The front door was unlocked. All the doors were, likely. He could have walked right in. I’d forgot about that. But now I knew he wasn’t meant to. I laughed to see how a laugh would sound. Again. Good.
The road was gone. Fences, bushes, old machinery: what there might be in any yard was all gone under snow. All I could see was the steep snow and the long shadow lines and the hard bright crest about to break but not quite breaking and the hazy sun rising, throwing down slats of orange like a snow fence had fallen down. He’d gone off this way yet there was nothing now to show he’d gone; nothing like a bump of black in a trough or an arm or leg sticking out of the side of a bank like a branch had blown down or a horse’s head uncovered like a rock; nowhere Pedersen’s fences had kept bare he might be lying huddled with the horse on its haunches by him; nothing even in the shadows shrinking while I watched to take for something hard and not of snow and once alive.
I saw the window I’d broke. The door of the barn hung ajar, banked steeply with snow. The house threw a narrow shadow clear to one end of the barn where it ran into the high drift that Hans had tunneled in. Higher now. Later I’d cut a path out to it. Make the tunnel deeper maybe. Hollow the whole bank like a hollow tree. There was time. I saw the oaks too, blown clean, their twigs about their branches stiff as quills. The path I’d taken from the barn to the house was filled and the sun was burning brightly on it. The wind had curled in and driven a steep slope of snow against the house where I’d stood. As I turned my head the sun flashed from the barrel of pa’s gun. The snow had risen steeply around him. Only the top of the barrel was clear to take the sun and it flashed squarely in my eye when I turned my head just right. There was nothing to do about that till spring. Another snowman, he’d melt. I picked my way back to the front of the house, a dark spot dancing in the snow ahead of me. Today there was a fine large sky.
It was pleasant not to have to stamp the snow off my boots, and the fire was speaking pleasantly and the kettle was sounding softly. There was no need for me to grieve. I had been the brave one and now I was free. The snow would keep me. I would bury pa and the Pedersens and Hans and even ma if I wanted to bother. I hadn’t wanted to come but now I didn’t mind. The kid and me, we’d done brave things well worth remembering. The way that fellow had come so mysteriously through the snow and done us such a glorious turn — well it made me think how I was told to feel in church. The winter time had finally got them all, and I really did hope that the kid was as warm as I was now, warm inside and out, burning up, inside and out, with joy.
MRS. MEAN
1
I call her Mrs. Mean. I see her, as I see her husband and each of her four children, from my porch, or sometimes when I look up from my puttering, or part my upstairs window curtains. I can only surmise what her life is like inside her little house; but on humid Sunday afternoons, while I try my porch for breeze, I see her hobbling on her careful lawn in the hot sun, stick in hand to beat her scattered children, and I wonder a lot about it.
I don’t know her name. The one I’ve made to mark her and her doings in my head is far too abstract. It suggests the glassy essence, the grotesquerie of Type; yet it’s honestly come by, and in a way it’s flattering to her, as if she belonged on Congreve’s stage. She could be mean there without the least particularity, with the formality and grandeur of Being, while still protected from the sour and acrid community of her effect, from the full sound and common feel of life; all of which retain her, for me, on her burning lawn, as palpable and loud and bitter as her stinging switch.
I may have once said something to her — a triviality — and perhaps once more than that, while strolling, I may have nodded to her or I may have smiled… though not together. I have forgotten.
When I bought my house I wished, more than anything, to be idle, idle in the supremely idle way of nature; for I felt then that nature produced without effort, in the manner of digestion and breathing. The street is quiet. My house is high and old, as most of the others are, and spreading trees shade my lawn and arch the pavement. Darkness is early here at any time of year. The old are living their old age out, shawled in shadows, cold before fires. A block away they are building stores. One feels the warmth that is the movement of decay. I see the commercial agent. He wears gold rings. His hand partitions. Lamps will grow in these unlucky windows. Wash will hang from new external stairs. No one has his home here but myself; for I have chosen to be idle, as I said, to surround myself with scenes and pictures; to conjecture, to rest my life upon a web of theory — as ready as the spider is to mend or suck dry intruders. While the street is quiet, the houses whole, their windows shaded; while the aged sit their porches and swap descriptions of their health; the Means, upon the opportunity of death, have seized the one small house the neighborhood affords. Treeless and meager, it stands in the summer in a pool of sun and in the winter in a blast of air.
My house has porches fore and aft and holds a corner. I spy with care and patience on my neighbors but I seldom speak. They watch me too, of course, and so I count our evils even, though I guard my conscience with a claim to scientific coldness they cannot possess. For them no idleness is real. They see it, certainly. I sit with my feet on the rail. My wife rocks by me. The hours pass. We talk. I dream. I sail my boats on their seas. I rest my stories on their backs. They cannot feel them. Phantoms of idleness never burden. If I were old or sick or idiotic, if I shook in my chair or withered in a southern window, they would understand my inactivity, and approve; but even the wobblers make their faithful rounds. They rake their leaves. They mow and shovel. They clip their unkempt hedges and their flowers. Their lives are filled by this. I do no more.
Mrs. Mean, for instance: what could she think? She is never idle. She crowds each moment with endeavor.
When I had my cottage I used to see, on Sabbaths, a wire-haired lady drive her family to the beach. She rented everything. Her family dressed in the car, the windows draped with blankets, while the lady in her jacket rapped on the hood for speed, then rushed them to the surf. She always gestured grandly at the sea and swung a watch by its strap. “So much money, so much time, let us amuse,” she always said, and sat on a piece of driftwood and shelled peas. The children dabbled at the water with their fingers. Her husband, a shriveled, mournful soul, hung at the water’s edge and slowly patted his wrists with ocean. Inertia enraged her. She thrust her pods away, pouring her lap in a jar. “Begin, begin,” she would shout then, jumping up, displaying the watch. The children would squat in the sand until foam marked their bottoms, staring in their pails. Papa would drip water to his elbows and upper arm while Mama receded to her log. The children fought then. It began invisibly. It continued silently, without emotion. They kicked and bit and stabbed with their shovels. When she found them fighting she would empty her lap and start up, shaking the watch and shouting, but the children fought on bitterly, each one alone, throwing sand and swinging their pails, rolling over and over on the beach and in and out of the moving ocean. She ran toward them but the sea slid up the sand and drove her off, squealing on tiptoe, scuffing and denting the smooth sand. The children plunged into the surf and broke apart. “Don’t lose your shovels!” The waves washed the children in. They huddled on dark patches of beach. At last their mother would run among them, quickly, between breaths of ocean, and with her hands on her hips, her legs apart, she would throw her head back in the mimic of gargantuan guffaws, soundless and shaking. “Laugh,” she would say then, “there is only an hour.”