Nancy did not understand what she had done, because she did not know why she had done it. She drove the last twenty-five miles to Catamount puzzling over the event, replaying it and rephrasing her description of it as she drove, thinking, as if saying it to Moses, I stopped to pick up a hitchhiker in the rain but I didn’t do it, but I don’t know why I didn’t do it. She tried several explanations — that she suddenly, inexplicably, had become frightened by the hitchhiker, since she might have made a mistake, the girl might actually have been a man; that she was still addled by the close call with the truck back on the Turnpike; that she had suddenly realized that the hitchhiker would break into her solitary thoughts, which at this time more than at any other she treasured and needed — but none of the explanations told her truly why she had tempted and then rejected the girl, why, by slowing almost to a stop, she had offered something she was not ready or willing actually to give.
She drove quickly along Main Street in Catamount, the tall elms and maples alongside the street shedding their last leaves in the rain, the stores and offices darkened and empty, except for the Copper Skillet, where, as she passed, she could see a few solitary diners at the counter. At the far side of town, she turned right toward home, uphill for a quarter mile, and there it suddenly was, the white Cape farmhouse and attached barn, the neatly trimmed lawn and flowerbeds, the bony, leafless oaks by the side of the road.
She turned into the drive and parked the car in front of the barn door. She would have to run no more than twenty feet to reach the breezeway and the kitchen door, but she knew she would be soaked through by the time she got there, so she sat for a few seconds, hesitating to leave the dry, smoky warmth of the car. She wished she had brought an umbrella. She decided that from now on she would bring an umbrella with her on Thursdays. Then she decided that she would not leave Ronald, and stepping from the car, she ran into the house.
The Right Way
THE BOY STEPPED OUT OF THE HOUSE to the porch and from the porch into the glare of sunlight off the snow. The boy was fourteen years old, exactly, for it was his birthday. Tall and somewhat awkward, his height was coming early and in bits and pieces. First his hands and feet, then his legs, followed a few months later by his arms, so that his body seemed to be made of parts from several different-sized bodies, which made him look fragile and graceless, a long-legged bird walking on rocky ground.
He moved down the straight, wide, freshly cleared path in the snow, gazing at the path from different angles, as if admiring his work, for it was he who had shoveled the path earlier and then the driveway, from the barn all the way to the road, where he had diligently chopped away the hardpacked snowbank made by the town plow, tossing the huge, heavy chunks of snow over his shoulder, deliberately constructing with them neat, conical gateposts on either side of the driveway. Now he stood in the middle of the driveway and studied the crisp, dry snow, studied the way it smoothed the world, softened the fields and yard almost into abstraction, abruptly to break off where, with the shovel, he had cut cleanly into it, had carved out blocks of snow that got deposited in a rumpled row a few feet back from the cut, as if the snowfield had risen slightly into a rough wave before pitching over a low fault in the earth’s crust.
The boy had his hands jammed into the pockets of his red plaid jacket and stood with feet apart, his wool hunter’s cap pulled down over his ears. It was a cold day, despite the bright sunshine, and a stiff wind blowing through the tall pine trees at the edge of the yard became, on noticing it, a grieving kind of noise that made it difficult but not impossible for the boy to hear his father, inside the house, call his name, first from the front of the house, where the parlor was, then from the kitchen, until at last the door to the porch was flung open, and the man stood there, looking at the boy with a mixture of puzzlement and irritation.
The man was large, a few inches taller than the boy, but heavy through the shoulders and arms, with a large, full face and straight, dark brown hair. He was in his shirtsleeves, wearing brown twill trousers and green braces. “Dewey,” the man said, as if making an announcement. He was silent for a moment, but the boy made no response. “What the hell you doing out here? I was calling all over.”
“I’m all ready. I was only waiting for you out here.”
“You ate breakfast.”
“Sure.”
The father turned and hollered to someone inside. “He’s outside! He already ate, he says.”
A woman, the boy’s mother, answered indistinctly.
“I don’t know when,” the man said. He was pulling on a wool mackinaw and cap, still by the open door. When the man spoke to the woman he looked at the boy.
“Will you bring the others with you?” the woman asked.
“I don’t know when I’ll be back, maybe not till this afternoon. They’ll get bored. It’s just errands. Besides, Dewey’s doing the driving.”
“Oh,” the woman said, as if the fact of the boy’s driving was somehow significant.
The man was plainly irritated. He turned back to her and said. “It’s his birthday, isn’t it? Besides, he drives here at the farm all the time.”
“Fine.”
The man closed the door and stepped into the white glare beyond the porch. Moving ahead of him, the boy went quickly to the barn and pulled the wide door open. While the man walked around him and climbed into the passenger’s seat of the Ford, the boy prepared to crank-start the sedan from the front.
“Set your spark?” the man asked.
“Oh, yeah,” the boy said, and he rushed around to the driver’s side and moved the spark lever. Then he hurried to the front again and commenced cranking, until the motor coughed and turned over, caught and was running.
“Let it warm up,” the man said. He sat with his thick arms crossed over his chest, his head pulled low to his shoulders, and stared straight out the open barn door at the brilliant white world beyond. His freshly shaved face was gray and taut, and his pale blue eyes glistened wetly behind a film, as if he were peering at the world through a window. He was a sad-looking man, the kind of man who has given up trying to stop the dying going on around and inside him.
Behind the black sedan, in the warm darkness of the barn, there were animals and hay and grain, and the noises of the cows and the pair of draft horses as they ate, the cluck of the hens and the nervous snorts from the pigs mingled with the earthy smells of their confinement — a warm, crowded, utterly domestic place, like the inside of one’s own body.
“All right,” the father said, and the boy put the car in gear and drove out. When the sedan was clear of the barn, he stopped, and the father got out, walked back and closed the barn door.
Returning to the car, he said again, “All right,” and they left the farm, turned right at the road and headed for town, tire-chains slapping loosely against the freshly plowed dirt road, the motor chirping warmly along, and the boy, for the first time, driving to town, driving skillfully, too, for he had driven for almost two years now, as his father had said, but only out at the farm, driving the tractor in the fields and the truck along old lumber trails in the woods, hauling wood back and trash out, bringing corn or hay or a load of potatoes in from the fields — never this, however, never along a public road and then along the streets of Catamount, where there would be other cars and where there would be people who would see him and wonder if that was Dewey Knox, Fred Knox’s oldest boy, driving Fred’s new Model A. That boy’s growing up fast, they’d say. Before long he’ll be as big as his father, they’d say.