were only now entering Shirley Falls, through the back way. The buildings became much closer to one another, and the high wooden houses, built years ago for the millworkers, were there as well, almost on top of one another, with their wooden staircases down the backs of them. Jack peered through the car window and saw a few black women wearing hijabs and long robes walking along the sidewalk. “Jesus,” he said, because the sight surprised him.
“My mother, back in the day,” Olive said, “oh, she hated hearing people speaking French on the city buses here. And of course many of them were speaking French, they had come from Quebec to work in the mills, but, oh, how Mother hated that. Well, times change.” Olive said this cheerfully. “Look at these people,” she added.
“It’s kind of weird, Olive.” Jack said this, peering to the right and left. “You have to admit. Jesus. It’s like we drove into a nest of them.”
“Did you just say a nest of them?” Olive asked.
“I did.”
“That’s offensive, Jack.”
“I’m sure it is.” But he felt slightly ashamed, and he said, “Okay, I shouldn’t have put it that way.”
They drove through the town, which seemed to Jack to be very bleak, and then they drove across the river and up a long hill where there were houses in neighborhoods. “Turn, turn, right there,” Olive demanded, so Jack turned right and they drove down the street and she showed him the house that Henry had grown up in.
“Nice,” Jack said. He didn’t really care where Holy Henry had grown up. But he made himself look, and consider, and it seemed the right place for Henry to have been raised. The house was a small two-story, dark-green, with a huge maple tree on its front lawn.
“Henry planted that tree when he was four years old,” Olive said. “He did.” She nodded. “He found this tiny sapling and he decided to stick it in the ground, and his mother—old horror—apparently helped him water it when it was tiny, and now there it is.”
“Very nice,” said Jack.
“You don’t care,” Olive said. “Well, never mind, let’s go.”
Jack made himself look around the little neighborhood, and he said, “I care, Olive. Where do you want to go now?”
And she said out to West Annett, where she had grown up, so he drove the car while she directed him, and they went along a narrow road, past many fields that were still oddly green for November, and the sun slanted across them with that horrifying gorgeousness. They drove and drove, and Olive told him about the one-room schoolhouse her mother had taught in, how her mother had had to come early to get the fire started in the winter, she told him about the Finnish woman who used to watch her—watch Olive—when Olive was too small to go to school, she told him about her Uncle George, who was a drunk and who had married a young wife and the young wife fell in love with a neighbor—“Right there, that house right there”—and then the neighbor, well, Olive didn’t know what went on with him, but the young wife had hanged herself at the bottom of her cellar stairs.
“Jesus,” Jack said.
“Yup,” said Olive. “I was scared to go down to that cellar when I was a kid, someone would send me down to get potatoes or something and, oh, I hated going down there.”
“God,” said Jack.
And then Olive said that her Uncle George had remarried, but ten years after his first wife died, he hanged himself in the same spot.
“My God,” Jack said.
* * *
—
So it was like that, they drove around many back roads and they talked. Jack talked about his own childhood, which he had already done, but seeing Olive’s childhood home made him think of his childhood home outside of Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, and he spoke of it again now, the sense of its smallness to him, even when he was young, though it was not as small as Olive’s house had been, but he had felt cramped, he said now. Olive listened, and said, “Ay-yuh.”
Then she said, “Would you look at that,” because Jack had turned a corner and before them was the November sinking sun against the darkening blue sky. Along the horizon was a spread of yellow. And the bare trees stuck their bare dark limbs into the sky. “That’s kind of amazing,” Jack said.
Up and down the car went, up one small hill and down another,