“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 bills, which was now turning mile by mile from blue to a light 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 con-crete 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 bad a little whitewashed 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 book coming at us from above.