“I can understand your feeling better than you can, young man. I spend my life understanding feelings, yes, my own and others, that’s what I do, that’s what poets do, that’s what they’re supposed to do.”
“You’re a poet?”
“I’m the poet in residence here,” he said, drawing himself up slightly trying to tuck his shirt in glancing then at me from the corner of his eye.
I thought I would never know the end of the subtle luxuries with which the wealthy provided themselves.
“So I can understand your feelings. But I also understand poor Libby’s, good God she’s one of the few decent people around here, and now she’s in fear for her job. Do you realize what it would mean for her to lose her job? Of course I’ll do what I can, the Bennetts aren’t here right now, fortunately, I’ll think of something, yes, I’ll speak to Lucinda, I suppose I can, but that’s not the point. You should have realized the girl was responsible for anything you did. She was nice to you, she made you her friend, she shared something she knew, and that’s how you repaid her.”
I liked him enormously. I was smiling I was admitted into his realm of moral concern without passport credentials references of any sort. There I was a hobo boy lying on this cot in this weird place suppurating, for all he knew, in my dereliction, not a pot to pee in, and he was trying to recall me to my honor. He assumed I had it!
He saw me smiling and started to smile too. Then we were laughing.
“Of course it was wicked, a good wicked joke, God knows I can enjoy a joke at his expense. I wish there were more of them. Incidentally, he himself is not totally devoid of humor, you know.”
“Who?”
“Bennett. I’ve studied him a long time. He’s a very capable human being. Quite charming at times. The mistake most people make is to jump to conclusions before they even meet him.”
“Well, I’ll try not to,” I said and we laughed again.
At that moment my mother-keeper came in, took my tray, gave Penfield a dirty look, and left.
“Dreadful woman,” he said. “They all are. Except for Libby, of course. They despise me. I’m more than they are but I have no place as they have. They play all sorts of tricks on me, I have to beg for my meals. But when the Bennetts are here they’ll invite me to dine and then I’m served like I’m the king of England.”
I saw that he suffered from this, as from everything, in a state of expressive self-magnifying complaint.
“Well, I suppose I should go. How do you feel, by the way?”
“Lousy.”
He pulled up his jacket sleeve and showed me on the inside of his left arm a pale scar from the wrist to the elbow. “You’re not the only one, I want you to know. They treed me seven years ago when I came here one night — just like you.”
13
One morning on his bed at the foot a folded suit of dark green. He dressed in it and looked for the first time into the hallway outside the room where he had been since he was carried there on some door was a mirror and there he was thin pale-faced boy pale as a sheet, with a sparse stubble on the rim of the jaw, a head of uncombed hair looking too big for the body, and a hunch as if he were still flinching from the teeth, from the snarling face of the mountainous night.
Something has leaked out through the stitches and some of the serious intention of the world has leaked in: like the sense of high stakes, the desolate chance of real destiny.
There was a distant railroad track with telephone poles regularly spaced down the side of my neck over the clavicle across the breastbone. There was another spur line on either arm and the right leg.
I had no feeling in the fourth finger of my right hand.
Thus I found myself on a brilliant morning raking leaves in the shadow of the great sprawling lodge house of the auto magnate F. W. Bennett. I was not to consider myself employed, however. My Loon Lake parents would as frankly have sent me on my way but they did nothing without the approval of their employer, who was still to return.
I felt weak in the knees, I couldn’t have gone anywhere anyway. I was glad to hold on to the rake.
The lodge house was two stories on the land side, three on the lake side — the land dropped precipitously from the crest of the hill — and its walls were logs, uniformly brown, set with casement windows and crowned with a wood shingle roof of many angles and regularly spaced dormers. The trees oak maple elm, and though it was still September, a heavy leaf fall everywhere behind the meadow of my encounter, a burning wood of orange and gold and behind this on a distant mountain, ageless stands of evergreen against the bright blue sky.
As the morning advanced the sun was warm on my back. The air was sweet. I felt better. I was one of three or four workmen. A small truck with slat sides moved slowly among us to receive our leaves. We moved around to the back of the house and swept the leaves from two terraces, the upper with tables and chairs for dining, the lower with cushioned wooden wheeled lounge chairs for the view and the sun.
The lake out there a definite mountain lake, a water cupped high in the earth, its east and west shores hidden from view by intervening hills, its south shore across the water filled with pine and spruce that rose up straight on the mountainside in a kind of terror.
The lake glittered with fragments of sun, and flying over it were a couple of large black-and-white loons, big as swans. There was a boathouse down at the water in the same style as the main house. A dock going around the boathouse. A swimming float fifty yards out.
Between the terraces and the water line was a steep hillside garden of wild things, and through its paths we raked away the unwanted leaves from the bushes and plants.
I looked back up the hill to the house and felt the imposition of an enormous will on the natural planet. Stillness and peace, not the sound of a car or a horn or even a human voice, and I felt Loon Lake in its isolation, the bought wilderness, and speculated what I would do if I had the money. Would I purchase isolation, as this man had? Was that what money was for, to put a distance of fifty thousand acres of mountain terrain between you and the boondocks of the world?
The man made automobile bodies, and they were for connection, cars were democracy we had been told.
The wind rose in a sudden gust about my ears, and as I looked back to the lake, a loon was coming in like a roller coaster. He hit he water and skidded for thirty yards, sending up a great spray, and when the water settled he was gone. I couldn’t see him, I thought the fucker had drowned. But up he popped, shaking and mauling a fat fish. And when the fish was polished off, I heard a weird maniac cry coming off the water, and echoing off the hills.
A while later I followed the workers going along the hillside with their rakes through the trees past the stables to the staff house for lunch. The people of the light and dark green ate in a sort of bunkhouse dining room with long tables and benches. The food was put out on compartmented metal trays as in a cafeteria.
Fifteen, twenty of them looking at me as I hesitated with my tray and then slid into a place next to Libby, who smiled and looked with some satisfaction to the rest of the table. I was inspected by a heavyset man with thick black eyebrows I took to be the uncle she had mentioned. I gave back a clear-eyed friendly face don’t worry I’m no threat not me. After that I was ignored. I studied them all covertly: there were two, possibly three families of Bennett servants here. They did not make conversation. I had a palpable feeling of the politics of the place, the suspicious credential I had as a victim of the dogs. It wasn’t enough to crack their guild. They seemed confident of that.