373: Every fall, . . .
Herb ’n’ Lorna, Chapter 16 concludes
Every fall, during those years when Bert and Ella and I had lived with Herb and Lorna, all five of us would drive upstate to buy firewood. Herb had constructed a small trailer just for hauling wood, and he and Bert, with the help and advice of Lorna and Ella, would get this hitched to the car the night before, so that we could leave before dawn the next day. We would get up and dress in the dark, and we would slip out of the house in silence, so that we wouldn’t disturb the neighbors, but also because all of us enjoyed the unusual nature of what we were doing, I think. We would eat our breakfast on the road, in the car, while Herb drove. There were always hard-boiled eggs, baking-powder biscuits, fruit, coffee, and milk. The coffee was kept in a tall Thermos bottle protected by a cylindrical sleeve of leather. The milk and cream were in mayonnaise or jelly jars. The butter was packed into a crockery bowl. Salt and pepper were folded into tiny envelopes of waxed paper.
Lorna sat in the front, beside Herb, and she handed him his egg, his biscuits, and his coffee when he asked for them, so that he could keep driving. When he finished eating, he would say, “Would you ignite me — ”
He would pause, turn toward Lorna, and wink. She would smile — sometimes even giggle — and redden — sometimes even poke Herb — as if it were possible for us to understand his reference to the night the ballroom burned.
“ — a nicotine, please?” he would finish at last. Lorna would light him a cigarette, a Kool.
Before noon, we would reach the place where we bought the wood. I remember it as a farm, with chickens in the yard outside the house. All of us would work to load the trailer. I carried the kindling. Herb and Bert would concern themselves for some time with making the load stable and tight and safe, and there were likely to be disagreements between them about the best way to accomplish this. Lorna and Ella were vigilant, concerned, compassionate peacekeepers, but I think that it may have been on these wood-buying trips, more than at any time during the routines of daily life in close quarters at home, that the strain of living together showed most clearly. At the time, I couldn’t have understood why.
We would eat a picnic lunch, and then we would drive back to Babbington. “It will be dusk by the time we get back,” Lorna would say. “We’ll all have to work like the dickens to get the wood stacked under the porch before it’s too dark to see what we’re doing.”
It would be dusk by the time we got back, and we would all work like the dickens to get the wood stacked under the porch before it was too dark to see, but we never quite made it. The last bit of stacking was always done by the light of a kerosene lantern, assisted by flashlights that grew dimmer by the minute. When at last the wood was all stacked, Herb and Bert would carry some in for the first fire of the new season, and we would all sit in the living room and drink cocoa and watch the flames. We would eat dinner in the living room that night, something that Lorna and Ella had made the day before and just had to heat up, like chowder or stew. After a while, Lorna would begin to yawn, elaborately. Soon, she would insist that Herb come to bed.
“But I’m enjoying the fire, Lorna,” he might say.
“Herb,” she would say, “let’s go to bed. Let Ella and Bert enjoy the fire by themselves. Come on, Peter, you come to bed, too. It’s time for you to get to bed.”
Bert and Ella and I couldn’t have known that for all the years Herb and Lorna had lived in that house they had wanted to make love in front of the first fire of the season.
[to be continued on Wednesday, November 2, 2022]
In Topical Guide 373, Mark Dorset considers Language: Idiolect, Private Meanings and References, Code Words; Smoking: Cigarettes: Real Brands: Kool; and Advertising: Types of Appeal from this episode.
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