Free A Stranger's House by Bret Lott Page A

kill me as it had all but done to my mother. Though he hadn’t spoken to me since that time, I listened, listened to this day. And I had lived.
    Â 

    Tom and I said nothing on the way out to Chesterfield, through Haydenville and on past the lumbermill, Route 9 now narrow and twisting along the bank of the Mill River, water this time of year only deep enough to glaze the rocks across the bed. In Williamsburg we passed the General Store, the parking lot packed with cars. I wanted to tell Tom to pull into the gravel lot behind the place and let us go in, have a look around, but I said nothing. We were moving, driving somewhere, the earth turning beneath us, and for that I was thankful. We were going to what could be our house, I thought. A home, our own, and I settled back in the seat.
    Outside Williamsburg we turned onto 43 and headed south, the road bordered now with trees, and for the first time I saw the changes in colors that had already come about, the hardwood trees giving up the green for autumn. The color usually started at the tops of trees, off to one side in a certain spot, where a single branch would be filled with yellow- and orange-edged leaves, a sprinkle of color that made you see the shape of the tree, shape you’d taken for granted since the trees had filled out with new leaves last spring. The farther out we got, too, the more trees had already begun the change until it seemed color was all around, not yet the cascades of red and orange and russet and yellow, but the hints, the edges, that let you know things were about to move into fall.
    Chesterfield itself sat up on a hill, one of the first at the edge of the Berkshires; houses, some old, some not so old, sat along both sides of the highway. There was a church, and a gas station, amarket and post office, all the lawns neatly trimmed, some clapboard sidings brown and weatherbeaten, others in clean, white lines and angles, still others shingled over.
    It was a beautiful, small town, and as we passed through it I could see us stopping for gas and talking to the owner of the station, going to the post office for Christmas stamps, stopping in the market for milk on the way home. I could live here.
    The road fell down toward the gorge, and from the crest, just beyond the main strip of town, I could see the Berkshires before us, and the colors etched into the green, here and there a stark bush already gone red, the whole upper half of a maple given over to orange.
    I looked at Tom. He looked at me. He smiled.
    â€œWhat do you think?” he said. He looked back at the road. He was still smiling.
    I said, “I can see us here.”
    He said nothing, put the car into low gear, and we moved down into the valley, fields below us to the left, to the right those trees. On both sides of the road ran old stone fences, rocks fallen over here and there, but for the most part neat and sturdy. I wondered how many days those walls had seen, how many sunsets and snow-falls and thunderstorms and summer afternoons, and how many anonymous cars just like ours had driven past them day after day while they just waited for a shift in the stones, the giving way of earth from rains and melting ice to make those breaks in the line where stones had fallen back to the ground, back to where they came from in the first place.
    I could feel the engine running hard, feel the pull of the brakes as we headed to the bottom of the valley, and then we crossed the bridge, the stream only boulders and rocks outlined with slow-moving water. On the other side of the stream two hills shot up, the road going between them, following another stream, this one to the right, on my side. Three or four houses were on this side, some kept up, others a little shabby, but houses all the same.
    I said, “Our future neighbors.”
    Tom said, “Don’t jump the gun. We’re just up here to look.”
    We were almost there; the drive up didn’t seem half as long as it had Thursday