The Chardon Chronicles: Season One -- The Harvest Festival (2 page)

The Sun Tarot From 1909 Rider-Waite-Smith
Deck

Judge Marcus Rice was on the road almost
every morning. Rain didn’t bother him. Cold didn’t bother him. He
jogged his five mile route as long as the footing wasn’t too bad.
The rural roads of his route connected nowhere to nothing, so
traffic was rare and drivers that did pass were usually courteous
and slowed down as they went by. In spite of that, his wife made
him wear a ridiculous, he thought, LED hat and jacket. He got the
outfit for Christmas, and tweeted a picture of himself standing
next to the tree, “Which one’s the tree?!” Lots of retweets and
favorites on that one.

He lived in the country on a gentleman’s farm
with his wife their four kids and a whole menagerie of animals. He
made a point of keeping the place going year round as if farming
were the family business. They rented horse stalls all year, did
maple syrup in the spring, and firewood and hay in the fall. The
kids usually enjoyed getting involved and the property was a great
place to entertain and engage in the glad handing politics of the
County: prosperous people helped other prosperous people be
prosperous, but not in an unseemly way.

The miles ticked by under his feet. The dry
grass of mid August was yellow and waving in a gentle morning
breeze. The leaves of the maples and locust trees along the road
were still mostly green. The sky was deep hazeless blue, and the
morning sun a bright white disk. Fawns and their mother looked up
at him as he went past. He waved, “mornin’ fellas”.

He had no idea death was bearing down on him.
Sarah Cantoe pulled out of her sister’s driveway and went north on
the narrow chip and tar two lane. She barreled along and ignored
the sounds of the tires slapping over potholes. A bootleg CD from
the tween idol
du jour
kept skipping and chirping and her
kids were carrying on and fighting with each other. The light from
the world poured through her eyes and into her mind, but the
brilliance of the day only made a fuzzy impression on her.

She was under the influence of a cocktail of
drugs and booze that would have rendered a typical person unable to
walk, but for her it was just normal numbness. She saw Marcus’ vest
from a couple of miles away. A small voice inside her pleaded to
just pass him and go home, but she ignored it. She gripped the
wheel and pointed the car over the double yellow lines. Marcus
heard the car approaching from behind, but didn’t see it. His life
was so routine and protected he barely imagined the possibility of
an accident happening to him. He couldn’t have conceived that a
group of predators stalked him for months and coldly decided to
erase his presence from this plane of existence.

He didn’t really feel the impact. It was just
a jumble of up and down and spinning sensations. A profound injury
is a different sort of experience than a minor one. Get a paper
cut, and a chorus of nerves shrieks against a background of quiet.
The brain focuses all attention on a trifle. With a shattering
injury, the attempt to regain equilibrium consumes all the brain’s
resources. The world just becomes a fuzzy dream.

Keith Marte woke up an hour before his alarm
was set to sound and he got up to look in on his daughter Chloe.
The condo was still stacked with boxes. Only the kitchen was
unpacked and there was some sitting space in the living room. The
timing of his lease running out in Nashville made the move a big
rush, so they had no time to settle in before school started. He
felt a little twinge of regret about it, but his daughter was
amazingly resilient, or at least she pretended to be.

She was still asleep. Her cell phone screen
was casting a faint glow up at the ceiling and shining against the
empty boxes stacked near her dresser. He started the coffee and got
breakfast going and picked up the paper from the concrete slab
porch.

The activity nudged her awake, and a crusted
rag slipped off her head onto the bed. “Oh… shoot! shoot… shoot!”
She said. She walked out into the kitchen. “What’s up?” he
asked.

“I had a zit on my forehead last night, I was
soaking it with peroxide, but I fell asleep.” She ducked into the
bathroom. Oh great! I’ve got skunk hair.” She held the offending
strands in her hand and stared at them.

Keith Marte glanced up from the paper. “Well,
it’s really not that bad. Maybe you’ll start a trend?”

She rattled through some boxes in the
kitchen. “I don’t have any hair coloring! I tossed it before we
moved. Grrr….”

“Wear a hat!”

“Do I want to be
that one kid
who
wears a hat? There can only be one per class; what if someone’s
already that kid, dad?”

“I’ve got some black spray paint in one of
these boxes.”

“Haha. very funny. This trauma’s gonna scar
me for life and all you can do is mock? I think I’ll do the
hat.”

“Do you want a lift? I am going to the office
and it’s on the way.”

“I think I’ll walk. Soak in the scenery.”

She popped earbuds in her ears and set out
toward the school. It was a cool morning and dew was silver on the
grass. She had hiking boots on so she left the sidewalk and cut
across the lawn of the condos. The town was just starting to stir.
The adult faces in the cars were heading off to jobs away from
town. The baby faced sixteen and seventeen year olds were heading
toward the high school.

The high school is the heart of any small
town. It’s one place where at least some patches of actual human
life happen. Dreams are protected and even encouraged by adults who
project their hopes on their children and at least attempt a
vicarious escape from The Matrix.

The High School building was faced from
reddish orange bricks and had two rows of dark framed institutional
windows. Some were decorated with posterboard letters “CHS” and
“Welcome Back!” signs. A smokestack towered above the building.
Busses were stopped in a long line and the students without cars
streamed from them into the building. Kids were hanging around by
the doors catching up after the summer break, a few teachers and
vice principals tried to keep the mass moving through the metal
detectors.

A lanky black haired boy on a BMX bike shot
past Chloe’s shoulder. He was wearing a black concert T-Shirt that
had the name
White Roses
in script letters across the front
with white silkscreened rose stems wrapped around his skinny torso.
“Hey!” she shouted angrily.

“Sorrrryyyyy” she heard as he went by.
“Steeeeeve!” he shouted and waved to a friend wearing the same
T-shirt.

A convertible drove past on the way to the
east student parking lot. It was a cream colored Austin Healey 3000
with red leather interior. The girl driving the car had shoulder
length red hair that curled at the ends. She was wearing a bomber
jacket and sunglasses like something out of the 1940’s. Heads
turned as she passed.

Chloe’s 7:30AM class was Calculus. It was on
the second floor of the building in a windowless drab cinder block
room. The rear wall had a crack that ran from one side of the room
to the other--the result of an earthquake in 1986. The crack had
mostly been patched, except for a few places where the dark cinder
block material was visible.

The room was already almost full by the time
she found it. The two boys in the concert T shirts were sitting at
the back chatting to each other and laughing. Tracy Wells the girl
in the convertible was in the back row watching the class pile in.
Chloe sat in front of her.

The teacher, Mr. Bartlett, walked into the
room. He was a big man, with a big smile, and big hands. He wore a
well worn dress shirt and some dockers with frayed cuffs and tennis
shoes. He grabbed chalk and wrote on the board, sounding out the
syllables. “Cal-cu-lus.” with a flourish underneath. “What is it?
What does it mean to you…Steve.”

One of the concert T-Shirt boys answered with
a shrug, “To me, it means scary.” The rest of the class chuckled.
His friend, Morgan, nodded.

“How about you, Tracy?”

“Integrals. Derivatives, I think…” her voice
was a contralto, a little rusted from smoking for a couple of years
and seemed out of place coming from a fresh faced teen.

“Yes, good.” He wrote INTEGRAL and DERIVATIVE
on the board along with their mathematical symbols. Then he
stopped. “This is the most important thing I’ll tell you all year.”
The class was very quiet. “Calculus was invented--maybe
discovered--by two men; Just flesh and blood men, dudes even, only
a few hundred years ago. Their names were Isaac Newton and
Gottfried Leibniz. It transformed the world...” he launched into a
lecture on the history of the subject.

When the bell rang, the room exploded into
noise and activity. The kids clumped into groups and went out the
door into the crowded hall. Morgan and Steve and Tracy went
together. Chloe started to follow them. Morgan stopped suddenly
when he saw something glinting in the crack in the wall.

She almost ran into him, and complained,
“Whoa! Again almost hitting me!”

“Oh, sorry. I thought I saw something in
there. He pointed at the crack in the wall.”

“What, in the wall?” She asked.

“New Girl, can I call you New Girl? Yeah,
there’s something shiny in there, I’ll have to check that out.”

“My name’s Chloe, Chloe Marte. My dad and I
just moved here.”

Tracy said, “Nice hat.”

“Thanks.”

At the end of each school day, the high
school becomes the nucleus of a cloud of activity that extends for
miles. Kids head out onto the front field for marching band
practice, others to football or gymnastics, some head into a garage
to work on a car. Others go running miles for cross country. Some
head home, or into the woods to smoke, drink, or get in
trouble.

Chloe just started walking home with no
particular plan in mind. At the crosswalk, Tracy pulled up. She was
vaping. She blew out a cloud of mist through “O”’ed lips. “Hey,
Chloe. Want a ride?”

“Sure. The car is so cool. What is it?”

“Oh thanks. It’s an Austin Healey. It was my
mom’s. I just took it out of storage. I love it, even though it’s
actually pretty unreliable. Hopefully it will run for a few months
before the next major repair.”

“Your mom?”

“Well, I’ll fill you in before you hear the
sad story from people who want to weep for me... My parents are
gone. If you Google it, there was a car accident, a total loss.
Dental records… DNA… But I
know
they’re not dead.”

“Wow. How long?” Chloe checked Tracy’s face
for any sign of emotion, but the sunglasses made it difficult to
read her expression.

“It’s been three years... My Uncle is around
sometimes, but otherwise, it’s just me in a big old house.”

“I’m with my Dad in a condo. Mom’s who knows
where doing god knows what.”

“Family, eh? Want to come over?”

“Sure, but can we stop at the drugstore
first… bit of a hair emergency.” She took off the hat.

“Dude, you could totally pull that look
off.”

“Maybe, but I want it painted black.”

The wind whipped their hair as Tracy buzzed
along Sherman Road toward the tree farm. A big faded sign “Wells
Hardwoods” stood high above the driveway, which was a gravel snake
winding through a field toward a boxy white farmhouse with black
shutters. In front of the house, hay was waving in fields that
rolled off to a distant tree line.

They parked in a pole barn next to a Ford
blue tractor. The floor was hard packed dirt that had been polished
shiny by decades of feet and the place smelled of oily mustiness
and hay. Light shone in through vents near the roof at either end.
Chloe followed Tracy along a concrete path to the back door. She
fumbled with a big ring of keys and they went in.

The interior of the house was like an
all-wood box with windows. The ceilings, floors, and walls were
wood. Some trim had been hand carved into leaves and acorns and
geometric patterns. Knick-knack shelves and book shelves were
tucked into every available space that wasn’t covered with a
painting.

“If you want to do your hair, be my guest.
The bathroom is down the hall on the left. Or if you want to use
the kitchen sink, go ahead and we can chat. I’m going to get a
beer.”

“A beer?”

“Yeah, want one?”

“OK. I’ve never had one. I’d love one.”

“If you don’t like it I’ve got some hard
cider. Or water or juice or whatever, too.”

“I’ll try a beer.” Chloe opened the hair dye
box at the sink. “You have a towel? This can get messy, so if
you’re a neat freak, don’t uh, freak.”

“Neat freak? Not me.” Tracy grabbed a couple
towels from a closet and threw them at Chloe. She popped open two
Erie Brew House Red Ales with a bottle opener. “Let me know if
you’d rather try something else.”

“Um. Yeah… well, that’s so good. It’s so red.
Looks like blood from this angle.”

They chatted and drank in the den while her
hair dried. The kitchen door opened again. “That’s the guys. Hey
guys! We’re in here.”