Now William T.’s truck sat in the back of a cemetery of rusty unclaimed cars. All it did was sit. The truck neither waited for nor missed William T., and William T. had no idea how he would return to his home.
He pictured it, his house, silent atop Jones Hill, the broken-down barn equally silent in the wake of all the animals who once had lived there. The lambs of years ago, dead of white muscle disease, buried under the butternut tree. The calfless cow, dead of old age and buried next to the old springhouse. Max, the small black dog who had twice bitten Tamar Winter’s father. All creatures great and small.
William T. called Burl.
“Burl?”
“William T.? Where the hell are you?”
“California.”
“What the hell are you doing there?”
“We were going to go there when we were kids. Don’t you remember? We were going to eat oranges off the trees and pick bay leaves for your mother.”
“My mother’s been dead for twenty years.”
“I know.”
“More than twenty years, William T.”
“We should have gone, Burl. We should have gone and picked bay leaves for her, enough for the rest of her life.”
Silence.
“Burl. There’s a favor I need you to do for me.”
Silence.
“Burl.”
“What sort of favor? Do you need to borrow some money?”
William T. shut his eyes.
“Neither a borrower nor a lender shall I be,” William T. said. “What I need you to do is this. Call up my nephew and have him come down and get the trees.”
“What trees?”
“My red spruce. Call up Peter. Have him go get the trees.”
“William T.—”
“Stop, Burl. No more. Just do what I say. And take care of the flock.”
William T. hung up the phone before he could make sense of Burl’s tinny words squawking away on the other end. He put his hands over his eyes. Then something occurred to him. He called Burl up again.
“Burl. Tell Peter not to touch the big spruce, the giant one, down at the beginning of the far meadow. Leave that one alone.”
He hung up again quickly, before Burl had a chance to say a thing. Exhaustion prickled through William T.’s bones, and his eyes were dry and tight. He massaged them with the fingers of his unbandaged arm, but his fingers were hot and brought no relief.
The doctor sat in the chair he’d pulled over to William T.’s bedside, leaning forward, his hands quiet in his lap. He didn’t hide behind his clipboard, cast his eyes down, and pretend to study it like some doctors did.
“Can I tell you a story, Doctor?”
“Sure.”
“It’s more of a question than a story, I guess.”
“Okay.”
“An elderly diabetic cat goes for a walk on a day when there should be snow but isn’t,” William T. said. “Before you know it, a bald eagle comes swooping down and grabs him.”
The doctor waited. “And?”
“That’s it,” William T. said. “Carries him off into the sky, never to be seen again.”
The doctor looked thoughtful.
“An elderly, diabetic cat?” he said. “Diabetes in cats can sometimes reverse itself. They’re the only species known to have that capability.”
“This cat’s diabetes did not reverse itself. Maybe it would have; maybe someday the cat would have woken up, good-bye diabetes, good-bye insulin, good-bye syringe, but that day had not yet come to pass.”
“What’s your point, Mr. Jones?”
“My point is why.”
“Why what?”
“Why did the eagle come out of nowhere and grab him? Just take him away like that.”
Silence.
“It makes no rhyme nor reason,” William T. said.
He opened his eyes and studied the doctor. The doctor looked straight at him, patient, quiet eyes.
“Is it punishment, do you think?”
“Punishment for what?”
William T. spread his hands out to encompass the hospital room, the window that looked out on the flat Utica landscape of buildings. The overcast sky.
“I don’t know,” William T. said. “Because his owner didn’t protect him, didn’t keep him safe shut up inside the house where an eagle wouldn’t have come swooping out of the woods straight toward him?”
The doctor’s hands were still in his lap. William T. had noticed that this doctor never seemed to move his hands unless it was absolutely necessary. There were no Band-Aids on his fingers. Maybe he never made a surgical mistake.
“I used to have a wife,” William T. said. “I used to have a son. We used to drive up on summer nights to the Kayuta soft serve, have a cone.”
After the doctor left, William T. pushed himself to a sit with his good arm. The room was stifling. He swung his legs over the side of the bed. The window had a lever and he cranked it outward one slow rotation at a time. Winter air rushed in at him as if it had been waiting for this, its one chance. A cold stream blew his hair off his temples. He leaned forward and placed his damp forehead on the glass of the window and stared outside. It was a day like all the many days that had preceded it: lightless but for the flat gray horizon of endless banked clouds.
“No snow yet,” a voice said.
William T. lifted his forehead off the window. Sophie stood in the doorway, her hands jammed in the pockets of her jeans. On her feet she wore a pair of new sneakers, blindingly white. The parka was gone, replaced by a lumber jacket that couldn’t be keeping her warm enough in this cold.
“I don’t mind it,” Sophie said. “It’s not so bad, a winter without snow.”
“It’s against the natural order of things.”
“William T., a lot of people have been asking about you.”
“Have they?”
“I didn’t know what to tell them. Then Burl called me a couple hours ago and said you were here.”
“I told him I was in California.”
“Burl’s smarter than you’d think,” Sophie said. “He called the operator and had her trace the number of where you called him from. He told her it was an emergency.”
“Burl lied?”
She stood in the doorway, half in and half out of the room, her hands invisible, hidden in the depths of her pockets.
“You tell me. Did he lie?”
“You must be cold,” William T. said. “Where’s your parka?”
Her lips tightened. She had always had such a soft face, Sophie, out of keeping with her lean girl’s body. Her face was the only part of her where the flesh was padded and round. She stood in the doorway and unplugged her hands from her pockets, massaged one into the other, rubbing each finger in turn as if there were an individual pain in every joint. She used to be a different person, this girl; she used to be afraid of nothing.
“They chopped down your trees,” she said. “They’re gone, William T.”
William T. shut his eyes but his red spruce appeared before him anyway, dark curving boughs spread in all their piney grace to the world. The sun had shone down, and the rain had come in its necessary way, and the snow had fallen, and the roots of his trees had worked their way into his soil for fifty years. A child had stood under them, playing hide-and-seek. Dad? Can you find me? There had been one moment in one day of the life of each tree when it was exactly William T.’s height, and that moment had come and gone. William T. refused to think of his trees, yet there they were behind his closed eyes, leading him down the dirt road to the far meadow. Ally ally all’s in free.
“Peter told Burl he was sure you didn’t mean it and he wasn’t about to do it, but Burl told him that was your explicit order. Is that true, William T.?”
It’s true, William T. thought. It’s true. I’m sorry, William J.
A few minutes ago his child had occupied that same space, his fingers reaching up to the tall spruce boughs spreading out around him like sheltering arms, smiling, wa
iting for his father to find him. I’m sorry. There was no room for anything else. No room for the thought of his truck lost to the abandoned truck yard, no room for the tall arching highway lamps marking their endless way, no room for the towering pines, no room for Eliza eating unsugared oatmeal at the sister’s house in Speculator, no room for Sophie, shivering in her unlined lumber jacket.
“What happened to my life, Sophie?” William T. heard himself say.
She came over in a swift and soundless way to his bed and knelt beside him. She took his hands in her own and gripped them together, the good and the bandaged, in a tight bundle.
“Don’t.”
William T. closed his eyes. Her fingers were strong and warm and circled his hands. He remembered a night when he had been driving past the Buchholzes’ barn and seen the lights of Sophie’s car down in the rutted track that wound through the Buchholzes’ cornfield. They glowed red for a second, then winked off. William T. had stopped by the side of the road, worried that she was stuck. But as he came up behind the car in the darkness he had seen that William J. was with her, their two heads leaning back against the seat cushion. Staring out at the stars and the slender crescent of rising moon. It had been a cool night, the end of summer. William T. had stopped yards away, not wanting to break the silence.
“I watched you and William J. once, sitting in your car in the Buchholzes’ cornfield with the lights off,” William T. said. “It was summer. It was a beautiful night. Stars.”
He opened his eyes.
“I think about that sometimes, you and him, crazy about each other.”
“There were a lot of nights like that,” she said.
The little girl in her yellow sundress came drifting by outside the hospital window. She was waving. She was mouthing words he couldn’t understand. She was trying to get his attention. Good-bye to that girl, William J. and Sophie’s baby.
“Are you still my daughter-in-law?” William T. said. “I can’t seem to figure out whether you’re still my daughter-in-law or not.”
“I don’t know,” Sophie said. “Does it matter?”
“I always thought of you as just my daughter, anyway. The hell with the in-law stuff.”
She sobbed. Her long white fingers rose like fenceposts over her eyes and mouth, her bent forehead. Sophie. Sophie. After a time she was quiet. She blew her nose.
“Me, too,” she said.
He searched her eyes behind the darkness to see if he could see peace there, the peace she had said she wanted. Maybe it was there. Maybe it was there, behind her girl’s soft face, her murmuring voice. She put her hands over his, her long white fingers tracing the veins on the backs of his hands, conductor’s batons trying to find a beat. William T. conjured her at seventeen, her legs draped over William J.’s lap while he played his guitar. She had leaned against big pillows back then, and kept her eyes fixed on him, and smiled, and laughed, and sometimes sang. She had a voice that couldn’t hold a note, Sophie; it was a whisper of a voice that climbed and fell and wavered here and there like a stream unsure of which way was south, which way it needed to go to meet the big ocean it sensed was out there.
By the time William J. was diagnosed, his hearing was mostly gone. Without asking Ray or anyone else, William T. had transferred him to the Snyder route, his most dependable haul. Then came the April storm. William T. had sat in his kitchen all night, imagining the lights blinking out all over New England, waiting for the haulers’ calls, charting with his pencil routes to the few plants with electricity and sprayer equipment that were within reach of the bulk tank trucks. The rest he told to go ahead and dump. There was nothing else to do. The milk wouldn’t last.
The phone rang and rang and at the first ring each time he had snatched it up. Efficient and knowledgeable.
“Hank,” he had said, knowing each hauler by the sound of his first hello. “I know the Kraft plant in Lowville’s shut down. Power outage all over the Northeast!”
The hauler had told his story, anyway. They all needed to tell their stories. William T. had listened.
“I know you got seventy thousand pounds there, Hank, but there’s nothing we can do. It’s a goddamn hurricane! You’re going to have to dump. Go to Jacobs’ farm, you’re only a couple miles away, and let her loose.”
The trucker’s voice echoed inside the phone.
“I know. But you got to dump her, and if you do it in Larry’s field, it’s not reentering the food chain. It’s legal as long as he says so, and he owes me a favor. Then try to find a motel with some power. Live it up! Take a shower even!”
William T. had hung up and drawn a line through the trucker’s name and his route and the amount he was hauling. Jesus Christ. Thousands of pounds of fresh, sweet milk, dumped into the fields behind a willing farmer’s house. Everything that had gone into its creation: calf grown to cow, grass grown to hay, water falling from the heavens and filling the cow-pond, pasturage, barn, milking machine, measuring, weighing. The bottling and distributing, the lining up on cold grocery shelves, the pouring into glasses in a thousand different homes, gone.
The phone had rung again. Another hauler having driven through a wind-raged night, come to the plant to find it dark and emptied of help. William T. snatched it up.
“William T. Jones.”
“____”
“This is William T.,” William T. said again. He shook the phone, just on the off chance.
“___”
“Jesus Christ, speak up. This is William T. Who’s this?”
“—Dad?—”
Oh dear God. William J., calling from somewhere on the Snyder route and unable to hear the sound of his father’s voice.
“William J.! It’s me!”
“—Dad?—”
“Where are you? Son! Where are you? Can you hear me?”
“—”
“William. William J. Can you hear me?”
“—Dad?”
“Listen, William J. The electricity’s out everywhere in the Northeast. There’s no plant close enough to haul the load to. You’re going to have to dump. Can you hear me?”
Silence. The phone hummed in his ear, an occasional small crackle of static.
“You’re going, to have, to dump!”
“Dad?”
William T.’s heart seized. “William J.”
“Dad?”
“It’s me. I’m here.”
“Dad, can you hear me?”
William T. had sat there at his kitchen table, charts and graphs spread out before him, most haulers already taken care of, a thick line of graphite drawn through their names. Wm J. Jones still blank. He picked up his pencil and balanced it between the thumb and forefinger of his right hand, closed his eyes, and listened to his son. There was a sound in the kitchen: a chair scraped. William T. opened his eyes. Eliza was sitting opposite him, her eyes fixed on his. Is it him? she mouthed silently. William T. nodded. He clutched the phone in his hand and pressed it hard to his ear.
“William J. Dump the load. Get rid of it. Come on home.”
“—Dad?—”
William T. said nothing else. A few seconds later the line went dead in his ear, and a few seconds after that began the long monotonous stutter of a broken connection. A few days later the power came back on and the report came in of a bulk tank truck jackknifed in the storm and ruined on an off-ramp above Perryville. A few weeks after that William T. took his son for a drive, up to the railroad tracks north of Remsen where he himself had walked as a boy.
CRYSTAL STOOD NEXT TO THE BED, DANGLING his key chain. William T. looked at it: a miniature Dairylea sign, his twenty-year service award. His big silver truck key was on the chain, and two smaller keys that he had long since forgotten the use of. Ghost keys, unlocking nothing.
“Your doctor said he moved your truck into the garage the night you came in and started it up a couple times to make sure it didn’t die.”
William T. looked at her, engulfed in the giant red parka she always wore in win
ter. Big black men’s boots on her feet. Questions chased themselves around his brain but he was too weary to ask them.
“Burl drove me over,” she said. “He’s staying with Johnny until I get back. He’s been feeding your flock while you were gone, too.”
So there had never been a tow truck, come in stealth in the middle of the night to hook up William T.’s truck and drag it away. No driver standing by the open door of his cab in the darkness, yawning and listening to Lucinda singing about this sweet old world. William T. pictured his truck. It didn’t look like something anyone would want. To anyone glancing at the Pick-Up/Drop-Off Only spot, it would have looked like a discard, something no one would miss.
“Why didn’t Burl come in?”
Crystal squinted, tiny lines fanning beside her gray eyes. She looked tired. She shook her head.
William T. picked up the miniature Dairylea sign and swung the key back and forth above his palm. He snapped the chain in two and tossed the miniature Dairylea sign into the trash can. Good-bye, Dairylea.
“Are you ready?” Crystal said.
He looked at her, her dark hair slipping out of the neck of the coat she’d tucked it into. She swiped a wisp out of her eyes, plucked the key from William T.’s hand, and held out her hand to him. The nurse came pushing a wheelchair but William T. waved her away with his free hand. The doctor walked them out to the front entrance and shook William T.’s hand.
“Thanks for taking care of the truck,” William T. said.
Behind them the automatic doors opened and shut, opened and shut, an eternity of back and forthing.
“I’d fix those doors if I were you,” William T. said. The doctor smiled and held up a hand in farewell.
Crystal slid behind the driver’s side door and shoved open the passenger door for William T. He leaned back against the seat and closed his eyes. It seemed an immeasurable space of time since he had been in the outdoor air.
“Has it snowed in Sterns?” he said to Crystal.
Was It Beautiful? Page 12