The Best American Short Stories 2013

by Elizabeth Strout

  She poured the fresh milk into a basin and covered it with a piece of cheesecloth she kept by, then led him into the main part of the house. The windows there had no curtains, so the light was coming in. Also the woodstove had been in use. There was a sink with a hand pump, a table with oilcloth on it, worn in some places to shreds, and a couch covered with a patchy old quilt.

  Also a pillow that had shed some feathers.

  So far, not so bad, though old and shabby. There was a use for everything you could see. But raise your eyes, and up there on shelves was pile on pile of newspapers or magazines or just some kind of papers, up to the ceiling.

  He had to ask her, was she not afraid of fire? A woodstove too.

  “Oh, I’m always here. I mean, I sleep here and everything. There isn’t any place else I can keep the drafts out. I’m watchful. I haven’t had a chimney fire even. A couple of times it got too hot and I just threw some baking powder on it. Nothing to it.

  “My mother had to be here anyway,” she said. “There was no place else for her to be comfortable. I had her cot in here. I kept an eye on everything. I did think of moving all the papers into the front room, but it’s really too damp in there, they would all be ruined. She died in May. Just when the weather got decent. She lived to hear about the end of the war on the radio. She understood perfectly. She lost her speech a long time ago but she could understand. I’m so used to her not speaking that sometimes I think she’s here, but she’s not.”

  Jackson felt it was up to him to say he was sorry.

  “Oh well. It was coming. Just lucky it wasn’t in the winter.”

  She served him oatmeal porridge and tea.

  “Not too strong? The tea?”

  Mouth full, he shook his head.

  “I never economize on tea. If it comes to that, why not drink hot water? We did run out when the weather got so bad last winter. The hydro gave out and the radio gave out and the sea gave out. I had a rope round the back door to hang on to when I went out to milk. I was going to get Margaret Rose into the back kitchen, but I figured she’d get too upset with the storm and I couldn’t hold her. Anyway she survived. We all survived.”

  Finding a place in the conversation, he asked were there any dwarfs in the neighborhood?

  “Not that I’ve noticed.”

  “In a cart?”

  “Oh. Were they sitting? It must have been the little Mennonite boys. They drive their cart to church and they sing all the way. The girls have to go in the buggy, but they let the boys ride in the cart.”

  “They never looked at me.”

  “They wouldn’t. I used to say to Mother that we lived on the right road because we were just like the Mennonites. The horse and buggy and we drink our milk unpasteurized but the only thing is, neither one of us can sing.

  “When Mother died, they brought so much food I was eating it for weeks. They must have thought there’d be a wake or something. I’m lucky to have them there.

  “But they are lucky too, because they are supposed to practice charity and here I am practically on their doorstep and an occasion for charity if you ever saw one.”

  He offered to pay her when he’d finished but she batted her hand at his money.

  But there was one thing, she said. If before he went he could manage to fix the horse trough.

  What this involved was actually making a new horse trough, and in order to do that he had to hunt around for any materials and tools he could find. It took him all day, and she served him pancakes and Mennonite maple syrup for supper. She said that if he’d only come a week later, she might have fed him fresh jam. She picked the wild berries growing along the railway track.

  They sat on kitchen chairs outside the back door until after the sun went down. She was telling him something about how she came to be here and he was listening, but not paying full attention because he was looking around and thinking how this place was on its last legs but not absolutely hopeless, if somebody wanted to settle down and fix things up. A certain investment of money was needed, but a greater investment of time and energy. It could be a challenge. He could almost bring himself to regret that he was moving on.

  Her father—she called him her daddy—had bought this place just for the summers, she said, and then he decided that they might as well live here all year round. He could work anywhere, because he made his living with a column for the Toronto Telegram. (Jackson just for a second embarrassingly pictured this as a real column holding or helping to hold up a building.) The mailman took what was written and it was sent off on the train. He wrote about all sorts of things that happened, mentioning Belle’s mother occasionally but calling her Princess Casamassima, out of some book. Her mother might have been the reason they stayed year round. She had caught the terrible flu of 1918 in which so many people died, and when she came out of it she was a mute. Not really, because she could make sounds all right, but she seemed to have lost words. Or they had lost her. She had to learn all over again to feed herself and go to the bathroom, but one thing she never learned was to keep her clothes on in the hot weather. So you wouldn’t want her just wandering around and being a laughingstock, on some city street. Belle was away at a school in the winters. It took him a little effort to realize that what she referred to as Bishop Strawn was a school. It was in Toronto and she was surprised he hadn’t heard of it. It was full of rich girls but also had girls like herself who got special money from relations or wills to go there. It taught her to be rather snooty, she said. And it didn’t give her any idea of what she would do for a living.

  But that was all settled for her by the accident. Walking along the railway track, as he often liked to do on a summer evening, her father was hit by a train. She and her mother had already gone to bed when it happened and Belle thought it must be a farm animal loose on the tracks, but her mother was moaning dreadfully and seemed to know first thing.

  Sometimes a girl she had been friends with at school would write to ask her what on earth she could find to do up there, but little did they know. There was milking and cooking and taking care of her mother and she had the hens at that time as well. She learned how to cut up potatoes so each part has an eye, and plant them and dig them up the next summer. She had not learned to drive, and when the war came she sold her daddy’s car. The Mennonites let her have a horse that was not good for farmwork anymore, and one of them taught her how to harness and drive it.

  One of the old friends came up to visit her and thought the way she was living was a hoot. She wanted her to go back to Toronto, but what about her mother? Her mother was a lot quieter now and kept her clothes on, also enjoyed listening to the radio, the opera on Saturday afternoons. Of course she could do that in Toronto, but Belle didn’t like to uproot her. Or maybe it was herself she was talking about, who was scared of uproot.

  The first thing he had to do was to make some rooms other than the kitchen fit to sleep in, come the cold weather. He had some mice to get rid of and even some rats, now coming in from the cooling weather. He asked her why she’d never invested in a cat and heard a piece of her peculiar logic. She said it would always be killing things and dragging them for her to look at, which she didn’t want to do. He kept a sharp ear open for the snap of the traps and got rid of them before she knew what had happened. Then he lectured about the papers filling up the kitchen, the firetrap problem, and she agreed to move them, if the front room could be got free of damp. That became his main job. He invested in a heater and repaired the walls and persuaded her to spend the better part of a month climbing down and getting the papers, rereading and reorganizing them and fitting them on the shelves he had made.

  She told him then that the papers contained her father’s book. Sometimes she called it a novel. He did not think to ask anything about it, but one day she told him it was about two people named Matilda and Stephen. A historical novel.

  “You remember your history?” He had finished five years of high school with respectable marks and a very good showing in trigon
ometry and geography but did not remember much history. In his final year, anyway, all you could think about was that you were going to the war.

  He said, “Not altogether.”

  “You’d remember altogether if you went to Bishop Strawn. You’d have had it rammed down your throat. English history, anyway.”

  She said that Stephen had been a hero. A man of honor, far too good for his times. He was that rare person who wasn’t all out for himself or looking to break his word the moment it was convenient to do so. Consequently and finally he was not a success.

  And then Matilda. She was a straight descendant of William the Conqueror and as cruel and haughty as you might expect. Though there might be people stupid enough to defend her because she was a woman.

  “If he could have finished, it would have been a very fine novel.”

  Jackson of course wasn’t stupid. He knew that books existed because people sat down and wrote them. They didn’t just appear out of the blue. But why, was the question. There were books already in existence, plenty of them. Two of which he had to read at school. A Tale of Two Cities and Huckleberry Finn, each of them with language that wore you down, though in different ways. And that was understandable. They were written in the past. What puzzled him, though he didn’t intend to let on, was why anybody would want to sit down and do another one, in the present. Now.

  A tragedy, said Belle briskly, and Jackson didn’t know if it was her father she was talking about or the people in the book that had not been finished. Anyway, now that this room was livable, his mind was on the roof. No use to fix up a room and have the state of the roof render it unlivable again in a year or two. He had managed to patch the roof so that it would do her a couple more winters, but he could not guarantee more than that. And he still planned to be on his way by Christmas.

  The Mennonite families on the next farm ran to older girls and the younger boys he had seen, not strong enough yet to take on heavier chores. Jackson had been able to hire himself out to them during the fall harvest. He had been brought in to eat with the others and to his surprise found that the girls behaved giddily as they served him; they were not at all mute, as he had expected. The mothers kept an eye on them, he noticed, and the fathers kept an eye on him. All safe.

  And of course with Belle not a thing had to be spoken of. She was—he had found this out—sixteen years older than he was. To mention it, even to joke about it, would spoil everything. She was a certain kind of woman, he a certain kind of man.

  The town where they shopped, when they needed to, was called Oriole. It was in the opposite direction from the town where he had grown up. He tied up the horse in the United Church shed there, since there were of course no hitching posts left on the main street. At first he was leery of the hardware store and the barbershop. But soon he realized something about small towns that he should have realized just from growing up in one. They did not have much to do with each other, unless it was for games run off in the ballpark or the hockey arena, where all was a fervent made-up sort of hostility. When people needed to shop for something their own stores could not supply, they went to a city. The same when they wanted to consult a doctor other than the ones their own town could offer. He didn’t run into anybody familiar, and nobody showed a curiosity about him, though they might look twice at the horse. In the winter months, not even that, because the back roads were not plowed and people taking their milk to the creamery or eggs to the grocery had to make do with horses.

  Belle always stopped to see what movie was on though she had no intention of going to see any of them. Her knowledge of movies and movie stars was extensive but came from some years back. For instance she could tell you whom Clark Gable was married to in real life before he became Rhett Butler.

  Soon Jackson was going to get his hair cut when he needed to and buying his tobacco when he ran out. He smoked now like a farmer, rolling his own and never lighting up indoors.

  Secondhand cars didn’t become available for a while, but when they did, with the new models finally on the scene and farmers who’d made money in the way ready to turn in the old ones, he had a talk with Belle. The horse Freckles was God knows how old and stubborn on any sort of hill.

  He found that the car dealer had been taking notice of him, though not counting on a visit.

  “I always thought you and your sister was Mennonites but ones that wore a different kind of outfit,” the dealer said.

  That shook Jackson up a little but at least it was better than husband and wife. It made him realize how he must have aged and changed over the years, and how the person who had jumped off the train, that skinny nerve-racked soldier, would not be so recognizable in the man he was now. Whereas Belle, so far as he could see, was stopped at some point in life where she remained a grown-up child. And her talk reinforced this impression, jumping back and forth, into the past and out again, so that it seemed she made no difference between their last trip to town and the last movie she had seen with her mother and father, or the comical occasion when Margaret Rose—now dead—had tipped her horns at a worried Jackson.

  It was the second car they had owned that took them to Toronto in the summer of 1962. This was a trip they had not anticipated and it came at an awkward time for Jackson. For one thing, he was building a new horse barn for the Mennonites, who were busy with the crops, and for another, he had his own harvest of vegetables coming on, which he planned to sell to the grocery store in Oriole. But Belle had a lump that she had finally been persuaded to pay attention to, and she was booked now for an operation in Toronto.

  What a change, Belle kept saying. Are you so sure we are still in Canada?

  This was before they got past Kitchener. Once they got on the new highway, she was truly alarmed, imploring him to find a side road or else turn around and go home. He found himself speaking sharply to her—the traffic was surprising him too. She stayed quiet all the way after that, and he had no way of knowing whether she had her eyes closed, had given up, or was praying. He had never known her to pray.

  Even this morning she had tried to get him to change his mind about going. She said the lump was getting smaller, not larger. Since the health insurance for everybody had come in, she said, nobody did anything but run to the doctor and make their lives into one long drama of hospitals and operations, which did nothing but prolong the period of being a nuisance at the end of life.

  She calmed down and cheered up once they got to their turnoff and were actually in the city. They found themselves on Avenue Road, and in spite of exclamations about how everything had changed, she seemed to be able on every block to recognize something she knew. There was the apartment building where one of the teachers from Bishop Strawn had lived (that was only the pronunciation, the name was spelled Strachan, as she had told him a while ago). In the basement there was a shop where you could buy milk and cigarettes and the newspaper. Wouldn’t it be strange, she said, if you could go in there and still find the Telegram, where there would be not only her father’s name but his smudgy picture, taken when he still had all his hair?

  Then a little cry, and down a side street she had seen the very church—she could swear it was the very church—in which her parents had been married. They had taken her there to show her, though it wasn’t a church they were members of. They did not go to any church, far from it. Her father said they had been married in the basement, but her mother said the vestry.

  Her mother could talk then, that was when she could talk. Perhaps there was a law at the time, to make you get married in a church or it wasn’t legal.

  At Eglinton she saw the subway sign.

  “Just think, I have never been on a subway train.”

  She said this with some sort of mixed pain and pride.

  “Imagine remaining so ignorant.”

  At the hospital they were ready for her. She continued to be lively, telling them about her horrors in the traffic and about the changes, wondering if there was still such a show put on at Christmas by Eaton’s
store. And did anybody remember the Telegram?

  “You should have driven in through Chinatown,” one of the nurses said. “Now that’s something.”

  “I’ll look forward to seeing it on my way home.” She laughed, and said, “If I get to go home.”

  “Now don’t be silly.”

  Another nurse was talking to Jackson about where he’d parked the car and telling him where to move it so he wouldn’t get a ticket. Also making sure that he knew about the accommodations for out-of-town relations, much cheaper than you’d have to pay at a hotel.

  Belle would be put to bed now, they said. A doctor would come to have a look at her, and Jackson could come back later to say good night. He might find her a little dopey by that time, they said.

  She overheard and said that she was dopey all the time, so he wouldn’t be surprised, and there was a little laugh all round.

  The nurse took him to sign something before he left. He hesitated where it asked for what relation. Then he wrote “friend.”

  When he came back in the evening he did see a change, though he would not have described Belle then as dopey. They had put her into some kind of green cloth sack that left her neck and most of her arms quite bare. He had seldom seen her so bare or noticed the raw-looking cords that stretched between her collarbone and her chin.

  She was angry that her mouth was dry.

  “They won’t let me have anything but the meanest little sip of water.”

  She wanted him to go and get her a Coke, something that she never drank in her life as far as he knew.

  “There’s a machine down the hall—there must be. I see people going by with a bottle in their hands and it makes me so thirsty.”

  He said he couldn’t go against orders.

  Tears came into her eyes and she turned pettishly away.

  “I want to go home.”

  “Soon you will.”