thrusts his hands into the pockets of his pea jacket.
Back at the bottom of the hill, they both get out. They open the trunk and try to jack up the rear of the car. They have no flashlight and nothing is easy. The snow at the side of the road is six inches deep and in trying to lift their tires clear of it they jack the rear too high and the car topples sideways and throws the jack upright, with shocking velocity, into the center of the road. “Jesus,” Caldwell says, “this is a way to get killed.” He makes no motion to retrieve the upright so Peter goes and gets it. Holding the notched bar in one hand, he looks along the side of the road for a rock to block the front tires but the snow conceals all such details of earth. His father stands staring at the tops of pines that hover like dark angels high above them in the storm. Caldwell’s thought seems to his son to be describing wide circles, like a scouting buzzard, in the opaque mauve of the heaven above them. Now his thought returns to the problem underfoot and together the father and son prop the jack under the bumper and this time it holds. They discover then that they are unable to fasten the chains. In the dark and cold it is too late for their blind eyes and numb fingers to learn how. For many minutes Peter watches his father squat and grovel in the snow around the tire. In this time no car passes. Route 122 has ceased to bear traffic. His father seems on the verge of clip ping the chain fast when it all slips forward into his hands. With a sob or curse blurred by the sound of the storm Caldwell stands erect and with both hands hurls the tangled web of iron links into the soft snow. The hole it makes suggests a fallen bird.
“You should fasten the catch on the inside of the wheel first,” Peter says. He digs up the chains and goes onto his knees and crawls underneath the car. He imagines his father telling his mother, “I was at my wits’ end and the kid just takes the chains and gets under the car and fastens ‘em neat as a pin. I don’t know where the kid gets his mechanical ability from.” The wheel slips. Several times as he drapes the cumbersome jacket of links around the tire, the tire lazily turns and shucks its coat of mail like a girl undressing. His father holds the wheel still and Peter tries once more. In the underworld beneath the car the muted stink of rubber and the parched smells of rust and gas and grease seem breathed syllables of menace. Peter remembers how the car toppled from the jack, imagines how the springs and axle would crush his skull. One comfort, there is no wind or snowfall here.
There is a little catch that holds the clue to fastening the chains. He finds this catch and, reading with his fingertips, deduces how it operates. Almost he succeeds in snapping it. Only a tiny gap remains to close. He applies a pressure that makes the prostrate length of his body tremble; his kidneys ache sweetly; the metal bites deep into his fingers. He prays; and is appalled to discover that, even when a microscopic concession would involve no apparent sacrifice of principle, matter is obdurate. The catch does not close. He squeals in agony,
His father calls to him, “The hell with it. Get out from under.”
Peter obeys, stands, shakes the snow from his jacket. He and his father stare at each other in disbelief. “I can’t do it,” he says, as if it could be denied.
His father says, “You did a damn sight better than I did. Get into the car, we’ll go into Alton for the night. Once a loser, twice a loser.”
They put the chains into the trunk and try to lower the car on the jack. But even this piece of retreat proves impossible. The small lever supposed to reverse the jack’s direction swings loose and useless. Each shove on the handle lifts the car a notch higher. The fluttering snow pesters their faces; the whine of wind distends their eardrums; the burden on their tempers becomes unendurable. The whole soughing shifting weight of the storm seems hinged on this minute mechanical refusal.
“I’ll fix the bastard,” Caldwell announces. “Stand clear, kid.” He climbs into the car, starts the motor, and drives forward. For a moment the jack upright is caught in the tension of a bow and Peter expects to see it go flying like an arrow into the storm. But the metal of the bumper itself yields under this instant of stress, and the next instant drops the car onto its springs with a sound like icicles snapping. A lip-shaped dent along the lower edge of the rear bumper will always remember this night. Peter gathers up the jack parts and throws them into the trunk and gets into the front seat beside his father.
Aided by the tendency of the rear wheels to slither, Caldwell turns the Buick around and points it toward Alton. But in the hour since they came onto this road another inch of snow has fallen and the packing action of traffic has utterly ceased. The little rise that takes the road out of the trough at the bottom of Coughdrop Hill, a rise so slight that on a fair day it whips by beneath the wheels unnoticed, proves too steep to negotiate. The rear tires never cease slithering. The slits of vision in their windshield go furry and close; the heavenly bin from which the snow has been sifted now bursts its sides. Three times the Buick sloughs forward up the shallow slant to have its motion smothered. The third time, Caldwell grinds his foot into the accelerator and the crying tires swing the rear of the car into the untouched snow at the side of the road. There is a small depression just off the shoulder. Caldwell shifts down to first gear and tries to lift out, but the snow holds them fast in its phantom grip. His lips make a quick silver bubble. Crazed, he shoves the shift into reverse and rams the car backwards so they are hopelessly stuck. He switches off the motor.
A certain peace settles upon their predicament. A delicate friction, like sand being swept up, moves across the top of the car. The overheated motor ticks tranquilly under the hood.
“We’ll have to walk,” Caldwell says. “We’ll walk back to Olinger and stay the night at the Hummels’. It’s less than three miles, can you make it?”
“I’ll have to,” Peter says.
“Jesus, you don’t have any galoshes on or anything.”
“Well neither do you.”
“Yeah, but I’m all shot anyway.” After a pause, he explains, “We can’t stay here.”
“Gah-dammit,” Peter says, “I know it. I know it, stop telling me. Stop telling me things all the time. Let’s go.”
“A father who was half a man would have gotten you up that hill.”
“Then we’d have got stuck someplace else. It’s not your fault. It’s nobody’s fault; it’s God’s fault.
Peter gets out of the car and for a time, of the two, is the leader. They walk in their own ruts up the Jewish Cemetery hill. Peter finds it difficult to put one foot directly ahead of the other, as the Indians were said to have done. The wind keeps tipping him. There is a screen of pines here and though the wind is not powerful it yet has an insistence that penetrates the hair on his head and fingers the bone underneath. The cemetery land is held back from the road by a retaining wall of gray stone; each protruding stone wears a beard of white. Somewhere deep in the opaque smoke Abe Cohn lies snug in his pillared mausoleum. Peter draws comfort from this knowledge. He glimpses an analogy with the way his own ego is sheltered under the mineral dome of his skull. On the flat beyond the cemetery the pines fade away and the wind blows as if minded to pierce his body through and through. He becomes transparent: a skeleton of thoughts. Detached, amused, he watches his feet like blinded cattle slog dutifully through the drifted snow; the disparity between the length of their strides and the immense distance to Olinger is so great that a kind of infinity seems posited in which he enjoys enormous leisure. He employs this leisure to meditate upon the phenomenon of extreme physical discomfort. There is an excising simplicity in it. First, all thoughts of past and future are eliminated, and then any extension via the senses of yourself into the created world. Then, as further conservation, the extremities of the body are disposed of-the feet, the legs, the fingers. If the discomfort persists, if a nagging memory of some more desirable condition lingers, then the tip of the nose, the chin, and the scalp itself are removed from consideration, not entirely anesthetized but deported, as it were, to a realm foreign to the very limited concerns of the irreducible locus, remarkably compact and aloof, which alone remains of the once farflung and ambitious kingdoms of the self. The sensations seem to arrive from a great distance outside himself when his father, now walking beside him and using his body as a shield against the wind for his son, pulls down upon Peter’s freezing head the knitted wool cap he has taken from his own head.
VIII
MY LOVE, listen. Or are you asleep? It doesn’t matter. In West Alton there was the Alton Museum, set among
