Crossing to Safety (36 page)

But where, then? Back to the Ridge? I could think of nothing better, and having started, I grew more convinced with every step that I would find him there. I went fast down the old hay road, past the cellar hole full of fireweed where a farmhouse had burned, through the sugarbush where spruce trees were growing up and choking everything, across the playing-field meadow and along the balsam tunnel and through the gate. From above, I looked down on the house and its quiet lawn.

The Rambler sat just where Moe had left it. The note was still on the aerial. The folded lounge and the folded chair lay on the grass.

Since then, wild goose chases have followed one another. It occurred to me, the idea going on in my head like a light bulb in a comic strip, that he might have found his way, perhaps without intending it, down to his study/shop in the compound. He might be down there now, straightening used nails on the anvil.

Of course, of course. The idiot boy would have thought of that long ago.

I climbed into the Rambler and drove on down, parked in the grove of the parking lot, walked down past the woodshed to the shop, opened the sliding door on the quiet room smelling of linseed oil.

“Sid?” I said.

Nothing.

Later, back at the Ridge, sitting on the porch step eating crackers and cheese and trying to think what to do next, I saw that the sun was over the hill, and that all along the west a bed of cloud with fiery edges was turning orange. The sunset was going to be fine, just what Charity would have ordered. Another light bulb went on in my head. Over on the western slope of the hill was a place where the ice had gouged a long trough through an outcropping of schist. What was left when the ice withdrew was a bench a hundred feet long, with a sloping back and moss cushions, where at least a dozen times we have gone to be quiet and watch the fire die out of the sky. Whatever he had been doing for the last four hours, wouldn’t Sid be drawn there now? I thought he would. I could imagine him sitting there in the flat red light, brooding on his loss and on the fact that he was excluded from it, like a child, for his own good; and I could imagine him savaging himself with the unconsoling lines that education and habit would have brought to the surface of his mind:

It is a beauteous evening, calm and free.
The holy time is quiet as a nun
Breathless with adoration. The broad sun
Is sinking down in his tranquility . . .

If I wanted to drive down the hill and a mile around, I could get there by car. But I did not want to risk having Sid return to find the house empty, the car with its note gone, nobody around. Tired as I was, I would walk—it was no more than a half mile through the woods.

Before I left I turned on the porch light and pulled the note a little higher on the aerial. Then I walked, so tired my hip joints ached in their sockets, through the darkening hardwoods till I came to the western edge, and the sky opened, with the whole main range cut out in black against it. The long bed of cloud that had been fiery at the heart and silver at the edges had cooled to purple, dying like a coal. The ice-cut trough, nearly clear of trees, angled along the hill. My eyes hunted along it for a reddened khaki figure.

“Sid?” I said again.

Nothing.

Coming back, I found the woods so dark I had to use the flashlight. See? my mind said to me as I played it on stumps and ferns ahead. You can understand his dependence. She told you that sooner or later you’d need a flashlight, and she was right. As usual.

By then I was really alarmed, not merely concerned. I had let more than four hours go by when I should have been organizing a search party and letting the picnic fall apart as it might. The porch light, when I came up the hill from the stable, did not cheer me, for I saw at once that the Rambler was still there, and the note a tip of flame above it, catching light either from the porch or from the moon.

I was headed for it, intending to go straight to the hilltop and enlist the family in the search, when I heard the telephone in the kitchen. I burst in the door and answered it. “Hello?”

“Ah, darling,” Sally said. “You’re back. How did it go?”

“What?”

“The picnic. How was it? We saw you’d gone when we came out—the Marmon was gone.”

“Oh,” I said. “Yes, it was all right.”

“They didn’t miss her, then. They went ahead.”

“They went ahead. But of course they missed her. They went ahead because most of them didn’t know.”

“You sound out of breath.”

“I just ran in from the yard.”

“How’s Sid?”

“Okay. Playing his role. He’ll be all right.”

“Oh, I’m so glad,” Sally said. “I was afraid . . . How are
you
? Did you have any trouble with him? He didn’t break down?”

“Not that I noticed.”

“Good. Because, you know,
she
did. She sat and looked out the window and cried all the way over. Having done that to him, she found she’d done it to herself.”

“It’s a mess,” I said. “Have you got her settled? Are you coming back tonight?”

“No, that’s why I called as soon as I thought you might be back. We’ll be home before noon tomorrow. We didn’t stay with Charity long because she was so tired and weak. We saw her again just now, after dinner, and we’ll see her tomorrow before we start back.” There was a pause. “Larry?”

“Yes?”

“I love you.”

“I love you too.”

“Are you going to spend the night at the Ridge House?”

“We haven’t discussed it. I suppose I might.”

“Do. I don’t want to think of either of you alone. Did you have a walk?”

“My legs are worn down to stumps.”

“Poor fellow, I
bet
you’re tired.”

“How about you? You must be worn out after a day like this one.”

“Oh, I don’t know. A little, maybe. Not too. Just . . .”

“What?”

“Sad. You know?”

“I guess I do know. Get to bed. Get a good sleep.”

“I will. You too.”

“All right. Goodnight, sweet.”

“Goodnight.”

Sound of her kiss in the receiver, than
click
. I went back outside.

The moonlight has gathered and concentrated itself, the lawn lies out there pallid and even, the Rambler squats upon its shadow, the note is now a petal of pale flame. The folded chairs lie on the grass, faintly gleaming, like a pile of bones. From far off, drifting down from the hilltop, comes the sound of singing.

I have made up my mind that I will not drive up there after all. If they are singing, they are close to finished with their family duty. Moe and Lyle, and perhaps others, will surely be stopping by here to check with Sid and me. I would gain only a few minutes, and risk breaking up what they have loyally held together, if I went up now.

And anyway, Sally’s voice is still in my ears, wearier than I have ever heard it. Even in her worst spells she doesn’t sound like this, and she takes care to see that there are very few bad spells, and that when she has them they do not show. On the screen of my mind appears her struggling image, floundering across the grass toward the station wagon, left behind by the others, even by the friend to whom she gives her whole store of love and gratitude. She is like some unbearable, sticky-sweet Disney character, some hurt and wistful little creature scorned by her kind. In a Disney fable, there would be a transformation—Dumbo would find that his big ears let him fly, the Ugly Duckling would sprout the white plumage and grow the imperial neck of a swan. But in this script there will be no such ending.

“Could you survive her?” Sid asked me this afternoon. I read his question as being aimed really at himself, and answered it accordingly. Now that I ask it seriously of myself I don’t know how to reply.

One of the peculiarities of polio is that its victims, once they have recovered from the virus and settled down to whatever muscular control it has left them, live a sort of charmed life. Crippled as they are, they are rarely ill, they are surprisingly tough and durable, they astonish their sound companions with their capacity to endure.

But that is not forever. There comes a time in the life of every such patient when the whole system—muscles, organs, bones, joints—begins to fall apart all at once, like the wonderful one-hoss shay. Every polio patient is warned to expect that time, every polio family lives with that foretold doom waiting for it at some unknown but expected time in the future. One learns to live with it by turning away from it, by not looking. And yet on occasion one is aware of an intense, furtive watchfulness, and the victim, the doomed one, must surely have just as often the vulnerable sense of being watched.

Could I survive her? More accurately,
can
I? Suppose the tired conversation we just had on the telephone were the last, what would I do? Run mad through the woods like Sid, to be found later in some pond, or hanging from a tree?

The image is too clear to me, and I rise, intending to head for the Rambler, to drive up and start what I should have started hours ago. But then I see on the sky, above the wall of trees, a long dim movement of light. Someone up on the hilltop is turning or backing around, his headlights pouring off into the sky. Better to wait. And brace up—answer the question.

I am so tired that I melt back onto the step. Too old for this physical and spiritual exertion. I will be worthless now for any further searching. I should have gone straight on up with Moe, we should have roused the whole summer colony, the farmers around, the police. Guilt comes to join anxiety in my mind, I am near to tears for my own incompetence.

The lawn spreads out before me under the moon, light gleams off curving metal surfaces, I see the moon’s reflection in glass, reflected as if from water, and looking out with unfocused eyes I see it as another scene. My tired mind, dreaming or inventing or remembering, moves reality ahead as a carousel moves a color slide, and another slide takes its place.

I am in our walled yard at Pojoaque, standing beside the swimming pool that we installed for Sally’s therapy. The moon shines down on me from a polished black sky, and shines up at me from black water. I have been hearing the screech of a hunting owl, and now I see him on the telephone wire, a Halloween silhouette, cat-size and cat-eared. A moment only, and then he is not there, gone as soundlessly as a falling feather. The moon stares back at me from the pool.

Then it cracks, crazes, shivers, spreads on tiny, almost imperceptible ripples. Some moth or night-flying beetle has blundered into it, I think. But when I put my flashlight on the spot from which the ripples seem to emanate (and who is ever without a flashlight?) I see that a mouse is drowning there. He is a very small mouse, hardly bigger or heavier than a grasshopper, and he apparently cannot sink. But he must have been in the water for some time, for his struggles are feeble, and as I watch, they stop completely. He lies on the surface, his ripples spread and dissipate and smooth out.

I am not unused to things drowning in our pool. Rabbits and ground squirrels come in from the dry country around in search of a drink, and sometimes, like this mouse, fall in and find themselves trapped by walls of shiny, unclimbable tiles. Once in, they have no way to get out, though twice I have found bedraggled mice crouching in the opening where the Jacuzzi drains into the main pool. That is no escape, only a respite, for as soon as the filter pump starts they will be washed into the pool again.

And once, on a morning after a big thunderstorm, I came out and found a neighbor’s bulldog dead on the bottom. He had wandered in the open gate, probably blinded and scared by the cloud-burst, and fallen in. Heavy bodied, heavy headed, and short-legged, he had swum, I suppose, a round or two of the slick walls before he went down. That was not a good morning.

Now this mouse, intruding on my prebedtime breath of air with his trouble. Generally when I find mice in the pool they are dead, and I can scoop them out with the net and throw in an extra gallon of chlorine to disinfect their intrusion. I will do the same with this one, I think, and get the net.

Even while I am dipping him up, I wonder why I do it. Perhaps the owl scared him into the pool. If he is alive when he comes out, the owl may get him. Or I may have to thump him on his paper-thin skull, for fear his mouselike reproductive capacities will people the patio with skittering offspring, to endanger Sally on her canes.

I lay the net on the pavement and turn the light on it close. A wet wisp, thoroughly dead, the mouse lies in the nylon web. I pick up the net and carry it to the low back wall and turn it upside down on the other side. In the flashlight beam the mouse is so tiny I can hardly see him, there at the edge of a grass clump—a tuft of fur, a recently sentient little chunk of complicated proteins now ready for recycling.

Then miracle. The fur stirs, finds itself on dry ground. In a scurry of legs it disappears among the grass and weeds.

Survival, it is called. Often it is accidental, sometimes it is engineered by creatures or forces that we have no conception of, always it is temporary.

I squeeze my eyes hard shut, and when I open them again, New Mexico is gone from my sight. But what put it in my mind is not. I remember Sally’s face, contracted with pain, when we brought her out of that last camp to the road where the car waited—I riding behind her to hold her on, Sid leading old Wizard, Charity walking alongside to steady and hold as she could. It was not a rescue according to any Pritchard formula, but a desperate improvisation like much that has followed. And every detail of that long improvisation has tightened the bonds that hold us together.

Suppose she had died in childbirth under the care of that doctor whom I can’t think of even yet without anger—whose name I have carefully forgotten. I would have left that delivery room a nothing, made nothing by the nothing that remained on the bloody table, but I would have survived her. I would probably even have gone on writing, for writing was the only thing besides Sally that gave meaning and order to my life. A nothing, writing nothings, I might have gone on a long time, out of habit or brute health.

It would have been an appalling fate. I am flooded with gratitude that I wasn’t asked, quite yet, to survive her, that down under her cone of pain and ether she heard the anesthetist’s exclamation, “She’s going, Doctor!” and brought herself back, thinking, “I can’t!”