The Centaurus

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.”

Now the coolness of air off the dammed lake and the swans’ vulgar brackish cries would touch us, and up high through a gap in a mythic black-leaved beech a pale ochre cornice of the museum would show, and a sunstruck section of the raised skylight with its pistachio-green leading. We would pass through the parking lot that made me covetous and ashamed, for at that time we had no car; pass along the gravel pedestrian path among children bringing bags of breadcrumbs to feed the swans; pass up the wide stairs where a few people in clean summer clothes would be snapping cameras and unwrapping sandwiches from waxpaper; and pass into the high religious hall of the museum itself. Admission was free. In the basement, indeed, free classes in “nature appreciation” were held in the summer months. At my mother’s suggestion I once enrolled. The first lesson was to watch a snake in a glass cage swallow a chattering field mouse whole. I did not go for the second lesson. The main floor was given over to scientific exhibits for the benefit of schoolchildren, stiff stuffed creatures and Eskimo and Chinese and Polynesian artifacts, case after case, categorized, dust-proof. There was a noseless mummy, with always a small crowd around him. As a child this floor filled me with dread. So much death; who would dream there could be such a quantity of death? The second floor was devoted to art, mostly local paintings that, however clumsy and quaint and mistaken, nevertheless radiated the innocence and hope, the hope of seizing something and holding it fast, that enters whenever a brush touches canvas. There were also bronze statuettes of Indians and deities, and in the center of the large oval room at the head of the stairs a naked green lady, life size, stood in the center of a circular black-lipped pool. She was a fountain. She held to her lips a scallop shell of bronze and her fine face was pursed to drink, but the mechanics of the fountain dictated that water should spill for ever from the edge of the shell away from her lips. Eternally expectant-with slight breasts, a loosely swirled cast glory of verdigrant hair, and one foot lightly resting on its toes-she held the shell an inch away from the face that seemed with its lowered lids and parted lips asleep. As a child I was troubled by her imagined thirst, and I would place myself so I could see the enduring inch that held her mouth from contact with the water. The water fell as a thin varying ribbon, pearlish green, spiraling as it left the scalloped edge, splaying before it struck the surface of the pond with a ceaseless gentle impact whose splash was sometimes flung by the subtle variations of accident as far away as the rim of the pond, deckling with a tiny cold prick, like the touch of a snowflake, my hand resting there on the black marble. The patience of her wait, the mildness of its denial, seemed unbearable to me then, and I told myself that when darkness came, and the mummy and the Polynesian masks and the glass-eyed eagles below were sealed in shadow, then her slim bronze handmade the very little motion needed, and she drank. In this great oval room, which I conceived as lit by the moon through the skylight above, the fall of water would for a moment cease. In that sense, then-in the sense that the coming of night enwrapped the luminous ribbon of downfalling water and staunched its flow-my story is coming to its close.

The irritable traffic pecks soothingly at the windows of our loft, those windows whose thin glass has so long needed dusting that their delicate grapitic grayness seems internal, a shade of cathedral glass. The cafeteria neon two stories be low rhythmically stains them rose. My vast canvases-so oddly expensive as raw materials, so oddly worthless trans muted into art-with sharp rectangular shoulders hulk into silhouette against the light. Your breathing keeps time with the slow rose. Your solemn mouth has relaxed in sleep and the upper lip displays the little extra racial button of fat like a bruise blister. Your sleep contains innocence as the night contains dew. Listen: I love you, love your prim bruised mouth whose corners compress morally when you are awake and scolding me, love your burnt skin ceaselessly forgiving mine, love the centuries of being humbled held in the lilac patina of your palms. I love the tulip-stem stance of your throat. When you stand before the stove you make, all un conscious, undulant motions with the upper half of your body like a drinking hen. When you walk naked toward the bed your feet toe in as if your ankles were manacled to those of someone behind you. When we make love sometimes you sigh my name and I feel radically confirmed. I am glad I have met you, glad, proud, glad; I miss only, and then only a little, in the late afternoons, the sudden white laughter that like heat lightning bursts in an atmosphere where souls are trying to serve the impossible. My father for all his mourning moved in the atmosphere of such laughter. He would have puzzled you. He puzzled me. His upper half was hidden from me, I knew best his legs.

Hey. Listen. Listen to me, lady. I love you, I want to be a Negro for you, I want to have a wised-up shoe-polish face taut as a drum at the cheekbones and wear great opaque anonymous-making sunglasses at three a.m. in a dim lavender cellar and forget everything but the crooning behind my ribs. But I cannot, quite. I cannot quite make that scene. A final membrane restrains me. I am my father’s son. In the late afternoons while the day hangs in distending light waiting to be punctured by the darkness that in arrows of shadow rides out from the tall buildings across the grid of streets, I remember my father and even picture-eyes milky with doubts, mustache indecisive and pale-his father before him, whom I never knew. Priest, teacher, artist: the classic degeneration.

Forgive me, for I do love you, we fit. Like a Tibetan lama I rise out of myself above the bed and see how we make, yin and yang, a person between us. But at the hour in the afternoon when my father and I would be heading home in the car, I glance around at the nest we have made, at the floor boards polished by our bare feet, at the continents of stain on the ceiling like an old and all-wrong discoverer’s map, at the earnestly bloated canvases I conscientiously cover with great streaks straining to say what even I am beginning to suspect is the unsayable thing, and I grow frightened. I consider the life we have made together, with its days spent without relation to the days the sun keeps and its baroque arabesques of increasingly attenuated emotion and its furnishings like a scattering of worn-out Braques and its rather wistful half-Freudian half-Oriental sex-mysticism, and I wonder, Was it for this that my father gave up his life?

Lying awake beside you in the rose-touched dark, I wake on a morning long ago, in Vera Hummel’s guest bedroom. Her room shone in the aftermath of the storm. My dreams had been a bent extension, like that of a stick thrust into water, of the last waking events-the final mile staggering through the unwinding storm; my father’s beating at the door of the dark house, knocking and whinnying and rubbing his hands together in desperation yet his importunity no longer seeming absurd or berserk to me but necessary, absolutely in my blind numbness necessary; then Vera Hummel yawning and blinking in the bleaching glare of her kitchen, her un bound hair fanning over the shoulders of her blue bathrobe and her hands tucked in the sleeves and her arms hugging herself as she yawned; and the limping clump of her husband descending the stairs to receive my father’s outpour of explanation and gratitude. They put us in their guest bedroom, in a postered sway-backed bed inherited from Mr. Hummel’s mother, my grandfather’s sister Hannah. It smelled of feathers and starch and was so like a hammock that my father and I, in underclothes, had to cling to the edges to keep from sliding together in the middle. For some minutes I kept tense. I seemed stuffed with the jiggling atoms of the storm. Then I heard the first rasp of my father’s snuffly little snore. Then the wind outside the room sighed mightily, and this thrust of sound and motion beyond me seemed to explain everything, and I relaxed.

The room was radiant. Beyond the white mullions and the curtains of dotted Swiss pinned back with metal flowers painted white, the sky was undiluted blue. I thought, This morning has never occurred before, and I jubilantly felt myself to be on the prow of a ship cleaving the skyey ocean of time. I looked around the room for my father; he was gone. I had sunk into the center of the bed. I looked for a clock; there was none. I looked to my left to see how the sun lay on the road and field and mailbox, and my gaze met instead a window giving on the luncheonette’s brick wall. Next to the window, its chipping veneer somehow grimacing, was an old-fashioned bureau with fluted glass knobs, a wavy-faced top drawer, and ponderous scroll feet like the toeless feet of a cartoon bear. The radiance beyond the house picked out the silver glints in the stems and leaves of the wallpaper. I closed my eyes to listen for voices, heard a vacuum cleaner humming at some distance, and must have slipped back into sleep. When I awoke again the strangeness of it all-the house, the day so fair and sane in the wake of madness, the silence, inside and out (why had I not been wakened? what had happened to the school? wasn’t it Wednesday?)-held me from falling back, and I arose and dressed as much as I could. My shoes and socks, set to dry on a radiator in the room, were still damp. The strange walls and hallways, demanding thought and courage at every turn, seemed to suck strength from my limbs. I located the bathroom and splashed cold water on my face and ran my wet finger back and forth across my teeth. In bare feet I went down the Hummels’ stairs. They were carpeted with a fresh-napped beige strip held in place by a brass rod at the base of each riser. This was the kind of Olinger home, solid and square and orthodox, that I wished my family lived in. I felt dirty and unworthy in my weary red shirt and three-day underwear.

Mrs. Hummel came in from the front room wearing a pinned-up bandana and an apron patterned with starlike anemones. She held a dainty straw wastebasket in her hand and, grinning so her gums flashed, hailed me with, “Good morning, Peter Caldwell!” Her pronouncing my name in full somehow made me completely welcome. She led me into the kitchen and in walking behind her I felt myself, to my surprise, her height, or even an inch taller. She was tall as local women went and I still thought of her as the goddess-size she had appeared to me when I first arrived at the high school, a runty seventh-grader, my waist no higher than the blackboard chalk-troughs. Now I seemed to fill her eyes. I sat at the little porcelain-topped kitchen table and she served me like a wife. She set before me a thick tumbler of orange juice whose translucence cast on the porcelain in sunlight an orange shadow like a thin slice of the anticipated taste. It was delicious for me to sit and sip and watch her move. She glided in blue slippers from cupboard to refrigerator to sink as if these intervals had been laid out after measuring her strides; her whole spacious and amply equipped kitchen contrasted with the cramped and improvised corner where my mother made our meals. I wondered why some people could solve at least the mechanical problems of living while others, my people, seemed destined for lifetimes of malfunctioning cars and underheated toiletless homes. In Olinger, we had never had a refrigerator, but instead a humiliating old walnut icebox, and my grandmother never sat down with us at the table but ate standing up, off the stove with her fingers, her face wincing in the steam. Haste and improvidence had always marked our domestic details. The reason, it came to me, was that our family’s central member, my father, had never rid himself of the idea that he might soon be moving on. This fear, or hope, dominated our home.

“Where’s my father?” I asked. “I don’t know exactly, Peter,” she said. “Which would you prefer-Wheaties or Rice Krispies or an egg some way?”

“Rice Krispies.” An oval ivory-colored clock below the lacquered cabinets said 11:10. I asked, “What happened to school?”

“Have you looked outdoors?”

“Sort of. It’s stopped.”

“Sixteen inches, the radio said. All the schools in the county have cancelled. Even the parochial schools in Alton.”

“I wonder if they’re going to have swimming practice to night.”

“I’m sure not. You must be dying to get to your home.”

“I suppose so. It seems forever since I was home.”

“Your father was very funny this morning, telling us your adventures. Do you want a banana with the cereal?”

“Oh, gee. Sure, if you have it.” That surely was the difference between these Olinger homes and my own; they were able to keep bananas on hand. In Firetown, on the rare times my father thought to buy them, they went from green to rotten without a skip. The banana she set beside my bowl was perfect. Its golden skin was flecked evenly all over just as in the four-color magazine ads. As I sliced it with my spoon, each segment in dropping into the cereal displayed that ideal little star of seeds at the center.

“Do you drink coffee?”

“I try to every morning but there’s never any time. I’m being an awful lot of trouble.”

“Hush. You sound like your father.”

Her “hush,” emerging from an intimacy that someone else had created for me, evoked a curious sense of past time, of the few mysterious hours ago when, while I was sound asleep in my great-aunt Hannah’s bed, my father had told of his adventures and they had listened to the radio. I wondered if Mr. Hummel had been here also; I wondered what event had spread through the house this aftermath of peaceful, reconciled radiance.

I made bold to ask, “Where is Mr. Hummel?”

“He’s out with the plow. Poor Al, he’s been up since five. He has a contract with the town to help clear the streets after a storm.” I “Oh. I wonder how our poor car is. We abandoned it last night at the bottom of Coughdrop Hill.”

“Your father said. When Al comes home, he’ll drive you out in the truck to it.”

“These Rice Krispies are awfully good.”

She looked around from the sink in surprise and smiled. “They’re just the ones that come out of the box.” Her kitchen seemed to bring out a Dutchness in her intonation. I had always vaguely associated Mrs. Hummel with sophistication, New York, and the rest of it, she shone to such advantage among the other teachers, and sometimes wore mascara. But in her house she was, plainly, of this county.

“How did you like the game last night?” I asked her. I felt awkwardly constrained to keep a conversation up. My father’s absence challenged me to put into practice my notions of civilized behavior, which he customarily frustrated. I kept tugging up the wrists of my shirt to keep spots from showing. She brought me two slices of glinting toast and a dopple of amber crabapple jelly on a black plate.

“I didn’t pay that much attention.” She laughed in memory. “Really, that Reverend March amuses me so. He’s half a boy and half an old man and you never know which you’re talking to.”

“He has some medals, doesn’t he?”

“I suppose. He went all up through Italy.”

“It’s interesting, I think, that after all that he could return to the ministry.”

Her eyebrows arched. Did she pluck them? Seeing them close, I doubted it. They were naturally fine. “I think it’s good; don’t you?”

“Oh, it’s good, sure. I mean, after all the horrors he must have seen.”

“Well-they say there’s some fighting even in the Bible.”

Not knowing what she wanted, I laughed nevertheless. It seemed to please her. She asked me playfully, “How much attention did you pay to the game? Didn’t I see you sitting with the little Fogleman girl?”

I shrugged. “I had to sit next to somebody.”

“Now, Peter, you watch out. She has the look in her eye.”

“Ha. I doubt if I’m much of a catch.”

She held up a finger, gay-making in the county fashion. “Ahhh. You have the possibilities.”

The interposed “the” was so like my grandfather’s manner of speech that I blushed as if blessed. I spread the bright jelly on my toast and she continued about the business of the house.

The next two hours were unlike any previous in my life. I shared a house with a woman, a woman tall in time, so tall I could not estimate her height in years, which at the least was twice mine. A woman of overarching fame; legends concerning her lovelife circulated like dirty coins in the student underworld. A woman fully grown and extended in terms of property and authority; her presence branched into every corner of the house. Her touch on the thermostat stirred the furnace under me. Her footsteps above me tripped the vacuum cleaner into a throaty, swarming hum. Here and there in the house she laughed to herself, or made a piece of furniture cry as she moved it; sounds of her flitted across the upstairs floor as a bird flits unseen and sporadic through the high reaches of a forest. Intimations of Vera Hummel moved toward me from every corner of her house, every shadow, every curve of polished wood; she was a glimmer in the mirrors, a breath moving the curtains, a pollen on the nap of the arms of the chair I was rooted in.

I heavily sat in the dark front parlor reading from a little varnished rack Reader’s Digests one after another. I read until I felt sick from reading. I eagerly discovered and consumed two articles side by side in the table of contents: “Miracle Cure For Cancer?” and “Ten Proofs That There Is a God.” I read them and was disappointed, more than disappointed, overwhelmed-for the pang of hope roused fears that had been lulled. The demons of dread injected their iron into my blood. It was clear, clear for all the smart rattle of the prose and the encyclopedic pretense of the trim double columns, that there were no proofs, there was no miracle cure. In my terror of words I experienced a panicked hunger for things and I took up, from the center of the lace doily on the small table by my elbow, and squeezed in my hand a painted china figurine of a smiling elf with chunky polka-dot wings. The quick blue slippers sounded on the carpeted stairs and Mrs. Hummel made lunch for the two of us. In the brightness of the kitchen I was embarrassed for my complexion. I wondered if it would be manners to offer to leave, but I had no strength to leave this house, felt unable even to look out the window; and if I did leave, where would I look, and for what? My father’s mysterious absence from me seemed permanent. I was lost. The woman talked to me; her words were trivial but they served to make horror habitable. Into the shining plane of the table-top between our faces I surfaced; I made her laugh. She had taken off her bandana and clipped her hair into a horsetail. As I helped her clear the table and took the dishes to the sink, our bodies once or twice brushed. And so, half-sunk in fear and half alive and alight with love, I passed the two hours of time.

My father returned a little after one. Mrs. Hummel and I were still in the kitchen. We had been talking about a wing, an L with a screened porch, which she wanted to have built onto the back of her house; here in the summers she could sit overlooking her yard away from the traffic and noise of the pike. It would be a bower and I believed I would share it with her.

My father looked in his bullet-head cap and snow-drenched overcoat like a man just shot from a cannon. “Boy,” he told us, “Old Man Winter made up for lost time.”

“Where have you been?” I asked. My voice ignobly stumbled on a threat of tears.

He looked at me as if he had forgotten I existed. “Out and around,” he said. “Over at the school. I would have gotten you up, Peter, but I figured you needed the sleep. You were beginning to look drawn as hell. Did my snoring keep you awake?”

“No.” The snow on his coat and pants and shoes, testimony of adventure, made me jealous. Mrs. Hummel’s attention had shifted all to him; she was laughing without his even saying anything. His bumpy face was ruddy. He whipped his cap off like a boy and stamped his feet on the cocoa mat inside the door. I yearned to torment him; I became shrill. “What did you do at the school? How could you be so long?”

“Jesus, I love that building when there aren’t any kids in it.” He was speaking not to me but to Mrs. Hummel. “What they ought to do with that brick barn, Vera, is turn the kids out on the street and let us teachers live there alone; it’s the only place I’ve ever been in my life where I didn’t feel like somebody was sitting on the back of my neck all the time.”

She laughed and said, “They’d have to put in beds.”

“An old Army cot is all I’d need,” he told her. “Two feet wide and six feet long; whenever I get in bed with somebody they take all the covers. I don’t mean you, Peter. Tired as I was last night I probably took ‘em from you. In answer to your question, what was I doing over there, I brought all my books up to date. For the first time since last marking period everything is apple pie; I feel like they lifted a concrete block out of my belly. If I don’t show up tomorrow, the new teacher can step right in and take over, poor devil. Biff, bang; move over, buddy, next stop, the dump.”

I had to laugh.

Mrs. Hummel moved to her refrigerator asking, “George, have you had lunch? Can I give you a roast beef sandwich?”

“Vera, that’s kind as hell of you. To tell you the truth, I couldn’t chew a roast beef sandwich, I had a back tooth pulled last night. I feel a hundred per cent better but it’s like the lost Atlantis in there. I had a bowl of oyster stew up at Mohnie’s. To be perfectly honest with you though, if you and the kid were having coffee, I’d take a cup. I forget if the kid drinks coffee.”

“How can you forget it?” I asked. “I try to drink it every morning at home but there’s never any time.”

“Jesus, that reminds me. I tried to get through to your mother but the lines are out. She doesn’t have a scrap of food in the house and if I know Pop Kramer he’ll be trying to eat the dog. Provided he hasn’t fallen down the stairs. That would be just my luck; no doctor can get in there.”

“Well when are we going to get there?”

“Any minute, kid, any minute. Time and tide for no man wait.” He called to Mrs. Hummel, “Never take a boy away from his mother.” Then he pinched his lips in; I knew he was wondering if this had been tactless because she, for reasons that were dark to me, had no children herself. With the pointed quiet of a servant she set the smoking coffee on the counter near him. A coil of hair came loose and trailed across her cheek like a comment. He tried to subdue the excitement in his voice and told her, “I saw Al over by Spruce Street and he’s on his way home. He and that truck have been performing miracles out there; this borough does a bang-up job when the chips are down. Traffic’s moving on everything but the alleys and the section around Shale Hill. Boy, if I was running this town we’d all be on snowshoes for a month.” He clenched and unclenched his hands happily as he gazed into this vision of confusion. “They say a trolley was derailed over in West Alton late last night.”

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.”

“Can you steer by it?”

“I don’t know. I’ve never tried. It’s an interesting question.”

I told him, “I can never find the North Star. I always expect it to be bigger than it is.”

“That’s right. I don’t know why the hell they made it so small.”

His shape before me was made less human by the bag of groceries he was carrying and it seemed, my legs having ceased to convey the sensations of walking, that his was the shape of the neck and head of a horse I was riding. I looked straight up and the cobalt dome was swept clean of marble flakes and a few faint stars were wearing through. The branches of the young trees we walked between fell away to disclose the long low hump, sullenly lustrous, of our upper field.

“Peter?”

My father’s voice startled me, I felt so alone. “What?”

“Nothing. I just wanted to make sure you were still behind me.”

“Well where else would I be?”

“You got me there.”

“Shall I carry the bag for a while?”

“No, it’s clumsy but it’s not heavy.”

“Why’d you buy all those bananas if you knew we were going to have to lug everything half a mile?”

“Insanity,” he answered. “Hereditary insanity.” It was a favorite concept of his.

Lady, hearing our voices, began to bark behind the field. The quick dim doublets of sound like butterflies winged toward us close to the earth, skimming the feathery crust rather than risking a plunge upward into the steep smooth dome that capped a space of Pennsylvania a hundred miles wide. From the spot where the lower road led off from the upper we could see on a clear day to the first blue beginnings of the Alleghenies. We walked downward into the shelter of our hillside. The trees of our orchard came first into view, then our barn, and through the crotches and tangled barren branches of the orchard our house. Our downstairs light was on, yet as we moved across the silent yard I became convinced that the light was an illusion, that the people inside had died and left the light burning. My father beside me moaned, “Jesus I know Pop’s tumbled down those damn stairs.”

But footsteps had beaten a path around the corner of the house ahead of us, and on the porch there were plentiful signs that the pump had been used. Lady, free, raced out of the darkness with the whir of a growl in her throat and then, recognizing us, leaped like a fish from the splashing snow, jabbing her muzzle at our faces, her throat stuck fast on a weak agonized note of whimpering love. She battered and bustled through the double kitchen door with us and in the warm indoors released an unmistakable tang of skunk.

Here was the kitchen, honey-colored, lit; here were the two clocks, the red electric thrown all out of right time by the power failure but running gamely nevertheless; here was my mother, coming forward with large arms and a happy girlish face to take the bundle from my father and welcome us home. “My heroes,” she said.

My father explained, “I tried to call you this morning, Cassie, but the lines were down. Have you had a rough time? There’s an Italian sandwich in the bag.”

“We’ve had a wonderful time,” my mother said. “Dad’s been sawing wood and this evening I made some of that dried-beef soup with apples Grammy used to make when we ran out of food.” An ambrosial smell of warm apples did breathe from the stove, and a fire was dancing in the fireplace.

“Huh?” It seemed to daze my father that the world had gone on without him. “Pop’s O. K.? Where in hell is he?”

Even as he spoke he walked into the other room and there, sitting in his accustomed place on the sofa, was my grandfather, his shapely hands folded across his chest, his little worn Bible, shut, balanced on one knee.

“Did you cut some wood, Pop?” my father asked loudly.

“You’re a walking miracle. At some point in your life you must have done something right.”

“George, now I don’t wish to be ac-quisi-tive, but by any chance did you remember to bring the Sun?” The mailman of course hadn’t gotten through, a sore deprivation for my grandfather, who wouldn’t believe it had snowed until he read it in the newspaper.

“Hell, no, Pop,” my father bellowed. “I forgot. I don’t know why, it was insanity.”

My mother and the dog came into the living-room with us. Lady, unable to keep the good news of our return to herself any longer, jumped up on the sofa and with a snap of her body thrust her nose into my grandfather’s ear. “Hyar, yaar” he said, and stood up, rescuing the Bible from his knee in the same motion. “Doc Appleton called,” my mother said to my father. “Huh? I thought the lines were out.”

“They came on this afternoon, after the electricity. I called Hummel’s and Vera said you had gone. She sounded more pleasant to me than I’ve ever heard her over the phone.”

“What did Appleton say?” my father asked, crossing the room and looking down at my globe of the Earth. “He said the X-rays showed nothing.”

“Huh? Is that what he said? Do you think he’s lying,

Cassie?”

“You know he never lies. Your X-rays are clear. He said it’s all in your nerves; he thinks you have a mild case of, now I forget-I wrote it down.” My mother passed to the telephone and read from a slip of paper she had left on top of the directory, “Mutinous colitis. We had a nice talk; but Doc sounds older.”

Abruptly I felt exhausted, empty; still in my jacket, I sat down on the sofa and leaned back into its cushions. It seemed imperative to do this. The dog rested her head on my lap and wriggled her ice-cold nose into place beneath my hand. Her fur felt stuffed fluffy with chill outdoor air. My parents looked enormous and dramatic above me.

My father turned, his great face tense, as if refusing to undo the last clamp on hope. “Is that what he said?”

“He did think, though, you need a rest. He thinks teaching is a strain for you and wondered if there was something else you could do.”

“Huh? Hell, it’s all I’m good for, Cassie. It’s my one talent I can’t quit.”

“Well, that’s what he and I thought you’d say.”

“Do you think he can read X-rays, Cassie? Do you think the old bluffer knows what he’s talking about?”

I had closed my eyes by way of giving thanks. Now a large cool dry hand came and cupped itself over my forehead. My mother’s voice said, “George. What have you done with this child? He has a roaring fever.”

Muffled somewhat by the wooden wall of the staircase, my grandfather’s voice called down to us, “Pleasant dreams.” My father strode across the vibrating kitchen floor and called up the stairs after him, “Don’t be sore about the Sun,

Pop. I’ll get you one tomorrow. Nothing’ll happen until then, I promise you. The Russians are still in Moscow and Truman’s still king.”

My mother asked me, “How long has this been?”

“I don’t know,” I told her. “I’ve felt sort of weak and un real all afternoon.”

“Do you want some soup?”

“Maybe a little, not much. Isn’t it a relief about Daddy? His not having cancer.”

“Yes,” she said. “Now he’ll have to think up some new way of getting sympathy.” A quick bitter frown came and went in the soothing oval of her face.

I tried to get back into the little intricate world my mother and I had made, where my father was a fond strange joke, by agreeing, “He is good at that. Maybe that’s his talent.”

He came back into the room and announced to us, “Boy, that man has a temper! He is really and truly sore about my not bringing home a newspaper. He’s a powerhouse, Cassie; at his age I’ll be dead for twenty years.”

Though I was too dizzy and sleepy for calculations, this sounded like an upward revision in his expectations.

My parents fed me and put me to bed and took a blanket off their own bed so I would be warm. My teeth had begun to chatter and I made no attempt to repress this odd skeletal vibration, which both released swarms of chill spirits within me and brought down from my mother warm helpless fluttery gusts of concern. My father stood by kneading his knuckles.

“Poor kid he’s too ambitious,” he moaned aloud.

“My little sunbeam,” my mother seemed to say.

To the tune of their retreating voices I fell asleep. My dreams did not embody them or Penny or Mrs. Hummel or Mr. Zimmerman or Deifendorf or Minor Kretz or Mr. Phillips but seemed to take place in a sluggish whirling world that preceded them all and where only my grandmother’s face, flashing by on the periphery with the startled fearful expression with which she used to call me down from a tree I was climbing, kept me company in the shifting rootless flux of unidentifiable things. My own voice seemed throughout to be raised in protest and when I awoke, with an urgent need to urinate, my parents’ voices below me seemed a grappling extension of my own. Morning light the tone of lemon filled the frame of my window. I remembered that in the middle of the night I had almost surfaced from my exitless nightmare at the touch of hands on my face and the sound of my father’s voice in a corner of my room saying, “Poor kid, I wish I could give him my mulish body.”

Now he was saying downstairs in the high strained pitch he used like a whip on my mother, “I tell you, Cassie, I have it licked. Kill or be killed, that’s my motto. Those bastards don’t give me any quarter and I don’t give them any.”

“Well that’s certainly a very poor attitude for a teacher to have. No wonder your insides are all mixed up.”

“It’s the only attitude, Cassie. Any other attitude is suicide. If I can just hang in there for ten more years, I’ll get my twenty-five years’ pension and have it licked. If Zimmerman and that Herzog bitch don’t have me canned, that is.”

“Because you saw her come out of a door? George, why do you exaggerate so? To drive us all wild? What good will it do you when we are wild?”

“I’m not exaggerating, Cassie. She knows I know and Zimmerman knows I know she knows.”

“It must be terrible to know so much.” A pause. “It is,” my father said. “It’s hell.” Another pause. “I think the doctor’s right,” my mother said. “You should quit.”

“Don’t be a femme, Cassie. That’s just Doc Appleton baloney, he has to say something. What else could I do? I’m an unemployable.”

“Couldn’t you quit and, if you can’t find other work, farm this place with me?” Her voice had become shy and girlishly small; my throat contracted with grief for her. “It’s a good farm,” she said. “We could do like my parents, they were happy before they left this place. Weren’t you, Pop?”

My grandfather did not answer. My mother hurried nervous little jokes into the gap. “Work with your hands, George. Get close to Nature. It would make a whole man of you.”

My father’s voice in turn had become grave. “Cassie, I want to be frank with you, because you’re my wife. I hate Nature. It reminds me of death. All Nature means to me is garbage and confusion and the stink of skunk-brroo!”

“Nature,” my grandfather pronounced in his stately way, after clearing his throat vehemently, “is like a mother; she com-forts and chas-tises with the same hand.”

An invisible membranous tension spread through the house and I knew that my mother had begun to cry. Her tears were half my own yet I was glad she had been defeated, for the thought of my father as farmer frightened me. It would sink me too into the soil.

They had left a potty by the bed and, kneeling humbly, I used it. Only the medallions of my wallpaper watched. Like a flayed hide stiff with blood my red shirt lay crumpled on the floor against the baseboard. The action of getting out of bed threw into relief my condition. I was weak-legged and headachy and my throat felt glazed with dry glass. But my nose had begun to-run and I could scrape together a small cough. As I resettled myself in bed I relaxed into the comfortable foreknowledge of the familiar cycle of a cold: the loosening cough, the clogging nose, the subsiding fever, the sure three days in bed. It was during these convalescences that my future seemed closest to me, that the thought of painting excited me most and sprang the most hopeful conceptions. Lying in bed sick I marshaled vast phantoms of pigment, and the world seemed to exist as the occasion of my dreams.

My father had heard me get out of bed and he came up stairs. He was dressed in his too-short coat and his imbecile knit cap. He was ready to go, and today my sleepiness wouldn’t hold him back. His face wore a gaiety. “How is it, kid? Boy, I gave you a rough three days.”

“It wasn’t your fault. I’m glad it worked out.”

“Huh? You mean about the X-rays? Yeah, I’ve always been lucky. God takes care of you if you let Him.”

“Are you sure there’s school today?”

“Yep, the radio says they’re all ready to go. The monsters are ready to learn.”

“Hey. Daddy.”

“Huh?”

“If you want to quit or take a sabbatical or something, don’t not do it on my account.”

“Don’t you worry about that. Don’t you worry about your old man, you got enough on your mind. I never made a decision in my life that wasn’t one hundred per cent selfish.”

I turned my face away and looked through the window. In time my father appeared in this window, an erect figure dark against the snow. His posture made no concession to the pull underfoot; upright he waded out through our yard and past the mailbox and up the hill until he was lost to my sight behind the trees of our orchard. The trees took white on their sun side. The two telephone wires diagonally cut the blank blue of the sky. The stone bare wall was a scumble of umber; my father’s footsteps thumbs of white in white. I knew what this scene was-a patch of Pennsylvania in 1947-and yet I did not know, was in my softly fevered state mindlessly soaked in a rectangle of colored light. I burned to paint it, just like that, in its puzzle of glory; it came upon me that I must go to Nature disarmed of perspective and stretch myself like a large transparent canvas upon her in the hope that, my submission being perfect, the imprint of a beautiful and useful truth would be taken.

Then-as if by permitting this inchoate excitement to pass through me I had done an honest piece of work-I went weary and closed my eyes and nearly dozed, so that when my mother brought up my orange juice and cereal I ate with an unready mouth.