The Ruin

The first time I saw Wade Kelleher he was standing in the middle of the road at the bottom of Barlow Hill with his hat in his hand, as if he had been waiting there for a bus that had stopped running years ago.

It was early December, and I had been in the county nine days. I am a structural engineer; the state had hired my firm to say what ought to be done about the old mill dam at Ashcroft Mills, and about the iron bridge on Chandler Road that had been posted at six tons for as long as anyone could remember. The dam was sound, as it turned out. The bridge was not. Neither fact interested anyone but me.

That morning I had driven north from Malone to look at a culvert, and coming back I took the long way, the road that runs along the creek and then climbs, for a quarter of a mile, up the shoulder of the hill the locals call Barlow's. At the top there is a stand of old hardwoods, and at the bottom, where the road turns and the creek comes close to it, there is a single elm of a size that does not exist anymore in that part of the country.

The snow had stopped the night before and the plows had not been through. The road was a white trough between two walls of white, and I came down it in second gear with the heater on and the radio giving me nothing but static and a country station out of Potsdam that kept fading. Then the trough opened, and there he was.

He was a very tall man, and thin in a way that made his coat hang off him like something on a nail. His left arm was bent against his side and did not seem to be doing any work, and he stood with his weight all on one leg and his hip pushed out to take the strain, the way a man stands who has learned that standing is a thing you have to plan. His hat was off, held against his chest in his good hand. He had gray in his hair and gray in the stubble on his jaw, and the lines in his face had set in the way lines do when they are made by one thing repeating. I put him at sixty-five. I found out later he was fifty-two.

He looked at my truck as if he had never seen a truck before, and then he looked at me, and then he put his hat back on and started up the road toward me, and I stopped — there was nothing else to do; the road was one lane wide there — and he came up alongside the window and bent down, and I saw that bending was also a thing he had to plan.

"Chandler Road's closed past the creek," he said. "Culvert's washing out under the fill."

"I know it," I said. "I was just at it."

He nodded, and straightened, and stood there. He did not ask me who I was, though everyone in that county asks everyone who they are, and by then I knew enough to notice the omission. He looked past me up the hill, at the elm, at the place where the road turned. Then he said, "You want to back up to the top and take the Hollow road. It'll add you four miles."

"I'd rather not back up four miles of hill."

"Suit yourself," he said, and stepped back, and I drove on down through the turn and past the elm, and in the mirror I watched him standing in the road, not moving, hat in hand again, as if the conversation had been a thing he had been obliged to get through and it was over now and he had gone back to whatever it was he had been doing, which appeared to be nothing at all.

That was the first time. I have thought about it a great deal since, because everything that came after it was in it, if I had known how to read.

I asked about him that afternoon, at the farm-supply place in Riggs Falls where I had gone to buy a pair of gloves that fit. The man behind the counter was a boy of about twenty who was not interested in me, and so I asked the woman at the register, and she said, "That'd be Wade Kelleher," in a tone that closed the subject, and then, because she was a country woman and could not leave a stranger standing in an unclear silence, she added, "He's on the Hollow road. Up past the old Haskins place."

"What happened to his arm?"

She looked at me with the flat patience of a person who has answered that question in that tone before. "The smash-up," she said.

"The what?"

"Twenty-five years ago," she said. "Him and the girl. You'll hear about it." And she gave me my change, which is how I learned that in that county a thing can be simultaneously the most famous thing that ever happened and a thing that nobody proposes to be the first to tell you.

I heard it first from Merle Fisk, who sold me the gloves after all and threw in a tube of hand salve I hadn't asked for because, he said, no man should be out in that weather with hands like mine.

Merle Fisk was seventy-eight and had driven the school bus in that district for forty-one years, from the year they finally paved the Hollow road to the year they cut the route in half for lack of children. He had carried, in the course of that career, every person under sixty in three townships, at least twice a day, and he regarded this as a professional qualification for knowing everything about all of them. He was not wrong. In a place where nothing happens, a man who has driven the children of the place to school for forty-one years is a kind of archive.

"Kelleher," he said. "You saw him up to the hill?"

"He was standing in the road."

"He does that," Merle said. "He'll stand in the road. Not much else to do." He rang up the gloves and put them in a paper bag, and then he did not hand me the bag. He held it, and looked at the register, and I understood that I had been granted an audience and that it would be a mistake to seem in a hurry.

"He was a bright boy," Merle said. "That's the thing people forget. He had the best part of two years at the ag school in Utica — engineering, that was — and he was the one they sent for when anything broke. That's a thing you might not guess, to look at him now. He could take a pump apart and tell you what was wrong with it by the sound." He handed me the bag. "Then his father died and his mother took sick and he came home, and that was that."

"That was what?"

"That was the end of the bright boy," Merle said. "She wasn't sick the ordinary way. She went quiet. She'd sit all day in the chair by the stove and not say a word, and he'd sit with her, because you can't leave a person like that, and after a while you can't remember what you did with yourself before you started sitting." He looked at me over his glasses. "You want to understand Wade Kelleher, that's the first thing. He sat with his mother for three years and did not go anywhere, and when she died he married the first woman who came into the house and stopped the silence. You know how that goes."

"I can guess."

"You can't," Merle Fisk said, without unkindness. "Nobody guesses that. That's the trouble with everything that ever happened up here. Nobody guesses it, so it goes on and on and everybody knows it and nobody says it."

I asked him, then, about the arm.

He was quiet for a moment. The store was warm and smelled of rubber and seed corn, and outside the light was going the way it goes in that country at four o'clock in December, not fading but draining, as if somebody had pulled a plug.

"Him and the girl," Merle said, "came down Barlow's Hill in the dark on a sled."

"On a sled."

"On a sled," he repeated, in exactly the same tone. "The road was pure ice that night. They'd been over to the station at Ashcroft Junction, and they came back up the Hollow road and stopped at the top of Barlow's, and — " He stopped, and started again. "They stopped at the top of the hill, and then they went down it. On the sled. And they hit the elm. You've seen the elm."

"I've seen it."

"Two people don't walk away from that tree," Merle Fisk said. "And those two didn't. But they didn't die, either, and that's the part you'll want to think about, if you're going to think about it at all. It might have been better if they had." He put both hands flat on the counter. "She broke her back. She's in that house now, up the Hollow road, sitting in a chair by a stove. And he broke this and that, and the arm never came right, and neither did he."

"She's in the house?"

"That's what I said."

"You mean — she's living with him? With him and his wife?"

Merle Fisk looked at me for a long moment with the mild, terrible patience of the old. "The wife's the one takes care of them both," he said. "Both of them. Twenty-five years now. There's the three of them up there in that house and there's been the three of them longer than you'd believe, and nobody in this county has worked out yet whether it's a punishment or a mercy, and I'll tell you something, son, I've stopped working on it."

He came around the counter and walked me to the door, and stood in the doorway looking at the sky, which had gone the color of a nickel.

"You'll be wanting to get back before it starts again," he said. "It's going to start again."

It started again that night. It did not stop for two days.