Chapter Four
Four
The children sat in a line before the stage, Nausica? before them.
Today she would be handing out the roles.
There would be four lovers, six players, seven fairies, the Duke of Athens, and Queen of the Amazons.
This made nineteen characters. There were two classes, Miss Cooper’s class and Miss Kayleigh’s class, each with twenty-three students.
That made forty-six actors, if everyone actually showed up.
In the real world, she would have auditions and send twenty-seven of them packing, and they would become baristas.
A little boy began to cry.
But this was not the real world.
The boy stopped crying.
Nausica? began to pace the stage, her boots echoing with each step, the velvet of her doublet glimmering in the stage lights. The way she saw it, they had three options.
One was to add some extra nonspeaking ensemble fairies, specifically twenty-seven nonspeaking fairies, which was a lot of fairies, though not inconceivable, because they usually rolled in big groups.
The second option was to divide up the important roles so that—to use the example of Puck, who, let’s get this on the table, everyone wanted to play—one child, let’s call her Child 1, would play Puck for a few lines, then Child 2 would take up the next few lines, then Child 3, and so on, which would allow up to twenty-eight Pucks and still cover the remaining characters, which was fine, and they could create a sense of continuity in costumes.
But this required the children to nail their lines, and really enunciate, and, given what she’d seen so far, she had to be realistic.
This brought her to option three, which was more her preference, and which took things to another level, choreographically speaking.
This was to have more than one child playing a character at the same time, providing balance and drowning out the mumblers.
And this would allow for more Pucks. For example, they could have ten Pucks, eight lovers, double the players to make twelve total, one Duke of Athens and Queen of the Amazons, who, to be honest, weren’t exactly anyone’s favorites, two Oberons, two Titanias, and then the other four quieter fairies.
She stopped mid-stomp. No, wait, she’d gotten that wrong.
Her fingers went up. Ten Pucks, eight lovers, double the players, two Dukes, two Queens, two extra random fairies without speaking roles for the shy kids.
That’s ten, eighteen, thirty-two, thirty-six, forty-two.
Ah, shit. And her dad asked why she didn’t go into engineering!
Okay, so they would double up on the fairies, two Oberons, two Titanias, two Cobwebs, two Mustardseeds, two Motes, two Peaseblossoms.
She looked at Miles.
“Forty-eight,” said Miles.
“Okay,” she took a deep breath. “Model calm, Nausica?. Model thinking on your feet. Maybe ten Pucks is too many. Let’s say eight.”
The children groaned. The little boy started crying again.
“Okay: ten Pucks. Fuck it.” She’d cut two of the randoms.
The boy stopped crying. A cheer went up.
—
“Say,” she said, when the children filed out. “You have time for a drink?”
Which he told himself meant coffee, because it was one-thirty in the afternoon.
And was only natural, given the complexities of the performance, though really what she wanted to talk to him about was Tolstoy, whom she’d been thinking about a lot, she told him, occasionally brushing his leg with hers, in the booth she had selected in the campus pub, far toward the back.
—
The next Wylkes Society meeting was no less exciting than the first.
This time, there was no movie playing at the campus film club, so Miles told Kate that he was getting together with Andrei and a couple of other guys.
And Kate was pleased to hear this, but she had another departmental event.
So the kids would stay home alone; well, with Giuseppe. Miles left them his phone.
Miles took the car. Kate was getting a ride from someone in her department; so expansive was her network of friends these days that Miles had trouble remembering which one was the Italianist and who the Luso-Germanist. But now he had his own friends, lots of them.
The meeting this time was at Earl’s house, or, more specifically, down in the basement of Earl’s house, where Earl’s wife, a devout woman who approved not of the blasphemies of Jeremiah Wylkes, had banished them.
Earl’s house was in the old center of town, not far from the school—indeed, just down Main Street from the building where Nausica? mentioned she was staying, had pointed out to him. Apartment three. In case he was passing by.
Compared with the Mountain Catch, the basement was a cozy spot: well lit, and well warmed by a poorly insulated boiler that spilled most of its heat long before it rose to the sacred precincts of Mrs. Blossfeldt’s upstairs realm.
A medley of lawn chairs and workbenches were arranged in a circle.
Lanterns of different vintage hung from the ceiling.
Earl was a collector of lanterns, just as he was a collector of band saws, jigsaws, and vintage circular saws, exemplars of which had been pushed aside to make space for the meeting.
It could have served as a set for a horror film were it not for all the forest memorabilia.
Photos on the wall showed men and trees, trees and men, men and lumber.
Earl came from a line of lumbermen, log drivers who had cleared jams on the Hudson during the heyday by walking out onto the great roiling mass of trunks with nothing but pike poles and boots studded with hobnails.
Here were more than a few photos, the river thick with logs as far as the eye could see, men standing in the middle of the jam, their hats pushed back, thumbs tucked in suspenders, leaning against pikes three times their height.
Miles had arrived a few minutes early, and Earl the storyteller was happy to find a listener, and by the time the Jeremiah Wylkes Society had a quorum, he was deep into the tale of his great-grandfather Isaiah, who’d logged the far side of the mountain alongside his father, skidding fallen trees with sleds and cleated horses to the lake bed, where they stacked and stamped them, leaving them until spring came and the ice gave way and the swelling waters sent them running down the Foxkill.
It was forty miles to the Hudson, and another fifty to the mills above Glens Falls, a lot of river for Greensbury logs to get mixed with the logs of other loggers, which meant the men would stalk the hodgepodge at the boom to guard their floating quarry.
A photograph showed Isaiah, age thirteen, balanced on the jam. Miles’s knee hurt just looking at it.
I have his boots, said Earl, and he reached up on a high shelf and brought down a pair of shoes scarcely larger than Olive’s, with worn nails stuck haphazardly through the sole.
By then, the room had begun to fill with other Society members, and Miles handed back the shoes. But Earl wasn’t done with his story. He didn’t want Miles to think that he was just some old codger reminiscing, because his grandfather and the skid run had everything to do with Jeremiah Wylkes.
—
The evidence was a diary, missing its back cover, found among his great-grandfather’s belongings when the old man shuffled off to Heaven’s woods.
It had begun with the aforementioned question of how to get the logs from here to there.
To say it was hard work was the understatement of the century, but Earl’s great-grandfather had loved it, loved the logging, the skid, and, mostly, loved the river, wrote in his journal how in bed at night he could feel the shifting of the logs, even during the winter.
But then, one summer—1871, to be exact—he was out above the falls, crossing the jam, when the retainer boom downstream gave way.
It was not the first time that this had happened, and the fact was that the jam was already gridlocked, else the mass of logs would have obliterated just about every dock and harbor on the way to New York City.
But Earl’s great-grandfather was on the leading edge that day, and he slipped, and was pulling himself back onto the drift when a huge trunk, turning in one of the eddies, swung round and crushed his leg.
How Isaiah Blossfeldt made it across a half-mile of moving river filled with more forest than water was a mystery only God knew the answer to.
But somehow he did, and someone set his leg and got him back to Greensbury, and when he had recovered, he knew he had to find a different way to get the trees from here to there.
In the past few years, railroads had begun to spread deeper into the Green Mountains.
Isaiah, limping through the little town—not unlike good Miles, added Earl—saw Greensbury as the center of the booming trade, his railway supplying the world not only with her lumber but with marble from her quarries.
The only question was where to lay the tracks.
For several years, Isaiah pondered this puzzle, courting anyone in town who might have money to invest. Then, in 1875, came the news that across the border in Massachusetts, the Troy and Greenfield Railroad had finished drilling Hoosac Mountain, the longest tunnel in the world.
Sitting idle were eighteen pneumatic Burleigh drills, which he bought at a discount and hauled up to Vermont.
Look down at the profile of the Southern Greens, said Earl, and you can make out places where the Almighty has seen fit to pinch it, east to west. It was in one of these spots that they began the excavation, setting up bores on both sides of the mountains and running a path of alignment towers so that the tunnels met.
Not an easy feat, to drill two sides of a mountain and meet somewhere in the middle, but Isaiah was determined.