have the jewelweed and the October sunlight this time.
I skirted the balsam stand and came out on the back of Banger’s ridge. When I looked down I saw Stone City.
There are some places that fill us with immediate loathing and fear. A friend once described to me a circle of oaks behind a farmhouse in Iowa that made the hair on the back of his neck stand up. Later he heard that the body of a murdered child had been found there, half-covered with wet soil, a decade earlier. I felt something evil tincturing the pale light that washed my first view of Stone City.
It was an abandoned farm lying between two ridges, no roads in or out, only a faint track choked with viburnum and alder. The property, shaped like an eye, was bordered on the back by a stream. Popple and spruce had invaded the hay fields, and the broken limbs of the apple trees hung to the ground.
The buildings were gone, collapsed into cellar holes of rotting beams. Blackberry brambles boiled out of the crumbling foundations and across a fallen blue door that half-blocked a cellar hole.
I came cautiously down the slope to the fields. The grass hummed with cicadas, crickets and grasshoppers that had escaped the early frosts. The buzzing stopped as I stepped into the field. The soil looked thin. A long backbone of rock jutted from the pasture. Something of the vanished owner’s grim labor showed in a curious fenceline that would stand another hundred years; the fence “posts” were old iron wagon axles sunk deep into holes hand drilled in the granite ledge.
There was no wind. Yellowjackets were at the rotten apples under the orchard trees. The light fell slow, heavy. Inhaling the sharp odor of acetic, rotted fruit I stepped into the honey-colored field. I remembered the feeling I had as a child, of sadness in the early fall.
A bird tore from the apple tree with a sound like ripping silk straight toward the narrow neck of field that closed into trees. Feathers made a brief aerial fountain and I marked the bird’s fall into quivering grass as I dropped the gun. A second, a third and a fourth roar, the air was full of birds, breakers of sound over my head, bird flight and shotgun beating against the walls of hillside and birds falling like fruits, hitting the ground with ripe thumps. Only the first of them was mine.
A bell tinkled and a Brittany came into the field to pick them up. Banger said, “You stepped out just the same time as I did. You the one I hear shootin’ up in the Choppin’ Swamp these past weeks?” He didn’t look at me. The dog brought all the birds to Banger.
“Nice shooting,” I said. The birds were good-sized. “What is this place?” There were three hens and a smaller cock.
Banger looked around and twisted up his mouth a little. He took up a bird and gutted it.
“This place, this old farm, is a place I used to hunt when I was a kid. I was run offa here three times, and the last time I was helped along with number six birdshot. Still got the little pick scars all acrost my back. Old man Stone. Shot me when I was a kid, trying’ to run me off.” He pulled the viscera of the second bird from the hot cavity.
“Place used to be called Stone City. I still call it that. Stone City. The Stones all lived up here—three or four different families of them. Their own little city. Tax collector never come up here. No game warden, nobody except me, a kid after the birds. There’s always been birds here.”
“What happened to the Stones?”
“Oh, they just died out and moved away.” His voice trailed off. I didn’t know then he was lying.
The afternoon sun streamed over Banger’s dog who sat close to his leg. His hand went out and cupped her bony skull. “My dog,” he said. “All I got in the world, ain’tcha, Lady?”
He squatted on the ground and looked into the dog’s eyes. I was embarrassed by their intimacy, by the banal name, ‘Lady,’ by the self-pity in Banger’s voice. No, I thought, there was no way I could be Banger’s hunting companion. He had his dog. So it was a shock when the dog walked over to me and licked my hand.
“My Jesus,” said Banger. “She never done that in her life.”
He didn’t like it.
We walked back past the cellar holes toward the spruce at the end of the fields. Banger’s dog walked beside and one step behind him.
“Give you a ride,” said Banger.
His old Power Wagon was parked on a logging road half a mile below Stone City. It rode rough, bottoming out on hummocks and rocks. Lady sat in the middle and stared straight ahead like a dowager being driven to the opera. Banger shouted at me over the roar and clatter of the truck.
“Old man Stone … meanest bastard I ever … all his sons and daughters wilder … mean … and they was a lot of them.” The gears crashed and Banger wheeled the truck onto the main road.
“They had all these little shacks with broken-down rusty cars out front, piles of lumber and empty longnecks and pieces of machinery that might come in handy sometime, the weeds growin’ up all crazy through ’em everywhere. The Stone boys was all wild, jacked deer, trapped bear, dynamited trout pools, made snares, shot strange dogs wasn’t their own and knocked up every girl they could put it to. Yessir, they was some bunch.” He turned onto a dirt road that ended at the sugarhouse he’d fixed up.
“Should of looked at what I was doin’. Guess I brought you home with me, I’m so used to turnin’ up the hill. Fried bird for supper. You might as well stay.”
He took down four birds from the side of his woodshed and hung up those in his game vest. He wouldn’t let me help pluck the supper birds but waved me into the sugarhouse. Lady raced around him, chasing the down feathers in the rising late afternoon wind.
I looked around inside. There were a few books on a shelf, some pots and pans hanging from nails, the dog’s dish and a braided Discount Mart rug behind the stove. Banger’s cot, narrow as a plank, stood against the far wall. I thought of him lying in it, night after night, listening to the dog’s snuffling dreams behind the stove.
The place was something of a grouse museum with spread pat tails mounted on the walls—greys, a few cinnamon reds and one rare lemon-yellow albino. Curled snapshots of Banger as a young man with grouse in his hands were stapled up beside colored pages cut from hunting magazines, showing grouse on the wing. There were shotguns hanging from pegs and propped in the corners. A badly mounted grouse of great size, tilted a little to one side as though it were fainting, stood on a section of log behind the door, and nests of dried-up grouse eggs on a little shelf must have dated back to Banger’s boyhood collecting days, featherlight shells filled with dried scraps of embryonic grouse.
I lit the kerosene lamp on the table, illuminating a framed photograph in a wreath of plastic flowers, a picture of a girl standing in front of a farmhouse with a sagging roof. She had long hair, the ends blurred as though the wind were blowing it when the shutter snapped. She squinted into the sunlight, holding a clump of daisies hastily snatched up at the last minute for effect. I could see the clot of soil clinging to the roots. Banger’s dead wife.
Lard spattered out of the frying pan and flared, ticks of flame, as Banger dropped in the floury pieces of grouse. He sprinkled salt and pepper, then threw the fresh livers and giblets of the day’s bag to Lady behind the stove.
We ate in silence. Banger’s jaws worked busily on the savory birds. He said nothing for a change. The oil lamp flame crept higher. I thought of wagon axles set in granite ledge and
