Before We Sleep

by Jeffrey Lent

  He pulled a cigarette from the pack on the dash and smoked, intent on his driving. Then he looked at her and grinned and said, “That was a pretty good haul, wouldn’t you say?”

  “Oh my gosh! Oliver.”

  He said, “Well, we’re not done yet. I was thinking, we get home, unload this stuff and then drive over to Onion Flats and grab a bite and roll on into Randolph and go to the movies. Make a night of it. Whaddaya say, Ruthie?”

  She was her mother’s daughter: Along with slowly working on the interior of the house, she took on the yard. Perhaps once there had been order there but it had long passed. She took a saw and cut deadwood from the lilacs, pruned back the spirea, dug up by the roots goldenrod and wild grapevine, thinned the weeds from a patch of lily-of-the-valley, trimmed back the high tangled canes of red, yellow and white roses. She wore dungarees and checked summer shirts with the sleeves rolled up and the tails also, knotted over her midriff. When she could she’d make her way to the house on West Hill and return with boxes of transplants: bleeding hearts, daylilies, dahlias, bee balm, a carefully dug shoot from the smokebush; hostas and clumps of periwinkle and pachysandra for the shaded spots. As she worked she also, inevitably, pulled stones and rocks from the soil, the mostly flat stones in irregular shapes but only a few inches thick and, inspired by a photograph essay in Life about the islands of northern Scotland, built carefully balanced cairns, mostly where piles of stone accumulated, because nothing else was growing there. Something took her about this process, to the point where walking in the woods above the house she kept her eye tipped for rocks that would serve her and carried them home. And soon she was shifting soil and plants again, studying the lay of her garden and creating terraces, building walls of layered stone to mark and hold them.

  Her father-in-law came by one afternoon, unexpected, and found her working on one. Stood waiting until she sensed his presence and looked up, sweat beading and dropping from her nose.

  Ed Snow said, “You want me to ask Walter Payne if he wants a helper?”

  She stood and ran a grimy hand across her face and knew immediately she’d left mud tracks there. She grinned and said, “I think I’ve got all the rock I can handle, right here.”

  He nodded and said, “Yup. I guess I shoulda told Oliver but somehow I wanted to try and surprise you both. There’s an electric range in the back of the truck and Tuck Braman is in the cab, to help wheel it in and also with his tools, to wire it up. You’ll be cooking cool by suppertime.”

  “You what?” she said.

  “The thing I been thinking is, we don’t just haul the wood range off and scrap it. But work it into the side parlor with the bricked-up fireplace, knock a hole through to the chimney six feet up and hook it up there. A backup, you might say. Or a warm spot come winter. Or both.”

  “Goodness,” she said. “I’m a mess.”

  He grinned again. “Nothing like you will be a couple hours from now.” Then he stepped close and winked and said, “Don’t say nothing to him but the word I got is sometime August, I’ll be able to get a new Frigidaire, also. Think a that.”

  She scrubbed her palms against the fronts of her dungarees. More smears. Then said, “We don’t want anything other people can’t get.”

  Ed nodded. “It’s a trickle now but a flood soon. And he earned it. You worry what people think, remember this—they don’t know a damned thing.”

  She’d read A Tale of Two Cities in high school and liked it well enough but Thomas Hardy was new to her and she ran her finger along the row of books and settled on Jude the Obscure. She liked the title and she quickly warmed to Hardy’s world that seemed close to the one about her. It took longer for her to fully understand the story. Years.

  The summer went along. Oliver spent most evenings and weekends working on the place and took on the project of reglazing the windows and also the storms, which stood in dusty ranks at the back of the barn, in the low ell that once held animals, and in the process began construction of a simple workbench and area, with basic tools. He was pensive and silent much of the time but was quick with a joke or to compliment her on a meal. He noticed the work she did and spoke of it. And there were nights she’d wake alone and stand at the bedroom window to see him in the yard, slightly hunched, one arm wrapped around his chest as if cradling a wound he’d never revealed to her, the other hand passing up and down, the small flare as he smoked. Sometimes she’d wake only as he settled back into bed, the smell of tobacco strong about him. She came to love the smell, understanding that something of his smoking drew him both away to a place he needed to revisit but also knowing it was some portal home. Other times he came to the bed and nuzzled her, a seeking probe of cautious lips upon her shoulder or arm until she turned to meet him. She’d almost forgotten the man, the boy, who in his eagerness and urgency had gently bruised her, had twisted and turned her as if she was his own thing, had grown used to and welcomed now the man who was tentative, who silently asked for her to accommodate him. His hands a swimming glide upon her hips, his tongue a hot swift probe to her nipples above him. Brushing his face.

  He took to walking up the hill to have lunch with her. Carrying a paper of thick-sliced bologna and a loaf of bread. Or hard salami. A jar of mustard if they were out. A couple of candy bars and twin bottles of root or birch beer in his trouser pockets. She’d told him she could warm up leftovers of which there were plenty or make lunch for him if he’d only tell her what he wanted in the morning but he’d said he liked it this way. Showing up, with most everything they needed. He liked to slice cheese and place it upon a mustard-slathered slice of bread, then fry the bologna in grease and set it sizzling atop the cheese and slap the other slice of bread on top, letting the heat melt the cheese. Four days of this passed before he could convince her to try it and she was shocked to discover how delicious it tasted. He peeled and sliced apples and ate them with peanut butter. Slouched back in his chair, the radio turned loud if he found a program to his liking. Then rising and kissing her and walking back down to work. She’d wash the dishes and often as not eat the candy bar, leaf through the new magazine he’d brought, see her afternoon rising, slowly, before her. Languorous, almost as if they’d made love. The way he walked off, downhill, not quite sauntering but with a relaxed comfort in his stride. He was coming home, more so all the time, was what she thought. And she was meeting him, understanding how slow such meetings can be and all the better for taking time.

  He’d barely had time to walk down to the store the morning mid-August when his mother pulled in, got out of the truck and walked toward the house. Ruth was washing dishes and had a kettle of chokecherries simmering on the stove behind her, ready to make jelly as she watched Jennie Pease Snow come on. And felt it like a stone in the pit of her stomach.

  “I’ll not mince words,” Jennie said after accepting a cup of coffee, settled across the table from Ruth. “Ed’s not happy I’m here, but for that matter I’m not happy, either.”

  “He seems to be settling in,” Ruth offered.

  “We’d hoped.” Jennie’s eyes were off just over Ruth’s shoulder and she was blinking a slow but steady bat and Ruth realized her mother-in-law was holding back tears. “But truth is best said straight: Ollie’s not good in the store. Oh! He can be. Johnny-on-the-spot. But then he’ll disappear and we’ll find him out back, sent after something or another but nowhere near where it is. Gone to cut a screen for a window and we’ll find him up among the boots and overhauls, cross-legged on the floor. Or out the back smoking, rubbing the toe of a shoe in the dust. Times he’ll be at the counter and be asked for something and him setting on the stool with his knee over the other and he’ll peer about and then send the customer off to seek what they’re after, themselves. Now that’s not such a hard thing, the way it sounds, but it’s not the way Ed does business; it’s not what people are used to when they walk in the door. They ask; we get it for them. Most, after all, know where to find things. But now the store is filling up again and with items peopl
e’ve been waiting for. New and old, you see what I’m saying? It’s all wonderful, thank the Lord, but people are confused by all of it. And there he sits behind the counter with a cigarette the corner of his mouth and a far-off look in his eye. I told Ed, and he didn’t want to hear it but I told him anyway: We can’t have it.”

  Ruth sipped the now cool coffee and said, “What can I do?”

  “What can any of us do? He’s my boy and to see him like this? It’s a terrible thing, for me. If I had a answer I’d speak my mind about it. I don’t think it’s you; hell, honey, I don’t think it’s any of us. Ways, I know it’s not even him. Not a choice he made. But that’s one thing and time can work on it, is how I see it. He’s a good man, we both know that.”

  And Ruth was cool herself. “He is indeed. If you’re telling me you’re letting him go, you should be telling him. I’ve got a good job, myself. We’ll be fine.” And not saying, because she didn’t need to, that she had greater resources to draw upon as well. Ruth said, “Of course, I appreciate all you and Ed have done.”

  The older woman reared back slightly, tossed her head. That white-blonde hair thick as a mare’s tail, snapping blue eyes. Jennie Pease Snow said, “I remember how it was to be young and feel you had to be ready to do battle with the world. No, we’re not letting him go. Comes the day, it’ll be his business and don’t you forget that. But the time being, Ed and I agreed it’d be best if Oliver worked afternoons, driving deliveries as they need to be made, and then a few hours at night, stocking the shelves and cleaning up. Taking inventory. Mostly alone you see. And we already told him. And he agreed. Liked the idea, I could see he did.” She paused and said, “In a sense he’ll be learning the guts of the business in a way he’d not, otherwise. There’s a purpose to all things.”

  She stood and said, “Best for him and best for us and in the end it comes to the same thing. You want pint jars for chokecherry jelly, I’ll send some if you need em. Strain it three times to make it clear and hold the sugar to keep it tart, my mother told me. I never made it myself, never had the time. But it’s some good on toast, isn’t it?”

  He took it in stride. She didn’t ask how he felt about it but it was clear soon enough that he liked the arrangement. Many days he was about the house and he took on more projects, and his father found more paint for them. One day Oliver left early and drove up midmorning with a load of planks in the back of the truck and soon enough was tearing up a section of the front entryway, wood punked and rotten—something she hadn’t the faintest idea of—and then went to work replacing it. Evenings he was out of the house from nine to midnight and she missed him but his time about the place during the day made up for it. And she was not altogether unhappy having those evening hours alone. She tuned the radio as she pleased, she read, she worked on lesson plans for the coming school year. And when he’d come in he often woke her and they’d sit talking or loving, or loving and then talking. So she’d wake some mornings late, hearing him whistling as he worked down below. She’d rise and go down to the kitchen to find the percolator of hot coffee, bacon cooked and waiting for her.

  One afternoon she was on the small lawn, reading in the shade and lifted her eyes to watch an unfamiliar car climb the hill, then turn into their driveway and pull to a stop. Oliver stepped out and walked over, grinning, twirling a keychain around an upraised index finger.

  “What’ve you done? Did you buy yourself a car? Or steal it?” she teased.

  “C’mon. Come take a look,” reaching his other hand down and she took it and was lifted up. Despite herself, she was intrigued. From her father she gained a love of automobiles that most of the other young women she knew did not have: Father and his Buick, his devotion to the sleek lines of the car, the long swept hood holding the powerful engine, the narrow elegant grille on the front, the lovely interior. And before that, of her youngest memory, was the Packard, with the fold-down roof, headlamps like bulging eyes, and again, long sweeping lines, a lovely vision of a memory being curled against him as he powered the big car through a snowstorm at night; she had no idea what they were doing out in that storm, where they were going or returning from, guessing he’d taken her to a school-board meeting or something like that, just the two of them, her mother waiting at home but the vivid memory of the warmth of the car, the warmth of his body against hers, his brushed woolen overcoat against her cheek, a smell, also, his bay-rum aftershave and then the world outside, the two cones of light converging and a splattering constant barrage of snowflakes against the windshield, the darkness above from where the fast flakes came, the sense of a small warm place moving through a dense dark night.

  The car before her was nothing like those but she liked it nonetheless even if she’d seen dozens of them in the past years: a two-door coupe from before the war with small round windows behind the bench seat and the spare tire centered against the trunk, the car almost saucy somehow. Painted a gun-metal gray, and, as she walked toward it, she took it in all over again and liked what she saw. Less modest than first glance; jaunty, indeed.

  She looked at her husband. “What’s this, Oliver?”

  He tossed the keys toward her, a gentle underhand. Still, she missed them after a quick swipe but rose up fast with the keys in hand. He said, “Why don’t you take it for a spin?”

  Something in his grin. She said, “Come with me.”

  “Why should I? It’s your car.”

  “I don’t need a car.” The keys hot in her hand.

  “You’re going to walk down and back to work? I don’t think so. Not my wife. Now, go on. Take a drive.”

  Time to time the thought came to her that theirs was not a normal life. But then, quickly, what did she know of a normal life? What, exactly, was normal? If sometimes he was distinctly absent, not gone somewhere else so much as not fully there, she wondered what to expect, anyway. It was not as if he’d been away on a long pleasure cruise. And other things, bits of knowledge, came her way. Bob Merton was said to be drinking too much, in a not-always-quiet way. Other stories. Articles about men home from the war, trying to adjust to this new world. One in which no one quite seemed to clearly see that path forward—as if victory had diminished meaning and purpose. And other things uncertain: the Soviets, those great allies, were of a sudden a menace in Europe. And the atomic bombs—the photo essays were disturbing as well as the lesser disturbance of a photo essay of a college football team from somewhere in the Midwest—Nebraska, Kansas, she couldn’t recall now, but a coed cheerleader holding aloft a placard begging to give the rival team A Tomic Ache. And the newsreels out of Germany, the death camps, something she did not yet understand but for the clear thrum of a deadly menace. A stain great and dark lay over the world and she realized victory had not obliterated the stain but only made it more clear, brought it to light.

  She lay on her side watching her husband sleep. Wondering what those fluttering lids had seen, what his ears had heard. What his own hands had done. She forgave him all of it, whatever it was. Wondered if she’d ever know. And recalled what his mother had said about time. And her own mother, a lifetime ago, it seemed, about patience.

  She thought perhaps a baby might pull both of them forward, not away from the past so much as toward the future. She also felt a hint of caution spring within herself: Her own employment was steady and certain, if barely undertaken; approaching her third year. A baby could thrust Oliver onward into life. But she was not yet certain of that. Thoughts at three in the morning.

  Summer ended; the school year began. The long days of early September allowed summer to close down slowly. Most days held no threat of rain and she often walked down to the Academy in the morning and back up again in golden glowing afternoons and she’d work outside until dusk and still have time to read papers, mark margins, review the plans for the days ahead. Her first year of teaching she’d felt thrown into a wringer washer; but the second she had a better sense of how to proceed and so she kept the work-load light until the third week of September, the
actual end of summer. This was not a fluke of discovery but a thought, an observation dredged from memory: She’d been in sixth or seventh grade and one night at the dinner table her father was holding forth. She had no memory of what had caused his fulmination but ever after, the essence. “Look at those children off the hill farms—the ones who don’t start school until the harvest is done. They come in fresh and clear and ready to learn. No—it’s not the escape from the labor, that labor is their lives. It’s the closing down of days, the march toward winter, for what is winter but the interior season? Interior not only of being more house-bound, barn-bound, but also the interiority of the mind. Most literally, time to think, minds with the space and openness, the freshness if you will, to tackle new ideas, fresh concepts, minds, damn it all, ready to learn, hungry to learn. I tell you, Jo, there’s something to this. If I could convince the powers in Montpelier, a ridiculous thought, but if I could, to give me five years where the school year started mid-October and ended mid-May but school ran from seven in the morning to five in the afternoon, why, I think those children would learn more, absorb more, in those hours than our present system. And it’s not just those farm children, not at all, but all children. They need their childhoods, they need to be outside and running about as children need to do, be it helping on the farm or splashing in brooks, fishing, getting up ball games—whatever it is, but on their own. Exhausting themselves but tackling life full-on. I swear, we’d see a great difference. If they’d only let me try it.”