Annie Proulx - Heart Songs

“Bill, you look like a character out of a Rupert Frost poem,” said the woman who’d bought Potter’s farm and planted a thousand weedy birches on prime pasture. The new people said Stong was a character. They liked his stories, they read morals into his rambling lies and encouraged him by standing around the feed store playing farmer—buying salt blocks for the deer, sunflower seeds for the bluejays and laying mash for the pet chickens they had to give away each fall.

Stong set his tattered sails to catch this changing wind. In late life he found himself admired and popular for the first time, and he was grateful. He saw what the summer people liked, and to please them he carried armloads of canning jars, books, tools and other family goods down from the house to the store. He arranged generations of his family’s possessions on the shelves beside the work gloves and udder balm. He filled the dusty window with pieces of old harness, wooden canes and chipped china.

In autumn he laid in ammunition for the summer men who came back for their week of deer hunting. The sign in his window read GUNS BLUE SEAL FEED WINE ANTIQUES, a small part of what he offered, for all his family’s interests and enterprises were tangled together on the shelves as if he had drawn a rake through their lives and piled the debris in the store.

“They say,” said Urna, “that he’s cleaned out everything from kettles to cobwebs and put a price tag on it. You know, don’t you, that he’s selling all them old books his grandfather used to have. He’s got them out there in the barn, higgledy-piggledy where the mice can gnaw on them.”

“Has he,” said Hawkheel.

“I suppose you’re going up there to look at them.”

“Well,” said Hawkheel, “I might.”

The Stong place was high on a bluff, a mile upstream from Hawkheel’s trailer as the crow flew. To Hawkheel, every turn of the road was like the bite of an auger into the past. He did not remember his adult journeys up Stong’s driveway, but recalled with vivid clarity sitting in the dust-colored passenger seat of their old Ford while his father drove over a sodden mat of leaves. The car window had been cranked down, and far below, the hissing river, heavy with rain, cracked boulders along its bottom. His father drove jerkily, lips moving in whispered conversation with invisible imps. Hawkheel had kept his hand on the door handle in case the old man steered for the edge and he had to jump. It was one of the last memories he had of his father.

The Stong place, he saw now, had run down. The real-estate agents would get it pretty soon. The sagging clapboard house tapered away into a long ell and the barn. The store was still in the ell, but Hawkheel took the old shortcut around back, driving through the stinging nettles and just catching a glimpse through the store window of Stong’s white head bobbing over a handful of papers.

The barn was filled with dim, brown light shot through like Indian silk with brilliant threads of sunlight. There was a faint smell of apples. On the other side of the wall a rooster beat his wings. Hawkheel looked around and saw, behind the grain sacks, hundreds of books, some in boxes, some stacked on shelves and windowsills. The first one he took up was a perfect copy of Thad Norris’s 1865 The American Angler’s Book. He’d seen it listed in his catalogue at home at $85. Stong wanted one dollar.

Hawkheel went at the boxes. He turned out Judge Nutting’s nice little book on grouse, The History of One Day Out of Seventeen Thousand. A box of stained magazines was hiding a rare 1886 copy of Halford’s Floating Flies, the slipcase deeply marked with Stong’s penciled price of $1.50.

“Oh God,” said Hawkheel, “I got him now.”

He disguised the valuable books by mixing them with dull-jacketed works on potatos and surveying, and carried the stack into the feed store. Stong sat at the counter, working his adding machine. Hawkheel noticed he had taken to wearing overalls, and a bandana knotted around his big neck. He looked to see if there was a straw hat on a nail.

“Good to see you, Leverd,” said Stong in a creamy voice. He gossiped and joked as if Hawkheel were one of the summer people, winked and said, “Don’t spend your whole social security check on books, Leverd. Save a little out for a good time. You seen the new Ruger shotguns?” Mellowed and ripened Stong, improved by admiration, thought Hawkheel.

The books had belonged to Stong’s grandfather, a hero of the waters whose name had once been in the Boston papers for his record trout. The stuffed and mounted trout still hung on the store wall beside the old man’s enlarged photograph showing his tilted face and milky eyes behind the oval curve of glass.

“Bill, what will you take for your grandpa today?” cried the summer people who jammed the store on Saturdays, and Stong always answered, “Take what I can get,” making a country virtue out of avarice.

Stong was ready to jump into his grandfather stories with a turn of the listener’s eye. “The old fool was so slack-brained he got himself killed with crow bait.”

Hawkheel, coming in from the barn with book dust on him, saw that Stong still lied as easily as he breathed. The summer people stood around him like grinning dogs waiting for the warm hearts and livers of slain hares.

Stong’s best customers were the autumn hunters. They reopened their summer camps, free now from wives and children, burned the wood they had bought in August from Bucky Pincoke and let the bottle of bourbon stand out on the kitchen table with the deck of cards.

“Roughin’ it, are you?” Stong would cry jovially to Mr. Rose, splendid in his new red L.L. Bean suspenders. The hunters bought Stong’s knives and ammunition and went away with rusted traps, worn horseshoes and bent pokers pulled from the bins labeled ‘Collector’s Items.’ In their game pockets were bottles of Stong’s cheap Spanish wine, faded orange from standing in the sun. Stong filled their ears to overflowing with his inventions.

“Yes,” he would say, “that’s what Antler Mountain is named for, not because there’s any big bucks up there, which there is not”—with a half wink for Hawkheel who stood in the doorway holding rare books like hot bricks—“but because this couple named Antler, Jane and Anton Antler, lived up there years ago. Kind of simple, like some old families hereabouts get.”

A sly look. Did he mean Hawkheel’s father who was carted away with wet chin and shaking hands to the state asylum believing pitchfork handles were adders?

“Yes, they had a little cabin up there. Lived off raccoons and weeds. Then old Jane had this baby, only one they ever had. Thought a lot of it, couldn’t do enough for it, but it didn’t survive their care and when it was only a few months old it died.”

Stong, like a petulant tenor, turned away then and arranged the dimes in the cash register. The hunters rubbed their soft hands along the counter and begged for the rest of the story. Hawkheel himself wondered how it would come out.

“Well, sir, they couldn’t bear to lay that baby away in the ground, so they put it in a five-gallon jar of pure alcohol. My own grandfather—used to stand right here behind the counter where I’m standing now—sold ’em the jar. We used to carry them big jars. Can’t get ’em any more. They set that jar with the baby on a stump in front of their cabin the way we might set out a plaster duck on the lawn.” He would pause a moment for good effect, then say, “The stump’s still there.”

They asked him to draw maps on the back of paper bags and went up onto the Antler to stare at the stump as if the impression of the jar had been burned into it by holy fire. Stong, with a laugh like a broken cream separator, told Hawkheel that every stick from that cut maple was in his woodshed. For each lie he heard, Hawkheel took three extra books.