Nights Below Station Street

by David Adams Richards

  He had a new scarf in the back of the ear and wrapped that about the collar of his three-quarter-length coat. The trouble was he had no boots, only his leather shoes.

  He looked in at Myhrra. “Some of the road’s bare,” he said. “I’ll be back in a little while.” And then he poked his head inside and kissed her as an afterthought.

  “Bring me back something to eat,” she said. He took off his watch and gave it to her, and told her to count the minutes until he got back.

  Turning around he slipped suddenly and went down on one knee. His body looked suddenly heavy, as he staggered up.

  He walked for a while and it soon became clear that everything was covered over. Sometimes snow was up past his shins. And at other times he stepped off the road and went up past his knees. He lit his lighter and found his way back to the road. Sometimes white drifts loomed up like animals, which he was always frightened of – he had not liked the woods since that time on a fishing trip when his friends ran ahead of him and he got lost. Now he looked about and the trees were so close to him that he couldn’t believe he was on a road at all, which had become nothing more than a track, with some old wooden fence posts being the only markers.

  Snow. Snow on his bare head and behind his ears. He tasted snow on his lips. He thought of an old veteran at the cenotaph, who when he saw the first snowflake of the winter falling out of an iron-grey sky said, “There’s mathematical perfection.” And then turned to Vye, who was a cadet at the time, smiled, and then kicked his heels absurdly and looked glumly ahead.

  Vye suddenly thought of Belinda holding the little girl on her hip. Even though men were stronger they could not carry children with the ease and dexterity of women. And at this moment, feeling lonely, that seemed an essential fact, though he did not know why. He got angry with the trees, and with the sound of the wind.

  He took a rest and blew his nose. And then he thought of Myhrra back in the car and he pushed on. He cursed at the snow and at the wind, and he swung his fist twice into the night air. But nothing came of it. His shoes were soaking and his left leg was numb. So he stopped and tried to pull his socks up higher, and then whistled.

  He moved on into the snow and drifts, using his lighter to light the way, and stumbling forward as he went. His thick legs made a path – an indistinct track, as if children had played there a long time ago.

  Because of the champagne she’d drunk, Myhrra had to get out of the car to have a pee. She took her coat from the back seat and put it around herself. The snow was deep as she struggled over to a certain spot which was almost bare and dry, under the huge white pine she had noticed before but had forgotten about. Vye’s watch had ticked away forty-seven minutes. The storm had increased, and yet in the bare spot under the tree she could smell pine nettles and summer branches.

  As she stood there, her wedding veil came off and blew up in the air. Snow fell down her neck. She slapped at the snow with her hands as if to brush everything away. Then she remembered the last woman whose hair she had cut, and remembered how white her neck was under her dark, black hair. And then she felt tears in her eyes.

  She also thought of Byron with his fish and mice – and how sometimes at night when they were alone he would put on plays for her. Wearing a bath towel as a cape, he would act out Caesar. That was always the character he acted out, that is, his own rendition of who he thought Caesar might be. Sometimes he would have Caesar killing everyone in the house. And sometimes he would have Caesar getting it in the guts and falling into her lap.

  But now as she started back she thought she heard an animal and froze. Suddenly the idea that she was alone – miles from the nearest house, in the middle of a blizzard – made her afraid. One tree creaked and then another. And she couldn’t see the car from where she was. It sounded to her as if the animal was coming after her, and she panicked and ran away from it.

  She ran thirty feet into the woods and then tried to find her way back out. Snow covered her coat and the front of her dress. A stick had scratched her face, and had caught in her hair.

  She sat on a log, shaking, looking about, as if waiting for someone to tell her to do something. Now she did not know how she got in here or how she would get out. Taking deep breaths, she looked at Vye’s watch to see what time it was and had to scratch the snow off it. It had stopped. The trees are insulting to those who are lost. People curse the trees they are lost amongst, simply because of their indifference.

  The best thing was to follow her footprints back, and that is what she attempted to do. A few hours ago she was sitting at the head table, while the emcee told one joke after the other about Myhrra – but now nothing seemed funny. All the words had put a bad taste in her mouth, and her heart sank as she remembered some of the things that were said. She moved on, but in the dark in a blizzard she only struggled on further into the woods. The pit of her stomach seemed to turn cold.

  Yet by not finding the road – and by taking a turn to the left because of a windfall that tore her dress, stumbling down a hill and grabbing a branch in the dark – by coming to a brook and being frightened that it was a swamp, and moving back up the hill – and stopping just an instant to realize that she had lost both of her shoes – and by waiting a few seconds to taste the blood on her gashed cheek – she had saved her life.

  For if she had done anything else, moments sooner or moments later – or taken another direction in any degree, or stopped for any longer on the windfall when she checked the time, or got out of the car any later to have a pee – she would not have stumbled out in front of Allain Garret’s truck lights just as he was backing out of his wood lot. Similarly, if Allain had not left the house when he had, he would not have spotted her.

  Allain at first did not even know what he saw. But he moved forward and shone his truck lights again, and saw Myhrra falling down at just that instant. When he approached her she did not realize it was him and picked up a rotted branch in order to defend herself, and he looked at her from behind a tree quizzically, wondering what she was up to. Then he smiled, his breath smelling of rum and his face creased.

  And suddenly she tried to smooth her dress and looked at him, and then sat down in the snow. And when she did this, he smiled again and helped lift her. She began to tell him about Vye, but at this moment he could not help holding her in his old arms, which were shaking.

  Vye stumbled forward with his lighter lighting the way. But the wind kept blowing it out. Snow had covered his shoulders and hair, and gotten down the back of his neck. He carried his gloves in his left hand, which was a habit he had.

  An hour had passed but he hadn’t come to the main road. He had taken his cummerbund off and now regretted it, for snow and wind washed onto his stomach through his open coat.

  Then he decided to turn and go back to the car. And then, after a time, and after falling twice, he came to two roads, and had no idea which one to take.

  Suddenly he remembered how Joe and Clay Everette could travel in the woods, and this made him angry at them. Besides this, he’d heard a car door slam, but didn’t know what direction it came from. Then he saw Maggie smiling at him, the day he went to Belinda’s. He yawned suddenly.

  After a time he was drawn irresistibly toward the woods, every now and then stopping to check the number of buttons he was missing on his coat, and trying to button them up. He remembered how proudly he’d sat on the men’s hands as they carried him to the car. All of the shouting and laughing seemed ridiculous and sad. And he became annoyed with himself for not saying something more, or better, or in a different way.

  Vye had taken a wrong turn at the top of the first hill. He had moved off the road the car had travelled, and without knowing it was in a maze of logging roads. His lighter no longer worked and he had left his gloves on a stump. It was a stump he kept circling without knowing that he was. The trees he touched with his hands were often trees he had walked near twenty minutes before. Drawn irresistibly into the woods, he called out Myhrra’s name until he couldn�
�t bring himself to anymore, sitting on the very gloves he had left behind an hour ago. He took out his handkerchief and remembered how his best man had tucked it into his pocket in the church, along with a note. He had not read the note, and now it fell into the snow without him seeing it.

  Vye didn’t know that at that moment there were twenty men looking for him.

  Ralphie at that same moment was tucked up in a dark hole, with his light out, smoking a cigarette. He was covered in ore and only the rims around his eyes were white. Because of his hard hat and dirt, his hair was flat on his head. The last thing he thought of was that Adele was pregnant. He himself knew nothing about it.

  He was a mile under the earth and he was considering a calculus problem. That is, how does a person get to where he is from where he has been? Ralphie had no idea how, except he believed it was all natural once it happened. And that there was nothing unnatural or not supposed to happen. So he was now tucked up in a hole under the surface, with his feet on an old piece of pipe – that may have been left there seven months ago or longer – smoking a cigarette that he had rolled.

  And Ralphie thought of it this way – at first he had no desire to go underground at all and had not intended to. He had intended to be in the lab. That was the job he’d applied for.

  Now he was here, beneath the earth. So instead of collecting and analyzing soil samples and taking water samples of streams and ponds, he was carrying blasting caps in his pocket, shovelling ore and placing dynamite, playing pranks on other men – and sometimes crawling up into a chute with a ton of ore above his head. And all of this made him feel special, why he did not know, and since he had grown into it, it was something he would do.

  And as he sat back smoking a cigarette, and hearing water drip, he knew he could be no place else. An object falls, it has no idea where it will land, but at every moment of its descent it is exactly where it is supposed to be.

  Far above him, the storm howled, but here in a crevice of an old ore drift in a lonesome little pocket a thousand feet beneath the ground, he saw the lights of two men at the end of the tunnel, and the glow of cigarettes.

  Joe drove toward his camp. It was snowy at the crossroads, where he stopped to think. He pulled over on the side of the road, and watched as the snow came down over his windshield, and danced in front of his headlights.

  The truck engine and the smell of snow made him sleepy. He had taken the vodka, but he had not had another drink of it. Once just after he had stopped drinking, he’d gone to a party at Myhrra’s. Gloria Basterache had given him a mocha-ball filled with rum. Yet as soon as he had taken it, and had swallowed a sliver of chocolate, he spit the rest of it out. Gloria had apologized and said: “It’s just a mocha-ball – it’s not poison.” And she swung away from him and announced to Rita in the same way she always had when dealing with Joe that she had made some sort of mistake. Then Gloria seemed more angry with him than ever. Joe had to leave the party and go downtown. Walking about half the night, he felt as if he had taken a drink, and since he had taken a drink, what was preventing him from taking another one, and if nothing was preventing him, why didn’t he have one? All of the reasons why he might be able to get away with having a drink flooded over him. It was the same as at this very instant.

  But why had he hurt his back in the first place? Because he had tried to do something when he was drunk. He had taken the tractor out after dark and had tried to cut the fire off by himself. He had almost done it too – at least on the section of road where he had been working, but the tractor rolled on him, and he was pinned under it, as the fire burned all about him. Joe lay there, while the fire burned toward him, trying to move the wheel back and forth to the right and left to get it off of his lower back.

  Yet it was better to drink. No one bothered him. He had a good time, and caused no one any worry. It was a strong man’s only weakness, and everyone knew that as a fact. Besides all the reasoning, when you came right down to it, it meant nothing. Why should he be concerned? No one else was.

  At the crossroads the snow fell; fell gently over the porches and woodsheds of the five houses that sat near it.

  Why he had come here he had no idea. He had started out toward the hospital but had turned onto this road. He rolled the window down, sniffed the cool air, and had a drink out of the plastic bottle. The woods were quiet. A sash of snow fell over the trees, and wisped in the opened doorway of a dry shed. It was good to have this place because it looked so much like the Christmas cards, Joe thought. He wiped his face and had another drink.

  He prolonged his stay here another ten minutes by taking a sip out of the bottle now and again. Then, just as he was going to turn around, he suddenly had an impulse to drive further up the snowy road which he knew so well. It looked so still and peaceful that he could not help wanting to go up there. And, leaving the window down so he could feel the air on his face, he went further into the woods. He had every intention of going up to see his child and grandchild – and to be with them – and yet at every point on his journey he was doing other things. Once he got out of the truck and slammed the door, and stared at the sky. At another point he walked in off the road by forty yards to see a tree-stand he had built two falls ago. When he came out, two coydogs ran off ahead of him. Then a huge bull moose, with its back covered in snow, stood up and lumbered off in the other direction. Joe felt that everything was here, and everything here was exactly the way it should be.

  Then he went about to the back of the truck and looked into some old cardboard boxes, some old tires, and under some planks for his snowshoe harness, which he was sure he had.

  Then, after fixing up his snowshoes, he got back into the truck, turned on the radio, and listened to some music.

  Driving again, he came to the new logging road that had been made last fall, and he had a sudden inspiration, so he took it. He wanted to know if he would be able to drive right out to the brook by this new cut. The brook he and Milly camped near. He did not know that this was the brook Myhrra had met. The truck engine valves ticked, there was a smell of gas in the night air, and the snow got deeper. He stopped again – checking to see if he had his comealongs. He knew he had them but he just wanted to be safe.

  He went over to the path and walked down to the lean-to and lit a cigarette. Here he hunkered down for a minute and looked about. Far behind him he heard the same moose crashing and he smelled the wind. He heard the coydogs too, and then everything was silent.

  He went back to the truck, put on his snowshoes, and went down to the brook with the vodka bottle in his hand. Snow came down and landed on his face. Here the brook spread under some dark alders. The tree stumps had been ploughed back, and the snow rested upon the stumps and alders. To his left was a pond, where an old beaver dam sat eerily in the darkness.

  His camp at Brookwall was two miles above the pond. And he turned in that direction. Walking along the brook in the night he disturbed a small animal, perhaps a weasel, who went hopping blindly over the snow and down quickly into some shrubs. At a point above the pond he crossed the brook, which put him onto the old logging roads. And it was on one of these roads that he started off toward his camp.

  Looking down at his feet, every now and then he saw an indentation, almost buried in new sifts of snow. He looked at them, and wondered who would be in here, and then decided that it was probably just the way the snow had formed in the blizzard. And he left it at that.

  Lighting a fire at his camp, he rummaged about for a little while, lit a lantern and looked over the walls, to see how everything was wintering. Then, without knowing he was going to, he looked at the bottle of vodka, and suddenly he poured it out into the snow.

  He lay down and drifted off to sleep. A log cracked in the fire, and embers burned away.

  He woke an hour later with a start, as if there was something that he had to do immediately. Yes. He had to get to the hospital. He put on his coat, put his snowshoes back on, and started out. The storm had lifted. Some dry snow scuttle
d along the drifts of deep snow, and the moon was just coming over the trees which the wind still tossed and tormented. The wind was fresher and colder, and his eyes watered.

  He felt good, happy for the first time in a long time, and he was thinking of nothing in particular.

  He happened at that moment to cut along a side log road that ran diagonally to the road he had come up on and to the brook which he had crossed. Therefore he would meet the brook further up but sooner. And as he moved along, with the moon now above the trees, he saw those same indentations in the snow. He stooped down and looked more closely at them. He saw how they crossed this logging road in a hurry, and zigzagged off into the woods. It was either someone in lifting traps or else someone lost.

  It took Joe a while to track and mark the trees, and to realize that whoever it was had been walking in smaller and smaller circles. Once he had figured this out, Joe went back out onto the logging road again, and made an imaginary line to the centre of the circles, and started in. He walked in, down over a hill, and there, at a place about fifty feet from the brook, he saw Vye huddled up against a stump with his hands up over his face.

  Vye looked up at Joe at that second and said, “I lost my gloves, Joe.” And he smiled, as if losing his gloves would be what Joe would be most concerned about. And then he seemed to drift back to sleep.

  Joe took his coat off, and put it around him. He lifted him to his feet and kept shaking him to wake him up.

  Then he crossed the brook, with Vye on his back, and made his way up through clear cut and slag and moved toward his truck. His back pained only slightly but he did not feel it so much – not knowing the processes of how this had all happened, only understanding that it was now irrevocable because it had.