Back of Beyond

by Steve Smith

The old Ford station wagon squeaked to a stop just off the dirt road at the bottom of the long hill. The old man got out and looked back up the hill, marveling that the brakes had held again.

The October sun was starting to dry the frost from the bracken ferns as he let Skip out of her kennel in the back of the car. The setter, like him, had seen many autumns, many grouse and woodcock. This hunt was going to be just one more in a never-ending string of hunts.

He assembled his old Ithaca, the 20 double’s worn barrels glinting in the sun as he clicked the forearm into place. He thumbed the lever, and the empty chambers stared up at him. Dropping a pair of yellow shells into the unseeing eyes, he left the gun open as he swung his leg across the fence that bordered the old railroad grade that skirted the bottom of the hill and headed west, out of sight. It headed for Back Of Beyond.

It wasn’t really named that, the old, long-dead town. It was named Martinsville or Marlettesville, or something like that but he just renamed it Back Of Beyond, because it was so far off the beaten path, almost no one knew it was there. It wasn’t like the town council was going to overrule him.

The place was old and dying when the old man was young. He hadn’t known it though, because he’d grown up in another part of the state. It was only after the War that he had moved here and had started poring over old maps in the county clerk’s office to locate grouse cover. It was then that he discovered it on an old plat map and decided to visit there. He was glad that he had.

Back Of Beyond had been a railroad stopover years ago. It had started as a coal and water stop for the great trains that hauled the great trees to the mills during the late 1880s. As the trees disappeared and the soil was opened to sunlight, the farmers and their plows moved in and a town started to grow. Then the Depression hit, and a few years later the War took many of the young men; and after the War, the young people left behind decided there was more money in the cities. The old folks died off or moved away, and the forest came back, and with it came the grouse and woodcock, and with them came the old man.

When he first came to Back Of Beyond, it was easy to find, not grown over like now. Just follow the old grade west until you came to the first of the old buildings that marked the town square. The shells of a few stores and some pitiful old houses, many collapsed by weather and years, were about all that was left now. In other places, only cellar holes.

He hunted on the edge of town. One of his favorite spots was right around the old town cemetery. The weathered stones showed the old man what had happened during those early, spare years. The dates and ages on the stones told him there must have been an epidemic of some kind, maybe the flu or measles, which had killed a number of children. The inscriptions told the story: “Josie Ann, beloved daughter, dead at age seven in the year of Our Lord eighteen-hundred and ninety-six, April 6.”

And so on.

Other stones told of lives lived and snuffed out early by accident, childbirth, and the rigors of fighting the wilderness every day of a short life. Very few stones showed that the owner had lived past fifty. The old man could remember turning fifty, a long time ago.

He remembered another graveyard near the city. The one where he’d buried Evelyn. He buried her right there next to Jeff. Jeff, with his military headstone and flag and his Bronze Star.

Jeff had loved Back Of Beyond, too, although his youth made it hard for him to sit still while the old man uncased his gun and filled his pipe. Jeff had come to Evvie and him late in life, and he never could quite keep up with the boy. Always on the move, he’d gone away to college and then to the Air Force, and then halfway around the world to a place called Da Nang… and finally he’d come home, draped with a flag, to the graveyard where he waited for his mother.

But the old man never thought of them as being there. He thought of them as being here, in the Back Of Beyond cemetery.
The old man thought of the dogs who had come here with him for their last hunt, not that they’d known. They’d died, all three of them, in his arms at the vet’s office and he’d put them in the Ford and driven to the old grade and walked back to the town and to the cemetery and he’d buried them under the remnants of the white pines. They’d loved this place the most, and so he’d brought them here.

He had been leaning against a pine as the memories of the place washed over him. A good wife, a good son, good dogs. All gone. For a time, he was like dead, too, only still breathing. But slowly, he came to the realization that the worst thing that could happen to a man had already happened to him, and that what years he had left would be spent in fooling with puppies and hunting grouse. Always, there were grouse. He’d lived for them, and here in Back Of Beyond, it was as though the birds lived for him to take his mind from his grief.

He clicked his tongue to Skip. She’d been standing nearby, watching him. He turned his back on the graveyard and headed for a clump of aspen that skirted the old grade and was taking it over in spots.

Skip knew the game, knew the birds. She was old, but she was determined, and within fifteen minutes, she had a point. The old man remembered that it wasn’t too far from here that Robin had pointed a grouse for Jeff – his first. The boy had taken the bird with one swift shot, and the old man had it mounted. It’s still in his room back in the city, right where it was the day the boy had left for Vietnam. Everything was the same, even the necktie carelessly thrown over the mirror on his dresser. He had joked to his mother that he’d put it away when he came home, and Evvie hadn’t ever let anyone touch anything in Jeff’s room.

But Jeff had come home in a government-issue casket and the tie was still there and the grouse was still blankly staring out the window in his room and six months later, he’d buried Evvie. Like some of the mothers of Back Of Beyond, she hadn’t been able to cope with life without her only child. Her heart went, and with it went the last of the joy from the old man’s.

But Skip was waiting, and the old man moved in to flush. The bird hammered up through the aspen whips. Even as he triggered the shot, his mind told him, Young hen, and after the retrieve, the rump and primary feathers proved him right. He pocketed the bird. Funny, there wasn’t the old feeling. The point had been flawless, the bird courageous, the shot true. But like players who know their parts a bit too well, the thrill was gone.

The parts hadn’t changed, it was him. The visit to the doctor hadn’t helped. Not by a long shot.

After Evvie had died, he knew the worst pages of his life had already been turned, but that was before the visit. His stomach had been giving him fits, so he went. Hadn’t been to the doctor since the War, but he went now.

Cancer.

My God, what a horrible word that is.

Cancer.

He had it, and it was going to kill him, and it was going to do it within six months if he were lucky.

If he weren’t lucky, it would take a year.

He spurned the surgery that the doctor said probably wouldn’t help, and the chemotherapy that would make his hair fall out and, as the old man had told the doctor, “leave an ugly corpse.”

Nope, he decided the way to go was to take it like a man. To wait for it. And all the time he’d pray that it would come and get him quickly. He just had Skip now, and some days it was nip and tuck as to who was going to go first. But, October had come, and the bounce came back in her step and she was ready at the door for the opener. Ready to go to Back Of Beyond.
She was all he had. Sometimes the weakness he felt, the pain and the exhaustion, were all he could stand. He’d put dogs down who’d suffered less pain, and one black night he’d taken the Ithaca down from the rack and dropped a single shell into the right barrel and raised the muzzle toward his head…. But his fighter’s heart said no, not this way. Not now. Better to wait for it. Death.

Skip had another point, and a woodcock twittered up. The Ithaca was true again, and the retrieve was perfect. The little weight it added in his game bag seemed greater than he knew it to be. He loved woodcock, loved them for their mysterious ways and their nighttime comings and goings. Years ago, he and Evvie and Jeff had spent spring nights listening to the ‘cock dance, watching their spirals in the darkening sky. They’d stay until full dark and then walk back to the car hand-in-hand and eat a sandwich as the stars came out. Years ago. Three lifetimes ago. Now, they were gone, and The Reaper was winning.

He sat down on the old stone fence where he always sat at noon to eat lunch, only today, there was no lunch. The pain and the nausea made eating a cruel joke these days. Lucky he could even shuffle along today, amazed at his shooting; but eating was out of the question. So he fed the sandwich he carried out of habit to Skip, and she begged for more.

Finally, he decided to head for the grade and the car and home. Skip followed slowly, as if knowing that this was the last time, the last visit to Back Of Beyond.

They stopped by the cemetery once more as they passed, and the old man leaned, and then sat down, under a huge flaming sugar maple, the leaves falling into breathless air against a sky as blue as Evvie’s eyes had once been. And Jeff’s.

He sat there, and Skip lay down next to him, and the old man’s mind wandered. To Jeff, to Evvie, to other dogs, to the birds. He relaxed. Funny, he hadn’t really relaxed like this in years. Maybe never. As his mind journeyed, the leaves fell on him and Skip, and the sun slipped lower in the sky.

And finally, the leaves nearly covered them both. Skip stood, shook, prodded the old man with her nose, licked his cold face, and turned toward the old grade and the car. The dog stopped and looked back.

But the old man didn’t follow. Not this time. He was already home.