William Gass - In the Heart of the Heart of the Country

I jumped up and ran to the kitchen only stopping and going back for the gun and then running to the closet for the pail which I dropped with a terrible clatter. The tap gasped. The dipper in the pail beneath the sink rattled. So I ran to the fire and began to poke at it, the logs tumbling, and then I beat the logs with the poker so that sparks flew in my hair.

I crouched down behind a big chair in a corner away from the fire. Then I remembered I’d left the gun in the kitchen. My feet were sore and bare. The room was full of orange light and blackened shadows, moving. The wind whooped and the house creaked like steps do. I was alone with all that could happen. I began to wonder if the Pedersens had a dog, if the Pedersen kid had a dog or cat maybe and where it was if they did and if I’d known its name and whether it’d come if I called. I tried to think of its name as if it was something I’d forgot. I knew I was all muddled up and scared and crazy and I tried to think god damn over and over or what the hell or jesus christ, instead, but it didn’t work. All that could happen was alone with me and I was alone with it.

The wagon had a great big wheel. Papa had a paper sack. Mama held my hand. High horse waved his tail. Papa had a paper sack. We both ran to hide. Mama held my hand. The wagon had a great big wheel. High horse waved his tail. We both ran to hide.

Papa had a paper sack. The wagon had a great big wheel. Mama held my hand. Papa had a paper sack. High horse waved his tail. The wagon had a great big wheel. We both ran to hide. High horse waved his tail. Mama held my hand. We both ran to hide. The wagon had a great big wheel. Papa had a paper sack. Mama held my hand. High horse waved his tail. Papa had a paper sack. We both ran to hide. Papa had a paper sack. We both ran to hide.

The wind was still. The snow was still. The sun burned on the snow. The fireplace was cold and all the logs were ashy. I law stiffly on the floor, my legs drawn up, my arms around me. The fire had gone steadily into gray while I slept, and the night away, and I saw the dust float and glitter and settle down. The walls, the rug, the furniture, all that I could see from my elbow looked pale and tired and drawn up tight and cramped with cold. I felt I’d never seen these things before. I’d never seen a wasted morning, the sick drawn look of a winter dawn or how things were in a room where things were stored away and no one ever came, and how the dust came gently down.

I put my socks on. I didn’t remember at all coming from behind the chair, but I must have. I got some matches from the kitchen and some paper twists out of a box beside the fireplace and I put them down, raking the ashes aside. Then I put some light kindling on top. Pieces of orange crate I think they were. And then a log. I lit the paper and it flared up and flakes of the kindling curled and got red and black and dropped off and finally the kindling caught when I blew on it. It didn’t warm my hands any, though I kept them close, so I rubbed my arms and legs and jigged, but my feet still hurt. Then the fire growled. Another log. I found I couldn’t whistle. I warmed my back some. Outside snow. Steep. There were long hard shadows in the hollows of the drifts but the eastern crests were bright. After I’d warmed up a little I walked about the house in my stocking feet, and snagged my socks on the stairs. I looked under all the beds and in all the closets and behind most of the furniture. I remembered the pipes were froze. I got the pail from under the sink and opened the door to the back porch against a drift and scooped snow in the pail with a dipper. Snow had risen to the shoulders of the snowman. The pump was banked. There were no tracks anywhere.

I started the stove and put snow in a kettle. It always took so much snow to make a little water. The stove was black as char. I went back to the fireplace and put more logs on. It was beginning to roar and the room was turning cheerful, but it always took so much fire. I wriggled into my boots. Somehow I had a hunch I’d see a horse.

The front door was unlocked. All the doors were, likely. He could have walked right in. I’d forgot about that. But now I knew he wasn’t meant to. I laughed to see how a laugh would sound. Again. Good.

The road was gone. Fences, bushes, old machinery: what there might be in any yard was all gone under snow. All I could see was the steep snow and the long shadow lines and the hard bright crest about to break but not quite breaking and the hazy sun rising, throwing down slats of orange like a snow fence had fallen down. He’d gone off this way yet there was nothing now to show he’d gone; nothing like a bump of black in a trough or an arm or leg sticking out of the side of a bank like a branch had blown down or a horse’s head uncovered like a rock; nowhere Pedersen’s fences had kept bare he might be lying huddled with the horse on its haunches by him; nothing even in the shadows shrinking while I watched to take for something hard and not of snow and once alive.

I saw the window I’d broke. The door of the barn hung ajar, banked steeply with snow. The house threw a narrow shadow clear to one end of the barn where it ran into the high drift that Hans had tunneled in. Higher now. Later I’d cut a path out to it. Make the tunnel deeper maybe. Hollow the whole bank like a hollow tree. There was time. I saw the oaks too, blown clean, their twigs about their branches stiff as quills. The path I’d taken from the barn to the house was filled and the sun was burning brightly on it. The wind had curled in and driven a steep slope of snow against the house where I’d stood. As I turned my head the sun flashed from the barrel of pa’s gun. The snow had risen steeply around him. Only the top of the barrel was clear to take the sun and it flashed squarely in my eye when I turned my head just right. There was nothing to do about that till spring. Another snowman, he’d melt. I picked my way back to the front of the house, a dark spot dancing in the snow ahead of me. Today there was a fine large sky.

It was pleasant not to have to stamp the snow off my boots, and the fire was speaking pleasantly and the kettle was sounding softly. There was no need for me to grieve. I had been the brave one and now I was free. The snow would keep me. I would bury pa and the Pedersens and Hans and even ma if I wanted to bother. I hadn’t wanted to come but now I didn’t mind. The kid and me, we’d done brave things well worth remembering. The way that fellow had come so mysteriously through the snow and done us such a glorious turn — well it made me think how I was told to feel in church. The winter time had finally got them all, and I really did hope that the kid was as warm as I was now, warm inside and out, burning up, inside and out, with joy.

1

I call her Mrs. Mean. I see her, as I see her husband and each of her four children, from my porch, or sometimes when I look up from my puttering, or part my upstairs window curtains. I can only surmise what her life is like inside her little house; but on humid Sunday afternoons, while I try my porch for breeze, I see her hobbling on her careful lawn in the hot sun, stick in hand to beat her scattered children, and I wonder a lot about it.

I don’t know her name. The one I’ve made to mark her and her doings in my head is far too abstract. It suggests the glassy essence, the grotesquerie of Type; yet it’s honestly come by, and in a way it’s flattering to her, as if she belonged on Congreve’s stage. She could be mean there without the least particularity, with the formality and grandeur of Being, while still protected from the sour and acrid community of her effect, from the full sound and common feel of life; all of which retain her, for me, on her burning lawn, as palpable and loud and bitter as her stinging switch.