Now she and Pete went to see her son without the jams but with a soft deckle-edged book about Daniel Boone, pulled from her own bookcase, which was allowed, even though her son would believe that it contained messages for him, believe that, although it was a story about a long-ago person, it was also the story of his own sorrow and heroism in the face of every manner of wilderness, defeat, and abduction, that his own life could be draped over the book, which was simply a noble armature for the revelation of tales of him. There would be clues in the words on pages with numbers that added up to his age: 97, 88, 466. There would be other veiled references to his existence. There always were.
They sat at the visitors’ table together, and her son set the book aside and did try to smile at both of them. There was still sweetness in his eyes, the sweetness he’d been born with, even if fury could dart in a scattershot fashion across them. Someone had cut his tawny hair—or, at least, had tried. Perhaps the staff person hadn’t wanted the scissors to stay near him for a prolonged period and had snipped quickly, then leaped away, approached again, grabbed and snipped, then jumped back. That’s what it looked like. Her son had wavy hair that had to be cut carefully. Now it no longer cascaded down but was close to his head, springing out at angles that would likely matter to no one but a mother.
“So where have you been?” her son asked Pete.
“Good question,” Pete said, as if praising the thing would make it go away. How could people be mentally well in such a world?
“Do you miss us?” the boy asked.
Pete did not answer.
“Do you think of me when you look at the black capillaries of the trees at night?”
“I suppose I do.” Pete stared back at him, so as not to shift in his seat. “I am always hoping that you are okay and that they treat you well here.”
“Do you think of my mom when you stare up at the clouds and all they hold?”
Pete fell silent again.
“That’s enough,” she said to her son, who turned to her with a change of expression.
“There’s supposed to be cake this afternoon for someone’s birthday,” he said.
“That will be nice!” she said, smiling back.
“No candles, of course. Or forks. We’ll just have to grab the frosting and mash it into our eyes for blinding. Do you ever think about how, at that moment of the candles, time stands still, even as the moments carry away the smoke? It’s like the fire of burning love. Do you ever wonder why so many people have things they don’t deserve but how absurd all those things are to begin with? Do you really think a wish can come true if you never ever ever ever ever ever tell it to anyone?”
On the ride home, she and Pete did not exchange a word, and every time she looked at his aging hands, arthritically clasping the steering wheel, the familiar thumbs slung low in their slightly simian way, she understood anew the desperate place they both were in, though their desperations were separate, not shared, and her eyes then felt the stabbing pressure of tears.
The last time her son had tried to do it, his method had been, in the doctor’s words, morbidly ingenious. He might have succeeded, but a fellow patient, a girl from group, had stopped him at the last minute. There had been blood to be mopped. For a time, her son had wanted only a distracting pain, but eventually he had wanted to tear a hole in himself and flee through it. Life, for him, was full of spies and preoccupying espionage. Yet sometimes the spies would flee as well, and someone might have to go after them, over the rolling fields of dream, into the early-morning mountains of dawning signification, in order, paradoxically, to escape them altogether.
There was a storm looming, and lightning did its quick, purposeful zigzag among the clouds. She did not need such stark illustration that horizons could be shattered, filled with messages and broken codes, yet there it was. A spring snow began to fall with the lightning still cracking, and Pete put the windshield wipers on so that they could peer through the cleared semicircles at the darkening road before them. She knew that the world had not been created to speak just to her, and yet, as for her son, sometimes things did. The fruit trees had bloomed early, for instance—the orchards they passed were pink—but the premature warmth precluded bees, and there would be little fruit. Most of the dangling blossoms would fall in this very storm.
When they arrived at her house and went in, Pete glanced at himself in the hallway mirror. Perhaps he needed assurance that he was still alive and not the ghost he seemed.
“Would you like a drink?” she asked, hoping he would stay. “I have some good vodka. I could make you a nice white Russian!”
“Just vodka,” he said reluctantly. “Straight.”
She opened the freezer to find the vodka, and when she closed it again she stood there for a moment, looking at the photo magnets she’d stuck to the refrigerator door. As a baby, her son had seemed happier than most babies. As a six-year-old, he was still smiling and hamming it up, his arms and legs shooting out like starbursts, his perfectly gapped teeth flashing, his hair in honeyed coils. At ten, he had a vaguely brooding and fearful expression, though there was light in his eyes, and his lovely cousins beside him. There he was, a plumpish teenager, his arm around Pete. And there, in the corner, he was an infant again, held by his dignified, handsome father, whom he did not recall, because he had died so long ago. All this had to be accepted. Living did not mean one joy piled upon another. It was merely the hope for less pain, hope played like a playing card upon another hope, a wish for kindnesses and mercies to emerge like kings and queens in an unexpected twist in the game. One could hold the cards oneself or not: they would land the same way, regardless. Tenderness did not enter into it, except in a damaged way.
“You don’t want ice?”
“No,” Pete said. “No, thank you.”
She placed two glasses of vodka on the kitchen table. She sank into the chair across from him.
“Perhaps this will help you sleep,” she said.
“Don’t know if anything can do that,” he said, taking a swig. Insomnia plagued him.
“I am going to bring him home this week,” she said. “He needs his home back, his house, his room. He is no danger to anyone.”
Pete drank some more, sipping noisily. She could see that he wanted no part of this, but she felt that she had no choice but to proceed. “Perhaps you could help. He looks up to you.”
“Help how?” Pete asked with a flash of anger. There was the clink of his glass on the table.
“We could each spend part of the night near him,” she said carefully.
The telephone rang. The Radio Shack wall phone brought almost nothing but bad news, and so the sound of it ringing, especially in the evening, always startled her. She repressed a shudder but still her shoulders hunched, as if she were anticipating a blow. She stood.
“Hello?” she said, answering it on the third ring, her heart pounding. But the person on the other end hung up. She sat back down. “I guess it was a wrong number,” she said, adding, “Perhaps you would like more vodka.”
“Only a little. Then I should go.”
She poured him some more. She’d said what she needed to say and did not want to have to persuade him. She would wait for him to step forward with the right words. Unlike some of her meaner friends, who kept warning her, she believed that there was a deep good side of Pete and she was always patient for it. What else could she be?
The phone rang again.
“Probably telemarketers,” he said.
“I hate them,” she said. “Hello?” she said more loudly into the receiver.
This time when the caller hung up she glanced at the lit panel on the phone, which was supposed to reveal the number of the person who was calling.
She sat back down and poured herself more vodka. “Someone is phoning here from your apartment,” she said.
He threw back the rest of his drink. “I should go,” he said, and got up. She followed him. At the door, she watched him grasp the knob and twist it fir
mly. He opened it wide, blocking the mirror.
“Good night,” he said. His expression had already forwarded itself to someplace far away.
She threw her arms around him to kiss him, but he turned his head abruptly so that her mouth landed on his ear. She remembered that he had made this evasive move ten years ago, when they had first met, and he was in a condition of romantic overlap.
“Thank you for coming with me,” she said.
“You’re welcome,” he replied, then hurried down the steps to his car, which was parked at the curb out front. She did not attempt to walk him to it. She closed the front door and locked it as the telephone began to ring again.
She went into the kitchen. She had not actually been able to read the caller ID without her glasses, and had invented the part about its being Pete’s number, but he had made it the truth anyway, which was the black magic of lies and good guesses, nimble bluffs. Now she braced herself. She planted her feet.
“Hello?” she said, answering on the fifth ring. The plastic panel where the number should appear was clouded as if by a scrim, a page of onionskin over the onion—or rather, a picture of an onion. One depiction on top of another.
“Good evening,” she said loudly. What would burst forth? A monkey’s paw. A lady. A tiger.
But there was nothing at all.
ALICE MUNRO
Train
FROM Harper’s Magazine
THIS IS A SLOW TRAIN anyway, and it has slowed some more for the curve. Jackson is the only passenger left, and the next stop is about twenty miles ahead. Then the stop at Ripley, then Kincardine and the lake. He is in luck and it’s not to be wasted. Already he has taken his ticket stub out of its overhead notch.
He heaves his bag and sees it land just nicely, in between the rails. No choice now—the train’s not going to get any slower.
He takes his chance. A young man in good shape, agile as he’ll ever be. But the leap, the landing, disappoints him. He’s stiffer than he’d thought, the stillness pitches him forward, his palms come down hard on the gravel between the ties, he’s scraped the skin. Nerves.
The train is out of sight; he hears it putting on a bit of speed, clear of the curve. He spits on his hurting hands, getting the gravel out. Then picks up his bag and starts walking back in the direction he has just covered on the train. If he followed the train, he would show up at the station there well after dark. He’d still be able to complain that he’d fallen asleep and wakened all mixed up, thinking he’d slept through his stop when he hadn’t, jumped off all confused.
He would have been believed. Coming home from so far away, from Germany and the war, he could have got mixed up in his head. It’s not too late, he would be where he was supposed to be before midnight. But all the time he’s thinking this, he’s walking in the opposite direction. He doesn’t know many names of trees. Maples, that everybody knows. Pines. He’d thought that where he jumped was in some woods, but it wasn’t. The trees are just along the track, thick on the embankment, but he can see the flash of fields behind them. Fields green or rusty or yellow. Pasture, crops, stubble. He knows just that much. It’s still August.
And once the noise of the train has been swallowed up, he realizes there isn’t the perfect quiet around that he would have expected. Plenty of disturbance here and there, a shaking of the dry August leaves that wasn’t wind, a racket of unknown, unseen birds chastising him.
People he’d met in the past few years seemed to think that if you weren’t from a city, you were from the country. And that was not true. Jackson himself was the son of a plumber. He had never been in a stable in his life or herded cows or stoked grain. Or found himself as now stumping along a railway track that seemed to have reverted from its normal purpose of carrying people and freight to become a province of wild apple trees and thorny berry bushes and trailing grapevines and crows scolding from perches you could not see. And right now a garter snake slithering between the rails, perfectly confident he won’t be quick enough to tramp on and murder it. He does know enough to figure that it’s harmless, but its confidence riles him.
The little jersey, whose name was Margaret Rose, could usually be counted on to show up at the stable door for milking twice a day, morning and evening. Belle didn’t often have to call her. But this morning she was too interested in something down by the dip of the pasture field, or in the trees that hid the railway tracks on the other side of the fence. She heard Belle’s whistle and then her call, and started out reluctantly. But then decided to go back for another look.
Belle set the pail and stool down and started tramping through the morning-wet grass.
“So-boss. So-boss.”
She was half coaxing, half scolding.
Something moved in the trees. A man’s voice called out that it was all right.
Well, of course it was all right. Did he think she was afraid of him attacking Margaret Rose, who had her horns still on?
Climbing over the rail fence, he waved in what he might have considered a reassuring way.
That was too much for Margaret Rose; she had to put on a display. Jump one way, then another. Toss of the wicked little horns. Nothing much, but jerseys can always surprise you with their speed and spurts of temper. Belle called out, to scold her and reassure him.
“She won’t hurt you. Just don’t move. It’s her nerves.”
Now she noticed the bag he had hold of. That was what had caused the trouble. She had thought he was just out walking the tracks, but he was going somewhere.
“That’s what the trouble is. She’s upset with your bag. If you could just lay it down for a moment. I have to get her back toward the barn to milk her.”
He did as she asked, and then stood watching, not wanting to move an inch.
She got Margaret Rose headed back to where the pail was, and the stool, on this side of the barn.
“You can pick it up now,” she said. “As long as you don’t wave it around at her. You’re a soldier, aren’t you? If you wait till I get her milked, I can get you some breakfast. Good night, I’ve got out of breath. That’s a stupid name when you have to holler at her. Margaret Rose.”
She was a short, sturdy woman with straight hair, gray mixed in with what was fair, and childish bangs.
“I’m the one responsible for it,” she said, as she got herself settled. “I’m a royalist. Or I used to be. I have porridge made, on the back of the stove. It won’t take me long to milk. If you wouldn’t mind going round the barn and waiting where she can’t see you. It’s too bad I can’t offer you an egg. We used to keep hens, but the foxes kept getting them and we just got fed up.”
We. We used to keep hens. That meant she had a man around somewhere.
“Porridge is good. I’ll be glad to pay you.”
“No need. Just get out of the way for a bit. She’s got herself too interested to let her milk down.”
He took himself off around the barn. It was in bad shape. He peered between the boards to see what kind of a car she had, but all he could make out in there was an old buggy and some other wrecks of machinery.
The white paint on the house was peeling and going gray. A window with boards nailed across it, where there must have been broken glass. The dilapidated henhouse where she had mentioned the foxes getting the hens. Shingles in a pile.
If there was a man on the place, he must have been an invalid, else paralyzed with laziness.
There was a road running by. A small fenced field in front of the house, a dirt road. And in the field a dappled, peaceable-looking horse. A cow he could see reasons for keeping, but a horse? Even before the war people on farms were getting rid of them, tractors were the coming thing. And she hadn’t looked like the sort to trot round on horseback just for the fun of it. Then it struck him. The buggy in the barn. It was no relic, it was all she had.
For a while now he’d been hearing a peculiar sound. The road rose up a hill, and from over that hill came a clip-clop, clip-clop. Along with the clip-clop some littl
e tinkle or whistling.
Now then. Over the hill came a box on wheels, being pulled by two quite small horses. Smaller than the ones in the field but no end livelier. And in the box sat a half dozen or so little men. All dressed in black, with proper black hats on their heads.
The sound was coming from them. It was singing. Discrete high-pitched little voices, as sweet as could be. They never looked at him as they went by.
It chilled him. The buggy in the barn and the horse in the field were nothing in comparison.
He was still standing there, looking one way and another, when he heard her call, “All finished.” She was standing by the house.
“This is where to go in and out,” she said of the back door. “The front is stuck since last winter, and it just refuses to open, you’d think it was still frozen.”
They walked on planks laid over an uneven dirt floor, in a darkness provided by the boarded-up window. It was as chilly there as it had been in the hollow where he’d slept. He had wakened again and again, trying to scrunch himself into a position where he could stay warm. The woman didn’t shiver here—she gave off a smell of frank healthy exertion and what was likely the cow’s hide.