(”Fat’s what got him,” Doc Cathey had said. “The same thing that’s gonna get you. I just hope you got your will made out.” That was before Henry had married Callie. Nowdays Doc would say: “You lose ninety pounds, boy, or Callie’ll be a widow.” He would leer when he said it and touch Henry’s arm, as if he were one of the family.)
The wind pushed past the window and blurred the outlines of the pine close to the street, bent in the churning snow. Except for the blooms of brightness in the snowy air, you wouldn’t know there were lighted windows across the street. The snow had covered up everything now. The short space of lawn that you could still see was drifted high, and where there had been bushes before, right under the window, there were only mounds. Up in the mountains the roads would be closed, and truckers would be pulled up into farmers’ yards, and maybe pulled up in front of the Stop-Off, too, because the place was never shut down, the neon sign burned night and day, week in week out, or had until now anyway, and it was worth a little bad driving to get to where people knew you. There would have been accidents by now, maybe. There sometimes were in blizzard time. Trucks jackknifed across the road or turned upside down at the foot of a cliff, half-sunk in the river, the icy water running through the cab, the bearded trucker dead a hundred, two hundred miles from home. It didn’t happen often, but it happened. When you ran a diner for fifteen, twenty years maybe it seemed oftener than it was. You saw them, you dished up chili to them, and coffee and pie and cigarettes, and they waved and left, and you told their jokes to somebody else, and two weeks, two months, two years later you saw their clean-shaved faces staring out at you, dead, from the paper. That’s how it seemed. He thought of George Loomis. His picture had been there too, and he’d been as good as dead; it had been touch-and-go for a week. That day too there’d been snow falling — an October snow, thin, icy, almost rain.
(“Jesus Christ,” Lou Millet had said. He never talked much, Jim was the talker. Jim Millet was there too, drinking coffee, his nose still wrinkled from what he’d seen. “George Loomis,” Lou said. “Poor bastard must be hexed. You’d think he’d be just about ready to change his name and start all over.”
Callie had stood with her back to them, wiping cups. Her hands moved, but the rest of her was motionless, the way she’d stood a long time ago when they talked about Willard Freund, before she’d found out about him, before he ran away and left her in trouble with nobody on earth but fat Henry Soames to turn to, a father to her in Frank Wells’ place, or so he’d thought until that night in the lean-to when she’d said to him, “What can I do?” She was wearing a man’s white shirt, and rain had pasted it to her.
Jim Millet talked and she listened with her mouth pressed shut.
“It was bloody,” Jim said. He shook his head and took another gulp of coffee. “The damn corn binder was still running.”
Henry had seen the place — this was later, though — a rocky strip of land four rods wide and a half-mile long that angled along beside the woods, up above the swampland. It looked like a place where something like that would happen, and what was strange, it wasn’t three rods from the place where fifteen years ago Ba-Ba Covert had rolled over his spike-wheeled tractor and crippled himself for life and would have killed himself if he’d been sober. White stumps jutted up out of the water, and around the edge of the swamp there were half-dead willows and then locusts and then two tamaracks so tall that in late afternoon their skeleton shadows stretched the length of the cornlot.
“Ok,” Lou said, not looking at Jim, watching Callie.
“The goddamn cylinder was going around and around—” He made a circling motion with his right hand, touching his left bicep and circling away, touching the bicep again, circling away. “You could see slivers of bone — I never see nothin’ like it — red with blood and then redder in half-a-second, and the blade chewing away like a fuckin’ rasp.”
Lou stood up. “Ok,” he said.
Jim had nodded, looking into his coffee again. He said, “Christ in a crock.”
And Callie had said afterwards, “You forget things like that can happen.”
Henry had nodded. “Poor devil. He’s had one hell of a life.”
She said, “If only he’d find some nice girl, after that other one, I mean.” Her eyes were half-closed, thinking. “It’s not right for a man like George to live up there in that big old house all alone that way. He must have loved her something awful — or hated her.”
“Well, it’s none of our business,” Henry said.
“Whose is it, then?” she asked. She was like an old woman sometimes. He put his arm around her. The next morning Henry had gone to see him, and he’d stayed at the hospital all day.)
He looked at the snow. There would be trucks parked by the Stop-Off, banked in, hub-deep by now, and maybe Willard Freund would be there in his dented-up, sawed-down Dodge, with the motor on, and the heater. But, no. He was back, but he’d be at his father’s place. Sitting in the kitchen drinking coffee and reading Scorchy Smith and Out Our Way in the paper, or up in his bedroom playing his banjo or lying with his eyes open, staring at nothing, like a blind man, the way he always did, and grinning, shy. Maybe he even grinned when he slept.
5
Henry stayed awake. He sat with his hand on Callie’s, his eyes staring at the shadows at the head of the bed, his mind wandering up and down roads that would be drifted in now, where truckers would sit shivering in their cabs. Suddenly he remembered his father sitting gigantic in the chair by the fringed lamp on a winter night, reading a book. He hadn’t remembered his father so vividly for a long time. He could almost count the liver spots on the side of the old man’s head. Then he remembered his father as he’d been toward the end, sitting asleep like a boulder with his hands folded over the head of his cane, his unlaced shoes toeing inward. Chippies could walk on his shoulders without waking him. He’d looked dead.
The night nurse came on, the cross one, and cleaned up the room and muttered and left.
At 1:00 A.M. the pains all at once got sharper, and he saw Callie’s eyes open. She whispered, “No,” and he leaned closer, holding her hand more tightly. Her eyes closed again and she whispered, the corners of her mouth trembling, “Surely it can’t last much longer.”
He sat still, waiting. He could smell the plants in the hall. She groaned again, and the groan was different now, there was fear in it, and Henry’s chest tightened so hard he had to brace himself against the pain. She moved her head from side to side on the pillow, tears running down her cheeks, and then she lay still again for a minute. Another one came and she whimpered, “Oh, please, please, God.” It passed. She whispered, “Henry, get the doctor here, get a nurse.”