If You Could See Me Now Read Online Free PDF Page A

momentarily high.
    —
    But between the bridge and my grandmother’s farmhouse were many more landmarks—I knew the roads, the few buildings, even the trees by rote from my childhood, when they had been all washed in the glow of being on vacation—all of them important, but at least three of them vital. At the first crossroads past the bridge I left the highway, which continued, going over another, low metal bridge, on to Arden, and joined the narrower road into the valley. At the very edge of the entrance to the valley, when one first becomes aware of the wooded hills sloping up from the far side of the fields, was the yet narrower and rougher road to Auntie Rinn’s house. I wondered what had happened to that sturdy little wooden structure now that the old woman was surely dead. Of course children have no proper idea of the ages of adults, forty to a ten-year-old is only a blink away from seventy, but Auntie Rinn, my grandmother’s sister, had always been old to me—she was not one of the fat vital shouting farm women conspicuous at church picnics in the valley, but of the other common physical type, drawn and thin, almost stringy from youth on. In old age, these women seem weightless, transparencies held together by wrinkles, though many of them work small farms with only the mostnecessary assistance. But Rinn’s day had long passed, I was sure: my grandmother had died six years before, aged seventy-nine, and Rinn had been older than her sister.
    Rinn had owned a considerable reputation for eccentricity in the valley, and visiting her always partook a bit of the adventurous—even now, knowing that the old wraith’s home was probably inhabited by a red-faced young farmer who would prove to be my cousin at several removes, even now the little road up the hill to her house looked eerie, winding up past the fields to the trees. Her house had been so thickly surrounded by trees that little sunlight had ever fought through to her windows.
    I think Rinn’s oddness had been rooted in her spinsterhood, always something of an anomaly in farm country where fertility is a sign of grace. Where my grandmother had married a neighboring young farmer, Einar Updahl, and prospered, Rinn had been tenuously engaged to a young Norwegian she never met. The match was arranged by aunts and uncles in Norway. It is the only sort of engagement I can imagine Rinn accepting—to a man thousands of miles away, a man in no danger of impinging upon her life. The story, as I remember it, was that the young man ceased to threaten Rinn’s independence at the very time he drew nearest to it: he died on board the boat bringing him to America. Everyone in the family, save Rinn, thought this was a tragedy. She’d had a house built for her by her brother-in-law, my grandfather, and she insisted on moving into it. Years later, when my mother was a child, my grandmother had visited Rinn and come upon her talking volubly in the kitchen.
Are you talking to yourself now
, asked my grandmother.
Of course not
, said Rinn.
I’m talking to my young man
. I never saw any sign that she was on excessively familiar terms with the departed, but she did look as though she werecapable of tricks not available to most of us. I knew two versions of the story of Rinn and the heifer: in the first, Rinn was walking past a neighbor’s farm when she looked at his livestock, wheeled around and marched up the track to his house. She took him down to the road and pointed to a heifer in the pen and said that animal will die tomorrow, and it did. This is the predictive version. In the causal version, the neighboring farmer had offended Rinn somehow, and she took him into the road and said, that heifer will die tomorrow unless you stop—what? Crossing my land? Diverting my water? Whatever it was, the farmer laughed at her, and the heifer died. The causal version was certainly mine. As a child I was scared to death of her—I had half-suspected that one glance of those washed-out