Strange Highways

loved the sound of his laughter, perhaps because she had heard so little of it during the past two years.
     On the right-hand corner, two cars and a pickup were filling up at the Shell station pumps. A six-foot pine tree was angled across the bed of the truck. Christmas was only eight days away.
     On the left-hand corner was Haddenbeck's Tavern, standing before a backdrop of hundred-foot spruces. In the burnt-out gray twilight, the falling snow was like cascading ashes descending from an unseen celestial blaze, though in the amber light of the roadhouse windows, the flakes resembled not ashes but gold dust.
     "Come to think of it," Tommy said from the rear seat, "how could there have been cars when you were ten? I mean, gee, they didn't invent the wheel till you were eleven."
     "Tonight for dinner - worm cakes and beetle soup."
     "You're the meanest mother in the world."
     She glanced at the mirror again and saw that in spite of his bantering tone, the boy was not smiling any longer. He was staring grimly at the tavern.
     Slightly more than two years ago, a drunk named Deke Slater had left Haddenbeck's Tavern at the same time that Jim Lassiter had been driving toward town to chair a fund-raising committee at St. Paul's Church.. Traveling at high speed on Black Oak Road, Slater's Buick ran head-on into Jim's car. Jim died instantly, and Slater was paralyzed from the neck down.
     Often, when they passed Haddenbeck's - and when they rounded the curve where Jim had been killed - Tommy tried to conceal his enduring anguish by involving Meg in a jokey conversation. Not today. He had already run out of one-liners.
     "Light's green, Mom."
     She went through the intersection and across the township line. Main Street became a two-lane county route: Black Oak Road.
     Tommy had adjusted intellectually - for the most part emotionally as well - to the loss of his father. During the year following the tragedy, Meg had often come upon the boy as he sat quietly at a window, lost in thought, tears slipping down his face. She hadn't caught him weeping for ten months. Reluctantly he had accepted his father's death. He would be okay.
     Nevertheless, that didn't mean he was whole. Still - and perhaps for a long time to come - there was an emptiness in Tommy. Jim had been a wonderful husband but an even better father, so devoted to his son that they essentially had been a part of each other. Jim's death left a hole in Tommy as real as any that a bullet might have made, although it would not scar over as fast as a gunshot wound.
     Meg knew that only time could knit him completely.
     Snow began to fall faster and dusk surrendered to night, reducing visibility, so she slowed the jeep wagon. Hunching over the wheel, she could see ahead only twenty yards.
     "Getting bad," Tommy said tensely from the rear seat.
     "Seen worse."
     "Where? The Yukon?"
     "Yep. Exactly right. Middle of the Gold Rush, winter of 1849. You forgetting how old I am? I was mushing Yukon dog sleds before they'd invented dogs ."
     Tommy laughed but only dutifully.
     Meg could not see the broad meadows on either side, or the frozen silver ribbon of Seeger's Creek off to the right, although she could make out the gnarled trunks and jagged, winter-stripped limbs of the looming oaks that flanked that portion of the county road. The trees were a landmark by which she judged that she was a quarter mile from the blind curve where Jim had died.
     Tommy settled into silence.
     Then, when they were seconds from the curve, he said, "I don't really miss sledding and skating so much. It's just ... I feel so helpless in this cast, so ... so trapped."
     His use of the word "trapped" wrenched Meg because it meant that his uneasiness about being immobilized was closely linked to memories of his dad's death. Jim's Chevy had been so mangled by the impact that the police and coroner's men had required more than three hours to extract his corpse from the overturned car; ensnared by tangled metal, his body had to be cut loose with acetylene torches. At the time, she had tried to protect Tommy from the worst details of the accident, but when eventually he returned to his third-grade class, his schoolmates shared the grisly facts with him, motivated by a morbid curiosity about death and by an innocent cruelty peculiar