needed no explanations.
“And you.” I took the opportunity to change the subject, exhausted from dredging up those memories. “Surely you haven’t been alone this whole time. Did you ever marry again?”
He twisted his mouth but offered up nothing.
“Don’t tell me you’ve been lonely all this time? That would be too sad.”
“Well, I wouldn’t say lonely. You’re rarely alone if you’re a doctor in these villages, everyone needs your attention and they’re happy that you’re there… I was always being invited to eat with them, attend their observances. Partake of their lives.” His eyes dipped closed for longer and longer instances, and a languor settled on his face. I took a lap robe and spread it over him. He opened his eyes for a brief moment.
“I’m going back to Maine. I want to see it again. That’s why I looked you up, Lanny. I want you to go with me. Will you?”
I had to fight back tears at the prospect of returning home with Jonathan. “Of course I will.”
FORTY-EIGHT
We took one of those gigantic Airbus planes for the trip back to America. From New York we took a commuter plane to Bangor, then rented a sport utility vehicle to drive north. I hadn’t seen this land for two centuries and, crazy as it may sound, there were stretches that seemed to have changed very little. For the rest of it, there were asphalt roads, Victorian farmhouses, immense fields of neatly tended crops, the spindly towering inchworms of irrigation pipes off on the horizon. Seen from behind the windshield of this big plush vehicle, it was easy to fool myself into thinking that I’d never been there. Then the road would cut off the farming plains, into the Great North Woods. We’d plunge into the cool dark of the forest, flanked by row after row of outsize trunks, the sky obliterated by a blanket of green. The car dipped and climbed to follow the rise and fall of the land and swerved around boulders pushing their way up out of the earth, now mossy with lichen. All this I remembered. I saw the trees and was taken back two hundred years, flooded with the recall of my first life, my true life, the one that had been taken away from me. It had to be the same for Jonathan.
We sensed our home getting closer. The trip passed quickly in an automobile. The last time we had made this trip it was weeks in the carriage, Jonathan in shock from what I’d done to him, barely speaking a word to me.
We were speechless on the approach to town. How everything had changed. We couldn’t even be sure that this road, the main road cutting through the middle of town, was the same small dusty wagon trail that led to the fledgling St. Andrew two hundred years ago. Where was the church and the graveyard? Shouldn’t we be able to see the meeting hall from here? I rolled the car down the street as slowly as possible so we could try to transpose the town we remembered over the one in front of us.
St. Andrew hadn’t become like many towns in America, where every store, restaurant, and hotel is the product of a multinational corporation and generic the world over. At least St. Andrew had some individuality, even if it had lost its original purpose. It was no longer industrious. The sprawling farms were gone and there had been no sign of the logging business for the past ten miles. The business of leisure had taken its place. Wilderness outfitters lined both sides of the main street, businesses where well-scrubbed men in rugged clothing escorted other men and women through the forest or down the Allagash in canoes. Or took them into the middle of the river in hip waders, casting all day for the fish they would release once they had been admired. There were craft stores and inns where once there had been farmhouses and barns, Tinky Talbot’s forge and the Watfords’ general store. We were amazed to figure out, finally, that the congregation hall must have been demolished and that the center of town was now occupied by a hardware store, an ice-cream shop, and a post office. At least the graveyard had been undisturbed.
This new generation of inhabitants surely thought it pleasant enough, and if I hadn’t known what it was like two centuries ago, I wouldn’t have objected. But the town now made its living catering to the whims of strangers and seemed degraded, like finding your childhood home had been turned into a bordello, or worse, a convenience store. St. Andrew had traded its soul for an easier way of life, but who was I to judge?
We checked into a sporting lodge outside town. Dunratty’s was like an old motel, shabby from an unavoidable neglect, that catered to the seasonal hunters and fishermen and so a certain austerity was expected. There was a set of ten or so rooms making up one unit, attached to the office. We asked for a cabin, the one set farthest into the woods. The caretaker said nothing, merely looked discreetly for the presence of rifles or fishing poles and finding there were none, went back slowly and resignedly to his task. He did ask if we were married, as though he minded that one of his murky cabins would be used as a love shack. The place was empty except for us, we were told; it would be very quiet. He would be available at the house if we needed anything-and he pointed off in some indiscernible direction-but otherwise we could expect to be left alone.
It was dismal, all four walls lined with cheap paneling, the roof merely covered in plywood. The space was dominated by two beds-slightly larger than single beds, neither as large as a double, with Depression-era metal rail frames-set apart by a small dresser put in the place of a nightstand, and topped with a ceramic lamp. Two threadbare upholstered chairs faced what looked to be a thirty-year-old television. To one side was a small, round table accompanied by three armless wooden kitchen chairs. Through a doorway I found a small, functional kitchen, and through a second doorway, a slightly mildewed bathroom. I laughed when Jonathan threw the suitcases on one of the beds. “We’re staying?” I asked, incredulous. “There must be someplace nicer. Maybe in town…”
Jonathan said nothing but stood before a set of sliding glass doors. Beyond a plain wooden deck were the woods; great thick trunks towering above us, creaking in the wind. We opened the door and stepped into the middle of the forest, and clean air licked over and around us. We stood on the modest square of the deck and looked into the endless forest for an immeasurable amount of time. This was the home we had known. It had found us. “We’re staying,” Jonathan replied.
We left the cabin about five that afternoon, anxious to look around a little more before the sun set. It was difficult to make our way, though; roads we expected to lead in one direction ended up taking us to another place entirely, as the area had been shaped and reshaped over time. The current grid of roads had been laid down by the modern logging companies and went through mile after mile of forest for no apparent reason, leading straight to a highway, which in turn would take us to the juncture of the Allagash and St. John Rivers. After two false starts, we found a road that reminded us of the carriage trail that had led out to Jonathan’s house, and it was with a silent nod from Jonathan that we pursued it to its end.
We burst through a tunnel of overgrown trees onto a cleared swath that had once been hayfields in front of the St. Andrews’ house. The road had been moved-it no longer swept through the gully by the icehouse and then up to their big house-but I recognized the shape of the land. Now, a dirt logging road cut to the right of the house, which still stood on the bluff. We sped up a little, anxious to see it again. But as we got closer, I let up on the pedal. The house was still standing, but only someone who had once lived there would have been able to recognize it.
The once glorious house had been left to rot. It was like a corpse that had been exposed to the elements, a skeleton with every feature by which you’d known the person fallen away. The once grand house sagged, stripped of paint, missing slate tiles upon its head, slats from its torso. Even the stand of pines that had formed a windbreak in front were failing, spindly and unloved, the kind of trees you find in a graveyard.
“It’s abandoned,” Jonathan said.
“Who would have thought,” I offered, not knowing what to say. “Oh, well, Jonathan… at least they left it in its spot. You saw where my family’s house would have been-nothing but a crossroads now. The world moves on, doesn’t it?”
Jonathan fell quiet in response to my attempt at cheerfulness. We turned the car around and headed back toward town.
We went to a small restaurant in the center of town that night for dinner. You could call it a restaurant in that it was a place where meals could be purchased, but it didn’t resemble the sort of restaurant that I was used to patronizing. It was more like a diner with a dozen laminate-topped tables, each surrounded by four metal-tube chairs. The tablecloths were oilcloth, the napkins paper. The menus were covered in yellowing plastic, and it was a safe bet that the menu had not changed in twenty years. There were five customers, including Jonathan and me.
