Volt: Stories Read Online Free PDF Page B

stiffened.
    Old Saints Highway, Traverson Lane, Birch Road, Hickory, Mayapple: roads driven to school, to dates, roads mapped in memory. They’d taken the long way, avoiding the drive through town, and now cruised a straightaway, snow overfilling the ditches, then Sadie pumped the brakes and they crossed the freight tracks and there sat his home, high on the knob and blending with a gray-brown sky.
    Snow covered everything, covered the tracks and hillside, drifts scaling the barn walls. A pack of whitetail does, undaunted by the truck turning into the drive, huddled in the near field, nibbling the wheat beneath the snow. If I’d been here during deer season, Winslow thought, them does wouldn’t be out there. Now he’d have to ward them off, day after day, or they’d devour the crop. The truck slowed and then stopped by the house, the engine shut down and ticking.
    “Need help inside?” Sadie asked, without looking at him. “Or you think you can make it alone?”

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    Her hair smelled as it’d always smelled, as she helped him down into the rocker. Then she was gone upstairs. The front parlor felt new, its wood paneling painted a pale yellow, and on the wall above the couch hung needlepoint, four rows of five pictures, each in simple white frames, threads brilliant in shades of reds and blues and oranges.
    Sadie returned with his pajamas, sheets, a quilt, and a pillow. She made his bed on the couch. Then she crossed to the rocker and knelt before Winslow, helped him off with his boots. He wanted to kiss her hair, to pull her close. She helped him to the couch, handed him his pajamas, and left the room.
    Winslow struggled changing alone, left his buttons undone, and climbed beneath the covers. He lay in lamplight, listening to a vacuum upstairs. The smell of pot roast filled the house. Then the vacuum stopped and Sadie came downstairs. He heard the oven door open, heard water from the faucet, plates clinking.
    She brought in a plate and set it on the coffee table, handed him a glass of water, made him sit up and take his medicine. She told him to eat if he could. She said she’d see him in the morning. Then she was gone again, her footsteps ascending the stairs. Winslow stared at the plate until his eyes watered. With excruciating effort, he reached behind him and switched off the lamp.

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    Winslow lay awake, dwelling on all the people he’d soon face. The tragedy of a small town was that bygones never wholly dissipated; Winslow still held a grudge against William Gentry, who’d bullied him in grammar school, and could never see pure Annie Phillips, a registered nurse and mother of three, who as a girl skinny-dipped with the high school ball team. Winslow would prefer to get it over with, to stand in the Old Fox Tavern and let the entire town, one by one, slug him in his busted ribs.
    But the grace of Krafton came with the seasons, sowing, reaping, breeding an understanding that last year has no bearing on this one; this crop might be better, or worse, and regardless there’ll be another and then another. In this there was only the future and diligent work, and not emotion but movement, just as the rain falling or crops sprouting was not emotion.
    Winslow decided he’d engage the forthcoming days in the movement of work, and tried to remember how his days had begun at this time last year. He imagined the farm taken to ruin, chickens unfed in their coop, cows bloated, the silo a high mash of seed gone to rot. He was tempted to dress and inspect the outbuildings. But his body wouldn’t allow it.
    Winslow managed to stand and carry a blanket to the rocker by the windows. The sky was clouded, the land black. He could see little beyond the yard, and told himself, as he had over years of taking crops to store, to allow last year’s seed, which grew imperceptibly, day after day, and then was a stalk gone beneath the harvester reels, to vanish from his waking life, to be no more than a ghost in his dreams.

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    They