Rules of Civility - Amor Towles [97]
To hear him talk about Eve’s future you wouldn’t have had an inkling of what had just transpired between them. You would have assumed they were old familiars with a fond and unspoiled camaraderie. And maybe that was just about right. Maybe for Tinker their relationship had been reset to January third. Maybe for him the last half a year had been snipped from the chain of events like a poorly scripted scene in a film.
As we walked farther, our conversation became intermittent like the sunlight through the woods. Squirrels scattered before us among the tree trunks and yellow-tailed birds zipped from branch to branch. The air smelled of sumac and sassafras and other sweet-sounding words. And I began to think that maybe Tinker was right: Maybe I was a hiker.
But the slope began to grow steep, then steeper, and steeper still until it was the pitch of a staircase. We were climbing single file in silence. An hour went by, maybe four. My boots became a size too small and my left heel felt like I had stepped on a frying pan. I fell twice, scuffing my foxhunting khakis, and I had long since sweat through my heiress’s shirt. I found myself wondering if I had enough self-control to ask How much farther? in a casual, disinterested, offhand sort of way. But then the trees started thinning and the grade mellowed, and suddenly we were on a rocky peak exposed to the open sky with a view to the horizon unmarked by man.
Far below us, a mile wide and five miles long, the lake looked like a giant black reptile crawling across the wilds of New York.
—There, he said. You see?
And I could see. I could see why Tinker, feeling that his life was in disarray, had chosen to come here.
—Just as it looked to Natty Bumppo, I said, taking a seat on the hard stone.
Tinker smiled that I remembered who he had wanted to be for a day.
—Not far from it, he agreed, pulling sandwiches and a canteen from his knapsack.
Then he sat down a few feet away—at a gentleman’s distance.
As we ate, he reminisced about when his family had spent Julys in Maine and he and his brother had hiked the Appalachian Trail for days at a time—outfitted with the tent and compasses and jackknives that their mother had given them for Christmas and that they had waited six long months to put to use.
We still hadn’t spoken about St. George’s or the change in Tinker’s circumstances as a youth. I certainly wasn’t going to bring it up. But when he talked about hiking in Maine with his brother, he was making it clear in his own way that those were halcyon days preceding less fortunate times.
When we finished lunch, I lay down with Tinker’s pack under my head and he broke sticks and tried to toss them onto a small bed of moss twenty feet in the distance, in the manner of a schoolboy for whom no walk home is without its world championship. His sleeves were rolled up and he had freckles on his forearms from exposure to the summer sun.
—So were you a Fenimore Cooper fan in general? I asked.
—Oh, I must have read Last of the Mohicans and Deerslayer three different times. But then, I loved all the adventure books: Treasure Island . . . 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea . . . The Call of the Wild . . .
—Robinson Crusoe.
He smiled.
—You know, I actually picked up Walden after you said you’d want to be marooned with it.
—What did you think? I asked.
—Well, at first I wasn’t sure I was going to make it. Four hundred pages of a man alone in a cabin philosophizing on human history, trying to strip life to its essentials . . .
—But what did you think in the end?
Tinker stopped breaking sticks and looked into the distance.
—In the end—I thought it was the greatest adventure of them all.
At around three, a bank of blue gray clouds appeared in the distance and the temperature began to drop. So Tinker gave me an Irish sweater from his pack and we headed back down the trail, trying to keep a few strides ahead of the weather. We had just gotten to the grove of trees when it began to sprinkle, and we were vaulting up the steps of the house with the first clap of thunder.
Tinker built a fire