The Probable Future (36 page)

“D
ID YOU SEE HER HAIR?
” was the first thing Jenny said when Will came by later. “I’m sick over it.” Liza was closing up the kitchen and everyone else had left for the day.

“Where’ve you been? Everyone in town has seen her hair.” Will helped himself to a bottle of water. “Just like everyone seems to know you’re sleeping with my brother.”

“That’s not fair. Your brother is in crisis.”

“The missing thesis, yes. Big deal. Actually, he’s never seemed happier, Jen, so maybe that thesis of his was just a substitute for real life. Now he has what he’s wanted since we were kids. You.”

“Since you were kids?” Jenny leaned her elbows on the counter-top, pleased. For a giddy moment, she forgot about propriety, lost manuscripts, daughters with dyed hair.

“It was his idea to sleep out by the lake that night. You knew that, right? He was crazy about you even back then. I had that goddamned
bee allergy even then—I hated the countryside, but I couldn’t let him win. Not at anything. Not at you.”

As for Matt, he’d given up hope that his thesis would be found, and had finally set to work taking down the old tree. He might never get his master’s, but his life had taken such an unexpected turn he didn’t know what to think. Everything that had once been important barely mattered to him now. He understood now why people pinched themselves to make certain they weren’t dreaming. Real life was much stranger than any of his dreams, on this Jenny Sparrow agreed. When she slept beside him, Jenny experienced his dreams of the history of Unity, the everyday details of a hundred, two hundred, three hundred years ago. He dreamed of his work, as well, of lilacs and lilies, of tangled bittersweet that was so invasive some of his clients had acres of their land covered by it, hiding evergreens and beech trees until they resembled camels cloaked with green fabric. Impossible to know what’s beneath all that bittersweet. Nearly as impossible to get rid of it altogether.

On the day he began to work on the oak tree, Matt found himself whistling, for no reason or for every reason, he wasn’t quite sure. The hive in the dead section of the oak was enormous; the bees were bound to be somewhat disturbed, but Matt hoped to take the hive out into the woods, or down to the dairy farm in North Arthur where the owner might be willing to let him set up in return for some of the honeycombs. There were fields of red clover in North Arthur, and half a dozen strawberry farms. Strawberry-clover honey would be a treat, and hopefully the bees would make the transfer to their new location without too much stress.

The two lowest dead branches had already been cut off and Matt had begun to saw the first of the huge limbs into manageable logs that he could cart away. He was supposed to have a helper on this day: Jimmy Elliot had been assigned to him to serve extra community service. It kept piling on, hour after hour, but Jimmy Elliot, it seemed, had other things on his mind. He continued to be drawn to
the tea house. As he stood out in the road throwing stones at the window one night, Robbie Hendrix, the police chief, happened to be driving by in his cruiser. Hendrix, having forgotten all the trouble he himself had been in as a boy, had stopped and ticketed Jimmy. Public nuisance, that’s what he was.

“What’s wrong with you?” the chief asked as he wrote out the ticket for Jimmy, scratching out the twenty-five-dollar fine and writing in:
Public Works—10 hours. See Matt Avery
. “Are you out of your mind? Don’t you know glass breaks?”

Well, of course Jimmy knew that. And if the truth be told, he couldn’t quite explain what he was doing. He’d been snagged by love, when he was the last person anyone would expect to be a target. At any rate, Jimmy had never shown up at the appointed hour of his community service. Because of this, work on the old tree was progressing slowly. If Jimmy had been there, he might have been dizzy from the sound of buzzing or feared being stung as bees circled round, but Matt only paid attention to the wood. Oak was beautiful, one of his favorites, but he loved fragrant fruitwood as well. Peach-wood stayed on a woodcutter’s hands and he couldn’t wash the scent away. Applewood looked pink in the center. Plumwood had a heart inside its trunk; strike it once, and the whole tree would fall.

Matt had received several requests for the cut logs from this old oak—Mrs. Gibson wanted to make a bookshelf out of it, Enid Frost had requested firewood for the woodstove in the train station, old Eli Hathaway came round in his taxi and had picked up a quarter-sized piece of wood which he vowed he would keep in his pocket so that he could always touch wood for luck. Cynthia Elliot stopped by on her way to work at the tea house, and as she watched Matt cut up the logs, she had tears in her eyes. Cynthia had recently turned sixteen but she looked like a kid with those dozens of braids in her hair, still riding through town on her bicycle, bemoaning the fate of a tree. She’d walked past it in kindergarten, after all. She’d tangled a kite in its branches one summer and watched, terrified, as her
brother Jimmy climbed so high to rescue the kite she thought he’d disappear into the sky. She’d climbed it the first time she’d run away from home, and had spent the whole night in its branches, convinced she would never speak to her mother again. But in the morning she’d felt comforted; instead of hitchhiking to New York or Boston, she’d walked home.

“Your brother’s supposed to be helping me out here, but I may just leave part of the trunk. It may still grow,” Matt told Cynthia, when he shut off his saw, removed his goggles and headset, and saw she was crying. “The one side, at any rate.”

Sure enough, half of the tree had unexpectedly begun to leaf out, weeks behind its season, but not entirely dead. Several grades from the elementary school had come on field trips to visit the oldest tree in the county. They’d practiced their cursive while writing letters to the mayor which protested the cutting down of the oak. The Friday before, the entire third grade had circled round the tree as Matt worked. The boys and girls had been holding hands as they chanted:
One, two three, don’t make firewood out of me! Four, five, six, I’m more than a pile of sticks!

Another man might have felled the tree completely, despite such pleas, certainly it would have been easier, but Matt had decided he would try his best to salvage the half that was still somewhat healthy. He worked late, and on the weekends. People in town got used to hearing a saw, just as they became accustomed to bees flying through the air, a buzzing cloud that hovered above backyards and along lanes. There was a great deal of yellow in the air when Matt noticed someone familiar walk by. He took off his goggles, thinking they were obscuring his vision, but, no, there she was. Rebecca Sparrow stood on the street corner, wearing jeans and work boots, a backpack slung over one shoulder.

“You’re staring,” she called up to him, and indeed he was, even though by now he had realized the girl on the sidewalk was his niece, Stella.

“You look exactly like her.” Matt climbed down from the ladder that rested against the oak. “Have you seen the portrait in the reading room at the library? There used to be a miniature, given to Rebecca by its painter, Samuel Hathaway, but that was lost somehow.”

“Sorry. I haven’t been to the library.” That particular lie burned in Stella’s mouth, so she accepted a Life Saver from the roll that Matt offered, even though she hated him at the moment. What would he be to her if he and her mother wound up together? An uncle? A stepfather? Nothing at all? Maybe she should burn that thesis of his that was right now in her backpack. Maybe it would serve him right. They stared up at the old tree. The air was filled with amber pollen and bees.

“That’s an eyesore,” Stella said. “What an ugly tree.”

“Your friend Cynthia cries whenever she rides by.”

“She cries on a regular basis. She’s so sensitive she breaks out in a rash if she sees a sign for a lost dog. Everyone knows Cynthia is too kindhearted for her own good.”

“Unlike her brother?”

Matt continued looking at the tree, but he could feel the heat of Stella’s glare. All the same, he’d seen Jimmy mooning around after her. The last time Jimmy had been in trouble, the community service he’d been assigned was helping to clear the snow off the common. He’d been a taciturn and surly helper. Maybe it was just as well Jimmy hadn’t shown up for work; if Matt remembered correctly, the only thing the boy had said in his three days of service was
Am I done?

“Don’t think you know the first thing about Jimmy, because you don’t,” Stella informed.

“Sounds like you do.”

“Are we discussing our love lives?”

The glare was worsening; it was white hot, as a matter of fact.

“Do you want to talk about your mother and me?”

“Absolutely not.” Stella took a step back. “Good God, no.” As she
thought that over, she had a most sour expression. Her mother in love? Just the idea made her head hurt. She looked up at the beehive. “There are too many bees. Aren’t you afraid you’ll be stung?”

“Watch.” Matt went to a bee drowsing on the bark of one of the cut branches and snatched it up in his hand. When he opened his hand for Stella to see, the bee hovered there for a moment, stunned, then calmly flew off.

Stella laughed out loud. “You’re nuts.”

“You’re the one with the black hair.”

“I wanted to honor her,” Stella said. For some reason she felt like crying. “I wanted somebody to remember Rebecca.”

“So did I.”

Stella was standing on a completely familiar corner, yet she felt impossibly lost. Could it be she and Matt wanted the same thing?

“I think you deserve this.”

Matt reached in his pocket for the compass Jenny had given him.

“Your mother gave it to me. I guess your grandmother gave it to her. But I think it’s meant to be yours.”

“Are you trying to buy my friendship or something?”

“Nope.”

“What are you trying to do?”

“Cut down an eyesore.”

Matt went back to work and Stella watched for a while. The sound of the saw and the hum of bees echoed all through town. People had to shout at each other in order to be heard, and there were some folks who had a craving for honey when they weren’t even partial to sweets.

After a while, Stella decided to try out Rebecca’s compass. It showed true north and felt cool as the north in her hands. She walked for half a mile, and when she looked up, she was standing outside the library. That’s where she’d been led.

Mrs. Gibson was locking up, but she agreed to let Stella run in
and look for the bracelet she said she had lost. Mrs. Gibson more than understood. She wasn’t judgmental; her own daughter Solange had tinted her hair blue when she was a teenager and run off to New York to be an actress.

Go on
, Mrs. Gibson said, unlocking the door that was carved out of local wood, another huge oak, felled before anyone in town had been born.

Stella had told one last lie, but one which wouldn’t hurt anyone. The bracelet her father had given her was around her wrist, as always. This lie told to Mrs. Gibson tasted plain in Stella’s mouth, that’s how close to the truth it was.

Two minutes
, Mrs. Gibson called, but that was time enough for Stella to run in and leave her uncle’s thesis on the table in the historical records room. Nearby was a case where important artifacts were displayed: the town seal of Unity, the land grants from the king, a letter from Lincoln to Anton Hathaway’s parents, citing the boy’s bravery and his sacrifice to his country.

“I see you found what you were looking for,” Mrs. Gibson said when Stella came out of the library. Stella held up her hand and shook it so that the bell on her bracelet made a tinkling sound.

“Every time someone died in this town they rang the bell that’s up at the old meetinghouse. But not for Rebecca. Matt wrote about it in his thesis.”

“Did he?”

“The meetinghouse burned to the ground in the big fire. That’s when the bell melted. Matt told me all about it.”

Stella remembered a mention of the slight of the unrung bell in the last chapter of the thesis. She found herself walking Mrs. Gibson to her car, wanting to hear more about Matt.

“He’s a good person and he’ll be a good teacher. I’m glad he’s going to get his degree.”

“Why wouldn’t he?” Stella said.

“My feelings exactly,” the librarian agreed. “That thesis is bound to turn up.”

After Mrs. Gibson got into her car and drove off, Stella stood there for a while, watching the exhaust from the car turn from black to blue to gray. When she left the parking lot, Stella took the long way back to the tea house. She passed the firehouse, which never would have existed without Leonie Sparrow, and the elementary school, founded by Sarah Sparrow, and the town hall, built a few years after Rosemary Sparrow ran so fast through the woods that she managed to save every boy fighting in the fields. The whole town turned blue at this hour, the white houses, the church with its steeple, Town Hall, the train station where the clock chimed the time. Blue as the shadows of the plane trees, the lilacs, the sidewalks, all of it blue as could be before the dark fell, a curtain of night so deep most people in town could sleep well, and the rest—the guilty, the lovesick, the aging, the sorrowful—would simply have to face whatever the night might bring.

III.

O
LD
E
LI
H
ATHAWAY
had taken ill; the end, it was now abundantly clear, would come the way he always suspected it would, with his heart. First he was brought to the hospital in Hamilton, then taken to Boston to see the specialists, and just when he felt he had become a parcel that was undeliverable at any address, he was brought to the nursing home in North Arthur, at the very end of Hopewell Street. In spite of his age, Eli was strong; he’d had a series of cardiac incidents that another man wouldn’t have survived. With a family history of cardiac trouble and early death, he had done his best to stay away from matters of the heart. He had never married, or had children, nor had he spent a cent of his family’s money, which had increased
over the years as the remaining properties from the original Hathaway land grant were sold off, acre by acre. Eli didn’t need to work, he had chosen to drive a taxi; he enjoyed the fact that everyone in town knew him by name. As he aged, people in Unity decided he was charming rather than ill tempered. His neighbors brought him dinner and Christmas pies; Enid Frost, who ran the ticket office at the train station, had fixed Eli Hathaway coffee each day for the past twenty-two years without ever asking for a donation to the coffee-break fund.