I glanced over my left shoulder just before we took the turn at the pankoeken café to go through the village. Arthur was cycling along behind me as usual, instantly visible in his day-glo yellow windbreaker. I followed curving Dorpstraat past the curtain shop, the hardware store, the inviting but ever- empty pub with wooden bar stools and pub tables set out in the gravel front yard. I took the right turn-off at Speulderbosweg to our favorite path. A couple of minutes down the road I glanced over my left shoulder as one does these days. No Arthur.
I pulled off the path and waited for him to catch up. There was a truck just behind so I thought he would blaze into view any second. Seconds became minutes, Still no Arthur. But the village only took 30 seconds to bike through, maybe 35 if you were really poking along.
There aren’t that many byways and black holes in our village.
Where was he? Why did he always do this to me? The simplest things became problems. If he wasn’t hitting his head on the shed door – and how many times did it take to learn where the overhang hung? It didn’t change places every day –if it wasn’t the shed door, it was stubbing his toe, taking too much Klonopin on the plane so I just about had to slap him silly and splash cold water in his face to get him through customs. Forgetting his glasses so I had to do all the work of decoding while he stood there like a dummy. I wasn’t the one who had been valedictorian of an earnest Massachusetts high school. I hadn’t even learned how to drive until I was 26. The first 20 yrs of our life together had been him taking care of me, and it’s not like he got Alzheimer’s.
I guess what he got was tired.
Damnit. I cruised back through the village. No luck.
Oh God, there had been a garbage truck back on Oud Milligenseweg. We were admiring the robotic arm that picked up the perfectly arrayed garbage cans – one smallish one per household – and dumped the contents in the truck. I just assumed he had safely cleared the truck along with me. What if he’d stumbled? What if he’d picked that moment to get tangled up in his feet and suddenly fall off his bike for no reason? These things happened to him.
Oh God, let him be all right. Please God, my life is over if his is. Oh God, and he could be lying there on the wrong forest path. He kept saying he would learn Dutch but he never would. How did I know he never would? There was always a chance. Wasn’t there always a chance?
He wasn’t back on Oud Milligenseweg. The garbage truck was gone.
But what if he’d fallen somewhere else with no one to help him? Maybe he took the wrong path. Even on a summer afternoon with sun dappling through the high spruce, our village didn’t see much traffic, cycle, car, or even on foot.
I headed down our alternate route, racing down the slope of the cornfields, scanning the green fields for his dayglo yellow jacket. I went all the way to the rotary leading to Harderwijk but finally crossed over at the Antiek barn to cycle back.
The slope wasn’t so gentle going back. In fact the incline had grown steep and hard to negotiate and went on much too long. I put my cycle in low gear and took the hill standing up, scanning the opposite side through the copses of birch.
But he had disappeared from the world in an instant.
The path jagged and our windmill came into view in the distance, off to the left across the cornfields. We had never seen it from this view. I remembered reading that there had been a windmill in that spot since the 1300’s. All the lost generations of farmers tilling their fields here must have looked at it as a beacon.
I was numb and frightened, at that stage where the mind equally wants to know and doesn’t want to know anything ever again. Just to keep the body moving so the mind didn’t have to, I raced to the forest path we’d started out for. The weather was perfect, low 60’s without any wind.
There I found him. I spotted his yellow jacket first. It came into view down the hill. Then I saw him, cycling up the slope as I raced down to meet him.
“I knew you had to be here somewhere,” he said.
He had a huge smile on his face but he was quite calm.
“What happened?”
“My jacket. It was cooler than I thought at first so I stopped to zip it up. It got stuck and by the time I fixed it, you’d vanished.”
“Oh, thank God,” I said.
“I knew you had to be somewhere,” he repeated.
On the way back we passed right in front of the windmill. It was Thursday so you could go inside, up the wooden ladders and see the mill still at work. We had never gotten around to doing so, but suddenly now it seemed urgent not to delay.
We climbed up the narrow wooden ladders to the second level and stepped out onto a wooden verandah that wrapped around the windmill. We looked out across the countryside. The view seemed to stretch back into time so far you wouldn’t be surprised to see Frodo bobbing along the green-gold quilt of the cornfields.
On the ground, a white-haired man nearly diaphanous with age pulled on vast ropes to release the brake stone in the tower. Still the wooden windmill propellers did not turn.
“You have to wait for the wind,” said a voice behind us.
We turned to see an ancient gentleman wearing a tan summer suit and well-pressed white shirt. He was leading a small group of children up the ladder to the third level, where corn meal was pouring down out of a metal chute.
“This is enough,” I said to Arthur. “I’d like to go up there but I’m scared.”
The docent turned to us in a kindly way like some angel of the windmill.
“There is no danger,” he said.
Still we stayed on the second level. We could see as far as we needed to.
Back at the bungalow, we wheeled our bikes into the red cedar shed. Through the hedges, I could just see our neighbor Edith, eating her solitary dinner at the dining table. She lost her husband just last year, but still she sits down at her table every night as if to do so keeps him near her.
“Edith,” I call, “come over and have dessert with us when you finish.”
“Ja,” she answers, “okay.”
But when I knock on her wooden gate a half hour later she’s changed into her robe and pajamas.
“Maybe the next time,” she says. “I find I do not have the heart to visit right now.”
“Yes, the next time,” I agree.
Back inside our cabin Arthur is dozing on the couch, listing to 70 degrees. I squeeze in on his left and lay my head on his shoulder. My neck is stretched and beginning to cramp, but I leave it there anyway, for hours it seems.
But maybe the time was much shorter.
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