“Nothing is free, moro.”
“But it is. I guess it’s considered part of his research. A Mr. Peabody.”
“Mr. Peabody? Isn’t that Bullwinkle’s dog? With the glasses?”
“Bullwinkle doesn’t have a dog. He has a squirrel. It’s not really Peabody, it’s something close to that. He’s coming, is what I know. Next Wednesday. Now I’m looking around this homeless shelter we live in and freaking out. I have hostess anxiety.”
“You don’t have to serve him tea.”
“No. But I’ll pick up all the clothes off the floor. And ask Tig not to dig up the entire yard until after he leaves.”
“My genius wife. You’re doing this.”
“I am.”
She was doing more. Willa had waited a respectful interval of hours before claiming the dead man’s room as an office and moving in her desk, ostensibly to file the application for historic registry. She hadn’t told Iano yet, in case it wasn’t true, or Christopher for fear he might resent the incursion on his territory, but Willa had passed application right out of the starting gate. Now she was gaining on book proposal. Her desk was piled with draft outlines, printouts from internet searches, and copies of Mary Treat’s letters, which she was combing for references to Thatcher Greenwood. From archived newspapers she was picking out sparse but tantalizing shrapnel: a crazy WWF-style verbal match in the town hall, titled Darwin versus Decency. A school scandal, an outburst at a murder trial. What she craved to find was direct correspondence between Thatcher and Mary. Willa was riveted by these two, both ahead of their time, joined (she imagined, somehow) against their world. It wasn’t the idyll she’d thought. Mary’s correspondence with her scientist friends suggested the gentle Victorians of Vineland, and America for that matter, had shit for brains. They resisted Darwin’s logic and rationality in general, to an extent that struck Willa as nuts. A great shift was dawning, with the human masters’ place in the kingdom much reduced from its former glory. She could see how this might lead to a sense of complete disorientation in the universe. But still. The old paradigm was an obsolete shell; the writing on the wall was huge. They just wouldn’t read.
Dusty had turned over his plastic bowl and was using the spoon as a drumstick. Resourceful lad. “Why is Tig digging up the yard?” Iano was asking.
“To plant stuff. You know this.”
“I thought that was over at the school for the disabled.”
“Also here. She and Jorge offered our property for the same project.”
“To the Feebleminders.”
“They have a new name. Freedom Minders. Maybe that was it all along, and Tig was just yanking our chain. Whoever they are, they’re showing up at all hours with shovels to dig up our lawn for vegetable beds. April would be the month for it.” Through the window Willa could see at this moment a quartet of girls, two young, two older, one of them challenged, judging from certain physical cues so subtle Willa would be hard pressed to describe them. “You know about this, Iano. We talked about it. The night Tig told us she and Jorge were moving into the carriage house.”
“We discussed digging up the yard?”
“Yes. We absolutely did.”
Tig wasn’t home yet. She worked only the lunch shift now, and took full charge of Dusty the rest of the time. But the diggers came and went on their own schedules. Through her wide network Tig was also arranging to get every remnant of Nick’s medical supplies back into the system. Jorge’s sister Sondra knew a full range of sick people who could use the lot. Willa was confounded. Millennials she thought she knew: the overmothered cyborgs helplessly sunk in their virtual worlds. From what planet came this new, slightly feral tribe of fixers, makers, and barterers, she had no idea.
“I was distracted,” Iano said. “That night Tig told us about moving in with Jorge.”
What he’d been was upset. “Why does it bother you so much? Your daughter is twenty-six. You and I were married at that age. We had Zeke.”
“What are you saying, Willa? She’s pregnant?”
“No! Just that it’s normal for Tig and Jorge to want their own place.”
“A filthy old garage in the backyard with no plumbing or electricity.”
“It has electricity. They found wiring, they just need to update it. You should see the place, it’s bigger on the inside. It has an upstairs.” She laughed. “No stairs, per se. But an upper floor. You get to it through a little square hole, with a ladder.”
“Sounds lovely.”
Willa still couldn’t put a finger on Iano’s objection to the Tig-Jorge narrative. It certainly wasn’t Jorge as a particular choice; in the realm of proving himself, the deal was more than done. Maybe it was just a father’s duty to resist a daughter’s drift toward another man. For whatever reason, Willa found herself in the stunning position of being Tig’s favored parent and keeper of some large secrets, beyond the swiped Papu ashes. Tig was getting a phone. She’d submitted to this as a first step on her long road to becoming, maybe, eventually, Dusty’s legal guardian. Their talks on the subject were taking on Yalta Conference dimensions, with one of the significant powers excluded. Willa had no idea how to get Zeke to the table, when every tentative Dusty conversation felt as if she were breaking down walls to storm the raw terrain of her son’s broken heart. She settled instead for warning Tig of the infinite complications of parenthood. But the logistics of a new phone turned out to be simple: Tig could add herself to Jorge’s family plan. This might be a modern equivalent to marriage.
Dusty was probing the straps and buckle that locked him into his high chair. Willa judged him to be about two minutes from jailbreak. She needed to wind up this call.
“Are you still in bed, lazybones?” she asked.
“Not in bed exactly. But not officially up. I haven’t yet presented myself.”
It was earlier in Phoenix by some inconstant number of hours. Sun-scorched Arizona did not do Daylight Saving, because why would they, and in years of calling home, Iano had invented a mnemonic for the relative time zone. In winter they skied with the Rockies, in summer they surfed with California. In April, who the hell knew.
“Do you have coffee, at least?”
“I do. I sneaked into the kitchen unapprehended.”
“Athena must have a houseful. Did she put you in the basement on that brokeback fold out?”
“No, my rank has evidently improved. I’m upstairs, in Artemisia’s bedroom. I haven’t been in here before. It’s kind of … ruffly.”
“Artemisia’s room? She’s what, midthirties by now?” Last Willa had heard, Artemisia answered to Art and was running a salmon-fishing charter in Alaska.
“It’s a museum. I’m not kidding. Dried prom corsages, posters, the altar is untouched. I’m bunking here with Boyz II Men.”
“Seems like they’d figure out she’s not coming back. And way over the ruffles, in any case.”
“Don’t tell my sister. She thinks the lesbian sea captain thing is just a phase.”
“Ah. It so rarely is.”
A five-foot twist of gristle, that girl Art. Some of the Tig genes had surfaced over there as well: tiny but mighty. They had one more pint-size cousin, an unfortunate boy. Takis. He’d been teased mercilessly at family reunions, the adults being worse than the kids, and Takis had grown up to show them all, achieving fame and fortune as a snowboarder. Olympic finalist, commercial endorsements, the works. He’d retired in his thirties with enough money to open a microbrewery in Boulder.
Iano had returned to the subject of his miserable flight. It was a little maddening but Willa understood she needed to hear this out so he could move on. The memorial service was later that day. “It’s over five hours, this flight, and they feed you nothing. I’m crammed into a space the size of a dog kennel, I have to pee, and I’m starving.”
“Iano, honey. This is common knowledge, that airlines no longer give you food. I offered to pack you a lunch. Remember?”
“I objected on principle. These airlines are
supposed to be transporting humans. They used to do that. Now they don’t. Nobody could fit comfortably in that space. What kind of passenger are they making these airplanes for?”
“Not the kind I like. Tall, dark, and handsome.”
“The humans of the future. Bots. They’re making airplanes for bots. Are those an actual thing?”
“I know they actually crawl around the web and try to steal your cookies.”
“I picture them looking like spiders.”
“I don’t think they do. They’re numbers. Codes, or something. So not real, as in taking up space.”
“And not eating. You see, moro. I rest my case.”
“I’ll betcha money the Tweedles packed lunches.”
“Gamo tin panageia. Tuna fish, fried chicken. Egg salad!”
“Wow. Hell is other people, with egg salad.”
“And a yapping dog.”
“Poor baby, starving to death in the bacchanalia. Did they share, at least?”
“No! If we had been on a raft, they would have eaten me.”
“But you’re so adorable. Mrs. Tweedle didn’t share?”
“She was immune to my charms.”
“Nope. Not buying that.”
“Okay, she shared. A little.”
Willa would let him complain until he was finished. Then he could turn to the family rites, a bone-grinding dance of survivors and the patriarch they couldn’t quite love to the end. Willa would scrape off the food and liberate her charge. Soon she would hand him off to Tig and pull off her own escape, disappearing into the thrilling possibility of a book. The arrival of a hero in her house had blown Willa’s passion for Mary Treat into a giddy disease state. These two iconoclasts living in one another’s line of sight, anode and cathode, had some current flowing between them that Willa had accidentally stuck a hand into. Now she lay awake nights hearing their conversations, seeing them in Mary’s parlor among her spider jars. Walking in the barrens. After a lifetime of meticulously detached journalism, this felt less like an assignment than an out-of-body experience. While executing all other duties—cooking, baby minding, even now, listening to Iano—Willa found herself fidgeting like a derby horse at the gate, impatient to get to her writing desk.
And Tig was likewise impatient to scoop Dusty into her arms when she came home from work every day. Willa could see it. Tig walked around with the starry-eyed, introspective glow of an expectant mother. Willa worried about what she’d set in motion the day she asked Zeke for power of attorney. He’d agreed a little too easily to custodial transfer, but of course he was overwhelmed, trying to recover a life for himself in Boston. It made sense for Dusty to stay where he was, until something. If Zeke kept avoiding the subject of what that something might be, and if it should someday come to pass that Tig’s life was a better place for a child than Willa’s, technically she wouldn’t need Zeke’s permission for another custodial transfer. But could not imagine proceeding without his blessing. And between those two siblings, little was blessed.
“Have a good funeral,” she told Iano when he finally sounded ready to sign off. “And then fly straight home, I miss you. Take a deep breath, suck it up. Pack a lunch.”
“Have fun with your what’s-his-name architect, Mr. Peagraves.”
“He’s going to ride in here and save the day.” Willa found she believed this. The house and its fortunes had felt different since Nick’s passing. Or maybe it was just April, but life seemed possible here, one house down from the corner of Sixth and Plum.
A minute after Willa hung up the phone, a funny thought struck her: Tig would have fit on that plane just fine. Tig, Art, Takis, these anomalous, scrappy survivors, might be the lucky ones. They ate less and took up less space: the humans of the future.
*
Peakesbury was the name. His game was disaster. Willa needn’t have bothered with cleaning up, because the expert never went inside. He got out of his white pickup truck wearing clean, pressed khakis and a button-down shirt, and required less than an hour to wreck her world.
His tools were a clipboard, retractable tape measure, and a little trowel he used for scraping the edges of bricks, looking for identifying marks. Masonry happened to be his area of special interest. He followed his nose to a date, in very short order: 1880. He declared the house to have been built that year, or soon after.
“No,” Willa said. “We’re sure it’s older than that.”
Peakesbury looked from Willa to Chris, and back to Willa. He was too young and polite to say what he was thinking, but Willa saw it plainly: Did I just drive an hour to talk to a couple of know-it-all shitwits?
“I’m sorry,” she said. “It’s just that we have conflicting information. Why that exact date?”
“In 1683 the General Assembly fixed a size for common brick that conformed to the English-made product of the time. There wasn’t a brick in New Jersey bigger or smaller than nine and a half by four and a half by three. Until 1880, when the Dunwiddie brickyard opened over by Union Lake.”
Wow, Willa thought. She did ask.
He took a pen out of his shirt pocket, looked at it, put it back, and soldiered on. “So, Dunwiddie struck mud over by that lake and invested in machinery nobody else could afford at the time. He’d already made one fortune in glass factories. His new yard made bricks cheaper and faster than any other in this part of the country, and they turned out a little smaller. Nobody called him on it, because he paid off the authorities.”
“So these are some kind of Mafia bricks?” Willa asked.
“He’s quite a big name in bricks, Orville Dunwiddie,” he said, dodging any hint of irony. “Later on his son Leverett took over the operation. The bricks themselves are worth something, to folks who really know their masonry.”
She had to wonder how many folks really knew their masonry. Peakesbury knelt at the base of a corner wall and scraped lightly at the end of a brick. “Now, you see this mark on the end, a little impression of a D?”
Willa and Chris leaned over obediently to observe the D.
“That’s the Dunwiddie stamp.”
Chris had not yet said a word to this expert, even when Willa had deferentially introduced him as “our town historian” and the two men shook hands. She noticed he’d worn his best suit to this appointment, an antique white three-piece ensemble a tad more eccentric even than his everyday wear. Christopher, she realized, was starstruck.
“I see the mark,” Willa said. “I’m not arguing with any of that. You obviously know bricks. But we’ve done a lot of research on a person who lived at this address; we’re sure he lived here. And it was only for a short time, between 1874 and 1875.”
“There is no mistake about those dates,” Chris finally chimed in with his trademark hauteur, to Willa’s relief. “That was a significant year in Vineland, 1875. As you undoubtedly know.”
Peakesbury looked blank, and not too interested.
“Charles Landis and Uri Carruth. The murder of the century.” Chris was rallying now. Willa decided to step aside and let the eggheads duke it out. “A resident of this house was involved in the famous trial. We have primary sources on that. Newspaper articles, that level of reliability. Our person of interest was a public figure.”
“We know it was this house,” Willa added, seeing a potential weak spot. “We even have a correspondence that mentions those two trees.”
The expert ran a hand through his tidy brown hair and looked around the yard, as if for an escape route. Willa was starting to feel embarrassed for everyone present.
“I’m not saying the trees weren’t there in 1875,” he allowed. “And I’m not saying your man wasn’t here. This house wasn’t here. These bricks at that time were mud in the ground. The plant that manufactured them did not make a brick before 1880.”
“Our dates and identification for our historical personage are solid,” Chris said, getting peevish. “We know it was not after 1880, because he left town in 1875. Prior to the fall of that year, and for most of th
e previous one, he was right here. So what do you suggest he was living in, a tent?”
Peakesbury looked at the house a little sadly, for such a long time Willa began to feel uncomfortable. The cockeyed chimneys, those horrible cracked walls. The man might as well have been looking up her skirt. Finally he spoke. “No, I expect he lived in a house. Something that got pulled down to make way for this one.”
“Oh,” she said.
“This would have been prime real estate at the time. If the house wasn’t up to snuff, the owner wouldn’t have hesitated to raze and rebuild, in order to stay here in the center of town.”
“But he didn’t stay here,” Chris parried, failing to move to the next step of the logical progression, as Willa had. She’d relaxed her denial muscles and heard what the man was saying: Thatcher Greenwood lived in a house that got torn down. For whatever reason. Soon after he left Vineland, the walls came down. His castle hadn’t stood.
“You’ve still got a late-nineteenth-century structure,” the man offered, clearly seeing the need here for a consolation prize. “Not that addition of course, that’s nineteen twenties. And I can’t vouch that the rest of the structure is worth the expense of restoration. To be honest I’m going to vouch that it isn’t, from what I can see standing here. Unless you’ve got some extenuating value. But 1880s is still historic.”
“That’s the nail on the head,” Willa told him. “We’ve been betting on the extenuating-value clause. ‘Structure associated with persons of historic significance.’”
She waited for the thunder and lightning, or worse, to burst into tears in front of these men. But they were paying no attention to Willa now, circling each other in the ring. There was no win here. The house hadn’t stood. She’d put her faith in a resident who probably had been just as stuck then as she was now, had inherited some inappropriate wreck of a place and tried everything to keep it standing. He’d failed, and so would she.
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