Ethics, Values, & Sustainability
Environmental Strategy & Sustainability
Systems Thinking & Sustainable Businesses
Last Updated 01/14/2006
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Story 26
Sunday morning, our second Sabbath as dwellers of Helena, I woke before the day did, and my getting out of bed roused Rob. “Where’re you off to?” he asked as I dressed.
“A walk. Up to see how the day looks.”
He yawned mightily. “McAngus, the wheelwright shop is all the way back in Scotland and you’re still getting out of bed to open it.” More yawn. “Wait. I’ll come along. Just let me figure which end my shoes fit on.”
We walked up by the firebell tower above Last Chance Gulch. Except for the steady swimming flight of an occasional magpie, we were up before the birds. Mountains stretched high everywhere around, up in the morning light which had not yet found Helena. The business streets below were in sleeping gray. Over us and to the rim of the eastern horizon stretched long, long feathers of cloud, half a skyful streaked extravagantly with colors between gold and pink, and with purple dabs of heavier cloud down on the tops of the Big Belt Mountains. A vast ky tree of glow and its royal harvest beneath.
“So this is the way they bring morning into Montana,” observed Rob. “They know their business.”
“Now that I’ve got you up, you may as well be thoroughly up, what about.” I indicated the firebell tower, a small open observation cabin like the top of a lighthouse but perched atop an open straddle of supports.
Rob paused as we climbed past the big firebell and declared, “I’d like to ring the old thing and bring them all out into the streets. Maybe we would find Lucas then.”
Atop the tower, we met more of dawn. The land was drawing color out of the sky. Shadows of trees came out up near the summit of Mt. Helena, and in another minute there were shawls of shadow off the backs of knolls. Below us the raw sides of Last Chance Gulch now stood forth, as if shoveled out during the night for the next batch of Helena’s downtown to be sown in.
Rob pondered into the hundred streets below, out to the wide grassy valley beyond. Nineteen thousand people down there and so far not a one of them Lucas Barclay. A breeze lazed down the gulch and up the back of our necks. “Where to hell can he be, Angus? A man can’t vanish like smoke, can he?”
Not unless he wants to, I thought to myself. But aloud: “Rob, we’ve looked all we can. There’s no knowing until Christmas if Lucas is even alive. If your family gets the Montana money from him again, there’ll be proof. But if that doesn’t happen, we have to figure he’s –“ Rob knew the rest of that. Neither of us had been able to banish that Lewis Barclay tombstone entirely from mind. I went on to what I had been mulling. “It’s not all that far to Christmas now. But until then, we’d better get on with ourselves a bit. Keep asking after Lucas, yes. But get on with ourselves at the same time.”
Rob stirred. He had that cocked look of his from when we stepped past the drowned horse on the Greenock dock, the look that said out to the world, surely you’re fooling? But face it, this lack of trace of Lucas had us fooled, fully. “Get on with ourselves, is it. You sound like Crofutt.”
“And who better?” I swept an arm out over the tower railing to take in Helena and the rest of Montana. As full sunrise neared, the low clouds on the Big Belts were turning into gold coals. On such a morning it could be believed there =was a paunch of ore on every Montana mountain. By the holy, this was a country to be up and around in. “Look at you here, five thousand miles from Scotland and your feet are dry, your color is bright, and you have no divided heart. Crofutt and McCaskill, we’ve seen you through and will again, lad. But the time has arrived to think of income instead of outgo. Are we both for that?”
He had to smile. “All right, all right, both. But tell me this, early riser. Where is it you’d see us to next, if you had your way?”
We talked there on the bell hill until past breakfast and received the scolding of our lives from Mrs. Billington. Which was far short of fair, for she gained profit for some time to come from that fire tower discussion of ours. What Rob and I chose that early morning, in large part because we did not see what else to decide, was to stay on in Helena until Christmas sent its verdict from Nethermuir.
Of course we needed to earn while we tried to learn Montana, and if we didn’t have the guidance of Lucas Barclay we at least had an honest pair of hands apiece. I took myself down to a storefront noticed during our trekking around town, Cariston’s Mercantile. An Aberdeen man and thus a bit of a conniver, Hugh Cariston: but just then it made no matter to me whether he was the devil’s half-brother. He fixed a hard look on me and in that Aberdonian drone demanded.
“Can ye handle sums?”
“Aye.” I could too.
I am sure as anything that old Cariston then and there hired me on as a clerk and bookkeeper just so he could have a decent Scots burr to hear. There are worse qualifications.
In just as ready a fashion, Rob found work at Weisenhorn’s wagon shop. “Thin stuff,” he shook his head about American wheels, but a least they made a job.
Eight years a widower, Garnett still sometimes awoke disoriented and lost to the day. It was because of the large empty bed, he felt; a woman was an anchor. Lacking a wife, he had turned to his God for solace, but sometimes a man also needed the view out his window.
Garnett sat up slowly and bent toward the light, seeing as much with his memory as with his eyes. There was the gray fog of dawn in this wet hollow, lifted with imperious slowness like the skirt of an old woman stepping over a puddle. There were the barn and slatsided grain house, built by his father and grand father in another time. The grass-covered root cellar still bulged from the hillside, the two windows in its fieldstone face staring out of the hill like eyes in the head of a man. Every morning of his life, Garnett had saluted that old man in the hillside with the ivy beard crawling out of his chin and the forelock of fescue hanging over his brow. As a boy, Garnett had never dreamed of being an old man himself, still looking at these sights and needing them as badly as a boy needs the smooth lucky chestnut in his pocket, the talisman he rubs all day just to make sure it’s still there.
The birds were starting up their morning chorus. They were in full form now, this far into the spring. What was it now, the nineteenth of May? Full form and feather. He listened. The prothalamion, he had named this in his mind years ago: a song raised up to connubial union. There were meadowlarks and chats, field sparrows, indigo buntings, all with their heads raised to the dawn and their hearts pressed into clear liquid song for their mates. Garnett held his face in his hands for just a moment. As a boy he had never dreamed of an age when there was no song left, but still some heart.
. . .
Garnett stood admiring the side of his barn. Over the course of a century the unpainted chestnut planks had weathered to a rich, mottled gray, interrupted only by the orange and lime-colored streaks of lichen that brightened the wood in long, vertical stripes where moisture drained from the galvanized tin roof.
He was haunted by the ghosts of these old chestnuts, by the great emptiness their extinction had left in the world, and so this was something Garnett did from time to time, like going to the cemetery to be with dead relatives: He admired chestnut wood. He took a moment to honor and praise its color, its grain, and its miraculous capacity to stand up to decades of weather without pressure treatment or insecticides. Why and how, exactly, no one quite knew. There was no other wood to compare with it. A man could only thank the Lord for having graced the earth with the American chestnut, that broad-crowned, majestic source of nuts and shade and durable lumber. Garnett could recall the days when chestnuts had grown so thick on the mountaintops of this county that in spring, when the canopies burst into flower, they appeared as snowcapped peaks. Families had lived through the winter on the gunnysacks of chestnuts stored in their root cellars, and hams from the hogs they’d fattened on chestnuts, and they money they’d earned seeding chestnuts by the railroad car to Philadelphia and New York City, where people of other nationalities and religious persuasions roasted them for sale on street corners. He though of cities as being populated with those sorts of people, they types to hunker over purchased coals, roasting nuts whose origins they could only guess at. Whereas Garnett liked to think of his own forebears as chestnut people. Of chestnut logs the Walkers had built their cabins, until they had sons and a sawmill to rip and plane the trees into board lumber from which they then built their houses and barns and finally an empire. It was lumber sales from Walker’s Mill that had purchased the land and earned his grandfather the right to name Zebulon Mountain. Starting with nothing but their wits and strong hands, the Walkers had lived well under the sheltering arms of the American chestnut until the slow devastation began to unfold in 1904, the year that brought down the chestnut blight. The Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away.
Eight years a widower, Garnett still sometimes awoke disoriented and lost to the day.
…From the day they’d first met at the University of Kentucky [Lusa had] recognized [Cole] as a scholar of his own kind. Cole was there for a workshop on integrated pest management. A group of farmers in this county had raised the tuition and sent him to Lexington knowing Cole would ignore the claptrap and bring back to them anything worth knowing. Their confidence was justified. He’d not been automatically impressed with Lusa’s status as a postdoctoral assistant, but had pressed her with questions when he saw how well she knew the gelechid moths, denizens of a grain crop in storage. His eyes, the blue of a rainless summer sky, had begun to follow her in a way that either alarmed or flattered her, she couldn’t say which. She’d showed him her lab and her father’s larger one in the same building, where he studied the pheromones of colding moths, notorious pests of apple trees. The laboratory moths lived scrutinized lives in glass boxes where scientists learned to fool the males into mating with scent-baited traps so their virgin brides might vainly cover the world’s apples with empty, harmless eggs.
…
Lusa was alone, curled in an armchair and reading furtively – the only way a farmer’s wife may read, it turns out- when the power of a fragrance stopped all her thoughts. In the eleventh hour of the ninth day of May, for one single indelible instant that would change every thing, she as lifted out of her life.
…
…People in Appalachia insisted that the mountains breathed, and it was true: the steep hollow behind the farmhouse took up one long, slow inhalation every morning and let it back down through their open window and across the fields throughout evening – just one full, deep breath each day. When Lusa first visited Cole here she’d listened to talk of mountains breathing with a tolerant smile. She had some respect for the poetry of country people’s language, if not for the veracity of their perceptions: mountains breathe, and a snake won’t die till the sun goes down, even if you chop off its head. If a snapping turtle gets hold of you, he won’t let go till it thunders. But when she married Cole and moved her life into this house, the inhalations of Zebulon Mountain touched her face all morning, and finally she understood. She learned to tell time with her skin, as morning turned to afternoon and the mountain’s breath began to bear gently on the back of her neck. By early evening it was insistent as a lover’s sigh, sweetened by the damp woods, cooling her nape and shoulders whenever she paused her work in the kitchen to lift her sweat-damp curls off her neck. She had come to think of Zebulon as another man in her life, larger and steadier than any other companion she had known.
But now there was her husband across the field, breaking off the honeysuckle branch to bring back to her. She was sure of it, for he’d tucked it between his thigh and the padded seat of the Kubota. Its cloud of white flowers trembled as he bounced across the plowed field, steering the tractor with both hands. His work on the lower side was nearly done. When he returned to the house for his late-morning coffee and “dinner” as she was learning to call the midday meal, she would put the honeysuckle branch in water. Maybe they could talk then; maybe she would put soup and break on the tale and eat her bitter words from earlier this morning. They argued nearly every day, but today had already been one of their worst. This morning at breakfast she’d nearly made up her mind to leave. This morning, he had wanted her to. They had used all the worst words they knew. She closed her eyes now and inhaled. She could have just let him laugh, instead, at her fondness for this weedy vine that farmers hated to see in their fencerows.
It was Skeeter Week in Moose County, 400 miles north of everywhere. Armies of young enthusiastic mosquitoes roes from woodland bogs and deployed about the county, harassing tourists. Permanent residents were never bothered. And, after a while, even newcomers developed an immunity, attributed to minerals in the drinking water and in the soil that grew such flavorful potatoes. As for the summer people, they bought quantities of insect repellent and went on praising the perfect weather, the wonderful fishing, and the ravishing natural beauty of Moose County.
One morning in mid-June a columnist for the Moose County Something was working against deadline, writing his annual thousand-word salute to Skeeter Week. With tongue in cheek he reported readers’ exaggerated claims: A farmer in Wildcat had trained a corps of skeeters to buzz him awake every morning in time for milking. A music teach in Pickax City had a pet skeeter that buzzed Mendelssohn’s “Spinning Song.”
He was no backwoods journalist. He was James Mackintosh Qwilleran, former crime writer for major newspapers Down Below, as the locales called all states except Alaska. A freak inheritance had brought him north to Pickax, the county seat (population 3,000). It also make him the richest man I the northeast central United States. (It was a long story.)
He cut a striking figure as he went about, interviewing and making friends for the paper. He was fiftyish, tall, well built, with an enviable head of graying hair and a pepper-and-salt moustache of magnificent proportions. But there was more to the man than an instantly recognizable moustache; he had brooding eyes and a sympathetic mien and a willingness to listen that encouraged confidences. Yet, his friends, reader, and fellow citizens had come to realize that the sober aspect masked a genial personality and sense of humor. And everyone knew that he lived alone in a converted apple barn, with two Siamese cats.
…
Qwilleran said, “Wait till you see Koko’s choice of the two most interesting photos in Underhill’s collection.”
Brodie looked at the squirrels. “Those are tree stumps in the background! Looks as if a whole grove has been cut down! Where was this taken?”
“In the Black Forest Conservancy, where timbering is illegal. Those stumps represent a million dollars’ worth of black walnut.”
“How do you know?”
“I borrowed a book from Doc Abernethy…Andy, we have tree pirates in the Conservancy!”
“I’ve heard of tree rustlers-”
“Same thing.” Qwilleran looked at Koko and remembered the cat’s fascination with Hannah’s video. A rollicking band of pirates we!
Qwilleran went on. “The suspect, I believe, is an experienced woodsman. He was up here a few weeks ago and talked to Jake Olsen about hiring you huskies for a logging movie. Actually, he was probably mapping the territory and locating the best black walnuts. He would bring his own crew. A furniture moving van was seen in the vicinity. We can guess that it brought up the chain saws and forklift…and the lumberjacks…and maybe camouflage tents. Then it hauled ten-foot logs Down Below. To expedite the robbery, they might dump them in a holding warehouse in a nearby county and return for another load. For what it’s worth, the van had a Wisconsin tag and DIAMOND COMPANY logo.”
It was Skeeter Week in Moose County,
400 miles north of everywhere.
