Leave Her to Heaven Read online

  The way at first ascended at a steep zigzag, climbing for a few rods to top the rocky point which was, on this side, the anchor of the dam. Before he was halfway up this short climb, Harland was gasping for breath. He set his teeth and pushed on to the top, but by the time he reached it his heart was pounding in his throat, his lungs ached, and he was sweating hard. He stopped to rest, mopping his forehead, feeling a strong distaste for himself. This was not the clean, honest sweat of a body lean and hard, but the oily exudation from soft layers of pale yellow fat which overlaid all that was left, after months of sedentary life, of what had been his muscles. Once he had been proud of his fit condition, with skiing in the winter, and in the summer at Back of the Moon long afternoons of strong tramping through the forests when his morning’s work was done. But now he was a soft, pulpy, white thing like one of those grubs which live out their lives in dark, humid soil; like one of those fat, eyeless, flabby fish which dwell in subterranean waters and never feel the sun. Even his hands were trembling with fatigue from this short climb.

  ‘I’m like a man who has been sick,’ he thought, looking at these shaking hands; and for a moment a profound and hopeless depression overwhelmed him. He sat down, his shoulders sagging. Was it worth while to go on, to try to fight down the past, to submit to all the pangs the future held? Were it not wiser and easier and even braver to make somehow, here, now, a quick and peaceful end? The world, if he lived, would always be ready with its side glances and its whisperings, wherever and whenever he should face the eyes and the tongues of men again. Here in the solitude was peace. Could he not stay here, let his body come here to its last corruption and set his tormented spirit free? Death would be so easy and so sweet.

  He sat in half-surrendering self-scorn until he heard at some distance in the stillness of the forest the sound of Leick returning; and he was ashamed that Leick should find him here, and yet ashamed too to pretend a strength he did not possess. So he sat where he was till Leick came up the path to face him; and when the other paused he said honestly:

  ‘I got this far, Leick, but I played out.’

  Leick nodded, assenting calmly. ‘Take your time,’ he advised. ‘I’ll need a couple more trips myself.’ He went on down to the landing by the dam, wisely leaving Harland to fight his battle out alone.

  Harland rose and resumed his burdens and proceeded. When Leick, bowed under the bulk of fly and bedrolls, overtook him, he moved aside to let the other pass and followed on. His depression had somehow vanished. Perhaps the deep and labored breathing provoked by that first short ascent had purged his lungs, had burned out some of the sooty dregs with which they were encrusted. He was sweating freely now, like a squeezed sponge, and he savored the salt taste on his lips and found it good. Leick went on and disappeared, and Harland stopped once to rest — he merely paused this time, without sitting down — and then proceeded. When he met Leick returning, the guide grinned approvingly.

  ‘Keep straight ahead,’ he said with a backward nod to show the way. ‘You’ll see the canoe. I’ll fetch the rest of it this time.’

  When, a few rods farther, Harland came down to the waterside, it was where a considerable tributary brook flowed into the main stream; and the River even in this half-mile had drawn reinforcements from little spring brooks, so that it bore now enough water to free the canoe. Yet Harland knew that there would still be shallow reaches where he might need to wade, perhaps to help Leick drag or carry the loaded canoe across these obstacles into deeper water. There were boots in his duffel, but he chose instead a pair of shoe pacs, and he changed his clothes too, stowing coat and trousers away in a careless roll, thinking with a grim satisfaction that whether his trousers were creased would not matter soon again. He put on stag pants and a flannel shirt which Leick had brought for him from Back of the Moon; and in the well-worn garments — a little too big for him now, for he had lost weight in these months while his muscles turned to fat — he felt strong and alive again. He caught himself starting to sing, and checked suddenly, long habit of silence clamping his lips; but then he remembered that he could sing now if he chose, and he flung back his head and like a dog that bays the moon, he shouted at the serene and cloud-swept sky:

  ‘Oh a capital ship for an ocean trip

  Was the Walloping Window Blind...’

  He wondered why he sang that particular song. The words had not entered his mind for — how long? Then he remembered the last time he heard the song, and the past pressed down on him again, silencing him, bowing his shoulders under a load that seemed unbearable.

  When Leick returned, Harland was lying on the gravel bar beside the water, his duffel bag for a pillow, his arm across his eyes against the bright sky and the sun. Leick said in approval of his change of costume: ‘Well, you look more natural!’ But Harland did not speak nor stir till by the sounds he knew the canoe was loaded. Then he rose, and Leick without a word put the duffel bag in place in the canoe, and set the craft afloat, and steadied it while Harland stepped in.

  To float free upon the mirror surface of the infant River was a release; but it was not yet all easy going, for sometimes there were sunny rips where the clear bright water sparkled and chuckled over gravel, and the canoe might scrape or even ground. At such times Leick, stepping out into the water and coming to the bow to drag the canoe a few feet, always freed it quickly. At frequent intervals lesser streams added their waters to the larger. The travellers came to a region where beaver had been active centuries ago, their dams backing up the water and catching silt and gravel in the spring floods till they had created wide marshy intervales, which, now that the dams were gone and the water was drained away, were pleasant meadows where the tall grass grew head high to a man. Sometimes the stream clung close to the foot of the mountains on one side, and arching trees on that bank made a shady canopy, and the water, barely deep enough to carry the canoe, glided easily over a bed of fine gravel; while on the other side the intervale might lead the eye pleasantly away, sometimes a scant hundred yards, sometimes half a mile or more, to wooded higher land beyond. Once they saw bobbing white flags ahead where two or three deer, playing some game or other, bounded sportively to and fro in the reedy undergrowth which clad a low gravelled island in the stream itself. They came close to these deer unseen, till the creatures, at last alarmed, turned to blow at them challengingly, and finally took flight, their tails visible for a while as they made their way in effortless bounds through the shallows and off toward the cover of the woods.

  ‘A pile of deer up here,’ Leick said. ‘They ain’t bothered much, only poachers come in most every winter and take out a few sled loads.’

  Twice more they had short carries to pass dams built by the lumbermen, and once the stream threaded a cedar bog where blowdowns blocked their way; and sometimes they lifted the canoe over these obstacles, and sometimes Leick, wading knee deep, used his axe to clear the channel.

  Thus the pleasant afternoon droned on, and an hour before sunset they came to a gravelled point where men had camped before, and landed there.

  ‘Well,’ said Leick contentedly. ‘We’re past the worst of it. Mostly all straight going now.’ He took from where it was coiled around his hat a six-foot leader with a Parmachene Belle at the tip, a Silver Doctor for a dropper. ‘Get us what you figure we can use tonight,’ he directed. ‘I’ll be settling things.’

  A few rods above the point, a little brook made in, and Harland turned that way, supplementing the leader with a bit of twine and a birch shoot. The trout were young and bold and hungry. He brought back half a dozen, not too large for the pan, and cleaned them; and then he took his ease while Leick with the skill of long experience spread their beds, stretched the fly for security against a chance shower, set his fire and so presently had supper ready. Afterward, he washed the dishes, saying little, letting Harland drink the healing silence of the wilderness. Before dusk turned to dark they were ready for the night, a smudge drifting smoke across their beds to keep insects away; and a little a
fter full dark they rolled in their blankets side by side.

  The night was long, and it was all one silence through which at intervals some soft sound came. Once, lying awake, savoring the fragrant darkness rich with the scent of the pine spills which carpeted the ground, Harland heard a train whistle far away in the direction from which they had come. More than once he heard the movement of some wild thing near them; the interrogative thump of a rabbit, the heavier tread of a deer drawn by the salt smell of their bacon frying, the querulous whining bark of a fox not far away; and once they heard the busy teeth of a porcupine, and Leick rose to drive the creature off, and then all was still again. These sounds and these silences alike entered into Harland, became an enriching part of him. He had known silences enough, in the months just gone; but those were the dead silences of a tomb inhabited by living men. This night was all alive and free. He slept at last, and for the first time in long, he slept dreamlessly.

  – VI –

  At gray dawn Leick rolled out of his blankets; and, still half-asleep, Harland heard the stroke of the axe and smelled the first smoke. He rose to go to the stream side, and strip his pale body and bathe, hurrying afterward into his clothes to protect himself against the swarming mosquitoes, coming back to find immunity in the drifting light smoke of the fire. While they ate, Leick baked corn bread for their nooning, and before the sun lifted above the wooded mountains to the eastward, the canoe was loaded, and they embarked.

  Harland, measuring the distance in his mind, decided they had still some thirty miles to go; and he took a paddle to make greater haste, but the unaccustomed exertion soon tired him and his ribs began to ache and he put the paddle down again. Leick said understandingly: ‘Don’t wear yourself out. I’ll hump her along. We’ll be there by mid-afternoon, with the current to help.’

  ‘Even that little paddling tired me.’

  ‘You’ll harden up quick. Set back and enjoy yourself.’

  So Harland submitted, filling his eyes with the passing scene. For the first two hours they rode in beauty. The River gathered to itself many little brooks and trickles; it threaded a region of rugged hills that were not quite mountains, rising steeply seven or eight hundred feet above the water. The hills were dad in good second growth of spruce and pine; and along the waterside there were hardwoods, birch and beech and oak and an occasional elm.

  But at the end of those two hours they came into the burnt land. The River was the same, the hills the same, the sky the same; but instead of forest, there were charred and lifeless stumps, scattered thinly across the steep slopes, standing erect like the chimneys of ruined homes. Most of the burned trees had fallen, to be covered by the quick springing undergrowth; but the gaunt black fingers of those which continued to stand still pointed as though in stubborn accusation at the heedless sky. In some places, even the humus which once covered the rocky slopes had been consumed by the fire, and the ashes had blown or washed away, so that no vegetation yet found a foothold there; and the naked rocks and ledges lay like bleached bare bones. In other places, the new growth, poplar and birch and brier and miscellaneous underbrush, was waist or shoulder high; and once or twice, on the slopes this thicket covered, they saw browsing deer which watched their passing, standing at a distance unalarmed.

  Once Harland asked a low-voiced question. ‘Was this all that same fire?’

  Leick said: ‘Yup! It burned a strip twenty-five miles wide and half as long again, right through here.’

  ‘It hasn’t grown up much, even in four years.’

  ‘Takes time for the new growth to get a start,’ Leick agreed. ‘But it’ll come along fast now:’

  Four years? His own words stayed in Harland’s mind. Was it in fact four years since, sitting in the shallows of the river with only his face out of water, he had seen these hills all a sea of leaping, hungry flames? It seemed a lifetime and a bitter one, interminably long; yet the new growth began to conceal the wound the earth had suffered, and ten years from now, or fifteen, these hills would all be healed again, clad once more in the seemly garment of the forest. For even in these burnt lands there was the potentiality of beauty. The ashes left by that conflagration were not dead after all; but caught in crevices and hollows of the rocky slopes they waited to receive and to nurture the seeds of life once more.

  Harland thought his own life had been in some ways like this progress down the River, beginning with hard toil, coming then to a land of smiling intervales with a strong stream to bear him into lovely shaded reaches of even keener beauty. Afterward, just as they had come this morning, so he had come to desolation; yet, just as this ravaged waste one day would smile again, when the forest flowed back across the land to hide its scars, so too the future held its promises for him.

  The sun lay scorching in the valley where the River ran. Harland watched the passing water, and sometimes as they drifted quietly through the great pools, he saw the swirl of grilse and salmon moving away from the canoe. The big fish were a translucent green. It was as though they were a part of the water in which they dwelt; and only their shadows, following them along the bottom, testified that they had solid substance. He stood up now and then, balancing himself against the paddle surge of the canoe which was like a pulse beating under his feet, the better to see these fishes and these shadows on the clean bottom of the stream.

  They found no shade for their nooning, but a little grassy level beside a brook mouth served well enough, and a burned stump furnished splinters for a small fire to boil the kettle. Harland ate little. ‘How much farther?’ he asked, when they were done. The landmarks, which he had not seen since the fire, were strange and confusing now with the forest stripped away.

  ‘Not far,’ Leick told him, and Harland sat staring at the River flowing free, and Leick saw his fierce impatience and made haste to clear away and they pushed on. Two miles below, they saw on the high bank a cabin, built of new logs since the fire, and the warden who lived there came to watch them pass, and Leick lifted his paddle in greeting and had a sign of recognition. ‘He’ll telephone ahead,’ he said. ‘Let her know we’re coming.’

  Harland did not speak. The broad Sedgwick contributed its waters, and the River thereafter was twice what it had been before. Though it might narrow to pierce some deep defile between crowding hills, or where gravel bars flanking the main current had built out for half its width, it was always a strong and steady stream, the constricted waters flowing faster so that the canoe on their breast darted ahead as though suddenly it were alive, to slow and move sedately on the easier flood below.

  The River ran through burnt land still, through a waste of blasted rocks and blackened stumps; yet always there was the thin green carpet of new life that would give birth to forest by and by. Harland, watching as each new prospect opened out before them, began to tremble with anticipation — and with a sort of terror too, as though he could not yet believe this scarred ugliness would ever end. He searched the hilltops far ahead for some hint of living forest standing there, but as each new vista opened, the prospect was the same; ravished slopes and a naked skyline with the pillars of the dead trees black against the blue. When he saw at last that for which he had looked so long, his eyes stung with sudden shaking happiness.

  They had rounded a bold point rising steeply from the water where the River made an S-curve, undercutting the banks against which its full force was flung. For half a mile beyond the turn the stream ran straight and free; and at the end of that half-mile, Harland saw — for the first time since they had entered the desert of the burnt land — the dark green of spruce and hemlock and cedar and pine, their foliage mingled in varying hues; and he saw the brighter foliage of hardwoods too. These trees were not packed together in a forest mass, but were scattered pleasantly across a level sweep beside the river; and it seemed at first glance that there were hundreds of them, receding into the distance in a contenting perspective.

  He watched and could not speak, and Leick said behind him: ‘Purty, ain’t it? It was some j
ob, too. Every one of them trees we had to fetch from down-river. You can’t transplant forest trees so they’ll live in the open; have to get ’em where they’ve growed out in the field like. We moved seventy, but there’s some will die.’

  Harland nodded, unable to speak, feeling his throat choked as though with tears, and Leick said in the tone of one remembering proudly and happily a labor that was loved: ‘Yes sir, it was a job! Every one of ’em, we had to dig a trench around it that first summer and fill it up with fresh loam so’s the roots would branch out and ball up. Then come winter and the freeze, we horsed ‘em out of there and fetched ’em up here on sleds on the ice. We’d already dug the holes for ’em up here, and levelled the ground and got grass started and all. There was around thirty of us working steady, just on the trees and the land, only when the snow was too deep for any use. And a crew putting up the house besides.’ Then he added quietly: ‘You can see the house now.’

  They had been following till a moment before the main current which ran close under the north bank of the River; but it veered, angling out into mid-stream, and as they went with it the house indeed came into view. It was built, not of logs as the forest custom was, but of sawed boards and timbers. It was a low, sprawling house with wide verandas and a huge foursquare chimney; and shrubs already bound it to earth, and there was young grass all around.

  And as Harland looked with hungry eyes, a woman left the house to come toward the landing that was still a quarter-mile ahead of them.

  She was in white. That much Harland could see, and he could see the rhythm of her walk. By that alone he would have known her anywhere; for there was always about her manner of walking something unmistakable — and indescribable. It was not enough to say that she held herself erect, her head high, her back flat, her slim legs moving easily; there was in the way she moved something gracious and serene. She seemed never to make haste, yet Harland knew by experience that it needed his best gait to match that easy, lovely way she had. He tried, since this was his almost forgotten trade, to put her walk into words; and he thought that as she came toward the landing — which they too now approached — it was as though she were about to drop him a curtsy. Without actually doing so, she nevertheless seemed to hold her skirts caught between her fingertips and lightly outspread like a fan. Her garments borrowed grace from her.