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.But if we could have moved here, near a gristmill, things would have been different.Was it too late? Maybe it wasn't too late.Maybe Anne Marie and I could work things out in New Hampshire; maybe the boxy churches would help her forget my lying and would also help me to finally tell the truth; maybe my bumbling wouldn't be so severe here, in Red Bell, or in one of its neighbors.After all, the place was so very old and had been through a lot, so you probably couldn't do much to it that hadn't been done to it already.The ancient, meandering stone walls, for instance: they were everywhere, and if the Indians and the British and generations of livestock hadn't wrecked them, I didn't see how I could do the walls much damage, either.They looked tough and permanent, those walls, but with the snow on them they looked soft, too, which was how I was starting to think of myself ― or rather, was how I was starting to think of my future, New Hampshire self.Yes, New Hampshire was already doing strange things to me.After only an hour in the state, I had fully imagined life here with Anne Marie and the kids; it was easy to do so, easy to forget that Anne Marie was with Thomas Coleman now and wanted nothing more to do with me.I wondered if this was how my father had felt during his three-year exile ― if he'd felt hopeful and dreamy about the prospect of a new life with his wife and boy in Duluth, Yuma, et cetera.It hadn't worked out that way for him, exactly, but it would work out better for me and mine ― of that I was convinced.Because everyone knows that the one constant in the human story is progress, and my father's Duluth was not my New Hampshire, his familial disaster not mine, and so I pledged to look into local real estate prices and employment opportunities immediately after I found out who had called me, asking me to meet him at the Robert Frost Place at midnight.But then I kept driving north, up into the White Mountains and toward Franconia, and it got so awfully poor and depressing that even the snow couldn't disguise it.First the clapboard houses lost their clapboards and took on some aluminum siding, still white but somehow dirty against the legitimately and naturally white snow.I felt bad for the houses, having to be compared to the white snow and failing so completely.It would probably have been better for the houses and the people in them to move south, where there was no snow to have to live up to.Anyway, accelerating through time (because this trip took hours and hours ― you could see why people in a hurry and with no eye for local detail are so completely devoted to the interstate), I drove farther north, and the trailers started popping up here and there, until there were only trailers and I started to miss the aluminum siding.Oh, those trailers were sad and made Mr.Frazier's neighborhood in Chicopee seem like Shangri-la.They looked cold, too, sitting there on the open ground with no trees to protect them from the wind and the drifting snow.Some of the trailers had plywood entrances tacked onto their fronts or sides, and I could see the plywood jittering in the wind.Every trailer had a stovepipe coming out of its roof, sticking out of the tar paper like a lonely digit.The smoke came furiously out of these pipes, the wood burning double time so as not to spend any extra minutes in the trailers.There were wrecked cars in every yard, taking the place of the trees, and they, too, were covered with snow, the way the stone walls had been farther south.But whereas the snow had softened the boulders, the wrecks looked cruel as the rusted and warped fenders punched through the snow, making harsh holes in the drifts.I was in Franconia now, with the White Mountains everywhere, and it should have been beautiful, but it wasn't.The mountains themselves seemed impossibly far away, as if they didn't want to get too close to the trailers.It was awful, all right, so depressing, so poor, and by now the hole inside me ― the hole where Anne Marie and the kids were, the hole that pretty Red Bell had started to fill ― was as large as ever, and I'd forgotten about Red Bell entirely, couldn't remember what made it so beautiful, couldn't even conjure up a gristmill.This is what poverty does, I guess: it ruins your memory of more beautiful things, which is just another reason why we should try as hard as we can to get rid of it.Peter Le Clair's address: 10 State Route 18
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