Dreams Underfoot: A Newford Collection (55 page)

Paperjack was sitting on this side of the river, doing I don’t know what. From where I stood, I couldn’t tell. He seemed to be just sitting there on the riverbank, watching the slow water move past. I watched him for awhile, then hoisted my fiddlecase from where I’d leaned it against the wall and hopped down to the sand. When I got to where he was sitting, he looked up and gave me an easy, welcom-ing grin, as if he’d been expecting me to show up.

Running into him like this was fate, Jilly would say. I’ll stick to calling it coincidence. It’s a big city, but it isn’t that big.

Paperjack made a motion with his hand, indicating I should pull up a bit of lawn beside him. I hesitated for a moment—right up until then, I realized later, everything could have worked out differently.

But I made the choice and sat beside him.

There was a low wall, right down by the water, with rushes and lilies growing up against it. Among the lilies was a family of ducks—mother and a paddling of ducklings—and that was what Paperjack had been watching. He had an empty plastic bag in his hand, and the breadcrumbs that remained in the bottom told me he’d been feeding the ducks until his bread ran out.

He made another motion with his hand, touching the bag, then pointing to the ducks.

I shook my head. “I wasn’t planning on coming down,” I said, “so I didn’t bring anything to feed them.”

He nodded, understanding.

We sat quietly awhile longer. The ducks finally gave up on us and paddled farther up the river, looking for better pickings. Once they were gone, Paperjack turned to me again. He laid his hand against his heart, then raised his eyebrows questioningly.

Looking at that slim black hand with its long narrow fingers lying against his dark suit, I marveled again at the sheer depth of his ebony coloring. Even with the bit of a tan I’d picked up busking the last few weeks, I felt absolutely pallid beside him. Then I lifted my gaze to his eyes. If his skin swallowed light, I knew where it went: into his eyes. They were dark, so dark you could barely tell the difference between pupil and cornea, but inside their darkness was a kind of glow—a shine that resonated inside me like the deep hum that comes from my fiddle’s bass strings whenever I play one of those wild Shetland reels in A minor.

I suppose it’s odd, describing something visual in terms of sound, but right then, right at that moment, I
heard
the shine of his eyes, singing inside me. And I understood immediately what he’d meant by his gesture.

“Yeah,” I said. “I’m feeling a little low.”

He touched his chest again, but it was a different, lighter gesture this time. I knew what that meant as well.

“There’s not much anybody can do about it,” I said.

Except Sam. She could come back. Or maybe if I just knew she’d been
real ...
But that opened a whole other line of thinking that I wasn’t sure I wanted to get into again. I wanted her to have been real, I wanted her to come back, but if I accepted that, I also had to accept that ghosts were real and that the past could sneak up and steal someone from the present, taking them back into a time that had already been and gone.

Paperjack took his fortune-telling device out of the breast pocket of his jacket and gave me a questioning look. I started to shake my head, but before I could think about what I was doing, I just said,

“What the hell,” and let him do his stuff

I chose blue from the colors, because that was the closest to how I was feeling; he didn’t have any colors like confused or lost or foolish. I watched his fingers move the paper to spell out the color, then chose four from the numbers, because that’s how many strings my fiddle has. When his fingers stopped moving the second time, I picked seven for no particular reason at all.

He folded back the paper flap so I could read my fortune. All it said was: “Swallow the past.”

I didn’t get it. I thought it’d say something like that Bobby McFerrin song, “Don’t Worry, Be Happy.” What it did say didn’t make any sense at all.

“I don’t understand,” I told Paperjack. “What’s it supposed to mean?”

He just shrugged. Folding up the fortune-teller, he put it back in his pocket.

Swallow the past. Did that mean I was supposed to forget about it? Or ... well, swallow could also mean believe or accept. Was that what he was trying to tell me? Was he echoing July’s argument?

I thought about that photo in my fiddlecase, and then an idea came to me. I don’t know why I’d never thought of it before. I grabbed my fiddlecase and stood up.

“I ...” I wanted to thank him, but somehow the words just escaped me. All that came out was, “I’ve gotta run.”

But I could tell he understood my gratitude. I wasn’t exactly sure what he’d done, except that that little message on his fortune-teller had put together a connection for me that I’d never seen before.

Fate, I could hear Jilly saying.

Paperjack smiled and waved me off.

I followed coincidence away from Paperjack and the riverbank and back up Battersfield Road to the Newford Public Library in Lower Crowsea.

Time does more than erode a riverbank or wear mountains down into tired hills. It takes the edge from our memories as well, overlay-ing everything with a soft focus so that it all blurs together. What really happened gets all jumbled up with the hopes and dreams we once had and what we wish had really happened. Did you ever run into someone you went to school with—someone you never really hung around with, but just passed in the halls, or had a class with—and they act like you were the best of buddies, because that’s how they remember it? For that matter, maybe you
were
buddies, and it’s you that’s remembering it wrong ....

Starting some solid detective work on what happened to Sam took the blur from my memories and brought her back into focus for me. The concepts of ghosts or people disappearing into the past just got pushed to one side, and all I thought about was Sam and tracking her down; if not the Sam I had known, then the woman she’d become in the past.

My friend Amy Scallan works at the library. She’s a tall, angular woman with russet hair and long fingers that would have stood her in good stead at a piano keyboard. Instead she took up the Uillean pipes, and we play together in an on-again, off-again band called Johnny Jump Up. Matt Casey, our third member, is the reason we’re not that regular a band.

Matt’s a brilliant bouzouki and guitar player and a fabulous singer, but he’s not got much in the way of social skills, and he’s way too cynical for my liking. Since he and I don’t really get along well, it makes rehearsals kind of tense at times. On the other hand, I love playing with Amy. She’s the kind of musician who has such a good time playing that you can’t help but enjoy yourself as well. When-ever I think of Amy, the first image that always comes to mind is of her rangy frame folded around her pipes, right elbow moving back and forth on the bellows to fill the bag under her left arm, those long fingers just dancing on the chanter, foot tapping, head bobbing, a grin on her face.

She always makes sure that the gig goes well, and we have a lot of fun, so it balances out I guess.

I showed her the picture I had of Sam. There was a street number on the porch’s support pillar to the right of the steps and enough of the house in the picture that I’d be able to match it up to the real thing. If I could find out what street it was on. If the house still existed.

“This could take forever,” Amy said as she laid the photo down on the desk.

“I’ve got the time.”

Amy laughed. “I suppose you do. I don’t know how you do it, Geordie. Everyone else in the world has to bust their buns to make a living, but you just cruise on through.”

“The trick’s having a low overhead,” I said.

Amy just rolled her eyes. She’d been to my apartment, and there wasn’t much to see: a spare fiddle hanging on the wall with a couple of Dilly’s paintings; some tune books with tattered covers and some changes of clothing; one of those old-fashioned record players that had the turntable and speakers all in one unit and a few albums leaning against the side of the apple crate it sat on; a couple of bows that desperately needed rehairing; the handful of used paperbacks I’d picked up for the week’s reading from Duffy’s Used Books over on Walker Street; and a little beat-up old cassette machine with a handful of tapes.

And that was it. I got by.

I waited at the desk while Amy got the books we needed. She came back with an armload. Most had Newford in the title, but a few also covered that period of time when the city was still called Yoors, after the Dutchman Diederick van Yoors, who first settled the area in the early 1800s. It got changed to Newford back around the turn of the century, so all that’s left now to remind the city of its original founding father is a street name.

Setting the books down before me on the desk, Amy went off into the stacks to look for some more obscure titles. I didn’t wait for her to get back, but went ahead and started flipping through the first book on the pile, looking carefully at the pictures.

I started off having a good time. There’s a certain magic in old photos, especially when they’re of the place where you grew up. They cast a spell over you. Dirt roads where now there was pave-ment, sided by office complexes. The old Brewster Theatre in its heyday—I remembered it as the place where I first saw Phil Ochs and Bob Dylan, and later all-night movie festivals, but the William-son Street Mall stood there now. Boating parties on the river. Old City Hall—it was a youth hostel these days.

But my enthusiasm waned with the afternoon. By the time the library closed, I was no closer to getting a street name for the house in Sam’s photo than I had been when I came in. Amy gave me a sympathetic “I told you so” look when we separated on the front steps of the library. I just told her I’d see her tomorrow.

I had something to eat at Kathryn’s Cafe. I’d gone there hoping to see Jilly, only I’d forgotten it was her night off. I tried calling her when I’d finished eating, but she was out. So I took my fiddle over to the theatre district and worked the crowds waiting in line there for an a hour or so before I headed off for home, my pockets heavy with change.

That night, just before I fell asleep, I felt like a hole sort of opened in the air above my bed. Lying there, I found myself touring New—

ford—just floating through its streets. Though the time was the present, there was no color.

Everything appeared in the same sepia tones as in my photo of Sam.

I don’t remember when I finally did fall asleep.

The next morning I was at the library right when it opened, carrying two cups of take-out coffee in a paper bag, one of which I offered to Amy when I got to her desk. Amy muttered something like, “when owls prowl the day, they shouldn’t look so bloody cheerful about it,” but she accepted the coffee and cleared a corner of her desk so that I could get back to the books.

In the photo I had of Sam there was just the edge of a bay window visible beside the porch, with fairly unique rounded gingerbread trim running offfrom either side ofits keystone. I’d thought it would be the clue to tracking down the place. It looked almost familiar, but I was no longer sure ifthat was because I’d actually seen the house at some time, or it was just from looking at the photo so much.

Unfortunately, those details weren’t helping at all.

“You know, there’s no guarantee you’re going to find a picture of the house you’re looking for in those books,” Amy said around mid-morning when she was taking her coffee break. “They didn’t exactly go around taking pictures of everything.”

I was at the last page of
Walks Through Old Crowsea.
Closing the book, I set it on the finished pile beside my chair and then leaned back, lacing my fingers behind my head. My shoulders were stiff from sitting hunched over a desk all morning.

“I know. I’m going to give Jack a call when I’m done here to see if I can borrow his bike this afternoon.”

“You’re going to pedal all around town looking for this house?”

“What else can I do?”

“There’s always the archives at the main library.”

I nodded, feeling depressed. It had seemed like such a good idea yesterday. It was still a good idea.

I just hadn’t realized how long it would take.

“Or you could go someplace like the Market and show the photo around to some of the older folks.

Maybe one of them will remem-ber the place.”

“I suppose.”

I picked up the next book,
The Architectural Heritage of Old Yoors,
and went back to work.

And there it was, on page thirty-eight. The house. There were three buildings in a row in the photo; the one I’d been looking for was the middle one. I checked the caption: “Grasso Street, circa 1920.”

“I don’t believe it,” Amy said. I must have made some kind of a noise, because she was looking up at me from her own work. “You found it, didn’t you?” she added.

“I think so. Have you got a magnifying glass?”

She passed it over, and I checked out the street number of the middle house. One-forty-two. The same as in my photo.

Amy took over then. She phoned a friend who worked in the land registry office. He called back a half hour later and gave us the name of the owner in 1912, when my photo had been taken: Edward Dickenson. The house had changed hands a number of times since the Dickensons had sold it in the forties.