Jerry sat down on the couch and tried to read but was made antsy by the grim cinder-block interior of the place, and he watched the cold sunlight through the window gratefully, drinking it in but too weary to get up and go out into it. During each of the seventeen years that Jerry had lived with Karen up in the mountains, the winters had gotten harder and harder for him, psychologically, and though he had not been bothered by it when he was younger, Jerry had come to believe in what the physicians were now calling “seasonal affective disorder,” where a person in a gray climate becomes sadder during the light-stricken, shortened days of winter. His fatigue wasn’t that simple, he knew, but was present on top of any other weariness, and it seemed to him that the debilitating effect of the winter-sadness was cumulative, like that of too many concussions, the true harm of which is sometimes not revealed until years after the initial injury.
Some years, enduring the winter-sadness was like taking a beating, and the flat-water place of their marriage made the beating worse. Karen went days without touching him, and there were days when she did not seem to like it when he touched her. Sometimes, however, right before falling asleep, they would hold hands, in that last half-minute of wakefulness. Had Jerry become a less interesting person over the years? He didn’t think so, but was it possible that a lifetime of stacking rocks, one after the other, had conspired to make her believe that he had? That she had heard and seen all that he had, finally, to offer?
Jerry knew that he wouldn’t be able to be a stonemason forever: already he found he was having to use smaller and smaller rocks, using the larger ones only as capstones to save his strength and energy; and some day, all the wear and tear—cartilage and ligament damage, back failure, arthritis, and finally, general and overwhelming old-man’s weakness—would deprive him of the solace he found in his work, and that saddened him, though he tried not to think about it overmuch.
He disliked the winter more and more each year, resenting the way it covered up all the stones in the quarry so that he had to wait until spring to select the rocks he would be using in his coming year’s work, and he disliked, too, the way the snow covered not just those loose fieldstones on projects unfinished from the autumn before but also all his completed projects. He missed most of all the feeling he got at the end of each day’s work, at dusk, when he would look back with pride at the advance of his work, matching comfortably the advance of the summer day, and of how he would always, then, begin to think of Karen with deep hope and deep love, always with hope and love, and would leave his unfinished rock wall, always unfinished, and head on back home, truly eager for another try, no matter how the day had started out upon leaving home that morning.
In the old days, when Karen had to leave a note for him, she would always sign it, “Love, K,” even if they had had a squabble earlier that day. But now if there has been even the slightest problem, much less an eruption—suppose Jerry has put a stamp on an envelope crookedly, giving rise to the risk, in Karen’s opinion, of the letter’s recipient getting the impression that Jerry is a “hayseed,” then Karen will omit the “Love, K” part and will leave the note, the instructions, unsigned—as if it, love, or the mention or reaffirmation of it, is a reward to be dispensed or taken away dependent upon execution of behavior, or even upon the sheer horoscopical luck, or unluck, of the day. As if it is a commodity, a finite resource prone to being earned and bartered or lost, rather than something that moves in wild currents of breath writhing in gibbous ribbons across the sky.
There at Jim’s old navy base, Jerry sat remembering once again the hope he used to feel at the end of each day’s work, and he watched the bright yellow winter sunlight for a long time before emerging from his saddened paralysis and hauling himself out into the sunlight, where he stood in the cold for a long time, ankle deep in snow in the front yard, with his face turned upward, his arms spread wide and lifted loosely to the sky, eyes shut, and felt dully the sun’s touch upon his bare face, and the faint warmth of it through his eyelids.
He stood like that for a long time, until his arms grew heavy, and even after he had lowered them he remained standing there, head tipped down and shoulders rounded, like an old horse in a barnyard, or an old hound.
…
When Jim awoke, there was little more than an hour left before the second surgery. He was groggy and silent, and though he did not seem to Jerry to be entirely accepting of his fate, whatever that might be, there was a new resolve about him, as if the despair and confusion, though not banished, had been put aside for however long it would take to get through the operation.
In some ways, this brittle steadiness by Jim was harder for Jerry to be around than Jim’s previous worries. It seemed to Jerry now that there was the feeling that a bomb was about to go off, that terror and blackness was but a thin scratch beneath the surface.
Jim knew he’d be wiped
