by Zenith Brown
“This is Anita,” he said happily. “I wanted her to meet you. We’re going to be married Wednesday. You’ll put her up overnight, won’t you? She couldn’t stay in that flea bag in town, and you know my stand on motels.” As an afterthought, he asked, “Where’s little Molly?”
“She’s with our kids,” Spig said. “They’re having a picnic supper over at Miss Fairlie’s.”
“Well, then, don’t bother,” Stan said. “Anita can see her later. She’s got a kid of her own. Lucy. She’s sixteen.”
“Fifteen,” said Anita. She was slim, sleek and self-possessed, not as young as she’d looked in the car, dark-eyed, with long hair in a knot of glittering gold at the nape of her neck. She was polite and detached, a transient at a convenient inn. She tossed her floppy black hat on the sofa and tapped her lips to smother a yawn. “Don’t you get horribly bored, way out here?”
“We love it,” Molly said.
Stan lighted a cigarette with a new gold lighter. He was tall, on the slender side, clean-cut and boyish in a sort of academic way, with his steel-rimmed spectacles. The quiet shyness that had been one of his most attractive qualities seemed to have got swallowed up somewhere along the line.
“We’ll just mosey on over and have a look at my place,” he said. “Anita’s got plans for a house she wants to build. We’re going to turn the old shack into a garage with a guest studio upstairs. Anita knows a lot of topflight artists. They can come down and work, be company for her while I finish the new book. They’ll be a bit of leaven for the local dough-heads.”
A little towards the woods between the two places, he left Anita and came back. “I knew you’d be crazy about her,” he said. “Her first husband was a louse, stinking rich, but her father’s a lawyer, so she got enough to do as she pleases. You’ll probably want to get some of the neighbours in, but let’s keep it small—just the Camerons and Potters. We brought some Scotch in the trunk. We won’t be long.”
The Camerons and the Potters had the only show places, except Eden itself, out on the peninsula known as Eden’s Neck. The rest of the neighbours were people like the O’Learys, with jobs in Washington, people who wanted a place for their kids and had bought two or three acres when Sudley sold off a worn-out farm across from Miss Fairlie’s gate on the old road.
Spig tried to avoid the pale shattered look in Molly’s eyes as she stood there, a white line around her lips. Then he went over to her.
“I’m all right.” She turned abruptly away. “How could he? Oh, how could he!” she whispered. “What’s happened to him? He used to be so——”
“Don’t, Molly . . . please.” Spig was sick himself, and then angry, at the callous nonchalance of Stan Ashton’s announcement. “And I’m damned if we’re going to call the Camerons.”
“Yes.” Molly’s eyes kindled. “Yes, we are. We’re not going to be rude to her.” She turned quickly back to him. “Spig—she won’t take Molly A., will she? I couldn’t bear . . .”
“I don’t think we need to worry.”
“Then you call the Camerons. Ask them to lend us some Scotch—I wouldn’t touch theirs. And ask them to bring ice—the kids took ours to Miss Fairlie’s.”
They thought about Kathy’s child, but they didn’t think about Kathy’s property. Not till later when Joe Cameron and Spig were out in the kitchen. Over the pink geraniums on the long window sill they could see the airy silver structure of the bridge, soaring gallantly out across the Devon, white sails like a flock of shining sea birds resting on the blue, sunlit water beneath it. Its landfall was hidden at this end by the pair of great chestnut oaks on the Ashtons’ shore. The only sign there was a highway over there was a wide gap in the tree tops, in front of the taller beeches and willow oaks that filled the shallow arc between the road and Sudley’s fences.
“Lucky for us old Stan’s a Town Planner and a big wheel in highway improvement circles,” Joe Cameron remarked. He was a big, red-faced man with light hair and stupid, ox-brown eyes, as steady as an ox and very shrewd. “The little lady looks more like Bailey’s Beach than Plumtree Cove to me, and that’s a nice fifty feet Stan’s got between the bridge and Sudley’s place. And about three hundred yards along the road? Might be a temptation to cash in . . . if she didn’t like it down here.”
Spig shook his head. “That’s all settled. We’re giving that little strip between the road and Sudley’s fence to the State for a picnic area.” A sort of memorial to Kathy, he would have added before Anita came. “If she doesn’t like it here, we’ll buy back the four acres this side of the road. That’s the agreement. It’s in a letter of stipulation Stan signed after Kathy died. Like the one we signed for Miss Fairlie. We pro-rate it at what we paid her, plus the cash he’s put in.”
It was that simple to Spig O’Leary.
“Let’s hope the house they’re talking about isn’t too fancy, then,” Joe Cameron said. “I still wish to God we could get the Commissioners to pass a zoning law for this county. Nobody’s safe until they do. I don’t see why Sudley can’t see it. The road isn’t a year old and look what’s happened to it—right up to his own cow pasture. It’s a crime.”
It’s worse than a crime. Spig O’Leary told himself that twice a day, five days a week, driving back and forth to work in Washington. Coming home, he didn’t need the Colonial signpost in the parkway planting of dogwood and laurel to tell him he was entering Devon County. Dave’s Drive-In (For White) on the left and Cab’s Overnight and Eatery (For Coloured) on the right were like a pair of watchtowers on the county line, where the Governor had cut the broad, white ribbon, officially opening the new highway around Devonport to the bridge. “My friends of this great and lovely county in this great and lovely State . . .” Spig could still hear him as he stood bareheaded, scissors in his hand, flowers on his tongue. “Be ceaseless in your vigil, tireless in your guardianship. Let this magnificent artery of peace and prosperity be a boon and a blessing. Do not let it become a menace to your children, a curse to you.”
And Devon’s answer stretched from the county line to the Sudley pastures, for five miles on both sides of the road. “Devon Death Strip,” the Washington and Baltimore papers called it . . . a nightmare in flowing neon, red, green and shocking pink. Liquor. Beds. Beer. Dance. Soft Drinks. Gas. Oil. Fried Shrimp. Package Goods for Fishing Parties. TV. We Never Sleep. Nor did anyone else within range of the sonic attack from the jukes, the callipoe at Colby’s Carnival and the perpetual grind of the slot machines. Five miles of taverns, motels, gas stations, wooden shacks and cut-rate liquor stores had erupted like atomic mushrooms almost before the concrete was dry. The merchants of Devonport had rushed out to help reap the golden harvest. There were super-markets, hardware and farm implement stores, new and used cars, a branch of Sudley’s bank cheek by jowl with the Breezy Inn. Along both sides, five miles of cut-throat competition, the turf in the centre parkway chewed up with tyre gouges, littered with beer cans, paper cups and empty bottles, from the county line to Bill’s Live Bait, Blood Worms and Peelers next to Sudley’s winter wheat on the left, across from the Three D (Your Last Chance to Dine, Drink and Dance) next to Sudley’s cow pasture on the right.
From there, the highway ran between Sudley’s new white-painted fences, mile-long ribbons, to the woods of Eden’s Landing and down through them, fifty feet from Sudley’s line, into the Plumtree Cove tract to the bridge crossing the Devon—a little over two miles in all. That was what was left of Devon’s highway that was not a shambles.
And it was safe. Sudley loved the land and by Devon standards was a rich man. Old Stan Ashton was the high priest of highway sanctity. Miss Fairlie was eccentric, but not eccentric enough to chop down the woods of Eden to build a shopping centre two hundred yards from the gate on the old road that she still padlocked every night and all day Sundays. At Sylvan Shores the Home Owners’ League was fighting off a boat repair yard, and at Chapel Creek a canning factory. But the O’Learys and the people like them who’d socked their last dime into the ho
mes on Eden’s Neck—they were safe.
Or so they thought until Monday evening the second week in June.
Spig O’Leary saw the men putting the signboard up in the corner of Sudley’s buttercup-gold and green pasture as he slowed down, blinded by the sun glinting on the blue glass octagon of the Three D (Your Last Chance to Dine, Drink and Dance). He took it for granted it was the sign for the County Fair, held every year on the Sudley Farm. The red light blinking on one of the sheriff’s cars at the front door of the Three D caught his eye, and he saw the sheriff himself then, standing by a yellow convertible with two kids in it, neither of them more than seventeen. He saw Spig and motioned to him to pull in.
“. . . If I catch you in this county again,” he was saying. “Now get going, punks. Get the hell out of Devon County and stay out. You hear?”
The driver gunned the motor and the car roared out into the road, across the parkway, ripping the turf open, both of them laughing, not hearing Buck Yerby’s bellow.
“Damn them,” he said violently. “I wish this road had never come here. I just dropped in for a pack of cigarettes or Nick’d be on the floor with his head open. He caught ’em putting slugs in his slot machines and that punk driving had a bottle ready to brain him.”
“No use blaming the road,” Spig said. “It’s these joints . . .”
“Yeh, I know.” Yerby was still burned up. “I heard you at the commissioners’ meeting Thursday night. I don’t need you or the Home Owners’ League to tell me what goes on. Look—when I took this job, I had one part-time deputy, ran myself an automobile business and went fishing Saturdays. Now I’ve got eleven full-time deputies, twelve radio cars, uniforms, what-have-you. You don’t have to tell me—I’ve got kids same as you. All I stopped you for was to tell you I need a new deputy out here on Eden’s Neck and you’re it.”
“Not me, I’m not,” Spig O’Leary said.
“You. O’Leary, the hot shot of the Eden’s Neck Branch of the Home Owner’s League. There’s not one of you people contributes a damn’ thing except to live here and bellyache. You could all go to hell for me. Except Miss Fairlie. I’m worried about her, with this new set-up.”
“What new set-up?”
Yerby looked at him. Then he shrugged. “Why don’t you take a week off and stick around, O’Leary?” he said sardonically. “You might get the score. But you be in at eight to-morrow morning and take your oath. And take it seriously. I don’t pass out any gilt badges just for laughs.”
He started to his car and turned. “And thanks, Spig. I sure appreciate . . .”
“You go to hell.” O’Leary’s grey eyes lighted. “You don’t have to rub it in.”
Buck Yerby grinned. He looked at his watch. “How about a quick drink on it? You got time?”
“Not for this lousy joint, I haven’t.”
There was a sudden, smouldering fire in Yerby’s eyes. “I figure it doesn’t hurt the Three D for the sheriff to drop in for a drink if a drink doesn’t hurt the sheriff,” he said evenly. “Nick’s a citizen. He’s got his place over on Shad Creek. His kids go to school with yours and mine. Maybe he is a Greek with lousy taste in blue glass—like that ex-brother-in-law of yours says he is. But you couldn’t print what Nick thinks about Stanley S. Ashton. Kathy was a friend of Nick’s when he had that Greasy Spoon on Church Street.”
O’Leary’s face flushed, the heat smouldering in his own eyes. “That’s no business——”
“Right. And it’s no business of Ashton’s if Nick likes blue glass, and you can tell Ashton the quicker he gets out of here the better everybody’s going to like it. And there’s a lot of people think you’re just as big a heel as he is a louse, O’Leary—sounding off on Sudley the other night. So what if he doesn’t believe in zoning laws? There’s nobody in Devon hates gambling and the slots the way he hates ’em. He’s done a lot more for this county than any of you people. And personally, I don’t think you’re a heel, O’Leary. I think you’re a plain sucker.”
He opened his car door. “You think you’re down on Sudley. Well, that’s nothing to how he’s down on you.” He got in and slammed the door. “If you haven’t seen that thing” (he made an angry gesture towards the signboard in the corner of the pasture) “you better take a look at it. That’s what Sudley thinks of you, O’Leary.”
The loose gravel peppered Spig’s legs as the car shot forward. He stood there staring at the sign he’d taken for granted was the sign for the County Fair. He shut his eyes and opened them again. There was no mistake. There it was—and with it an empty hollow where his stomach had been.
“For Sale. For Industrial Development. 600 Acres. 2000 Feet of River Frontage. See H. Sudley, 19 Church Street, Devonport.”
Spig O’Leary stood staring at it, the bottom dropping out of everything important to him in Devon County. That was Sudley’s answer to the people on Eden’s Neck and the petition for some kind of law to protect their homes. It was so stupefying that the people waiting to get to the gas pumps had to sound their horn twice before he heard it and moved.
The green and gold of the winter wheat and the flower-embroidered tapestry of the pastures behind the white ribbons of mile-long fences were a blur on either side of him. He drove slowly, still a little dazed. That’s what Sudley thinks of you, O’Leary. But there was nothing he’d said nor anything he’d done that could possibly be taken as a personal attack on Sudley. He came to the end of the fences where the highway curved gently into the woods of Eden, fifty feet from the side of Sudley’s tobacco fields stretching down to the river-front behind the shallow arc of beeches and willow oaks that they were going to give the State. He turned left into the cross-way, half-way to the bridge, and waited for the traffic to clear for him to go across into the gravelled side road marked “Plumtree Cove” that ran between the back woods of Plumtree and Miss Fairlie’s fields in her section of the bridge approach. The narrow strip for the roadside park, behind him as he waited in the cross-way, was the only thing he could think of that could have offended Sudley as deeply as Yerby said he was offended. Having the whole side of his place bottled up behind a lousy fifty feet, with no access out to the bridge and its approach, might be what had infuriated him. There was nothing else, certainly.
A sudden flush of adrenalin made the blood tingle at the back of his neck. He crossed over into the gravelled road, jerked to a stop at the mail box and got out a letter to Tip from the county agent and the evening papers. The sound of a tractor was coming from Miss Fairlie’s field. He drove on around the bend and jammed his brakes on to keep from hitting a green truck standing tail-on in the middle of the road. It was Sudley’s truck and his tractor up in the field, with his seventeen-year-old boy Charlie at the gears. Sudley himself was leaning on the fence in front of the truck.
He turned as Spig opened his car door and got out. For an instant his pale blue eyes were not shuttered. The sudden, naked violence in them was so intense that Spig stopped motionless. It was Sudley who spoke first.
“Good evening, Mr. O’Leary.” His eyes were shuttered again, his voice soft as it always was. He turned back to the fence, cupping his hands to his mouth. “Keep your contours smoother, son!” he shouted. “Narrower in the dip!” He dropped his hands to the fence rail. “I like a pretty field. Miss Fairlie’s tractor’s in the shop, so I thought I’d help her out. Gives the boy extra for that car he wants. His mother wants to give it to him—he’s her baby, spoiled rotten. I say he’s got to earn it.”
Across the field Sprig could see the boy swinging the red tractor in a graceful arc to narrow the dip in the rib of the contour. His face was taut, his full mouth sullen, his dark eyes stormy with resentment as he whipped the tractor back up the field.
“Fine boy you’ve got, Mr. O’Leary,” Sudley said. “Glad I don’t raise vegetables—he’d run me out of business. Tells me he’s eleven. That’s the kind of boy I like to see.”
“Tip’s okay,” Spig said shortly. He tried to keep his voice as even and as affa
ble as Sudley’s. “Look. I just saw this sign of yours.”
“I figured you’d see it.” Sudley interrupted him calmly. “And I figured you wouldn’t like it, Mr. O’Leary. I know you and Mr. Ashton got the idea nobody’s got a right to sell land—except you and Mr. Ashton.”
Watch it, Mac. He’s needling you. “Ashton and I aren’t selling any land, Mr. Sudley,” Spig said quietly. “We’re giving the State that little strip along your fence.”
“I’ve heard you say that.”
“You wouldn’t be calling me a liar, by any chance, would you?”
“You’re putting it that way, Mr. O’Leary.” Sudley’s eyes met his steadily. “We’ve got different ways, here in Devon. You new people here on Eden’s Neck—you’ve got fine ideas. But you’ve got jobs in Washington, or money so you don’t need jobs. We find it sort of hard to tell people in debt with no money they can’t sell a mite of worn-out tobacco land when they’re offered a big price for it. Or tell a widow with five kids she can’t sell beer and soft crab. As long as it’s beer and soft crab she’s selling, Mr. O’Leary. We don’t much go for double dealing, here in Devon.”