Russell Banks - The Reserve

At the same time, when it came to matters of right and wrong, she believed that she was as stubbornly independent of Hubert’s opinions as he was of hers. They did not, therefore, discuss politics or religion or money. Those subjects did not yet concern them and might never concern them, although she knew that he had voted for Herbert Hoover, that he was a practicing Methodist, and that he owned little more than his cabin and his old car and his rifles and dog and lived for the most part outside the cash economy. And Hubert believed what the other villagers believed — that Alicia and her husband were probably Communists, atheists, and rich, for they were “from away,” as the locals said. Thus, when Alicia and Hubert spoke of right and wrong, ethical matters, they talked, not about their politics, religion, or money, but about the one thing more than any other that they shared — adultery.

In his bed, their faces pressed together, their hands laced and bare thighs touching, she said, “I don’t believe in this, Hubert. Adultery. It’s wrong. I don’t mean the sex part, our secrets. I mean the lying. The deception. I’m scared of it.”

“Why are you scared of it?”

“Because we’ll pay dearly for this someday. Probably someday soon. It’s not the same as having secrets. Everyone has secrets. It’s like privacy. But whether Jordan finds out or not, lies and deception corrode your soul, Hubert. They turn you inside out and make you into a liar and deceiver. It’s not just what you do , Hubert, it’s who you become . Not to God, and not to other people, who don’t know you’re lying. To yourself. I don’t want to become that person, Hubert.”

He lifted his hand to her face and traced her lips with his fingertips and said, “You’re wrong. It’s not a terrible thing. Come on, now, it’s a damned beautiful thing we’re doing. A good thing, not a bad one. I loved only one other woman, Alicia, and she died. And now you. And to tell the truth, I didn’t love her the same way as you. I loved her because I knew her so long and so well. It was love, yes, but it was different. It was like love. So nothing you say will make me think it’s not a beautiful and good thing, Alicia. Nothing.”

“Nothing, my darling? But it will come to nothing. It can’t go on, and you know that as well as I.”

“No,” he said. “Don’t think like that.” And he kissed her again, and she closed her eyes and opened herself to him again.

AT THE BOTTOM OF BEEDE MOUNTAIN, ALICIA DROVE THE FORD past the Clarkson farm and made a wide, distracted turn onto the unpaved road and headed north toward the village of Tunbridge. The road wound through the valley of the Tamarack River, whose headwaters rose deep in the rugged mountains of the Reserve, among the brooks and muskegs that fed the Second Lake. Here below, surrounded by the peaks of the Great Range, the valley was broad and flat, with wide green meadows — a rich floodplain granted shortly after the Revolutionary War to New Hampshire and Vermont veterans of the war as payment for their services. For generations, in spite of the harsh climate, the inhabitants of the valley had managed until recent years to feed, clothe, and shelter themselves and their families through careful use and management of the region’s few natural resources — soil good enough to support family farms and modest herds of livestock, a surplus of tall timber for export to Albany and Troy, and fast-running streams for powering small mills. For generations, the people of Tunbridge had been farmers, woodcutters, and mill workers.

Hubert St. Germain was one of the few local men who regarded themselves, not as simple working people, but as professionals. The guides were gruff, no-nonsense men whose skills and knowledge of the mountains, forests, lakes, and streams were essential to and much admired by people from the cities whose desire for a wilderness experience, starting in the mid-1800s, brought them north to the Adirondack region in increasing numbers. For many years, the visitors were paying guests at local farmhouses, eating homegrown produce and fresh game at the farmers’ tables, playing cards and checkers in their parlors after supper, and swapping stories on their front porches. During the long summer days the people “from away” followed the hired guides into the forest and shot at deer and bear and other wild animals, killing them by the hundreds, and fished where they were told along the streams and on the lakes, where they caught trout by the thousands, and scrambled behind the guides up the steep, rocky, root-tangled trails to the bare mountaintops, there to quicken and refresh their sooty, urban souls with transcendental views of nature unadorned spreading out below to every horizon, as far as the human eye could see. The visitors were for the most part an educated, genteel lot, and many of them painted pictures of these scenes; others wrote pastoral poetry; still others wrote long letters and kept copious journals in which they extolled the harsh beauty of this wild terrain and praised the warm generosity and independence of the people who lived in it year-round.

Late in the nineteenth century and in the early years of the twentieth, however, with the creation of the Reserve and the construction of the Tamarack Club and cottages and the large, elegantly outfitted wilderness camps like Dr. Cole’s Rangeview on the Second Lake, the visitors no longer boarded in the homes of the residents. Instead, they hired the local people as caretakers, cooks, and cleaners, used them as waiters and gardeners and golf caddies at the club, so that the near equality of summer visitor and year-round resident began to disappear. A mutual parasitism based on a rigid set of class distinctions very much to the advantage of the outsiders took its place.

Then, when the stock market collapsed and the Depression took hold, one by one the small textile, shoe, and paper mills owned and managed by corporations based elsewhere shut down; and the downstate market for timber shrank and soon disappeared altogether. With the flow of outside capital gone dry, local people could no longer pay their debts. The banks downstate started calling in outstanding loans, and farms and homes, many of them heavily mortgaged, were repossessed or sold for back taxes, and land that had been in families for generations was sold off for a few dollars an acre, some of it to summer people, the rest to the Reserve. Gradually, by the mid-1930s, most of the year-round residents of the region found themselves out of necessity surviving solely as the seasonal, part-time, underpaid employees of the summer people. In two generations a class of independent yeomen and yeowomen had been turned into a servant class, with all the accompanying dependencies, resentments, insecurity, and envy.

Not Hubert St. Germain, though. The son and grandson of Adirondack guides, Hubert had no such diminished sense of himself as had his neighbors, or he never would have become the secret lover of Alicia Groves. Neither servant nor boss, the Adirondack guides were throwbacks to men of an earlier era, when the region had not yet been settled by white people — solitary, self-sufficient hunters and trappers and woodsmen who thought of themselves as living off the land, regardless of who owned title to it. They were viewed by locals and outsiders alike as independent contractors — somewhat the way the artist Jordan Groves was viewed. Thus, late one Saturday afternoon in October, when all the summer people had left the region to shift for itself once again and Jordan Groves met Hubert St. Germain for the first time at the Moose Head Inn in Sam Dent, after drinking a half-dozen bottles of beer with him and losing at arm wrestling to him — a thing that rarely happened to Jordan Groves — the famous artist felt easy about inviting the local guide home to eat with him, and the guide felt no discomfort in accepting. It was late at night by then, and the family was asleep. The men cooked steaks in a cast-iron skillet and drank whiskey and continued arm wrestling at the kitchen table until finally, at midnight, the artist was able to put the guide’s arm flat to the table.