8

THE next morning I could hardly wait to see the children. I had a panicky feeling that they might not come. Perhaps their families wouldn’t want to trust me with them. I hadn’t really wanted to teach before; it was just a stopgap. But now I wanted to teach here. The children had driven away with such solemn faces, and I wanted to see them singing or laughing or listening to a story again.

I was ready for school so early I had a long time to wait. I sat at my desk as I had sat the first day of school. The room was just the same as it had been that first day, and yet everything was different. Now I knew the children who belonged in these seats, even the oversize seat at the end of the first row. I knew the color of Raymond’s galluses that held up his made-over trousers and how he could snap his fingers, and Mary Cassidy’s hair ribbons and Mike’s giggle and how painfully Nels Thorson went at arithmetic.

The schoolroom was quiet and orderly and empty, but full at the same time. Lincoln looked out through the windows at the snow-covered butte. The patent-medicine calendar hung on the back wall. I glanced at the calendar and then I wrote on the board, as I always did, “Today is December 4, 1941.” A date looks so innocent until you know what can happen on that date.

I picked up the broom and threw a jacket over my shoulders and went out to sweep the front stoop, but really I went to watch for the children. It was starting to snow again—a fine soft snow powdered the air—but there was no wind. The very air seemed gentle. I thought of the snow sifting down on Robert’s grave if they buried him today.

The La Mere boys came first, riding double on the old horse they called Tobacco. I waved to them and they waved back. Leslie Harper’s father brought the others in the Pony Express. Sigrid Thorson slid out of the end of the little truck before the others and came running to me with a big box in her arms.

“Mother sent you a cake, Miss Webb,” she shouted eagerly. Mary Cassidy brought a jar of baked beans.

“Mamma said she guessed we must have eaten you out of house and home, Miss Webb.”

I saw the children glance quickly, almost surreptitiously, at Robert’s desk as they came in, and then their eyes came back a second time with eagerness because of the little tree.

“We’re going to trim our tree this year in memory of Robert,” I said. “Every day that we get through our work in good time we’ll make something for it.”

We raised the flag this morning in the gently falling snow. The children laughed as the snow tickled their faces and made the Cassidys’ and La Meres’ black hair gray. We sang Christmas carols at noon and talked about our Christmas entertainment for the parents. And then, because it was bound to, I suppose, the conversation slipped around to Robert.

“They took him on the train back to Illinois,” Nels Thorson said. “That’s where the Donaldsons come from. I wish I hadn’t pinged him with my beebee gun last fall,” he said.

“Do you think God’ll take him home, Miss Webb?” Leslie asked.

“I’m sure he will,” I said.

The mailman came through in the afternoon. He stopped to leave my mail with a great honking and hand-waving. I went out to get the mail because I thought he might have a message for me, but he only wanted to talk.

“Too bad about that boy,” he said as he handed me a letter from Mom.

“Yes.”

“It’s a miracle to me you didn’t all freeze; there was a mailman on the Higgins route, Jed Larson, froze to death in a snowbank. I knew him well, often used to see him in town. Mrs. Donaldson was saying in town you should have kept closer watch on Robert. ‘Why, say,’ I sez to her, ‘she oughter get the Carnegie medal for that trip to Harpers’.’ I didn’t tell her I was glad you saved the bright ones, but I sure was.”

Mom wrote: “Your Father want to see you. He says you are for away as last year in Minnesota. He is still down sick. Can you come home Saturday. I meet you in Clark City. Anna.” Mom always signed her name that way, even to me.

When the children left that day I got out the letter and read it again and I decided to go home. The bus went past the highway about 10:30. If I started early enough I could walk the six miles to the highway easily.

It was a good feeling to lock the teacherage and know that I’d be away overnight. I was on the road by seven Saturday morning. I wore Mom’s valenkis; they didn’t make my feet look any smaller, but they kept them warm. I didn’t carry anything with me. I had old clothes at home. The sky was still dark and the snow stood out white, as though the two were wrong side around, the sky where the ground should be. The gentleness had given way to cold again.

I reached Harpers’ place by eight. Even before I got to their gate I could see a man moving around there. He was too big and straight for old Mr. Harper. I moved over to the outside rut of the road and made up my mind to go by quietly. We had told each other a lot about each other for a first evening’s visit. I thought it would make me feel strange and half-embarrassed to talk to him again.

But Warren Harper saw me and came out to the road. The country is bare enough so you can see a person a mile away. He stood at his corral gate as though he were uncertain, then I guess he remembered my black bandanna with the red fringes.

“Hello, Miss Webb,” he said as soon as I was near enough.

“Hello,” I said. “The snow’s packed down good.” But I kept right on walking.

“Where are you going?”

“Home for the week end. I can’t stop,” I said, and then thought that he hadn’t asked me to.

He leaned comfortably on the top rail of the fence as though it were summer. “Going to walk all the way to Gotham?”

“Oh, no, I’m catching the bus on the highway.”

“Six miles, as cold as it is today! What do you want to do, freeze your face again?”

“It isn’t bad when you’re walking. Father’s sick. I wanted to go home this week end.”

“I can see how you might anyway. Come on in a minute and I’ll drive you home.”

Leslie and Mrs. Harper were not up yet. Only Mr. Harper was in the kitchen.

“Father, I’m going to town to put in a claim for the insurance on those sheep,” Warren said. “We lost about five hundred in that blizzard,” he told me. I knew what such a loss meant to a sheep rancher.

We talked about Leslie most of the way in.

“He must have been devoted to his mother,” I said.

“Yes, he was. She was little and dark and laughed easily, and cried easily, too. He saw her do plenty of both. He heard from her that the ranch was the last place on earth to live and how the wind blew and how cold it got. He’s made up his mind not to like it because she didn’t.”

Then Mr. Harper seemed lost in his own thoughts. I didn’t interrupt him. The day was as light then as it was going to be. The sky made me think of a piece of iron covered over with frost.

“I went over to Los Angeles once to see Gladys after she’d been gone over a month on one of her missions,” Mr. Harper said abruptly. “I felt so sorry for Leslie I thought I’d see if we couldn’t patch things up again. She was living with a man, this preacher fellow. I couldn’t tell Leslie a thing like that about his mother even if he’d understood it. So I came back and told him she had died. She did die a year and a half later.

“When I told Leslie that she wouldn’t ever come back he didn’t cry, just looked at me, and then he said, ‘You didn’t love her.’ That was something for a six-year-old child, wasn’t it?”

“That was hard,” I murmured. I wanted to say I knew a little how Leslie had felt. I could have told him about Mom and Dad, but that was too deep a part of me.

Warren Harper lit a cigarette and smiled at me. “Did you ever know such a guy? Known you two days and pours out his soul. Well, don’t worry, I won’t say a word about myself or my child on the way home.”

“On the way home?”

“I’d like to come down Sunday afternoon and get you.”

“But that’s eighty-five miles.”

He shrugged. “I’ve gone a lot farther for less reason.”

I made him let me out where our road turns off the highway. “You can meet Mom and Dad Sunday, if you come. I don’t know how Dad is,” I told him.

“I’ll be here Sunday. You can count on it.”

The road wasn’t shoveled and there were no ruts through the snow. Dad must have been sick all week. I tried to see the house as I had that day with Gil, unpainted clapboards and all, but I couldn’t; it looked good to me. I saw the kitchen window and the gray-white bark of the cottonwood above the coulee and I began to run through the snow.

Mom heard me call and came to look out the window. We could never break Mom of her habit of looking out first when someone knocked. But it was good to see her face break into a smile when she saw me.

“Yeléna!”

“Hello, Mom!”

“We gave you up when we don’t get no letter and then we hear the radio.”

“Ellen!” Dad called from the other room.

“Oh, Dad, you’re still laid up!”

“I’m over this bout. I’m just waiting for the weather to get human and I’ll be out.” Dad was dressed, but he wore his sweater and bedroom slippers and he looked sick.

I sat down on the couch and Mom brought up a chair. They had set up the heater here in the front room.

“Yeléna, that boy, was he the big one?” Mom asked right away. “Your father was reading the paper and I am setting my bread dough. I wasn’t listening much, then I hear ‘Prairie Butte teacherage.’ I come quick to listen . . .” I’d forgotten how Mom told things. Dad always listened impatiently because she told so many details and then, as usual, he interrupted her.

“I should never have let you go to that place,” Dad grumbled. “Do you remember, I asked Sunday when we were there how far you’d have to go for help? Anna asked why you’d need any,” Dad finished triumphantly.

Mom made a business of picking up my coat and helped me off with my valenkis. Her face was sulky at being in the wrong. They always argued like this in the winter. Then Dad said:

“It must have been a terrible experience! That was the boy who wasn’t quite bright, wasn’t it?”

“Yes. It seemed awful that he was so near all the time. I don’t see how I missed him, because I hunted back and forth and called and called.”

“It was bad storm,” Mom said. “I could lose myself going to the barn, almost.”

“How did the family take it?” Dad asked.

“His mother blamed me; the father was very kind.”

Mom nodded her head. “You can’t tell about children. You have to keep your eye on them.”

“That boy wasn’t bright anyway,” Dad said crossly.

My room had been shut off since cold weather. It was cold in there and looked bare without the icon in the corner. The lipstick in my bureau drawer was as stiff and cold as though it had been frozen. I found some green beads I used to wear last year and fastened them around my neck. They were like ice. I opened the drawers and looked in. In the bottom drawer was Gil’s picture staring up at me.

“Yeléna, you catch cold in there. Hurry out!” Mom called. I shut the drawer quickly before I had time to look at Gil. But I wished suddenly that I hadn’t written that letter. I felt strange here at home with Mom and Dad. I could see so much better now what Gil had felt.

It was better that evening eating supper in the kitchen. Everything seemed so bright in the electric light after my lamps. We had fresh meat and Mom’s fresh bread. When we were drinking our coffee, Dad took a letter from his sweater pocket with such deliberateness I knew he meant me to notice. Mom left her coffee and started clearing off the dishes.

“Your Aunt Eunice had occasion to write me last week about some business in connection with our father’s house,” Dad said. “Several years ago she had to place a mortgage on the house in order to pay a hospital bill. The man who held the mortgage, an old friend of my father’s, has died, and his son wants to foreclose. Eunice says he wants the house for himself. She writes to ask if I could help her.”

“You have no good from it,” Mom put in.

Dad seemed not to notice. “Your aunt wants to keep the house. She has lived there all her life. It has my grandfather’s name plate on the door, ‘Benjamin Webb, Esquire.’ I had to polish it when I was a youngster, with vinegar and salt, I remember.” Dad pulled a snapshot out of the envelope and handed it to me. “Your aunt enclosed a picture of it.”

I had never seen it and yet when I looked at the picture, the house was so exactly as I knew it must be that it was like recognizing a place I knew well. Only I hadn’t known there was an iron grill along the porch or that there was a big bush in the front yard next to the fence.

“What’s that bush, Dad?”

“That’s a smoke bush, kind of a pink feathery stuff. You could pull it off in your fingers and blow it. My mother was very partial to it,” Dad said.

I turned the picture over. On the back was written “I enclose this picture in case you have forgotten what the old place looks like.” The writing was so light it was surprising that the words should have such barbs. It wasn’t a house anyone would forget. It stood very square with two big windows on either side of the front door, four windows across the second story, and a dormer on the third. The house was built of wider clapboards than I had ever seen, and each window had blinds. I had never seen blinds on a house before.

“Eunice writes that she could perhaps sell the house for a good price. Summer people are glad to pick up a house in Vermont nowadays, but she wants to live in it.”

Mom had been picking up the dishes. “If she can’t pay, she better sell,” she said.

There was a long hard silence in the kitchen, the kind I knew well. I looked at Mom’s face set so sullenly and at Dad’s, cold and hurt.

“Do you think you’d like to go back there sometime, Ellen?” Dad asked.

“Oh, I’d love to go back and see it.”

Mom stood by the table and stirred her cold coffee. “I want no part in it,” she said.

“You have no part in this, Anna. This was my life before I ever met you. This is for me to decide.” I had never seen him so stern. Mom went back over to the sink. Her face was dark and thick. I knew she minded Dad’s talking like that before me. Dad turned to me and went on in a quiet voice:

“After all, Eunice is my only sister. I should hate to see her having to move out of the house. She hasn’t had too much out of life. The young fellow she expected to marry was killed in France early in the war. She never went with anyone else as far as I know. I can’t forget how she cried the day I went away to the Army. I told her I’d be back, but I suppose to her I never really did come back. She went on taking care of Mother and working hard, and after Mother died she went on alone.”

“You help with funeral!” Mom muttered. But Dad seemed to have lost sight of Mom and me and to be back in Vermont. It had never occurred to me before that he might still love this faraway sister. She had never seemed very real to me.

“This is a bad year for ready cash. She needs five hundred dollars by the end of the week. I know she tried to raise it herself first.” Dad was really talking to himself. “I suppose she thinks I’m well off. To people back there a rancher in Montana sounds . . . pretty prosperous.” I could see that Dad’s pride was in this, too.

“How do you think you get five hunderd dollar?” Mom asked from the sink. Her voice was sly, almost sneering.

“I thought I’d go to town Monday and get a loan. I won’t have any trouble. Everything I own is paid for.”

I went over to get a dishtowel back of the stove. For an instant a kind of anger flashed up in my mind like pan grease that’s caught fire. He could talk about a loan for his sister and how easy it would be, but he didn’t get a loan to send me back to college. I forgot for the moment that Dad had been sick, and I hadn’t really asked him.

“You won’t put loan on this ranch,” Mom said, looking at Dad across the little kitchen. “She don’t mind to borrow money. Let her borrow some more.” I held my breath for what Dad would say next.

“That’s right, Anna, I put the ranch in your name, didn’t I?” His tone was quiet and cold. “I told you you’d earned it, you’d worked so hard.”

I glanced at Mom and her eyes seemed to me to gleam under her dark brows.

“Don’t worry, I won’t put no loan on the ranch,” Dad said, mimicking Mom’s grammar. “I can raise the five hundred dollars on the combine!”

I think I have never seen Mom move so swiftly. She came over and sat down at the table. “Don’t do that, Ben!” Fear made her voice heavier. I knew how she loved the combine.

“I won’t see my sister having to sell her house, Anna,” Dad said. “That’s something I couldn’t do.”

“What if we get no crop next year?” Mom said.

“Maybe we’ll have a bumper crop!” Dad said. “Anyway, Anna, I’m going to raise that money and send it to Eunice.”

I was so used to thinking of Dad as sick or tired and Mom as strong, it was strange now to see Mom frightened and angry and feel Dad’s strength. Maybe it was because he was sorry for her that he said gently:

“Look, Anna . . .”

“I don’t want to hear no more,” Mom said like an angry child. “You are big fool, Ben Webb, to make debt on the combine.” She slammed the kettles together as she put them away in the cupboard under the sink.

I picked up the snapshot on the table and studied it again, just to be doing something

“Eunice is honest about it. She writes that she could sell the house for a good price.” Dad took out a cigarette and went over to the stove for a match. “It must’ve been hard for her to write and ask me,” he said as the match flared out in his hand.

I saw Mom watching Dad as he got out a pad of paper and pen and ink and sat at the kitchen table writing. I finished drying the dishes, and all the time we could hear the pen scratching across the paper. When Dad was through he folded the paper and put it in the envelope and did not seal it. We didn’t know what he wrote, but we knew he was going to send the money.

Mom couldn’t seem to settle down. She opened the door to my room so the warm air could go in there and brought some flannel pyjamas of mine that were cold from lying in the drawer and hung them behind the stove, then she set the table for breakfast with a noisy clatter of the knives and forks. I wondered why I had come home.

It’s a terrible thing the way a child can sit in judgment on her parents without their knowing it.

We had to leave our bedroom doors open that night to keep warm. I lay in bed and heard no least murmur of voices from the other room. They had gone to bed in silence, Mom in anger. I couldn’t sleep. About midnight I closed my door and pushed up my window to the cold. I would be glad to be back in the teacherage.

I was outside all the next morning. It was a bright, clear day. The roof of the house and the long side of the barn laid a bluish shadow on the snow, and the dogwood bush in the coulee was bright-red above the snow, and the willows were as yellow and shining as a new-varnished floor. The strips of fallow ground and the strips of stubble were covered equally by the snow, and the blue sky looked as bright and warm as a blue wool afghan. Way off, the mountains of the Main Range were blue, streaked with white, and looked thin-edged against the sky. It was six below zero on the barn thermometer, but Mom had only a sweater over her shoulders and I had only a leather jacket. The sun made us feel warm, I guess, and the brightness made us a little giddy. This morning I knew why I had come home. I loved this place! The night’s trouble was shut in the house.

Mom showed me the turkeys.

“Thirty-eight orders already and the meat man take what I got left. Three cents more a pound I get this year. Pretty good, Yólochka?” Mom said, looking at me with a wide smile.

We walked over to the chicken house. I had something I wanted to tell her.

“Mom,” I began, “at first I couldn’t bear to think about Robert. I kept trying not to remember things . . . you know. Then I thought how you used to tell me about the killing of your mother and father in Russia and I could tell by your eyes how you could see it all over again. So I stopped pushing Robert’s death out of my mind. I was to blame, and I just looked right at it. It hurts but not the same way. . . .” I looked at Mom and found her eyes big and dark on my face.

“Sure, is no good to hide your eyes,” Mom said.

We were on our way back to the house and I was feeling very close to Mom when I said:

“Don’t be that way about Dad’s helping his sister. He has to do it.”

“We got to think of ourselves and you, Yeléna. We work hard for what we got.” She looked out past the barn to the snow-covered wheat fields. “She don’t work so hard!” she grumbled.

We might have walked at either end of a strip of wheat—we were no closer together than that, after all.

Dad took me out to see the pigs and the two horses we kept in the barn. It was cold enough so their breath was white and thick in the air, pretty plumes that meant life in the coldness.

“Should you be out here in the cold, Dad?” I asked.

“Oh, I don’t think it makes much difference. I seem to get these bad colds in the winter whatever I do. Your mother babies me like a child.”

It was never so easy to be quiet with Dad as with Mom. I think he was more comfortable talking.

“It’s pretty quiet around here without you, Ellen. It seems as though you’re farther away over there at Prairie Butte than you were last winter.”

I laughed. “Eighty-five miles isn’t very far. When the weather’s better you can drive over often, or I can catch a ride back.”

Dad stopped in the shed where the combine was. Cold bright bars of light came through the loose boards in back of the shed, but even with the front door propped open it was shadowy in there. The combine looked bigger than it was.

“I want to get the model number off this thing,” Dad said, bringing out a pencil and an envelope.

I laid my hand on the floor of the combine. It was as icy-cold as it had been blistering-hot last summer. When I was younger I used to pretend it was an airplane standing in our own private hangar.

“I don’t know what was the matter with me, Ellen, that I didn’t raise some money on this before for you.” Dad’s voice was muffled, but I could feel the apologetic note in it. “I guess I was so wrapped up in my own misery about that time . . .”

“Oh, Dad, this didn’t hurt me any. I can go back next fall.” It was easy to be generous now.

“Your mother can’t understand how I feel about helping your Aunt Eunice, Ellen.” I felt Dad expected me to understand. “I should have managed better back in the beginning with your mother and my family. There should have been some way . . .”

“Do you and Aunt Eunice look alike, Dad?” I asked, partly because I was trying to see her, partly because Dad seemed so sad.

“No, I don’t think so. She was dark. I used to think she was the prettiest girl in town. I brought her back a samovar from Russia, but I don’t suppose she ever used it.”

“Did she . . . was she nice to Mom in the beginning?”

“I think she meant to be. They were so different, of course.”

We were so quiet for a minute that I heard Mom calling from the house. I went outside and Mom was standing in the kitchen doorway. Her face was alive and excited.

“Ben, Ellen, come up here, quick!” she called.

She sounded so urgent we ran. Mom had the radio blaring. She always turned it up too high. We couldn’t hear it at first for the noise of it.

“It’s war!” Mom said as soon as we got to the porch, and the way she said it sent shivers down my back. “The Japs come over Pearl Harbor and bomb it.”

Mom stood with her hands on her hips. She looked like one of the figures you see in pictures of the crowds in Russia. She seemed somehow more foreign. I saw her more clearly than I took in the news.

Dad stood by the radio, listening to every word.

“We can’t do anything else,” he said. His face wasn’t sick or pale, now. I could see how he had gone to war before. Neither Dad nor Mom was thinking about themselves or me. “It’s time we were in!”

Dad was so excited I felt ashamed that I was so quiet. I had never heard war declared before; I had only read about it. Mom sat down on the couch, listening to every word. Her eyes flashed, but she didn’t say anything.

“This’ll make the last war look like a neighborhood fight,” Dad said.

It was two o’clock before we sat down to dinner. All that time the radio had been blaring. Mom mashed the potatoes and peeled the beets with that listening look on her face. Dad wouldn’t stir until the war news was over. He was so excited he wasn’t like himself. I had never really known him before, I felt. I could see how he must have been at Gil’s age.

Mom laughed suddenly. “Ben, you remember how you was so sick you didn’t know there was armistice?”

Dad nodded. “I couldn’t believe it. I thought you were all fooling.”

“Remember, you said, ‘Give me a kiss, then.’ An’ the Army doctor he laugh and say, ‘Go on, kiss him, Anna!’”

“Sure, I remember,” Dad said.

“Yeléna, watch out or your Dad go off to war again!” Mom joked. She gave him a little slap on the shoulder. All their coldness of last night was gone.

I felt a kind of resentment. They were fools. The last war was to blame for Dad’s ill-health ever since, it was to blame for his marrying Mom and all their bitterness and hatred and trouble. I couldn’t understand them. They didn’t even seem to notice that I was quiet.

After a while Dad said, “Well, wheat will go up.”

“Just for little,” Mom said. “Wars are bad after.”

But Dad wasn’t listening. He had gone over to sit by the radio again to eat his dessert. I looked at him.

“Dad, I’d think you’d feel all you did in the last war was wasted. I’d think all the men who were crippled and came back sick like you would feel bitter about another war.” I had to say it.

“What was that, Ellen?” Dad turned down the radio a little so he could hear me, but they were giving some details of the catastrophe at Pearl Harbor; he turned it up again and bent nearer to hear without waiting for me to repeat what I had said.

Warren Harper came just after dinner. He and Dad started in on the war.

“This makes my mind up for me; I’m going into the Army. I’m twenty-seven and I have only one child. It looks as though they’d need plenty of men.”

“Well, you know, I was in the last war,” Dad began, “and . . .” I went into the other room as though I had something to pack. I couldn’t stand it to hear Dad go over all that again. Mom stood by as though she were interested in every word. I wished I were not going back with Warren Harper. I wished I were driving back alone. I had nothing to take, so I picked up the book of poems. Dad wouldn’t do anything but listen to the war news from now on anyway.

“Didn’t I tell you I’d come? You didn’t believe it, though, did you?” Mr. Harper asked, smiling, as we drove out on the highway.

“I didn’t do anything about the bus, though,” I said.

“Have a good time?”

“I was glad to see them and the place,” I said cautiously.

“They’re an interesting pair. Your dad’s certainly excited about the war, isn’t he?”

“How’s Leslie?” I asked, to turn the talk from the war.

“Oh, I don’t know. I brought him a knife back from town and he thanked me politely enough, but he didn’t holler for joy like any ordinary boy would. I took him out to look at the stars last night when I got home. They were as clear as you’d ever want to see. I thought he’d like to learn the name of the constellations, but he got cold and shivered and said he wanted to go in.”

“He probably was cold. Take him out when it’s warmer. In the summer I used to like to lie on the hill back of our house and look at the stars.”

“I won’t be here by then. I’ll be in the Army. Let’s stop and do the town,” he said as we drove down the main street.

“This is something like it,” he exclaimed as the waiter set down our drinks. “Last night I had a glass of beer with a hamburger on my way home. Then when I was out looking at the stars with Leslie I picked him up to carry him over a place where the snow was deep. He said, ‘Dad, you’ve been drinking!’ as though I’d broken all the Ten Commandments. I didn’t tell you that part, but you can see how the star expedition wouldn’t be very successful. I’m afraid he’ll never do anything but dislike me. It’s just as well for him that I’m going into the Army. He’s better off without me.” Mr. Harper ordered another drink.

“That’s not so,” I said quietly. “Give him more time. You don’t have any idea how the life of his mother and father affects a child.”

I had never meant to tell anyone about Ben Webb and Anna Petrovna, but I told Warren Harper, whom I hardly knew. He sat holding his tall glass in his hands, his eyes very bright and sympathetic, his face a little flushed and his hair rumpled from the way he ran his hand over it. I guess I told him because I had just been home and it had all hit me so hard, and because of Leslie. I didn’t know whether he took in all I said or not, but he listened. His eyes hardly left my face. I told him about Gil’s leaving and how I came home and overheard Mom and Dad. I didn’t seem to mind his knowing about Gil.

“That was pretty thick,” he said. “I suppose Leslie overheard us plenty. No wonder a kid gets to hate his parents.”

“Oh, I don’t hate Mom and Dad. If anything, I hate . . . I guess I hate the war. Things wouldn’t have happened just this way except for the last war. And now there’s another war.”

“It’s not the war. People do the damnedest things without wars,” he said thickly.

I couldn’t get him to leave before eight o’clock. We had sat there over three hours. When we left I made him let me drive. He was quiet so long I thought he must have fallen asleep, but he was wide-awake, staring out at the road ahead of us. I liked driving, but it’s lonely with someone so sunk in his own thoughts. The world was black and white and cold. There was nothing soft or indistinct or tender about the night.

I drove all the way to the teacherage and turned the car around. He had spoken only once; that was when I got out of the rut and then landed back in it.

“Not bad!” he said.

“I hope you get home all right,” I said when I got out of the car. “And I don’t know that I blame Leslie,” I added brutally, but partly because I was annoyed that I had talked so much.

He didn’t say a word. The car stood there for a few minutes, then I heard him driving off. The most he could do was to run in a snowbank and have to walk home.