WINTER NIGHTS
One Saturday morning Kenneth Dettinger arrived at the log house to find R.J. going through the last of the Markus possessions. He helped her sort through the tools and the kitchen utensils.
“Hey, I’d like to keep the screwdrivers and some of the saws.”
“Okay. You’ve paid for them.”
Doubtless she sounded as depressed as she felt. He gave her a searching look. “What’s going to happen to the rest of this stuff?”
“You’re giving it to the church ladies for their tag sale.”
“Perfect!”
They worked together for a time without speaking. “You married?” he asked finally.
“No. Divorced, same as you.”
He nodded. She saw an ache fly across his features, fleeting as a bird, coming and going in an instant. “It’s a hell of a big club, isn’t it?”
R.J. nodded. “Members all over the world,” she said.
She spent a lot of time with Eva, talking about the old days of Woodfield, discussing events that happened when Eva was a little girl or a young woman. Always, she watched the old woman closely, made uneasy by what was clearly a winding down of vitality, a gradual fading that had begun in Eva shortly after her niece’s death.
R.J. asked her again and again about the Crawford children, still held captive by the mystery of the infant skeleton. Linda Rae Crawford had died in her sixth year, and Tyrone had died when he was nine, both before they had reached child-producing age. So it was on the other two siblings, Barbara Crawford and Harry Hamilton Crawford, Jr., that R.J. focused her attention.
“Young Harry was a sweet-natured boy, but not cut out for a farm,” Eva remembered. “Always had his head buried in a book. He studied at the state college in Amherst for a while, but then he got thrown out, something to do with gambling. He just went away somewheres. I think California, or Oregon. Someplace out there.” The other daughter, Barbara, was a steadier kind of person, Eva said.
“Was Barbara pretty? Did she have men who … you know, came around and courted her?”
“She was pretty enough, and a very nice girl. I can’t remember her having any particular feller, but she went away to the normal school in Springfield and married one of her teachers.”
Eva became impatient with R.J.’s questions and cranky about her presence. “You don’t have young ones, do you? Or a man at home?”
“I do not.”
“Well, you’re making a mistake. I could have gotten me a good man, I know I might have, if only I’d been free.”
“Free? Why, Eva, you talk as though you were a slave back then. You’ve always been free. …”
“Not really. I couldn’t break away. My brother always needed me to stay on the farm,” she said stiffly. Sometimes while they talked she grew visibly agitated, the fingertips of her right hand plucking at the tabletop or the bedspread or the flesh of her other hand.
She had had a hard life, and R.J. saw that it disturbed her to be reminded of it.
There were numerous and growing problems involving her present life. The church volunteers who cleaned her house and cooked her meals had reacted splendidly to a crisis, but they weren’t able to do it on a long-term basis. Marjorie Lassiter was empowered to hire someone to clean the apartment once a week, but Eva needed extended care, and the social worker confided to R.J. that she had begun to look for a nursing home that would take her. Eva was querulous and raised her voice a lot, and R.J. suspected that most nursing homes would try to keep her sedated. She saw problems ahead.
In mid-December, suddenly there was snow to match the cold. Sometimes R.J. dressed in layers and ventured out onto the trail on her skis. The winter woods were still as a deserted church, but there were signs of occupancy. She saw the fresh pugmarks of a wildcat and tracks of deer of varying sizes, and a bloodied and furstrewn patch of broken snow. Now she didn’t need David to tell her that a predator had taken a rabbit; it was coyotes, their dog tracks were in the snow all about the kill.
The beaver ponds were frozen and snow covered, and the winter river gurgled and rushed over, under, and through an atmosphere of ice. R.J. wanted to ski along the riverbank, but that was where the cleared trail ended, and she had to turn around and go back the way she had come.
Winter was beautiful in the woods and the fields, but it would have been better shared. She ached for David. Perversely, she was tempted to telephone Tom and talk out her troubles, but she knew he was no longer available to her. She was lonely, frightened about the future. When she ventured forth into the cold whiteness, she felt like a tiny mite lost in the enormous deep freeze.
Twice she hung beef suet in net onion bags for the birds, and each time it was stolen by a red fox. She saw his tracks and caught glimpses of him skulking, a wary thief. Finally she carried a ladder out to a young ash tree at the edge of the woods and, teetering but climbing high, hung another chunk of suet too far up for the fox to leap. She refilled her two bird feeders daily, and from the warmth of her house she watched chickadees, several kinds of nuthatches and grosbeaks, tufted titmice, a huge hairy woodpecker, a pair of cardinals. The male cardinal pissed her off; he always sent the female to the feeder first, in case there was danger there, and the female always went, a perpetual potential sacrifice.
When will we ever learn? R.J. asked herself.
When Kenneth Dettinger telephoned, he caught her by surprise. He was back in the hills for the weekend, and he wondered if she would care to join him for dinner.
She opened her mouth to refuse the invitation and began arguing with herself. She should go, she thought, as the moment lengthened and he waited for her reply until the pause was embarrassing.
“I would like that,” she said.
She groomed carefully and chose a good dress she hadn’t worn in a while. When he picked her up he was wearing a tweed jacket, wool slacks, lightweight black hiking boots, and a heavy down jacket, the hill country dress-up outfit. They went to an inn on the Mohawk Trail and took their time over wine before ordering. She had become unaccustomed to alcohol; the wine relaxed her, and she discovered he was an interesting man, a good conversationalist. For several years he had spent three weeks annually working in Guatemala with children who had been traumatized by the murders of one or both of their parents. He asked insightful questions about her practice in the hills.
She liked the meal, the talk about medicine and books and movies, enjoying herself enough so that when he took her home it felt natural to invite him in for coffee. She asked him to light the fire while she started the coffee.
When he kissed her, that somehow felt natural too, and she enjoyed the experience. He was a good kisser, and she kissed him back.
But her lips became like wood, and very soon he stopped.
“I’m sorry, Ken. The timing is very wrong, I guess.”
If she had hurt his ego, it didn’t show. “Do you give rain checks?”
She hesitated too long, and he smiled. “I’m going to be in this town a lot in the future.” He held up his coffee mug to her. “Here’s to better timing. After a while if you would like to see me, let me know.”
He kissed her on the cheek when he left.
A week later he came up from New York for three days over the Christmas holiday, with another man and two very attractive women, both young.
When R.J. passed them on the road in the Explorer, Ken honked his horn at her and waved.
R.J. spent Christmas Day with Eva. She had made a small turkey at home, and she brought it over with the side dishes and a chocolate cake, but Eva derived little enjoyment from the meal. She had been told that in two weeks she would be transferred to a nursing home in Northampton. R.J. had gone there to check it out. She had told Eva it was a good place, and the old woman had listened quietly and had nodded her head without comment.
Eva began to cough while R.J. was cleaning up after their meal. By the time the dishes were put away, her face was hot and flushed.
R.J. had had sufficient experience with influenza so that it was an easily recognizable enemy. It had to be a flu strain not included in the vaccine Eva had received.
R.J. toyed with the idea of sleeping in Eva’s apartment or of getting one of the local women to stay the night.
But Eva was so frail. In the end, R.J. called the ambulance and rode in it to Greenfield, where she signed the papers admitting Eva to the hospital.
The next day, she was glad she had done so, because the infection had impaired Eva’s respiratory system. R.J. ordered antibiotics in the hope that the pneumonia was bacterial, but it was a viral pneumonia, and Eva sank rapidly.
R.J. waited in the hospital room. “Eva,” she said. “Eva, I’m here with you.” She drove back and forth between Woodfield and Greenfield and sat by the bedside holding Eva’s hands, feeling the old woman’s life wind down and saying good-bye to her without any more words.
R.J. ordered oxygen to ease her labored breathing, and toward the end, morphine. Eva died two days before the new year.
The ground in the Woodfield cemetery was hard as flint, and a grave couldn’t be dug. Eva’s casket was placed in a holding vault. Her burial had to await the spring thaw. There was a memorial service at the Congregational church, sparsely attended because in ninety-two years not many people in town had known Eva Goodhue very well.
The weather was beastly, a series of what Toby called “three-dog days.” R.J. had not even one dog to cuddle with against the cold, and she saw the spiritual danger of unremitting gray skies. She took responsibility for herself. In Northampton she found a teacher of viola da gamba, Olga Melnikoff, a woman in her seventies who had spent twenty-six years with the Boston Symphony. She began to have weekly lessons, and now in the still, cold house at night she sat and clamped the great viol between her knees as if it were a lover. The first strokes of the bow gave off sonorous bass vibrations that thrust their way deep into her body, and soon she was lost in the exquisite business of making sound. Mrs. Melnikoff started her on the basics, grimly correcting the way she wanted to hold the bow, ordering her to repeat the musical scale again and again. But R.J. already was a musician of piano and guitar, and soon she was doing exercises and then a few simple songs. She loved it. Sitting alone and playing, she felt that she was accompanied by the generations of Coles who had made melody with this instrument.
It was a time to spend wood on the fire and stay in bed nights. She knew the wild creatures must be suffering. She wanted to leave hay in the woods for the deer, but Jan Smith dissuaded her. “Deliver them from our kindness. They’re best off when we leave them completely alone,” he said, and she tried not to think of the animals and birds during weather when tree trunks cracked open from the cold like pistol shots.
The hospital announced that any doctor with a modem could access a patient’s chart in a few seconds and could give the nurses instructions over the telephone instead of making the long, slippery drive to Greenfield. There were nights when she still had to go to the hospital in person, but she invested in the equipment and was thankful to embrace some of the technology she had left behind in Boston.
The great blazes she built nightly in the fireplaces kept her warm despite the winds that shook the house on the verge. She sat by the fire and went through journal after journal, never quite catching up but making great inroads on her medical reading.
One night she went to the closet and took down David’s manuscript. Seated by the fire, she began to read.
Hours later, suddenly conscious that the room was cold, she stopped to rebuild the fire, to use the bathroom, to make fresh coffee. Then she sat and read again. Sometimes she chuckled; several times, she wept.
The sky outside was bright when she was through. But she wanted to read the rest of the story. It was about farmers who had to change their lives because the world had changed, but who didn’t know how. The characters were alive but the manuscript was unfinished. It left her deeply moved but wishing to scream. She couldn’t imagine David would abandon such a book if he were able to complete it, and she knew he was either gravely ill or dead.