The Call

For the rest of June and all of July I ran the school, and in the evenings I did my own arithmetic. I put a number on a piece of paper and the number was sixty thousand dollars, which was what the church board wanted for the schoolhouse and the two acres. I had a lawyer draw the offer up and send it, and the board met twice and voted, and the paper sat on a table in the church office all summer, and in September they voted again and said no, which is a thing I have never been able to make into a grievance, because a church that has held that building since 1929 has a right to hold it.

In the second week of October, on a Tuesday, Silas came up to the house. He had never done that. Dee was on nights and Marian was at the clinic, and he sat down in the chair by the window with his hat on his knee and said he had taken the posting and would leave in three weeks, and that the offer he had made me in March stood, and that he had not come to ask again, only to say it once more.

Then the phone rang.

It was the old black phone on the wall by the pantry, and the answering machine beside it picked up on the fourth ring because nobody got up. The machine clicked. There were three seconds of nothing on the tape. Then a man’s voice said one word, which was my name, and then there was a click and then the dial tone. I knew the voice. There was only one man who said my name that way, flat and from a distance, as if he were reading it off a list, and I knew there was only one place he could be.

I have thought about that word for twelve years. There was no number on the machine, and the phone company said the same thing the machine said, which was nothing. Dee said wrong number. Marian said people call this house by mistake all the time, which is true and answers nothing. I played the tape three times, standing under the pantry light with a spoon in my hand. On the third time I turned the machine off, and Silas said something about the posting, and I said I had to go.

I did not let myself say where I was going when I went to bed that night. In the morning I put three days of clothes in a bag, left the schoolhouse key on the kitchen table with a note that said the older children could have the chart, and drove east.

I had bought a truck in July for nine thousand four hundred dollars, and it was the first thing I ever paid for with money that came to me and not out of my work, which was the difference between the woman who got on the bus in January and the woman who was driving. The road east goes up out of the valley and into the Finger Lakes, and it was the third week of October, the trees past color, the air with the cold in it that comes off water.

Twenty miles out of the county I smelled smoke and thought somebody was burning brush. I smelled it again at the next town and the next, and by then I knew it was brush, and it made no difference at all: I drove the last hour with the window down an inch, the way a person does when they are trying to place a tune.

Coldbrook had been forty acres and a house and a lawn that a man mowed twice a month. What was there in October was the front of the house standing, the whole middle gone, and the north wing down into its own cellar, and a chain across the drive, and a state fire marshal’s notice on a post, rained on for nine months to the color of weak tea.

The wing burned on the twenty-second of January, nine days after I got on the bus. Sabine Mercier died in it. Bernice Grady came out the front with a burn along one arm and gave a statement, four sentences long, of which I have only ever been able to keep the first: “Miss Mercier was not supposed to have matches, and I have said so in this house for five years.” You will want to know whether it was his fault. He went in through the north door after the roof came down and came out with a fireman holding his shoulder, and there was an inquiry, and lawyers came up from Miami, and nobody was charged with anything. That is all I will say about it.

Bea Truitt was still on the property, in the gatehouse by the road, sixty-four years old and the same hands. She came out onto the porch when I stopped the truck and stood and looked at me for a while and said, “He is up at Ninebark. He will not come down. You should know before you go up that he cannot see you.”

I walked up through the orchard because the lane was washed out. The apple trees were still there, and the black cherry was still split down the middle from the lightning and still had fruit on it, and I put my hand on the fruit and left it there.

Otto got up off the step. He was thirteen by then, deaf in one ear, and his hips were gone. Adrian came to the door and stood in the frame and did not say anything for a while. The right side of his face was scar from the brow down past the jaw and his right hand was a lump with fingers in it, and his eyes went over me and stopped short and went past, and then he said, “You took the bus.” “Three dollars,” I said. “And I lost the bag on the way.” He asked whether Mila had learned her eights. I said she had. He asked whether I had eaten anything since the county line. I said I had not, and he turned and went inside and put a pot on the stove, and that is the whole of how it went, and I have never been able to make it sound like anything else.

There was a hook on the inside of that door. I noticed it the way I notice things, and I said nothing about it, then or ever.

We were married eleven days later in the town clerk’s office, at ten in the morning, with Bea behind us and Dee Vaughn, who drove four hours with a pot of soup in the back seat, and Otto in the truck outside. I wore the navy dress I had bought in Welden for Vera’s funeral. It took four minutes.

That winter I found out what I had married into the way a person finds out the parts of an old house, one at a time. Adrian could not read. He could see light, and the shape of a door, and a person at four feet, and nothing on paper. He sold the survey work to a man in Buffalo. For the first four months he paid me the wage he had paid me as a tutor, because I asked him to, and it is in the ledger with his name at the top of the page, and I will not be explaining that to anybody.

In 2015 a surgeon in Buffalo took a cornea from a donor of about forty and sewed it into his left eye, and he got back a band of vision about the width of a hand. He can see the lake when the light is on the water, and Sam at the end of the dock. He cannot read. In August the lake is cold three feet down and Sam swims anyway and Tess will not go past her knees and stands on the sand and yells at the water. He asked me once, on the road in the fog in May, whether I could swim, and did not explain the question, and I have understood it since, and it was not about the water.

Sam was born in the spring of the third year. Tess was born six years later, and she is named for a girl at Ellerslie who died at thirteen and told me once that not everything unfair is worth hitting back on the day you notice it. I have not explained the name to Sam. I will when he is older and can hold two things at once.

Mila is twenty-two and works on the water with a survey crew out of a town two hours east, and she calls me by my first name, which was her idea. Bea is in the gatehouse still, and this fall she canned forty quarts of tomatoes and gave us nineteen. Silas died three years ago in September, out west, on an evacuation road ahead of a fire, driving a van with six people in it. Five of them lived. Marian called and told me in one sentence, because that is how that family does things. He never married. The school board named the building for him two years ago. Bram Pell died in 2019 in a rented room in Cheektowaga, and Kate paid for the funeral, and she wrote me one line about it, which is the last thing Kate has written to me.

That is the account, and the numbers are where the truth is kept and the rest is weather.

There is a window in the Ninebark cottage that I clean every morning whether it needs it or not, and this winter it needs it constantly, because the lake throws its weather uphill and the weather arrives as ice. This morning the glass came clear in two strokes inside and one long scrape outside, and through it there was the shore and the gray water and the snow coming across it in a line, and the black cherry down the slope.

Sam is at the table doing arithmetic and getting some of it wrong. Tess is asleep and will be up at six, which is her hour and not mine. Adrian is down the hall asleep with an old dog that can no longer climb the stairs, and in a little while I will stand at the foot of the bed until he wakes and sees the shape of me, which is how we have started the day for twelve years.

I close the notebook and put it back between the salt tin and the jar of pens that half work, and I go and clean the window, which will need it again by dark.