It was lame, and old Mrs. Bernstein saw right through it. She tilted her head and gazed at me. I felt like a doofus, ashamed because I wasn’t really sure myself why I had come here.
Eventually I came up with, “I haven’t been here since . . . well, since ages ago.”
“I still remember when your whole family came here to scatter Herb’s ashes—your grandfather’s ashes, I mean. I was really glad I could take part, because I’d only seen his obituary the day before. I think your grandparents must have been living in Newburgh for three years at the time, and we weren’t that much in touch anymore, like most old neighbors.” Her face showed genuine regret, the kind you see only in people at the epilogue of their lives and after they’ve been given some kind of SparkNotes clarification of all that came before. “It was a beautiful ceremony. The woods were so full of life that day; all the birds were chirping. Remember?”
“I wasn’t there,” I said softly.
“You weren’t? Why not?”
Hot flush behind my face.
“Heavens. Oh, heavens. That means the last time you were here must have been . . .”
“After the fire.”
“Goodness gracious, I didn’t know.” The old lady’s expression became firm, and she wiped her hands on her apron. “Know what? How about I quickly change, then walk with you to where the house used to be. That is, if you don’t mind walking slowly. I’m afraid I’m not as strong as you are, at my age.”
I wasn’t sure I even wanted to go up there. Just the thought made my guts turn. As far as I remembered, the track stretched up the mountain for miles and miles before it brought you to Huckleberry Wall. Miles and miles back into the past. Nothing I looked forward to. I vaguely recalled we used to go up there only in Grandpa’s 4WD . . . except for that last time.
That last time, when we sleighed down the mountain.
I told her the path was way too long for walking.
“Not at all. I walk there every day with Zeus here. Usually I turn back halfway, because it’s quite a climb. But it shouldn’t be a problem for you. It couldn’t be more than a mile.”
“The Panther Mile,” I said.
She looked at me in surprise.
“That’s what my grandpa always called it.”
“Ha, I forgot that! The Panther Mile. That’s a good one. It’s been a long time since we saw any panthers around here. Sooner or later, they all go back into the mountains, Sam.”
We both stopped talking and I mulled over her words.
Then Mrs. Bernstein said, “No wonder the track looked longer that night. Maybe it was longer—that’s how those kinds of tracks tend to behave when it counts. Wait, I’ll be right back.”
She hurried inside, leaving Zeus with me. The dog panting at my feet, tilting his head, gazing at me, tongue hanging out. Smiling. Insinuating I must be really stupid.
4
To say I worked up a sweat keeping up with Mrs. Bernstein would be pushing it, but I gotta admit, checking my pace was no option either. It wasn’t just her hands that were peppy; it was her total constitution. Zeus trotting half a football field ahead of us, filling the woods with barks. The whole time I’m thinking, Where are we really going?
“Tell me how it all started,” she said.
With a story, of course. Everything always starts with a story.
The last time I was in the Catskills, the last time I was in Huckleberry Wall. The night it burned down. Picture it: the perfect mountain cabin, the perfect sleepover jaunt at Grandpa and Grandma’s. Snow clinging to the windows. The snow on the windows, the storm screaming to get in, and my sweet ol’ Grandpa telling ghost stories by the fire. The fireplace fire, I mean.
I told Mrs. Bernstein that when the hearth was burning it got so hot in Huckleberry Wall that it totally zonked you. Julia, only six at the time, flaked out on Grandma’s lap. Grandma knitting her scarf, and all you could hear on a night like that was the needles’ cozy tapping and the crackling of the fire. The wind battering the roof. My grandpa’s oldster voice. They say you forget the voices of the dead first, but I know exactly how my grandpa’s voice sounded.
It’s his face I don’t remember.
Every time I try to picture it, I can only see a black hole. Smoke coming out.
What I didn’t tell Mrs. Bernstein, cuz I couldn’t find the words, was that my childhood up here was loaded with stories. Walking up, me and Mrs. Bernstein on the Panther Mile, mounting the trail to Huckleberry Wall, these stories surrounded us in a wide circle. I remember when I was a kid, I could see hidden faces in the wooded hilltops around Huckleberry Wall. The hilliest and highest of them all, enshrouded in snow in winter, resembled an attacking bird of prey, the lower peaks to the left and right the tips of its spread wings. The spying bird eyed our backs when Julia and I were sledding down the slope behind the house or when I was helping Grandpa chop wood.
There were secrets and stories buried in these mountains, but basically they were good.
The havoc that one flame, one spark, one story can wreak.
“Tell us a real ghost story, Grandpa,” I said that evening. That evening of snow and wind. Snow and wind and fire. I was sitting at his feet, on the carpet, a deep pile and highly flammable carpet, in my PJs, stuffed animals in formation, spouting some groundbreaking supplication for mansions with blood-dripping ceilings, manors in which nonexistent babies cried all night, manses where a body covered in stab wounds would materialize on the cellar stairs. My healthy American taste even then shaped by HBO and the six o’clock news.
I said, “Julia’s asleep, so now you can make it really scary.”
But Grandpa told me a totally different type of story, and those are the ones that leave the deepest impression.
“Once upon a time, long ago,” he commenced, “in Phoenicia, at the bottom of the Panther Mile, as the sun hung large and red on the horizon, a party was under way.”
“Is this a true story?”
“Sure it’s a true story,” he said. “All the stories I tell you are true. Everyone was invited, even the Hermit, who lived right here, high up the mountain. The townspeople didn’t know if the Hermit would come, since he was an odd one and nobody had ever penetrated these woods on the slopes high enough to reach his house. Scroungers and berry pickers swore that they had never come across any living soul up in those mountains but had seen only fleeting shadows that skimmed over the treetops and obscured the sun, and had heard only the sound of mighty wings.”
And fifteen years later, Mrs. Bernstein recited, “There is a Catskill eagle in some souls, that can dive down into the blackest gorges, and soar out of them again to become invisible in the sunlight.” She said, “I’m not sure I’m quoting it right, but it’s from Moby-Dick. It goes on, something about it always flying higher in the mountains than the birds in the plains. But I think I like that first bit the best.”
“Are there still eagles around here?”
“Oh, certainly. Sometimes I give them a morsel of liver; that’s their favorite. From my hand. Aren’t the woods lovely today?”