The chuckling fingers (2 page)

“This is the entrance to Fiddler’s Fingers.”

Near the gate round-boled white birches grew in rings; after that the car entered a grove of Norway pines so densely set that dusk seemed to close in. No green along the earth there— only the light brown of old pine needles halfway toward being resolved into earth again, dappled in moving patterns of light and shade. The pine stems swayed like huge black reeds, extending twenty and thirty feet upward before the branches were needled, in whorls like round green eyes against the thin blue sky.

My nose filled with the warm sun-heated pine smell that’s as pungent as spice. When the car slowed to take the hairpin curves I heard for the first time over the hum of the motor the wilderness sound that was to be woven through all that happened—the rushing clash of pine tops, the wind’s rustle and swirl among pine needles, the crash of water against rock. The sound seemed in layers—overhead the roaring rush, down below an intense quiet, as if something in the forest listened for the sly, secret pouncing by which most of its denizens died so that others might live, listened for what might be a twig snapping under the paw of death, blood hungry and near.

Instinctively I reached across Toby for Bill’s coat sleeve.

He grinned at me briefly. “See a bear?”

I answered idiotically, “I’d rather see than be one.”

“Ann likes me.” He patted my knee.

Jacqueline turned toward me, and for an instant there was contact; we’d long ago had a commune of perceptions—was my thought in her mind too? But she turned away quickly; I couldn’t tell. The car was swinging now toward the opening beyond a last rank of trees; with a suddenness of a picture whose covering has been ripped away, the Fingers and the lake were right in front of us.

* * *

I’ll never forget my first sight and my first feelings about Fiddler’s Fingers.

A clearing on the shore, with the restless silver-peaked blue lake filling the foreground, thick forest filling the background, with the huge square brown log house to the west and those dark rocks to the east. Those rocks—the five tall, jagged pinnacles from which the place got its name—dominated that first sight; they stood a little distance from the drive, crooked, looming, entirely too much like the grasping fingers of a gigantic hand.

I’d heard the legend from Myra—one of the Paul Bunyan yarns about a girl named Lily Lou whom Paul had favored. When Paul had gone on his long trips East and West Lily Lou had found company elsewhere, so flagrantly that Paul at last had heard. He’d come back to find the girl at a lakeshore dance, waltzing in the arms of one of his own henchmen while his own favorite fiddler scraped out the tune.

What Paul had done was to beckon the fiddler to play on; he’d grabbed the girl from her partner and danced with her in a tempo quickening like storm, waltzed until the eyes of the watchers swam and the fiddler reached his breaking point. At the crest of music Paul had flung the girl, not even glancing to see who caught her. The fiddler, chuckling, had died in his last effort, falling, soaking into the earth like one of his own tunes. Only his right hand had stayed aboveground, the fingers reaching for the bow.

“Yaffs!” Toby pushed me, anxious to show of the marvels of the place, as soon as Bill stopped the car.

I’d heard that part of the legend, too, but somehow as I stood beside those rocks I didn’t feel prepared for what I heard—the large, satisfied, silky gurgle that seemed to come from beneath the stones.

Bill, amused, said, “No need to look so startled, Ann. That’s just an underground river bouncing around in its rocky caverns. It’s not really Paul Bunyan’s fiddler.”

But what was making me look startled wasn’t just the sight and sound of the Fingers—it was a feeling I had, a feeling of the wilderness, of which I seemed to be standing at the core; a feeling of being awed and exalted, because that wilderness was so beautiful, so mighty, so aloof. When I turned the lake was before me; this was Superior, the largest fresh-water sea of the world; this steel-blue water that lashed itself white against the harsh and rocky rim was water so old that it had brimmed lost glacial and preglacial lakes.

Much more clearly than in the car I heard the forest roar, the forest that began here along the lake and that I knew stretched from the head of the lakes at Duluth eastward and northward through all the great, lost, undiscovered reaches of the Laurentian Shield. This was the heart of what had once been an entire boisterous wild continent, primeval, bold, tumultuous and dangerous. Wild animals were at home here; I could feel that only strong people ought to live here; weak people, living here, might come to have in their eyes the light, steady stare of the wolf.

This wilderness could rouse basic desires to be, to get, to do

Perhaps in what was to happen the wilderness was more important than anything else.

* * *

I managed to shake off some of that first overwhelming impression of the wilderness and its power, but through all that followed I was never quite to lose it. The house toward which we turned after a few moments was a huge square barrack of pine logs peeled and varnished until they shone like honey. Inset at the east side was one porch and across the entire front, facing the lake, was another. A terraced bank of flowers divided the lawn from the drive.

“That low building in back is the barn. Myra keeps cars in it now.” Jacqueline pointed out two smaller buildings. “That other one west on the shore—there, half hidden by trees— that’s the boathouse.”

Toby had started on a run for the house.

“Gramma! Where is you?” she called as she went, and disappeared inside the front porch. When we reached there she was jumping up and down announcing loudly, “I go bafroom!”

Myra, rising, was hastily dropping her needle point in a chair and stooping to undo buttons with a practiced hand. She gave the exposed rear a small spank and came forward smiling as Toby sclittled into the house.

“Loveliest thing about Toby,” Myra said, “she makes life so formal. Goodness, Ann, I’m glad you’ve come.”

Wasn’t there worry at the bottom of her dark eyes, too?—a worry she was trying as hard as Jacqueline and Bill to cover?

But what was uppermost as she took my hands in both of hers was her warm hospitality and friendliness; impossible not to like and admire Myra. She has some of the Heaton imperiousness—she’s Bill’s cousin—but it’s an entirely feminine imperiousness; she’s so delicate she might have been carved out of crystal by Lalique—white hair braided in a coronet around her small head, wide eyes that are deep and almost black, faintly pink-flushed skin. She’s forty-three, young to be Toby’s grandmother, but then Pat, her son, would have been young to be Toby’s father—if he’d lived.

Young marriages, I’d learned, ran in the Heaton family. Pat was nineteen, a sophomore at the university, when he married Jacqueline after knowing her exactly one week.

Making the best of things is one of Myra’s characteristics. Goodness knows she must have had long practice of it, being so long a widow and having her sister Octavia on her hands. The first thing I’d heard her say after Pat’s marriage was, “Well, I can use more family,” and she’d stretched that to include, not just Jacqueline, but Aunt Harriet and me too.

When Pat was killed that summer at the job he took—it was in a flour mill, and there was a dust explosion—Jacqueline and the coming baby became the core of Myra’s life. Jacqueline is Toby’s mother and has responsibilities such as discipline, but Myra and I just adore her.

Wry recognition of that weakness was in her eyes now as she glanced once again at Toby laboriously and hurriedly mounting the stairs inside. When she turned back some of the smile had faded from her mouth.

“I’m
glad
you’ve come,” she repeated, and it had an emphasis I couldn’t mistake; she was worried and had an anxious hope that now I had come things might be cleared up.

“Not half as glad as I am to be here.” I answered both the open and the hidden statements. I could see now what I must do—I must find out what it was Jacqueline hid before I could do anything else.

I asked lightly, “How’s about helping me unpack?” It wasn’t in Jacqueline, I thought then, to keep anything from me if I got her alone.

But the green-brown eyes just brushed me evasively. “We’ll all help unpack. Toby loves unpacking. So does Bill.” It was quiet, but it held her screened.

“Me, I’m a travel-bag addict,” Bill said behind me, and 1 looked to see if he were being pleasant or helping Jacqueline evade, but his Roman-coin face didn’t tell. He had one of my bags in each hand—bags he’d tipped a filling-station attendant to lift to the car at Grand Marais.

I’d have to play the game of casualness too. “Hercules lifted the world,” I said; “the Finns held off brute Russia for weeks, but
Bill
carried in two suitcases!”

“Remember this the next time someone tells you I won’t even carry my own cigarettes.” Bill started for the inside room, and I was following when Myra touched my arm.

“You remember Octavia?”

Hurriedly I glanced around, for the first time noticing the woman who sat in a corner bent above a magazine, but with her eyes lifted, watching.

“Oh, Octavia, I was hoping you were here!” I tried to make it warm and pleasant, going toward her to shake hands, but somehow the words came out too cheerful, as if she were a child I didn’t know how to approach.

As usual when she was looked at a spasm of agonized shyness contorted Octavia Heaton’s face, and the dark eyes so like Myra’s sought wildly around as if for escape, then looked down at the magazine as if that were a refuge. I had to reach for her hand; she didn’t lift it.

Poor Octavia! I’d never known anyone for whom I felt more thoroughly sorry. As far as I knew, there was nothing wrong with her, except that she was birthmarked—her upper lip was puffed and blue. She was somewhere in her thirties, fragile like Myra, and with smooth brown hair in an enormous knot low on her neck, not bad looking, except for the disfigurement which seemed to have broken her spirit entirely. I’d never heard her speak as much as a word. Through the week I’d spent at Myra’s Duluth house before the wedding Octavia had seemed to slide along the walls like a crumpled wraith, vanishing completely if any stranger came near. Only Myra treated her as if she were a person; other people found it almost impossible to remember she was around.

“Ann’s going to have the southeast room while she’s here,” Myra told Octavia now. “The next one to yours. It’s nice to have the house full, isn’t it?”

But she expected no answer from the down-bent, still agonized face. She turned, leading me back toward the door where Jacqueline waited. Bill had gone on upstairs to the pleasant pink-and-blue corner room I was to occupy during my stay.

The upstairs at Fiddler’s Fingers was to be fairly important in what happened. I can just as well show you its simple arrangement now.

Myra stayed below, but Toby, returning from the bathroom to be rebuttoned, joined Bill in nosing things out of my suitcase with the intimate, fascinated interest of a pup terrier. For her I’d brought a slate and colored chalk, for Jacqueline a black velvet evening cape with a hood and a scarlet silk lining—one I’d picked up in a clearance. With the surface gaiety she was using for her screen Jacqueline put on the cape, pirouetting in it.

“Little Black Riding Hood,” she said. “Does anyone like me?”

Bill should have answered—he didn’t. Instead his eyes fixed on her, dark, inscrutable.

“I like you. I’ll take you back if Bill doesn’t look out,” I began, and I wasn’t just fooling either. But she was standing still, pulling at the ribbons with fingers that shook, slipping hurriedly out of the cape and walking away down the hall with it, her head bent.

Bill turned abruptly to stare out the window until she came back, bright and animated again, to lead the way downstairs. I went, but what was growing in me then was anger. I was going to find out what the matter was, or else.

The moment we were downstairs Myra called cheerfully from the kitchen, “You’re going to find out what a holiday’s like at the Fingers, Ann. The maid’s helping her sister at the resort, and we’re shifting for ourselves. If anyone would like to help set the table—and someone could go to the resort for roast chicken and ice cream—”

Quickly I grabbed at opportunity. “Let’s you and I—”

But again Jacqueline was swifter, forestalling me, smiling her covering smile.

“And leave Bill to set the table?” she asked lightly. “No, I’ll do the table. You go to the resort with Bill, Ann. Toby can go along.”

Frustration—another emotion that was to become familiar. I found myself, reluctant and mutinous, being maneuvered across the front porch where Octavia still huddled over her magazine, and on up the path toward the resort with Bill and Toby.

That resort path, which was to feel my feet so often, led across the narrow west lawn, past the boathouse, then up a little hill and down a little valley, through clumps of tall bushes and some ash and birch trees.

Bill offered, “Superior’s cold for swimming, but we go along here to the resort if we ever do swim,” keeping up the pretense that things were normal, but with a gloomy and absent face.