The Sled in the Barn

The barn was the only part of that place that still belonged to Wade Kelleher, and he kept it the way a man keeps the last room in a house he is about to lose.

It was a Connecticut barn, which is to say a big one for the acreage, ninety feet by forty, with a stone foundation that had been repointed at some point and not since. The haymow was empty and had been empty for nine years, and there was light up there and a smell of old timothy that he could not get out of it. Below there were the stalls, six of them, empty, and it was in the stalls that he had built his shop: a bench along the wall, a vise, three hundred pounds of tools on nails and in coffee cans driven into a two-by-six, in an order that made no sense to anybody but him and made complete sense to him.

He could fix anything. That was what people in the county said about him even then, when they said anything at all, and it was the reason he had any work that winter. There was no money in the county for new machinery and so the county ran on men like him, and he went out to Arthur Mosher's and to the Ordways' and to the church in Riggs Falls and to the man who ran the junkyard at Ashcroft Junction, and he came home at night with his hands black and eleven dollars in his pocket and the arithmetic of the household waiting for him on the wall.

The list of what could be sold was in his head and had been for two years. It was, as lists of that kind are, entirely honest and entirely useless.

The woodlot was eleven acres of standing timber on a slope that a logging outfit from Malone had looked at twice and had offered nineteen thousand dollars for the year before, and the offer had expired, and he had not taken it, and he lay awake at night working out why, and the reason was that the woodlot had been his grandfather's and was the last thing on that place that the bank had no paper on. The rest of it — the skidder with the cracked head, the tractor, the three dry cows — he could have turned into about four thousand dollars in a week if he had been willing to be robbed. The house and the farm were worth less than the two loans against them, and had been for years, and everybody on that road knew it.

Add it all up and it came to about twenty-three thousand dollars if he sold everything at once, which is what a man gets for a life, and against it were the two loans, the balloon of eleven thousand four hundred due on the eleventh of April, and the interest on a skipped payment from the fall before.

There was no sum in which he kept the place. He had run the numbers so many times that they had become a kind of rosary.

I have said what Tessa Bright's days were. I have not said what they were like when there was nobody else in them.

Verna slept from two to four in the afternoon, and after the first month Tessa had the run of the house in those two hours, and she took it out of doors when she could. She had a coat that was not adequate, which was a fact about that household nobody ever mentioned, and she learned to put on two sweaters under it. She began to come out to the barn.

It was not a plan and there was nothing in it. She came out with the empty water pails or with a question about the furnace or with an apple, and she stood in the open bay with the light behind her, and she talked the way she talked — in paragraphs, with her hands — and Wade Kelleher worked, and answered her in six or seven words, and she did not appear to notice that this was not a conversation. That is what her two hours were: an unheated shed, a man with his back turned, and the sound of a woman's voice going on and on about nothing, and I have come to think that it was the nearest thing to happiness that either of them ever had, and that neither of them knew it, and that if they had known it, none of the rest of it could have happened.

It was in the second week of February that she found the sled.

It hung from two nails on the beam over the bench, where it had hung since the fall of the winter Wade was eleven, and it had been his father's and before that it was anybody's guess. It was a wooden sled with steel runners, sixty inches of it, and the deck had gone silver-gray and there was a crack in the left runner that had been brazed by hand in the nineteen-sixties by a man who was still alive then, and the steering bar had been re-soldered by Wade himself the last time he had used the thing, which was the winter he was seventeen.

"What is that?" Tessa said. "Is that a sled? Is that a real sled?"

"It's a sled."

She got a chair and stood on it and took it down herself, which he did not expect, and which took her a while, and then she put it on the floor of the bay and sat on it and tried the bar, and laughed, in the cold, in an empty barn, in February, which is not a thing that most people do.

"It doesn't have any rope," she said.

"You don't need a rope."

"How do you steer it?"

"With your feet on the bar and your hands on the sides."

"That's not steering," she said, "that's falling with intentions," and Wade Kelleher, who had been mending a hydraulic fitting on the bench, did a small thing with his mouth that was the beginning of a laugh and had not got all the way to one in some years.

Then she said: "Where would you take it?"

And that, I think, was the moment. It was a girl of nineteen sitting on the floor of a barn in a coat that did not fit her asking an idle question, and it cut through that man like a wire, because it was the first time in six years that anybody had asked him what a thing was for.

He told her. That road runs north out of the Hollow and up over the shoulder of Barlow's Hill and there is a mile and a quarter of it between the Ordway woodlot at the top and the turn at the bottom, and it is one of the very few pieces of road in that county that a man can see from end to end, and in that country that is a kind of beauty, and it is the reason the kids have coasted it for a hundred years.

He told her that a man who started above the woodlot and set the sled on the crown of the road picked up speed for a quarter of a mile, and that the fences went by on both sides and there was nothing to do but hold it, and that then the grade steepened and he went through the dark under the trees at forty miles an hour, and that a mile and a quarter later, where the road turned hard right and the creek came close, there was a single elm standing on the outside of the curve, and that a man took the turn, or he took the elm.

In a good winter they plowed the shoulders, and the town put up hay bales at the elm, and every boy in the Hollow went down Barlow's Hill at least once a winter, and half the girls too, and Wade Kelleher had gone down it on that sled, on that very sled, with his father standing at the top and shouting something he could not hear, on nine or ten nights of his boyhood, and had never once been afraid.

He told her a shortened version of that, standing at the bench with the fitting in his hand, and when he had done, Tessa Bright sat on the sled on the barn floor and looked at the open bay and the snow in the field beyond, and said, "I want to do that."

"Not in the dark," Wade Kelleher said.

And she laughed again, and got up, and they put the sled back on its two nails over the bench, and it hung there for the rest of the winter, forty-one days, on two nails, over the bench, and I have stood under it and looked at it, and it is one of the things I have not been able to make anything of, or to stop thinking about.