Peter Straub - If You Could See Me Now

While the phone trilled at the other end I gazed dumbly through the window facing the lawn and the road, and through the trunks of the walnut trees saw Duane already mounted on his tractor, plying majestically across the field near where the trees began. He reached one end of his course and made the heavy tractor twirl around as easily as a bicycle. On the third ring the receiver was lifted. She did not say hello, and after a moment I spoke myself.

“Rinn? Is that you, Auntie Rinn?”

“Of course.”

“This is Miles, Auntie Rinn. Miles Teagarden.”

“I know who it is, Miles. Remember to speak loudly. I never use this terrible invention.”

“Duane said he told you I was coming.”

“What?”

“Duane said — Auntie Rinn, could I come up to see you this morning? I can’t work, and I couldn’t sleep.”

“No,” she said, as if she already knew.

“May I come? Is it too early for a visit?”

“You know farm people, Miles. Even the oldsters get up and doing early in the day.”

I put on a jacket and walked across the dew-sodden lawn to the Volkswagen. Condensation streamed off the windshield. As I swung into the road where I had seen the Tin Woodsman make her curious and emotionless departure from the boy who could only be Zack. I heard my grandmother’s voice, speaking quite clearly some words she had uttered in my dream. Why did you have to come back ? It was as though she were seated beside me. I could even smell her familiar odor of woodsmoke. I pulled off to the side of the road and wiped my face with my hands. I wouldn’t have known how to answer her.

The trees which began toward the end of the ratted road to Rinn’s house, just where the valley begins to climb up into the hills, had grown taller and thicker. The pale early sunlight came slanting down, spangling the corrugated trunks and the spongy, overgrown earth. A little further along the narrow road, some of the rags of light struck the side of Rinn’s chicken coop, the top of which was fully illuminated by sunlight. It was a big barnlike structure, long and high as a two-story house, painted red; little comic-strip windows like missing pieces of a jigsaw puzzle arbitrarily dotted the side facing me. Further up the rise stood her house, which had once been of white boards but now badly needed paint. The three-room structure looked as though a cobweb had settled over it. The trees had marched right into her tiny area of lawn, and big thick branches wove together over her roof. As I got out of the car, Rinn appeared on her little porch; a moment later she opened the screen door and came outside. She was wearing an ancient blue print dress, calf-high rubber boots and an old khaki army jacket with what seemed to be hundreds of pockets.

“Welcome, Miles,” she said, with that Norwegian lilt in her voice. Her face was more wrinkled than ever, but it was luminous. One of her eyes was covered with a film like milk. “Well. You haven’t been here since you were a boy, and now you’re a man. A nice tall man. You look like a Norwegian.”

“I should,” I said, “with you in my family.” I bent to kiss her, but she held out her hand, and I took it. She wore knitted fingerless gloves, and her hand felt like loose bones wrapped in cloth. “You look wonderful,” I said.

“Oh, goodness. I have coffee on the stove, if you’re a coffee drinker.”

Inside her tiny, overheated kitchen she thrust sticks of wood down into the heart of her stove until the iron pot bubbled. Coffee came out in a thin black stream. “You’re not always up so early,” she said. “Are you troubled?”

“I don’t really know. I’m having trouble getting started on my work.”

“It isn’t your work though, is it, Miles?”

“I don’t know.”

“Men should be workers. My young man was a worker.” Her good eye, almost as pale as Alison’s and a thousand times more informed, examined me over her cup “Duane is a good worker.”

“What do you know about his daughter?” I was interested in her opinion.

“She was misnamed. Duane should have named her Jessie, after my sister. That would have been right, to name her after his mother. The girl needs to be guided. She’s high strung.” Rinn peeled a cloth off a plate loaded with round flat discs of a breadlike substance I knew well “But she is much nicer than she wants you to think.”

“You mean you still make lefsa?” I said, laughing, delighted. It was one of the great treats of the valley.

“Lefsa and sonnbockles. Of course I make them. I can still use a rolling pin. I make them whenever I can see well enough.”

I spread thick butter on a piece and rolled it up into a long cigar shape. It was still like eating bread prepared by angels.

“Are you going to be alone this summer?”

“I’m alone now.”

“It’s better to be alone. Better for you.” She meant me specifically, not mankind in general.

“Well, I haven’t had much luck in my relationships.”

“ Luck ,” she snorted, and hunched further over the table. “Miles, do not court misery.”

“Misery?” I was genuinely startled. “It’s not that bad.”

“Miles, there is great trouble here now. In the valley. You have heard the news. Do not associate yourself with it. You must be alone and apart, doing your work. You are an outsider, Miles, a natural outsider, and people will resent your being near. People know about you. You have been touched with trouble in the past, and you must avoid it now. Jessie is afraid that you will be touched by it.”

“Huh?” It was with talk like this that she had terrified the wits out of me when I was a child.

“You are innocent,” she said — the same words my grandmother had used, in my dream. “But you knew what I am talking about.”

“Don’t worry. No matter how provocative they get, little girls don’t tempt me. But I don’t get what you mean by innocent.”

“I mean that you expect too much,” she said. “I think I am confusing you. Do you wish more to eat or do you care to help me gather my eggs?”

I remembered her comments about work, and stood. I followed her outside and through the trees down the slope to the henhouse. “Go in quietly,” she said. “These birds can be excited easily, and they might suffocate each other in panic.”

Very gently, she opened the door of the tall red structure. A terrible stench came to me first, like ashes and dung and blood, and then my eyes adjusted to the dark and I saw hens sitting on their nests, in tiers and rows like books on a bookshelf. The scene was a parody of my Long Island lecture halls. We stepped inside. A few birds squawked. I was standing in a mess of dirt, sawdust, feathers, a pervasive white substance and eggshells. The smell hung acrid and powerful in the air.

“Watch how I do,” Rinn said. “I can’t see in this light, but I know where they all are.” She approached the nearest nest and inserted her hand between the bird and the straw without at all stirring the hen. It blinked, and continued to stare wildly out from either side of its head. Her hand reappeared with two eggs, and a second later, with another. A few feathers were glued to them with a gray-white fluid. “You start at that end. Miles,” she said, pointing. “There’s a basket on the floor.”

She covered her half before I had coaxed a dozen eggs out of half as many unhappy hens. Duane’s thick bandage made for clumsy work. Then I went up a ladder where the air was even denser and stole more eggs from increasingly agitated birds; one of the last ones pecked me in the hand while I held her three warm products. It was like being stabbed with a spoon.

Finally we were done, and stood outside in the rapidly warming air beneath the looming trees. I inhaled several deep, cleansing breaths. At my side, Rinn said. “Thank you for helping me. You might make a worker some day. Miles.”