The Beginning Place Read Online Free PDF Page B

I’m home every night, I’m with her on weekends, everything she asks—what can I do that I don’t do?
    His self-accusation was, he knew, unjust, and it did not matter if it was just or unjust: it was judgment; he could not escape it. His bowels felt loose and he was still a little dizzy. He got through his work clumsily, making stupid errors over and over at the register. It was Friday, a heavy afternoon. He could not close his checkline till ten after five, and then only by getting Donna to take his place. “You sick, honey?” she asked him, as he gave her the register key. He did not dare repeat the lie lest it eat the truth again. “I don’t know,” he said.
    “You take care now, Buck.”
    “I will.”
    He made for the back of the store, clumsy and blundering among the crowded aisles. He got his bedroll and backpack from the coldroom and set off through the streets, eastward not westward, towards the paint factory, the waste fields, the gateway. He had to get there. It would be all right when he got there. It was his place. He was all right there.
    The fields were furnace hot. Soaked with sweat and his mouth dry as plaster, Hugh struggled on into the woods, left heat and bright day behind him as the path went downwards and he crossed the threshold of the dusk. He set down his load and went as always straight to the stream bank, knelt, and drank. He stripped off his sweaty clothes and walked out into the water. His breath caught in a ha! of painful ecstasy at the cold of it, the push and force and curl of the current, the grainy skin of rocks under his soles and against his palms. He slipped into the deep pool, dived under, let the water take him, the water in him, he in the water, one dark joy. All else forgotten.
    He came up blinded by his hair, floated for a while under the circle of the colorless, cloudless sky, then at last, the cold of the water striking to the bone, touched ground and splashed ashore. Always he went in silently, with reverence, and came out noisily, charged with life. He rubbed down, pulled on his jeans, and sat down beside his backpack to open it ceremonially. He would make his camp; he would cook dinner. He would lay out his bed there in the shelter of the shrubs in the high grass, and lie down, and sleep beside the running water.
    He wakened under the dark trees, the odor of mint and grass in his head. The faint wind touched his face and hair like a dark, transparent hand.
    It was a strange, slow wakening. He had not dreamed, yet felt that he was dreaming. Entire trust and confidence possessed him. Having lain down and slept on this ground he belonged to it. No harm would come to him. This was his country.
    He got up and washed himself at the creek; kneeling on the shelving rock above the water he looked across to the pale grass of the glade on the other side, the dark masses of bushes and foliage, the clarity of sky over the trees. He stood up then, and set out across the creek, barefoot, not in the water this time but going from rock to rock till a final broad step took him onto the sand of the farther shore. Mint grew on the weedy bank above the sand on this side, too. He picked a leaf, ritually, and chewed it. Farside mint was the same as nearside mint. There was no boundary. It was all his
country. But this time, this was far enough: he would go no farther now. Part of the pleasure of being here was that he could listen for and obey such impulses and commands coming from within him, undistorted by external pressures and compulsions. In that obedience, for the first time since early childhood, he sensed the headiness of freedom, the calmness of power. He chose now to go no farther. When he chose to go farther he would do so. Chewing the mint leaf he strode with wide, steady steps back across the stream.
    He dressed, packed up his bedroll neatly and tucked it away well concealed in the hollow under a bush, put the knapsack with the food in it up in the fork of a tree—he had read