Too much happiness_ stories - Alice Munro [103]
The walk, or maybe the cold, has brightened her face and sharpened her voice. She gets down and looks at his ankle, says she thinks it’s swollen.
“Could have been worse,” he says.
She says this was the one time she hadn’t been worried. The one time she wasn’t and she should have been. (He doesn’t bother telling her that she hasn’t shown worry about anything for a matter of months.) She didn’t have a single premonition.
“I just came to meet you to tell you,” she says, “because I couldn’t wait to tell you. This idea I got when the woman was working on me. Then I saw you crawling. And I thought, Oh my God.”
What idea?
“Oh that,” she says. “Oh—well, I don’t know what you’ll think. I could tell you later. We gotta get your ankle fixed.”
What idea?
Her idea is that the outfit Percy heard about doesn’t exist. Percy heard some talk but not about some strangers getting a license to log the bush. What he heard was all about Roy himself.
“Because that old Eliot Suter is all big talk. I know that family, his wife was Annie Poole’s sister. He’s going round blowing about the deal he got and added on to it quite a bit and first thing what have you? Ends up the River Inn for good measure and a hundred cords a day. Somebody drinking beer and listening in on somebody else drinking beer and there you are. And you have got a kind of a contract—I mean you’ve got an agreement—”
“It may be stupid all right—” Roy says.
“I knew you’d say that but you think about it—”
“It may be stupid but it’s the same idea I had myself about five minutes ago.”
And this is so. This is what came to him when he was looking up at the buzzard.
“So there you are,” Lea says, with a satisfied laugh. “Everything remotely connected with the inn, it just turns into some big story. Some big-money kind of a story.”
That was it, he thinks. He was hearing about himself. All the ruction comes back to himself.
The bulldozer isn’t coming, the men with the chain saws are not converging. The ash, the maple, the beech, the ironwood, the cherry, are all safe for him. For the time being, all safe.
Lea is out of breath with the effort of supporting him, but able to say, “Great minds think alike.”
This is not the moment to mention the change in her. No more than you’d call your congratulations to somebody up on a ladder.
He has knocked his foot hoisting himself—and partly being hoisted—into the passenger seat of the truck. He groans, and it’s a different kind of groan than would come out of him if he was alone. It’s not that he means to dramatize the pain, just that he takes this way of describing it to his wife.
Or even offering it to his wife. Because he knows that he isn’t feeling quite the way he thought he would if her vitality came back to her. And the noise he makes could be to cover that lack, or excuse it. Of course it’s natural that he’d feel a bit cautious, not knowing if this is for good, or just a flash in the pan.
But even if it is for good, even if it’s all good there’s something more. Some loss fogging up this gain. Some loss he’d be ashamed to admit to, if he had the energy.
The dark and the snow are too thick for him to see beyond the first trees. He’s been in there before at this time, when the dark shuts down in early winter. But now he pays attention, he notices something about the bush that he thinks he has missed those other times. How tangled up in itself it is, how dense and secret. It’s not a matter of one tree after another, it’s all the trees together, aiding and abetting one another and weaving into one thing. A transformation, behind your back.
There’s another name for the bush, and this name is stalking around in his mind, in and out of where he can almost grasp it. But not quite. It’s a tall word that seems ominous but indifferent.
“I left the ax,” he says mechanically. “I left the saw.”
“So what if you did. We’ll find somebody to go and get them.”
“And there’s the car too. Are you going to get out and drive