A certain peace settles upon their predicament. A delicate friction, like sand being swept up, moves across the top of the car. The overheated motor ticks tranquilly under the hood.

“We’ll have to walk,” Caldwell says. “We’ll walk back to Olinger and stay the night at the Hummels’. It’s less than three miles, can you make it?”

“I’ll have to,” Peter says.

“Jesus, you don’t have any galoshes on or anything.”

“Well neither do you.”

“Yeah, but I’m all shot anyway.” After a pause, he explains, “We can’t stay here.”

“Gah-dammit,” Peter says, “I know it. I know it, stop telling me. Stop telling me things all the time. Let’s go.”

“A father who was half a man would have gotten you up that hill.”

“Then we’d have got stuck someplace else. It’s not your fault. It’s nobody’s fault; it’s God’s fault. Please. Let’s stop talking.”

Peter gets out of the car and for a time, of the two, is the leader. They walk in their own ruts up the Jewish Cemetery hill. Peter finds it difficult to put one foot directly ahead of the other, as the Indians were said to have done. The wind keeps tipping him. There is a screen of pines here and though the wind is not powerful it yet has an insistence that penetrates the hair on his head and fingers the bone underneath. The cemetery land is held back from the road by a retaining wall of gray stone; each protruding stone wears a beard of white. Somewhere deep in the opaque smoke Abe Cohn lies snug in his pillared mausoleum. Peter draws comfort from this knowledge. He glimpses an analogy with the way his own ego is sheltered under the mineral dome of his skull. On the flat beyond the cemetery the pines fade away and the wind blows as if minded to pierce his body through and through. He becomes transparent: a skeleton of thoughts. Detached, amused, he watches his feet like blinded cattle slog dutifully through the drifted snow; the disparity between the length of their strides and the immense distance to Olinger is so great that a kind of infinity seems posited in which he enjoys enormous leisure. He employs this leisure to meditate upon the phenomenon of extreme physical discomfort. There is an excising simplicity in it. First, all thoughts of past and future are eliminated, and then any extension via the senses of yourself into the created world. Then, as further conservation, the extremities of the body are disposed of-the feet, the legs, the fingers. If the discomfort persists, if a nagging memory of some more desirable condition lingers, then the tip of the nose, the chin, and the scalp itself are removed from consideration, not entirely anesthetized but deported, as it were, to a realm foreign to the very limited concerns of the irreducible locus, remarkably compact and aloof, which alone remains of the once farflung and ambitious kingdoms of the self. The sensations seem to arrive from a great distance outside himself when his father, now walking beside him and using his body as a shield against the wind for his son, pulls down upon Peter’s freezing head the knitted wool cap he has taken from his own head.

VIII

MY LOVE, listen. Or are you asleep? It doesn’t matter. In West Alton there was the Alton Museum, set among magnificent flowering grounds where every tree was labeled. Black swans drifted preening in pairs upon the surface of the opaque lake created by damming the small shal low-bedded stream here called Lenape. In Olinger it was called Tilden Creek, but it was the same stream. My mother and I on a Sunday would now again walk to the museum, the only treasury of culture accessible to us, along the lazy shady road that kept the creek company, and connected the two towns. This mile or so, then, was a rural interspace, a remainder of the county’s earlier life. We would pass the old race track, abandoned and gone under to grass, and several sandstone farmhouses each accompanied, like a mother with a son, by a whitewashed springhouse of the same stone. Quickly crossing the harsh width of a three-lane highway, we would enter on a narrow path the museum grounds, and an even older world, Arcadian, would envelop us. Ducks and frogs mixed flat throaty exultations in the scummy marsh half-hidden by the planted lines of cherry, linden, locust, and crabapple trees. My mother knew the names of every plant and bird, would name them for me, and I would forget, as we walked along the gravel path that widened here and there into little circlets with a birdbath and benches where, often as not, a linked pair of humans would break apart and study our passing with darkened, rounded eyes. Once when I asked my mother what they had been doing, she replied with a curious complacence, “They were nesting.”

Now the coolness of air off the dammed lake and the swans’ vulgar brackish cries would touch us, and up high through a gap in a mythic black-leaved beech a pale ochre cornice of the museum would show, and a sunstruck section of the raised skylight with its pistachio-green leading. We would pass through the parking lot that made me covetous and ashamed, for at that time we had no car; pass along the gravel pedestrian path among children bringing bags of breadcrumbs to feed the swans; pass up the wide stairs where a few people in clean summer clothes would be snapping cameras and unwrapping sandwiches from waxpaper; and pass into the high religious hall of the museum itself. Admission was free. In the basement, indeed, free classes in “nature appreciation” were held in the summer months. At my mother’s suggestion I once enrolled. The first lesson was to watch a snake in a glass cage swallow a chattering field mouse whole. I did not go for the second lesson. The main floor was given over to scientific exhibits for the benefit of schoolchildren, stiff stuffed creatures and Eskimo and Chinese and Polynesian artifacts, case after case, categorized, dust-proof. There was a noseless mummy, with always a small crowd around him. As a child this floor filled me with dread. So much death; who would dream there could be such a quantity of death? The second floor was devoted to art, mostly local paintings that, however clumsy and quaint and mistaken, nevertheless radiated the innocence and hope, the hope of seizing something and holding it fast, that enters whenever a brush touches canvas. There were also bronze statuettes of Indians and deities, and in the center of the large oval room at the head of the stairs a naked green lady, life size, stood in the center of a circular black-lipped pool. She was a fountain. She held to her lips a scallop shell of bronze and her fine face was pursed to drink, but the mechanics of the fountain dictated that water should spill for ever from the edge of the shell away from her lips. Eternally expectant-with slight breasts, a loosely swirled cast glory of verdigrant hair, and one foot lightly resting on its toes-she held the shell an inch away from the face that seemed with its lowered lids and parted lips asleep. As a child I was troubled by her imagined thirst, and I would place myself so I could see the enduring inch that held her mouth from contact with the water. The water fell as a thin varying ribbon, pearlish green, spiraling as it left the scalloped edge, splaying before it struck the surface of the pond with a ceaseless gentle impact whose splash was sometimes flung by the subtle variations of accident as far away as the rim of the pond, deckling with a tiny cold prick, like the touch of a snowflake, my hand resting there on the black marble. The patience of her wait, the mildness of its denial, seemed unbearable to me then, and I told myself that when darkness came, and the mummy and the Polynesian masks and the glass-eyed eagles below were sealed in shadow, then her slim bronze handmade the very little motion needed, and she drank. In this great oval room, which I conceived as lit by the moon through the skylight above, the fall of water would for a moment cease. In that sense, then-in the sense that the coming of night enwrapped the luminous ribbon of downfalling water and staunched its flow-my story is coming to its close.