Cascade

by Maryanne O'Hara

  “Now, remember who our governor is, good people.” Zeke stabbed his cigar into the air to make his point. “He is no patron of the arts, like his predecessor. He is Mr. James Michael Curley and the few piddling votes he can get out here don’t matter much to him. And as I implied, there’s talk that he not only wants to take our valley, but I’ve heard, through people I know I can trust, that he’s been telling his local voters he’ll bus them out here to get them jobs. This will be a political coup for the Boston politicians—oh, it will make them all look good. I can hear their slogans now.”

  So that was the real reason. Dez looked out over the crowd. Instead of anger and outrage, she saw quiet, defeated faces. We’ve been living with bad news for so many years now, the general silence said, here is one more piece. Bad news had simply been the stuff of normal life for too long, newsreels and radios delivering gloom nonstop: strife in Europe, dust storms obliterating the western prairies, city bread lines filled with the out-of-work.

  From outside, a boy jumped up—high schooler Popcorn Webster, his face at the window for just a flash, hand cupped to his mouth. “Which will it be, though? Cascade or Whistling Falls?”

  Everyone laughed; Zeke shook his head. “We just have to wait and see, folks. You’ll be seeing the surveyors around town again, the engineers, working out of the old boys’ camp. As you know, the 1927 legislature created the water commission and both the House and Senate passed the water bill back in 1928. So a good deal of the surveying has been done—but you all remember that.” He gestured to a stack of heavy, thick binders behind him on the selectmen’s table. He picked up one of the binders and dropped it with a heavy thud. “Most of the surveying, I’m afraid.”

  Again, there was silence, as everyone remembered how the water commission’s engineers had, for a time, kept an office above Stein’s store. They’d surveyed every square inch of town property and roads, they’d drawn up maps. After the water bill passed, everyone expected the bill appropriating the Cascade River would be next. Cascade appeared doomed. Then the Richard Harcourt rumors started, the threat disappeared, and once it was gone, everyone had been happy to forget about it.

  “What’s left is formalities,” Zeke said. “Deciding which valley is best suited to a dam—which valley has higher elevations, less ledge, better whatever-they-are-looking-for. They say we’ll know by July first, about two months.”

  There were cries of Two months? “Impossible,” someone shouted.

  In the front row, a woman’s hand shot up and stayed in the air.

  “Lil?” Zeke asked.

  Everyone strained to hear Lil Montgomery.

  “Can you speak up?”

  “Whistling Falls has a smaller population, barely any public buildings. There’s less disruption if they take Whistling Falls.”

  “True, Lil, as we just said.” Zeke’s gaze from the stage, toward Lil and everyone else who would state the same thing over and over again, was patient. “And we have to hope that factors into the equation.”

  “So is Midland really out of the picture, once and for all?”

  Zeke answered her by speaking out to everyone. “Yes, folks, at last summer’s hearing in Midland, there was such vigorous and organized opposition that the water committee was decisive in their decision to look westward again. My friend at the State House tells me they made an awful lot of noise.”

  Popcorn jumped again, his face at the window: “We can make noise, too!”

  “You certainly can, Mr. Webster,” Zeke called, eliciting another laugh. “But I have to say, I’m not sure it will do much good. They rather easily dismissed Midland because Midland is not an ideal location. The Cascade River has been officially chosen, whether we like it or not. Now we have to wait and hope that our town will be spared. Final tests will begin after the Memorial Day holiday.”

  It was already May 1. There would be all-around tension until the state made its decision. That tension was evident in the brief period of silence that followed before someone—was it Asa?—spoke out. “I say we fight it.”

  Dez felt her arm shooting up—she couldn’t stop it. She didn’t really like speaking in front of groups but she could never stay quiet if she had something important to say.

  Zeke put a shading hand to his eyes. “Who’s that?” Heads turned her way.

  She jumped off her perch on the radiator too quickly, and in the tilt of her body, a feeling like vertigo hit her. The ground under her feet—she could almost imagine it giving way. She put a hand to the wall to catch her balance, but imagined flooding overhead, imagined herself at the bottom of a reservoir, unable to breathe, looking up, up through water, like the sketches she had done at Christmas.

  She stepped into the aisle so her voice would carry clearly. “I’m thinking,” she said, “that the smart thing is to prepare for the worst. I think we’ve got to plan how we’re going to negotiate fair value for our land. I mean, my father’s playhouse is worth much more than its timber and nails. And then if they take Whistling Falls, good, but we’ll have been prepared, at least.”

  “Excellent point,” Zeke said. On the dais, the other men murmured their agreement. “And if your father was here, we all know he’d have a quote for us. One that comes to my mind is the Duke of Venice: The robb’d that smiles steals something from the thief. Thank you, Dez.”

  She stepped back to the radiator and pulled her pad from her pocket, pencil flying over the paper, envisioning a new work. If the worst happened, if the reservoir was built in Cascade, she could record it all, maybe in a series of panels, explore what it meant to dismantle a town, to disincorporate it, to move everybody out and say this place no longer exists. In Europe, she had seen murals depicting the rape of Europa, the fall of Rome. You could tell whole stories with mural panels. In Paris, in the twelfth arrondissement, painted on the side of a courthouse, was a depiction of the French revolution, which began with early fires lit by insurrectionists and ended with Marie Antoinette’s neatly guillotined head falling into a bucket.

  The panel idea was good—with the playhouse as the central theme somehow. First the playhouse on a long-ago opening night, with excitement and some kind of foreboding in the air. Second, the playhouse of now, uncertainty evident somehow. Then the playhouse of the future, with a tone she was still unsure of. Water closing over everything?

  In any case, a series of panels, yes. She closed her pad with the satisfaction that came from solidifying an idea.

  Up near the stage, Bud Foster had raised his hand and moved nearer the stage to speak. He was looking downright skinny, his jacket practically hanging off his shoulders, and he kept his eyes cast down as he rubbed his hands together apologetically. “I have to say Elaine and I’d be grateful to get cash for our land. I’ve never farmed it, and I sure can’t sell it in these hard times. With a bit of cash, we could start somewhere else.”

  Hartwell Page himself rose from his chair on the dais. “I have to confess,” he said. “I’m thinking the same.”

  A few others admitted that they, too, might benefit from selling to the state. The buzz in the room swelled as everyone started to talk at once. Onstage, Zeke covered the microphone and bent toward the front row. He stood up straight. “Folks, Asa Spaulding has something to say.”

  Asa’s fair head poked up from the crowd down front, from a spot right beside where Lil Montgomery’s raised arm had emerged. He took a moment to regard the crowd soberly, then rested his hands on his hips and waited until all eyes were on him, until all the rustling and coughing and chair-scraping had ceased. His eyes found Dez and he imperceptibly shook his head.

  “This is our home,” he said, enunciating each word. “This is our land.” As he spoke, he turned slowly, to address as many people as possible. “Most of us have been here for generations. We will get through these hard times, but if we sell our souls for cash, how will we live with ourselves?”

  “It’s easy for them who have cash—” A shrill woman’s voice from the middle of the crowd.
It sounded like Tilly Allison, and everyone knew she was a grudging sort.

  Her remark was met with general coldness. Asa Spaulding was well-liked. Zeke banged his gavel and said, “Please let Asa speak.”

  “I hate to wish this on our neighbors, but we have much more to lose than Whistling Falls. Like Lil pointed out, we’ve got a much larger population, far more businesses. It makes sense for the state to choose Whistling Falls.” Asa’s eyes passed over Bud, then Dez. “But we can’t just sit around and wait for that to happen. We have to make it happen.”

  On the drive home he was grim, a hard man she did not know. After the meeting, people had peppered him with questions, “What did you mean, Asa? What can we do?”

  “We have brains, imaginations, voices,” he said. “Let’s use them. Let’s think.”

  Driving, he scoffed at Zeke’s wait-and-see policy. “Wait and see. In other words, sit like hunters’ ducks until they decide to shoot us.” And he was disturbed by the fact that Dez had spoken. “You got people into a giving-in frame of mind. You got them thinking about dirty money.”

  “I did nothing wrong. My point was well taken. Everyone thought so. People have no money, Asa. You’re lucky to have a business of your own, one that provides things people need no matter what. And that bit of cash your mother put away. You’re lucky! And I’ve got to think about the playhouse, don’t I? I can’t see it sold for pennies and torn down.”

  They turned up River Road, but he drove right past their house.

  “Where are you going?”

  “I just need to see,” he said, vaguely.

  See what? But she didn’t say anything, though her fingers flexed with impatience. She had put off the ironing and now it was ahead of her.

  At the end of River Road, past Pine Point, he turned left onto the old Amherst Road. They passed miles of dark fields with only the occasional farmhouse and arrived in the center of Whistling Falls, a simple four-corners. There were no streetlights, no public buildings, just a few houses and a grange hall. “Look at this,” Asa said, braking to a stop. “There’s nothing here. They’ve got to take this place. It makes so much more sense.”

  He was more relaxed driving back to Cascade, taking the long, roundabout way, passing by the Cascade Golf Course, slowing the car as they rolled past. The handsome fieldstone mansion that had been the Clark estate had been transformed, with a double front door and striped awnings on every window, into the clubhouse. There were still signs of construction—some scaffolding near the chimney, and bushes with big root balls, not yet planted, but the club looked on course to open as scheduled in June.

  “Makes no sense to build that then tear it right down,” Asa said.

  “Perhaps.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I’m skeptical. You heard what Zeke said about the governor. The man’s a crook! Who knows what will happen? I’m against this as much as anyone, but I’m also starting to accept that it might really happen and if it does, well, then maybe it’s a blessing in disguise. In a city like Boston,” she said, “or New York,” she added, carefully testing the waters, “I might get an illustrator’s job. In any case, I’d probably get more portrait work than I do now. All I’ve had is those two little girls, and the mother sent her driver to pick up the painting last Friday, almost a week now, and I still haven’t been paid. And you could run a drugstore anywhere. We could be happy in a busier place, Asa.”

  His face, lit by the moon as he turned to look at her, revealed deep distress. “Dez, I don’t want to run a drugstore anywhere. I want to run my drugstore here, in my town. Raise our children here.” He reached across the seat to pull her beside him, but the yank was clumsy, pinching the flesh above her elbow.

  “Well, what if you can’t?” she said irritably. “There aren’t any more Stock Exchange vice presidents or governors to care about us anymore. Richard Harcourt went to jail! Everything’s changed. Cascade isn’t what it was and it may never be again. Maybe we need to realize that.”

  He stiffened; she’d gone too far. The car rolled down the driveway, its headlights throwing out two circular beams that winked out when Asa braked and turned off the engine.

  He sat quietly for a moment. “What is it you want, Dez?”

  “I’m just saying we might do well somewhere else. We might do better somewhere else.”

  “This isn’t enough for you, is it? I’m not enough for you.”

  “Asa, all I meant was that it’s not like this threat hasn’t been hanging over our heads for years, and now the state’s telling us we’ve got a fifty-fifty chance of losing.”

  “We’re not going to lose,” he said, and got out of the car.

  She sat for a moment, then followed after him. Inside, she saw he’d headed straight for his study and shut the door. She dragged the ironing basket into the parlor, set up the ironing board, and plugged in the hot-iron. While it heated up, she pulled open the door of the studio to look at the half-rendered view of the playhouse, stark against the river, that she had been working on since last week. With memory of the vertigo feeling that had hit her in Town Hall, and with fresh eyes, she suddenly saw, as if it were already painted, a maple tree looming out over the river, gnarled and reaching, down, down into the water.

  She had to start over.

  The perspective needed to be the view up through the water, the drowning view up, like those winter sketches, like the dizzy feeling, the firmly planted tree reaching down, its form blurred and heightened by the water’s distortion.

  She could see the composition clearly, fixed within her pupils, and knew: she needed to lay the boundaries down before the image slipped away. She changed into her smock, scraped at the old paint, and began to knife out a selection of color: blue-black, ultramarine ash, lamp black. Shades of luminous, silver bark.

  But her first dabs dispirited her; they looked false. She kept on, and, gradually, the trunk began to come to life on the canvas. Not too bad. Then—it seemed a sudden thing—what she always hoped for with oils, but could never count on, happened: the convergence of effort and inspiration into something that actually looked the way she intended it to look. She let herself go—it was such a gift when this happened—and the tree came alive, the air around it thick and ominous. She mixed madder lake and yellow ocher with white to add layers of luminosity, to show that despite the gloom, trying to get in, there was light. What seemed a minute later, the banjo clock chimed in that speeded-up way time had when it was altered by the pleasure of being engrossed in something, and Asa poked his head in.

  “What in God’s name are you doing?” Was he angry? He looked angry. He gestured toward the parlor, toward the heaped-up ironing basket, the ironing board and hot-iron, plugged in and forgotten.

  She grabbed his wrist and pulled him to her easel. She had to make him see. She did her best to explain: that when she got this kind of vision, she had to express it immediately or risk losing it forever.

  “I don’t know much about art,” he said. “This looks interesting, I can see that. There’s a lot that’s pleasing about it.” She was relieved; she’d gotten through to him. “But can you come down from the clouds? Our house, our town, is drowning—literally—and you’re in here painting pictures. Instead of trying to help, you’re standing up at Town Meeting telling people to sell, and you’re in here doing—this.” He flapped his palm at the painting. The back of his hand smudged the bark details she had worked so hard to get right.

  There was a stunned, voiceless moment, almost black. She wanted to tear into him even as she fast-formulated how she could fix it: scrape there, reapply the paint.

  “You haven’t been yourself since that crazy friend of yours stopped by, and I’ve lost my patience. Got that? Lost it!” He was yelling. She had never heard him yell. She hadn’t thought he was capable of yelling. “Here we risk losing everything and I don’t have any shirts for morning.”

  “But you do, Asa.” She realized her face was wet. She realized she was crying. �
�There are shirts in the wardrobe.”

  He stormed over to the basket and pulled out the first one that came to hand—a white one, like all the others. “I want this one, though! This one!” Forgetting that there was paint on his hand, a splotch of brown that ruined the shirt.

  “But you don’t, Asa. You only wanted that one because it’s not ironed. Why are you so angry?”

  He was all balled up, hands clenched, face red, sputtering for words. He didn’t like fighting any more than she did. But this fight was not about shirts. It was about not wanting the same thing, it was about a man marrying a woman and thinking maybe he’d made a bad choice. It was about realizing he’d ruined a favorite shirt. “And now it’s a rag.” He balled up the shirt and rubbed his fingers with it. “And this sonofabitch oil paint doesn’t come off, does it?”

  A harsh word she’d never heard him use, and which had the effect of a slap across her face. It stunned her.

  They had been living together for months now. She knew what it was to turn in her sleep and feel the length of his bare leg; she knew the pharmaceutical smell of his skin at the end of a long day. She knew things she’d never cared to know about anyone, like how five minutes after eating breakfast he needed to spend ten in the bathroom. But she hadn’t ever seen how they would react to problems, and a small part of her stood apart, grimly satisfied. Maybe a rift between them was what she’d wanted all along, she thought, fetching turpentine, handing it to him, then tearing off her smock and pulling the rest of the shirts out of the basket. Throwing them hard, one by one, onto the sofa.

  “Okay, okay. Are you happy? Here I go, ironing your shirts. They will all be ready by morning. You will have your pick.”