In Sleeping Weather
October arrives in my corner of New England. Across the valley, a wine stain soaks the ridges first, then seeps down into the river bottom where, along the hedgerows, apples fall and deer are pleased to find them. After the last cut of hay, dairymen climb off tractor seats and into tank trucks that rumble down gravel roads with their loads of manure. As the engine noise departs, dust takes an eternity to settle, and sunlight becomes something material, dancing through empty space.
October brings the best sleeping weather. Flannel sheets are retrieved from the linen closet as evenings arrive with a chill, and at night we open the windows wide and pull the quilts up to our chins. Shivering, we relish a clutch of cold that we didn’t realize we’d been missing, and we surrender to the finest sleep of the year.
A window opens upon the dark, allowing whispers of the wild in and the domesticated out. One night in the heart of sleeping weather I hear geese flying in the dark. Their honking stops me, falling into sleep, and tugs me back. I roll over and look out the window. I can’t see the geese, of course, but I imagine their wingbeats, their communal exodus as a wedge driven into the space between the moon and me. They fly together and split wide open the end of summer, making space that the colder weather fills.
I look over at my wife. She’s still sleeping. I don’t wake her up even though I know she, too, might love to hear the geese. Instead I take her hand beneath the covers and squeeze it a little. At the foot of the bed, the dog is aware of his own nighttime birds, those conjured behind half-closed eyes. He whimpers while his feet twitch, and I don’t wake him either. It’s just me and the geese for now, their hollow sounds receding south. I turn onto my back, not wholly awake quite yet, caught somewhere in between.
In the moonlight, eyes still closed, memories sift down like burnt bits of paper ash, nearly weightless. Sorting among them, I find a place in time perhaps more lovely than it had been unfolding, and in that place an afternoon resplendent and my old friend Linck walking up from his orchard whistling, an axe over one shoulder.
How long gone is that day? A decade maybe? But the moment assembles itself out of those weightless ashes . . . his choppy steps, a threadbare coat and hunting hat, a battered canoe strapped to the car. He says a cursory hello, sinks his axe into a splitting stump and waves me over to a stack of apple crates on the woodshed steps. “Throw these in the back of the car,” he says, handing me one crate spilling over with decoys, tangled anchor strings and a ball of camouflage netting. “The paddles are already in there.”
This had become our rite of autumn even as I’d grown up and moved away, returning only for a few days in October that passed too quickly. A dozen years or more we’d met in the dawns and the late afternoons to drink weak coffee and drive slowly out of Linck’s dooryard, letting something as inevitable as gravity and passing time pull us down the hill and across the stubble of the Houston Farm’s river-bottom mowing. On the edge of the pond we’d pull the gear, the canoe and the paddles and stuff our pockets with more shells than we could possibly hope to need. I’d get in first, awkward in all those layers and floppy boots, a caricature of grace. I’d take the bow seat without asking. Unseen behind me, Linck would slosh the mud off his hippers in the shallow water and settle into the stern, pushing off with his paddle. We’d then slice into a place so still it was a bit nervous-making, a world made of mud, black water and possibility. Somewhere, always, a cow would take offense at some transgression real or imagined but utterly unacceptable nonetheless.
Was that the last time I saw him, the last time we set our decoys in Mud Pond? Was that the day when, shivering in the cattails and waiting for the puddle ducks to come in, we saw the big strings of Canadas high and heading south? Was that the day he told me that, as a boy, paddling the wild rivers in far northern Quebec, he and his brothers had run out of food and gone poking into a grassy bay in search of pike for supper? He said that by chance they’d spooked a mama goose and a string of flightless goslings and, with clarity of conscience known only to hungry boys, they’d tumbled into the shallow water and chased down a pair and pounced on them. They’d eaten the goslings that night without an ounce of remorse, roasted whole on sticks over a spruce fire, the skin greasy black and rubbery. He said they’d been no good at all—and the best thing he’d ever eaten.
I remember how I giggled at the story, my back to Linck in the cattails, imagining how this man had once been a boy and had somehow remained a balance of a boy from then till now, a half-century hence. How had he, unlike the other men I knew, not lost the wonder that illuminates the young? His hands were scarred and bent, his gun was a wobbly pump, but in him glowed an ember that kept him coming out here filled with wonder, to sit in the mud and spit clandestine tobacco, to tell me dirty jokes. We sat there in the cattails and waited and thought our thoughts in silence, and I wonder now if he knew that shared stories and shared silences were equal treasures, perhaps for him and surely for me.
When the teal came in, upsetting our reverie, buzzing past the ragtag decoys like a swarm of angry bees, he hissed, “Greenwings!” He hit his call just a little as the birds made their swing of the cove and surveyed the scene once more. “Shoot! Shoot!” he said, but I was already shooting, emptying out my old Browning and waiting for a bird to upend and fall, confused that none did so. Echoes bounced down the valley, and I watched the flock turn tail back north, intact and unbroken despite my intentions otherwise.
“Jesus Christ . . .” he muttered, and I plucked the bobbing empties from the water, careful not to wet my gloves. I fumbled three fresh shells out of my pocket and tried to reload.
Linck was not one to let a miss go unrecognized, and he groaned. I looked back and shook my head, noting not for the first time that he’d never raised his gun, the burden of failure solely on my shoulders. “One of these days . . .” he said and shook his head, leaving the statement unfinished for my consideration.
Deep down, I knew he’d wanted one for me as much as I had.
We waited, watching the rest of the afternoon descend closer to evening, and eventually heard the milking machines come on at Houston’s. We thought our quiet thoughts some more. Linck whistled at an otter that had come to give us a look-over. The little fellow bobbed for a moment and dove, a sleek arc of back then tail then just concentric rings.
And it was then that we saw them, out of the north: a short string of geese coming low over the outflow of the pond, pitching into the corn stubble in the field behind the barn. Linck honked a few times on his flute but didn’t turn them, bent as they were for a last feed in Houston’s cut corn. He pulled out his binoculars and whistled to himself, and I could nearly see the machinations beginning, the ember glowing beneath the breast of his faded coat.
“I think we can make a play on those birds,” he said, already pushing us out of the cattails and into open water, being careful not to bump the decoys.
I picked up my paddle and helped us make haste, letting Linck do the steering, edging us around the margin where we remained loosely hidden from the birds at their feed. He nosed us into shore where a hump of ground brought the stubble down barely to the water’s edge and a treed hedgerow bisected the field. We hit the shore with a thump, and I held on tight to a clump of grass while he pulled the stern in close.
“OK,” he whispered. “This might just work. You crawl up to the top of this rise till you can just see those birds, and I’ll sneak up around them in the trees. I’ll get as close as I can and flush them your way. You’ll see me, but don’t shoot low.” He thought for a second. “And don’t miss . . . .”
Linck was already moving into the trees, and I was already down in a crawl, my heart beating hard but not from exertion. Moving as quietly as I could, dragging too many pounds of neoprene and rubber through the manure-splattered stubble, I pushed my gun ahead of me. I kept looking at the hedgerow, and then looking back at the top of that little hump, hoping hard that I’d not rush it but that I’d get there soon. It seemed to me that these endeavors always began to crumble just when success was still a bit out of reach, but enough effort had already been invested to guarantee a level of disappointment. I thought these thoughts and crawled up a manure-splattered hill under fading daylight, and I watched for my old friend Linck over there in the trees.
At the very top I took off my hat, to not have any extraneous bits show over the rise and give me away, and slid up to where I could just see. There they were: a small flock of greaters not 40 yards out, one old sentinel bird standing tall and swiveling his neck back toward the treeline. I have to think that Linck saw him and that he saw Linck, and maybe, too, that Linck saw me, though I can’t be sure. But as that sentinel bird started to move and to sound the alarm, Linck burst out of the trees running hard in his hipboots and nearly tripping over the stubble, coaxing a response from the birds that would send them my way. It worked and just barely, but those birds turned downhill in a string and got up just as I did, and I shouldered the gun as they passed barely within what I thought was good range, gaining elevation in something like slow motion. And as they passed, I swung through them right to left, thinking hard and hurriedly about the second bird in line but not waiting quite long enough to overtake him. I touched off two shots, knowing I was behind even as I did so, but oh if the very last bird didn’t buckle in its flight, stopping upon its upward and outward path and falling heavily back to the ground, still a bit of life left in it. The bird thumped when it landed, heavy enough that I could feel as much as hear the impact, then got up, wings akimbo, and headed for the roadside ditch.
And there, whooping fit to beat the band, was old Linck, tripping and running in his hipboots, chasing that crippled bird clear across Houston’s cornfield and pouncing on it in the mud. I can’t say, but I’d venture he was as glad as he’d been that day long ago in Quebec . . . or at least as proud. He stood up, still whooping, and from all that distance I watched as he raised his arms in exaltation, an unlucky goose dangling heavy in one hand, flapping its last few wingbeats against Linck’s coat and into the broken silence . . . .
In bed, in sleeping weather, the geese have gone. The dog has quit his dream-time chase and is snoring softly now. My wife, beside me, hasn’t stirred. I let go of her hand and roll back on my side, facing the window. The weightless bits of memory have settled all the way down, and I look out at a moon so bright as to fill my eyes with light, making the static image of Linck and a big dead goose faint again. I wonder if this is what it is like for him now, a mind full of images that are barely decipherable. Maybe his thoughts these days are full of sifting bits of paper ash, bright lights, an abstract awareness of October sun that brings with it something different than what’s been but no context for that difference other than flannel sheets on the bed. I hope the sleeping weather feels as good absent the anticipation of it or the recognition of why it’s here. I wonder if he knows the sound of geese anymore, or if, with his memory slowly leaving, their calls are just something else that is scary in the night.
I don’t go up to see Linck anymore, because he doesn’t remember me and that confuses him, making the days hard for those helping him navigate through. I’d like to go sit with him even just to be close, maybe just to sit in silence like we did for all those hours in cattails and dark, letting our thoughts go where they would without much steering. I don’t suppose it would hurt anything, but then maybe I’m wrong. Maybe the reason we could sit in that silence was that we recognized each other despite the gloom, and a world all around us from which we summoned collective meaning could weave a story of why it was all-important, and beautiful and relevant to us. If I’m honest, I guess my presence now might make things harder—for him and me. But what is worse to consider about a friend getting old and a memory being gobbled up by whatever disease robs a man of it is the consideration that lived moments could ever be taken away. I don’t have much, but I have these bits of time remembered, and I shared a few with Linck and don’t like to think they are just mine now. That’s too much to hold alone. I prefer him there with me, sitting in silence, watching the big strings leave while keeping them close all the same. And I miss him, even though he’s still up there on the hill above Houston’s cornfield, in the house with the woodshed and orchard. I suppose I just wish his memories were still there with him, where we could keep them together and find them again when we need to.
First Published in Shooting Sportsman Magazine
