Alice Munro - Too Much Happiness

The situation, which seemed at first so unreal to him, is getting to seem more natural. Going along on hands and elbows and the one knee, close to the ground, testing a log for rot, then pulling himself over it on his stomach, getting his hands full of rotten leaves and dirt and snow-he can’t keep his gloves on, can’t get the proper hold and feel of things on the bush floor except with his cold bare scratched hands-he is no longer surprised at himself. He doesn’t think anymore about his ax and his saw back there, though at first he could hardly pull himself away from them. He scarcely thinks back as far as the accident itself. It happened, no matter how. The whole thing no longer seems in the least unbelievable or unnatural.

There is a fairly steep bank to get up, and when he reaches it he takes a breather, relieved to have come this far. He warms his hands inside his jacket, one at a time. For some reason he thinks of Diane in her unbecoming red ski jacket and decides that her life is her life, there is not much use worrying about it. And he thinks of his wife, pretending to laugh at the television. Her quietness. At least she’s fed and warm, she isn’t some refugee shuffling along the roads. Worse things happen, he thinks. Worse things.

He starts up the bank, digging in his elbows and his sore but serviceable knee where he can. He keeps going; he grits his teeth as if that will keep him from sliding back; he grabs at any exposed root or halfway-sturdy stem that he can see. Sometimes he slides, his hold breaks, but he gets himself stopped and inches upwards again. He never raises his head to judge how far he still has to go. If he pretends the incline goes on forever, it’ll be a kind of bonus, a surprise, to get to the top.

It takes a long time. But he pulls himself onto level ground at last, and through the trees ahead and the falling snow he can see the truck. The truck, the old red Mazda, a faithful old friend, miraculously waiting. Being on the level raises his expectations of himself again and he gets onto his knees, going easy, easy on the bad leg, rises shakily onto his good leg, dragging the other, swaying like a drunk. He tries a sort of hop. No good-he’d lose his balance that way. He tries a little weight on the bad leg, just gently, and realizes that the pain could make him black out. He sinks back to the old position and crawls. But instead of crawling through the trees towards the truck he turns at right angles and makes for where he knows the track to be. When he gets there he begins to make better time, crawling over the hard ruts, the mud that has thawed in the daylight but is now starting to freeze again. It’s cruel on the knee and his palms but otherwise so much easier than the route he had to take before that he feels almost light-headed. He can see the truck ahead. Looking at him, waiting for him.

He’ll be able to drive. So lucky the damage is to the left leg. Now that the worst is over a lot of vexing questions come at him, along with his relief. Who will go and get the saw and the ax for him, how can he explain to anybody just where to find them? How soon will the snow cover them up? When will he be able to walk?

No use. He pushes all that away, raises his head to get another encouraging look at the truck. He stops again to rest and warm his hands. He could put his gloves on now, but why ruin them?

A large bird rises out of the bush to one side of him and he cranes his neck to see what it is. He thinks it’s a hawk, but it could be a buzzard. If it’s a buzzard will it have its eye on him, thinking it’s in luck now, seeing he’s hurt?

He waits to see it circle back, so he can tell what it is by the manner of its flight, and its wings.

And while he’s doing that, while he’s waiting, and taking note of the bird’s wings-it is a buzzard-he is also getting a drastically new idea about the story that has preoccupied him for the last twenty-four hours.

The truck is moving. When did it start? When he was watching the bird? At first just a little movement, a wobble in the ruts-it could almost be a hallucination. But he can hear the engine. It’s going. Did somebody just get into it while he was distracted, or was somebody waiting in it all the time? Surely he locked it, and he has the keys with him. He feels his zipped pocket again. Someone stealing the truck in front of his eyes and without the keys. He hollers and waves, from his crouched position-as if that would do any good. But the truck isn’t backing into the turnaround to drive out; it’s bumping along the track straight at him, and now the person driving it is honking the horn, not in a warning but a greeting way, and slowing down.

He sees who it is.

The only person who has the other set of keys. The only person it could be. Lea.

He struggles to get his weight onto the one leg. She jumps out of the truck and runs to him and supports him.

“I just went down,” he tells her, panting. “It was the dumbest damn thing I ever did in my life.” Then he thinks to ask how she got here.

“Well, I didn’t fly,” she says.

She came in the car, she says-she speaks just as if she’d never given up driving at all-she came in the car but she left it back at the road.

“It’s way too light for this track,” she says. “And I thought I might get stuck. But I wouldn’t’ve, the mud’s froze hard.

“I could see the truck,” she says. “So I just walked in and when I got to it I unlocked it and got in and sat there. I figured you’d be coming back soon, seeing it’s snowing. But I never figured you’d be doing it on your hands and knees.”

The walk, or maybe the cold, has brightened her face and sharpened her voice. She gets down and looks at his ankle, says she thinks it’s swollen.

“Could have been worse,” he says.

She says this was the one time she hadn’t been worried. The one time she wasn’t and she should have been. (He doesn’t bother telling her that she hasn’t shown worry about anything for a matter of months.) She didn’t have a single premonition.

“I just came to meet you to tell you,” she says, “because I couldn’t wait to tell you. This idea I got when the woman was working on me. Then I saw you crawling. And I thought, Oh my God .”

What idea?

“Oh that,” she says. “Oh-well, I don’t know what you’ll think. I could tell you later. We gotta get your ankle fixed.”

What idea?

Her idea is that the outfit Percy heard about doesn’t exist. Percy heard some talk but not about some strangers getting a license to log the bush. What he heard was all about Roy himself.

“Because that old Eliot Suter is all big talk. I know that family, his wife was Annie Poole’s sister. He’s going round blowing about the deal he got and added on to it quite a bit and first thing what have you? Ends up the River Inn for good measure and a hundred cords a day. Somebody drinking beer and listening in on somebody else drinking beer and there you are. And you have got a kind of a contract-I mean you’ve got an agreement-”

“It may be stupid all right-” Roy says.

“I knew you’d say that but you think about it-”

“It may be stupid but it’s the same idea I had myself about five minutes ago.”

And this is so. This is what came to him when he was looking up at the buzzard.

“So there you are,” Lea says, with a satisfied laugh. “Everything remotely connected with the inn, it just turns into some big story. Some big-money kind of a story.”

That was it, he thinks. He was hearing about himself. All the ruction comes back to himself.

The bulldozer isn’t coming, the men with the chain saws are not converging. The ash, the maple, the beech, the ironwood, the cherry, are all safe for him. For the time being, all safe.