Otherworldly Maine (19 page)

“‘I wore Worth's gardening gloves,' she said. ‘It wasn't anything anyway, Homer, but a jumped-up woodchuck with a little poison in it.'

“‘But missus,' I says, ‘where there's woodchucks there's bears. And if that's what the woodchucks look like along your shortcut, what's going to happen to you if a bear shows up?'

“She looked at me, and I seen that other woman in her—that Diana-woman. She says, ‘If things are different along those roads, Homer, maybe I am different, too. Look at this.'

“Her hair was done up in a clip at the back, looked sort of like a butterfly and had a stick through it. She let it down. It was the kind of hair that would make a man wonder what it would look like spread out over a pillow. She says, ‘It was coming in gray, Homer. Do you see any gray?' And she spread it with her fingers so the sun could shine on it.

“‘No'm,' I says.

“She looks at me, her eyes all a-sparkle, and she says, ‘Your wife is a good woman, Homer Buckland, but she has seen me in the store and in the post office, and we've passed the odd word or two, and I have seen her looking at my hair in a kind of satisfied way that only women know. I know what she says, and what she tells her friends . . . that Ophelia Todd has started dyeing her hair. But I have not. I have lost my way looking for a shortcut more than once . . . lost my way . . . and lost my gray.' And she laughed, not like a college girl but like a girl in high school. I admired her and longed for her beauty, but I seen that other beauty in her face as well just then . . . and I felt afraid again. Afraid
for
her, and afraid
of
her.

“‘Missus,' I says, ‘you stand to lose more than a little sta'ch in your hair.'

“‘No,' she says. ‘I tell you I am different over there . . . I am
all myself
over there. When I am going along that road in my little car I am not Ophelia Todd, Worth Todd's wife who could never carry a child to term, or that woman who tried to write poetry and failed at it, or the woman who sits and takes notes in committee meetings, or anything or anyone else. When I am on that road I am in the heart of myself, and I feel like—'

“‘
Diana
,' I said.

“She looked at me kind of funny and kind of surprised, and then she laughed. ‘Oh, like some goddess, I suppose,' she said. ‘She will do better than most because I am a night person—I love to stay up until my book is done or until the national anthem comes on the TV, and because I am very pale, like the moon—Worth is always saying I need a tonic, or blood tests or some sort of similar bosh. But in her heart what every woman wants to be is some kind of goddess, I think—men pick up a ruined echo of that thought and try to put them on pedestals (a woman, who will pee down her own leg if she does not squat! it's funny when you stop to think of it)—but what a man senses is not what a woman wants. A woman wants to be in the clear, is all. To stand if she will, or walk . . .' Her eyes turned toward that little go-devil in the driveway, and narrowed. Then she smiled. ‘Or to
drive
, Homer. A man will not see that. He thinks a goddess wants to loll on a slope somewhere on the foothills of Olympus and eat fruit, but there is no god or goddess in that. All a woman wants is what a man wants—a woman wants to
drive
.'

“‘Be careful where you drive, missus, is all,' I says, and she laughs and give me a kiss spang in the middle of the forehead.

“She says, ‘I will, Homer,' but it didn't mean nothing, and I known it, because she said it like a man who says he'll be careful to his wife or his girl when he knows he won't . . . can't.

“I went back to my truck and waved to her once, and it was a week later that Worth reported her missing. Her and that go-devil both. Todd waited seven years and had her declared legally dead, and then he waited another year for good measure—I'll give the sucker that much—and then he married the second Missus Todd, the one that just went by. And I don't expect you'll believe a single damn word of the whole yarn.”

In the sky one of those big flat-bottomed clouds moved enough to disclose the ghost of the moon—half-f and pale as milk. And something in my heart leaped up at the sight, half in fright, half in love.

“I do though,” I said. “Every frigging damned word. And even if it ain't true, Homer, it ought to be.”

He give me a hug around the neck with his forearm, which is all men can do since the world don't let them kiss but only women, and laughed, and got up.

“Even if it
shouldn't
ought to be, it is,” he said. He got his watch out of his pants and looked at it. “I got to go down the road and check on the Scott place. You want to come?”

“I believe I'll sit here for a while,” I said, “and think.”

He went to the steps, then turned back and looked at me, half-smiling. “I believe she was right,” he said. “She was different along those roads she found . . . wasn't nothing that would dare touch her. You or me, maybe, but not her.

“And I believe she's young.”

Then he got in his truck and set off to check the Scott place.

That was two years ago, and Homer has since gone to Vermont, as I think I told you. One night he come over to see me. His hair was combed, he had a shave, and he smelled of some nice lotion. His face was clear and his eyes were alive. That night he looked sixty instead of seventy, and I was glad for him and I envied him and I hated him a little, too. Arthritis is one buggardly great old fisherman, and that night Homer didn't look like arthritis had any fishhooks sunk into his hands the way they were sunk into mine.

“I'm going,” he said.

“Ayuh?”

“Ayuh.”

“All right; did you see to forwarding your mail?”

“Don't want none forwarded,” he said. “My bills are paid. I am going to make a clean break.”

“Well, give me your address. I'll drop you a line from one time to another, old hoss.” Already I could feel loneliness settling over me like a cloak . . . and looking at him, I knew that things were not quite what they seemed.

“Don't have none yet,” he said.

“All right,” I said. “
Is
it Vermont, Homer?”

“Well,” he said, “it'll do for people who want to know.”

I almost didn't say it and then I did. “What does she look like now?”

“Like Diana,” he said. “But she is kinder.”

“I envy you, Homer,” I said, and I did.

I stood at the door. It was twilight in that deep part of summer when the fields fill with perfume and Queen Anne's lace. A full moon was beating a silver track across the lake. He went across my porch and down the steps. A car was standing on the soft shoulder of the road, its engine idling heavy, the way the old ones do that still run full bore straight ahead and damn the torpedoes. Now that I think of it, that car
looked
like a torpedo. It looked beat-up some, but as if it could go the ton without breathin' hard. He stopped at the foot of my steps and picked something up—it was his gas can, the big one that holds ten gallons. He went down my walk to the passenger side of the car. She leaned over and opened the door. The inside light came on and just for a moment I saw her, long red hair around her face, her forehead shining like a lamp. Shining like the
moon
. He got in and she drove away. I stood out on my porch and watched the taillights of her little go-devil twinkling red in the dark . . . getting smaller and smaller. They were like embers, then they were like flickerflies, and then they were gone.

Vermont, I tell the folks from town, and Vermont they believe, because it's as far as most of them can see inside their heads. Sometimes I almost believe it myself, mostly when I'm tired and done up. Other times I think about them, though—all this October I have done so, it seems, because October is the time when men think mostly about far places and the roads that might get them there. I sit on the bench in front of Bell's Market and think about Homer Buckland and about the beautiful girl who leaned over to open his door when he come down that path with the full red gasoline can in his right hand—she looked like a girl of no more than sixteen, a girl on her learner's permit, and her beauty
was
terrible, but I believe it would no longer kill the man it turned itself on; for a moment her eyes lit on me, I was not killed, although part of me died at her feet.

Olympus must be a glory to the eyes and the heart, and there are those who crave it and those who find a clear way to it, mayhap, but I know Castle Rock like the back of my hand and I could never leave it for no shortcuts where the roads may go; in October the sky over the lake is no glory but it is passing fair, with those big white clouds that move so slow; I sit here on the bench, and think about 'Phelia Todd and Homer Buckland, and I don't necessarily wish I was where they are . . . but I still wish I was a smoking man.

I
am not a nervous man, or one addicted to seeing visions and dreaming dreams, but once, as I journeyed through the wilderness of this world, I had a dream, “which was not all a dream,” but partly a vision of the future, like those vouchsafed to the clairvoyant in his magnetic state. I do not know that I had been magnetized, and yet, I half suspect that some distant passes had been made at me, or some charmed toothpick or pencil case had been charged with subtle essence, and put under my pillow to work the wondrous devilment. I would charge no one rashly, yet truth compels me to state facts, and then, as the newspapers say, a candid public will judge, whether or not I have been fairly dealt with. I am one of the unfortunate victims, selected, I know not on what principle, who were months since penciled down on gilt-edged note paper in a fair Italian hand, as the masculine contributors to the “Bangor Book” to “do” the rough and solid work in this superstructure of the wit and wisdom of Down East. The list was soon exhibited thereon, like the marks on the death roll of the Roman triumvirate. At first, I laughed outright, and snapped my fingers in defiance and indignant resistance. I write in a book!! A Bangor book! I, of all men!

“The dog star rages.”

For a wonder, like the wonder in heaven, the woman said nothing, but looked calm, confident, and secure, and I began to feel like the entwined fly in the web of the spider. I was left alone, after a significant nod, and the single words,—“prepare, the time is short.” I mused awhile, and then rushed into business. In its vortex I actually drove, at times, from my mind the injunction and the warning. But time passed, and I felt a gentle pull, and “is it ready?” in a low, soft, musical voice, fell upon my ear.

“What?” said I.

“The contribution in prose or verse,” said she.

“Ready, my dear woman—no, and never will be.”

“Yes, it will be. The paper is made on which it will be written; the pen and ink are waiting. Beware of the third time of asking.”

And she turned away to speak to another of the unfortunate
listed
men. I only heard her say the printers will reach your page next week—and there can be no delay—the boy will call for copy— “I defy the
devil
and all his works,” said the incipient author.

I could not resist whispering in his ear, “So you may, but who can stand against the determined purpose of a woman?” (His article appears in the volume, and stands the voluntary offering of an unpracticed author, to the great curse of humanity.) I turned again to my fair dictator, determined to break away from the strange enchantment, for I began actually to feel a sort of itching in my fingers, and to look with unwonted interest towards the ink stand and the writing desk. I found myself parting my hair and smoothing it down and opening my vest and turning down my collar
à la Byron
. I saw myself in the mirror, and there was a new and most ludicrously grotesque, sentimental, half-poetic and half-transcendental, and altogether lackadaisical stare of the eyes, and dropping of the eyebrows. The case began to look alarming. Everything about me looked “blue.” The “
cacoethes scribendi
” was developing its symptoms, and whether taken in the natural way or by inoculation, it threatened a fatal result.

I roused myself for an impressive appeal. I knew that woman was ever ready to succor and relieve distressed humanity. “My good friend,” said I, “listen to reason.”

“Listen to a fiddlestick!” (She did not say a “fool,” but she did look a little contemptuous, and more impatient.) “Why do you resist? Are you not ‘listed,' and booked, and have we not devoted ten pages to you?”

“But how can I write? I never wrote a line for a book in my life; and the idea of having my words, written by my hands, actually printed, and hot-pressed, and screwed and bound in real hard covers, is entirely overwhelming.”

“Now does not this pass all endurance?” said she; “that you, and others like you, self-styled ‘lords of the creation,' with fierce whiskers, and broad shoulders, and the assumed air of independence, and with the roughness of bears, should not have the heart of a hen partridge—whilst we women, timid, delicate, and retiring, as is our nature and destiny, are ready to go boldly forth to the public, and to write our prettiest and our best, and have it printed, too,
solely
from our love for the cause of the fatherless and the destitute?”

“But think of the Bangor public, and the cynical and severe critics in our midst, who, not being willing to write, are yet over-willing to carp, ridicule, and disparage.”

“Think of the orphans,” said she!

“Think of the reviewers,” said I!

“What
reviewers
,” said she, “would ever think our Down East book worthy of notice?”

“That's true again,” said I. “Then write your article, not having the fear of the reviewers before your eyes.”