They dropped out of a sledge of low cloud, hundreds of sooted angels sculling the dusk. Tee paused to admire them. He was in the midst of a walk along the lower ridge of Orphan Mountain, less a mountain and more a swell in the land that was really called Elliot’s Ridge, but Tee had always liked to rename things. Make them his own. An erstwhile poet’s penchant, he supposed.
Usually his evening route led below, along the bed of the beck, a stream, or really a braid of small streams, that he’d christened Dredlock Springs, its marshes matted with Indian grass and perfumed with sulfur, a tea-black stream dredged this time of year with fallen leaves, an easy traipse along deer trails, through hedges of wild azalea, mountain laurel, and bayberry, a path which, before he turned back at the Springs, afforded him, especially in late fall and winter, a far-off glimpse of the interstate highway, its quixotic pinpricks of pear-cool headlamps oddly consoling in the dark.
The ridge walk was hard to make with a distracted mind, the paths irregular and criss-crossed with thorny bramble scourges, fallen trees. This late afternoon, too, he was forced to trudge through a fresh fall of wet leaves, knee-high in some places, that had come down in a recent, freakish spate of late-October thunderstorms. He called this part of Orphan Mountain the Long Ago because he often lost his way here, despite his pocket compass and his landmarks—an old cemetery overgrown with periwinkle and marked off by a circle of stones, an abandoned skull of a house shackled by vines, one wall completely stripped away, exposing an inside grid of rooms, like a ravaged doll’s house. The ruin of an old iron furnace. Rutted, precipitous lumber and park service roads gashed with blood-red clay, occasionally traversed by trucks and reckless hot-rodding teenagers, though the only evidence Tee had of the latter were the a few weathered crosses marking a spot where someone had long ago wrecked and died. And an aluminum deer stand, about 50 feet off the path, whose ladder he sometimes climbed so he could perch in a seat, rickety as the carriage of a Ferris wheel, and look out upon a purfled infinity of woods and sky.
He knew that others, hunters mostly, hikers, passed through there, but he never saw anyone. Once he found a bloated Playboy, its pages stuck together, wedged into the slats of the deer stand aerie. Another time, a green, corked bottle of urine sitting upright in a rut. Why piss in a bottle, he’d wondered, out there with all the woods around you? And one March morning, long ago, when he’d been sixteen, on one of the rare visits he’d made to this place after his own parents’ death but before he’d come back as an adult, he’d encountered the faded turquoise remnants of a parachute and a partly unhinged, rope-wrapped human skeleton wedged high in the mistletoe-infested arms of an ancient oak just coming into leaf. Probably a drug-runner, though it would be years before he thought of that, plastic sacks of something coagulated still strapped to the clavicles. What he thought of then, instead, were the bodies of his own parents, charred beyond recognition amidst the wreckage of his father’s prop plane, gone down for no finally discoverable reason into a ridge of the Alleghenies just two years before.
What he saw, now, if anything, were deer, their flanks darker with winter coming on, and flocks of wild turkey, quail, little periscopes skittering in shoals across his way. If lucky, he’d spot the albino fawn, which on three occasions had stared back at him with red-rimmed eyes from different shaded glades. Yesterday, the knuckled vertebrae of a skinless snake, making a loop of itself.
If he concentrated in the Long Ago, was not too preoccupied with his memories of Em, still fresh lo these many years, the chagrin and loss of her a memory that he worried and polished like a key, or with his work on the clocks in his kitchen workshop, he could find the fork that broke through to the lookout. From there he could see, by late October, if he squinted, the six chimneys of the old house, his house, inherited fifteen years ago from a great uncle, and which, despite its immensity, was partially hidden even in winter by swells and thick mesh of treetops, enisled by its own vast acreage amidst miles of state and national forests in an area known for lightning strikes, chalky screes of iron ore, and hot springs.
And sometimes, like this evening, he would arrive at just the right point on just the right hour in late October to see them again: the swifts on their migration southward. Where did they come from? Where did they go? Honduras? Peru? For a few nights each autumn, the swifts returned to lodge in one of the massive chimneys, the tallest one, closest to the central roof spine at the juncture of the main house and the west wing.
When Tee was inside the house—he inhabited just a small part of it—he lost track of its scale, but seen from above, even obscured by trees and distance, it was impressive. Seven-bays, two-and-a-half-stories, built on a raised basement, it branched off onto four dramatically different elevations, some opening into broad courtyards that had no doubt once been quite fancy, the many windows of the north façade staring down at a wide lawn with a semi-circular drive, all wildly overgrown, and a balustrated piazza reached by broad curving stairs, crumbling and matted with mosses. There was a conservatory, or sun porch, glinting in last light at one end of the upper story. The whole mansion was covered by a standing-seam sheet metal roof with a copper wash, pierced by shed-roofed dormers on the north elevation and pedimented ones on the remaining sides. There were the six large chimneys, and it was into one of these that the swifts now streamed. The house had been known for over a century as Handel Hall, and there was a carved pillar at the end of the long drive that said as much. When he’d been a disgruntled teenager, sent off to school, Tee used to call the place Handel Hell. Now he called it The Hole.
Generations of migrating swifts had been stopping at The Hole. The morning after the first time he’d witnessed from the lookout their gallows-hour swarming, their majestic, gilt scissoring of the air, their ribbony plummets in twos and threes into the chimney top—after several hundred, he’d stopped counting, so delirious was he with an unaccountable premonition of their significance—a visitation!—he had made his way through the dim, cobwebbed catacombs of the massive fieldstone cellar—even now there were parts of the house he’d not explored—pried loose with a coal shovel the rust and lime-stuck damper, and poked a flashlight into its dark mouth.
Gray, feathered cakes of split quills, bird lime, and insect hulls dislodged and broke apart on the hearthstone at his feet, and though the chimney, long unused, was stories high, and his lamp sketched but a short way up, he could tell that the swifts were not there. Had he dreamed them? Tee knelt in the fragments of pinion dross and feared he might weep.
And yet that very night, as the sun sank into the thinning trees to the west, he was compelled to the ridge to watch for them again, and they magically returned, materializing out of thin air and funneling in black rivers into the flue. They followed this pattern for two more nights, like clockwork, feeding by day, roosting at night, and then on the morning of the fifth day, his ear pressed to the whitewashed cellar mantle at the very heart of that monstrous house, Tee felt them depart a last time with a roar so thunderous he ran the long, dank length of the cellar and emerged panting into the frost and dawn of the south lawn to watch them vanish with the fleet undeniability of a wish, a memory, an eon.
Em, Emma, the M-Bomb had left him that way. One day she had been his, he’d possessed her by all the names he had given to her, owned her love, or felt that he had; then she’d evaporated, was gone forever into an ether of obligations, secrets, a departure whose causes, and his own culpability in creating them, he could, or would, not fathom, own, nor ever truly forgive. Em for “married,” he’d think in moments of particular self-pity.
Tee had to admit that his excitement about the way the swifts left but then returned was in some way connected to a wish that Emma Miles would materialize again, repentant and still passionately in love with him. Since that first visitation of the swifts, Tee had read about them, learned that unlike many birds they can not perch, and instead hang, like bats, and so must all day fly, fly, beating the air, searching, hunting, fueling, never resting, never once stopping until some instinct harnesses them, calls them at sunset in one ecstatic herd, to whatever place—an empty tree trunk, an old, uncapped chimney—the latter more and more rare these days—to roost and flock and shelter and rest. He had watched for them every year after that and seldom missed their return or departure. Once, creeping along the un-electrified tunnels of the west wing cellar with his flashlight, very quietly, so as not to disturb them, he’d shifted aside the plywood plank he’d put up to block light and egress, and for as far up as his beam could reach he saw the swifts hanging there, folded, fat penknives, side-by-side in sleep, their feathers sleek in the fragile cone of his torch beam, cobbling the guano, creosote, and smoke-haunted blackness that tunneled beyond his reach toward the star-clabbered sky.
If Tee had not been so absorbed in thinking on this particular evening about the eighteenth-century English wooden long-case clock opened up and dismantled on sawhorses in his kitchen shop, of the day’s puzzlement over the crown wheel and verge, he might have been more conscious of his walk’s direction, the reasons for choosing to clamber up the ridge to the lookout. No matter. Here he was again, after all, his breath condensing in the air, arms wrapped around his torso, compelled by tides beyond himself. And if he had not been, there on the chilly, burnished precipice, so caught up in the spectacle of his swifts’ annual return, he might have seen, from the chimney at the furthest gable of the far east wing, near the glass conservatory, a pencil trace of smoke rising, then dissolving into the blue brow of the declining year.