Aegypt Page 4

‘I seem to have blown it,’ Pierce said cheerfully. They both looked toward the beached bus, whose other passengers milled aimlessly around it.

  ‘Hell with it,’ Spofford said suddenly. ‘Leave it. Come visit. I’m not far. Stay awhile. There’s room. Stay as long as you like.’

  Pierce looked from the bus to the meadow across the river, where now the sheep were spreading out, chewing contentedly. ‘Stay?’ he said.

  ‘We’ve got to catch up,’ said the shepherd. ‘The old alma mater. The old neighborhood.’

  ‘I’ve left them both.’

  ‘No shit.’ He gestured with his crook toward the lands beyond the rise of the meadow. ‘My place is up,’ he said. ‘Around the mountain.’

  What the hell anyway, Pierce thought. A runaway mood had been in him all day, all week; all summer for that matter. He had got this far toward Duty and the Future and been thrown off course, no fault of his own. Okay. So be it. ‘What the hell,’ he said, a strange and sudden exhilaration rising from his breast to his throat. ‘What the hell, why not.’

  ‘Sure,’ Spofford said. He whistled a note that set the sheep in motion and took Pierce’s arm; Pierce laughed, the dog barked, the whole straggling line of them left town.

  This Spofford had once, some years before, been Pierce’s student; he had been, in fact, among Pierce’s first students at Barnabas College, trying out education on the GI Bill or its Vietnam equivalent. Pierce remembered him sitting in History One earnest and attentive in his fatigue jacket (SPOFFORD on the white tape over his breast pocket), seeming displaced and unlikely there. He was only three or four years younger than Pierce, whose first real gig that was (‘gig’ they called it in those days; Pierce had been doing a long gig in graduate school while Spofford did his gig in Vietnam). With the same GI money, Spofford had opened a small joinery shop in Pierce’s low-rent neighborhood, doing fine spare pieces with a skill that Pierce envied and enjoyed watching. They’d become friends, had even briefly shared a girlfriend – quite literally one night, a night to remember – and though radically different in many ways, had, while drifting away from each other, never quite drifted apart. Spofford soon quit school, and then the city, taking his skills back to his native country, and Pierce would now and then get a letter in Spofford’s minuscule and perfectly legible hand, noting his progress and inviting Pierce to visit.

  And here at last he was. Spofford, nut-brown and hale, ragged straw hat and crook, looked well, suited; Pierce felt a surge of something like gratitude. The streets of the city were littered with Spoffords who had not escaped. When he grinned sidelong at Pierce – no doubt assessing Pierce in return – his teeth shone white in his big face, save for one central upper, dead and gray. ‘So here you are,’ he said, offering his world with a sweep of his arm.

  Pierce looked over where he was. They had ascended the meadows of a tall hill’s folded basis; its wooded heights rose beside them. The valley and its twinkling river lay below. There is almost a music in such summer views, an airy exhalation of soprano voices; Pierce didn’t know whether the music which always used to accompany the opening scenes of pastoral cartoons, Disney’s especially (music that the animated hills and trees sang, dancing slightly), was a transcription of this music he seemed now to hear, or whether this music was only his own memory of that. He laughed to hear it. ‘Nice,’ he said. ‘What river is that?’

  ‘The Blackberry,’ Spofford said.

  ‘Nice,’ said Pierce. ‘The Blackberry.’

  ‘The mountain is Mount Randa,’ Spofford said. ‘From the top you can see over into three different states, up into New York, down into Pennsylvania, over into New Jersey. A long view. There’s a monument up there, where a guy had a vision.’

  ‘Of three states?’

  ‘I dunno. Something religious. He started a religion.’

  ‘Hm.’ Pierce could see no monument.

  ‘We could climb it. There’s a path.’

  ‘Hey, may be,’ said Pierce, his breath already short from this gentle incline. The dog, Rover the drover, barked impatiently from on ahead: his four-legged charges were getting on all right, his tall ones were malingering.

  ‘Are these guys yours, by the way?’ Pierce asked, amid the sheep, looking down into their silly upturned faces.

  ‘Mine,’ said Spofford. ‘As of today.’ He tapped the hind legs of a laggard with a practiced motion of his crook’s end, it bleated and hurried on. ‘Did some work for a guy this summer. Raising a barn, carpentry. We made a trade.’

  ‘You needed sheep?’

  ‘I like sheep,’ Spofford said mildly, surveying his own.

  ‘Well, who doesn’t,’ Pierce said laughing. ‘All we like sheep.’ He sang it out, from Handel’s Messiah: ‘All we like sheep. All we – like – sheep . . .’

  Spofford took up the tune (he and Pierce had sung it together in a come-all-ye version one winter in the Village) and so they went singing up the meadow:

  All we like sheep

  All we like sheep

  Have gone astray; have gone astray

  Every one to his own way.

  TWO

  The Blackbury River (not Blackberry, as Pierce heard it) arises as an unpromising stream in the Catskills in New York; fed by kills and brooks, it surpasses or incorporates its fellows and becomes a river as it nears the border, where it debouches into a mountain reservoir round and silver as a nickel, and called Nickel Lake for that reason or a different one. In Nickel Lake it cleanses itself of the silt gathered on its New York journey, and when it exits from the lake refreshed, it falls broadly over a series of stony rapids and low waterfalls amid the aspen woods that foot the northern Faraway Hills. In the long central valley of the Faraways it finds itself; when people speak of the Blackbury, they mean this river, widening and stretching and slowing to a stroll as it meanders across its pleasant floodplain. It has made a few shortcuts through this valley floor over the centuries as it matured; in 1857 folks found, after a week of violent spring rains, that it had broken right across one great curve of itself, leaving an oxbow lake behind and cutting two miles off the boating trip from Ashford Haven to Fair Prospect.

  The Blackbury for most of its length has always been a useless sort of river; bordered as it is on both sides by the stony Faraways (Mount Randa rises in a series of ever-steeper removes from its western banks), it has no real ingress; clots of tree-topped islands every mile or so inhibit navigation. A stretch of fertile fields does well in corn and vegetables between the river and the mountains, though often disastrously flooded, and as it seeks an egress from the valley, its banks grow steeper and its course narrower, the land is more sharply folded and less farmed, the woods older, the banks less populous.

  The river breaks from its valley through a gap called David’s Gate, between stony palisades which are the eroded clubfoot of Mount Randa, and there is a sudden confluence there with the much smaller Shadow River, which has been curling and cutting its way along the steeper western side of Mount Randa before adding itself to the larger body; and there, built up on the palisades and reached by two bridges, one over the Shadow, one over the Blackbury, is the town of Blackbury Jambs: named for the enjambment of two rivers, or because it occupies the jambs of David’s Gate – both opinions, and others, are held locally.

  Sometimes, in the right weather or the right light, it is possible to see, from Blackbury Jambs, the two rivers rushing together and turning southward, but not mixing; the Blackbury’s water, now silted again from its slow valley journey, less reflective, less brilliant, than the faster, colder Shadow; two kinds of water side by side for a moment, shouldering each other. Fish might swim, it seems, from one kind of river into another, as though passing through a curtain. Then the moment is gone; it is all one river. (There is local argument about this too, though; some claim that the sight of two rivers is an optical illusion, or even a legend, something never really seen at all. Those who have seen it – or know others well who have seen it – merely state the fact again. The ar
gument goes on.)

  You can get to Blackbury Jambs from the north by taking the river road along the eastern bank of the Blackbury, and crossing the bridge at South Blackbury; or you can cross farther up, at Fair Prospect, and take a smaller road over a hump or two of mountain, and come into town at the top – Blackbury Jambs being one of those towns that has a top and a bottom. Locals invariably do that; and as she once had been a local, and was on her way to becoming one again, that’s how Rosie Mucho always did it when she came into the Jambs from her house in Stonykill, even though her old station wagon, huge as a boat, pitched and rolled like one too as she came over the mountain road.

  Rosie Mucho (née Rosalind Rasmussen, and soon to be so again) had a longish list of errands, some pleasant, one not, one not even exactly an errand at all though Rosie had decided to think of it as one, had put it on the mental list along with the daycare center, the stop at Bluto’s Automotive, and the library.

  In the car with her were her three-year-old daughter Sam, her two Australian sheepdogs, her natal chart in a brown manila envelope, a historical novel by Fellowes Kraft to be returned, and her husband’s lunch, wrapped in plastic wrap; and then too all the other oddments, baggage and tackle that invariably accumulate in a car of this one’s kind and age. Beside her on the seat was the rear-view mirror, which only that morning had come off, when Rosie tried to adjust it, from where it was attached to the front window. It reflected nothing useful there, only cast up into Rosie’s face and her daughter’s the brilliant August morning and the leafy way.

  The streets of Blackbury Jambs are a series of traverses leading down to the waterfront main street that connects the two bridges. Up above, the houses are often gaunt frame places with outside staircases to the second floor, and wash hung on lines from windows, and steep front stairs; for the Jambs could not until recently have been considered a pretty town, or a wealthy one; it was a workingman’s town. Now there are health-food stores and shops with clever names on the ground floors of some houses, galleries in the old warehouses; but still, especially in hard weather, an older, less hopeful place still persists, a black and white photograph: dirty-faced children, a sour church bell, coal smoke, smells of five-o’clock supper. Rosie, who remembered, was cheered by the new cleanliness and color of the town; amused, too, by its air of dressing up. She wheeled the big car downward and then turned onto a shady street, Maple Street, and pulled up – the steepness of the street required some pulling – before a large house, one of that kind whose hipped roof seems to bulge pregnantly and whose deep porch is supported by fat pillars made of rubble. Up its side went the usual stairway to an apartment on the second floor.

  ‘Going to see Beau for a while?’ asked her daughter Sam. It was their usual euphemism for being left at daycare.

  ‘Yup.’

  ‘C’n I come up?’

  ‘You can come up,’ Rosie answered, pushing open the door of the wagon, ‘or you can stay down in the yard.’ The brief, brownish yard had its attractions: there was a changeable number of children who lived in the house, and their toys – trucks and wagons and a garish plastic motorcycle – lay here and there.

  Sam chose the yard, and solemnly, as though it were duty not pleasure, mounted the motorcycle.

  Crumb-crushing equipment, Rosie’s husband Mike called such things. Kids were crumb-crushers. Apartments with outside stairways, like Beau’s, were creeper apartments. Mike Mucho had supported himself through school selling encyclopedias door to door and had picked up the lingo. Creeper apartments with crumb-crushing equipment in the front yard indicated good marks: young marrieds with kids.

  Like so many other certainties, that one had passed. Nowadays daycare might be indicated, three or four or five single women, a couple of them with kids, a butch, a baker, and a candlemaker, and six or eight other kids taken in to help pay the rent – as here. And Beau upstairs could not be sold an encyclopedia, not one anyway of the kind Mike had once sold.

  He should have stuck with that, Rosie thought, climbing upward. I bet he was good at it. I just bet. Helpful. Advisory. We’re conducting a survey in your community, Mr. and Mrs. Mark. We want to place these books in your home, at no cost to you now or ever.

  ‘ ’Lo, Beau!’ she called through the screen door. ‘You up?’ She cupped her hands against the screen to look within.

  ‘Hello, Rosie. Come on in.’

  He sat lotus-fashion on his white-clothed mattress, dressed in a white caftan. The little apartment was white too, walls ceiling and floors; a long strip of oriental carpeting connected an enameled metal kitchen table, the white bed, and a small balcony beyond, overlooking the town and the river. Beau’s path.

  ‘I can’t stay,’ Rosie said, loitering just inside the door. ‘I didn’t want to disturb you. Hey, don’t unfold just for me.’

  Beau laughed, rising. ‘What is it?’

  ‘Can I leave Sam for a while? I’ve got a bunch of stuff to do.’

  ‘Sure.’

  ‘Just for a couple of hours.’ She was aware she hadn’t paid this month’s bill, and didn’t have a check; this wasn’t supposed to be a day on which she left Sam here. Emergencies. Emergencies and money made her a little shy before Beau, who didn’t seem to acknowledge either in an ordinary way.

  ‘Sure,’ Beau said. ‘You want a cup of tea? Who’s downstairs?’

  ‘I didn’t look in. I can’t stay.’

  Beau began making tea anyway. Rosie watched him set water to boil on a hotplate, find tea and cups, set them out. He was still smiling slightly. He always was. Rosie thought maybe it was only the shape of his mouth that made it seem so, a turn-up of the delicate corners like an archaic Greek statue: a beautiful mouth, she thought. A beautiful man. His sweep of curly black hair had a brilliant sheen, his velvet eyes were soft; his long narrow nose, that mouth, and the shapely beard, made him look like the best kind of Renaissance Jesus, strong young courtier become translucent with holiness.

  ‘So what’s up?’ Beau said. ‘How’s Mike?’

  Rosie walked Beau’s path toward the balcony, enfolding herself in her arms. ‘All right,’ she said. ‘He’s having fun. A lot of fun. He’s in his Down Passage Year.’

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘Climacterics. His thing. Every seven years. Things go up and down. A sort of curve.’

  ‘Oh yes. I remember now. He explained it to me once. He referred to it.’

  Mike didn’t like Beau, and didn’t like Sam being given into his care. Beau had tried to draw him out once or twice when he’d dropped Sam off; Beau (Rosie had seen it) could draw almost anybody out, but not Mike. ‘Yeah,’ Rosie said. ‘Down Passage Year. Heading for the bottom of a cycle. He’s feeling very tender. So he says. His needs, you know?’ She laughed. ‘His needs are sticking out.’

  Beau opened a china cookie jar in the shape of a fat pig and took out a lumpy circle of something brown, Beau’s own recipe probably, Rosie thought, he did the cooking as well as much of the baby-sitting for the women downstairs. He saw to them; that was his only job; somewhere, Rosie guessed, between guru and servant and pet for them. What other relations he had with them she didn’t know; it wasn’t that he or anyone hid them, only that they were too amorphous, or too superstandard, to ask questions about in a nosy way. For all Rosie knew, he was chaste as well as holy. Chaste: watching him chew with slow self-possession, she felt impelled to stroke him like a cat.

  ‘I think,’ Beau said, ‘he’s a young soul.’

  ‘Oh yeah?’

  ‘I think,’ Beau said, ‘that might be why it’s a hard trip for you.’ She’d never told him that life with Mike was a hard trip. ‘You’re an old soul,’ Beau said. ‘And he’s just not in the same place you are.’

  ‘An old soul, huh,’ Rosie said, laughing. ‘An old soul. A jolly old soul.’

  There was a shriek outside, and Beau without haste put down his cup and went out. Sam and Donna, a fierce-faced child Rosie mistrusted, each held an arm of the plastic motorcycle, glaring at each
other.

  ‘Hi, Sam,’ Beau said, shielding his eyes like a scout.

  ‘Hi, Beau.’ Still not releasing the vehicle. Donna shrieked threateningly again.

  ‘Hey,’ Beau said. ‘Hey, what’s all this energy, where’s all that coming from? Hey, let’s talk.’

  ‘I’ve got to run, Beau,’ Rosie said, fishing out her bunch of keys from her overalls. ‘Bye, Sam. You be nice. I’ll be back soon.’ Sam had already begun negotiations with Beau, who knelt to hear both children, and barely noticed her mother pass. Rosie, starting her car, glanced back at them and had a sudden vision, an idea for a painting, that made her laugh. A big painting. It would be a version of that old religious picture that used to be everywhere, Jesus sitting on a rock and around him all these sweet-faced kids of all nations with shining eyes. Only, in her painting, around the same Jesus (Beau in his caftan) would be real kids, kids today: sticky-fingered kids armed with TV weapons, kids in plastic diapers, kids in filthy T-shirts lettered with smart remarks, belly buttons showing, orange-popsicle drool on their chins, bandaids on their knees; kids lugging superhero dolls and frayed blankies and five-and-dimery of every kind, riding red and yellow plastic motorcycles, making rum-rum noises. She laughed aloud, seeing it clearly. The Easy Jesus Daycare Center. Suffer the little crumb-crushers. At the end of Maple Street she had to stop, unable to make the turn, laughing hard, too hard, tears standing in her eyes.

  She returned the novel, a week overdue, to the library that stands on Bridges Street, one of those thick, gray Romanesque concoctions that Andrew Carnegie used to give away across America, pillared, arched, rusticated and domed, at once fantastic and dispiriting. The stone steps are worn like old salt licks, partly by Rosie’s young feet in years gone by; and in the entranceway there hangs a slab of prehistoric mud, turned to stone fifty million years ago with the track of a dinosaur clearly pressed into it. When Rosie was a child, she would stand before that paw, thinking: fifty million years ago; and in after years she had often described it to others, the old library where there hung an immense footprint of a prehistoric monster. Immense: the print, when Rosie returned to the Faraways fully grown, had shrunk to the size of a monkey’s paw, or a human hand signaling three: trivially, laughably small. Well, so had she been herself, back then, fifty million years ago. She passed into the dim inside.