Random Winds (13 page)

Quite without warning, not fifty feet ahead of the car, a tremendous limb, almost a quarter of a giant elm. split from the weight of ice and crashed on the road. In pounding panic, Martin swerved. If he’d been a few feet farther along, all his problems would be over! And he laughed at his own macabre humor. Indifferent nature! Savage world!

The wind whipped the trees as he carefully skirted his near-disaster. March was the most dismal month of all. Yet his father had loved it, had liked to talk of the stately cycle of the year, its rhythm and its grandeur. The road curved around the lip of a plateau from which, through beating snow, he could see a spread of white fields and hills folding back to the mountains out of which he had just come. Grand, yes! Eternal. Majestic. All the orotund words. A man might well stand in awe of it. He understood that deeply. But everybody wasn’t meant for it, and he hated it, hated the loneliness, the monotony, the awful cold. He had never said it aloud before, but he said it now.

“I hate it.”

And he could have wept.

Six miles from home in sleet as slippery as grease, the car slid off the road. He swore, then rocked the car, trying to get traction. He revved the engine over and over, to no avait. At last he got out It was so cold, thirty below he’d guess, that his lungs burned with the small pain of each indrawn breath. The hairs prickled in his nostrils. Taking the shovel from the back seat, he tried to dig. The snow was so hard that the tip of the shovel bent backward. He sighed.

“Goddamned junky old car! Goddamned winter!” Suddenly recalling Pa’s advice, he got the burlap from under the front seat and placed it beneath the rear wheels.
Then he started the engine. It roared and whined. The wheels spun furiously. It’s rubbing the tires to a thread, Martin thought. But at last they caught hold and the car lurched back onto the road.

When he crept into the yard an hour later, the house was dark and he remembered that his mother had gone to an afternoon at the church, followed by a supper. She had left his meal on the coal stove in a covered dish. It was stone cold. Then he saw that the kitchen fire was out The house smelled dank and musty. He ran down to the cellar where the furnace stood like a hungry monster beside a hill of glossy coal and flung the door open.

There was no fire here, either. The monster hadn’t been fed and ashes were thick in the grate.

Blasted boy! His mother had arranged with Artie Grant to tend the fires today while she was gone, but obviously he hadn’t come. He went back upstairs to the rear porch for kindling wood. Each ice-incrusted piece had to be dislodged by sheer force. Now, back to the cellar with newspapers and matches. But first the ashes must be cleaned out. Martin’s head pounded as dust from the ashes set off a fit of coughing. He sweated and shivered, shoveling the ashes out, then shoveling the coal in. Last he shook down the grates, making a lonely rattle in the empty house. From the head of the stairs the collies stood observing him, while he watched the fire take hold.

Finished in the cellar, he went back up to the kitchen. His mother had just come home. For an instant she was framed in the doorway, her pretty eyes anxious. She wore her old, black “good” coat; the black feather on her hat was turning green. Humble. That’s how she looks, he thought. Mean word. Humble.

“Goodness, look at you! You’re all over ashes!” she cried.

“Yes. Where in blazes was Artie Grant?”

“He’s usually so dependable! I guess the weather was just too bad for him to get here.”

“It was, was it!” Martin was furious. “Wasn’t too bad for me, though! I only traveled thirty miles round trip to Danielsville and back!”

“Martin,” his mother said mildly. “Martin, you’re tired and hungry.”

“Of course I am. Why not?” After a day like this one, was it too much to ask for a house that was warm so that you could at least rest when you came in?

When his supper was ready Ma sat down in the rocker near the table. “That shutter keeps banging. Hear it? The hinge is loose. If I get a new hinge, will you put it on sometime?” And without waiting for him to answer, “Your father never cared about things like that. Never cared about things at all, you might say. The world of ideas, that’s what he lived in, all that he cared about,” she reflected, sighing a little. The light fell over her head, over a smooth streak of gray that lay like a ribbon on her still-dark hair. She was talkative tonight. “Yes, he was a student of the world. He read everything. I’m sorry I never had much time, and now it seems to be too late. I’m out of the habit of reading.” She rocked: creak, creak. “Anyway, I would never have been like him. I do like things so much. I like
having
things. You never knew that about me, did you?” she asked shyly, as if she were making some astounding confession.

“It’s no sin to like things, Ma.”

“Do you know where I always wanted most to go? I used to wish I could go to Washington, to see the Lincoln Memorial and the Capitol and all that. But we could never seem to get away.”

“You could go now. It’s outrageous that you should have to think twice about having such a small pleasure.”

“More than twice. We don’t have the money to spare. You’ll be needing a new car by summer. It’s a wonder this one has lasted as long as it has.”

Never in all the years Martin had known his mother had she expressed any desires. It hurt him to hear her. Yes, and made him strangely angry, too. He felt a whole jumble of restless feelings.

“Your father was so content. He’d sit here rocking by the stove when the front room was too cold to go over his records, and he never complained. Sometimes he’d read
aloud about places far away. Places like Afghanistan or the Amazon. And I’d ask him, ‘Don’t you wish we could go there? “I am there in my mind,’ he’d answer.”

“I’m not like him,” Martin said.

“That’s true. I’ve never known anyone like him.”

In the hall the old clock struck with a tinny bong. Ashes tinkled in the stove. His mother coughed, a thick phlegmy cough that she hadn’t been able to get rid of all winter. It wasn’t her fault, surely, but it was exasperating. And he had a sudden projection of himself on long, dull, winter nights like this one, sitting in a shabby room like this one with a faceless woman: not his mother, of course, but a woman who would be his wife, since inevitably a man acquired a wife.

The future was a dull road going endlessly uphill, downhill, uphill, stretched through an unchanging landscape; at last, when one no longer hoped for any change, one would come to the final hill and just drop quietly off into the unknown. Life would have passed, never having counted for very much, or not what one wanted it to count for, at any rate. It would have gone by without color, without sparkle or aim.

But all the time, in other places, some men would have been doing what they wanted to do! They learned, they lived, they moved ahead! And there came again that old sense of rushing time which had haunted and beset him since adolescence. He was already twenty-eight! Without meaning to, he smashed a fist into his palm and sprang up as if he had been shot. There was such tension in his solar plexus that he had to move, he had to—

His mother looked up. “Where’re you going?”

“I don’t know. Just out.”

“In this weather?” For it had begun to sleet again.

“I’ve been in it all day. I’m used to it.”

“Oh, I forgot to tell you. While you were down cellar, Jessie Meig telephoned. Odd for a girl to telephone a young man, don’t you think so?”

“No. Just natural and honest.”

“Her sister didn’t do it, did she?”

No, Martin thought, she never did.

“It’s not even very clever, if you ask me. She must be a strange girl, that Jessie Meig.”

“Why do you always say ‘that Jessie Meig’ as though you had something against her?”

“How could I have anything against her? I don’t even know her.”

“You know she’s crippled, and that’s what you’ve got against her.”

“Martin, I don’t understand you sometimes! You’re so blunt and bluff lately, so outspoken! You’ve no tact anymore.”

“I’m outspoken, I’ll admit.” It came to him that indeed he was more candid than he had used to be, that he had learned it for good or ill from Jessie. “Say what you mean and mean what you say. What’s wrong with that?”

“Very well, then. I can’t for the life of me understand what you can see in a poor, crippled girl. It’s pitiful, of course it is, but here you are, a tall strapping fellow, and you could get any girl you wanted if you set your mind to it.”

“I’ve told you, Ma. She’s a friend, one of the best I’ve ever had outside of Tom, and there are things she understands about me that even Tom doesn’t. How she’s managed to know so much about the world, living the way she has, I have no idea. And I like being with her. What more can I say?”

His mother looked surprised. “Why nothing more, I should think.”

And he went on, vehemently, “Because she has a few misshapen bones, is she any less a woman? Is she to be put away as damaged goods, returned to the manufacturer, because of that?”

His mother was silent.

“By the way, what did she want?”

“Just to know why you’d been staying away and whether you might want to come over this evening.”

Twenty minutes later Martin stood in the Meigs’ library. It went very quickly. His mind had simply made itself up,
and he didn’t have to think about words. The father grasped Martin’s two hands in both of his.

“You won’t be sorry. It’s probably the wisest decision you’ll ever make.” There were tears in his eyes and at that moment Martin began to like him. “God bless you both.”

Jessie’s answer to his question was surprisingly calm.

“Are you sure you know what you’re doing?”

“I’m sure.”

“Because I don’t want to be an albatross around your neck. I couldn’t bear it.”

“You will never be that, I promise!”

She had a pretty mouth and when she smiled, two charming dimples appeared at the corners. Taking her face between his hands he kissed her gently.

“I’ll make life good for you,” he said.

He meant it, with all his heart.

Fern always teased Alex that she had married him because she loved his house.

“Well, naturally,” he would answer, “how could anyone help but fall in love with Lamb House?”

Among its oaks and orchards it lay as though, like them, it had been planted there; so farsighted had they been, those Elizabethans with a sense of home and long generations.

Through diamond-paned casements one looked south toward the village of Great Barrow. Little Barrow lay three miles to the west. On the tilted slope above the valley, pear trees flowered and the hills rolled back into a haze.

Fern turned from the easel. The spaniels, sprawled with noses to the grass, raised their heads in question. They had followed her across the Atlantic and shadowed every move she made.

“No,” she told them, “I’m not finished yet.”

And she raised her eyes to the living picture beyond the easel. In the upper left-hand corner lay a green square dotted with pinpoints of white which seemed scarcely to move, although they were live sheep on the Baluster farm. Everything was small and perfect, as in a meticulous Book of Hours. The valley was the merest hollow in the swell of the land.

“As if God’s finger touched, but did not press, in making England,” she said aloud, and was pleased with herself for quoting Elizabeth Barrett Browning. She had been studying the English poets from Chaucer to Eliot, for if one were going to live in a country, she believed, one ought to know its poets.

“Now that I know you well enough, I’ll confess,” Alex’s mother had told her only a few weeks before. “I wasn’t very happy about having an American daughter-in-law. So
many American girls are simply not ladies; I can’t help saying it. But you are, and so very charming, Fern! Everyone says so.”

They had been standing in the upstairs hall, which, like the great one downstairs, was blazoned with family portraits: squires in eighteenth-century breeches and lace cuffs, clerics in grim black, an admiral with a three-cornered hat, two cabinet members—Tory, nineteenth century—and over one fireplace, the original Elizabethan with beefy face and sleepy eyes to whom this manor had been given for favors rendered the Crown somewhere in the West Indies. They were all Lambs.

Alex’s mother came from a decent undistinguished family of schoolteachers.

“Naturally,” Alex said with some amusement but no unkindness, “all this ancestor business means more to her.” His late father, though, had been bored and sometimes irreverent about it.

On a table in the angle of the stairwell stood a group of photographs in silver frames.

“That, of course, is Edward VII as Prince of Wales,” the elder Mrs. Lamb had informed the younger.

Fern had dutifully bent to read the scrawled inscription.

“My husband often went on shooting parties in Scotland with His Royal Highness.”

“Went whoring with His Royal Highness too, I’ll wager,” Alex had remarked in private.

“I had this photo of Susannah put up here in the hall while you and Alex were on your wedding trip. It used to stand on the piano in the drawing room, but I should think that too conspicuous, not fitting, now that Alex has married you.”

Fern had murmured that she wouldn’t have minded, which was true. She felt no jealousy, although her mother-in-law apparently expected her to. The girl was dead, after all. Here she sat for all time in her patrician simplicity with hands on lap and a pearl rope looped around the little finger. The one memorable feature of her neat face was a timid expression in the prominent eyes. Could she perhaps
have had some foreboding that she was going to die and leave her week-old boy?

“To tell the truth, I was never very happy about Susannah, although she was English to the bone.”

Perhaps she had only been intimidated by this mother-in-law!

“You are far prettier, you know.”

What an unnecessary, heartless thing to say!

“It’s a good thing Neddie has no idea about his mother.”