The Second Coming

the highway where it came over the hill beyond the cedars. She was waiting for the bread truck.
    When the bread truck came, she looked at her watch, opened her notebook, and began to write.
    2
    When she woke in the morning it was cool enough in the greenhouse to make her think about keeping warm when winter came.
    The stove was her best hope. The only alternative was to buy a kerosene heater in town, if such a thing was available. That cost money and meant buying and lugging fuel and stinking up the greenhouse, which still had its faint reek of root rot and tropic orchid damp.
    But how to move the stove from the cellar of the ruin to the potting shed? It was too heavy to move more than an inch or so along the cellar floor, let alone haul up the steps.
    But she thought it would do. Big and black and iron, it was a Ben Franklin maybe or a potbellied. No, it didn’t have a belly but an oven and firebox as big as a dollhouse and capped by iron lids the size of dinner plates and a balcony of warming compartments (she guessed). It even had a water tank. And its name was not Ben Franklin but Grand Crown. Mica windows, crazed and brown and glittering with crystals, let into the dark room of the oven. There were pipes of light fluted blued metal, one an elbow—fluted flues? It was a cook stove! But didn’t cook stoves warm rooms? Was it also a water heater?
    Then why hadn’t she asked the man with the golf stick to help her? He was strong enough. They could have got it out with ramps and ropes like the Egyptians building the pyramids. Had she been put off because he was angry and out of it, sunk into himself, beheading skunk cabbages and aiming the golf stick like a gun? No, for that very reason he’d have done it—for the reason that he was, she saw at once, out of it, out of his life, he’d have been glad to do anything at all except whatever it was he was doing or not doing. So that she had only to say to him in the glade do this, do that, and he’d have done it, not for her, not even seeing her, but for the pleasure, the faint ironic pleasure of the irrelevance of it, of helping a stranger move a stove in the woods.
    Though she could not have said so, she could tell that he had reached such a degree of irony in his life that he would as soon do one thing as another. He’d have been glad to help her move the stove just for the oddness of it. “Where have you been?” his golfer friends would ask him. “I sliced out-of-bounds on eighteen and met a girl who asked me to help her move a stove into her house.” “Right,” they would say. “What else?”
    No, she hadn’t asked him because she didn’t want to ask anybody. Asking is losing, she might have said. Or getting helped is behelt. It is not that a debt is incurred to a person for a thing as that the thing itself loses value. It was her stove and her life and she would move the stove and live her life. Sitting on the step beside the dog, she felt the porcelain shield and the blue enameled trademark Grand Crown and tapped the mica window. It was as solid as quartz. The stove was heavy. She could barely pick up one corner.
    There was time to get it out. The October sun was warm. Get it out how? With ramps? pulleys? slaves? She didn’t know. All she knew for sure was that she could do it and do it alone. Anything is possible if you have time and take thought over it. She had found a treasure. You don’t ask a stranger to help you move a treasure. You don’t ask friends either. And you certainly don’t ask family.
    She had at least a month. If she had to she could take it apart piece by piece and move it like the Statue of Liberty.
    Wasn’t there a picture in a dictionary showing a child picking up a horse, using a system of pulleys and ropes? She could go to the hardware store but she needed a word. What was the word for such a thing? If she didn’t have the word, they wouldn’t give it to her. Never mind. She’d look until she found it, then point. I hate to go into hardware stores and not know the name of a thing.
    Go to library, get book on greenhouses, look up pulley in dictionary. There might be a picture of different kinds of pulleys with names.
    Move stove, she wrote. She wrote:
    Consider water problem, i.e., taking a bath. It appears stove has small pipes for heating water. Water supply?
    Two more problems:
    One: How to live. How do you live? My life expectancy is