Cascade (16 page)

“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.”

T
he 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.

“The druggist isn’t in,” Dez said. “But if you leave your prescription—” she gestured with her chin toward the countertop “—you can pick it up later tonight.”

“Oh, I don’t need anything filled,” he said. He hoisted himself onto a stool and folded his hands in front of him. “Unless a lemon Coke counts as medicine. I think it could, on such a hot day. I do think so.”

Dez suppressed a sigh. Judging by the size of him, he would want at least two, as well as a big lunch and probably a slice of pie. Then the late-afternoon crowd would wander in and she’d never get back to her drawings.

She dried her hands and offered him a menu, thick plastic edged in black. He studied it as she pumped cola syrup into a glass, added fizzy water and ice, cut into a fresh lemon and squeezed the juice into the mix. She poured the soda into a paper cone and set it into its chrome support. “Are you visiting?”

“I’ll be around for a while,” he said. He pursed his lips and made his eyes comically round, an expression that came across as effeminate. “And I’m afraid I won’t be very popular.” When she didn’t react, he said, “I’m from the water commission,” emphasizing the word
water
, and smiling with exaggerated gratitude when she didn’t then change her manner. He mouthed, as if whispering a secret, “I guess I’m already infamous. Some kid just threw a mud ball at my car.”

In the space of the next two minutes he told her what had to be his entire life history: about growing up in Athol, about his wife and son and how they were living in Newton but would likely head back to Athol now that he had landed this job, about his brother in Springfield, who had six kids and was let go from the Smithfield dartboard factory. “You never think about how things like that are made, do you? Dartboards.”

Dez admitted that no, she did not.

“Well, sure, someone’s got to make them. Joe used to sand the edges. I do what I can to help, but it’s been tough for me, too, till I got this job.”

He told her too much, things most people would never talk about. Like how at one low point last winter his wife went to the welfare for some oatmeal and they gave her some but not before some grudging worker said,
You got a husband and a fine boy?

“You might not see, out here, with farms and all, just how bad it is in the cities, but people are fighting over the garbage restaurants throw out. I couldn’t say no to a job. I hope people won’t hold it against me.”

He seemed too thin-skinned, too concerned with whether people liked him. “No,” Dez agreed. “You can’t say no to a job.”

His job would be to assist the commissioner, and he wasn’t supposed to start work until Monday but he had decided it was smart to come early. “Get the lay of the land. The boss shows up Monday, knows I’m on the ball.”

Asa and his diggers didn’t expect anyone in town until Monday. What if this man went exploring? With his large frame, he didn’t look like he did too much recreational walking, but you could never make assumptions. Secret Pond really was well named, but someone walking the course of the river might hear voices and investigate.

“So it’s between us and Whistling Falls,” she said, stating the fact to see if he might reveal information.

The last of his Coke zipped through the paper straw and disappeared. He glanced up, out of breath, and gestured for another. “Technically.”

“Technically?” She set to mixing the second Coke.

“Between you and me, Cascade’s the best choice, but we’d have less trouble if we took Whistling Falls.”

She nodded, hoping he’d say more, and slid the drink in front of him.

“I shouldn’t talk about it,” he said. He studied the menu. “You wouldn’t have any meat loaf, would you?” He was the kind of man whose face softened at the mention of food. “I could go for a nice meat loaf, makes my mouth water just to think about it.”

“No, no meat loaf.”

“I stopped in here once and there was a great meat loaf on the menu.”

“My mother-in-law’s, but she’s passed away, a couple of years now.”

He mumbled his sympathy. “And the playhouse—I saw it’s boarded up. Don’t tell me the playmaster’s gone, too.”

“My father. Did you know him?”

“He’s passed on?”

“At the New Year.”

He was effusive in his condolences, in his praise for her father.

“But how did you know him?”

“Oh, it’s a story,” he said, clasping his hands together. “One night he was playing that king who gets murdered by the fellow who wants his throne—what’s-his-name.” He snapped his fingers, tapped at his temple.

“Duncan.”

“No, the name of the play,” he said. “
Macbeth
, of course,
Macbeth
. Oops. I’m not supposed to say the name of that play, am I? It’s bad luck. Right?”