Chapter Ten #6
The problem remained: how to get Bentley up the walkway steps.
Of course, Bentley had a solution—there was a plank in the car just for this purpose—such is the world that a man confined to a scooter must not only endure the indignities of narrow doorways and uncleared sidewalks, but must in fact go through life carrying his own plank.
But Bentley, as we have seen, was not one to feel sorry for himself.
Twice Miles set down the plank, and twice Bentley motored over it, and then they were inside, the door was closed, and, with a great synchronous shiver, two cloaks of snow slipped off the two men’s shoulders and onto the floor.
—
Wilson Bentley stayed with the Krzelewski-Petrosians for three days.
Little did any of the parties know, but, as the snow fell gently on the land, there occurred a transfer, imperceptible at first yet in its sum tremendous, of matter from sky to earth.
Water droplets once suspended in the atmosphere settled on the branches of the trees, and with each falling flake, the weight upon the boughs grew greater, and deep within the wood the fibers began to strain.
And then, all over Greensbury, and across the border in Oakfield, the trees felt a twanging in the cords of their heartwood, and then their heartwood broke.
Trees such as the eastern white pine by Rumphius’s driveway.
Miles, standing with Bentley by the hole excavated in the carpet, heard it, and Bentley, too, and Olive, up in her room, awoke, and blinked at the darkness, but, finding no rent in her world, lay back asleep.
To everyone’s great fortune, the great branch missed the ambulance by less than a foot. But it was a foot on the far side of the ambulance—in other words, between ambulance and road.
To leave that night was thus out of the question, but so was leaving the next morning, for the chainsaw hanging in Rumphius’s garage was an aspirational chainsaw, and had been purchased by the good professor on a manly whim that had extended neither to fuel nor to oil.
And since, somewhere in the land, another branch had taken with it a critical power line, when the gathered parties awoke the next morning (Reader, Bentley graciously took the couch), they found themselves in a Vermont little different from that of the first Snowflake Bentley—the children ecstatic at the prospect of a snow day, Kate relieved not to teach given the prior evening’s pandemonium, and Miles eager to resume the many conversational threads that had begun the night before in the emergency room, only to be cruelly interrupted by the cherubic rush.
In fact, all were similarly charmed by Snowflake’s presence.
The children both had heard of the first Bentley of course, and Kate had taken them aside and explained how their guest was a different sort of person, a nice man, a man who had helped Daddy, but a man with one very particular belief, odd, but harmless, or probably harmless.
They ran downstairs to meet their guest, Olive marveling at this new contour of adult silliness, while Wesley cautiously appraised this person who was so clearly wrong about one thing, but astonishingly knowledgeable about everything else.
—
And then the tree service came, the driveway was clear, and Bentley climbed back onto his scooter and drove out into the snow.
“Well, that was something,” said Kate, as Miles hobbled back to the door and the two turned to wave goodbye to their houseguest. And it was something.
By then they were very grateful; it had been Bentley’s propane stove that had heated their water and their chili, and Bentley’s kerosene lantern that had kept the darkness away, and the children loved the scooter, which he let them drive around the house, couches to the side, Wesley gunning it with Olive riding, and then Olive at the wheel and Giuseppe in the basket, and if anyone worried about the carpet, they said nothing, because that ship had sailed.
And Miles truly felt honored to have the entire—or near-entire—library of human folly parked there in his driveway.
That’s it, he would think: a lot of Unreason, certainly, but how refreshing to have it all in one place.
On balance, it was a not-unpleasurable way to pass their snowed-in hours.
Kate was glad her husband had the company, and how else was Miles going to pass time with a bum knee, other than working on his dissertation?
Indeed, watching the ambulance trundle off down the driveway, Miles felt a little pang that could only be described as loss.
And now? he wondered. Standing at the doorway, shaking his new friend’s hand in valediction, he had found himself a little tongue-tied.
“Say, you going to be okay?” Bentley had asked, though Miles had said nothing of his troubles.
And he laughed. It was just a knee, right?
With Bentley’s help, he’d found a true certificated orthopedist. But both men knew that this was not what his friend was asking, and Bentley looked at him through his thick, smudged lenses, as if he could see into his soul.
“See you,” he said.
“See you!”
And Miles had walked back to the house, to his wife, with the ski poles he was using as crutches. His heart fell a little with each step. For now what was he to do, how was he to fill the days?