“I said I’ll be there,” Wade said in a dead voice, and he reached across Margie and slid the receiver into its cradle.
“He’s really pissed,” she said. “Isn’t he?”
“Yep.” Wade slid out of the bed and yanked his clothes on.
“He probably ought to be, though. I mean, I never really thought of it,” she said. “The plowing. How come you didn’t just do it? What happened?”
“I forgot.”
“Forgot? You forgot it was snowing?”
“No, no, I knew it was snowing, all right. I just forgot that I was the one who had to plow it off the roads. Sometimes,” he said, “sometimes you just forget who you are. Especially when you’re sick of who you are,” he added, and he walked quickly from the bedroom, and Margie thought, Oh boy, trouble.
It was cold, but not uncomfortably so, and Wade was almost glad to be outdoors. Sometime earlier, probably around midnight, while he slept, the snow had stopped falling, and the sky had cleared. Now, as Wade drove toward town from Margie’s house, he could feel morning coming on, and he suddenly felt glad to be out of Margie’s bed and alone in his car with the heater fan clattering, the woods on either side of the road dark and impenetrable behind a white skirt of snow, the car head-lights splashing bright light ahead of him, like a wave washing up on a beach.
LaRiviere sat glowering out his kitchen window when Wade drove into the lot and parked his car next to the grader, but he did not come out to holler or to threaten him, and Wade simply went about his business and drove back out in the grader. He knew his route, and he knew that it would take him four to five hours in this snow, barely six inches of light powder. There was no school today: he would not have to worry about being out in front of the school in time to direct traffic and could just go on plowing until the job was done.
It was not long before Wade began actually to enjoy himself; it was almost fun, huddled up there in the grader alone in the cockpit with the four headlamps peering like monstrous eyes over the top of the huge front tires, casting nets of light across the smooth soft unbroken snow. The pain from his tooth was steady and familiar, like an old friend, and Wade felt calm and competent and not at all lonely.
Headed north on Main Street, he chugged past Alma Pittman’s house. Under a white mantle, the house was dark as a tomb, and Wade imagined the tall thin woman lying in her bed in the upstairs bedroom where she had slept alone her whole life, straight out and on her back, her hands crossed over her flat chest — not as if dead, exactly, but in a state of suspended animation, waiting for dawnlight, when she would rise, dress, make herself a pot of tea and go back to her work of keeping the town records. For as long as Wade could remember, back into his childhood, Alma Pittman had been the town clerk. She ran for the post, with only token opposition, every year, her election a simple annual renewal, as if no one else could be trusted to log the births and deaths, record the marriages and divorces, list the sales and resales of land and houses, register the voters and issue the permits and licenses for hunting and fishing and calculate and collect the taxes and fees, and in that way connect the town to the larger communities — the county, the state and even the nation — and make the people of Lawford into citizens, make them into more than a lost tribe, more than a sad jumble of families huddled in a remote northern valley against the cold and the dark.
Wade knew the inside of Alma Pittman’s house welclass="underline" she was his ex-wife’s aunt, and after Lillian’s father had died and her mother had remarried and moved up to Littleton, Lillian, who still had two years of high school left, had moved in with her aunt. That was the summer Wade got his driver’s license, and every Sunday he drove Lillian out to the Riverside Cemetery, where she placed wildflowers in a plastic vase by her father’s gravestone and then stood silently for a few moments at the foot of his grave, wringing her hands and fighting off tears. She followed the routine precisely every Sunday afternoon, as if the whole enterprise — wildflowers, silence, hand wringing, heaving chest and wet eyes — were a spiritual exercise, a weekly purification rite that had nothing to do with her father.
To Wade that summer, Lillian was a nun touched by tragedy. She was tall and slender, still a girl, with long oak-colored hair that, brushed a hundred strokes every night and fifty more in the morning, hung straight as rain almost to her waist. Her father had been a housepainter who had not drawn a sober breath in years, people said. The previous autumn he had been painting the flagpole at the newly built elementary school, and in sight of half the children in town he had fallen from the top of the pole, had smashed his back and skull and had died right there on the playground.
I was in the first grade then, my first year at school, and had been among the fifty or sixty kids who had seen the man fall (or heard it, or were close enough to have seen it but did not — I am not sure even today whether I actually did see it) and told the story over and over at supper—”I’m out there at third base, so I got this wicked good view of the flagpole, which is right behind the batter’s cage, and all of a sudden, it’s like a plane crashing, eerroo-oom! Whap!”
Finally, after a week of it, Wade had snapped at me, “Hey, c’mon, Rolfe, we all know the story. Whyn’t you think of something new to say? Besides, it’s kind of disgusting when we’re eating.”
Pop had held his fork in midair between his plate and mouth and said, “Leave him be, Wade. Don’t be such a candyass, anyhow. Rolfe probably won’t ever see nothing that stupid again.”
“I hope not,” Ma had said.
Wade had shut up, but sensing the source of my brother’s discomfort, I did not tell the story again.
The following spring, Lillian’s mother married Tom Smith, a divorced drinking buddy of Lillian’s father, another housepainter, who lived up in Littleton and owned a triple-decker apartment house there. The woman took her two younger daughters to Littleton with her, leaving Lillian behind, to complete high school and live with her spinster aunt, Alma Pittman, the hardworking dour pinch-faced older sister of her dead father, a woman who was regarded as necessary to the town but a little overeducated, because she had studied accounting for two years at Plymouth State before coming back to Lawford during the war to take care of her ailing parents.
Lillian did not particularly like her cheerless aunt, but the woman left her alone, gave her a room upstairs and allowed Wade to come over whenever he wanted and even let them spend hours alone in Lillian’s room with the door closed, where they passionately kissed and hugged and groped through each other’s clothing to their virginal bodies. And after a while, exhausted, they would cease to struggle with the angels of their adolescent consciences; they fell away panting and talked in whispers of their fears and longings; and sometimes they came downstairs and sat side by side on the couch, with Alma in her ladder-back rocker, and the three of them watched television together. And though Wade and Lillian did not actually make love in those steamy sessions upstairs (perhaps because they never actually made love), it was during those summer months, when Wade was sixteen years old and Lillian fifteen, that they decided to marry as soon as they graduated from high school. It was the same summer that Wade first spoke to anyone of our father’s violence.
In the years that our father had been beating him, Wade had not spoken of it to anyone, not to his friends at school or on the football and baseball teams, who often joked, the way boys in cars or in locker rooms will, about how their old man used to beat the shit out of them but he damn well better not try it now or he will damn well get his ass kicked. And he could not imagine talking about it with our mother, though at times it seemed clear that she wanted him to. Whenever she brought the subject up, he felt his heart race, as if she had asked him something about his sex life or told him something about hers, and he always said, “I don’t want to talk about it.”