Heart Songs

“Bill! You’ll be interested that last week I seen the heaviest buck I seen in many years. He was pawing through the leaves about thirty yards from My Place.”

In Chopping County “My Place” meant the speaker’s private deer stand. It was a county of still hunting, and good stands were passed from father to son. Hawkheel’s Place on the Antler regularly gave him big deer, usually the biggest deer in Feather River. Stong’s old Place in the comfortable pine was useless, discovered by weekend hunters from out of state who shot his bucks and left beer cans under the tree while he tended the store. They brought the deer to be weighed on Stong’s reporting scales, bragging, not knowing they’d usurped his stand, while he smiled and nodded. Stong had not even had a small doe in five years.

“Your Place up on the Antler, Leverd?” said Stong, letting the cover of the Beever fall closed. “Wasn’t that over on the south slope?”

“No, it’s in that beech stand on the shoulder. Too steep for flatlanders to climb so I do pretty good there. A big buck. I’d say he’d run close to one-eighty, dressed.”

Stong raked the two quarters toward him and commenced a long lie about a herd of white deer that used to live in the swamp in the old days, but his eyes went back to the book in Hawkheel’s hands.

The long fine fishing days began a few weeks later, and Hawkheel decided to walk the high northeast corner of the county looking for new water. In late summer he found it.

At the head of a rough mountain pass a waterfall poured into a large trout pool like champagne into a wine glass. Images of clouds and leaves lay on the slowly revolving surface. Dew, like crystal insect eggs, shone in the untrodden moss along the stream. The kingfisher screamed and clattered his wings as Hawkheel played a heavy rainbow into the shallows. In a few weeks he came to think that since the time of the St. Francis Indians, only he had ever found the way there.

As August waned Hawkheel grew possessive of the pool and arranged stones and twigs when he could not come for several days, searching later for signs of their disarray from trespassing feet. Nothing was ever changed, except when a cloudburst washed his twigs into a huddle.

One afternoon the wind came up too strong to cast from below the pool, and Hawkheel took off his shoes and stockings and crept cautiously onto the steep rock slab above the waterfall. He gripped his bare white toes into the granite fissures, climbing the rough face. The wind blew his hair up the wrong way and he felt he must look like the kingfisher.

From above the pool he could see the trout swimming smoothly in the direction of the current. The whole perspective of the place was new; it was as if he were seeing it for the first time. There was the back of the dead spruce and the kingfisher’s hidden entrance revealed. There, too, swinging from an invisible length of line wound around a branch stub, was a faded red and white plastic bobber that the Indians had not left.

“Isn’t anything safe any more?” shouted Hawkheel, coming across the rock too fast. He went down hard and heard his knee crack. He cursed the trout, the spruce, the rock, the invader of his private peace, and made a bad trip home leaning on a forked stick.

Urna brought over hot suppers until he could get around and do for himself again. The inside of the trailer was packed with books and furniture and the cramped space made him listless. He got in the habit of cooking only every three or four days, making up big pots of venison stew or pea soup and picking at it until it was used up or went bad.

He saw in the mirror that he looked old. He glared at his reflection and asked, “Where’s your medicine bottle and sweater?” He thought of his mother who sat for years in the rocker, her thick, ginger-shellacked cane hooked over the arm, and fled into his books, reading until his eyes stung and his favorites were too familiar to open. The heavy autumnal rain hammered on the trailer and stripped the leaves from the trees. Not until the day before deer season was he well enough to drive up to Stong’s feed store for more books.

He went through the familiar stacks gloomily, keeping his weight off the bad leg and hoping to find something he’d overlooked among the stacks of fine-printed agricultural reports and ink-stained geographies.

He picked up a big dark album that he’d passed over a dozen times. The old-fashioned leather cover was stamped with a design of flowing feathers in gold, and tortured gothic letters spelled “Family Album.” Inside he saw photographs, snapshots, ocher newspaper clippings whose paste had disintegrated, postcards, prize ribbons. The snapshots showed scores of curd-faced Stongs squinting into the sun, Stong children with fat knees holding wooden pull-along ducks, and a black and white dog Hawkheel dimly remembered.

He looked closer at one snapshot, drawn by something familiar. A heavy boy stood on a slab of rock, grinning up into the sky. In his hand a fishing rod pointed at the upper branches of a spruce where a bobber was hopelessly entangled in the dark needles. A blur of moving water rushed past the boy into a black pool.

“You bastard,” said Hawkheel, closing the album on the picture of Stong, Bill Stong of years ago, trespassing at Hawkheel’s secret pool.

He pushed the album up under the back of his shirt so it lay against his skin. It felt the size of a Sears’ catalogue and made him throw out his shoulders stiffly. He took a musty book at random—The Boy’s Companion—and went out to the treacherous Stong.

“Haven’t seen you for quite a while, Leverd. Hear you been laid up,” said Stong.

“Bruised my knee.” Hawkheel put the book on the counter.

“Got to expect to be laid up now and then at our age,” said Stong. “I had trouble with my hip off and on since April. I got something here that’ll fix you up.” He took a squat, foreign bottle out from under the counter.

“Mr. Rose give me this for checking his place last winter. Apple brandy, and about as strong as anything you ever tasted. Too strong for me, Leverd. I get dizzy just smelling the cork.” He poured a little into a paper cup and pushed it at Hawkheel.

The fragrance of apple wood and autumn spread out as Hawkheel tasted the Calvados. A column of fire rose in the chimney of his throat with a bitter aftertaste like old cigar smoke.

“I suppose you’re all ready for opening day, Leverd. Where you going for deer this year?”

“Same place I always go—My Place up on the Antler.”

“You been up there lately?”

“No, not since spring.” Hawkheel felt the album’s feathered design transferring to his back.

“Well, Leverd,” said Stong in a mournful voice, “there’s no deer up there now. Got some people bought land up there this summer, think the end of the world is coming so they built a cement cabin, got in a ton of dried apricots and pinto beans. They got some terrible weapons to keep the crowds away. Shot up half the trees on the Antler testing their machine guns. Surprised you didn’t hear it. No deer within ten miles of the Antler now. You might want to try someplace else. They say it’s good over to Slab City.”

Hawkheel knew one of Stong’s lies when he heard it and wondered what it meant. He wanted to get home with the album and examine the proof of Stong’s trespass at the secret pool, but Stong poured from the bottle again and Hawkheel knocked it back.

“Where does you fancy friend get this stuff?” he asked, feeling electrical impulses sweep through his fingers as though they itched to play the piano.

“Frawnce,” said Stong in an elegant tone. “He goes there every year to talk about books at some college.” His hard eyes glittered with malice. “He’s a liberian.” Stong’s thick forefinger opened the cover of The Boy’s Companion, exposing a red-bordered label Hawkheel had missed; it was marked $55.

“He says I been getting skinned over my books, Leverd.”

“Must of been quite a shock to you,” said Hawkheel, thinking he didn’t like the taste of apple brandy, didn’t like librarian Rose. He left the inflated Boy’s Companion on the counter and hobbled out to the truck, the photograph album between his shoulder blades giving him a ramrod dignity. In the rearview mirror he saw Stong at the door staring after him.

Clouds like grey waterweed under the ice choked the sky and a gusting wind banged the door against the trailer. Inside, Hawkheel worked the album out from under his shirt and laid it on the table while he built up the fire and put on some leftover pea soup to heat. “‘Liberian!’” he said once and snorted. After supper he felt queasy and went to bed early thinking the pea soup might have stood too long.

In the morning Hawkheel’s bowels beat with urgent tides of distress and there was a foul taste in his mouth. When he came back from the bathroom he gripped the edge of the table which bent and surged in his hands, then gave up and took to his bed. He could hear sounds like distant popcorn and thought it was knotty wood in the stove until he remembered it was the first day of deer season. “Goddammit,” he cried, “I already been stuck here six weeks and now I’m doing it again.”

A sound woke him in late afternoon. He was thirsty enough to drink tepid water from the spout of the teakettle. There was another shot on the Antler and he peered out the window at the shoulder of the mountain. He thought he could see specks of brightness in the dull grey smear of hardwood and brush, and he shuffled over to the gun rack to get his .30–.30, clinging to the backs of the chairs for balance. He rested the barrel on the breadbox and looked through the scope, scanning the slope for his deer stand, and at once caught the flash of orange.

He could see two of them kneeling beside the bark-colored curve of a dead deer at his Place. He could make out the bandana at the big one’s neck, see a knife gleam briefly like falling water. He watched them drag the buck down toward the logging road until the light faded and their orange vests turned black under the trees.

“Made sure I couldn’t go out with your goddamned poison brandy, didn’t you?” said Hawkheel.

He sat by the stove with the old red Indian blanket pulled around him, feeling like he’s stared at a light bulb too long. Urna called after supper. Her metallic voice range in his ear.

“I suppose you heard all about it.”

“Only thing I heard was the shots, but I seen him through the scope from the window. What’d it weight out at?”

“I heard two-thirty, dressed out, so live weight must of been towards three hundred. Warden said it’s probably the biggest buck ever took in the county, a sixteen-pointer, too, and probably a state record. I didn’t know you could see onto the Antler from your window.”

“Oh, I can see good, but not good enough to see who was with him.”

“He’s the one bought Willard Iron’s place and put a tennis court onto the garden,” said Urna scornfully. “Rose. They say he was worse than Bill, jumping around and screaming for them to take pictures.”

“Did they?”

“Course they did. Then they all went up to Mr. Tennis Court’s to have a party. Stick your head out the door and you’ll hear them on the wind.”

Hawkheel did not stick his head out the door, but opened the album to look at the Stongs, their big, rocklike faces bent over wedding cakes and infants. Many of the photographs were captioned in a spiky, antique hand: “Cousin Mattie with her new skates,” “Pa on the porch swing,” simple statements of what was already clear as though the writer feared the images would someday dissolve into blankness, leaving the happiness of the Stongs unknown.

He glared, seeing Stong at the secret pool, the familiar sly eyes, the fatuous gaping mouth unchanged. He turned the pages to a stiff portrait of Stong’s parents, the grandfather standing behind them holding what Hawkheel thought was a cat until he recognized the stuffed trout. On the funeral page the same portraits were reduced in size and joined by a flowing black ribbon that bent and curled in ornate flourishes. The obituary from the Rutland Herald was headlined “A Farm Tragedy.”

“Too bad Bill missed that dinner,” said Hawkheel.

He saw that on many pages there were empty places where photographs had been wrenched away. He found them, mutilated and torn, at the end of the album. Stong was in every photograph. In the high school graduation picture, surrounded by clouds of organdy and stiff new suits, Stong’s face was inked out and black blood ran from the bottoms of his trousers. Here was another, Stong on a fat-tired white bicycle with a dozen arrows drawn piercing his body. A self-composed obituary, written in a hand like infernal corrosive lace that scorched the page, told how this miserable boy, “too bad to live” and “hated by everybody” had met his various ends. Over and over Stong had killed his photographic images. He listed every member of his family as a survivor.

Hawkheel was up and about the next morning, a little unsteady but with a clear head. At first light the shots had begun on the Antler, hunters trying for a buck to match the giant that Stong had brought down. The Antler, thought Hawkheel, was as good as bulldozed.

By afternoon he felt well enough for a few chores, stacking hay bales around the trailer foundation and covering the windows over with plastic. He took two trout out of the freezer and fried them for supper. He was washing the frying pan when Urna called.

“They was on T.V. with the deer,” she said. “They showed the game commissioner looking up the record in some book and saying this one beat it. I been half expecting to hear from you all day, wondering what you’re going to do.”

“Don’t you worry,” said Hawkheel. “Bill’s got it comin’ from me. There’s a hundred things I could do.”

“Well,” said Urna. “He’s got it coming.”

It took Hawkheel forty minutes to pack the boxes and load them into the pickup. The truck started hard after sitting in the cold blowing rain for two days, but by the time he got it onto the main road it ran smooth and steady, the headlights opening a sharp yellow path through the night.

At the top of Stong’s drive he switched the lights off and coasted along in neutral. A half-full moon, ragged with rushing clouds, floated in the sky. Another storm breeder, thought Hawkheel.

The buck hung from a gambrel in the big maple, swaying slowly in the gusting wind. The body cavity gaped black in the moonlight. “Big,” said Hawkheel, seeing the glint of light on the hooves scraping an arc in the leaves, “damn big.” He got out of the truck and leaned his forehead against the cold metal for a minute.

From a box in the back of the truck he took one of his books and opened it. It was Haw-Ho-Noo. He leaned over a page as if he could read the faint print in the moonlight, then gripped it and tore it out. One after another he seized the books, ripped the pages and cracked their spines. He hurled them at the black, swaying deer and they fell to the bloodied ground beneath it.

“Fool with me, will you?” shouted Hawkheel, tearing soft paper with both hands, tossing books up at the moon, and his blaring sob rose over the sound of the boulders cracking in the river below.

STONE CITY

THE dark-colored fox trotted along the field edge with his nose down, following the woodsline of his property—his by right of use. His smoky pelt was still dull from molting and had not yet begun to take on its winter lustre. A stalk of panic grass shivered and he pounced, then crunched the grasshopper.

He skirted the silver ruins of abandoned farm buildings and spent some time in the orchard eating windfalls. Then he left the apple trees, crossed the brook at the back of the field, pausing to lap the water, and moved into the woods. He want familiarly into the poplars, black ears pricked to the turn of a leaf, nose taking up the rich streams of scent that flowed into the larger river of rotted leaf mold and earth.

1

At the time I moved into Chopping County, Banger was about fifty, a heavy man, all suet and mouth. At first I thought he was that stock character who remembered everybody’s first name, shouting “Har ya! How the hell ya doin’?” to people he’d seen only an hour before, giving them a slap on the back or a punch on the arm—swaggering gestures in school, but obnoxious in a middle-aged man. I saw him downtown, talking to anybody who would listen, while he left his hardware store to the attentions of a slouchy kid who could never find anything on the jumbled shelves.

I made the mistake of saying what I thought about Banger one night at the Bear Trap Grill. The bar was a slab of varnished pine; the atmosphere came from a plastic moose on top of the cash register and a mason jar half-filled with pennies.

I wanted to find somebody to go bird shooting with, somebody who knew the good coverts in the slash-littered mountainous country. I’d always hunted alone, self-taught, doing what I guessed was right, but still believing that companionship increased the pleasure of hunting, just as “layin’ up” with somebody, as they said locally, was better than sleeping alone.

I was sitting next to Tukey. His liver-spotted hands shook; hard to get a straight answer from him or anyone else. They said he was a pretty good man for grouse. They said he might take company. I’d been courting him, hoping for an invitation to go out when the season opened. I thought I had him ready to say, “Hell yes, come on along.”

Banger was at the end of the bar talking nonstop to deaf Fance who had hearing-aid switches all over the front of his shirt. Tukey said Fance had a gun collection in his spare bedroom and was afraid to sleep at night, afraid thieves would break in when the hearing aids lay disconnected on the bedside table.

“God, that Banger. He’s always here, always yapping. Doesn’t he ever go home?” I asked Tukey. In ten seconds I scratched weeks of softening the old man up. All that beer for nothing. His face pleated like a closing concertina.

“Well, now, as a matter of fact, he don’t, much. His place burned down and the wife and kid was fried right up in it. He got nothing left but his dog and the goddamn hardware store his old man left him and which he was never suited to.

“And my advice to you,” Tukey said, “if you want to go out bird shootin’ like you been hintin’ around, or deer or ’coon or rabbit or bear huntin’, or,” and his dried-leaf voice rose to a mincing falsetto, “just enjoyin’ the rare beauties of our woodlands …” He broke off to grin maliciously, exposing flawless plastic teeth, to let me know they had seen me walking in the woods with neither rod nor gun in my hands.

His voice dropped again, weighted with sarcasm. “My advice to you if you want to know where the birds is, is to get real friendly with that Banger you think is so tiresome. What he don’t know about this country is less than that.” He raised the dirty stub of an amputated forefinger, the local badge of maimedness that set those who worked with chain saws apart from lesser men.

“Him?” I glanced at Banger punctuating his torrent of words with intricate gestures. He pointed with his chin and his hands flew up into the air like birds.

“Yes, him. And if you go huntin’ with him I’d like to hear about it, because Banger keeps to himself. Nobody, not me, not Fance, has went out huntin’ with him for years.” He turned away from me. I finished my drink and left. There was nothing else to do.

I didn’t bother with the locals again, except Noreen Pineaud: thirties, russet hair, powder-blue stretch pants and golden eyes in a sharp little fox face. On Fridays she cleaned the house.

She stayed for a cup of coffee and smoked a cigarette one Friday, after I wrote her check. We sat at the kitchen table. She told me she was separated from her husband. That old question hung there. The check lay on the table between us.

I didn’t say anything, I didn’t move, and after a minute she tapped out the cigarette in the aluminum frozen-pie pan that was all I could find for an ashtray. She did it gently to show there weren’t any hard feelings.

I had retreated from other people in other places like a man backing fearfully out of a quicksand bog he has stumbled into unknowingly. This place in Chopping County was my retreat from high, muddy water.

Noreen looked a lot like the kid in Banger’s hardware store. I asked her.

“Yeah, he’s one of my nephews, Raymie. My brother, Raymon’, he don’t want the kid to work for Banger. He’s real strict, Raymon’. Says it’s a fag job. See, he wants the kid to trap or get a job cuttin’ wood.” She turned her sharp face to follow the trail of drifting headlights outside the window.

“Raymon’ made a lot of money with a trapline when he was a kid, and now the prices for furs are real good again. Foxes and stuff. So he got Raymie these twenty-five traps a coupla weeks ago. Now he says Raymie’s gotta set’em out and run the trapline before he goes down to the hardware store in the mornin’. You know how long that takes? Raymie takes after his mother. He like things easy.”

She talked on, uncoiling intricate ropes of blood relationship, telling me who was married to whom, the favorite small-town subject. I listened, out of the swamp now and onto dry ground.

That fall I went alone for the birds as I always had. No dog, alone, and with my mother’s gun, a 28-gauge Parker. Thank you kindly, ma’am, it’s the only thing you ever gave me except a strong inclination toward mistrust. She wrote her own epitaph, a true doubter to the last.

Although I sleep in dust awhile

Beneath the barren clod,

Ere long I hope to rise and smile

To meet my Saviour God

If He exists.

The first morning of the season was cold, the frosted clumps of tussock grass like spiral nebulae. I went up the hardwood slopes, the trees growing out of a cascade of shattered rock spilled by the last glacier. No birds in this grey monotony of beech and maple, and I kept climbing for the ridges where stands of spruce knotted dark shelter in their branches.

The slope leveled off; in a rain-filled hollow a rind of ice imprisoned the leaves, soot-black, brown, umber, grey-tan like the coats of deer, in its glassy clasp. No birds.

I walked up into the conifers, my panting the only sound. Fox tracks in the hoarfrost. The weight of the somber sky pressed down with the heaviness of a coming storm. No birds in the spruce. Under the trees the hollows between the roots were bowls filled with ice crystals like moth antennae. The birds were somewhere else, close hugging other trees while they waited for the foul weather to hit, or even now above me, rigidly stretched out to imitate broken branch stubs in the web of interlacing conifers, invisible and silent, watching the fool who wandered below, a passing hat and a useless tube of steel tied to the ground by earth’s inertia.

What, I thought, like every grouse hunter has thought, what if I could fly, could glide through the spruce leaders and smile down into the smug, feathery faces like an old ogre confronting the darling princess. The view from the ground was green bottlebrushes, impenetrable, confusing, secretive, against a sky the color of an old galvanized pail. No birds.

The dull afternoon smothered a faraway shotgun blast from some distant ridge, quickly followed by another. He missed the first time, I thought. It was less a sound than a feeling in the bone, muted strokes like a maul driving fence posts. I wondered if it were Banger. Banger would not have missed the first shot. It must have been a double.

Even now, as I stood listening to the locked silence, he was probably taking the second bird from his dog’s mouth, fanning the tail, smoothing down the broken feathers and opening the crop to see the torn leaves of mitrewort and wood sorrel spill out. I could imagine him talking to the dog, to the fallen bird, to his shotgun. I felt an affinity to that distant grouse hunter that I could never feel for the downtown talker.

In the weeks that followed I often hunted that ridge where the beech spread into the spruce like outstretched fingers. I heard the increasingly familiar shotgun from the second ridge beyond mine. I put up birds and I took some down.