Of course, blackflies and deerflies and mosquitoes were among those moving things, and at times they became torture, enough to make me scream. I still fled back to the tent to escape them. Nor was the weather always conducive to pleasant meditations. Storms on my ridge could be frightening in their intensity; there were days of sullen drizzle, and there were hot, hazed days, murky with humidity, so stifling that the most basic camp tasks seemed impossibly difficult.
And still, at night, fear would steal into my little clearing. At times, the image of that pile of guts came back, and I felt as if surely one of the Goslants had to be watching from the dark. One night I was wrenched out of sleep by a horrific screaming, growling, gargling, very close by—some smaller animal being killed by a larger one, probably a fisher cat. The dark forest seemed full of murder.
But more powerful, more imposing by far was the huge, formless terror of darkness and wildness, the abyss staring back at me. It was as big as a god, whether it came from the darkness outside me or inside me, and it was a god heedless of prayer and ignorant of mercy, and my whole body knew that god from ten million years back. Yes, the Fear remained. But it was better counterbalanced now by a slowly growing sense of competence in—and a greater tolerance for the mundane discomforts of—woods living.
Chapter 28
Toward the end of July, on one of my days off, I was sitting on my log clipping my toenails when I heard Earnest call from down near the last trail bend: “Ann! You decent?”
“Come on up and find out!” I yelled back.
He came into the clearing puffing, a barrel of a bear of a man in oil-stained jeans and blue work shirt, sweat sheen on his summer-bronzed face. Like the rest of us, even the mighty Earnest was showing the strain of work. He couldn’t neglect his tree business, because it provided greenbacks—he was feeding some into the farm’s cash flow by now, to help pay for Lynn’s assistance with milking—yet he had to be at the farm as often as possible. Now he spent most nights there, coming in his big stake-side GMC so he could go straight to tree jobs.
He had spent the previous afternoon working on the tedder, which had gone awry just when the hay had to be turned. This created an urgent problem. Once the hay’s been cut and is drying in its rows, timing is everything: If the weather turns wet when it’s on the ground, it can ruin a whole crop. If one of the hay crops can’t be used, the farmer has to buy it from someone else, and so if money’s tight it gets tighter still. The tedder is a triangular frame mounted with four big spiders that spin rapidly, that you tow behind the tractor to flip and spread the rows of semidry hay. Each of its legs ends in a pronged fork, giving the whole thing a spiny, spiky look. Part of the frame had broken and Earnest had done a lot of urgent clanking and welding to get it functional again.
“Day off,” he stated.
“Mm-hm.”
He sat heavily on the ground, looking around my site, nodding to himself but ill at ease. “Nice up here.” Stalling.
I helped him stall: “How’s your hand?” He had burned his wrist on a piece of hot steel while welding the tedder, a mistake he would never have made if he weren’t so overworked. I had put aloe on it and taped gauze over it. Maneuvering his arm and wrist to tend to him, I was struck by how thick his hand was through the palm, how startlingly solid, how strange it was to find the instrument of his incredible physical power lying passive in my own much smaller, slighter hands.
He nodded, held up the bandaged wrist, wiggled the fingers to show they still worked.
“Need a favor,” he said.
My heart sank, but I knew he wouldn’t ask if he had any alternative. And I owed him a great deal.
Earnest planned to spend the night at a motel in Burlington, so I drove behind him up to the park-and-ride lot in Williston, left my car there, and joined him in the truck. Despite our fatigue, we both felt more energized when we got off the main roads, bouncing along together on the GMC’s big bench seat, each with an elbow on our windowsill, fresh air blustering in, thermos and bagged sandwiches bouncing between us. It was to be another huge old tree, this time a silver maple that had been hit by lightning and riven and was now dangerous.
“I’m doing this on one condition,” I told him.
“Making me an offer I can’t refuse?”
“You’re in no position to negotiate, no.”
He shrugged, resigned.
“I have …” I counted them in my head “… five items on my conversational agenda, and I’ll expect you to be forthright about them.”
“‘Forthright.’”
“Yes.”
He groaned, downshifted, cranked the wheel to turn onto the dirt road, rumbled the truck back up to speed.
“Diz,” I said. “Maureen Goslant.”
“Yeah, Diz. Our Diz. Not closely related to those Goslants up the hill, I don’t think. Maybe second or third cousins. With them, though, who knows? A, uh, certain amount of intermarrying among the clans. Lots of Goslants, big tribe—old Vermont backwoods name. Her immediate family came from up near Marshfield.”
“She was ashamed of the name. Of being associated with them in any way.”
He thought about that, then reframed the issue: “She worked hard to draw a line that distinguished her, yes.” He mused for a moment, then chuckled. “Early on, when she first came to the farm, the bunch up the hill
