It was a cold morning, but not exceptionally cold for that time of year, four or five notches below freezing, and the engine kicked over with the first turn of the key. As they sat there waiting for the car to warm up, Ferguson asked if she would prefer that he do the driving instead. He wouldn’t have his license until he turned seventeen in another six weeks or so, but he had his learner’s permit, and given that she was a licensed driver who happened to be in the car with him, it was perfectly legal for them to switch places. Ferguson added that he was a good driver, and for many months now his parents had been letting him handle the chauffeuring duties whenever he had to go somewhere with them, either singly or together, and neither his mother nor his father had ever complained about the results. Francie smiled a tight little smile and said she was sure he was an excellent driver, probably a better driver than she was, but she was behind the wheel now, and they were about to get started, and going down the hill could be a bit tricky for someone who had never driven on a dirt road, and so she would do the driving, thank you, and once they got to the store and bought the things they needed to buy, maybe they could switch places for the ride back home.
As it happened, there was no ride back home. They couldn’t return from Miller’s General Store because they never managed to reach the store, and on that morning, which Ferguson would always think of as the morning of mornings, both cousins paid a price for that interrupted journey in the mountains of Vermont, especially Ferguson, who wound up paying for it long into the future, and while no one held him responsible for the accident (how could he be responsible if he wasn’t driving the car?), he nevertheless blamed himself for causing Francie to turn her eyes from the road, for if she hadn’t glanced over to look at him instead, she never would have skidded on that patch of ice and crashed into the tree.
The point was that he knew better than to allow himself to be drawn into the argument. Francie had every right to feel annoyed with him, and he decided the best course of action would be to say as little as possible to her, to nod his head and agree with whatever harsh judgment she pronounced on him, to resist the temptation to defend himself. Let her be angry, he thought, but as long as he could prevent that anger from inciting an anger of his own, perhaps the confrontation would be short and small and soon forgotten.
Or so Ferguson thought. His mistake was to assume that the central issue was the noise, the indiscretion of that noise and the selfishness he had shown by inflicting it on the others, but the noise was only part of it, the least part of it, and once he understood that the attack was far bigger than the one he had prepared himself for, he was caught with his guard down, and when Francie lashed out at him, he lashed back at her.
She managed to navigate the car down the mile-long hill without any trouble, but when she came to the bottom and paused, she turned right instead of left, and since Gary had said the store was to the left, Ferguson mentioned it to her, but Francie merely strummed her fingers on the steering wheel and said not to worry about it, Gary had no sense of direction, he was always mixing things up, and if he said they should go left, that must have meant they should go right. It was a funny thing to say, Ferguson thought, but the words didn’t sound funny when they came out of Francie’s mouth, they sounded bitter and slightly contemptuous, as if Francie were peeved at Gary about something, or peeved at someone else about some other thing, her brother Jack, for instance, who was rarely in touch with her anymore, or her pain-in-the-neck father, who had just lost another job and was on unemployment again, or perhaps all three men at the same time, which would have made Ferguson the fourth man she was on the outs with that morning, and the fact that she had indeed taken the wrong turn and was driving farther and farther away from the store didn’t help to soften her mood when she discovered her mistake, which meant that the second half of the interrupted journey was spent on a series of twisting back roads in search of a route back to the county highway where they had started, and in the frazzle of bad temper and frustration that descended upon his normally uncombative first cousin, Francie finally got down to the business that had prompted them to leave the house in the first place and let him have it.
How sad, she said, how sad and disappointing it was to discover that her darling boy had turned into a lying cheat, that he was just another crumb in a long line of crumbs, and how dare he use her in the way he had, dragging his girlfriend up to Vermont in order to fuck her behind everyone’s back, it was disgusting, two horny kids charming everyone on the ride up and then sneaking around in the attic at night, fucking on top of two little children, and how could he do this to her, she who had loved him since the day he was born, she who had bathed him and cared for him and watched him grow up, and what was she supposed to say to his mother, who had let him go to Vermont because she knew he would be safe with his cousin, there was trust involved in all this, she said, and how could he break that trust under her very roof, an out-of-control teenager who couldn’t even keep it in his pants for one night, and the truth was she didn’t want him there anymore, she would put him and his slut girlfriend on the bus this afternoon and send them back to New York, and good-bye and good riddance to them both …
That was the beginning. Five minutes later, she was still talking, and when Ferguson finally told her to shut up and stop the car, shouting that he’d had enough and would walk back to the house to fetch his things, Francie turned to him and said, with something like madness in her eyes, Don’t be ridiculous, Archie, you’ll freeze to death out here, which convinced him that something was wrong with her, that her mind was wobbling, on the verge of cracking up, and because she went on looking at him as if she no longer remembered what she had just been saying, he smiled at her, and when she smiled back at him, he realized that she had stopped looking at the road, and a moment later the car slammed into the tree.
NO SEAT BELTS, not in 1964, and consequently they were both injured in the crash, even though the car had been traveling at a moderate speed, somewhere between thirty and thirty-five miles an hour. Francie: a concussion, a broken left clavicle caused by the impact when she was flung forward into the steering wheel, and once she was released from the Vermont hospital, transfer to a New Jersey hospital to recover from what the doctors told Gary was a nervous breakdown. Ferguson: unconscious and bleeding from his head, his arms, and his left hand, which had gone through the windshield first, and while no bones were broken (a long-odds fluke that confounded the staff and inspired some of the nurses to call it a medical miracle), two of the fingers on that left hand were severed by the windshield glass, both joints of the thumb and the top two joints of the index, and because the fingers were buried in the snow and not recovered until spring, Ferguson was fated to march through the rest of his life as an eight-fingered man.
He took it hard. He knew he should be glad he wasn’t dead, but his survival was a fact, something that no longer had to be questioned, and the question before him now was not so much a question as a cry of despair: What was going to happen to him? He had been deformed, and when they removed the bandages and showed him what his hand looked like, what it would always look like from now on, he was revolted by what he saw. His hand was no longer his hand. It belonged to someone else, and as he gazed down at the stitched-up, smoothed-over spots that had once been his thumb and index finger, he felt sick and turned his head away. So ugly, so hideous to look at—the hand of a monster. He had joined the brigade of the damned, he told himself, and from now on he would be looked upon as one of those crippled, distorted people who no longer counted as full-fledged members of the human race. And then, to compound the agony of those insidious humiliations, there would be the trial of having to relearn a hundred things he had mastered as a small boy, the myriad manipulations that a two-thumbed person performed unconsciously every day, how to tie his shoes, how to button his shirt, how to cut his food, how to use a typewriter, and until those tasks became automatic for him again, which could take months, perhaps even years, he would be constantly reminded of how far he had fallen. No, Ferguson wasn’t dead, but other words beginning with the letter d clung to him like a flock of starving children in the days that followed the accident, and he found it impossible to free himself from the spell of those emotions: demoralized, depressed, dumbfounded, discouraged, dejected, down in the dumps, desperate, defensive, despondent, discombobulated, distressed, deranged, defeated.