by Bret Lott
It’s smaller, of course, than the house, which I sold off right after Boyce died, because it was what seemed the right thing to do: streamline. The kids—Roger; his older brother, Dean; and Linda, the firstborn—had all moved out years before, though after Linda got divorced she moved back home with Kevin and Sasha in tow, her two boys, my grandsons, her job at the accounting firm in Orlando nowheres near enough to let her live on her own. That lasted three years, until she met up with Jack, married him, and moved out on us.
Then, of course, Boyce died, and here was this empty house we’d bought for $28,000 in 1974, and which I could sell for $150,000—$112,000, once the real-estate agent and the balance on the mortgage was paid off—and no more worrying over cleaning a house growing bigger and more empty each year, Boyce and I living in only the same three rooms: kitchen, living room, bedroom. After he died there was then the yard and the pool for me to worry over. So it seemed the right thing to do. After I’d paid Uncle Sam off I just split the money four ways, a quarter to each of us.
Then I moved to the apartment, a good half hour closer to the office. And there’s that pool I don’t have to pay some kid to clean or do it myself.
Streamlining.
But the kids—see, the kids thought what I’m sure everybody thought and still thinks today, two years later, that all of this streamlining was how I wasn’t dealing with the center of things: Boyce, his passing on. But they’re wrong, and I can prove it.
Because there’s these moments, like this one right here at O’Hare, when all of it sweeps back over me, and I’ll see some small thing like a traveler tired as I am of traveling wherever it is he’s traveled, and I’ll see he looks like my son, believe it for a minute or two, then let track back into me that truth of how Boyce used to stand and let me have it, give to me whatever words he’d planned to give.
And here he’ll be.
FINALLY, BECAUSE HE WANTED WHAT HAD HAPPENED BETWEEN them finished, he said, “I love you.”
“Now you tell me,” she said. She stood at the window, holding herself.
He was silent a moment, then said, “Well, yes. Now.”
The room was dark save for the pale silver mist cast by the moon. Neither had thought to turn on any of the lights in her apartment.
“It only occurs to you now to tell me you love me.” She stood in profile to him, holding herself, her eyes, as best he could tell, looking out the window. It was a second-story apartment, and he could see out the window the small parking lot behind the complex.
She still hadn’t put any clothes on, and he saw how the light from the moon shone on her, illuminated her face and breasts and abdomen and arms. The rest of her was lost to the darkness of the room, this woman an apparition, floating in the dark and light of a bedroom.
But he could see enough. He saw in the way she held herself the damage he had already done, saw in the slope of her shoulders the weight he’d placed there. And he saw in this damage and weight his way out.
“It occurred to me to say that before,” he said. He’d gotten his underwear on and his shirt, though he still hadn’t buttoned it. “But I’m saying it now. I love you.”
He stood from where he sat at the foot of the bed, started in on the buttons there in the dark, and as he stood he caught sight of himself in the dresser mirror against the wall across from him.
He turned quickly to look behind him, startled at the glimpse of a dark and ill-defined man in the darkness of the room. For an instant he believed there was a third person here, someone lurking and listening to all that had taken place this evening; but when he saw nothing behind him, he knew in the next instant that in fact it had only been his reflection. He felt his face flush, felt his neck go hot with the knowledge he’d been fooled so easily.
She turned to him. She said, “What? What’s wrong?”
“Nothing,” he said. “Nothing.”
He let his hands go from the work of buttoning his shirt, went to her there at the window. She was facing him, her back to the window, so that she was a silhouette to him, a faceless woman who stood holding herself against the dark and the moonlight.
He put his arms around her, held her close. He smelled her hair, closed his eyes.
He said, “I just love you.”
Still she held herself, and he felt her turning in his arms, turning so that now he held her from behind, his arms holding her arms holding herself, the two of them facing the window.
He opened his eyes, saw out the window what she’d been watching: the parking lot, a few cars scattered across it. He saw his car down there, saw hers. He saw the wooden fence at the back of the lot, beyond it the rear of a grocery store, the loading dock there, everything lit with the moon.
“Look,” she said, and he saw her hand go to the window, saw her point down and to the right.
Two people were walking away from the apartment building, a man and a woman. They were holding hands, he could see.
The two people walked toward a car at the far end of the lot, an old station wagon parked backwards in the slot, the rear bumper almost touching the fence between the lot and the loading dock.
“I said I love you,” he said, and heard in his calculated words the finality of event, the end of things as he wanted them to end.
The couple reached the station wagon, stopped. He saw in the moonlight the woman look up at the man, saw the two of them lean together, saw them kiss.
It was a small kiss, not much more than a peck, he believed, but because it was so brief the kiss seemed to carry with it all the more value, carried with it, he thought, love.
“That’s us,” she said, and paused. She seemed to take in a breath, seemed to stiffen in his arms. “That’s us,” she said again, this time in a whisper, “if we were somebody else.”
The two people separated then. The man went to the driver’s side, the woman to the passenger’s. They opened their doors at the same moment, the dome light inside cutting on, a dull yellow light that filled the inside of the car.
They climbed in, and he saw their faces, saw they were smiling. For a moment he thought he recognized them. He thought he knew these people, their faces almost familiar.
Then he knew them, and knew the truth of what she’d spoken a moment before, words uttered by this apparition in his arms, a woman bathed in the silver mist of the moon.
It was, in fact, themselves down there. He knew the woman’s smile, knew his own as well, though he could not now recall the feel of one, the twist of muscles beneath skin that might signal some joy, a moment of light.
It was the two of them down there. Him. Her.
Then the car doors closed, and the couple disappeared.
He let go of her. He’d seen enough, and turned back to the room before the car started, before the flare of headlights that would illuminate the world, reveal himself in this room to be only a glimpse in a mirror, an apparition himself.
He worked at the buttons, eyes closed, satisfied now there were no words left.
Then she spoke. “I love you,” she said.
He paused, uncertain what she meant by this. He slipped the last button, the one at his throat, into its hole, his fingers suddenly huge and clumsy, ill designed for such detailed work.
He opened his eyes.
Here they were, of course, seated in the station wagon at the stoplight outside the complex parking lot, to his right the grocery store, to his left the complex. The station wagon headlights illuminated the midnight intersection before them.
He turned to her, saw her smiling at him.
He’d thought he would be the one to end this. He’d thought he would have the last word.
But then the light changed to green, and she nodded, still smiling. “It occurred to me to say that before,” she said, using his own last words against him, “but I’m saying it now. I love you.”
She was the one to finish it, he saw only then. And she was the one, too, to usher him into this next event about to begin, an event over which he
had lost control, an event freighted, he knew, with damage and weight.
He took in a breath, held it a moment, let it out. He looked at the green light hanging above them, did his best to will it back to red. But the light stayed green.
Then he looked out his window and over his shoulder, looked behind him to a second-story apartment window.
The window was darkened, but he believed he could see two faces there, both of them vague and ill-defined, gray in the moonlight.
He wanted to recognize them. But they were no one he knew.
“I just love you,” she said.
He turned to the woman beside him, saw her eyes.
He tried to speak, but no words came to him, all the words he knew used up, gone.
Then he did the only thing he knew to do, and leaned toward her, moved his face to hers, and gave her lips a small kiss, not much more than a peck, a kiss so brief it seemed to carry with it all the more value, carried with it, he thought, love. A kiss he would have given, he knew, if he were somebody else.
He pulled away from her, felt himself smile: another symptom he was not who he believed he was.
He faced forward, placed his hands on the steering wheel at ten and two o’clock. He looked at her one last time, nodded. Still she smiled at him.
Then gently, carefully, he gave it the gas, eased their station wagon out into the world.
WE SAVE THIS STORY FOR ONLY THE DARKEST WINTER NIGHTS, the thickest snows, when we know we cannot dig out for a few days and so are guaranteed one another’s company.
Sure, there are plenty of stories we pass back and forth among us. There is the story of Elder Hosmer, dead these one hundred years, and the Hosmer place, about the light that passes from window to window early midsummer mornings. There is the story of the Indian, one of King Philip’s men, and how he screams certain evenings from the top of Greenscott Hill, his foot snapped in a saw-toothed bear trap generations ago. And there is the provost (maybe he set the trap the Indian was caught in, we often speculate) and the story of how he walks our creeks and streams autumn nights, his wife’s scalp in one hand, his own bloodied hatchet in the other. These are all stories we tell indiscriminately when we are hunting, rifles crooked in our arms as we stand before a blazing campfire at dawn, or walking home nights after town meeting, or after large suppers.
But the story of the train is irrefutable. It happened. We were there: three boys, but boys with enough sense and enough fear to know when not to tamper with the truth. It was the truth that frightened us the most.
As was often our habit during the Great Depression, and as we still do today, our families had gathered together for dinner. It was a night much like this, a night of snow, and by ten-thirty there was no chance of anyone leaving. There had not been much snow that winter, not until that night, but there had been bitter cold, and Shatney Lake had already frozen clear and thick. We were assured of having nothing to do the next day: no work, no school, only the giant task of digging ourselves out, and even then there would be no hurry. The snow was here to stay, and we had no idea when it would let up. We started to bunk down for the night, the men and boys in the front room and kitchen, the women and girls in the bedrooms. We boys settled into our quilts and blankets and waited for the stories our fathers used to tell. They did not fail us. There was nothing more pleasant back then than to be warm and full and to have a frightening story in our heads before falling off to sleep.
And, like every night, we waited for the last train through, a train that made no stop in our small town, but which we counted on every night to rock us gently to sleep, the rhythm of the boxcars like the soft roll of thunder in a summer storm. The train came by, and we closed our eyes, imagining we were on it, riding the rails to destinations unknown, the train rolling along the ridge and slowly curving toward deep, frozen Shatney Lake, then crossing the old trestle, disappearing until the next night, when we would imagine the same things all over again.
But this night, as soon as the rocking of the boxcars disappeared, there came a scream of metal on metal that seemed to last hours, as though Satan had wanted to wake the world on that peaceful night. The scream shuddered up and down the valley until surely every household within four miles had been awakened.
We got up and looked out the windows but could see little, the snow was falling so heavily. Something had happened, we all knew, something terrible. Our fathers decided to go have a look, but our mothers decided otherwise. They would not let the men outside, not in that storm, not in that cold, not in that snow. While they argued the point, we boys climbed out the kitchen window. We were going whether our fathers did or not. We waded through the snow up to the crest of the ridge and to the tracks.
Once there, we looked back to the house and saw a faint yellow glow from one of the windows. All else was white, save for the tracks cleared of snow by the train only a few minutes before. Our fathers would be out here soon, either to find out what had happened or to take us home. We knew.
From the crest we could see nothing around us, but we knew the track from summer days, following it out to Shatney and the bluffs, walking the gravel and rock barefooted, skipping every other creosoted tie. The tracks slowly curved to the lake, and once there on those hot days we would climb down somewhere on the old trestle, drop our fishing lines in, and spend the rest of the day. But these thoughts were far away. We wanted to find out what in God’s world had happened.
We reached the lake and stopped dead. There in the white darkness we saw the broken timber of the trestle and the twisted rail torn from the edge of the bluff overlooking Shatney. Had the snow been falling more heavily, had it drifted any more, had we not been looking where we placed each step, the three of us would have stepped off the edge and fallen to the ice forty feet below.
Look, one of us said, pointing off into the snow. He was pointing down. There was something dark there on the lake. We climbed a few feet down onto the ice-covered rocks and stared hard into the swirling, blowing snow. There was something huge and dark and awful down there, something that took on more and more detail as we stared at it, until we realized it was a boxcar. It was a boxcar planted halfway into the ice, hammered into the lake like a spike. It was silent, a dark leviathan in a sea of white snow. We said nothing, only watched the terrible thing standing on end.
And there in the howling wind, the snow stinging our faces, our bodies shivering, the boxcar started to move, slipping slowly down, down, silently into the frozen lake. At first the movement was imperceptible; we imagined it was our eyes or the cold or the play of the snow, but before we could say anything, the boxcar disappeared into the ice, swallowed into the lake as if it were a snake returning to its hole.
Our fathers arrived a few minutes later to find us still there on the rocks staring into the white, none of us having yet spoken a word. We said nothing on the way home, said nothing until we were back inside and near the fire. Our mothers scolded us for having gone, while our fathers looked out the windows, speaking quietly together. We were sent to bed after we drank some coffee, but we could not sleep. The snow continued.
The next morning was bright and clear, and the three of us, having not slept all night, watched the sun rise over the ridge. Our footprints out into the snow had long since disappeared. The snow had drifted so that it took us a good hour just to clear a path from the house to the barn. We fed the horses, which stood in the darkness of the barn, their breath shooting from their mouths like great clouds.
We came out of the barn and saw that our fathers were leaving for the trestle, snowshoes on, day packs on their backs. We came running at them, yelling and crying about wanting to go. It was our right, we reasoned; we had been the first ones there and had seen the last boxcar slip into the ice. In the morning light, the sun banging up off the new snow, the awfulness of that huge black car was wearing off, and the idea of that sunken train in the lake seemed more like an adventure. It was a novelty, something out of the ordinary. We wanted to go down there and look
again. They decided to let us go.
Damage to the trestle was greater than we had seen the night before. The bridge had fallen from the bluffs to mid-lake, and the wooden structure looked like some great animal bowing down on its knees. Ice had collected on all the crossbeams and had broken many of the struts in half. We figured that when the engine first moved out onto the trestle, the added weight then broke the already ice-laden crossbeams in two. The engine and the cars following it had fallen in line into the lake.
We stood at the top of the bluff and looked off to where we had seen the boxcar the night before. All that was left to indicate anything had happened at all, that anything had ever been near the lake surface last night, was a sunken area of snow about thirty feet off the edge of the rocks and a little to the right of the bridge. Snow had covered the skim of ice that had already formed in the hole.
Suddenly we heard a whistle blast break clean across the valley, carried across the snow. We turned from the lake to see an engine coming around the last curve before the lake, moving slowly, the prow scraping snow from the tracks as it moved along. The railroad people had arrived.
Only two men had been aboard the wreck, the maintenance supervisor told us. The supervisor was a clean-shaven man and wore blue overalls and shiny black boots. He had on a wool cap and a heavy coat slick with machine oil. Two engineers, he told us, and four empty boxcars coming down from Canada. He told us they had known for a long time that this bridge was a hazard, and that sooner or later the worst was bound to happen, and that they were going to have to close the route anyway, what with the Depression and all. He said it was a terrible shame that it had happened at all, and that it had been these two men in particular. We looked at him for a few moments, then looked at one another.
