Little Hills
In the night, and in the snow, they gradually lost the road. The humped ground went away in all directions, without landmark, featureless white in the darkness, and by the time they were sure of being lost, surer of being stuck, there was no way to know how far they had come from the pavement. They were both, or had been, South Dakota people, and this was no blizzard, only a snow that fell straight and thick through the cones of the headlights. They were perhaps a little more annoyed than frightened.
Lyle pulled up the collar of his coat and stepped outside briefly, tramping behind to the trunk, to the old pieced quilt folded up there beside the jack and the jumper cables, and then back to sit beside Claire, close together under the quilt in the front seat of the car. They had brought a suitcase for what would have been the overnight at the house of the eldest child. In a while they opened it, put on cardigans beneath coats, doubled stockings inside shoes.
They spoke, at times, of other snows, other landscapes, and only once of the children, who were no longer children, who would begin to worry now, soon, waiting, looking out through the living room windows into the darkness. Claire remembered, with sudden and unaccustomed clarity, that they had begun to carry a quilt in the car when the children had been still babies, for the going-home-late times with all three sleep-sweaty, legs tangled, in the back seat of the Ford. She thought of saying that to Lyle. But of the two of them, he was the more sentimental, the more prone to long, nostalgic remembrance, and she had a dim, unreasoned dread of that tonight. She said finally, "It's good we had this old blanket," and he made a small sound of agreement, not remembering.
Eventually, in the darkness, and without discussion, they climbed over onto the back seat to lie down together under the quilt. "Oh for Pete's sake," Claire said, and lifted one elbow to fend his hand from her small old breast. She used a tone of exasperation that had been worn down over years to ritual only. He said, with innocent surprise, a ritual voice also, "Oop. Sorry dear, didn't know I had my hand there."
He shifted his weight in the darkness, turning sideways on the narrow bench seat and drawing up his knees. She nested behind him, pressed against the back of the seat with her knees tucked behind his.
"Spoons," he said, reaching around to pat the rise of her hip. "We haven't laid like Spoons since you bought that damned big bed." In the little pause afterward, she could feel him trailing out to the end of the thought. "Can't catch you...hell, can't even find you in that damned bed."
"That's not the bed's fault, you dotty old goat."
"Too much pepper," he said, grumbling. "I read that once. I'm cutting back on my pepper."
She had one arm around his soft middle. Her other arm, pressed under her own body, her bony hip, already had begun to numb with the loss of circulation. She wriggled it out, tried to find a place for it parallel between them without contorting her shoulder. Her neck ached a little too, without a pillow. Finally she bent the arm up, put it under her head. In a moment the hand slept, needling. She pulled it down again.
"What...," Lyle said. By the furred edge of his voice she thought he probably, irksomely, already had dozed off. He slept anywhere, like a child, she not at all without a good firm mattress and a pillow, sheets, a blanket.
"I'm 69 years old. This is not a comfortable way for me to sleep. That's what."
He edged away from her wordlessly, making room, until she was driven to clasp him tighter—he would have fallen or lain down on the floorboards.
"Damned little foreign car," he said, without annoyance.
"That one was your idea," she said.
They slept little or not at all. Lyle occasionally looked at the digital display of the watch, and Claire occasionally asked for a report of the time. Frequently they found new positions, sitting, lying, sitting again. When finally there seemed a little thinning of the darkness inside the car, Lyle rolled the driver's window down and pushed against the vertical pane of snow with a flat plastic folder of car papers from the glove box. The little white wall fell out and away, and a colorless daylight came inside with them.
"Roll up the window, Lyle, for heaven's sake." The light—or the opened window—had made the space inside the car seem suddenly much colder.
She sat on the back seat holding onto the quilt while Lyle went out to clear the exhaust pipe, and when he had the engine going and the heater, she climbed stiffly over the seat and put her hands and feet in the tepid gush of air. She looked past Lyle, out the cleared side window.
"I don't think it snowed too much more after we stopped," she said, making a cautious choice of words, deciding not to give shape to their situation by naming it "lost."
Lyle may have been engaged in something like that himself. He made a low, grumping sound. "They wouldn't know snow in this part of the country if it fell on them." He put his thick, big-knuckled hands under the heater vent, rubbed them briskly together. "I'll lay odds the plow's already come by on that road back there."
In pale daylight they trudged along the car's obliterated back trail, lifting feet high, setting them down carefully in knee-deep powder. Lyle held her hand: he was disposed to think of her as frail, though not as a result of old age, simply old fictions. They went back along a flattish track, the way they must have come in the car, to another flat place that seemed to wind between rises and may have been the road. Lyle kicked down through the snow seeking the asphalt, while Claire stood with her hands in her coat pockets, staring out against the gray. The land seemed only vaguely like the one they had traveled in other weather, low smooth rises and sometimes in the gullies clumps of box elder, or along the slopes the wide-crowned canyon oaks, looking hunched now under shawls of snow.
"Lyle, isn't that a house?"
He left off his kicking and followed where she was pointing, south and east, a small chip of darkness beside the larger, rounder form of a single big tree. He put one hand flat above his eyes, peering. He was the long-sighted one, without eyeglasses even now, on the day when his children would have celebrated his 73rd birthday. "Might be," he said finally.
They left the place that might have been a road and went toward the place that might have been a house, striking out for it in a straight line, high-stepping in the snow. The slopes that had seemed trivial became now unexpectedly formidable. In a little while Lyle left off holding her hand, and they each climbed alone, swinging arms to balance, gusting clouds of their breath in the chill air.
They often were out of sight of the house—if that was what it was—and the distance gradually seemed to dilate. In the clear, chalk-gray light, without curbs or neighbors lawns to measure against, they remained always a mile from it. The snow began to warm and weaken, and their shoes made loose plopping sounds when they set them in the slush. Claire, under the coat, the wool sweater, the doubled stockings, began to sweat.
Once, Lyle stood bent with his hands resting on his knees and called to her. "Maybe we ought to go back to the car."
There had been a moment, as the first cold light had come in the opened window, when she had seen suddenly, clearly, a little headline: Elderly Couple Found Dead in Stranded Auto. But now, in the wet flat daylight, she was only miserable and sodden and tired, and there was no melodrama in any of this, or even the possibility of it. And she was more stubborn then he, liked it less when they must turn back from anything they'd started for. She stood wide-legged, resting her fists on her hips, considering Lyle's pink, unpressed face. "We're more than half there now, don't you think?"
So they went on over the little hills.
It was, in fact, a house. Claire was able to see that finally from the next to last hillock, standing higher there where stones had been piled up or had fallen down in a sort of cairn.
"Someone's little summer cabin," Claire said, and looked back to Lyle for confirmation. He toiled up to the rocks without lifting his head. His mouth was open, puckered, sucking in the air with a wheeze like an asthmatic.
Old man, she thought suddenly. She was, despite his little masculine fantasies, the harder and stronger one, ever had been. She would outlive him. She had chided him with that occasionally, but the conceit, the mischief went out of it now all at once, and it lay deflated and heavy and cold against her chest.
When he had come up to where she was, she put one hand on his arched back, patting through the bulk of his clothes.
"Poor old baby," she said, teasing a little, irresistibly.
"Out of shape," he said, all on one panting exhale of air. She waited with one hand still on his back while he gained his breath. "I'm gonna start walking more," he said. "Read that, more than once. Walking is better for you than that jogging business." He straightened stiffly, squinting out toward the small house. "Well hell," he said. "Won't be anybody there. No phone either. Should've stayed with the car or followed up the road."
Claire looked behind them. From where they stood, there was no seeing the car, just the broken track of their feet going away across the snow, and she had a sudden, not clear, premonition, one of several now in this strange long day. As she looked around again at Lyle, he sat down without warning in the watery snow.
She made a quick small sound of surprise, of embarrassed amusement, standing there above him. It was rather a long moment later before she was able to make a truer sound, looking down on the face he turned up to her, white against the whitened stones.
"Lyle. Oh Lyle. Oh."
It had been a great, childish fear of his that he might be buried or burned mistakenly when he was not yet truly dead. There were occasional small pieces in the newspaper, some person who sat up suddenly or blinked an eye as the mortician readied his tools, and Lyle would always fold the page there and tap it with his finger and hand it over to her to read. "Now don't you bury me until I'm stone cold."
She sat beside him through the rest of the morning, with her sweater folded up under his head, and she held his hand until the hand she held was utterly cold and stiff and sooty gray, like the snow that lay in little icy doilies on the rocks around them.
At one point early on, she wept a little. But, as had been the case now for several years, she found tears less satisfying and less necessary than they once had been. Afterward she only sat beside him, holding his hand, with her chill wet feet tucked under her buttocks.
Finally she went on the rest of the way to the little cabin, found it silent, locked, the windows shuttered. She'd had in mind that she might find something there, a blanket or a sheet, something, to cover Lyle's body. When there was none, she went back to sit beside him again. As she came back from that distance, his body lying on the snow seemed quite small, unprotected. She found she was unwilling to go off again, to strike out for the car, with Lyle lying so uncovered.
Sometime in the late afternoon a little snow began to fall again, fine and brittle, the flakes gathering individually in Lyle's eyelashes, the sparse hair along his brow, the seams beside his nose. She had begun, by then, to think of covering his body with stones, with the stones that were piled up or had fallen down all around them. But in the snowfall, in her dry, griefless fatigue, covering him was more easily done. She simply waited while he was settled beneath this more gentle comforter.
And she slept a little, finally, dreaming she was a child, lifted and carried sleep-heavy against her daddy's chest, her long thin legs dangling cold beneath the carriage robe.
Northwest Magazine, March 22, 1987.