Board and Lodging

The storm came in the night with the particular violence that a storm has when it has crossed three hundred miles of nothing to get to you, and by morning Route 11 was closed at both ends and the county had put out a notice on the radio that anyone without a reason to be out should stay in.

I had a room at a motel in Malone that was being renovated, and by the second day the renovation had reached my floor and the manager had reached the end of his patience. I could have called the state office. What I did instead was what you do in that country, which is to stand in the doorway of the hardware store in Riggs Falls for an hour and wait for somebody to take an interest in you.

The somebody was Dean Mosher, who was thirty-four and built like a man who had spent his life lifting things, and who was the county's road foreman and the son of Arthur Mosher, whose farm the road passed. Dean had taken me out to the dam the week before in his own truck when the county truck threw a belt, and had made it clear that he considered my firm, and my clipboard, and the whole business of reporting on a bridge that everybody could see was falling down to be a species of weather that had to be endured.

"You're still here," he observed.

"I'm still here."

"The motel's a mess. They're doing the second floor."

"They've reached mine."

Dean Mosher looked out at the road, which was a white scar between two white banks and would be, he said, for three days at least. Then he looked at me and did the arithmetic a country person does.

"Cost you a fortune," he said, meaning the motel.

"It would."

"There's the Kellehers," he said, and did not sound as though he were recommending anything. "Up the Hollow road. They take a boarder in the winter sometimes, when there's money in it. Which there isn't much of, so they will." He put his hands in his pockets. "It's not the Ritz. It's cold, and she is — " he stopped and picked a different word — "particular. But it's warm in the kitchen and it's cheap and it's five minutes from where you're working."

"Is there a reason you're hesitating?"

Dean Mosher looked at me for a moment. "No," he said, which in that county means yes, and he wrote the directions on the back of a receipt.

The Kelleher place stood on a slope above the road, with the barn below it and the house above, so that from the road you saw the house standing on the barn's shoulders. It had been a good farm once. You could tell it from the proportions of things: the barn was too big for what was in it, the doorway too wide for the door, the porch rail something a man had made on a Sunday when he still had time to make things well. Now there was a sheet of plywood over one upstairs window and a blue tarp on the far corner of the barn roof that had been there long enough to have gone pale, and the driveway was two ruts in the snow with a stripe of unplowed white between them, which told me that whoever plowed it did it by driving back and forth and not with a blade.

A man came out onto the porch as I came up the path. He was wearing the same coat. He looked at my truck, and then at me, and then at the bag on the seat, and I saw that he had understood the whole of it at once, and had already worked out what he thought about it, and had decided not to say.

"Dean Mosher said you might have a room," I said.

"He did," said Wade Kelleher. And then, because he was a country man and could not leave me standing in the cold, he said, "Come in," and stood aside.

The inside of the house was smaller than the outside, which is a thing you notice in old farmhouses and never get used to. There was a kitchen with a woodstove going and a table with oilcloth on it and a calendar from the feed store with the same picture it had had for three years; and beyond the kitchen, through a doorway, a front room into which the stove's heat did not seem willing to travel, where the good furniture stood in the dark under sheets, and where a clock on the wall was not running.

At the table sat a woman of about sixty with her hair pulled back too tight and a cardigan buttoned to the throat, and in front of her a plastic tray of pills, sorted by the day.

"You'd be the engineer," she said.

"I would."

"Dean said you'd be wanting a room." She looked me over, unhurried, the way a woman looks over a man who is about to be in her house. "Sixty a week, and you eat with us, and I don't do your laundry — I'm not able. The bathroom's at the top of the stairs and the water takes a while."

"That's fine."

"My name's Verna Kelleher." She did not offer her hand. "You'll want to know what's wrong with me, so I'll tell you and then we won't discuss it. My thyroid, my nerves, and my back, and I've been on the pills six years, and the specialist in Malone says what he always says. He's a fraud. That's the end of that."

"I'm not a doctor."

"No," Verna Kelleher agreed, in a way that suggested she had considered the possibility and rejected it. She took a pill and swallowed it with a little water and looked at the stove.

And then, from the back of the house, down the passage past the kitchen, a woman's voice said:

"Verna. Verna. It's cold in here."

It was not a loud voice. It was a voice with a great deal of practice in being heard without being raised, and it had that particular flat querulousness that comes of asking a question to which the answer has never once been satisfactory.

"I'll bring the fire up," Verna Kelleher said, without turning her head.

"You said that before," said the voice.

"I'll bring it up," Verna said again, in exactly the same tone, and got out of her chair, and went down the passage, and I heard a door and then, after a while, the sound of a stove being fed with wood, and then the door again, and Verna came back and sat down and looked at the tray of pills as if she had never seen it before.

Nobody explained anything. Nobody said a name. It was done so smoothly, so without seam, that it was a minute before I understood what I had just heard, and by then the moment in which a stranger may decently ask had gone by.

Wade Kelleher carried my bag up the stairs and set it down in a small room with a bed and a dresser and a window that looked out over the barn and the white fields falling away north, and he did it entirely with his right arm, holding the bag against his hip with the left, and he did not let me take it from him, and he did not say a word the whole time. At the door he stopped.

"You'll want to know about the house," he said. "There's no call to know about the house."

"I'm only here for the winter," I said.

He looked at me then with a directness that had nothing in it of the man standing in the road with his hat in his hand. "That's what everybody says," he said, and went down the stairs, and his step on the stairs went one — two, one — two, and I lay in the dark in a strange house in a strange county and listened to a woodstove being fed, and to the wind finding the tarp on the far corner of the barn, and to the voice at the back of the house saying, twice, in the dark, that it was cold.

At breakfast there were two of us at the table, Verna and me.

I had come down at seven and found Verna at the stove and Wade already gone, and we ate without speaking, and then Verna took a tray, and I heard her go down the passage. Through the two doorways, down the length of the house, I could see a slice of the back room, and the chair in it, and the corner of a window with the light coming through, and a woman sitting in the chair with a blanket over her legs and a hand on each arm of the chair.

She was small. She had gray in her hair, and the hair had been the color of the kitchen table once, and her face had gone thin and sharp, and the sharpness of it was the sharpness of pain rather than of character. But the hand on the arm of the chair was a young hand, and the way she had turned her head when the door opened was a young way of turning, and she had looked down the length of the house, past Verna, at me, and had seen a stranger, and her face had done the thing that faces do when they have forgotten how to be seen: it had gone suddenly open, like a room when the door blows in.

Then Verna had said something to her in a low voice and set the tray down, and the face had closed.

That was Tessa Bright. She was forty-four years old, and she had been in that chair, or one like it, for twenty-five years.

We ate, the two of us, at the oilcloth table, and in the course of twenty minutes nobody said one word to anybody that was not a fact about the weather, or the food, or the state of the road. It was the most complete silence I had ever sat in. It was not the silence of people with nothing to say. It had a shape to it, and the shape had been made over a long time, and each of us was sitting in his own particular groove of it, and we all knew the grooves, including me, who had been in the house for twelve hours.