The Centaurus

I usually did, as a last sip of civilization before we descended into that rural darkness that by some mistake had become our home. “No,” I told him. “I have no appetite. Let’s go.”

“This poor son of mine,” my father a

Furious, I pushed through the door into the air. The lake across the road, rimmed in snow, looked black as the back of a mirror. It was that twilight in which some cars have turned on their headlights, some their parking lights, and some no lights at all. My father drove as fast as if the road were bare. In some parts the road had been scraped clean and on these patches our chains changed tune. Halfway up Fire Hill (above us, the church and its tiny cross were inked onto an indigo sky), a link snapped. It racketed against the rear right fender for the remaining mile. The few houses of Firetown patched the dusk with downstairs windows glowing dimly as embers. The Ten Mile I

Our road had not been plowed. Our road was actually two roads, one which went in through the Amish fields and another which led off from that, down past our property, to rejoin the highway by Silas Schoelkopfs pond and barn. We had left by this, the lower road; we returned by the upper. My father rammed the Buick through the heaped snow and it sagged to a stop perhaps ten feet off the highway. The motor stalled. He turned off the ignition and snapped off the lights. “How will we get out tomorrow?” I asked.

“One thing at a time,” he said. “I want to get you home. Can you walk it?”

“What else can I do?”

The unplowed road showed as a long stretch of shimmering gray set in perspective by two scribbled lines of young trees. Not a houselight showed from here. Above us, in a sky still too bright a blue to support stars, sparse pale clouds like giant flakes of marble drifted westward so stilly their motion seemed lent by the earth’s revolution. The snow overwhelmed my ankles and inundated my shoes. I tried to walk in my father’s footsteps but his strides were too great. As the sound of traffic on the highway faded behind us, a powerful silence strengthened. There was a star before us, one, low in the sky and so brilliant its white light seemed warm.

I asked my father, “What’s that star?”

“Venus.”

“Is it always the first to come out?”

“No. Sometimes it’s the last to go. Sometimes when I get up the sun is coming up through the woods and Venus is still hanging over the Amishman’s hill.”

“Can you steer by it?”

“I don’t know. I’ve never tried. It’s an interesting question.”

I told him, “I can never find the North Star. I always expect it to be bigger than it is.”

“That’s right. I don’t know why the hell they made it so small.”

His shape before me was made less human by the bag of groceries he was carrying and it seemed, my legs having ceased to convey the sensations of walking, that his was the shape of the neck and head of a horse I was riding. I looked straight up and the cobalt dome was swept clean of marble flakes and a few faint stars were wearing through. The branches of the young trees we walked between fell away to disclose the long low hump, sullenly lustrous, of our upper field.

“Peter?”

My father’s voice startled me, I felt so alone. “What?”

“Nothing. I just wanted to make sure you were still behind me.”

“Well where else would I be?”

“You got me there.”

“Shall I carry the bag for a while?”

“No, it’s clumsy but it’s not heavy.”

“Why’d you buy all those bananas if you knew we were going to have to lug everything half a mile?”

“Insanity,” he answered. “Hereditary insanity.” It was a favorite concept of his.

Lady, hearing our voices, began to bark behind the field. The quick dim doublets of sound like butterflies winged toward us close to the earth, skimming the feathery crust rather than risking a plunge upward into the steep smooth dome that capped a space of Pe

But footsteps had beaten a path around the corner of the house ahead of us, and on the porch there were plentiful signs that the pump had been used. Lady, free, raced out of the darkness with the whir of a growl in her throat and then, recognizing us, leaped like a fish from the splashing snow, jabbing her muzzle at our faces, her throat stuck fast on a weak agonized note of whimpering love. She battered and bustled through the double kitchen door with us and in the warm indoors released an unmistakable tang of skunk.

Here was the kitchen, honey-colored, lit; here were the two clocks, the red electric thrown all out of right time by the power failure but ru

My father explained, “I tried to call you this morning, Cassie, but the lines were down. Have you had a rough time? There’s an Italian sandwich in the bag.”

“We’ve had a wonderful time,” my mother said. “Dad’s been sawing wood and this evening I made some of that dried-beef soup with apples Grammy used to make when we ran out of food.” An ambrosial smell of warm apples did breathe from the stove, and a fire was dancing in the fireplace.

“Huh?” It seemed to daze my father that the world had gone on without him. “Pop’s O. K.? Where in hell is he?”

Even as he spoke he walked into the other room and there, sitting in his accustomed place on the sofa, was my grandfather, his shapely hands folded across his chest, his little worn Bible, shut, balanced on one knee.

“Did you cut some wood, Pop?” my father asked loudly.

“You’re a walking miracle. At some point in your life you must have done something right.”

“George, now I don’t wish to be ac-quisi-tive, but by any chance did you remember to bring the Sun?” The mailman of course hadn’t gotten through, a sore deprivation for my grandfather, who wouldn’t believe it had snowed until he read it in the newspaper.

“Hell, no, Pop,” my father bellowed. “I forgot. I don’t know why, it was insanity.”

My mother and the dog came into the living-room with us. Lady, unable to keep the good news of our return to herself any longer, jumped up on the sofa and with a snap of her body thrust her nose into my grandfather’s ear. “Hyar, yaar” he said, and stood up, rescuing the Bible from his knee in the same motion. “Doc Appleton called,” my mother said to my father. “Huh? I thought the lines were out.”

“They came on this afternoon, after the electricity. I called Hummel’s and Vera said you had gone. She sounded more pleasant to me than I’ve ever heard her over the phone.”

“What did Appleton say?” my father asked, crossing the room and looking down at my globe of the Earth. “He said the X-rays showed nothing.”

“Huh? Is that what he said? Do you think he’s lying,

Cassie?”

“You know he never lies. Your X-rays are clear. He said it’s all in your nerves; he thinks you have a mild case of, now I forget-I wrote it down.” My mother passed to the telephone and read from a slip of paper she had left on top of the directory, “Mutinous colitis. We had a nice talk; but Doc sounds older.”