Cascade (15 page)

When Dez and Jacob looked doubtful, he became insistent. “The same thing happened in the 1870s when they made a reservoir out of the Sudbury River. An old man in Ashland hung himself. Couldn’t handle the thought of losing his house. It’s right there in black and white in a newspaper down at the library, Betty’s been showing everyone. And they’re moving full steam ahead, a crew coming in next Monday to get the old boys’ camp ready for the engineers. That’s going to be their base. Just one piece for you, Dez.”

The envelope was postmarked Worcester. Payment for the portrait, finally, hopefully. She tucked it in her pocket, and through Jimmy’s chatter, she and Jacob looked at each other. She put a hand to her heart to calm herself, willing Jimmy to leave, but he only kept talking, then asked for a lift back into town. Dez was the end of the line, he said, and his knee was bothering him.

Jacob lifted his shoulders in a subtle, helpless gesture. It was getting late anyway.

When they drove away, she ran inside the house and unsnapped the front of her dress in one ripping motion. She reached down. No blood. Just one trembling finger against tissue that had never felt so swollen and soft.

She rinsed her hands under the tap, not knowing what to think, how to feel. There were rules for this kind of behavior. Guilt was supposed to
be felt. But she felt only agitation. She wanted to run down the road after him. She wanted to jump into his truck and drive away and never come back. What would happen between them now? What, realistically, could happen? Nothing, she knew, but that didn’t stop her from wanting to see him again, immediately, now, forever. The need felt like it might possibly consume her.

We find ourselves alive here, she thought, born into a cultural set of what’s right and wrong that often differs from other cultures, other time periods. You learn to trust your feelings—the sick knowledge that something’s inherently wrong, or the sure certainty that something is right. The connection with Jacob felt only right.

S
he couldn’t stop it. The thought of him was there when she opened her eyes in the morning; it was there when she stooped down to retrieve the newspaper, when she poured milk for Asa, when she glanced at her reflection in the mirror, when she watched her brush lay each stroke onto the tree painting, and then, finally, when she pushed it into the drying rack.

Days passed. The doctor from Athol officially pronounced Dr. Proulx’s death an accident. Without a note, he said, there was no way to know what the man’s intentions had been, and he had no interest in maligning a decent man’s reputation. His decision allowed for a prompt funeral, which Jacob did not attend, but then, Dez reasoned, would he have even known it was happening?

A week went by, and then another, and she was barely aware of the details of the days, so consumed was she by feverish ruminations. He must have gone to New York, she decided. Something was keeping him from coming, or from letting her know his plans. Surely he’d be back, probably when she least expected it.

In town, placards were posted everywhere—on the doors of Town Hall, on the bulletin board next to the Handy’s screen door, nailed to trees on each end of the common. Engineers and administrators of the state water commission would be arriving in Cascade the Monday after the holiday. Final tests would begin the first week of June.

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.

Y
ears 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?”

“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.”