The Probable Future (38 page)

“I guess Jimmy Elliot is working for you again,” Hap said to Matt Avery when Matt came by, uninvited, to speak on Stella’s behalf.

“He was supposed to. Never showed up. What did they nab him for this time?”

“They got him for throwing rocks at the tea house.”

“That’s an asinine thing to do.”

“I think he’s in love.”

“Ah.” Matt nodded, sympathetic. Even Jimmy Elliot wasn’t immune to such things. “I stopped by your grandfather’s house and
took down some fencing and left the bulldozer inside the field,” he told Hap. “Tomorrow morning make your grandfather go out somewhere, take him to breakfast. I don’t think he should be there when I’m digging the hole for Sooner.”

“He’s pretty broken up.”

“Well, he spent twenty-five years pretending to hate that horse.”

After Matt went in to the meeting, it was quiet in the corridor, and Hap got back to reading the police report. People inside the meeting room were surprisingly silent as well, in something of a state of shock as they listened to Dr. Stewart explain that Eli Hathaway had asked Stella to determine what would be done with his estate. At this point many members of the council were wondering if Eli Hathaway wasn’t merely being spiteful in his choice of a teenaged executrix; this child now had the power to decide what to do with far more money than anyone had guessed Eli had possessed. They realized it was a huge bequest as Nathan Elliot read off the list of properties, securities, bank accounts, investments. Wasn’t choosing Stella to oversee it all a joke on the council members and on the town?

But, no, as it turned out, this was no prank; Stella had already come up with a plan. A clinic was to be built on a lot of Hathaway land, and a doctor and nursing staff employed, for such was Stella’s resolve; people wouldn’t have to go all the way to North Arthur or Hamilton if they were ill. Not only that, but the Hathaway Recreation Center would be built across from the library. There would be tutoring and an afterschool program; in the summer, swimming lessons would be offered to one and all. This was well and good, this was excellent, as a matter of fact. The members of the town council began to relax, but then Matt Avery got up and he started to talk. This was something of a surprise as well, for Matt wasn’t known for his oratory skills. All the same, after so many years of plowing snow and cutting down trees, after so much time spent being alone, he
couldn’t seem to talk enough. When he finally got in front of a classroom in the fall, he’d go on lecturing for an hour or two at a time, without stopping for breath or a glass of water.

It took Matt more than an hour to tell Rebecca’s story; those members of the town council who hadn’t been silently taking an oath against Eli Hathaway’s memory were cursing him now. But when Stella stood up to thank Matt for his background for her most important decision, even the dissenters fell silent. Now the other shoe was about to drop, the bloody, stone-filled boot. Stella had on the silver star Eli had given her, the one Rebecca had been wearing when she’d been lost in the woods.

Stella informed the group that a dispensation from the mayor and the council would allow a memorial to Rebecca to be built in the center of town. A crew had already been approached and were carting a six-foot-tall slab of granite down from New Hampshire; an ironworks in Lowell had already been contacted. If anyone felt that such a memorial was a sacrilege, they didn’t speak up on that day— there was the health center to consider, after all, much needed in town. There was the rec center, where their children would learn to swim—and so work was quickly begun.

If anyone expected letters of protest, they were sorely disappointed. To most people in town, Rebecca Sparrow was nothing more than a portrait in the library, one of the first settlers in Unity, a young girl with long black hair. Folks got used to the idea of Rebecca’s memorial, just as they became accustomed to seeing Stella on the town green, sprawled on the grass on days that were fine and on those that were foul. Something that had taken so long now went up in no time, right in the very center of the green, surrounded by plane trees and lindens. Atop the simple granite slab there was a bronze bell which, when it was rung, would be heard for miles around. There would never be silence again, at least not in this town.

Elinor and Jenny came to the common on the evening when the
bell was set in place. It was a windy night in May, and Elinor and Jenny had both dressed up. It was an occasion, after all. Stella hadn’t wanted a public display; no fireworks to announce the memorial’s completion, no town sing-alongs. It was a family matter, first and foremost. Jenny did the driving now, and she helped her mother along the path that cut across the common. Stella had picked a handful of violets, which she’d set on the step of the memorial in a little glass vase.

“Did it turn out all right?”

Elinor was out of breath and chilled, but seeing the memorial was worth the trek she’d made from Cake House. She nodded her approval; it was, indeed, beautiful. She thought about everything that was invisible: courage, honor, pain, love. She narrowed her eyes and the memorial disappeared, just for an instant; then it was right there in front of them again.

“It’s perfect,” Jenny Sparrow said.

It was the hour when the light faded quickly, when it drifted down and turned everything blue, houses and steeples, fences and sidewalks. In the time when Rebecca Sparrow lived in this town, people believed blue could protect them from evil, and they often attached strips of indigo homespun to their undergarments and the hems of their skirts. They believed anything sewn with red thread could cure what ailed them, be it fevers or nightmares or fits of coughing, that bay laurel could protect a man from lightning, that helping a blind man would bring good fortune. They believed that remembering someone could bring them back to you long after they had departed, if you only concentrated hard enough, if you stood outside on a windy night and tried to count every star sprinkled across the universe like rice on a table or stones in a lake, like bones in a body or snowdrops in the grass.

————

I
F A TRAVELER
was without a map in this section of Massachusetts, he could easily grow confused. The villages blended together to any out-of-towner passing through, particularly when the view was surveyed from the window of the train. Look, and look again; white steeples, town halls, houses with black shutters. Farther out—malls, triplexes, parking lots—and farther still—green woods, streams, fields of black-eyed Susans and barley. It was a quilt without distinction, lilac here, green there, bordered by blurred faces, by rocks and clouds, by bricks and train tracks. Imagine the stations that go by: Concord, Lincoln, Hamilton, Monroe, North Arthur, Unity. The last of these had been built in 1930, out of brown granite, constructed by men from out of town, from Boston or New Haven, men so desperate for jobs they were willing to sleep on cots set up in Town Hall. There they dreamed of home and of trains and of the brown granite dust that fell everywhere whenever the stone was cut, dusting their faces, drawn into their lungs.

When Elisabeth Sparrow came to feed these men she brought pots of nine-frogs stew and over a hundred loaves of bread. Elisabeth heard these men crying in their sleep, she heard them praying for a familiar face, a kind word, supper set before them with care. She was that face, those words, that bread for an entire year. The train station was built with Elisabeth in mind; her name could be found etched into the granite in dozens of places, although an individual had to know what he was looking for in order to identify the lettering. On the whole, people in town didn’t seem to notice; to them, the marks were all but invisible, dusty strikes, like a chicken’s scratch, a pattern that was indeed impossible to make out if someone was standing too near.

Eli Hathaway used to be a common sight here, out in the parking lot in his taxi or chatting with the ticket-seller, Enid Frost. Eli himself had made a hobby out of counting the times Elisabeth’s name appeared in stone, and at last count it was 1,353. But the days of Eli Hathaway’s counting her name were over. Now, it was the new
driver, Sam Dewey, from over in Monroe, who was parked at the station. Sam was an overly eager fellow who’d confide to anyone who got into his cab that he was trying to start a new life in Unity after his divorce. Indeed, he had a lot to learn. Ever since that incident with Sissy Elliot, when he left her outside the Laundromat, where she stood on the street for several hours, hoping for a neighbor to pass by to give her a lift, Sam had been studying local maps. He no longer had to ask his passengers for directions:
How do you get to Lockhart Avenue? What’s the shortcut to the mall in North Arthur?

On the seventeenth day of May only one passenger got off the early train. Sam Dewey had already begun to wonder if he’d be able to earn a living driving a taxi in this town, so he made a bet with himself on that day, not that he was a betting man, not since his wife had left him, claiming he spent more time at Foxwoods than he did with her. All the same, if the gentleman on the platform got into his cab, Sam would stay in town. If, on the other hand, the fellow who’d gotten off the train turned and walked away, or if a friend or relative came to pick him up, Sam would move to Florida. Just thinking about Boynton Beach, where he’d been once on holiday, and the sunny life that might be ahead, cheered Sam up mightily. But after he went to the phone and looked through the Yellow Pages, the man on the platform approached. He was a well-dressed individual in his thirties, dark hair, a good-looking man who wasn’t bogged down by luggage, except for a backpack slung over one shoulder.

Walk on by
, Sam started thinking, because after only a few weeks, he could already feel his body molding into the indentation in the driver’s seat left by Eli’s inert form, positioned in the very same place for so many years. But as it turned out, Boynton Beach would have to wait. Sam would be staying in Unity, at least for the time being. It seemed he had a passenger.

“Lucky you’re here,” the passenger said. He was a little out of breath and he wasn’t as well dressed as Sam had first thought. It was an old suit, actually, but who was Sam to judge? He himself was
wearing a frayed sweater and a pair of chinos stained with coffee. “I thought there’d be a car rental place,” the fellow said.

“In Unity? You’ve got the wrong town. Wait a second, maybe you do have the wrong town,” Sam joked, angling for a tip later on. “Who is it you’re going to see?”

When the passenger said he was just passing through and thought he’d find a motel, Sam Dewey told him, once again, wrong town. The closest motel was the Night Owl in North Arthur, so if it were lodgings he wanted, his best bet was Laurie Frost’s guesthouse. Laurie was Enid the ticket-taker’s daughter, and quite attractive; Sam wouldn’t mind if she felt grateful enough for this referral to say yes if he asked her out to dinner. Laurie’s guesthouse was really a converted garage, but it looked fine to most people’s eyes, and Sam waited as his passenger walked up the slate path bordered by hostas. He stood outside, leaning up against the taxi, where he smoked a cigarette and nodded as a man ran past.

“Slow down,” Sam called out to the runner, feeling quite neighborly as Will Avery went by. Will was not in the least deterred by the fact that Laurie’s house was at the top of a hill, but he didn’t want to waste any energy in speaking. “Save your energy! Take a taxi!” Sam suggested, but Will only waved and kept on, as he did every morning on his sweep through Unity.

When Sam’s passenger returned, he wanted to drive around a bit, see the town. He sneezed several times. “Damn it,” he said as they headed back down the hill.

“It’s the pollen.” Sam cast himself in the role of local expert. “The lilacs, the grass, all the wildflowers. Pollen everywhere you look. My guess, you’re a city boy.”

The passenger described a historic house he’d heard about, one built like a wedding cake, and Sam Dewey assured him it wouldn’t be a problem to drive over and take a look. Of course, without an address, Sam had no idea of where to go, so he drove around awhile, circling the town and wondering how much he could charge for this
tour. He stopped for a minute outside Town Hall, ran in, and quickly scanned the map posted in the hall which listed points of interest. Cake House. The earliest surviving building in town. It had to be that.

They drove past the old oak, surrounded by orange cones, for the branches were now dangerously brittle on one side, down Lockhart, to reach what some people called Dead Horse Lane.

“Can’t go any farther,” Sam Dewey said. At least they could see the three chimneys from here, and a bit of the roofline as well. “My cab would never make it past the ruts they’ve got. Look at that one!” He pointed to a hole in the driveway so deep it was filled with water. What appeared to be a large stone, but was in fact a snapping turtle, was in the center of the mudhole. “I’d break my axle on that.”

The passenger paid and got out. This time he told Sam not to bother to wait. He let Sam Dewey believe he’d checked into the guesthouse, when all he’d done was pick up the copy of the
Unity Tribune
that was on Laurie Frost’s doorstep and stick it in his backpack. He didn’t want to appear to be a drifter, although that, in fact, was what he was these days. He liked to walk, he told the nosy cabdriver, and that seemed to satisfy Sam Dewey and send him on his way. The passenger walked down the driveway, past the mud puddle. There was the white house that looked so much like the model he’d taken from the table in the front hall of the apartment on Marlborough Street. There was the very same porch, the windows with their funny bumpy panes of glass, the hedges of laurel that were so sweet the bees that hovered around the blooms were groggy, unlike the felt ones on the model’s laurels, bees stuck on with glue, with wings that never moved.

One thing he’d said was true: he was just passing through. He’d need a place to rest though, so he turned into the woods. In fact, he wasn’t a city boy as that idiot taxi driver had deduced. He’d been raised in the north, far up in New Hampshire, and there he’d stayed until his girlfriend had broken his heart and moved to Boston. In
time he had followed her; he’d won her back, but she’d cast him aside again. Twice was once too many times to do that to him.