The Last Adam (3 page)

In bad weather, or in winter, few cars attempted the climb to Cold Hill. It would be absolutely impossible for the school buses, so Cold Hill continued to have its small, shabby, one-room school for the children of the families living in the dozen poor farms which succeeded each other along the cleared strip of barren upland. No one of any means or influence lived on these drearily wind-swept acres, fifteen hundred feet, every foot difficult, above New Winton in the valley, so there was no reason for New Winton to add the great expense of making the road passable to its already sufficient troubles with roads.

In the case of the Cold Hill road, there was a further paralysing point. At the end of the seventeenth century the first white men to see and covet the valley had stood at this edge of the eastern hills. They descended—or if they did not, their wagons and ox-teams must have, for it was the one possible place—just where the Cold Hill road still came down. For at least three-quarters of a century this road, not then so much worse than other roads, was the way to New Winton. They called it the Hartford Post Road. Now described for the purpose as the Historic Hartford Post Road, its plight was pressed regularly by New Winton's representative in the legislature, to the attention of the Committee on Roads, Bridges, and Rivers. As New Winton was, if possible, less important to Hartford than Cold Hill was to New Winton, for thirty years it had been just as regularly disregarded. The State Highway Department had never been instructed to acknowledge responsibility. Perhaps it never would be; but as long as New Winton hoped the state might sometime take it over, there was little likelihood of the town doing anything.

Though this was Friday morning, Joel Parry hadn't seen anyone try the Cold Hill road since the storm on Tuesday. At nine o'clock, standing aimless in his barnyard, not sure yet how best to waste the day, he was interested to notice a motor-car. It was rounding the dammed-up, frozen pond which, fenced about and posted with No Trespassing signs, was the reservoir of New Winton's water-supply system.

Joel's eyes were not good. Blinking against so clear a morning and so much painful snow filling this high hollow behind the Cobble, he couldn't tell who it was. It might be someone coming to see him; or someone going on around the Cobble to the Lincolns'. People going to the Hoyts' usually came the other way, but most cars were bound for one or the other. He took several steps down towards the roadside to ask the driver, because he could tell him that the Lincolns weren't there. Like Mr. Hoyt, Mr. Lincoln was a painter—an artist, that was—and had a good deal of what Joel understood was temperament. It had made him gather up his wife, infant son, and servant, close his house, and depart on Monday with fantastic violence for New York. He had stopped to make an arrangement with Joel about keeping an eye on the place.

At the roadside, huddled in his mackintosh and ready to triumph over the driver with his information, Joel saw first, in the corner of the wind-shield, a white oblong card with black letters. Not yet able to read it, Joel did not need to. He knew at once that it said:
Board of Health.

He turned squarely round, retiring with surly preoccupation as though on some important errand to the barn. He heard the car come abreast and pass him. His curiosity made him look to see which way it would go at the fork beyond. To his astonishment, it went right, and he could not stop himself from shouting out, sour; in a sense, jeering: "You'll never make Cold Hill! "

Not heeding him, the car jolted into the lower woods. The angle of the barn hid it from sight.

Doctor Bull heard Joel. Joel was one of his inveterate enemies. Joel had been, without the least relenting, ever since the summer afternoon eight years ago when his boy, Joel, died. Nothing like the course of events to establish a diagnosis; and young Joel's complaint had been appendicitis after all. They got him to the Torrington hospital twenty minutes before his advanced peritonitis finished him. An interne there, not aware that any physician had been consulted in the case, chided Joel. The patient should have been brought in two days ago. Joel, interpreting the information in his own way, said widely that Doctor Bull had killed his son. When you got right down to it, George Bull guessed he had, for he had administered a dose of castor-oil and told them not to worry. On the other hand, if he were to send everybody he had found in forty years' practice with symptoms of a moderate bellyache over to a hospital miles away for observation —

Now, actually seeing the Cold Hill road begin its climb, George Bull saw too that Joel was probably right; it looked impossible. More pleased than not, he roared out loud, exhilarated by the freezing blue sky, the bold rise of the snowy woods, and something to get to grips with. He opened his engine wide and rushed to the attempt.

There was a quick loss of headway; a slowing, vain jangle of his chains searching for a hold. Snow fanned up furiously, spurting under his hind wheels. Since he was presently making no progress, his engine stalled. He eased the car down to the bottom, turned it round, started up hill again, uproarious, backing this time.

To his slight surprise, he was successful. The snow, mauled to the underlying dirt by his first attempt, gave him some traction to start, and so just enough momentum to continue. Grunting, his face scarlet with cold and exertion, he peered over his shoulder, out and up, his hands busy with the wheel, twisting to take every advantage the surface gave him. In this way, uncertainly but steadily, he covered slightly more than half the ascent. He saw then that the bad curve ahead was going to be too much. He swept his eyes about, jerked powerfully to the right, and backing straight through an unbarred gate in the rail fence, found himself in an open field. Wheeling on this wind-thinned, never trodden snow, he was able to go into second. Picking a low place, he rode down the overgrowth of small bushes separating this field from the next, drove on up the slope between the spaced corn shocks, elated by the excellence of his inspiration. With surprisingly little difficulty he reached at last the fence behind the Crowes' barn.

Out, he put his bag on the running-board, stamped in the snow, shaking his shabby racoon coat into place. The red fleshy mass of his cheeks, the great bulging sides of his nostrils, red, too; the red, strong solid lips and blue eyes, wrinkled by the years at the corners but very bright and shining, gave him the air of a robust, benevolent Santa Claus. He beat his gloved hands together, hard, making a sound like Olympian applause while he looked down on the whole white valley.

New Winton lay there, but George Bull could not see it. The crest of the Cobble, now far below, concealed the village. He could see fields just west of it; the red brick, extensive slate roofs and cupola with golden top of the new village school; and part of the Episcopal cemetery. Beyond that, the fringe of bare trees marked the edge of the frozen river. He could even make out a small truck moving down the road to the heavy-beamed steel arc of the bridge.

Looking down more directly, between the slope of the hill he stood on and the low bump of the Cobble on which a thin screen or scruff of trees had been left, there was the round spot of the reservoir, adequately isolated. Two brooks, which joined with a now sunken spring to feed it, could be traced by their rocky courses some distance up and back through the irregular hillside. North, were the roofs of Joel Parry's house and barns. Seen from here, it looked very much as though Joel's barnyard would drain into the reservoir. George Bull wished that such a thing could be suspected. Then, as Health Officer, he could have Joel's whole place condemned and make him a lot of trouble. As a matter of fact, Joel's land -was on a lower level, sloping into the gentle depression widening on, north, between Cold Hill and the northern point of the Cobble. Following this funnel-shaped falling away, one could see, well north, clear through the naked trees, the French provincial outlines of the house Norman Hoyt's cover-designing for a popular weekly had financed. It looked very pleasant this snowy morning. Thin blue smoke mounted, it seemed as much as fifty yards, straight up from the chimney at the end.

Out of the small gap where the bridge road went west through the hills to Truro came the newest feature of the valley. George Bull hadn't seen the Interstate Light & Power Company's high tension transmission line with all the steel up before. It was said to be the most considerable yet erected in the East, and George Bull could believe it. Even at this height the towers marched in tremendous parade. Grey skeleton galvanized steel, they crossed the narrow river, the flat fields, and, high above a special wire guard, US6W. They were hard to overlook; they were to carry 220,000 volts, and it was deemed expedient to lift up such a thunderbolt on towers ninety-seven feet tall where there was any chance of people moving around and under them. Once across the valley, they shortened to get over the wooded rise which turned the railroad and US6W into two separate south-bound channels. The line took, in effect, four relatively squat steps uphill and across the summit. Now the great towers were resumed again, three of them standing at thousand-foot intervals between the south slope of the Cobble and the north end of a marshy sheet of water close to the railroad track, called Bull's Pond.

Through a denuded swathe in the succeeding second-growth woods, the line stepped up the eastern valley wall. It straddled the roofs of the construction camp, lying south-east, behind and above the round spot of the reservoir. By turning, staring that way through the haze and shine of sun on snow and the blur of white-bottomed woods, George Bull could see the tower tops in unbroken sequence, departing majestically to the hazed horizon. It couldn't be said to add much to the rural beauty, but it was something to see. George Bull laughed, for Mrs. Banning had made an awful fuss about it—as it happened, belatedly, when the right of way had been quietly secured and the concrete footings for the towers were being put in.

He supposed it was quite an outrage to Mrs. Banning's proprietary feeling about New Winton. Looking back to the externe high end of the Cobble, he could see a part of the aged, almost orange brick of the Cardmaker house set in its great trees, and he laughed again, for Mrs. Banning had had trouble there too. Four or five years ago Janet Cardmaker and her house had thrown New Winton into a turmoil of the sort which George Bull most enjoyed.

The Cardmaker house was the fourth of four houses actually dating from the eighteenth century. Of course, it was a close thing; it had been built in 1790. Levi Cardmaker, who happened to have lost his ears in England, was doing better in America. About the middle of the century he had shrewdly possessed himself of what was then regarded as an iron mine, a few miles west of Truro. By the river he had built and owned New Winton Furnace. In 1777 New Winton Furnace cast fifty cannon for the Continental Army, and they were paid for, gold in advance; a fortunate turn for Mr. Cardmaker, for the Continental Army never got them. When, in April, the patriots ran from the Ridgefield barricade, allowing the British to advance and burn Danbury, these cannon, unmounted and cradled for shipment, made the choicest item of the spoils. Mr. Cardmaker had better luck in keeping his gold. The house he built when he judged (even in his timorous old age) it was safe to build houses was much the finest and most elaborate in that whole corner of the state.

At any rate, New Winton had been taking this fine house calmly enough for rather more than a hundred years. Since it was not down on the green, it was as good as forgotten when a Mr. Rosenthal happened on it. Mr. Rosenthal was excited. Janet herself said that she thought he was going to have a stroke when she told him anything he wanted was for sale.

Recovering, Mr. Rosenthal had wanted a good part of the furniture in the front rooms. Plainly he would have liked the whole house, but since that was impractical, he took mantelpieces and panelling. Carefully and expertly, men he brought up for the purpose removed the long curved stair rail in the hall. They took the semicircular porch with four thin white columns; door, lintel, fanlight, and the beautiful scrolled ironwork done by a blind German at the long-gone New Winton Furnace forge. Mr. Rosenthal gladly had his carpenters build Janet a new door at no expense to her. The truth was, he paid very well for what he took.

Now, led of course by Mrs. Banning, came the uproar. No possibility of doing it remained, but warm talk turned on the advisability of buying so fine and historic a mansion. A queer creature like Miss Cardmaker actually had no right to it; it belonged to posterity. Most of the uproar necessarily subsided when Mr. Rosenthal, personally supervising every operation, departed for New York, shepherding a truckful of spoils. The victory was his, if one excepted the spectacular triumph of Henry Harris, then a Justice of the Peace.

No one in the village was too humble, or too indifferent to resent (once told of what it consisted) this brigandage; but only Mr. Harris could find effective expression for the feeling. After consulting the town records he was able to announce that if Mr. Rosenthal was so keen on antiques, here was another for him. It was an ordinance passed in 1803. It provided a fine of twenty-five dollars for trespassing on the village green by a non-resident without written permission from a selectman. Once it had served to keep itinerant pedlars from camping there. Henry Harris guessed that it would apply just as much to Mr. Rosenthal, seen to be impudently walking round the old Congregational church which stood on this public land. Mr. Harris sent for Lester Dunn, one of the constables, and Lester went and arrested Mr. Rosenthal, who was examining the edifice with painstaking appreciation. Mr. Harris read him the regulation. If Mr. Rosenthal didn't think it applied to him, he'd better send for his lawyers and let them show Mr. Harris why not. Mr. Rosenthal paid. There were, he remarked, somewhat redder in the face but quiet and patient, many quaint and interesting things to-be found in the old records.