The Writing on the Wall A Novel

Two



THE third day was much the same, as was the fourth and fifth, and her great discovery didn’t come until Saturday, with the very first piece she stripped from the wall.

She had finished both sides of the hall and was ready to shift her attention to the front parlor. To the left of the window was the obvious place to start—a protruding edge where two seams overlapped right there at face level. She had learned to look for these vulnerabilities, and so, not thinking much about it, she slid her putty knife under the seam, wedged further, then lifted.

The piece came off easily enough, though it was disappointingly small. On the wall beneath it was something she thought at first was an insect, a petrified spider. She started scraping, then realized the spot didn’t protrude but was flush with the plaster. It looked like a stain, a calcified black stain, taking on a crescent shape before disappearing under paper she hadn’t yet scraped off.

Careful Vera, she told herself, though she wasn’t sure what she was responding to or why caution came over her so fast. She put her face up close to the wall and squinted, making sure she only got paper and didn’t scratch the plaster underneath. More of the stain slowly became visible, enough so she finally understood what it was. The letter c written in black ink, India ink, with a precision and gracefulness that could only be from a different era.

An initial? It was lower case, it couldn’t be meant for initials. It was partly hidden under a three-layer fragment—under, which meant it had to have been left there by whoever first papered the walls back in 1919. The ink was faded the same way the bottom layer of paper was, so it was reasonable to assume it had been applied just before the wallpaper and they had aged through the decades together.

She rummaged through the supplies for a smaller putty knife that would work more delicately. To the right of the c was an r and an e. She put her cheek so tight to the wall that her vision couldn’t make out what came next, and only after uncovering the next five letters did she bring her head back and read.

credence

It was like someone’s voice spoke the word out loud—in the silence, she took the surprise of it straight into her heart. An old-fashioned word, one she had to think about for a moment before understanding. Credence. The last e wasn’t quite cleared yet; in scraping off its final loop, she came upon a period, so it was obvious, if she was going to uncover the entire sentence, she had to work back to the left.

Mrs. Hodgson said he asked about me but I gave this no credence.

The handwriting was beautifully proportioned, flowing along with perfect naturalness, though it must have been wearying to hold a pen that high. The script part, the little decorations, flourishes and curls, was particularly graceful, and gave the impression a breeze was blowing the sentence across the wall. The o’s were round and open, almost prissy, but the t and i’s looked rebellious, the cross bars and dots drifting well to the right of where they should be. The first letter in Hodgson was wonderfully bold and exaggerated; Vera, staring at it, realized she had forgotten what a capital H in script even looked like.

It was already ten now, time for her tea break, and she forced herself to go ahead with this. When she came back to the parlor and stared up again at the wall, she experienced a moment of very intense shyness, as if there were a person in the room after all, and, having spoken those first words to her, it was now her turn to say something back.

She stepped back to appraise the wall from a distance. It was obvious that anyone writing on the wall would begin on the top left corner. They would have plenty of room that way, the window was well to the right, and the wide expanse of plaster would have suggested a blank sheet of paper or the empty page of a book. If that was the case, if her hunch was correct, then the sentence she uncovered would have occurred well down from the start. To expose the rest meant sliding the ladder over, putting it tight against the wall, reaching up as high as she could.

In the top left corner was wedged the name Alan, which she uncovered all at once, the wallpaper being friendlier there, more supple. The rest of the sentence was easy, too, as was the line below that, then the line below that—lines she didn’t let herself read until she had six of them exposed.

Alan has gone to the city with his lumber and planks. For five or six days he tells me. When you return I will have the paper on I promised when I kissed him goodbye. I had not kissed him in a long time and it is a long time since I have been alone. He is different than he used to be. Because of what he did? Because of what he did not do, could not do? He seemed surprised by my kiss. He put his hands on my shoulders and turned me to the light, stared down hard at me, then, just before he let go, nodded and I think maybe sobbed.

Vera read this twice, three times, running her nails along the letters trying to scratch off the stubborn specks of paper that still adhered. Her reactions came so fast they were hard to separate. The feeling of the past coming alive beneath her hands—prying open a coffin couldn’t have given her the sensation in such strength—plus the impression that light had flooded into the room, a radiance that had been captured and released from a shroud. Who had written this, when, how, why? The questions jumped out at her all at once, but even faster came the realization that the only way to find answers was to uncover even more.

She understood one thing immediately—she could not be the first person to read this. There was the top layer of knotty pine paper, the two nondescript layers beneath that or at least the flecked remains of that paper, then, on the bottom, the faded bits of papery peach that must have been original. That was the chronology, and all she had to do to understand it was reverse it, starting back when the house was new. Blank wall, words written on wall, paper pasted over words. New owners, lazy owners, paper pasted over paper. New owners, lazier owners, paper pasted over paper over paper. New owner, energetic owner, strip top layer, strip middle layer, strip bottom layer, uncover words, read words, cover them up again with the ugly knotty pine.

The next strip she peeled was nearly her record when it came to length, but there was nothing beneath it except blank plaster, which disappointed her greatly. So it was just a brief, random message after all, little more than a doodle, written there on a whim. But she was wrong on this. Once she cleared another eight inches the writing surfaced again—the writer, whoever she was, enjoyed beginning her paragraphs with deep indentations.

I was born on Christmas day in 1903 during the famous blizzard. I do not know the name of my father but Mrs. Hodgson once told me she thought he might be Selah Tompkins who worked with horses in the woods and was reckless and let a sled ride over him as everyone always knew it would. Mrs. H. sometimes seemed about to tell me who my mother was but always shook her head at the last moment. At the home there were four of us named Elizabeth so to avoid confusion one stayed Elizabeth, one became Liza, one became Lizzy, and I became Beth. Liza grew up and went down to the mills, Lizzy went to work for a preacher’s wife out in Indiana and I was the only one who stayed here. Elizabeth, who got to keep her name, ran away to Boston which meant running away to be bad.

Reading as she scraped made Vera dizzy—her close vision blurred the letters up, smeared their blackness, giving her the disorienting sense they were an inky black pool and she was about to fall in. She went for her glasses, but they made it worse. The only way to proceed was to clear large sections off at a time, then and only then let herself read. Stripping would give her a goal, a focus— reading would be her break, her reward.

She worked an hour, got the first two strips off, went out to the kitchen to make herself a sandwich, came back and cleared three strips more. The words had waited patiently under the paper all those years, but now that they were exposed to light they seemed actively reaching out to her, demanding to be understood. Sensing this made her hurry and hurry made her clumsy. She scraped too hard—the blade skipped up and cut her finger, so her blood made a film over the writing which wiping only blended in deeper. She thought about using the stripping solution again or even trying the steamer, but worried they would be too harsh, too erasive.

A thunderstorm came up in the afternoon, the hills concentrating the noise and doubling it, until the house shook with each clap. The rain brought the dark on early, forcing her to stop. By then, she had one wall entirely cleared. She was going to put the lights on to read, but then discovered the power had gone off, forcing her to search for the kerosene lamp.

The words must have been written in such a light—if anything, the softness made the ink stand out more vividly, with more force. She set the lamp down on the top step of the ladder, and by moving it closer to the wall or back again she could illumine different paragraphs in a well-defined arc. Seen from a distance, the lines looked like a book, they were so neat and regular, and she realized that this had probably been Beth’s intention, to make it all resemble a book. Lines extended across the wall, stopped at the same right margin, then started up again precisely a half inch below, and so on in the same pattern all the way from the ceiling to the floor—and then over again, only this time one full strip over to the right. Between the regularity and neatness it was amazing how many lines fit in.

They say I was a quiet child except when I had a friend and then I would pour my heart out. But I think there were never many friends. I remember when I was six, Independence Day came and they sent Mounties down from Canada in their red uniforms to march in the parade. I remember skating on the pond in our shoes since we had no skates. I remember dandelion necklaces we pretended were gold. Not much else beside this. They taught us always to sit with our hands folded, whether it was in class or at dinner or saying our prayers, and I knew even then what they really wanted us to do was hold in our thoughts, keep them small and tidy and confined. I could not do this very well. My thoughts made my hands tremble. Someone was always shouting “Don’t fidget!” at me and the more they yelled the more my hands wanted to explode.

It was easier once I learned to read, things grew bigger. Later, Peter Sass teased me about this. “Did you starve in your orphanage?” he asked, with his amused little look that he never allowed to become harder. “Orphans are supposed to starve. Why, just think of Oliver Twist!”

I almost starved I felt like saying. But it had nothing to do with food.

Our books were Sleepy Hollow, Man Without a Country, Message to Garcia, The Queen of Sheba and Ned Buntline. That was for the boys. For girls they had Wide Wide World and Quechee. They were about orphans and how they married rich men and we read them over and over again because they were the only books that told us how to act as orphans. I read faster than any of the girls or even the boys, but this only made everyone mad at me, they said I was becoming capricious, taking on airs. How can books do anything bad to you? I wanted to ask. It was an important question because inside them is where I lived.

I was eleven when I left. The Hodgsons bid lowest for me and if you bid lowest the state had to hand you over. I was lucky since they were both very kind. They never had children of their own which was a pity. I helped Mrs. H. in the kitchen and caring for the house. She was so cheerful that this was easy for me, though the work could be hard. I helped Mr. Hodsgon, too, times when he had trouble getting hired men. Their farm was the highest in town, all the other hill farms had been abandoned, but he always swore he would be last to give up. I liked helping him mend walls, since he still used oxen and he let me slap their flanks and shout at them to get moving. He laughed when they just looked at me and refused to budge, as if saying “Who is this pigtailed little girl and why is she so bothered?”

I loved seeing things from the distance. When we finished work I would stick my arms out and balance my way along the stone wall past the briars to the highest part. In July where the hills unfolded was like a huge green comforter rolling away toward Canada, with a giant hand underneath plumping it out. Looking at this blew my smallness away and I vowed never to let it back.

I turned fifteen on Christmas the year the war commenced over in France. Mrs. H. wanted to have a talk but she knew it would distress me so she waited until the following week. It was snowing and we had stopped sewing to watch a deer try to hop her way through the drifted field.

“Well,” Mrs. H. said when we both sat down. “You’re grown now and that means we need to be looking after your future. There are lots of things you could be doing and it’s up to you which one to choose. Not right away. Why you can stay with us as long as you want. But presently.”

I could see it was hard for her, so I nodded, tried my best to smile.

“You could go down and work in the mills, they treat their girls very well now, it’s not like it used to be.”

She said this calmly but could not help frowning.

“You could go out west like so many girls, Iowa or even Montana, they have special trains, and we would arrange for you to work for a respectable family.”

She said this even more calmly but once again frowned.

“Or for that matter you could stay right here and get married. Not right away of course. In time. There are so few young men left but we would find one.”

She made her voice all bright, but once again her frown betrayed her. I did not give her an answer, because there was one thing I dreaded and finally had to ask.

“What about school? Vacation is over tomorrow and I want to go back.”

She looked at me and I read her look and turned away from it, we both turned away, since we knew how she had to answer and it was the first time she ever caused me pain.

“School is over for you, Beth. Why it would be high school and you know we can’t afford to board you out. You’re the smartest pupil in class, they always tell us that, and we know how much you love reading. I was talking to the principal and he says you can come back in June and deliver the commencement and you’re the first girl they ever asked.”

I tried keeping up. The library in town was six miles through the snow, but Mrs. H. would invent errands for me, parcels she wanted dropped at the various farms, since she knew they would give me something warm to drink and let me dry off by their fire. I tried keeping up in arithmetic and history but I could only carry so many books and there was so much I wanted to read just for pleasure. I had never read poetry before but now I read all I could. They had Ella Wheeler Wilcox, Sara Teasdale and Robert Service, though the librarian did not want me to read him since there was swearing in his poems. “Were you ever out in the Great Alone?” one of his best ones began and I kept saying that to myself over and over during the long walk back to the farm.

They had better than that. Helen Hunt Jackson’s Ramona I read again and again. Elizabeth Barrett Browning I read because we shared first names, then because I loved her books more than anyone’s. Aurora Leigh was about a girl growing up in Florence and marrying her cousin Romney who does not want her to be a poet since women do not have the brains and courage needed to write poetry. She leaves him and moves to London where I liked the story best, Aurora living by herself writing poetry.

No one had checked this out in years. None of the books I read had been checked out in years. It was as if books were deliberately left in the library to rot while everyone went off to the moving pictures and it was only me in the world who still cared for them. Sometimes when I took them off the shelves I imagined them sighing in happiness and relief, finding someone whose fingers and eyes would make them live.

On those journeys back home I became adept at reading while I walked and sometimes had a hundred pages finished by the time I turned up the Hodgsons’ road. My arms would ache from holding the book out straight and I would probably have tripped two or three times and scratched my face on overhanging limbs, but I would have enough read that I could put the book down and help Mrs. H. get supper without being desperate to know what happened next.

Five months after our conversation about leaving school we had our second talk. I had not forgotten about the choices lined out for me, but I was no closer to deciding which was best than I had been the first time.

Her expression was graver this time. She started off with the biggest news first.

“Mr. H. and I are giving up the farm. His heart just won’t take it, all the work there is, and my lumbago doesn’t like winter better than it ever has. My brother lives in Ohio and that’s where we’ll be moving. George Steen is giving us something for the land, enough for rail fare anyway. That leaves you Beth to think about.”

“I’ll be fine,” I said quickly, though the words were even more hollow than they sounded.

“Alan Steen you must surely know. Wasn’t he just ahead of you in school? I saw him yesterday when I went to town and he’s usually so bashful and quiet, but he surprised me since we had a nice long talk.”

Mrs. Hodsgon said he asked about me but I gave this no credence. I never saw him speak to a girl in school let alone me. He played baseball but stood at the bottom of the class and never opened a book without wincing. He was gentle with the smaller pupils, he never let anyone bully them, and other than that I knew very little about him.

He is six feet tall, with boyish features, and his friends tease him cruelly about his ears. He slumps too much, being so tall, but when he finally looks at you his eyes are friendly and sympathetic. And his hair is oatmeal colored, with lots of brown sugar mixed in. He is strong, he has always been strong if you talk just about muscles. Once at school the shed caved in from the snow and he went outside and lifted the beam on his shoulders until the men could come brace it back up.

He started visiting the farm now, pretending it was to talk to Mr. Hodsgon. I remember being astonished that he could talk so easily. Most of it was about his parents who he worshipped. He was temporarily angry with his father because he wanted to go join the Canadians and fight against the Kaiser and his father said no, but I never heard him say anything else against him.

Mr. Hodgson did not think very highly of George Steen. He was said to be the richest man in town, but what did that mean up here? “He’s got his head an inch further out of the mud than the rest of us,” Mr. H. said. “An inch—and he thinks it’s a mile.”

When commencement night came Mrs. Hodsgon made a dress for me from muslin she found in her trunk. She tried her best, she looked startled and puzzled when she first saw it on me, but I loved it since I never had white to wear or anything so soft. I worked hard on my speech, I delivered it in a clear, strong voice, but it dissatisfied me terribly. It was about our futures and how bright they were, but when I looked down at the six graduates waiting to receive their diplomas, saw how dull and hopeless they looked, I knew it was all platitudes and I had chosen the wrong thing to say.

They were all going on to high school but not me. The Hodgsons were leaving for Ohio in July. My dress I would never wear again. I hate self-pity more than I do anything, but it was hard and I turned rudely away from people who congratulated me on my speech and tried not to cry. But that was only half how I felt. There was a tent set up and paper lanterns and banjo music and I saw the older boys staring at me in a way they never had before and for the first time ever I felt pretty and feeling this made me dizzy and I wanted to feel it even more.

That was one of those June evenings when the locust trees blossom even beyond what they manage normally, and the creamy tassels looked like decorations hung from the branches especially for us. They were the same color as my dress—I remember that, too. Behind the school was a grove of hemlock and we all knew that if you ducked your head and pushed through the branches you came to a secret path that led down to a soft little wildflower meadow where no one could see you. After a while people stopped congratulating me and I was alone. I could hear fiddle music starting and I was still feeling dizzy, only this time it was from the perfume of the locust blossoms which was overwhelming

Without really thinking about it, I began walking toward the hemlock grove, and without ever hearing him, I noticed Alan Steen walking right behind me. We came to the secret passage and stopped side by side. We still did not talk, though I could feel his eyes on my shoulders and the back of my hair. I knew that if I ducked through the branches and pulled the briars apart and walked down to the meadow he would follow after me, shy as he was. It did not seem just a meadow, it seemed like my future, and I was tired of always waiting for the future, always being frightened of it. That is why when Alan, getting up his courage before I did, stepped through the trees, held the branches back, reached his hand out, I took it, held it hard. I was fifteen and a half years old.

His parents decided that the wedding should be in August. The Hodgsons had left by then and so Alan’s maiden aunt walked me down the aisle, tsk-tsking with her tongue the entire way. It was only afterwards that I got to know Mr. Steen. Mr. H. always described him as a cross between President Taft and President Wilson—“lard topped with preacher.” And it is true, he is corpulent now, though in his younger days he had been a famous brawler and his face, solemn as it is, still bears scars. His skin is the color of old potato peels, his ears and nose are stuffed with briary red hair and his eyes always look frightened and confused without his meaning them to.

He has a business that thrives, buying up land and abandoned farm houses, ripping them apart and having Alan cart the planks down to the city where they fetch a good price. When Mr. Steen was young he had gone for wild times to Quebec and he had the fixed belief that Sherbrooke was going to be the next Montreal. If you took a ruler and drew a line on a map from Sherbrooke to Boston it went right through town, thereby assuring him his eventual fortune.

In the meantime he never worked very hard, but spent all his free time hating. He hates immigrants and Jews and Negroes and professors and Socialists and sissies and scientists and Democrats. None of these people demonstrate true Americanism in his opinion, Americanism being his favorite word. He could be nice enough, talking to me, almost too nice I thought at times, but when the hate comes over him his eyes harden, his neck stiffens, and his fat puffs up until he seems doubled. Where does this come from? I often wondered. His life had not been a bad one. It was like he plucked it out of the air, that was the frightening thing. Like hate had wafted in a cloud from another part of the country and, since it suited him, he reached up and pulled the cloud down.

He has his cronies, the toughest of the loggers and teamsters who are in his employ. “My troopers,” he calls them. There are no Jews here to trouble or Negroes, so during the war they devoted most of their energy to harassing Frenchies. Young farm boys were crossing the line from Quebec to hide from conscription, they wanted no part of England’s fight, and Mr. Steen and his posse patrolled the back roads at night to capture them and send them back, almost always after beating them senseless.

Mrs. Steen is rail thin, with black hair so beautifully silky it seems stolen and a chin that looks hacked out of bone-white flint. Her lips hardly move when she talks, the words seem to emerge half-formed from the bottom of her neck. She is a miser, her fingers enjoy the feel of money which she always turns in her fingers before pocketing. She bullies the minister in church, he goes around in constant fear of what she might demand, and she will not allow a book in her house except the Bible.

She calls me “My little lamb” and all but purrs, but then she remembers that I had finished ninth grade and she had only gone through fourth and so she scowls and calls me “The professor” or “Little Miss Fancy Airs.” She hates me because I will not go to church on Sundays. I told her it was Alan’s one day off, our only time to walk in the woods together or go for a picnic, but this only made her angrier.

Alan listens to everything his parents say, takes it very seriously and will not hear a word against them. They bully him mercilessly, are always comparing his lack of accomplishments to his father’s success. How he gave in on the house is a good example.

We planned to purchase one of the old farmhouses and fix it up. We talked and talked about how we would do this, but his parents said no, that we must live closer to town, that only rough people still lived in the hills. I remember after the wedding when we finished the miserly round of sugarcake that was all Mrs. Steen would allow. “I have a surprise for you, Beth,” Alan said, turning away so as not to meet my eyes. “Mother and Father are building us a new house out by the creamery and it should be ready by autumn.”

The spot they picked was three miles from town but Mr. Steen was convinced business would grow in that direction and then we would be in the center of things. The fields round about were owned by Judson Swearingen and they are wet and soggy most seasons, but there were three flat acres protected from the north wind by hills. The only neighbor lives with his daughter a half mile further on the road, old Asa Hogg who came back addled from the Civil War after all he had seen.

We stayed with Alan’s parents while the house was being built. Mr. Steen would drive us out in his carriage to watch how things progressed. He was good with horses, he could calm the unruliest with a whisper, and except for the fact that he needed them for business he had no use for automobiles at all. He would bark instructions out to the workmen from the road, gesturing with the mallets of his fists. Mrs. Steen sat beside him with her head bowed praying. Praying for the house to be finished quickly? Praying for the rafters to collapse? It was going to be nicer than the house she had as a bride so she was jealous. Since her lips barely moved and her voice emerged from her neck, people in church thought she was speaking in tongues. It made me shiver and if no one was watching I covered up my ears.

The house was finished in October. Alan did not tell me until we moved in, but some of the timbers had been salvaged from the Hodgsons’ farm when Mr. Steen tore it down. This made me sad but then I felt comforted and reassured, that those good people were still somehow with me. Alan painted the house red and put up a small barn and I was responsible for making everything pretty inside. I had my collection of books and Alan crafted a shelf for them which we put under the window here in the parlor. There were not very many. Mrs. H. had given me her Dickens and teachers in school felt sorry for me and sent textbooks and I had some poetry from the library they were otherwise going to discard. Not many books—and so I cherished every volume like old friends.

The workmen left a mess inside and it was many weeks before I had things straightened and cleaned. The kitchen was too big but Alan found a wide silver stove that made it cozier. I ordered a beautiful paper from the Sears and Roebuck book but I procrastinated pasting it up since I loved the bare walls just as they were. The plaster was cream colored and so smooth you could not resist running your hands along them. They gave you the feeling that they could be anything you wanted them to be, that they were just waiting for your command. Mr. Steen hired his roughnecks to build the house but for plastering the walls he sent for a gentle Italian man, Mr. Cipporino, who lived three towns south and was a master of his craft.

“Ah Beth!” he would sigh as I sat watching him work. I knew that it was not me he was sighing for, but someone he had left years ago in Italy. “Ah, mia Beth!”—and then, turning back to the wall, he would smooth his artist’s hands across the plaster to make it perfect.

Mrs. Steen hated the walls, she always complained how bare and ugly they looked without paper and when was I going to decently cover them? Never, if it was up to me. Not until I understood what their smoothness was asking of me, what they wanted me to make them.

I would have liked the house more if I was not bothered by a feeling that grew stronger toward winter. What had I done to deserve something so nice? I knew about housework, I could clean and scrub all day long, and yet my labor had not earned the house and for that matter neither had Alan’s. I had no one I could talk to about this. Alan could be strong at night in our room, so strong and loving in the light from our candle, and yet this would fade once dawn came and he would be timid and uncertain, letting his parents boss him or even his friends. I loved winter more than summer because in winter the nights were longer and the longer the nights lasted the longer he was mine.

A baby was supposed to come that spring, we both knew what was expected, and when it did not I had no one to ask questions of and I was left alone to suffer everyone’s whispers and stares. It was then that my idea formed, though really I had clung to it all along. I know it was Decoration Day before I got up the nerve to ask.

We sat on the porch waiting to go into town. When I was little there would be a parade with all the G.A.R. veterans but now only poor Asa Hogg was left. Alan was going to drive him to town and hold him steady while he laid a wreath on the monument. I knew we would not have time alone later so I decided to ask now.

“I will put the garden in tomorrow,” I said, not knowing how else to start. “I think blueberries will do well here, so we need to find out about cuttings.”

Alan, who sat with his chair propped back against the railing the way he liked, grunted out a yes. A merganser splashing in the stream across the road held his attention.

“We have the house nearly done now,” I said. “We shall have a family, but it may not be for some time yet.”

The merganser paddled off and it was only then that he looked at me.

“What was that, Beth?”

If I was going to ask, it had to be all in one rush.

“I wrote the principal at the high school and he said I could matriculate in September, though I may have to work harder than the others to catch up. I’m ahead in reading and not that far behind in numbers. I might be able to graduate in a year and a half if I work hard. Then I could be of help to you in business and when we have children I can teach them at home even before they go to school.”

Alan shook his head as I knew he would. “Please?” I said, and hated myself immediately since it was so nearly like begging.

“In September?”

“The garden will be done then, you’ll be going on your trips to the city so I’ll often be alone. It isn’t hard to get there. I can ride Bonnie to the train station and take the local.”

This time he really thought about it, I could tell by the serious way he squinted into the sun. He did not want to hurt me and yet it was difficult for him to say yes and so he ended up saying what I knew he would all along.

“I’ll ask Mother and Father what they think of your notion and if they say yes then you can.”

We collected Asa Hogg in the buggy and drove him to town. During the ceremony I could see Alan whispering to his parents but it was impossible to tell anything from their expressions. They drove off immediately afterwards but we stayed on for the picnic and ball game. We got home in the dark and I went in ahead with the lantern while Alan unhitched the horse.

I knew right away something was different, the violated sensation was waiting for me the second I crossed the threshold and by instinct I ran straight into the parlor to my books. They were gone, every last one of them. The Dickens, the textbooks, the poetry. There was no sign of them, the bookcase was gone, too, and in its place, for an insult, was a huge brass spittoon.

Alan came in now and I turned on him all my fury.

“Your parents did this. Your father. No, your mother.”

“Beth—”

“I am going to high school in September. You can agree with this or not but I am going and no power on earth can stop me.”

“Of course you can go. Of course, Beth. Why, it’s a swell idea. You can give it thirty days to see if you like it or whether it’s too hard.” He nodded, proud of himself for coming up with a compromise. “Thirty days seems perfectly reasonable.”

“I will graduate head of the class,” I said, not bragging, but like a statement of fact I had to make, not to him, not even to his parents, but to myself.

I took the spittoon and carried it out to the porch, determined to throw it in the stream. There on the lawn, deliberately trampled, was one of the poetry books the librarian had given me. I picked it up, wiped the mud from the covers, held it close to my breast and took from it, not the comfort I usually found, not the escape, not the friendship, but courage.

Vera stooped to read the last paragraph, and for the last line, tucked well down into the dusty corner, she had to kneel. The words were spaced closer together the nearer the floor they dropped. The girl, Beth, had obviously been very determined to fit in as much as she could. The script that had started off so neat and prim changed toward the bottom. The ink was blacker, as if she had pressed harder on the pen; the dots on the i’s and the crosses on the t’s had drifted right from the beginning, but now they often blew over into the next sentence.

Vera got back up and touched the wall again, as she had many times while reading. The words seemed warm, or at least she fooled her fingers into sensing warmth. If she closed her eyes, concentrated, she could feel the shallow, all but imperceptible, gouges left by the nib of Beth’s pen.

She would have liked to uncover more, starting on the wall to the right, but she was too tired now, not only her wrists but her understanding. Taking the putty knife she peeled back a strip near the top, just to assure herself there were indeed more words. Who had written them was plain enough now, the girl had gone to great lengths to explain. What it was meant to be wasn’t as clear, but it appeared to be an explanation or confession. Why she had done it was harder to guess, though with patience, with more wall cleared, perhaps that would become obvious as well. Some of her motives were understandable enough. The feeling of having something cooped up inside demanding its way out. The comfort of confiding in the future. Wanting to put words down just to find out if they made any sense. Anyone could understand this, really anyone, you didn’t need matching pain of your own.

That night, for the first time since arriving, Vera slept without waking up for her midnight vigil. She took a walk around the house in the morning, trying to see it all from Beth’s point of view, how it must have looked in 1920. The lilac near the kitchen seemed ancient, it was so high and tangled, and she remembered reading that in the old days wives would plant them near a window just to enjoy their perfume. Some of the shade trees must have been a hundred years old, too, they were so high and rotten. When she walked around to the front she could look up the road to the small gray farmhouse—Asa Hogg’s place, the addled one, the man who had seen too much of war. She walked across the grass, trying to imagine discovering a favorite book trampled in the mud—then, guessing, decided that right there must be the spot, halfway between the porch and the road near a lichen-covered flagstone sunk well down into the grass.

Too much had been added or subtracted over the years to make the yard look original. All the debris, the rusty swing set, the corroded lawn chairs, seemed to be from the Fifties or Sixties, and it overwhelmed anything earlier. Looking back at the hills or even up at the sky gave Vera a better, purer sense of it—what it must have been like to be young and spirited in a land that was emptying out.

When she went back inside, before starting on the next wall, she searched through the last lines from the night before. Reading, she had been taken out of herself, her absorption had come as a relief, and yet the old danger still persisted, of tripping back to the present on a random phrase. She found it now, Alan’s compromise—“Thirty days seems perfectly reasonable.” It was as if she had put the words there herself, they fit so ironically. Thirty days, the length of Cassie’s sentence. Thirty days for smiling. Thirty days in an army stockade for smiling at the wrong time, the wrong place. Thirty days for Cassie to prove herself in prison. Thirty perfectly reasonable days for Vera and her walls.

As before, the only way to escape this was to busy herself working. The parlor was perfectly square, which meant this next wall was the same breadth as the first, which meant a day’s worth of scraping. It was both easier and harder, knowing what was hidden underneath. Impatience made her hurry, always fighting down the temptation to just hack the wallpaper away, regardless of what it did to the plaster, but at the same time the writing made things easier, since the words seemed actively helping her, demanding their way out, pressuring up on the strips of paper while she pulled. By late afternoon she had the entire wall uncovered, and there was still enough sunlight filtering through the window that she could read without needing the lantern.

The distance to school never bothered me. Our town does not have enough pupils for a high school of its own and neither does the next town so it meant going three towns south to where the first big railroad bridge crosses the river and all roads meet. Alan had a truck now for business and he would drive me to the station where I would wait for the morning milk train. There were no cars for passengers but the trainmen were friendly and would let students ride in the caboose. It was thirty minutes ride and then I would walk the rest of the way uphill another twenty-five minutes. This was fine, since I still remembered how to read as I walked and it was while trudging up and down those steep sidewalks that I did much of my work.

On the first day, not knowing any better, I wore my best frock. This made the other girls decide I was rich and stuck-up, though I felt like a bumpkin compared to them. But when I climbed up the marble staircase, found the locker assigned to me and went to my first class I was almost bursting from happiness and nervousness combined, since it was by far the bravest thing I had ever done.

My first class turned out to be disappointing. I found a desk near the front and the boy behind me, when the door opened and the teacher came in, poked me in the shoulder. “Miss Crabapple,” he whispered and for the rest of the class I thought that was her name. She had a sour frown, sour eyes, sour wrinkles and she made us sit with our hands folded so it was like I was seven again and back at the county home.

That was history. Mathematics was better and then came lunch which I ate alone under a tree and then it was time for English composition. The classroom was on the fourth floor off in a corner so it seemed exiled from the rest of the school, a secret room or garret that made me feel like Aurora Leigh living in London writing her poems. I felt a pleasant sense of anticipation even before the door opened and the teacher walked in.

He was a young man, not that much older than the seniors, but he gave off an immediate air of authority and command—it was only later we found out he had been an officer in the Great War. He was handsome in the way men are who can force away their homeliness by sheer will power. You did not notice his big nose or over-large head or bad complexion—his blue eyes and spirited way of staring blinded you to the rest. You sensed that his face was not the barrier or shield that most people’s are and you were looking directly in to who he was, who he really was, with no excuses. Likeable is the handiest way to describe this. Likeable but with an edge.

His hair was sandy and surprisingly unkempt. His eyelashes were the longest, most doe-like I had ever seen on a man and he seemed self-conscious about this, because he was always touching them, almost primping. He dressed shabbily, in a brown suit that hung loose from his shoulders. Combined with his dusty army shoes and half-tied tie it made him look absent-minded, which was the very last thing Peter Sass ever was.

He sat at his desk with his head in his hands moodily staring out at us, then, as if electricity had just switched on inside his chest, sprang to his feet and started marching up and down the nearest aisle.

“Who’s your favorite author?” he demanded, stopping at the first desk.

“Uh, Longfellow,” the boy stammered.

“Who’s your favorite author?” he demanded, stopping at the second desk.

“Eugene Field,” the girl said primly.

“And you?”

“Edgar Rice Burroughs.”

“You?”

“Maria Susanna Cummins.”

“You?”

“Samuel Clemens.”

The teacher stared down at him.

“Sawyer or Finn?”

“Tom Sawyer.”

That took care of the first aisle. He marched down my aisle next, where there were only four of us.

“Who’s your favorite author?” he demanded, stopping at the first desk.

A blonde boy sat there, new like me and very handsome—the girls had been pointing at him, nudging each other and giggling before the teacher came in.

“Oscar Wilde,” he said in a voice of complete and utter boredom.

Mr. Sass, obviously surprised, hesitated, then moved on to me.

“Browning,” I said before he could even ask.

“Mr. or Mrs.?”

“Mrs. of course.” I wanted to stand up for myself right away.

“Who’s your favorite?” he said to the student behind me.

“Jack London.”

“And you?”

“Theodore Dreiser.”

Mr. Sass returned to the chalk board, folded his hands behind his back, drew himself up straight like he was about to issue orders to his platoon.

“This is a large class and we have permission from the principal to divide it into sections. One group will immediately transfer to Miss Gleason’s class while the ones I call out will remain here.”

He walked down the aisle again, brandishing a ruler.

“Stay,” he said to the boy who liked Wilde.

“You too,” he said to the boy who liked London.

“And you,” he said to the girl who liked Dreiser.

My heart sank because he walked right past me toward the other aisle, but then he abruptly swiveled, came back to my desk.

“And you.”

This is what it became, just the four of us in that dark, drafty classroom hidden away under the eaves. How Peter arranged this no one knew. We heard that he worked very hard with his other classes, took a personal interest in every pupil, and I saw for myself how furious he would get when Lawrence, the blonde boy, made fun of them and called them dolts. Even with us he was strict, he would call roll and demand we answer, and then we had to stand up and salute the flag. After that he would relax, treat us as equals, and I think he saw our special class, coming at the end of a long day, as his reward for drilling the rules of grammar into future shop owners, druggists and clerks.

We started with four but were soon down to two. The girl who read Dreiser, Ellen knew lots of names I had never heard before, not just American authors but ones in Europe. Though I was frightened of her for being so smart and she was frightened of me for already being married, we tried hard to be friends. Her parents had sent her there from a village even more remote than ours, but the room and board turned out to be so dear that she had to leave school and start work.

The boy who liked Jack London was quick and very funny but his banker father wanted him to take business courses, not waste his time on novels and poetry, so he soon left as well. That left just two of us—and yet every day, the moment he stepped into the classroom, Peter would take out his attendance book and call roll.

Lawrence was the other pupil, Lawrence Ridley Krutch. Like Ellen, his parents sent him into town to board since he lived so far away. He never talked about them or his home, seemed already done with that part of his life, and kept his eyes firmly on his future. His brilliant future. He made sure everyone knew it was going to be brilliant. For he was by far the smartest pupil in school and saw no reason to pretend otherwise. Unlike every other boy, sports held no interest for him and he was outspokenly contemptuous about the “clodhoppers” who played football and baseball.

His hands were soft and delicate, not rough like the other boys’, and his eyes were a flirt’s, so lively and dancing. The girls adored him but he had no favorites, seemed happiest when five or six surrounded him in the hall and giggled at his jokes. He was very nice to me, I was the one girl he let be his confidante, I suppose because he thought of me as an experienced older woman. When I had trouble with mathematics he made sure he sat with me after class to go over every problem until I understood. When he learned I was an orphan he asked me all kinds of questions about what it had been like and no one had ever done that before.

“Why didn’t you take down their names?” he asked. “The names of all the people who mistreated you.”

“Their names? I’ve tried hard to forget them. Why would I want their names?”

“For revenge,” he said—and then he shook his head in amazement, that I could be so innocent and naïve as to forgive them.

I worried about him sometimes, the contempt he was too free in expressing, his carelessness toward life. He knew his future was bright, that his brains would carry him far from these hills, but for the time being he seemed in no hurry. Except for his weakness for sarcasm, he seemed perfectly content to be the smartest, handsomest boy for a hundred miles around.

Peter, once Lawrence and I raised our arms and yelled “Present!”, lectured while pacing back and forth in front of the chalk board, rubbing his hand across his forehead like he was polishing off his thoughts before releasing them. He wrote on the board so vigorously the chalk was always snapping in his hand and it was my job to collect the pieces after class and line them up again in the tray.

As I said, he talked to us as equals, though this was more for Lawrence’s sake than mine. I had to struggle to understand, I was so far behind. But I enjoyed having to struggle. All my life I had been surrounded by people who wanted to make life as small as they possibly could and now for the first time I was with a man trying to make life as large as it could be made. Often in the middle of his talk he would go to the window and point outside, showing us that this is where the world of ideas was, not here in this stuffy classroom. The more excited he grew about his subject, the softer his voice became—Lawrence and I were always leaning forward to hear.

What he enjoyed talking about most was American literature. This was not some dead mummified thing in a textbook, he told us, it had not been buried with Washington Irving or Fenimore Cooper, but was going on right now out that window—why, it was coming into maturity as we spoke, entering the golden age everyone had been awaiting for so long. Edward Arlington Robinson, Edith Wharton, Sherwood Anderson, Robert Frost who was writing about these hills, even Booth Tarkington who should not be ignored. We should pay very careful attention to every word they wrote.

He told us the best thing about American authors was their faith in progress and their believing that America was the best chance mankind ever had for achieving that progress, not just in material things but in basic human values like honor, respect, tolerance and mercy. American writers believed that men, even simple men, could be trusted to set things right in time. That had always been the American wager, he said, and if writers were sometimes disillusioned, it was only because reality had not yet caught up with the dream.

He got excited, rubbed his forehead, rumpled his hair, moved to the window and pointed outside.

“Right now, understand? Out there, out across the country, men and women not much older than you are creating the books that teachers will tell their students about in a hundred years time.”

Listening to his passion, it was impossible not to believe that these authors and poets were writing right outside on the high school’s lawn. I had never heard anyone talk like this and while I always felt ignorant and naïve and very much behind, I felt this less so as the weeks went on. “He who believes in the potential of life must also believe in its realization and be predisposed to work for it,” Peter told us. I wrote that down on my tablet and all the way to the train station stared down at it and by the time I got there understood.

He went out of his way to recommend books to us. He told me about Celia Thaxter who wrote beautifully about living on an island off the coast and then recommended Mary Austin who wrote about her early life in the Western desert land and her later years working at a settlement house in the New York slums. The Land of Little Rain the first one was called and No. 26 Jane Street was the name of the second. The library did not have either, but when I came to school that Monday there they were gift wrapped on my desk and Peter, trying hard not to grin, pretended he had no idea where they came from.

Peter never said very much about himself, not in those first weeks. He had moved often since leaving the army. This was his fourth teaching position in two years and each move brought him further north toward the edge of things. He rented a house out by the river. He liked trout fishing and he had a gramophone collection with lots of Rosa Ponselle. Along with his books this was enough to keep him happy. He told us more than once that lonely as things were here he wanted to make it his home.

The trains ran more irregularly in the afternoon and I often got home after dark. Alan would meet me at the station and carry my books. He held them in a strange way, at arm’s length like they might hurt. He seemed confused by them, puzzled that I could find so much meaning in things he had always been frightened of.

“Your thirty days are up today,” he said once we reached home. “I’m glad you had the chance to try. Maybe some time in the future you can go back.”

I knew I had to keep my temper. They did not seem his words and I knew where they were coming from.

“Tomorrow I go back. It’s only Thursday.”

“Well, I’ll need to ask Mother and Father about that.”

“A wonderful idea. Let’s invite them for Sunday dinner.”

It was important to call their bluff but I regretted it once they came. Mrs. Steen went on an inspection tour of the house, frowning at all the fixing up still needing to be done. The fact the walls were not yet wallpapered especially bothered her—in her view of things a woman who lived in a house with bare walls was equivalent to a woman who paraded around naked. She touched the plaster as if smearing it with something dirty from her fingertips and later I went around scrubbing every single spot she touched.

We had a little comedy when dinner started. Alan went to a side chair, leaving the position of honor at the head of the table for his father, but I got there before he could, held the chair back and said loud as I could, “Alan? Why don’t you sit up here?”

So. There was a mood. Mr. Steen speared some roast off the platter, then started in on his favorite topic—the fine work they were doing down in Washington, rounding up foreign agents, throwing radicals in jail, putting a good healthy scare into people. Attorney General Palmer deserved a medal for standing up for real Americanism. Why, he could do good work right up here if someone alerted him to the situation. There were teachers in the high school who were stirring things up, trying to change things, importing foreign thoughts. He heard there was a new teacher who acted as their ringleader, a Mr. Ass or Mr. Rump or something unmentionable like that.

Alan, who had sat silently eating his turnips, now looked up.

“Mr. Sass. Beth has him for English.”

I nodded. “He’s the best teacher there.”

Mr. Steen stared over at me—the scars seemed to coil upwards from his cheeks to his eyes, narrowing them into purple slits.

“He’s a Democrat,” he said, spitting out the word.

“No,” I said calmly. “He hates Wilson and worships Teddy Roosevelt.”

“He’s a radical.”

“No. He was an officer in the Rainbow Division and fought in France.”

“He’s a New Yorker.”

“He was born in Bemidji, Minnesota where it’s even colder than here.”

“A Jew.”

“The son of a Presbyterian minister.”

“I bet he thinks we’re descended from apes.”

I was going to say something terrible but before I could someone interrupted.

“He’s a bachelor!”

Mrs. Steen said this, or, in her manner, croaked the words out her neck. She made it sound like the worst accusation yet. By this point I just wanted to laugh at them and I had to busy myself with the rest of dinner or perhaps I would have. When I came back from the kitchen Mr. Steen had switched his venom to an easier target. A librarian two towns over was stirring things up, handing out radical literature, giving young people dangerous ideas. When I asked him what sort of radical literature he frowned mysteriously, as if that was for him to know and me to guess. I asked again and this time he mentioned Uncle Tom’s Cabin.

“I think it’s time me and my boys went over and paid her a visit,” he said darkly. “Just a little visit by real Americans to show her what’s up, give her a good healthy scare.”

Mrs. Steen must have worried he had gone too far—she wiggled her eyes back and forth as a warning and he changed the subject with a coarse laugh.

“I nearly wet my pants laughing today, the sight I saw.”

Alan knew his cue. “What sight was that, Father?”

“Francine Toliver climbing over a fence. Why she must weigh three hundred pounds just counting her bottom.”

It was the worst dinner I ever sat through and when his parents left Alan and I had our first real quarrel.

“Someone saw you walking out with him,” he said. This was lying in bed with the lights out long after I thought he had fallen asleep.

“With who?”

“Your Mr. Sass.”

“It’s a long way to the train station, Alan. He helps me carry my books just as you do once I get home.”

“Like Mother says, he’s a bachelor. People will get the wrong impression. I don’t want you seeing him outside class.”

“Is that your idea or your parents’?”

He took so long to answer I thought he had fallen asleep again.

“I have ideas, Beth. They may not come as quick as yours do, but they’re there just the same.”

Autumn had been rainy and cold but the following week it turned warm again and the sun slanting through the leaves felt like a gift the sky was laying against your face. Indian Summer people said—it will not last long. On Tuesday I was sitting on a bench outside school, alone with my lunch as usual, when someone called down to me from a fourth-floor window.

“Stay right there, we’re coming down for you!”

It was Peter and Lawrence who between them had decided it was far too nice to have class indoors. We walked downhill past the match factory which was empty and derelict, then, after passing the abandoned clothespin factory and climbing a fence or two, came at last to the railroad tracks that ran along the river.

It was breezy, the wind streaked the water, but if anything it felt even warmer than back at school. Lawrence tried catching the maple leaves as they fell but had a hard time, they swerved so at the last second. Peter tried and did much better. In a short time he had a bouquet which he handed me with a courtly flourish. He took my hand, then, acting a bit bashful, as if this were too bold of him, reached for Lawrence’s hand, too, so we walked three abreast on the bed of cinders that flanked the tracks.

We stopped where the trees opened into a meadow set high above the river’s surface. You could tell from the way the bank was worn that it was a favorite spot for picnickers and fishermen. Someone daring had shimmied up a tree and hung a hempen rope for a swing. It was a tall silver maple leaning from the bank, so the rope dangled a good way out. You could easily picture children playing on it in summer, reaching with a forked branch to tug the rope back to the bank, grabbing hold of it and laughing as they launched themselves over the water to land with a mighty splash. The end of the rope swing, the part that dangled over the river, was tied into two thick knots. Lawrence, pointing, said something strange.

“It looks like a noose, like a hangman’s noose.”

It cast a pall and he seemed to know it because right away, jumping up on a stump for a stage, he started in with his impressions of all the teachers. Peter tried not to laugh but in the end it was too much for him, especially his Miss Crabapple, and he applauded even louder than I did.

When Lawrence finished, Peter tried persuading him to go down the river bank with him to search for pike sunning in the shallows, but Lawrence was timid when it came to things like that so Peter went by himself. It was a steep, perilous climb down and Lawrence and I were certain he was going to tumble in, but at last he made it and lay there on the last narrow shelf with his arm extended out over the water as far as it would go. He was as still as a heron, concentrating, and then suddenly his hand dipped and came back out holding a silver minnow! He lifted it above his head as if it were a real trophy, then lobbed it as far out into the river as he could.

He is showing off again, I decided, and who else could that be for but me? It made me feel girlish, seeing that. With the sun shining down on him, outdoors, he gave off even more authority and strength than he did in his classroom and I wondered at myself that I had ever thought of him as homely.

After he climbed back up we lay quiet on the grass. Above us the maple leaves were layered atop each other like fans the breeze kept peeling back, so more sky became visible even in the few minutes we stared. I wondered if I should tell Peter about what the Steens had said at dinner, but they were so ridiculous, their accusations so wild and unfounded, it seemed that saying them out loud would only be making the danger more real than it actually was. In the end what did their accusations amount to? That ignorant bigots knew his name.

As beautiful as it was there, Peter had not forgotten this was supposed to be a class. From his battered army bag he took out a slim, rose-colored volume.

“A friend sent me this while I was in France. I carried it with me the whole time I was there. It became my talisman—my rabbit’s foot. There was one shell. Well, I won’t tell you what it did to us. But the first thing I did when I shook the mud off was check my pocket to see if it was still there.”

He opened the book, then hesitated. What he was going to share with us seemed so important that he could not bring himself to begin.

“Picture a girl, not much older than you Beth, standing on a hill above the coast looking out toward sea.”

I nodded, closed my eyes, not because I had to in order to imagine, but because I thought this would encourage him to start.

“Renascence,” he said quietly. “By Miss Edna St. Vincent Millay.”

At first I was more conscious of his voice than I was the poem, he read so wonderfully, but then the words disappeared and all I was aware of was being inside the experience itself. The girl in the poem looks out at the wide view of ocean, sensing the islands and the horizon, and it is very simple that way until, in a stanza of magic, the sky presses down on her and forces her into the ground, so it is as if she is dead. She has to suffer all the pain of the world. “I saw and heard and knew at last,” she says, “the how and why of all things past.” When the pain finally eases, when she begins to sleep serenely for evermore, a torrent of rain bursts from the same sky that crushed her and washes her back to life. She embraces all the sights, smells and sounds of the world she had once taken for granted, all the beauty after all the pain, ruing the day she ever thought of life as trivial and small.

Peter, reaching the last verse, closed the book and read by heart.



“The world stands out on either side,

No wider than the heart is wide

Above the world is stretched the sky

No higher than the soul is high

The heart can push the sea and land

Farther away on either hand

The soul can split the sky in two

And let the face of God shine through

But East and West will pinch the heart

That can not keep them pushed apart

And she whose soul is flat—the sky

Will cave in on her by and by.”



I would need Miss Millay’s gift for words to describe what her words did to me. Never had I heard anything that made me feel that the author has seen so deeply into my heart. I knew what smallness did to the soul, how difficult it was to fight this off. I knew that hunger for beauty and how alone it could make you feel. I trembled, literally trembled, to find she knew this about me and so much more.

Again! I felt like shouting but Peter had already moved on to read more poems. Ashes of Life one was called and When the Year Grows Old and then, as his gentle little finale, Afternoon on a Hill which made it seem like she was sitting there with us.



“I will be the gladdest thing

Under the sun!

I will touch a hundred flowers

And not pick one

And when the lights begin to show

Up from the town

I will mark which must be mine

And then start down.”



Laying beside me on the grass, Lawrence seemed as moved as I was. “Tell us about her,” he said.

Peter shrugged. “I don’t know much. She published her first poems when she was a student at Vassar College. She can’t be much more than twenty-five now. My friend in New York knows her slightly. Her new book of poems is coming out before Christmas.”

When he read poetry Peter trusted us to understand and he seldom offered us any interpretations. He seemed too moved to bother trying to teach us, or perhaps, prompted by the poem, he decided that he needed to teach us something harder and the only way to do this was by changing the subject.

Without any preliminary he started talking about his experience in France, something he had never done before. His regiment had been stationed west of a town called Romagne where the fighting was brutal. Night attacks mostly. Noise, blinding lights, poison gas. The wounded calling for their mothers. Hardly knowing which side was which.

“I did well there,” he said honestly, without the slightest trace of bragging. “The boys respected me, not because of any of my virtues, but because they needed someone to look up to and there were no other candidates in sight. I found I could take the shelling better than most, which I put down to my complete lack of imagination. We had men in the division from all over the country—that’s why they called us Rainbow. Many were poor farm boys from the high plains or the Appalachians who had run away just for the adventure. They were sorry they had now, the trenches were so horrible. But they carried on without complaining and that’s why I came to love them.”

He told us stories about several, giving us their names and hometowns and what brave, selfless deeds he had seen them perform and how far too often he had to crawl out of the trench to recover their bodies. They were in the famous fight for Chatillon Hill and half his platoon had perished climbing the slope. It was afterwards, lying exhausted with the survivors in a shell hole fifty yards from the German trench, that he saw something that haunted him still.

“I don’t expect you to believe when I tell you this. At first it was nothing more definite than that cloud you see blowing in right above us, but then gradually it became more substantial, touching the earth, gaining strength seemingly from the corpses, coiling upwards and darkening. There was gas in the shell holes and fog and smoldering flares and all kinds of strange and terrible vapors, so it wasn’t unusual for the men to see visions. But what we saw that night was more real than anything we witnessed before.”

The streamers of fog and gas furled themselves around an axle that was black and hard, so at first it was like watching a huge pole being erected in No Man’s Land from which swirled long skirts of shredded fabric the same dun color as the dead men’s tunics. The top third of the pole swelled, became fleshy—it seemed a huge mushroom or a grotesquely misshapen face.

Next to him, the sentry raised his rifle ready to fire but Peter stopped him. What was there to shoot? The other soldiers, sensing that something was up, crawled to the lip of the hole and stared. These men, who could face down any German attack, now wore expressions of absolute horror. For the pole seemed to divide itself vertically into two and then two again and then another two, so there were soon more than a dozen, only they were no longer poles but the gigantic outlines of men. Not ordinary men. Devils.

“I know what you’re thinking. That it was all an illusion, that we had been fighting in those trenches too long. And perhaps it was an illusion, but the illusion was a real one, which is not the contradiction it sounds. For the first time in my life I realized Evil, pure Evil, really exists in the world. Not a man there didn’t believe that this is what we were staring at—that the devil was emerging from hell and dividing himself up into a band of identical brothers. He was surprisingly like what you see in bad illustrations, he even had a long black cape, but it was his face that convinced you he was the real thing—never again do I want to see such a face. He, or rather they, seemed to be a bit confused by the lay of things, even devils couldn’t figure out No Man’s Land satisfactorily. But they soon got their bearings and started off.”

“Off?” Lawrence said. He had listened to this as silently as I had and I could tell he was just as moved.

Peter nodded. “The twelve devils moved off in different directions, high stepping over the barbed wire. One turned and headed in the direction of Germany. One turned south toward Italy. One went toward Belgium and another toward England. One seemed perfectly content to stay there in France. One headed northeast toward Russia.”

Lawrence forced himself to smile. “Well, at least none headed toward the good old U.S.A.”

Peter closed his eyes. “Two did.”

We were silent—for a long time we stayed silent. Peter’s story was so powerful it seemed to influence the weather or maybe it was the changing weather that darkened his mood. The puffy clouds hardened now, became mercury color trimmed with white. The wind swept around from the north and strengthened, so the canopy of leaves blew down onto our laps. The river changed, now that the sunlight had left it. It flowed faster, more purposely, as if it were carrying not just its water south, but everything about the valley that was beautiful and fragile and not tied down.

Peter, seeing me shiver, leaned over and covered me with his jacket. We lingered for a few minutes yet, reluctant to let go the afternoon. They must have read the river like I did, that it was escaping, flowing toward the future, because the future is what they began talking about.

Lawrence told us he had been admitted to Columbia University in New York to begin a special accelerated program in the spring. He did not bother being modest about this since, he explained, it was a perfect opportunity for a boy with his abilities and ambitions. He would not miss small town life at all—he was very funny about this, very sarcastic and mocking. As usual with Lawrence, the more he went on the handsomer he became. It was as if only sarcasm could fill his face with energy, make his beauty come to life.

“Boobus Americanus!” he yelled toward town. “Sunday school yokels, Odd Fellows, the glorious commonwealth of morons! Goodbye to you all! Goodbye Philistines! Goodbye Boosters! Goodbye Klu Klux Krazies who reek of dung!” He waved his arm around. “Goodbye mills, goodbye cows, goodbye town!”

Peter and I both laughed, though we wanted to shush him, he yelled so loud. Peter, when it was his turn, spoke more quietly. He was not sure yet, he had only been here a few months, but he was beginning to think this was as good a place as any to make a life. There were no book stores within a hundred miles, true, but other than that it had many of the qualities he had been looking for. He wanted to teach and be with his books and take walks in the hills and these seemed perfectly attainable goals. He was afraid Lawrence was over-valuing the rest of the world. Here where people needed each other they had to be more tolerant of differences, not less.

He said it again, as if wanting to stamp it on the day and make it permanent.

“I want to enjoy my books and teach and every once in a great while be blessed with students like you.”

It was my turn after that, my turn to speak of my future, and while I could sense them watching me, waiting, I had nothing.

“I need to go now,” I said. We all sprang up together and beat the leaves from each other’s shoulders. It was the happiest afternoon I had ever spent. I wanted to tell them that but felt too shy.

We walked back up the railroad tracks and they waited with me for the train. The Indian Summer that had lasted so long was over now. The clouds lowered, the wind gusted, icy pellets blew down—and thus began the harshest, cruelest winter in a hundred years.

Once again, as on the first wall, the spacing between lines tightened as the writing dropped toward the floor. Once again, as with the first wall, Vera was kneeling by the time she finished. It took more effort than reading a book, with the constant adjustments needed to make out the words—stepping close where the script was faded, stepping back again when her eyes began blurring things up. Her back hurt from stooping, her neck was sore from following the lines toward the top, and now her knees ached, too, so her whole body was involved. The ironic thing was that her fingers and wrists had toughened considerably; a week’s worth of scraping had burned all the soreness out, so she felt she could go on stripping wallpaper forever if that’s what it took.

At times, reading, she felt a tugging sensation, not just on her eyes, not just on her heart, but on every part of her still capable of responding to the world. Take me out of myself! In the middle of the wall she had made this appeal and almost immediately it had been answered. A different era. A different consciousness. Different wounds. The sensation of inhabiting these was addictive, her imagination wanted more and wanted it instantly, and it was only the fact she hadn’t eaten anything since breakfast that made her decide to take a break.

There was housekeeping to attend to. Strips of paper covered every inch of the parlor floor and she had to sweep this and take it outside to her little fire. The dishes, the few she had used, hadn’t been washed in two days. The lantern had to be refilled, but she knew how to do this from camping, and this time she brought the kerosene in with her so she could work deep into the night.

She slid the ladder over to the next wall, took an appraising squint at things, decided to use the broadest scraper first. No words emerged from under the first piece she peeled, but this only made her smile. Beth and her indentations! But when she pried the next piece off there was nothing under that either, and nothing beneath the next one, nothing but bare plaster all the way across. Puzzled, she climbed down one step, chipped at the paper just enough to lift it back. Nothing. Nothing on that wall. Nothing, when she investigated, on the fourth wall either.

She felt so disappointed that her shoulders literally sagged, but there was only one possible explanation. Beth must have begun her wallpapering on these two walls the very first day she started. She must have thought long and hard about writing on the plaster, the idea had tempted her and frightened her simultaneously, and her inner debate wasn’t resolved until she had the first half of the room, the first two walls, entirely papered. Then, not able to contain herself any longer, she began writing on the bare third wall and then the bare fourth—Vera’s first wall and second. Continuing on around the room would have meant stripping off the wallpaper she had already hung, and instead of doing that Beth would have taken her story to a room where the walls were still bare and inviting, which meant, logically, the next room down the hall. It was the only sequence that made sense.

The next room down the hall. Vera had peeked in on her inspection trip, but this was the first time she had ever entered the room itself. It surprised her, it was so feminine and cozy, and she decided immediately that it must have been, not a den, but a sewing room, a place of refuge. The knotty pine paper darkened it terribly, but the floors were the lightest, most delicate looking in the house, with maple boards that had been milled and chevroned to form interlocking triangles, then polished to a jewelry box sheen a hundred years of traffic hadn’t managed to erase. It even smelled vaguely of wax, and brought back memories of her grandmother and Easters and brand-new shoes.

Things grew shabbier higher up. A fan-shaped window had lost most of its glass, and the dampness streaming in found the lantern light and turned it plasma yellow. The molding, delicate as it was, hung down in strips, as if someone had gotten mad at it and yanked. And then of course the wallpaper, which seemed an even worse desecration here than in the front parlor.

Which wall to start on was difficult to determine, but, using a book as her template, it made sense to try to the left of the door and work her way around to the right. She went back to the parlor for the ladder and tools, balanced her way up three steps, wiped the sweat from her forehead, shook the hair from her eyes, and started scraping.

Almost immediately she came upon a word, which surprised her, since it was Beth’s habit to indent. Still, she didn’t think much of it—if anything, she was pleased to have located the writing so quickly—but that changed with the second word, revealed when her scraper got lucky and pried off a six-inch strip all at once. It wasn’t Beth’s handwriting, it was nowhere near as neat, and the ink was different—ballpoint, and blue instead of black.

I can’t

The surprise came doubled—surprise at finding it, surprise that her first reaction was irritation. When she had first discovered Beth’s writing the effect had been of a woman stepping into the room and pronouncing the old-fashioned word out loud, credence, and now, having become used to that voice, comfortable with that voice, she was suddenly called upon to listen to another one that already seemed louder, more shrill. But almost immediately her curiosity took over. She dug away near the ceiling and found another word and then another, followed their prompts right across the top of the wall until she had the line entirely uncovered.

I can’t tell a story like she can.

The ink was thin and cheap-looking, recalling those plastic Bics she used when she was in middle school. With the pen held that high to write, there were places where the ink had dried up altogether, the letters becoming little more than cursive white scratches. Some letters were script and some were printed, but it was impossible to figure out what guided the logic, and the line itself slanted sideways like a ramp. It was slapdash, even drunken—the handwriting of someone who cared nothing for rules or consistency.

Who had written it was more obvious than it had been with Beth. It could only be the woman who had lived in the house back in the Sixties, the one who stripped off the three layers of old wallpaper, then covered up everything with the knotty pine and wedding cake that had been on the walls ever since. In walking through the house, in exploring the overgrown garden or following the dead-end path out to the wall, Vera had sensed this woman’s presence much more strongly than she had any of the other owners, though this had never crystallized into a definite image, much less a name or personality.

Someone had lived here fifty years ago who had labored mightily to turn it into a replica of the suburban homes she saw in the women’s magazines and on television, with a swing set, lawn chairs and barbecue, the rusty remnants of which now littered the weeds. She had tried the same trick inside with the wallpaper, working hard to make things modern, scraping off the layers she must have considered horribly old-fashioned and dull. And then, like Vera, she had discovered Beth’s words. Discovered them, read them—and then covered them up again, but not before writing on the walls herself.

I can’t tell a story like she can. More diffident than Beth, but was that just a pose? You could read the sentence as a brag, not so much the words but the forceful, don’t-give-a-damn way they were scrawled. I can’t tell a story like she can—and then the unwritten add-on that seemed implicitly attached: but I’m damn well going to try.

Vera was too tired for any emotion to stay with her for long— surprise circled back to irritation, that this woman should dare interrupt her connection with Beth. At the minimum, it meant more work. She crossed over to the next wall and peeled off just enough paper to find the same sloppy handwriting, then checked the next wall, then the one after that. It was the Sixties woman’s room all around. Beth, unless she had given up completely, must have skipped the sewing room for the next room down.

This was the back parlor, identical to the first, only smaller and shabbier, with a tent of cobwebs held up by a plastic milk crate, empty beer cans, a whitish-green powder dribbled to the floor by wasps. Jeannie had said something about squatters and maybe this had been their space. A plywood shelf jutted out from the wall with a stack of paper plates that looked petrified and a faded copy of a 1967 TV Guide. Someone had made a halfhearted attempt to brush everything into a corner, then given up—the broom still lay in the middle of the floor where they had dropped it, the bristles chewed off by mice.

But it made perfect sense that, back when the room was new, Beth would have preferred it to the sewing room. The walls were larger, giving her more space, and the light was better thanks to the window. Immediately, under the very first strip she peeled, Vera came upon her writing again, up high on the top left-hand corner of the left-hand wall. For all her impatience, there wasn’t much she could do about this until morning, not unless she wanted her arms to drop off. On her way upstairs, she stopped by the sewing room, stared in toward the dark. It was silly of her, childish, but too many spirits were popping out at her now, and she shut the door as tight as it would go.

Stripping went fast in the morning. She placed the radio in the middle of the floor, found her Quebec station, pulled the ladder over, started in. Enough mist had oozed through the window that the wallpaper felt damp, but this seemed to help, since she man aged to peel off some of her longest strips yet. What helped even more was establishing a three-part rhythm she could maintain right across the wall. Edge of scraper to get cut started, little nicks and nudges to loosen things, blade pressed back as far as it would go. What—happens—next? the rhythm went. By the end of the third wall she was actually reciting this out loud, like a work song that made things easier, not only by helping her concentrate, but holding off the darker moods that were always waiting to rush into a vacuum.

By lunch she had the first two walls uncovered and by dinner all four. Now that the words were there for the reading, she hesitated, wanting to read them immediately and yet feeling unaccountably shy. She went outside, used the hose for a shower, went upstairs for her robe, came back again for the lantern. Such ceremony!—and yet she felt unable to read the walls without it. I’ll need to dress in white if this goes on much longer, she decided. But it was only because she felt so strongly the need to give something back to this girl, not just through her scraping, but by the purity of her attention.

It was nearly Christmas when I had my idea. Peter told me Miss Millay’s new volume of poetry was coming out and I decided it would be the perfect gift for him. He had opened a wider world for me, the world of books and poets and ideas, and now I could go out into that world and bring part of it back for him. He complained about there not being a book store within a hundred miles, which left me grasping—a hundred miles WHERE? I could not ask him without giving away the surprise so I ended up asking the only other person who might know.

Miss Norian, the school librarian, was the meanest woman in school after Miss Crabapple. She attended the same church as Alan’s mother and gave the minister an even harder time. She did not enjoy loaning out what few books the library had. Two days was all you were allowed and if you returned it late you were not permitted to take out another one all term.

So, I had to get up my nerve to approach her. She seemed to like me or maybe it was because she knew I was related to Mrs. Steen and wanted to curry favor.

“I have a question about the library,” I said. “If you want to order a new book, where do you order it from?”

This surprised her—it was many years since she ordered a new book. The wen on her nose quivered in suspicion.

“I sent to Brattleboro. To the Elm Street Book Store.” She squinted at me through her spectacles. “Number 41 Elm.”

“Would a book arrive in time for Christmas? If I telephoned and had it sent?”

“Christmas? Why that’s only three days, Beth. I would say there is no chance of that at all . . . How is dear Mrs. Steen? She does such fine, such charitable work. Please give her my sincerest regards, will you promise?”

I never considered not going. Having the idea I had to pursue it to the end. Alan was working with his father dismantling a farm house north of town. He had his new truck, no one else in town had one so big, and he was always calling me outside to see how much lumber he managed to pile on its bed. On Friday he would be away all day, which meant I could take the milk train into town just like I was going to school. When I got there I could wait for the express which ran straight down the river to Brattleboro. It was good service. If I walked directly to the book store from the station and did not dawdle I could easily be back in time to fix Alan his dinner.

I had just enough money saved from what Alan gave me for groceries. He always left in the morning before I woke up, but this time I rose with him.

“What time will you be home?” I asked when I helped him on with his shirt. The truck was running outside and he stood by the window proudly watching its steam.

“We might cut the day short, it’s up to Father. See those clouds? We’re due for a storm. You’ll stay close to the house where it’s warm? It’s good that school is on vacation.” He took a meaningful glance at the bare, unpapered walls. “Maybe you can have a go at things?”

“Do you remember me telling you about Ellen Lavoie, the girl who left school to work? She wrote and we’re meeting for lunch today as a Christmas treat. I may be back a little late.”

The steam coming from his truck went from clear to sooty and Alan seemed concerned over that. Pointing toward the sky with a be-careful gesture, he disappeared out the door.

I had never lied like that before, not even over small things. I felt guilty, but it was more complicated than that, and I sensed I had taken my first step out into the world even before my journey started. I did take Alan’s advice over one thing. He had a long woolen coat he wore when it was below zero and though it came down almost to my ankles I knew it would keep me warm no matter what the day brought.

The trainman, Zack Perkins, was surprised to see me since there was no school. He shouted out a warning, “No heat in the caboose, Beth!” but with Alan’s coat I managed fine. When we came to town, instead of walking to the high school as usual, I purchased my ticket, crossed the platform and waited for the southbound train. I could see it for a long time before it arrived, with its black plume of steam, and when it pulled into the station I jumped back to avoid its sparks.

There were few passengers. Four commercial travelers sat playing pinochle on a sample case, on their way home to Boston after a trip to Montreal, and they smiled pleasantly when I walked past. Further down was a family with a wicker hamper settling in for a long trip. I balanced my way to the next car and sat on the left so I could watch the river. For a long time I was convinced the train must be headed north, not south, the land seemed so empty and forgotten. A half hour after we left I was further from home than I had ever been before and yet it looked scarcely different. Solitary farm houses set high against the hillsides. Forests that had been cut down to stumps. Now and then a little village, nestled inside a bend in the river or perched above a falls. All the way to Brattleboro I saw only one single person, an ice fisherman in a red parka hunched motionless over his hole.

And yet this could have been France, I was so fascinated. I sat with my face touching the window and kept twisting around since I wanted to see everything, not miss a single detail. The valley spread apart when we got close to Brattleboro, the train slowed down, and between one moment and the next there were people everywhere. Hobos warming their hands over a fire. A gang of workers repairing the tracks. Boys out with their slingshots, aiming good-naturedly at the coal car. Autos waiting at crossings for us to pass—more autos than I had ever seen before and trucks that made Alan’s look tiny.

When the train stopped I climbed down onto the platform and asked a newspaper boy which way Elm Street was. It had begun snowing and the streets were slippery, but the town was crowded with shoppers getting ready for Christmas. Walking up Main Street I saw my first negro man ever and just beyond him my first Chinese man and then my first flapper, her hair bobbed and shiny, her dress stopping just above her knees, a cigarette jaunty in her heavily rouged lips. A policeman dressed like an admiral directed traffic and seeing me put his hand up imperiously and made everyone stop so I could cross. I felt self-conscious, Alan’s coat was so long and heavy, but then I realized that no one could really see me, that there were so many people on the street I passed unnoticed. I liked that feeling. It made me think I had been dropped invisibly into a magic city that I could enjoy all I wanted without having to explain.

Elm Street was three blocks off Main, lined with small shops. All the display windows were decorated for Christmas, with wooden trains or hand-carved creches and tinsel-covered trees— the falling snow touched their glass with a delicate, fleecy pat. I stared in at all of them but they were nothing compared to the window of the last shop. I had to rub the frost with my glass to see inside. There was nothing displayed there but books and yet they were more colorful and happier looking than anything in the other windows, with their different sizes and shapes, the way they slanted against each other, supported each other, propped each other up. Some covers were coral and others were butter-colored or a very deep rose, and they blended into one long extravagant mural that ran right along the glass. By walking down it I could make out an ocean liner and doughboys and Lillian Gish and a man leading a camel and girls with parasols and an old woman walking hunched through a picket fence and a man with his hands on his hips staring defiantly from a cliff and President Harding and the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse riding four skeleton steeds. The authors’ names made a flowing scroll of their own and I smiled when I found one I recognized. I had never seen so many books in one place at one time and when I considered that this was only the display window, that there were likely to be hundreds more inside, I felt dizzy from happiness and shyness combined.

The bell tinkled when I opened the door. I stamped my shoes on the mat, shook back my hair to make sure no flakes would fall on the books. A round turtle of a man was down on his knees searching a shelf near the cash register and a pleasant looking woman stood on a sliding ladder writing on a ledger but there was no one there to stop me from looking my fill.

It resembled a city, that was what struck me hardest. Not a book store but a city. The shelves were arranged in parallel rows and pressed close together like city streets, so there was hardly room to slide between. That made it crowded but in a good way, as if the city was bursting from energy and excitement. The aisles were the streets and the shelves were the buildings and the books were the inhabitants, and, as in the window, they came in all shapes and sizes, textures and colors. Too crowded and sloppy someone else might have complained but I realized the moment I entered the shop that this was its magic, that there was simply no way to display books without making them beautiful. Throw them in the air, let them fall, the effect would have been beautiful. Stack them end on end it would be beautiful. Pile them backwards. Books can not help being what they are.

It was hard, I wanted to pick up every single one and read them right there or collect an armful to bring home. I could not do this, I barely had enough money for the book I wanted, and so, not to be tempted, I went over to the woman and asked for help.

“I would like Edna St. Vincent Millay’s new volume of poetry,” I said—and being able to say this out loud made the whole trip worthwhile.

The woman wore her glasses on a chain and now she tugged them up her nose to see me sharper. I think my coat surprised her. That someone wearing a shaggy farmer’s coat could have heard of a famous poet.

She smiled kindly enough. “Do you mean A Few Figs from Thistles?”

I nodded.

“We don’t have any in yet. It’s proven very popular in New York. I did place an order.”

She must have seen my disappointment. “Wait a moment,” she said, climbing backwards down the ladder. “A new shipment came in this morning I haven’t unpacked. Novels mostly, but perhaps, just perhaps. Let me check in back.”

She was gone a long time. When she returned she carried something cupped in her hands like a baby kitten.

“One copy! It’s your lucky day, miss.”

I handed over my money and she handed it back all wrapped. “Just a moment,” she said, glancing out the window. “Let me add an extra layer for the storm.”

I wanted to touch it, open the pages, and I was sorry she had wrapped it so quickly. I had never bought a book before and decided that this must be the proper etiquette, not to look at a book until you brought it home. I thanked her for her help. The turtle-like man stood behind me with an armful of novels and I felt jealous and happy for him, too.

It should have been faster going back to the station, since I now knew my way, but the snow blew sideways and it was impossible to walk without wincing. The train pulled late into the station—the locomotive’s silhouette was nearly doubled by the snow clinging to its hood. When the conductor put down his box for me to board I heard him call out to another conductor further along the platform. “Let’s hope they have the St. Bernards ready, Mike!”

There were more passengers this time, mill girls returning for Christmas to the farms where they grew up. They were dressed in the latest fashions, trying to act sophisticated and aloof, but giggling, too, they were so excited at going home. With their gifts and bundles it was hard to find room and I had to wedge myself in near the middle of the car.

We were well out of the station before I got up the nerve to free the book from its wrapping. The jacket was simple. A Few Figs from Thistles by Edna St. Vincent Millay, with red bands boxing the title and softer red highlighting her name. The covers, when I slipped back the jacket, were blue—sea blue, I decided, though I have never seen the ocean. They had a rich texture, since especially fine cloth had been used. I ran my fingers along the front, then down the spine. The book felt good in my hands, not too heavy, not too light. I opened it to the middle, enjoying the perfect way the paper felt, stiff but not too stiff, pliable but not too pliable, with a faint grainy quality that made me sense the trees and forests from which it came.

I took my time with this and only looked at the back of the jacket when I felt ready. Miss Millay’s photograph was very small. She was even younger than I imagined, not much older than me and much prettier. Her hair was bobbed but a rebellious curl was fallen loose over her ear. Her eyebrows were thin, she had no defenses over her eyes, so they looked very vulnerable. Her small hand was up against the side of her small chin and below it was a glimpse of lacy black collar. She had a perfect Mary Pickford mouth and her nose was delicate and very feminine. My friend, I decided, though I knew it was silly. My new best friend.

I intended to keep the pages uncut but I knew Peter would understand my temptation. For a cutter I used my comb. I cut all the pages, holding the book open on my lap, then when I finished went back and read the book straight through, trying on the weight and feel of the words the same way I had the covers and paper.

After that I read through it again, this time more slowly. To the Not Impossible Him. The Philosopher. The Singing Woman from the Wood’s Edge. MacDougal Street. I loved all the poems, especially the way she seemed to be talking very simply right to me and then suddenly deepened the meaning so I had to grasp. But it was there when I grasped. She tutored me as I read, never went so fast and far my understanding could not catch up.

I loved the sonnets best. I knew they were sonnets because they were fourteen lines and Peter had taught Lawrence and me how to recognize their rhythm. I decided to memorize one so when I gave him the book I could recite it out loud. It was nearly impossible to pick a favorite, at least not until I came to the last one which was perfect.



“Oh, my beloved have you thought of this:

How in the years to come unscrupulous Time,

More cruel than Death, will tear you from my kiss,

And make you old, and leave me in my prime?

How you and I, who scale together yet

A little while the sweet, immortal height

No pilgrim may remember or forget,

As sure as the world turns, some granite night

Shall like awake and know the gracious flame

Gone our forever on the mutual stone;

And call to mind that on the day you came

I was a child, and you a hero grown—

And the night pass, and the strange morning break

Upon our anguish for each other’s sake.”



Even with the girls talking away on either side of me I soon had it by heart. “I was a child and you a hero grown.” I recited that to myself over and over again a hundred times.

Absorbed in the book, I was slow to realize something was wrong. The silence alerted me first—the mill girls had stopped their chattering. They sat straighter than before and looked out the window in absolute terror. These were farm girls and you could add to that whatever hard conditions they knew from the mills and yet they were terrified by the storm’s ferocity. The train had slowed down but if anything it rattled even more than it had when it was speeding and I realized it was from the wind—that the wind was blowing furiously, bringing with it the hardest, thickest, most malevolent snow I had ever seen.

We had left Brattleboro at one, which meant it must be four now and yet the dark was already total. The lights in the train went out and soon the heat failed, too. All the girls, dressed in their city best, began shivering. The conductor marched down the aisle with a grim expression, brushing off their questions. “Delay!” he shouted from the end of the car. “Dee . . . eee . . . lay!”

We finally started up again, the girls resumed chatting, but then it became like a giant was rapping his knuckles against the window while his dog grabbed us between its teeth, worrying us this way then that. After ten minutes we stopped again, this time for good.

There were sobs and screams from the flightier girls. They did not like that it was dark. The older ones seemed resigned, they were already unrolling their bundles searching for thicker clothes. I was warm in Alan’s coat but wanted to scream louder than any of them, just because I was so frustrated and worried. Not from the storm but the delay, what it would mean if I was marooned.

“How long will this be?” I asked the conductor on his next trip down the aisle.

“The drifts have us blocked.”

“I have to get home.”

“We’re here for the night, Miss. It will be cold but at least you’ll be safe. We have coffee brewing in the caboose and we’ll bring that around for you. I suggest that everyone make themselves comfortable.”

He said this kindly and his voice stayed calm. But I could not take that for an answer because if I did then everything, all the plans I had constructed so carefully, would come crashing down. Portents of doom were what the heroines of those novels I read as a girl were always experiencing—and now here it was my turn, the portents were real and powerful and bewildering, since I could not understand what the doom would consist of, only that it would come if I stayed on that train.

If we were three hours north of Brattleboro then it meant we had to be close to town where the high school was. The tracks were up high, exposed to the worst of the storm, but things would almost certainly be easier down on the main road. I wrapped the book up again, pressed it down into the coat’s deepest pocket, then walked quickly to the rear of the car so I would not have time to lose my nerve. The door was frozen, it took shoving to pry it open, but then I got my knee and shoulder against the edge and really pushed.

I tried letting myself down slowly but the steps were icy and I tumbled off. It did not hurt, the drift was so deep, but snow got down my collar and turned to ice water against my skin. I felt in my pocket for the book and felt reassured that it was safe. I had come down near the front of the train. The locomotive, so arrogant and unstoppable, had butted its snout into a drift three times as high, so it now looked very meek. Steam whistled from the stack but it sounded soft and plaintive, as if the engine were sobbing in mortification.

I slid down the embankment, spreading out my arms to keep from going too fast. There was a band of alders bent into hoops from the snow but I ducked through them and gained the road. The drifts were not as high as on the tracks, though the snow was still over my knees. There was a crossing gate festooned with icicles, but no sign of traffic—any autos would have been quickly swallowed. With the wind blowing from the south it meant I must keep my back to it in order to head north. I pulled the coat collar up high as it would go, but that left most of my hair exposed and the icy pellets soon made it feel like tangled lead.

Where the road rose the traction was treacherous and where it dipped the wind collected even thicker drifts. Every fourth or fifth step I had to stop and catch my breath, though that was hard with the cold squeezing my lungs. The wind made so much noise it was almost silent. It was like the locomotive had started up again, two locomotives, ten locomotives, they were speeding down icy rails right over my head, yet all I could sense of them was their rushing, belittling power, not their noise.

It was hard staying calm. The more exhausted I became the more my fancy started working on me and it was this loss of control that frightened me most. At one point I thought I saw a bonfire, imagined voices cackling in glee, decided it must be hobos, drunken hobos, so I turned away from the road and tried a detour through a swamp. That was a mistake and it took me a long time to grope my way back. In the willows ahead of me appeared a very still shape—a doe sinking to her knees, the weight on her forehead simply too much to bear.

I had read that to keep your courage up you should always whistle, but when I tried it my lips were far too cracked and dry. What worked better was remembering winters when I was little and how I used to walk back to the Hodgsons’ farm from the library reading a book the entire way. Miss Millay was in my pocket, I was not going to take her out, but I recited to myself the sonnet I memorized on the train. “Some granite night” was the phrase I kept saying, since I was up to my waist in one now, with snow as hard and sharp as shredded stone. It seemed to warm me, the literal truth of it, and then I remembered one of her couplets that helped even more. “Let us go forth together to the spring; Love must be this, if it be anything.” In my stupor, my exhaustion, it became my destination, the only thought my head would allow. I am going forth with my lover to the spring I told myself, over and over until it made no sense. Going forth. Forth. Forth to the spring.

I found another trick that helped. Instead of just carrying Miss Millay’s book, I convinced myself that I was carrying her in my arms, my newest friend, and she was light and lithe and yielding—not a burden but something that lightened my way.

I do not know how long it was before I saw my first light. I was reluctant to believe in it, since I was convinced I was hallucinating. Very tiny, no bigger than a match—a yellow flame, one that grew steadier, less lambent, the closer I got. The town! There were suddenly more lights, so it was like a Christmas tree had blown over and scattered its candles either side of the road. I knew I was safe now or could be if I went to one of the doors and knocked, but all the courage I found in myself was reluctant to just quit. Off in the distance, dark and blocky, I could make out the high school and past that came the first shops, but they were deserted in the storm and in some respects the last half mile I walked was the hardest and loneliest yet.

I had never been to his home before but I knew where it was. On the edge of town near the river, the last in a row of three. A cottage more than a house—it was snug and secret looking behind icy vines. A candle shone from an upstairs window, though there were no lights below. The knocker on the door was frozen so I used my hand. It was not long before Peter came to the door, wearing a silky green robe. He was surprised, but he got over that instantly, seemed ready to start teasing me about something, and then that expression changed, too, once he put the light on and looked at me, really looked at me. Shock, concern, tenderness. They blinked down his face in three successive flashes and I realized for the first time what walking through that storm had cost me.

“I’ve brought you this,” I said. I had practiced saying it all day.

I reached down into the coat pocket and brought out the book. I unwrapped it for him, though my hands shook from cold and something more than cold. He took it, stood staring down at it, and his smile, when he looked back up again, was everything I had dreamed it would be.

“Beth,” he said, taking my hands, drawing me inside. “Dear Beth.”

He held the book up to the lamp, nodded, then very carefully placed it on the mantle over the fireplace and squared it away just so. All his concern was on me now. Outside, I had been able to force the cold away, but once I came into his parlor I began shivering uncontrollably and thought I would fall. He drew me over to the fire, turned me so I was facing it, my back toward him, then gently began removing my clothes. He started with the coat, which was stiff as armor, lifted off my blouse, his hands expert and tender, then kneeled so he could remove my skirt. He stood up again and from behind began kneading my bare shoulders transferring his warmth deep into my skin. After a few minutes I could sense his lips very close to my ear. “Can you remove everything else?” he asked. “I’ll be back when you’re ready. No, here—take this first.”

He stepped away, then came back with a thick woolen sweater. I nodded. I heard his footsteps going up the stairs and so I did what he told me to, took off the rest of my clothes and put his sweater on, which was thick and scratchy and fell down below my hips. The stairs squeaked again. I looked shyly up and there coming down the stairs beside Peter was Lawrence, wearing the same kind of silky green robe, rubbing the sleep out of his eyes and not looking happy at all.

“Why hello there, Beth.”

It did not seem like the Lawrence I knew, or rather it seemed like him but in an exaggerated form. His expression managed to be arrogant and coy and jealous and friendly all at once. He and Peter had brought blankets which they wrapped around me, then led me gently but firmly over to the couch. Peter left for a moment, then came back with a mug of tea. The two of them sat beside me in their matching robes, none of us saying anything but staring toward the fire, the only sound in the room being the crackle of its flames. I was confused, it combined with the cold to make me dizzy, and then when the blankets and tea did their work there was just the confusion. I remember seeing Lawrence’s school books on the table and thinking that they had not just been casually dropped but stood between bookends like they had been there a very long while.

“You need to sleep now,” Peter said. Never had I seen his eyes look kinder. He shooed Lawrence off the couch so there was room for me, then put his arms under my legs and lifted me around. I was exhausted, I must have fallen asleep before they disappeared upstairs, but I kept my eyes open just long enough to see Peter come back to the mantle and take the poems.

When I woke up it was still dark though the clock read seven. Christmas Eve. I rubbed at the frosty window and saw golden Venus. My clothes were draped over a chair by the fire and were warm when I put them on. Before leaving I walked around the room making sure to tiptoe. There were not as many books as I thought there would be, but almost every one was folded open and turned upside down as if they were all being read simultaneously. Other than that, there was not very much. Mementos of his time in France. A few French coins. A cheap plaster replica of a saint. Ivory cufflinks. A phrase book issued to officers. Medals, scattered across the bookcase with the lesser souvenirs.

I was lucky because the rollers had already been over the road and I was able to walk on the crust. The morning milk train had not yet left and the trainman waved me back toward the caboose. There was less snow on the tracks the further north we went and by the time we got to town there was hardly any snow at all. This frightened me, though I could not say why. That despite the blizzard it had not snowed here even a little.

When I climbed down from the caboose I saw Alan’s truck. He got out, walked around the front, held the door open. “I’ve been waiting here all night,” he said when I got in. “I knew you would come back and I didn’t want to miss you.”

He tried saying this tenderly, but it came out as an accusation. He looked colder, more exhausted than I did, but when I tried giving him his coat he wouldn’t take it.

“I knew you would come back, Beth.”

Three times he said this which could only mean he had been saying it to himself all night. We drove to the house without saying much more besides that. Mr. Steen’s automobile was parked out in front. Alan did not seem surprised to see it there. “Go in,” he said, again trying to sound gentle, but nervousness had him now and it came out rough.

Mr. and Mrs. Steen stood waiting in the back parlor, here against this wall where I can still sense their shapes. Mr. Steen had a new coat for Christmas made of fur and it seemed to shrink him, make him smaller, like an animal withdrawing into his pelt. Mrs. Steen had a new coat, too, and it was as thin and cheap as his was expensive and plush. And yet it seemed to enlarge her. She acted excited and not in a good way—never had I seen her eyes shine so bright. But enlarged is not the proper word. She looked bigger than that, more satisfied, as if she had swallowed hate for breakfast. She looked engorged.

Alan had walked me into the room but now he separated himself and stood with his parents against the wall so it seemed like I was facing a jury.

“Where were you last night?” Mr. Steen demanded, with no preliminary.

I was not afraid to stare them down.

“In town,” I answered. “I was trapped there by the snow.”

“What snow?” Alan and his father asked simultaneously. Mrs. Steen, for her part, stared toward the window and the brilliant blue sky.

“The blizzard. I couldn’t walk any further. Peter Sass took me in.”

Mr. Steen scratched his belly under his coat. “Why would he do that?”

I knew if I told them about the book they would not understand and if they did understand then they would hate me. I said nothing.

Mr. Steen’s bullying instincts took over now, making his chest and shoulders swell back up to their normal size.

“The Jew? The radical? The agitator?”

I stared him straight in the eye. “He took me in. I brought him a book as a gift.”

I could not help saying that, though I regretted it immediately—the hate in their eyes went deeper than anything I had seen so far.

“Tell the truth, Beth,” Alan said. He bowed his head, preparing himself for the worst.

Mr. Steen cut him off. “Oh, a book is it? A married woman visits a bachelor’s bedroom in the middle of the night to read him a book? A pretty name for it. A book!”

“Nothing happened.”

“You lie!”

I should have fought back harder, gone over and spat defiance right straight into his face, but I was still exhausted from fighting the snow. Weakness made me desperate and more than anything I needed someone’s help.

“Lawrence was there. He can tell you about it. Ask him.”

Alan looked puzzled. “That boy in your class? Lawrence?” He turned to his father. “There’s a boy in her class named Lawrence.” He tried remembering what I had said about him. “Very handsome. Very smart.”

Mr. Steen was slow to take this new fact in. I could see his brain working—he even rubbed his hand on his forehead to help it along.

He spoke very slowly and more to his wife than to me. “A school boy. At the teacher’s house. At midnight. A pretty schoolboy.”

He then did something I had never seen him do before—he put his arm around Mrs. Steen’s shoulders and drew her close. They talked too soft and fast for me to make out what they said. Alan was part of the conference, too, though he only ducked his chin toward them without speaking. After a long time their heads split apart again and Mr. Steen began buttoning up his coat.

“Stay here,” he said. “Mother Steen will keep you company.”

He took Alan’s arm and guided him out through the hall. A few seconds later we could hear Alan’s truck cough to life. Mrs. Steen was furious she had been left behind. She stared with enough intensity to pin me to the wall. “Don’t move!” her eyes commanded, and then I heard her spitting into the telephone out in the hall. When she returned she was almost beside herself from excitement. She paced back and forth across the floor muttering to herself the way she must have when speaking in tongues. The words oozed from her neck like they always did, only this time they seemed covered in gristle and blood.

“Just a good scare is it? Just a good scare? You’ll miss the fun you will. Stay here they say, watch the girl they say, no place for a woman. No place for a woman? No place? No other place. No other place! Just a good scare? We’ll have a party with just a good scare. Women aren’t invited, women can’t watch? Women can’t watch? We’ll watch our fill, the good Lord will watch with us.”

The angrier she grew the faster the words came out, to the point I could no longer understand. After a few minutes a horn sounded out on the road. She grabbed my wrist, not bothering to be gentle and pulled me after her outside. A black truck was waiting, shabbier than Alan’s, driven by a man I recognized as one of the roughest of Mr. Steen’s loggers, feared for the way he used his belly as a weapon during brawls. Mrs. Steen hurried over and issued her instructions, jabbing his stomach in emphasis. He nodded, got behind the wheel, and then Mrs. Steen grabbed me by the hair and forced me onto the back seat next to her.

Mr. Steen’s man drove east toward the village, which puzzled me, and I only became frightened when we reached the main road and swerved south. Mrs. Steen kept urging him to go faster. The road was clear but then we came to where the snow had fallen and he had to stop and put on chains. Mrs. Steen, if she noticed the snow, said nothing. While she waited for the man to finish she drummed her knuckles on the back of the seat and stared toward the steering wheel as if debating whether to take over. She cuffed him on the back of his neck because he drove too slow and cursed him when he skidded. For an hour we drove that way. We passed the high school. We came to the railroad tracks and the river and then suddenly I knew where we were heading.

Trucks had trampled down the snow and parked atop their own dirty tracks. A child’s shredded kite, forgotten in the summer, stuck out of the drifts like a yellow marker showing which way to walk. Mrs. Steen walked on one side of me and the driver on the other so there was no chance of my bolting. There was a band of birch trees, then an abrupt ridge, and it was not until we crested this that we could see the river. It was the color the deepest cold can take on without actually freezing—gray beyond gray, so it was impossible to look at without shuddering. There were icebergs, too, long swelling humps, and they bobbed up and down in the current like racing ponies.

Twenty yards back from the bank, in the flat spot where the three of us had our picnic in October, stood a group of ten or eleven men. My first reaction was laughable. I thought it was a ball game—that these men had decided on the coldest day of winter to play baseball. Then, when they dragged me closer, I saw they all wore parkas and gumboots, so I knew they were loggers, Mr. Steen’s men. They are driving something downriver I decided, logs or pulp, but the cold slowed my understanding and it was another few seconds before I saw things clear.

In the center of their ring, prone but with his arm up as if fending off blows, lay a naked man. Lawrence! He was wet and it made his whiteness even more startling, though the veins in his arm were as red as licorice. I could not understand why he should be wet and naked and cringing in the snow, my eyes could not accept what they were seeing. One of the men kicked his ribs and laughed and then another man took off his parka and threw it at him, not in charity but disdain. Lawrence fumbled desperately to pull it on—already the wetness was turning to ice.

I tried running to him, but Mrs. Steen grabbed my arm and yanked me back. Lawrence’s humiliation was not what I had been dragged there to witness. On the edge of the river stood another group of men, the roughest of Mr. Steen’s loggers plus Mr. Steen himself. There was someone in the middle of their ring and like Lawrence he was naked, though he was not lying down but standing tall and proud like he was at attention.

“Peter!” I yelled.

The driver shoved me sideways and Mrs. Steen clamped her hand over my mouth. Off to the left under a big pine, well apart from the two mobs, Alan stood by himself watching. I know he did not see me, not yet. Peter did not see me either, nor could he have heard my shout over the river’s roar. What frightened me was what lay draped over Peter’s shoulder—the dangled rope of the tree swing, the one we had seen on our picnic, the one Lawrence compared to a noose.

Responding to an abrupt gesture from Mr. Steen, two of the toughs grabbed the rope and forced it down over Peter’s head and shoulders, cinching it tight across his chest. His turn now, I suddenly realized. His turn after Lawrence’s, though I still did not understand for what. At Mr. Steen’s barked command, the men pulled Peter to the furthest edge of the bank, then positioned themselves behind him squatting on their heels.

I turned away so as not to see but Mrs. Steen anticipated this and by twisting my arm forced me to look. “Sodomite!” she hissed, pointing. Peter saw me now, I am certain he saw me, because he raised his hand just as the two men who had hold of him shoved him hard toward the river. The tree rope tightened on his chest and his feet came off the bank, swinging him sideways out over the current, then careening him back. He did not struggle to fight this—from first to last he did not struggle. He bounced off the lip of the bank and pendulumed back again, this time even further out, and as his full weight came against the rope it snapped apart right above him and he fell into the river with less splash than a stone would make but only a quick leaden sucking.

He rolled over like a log, rolled a second time, and I could see him trying still to raise his arm through the current. Mr. Steen and his men staggered over to the bank and stood there staring in cow-like stupidity, but I think even before my scream Alan must have started running. He forced his way through the snow to the bank and ran downstream trying to keep Peter in view, tugging off his jacket then his shirt. Where the bank steepened he must have made his decision because he dove into the river head first. We could see him splashing at the ice, trying to keep it from forcing him under, but the current would not let him go further out than he already was. The men finally started running—after Alan, not Peter. They could have saved themselves the bother. Far downstream, just where it seemed he would disappear after Peter around the first bend, we could see an exhausted Alan stagger alone through the shallows back to the bank.

“He’s saved!” a man yelled, one of the ring guarding Lawrence. Then, realizing his mistake, he kicked viciously at the snow. They seemed ashamed of themselves, this group, and now they were all taking off their parkas to cover Lawrence’s nakedness, warm him back to life. He was crying, sobbing, retching, though he could not have known yet about Peter.

Behind me, Mrs. Steen put her lips to my ear and whispered like she was stuffing hate in just as deep as hate would go.

“You saw nothing, understand? You were home with all of us, we baked a cake for Christmas, sang songs and didn’t once leave the house. Understand? Understand woman! You saw nothing, you were home with the three of us, we baked a currant cake for Christmas, sang carols, stayed in the house the whole livelong day.”

I nodded just to be rid of it, that moist hateful breath down my ear. The men pulled Lawrence to his feet and took him back to one of the trucks. Someone else ran to help Alan. Mr. Steen and his cronies walked backwards from the river, using pine boughs to sweep snow over their boot prints. Mrs. Steen and the driver tugged me over to the truck and forced me in.

I was sick after that. All the novels I read as a girl, in almost every one, the heroines come down with brain fever after suffering their tragedies. It was not brain fever I had, it was only the flu, but it still kept me in bed for a very long time. Alan would not leave my side at first, though we never talked. One night I woke from my delirium and it was not Alan sitting by the bed but Miss Norian, the friend of Mrs. Steen, and she was tearing out the pages from a book and using them to blow her nose. With the other hand she was stroking back Peter’s hair which rested on her lap like a soft brown pillow—and I hated her for daring to touch him, though I knew it was only my fever.

Gradually I grew better and then one day Alan said he would leave me alone and go off to work. Later that afternoon I felt strong enough to walk downstairs and after resting a bit in the parlor I decided to go outside for some air. There was a path shoveled through the snow to the road. I was all the way there, turning to come back, when I noticed a black truck parked fifty yards away. There was a man behind the wheel and he did not seem to be doing anything but watching. Watching the house. Watching me. As I got better, as Alan began leaving me along for a longer time each day, the truck remained there, or a similar truck, with a similar driver, so I was always watched.

And I knew that this is how it would be. It would always be that way. It would be that way until I gave them what they wanted.

“I have wonderful news,” I told Alan on Valentine’s Day when he brought me candy. “We will be having a baby. There can be no mistaking the signs.”

“A son! Why I’m sure of it, Beth!”

“I’m sure, too.”

The next day when I went out for my walk the truck was gone.

How long I can fool them I do not know but it will not have to be for long. Alan feels confident enough to go on a trip to the city with lumber and will be gone five days. “I’ll hang the wallpaper while you’re away,” I told him. “At last I have the time and when you come home it will be finished, every room.”

“You’ll be careful on the ladder?” he said, leaning over to kiss me.

“I’ll be careful.”

“Wonderful. Why that’s just wonderful, Beth. Mother will be so pleased.”

I will begin hanging the paper the moment I finish this sentence and I will work very carefully until every wall is covered and I will leave my story behind and I will never stop hating them and in springtime when they least expect it I will go.