by Jane Langton
The removal of Annie’s furniture was almost done. Homer and Mary parked the headboard of her bed against a tree, and Homer mopped his forehead with his sleeve. “What are we going to do with all this stuff? We can’t take it to our place. Our house is too small.”
“Oh, ugh,” said Mary. She was worn out. Her back would never be the same. “There’s a storage place on Route 2A.” She stretched out on the grass. “Of course, there’s always my sister’s barn, there on Barrett’s Mill Road. But poor old Gwen, we can’t crowd more things in there while she’s away. She’s already storing Freddy’s boat, and Miranda’s boyfriend’s stuff, and John’s old muscle-building apparatus, and your old files, remember, Homer? You promised to remove them as soon as you got organized, and that was ten years ago.”
“Oh, Lord, I keep forgetting.” Gasping, Homer sat down beside Mary. “Look, the furniture’s no problem. What are we going to do about Annie?”
“Oh, Homer, it’s not her fault.”
“The thing is, she swears she won’t leave. She’s going to sit right there in front of that wall while forty tons of machinery comes straight at her.”
“Well, maybe being stubborn will work.” Mary looked at him defiantly. “Homer, she won’t be alone. I’m going to sit right there beside her. The guy won’t go through with it. No matter how many court opinions Gast has on his side, it would be murder if anybody got hurt. Besides, if she can hold out long enough, maybe we can get something on the Gasts.” Mary sat up and grasped Homer’s arm. “Hurry up, Homer. Find something. I know it wasn’t Annie’s fault that little Eddy died.”
“Oh, I see,” whined Homer, “it’s all up to me.”
Gast was back. “Okay, that’s enough,” he said loudly. “Now get that woman out.”
Annie’s friends came back to life. They jumped up, prepared to witness the collision between an irresistible force—the grappling machine—and an immovable object—Annie Swann and her wall. The television crew came alive too, as did the reporter from the Globe and the one from the Boston Herald.
Gast glowered at Mary Kelly. “She’s your relative, right? Get her out of there.”
Mary turned her back on him, and walked in the front door. “Annie, are you okay?”
Annie was alone in her ruined living room, using a broom to sweep broken glass into a heap. It was a housewifely action, as though she were still surrounded by four solid walls, as though one side of her house were not gaping open to the wind and weather.
“I’m okay,” said Annie, sweeping too vigorously, sending fragments of glass whizzing across the floor.
“Oh, goddamnit,” said Homer, coming in after his wife, resigned to the necessity of joining Annie’s death-defying stand against the monster machine. He grinned at her. “Why didn’t I marry into a sensible family?”
Annie laughed. “Sorry, Uncle Homer. That was your big mistake.”
The enormous grinding whine of the diesel engine began once more, and the scream of the hydraulic pumps sending oil into the pistons at high pressure. Minnie Peck was there again, along with Trudy Tuck, Lily and Henry Coombs, Wally Feather, Henrietta Willsey, and Perry Chestnut. This time they were not whooping and shouting. Their warlike spirit was gone.
They stood silently at one side, watching the swing of the grappling jaws and the rocking rotation of the massive counterweight. Delicately, as if he were reaching out his hand, the operator opened the grapple over the corner of the kitchen wall and closed it again, biting off a chunk of Annie’s kitchen cabinets. A forgotten tin of sardines shot up in the air. A section of the ceiling caved in and collapsed.
Annie, Homer and Mary huddled inside Flimnap’s wooden shelter. “Come on out, you guys,” shouted Wally Feather.
“Come out, come out!” cried Trudy Tuck.
“Get out of there, you people,” shouted Bob Gast, his voice trembling. “Come on out, I mean it.”
“Mrs. Kelly,” screamed Charlene, “get out, get out!”
“We’re, not leaving,” roared Homer. He put one arm around Annie and the other around Mary. Together they crouched under Flimnap’s wooden roof as the teeth of the grappling machine bit down and tore at joists and rafters with a grinding racket of splintering wood.
“Oh, God,” muttered Mary, “there goes the kitchen.”
“It’s okay,” whispered Annie, as the corner post went down and the east window buckled out of its frame. “Let him, let him. It’s okay.”
“Christ,” muttered Homer, wondering what demonic forces in his life had led inevitably to this crisis, what tendencies ingrained in him since childhood. What ghastly flaw in his character pointed directly to this moment when he would find himself crouching inside a collapsing building? Good Lord, what was Annie doing? She was jumping up, standing out from under the sheltering wooden roof to look up at her painted wall. “Come back, you idiot,” cried Homer. “You’ll get yourself killed.”
She couldn’t hear him, she wasn’t listening. She was staring at her wall.
So far it seemed all right. There were no cracks. The lifesize figures were nearly hidden under plaster dust, but they were intact. The ghostly ship on her painted horizon was still afloat. Under a white film the Owl and the Pussy-cat still rowed their boat serenely.
As the grappling machine rolled back over the heap of wreckage and swiveled on its massive turntable, Annie crawled into Flimnap’s house again and said shakily, “It’s okay so far.”
Robert Gast was in torment. Once again he yelled at the three fools who had holed up in his doomed house: “Get out, you morons, get out of there!”
“Morons!” echoed Charlene, screaming at the top of her lungs.
The machine groaned forward. Minnie and Trudy, Henry and Lily, Perry and Wally shouted, “No!”
“You’re witnesses,” yelled Gast, his voice cracking in a high shriek. “If anything happens, it’s their fault. I won’t be held responsible.”
But he would be held responsible, and he knew it. Terrified, he watched as the grappling jaw yawned and gulped down another piece of roof. The south end of the kitchen was gone, the bedroom, the bathroom. Homer, Mary and Annie huddled under their wooden umbrella as another piece of the ceiling collapsed. Their friends screamed at them, “Come out, come out!” But they bowed their heads and hunched their shoulders and hung on.
Gast had endured enough. He shouted at the driver to stop.
“No, no, Daddy,” cried Charlene, snatching at his arm, battering his chest with her fists. The fate of her Olympic pool hung in the balance, with its turquoise water, its red-and-blue deck chairs and colorful jungle plants.
The wrecking machine shivered a couple of times, then clanked to a stop and fell silent.
Chapter 48
Set a man to watch all night,
Watch all night, watch all night!
Set a man to watch all night,
My fair lady!
Mother Goose rhyme
“If we can’t leave, we can at least make ourselves comfortable.” Mary made a list of all the things they were going to need, like sleeping bags, blankets, bottled water, and a microwave oven.
Homer shook his head. “A microwave won’t do us much good without electricity.”
“Oh, we’ve got to have electricity.” Mary grinned and poked him in the chest. “Go out and get us some electricity, Homer.”
Fortunately, Flimnap O’Dougherty turned up just then. “Oh, God, Flimnap,” said Annie, looking up at him from the dark cave of the wooden shelter he had detached from the back of his truck, “where have you been?”
For once he didn’t dodge the question. He knelt on the gritty floor and said softly, “The fact is, I don’t like cameras very well.”
“I see,” murmured Annie, although she didn’t see.
The trouble was, the cameras were more and more in evidence. The story about Annie’s refusal to move out of a condemned house had gripped the imagination of the newspaper-reading, television-watching nation. Some people sided with Ann
ie, who was painting some sort of mural on the wall of a rented house and couldn’t bear to see it destroyed. Others were all for legality. “It’s her own fault. It’s not her house. Why would any sensible person paint a picture on the wall of a rented house?”
So there were more newspeople every day. Fortunately, the lay of the land and the shape of the house provided protection. Annie’s friends could rattle the knocker of her front door and slip inside, but everybody else had to watch from the driveway. The wrecked south side of Annie’s house was shut off on one side by a vast thorny patch of blackberries, and on the other by the fence and padlocked gate that had been erected by the Gasts. Far away, across the cornfield, Annie and her friends could see Baker Bridge Road, where the traffic came and went, looking like Matchbox cars, but immediately below her small front yard there was a bristling wilderness.
“They can’t get through that,” gloated Mary Kelly, who had tried it. “It’s like the hedge of thorns around Sleeping Beauty’s castle.”
It was true that Flimnap O’Dougherty did not like cameras. He came and went with care, appearing after nightfall or early in the morning, doing an odd job or two, then vanishing.
With his usual skill he solved the problem of electric power. He sent Homer out to buy an adapter for the cigarette lighter in Annie’s car, then ran a long wire through the front door to a lamp with a bent silk shade. The lamp shone down on a card table belonging to Henrietta Willsey. Wally Feather was a camping enthusiast in his spare time, and he produced a pop-up tent. Mary brought over a television set, and Flimnap soon had it glowing in the dark hollow of the shelter. Then, ever the practical handyman, he built an old-fashioned privy in the bushes and provided it with a garden fork and spade.
The problem of guard duty was taken care of by Lily Coombs, the creator of pretty arrangements of dried flowers. Lily worked out a schedule. She soon had all her time slots filled with stalwart defenders of Fortress Annie. Homer and Mary came and went, taking their turns.
And then, for a while, things settled down. Life was bizarre, but a routine developed. Before long a weird normalcy prevailed in Annie’s ruined house.
And it wasn’t just her friends who cheered her on. It was the images on her wall. They were still there, wraithlike under their coating of white dust, looming figures presiding over Annie’s ramshackle domestic arrangements. They belonged to her, they needed her, they must not be allowed to die. “It’s amazing,” said Mary to Homer, “the way Annie hangs on. Tough, that girl is tough. We’ve got to back her all the way.”
So it was a standoff. For the moment, Robert Cast was stumped. He had succeeded in destroying three-quarters of Annie’s house (which was not really her house at all). But the north side remained intact, because the goddamned woman had put her body in the way. It was an absurd emotional gesture, but it meant going back to law.
“Don’t talk to me about it,” said Roberta, throwing up her hands. “Talk to Sprocket.”
“Oh, God, Roberta.”
“Hurry up, Daddy,” insisted Charlene. “We’ve got to schedule the pool company early, or they won’t come until next year.”
“Honestly, Charlene,” moaned her father, “sometimes I wonder if we should really go through with it. It’s become such a big deal.”
Charlene fixed him with her eye. “Dad-DY?”
“Well, all right, all right. Okay, I know.”
Harassed by cameras and inquisitive reporters, Gast bought himself a toupee. It sat on the top of his head like a doily, making a sharp curve too low over his face. On television he looked pale and frightened. His protestations of perfect legality were unheard. All the sympathy went to Annie COURAGEOUS ARTIST DEFIES WRECKINC MACHINE, that was the gist of the reporting, and Gast resented it.
And how strange, the way they wrote about her all the time but never showed a picture of Anna Swann in the flesh.
“Get her,” said Harvey Broadstairs, executive editor of the Boston Globe. “It’s insane, all that stuff about her on page one, and no picture.”
Seven staff photographers were crowded around his desk. Tim Foley said, “How about the back flap of one of her children’s books?”
“No picture,” said Broadstairs. “We tried her publisher, but they’re out of business. Big takeover. You guys have got to do something. I don’t care what you do, but come back with a picture of Anna Swann.”
Behind the seven photographers pressing up against the executive editor’s desk there was an eighth. Bertha Rugg was crowded out. She couldn’t squeeze between the hips of the young women and the shoulders of the young men. She stood in the back and listened with all her might.
Chapter 49
… at the edge of the forest is a great lake. Behind it stands a tower, and in the tower sits a beautiful princess …
The Brothers Grimm, “The Skilful Huntsman”
“Why doesn’t she come out?” said Tim Foley, button-holing Mary Kelly in the driveway. “She’s your niece, right?”
“Why should she come out?” said Mary stoutly. Supporting a blueberry pie on the flat of one hand, she banged the knocker with the other. “She’s fine in there: Just fine.”
The door opened a crack and Trudy Tuck looked out. Mary slipped past her, and the door closed, scraping the floor because everything was out of plumb.
Tim sighed with frustration. He was one of the small army of photographers who were trying to take a picture of the controversial Anna Swann and show her to the world, because everybody out there was taking more and more of an interest in her protest. The wire services transmitted the story far afield. The TV cameramen were there every day, waiting for something to happen.
Time was suspended. Bob and Roberta Gast came and went, poker-faced, hiding away in their side of the house, from which no living sound emerged. Annie and her friends camped in front of her painted wall, wondering when the protest would come to an end. Any day now a crowd of riot police would show up with an arrest warrant and drag Annie out. Then Gast would bring in his machines and obliterate Annie’s wall. The time would certainly come. Her wall was doomed.
Around the house the green biomass of late spring burgeoned in the trees. On the topmost twig of a dead elm in the field a mockingbird hurled tunes at the sky—come and get ’em, no two alike. In the late afternoon a robin repeated his own cheerful song over and over. The two birds were behaving exactly like the humans in the disputed house, claiming some patch of field or hillside or wilderness as their own.
In the mad circumstances of life in a nearly demolished dwelling, Annie felt it, the sense of approaching disaster, as though the puffy clouds of summer were inscribed with exclamations of warning. Defying the clouds, she assembled her chalk, her brushes, and her colors, and got back to work.
The fifth and last section of her painted gallery was only half finished. Edward Lear occupied one side of the arched opening, a bearded man with round spectacles and a stovepipe hat. Robert Louis Stevenson stood jauntily erect on the other side, with a parrot on his shoulder. The space between them was blank.
It was the dangerous spot where the mysterious face had returned so often. It had been empty for over a month. The ugly face with its terrible teeth and horrible eyes had not come back. What if she painted something on purpose in that spot? The mysterious face might never show up again. Annie imagined a ghostly image drifting up to the wall and saying, Whoops, sorry, and fading away forever.
“Why don’t we clear up this awful mess?” said Lily Coombs, poking her foot at the pile of wreckage mounded on the floor and all over the crushed grass outside—fallen timbers, shattered glass, mangled clapboards, chunks of plaster, and torn strips of asphalt roofing. On top of the heap, like a vulgar piece of sculpture, Annie’s toilet lay on its back, gaping at the sky.
Homer was stubborn. “It’s Gast’s responsibility. He made the mess. Let him clear it up.”
“The wrecking company,” said Henry Coombs. “It must be part of their contract, to clean up the site.”
“Well, maybe we shouldn’t wait,” said Lily, frowning at Homer. “Why don’t we clear it out ourselves? Hire a Dumpster and carry stuff out in buckets through the front door? It’ll give us something to do.”
It was a good idea. Soon everybody was scooping bits of wreckage into wastebaskets and paper bags. Slowly the pile of broken clapboards and chunks of plaster and fragments of glass diminished, but only slightly.
Annie ran a borrowed vacuum cleaner around the edges. It made a lot of noise, shrieking as it picked up plaster dust and slivers of glass. Within the shriek Annie heard human voices, high-pitched arguments and shouts.
There were no arguments among the guardians of Fortress Annie. Eight of them were taking turns with Annie, bringing food, bottled water, clean laundry, and news—Homer and Mary Kelly, Henry and Lily Coombs, Wally Feather, Henrietta Willsey, Trudy Tuck, and Minnie Peck.
Minnie was especially faithful. She was delighted to be prominently on hand. She loved bouncing out of her car beside the van from CBS and granting an interview. After all, she was ten times more telegenic than Annie, and as a fellow artist she had been close to the scene from the beginning. It was soon apparent to the assembled gatherers of information that Minnie was au courant with Annie’s artistic raison d’être, and, more important, that she could answer questions about Annie’s love life. Minnie conned one of the network people into interviewing her in her studio against a background of Millennial Woman, Millennial Man, and Millennial Child.