The orioles returned, and the apple trees budded, blossomed, came into full leaf. The poppies split, one or two a day, papery splashes of red and pink amid the hardy green weeds that had grown up overnight. Dez heard people complaining in the Handy, on the streets—Jacob Solomon hadn’t shown up with any of his deliveries. He let Ethel Bentonford down regarding a special red yarn order. She grew increasingly queasy.
On May 24, a Friday, Dez overheard Al Stein in the Handy Grocery telling Ethel Bentonford that he’d had a telegram from Jacob, promising delivery of the inventory Al arranged to buy. “Should include that yarn you’ve been on about.”
Ethel grumbled that next Thursday was Memorial Day and that meant she wouldn’t get the yarn for two weeks.
Dez looked down at the bar of Nason’s soap she was holding. Addis Proulx had died on May 2. Twenty-two days ago. Jacob couldn’t possibly be so busy he couldn’t send some kind of word. Maybe he was embarrassed. Maybe he was doing what a lot of men do when they are afraid of a woman’s passion, or their own, when they don’t know what to do with it: disappear.
11
Years later, when Dez was hard at work on the Cascade murals, choosing the kind of storytelling details that would translate well to canvas, she would come back to this quiet Wednesday night before Memorial Day, a night so moonless and thick with clouds she couldn’t see her feet as they hit the pavement, could hear only the sounds of night birds and insects, the roaring of the Cascade Falls. She would remember the shadowy, hulking shapes that were the closed-up summer homes, the empty look of the town—a single light in the police station in the basement of Town Hall, the hotel sitting dark at the end of Elm Street, with just the small flicker of a reading lamp shining from within Mrs. Mayhew’s private apartment. She would paint an entire panel devoted to the dimmed, defeated look of an American small town in 1935, a night scene with one bright spot: the rear of the playhouse, glowing with amber light, like a beacon.
That morning, Asa had asked for the keys to the playhouse. He and a few men needed a private place to talk about what to do, he said, but he’d been vague about just what it was they thought they might do. And he wouldn’t be pressed. “Not sure. Maybe nothing.” And he wouldn’t be home for supper; he’d grab something at the Brilliant.
Dez fetched the playhouse keys from where she kept them safe inside a rosewood box on a shelf in her studio, then, hearing Asa up in the bathroom, peeked into the study. A surveyor’s map sat on his desk, dated 1899, depicting the entirety of the Spaulding property—forty-two acres, most of it forest, that hugged the southeastern bank of the Cascade River. Clipped to the map was a multipage chart, handwritten in faded blue ink, that noted seasonal water levels from spring 1869 until the day in July 1901 when a carriage accident ended Asa’s grandfather’s life.
What was Asa planning? At Dr. Proulx’s funeral, she’d looked around the crowd after the service and found him in the pastor’s back parlor, speaking in a low voice to a few of his friends. A week later, he’d spent Sunday afternoon tramping around the woods. When he returned at dusk, his clothes smelled of wind and pine pitch. For three or four nights in a row, while Dez was washing up after supper, instead of going back to the drugstore for six thirty, he spent time at his desk with the door closed.
The night was warm, so Dez was in luck. The men had cracked a window, one that offered a narrow view of the stage and front seats. If she strained, she would be able to hear. Bud Foster, Pete Masterson, Dick Adams, and Bill Hoden all sat in the front row in the same way: pitched forward, legs crossed at the ankles, elbows bent and hands clasped, listening to Asa, who stood at the base of the stage, talking and gesturing. A pile of small rocks sat on the stage directly behind him.
“Secret Pond,” Dez heard him say. She cocked her right ear toward the stage and covered her left ear with her hand to hear more clearly. He was talking about opening the small diversion channel his great-grandfather had constructed, for assistance in dry summers, at the inlet that led to the pond called “Secret” because its point of diversion from the Cascade River was basically undetectable. The pond sat deep within a glen, hidden by giant ferns and thick pines. They had once picnicked there.
“Bud,” Asa said. “You remember the dam, right?”
Asa had once explained the dam to Dez, but she didn’t understand the connection, and apparently neither did Bud, who nodded, but in a confused way.
Asa explained: the Cascade River was no pebbly stream but a broad expanse of water, with an abundant flow that made it desirable to the state. But past Whistling Falls, past Pine Point, it underwent a number of twists and turns to skinny out right by his land before filling out again on its way toward the center of Cascade. Less than a quarter mile from that skinnying, Asa’s grandfather had enlarged a pond on his property, and connected it to the main river by digging a narrow channel. Then he built a dam so he could flood the pond with river water whenever drought threatened. And although the flooding made it possible for him to water his crops, the leaching of the river lowered water levels only subtly, almost undetectably, the way a long drought might.
“The dam’s been sealed shut for more than thirty years so there are roots and brush and trees grown up around the basin,” Asa said. “The pond itself is just a dry hole right now. It’s filled in with a lot of silt.” He turned toward the stage and used the stones to demonstrate how he planned to pull the dam apart. “First thing, we have to dig out the pond. Then we dig the diversion channel wider and deeper.”
Someone asked why.
Asa held up a finger to say I’m getting to that, but Dez lost the explanation as, a mile away, a train wailed, followed by faint, intrusive chugging that intensified over two minutes and culminated in a long shriek of steel and whistle.
When quiet returned, Asa was still talking and the other men had gotten to their feet to crowd around the stones on the stage. “If we divert water from that stretch of the river where it twists so much,” Asa said, “we will reduce the flow into Cascade. Overflow from Secret Pond will flow toward the Whistling Falls branch of the river. On the whole, our water levels will appear lower than they should. It might look like we’ve got too much ledge here in Cascade. Which we do, and this will help to illustrate that.”
Dez inched up the window. Someone said something she couldn’t make out.
“Don’t you see?” Asa was getting exasperated. “When the state performs those final tests downstream at Pine Point, they’ll see all this abundant water in Whistling Falls and less of a flow to Cascade. Leaving them, I hope, to reason that west of Whistling Falls there’s lots of bedrock, like at Midland. Expensive bedrock that will require dynamite, blasting, and a bigger payroll. Whistling Falls will look much more easily floodable, nothing but soft fertile valley, full of silt.”
“I sort of see,” Bud said. “But the idea feels sort of hopeless—too small to make a difference.”
“And too complicated,” Dick said. “These people are engineers, Asa. I don’t think you know what you’re up against.”
“And they’ve done most of the tests already,” Bud added.
Pete stepped between Asa and Dick, shaking his head at Asa’s rocks. Pete had managed a large clock factory in Amherst before he lost his job, and was probably the most logical of the group. “This skinny part of the river will mean nothing once they start blasting. It’s a waste of time, Asa.”
“The point is,” Asa said patiently, “every builder avoids ledge, and blasting, if he can help it. You can’t tell me they’re not working with a tight budget. If we succeed at this, it can make the decision to choose Whistling Falls easier—less work, fewer costs.”
Pete considered. “Good point. But did you hear about Zeke’s friend at The Boston Evening Transcript? They’re sending a photographer and reporter out here to write about how we’ve been twice burned. They’re going to focus on the golf course and how crazy it would be to tear it down. Why don’t we just hope for a good story and put it in the hands of fate?�
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“Because we should be the masters of our fate! And because this plan might work!” The passion in Asa’s voice made Pete step back a little, as did Dez. It highlighted a quality of natural authority that she hadn’t realized he possessed. “I’m not saying the newspaper article won’t help,” he said. “It might. But we’ve got to try everything. Secret Pond is very aptly named. If a person doesn’t know about it, there’s really not much of a chance he’ll find it, at least not at this level of planning.”
Pete picked up one of Asa’s rocks and turned it about in his hand. Word had it that he spent a lot of time drinking at the roadhouse that had sprung up out on Route 13 as soon as Prohibition ended. “But is it fair to Whistling Falls?”
The question caught Asa off-guard. He pulled off his spectacles and rubbed the bridge of his nose. “No, it’s not, is it?” He shrugged, accepting the acknowledgment of something about himself he hadn’t known was there. “But I’m afraid it’s every man for himself. And Whistling Falls doesn’t have half our houses, no churches, no school, just the grange. They just don’t stand to lose so much.”
Maybe every person’s first reaction to a problem was instinctively selfish, Dez thought. Maybe overcoming that instinct was what differentiated the truly good from everyone else.
“It’s worth a try, I think,” Bill said. “How’s the water pressure out there?”
“Slow and steady,” Asa said, shooting Bill a grateful look.
“The trick,” Bill said, “will be timing it right.”
“I’ve worked out some calculations. I figure that opening the dam a week before they start their tests should be about right. But we need a good four days to dig. Secret Pond’s more secret than pond at this point. We’ll need to start tomorrow.”
“But the holiday,” Bud said. “What about the parade, the picnic?”
“We’ll dig at dawn and you can all make it to the picnic by noontime. You can tell your families I’ve hired you to clear brush and work my land for me. Which is what I’m doing.” He looked each man, one at a time, in the eye. “I’m hiring you.”
All four men were out of work. Everyone knew that Bud had been forced to apply for the new relief program; others wouldn’t be far behind.
“We all live here, Asa,” Bud said. “You don’t have to pay us.”
“I want to pay and I insist on it. I can give you each a dollar fifty a day.”
There was a shocked silence that even Dez was part of, then Dick murmured, “That’s more than fair, Asa, but we can’t take pay for this. If it works, we all benefit.”
They began talking over one another. “No.” Asa broke in firmly. “You don’t all benefit. I do. You’ll be on my land, giving up your time, and I’m the one who owns forty-two acres they’ll have to pay assessed value to acquire if we lose.”
So it was decided: they would begin digging in the morning, hiking into Secret Pond so as to arrive by dawn. “If we work hard,” Asa said, “we can be done by Sunday. According to Zeke, surveyors are going to start first thing Monday. They’ll be setting out their test sticks everywhere. That’s when I’ll open the dam. Seven days of water draining from the river should be enough. By the following week, when they check their levels, hopefully they’ll lean toward Cascade being too full of bedrock.”
Bud pointed out that Saturday was Asa’s day, wasn’t it, to go on his monthly supply trip to Hartford?
“I can hold off a week.” Asa folded the map and laid it on the stage. “One last point,” he said. “We don’t tell our wives. We don’t tell anybody. If the water people find out, we’ll have wasted our time.”
“What about Dez?” Dick said. “Won’t she notice us going into the woods?”
“We’ll come in from the east, near Pine Point, early. Four thirty. And I’ll need her to work the drugstore this weekend anyway.”
Across the common, the departing train shrieked in the dark. Dez could feel the reverberations of the rails under her feet as the train rolled away. If Cascade was taken, the rails would be lifted, the trains routed somewhere else. The river itself, which was oblivious to everyone so feverishly discussing it, would keep flowing no matter what the state decided. The Cascade River had flowed for—how long? When did the rivers begin? After the Ice Age? After a great melting to be sure, a gushing, a releasing of something central, and then all those tributaries carving new pathways. She imagined Cascade dismantled, every last house gone, imagined a dike, the river rising, rising, spilling over its sides, filling the valley. Then, what? Water. Silence.
Recording the drama of the choice—that was an idea that might sell. Maybe if the drama was portrayed in a visual way, people would want to champion Cascade. She thought back on the mural panel sketches she had jotted down at town meeting. She could scale the mural idea down to watercolor illustrations that could be printed in a magazine. She could draw a scene much like this, a meeting of determined men. She pulled her sketchpad out of her pocket, pressing it to the wall to scribble characteristics to remember: Bud’s pessimism and rounded shoulders contrasted with Asa’s raised arms, his zeal. She worked in a quick and focused manner, recognizing that she had received a kind of gift, a good opportunity—a way to achieve some notice and help Cascade at the same time. She, too, would work through the holiday—she had never cared for parades and could go to the picnic late. If Asa needed her at the drugstore over the weekend, she could bring her work and do her best to be productive between customers.
She slipped into the darkness of the common to avoid the men as they disbanded. Between all of them—Asa, herself, Zeke’s friend at the newspaper—someone’s plan had to make a difference. If the engineers thought Cascade was too full of ledge, if the reporter wrote a good story, if she herself illustrated the drama and managed to sell it to a magazine, if Cascade’s story caught the public’s attention, the public might clamor for Cascade’s rescue. And there really was less work involved if the state chose Whistling Falls. The engineers might take the first new numbers they came up with and make the easy decision. The governor couldn’t possibly care which town the engineers decided on, so long as Boston got its drinking water.
She was almost to Main Street when a voice called out her name. Standing in the puddle of light shining down from the streetlamp outside Stein’s, beckoning, was Lil Montgomery, calling out to ask what Dez was doing in town so late, and wanting to know if Dez would like to take in a movie sometime next week.
Dez hung back a second, observing, taking stock. Lil was transparently livelier with a man in her life, and that was a tiny bit repulsive. But wasn’t she being hypocritical to think that? Hadn’t she herself brightened on Thursdays?
She almost said yes. It could be a bit of fun to see a movie. But she would need time, this weekend, to work on the sample drawings, and Asa had mentioned he needed her to work the fountain. On Monday, when he opened the dam, she would start telephoning magazine editors. If she was successful, she would be busy.
“Maybe,” she said, not promising anything. “I’ll have to let you know.”
12
The playmaster’s daughter. That was what he called her—the man who showed up at the drugstore the day after Memorial Day.
First thing that morning, Dez walked to the drugstore with a bag containing her sketchbook and pencils. The town was quiet, quiet and hot. If she were to illustrate it, she would smear paint to convey the overwhelming sultriness, would use shades of unrelenting color—harsh yellows and whites that refused to be toned down.
She usually enjoyed working the fountain—people came in and talked; it was a chance to catch up, and she liked the quick pace of grill cooking. But today she needed to sketch, and the most drawing she could realistically hope to get in would be first thing and then maybe during the lull after lunch. If there even was a lull. You could never tell. And she still had to get to the library at some point, search through periodicals and telephone directories for names and numbers of editors.
She unlocked the door
. Inside, the window awnings provided an illusion of coolness. The soda fountain’s chrome taps gleamed. There was the humming sound of the Frigidaire, the creak and whir of the overhead fan when she yanked on the chain pull. She checked the ice supply, the lemons, the fountain syrup containers, lit the pilot on the grill. Then she sat down with her sketchbook to work on the idea she’d come up with.
Behind the railroad station, a rocky hill had been looming over the valley for thousands of years. It had watched over Indian longhouses, it had watched over settlers building homes; it would watch over any future destruction. She decided it could serve as the recognizable landmark in a series of panels that depicted different eras of Cascade history, from Indian times to the present.
Using a recognizable topographical landmark was an old idea, but one Dez had always liked. Her mother had owned a book that contained reproductions of one particular example, Thomas Cole’s Course of Empire series. As a child, Dez had studied every detail of the color plates, mesmerized by the change that the passing of time could bring upon a place. Cole’s series consisted of five paintings that traced the rise and fall of a nonspecific civilization. Each painting contained, as focal point, the same erratic boulder—a giant misfit rock, perched on a cliff, deposited randomly by a long-ago melting glacier.
Light fell through the slatted blinds onto the worn wooden floor and the overhead fan spun slowly as she worked out her first scene, an Indian longhouse shadowed by the rocky hill. She had a good half hour to herself before the bell on the door started jangling—a passerby in for a vanilla Coke, Bo Harris in for a cup of hot water, fumbling in his pocket for a tea bag. Then it was one after the other, people in for coffee and grilled muffins at first, then, as noon approached, for franks and hamburgers and Cokes.
The last lunch straggler left by two, and Dez was at the sink, up to her elbows in lukewarm gray suds, when the door jangled again. A middle-aged man wearing a much-too-small brown woolen suit that looked like it was suffocating him peered in with almost comical hope. “Are you open?” At Dez’s nod, he pulled off his hat with some relief, revealing a dark red crease across his forehead where the brim cut into his skin. His face was pink and damp.
Cascade Page 11
