The Diary Man, continued

He put the pedometer back in his watch pocket. He studied the notebook again. "There’s a practical reason as well as the record of the distance I walk. I’m studying glacial phenomena around here, and I can measure the distance between, say, this striated ledge and another over on that ridge. Or I can go back a certain distance and be where I found something."

"How do you mean?"

"I could go back to the place I was on Tuesday, the eighth." He turned a page of the notebook. He looked me straight in the eyes again, testing. "I found a granite outcropping with quartz crystals."

"Honest? I’ve seen veins of quartz but never crystals."

"I chiseled them out and took them home. I’ll show you when we get back, if you like."

This offer made me inordinately happy and excited. I said, "You bet I’d like to see them."

From reading and from tales of prospectors, I associated quartz and gold. A few years before, a woodsman named Mose Williams had blown himself up dynamiting for gold out on Quartz Mountain. Maybe he had been sober instead of drunk as everyone said. Maybe he had known something nobody else could find.

When we reached Eddie’s house on the edge of the village, he took me past the barn and across the yard to the long shed that was his father’s carpentry shop. We were alone in the bench-lined room with its smell of pine shavings and varnish. Eddie opened a padlocked chest on one of the benches. I looked in and saw box after box of rock samples neatly tagged. I saw a large notebook, a handbook of rocks and minerals in red binding, a mason’s hammer, chisel, and drill.

Eddie took out a little cardboard box and showed me a cluster of white quartz crystals. They gleamed dull yet exciting, mysteriously six-sided.

The notion of treasure in the earth brought Eddie and me together more than the snowshoes had done. It lasted two years. We were cocky enough to doubt our parents and other adults who said that the town had been explored for minerals back to Revolutionary times, and there was only a scattering, and some old pit mines for mica. We hiked and camped around the hills and small mountains east of the river. After I was sixteen and had my driver’s license, I could borrow the old Dodge that my father kept for fishing and hunting.

We traveled through the White Mountains, mostly in the foothills, to old mines and diggings. Eddie always carried his pocket notebook. We camped out a lot. We slept on balsam boughs under a piece of canvas stretched between trees. Windy rain sometimes soaked our blankets. We protected ourselves from insects by applying a stinky fly dope with a pine tar base. I often caught trout. In the evenings I would cook them with bacon in an old frying pan, and boil potatoes in an empty lard pail. Eddie would transfer by firelight or candlelight the information from his pocket notebook into a daybook and diary. He had a trick of punching a hole in the side of a tin can with his jackknife and inserting a candle and lighting it. The shiny inside of the can threw a spot of light on his daybook. We had a flashlight, but he wanted to save the batteries.

We got along well. I accepted him, while tentatively understanding that his driving interest I would have no urge to match, that his single-minded pursuit of an idea would be far beyond my estimate of its importance. I thought I gave in to him a lot. He was, in matters he considered serious, a loner. He did what he wanted, in a pleasant way, but stubborn. If I had learned of an old mine, and he had heard of one, we went to his first or he went alone.

Before long our interests diverged. I would dig over mine dumps looking for minerals, or I’d creep about ledges in search of crystals. Then I’d go fishing in the nearest pond. Or if we were on a stream, I would catch some trout and then try panning for gold. I never found any. Eddie was more interested in the formations of the earth’s crust, in the combinations and origins of stones and outcroppings. He would study glacial deposits in gravel banks. He would travel miles through the woods alone on foot seeking the limits of strange rock formations.

Of course, his lack of knowledge hindered him, and this began to haunt him, as though he might never rid himself of this failing or weakness. He read all the books he could find. He longed to go to college. Our separation began the summer I had graduated from high school, and Eddie still had another year.

He found a regular job. I don’t know how, in that Depression year of 1932. He worked at a hotel golf course near Mount Washington. He slept in a board cabin with three other boys. He mowed the golf course by tractor and the greens by hand mower. He saved most of his wages for college. I drove up to see him once, and found him at the garage near the golf course, tarring the slanted flat roof with a long-handled brush and a pail of black asphalt. He said he went rock hunting on his day off. He asked me to come up and go with him. I had discovered that rock hunting couldn’t compare with girls. I made some wise remark—"wise” was what we called it then, meaning impudent—to the effect that my presence would interfere with his taking along one of the waitresses. He looked unblinking at me. Exposure to the sun had tanned his face dark brown, and he was sweating up there on the roof. He said, "I won’t get caught by that trap.” A ribald reply from me also failed to amuse him.

A few years later, I had second thoughts about our respective attitudes toward girls. I was living in Boston with a wife and a baby son, and finding my days in an uncle’s bank hardly all I had dreamed about, such as becoming a world traveler and foreign correspondent. Eddie was working for his master’s degree in geology at a university out West.

In the honored tradition of those years in our state, I had gone to Dartmouth with the rich boys, and Eddie had gone to the University of New Hampshire with the poor boys. He applied himself. I didn’t. He was reaching for that knowledge the lack of which had haunted him. I eased into an English major, saying that liberal arts must not be expected to prepare you to earn a living. I learned later that it certainly enriches your life, although I doubt whether that has anything to do with Eddie. Still, maybe it has. I’ve come to doubt my doubts.

Let’s say I followed the route of least resistance. I went to work for my uncle because I had no money of my own and wanted to marry Sarah, which I did. She wanted a baby, and I didn’t mind. When the war came, the thing to do seemed to be to enlist in the navy. After the war my job in the bank was waiting for me.

Eddie took the hard way of driving himself: hard work at his studies, hard work to earn his way, hard work in the field after he became a member of expeditions into the Canadian bush. During the war he specialized in oil explorations connected with our national emergency. I think he devised some new techniques. Then he was in Alaska, South America, the Middle East. He seemed to be all over the map. He sent me cards regularly, and sometimes short concise letters, although I could scarcely recall when we had last talked together.

Years passed, and I never saw him, but I carried thoughts of him as part of my life equipment, the way you do about a long-time friend. I came to envy him his travels, his success, his varied interests all over the world. I would commute into Boston from our home in the suburb of Winchester, and I would think of him free from the deadly rat race in which I found myself.

I envied him, later, when he bought a house in our hometown and remodeled it and moved in with his young blond wife, his son, and his daughter. The children seemed impossibly young to me. He had been almost forty when he married. Billy was blond, chubby and pink-cheeked, sensitive and easily moved to tears, but usually deliberate and calm like his mother, for Myra’s beauty was largely emphasized by her composed personality. Myra was the sort of woman who can arrange flowers with a touch. As for the daughter, Rachel was brown-haired and cool-eyed, like Eddie, and she expressed his intensity of concentration when she sewed dresses for her dolls.

I discovered all this when I went to Houghton to visit my folks. Eddie and I had a good reunion one evening, and I drank too much. I had walked to his house along the familiar streets, under the old trees. He drove me home in his quietly expensive foreign car.

I continued to see very little of him.

We did go rock hunting one summer, for old time’s sake, not in an ancient Dodge but in his Land Rover. The excitement eluded me. Instead I felt quietly happy, with only a slight pang at realizing only the aura lingered from our youthful adventures. Besides, I had forgotten most of the geological terms. Eddie had learned hundreds more.

We camped by an abandoned mica mine in a green hardwood forest near a pond. I went fishing for trout. Eddie set off rock hunting, or prospecting—whatever it should be called when done by a rich, successful geologist and oil man—mine owner, for all I knew.

He came back with beryl crystals from up on the mountain. That evening at the campfire, he made notes about his find, just as he used to. The beryl crystals could be of no importance to him anymore; to record his doings was still his obsession, or now had become a powerful habit. Somehow I felt I was part of this long continuity of his. I sat against a tree smoking my pipe, sometimes slapping at a mosquito. I was full of trout and rum and contentment. I found pleasure in Eddie’s company and in our shared past. I was at other campfires in other days."You know," said Eddie, "I’m thinking of hiring a secretary. Have her type up all these diaries and workbooks. Publish them at my own expense. I’ve used everything of scientific value in them, but as I get older, they seem to mean more personally."

"You always did like to make a record of your doings. Remember the hen pen?"

"I’ll never forget it." He gave the snort and cough that had come to represent his laugh. "I went down there one day, a few years back when I was visiting the folks. Saw the dates and everything, still there, kind of dark and dusty, but I could read them—except about Punk.” He laughed again. "Gave me a lot of satisfaction," he admitted.

"Sure, I bet it did." My words lacked the enthusiasm I intended, for his return to the hen pen seemed to me silly and sentimental. Yet because I had a sense of the years past, and of the boy with the jackknife making his first unconscious refusal of oblivion, I added, "It must have been a good experience."

""It was," he said, "but it got to me a little, thinking of how long ago it had been, yet I could still read those carvings. And after a minute it seemed like yesterday." He put more wood on the fire. "Another thing I did, recently that is—well, you know Billy’s growing up. I wanted to show him where I’d been as a kid. I thought I’d show him the beech trees I carved. I should have known better. The woods had been cut over, logged. No beech trees with my carving on them. So I took Billy over that hill where the old Norris farm used to be—the place where you and I fooled around one afternoon tying loops in the young pines that had seeded into the pasture." "I remember.”

"Well, it seemed quite a walk for Billy, though only two and one half miles by my pedometer. I don’t think I had taken him in the woods more than three times, not really hiking, and he kept making comments about the bushes and the bugs. He tripped over logs and stones. Anyway, I found the pines, part of a forest, for gosh sakes, big around as my leg now. Bigger. I had Billy climb one, and I took his picture sitting on the loop, He wasn’t much impressed. I wish he’d go out in the woods more. Like we used to. That was a good boyhood, the one we had, you know it?"

"Sure was," I agreed.

"Long time ago. Longer than we think, you know that?"

"More than just years."

"That’s what I mean." He paused. "Not that I pretend to understand it. Nor my kids.”

"What are you talking about? You’ve been right in the middle of new discoveries, new developments. You’ve traveled all over the world. You know all kinds of people.”

"Just the same,” Eddie said slowly, pointing at the flames in front of him, "that fire still lights my notebook for me. I have six new flashlights and two propane lanterns at home, but you know, I left them there on purpose. Know why? I wanted to try the firelight again. I’ve seen change. I’ve caused some. But I don’t know about progress. Sometimes I get out my old diaries. I read them over. I feel more of a person afterward. They tie me together into a whole man.”

"Lucky you.”

"Yes, I’m fortunate to have them. I’m glad I kept them all these years.” He leaned over and pushed together the fire, which had burned down. It was a way he had. He picked up the charred sticks by the unburned ends and placed them on the red coals so they flared again. "But it’s all very—” he hesitated, "very transient. The diaries capture it and hold it for me. Of course, for other people, I hope, after I’m gone.”

I didn’t know what to say.

This camping trip was the last for several years.

I saw some changes myself. My folks died. Surprisingly saddened, for we had grown far apart, and they were old and sick, I found myself shaken by my new role as quarry of pursuing time and extinction—nobody in back of me anymore—a loneliness incomprehensible before their deaths.

With the money I inherited, I decided to live a new life while I could. I gave up my job at the bank. I paused to look around me—felt bewildered, and moved to the old house in Houghton. Just Sarah and me. Our son was grown and married, and we were grandparents.

That summer late—it must have been August, for Sarah and I had been busy moving and fitting into village life, adjusting ourselves and finally enjoying ourselves—Eddie returned from an extended trip with Myra. He wanted to make another excursion fishing and rock hunting. I told him it would have to be something easy for me, no backpacking up mountain trails nor sleeping on the ground. So we camped at the end of a logging road close to his new Land Rover, beside a brook. We put up a comfortable big tent to shelter the air mattresses.

Eddie talked again that evening by the campfire, after he had made his notes. He had aged to gray hair. He had the sinewy arms of a tough old man. I was made doubly aware of my own bald head and arthritic joints. He talked about his son and daughter. Billy couldn’t settle down after his service in Vietnam. He worked at odd jobs, got himself fired once or twice, went away to college.

"We didn’t hear from him for a long time,” Eddie said. "But after all, we knew from Vietnam he wasn’t a frequent letter-writer. Then we kept sending him things he liked—canned nuts, salted you know, and candy and snacks like anchovies. He’d acknowledge those. Myra used to do the packaging. To make sure the weight was right, she’d put the package on the pink baby scale she weighed Billy on when he was a baby. I bought her a different scale. I couldn’t stand to see her use the other. Well, he came back from Vietnam, and now he isn’t in college at all but traveling around the West with his wife and calling home for money every so often. I don’t understand it. A wife, no job.”

Eddie went through his fire-tending routine. "And Rachel...Rachel’s living with a bearded hippie in Boston and experimenting with drugs, I’m afraid.”

Billy and Rachel were younger than my son, I was aware, but Eddie seemed to be telling me of a different generation. Perhaps he was; perhaps they were. Kids have changed that much in a few years. He said finally that he had hoped for grandchildren. Billy was to have a vasectomy after his wife’s abortion. Rachel was going to have a tubal ligation. No grandchildren for Eddie.

I turned the talk to his diaries. He had put off hiring a secretary and having them typed and published, but he had been looking them over the other night after his return. Did I remember...

We talked for a long time there beside the fire. Something was different. After the second day, we drove back down the mountain.

Eddie always was a neat man, as he had been a neat boy, in his person, in his habits, and as much as possible in his surroundings. The mahogany desk in his study could have been from a room preserved after the death of a famous man. There were filing cabinets, cases of minerals, shelf upon shelf of books, and the diaries year by year—all catalogued.

His house outside was always painted fresh white, the lawn trimmed, the garden in rows. During the wnter, even the snow paths were cut through the drifts straight and sheer, as he had trained the neighbor’s boy to make them with the snowblower. Eddie liked to do much of this work himself.The next spring he was tidying up the grounds by burning weed patches and old grass. Safe enough; the earth still held dampness from melting snow. Hardly a breath of air stirred the blue sky or cooled the warm sunlight. I remember because I went out to dig in our garden. I had taken off my jacket, but I put it on again when the wind came up chill, in the way that Robert Frost noted about springtime in New Hampshire. I remember because I waved to Eddie and Myra as they drove past, going for a ride on that lovely day.

Some time after, I heard the fire siren wailing its summons to our volunteer fire department.When I reached Eddie’s house flames had erupted through the roof, which seemed about to collapse or be wafted away on the tremendous updraft of fire. Our giant chief, Ben Bowman, lunged out the front door with his arms around Eddie, whose feet dangled limply. Ben walked toward the road and gently placed Eddie on the grass beside a fire truck.

I went to him. He lay gasping, stared at me as I bent over him, burst out, "They’re gone!” Then shaking his head, "Where am I?” Sitting up, choking, coughing, sooty face, singed eyebrows. "Who am I?”

But he recovered quickly enough and directed the men in saving the barn with hoses from the pond at the dam in the brook. The house smouldered to a charred shell sagging around the brick chimneys. The sun was going down.

After a while, about dusk, when there was nothing to be done, I prevailed on Eddie and Myra to come to our house. He had been talking of rooms at the inn until he could rebuild. Then he seemed to have no more to say. He nodded, and with Myra, got into his car and followed me home.

He continued distant and silent at our house. I saw no need to attempt to draw him from himself. He had taken a shower and dressed in a shirt and slacks of mine, and slippers. We were seated in the living room. Sarah had gone upstairs with Myra, whose reaction had been exhaustion. I noticed Eddie looking around him, an inquiring look on his face as though he had not seen the room lately. The room had remained essentially the same as when my folks lived there. He must remember it.

Finally he said, motioning about him, "These are mostly your folks’ things, aren’t they?”

"Yes. The couch is new.”

"I like this room,” he said. "You know, I wish I’d kept my folks’ house when they moved to Florida. Don’t have anything of theirs, not like this. They passed away before yours did, and I was young enough not to care about the old place—except those boards in the hen pen. I pried them loose and stored them in my attic. Believe it or not. I must be some kind of nut.” He looked at me quietly a moment. "You like living here, don’t you?”

"Sure do.” I was tired. I had a whiskey. Eddie declined, as he usually did.

Sarah came back from seeing to Myra. "Sound asleep. How about soup and sandwiches for supper?”

We ate a little, and soon after, we went to bed. I offered Eddie a sleeping pill, but he shook his head. I took one myself.

In the morning I rose early as was my custom, and went to the eastern window. There had been a frost, perhaps the last of the spring, and I could see it white on the porch roof where the sun had not yet reached it, and on the shadowed section of the asphalt driveway, where Eddie walked along toward the garage. He moved slowly. His feet dragged. His hands hung at his sides.

He went into the garage, walking below the overhead doors that my father had installed when he remodeled the building from the stable it had been in the old days. I kept a sort of workshop and toolroom in the section where I first remembered stalls as a boy—although my father never kept horses; he drove then a slant-front Franklin, later the Dodge, which he kept for fishing, then a Packard.

Eddie came out of the garage. I saw a hammer in one hand—a heavy mason’s hammer, and a stone-cutting chisel he must have found among my rock hunting equipment, which I hadn’t touched since our last camping trip.

He walked toward the flower garden. There were shrubs, and paths, and a sundial, and a birdbath, two rustic seats by the evergreen hedge, and a big round boulder. Sarah and I had raked away the winter mulch of leaves from the flower beds, but I had not yet hauled them to the compost heap, and they lay in brown rows on the grass. I thought we had uncovered the perennials too early, and I hoped the frost had not hurt the tender green shoots.

I noticed a change in Eddie’s actions and, probably, in his mood. I saw the precise walk, the determined carriage, the trim posture. Arms swinging, he stepped out toward the big boulder.

He began to chisel at the boulder. He knelt down and drove the hammer against the head of the chisel. I could hear through the open window the ting-spat, ting-spat, combining the steel-on-steel and the steel-on-rock.

The odd thing was I felt no concern. I knew what he was doing—making a record. I could imagine the date, and I supposed he would square the nine as he had learned with the jackknife. I wondered what he would put after the date. I ent into the bathroom to shave. I dressed. I went out to the garden.

Eddie was kneeling there in the sun on the grass in front of the boulder. He looked very gray. The hammer and chisel lay beside him. I read, as I had thought, the figures and letters for that month and year.

He turned slowly toward me, flexing his hands together as though his fingers ached. We both looked at the boulder.

He said, "Hope you don’t mind.”

"Not at all. What are you going to chisel in after the date?”

He looked at me from those brown eyes, cautious, observant.

"Nothing,” he said.