by CJ Hauser
Henry was so happy when I told him I’d done it. He made dinner. He grilled, and through the screen door I could hear him singing a little as he flipped the blackening vegetables with a metal spatula. As he set the table that night, he laid the plates on the table with such enthusiasm that he shattered one, the white seam of china inside the blue enamel visible as a vein.
But his happiness is wearing thin. Not only because I have been sulking but because he is bracing himself for the article and what it will mean for the construction. He’s working long hours to get as many saplings and plantings in as he can. It’s as if he thinks he’ll be able to keep this job if only he can water in enough boxwoods.
So, how is work? While Quinn and Charley have been researching and fact-checking for the Dorian piece, I’ve been writing the majority of the paper: LOBSTERMEN PETITION FOR MINIMUM CATCH SIZE DECREASE! LOCAL 4-H TO SPONSOR CAKE WALK! ALBINO DEER SPOTTED NEAR SOUTH FORK, AGAIN! While I find myself cropping photos of lemon meringue pies and coming up with terrible puns to keep myself amused, Quinn and Charley are calling up state offices about land deeds. Calling up banks to confirm the accounts are what we think they are. Looking into the Dorians’ past real estate records, and requesting anything that’s on file.
“Work is fine,” I say. “ ‘Red Tide: Is It Worse Than Ever?’ ”
“Is it?” Henry says.
“Experts disagree,” I say. “It’s highly controversial. How is your work?”
Henry nods. “Good,” he says. “We put in three Japanese maples yesterday.”
I nod. We sit there quietly. We have never had trouble finding things to say to each other before. I sip my coffee.
A pinecone drops from the branches above us. Henry kicks it over to me. “When I was a kid we used to collect these,” he says. “My mother told us there was magic in them, and if we let them dry long enough, we could release it. At Christmas we chucked them in the fire and the flames changed from orange to yellow-green. Mom told us that was the magic being released and we could wish on it.” He stirs his oatmeal around with the spoon and it steams.
“So they were magic?” I say.
“Definitely,” Henry says. “All my wishes came true.”
I pick up the pinecone and finger its pieces. This is the kind of story that made me fall in love with Henry. All the haunted carousels and the fishermen’s weddings and magic pinecones. “What was it really?” I ask. “That made the fire change colors?”
“What, you don’t think it was magic?” Henry says. He thumps me on the leg. “C’mon,” he says.
I shrug.
“Borax,” he says. “Laundry detergent basically. You have to soak them in it, then let them dry out again. My mother used to soak them when we weren’t looking.”
Of course she did.
I worry that all the old saints like June are being driven out of this place. The kind mothers, the stoic fathers, the fishermen, and the local legends from Henry’s stories—I fear I have showed up just in time to catch their last days. Maybe I’m too romantic. Maybe that’s just what a story is. The sort of thing you have to understand on its own terms, a stretched truth and not a real thing at all. Maybe if you believe in the real-bodied truth of such things or places you are a fool.
Everyone needs to grow up sometime. Maybe even towns need to grow up. To stop imagining what they want to be, and just get down to the dirty business of what will keep them alive.
Henry gets up and offers to take my mug to the dishwasher. I give it to him.
“I’m headed out,” he says. “You want a ride?”
“Sure,” I say, and follow him inside. Even if I did help write the piece, it probably wouldn’t be enough for all those old blinking ghosts to stick around.
34
Quinn
Rosie clomps downstairs to meet me, a Polaroid postcard in her hand. “I haven’t sent them one in more than a week,” she says. “If I stop now they’ll think it was a phase.” Rosie’s hair is brushed out and hanging down. She’s wearing one pair of enormous silver hoops. I think she’s lost weight these past weeks.
I grab her hips. “You’re not eating enough,” I say. “Or sleeping enough.” She’s out late every night with those guys, plotting. Even Jethro has been off and on at the Uncle.
Rosie hikes up her pants. “I’ll sleep tonight, after the benefit concert,” she says. Her pants slide right back down to where they were. If Rosie’s ass starts shrinking I swear I’ll cry.
As we walk to the car I say, “Listen, I’m going to park the car over behind the post office so that if a bunch of people try to leave the green at once, we won’t be stuck.”
“Why would that happen?” Rosie says. She opens the passenger door. Stands there, her chin tucked to her neck, putting up her hair, one wrist flying around, looping the rubber band.
“If the police come,” I say. “So if they come, don’t do anything stupid. Just book it over there, okay?”
“Quinn,” Rosie says. “If the police come I’m letting them take me.” Like this is obvious.
I don’t think they make arrests for performing folk music without a permit, but it’s not the police I’m worried about. It’s what the rest of those men might do if the police try to shut the show down. “Rosie,” I say, “if the police come, please let the other guys deal with it, okay?”
She looks at me like I’m a moron. “But then what would be the point, Quinn?” We’re talking over the hood of the car, each of us on a side. “I’ve worked just as hard as they have and I’m not going to let them or you keep me cheerleading and painting banners. When this is through I want everyone to know I was a part of this. A big part. So I’m not going to let you whisk me out of there like some kid.”
But she is a kid. And I know she’s worked hard but sometimes I wish she’d be thinking about me instead of about Carter and his Rebel Seven. Thinking about the two of us instead of a busted old carousel and this shitty town. “Just get out of there if things go wrong,” I say. “Okay?”
“Arrrrrr!” She makes a frustrated noise. “Why can’t you understand anything ever!” She slams the car door. Why can’t I understand anything ever? This is a damn good question. I swear I once yelled that exact same thing at my mother. I think I was nineteen. Yes, I think it was when I was Rosie’s age.
So I pull a Marta. “Fine,” I say. “Fine. Let’s just go.”
“No,” Rosie says, shaking her finger at me now, like I’m going to be learned a lesson. “No, we’re going to walk there. Let’s take Kenamon Road.” She waves the stamped Polaroid she was going to mail to her parents out in the air between us. “You’ll get it,” she says. “I’m going to show you and then you’re going to get it.”
We start off down Main Street like normal. Wobbly shrubs full of yellow blooms have appeared in people’s yards. There is green climbing everywhere, vines sneaking up around telephone posts. The power lines are strung low, sweeping from post to post. It makes me nervous when the breeze picks up and they sway.
Rosie leads me onto Kenamon Road. “Kenamon?” I say. “Is that like a street planner’s typo?”
“It’s a different version of the same word,” Rosie says. “Menamon is Penobscot for somebody’s son. Kenamon means your son.”
The whole street is a leafy tunnel of green. The air feels cool, and all the little houses here with their weird slanting porches have the strangest things out on the lawns. Junk, Henry would say.
“It looks just like my street did,” Rosie said. I’m looking around and it is clear, yes, this is the sort of place where you can grow a Rosie. Rosie takes my hand. The porches all have columns and the paint peels off them in strips, because sea air, even at a distance, will strip away your best intentions. There are chairs on these porches. Lots of them. Like whole families are prepared to sit together for long stretches of time here.
These houses, they are so sweet. It’s not like where I grew up with Marta. Not at all. The road is not paved and Rosie keeps getting pebbles in h
er sandals. She stops, leans against me, and flicks her ankle around. On one porch there’s a well-worn easy chair full of pillows pointing directly at another easy chair across the street, ready for a cross-road conversation. The people who live here are not rich enough to secrete their yards and lives from one another, like they do up in Elm Park, where privacy is part of the pitch. It feels like Swiss Family Robinson. I see a row of dead horseshoe crabs lined up on a set of steps. A rusted old oven spills blooms on a lawn. There’s one yard so covered in child-sized sports equipment it seems the house’s children must have a league, a dozen players at least. A brown rabbit scurries under a bush. I smell a barbecue grill. I hear guitar music from somewhere. Maybe it’s Carter, warming up with an amp, broadcasting a pied piper’s call to join him on the green.
I wonder what I would have been like if I’d grown up here. Different for sure. After all, Carter did, Rosie did, and they seem to get some things that I just don’t. They trust in things I can’t imagine.
“How could anyone bulldoze these?” Rosie says. “Do you see?”
She’s right, and I think they’re bastards. But you’ve got to think about the truth sometimes too, so I say, as quietly and nicely as I can, “And that sucks. But they paid for them, Rosie. You know? It doesn’t make it right, but they paid for those houses.”
“Yeah”—Rosie shrugs—“but we thought they were going to live in them.” She leans on me again, slipping pebbles from her sandal.
Rosie says, “So this is what it was like. Down on Penobscot, where I grew up. And now they’ve built that thing and poured concrete all over my magic seashell and my letter to my future self and my lock of hair. And my parents are gone and I wouldn’t mind so much if that house was at least still there, even if I couldn’t live in it. Then I could at least still walk by and remember how nice things used to be. But it’s just gone, and the whole town will be gone soon too. It’ll all become something different and the something different will be exactly like everywhere else. And if that happens, I want no part in this.”
“I thought you wanted out of here,” I say. “To be in a band and tour the world.”
“I used to think so,” Rosie says. “But it hasn’t seemed so bad lately. What with Carter, and you, and all this stuff happening? It’s not like before. I want things to stay the way they are right now.”
She looks up at me, embarrassed, and I get it. This stuff with the carousel, and town, it’s about her, but it’s about us too. The two of us, together, is part of the reason why Rosie thinks Menamon is worth fighting for these days. I was just too dumb to understand it, because sometimes I can’t understand anything ever. I grab Rosie’s face and I kiss her. On her mouth but also on her eyes, her forehead, her chin. It’s emotional spillover is what it is. It’s like: I love you so much I can’t just kiss you here I’ve got to kiss you there and there and there.
Rosie smiles and kisses me back, only once, only on the mouth, but she means it. We walk to the end of the street and come out on Bayonet Lane, which will take us closer to the town green, to the show.
WHEN WE GET to the green, it seems like every teenage boy in town has showed up and offered himself as an electrician, a grip, a groupie. They’ve heard that Carter Marks is going to sing. Sure, none of these kids know what folk music is, but this is the biggest thing that’s happened to Menamon in so long that Carter might as well be the fucking Beatles.
The boys are snaking wires and carrying black boxes all over the green. We’ve had three whole days of sun, so the mud is firmed up. It’s seventy-two degrees and sunny. People are starting to spread out their quilts and beach towels. Old people are struggling to set up sea-rusted beach chairs that creak. Kids are toddling about, followed by tired-looking but happy mothers. Happy is what everyone looks like, because if this town knows anything, it’s to take a spring day when you get it.
The boys unfurl a hand-painted banner above the gazebo’s gables, and I recognize the loopy handwriting immediately. Rosie’s. The banner says CONCERT FOR THE THAW.
We sit up front, in the grass, and watch things come together on the wooden platform someone found time to build in front of the gazebo this week. Billy Deep taps a mic, and the sound reverberates. “One two three,” he says. “Hey, Rosie! How do I sound?”
“I can hear you all right!” Rosie shouts back, through cupped hands.
More people show up. Joseph Deep is running the grill, making burgers, clams, and corn. All proceeds, says another sign painted in Rosie’s handwriting, will go to pay fines unjustly incurred at the Neversink Park Protest. By the time the boys begin carrying instruments onstage, the green is packed. Two hundred, maybe three hundred people. When Carter and his band head up to the bandstand, people applaud.
Carter’s wearing jeans and a faded red T-shirt, nothing special, but he walks onstage with some swagger in his step. He’s got a smile creeping up on his face he’s trying not to let show. His hair is loose and falls almost to his shoulders.
Three men climb onstage. There’s a rail-thin guy with a bristly mustache wearing a huge green baseball cap. He picks up a Gibson I’d give my left arm for. A man who looks like a bear—square-jawed, sideburns black and hair thick, enormous hands—picks up a bass. The drummer has silver hair and twinkling eyes. He looks ten years older than the rest of them. He’s wearing a black brace on one hand and holding his sticks in the other, and he’s got a smile you’d pay a million dollars to see. Carter’s checking out the setup and talking to them and they start laughing about something.
Carter loops his guitar strap over his head and plucks a few notes. They ring out and silence the crowd. Then he comes forward and takes the microphone. “Hello,” he says. “I’m Carter Marks and these good men are the Jackson Ramblers. I’d like very much for you all to welcome them to town.” The crowd claps and the Ramblers nod and tip their caps.
“Whoo!” Rosie shouts so loud I grimace. She elbows me, and I give a little whoop.
“We’d like to start with a special song for the good folks at town hall,” Carter says. He counts off and they launch into “Big Yellow Taxi” by Joni Mitchell. The crowd is cheering and laughing and everyone sings along extra loud at the parts about trees and parking lots. Rosie is singing so hard her eyes are shut.
They go into their own set next, a mix of Carter’s stuff plus some blues and trad. The Ramblers and Carter play together perfectly. I watch them shoot each other looks before solos and double up on a chorus on the fly. It’s like they’ve been doing this for years. And then I realize, they probably have. The bass player I recognize from an album of Carter’s I used to have. The old drummer too, he just used to be more unkempt and dangerous-looking. Carter’s got the old band back together.
They play highlights from their old albums, most of which no one knows. But I know them all. Every damn song I grew up listening to and wondering about. Dissecting the words and imagining what Carter’s face looked like when he was singing them. And here he is.
In the grass, Rosie and I are swaying back and forth together as night has come on. It’s blue-dark out, and then I see Cliff Frame messing with something out behind the gazebo. He brings his hands together, just like he did with his Christmas display, and a million little twinkling lights go on. They are strung all around the green: in the trees and around the gazebo and over our heads. Carter says, close into the microphone, “Mr. Cliff Frame, everybody,” and everyone is on their feet and cheering.
The Rambler with the mustache and the green hat produces a fiddle, and Carter counts it off for the next song. It has been winter for so long, and finally here we are out of our houses and together. Some of the old-timers get up and start dancing. Rosie pulls me to my feet and we’re dancing too. The lobstermen and fishermen dance, because seafarers are always the dancing kind. The guys from the ironworks, though not dancing, are stomping their feet and nodding like they approve. Carter’s voice is so low and smooth it carries into the night. I imagine even Maude Gunthrop is able to hear it up
at her house.
“Ladies and gentlemen, thank you so much for coming out tonight. Let’s hear it for the Ramblers!” Carter says. Everyone gives a big cheer and Rosie and I jump up and down. Then Carter says, “For our next song we’d like to call up a special guest. Miss Rosalind Salem, would you come to the stage?”
Rosie kisses me on the cheek and then cuts through the crowd. She jogs up the steps and is out of breath by the time she gets there. “Hi,” she says into the mic, and Billy Deep lets out a whoop that sets the whole crowd laughing and clapping.
“Rosalind is going to help me sing the next number,” Carter says. “A song called ‘No Medicine.’ ”
My song. It’s my song.
I am so embarrassed I think I should probably die. It’s too awful, just a scrap of nothing in my notebook. I played it for Rosie only once. I see Carter and Rosie talking and nodding and they’re about to start, so I start pushing my way through the crowd, getting the hell out of there. “Excuse me, excuse me,” I say. But then Carter starts playing.
You thought I was a train, come barrelin’ down the tracks
I thought your heart was a white, white bird,
but when it flew off it was black
You thought I was a fighter, you thought I was a saint
Your face it looked like broken glass when you realized I ain’t
There’s nothin’ to be done for that, no medicine I can give
Can’t patch up what’s broke too bad,
some ills you have to live with . . .
When I hear how Carter takes my opening, those first couple chords, and adds all this finger picking to it, I turn around. Because it sounds really good. He drives the intro into a rollicking rolling verse, and Rosie sings, her voice deep. The Ramblers sing the low harmonies behind her. The chorus Carter has brightened, and made faster, so it sounds half like one of his songs and half like one of mine. Rosie belts out the chorus, and I can’t believe her up there, in her enormous earrings, with her deep voice. Carter jumps in with the tenor part, and when they harmonize I almost die on the spot. Everyone in the crowd looks like they’re a little bit in love with Rosie singing like this, but I don’t feel mad or jealous or any other rotten thing. Because it’s my words she’s singing. They can love her all they want, ’cause it’s my song she wants in her mouth.
