by Van Reid
Sundry went looking for Maven Flyce and found the man stalking the path from Droone Acres with great caution, Lillie and Topper calmly walking behind him. Topper had taken a liking to Maven; the gelding nudged Maven in the back and almost knocked him down. Lillie let out a snort of recognition when she caught sight or wind of Sundry.
“Is he gone?” asked Maven Flyce. He watched the woods and the path past Sundry with wide eyes, his cowlick almost with the personality of a dog’s ear—cocked for the first signal of danger. “Did he disappear?”
“What?” asked Sundry.
“Is he gone?” said Maven. “Is Mr. Burne’s ghost gone off somewhere?”
“You don’t have to act frightened anymore, Maven. The sheriff is here.”
“What?” said Maven.
“You don’t have to pretend to be frightened anymore.”
“Pretend?” said Maven.
“I thought you—” began Sundry, but he stopped himself and considered Maven’s innocent expression. “Maven, I told you last night that Mr. Burne was still alive.”
“Oh,” said Maven and the look of fear altered to one of rudimentary amazement. “I forgot.”
When quizzed, Maven described a chaotic scene among the Droones. He was astonished. Many of them were packing valuables into wagons and carts and readying themselves to leave. Maven had never seen anything like it. He thought some of them were raising new spells, and he had watched one woman running about in the woods with an armload of household objects. What would Horace say?
Sundry thought that the simplest way for all of them to get out of Dutten and get home was to tell the sheriff and his men no more than they absolutely must.
As it turned out, the men from China village were only too glad to call it a false alarm. There were still shouts in the woods toward Albion and flashes of life above them as Normells returned to their homes with their own plans for departure or survival. The sheriff and his men viewed it all with apprehensive posture and started several times at unexpected shouts from the woods. Behind the summerhouse, Sundry found the chaise and horse that Jeffrey Normell had hired in Vassalboro. When he came back to the shore, the sheriff was looking like a man who wants to leave and isn’t very certain how to do it gracefully.
“Do we know what happened here?” asked the sheriff.
“There was a difference of opinion,” Sundry admitted. “But I think it’s straightened out now.”
“You’re not from around here, are you?” said the sheriff, as if this fact alone would explain how Sundry came to Dutten Pond. “Come back sometime, and tell me what it’s all about,” he said. He raised an abstaining hand and added, “Long after it’s done.”
It was a quiet journey out of Dutten, under escort of the sheriff and his men. Sundry had leisure to be surprised, in retrospect, to see Robin Oig and Abijah Cook and managed to get the most of their story; he would pursue Melanie’s later. The man with the oar pondered mightily on what had occurred that morning but didn’t seem to get very far with it. He looked from Sundry to the little girl and back again, so that it appeared as if he were shaking his head.
When they got Burne Ring into the open chaise, and Melanie climbed in after, Sundry took the driver’s seat and brought the horse around. There was still a sense of peril on the road out of Dutten, and Sundry was glad to come out into the sunlight and onto the main road with the sheriff and his men behind them. On the road to China they passed the southern extremity of Dutten Pond, and the sheriff thought to ask who was out in the boat.
Sundry and his companions lost their escort when they reached the town. The sheriff repeated to Sundry his invitation to come tell him what had happened—in due time. Robin Oig had explained to the men from China what he was doing with a great long oar over his shoulder. The sheriff did not specifically invite Robin back. He and his men lingered on the porch of the local post office and watched the strangers ride out of town.
The nearest railway station was in Winslow, and the six travelers took the northwest road. Halfway there they came to a road pointing south and Abijah announced that he and his horses would be leaving them. “We told you Dutten was a chancy place,” he said to Sundry, when he had been thanked profusely.
“I never doubted you,” said Sundry, and the young farmer laughed.
“Good luck,” said Abijah Cook to Robin Oig as they shook hands. “I bet you’re halfway there.”
“Do you think?” said the sailor. He watched Ab ride off on Cram, with Bolt on a lead behind. “His father saw a machine at the fair,” said Robin. “It moved all by itself,” he informed Sundry, though he didn’t appear to completely understand what this meant.
“He can build a stone wall,” said Sundry.
“I am amazed,” said Maven.
Robin Oig decided to head north and west, no matter where Mr. Moss and the elf child were going. Looking at Melanie in broad daylight, Robin wasn’t sure she was an elf child. Clearly he had reckoned wrongly when he hitched his quest to Sundry Moss.
So they parted company with the sailor outside Winslow.
“You’ll want that stuff from the box,” said Robin. “You can put it in one of those sacks in the carriage.”
“Stuff?” said Maven. “My word! I didn’t know there was any!”
“Not at all,” replied Sundry. “Take it with you, please, and far away from here.” Then Sundry thought, He might find something in that haversack that he can trade for good directions.
Robin looked unsure about it all. He frowned, looked at the ground, and kicked at a stone. “Hmmm,” he said. “I might find something in it that I can trade for good directions.”
Sundry himself frowned and nodded.
Another two miles down the road, they came to a crossroad where stood a weathered sign that said BENTON FALLS.
“That’s north, I guess,” said Robin, pointing to the right, and with very little ceremony, he took his oar and his haversack and went his separate way. The others watched him go. He walked like a man going somewhere, renewed in his purpose. Someone would ask him what he was doing with that great long oar and he would tell them about Fiddler’s Green. The last they ever saw of him was the tip of the oar disappearing down the farther slope of a hill.
“What will he do with it all?” asked Melanie.
Sundry understood that she was speaking of the humble objects found in the silver box and also a few objects that were not so humble, including a gold watch with the initials C. N. engraved on its back. “I couldn’t say,” said Sundry. “If those things harbor all those people’s second sight, he’s going to be a very smart man.”
“I am amazed!” said Maven.
As it happened, they had another parting in Winslow. Maven had taken a great shine to Topper and the admiration appeared to be mutual. It was the cowlicked fellow’s honest sadness at leaving the gelding behind that settled Sundry on a plan he had been contemplating since they left China.
“You won’t get off the train till you reach Portland?” Sundry made Maven promise.
“My word!” said Maven. “Who’d have thought it?”
“And you’ll stay awake?”
“I got quite a nice nap in, back at the house,” said the fellow.
“We’re going to Brownville,” said Bume Ring when the word “Portland” sunk into his head.
“You’re going to take your daughter home, Mr. Ring,” said Sundry.
“We don’t have any home,” said the father.
“The Sparks are her home,” replied Sundry, and Bume did not argue.
“Home is where your hat is,” declared Maven. Horace had said this once. Of course, Maven didn’t wear a hat, and he tapped the top of his head when he said this as if he were just now realizing it.
Once they had their tickets, Sundry took his companions to a restaurant for a large breakfast, and Maven was even able to obtain (with Horace McQuinn-like efficiency) some small beer for Bume Ring’s specific thirst. Melanie had never eaten in a restaurant before and
she looked almost as surprised by it all as Maven. Burne ate little or nothing, but everyone else discovered a hearty appetite.
Sundry saw them onto the train. Melanie looked uncertain when she realized that he was not traveling with them back to Portland.
“I’m here,” announced Maven.
By the time Sundry was back on the platform, looking in through the window, the little girl was asleep next to her father. Burne sat back, his head up, his eyes staring coldly into the middle distance. Sundry signaled to Maven that he must stay alert, and Maven, misunderstanding him, checked his cowlick, as if it might have disappeared. Then he smiled and nodded.
“Don’t get off the train!” shouted Sundry.
Maven might have put the window down, but instead he put his face next to the glass and shouted in reply. “I’ll be riding backward!” He pointed at his shoulder and then at the front of the train behind him.
Sundry nodded. When the train was gone, he went into the station and wired the Sparks that the Rings and Maven Flyce were coming home. He was amazed.
He was tired but would ride some more before finding a roadside inn, where he might bed down and sleep. He trotted Lillie out of town, leading Topper and taking them south toward Vassalboro.
The fields were green, the Kennebec was broad and blue. It was a beautiful June day. Riding the country lanes he was filled by the songs of birds.
BOOK FOUR SMALL ENDS UNDONE
(June 14–15, 1897)
56. The Mantel Watch (June 14, 1897)
J ust north of Jackman Station, about twenty or thirty miles from the Canadian border, on a rainy afternoon following a rainy morning, Clarence Nesbit was sorting accounts in the parlor and wondering when the pigs would litter when he looked out the window and saw, coming through the weather atop Heald Hill, the figure of a man with a sack under one arm and a great length of something slung over his shoulder. The solitary walker was on a footpath, well away from the main road, and Clarence thought he must be a little damp around the edges, traipsing the rain and the June grass.
“Evie,” he called to his wife. Evie had come up from the cellar just before lunch with two quarts of peach preserves and announced that she was going to bake some pies. Clarence loved peach pie about as much as anything you could carry with a table fork, and he deplored to interrupt her good work, but he called again. “Evie, come look at this.”
Evie came into the parlor, wiping flour from her arms with a grain sack towel. It was not usual for Clarence to call to her like that, and she approached the desk where he sat with curiosity and a little dread that he had bad news about what they owed.
“Who is that?” asked Clarence. The figure descending Heald Hill was almost to the point where he would disappear behind the near rise.
Evie squinted through her glasses, then squinted over them. “What’s that he’s carrying?” she asked in reply.
Then the figure did disappear, though the upper length of whatever the man was carrying continued to bob in sight above him.
“It’s not Charlie Pintner?” Clarence wondered aloud.
“Charlie never walked that pace,” said Evie.
“It is raining.”
“He never walked in the rain, either,” she said. “Nor walked when he could ride, and he’d wait a week to get one.”
“John Beamus?”
“Out here?”
“Grant Goodey?”
“Too broad.”
They could see the fellow’s head, and then his shoulders. He was a good deal closer now, and they thought they could make out what he was carrying. By the time he reached the front of the Nesbits’ farmhouse, where the footpath crossed the track to the main road, Clarence was on the front stoop watching him.
“Kind of pondy out there, isn’t it?” called Clarence. “You’ll need that oar, and a boat and a bale besides, if you follow that path much farther. Goes right down to Coburn Pond and the old landing there.” The fellow looked over his shoulder, and Clarence invited him in. “Come out of the rain, and put on a pair of dry socks, if you got them.”
The man thought about this, then walked up to the house and laid the oar beside the front steps. The fellow’s boots squelched on the hall carpet when he entered, and Evie stood at the pantry door, watching him as he pried them off.
“No, no,” said Clarence when the man looked about for a place to hang his coat. “By the parlor fire.”
“Much obliged,” said the man; those were his first words since entering the farmhouse.
“Come in, come in,” said Clarence. He led the way to the parlor and swung a chair around for the man to settle his large frame. The fellow politely hesitated, considering his damp backside, but Evie came in with an old flour sack to put beneath him.
“I put the kettle on,” she said. “You’re too early for peach pie; but I baked bread this morning, and it’s still warm.”
The man blinked and nodded. Evie frowned at her husband, but more from curiosity than outright disapproval.
“Clarence Nesbit,” said the husband. “This is my wife, Evie.”
The stranger shook Clarence’s hand and said, “Robin Oig.”
“You look like you’re going somewhere with that oar,” said Clarence.
“Fiddler’s Green,” said Robin.
Clarence straightened in his seat and did his best not to look astonished.
“Is that up by Moose River?” wondered Evie.
“No,” said Clarence with a short laugh. “I don’t think it’s up Moose River.”
“Fiddler’s Green,” she said.
“Yes, ma’am,” said the sailor, for it was plain to them he represented that breed.
“Is that where you hail from then?”
The man took a deep breath and weighed his answer before issuing the following statement. “Fiddler’s Green, ma’am, is a form of paradise, that is, heaven, that is, anyplace that won’t starve you, burn your hide, or freeze parts that you might be needing in port. Fiddler’s Green, they say, takes some wandering to find, and there’s only one way of knowing it. Throw an oar over your shoulder, take that oar with you wherever you go, and wherever you go, you go as far from the sea as the sea will allow (when you leave the sea, you’ll find the sea if you go far enough, if you take my meaning), and you roam with that oar till you come to a place where they ask to look at it, and they peer at it, and they consider it, and they ask you what it is. And then you’ve found it.”
“Goodness’ sakes!” she said. “What could that be?”
“Fiddler’s Green,” he said with conviction. He looked to Clarence.
Evie was a little wide-eyed.
Clarence nodded and waved a hand. He had heard of Fiddler’s Green—there had been a song that someone sang, years before—but he had never met anyone who believed such a place existed, and certainly not anyone who was looking for it with an oar over his shoulder. “You’re heading north then,” said Clarence.
Robin Oig nodded. The guest had come from farm stock himself, they soon discovered, and he could talk great sense on the subject, so that they began to wonder, before he thanked them for tea and a sandwich and said he must be moving on, if they had heard him right after all.
But in the hall, once he’d got his boots on again (wincing a little as his dry socks squelched against the wet leather) and shouldered into his coat and lifted his sack, Mr. Oig looked out into the rain and looked relieved to see the oar leaning against the house. “I hope it was all right to leave it out there,” he said.
“An oar means to get wet,” said Clarence.
“It’ll get wet today,” said Evie. “I wish we could save it all up for August when it gets droughty.”
“Don’t you have a well?” asked Robin Oig.
“Well,” said Clarence, “we do. But it doesn’t last the summer.” He pointed down past the eastern corner of the house.
“You want to dig over that way,” said the sailor. He pointed in the other direction. “About six or eight yards this si
de of that oak tree.”
“How do you know that?” asked Clarence.
“I couldn’t tell you,” he said. “It just sort of came to me. My oar has been leaning toward water these days.”
Clarence and Evie exchanged glances.
The sailor thanked the Nesbits again, took up his haversack and his great long oar, and went out into the rain. He seemed to study the weather for a moment, squinting at the dark sky and the wet. He waved when he was up the track some yards, heading for the main road.
“Goodness’ sakes!” said Evie.
“You never know, do you?” said Clarence.
“I certainly didn’t when I got up this morning. This side of the oak tree!”
“What do you think?” said Clarence. He leaned out into the rain and looked west. “Should I try it?”
“What, dig a hole over by the oak tree?”
“He seemed pretty sure.”
“Yes, his oar leans toward water.”
“I never did hear of a sailor who could dowse,” said Clarence.
“I never did hear such nonsense, but I suppose you won’t sleep soundly till you’ve dug up those oak roots and made an ugly hole in the yard.”
Clarence laughed. She knew him too well. “I don’t suppose I will,” he admitted. “It was you who brought it up.”
Evie shook her head, made a noise, and went into the parlor to clean up after their unexpected guest. Clarence looked after the man, but he was gone; then he leaned out into the rain again and looked over at the oak tree.
“Clarence?”
“Yes.”
“Clarence?”
“What is it?”
“Since when have you a gold watch?”
“Since when have you lost your mind?” he replied with a laugh.
“I mean it!”
“A gold watch.” Clarence shut the front door and wandered into the parlor. His wife held something golden in the palm of her hand.
“It has your initials,” she said.
“What?”
“C. N. Look!”
Clarence peered over her outstretched hand, then gingerly lifted the gold watch from her palm.
