from "Now Look."

Prologue to and first chapter of my second novel.

The novel, arriving 35 years after my first, will be published by Down East Books in May.

            Prologue

The world may be changed. No one hopes so more than George Mayes. He tries to remind himself that every day he wakes up to is a new one. Corny? He scarcely cares. And it’s not a snap for him to stay with the present anyhow; it never has been. A slew of yesterdays keep crowding his mind, perhaps more than ever just now. There’s never been a guarantee– of anything.

He’s still George, though, and Evan still Evan, please God.

George has no doubt there’s plenty he needs to make up for from so many of those yesterdays, the ones that got him where he is now. He knows that he tends toward melodrama, too easily imagining whatever present he’s in to be the permanent one, containing everything his life will ever contain. That’s not so much different from living in the future, which sometimes seems a dire prospect, sometimes liberating, but which, of course, remains forever unpredictable.

July before this, in the unnerving visit George remembers, Evan was in his seventy-eighth year. He weighed little enough that George could slide him to the other side of the cab like a small child. So thin you could spit through him, the way Evan always claimed you could through the paddle Joe Mell made for him down at the Indian Point some sixty years back. Astounding, how many of this old drunk’s idioms have crept into George’s own interior language.

George wasn’t alive when Joe fashioned that paddle, and yet, however vainly, he believes he can appreciate what went into it. He even briefly knew Joe Mell, if Joe could be known to a white man, or in fact to anyone, loner that he remained. The paddle’s wrought of clear ash, and its shaft has decades of Evan’s sweat in it. Like so much else, it implies a narrative George would love to recount, and will never be able– not the half of all he’s been told and all he’s witnessed.

Pushing the seat back as far as it would go, George turned the engine over. The old man didn’t wake up.

George was once a young man, and Evan Butcher no sot. George fights as hard as he can not to think of his friend that way, no matter what’s gone on– the heartbreak, the pain, the news that has always seemed to get worse for the Butcher family.

It’s been a long time since he and Evan first met, and he’s gotten less and less innocent about the world since. So his naiveté about that heap beside him in the truck’s cab was something willed. It still is. There are just certain things he can’t let go of. He’ll cry if he does–not for the first time.

George could make a quick and orderly catalog of quick and disorderly deaths. Like anyone, he can count up other losses too since his youth: a bit of wind, a bit of spring in the legs, a first wife, and trust in most people’s decency. Good riddance also to some sordid stuff in his own character. And some less sordid than perverse. For almost thirty years, he’s fought to govern his damnable sentimentality, which at times can prove nearly catastrophic.

But yes, there are some things he’s stubborn about keeping, whether or not they do him any favors. He won’t let his earliest vision of Evan vanish, not on his life. Can’t anything he craves be real? Can’t he hold onto something? He immediately scolds himself for self-pity, because in truth he’s held onto a lot more than he ever deserved.

He felt heartache that last time he saw Evan, but it was mixed with rage. There the old boy sprawled, one knee on the floorboards, one hand reflexively grabbing the seat as it could. A little anxious, George leaned toward his passenger. Slower breathing than nature intended, for sure; it seemed to come from somewhere so deep that George couldn’t bear to think about it. But at least it was breath.

Rattling toward the county road, the little truck bobbed in the ruts of the graveyard lane. Its headlights showed names on lichen-yellowed stones. Harley Ferguson. Billy McPeake. Louis Maclean. On and on. There were more dead folks here than live ones in the village now, most of the woods jobs gone south or overseas, the younger generation moved to pastures they hope to find greener.

It was said that Harley Ferguson could lift a full keg of nails off the ground. Billy McPeake, some claimed, lived all one summer on nothing but watermelon and vanilla. Louis Maclean was the best storyteller in a place full of storytellers. “A man of his time,” Evan always called him.

But what’s a man’s time, a woman’s? Where were the women? George half convinced himself there were only a scattered few among the buried men. No truth to that, of course, but George knew a lot of wives and sisters and cousins who did still live, while almost half 0f Evan’s working chums were gone, one way or another, before George ever laid eyes on Woodstown.

There lay Lemont Brazier. LEE-mont, the old ones said. Oh, how they said. How they said and said and said. Yes, Louis had the reputation for stories, but none of the oldtimers was a slouch with them. Not Evan, for certain.

Just before he reached the town road, George read Bradley Llewellyn. He knew Brad fell into a logjam on the Percy River in 1934. He knows about that awful accident– from Evan, of course, who at nineteen was on just his second river drive that April. The crew fished poor Brad out at Crooked Rips the day after he went under. Evan spoke of how they poured a carton of salt into his bedroll and wrapped him in it.

“Like corning venison,” as he once put it, sad-eyed, “and salt were dear.” Then the bateau bore that pitiable lump all the way to the drive’s end at the sea. Thirty-nine days. “Cold spring that year,” Evan added, “praise be.”

George stopped at Llewellyn’s stone that night. Though he knew what it was from too many prior night visits, he wanted to look again at the shape, a bit like an arrowhead, somehow fastened on top. Carved of wood, it crudely represented the bow of a canoe, the stern having rotted away long back. George can’t remember when. But he thinks again: what’s time, after all, when you can’t keep the years sorted anyhow?

The cemetery sign now showed only the first syllable of Woodstown, the second fallen like the sternward half of Brad’s canoe. So goddamn much gone down, George mused. Though he’s ashamed of it, he can fall in love with a purple mood. That night, the sky was clear, and within hours the sun would come up to light the countryside, same as always from the start of forever. But poor little Georgie had the blues.

Out on the gravel, when George goosed the throttle, Evan’s other knee slipped off the seat. His body twisted so that he was propped on his elbows now. He looked to be at prayer. Maybe that was it, George briefly fancied. Evan wanted to say a word or two to his chums in a hallowed place. But of course the man was simply passed out; he didn’t have any noble goal. Never mind bloodshed. Never mind the paths chosen by the twin grandsons. Never mind any of that, George said to himself, as if he could just boss his mind around. Evan was only drinking because he drank. That’s what drunks do.

George had to be gone next morning, and it was already after midnight. He’d only had the single week, four days of which his wife and girls were spending in a New Jersey seaside rental. He knows he’s blessed as husband and father, but a single day on that saltwater, filthy with condoms, cardboard cartons, beer cans, orange peels, junkies’ syringes... well, it was more than he cares to cope with ever again, even in beloved  company.

Smudge-gray surf; crowds of oiled people whose idea of a vacation is lying in sand doing nothing. Everybody’s kids cranky with sunburn and not enough sleep. That same sand in your bed. No thanks.

George, to his shame, is still one judgmental soul, which has never been good for anyone, least of all him. But despite himself, the beach town’s pink and yellow ice cream shop rose to mind as he drove Evan back to his village, the most improbable place on earth for such reverie.

That little joint was dolled up to look like something from the early fifties of his own boyhood. Gulls squabbled there for scraps of cone or whatever. For some reason, that scavenging struck him as worse than their fussing over the ocean’s detritus, which the birds did as well. The sweet odor of the store; the silly peaked hats on the pimply soda jerks; the jars full of chocolate sprills– jimmies, they were called when George was his daughters’ age. Maybe they still are. He shrinks from the memory of everything there. But why should any of it matter?

When the girls weren’t much more than toddlers, before the disasters, he and Julie took them on what proved to be their only seaside vacation. Everybody agreed afterwards that Dad should just go bunk with the mice in his ratty old camp up north. They could take the full family vacation over the winter holidays.

George is not such a grownup, he sometimes fears. He hadn’t behaved well at the ocean. On the other hand, he did keep the Maine place up, more or less. He needed to pass at least one short spell there each summer.  Julie knew that then, and still approves, though she can’t begin to fathom her husband’s affection for such a place.

That last week in Woodstown had been a bad one, the worst since he corked his own bottle. He hauled Evan Butcher home from the cemetery six times in as many nights. George got pretty used to the short walk across the weedy old baseball field. He’d been watching his friend and mentor’s decline for more than five years now. But rescuing him from the marble orchard every single evening was something new, dire.

He recalls how he turned on a flashlight to find his way through one of the gaps in the outfield fence, and then through the alders behind Timmy Beeson’s barn, where good canoes are still built on his grandfather Pappy’s molds. Not as good as Butcher canoes, maybe, but good, all right. They’re mostly sold to out-of-towners now.

A woodcock might whistle up from an alder thicket and plunk back down. Bitterns– post-drivers, Evan called them– might thump in the wetland. George could have enjoyed his stroll. Otherwise. It was at least a tad better and certainly easier when Evan stayed in his shop to drink. The prior couple of years had changed that.

At the dogleg by the church, George braked, noticing the forward quarters of a moose. He could just make out her dull eye.  She’d been hanging around town all summer, and he’d seen her in full daylight a couple of times that same week. She wasn’t a very big cow, but if she decided to bolt across that skinny road, she’d be more moose than Evan’s road-weary pickup could handle. She stayed put, though, her ears cocked at the truck clattering past.

Well before Evan decided to pass out there nights, George had been to the graveyard plenty of times over the years. Never a good idea. He scarcely knew why he did it. Those visits were like looking at old snapshots, for him a gut-busting experience, even when he doesn’t know half the souls in the photographs. Something hurtful always stares back at him from those pictures. So what could it have been, this graveyard impulse in him– and in Evan?

Brad Llewellyn, drowned on a river drive before George drew breath, is still no more than a character in a story. So how can George mourn the man so? Our stories may keep us going, he thought, but they all end the same over time.

Where in hell had that gloomy notion come from? He knew he should just stamp out the woeful mood. He remembers shaking his head, trying to purge it. So many details came back, though, and do. And every charge of recall can spark another, and that one another, and that one the next.

He had to force himself to concentrate on the skinny road as he hauled Evan home, but that moose in the headlights made George remember sitting on beach rocks at Semnic Lake, watching Evan work a call fashioned from a coffee can and a shoelace.

 “Keep looking right acrost at the dead stream,” Evan whispered, sliding rough fingers along the lace. “Be a moose in it ‘fore long.”

Wetted, the string made a grunting noise as Evan worked it, and the can amplified the sound. George had never seen a moose, could scarcely imagine one, so what happened next was something out of phony, romantic, and plain bad north woods movies: a bull trotted onto the lakeshore as if on cue. George half believed it was some sham. Or else it was wizardry.  The animal’s velvet peels were grimy and bloody on the antlers, and the greenhead flies made a halo around them. You could see that even across the water.

How often George gawked in the early years at what seemed, sure enough, to be magician’s work. Once, as they rested on the Semnic carry, George snapped a skinny underbough from a tree, handed it over, challenging Evan to identify it without looking.

“Breaks like a cedar,” Evan said. Cedar it was.

“How could you tell?”

“I’ve felt of a stick or two.”

Evan has taught George enough in the decades since then that the trick seems less amazing now, but back then it felt magical, all right.

Taking Evan back to his shop last July, George also recalled a spring day when young Ben Patcher came by Evan’s place, black flies thronged around his head too. Maybe that was the connection, a memory of flies around some creature’s head, for the love of God. Ben kept waving his oddly delicate hands to break up the swarm. He wanted to know what to do about a sow who’d gone off her feed.

The three of them left the dooryard. George can still picture the white puffs of dust they kicked up from the roadbed. They crossed the tannery bridge, that cloud of blackflies staying right with them, thickening when they reached the sty. 

Evan glanced at the pig, then turned to Ben with an expression not quite amused, and not quite not. “She wants her tail cut off,” he said. And before Ben could react, Evan pulled his dirk knife from its metal scabbard, on which his father must have etched 1915, year of his birth.

How George wanted to play savvy! He looked away, though, and would have closed his ears if he could. After a minute he peeked back. The sow hadn’t made a sound, hadn’t even bled much; she stood there briefly, staring down at the severed tail, pink as an angleworm in the dust. Then she gobbled it, quick-stepped over to her trough, and started working it end to end. George mused that her head moved like a typewriter carriage.

How would that head look when Ben held a pistol behind one ear and triggered it? George shivers. That’s what surely happened to that sow come slaughter time. When a gun is fired at close range into a skull, are the brains literally blown out, or is that just an expression? It’s not like a duck or grouse or woodcock on the wing in any case, not even like a head-shot deer at thirty yards. Not like running something sharp into your skull, either.

A big moon had stayed up, so George cut the lights as he nosed the truck into the Butchers’ dooryard. Poor Mattie must have been upstairs in bed. She likely thought it was too late in the game to stay up worrying over a husband she couldn’t understand anymore.

George carried Evan into his shop, appalled again that he’d gotten so tiny, the arms that had once felt like braided cable gone soft and crepelike. Evan kept an army cot and an old-fashioned blanket roll in the shop. George thought of Brad Llewellyn in his own salty bedroll as he kicked Evan’s to the floor. No need for covers. There was sweat on his friend’s face and his too.

Outside, the river lisped through the bank-brush forty yards east. A loon in one of the back ponds cackled nervously. A barred owl pumped its eight notes into the air, and another answered, a sound like pshaw at the end, drawn out, sliding down and opening up before it quit. Amid all this, George heard choked snoring behind him in Evan’s shop.

George spoke out loud: “That man wants his booze cut off.”

            I.

Mattie scowled through her bedroom window, following George Mayes as he walked out the dooryard to the tannery bridge. Then the river alders hid him. On the way to his camp, ready to head down-country, was he? Nowadays she and George didn’t talk like they used to. But who’d tote her husband’s sorry carcass home now?

It was coming on daylight in their back lot, covered with maple whips now, some with a touch of flame already. Lord, she used to love the time between tree-color and snowfall, only that little bit of red in the woods to start, but the winds coming back soon, stiff enough to lay foam-lines side by side on McLean Lake, and the salmon and brook trout moving to the shallows come early October. When she was a girl, she used to stand on the bridge and drop pebbles, just to watch them shoot out and then slide back where they’d been.

She felt a change brewing even now, no matter the weather stayed warm. Two ravens were fighting a blow to get upstream, gathering two yards and giving up one, flopping around like laundry. She could just make them out against the gray. The mountain ash berries in her dooryard weren’t even ripe yet, but the waxwings were mobbing them already. Oh, the light off those birds!

“You don’t have to live with that old man,” she whispered after George.

Well, time was, she thought of Evan as a hero too, that short year they were courting, when weather meant a thing or two, like she was just thinking. Buck deer in rut, say, and the town all women in daytime. Best-looking young fellow in the village, Evan, no two ways about it. He’d get done in the woods, working or hunting, whichever, and he’d be back from camp on Saturday evenings, so’s to go out somewhere only with her. A dance, maybe, or only a moonlight canoe ride uplake. And they had all day Sunday– nobody but the two of them until Tommy was born.

Evan turned himself out so nice in those days. She used to wonder how on earth could his shirt get that white, and who made it that way? You could see it even after dark. Nearly the same for his teeth– he had every one of them then, never mind he chewed that awful snoose like any ‘jack.

And under the shirt... “It’d make a mare to eat her own bedding,” she muttered. Then she blushed, even though she was all by herself.

It wasn’t just how Evan looked, though. He was a man among men, drove the Percy every April, first one hired by the time he was only 19, best paid but Biscuit the cook, who was on the drive since Evan was a baby. That river business scared Mattie half to death before he quit, praise Jesus. They don’t drive timber by water anymore.

Winters he cut railroad sleepers. Ties, the company called them. Camp boss would go man to man at night, taking tally. “Fourteen,” one of the boys would say, and it stayed about like that for everybody up to Evan. Twenty, twenty-four, twenty-six. Even thirty-two once after he heard Sebby Pierson meant to beat him. Evan worked himself about off his feet and Sebby went right back to the pack because her husband cut the thirty-two, and each last one an A-sleeper which Boston and Maine would be glad to lay down.

Even in his prime he couldn’t do such a thing now. Not enough good wood anymore. In those days, plenty of fine trees stood handy by, south of Gary Pond in the black swamp. That meant Evan was home nights. It was sure a lot better than during the drives in spring, when she learned what lonesome meant. And she couldn’t sleep for the thought of him trotting around on those damned long-logs or stepping out on a jam with a charge of dynamite on a pole. How could a man claim to love such a business? But Evan claimed he did.

Those days making sleepers he never saw their house in daylight but for Sunday in winter. He went off every day with a lantern and that broadaxe and a dinner pail and bucksaw strung on him somehow and not come home till after dark. She got up with him and waited for him nights. Plenty to do anyhow, especially after Tommy came along, but that didn’t make any difference. Even when she was tending the baby or stoking the furnace or splitting kindling, a lot of what she did was wait for Evan Butcher.

Now look.

My seventh essay collection, “Such Dancing As We Can,” will be released on January 10th. It’s already available as a Kindle Book on amazon.

I am also pleased to say that the superb Irish poet Patrick Deely chose my poem, “My Recourse to Country Life,” as the best to have been published in 2023 by the excellent Irish journal, The Milk House. You can hear me read it at  https://www.themilkhouse.org/best-poem-2023-winners-announcement/