by Jane Langton
“Not at this time.”
“I see. Well, now, sir—”
“I bid you good morning.”
When Jack walked into the office, still a little dizzy from his upward flight, Grandison beckoned him to the map table. It was a very large table, but it was dwarfed by the space around it, a room that was made even larger by the immense views surrounding it on three sides. Oversize maps could be spread out on the table, then swept off to be replaced by others. There were small-scale maps of the entire North Shore, the Berkshires, the Cape, there were mid-scale maps of towns and cities and large-scale maps of single streets and individual parcels of real estate. Jefferson Grandison could focus the zoom lens of his interest swiftly, rushing down from far away to stare at single souls laid bare. In the company of Jack Markey, he often looked down on the creation in this way, gazing at the land of Judah, the river Jordan, the waters of Nimron, the wilderness of Moab.
Today their attention was directed at Concord, Massachusetts, and the intersection of Route 2 with the Walden Pond road, Route 126. Jack’s current project was nearby, Walden Green, a mixed-use complex on a parcel belonging to the local high school on the northwest side of the intersection.
Grandison touched with his pencil the forty-acre site of the Concord landfill on the other side of the highway. “It’s being phased out, you say, the landfill?”
“Right. They don’t have much room left for that old-fashioned kind of refuse-disposal. Oh, they’re doing what they can. They’re recycling. But pretty soon their only choice will be a transfer station in the same place. Well, you know what that’s like. Big expense. Everything sorted and trucked away.”
“The landfill belongs to the town of Concord?”
“That’s right. To the town.”
“Which is, I believe, in a state of fiscal crisis?” Grandison’s pencil drifted slowly down Route 126 and stopped. “And this, what’s this next door?”
“Pond View. It’s a trailer park.”
“Surprising, a landfill and a trailer park so near to Walden Pond.”
“Yes, but the trailer park is being phased out, too. Those people only have a life tenancy. When they die, nobody else can come in.”
“According to this map, the trailer park belongs to the commonwealth of Massachusetts, which is also in a perilous financial condition. How old are the tenants, roughly speaking?”
“I don’t know.” Jack made a joke. “Somebody might set a few of those mobile homes on fire.”
Grandison twiddled his pencil and said nothing. The pencil made meaningless scrawls across the parcel known as Pond View.
When the interview was over, Jack entered the glass elevator, pushed the button, and fell out of the sky, plunging earthward, emerging on Huntington Avenue breathless after his headlong descent.
On the sidewalk he had to step around the scattered possessions of a bag lady who was sitting just outside the glassy entrance of the office tower. Jack tossed a quarter in her direction and walked quickly away.
Sarah Peel reached for the quarter and zipped it into her coin purse, but she was not grateful. Sarah knew that no kindly Lord kept watch over this sparrow’s fall. Only the cold March wind, blustering down the narrow shaft of one Boston street or another, affected the course of her days. Sometimes it blew dust into her face, sometimes sleet and snow, and sometimes money. It was a random process, entirely without intention to help or to harm.
3
I have travelled a good deal in Concord …
Walden, “Economy”
There were two visitors to the Pond View Trailer Park on the day Charlotte Harris rushed out of her mobile home to toss her letter into the cab of the small truck belonging to Julian Snow.
The first was Homer Kelly. When Homer set out on that June morning he had no intention of visiting the trailer park. His destination was Goose Pond, a miniature body of water lying in a deep kettle hole just east of Pond View.
Actually he wasn’t approaching the real Goose Pond. Homer was seeking a vision in his mind, a wild place described in the journals of Henry Thoreau. Like Jack Markey and Jefferson Grandison, Homer was studying a map of Concord. His was an old one. The forking rivers ran across it from lower left to upper right, lined with little symbols meaning marshy places—the Sudbury Meadows, the Great Meadows, Gowing’s Swamp. Converging lines were hills—Annursnac, Curly Pate, and Thoreau’s favorite lookout over the Sudbury River, the rocky ledge he called the Cliffs. The ponds were marked on the map, too—Walden, Bateman’s, Flint’s, and the wide bend of the river called Fair Haven Bay where Homer lived with his wife, Mary, in a small house on the shore.
There was no Route 2 on Homer’s old map, there were no housing developments, no hospital complex, no regional high school, no correctional facility, no fashionable shops. In those days Walden Pond had not been afflicted with a highway, a landfill, a trailer park, and a thousand visitors a day on hot summer Sundays. The railroad, it was true, ran past the pond, and there had been mills and a leadworks in the southwest part of town. But mostly Concord had been a network of woodlots and farms, with a few stores on the main street called the Milldam.
Looking at the map, consulting Thoreau’s journal, Homer could imagine the mid-nineteenth-century town. Daily he studied the record of Thoreau’s explorations of his native village. Daily he set off to see the places for himself, looking for the wellsprings of Thoreau’s prose. The words had been written down on paper, but to Homer they were attached to the landscape, stuck to the clapboards of houses, written on the leaves of trees, growing like lichen on the stone walls, ground into the soil by Thoreau’s stout boots. Homer didn’t know what he would learn by his explorations, but he was convinced that he couldn’t understand the words without seeing the landscape from which they had come.
It was good to be back. During the last academic year, Homer and Mary Kelly had abandoned New England for Italy. They had taken a sabbatical from their teaching jobs in Cambridge and their transcendental heroes in Concord, to go whoring after foreign gods. Now they were burrowing back into the nest.
For Homer this morning the goal was Goose Pond. Henry Thoreau had once scared up a pair of black ducks at Goose Pond. He had seen waterbugs dimpling the surface. Perhaps on this warm June morning a century and a half later there would still be ducks on the water and a new race of waterbugs, the remote descendants of Henry Thoreau’s.
“And who knows?” said Homer, putting a banana in his pocket as he walked out of the house. “I might hear my first wood thrush.”
“Not there,” said Mary. “Not at Goose Pond. You’ll never hear a wood thrush so close to Route Two.”
Mary was wrong, but by the time Homer found his way to the shore of the pond, coming in from the housing development on the eastern side, the local wood thrush had stopped singing. Homer could hear only the roar of traffic on Route 2 and the drone of mosquitoes diving in for the kill as he splashed around the pond in his rubber boots.
Soon the mosquitoes were floating vials of Homer Kelly’s blood.
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Grateful acknowledgement is made for permission to reprint extracts from The Divine Comedy by Dante, translated by Dorothy L. Sayers, published by Penguin
Books Ltd.
copyright © 1991 by Jane Langton
drawings by the author
978-1-4532-5229-1
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