Bloodlines

nondescript brown house with a large, distinctive red mailbox. I’d reset the trip meter at the turnoff. At .6 miles, the red mailbox appeared on my right. I was positive that this was the last house before the Simmses’. If I remembered correctly, what lay beyond on the right was, first, a stretch of woods, then an open field, and then a smaller wooded area that separated the field from the roughly cleared patch of land around the Simmses’. I slowed way down and trained my eyes on the right-hand side of the road. Although I couldn’t have been doing more than five miles an hour, the Bronco hit a hole that threw my teeth out of alignment. I swore. Then the field suddenly appeared. I killed the headlights and pulled to the side of the road, but when I got out, I left the door open and the engine running.
    Sooner than I expected, I found what I suspected would be there, a break in the tumbledown stone wall and the thin line of mixed maples and weeds that divided the field from the road, and a welcome pair of ruts left by the tires of last summer’s farm equipment. Returning to my Bronco, I locked the hubs, got back in, shifted to four-wheel drive, eased into the field, and pulled to the left, out of the ruts and onto a firm, grassy area where the saplings that overgrew the wall would help to screen the car from the lane. I turned off the engine and opened the door. In the distance, a couple of dogs barked. At me? Or maybe at a skunk or a thieving raccoon or a bold individual extending the coyote’s range.
    Except for the voices of the dogs, the silence was absolute. I tried not to break it. At least to my own ears, my efforts failed. To load the Ladysmith, you press the thumbpiece forward, thus unlocking the cylinder so you can turn it. You put the rounds of ammunition in the charge holes, and you turn the cylinder back into the frame until it locks. The procedure doesn’t normally sound like grapefruit-size hailstones falling on a tin roof. And, yes, I know it’s unsafe to carry a loaded revolver, but what was I going to do? Protect myself with an unloaded firearm stuffed in the bottom of my backpack? By the way, even though Buck had the holster specially made for me, it was a stupid present. Underarm might have been okay. But did he really expect me to swagger around like Annie Oakley with a gun on my hip? I left my parka unzipped, but when I pulled the tattered old poncho over my head, the fabric swished and moaned like a high wind. The car door closed like a clap of thunder.
    But once I was moving across the furrows and tussocks of the field, my inaudible footsteps seemed to deaden the air like white noise. At the edge of the field, I pulled out my two-D-battery flashlight and, using my hand to shade the beam, flipped it on. Ahead of me lay a low stone wall, the traditional New England marker of boundaries. This one, though, like the one that bordered the lane, hadn’t been mended for decades. Good fences? But who reads Robert Frost these days? Walter and Cheryl Simms were no one’s idea of good neighbors, anyway. The Norway maple, the kudzu of the rural Northeast, had sown itself thickly on both sides of the wall. On top, rusted strands of old barbed wire waited to snare and trip the unwary, but it didn’t get me. As I’ve said, I grew up in Maine.
    The woods beyond the wall were so dark that it would have been easy to believe that the sun was waiting for the first of April to rise briefly and, even then, only as a mean joke. Ever been in the woods around here? Well, if not, forget the postcards of model sugar bushes in Vermont and the travel brochure pictures of groomed forests in state-owned park land. When I say woods, I don’t mean a Christmas tree farm or a spruce plantation, either. I mean thick brush, impenetrable clumps of alders, fallen logs, and the tough vines of wild blackberries, God’s own barbed wire. I took a deep breath and searched for a route through the undergrowth. There was an earthy smell of wet moss, slow-decaying leaves, and the decomposing bodies of microscopic animals.
    But I hit it lucky. To my right, I found the remains of an old path, maybe the trace of a lumber road, maybe the vestige of a long-dead friendship between neighbors whose houses had sunk into cellar holes. With the filtered beam of the flashlight aimed at my feet, I took firm steps on the packed-down earth. Then the barking of a couple of dogs gave way to a voice entirely different from theirs. I have no