Something in the Water

by Charlotte MacLeod

What with mud stains, grass stains, and stains of various natures that he preferred not to think about, the bag was fairly disgusting by now. So what? A man of the turnip fields cared naught for such bagatelles. As Peter recalled, that sacklike garment Miss Rondel had been wearing yesterday hadn’t been any too pristine either. He added Elva Bright’s two jugs to his equipment and began the arduous clamber up the rock-strewn slope.

  It was as well he’d pulled off where he did. Not much farther along he came upon a parked pickup truck, a biggish one, blue and silver with a cap on the back. This was really the kind of vehicle a person needed for such rugged terrain but Peter couldn’t envision Miss Rondel driving it. Therefore, she must have company. He felt unreasonably put out at the prospect of not being given her full and undivided attention.

  Quod erat absurdum. Grown men didn’t wax petulant over such trifling disappointments. Or did they? Somewhere up above, either a basso profundo or a talking walrus was making the welkin ring.

  “All right, I’ll do it. And you won’t like it!”

  The roar was an affront to the lupines, to the buzzing of the bees among the blossoms, to the far-off susurrations of a receding tide on a day that should have been halcyon. Who was going to do what? And why wasn’t Miss Rondel going to like it?

  A shower of egg-sized pebbles rolled down the slope. Instinctively Peter dodged behind a boulder. He was just in time to avoid a whizzing pebble that might have hit him if he’d been a second slower to move. Instead, it hit a birch tree about twenty feet on with a thud that made him wince. More stones and more thuds followed in rapid-fire succession, then the bull-moose charge of a burly figure wearing a wildly stained feed cap that might once have been red. Peter recognized the cap. This was the surly cuss whom he’d seen a while ago leaving Elva Bright’s dining room with the man who’d talked of clapping a lawsuit on Jasper Flodge’s estate.

  Not that it was any of his business, and not that he intended to get involved in anything related to the late Mr. Flodge’s almond-flavored demise. Still, Peter couldn’t help wondering. Was Frances Hodgson Rondel by any chance a family connection, in line to inherit Flodge’s estate, assuming he’d had one? Had her disgruntled visitor been trying to talk her into settling Flodge’s debt out of court instead of putting him to the expense of a lawsuit? And had she told him to take his threatened lawsuit and stuff it up his downspout?

  Reminding himself again that none of this had anything to do with him, Peter clambered on, noting to his satisfaction that quite a number of the plants were ready to yield up their seeds, pausing now and then to take a soil sample. Lupines were supposed to crave a soil rich in leaf mold. He could not for the life of him figure out how luxury-loving plants the size of these could grow, much less thrive, in such meager footing. The logical explanation was that Miss Rondel fertilized the bejeepers out of them, but he could see no sign that such was the case. Drat, he wished Timothy Ames were here!

  By the time Peter breasted the ledge, he felt like the youth who bore ‘mid snow and ice a banner with a strange device; he had a sneaking urge to shout “Excelsior!”

  He curbed it, however. In the first place, there was nowhere higher for him to climb. In the second, Miss Rondel was right here in the dooryard, pinning a towel to her clothesline. She might consider such behavior strange and rescind her permission to gather seeds. As he held his peace, she removed the weathered clothespin that she’d been holding between her lips—the way Peter’s mother and grandmother had been wont to do, he recalled, surprised by a pang of nostalgia—and greeted him with the poise of a born aristocrat.

  “Good morning, Professor. I see Elva’s given you her jugs to be filled. Perhaps you’d be good enough to set them in on the kitchen table? I’ll be done here in a minute or two.”

  She nodded toward the open back door and stooped to pick another damp wad out of her laundry basket. Pink plastic, Peter noted with inward disapproval. The basket ought to be of woven cane, stained dark by time and use and in none-too-good repair. He hooked his right-hand jug to a spare left-hand finger and fished in his pants pocket for Mrs. Bright’s envelope.

  Inside the house, he found nothing to disappoint him: Miss Rondel’s kitchen was not laid out quite like his grandmother’s, but the general impression was the same. Peter could have sworn he recognized the pattern that showed dimly through fifty years’ buildup of varnish on the well-scrubbed linoleum. He knew exactly how those flat, hard sofa cushions stacked on the sagging iron cot in the corner would feel against his back, should he take the liberty of testing them. The granny afghan spread over the cot was the wrong mix of colors, though, and so was the money cat sprawled on the afghan, giving an occasional absentminded lick to its left hind leg.

  Old Tige had been a brown tabby, his preferred lounging spot the braided mat in front of the black soapstone sink; he’d had the whole Shandy family trained to step around him. Peter hadn’t thought of Tige since he couldn’t remember when. Yet he’d loved the raggedy-eared old tyrant. Still did, he supposed, absurd as it was to be wasting sentiment on a critter who’d yielded up the last of its nine lives forty years ago or better.

  The table was about right, standing plunk in the middle of the floor where a farm wife could work around it from whatever side was handiest. Its stumpy legs were enameled in once-glossy apple green with a few chips knocked off, its unpainted top scrubbed into humps and hollows with little rounded-off knots poking up through the grain here and there. The cast-iron stove was no more than Peter had expected. The electric toaster oven and teakettle sitting on a nearby shelf did give him a minor jolt, but it stood to reason that Miss Rondel wouldn’t want to keep her stove fired up during the hot days of summer.

  Peter set Mrs. Bright’s jugs on the table as bidden, tucked one end of the envelope under the first one so that it couldn’t be overlooked, and was about to go back outdoors when he noticed a new-looking stretched canvas that had been set on the seat of a green-painted pressed-wood chair drawn up to the table.

  Peter Shandy was, in his way, a scholar. He knew a great deal about the kinds of culture that come with prefixes such as agri-, horti-, and silvi-. Culture without a prefix tended to leave him cold, particularly when it took the form of being herded around a gallery trying to pretend he liked what he saw. As a rule, Peter did not like what he saw: not minimalist, cubist, post-post-impressionist, or much of anything else with an -ist on it, not excluding realist. If he didn’t know what the artists had been up to, he was bored. If he could identify what he saw, he was more apt than not to wonder why they’d bothered. He had thought well of Miss Rondel thus far, was his pleasant illusion to be shattered? Was she, then, a dabbler in art?

  No, she wouldn’t be the type to dabble: Peter knew full well that nice people didn’t sneak peeks at other people’s belongings that were none of their business, but the spirit of Rikki-Tikki-Tavi was too strong within him. If he were just to tilt back the chair very, very carefully so as not to risk smudging the—great balls of fire! All question of couth went by the board. He moved the chair far enough out to give him a good look, and stood transfixed. He was still numb with wonderment when Miss Rondel came looking for him.

  “Professor, aren’t you—oh.”

  She was angry, and trying not to show it. Peter didn’t give a damn. Et in Arcadia Shandy. He too had been in Arcady, he still was. He hadn’t been there long enough. He supposed he ought to say something.

  “This—” No good. He tried again. “I—er—did you do this?”

  “No.” The anger was plainer now.

  “Then who?”

  “I am not at liberty to say.”

  “But it’s—good God!”

  “Are you trying to tell me you like it?”

  “Yes.” Peter was gathering his wits about him. “I apologize for taking the liberty, Miss Rondel, but I can’t be sorry that I did. This picture—it’s—I don’t know what it’s about, but it’s—saying something I want to hear.”

  “You surprise me very much
, Professor Shandy.”

  “I surprise myself. I’m not particularly inclined to notice paintings as a rule. What I know about art could be written on the head of a pin. Why this one gets to me the way it does is more than I can fathom. All I can say is, I wish it were mine.”

  “Do you really?” Miss Rondel had simmered down by now, she was studying the canvas herself. It took her a while to reply. “Yes, I suppose that would depend. Professor, I happen just now to have custody of some other paintings by the same artist. I haven’t shown them to anybody else and didn’t intend to, but you may see them if you wish. On one condition, that you say absolutely nothing about them to anybody at the inn or around the town.”

  “No problem, Miss Rondel. I’m planning to leave anyway, as soon as I’ve gathered the lupine seeds you’ve so kindly let me take.”

  “So soon? What a pity. Then you’d better see them now, if you want to. Come this way, please.”

  She opened the door leading into a small dining room that looked as if it didn’t get used very often and raised the blinds that had been keeping out the strong sunlight off the water. “Here they are, what do you think of them?”

  “I don’t know.”

  In total bemusement, Peter stood before one, then another, and another of the unframed canvases that circled the walls. There were ten of them, all dealing with simple themes: sea, rocks, sky, fields, lupines. Not lupines. Something. Color. Form. Not form. He was damned if he knew what he was looking at, but he couldn’t take his eyes away.

  None of the paintings could be called pretty. Some of them made Peter feel uneasy, particularly one in which tall thrusts of color hurled themselves out of unrelenting granite. By some ocular magic, a few tawny-rose lupines growing in a small pocket of dirt up the sides of a rocky ledge had become a portrait of President Thorkjeld Svenson; not the way he’d looked but the way he must have been feeling a few weeks ago when he’d driven his prized Balaclava Blacks to yet another triumph at the Balaclava County Annual Workhorse Competition.

  This was a young people’s picture, Peter decided, one that ought to be hanging in the college. If any picture was worth a thousand words, this shape-changer should be good for many millions. Merely by passing by it day after day, students could learn a damn sight more than they would from the blether they got from some of their longer-winded instructors. He surprised both himself and Miss Rondel by bursting into joyous laughter.

  If Miss Rondel had in fact gone to school with Elva Bright’s grandmother, she might well be old enough to have imbibed the aura of Queen Victoria’s day. Clearly, like the late Queen, she was not amused.

  “I must say, Professor Shandy, that, while I can recognize a certain merit in some of these paintings, none of them has ever provoked me to hilarity. Obviously you see something here that I don’t.”

  “Then it’s remarkably kind of you to give them houseroom.”

  “Not really. It’s just that I have the space, you see. It would have been a waste just to let them decay in a barn somewhere.”

  “It would be criminal. The artist has never considered taking them to a gallery?”

  “Oh no, never in the world. It would be nice if they could be sold somehow, I suppose, but then the word might get out about who painted them, and that could lead to complications. You know how people are. Of course in your case, I don’t suppose…”

  Miss Rondel let her voice dwindle off. Peter wondered if he should have brought another envelope, he picked up his cue with alacrity.

  “Er—assuming the artist did want to sell any of the pictures, what—er—price range do you think—er—”

  “Goodness, I’ve never given that side of it a thought. I don’t suppose the artist has, either. Perhaps you might care to make a suggestion?”

  “M’well, say for instance that one out in the kitchen. Suppose for the sake of argument I opened with an offer of a thousand, and then we could dicker. I wouldn’t mind going a little higher if…” He too knew when to dwindle.

  In fact, Peter could go a good deal higher if he had to. His giant rutabaga, known in all cooler climates as the Balaclava Buster, was still bringing in substantial royalties, as were the petunia Helen’s Fancy, the viola Spritely Sieglinde, and various other horticultural triumphs, of which the Rondel lupine strain might yet become another. If his experiment worked out, Frances Rondel would of course get her share of the take. She looked as if she’d be around long enough to enjoy the extra income even if she was, as alleged by Elva Bright, well on her way toward the century mark.

  As to that magical picture, Peter knew a decent amount of haggling would have to be gone through before a firm figure was arrived at. Furthermore, he was beginning to have feelings about some of the others and didn’t want to price himself out of the market first crack off the bat. He must have struck a chord, though, Miss Rondel was looking at him through slightly narrowed eyelids.

  “You did mean a thousand dollars, Professor? Would that be in American money?”

  “Well, yes, that was what I had in mind. I’ve never bought a painting before, but I’ve been to a few exhibitions with my wife and somewhere between one and two thousand seems to be a—er—popular range. It’s too bad to put you in the middle like this.”

  “Oh, I don’t mind helping out, provided you’re really serious. You’re quite sure you want to do this?”

  “Sure enough to give you a deposit right now, if you want one. I’d have to write you a check, but I can make it a counter check if you’ll tell me where to find a bank. Or I could phone down to my wife and ask her to bring up a certified check, a money order, or even the cash if your—er—protege would prefer it. You know our friend Catriona McBogle from Sasquamahoc. She’s visiting at our house now, as I believe I mentioned to you yesterday. Helen can ride back to Maine with her. I’d want Helen to see the paintings anyway, if you don’t mind showing them again.”

  “What if Mrs. Shandy doesn’t care for them?”

  “She will.”

  Gad, he’d done it now. What about all that garbage he’d been spouting to himself earlier about hightailing it away from Pickwance as soon as he’d finished looting the lupines of their seed? What had got into him, anyway? Peter wasn’t an acquisitive man, by and large. Choosing adornments for the house had always been a job he preferred to weasel out of, whenever Helen would let him. But, dad-blang it, he was going to have that incredible painting and maybe a couple more even if, perish the thought, he had to hang around here for the rest of the summer while some neurotic genius was making up his or her mind to talk business.

  Chapter 5

  SO ON TO THE lupines and to hell with negative thinking. Peter slung his gathering bag over his shoulder, took out a few of his spillproof plastic envelopes, and buckled down to business. The range of color was greater than any he’d encountered before but the variations were often subtle; he had to invent a color code as he went from one magnificent stalk to another that was almost like it but not quite. He just hoped he’d be able to remember what his complex improvisations stood for when he got back to his greenhouses.

  Some of the stalks had gone completely to seed, he labeled them with question marks and went on filling his little packets. He was in no great hurry, he paused now and then to settle a territorial dispute with a bee or a butterfly or to pass the time of day with Miss Rondel’s overweight cat, who’d strolled out to see what was going on. A blue jay gave him hell for trespassing on its turf while keeping a wary distance, as a blue jay naturally would. A wren less than a third of the blue jay’s size was far bolder, bouncing on the tip of a brier and carrying on a running commentary not six feet from the fat cat’s nose. She put Peter in mind of his next-door neighbor back home.

  He lost track of the hours and didn’t care. Somewhere along the line he ate the sandwiches that Mrs. Bright had put up for him and washed them down with a big tumblerful of spring water that Miss Rondel brought out to him. It was in fact water, he was interested to note, and excellent water at
that. Peter had drunk from many a spring, he was by now something of a connoisseur; he rated the Rondel’s Head product grade A-plus and gave it five stars for good measure.

  Somehow, the water had a relationship to his painting, the one that would be his forevermore even if, God forbid, he never got to lay eyes on it again. It carried that same hint of something far greater than excellence, something illusive but essential that he couldn’t taste but was perfectly well able to recognize. He wished he’d brought a jug of his own to be filled, he had an instinctive feeling that Mrs. Bright was not going to let him have any of hers and he didn’t blame her a whit.

  His whistle thus transcendentally wetted and his vigor renewed, Peter went on gathering lupine seeds. He had seen Childe Hassam’s idyllic painting of Celia Thaxter in her seaside garden, he’d thought this would be a nice, lazy way to pass a leisurely afternoon. Dropping down over a twenty-foot granite ledge with jagged rocks at the foot to reach a tiny pocket of soil that had managed to lodge in a crevice, hanging on more or less by the toenails while he broke off a few browned flower heads and tied them up in his shirttail for safekeeping so that his fingers could seek out handholds to climb back up by must have been a picture that Hassam would not have cared to paint.

  The tide was rolling in by now, sending up great fans of spray as it hit the rocks. Peter’s pant legs were half-soaked by the time he’d clambered along the cliff to where the going was less precipitous. He didn’t care. He’d have gone back down for more seeds if there’d been any more to get. He still couldn’t figure out how those plants could grow so phenomenally under what looked like such adverse conditions. He said as much to Miss Rondel as he was thanking her for letting him spend the day in her garden and bumming another drink of water for the road.

  She only smiled and thanked Professor Shandy in turn for the several packets of mixed seed that he’d prepared for her. She’d told him not to bother sorting them out, she was only planning to chuck them along the roadsides as the by now legendary Hilda “Lupina” Hamlin had started doing down around Christmas Cove a good many years ago. Not that hers would ever do so well as Hilda’s, she didn’t suppose, but they’d be pretty in the springtime and she’d let him know about the paintings.