The Wintering by Joan Williams

strolled to the kitchen because there was a commercial on television. He saw by Dea’s face that she did not want ham, either. He thought of things he ought to tell her, that he knew he had not come up to her expectations, for one thing. Almoner, now, might be able to put those things into words, and for that, he could envy the man. Inadequately, he tried to tell her everything by saying, “I love you. I sure do.”
    â€œI know it,” Dea said, patting his hand. And she was grateful he meant she would never grow too old for him. Yet she was glad to be able to draw his attention to the window, having seen that Old Bess’s calf had escaped into the road again. She watched Joe cross the yard to head the calf back to the side lot, admitting she felt envious of Amy and her young friend. Suddenly, she had a premonition of Joe’s early death. She would live then in long loneliness, regretting even the passing of these days, Dea thought.
    The town, Amy had thought, would have some look comparable to Almoner’s greatness. She stared about it in disappointment. All the little stores, with flat roofs, seemed squashed together and faced a railroad station in the center of town. The tracks, from a distance, seemed to end at a crumbly red brick Court House with white pillars. In reality, they curved on beyond it and stretched across the flat Delta, following briefly a willow-banked, somnambulant and yellowish river. In all directions, parked cars fanned out from the station. Negroes, who congregated about it on benches, liked the might and windiness of passing trains. Few stopped. For the most part, they were expresses rushing on toward New Orleans. The silence which descended after a train had gone lay vastly heavy over the countryside. People pausing to watch the train had loose clothing blown about in its breeze and seemed to stand in frozen wonderment at the thought of other places. Now, at standstills and as if mesmerized, people who had watched the train pass remained. Even Quill’s car, halted in its presence, seemed to quiver. The train sent back thin whistling cries as lonesome as the bearable loneliness of the countryside itself. And in its aftermath, pursuits resumed by those who had watched seemed negligible. An old man in a stationmaster’s black suit came out, totteringly, to inspect flowers in a garden along the tracks, which was surrounded by a little white wire fence, like intertwined croquet wickets, of that height. His flowers grew voluptuously, though some straggled in a dark red line along the ground as if something wounded had gone by. Others were yellow blossoms on thin stalks as if the sun had graciously scattered pieces. It was high now and bright.
    Unevenly along the end of one block were Negro stores with bluish-looking screen doors. Quill drove across the tracks. Amy could smell popcorn from a movie where already children had formed a Saturday-afternoon line. Some store windows held bent faded placards and tricolored bunting, heralding politicians, left over from the Fourth of July. A man, cutting diagonally across the street, seemed an artistic person, wearing a slouch hat and smoking a pipe. “That might be Almoner!” Amy cried. Neither of them knew what he really looked like for he had refused pictures for many years, even for book jackets. Immediately, Quill had clapped his foot to the brake, causing a number of car horns to blow behind them. “Oh no,” Amy said. “Go on. It’s not.”
    â€œHow do you know?” Quill said.
    â€œThat man spit on the street, and Almoner wouldn’t,” she said. Pretending not to observe Quill’s exasperation, she told herself as he drove off erratically that he was anxious. She knew inwardly that Almoner would be tall and would seem protective and even if he were old and grey, he would seem dark and mysterious.
    She grew more anxious, staring with dread at two lines of sentinel cedars guarding Mrs.