Heart Songs - Annie Proulx

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      There were only a few weeks left in the season. I did not let my new interest in the confessional break the pattern of birds. I went out every few days, sometimes only for an hour, sometimes until the end of the light. I did not go to Stone City, tinged with Banger’s dark and private hatred. The first staying snows fell; the air hardened and crystallized to winter temper.

      One morning, with the damp smell of coming snow hollowing my nostrils, I found Banger’s and Lady’s fresh tracks in the strip of hardwoods behind my house, bearing south. I took the deliberate trail as an invitation, thinking that perhaps it was the closest Banger could get to asking me to come along.

      He had a good start. It was past noon by the time I reached Stone City. I’d traveled parallel to Banger’s trail, but higher up the mountainside, thinking his earlier passage would have sent the birds sweeping and scuttling up the slope into hiding from storm and man.

      I did well, flushing half a dozen in my slow hunt, for it was not a day when the birds moved easily. I brought one down, a reflex shot through a thick stand of young fir, as thin and crowded as bamboo, despite my cold-numbed thumb that could barely nudge the safety off. It grew increasingly colder and the snow began, serious snow.

      Stone City was a desolate ruin, but Banger had a fire going in the shelter of a crumbled stone foundation wall and was boiling coffee in a small pot. The blue door was covered with snow. The flakes spit as they hit the flames. Banger threw on another silvered board from the collapsed house.

      “Get anything?”

      I held up the bird and described the shot. Banger spread the tail into a lady’s fan, counted the feathers, flicking the two unbarred ones, gave me a look of reproach when he saw I had not opened the crop and did so himself.

      “Beechnuts. All mornin’ they been gettin’ ’em before the snow covers ’em all up. Every one a these”—he pointed at the four birds lying in a neat row—“was full up with beechnuts. Beechnut birds has got the best flavor.”

      I had never gotten the limit of birds in my life.

      The coffee was hot and good. Banger said he always carried a little bag of coffee and the small pot in his game vest for the cold days. The fire burned down fast into plank-shaped coals. Banger went down into the cellar hole, looking for dry boards. He came out rubbing something on his sleeve.

      “By God, look what I found on the top of the wall down there.” He held it out to me. “That’s old man Stone’s knife.”

      It was a big folding knife with two blades, corroded, rusted. The body of the knife was a mottled yellow celluloid. There were shadowy images under the celluloid, flakes of images that suggested a pirate playing a concertina or a pile of books tumbling from a table while a mad professor grinned. There was a clearer image on the other side. A naked girl sat cross-legged on a beach, looking at the camera with a curved smile like the rim of a wineglass. Her hands patted a cone of sand between her legs.

      I handed the knife back to Banger. It was heavy, as though it had gathered weight with age. Banger kept playing with it, trying to make out the shattered image. “By God, old man Stone’s knife!” He laughed.

      “What’s the story on the Stone that was electrocuted?” I asked. Noreen had never gone back to the subject and a mutual delicacy kept either one of us from returning to that first conversation.

      “Electrocuted? How’d you hear about that?”

      I didn’t answer and he turned the knife in his hands.

      “That was Floyd Stone, the one that brought the whole pack of Stones down. He was a wild one, but not so wild as some of the others.” The fresh planks smoked and then caught, blue flames rose elegantly along the edge of the boards. Lady put her head on Banger’s knee and looked across the fire at me.

      “How’s my girl? How’s my good old girl?” I said in that foolish voice I use with dogs I like. She wagged her feathery tail. Banger tightened his arm around her and I had a guilty rush as though I’d been caught caressing another man’s wife.

      “Floyd Stone. People around here had trouble with the Stones since the town began. Fact, the Stones were the first settlers here, but nobody brags about it.

      “They come up from New Hampshire or down from Quebec, one, I don’t know which. A real old family, and a real bad family. Floyd was just like all his brothers and cousins, had a crazy streak in him when he was drunk; he’d do anything, just anything. Always had a deer rifle with ’em, all of ’em.

      “This one time he was drivin’ up the hill from town, drunker’n a skunk, real hot, but not so loaded he couldn’t navigate that old truck. Gets to the train crossin’, train’s goin’ through. Seventy-three boxcars. He counts ’em. Two automobiles come up behind him, one the Baptist minister. End of the train comes. There’s that guy standin’ out on the little caboose porch. He waves to Floyd like them fellows do.

      “Floyd picks up his .30–.30 quick as a snake and shoots the guy right through the head just like you or me woulda waved back. Shot him dead for no reason. Never even saw him before. Then he took off for up here. Stone City.”

      Banger pried a rusted blade out of the knife’s body. “They come up to get him from all over. Had the state police, the sheriff, couple hundred men from down below, all had guns and anxious to use ’em. It was an army. The crowd was real ugly, had enough of Stones.

      “Old man Stone come out on the porch. ‘Git off my property!’ he yells like he had a shotgun in his hands. But he didn’t have no shotgun. Guess he would have if he hadn’t been boiled himself. Holdin’ a pitcher, one of them old tin pitchers, sloppin’ full of some kind of homemade jungle juice. Just stood there, swayin’ back and forth, eyes all red, yellin’ ‘Git off a my property!’

      “State police yells back, ‘We have a warrant here for the arrest of Floyd Stone for the willful murder of whoever he was, and so forth. Come on out, Floyd!’

      “Course Floyd didn’t come out. There was four or five houses here, could of been in any one of ‘em, could of been in the woods. Then the state police says something to four of his guys and they run right up those porch steps and grab old man Stone and arrest him for obstructing justice. Right there was the porch.” Banger pointed at the blue door.

      “Fight, kick, scream, seventy years old, but that old man flashed out with his long fingernails and cut one of the state police right across the eyeball, fellow lost his eye and had to be pensioned off on full disability.

      “Nobody wanted to go into them houses to look for Floyd. This was before they had mace and stuff that they squirt under doors. Crowd’s ready for action, real savage. Somebody yells, ‘Tear them houses down! That’ll uncover the murderin’ little prick!’ Like I said, there was a couple hundred people there.

      “They swarm all over those houses, pullin’ rotten boards, kickin’ in windows. Somebody got a axe and pried up the ends of the clapboards and ten more would rip it off like it was paper. Stones come flyin’ out of those houses, women, kids, drunk Stones, some old granny, all of ’em yellin’ and cryin’.

      “Well, they got Floyd, too, in about ten minutes. He was layin’ under the bed, hidin’, had his old killer deer rifle under there with him, pointin’ it at the bedroom door. He wasn’t expectin’ to have the whole back wall ripped off real sudden and a dozen guys grab his ankles and yank him out from under that bed. Police took him away—had some trouble to git him away, too—and left the rest of the Stones there with us. Somebody found some roofin’ tar and started gettin’ it hot.”

      I wondered if Banger had been the one to find the tar.

      “They killed all the chickens for the feathers and some geese and ducks too. Then they stripped every one of them Stones except the women and the kids,

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