Elizabeth and After Read Free Page A

began to settle. He opened the door. The wheels were half sunk into the mud.
    McKelvey grabbed the roof and hauled himself to his feet. His knee locked and he had to massage it again before he could limp around the car and
assess
the situation. Thirty years ago he’d dumped a few loads of sand to keep this stretch of swampy track out of the water. At the time he’d thought about solving the problem for eternity by mixing in some gravel and ditching the sides so the water could escape. But that would have been an extra week’s work. Better just to use the road in late November, after the fall rains, when the frost was in the ground and a thin crust of snow lay on top. He would load up his chainsaw and drive back in the old truck with a couple of sandwiches and a thermos of coffee. A few hours later he’d have enough wood to spend the rest of the day splitting and stacking.
    Now the leaves were thick and green. And even though the sky was clear and the sun high, there was a ripe marshy smell.
    Mud had spattered the car’s fenders and doors. McKelvey got onto a dry spot behind the trunk and opened it to search for a shovel. Not that he would have used it.
“Nyet!
Absolutely forbidden,” Dr. Knight had decreed. “No physical exertion. No exercise. Nothing a pregnant woman wouldn’t do.” This last had mystified McKelvey since Elizabeth, when pregnant, had done all sorts of things, many impossible for him even when his knee worked, his heart hadn’t needed a valve job, and that tractor tire around his gut had been just a few extra layers of muscle, beer and bumbleberry cake.
    There was a loud crack. A porcupine that had hoped to scramble unseen up a young maple came crashing through the branches and landed in a juniper bush a few feet away. As it began to waddle off, McKelvey felt something release in his lungs, as if for the last eight years at the R&R, without his even knowing, his breath had been blocked. Now the swamp smellbroke down into the odour of rank ferns, beaver shit, fast-growing marsh grass, spruce pitch, maple bark, decomposing bullrushes, frog breath, honeysuckle, a dozen, a hundred, a thousand different messages that crowded and fluttered through his brain like swarms of moths released from a long-closed trunk. He began to hear the peepers, the frogs, the crackling footsteps of the porcupine, the movement of bird wings through the air, the mud bubbling around the Pontiac he’d taken from Luke Richardson’s lot.
    He reached into his fishing vest, broke off a hunk of cheese with his fingers, wrapped it in salami. He repeated this until the supplies he’d taken from the R&R were used up and the anxious edge in his stomach had settled into a dull digestive warmth. He realized the phone had spooked him out of inspecting the rest of the house. Maybe the bedroom he’d once shared with Elizabeth now had a four-poster with a canopy. The old parlour with wallpaper that had been peeling for sixty years might be a haven warmed by a fireplace with a marble hearth. Or have, built right into the wall, one of those wood-stoves with glass doors through which you could contemplate the fire and remind yourself of the days when you were a Neanderthal roasting up a nice chunk of hairy elephant.
    McKelvey found a few dead branches and pushed them into the mud under the tires for traction. He climbed back into the car. His shoes—heavy and caked with the slick clay-rich mud—attached themselves to the floormats, which he considered might be useful under the wheels if the wood didn’t work. Brute force was for the young and the brainless, those whose bones were still green and pliable. Now was the age of wisdom and cunning. He switched on the motor. It gurgled enthusiastically. McKelvey pushed the accelerator to the floor.
    The motor growled and roared. The wheels spun and whined. Shooting up from under the car came a powerful curtain of mud. The car sank even lower. Underneath all that mud were some rocks McKelvey