Our Story Begins: New and Selected Stories

by Tobias Wolff

  The wind had died. The snow was falling straight down, less of it now and lighter. We drove away from the resort, right up to the barricade. “Move it,” my father told me. When I looked at him, he said, “What are you waiting for?” I got out and dragged one of the sawhorses aside, then put it back after he drove through. He pushed the door open for me. “Now you’re an accomplice,” he said. “We go down together.” He put the car into gear and gave me a look. “Joke, son.”

  Down the first long stretch I watched the road behind us, to see if the trooper was on our tail. The barricade vanished. Then there was nothing but snow: snow on the road, snow kicking up from the chains, snow on the trees, snow in the sky, and our trail in the snow. Then I faced forward and had a shock. There were no tracks ahead of us. My father was breaking virgin snow between tall treelines. He was humming “Stars Fell on Alabama.” I felt snow brush along the floorboards under my feet. To keep my hands from shaking I clamped them between my knees.

  My father grunted thoughtfully and said, “Don’t ever try this yourself.”

  “I won’t.”

  “That’s what you say now, but someday you’ll get your license and then you’ll think you can do anything. Only you won’t be able to do this. You need, I don’t know—a certain instinct.”

  “Maybe I have it.”

  “You don’t. You have your strong points, sure, just not this. I only mention it because I don’t want you to get the idea this is something anybody can do. I’m a great driver. That’s not a virtue, okay? It’s just a fact, and one you should be aware of. Of course you have to give the old heap some credit too. There aren’t many cars I’d try this with. Listen!”

  I did listen. I heard the slap of the chains, the stiff, jerky rasp of the wipers, the purr of the engine. It really did purr. The old heap was almost new. My father couldn’t afford it, and kept promising to sell it, but here it was.

  I said, “Where do you think that policeman went to?”

  “Are you warm enough?” He reached over and cranked up the blower. Then he turned off the wipers. We didn’t need them. The clouds had brightened. A few sparse, feathery flakes drifted into our slipstream and were swept away. We left the trees and entered a broad field of snow that ran level for a while and then tilted sharply downward. Orange stakes had been planted at intervals in two parallel lines and my father steered a course between them, though they were far enough apart to leave considerable doubt in my mind as to exactly where the road lay. He was humming again, doing little scat riffs around the melody.

  “Okay, then. What are my strong points?”

  “Don’t get me started,” he said. “It’d take all day.”

  “Oh, right. Name one.”

  “Easy. You always think ahead.”

  True. I always thought ahead. I was a boy who kept his clothes on numbered hangers to ensure proper rotation. I bothered my teachers for homework assignments far ahead of their due dates so I could draw up schedules. I thought ahead, and that was why I knew there would be other troopers waiting for us at the end of our ride, if we even got there. What I didn’t know was that my father would wheedle and plead his way past them—he didn’t sing “O Tannenbaum,” but just about—and get me home for dinner, buying a little more time before my mother decided to make the split final. I knew we’d get caught; I was resigned to it. And maybe for this reason I stopped moping and began to enjoy myself.

  Why not? This was one for the books. Like being in a speedboat, only better. You can’t go downhill in a boat. And it was all ours. And it kept coming, the laden trees, the unbroken surface of snow, the sudden white vistas. Here and there I saw hints of the road, ditches, fences, stakes, though not so many that I could have found my own way. But then I didn’t have to. My father was driving. My father in his forty-eighth year, rumpled, kind, bankrupt of honor, flushed with certainty. He was a great driver. All persuasion, no coercion. Such subtlety at the wheel, such tactful pedalwork. I actually trusted him. And the best was yet to come—switchbacks and hairpins impossible to describe. Except maybe to say this: if you haven’t driven fresh powder, you haven’t driven.

  The Night in Question

  Frances had come to her brother’s apartment to hold his hand over a disappointment in love, but Frank polished off half the cherry pie she’d brought him and barely mentioned the woman. He was in an exalted state over a sermon he’d heard that afternoon. Dr. Violet had outdone himself, Frank told her; this was his best, the gold standard. Frank wanted to repeat it to Frances, as he used to act out movie scenes for her when they were young.

  “Gotta run, Franky.”

  “It’s not that long,” Frank said. “Five minutes. Ten—at the outside.”

  Three years earlier he had driven her car into a highway abutment and almost died, then almost died again, in detox, of a grand mal seizure. Now he wanted to preach sermons at her. She supposed she was grateful. She said she’d give him ten minutes.

  It was a muggy night, but as always Frank wore a long-sleeved shirt to hide the weird tattoos he woke up with one morning when he was stationed in Manila. The shirt was white, starched, and crisply ironed. The tie he’d worn to church was still cinched up hard under his prominent Adam’s apple. A tall man in a small room, he paced in front of the couch while he gathered himself to speak. He favored his left leg, whose knee had been shattered in the crash; every time his right foot came down, the dishes clinked in the cupboards.

  “Okay, here goes,” he said. “I’ll have to fill in here and there, but I’ve got most of it.” He continued to walk, slowly, deliberately, hands behind his back, head bent at an angle that suggested meditation. “My dear friends,” he said, “you may have read in the paper not long ago of a man of our state, a parent like many of yourselves here today…though a parent with a terrible choice to make. His name is Mike Bolling. He’s a railroad man, Mike, a switchman, been with the railroad ever since he finished high school, same as his father and grandfather before him. He and Janice’ve been married ten years now. They were hoping for a whole houseful of kids, but the Lord decided to give them one instead, a very special one. That was nine years ago. Benny, they named him—after Janice’s father. Though he died when she was just a youngster, she remembered his big lopsided grin and how he threw back his head when he laughed, and she was hoping some of her dad’s spirit would rub off on his name. Well, it turned out she got all the spirit she could handle, and then some.

  “Benny. He came out in high gear and never shifted down. Mike liked to say you could run a train off him, the energy he had. Good student, natural athlete, but his big thing was mechanics. One of those boys, you put him in the same room with a clock and he’s got it in pieces before you can turn around. By the time he was in second grade he could put the clocks back together, not to mention the vacuum cleaner and the TV and the engine of Mike’s old lawn mower.”

  This didn’t sound like Frank. He was plain in his speech, neither formal nor folksy, so spare and sometimes harsh that his jokes sounded like challenges, or insults. Frances was about the only one who got them. This tone was putting her on edge. Something terrible was going to happen in the story, something Frances would regret having heard. She knew that. But she didn’t stop him. Frank was her little brother, and she would deny him nothing.

  When Frank was still a baby, not even walking yet, Frank Senior, their father, had set out to teach his son the meaning of the word “no.” At dinner he’d dangle his wristwatch before Frank’s eyes, then say No! and jerk it back just as the boy grabbed for it. When Frank persisted, Frank Senior would slap his hand until he was howling with fury and desire. This happened night after night. Frank would not take the lesson to heart; as soon as the watch was offered, he snatched at it. Frances followed her mother’s example and said nothing. She was eight years old, and while she feared her father’s attention she also missed it, and resented Frank’s obstinacy and the disturbance it caused. Why couldn’t he learn?

  Then her father slapped Fr
ank’s face. This was on New Year’s Eve. Frances still remembered the stupid tasseled hats they were all wearing when her father slapped her baby brother. In the void of time after the slap there was no sound but the long rush of air into Frank’s lungs as, red-faced, twisting in his chair, he worked up a scream. Frank Senior lowered his head. Frances saw that he’d surprised himself and was afraid of what would follow. She looked at her mother, whose eyes were closed. In later years Frances tried to think of a moment when their lives might have turned by even a degree, turned and gone in some other direction, and she always came back to this instant when her father knew the wrong he’d done and was shaken, open to rebuke. What might have happened if her mother had come flying out of her chair and stood over him and told him to stop, now and forever? Or if she had only looked at him, confirming his shame? But her eyes were closed, and stayed closed until Frank blasted them with his despair and Frank Senior left the room. As Frances knew even then, her mother could not allow herself to see what she had no strength to oppose. Her heart was bad. Three years later she reached for a bottle of ammonia, said “Oh,” sat down on the floor, and died.

  Frances did oppose her father. In defiance of his orders, she brought food to Frank’s room when he was banished, stood up for him, and told him he was right to stand up for himself. Frank Senior had decided that his son needed to be broken, and Frank would not break. He went after everything his father said no to, with Frances egging him on and mothering him when he got caught. In time their father ceased to give reasons for his displeasure. As his silence grew heavier, so did his hand. One night Frances grabbed her father’s belt as he started after Frank, and when he flung her aside Frank head-rammed him in the stomach. Frances jumped on her father’s back, and the three of them crashed around the room. When it was over Frances was flat on the floor with a split lip and a ringing sound in her ears, laughing like a madwoman.

  Frank Senior said no to his son in everything, and Frances would say no to him in nothing. Frank was aware of her reluctance and learned to exploit it, most shamelessly in the months before his accident. He’d invaded her home, caused her trouble at work, nearly destroyed her marriage. To this day her husband had not forgiven Frances for what he called her complicity in that nightmare. But her husband had never been thrown across a room, or kicked, or slammed headfirst into a door. No one had ever spoken to him as her father had spoken to Frank. He had no idea what it was like to be helpless and alone. No one should be alone in this world. Everyone should have someone who kept faith, no matter what, all the way.

  “On the night in question,” Frank said, “Mike’s foreman called up and asked him to take another fellow’s shift at the drawbridge station where he’d been working. A Monday night it was, mid-January, bitter cold. Janice was at a PTA meeting when Mike got the call, so he had no choice but to bring Benny along with him. Though it was against the rules, strictly speaking, he needed the overtime and he’d done it before, more than once. Nobody ever said anything. Benny always behaved himself, and it was a good chance for him and Mike to buddy up, batch it a little. They’d talk and kid around, heat up some franks, then Mike would set Benny up with a sleeping bag and air mattress. A regular adventure.

  “A bitter night, like I said. There was a furnace at the station, but it wasn’t working. The guy Mike relieved had on his parka and a pair of mittens. Mike ribbed him about it, though pretty soon he and Benny put their own hats and gloves back on. Mike brewed up some hot chocolate, and they played gin rummy, or tried to—it’s not that easy with gloves on. But they weren’t thinking about winning or losing. It was good enough just being together, the two of them, with the cold wind blowing up against the windows. Father and son! What could be better than that? Then Mike had to raise the bridge for a couple of boats, and things got pretty tense because one of them steered too close to the bank and almost ran aground. The skipper had to reverse engines and go back downriver and take another turn at it. The whole business went on a lot longer than it should have, and by the time the second boat got clear Mike was running way behind schedule and under pressure to get the bridge down for the express train out of Portland. That was when he noticed Benny was missing.”

  Frank stopped by the window and looked out, unseeing, as if contemplating whether to go on. But then he turned away from the window and started in again, and Frances understood that this little moment of reflection was just another part of the sermon.

  “Mike calls Benny’s name. No answer. He calls him again, and he doesn’t spare the volume. You have to understand the position Mike is in. He has to get the bridge down for that train, and he’s got just about enough time to do it. He doesn’t know where Benny is, but he has a pretty good idea. Just where he isn’t supposed to be. Down below, in the engine room.

  “The engine room. The mill, as Mike and the other operators call it. You can imagine the kind of power that’s needed to raise and lower a drawbridge, aside from the engine itself—all the winches and levers, pulleys and axles and wheels and so on. Massive machinery. Gigantic screws turning everywhere, gears with teeth like file cabinets. They’ve got catwalks and little crawlways through the works for the mechanics, but nobody goes down there unless they know what they’re doing. You have to know what you’re doing. You have to know exactly where to put your feet, and you’ve got to keep your hands in close and wear all the right clothes. And even if you know what you’re doing, you never go down there when the bridge is being moved. Never. There’s just too much going on, too many ways of getting snagged and pulled into the works. Mike has told Benny a hundred times, ‘Stay out of the mill.’ That’s the iron rule when Benny comes out to the station. But Mike made the mistake of taking him down for a quick look one day when the engine was being serviced, and he saw how Benny lit up at the sight of all that steel, all that machinery. Benny was just dying to get his hands on those wheels and gears, to see how everything fit together. Mike could feel it pulling at Benny like a big magnet. He always kept a close eye on him after that, until this one night, when he got distracted. And now Benny’s down in there. Mike knows it as sure as he knows his own name.”

  Frances said, “I don’t want to hear this story.”

  Frank gave no sign that he’d heard her. She was going to say something else, then made a sour face and let him go on.

  “To get to the engine room, Mike would have to go through the passageway to the back of the station and wait for the elevator, or else climb down the emergency ladder. He doesn’t have time to do either. Doesn’t have time for anything but lowering the bridge, and just barely enough time for that. He’s got to get that bridge down now or the train is going into the river with everyone on board. This is the position he’s in, this is the choice he has to make: his son, his Benjamin, or the people on that train.

  “Now, let’s take a minute to think about the people on that train. Mike’s never met any of them, but he’s lived long enough to know what they’re like. They’re like the rest of us. There are some who know the Lord, and love their neighbors, and live in the light. And there are the others. On this train are men who whisper over cunning papers and take from the widow even her mean portion. On this train is the man whose factories kill and maim his workers. There are thieves on this train, and liars, and hypocrites. There is the man whose wife is not enough for him, who cannot be happy until he possesses every woman who walks the earth. There is the false witness. There is the bribe taker. There is the woman who abandons her husband and children for her own pleasure. There is the seller of spoiled goods, the coward, and the usurer, and there is the man who lives for his drug, who will do anything for that false promise—steal from those who give him work, from his friends, his family, yes, even from his own family, scheming for their pity, borrowing in bad faith, breaking into their very homes. All these are on the train, awake and hungry as wolves, and also on the train are the sleepers, those who with open eyes sleepwalk through their days, neither doing evil nor resisting it, like soldiers who lie
down as if dead and will not join the battle, not for their cities and homes, not even for their wives and children. For such people, how can Mike give up his son, his Benjamin, who is guilty of nothing?

  “He can’t. Of course he can’t, not on his own. But Mike isn’t on his own. He knows what we all know, even when we try to forget it: we are never alone, ever. We are in our Father’s presence in the light of day and in the dark of night, even in that darkness where we run from Him, hiding our faces like fearful children. He will not leave us. No. He will never leave us alone. Though we lock every window and bar every door, still he will enter. Though we empty our hearts and turn them to stone, yet shall he make his home there.

  “He will not leave us alone. He is with all of you here, as he is with me. He is with Mike, and also with the bribe taker on the train, and the woman who must have her friend’s husband, and the man who needs a drink. He knows their needs better than they do. He knows that what they truly need is him, and though they flee his voice he never stops telling them that he is there. And at this moment, when Mike has nowhere to hide and nothing left to tell himself, then he can hear, and he knows that he is not alone, and he knows what it is that he must do. It has been done before, even by him who speaks, the Father of All, who gave his own Son, his beloved, that others might be saved.”

  “No!” Frances said.

  Frank stopped and looked at Frances as if he couldn’t remember who she was.

  “That’s it,” she said. “That’s my quota of holiness for the year.”