… then there was his own place, warm dark, brown, comfortable, musky as the den of a tobacco smoking bear … thick with the humidor smells of whole families of odd-sized cigars, imported cigarettes, snuffs just waiting to be exploded on the air …
Take all that: away, thought Charlie, you got nothing. Buildings, sure. Anyone can raise a frame, paint a sign to say what might go on inside. But it was people that made the damn thingget.
Hank surfaced in his own long thoughts.
“Guess right now I’m sad. Want to send everyone back to open their shops so I can see what they were up to. Why wasn’t I looking closer, all these years? Hell, hell. What’s got into you, Hank Summers. There’s another Oak Lane on up the line or down the line and people there busy as they are here. Wherever I land, next time I’ll look close, swear to God. Good-bye, Charlie.”
“To hell with good-bye.”
“All right, then, good night.”
And Hank was gone and Charlie was home and Clara was waiting at the screen door with a glass of ice water.
“Sit out awhile?”
“Like everyone else? Why not?”
They sat in the dark on the porch in the chain-hung wooden swing and watched the highway flush and drain, flush and drain with arrivals of headlight and departures of angry red fire like the coals from an immense brazier scattered to the fields.
Charlie drank the water slowly and, drinking, thought: In the old days you couldn’t see the roads die. You felt them gradually fade, yes, lying in bed nights, maybe your mind got hold of some hint, some nudge or commotion that warned you it was sinking away.
But it took years and years for any one road to give up its dusty ghost and another to stir alive. That’s how things were, slow arriving and slow passing away. That’s how things had always been.
But no more. Now, in a matter of hours.
He paused.
He touched in upon himself to find a new thing.
“I’m not mad any more.”
“Good,” said his wife.
They rocked awhile, two halves of a similar content.
“My God, I was stirred up there for awhile.”
“I remember,” she said.
“But now I figure, well … ” he drifted his voice, mostly to himself. “Millions of cars come through every year. Like it or not, the road’s just not big enough, we’re holding up the world, that old road there and this old town.
The world says it’s got to move. So now, on that new road, not one but two million will pass just a shotgun blast away, going where they got to go to get things done they say are important, doesn’t matter if they’re important or not, folksthinkthey are, and thinking makes the game.
If we’d really seen it coming, thought in on it from every side, we’d have taken a steam-driven sledge and just mashed the town flat and said, ‘Drive through!’ instead of making them lay the damn road over in that next clover patch.
This way, the town dies hard, strangled on a piece of butcher string instead of being dropped off a cliff. Well, well.” He lit his pipe and blew great clouds of smoke in which to poke for past mistakes and present revelations. “Us being human, I guess we couldn’t have done but as we did … “
They heard the drugstore clock strike eleven and the Oddfellows Hall clock chime eleven thirty, and at twelve they lay in bed in the dark, each with a ceilingful of thoughts above them.
“Graduation.”
“What?”
“Frank the barber said it and had it right. This whole week feels like the last days of school, years ago. I remember how I felt, how I was afraid, ready to cry, and how I promised myself to live every last moment right up to the time the diploma was in my hand, for God only knew what tomorrow might bring. Unemployment. Depression. War. And then…
.
The End
