But I still had a few minutes to look for him. Where? The idiot boy sent to find a lost horse asked himself where he would go if he were a horse, and went there, and there the horse was. In my experience, horses never strayed downhill, always up. If I were a horse— or if I were Sid Lang—I would not stray downhill either.
So I went for a quarter of a mile or so up the hayroad that Sid and Charity used as a shortcut to the picnic site: through a gate, along a warm fragrant tunnel under the balsams, and into the empty meadow that Charity had had bulldozed for a playing field.
It seemed to me an absolutely characteristic Charity artifact. She had prepared that field in a burst of enthusiasm without considering that it was a steep mile and a half from the lake where all the children lived. The uncut grass was eighteen inches high. Obviously nobody had played anything there all summer.
But then, as I neared the far edge, I saw off to the left a trampled circle marked by horse dung. Margie, undoubtedly, the bewildered and desolated granddaughter, had been there training her sister-companion-friend to trot, canter, and change leads, in brooding repetitive circles. Not so different from what Sid was doing out here somewhere, and without even a horse for company.
It didn’t seem right to call out in that quiet place. Quiet—only when I stopped at the edge of the spruce woods did I realize how quiet. The sun beat down on me, angled but still hot. The air hummed and buzzed with insects, but their noise was a form of silence, not a sound, and over the whole hill lay a cushiony emptiness that absorbed and blotted up every vibration of air. I listened until the stillness rang in my ears. The meadow, unstirred by the slightest wind, darkened as I watched it, like a curing Polaroid film.
Then I heard a car. At first I thought it must be the station wagon coming up for Charity, and I started to run back, thinking I must somehow get the Marmon—no, too late. Then I realized that the sound was coming from behind me, and turning, I saw Moe’s old Rambler nosing out of the woods into the open.
We had a hurried, baffled conference. He had seen nothing of Sid on his way down from the hill, though as he said, he had not been looking for Sid, he had been keeping his eye out for the Marmon. Charity’s directions, relayed by Sally over the telephone, had been to get the family up to the hilltop, and if Sid and I were not already there, to come and get us—at once.
Moe was sober and upset. “It’s like something out of K-k-Kafka,” he said. “Where is he?”
“I don’t know. Walking, I guess.”
“Is the c-car still there?”
“Yes.”
“Hallie and Comfort haven’t shown up yet?”
“They hadn’t ten minutes ago.”
“We’d better h-hustle,” Moe said.
I climbed in beside him and we went on down, leaving the gate open, and parked beside the Marmon on the grass. There was no sign of anyone, or any movement through the kitchen windows. Charity’s bedroom, on the other side of the house and at the far end, was out of sight and out of earshot.
Moe, in a tearing hurry, motioned for me to drive, but I said I thought I’d better try to find Sid. We could walk up, or come in Moe’s Rambler. Moe agreed after only a moment’s hesitation. Obviously the thought of being caught there by the station wagon caused him intense anxiety. He climbed into the Marmon and looked distractedly down at its mysterious dashboard. I had to show him where the switch and the starter button were. He bucked the car a foot forward trying to start it in gear. Finally he got it going.
“If I run across him I’ll take him on up,” he said. “We’ll h-h-honk all our h-h-horns. If you find him, b-bring him. The key’s in the car.”
“Fine.”
At the last moment, I yanked Charity’s lounge and Sally’s chair from behind the running-board rack and dropped them on the lawn. Charity wouldn’t need her lounge ever again, but Sally could not get along without the chair. Standing on the running board, I rode with Moe up the hill to the gate. With a relief that surprised me, I stepped off as we pulled behind the screen of birches and brush, and just before I stepped off I grabbed a flashlight out of the top of one of the hampers in the back. So powerfully did Charity’s instructions and training direct our every move.
At the gate Moe gave me a sober look, grimaced, and drove away, looking small and childlike behind the wheel of that leviathan. He rocked ahead and disappeared down the balsam tunnel, leaving me standing in the spritzy smells of raspberry and hazelbrush, my ears alert for the sound of the station wagon coming up the hill.
I heard it almost at once. While I waited for it to come in sight below me, I was wondering what effect the sound of cars might have on Sid. First the Rambler, then the Marmon, now the station wagon—any one of them might be the sound of the end of his life. Would it drive him deeper into the woods, or would it draw him to lurk by the side of the road and watch?
The station wagon topped the steep pitch and drew up beside the Rambler. Hallie and Comfort got out and hurried inside. I waited. The door, left open behind them, stared back at me, as pregnant with unfulfilled possibility as an open door on an empty stage.
Then in a very few minutes it filled. The white outline of Mrs. Norton appeared in it, carrying a suitcase. She backed through, set the suitcase down, and leaned in to help Hallie and Comfort get Charity through.
Intent on the step down, Charity did not look up. I saw her cameo profile and the graceful, weak, flowerlike droop of her neck and head. Her helpers moved with her in synchronized steppings and bendings. They were like the chorus of women in some Greek drama, or Morgain le Fay and her maidens bringing wounded Arthur on board the barge for Avalon. Totentanz. Grave and solicitous, intensely concentrated, they crossed the porch and descended the other step to the lawn.
From behind the screen of brush I watched them, hoping that Sid was not hidden anywhere, watching as I was. In his shoes, I could not have borne this.
Then the doorway filled again, and there, hobbling and lurching, helpless to help or even keep up, shrunken and warped out of shape, came Sally—no part of the dance, but harder to watch than any of it.
The vision of her floundering in the wake of the concentrated helpers and their feeble charge turned my distress into outrage. Not at any of the helpers, not at Charity’s willfulness, not at the solidarity of women collaborating in what only they could do as well, while excluding male intrusions. No, at it, at fate, at the miserable failure of the law of nature to conform to the dream of man: at what living had done to the woman my life was fused with, what her life had been and was. What she had missed, how much had been kept from her, how little her potential had been realized, how hampered were her affection and willingness and warmth. The sight of her burned my eyes.
The other three helped Charity into the middle seat and propped her with cushions. Mrs. Norton got the suitcase and herself into the back. Outside, Hallie and Comfort stood a moment looking, it seemed to me with satisfaction, at the Rambler. They said something, but I could not distinguish words. They looked up my way, so that I shrank behind my screen of brush like a discovered peeping tom.
Then Hallie got into the back beside Mrs. Norton. Comfort slid into the driver’s seat. Sally braced her canes and boosted herself awkwardly in beside her, pulled in her canes, and shut the door. The engine started, the station wagon backed and headed down the road. I watched it until it dipped down behind a clump of birches. For a little while I heard the engine, then only the humming quiet of the hill.
Down at the house I found the door unlocked. For some reason, the fact that I could get in, and Sid too if he should return, reassured me. On an impulse, perhaps to see what he would find if he did return, I went through the house to the bedroom. It showed no signs of precipitate flight. The bed was made, books and magazines were stacked neatly on the bed table, the curtains were drawn against the dropping sun, the implements of sickness—sipping glass, bottles, Kleenex, mohair comforters, heating pad—were out of sight, put away, disposed of. An empty bedroom, no more.
Outside again, I scribbled a note on the pad that hung beside the door. I said that Moe had taken the Marmon, and that I was walking. If Sid came back here, he should take Moe’s car and go on up. I would see him.
This note I stuck on the Rambler’s aerial, and with the flashlight in my hip pocket went up the rise to the pasture gate, through the balsam tunnel, and across the playing field’s tangled grass to the edge where woods met meadow in a line as abrupt as a cliff. Tentatively, not as loud as I intended, I called. Listening brought me no answer. I found the masked entrance of the path and stepped inside.
In one step I was in brown twilight. Nothing grew in that dense shade. The lower branches of even healthy trees were shade-killed, spiky, scaly with gray lichen, and many trees had been broken or tilted by wind or snow, and lay crosswise, hung up, down and half down. The path that I remembered wound through this tangle, soft underfoot with duff and moss, and where trees had gone down across it someone with an axe or machete had cut through the trunks or trimmed the branches. I knew who. In a summer like this, Sid would have spent a lot of time clearing paths like this. He might be doing it right now.
I listened, but I heard nothing. Nor did I call in there. The shrouded quiet forbade noise. Anyway, there was no use to call, or search the skeleton woods for a sign of him. If he was in there, he would be on the path, and that went secretly ahead of me. I followed it.
And found nothing. I walked every trail on the hill, some of which I knew from past summers and some of which I found with my feet. I went to the hidden spring deep in the woods that he had shown me once, a place like a boys’ hideout. Nothing. I walked the long trail clear around the hill, a tiring hour and a half of up and down, because it occurred to me that what he wanted was the most strenuous walk he could find. Nothing.
There were scuffs in the trail, and chunks of moss had been kicked off an outcrop in one place, but I was not tracker enough to know whether those marks had been made that afternoon or last month. The woods were silent, except once when I came into the open and heard the yelling of kids, a good way off on the hilltop. It offended me, and I drew a gloomy parallel between Charity and the bare, gnarled, immoderately branched, very dead seed trees that I had come across here and there in the spruce woods—trees that had obviously grown up in an open meadow and seeded the area around themselves, and then been choked out by their profuse offspring. It was unfair to blame those children for having the fun that Charity had arranged for them, but that’s the way I felt.
Later, at nearly seven o’clock, I came close enough to see them. They were all spread out on the knoll above the cooking fire, eating while Lyle and David squatted in the smoke, carving up steaks, and Barney circulated with a wine jug on his finger. They irritated me too. Why were they so carefree, when they must know why neither Charity nor Sid, nor Sally nor I, nor Comfort nor Hallie, was there? But a moment’s thought convinced me that they didn’t know. At most, Moe and maybe Lyle knew; and they would not have told, because Charity’s orders were very clear. If they were worried about Sid, they must have persuaded themselves that I had him somewhere, or was walking his legs off for therapy.
That I didn’t, that it was only my own legs I had been walking off, was all the more reason for not going over to join them and partake of the feast whose smells across the hill watered my mouth. If I went over there I would get sidetracked into a lot of greetings and questions and sociability, or else I would have to tell them why I couldn’t get sidetracked, and that would break up the picnic.
But where, then? Back to the Ridge? I could think of nothing better, and having started, I grew more convinced with every step that I would find him there. I went fast down the old hay road, past the cellar hole full of fireweed where a farmhouse had burned, through the sugarbush where spruce trees were growing up and choking everything, across the playing-field meadow and along the balsam tunnel and through the gate. From above, I looked down on the house and its quiet lawn.
The Rambler sat just where Moe had left it. The note was still on the aerial. The folded lounge and the folded chair lay on the grass.
Since then, wild goose chases have followed one another. It occurred to me, the idea going on in my head like a light bulb in a comic strip, that he might have found his way, perhaps without intending it, down to his study/shop in the compound. He might be down there now, straightening used nails on the anvil.
Of course, of course. The idiot boy would have thought of that long ago.
I climbed into the Rambler and drove on down, parked in the grove of the parking lot, walked down past the woodshed to the shop, opened the sliding door on the quiet room smelling of linseed oil.
“Sid?” I said.
Nothing.
Later, back at the Ridge, sitting on the porch step eating crackers and cheese and trying to think what to do next, I saw that the sun was over the hill, and that all along the west a bed of cloud with fiery edges was turning orange. The sunset was going to be fine, just what Charity would have ordered. Another light bulb went on in my head. Over on the western slope of the hill was a place where the ice had gouged a long trough through an outcropping of schist. What was left when the ice withdrew was a bench a hundred feet long, with a sloping back and moss cushions, where at least a dozen times we have gone to be quiet and watch the fire die out of the sky. Whatever he had been doing for the last four hours, wouldn’t Sid be drawn there now? I thought he would. I could imagine him sitting there in the flat red light, brooding on his loss and on the fact that he was excluded from it, like a child, for his own good; and I could imagine him savaging himself with the unconsoling lines that education and habit would have brought to the surface of his mind:
It is a beauteous evening, calm and free.
The holy time is quiet as a nun
Breathless with adoration. The broad sun
Is sinking down in his tranquility . . .
If I wanted to drive down the hill and a mile around, I could get there by car. But I did not want to risk having Sid return to find the house empty, the car with its note gone, nobody around. Tired as I was, I would walk—it was no more than a half mile through the woods.
Before I left I turned on the porch light and pulled the note a little higher on the aerial. Then I walked, so tired my hip joints ached in their sockets, through the darkening hardwoods till I came to the western edge, and the sky opened, with the whole main range cut out in black against it. The long bed of cloud that had been fiery at the heart and silver at the edges had cooled to purple, dying like a coal. The ice-cut trough, nearly clear of trees, angled along the hill. My eyes hunted along it for a reddened khaki figure.
“Sid?” I said again.
Nothing.
Coming back, I found the woods so dark I had to use the flashlight. See? my mind said to me as I played it on stumps and ferns ahead. You can understand his dependence. She told you that sooner or later you’d need a flashlight, and she was right. As usual.
By then I was really alarmed, not merely concerned. I had let more than four hours go by when I should have been organizing a search party and letting the picnic fall apart as it might. The porch light, when I came up the hill from the stable, did not cheer me, for I saw at once that the Rambler was still there, and the note a tip of flame above it, catching light either from the porch or from the moon.
I was headed for it, intending to go straight to the hilltop and enlist the family in the search, when I heard the telephone in the kitchen. I burst in the door and answered it. “Hello?”
“Ah, darling,” Sally said. “You’re back. How did it go?”
“What?”
“The picnic. How was it? We saw you’d gone when we came out—the Marmon was gone.”
“Oh,” I said. “Yes, it was all right.”
“They didn’t miss her, then. They went ahead.”
“They went ahead. But of course they missed her. They went ahead because most of them didn’t know.”
“You sound out of br
eath.”
“I just ran in from the yard.”
“How’s Sid?”
“Okay. Playing his role. He’ll be all right.”
“Oh, I’m so glad,” Sally said. “I was afraid . . . How are you? Did you have any trouble with him? He didn’t break down?”
“Not that I noticed.”
“Good. Because, you know, she did. She sat and looked out the window and cried all the way over. Having done that to him, she found she’d done it to herself.”
“It’s a mess,” I said. “Have you got her settled? Are you coming back tonight?”
“No, that’s why I called as soon as I thought you might be back. We’ll be home before noon tomorrow. We didn’t stay with Charity long because she was so tired and weak. We saw her again just now, after dinner, and we’ll see her tomorrow before we start back.” There was a pause. “Larry?”
“Yes?”
“I love you.”
“I love you too.”
“Are you going to spend the night at the Ridge House?”
“We haven’t discussed it. I suppose I might.”
“Do. I don’t want to think of either of you alone. Did you have a walk?”
“My legs are worn down to stumps.”
“Poor fellow, I bet you’re tired.”
“How about you? You must be worn out after a day like this one.”
“Oh, I don’t know. A little, maybe. Not too. Just . . .”
“What?”
“Sad. You know?”
“I guess I do know. Get to bed. Get a good sleep.”
“I will. You too.”
“All right. Goodnight, sweet.”
“Goodnight.”
Sound of her kiss in the receiver, than click. I went back outside.
The moonlight has gathered and concentrated itself, the lawn lies out there pallid and even, the Rambler squats upon its shadow, the note is now a petal of pale flame. The folded chairs lie on the grass, faintly gleaming, like a pile of bones. From far off, drifting down from the hilltop, comes the sound of singing.