Too Much Happiness

So it wasn’t sounding like a part-time enterprise, the kind he carried on himself. It could be a big outfit, somebody from out of the county altogether.

Eliot Suter had not given any hint of this offer when Roy was talking to him. But it is quite possible that an approach was made to him later and he decided to forget the casual sort of arrangement that had been put forward by Roy. Decided to let the bulldozer go in.

During the evening Roy thinks of phoning up and asking what is going on. But then he thinks that if the farmer has indeed changed his mind there is nothing to be done. A spoken agreement is nothing to hold to. The man could just tell him to clear off.

The best thing for Roy to do might be just to act as if he has never heard Percy’s story, never heard about any other fellow-just go in and take what trees he can as quickly as he can, before the bulldozer gets there.

Of course there is always a possibility that Percy may have been mistaken about the whole thing. He isn’t likely to have made it up just to bother Roy, but he could have got it twisted.

Yet the more Roy thinks about it the more he comes to discount this possibility. He just keeps seeing in his mind the bulldozer and the chained logs, the great log piles out in the field, the men with chain saws. That is the way they do things nowadays. Wholesale.

Part of the reason the story has made such an impact is that he has a dislike for the River I

Local people go to the i

“Well, she was,” said Lea. “She is. She says so herself.”

True. But Roy still thinks of those people as snobs. Grabbers and snobs. They are putting up new buildings supposed to be like an old-time store and an old-time opera house, just for show. They burn wood for show. A cord a day. So now some operator with a bulldozer will be levelling the bush as if it was a cornfield. This is just the sort of high-handed scheme you would expect, the kind of pillage you might know they would get up to.

He tells Lea the story he has heard. He still tells her things-it’s a habit-but he is so used to her now not paying any real attention that he hardly notices whether there is an answer or not. This time she echoes what he himself has said.

“Never mind. You’ve got enough to do anyway.”

That’s what he would have expected, whether she was well or not. Missing the point. But isn’t that what wives do-and husbands probably the same-around fifty percent of the time?

The next morning he works on a drop-leaf table for a while. He means to stay in the she’d all day and get a couple of past-due jobs finished. Near noon he hears Diane’s noisy muffler and looks out the window. She’ll be here to take Lea to the reflexologist-she thinks it does Lea good and Lea doesn’t object.

But she is heading for the shed, not the house.

“Howdy,” she says.

“Howdy.”

“Hard at work?”

“Hard as ever,” Roy says. “Offer you a job?”

This is their routine.

“I got one. Listen, what I came in here for, I want to ask you a favor. What I want is to borrow the truck. Tomorrow, to take Tiger to the vet. I can’t handle him in the car. He’s got too big for the car. I hate to have to ask you.”

Roy says not to worry about it.

Tiger to the vet, he thinks, that’s going to cost them.

“You weren’t going to need the truck?” she says. “I mean, you can use the car?”

He has of course been meaning to go out to the bush tomorrow, providing he got his jobs done today. What he’ll have to do, he decides now, is get out there this afternoon.

“I’ll fill it up with gas for you,” Diane says.

So another thing he’ll have to do is remember to fill it up himself, to prevent her. He is just about to say, “You know the reason I want to get out there is something’s come up that I can’t help thinking about-” But she’s out the door and going to get Lea.

As soon as they are out of sight and he has things cleaned up, he gets into the truck and drives out to where he was the day before. He thinks about stopping by and questioning Percy further but concludes that it would not be any use. Such a show of interest might just get Percy inventing things. He thinks again about talking to the farmer but decides against it for the same reasons as last night.

He parks the truck on the trail that leads into the bush. This trail soon peters out, and even before it does he has left it. He is walking around looking at the trees, which appear the same as they did yesterday and don’t give a sign of being party to any hostile scheme. He has the chain saw and the ax with him, and he feels as if he has to hurry. If anybody else shows up here, if anybody challenges him, he will say that he has permission from the farmer and he knows nothing about any other deal. He will say that furthermore he intends to go on cutting unless the farmer comes and personally tells him to get out. If that really happens, of course he will have to go. But it’s not likely it will happen because Suter is a hefty man with a bad hip, so he is not much taken to wandering around his property.

“… no authority…,” Roy says, talking to himself like Percy Marshall, “I want to see it on paper.”

He’s talking to the stranger he’s never even seen.

The floor of any bush is usually rougher than the surface of the surrounding land. Roy has always thought that this was caused by trees falling, pulling up the earth with their roots, then just lying there, rotting. Where they had lain and rotted there would be a mound-where their roots had torn out the earth there would be hollows. But he read somewhere-fairly recently, and he wishes he could remember where it was-that the cause was what happened long ago, just after the Ice Age, when ice formed between layers of earth and pushed it up into odd humps, just as it does today in the arctic regions. Where the land has not been cleared and worked the humps remain.

What happens to Roy now is the most ordinary and yet the most unbelievable thing. It is what might happen to any stupid daydreamer walking in the bush, to any holidayer gawking around at nature, to somebody who thought the bush was a kind of park to stroll in. Somebody who wore light shoes instead of boots and didn’t bother to keep an eye on the ground. It has never happened to Roy before in hundreds of times of walking in the bush, it has never once come near to happening.