Before We Sleep

by Jeffrey Lent

  She waited a good long pause and quietly said, “Thank you.”

  “Don’t thank me. Thank him. He’s a good man. Doing what he needs to do. And damned glad he’s doing it.”

  He brushed one hand against an eye and then turned and walked in his sock feet to the door where he pushed his feet into his unlaced boots, small puddles on the floor. Took down his wool jacket and shrugged into it and turned.

  “See you Sunday?”

  “Church and then dinner all of us. I’ll have the lamb and a pie and Mother’s got an endless supply of apple-mint preserve. We’ll be there.”

  “Yup. Good day, then.”

  “Ed?”

  He turned back. “What is it?”

  “Do you really think it’ll work out as you say?”

  He took a moment. “All I know is most things work out. But how I say? Only time answers that question.” Then he asked, not for the first time, “The two of you? You all right?”

  She flushed brightly warm. Her face right down to her shoes. She said, “We’re good. Like you said, most things work out.”

  “And take time.”

  “I’m learning that.”

  He waited the least beat. “Gonna take all my life, is my guess. Yours too, likely.”

  “That’s a terrible thought.”

  “You think so? Me, I wouldn’t have it any other way. Keeps you thinking, right up to the end.”

  Then gone.

  Spring creeps in, back and forth, a season unsure of itself. Then around Memorial Day and school graduation, often the same weekend, summer arrives. Apple blossoms throw brilliant canopies about the trees, then rust and blow away. The lilacs bloom, the gardens are sprouting and gaining fast, the leaves one week are pale green crowns against the sky, the next are dense and dark and throwing full blankets of shade upon lawns freshly mowed, roadsides, carpeting woodsfloors. Might come a few cool days of showers mid-month that only prompts higher the grass, the hayfields, the spill and gurgle of brooks. By the end of the month winter and snowbanks and ice are a flickering memory. Summer in full riot—the songbirds back and some already fledging young, swarming the fields and woods, over every yard and corner, the smell wafting of first-cutting hay, the sun rising before most people are out of bed and long evenings, the day extending itself with a lazy lengthened twilight toward ten o’clock, as if reluctant to give itself to nightfall. Another world of a sudden from the long cold dark now forgotten.

  She’d had a wondrous lazy morning. Oliver had come home in the early hours after his work at the store, woke her and kissed her and left her again. She woke to hot coffee and an empty house. He’d gone up toward Derby, answering a call that came in over the telephone about a fiddle a child had dropped on granite flagstones the day before and that the caller—the mother in this case, needed for the coming Fourth of July and a kitchen tunk that evening. Whatever the damage, it was unlikely the instrument could be repaired so quickly but Oliver was on his way to do the best he could and, Ruth knew, taking along his grandmere’s fiddle, to loan for the event. The first time he’d offered such service and Ruth wondered if it was because the player was a woman, then pressed the thought from her mind. Oliver worked within his own code, and the code was about music and nothing else. She knew that.

  She made toast and drank coffee as she sat and read the paper. After a while she went out to the garden and harvested the last of the peas. Then she took a book outside and sat in the shade of the apple trees and read.

  She heard the car coming up the hill and startled. It was no car she knew, and she knew everyone that had reason to drive the hill. When it turned into the drive she was not surprised. Where else might a stranger be going? Still, she only closed the book on her thumb and held it on her lap, not wanting to leave the story, not yet willing to cede even this small portion of her day to a stranger seeking her husband. The rumbling engine shut off and then nothing. No slam of a car door, no one calling out. She sighed and stood, left the book on the chair as if a promise to herself she’d return soon and walked around the house to do whatever she could for whomever it was.

  Not a surprise, the car was a ruin of a thing, a jalopy pieced together from other ruined cars. A couple of the older high school boys, a couple of younger men in the area drove such rigs. She tried and failed to suppress judgment—it was a certain sort of young man who chose such a vehicle. And had a ripple of doubt—if the driver was looking for Oliver what sort of disaster of a fiddle might he have? And the means to pay for repair? Then caught herself as a blush of recognition came over her—she was making an assumption once again about someone most probably of French Canadian descent. Had she learned nothing? Then saw the plate on the front of the car. Come all the way from Maine. A signifier of serious intent. And still the occupant had made no effort to step out of the car and in the same moment she understood she was being watched. Appraised as she stood also, waiting.

  She walked up to the car, stopping a few feet from the door, the open window. A man, indistinct, sat behind the wheel. Smoking—she could smell it, his head turned away as if he was studying the village below.

  “Hello,” she called. “Can I help you?”

  He turned and leaned an elbow out the window and pushed forward to rest his chin upon his elbow and looked up at her. “I hope so,” he said. “I’m looking for Oliver Snow.”

  He was the best-looking man she’d ever seen. Mouth, nose, eyes, chin, the certain jut of his ears, his dark brown hair grown out from his head like the pelt of some water-living creature but for the cowlick turned up and the curling down upon his forehead. She disliked him immediately.

  “He’s not here,” she said.

  “But what they told me down the village? I’m at the right place?”

  “He’s not here,” she repeated. “But if you have a fiddle to be repaired you can leave it and he’ll get in touch with you.”

  He opened the door and stood out of the car. He was a man made right, all his parts aligned as if pulled from a mold. He was wearing khaki trousers over scuffed work boots and a white shirt with the sleeves rolled above his elbows, his face and arms stained dark from hours under the sun. This early in summer even farmers she knew were more burned than dark like this. He was holding out a hand to shake and she took it and felt the softness there in his hand, also the rough edges of old callouses. He was speaking but she was not yet hearing—thinking he worked the woods, this winter, That’s how he looks like he does.

  He was talking throughout this.

  “I don’t know the first thing about fiddles. But I am looking for Oliver Snow.”

  She interrupted him without knowing she was going to. “Who are you?”

  “I’m Brian Potter.” He paused just long enough for her to realize perhaps he expected she might recognize his name. Then he reached a hand and said, “You’re Ruth?”

  She felt something was being established between them, with no idea what that might be. She ignored his hand and kept her own clasped before her. She said, “Oliver’s not here. What do you want with him?”

  He dropped his outstretched hand and snagged both thumbs in his waistband, his hands loose, harmless. He said, “I was in the war with him.”

  “He’s never mentioned anyone named Brian Potter. What do you want with him?”

  “I’m not surprised. But see, he saved my life. Which is why I’m here. To thank him for that.” He shrugged. “I guess it was a small thing, for him. A moment. But it wasn’t for me.”

  She looked at him again as if seeing him for the first time. She said, “I’m sorry, I don’t know what came over me. Yes, I’m Ruth Snow, Oliver’s wife. Why don’t you come in the house? I’ll fix some tea. Or do you prefer coffee?”

  “No,” he said. “I won’t intrude. I’ll come another time.”

  “Nonsense,” she said. “I won’t have it. You’ve come a long way and Oliver will be back soon enough.” Even as she said this knowing it was not true.

  “Well, truth is, I cou
ld use a cup a joe.”

  Quickly she said, “You got it.”

  Before he could protest she poured the cold coffee down the sink, rinsed out the pot and basket and set up a new pot to percolate. As she worked she watched him: sitting on a chair pulled away from the table, his hands easy on his spread knees as he baldly and easily surveyed the room, what else he could see of the house. If there was judgment in him it didn’t show and she was proud of her home. She was also curious about him, partly for what he’d said, why he was there, but mostly because she sensed a portal, the possibility of a door into whatever had happened. Oliver’s war. And then she halted that thought. As if her mother spoke in her ear, perhaps her father. Oliver held himself close and this frustrated her but it was a choice he’d made and she’d silently agreed to live with it. And she needed to honor that silent agreement. Or she’d be making a betrayal of her husband. A small one perhaps. Perhaps not so small. Digging behind silence—what was that but betrayal?

  And she knew nothing of this man seated in her kitchen. He’d tapped out a Lucky and spun the Zippo wheel, pulled the ashtray close and appeared to be absorbed in studying the rings of smoke he lofted toward the ceiling.

  The coffee was done and she took the cream pitcher from the fridge and set it next to the sugar bowl on the table, poured out two cups and settled one before him and took the other and sat across the table from him. She waited but he was already turned toward her, his cup lifted from its saucer, his lips pursed as he blew the surface. He drank his coffee black. Sipped and set the cup back in the saucer. He hadn’t said a word since coming in and she wondered what this silence was all about—perhaps his own, it occurred to her. Very well probably his own.

  “Thank you,” he said. “You needn’t have gone to the trouble.”

  “It was hours old, and cold.”

  Now she felt she wanted him gone—thinking again about Oliver—it could be late afternoon, even dusk, before he returned from Derby. A long trip. But nothing like the trip this man had made. She felt off-kilter, at sixes and sevens as her father would’ve said. What to do with this man, what to say? Whatever he knew of Oliver at war, whatever had happened, she would not listen to. That alone was Oliver’s to tell her and so far he had not.

  Brian Potter said, “As I said, it was a small thing for him. What one did if they saw the chance. But for me—well I wouldn’t be sitting here, if your husband hadn’t seen that chance and acted. Could be he doesn’t even recall it—or it was only one small thing in a long day of things large and small. That’s how it was. The war, I mean. And also this—you wonder, now I mean, you wonder how many of those small chances did I miss? How many men don’t have what I have? The opportunity to try and thank a man? And this, too: How many times did it shave close to me, death, I mean, and I never knew it? Well, plenty, I can say with certainty. Probably freeze my spine forever if I knew the actual number, if there was an accounting laid out for me. But this is what I know for sure and once it was over, that moment, I mean, I made a solemn vow that if ever I could I’d find this man and shake his hand. All I want.”

  She said, “Oliver does not talk about the war. To me, to anyone that I know of. I don’t want to hear your story—that’s between the two of you. If he’ll listen. I can’t say that he will. But he might. The thing is, I misled you. He left early this morning to go up almost to Canada and it will be late in the day before he comes back. He’s not here, is what I’m saying. And I’d ask you to stay and wait for him but I have my own work to do and—”

  He interrupted. “You don’t want me hanging around all day.” He smiled.

  She said, “That’s not exactly what I meant.” Considered and then said, “I want you to be able to see him. Clearly you need to and who knows, it might be good for him.”

  “Good enough.” He stood. “But you think late in the day he’ll be back around?”

  “I know he will be.”

  He stretched his arms over his head and raised up on his toes. She heard his spine crack as he turned his head side to side. He said, “I’ll come back by early evening—if he’s not home maybe we can figure out the next step then. Meanwhile, I drove along a pair of rivers—a big one and then up this valley, a smaller one. I’ve got fishing rods in the trunk of my car—that old wreck. So I’ll go chase trout for the day and be happy doing so. Maybe find some feeder brooks and go up those. And don’t you worry—I’ll be happy as can be doing that.”

  She felt a panic, as if she’d failed somehow. She said, “You need worms, down to the village is Snow’s Mercantile. They sell cartons of worms.”

  He grinned and said, “Thanks. But I fish with flies. I tie em myself. You know what I’m talking about?”

  She said, “A long time ago, when he was a young man, my father did that.”

  “It’s a grand thing. Thanks, Ruth. I’ll see you later.”

  She sat again outside and returned to her book. But the pages made little sense and she wondered if she’d been reading or simply skimming. She’d never cared for historical fiction although Kenneth Roberts wrote of her own place, in the widest of terms—northern New England. But Lydia Bailey was of Haiti, and the slave revolt and worse, she couldn’t make sense of the plot, or the woman that seemed a sort of dream behind the plot. She thumbed back a dozen pages from where she’d left off and failed to find the momentum, was, in fact, even more lost. Almost one hundred and fifty pages in and she slowly put in place her bookmark and stood, carrying the book to the house.

  What troubled her most was she was certain she’d been deeply engaged for most of those pages. And now it seemed, not.

  Ruth changed and then drove down to the village and up West Hill to her mother’s house. She walked in without knocking as everyone did and surveyed the jars lined up on the kitchen counter. Deep ruby red. Fresh strawberry preserves. There were still a half-dozen quarts of strawberries on the other side of the sink and Ruth guessed she’d be taking home some berries, thought ahead and figured to find some cream in the village, make biscuits that afternoon and have shortcake for dessert that night. All this while passing through the kitchen and dining room and into the library where she found her mother.

  Jo was working needlepoint. The house, while not as old as others, was old enough so after sixty or so winters no longer sat quite plumb. Doors between rooms would not always stay open or closed. In her younger years Jo had re-covered a nursing rocker, one free of arms, with a new back, several other seats of chairs as well. But these last years her needlepoint had been a bit less fine, though tight and clean. She was intent upon covering bricks with a single cool color, with her monogram worked upon the top. To be used as doorstops, holding doors open or closed as needed. Understated, hidden unless one looked. Utilitarian.

  Ruth sprawled back with a sigh in one of the leather wingbacks across from her mother.

  “What is it, dear?”

  “Oh. Kenneth Roberts exasperates me.”

  Jo glanced up, went back to her work. She wore steel spectacles perched far down upon her nose. She said, “I’ve given up reading fiction. Most of it doesn’t make sense to me anymore. Biographies and history hold my interest. Boswell on Johnson remains interesting, if infuriating, often. Gibbon. And the poets; Wordsworth, Keats, Shelley, some of Coleridge. He was a mess of a man but could write, I have to say. And this new man, Frost? You’ve heard of him?”

  “He’s hardly new, Mother.”

  “Perhaps to you. And I’ve not settled my mind on him—he writes of people I might well know, probably do. How much art is in that, I ask.”

  “A good bit, is what I think.”

  Jo only then lifted her eyes and settled them upon Ruth. “Perhaps so. It’s all in how it’s told. Now then, what brings you here this fine summer morning?”

  Ruth paused, took a breath and said, “There’s a man come. After Oliver.”

  “What do you mean? What for?” Jo’s tone was arch: a lioness roused to potential danger for a cub and it was nothing more t
han Ruth expected and still surprised her. Not until this moment sure of how much her mother loved her husband.

  “He was in the war with Oliver, he says. He’s from Maine. He claims Oliver saved his life.”

  Jo nodded. “And?”

  “And nothing. He wants to talk with him, is all. And Oliver’s up to Derby over a fiddle today. The fellow went off fishing and will come back later. I don’t know. I guess I hope Oliver makes it home before the man shows back up.”

  Jo said, “I don’t think it’s so unusual. Men who met during the war, met in hard ways or strange times, which clearly the war produced an abundance of, I don’t think it’s strange for one to seek another out. Perhaps if nothing else to gain assurance that whatever that strangeness was, truly did occur. We see it all about us, if you only look: How the war and now life after, are so at odds with one another and yet exist within the same person. Your own husband, I’d say. And Oliver saved this man’s life?”

  “It’s what he said.”

  “Well, goodness sake. Why wouldn’t he come, Ruth?”

  “It’s not that so much. It’s—I don’t know.”

  Jo stood and crossed the library to the walnut stand that held decanters and bottles, racks of glasses and tumblers. As she worked she spoke: “Not even noon but I’m having a neat rye. There’s no ice. I’ll fix you one as well. There we go. I see your dilemma and have a clear answer for you.”

  She brought the tumbler with the splash of rye, held on to her own. Ruth took the glass and cupped her hands around it. Jo looked down upon her a moment, then retreated to her chair, sipped and set the glass on the cork coaster on the side table.

  She said, “A man has entered your life that might provide you with some answers to what has afflicted your husband. And you might have the opportunity to speak with him, to draw him out, to hear his tale, and in doing so learn things about Oliver that Oliver has not been willing or perhaps able to share with you. Is that it?”