The Hand on the Bale
On the Saturday of homecoming, at about ten past ten in the morning, I laid my right hand down on a hay-bale quilt, palm up, and waited to find out whether a woman I had not spoken to in fifty-five years would put her hand in it.
I had practiced that, if you can believe it. I am seventy-three, and I climbed poles for the power district for thirty-eight years, and on Friday night I stood in my motel bathroom in Elmcrest with the door shut and practiced putting a hand down open on a towel rack. I had been warned, in the plainest terms, that I was not to take hers. If she wanted a hand, she would have to choose it.
She chose it. It took her about as long as it takes a hay rack to roll past two storefronts. I have thought about those two storefronts every day since.
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My name is Stan Tyree, Stanton on the birth certificate. I want to tell you my side of that morning, because it is the shorter half of a long story and the only half that has her in it. You will have read hers. She told it straight, and she told it believing one thing about me that was not so. She believed I never knew who pulled me out of the Vandover mill pond on a Saturday in January of 1970.
I have known for fifty-six years. This is why I never said so.
The Ice
I was sixteen, and I could skate better than anyone at Elmcrest High, which is a small claim. The Vandover mill pond was where you went in January when the creek had been solid a week. Everybody knew the flume end was bad. The spring comes in there under the old race, and the ice looks fine and is the thickness of a pie crust. I knew it too. At sixteen, knowing a thing and doing the opposite are not strangers.
I remember the sound. People think ice cracks like a shot. Mine opened like a sigh, a long wet breath, and the world dropped out from under both skates and the water closed over my head so cold I thought it was loud. I came up under the shelf and could not find the hole. I put both hands flat against the underside of the ice, and I thought, very clearly, I am going to die in front of the Vandovers’ barn and they won’t even hear it.
Then there was a hand in the water. Not a hand. Wool. A rope of red wool, thrown across the edge of the hole and trailing, and I got my fist into it the way a drowning cat gets into a sleeve.
“Hold the scarf, Stanton,” somebody said. “Hold it. Don’t you let go.”