The Elm

They walked back up the hill.

It is a mile and a quarter from the turn at the bottom of Barlow's Hill to the woodlot at the top, and it is uphill the whole way and the road was black ice, and it took them twenty-five minutes, and they took the sled up with them between them, one of them on each side. It was the last conversation the two of them ever had, and it took place at a walking pace in the dark and in the cold on the shoulder of a hill in northern New York at ten minutes past seven in the morning on the twenty-sixth of March. I have put it together from the ten or eleven fragments he gave me and from the few sentences she gave me once, in the back room, when the nurse was out and Verna was asleep.

She started it.

"Tell me what's down there."

"Plattsburgh."

"That's a place. Tell me what's in it."

"A motel that'll take you back for the season, and your aunt in the north end, and the bus."

"And then what."

"And then you get on with it."

She was quiet for about twenty yards of ice, and he was watching his feet.

"She's going to write to my aunt," Tessa said. "She'll write her a letter and she'll tell her about the front room and she won't say one word that isn't true, and my aunt will keep the letter in a drawer the way she keeps everything, and I'll be in that house in the north end of Plattsburgh where I've been before, and I'll know that everybody in it has read the letter. That's what's down there. I thought you should hear it said out loud at least once."

He did not say anything.

"I'm not asking you to fix it," she said. "I'm not asking you for anything. I want that on the record. You didn't do one thing wrong to me in four months and you're not going to do one thing wrong to me now. I just want to say the true thing once, because there's nobody in this world I can say a true thing to, and there's going to be nobody for the rest of my life, and the true thing is: I worked in that house for four months and I have never once been so happy, not one day, not in my whole life, and I know exactly what it was and I'm not a fool, and I know I'm nineteen and I know I'll be all right by June, and I don't want to be all right by June. There. That's all of it. That's the whole thing."

And then, at the top of the hill, standing in the road with the sled between them and the truck twenty feet away and the first of the light coming up behind the woodlot so that the tops of the trees had begun to come out of the dark, she said:

"Aim at the elm."

Wade Kelleher said, "You'd be killed."

"Yes," said Tessa Bright.

"There'd be no — "

"I know."

He stood there with his hand on the sled. He has told me what was in his head and it does not matter and I am not going to make it bigger than it was, because the truth of that moment, as far as I have been able to get at it in twenty-five years of asking a man in a chair by a stove who has very little to say, is that there was nothing in his head at all. It was not a plan and it was not a pact. It was seven o'clock in the morning and the light was coming and the bus was at the Junction at ten past seven and two people who had nothing had got to the top of a hill, and the road went down, and one of them had said what she had said, and neither of them was going to be the one to say the other thing, and so the other thing got said by the road.

He got on the sled and she got on in front of him.

He said, "Put your head down."

She said, "All right."

He pushed off with his boot.

The first time down they had gone like a thing falling. The second time they went the same way and it was not the same at all, and this is the part that nobody in that county has ever wanted to hear, and it is the reason I am writing this down.

A road like that will not hold a decision. It takes the decision off a man about two hundred yards in. There is nothing but the runners and the cold and the white going past and the grade, and at eight hundred yards the trees come over and he goes into the dark, and the whole of a man's animal body, which has been looking out for him since he was born, stands up and starts screaming, and the argument he had with himself at the top of the hill is not in the same world as the thing that is holding the deck of a wooden sled at twenty-five miles an hour on black ice at seven o'clock in the morning.

I have asked him what he saw. He said he saw the elm.

That is all I ever got out of him: two sentences, in the kitchen, in the second week of April, with the tray of pills between us on the oilcloth. I asked him what he saw, and he said, "I saw the elm." And then, after about ten seconds, he said, "It was in the light," and then he did not say anything else for the rest of the evening and I did not ask him again.

What I have concluded, and what I set down as a conclusion and not as a fact, is this: that at the very last, with the turn and the tree about twenty yards out, the girl in front of him turned her head and looked back at his face. I do not know that. Nobody knows that. What matters is what happened next, and what happened next is that one of the two of them moved.

He swung the sled.

He put his boot down into the ice and hauled the bar over — that is the one thing he has told me about that second, and the arm has been no good to anybody since — and he turned the sled out of the run of the hill, and the sled came broadside to the turn, and the elm, which is a tree and does not care, took them a blow on the left quarter that was not a head-on blow and was not a glancing blow but something between the two, and the two of them left the sled and the sled went on into the ditch, and Wade Kelleher came down on the ice on his left side with his arm under him and his leg folded under that, and Tessa Bright came down on her back on the shoulder with her head about three feet from the root of the tree.

And the tree that was going to kill them did not kill them because it was struck at an angle, and that fact has cost me more hours of sleep than anything else in this account, and it is the fact the whole county has built its joke on.

He did not mean to live. I want to be exact about that, because the county has it that he lost his nerve at the end, and losing your nerve is a coward's thing, and this was not that. He changed his mind, in less than a second, without one word, and he changed it for her and not for himself. If he could have done it the other way, if he could have put the sled into that elm and died and left her dead beside him, he would have called it afterwards the kind thing; and I am the only person left who was in that county to argue it, and I say no. Not in that county. Not anywhere.

They were found at twenty past seven by the man who drove the milk truck out of Riggs Falls, who had come up the hill in second and had seen something lying in the road in the grey and had thought it was a deer and had not wanted to stop, and had stopped.

Tessa Bright was conscious and could not move her legs and said nothing at all in the eleven miles to the hospital in Malone, and she has a voice like a door and I have heard her use it, and she did not use it in the ambulance. Wade Kelleher walked to the truck with the milk man's arm and did not look at the sled in the ditch, and the two of them rode in the cab together, and neither of them said one word about the hill, and the ambulance was fifteen minutes behind them the whole way and they did not know it.

Two vertebrae. That is what she has, in her back, in the middle, where the parts of a person that go to the legs come out of it.

They got him to the hospital in Malone with a shattered left elbow, a left shoulder out of the joint, four ribs, and a break in his left leg at the hip socket that was not set right, and it was set by a surgeon who was tired, and it has been set that way for twenty-five years, and it is the reason he stands in the middle of the road with his hat in his hand on the off chance that standing is easier somewhere else.

Neither of them was dead. That is the end of the hill, and that is the whole of it, and it is what Merle Fisk meant in the hardware store in Riggs Falls in December when he said to a stranger with a clipboard that it might have been better if they had died, and I did not understand him then, and I understood him in April, and I have understood him ever since.