Cool's Ridge

by Perrin, Ursula;

  3.

  “God, it was awful,” Liz said. “That smell. That odor of burned flesh. I don’t know, I just don’t understand. There was nobody, absolutely nobody around to let those poor animals out of the barn?”

  “How much stock did they lose?”

  “They claim twenty heifers. Ugh. I wanted to vomit.”

  “That many? I didn’t think they had that big a herd.”

  “Twenty heifers, a goat, two pigs. So they said. The horses—at least the horses were out in a paddock. Scrawniest things, I doubt they feed them and the paddock doesn’t have a blade of grass left in it.”

  “The barn’s totally gone?”

  “Oh yes.”

  “What’d they say the cause was?”

  “Oh … you know. Maybe lightning. Maybe something else. So Coral said, rolling her eyes.”

  “Something else like what?” Leonard asked. “Voodoo?”

  “Like Erroll,” Shauna said. She came from the direction of the bathroom-darkroom, holding up by their corner clips two wet photographic prints. “It’s true, Coral kept batting her eyes at Pee Wee Smythe—he’s the Captain of the Volunteer Fire Department—and then she’d say, ‘Maybe it was the storm, but wouldn’t I have heard the lightning strike?’”

  “They’ve had two other fires at their farm in the past five years,” Liz said.

  “Hmm,” Leonard said. “Interesting. Are they insured?”

  “You bet,” Shauna said. She jiggled the prints. “Well? What do you think?”

  Leonard bent his head to peer at a photograph. “Wow. That’s great.”

  Shauna had taken the burning barn backlit against the late afternoon sun. The main posts and beams still stood, but everything else—cupola, siding, windows—had been consumed, and the charred black skeletal shape, rising out of hazy billows of smoke, had the uncanny look of a half-dead corpse emerging from hell.

  “Oh Shauna,” Liz said. “Yes. Terrific.”

  “Thanks, folks,” Shauna said blithely. “I agree.”

  “We’ll splash it all over the front page,” Leonard said.

  “No fooling! Well I am thrilled. On the front page of our first edition.” She stood on tiptoe and with the photos fluttering out of her hands meant to kiss Leonard on the lips, but missed and grazed his chin. He leaped back, alarmed, and the rubbed his chin and laughed.

  “Okay,” he said, “let’s try that again.” He stooped and caught Shauna’s head between his long hands and kissed her hard on the mouth.

  “Mmm … oow,” Shauna said.

  “Which one is it?” Liz asked humorously. “‘Mmm’ or ‘ow’?”

  “A little of both, I think.” Shauna said. “Leonard, you are a brute. I believe you have bruised my lip.”

  “Your own fault,” Leonard said, and slumped down into his chair. It had been bought secondhand and made a pitiful groaning sound whenever anyone sat in it. “Please don’t tease the beast. Maybe my sign should read ‘truculent beast.’ Okay, Liz, you’d better get going.”

  “Oh, is it my turn?” she asked coolly.

  Leonard hunched over his cluttered desk and began shuffling papers around in what seemed to Liz a nervously random fashion. “You’d better get on the story.”

  “You mean I don’t get kissed?”

  “You don’t want to be kissed. At least not by me.”

  “How can you tell?”

  “I’m very perceptive. If you get on it now, you’ll have the story done by eight. It’s got to be done tonight because tomorrow we put the paper together. That’s going to take all day.”

  “It is? Why?”

  “Because that’s how long it takes.”

  “Wouldn’t it be better if I wrote it tomorrow just to let my impressions digest?”

  “Digest?” Leonard asked coldly. “And get what?”

  “Please,” Shauna said, “don’t say it. You know I despise crude language.” She stepped into the darkroom and closed the door.

  “Seriously,” Liz said. “I’m skeptical. I just don’t believe it the way I heard it. My theory is, Coral’s trying to pin this fire on Erroll.”

  “I really don’t care about your theories,” Leonard said. “You told me you knew how to write a news story. Well write it. Write it and I’ll edit it. If you can’t do it you shouldn’t have gone out.”

  Liz sat down at her desk and pulled up her chair. “Male chauvinist,” she said.

  “What?” Leonard said.

  “I think you heard me,” Liz said. She flipped open her notebook and, with some intensity, began to read her notes. In her absence the desk had acquired a philodendron plant, a gregarious little fellow with many awkwardly trailing appendages.

  “Oh just cut it out,” Leonard said in a low voice full of tension. “I can’t stand the cuteness of it. Do you want to work here or do you want to trade insults? I am not a male chauvinist. I am absolutely as rude, bossy, mean and inconsiderate with men as I am with women. Do you understand?”

  She didn’t answer.

  Leonard put his head in his hands and closed his eyes. He was often unjustly short with Liz. Her coolness seemed to him to conceal a challenging mockery. She had said, “Kiss me,” but if he’d done it, no doubt she would have slapped him. All right now, he said to himself, Stop it. He sighed and glanced in her direction. Her head was bent, her jaw thrust out. “Liz? Your father was here. He left a note for you, stuck on one of your pencils.”

  She apprehensively raised her head. Maybe it was a trick of the flat fluorescent light, but Leonard thought that he saw her eyes flicker and the skin around them tighten, as if she’d had a brief sharp pain. “My father? What’d he want?”

  “I don’t know. He came to take you to lunch. Since he missed you at lunchtime, he’s planning to take you to dinner.”

  She removed the impaled scrap of yellow paper from the pencil’s tip, unfolded it and anxiously read. What was she so worried about? Leonard wondered. Maybe she hadn’t told her father about the engagement. Maybe she knew Daddy wouldn’t approve, ’though that would be hard to believe, a well-educated, good-looking, athletic young man like Skip, with a law degree, good connections, lots of money and no religious aberrations.

  Liz pushed the note away, looking relieved. She straightened her shoulders and sat up. She had on a white cotton blouse with a pointed collar and short sleeves, a blouse so girlish that it evoked for Leonard all the passions of junior high school. Her arms were long and looked slightly bluish in the sickly office light. She did not paint her nails. “So there wasn’t an emergency,” Liz murmured.

  Leonard blinked. “I don’t think so. He gave the impression he’d just come up for a drive. Does he know?”

  Liz looked up. “Know?” she asked vaguely. She’d been staring at her notebook again.

  “About the, uh, your engagement.”

  “Oh. Well, no. I called to tell him but he wasn’t in. He … he and my mother have recently separated so …”

  “Oh.” Leonard ducked his head and stared at his desk blotter. There before him was his typed-out story on family reunions, which, he thought, hit every stop on the hand organ. Patriotism, Democracy, Liberty, Family and The Countryside as a More Perfect Way of Life as opposed to the City, which was Wicked and Dirty. It wasn’t all a crock, only there was a certain regrettable tendency on the part of many inhabitants to accept these myths as ongoing reality, what Leonard thought of as the True Believer syndrome. In fact, many families up here were not exactly intact, the divorce statistics being just about as bad here as anyplace else. Why hadn’t his mother mentioned this piece of news? No wonder Liz looked so edgy and brittle. “Say,” Leonard said, “that reminds me.” He slumped back in his revolving chair, which groaned again but less audibly. “It turns out … this is in the small world department … that my mother knows your mother. They went to Smith College together.” (Oh Christ, Leonard thought. Worse and worse. That sounded so sneery.)

  She looked up and smiled.

  The first
effect of her face on him had been one of plainness, a face too thin, tanned, and ordinary, no makeup, nose too straight, cheeks too flat, eyes—dark-lashed, oh her eyes were possibly beautiful but who could tell when she kept them in a habitual frown or neatly lowered or hidden behind dark glasses? Worst of all was the severity of her expression, second cousin to a cigar-store Indian, impassive in the worst WASP way. But when she smiled truly, as she did now, her face came alive. She had deep folds in her face when she smiled, not cute comma-like dimples but creases that elegantly rearranged and softened her facial conformation; and her eyes, those brilliant gray eyes full of mirrored light, suggested all sorts of images to him, like country ponds on a gray December morning, and what else? What else?

  “Oh, isn’t that funny?” Liz said. “What’s your mother’s name?”

  He cleared his throat. “Emily,” he said. “Gannet,” he added and then shrugged and gruffly muttered, “of course.”

  Liz said, “My mother’s name is Cassandra, and funnily enough, she is one. A veritable Cassandra, my father always says. She’s spent her entire life warning people of awful impending events. Nobody listens to her, but she’s usually right.”

  “So she’s either psychic or she’s a realist.”

  “She knows more facts than other people so I’d say she’s a realist.”

  “There’s an uphill fight! I’ve just been sitting here thinking how, politically, Americans live by myths.”

  Shauna emerged from the darkroom bathroom. “‘Night, gang,” she said. “I’m leaving. Leonard, what shall I tell Alice about my swollen lip?”

  “You’ll think of something,” Leonard said.

  “Oh, but do I want to?” Shauna asked, and comically wiggled her reddish brows before she closed the door to the alley.

  “I wonder why?” Liz asked as the door closed. She tapped her pencil on her chin.

  “Why what?” Leonard asked.

  “Why do you think Americans live by myths?”

  “It’s easier,” Leonard said. He frowned and picked up his pencil, stared at the copy on his desk, and then threw the pencil down and stood up.

  “Oh, are you going?” Liz asked.

  “I’ve been here all day. It’s time for me to go and for you to start writing. If I see your father back at the house, what shall I say?”

  “Tell him to meet me here. I drove in with Shauna and I’ve got no car. Is there a restaurant you could recommend?”

  “I don’t know about Stanton. Out near us there’s The Dark Moon Inn and Sonny’s Place. Avoid The Rainbow’s End. Food’s bad, the customers are worse. I like Sonny’s myself.”

  Wouldn’t it be great, Leonard thought, if she could actually write a good news story? Or maybe even a story that was more or less grammatically correct? He stepped out into the twilit alley and headed up toward Main Street in his faintly squishing sneakers. A strip of pure aqua sky hung over the row of small-town three-story commercial buildings, illuminating their Victorian roof-lines and releasing from the dingy brick and sandstone facades a celestial twilight rosiness. The luminous Edward Hopper effect was heightened by Main Street’s silence: it was deserted. At seven p.m., all the stores were locked, the customers gone home. He, too, was going home. It had been a good day. He liked what he was doing. Now he wanted to go home and have a good dinner and a glass of wine. He felt healthily hungry. It might be a good evening for music, any kind of music. He would read and then go to bed. It would be nice to sleep with someone. Someone, he thought wistfully, who wanted to sleep with him.

  He walked up Main Street past The Book Blast, Kline’s Drug Store, Van Auken’s Jewelry Store, before he remembered that he had parked the Beetle in the back parking lot instead of the lot next to the movie theater. Walking back down Main Street, he thought how familiar the rhythms of small-town life were to him, how he understood that farm families ate supper at five, went to bed by nine. He had never again wanted to live in a small town, but now that he was here he didn’t mind it. Of course, he didn’t actually live in Stanton, he lived at The Farm. They lived at The Farm. He walked back down the cobblestoned alley. At the building’s corner he glanced into The Monitor’s lit-up office window. Liz was still sitting at her desk engrossed in what she was writing. She looked as intent as if she were taking an exam. Her left arm lay bent on the table, her right hand moved into his view, paused and then disappeared again. Now he saw a yellow pencil roll across the desk, and she tipped back her head, yawned and stretched. He hair fell down her back, long straight brown hair. Her arms were raised, wrists cocked. He imagined he could see the glint of the diamond ring on her upraised hand, and he turned and rapidly walked downhill toward the parking lot where the orange Beetle sat hunched, waiting. It was a dependable car, a German car, a car that Alice claimed to love and that Leonard was indifferent to, or so he told himself. It had been the gift of Alice’s Uncle Bob, who was a plumber. Bob had said, as he handed Alice the keys, “Whatsa matter, Babe, don’t the hubby got the wherewithal to buy a car fer ya? Wassa matter, Leonard? Ya gotta have balls you know, Leonard. That’s what life is all about. You get born, you grow up, you work, you earn. Fer what? Sose you can get yourself a beautiful broad like Alice. Get her and keep her, Leonard.”

  “No fooling,” Leonard had said. “I never thought of it that way.”

  “Yeah?” Bob said. “Better start. Nothin’s for free in this life.”

  I know, Leonard had thought to himself, grimly.

  He angled himself into the little car, and turned the key in the ignition. The dependable motor started with a deep German rumble. He backed out and headed toward Main Street, then turned right toward the Village Green. He passed the Union soldier leaning on his musket, wearily looking south toward Chickamauga and Murfreesboro. He swung left around the Green and headed out of town on the highway, driving west into the aqua sky. His mood had changed. It occurred to him that he did not want to go home, home to The Farm, home to his wife, Alice. What if he had supper out? He passed the Stanton Memorial Hospital, he passed the Perkins’ Farm vegetable stand. He remembered that he had no money, none with him and none in the bank. He ought not to think about money, it made him gloomy.

  Framed by his windshield, the Sunset Spectacle came on—banners of gold, pink, and orange billowed and flowed, as if seductively inviting him to Live, Dance, Enjoy. He thought of Liz and wondered, if she had money. She looked as if she might. Of course, Skip had money.

  To his right, the mountain ridge lay like a wall under the streaming sky.

  Yes, Skip had money, but why all these thoughts about money? He had never cared much about it. So what was the point, he angrily asked himself, of starting now?

  It wouldn’t change anything.

  III

  FAMILY FIREWORKS

  1.

  When Leonard sent me out on the Knacker story, he said, “Would you do me a favor please? Don’t gunk the story up. Just write it down. Try to remember that you’re not Tom Wolfe and we wouldn’t want you if you were. This is a simple country newspaper, that’s all.”

  I said, “Really, I’m not stupid you know.”

  He said grimly—he has a way of tensing his mouth and his jaw, a trick of the mandibles that makes that slight dent in his chin almost disappear—“That’s often the trouble. Do you see what I mean?”

  “No.”

  “Being too smart. Doing too much. Treat it as a simple news story.”

  So I just wrote it down, trying to retrieve whatever odd bits of journalistic know-how I’d retained from high school and our high school newspaper. I was business manager. I’m the type of person people always make into business manager because I’m quiet and I look stable and competent. I suppose I don’t look as if I can write anything more creative than a bill. Actually, I am a pretty good writer and an even better reader, so I was irritated by Leonard Gannet’s assumption that without his explicit directive I would gunk the story up.

  And then, why, I thought, tossing down my pencil and stretc
hing, had he left like that? He must think I’m an idiot; as soon as the conversation takes an interesting turn he leaps out of his chair and makes for the door. I’m not a philosopher or an anthropologist, or a Jungian, but what he’d said about myths had interested me. It’s not a subject I’d particularly thought about, but of course he’s right, even now, in 1972, there are myths implicit in our culture, just as there must be French and British and Russian and Chinese myths. And isn’t it the acting out of these myths that account for the so-called “national characteristics” of the earth’s various nationality groups, rather than anything inherent or genetically coded? Take the word “freedom.” I take that word rather than liberty because liberty reminds me of revolutionary France. Freedom has all sorts of meanings that strike me as plainly American. I think first of all of freedom as related to space and movement—as in “Don’t fence me in.” Freedom seems to me a much more physical word than liberty and surely that relates to how many of us have experienced this country—as wide, open, spacious. It isn’t, of course, not anymore, not as development gobbles up whatever space is left, as least in the Northeast, but don’t we tend to think of our lives in terms which no longer exist? In other words, the myth is always about a hundred years behind the current reality. We grow up incorporating certain myths into our view of the world, or perhaps they actually create our perception of the world. As adults we defend these myths and act them out. Can one stand outside of them?

  “Leonard does.”

  These words seemed so clear to me, sang out so ringingly that I glanced around as if to confront whoever had spoken them. No. There was no one, only a shadow passing across the front window. Leonard seemed to me outside all American myths, not only because of his partly European background, but also because he so rigorously took that stance. It was something I was attracted to—mentally, I mean—his insistence every moment on examining a thought or an action.