Curtis Blaine

The red pickup with the light bar on the cab began to come up the Hollow road in the last week of January, and it came up it eight times before the first week of March, which is a number I have from Merle Fisk, who counted it, and from Rachel Ordway, who was nineteen that winter and had the sharpest eyes in that township.

There was always a reason. That is the thing about a young man with a feed store behind him: there is always a reason. It was a bag of layer mash that had been on the truck and was going to be rained on. It was a catalogue. It was a question about the water line, which Curtis Blaine's father had put in for Wade's father back in the seventies and which had been giving trouble ever since. And it was the road: he would come up on a Saturday afternoon in February when the road was two ruts of ice, which no man does unless he wants to be on the other end of it, and stand in the kitchen and drink coffee and talk to Verna Kelleher about the price of corn.

Verna Kelleher received him the way she received everything, which is to say as an entry.

I am going to be careful here, because it would be very easy and very false to make Verna the villain of this chapter, and she is not. Verna Kelleher, in the January and February of that winter, did the most generous thing she did in her whole life, and she did it for the most self-interested reason in the world, and both of those things are true at the same time and neither of them cancels the other.

She began, in the last week of January, to talk about Curtis Blaine at the table.

She talked about the store, which was the biggest business in the Hollow and had been in that family two generations, and about his mother, who was a widow with money, and about the house on the Ridge road with the new siding on it. Then she said the actual sentence, which she said twice in six weeks, both times in the same tone, and which I have from Tessa Bright herself, who repeated it to me twenty-five years later in the back room in about nine words, without any emotion whatever:

"It would be the making of a girl that had nothing."

That is what she said. Not, "You ought to marry him." Not, "I am getting rid of you." She said it as an item of general information, at a table, in a warm kitchen, to a girl of nineteen who had two bags and a duffel and forty-one dollars, and then she got up and took the plates and did the dishes, and the offer was on the table and it stayed on the table for six weeks and neither of the two of them ever referred to it again directly, and every single thing that happened in that house in those six weeks happened in relation to it.

The county agreed with her. I want that on the record too. I have heard the same sentence in the hardware store in Riggs Falls, out of men who did not know who I was: that the girl had had her chance and thrown it away, and that Wade Kelleher had been a fool, and that there had been a deal that could have been made; and then one of them told the joke and they all laughed, and I went out and stood in the road for a while.

Wade Kelleher came home in the February and the red pickup was in his own yard, and he drove in, because it was his yard and because he had a truck full of pulpwood and nowhere else to put it. I have this from him: the only fourteen sentences about himself I ever got out of the man, and I have them still.

Curtis Blaine came down the steps of that house while Wade was still reaching for the door of his own cab, and stood in the yard with his hands in his pockets.

"Wade."

"Blaine."

"I was just at your water line," Curtis Blaine said. "There's a soft spot in the run below the milk house. My father put that line in for your father and I've heard it's been giving you trouble."

"It's been giving me trouble."

"It's the frost. In and out of the ground like that." He looked into the bed of the truck. "That's a lot of cord for one man."

"It's eleven dollars a cord."

In the kitchen window Verna Kelleher was sitting where she always sat, and she was watching the two of them in the yard without any appearance of watching, which was a thing she could do. Tessa Bright was not at the window and did not come to the door. She was in the back of the house.

Curtis Blaine got into his truck and started it, and before he put it in gear he looked once at the window of that house where a girl of nineteen was not standing. Then he backed out of the yard, and the light bar went off down the Hollow road between the trees and was gone.

Wade Kelleher stacked the wood.

He never told her about it. He never once said one word to Tessa Bright about Curtis Blaine — that much I have from her, and she would have known — and she learned the whole of it from Verna, and Verna told it entirely as a joke about a man who cannot say a thing out loud, which is the way Verna Kelleher handled everything that she did not know how to handle, and which is the way she has been handling it for twenty-five years.

The third of March was the last time. It was the day before Verna went to Malone, and it is the last time a young man with two years of the state university and a feed store behind him ever came up that road, and I have this from Rachel Ordway, who was walking back up from Riggs Falls with Tessa Bright that afternoon.

Curtis Blaine was in the yard when they came up it, standing by his truck with his hands in his pockets, and he said hello to Rachel and then he said, to Tessa, with the whole of a young man's terrible courage, that his mother had said there was a dance in Malone at the American Legion on the sixteenth and that he would be going and would she.

And Tessa Bright stood in that yard with her hands in the pockets of a coat that did not fit her and said no.

That is what Rachel Ordway told me and it is all she told me, and she told it to me in her kitchen on the Ridge road with her husband's boots by the door, and she said, "She said it in about four words, and she said it kind, and then he got in that truck and went down the road, and she stood there and looked after it, and then she went into that house, and I have never in my life been sorrier for anybody, and I went home." And then Rachel Mosher looked at her own kitchen and said, "Of course, you know what everybody says, don't you, about that afternoon."

I said that I did.

"They say she was a fool," said Rachel Mosher. "They've been saying it twenty-five years. And I'll tell you something. I have three children and a husband that's decent to me and a house with a new furnace in it, and I have thought about that afternoon more times than I've thought about anything else in my life, and I have never once been able to make myself say whether she was a fool or the only one of us that wasn't."

She thought about that for a moment. Then she said, "She was nineteen. What are you going to do."

And she got up and put the kettle on.