Before We Sleep

by Jeffrey Lent

  “She was a slip of a girl with dirty blonde hair and a face shaped like a heart, always looked younger than she was. Mother was none too pleased—she grew up out on the Falls Road in a rough house and her father worked, when he did, as a carpenter, but one people seldom called on twice for a job, if you get my drift. But there’s not one of us chooses our parents, best I know. And Brian was lit up with her and I knew that was a good thing. You, you’re young. Let me tell you something about being a parent because, God willing, you’ll be one, one day: You do your best all the way but a part of that is understanding from the beginning that when they try to walk, they’re going to fall down. That never stops. So when you think they’re falling down you still have to cheer them on. Or as they get older keep your mouth shut. And Deedee was a girl with a big heart. Sometimes that counts for more than anything else a person carries in this world. I saw it in her and she knew I did. I liked her.”

  In his long pause Katey said, “What happened?”

  He nodded. “What happened was this: They were together two years. Almost two years. Then on April 8, 1953, about three in the morning—it was his night off and they’d gone to a house party up toward Northfield and they were driving home. It was raining and certainly there was fog in the low spots of the road. Later he told me he was most likely driving faster than he should’ve been but they were in high spirits, laughing and singing along to the radio. Running fast all the sudden his car slipped off the right-side shoulder. He tried to get it back on the road but that shoulder just sucked them along, was slowing them down and he gave her the gas, trying to get the power up to pull back onto the blacktop and the bridge over the arm of Middle Lake loomed up and they slammed hard into the abutment. There it was.”

  He paused, wiped his brow with the back of his hand and squinted as he looked down upon her. She saw it as if a movie reel but said, “Tell me.”

  “Brian came to his senses and opened his door and stepped out. The headlights had quit but there was a moon and, he told me, it was as if he could see through bright daylight. The passenger side of that car was crumpled in like a beat-up accordion. Deedee, she never felt a thing.”

  “Oh, no,” she said.

  He took a step back, looked up at the sky. Then he came forward again and crouched to look up at her. “Yes,” he said. “We thought it was hard until then. The worst part for Brian was how he stepped out of the car and was fine. He walked away. And she did not.”

  Katey’s throat was tight, her eyes wet. “I’m sorry,” she said.

  He blinked himself but said, “Like Mother, I think you should leave him alone. But that’s your choice. You only need to know how he got where he is, is all. What you do with it is up to you. When you leave here, I mean.”

  “That’s fair.”

  “There is no fair to it. He quit drinking and went to Orono and got himself into the University and studied forestry—he had plans to work in timber management or something like that. But it was also out of his own loves, from boyhood, that he now returned to. He’d left all that after the war but when Deedee died it was as if he was trying to find some other part of him he’d lost. All spring and summer he was out in the woods, along the rivers and streams, the beaver ponds, fishing for trout. And his second year of college he took up bird hunting again. Partridge and woodcock. That was a bit of a surprise because when he first got home from the war he left his rods on their racks but packed away his shotguns. But he never again went to deer camp with the other fellows. He was cleaning a brace of woodcock one afternoon and I asked him, I said, You can shoot the birds but you won’t go after good honest venison anymore? He only looked at me and told me, That’s right. As if I should understand and I guess I do. Something about size and scale—who knows, maybe even more than that. I would not describe him as happy then but more a man who’d reached down in and found the last truths he could still hold to.

  “The summer before his senior year he was down fishing the bogs along Englishman River and he walked out with a full creel and drove a mile up the road and there was a woman with a flat tire. Judith Trask. Summer people they are, all the way from Virginia. Comfortable I guess but not so much as some—they own a little island in Larrabee Cove. A great-grandmother came from up here but went south and married into the Trask family. She was a Larrabee and the island come with the marriage. It’s not a grand thing—you can row out there in a dinghy but the house is nice enough. Well, he fixed her tire and they got to talking and she took him home for lunch and that was that. She brought him back to life, listened to his stories I’d guess but herself there across from him made simple evidence. That life is relentless, demands of us to take up the reins of life and drive the wagon. And she was, is, an interesting wagon, herself. They spent the summer together and then she and hers went back south and he went on for his last year of school. But that fall he took the train to see her, visit her family, all those he hadn’t met that summer. He came back and I asked him how it was and he told me it was the best he’d ever seen. I already knew he was gone, and was glad of it, you can imagine. But I asked him what he meant and he told me, The fishing isn’t much; they’re big on bass and bream, catfish which are ugly things but the birds. It’s hundreds of acres of farmland filled up with quail like hells-a-popping. Grinning as he said that. I said I meant how was it with Judith and her people, and he grinned again and said, Didn’t I tell you? We’re getting married next summer.

  “That’s where he is, you want to find him. I’d echo Mother: I don’t think he’d be of any help to your dad. Or you. And it’s a long drive. Even for a ’56 Ford. That’s a good truck. I think you should go home. All you need to help your dad is to be kind and to get on with your own life. That’s truly what a father, any father, wants.”

  She nodded. “I guess so. I guess you’re right.”

  He nodded also. “I am.” He stood then, a slow lifting as if his knees ached. Other parts also. He said, “Still, I’m pleased to meet you, Katey Snow. And Mother would say the same, she was able. You drive careful now.” And he turned, began to turn.

  “Wait,” she said. “Wait a moment.”

  He turned back and stood. An old man, worn and strong. Waiting.

  “You never said where he was. The town.”

  He sighed and said, “It’s not more than a crossroads. Outside of South Hill. A place called Cranston. It’s almost in North Carolina, a long ways from here.”

  “Thank you,” she said. “I just wanted to know. I can’t imagine going there.”

  Four

  Ruth

  Following the directions of his telegram she rose early on that March morning and made coffee, quietly to not wake her mother. Then last thing called and woke the school principal at home to inform him she was sick and could not be in that day. She did not cough or make any false gestures; the natural distress in her voice was enough. Let herself out of the house and started the Buick and drove off down the hill toward the village. Her father dead nine months, dropping like a sun-struck man two weeks after V-J Day, as the first detailed accounts of the atomic bombs began to come in, both on radio and in the newspapers. He’d been pacing the lawn, awaiting supper, the still-bright light of midsummer softened, tasting autumn. He held a celebratory tumbler of whiskey but when it fell from his hand it was untouched, his face screwed with a frown of caution, concern, worry. Not so many years later she’d realize he was the first person she knew that saw the future in those otherwise heady days.

  The snow had rotted away on south-facing fields and pastures and the roadside ditches were full of rushing water, the river also once she came into and then left the village. The eastern sky was pink and to the south was dark and snow squalls passed around her; she passed through them. For a short time she was in a full swirling storm of snow and ten minutes later she’d turned at the bridge to Royalton and headed east along the river, toward White River Junction and the train station there and the sky broke and a dense bar of sun pooled against her windshield an
d threw the chopped ice floes on the river into jagged relief of white and dark, light and shadow.

  He could’ve taken the bus to Randolph. Or the train on to Royalton. But he’d asked her to meet him at the station in White River at 7:15 in the morning. Alone. It was six months earlier than she expected. Best she knew he didn’t have the points for so early a discharge. But then he hadn’t been forthcoming in his few letters to her. Last she’d heard he’d been in Stuttgart, Germany. But now, driving, she reflected that he hadn’t told her what he was doing there. Once the war ended in Europe his letters had been much as before, short, somewhat abstract as if the censors had still been at work but without those blacked-out sentences. As if he’d grown used to writing that way. More truly she’d grown used to reading this code of non-code.

  After following the rising sun for most of an hour she parked at the station in White River and was again in a snowstorm. Heavy wet spring snow. A weekday morning, the lot held only a handful of cars. Trucks backed up to the freight platforms. The world of the war, the rhythms and routines of daily life were still overlapping in all ways. No one knew what normal was. Housewives still hoarded bacon grease. Magazine advertisements promised many fine things to come, soon. Young women were suddenly out of work, replaced by the men returning. No one knew yet what to make of this peace. Except the swelling understanding that the world they’d been fighting to save was going to hold a bold new face—one hidden still, as a young girl who’d turn from her ardent man, tuck her chin to her shoulder and show him the back of her head. As if saying Read your future in the strands of my hair. A world aquiver.

  He was the last one off the train. So much so she almost thought she’d gotten the time wrong. But then there he was. In a pinstriped suit she’d never seen before, coming toward her across the wet floor of the station. He was very thin and the suit draped upon him. He’d paused a moment and glanced twice around before his eyes lit upon her. Dense and flickering in his sockets. He walked up to her and stopped a foot away but raised his hands and held her shoulders. His hands trembled. She felt a tremor throughout her. He said her name. Then leaned and pressed dry chapped lips upon her forehead.

  “Oh, Oliver.” She’d imagined this moment over and again. She hadn’t expected him to sweep her back in a welter of passionate embrace but something more than this. His very eyes seemed to tremble.

  “Could you,” he said. “Could you take me home?”

  “Of course. Do you have luggage?”

  Now a faint wisp of smile came and went. “That’s not a word I’ve heard in a while.”

  They collected his duffel and a battered trunk on the platform and shared an awkward moment as they looked down upon it—clearly more than he could manage. She turned and found a porter with a hand truck and palmed him a quarter and ten minutes later the luggage was stowed in the trunk of the Buick and they stood together at the back of the car. The snowstorm was gone at least for the moment and through pale skies above the station was the round disk of the sun, colorless, almost a full moon behind clouds. She held out the keys in the palm of her hand. He looked at them, looked at her, then took the keys and got in the car.

  He’d leaned across and opened her door for her.

  They drove up the valley along the river. There was some traffic now, a weekday morning with people coming down out of the hills and headed to work in White River or Lebanon, Windsor. School buses making cautious way. His hands slipped loose and easy upon the wheel but she saw his eyes so very busy, flitting not just at intersections or where a side road entered, the clumps of children huddled waiting for their bus but constant, in a motion of awareness upon every rock outcropping, every thicket of trees, down toward the river where an undercut drew close upon the road. And a tang rose from him, a smell she couldn’t place but metallic or acid, raising an unformed memory of chemistry all those years ago.

  He reached and turned on the radio. The morning call-in of shop and swap, country voices not always clear punctuated by breaks from the station reporting on the weather, high school sports scores, an advertisement for Victory Bonds, reminded all that the war might be over but great challenges, great costs lay before them all. The occupation forces in Japan, in Germany, needed support. He lifted a hand from the wheel and dove his index finger down upon the radio dial and shut it off.

  “How’s your mother?”

  “Shaken but stalwart. She’ll live to be a hundred. Your letter meant much to her.”

  “I wrote … yes. And my parents? When did you last see them?”

  “At church, Sunday. And I had dinner after, as I always do.”

  A small flick of glance toward her. “You still go?”

  “To Sunday dinner? Of course.”

  “I meant, to church?”

  “Why wouldn’t I?”

  It was snowing again and he drove the best part of a mile before he said, “No reason. It’s good you do.”

  “Oliver?”

  The snow was a sudden squall and he drove with all attention ahead but he answered her. “I need to go see them. This morning. You can drop me off and go on to school.”

  “I took the day off.”

  He glanced at her. “I appreciate that. I do. But I need to see my mother, just now.”

  Then why didn’t you call her to pick you up? She said, “Of course you do. Oh, sweetheart, I’m so glad you’re back!”

  The sun was streaming from behind them, the car filled with sharp golden glow. He tapped a finger atop the wheel and said, “Me too.” After a moment he said, “When I’m done there, shouldn’t be too long, a couple hours at most, where do I find you?”

  She took a ChapStick from her bag and rolled it over her lips, looking straight ahead. The camphor fumes rose to her eyes and she blinked back the water there. She turned to him and thrust the stick out toward him.

  “Here.” Her voice a rough rasp. “You need this.”

  He slipped his eyes over hers and back to the road. “I guess maybe I do. Thanks. I’m out of practice, for most all good things.” He held the ChapStick but didn’t use it. After a moment he said, “So, Ruth. Where do I find you?”

  “I guess I’ll be at home.”

  “Home,” he said. It wasn’t a question but almost, a tilt toward lift in his voice. Then he rolled the balm over his dry cracked lips. Made the turn north out of Royalton onto the valley road. And sighed. A small ease of pleasure, there. Then he handed it back to her and said, “Well. We’ll see, won’t we?”

  She was furious and ferociously calm. Ed Snow came out onto the porch and stood peering at the car as if to determine what all this meant, as Oliver hovered over the open back, tugging at his duffel atop the old trunk and Ruth stood back only a moment, then said, “Oh for God’s sake,” and elbowed her husband aside and heaved first the bag and then the trunk out onto the curb. Ed called, “Jesus Christ! Oliver? Is that you?” Behind him Ruth saw the door open and Jennie Pease Snow was pushing past her husband. But Ruth was already in the car, the engine whining as tires slipped in the slush and then caught. She went on without stopping but making her turns and twice oncoming cars blared horns at her as she cut before them and then on up West Hill and finally home. Where she sat in the car with her forehead down upon the wheel, crying. After a time her mother came out wearing one of her father’s old overcoats and bent to look upon her through the car window. Ruth waved her away, her forehead aching from pressing against the steering wheel, her hair loosened and down about her face, her eyes swollen. Jo rapped knuckles against the glass and then jerked the door open and reached in to switch off the engine. After a moment all the world held was the huff of her mother breathing and the drip of water off the eaves. Jo said, “Whatever it is, it’s nothing so bad a cup of tea won’t help.”

  Ruth blew out of the car and made for the house, quickly upstairs to her bedroom. She paced back and forth. After a bit she realized no one—not even her mother—was following her up. She was chilled and some way she couldn’t name, felt unclean.
She undressed and wrapped in a threadbare robe and went down the hall on bare feet and ran a bath until it was full and steaming, poured in a handful of soap flakes and watched the bubbles rise.

  And standing there thought I am no kind of bride. She reached in and pulled the plug and went to her room and dressed again for the day. She leaned close to the mirror and drew her eyebrows, deftly turned red her lips. She leaned close and looked and saw her puffed eyes and pulled back and looked again and thought I am what I’m stuck with.

  She went down the backstairs to the kitchen and fried an egg and made toast and ate standing up. She gained a bit, not much but some, enough to know she was possible. She took the cozy from the teapot and poured a cup of tea and, steam swirling up, carried it through to the library where her mother sat beside the fire and took a chair, sinking back and took a sip of the tea. Gazing at the leaping and twinkle of flames, reflecting. Not wanting to look anywhere else. But only to wait what the day would bring.

  Her mother said, “He’s home?”

  “He’s down to his parents’ house.”

  “That’s understandable.” Jo’s voice was kind. She said, “I expect he’ll be along shortly.”