January in Paris

Fiction--Thank you, Billy Collins

[Note to the Reader: I think of myself as an experimenter with the short story. For some time, I’ve had the idea of writing stories inspired by poems I’ve run across and loved, using the same title but going off in whichever direction inspiration took me. Previously posted stories “The Wild Geese” and “Birches,” by Mary Oliver and Robert Frost respectively, are examples of these. This one is inspired by Billy Collins. My beginning and ending may, in places, follow him too closely, but here it is anyway. You can look up the poem and judge for yourself. I hope to do more of these in the future.]

January in Paris

That winter I had nothing to do but keep the fire going in the barrel stove. Nighttime—in watch cap, double socks, scarf, two shirts, and a sweater—I stood minding the flames through a crack in the stove top. Later, adding coat and gloves, I split wood and took a final leak against a hemlock.

Some mornings, I pulled on my boots and trudged up through the woods to the top of the ridge. A pseudo-Thoreau in those days, inspector of snow drifts, I avoided trampling where the wind had carved its more fanciful creations. Tiny frozen crystals melted on my bare cheeks and gathered on my shoulders, and at steep places, snow to my waist, I pulled myself up by the limbs of saplings. Other days, the sun bounced so intensely off the snow that I had to shade my eyes as I found my way.

At the top, I looked over farm fields and the valley road that ran through the village. Beyond, farms dotted the wavey landscape before the state lands and the long, forested wall of Tussey Mountain. Most times then, I retraced my steps home to split more wood or take my buckets on a shoulder yoke down the slope to the spring. But the village had a small, unlikely café at the back of a general store that I’d been to once while my truck still ran, and one day, close to my birthday, standing there looking down to the village, I decided that I had just enough money in my pocket to push on for a cup of strong coffee and an apricot muffin.

The climb from the cabin had taken twenty minutes, though it seemed much longer. Now the walk through the drifts from the top of the ridge to the village took nearly an hour, but then a sign on the door said the café had shut its doors for good. Standing there alone with a jagged wind stinging my nose, I laughed out loud at myself and turned for home. Lunch was oatmeal with peanut butter and jelly, washed down with two glasses of spring water. Three new logs blazed up, and I slid the rocking chair close, wrapped my scarf a little tighter, and relaxed with a collection of short stories—and my dreams. Some days, remembering my reason for going there, I pulled a table closer and sat twiddling a pen over a blank page, not knowing then how to start.

My one neighbor was Ray, an old spinner of yarns with an endless cast of characters, real or imagined, bumping around in his head. You always knew who the story was going to be about by how he started: “He lived up in Poor Hollow,” he might begin in his reedy tenor, “and the farther up you went, the poorer it got. Well, he lived at the verrry end,” which meant the story was about Harley Hendershot and his brain damaged wife. Evenings, we sat eating dried apples from a bushel basket, warming ourselves by the wood stove in his basement. He chewed tobacco on one side of his mouth and talked out of the other, then, at a dramatic pause, reached over with a stick to open the stove’s door and spit tobacco juice into the flames.

I rode shotgun in Ray’s pickup to collect slab wood from a sawmill. We’d pile the bed of the truck as high as we dared, then inch our way home over the icy roads, careful not to tip over, then cut each long, barky slab into stove length chunks with a chain saw. This time the chunks went to Ray; that time to me. I burnt the wood and filed away his characters in my imagination, thinking they’d grow there.

That was my life then, as I like to remember it anyway. I was young and strong. My girlfriend of those days sometimes drove out from town, and we made feral love, shedding our layers in the cold, and I rose afterwards to stoke the fire as she sat big eyed on the bed, clutching the blankets around her bare shoulders.

That had all been in the time of collecting “experience,” before the time of collecting “age,” which is a time of remembering appointments and, eventually, medication schedules. Some go off to Paris. I had gone to the woods. There had been a woman that one time I visited the village café. A kind of ghost, really, I imagined. She was a short, slightly stout woman with grey hair in a bun, and glasses on a chain around her neck, her large galoshes dripping melting snow on the floorboards. She’d been reading a thick book from the library, and I’d hoped to talk to her. Before I could find the words, though, she wrapped a heavy coat around herself and hurried away, then, of course, the place folded.     

But, scrolling a long way forward, having collected plenty of age, it’s January again, cold and snowy. I’m sitting with a cup of strong coffee and a butter croissant in a city coffee house—my city and my coffee house, I like to think—and I once again see her across the room with her book. Not a day older. The very floorboards transformed to that village café. She, the very ghost. Grey bun at the back of her hair. The book surely from the library, and glasses on a chain around her neck. The thought of her had been there for me all the years I’d lived in that neighborhood. She read a book or the Times, speaking to no one, and then rising abruptly, gone like a lost inspiration—to be what? To go where? Maybe she would live alone in a tiny apartment. A lonely pensioner. A catless tender of house plants? I imagined scenarios, wondered what I could think of to make her turn and give me a start. Nothing took. Summer and winter, I haunted the walking paths in the park across the street, befriended baristas and regulars as they appeared then vanished, checked in with the eccentrics who fed the birds and the squirrels, assembled a rare collection of neighborhood characters, but, when I sat at my table at home, I could never assemble a single sentence to make her flesh.

Then that January day, I couldn’t begin to know how it happened, taking care on the icy sidewalks and thinking about the cabin and the ridge and Ray, I walked her home to my place, a single staircase up from the street, where I found that one needed sentence and another and another until, loosening her tight bun and shaking her hair free, she showed me the way deeper into a story that ended, as this one does, with her asleep in my bed, one bare, girlish leg uncovered, and me sitting at my little table by my front window finishing this sentence.