The Music My Neighbor Would Not Turn Down

Because here is what else happened in that same minute, and I only pieced it together the next morning. Chet, drunk and showing off for his buddies, or maybe just running one of them home, had come flying down the lane in that loud dually right as the limb came down, and he had stood on the brakes on wet gravel in the dark, and he had put that forty-thousand-dollar truck nose first into the creek ditch, buried to the frame in the mud, two feet from the fallen hackberry, with the water already coming up under it.

And the music stopped because Chet Holloway finally had a problem that his volume could not solve.

I did not know any of that yet. What I knew was the power was out, there was a tree down somewhere close, and in a storm on Mink Slide Lane there is one thing that happens, the same thing that has happened my whole life, which is that everybody goes to the Tedders’. Earl and Loretta have the wood cookstove and the old hand-pump well and a propane lamp and eighty years of knowing how to be comfortable without electricity, and when the lights go out the whole lane drifts to their kitchen with a flashlight and a dish, and you wait the storm out together. My own granddad used to do it. It is just what the lane does.

So Hannah bundled Nora up, who for once was not crying because the barometer or the Lord or something had finally knocked her out, and we walked down through the tail end of the rain to the Tedders’ with a flashlight, and sure enough there was Dana just off a half shift, and Roy with his old slicker on, and Shelby and Tyler and little Eli in his pajamas, and Earl had the lamp lit and Loretta had the kettle going on the wood stove, and for the first time in two months the whole lane was in one warm room together and it was quiet, a human quiet, people talking low, Eli calm on the floor with a flashlight, Nora asleep. I had not known how much I missed it until I had it back.

And that was when the knock came at the Tedders’ door.

Loretta opened it and there was Chet Holloway, soaked to the skin, mud to his knees, no coat, his hair plastered down, and his two buddies had long since taken off and left him, and he stood there in the one warm doorway on the whole dark lane and you could see it on him, the thing a man wears when he has finally run clean out of road. His truck was in the creek. The tree had the lane blocked both directions, him and everybody else, and there was no tow truck coming out here before morning in this, and his generator could not pull his own truck out, and he had come, because there was nowhere else to go, to knock on the door of the people he had kept awake all summer.