Old Sign

Chapter One

He loaded the truck three times and got it wrong all three.

The first time he put the wall tent in, because the wall tent goes in, and he had it in the bed and strapped down before he stopped and stood there with his hand on the tailgate and worked out that there was no season, and no camp, and nobody on any particular piece of ground expecting him. He took it back out. It went in the corner of the garage where it had sat since the middle of November, and it went down in the same rectangle it had made in the dust, because he put it down in the same place.

The second time he did not put the tent in, and got about nine miles up the road in his head, and turned the whole thing around in a driveway he had never pulled out of.

The third time he put the tent in.

The cots were in the rack over the tent, both of them, in their bags, and he got one down and put it in the bed and stood there and looked at the other one.

He had put that second cot up every October since 2020. Sheet, blanket, pillow, folded down, on the left side, the way it went, and he had never once said out loud who it was for and had never needed to.

He left it in the rack.

That was the twenty-sixth of April, a Friday, at a quarter of six in the morning, and the yard light was still on and the grass was wet and there was a robin going at it somewhere down the street toward the Dillons'.

Clothes were the problem.

He had hunting clothes, which is wool and canvas and everything the color of a dead leaf, and he had work clothes, which is what he had welded in for thirty years and what he still put on to cut the grass, and he had one suit he had bought in 2016 for a wedding and had worn four times since to funerals. There was nothing in the middle of that. He stood in front of a closet at six in the morning and understood that he was sixty-four years old and did not own a shirt he would want to be seen in at a restaurant with a woman in it.

He put four shirts in a bag. Two of them were the same shirt.

Then he went back out to the garage.

The bench was the bench. The pegboard was over it with the outline of every tool on it in black marker in Sarah's handwriting, and most of the outlines still had the right tool in them, and the small vise grips were on the hook where the small vise grips go.

The radio was on the bench.

It had been on the bench since the seventeenth of November. Zenith, forty-seven, wood cabinet, and he had it working in the sense that it drew power and got warm and put out a low even hum with nothing on top of it, and he had spent four days in a sling in November putting it back together one-handed and had not got one station out of it yet.

He looked at it for a while.

Then he shut the garage door and did not take it.

He got about four steps and came back and put the door up again.

The little stick welder was under the bench in a milk crate with the leads coiled on top of it and a hood, and he had carried that outfit to about two hundred jobs on his own time and had not had it out since the summer before Sarah died.

There was a box of seven-eighteens in the crate that had sat four summers in an unheated garage, and he took it out and set it on the bench and left it there, because a low hydrogen rod that has been damp is not a rod any more, it is a thing that scratches and pops and lays down a bead full of holes and lies to you the whole time. He put an unopened sleeve of six-elevens in the crate in its place. Six-elevens do not care where they have been.

He put it in the truck.

He would tell you now that he could not have given you one reason, and that is the truth, and it is also the truth that he did not stand there and think about it. He picked it up and put it in the bed and put the tarp over it, and then he shut the door for the second time and went in the house.

Sal came over at ten of seven, which was not a thing Sal did, because Sal did not get up at ten of seven for anybody living. He came in the back without knocking. He had a bag of rolls under his arm and he stood in the kitchen and looked at the four shirts folded on a chair.

"Two of those are the same shirt."

"They're not the same shirt."

"Ray."

"One of them's got a pocket."

Sal put the rolls on the counter. He got a plate down out of the cabinet, the wrong cabinet, one-handed, and looked at it and put it back.

"How long?"

"I don't know."

"That's not an answer, that's a thing people say instead of an answer."

"I don't know, Sal."

"Two weeks. Three weeks. A month." Sal turned around and put both hands flat on the counter. "It's not a hard question. It's got a number in it."

Ray got the percolator going because his hands wanted something.

"I'm going up," he said. "That's what I've got."

"All right."

"That's the whole of it."

"All right," Sal said again, and let it sit, which in thirty-one years he had not done, and Ray turned around and looked at him.

Sal was doing something with his mouth.

"I want to say a thing," he said, "and then I'm going to eat one of those rolls and go home, because my sister's coming at nine and if I'm not there she goes through the mail."

"Go ahead."

"I wrote it down."

"Wrote what down."

"On the calendar." Sal got his phone out of his shirt pocket the way a man does when he has already found the picture and put it away and found it again. "There. That's the twenty-sixth."

Ray took the phone and held it out at the distance he holds things and got his glasses down off the top of his head.

It was the calendar off the refrigerator on Sal's kitchen wall. Knights of Columbus, a bridge on it, April. And in the square for the twenty-sixth, in pen, in Sal Petrucci's terrible handwriting:

RAY GOES UP.

"When'd you write that?"

"November."

He handed the phone back.

"I told you Tuesday," he said.

"You told me Tuesday."

"Sal."

"I wrote it in November," Sal said, "the week you got home, and I want you to know that, and I want you to know I'm not sore about it, and I want you to know I noticed. That's the three things. That's all of it and I'm done."

He took a roll out of the bag and put it in his coat pocket, which is not where a roll goes.

"You're not going to say anything," he said.

"No."

"That's fine."

"Sal."

"That's fine, Ray. I didn't come over here for a speech, I've got a sister coming at nine." He got the door with two fingers. "Call me Sunday. Not because you have to. Because I'll be sitting there."

He went out and Ray heard the car door and heard him take three tries getting the seat right, the way he did, and then the car went off down toward Bristol Road.

Ray ate one of the rolls standing up at the counter.

He got out at twenty past seven.

The way north is four and a half hours if you do not stop and about five and a half if you do, and he had done it forty times and not one of them in April.

That was the thing he could not get used to for the first two hours. In October the country opens up. The leaf comes off and the ridges go from a green wall to a set of bones, and you can see three hundred yards into timber you could not see forty into in August, and every mile of that drive is a mile of the ground showing you what it is. In April it does the other thing. Everything was coming on at once. The bottoms were already out, and the sidehills were coming, and the tops were still bare and gray and about a week behind the rest of it, and the whole business was closing rather than opening.

He drove through it and could not read one foot of it and it bothered him more than he would have said out loud.

He stopped for gas at the place in Lock Haven and got a coffee he did not want.

Somewhere past Renovo he came up on the sign for the road that goes over toward Cross Fork and he took his foot off the gas without deciding to, and then put it back on, and went by.

The creek was up.

That he did know about. He came over the top and down into the Kettle and the water was doing what it does the last week of April, which is running high and hard and the color of tea with the light going through it, and there was a fellow in it below the bridge in waders up past his belt, casting badly and happily, and Ray slowed down to look at him the way you slow down to look at a man doing a thing you have done.

He did not turn off at the top road.

He wanted to. He had it worked out in about four seconds: down into the flat, look at the fire ring, look at where the tent goes, be back on the road inside twenty minutes. It was a good plan and it took no time at all and there was no reason in the world not to do it.

He went past the top road at fifty-five and did not look up it.

He got into Coudersport at ten of one in the afternoon.

It was the same town. He had been expecting it to have done something. The bank was the bank and the hardware store was the hardware store and there was a kid on a bicycle going the wrong way up North Main exactly the way there had been a kid on a bicycle going the wrong way up North Main in October, and it might have been the same kid, and Ray sat at the light and had the strong and stupid feeling that the whole place had been standing there since November waiting for him to come back and see it.

The state store had four reds on the shelf. He did not go in.

He went out Maple and slowed at the fourth house on the left, which had a porch across the front of it and a detached garage that had never had a car in it, and there was a cruiser in the driveway and the driveway was not big enough for two.

He parked on the street.

He sat there for a minute with the engine off.

Then he got out and got the bag with the four shirts in it, and he left the tent in the bed under the tarp, and he stood on a sidewalk on Maple Street in Coudersport, Pennsylvania, at ten of one in the afternoon on the twenty-sixth of April.

The door opened before he got to the steps.

"You're early," Donna Anders said.

"I left early."

"You left early." She had a dish towel in one hand and she was not in the uniform and her hair was down. "How early."

"Twenty past seven."

"Ray."

"There wasn't any traffic."

"There is never any traffic," she said. "That's not what early means."

She stood in the door and looked at him standing on her walk with a bag in his hand.

"Well," she said. "Come in the house."