challenge of an idea that might differ from his own. Time flew, and each ended the night full and happy, with the rare glow that comes from knowing your very being has been understood by somebody else, and that there might just be someone out there who will only ever see the best in you.
* * *
• • •
Fred lifted the table easily down the last of the steps, ready to move it back into his house, then turned back to double-lock the door. Alice stood beside him, wrapping her scarf around her face, her belly full and a smile on her lips. Both were shielded from view by the library and somehow found themselves standing just inches apart.
“You sure you won’t let me drive you back up the mountain? It’s cold, and dark, and that’s a long walk.”
She shook her head. “It’ll feel like five minutes tonight.”
He studied her in the half-light. “You ain’t spooked by much these days, are you?”
“No.”
“That’ll be Margery’s influence.”
They smiled at each other and he looked briefly thoughtful. “Wait there.”
He jogged up to the house and returned, a minute later, with a shotgun, which he handed to her. “Just in case,” he said. “You might not be spooked, but it’ll allow me to rest easy. Bring it back tomorrow.”
She took it from him without protest, and there followed a strange, elongated couple of minutes, the kind in which two people know they have to part, and don’t want to, and while neither can acknowledge it, each believes the other feels it too.
“Well,” she said, at last, “it’s getting late.”
He rubbed his thumb speculatively across the table-top, his mouth closed over words he could not say.
“Thank you, Fred. It was honestly the nicest evening I’ve had. Probably since I came here. I—I really appreciate it.”
A look passed between them that was a complicated mixture of things. An acknowledgment, of the kind that might normally make a heart sing, but cut with the knowledge that some things were impossible and that your heart could break a little knowing it.
And suddenly a little of the magic of the evening dissipated.
“Goodnight, then, Alice.”
“Goodnight, Fred,” she said. Then, placing the gun over her shoulder, she turned and strode up the road before he could say anything that would make more of a mess of things than they already were.
SIXTEEN
That’s the one trouble with this country: everything, weather, all, hangs on too long. Like our rivers, our land: opaque, slow, violent; shaping and creating the life of man in its implacable and brooding image.
• WILLIAM FAULKNER, As I Lay Dying
The rain came late into March, first turning the frozen sidewalks and stones into skating rinks, and then, through sheer relentlessness, obliterating the snow and ice on the lower ground in an endless gray sheet. There was limited pleasure to be found in the slight lifting of temperatures, the prospect of warmer days ahead. Because it didn’t stop. After five days the rain had turned the unfinished roads to mud or, in some places, washed away the top layers completely, revealing sharp boulders and holes on the surface that would catch the unwary. Waiting horses stood tethered outside, their heads low and resigned, their tails clamped to their hindquarters, and cars bucked and growled along the slippery mountain roads. Farmers muttered in the feed store, while the shopkeepers observed that the Lord only knew why that much water was still hanging up there in the heavens.
Margery arrived back from her 5 a.m. round soaked to her socks, to find the librarians sitting with steepled fingers and fidgeting feet with Fred.
“Last time it rained like this, the Ohio burst its banks,” said Beth, peering out of the open door, from where you could hear the gurgle of surface water as it made its way down the road. She took a last drag of her cigarette and ground it under the heel of her boot.
“Too wet to ride, that’s for sure,” said Margery. “I’m not taking Charley out again.”
Fred had looked out first thing and warned Alice it was a bad idea, and though there was little that would normally stop her, she took him seriously. He had moved his own horses up onto high land, where they could just be seen in a slick, wet huddle.
“I’d put them in the barn,” he had told her, as she helped him walk the last two up, “but they’re safer up there.” His father had once lost an entire locked barn of mares and foals