"Isaac My Son" - читать интересную книгу автора (Maclean Katherine)

Isaac My Son

Isaac My Son

Carl West and Katherine MacLean



Carl West and Katherine MacLean are married and live together in a handbuilt house on twenty acres of Maine woods surrounded by beautiful, tiny, granite swimming pools. They paint, sculpt and write, do carpentry, build greenhouses, cut trees and move the landscape around in wheel barrows, and occasionally they sell something.

The idea for the following story came from a Maine ex-Marine back from the Vietnam war with a job in Portland. He explained over coffee how he had returned home to a Micmak town in the north woods and found his girl and his best friend had married when he was listed missing in action. His parents had sold his clothes and and guns and traps and trapping rights.

"He was rescued from murdering them by passing out drunk in the woods on top of spilled wine bottles," MacLean adds. "While unconscious, he talked with an old man who gave him fatherly advice and seemed totally real. The fatherly voice took all the pain and anger from him, and he woke up under a giant pine, under a pile of pine needles, feeling newly clean inside and changed forever. Later, he heard it was called a Grandfather Tree.

"Mycelium mat of the kind that feeds pine roots really seems to have some relation to neural fibers of the dendrites of the brain, and they die at 106 degrees ," she explains. "More and more cellular life is being found to be a symbiotic fusion of originally separate beings. The mycelium-neuron suspicion is in scientific literature that was brought to our attention by Christopher Mason, my son. I worked it into a plot that Carl changed and wrote."

Katherine MacLean is the author of numerous short stories and novels that have been translated into twenty languages. She was the recipient of the 1971 Nebula Award for her novella "The Missing Man." The Diploids (1962), a collection of some of her stories from the 1950sЧincluding the wonderful "A Pyramid In The Desert"Чproved a major distraction to the editor of this book, then thirteen, when he should have been applying grammatical Band-Aids to splintered syntax. (My apologies and thanks, therefore, albeit belated, to Alan Jones, my long-suffering English master at Leeds Grammar School, who would often ask where I thought such behavior as reading paperbacks during lessons would get me. Here's the answer.)

Carl West has taught art and is a former police officer who lived and traveled through Central America and the South Pacific. He has co-authored one novel with MacLeanЧDark WingЧand now divides his time between his farm and writing science fiction. Right now, they are both working on their own books as well as collaborating on a third science fiction novel.

Whoever thinks that only big is beautiful, begin here...



All day long they climbed, the boy lagging behind him, the two working higher and higher, past the houses, past the roads, through sloped meadows, circling brush and brambles, resting in thin forests. The boy lagged and wandered and asked the same questions over and over in a dull mumble.

The father remembered the happy, almost singing voice of his son before the fever, the clever words, now stopped. Tears stung his eyes. He stopped and shared soda and sandwiches with the boy, and watched him for signs of improvement.

It had been a long year of waiting and watching, the two away from schools, out of doors, the child, regaining health and grace, the father losing money, getting behind on his research. He had talked with old locals who remembered what medicine men had done for the brain damaged, the spirit-lost. Their stories had agreed.

Above, projecting from a distant white line of granite ledge towered the green-black spike of a huge hemlock evergreen, "Grandfather Tree." They were closer now, but the climb was steep. He turned aside to find an easier slope. The boy was tired. The whining repetition of the boy's voice was a dull pain in his ears.

The late afternoon sun sent long lengthening shadows and pools of cooling dark. He turned back to one and took the boy's arm. "Let's rest, then I'll carry both packs if you collect some firewood on the way."

The boy looked up dully and mumbled, "Straps hurt," and did not take off his straps. The father had to repeat twice before the boy understood and dropped his pack.

Later, his father shouldered both packs and trudged more slowly up the trail, while his boy ran ahead, gathering wood, cracking dead branches off trees with a silent grace that was different from the enthusiasm and exclamations of discovery of the years before the fever.

"Healthy,Ф his father said. "Animal," his silent observation added and he ground his teeth against anger. The city doctors had said there was no hope. On the trails through Maine and Canadian forests, collecting botanical specimens, bringing his son, old Indians had looked at the boy and remembered that the spirit lost to a fever or blow on the head could sometimes be brought back by offerings to a grandfather tree that seemed a bad dream.

Under the great tree there was a wide spread of rounded ground, like a thick rug cushioned with fallen pine needles two feet deep. While the boy built a fireplace on the windswept granite ledge, his father carried one of his flakes of white granite up to the shade of the great tree and dug a groove. He lifted the bedding of pine needles and folded it back like layers of blankets until it turned damp and dark and showed magic silver threads.

He was reassured by the sight of the mold. Trying not to break any of the silver web, he dug deeper until small tree roots stopped his fingers. It was deep enough. He smoothed it neatly into a body-sized trench, picked up the rock and called his son.

Afterward, he replaced the brown, damp layers with their silken white threads, tucking them in around the damaged bloody head and over the kerchief he draped over the blank child's face, covering the motionless body, hoarsely singing the old native chants, and mixing it with calling on a god he no longer believed.

He sat beside the grave and remembered. He taught botany. A young native American studying at his college had come to his office and asked him about "ghost trees." He had confessed he had been blessed with advice and peace from a ghost tree after drunkenly trying to commit suicide beneath it, puking and spilling wine and drinking and leaking blood from crashing through brush and trying to cut his veins with a broken wine bottle, howling his rage against an unjust world until he passed out. He woke two days later under a huge old pine, feeling at peace, clearly remembering long talks with an old man who was a pine tree. The new peace of mind had lasted and become permanent. Afterward, the old men of his village had told him the tree was called Grandfather.

The botanist had tried to find the biggest hemlock hanging over the Indian student's home village. It was dark under the great old tree. He felt a presence over him and looked up, but it was not an old man, it was the dark branches of the tree. The last purple clouds of sunset were fading in the west and he could no longer see his son's grave.