CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
I didn't need to run.
The forest is damp, fragrant, and would be completely silent but for Seamus. I could've found him blindfolded. Either he only knows how to walk noisily, which I suspect is the case, or he isn't trying not to. But it's clear he has no idea he's being followed. In the dark just behind him I time my steps to his, unnecessarily, quiet as brushing leaves, while he crashes around, loses his way, holds up the lantern, finds it again. The lantern bobbles crazily. Swathes of his body light up: a stumbling leg, one half of his jaw, one ear.
Whomever he's meeting out here must be expecting him. Clearly it's not something or someone he fears, as he's incapable of sneaking up on anything. He's just walking through the woods at night and having a fair amount of trouble over it. Not too fast, not slow, not in a hurry but also not dallying. But who is it?
Of course there are girls in the village. But which of them would agree to wait in the belly of Harthome's haunted forest at midnight for the embrace of a penniless groundskeeper? So who else? Or what else? An errand? If he wanted to hide something he needn't come this far to do it, and anyhow his hands are empty but for the lantern. To receive something? A gift? What sort of transaction requires this late-night journey?
Something in the set of his shoulders shows me he's tense. Nothing in these woods to be afraid of, I think. So far we've passed a badger and some rabbits. That's all that's left here now. Wolves, bears, boars; they were all hunted away centuries ago; the only fearsome thing remaining is skulking just behind him, wringing its hands and worrying. If it's only a girl, I say to myself, I'll turn around, but if it is a gift I want a few words with the giver.
And if it is just some dalliance, I tell myself, remember that the next time he's putting his hand on you. But even as this jealousy whispers through me I recognize its sorry childishness and pause, chilled by myself and by my own futility.
Ducking under a branch, I pass through a fine veil that adheres to my face. A spiderweb. In that moment, standing eyes closed while I wipe the web out of my lashes, listening to the furor of him crashing ahead, what it is that he's afraid of becomes suddenly, laughably obvious: he's scared because he's been told of the monster in the forest. He should be, I think to myself, it's right behind him.
The night wind lifts up from the sea and shakes the canopy around and somewhere high above us a low groan begins, the creak of two fallen trees resisting each other. He stops dead still and raises the lantern, his head tilting back, hair falling away from the part. Then, slowly, he turns. I am caught. There's nothing to do but take it. I stand perfectly still myself and watch his turning face light up but for the dark hollows under his brow ridge, my eyes on them, watch his shoulders square to mine, watch the lantern swing gently from his raised hand, to and fro.
Then his face flickers upward and he scans the top of the trees again. As his chin raises his Adam's apple juts out sharply from his throat. It bobs as he swallows. Somehow he hasn't seen me, though I'm near enough that, should he throw the rock I can now see clutched in his left hand, he'd hit me square.
He lowers the lantern, mutters something to himself, turns back around, and I let my breath out. That he overlooked me is unbelievable. For a moment I wonder if it could be possible that he cannot see well in the dark. Or it could be that his eyes passed right over me, not believing that what they just saw- me, hunting him through the night- was true.
He starts off again, and after a pause I follow him.
.
Even if I didn't hear the frogs' piping I would know where we are by the smell, especially now as the gumdrop tang of blackberries gives way to a dank yellow murk. I had an idea he'd be heading out to the far meadow for whatever sort of tryst this is and so I'm surprised when he stops short. Here, out of anywhere? Under my feet the earth is spongy, springing up around my boots, and the grass hitting my calves is dense and reedy. A white willow- half a willow, really, one side split away and blackened by old lightning- looms massive and ghostly in the lantern light and it's this he walks up to, stepping high in the marsh, to hang the lantern against its jagged trunk.
Here we are, then, at the pond where I swim in the summers. Where I played when I was a boy. The water was always, always cold no matter how hot the day, and because it was not all that far from the house it was not forbidden. I loved it. And best of all, at the pond's silty bottom swam little, silvery, delicious fish. These I would catch with my hands and contentedly eat whole, sitting on the bank and spitting out the minuscule bones, until the afternoon Jepson caught me at it. He took off his belt and I had my first and last whipping. It was terrible. I could neither get away from him nor understand why I was being beaten. Afterward he hauled me, fighting wildly, up to the house and deposited me with Agnes, leaving me to explain to her through my sobs what had happened. I was fishing and he hit me, I remember crying. She put cold cream on my welts, for some reason, and for some reason was not horrified by what he had done to me, as I was, but by what I had done. Never again, she told me, meaning, of course, that I had broken one of the iron rules of civilization: never raw meat.
Because of this memory the thought of the pond has always brought with it a little sting of shame. And as I kneel in the reeds to spy on Seamus, the sting raises itself once again.
He slides out of his coat and then his sweater. The lantern sways as he hangs them on the branch beside it as if he were at home, carefully, pulling the wrinkles out of the sleeves. I watch him tuck his chin to unbutton his shirt, pull it off and hang it, then his undershirt. He bends, leans against the tree, unlaces his boots. His hands moving at his waist. I hear the jangle of his belt and I look away. A quiet shuffling. When I look back- I can't help myself, although by continuing to watch I've passed the boundary of curiosity and have become a voyeur- he's hanging up his trousers, his back to me, the moon in the trees waving light over him and making pointed shadows beneath his shoulder blades, inside the furrow of his spine. I don't look away. His broad shoulders and narrow hips, his triangular body dappled by leaves, his excruciating beauty, the shifting interlock of moonlight against the interlock of his muscles moving beneath his skin, the shadows inside the long line of his thighs; his head bent, his face in darkness.
He turns to face me. He doesn't know he's being watched. He lifts an arm, scratches under it, stretches both arms overhead, yawns, stares out at the water, scratches inside the crease of his thigh. I should not be seeing this. What he is doing out here is intensely private. What it reveals about me, hiding here to watch him, is a truth I don't like knowing. But the sight of him wrenches into me like a knife and I don't look away.
He steps into the pond and it cuts him off at the calves, then at the thighs, and then when he is waist-deep he looks like a carved marble effigy truncated by the black surface. The water must be ice-cold. The pond is fed by a deep spring. He doesn't seem to notice. As he wades smoothly out into the dark the wind clears the clouds and a column of pale light opens over the water. In that moment, standing in the column, reflected in the black water, he seems oddly, startlingly primeval.
Then he crouches low with his arms before him and in one fluid movement slips into and under the water, and is gone.
A coil of ripples mark where he went under. As I watch, the pond reforms itself as if he were never there- no bubbles, nothing at all; then the ripples gradually fan out and smooth themselves over. Once again the water is a black mirror. The moon's jagged reflection sits silently on top.
All this, just to swim. My legs ache from crouching. I dig out the beetle which is crawling around inside my shirtsleeve and flick it into the dark, stand up, dust my knees off, prepare to leave. I'm ashamed of myself and of my voyeurism; what did I gain in return for it? I don't know any more of him than I did beforehand and this night swim of his, odd as it is, is innocent. I found out nothing, he met no one, there was no great conspiracy; moreover, it was myself I saw most clearly: craning, beggarly, my eyes scraping over his body with adolescent desperation. I rub my face with my hands. I wish I'd not followed.
Reflected on the pond's surface the moon is a glowing oblong egg, radiant and precise as a painting. Perfectly smooth. Smooth, because he hasn't come up out of the water. How long has it been since he went under? Minutes. Nothing moving at the dark reedy edges of the pond, and not a break in its surface anywhere, it is utterly still, he is under it, he is at the bottom and for some reason cannot come up.
I am pulling off my coat, face suddenly hot, throat tight, stepping forward into the mud, how will I find him in there in the dark- and then a sound, like a hand holding me back: a soft splash at the pond's far edge. I stop, crouch down. In the silence a long rough breath comes from the edge and, focusing, I make out his sleek head bobbing up calmly at the other side. Another deep breath, the pale flash of his back twisting, diving in the water to submerge again. I wait. This time I count. Sixty, eight times. Nine. I stop counting. It's bewildering. Ripples in the pond's center; I stare as his profile rises cleanly up and out from the cut edge of the water, hear his deep, ragged breath, watch him float into the column of moonlight. His eyes close. His breath goes soft, then silent. He's completely relaxed, only the disc of his face and the knuckles of one hand breaking the surface of the water. His lips part.
I sit down in the ivy and for a long time I watch him floating across the glass surface of the pond. Watch the track of moonlight pass over his eyes, a long and wavering gold spear; he doesn't open them, doesn't move at all. He is- it's obvious- saturated with calm and with some form of pleasure. A catch in his breath. His eyelids flicker. He's falling asleep.
A kind of shyness settles over me and I creep backward, crouching, silent as I can on my numbed legs. Clouds cover the moon again and the disc of his sleeping face floating in the center of the pond gradually recedes. My hands are cold and I think of how cold the water must be and I don't see the woods around me, perhaps for the very first time in my life. I make it home by scent and memory, by habit, and suddenly I look up in the dark to see the kitchen door before me, realize that the thin smooth thing my right hand is holding is its key.
He looked in the water how I feel in the moonlight. And if that were true, it could be that I have something essential, something fundamental, in common with a human being. I don't know how I feel about this. I don't know how it can be possible.
Very quietly, so that I don't wake Agnes, I turn the key and let myself in.