What Olive Mosher Told Me

The work went on. Every morning I walked down the ruts to the road and drove to Ashcroft Mills, where the old dam sat in the creek with the mill beside it, roofless now, its windows boarded and its wheel gone, and where I spent the short days measuring cracks and tapping concrete with a hammer. The dam was, as I have said, sound. The problem was the spillway, and nobody had put a dollar into it since 1974, and the state wanted a number, and the number was going to be large.

I fell into the rhythm of the place faster than I expected. That is the thing about a hard winter in a poor county: it makes a routine out of you whether you have one or not. I was up at six, at the mill by eight, back at five, and at five-thirty I sat at the oilcloth table with two people who did not talk, and at nine I went up to a cold room and read until my eyes hurt.

You learn things in a house like that. You learn that Verna Kelleher took her pills at seven and ten and two and seven again, and that the two o'clock ones made her sleep, and that the hours between two and four belonged to nobody and were consequently the only hours in which Tessa Bright had a face. You learn that Wade Kelleher left the house before daylight and came back after dark and that the hours in between were spent somewhere — I found out where later — and that when he did come in he sat down at the table in his coat and did not take it off until he was told to eat. You learn that the word "she" in that house could mean either of two women and that everybody, including me, had learned to hear which one from the tone.

And you learn that a house can hold two people who have not touched each other in twenty-five years and three who have not said an unnecessary word in three, and that this arrangement is not peaceful and not violent, but a third thing for which I do not have a name, and which I began, after a week, to find almost unbearable, without being able to say why, since nothing whatever was happening.

It was Dean Mosher who sent me up to his father's place.

The Mosher farm was south of the Hollow, four hundred acres of good bottomland along the creek, the only farm in that part of the county that still made money, because Arthur Mosher had put in a herd of beef cattle when everybody else was putting in Holsteins, and had been right. He was seventy-one and still did the morning feeding himself. He had asked Dean to ask me to come and look at the tie beams in his barn, which had sagged, he said, since the wet summer, and which he wanted a professional opinion on and would not pay for, and intended to argue about.

I went on a Sunday afternoon in January. The snow had been down a month and the light was that flat white light that makes everything look like a photograph of itself. Olive Mosher met me at the door before I had got out of the truck.

She was sixty-eight and small and quick and had the same quality her son had of looking at you and doing the arithmetic, except that where Dean's arithmetic was about cost, hers was about need. She took my coat and hung it on a hook over the furnace register and sat me down at a table with a plate of something before I had said one word about tie beams or beams of any kind, and she sat down opposite me and put her hands flat on the table and said:

"So you're up at the Kellehers'."

"I am."

"And how's she treating you?"

I understood that she meant Verna, and I said that Verna was treating me exactly as advertised.

Olive Mosher nodded slowly, twice, as if I had passed something. Then she said, "Verna was a different girl," and stopped, and looked out the window at the barn, and I understood that I had come to the Mosher farm for the tie beams and was going to leave with the other thing.

"How different?"

"Oh, she had a laugh on her you could hear down the road," Olive said. "She was smart, too. She went and got her certificate at the community college over to Canton and worked three years at the nursing home in Malone, evenings, and she was good at it. Everybody said so. She was one of those ones who can be with a sick person without getting tired of them, which is rarer than you'd think." She paused. "Some people are only good at being with sick people, though. If you follow me."

I said that I followed her.

"Her people were from down the creek. Verna and Tessa's mother were first cousins, which makes the girl up at the house — Tessa — Verna's cousin's daughter and nothing closer. The mother died when Tessa was nine and the father was no account and went off to Syracuse, and there was nobody, and Verna took her in for a year when the girl was twelve, and then there was a fight about something nobody will tell me, and the girl went to an aunt in Plattsburgh, and that was that, except that it wasn't."

"When did she come back?"

"Same year as the smash-up," Olive Mosher said. "That's the thing everybody gets wrong. The girl came in the November and the smash-up was in the March, and if you ask anybody in this county about it they'll tell it to you the other way around, as if she came in to help afterwards, and it was never that. She came first. She came because Verna was sick and they had no money and Wade was trying to work the farm and the mill and it was killing him, and the girl was nineteen and had nothing, and Verna wrote to her, and she came." She looked at me. "That's the part nobody says. Verna asked her to come. You remember that."

The kettle went and she got up and made tea and put it down in front of me and sat again.

"She was a good girl," she said. "That's not me being kind to the dead; she's alive, worse luck, but she was a good girl. She could take a room and turn it over in an hour. She sang. There was nothing to sing about and she sang anyway, and it drove Verna to distraction and it drove the other one worse. You could hear her down the hill in the evenings. You could hear her all the way down at our mailbox in the summer when the windows were open."

"You could hear her from here?"

"On a still evening," said Olive Mosher, "yes. That is not an exaggeration for effect. Ask Arthur. He's deaf in the left ear and he heard it." She turned her cup in its saucer. "And then in March it stopped, and it hasn't been heard since, and that was twenty-five years ago, and I have not heard a woman sing in that house from that day to this."

I said the thing that she had been waiting for me to say.

"Mrs. Mosher, what actually happened?"

"Merle Fisk told you about the hill," she said, not as a question.

"He told me about the sled."

"Then he told you everything and nothing," she said, "which is how it's told up here, and it isn't a lie, and it isn't the truth. There was a hill and there was a sled and there was a tree, and that's the story, and the story takes about a minute and a half and it lets everybody off." She leaned forward. "There were two people who got on that sled on purpose. On purpose. That's the thing about it. It wasn't an accident on that hill. The accident was everything that made them get on it."

The stove ticked. Out in the barn, Arthur Mosher was doing something with a bucket that made a sound like a bell.

"If you want to know," Olive Mosher said, "don't ask about March. Ask about the winter. Ask about the six weeks before it, the ones when Verna was away and the girl and that man were alone in that house, because that's where it happened, whatever it was. The hill was just where it finished. I've lived on this road sixty-eight years, and I've thought about it more than I should, and I will tell you what I have arrived at, which is only this: those three people were kind to each other, every one of them, in the way they had, and it killed them. There's no villain in that house. That's the worst of it. If there was a villain you could get over it."

She got up and began to clear the table, and her manner had changed back to the manner of a woman who has a plate to wash.

"Now," she said, "go and look at Arthur's beams, and tell him they'll hold, because they will, and because he'll be up all night if you tell him anything else."

I looked at the beams. They would hold. And then I drove home in the dark along the creek with the snow coming down over the headlights like something being shaken out of a sheet, and I sat down at the oilcloth table with two people who did not talk, and I looked at the woman and the man, and I thought about a winter, and about a girl singing on a hill, and I understood that I was not going to get any sleep that night, or for some nights, until somebody told me the rest of it.

Nobody told me. I have had to put it together, from bits, the way it always is; and what follows is what I have put together, and I have checked it where I could, and I have not smoothed it where I couldn't.