“Sure.”
“I mean, I know how hard it is to…” To what? Harry thought. “To adjust to a new place.” He could almost hear the word through his son’s ears: adjust. It seemed a bad thing to have to do.
“Dad?”
“What?”
“Do you think it’s snowing in Duluth?”
Actually, Harry had worked like hell in Duluth, especially in the last five years, and the town might just as well have been Des Moines or Atlanta, for all the time he’d had to think about it. He had grown up in Duluth, though, and for just one moment he did feel his son’s homesickness, just a flash of it, and then it faded and was gone. It must have been a memory of some time in his childhood, a memory of a memory. What he could see was that Jimmy was listless and unhappy—that was plain enough.
“Do you think it’s snowing in Duluth?” Jimmy asked again, his thin face turned toward the window.
“It might be, but I don’t think it would be the same storm.”
“No, I guess not.” Jimmy’s hands, still in his mittens, lay palms up in his lap.
His arms seemed so listless that Harry could believe he’d lost the power to raise them, and moved by Jimmy’s sadness he began again to feel that wisp of memory of his own childhood. They had lived on Park Point, between the bay and the lake, on the bay side of the narrow point of sand. In the winter, the snow sometimes drifted as high as the trolley wires, and the house creaked and moved in the blizzards that roared in from the lake and tried to push them into the bay. He’d lie in bed, just on the edge of real fear, and try to hold the house down on its precarious foundation. Now, just for a flash, just for the smallest instant, he was filled with the unbearable pleasure of memory. “You’d better get ready for dinner,” he said.
Jimmy nodded, and began, slowly and weakly, to pull his mittens off. At supper, he was almost too polite, and ate very little. After supper he went right to his room, and Harry and Ruth remained silent at the table.
* * *
All that night it snowed. The snow drifted softly over the house, sometimes ticking lightly against the windows. Down through the bare trees it came, to fill up the lawn and cover over the street. On the spruce and pine at the end of the street, it stopped, then sifted down through the dark branches that seemed almost unbelievably green where the streetlight touched them. Jimmy stood at his window, wrapped in a blanket. He’d awakened at four in the morning and smelled the snow, somehow—or maybe it was the hard dryness of his radiator, which was too hot to touch. Then he heard the softness of the snow. At first there was his happiness about the first snow of the year, and then it seemed too cruel that he was far from home in this foreign place, like the dream in which it is your father standing in the dark, and you are so relieved until he turns and it is not your father at all.
The snowplow trucks had long been out; he heard on other streets their muffled boom and scrape, and after a while one came slowly down his street, snow streaming across its dim headlights, its weight felt in the timbers of the house, and shoved its great wave of seething snow into the trees at the dead end; then it backed, turned, and pushed back up the street. The snow still whirled down, invisible until it fell below the streetlight, where it turned white and glided into the pureness of the ground. In a few minutes, the street was as smooth as it had been before.
Jimmy went back to bed, but lay awake, and later the great truck came back down the street. He must have slept, although the night seemed very long, and each time the plow rumbled and boomed he half waked. In the morning, as he lay unrested in the warm bed, he wondered if he had heard the plow three times or a hundred times. With the sheet over his eyes, so close his eyelashes touched it, he stared into whiteness. What if the snow had come up like this over his windows, over the house, pure and white and soft as blindness? The street would have to be a tunnel, then, and the whole town subterranean. He pulled the sheet away from his eyes and looked; the snow still fell past his window. A toilet flushed, and then his parents spoke softly in the hall as they moved past his door. It was Saturday, and they didn’t want to wake him because he had looked thin and tired. He knew they were worried about him, and he was vaguely sorry about that, but ever since they all had been transferred away from home, his parents’ authority, even the strength of his concern for them, seemed to have lost importance. It was as if they were all merely puppets, moved by someone else’s hand.
Late in the morning, he got up and went downstairs in his pajamas and bathrobe. The dry air in his room had made him thirsty, and he had a glass of milk. His mother wanted to make him scrambled eggs, which he usually liked, but he didn’t want any. She seemed upset by this, and even in his own mind, as he examined the vision of a plate of scrambled eggs, yellow folds steaming, he wondered how they could seem chalky and strange—too strange to eat.
“Isn’t the snow nice?” his mother asked. “You love the snow.”
“Yeah,” he said, but this was not his snow. It had come unhoped-for, with neither his joy nor his permission.
All Saturday it snowed, and the plow returned several times. Instead of their shoveling the driveway, as he and his father had done on their steep street in Duluth, a jeep came and plowed them out. That evening the jeep had to come again, and with a great many backings and turnings did a mammoth but sloppy job on the driveway. When the town plow came back, it pushed everything down into the trees. After supper, a big yellow loader came, and with its scoop piled the snow higher against the evergreens, until their tops were like Christmas trees growing on a white hill. The pile was at least fifteen feet high.
On Sunday morning, the TV said New Hampshire had received twenty-five inches of snow, and though it had begun to taper off, there would be no school in many towns on Monday. Later, the local radio station said Leah was one of those towns; the school buses would not be able to get through to the outlying roads of the school district for at least another day.
That morning, Jimmy felt tired. His arms almost ached—seemed just on the verge of pain whenever he moved them. He sat watching television, and afterward couldn’t remember what he’d seen. His mother asked him why he didn’t unpack his things and arrange his room—it was so much nicer than the little room he’d had back in Duluth. He said he might, but merely went upstairs and sat on his bed for a while. When he stood up he looked out the window at the huge pile of snow the loader had made; he had never seen so much snow piled so high in one heap—a mountain of snow. He thought of the buried trees descending like elevators down into the white, deep into a kind of blankness, where all was pure and new. A little shiver of excitement startled him, because he wasn’t sure what had caused it. That pureness, like a piece of white paper to draw on, where you alone run the pencil that carves out the world from the flatness of it. But why should he care, all of a sudden? He knew only that in the deep pile existed possibilities for him, perhaps a way to change his weakness back into some kind of action, and so he put on his long underwear and ski pants, then went downstairs and took his rubber boots from the hall closet into the kitchen. He knew his mother was happy to see him want to go outside—she made sure that he had his mackinaw buttoned, tucked his scarf in around his neck, and didn’t ask him where he was going.
He remembered having seen something on the back wall of the garage that had not been too interesting, but now he went out to look at it more closely. It was a little folding shovel, and he knew from television that in the Army it was called an entrenching tool, used by soldiers to dig foxholes. It even had a green canvas scabbard he could, with some bending of the wire clasps, hitch on his belt. Some previous tenant of the house had hung it on the wall and left it—he knew it didn’t belong to his father—and so without asking he took it for his own.
He approached the snow pile circumspectly; he wondered about this, too, for he had every right to examine it, and no other children lived on the street. Slowly he pushed through the light snow, waist-high in places, around the back of the garage, through the trees, so tha
t he came onto the pile from the rear. The snow wall, much harder than the snow that had merely fallen of its own weight, rose up before him, laced by green branches. At the base of a pine tree, the branches had caused a natural tunnel, and he got down on his knees to look into it. The light came through the walls, softly, and all around him the snow breathed clean cold onto his face. After a few feet, the tunnel came to nothing; he crawled inside, on his knees on the pine needles sifted over with light snow, and he couldn’t even turn around. He began digging merely to make the tunnel big enough so he wouldn’t have to back into it in order to see the opening from the inside, but the snow cleaved off so easily and the wall he began to carve with the green blade of his shovel was so much his own smooth creation he kept on until he had nowhere to put the snow. It would take too long to kick it out the door, and he’d get snow up his waist, so he struggled out into the daylight again, in his nose the smell of snow, like cold water. He needed other tools—a cardboard box to put the snow in, and he could slide it out easily; plenty of boxes were in the basement, left over from moving.
He didn’t want to have to go back to the house—there was even some reluctance to make his trail plain, as though he might be followed or observed. But he needed the box, and he did go back, successfully unseen—his mother was upstairs—and found a good box, narrow and long, and not too high. This he carried back above the snow, so as not to leave an imprint of its smoothness or squareness anywhere, and he felt relief when the branches closed over him again. Farther inside the tunnel he felt even more safe, and with each carving stroke of his shovel his safety seemed to increase: the room grew in volume. Bluish light came down through the arched ceiling, and as he moved the end wall past the tree, the room grew lighter. By four o’clock, as the light began to fade, his room was five feet wide, and nearly five feet high at the top of the arch. Carefully he cleaned the floor and sharpened the corners, then pushed the box outside along its smooth worn track, to empty it again. As the last light faded, he returned to sit in his snow room; quietly the cold moved out of the walls and surrounded him, yet he was not cold. Before he left, he put the shovel and the box inside, and carefully covered the entrance with blocks of snow.
That evening his father asked him what he’d done all day, and he said he’d watched television, and then played in the snow for a while. As he lay in bed that night waiting for sleep, he seemed to be in the snow room again, and it was huge as a cavern. He could look up the wall, higher than houses, and see the smooth strokes carved by his shovel. The great strokes had smoothed a wall high as a palisade.
In the morning, he woke at the first light. His hands and arms were sore, yet seemed stronger, and a sense of urgency, not happy but at least purposeful, made him get out of bed immediately. He gathered his clothes as quietly as possible and went down to the kitchen to dress. Though he wasn’t hungry, he decided to eat a bowl of cereal; he must leave evidence that he had eaten, and also he knew that his body needed the food. This was a strange idea he had never worked upon himself before—he had been forced to eat things that were good for him, carrots and cauliflower and other things that seemed to grow in the mouth, but now by his own choice he ate without hunger, so that he could go to his snow room without being followed, and have the strength to work. This deliberate treatment of his body, without the simple desire of appetite, was so new it seemed dangerous, and he shivered for a moment with a fear like the tingle of falling.
As another precaution he tore a piece of paper from the grocery list pad and wrote a note:
Dear Mother and Dad,
I have gone out to play in the snow.
love,
Jimmy Paulson
Later, Harry and Ruth examined the note. “That’s a good sign, I’d say,” Harry said.
“I wish he had a friend,” Ruth said. “I wish some other children lived on the street. Do you have to go to work this morning? You could do something with him—play with him or something. Go skating.”
“There’s no skating with this snow. Anyway, it hasn’t been cold long enough to freeze the rink.”
“You could do something with him.”
“You know I have to go to work,” Harry said, with some of his impatience showing. He felt guilty—a little—and it seemed mostly Ruth’s fault. “I’m responsible for the whole plant now. You know that. Things no one else can do.”
“You go away on Saturdays, on Sundays. You go down there. When does he get to see you?”
“Ruth, I have to. I simply have to, now. Later on, I’ll get things organized, but now there are so many things.”
“We could have stayed in Duluth!” she said, and began to cry.
He wanted to tell her the facts of life—that when a man is offered a promotion and refuses, or even hesitates, he is through. They couldn’t have stayed in Duluth. That was absolutely impossible. But he’d told her all this before, in calmer circumstances. He went to work leaving everything like that.
Jimmy began to carve a door upon the rear wall of his room. He made the lintel, then the sides, carefully cutting a sharp edge all around, even where the plow had folded some sand into the snow, and then shaved down the center of the door until it stood upon the wall with the authority of its squareness. It seemed a door he might simply open, if he knew how, and then he might walk through it into that perfect uncreated world beyond.
When he pushed the box full of snow out into the sunlight, he was blinded, and couldn’t keep his eyes open. Then, when he pushed the box ahead of him back into the hole, it was almost too dark to see, and his new door seemed just too primitive—only some marks upon the wall. He would have to have light, and immediately he remembered the red candles that had been stored so near a radiator they had melted over upon themselves into jointed-looking shapes. They were somewhere in the basement, in a shoe box; they would never be used, yet never thrown away, and he knew he could have them.
He would need the light, because he felt certain he was going beyond the carved door, deep into the interior of that place he almost knew already. Why was he sure, for instance, that the door entered immediately upon a passage, and not another room? And at the end of the passage, another door led to a vast place of light, where he could breathe freely again and not be sick.
He knelt in the dim cave tasting the bitter dye of his mitten; he wanted only to pass into that place, but he had to wonder about himself, and for the last time to speculate upon his belief in such childish magic. No, it was there, and therefore true; how could he not believe it? The world was there, waiting to be defined by his own hands. Now he would have to get to work; he needed the candles, so he must go out into the sunlight of the unhappy town, and go back to the big house for a while. He would have to take time out for lunch, too, because of his mother. He wasn’t worried that she would come out to see what he was doing, because she wasn’t the kind of person who ever left the sidewalk to go out into the snow. She wouldn’t even have the right kind of boots for that. Then, after that delay, he could come back to this real work.
When Harry Paulson got home from work that evening, Ruth opened the kitchen door before he could put his hand on the knob, and stood there dramatically, her hands flickering across her face.
“It’s dark, and he’s still out there by himself! What can he be doing in the dark?”
“I’m sure he’s all right,” Harry said, but he turned to go and see. In the garage, he met Jimmy coming in, and pretended to look for something in the car. Then, because he had falsified his intentions, he couldn’t ask Jimmy what he’d been doing. Ruth did, though.
“I’m building something,” Jimmy said. To Harry he seemed not so much evasive as simply bored by their interest.
“What are you building?” Ruth asked.
“Sort of a fort. You know,” Jimmy said wearily.
“You’re all wet!”
“Now, Ruth,” Harry said. “Naturally he’s going to get wet in the snow.”
“But he hasn’t been feeling well!”
“I feel fine,” Jimmy said.
“He doesn’t look fine. He looks pale, and he doesn’t eat enough. I made him a sandwich for lunch and I found most of it in the garbage can.”
“I ate the meat out of it,” Jimmy said.
“You’ve got to eat more. You’ve got to go to school tomorrow, and you look so tired and thin!” Ruth’s voice quavered.
Harry stood by, helpless. He felt that he should be the one to understand his own son. He’d always seemed to before. But now this strangeness came up in front of him—this and other things—and they seemed beyond understanding.
Jimmy sat down on the kitchen floor and began to pull off his boots, and Harry could at least help with that. As he pulled at Jimmy’s boots, the little boy seemed as light as cloth, and Harry had to hold him by his skinny knee with one hand and pull a boot off with the other. Jimmy lay back passively and let this be done.
“You’ll have a hot bath before supper,” Ruth said. “Look at his feet. They’re practically blue!”
“That’s only stain from my socks,” Jimmy said.
He was calm, and went upstairs in his underwear, slowly for him. He actually walked. Harry could not remember seeing Jimmy walk up the stairs before, and he was not so old himself he couldn’t remember the time when he never walked up the stairs, but always took them at a run. When did it happen, that great change in him? It seemed such an important point in his life that he felt he should remember the exact set of stairs, and the very hour in which he had lost that easy lightness in his body.
After getting in the tub, Jimmy lay back in the hot water that burned quickly at his skin and then was merely thick and warm. The back of the tub seared his shoulders with ice, and that changed, too, so that in a moment he lay suspended in warmth so benevolent the water seemed part of him, as though it moved easily through the pores of his skin. He thought of reptile sunning on a rock, having to be no more than the extension of the temperature of the world, and when the world cooled, he cooled, and still felt nothing, no more than the rock itself felt its changes and retractions.
Leah, New Hampshire Page 10