The Beginning Place

3

He broke the signboard, stamped the pieces into the mud, and stood there in his shirt and jeans soaked from his stumble in the creek, his shoes full of water. “You bastards,” he said, the first words he had ever spoken aloud in the twilight place. “You sneaking bastards!”

The high bushes crashed and writhed. Somebody came out of hiding there, a boy, black-haired, staring. “Get out,” the boy said. “Clear out. This is private property.”

“All right. Where’s my stuff?” Hugh took a step forward. “It cost a week’s pay. What did you do with it?”

“It’s up there in the woods. Don’t bring it back. Don’t come back. Just get out!”

The boy stepped forward, self-righteous, jeering, hateful. Hugh could not keep himself from shaking. “All right,” he said, “you didn’t have to—” It was no use. He turned, plunged back down the bank and across the stream, slipping and catching himself on boulders as he crossed. He made for the gateway. He had to get out. He would get out and go, never come back, it was ruined. His stuff was up in the woods, he would go through the gate and get his stuff and never come back.

But he had already gone through the gate.

When he looked back he saw the twilight behind him and the rush of the water and the rocks breaking it, and ahead of him he saw the twilight and the path going on among the trees.

He had lost his way. There was no way.

He went on a few steps, then stopped; he stood there; then came back, passing between the high bushes and the red-barked pine, to the beginning place.

The other, the stranger, was still standing on the far bank. Not a boy but a woman, jeans and white shirt, blur of black hair, white face staring.

“I can’t get out,” Hugh said. “There isn’t any way.”

The loud sweet voices of the water ran between them.

He was very deeply frightened. He said, “If you know this place, if you live here, tell me how to get out!”

The woman came forward abruptly, crossed the creek, going light and lithe from stone to stone. She stopped by the shelving rock and pointed to the gateway. “There.”

He shook his head.

“That’s the gate.”

“I know.”

“Go on!”

“It’s changed,” he said. He turned and crossed the glade, went between the bushes and the pine, and went on. There was no darkening of the way, no steep scramble under shrubs and blackberry, no sunlight ahead. The trees stood close and dim in the windless dusk and there was no sound but the music of the creek behind him. He turned at last and saw the figure by the water watching him.

He came back. She came across the grass to meet him.

“It goes on,” she said in a whisper. “I never saw that. It’s never been closed on this side.—Come on!” She passed him, quick, rageful, going towards the gate. He came with her. The rough reddish trunk of the pine brushed his shoulder. On the dark path a bramble caught at his hair. He could scarcely see her scrambling ahead. A bird chip-chipped dryly overhead. The air smelled of smoke, rubber, gasoline, sunwarmed pine needles. The path underfoot was dry. “There’s your stuff,” the woman said. His pack and bedroll lay in the scruffy grass by the thickets.

He looked at them, as if to check that everything was there. He did not dare look back. He was afraid that if he looked back the twilight would rise and come with him. The woman, the girl, his age, stood on the path, black hair, black eyes, white face.

“What place is that?” he asked her. “Do you know?”

She did not answer at once, and he thought she was not going to. “If you belonged there, you’d know,” she said in her harsh, thin voice.

“I need—” He could not get the words out. Why did he stand here letting her shame him? His face was hot and stiff, had he been crying? He rubbed his jaw with his hand, hiding his mouth, to hide his shame.

“It isn’t a boy scout camp,” she said. “It’s not for bringing all your crap into and camping and—It isn’t any state park. You don’t know anything about it. You don’t know the rules. You don’t speak the language, you don’t know their—It isn’t your place. You don’t belong. It isn’t safe.”

No anger would rise to relieve him of shame. He had to stand there and take what she said, and then repeat the only thing he had to say, “I need to come back.” His voice was a mumble. “I won’t leave stuff there.”

She shook with rage like a bit of newspaper shaken by the wind, a bit of blazing paper in a fire.

“I warn you!”

What she had said before was getting through to him.

“There are—people that live there?”

After a long pause she said, “Yes. There are.”

Her eyes flashed queerly in the restless light.

“They’re waiting for you,” she said in her stifled, jeering voice, and then came forward suddenly and passed him, not going back, as he had expected, down the path into the evening land, but passing him, abrupt, swift, solid, and going forward into the morning. Within a few feet the bulk of the thickets hid her, another moment and the slight sound of her steps was gone.

Hugh stood bewildered and bereft in the warm, slightly dusty air of the woods, which was continually shaken by the vibration of distant engines on the ground and in the air. A spot of sunlight filtering in through leaves danced on the dun cover of his bedroll, in constant motion.

Where do I go now? There isn’t anywhere to go.

He was tired, worn out by emotions—anger, fear, grief. He sat down there beside the path, one hand on his backpack, protectively, or for reassurance. The dreary ache of loss would not leave him or grow less.

Maybe she feels like this too, he thought. Like I took it away from her.

But I can’t help it. I have to go back. I don’t have anywhere else. She has no right…That was not the appropriate word, but he did not know how else to put it.

I will go back. I won’t leave my stuff there. Not at the gateway clearing, anyhow. I could go farther—up the creek a ways. She can’t go everywhere. There’s no reason we’d ever have to see each other.

Unless I can’t get out again.

That thought went through his mind quite lightly. The panic terror he had submitted to when the gateway led only farther into the twilight had already sunk down deep in him, too deep to stir up easily. If it’s like that again I can wait, he told himself, and go through with her when she comes.

She’s like me, she comes from here. But there are people who live there, she said.

But his mind slipped away from this idea too. I don’t have to meet them. There’s never been anybody at the creek place. And she’s gone now. I’m going back…

He shoved his gear under the dusty, spiny outskirts of the thicket, stood up, and went back down the path to the threshold and into the twilight, to the clear water where, at last, he knelt and drank. The water washed his face and his hands, washed away shame and fear. “This is my home,” he said to the earth and rocks and trees, and with his lips almost on the water, whispered, “I am you. I am you.”

He got to Sam’s Thrift-E-Mart at ten and by ten-five was opening up Line Seven. Donna looked over from the register in Six. “You O.K., Buck?”

For Hugh two days and three nights had passed since he left work an hour early yesterday afternoon; he did not remember why Donna might think he wasn’t O.K. “Sure!” he said.

She looked him up and down with a curious expression, cynical yet admiring. “You wasn’t sick at all,” she said. “You had something better to do.” She rang up a sixpack of cola and a packet of cocktail cheese snacks for a shaky, unshaven old man, remarking to him and to Hugh, “Ain’t it wonderful to be young? But I wouldn’t go through it again if you paid me.”

He did not explore far downstream. The gorge of the creek deepened; it always seemed darker in that direction. Upstream from the gateway clearing there was less underbrush, and in many places the creek had clear, broad, sandy verges. He came to a place where the creek, under a stand of big willows, was narrowed by an outcropping of red rock that slanted across the streambed in steps and shelves. Above the white water lay a deep, long pool. The shores were overhung by trees, but the pool itself lay open to the sky. The place had about it a sense of remoteness, self-containment; no one else would come here.

He made a cache for his gear, the fork of a low tree, so thickly overgrown with a small-leafed vine that it was hidden even from him till he put his hands on it. He gathered a little supply of firewood, mostly branches from a dead tree nearby, and scooped a fireplace in the sand of the sheltered bank just above the barrier of red rocks. He laid a fire ready. Then he took off his shirt and jeans and silently, holding his body straight, walked out into the still pool. Just above the rock barrier it was deeper than he was tall. There he swam in silent and intense delight until he could bear the cold no longer, and made for the shore cramped and shuddering, and lighted his fire.

The flames were beautiful in the clear twilight. He crouched naked to get the heat on his skin, in his bones. At last he dressed, and made himself a cup of the sweet coffee-chocolate mix he had bought on sale, and sat drinking it in peace of heart. When the fire had burned down he covered all trace of it with sand, put on his shoes, and set off to explore farther upstream.

He came daily now. Half his life was spent in the twilight land. When he was there even the rhythm of his breathing was different; was deeper. When he woke from the sleep he slept there, a sleep deeper than dream, dark and resistless as the currents of the stream, he would lie a while, lazy, listening to the water run and the leaves stir, thinking, I’ll stay here…I’ll stay another while…He never did. When he was at work in the supermarket, or at home, he did not think much about the evening land. It was there, that was all he had to know while he was checking out a sixty-dollar load of groceries or getting his mother quieted down after a rough day at the loan company where she worked. It was there, and he could come back to it, the silence that gave words meaning, the center that gave the world a shape.

He had never found the gate closed again, and had given the possibility very little thought. It had had something to do with the girl. It had happened because of her, because of her being there, and that was why she had been able to unhappen it, going with him through to the other side. From time to time he thought about her, apprehensive yet regretful. If she had not been so full of hate and spite maybe they could have talked. He had let her push him around, it was his fault. She might have told him something about this land. Apparently she had known it longer and knew it better than he did. If she didn’t live here, she knew those who did.

If there were any others. He thought about that a good deal, during his silent whiles at the willow place. All she had said was something like, “You don’t know the language,” and then when he had asked if there were people living here she had said yes, but after hesitating, and with something faked or forced in what she said. She had been trying to scare him. And the idea was threatening. It was being alone here that was the joy of it. Being alone, not having to try to handle other people, their needs, demands, commands.

But people who lived here, what could they be like? What language would they speak? Nothing here spoke. No bird ever sang. There must be animals in the woods but they were elusive, silent. There was no need for anybody here to bother anybody else.

He thought about these things when he sat in the silence by the bright small fire beside the water under the willows. A thought here could occupy his mind for a long time, having room to expand and think itself through. He had never felt himself to be particularly stupid, and had done well enough in school in the subjects he liked, but he knew people found him stupid because he had no quickness. His mind would not work in a hurry, would not rush. Here he could come and think things out, and that made a great part of the freedom he felt here. The alternation of two utterly different lives, the repeated crossing of the threshold between Kensington Heights and the evening land, might have confused and exhausted him, if it had not been for the strength he got from his whiles by the creek. He was quiet, occupied simply and fully with hiking, swimming, sleeping, thinking, using his senses; and that full quietness replaced all the sense of being pushed and hurried through life without time to ask what he was doing or where he ought to go, without time to see that there were choices, and to choose. Even there, if he held fast to the quietness he found here, even there he managed to get some thinking done.

Since he had said his mother was sick, had heard his voice say the word, he had been self-compelled to face the idea instead of running and hiding from it; to try to consider steadily how sick she was, and what her sickness was.

That was hard. It meant comparing: as if she was not his mother, but any woman, anyone. Anyone sick.

In his last couple of high schools he had known fellows who went the hard-drug route, all the way. And in tenth grade, it was not a memory he wanted to dig up, the girl who used to copy his English assignments sometimes, he could not think of her name—she always made him feel guilty because she was so humble—Cheryl was her name, and one day the week before school was out she had locked herself in a stall in the girls’ room and tried to stuff herself down a toilet. He had heard the screaming and seen a girl in the hall laughing in a horrible whooping way, and then Cheryl carried out doubled up, with pinkish water dripping out of her hair, screaming in a high thin voice, and he and all the other kids standing watching, people running up the stairs to see. Nobody had known how to talk about it afterwards, nobody who had heard the screaming. That was the worst he had been close to so far, but working in groceries you saw a lot of people scolding the mushrooms, and crazies like the shoplifter who tried to bribe his way out or the guy who pulled a knife on Donna when she refused to cash his check without ID; and people doing things that might have a reason but looked pretty weird, such as buying forty-eight bottles of germkiller spray and a can of water chestnuts. What all these people had in common, as well as he could figure it out, was a kind of getting out of gear, out of synch. The engine made a noise but no power got to the wheels. They were stuck. They got nowhere. In the last seven years his mother had changed houses thirteen times and lived in five different states; and the oftener she moves, he thought, the more she doesn’t get anywhere.

All the same, even if she was like the mushroom people and the germ-spray people, she wasn’t as bad as the junkies or Cheryl. She was stuck but not sunk. The loan company, a huge outfit with offices all over the country, had let her transfer twice now, and still gave her raises. She complained a lot about the work, but never missed a day at it. And in this office she had made a friend finally, Durbina, and found a whole new interest, this previous-lives business, which she was getting very deep into. Was that crazy? Hugh had no inclination to judge it one way or the other. What she told him sounded pretty silly. They always seemed to remember being princesses or high priestesses in their previous lives; he wondered who had worked at the loan companies and the supermarkets in Ancient Egypt. But then, no doubt you tended to remember the high points. It was screwy, but no screwier than most things people got interested in: baseball scores, aluminum futures, antique medicine bottles, nuclear proliferation, Jesus, politics, health foods, playing the violin. People did very strange things. People were extremely strange. All of them. You couldn’t judge sickness by strangeness, or everybody would come out sick. Sick was when you drove the car in neutral. The place she couldn’t get away from was home, the more she left it the worse she was stuck; could not bear to be alone in the house, could not come home at night to an empty house, lived in terror of waking up at night with no one else there. And that had got worse. She was worse now than she had ever been—But I know that, he thought. What’s the good of knowing it? There’s nothing I can do. She hasn’t got anybody but me. You have to have somebody, even if neither of you can do anything. There isn’t anybody else.

He was waiting for Hugh at the corner across from school. “Let’s go watch the track events down at the college practice field,” he said, and Hugh, thirteen, wearing the green shirt he had got yesterday for his birthday, noticed the other kids noticing his dad, a big, fair man, tall and broad-chested, looking good in a jeans jacket gone white at the seams. He had the Ford truck there and they drove down to the college track and watched runners, broad jumpers, pole vaulters in the golden haze of the April afternoon. They talked about the last Olympics, about the techniques of pole vaulting. His dad punched his shoulder gently and said, “You know, Hughie, I have a lot of confidence in you. You know that? I can count on you. You’re steadier than a lot of grown men I know. You keep that way. Your mom’s got to have somebody to depend on. She can depend on you. It means a lot to me, knowing that.” Hugh could not kiss the large, gold-haired hand; the only way men were allowed to touch each other was by hitting. He could not even touch the frayed cuff of the jeans jacket. He sat silent in the sudden blissful sunlight of praise. Next day when he got home from school their neighbor Joanna was there, thin-lipped, in the kitchen; Hugh’s mother was lying down, under sedation; his father had gone off in the Ford truck leaving a note saying he had a job in Canada and thought this was a good time to make the break.

Hugh never saw the note, though Joanna had repeated a couple of phrases from it, such as “a good time to make the break,” and he knew his mother kept it among her papers and photographs in a file box.

He had got lousy grades the rest of that term, because his mother had kept him out of school by any means she had, usually by having a crying jag at breakfast. “I’ll come back, I’m just going to school. I’ll be back at three-thirty,” he would promise. She would cry and beg him to stay with her. When he did stay he did not know what to do with himself but read old comic books; he was afraid to go out and afraid to answer the telephone in case it was the school attendance officer calling; his mother never seemed to be glad to have him there. That summer they had moved for the first time, and she had got a job. Things were always better for a while at first in the new places.

Once she had started working she could cope with daytime all right, and he finished school without any problem. It was the night, the darkness, that she still couldn’t handle, being alone in the dark. So long as she knew he was there she was all right. Who else did she have to depend on?

And what else did he have but his dependability? Anything else he might have thought he was or was worth his father had pretty well devalued by leaving. People don’t leave necessary things, or valuable things. But though he understood well enough what Cheryl had felt like, like shit, that ought to be got rid of, he wasn’t going to do anything about it, as Cheryl had tried to do, because in one respect he was valuable, useful, even necessary: he could be there when his mother needed somebody to be there. He could take his father’s place. Sort of.

When he had to go out for track in spring in tenth grade, he broke his ankle pole vaulting the first day. He was never any good at sports. He got big and tall, but heavy, with soft muscles, soft skin.

“Hey, I’m going to get one of those cute red suits and start running up and down the street too,” Donna said. “Where’s your spare tire gone to, Buck?” He looked down at his belly self-consciously but saw that maybe it did look better than it used to. No wonder, since every morning before work he got in a long fast walk plus something like ten or twelve hours of hiking and swimming and not eating very much. Getting enough food into the evening land was a problem which he solved mainly by going hungry there.

His first explorations farther upstream had been tentative and short. He was afraid of getting lost. He bought a compass and then discovered he did not know how to use it. The needle flittered and veered at every step, and though it seemed most of the time to indicate that north was across the creek (if north was the blue end of the needle) he would need a bit more than that to get back to the gateway clearing if he got deep into the hills upstream. There were no stars or sun to take directions from. What did north mean, here? The trees grew close enough that walking could never be straight for very long, and he found no open viewpoint, no way to get an idea of the lay of the land. So he explored the paths and thickets, hollows, glades, side valleys, hillside springs, windings and turnings of the forest on both sides of the creek upstream from the willow place. He learned that piece of wilderness. He had a lot to learn. He knew nothing about wilderness, woodcraft, plants. Trees with cones were pines. Trees with drooping stringy branches were willows. He knew oaks, there had been a huge oak on the playground of one of his high schools, but none of the trees in this forest looked like it. He got a book on common trees and succeeded in identifying several: ash, maple, vine maple, alder, fir. Everything he saw and all that came under his hand interested and occupied him, here. He thought also about what he did not know and had not seen. How far did the wilderness, the forest, go on? Was there any end to it? He had gone several miles now along the creek and there was no change, no slightest track or sign of mankind. Even the birds and beasts were all but unseen; he followed the faint paths of the deer but never saw one, found sometimes an old bird’s nest fallen, but never, in the changeless time and season and the weather without change, heard an animal cry out, or a bird sing.

The creek, his companion and his guide: what of it? It must join a river, or become a river, downstream, and large or small it must run at last into the sea.

His breath caught. He stared blankly at his fire, his mind held by that thought: the sea that lay beyond the coasts of evening. The darkness to which this living water ran. White breakers in the last of dusk and out beyond them the depths, the night. The night, and all the stars.

So vast and dark was that vision, so terrible the thought of the stars, that when it left him and he looked around again at the familiar rocks, sandbars, trees, branches, leaf patterns of his camping place, everything seemed small and fragile, toylike, and the flat, bright sky was very strange.

He often called the country the evening land in his mind, because of the eternal twilight, but he now thought that name was wrong. Evening is the time of change, the threshold of night.

The soft wind blowing down the valley of the creek roughened the surface of the pool. The vision touched him again: the broad dim step, the threshold land, and this silver stream across it running downward into darkness from what heights, what eastern mountains of unimaginable day?

He sat again bewildered in the twilight, feeling that he had known for a moment why he held that water to be sacred.

“I ought to go on,” he said under his breath. Every now and then he spoke, half aloud, alone; a word or a sentence once in a whole stay.

He had been shaving, and he got on with it. What seemed a day and a night’s worth here might be less than an hour in the daylight world, but his beard kept his time, not the clock’s. It would have simplified life to let the thing grow—though at eighteen he had worried about it, it was thick, vigorous, and brassy now, so that his mother was always telling him he needed to shave—but employees of Sam’s Thrift-E-Mart were not permitted to wear beards. He had had enough hassle about keeping his hair where he liked it, down about to his collar. So the last of his ritual at the willow place, before he packed up and hid his gear, was the shave. Sometimes he heated water, but if his fire had gone out he used cold water, clenched his teeth and scraped away; even then the touch of that water was kindly.

On Saturday night he told his mother he would be gone all Sunday morning on a long hike “in the country.” She complained again about the noise he made getting up early, but was not otherwise interested. He left at five in the morning, with a packet under his arm of expensive dried and freeze-dried food to transfer to his pack. He intended to stay a while in the twilight land, to leave what he knew, to go on.

He had never found but one path that seemed to be a real path or way: the one that led out of the beginning place, directly away from the gateway. He crossed from rock to rock at the ford, went past the dark bushes that the girl had stepped out of, a long time ago now, weeks, and started up the slope out of the valley of the creek. The path climbed, winding a bit but keeping on the axis vertical to the creek, the one direction he hoped to be able to keep. He had found that, even when momentarily disoriented in the woods upstream, if he stopped and let it come to him he had a general sense of where the gateway was—behind him, to the left, over that rise, or whatever—and this sense had not yet played him false. He had no plan now but to keep the gateway directly behind him if he could, and to go on until he was tired of going.

Up on the crest of the ridge the air seemed lighter. On the far slope the trees were tall and sparse, the ground between them open, without underbrush. Faint but clear enough to the searching eye, the path ran straight on down. As he followed it over the ridgetop he lost for the first time the sound of the creek, the voice that blessed his sleep.

He walked for a long way, steadily and rather doggedly, taking some pride and pleasure in his body’s ready endurance. The path grew no clearer but no less clear. Other ways branched off from it, deer trails most likely, but there was never any doubt which was the main one. He knew that if he turned around this path would take him straight back to the beginning place. His sense of where the gateway was seemed almost to sharpen as he went farther from it, as if its psychic law of gravity were the opposite of the physical one.

After crossing a creek somewhat smaller than the gateway creek he sat down near the noisy water and had a bit to eat; when he went on he felt cheerful, resolved to trust his luck.

All the folds of the land ran across his way. The valleys were dim; in the depth of the dimness always there was the voice of a spring or stream. The slopes were not difficult climbing but they got larger and higher as he went on, the upslopes always longer than the downslopes, as if all the land was tilted. When he came to a third big creek he stopped to have a swim, and after swimming decided to call it a day. He liked the phrase. It was perfectly accurate. He could take any piece of time he liked and call it a day; another span and call it night, and sleep it through. He had never (he thought, sitting by the coals of his brushwood fire on the shore of the creek) experienced time before. He had let clocks do it for him. Clocks were what kept things going, there on the other side; business hours, traffic lights, plane schedules, lovers’ meetings, summit meetings, world wars, there was no carrying on without clocks; all the same, clock time had about the same relation to unclock time as a two-by-four or a box of toothpicks has to a fir tree. Here there was no use asking, “What time is it?” because there was nothing to answer for you, no sun saying “Noon” and no clock saying “Seven-thirty-eight and forty-two seconds.” You had to answer the question yourself and the answer was “Now.”

He slept, and dreamed of nothing, and woke slowly, so relaxed he could hardly raise his hand at first.

From this third creek on, the land got rougher. The tilt of it was all up, and the tiny streams now chased downward beside or across the trail. The trail itself was clear. Whoever had made it, whenever it had been made, there was no litter, no sign of any recent passer, but the way was unmistakable, going up easily and purposefully, turning back and forth on the slopes but always heading the same general direction. Its purpose was all he had; he let it lead him. The forest had thickened, massive stands of fir, where the twilight lay heavy. There was no sound but the soughing of wind in the firs, an immense quiet noise. He crossed the small trails of rabbits or mice or other shy wood creatures, once he saw a tiny broken skull near the path, but he saw no living creature. It was as if each here kept its own solitude. The sense of his solitude came on him now as he climbed the long, dim slopes in the unchanging quiet. He saw himself, very small, walking through the wilderness from no place to no place, alone. So he might walk on forever. For the time beyond the clocks is always now and the way to forever is now.

Hunger broke his trance of walking. He stopped to eat; when he went on he felt less dreamy, more alert. The trail now got so steep in places that he leaned forward on both hands to rest, and he felt the mountain press against his hands, the bulk and depth and strength of the earth, her grainy skin rough with rocks and roots. For a long time the trail had been going somewhat left of the gateway axis. Now it turned back towards the axis and leveled out. He could stand straight and walk freely, and the easier rhythm was a relief. The firs crowded thick, high, and dark, the air under them was dark, but as he looked ahead he saw the clear breadth of the trail, almost a road here. And in the dry air he caught, once, once again, the faint scent of woodsmoke.

Now he walked steadily, alert, intent.

The road swung in a long rising curve, on and on. The slopes to the right below it steepened and began to drop away so sharply that the trees below the road no longer blocked the view. He could for the first time in this land see for a long way. He saw that he was on the side of a mountain. To his right and ahead, beyond a falling sweep of treetops, the rim of a farther mountain stood dark against the clarity of sky. He walked on more slowly, a little dazed, feeling himself as if floating between the vast, obscure valleys and the vast gulfs of the sky. He looked along the road as it turned again, and saw nestled against the mountain shoulder the roofs and chimneys of a town, the gleam of a lighted window in the cold dusk. There was home, and he walked towards it, and came down the street between the lamp-lit windows, hearing a child’s voice calling words he did not understand.