Seed on the Wind

They went to a railroad station she did not know. At first sight it seemed unfamiliar, and she gazed around at the row of ticket windows and the arrangement of benches in the waiting room to make sure. Immediately she was seized with panic; she stopped dead and refused to move a step. Her father yelled to the porter, who halted to wait for them, and then turned to her and explained. This train did not go home, but was on another line which stopped at Overton. At Overton they would hire a car to drive them home, forty miles over a state road. Did Lora want to arrive at their home station and descend from the train with everyone there from taxi drivers to the ticket agent recognizing her and looking at her? He explained this patiently, and she was touched by the evidence of his thoughtfulness and ingenuity. It seemed a bit over-subtle even for him, but of course he was right; she would have hated that. She walked beside him down the long platform, and they had barely found their seats in the parlor car when the train jerked forward and rolled slowly out of the shed.

They got to Overton after midnight, an hour late on account of the snowstorm. But their real tussle with the storm then began, during the forty-mile drive northwest, directly in the teeth of the blizzard. They had difficulty finding anyone who would undertake it, and finally persuaded a man who owned a little garage on the edge of town and whose only available vehicle was an open touring-car. He put up curtains, but the wind tore them open before they had gone a mile; and a few miles further on they got stuck in a drift. That was what he had put in the shovels for. Ten minutes’ furious work by the two men, while Lora sat huddled in robes and blankets on the rear seat, got them underway again. Four times more the performance was repeated before they got through, and in between these episodes they shoved the wheels stubbornly forward in low or second gear, with a wind of hurricane force, cruelly cold, blinding and stinging them with the icy particles of sleet and snow it drove before it. Once the driver had to fight his way through the drifts to a farmhouse and bring the farmer with a team of horses to pull them back on the road, or at least where the road was supposed to be. This was mad, Lora thought. Plain crazy. They should have stayed at a hotel in Overton. But the driver, a wiry little man with a strong foreign accent and bushy eyebrows which now were shelves of frozen snow, evidently didn’t mind it at all; he would laugh in gay excitement and shout encouragements to the car as it plunged and struggled forward. Lora was certain her feet were frozen.

As they turned into the driveway of their home her father looked at his watch by the dashboard light and announced that it was four o’clock. He paid off the driver, repeating his advice against attempting a return trip until the day came. He wouldn’t, the driver said; he knew a place to go where he could get just what he needed, inside and out. Then Lora wriggled out of her nest of blankets and robes, and her father picked her up in his arms and carried her through the drifts that had piled up to the very door. As they went in a blast of wind and snow whirled in too. The living room was warm, all the lights were on, and logs were blazing in the fireplace; and Mrs. Winter was there, arising from a chair in front of the fire as they entered. More slight and fragile than ever, her eyes red with weeping, a brown shawl around her shoulders, she came a step or two toward them, then stood still, swaying a little it seemed with the dancing light of the fire behind her. Lora knew she had to put her arms around her and kiss her, and she didn’t want to. She was filled that instant with a deep and overwhelming regret that she had let herself be brought home. Home indeed. This her mother! This weak ineffectual ghost — when what she needed was strength against her own weakness. That man would destroy them both yet — her mother was gone already beyond all hope of salvage; and here was she herself back again, and though she was by no means beyond hope she felt herself quivering with a distrust and revulsion that went clear to the center of her bones. Drowsy with cold and exhaustion, the warmth of the room was arousing her blood, awakening her momentarily into a curious trance of excitement and terror; everything was unreal and threatening and dangerous. She should not have come, she should never have let him bring her here.

Her arms were around her mother’s shoulders when her father’s voice sounded, dry and hostile:

“I told you not to keep the lights on.”

This struck Lora as outrageously petty and unreasonable, and the remembered tone made her furious. She turned and flung at him:

“Oh, shut up. Just once shut up.”

In a vague gesture, presumably comforting, the palm of Mrs. Winter’s hand was rubbing up and down the sleeve of her daughter’s dress.

“I pulled the shades down tight,” she said.