The Cabin Page 7

  The tea arrives. It is the middle of the night. I am reading about the training of the goshawk. I am sharing Mr. White’s experiences. I myself now want to capture and train a hawk. I want to live a simple and a pure life. I want to confine myself to the wind and the rain, and make the body and mind of a hawk the complete focus of my existence. However, I will gladly settle for sitting in this hotel room in London with my book and cup of tea.

  The Truck Factory

  I can’t remember the exact year, but it was sometime in the mid-sixties. Either I was home from college or it was the last summer before I went away. I had a job at the truck factory.

  I was living with my dad near the lake, and the truck factory was out near Cicero. I got there and back by riding with a couple of Swedish guys. I think I paid them a dollar a day, or it might have been a dollar a trip. In any case, halfway through the summer they decided to up the ante on me, and I remember the close and rather vicious expression on their faces when they informed me of the fare increase.

  I started out my day around 5 A.M. It was still something other than unbearably hot on the street, and I remember running into the same paperboy every morning on Broadway around Addison, and thinking, as I nodded to him, what a beautiful place the world was. I smoked a cigarette at the bus stop on Addison, and waited for the bus.

  The bus took me way the hell and gone out west, to the place where I would wait on the corner for my ride.

  The two Swedish guys, picturesque and improbable as this seems, referred to me throughout the summer as “The Rider.” I was The Rider. And I rode in the back. The car was a ’55 Chevy in mint condition. They picked me up on Madison, and we rode at about thirty miles an hour out west to the factory. The ride burned me up every day, out and back. If they would have driven at the speed limit, I could have slept another half hour in the morning, I could have been home half an hour earlier and had a shower and a beer. The slowness of the ride seemed to me to be an expression of their hatred for the world.

  We had to punch in before seven-thirty. It wasn’t hard to do because we were always early. Another of the great moments in the day was that which came after punching in and before work. There was time for another cigarette and a cup of coffee from a vending truck. To this day I love those vending trucks with the quilted silver sides. I think everyone must.

  I worked in the maintenance department, which meant that I went where they sent me and did what they told me to do when I got there. My favorite job of the summer was testing torque rods. I am not sure what torque rods do, but I know that these torque rods were around two and a half feet long and had a weld at each of their ends, and that this batch had been welded incorrectly. So I was placed in a corner of the factory with barrels of torque rods. I took them, one by one, out of their barrel, first placed one and then the next weld on an anvil, and whacked the welds with a sledgehammer, in an effort to get the welds to part. I did that for several days, and there was something about the rhythm of the job—flipping the torque rod in the air to get to the weld on the other side, whanging the thing—that was completely satisfying.

  I spent a month about twenty feet above a concrete floor, ripping out an asbestos ceiling.

  A hangarlike part of the truck factory was being renovated, and I and a few others in the maintenance department were commissioned to get the ceiling down. We spent each day duck-walking on two-by-six joists twenty feet up in the air, as I have said, ripping the old ceiling out with pry bars. For many years I had less than strong lungs, and fairly raspy breath, and I would like to attribute those conditions to the month spent with the asbestos, which seems to me a more dramatic story than twenty-five years of tobacco.

  There was another month spent with weed killer and a backpack spray canister. I roamed the outskirts of the factory, spraying that which passed for grass. At one point I lost the nozzle for the apparatus. I can’t remember how or why, except that it was an act of negligence on my part. I remember being bored, and thinking, Oh, hell, I know I should do (a) with this nozzle, and it would be just as easy to do (a) as to do otherwise, but I will do (b) because I am bored, and perhaps this will make someone pay.

  Soon after being transferred out of the weed job, I was called before a tribunal of my superiors and asked what became of the nozzle. I, of course, lied and told them I had no idea. I remember that the tribunal went on for a godlessly long time, at the end of which one of the senior men in the maintenance department said, “Well, I believe him. I believe him, and that’s that.” And I thought, You dumb sonofabitch, of course I lost the nozzle. Everyone here knows that except you.…

  Why was the nozzle that important to them? I don’t know. Why did they not just dock me whatever dollar or two it cost and be done with it? I don’t know. I remember getting docked for various other things. I was docked for punching out early, for example, and for punching in late at the end of lunch.

  Lunch was twenty minutes, whistle to whistle. When the whistle blew I was sodden with sweat and exhausted. Many days I would climb into the bunk of a sleeper cab and fall asleep. I remember them as the deepest sleeps of my life. I loved those sleeper cabs. I recall one of the factory hands gesturing to a matched pair of ready-to-roll tractors and telling me, “Son, inside of a year, one of them is going to pay for the both.…” And when he told me, I wanted to be picking up those tractors, to be putting them out on the highway, and having one pay for the both inside of a year. I wanted to be sleeping in the back of the cab as the truck rolled down the highway. I can’t imagine anyone who wouldn’t.

  One day they were digging a trench along the outside of the main factory building, and a couple of guys (I would like to say that they were from the maintenance department, but I don’t know if that’s true) were down in the trench; just before lunchtime, the trench fell in on them, and they died. I think I found out about it after lunch. I was most probably napping.

  There was some sort of chemical factory on the far side of the truck factory, and when the wind blew toward us, which was much of the time, everything smelled as I think hell must smell. Inhuman, and contrived, and unhealthy beyond mistake.

  What else happened that summer? I put a nail through the sole of my workshoe, and had to get a tetanus shot, and I limped for a week or so, and learned about steel-soled shoes.

  I argued one long week with myself about taking a Friday off. The Monday was a holiday of some sort, and you were paid for it if you worked the two adjoining workdays. I had some important appointment and, of course, I didn’t go in on Friday, and so lost the holiday pay, and am still upset about it twenty-five years later, and still do not know whether to be mad at myself for my weakness, or at the factory for coming up with such a good plan for ensuring attendance.

  The trucks were made to order, and had a reputation for being top of the line.

  I’ve seen them on the road in the Midwest or, infrequently, in the East, and invariably say to anybody in the car, “You see that truck? I used to work there.”

  In Vermont

  The term that comes easiest to mind is ghosts, but the lights on the hill weren’t ghosts, or, if they were, I am not sure what ghosts are; as, of course, I am not. I can’t say what they are, but I knew when I encountered them.

  And the hill itself may have had something to do with it. Down at the bottom, near my house, there is the graveyard; and I was thinking about Annie’s story on the night I passed it, coming home, and something pulled my coat.

  I’d like to say that I “felt something,” which is to say, some presence, but all I felt was the tug on my coat sleeve. I was walking dead on the crown of the road. The night was pitch dark, and I was on the crown to avoid any possibility of branches whipping my face. I was thinking of what Annie had said.

  When she was young, she said, she lived in the white house, up the hill from my house, above the graveyard.

  She was walking one day, when she was young, and all of a sudden there was a man by her side. On the lonely dirt road, in the country,
and, all of a sudden, there was someone there.

  She told me he was dressed oddly, in a fashion out of the past. And she said she felt frightened.

  The man nodded and asked her name. She was young, and had been cautioned by her parents not to talk to strangers, so she didn’t respond. He told her that his name was Anders.

  She walked up to her farmhouse. Later that night she told her parents. They said that Anders had been the name of the hired man back in their grandparents’ time; and it was of this that I was thinking when I walked in the crown of the road by the graveyard that night and something pulled on my coat sleeve.

  Then there were the moving stars I’d seen, some fifteen miles from the town, and twenty-five years back.

  One winter night, when I was young.

  There were five or six of them in the sky. They looked like stars. They would be still for a while. Then they would move and group or cluster for a while, and dart, as if they were chasing one another from one side of the sky to the other.

  Sometimes they would shoot across, sometimes they’d move slowly, to the other horizon, where they regrouped into various patterns. I was with several friends. We watched for a while, then telephoned the air-force base in Plattsburgh to report what we’d seen.

  The fellow there thanked us. We asked if he had had other reports of the objects, and he said no, he had not. We asked what he thought they might be, and he said he had no idea.

  After I got home that night, up my hill, twenty-five years later, once again I saw the lights.

  It was four in the morning. I was tired, I was alone in the house. I was brushing my teeth. I glanced out the window, and up the hill, up past the cemetery, past the white house, up the hill, up at the crest of the hill, or as they say, at the height of land, there was a light. It was a bright light, like truck-mounted beacons we would see at a film opening, or like an antiaircraft beacon, scanning the sky. As if it were describing a cone, whose point was on the ground. The shaft of light circled slowly. The beam was much stronger than truck-mounted klieg lights. And it was pure white.

  On the ground, beyond the trees at the edge of the field, just at the top of the hill, was this beacon.

  I nodded and, in my exhausted state, went on preparing for bed.

  And then I asked myself what the light was, up the hill.

  “Well, that’s just …”I started to explain; and then I stopped, as I realized that I had no idea what it was, or what it possibly could be. I set myself to suggest a scenario that would put that light up the hill. I went back to the window, and it still was there, circling slowly.

  I was fascinated by the white purity of the light, and I remember thinking that I’d never seen a light that white before. What could it be? It was a signal of some sort, but to whom and by whom?

  And why would it be here, in the middle of the night, on a peaceful country road in Vermont?

  One summer evening some years back, I had been sitting on the porch of this same house, looking, by chance, up the road at the white house, which was vacant at that time, and I saw a small fire burning below the barn.

  I remember that I thought as I watched it, That’s just a … and, when I could not discount it, I walked up the hill, to find a rapidly spreading fire in the brush, now caught on the barn. I tried to get it out, but it had grown too big for me, so I ran back and called the village fire department.

  They got the fire out, and I basked for some long time afterward in a self-awarded sentiment of rural neighborliness.

  For, if I had not seen it, I thought, or recognized it, or investigated it, or acted upon it, the barn and the house would have burned.

  And it was the memory of this feeling of neighborliness that moved me to decide to climb the hill to investigate the light.

  For there was no one in the white house, and there was no one living in the house beyond it—the house across from the field from which the light was coming.

  There was no one on the hill but me; and I must have felt that the light boded malevolence, or danger, for, when I redressed myself and started out of my house, I took a gun.

  It was four in the morning of an early spring night as I opened my door, and I congratulated myself on my courage.

  Many, I thought, would not venture that half-mile up the hill. Many would stay in their homes, I thought.

  And I asked myself why they would do that; and I answered they would do that because the light meant great danger; and I became fearful. I went back in my house, closing the door softly, as one moves when one is a child and moving in the dark so as not to draw the notice of the evil creatures in the room.

  I went back in my house, and looked out of the window, and saw the light was still there, up the hill.

  I asked myself if I was content to live in ignorance of the nature of the light, and as much as I piqued myself with my cowardice, I found that I wasn’t going to climb the hill.

  I undressed and got into bed. Although my mind was busy, I fell asleep; and I awakened some time later to a great feeling of fear, and a brilliant, all-pervading white light pouring in my bedroom window, as if the source were down, just outside of my house.

  And then I fell asleep again.

  The next morning I asked everyone in town if they’d seen or heard anything, or if they could account for the lights I had seen; and they’d seen nothing, and could not explain it.

  And down at the bottom of the old sugaring lane on my property, there is a dip in the land at the intersection of the lane with our dirt road which marks the site of the town’s earliest settlement two hundred years ago.

  In any case, down the hill from my house, the land slopes to a depression at the bottom of what was the old lane. There was and remains something about that spot. I do not like it. I put a small compost pile there. It seemed fitting for a low, hidden, and somehow unpleasant spot.

  Perhaps you’ve noticed spots like that. Not in the city, where the land is covered, but out in the country or the woods.

  Perhaps you’ve felt the spots that are happy, and the spots that exude danger, as if they were sending the message, “Ignore me at your peril. You should not be here.”

  I put the small compost pile in the hollow at the bottom of the hill.

  Up by my house, between the house and the cemetery, near the road, there was a swing set. And one afternoon I was pushing my daughter on the swing, and my eye went beyond her, down the hill, down to a form by the compost pile. It was the form of a man, and it was dead white, from head to foot.

  I saw it for a second, then it disappeared.

  I wondered if it had been conjured, somehow, out of my feelings of antipathy for the spot.

  Some weeks later, it must have been at the end of summer, for there were apples on the trees, my daughter asked me to climb to get her an apple, which I did.

  She took a bite, and told me that it was too early and the apple was sour, and she didn’t want any more. “What should I do with it?” she asked, and I told her to walk the fifty feet down to the compost pile.

  “No,” she said, “I don’t want to go there. There’s a monster that lives there.”

  And there were people talking. Outside of various houses in the night. One summer, in a cottage at North Hero; one whole fall, back in the sixties, when I lived with friends in a rented trailer in the woods.

  That fall there were two men talking outside all night, night after night, till one of us, left alone one night, called the state police. They searched and found nothing; and when we returned from our school vacations, or wherever we had been, we all said to one another, “Oh, my God, you’ve heard it, too …?”

  Like the old woman at the house outside of Newport.

  A friend told me about the house on the lake, and I took it for a summer, and heard the old woman crying and scolding in the night, and went outside so many times to see her, but there was never anything there. Back in New York in the fall, the friend who’d suggested the house asked how the summer had gone. I told her it
went well.

  “Is the ghost still there?” she asked.

  “Yes,” I told her, “the ghost is still there.”

  Music

  I lived two terrible years as a smoker in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Not only was I a smoker, I was a smoker of cigars, and many of them.

  I endured the polite signs in places of business and congress, and many impolite reproachful looks and stares of my liberal brethren—those looks that said, “If I were less of a gentleperson, I would be looking at you in such a way as to let you know that your habit, which you must know is unhealthy, but from which you have not the willpower to refrain, is as insulting and offensive to those around you as it is disgraceful to its practitioner.”

  I became oh-so-tired of wondering whether my cigar smoking was going to elicit the above response, and spent a lot of time thinking about my prospective reply: should I be arrogant and ignore, arrogant and respond, courteous and beg pardon, et cetera.

  This, of course, took the thrill out of cigar smoking. My liberal brethren had reduced me to a worried and cowering state on this one issue. I was upbraided in the park for smoking cigars; this park, which, previous to my correction, I had always thought of as “Outside.” And my last refuge was the lovely tobacco store on Mass Ave, where they let me sit up in the chess gallery and smoke their cigars while I worked—until this previously beloved resort became as a prison to me, and I stopped smoking.

  I feel much better since I stopped. My clothes smell clean, my wind and general fitness are improved. I am, as any reformed person, aware of the benefits that this reform has wrought for the populace in general; and I find that I do object to smoking on planes, in restaurants, and in any place where the nonsmoker has no comfortable means of distance from the offensive object. I think and hope that I neither express nor feel the self-righteousness that I found so dreadful as its recipient, but I do admire the net result of those workers for a smoke-free world—the laws and improvements that they have wrought. It’s not something I would have gone to court about, but I’m glad they did.