“She’d been stuck a few times, too, and had to get a pull from some farmer with a tractor and chain.
“I was there one day laying tile in the bathroom, sitting there with grout squittering out of every damn crack you could see—I dreamed of nothing but squares and cracks that was bleeding grout that night—and she come stood in the doorway and talked to me about it for quite a while. I used to chafe her about it, but I was also sort of interested, and not just because my brother Franklin used to live down-Bangor and I’d traveled most of the roads she was telling me of. I was interested just because a man like me is always uncommon interested in knowing the shortest way, even if he don’t always want to take it. You that way too?”
“Ayuh,” I said. There’s something powerful about knowing the shortest way, even if you take the longer way because you know your mother-in-law is sitting home. Getting there quick is often for the birds, although no one holding a Massachusetts driver’s license seems to know it. But knowing how to get there quick—or even knowing how to get there a way that the person sitting beside you don’t know . . . that has power.
“Well, she had them roads like a Boy Scout has his knots,” Homer said, and smiled his large, sunny grin. “She says, ‘Wait a minute, wait a minute,’ like a little girl, and I hear her through the wall rummaging through her desk, and then she comes back with a little notebook that looked like she’d had it a good long time. Cover was all rumpled, don’t you know, and some of the pages had pulled loose from those little wire rings on one side.
“The way Worth goes—the way most people go—is Route 97 to Mechanic Falls, then Route 11 to Lewiston, and then the Interstate to Bangor. 156.4 miles.’ ” I nodded.
” ‘If you want to skip the turnpike—and save some distance—you’d go to Mechanic Falls, Route 11 to Lewiston, Route 202 to Augusta, then up Route 9 through China Lake and Unity and Haven to Bangor. That’s 144.9 miles.’
” ‘You won’t save no time that way, missus,’ I says, ‘not going through Lewiston and Augusta.
Although I will admit that drive up the Old Derry Road to Bangor is real pretty.’
” ‘Save enough miles and soon enough you’ll save time,’ she says. ‘And I didn’t say that’s the way I’d go, although I have a good many times; I’m just running down the routes most people use. Do you want me to go on?’
” ‘No,’ I says, ‘just leave me in this cussed bathroom all by myself starin at all these cussed cracks until I start to rave.
” ‘There are four major routes in all,’ she says. The one by Route 2 is 163.4 miles. I only tried it once.
Too long.’
” ‘That’s the one I’d hosey if my wife called and told me it was leftovers,’ I says, kinda low.
” ‘What was that?’ she says.
” ‘Nothin,’ I says. Talkin to the grout.’
” ‘Oh. Well, the fourth—and there aren’t too many who know about it, although they are all good roads—paved, anyway—is across Speckled Bird Mountain on 219 to 202 beyond Lewiston. Then, if you take Route 19, you can get around Augusta. Then you take the Old Derry Road. That way is just 129.2.’
“I didn’t say nothing for a little while and p’raps she thought I was doubting her because she says, a little pert, ‘I know it’s hard to believe, but it’s so.’
“I said I guessed that was about right, and I thought— looking back—it probably was. Because that’s the way I’d usually go when I went down to Bangor to see Franklin when he was still alive. I hadn’t been that way in years, though. Do you think a man could just—well—forget a road, Dave?” I allowed it was. The turnpike is easy to think of. After a while it almost fills a man’s mind, and you think not how could 1 get from here to there but how can I get from here to the turnpike ramp that’s closest to there. And that made me think that maybe there are lots of roads all over that are just going begging; roads with rock walls beside them, real roads with blackberry bushes growing alongside them but nobody to eat the berries but the birds and gravel pits with old rusted chains hanging down in low curves in front of their entryways, the pits themselves as forgotten as a child’s old toys with scrumgrass growing up their deserted unremembered sides. Roads that have just been forgot except by the people who live on them and think of the quickest way to get off them and onto the turnpike where you can pass on a hill and not fret over it. We like to joke in Maine that you can’t get there from here, but maybe the joke is on us. The truth is there’s about a damn thousand ways to do it and man doesn’t bother.
Homer continued: “I grouted tile all afternoon in that hot little bathroom and she stood there in the doorway all that time, one foot crossed behind the other, bare-legged, wearin loafers and a khaki-colored skirt and a sweater that was some darker. Hair was drawed back in a hosstail. She must have been thirty-four or – five then, but her face was lit up with what she was tellin me and I swan she looked like a sorority girl home from school on vacation.
“After a while she musta got an idea of how long she’d been there cuttin the air around her mouth because she says, ‘I must be boring the hell out of you, Homer.’
” ‘Yes’m,’ I says, ‘you are. I druther you went away and left me to talk to this damn grout.’
” ‘Don’t be sma’at, Homer,’ she says.
” ‘No, missus, you ain’t borin me,’ I says.
” ‘So she smiles and then goes back to it, pagin through her little notebook like a salesman checkin his orders. She had those four main ways—well, really three because she gave up on Route 2 right away—but she must have had forty different other ways that were play-offs on those. Roads with state numbers, roads without, roads with names, roads without. My head fair spun with ’em. And finally she says to me, ‘You ready for the blue-ribbon winner, Homer?’
” ‘I guess so,’ I says.
” ‘At least it’s the blue-ribbon winner so far,’ she says. ‘Do you know, Homer, that a man wrote an article in Science Today in 1923 proving that no man could run a mile in under four minutes? He proved it, with all sorts of calculations based on the maximum length of the male thigh-muscles, maximum length of stride, maximum lung capacity, maximum heart-rate, and a whole lot more. I was taken with that article! I was so taken that I gave it to Worth and asked him to give it to Murray in the math department at the University of Maine. I wanted those figures checked because I was sure they must have been based on the wrong postulates, or something. Worth probably thought I was being silly—”Ophelia’s got a bee in her bonnet” is what he says— but he took them. Well, Murray checked through the man’s figures quite carefully . . . and do you know what, Homer?’
” ‘No, missus.’
” ‘Those figures were right. The man’s criteria were solid. He proved, back in 1923, that a man couldn’t run a mile in under four minutes. He proved that. But people do it all the time, and do you know what that means?’
” ‘No, missus,’ I said, although I had a glimmer.
” ‘It means that no blue ribbon is forever,’ she says. ‘Someday—if the world doesn’t explode itself in the meantime—someone will run a fwo-minute mile in the Olympics. It may take a hundred years or a thousand, but it will happen. Because there is no ultimate blue ribbon. There is zero, and there is eternity, and there is mortality, but there is no ultimate.’ “And there she stood, her face clean and scrubbed and shinin, that darkish hair of hers pulled back from her brow, as if to say ‘Just you go ahead and disagree if you can.’ But I couldn’t. Because I believe something like that. It is much like what the minister means, I think, when he talks about grace.
” ‘You ready for the blue-ribbon winner for now?’ she says.
” ‘Ayuh,’ I says, and I even stopped groutin for the time bein. I’d reached the tub anyway and there wasn’t nothing left but a lot of those frikkin squirrelly little corners. She drawed a deep breath and then spieled it out at me as fast as that auctioneer goes over in Gates Falls when he has been putting the whiskey to himself, and I can’t remember it all, but it went something like this.” Homer Buckland shut his eyes for a moment, his big hands lying perfectly still on his long thighs, his face turned up toward the sun. Then he opened his eyes again and for a moment I swan he looked like her, yes he did, a seventy-year-old man looking like a woman of thirty-four who was at that moment in her time looking like a college girl of twenty, and I can’t remember exactly what he said any more than he could remember exactly what she said, not just because it was complex but because I was so fetched by how he looked sayin it, but it went close enough like this: