The Lot at the Crossroads

In April of 1977, on a Tuesday that had begun as nothing at all, Ruth Calloway left the county clerk's office at five o'clock and walked home by her usual route.

She had walked the same six blocks for twenty-two years. Down past the brick post office with its flag snapping hard in the spring wind. Across Main Street where Sal's Diner threw a rectangle of yellow light onto the sidewalk even before dusk. Past Cole & Son, which still had rakes and seed trays in the window because spring in Latchford was less a season than a negotiation. Then on to the crossroads, where Route 11 ran north and south through the valley and Morrow Road cut east toward the hills.

The town smelled of thaw. Snow had gone from the shaded places only a week ago. Water ran in the ditches with a hurried sound. The earth was giving itself back reluctantly, dark under the matted grass. The light had that washed, uncertain quality it gets in upstate New York in early spring, when the world looks less renewed than uncovered.

Ruth walked with her handbag on her left arm and her gloves tucked into one pocket of her coat. She was a small woman and did not waste motion. Her steps were even. Her face, to anyone passing, would have looked composed in the ordinary way of middle-aged women on their way home from work. She liked that. She had made a life that did not attract notice.

At the corner by the diner she stopped.

The northeast lot had a chain-link fence around it as it always had, and the flat open ground beyond the fence looked much as it had looked for as long as Ruth could remember. But there was a new sign wired to the fence, white with red block letters:

FUTURE HOME OF LATCHFORD PHARMACY

She stood still long enough for the words to settle into sense.

A truck passed on Route 11. Its engine should have seemed loud at the intersection. At that corner it arrived muted, as if it had come a greater distance than it had. The air had its usual quality there, slightly cooler than the rest of the street, a little thicker in the lungs. Ruth felt it touch the skin of her wrists where her coat sleeves had ridden back.

Behind the fence the lot had been disturbed. Survey stakes with orange flags marked the ground. The scrub growth near the back had been cut away. Soil had been turned over in strips. And in the middle of it all, still sunk flush with the earth where it had always been, lay the stone.

From the sidewalk it looked unremarkable. Flat, grey, broad as a dining table, with a surface too smooth to be accidental and too plain to invite admiration. Children had tripped over it. Boys had stood on it and shouted at each other. Snow had covered it every winter and weeds had pressed up around its edges every summer. The town had gone on around it with the steady disregard people bring to the oldest things.

Ruth had never disregarded it.

When she was seven, her mother had first brought her there at dusk with a thick greenish glass wrapped in a white handkerchief. Edith had not explained where they were going. She had simply crossed the road, stepped through the gap in the fence that had been there then, and walked to the stone as if responding to an appointment. Ruth had followed. Her mother filled the glass from a bottle in her bag, set it on the stone, and stood.

That was all.

No prayer. No crossing herself. No kneeling. Just the glass and the standing and the silence that was not quite silence because the world was never silent there, only muffled, as if every sound had first to pass through something dense and old before it could reach the ear.

Ruth had watched for years before she understood, and after Edith died in 1969 she had taken up the glass without any conversation ever having occurred. No instruction had been given. None was needed. Some household tasks are inherited that way. The person who has always done them is gone, and so the next person does them.

She looked now at the sign on the fence, then at the stone.

Something had changed in the lot besides the stakes and the scraped earth. She could feel it with the same bodily certainty with which she felt weather moving in from the west. The place was awake in a way it had not been the week before. Not louder. Not stronger exactly. More attentive.

She glanced up and down the street. A woman from the Methodist church passed on the opposite sidewalk carrying groceries. Two boys on bicycles coasted through the intersection without looking either way. No one paid Ruth any mind.

She opened her bag.

The glass was in its usual place, wrapped in the handkerchief to keep it from knocking against her compact and keys. She had not known, leaving the office that morning, that she would need it before reaching home. But she had carried it anyway. She often did.

Ruth took the glass out, held it a moment, then looked again at the lot. The fence had a place near the rear corner where one section had come loose from the post. Anyone small enough and willing to soil a coat could get through without trouble.

She crossed the street.

The chain-link rattled softly under her hand. She slipped through the gap with the practiced, unceremonious efficiency of someone who had done such things before and did not consider herself the sort of woman who trespassed, even while trespassing. The ground inside the lot was damp and uneven. Mud clung to the edges of her shoes.

She walked to the stone.

Up close it had the same density it always had, the same refusal to be merely geological. Ruth never would have said a thing like that out loud. She did not think in dramatic language. But standing near it was like standing near a piece of gravity laid level with the earth.

She took the water bottle from her bag, unscrewed the cap, and filled the glass nearly to the rim. The wind touched the surface once and made a brief shiver there. Then she set the glass on the stone.

The water went still.

Ruth stood with her hands at her sides.

The lot held itself around her. Route 11. The diner across the road. The church on the opposite corner. The whole town present and ordinary. But at the stone the ordinary world thinned a little, as if its paper backing had gone damp and something older underneath was beginning to show through.

She felt it then, distinctly, for the first time since she had begun this work after her mother: not just the weight of the place, not just its patience, but its attention.

Something was looking back.

Not with eyes. Not from a point in space. The feeling had no shape she could have described. It was simply the absolute certainty that the standing had ceased to be solitary. The sign on the fence had done it, or the stakes, or the turned ground. The threat of burial had changed the terms. The old quiet regard of the crossroads had sharpened into a question.

Will you stay.

Ruth did not move. Wind lifted the hair at her temples and cooled the damp place between her shoulder blades. The water in the glass remained perfectly level. The air seemed heavier than air had any right to be.

She stood until the streetlights came on one by one and the intersection took on its evening arrangement of yellow lamps and moving headlights. Then she picked up the glass, poured the water out into the turned earth beside the stone, wrapped the glass again, and put it back in her bag.

By the time she reached home the roast Donald had put in the oven was nearly done. He was in the living room in shirtsleeves watching the news, one hand resting on the arm of his chair. He looked up when she came in.

"You're late," he said.

"I stopped on the way."

He nodded, satisfied by the sentence because it was a sentence people said every day and because Donald belonged entirely to the world in which ordinary explanations were sufficient. Ruth hung up her coat and washed her hands. There was mud dried at the edge of one heel. She turned her foot so the kitchen light would not catch it.

They ate at the table by the window. Donald talked about a claim adjustment for the Mertons' barn roof. Ruth passed the potatoes. The anchorman on television used the word inflation three times in as many minutes. Nothing in the house was out of place. Nothing visible had changed.

But her hands stayed cold through dinner.

Later, after the dishes were dried and put away, she stood alone at the sink and looked out into the dark yard. Beyond the house, beyond the street, beyond the other houses and their lit windows and supper dishes and evening news, the crossroads sat under its streetlights with the sign on the fence and the stone in the middle of the lot.

Something was beginning.

She could feel it as plainly as frost in the air.