There is a little catch that holds the clue to fastening the chains. He finds this catch and, reading with his fingertips, deduces how it operates. Almost he succeeds in snapping it. Only a tiny gap remains to close. He applies a pressure that makes the prostrate length of his body tremble; his kidneys ache sweetly; the metal bites deep into his fingers. He prays; and is appalled to discover that, even when a microscopic concession would involve no apparent sacrifice of principle, matter is obdurate. The catch does not close. He squeals in agony, “No!”
His father calls to him, “The hell with it. Get out from under.”
Peter obeys, stands, shakes the snow from his jacket. He and his father stare at each other in disbelief. “I can’t do it,” he says, as if it could be denied.
His father says, “You did a damn sight better than I did. Get into the car, we’ll go into Alton for the night. Once a loser, twice a loser.”
They put the chains into the trunk and try to lower the car on the jack. But even this piece of retreat proves impossible. The small lever supposed to reverse the jack’s direction swings loose and useless. Each shove on the handle lifts the car a notch higher. The fluttering snow pesters their faces; the whine of wind distends their eardrums; the burden on their tempers becomes unendurable. The whole soughing shifting weight of the storm seems hinged on this minute mechanical refusal.
“I’ll fix the bastard,” Caldwell announces. “Stand clear, kid.” He climbs into the car, starts the motor, and drives forward. For a moment the jack upright is caught in the tension of a bow and Peter expects to see it go flying like an arrow into the storm. But the metal of the bumper itself yields under this instant of stress, and the next instant drops the car onto its springs with a sound like icicles snapping. A lip-shaped dent along the lower edge of the rear bumper will always remember this night. Peter gathers up the jack parts and throws them into the trunk and gets into the front seat beside his father.
Aided by the tendency of the rear wheels to slither, Caldwell turns the Buick around and points it toward Alton. But in the hour since they came onto this road another inch of snow has fallen and the packing action of traffic has utterly ceased. The little rise that takes the road out of the trough at the bottom of Coughdrop Hill, a rise so slight that on a fair day it whips by beneath the wheels unnoticed, proves too steep to negotiate. The rear tires never cease slithering. The slits of vision in their windshield go furry and close; the heavenly bin from which the snow has been sifted now bursts its sides. Three times the Buick sloughs forward up the shallow slant to have its motion smothered. The third time, Caldwell grinds his foot into the accelerator and the crying tires swing the rear of the car into the untouched snow at the side of the road. There is a small depression just off the shoulder. Caldwell shifts down to first gear and tries to lift out, but the snow holds them fast in its phantom grip. His lips make a quick silver bubble. Crazed, he shoves the shift into reverse and rams the car backwards so they are hopelessly stuck. He switches off the motor.
A certain peace settles upon their predicament. A delicate friction, like sand being swept up, moves across the top of the car. The overheated motor ticks tranquilly under the hood.
“We’ll have to walk,” Caldwell says. “We’ll walk back to Olinger and stay the night at the Hummels’. It’s less than three miles, can you make it?”
“I’ll have to,” Peter says.
“Jesus, you don’t have any galoshes on or anything.”
“Well neither do you.”
“Yeah, but I’m all shot anyway.” After a pause, he explains, “We can’t stay here.”
“Gah-dammit,” Peter says, “I know it. I know it, stop telling me. Stop telling me things all the time. Let’s go.”
“A father who was half a man would have gotten you up that hill.”
“Then we’d have got stuck someplace else. It’s not your fault. It’s nobody’s fault; it’s God’s fault. Please. Let’s stop talking.”
Peter gets out of the car and for a time, of the two, is the leader. They walk in their own ruts up the Jewish Cemetery hill. Peter finds it difficult to put one foot directly ahead of the other, as the Indians were said to have done. The wind keeps tipping him. There is a screen of pines here and though the wind is not powerful it yet has an insistence that penetrates the hair on his head and fingers the bone underneath. The cemetery land is held back from the road by a retaining wall of gray stone; each protruding stone wears a beard of white. Somewhere deep in the opaque smoke Abe Cohn lies snug in his pillared mausoleum. Peter draws comfort from this knowledge. He glimpses an analogy with the way his own ego is sheltered under the mineral dome of his skull. On the flat beyond the cemetery the pines fade away and the wind blows as if minded to pierce his body through and through. He becomes transparent: a skeleton of thoughts. Detached, amused, he watches his feet like blinded cattle slog dutifully through the drifted snow; the disparity between the length of their strides and the immense distance to Olinger is so great that a kind of infinity seems posited in which he enjoys enormous leisure. He employs this leisure to meditate upon the phenomenon of extreme physical discomfort. There is an excising simplicity in it. First, all thoughts of past and future are eliminated, and then any extension via the senses of yourself into the created world. Then, as further conservation, the extremities of the body are disposed of-the feet, the legs, the fingers. If the discomfort persists, if a nagging memory of some more desirable condition lingers, then the tip of the nose, the chin, and the scalp itself are removed from consideration, not entirely anesthetized but deported, as it were, to a realm foreign to the very limited concerns of the irreducible locus, remarkably compact and aloof, which alone remains of the once farflung and ambitious kingdoms of the self. The sensations seem to arrive from a great distance outside himself when his father, now walking beside him and using his body as a shield against the wind for his son, pulls down upon Peter’s freezing head the knitted wool cap he has taken from his own head.
VIII
MY LOVE, listen. Or are you asleep? It doesn’t matter. In West Alton there was the Alton Museum, set among magnificent flowering grounds where every tree was labeled. Black swans drifted preening in pairs upon the surface of the opaque lake created by damming the small shal low-bedded stream here called Lenape. In Olinger it was called Tilden Creek, but it was the same stream. My mother and I on a Sunday would now again walk to the museum, the only treasury of culture accessible to us, along the lazy shady road that kept the creek company, and connected the two towns. This mile or so, then, was a rural interspace, a remainder of the county’s earlier life. We would pass the old race track, abandoned and gone under to grass, and several sandstone farmhouses each accompanied, like a mother with a son, by a whitewashed springhouse of the same stone. Quickly crossing the harsh width of a three-lane highway, we would enter on a narrow path the museum grounds, and an even older world, Arcadian, would envelop us. Ducks and frogs mixed flat throaty exultations in the scummy marsh half-hidden by the planted lines of cherry, linden, locust, and crabapple trees. My mother knew the names of every plant and bird, would name them for me, and I would forget, as we walked along the gravel path that widened here and there into little circlets with a birdbath and benches where, often as not, a linked pair of humans would break apart and study our passing with darkened, rounded eyes. Once when I asked my mother what they had been doing, she replied with a curious complacence, “They were nesting.”