Mohawk by Richard Russo

Author:Richard Russo [Russo, Richard]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-307-80984-1
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2011-11-15T16:00:00+00:00

27

At two in the morning Mohawk is chilled and asleep. In the whole town not one person is abroad in the brittle night air. If anyone were awake indoors, he might detect the first snow of the winter gently dusting the town. By morning it will have disappeared, or remain only as frozen ice crystals on the sidewalks, and the small boys hoping to make a dollar before Christmas will be disappointed.

The traffic light at the Four Corners clicks green, then yellow, then red. No car has passed beneath it in half an hour, and no one would be inconvenienced if the light didn’t change until five-thirty when the milk trucks begin their rounds. On weekdays no policemen are on duty once the bars close, though one sleeps at the switchboard in the station in case there’s a call. In Mohawk there is no all-night diner or all-night anything. Harry tried to keep the Grill open for a while, but it was more trouble than it was worth. The nightman treated the business as if it were his own—which is to say, he kept the profits. In midweek there isn’t even a poker game upstairs.

In front of the Grouse home on Mountain sits a large moving van. The driver had pulled in late that afternoon and left it parked there so they could get an early start in the morning. To load the furniture and boxes from the upstairs flat won’t take long. The truck is already three-quarters full with the belongings of a Rochester family moving into a four-bedroom in the Stamford area. Anne Grouse can see the top of the truck from where she sits, surrounded by boxes, on the sofa. Her bed and frame are disassembled, and if she sleeps tonight, it will be right where she’s sitting. Her intention was to work through the night, but Mrs. Grouse and Randall have pitched in and everything’s ahead of schedule, leaving her with nothing to do but battle the vague presentiment that going away amounts to running away. Still, she is as committed as a person can be, having signed agreements, made promises, paid money.

The house is so still that when the refrigerator clicks on, she’s startled. She decides to look in on Randall, not because he needs looking in on but because she needs to look in. The move will be good for him, at least, especially now that he has been formally elevated to hero status with his picture in the Mohawk Republican and three civic groups fighting over dates to honor him in official ceremonies. He has dealt with all of this better than she herself has. But then Randall has always been contemptuous of the opinions of others, even when that opinion happened to be flattering. He is a strange boy. Just when she’s convinced that he’s going to pass through life aloof, a wry critic, he risks his life for a perfect stranger. And Billy Gaffney, of all people. The symmetry is so perfect as to suggest there might be a Supreme Architect after all, or something.

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