by Jeffrey Lent
She’d planted those stolen plants and envisioned them growing the next spring, had walked through her house now with those older familiar items, had taught school, been tender as she could with her husband, and daily bickered with her daughter over learning the necessary work of daily life. It wasn’t all bad, she thought. Katey laughing with her when both forgot the final batch of Christmas cookies as they finished trimming the tree, standing in the kitchen with the dark hard lumps steaming rank smoke. From the radio a suddenly hilarious solemn version of “The Little Drummer Boy.” Pa-ROM-pa-pa-POM.
It was about this time that almost nothing seemed to make sense. She held to this as a secret—even from Oliver. Afraid if she tried to articulate she’d only further discover the madness that seemed to burble along inside. She walked through her days as if inhabiting another body. She woke in the night with her heart racing, her mind a tumbling turmoil.
She wasn’t herself but didn’t know what that self might be. In constant panic invisible to those around her. Not just Oliver and Katey but everyone. For the first time in her life she was confronted with issues she couldn’t share with her mother.
She started to walk the streets of the village at night. She began one evening in February after a day of snow. It was much later she realized this was a year to the day that Jo had fallen. They’d all eaten together, a supper of pot roast with potatoes and carrots and onions in brown gravy and salads of iceberg lettuce and Oliver had excused himself to his workshop. Katey did homework at the cleared table while Ruth washed the dishes and put them away and then the girl had watched television in the next room while Ruth sat in the one soft chair next to the old wood range and read without much care for the story. After a while Katey had come to kiss her good night, before going up to shower and go to bed. Ruth read some more and then closed the book and stood. She put her hands in the small of her back and stretched, opened the firebox and filled it—she liked a wood fire in the kitchen in wintertime, even with the wood furnace down cellar. Then, as if she’d planned it, she went to the row of outdoor boots by the door, the pegs above holding coats and hats and stepped into her felt-lined gum boots, pulled on her dark gray wool coat and belted it snug and then took down her navy scarf and made a triangle with it over her head and wrapped her neck, twisting the ends under her chin and tucked them down into the coat. She let herself out into the woodshed ell and then into the driveway. Oliver had shoveled the driveway sometime in the afternoon but before the snow had stopped. There were tire tracks that disappeared into the garage where her car sat. She walked out the tracks to the road which had been scraped mostly clear by the plow trucks an hour ago and she walked down into the village.
The air was still and chill but not bitter and the streetlights threw light upon the freshly made banks of snow. She kept to the side of the road going down Beacon Hill and turned into the village proper where the squares of lit windows reflected out onto the snow. She also passed winter trees, the dark balsams with boughs pulled low and outlined by the weight of new snow, the bare fingers like ink stains of the maple crowns, the ash trees and the inverted wineglass shapes of the elms. There was disease killing the elms although not yet in this village but as she looked at the big elm at the corner of the North Common and Creamery Row she understood one year soon the tree would look like this in the summer, bare of leaves, standing dead, until it was cut down and removed and forever gone.
Everything was closed for the night in the block of business, although the windows were lit in her in-laws’ store, the four ranks of plate glass that flanked the steps leading in and each window held goods specific and arrayed neatly; kitchenware and crockery, winter clothing and folded blankets, tools and snow shovels and a pair of Tubbs snowshoes and in the last, a small pyramid of round wooden cheese boxes, with an open round of cheddar on top, along with coffee grinders and small sacks of roasted beans. And along the bottom of that window was a line of brightly colored packets of garden seeds. To remind that winter was not forever.
The only other light was up at the top of the block where the small VFW post had a naked bulb over the door and a red Schlitz neon sign in the high small window. There was an older truck parked there and a Studebaker sedan. She recognized the truck but not the sedan and walked on, for a few moments trying but failing to pull from her memory the name of the owner of the truck. Then she was up the other side of the Common and walking again along residential streets. Some people had shoveled their sidewalks and others had left that job to the morning. For themselves or the boy who would be paid to do so, early. The snow had only stopped sometime after dark.
She wasn’t sure what she was doing but knew it was the best thing she’d done in a long time. She walked at a brisk pace and passed house after house with their lit windows. Some few fully dark and these mostly homes of older people. Some houses all dark but for the one gray flickering window where a television was on. Kitchens bright as someone worked inside. An upper room throwing its light out, perhaps a child studying, someone reading, listening to the radio. She passed a house with a bright window just yards away from her and an older man sitting in his chair, seeming to gaze out upon her or perhaps only lost in his own mist of reflected light in the glass and whatever memory he was enraptured by. Also the second-story window where she briefly saw a girl come before it with a towel wrapped like a turban around her head and another around her torso, her shoulders and arms bare and then Diane Tucker lifted her hands and pulled away the towel and stood bare-breasted looking out into the night. Ruth back under hemlock shade from the streetlights and so invisible and she stood, wondering who the girl intended or thought might be waiting outside for this vision and then understood most likely it was no specific person but the idea of someone. Then Diane went away from the window and a few minutes later the light went off and Ruth walked on. After a time she circled around and made her way back up Beacon Hill and let herself in to a quiet house. The lights were all off but for the one that burned all night in the kitchen and she knew the stoves were banked. She took off her boots and scarf and coat quiet as a whisper. In sock-footed silence she made her way to the side cupboard and poured a small measure of gin into a glass and looked at the fridge but didn’t want to risk the noise for an ice cube and so sat in the chair with her feet up on the warm ledge of the stove in the near dark and slowly sipped the gin and felt the warm flush through her and didn’t know much more than when she’d started out earlier except that she was not so frantic, that her heart was calmer. Or she was only tired. Even that, she knew, was enough. She went up to bed only after she was fully warm.
This went on. Not every night but a couple of times a week. Weeknights. She was a bit shocked how easy it was to leave the house at a certain hour and have no one miss her. But not so shocked—she was calculating and careful, as she wandered. After what, she still did not know. But it was good that she did, she knew that.
There were no strangers that she passed in the dark. But she did wonder what was hidden, when she passed houses with front windows lit and no one in sight—what might be occurring in the rooms away from the streets. What arguments or fights were hidden in those darkened back rooms. Mike and Rita Howell. Word about town was they were having a hard time, that Rita had been spotted in the Acme in Randolph in a scarf and sunglasses grocery shopping on a cold and cloudy day. Twice passing by their house on High Street she’d glimpsed them in the front room with the lights on. Sitting in their chairs side by side facing the television. Then again on a Tuesday night but still early the lights in the house all damped and dark. Their one car in the drive. A faint flicker from a second-story room. Fighting or fucking or, she understood, both. The widow Madge Garnett who sat in her kitchen every time Ruth passed by, at her table with her back to the window but clearly dealing cards to an empty chair across from her. Some conversation was occurring in that room. Once standing again far back in tree shadows as she watched Chuck Morton just come out of the VFW and trying and failing to open the door of h
is truck, slipping and falling, hauling himself upright, steadying himself, then reeling away, pitched off in fast stumbling steps into the night, unable to find equilibrium. From the looks of him, a stumblebum drunk but also the owner of the sawmill up on Kipling Hill and as such a buyer of loads of logs, an employer of a crew of men, one known for delivering lumber cut true and fair, always behind his men. How to explain this, she thought?
She was caught twice. The first time she walked back into the house toward the end of the second week of her stealthy hikes, had gotten comfortable with the stove and her glass of gin when Oliver padded in on sock feet and mildly said, “What’re you up to, Ruthie?”
She looked at him and raised her glass but didn’t yet swallow and said, “I’m walking. Is that all right with you?”
“I guess.” He reached and gently rubbed the back of her neck. “Is it good for you?”
“I don’t think I’d be doing it, if it wasn’t.”
He paused a moment and then said, “All right, then.” And turned and padded away up to bed. She took her time with her drink and again, when she went to bed her feet were warm and he was sleeping soundly.
The other time she was coming on toward home on a late April night and the air had been switching between warmish and chill all day and into the evening. There was a moon and scuds of clouds passing between the moon and the earth and she walked from shade to shadow, more so than simply the pods of yellow light from the streetlights. As she walked along she heard the hum of a motor coming up slowly behind her and she kept her head held up and straight, her shoulders squared. Her posture almost martial. This had happened a couple of other times and she’d never given them so much as a glance but strode on with purpose and defiance in her walk and they’d always drifted by and then pressed the gas a bit and moved along, taillights fading in the dark.
This night however a deputy sheriff in his prowl car glided alongside her and came to a stop in the street just ahead of her. The driver door opened and the deputy stepped out and turned to look at her under the streetlight. His cap was pushed up on his forehead and she saw that it was Merle Howe. She was bareheaded that night and so stepped forward so he could see her clearly. “Good evening, Merle. What can I do for you?”
His face was broken into planes of light and dark and he said, “Oh, my. Is that you, Missus Snow?”
He’d been a student of hers, years before. She realized that he was already mortified but trying to do his job. Which matched her memory of how he was as a boy.
A moment passed. Then he said, “I got a report on someone walking about the village.”
“I guess that would be me. I thought I was free to do that. It’s where I live.”
He pushed one boot up the side of the other and then did it again as he watched himself do it. Then he looked back at her. “Yup,” he said. “Is everything all right?”
“Everything is fine,” she said. She considered a moment and added, “I’ll get along then. Thanks for checking on me, Merle. You have a good night.” And set off walking again, making her way slowly down the main street, the state highway, then around the South Common before finally crossing the road and heading up Beacon Hill. Beyond the scraps of clouds and the moon she could see Orion and the Sisters lowering toward the top of the hill. The streetlights were too few, too dim and widely spaced, to choke out the stars.
She continued one or two evenings a week as the spring came on. She knew people were aware of her walking and guessed those that did, or those that talked about it, likely thought her strange. This didn’t bother her, she knew she was strange. She just didn’t quite know why. But she changed her route, walking up the narrow street beside the courthouse where it doglegged past a few houses and opened into the ranks of the Hillside Cemetery and here she found peace and solitude among the memorials to the dead. And was alone. The evenings were growing longer and so she found herself there in the remainder of the day’s light. From the higher part she could look across the narrow valley and just spy the front side of her own home, the back of the barn and Oliver’s workshop. This rambling almost satisfied some unease within her. She also spent days that spring feeling as if she were making do, putting on a shadow play of her own self, as if her real self lingered a half-step behind her, and that self a muddled, mute and perturbed one. Looking at her husband and daughter and knowing they had no idea what dark land she inhabited. She was skillful at that. Maintaining her disguise of normalcy, her facade of mother, of wife. Katey, fifteen in January, within her own confusions, would hug and kiss her mother spontaneously, bursting through with her own need for comfort and consolation, turning to where she knew safety to be. Oliver humming a tune over his soup, then reaching out to pat her hand before rising from the table and back to his shop. And, in his way, still coming to her in the night.
It all came to a stop on a Sunday night the end of April, the evening of the full moon as she stood in the cemetery. The stones around her were white in the moonlight, the older dark slate stones almost the soft color of bones. She’d stood looking down upon the village and then lifted both hands together just below her chin, her elbows joined before her and without a clue she would speak before she did, found herself saying out loud, “I’m not going anywhere. There’s nowhere else I want to be.” And only understood then that she was still grieving her mother and stood for a time silently weeping.
Then a great well of peacefulness came upon her and tension drained out of her, down from her neck and shoulders and arms to flow from her fingertips and into the ground. She stood so for a time, washed in the moonlight and then walked slowly but easily down out of the burying ground and back through her town and home. As she made her way up Beacon Hill in the soft night she heard the first broken cries of northbound geese beating on through the night and thrilled to that sound, as if, the world turning once again, she’d not only made her way home but had linked herself to something greater than herself.
Now, two years later working on her hands and knees along the shelves of books, lifting and glancing at titles, some making her smile, others just a job to be done, wondering where her girl was now, knowing how foolish was her certainty that Katey would call. And knew again that jittering uncertainty of mind, wondering if this strange and accommodating measure of her life, if that was all she got. And knew that question had come truly from her but also from those around her. A rift it seemed opened and demanding an answer. As if she might have cast it all away and gone off into the world after something else, as indeed so many had. And, indeed, as so many still were doing. Including her daughter. But beyond Katey, as if the world were pressing on all sides, demanding a need for more. Since clearly more was offered, why settle for less?
Yet here she was. And this was good. There were far worse things than to prepare youngsters for the world that would lie ahead of them. To prepare them for the day when, inevitably, that world would not make sense. She couldn’t save Katey or anyone. She had barely saved herself. And she knew her daughter saw her as a woman settled so, and knew also her daughter didn’t yet know what peace she’d earned in that settling. To do work in the world. To be loved by a good and kind man. As it moved between both of them, so often not spoken of. For that, then, she knew was the most important thing of all: not the words but the greater love. The one constant through silence and darkness, through doubt and fear. Of knowing the other understood, that lived within that very same world, not exact, but parallel. Running along, side by side, the two of them down through life.
She’d just dusted and put back Hemingway’s Old Man and the Sea and lifted down A Farewell to Arms, had held that book a long moment, recalling that when she first read it in high school she’d thought it to be a tremendously passionate story of love, and then rereading it a few years ago it seemed on a whim and had been struck by what a tremendously terrible and tragic tale it actually was. And how lucky she’d been in her own life, then dusted it and set it back on the shelf, paused before A Moveable Feast, her fingers d
irty and her nose filled with dust, thinking she should pause and take a break, wash her hands, perhaps brew a pot of tea. There was no great hurry. It took a couple of days to dust the books and she also needed to make a call about the strawberries. They should be ripe now and she didn’t want to miss them. She’d almost forgotten all about it when the phone rang. She turned and looked at it. It rang again. She set down the rag and thought It’s going to be Jennie wanting Oliver for something. Or anything else.
She crossed the room and waited for the third ring and then lifted it to her ear and took a breath and, her voice rising toward a question, said, “Hello.”
She listened a moment and then said, “Of course.”
When she hung up the phone she stood serious for a long moment. Then smiled. She went into the kitchen and made tea and sat thinking about all she’d heard while the tea steeped. Then drank a cup as she mulled other things. When she finished she rinsed her cup and saucer and left a cozy over the pot and went upstairs. She went into the guest bedroom where Oliver had been sleeping since he’d broke the news to Katey. It had been his choice and she’d accepted that he was doing what he needed to do. She stripped the bed and carried the sheets and pillowcases downstairs and washed them. She went back up and remade the bed with fresh sheets and a blanket, then from the cupboard a chenille spread, all tucked down tight and square. She popped up the shades. On the top of the bureau she found a bottle of Old Spice and she returned it to the bathroom by his shaving mug and razor. She returned to the room and looked around. It was the guest room again.