“Mine is simple,” I said. I didn’t say, though, what forms it had taken recently, nor anything about the moon-slice of somebody else’s gold eye in the middle of my wife’s back as she labored for us.
“So is mine, and I work for it. A gut-survival situation may never happen. Probably it won’t. But you know something? I sleep at night. I have no worries. I am becoming myself, as inconsequential as that may be. I am not something some-body shoved off on me. I am what I choose to be, and I am it.”
“There’re a lot of other kinds of people to be, than what you are,” I said.
“Sure there are. But this is my kind. It feels right, like when you turn loose the arrow, and you know when you let go that you’ve done everything right. You know where the arrow is going. There’s not any other place that it can go.”
“Lord,” I said. “Lewis, you’re out of sight.”
“Who knows,” he said. “But I believe in survival. All kinds. Every time I come up here, I believe in it more. You know, with all the so-called modern conveniences, a man can still fall down. His leg will break, like Shad Mackey’s. He can lie there in the woods with night coming on, knowing he’s got two cars in the garage, one of them an XKE, a wife and three children watching “Star Trek” as he lies trying to get his breath under a bush. The old human body is the same as it always was. It still feels that old fear, and that old pain. The last time I was near here…”
“You know that old broken-leg thing, don’t you, buddy?”
“I know it,” he said. “I broke it like a goddamned fool, up here by myself. There was a trout stream I wanted to fish, and it was hard to get to. I took thirty feet of rope and let myself down to the creek and fished… well, I fished. It was one of the best afternoons I ever had with man or woman or beast. I was climbing back up when the rope worked into my right hand and began to hurt like hell, and I slacked up on that hand and tried to wrap the rope around it a different way, and the next thing I knew, the damned rope slicked through the other hand and I was going down. In fact, I was already down. I hit on one leg, and I could hear something go in that right ankle. I had a hard time getting up from the bottom of the creek, with those waders on, and when I tried to stand up, I knew I had it to do.”
“How’d you get out?”
“I went up the rope. I just armed it out, hand over hand, and then started hobbling and hopping and crawling. And you damned well better hope you never have to one-leg it through any woods. I was holding on to every tree like it was my brother.”
“Maybe it was.”
“No,” Lewis said. “But I got out, finally. You know the rest.”
“Yeah. And now you’re going back.”
“You better believe it. But you know something, Ed? That intensity; well, that’s something special. That was a great trip, broken ankle and all. I heard old Tom McCaskill, the night before. That was worth it.”
“Who is that?”
“Well, let me tell you. You come up here camping in the woods, on the river in some places, or back off in the bush, hunting or whatever you’re doing, and in the middle of the night you’re liable to hear the most God-awful scream that ever got loose from a human mouth. There’s no explanation for it. You just hear it, and that’s all. Sometimes you just hear it once, and sometimes it keeps on for a while.”
“What is it, for the Lord’s sake?”
“There’s this old guy up here who just gets himself — or makes himself — a jug every couple of weeks, and goes off in the woods at night. From what I hear, he doesn’t have any idea where he’s going. He just goes off the road and keeps going till he’s ready to stop. Then he builds himself a fire and sits down with the jug. When he gets drunk enough he starts out to hollering. That’s the way he gets his kicks. As they say, don’t knock it if you ain’t tried it. You tried it?”
“No, but maybe on this trip. I doubt if I’ll ever get another chance. Maybe we don’t even have to go down the river. Maybe we should just go off and drink and holler. And Drew could play the guitar. I’ll bet he’d just as soon. I’ll bet he’d rather.”
“Well, I wouldn’t. Would you?”
“Don’t knock it if you ain’t tried it,” I said. “But no, I wouldn’t. In fact, I’m looking forward to getting on the river. I’m so tanked up with your river-mystique that I’m sure I’ll go through some fantastic change as soon as I dig the paddle in the first time.”
“Just wait, buddy,” he said. “You’ll want to come back. It’s real.”
I looked off at the blue forms of the mountains, growing less transparent and cloudlike, shifting their positions, rolling from side to side off the road, coming back and centering in our path, and then sliding off the road again, but strengthening all the time. We went through some brush and then out across a huge flat field that ran before us for miles, going straight at the bulging range of hills, which was now turning mile by mile from blue to a fight green-gold, the color of billions of hardwood leaves.
Around noon we started up among them, still on the highway. At an intersection we turned off onto a blacktop state road, and from that onto a badly cracked and weedy concrete highway of the old days — the thirties as nearly as I could tell — with the old splattered tar centerline wavering onward. From that we turned onto another concrete road that sagged and slewed and holed-out and bumped ahead, not worth maintaining at all.
It was still about forty miles to Oree. We had to get there, hire two men to drive the cars back down to Aintry and then go downriver and find a campsite and set up camp. If possible, we also wanted to buy some more supplies. We had time, but we didn’t have any to waste. Lewis speeded up; a bad road always challenged him. The canoe bumped and grated overhead.
We were among trees now, lots of them. I could have told you with my eyes closed; I could hear them whish, then open to space and then close with another whish. I was surprised at how much color there was in them. I had thought that the pine tree was about the only tree in the state, but that wasn’t the case, as I saw. I had no notion what the trees were, but they were beautiful, flaming and turning color almost as I looked at them. They were just beginning to turn, and the flame was not hot yet. But it was there, beginning to come on.
“You look at these trees,” Lew said. “I’ve been up here in April when you could see the most amazing thing about them.”
“They look pretty amazing now,” I said. “What do you mean?”
“Have you ever heard of the larva of the linden moth?”
“Sure,” I said. “All the time. Tell you the truth, no.”
“Every year when the larvae are ambitious — larvas is larvae — you can look at the trees and you see something happening.”
“What?”
“You can see a mass hanging. A self-hanging of millions of ’em.”
“Is this another put-on?”
“No, buddy. They let themselves down on threads. You can look anywhere you like and see ’em, wringing and twisting on the ends of the threads like men that can’t die. Some of them are black and some are brown. And everything is quiet. It’s so quiet. And they’re there, twisting. But they’re bad news. They eat the hardwood leaves. The government’s trying to figure some way to get rid of ’em.”
It was a warm day. Everything was green, and through the green there was that subtle gold-coming color that makes the green hurt to look at. We passed through Whitepath and Pelham, towns smaller than the others, and Pelham smaller than Whitepath, and then began to wind and climb. The woods were heavy between the towns, and closed in around them.
“Look for deer,” Lewis said. “When there’s not much mast, they come down to the cornfields and along the roads.”
I looked but didn’t see any, though at one curve in the road I thought I saw something dart back into the woods to the right. But the leaves where I thought it had gone in were not moving, so probably it was my imagination.
Finally we came to Oree. It was evidently the county seat, for it had a little whitewa
shed building it called the town hall; the jail was part of it, and an old-fashioned fire engine was parked at one side. We went to a Texaco station and asked if there was anybody there who’d like to make some money. When Lewis killed the engine, the air came alive and shook with insects, even in the center of town, an in-and-out responding silence of noise. An old man with a straw hat and work shirt appeared at Lewis’ window, talking in. He looked like a hillbilly in some badly cast movie, a character actor too much in character to be believed. I wondered where the excitement was that intrigued Lewis so much; everything in Oree was sleepy and hookwormy and ugly, and most of all, inconsequential. Nobody worth a damn could ever come from such a place. It was nothing, like most places and people are nothing. Lewis asked the fellow if he and somebody else would drive our cars down to Aintry for twenty dollars.
“Take two of you to drive this thing?” the man asked.
“If that was the case we’d need four,” Lewis said, and didn’t explain. He just sat there and waited. I glanced up at the prow of the canoe, the hook coming at us from above.
After a long minute Drew and Bobby drove up beside us.
“See what I mean?” Lewis said.
The other two got out and came over. The old man turned as though he were being surrounded. His movements were very slow, like those of someone whose energies have been taken by some other thing than old age. It was humiliating to be around him, especially with Lewis’ huge pumped-up bicep shoving out its veins in the sun, where it lay casually on the window of the car. Out of the side of my eye I saw the old man’s spotted hands trembling like he was deliberately making them do it. There is always something wrong with people in the country, I thought. In the comparatively few times I had ever been in the rural South I had been struck by the number of missing fingers. Offhand, I had counted around twenty, at least. There had also been several people with some form of crippling or twisting illness, and some blind or one-eyed. No adequate medical treatment, maybe. But there was something else. You’d think that farming was a healthy life, with fresh air and fresh food and plenty of exercise, but I never saw a farmer who didn’t have something wrong with him, and most of the time obviously wrong; I never saw one who was physically powerful, either. Certainly there were none like Lewis. The work with the hands must be fantastically dangerous, in all that fresh air and sunshine, I thought: the catching of an arm in a tractor part somewhere off in the middle of a field where nothing happened but that the sun blazed back more fiercely down the open mouth of one’s screams. And so many snakebites deep in the woods as one stepped over a rotten log, so many domestic animals suddenly turning and crushing one against the splintering side of a barn stall. I wanted none of it, and I didn’t want to be around where it happened either. But I was there, and there was no way for me to escape, except by water, from the country of nine-fingered people.
I looked off into the woods, then, and shot an eye corner back at my bow. This trip would sure be the farthest off in the woods I had ever been; there would be more animals than I had ever been close to, and they would be wilder. Lewis said he believed there were even a few bears and wild hogs in the mountains, though he said that the hogs were more likely to be domestic pigs that had run off. But they revert fast, he said; they grow that ruff up the back of the neck and the snout stretches out and the tushes get long, and in six or seven years you can’t tell them from the ones in Russia, except maybe by a notch in the ear or a ring in the nose. I knew there was not much chance of our running into a bear or a hog; that was romance. But then, the idea of hunting, for me, was also a kind of romance. The death of a real deer at my hands was just a vaporous, remote presence that hovered over the figure of the paper deer forty-five yards away at target six of our archery range, as I tried to hit the heart-lung section marked out in heavy black.
“Man, I like the way you wear that hat,” Bobby said to the old man.
The man took off the hat and looked at it carefully; there was nothing remarkable about it, but when it was on his head it had the curious awkward-arrogant tilt that you find only in the country South. He put the hat back on the other side of his head with the same tilt.
“You don’t know nothin’,” he said to Bobby.
Drew said, “Can you tell us something about the land around here? I mean, suppose we wanted to get down the river to Aintry. Could we do it?”
The man turned away from Bobby, and the finality with which he did it made me glance at Bobby to see if he had disappeared as a result. Bobby was smiling the kind of smile that might or might not come before a mean remark.
“Well,” the man said, “it’s right rocky, on down a piece. If there’s been a rain it raises way up, but it don’t come over the banks, leastways in most places. There ain’t no danger of the valley floodin’; ain’t nothin’ in it anyway. Furthest down I been is Walker’s Point, about fifteen miles, where the land starts gettin’ high. In a dry spell the river drops on down out of sight; you got to lean way out over the rocks to see it. And they say there’s another big gorge on down south, but I ain’t never been there.”
“Do you think we can get down the river?” Drew asked.
“In whut?”
“In these two canoes.”
“I wouldn’t want to try it,” he said, and straightened up. “If it rains, you’re liable to be in bad trouble. The water climbs them rock walls like a monkey.”
“What the hell,” Lewis said. “It’s not going to rain. Look up yonder.”
I looked up yonder. It was clear, hazy-hot blue with no clouds. It seemed all right, if it stayed that way.
“If it rains, we’ll just find us a place and hole up,” Lewis said. “I’ve done it before.”
“You’ll have a time holing up if you get down in that gorge.”
“We’ll make out.”
“All right,” the old man said. “You asked me. I told you.”
Drew and Bobby turned to go back to the Olds, and the Texaco man walked back alongside of Drew. I heard him ask, “Whose guitar is that-there yonder?” Then he was jumping like a dog on its hind legs back into the filling station. “Lonnie,” he hollered, “come on out chere.”
He came back and behind him was an albino boy with pink eyes like a white rabbit’s; one of them stared off at a furious and complicated angle. That was the eye he looked at us with, with his face set in another direction. The sane, rational eye was fixed on something that wasn’t there, somewhere in the dust of the road.
“Git yer banjo,” the old man said, and then to Drew, “Come on, play us a little something.”
Drew grinned, rolled down the back window of the wagon, got out the big cracked Martin and put on his finger picks. He came back to the front of the Olds and hiked himself onto the hood with one leg up to hold the guitar. He tuned for a minute, and Lonnie came back holding up a five-string banjo with a capo made out of rags and rubber bands.
“Lonnie don’t know nothin’ but banjo-pickin’,” the old man said. “He ain’t never been to school; when he was little he used to sit out in the yard and beat on a lard can with a stick.”
“What’re we going to play, Lonnie?” Drew asked, his glasses opaque with pleasure.
Lonnie stood holding the banjo, looking off from us now with both eyes, the eyes splitting apart and all of us in the blind spot.
“Anything,” the old man said. “Play anything.”
Drew started in on “Wildwood Flower,” picking it out at medium tempo and not putting in many runs. Lonnie dragged on the rubber bands and slipped the capo up. Drew started to come on with the volume; the Martin boomed out and over the dusty filling station. I had never heard him play so well, and I really began to listen deeply, moved as an unmusical person is moved when he sees that the music is meant. After a little while it sounded as though Drew were adding another kind of sound to every note he played, a higher, tinny echo of the melody, and then it broke in on me that this was the banjo, played so softly and rightly that it sounded like Drew’s o
wn fingering. I could not see Drew’s face, but the back of his neck was sheer joy. He eased out of the melody and played rhythm, and Lonnie took it. He emphasized nothing, but through everything he played there was a lovely unimpeded flowing that seemed endless. His hands, full of long scratches, took time; the fingers moved only slightly, about like those of a good typist; the music was just there. Drew came back in the new key and they finished, riding together. For the last couple of minutes of the song, Drew slid down and went over and stood beside Lonnie. They put the instruments together and leaned close to each other in the pose you see vocal groups and phony folk singers take on TV programs, and something rare and unrepeatable took hold of the way I saw them, the demented country kid and the big-faced decent city man, the minor civic leader and hedge clipper. I was glad for Drew’s sake we had come. Just this incident would be plenty to satisfy him.
“Goddamn,” he said as they finished.
“Come on, Drew,” Lewis said. “Put that thing away. We got to get water under us.”
“I could play with this guy all day,” Drew said. “Can you wait just a minute? I’d like to get his name and address.”
He turned to Lonnie, then quickly to the old man; he was, I guess, afraid that Lonnie didn’t know his name and address. They walked together a few steps, almost out of the area of the filling station, and stood talking. Then Drew passed the Martin to the old man and took a pencil and his wallet out of his pocket and wrote carefully what the old man told him. Once the man touched Drew’s shoulder. Drew came back, and the old man and Lonnie went inside.
“You know,” Drew said to all of us, “I’d like to come back up here, just to hear some more music. I thought all the real country pickers had long since gone to Nashville.”
“How about the river?” Lewis asked.
“He tells me you can’t get down to the river anywhere in town here. It’s too steep. But eight or ten miles north of here the land’s flat. We might be able to find us a road through the woods. There was a logging operation up there a few years back, and he thinks there are still some roads that go down to the river, or somewhere around it.”