Christmas at The New Yorker by New Yorker

Author:New Yorker [The New Yorker]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-307-48291-4
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2003-08-16T04:00:00+00:00

SOLACE

LINDA GRACE HOYER

Ada dropped a lighted match into the heap of Christmas paper at the edge of her woods and watched its flame consume the red tissue in which one of several gifts from her son, Christopher, had been wrapped. It was a clear day, with a stiff breeze from the northwest. She wore faded bluejeans with unravelling cuffs and a red mackinaw that had belonged to her husband, Marty. An inch of snow had fallen during the night and, against a cloudless sky, the balsam fir that Ada’s mother had planted to add a touch of green to the gray woods in winter gently waved its wide branches. With snow on the ground and the wind coming the way it was, the risk of setting fire to the woods was minimal, Ada thought. But even while she prodded the pile of paper with a staff she sometimes used to steady her steps when walking outdoors, a green pickup truck turned in to her yard and Mr. Murdough, her nearest neighbor, jumped from the cab.

“I saw your fire,” he said, “and thought it might be the woods.”

“Oh, no, this is where I always burn the paper—very carefully,” Ada said, and she turned to the youthful tricolored collie that earlier in the year she had bought from the custodian of the local animal shelter. “We love that woods, don’t we, Peter Pup?”

“You know that woods has no fire lanes and there’d be no way for us to bring in a fire engine,” Mr. Murdough said.

“I know that,” Ada said. Mr. Murdough’s unexpected arrival implied a need for his presence that Ada had not felt, and she did not smile.

“If you tell me where to find a bucket, I’ll bring water from your spring, to douse the fire when you leave.”

Though Ada previously had been unaware of Mr. Murdough’s resemblance to her late husband, she noticed it now. Their straight blond hair, their deep-set hazel eyes and jutting jaws were similar. Especially like Marty was Mr. Murdough’s determination to help.

The April that followed Marty’s death, Mr. Murdough had driven his tractor into a field where Ada was hand-raking newly turned ground prior to planting peas in it and, above the roar of the engine, shouted, “That’s not the kind of work you should be doing. It’s too hard for you.” There had been no time for Ada to explain that on account of a recent thunderstorm the soil was too wet to be worked any way but by hand. Looking as determined as Marty might have under the same circumstances, Mr. Murdough had sent the tractor careering back and forth, while she stood by and saw her garden ruined. Then, without speaking, Mr. Murdough had driven away, and Ada, rake in hand, had retired from the field. To this winter day, eight and a half years later, Ada had not returned to plant peas, though in summer she drove her own tractor-drawn mower into that field to cut a tangle of red clover and Queen Anne’s lace that grew where peas might have grown.

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