Before the Dance

What follows I have put together from what I was told and from what I saw in that house, and where I was not told I have said so, and where I have guessed I have tried to guess as a man who has spent his life measuring things, which is to say carefully, and without pretending to more than the tape gives me.

The winter I am going to tell about began in the November of the year that was twenty-five years ago, and it ended in the March.

Wade Kelleher was twenty-seven that winter, and he had been married six years.

He had been, as Merle Fisk said, a bright boy. He had gone to the agricultural school at Utica — the one that became the college, up on the hill — and he had taken the two-year course in what they called farm mechanics, which in that era meant pumps and engines and electrical systems and the arithmetic of a load-bearing beam, and he had been good at it. He had had, according to the only man in the county who would say so out loud, a real hand for machines: he could hear a bearing going in a tractor from thirty feet away, and he could look at a sagging floor and tell you where the trouble had started and about how long ago. He had had an idea, at twenty, of going on to the four-year school and becoming the kind of engineer who draws things and gets paid for the drawing. His mother had kept the letter of acceptance in the drawer of the sideboard for the rest of her life.

His father died in the February of his second year. It was the usual thing: a man of fifty-five, up on a barn roof in a thaw with a shovel, and gone before he hit the ground, and nobody's fault. Wade came home for the funeral and stayed for the planting and did not go back, because there was the place, and there was his mother, and there was the machinery, and there was nobody else.

His mother lasted four years and was not herself for three of them. That is the part that Merle Fisk told me and that Olive Mosher confirmed, and neither of them said it the way I am about to say it, because they were country people and had a country person's horror of naming a thing. She sat. She had always been a quiet woman, and after the funeral she simply kept going in the direction she had been pointed, until she arrived at a place where she did not speak at all except to answer, and then not always to answer. She ate if it was put in front of her. She went to bed when she was told. She sat in the chair by the stove from morning to dark and looked at the stove, and if Wade went out of the room for more than an hour she would begin to make a small noise in her throat that stopped the moment she heard his step.

He could not leave her. That is not a figure of speech and it is not a moral judgement; it is the arithmetic of the situation, and he did the arithmetic in about a week and it came out where it came out. There was the farm, which needed a man on it. There was his mother, who needed a man in the room. There was the money, which there was not much of, and which was less every year, and which did not stretch to a hired woman and a hired man both. A county agency offered a worker three mornings a week, and he took them, and it made no difference to a thing that could not be fixed by three mornings a week.

So he sat with her for three years. He was twenty-one when it ended. And I want to write down what Olive Mosher said to me about it, because it is the single most useful sentence anybody in that county said in my hearing, and because it explains everything after it.

She said: "A man can sit with a person for a year and keep himself. Two years and he starts to go. Three years and he's gone, and he doesn't know he's gone, and neither does anybody else, because there's nobody there to tell him. And then the person dies and he's a man in an empty house who has not been himself since he was twenty-one, and the first thing that walks through the door, he marries."

Verna came through the door in the spring, from the agency, because the agency sent whoever it had, and Verna had grown up two miles down the creek and had a certificate and no illusions about upstate farm work. She was twenty-eight. She was competent in a way that was, to a man who had been alone in a house for three years, indistinguishable from kindness. She talked. She made decisions. She took the pills out of his hands and put the pills in a tray and the tray in a drawer and the drawer on a schedule, and the house began to run, and in the six weeks after his mother died he asked her, and she said yes, and it was thought a good match by everyone, and it was.

For two years it was all right. I want to be careful here, because it would be easy and false to say it was never all right. There were two years when the house was warm and the meals were on time and Verna went to the grange and to church and had opinions about the school budget and laughed out loud on the porch in the summer, and Wade worked the place and drove a snowplow for the town in the winters and put in a new water line with his own hands, and people said the Kelleher boy had come back to himself. There was even talk, at one point, about a baby. It did not happen, and nobody ever knew which of them wanted it more, and after a while nobody brought it up.

Then the mill closed, and that was the beginning of the end.

The mill at Ashcroft Mills had been the reason for the road and half the reason for the county, and it died in the summer of the sixth year of their marriage, and seventy-one jobs went with it, and the county never found anything to put in the hole. Wade had been doing work for the mill in the off-season: machinery, belts, hydraulics, the ugly jobs. That went. He began to drive the plow for the town in the winter and to cut wood for whoever would buy it, and it was not enough, and it was now worse.

That is when the loans started. There is nothing unusual in it: they refinanced the farm to pay the mill's last bill, and then borrowed against the house for a used skidder with a cracked head, and the second loan was secured against the whole place, on a valuation done when there was still a mill to value it by.

And that is when Verna began to be ill.

I am not going to adjudicate Verna. She has been adjudicated by every person on that road for twenty-five years and it has not helped her. She was ill; she is ill; the pills are real and the thyroid is real and the back is real, and the specialist in Malone is not quite the fraud she calls him, though he is not much better. There is also the plain fact, which Olive Mosher stated and which I have no way to disprove, that a woman who had nursed a silent man's mother to the end of it and had spent the six years since watching a farm go under may begin to find in her own body the only subject on the place that still has anything new to say. I do not know. I knew her for one winter and I am not qualified. I only know that by the fourth year of their marriage she had stopped going to the grange, and by the fifth she had stopped going to church, and by the sixth she had stopped going out of the house except to the doctor, and that the house, which had been poorly run before she came, was now run by a woman who was ill in it, which is a different and much worse thing.

In the November before the March, Tessa Bright came.

She was the daughter of Verna's first cousin, dead of an aneurysm at forty-one; the father was gone, Syracuse or somewhere, nobody knew and nobody asked. Tessa had been taken in for a year at twelve and then had gone to an aunt in Plattsburgh after a quarrel that nobody in the family would describe to me even twenty-five years later, which tells me it had been about money or about a man and probably both. She had finished high school in Plattsburgh and had worked two winters at a motel off the interstate and had a bag and a duffel and, when Verna wrote to her, nothing whatsoever to lose.

She came up on the bus to Ashcroft Junction and Wade went down and got her in the truck. He was twenty-seven and she was nineteen. Nobody has ever told me what they said to each other on that drive, and I have decided not to invent it, except to say that it is eleven miles from the Junction up to the Hollow and that it took them, according to Verna, who timed everything in those days, thirty-five minutes, which is a long time for that road, and that when they came into the kitchen Tessa Bright was carrying her own bags and laughing at something, and Verna was at the table with her pills, and she was already calculating.

For six weeks it was better than the house had been in years. She cleaned it. She got the sheets off the furniture in the front room and hung them on the line and put them back folded and did not put them on the furniture, which Verna noticed. She cooked badly and then well. She mended the porch rail. And she sang, up and down the house, in the mornings and in the afternoons, and when Verna told her to stop she stopped for a day and started again, because she was nineteen and had no idea that a house can have rules that have never been written down.

On a Friday in the third week of January, Wade Kelleher drove down to the Hollow to fetch her from the dance at the fire hall.

The Firemen's Auxiliary held one every other Friday through the winter, and they were the only social event within nine miles, and Verna had not gone to one in four years and had strong views about them. Tessa had gone with the Ordways' girl. Wade had spent the day hauling pulpwood for Arthur Mosher at eleven dollars a cord and had come in with his hands blue and his back gone and a bill from the bank in Potsdam on the seat of the truck, and he had eaten standing up, and at eight o'clock he had got back into the truck and driven down to the Hollow, because the road past the fire hall is the worst road in the township when it ices, and because he had said he would, and because — and this is the only thing in the whole account that I am prepared to call certain — because the house without her in it was not a house he could sit in.

He parked across the road under the maples, and he did not go in.

The hall had been a grange and then a garage and then a fire station, and it had a row of windows along the road side that were fogged at the bottom and clear at the top, and through the clear part you could see the whole of it: the string of bulbs, the band, which was two men and a machine, the folding tables, the children running, the old people along the wall in their coats. He stood in the cold with his collar up and looked in at the top of the windows for a while, the way a man does when he has no right to be inside and no intention of going home.