Fidelity Page 10

  Presently he came back, and she seemed to feel rather than hear or see him as he moved into the doorway and stopped. “I don’t know how long I’ll be gone. You and the kids’ll have to do the chores and look after things.”

  “All right.”

  “I fastened up the dogs.”

  “I heard you.”

  “Well, don’t let them out. And listen, Lyda. If somebody wants to know, I’ve said something about Indiana.”

  She listened until she heard the old pickup start and go out the lane. And then she slept.

  Danny’s preparations were swift and scant but sufficient for several days. He stripped the bedclothes from Burley’s bed, laid them out neatly on the kitchen floor, and then rolled them up around a slab of cured jowl from the smokehouse, a small iron skillet, and a partly emptied bag of cornmeal. He tied the bundle with baling twine, making a sling by which it could hang from his shoulder. From behind the back hall door he took his hunting coat with his flashlight in one pocket and his old long-barreled .22 pistol in the other. He removed the pistol and laid it on top of the dish cabinet.

  His pickup truck was sitting in front of the barn, and the confined hounds wailed again at the sound of his footsteps.

  “Hush!” he said, and they hushed.

  He pitched his bundle onto the seat and unlatched and raised the hood. He had filled the tank with gas that afternoon but had not checked the oil and water. By both principle and necessity, he had never owned a new motor vehicle in his life. The present pickup was a third-hand Dodge, which Burley had liked to describe as “a loose association of semiretired parts, like me.” But Danny was, in self-defense, a good mechanic, and he and the old truck and the box of tools that he always kept on the floorboard made a working unit that mostly worked.

  The oil was all right. He poured a little water into the radiator, relatched the hood, set the bucket back on the well-top, and got into the truck. He started the engine, backed around in front of the corncrib, turned on the headlights, headed out the lane—and so committed himself to the succession of ever wider and faster roads that led to the seasonless, sunless, and moonless world where Burley lay in his bonds.

  The old truck roaring in outlandish disproportion to its speed, he drove through Port William and down the long slant into the river bottoms where the headlights showed the ripening fields of corn. After a while he slowed and turned left onto the interstate, gaining speed again as he went down the ramp. The traffic on the great road was thinner than in the daytime but constant nevertheless. As he entered the flow of it, he accelerated until the vibrating needle of the speedometer stood at sixty miles an hour—twenty miles faster than he usually drove. If at the crescendo of this acceleration the truck had blown up, it would not altogether have surprised him. Nor would it altogether have displeased him. He hated the interstate and the reeking stream of traffic that poured along it day and night, and he liked the old truck only insofar as it was a salvage job and his own. “If she blows,” he thought, “I’ll try to stop her crosswise of both lanes.”

  But though she roared and groaned and panted and complained, she did not blow.

  Danny’s mother, Kate Helen Branch, had been the love of Burley Coulter’s life. They were careless lovers, those two, and Danny came as a surprise—albeit a far greater surprise to Burley than to Kate Helen. Danny was born to his mother’s name, a certified branch of the Branches, and he grew up in the care of his mother and his mother’s mother in a small tin-roofed, paper-sided house on an abandoned corner of Thad Spellman’s farm, not far from town by a shortcut up through the woods. As the sole child in that womanly household, Danny was more than amply mothered. And he did not go fatherless, for Burley was that household’s faithful visitor, its pillar and provider. He took a hand in Danny’s upbringing from the start, although, since the boy was nominally a Branch, Danny always knew his father as “Uncle Burley.”

  If Danny became a more domestic man than his father, that is because he loved the frugal, ample household run by his mother and grandmother and later by his mother and himself. He loved his mother’s ability to pinch and mend and make things last. He was secretly proud of her small stitches in the patches of his clothes. They kept a big garden and a small flock of hens. They kept a pig in a pen to eat scraps and make meat, and they kept a Jersey cow that picked a living in the green months out of Thad Spellman’s thickety pasture. The necessary corn for the pig and chickens and the corn and hay for the cow were provided by Burley and soon enough by Burley and Danny.

  If Danny became a better farmer than his father that is because, through Burley, he came under the influence of Burley’s brother, Jarrat, and of Jarrat’s son, Nathan, and of Burley’s and Nathan’s friend, Mat Feltner, all of whom were farmers by calling and by devotion. From them he learned the ways that people lived by their soil and their care of it, by the bounty of crops and animals, and by the power of horses and mules.

  But if Danny became more a man of the woods and the streams than nearly anybody else of his place and time, that was because of Burley himself. For Burley was by calling and by devotion a man of the woods and streams. When duty did not keep him in the fields, he would be hunting or fishing or roaming about in search of herbs or wild fruit, or merely roaming about to see what he could see; and from the time Danny was old enough to want to go along, Burley took him. He taught him to be quiet and watch and not complain, to hunt, to trap, to fish and swim. He taught him the names of the trees and of all the wild plants of the woods. Danny’s first providings on his own to his mother’s household were of wild goods: fish and game, nuts and berries that grew by no human effort but furnished themselves to him in response only to his growing intimacy with the countryside. Such providing pleased him and made him proud. Soon he augmented it with wages and produce from the farmwork he did with Burley and the others.

  The world that Danny was born into during the tobacco harvest of 1932 suited him well. That the nation was poor was hardly noticeable to him, whose people had never been rich except in the things that they continued to be rich in though they were poor. He loved his half-wooded native country of ridge and hillside and hollow and creek and river bottom. And he loved the horse-and-mule-powered independent farming of that place and time.

  When Danny had finished the eighth grade at the Port William school, he was growing a crop of his own and was nearly as big as he was going to get, a little taller and a good deal broader than his father. He was a trapper of mink and muskrat, a hunter and fisherman. He farmed for himself or for wages every day that he was out of school and in the mornings and evenings before and after school. If Burley had not continued to be Kate Helen’s main provider, Danny could and would have been.

  When he began to ride the bus to the high school at Hargrave, the coaches, gathering around him and feeling his arms and shoulders admiringly as if he had been a horse, invited him to go out for basketball. He gave them the smile, direct and a little merry, by which he reserved himself to himself, and said, “I reckon I already got about all I can do.”

  He quit school the day he was sixteen and never thought of it again. By then he was growing a bigger crop, and he owned a good team of mules, enough tools of his own to do his work, and two hounds. When he married Lyda two years later, he had, except for a farm of his own, everything he had thought of to want.

  By then the old way of farming was coming to an end. But Danny never gave it up.

  “Don’t you reckon you ought to go ahead and get you a tractor, like everybody else?”

  And Danny looked up at him from the hoof of the mule he was at that moment shoeing and smiled his merry smile. “I ain’t a-going to pay a company,” he said, “to go and get what is already here.”

  “Well,” Burley said, though he knew far better than the Hargrave basketball coach the meaning of that smile, “tractors don’t eat when they ain’t working.”

  Danny drove in a nail, bent over the point, and reached for another nail. He d
id not look up this time when he spoke, and it was the last he would say on the matter: “They don’t eat grass when they ain’t working.”

  That was as much as Burley had wanted to say. He liked mules better than tractors himself and had only gone along with the change to accommodate his brother, Jarrat, who, tireless himself, wanted something to work that did not get tired.

  Burley loved to be in the woods with the hounds at night, and Danny inherited that love early and fully. They hunted sometimes with their neighbors, Arthur and Martin Rowanberry, sometimes with Elton Penn, but as often as not there would be just the two of them—man and little boy, and then man and big boy, and at last two men—out together in the dark-mystified woods of the hollows and slopes and bottomlands, hunting sometimes all night, but enacting too their general approval of the weather and the world. Sometimes, when the hunting was slow, they would stop in a sheltered place and build a fire. Sometimes, while their fire burned and the stars or the clouds moved slowly over them, they lay down and slept.

  There was another kind of hunting that Burley did alone. Danny did not know of this until after Kate Helen died, when he and Lyda got married and, at Burley’s invitation, moved into the old weatherboarded log house on the Coulter home place where Burley had been living alone. There were times—though never when he was needed at work—when Burley just disappeared, and Danny and Lyda would know where he had gone only because the hounds would disappear at the same time. Little by little, Danny came to understand.

  In love Burley had assumed many responsibilities. In love and responsibility, as everyone must, he had acquired his griefs and losses, guilts and sorrows. Sometimes, under the burden of these, he sought the freedom of solitude in the woods. He might be gone for two or three days or more, living off the land and whatever leftovers of biscuits or cornbread he might be carrying in his pockets, sleeping in barns or in the open by the side of a fire. If the dogs became baffled and gave up or went home, Burley went on, walking slowly hour after hour along the steep rims of the valleys where the trees were old. When he returned, he would be smiling, at ease and quiet, as if his mind just fit within his body.

  “Don’t quit,” Danny said to the truck, joking with it as he sometimes did with his children or his animals. “It’s going to be downhill all the way home.”

  He was making an uproar, and uproar gathered around him as he came to the outskirts of the city. The trailer trucks, sleek automobiles, and other competent vehicles now pressing around him made him aware of the disproportion between his shuddering, smoking old pickup and the job he had put it to, and he began to grin. He came to his exit and roared down into the grid of streets and lights. He continued to drive aggressively. Though he had no plan to speak of, it yet seemed to him that what he had to do required him to keep up a good deal of momentum.

  At the hospital, he drove to the emergency entrance, parked as close to the door as he could without being too much in the light, got out, and walked to the door as a man walks who knows exactly what he is doing and is already a little late. His cap, which usually sat well to the back of his head, he had now pulled forward until the bill was nearly parallel with his nose. Only when he was out of the truck and felt the air around him again, did he realize that it was making up to rain.

  The emergency rooms and corridors were filled with the bloodied and the bewildered, for it was now the tail end of another Friday night of the Great American Spare-Time Civil War. Danny walked through the carnage like a man who was used to it.

  Past a set of propped-open double doors, an empty gurney was standing against the corridor wall, its sheets neatly folded upon it. Without breaking stride, he took hold of it and went rapidly on down the corridor, pushing the gurney ahead of him. When he came to an elevator, he thumbed the “up” button and waited.

  When the doors opened, he saw that a small young nurse was already in the elevator, standing beside the control panel. He pushed the gurney carefully past her, nodding to her and smiling. He said, “Four, please.”

  She pushed the button. The doors closed. She looked at him, sighed, and shook her head. “It’s been a long night.”

  “Well,” he said, “it ain’t as long as it has been.”

  At the fourth floor the doors slid open. He pushed the gurney off the elevator.

  “Good night,” the nurse said.

  He said, “Good night.”

  He had to go by the fourth floor nurse’s station, but there was only one nurse there and she was talking with vehemence into the telephone. She did not look up.

  The door of Burley’s room was shut. Danny pushed the gurney in and reshut the door. Now he was frightened, and yet there was no caution in him; he did not give himself time to think or to hesitate. Burley was lying white and still in the pallid light. Danny took a pair of rubber gloves from the container affixed to the wall and put them on. Wetting a rag at the wash basin, he carefully washed the handle of the gurney. He then pushed the gurney up near the bed and removed the folded sheet from it. Leaning over the bed, he spoke in a low voice to Burley. “Listen. I’m going to take you home. Don’t worry. It’s me. It’s Danny.”

  Gently he withdrew the tube from Burley’s nose. Gently he pulled away the adhesive tapes and took the needle out of Burley’s arm. He took hold of the tube of the bladder catheter as if to pull it out also and then, thinking again, took out his pocketknife and cut the tube in two.

  He gathered Burley into his arms and held him a moment, surprised by his lightness, and then gently he laid him onto the gurney. He unfolded the sheet and draped it over Burley, covering him entirely from head to foot. He opened the door, pushed the gurney through, and closed the door.

  The nurse at the nurse’s station was still on the phone. “I told you no,” she was saying. “N, O, period. You have just got to understand, when I say no, I mean no.”

  Near the elevator two janitors were leaning against the wall, mops in hand, as stupefied, apparently, as the soldiers at the Tomb.

  When the elevator arrived, the same nurse was on it. She gave him a smile of recognition. “My goodness, I believe we must be on the same schedule tonight.”

  “Yes, mam,” he said.

  She hardly glanced at the still figure on the gurney. “She’s used to it,” he thought. But he was careful, nonetheless, to stand in such a way as to make it hard for her to see, if she looked, that this corpse was breathing.

  “One?” she asked.

  “Yes, mam,” he said. “If you please.”

  Once out of the elevator, he rolled the gurney rapidly down the corridor and through the place of emergency.

  A man with a bandaged eye stood aside as Danny approached and went without stopping out through the automatic doors.

  A slow rain had begun to fall, and now the pavement was shining.

  The Coulter Lane turned off the blacktop a mile or so beyond Port William. Danny drove past the lane, following the blacktop on down again into the river valley. Presently he turned left onto a gravel road, and after a mile or so turned left again into the lower end of the Coulter Lane, passable now for not much more than a hundred yards. Where a deep gulley had been washed across the road, he stopped the truck. He was in a kind of burrow, deep under the trees in a narrow crease of the hill: the Stepstone Hollow.

  He switched off the engine and sat still, letting the quiet and the good darkness settle around him. He had been gone perhaps two hours and a half, and not for a minute during that time had he ceased to hurry. So resolutely had he kept up the momentum of his haste that his going and his coming back had been as much one movement as a leap. And now, that movement completed, he began to take his time. In the quiet he could hear Burley’s breathing, slow and shallow but still regular. He heard, too, the slow rain falling on the woods and the trees dripping steadily onto the roof of the truck. “Well,” he said quietly to Burley, “here’s somewhere you’ve been before.”

  The shallow breathing merely continued out of the d
ark where Burley, wrapped in his sheet, slumped against the door.

  “Listen,” Danny said. “We’re in the Stepstone Hollow. It’s raining just a little drizzling rain, and the trees are dripping. That’s what you hear. You can pret’ near just listen and tell where you are. In a minute I’m going to take you up to the old barn. You don’t have a thing to worry about anymore.”

  He got out and stood a moment, accepting the dark and the rain. There was, in spite of the overcast, some brightness in the sky. He could see a little. He took his flashlight from the pocket of his coat and blinked it once. The bundle of bedclothes and food that he had brought from the house lay with the coat on the seat beside Burley. Danny dragged the bundle out and suspended it from his right shoulder, shortening the string to make the load as manageable as possible. Taking the flashlight, he then went around the truck and gently opened the door on the other side. He tucked the sheet snugly around Burley and then covered his head and chest with the coat.

  “Now,” he said, “I’m going to pick you up and carry you a ways.”

  Keeping the flashlight in his right hand, he gathered Burley up into his arms, kneed the door shut, and started up the hollow through the rain. He used the light to cross the gulley. Beyond there, he needed only to blink the light occasionally to show himself the lay of things. Though his burden was awkward and the wet and drooping foliage brushed him on both sides, he could walk without trouble. He made almost no sound and was grateful for the silence and slowness and effort after his loud passage out from the city. It occurred to him then that this was a season-changing rain. Tomorrow would be clear and cool, the first fall day.

  It was a quarter of a mile or more up to the barn, and his arms were aching well before he got there, but having once taken this burden up, he dared not set it down. The barn, doorless and sagging, stood on a tiny shelf of bottomland beside the branch. It was built in the young manhood of Dave Coulter, Burley’s father, to house the tobacco crops from the fields, now long abandoned and overgrown, on the north slopes above it. Abandoned along with its fields, the barn had been used for many years only by groundhogs and other wild creatures and by Burley and Danny, who had sheltered there on rainy days and nights. Danny knew this place in the dark as well as if he could see it. On the old northward-facing slopes on one side of the branch was a thicket of forty-year-old trees: redbud, elm, box elder, walnut, locust, ash—the trees of the “pioneer generation,” returning the fields to the forest. On the south slope, where the soil was rockier and shallower, stood the uninterrupted forest of white and red oaks and chinquapins, hickories, ashes, and maples, many of them two or three hundred years old.