W

  P.S.! (And never has the world known such a postscript!) Ah, Erasmus. Brought this, my letter, to the post, only to find yours waiting. Snatched mine back from the postman, horrified at my indiscretion, for suddenly I was certain I would find some quiet note signed by you and Clara thanking us politely for our hospitality. Shame instantaneous—how close I had come to betraying myself with feverish ramblings!

  Went outside—I was trembling and didn’t want anyone else to see me. Read your letter standing there in the middle of the street, twice nearly run down by carriages. Read it again—there was no world left beyond your words. Let the critics debate your greatest poems, for me there will be none other than your letter. In answer, I enclose the above, written at my desk, while you wrote at yours.

  To put a reply to your query: in one week’s time, Katherine will take the children to Albany to spend the final days of September with her mother, and I will be alone.

  September 29

  Friend, I send this in haste, for you have just left, but there is still so much I feel that I must tell you. The world is of a different color today—azurite sky, canary sun, tumbling streams of malachite. Van Eyck has painted my leaves, the green moss wears a sheen of gold, and even pewter gleams like silver. I wish to stop each long-faced citizen and grab him by his shoulders and shake him, demand that he look around and marvel at the trees, the blue stone, the white cusping on the river. Whence come you, Erasmus? How is that I have been granted such a benediction? The blanket which we brought with us will go unlaundered for as long as I can hide it from Annie without suspicion. Twice on the road I brought it to my face to inhale your memory. I had thought the Falls a sacred space enough without your presence. Now I fear that I might betray myself by shaking hand and reddening throat, should I take another visitor there. All questions about impossibilities vanish, shame vanishes, never has life been clearer. The necessary duplicities we spoke of seem but trifles, and earthly ones, and easily solved. For aren’t all men, to some degree, liars? In sum: I can live like this, and if I must endure the distance, it is as one can live through winter knowing spring will come.

  P.S.—You have left a jacket.

  October 3

  My Dear Friend, In haste, pseudonym to pseudonym. The peril you describe concerning Clara’s near discovery of my letters drew me up short. To think that I have risked everything fills me with remorse. I should have learned this after my own close call with Willa’s buttery fingers, back in that time before this madness struck us both. Write back to me care of G——, at his tavern. He is discreet, will suspect a dalliance, make some winking joke about a Boston maid, but cherishes his reputation as a keeper of secrets.

  Anon, W

  October 10

  Dear Friend,

  Received your letter of the 8th. How kind of the Muses to grant you inspiration. Hope your writing me does not arouse their envy—I am not certain what they think of works with audiences of only one. I, of course, am grateful, flattered to think that I might have played a role in the “poems of friendship” you are writing, but you know that the genius is your own.

  Here there is nothing but splendor. You have lit a fire beneath me and made me feel, if for an instance, that I am equal to the gauntlet thrown down by these woods. For how, indeed, to capture this? Gone the slow and cautious gilding of the birches, the faint yellowing of the sugar maples, this inching into autumn: no, now the forest plunges headlong into it. Yesterday it was the hornbeam, today the chestnut—I’d hate to see her tailor’s bills. There are times I’m sitting in my glen (our glen), before my river (our river), and I am certain that the low beech who drops her branch across my vision has changed her hue over the course of minutes. That the high maple behind me blushes more deeply, that the little rim of fire had spread a little further around the scalloped feathers of that oak. Ha! I want to shout at them. I saw you. It is like a game I used to play with O when she was very little, when she would slink from hiding place to hiding place, moving very slowly, as if this meant I wouldn’t see. But I do see. There is a way-faring tree who greeted me this morning clothed in crimson, and yet, as the day went on, revealed a distinct purpling. I caught my breath when I first saw it happen: one leaf and then, above, a second, and then, at once, the rest. Began the morning cursing at the limits of my cinnabar, only to discover that what I needed was a deeper blue.

  In sum: I can’t keep up. I had sworn to myself that I wouldn’t paint any more from sketches: no more winters troubling over autumn’s memory. But this was a conceit of summer, when the days seem to pause for a moment in their cloaks of green. But the sun doesn’t slow for the painter of sunsets, so why should my woods? Might you find, somewhere in your city, some Hindoo-god of a contraption, of a thousand arms and thousand brushes with which, by means of some many-jointed lever, I might capture all I wish? Yesterday, I was but a stone’s throw from the house when I found a parade of little mushrooms, rising from the leaf-fall. Easily overlooked at first, but upon closer inspection, creatures of such a pale blue as I have only seen in alpine waters. Had I been painting, locked up in my room, I would have missed them, for by afternoon they had begun to blanch, and by nightfall, were as white as brides, with lacy veils descending from their caps. Death and the maiden—by morning they were gone.

  Such is my predicament—it is all happening too fast. Yes, it will come around again, next year, and after that again. But one feels the lurching of the minute hand. I propose a new calendar: not one autumn but twelve, a hundred. The autumn when the birches are yellow but still have their leaves; when the beeches are green but the birch leaves have fallen; when the oaks tint to the color of ripe apricots and the beeches yellow; when the oaks turn a cigar brown and the beeches curl up into crispy copper rolls. And so on: I’ve missed a few. But to call it all just “autumn”!

  P writes again, asking if I am progressing, if I have anything new. Dashed off a letter that I now fear was a bit flippant, but I will paint what I paint and not answer to their bully whips.

  Almost forgot: yesterday, O, playing in the orchard after the rain, turned up what seemed to be the head of an old hoe. And to think that, in all its shifting, the earth decides to offer this up now. Which of my ghosts? Alice? Mary? Dull old Nehemiah? I’d like to think that even he wasn’t immune to the charms of the place—perhaps he took old Prosper up to the falls and let her feel the rumbling of it. Bathed up there, rubbed the ice in his armpits, and splashed snowmelt on his chest until, one day, the heart couldn’t take it anymore and he pitched gloriously over into the stream, where he’s been dissolving ever since.

  That’s how we’ll go: heart to heart, thump thump, churn around each other like wood shrimp in the tumbling water, deliquesce, and flavor the tea.

  WHT

  October 24

  Dear Friend,

  Katherine again to Albany. Annie in Boston with her sister, who is ill. You, cursed you, have returned to other claimants. Solitude here, ’mongst boughs pavillion’d. Prefer, of course, the highest bliss. November 5—your promise, blood-sworn. With this knowledge I can take my stand and endure the crucible of time.

  Still giddy. Nature doing her best to draw me into her cloak of melancholy, but I have the memory of my friend. A week of cold wind: days when I must bind myself in blankets, when the paint is too cold to spread. Wander, then. Over the logs, fungus-feathered like turkeys, the moss where we once pressed our silhouettes. On a flat blue stone, a pair of beetles, even darker blue, and iridescent as cantharides—so absorbed in flagrant delectation that they ignored me as I lifted them. Farther: an old ash, dead, wearing its loose bark like an écorché figure that holds his own flayed skin.

  The frogs seem to have vanished. I might go on, but am exhausted from a night spent yearning.

  November 5.

  Write.

  WHT

  P.S.—Last apple of the season—my consolation. And a mystery: a worm hole leads in but not out of it. What am I to make of this? Do they follow their own trail in exit? Transform into the very apple’s flesh?

  November 4

  E—very well—I understand. I am prisoner to the calendar: the 15th, then. Will wait, will ever wait. You can come—Katherine will be back here, but she will think nothing odd of your needing some country air. Still miles of country where we can be alone.

  W

  November 12

  N—another note, to your home address, as I am not certain that my prior letter reached you. Greetings to Clara and the children. First snows here. The beeches and oaks have yet to lose all their leaves, and the sight of the white snow on the brown and red is exquisite—am working on a smaller canvas trying to capture what I mean. My family joins me in extending an invitation—even if the color is gone, I think that you will find much to inspire you in your new work. All are invited, though if Clara cannot join you, you are welcome to come yourself.

  WHT

  November 16

  E—fear I have said something wrong. Please come. Please write.

  WHT

  November 21

  Walking in the woods yesterday after a rain, I found myself before the silver stump of a fallen birch, whose smooth skin and two tapering roots looked so much like the torso of a statue that it took my breath away. Suddenly I understood what it must have been like for the young Greek shepherd whose wandering flocks turned up the abandoned pelvis of a marble Venus, and who, for one blessed moment in his life, before he whispers his secret at the tavern, before the world converges on his little wood, has her to himself.

  November 30

  Dear Friend,

  I do not expect a reply. You are aware of my situation. Katherine has gone to Albany to be with her mother. I will remain here, with my ferns and my mountain. No words to describe the tears, the fury—truly, I hadn’t thought her capable of it. Nothing can placate her, despite my insistence that what I have with her and what I had with you exist on different planes. She would be my wife always, never did I think otherwise, never did I hope to cause such pain. Oh, but whom am I arguing with! Will you convince her, Nash? You are banned, you know this. The threat is very clear—your career will be ruined, and so your life. I suspect mine already is—career that is; I will live on—but the more I think about it, I think my career ended when I came here, stopped painting for them, and truly tried to see. But you are too great for the world to lose you. Oh, the dream circles me that you might give up the accolades of men and come here, vanish with me among my fugitive leaves. But you are made of something different—the world needs you, not only I. Such is my justification, though I know I have been left without a choice. Sadness, only.

  So: no scandal, no pleading. I will follow at a distance, and content myself with the knowledge that one day I might find myself within your pages. Should in the future, on a pleasure trip to these mountains, your carriage pass my port side, have no fear: I promise I will look to starboard. I ask only one thing. If your harridan wife has not destroyed my letters, I humbly request that you return them to me, as I here return yours. There are things there I wish to hide from the world and recall only to myself.

  WHT

  Five

  NOT to his daughter, for she knows his secret had been kept from her deliberately. Not to her sister in Boston, for she would be disgusted by the sin, condemn his memory for its godlessness. Not to her family back on the island, too distant. Not to her friends—though there are so few now—for they wouldn’t understand what love had driven her to do. Not to his neighbors, for he has a right to be remembered as the person he pretended. Not to the priest—oh God, no. Not to the sad, stumbling Oakfield drunks, whom she imagines as more understanding, but less discreet.

  Not to William, for he cannot answer. Though she dreams he answers. Though it is his forgiveness that she needs.

  Late December, and she haunts the house he left her. Rises in the morning and walks its rooms, its stairs and corridors, opens doors, just looking. Ghosts everywhere. She senses them, knows that there is no such thing.

  Sometimes seeks his presence.

  William, are you there?

  Is that you, William? I saw the curtains shifting, I heard rustling. Just say so, and I’ll tell you everything, I will explain.

  Just a signal.

  Puff of vapor on the mirror.

  Dent in the pillow.

  A word.

  But the whole house breathes, always has. Creaks and tilts. Cracks and whispers with the cold.

  A whole chorus, but in none of it is him.

  In the mornings, she walks outside, where once they walked together. Wears his jacket, his scarf, his mittens. The snow knee-deep in places, but it doesn’t stop her. Before, she carried the two of them through worse.

  She goes because it is the only place where she can bear his absence. Because the cold, the treacherous path: they make their own demands, distract her from her secret. Two secrets: his and hers.

  Everywhere the tracks of little animals, the deep steps of the deer. The snow renders their passage legible, reveals the long night’s silent maps.

  Would they listen, the animals? She smiles ruefully, imagines the chipmunk scolding from his oak confessional. The gossiping chickadees. The wolf’s summary revenge.

  No.

  Not to mouse or marten. Not to the river. Not to the earth.

  But maybe?

  Stops there in the forest, and looks about her. Then she’s on her knees, digging into the snow until she strikes the moss beneath it. Throws off her mittens, digs again. When she hits the frozen earth, she grabs a stick and scrapes the gravel, the fine roots. Black loam crumbles. Deeper now. Until she can press her face into the hole.

  Inhales it, the sweet, cold smell of moss and soil. Whispers into it and feels the warmth of her breath rise back to her. Looks down to where she’ll bury it, and then presses her mouth into the hollow and begins to speak.

  * * *

  She had come to work for him after his seventy-fifth birthday, when he had fallen on the road outside his house and fractured his leg.

  She was fifty-four. Temporary was what the daughter told her. Temporary assistance in matters of everyday life.

  House a bit run down too, could use some tidying up.

  Three hours by train and another by sleigh, and she had never been more than ten miles from the ocean. No other help, the daughter told her, besides his neighbor, Lund, who did odd jobs and brought his meals.

  December, and already snow across the country. Many reasons to say No.

  Yes.

  Because her niece’s family was growing, had no space left for their spinster aunt.

  Because her last client had passed away that autumn and she felt she was no longer necessary to the world.

  Because there was no returning to the Azores, to that hunger.

  Because of something in the daughter’s story. A painter, once renowned, until he disappeared into the woods alone. Something in the life that needed answering. Something in his solitude which reminded her of her own.

  She arrived there one week later, snow-dusted, smelling of the bearskin blanket on the sleigh.

  He up in his room, tall and pale, with a sparse white beard. Nails untrimmed, brace on his right leg beneath the sheets. The sharp shin of the left.

  His hair matted to his head by sleep-sweat. A pair of ladybugs upon the hand that lay outside the blanket, at first she thought they were two drops of blood. She looked over at the daughter.

  A temporary assistance?

  For she’d nursed the old for twenty-seven years, knew the leg was just the culmination of a chain of troubles, a waypoint on a road he would have continued down had she not come. When she shaved his beard that night, she found a face of such fine, translucent flesh, she felt as if she held his skull.

  He was knobbly-elbowed, rail-chested, and scars showed pearly over his heart and flank. Low on his coccyx, she found the pink sheen of an impending ulcer. How long had they let him languish? If the skin had given way, there would be no turning back.

  And outside, grey deer, blue snow.

  And the house, the tumble, the mazy skein of its rooms.

  The beds dusty, spotted with mouse droppings.

  The ashy, unemptied hearths, the sooted lamps.

  Four roofs, ten fireplaces, eighteen rooms, and all but three abandoned. The rest filled by his life of scavenging. Strips of bark and withered clumps of fungus. Bones of animals. Piles of porcupine quills. Dried grey tufts of goldenrod, cracked pods of milkweed, fern fronds, jars with insect specimens. Antlers, turtle shells, and bird eggs, lined up along the mantelpieces: lemon yellow, blue, and charcoal black.

  And stones by the hundreds, and feathers by the hundreds, and the gourds. Birds’ nests on the shelves, and branches everywhere, great piles of bark. Walnuts chiseled by the squirrels, each with the same exquisite butterfly design.

  And the daughter, as if sensing the question: they were studies for his paintings.

  As if this could explain why he’d kept them, why he didn’t throw them out.

  Was it then that she had fallen in love with him? Presented, as she was, so instantly, with the evidence of her necessity?

  Or had it happened later that December, when she’d taken him outside to feel the falling snow against his face?

  Or January, when he’d yielded to her nagging, and allowed her to gather up the old leaves from his shelves? When he mentioned, gently, as if in passing, the children’s sleigh beneath the clutter in the barn. When she hauled it out and set him on it, pushed him to the meadow, where they could look back on the house.