head of steam. Now every song sounds like it’s about fucking. So many cars. At first I felt like I was taking my life into my hands every time I crossed the street. There was more–everything was strange and frightening -but maybe you get the idea, or can at
least grasp a corner of it I began to think about doing something to get back in. When you’re on parole, almost anything will serve. I’m ashamed to say it, but I began to
think about stealing some money or shoplifting stuff from the FoodWay, anything, to
get back in where it was quiet and you knew everything that was going to come up in
the course of the day.
If I had never known Andy, I probably would have done that. But I kept
thinking of him, spending all those years chipping patiently away at the cement with
his rock-hammer so he could be free. I thought of that and it made me ashamed and
I’d drop the idea again. Oh, you can say he had more reason to be free than I did–he
had a new identity and a lot of money. But that’s not really true, you know. Because
he didn’t know for sure that the new identity was still there, and without the new
identity, the money would always be out of reach. No, what he needed was just to be
free, and if I kicked away what I had, it would be like spitting in the face of
everything he had worked so hard to win back. So what I started to do on my time off
was to hitchhike a ride down to the little town of Buxton. This was in the early April of 1977, the snow just starting to melt off the fields, the air just beginning to be warm, the baseball teams coming north to start a new season playing the only game I’m sure
God approves of. When I went on these trips, I carried a Silva compass in my pocket.
There’s a big hayfield in Buxton, Andy had said, and at the north end of that
hayfield there’s a rock wall, right out of a Robert Frost poem. And somewhere along
the base of that wall is a rock that has no earthly business in a Maine hayfield. A
fool’s errand, you say. How many hayfields are there in a small rural town like Buxton?
Fifty? A hundred? Speaking from personal experience, I’d put it at even higher than
that, if you add in the fields now cultivated which might have been haygrass when
Andy went in. And if I did find the right one, I might never know it Because I might
overlook that black piece of volcanic glass, or, much more likely, Andy put it into his pocket and took it with him. So I’d agree with you. A fool’s errand, no doubt about it.
Worse, a dangerous one for a man on parole, because some of those fields were
clearly marked with NO TRESPASSING signs. And, as I’ve said, they’re more than
happy to slam your ass back inside if you get out of line. A fool’s errand… but so is chipping at a blank concrete wall for twenty-eight years. And when you’re no longer
the man who can get it for you and just an old bag-boy, it’s nice to have a hobby to
take your mind off your new life. My hobby was looking for Andy’s rock.
So I’d hitchhike to Buxton and walk the roads. I’d listen to the birds, to the
spring runoff in the culverts, examine the bottles the retreating snows had revealed–
all useless non-returnables, I am sorry to say; the world seems to have gotten awfully spendthrift since I went into the slam–and looking for hayfields.
Most of them could be eliminated right off. No rock walls. Others had rock
walls, but my compass told me they were facing the wrong direction. I walked these
wrong ones anyway. It was a comfortable thing to be doing, and on those outings I
really felt free, at peace. An old dog walked with me one Saturday. And one day I saw
a winter-skinny deer.