by Daren Wang
“I tend to define party pretty loosely,” she said and reached into the basket and brought out the pontil jar. He laughed as he caught wind of the aroma of rum and fruit.
She dug through the basket but found that she had not packed cups.
“Oh well,” she said, and tilted her head back for a quick swig from the blue glass jar before passing it over to him.
“I’m going downtown tomorrow,” she said, poking at the fire with a stick.
He paused the jar at his lips.
“It’s a good chance to get you out of here and over to Canada before Wilhelm tries anything again.”
He drank for a long time and winced as he handed it back to her.
“Thank you,” he said, but there was a sadness in his voice.
The fire snapped and hissed as she warmed her hands.
“When I was little, everyone would bring instruments and we would dance into the night, or until it got too cold,” she said.
“I’ll never be much of a dancer again,” he said, lifting his peg into the air in front of him.
“I’ve seen couples too old to stand sit in chairs and dance with their eyes,” she said. “You are too quick to say what is and isn’t possible.”
“I could try to sing you something,” he said, and she nodded.
He took up “The Wayfaring Stranger” and she got up to stir the pot. He had a deep voice, but it slid between notes at random moments, and she could discern no rhythm. It hurt her ears but she tried not to judge him, wondering if he was using some exotic style from the South, or perhaps a manner of singing passed down from Africa. She watched him intently, nodding. At last, he could not maintain the joke, and laughed at her serious face.
“My momma used to beg me to just move my lips in church,” he said.
“If you can’t sing, then you’ll not have the privilege of seeing me dance,” she said with a pout as she dropped onto the stool and took another long pull from the jar. When her apparent anger caused him to choke back his laughter, she guffawed the mule-like bray that her father always asked her to suppress.
She stood then, laughing, and swayed to a tune she remembered from her childhood. She closed her eyes and felt the warm sun on her face, and extended her one arm out and put the other on her breast, and the breeze came and pushed the hair into her face, and still she danced, turning herself around, sensing his eyes on her even through her own closed lids.
When she stopped and opened her eyes, she was taken aback by the look of longing and loss on his face.
The barrels of sap took hours to boil and they sat together in the clearing, munching sandwiches and passing the jar back and forth.
She was laughing and showing him how to make taffy by pouring a dribble of syrup onto a patch of clean snow when Nathan walked into the clearing, a grimy canvas bag over his shoulder. She felt like a child caught at some forbidden game, and bolted straight up and Joe struck a pose much like hers. Her father stepped to the cauldron without offering a greeting and drew up the dipper, sniffed it, then held it high as he poured thick fluid back into the pot. He watched the twist and shade of viscous liquid as it passed in front of his eyes and then gingerly ran his callused finger inside the empty ladle and put it to his tongue.
“This is nearly ready,” he announced. “Maybe another half hour.”
He looked at the two coconspirators standing like mustered soldiers.
“Not much left,” he said, nodding at the jar in Joe’s hand.
“No, sir,” Joe said.
Nathan drew an engraved metal flask from his coat pocket, twisted off the top, and half emptied it into the jar before clicking it against the blue glass.
“None have freedom until all do,” he said.
Joe looked down at the jar uncertainly until Nathan nudged the bottom, pushing it toward Joe’s mouth.
“It’d be rude to not drink when the toast is in your honor,” he said, and waited for Joe to upend the jar before drinking himself.
Mary stared silently at her father.
“The chunk ice is flowing pretty fast,” he said, dropping the flask back into his pocket. “I came to check the mill for damage.”
He started toward the creek.
“There’s a crack on the bottom board of the flume,” Joe offered. “If you’ve got the tools, I can get that fixed up for you.”
Nathan turned and cocked an eyebrow.
“I used to work on a mill back home,” he said.
“Then come along,” Nathan said.
Nathan waited for him to limp past before turning back to his daughter.
“There’s eyes in this forest,” he said. “It was foolish to bring him out here.”
The two men stayed at the mill for a long time, and Mary could hear their voices and the sounds of the work being done as she finished the last of the boil by herself. On the ride back to the farm, Mary drove the sleigh wordlessly but smiling as Nathan and Joe traded tales of hewing ancient trees.
At the house, she led Joe back down into the cellar and left him there, alone with his books.
Katia was in a frenzy preparing dinner for Leander, and Mary had to spend the rest of the afternoon in the kitchen, trying to calm the girl.
As he always did, her brother arrived in a flourish, flinging the front door open to the cold evening air, shouting hellos, and stomping the mud from his polished shoes. The rush of noise reminded Mary of how the house had always been the point of congregation for Leander’s many friends, and how it had grown solemn and quiet since he’d moved downtown.
He lifted Katia off her feet in a bear hug. Mary told him that his bright blue silk waistcoat and matching cravat made him look like a dandy. He kissed her on the cheek and gave her the smile that she always took to mean that he was up to something, but there was a wildness in his eyes she had never seen before.
Her father came and greeted him solemnly and tried to lead his son into his study, but Leander was all motion and nerves, and could not sit still for long.
He found Mary and Katia in the kitchen, and the words spilled from him in an endless stream as he told story after story about his time spent with Isabel. When Mary tried to interject, he plowed over her without stopping, and soon she just stopped talking altogether while the cascade of stories about this woman’s wealth and beauty flowed unabated.
When dinner was ready, Nathan called them all to the table.
As they sat, Leander rummaged through his bag and brought out a bottle. Mary could see there were others in the bag.
“I told Isabel how smart you are,” he said, handing it to her. “She sent this out.”
Mary looked at the bottle skeptically.
“Brain Tonic,” she read from the label. “Premium Coca Wine.”
“I drink it all the time,” Leander said with a big grin on his face. “It’s very invigorating.”
Mary opened the bottle and offered some to her father.
“I’ll stick with buttermilk,” Nathan said, shaking his head and holding his hand over his wineglass.
Mary poured some for herself and Leander. She sipped a little and scrunched her face in rejection.
“It’s bitter,” she said, but it took only a second for the tonic to clear the haze she’d felt since the day’s rum punch wore off.
“Isabel says it’s the new thing in Europe,” Leander said, emptying his glass in one gulp and reaching for the bottle. “She has cases of it sent over from Corsica every month.”
“You are spending a lot of time with her, aren’t you?” Mary asked.
“Yes. She’s convinced me to move to New York when she returns there next month,” he said. “She said it’s the place to make real money.”
“New York!” Mary exclaimed. “I’m so jealous. I’d give anything to go there.”
She looked over to see her father’s grim face frozen over his motionless knife and fork and knew better than to say more.
Leander scratched at his neck nervously in the silence as Nathan gat
hered himself.
“And what will you do there?” Nathan asked through a clenched jaw.
“I’m going to be a trader,” Leander said. “There’s a fortune to be made there.”
“A trader,” Nathan said. “What good is a trader?”
“Trading is all the rage,” Leander said. “It all happens downtown in Manhattan. You buy these little bits of companies, what they call stocks, you buy them when you think the company is going to grow and make money. If you know something before everyone else, let’s say that a company’s well has struck oil somewhere, then you can buy that stock before everyone else and then sell it after the news is out. You can make a lot of money in no time at all.”
“I know what they do,” Nathan said. “That wasn’t my question.”
Leander frowned. “Isabel knows everything about how it works and she gets all kinds of information before everyone else. She’ll help me get up and running. I can make more money investing in stocks in one day than this farm has ever made.”
He paused, and there was no sound other than the clock in the hallway.
“That’s why I came out to talk with you,” Leander said, filling the silence. “You told me you wanted me to manage the family’s affairs, and that’s what I want to do. I’ve come out here to ask you to let me take our money to New York. I’ll double it the first day. Guaranteed. We can be rich, and then you and Mary won’t have to grub in the dirt here anymore.”
He stopped and dabbed at the sweat on his upper lip.
“Grub in the dirt,” Nathan said. “Is that what we do?”
“I don’t mean it like that,” Leander said. The color was rising in Nathan’s face, and Leander scrambled to head off his father’s anger. “It’s just that there’s easier ways to make money. You’re getting too old to spend so much time at that mill. Let me take care of you and Mary. You won’t have to worry about anything else. You can move off the farm, get a big house downtown, and be near your friends, have a life of leisure.”
A vein bulged on Nathan’s forehead, and his face flushed. He stared at his plate for a long time before replying.
“No,” he said.
He picked up a chicken leg and bit into it, chewing slowly, not looking at his son. Mary could see he was struggling to keep his anger in check.
“You mustn’t say no,” Leander said, desperation in his voice. “This is the future. I already know where we should put the money. Isabel knows some men in Schenectady who want to build a factory to manufacture punt guns. When the war comes, both sides will be buying them up. We can’t miss this chance. Isabel says that this is the future.”
Nathan gnawed the meat from the leg and dropped the clean bone onto his plate.
“What do you know about this woman?” he asked. “This Isabel Fitch.”
“She’s marvelous,” Leander said. “She’s circled the globe and seen the most astounding things, been to the most amazing places. Very modern. Very forward thinking.”
“Do you know why she went abroad?” Nathan asked.
“She wanted to see the world,” Leander said, surprised by the question.
“What do you know of her husband?” Nathan asked.
“He was a trader,” Leander said. “That’s where I got the idea. Very successful. He had businesses all over the place. That’s why Isabel is here. She is selling some of the businesses he had here in Buffalo.”
“Do you know how he died?” Nathan asked.
Leander glared at his father over his untouched plate.
“Have you been checking up on her?” he asked. “What gives you the right?”
“It was quite easy,” Nathan said. “She’s quite famous, you know.”
Leander finished his glass and emptied the bottle into it. A sweat stain had developed on his linen collar. He said nothing.
“He was my age, had a grand mansion on Worth Square in Manhattan,” Nathan said. “They found him shot on the steps one day.”
Mary gasped.
“You might think she’d be bereft at such a thing,” he continued. “But in her grief, she managed to pack and be ready to board a steamer for the Far East the very next day. She later said she feared the killers, but the Herald guessed she was fleeing the police.”
“Surely you don’t think she had anything to do with killing her husband?” Leander asked. Sweat beaded on his upper lip, and Mary wanted to dab it away for him. He fidgeted with his silverware.
“I don’t like this woman or the notions she’s filled you with,” Nathan said. His voice rose, the force of it filling the room like a revival preacher’s. “Whatever her interest in you, I guarantee it is not to your betterment. You have forgotten where you’re from, what this family stands for. I’d rather go blind than leave this place and move into that city. I would not allow you to bet everything I’ve built in some New York casino, even if it meant a certain hundredfold return. We are Willises. We make things. We grow things. We are not gamblers, traders of scraps of paper and secrets. It’s time we put an end to this foolishness. You will ride with your sister to town tomorrow and bring your things back here. You will come home and work hard for the first time in your life. It’s time you show yourself to be a man instead of that harlot’s lapdog.”
“You will not talk that way of the woman I love,” Leander hissed. He clenched and unclenched his fists. Mary feared he would launch himself across the table.
“You love her?” Nathan roared. “You are a bigger fool than I thought. Can’t you see that she wants you completely dependent on her? Even now she sends you out here with some harebrained scheme knowing I am the kind of man who would never allow my money to be risked on such a thing. She seeks to break you from your family. She uses you. Can you not see it?”
“You make this about you, and your money. You can’t stand the idea of me making a name for myself, of doing better than the great Nathan Willis,” Leander shouted back. “It is you who would keep me down, demanding that I come back here and shovel shit while the world is my oyster.”
“You are nothing but a spoiled brat,” Nathan shouted back at him, cocking his hand over his head.
“I’ve had my fill,” Leander said. He stood, nearly knocking the table over, and his shoes echoed hard on the floor as he snatched his coat from the rack, flung open the front door, and walked out into the black night. Cold air flooded the room and Mary got up and closed the door behind him.
Nathan sat at the table, staring blankly at the china cabinet across the room. Mary poured some more buttermilk in his glass.
He lifted his face to her, and there was a glistening in his eyes.
“He’ll be okay,” she offered.
He shook his head.
“I raised you both up like we were still pioneers, but the world around us has changed,” he said after a long pause. “You’re not on the frontier, but I don’t know how to give you that city polish, either.”
He reached for her hand and attempted a smile.
“I fear I’ve situated you such that you’ll never find a husband acceptable to you,” he said. “It was no secret that I hoped you might find a young man at that school.”
She pursed her lips. “What I found at that school was that there should be more than one way for a woman to make her way in the world,” she said. “I’ve leaned against enough cotillion walls to know that I’d be a fool to spend my time and my heart waiting for that mythical creature, that ‘suitable husband.’ There are many forms of happiness, Father, and from what I have seen, there are none less dependable than love.”
He looked up at her, grief in his eyes.
“There’s nothing other than love,” he said. “All else falls away.”
“Look at how you suffered when Mother died,” she said.
He shook his head, and looked at her with red-rimmed eyes.
“Is that what you took away from that time?” he asked. “It is my fault. I made you this way.”
He pulled the corners of his mouth down. “Do you
know why I never married again?”
She shook her head.
“It was you,” he whispered. “I saw so much of her in you. Her iron sense of right. Her endless curiosity. Her heart wounded by all that was wrong in the world. I was happy enough just to have you here, to be reminded of the best in her.”
He bit his lip.
“It was selfish of me. I see that now. It was too much responsibility to put on such a young girl. And because of that, you would deny yourself so much. Yes, I was ruined for a while. But there’s you. And there’s Leander. The pain of love is just the chaff against the grain. Would you leave the fields fallow? Of course not. In the end, we are Willises. We are farmers.”
HARRY
Harry Strauss knew Town Line better than anyone.
He knew its distances. It was one thousand and twenty-three paces down Town Line Road from the train station to the Seneca highway, but twelve hundred and sixty-seven from the highway down to the creek.
And he knew its secrets. There was a window at the back of Snyder’s General Store that could be jimmied with a pocketknife. Wilhelm sometimes stacked cases of full bottles of beer under an overhang behind the bar. The key to the schoolhouse was under a rock forty paces from the front door.
He had his own secret, too.
When he was a little boy, he’d buried a pickle crock under the cypress windbreak behind the parsonage and that’s where his treasure was buried. Sixty-three dollars and forty-eight cents. It wasn’t much, but it was a start, and it was all his. Leander and Hans, they were rich, but they didn’t really have anything. Everything belonged to their families. They didn’t even own their own time. But Harry did. When Leander and Hans were stuck in the little schoolhouse, he and Jep had been out scouting fishing holes. When Leander and Hans were home studying, Harry had been digging up arrowheads.
It was kind of like that now, too. Leander was down in Buffalo doing whatever it was his father told him to do, and now that he was gone Hans’s parents kept him reined in pretty well, too. Not Harry, though. He didn’t have to answer to anyone.
Though he had to admit it’d been pretty lonely, especially with Jep gone.
