The Spirit Wood by Robert Masello Read Free Book Online Page B

there, no welcome—only great, bulging eyes that glistened wetly, observing her, waiting for her. It was the first time in her life she remembered experiencing something as distinctly “other,” something that was large and alive but unutterably foreign, not to be communicated with in any way she knew. Not, above all, to be trusted. She rode the pony that day—her father hadhoisted her up before she knew it—but she never did again.
    “Me, I don't move so good,” Nikos was saying. “I get trouble in my legs. Go, look around. I will find you later. And anyway,” he confided, “I like in the afternoon to take a little rest. Your grandfather,” he said, smiling and wagging one finger at Peter, “he used to say to me, ‘Nikos, I can never find you in the afternoon. Where do you go to—you are nowhere.’ “
    “Where do you go?” said Peter, striving for the same light tone.
    “Everywhere,” said Nikos, beaming and opening his arms. “I go everywhere.” Then he added, “But mostly, my house. Over there,” he said, pointing vaguely to the west of the main house. “You will see it. If not, I will show you. Later. Now, go on,” he said, shooing them away. “While there is so much sun.” He turned and sidled off across the drive, his boots scraping small bare patches in the loose gravel. As if he knew they were watching him still, he waved one hand behind him. “Go on. Go look around.”
    Peter smiled and turned to Meg. “What a character,” he said in a low voice. “What do you suppose happened to him to make him walk that way?”
    Meg looped her hair back behind her ears. “I don't know—maybe polio? An accident?”
    “But how about those rubber boots? On a day like this?”
    Meg shrugged, as if uncurious; in fact, she was. But Nikos had already made such a profound, and troubling, impression on her, that all she wanted was to put him out of her mind again, before the day was altogether ruined for her. Pushing her hands down into the back pockets of her jeans, she turned in a slow, full, wondering circle. “Isn't it amazing,” she announced, having taken in a 360-degree view, “to think that you can actually own things like this? Trees and rocks andland . . . that everything you're looking at actually belongs to you, just like something you'd buy in a store.”
    “Are you implying there's something wrong in ‘owning’ a part of what God has given to all mankind?” said Peter, facetiously.
    “Three weeks ago, if you'd asked me that question, I'd have said no. But now,” she debated, squirming as if in mild discomfort, “I guess I'd really have to say—no.” She laughed, and when Peter did, too, she said, “A fine pair of bleeding-heart liberals we make.”
    “Après nous, le déluge.”
    “Would you care to show me around the place, Louis?” She took him gently by the arm. “Which way would you recommend?”
    “What difference does it make? Like Nikos,” Peter declared, “I go everywhere.” He laughed again.
    Skirting the house, which loomed above them like a great gray cliff—Peter couldn't resist reciting the appropriate lines from Wordsworth's The Prelude —they discovered they were at the top of a long and gentle rise, at the foot of which, hundreds of yards below them, they saw a long wooden pier extending out into the bay and a ramshackle boathouse painted green and white. Halfway down the incline, off to the left, was a small, vine-covered gazebo with a cupola top.
    “Oh, look at that,” exclaimed Meg, bounding off across the vast, unkempt lawn. Taking hold of one of the wooden posts, she swung herself up into the little round enclosure and plopped down on the rough-hewn bench inside. Peter joined her, and together they gazed up between the posts to the house above them. From the rear, it presented an equally sullen and uninviting view, the central block dominated by what appeared to be a single long chamber. Between the two short wings which extended down the hill,