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talk about it if it upsets her.”
    He glanced at me like a man floating up from under water. Leda said in a small, aching voice: “I wish to God we could move to Boston.”
    The granite face closed in defensiveness. “Led’, we been over all that. Nothing is going to drive me off of my land. I got no time for the city at my age. What the Jesus would I do? Night watchman? Sweep out somebody’s back room, b’ Jesus Christ? Savings’d be gone in no time. We been all over it. We ain’t moving nowhere.”
    â€œI could find work.” For Harp of course that was the worst thing she could have said. She probably knew it from his stricken silence. She said clumsily, “I forgot something upstairs.” She snatched up her mending and she was gone.
    We talked no more of it the rest of the day. I followed through the milking and other chores, lending a hand where I could, and we made everything as secure as we could against storm and other enemies. The long-toothed furry thing was the spectral guest at dinner, but we cut him, on Leda’s account, or so we pretended. Supper would have been awkward anyway. They weren’t in the habit of putting up guests, and Leda was a rather deadly cook because she cared nothing about it. A Darkfield girl, I suppose she had the usual twentieth-century mishmash of television dreams until some impulse or maybe false signs of pregnancy tricked her into marrying a man out of the nineteenth. We had venison treated like beef and overdone vegetables. I don’t like venison even when it’s treated right.
    At six Harp turned on his battery radio and sat stone-faced through the day’s bad news and the weather forecast—“a blizzard which may prove the worst in forty-two years. Since 3:00 P.M., eighteen inches have fallen at Bangor, twenty-one at Boston. Precipitation is not expected to end until tomorrow. Winds will increase during the night with gusts up to seventy miles per hour.” Harp shut it off, with finality. On other evenings I had spent there he let Leda play it after supper only kind of soft, so there had been a continuous muted bleat and blatter all evening. Tonight Harp meant to listen for other sounds. Leda washed the dishes, said an early good night, and fled upstairs.
    Harp didn’t talk, except as politeness obliged him to answer some blah of mine. We sat and listened to the snow and the lunatic wind. A hour of it was enough for me; I said I was beat and wanted to turn in early. Harp saw me to my bed in the parlor and placed a new chunk of rock maple in the pot-bellied stove. He produced a difficult granite smile, maybe using up his allowance for the week, and pulled out a bottle from a cabinet that had stood for many years below a parlor print—George Washington, I think, concluding a treaty with some offbeat sufferer from hepatitis who may have been General Cornwallis if the latter had two left feet. The bottle contained a brand of rye that Harp sincerely believed to be drinkable, having charred his gullet forty-odd years trying to prove it. While my throat, healed Harp said, “Shouldn’t’ve bothered you with all this crap, Ben. Hope it ain’t going to spoil your sleep.” He got me his spare flashlight, then let me be, and closed the door.
    I heard him drop back into his kitchen armchair. Under too many covers, lamp out, I heard the cruel whisper of the snow. The stove muttered, a friend, making me a cocoon of living heat in a waste of outer cold. Later I heard Leda at the head of the stairs, her voice timid, tired, and sweet with invitation: “You comin’ up to bed, Harp?” The stairs creaked under him. Their door closed; presently she cried out in that desired pain that is brief release from trouble.
    I remembered something Adelaide Simmons had told me about this house, where I had not gone upstairs since Harp and I were boys. Adelaide, one of the very few women in Darkfield who