“‘No’m,’ I says.
“She looks at me, her eyes all a-sparkle, and she says, ‘Your wife is a good woman, Homer Buckland, but she has seen me in the store and in the post office, and we’ve passed the odd word or two, and I have seen her looking at my hair in a kind of satisfied way that only women know. I know what she says, and what she tells her friends…that Ophelia Todd has started dyeing her hair. But I have not. I have lost my way looking for a shortcut more than once…lost my way…and lost my gray.’ And she laughed, not like a college girl but like a girl in high school. I admired her and longed for her beauty, but I seen that other beauty in her face as well just then…and I felt afraid again. Afraid for her, and afraid of her.
“‘Missus,’ I says, ‘you stand to lose more than a little sta’ch in your hair.’
“‘No,’ she says. ‘I tell you I am different over there… I am all myself over there. When I am going along that road in my little car I am not Ophelia Todd, Worth Todd’s wife who could never carry a child to term, or that woman who tried to write poetry and failed at it, or the woman who sits and takes notes in committee meetings, or anything or anyone else. When I am on that road I am in the heart of myself, and I feel like—’
“‘Diana,’ I said.
“She looked at me kind of funny and kind of surprised, and then she laughed. ‘O like some goddess, I suppose,’ she said. ‘She will do better than most because I am a night person—I love to stay up until my book is done or until the National Anthem comes on the TV, and because I am very pale, like the moon—Worth is always saying I need a tonic, or blood tests or some sort of similar bosh. But in her heart what every woman wants to be is some kind of goddess, I think—men pick up a ruined echo of that thought and try to put them on pedestals (a woman, who will pee down her own leg if she does not squat! It’s funny when you stop to think of it)—but what a man senses is not what a woman wants. A woman wants to be in the clear, is all. To stand if she will, or walk…’ Her eyes turned toward that little go-devil in the driveway, and narrowed. Then she smiled. ‘Or to drive, Homer. A man will not see that. He thinks a goddess wants to loll on a slope somewhere on the foothills of Olympus and eat fruit, but there is no god or goddess in that. All a woman wants is what a man wants—a woman wants to drive.’
“‘Be careful where you drive, missus, is all,’ I says, and she laughs and give me a kiss spang in the middle of the forehead.
“She says, ‘I will, Homer,’ but it didn’t mean nothing, and I known it, because she said it like a man who says he’ll be careful to his wife or his girl when he knows he won’t…can’t.
“I went back to my truck and waved to her once, and it was a week later that Worth reported her missing. Her and that go-devil both. Todd waited seven years and had her declared legally dead, and then he waited another year for good measure—I’ll give the sucker that much—and then he married the second Missus Todd, the one that just went by. And I don’t expect you’ll believe a single damn word of the whole yarn.”
In the sky one of those big flat-bottomed clouds moved enough to disclose the ghost of the moon—half-full and pale as milk. And something in my heart leaped up at the sight, half in fright, half in love.
“I do though,” I said. “Every frigging damned word. And even if it ain’t true, Homer, it ought to be.”
He give me a hug around the neck with his forearm, which is all men can do since the world don’t let them kiss but only women, and laughed, and got up.
“Even if it shouldn’t ought to be, it is,” he said. He got his watch out of his pants and looked at it. “I got to go down the road and check on the Scott place. You want to come?”
“I believe I’ll sit here for a while,” I said, “and think.”
He went to the steps, then turned back and looked at me, half-smiling. “I believe she was right,” he said. “She was different along those roads she found…wasn’t nothing that would dare touch her. You or me, maybe, but not her.
“And I believe she’s young.”
Then he got in his truck and set off to check the Scott place.
That was two years ago, and Homer has since gone to Vermont, as I think I told you. One night he come over to see me. His hair was combed, he had a shave, and he smelled of some nice lotion. His face was clear and his eyes were alive. That night he looked sixty instead of seventy, and I was glad for him and I envied him and I hated him a little, too. Arthritis is one buggardly great old fisherman, and that night Homer didn’t look like arthritis had any fishhooks sunk into his hands the way they were sunk into mine.
“I’m going,” he said.
“Ayuh?”
“Ayuh.”
“All right; did you see to forwarding your mail?”
“Don’t want none forwarded,” he said. “My bills are paid. I am going to make a clean break.”
“Well, give me your address. I’ll drop you a line from one time to the another, old hoss.” Already I could feel loneliness settling over me like a cloak…and looking at him, I knew that things were not quite what they seemed.
“Don’t have none yet,” he said.
“All right,” I said. “Is it Vermont, Homer?”
“Well,” he said, “it’ll do for people who want to know.”
I almost didn’t say it and then I did. “What does she look like now?”
“Like Diana,” he said. “But she is kinder.”
“I envy you, Homer,” I said, and I did.
I stood at the door. It was twilight in that deep part of summer when the fields fill with perfume and Queen Anne’s Lace. A full moon was beating a silver track across the lake. He went across my porch and down the steps. A car was standing on the soft shoulder of the road, its engine idling heavy, the way the old ones do that still run full bore straight ahead and damn the torpedoes. Now that I think of it, that car looked like a torpedo. It looked beat up some, but as if it could go the ton without breathin hard. He stopped at the foot of my steps and picked something up—it was his gas can, the big one that holds ten gallons. He went down my walk to the passenger side of the car. She leaned over and opened the door. The inside light came on and just for a moment I saw her, long red hair around her face, her forehead shining like a lamp. Shining like the moon. He got in and she drove away. I stood out on my porch and watched the taillights of her little go-devil twinkling red in the dark…getting smaller and smaller. They were like embers, then they were like flickerflies, and then they were gone.
Vermont, I tell the folks from town, and Vermont they believe, because it’s as far as most of them can see inside their heads. Sometimes I almost believe it myself, mostly when I’m tired and done up. Other times I think about them, though—all this October I have done so, it seems, because October is the time when men think mostly about far places and the roads which might get them there. I sit on the bench in front of Bell’s Market and think about Homer Buckland and about the beautiful girl who leaned over to open his door when he come down that path with the full red gasoline can in his right hand—she looked like a girl of no more than sixteen, a girl on her learner’s permit, and her beauty was terrible, but I believe it would no longer kill the man it turned itself on; for a moment her eyes lit on me, I was not killed, although part of me died at her feet.