The Wintering Read Free

can wash down some pills with?” he had said.
    â€œSuh,” Cole had answered.
    He remembered racing along the softly crushed, red gravel road, his pickup behind the Negro’s, and going around back of a rural store he knew the Sheriff owned. Why not keep the whiskey closer to town, at the jail? he had wondered, going back through the pine-sweet, shining countryside with an old tarpaulin thrown over a case of beer and several bottles of bad Scotch, wishing for a bootlegger who knew more about whiskey. “Hardly no calls for Scotch,” Cole had said. “We gets the cheapest.”
    Now, watching Jessie set down consommé, Almoner wondered whether anything was left to drink and where it was. The soup’s steaming smell thrust upward. It was like the smell of a wet chicken or a wet hound, and suddenly he tasted again the first can of warm beer chasing the first capsule. He remembered little beyond that except a progression of daylights and darks. But what day or week it was now, he had no idea. He had managed, finally, to know nothing but darkness. Spooning soup wearily and without curiosity about those missing days, he recalled a sensation of glitter and gorgeousness, which meant he had spent time on a chaise in the dining room. Imprinted on his memory was the gleam of crystal, in bright sunlight let in through the muscadine, and that would have been the chandelier. He had a connecting memory of some green outdoors scent, lilies-of-the-valley, but not growing in spring’s moist ground along the edges of the porch. He thought the scent had been Amelia’s ritualistic perfume. He remembered opening his eyes and glimpsing her standing in some light-colored, sprigged dress, holding a white patent-leather pocketbook off which sun bounced as dazzling as snow.
    If she had spoken, he might have responded, but she had instead only looked, and closing his eyes, he had kept them resolutely closed, without being able to help his mouth’s corners turning up, like a cat’s mouth. Exasperated, she had turned and gone sharply away, leaving to trail across the air the smell that made him want to possess something as unbelievably sweet. He had seen her as if through one-way glass. That would be his choice now in life, he thought, to see but not to be seen and to know things but not to have to contend with anything else. He had felt stretched beyond himself by forty and had had, then, a surfeit of the feeling for ten years.
    At forty, he had thought life had to be faced as being made up of many shortcomings. And thinking this moment of Inga, he wished there were some way of supposing her somewhere besides in the house. The pain of recalling was too sharp, but something always brought him back to it. He spooned soup rather sullenly, and Jessie, noticing, stood at the sink with a hand kneading her back.
    â€œYou got the misery?” he said, stopping the spoon, solicitously.
    She only mumbled and pretended inability to answer because her lip was too full of snuff, though it was not. He was able to interpret this as awareness of his feelings; their thoughts scattered in varied directions, but in the way she stood and he ate, they meant compassion for each other. He was wondering what point there was to reaching on and on outward into life if, now, he was to be so overcome with some indefinable need that not even Seconal and beer could deaden it. Spoon resting in empty bowl, he thought, staring down at the table and mentally composing a picture which he titled Emptiness.
    â€œIs that axe still on the back porch?” he said.
    â€œWas,” Jessie said.
    Jammed into an old cotton basket beside a saw, which was also rusty, the axe came out, dull-edged and with a scraping sound that set his nerves vibrating as wrongly as musical strings plucked by some untutored hand. And his nerves kept vibrating as they did at the sound of Amelia’s voice. She had followed him into every room of the house, once. He