“Half a day is bad enough,” Rachel answered in a scolding voice and began to cry harder. Louis held her, and Gage slipped an arm comfortably around each parent’s neck. When Rachel cried, Gage usually cried too. But not this time. He has us to himself. Louis thought, and he damn well knows it.
They waited with some trepidation for Ellie to return, drinking too much coffee, speculating on how it was going for her. Louis went out into the back room that was going to be his study and messed about idly, moving papers from one place to another but not doing much else. Rachel began lunch absurdly early.
When the phone rang at a quarter past ten, Rachel raced for it and answered with a breathless “Hello?” before it could ring a second time. Louis stood in the doorway between his office and the kitchen, sure it would be Ellis’s teacher telling them that she bad decided Ellie couldn’t hack it; the stomach of public education had found her indigestible and was spitting her back. But it was only Norma Crandall, calling to tell them that Jud had picked the last of the corn and they were welcome to a dozen ears if they wanted it. Louis went over with a shopping bag and scolded Jud for not letting him help pick it.
“Most of it ain’t worth a tin shit anyway,” Jud said.
“You’ll kindly spare that talk while I’m around,” Norma said. She came out on the porch with iced tea on an antique Coca-Cola tray.
“Sorry, my Love.”
“He ain’t sorry a bit,” Norma said to Louis and sat down with a wince.
“Saw Ellie get on the bus,” Jud said, lighting a Chesterfield. “She’ll be fine,”
Norma said. “They almost always are.” Almost, Louis thought morbidly.
But Ellie was fine. She came home at noon smiling and sunny, her blue first-day-of-school dress belling gracefully around her scabbed shins (and there was a new scrape on one knee to marvel over), a picture of what might have been two children or perhaps two walking gantries in one hand, one shoe untied, one ribbon missing from her hair, shouting, “We sang ‘Old MacDonald’! Mommy! Daddy!
We sang ‘Old MacDonald’! Same one as in the Carstairs Street School!”
Rachel glanced over at Louis, who was sitting in the window seat with Gage on his lap. The baby was almost asleep. There was something sad in Rachel’s glance, and although she looked away quickly, Louis felt a moment of terrible panic.
We’re really going to get old, be thought. It’s really true. No one’s going to make an exception for us. She’s on her way… and so are we.
Ellie ran over to him, trying to show him her picture, her new scrape, and tell him about “Old MacDonald” and Mrs. Berryman all at the same time. Church was twining in and out between her legs, purring loudly, and Ellie was somehow, almost miraculously, not tripping over him.
“Shh,” Louis said and kissed her. Gage had gone to sleep, unmindful of all the excitement. “Just let me put the baby to bed and then I’ll listen to everything.”
He took Gage up the stairs, walking through hot slanting September sunshine, and as he reached the landing, such a premonition of horror and darkness struck him that he stopped-stopped cold- and looked around in surprise, wondering what could possibly have come over him. He held the baby tighter, almost clutching him, and Gage stirred uncomfortably. Louis’s arms and back had broken out in great rashes of gooseflesh.
What’s wrong? he wondered, confused and frightened. His heart was racing; his scalp felt cool and abruptly too small to cover his skull; he could feel the surge of adrenaline behind his eyes. Human eyes really did bug out when fear was extreme, he knew; they did not just widen but actually bulged as blood pressure climbed and the hydrostatic pressure of the cranial fluids increased. What the hell is it? Ghosts? Christ, it really feels as if something just brushed by me in this hallway, something I almost saw.
Downstairs the screen door whacked against its frame.
Louis Creed jumped, almost screamed, and then laughed. It was simply one of those psychological cold pockets people Sometimes passed through-no more, no less. A momentary fugue. They happened; that was all. What had Scrooge said to the ghost of Jacob Marley? You may be no more than an underdone bit of potato.
There’s more gravy than grave to you. And that was more correct-physiologically as well as psychologically-than Charles Dickens had probably known. There were no ghosts, at least not in his experience. He had pronounced two dozen people dead in his career and had never once felt the passage of a soul.
He took Gage into his room and laid him in his crib. As he pulled the blanket up over his son, though, a shudder twisted up his back, and he thought suddenly of his Uncle Carl’s “showroom.” No new cars there, no televisions with all the modem features, no dishwashers with glass fronts so you could watch the magical sudsing action. Only boxes with their lids up, a carefully hidden spotlight over each. His father’s brother was an undertaker.
Good God, what gave you the horrors? Let it go! Dump it!
He kissed his son and went down to listen to Ellie tell about her first day at the big kid’s school.
8
That Saturday, after Ellie had completed her first week of school and just before the college kids came back to campus, Jud Crandall came across the road and walked over to where the Creed family sat on their lawn. Ellie had gotten off her bike and was drinking a glass of iced tea. Gage was crawling in the grass, examining bugs, perhaps even eating a few; Gage was not particular where his protein camу from.
“Jud,” Louis said, getting up. “Let me get you a chair.”
“No need.” Jud was wearing jeans, an open-throated work shirt, and a pair of green boots. He looked at Ellie. “You still want to see where yon path goes, Ellie?”
“Yes!” Ellie said, getting up immediately. Her eyes sparkled. “George Buck at school told me it was the pet cemetery, and I told Mommy, but she said to wait for you because you knew where it was.”
“I do, too,” Jud said. “If it’s okay with your folks, we’ll take us a stroll up there. You’ll want a pair of boots though. Ground’s a bit squishy in places.”
Ellie rushed into the house.
Jud looked after her with amused affection. “Maybe you’d like to come too, Louis.”
“I would,” Louis said. He looked at Rachel. “You want to come, honey?”
“What about Gage? I thought it was a mile.”
“I’ll put him in the Gerrypack.”
Rachel laughed. “Okay… but it’s your back, mister.”
They started off ten minutes later, all of them but Gage wearing boots. Gage was sitting up in the Gerrypack and looking at everything over Louis’s shoulder, goggle-eyed. Ellie ranged ahead constantly, chasing butterflies and picking flowers.
The grass in the back field was almost waist high, and now there was goldenrod, that late-summer gossip which comes to tattle on autumn every year. But there was no autumn in the air today; today the sun was still all August, although calendar August was almost two weeks gone. By the time they had reached the top of the first hill, walking strung out along the mown path, there were big patches of sweat under Louis’s arms.
Jud paused. At first Louis thought it might be because the old man was winded-then he saw the view that had opened Out behind them.
“Pretty up here,” Jud said, putting a piece of timothy grass between his teeth.
Louis thought he had just heard the quintessential Yankee understatement.
“It’s gorgeous,” Rachel breathed and then turned to Louis, almost accusingly.
“How come you didn’t tell me about this?”
“Because! didn’t know it was here,” Louis said, and was a little ashamed. They were still on their own property; he had just never found time to climb the hill in back of the house until today.
Ellie had been a good way ahead. Now she came back also gazing with frank wonder. Church padded at her heels.
The hill was not a high one, but it did not need to be. To the east, heavy woods blocked any view, but looking this way, west, the land fell away in a golden and dozy late summer dream. Everything was still, hazed, silent. There was not even an Orinco tanker on the highway to break the quiet.
It was the river valley they were looking into, of course; the Penobscot, where loggers had once floated their timber from the northeast down to Bangor and Derry. But they were south of Bangor and a bit north of Deny here. The river flowed wide and peacefully, as if in its own deep dream. Louis could make out Hampden and Winterport on the far side, and over here he fancied he could trace the black, river-paralleling snake of Route 15 nearly all the way Bucksport. They looked over the river, its lush hem of trees, the roads, the fields. The spire of the North Ludlow Baptist Church. poked through one canopy of old elms, and to the right he could see the square brick sturdiness of Ellie’s school.
Overhead, white clouds moved slowly toward a horizon the color of faded denim.
And everywhere were the late-summer fields, used up at the end of the cycle, dormant but not dead, an incredible tawny color.
“Gorgeous is the right word,” Louis said finally.
“They used to call it Prospect Hill back in the old days,” Jud said. He put a cigarette in the corner of his mouth but did not light it. “There’s a few that still do, but now that younger people have moved into town, it’s mostly been forgot. I don’t think there’s very many people that even come up here. It don’t look like you could see much because the hill’s not very high. But you can see-”
He gestured with one hand and fell silent.
“You can see everything,” Rachel said in a low, awed voice. She turned to Louis.
“Honey, do we own this?”
And before Louis could answer, Jud said: “It’s part of the property, oh yes.”
Which wasn’t, Louis thought, quite the same thing.
It was cooler in the woods, perhaps by as much as eight or ten degrees. The path, still wide and occasionally marked with flowers in pots or in coffee cans (most of them wilted), was now floored with dry pine needles. They had gone about a quarter of a mile, moving downhill now, when Jud called Ellie back.
“This is a good walk for a little girl,” Jud said kindly, “but I want you to promise your mom and dad that if you come up here, you’ll always stay on the path.”
“I promise,” Ellie said promptly “Why?”
He glanced at Louis, who had stopped to. rest. Toting Gage, even in the shade of these old pines and spruces, was heavy work. “Do you know where you are?” Jud asked Louis.
Louis considered and rejected answers: Ludlow, North Ludlow, behind my house, between Route 15 and Middle Drive. He shook his head.
Jud jerked a thumb back over his shoulder. “Plenty of stuff that way,” he said.
“That’s town. This way, nothing but woods for fifty miles or more. The North Ludlow Woods they call it here, but it hits a little corner of Orrington, then goes over to Rockford. Ends up going onto those state lands I told you about, the ones the Indians want back. I know it sounds funny to say your nice little house there on the main road, with its phone and electric lights and cable TV and all, is on the edge of a wilderness, but it is.” He looked back at Ellie.
“All I’m saying is that you don’t want to get messing around in these woods, Ellie. You might lose the path, and God knows where you might end up then.”
