Chapter 13 The Town That Slept

Hazel came home for Thanksgiving on the Wednesday with two bags of laundry and a tan from a term she described as a health, and she was through the front door and up the stairs and half way along Wren's bedroom before she said anything at all. "You are different," Hazel said. "I am not." "You walk with your chin up." Hazel dropped the second bag on the floor and sat on the end of the bed. "You have walked with your nose in your collarbone since you were eleven. Your father does not notice because he cannot see above the table. I have known you since we were six. Wren. What is it." Downstairs the radio was going, which it went every day of the year, and underneath the radio the oven ticked as it cooled, and there was a smell of sage coming out of the kitchen where her father had left the door open so that she would know he had cooked. "Shut the door," Wren said. Hazel shut the door. They sat on the bed with the blind down and the Hales going past the window, a car every twenty minutes or so, and Wren told it. The bottle in the reeds. The letter with the J. The answer she had put back under the last dry plank on the first night of September, and the answer that had been waiting there, which said he was seventeen too and lived on the west bank. The weeks of it, one night each way. The rain. The flood, and the six nights she had stood in it. The Saturday morning in the light. "You have not told me one word of this since the day school started." "You were in a health." "I was in a health," Hazel agreed, "with a room full of people, and I sent you a photograph of a duck." She put her elbows on her knees. "August. It is the end of November, Wren." "I know what it is." "You have a bridge." "I have a bridge," Wren said, "and a boy on the other side of it, and he has a name, it is Miles, and he is the welder's son at the mill, and he has not told his father and I have told you, and I do not like the arithmetic of that." Hazel got up, went to the window, and stood with her thumb on the blind. "Have you crossed in daylight?" "Yes." "Saturday?" "Saturday. The Sunday after the flood went down. He put his boots off and stood on the gravel in his socks and told me he was frightened of the fourth plank." Wren felt her own mouth go. "Hazel, he told me he was frightened of the fourth plank. He has been walking on that thing in the dark for eleven weeks and the thing he is frightened of is a piece of wood." Hazel turned round. "Right," she said. "Well. I have been waiting all term for something to happen in this town." She came back and sat down. "What do you want me to do?" "Nothing." "Then I will do what I want, which is come and look at him." "You are going to embarrass me." "I am going to be extremely charming and I am going to ask him a practical question about February," said Hazel, "and if he cannot answer it you are to stop writing to him at once, because a boy who has not thought about February has not thought about you." They went down to the bend on Sunday afternoon at two, in daylight, in the flat grey cold of a late November afternoon. Miles was already there with a length of chain in his hand, and he had put his coat on, and he came up the bank and looked at Hazel for slightly too long. "This is Hazel," Wren said. "You are the one who does the birds." Hazel put out her hand. "She says you have been calling a sedge wren a sparrow for six weeks." "It is a small brown bird." "It is a sedge wren. It is small and brown and it is a sedge wren, and she has been putting up with you over it since September, and I would like that on the record." "Yes ma'am," said Miles. They let him work. Wren sat on the gravel and Hazel sat on the gravel and the two of them watched a boy in a good coat put a chain round a rotten rail post and lever it while two women gave him a hard time, and after a while Hazel stopped making jokes and started watching the way he set his feet, and stopped watching that too and started watching the bridge. Then she stood up and walked out to the last dry plank and stood over the place where the bottles had been going in and out of the water all that autumn, and came back, and said the thing she had come to say. "What happens to it in February," she said. "There is ice on that water. You cannot put a lantern out here and you cannot write a letter and you cannot stand on a plank you have said yourself is a liar in the wet. What happens in February." Miles had the chain in both hands and the light going across the water from behind him. "It gets iced over and you stop going near it," he said. "That is the honest answer. It gets iced over and it stands there without anybody, and you wait, and in March the ice goes and the wood is wet and it is the same bridge you left, and you go back to it and you find out whether it was honest with you over the winter." "You are saying the two of you have a three-month argument with a bridge every year." "We have a three-month argument with a bridge every year," Miles said. "It is the only thing in this town that has ever made me work out an answer before opening my mouth. Your friend can keep me." Hazel considered this for as long as it deserved. "Saturdays," she said. "Saturdays," Miles agreed. "In the light." It was dark when they came off the bend. There was ice on the mud at the top of the mill road, thin and grey and breaking underfoot, and the mill windows were on, and above them the workshop roof was lit, which was unusual, because Miles had said Saturdays the men finished at four and the roof light was not touched on a weekend unless there was work. They were a quarter of a mile down the bank when Wren stopped, because down at the bend, out over the black water where the bridge was, there was a light. It was a small light. It was low, about waist height, the way a lantern sits when somebody has hooked it under a deck, and it swung a little and came to rest, and then after a moment it went out. "That was not him," Miles said. He was already moving. "It cannot have been him, he is standing next to me." "I know whose it was not." He was going fast now, up the bank, on the ice, and she had to run to keep level with him. "My father has a hurricane lamp in the workshop. He has had one since before I was born. He keeps it on the shelf by the door, and he has never once in his life carried it out of that shed." "He would not come down here." "My father has not walked on that bank since the water went over the road fifty years ago," Miles said. "So either somebody has taken his lamp, or he has been walking on it all along, and the two of those things is one thing and I do not know what it is yet." They stood on the bank above the bend in the dark, and the light did not come back, and the two of them stayed there a long time, and neither of them said the sentence that was sitting in the middle of them, which was that the bridge had stopped being a thing that two people owned.