He’d remembered all that, standing in the attic when he’d found his son, and he’d thought of the empty whiskey bottle on the table downstairs, the whiskey Uncle Ira hadn’t needed, as of course Richard knew. If his son could come back—if some magic could happen in the world just once, and his son could slip back through the secret door—he would say to him: “Richard, never mind about the whiskey. It’s all right.”
But there was, of course, no secret door; that was the single most important fact in the universe. Mistakes were final—the ladder against the barn, the story about the death of Uncle Ira that he shouldn’t have told. He felt himself fingering the snake’s head again, scraping the tip of his bobbed finger against the one remaining tooth, and a brief flush of some queer emotion went through him—not anger, exactly; perhaps a brief flicker of understanding. There was a wastebasket standing by the table in the corridor ahead of them, and he drew out the snake’s head and, when he came to the wastebasket, dropped it in. “Thorry,” he said aloud. Lewis glanced at him.
Ed Thomas’s door was partly closed. Lewis, after a moment’s thought, leaned over toward it and lightly knocked.
“Come in!” someone called, possibly Ed Thomas’s voice gone light.
Lewis pushed the door a little, stepping back from it as if he thought it might have a crate on top. “I’ll go see about Ginny,” he said.
James sucked his mouth in, his eyes darting in alarm once more, then nodded. “Ay-uh,” he said. “Well … I be here.”
Far down the corridor there was a middle-aged red-headed woman he thought he knew. She was heavy, rumpled from sleeplessness. She did not seem to see him.
3
(Ed’s Song)
No one had prepared him for how Ed Thomas looked. He was better, Lewis had said, and it was true he was out of the oxygen tent—it was over by the wall, ready to be used again if he should need it—but he was no better than he might be. His skin had gone transparent, the blood in his veins looked the blue of snowy shadows in January, his eyes had sunken, and one got the impression that in a few hours he’d lost weight. Though he was weak—his voice, above all, had lost energy—he lit up with pleasure as James came in. It was an effect difficult to pin to any physical particulars: though he was weak as a baby, too feeble even for a full-fledged smile, his mind, perhaps spirit, seemed as lively as ever, locked inside.
“James, boy,” he said, almost a whisper. “Hi golly there!”
“Mahnin, Ed.” He approached the bed timidly, his cap in the two hands in front of him like a rabbit’s, chin arching over it, meek as Ethan Allen when Jedediah Dewey got through with him for shootin at the churchbell, before Ticonderoga.
It was a single room—a chest, a lamp, a standing bed-table, some closets, a door to a bathroom, one chair, and one long window looking out at the Bennington Monument and the mountain beyond. Ed was in pajamas Ruth had brought him, dark red with black collar, Japanese-looking. His white hair was cocked up at curious angles; along the hairline there were tiny beads of sweat. He held out his hand for James to shake, though neither one of them was a hand-shaker, and both would have thought it, any other time, affected, citified, and morally dubious, like the smiles of a salesman. Ed made an effort to squeeze heartily; the effect showed only on his face.
“Hi golly,” he said again. “Lewis told me he’d trick you up here!”
“Didn’t take him no trickin, Ed. Ith good to thee you better.”
“Sorry bout the way I went and crumpled there.” Ed smiled feebly and slightly shook his head. “Own damn fault. Thirty years they been tellin me to quit those cigars.”
James met his eyes, tasted his lips, getting courage up, then changed his mind and looked down.
“Damned embarrassin to be sick,” Ed said. “Raises hob with the fahmwork. But then—” He rolled his eyes toward the window without turning his head. “I guess if I ain’t made a fortune by now, I might’s well tell it to the bees.”
“You know how it ith in Vermont,” James said. “Mebby neth year.”
Ed nodded, half-smiled. “Mebby.” For a moment he closed his eyes. When he opened them he said, “I spose you’re hopin that boy Lewis will take over the fahm for you, one day.”
“I dunno. Don’t much matter. I put him in my will—after Thally.” He smiled, seeing the irony in that, and glanced at Ed. “I thould have cut off that ole woman without a thin dime.”
Ed smiled back. “It’s a funny world,” he said.
James nodded thoughtfully, pushing his hands into his overalls pockets, then abruptly shook his head. “That Thallyth the Devilth own thtepmother,” he said.
As if he’d heard something completely different—or as if he knew James had meant something different—he said, “She was a beautiful woman all right.” His voice all at once had turned surprisingly sad. He rolled his head sideways to look more comfortably at the monument and mountain. James said nothing, hardly knowing what to say, and after a time Ed said, “I’ll be sorry to miss the elections on TV.”
James’ eyebrows lifted.
“Never live to see ’em,” Ed said, not making much of it. “Man knows about these things, sometimes. Got no reason to complain, never said I do, but I always enjoyed a good election.”
“Now wait a minute, Ed—”
He waved it away, half smiling. “No, never mine that. They’ll let me inta Heaven. Only real sin they can lay on me is I never did a dollar’s worth of sin in my life.” He smiled again. “Oh, I’ve thought a few. Maybe they’ll count that.”
The Bennington Monument was creamy white, with the sunlight falling full on it. On the crest of its high hill, surrounded by mountains, it ruled the valley. Despite its pure color, its imposing height, it was an ugly structure, most people with a modicum of sense maintained. James Page was among them, though he loved the thing anyway, patriot that he was, and in fact thought it fitting—massive, countrified, a towering but somewhat orotund obelisk constructed not of Vermont marble but of New York State limestone, plain and raw as the people memorialized: Col. Stark, for instance, one of James’ ancestors, famous for standing on a farmer’s pair of fence-bars and sighting the enemy and yelling to his men: “There’s the British, and they’re ours, or tonight Molly Stark sleeps a widow!” Mount Anthony was grayish blue to the west of it, here and there a patch of green, or a single tree with yellow leaves still on it, a poplar maybe, among the last to go. Overhead, the sky was bright blue.
Ed rolled his head back—lying with it turned to look out was too much strain—and closed his eyes. He went on talking, and James Page listened, unable to think of a word he could say except lies, and it wasn’t a good time for lies.
“I always enjoyed a good election,” he said. “It was better in the old days, when you and I was young. There’d be bunting in the villages, streets full of buggies, some fancy politician come to hammer on our ears. You remember the election of nineteen twelve? Teddy Roosevelt came and made a speech there in Bennington, that was the year of the Bull Moose campaign. I dunno what he said, I was too young to listen, but I remember, by tunkit, that man was big. You look at his picture, you’d think he was some little bespectacled doctor or college professor, and you read all the stories of how he overcame sickness and what-not, you might get the idea he was one of those little Napoleons proving his stuff. But hi golly, that man stood a whole head taller than John G. McCullough in his prime, and more solid than one of George Ellis’s Marmons. I member that same year President William Howard Taft came to Manchester, fat as a hippopotamus—played golf with my uncle—I member the President had a floppy white hat. He was no good, that Taft. See it in his eyes. Back-slappin hand-claspin stogie-puffin bandit, so fat if you’d put a wick in him, you could have burned him for a candle.” He smiled.
“I member one year at election time there was a man came to town had a white bear.”
“I remember that!” James Page said, startled.
“You oughtta remember it,” Ed said with a laugh—his eyes re
mained closed—“it was dahn near the end of your Ariah.”
James frowned. “Now that pot I don’t remember.”
“You don’t? Why son of a dog! Ariah was thirteen years old at the time. Prettiest thing in all the Shires. Eyes blue as skies in October and yellah yellah hair. Got darker later, but when Ariah was thirteen, it was still about the color of thrashin straw. She was over at her aunt’s on the Monument Road, there by the Drake place, and she got it in her mind she’d take a ride in the buggy. Hoss they had was skittish, but Ariah was pretty good at handlin the thing, and her aunt never gave it two thoughts, I guess. So they hitched up the buggy and away she went.
“Half an hour later, just about time it was gettin down toward dark, aunt was out in the yahd and what should she behold but that man with that cussed white bear go by, bear sittin there in the buggy-seat just like a human, right next to the man. Well the aunt knew pretty well what that hoss was gonna think when he looked at that bear, so she goes flyin down the road yelling ‘Ha-a-a-lp! Ha-a-a-lp!’ and every neighbor from far or near come flyin to the rescue. Happened my father was there in the vicinity in his trap, and me there beside him, and as soon as he leahnt what was happenin, away we flew to overtake ’em.
“Well we never saw the bear, as it happened; all we saw was that hoss and little Ariah come flyin down the road towahds us, and my father whipped around and went fast he could go in the same direction as that runaway hoss, and finally he captured it. Found out later what happened was, the man had heard Ariah’s hoss comin, when she was comin through the shale line on Monument Road, and he’d run his buggy up in some weeds and got the bear down and sat on the thing till the hoss went by. But Ariah’s hoss had smelled the bear, and that was ah it took. You fahgot that story?”
“No,” James said, “I remember now.” His eyes had filled with tears, though he was not aware of any feeling.
“Those was fine elections,” Ed Thomas said and nodded, still not opening his eyes. “But they’s too many people for such elections now. I don’t begrudge it. I like those TV elections too. Believe you me! I member the John F. Kennedy election. First time I ever understood what was really goin on at those things—cameras pokin out every cranny and nook, talkin to delegates when they was drunk and half crazy—it was an eye-opener. Demonstrations on the floor, they would’ve fooled me easy, but there was Walter Cronkite explainin what was happenin, or Huntley or what-have-you, and I tell you it made me more excited than I ever was before about a public election. People groan abut the modahn world, but let me tell you, I’ve been proud, sometimes, watchin the elections.
“People scoff at TV. I b’lieve you do, James. But let me tell you, we don’t vote like we use to. Whole country could be swayed by a tame white bear, or one time three hosses that supposably could talk. It was fun, by tunkit, but it’s over; the world’s grown up. People are thinkin and ahguin like they never did previous to this present age, and it’s the idiot-box more’n ennathin else that made it happen.
“Well, I’ll miss the election.” He shook his head, opening his eyes for a moment, then letting them close again. James gazed out at the monument, waiting, hoping for something, he could hardly have said what. He wiped his wet eyes.
“I’ll tell you some other things I’ll miss, if you ask me.”
James stirred himself to ask, but Ed went on:
“I’ll miss walkin out these last days of October, when the land’s dyin and the sky’s oversharp, and findin where the deer are on their hind legs pickin wild apples. And I’ll miss winter, by guard. I’ve never gotten over how much snow can fall in just five short months of winter. Never mind November, stot with the dark time, December. Blackest month of the year it is, and steadily increasin in blackness as the month draws on. Vermont’s a lot farther north than most people realize, ye know. A man I knew left the State a few years ago and moved south. Where he went was Canada, city of London, Ontario, to be precise, which is a hundred and twenty-five miles south of where he stotted, which was St. Albans, Vermont. If he’d gone on to Kingsville, he would’ve been two hundred miles south, swelterin in the sun.
“But the dahkness at least increases in a known and predictable way, and furthermore, by the end of the month the days reach their shottest and stot growin again. The cold’s trickier. Month begins gently, but one day—I’ve known it to be as early as the fifth and as late as the twentieth—you wake up cold and pull up another blanket. No use—you’re still cold. In the mahnin you look at the thehmometer and it’s eight below. Yestehday the Walloomsac was open water; today it’s solid ice. Then January. That’s the month of the snow. I don’t mean more snow falls, because it doesn’t—so cold that even the clouds lock up tight—but there’s snow there always, not a speck of bare ground, nothin alive but some deer and rabbits and snowmobiles.” He opened his eyes to meet James’. “Lot of people don’t care much for snowmobiles,” he said accusingly, “and I grant you they’re loud, besides nocturnal. But I tell you this: I use to go lookin at the scenery round my place on skis or snowshoes. Now I just walk in the snowmobile tracks. Funny thing about snowmobiles. They’re stupid little animals, but they know where the sights are, better than a deer.
“Then February. The days are longer then, the sun is higher, the snow’s more dramatic. An evening flurry will come down in huge, wet flakes, so thick and fast you’re convinced in an hour your fahm will be buried like Pompeii. But the flurry stops in ten minutes or so, leavin maybe two inches of good snowball snow, big feathery flakes. The mahnin after such a snow as that is what gave rise to picture postcards in the first place. The sky’s clear, air still and cold but not too cold. From every chimney you see the smoke goes up straight as a stick. You pass through a valley with an unfrozen brook, and such vapor comes up through the fifteen degrees that for fifty yards on each side of it, the branches, the bob-wire, the weeds that poke up through the snow are ah covered with jewelry.
“But I’ll tell you what I’ll miss more than ah the rest, and that’s ‘unlocking.’ Fools call it ‘mud season,’ and I don’t dare deny you, there’s a good deal of mud, because the first thing unlocks is the ground. I’ll tell you the first sign. It’s easily missed. Every year one of the first four or five days in March is going to be warm and sunny, with the temperature rising, for a little while, to somewhere between fifty and sixty. Look hard at a birch or red maple that day, you’ll see a peculiar haze of color in the upper branches: yellow on birch, red on a red maple. Look again the next day and the color is gone, nothing but dark, bare branches and, likely, a sleet storm. All the same, unlocking’s stotted. Dirt roads unlock first—the only ground not covered with snow. Each warm day the top inch or two of road touched by the sun thaws out. First cah goes by makes a couple of inch-deep ruts that’ll freeze by evening. You can pretty well count on getting stuck once or twice. I never count on it, myself, but I always do.
“Rivers unlock next. The two I know best—the Walloomsac and the Hoosac—both stot the same way. You first see two small streams running on top of the ice, one near each frozen bank. Then one day towards the middle of March, a patch of open water appears, then another. On the Walloomsac, which has a good many dams and slow water, the patches slowly enlarge for a week, until one day you notice an open channel with a line of ice floes sailing solemnly down the middle like Pharaoh’s boats.
“Meanwhile, two other kinds of unlocking have stotted. One’s the town meeting, where, you know yourself, what we mostly do is block progress—keep to our old covered bridges, for instance, though the richest and smartest people in town want concrete for their darn trucks and bulldozers. The other’s done with a brace and bit, and it’s called sugarin.
“The weather’s capricious, around sugarin time—the more capricious the better. The more Miss Spring dances in and backs out again, the more syrup you get. People in cars get furious when they’re stopped by a late, wet April snow, but in the sugarbush that’s a cause for rejoicing. Most of the season you do well to get three four inche
s of sap in the bottom of each bucket over twenty-four hours, but on the day of a sugar snow, your best buckets fill to the brim and run over. That night you boil to midnight, and it seems like a holiday.
“That’s a life, James, I’ll tell you, not as if you didn’t know—standin out there in the maple grove countin up your buckets like a banker, and lookin out over the hills as the whole world outside and inside unlocks. First the pussy willows come, and the rivers run emerald green. Then the deer come out. After a winter of eating just tree buds, and not too many of even them, they’re mad for grass. They come boldly into the fields to eat last year’s withered stems. One mornin last April I saw fourteen of the things in the pasture behind my house.