And as we drove slowly away, we were driving really slowly, we eventually came upon the railroad tracks and William said, “Oh God, Lucy. Wait a second.” There right ahead of us was a very small station. Storage sheds were along the train tracks. As Lois said, nothing had changed. And as we pulled into the station—not a car was in sight, not another person was present—we sat there and looked at the road that Catherine would have half-run, half-walked down on her way that snowy November evening to the railway station. The station was small and clapboard. It was not as much a station as a stop.
Oh I could see young Catherine half-running, half-walking down that windswept November dark road, and getting to the train station without her boots, just her shoes and snow on the ground, and no real coat either, so that she would not be found out, and I saw her half-running and half-walking like this, in dark clothes with a scarf pulled over the top of her head, waiting at that train station, so frightened, so deeply frightened—as she had probably always been from her years of abuse at her father’s hand—and I felt I could picture her thoughts:
If Wilhelm is not there when I get to Boston I will kill myself.
* * *
“Fucking Lois Bubar,” William said.
I turned to look at him quickly. We were driving back along to the main road.
“I wish she never existed,” he said. He pulled his hand down over his mustache and stared through the windshield at the road. “She wants you to put her in a book? And she wants you to make her look good? Jesus Christ, Lucy. And she says her only regret in her whole life is not being nicer to my mother? And then I show up and she won’t even see me? What a piece of crap she is.”
And I thought of the nursery school teacher who never picked him up again.
* * *
After my freshman year of college I got a job in the Admissions Department giving tours of the campus to prospective students. Oh, I loved it! I was so happy to have a job and not have to go back to my home for the summer, and I loved the college and I was happy to show people how much I loved it. But I mention this for one reason: There was a man who worked as an admissions person, he was not the director but he was at that time to my thinking a big deal, he was perhaps ten years older than I was, and he took a liking to me, and I only remember we went a few places together, but I don’t remember where they were. He had a car, of course, though to me that was so grown-up, that he had a car, and I remember when I was first in the car and seeing that the door handles had cup holders in them, and I thought: Cup holders? It seemed really grown-up to me, and not exactly my style. But I liked him, I probably loved him. I fell in love with everyone I met. And one night when he dropped me off at the apartment I was sharing with a number of other student friends （friends!）， he leaned me against his car and kissed me and I remember that he whispered, “Hey, Tiger,” in my ear, and I thought…I don’t know what I thought. But he was done with me after that night of just kissing, and a few months later he married the secretary in the office; she was a pretty woman, and I had always liked her.
I tell you this to explain how we kind of know who we are, without knowing it.
And the fellow in the Admissions Department knew I was not a person who could be with him and call him whatever a person calls someone after being called Tiger, and I could not really accept those cup holders; I was not sad to not hear from him again, it had always seemed a little strange that he would care about me in the first place. But again, my point! My point is: What is it that William knew about me and that I knew about him that caused us to get married?
* * *
The Haynesville Road was eerily quiet. We drove on this road for miles without seeing another car. There seemed, to my eye, to be a wretchedness to the road: Many trees were cut down on the sides of the road, and there were dead trees in swamps. In one place there were a few apples that were starting from trees, and William said that meant there must have been farms here at some point, and we kept driving. Everything looked a little burned by the sun.
A sign with a big Santa Claus head said CHRISTMAS TREES 300 FEET AHEAD. But we saw nothing in three hundred feet except for more of the same.
I could not stop the sense of fear I had in these Haynesville woods. There were many bogs with dead trees, and there was almost a pinkish glow to the different small dead trees, and a scrubby-looking weed that seemed almost like clover but not one I had ever seen before. We passed by a Baptist church—there was nothing else near it—and William said, “That could have been where Catherine and Clyde Trask got married, who knows.” He did not sound like he cared, and I sensed that he thought his real mother was the one he had had all his life who lived in Newton, Massachusetts, and any woman who had lived up here was of no interest to him; this is what I thought I sensed.