Charlie coughed. “Like the minister says, one man, one woman, that’s a marriage.”
“Yes.” Acheson answered, his voice trailing off. “It’s hard to imagine a world where lesbians walk around like they’ve done nothing wrong.”
“Wasn’t your ex one of those lezzies?”
Acheson sighed. “She still is.” His voice trailed off, and Mona stretched to peek out. He was slumped over on the bench, his head between his knees.
“Still kinda fond of her, eh?”
Silence.
“Hey, it ain’t that bad. She coulda died, like mine did.”
“That would have been better.”
Mona suppressed the urge to go out and shake both of them, and instead went back to the deli counter. She opened the sliding door and checked the stock. Three different kinds of cheddar, provolone, and Swiss, plenty of those, but the cold cuts were looking a little sparse. Ham, turkey, Italian sausage….
As she started writing a list of deli items to replenish, the door opened and closed with a jangle.
“I’ll take a quarter-pound of sharp cheddar, please.” Acheson, his thin frame hunched over, looked mournfully at Mona from the front of the deli counter.
She took the block of cheddar out of the cooler and placed it on the slicer.
“So, where is the funeral?” he asked.
Why was Acheson Levy asking about Gus’s funeral? It wasn’t like he’d even known him, much less cared about that crazy hermit. She looked up at him, the drooping blond hair hanging over his eyes, the patient, almost obedient stance. “It’s not exactly a funeral,” she said. “But if you want to come, it’s up on the mountain. Up at the site.” She couldn’t say the name of the place—it was still too raw—but Acheson nodded, as if it all made perfect sense to him. She would have thought he’d start in surprise, or object, or at least look away, but now he was looking even more mournful, as if he were about to cry. Mona sliced the brick of Cabot cheddar, wrapped it in white butcher paper, and handed it to him. “Did you know Gus, Acheson?”
“I did.” He cleared his throat, as if about to say something else, then turned away. “Well, I’ll see you there.” He walked down to the cash register where Sierra, apparently cheered up, was chatting with two boys.
Acheson waited while Sierra finished a long story about her girlfriend, who’d gotten stuck in the deep mud on Snake Hollow Road and had to wait an hour until someone found her, while all she had on her feet were her new white ballet slippers that she had been trying out for the prom. She lowered her voice to a stage whisper. “There’s a ghost up on that mountain.”
“Oh, sure,” scoffed the tallest boy. “And who told you that?”
“Mr. Throckmorton, who else!” she exclaimed.
“A ghost? What kind of ghost?” asked a blond boy through a mouthful of steak-and-onion sub with cheese and extra pickles.
“The ghost of a woman who was hanged up there back in the eighteen-hundreds. And now he died in the same place.” She shuddered and paused dramatically. “So, what do you think that means?”
Mona glared at her and slammed down the cheese slicer to get her attention, but Sierra only glanced her way, gave a little wave, and went on talking while Acheson waited. “I think she put a curse on the town! I think more bad things are going to happen in Wild Mountain, and—”
Mona stomped up to the front counter, shoved Sierra aside, and rang up Acheson’s cheese and two cans of dog food. Sierra looked bewildered, then shrugged and stepped outside the door with the two boys. Mona handed Acheson the receipt and looked at him. “How did you know Gus, Acheson?”
“He was my cousin.”
“What?” Mona stared, astonished. “How come I didn’t know this?”
“Well, I didn’t grow up in Wild Mountain. Just moved here a couple of years ago.” He sank into more of a stoop, and sighed. “I felt bad about Gus. When we were little, he and his parents would come to Boston every Christmas. Gus and I were playmates.”
“So, you must be Sonny? Cousin Sonny?”
“Yes.”
“I remember Gus talking about you.”
“When I got the job at the hospital and came here, I tried to get him to move back into town, but of course, he wouldn’t. So, I started taking meals up to him. Just chili and soups, canned stuff.” He gave her a wan smile and slipped out the door.
She stared after him as he waded through the group of teens, who were still talking excitedly. So, that was why Acheson was always buying those cans of chili and Spaghetti-Os and beans. He’d been taking them to Gus. Mona hadn’t been the only one feeding him. Acheson was Gus’s cousin. That would make him Gus’s next of kin. She frowned and went back to the deli.
As the door opened and slammed shut, a familiar voice shouted, “Mona!”
She put the brick of cheddar back into the case, and made her way to the front of the store.
“Mona! You won’t believe this!” How could she not recognize that voice, shrill and nasal at the same time? Pauline Perry, Edson’s wife. The last time she’d talked to Pauline had been just after the bridge fell, when Pauline had cried and fallen into her arms.
With her stringy blonde hair hanging limply around her wide face and a baby on her hip, Pauline heaved for breath as she stuck a pacifier in the baby’s mouth. “Did you hear about Gus Throckmorton?”
“Yes, I heard.”
“I can’t believe it!” Pauline said again. “Just fell over and died, right on the mountain! I mean, isn’t it lucky he doesn’t have family anymore?” She started to cry, and the baby, seeing her, began to cry, too.
Mona put down her sandwich. “Yeah, I guess he was lucky,” she said in a dry tone that made Pauline start and look up from the baby with suspicion. For some reason, just because she owned the general store, people seemed to think of her as a mother confessor, like a hairdresser or a bartender, and they came in and slobbered all over the place whenever anything happened in town. But this was a bit much. It wasn’t like Pauline even knew Gus very well.
“It’s okay, Chaz,” Pauline said, wiping the baby’s face with her sleeve. Chaz pulled at the pearlescent snaps on her cowboy shirt as she rummaged in the bag that was hanging from her other shoulder, and pulled out a juice bottle. “Here, Chaz,” she cooed, “juicy juice.” Chaz took the bottle, stuck it in his mouth, and stared at Mona as Pauline looked up at her. Two moon faces gazing at her, the inscrutable Anglo-Vermonter look.
The door opened again, and in came Charlie, surly and stringy with his long, ratty beard and signature overalls—but when he saw his grandson, his whole demeanor transformed into a beatific smile. “Hey, little buddy!” he exclaimed, and he reached out his arms. Little Chaz beamed and dropped his bottle as he stretched out his own arms toward Charlie. This was the way she remembered Charlie, Mona thought: jolly. Like back on the farm when she was a kid, when he’d take the kids on sleigh rides in the snow with the sleigh bells jingling—Charlie’s eyes twinkling, making them laugh. How had he become such a curmudgeon?
Charlie took Chaz as Pauline bustled to the rear of the store. “Too bad about old Gus,” Charlie said in a musing, philosophical tone as he bounced Chaz, who gurgled and played with his grizzly beard. “You going to the funeral?”
“Memorial service. Of course.”
“I hear it’s going to be up on the mountain.”
She nodded.
“I’d think the church would be a better place.”
She didn’t answer.
“Well, I hear Yeager’s having a job of it, with the hair all tangled up around the face, and the body crusted with layers of dirt he had to scrape off with a knife.”
“Charlie!” Pauline shouted indignantly. She had just rushed down the paper aisle, the ancient floorboards creaking. She was holding a stack of mail in one hand, a container of milk in the other. “Don’t talk like that around the baby!”
“He don’t know what I’m talkin’ about,” Charlie said with a smile, and tickled little Chaz under
the chin.
Mona’s mind was flashing back and forth to that eerie glow from the gray face, Luke kneeling above the body, and the two black outlines of Erica and Jake in the background. “It’s not—” she squeaked, “it’s not an open casket.”
“Now look what you did to Mona!” Pauline scolded, and Mona realized that tears were trickling down her face as Pauline came around the counter and hugged her. Her shoulders heaved, and little Chaz, who was stuck between them, started to wail. Embarrassed, she pulled away and grabbed a tissue from behind the counter. How could she lose control like this? Was this really about Gus?
The door swung open again, and a group of five tall teenaged boys trooped in, laughing and pushing one another, grabbing bags of chips off the rack and heading toward the soda cooler.
Pauline left with the baby, and Charlie went back to the deli, where the teenagers were shouting and arguing about whether subs were better without onions, and why Mr. Gold had taken Angus out of the last basketball game, and whether he should put him in this Friday. Charlie spoke to them, his low voice cutting through the boys’ chatter, and they quieted down. Mona picked up three bags of Smart Puffs that the boys had knocked off the rack, and clipped them back on.
When the boys reappeared, the smell of teenage angst and bravado clinging to their T-shirts, they jostled and argued, but in more subdued voices, shooting sidelong glances toward the deli and Charlie. Mona rang up their subs and sandwiches, a six-pack of Mountain Dew, and three large bags of chips.
The funeral. She hadn’t had much time to think about it since Monday, the day after the death, when Roz had rallied the troops—Mona, Frank, and Heather—and marched them over to the church to talk to Alice Spinelli, the Unitarian minister, after she and Frank had spent the morning on the mountain looking for Darling.
Roz didn’t believe Gus had started the fire. She, too, had known him all her life, and since they’d lived practically next door to each other—which, in rural Vermont, meant at least a mile away—they’d played together as children. She told them how moved she was by him when he’d come back to their house after the potluck meeting. “After everyone left,” she said, “Gus came back. I guess he’d been hanging around outside somewhere. He came to the door, actually looked me in the eye, and said ‘Anu sends her blessing’ to Heather and me.”
For the funeral, Mona had wanted a simple ceremony, just a gathering in someone’s house so the people who knew him could say something; but Roz, who had always insisted on the “proper” way of doing things, especially for public events, insisted that it had to be led by the minister.
Mona herself had never been caught up in religion or church. Her interest in this church, a plain white clapboard structure built in the 1800s, had been mostly historical. The church was originally Unitarian, she knew, but in the 1980s, when the Unitarians and the Congregationalists (the other church in town) realized that they were both so small they couldn’t support separate ministers, they’d merged and become the Community Church, a place for bazaars and festivals and town meetings as well as church services. And now, in its prominent position on the town green, it still stood as a symbol of New England tradition: church as meetinghouse and center of the community.
But when Mona, Roz, Heather, and Frank walked across the green to the church, none of them knew which door to go through. Of the four of them, Frank was the only one who had attended church recently, and that was only because, he confided, he liked to sing in the choir. He didn’t know where the minister’s office was.
After walking around and opening doors, they finally found it, tucked away behind the altar: a little cubbyhole decorated with bright red tapestry cloth and paintings of people jumping and dancing. Alice, surrounded by a mountain of books and papers, looked at them quizzically over her reading glasses.
When Alice Spinelli had come to town as the new minister with her husband Luke after 9/11, not everyone in town had been pleased. Charlie Perry, especially, could be heard spewing mild invectives whenever her name was mentioned. And in truth, Mona thought, Alice was not the warm, fuzzy type a small town wanted in its minister. She was a little too New York-y, too intellectual for Wild Mountain. But when they finally found her crowded, chaotic study behind the sanctuary and squeezed into it, she was glowing with ideas.
The service had to be on the mountain, she said. Frank told her about the stone circle and the stone chamber, and she lifted her eyes to the ceiling with a radiant expression. She envisioned the congregation in a circle, she said, each person holding a stone, and Frank leading them in some old folk songs from the time when he and Gus had lived in the commune in the sixties. Frank said it had actually been the eighties when they were there, but she’d waved her hand in the air with a “whatever,” and continued rhapsodizing about the stones and the cave, asking Frank for all his books on the stone circles.
Mona let go a breath she didn’t know she was holding as the boys, with their chips and sodas and subs, their voices ratcheting up several decibels, spilled out the door. Charlie hobbled back to the counter and put down his pastrami sub and large coffee. He opened his mouth to say something, then looked up.
Roz, scruffy in her work shirt and jeans, her blonde spiky hair sticking up at odd angles, stood just inside the door. “Hello, Charles.”
“Roz.” He nodded.
Mona rang up his sub and coffee, and put them in a bag. Roz’s presence was imposing on any day, but today, she emitted the energy of a volcano about to erupt. She stared at Charlie, who squirmed in a belligerent way. “Nothing personal, Roz.”
“You wanted to kick me off the select board, and it’s nothing personal?”
Mona turned around and straightened the stack of newspapers on the counter.
Charlie cleared his throat and put his bag on the counter, while Roz stood her ground, staring him in the eye. It was a standoff, almost as if they were daring each other to draw first, the gunfight at the O.K. Corral.
“I’m not going to resign, Charlie, and the select board has voiced their support.”
“Six out of eleven weren’t exactly a roaring victory.”
“Oh!” Mona interjected, “You won!” In all the uproar over Gus, she’d forgotten about the select board meeting, and hadn’t heard about the vote.
“And,” Roz lifted her broad chest and stood up straighter, still glaring at Charlie, “they voted to restore the bridge. Thanks to Heather and Frank, the grants came in, and it’s a go.”
“Wow!” Mona clapped. “Completely—” she stopped, feeling the icy daggers passing between Roz and Charlie as he slowly shifted his weight from foot to foot and twisted his face into a sardonic smile.
Soft sunlight floated into the room on streams of dust motes, a caress of spring that belied the tension emanating from the two adversaries. Mona banged two copies of The New York Times on the counter, and shuffled a basket of moose candies from side to side. Each maple sugar moose, wrapped in cellophane, was big as a child’s fist, and they made a crackling sound as she handled them.
But the staring match continued, and Mona, her distraction tactics stymied, twisted the end of her braid round and round. Why didn’t somebody come in the door? When she didn’t want the people, they descended like flies on honey, but now that she needed a diversion, the store was dead quiet. Finally, she heaved a sigh of exasperation. “For crying out loud, you two!” she exclaimed. “You’re both stubborn as a mule. So, you’re on different sides of everything. Surprise, surprise.”
Charlie was still smiling that creepy smile. He slowly picked up his bag and walked, in his characteristic hunched, pointy-chinned fashion, past Roz and out the door.
When the door closed, Roz poked up her middle finger at it. “If Elva Perry was still alive,” she said, “you wouldn’t see that kind of viciousness.”
“No,” Mona agreed. “Elva would tell him he’s full of shit.”
“Kick him in the butt when he’s out of line.”
“Shovel the shit right back at
him.”
“Give him the old heave-ho.”
“Tell him where to go.”
“And then some!”
Mona threw an orange into the air and caught it, then skipped around the room, grabbing Roz’s elbow, and shouting, “Yay for Roz! The bridge is back!”
Roz swung her arms like a conductor and sang to the tune of The Witch is Dead, “Heigh-ho! The bridge is back! The bridge is back! Heigh-ho, the covered bridge is back.” And they both broke out into laughter, the automatic bond from childhood reasserting itself, like siblings with their own unique way of laughing at the world, a shared history lodged in the bones and tissues.
38
WHEN ROZ LEFT, Sierra stepped nonchalantly inside, as if she hadn’t been on the porch chatting with the boys for half an hour.
Mona rifled through the accounts book and sighed. She still hadn’t discovered what had been going on in Gus’s mind. Could he have set the fire? And who was this Anu? Was it some kind of delusion? Frank seemed to think there was some truth to Gus’s ideas, or at least some symbolic meaning. She’d thought she had known Gus pretty well, but maybe not. Maybe Gus had possessed untapped depths of spiritual insight that just weren’t visible because of that smokescreen, that inability to connect with people in a normal way. But could he have gone over the edge, and somehow rationalized that the farm stand should burn to the ground? No, it just didn’t make sense. More likely, Johnny had done it. As Roz said, he’d always hated her, in spite of his recent show of openness and liberal views about marriage.
Sierra stood in front of the counter, that dismal, hangdog expression back on her face. Her behavior today had been odd.
“I’ve never seen you so gloomy, Sierra. What’s going on?”
“Well—” Sierra gave her a look both plaintive and defiant, shrugged, and started to walk back to the deli.
“Is it about Mister Throckmorton?”
Sierra stopped, chewing on a strand of dirty hair. “Yeah, but—” She sucked her hair. “I can’t tell you.” She hung her head and turned away.
Wild Mountain Page 25
