Why the Devil Chose New England for His Work (5 page)

After he stopped working, Robert would walk slowly across the field to spend several hours every afternoon in the woods sitting by himself under the thick canopy of leaves. Occasionally, she helped him, but she understood that he was accustomed to his life away from her in the woods, and she spent that time deciding what they would have for supper.

All his life her husband had been built like a tree himself, as straight and hard as the logs he skidded out of the woods north of Millinocket, a part of Maine she had never seen, even though he had spent more time there than he had with her. After he could no longer physically do the work in the camps and he came home for good, she thought finally she would have all of him. When he started spending his afternoons sitting in the woods down by the river, she realized there was a part of him she would never touch. Maybe it wouldn't have
bothered her as much if they had been able to have children.

Once, Robert came back, hung his cane in the closet (he could still walk on his own then), and sat down at the kitchen table.

“I guess I worked hard enough,” he said, “that we won't have to cut the trees down.” He faced the field and the woods beyond, but his eyes were closed and his jaw slack as if in sleep.

In the last few years of his life, he collapsed inward, his knees and back barely strong enough to carry him from one side of the property to the other. Part of her was grateful then, for she finally had him entirely to herself. He was like a child. He needed her for everything. She helped him to the tree line and turned around while he struggled ten or twelve feet into the shade of the giant white oaks and maples. Those were the happiest times of her life.

After he was gone, she took over the habit of his vigil by sitting in the woods for an hour each afternoon on a bench he had hewn from a fallen hemlock. “Hemlock never rots,” he had said. She thought of their life together. He had never wanted to talk about his winters working in the woods. It must have been cold, she guessed, sleeping in the uninsulated camps, fifty cots surrounding the wood stove. Days so cold the trunks of the pines cracked, sounding through the woods like gunshots. Her father had told her stories.
She had always known her husband lived two lives: one in the north woods, and one here on the farm with her.

After lunch, she walked down to the woods. She felt closer to him here, and as she gazed at the bark and leaves and needles, and at the green above spread like a blanket between her and the sky, the names of the trees came back to her: hemlock, white birch, red maple, white pine. Some of the pines seemed as wide as her car was long. Where the woods met the field, apple trees had gone wild, the tangled branches arching to the ground.

She was sitting at the kitchen table at ten in the morning the day after Robbie's usual visit when a knock sounded at the door. It was Robbie smiling in the window. She couldn't understand at first why he was here. It wasn't Wednesday, she hadn't baked anything. An older man she had never seen before nodded at her once and stared at his feet.

“We're going to be down the hill, Aunt Lucy. You won't even see us.”

“Down the hill?” she said.

“Don't you remember, we talked yesterday?”

“Yes, of course I remember.”

“We'll just be down in the woods then,” he said.

She wasn't exactly sure what was about to happen. They had talked about the woods, but they had talked about it many times before. She didn't understand how they had come to this point all of a sudden.

“I don't want you to worry, Aunt Lucy. From up here, you won't even notice the difference. We got a whole crew down there. Only take a few days.”

She nodded and looked down at the two pairs of boots on the doorstep.

“Now there's a bit of money in it for you, Aunt Lucy.”

“I don't need the money.”

“Of course you do. You need a new roof. And the foundation is cracked on the south side.”

He was probably right about these things. She had always kept the house clean and the garden weeded. She didn't know how much it cost to fix a cracked foundation or put on a roof. Her husband had taken care of all that. She needed to keep the house in good shape; someday it would belong to Robbie. To him and to Melanie. She had some money, she wanted to tell him, but didn't. She had always saved money, even when there was little to save.

At first she thought to bake something, in case Robbie and the other one came in for lunch—they hadn't carried lunch pails with them—but when the chain saws started she had to sit down. It felt as if a screw was tightening the column of her spine, paralyzing each muscle. More than two buzzed down at the bottom of the slope. It sounded like an army. She sat there all morning until finally the buzzing stopped at noon and she walked down the hall to the bathroom. The sound returned after lunch and lasted until dark
when it stopped but still echoed through her thoughts all night, long after the boys had gone home, holding her on the edge of sleep. She woke up past eight to the sound of the saws already at work again. There seemed to be more of them today than the day before.

She dressed quickly, pulling her coat over her nightgown and hurrying out the door and down the road to Robbie's parents' house. Charlie wouldn't be home, but Rebecca, Robbie's mother, would be, and she would have to see that there had been some misunderstanding.

Rebecca answered the door and waved Lucy inside. Rebecca was on the phone so Lucy sat down and clamped her hands between her knees. The buzzing was loud, even this far away.

Rebecca leaned against the wall on the other side of the room. Lucy watched her lips move, but she couldn't hear what she said. The murmur of her voice sounded like the purring approval of a cat. Lucy hated to be reminded that she didn't like someone, but it was hard to avoid with Rebecca.

“I'm afraid I'm on my way out the door, Aunt Lucy,” Rebecca said.

“It's just about the trees,” she said.

“The trees?”

“Down the hill. Behind the house—they're cutting down the trees.”

“I thought Robert talked to you. He told me that he talked to you, about the thinning.”

“Yes, he did. He did.”

“Then I don't understand what the matter is, Aunt Lucy. I'm going to be late.”

“I'm sorry. I didn't mean to barge over like this.”

“Well for goodness sake. If you talked to him—did he not tell you what he was going to do?”

“I didn't know he was going to cut the trees down.”

“I'm afraid I just don't understand. He came over to talk to you about thinning. We told him he had to talk to you first.”

“He did, yes, he did.”

Rebecca looked at her watch.

“But I didn't know he was going to cut them down.”

“Not all of them, for goodness sake. I don't know what you thought he was going to do.”

“Robert—he was saving those trees.”

“Saving them for what? They don't last forever. I'll talk to Robbie, and I'll have him go back over to see you, and you can tell him what your worries are. I may not see him tonight, though. I won't be back in time to tell him tonight. I've got a meeting. We're planning a sale at the library, and he goes to bed early.”

Her nephew had everything, Lucy wanted to yell but stayed silent. He had Melanie. He had a new truck, he would have her land and her house filled with children and grandchildren. She and her husband had always saved everything. During the war, everyone did. Robert was in the war for four years, fighting his way from Sicily to Germany while his younger brother
Charlie, Robbie's father, came in at the very end to guard prisoners for six months. Robbie had no idea what it had cost her and her husband (and their parents who had provided through the Depression) to put off what they wanted and do with less.

In the morning, she left soon after the saws started, for a parish meeting. Afterward, Elsie had people over for tea and coffee. Elsie had a big house on the opposite side of Vaughn, and though Lucy was too distracted to listen to the other women, at least she couldn't hear the saws. She stayed as long as she could and afterward went to the town landing to look out at the river until the sun went down. They couldn't work in the dark.

The next morning, Robbie stood on the front step with the low light at his back, his face in the shadow.

“Aunt Lucy? Hello,” he said, his voice just like her husband's. She sat down at the kitchen table, the breath taken out of her.

“My mother said you came over about the woods. She said you were worried we would leave a mess or something.”

He went to the cupboard, pulled out a glass, and filled it with tap water.

As if he already owns the place, as if I'm already dead
, she thought but then felt guilty. She offered him some juice or some coffee.

“No, water's good. Thank you, Aunt Lucy.”

She put the pot on anyway.

“I want you to know you can rest easy,” he said. “Uncle Robert would be proud of the job we're doing down there. Uncle Robert was a real woodsman, last of the old guys. He liked a job done clean at the end, and that's the way we're gonna leave it, don't you worry.”

“I'm not worried about that.”

“We're leaving some four inch and smaller—new growth.”

“Yes, yes, I'm sure you are.” Her eyes began to burn, and she squeezed them shut to keep from crying. “You see, I'm worried about the trees—the trees, you know, Robert. . . .”

“Uncle'd be very happy with the job. Very happy, Aunt Lucy. I don't want you to worry. We won't send nothing to pulp. Mostly logs, mostly logs, even in the spruce, and not really cause of the money. Uncle woulda wanted it that way. He hated things going to pulp. But the thing he'd be wild over, Aunt Lucy, is this birdseye maple we got. Gonna make beautiful cabinets in some rich guy's kitchen. No, you don't have to worry about a thing.”

The saws continued after he left. She dressed quickly in front of the mirror, her hands hurrying around her waist. She put on her long brown coat, packed her pocketbook in her purse, and held the keys in her hand, ready to walk down the front steps. It wouldn't do any good to go to any of the women she knew from church, the wives of her husband's friends, whom she had known for years. Her friends. They
would listen, maybe a few of them would understand, but they were all busy with families of their own. They couldn't do anything. The only person she could think of going to was someone most people didn't think of as a very good person at all—Don Small, who had once owned the garage in town. She had not thought of him in years, but she felt he was the only one who could help her.

Don's life had not been easy. One of his children had spent time in prison after causing quite a bit of trouble in Vaughn and somewhere else. Don and his wife had lived apart after the birth of their second child. His wife—Lucy could picture her round face but could not remember her name—died of cancer when the children were still young. The poor children went to live with their grandmother while Don stayed above the garage on Water Street. She had heard that he now lived way out the Litchfield Road before the old MacRitchie farm, in what one of her friends described as the remains of an old shack. She had heard that news three years ago and she didn't know, as she drove out of the valley, if he would still be there or if he was even alive anymore. He would be older than her by a few years.

Twenty years ago during a winter of heavy snow, her old Pontiac began to spew black smoke out of the tailpipe on her way back from Boyton's Market. If Robert had not been working in the woods, he would have fixed the car himself. She brought it to Don
Small, who had already closed his shop for the day. It was dark, the snow spiraling in the streetlight. She had to knock on the door to his upstairs apartment. He was bleary eyed. Maybe he had already started drinking, but he was courteous, calling her ma'am. They lived in the same town, but they had never spoken before. He had a boy manning the pump during the day, and he rarely came out of the garage to talk to anyone. He told her the car wasn't fit to drive. After some protest, she accepted a ride home in his truck. He put her groceries in the back under a tarp. The snow stopped and it was a clear crisp night, the banks towering and the powder of the fields crystalline in the moonlight. They didn't speak all the way up the hill. He helped carry in the groceries and stood mute in the dark house with his long arms hanging at his sides.

They were together that once, that one night, and to her knowledge no one saw him leave before dawn. She told him they could never see each other again, and he looked at her from the shadow of the doorway to the bedroom and didn't answer.

For years he called, always when Robert was away. She knew it was him because no one spoke when she said hello. She lived in fear that someone would find out or that Don would come to the house and force himself inside. He never did; he just called and hung up, like a teenager. She felt when he called how much he wanted her and thought about her in ways that her husband never had. On many Sundays, she asked for
forgiveness but never of the priest. She was afraid of what he would think, of the look he would have on his face every time she saw him on Sunday or at the market. She never felt forgiven, though she did, eventually, feel less guilty. In the end, she wasn't certain she wanted to be forgiven. She had traveled that night with Don to the very edge of the known world. She had wanted to see just once what it would feel like to throw everything away, and over the years she had wished on several occasions that Don would tell everyone and slash through everything she knew.