Searoad by Ursula K. Le Guin

Author:Ursula K. Le Guin [Guin, Ursula K. Le]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Library of America
Published: 2023-12-19T20:55:46+00:00

Crosswords

For Keith Kroeber

* * *

I DON’T HAVE MUCH TRUCK with spirits, ghosts, all that. Some people like it and are full of stories of haunted houses and the dead returning. When I was in grade school there was a little draw out past our end of town that the children dared each other to pass alone at evening, and boasted about next day: “I seen the Indian!” There was supposed to be this ghost of an Indian man, killed there way back when, would come and stand under the trees. An easy thing to see in the twilight if you’re looking for it, and they were, so as to boast. I don’t understand that triumph people take in telling about seeing ghosts, like they were smarter than others to have seen them, or had outwitted common sense. The Irish beat all for that. A sensible man like Mr. Carey would go ranting on about the second sight when he happened to remember that his grandfather was from Ireland. He’d tell how his mother in Oregon had a premonition of her brother’s automobile accident in Ohio and had shouted out at the dinner table, “Oh, John’s in great danger!” And sure enough, he’d run his car into a ditch that very day and was nearly killed. Why he drove into a ditch wasn’t part of the story. Maybe he saw a leprechaun, though not likely in Ohio. I am impatient with such stuff. I don’t think there are matters that are outside of nature, or that things can happen any way different from the way things do happen. I think that things happen in nature that we don’t altogether understand, and to call them ghosts is to make sure we will not understand. The best we can do is not to put a name to them, but to listen. I learned that from Terina Adams.

I met her when I was working as waitress at the Hiway House of Waffles on the graveyard shift. As I had no family with me at that time, it was easier for me than for the women with children or a husband home, and I was curious to try and see how I liked night work. At first I liked it well enough. The work was easy. Often there’d be a whole hour when nobody came in, and then it would just be a trucker or a couple driving all night, not fussy, not even talkative. Then the day would begin to break and the pace would liven up, but I was off at seven, just before it got heavy with the breakfast people. It suited me fine to see the sun rise. But I think sleeping in daylight began to trouble me some way. At any rate, all the time I worked nights, I was troubled by thoughts of my mother.

Thoughts of her hadn’t much bothered me before. I left home at seventeen and went to Los Angeles and got married. After my stepfather died

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