Mrs. Hummel tucked back her hair and asked, “Was anybody hurt?”
“Nobody. It jumped the rails but stayed on its feet. Our own trolleys didn’t get through to Ely until around noon. Half the stores in Alton are shut.” I marveled at all this information and imagined him gathering it, wading through snow banks, halting snowplows to question the drivers, running up and down raggedly heaped mounds in his too-small overcoat like an overgrown urchin. He must have circled the town while I was asleep.
I finished my coffee and the odd torpor that my nerves had been holding at bay now was permitted to invade. I ceased to listen as my father told Mrs. Hummel of his further adventures. Mr. Hummel came in the door, gray with fatigue, and shook snow from his hair. His wife fed him lunch; when it was over he looked at me and winked. “Do you want to go home, Peter?”
I went and put on my coat and socks and wrinkled clammy shoes and came back to the kitchen. My father took his empty cup to the sink and restored his cap to his head. “This is awfully white of you, Al; the kid and I really appreciate it.” To Mrs. Hummel he said, “Thanks a lot, Vera, you’ve treated us like princes,” and then, love, the strangest of all the strange things I have told, my father bent forward and kissed the woman on the cheek. I averted my eyes in shock and saw on the spatter-pattern linoleum floor her narrow feet in their blue slippers go up on their toes as she willingly received the kiss.
Then her heels returned to the floor and she was holding my father’s wart-freckled hands in her own. “I’m glad you came to us,” she told him, as if they were alone. “It filled up the house for a little while.”
When my turn to thank her came I didn’t dare a kiss and pulled my face back to indicate I was not going to give one. She smiled as she took my offered hand and then put her other hand over it. “Are your hands always so warm, Peter?”
Outside their door, the twigs of a lilac bush had become antlers. Hummel’s truck was waiting between the pumps and the air hose; it was a middle-sized rust-splotched Chevrolet pick-up with a flaring orange plow coupled to the front bumper. When it went into gear ten different colors of rattle seemed to spring into being around us. I sat between my father and Al Hummel; there was no heater in the front and I was glad to be between the men. We drove out Buchanan Road. Our old house looked like Old Man Winter’s palace, crowned with snow and sunning itself on the broad white side where I used to bounce a tennis ball when I was a child. Along the street children in passing had shaken the snow loose from the hedges and now and then above us a loosened batch poured down in a shuffling quick cascade through the branches of a horsechestnut tree. As the houses thinned, the snow reigned undisturbed over the curved fields beyond the steady ridge, as high as a man, of stained snow heaped by the plow. In the far distance the wooded hills still showed as blue and brown, but the tints were weak, as in the prints of an etching taken to clean the plate.
The weariness I felt overtakes me in the telling. I sat in the cab of the truck while, framed in the windshield like the blurred comics of an old silent movie, my father and Hummel shovelled out our Buick, which the plows in clearing Route 122 had buried up to the windows. I was bothered by an itching that had spread from my nose through my throat and that I felt to have some connection with the clammy chill of my shoes. The shoulder of the hill threw its shadow over us and a little wind ignited. The sunlight grew long, golden, and vanished from all but the tips of the trees. Expertly Hummel started the motor, backed the rear tires onto the chains, and made them fast with a plier-like tool. Little better than blurs now in the bluish twilight, the men enacted a pantomime with a wallet whose conclusion I did not comprehend. They both gestured widely and then hugged each other farewell. Hummel opened the door of the cab, cold air swept over me, and I transferred my brittle body to our hearse.
As we drove home, the days since I had last seen this road sealed shut like a neat scar. Here was the crest of Cough-drop Hill, here was the curve and clay embankment where we had picked up the hitchhiker, here was the Clover Leaf Dairy where conveyor belts removed the cow dung and all the silver chimneys on the barn roof were smoking against the salmon flush of the sky; here was the straightaway where we had once killed a confused oriole, here was Galilee and, beside the site of the old Seven-Mile Inn, Potteiger’s Store, where we stopped for food. Item by item, as if he were a druggist filling a prescription, my father went around the shelves gathering bread and sliced peaches and Ritz crackers and Shredded Wheat, piling them up on the counter in front of Charlie Potteiger, who had been a farmer and had come back from the Pacific to sell his farm to developers and set up this store. He kept our debt in a little brown five-cent note book and, though it ran as high as sixty dollars between pay-days, never forgave us so much as an odd penny. “And a loop of that pork sausage my father-in-law loves so much and a half-pound of Lebanon baloney for the kid to nibble,” my father told him. An extravagance had entered his shopping, which was customarily niggardly, a day’s food at a time, as if the next day there might be fewer mouths to feed. He even bought a bunch of fresh bananas. As Potteiger with his pencil stub effortfully toted up the bill my father looked at me and asked, “Did you get a soft drink?”
I usually did, as a last sip of civilization before we descended into that rural darkness that by some mistake had become our home. “No,” I told him. “I have no appetite. Let’s go.”
“This poor son of mine,” my father announced loudly to the little pack of loafers in red hunting caps who even on this day of storm had showed up to stand around and chew in here, “he hasn’t been home for two nights and he wants to see his mamma.”
Furious, I pushed through the door into the air. The lake across the road, rimmed in snow, looked black as the back of a mirror. It was that twilight in which some cars have turned on their headlights, some their parking lights, and some no lights at all. My father drove as fast as if the road were bare. In some parts the road had been scraped clean and on these patches our chains changed tune. Halfway up Fire Hill (above us, the church and its tiny cross were inked onto an indigo sky), a link snapped. It racketed against the rear right fender for the remaining mile. The few houses of Firetown patched the dusk with downstairs windows glowing dimly as embers. The Ten Mile Inn was dark and boarded shut.
Our road had not been plowed. Our road was actually two roads, one which went in through the Amish fields and another which led off from that, down past our property, to rejoin the highway by Silas Schoelkopfs pond and barn. We had left by this, the lower road; we returned by the upper. My father rammed the Buick through the heaped snow and it sagged to a stop perhaps ten feet off the highway. The motor stalled. He turned off the ignition and snapped off the lights. “How will we get out tomorrow?” I asked.
“One thing at a time,” he said. “I want to get you home. Can you walk it?”
“What else can I do?”
The unplowed road showed as a long stretch of shimmering gray set in perspective by two scribbled lines of young trees. Not a houselight showed from here. Above us, in a sky still too bright a blue to support stars, sparse pale clouds like giant flakes of marble drifted westward so stilly their motion seemed lent by the earth’s revolution. The snow overwhelmed my ankles and inundated my shoes. I tried to walk in my father’s footsteps but his strides were too great. As the sound of traffic on the highway faded behind us, a powerful silence strengthened. There was a star before us, one, low in the sky and so brilliant its white light seemed warm.
I asked my father, “What’s that star?”
“Venus.”
“Is it always the first to come out?”
“No. Sometimes it’s the last to go. Sometimes when I get up the sun is coming up through the woods and Venus is still hanging over the Amishman’s hill.”