Trailerpark

God’s Country

THE REAL ESTATE MAN HAROLD DAME was dying. Doctor Wickshaw gave him one month to six, and when he explained what few remaining services there were available for the real estate man, whether they kept him in the hospital or put him in a nursing home, and the costs of those services, the real estate man’s son and daughter-in-law, who had been running the business alone for nearly a year anyhow, decided to bring him home, to install him in his bedroom on the second floor and to hire a nurse to take care of him for the one month to six he had left. She could administer the drugs he required, she could clean and feed him and take care of his bedding, she could watch after his dying, and when he was dead, she could leave.

Decisions like this are hard, the son of the real estate man explained to his wife, who had reservations about having the old man in the house for one to six months, a living corpse, practically (though out of respect for her husband’s feelings she did not exactly put it that way), a total invalid drugged against pain, helpless and dependent as a newborn infant and daily becoming more so, shrinking into himself, unable to speak coherently or even to recognize who was in the room — it probably meant they wouldn’t be able to go to Florida for the month of January the way they’d planned.

Nonsense, the husband assured her, unless of course the old man happened to die during that particular month, in which case there would be the funeral to take care of, but they could fly back for that, if necessary. All they had to do was be sure that the nurse they hired was honest, competent and pleasant to be around, for after all, they themselves would have to be around her for one to six months, not counting the month of January, when they would be in Florida. The wife wondered if the nurse would have to eat with them. Of course not. She could take the room next to the old man’s, and she could eat there. The son and daughter-in-law would continue living downstairs in their wing of the house, where they had lived ever since the son had been brought into the business, and they would practically never see the woman.

There are several ways to go about hiring a private nurse to provide this kind of care, but when you live in a small town in a rural state like New Hampshire, probably the easiest way is to let your physician take care of it. Harold Dame’s son and daughter-in-law were busy people, especially with the old man so sick and for the last year unable to run the business the way he used to, so they had explained at great length to Doctor Wickshaw, an intelligent and tactful man, precisely what kind of woman they were looking for, and he had proceeded to find them just such a woman.

Doctor Wickshaw was what you might call an artistic man, in that he was the president of the Catamount Drama Club, the coordinator for the annual Suncook Valley Arts Festival, and owned a large collection of works by contemporary New Hampshire painters and sculptors. His wife was a potter and wore smocks and sandals and large gold hoops in her pierced ears. He had a white Vandyke beard, a rosy complexion, and the kind of round belly on a slender body that a man who enjoys exotic food and interesting wine often wears. He was good-natured, affluent (for he had been the only physician in town for over twenty-five years and had invested heavily and wisely in real estate), and somewhat eccentric. In the summer months he frequently wore Bermuda shorts and shortsleeved shirts to the office.

For over a year, he had been looking for a nurse who could double as a receptionist, and he had interviewed and rejected every local person even remotely qualified for the job and then had advertised in Concord, twenty-five miles away, and after interviewing and rejecting the few applicants who had come out from Concord, he had nearly given up the search. Very few people who have qualifications for such specialized work as nursing are willing to live in a small mill town like Catamount, a town that has been dying for a half-century, a town where the poor are not only always with you but where annually they seem to increase in geometric proportion to the rich. The old buildings, designed and constructed when labor was cheap and materials plentiful, grow older and shabbier and eventually fall, to be replaced by asphalt lots or else by corrugated iron, sheet metal and plastic structures whose function, regardless of the name of the building or the owner, seems to be strictly that of temporary storage. It occurred to Doctor Wickshaw, however, that if somehow a nurse could be lured to this town and could be made to stay for several seasons, she would discover, as he himself had discovered years ago, that it offered numerous advantages and pleasures not obtainable in the cities and attractive suburbs to the south. There was the beauty of the landscape, the lakes and forests, the rivers and mountains, the flowers and wildlife; there was the comfort of living among people whose names and family histories you knew, people who would come to your aid when you needed it and who would leave you alone when you desired it; there was the security of living in a community that still honored the old-fashioned virtues of thrift, honesty, independence and respect for the independence of one’s neighbors, love of God, love of country, and love of family.

“There has got to be someone left in the world who has a decent education and still cares for this kind of life,” the doctor told his wife.

She agreed, but all she’d seen lately of people with educations and options who happened to opt for living “up here among the savages,” as she put it, were hippies and real estate developers. Everyone else, she reminded him, if it’s possible, leaves.

“We haven’t left,” Doctor Wickshaw proudly announced.

“No,” she said. “We haven’t.”

Along about the time the doctor no longer felt able to hold this type of conversation with his wife — due to his failure to find a nurse willing to come out here to Catamount and work for little more than half of what she could make in Concord or down in Manchester, New Hampshire — the son and daughter-in-law of Harold Dame, the real estate man, had come to him and asked him to locate and hire for them a private nurse for the old man’s final one to six months. They were willing to pay whatever it cost — for they already knew how much it would cost to keep the old man in the hospital or in a nursing home, and there wasn’t a private nurse in the world who would charge them that much.

The doctor pondered a moment and informed them that he probably could get someone to come out of Boston, thanks to certain collegial connections he maintained there, and if they wished, he would do all the interviewing and hiring himself, for after all, who knew the medical and personal needs of Harold Dame better than he, Sam Wickshaw, his personal physician and his old friend and hunting companion of days gone by?

The son and daughter-in-law were relieved and went quickly on to their scheduled meeting with a surveyor out at Suncook Pond. The doctor picked up his phone and dialed Doctor Furman Bisher in Brookline, Massachusetts, a heart specialist with a summer home on Lake Winnepesaukee, and that is how Harold Dame, the real estate man, came to be cared for in his dying months by Carol Constant, a twenty-eight-year-old, recently divorced black woman from West Roxbury, Massachusetts, an unemployed nurse trying to return to the profession she had left three years ago to marry a man and care for his sick and aged mother. The mother had died, the man had gone to New York with a girl who wrote for TV, and Carol, after filing for divorce, had started looking for work. One of the physicians who had interviewed her, since many of his patients were black professional people and he was therefore in the market for a black nurse, was Doctor Furman Bisher. He had declined to hire her because Carol was not, to his eyes, an especially pretty woman. She was extremely dark, with a broad flat nose and liquid brown eyes. Her hair she kept cropped close to her head, almost like a skullcap. Also, she was a large woman, well muscled and tall, almost masculine, a little frightening to a man like Doctor Furman Bisher. But he had admired her obvious intelligence, and her credentials were impeccable, and she seemed to be an extremely pleasant woman, good-natured and kind, so he had not hesitated to recommend her to his New Hampshire colleague. “She’s a black woman,” he warned Doctor Wickshaw, “but she’s sensible. She needs a long-term private job like this to build up her file, which frankly was a little thin for me to take her on here. But she ought to be perfect for your needs up there in the boondocks,” he joked.

When Carol was first led into Harold Dame’s room on the fourth floor of the Concord Hospital, she knew immediately that he could not see her, and she was relieved. Doctor Wickshaw had met her at the bus station downtown, and he had stared at her whenever he thought she wasn’t looking, and at the hospital the receptionists, nurses and orderlies, even the elevator operator, had noticeably marked her presence as a foreign presence, and she had started to worry about her clothing, her shoes, her handbag — they were wrong, loud, shabby, large. Of course, she knew what the real problem was, and she knew too that it was not a problem as such, the way loud or shabby clothing was a problem, that is, as something that could be solved. No, this was a fact, a condition. She had not seen a human face that was not gray or pink or peach-colored since the moment she had boarded the bus in Park Square in Boston. All right, then. It was a condition, a working condition, and she would endure it. She had known it would be this way. She was no fool, and she knew her geography; she also knew herself and knew that to live and work wholly among white people would continually embarrass her, which in turn would anger her. Beyond that, she knew her anger would end up defeating her true purposes here, and, therefore, to avoid being angry, she would have to accept being embarrassed.

The nearly dead man in the hospital bed relieved her of her embarrassment, however, and for a moment she forgot the portly, red-faced doctor with the ostentatiously pointed beard, and the blond, square-faced head nurse who had imperiously demanded to know her business with the patient, requiring the doctor to explain elaborately that she was being considered for a position as Mr. Dame’s private nurse. The shrunken, ash-gray man lay inertly beneath the sheet, a short, narrow mound encircled by tubes and chrome-plated armatures. His wrinkled lids closed over bulbous eyes like onion skins, and his small, open, toothless mouth was sharp-edged and dark, like a hole punched in dry ground.

“He’s sleeping,” Doctor Wickshaw mumbled, as he flipped open Harold Dame’s file, perused it momentarily, and then passed it on to Carol. “His heart and lungs are strong,” he said smiling. “So unless he catches pneumonia, he could last six or seven months. Of course, he may go tomorrow, too. The surgeon’s report is right there,” he said, pointing over her shoulder to a faded, photocopied sheet with scribbling across it.

Carol read the file slowly, page by page — notes by the attending physician, Doctor Samuel F. Wickshaw, notes from the half-dozen laboratories consulted, notes from the surgeon who had done the exploratory, notes from the anesthesiologist, remarks and observations from the nutritionist, instructions from Doctor Wickshaw to the square-faced head nurse, and on down the line — so that, by the time she had finished reading, she had imagined a body for this man lying in front of her, an old, diseased, misused but still somehow stubbornly sturdy body. Yes, she decided, she could administer to that body the few services it would require until it expired. They weren’t technically difficult to administer, and the man would not interfere much, she knew, for he would be conscious only intermittently, and less so with each passing week. And the pay — they had discussed it on the telephone, she and the Doctor, and had agreed on a figure that was almost the same as she would have received in Boston — was satisfactory. She asked a few questions about the son and daughter-in-law, learned that they were working people who would be living in the house but in a separate wing of the house, that in fact they would be away much of the time and would most definitely not interfere with her whatsoever, and agreed to take the job.

“Excellent!” Doctor Wickshaw exclaimed. He moved closer, his cheeks reddening with pleasure. “I’m sure you’re going to enjoy it up here.”

“I am?” She took a backward step toward the man in the bed.

“Yes, the fall! It’s beautiful in the fall! The leaves! Look!” he said, pointing out the window.

Carol turned and looked out the large window to the hospital grounds below, and then beyond the grounds to the rippling, tree-covered hills spreading away to the west, a thick carpet of orange, yellow and red all the way to the horizon. It was late afternoon, and the sunlight touched the treetops and brought the colors forward as if on an outstretched hand.

“People drive hundreds of miles just to see these colors,” he said in a reverent voice. “And all we have to do is look out our windows. Isn’t it something?”

“Yes. Yes, it is something.”

He took a step back. “Well, now, let’s get ol’ Harold out of here and back in Catamount where he belongs, eh? The Dame place is lovely,” he assured her. “Up high, a lovely view of the lake, that’s Skitter Lake, and even a view of the White Mountains on clear days. You’re going to love it!” he promised.

For the first two days and nights at the house it rained, a cold, raw, wind-blown rain, and when it cleared, most of the leaves had been driven from the trees and lay wetly on the ground, heavy and faded to dull shades of brown and yellow. The trees were now skeletal, black and boney and nervous-looking. That first afternoon, Carol had met Harold Dame’s son and daughter-in-law, and they had approved of her, but she hadn’t seen them since, though several times during those first days she heard them come and go, returning from the office in downtown Catamount for food and sleep. They did not check in on the old man, she knew, for her room connected to his through a bathroom and she slept with both doors open.

Doctor Wickshaw telephoned several times a day and once again every evening. “To see how the patient’s doing,” he said cheerfully. When she reported no change, he said, “Fine, fine,” and then went on to ask her how she liked it up here in God’s country.

“It’s very pretty,” she said.

“Yes, well, you’ve only seen a corner of it so far. I’ll have to give you the guided tour some afternoon soon. No reason why you can’t take off a few hours and have a look at some of our natural wonders, the lake, the Catamount River, the old Indian fishing weirs. The town is quite pretty, too,” he told her. “The mill pond and the falls, several interesting old historical buildings, the park. A big difference from the city life,” he told her.

“Yes.”

“Safe! People leave their doors unlocked up here. ’Course, you better stay out of the woods in hunting season,” he joked.

“Really? When’s that?” From where she stood in her bedroom, she could see through the bathroom to Harold Dame’s room. He was awake, blinking slowly, like a turtle. Near his chin his emaciated hands clutched the top sheet, as if he were trying to protect himself with it or were ashamed of what lay beneath and were trying to hide it from the rest of the world. Slowly he turned his face toward her, seeking the source of her voice.

“I’m sorry, Doctor,” she interrupted, “but Mr. Dame’s awake.”

“Fine, fine, of course. Good girl,” he said cheerfully. “And say, call me Sam, will you? Everyone in town does. Save that ‘Doctor’ business for the stuffed shirts down south. Okay?”

“Okay.” She said good-bye and hung up, then walked quickly to her patient. Drawing up her chair, she sat next to the old man and gave him some water.

Taking care with his trembling mouth to use the plastic straw correctly, he studied the woman’s large face for a few seconds, then seemed confused and withdrew his gaze, leaving her alone again.

Gently, she stroked his narrow forehead and pushed his lank, white hair back. His eyes, watery and pale blue, closed, and then he was asleep.

The next afternoon, a Sunday, Doctor Wickshaw arrived bearing a portable television set for Carol and immense good cheer. It was a bright, warm day, and the son and daughter-in-law were home, downstairs in the living room reading the Sunday papers and watching a football game on the large color TV. They had come upstairs that morning around nine, had taken a minute to study the old man in Carol’s silent presence, and had asked her if she wanted to go to church. She said no, thanks, and with clear relief, they returned to their quarters.

Doctor Wickshaw, too, made a brief show of examining the patient, albeit with more precision than the old man’s survivors had. He listened to his heart, took his blood pressure, studied Carol’s notes on the man’s temperature, medication, bodily functions, and so on. Then, clamping shut his black leather bag, he placed it at the foot of the bed, sighed and observed that it wouldn’t hurt the old man if she took off for a few hours. “They’ll be here all afternoon,” he said, indicating with a nod toward the door the couple downstairs. “You must want a break.” He was wearing a brown corduroy shooting jacket with tan leather patches at the elbows and over his right shoulder, green twill trousers and a tattersall shirt. His short, white hair and beard bristled like antennae, and he rubbed his hands together happily.

Carol thanked him for the use of the television set and said no, she’d be just as happy to stay here at the house. She might take a walk later. “You’ve already been plenty kind to me.”

“No, no, you’re coming with me,” he said. “You need a break at least once a week or you’ll get wacky out here with no one but ol’ Harold for company.” He grinned, showing her his excellent teeth. “C’mon, now, go in there and change into some civilian clothes,” he said, pointing with his bearded chin toward her white uniform, “and I’ll wait for you outside. It’s a gorgeous day!” he exclaimed, darting a look out the window.

“All right.”

“That’s a good girl.” He left, and she turned, glancing as she departed from the room at the body of the old man in the bed. He was awake, blinking his watery eyes and looking at the space in the room she had just filled. He had a puzzled expression on his gray face, as if he were wondering where she had gone.

She turned away from him, and when she went into her own bedroom, she closed the door.

Doctor Wickshaw, or “Sam,” as he insisted on being called, talked steadily throughout the tour. He drove his huge, maroon Buick rapidly, nervously, waving his arms and pointing right and left at hills, trees and water as they passed Skitter Lake glistening in the sunlight and choppy in the breeze. They stopped for a minute at the Granite State Trailerpark so he could show her the remains of the old Indian fishing weirs, cruised through the center of town, with Sam enumerating, as they passed them, the several churches, the fire station, the police station, the town hall, the Hawthorne House, where, he told her, they often had first-class country and western bands playing, then stopped for a few moments at the park to watch a gang of teen-agers drink beer at a picnic table. On High Street, when they passed a large, white, Victorian house with a sign outside that said, SAMUEL F. WICKSHAW, M.D., the doctor slowed his car almost to a stop. Half the yard had been paved for cars, and the barn attached to the house in back had been converted into an office.

“I could run a clinic from that building,” Sam said in a tone that was almost wistful.

“Why don’t you?” Carol asked. It wasn’t difficult to admire the meticulous, white buildings, the white picket fence that ran along the front, the carefully tended flower gardens covered with wood chips and awaiting the arrival of winter. Evergreen shrubs along the front of the house had been covered with burlap, and she could see on the side porch several neatly stacked cords of fireplace wood.

“Can’t get the help.”

“Really?”

“Would you believe that the woman who’s been my nurse and receptionist for over a year now was trained as a dietician? Bless her, but she’s fifty-nine and can’t do much more than open a can of Band-Aids for me.” He sighed and drove thoughtfully on.

Back at the house, he pulled into the circular drive and parked. Carol reached for the door, but Sam turned toward her, and slinging his right arm over the seat back, he grabbed on to her shoulder with his hand. “Wait,” he said, suddenly serious.

His hand against her dark blue wool sweater was pink and blotched with liver spots, and his nails were white and carefully trimmed. She looked at the hand with curiosity, as if a leaf had unexpectedly fallen from a tree and landed there.

“I like you, Carol.” He cleared his throat. “You’re a fine nurse, and I like you as a person.”

“Thank you, Doctor.”

“Sam.”

“Yes. Sam.” With her right hand, she pulled the latch, and the heavy door of the Buick swung open.

“Well,” he said, smiling broadly again and releasing her shoulder. “I just wanted you to know you’re among friends up here in God’s country.”

“Yes. That’s … that’s nice of you.” She stepped free of the car and closed the door solidly, walked around in front of the car and gave a little wave good-bye.

He rolled down his window and called to her. “Carol. We’ll talk some more. Eh?”

“All right,” she said, her voice rising. “And thank you.”

He waved, closed his window, and drove swiftly off. For a moment she stood by the front door of the house watching him. A crow called harshly from the open field behind the house, and she could hear the afternoon breeze push through a stand of tall pines by the road. Then she opened the door and went quickly upstairs to her room.

Hurriedly, she shed her wool skirt, sweater and blouse and went to the closet and brought out her uniform, when, as if remembering something, she turned, padded barefoot across to the door that led to the bathroom and the room beyond, and opened it. She stood there in the doorway, holding her white uniform over one forearm, and looked at the man in the bed. His chest rose and fell slowly. His eyes were closed, and his mouth lay dry and open, his face slack as if being drawn by a great weight into the pillow. His gray hands twitched erratically above the sheet, his palms facing the ceiling, and he seemed to be pushing at a great, smothering blanket in his dreams.

November arrived, and with it the deer-hunting season, and all day long Carol heard gunfire coming from the woods behind the house. She could look out the window of her room and see miles of forest, leafless oak and maple trees, and along the ridges in the distance, blue spruce and balsam. Now and then she saw a red-suited figure with a rifle emerge from the woods and cross the brown field toward her and disappear at the side of the house. It had once been a farmhouse, with barns and outbuildings, but no longer. Modern plumbing and heating systems, picture windows, a pine-paneled recreation room and a large, renovated kitchen with a breakfast nook and gleaming new appliances had eliminated from the interior of the house all traces of the families that had owned the house before Harold Dame. It sat on a rise of land two miles west of town. Looking east, you could see the spires of the churches and here and there among the trees shining bits of the mill pond and, a ways farther, the lake. Spotted in the distance on the hills and ridges were houses and barns, old farms, most of them no longer farms but the renovated residences of people who made their livings in town from selling insurance, real estate, automobiles, snowmobiles and housetrailers to their neighbors and each other.

Though the weeks passed, Carol’s relations with her employers remained the same — precisely distant, perfunctory, and utterly routine. They entered the kitchen in the morning immediately after she had left it and a half-hour later departed for their office in town, returning in the evening to prepare their dinner, which they ate in the recreation room in front of the television set. On some nights they went out for several hours, but most nights they remained at home retiring to their bedroom downstairs early. She became deeply familiar with the noises of their routines, as if the couple were performing them in front of her. When she heard a toilet flush, she knew which of the two had flushed it; when she heard the shower, she knew who was bathing; when late at night she heard the refrigerator door open and after a few seconds close, she knew who had wanted a midnight snack. Once a day now, usually at dinnertime, they entered the old man’s room and asked about his condition. She answered their simple questions briefly and in general terms, which she knew was how they wanted her to answer them, and then, satisfied, they disappeared again. The son, Ed Dame, was in his mid-thirties, thick-bodied and short, several inches shorter, in fact, than Carol, with thinning, reddish hair that he combed carefully sideways to cover his receding hairline. His nose was hooked and short, like his father’s, but his face was fleshy, freckled, and anxious. The daughter-in-law, Sue, also short and anxious-looking, was muscular and tight-bodied. Her dark hair she curled nightly in blue plastic rollers, Carol knew, for one night she had accidentally come upon her in the kitchen. Carol had come downstairs hungry, around one in the morning after the late movie, had walked into the darkened room and discovered Sue already at the refrigerator, bent over and poking through its bright, crowded interior. She was wearing a pale blue dressing gown, large puffy slippers, and several dozen blue plastic hair curlers.

Startled, Sue jumped back, and the refrigerator door closed, leaving the room in darkness. For several seconds the two women stood silently in total darkness. Then Sue opened the refrigerator door again, casting a wide beam of light over the floor, and said in an even voice, “I’ll be out in a moment.”

“I’m sorry,” Carol said, and quickly went back upstairs.

The old man’s condition had not changed for the first few weeks, but around midmonth, as the weather grew colder and day after day was overcast, windy, with scattered flecks of snow spitting from the low sky, he seemed to weaken somewhat. He woke from his sleep less frequently, and when he woke he simply gazed at the ceiling for a few moments and then drifted away again. There was an IV set up for him, now, with plastic tubes leading away from his body as well. Carol performed her duties carefully, mechanically, gracefully, as if the only sentient being in the room were she, but every now and then she would catch herself standing at the foot of the old man’s bed staring at his withered, expressionless face. It was practically the face of a mummy now, a face long vacated, and yet she stared at it as if waiting for a response to her presence. But none came.

Sam Wickshaw telephoned daily, at first strictly on the pretext of checking on the condition of his patient, his old friend and hunting companion, Harold Dame, but then, after a few weeks, it seemed he called to report on his own day’s activities. He described the patients he had seen that day, whether at his office in town or at the hospital in Concord, where he made early morning rounds; he referred to several real estate deals he was involved with, described his difficulties winterizing his summer cottage at Lake Winnepesaukee (mentioning his friend, and hers, Doctor Furman Bisher from Brookline, Massachusetts), and told her with great pleasure that he had bought a snowmobile, despite his wife’s objections; and in late November, four days before Thanksgiving, he described to her in great detail how, that very morning, he had shot and killed an eight-point, one-hundred-fifty-pound deer. “It was up behind Shackford Corners, a few miles from where you are,” he told her. “I was up on a ledge, a whole lot of larch trees around me, and all of a sudden, there he was, big as life, down below me tiptoeing through a grove of young ash trees. I gut-shot him, and he took off. Actually, even though I was above him a ways, I had a lousy shot,” he explained. “Anyhow, luckily he cut around to my right, and when I came off the ledge, there he was again, so I got a second shot at him, and that time, he went down for good!”

They talked. She explained how she herself didn’t like hunting or guns, but she didn’t judge those who did, and he said he sure was glad of that. Sometimes he asked her questions about herself, her family, her ex-husband, her ambitions, and she answered his questions. Not in detail, however, but briefly and, as much as possible, in general terms, which she knew was how he wanted her to answer them.

Once a week, he drove out to the house and examined the patient. The examination usually took less than five minutes, but his visits took most of the afternoon, for the two of them talked, Sam doing most of the talking. Sometimes they walked down the road a ways or drove to a particularly scenic spot that Sam wanted to reveal to her. And inevitably, when they returned in his car to the house, Sam turned somber and tried for a moment to tell Carol how much and in what ways he liked her. Each time, Carol was able to ease out of the conversation without doing more than frustrating the man, so that, with a wave and a cheery remark, he could pretend to himself that he had never said anything that could be misconstrued as inappropriate.

There was a Sunday, however, when it did not go so smoothly. Carol had slipped out of the car, crossed in front of it and waved good-bye, and this time he had stepped out also.

“Wait a moment,” he said seriously.

She stopped and stood before him, the same height as he but a larger person with a larger face, so that next to her he seemed suddenly fragile.

“Carol, I want to suggest something to you.”

She smiled and reached out with one hand and patted his shoulder. “I know you like me as a person, Sam. I like you, too. Let’s keep it that way,” she said.

“No, no, no, that’s not what I meant. What I mean is, I … ah… I’d like for you to work for me. I’d like you to stay up here, after Harold … after Harold is gone, and work for me. I like you … oh, hell, I know how that sounds. But I want you to work for me.”

Carol said nothing. She studied the man’s earnest, red face, as if searching for a lie.

“Well, you think about it,” he blurted. “You think about it.” He got back into the car and closed the door. Then he cranked down the window. “You think about it,” he said. He started the motor, dropped the car into gear and drove swiftly away, exhaust fumes trailing behind.

The night before Thanksgiving, Harold Dame the real estate man died. At ten-thirty, Carol walked from her room to the old man’s room, and as soon as she crossed the threshold, she knew he was dead. She had learned to hear his breathing without having to listen for it, so that when his breathing ceased, she knew. In the darkness, she reached forward and felt at his neck for his pulse, then turned and went back to her own room. She was in her nightgown, ready for sleep, with her bed already turned down. The portable television Sam had brought her was still on, and blue-gray figures flickered incoherently in front of her, as she sat down on the bed and picked up the telephone. She held the receiver in her lap for a moment and stared at the television screen. Finally, she dialed, and when Sam answered, she told him. “Harold died, Sam.”

“Well. When, Carol?”

“In the last half-hour. I just went in to check him.” Her voice was flat and without expression.

“Well. Are you all right?”

“I’m all right.”

“What about Ed and Sue? Do they know?”

“No.”

“Okay, then. I’ll be right out there. I’ll handle everything, Carol, don’t worry.”

“I’m not worried,” she said.

“Listen, Carol, why don’t you come in here tonight, stay here with us. I’ll bring you back in with me. We have plenty of extra room,” he said. “Maybe you’d like to have Thanksgiving dinner with us tomorrow,” he said in a thin voice, as if talking to someone whose mind were already made up.

“All right. Thank you, Sam.”

“You will? Wonderful! I’ll be there in five minutes!”

She said good-bye and hung up. Then she rose from the bed and switched off the television, crossed the room and sat by the window, peering into the cold, familiar, New Hampshire darkness.