Fiddler's Green, Or a Wedding, a Ball, and the Singular Adventures of Sundry Moss

by Van Reid

  “I should hope so!”

  “No! Not Dresden. Mr. Moss.”

  “Oh.”

  “Oh?”

  “He’s a very nice man,” admitted Priscilla.

  “He’s quite smitten.”

  “So you say.”

  “So I saw! And if you could have seen yourself tonight, you’d understand why.”

  “Perhaps Mrs. Walton will want a maid,” said Priscilla, taking a page from her cousin’s book and plying some wry humor upon the subject.

  “Do you think that’s what Mr. Moss is? A butler or valet or something?”

  Priscilla was starded by this for reasons Cordelia couldn’t know. “I don’t think of him that way at all,” she said. “What do you think he is?”

  Cordelia shifted her posture, turning over on her back, to encourage clear consideration. “I think he’s Mister Walton’s best friend,” she said. “Well, aside from Mrs. Walton, perhaps.”

  Teacup let out a terrific yawn, and both the young women followed close upon this display with yawns of their own. Cordelia climbed onto her side of the bed, and they lay quietly with their own thoughts for some minutes. Teacup trudged a portion of the bed in circles, then dropped down between them with a low, troubled growl that made them laugh. There was more quiet in the room. A soft breeze came through the open window. The hour tolled from some steeple on a street below.

  “He’ll be at the wedding,” said Cordelia when the bells were done.

  “Do you think he will?” asked Priscilla hopefully.

  “I can’t imagine anything keeping him away.”

  25. The Indian Bridge

  The little room at the top of the tavern stairs was close, and Sundry opened the window to let in the breeze from the harbor. Lying on his back in the narrow bed, his arms behind his head, he conjured the excuses he might offer to the Underwoods for intruding upon them so soon as tomorrow. On a street somewhere above, the hour tolled a single bell. The ball would still be carrying on. Other romances would germinate or bud or come to fruition. (There would be two engagements announced in the social columns later that week.) Some affair might come to loggerheads and be finished. Somehow he felt both apart from and a part of it all.

  Sundry thought Priscilla Morningside would be sleeping now, and he imagined her curled in a large bed with her glorious dark hair spilling about her head, and he did so without shame.

  Some natural constructs exist so long that they become part of the spiritual landscape of being human, yet they stand out against the rest of the world when we are part of them, so that we wonder if we haven’t invented them or inherited them directly from some clever ancestor. Some constructs seem too straight and regular for the hand of chance. Truthfully, they are.

  To Sundry, a single, specific smile was the width of the world, and a particular voice all that he could hear. He would have been surprised how quickly and easily he fell asleep if he had been awake. Ardent love in an honest heart is like a lullaby.

  BOOK THREE THE SINGULAR ADVENTURE

  OF SUNDRY MOSS

  June 9–10, 1897

  from the Portland Daily Advertiser June 9, 1897

  CITY INCIDENTALS

  A car-load of Bangor extension ladders went through Portland yesterday for the Lindgren-Mahan Fire Engine Co. of Chicago.

  Ivanhoe Lodge, Knights of Pythias, will confer the rank of knight in the long form tomorrow evening.

  A brawny fellow, bearing the mark and accoutrements of a sailor and carrying over his shoulder an outsized oar, attempted to make ingress at a Commercial Street establishment on Saturday evening without first leaving that tool of his trade at the door. When the tavern keeper requested that he “put his oar in” somewhere else, the sailor informed the proprietor that he was loath to part with it, even for the fleeting length of time it would take to refresh himself.

  The oar was estimated by several onlookers to be at least ten feet in length and carved from some hardy tree not indigenous to these shores, but size and strangeness aside (not to mention the possibility of exaggeration), it is difficult to understand why he held it in such esteem. The tavern keeper was adamant that the instrument stay out-of-doors, or at least out of his door, and the sailor was equally convinced that it should go in with him. The upshot of this contest of wills was that the police were called for, and after a slight altercation, the sailor received the wisdom-inducing end of a stick at the top of his tall skull and was then carried by cart and four strong officers to the nearby precinct.

  A man who works for Stanwood, the blacksmith, was seriously injured Saturday afternoon. While a helper was swinging ...

  26. Leaving Without Knowing (June 9, 1897)

  Sometimes she heard a voice from the other room (or from outside or from within her own head) that called that other name. She had already grown accustomed to looking up when she heard her real name (the old name that was new again), but she had not left off saying, “Huh?” or “What?” or “Who’s that?” when she heard the name she had previously lived under for as long as she could remember. At first she thought that some of the children from the neighborhood were teasing her, particularly when she and Tim were sprinting the sidewalks or climbing roofs along the waterfront. Once she turned to Tim and said, “What?” and then, when he replied by saying, “What?” she said, “Did you hear that?” but he hadn’t.

  Sometimes she thought her father was calling her. She would pause to assess the voice that spoke the discarded name, and once she hurried back to the Faithful Mermaid, fearing the worst—that her father had died and had communicated the name he had given her across some ghostly expanse. But he was sleeping when she came to him and never knew she had been there to look in on him as a mother might look in on her child in the middle of the night.

  Once, since the discovery of her real name and her real person, Tim called her Mailon out of habit, though he was embarrassed afterward and apologized shamefacedly. Melanie was only surprised and then bemused. She could not be mad at Timothy Spark. He had not abandoned her, though she had not been what he thought all those long summer days hunting with the Abenaki along the forested trails of the city streets or fleeing enemy tribes with Daniel Boone on homemade sleds down the snowy slopes of the Western Promenade. It seemed a hard thing to be a girl after all those adventures, to ask a friend to carry on as if nothing had happened or changed, but Tim (according to his father) had proven a philosopher. Melanie didn’t know what a philosopher was, but she suspected it meant that he was forgiving.

  On the morning of her and her father’s departure for Brownville, Melanie woke up with the name Mailon in her head or spoken in the next room or from outside on the street. She thought it was a woman’s voice this time, and she wondered if it was her mother calling, though she couldn’t say why her mother would have employed a name she had never known.

  “I’m here,” she said under her breath. The bedchamber under the eaves felt close and warm after nights spent in the ancient coal room. She sat up in the trundle bed, the covers cast off since the middle of the night, and paid heed to the sound of the early-morning traffic below her window and the sense as much as the sound of movement in the house around her. “I’m here,” she whispered again, hoping for a response. She wondered if she would hear that name the rest of her life or if someday the voice, be it man or woman, adult or child, would speak “Melanie” to her, which prospect loomed in her fancy like Tim’s forgiving philosophy.

  A steam whistle blew from the southeast, and it was a moment (during the echoes rather than the original sound) before she realized that it was a train and not a ship. Another, deeper sound boomed from the harbor—the oceangoing speaking to the railbound. Shod hooves, clopping the cobblestones of Brackett Street, masked an intermittent rap upon her door till the horse and wagon had passed out of hearing. “Melanie?” came a voice. “Melanie?”

  “Tim?”

  “Your dad is up. He’s gone down to the kitchen.”

  “Wait for me!” she said,
and scrambled into her boy’s clothes. She hadn’t thought what this news boded when she opened the door with her socks and shoes (Tim’s socks and his old shoes) in her hands and her light brown hair, only now beginning to grow out in search of an acceptable female length and sticking out at startled angles. Tim’s own blond head looked far from a recent combing, but this disarray seemed to indicate more concern than wonder. Tim was a year or so older than Melanie, rangy and rawboned. He had freckles across his nose, and his eyes were the blue one could trust against clouds. “He’s says you’re leaving,” said Tim solemnly.

  Melanie’s mouth hung open. She couldn’t guess what he meant.

  “He says you’re leaving,” said Tim again. Melanie stood before him, dressed in boy’s clothes (not her old ragged things, but mended pants and a shirt that Tim had outgrown), but Tim could not see the boy anymore. He didn’t wonder, as his parents and everyone else did, how he had ever seen anything other than a girl in those delicate features. He didn’t entirely understand the difference between a scrawny, possibly stunted boy of six and a small-boned, even dainty girl of the same age, but he could see it. The change had not slowed her down, however, dodging pedestrians and wagons along the sidewalks and streets, or made her less fearless as they scurried the rooftops of the waterfront. He didn’t know if he admired her any more than before, but he admired her differently.

  “I’m leaving?” said Melanie. How could that be, now that the Sparks were taking her in and she would be one of them? There was a time when Mrs. Spark had refused to let the dirty waif into her kitchen and Mailon had only hovered outside the door, taking a plate of breakfast or a bit of supper in the alley; but after the adventure with the Moosepath League and Mr. Thump’s gratitude in the form of a substantial sum of money, Mabel Spark would not allow the gift into the hands of a father who would drink it up, and the child was taken into the warmth and bustle of the tavern. “If Mailon has a bath, we will take him in,” said Mabel Spark, and even the discovery that Mailon was Melanie had not altered the promise, though the woman of the house insisted that the newly discovered girl must soon adopt proper attire.

  But Melanie was to be one of them now, and she couldn’t be leaving if she was going to be one of them. She thought that she and her father must be going back to the coal room below Pearce Eddy’s flophouse, but she couldn’t understand why.

  “No,” said Tim. “It’s someplace else. He said you’re going to Brownville.” Tim searched Melanie’s face when he said this, looking for some sign of knowledge.

  She had none. “Where’s that?” she asked. It sounded like a place far away, if for no other reason than that she had never heard of it.

  “Daddy says up north somewhere,” he said. “Is your family there?”

  She shook her head. The children had not moved from their positions on opposite sides of the threshold, and Melanie suddenly wished that Tim would step aside so that she could hurry down to the kitchen and look at her father.

  “Are you going to leave?” he asked. Whether Mailon or Melanie, whether greeting him from the stoop outside the kitchen door or rising from her own bed down the hall, he had got quite used to her and wasn’t very sure what he would do without her. Life had taken some unexpected turns as of late, and he had not begun to catch up with them.

  “There’s just Daddy and I,” she said. Timothy shifted his posture, and she intuitively used the moment to step past him, her shoulders hunched and her gait stiff as she walked the hall to the back stairs.

  “Do you want me to hide you?” asked Timothy. He had not moved from the doorway. “There’s a hundred places you could go, if you want.” It was true; they knew every niche and cubby along the wharf district.

  She stopped to look over her shoulder. “Maybe later,” she said, but she couldn’t really imagine it. She had not the understanding or the words to say what she felt, but she had been hiding all her six years, and it would have seemed like going backward simply to find a hole to crawl in. She picked up the pace as she neared the stairs, and soon Timothy could hear her small feet clattering down, socks and shoes still in her hands.

  Timothy shook himself into movement and hurried to the stairwell. “Maybe I can come, too,” he said softly behind her, but she was gone.

  27. Quick at Figures

  “God bless you,” said Mabel Spark when Melanie sneezed. She almost said, “Start a journey with a sneeze, and you’ll never get where you mean to,” but she wasn’t as sure of this tenet as she was of certain other laws of nature. You could cause trouble if you put a hat on a bed, that was certain, and setting an extra place at the table almost always drew an unexpected guest (purposely setting an extra place didn’t work, of course, or every taverner in the world would have business); but Mabel wasn’t so sure about sneezing before travel, and she didn’t want to worry the child. Mabel shot a troubled look at Burne Ring, who sat at the kitchen trencher looking lost and out of breath. The taverness gave the little girl the handkerchief in her apron pocket and told her to keep it. Burne looked at his daughter as if he couldn’t quite remember who she was.

  “It’s the sun,” said Melanie.

  “The sun?” said Mabel. She fretted for this broken-down man and his boy-clad daughter, but the Faithful Mermaid must continue business, and there were hungry breakfasters in the tavern room. She busied Minerva and Annabelle with a look and a wave of the hand.

  “The sun makes her sneeze,” said Tim. He stood in the doorway to the back stairs, looking uncertain. He pointed to the window, where the rising sun, reflected from another window up the hill and across the way, lit the table before the little girl.

  “Nonsense,” said Mabel Spark, but she glanced from the little spot of brilliance on the table to the window and back again. “Close the door,” she said, which was more a precaution for winter than June, but habit with her.

  Tim closed the door to the back stairs and came further into the kitchen. “She can sneeze just coming out of the shade,” he said. “Mr. Ealing gave her a nickel once, just to see her do it.” He was proud of Melanie’s unusual talent, and just looking at him, Mabel wanted to go over and hug him but forbore for the sake of his seven-year-old dignity. Instead she made a noise of disbelief, though she didn’t actually suspect her youngest child of lying.

  “Horace and Maven’s breakfast,” said Thaddeus as he entered the kitchen.

  “Yes, yes,” said Mabel.

  The bearded taverner stood by the door and considered Burne Ring, who stared down at the plate of sausage and egg and biscuits that Mabel had provided for him. Thaddeus had applied a razor to the man’s face the night before and even trimmed his sparse gray-blond hair, which had been hanging like old straw over his ears, but Burne still had the look of a man who had not been recently groomed. His cheeks seemed in shadow, and his eyes were shot with red and sunk beneath what once had been a handsome brow.

  Thaddeus and Mabel were troubled. They had explained to Burne about the money Mr. Thump had given Melanie, or at least about part of it; they had given the stricken man a portion of the generous sum—what Mabel considered enough to get them to Brownville and put them up for a week or so while Burne searched for his relatives. She would send the rest when she’d heard they were safely settled or that Melanie was safely settled, which was more to the point, since Mabel couldn’t imagine the father would ever be safe or settled between here and the grave.

  The requested breakfasts were assembled, and Minerva took them out to the tavern room. “No need to hurry off,” Thaddeus said to Burne. He took a biscuit out of the warming oven as he passed it and approached the table. “Might be a good idea to stay a little longer and get your strength back.” Thaddeus, like Mabel, thought it more likely that Burne would “up and die” than “get his strength back,” but he might as well do it here where friends (or at least people willing to watch after him and his daughter) could tend him.

  “We’d better be going,” said Burne quietly, though he seemed to have wakened to this not
ion only when he stated it. He looked up at his daughter, who looked doubtful. “I’m grateful for all your help,” he said, but with more peevishness than gratitude in his voice. “I’ll give you something out of what this Mr. Thump gave us.”

  Thaddeus shook his head. Mr. Thump had given the money to Melanie, not her father, and the father hadn’t even thought “Why?” though they had explained to him how his daughter had helped do Mr. Thump and his friends a service. Burne asked for no other explanation and truthfully might not have understood it if it had been offered.

  About the time Minerva returned with an armful of dirty plates, the door to the back stairs opened again, and Sundry Moss came into the kitchen with a good morning meant for everyone present. Annabelle tugged at the back of her blouse and straightened her apron. Once she had rid herself of the plates, Minerva brushed at an imagined spot of flour on her cheek and left a spot of flour there. Sundry was surprised to see Burne at the kitchen table.

  It occurred to Mabel Spark that Mr. Moss was a free man while the newlywed Waltons were off to Halifax, and he was, as it happened, just the sort of steady fellow who could escort two poor souls like Burne and his daughter to their cousins in Brownville. She wondered how to suggest such a thing without actually seeming to do so.

  “Mr. Ring and Melanie are off to Brownville,” said Thaddeus, who may have been on a similar tack.

  “Not this morning!” said Sundry.

  “It seems they are,” said the taverner.

  “Let me fix you some breakfast,” said Mabel.