The Road at Dusk

Bea kept the household mail on a table in the hall, and the outgoing went in the box at the end of the drive, except when it did not. On the eleventh of May there was a letter from me to the county about my teaching certificate, and Bea said the box on the road had been knocked off its post in the winter and never set again, and that the nearest collection was at the store at the four corners, and that it was a mile and a half and I should take the flashlight.

I went at dusk, because that is when I had the hour. I took the letter and the flashlight and I did not take the dog, and I have thought about that a hundred times since, in the way you think about a door you did or did not shut.

There was fog on the lake road that evening. Not a wall of it. The kind that comes up off the water in bands at the end of a warm day, so that you walk through nine feet of clear air and then forty feet of gray and then clear again, and the limestone on the left sweats in it and the rail on the right drips.

I heard the engine before I saw anything. It was running high and uneven, and it was on the wrong side of the sound, which is to say it was coming from below the road and not from the road, and that is a thing your body knows before your mind does.

The car was off the shoulder on the lake side and down the bank about six feet, nose first, hung up on a black cherry stump that had kept it from going the rest of the way to the water. The rear wheels were out of the ground and still turning, and the driver’s door was open, and there was a man sitting on the ground fourteen feet uphill of the car with his back against a rail post and his legs out in front of him.

He was in his late thirties and dark, in a canvas jacket that was wet through, and there was blood coming off the knuckles of his right hand and going down into his cuff, and he had the other hand flat on his own knee as if he were keeping something in place. He had the look of a man who has already decided that this is a waste of his time.

There was a dog sitting next to him, which I knew before I got close, because Otto does not get up for cars and does get up for this, and it was Otto, wet and gray and turned sideways, watching the road.

I said, “Is anything broken.”

He looked at me the way Bea looks at a lathe, which is the house style, and then he said, “The car is.”

That was the first thing Adrian Voss ever said to me, and I have kept it exactly, and I have never been able to decide whether it was contempt or the shortest accurate sentence available, and after twelve years I am fairly sure it was the second one.

I asked whether he wanted me to call. He said the phone was in the car and the car was in a stump. He said it the way a man reads a balance sheet out loud.

So I did the thing the situation allowed, and I want to write down that it was not brave and it was not clever. I went down the bank on my heels and got the phone out of the car through the open door, and the car moved when I did it, four or five inches, and the wheels kept turning, and the water below was the color of a nickel and I did not have time to think about it, because there was a man on the bank with blood on his hand.

I called the tow from the store at the four corners, and the man there knew the address before I finished giving it, which is a small town fact. Then I went back up the bank and put a hand on Otto’s head and said the tow was coming in forty minutes, and I stood there in the fog with a stranger and a dog and a letter in my coat.

He asked me, without any preface, who I was.

I said I was the teacher. He asked how long. I said a month and a week. He asked what Mila had.

I understood then that this was the man Bea talked about in the way she talked about him, which was not at all, and I answered the question that was actually asked, which was not a question about Mila. It was a question about me. I said: French, four afternoons a week, out of a book she does not like. Arithmetic every morning, and she is two years ahead in it and one year behind in the reading. She writes a page a day. She has a list of twenty words on the back of the kitchen door that she has been spelling wrong for eleven months, and she will not take them off, because she says they are her words.

He listened to that with his eyes closed, which I took for rudeness and later understood to be a man who had been awake for thirty hours.

Then he said, “Read it to me.”

I did not know what he meant, and I said so, and he said, “The schedule. You have it. Bea said you keep it in your coat.”

I had it in my coat. I took out the page and sat on the rail post four feet from him and read the whole week out loud, Monday through Saturday, including the two afternoons of nothing, and he did not interrupt.

When I finished he said, “The twenty words on the door. Which ones.”

I told him. He wrote nothing down. He asked one more question, which was whether Mila knew the French was a game or a lesson, and when I said I had never asked her, he closed the notebook and said the tow was coming, and I could not see what he had been testing, and it was the only thing he asked all evening that was not about me.

The tow came at 8:20 and took the car up the bank with a winch that squealed, and the man from the store drove him and the dog up to the house in his truck, and I walked behind. It was a mile and a half, and on the walk I understood that I had just been interviewed and had not known it while it was happening, and that the answer I had given him was a schedule.

By the time I got to the porch the three of them were in the hall and Bea was taking his jacket and saying nothing at all about the hand.

He was in the study for two hours. At ten Mila was asleep, and Bea had gone to her rooms, and I was in the hall with a lamp because I had lessons to set, and he came out and stood in the door and asked me one more thing.

“Can you swim.”

I said yes. I had learned at Ellerslie, in the lake at the camp down the road, twenty minutes twice a summer for eight years, which is a fact I did not offer.

He did not explain the question and I did not ask him to, which was the second time that evening I kept my mouth shut, and the first time I understood that keeping my mouth shut in this house was going to be a kind of work.

He looked at me for a second and said, “Good.” Then he said, “Bea will be up at six,” and he went out to the driveway where the truck was waiting, and the headlights went down the drive and turned along the water and through the trees, and the fog took the light the way it takes light, in two long yellow streaks that slid across the wet limestone and then were not there.

I stood on the porch with the lamp until I could not hear it. Then I went in and locked a door that nobody had asked me to lock, and read the last line of the week’s schedule twice, to see whether I had said anything in it that was not mine to say.