The boy had his hands jammed into the pockets of his red plaid jacket and stood with feet apart, his wool hunter’s cap pulled down over his ears. It was a cold day, despite the bright sunshine, and a stiff wind blowing through the tall pine trees at the edge of the yard became, on noticing it, a grieving kind of noise that made it difficult but not impossible for the boy to hear his father, inside the house, call his name, first from the front of the house, where the parlor was, then from the kitchen, until at last the door to the porch was flung open, and the man stood there, looking at the boy with a mixture of puzzlement and irritation.
The man was large, a few inches taller than the boy, but heavy through the shoulders and arms, with a large, full face and straight, dark brown hair. He was in his shirtsleeves, wearing brown twill trousers and green braces. “Dewey,” the man said, as if making an announcement. He was silent for a moment, but the boy made no response. “What the hell you doing out here? I was calling all over.”
“I’m all ready. I was only waiting for you out here.”
“You ate breakfast.”
“Sure.”
The father turned and hollered to someone inside. “He’s outside! He already ate, he says.”
A woman, the boy’s mother, answered indistinctly.
“I don’t know when,” the man said. He was pulling on a wool mackinaw and cap, still by the open door. When the man spoke to the woman he looked at the boy.
“Will you bring the others with you?” the woman asked.
“I don’t know when I’ll be back, maybe not till this afternoon. They’ll get bored. It’s just errands. Besides, Dewey’s doing the driving.”
“Oh,” the woman said, as if the fact of the boy’s driving was somehow significant.
The man was plainly irritated. He turned back to her and said. “It’s his birthday, isn’t it? Besides, he drives here at the farm all the time.”
“Fine.”
The man closed the door and stepped into the white glare beyond the porch. Moving ahead of him, the boy went quickly to the barn and pulled the wide door open. While the man walked around him and climbed into the passenger’s seat of the Ford, the boy prepared to crank-start the sedan from the front.
“Set your spark?” the man asked.
“Oh, yeah,” the boy said, and he rushed around to the driver’s side and moved the spark lever. Then he hurried to the front again and commenced cranking, until the motor coughed and turned over, caught and was running.
“Let it warm up,” the man said. He sat with his thick arms crossed over his chest, his head pulled low to his shoulders, and stared straight out the open barn door at the brilliant white world beyond. His freshly shaved face was gray and taut, and his pale blue eyes glistened wetly behind a film, as if he were peering at the world through a window. He was a sad-looking man, the kind of man who has given up trying to stop the dying going on around and inside him.
Behind the black sedan, in the warm darkness of the barn, there were animals and hay and grain, and the noises of the cows and the pair of draft horses as they ate, the cluck of the hens and the nervous snorts from the pigs mingled with the earthy smells of their confinement—a warm, crowded, utterly domestic place, like the inside of one’s own body.
“All right,” the father said, and the boy put the car in gear and drove out. When the sedan was clear of the barn, he stopped, and the father got out, walked back and closed the barn door.
Returning to the car, he said again, “All right,” and they left the farm, turned right at the road and headed for town, tire-chains slapping loosely against the freshly plowed dirt road, the motor chirping warmly along, and the boy, for the first time, driving to town, driving skillfully, too, for he had driven for almost two years now, as his father had said, but only out at the farm, driving the tractor in the fields and the truck along old lumber trails in the woods, hauling wood back and trash out, bringing corn or hay or a load of potatoes in from the fields—never this, however, never along a public road and then along the streets of Catamount, where there would be other cars and where there would be people who would see him and wonder if that was Dewey Knox, Fred Knox’s oldest boy, driving Fred’s new Model A. That boy’s growing up fast, they’d say. Before long he’ll be as big as his father, they’d say.
An hour later, they had finished their errands—the purchase of a trap to keep a fox from the chicken coop, and at the hardware counter of the same store, nails, an ax handle, stove black, and a half-dozen carriage bolts; they had stopped at the post office, and they had stopped at the farmers’ exchange outlet to order seed; at Varney’s Dry Goods Store the boy’s father had purchased new boots for him, military style boots the color of oak that laced almost to the knee. When the boy wore them out of the store he tried to walk as if he had always worn boots like these, but he stumbled at the threshold and almost fell through the doorway to the sidewalk, while behind him his father and George Varney laughed. But he drove well—skillfully and with increasing confidence, pulling into parking places and backing out to traffic, though of course in a town as small as Catamount, even on a Saturday when most people in the area were doing their weekly shopping, housewives at the A & P, husbands and fathers at the farmers’ exchange or the hardware store, there was not much traffic.
Leaving town, they had turned left and had gone a few hundred yards past the Catamount River Bridge near Skitter Lake, when the man said to the boy, “You probably want a bite to eat.”
“I do.”
“Stop off at Daddy Emerson’s, then.”
The boy looked around at his father, who was staring straight out the windshield at the road.
“You can say you ate in town,” the father said.
The boy didn’t answer. They passed a small, run-down farmhouse, then took a left onto a narrow dirt road that looped through a pine woods and over a ridge. Here and there hundred-year-old farms with attached barns and outbuildings sat off the road, woodsmoke swirling from the big square chimneys while boys and sometimes men shoveled snow away.
“Okay?” the father said.
“What?”
“You’ll say you ate in town.”
“Yeah, fine. Sure.”
Running alongside a rocky stream humped over with snow and ice and, except for the scrubby leafless brush that grew along the banks, almost indistinguishable from the fields that spread like bedsheets away from it, the road narrowed gradually, crossed the stream on a rickety wooden bridge and headed for a cleft in the ridge at the end of the valley.
At the bottom of the cleft there was a large old house, a colonial that had not been painted or repaired for a generation. Behind the house was a barn with a collapsed roof, the timbers showing through like bones, and beyond the barn the land rose swiftly up to the ridge. The house faced the road, which ran past it and through the cleft to a crossroads in another town. Beyond the road was a steep slope dotted with gnarled old apple trees and rocks shoving gray heads through the snow. Because of the ridge in back and the steep slope in front, the house at midday in winter was in shadow and looked cold, and despite the gray string of smoke curling from the chimney, the place looked uninhabited.
The boy drew the Ford off the road and followed tire tracks through the unplowed snow around to the back of the house, where there were two more vehicles, a Model T coupe and an open, wood-sided, pickup truck. He parked the Ford next to the truck, shut down the motor, and got out. His father was already out and was at the door, knocking on an old board panel that had been nailed over a pane of glass in the door. The boy came and stood behind his father and looked down at the color and precise definition of his new boots against the gray, trampled snow.
A man’s gravelly voice called from behind the closed door. “Yeah?”
“Fred Knox.”
“Who else you got there?”
“My boy.”
“Okay,” and the door opened to a dark hallway. Then the owner of the voice appeared, a burly man in his sixties wearing
long underwear and floppy dark green trousers and on his feet loose, untied hunting boots. The man’s red face was large and good-natured, sloppy and half-covered with a week’s growth of white whiskers. “What say, Fred?” he said as he led the way along the dark hallway. He shuffled in his loose boots as he walked and bumped once or twice against one wall, as if his balance were off.
He opened a door at the end of the hallway and led the father and son into a warm, brightly lit kitchen. There was a long rectangular table in the center of the room with a few chairs scattered about and a Glenwood kitchen range near the stone sink crackling with a woodfire in its belly. There were two other men in the room, a tall, skinny man in a plaid wool shirt and wearing a hunting cap like the boy’s and a shorter, more compact-looking man with a black beard and a thick shock of black hair that fell across his forehead. Both men were in their late twenties, and the boy knew them slightly—the tall, skinny one was Al Foy, a woodcutter, and the short, bearded one was Jimmy Sherman, a hide-stacker from the tannery. He was supposed to have been a prizefighter for a few years down in Boston, but apparently not a successful one, for he had returned to Catamount and now lived with his mother and father in their apartment above the paint store. The burly, older man who had let them in was called Daddy Emerson. He had lived alone in this house since the death of his wife, twenty or more years ago.
“H’lo, boys,” Fred Knox said to the two men at the table. They had glasses in front of them, tumblers half-filled with a pale yellow liquid, and they were smoking cigarettes.
“Sit down, Fred,” Al, the skinny one, said. “That your boy?”
“Yep. Dewey.”
The boy took off his cap and crossed the room to a chair near the stove.
“Take off your coat, son. We’ll sit and get warm.” The father had taken a seat next to Al and across from Jimmy and had shed his mackinaw and hat. Emerson set a bottle and a glass on the table in front of the man, who quickly uncorked the bottle and filled the glass to the top, then drank off about an inch of the liquid. “Ahh! Now that warms a man up real quick!”
The other men laughed.
They drank and talked in low, relaxed voices. Emerson stood near the sink, resting his bulk against it, now and then lumbering across to the table to refill the glasses. At one point he turned to the boy and said, “Them’re awful good-looking boots. Brand-new?”
Dewey looked down at his boots. “Yes, sir. This morning.”
“Birthday present!” his father hollered.
The other men looked at the boy with interest. “Birthday?” Al said, smiling. “How old are you, kid?”
“Fourteen.”
“I’ll be damned! Fourteen! Happy birthday, kid,” Al said and turned back to his drink.
“You oughta give him a birthday drink, Fred,” Emerson said and, grinning, he reached for the bottle and a fresh glass.
“No,” the father said.
“No? Hell, how old were you when you got started? I wasn’t no older’n him, that’s for sure.”
“Go ahead, let the kid have a birthday drink,” Al said.
“It won’t hurt him none,” the man with the beard added.
“No,” said the father. “You got tonic, he can have some of that. But none of this stuff. This is too strong, you got to work up to it. You know that,” he said to Emerson.
Emerson reached into the cupboard next to the sink, pulled out a bottle of orange liquid and poured a glassful for the boy.
“What’s the proof of this stuff,” the bearded one, Jimmy, asked.
“A hunnert, easy,” Al said.
“Apple jack’s got a kick like this, it’s more than a hundred,” Fred Knox said. “What d’you think?” he asked Emerson.
“Hunnert an’ fifty, maybe,” Emerson said.
“Hunnert an’ fifty! Wow!” Al said, and he took another swallow from his glass. “Goes down like mother’s milk!” He laughed with a wide-open mouth.
The others laughed with him and drank. At the suggestion of the boy’s father, Emerson cut two thick slices of bread and made a cheese sandwich for the boy, then brought out a large jar of pickled pig’s knuckles for the men at the table, and while the boy ate his sandwich and the men gnawed away at the knuckles and talked politics, the old man busied himself at the sink washing glasses and a few greasy plates. He asked the boy to go out in the shed by the barn and bring in an armload of stove wood and told the boy’s father that the cheese sandwich was free. Quickly, the boy pulled on his coat and hat and went out.
When a few minutes later he returned with the wood, the men’s voices were loud, and Al was shouting at Emerson, “You was crazy, man! It don’t matter he was a Roman Catholic, he was gonna make it so we could sit in town and buy a damned drink of whiskey when we want!”
“Mattered to me he was Catholic,” Jimmy said in a loud, sullen voice. “You want the Pope runnin’ the country? You want all them New York and Boston Irishers and Eye-talians takin’ over everything we fought the damned war for? That what you want?” he shouted at Al. “Fish-eaters!” he sneered.
Emerson said to Al, “I never vote for a man who’s gonna put me outa business. That’s my politics. Period.”
“Al Smith wouldn’t put you outa business,” Fred Knox said. “Matter a fact, if it ever gets to be legal to drink, they’s a hell of a lot of people will turn out to be drinkers. You’d be sellin’ more of this stuff than you can make by now if Smith had won,” he pronounced.
“The hell you say.”
“The hell I do say. Smith wouldn’a put you outa business. But tell me this, Emerson, if Hoover was the Democrat an’ Smith the Republican, instead of the other way around, which one would you have voted for then?” Fred lifted his glass woozily and snickered into it.
The other men looked steadily over at Emerson, and even the boy looked at him.
“What’s it matter anyhow. People oughtn’t to talk politics and religion when they’re drinking,” Emerson said, and he went back to wiping off the glasses in the sink.
“Religion an’ politics is gettin’ to be the same thing, you ask me,” Jimmy said grumpily.
Fred signaled for more drinks, and Emerson refilled the glasses. For a while longer the men drifted in and out of several conversations concerning the subject of religion-and-politics, and then Al reached out and laid a long paw on Fred’s wrist.
“You can do it!” he exclaimed, his face brightening.
“Do what?”
“You can take Jimmy here. Arm-wrestling. I tol’ him this morning that they’s all kinda farmers around town could beat his butt. You can do it!”
“He does it all the time,” Fred said. “I don’t know the tricks.”
“There ain’t any tricks,” Jimmy said. He had sat up straight in his chair and was already poised, ready, his gaze fixed steadily on the boy’s father.
“I don’t know,” Fred said.
“Sure you can. I got a dollar bill here says you can. You willin’ to bet, Jimmy?”
“Sure.” The bearded man reached into his pocket and drew out a wrinkled bill and tossed it casually onto the table.
“It ain’t my money,” Fred said, and he rolled up his right sleeve and hitched his chair closer to the table.
Jimmy squared off against him, and the men locked hands. The boy stood up, and he and Emerson came toward the pair and stood at the end of the table, facing them.
“All right,” Al said, grinning broadly.
“Fine, fine. Call it,” Fred said, his face taut and somber.
Jimmy was relaxed, his beefy shoulders loose, his left hand lying flat in his lap. He watched the other man’s eyes.
“Ready?”
“Ready.”
“Okay … wrestle!”
Fred strained, the veins and cords in his neck leaping forward as if he were lifting a great weight, but the other man’s arm did not move. He tried to twist the man’s wrist toward him, so he could pull his arm instead of push it, but the man’s arm was like stone and
would not be twisted or pulled. Then slowly, steadily, the man with the beard pushed Fred’s hand back, inch by inch, in a slow, precise arc, all the way to the table. He let go of Fred’s hand, smiled through his beard and extended his right hand, palm up, to Al. “You owe me.”
Al shook his head and dug out a dollar bill. “I thought sure you could take him, Fred. You gotta lotta size on you.”
“I guess it’s in the wrong places,” he said. “And I told you, I don’t know the tricks.” He stood up, wobbled a bit, and reached for his wallet. He handed two dollars over to Emerson, nodded toward his son, who put his hat and coat on, and headed toward the door.
As the boy passed his father’s empty chair, he removed the man’s mackinaw from the chairback and carried it out with him. “Here, Pa, you forgot your coat,” he said in the hallway, but his father was already beyond the hallway and outside.
The man and the boy rode home in silence, until they reached the driveway, where the man instructed his son to swing the car around so it could be backed into the barn. “I won’t be going out again today,” he explained. His voice was low and his words came slowly and thickly as if he were speaking through a cloth curtain.
The boy turned the car around at the road and proceeded to back into the driveway skillfully and without hesitation, as if he had been driving to town for years. At the barn, he stopped, drew the brake up and stepped down from the car to open the barn door. His father sat heavily in his seat, ignoring him, lost in thought or lost in feeling. When the boy returned to the car, the father turned to him and said, “You tell your mother we ate in town. You understand?”
The boy didn’t look at him. He peered out the windshield across the square hood to the crisply shoveled driveway, along the path to the porch and house. There was a right way to do everything, even something as simple and unimportant as shoveling a path through snow to the kitchen. The boy’s father believed that, he had said it, too, and now the boy believed it. The pleasure you got from looking at a job done the right way proved that there was such a thing as the right way. Not just the best way, not the easiest way, not even the logical way. You did things in life the right way, and then, afterward, you got to admire what you had done. You didn’t have to avert your eyes from what you had done.