by Van Reid
23. More Things in Heaven and Earth
From the backdoor of her late aunt’s house, Phileda McCannon could see the light in a window on the opposite bank of the Narramissic reflecting off the rushing stream. The gates and sluices commanding the little river were still; only weeks before the water in these locks swarmed with the dark backs of the mysterious alewife, and the shores of the river likewise were crowded with fishermen and onlookers by day and lamplit night.
To the south there were more lights down in Orland Village, and more than a mile to the east, just ahead of Phileda (where she leaned at the door-post), the black mounds of Great Pond Mountain and Cave Hill rose out of the bed of the land like half-wakeful heads.
Phileda was tired, though she didn’t think she had done very much. Her cousin had been here last December and accomplished most of what needed doing to close the house. This afternoon Phileda had gone straight to work, packing away some things left in the shed, wrapping kitchen glasses and plate-ware in newspaper. Tomorrow she would go to Ellsworth to talk to the banker and meet a prospective buyer. She would have liked to have kept the house, but it was foolish enough for one middle-aged woman to occupy such a large place in Hallowell—her parents’ old home. What would she do with two houses?
And as beautiful as it was here in Orland—as cozy and snug—it was that much further from someone. He will be in Norridgewock, by now, she thought. There was an old map of the state, dated 1872, in a room upstairs, and earlier that evening, by lamplight, she had peered at this chart, tracing the line formed by the Kennebec till her finger met the name of the town where she imagined Mister Walton to be spending the night. The contours of geography, the name Norridgewock, the map itself, did not tell her nearly enough.
All evening Phileda had sensed that she was on the verge of losing something, as if Toby might vanish into thin air were she not there to watch him. The thought did make her smile, though in a contrary manner; with his portly frame, it would take a little more vanishing than with some people.
The house had worked its recent history upon her imagination, that history being of an unmarried schoolteacher, long retired. Aunt Katherine had been the very model of a spinsterish schoolmarm. Phileda herself, visiting Aunt Kate in the summers of her youth, had seldom seen beyond the expected surface—a kind heart wrapped in practiced severity, a flinty curiosity concerning her neighbors, a list of aphorisms and object lessons as long as your arm.
Aunt Kate wrote formal letters to her nieces and nephews and signed them in a lovely hand beneath the words With great affection. Her dry sense of humor was often evident, but Phileda was always surprised to be reminded of it. She was a capable cook and though not an excellent one, Phileda’s father always said “she had gingerbread to a standstill.” Phileda could almost smell it now. There was always some waiting in the warming ovens when Aunt Kate brought one of her visiting nephews or nieces back from the station. You could smell it from the street, and entering her house was as warm and comforting as sinking into one of the down mattresses in the rooms upstairs.
Looking out over the river toward Great Pond Mountain, Phileda was gripped by a chill, and she came in from the dark to the dimly lit kitchen, poked at the small fire in the stove, and turned up the lantern. Her cousin had left some things in the parlor—personal items in a single box—and Phileda brought these into the kitchen and put them on the table.
It was a strange thing to be picking through another person’s life; Phileda felt sadness but also curiosity, which is not a sad emotion. The sadness is most of all for ourselves, she knew, when we see the small objects that make up our lives and how very common most of them are; everyone with a home has dishes and chairs and framed portraits on the wall. The things she took from the box seemed too unsubstantial to represent a life; she had felt the same way about Aunt Kate’s funeral service. What a rich thing a single moment can be; perhaps you are only standing at your front door watching a chickadee flit in the rosebush, or you stop singing long enough to hear the rest of the congregation and wonder at the disparate voices joined together, or you laugh at something no one else would understand. But when a life is done, you must wonder what all those moments have amounted to.
The first thing Phileda pulled from the box was a small diary; the year 1896 was written in pen on the first page. It would be unfinished, of course; Aunt Kate had taken sick in November, Phileda had come to take care of her at the beginning of December, and she knew her aunt had not been well enough then to write. She thumbed through the diary’s pages to the last entry—November 21, 1896—and found references to the neighbor’s boat, early snow, and an item in the local newspaper concerning a white deer sighted on nearby Verona Island, but no mention of illness or hint of what was soon to come.
Phileda experienced no ambivalence about reading the diary; there would be nothing very revealing, certainly nothing shameful, and there was a trunk filled with previous years in Aunt Kate’s bedroom upstairs. If a life’s moments were to amount to something, what better place to find them out? But there would be no secrets to uncover, Phileda knew—nothing that was not proper and demure for an unmarried schoolteacher of forty-two years and retired twenty-two more.
Next she found a deck of bishop’s cards, which contained no faces or suits. Aunt Kate had not been unusually religious for her time or her generation but had contracted a suspicion (almost a superstition) regarding face cards from a minister uncle when she was young. Phileda had pleasant memories of playing with the strictly numbered deck (never on Sunday, of course) games that resembled whist or hearts.
Next there came half a dozen fine lace handkerchiefs—marvelous, delicate things, ivory white. They had the monograph K.P.—Katherine Pitcher—in one corner, hand-sewn in a pale blue by Aunt Kate’s own Aunt Kate, who had made them as part of a trousseau. The first Aunt Kate had lived and died on Prince Edward Island, having come from the south of England. The handkerchiefs were treasures of the most precious sort, and Phileda was touched that her cousin had left them for her. She put them on the table and softly pressed her hand upon them before peering back into the box.
There was a locket watch, dangling upon a gold chain; a little key to wind the watch hung like a tiny sparkling pendant from the middle link.
There were some old photographs—one of Phileda’s mother, Aunt Kate’s older sister, sitting sidesaddle on a small, dark horse. Helen Pitcher looked satisfied, and even a litde wry, not quite regarding the camera. She was very young. Dim and losing its detail, the picture was from before the war. Phileda had to guess at the people in the other pictures, and she looked in vain for something written on their backs. I must remember to write on the backs of all my photographs, she thought to herself.
In the box, there was a Bible and a hymnal. There was a small sheaf of newspaper clippings, including one (Phileda could read most of it without undoing the ribbon that tied the bundle) that reported the victory of one of Aunt Kate’s students at a countywide spelling bee.
John Burton, thought Phileda, silently mouthing the student’s name. She undid the strap and unfolded the piece of newspaper. When she found a reference to the boy’s parents, she laughed delightedly. John Burton was the present warden of the alewife stream she could see from Aunt Kate’s kitchen window—a lean Yankee fisherman short on talk and long on studied silence. He was a son of the rocky shore, with a fierce reputation for the letter of the law, when it came to his stream, and checkers. He kept a bachelor’s hall outside the village, and each year, during the month of hunting, disappeared to some interior forest.
And he was, according to this yellowing piece of newsprint, a master of the language—a champion speller. Who would guess that the gray-headed fellow barking orders by the sluice gate in alewife season had the intricacies of the English tongue and its wayward spelling harbored in his brain or that he had friends to this day (Phileda did not know this, of course) who still tested him with outrageous words, of which English has plenty.
I
t made Phileda smile, thinking of Aunt Kate glowering over her class as she called out the week’s words and young John Burton, born with native genius, soaking in what Aunt Kate so dearly hoped to give all her pupils. This was the moment bestowed upon Phileda in the nearly silent kitchen (a clock ticked in the parlor and a little wind pulled at the northeast corner of the house), a moment that might be lost someday with John Burton himself—Aunt Kate’s moment, and what a life might honorably amount to.
“There is no such thing as wasted knowledge,” Aunt Kate used to say, and the old woman had firmly believed, Phileda knew now, that any life was enriched by knowing where to find Calcutta on the globe, or how to divide by a fraction, or how Hamlet described the formidable state of being human.
Phileda wished Toby were near enough to tell this to.
A small plaque, writ with John Burton’s name and the magnitude of his accomplishments, came out of the box like continued revelation. There was a handwritten note attached to the corner of the award, and Phileda pulled the lantern closer to read the small, finely crafted letters.
“Miss Pitcher,” said the note, “you should have this. John.”
Then curiosity overwhelmed all sadness, and, with the date of the newspaper clipping committed to memory, Phileda took the lantern to Aunt Kate’s bedroom and sorted through the old chest at the foot of the bed till she had found the corresponding diary.
What she found was that Aunt Kate’s diaries of her teaching years recorded every triumph and every sadness she experienced through her pupils, and on the date following the spelling bee there was an entry for February 20, 1869, that said simply, “Found John’s award left upon my stoop this morning with a note from him that I should have it. It made me cry.”
Phileda cried herself, there in Aunt Kate’s room, but didn’t feel sad, somehow, except for the absence of Toby Walton.
24. The Fallacious Extremity
Fuzz Hadley waited in the back room of the Crooked Cat, questioning his gang as they straggled in from the back alleys of the waterfront. The brown house on Danforth Street was abandoned, for the moment. Patrons had been the first to bolt at the first sign (or sound) of trouble; the ladies of the establishment were close behind, once Fuzz and the boys had knocked down the door to room 12A.
The Moosepath League and their rescuers had escaped, and Fuzz was pretty sure where they had gone.
“They were waiting for me,” said Fuzz, lifting a beer. He’d been properly startled to find three men instead of one at the head of the stairs; and they’d been a serious-looking trio. Spark’s bearded relative had seemed especially grim and dangerous. “Right on my own street,” he said, more to himself than to the boys who waited with him for the cops to clear out. They could still hear the occasional shrill whistle or shout, and several officers of the law had tromped into the Crooked Cat, but Percy Beal had handled them nicely. Percy’s business ran counter to the law, but elections were over and the police had their hands full with more important matters—like busted down doors and women screaming in the night.
Percy stuck his head into the back room and said, “They’re gone, Fuzz.”
“Another beer,” was about all the thanks that Percy got. “Right on my own street,” said Fuzz again.
“‘And dar’st thou then, To beard the lion in his den?’” said Peacock Hope, sitting at the other side of the deal table.
“I didn’t know lions had beards,” said Jimmy Fain.
“They knew their way around,” said Fuzz, who continued to be baffled
“It was one of the Spark kids with them, I’m dead sure,” said Harmon Blunt when he and Tony Sutter scuttled in through the backdoor. “Tony had him by the cuff, but he shook himself free.”
“I had him, but he kicked me in the chops,” said Tony, coming up behind. He had a hand to his face. “Knocked a tooth loose,” said Tony, and he didn’t look very happy about it.
“They must have flown over those roofs,” said Harmon.
“I didn’t know lions had beards,” said Jimmy.
“It is not a true beard, I believe,” said Peacock, “and Scott refers to it in the most figurative sense.”
“What?” said Jimmy.
“I can’t figure what they wanted,” said Fuzz. There was a faint knock and Winnie Peel almost fell into the room when Harmon Blunt jerked open the door. “I guess they didn’t want you,” said Fuzz to Winnie, when she had dusted herself off. Only Peacock rose to offer her a chair.
Winnie made an unhappy sound and crossed her arms before her. “They were expecting more than me, I guess.”
“They were expecting me,” said Fuzz.
“I believe your modus operandi has lost its power to surprise,” said Peacock, and, as usual, most of them didn’t know what he was talking about.
Winnie said, “I mean they were expecting another girl.”
Fuzz grunted.
Hankie blew his nose loudly. “Sorry,” he said afterward.
Winifred said, “That fellow looked plenty interested when I talked with him outside the theater.”
“‘Vain as the leaf upon the stream,’” pronounced Peacock, ‘“And fickle as a changeful dream—’”
Jimmy Fain started to say something a good deal less genteel to Winifred but had not taken the precaution of stepping out of her reach, and he caught the back of her hand across his ear. “Ow!” said Jimmy.
“They were asking about some Mrs. someone,” said Winifred, who seemed to think this query more insulting than curious. “Roberto. Mrs. Roberto. They mentioned her twice. I don’t know who she is.”
“Ah! Mrs. Roberto!” said Peacock, sounding rapturous.
“You know her?” asked Fuzz.
Peacock was ready to tap his endless storehouse of gaudy words till Fuzz gave him the look. “I do,” said Peacock simply. It was the shortest sentence they had heard from him for quite some time. “She is the ascensionist!” he informed them.
This sounded like more fancy speech, and Fuzz said, “Now, look, Pea!”
“The parachutist!” declared Peacock Hope, his hands up, as if to prove he was unarmed. “The balloonist!”
“The woman who jumps from the balloon?” said Tony, nursing his jaw. Peacock nodded in agreement. “The same,” he said.
“Oh!” said Winifred with a gust. “She’s grand!”
Hankie gave another sad honk into his ever-present handkerchief.
“I saw her once,” said Jimmy, and he was taken with the recollection.
“Mrs. Roberto!” said Peacock. It cheered him just to say her name. “She drops in beauty, like her flight.”
“The lady in the balloon,” said Fuzz. “Why were they looking for her?” he wondered aloud, then to himself, What were Spark’s boys doing here tonight? And what was Spark’s bearded relation doing here with his gang? Fuzz was of a suspicious nature, and he had been working on a major suspicion regarding Thaddeus Spark for some time now. “Where’s she from?” said Fuzz, and when this garnered only expressions of curiosity he said, “This Mrs. Roberto?”
Jimmy shrugged.
Winifred said, “She’s foreign.”
“She keeps her gear over Bergen’s place,” came a voice not previously heard from that evening.
“What’s that, Skelly?” asked Fuzz.
Skelly Wilson came out of his corner like a little rat. “Those rich fellows,” he said. “I bet they were looking for where she has her gear.”
“Why would they?”
Skelly shrugged elaborately. “Something there must be worth something to someone. That coot keeps about a dozen locks on the door.”
“Old Nick?”
Skelly nodded. “He’s keeping something from someone, and that’s for certain. Tossed me out the window.”
“The window?” said Jimmy.
“He did. But I did some asking around and found out, finally, that it was that woman’s place where she keeps her gear. I didn’t have but a minute to see for myself. It was dark, too. Lots of books
and clothes and her parachutes, I wager. Big silk things.”
“Silk things?” said Peacock with great interest.
“Thaddeus must be keeping his rum there,” said Fuzz.
“Thaddeus doesn’t sell rum,” said Tony.
“He must be keeping something there!”
“But why would this relative of his,” said Peacock, “be asking after Mrs. Roberto in your establishment if Spark himself is using her rooms to conceal distillates?”
“I don’t know!” growled Fuzz. “It doesn’t make sense. HI knew, I’d know what Spark was up to.” The very backward nature of it all was what troubled him so. “That relative of Spark’s had some reason to come down here, and clearly it wasn’t you,” he said to Winnie. “He brought his gang with him, as if they were ready for a fight, but skedaddled the moment we headed up the stairs.”
“Perhaps,” said Peacock, “we are considering this impasse from the fallacious extremity—wrong end to, as it were.”
“I think I knew what he was saying that time!” said Jimmy, a little amazed at his own wisdom.
“Wrong end to?” said Fuzz.
“It’s quite obvious, now that I think of it,” said Peacock Hope. “They thought that we have possession of this Mrs. Roberto, or of something associated with her.”
“Yes,” said Fuzz. This was a little too obvious, he thought.
“And if they want this ... whatever,” continued Peacock, “and if old Nick is keeping it behind barred doors—”
“Then it must be worth having,” said Fuzz. “Or at least keeping it out of Spark’s hands.”
“Right end to,” finished Peacock, as if he were demonstrating a mathematical proof.
“Boys,” said Fuzz, “let’s go and visit Old Nick.”
They were all curious now, Winnie included, and she was not happy to be left behind. She hovered at the backdoor and watched them leave. The men moved quietly, and Fuzz, too, just as if he didn’t own the street, or just as if they were sneaking up on some poor unsuspecting soul already in sight.