jobs; hauling in his pickup, and even snow plowing in winter. His job at the Gottheim Chair Factory, keeping outmoded machinery running, was the kind of challenge he used to keep his skills honed. Elda tried not to worry over his absence, but that was what it was these past two days—trying. Human relationships required so much of what she seemed unable to give. When he showed again, he would probably be irritated if she gave away her concern.
Another worry was the sun—friend or foe? Could she really blame her failing sight upon the sun ... and wouldn't that be pointless? So here it comes—another lonely night in a bed of tears?—oh quit, woman quit! Quit all this worrying!
Just keep climbing. Almost there. Life is better when there's something on the horizon. Something like an annular eclipse to watch for. Elda had been counting on this for two weeks. It was movement in heaven—even if it didn't always live up to its billing. Maybe it was the waiting and watching that mattered, anyway. Hopeful watching itself might light and animate everything. Like an eclipse, watching could show forth an inscrutable purpose ... underscored in fire and blue air. Afterward, the remains of watching would be largely unintelligible, except in that kindling still moment before God slipped away.
The pack on her back waggled as she climbed, hand over hand, taking foothold in leaf-litter among rocks and roots. From every rotten surface slick with wet, the green life of earth was starting, tender and delicate. Frost had been coaxed out of everything, rains saturating all. Elda rejoiced in seeing pale green after so many months of winter white and brown. —But would there be gaze enough for it next year?
She lay on the hard ledge above the pond valley. She looked up through a makeshift combination of sunglasses and Balder's welding mask. Eccentric, the townsfolk would think her. Laughable. Lying out here on the edge like a stranger fallen from space—blackflies lighting but not biting. She could imagine the judgment: stop work, equip yourself, climb to the ledge ... because the moon's path crosses the sun? She was already some queer by any tale, spending her meager means on feed for wild animals, putting ads in The Village Voter for handouts for ailing wild animals. Animals don't need help! You can't stop animals. They come like raindrops, one after the other, a flood. A strong winter could take nine tenths of a herd's casualties in fawns, but it would just come back wombs full next May. Why all the work and expense when nature supplies her own gourdful each spring?
A nearby chickadee started its patient soft calling. Now another began further along the ledge. Elda stopped her self-involved thoughts to listen. She continued peering through the doubled glass, watching for the spectacle.
Ah. The bite was on: The sky appeared to take a piece of the sun. There would be no total eclipse because the ring of light would be too wide. From reports she knew that full annularity would be a while in coming. She could sit back, eat lunch, even doze, while waiting for the moon to center itself over the sun's disc.
Digging her lunch from the pack, Elda tried to imagine other space-fallen folks watching along the shadowline: people in northeast Asia, the Arctic, Ontario, the Baja peninsula. She felt a faint kinship with them. They too, would notice a powerful withholding. Ninety percent of all that light, for a time just taken away.
She ate under pines and slept to the soft sound of the hopeful chickadee.
The raucous call of ravens startled her awake. She donned the glasses and mask, slid to the edge of smooth rock and looked up, away from the valley of the ponds. In the sky the sun's rim was just closing the bright c, turning it into an o as the invisible moon covered it.
There. Elda beheld a complete and perfect ring of burning light. And she felt it pierce her retinas with fire. With a small cry she let the rig fall, closing her eyes. Now she saw that the sunglasses had slipped out of place after donning the rig. With haste she adjusted them, feeling tears well. Why had she attempted it with the less powerful mask—when she knew that a rating of 10 was not powerful enough protection? Because Balder had no mask with the required 14. Her reckless obsessions would wreck 'em!
Elda winked the tears away and lay very still, staring up through the mended rig at the thick ring of muted light. Quiet; stillness in the sight above seeped into her. This silent coupling of these great heavenly bodies moved her with a deep impression of silence. The sight imprinted her retinas, but the quiet embodied for her mind was more eloquent than what she was seeing. It was silence soft on her spirit. As though God had come and lain down in her.
She waited. Then she removed the rig and looked around at the natural world of her own familiar neighborhood. The light revealing this world was unnaturally toned. Here, almost, was the twilight again. A brighter twilight of the gods, but still subduing everything. She felt a slight drop in temperature and the breeze was freshening. All sights were hushed in silvery non-light: the valley, where part of Hutchins Pond and the entire village lay hidden by the hill; her house standing in trees; where pines grew dark and hardwoods twiggy and the creatures slept: Every loved thing was cast in that unsettling diffusion of dark and light. Was it an almost belittling dimness? As though the scene were no longer worth the shine of its reflection after all these years. And she felt its significance dissolving.
With care she donned the glasses and mask again, intently searching the spectacle. Now it was like an eye, watching her in turn. Suddenly. Great and heavenly, staring. She was protected from its awesome power to burn and blind, yes, but it was looking at her all the same. God had gotten up and walked away, gone, leaving this Great Eye staring at her. She willed herself calm beneath the unblinking gaze ... until it looked away, becoming a small c, opening on the opposite side of the circle. And the spectacle was undone.
She removed the mask, crawled away from the edge and stood. Elda gathered the remains of lunch, her gear, and crammed them into her backpack. From there she took the deer path up to the ridgetop, intending to hike back the long way—through the brush at the top and down to a dirt road. But she was startled to find that a cut had been made by loggers, and finished off with a bulldozer. Someone had slashed a fresh road along the spring-swollen ridge. The new road was deeply rutted, spongy with runoff and melted frost.
Developers coming! The ski resort on the north side of Jasper Mountain had opened up all sorts of speculation in the town. Outloud she exclaimed, "Someone's building ovah my head. They gont look down on me from theya porches?!"
Limping, aching, arthritic, Elda came through reddening woodland on the lane toward the crumbling house. Paunchy with fawn, Posey stepped out of bordering trees. Silently she came to Elda's side and nuzzled her hand. Relief flooded the woman.
"Why Posey! Waya you been!" She knelt and stroked the little doe's long tawny neck. Posey was an undersized, whitetail doe, befriended during a day's doctoring when the herd had taken shelter in the plowed lane. The snow was deep, so deep, then. After that, they had yarded up in the garden—not uncommon at the relatively hidden Simon's Ledge. The finish of hunting season sometimes brought injured deer to this house of healing.
Together they walked up the long lane. As the woman made rounds in the barn, Posey followed delicately. When it came time to check on the owl, however, she backed away and wandered outside to browse on blooming tender maples twigs.
An hour later, having released a mended partridge, Elda entered the oaken and pine paneled kitchen. There dismaying shadow fell on her, darkening the peace that Posey had given her. She felt for Posey's long ears and, reassured, flicked on the light. The doe went to the sideboard and, attempting to mount, scrabbled her small split hooves on the wooden countertop.
Chuckling, Elda snatched up the canister Posey was trying to reach, pried off the lid, and held out a handful of raw peanuts. Posey pushed her moist black nose against the heel of Elda's hand, delicately picking up the nuts with her tongue. Swallowing several, she set her hooves up again and, bending her neck, reached for the salt shaker. Elda grabbed it first and shook liberally into her hand, then held it out for the doe to lick.
The woman went to the sink, washed her hands, and filled the kettle to set on the woodstove. Suddenly she was too weary to stoke the fire. She turned off the light and crept to the couch by the stove, sank gratefully back and drew on an old patchwork quilt made by Everett's mother long ago. Posey knelt and lay atop a rag rug on the pumpkin-pine floor. Peacefully she chewed her cud. May light moved across the wall and was at last cut off by an arm of the hill. Neither creature stirred.
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History in Gottheim
It was still light outside when tall blond Balder came in. Posey scrambled up to meet him, sniffing then licking the small togue dangling among those in his hand. Laughing, he laid the fish on the sideboard and reached into a paper bag. Elda stirred on the couch and sat up stretching, glad of his voice.
"Better shoo the doe away, or we'll have none fah suppah," he said, giving Posey a nibble of something from the bag. "See what I brung you?" He held the something between his thumb and forefinger. The house being so dim, she could not make it out. "What is it?" she asked, rubbing her eyes.
He frowned. "It's fiddleheads is what. I could eat the bagful." He went to the wall and flicked on the light. "You gont fix'em or am I?"
"Well, I will, you spoiled kid." Never mind that Balder was approaching his mid-thirties. She stood and went to stick her hand in the bag to feel the small plump wheels of furled fern shoots. "Look at'em all! Waya did you find 'em?" She brought out a handful for the pregnant deer and led her out the door. "Boggy Place?"
Shaking his head, Balder got out the cutting board and lay the fish on it in the sink. "Hiked into Birch River afta work. Blackflies's starting."
"So don't I know it. Not biting yet, though." Elda got out a skillet, began heating oil. "Was you down by old Mason's Mills—across fum the old granite work, hidden like?" She put on a pot containing enough water to steam the coiled fiddleheads, sprinkled in some salt to remove bitterness.
"The same." He was cutting the brown and silver fish under running water. "Wasn't it you showed me it as a kid?"
"Cuss I did. Told you about the old grist mill. They had a carding and fulling mill. Prosperous, too, said Asa Bartlett."
Balder said, "Cold in heah." He went to the stove to lay kindling and blow on the embers. The door squealed as he shut it. "Kinda like the Bearces of theya day, guess."
"Yuht. Owned all that land around theya on both sides of the stream. Maybe 100, 150 years ago. Think what things was like back then."
"Blackflies like now. And no TV. Whad they do nights—visit?"
She nodded, breading pieces of fish. "Had socials, musicals and all. Dances, school plays. They read!" She grinned. Balder was back!
The fiddleheads were steaming and the fish laid sizzling in oil. She said, "What I don't know was how they stacked that monstah granite. How'd they move stuff like that then?"
"Oxen or draft hosses, with block'n tackle. Pulleys." He stood over the fiddleheads, picking through them with a fork. "Be surprised what you can do with'em. Look what you can do with a come-along—move a truck out of a mud hole with bare hands and that."
"Whad you see down theya besides fiddleheads?"
"Skunk cabbage, wild ginger, wake-robin, bellwort." He grinned.
"Good, ain't it?" She returned a grin.
Balder nodded, lounging against the sideboard his powerful shoulders at ease. His blue gaze was still upon Elda, paying attention. "Took my break when I could see that eclipse you been talkin'bout. You notice that strange silver light when it was on? That mask work OK? Know what that ring reminded me of?" He noticed her perfunctory response to all these questions and went on: Evah read Lord of the Rings? Story about this hobbit—theya little people. He had a powerful ring to get rid of. You might say it was a quest in reverse. A quest to get rid of power. Anaway, by the end of the fuss book, he's seeing this ring—like an eye looking at'em—every time he closes his eyes. You ought read that book, Mutha." He stared down at the skillet where she was poking at the fish. "Under certain conditions, I can see a ring in negative if I shut my eyes. That evah happen to you? Works out it's an image of my iris."
Elda was silent, turning pieces of lightly browned togue, not even looking up. His allusion to eyes and the eclipse threatened the peace his company had brought her.
She heard him go into the front parlor and snap on television. The McNeil/Lehrer News Hour on Senate legislation drifted into the kitchen. Elda turned her thought away from distress. There was something better to think of: Something was different about Balder. Gone was his more usual solemn silence. Tonight his attitude was light. Unconsciously she had seen it, but now she was aware.
Balder was tall and as good-looking as a healthy buck in velvet. He had a cap of blond, almost white hair, but when he wore his watch cap he reminded her of a Norwegian sailor, off the stormy North Sea. He could joke and wisecrack, yet for years there had been an air of grief about him. Vietnam grief, she called it. Everyone in town had opinions on the way he had spent his time here in isolation after his tour. "In hiding," they called it. They all thought the way to deal with grief was to work like a maniac. The respectable ones said so; others thought he should drink a little harder.
But today ... today was different. Thinking about it, Elda saw that Balder was happy.
He wandered back into the kitchen, saying, "Went down to apply at the papah mill today. Ovah to G'fid."
"The papah mill." Taken by surprise, she said crossly, "Whad you do that fah!"
He frowned. "Why does anyone? Fah the money."
"God-awful place! Could get choo killed."
"Now Mutha.... " He was laughing at her!
"Theya's poison in that mill!"
Frowning, he could see that she wasn't going to lay off this saw until a tree fell somewhere. "Forget it, Mutha. Prob'ly won't get the job anaway. Getting in is like getting into Harvard. Evah man in fifty miles tries to. Didn't Fatha?" He turned, went to get the plates from the cupboard.
Elda heaped one with flaking fish and steaming fiddleheads. She forced herself quiet, said in a low voice, "What's wrong with your job at the chair factory? You make money working on cars'n pickups besides. You get odd jobs enough."
He said (mysteriously she thought), "I need more money now. Let loose of it, Mutha." Balder went back to the parlor with his plateful.
Elda followed with hers. Balder sat on a sofa, facing the TV. She sat in a woolen worn arm chair, an afghan draped across its back.
Balder said, "Fiddleheads's good."
"Not bitter at all," she agreed.
It had been years since they ate together at the table, when his father was alive, in fact. More and more, since Everett's death, the news hour has come to dominate supper. Even breakfast is now frequently eaten before the Maine morning news.
Now each sits in separate thought, eyes upon the flickering images. Balder thinks of Middle America, whose cause is before him on the screen. He has just come away from what he thinks of as a typical product of that self-involved class. The young woman is up from Massachusetts to work with her brother, an entrepreneur developing a condominium resort. Gloria thinks herself brainy and brave. They are two from a fantasy written contingent, up to tame and shape the wildlands; to make a brighter suburbia than the labyrinthine, if elegant, subdivision they vacated. He frowns. As he considers their plans for Gottheim, the frown hardens into a scowl. The plans call for the Jasper Mountain ski resort to stride practically around the base of the bald rocky giant and make a new shiny Main Street for the community.
Watching the debate on economic trickle-down, Balder grimaces and thinks of these things. Gloria Fay has a master's degree in public policy and can punch up a computer, cranking out statistically loaded reports by the bucketload—but most likely can't mop out a toilet or feed herself. Not with any consistency. He has discovered that she is an upscale restaurant dweller, as some writer-lady somewhere put it. In her mind Maine is still the District of Maine, a province of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts—as it was two hundred years before gaining statehood in 1820.
She can ski though—like she was born schussing down mountain. Must've been two weeks ago when he noticed her on Glory Trail. Jasper's trails had not been so rotten then. She was there on the lift up ahead, decked out in brightness, banishing the dreariness of mud season. When she took off down Glory, he saw her below, swift like the trail itself (and her name nearly the same, he learned later). He had to work to catch up with her, through snow the consistency of sugar up top, then through the slush below. But the next trip he was on that lift with Gloria.
Canny talker, full of fun—like sunlight glittering on the surface of the pond. A voice like honey. He was rejoicing inwardly all the way topside again. They crossed the tops of spruces, and were ready to jump the ramp together.... Just there a dreaminess entered him, coupling with a patient desire. Gloria: her smile spring-bright, and head sleek with heavy gold hair. She led them toward the near precipice that was Glory Trail. And he followed her down, this time not in curiosity but with joy.
Now, sitting in front of the television, Balder Simon considers that he needs more money. He might even go into a restaurant other than the diner—once in awhile. Love has fired a quiet form of ambition in him where nothing else could. Yet he has made up his mind not to follow in her ways. He can't. Instead, he will go after things that have always seemed good but, until now, were not greatly desired. He will buy land of his own, and a house ... or build one? Someday—daow, he's not counting on it ... though having a family is what he wants. It will depend on how wedded she is to her fantasy. Will her unconscious selfishness bruise, break his heart? It's happened before.... But, Vietnam gave him suffering in stronger form, so that Balder now knows what time is for. Time exists to squander upon the best you can find.
Lord Jesus, there it is. Happening again, after all these years.
Intent on the next News Hour segment, about possible resort development in Virginia, Elda scarcely notices the wobbling snowy reception of the TV. She's listening, staring into space, not watching. Here beneath Simons Ledge in the mid-1980s Meguntic Mountains, the only stations available are few and distorted. Thinking of the planned development on the ridge, Elda wonders. How can these people keep building these elaborate, palatial houses, such as she sees on the screen? Who has money for such places? What do they all do for a living? Not farming, not mill work or logging. Is the rest of the country so different from Maine?—she guessed. They have to come here with money earned elsewhere.
She glances at Balder who is just coming into the room with a plate of toast, cup of coffee. Work boots, jeans, flannel shirt. It's practically a uniform. She asks, "Choo see the new road up theya yet?" She gestures toward great Jasper above.
"Saw them stot logging up theya last fall. Thought they must be putting in something by the way it was cut." He remembers her after settling back on the sofa. "Waunt tea?"
She stands uncertainly, her arthritic hip giving her a jolt. "I'll get it. Maybe two dozen house sites up theya. Hope they won't be so big's those on TV."
He watches her exit: stiff tonight. A slight, kerchiefed, crooked thing.
He raises his voice. "You'll be turning middle-aged, you don't watch, Mutha."
"I am middle-age, Balda!" she calls back.
"Then what'm I coming to, deah?"
"Y'ain't middle-aged till forty!"
In the kitchen she fills her cup, dunks a bag, wanting to ask where he's been for three days. She wonders, why is it none-of-your-business if you're the one worried?
Elda comes back with her tea, eases herself into the chair. Now it feels good sitting down. She'll stay awhile, put her feet up on the straw-leaking hassock.
The last segment of the News Hour is on the annular eclipse, a public television poetic essay. There is the great eye again, looking at her, just. The eye of one of Embla's old gods. The essayist tells how a crowd of students responds almost as one, awed witnesses of the covering and rediscovering of the sun. The wholeness of the sight brings a sort of rapture to the class as they are caught up together in a joyful response.
Slowly it comes to her that she wants to tell Balder. To tell someone trusty and loved. But she knows she won't. She will only tell Posey, a whisper under her breath. Because it is Elda's way to just ... keep going. Till she can't go no more. That's what she does when things are beyond her. She will move through twilight until it's so dark she can't see. All things will dissolve in one.
In treetops, high above, late light shone on red tips and tiny blooms. Elsewhere were hints of red and green buds. In the dooryard outside Simon's old settler house, Posey stood, gulping down her fiddleheads. Came a rattle, to her pricked ears, from the duff in the woods. The little deer lifted her pointed face nervously, staring through spindly tree stems. A red squirrel leaped, scurried up the trunk. Posey relaxed a bit, drifting toward the woods. Desiring company, she began browsing her way toward higher ground. Then, climbing on quick thin legs, Posey's hooves imprinted the soft earth, still mixed with last autumn's leaves. Sometimes her split hooves gripped protruding rock, milky quartz, or glinting granite. Hearing the intermittent rush of water and wind, she followed around the shoulder of the wooded slope. There the falling sun alighted yet. Breasting a rocky crest, she found a brimming brook and smelled its clean vegetative scent. She ducked to it, taking a long cold drink. Posey jerked her head up, watching.
Now she stepped through the water and began following along the course of the brook, through emerging grasses and plants—dainty spring flowers like bluet, sessile-leaved bellwort, blue violet. The Jasper Mountain brook wound around hummocks and saplings, beneath high straight trunks of maple beech birch. The paunchy little doe found young beech with shapely limbs, alight with tightly furled buds. She stopped to tear off the tender stems and swallow before continuing on her search for companionship.
Movement off her shoulder startled her, and she looked up. There a hairy woodpecker, speckled and striped, fell fluttering from tree to tree. It inspected crevices in the bark but did not rear back to thrust for a meal. Posey went on, picking her way with nervous delicacy, lifting her pointed face to the breeze.
And still calm light lingered above as she meandered up current, but at last the shadows deepened. The brook thinned to a trickle then turned to mush with green plants sprouting. There Posey saw yet deeper shadows, standing, quiet and many-legged: three does, each filled with fawn; and one of these her mother. Touching, rubbing necks in greeting, she joined them. In dusk they stood together, chewing cud, blackflies alighting. Now the deer started back toward low ground. They sought the still waters of ponds with peepers, a mist-strewn vale, and soft bedding.
Their shelter would be darkness. Darkness had sheltered their antecedents, who settled all the mountain long long ago.
At dawn came light on the heights of Jasper Mountain. In deep shade, far beneath, six deer looked up from a sheltered cove. The bald head of the mountain was out of sight, but across the pond a fir-crowned summit floated above a wreathing mist. Distant rumbling on the highway stirred them to move. In silence the does drifted upward through hemlocks toward higher ground. The slopes of Jasper Mountain stood in ponderous mystery over the village of Gottheim.
A door opened in the ell off the kitchen of a many-angled farmhouse near the shore. Stepping out, Asa Bartlett caught sight of the many-legged shadows disappearing among dark conifers beyond the cove. His breath a vapor on the early air, Asa stepped off the doorstone and walked across the sandy weedy, but trim, yard to his freshly painted Ford pickup. He had painted it hunter green last weekend and now stood in critical appraisal of the job—as he had each morning since. The right front fender might need a touch-up. Maybe a slight but definite line with a fine brush would do it. Asa considered heading to the shed for brush and spray paint, but his stomach was growling. He wanted a cup of Decatur's coffee more than anything on earth. So he yanked the door handle, slid into the pickup.
But he stopped, cocking his head to look in the rear view at his bandaged temple. He smoothed his crewcut brick red hair, then, wincing, adjusted his horn-rimmed glasses. How can this wound be throbbing still—after two days. That owl! He ought to go into the house, get his 30-30, go up to Elda Simon's and blast its malicious head off. But, catching a glimpse of his furious face in the mirror, Asa cackled, sinking back against the seat.
Don't you just look like Buster Bearce the time we tied his pants in knots. Asa recalled the decades-old incident of the lumber baron's son who went skinny dipping by moonlight, only to emerge and find his dungarees, shirt, and socks all knotted tight and soaking wet. Asa and Wellington Bird might have run off with the clothes but that would've been theft.
Asa turned his key in the ignition, eased out onto the hot-top and headed for the diner on the highway. The camps and summer places were still vacant as he drove past. Then the road wound through the narrows among broad ponds. He thought about the folks from away who had peopled the shores for decades. Now they were being joined in the area by skiway interests. The pattern of succession, which Asa often thought about, was making new inroads of late. Mentally he ticked them off. First had lived the Indians, which he thought of as abiding here since forever—though of course he knew about the land bridge migrations. Then came proprietors, then settlers and their descendants. Next were timber speculators, then immigrants—Irish, French, Scandinavian. Now it was developers. Everybody's staking their claim in these mountains ... each new group full of dreams.
They forget, he thought grimly. We spend more time in the ground than we do walking around on top of it. "Just waya do they think they're going s'fast?" he said aloud. Maybe that was why he enjoyed tying Buster's pants in knots. Always in a hurry, those Bearces. Gobbling up the land right to left since anyone can remember. As though consolidating holdings could somehow keep them from sharing space with roots and rocks in glacial till along with everybody else.
He pulled onto the highway and drove on as the diner showed silver and maroon beneath the wooded knoll. The village of Gottheim edged a gleaming pond, sheltered beyond in shadow: the tiny houses and businesses drowsing in the dusk of Jasper's great knees. Other mountains surrounded the valley, most named for Yankee settlers who once had homesteads there. Many granite shoulders of the low ones were to this day laced with networks of moldering stone walls, covered now in standing third and fourth growth timber. Overgrown discontinued wagon roads looped through the woods. The forest floor was pocked with old cellar holes, ingrown with oak maple birch pine spruce. Moss-grown dumps of rusting tools and seamless bottles lay near more recent pits dug by prospectors—the descendants of settlers, looking for treasure: tourmaline, topaz, amethyst, beryl. There were other treasures too, buried, unseen, of which Asa knew nothing. One of these lay hidden beneath concrete in the basement of a Jasper Mountain resort condominium.
He saw Elvegy Blanchard drive out of the parking lot of the diner in her Bronco pickup, the bed loaded with manure and its powerful smell reaching out to gag anyone in sight not used to it. Asa was.
Overstreet the tower clock of the Congo Church chimed distantly, just as he entered Decatur's diner. He enjoyed the diner's smell of coffee, bubbling hot oil, and chicken soup already a'simmer. The diner's floor was uneven, covered with linoleum in dire need of fresh wax. The ceiling was peeling tin, the booths taped and tattered, but no one—even tidy Asa—seemed to notice. The regulars seemed not to see the place at all ... except in those isolated, clear moments when things were either very right or going dead wrong.
He heard the jabbering on about Elvegy as he entered the glass door just inside the glass mudroom entrance. Apparently she'd left a stench, along with that of the manure, about her brother-in-law Ithiel Whitman. Her tone was escalating of late. Fortunately for Ithiel he could brush it off with humor.
"Went too far this time," Asa heard Rensalier Simon growl. And Melvinia Sessions answer, "But Ithiel just bears it light as pie. Seems to relish it like pie, too."
Asa copied it all and greeted a few regulars and, so that he might lean back against it surveying the door, took his usual stool near the counter's elbow. He liked sipping coffee before breakfast, seeing who came in. Decatur's was the place to imbibe gossip along with breakfast. People on their way to work stopped in, retirees took up residence, and school bus drivers klatched here after dropping off the children. Recently, a resort developer had suggested that the Post Office be moved out to a proposed mini mall. God awful!—but, if so, the diner's being not that far off Front Street, on a loop to the highway, would be doubly important as communal meeting point. Asa worked second shift at the village wood-turning mill, but still he came in every morning for breakfast and a word or two before running errands or returning home to chores. The latest news was kicked around, opinions batted back and forth—from booth to booth, over the counter and back again. Every juicy subject was here. Politicians, welfare mothers, abortion, the economy, foreign affairs, plain affairs, murder.
Like what happened the year the ski resort really took off—property rates tripled as folks came from away, speculating like mad. A Connecticut landlord shot his ex and her boyfriend, then larruped round over the back roads and tried to shoot his daughter-in-law in the gut.... Over property. That was the year young people gave up thoughts of owning and just tried to adjust to increasing rents; descendants of those generations who had remained when others had fled to easier places like Ohio (Asa muses a moment upon the Ohio fever of the previous century): their ancestors still faithful on rock-bound soil. But now, on minimum wage, they are unable to afford a place. Paper corporations and other large landowners once kept everything in trees for wood products but now were beginning to sell cutover and off-aged woodlots to developers. At Decatur's diner, locals met to talk it over, complain about the machinations and perceived effrontery of flatlanders coming with threats of "a booming economy and service sector jobs." As Asa had said, "That promise of a booming economy's what scares me. Means theya's a bust some wayas down the road."
A waitress in her late fifties stood behind the counter before the order window near the coffee urn. Her gray hair fluffy and short, Melvinia Sessions' eyes glittered behind her outsized pink glasses. Her head shook with exaggerated sympathy, or perhaps suppressed laughter, so that her earings sparkled as she called out in her tinkly voice, "How's the ol'owl bite, Asa? Gut any better since yestadee? And when can we expect to see a photo in The Voter?"
Asa grimaced. "Daow. And it's not a bite. I ought to shoot that bud. Can you imagine Elda Simon's nursing that malevolent thing? It could come back fah the rest the town. They won't be no cats left, anahow. Someone saw it disembowel one not two weeks ago. Least they thought 'twas the same owl."
"Cuss it's the same!" returned Melvinia. "Gott'im is haunted by a demon possessed great owl. Someone ought to call Stephen King'n tell 'em about that owl."
Rensalier Simon, sitting two stools down, set his coffee mug by and, still reading the paper, said, "Things is spookier than anathin he could tell."
"What they doing now?" Asa craned his neck for a look at Rensalier's paper. "Haven't seen the town bellyache yet."
The big man drew back, glaring, tipping The Village Voter against his expanse of green work shirt.
Asa huffed, and turned back to Melvinia. "Your joints gummed up with molasses today? Waya's my coffee?"
Melvinia poured a steaming cup and set it before him, saying, "How many thousands of cups've I brung you over the years, Asa? Never said nothing bout how fast I got those cups poured."
"Don't you sound like someone's laundress."
"Me—married to you?—and have to wait on you at home too?" She shook her head. "When I get home I put my feet up."
"I sure was not asking, but so don't I—about the feet, I mean," said Asa (his Gottheim Academy schooling notwithstanding).
"Like any ol'Mainer, you keep working, frigging with something."
"You don't? What about those yuppie kids you was babysitting? Their parents went ovah to Farmington teaching nights?"
"In three weeks school ends'n then I'm taking hints fom TV newspersons—like they call 'emselves now. Always giving out these health tips, so I pick'n choose fom all the medical advice. Too much work makes you tense. That makes you unfit for work, they say."
"Phew—work less so you can work more? What's the point?"
"Whad'll you have, deah?" she said tartly, pencil poised in hand.
"Hev I become a different person since yestadee? Give me what I always have! And waya's the counter paper? Got to find out what's spooky in Gott'im." He didn't waste a sidelong glance on Rensalier Simon.
Smiling, Melvinia jotted something down and laid the slip on the wooden sill of the window between the kitchen and the counter. Decatur, the business owner and cook, was inside at the grill. Melvinia hollered, calling his attention to the order.
At the counter Rensalier grunted then folded The Voter, laying it by his empty plate. He got up, resettled his ballcap on his squat head, and went to the cash register at the break in the counter.
Asa snatched up the paper and spread it out before him, muttering. There, in front of his bespeckled gaze, was a story of the owl attack, illustrated by a photo of the great horned perched on a T-bar in Elda Simon's barn. Asa was grateful he'd had the presence of mind to slip out the back way at the Gottheim Health Clinic, following treatment of his wound. He'd probably be staring at his own picture now. There was enough to mortify in print without his bloody bandaged likeness staring off the front page. He by-godfreyed to himself as Melvinia, chuckling, came over to pour more coffee. "Too bad li'l Libby didn't get choo with her camera," she said. "Wouldn't that be pretty, just?"
"Yuht," said Asa absently. He had found the spookiness Rensalier referred to and was already knee deep in it. "Taking seen as only course," read the headline. Developers had petitioned the Bureau of Parks and Recreation to use the power of eminent domain to intervene and settle an impasse in negotiations for purchasing private property. Developers would then convey to the state the clutter of dilapidated camps, warehouses, and junk-filled lots on Hutchins Pond, yielding ground for a shoreline park to enhance the proposed mini mall nearby. Asa finished the article and looked up, saying, "History's making rounds again."
"It has a way of doing that," said a female voice nearby.
Asa looked over, surprised. Olive Lovejoy had slid into the seat vacated by Rensalier. "Well, ain't choo the stranger! They let you out, have they?"
Melvinia set a mug before Olive and she clasped it in her dimpled hand. She was a large, talking woman, not fat. The henna was wearing out of her hair and so was the curl. Olive's clothes were comfortable, practical, a blue blouse and skirt; her face full, only just beginning to show little lines. She seldom wore makeup, but when she had the chance she painted her nails so bright they made you wince. Her life was spent in brooding over a houseful of five or six developmentally disabled. Now her husband had a malignancy in his liver, and she was watching him waste and die. Asa couldn't bring himself to ask after Horace right off. He had to work up to it, so he said, "What's new among the retarded?"
"Well, I'm getting disgusted, that's new. Bout ready to give up."
Asa moved the paper to make room for the plate Melvinia set before him. "What's this!?" he barked. But he was relieved to be distracted from his duty of broaching the subject of Horace. He looked from the yellow mounds on his plate into the glee of Melvinia's slack-skinned face.
"That's your usual, in't it?"
"I nevah et scrambled eggs'n my life!" He pushed it away, scowling. His head throbbed.
Melvinia's grin grew. "You know y'look like a Bearce when you make that face."
"And you look like an ape!"
Olive said, "That looks good. Give it heah." She reached over with her brightly painted fingers and pulled the plate to her. With relish she began eating.
Melvinia shrank back, sorry, then went to the window and called to Decatur to fry a couple eggs with bacon and homefries.
Asa heard and was mollified. He turned to Olive. "How's Horace?"
"It's those people ovah to 'Gusty! All they want's papahs."
Asa was baffled. Then he saw that she spoke not of Horace Lovejoy—she couldn't. Olive referred to the bureaucrats in Augusta.
She was shaking her head. "All my kids waunt is someone to take a li'l time with 'em. But 'Gusty only wants papers filled out. And numbas. X many sheets, x many towels, x many times I done this, x many times that. But all the kids waunt's attention. Stopped mopping the floor yesterday to play with Tommy. Sixteen years old'n his folks has dumped'em. He was in a pink-stink—s'lonely. 'Gusty don't care. Everything's got to be on papah." She stopped talking to take another bite of toast. Asa sat in commiserative silence. After a bit she said, "Looks like I got to give up on Billy. I've had problems with him, so Horace wants me to get rid of 'em—afterwards .... "
Asa gave a slight nod, otherwise leaving the thought alone.
"Billy's still afraid of Horace, though he's so ill. Respects 'em, might say."
"That the one uses the F-word evah other word?"
She nodded. "Billy's tough, but I give 'em time-out. Ten minutes. Like with children though—he thinks it's an hour." She turned her eyes toward the paper. "What's this history repeating itself?"
"Developers caunt get their hands on property fast enough. They waunt park land by eminent domain."
"Who evah got land that way before?"
"... Well, it's not the preferred method round here."
Her eyes smiled shut. "You wouldn't be thinking—That rumor about folks being cheated out o'theya land by mill owners—that going round again?"
Asa smiled. "That's just one example. Daow, I'm talking bout history!" He smacked the countertop for emphasis. "Go back to the beginning ... what's theya?"
"Indians. That's why Jimmy Carter signed that settlement. Ah ancestors took theya land."
"Now that settlement down east was a little different. This heah was nice'n legal. They had a grant fom the General Court afta the Indians was most subdued. All this land was reward fah theya own ancestors' part in fighting the French in Canada. But something happened even after that grant."
"Tell me." She let Melvinia pour her another cup. "I don't pay's close attention. Haven't been to society meetings lately, anaway."
She referred to the monthly meetings of the Gottheim Historical Society. Asa was the chief amateur historian and knew much of what was in the books and records. He encouraged the old folks to record their recollections. He pored over town and county documents, made trips to the state archives, and generally kept the society from moldering away. Asa urged the keeping of memoirs, compilation of photos and the donation of town related antiquities, letters.
"Oh it's all theya in the records. But I should say 'the memory of records' in this instance. Doc Kimball, writing in the last century, talked about the 'convenient fire' (what gossip of that time called it), occurring afta the founders had consolidated theya holdings. Evah notice it took thirty years to incorporate this town?"
"So?" Olive's plate was now empty except for crusts, on which she was patiently spreading jam. Intent on the story of Gottheim's founding, Melvinia leaned into the counter. Just then Decatur stuck his sweaty bald head through the order window.
"Asa's eggs is ready!"
Scarcely taking her eyes off Asa's face, Melvinia reached back for the plate. She set it before him, waiting for him to go on.
Setting an egg on a slab of homemade toast, he began eating. "Somebody had to survey that land. So the proprietors sent theya sons up from Mass'chusetts to do it. By the way, that's when the fust industry was stotted here. Boiling sap. Sugaring off was the fust industry, not milling. Even the Bartletts come up and was making maple syrup 'fore a house was evah stacked together." He mopped up some yoke with a forkful of potato.
"What was my folks doing—the Gammons? They was heah, waunt they? Woodsmen, trappers, meatmen?"
"They didn't come 'til later, not in that first cultch."
Melvina drew back at the slight.
"So, they was surveying,..." prompted Olive.
"And when they gut done," continued Asa with relish, "they says to the other grantees, 'we got to assess you fah labor'n costs. That'll be forty shillings each,' which amounted to a few months' wages."
"Waunt it only fair?" asked Olive. "That's how taxes work."
Asa shook his head. "A governing body decides taxes. There was no Town, no selectmen yet. Those that balked at the after-the-fact fee had theya lots sold at auction ... in absentia. And the sons of some proprietors bought that land for nothing. Much later, when theya was talk of litigation, come the 'convenient fire.' "
"Wait a minute," said Melvinia, seeing a righteous outcome in the Gammons' late-coming. "Your ancestors was one o'those propri'tahs! You're saying your forefathers cheated folks that stayed in Mass'n couldn't get here—cheated them out o'theya land?"
"May be. No one knows for sure who surveyed, who bought at auction'n what was bought. Look up the list of grantees fom the General Court. Lots of names you never heard of! Lots you have." He swallowed some cold coffee. "But maybe sowing and reaping's took care of all that by now—evened things out. Some families hev come up'n some have gone down. Don't yours own that goodly piece north of the mountain that developers are eyeing?"
"That's Reuel Gammons. Cousins on Mutha's side twice removed." She laughed, earings swinging. "Something like that! Older I get, less I keep track. I mistrust I'm related to myself some way."
A huff of exasperation exhaled from the hot little kitchen. Decatur, at the window and irritated, said, "I note the family resemblance! You're late comin' to work, late getting this order out—just like your cousin Melviny!"
Melvinia said, "Don't know what you're so pleg'ed'bout today." But Decatur had withdrawn. Shaking her head, she picked up the order and emerged from behind the counter toward the far booth.
Glancing up at the neon clock, Olive said, "Looks like I got get back. Theya's no end o'things to do."
Asa nodded, saying, "Be by t'see Horace in a bit." She smiled. He watched her pay up and walk out, regretful that she could not stay to hear the cycle of Gottheim's history; regretful that Olive would experience her own small piece of succession—now that Horace was leaving Gott'im's cycle for good.
Asa was always ready to tell the story of Gottheim, but he had learned patience over the decades. Yes, they took his droppers, the repository of people's mental sheds filling up. With that and the archives, droppers enough, he thought, to keep the townsfolk in knowledge for three generations. But he had no children of his own to test this on. And, with a fresh reminder of Horace's passing, he realized that this generational spread might exclude a child born this week in the Guildford hospital. He would have to talk to someone at the elementary school about starting a program of some sort.
The door opens and in comes Robbie Robichaud to straddle the stool beside Asa. Robbie is a good-sized man wearing the worn working green of Asa's generation.
"That jeezly rig!" he said. "There ain't enough baling wire in the state to keep that piece o'junk together. Got to go down to G'fid and get parts for that pulp-loader. Ezzy's got the pickup today so I had to take Drusilla's TransAm. She waunt too happy. Spoiled kid." He drew close the mug set before him. "At least I ain't in the woods gettin'bit."
Robbie was another living piece from the puzzle of Gottheim's history, descended from French-Canadians who had come from rural Quebec at the turn of the century when Maine's paper mills were up and running. Robbie's father lost him his language in school when English was pressed into him. School children administered the prejudices of their Yankee elders in the hallways: "All frogs gut talk English—if they waunt get along. Hev to learn to wash'n wear shoes." The Robichauds would have retained their language in a community the size of Lewiston where the Franco-Americans were employed in textile mills, or in Guildford where they made paper; but Robbie's grandfather had come to Gottheim to work in a wood-turning mill when the paper mill stopped hiring. And his offspring went into the woods where it was quiet and free from the taunts of bigotry. Robbie never finished school. But now, besides sons who were in the woods, he had a daughter, Drusilla, who looked to be going to college in the fall. And Robbie was proud and glad that he was at last able to spoil someone. Drusilla's first choice had been the prestigious Bates College, in Lewiston, but she wasn't unhappy to settle for the University of Maine at Farmington with its excellent education program and in-state tuition.