by Jonathan Dee
It wasn’t an overflow crowd by any means. Where in most election years they might get twenty people at this meeting, this year they had thirty-five or forty, but there were still folding chairs enough for everybody, and then some. The five current officials of the Howland government sat together at the heavy folding table. There was coffee in the back, and some Pepperidge Farm cookies on a platter; they didn’t have enough of those to last even until the meeting was called to order, but then they never did—however many cookies you put out, that’s how many people ate.
They opened with the Pledge, then with the moment of silence for the town’s war dead, whose names were all on the obelisk that stood on the center island of Howland’s main intersection. The town clerk asked for and received approval of the previous meeting’s minutes, then proceeded to the reading of the slate of candidates for Tuesday’s election. The man who currently worked as Tom’s assistant was named as the sole candidate for the tax collector’s job, Tom was named as the sole candidate for First Selectman, and Maeve’s name was not spoken. Tom was smiling calmly, reassuringly, though he also had a white handkerchief he touched to his forehead a few times. In just a minute or two, he would be asked if he wanted to give a speech, a formality that in past elections he’d waived, but tonight he had prepared a few remarks to help put the town, in this time of sudden but still orderly and democratic transition, at ease.
It was not unusual, at these town meetings, for people to blurt out jokes to undercut the rickety, mostly pretend formality of the whole ritual. But tonight everyone was still. Even if all the candidates were running unopposed, it was nonetheless democracy in action, the very essence of what set them apart from so many other nations of the earth, some of whom hated and resented and wanted to rob them of exactly this; and they were solemnly aware of that opposition, they absorbed and then reflected it. Before granting time for voluntary statements from the candidates, the clerk asked if any other candidates for town office wanted to petition for a spot on the ballot before the process was officially closed.
“I do,” said a voice. Everyone turned in their seats to locate it, and the clerk said rotely, “Will you stand, sir?” The speaker stood and about half the people in attendance recognized him as Philip Hadi.
There was a long, uncertain pause; everyone gradually turned from Hadi back to the clerk, waiting for some kind of procedural rule to be invoked so that everyone would know what happened next. The clerk knew the rule, but was a little too intimidated to enforce it. “Yes?” he said finally.
“Okay, well, I wrote down a few things,” Hadi said. He still wore the black fleece vest over the white dress shirt; it had come to seem less ridiculous, Mark thought as he watched from the back row, as if Hadi had waited it out, until it had become not the way in which he tried to look like others, but the way in which he looked precisely like himself. Plus it was cold in that gym. All those years with Marty in charge and they never even upgraded the heat. “The town of Howland, which I have come to regard as home, is vulnerable,” Hadi read. “Its economy is shrinking, its tax base is eroding, and it is not, with due respect to those present who have done their civic-minded best, professionally managed. After much consideration, I have decided to volunteer my name as a candidate for First Selectman.” He folded the paper but remained standing. He didn’t seem nervous exactly, Gerry thought. Irritated? That wasn’t it either. He didn’t relish doing this—commanding the attention of a roomful of people—but he didn’t doubt he was capable of it.
Two or three people started clapping, but they couldn’t get anything larger going, so they stopped.
“Well, it wasn’t really time for statements yet, but okay,” the clerk said. “Are you willing to answer any questions this meeting’s attendees may have?”
“Sure,” Hadi said. “Should I come up there?”
“No. Folks, let’s try to do this in an orderly fashion. If necessary we—”
“How can we afford you?” someone asked. “We can’t possibly pay what a guy like you is used to.”
“I will forgo a salary,” Hadi said. “So that’s, what, twenty-four thousand back into the town’s operating budget right there.”
“What about the property tax hike? Will there be any more of that, in order to get us out of that vulnerability you think we’re in?”
“Right, that. We can roll back last year’s tax increase right away. It wasn’t really necessary.”
“It wasn’t necessary?” Maeve blurted out.
“It was made to keep the government itself going,” Hadi said simply. “It did nothing for growth per se. A government’s nature—and this is by no means a problem unique to Howland—is to eventually become both means and end, self-sustaining, self-justifying. There is a lot of it we can simply get rid of.”
“And replace it with what? You?”
“And replace it with nothing. I don’t want to be all sentimental and say that the people of a small Massachusetts town like this have historically been able to take care of themselves, and of one another. But I will say that where a genuine, common need arises, hardworking, exemplary American citizens will seize the opportunity to fill that need.”
The old gym was dead silent. From across the aisle Mark exchanged a wide-eyed look with his brother; had they been sitting together it would have been hard to resist the vestigial, loving urge to express his excitement by punching Gerry in the arm. He’d thought about running himself, but this was so much better.
“Part of that budget you think we don’t need,” Maeve said, trying to control an emotional tremor in her voice, “is a reserve in case of emergency. Some years it snows twenty times instead of ten. Last year the septic overflowed right by the bandstand. What happens in a case like that? You want people to come together on their own, but sometimes things happen where you can’t wait around for that.”
Hadi seemed to think about that one for a moment. Then he lifted his head and shrugged. “I’ll pay for it,” he said.
“What do you mean, you’ll pay for it? How do you get paid back, if you’re cutting all our taxes?”
“I know every detail of what Howland spends, in good times and in bad, and frankly, it’s not that complicated. I want this town to succeed without losing its character. I want it to thrive. In order to see that happen, I’ll meet temporary or emergency needs with my own money if necessary. I can afford it. This place means that much to me. But of course this is a democracy, and it’s up to you.”
He sat.
Somebody elbowed Abigail lightly in the side and said, “Shouldn’t you be writing this down?”
One person let out a sort of celebratory whoop, and the clerk overreacted by shouting, “If we do not maintain order here, I will instruct Trooper Constable to remove any protesters from the hall. Trooper?” Constable, in the back of the gym by the door, separated his shoulders from the wall and stood up straight but otherwise remained where he was. Just as he did so, his pager went off. He had his radio with him, volume off while he was in the meeting; he held up an apologetic finger even though no one was looking at him anymore, and left the room, still hearing the clerk’s miffed voice as the door swung shut on him in the hallway.
The page was from 911 dispatch in Pittsfield. There was a report of a domestic incident within the Howland zone, out on Route 155, which figured. He pushed open the gym door again, just to make sure things weren’t degenerating, and heard the clerk, his evening now totally off track, saying something about a petition; people were already noisily pushing back their folding chairs to stand in line to sign it. Tom Allerton looked like he’d been kicked in the nuts, Constable thought. Couldn’t happen to a nicer guy. He let the door close again and went out to the parking lot. The clerk would be pissed at him, but so what, he was no security guard, sometimes he had a real job to do.
The cruiser roared up the empty roads. He could have put the siren on, or the lights, but there was no need, his path was clear. The trees were at the moment in the season where one good, windy storm would
bring most of the leaves down in one shot. Soon he hit the flat, exposed stretch of 155 that was all locals—no country cottages or hidden manors out there. Just regular houses, barely set back from the road, lit by the flicker of oversized faces on TV screens.
Rich people, he thought. The world shaped itself around their impulses. This would be something new under the sun, for sure—if the town voted basically to let some sentimental billionaire pay their bills, so they wouldn’t have to—but he was not immune to its attractions. He was tired of what he had to go through for the simplest things: a new roadside-assistance kit for the cruiser, for instance, after he’d used up the flares in the old one. That one had taken months. The forms he had to fill out, the begging, the dismissal. Maybe this would work better—just knock on a door and say, Hey, Rich Guy, the town’s one cop car is on bald tires, can you peel me off a couple hundred bucks? Thanks a lot! Simpler, for sure.
He rolled into the driveway and got out of the cruiser. He stood still for a moment, and heard nothing from inside, and then just as he took a step forward he heard a loud thud. He trotted up the steps and knocked loudly; he put his ear to the door, heard nothing, and took a step back. He wasn’t yet fully engaged but adrenaline had pretty well vaporized anything he might have been thinking about a few seconds before. “Police!” he said. The knob turned and the door parted about a quarter of the way. A man stood there too calmly, with a look of which Constable had learned to be wary. “Help you?” the man said.
“Evening. I’m Trooper Constable. Sorry to disturb you but I’m responding to a 911 call at this address.”
“Oh yeah? I don’t think the call came from here, though. Did it come from here?”
He’d been drinking. In his head Constable went through the checklist. The man’s left hand, on the doorjamb, bore a wedding ring, so he said, “Sir, is your wife home?”
“I like being called sir,” he said.
“What is your name?”
“Barrett Taylor.”
“Mr. Taylor, is your wife here with you? I need to see her.”
“You need to see her?” he said, smiling. “What kind of a perverted game are you running here?”
And suddenly it fell into place for Constable, with the instinct that came from having responded to a couple dozen of these calls: while this was probably not a big deal, the guy was trying to goad him into making it one. Confrontations like this escalated, for no good reason, all the time. “Mr. Taylor, I just need to see that your wife is here, confirm that she’s unharmed, and then I can go and leave you alone, all right? I’m sorry but we all have rules at our job and those are mine.”
“I love the way you guys talk,” Barrett said. “Hey, honey? Come here and let Officer Friendly confirm that you are unharmed.”
He opened the door another two inches and his wife’s head appeared under his arm. Her face was red, but that could have been from a lot of things.
“Man, go the fuck away,” she said. Her husband smiled proudly.
“Ma’am, did you place a call to 911—”
“That was our bitch neighbor. You should arrest her, you’re so hot to arrest somebody. See, that’s the problem with our world today. Everybody’s gotta be up in everybody else’s shit.”
“Ma’am, have you been drinking?”
“How is that any of your fucking business!” she screamed. “Aren’t you ashamed that this is your job?” Her husband let his hand fall lightly on her shoulder. Constable tried to peer around them, into their living room, such as it was. He saw clothes and dirty plates and a gym bag but no drug paraphernalia and nothing that indicated the presence of children.
“As you can see, she’s peachy,” Barrett said.
“I fucking hate cops!” she yelled, and she wrestled the door’s edge away from her husband and slammed it in Constable’s face. He stood there. He had reasonable cause to enter their home, without a doubt. And without a doubt that would end with his cuffing and booking one or both of them. Which would take him hours. And accomplish what? They were right: Why did he need to be there? On whose behalf? Screw these lowlifes. Let them stay behind closed doors and drag each other down in private. The idea that their personal problems were somehow his problem was a magical idea, a construct, some Mayberry shit, and it stopped being true the moment you stopped believing it was true. In the cold moonlight he radioed dispatch that the 911 call was resolved, and got home to his own family before the kids’ bedtime.
March: Turnips, carrots, javelin parsnips, arugula, mâche, rainbow chard, Finn Dorset lambs, Tamworth pigs, Belgian endives, cardoons, honey.
The restaurant was rarely more than two-thirds booked, but that was the way Todd liked it. Better atmosphere in the dining room, better pace and attitude in the kitchen. More of a learning atmosphere, like a teaching hospital as opposed to a battlefield, a MASH unit. He had the time and the patience to explain what he was doing, not only to the diners but to the young sous-chefs and line cooks and culinary students who cycled through. Students at CIA, forty or fifty miles down the Hudson, could sign up for a full-credit internship with him now, and why wouldn’t they? Cutting-edge work was being done here—not in terms of technique, which had become a sort of louche dead end anyway, but in terms of philosophy—and the countryside was beautiful, even in winter, especially for those unused to it.
As for the economics of a two-thirds-full dining room, that was not a concern. Pricing wasn’t something they needed to worry about. The restaurant had no menu, just a nightly prix fixe for whatever Todd felt like preparing; right now it was $195, but he could have doubled it if he wanted to. He didn’t want to price the locals out completely. Let them come for a special occasion. Still, he knew from his nightly tour through the dining room—talking to them, although he could have told just by looking at them—that he was serving mostly out-of-towners now. The restaurant had become a destination. The maître d’ had a list of local hotel and B&B recommendations for people who called for reservations from the city, people who maybe didn’t realize how hard it would be to make the long drive back home after being fed like that.
And the writers were starting to sniff around, the journalists and critics, from the Times, from Gourmet. Once word got out that way, they’d be booked solid every night. He should enjoy these easy servings while he could.
April: Ramps, shiitake mushrooms, fiddlehead ferns, watercress, asparagus, rhubarb, Swiss chard, beets, French fingerling potatoes, Finn Dorset lambs, Toulouse goslings, Tamworth pigs, leeks, horseradish, mâche, dandelion greens.
Diners were given, in lieu of a traditional menu, a booklet listing by month the local, seasonal ingredients from which the courses of the evening’s meal would be assembled. They were also given a small pencil, in case they wanted to record, for memory’s sake, any details or impressions. The dinner was usually sixteen or seventeen courses, so he found people appreciated the thoughtfulness of leaving space for notes.
You wanted to give them what was seasonal, what was local—to restrict and awaken them, as most high-end restaurants did not trouble themselves to do, to the specific place that they were in, and to the revolutions of time—but then it was also a matter of educating local suppliers about what else they might be growing: produce that would thrive up here, in every natural sense, but that few Berkshire family farms were familiar with. The stuff he got from Jack Whalen, for instance—the beets, the asparagus—was fantastic. Todd knew enough about soil to know that purple kohlrabi would do well there too. But Jack didn’t know from kohlrabi, because no one up here ate it, and he acted like it was some sort of hybrid or modern genetic experiment. Todd didn’t push him. He went over to the farm once a week or so, to be neighborly and to check on what was coming in. Even that much felt like an imposition; Jack’s wife Joanna, who’d had some kind of a stroke and walked and talked with difficulty, insisted on serving him coffee every time—they were very old-school that way—even though her efforts to get around the kitchen provoked visible agony both in her and i
n her husband. Finally one day Todd blurted out, and then was forced to maintain, the outright lie that he’d given up coffee. He worried that Jack might spot the travel mug that was always in his car.
Now, in April, he brought them a plastic container full of a kind of turnip candy—he didn’t know what else to call it—that he’d made using liquid nitrogen and the crate of turnips Jack had loaded into the bed of Todd’s truck the week prior.
“I served it Saturday for one of the dessert courses,” he told them. “People went crazy for it. You can’t even tell what it is until you bite into it.”
Jack tried one, with a strange, preoccupied, businesslike expression as he chewed; Todd thought he was trying to work out the flavors, but then he looked at his wife and shook his head, just barely. “Too hard for Jo to chew,” he said. “But it’s interesting. Thanks.”
The men went out to the fields. Todd squatted down and crumbled some of the soil between his fingers. Lightly he touched one of his fingertips to his tongue. Jack looked off toward the foothills as if embarrassed. The sky had that great quality of early spring, cold whenever a cloud crossed the sun, raw and promising, scoured by the wind. Todd talked up the kohlrabi, gave some stats off the top of his head about the pH balance it left in the soil, said he knew some other restaurants in western Mass would probably come for it too if they knew it was locally grown, and he wouldn’t stand in the way of that even though he would have loved exclusivity. He understood a farmer needed to make a living.
“ ’Twas ever thus, as my dad used to say,” said Jack.
Todd said he would assume the costs of the first planting, if Jack would tell him what they were. Just as a gamble that he was right, that it would thrive up here.
“If you say so,” Jack said.
Todd beamed. “Glad you’re as excited about it as I am,” he said teasingly.
“Well, it doesn’t much matter what I grow here anymore,” Jack said. “Money is money.”
