The Last Ride

He was up at five and had the kitchen stove going and the coffee on before there was any light in the windows at all, and Verna Kelleher did not come down.

She was awake. He knew she was awake because he could hear her, at intervals, up there in the room at the top of the stairs, the small deliberate sounds that a person makes who is lying in a bed with the light off and does not intend to sleep and does not intend to come down. She had said her piece on the Sunday night. She had done the sheet on the Monday morning, and everything for the girl's going had been done by her own hands as an administration, and on the Wednesday she lay in the dark and let the house do what it was going to do, and she never once, in twenty-five years, told anybody what she thought about that morning, and I asked her, and she said, "I was awake," and that was all I got.

Tessa Bright came down at twenty past six with her coat on and her two bags and her duffel, and she had put her hair up and she looked older than she had in November, and she stood in the kitchen doorway and looked at the room the way a person looks at a room they have already left, and then she said, in her ordinary voice:

"Where do you want the bags?"

"In the truck."

And at the door, with her hand on the jamb, she said, in exactly the same tone, not loudly, with her face turned away: "Should I say goodbye to her?"

"No," Wade Kelleher said.

And she nodded, once, and went out and down the steps in the dark, and that was the entire departure from the house, and there has never been anything in my possession about that house that has stayed with me longer than the fact that the two women who had lived in it together for four and a half months, one of whom had written to the other and asked her to come, did not say goodbye.

Then he did the thing I cannot account for and have never tried to explain to anybody, not to Olive Mosher, not to my wife, not to the man in the hardware store in Riggs Falls who tells the joke about it.

He went into the barn.

He went in with the shop light and he climbed onto the bench and he took the sled off its two nails and he carried it out on his shoulder, and there was no reason on earth for it. There was a mile and a quarter of hill between the top of the Hollow road and the turn, and every boy in the township coasted it, and the Ordway boys would have used the sled if he had given it to them, and that is what he told himself, standing in the barn at twenty-five past six in the morning with a wooden sled on his shoulder, and it was not true, and he knew it was not true while he was telling it to himself.

He put it in the bed of the truck under the tarp, on top of the bags, and Tessa Bright came round the back of the truck with the duffel and stood and looked at it for about two seconds, and did not say one word, and went round to the passenger door and got in, and that is the whole of what was said about the sled on the morning of the twenty-sixth of March.

I have asked myself why he did it, and I have four answers and I do not know which one is true, and I have decided to put all four of them down, because the county has only ever had one, which is that he meant to kill her from the first and had been planning it since the Sunday, and that one is a lie, and every one of the three people who was there would have told you it was a lie.

Two of the four are simple. The first is that the sled was the only thing in that barn he had ever been happy on, and that a man taking a last look at a place will sometimes take a thing with him. The second is that he could not drive her to the Junction and put her on a bus and come back alone, and had no notion what he meant to do instead, and that a man in that condition will pick up a tool without knowing what he wants it for.

The other two I have less right to. He wanted to be asked, and he would rather have had the sled under the tarp and been asked and said no than lie in bed at fifty and wonder whether she would have asked him. And he was twenty-seven years old and had loved her for four months and had done nothing about it, and there is an elm at the bottom of a mile and a quarter of hill that he had driven past since he was a boy; that is a fact about the road and not about his head, and he has told me himself that he did not think of it at all until the sled was on the ice.

Take whichever you like. I have taken all of them.

The road out of the Hollow comes up over the shoulder of the hill and joins Route 11 at the top, where the woodlot stands, and Route 11 goes down the north face of Barlow's Hill for a mile and a quarter to the turn, and they came to the top of it at twenty-five to seven.

It was not dark. That is the thing I want said exactly right, because the joke in the hardware store depends on its being dark and it was not dark. It was that particular graphite light that comes before the sun in the last week of March in the north country, when the snow has gone grey in the fields and the trees are black and there is nothing anywhere that has any color in it, and you can see everything and nothing is lit, and the road lay down the hill in front of them like a black pipe with the grey snow on either side, and at the bottom, a mile and a quarter away, where it turned hard right and the creek came close to it, the elm stood on the outside of the curve with its branches up.

Wade Kelleher stopped the truck at the top.

He has never told me why he stopped. He has told me that he stopped, and that he put it in first and set the brake and got out, and that he heard himself say the thing he said before he had decided to say it.

Tessa Bright got out on her side and stood by the truck with her hands in her pockets and looked down the hill.

"You said not in the dark," she said.

It was the same voice she had used in the barn in February. Not a clever girl's voice and not a coquette's voice; the voice of a person who has had almost nothing and has just been offered a thing that costs nothing, and who is nineteen, and who is leaving on the seven-ten.

Wade Kelleher said, "It's not dark now."

And she said, "No. It isn't."

He got the sled out from under the tarp and set it down on the crown of the road, and the runners bit, and the whole thing stood there on the ice like something that had been waiting for the two of them since the year his father was a boy.

She sat down on it first, with her two hands on the sides where he had told her in the barn, and he got on behind her and put his feet up on the bar and his hands on the deck on either side of her hips, and there was a moment when neither of them said anything and the truck ticked behind them in the cold, and then he pushed off with his boot.

They went down.

The road goes under you in a stream and the fences come at you and go by, and after the first eight hundred yards the grade steepens and you go through the dark under the trees with the branches coming over and the cold at the ends of your fingers, and a man does not think one thought. Wade Kelleher described it to me once, at the end of the winter, in eleven or twelve sentences, and he was smiling while he did it, and it was the only time in five months I ever saw him smile.

They fetched up at the bottom, short of the turn, and everything stopped, and the two of them sat on the sled on the crown of the road in the middle of the valley and did not get up for a while, and the sound of their own breathing was enormous.

Then Tessa Bright laughed, out loud, the way she had laughed on the ice at the foot of the hill in January, and it went up the valley in the grey light and came back off the side of the woodlot, and she stood up off the sled and turned round and looked up the mile and a quarter of hill she had just come down, and then she looked at the elm at the turn, thirty yards beyond where the sled had stopped, with its branches up, and then she looked at Wade Kelleher.

"It is five minutes past seven," he said, or did not say it, and it does not matter which, because neither of them looked at a clock and neither of them mentioned the Junction, and the Junction was eleven miles away and the bus left it at ten past. So they stood there in the road in the grey light with the sled between them, and then she said: "Let's go up and do it again."