It was, as paths go, nothing unusual — merely a line of least resistance through the pines. It ran up to the bank of the stream, then veered away again, like the arms in the letter "K." The upper arm, I was sure, would lead back to the clearing; the lower would continue into the woods, probably to a cabin. In fact, the general layout, from beginning to end, wasn't much different from the one I remembered as a child. The track let you get your car off the road, but you had to carry your stuff the rest of the way… like the voyageurs, my mother had complained.
I stood a moment, catching my breath, then started down the lower arm of the path.
It was shoulder wide, edged by pines and small oaks. Tramped down by the years, dead pine needles formed a smooth, springy turf and, in spots where the path descended, the roots of trees had wedged the earth into neat little steps. I was hurrying now as fast as I could, and my panting sucked in the pungent smells of wet leaves and forest rot and my flushed face began stinging with pine resin and sweat. Detour-ing around a huge, rotting stump, ascending a rugged range of boulders — a rhythm of crevices worked out by the years for your feet — the path twisted on for about two hundred yards. Then, again, a pale patch appeared up ahead. I slowed my pace. A moment later, I could smell woodsmoke, and a moment after that the cabin appeared. Through the trees, outlined against the gauzy, purplish gloom, it had an unreal appearance, like a painted flat in a play: the home of a woodcutter… an exiled fairy-tale prince… But then, as I crept forward and crouched at the end of the path, it jumped into focus and turned real.
Pressed down among some ferns, I peered into a small, rocky clearing.
The cabin stood in the middle of this. It was merely a frame shack, dignified with cedar-shake siding and a stovepipe chimney. Set up off the ground on concrete blocks, it had a tottering, precarious air — a distinct list to port — but was nonetheless clearly inhabited. A cozy plume of smoke curled out of the chimney; fresh kindling was stacked by the door. Catching my breath, I calmed myself. For I now realized that I could have this all wrong. I was assuming that Subotin had stopped in the clearing, but why shouldn't he have continued straight along the path and come here? No reason at all. He could be inside now. Someone was, without doubt. The cabin possessed one small window and a dark shape moved past it… and then I held my breath as the door began to swing open.
Who, in truth, did I expect to come through that door?
My fears said Subotin. My mind, such as it was, would have guessed May. But my heart — what I felt—told me my father.
Which was crazy, of course. But, in a funny way, I wasn't far wrong, for what I saw with my eyes was just as miraculous.
He was a big man, heavyset, with a broad chest sloping into a heavy belly. His face was broad and genial, his hair thick…
Yes, he looked like a bear — but he had a fox's cunning.
I rose and stepped into the open.
He stared at me, a piece of kindling in hand.
"Who are you?" he said.
"My name is Robert Thorne. Mr. Brightman."
22
I was shocked, stunned, flabbergasted… But perhaps I should have known. I closed my eyes, and could see May, standing on that barge in France. How beautiful she'd looked. And what else could have transformed her so? What other life could have let her live again?
Yet whatever I'd expected to find in that cabin, it had not been Harry Brightman. Harry Brightman had disappeared; Harry Brightman had killed himself; Harry Brightman had been murdered. This progression into oblivion was even more fundamental than an assumption, because at least you think about assumptions every once in a while. But this was one possibility that hadn't crossed my mind for an instant. So long had he been the object of my curiosity, and the subject of a thousand speculations, that his real presence — his occupation of any space outside my thoughts — was almost an affront. Harry Brightman was alive. How dare he be?
But he was — the Red Fox had been run to earth.
Seeing him in the flesh, in that cabin — and hearing his voice — demanded modifications of all my previous impressions. Yet they hadn't been completely wrong. The photograph of May's, taken with her own Brownie, and my own fantasies — the figure of a man bundled up inside an enormous fur coat; the figure coming off that ship in my dream — had caught his presence, his solidity. You describe many old men as "spry," or "lively," but not Harry Brightman. He communicated the physical force of a man half his age. On the other hand, my imaginings had all possessed an antiquated quality that his appearance denied. He had seemed trapped in the past of the newsreels, the past of Zinoviev, Trotsky, the Second World War: yet clearly he had a contemporary existence — he knew what an automatic transmission was, and he knew how to check in at an airport. And allied to this was another shifting of emphasis: in the past few weeks I had discovered the major course of his life, but it flowed in other directions as well and was fed by tributaries I'd scarcely bothered to notice. You could hear that in his voice, which was easy, rugged, and gentle: the voice of a man of the world, and of several worlds.
I must have stared at him for a long time before I finally said, "I'm not sure how to talk to the dead."
"In Greek, isn't it… alpha and omega? Or perhaps you're supposed to blow a trumpet. Come inside, please."
I looked around the dark cabin. It was a large, low, square room. A bunk bed stood in the far corner, the upper mattress bare, but the lower neatly made up with a dark brown blanket and a neatly plumped pillow. Just inside the door was a counter and sink, and directly in front of me stood an immense black wood stove. A sooty pipe emerged from the back of it. Suspended from the ceiling by loops of rusty wire, it ran along to the far end of the room, where it disappeared through the roof. Reaching up, Brightman leaned against it. The wire loops creaked. His hands were big and strong… he was certainly the most substantial ghost I'd ever laid eyes on.
I turned back to him. "I don't feel that angelic," I said.
He smiled. "Perhaps more judgmental, Mr. Thorne."
He was very cool; but he had to be feeling a certain amount of surprise himself. I said, "You do know who I am?"
"Yes. May's told me what a great help you were."
My smile, inevitably, was a trifle ironic. "I'm sure."
"Please, don't feel resentful. Or not at her. I know how upset she was at deceiving you. And you should understand that when she first called you, everything she said was quite true. She didn't know then that I was alive. It was only later, after what happened in Detroit, that I told her."