Nickel Mountain

1

At 5:00 A.M. when his wife woke him up Henry Soames opened his eyes at once, and he kept them open, unblinking, as he moved to the telephone table in the living room. He let himself down into the overstuffed chair, his long, thick upper lip lifted slightly from his teeth, and picked up the receiver. The wire hummed. Old Prince appeared in the bedroom doorway, ears raised, head cocked, seeing what he was doing. Then he turned and went back to his place on the floor beside the bed, next to Callie.

It was neither dark nor light in the room. The bloom of snow outside dimly lighted the wallpaper, bringing out silver glints and blue-gray lines — a man and a woman in old-fashioned dress standing on a path under a willow tree near a bridge, their two children, a boy and a girl, running up the path toward a man and a woman in old-fashioned dress, a willow tree, a bridge, two children, a man and a woman. Snowlight sharpened the angles and curves of the furniture so that each piece stood distinct and detached. In the entry room where there were no windows the wallpaper design blurred to shadows and then darkness. He sat looking straight into it, but he felt the entry room more than saw it. There was the old roller piano they never used except for putting photographs on — it had belonged to his mother once — and the oval rug, the nicked old shelf table with hymn-books and magazines underneath and a limp runner over the top, and on the runner, waiting to be hung up again, the wall lamp. In the entry room things seemed settled in, permanent, but not here. The furniture here was like furniture that had just been moved into a new house or is just about to be moved out of a house where nobody lives. In the half-light, the carved oval frame high on the wall above the davenport — it was an old picture of Henry Soames’ father holding a book — seemed to have nothing in it.

“Number, please,” the operator said. He gave the number and waited again while she rang it.

Over the phone the doctor sounded half-asleep. He said, “Well, sometimes it’s two or three hours after the sac breaks before contractions begin. When they do, you run her in to the hospital and have them phone me.”

“Yes, sir,” Henry said. He started to say more, but the doctor said goodbye and hung up. Henry sat in the darkness pulling at his left hand with his right. The skin was loose. He’d been getting his weight down lately.

It had snowed some more during the night, and the snow was sharp blue under the neon sign up front. This was the new part of the house, and he thought again how it was good they’d put the house where they had after all, with the Stop-Off right handy. It was Callie that had decided it, not Henry. He’d have thought she’d want something nicer, more like a home, a place with a lawn and trees and a view of the mountains. So had her folks. (“Now wouldn’t you rather have the old Kelsey place, or maybe a new house up on the hill next to our place?” her father had asked, and she’d said “No.” Henry had said, “The Kelsey place’d be real pretty with a coat of paint and some fixing up, and—” but she hadn’t let him finish. “Henry, be practical,” she’d said. She’d snapped it out. George Loomis and Lou and Jim Millet and Nick Blue the Indian and neighbors from here to Athensville and New Carthage had pitched in and helped him lay up the cinder-block house behind the diner and right next to the lean-to room where he, Henry, had lived all those years by himself — and they’d done it all by fall, had just finished up in time for them to pull down the scaffolding and sweep up the yard and go take over the work at George Loomis’s place when George had his arm torn off in his corn binder. Callie’d been six months pregnant by then, but she still ran the diner alone while he painted outside and inside, wheezing, oozing sweat, knocking together windowboxes and planting zinnias and laying yellow-painted rocks out along the driveway. When it was done they’d stood at this same window looking out at the neon sign where it jutted out from the corner of the diner, watching the semis roll by on the dark highway past the diner — and now house — and Callie had said, “It’s real nice.” She had stood with her elbows close to her sides and hadn’t looked at him, or not until he’d put one finger under her chin and turned her face around. She’d looked past him even then.) The snow lay smooth, sharp blue right out to the highway. Beyond the highway more snow, luminous white in the darkness, stretched away to the trees. The edge of the woods was vague, ghostly this early in the morning. The woods were over a mile deep — they came out over by Freund’s place — and though they never had in the old days, they made Henry uneasy now. It was as if there was somebody in there moving around. He dreamed about him sometimes, and sometimes when he was wide awake he wondered how it would be if Willard came back. They never talked about him.

He looked at the crack of yellow light under the bedroom door.

Jim Millet had said three days ago when he’d pulled in for gas, “You be sure and call the doctor yourself. There’s a night nurse down there gets a real charge out of delivering babies herself.” Dr. Costard, the obstetrician, had told Callie almost the same thing. He’d patted her arm with his white, soft hand and said, “When the time comes, be sure to call me, Mrs. Soames. Don’t leave it to the hospital. They get rushed sometimes, and you know how it is.” But that had been in mid-afternoon, when Dr. Costard was wide awake.

The chores lights were on up in Frank Wells’ barns on the hill, but no lights in the house. They’d driven to Cobleskill for a family reunion. It was too bad, for Callie’s sake. But then, they’d never been close. Frank Wells drank most of the time, these days, and though he was never much trouble himself — sometimes on his way home from town he’d pull off the road and down into the creek to sleep it off — it made things troublesome, in the end, because Callie’s mother was religious. She played the organ at the New Carthage Salem Baptist Church. That was partly why Callie’d come to work at the Stop-Off in the first place, she said. To get away.

He squeezed his upper lip between his finger and thumb and blinked slowly. He got up, shoved his hands down into his limp bathrobe pockets, and moved to the bedroom door.

“Looks like you’re gonna have that watermelon after all,” he said.

Callie smiled back. Neither of them ever called it a baby.

It looked as if she had pillows inside her nightgown. Her legs and arms and neck were thin, gray, and her head, turned toward the yellow plastic bedlamp, was flushed and too large.

“If it didn’t come soon I was going to call it off,” she said.

Henry went to her, smiling, sliding his slippers on the hardwood. He stood for a moment with his hands in his pockets, then touched her shoulder with the tips of his fingers. She didn’t move her hand to his.

Under the light her hair looked dry. He stood for a long time looking at her and smiling, thinking, Well I’ll be damned, it’s really come time. And in his mind he saw Willard Freund leaning over the diner counter, sharp-elbowed, tiny-eyed, smiling and talking to Callie. In his mind he could see it as if it were yesterday, Willard’s wide mouth, his cocked eyebrow, his face lighted under the lamp, the cluttered room behind him dark. Sometimes the three of them had talked. And then he’d found out what Willard was doing, had done already by that time because by that time he was gone, had run out on her as a man would run out on some common country whore. And now he would catch himself watching the woods, though it wouldn’t be from the woods he’d come; he’d come by the highway if he came. He’d come in with his hands in his pockets and his collar turned up, his eyes shy, and maybe Henry would feel sorry for him because he’d been a damn fool, and then again maybe he’d kill him, he didn’t know. Sometimes before he knew what it was he was thinking he would look at his wide, short hands and would close them slowly.

She said, “Let’s go to bed, Henry. It may be hours yet.” She looked past him; she hadn’t even turned her head.

He nodded. It was the truth that he needed his sleep. He wasn’t a kid any more. Twenty-five years older than she was, old enough to be her father. A fat old man with a weak heart, as Doc Cathey, their regular doctor, had said. “You get your beauty sleep, boy. You keep on settin’ up half the night and one of these days Callie’ll be a widow.” Doc had chuckled, hunched up and watching him sideways as if the idea of it pleased him all to hell, and maybe it did.

(Out by the gas pumps Doc had sat in his dented-up car fidgeting with his plastic hearing aid, his head brown and wrinkled as an old baldwin, and then he’d grinned, embarrassed maybe, and he’d said, “I s’pose you don’t want to talk about it, eh? … about Willard?”

Henry had half-turned as if he’d heard a footstep crunch the gravel behind him, but there was only the long, flat diner, the new white-painted house, and, beyond the roof, mountains and white clouds, and birds flying, starlings. He turned back to the car and put his hand on the cold metal of the gas pump, and Doc leaned farther out the car window, his eyes squinted almost shut behind the thick glasses. “You know I ain’t one to noise things around. Don’t bring on no coronary for nothin’. I never said she ain’t happy with you and this place here, I never inferred it.” He looked down at Henry’s hands.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Henry said. His voice was quiet, so quiet it surprised him. It was like a woman’s voice. The old man looked at him, and Henry could hear the noise of the starlings half-a-mile up the mountain.

The corners of Doc’s mouth twitched back. “Now, you listen here. Somebody was gonna bring it up sooner or later, whether it’s the truth or not, and there’s people could be a lot meaner about it than me. You get use to hearing it, boy, get use to it. It’s for your own good; you take my advice.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Henry said again, a whisper this time. He leaned toward the car and touched the door handle. He felt sweat prickling. The dog appeared beside the diner, ears lifted, watching.

Doc Cathey counted out his money with his thumb clamped down so hard on the bills that they almost tore as he pulled each dollar free. Henry took the money and didn’t count it. The old man switched on the ignition and ground on the starter button. A muscle in his jaw jumped. “I’m just trying to help out,” he said. “You know that. Don’t be a damn mule.” Henry didn’t say a word, and after a minute the old man rammed the car into gear and out onto the highway, spattering gravel. The dust he stirred up hung in the air, mixing with the smells of gasoline and exhaust fumes; then, very slowly, it settled.

Henry went in, moving automatically, looking up the highway toward the hill. In the sticky heat of the diner he rang up the price of the old man’s gas, not looking at the register, bent over it but not looking at it, and then, knowing what he was going to do and knowing he would have to fix it, he closed his two hands around the age-dry sides of the cash drawer and bent the wood outward until it split and broke away. Change fell out and hit the floor and rolled, ringing. His chest burned white hot. After a minute Callie came up and stood behind him, not speaking at first. He pulled at his lip. She said, “Have you gone crazy or something?” She waited. “Henry, go take a nap or something. You act like you’ve gone crazy.” She spoke slowly and evenly, keeping back from him.

“Callie,” he said. His voice cracked. He thought for a split-second of his father’s voice.

They looked at each other, and then she looked out at the pumps, or past them. Her lips were puffy from the dryness of August. “I can manage out here. Go on.” She didn’t come any nearer. That afternoon Henry went hunting. He shot three crows, and it took him till after dark.)

He pulled out of his bathrobe and slippers and crawled into bed and snapped off the bedlamp. He lay there awake, or lay there believing he was awake, breathing shallowly. Two hours later, at seven, the labor pains started, and Callie said, “Henry!” She shook him, and when he opened his eyes he saw that she had been up for some time. She was dressed up as if for church, even wearing her hat.

It was the twenty-ninth of December and the road to Slater was ice-packed and banked by gray drifts. The sky over the mountains was as gray as the snow, and there wasn’t so much as a sparrow moving on a telephone wire, and not a trace of wind. Black telephone poles stood out sharply against the gray all around them, pole after pole, a series winding downward as if forever. He was conscious of them as he passed them; even when he thought about other things, his body registered the rhythm of the telephone poles going by.

Callie looked at her watch once or twice on the way, timing the pains. She sat too close to the rattling door.

“Holding up all right?” he said.

“ ’Course I am, Henry. You?”

His right hand let go of the steering wheel as he shrugged. “I’m fine. Jim dandy.” He laughed. It was so cold in the car that their breath made steam. He pulled at the toggled wire heater control and the heater fan clanked into motion.

The tamaracks up on the mountains were bare, like dead pines. This year — every year — the bareness looked final. He let his hand fall to the seat between them, and after a minute, as if she’d thought it over first, Callie touched his fingers. Her hand was warm. The warmth surprised him, seemed out of place, mysterious.

The road curved sharply and they reached the bridge into town.

2

The waiting room at the hospital was small and cluttered — coffee cups, floor ash trays, magazines. It was like the lobby of a cheap hotel. The wall paint was dark with age, and up on the wall over the magazine table a stuffed owl stood staring on a hickory limb.

The woman at the desk said, “I’m sorry, but, just as I’ve told you, we have to collect when the patient enters.” She looked them over.

Henry pulled at the fingers of one hand. He leaned forward and said, “I’ll have to go home for the damn money then. But you’ve got to let my wife in right now. She’s in labor.”

“Don’t cuss, Henry,” Callie said. She smiled at the woman.

The woman at the desk said, “It’s a hospital rule. I’m sorry.” She was big-jawed and had colorless, close-set eyes.

“Write them a check, Henry,” Callie said.

Henry wet his lips. He looked at the woman and hunted through his pockets for the checkbook he never carried with him, then took the blank check the woman slid across the desktop and filled it out. She held it up to look at it. She was suspicious, but she said: “Through the double doors and turn right and straight down the hall to the end. Mr. Soames, you wait here if you like.”

Callie smiled at her again, politely, looking through her.

For fifteen minutes Henry sat with his hands clasped together, leaning forward under the stuffed owl, and every now and then he turned his head to look for the doctor, but he didn’t come. A young nurse came up, with her square head slung forward and down like a bull’s but her mouth was gentle, and led him to the labor room and opened the door for him. Henry went in. It was a drab green room with two beds, one of them empty, and shelves along one side of the room, with bedpans, washpans, colored bottles, towels, sealed gray bags. At the far end of the room there was a window, and he could look out and see dirty snow and a street and old houses and a dark, thick pine.

“You all right?” he asked.

She nodded. “Has the doctor come?”

“Not yet.” He pulled a chair up to the bed and sat down.

“It’s all right,” she said. “He’ll come.” Henry slid his hand under hers and she patted it and looked out the window.

He held her fingers, feeling the warmth, and after an hour he got up and got the dominoes out of her suitcase and dumped them on the bedside table. Henry still held her hand as they played. Every five or six minutes she looked away and shut her eyes, and Henry stared at the dominoes, feeling out as if with his hands their gray, cracked surfaces and yellowing dots. They’d belonged to his mother and father. A car started up on the street right outside the window and then another one farther down, and a boy carrying a box moved past on the sidewalk, running four steps, sliding, running four steps, sliding; then two men passed in long coats. Directly across the street an old woman backed out of her front door dragging a faded Christmas tree with bits of tinsel still clinging to the branches. The doctor didn’t come. A nurse came and took Callie’s pulse and put her hand on Callie’s stomach, then left. The pains were sharper now but not closer together. Henry stacked the dominoes neatly and put them away in their battered white tiebox and fastened the rubber band. Sweat prickled under his arms.

“You all right?” he said.

She nodded.

At eleven o’clock the doctor came in and examined her.

When he came out to the hallway where Henry stood waiting he didn’t say how she was. He put his hand on Henry’s arm, smiling, looking at Henry’s forehead, and said, still holding onto the arm: “You had your breakfast yet?”

Henry nodded without thinking. “How long will it be?”

The man tipped his head down, the smile still there, and he looked as if he were thinking it over. But he was studying the pattern in the floor, moving his gaze tile by tile down the hall. “No telling,” he said. “It’s a beautiful day for it.” He waved toward the windows at the end of the hall. Sunlight streamed through the diamond-shaped panes and gleamed on the brown and white tiles and on the leaves of wilting plants in the planter by the desk.

Henry kept from moving, because of the hand on his arm. He said, “Will it be today, then, you think?”

“It’ll come,” the doctor said. “Don’t worry yourself. It’s all right, I’ve been through it too.” He winked slowly, the way a woman would, and gripped Henry’s arm more tightly, then left, walking with his toes pointing outward, his head tilted to one side and back. Henry went in again. He stood heavily, balanced on his heels, his fingertips in his tight hip pockets, watching a pain take her. Then he sat down by the bed. “Poor Callie,” he said. She frowned and met his eyes as though he were a stranger, then turned her face away.

He looked for a long time at the side of her face, the line of her jaw, and he felt somehow uneasy, guilty, the way he felt on the long afternoons when he sat in the diner watching cars and trucks and buses pass on the highway, glittering in the sunlight, not stopping. He would feel uneasy, for some reason guilty, as though it were his fault they didn’t pull in, but then evening would come, suppertime, and somebody would come — truckers, or somebody like George Loomis, who would talk about things he’d seen in the Service — he had spells when he came sometimes four, five times a week, maybe because he lived all alone in that big old house — or Lou Millet would come, with gossip — or sometimes Willard Freund. But not Willard any more. Henry locked his fingers together and looked at the floor. Callie pretended to sleep.

At seven that night Doc Cathey came in with coffee and sandwiches. “Henry, you look worse’n her,” he said. He opened his eyes wider, as if it helped him focus, and the loose red netting on the whites made Henry look down. “I bet you ain’t eaten a bite all day long.”

“I’m all right,” Henry said.

Doc Cathey ignored him, holding Callie’s wrist, ignoring her, too, taking her pulse and watching the door as if he were afraid they’d run him out if they caught him. Callie compressed her lips and Doc Cathey glanced at her, then slid his hand under the bedclothes and onto her stomach. “She ain’t moved it down much,” he said to the room in general. “Looks like what they call primary inertia, maybe stiff cervix.” He looked at Henry. “You told Costard she’s a bleeder?”

Henry nodded. “He said he’d give her some kind of vitamin.”

Doc Cathey scowled and looked at the door again. “He will if he remembers. They don’t know one damn patient from another. Eat your sandwiches, Henry.” He looked back at Callie and grunted. “You lie here and keep at it a while, girl. See Henry gets some sleep.”

He went to the door and stood there, hunchbacked, looking at the doorknob. “She’s Rh negative too, ain’t she? What’s—” he paused “—the daddy?”

Callie said, “Henry’s negative.”

Nobody spoke for a minute. Henry sucked in his loose upper lip and felt the quick light ticking of his heart. The old man didn’t move. Henry said, “That’s right.”

Callie leaned up on one elbow and said, “Anyway, it doesn’t matter on the first one. The doctor said so.”

Doc Cathey peeked at her over the rims of his glasses, then at Henry. “May be,” he said. “That may be. They know everything, these fancy city doctors.” He shook his head. “You’ve thought up every complication I know of, you two.”

Callie asked, “How much longer you think it will be?”

“Lord knows. If your insides are froze up like I think, it’ll take a good long while yet, maybe two days.”

Callie lay back again. She closed her eyes, and Henry leaned toward her, groping with one hand for the foot of the bed, watching her face. Her mouth was closed and her nostrils were narrow, as if she’d stopped breathing. After a minute she said, almost in a whisper: “It’s the waiting that’s so awful.” She opened her eyes and looked at Henry, then closed them again and moved her head from side to side on the pillow. Her lips tightened, then relaxed. Henry touched her foot.

Out in the hall Henry asked, “Will it pain her much?”

“Maybe a little,” the old man said. “Maybe a good deal.” He fiddled with his hearing aid and watched Henry out of the corner of his eye, with a smile like a grimace. “She’ll get tired, and her insides’ll likely rip all to hell.” Then he said, “Worried about her, ain’t you?” He went on smiling and watching him. Henry closed his right hand and the nails bit into the palm.

“ ’Course I am. Anybody’d worry,” he said. “She’s my wife.”

Doc Cathey pushed one hand down into his coat pocket and closed the other over Henry’s arm. “ ’Course they would.” The queer smile was still there.

When Henry went back, Callie lay facing away from the door. She didn’t say a word as he came in.

3

Callie slept and Henry stood at the window watching darkness settle in. Lights went on in the front room of the house across the street, and down at the end of the block the supermarket neon blazed pink and blue, Miller’s. It began to snow again as he watched — big, light flakes that dropped onto branches and hung there as more flakes fell, mounding up. A boy passed on the sidewalk, pushing a bicycle, and four women got off the bus at the corner and came up the street slowly, carrying packages. None of them looked toward the hospital as they passed. Down on the supermarket parking lot there were cars and farm trucks parked, some of them with their taillights on, glowing like a few last scattered coals in a furnace. People moved around on the lot and inside the supermarket, on the other side of the full-length windows, and on the sidewalks beyond the lot — children, grown-ups, old people — a hundred or more in all. He pursed his lips. It was queer, now that he thought of it, how many people there were in the world, moving around, hurrying — in Slater, in Athensville, Utica, Albany, down in New York City — millions of ’em moving around, bent forward a little against the snow. He sipped the coffee Doc Cathey had brought and then he stood looking again, holding the cup in his two hands, feeling its warmth under his curled fingers. Millions and millions of people, he thought. Billions. His mind couldn’t seem to get hold of it. Callie groaned and half-wakened, and he set down the cup and went to her and fitted his two hands around the small of her back and pressed in as Lou Millet had told him he’d done with his wife to ease the pain. She breathed deeply again; her breathing was the only sound in the room.

He sat down by the bed and stared at the fuzzy shadows thrown by the nightlamp — a long shadow curving away and two thinner straight lines running into it, the head of the bed. When he shut his eyes he saw the highway in front of the Stop-Off, and trucks moving along it, dark, speeding up for the second of the two hills that rose one on each side of his place, and then the road leading down to Nickel Mountain where the bends got dangerous and where the upgrades got steeper, leading through bare-branched beeches and maples and into the firs and tamaracks and then into open space where if it wasn’t bad weather a man could see stars and, far below, the river. Callie groaned again and he pressed in on her back. It was hours since they’d checked her.

The door opened behind him and light flattened across the bed. The nurse said, “Somebody to see you, Mr. Soames. Out in the waiting room.”

He hesitated. When she didn’t come in he said, “It’s been hours since they checked my wife.”

“I’ll tell them at the desk. I’m off duty now.” She turned away, and he eased himself up out of the chair and moved into the hall. Callie groaned behind him and he stopped. She was quiet again.

In the dimly lighted corner of the waiting room George Loomis sat in his too-big sheepskin jacket, with an unlighted cigarette in his mouth, turning the pages of a magazine with his left hand, his head bent down to see. His right jacket sleeve hung empty. He was thirty — there was gray in his hair — but he looked like no more than a boy. He glanced up and grinned as Henry came near.

“Any news?” George asked, getting to his feet.

Henry shook his head. “She’s been in labor for sixteen hours. The labor room next door they’ve had three women in and out.”

George went on grinning, watching him, and Henry wondered all at once if it was pride that had made him say sixteen hours right away. Maybe he was hoping Callie would be in labor for a week.

George patted his jacket pockets, hunting. “It takes a while sometimes,” he said. “Cigarette?” He found the package, fumbled with it, tapped it against his leg to shake a cigarette out to where Henry could get hold of it, and held it up. Henry took it though he never smoked now, on account of his health, and put it between his lips. George held the matchbook and struck a match, all with his one hand — the wall beside him brightened for a moment — and lit Henry’s cigarette, then his own. They sat down. “You look tired,” George said.

Henry waved it away. “You’re out pretty late, aren’t you?” There were dark green shadows under George’s eyes and his cheekbones jutted out. His mouth was pale, like the mouth of a dead man. He hadn’t gotten his strength back since the accident.

“Chores,” George said. He held the cigarette out sideways, as if to see if it was straight, and Henry knew well enough what he meant. Chores with one arm — three hours for a one-hour job — because neighbors could come, a hundred of them, to milk while you lay in the hospital, and fill your yard with stove wood, and grind your grist and chop your corn and water your chickens and plow for you, but after a while you had to come home, and they had to go cut wood for themselves and grind grist and plow and plant, and if you were young yet, like George Loomis, you still had years of wood yet to cut. Even with two arms it wasn’t easy.

“How’s she doing?” George asked, turning away as he spoke, looking up at the owl on the wall.

“Fine so far. Doc Cathey thinks it might be rough.”

George nodded as if Doc had told him already. “Callie’s one hell of a gal.” He looked back at Henry. “What can I get you?”

Right over their heads an old man shouted something, or groaned, and George’s eyebrows drew inward. Henry looked at the ash on his cigarette, moved it carefully toward the ash tray, and scraped off all but the red cone. He remembered then and said, “We don’t need a thing.”

“I’ll bring you some breakfast,” George said. “Doc says you didn’t eat all day till he brought in some supper. He says to tell you be sure and get your rest.”

Henry nodded. “I sure appreciate this.”

“Forget it. I guess I’d better get a move on. It’s a long, long trail a-winding.” He grinned again, then stood up. “Say, I ran into—” He stopped, confused, then concentrated on his jacket zipper; but Henry understood.

“Who?” he said, sitting balanced, squinting.

George went on tugging at the zipper. He freed it finally, then looked up, pretending to smile. “He was bound to come back sooner or later. You know that.”

Henry watched him. “How long’s he been in?”

“I don’t know, maybe a day or two, maybe a week. I didn’t ask.”

“You talked to him?”

“I ran into him and I said hello; that was it. He’s got a job over at Purina. That’s where I saw him.”

“He means to stay, then?”

“No way of knowing.” He came a step toward Henry. “I’d really better get going, though. …”

Henry leaned forward, folding his hands, squinting more. He said — and in the half-dark room it did not seem a surprising thing to say—“I’m going to kill him.”

George blanched. He said quietly, looking at him, “You’re out of your fucking head.”

“I mean it.”

Abruptly, George got out his pack of cigarettes, shook one into his hand and lit the new cigarette from the one he had going. “I never heard such a thing,” he said. His hand trembled. “You sit there cool as a cucumber and—”

“I’ll tell you why.”

“I don’t want to hear. I don’t want to hear a thing about it. You’re crazy to even think it.”

“I’ll tell you what he did.”

George pivoted away, then back, determined. “Look, I’ve got to get started home. It’ll take me half-an-hour through this snow.” He came toward Henry again. “And listen, remember what I told you, get some rest.”

Henry reached out to block his way and George paused, but then Henry let it go. “I’ll try,” he said.

“Do it, now.”

He nodded. He sat perfectly still, his fists closed tight, watching George move past him and toward the door. George waved, and after a moment Henry returned the wave. He thought, So he’s come back. It made him feel light, as though the ground had dropped away and he hung in empty space.

He got up at last, slowly, looking at the doorway where a minute ago George Loomis had stood, where now there were only reflected lights and, beyond the reflections, snow. He turned it over in his mind: So Willard’s come back home.

Callie was still asleep when he went in. He sat down beside her and put his left hand on her back and closed his eyes. With his right hand he pulled at his upper lip. For two hours she didn’t make a sound, and then it started again,

worse. Her back was tender now and, gently, she pushed his hand away.

4

The night nurse was a spindly country woman, an old maid with a squeezed-shut face and brittle gray hair like steel wool. “This room’s a mess,” she said. “Clean up this room and in half-an-hour you got it looking like a hogpen.” She moved past the chair where Henry sat, sniffing at him as if he smelled, and straightened the unmessed second bed and the shelves on the wall. “Dominoes,” she said, disgusted, lifting the box from the bedside table with three fingers. “What’ll you people think of next.” And then she went out, not looking once at Callie.

He got no sleep, or no sleep that counted. He dreamed of the woods and thousands of birds turning and turning, a vortex above the trees, black against the gray of the sky. The next morning at seven, when Callie had been in labor for twenty-four hours, Dr. Costard came in again and sent Henry away while he made his examination. After five minutes the doctor came out and stood at the door pulling off his rubber glove.

“How is she?” Henry asked. His voice was like an old woman’s, or like his father’s — exactly like his father’s.

“She’s coming along,” the doctor said. “We’ll just have to be patient a while yet.” He walked over toward the desk and Henry followed him. The doctor said when the nurse looked up, “She’s dilated to three cm’s. Have her examined again in four hours.”

“Is that good?” Henry asked. “Three cm’s?”

“It’s a start.” The doctor smiled, plump-faced, like a hotel keeper. He had curly hair turned silver around the front.

“How much farther does she have to go?”

“Quite a ways yet.” He looked at Henry, then put his hand on his arm. “Ten cm’s,” he said. He smiled.

“Will it be today, you think?”

“Could be. There are a lot of things we’re not sure of yet in this business.” He started down the hall, toeing outward.

“She’s been in labor for twenty-four hours,” Henry said, following him. He said it quickly, his middle fingers interlocked and pulling at each other.

“They’ll do that sometimes.” The doctor waved at him vaguely, with his back turned, and walked on. Henry watched him go.

An hour later they called him to the waiting room and he found the breakfast George Loomis had left — cheese, crackers, two apples, coffee. George hadn’t been able to wait. It was eight miles each way from his place, but that wasn’t it, Henry knew.

He started back for the labor room to eat, and as he passed the cigarette machine he stopped and bought a pack of Old Golds with filters. He stood for a minute looking down at the package and then he remembered: Willard Freund leaning into the lamplight in the lean-to room behind the diner, rain drumming on the roof, the room full of the smell of burning wood, and Willard reaching toward the table for the cigarettes he’d laid there, the pack glossy under the lamplight, yellow and red. Old Golds were what Willard Freund smoked. He saw the woods again in his mind, the gray, dead tamaracks, the darkness farther in, the birds. He stood for a long while looking down at the package.

It went on, hour after hour. Doc Cathey came and went and nurses came on duty and went off again, and nothing happened. Once they gave her a shot to stop the labor and give her a rest. Henry smoked and just held Callie’s hand now. Delivery carts rolled by in the hall outside the door, and sometimes he heard the cries of newborn babies. When he looked out he saw new fathers talking, smoking cigarettes and looking in through the windows along the hall at the rows of baby beds — two squat, red-necked men with water-combed hair that needed cutting. Later there was another man, an Italian in an expensive suit. Callie lay still, white, with beads of sweat on her forehead. Outside the window the snow was still blowing, too thick to see through. At 6:oo P.M. Dr. Costard came in and examined her and gave her a shot. He smiled, as if sociably, then patted her arm. “I’ll drop back later to see how you’re doing.”

Callie ignored him.

Outside the door Henry said, “Still the same?”

The doctor puckered his lips, then smiled again. “No change to speak of.” He waved, then paused, turning back. “If things haven’t improved by morning maybe we’ll section her.”

Henry waited, balanced on the balls of his feet.

“Caesarian,” Dr. Costard explained. He winked, smiling. “But no use rushing Mother Nature. We’ll see how she does tonight.”

“She’s a bleeder,” Henry said. “When she cuts herself she keeps on bleeding.”

The doctor nodded, still smiling. “We’ll see.”

Henry went back, touching the wall as he walked.

It was dark. He stared at the shadows thrown by the nightlight, then turned his head to stare at the dominoes in the box. His father’s. They would sit up nights, his mother and father — his huge shirt would be open, showing spongy skin like wet clay and gray, curling hairs — and they’d stare at the oil-cloth-covered table where the dominoes lay, the winding paths, the boneyard, the fourteen in play up-ended like tombstones, and after a long time his father would place one and would smile, almost giggle, old-womanish, and his mother would place one right away, and then there would be the waiting again, like a wait in a game of chess, and then, as if kingdoms depended on it, his father would place another. He almost always won. There would be specks of dust on the bourbon in his glass, and once in a while his hand would move to the glass mechanically, and the corners of Henry’s mother’s mouth would tighten. He would sit with his eyebrows drawn outward for a moment after he’d drunk, his thick lips wet, his forehead white, and then he’d say, Ah! as if drunk for pleasure.

(”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.”

He got up and went to the door and out to the desk but there was nobody there, and he stood biting down on his lip, panicky, tears in his eyes too now, his palms wet. The night nurse came out of a room down the hall and glided toward him with a water pitcher. She stopped suddenly when Callie screamed.

“My wife,” Henry whispered. “Please, that’s my wife.” He caught himself breaking a leaf from the big poinsettia and tearing the leaf between his fingers.

She glared at him and moved on again and put the pitcher on the desk, then went back to the room where Callie lay and closed the door behind her. Another nurse came up from behind him — the quiet nurse with the square face — and touched his arm and said, “Poor kid.”

“I’ve never seen her like this,” Henry said.

She nodded. “It’s like that sometimes.”

“Couldn’t you call the doctor?”

“I can’t. Miss Childres will, when the time comes.” She winced, because Callie was screaming again, piercing. “Cheer up,” she said then. “Six months she’ll never remember a thing.”

The night nurse, Miss Childres, came out, pulling off her rubber glove. There was blood on it. She nodded, smiling, passing Henry. She said, “We’re coming nicely.”

“She’s bleeding,” Henry whispered. “For God’s sake, call the doctor.”

“All in good time,” Miss Childres said. “The perineum is tearing. Perfectly normal.”

Heat leaped through his chest and he clenched his fists. “Wait,” he said, his upper lip lifted. “Other women don’t go through all that. I been sitting here two days.”

“It happens sometimes,” Miss Childres said. But she went to the desk phone and lifted the receiver. Henry hurried back to the room.

She wasn’t white now. Her face was flushed, as if she were burning up. She was breathing hard. She lay with her teeth clenched, tears squeezing out of her closed eyes.

“They’re calling Dr. Costard,” Henry said. “You’re getting there. The nurse says you’re coming fine.” He gave her his hand and she clutched it.

Callie shook her head. “I can’t stand it. Henry, I can’t.”

And then she screamed again. Henry bent over her and pressed her hand to his stomach, and tears ran down his cheeks. The nurse came in with a hypo and Henry hung onto Callie’s hand, and, when it was over and the nurse had left, Callie screamed again. Henry tensed against the scream, and then all at once he was sobbing. It made him feel free, as though he’d burst out of a tight, solid box.

In ten minutes Callie was out of her head. She screamed at the sound of a cart passing by in the hall, and screamed again when the overhead light went on and the doctor came in, and screamed when the doctor touched her wrist. She gripped Henry’s hand as if to crush it.

“I’ve never seen her like this,” Henry said, shouting at them. “It’s not that she isn’t brave. It’s killing her.”

The doctor nodded. He said to the nurse, “Get another hypo ready.” The nurse left. “You’d better leave, Mr. Soames.”

Henry didn’t move.

“You’d better leave,” he repeated. He smiled, grim.

The younger nurse came in, and Costard said, “Bring in a wagon, we’ll move her into Delivery.”

The girl nodded and glanced at Henry, then left. Calmly, the doctor pried Callie’s hand away from Henry’s. Callie screamed again, half-sitting up in bed, her mouth a flat, black rectangle, screaming, Goddamn you, Goddamn you! Henry why don’t you help me! She twisted, and it moved the sheet. The sheet underneath was bloodstained.

The doctor turned to Henry. “You’d better leave.”

Henry backed toward the door. Callie screeched after him, I hate you. It doesn’t matter. I hate you. I love somebody else.

6

He sat for five hours in the waiting room out front. He held a magazine in his lap, on the cover the lower branches of a Christmas tree and under them the same magazine, the same cover, the same Christmas tree, magazine, tree, magazine, falling away like a shaft. For four hours he heard her screams and sat motionless, his hands closed over his face. Between her screams he heard voices mumbling, but there was no one near. It grew light outside and the wind dropped off and the nurses changed shifts. A day nurse touched his arm and said, “Coffee?” He looked up and nodded, not understanding. He said, “My wife—” She came back with coffee and he sipped it and his mind cleared a little. “She’s stopped,” he said. For an instant he felt light, giddy; then a vague possibility came to him, and after a moment, staring at the magazine without seeing, he was sure of it: She was dead. It made his heart trip. “She’s dead,” he whispered. The nurse said, amused, “Nonsense.”

Doc Cathey and George came in, talking and laughing. George hesitated at the door. Henry called out, getting up, “They phoned you?”

George shook his head, still holding back. “Not me. Baby born yet?”

“She’s dead. I think Callie’s dead.”

Doc Cathey stood still for a second. “Chickenmanure. They ain’t that stupid.”

Henry shook his head, pulling at his hand so hard it hurt. “She was in labor for forty-eight hours, and then the bleeding. I don’t know. I think—”

“Faddle,” Doc Cathey said. He leered, but he pivoted away and went through the double doors. He didn’t come back.

George said abruptly, “You and I are going to have some breakfast. Come on.”

Henry stood there unsteadily, his seat and the backs of his legs numb, and then went for his coat. George closed his hand over Henry’s elbow as they moved to the door and out into the cold and down the steps. The brilliance of snow on the lawn, on trees, on rooftops, stabbed at Henry’s eyes. For an instant the ring of mountains around them seemed to be moving; then they were utterly still, blue-white.

George slid in behind the wheel and ground on the starter a minute before the truck motor caught and roared. The truck cab shook, and through a gap in the floor boards Henry saw the motionless, soft snow on the road. George slipped his hand around the wheel to the gearshift and pulled it to low, then shifted to high and caught at the wheel.

“You’re tired, Henry,” he said. “If this business kills anybody it’s gonna be you.” And then he said, “Or maybe it’s me it’ll kill.” He laughed.

It might have been a boy, Henry thought. A boy like George, maybe born unlucky, who’d grow up to be orphaned and go off to the army and half-kill himself for a Japanese girl sixteen years old and a prostitute, or that was what Lou Millet said, and would come back home after that and crawl back to farming, a worn-out farm with worn-out equipment that would eat him alive, limb by limb, and maybe after that his heart if there was anything left of it. They’d have named him James.

Henry said, “If Callie was to die—” It came to him that he didn’t believe any more that she would die. He’d stopped thinking it the minute he’d seen George and Doc Cathey. He felt better, then worse. He should never have left. They might call for him any time.

George said, “The hell with you. You’re gonna have a little boy with a big wide slit of a mouth like Callie’s and a three-foot span across the shoulders and he’ll love up the country cunts till a guy like Freund looks like a eunuch.”

Henry breathed in shallowly and held it, and after a second he saw that George was shocked too, afraid even to explain what he meant, if he could, because Henry might have missed it. Henry tried to think what to say. He watched the brown snow on the street flash by under the floorboards.

George stopped the truck at Leroy’s place, and they got out and went down the ice-coated steps and in. The air was too warm, greasy. The place was crowded, a few women but mostly the old men who came in every morning from houses and attics and furnished rooms to get breakfast. At both ends of Leroy’s place there were mirrors; they made the room go on forever. Henry thought again of how many people there were in the world — fifteen, twenty here, ten thousand in town, another six thousand in Athensville, still more in Albany, Utica — it was hard to believe: “All these people sitting here without a worry,” he said, “and my poor Callie—”

George slid into the booth, looking down, then grinned and said, “It’s a funny damn thing … human beings, horses, cats. …”

Henry nodded, uncertain what he meant. He remembered the blood on the sheet.

George watched him, then held a cigarette toward him. He said, as if thinking of something else, “They look like they’ve had a hell of a time of it, don’t they.”

Henry looked, frowning. There was an old man with whiskers and a wrinkled neck, a large blue lump on his temple. At the table beside him there was a younger man reading a paper, leaning close to it.

Henry said, “I guess you don’t remember my father.”

“Vaguely,” George said. “I was just a kid then.”

Henry leaned forward and folded his hands and looked at the boy with the newspaper. “He could talk to birds, all kinds of them. They’d walk on his shoulders like he was a stump. Fattest man you ever saw in your life. Three hundred and seventy pounds. It finally killed him.”

George waited.

“He was an elephant. He walked with a cane two-inches thick. I remember he use to read poetry nights. It would make him cry.”

“They say he was a fine man,” George said.

Henry nodded, then shook his head slowly. “He was an elephant. Christ, you should’ve seen the coffin. Biggest damn coffin you ever saw, big as the world. With him in it it must’ve weighed six hundred pounds.”

George was watching the old man with the lump on his temple. Behind the old man there was a woman with penciled eyebrows and a powdered face and lumpy hands. A boy was with her, thirteen maybe, weak-jawed and weak-eyed and grinning. He looked like his mother, trapped already in what his mother was. Maybe it was like that with everybody, Henry thought. The spindly, crochety night nurse who liked to deliver babies herself, dead or alive, she was somebody’s daughter. And Costard, narrow-shouldered, toeing out, pot-bellied under the vest, he had children, he said. Henry shook his head. “It’s funny,” he said. “Jesus.”

George drew in on his cigarette, then let smoke come out with his words. “It’s funny as hell. You know what every one of these people’s got? A mirror. Put a man on a desert island and the first thing he’ll set out to find is a clear pool where he can see how he looks.”

It sounded bitter, and Henry laughed uncomfortably. Then he covered his face with his hand.

“Matter, boy?”

“Nothing,” he said.

He’d forgotten completely. He’d been sitting here for ten minutes, and he’d never thought about her once, not even to wonder if she’d meant it when she’d shouted, “I love somebody else.” It had seemed a long way between where he’d stood and the bed where Callie lay. He’d stood there helpless, his head pulled in, old, as if past all human use. Maybe she had meant it, too. Because there was, even now, Willard Freund. You never had a chance. Maybe you’d find something you thought a lot of, but it didn’t matter, all you could ever count on for sure was someday your heart would quit. His hands clenched.

George said, watching him, maybe reading his thoughts, “You look tired as hell.”

He relaxed. The waitress came. She had a long, pocked face, and she had on pink lipstick. She smiled at George, a come-on, and when she left, Henry said, not looking up, “She likes you. You ought to marry her.”

George grinned. “Once burned, twice shy.”

“You ought to marry somebody,” Henry said. “I mean it. Callie says so too.”

He wasn’t prepared for what it set off. George sat still and didn’t speak, then abruptly crushed out his cigarette and stood up. “We better get back.” He grinned then, but on the way to the hospital he didn’t talk.

The woman at the desk said, “Mr. Soames, you can go down to Maternity now. Dr. Costard’s been looking all over for you.”

Henry wet his lips, then went to the double door. When he glanced back, George winked. He was sitting down now, over in the shadowed corner of the room, by the magazine table. His eyes, looking into the light, were shiny like the eyes of the owl. His face was the color of ashes.

At the Maternity desk Henry almost asked if either of them had lived, but he stopped himself, simply stood leaning forward, one hand clinging to the other, waiting.

“You may see your wife,” the nurse said. And so he knew that it was the baby that had died if one of them had, not Callie; but he held himself back. She hadn’t said that. And then they were leading him into a room and somehow he knew at once — though she lay still, as if unconscious — that she was alive. The guard rails were up on the bed. When you were dead you didn’t need any guarding. He touched her hand. The nurse said, “It wasn’t Caesarean. They cut from below and used Kjelland forceps.”

“Did the baby live?” he asked.

The nurse smiled, cat-like. “They’re cleaning up now.”

He started to ask it again, but she left him.

Callie opened her eyes a little, looking at him. He leaned toward her. “Doctor,” she said, her voice light, drugged, “isn’t Henry here yet?”

He stood perfectly still, puzzled, his back going cold.

Her fingers moved as if to grasp his hand, but she was too weak. She said, “You been good to us, Henry and me. Everybody’s been. I want you to tell Henry. …” She smiled, far away, as though she really had died, withdrawn to where none of them could reach her, and she whispered, “Doctor, my husband is a good kind man. Tell him I said so. Tell him I said it in my sleep.” She smiled again, mysterious, suddenly foxy, and her eyes closed. Henry blinked.

And then it was Doc Cathey beside him, leading him through blinding sunlight past wilting, burnt-up plants to the wall of windows that looked in at the cribs.

“Doc,” Henry whimpered, shaking now, off his bearings; his right hand pulled at his left.

“Don’t blubber,” Doc snapped. “You’d think it was the first brat born on earth. Cain maybe. You make me sick.”

The nurse said, “It’s a boy, Mr. Soames. A big, big boy. Nine pounds, one ounce.” It lay with its hands folded up like a monk’s, its mouth angular, like Callie’s. There were forceps scars across the cheeks and one ear was black and cauliflowered. The head was browless and misshapen. The mouth quivered, crying.

“Well?” Doc Cathey barked. He cupped his hand under Henry’s elbow.

Henry leaned his forehead against the glass, his chest flaming. He could hear the baby’s voice through the glass. Then he couldn’t see anymore, he was crying now, and things were in motion all around him, reeling. “He’s beautiful,” he said. Tears ran down and he could taste them. “He’s beautiful. Holy Jesus.”

7

And so, it seemed to Henry, it was different now. Out of his hands. He looked around as he passed through the waiting room, but there was nobody there. Sick people, some plants, a doctor leaning over a chair and speaking in a whisper, George Loomis looking up, startled, from a magazine; that was all. He walked out to his square, black Ford and started it up. Doc Cathey came through the hospital door and started toward him, shouting. But Henry pulled out into the street as if he hadn’t seen him. He watched the sidewalk, and then he was outside town and he still hadn’t seen the slightest sign. At the Stop-Off there were trucks parked, four of them, long, dark, mounded in snow, and he opened up and invited the truckers in and perked coffee. The dog lay by the door and watched every move he made, wondering what he’d done with Callie. He told them about James, the baby — he used the word now — and gave out White Owl cigars, laughing, waving his hands, but all the time he spoke there was another excitement too, and he kept one eye on the door and the wide window that looked out over the highway toward the trees. There was nobody.

There was still nobody when dusk came. The lights went on in Frank Wells’ barns, not in the house; they were still away. More customers came, and they kept him busy at the grill. The next thing he knew it was dark, and still no sign. At midnight he cleaned the grill and the chili pans and dishes and locked up and turned out the lights.

He went into the living room — Prince coming sorrowfully at his heels — and sat down facing the window in the dark. The snow lay blue-white under the moon, and the walls of the room around him were blue-white silver glints, the man and woman, the bridge, the tree, the children. The woods were quiet. Up on Crow Mountain, in the fourteen-room brick house where George Loomis rattled around alone like a ghost, there were no lights on; nothing moved. There would be no light on down at Freund’s place either, beyond the woods; the family would be asleep; there were chores to do in the morning. Willard Freund would be awake though, sitting smiling to himself, or would be flitting around somewhere outside.

Voices mumbled around him, unintelligible, and he leaned forward in his chair. He saw without surprise that there were birds flying above the woods, thousands of them, gliding silently like owls, but talking, mumbling words like human beings. They flew through steam from the trees, or fog, or smoke maybe. Sometimes he could see only the smoke and the birds, as though the woods had disappeared or slipped from his mind, and then he could see the woods again, gray, moving closer. A sound of wind or fire blurred the voices and stirred the smoke into slow torsion, obliterating the birds, the bridge and the willow tree, the pines. When he saw the man coming across the yard, Henry jumped up.

The snow lay blue-white, crisp, and the trees were far away again, distinct in the sharp night air. The dog was watching him, ears raised.

And at last it all came clear to him. There never would be anybody there. Willard Freund wouldn’t show himself again as long as he lived. Callie wouldn’t see him either, or if she did it wouldn’t matter, because it was too late now. It was as if it was him, Willard Freund, that was killed by it. You had to be there, and Willard Freund hadn’t been, and now there was no place left for him, no love, no hate — not in his father’s house, even. Willard would see. No place but the woods — bare trees and snow and the low-moving shadows of dogs gone wild and birds and, maybe, if stories were true, bobcats.

He moved toward the window a little, not knowing he was doing it, and stood bent forward, looking out, not aware anymore of the room behind him. There was a game, a child’s game, where you stood the dominoes in a row and touched the end one and made them fall one after another, clattering. If one of the dominoes wasn’t in line it would still be standing there after the others had fallen down, would still be standing there erect, like a narrow, old-fashioned tombstone, all by itself on a windy hill, till doomsday.

Henry stood at the window looking out for a long time; then, breathing shallowly to cut down the pain, he turned and moved into the bedroom.