After Sol and Bonnie both left, he sat in the living room with his feet on the coffee table and drank instant coffee while he read the newspaper from the evening before. Once in a while his hands trembled and the newspaper began rattling in the empty house. Now and then the telephone rang, but he never made a move to answer it. It wasn’t for him, because nobody knew he was here.
Through his window at the rear of the house he could see up the valley to a series of steep mountain peaks whose tops were covered with snow, even though it was August. Lower down on the mountains, timber covered the slopes and the sides of the valley. The river coursed down the valley, frothing and boiling over rocks and under granite embankments until it burst out of its confines at the mouth of the valley, slowed a little, as if it had spent itself, then picked up strength again and plunged into the ocean. When Sol and Bonnie were gone, Myers often sat in the sun in a lawn chair out back and looked up the valley toward the peaks. Once he saw an eagle soaring down the valley, and on another occasion he saw a deer picking its way along the riverbank.
He was sitting out there like that one afternoon when a big flatbed truck pulled up in the drive with a load of wood.
You must be Sol’s roomer, the man said, talking out the truck window.
Myers nodded.
Sol said to just dump this wood in the backyard and he’d take care of it from there.
I’ll move out of your way, Myers said. He took the chair and moved to the back step, where he stood and watched the driver back the truck up onto the lawn, then push something inside the cab until the truck bed began to elevate. In a minute, the six-foot logs began to slide off the truck bed and pile up on the ground. The bed rose even higher, and all of the chunks rolled off with a loud bang onto the lawn.
The driver touched the lever again and the truck bed went back to its normal place. Then he revved his engine, honked, and drove away.
What are you going to do with that wood out there? Myers asked Sol that night. Sol was standing at the stove frying smelt when Myers surprised him by coming into the kitchen. Bonnie was in the shower. Myers could hear the water running.
Why, I’m going to saw it up and stack it, if I can find the time between now and September. I’d like to do it before the rain starts.
Maybe I could do it for you, Myers said.
You ever cut wood before? Sol said. He’d taken the frying pan off the stove and was wiping the fingers of his left hand with a paper towel. I couldn’t pay you anything for doing it. It’s something I was going to do anyway. Just as soon as I get a weekend to my name.
I’ll do it, Myers said. I can use the exercise.
You know how to use a power saw? And an ax and a maul?
You can show me, Myers said. I learn fast. It was important to him that he cut the wood.
Sol put the pan of smelt back on the burner. Then he said, Okay, I’ll show you after supper. You had anything to eat yet? Why don’t you have a bite to eat with us?
I ate something already, Myers said.
Sol nodded. Let me get this grub on the table for Bonnie and me, then, and after we eat I’ll show you.
I’ll be out back, Myers said.
Sol didn’t say anything more. He nodded to himself, as if he was thinking about something else.
Myers took one of the folding chairs and sat down on it and looked at the pile of wood and then up the valley at the mountains where the sun was shining off the snow. It was nearly evening. The peaks thrust up into some clouds, and mist seemed to be falling from them. He could hear the river crashing through the undergrowth down in the valley.
I heard talking, Myers heard Bonnie say to Sol in the kitchen.
It’s the roomer, Sol said. He asked me if he could cut up that load of wood out back.
How much does he want to do it? Bonnie wanted to know. Did you tell him we can’t pay much?
I told him we can’t pay anything. He wants to do it for nothing. That’s what he said, anyway.
Nothing? She didn’t say anything for a time. Then Myers heard her say, I guess he doesn’t have anything else to do.
Later, Sol came outside and said, I guess we can get started now, if you’re still game.
Myers got up out of the lawn chair and followed Sol over to the garage. Sol brought out two sawhorses and set them up on the lawn. Then he brought out a power saw. The sun had dropped behind the town. In another thirty minutes it would be dark. Myers rolled down the sleeves of his shirt and buttoned the cuffs. Sol worked without saying anything. He grunted as he lifted one of the six-foot logs and positioned it on the sawhorses. Then he began to use the saw, working steadily for a while. Sawdust flew. Finally he stopped sawing and stepped back.
You get the idea, he said.
Myers took the saw, nosed the blade into the cut Sol had started, then began sawing. He found a rhythm and stayed with it. He kept pressing, leaning into the saw. In a few minutes, he sawed through and the two halves of the log dropped onto the ground.
That’s the idea, Sol said. You’ll do, he said. He picked up the two blocks of wood and carried them over and put them alongside the garage.
Every so often—not every piece of wood, but maybe every fifth or sixth piece—you’ll want to split it with the ax down the middle. Don’t worry about making kindling. I’ll take care of that later. Just split about every fifth or sixth chunk you have. I’ll show you. And he propped the chunk up and, with a blow of the ax, split the wood into two pieces. You try it now, he said.
Myers stood the block on its end, just as Sol had done, and he brought the ax down and split the wood.
That’s good, Sol said. He put the chunks of wood by the garage. Stack them up about so high, and then come out this way with your stack. I’ll lay some plastic sheeting over it once it’s all finished. But you don’t have to do this, you know.
It’s all right, Myers said. I want to, or I wouldn’t have asked.
Sol shrugged. Then he turned and went back to the house. Bonnie was standing in the doorway, watching, and Sol stopped and reached his arm around Bonnie, and they both looked at Myers.
Myers picked up the saw and looked at them. He felt good suddenly, and he grinned. Sol and Bonnie were taken by surprise at first. Sol grinned back, and then Bonnie. Then they went back inside.
Myers put another piece of wood on the sawhorses and worked awhile, sawing, until the sweat on his forehead began to feel chill and the sun had gone down. The porch light came on. Myers kept on working until he’d finished the piece he was on. He carried the two pieces over to the garage and then he went in, used his bathroom to wash up, then sat at the table in his room and wrote in his notebook. I have sawdust in my shirtsleeves tonight, he wrote. It’s a sweet smell.
That night he lay awake for a long time. Once he got out of bed and looked out the window at the mound of wood which lay in the backyard, and then his eyes were drawn up the valley to the mountains. The moon was partially obscured by clouds, but he could see the peaks and the white snow, and when he raised his window the sweet, cool air poured in, and farther off he could hear the river coursing down the valley.
The next morning it was all he could do to wait until they’d left the house before he went out back to begin work. He found a pair of gloves on the back step that Sol must have left for him. He sawed and split wood until the sun stood directly over his head and then he went inside and ate a sandwich and drank some milk. Then he went back outside and began again. His shoulders hurt and his fingers were sore and, in spite of the gloves, he’d picked up a few splinters and could feel blisters rising, but he kept on. He decided that he would cut this wood and split it and stack it before sunset, and that it was a matter of life and death that he do so. I must finish this job, he thought, or else … He stopped to wipe his sleeve over his face.
By the time Sol and Bonnie came in from work that night—first Bonnie, as usual, and then Sol—Myers was nearly through. A thick pile of sawdust lay between the sawhorses, and, except for two or three b
locks still in the yard, all of the wood lay stacked in tiers against the garage. Sol and Bonnie stood in the doorway without saying anything. Myers looked up from his work for a minute and nodded, and Sol nodded back. Bonnie just stood there looking, breathing through her mouth. Myers kept on.
Sol and Bonnie went back inside and began on their supper. Afterward, Sol turned on the porch light, as he’d done the evening before. Just as the sun went down and the moon appeared over the mountains, Myers split the last chunk and gathered up the two pieces and carried the wood over to the garage. He put away the sawhorses, the saw, the ax, a wedge, and the maul. Then he went inside.
Sol and Bonnie sat at the table, but they hadn’t begun on their food.
You better sit down and eat with us, Sol said.
Sit down, Bonnie said.
Not hungry just yet, Myers said.
Sol didn’t say anything. He nodded. Bonnie waited a minute and then reached for a platter.
You got it all, I’ll bet, Sol said.
Myers said, I’ll clean up that sawdust tomorrow.
Sol moved his knife back and forth over his plate as if to say, Forget it.
I’ll be leaving in a day or two, Myers said.
Somehow I figured you would be, Sol said. I don’t know why I felt that, but I didn’t think somehow when you moved in you’d be here all that long.
No refunds on the rent, Bonnie said.
Hey, Bonnie, Sol said.
It’s okay, Myers said.
No it isn’t, Sol said.
It’s all right, Myers said. He opened the door to the bathroom, stepped inside, and shut the door. As he ran water into the sink he could hear them talking out there, but he couldn’t hear what they were saying.
He showered, washed his hair, and put on clean clothes. He looked at the things of his in the room that had come out of his suitcase just a few days ago, a week ago, and figured it would take him about ten minutes to pack up and be gone. He could hear the TV start up on the other side of the house. He went to the window and raised it and looked again at the mountains, with the moon lying over them—no clouds now, just the moon, and the snowcapped mountains. He looked at the pile of sawdust out in back and at the wood stacked against the shadowy recesses of the garage. He listened to the river for a while. Then he went over to the table and sat down and opened the notebook and began to write.
The country I’m in is very exotic. It reminds me of someplace I’ve read about but never traveled to before now. Outside my window I can hear a river and in the valley behind the house there is a forest and precipices and mountain peaks covered with snow. Today I saw a wild eagle, and a deer, and I cut and chopped two cords of wood.
Then he put the pen down and held his head in his hands for a moment. Pretty soon he got up and undressed and turned off the light. He left the window open when he got into bed. It was okay like that.
What Would You Like to See?
We were to have dinner with Pete Petersen and his wife, Betty, the night before our departure. Pete owned a restaurant that overlooked the highway and the Pacific Ocean. Early in the summer we had rented a furnished house from him that sat a hundred yards or so back behind the restaurant, just at the edge of the parking lot. Some nights when the wind was coming in off the ocean, we could open the front door and smell the steaks being charbroiled in the restaurant’s kitchen and see the gray flume of smoke rising from the heavy brick chimney. And always, day and night, we lived with the hum of the big freezer fans in back of the restaurant, a sound we grew used to.
Pete’s daughter, Leslie, a thin blond woman who’d never acted very friendly, lived in a smaller house nearby that also belonged to Pete. She managed his business affairs and had already been over to take a quick inventory of everything—we had rented the house furnished, right down to bed linen and an electric can opener—and had given us our deposit check back and wished us luck. She was friendly that morning she came through the house with her clipboard and inventory list, and we exchanged pleasantries. She didn’t take much time with the inventory, and she already had our deposit check made out.
“Dad’s going to miss you,” she said. “It’s funny. He’s tough as shoe leather, you know, but he’s going to miss you. He’s said so. He hates to see you go. Betty too.” Betty was her stepmother and looked after Leslie’s children when Leslie dated or went off to San Francisco for a few days with her boyfriend. Pete and Betty, Leslie and her kids, Sarah and I, we all lived behind the restaurant within sight of one another, and I’d see Leslie’s kids going back and forth from their little place to Pete and Betty’s. Sometimes the kids would come over to our house and ring the doorbell and stand on the step and wait. Sarah would invite them in for cookies or pound cake and let them sit at the kitchen table like grownups and ask about their day and take an interest in their answers.
Our own children had left home before we moved to this northern coastal region of California. Our daughter, Cindy, was living with several other young people in a house on several rocky acres of ground outside of Ukiah, in Mendocino County. They kept bees and raised goats and chickens and sold eggs and goat’s milk and jars of honey. The women worked on patchwork quilts and blankets too, and sold those when they could. But I don’t want to call it a commune. I’d have a harder time dealing with it, from what I’ve heard about communes, if I called it a commune, where every woman was every man’s property, things like that. Say she lived with friends on a little farm where everyone shared the labor. But, so far as we knew anyway, they were not involved in organized religion or any sort of sect. We had not heard from her for nearly three months, except for a jar of honey arriving in the mail one day, and a patch of heavy red cloth, part of a quilt she was working on. There was a note wrapped around the jar of honey, which said:
Dear Mom and Dad
I sewed this myself and I put this Honey up myself. I am learning to do things here.
Love,
Cindy
But two of Sarah’s letters went unanswered and then that fall the Jonestown thing happened and we were wild for a day or two that she could be there, for all we knew, in British Guiana. We only had a post-office box number in Ukiah for her. I called the sheriff’s office down there and explained the situation, and he drove out to the place to take a head count and carry a message from us. She called that night and first Sarah talked to her and wept, and then I talked to her and wept with relief. Cindy wept too. Some of her friends were down there in Jonestown. She said it was raining, and she was depressed, but the depression would pass, she said; she was where she wanted to be, and doing what she wanted to do. She’d write us a long letter and send us a picture soon.
So when Leslie’s children came to visit, Sarah always took a large and real interest in them and sat them down at the table and made them cocoa and served them cookies or pound cake and took a genuine interest in their stories.
But we were moving, we had decided to separate. I was going to Vermont to teach for a semester in a small college and Sarah was going to take an apartment in Eureka, a nearby town. At the end of four and a half months, at the end of the college semester, then we’d take a look at things and see. There was no one else involved for either of us, thank God, and we had neither of us had anything to drink now for nearly a year, almost the amount of time we had been living in Pete’s house together, and somehow there was just enough money to get me back east and to get Sarah set up in her apartment. She was already doing research and secretarial work for the history department at the college in Eureka, and if she kept the same job even, and the car, and had only herself to support, she could get by all right. We’d live apart for the semester, me on the East Coast, she on the West, and then we’d take stock, see what was what.
While we were cleaning the house, me washing the windows and Sarah down on her hands and knees cleaning woodwork, the baseboards and corners with a pan of soapy water and an old T-shirt, Betty knocked on the door. It was a point of honor for us to clean this house and c
lean it well before we left. We had even taken a wire brush and scoured the bricks around the fireplace. We’d left too many houses in a hurry in the past and left them damaged or in a shambles somehow, or else left owing rent and maybe having to move our things in the middle of the night. This time it was a point of honor to leave this house clean, to leave it immaculate, to leave it in better condition even than we had found it, and after we’d set the date we were going to leave, we had set to work with a passion to erase any signs of ourselves in that house. So when Betty came to the door and knocked, we were hard at work in different rooms of the house and didn’t hear her at first. Then she knocked again, a little louder, and I put down my cleaning materials and came out of the bedroom.
“I hope I’m not disturbing you,” she said, the color high in her cheeks. She was a little, compact woman with blue slacks and a pink blouse that hung out over her slacks. Her hair was short and brown and she was somewhere in her late forties, younger than Pete. She had been waitressing at Pete’s restaurant and was friends with Pete and his first wife, Evelyn, Leslie’s mother. Then, we had been told, Evelyn, who was only fifty-four, was returning home from a shopping trip into Eureka. Just as she pulled off the highway into the parking lot behind the restaurant and headed across the lot for her own driveway, her heart stopped. The car kept going, slowly enough, but with enough momentum to knock down the little wood rail fence, cross her flower bed of azaleas, and come to a stop against the porch with Evelyn slumped behind the wheel, dead. A few months later, Pete and Betty had married, and Betty had quit waitressing and become stepmother to Leslie and grandmother to Leslie’s children. Betty had been married before and had grown children living in Oregon who drove down now and then to visit. Betty and Pete had been married for five years, and from what we could observe they were happy and well suited to each other.