Cabin_ Two Brothers, a Dream, and Five Acres in Maine - Lou Ureneck [38]
All of which is to say it should have come to me as no surprise when one day a neighbor told me that there was a man who lived near the swamp, the one on the way to Green Island, who wanted me to come by for a job. She described him as an older man who had recently moved down from “the city,” which is the way nearly everyone there referred to North Jersey. This was in the summer, July, in the best part of the gardening season, when the lettuces were coming up in big green leaves in the dark sandy soil and under the hot Jersey sun. The man had gotten my name while sitting in Silverton’s only tavern, Toby’s. The owner of the bar, Toby, was a malevolent character. The bar had made him prosperous—he owned a new Buick and traveled to Florida for a few weeks in the winter. He also owned hunting dogs, mostly rabbit hounds, and had a reputation for cruel training methods. If a dog didn’t meet his standards, it was cast off or shot. Johnny drank there, and sometimes he brought me inside the bar. I sat on a bar stool with him and drank birch beer. Toby let Johnny run a tab, and this appeared to give him power over Johnny. He was deferential to Toby in a way I had not seen him with anyone else. I owned one of Toby’s cast-off dogs, a gun-shy English Pointer named Joe. Toby’s bar opened in the morning for men who couldn’t wait until noon for a drink and was a place to drop off and pick up information—the availability of part-time work, local squabbles, where fish were being caught and the like. One day the man who had moved to the place near the swamp had come into Toby’s and complained over his beer that the muskrats were cleaning out his garden. Toby told him that he knew a boy who could rid him of the muskrats. My neighbor’s husband had been present for the exchange, and she related it to me. “He will pay you,” she said.
It was July, certainly not trapping season. Motivated less by lucre and more by ego and the flattery of having had my name spoken in Toby’s as a trapper, I knocked on the man’s door. It was a sweltering day—nothing like my winter mornings in the swamp. He was a small dark man, and a television was mumbling somewhere in the house. He came out and took me to his garden. He showed me the garden damage and offered me a price. I came back the next day with a half dozen traps, and over the next days began catching the muskrats that were slipping into his garden at night. The man was pleased. “You really know how to catch those bastards,” he said. But each day as I stood in the summer sun I felt worse and worse about taking the dead muskrats from the traps—the pelts of the muskrats I was catching were useless in summer. They lacked the deep loft of fur and the black-and-brown sheen of the animals I caught in the winter. And there was nothing to do with the carcasses, so I buried them in a corner of his garden.
This trapping brought me none of the pleasure that I got from my winter rounds in the marsh. It seemed more than a waste; what I was doing seemed a sacrilege. I even stopped lifting my eyes to the marsh when I was in the man’s garden. I felt ashamed. On about the fourth day, I gathered up my traps, and without saying a word to the man, I walked away from his house with no intention of going back. I didn’t ask for the money I was owed. The money would have made me feel even worse. A couple of weeks after I had put the episode out of my mind, my neighbor told me the man with the garden was awfully pleased with the work I had done since the muskrats were no longer eating his garden. “He wants to pay you,” she said. I went back to feeling bad and that winter didn’t return to the marsh as a trapper. I had done something terribly wrong, and I was sure the marsh was aware of it, and if it wasn’t, I surely was.
This