1Leander wrote to both his sons. He did not know that Coverly was in the Pacific and it took three weeks for his letter to be forwarded to Island 93. Moses didn’t get his father’s letter at all. He was fired as a security risk ten days after Beatrice left for Cleveland. It was at a time when these dismissals were summary and unexplained and if there was some court of appeal Moses did not, at that time, have the patience or the common sense to seek it out. An hour after he had received his discharge he was driving north with all his possessions in the back of his car. The anonymity of his discharge gave it oracular proportions, as if some tree or stone or voice from a cave had put the finger on him, and the pain of being condemned or expelled by a veiled force may have accounted for his rage. He was far from the green pastures of common sense. He was angry at what had been done to him and angry at himself for having failed to come to reasonable terms with the world and he was deeply anxious about his parents, for if the news should get back to Honora that he had been discharged for reasons of security he knew they would suffer.

2What he did was to go fishing. It may have been that he wanted to recapture the pleasures of his trips to Langely with Leander. Fishing was the only occupation he could think of that might refresh his common sense. He drove straight from Washington to a trout pond in the Poconos that he had visited before and where he was able to rent a cabin or shack that was as dilapidated as the camp at Langely. He ate some supper, drank a pint of whisky and went for a swim in the cold lake. All this made him feel better and he went to bed early, planning to get up before dawn and fish in the Lakanana River.

3He was up at five and drove north to the river, as anxious to be the first fisherman out as Leander had been anxious to be the first man in the woods. The sky was just beginning to fill with light. He was disappointed and perplexed then when a car ahead of him turned off and parked on the road shoulder that led to the stream. Then the driver of the car ahead hurried out of his car and looked over his shoulder at Moses in such agony and panic that Moses wondered—so soon after dawn—if he had crossed the path of a murderer. Then the stranger unbuckled his belt, dropped his trousers and relieved himself in full view of the morning. Moses gathered up his tackle and smiled at the stranger, happy to see that he was not another trout fisherman. The stranger smiled at Moses for his own reasons; and he took the path to the water and didn’t see another fisherman that day.

4Lakanana Pond emptied into the river and the water, regulated by a dam, was deep and turbulent and in many places over a man’s head. The sharp fall of the land and the granite bed of the stream made it a place where there was nowhere a respite from the loud noise of water. Moses caught one trout in the morning and two more late in the day. Here and there a bridle path from the Lakanana Inn ran parallel to the stream and a few riders hacked by but it was not until late in the day that any of them stopped to ask Moses what he had caught.

5The sun by then was below the trees and the early dark seemed to deepen the resonance of the stream. It was time for Moses to go and he was taking in his line and putting away his flies when he heard the hoofs and the creaking leather of some riders. A middle-aged couple stopped to ask about his luck while he was pulling off his boots. It was the urbanity of the couple that struck Moses—they looked so terribly out of place. They were both of them heavy and gray-headed—the woman dumpy and the man choleric, short-winded and obese. It had been a warm day but they were dressed correctly in dark riding clothes—bowlers, sticks, tattersalls and so forth. All of this must have been very uncomfortable. “Well, good luck,” the woman said in the cheerful, cracked voice of middle age, and turned her horse away from the stream. Out of the corner of his eye Moses saw the horse rear but by the time he turned his head so much dust had been raised by the scuffle of hoofs that he didn’t see how she fell. He ran up the bank and got the fractious horse by the bridle as her husband began to roar: “Help, help. She’s dead, she’s dead, she’s been killed.” The horse reared again while Moses’ hand was on the bridle. He let go and the hack galloped off. “I’ll go for help, I’ll go for help,” the husband roared. “There’s a farm back there.” He cantered off to the north and the dust settled, leaving Moses with what seemed to be a dead stranger.

6She was on her knees, face downward in the dirt, the tails of her coat parted over the broad, worn seat of her britches and her boots toed in like a child’s, so stripped of her humanity, so defeated—Moses remembered the earnest notes of her voice—in her attempt to enjoy the early summer day, that he felt a flash of repugnance. Then he went to her and more out of consideration for his own feelings than anything else—more out of his desire to return to her the form of a woman than to save her life—he straightened out her legs and she rolled with a thump onto her back. He rolled up his coat and put it under her head. A cut in her forehead, over the eye, was bleeding and Moses got some water and washed the cut, pleased to be occupied. She was breathing, he noticed, but this exhausted his medical knowledge. He knelt beside her wondering in what form and when help would come. He lighted a cigarette and looked at the stranger’s face—pasty and round and worn it seemed with such anxieties as cooking, catching trains and buying useful presents at Christmas. It was a face that seemed to state its history plainly—she was one of two sisters, she had no children, she could be inflexible about neatness and she probably collected glass animals or English coffee cups in a small way. Then he heard hoofs and leather and her bereaved husband bore down in a cloud of dust. “There’s nobody at the farm. I’ve wasted so much time. She ought to be in an oxygen tent. She probably needs a blood transfusion. We’ve got to get an ambulance.” Then he knelt down beside her and put his head on her breast, crying, “Oh my darling, my love, my sweet, don’t leave me, don’t leave me.”

7Then Moses ran up the path to his car and, driving it a little way through the woods, he got it onto the loose dirt of the bridle path where the man still knelt by his wife. Then, opening the door, they managed together to lift her into the car. He started back for the road, the wheels of the car spinning in the loose dirt, but he was able to keep it moving and was cheered when they got onto the black-top road. There were choking and grunting sounds of grief from the back seat. “She’s dying, she’s dying,” the stranger sobbed. “If she lives I’ll repay you. Money is no consideration. Please hurry.”

8“You know you both seem pretty old for horseback riding,” Moses said.

9He knew there was a hospital in the next village and he made good time until he got stuck, on the narrow road, behind a slow-moving truck loaded with live chickens. Moses blew his horn but this only made the truck driver more predatory and how could Moses communicate to him that the thread of a woman’s life might depend on his consideration? He passed the truck at the crown of a hill but this only excited the driver’s malevolence and, roaring downhill, his chicken crates swaying wildly from side to side, he tried, unsuccessfully, to repass Moses. They had come down at last into the leafy streets of the village and the road to the hospital. Many people were walking at the side of the road and then Moses saw signs nailed to the trees advertising a hospital lawn party. They were out of luck. The hospital was surrounded by the booths, lights and music of a country fair.

10A policeman stopped them when they tried to approach the hospital and waved them toward a parking lot. “We want to get to the hospital,” Moses shouted. The policeman leaned toward them. He was deaf. “We have a woman here who is dying,” the stranger cried loudly. “This is a matter of life and death.” Moses got past the policeman and through the fair, approaching a brick building, darkened by many shade trees. The place was shaped like a Victorian mansion and may have been one, modified now by fire escapes and a brick smokestack. Moses got out of the car and ran through an emergency entrance into a room that was empty. He went from there into a hall where he met a gray-haired nurse carrying a tray. “I have an emergency in my car,” he said. There was no kindliness in her face. She gave him that appalling look of bitterness that we exchange when we are too tired, or too exacerbated by our own ill luck, to care whether our neighbors live or die. “What is the nature of the emergency?” she asked airily. Another nurse appeared. She was no younger but she was not so tired. “She was thrown by a horse, she’s unconscious,” Moses said. “Horses!” the old nurse exclaimed. “Dr. Howard has just come in,” the second nurse said. “I’ll get him now.”

11A few minutes later a doctor came down the hall with a second nurse and they wheeled a table out of the emergency room down a ramp to the car and Moses and the doctor lifted the unconscious woman onto this. They accomplished this in a summer twilight, surrounded by the voices of hawkers and the sounds of music that came from the fair beyond the trees. “Oh, can’t somebody stop this?” the stranger asked, meaning the music. “I’m Charles Cutter. I’ll pay any amount of money. Send them home. Send them home. I’ll pay for it. Tell them to stop the music at least. She needs quiet.”

12“We couldn’t do that,” the doctor said quietly, and with a marked upcountry accent. “That’s how we raise the money to keep the hospital running.” In the hospital they began to cut off the woman’s clothes and Moses went into the hallway, followed by her husband. “You’ll stay, you’ll stay a little while with me, won’t you?” he asked Moses. “She’s all I have and if she dies, if she dies I don’t know what I’ll do.” Moses said that he would stay and wandered down the hall to an empty waiting room. A large, bronze plaque on the door said that the waiting room was the gift of Sarah P. Watkins and her sons and daughters, but it was difficult to see what the Watkins family had given. There were three pieces of imitation-leather furniture, a table and a collection of old magazines. Moses waited here until Mr. Cutter returned. “She’s alive,” he sobbed, “she’s alive. Thank God. Her leg and her arm are broken and she has a concussion. I’ve called my secretary and asked them to send a specialist on from New York. They don’t know whether she’ll live or not. They won’t know for twenty-four hours. Oh, she’s such a lovely person. She’s so kind and lovely.”

13“Your wife will be all right,” Moses said.

14“She isn’t my wife,” Mr. Cutter sobbed. “She’s so kind and lovely. My wife isn’t anything like that. We’ve had such hard times, both of us. We’ve never asked for very much. We haven’t even been together very much. It couldn’t be retribution, could it? It couldn’t be retribution. We’ve never harmed anyone. We’ve taken these little trips each year. It’s the only time we ever have together. It couldn’t be retribution.” He dried his tears and cleaned his spectacles and went back down the hall.

15A young nurse came to the door, looking out at the carnival and the summer evening, and a doctor joined her.

16“B2 thinks he’s dying,” the nurse said. “He wants a priest.”

17“I called Father Bevier,” the doctor said. “He’s out.” He put a hand on the nurse’s slender back and let it fall along her buttocks.

18“Oh, I could use a little of that,” the nurse said cheerfully.

19“So could I,” the doctor said.

20He continued to stroke her buttocks and desire seemed to make the nurse plaintive and in a human way much finer and the doctor, who had looked very tired, seemed refreshed. Then, from the dark interior of the place, there was a wordless roar, a spitting grunt, extorted either by extreme physical misery or the collapse of reasonable hope. The doctor and the nurse separated and disappeared in the dark at the end of the hall. The grunt rose to a scream, a shriek, and to escape it Moses walked out of the building and crossed the grass to the edge of the lawn. He was on high land and his view took in the mountains, blackened then by an afterglow—a brilliant yellow that is seen in lower country only on the coldest nights of February.

21In the trees on his left the fair or carnival had hit its gentle, countrified stride. An orchestra on a platform was playing “Smiles” and on the second chorus one of the players put down his instrument and sang a verse through a megaphone. Strings of lights—white and faded reds and yellows—were hung from booth to booth to light, with the faint candle power of these arrangements, the dark of the maples. The noise of voices was not loud and the men talking up hamburgers and fortune’s wheel called with no real insistence. He walked over to a booth and bought a paper cup of coffee from a pretty country girl. When she had given him his change she moved the sugar bowl an inch this way and that, looked at the doughnut jar with a deep sigh and pulled at her apron. “You’re a stranger!” she asked. He said that he was. The girl moved down the counter to wait on some other people who were complaining about the chilly mountain dusk.

22In the next booth a young man was pitching baseballs at a pyramid of wooden milk bottles. His aim and his speed were superb. He stared at the milk bottles, drawing back a little and narrowing his eyes like a rifleman, and then winged a ball at them with the energy of sheer malevolence. Down they came, again and again, and a small crowd of girls and bucks gathered to watch the performance but when it was ended and the pitcher turned toward them they said so long, so long, Charlie, so long, and drifted away, arm in arm. He seemed to be friendless.

23Beyond the baseball pitcher there was a booth selling flowers that had been picked in the village gardens and there were wheels and a bingo game and the wooden stand where the musicians continued without a break their selection of dance music. Moses was surprised to find them so old. The pianist was old, the saxophone player was bent and gray and the drummer must have weighed three hundred pounds, and they seemed attached to their instruments by the rites, conveniences and habits of a long marriage.

24When they had finished their last set a man announced some local talent and Moses saw a child, at the edge of the platform, waiting to go on. She seemed to be a child but when the band played her fanfare she lifted up her hands, shuffled into the light and began a laborious tap dance, counting time painfully and throwing out to the audience, now and then, a leering smile. The taps on her silver shoes made a metallic clang and shook the lumber of the platform and she seemed to have left her youth in the shadows. Powdered, rouged, absorbed in the mechanics of her dance and the enjoinder to seem flirtatious, her freshness was gone and all the bitterness and disappointments of a lascivious middle age seemed to sit on her thin shoulders. At the end she bowed to the little applause, smiled her tart smile once more and ran into the shadows where her mother was waiting with a coat to put over her shoulders and a few words of encouragement and when she stepped back into the shadows Moses saw that she was no more than twelve or thirteen.

25He threw his paper cup into a can, and finishing his circuit of the carnival saw, walking through the deep grass smell and the summer gloom, a group, a family perhaps, in which there was a woman wearing a yellow skirt. The color of the skirt set up in him a yearning, a pang that put his teeth on edge, and he remembered that he had once loved a girl who had a skirt of the same color although he could not remember her name.

26“I want a specialist, a brain specialist,” Moses heard his friend shouting when he returned to the hospital. “Charter a plane if it’s necessary. Money is no consideration. If he wants a consultant, tell him to bring a consultant. Yes. Yes.” He was using a telephone in an office across the hall from the waiting room that had been given by the Watkins family and where it had grown dark without anyone’s bothering to turn on a lamp. Only a few lights seemed to burn in the hospital at all. The bereaved and elderly lover sat among covered typewriters and adding machines and when he had finished his conversation he looked up to Moses and either because the light caught his spectacles or because his mood had changed, he seemed very officious. “I want you to consider yourself on my payroll as of this morning,” he said to Moses. “If you have other engagements to fulfill you can cancel them, confident that I will more than make this worth your while. The hospital has given me a room for the night and I want you to go back to the inn and get my toilet articles. I’ve made out a list.” he said, passing such a list to Moses. “Estimate your mileage and keep track of the time and I will see that you are amply reimbursed.” Then he picked up the telephone and asked for long distance and Moses stepped out into the dark hall.

27He had nothing better to do and he was glad to drive back to the inn, not so much from a commendable sense of charity and helpfulness as from his desire to draw into a sensible perspective the events of the last few hours. Back at the inn he gave the manager—like a true Wapshot—the most meager account of what had happened. “She was in an accident,” he said. He went upstairs to the room that had been occupied by poor Mr. Cutter and his paramour. All the things on the list were easy to find—everything but a bottle of rye but after looking in the medicine cabinet and behind the books in the shelves he looked under the bed and found a well-stocked bar. He had a drink of Scotch himself in a tooth-brush glass. Back at the hospital Mr. Cutter was still on the telephone. He put his hand over the mouthpiece. “Now you get some sleep, my boy,” he said mingling paternalism with officiousness. “If you don’t have a place, go back to the inn and ask them to give you a room. Report back here at nine o’clock. Remember that money is no consideration. You’re on my payroll.” Moses went back to the bridle path to get his fishing tackle, which he found unharmed except for a fall of dew, and spent the night in his rented shack.