18

In the early hours of that November morning Frances dreamed she was walking in the deep forest where the thick trees screened out the sun. Enormous white triangular forms sprang up in front of her. They were the skeletons of icebergs, their bones ice-encrusted steel. A wintery gale pushed and tugged at the huge shapes until they began to sway and groan. Animals raced past her to escape the teetering giants. As the winds howled, the skeletons crashed to the ground, one by one, crushing the fleeing animals beneath them. It was their frightened screams that awakened her. Then the animals shrieks became a siren—something real.

Frances extricated herself from the tangle of sheets and blankets she had woven with her tossing and turning. The siren was coming from the well site. The lights of the rig were visible through the white snow that sliced the black sky. Her first thought was that the well had caught fire. She looked for flames rising in the darkness, but there was only the usual cold white glare of the fluorescent lights that made the site look like an operating room. The sirens faded. Since Wilson was working on the night shift, he’d be able to tell her what had happened.

Although it was only six o’clock, she dressed hurriedly, anxious to get out of the room where she felt that pieces of her nightmare were still bumping about in the darkness. There was a lovely early-morning farm program from the state college on television. The people appearing on the program were exactly like the people she used to know fifty years ago. Only their clothing had changed.

Frances turned on the porch light before letting the dog out and saw a huge gray shape leave the ground, circle the cabin, and fly away. A small mangled animal lay a few feet from the door; beneath it the snow was red. An owl had been tearing at something. For the last week the tracks of a snowshoe hare had cut through the yard. Last night she had thrown out some old apples and greens for the hare. Instead of it having been a kindness, she had made the hare move into the dangerous open space where an owl had been watching.

Stupid and thoughtless she had been. The trouble was that in winter she felt deserted when raccoons and porcupines curled up in trees and snakes and worms twined together underground. There was nothing for company but birds.

She scolded herself for sounding like a petulant old lady. She had her books, and Wilson managed to stop by each week. Together they were charting the drill’s progress as it passed through shale, where cold water was trapped in pools, down into rock that had once been covered by inland seas, and into the salt beds. Wilson had brought some of the salt for her. It had given her a strange feeling to taste salt from her own land and know that it was millions of years old. “Don’t worry,” Wilson kept assuring her, “they aren’t going to find any oil. I won’t let them.”

She settled down in front of the television set with a cup of coffee. The dog lay beside her, gnawing idly on the leg of the chair. The farm program today was on beekeeping. Unsettling closeups of the insects turned them into huge furry animals.

She refilled her coffee cup and listened to the morning news, read by newscasters natty in red blazers with the station’s crest in gold on their pockets. Plans were announced for a cross-country ski-athon later in the winter. The first snowstorm of the season had resulted in a delay of several school buses. The announcer shuffled his papers. “An accident occurred early this morning at a Ffossco well site, located in Pine County. A young man working at the site was seriously hurt in a fall. It is not known at this time what caused the accident. The name of the injured man is Wilson Catchner, believed to be a resident of Pine County.”

Frances threw on her coat. Her boots were buried somewhere in the pile of winter clothing on the floor of the closet. She left without them, and as she hurried to the truck, the wet snow crept into her shoes and chilled her feet. The accident was her fault! She remembered how Wilson had wanted to quit and she had encouraged him to stay. She prayed that he would be all right, falling back for some reason on a childhood prayer that she hadn’t thought of for seventy years.

The truck moved hesitantly through the drifts, resisting her efforts to gun it over the slippery rises. The wiper didn’t seem to be working; in order to see the road, she had to stop every few minutes to clear off the windshield.

At seven-thirty the sky was still dark, the shapes of the snow-covered houses along the road a ghostly white. A snowplow loomed up in front of her. It was impossible to see beyond it in order to pass. The snow from its blade was thrown against the truck, encrusting the windshield with snow. The ride seemed endless. Nearly an hour later when she reached the hospital, its rows of lighted rooms in the darkened city suggested a terrible urgency. The parking lot was familiar. In the last years of Tom’s illness she had often driven him there so that he could see his patients.

She hurried inside. A nurse was walking in and out of the patients rooms, dispensing medication from tiny paper cups arranged neatly on a metal tray. An aide rattled a cart of breakfast trays past her. Frances looked for a familiar face, but everyone was a stranger.

When she reached the large swinging door that led into the emergency room, she stopped, afraid to go farther. Only her need to see Wilson finally gave her the courage to push open the door.

Mr. and Mrs. Catchner were standing beside the nurse’s desk. They looked defenseless and out of place, like civilians caught by an invading army. She started toward them, relieved to see that the nurse at the desk was Lou Walsh, whom she had known for years. Before she could say a word, the Catchners saw her and moved close to each another, forming a wall between her and Lou’s desk.

Mrs. Catchner’s voice was sharp: “I don’t think you have any business to be here, Mrs. Crawford.”

Frances tried to answer, but it was like groping about in a dark bag to try to find the right words. “I just wanted to see Wilson—to find out how he is.” Then, acknowledging their prior claim as his parents, she hastily added: “If it’s all right with you.”

Mr. Catchner’s face was red, his voice loud in the hushed hospital room: “Don’t you think you’ve caused enough trouble? If it weren’t for you giving Wilson grand ideas about going to college, none of this would have happened!”

Frances was not hurt. Hadn’t she had already accused herself of the same thing? The phone on Lou Walsh’s desk rang. Then she motioned the Catchners to follow her. She glanced back apologetically at Frances.

Frances watched them disappear. She considered running after them, but knew she would be turned back. She thought of remaining until they returned, but could not bear to face them again. She fled.

All day long she sat in front of the television set, hoping for news of Wilson. One daytime serial followed another. Their artificial tales of woe seemed to Frances a mockery of her anguish. A game show came on. The master of ceremonies was a fatherly man proudly showing off the contestants as if they were his bright children. A young couple stood at the microphone. The woman was jumping up and down, squealing with excitement; her husband continually slapped his forehead. Every few minutes the couple threw themselves into each other’s arms with obviously feigned excitement.

Frances got up from her chair and carried her cup of cold coffee into the kitchen. The snowstorm had stopped. It was dark now, but a full moon cast a pale glow on the snow-covered ground. From the window she could make out the carcass of the hare. She thought of the owl returning in the night, circling the cabin, nervous in the bright light of the full moon. It would settle on the hare and try to tear off some meat, but the hare’s body would be frozen into a solid lump. The owl would hunch patiently over the hare, waiting for the warmth of its body to thaw the carcass. Then it would begin to rip off pink ribbons of the hare’s flesh.

She searched through the cupboard. On a shelf next to a box of old cookie cutters and a bag of dead light bulbs she found some rat poison. She would make slits in the frozen body of the hare and insert the poison. The owl would do no more killing. But before she could carry out her plan, a dark shape appeared against the moon.

It was a great gray owl, rare in that part of the country: Scoliaptex nebulosa, the Greek eagle-owl of darkness. The owl was the white-gray color of a winter morning, its breast soft and thick with down. The great gray owl had been sighted flying across Lapland and Russia and Mongolia. It was the largest of the owls. For revenge she had nearly murdered a king. For the first time that day she began to cry.

A pair of headlights appeared on the trail and the owl flew off. It was the Catchners’ truck. For a minute Frances expected to see Wilson climb out and make his way up the walk, but it was his father who knocked at her door. She urged him to come into the cabin, but he refused her invitation with a quick shake of his head.

“I guess he’s going to make it,” was all he said, and then he turned on his heel and headed for the truck. The headlights swung in an arc and disappeared.

Frances went out into the yard, forgetting to put on a coat. She hacked at the frozen earth with a shovel until she had a hole large enough to bury the hare. She laid it gently into the ground and covered it over. As she finished, a shadow winged silently across the snow. The great gray owl circled the yard, once, twice, and flew off carrying its shadow with it.