Before We Sleep

by Jeffrey Lent

  When Ruth did not respond, Jo asked, “Is the tea hot? I could warm it.”

  Ruth looked from the fire to her mother and said, “You know it’s hot.”

  Jo nodded. “Yes,” she said. “I do.”

  Her mother had drifted off into the kitchen sometime before she heard the truck coming up the hill and Ruth had stood and gone to the window to watch Ed Snow’s old International pickup truck pull into the yard, the truck outfitted with a homemade wood flatbed and atop that a peaked-roof enclosure in order to make deliveries of any sort called for. Oliver stepped down from the truck and reared back and surveyed the house. He was wearing old dungarees belted tight, a worn red flannel shirt and over that a red-and-black-checked Johnson wool coat. Old rubber boots planted in the mud. The clothes all hung upon him as if there was less of him all ways. He was bareheaded and there was color in his cheeks, spotty blooms that didn’t suggest health so much as the blush of fever. Then he spotted her through the glass and waved. She lifted a hand and waved back and went out to meet him, feeling she was overdressed and off-kilter and so as she passed through the mudroom entryway she pulled from the hook the canvas overcoat her mother had been wearing a little more than an hour before. Stained and several different shades of brown but blanket-lined and smelling, if not of her father, at least of home. Draped over her shoulders, she went into the day.

  He held open the passenger door of the truck and said, “I’d like to show you something.”

  “All right.” She stepped into the truck and smoothed her skirt beneath her as she settled. “Oliver—”

  “Please wait, Ruth.” And he leaned and pressed his lips to her cheek. She smelled the ChapStick and felt the softening of his mouth and, oddly or not, this was enough to still her.

  He drove down West Hill and into the village and he drove with only the slightest hesitation as he looked at her and away and back again. The snow had stopped and the sky had broken into high great swathes of blue with, one side or the other, ranks of dark clouds so the village and the hills were spread with golden sunlight or banks of shadow. As if the day was split in halves. Where the sun struck the hills there were fans of red halos about some of the trees, the sudden swelling of maple buds. The long dead grasses so swiftly exposed seemed yellow, showing still the compression of the swiftly melted snow and within those open fields were dark trickles of snowmelt flowing down. She could smell woodsmoke but also wet earth, a scent almost forgotten after the months of winter. In the village, across the sparse open ground of the North Common, a band of robins flittered, relit, worked the open grass with their beaks and then flitted on again.

  She had a moment: He’s come back in spring, like all good things.

  He turned up Beacon Hill. He said, “Do you remember Alden Jenks?”

  “He died.”

  “I know. Mother wrote me. I always liked this place.” He turned into the driveway just before Beacon Hill went from paved to dirt and off into the woods above. He shut the truck down and said, “Can I show you?”

  The house stood behind heaps of rotting snow, a path carved through the banks to the back door. The house once was white but now was the color of the old snow. Peeling green paint on the shutters and trim. She saw smoke rising thin from the ell chimney. It was an old house, over a hundred years, two-over-four around a center chimney and then the added ell for a summer kitchen that became the full kitchen over time. Attached to a woodshed and then beyond that, a free standing small barn. Like most, now a garage; once upon a time not only a carriage barn for a horse and buggy but likely also a milk cow, a flock of hens, even perhaps swine. She realized she was holding her breath. She let it out and in as neutral a voice as she could find she said, “You bought it?”

  He came around the truck and waited before her. He said, “I had some money saved. Mother and Dad put some up and I understand Moorefield Savings owns a bit of it too, but I can set that right in a bit—I’ve got some more money coming to me. Now, let me show you around.”

  He held out his hand and she took it and stepped down. He said, “I came up earlier and got a fire going in the range.” And then led her through to the ell door and went in to the chill woodshed and then through the back door into the kitchen. The house was very empty, just an old white-enameled range and an icebox. The walls were beadboard painted white, once, and the floorboards were old wide pine painted gray. Oliver dropped her hand and squatted by the range, opened the firebox and pokered the fire and added split sticks from the scuffed woodbox. He shut the firebox and stood and turned.

  “Mother and two of the village girls cleaned this place out and scrubbed it down best they could. It wants paint and, well, just about everything. But it’s solid. There’s a good Sam Daniels furnace in the basement to warm the whole place. Come summer we can paint any way you want. And Alden had some electric installed and also a telephone, fact is the phone is still here, which is a small miracle considering how short the country is of spare phones. And the home appliance fellow in Barre told Dad what he hears is by fall, maybe even summer, we could be in line for one of the new electric ranges and a Frigidaire, also. Wouldn’t that be grand? Brand spanking new. And the rest, the rest, well, we can make it yours any way you like. Here Ruth, let me show you around.”

  They went through the house. Entering each room he paused and she did so beside him. She could smell the ChapStick, also a hint of peppermint on his breath, mothballs from the Johnson coat. In three of the four downstairs rooms the fireplaces from the central chimney had been bricked over although the hearths and mantelpieces were intact. Each of these rooms was badly papered, the wallpaper gone yellow from years of pipe smoke, loose edges pulled free. The room closest to the kitchen was the largest and she guessed it had been Alden Jenks’s bedroom, scuffmarks on the floor where the feet of a bedstead had scraped gently over the years. A row of pegs along one wall. Single naked lightbulbs hung from the center of each room, long strings with metal cones dangling at the ends. In each room also rectangular metal registers were set into the floor, through to the cellar for the furnace heat to rise. The rooms smelled of mouse droppings, old wallpaper paste and the more recent sharp scent of hard soap. Upstairs the rooms had sloped roofs, single windows set into the end gables. The walls here were plaster, cracked in places but otherwise solid. Round cast-iron registers were set into the floor. The window shades were pulled down, yellow with age. The same scent of soap, the unpainted pine floorboards clean and worn with over a hundred years of footfalls.

  Ruth walked through all of this with her husband. It was nothing she’d expected. Oliver remained quiet and she didn’t know if he was reading her thoughts or his own hesitation, his own worries. What had he done? What he had done! He—somehow—while off at the war, with the help of his mother, had made a home for the two of them. It was not the house she’d expected to live in but even as she thought this, she realized how unlikely it was that they’d have lived on with her mother. In her shock and grief after her father died, with the uncertainty never voiced if Oliver would even survive the war, Ruth had clung tightly to the idea of her childhood home, of she and her husband, when he did return, remaining there. Now she was brought up short by the audacity of her thoughts—that he’d be willing to do such a thing, that her mother might be willing to be partner to such a plan.

  Back down in the kitchen he left her to tend the stove and she stood at the old deep soapstone sink and looked out the window set over the sink. In the backyard there were heaps of old snow, a thicket of twisted ancient lilacs, a handful of apple trees, the swollen buds visible in the stronger light of morning. She thought Underneath that snow are flower beds, a garden space, other things to be discovered. They were high enough so she saw a broad pie slice of the village and valley below. The Academy, an expanse of the South Common, the church steeple, the courthouse roof and a handful of houses. It wasn’t the house on West Hill, where she’d always imagined herself to be living. But there standing at the sink she thought This was pos
sible, even a good thing, a very good thing. Their own home. And he’d provided it, had made it happen.

  And turned to look at her husband. He was at the other window, one hand splayed against the glass as if it held him up. There was a sag about him and she realized this sag was the most salient feature of him she’d seen this day. Home from the war. She had no idea of what his war had been and she had a tremor that she might never really know. But knew he’d talk to her. As the months went on. Because this man shared himself with her. He always had. She reminded herself that he knew her also.

  She said, “I think this could work.”

  He studied her. “Do you?”

  “I do.”

  “That’s good, then.”

  She went to him and wrapped herself around him. The room was warm and she was moist and brought herself against him. You’re home, you’re home, she breathed to him and he bent closer as she kissed him. All the while thinking she was kissing a hemlock tree bowed over with winter snow, how pliant but stiff his back was, his kisses hungry against her lips, her tongue. His hands upon her back, almost as if they didn’t yet trust they were upon her.

  She reared back, still held, still holding. She looked at him and said, “I knew it. I knew you’d come home.”

  After a moment he said, “I know you did. Perhaps that’s why I’m here.”

  Sparkling, she teased, “Did you doubt it? Truly?”

  He appraised her. Later she’d realize he was appraising himself. He said, “Doubts? Oh, I had terrible doubts.”

  She reached and ran a finger from his forehead down between his eyes, along the length of his nose and settled against his mouth.

  “Shh,” she said. “There’s time for all that later. Just now, the question is, How do we make this a home? Between now and nightfall?” And ran all hot.

  A dark swarm of confusion passed across his face and he frowned in concentration. Then said, “We don’t need so much. Do we?”

  Ed Snow found a couple of cans of paint, a soft yellow like good butter and the three of them spent a Saturday in early May painting the kitchen. The house was furnished, sparsely but well. A cherry sleigh bed in their bedroom, a sturdy table and chairs with delicate strong arched backs in the kitchen. The smaller of her father’s desks also moved into the kitchen at a side window looking onto the yard where she’d sit evenings and correct papers, draw up lesson plans. An older but working Philco radio. A shutter-front hutch filled with china and glassware. Odds and ends but a start. How it felt to her. And she’d grown comfortable with the idea of putting things in place slowly, of building a home rather than trying to do it all in a hurry. At the end of that very first day, when Ruth and Oliver had used his father’s truck to bring down the bed from West Hill, her clothes, a chest of drawers, oddments also, sitting by the range in the kitchen to warm themselves, Oliver shrunken with fatigue and flushed with either fever or life, Ruth unsure how to ask which, herself also drained, his mother had knocked and let herself in with a hamper holding a Dutch oven of chicken and dumplings, a mincemeat pie freshly baked, a quart jar of pickles and a pint jar of cider the color of amber. Also a percolator and a half-pound of ground coffee for the morning, and she’d laid all this out, the chicken atop the range, the pie in the warming oven, the rest on the small table and kissed her son on his forehead and turned to Ruth and said, “Best advice my own mother ever gave me when I married Ed and moved down off the hill to town. Live in your house a year before you change much. See how it’s set for the seasons. What looks like a good idea in June, come January you might well regret.”

  Two months later they were painting the kitchen yellow. Mid-morning Oliver set his brush down and walked outside. Ruth and her father-in-law worked on. The color was delicious and she was delighted to see the transformation, sprung to other possibilities that lay ahead. Ed Snow was up on a stepladder and softly whistling a slow air, a lovely thing, she felt, that filled the room in just the way it needed to be filled. Then without looking at her, without missing a stroke of his brush he said, “There he is. Out in the garden kicking around. Looking for rhubarb or whatever might be popping up. You two? You all right?”

  She was quick. “Of course we are. Settling in.” Then she said, “It takes time, is all. I understand how it must be for him.”

  He glanced down at her and then worked on. After a time he said, “What I understand is you and me, we’re painting. And he’s not.”

  A few minutes later he resumed whistling.

  Oliver was a tender considerate lover. Rarely did he fail to kiss her and thank her for a meal, hold her hand as the spring evenings lengthened and into the long summer twilights as they walked up Beacon Hill and through the woods to the height of land, the freshening grass there emerald green in the late sunlight. Sometimes one or the other thought to bring his old binoculars and they’d climb the tower there and spy out over the land, shoulder to shoulder. In the bed he was also tender, a bit cautious as if he feared hurting her. Often as not, after the kissing, nuzzling, stroking flanks and sides, she would be the one to press him back and mount him, leaning forward to graze his lips with the tips of her breasts until his tongue stroked and then his lips closed upon a nipple. And she would rock her hips against him until she felt her breath catching and then leaned close again and waited for him. Afterward they’d lie side by side and he’d cup her chin and turn it to him and he’d kiss her and speak her name.

  All lovely and fine. And yet she couldn’t help but recall those few short weeks three years before after their marriage but before he left on the train for his basic training and eventual deployment, sleeping together in her childhood bedroom in her parents’ house and how he would hold her head with both his hands, running them over her with urgent hungry strength, turning her, part by part, limb by limb, as fit his mood and how this felt so right to her, surrendered to him was the word ringing throughout her then, surrendered because he was her husband and wordless he required much of her, most of which she’d had no idea existed or was possible until his panted commands. Free of harshness but for the pulse of him, the need of him, for her. Those nights and not a few stolen afternoons, mornings upon waking, she felt bruised and sore and delightfully so. As if in becoming a bride she’d become a woman. He’d hold her head between both of his hands and run those hands over her as if discovering what he’d always known and at the same moment informing her of his strength, his power over her, and how that power was only possible because she allowed it, invited and welcomed it, from him. His bride.

  Which she was. Perhaps more so than ever. Her job, one of her jobs, was to bridge those three years, to understand he was the same man but also a different man. A changed man. The man she loved and she did not doubt that. Her husband. Who turned to her after she made love with him and stroked her chin and spoke her name and kissed her.

  He had night sweats. Shuddering in sleep as the sheets grew soaked through, clammy and hot and she’d slip from the bed and fetch a wrung washcloth with cool water and bend over him, still sleeping, and press it to his brow. He muttered some few times and she’d lean close to his ear and whisper What? What did you say? Words enough to shut him down. Sometimes she woke from deep sleep and knew, even before she was awake that she was alone. The first few times she’d rushed down through the house calling his name in a half-whispered voice. But, moonlight or starlight, the house was dark and sometimes she found him sitting in the rocker beside the range and some other times she stood at the sink window and watched him standing alone out in the garden. Twice she went to him and led him back to bed and while he followed meek as a child she felt she was interrupting something and he was indulging her by coming to bed and after that, though she didn’t stop seeking him, once she found him she left him be and some time later always woke as he slipped back into bed beside her. Silent as he could. As if he didn’t want her to know he’d been gone. But most times, once under the covers and settled, he’d reach a hand and touch her, fingers running down her back, his
hand laid upon her upthrust hip. A few short strokes to her hair.

  She waited, but he did not speak about the war. A couple of times, late at night after lovemaking when he was attentive, she’d said, “If there’s anything you want to tell me?” and the first time he told her he loved her and the second time he’d said, “No. There’s nothing.” After that she did not ask.

  In June, as Ruth was finishing her school year, Oliver went to work in his father’s store, Snow’s Mercantile. Even with the enforced stasis of the war years the place had grown from when Oliver’s grandfather Gideon had purchased the rundown general store. It wasn’t only the apothecary, which had been the original mainstay beyond the few shelves of canned goods and a small counter to one side devoted to cigars, pipes and bulk tins of various tobaccos, the racks of packaged cigarettes. Or the small back room that held the local telephone switchboard. Originally a two-story building, with an empty upper floor but the first floor had been expanded over the years to the very edge of the lot it stood upon and the larger rooms divided to form a warren of connected rooms and the upper floor now held a set of offices as well as a room devoted to footwear and shelves of work clothes. Downstairs there were rooms filled with gardening tools and hand tools and grindstones, axes, scythes and cases of pocket knives. Packets of vegetable seeds and a rack of drawer-bins that held seed in loose bulk. Other rooms held kitchen goods; pots and pans, iron skillets and spiders and Dutch ovens, salt cellars and pepper grinders, tablecloths, food mills, apple peelers. Or board games and children’s toys; teddy bears, Flexible Flyers, packages of jacks and playing cards, a handful of china dolls in a glass case, yo-yos, slingshots, baseballs and a selection of ash-wood bats made up in Newport. A corner held a handful of musical instruments; guitars and mandolins, fiddles, tambourines, a pair of button accordions, a cornet, a clarinet, a tuba almost green with age, a rack of harmonicas, strings and reeds and valves. A stand of sheet music. Another room held the sparely available hunting rifles and shotguns, boxes of ammunition, also traps and scent-baits, fishing rods and lines—in spring and summer cartons of nightcrawlers. Tubbs snowshoes in all designs; bearpaws and cross-country, mountaineers. And the main rooms with their shelves of food in tin cans, also local canned goods, racks of candy bars and huge jars filled with penny candy; horehound and lemon drops, peppermint wheels, caramels, licorice twists. Shelves with bolts of cloth, spools of thread, pins and needles, even a display Singer sewing machine. Racks of magazines. On the wide front counter beside the brass National cash register there was a twenty-pound round of sharp cheddar. All in all a vast and sprawling business and with the war ended the bare spots on the shelves were slowly filling in. One front window held a display of various items on sale within, the other was papered over with advertisements promising goods on their way.