She had not even seen the house he had just finished building for her. As the story gradually came to me, Duane had wanted the girl’s first sight of her house to be as he was carrying her into it after the ceremony. Had she come out with her mechanic one night for a look and run off on the spot? Duane had gone into Arden to see her, the week before Christmas in 1955, and her parents had been weepy and hostile. It was a long time before he learned from them that she had never come home the night before — they blamed him, a Lutheran and a Norskie and a farmer, for the loss of their daughter. He ran up to her room and found everything gone: all her clothes, everything she had cared for. From there he raced down to the five and dime where she clerked and heard that she had told the supervisor that she wasn’t going to come in any more. And from the store he went to the filling station to meet the boy whose existence had never exactly been confirmed. He too had disappeared: “Run off last night in that new Stude,” the owner said. “Musta been with your girl, I spoze.”
Like a character in a parody of a Gothic novel, he had never spoken of the girl again, nor had he ever visited this terrible little house. It was never mentioned before him: he was pretending that his engagement had never happened. Four years later he met another girl, the daughter of a farmer in the next valley. He married her and had a child, but that too turned out badly for him.
The absurd frame structure was leaning as though a giant had brushed against it, in a hurry to get somewhere else; even the window frames had become trapezoidal. I walked across the dust and into the thick high weeds and grass. Burrs and bits of fluff adhered to my trousers. I looked in through the two windows facing the rear of Andy’s store and the valley road. The room was, to be straightforward, a mess, a mess of desolation. The floorboards had warped and rotted so that weeds thrust up at various places into the room, and bird and animal droppings littered the floor — it looked like a filthy vacant coffin. One corner held a tangle of blankets from which radiated a semicircle of dead cigarette butts. On the walls I could distinguish the scrawls left by felt-tip pens. My spirits began to dwindle as I looked in at my cousin’s folly, and I turned away, snaring my left foot in a thick fist of weeds. It was as though that malignant dwarf of a house had snatched at me, and I kicked out with all my force. A thorn stabbed my ankle as decisively as a wasp. Swearing, suddenly cold, I walked away from Duane’s little house and went through the dust around to the front of Andy’s.
This, the third of my landmarks, was much more comfortable, much more touched with the grace of normality. My family had always made a ritual stop at Andy’s before continuing on to the farm, and there we invariably loaded up with bottles of Dr. Pepper for me and a case of beer for my father and Uncle Gilbert, Duane’s father. Andy’s was what people used to mean when they said general store, a place where you could buy almost anything, workshirts and trousers, caps, ax handles and beads, meal, clocks, soap, boots, candy, blankets, magazines, toys, suitcases, drills and punches, dogfood, paper, hoes and rakes, chicken feed, gasoline cans, silage formula, flashlights, bread… all of this ranked and packed and piled into a long white wooden building raised up on thick stilts of brick. Before it, three white gaspumps faced the road. I reached the steps and went up through the screen door to the dark cool interior.
It smelled as it always had, a wonderful composite odor of various newnesses. When the screen door banged behind me Andy’s wife (I could not remember her name) looked up at me from where she was sitting behind the counter, reading a newspaper. She frowned, glanced back at her paper, and when I began to thread my way through the aisles of things, turned her head and muttered something toward the rear of the store. She was a small darkhaired aggressive-looking woman, and her appearance had become dryer and tougher with age. As she glanced suspiciously back, I remembered that we had never been friendly, and that I had given her reason for her dislike of me. Yet I did not think, that she recognized me: I have changed greatly in appearance since my early youth. The chemistry of the moment was wrong, I knew this; my earlier elation had ebbed away, leaving me flat and depressed, and I should have left the store at that moment.
“Anything I can do for you, Mister?” she asked, in her voice the valley’s lilt. For the first time it sounded unfriendly and alien to me.
“Andy in?” I asked, coming closer to the counter through the massed smells of newness.
She wordlessly left her chair and disappeared into the cavernous rear of the store. A door closed, then opened again.
In a moment I saw Andy walking toward me. He had grown fatter and balder, and his pudgy face seemed sexually indeterminate and permanently worried. When he reached the counter he stopped and leaned against it, creasing his belly. “What can I do you for?” he said, the jokiness of the phrase out of key with his rubbery defeated face and his air of country suspicion. I saw that gray had eaten nearly all of the brown in his fringe of hair. “You’re not one of the drummers. Reps, they call themselves now.”
“I wanted to come in and say hello,” I said. “I used to come in here with my parents. I’m Eve Updahl’s boy,” using the shorthand that would identify me in the valley.
He looked at me hard for a moment, then nodded and said, “Miles. You’d be Miles, then. Come back for a visit or just a look-see?” Andy, like his wife, would remember my little errors of judgment of twenty years before.
“Mostly to work,” I said. “I thought the farm would be a peaceful place to work.” An explanation when I had planned to give none — he was making me defensive.
“Don’t think I recall what kind of work you wound up doing.”
“I’m a college teacher,” I said, and the demon of irritation made me take pleasure in his flicker of surprise. “English.”
“Well, you were always supposed to be brainy,” he said. “Our girl takes shorthand and typing over to the business college in Winona. She’s getting on real good up there. Don’t suppose you teach around here anywhere?”
I told him the name of my university.
“That’s back East?”
“It’s on Long Island.”
“Eve always said she was afraid you’d wind up back East. So what’s this work you got to do?”
“I have to write a book — that is, I’m writing a book. On D. H. Lawrence.”
“Uh huh. What’s that when it’s at home?”
I said, “He wrote Lady Chatterley’s Lover.”
Andy swung his eyes up to mine with a surprisingly roguish gesture which was somehow girlish at the same time. He looked as though he were about to lick his lips. “I guess it’s true what they say about those colleges out East, huh?” But the remark was not the invitation to masculine revelation that it could have been: there was a sly malice in it.
“It’s only one of a lot of books he wrote,” I said.
Again I got the wink of roguishness. “I guess one Book’s good enough for me.” He turned to the side, and I saw his wife lurking in the back of the shop, staring at me. “It’s Miles, Eve’s boy,” he said. “Coulda fooled me. Says he’s here writing a dirty book.”
She came forward, glowering. “We heard you and your wife got divorced. Duane said.”
“We were separated,” I said a bit harshly. “Now she’s dead.”
Surprise showed in both their faces for a second.