Now there was the sound of slamming doors as the moving men hopped out of the cab and came toward them.
Ellie had wandered away a little, and now she said, “Daddy what’s this?”
Louis, who had started to meet the moving men, glanced back. At the edge of the field, where the lawn stopped and high summer grass took over, a path about four feet wide had been cut, smooth and close. It wound up the hill, curved through a low stand of bushes and a copse of birches, and out of sight.
“Looks like a path of some kind,” Louis said.
“Oh, ayuh,” Crandall said, smiling. “Tell you about it sometime, missy. You want to come over and we’ll fix your baby brother up?”
“Sure,” Ellie said and then added with a certain hopefulness “Does baking soda sting?”
4
Crandall brought back the keys, but by then Louis found his set. There was a space at the top of the glove compartment and the small envelope had slipped down into the wiring. He fished it out and let the movers in. Crandall gave him the extra set. They were on an old, tarnished fob. Louis thanked him and slipped them absently into his pocket, watching the movers take in boxes and dressers and bureaus and all the other things they had collected over the ten years of their marriage. Seeing them this way, out of their accustomed places, diminished them.
Just a bunch of stuff in boxes, he thought, and suddenly he felt sad and depressed-he guessed he was feeling what people called homesickness.
“Uprooted and transplanted,” Crandall said, suddenly beside him, and Louis jumped a little.
“You sound like you know the feeling,” he said.
“No, actually I don’t.” Crandall lit a cigarette-pop! went the match, flaring brightly in the first early evening shadows.
“My dad built that house across the way. Brought his wife there, and she was taken with child there, and that child was me, born in the very year 1900.”