Miller's Valley - Anna Quindlen Page 0,41

still doing my preliminary work,” I said.

“I’d be happy to sit down and talk to you. That would look good to the judges.”

“Do you know much about coal, sir?” said Richard.

“No, son. But I know everything about water and Miller’s Valley.” He picked up one of the microfilm boxes. “You talked to your father about your project?” he asked.

“Preliminary project,” I said. “It’s just preliminary.”

I believe in love at first sight. I remember the day it happened. Any time I want I can make myself feel that feeling again, although I don’t anymore, haven’t for years. But I could if I wanted to. There were times when all someone had to do was light a match for a birthday candle, start the fireplace in the living room, burn some trash at the dump down the end of the road. All I had to do was smell smoke, and I was there, I was there. The smell of smoke could get me going good.

Clifton was kissing the cows. I don’t know why, but that summer his favorite thing was to slip his head between the rails of the fence and kiss each one on its damp square nose. Cows can be skittish, but they hardly ever were with him.

“I like this one the best,” he said.

He was almost four, a good-looking little boy who was smart and watchful. Minding him now didn’t consist of much. He knew the rules, and he was good at keeping them. He was more like me, more like his aunt Mimi than his father. Of course his aunt Mimi had been around from the beginning, and his father—well, he just wasn’t.

I could see a thin ceiling of whisper-gray smoke over the entire valley. There’d been hardly any snow that winter, and little spring rain, which everyone had said was a good deal until the brush on the mountain got dry as typing paper and some passerby dropped a lit match or maybe a cigarette and set it alight. My father was back at my aunt Ruth’s, spraying her roof with the garden hose so that stray embers wouldn’t nestle between the asphalt shingles. The volunteer companies from six or seven towns were on top of the mountain, coming in on one of the old logging trails, sending a state helicopter over to the deep cold waters behind the dam to lower buckets and bring them back and upend them over the blazing brush.

“Don’t let anything happen to my house, Buddy,” Ruth had yelled out her window.

“It’s not your house,” my mother had yelled back, but Aunt Ruth couldn’t really hear her at that distance. I tried to remember the last time my mother and her sister had had a real conversation, a knees-touching-under-the-kitchen-table, eye-to-eye, pass-the-sugar conversation, but I couldn’t.

“This one is his wife,” Clifton said as he stood at the fence looking at a cow with a black eye and swollen udders. When he tried to kiss her she backed up and rumbled a low warning.

“No, no, I like you, cow,” he said. He had a big orange sucker Ruth had given him, but she still wouldn’t let him take any of her dolls down to see up close. “Those are just dolls to look at,” she said. “We don’t play with those dolls.”

I was sitting on a stump reading a book, The Construction of Water Containment Units in the Continental United States. I’d done so much research on my science project that I could have written a book myself, but maybe not the one I’d originally intended. “You don’t like that guy much,” Richard had said after Winston Bally had stopped by the conference room for the third time, and I didn’t like him any more for being right about most of the things he said about the valley. If you didn’t take the people who lived there into account, he had the right idea.

The helicopter came overhead, its bucket dripping water that I figured had a little bit of Andover in it. Clifton looked up. “Daddy was in a chopper,” he said.

“Really?” I said. Every once in a while Tommy would get drunk and say something like “The bugs, man, you can’t even believe the size of the bugs. They’ll eat you for breakfast.” But you couldn’t ask him a direct question about Vietnam. On the news they showed some boys who had burnt their draft cards, and Tom said, “I wasn’t even drafted, I signed up of my own free will.” Then he