The Difference Between Women and Men

by Bret Lott

  Then the supervisor broke out several shovels from inside the cab and asked if we didn’t mind giving him and his assistant a hand down there on the ice. Railroad policy, he told us, demanded that all accidents be verified, and he had an idea that if we dug away some of the snow from the ice he might be able to verify the engine number, just to make double sure the right train had gone down. The right wives had to be notified of their husbands’ demises, the supervisor said.

  We took the shovels, as did our fathers, and climbed down the rocks onto the ice. The lake had been frozen a month or so, and we had no fear the ice would not support us. It seemed a foot thick.

  We started clearing, keeping a safe distance from the hole where the train had entered. We dug into the snow, clearing an area where the supervisor imagined the engine must be resting, but all we could see through the ice was the cold dark water below. No train. He had us dig in a wider area, enlarging the original borders, and then we stopped digging again. He saw nothing. He asked that we clear a little larger area, nearer the hole, and we did. Our fathers shoveled snow with less and less enthusiasm, but we boys thought it great fun, and with each request of the supervisor dug even more furiously. Still, there was no sign of the train.

  After an hour and a half of digging, our fathers quit, saying that the railroad should be damned for sending out good men on a dangerous bridge in the first place. Down on his knees, his hands cupped around his eyes, the supervisor was oblivious and only stared down into the ice.

  And then he screamed.

  He stood up quickly and slipped on the ice, then tried to stand up again.

  “What is it?” we asked. “What is it?”

  But before he could answer, if indeed he had ever had any intention of answering, we looked down to where he had been searching and saw a man under the ice, frozen, gray, his arms out to either side in perfect silence.

  He wore blue jeans and a red-and-black plaid jacket. He had no face, only a blurred gray area where we expected to see his face.

  We all stood there on the ice, none of us moving any closer to what was there under the supervisor. He still screamed and slipped on the ice, calling for our help, for anyone’s help. He could not move from his spot above the frozen man.

  Then they appeared, first one, then three, then five, all around us, beneath the ice. It took a moment, and then we recognized these men.

  They were hoboes, bums catching rides on a southbound train, the same men who hung out of empty cars on summer days and hooted at us fishing from the trestle below them. But these men below us did not move and kept floating to the ice like swimmers seeking air. They appeared from nowhere, and we could not keep them from coming, a dozen, twenty, thirty of them, all bobbing to the surface in different positions, some curled up like stillborn animals, others stretched out straight. They wore overalls and caps and flannel shirts and coats, but none had faces, only blurred, undefined patches above their shoulders. And still they came.

  We tried to run on the ice, to get away, but slipped and fell over one another, falling to the ice, our faces meeting the faces of the dead. We screamed, the railroad men screamed, our fathers screamed. We struggled to make it to the snow, to get off the ice and those dead men, those derelicts who had no family except those around them, and who would never receive any burial except that which the lake had given them. We struggled to the snow, almost diving in headfirst when we finally made it off the ice.

  And then, just as suddenly, the bodies disappeared, first one, then another, then another, all sinking back to the lake bottom and the train, their home. They seemed to peel away and fell slowly back into the blue.

  We did not stay there to figure out what had happened, but moved as quickly and as silently as we could up onto the ice-covered rocks of the bluff, back onto the tracks, and home. The supervisor and his assistant climbed into the cab without a word, the shovels still down on the ice, and backed the engine along the track, first slowly, then faster and faster.

  They were gone from the valley by the time we made it home.

  The story is finished. There is silence in my living room as everyone here thinks over matters: the train, the lake, the bridge. There are no ghosts to speak of in this story, and it is precisely this fact that frightens us. We have no legends to create around this tale, no stories of old Indians or provosts we can exaggerate. There are no ghosts, except the trestle, still torn and twisted after fifty years, a reminder of our childhood. The train stopped coming through this valley the night of the wreck and has not been back since.

  We are no longer rocked off to sleep by the rolling train, but now must put ourselves to sleep, drinking warm milk, reading, or simply staying up all night, assuring ourselves we are alive in this frozen wilderness.

  And there is the ghost of the lake, the silence that is taken there. There are no screams at midnight, no candlelight in windows, no blood. We no longer fish there, no longer dare even to set foot in that lake for what we know is buried there. There is only silence.

  HE GAVE THE CASHIER HIS MONEY—A TWENTY AND A FIVE—AND waited for change, the blanket already in the white plastic bag.

  He needed the blanket because he knew it would be cold tonight, sleeping in the car. Of that much he was certain: the cold, him in the car, this blanket.

  His wife, the woman he’d loved all these years, had kicked him out over what he’d said once they had arrived at the end of the argument: “Whenever I tell you something and you can’t remember it, it’s because I never told you,” he’d said there in the kitchen, certain of the words lined up, certain of the sense they made. Certain, certainly, of the truth they would speak of the way their lives worked. “But whenever you tell me something and I don’t remember it,” he went on, “it’s because I wasn’t listening.”

  He’d said it, there in the kitchen, and he’d nodded hard once at her, put his hands to his hips for the certainty in the world he’d outlined with just those words.

  She was quiet a moment, a moment filled, he was certain, with her recognition of his keen and convicting insight into the injustice of her perceptions: She believed her words went unheeded by him, and believed his words had never been spoken. He was certain of all this in just that moment.

  And in that moment he was certain he still loved her. He loved her.

  But then she spoke. “You understand,” she said, and put her own hands to her own hips, and in that movement, a movement that bore extraordinary witness to her own certainty, he’d seen that his own certainty in his own words had been only a vague notion, a moment of smoke. Nothing more.

  “Now you understand,” she said. “Finally,” and she nodded once at him, but gently, carefully, the care she gave the gesture all the more proof of how certain she was.

  That was when she turned from him, took the requisite steps to the kitchen door and opened it wide, swept her hand toward the darkness outside like a game-show girl. She said nothing more, so certain she was that he knew what she meant by this move.

  And he knew.

  He watched the cashier’s hands in the drawer, watched the efficiency and certainty with which her fingers extracted the correct number of coins, the single dollar bill, then tore from the register the receipt, handed all of it to him in just one moment. He looked at her hands a moment more, then her face, in him a kind of unbidden awe at the sureness of her hands, of these moves.

  Then, the moment over, he took the money, the receipt, lifted the white plastic bag from the counter, and left. She hadn’t noticed the moment her hands had been held out to him, or his moment of watching her, and he wondered if in fact there had ever even been this moment between them. Maybe he’d imagined that instant, he thought.

  The automatic doors opened, and he stepped out into the night air, felt the chill and the damp. It would be cold tonight. He was certain of that.

  He started off, away from the store and into the lot. His car was here. He was certain of that, too. He would have a place to sleep. And he had this
blanket.

  He walked, and walked, passed beneath first one parking-lot lamp and then another, each lamp casting thin halos of light down around him while he looked for his car.

  He knew it was here somewhere, in this aisle, ten or twelve slots down. On the right. Or maybe it was the next row over. Maybe a few more slots down.

  But the lot was nearly empty because of how late it was, and he did not see his car anywhere.

  He felt his skin prickling over for the damp out here then, and for the dark, felt how strange and alien this feeling was as he walked, as though his skin were that of someone else, moving on its own in reaction to things out of his control: the temperature of the air, the turn of the earth away from the sun, the ability of air to hold water within it.

  He stopped, just inside yet another thin halo of light.

  Where was his car?

  And did he love his wife still, despite the way words worked in their world?

  And then, in the feel of his skin prickling over, and in the growing recognition of his misplacing an item as large and important this night as his car, and in the weight of the blanket in his arm, even in the vague halo within which he stood—a halo, he saw, like words lined up believing in their certainty, only to be found as hollow as his hands on his hips, as empty as a solid single nod—inside all this, he began to wonder:

  What made me believe it might be cold at night? And when did I come to believe night would come?

  Of what am I certain?

  He breathed in, breathed out. He felt himself swallow, though he could not be certain that was indeed what he felt.

  Quickly he took the white plastic bag from beneath his arm, held it and what was inside it out in front of him, held it with both hands, his hands trembling now in the smallest way but holding on tight, as if the bag and what was inside it and even his hands, his arms, himself might all disappear this moment.

  What do I know?

  And now he felt even truer, even dearer the earth turning upon its axis, felt deeply and dreadfully himself hanging from this round planet head outward and into space, felt too the wind of all space blow unforgiving and uncaring through him at whatever speed this unheeding planet revolved around the sun, and at whatever speed this unmerciful galaxy blew from its beginning toward its ever-expanding end, felt all of it in just that moment.

  Then finally, horribly, he felt fear move inside him, rising, unbidden and awful.

  He looked at the bag and his hands and his trembling, looked and looked, and wondered with a deep and incalculable wonder:

  What does the word Blanket mean?

  And what is Car?

  He looked then to the circle of light in which he stood, saw the asphalt and white lines in this thin light begin to tremble of their own, the world shivering beneath him as sure and certain as the cashier’s hands had measured money.

  What is Halo? he wondered.

  And Moment?

  He looked up to the parking-lot lamp then, felt himself go blind for it, as though scales were being settled into place instead of falling away, while still the earth shivered beneath him, and now the air around him began to swirl, and swirled, and lo! he felt himself lifted, felt himself rising into the pitch and twirl of the air, felt himself lifted and lifted into the vortex of swirling air and shivering earth and incalculable words that surrounded him, until he felt at last each molecule—if there were such a thing, or a word for it—explode into nothing, himself at its center, and nothing. Nothing at all.

  What is Love? he wondered then. And finally. Finally.

  —For Mr. Faulkner, with all respect

  I

  ONCE SHE WAS DEAD, THERE WOULD BE MORE STORIES. SHE knew that, knew how the contemptible commoners of this town thrived on what they could say of her, Miss Emily Grierson. This was a festering town, festered with the grand and luxurious nothingness of small lives that lent them the time, plenty of it, to tell themselves—and the dark of humid evenings filled with the stagnant decayed nothingness of their own lives—tales of her not true, not true, but true because they would tell them to one another, and believe them.

  Of course she had killed him. Someday they would know that. But the truth they would never divine. Given all the years of a base and fallen town’s life, they could not know the truth: the depth of her love.

  She pulled through her hair the engraved sterling brush, black now with tarnish so that his monogram could no longer be read, just as she had each evening since she had given him the comb, this brush, and the other of his toilet articles. Her gift to him that night.

  Each night since that night she had brushed her hair before going to bed, hair iron gray now with the passing of years, the same iron gray as her father’s when he, too, died so very many years before. Even before she had met the man with whom she had lain, the man she had murdered. Each night, as this night, she brushed her hair by light of the lamp’s rose shade as calmly and serenely as she had when, once the man she had lain with was dead, she had risen from the evening summer sheets heavy with the depravity of this life, this town, to find upon the seat of her gown, pure pure white, the small red smudge of red that signaled to her the pain she had felt in their sanctification was indeed real. Then she had simply gone to the dressing table and seated herself upon the chair, its rich burgundy velvet that night thick and rare in its feel, now this night the chair worn smooth to a slick dull red from the years she had sat here each night since.

  How many nights? she wondered. Was it last night, when she had lain with him and killed him? A week ago, a fortnight? Or years, decades?

  Now?

  They would tell stories of her because of the man, dead all these years, in the bed behind her. He would be found out, she knew, with her own passing, when the townspeople would break into her home to find her. They would find his body in the new nightclothes given to him that night upon which she had killed him, him fused into his nightclothes and the bedclothes that had not been changed since that evening a fortnight, decades, moments ago, his flesh no longer flesh but part of the real of this room, as real as the layer of dust on his suit folded neatly over the cane chair at the foot of the bed, on the dresser his tie, his celluloid collar. As real as flesh and bone and love all fused into the sheets, in just the same way lies were fused into the air about this hungry decrepit peasant town filling now—even as she pulled the brush through her hair, as every night—with stories about her.

  Let them, she thought. Let them all, in the ugly alchemy of the cracker mind, spawn their bastard lies of her. She knew the truth, knew enough truth to fill the grave, enough to land her in the great bald cold hereafter by dint and force of the truth of love and love and love, love past what any of them could imagine. Then, when each of them met the nothing end of their nothing lives, she would be there on the other side of the muddy disconsolate river of death, and they would see her upon the opposite shore, see she’d crossed pristine and glistening and dressed in pure pure white to the cold bald great hereafter. Then each one of the townspeople, the cretins, who lived upon lies they would tell about her, Miss Emily Grierson, lies savored as a dog savors a bone gnawed to nothing—these crackers would then cry to her for salvation as they themselves tried to cross the disconsolate river, only to find themselves quickly, surely drawn with the ugly weight of their lies of her to the slick silted bottom of the river, their impotent cries to her for salvation and her requisite silence in answer the last reckoning to the truth they would have before their lungs filled with muddy water of the difference between themselves and her that had stood between them their entire living lives: she was of legitimate blood; they were of empty.

  II

  They were dogs, she knew, every townsman save perhaps the Negro, her boy all these years, the boy now an old man who came and had come and would come with the market basket every few evenings, who swept the kitchen, and the pantry, the hall and parlor, as well as the room in which she now slept.

  She did not sleep in this room, this room onl
y a place she visited each night, first to lie down beside the dead man for a moment as best to recapture in the fleshless smile he held and fleshless arms drawn to his throat as if in embrace the beginning of love she’d encountered that night, and next to brush her hair at the dressing table as she had the night love had in fact begun.

  She did not sleep in this room, but in a room far more significant than any of these crackers would ever know, could ever know. She slept in the room off the hall downstairs, the room in which, she had been told by her father, her mother had died in childbirth. She herself had been all of her years the only proof positive her mother had ever lived, no pictures, no portraits, not even a moment of clothing or smell or a single strand of perhaps iron-gray hair of her mother’s own any evidence her mother had ever existed, save for the words given to her by her father: Your mother passed in childbirth, giving me you, he had said to her only once, the day of her fifth birthday, when only then it had occurred to her to ask. He spoke of it not again, ever. Not even her name.

  She’d had the Negro move her father’s articles from his bedroom the day after she had killed the man and into the downstairs room, the birthing room and passing room, the furniture as big and ungainly as the new secret she held inside her bedroom, the Negro, young then, wrestling mattress and headboard and footboard and night table and dresser along the dark wood walls of the upstairs hall and down the staircase and into the room.