A Show of Hands Page 6

  “They’ve been in that house the whole time, I suppose,” said Crisp. “The McKenniston place . . .”

  “Oh, yes,” said Stump. “Yes, they have. Don’t remember who had it before they come out here, but, yes, they been there ever since. Big old place, it is.”

  “Twenty-five rooms,” said Petey with an air of authority. “Thirty-seven acres across the neck with deep water on both sides.”

  Pharty leaned toward Crisp and spoke in confidence. “Petey’s cousin Alvin was caretaker up there.”

  Crisp was impressed. “Oh, I see. Thirty-seven acres you say. Well, now. And twenty-five rooms?”

  “In two buildings,” Petey said.

  “Big job,” said Crisp. “Is he still at it?”

  “Who, Alvin?” said Pharty. “Heck, no. He shot himself in the knee when they was out jackin’ deer one night, back some time now. He don’t come out anymore. Stays indoors. Embarrassed, I guess.”

  Which explained why Crisp didn’t know him.

  “Should be,” said Stump.

  “Who’s caretakin’ up there nowadays, Pete?” Pharty said.

  “Mostly Sanborn,” Petey replied.

  Pharty raised his eyebrows to admit the information and nodded it to the back of his brain. “That’s right, too.”

  “Yup.”

  “Mostly Sanborn,” Crisp echoed, and everyone nodded. Patience was a fruitful tree. He stood up, picked a caramel and a few peanuts from the skillet, and bade good day to his comrades. “Guess I’ll go check the mail,” he said. He did.

  “Well, here’s a new one, Matty.” With one hand Crisp was hanging his coat up for the third time while holding an envelope and letter in the other. As he walked down the hall toward the kitchen, the coat fell on the floor.

  “You sold one?” said Matty. She stopped her little flurry of activity and emerged from the cloud of flour that settled about her—the goddess of baking.

  Crisp finger-boxed the glasses back up his nose. “Well, no. No, they didn’t buy it, but listen to this: ‘Dear C,’ that’s all it says, ‘C,’ like this, see?” He showed her the salutation. “ ‘Dear C, My name is Candace Walpole. I’m Ms. Davis’s secretary.’ Davis is the editor,” Crisp informed Matty over the rim of his spectacles. “ ‘Part of my job is to send out rejection letters, like the one enclosed, and sign Ms. Davis’s name. Whenever I have time, I try to read the poems. It doesn’t seem right that I should be sending rejection letters when I haven’t even read the material, although I’m doing it on her behalf.

  “ ‘I suppose that sounds silly. Be that as it may, I just wanted you to know I think your poem is wonderful. I cried when I read it. I wish my editor was of the same opinion. It reminded me of my Grandfather Chester, whom I dearly loved.

  “ ‘How little that calls itself art these days is beautiful. I just wanted to thank you.’ ”

  The look that Crisp gave Matty would have been no different if he’d been awarded the Nobel Prize for literature and nominated the nation’s Poet Laureate in the same breath. He’d touched the heart of a fellow human being with his words. He looked again at the letter. “ ‘For what it’s worth, Candace.’ ”

  Matty clapped the flour from her hands and patted him on the forearm. “Now, there, Winston. You see? That’s somethin’, isn’t it? I mean, think of all the poetry that woman sees, and she thought enough of yours to write that letter. That’s special. It just shows you, it’s a question of taste, is all. Just because someone’s an editor doesn’t mean they know a good thing when they see it. You wait, one of these days you’ll get one with sense.”

  Crisp smiled. He dropped the rejection into the trash without reading it and gently folded the secretary’s note and tucked it in his pocket. Matty’s eyes, softened at the edges, followed his actions. “May I see?” she said. Crisp laid the poem on the table and went to his room. Matty didn’t pick it up. She pulled out a chair, sat down beside the sheet of paper, and read.

  Closer to the fire, chair by chair

  Grow the old and gray men gathered there.

  How vivid now the fire has become

  Closer to the fire, one by one.

  Closer to the fire, chair by chair

  They shift and mumble, nod, and doze and stare

  And talk of all the things they’ve never done

  Closer to the fire, one by one.

  Closer to the fire, chair by chair

  The tide of life withdraws and leaves them there

  Despite the battles faced, and lost, and won

  Closer to the fire one by one.

  Closer to the fire, chair by chair

  Ancient faces lined by joy and care

  Wonder, now that all is said and done

  How they’re closer to the fire, one by one.

  Matty looked out the window and sighed. Somewhere out there, in the cold canyons of New York, was a kindred spirit named Candace Walpole. “Lasagna,” she said. It was Crisp’s favorite meal, so she made it every time he got a rejection.

  They’d had a lot of lasagna.

  Mostly Sanborn got his nickname by virtue of the fact that his father was unknown. His mother, however, was a Sanborn.

  He was a lot of person in a small space. Everything about him, taken separately, seemed big—his head, his hands, his feet, his chest and shoulders. Somehow, though, the components were heaped together in such a way that they didn’t measure more than five foot five. The adhesive that held the pieces in place was a smile, without which he would have been unrecognizable.

  Mostly stumped up the drive as Crisp got off his bike, puffing loudly.

  “Helluva pedal, ain’t it, Pr’fessor!”

  Crisp unsnapped the bindings from his pant legs. For some reason he always found it difficult to keep from laughing when he talked to Mostly. “It’s nine miles from town?”

  “ ’Bout,” said Mostly. He shoved his hands behind the bib of his overalls and waited for Crisp to assemble himself. “How long d’it take ya?”

  Crisp looked at his watch. “Well, I left about one-thirty . . . What’s that? An hour and fifteen, twenty minutes?”

  “Not bad,” said Mostly. Crisp leaned his bike against the hedge, and they walked toward the house. “I never much got the hang of bicycles myself,” Mostly confessed. “My aspirations was pretty much satisfied once I got walkin’ down pat.” He laughed, and Crisp, embraced by the laughter, laughed, too. “Good day for it, though. I guess when it gets warm like this, people do crazy things. Spring’s next week.”

  Crisp stopped halfway down the hill and sopped up the surroundings with the sponge of his spirit. Already the snow had retreated to soggy pockets in the shadows. Fifty feet away the lawn broke against an outcropping of granite in explosions of juniper and splashes of golden grass. In the Thorofare teams of waves dressed in blue, black, and silver played pitch and toss with handfuls of diamonds. Soon small fleets of East Haven dinghies from the yacht club on the opposite shore would be rounding the buoys, their sails flapping like a spinster’s dainties hung out to dry.

  Crisp and Mostly bypassed the cottage and made straight for the path to the beach. There were similar cottages on cliff tops all along the shore. Huge summer homes, all cut from the same mold. Weathered shingles. White trim. Green shutters. Reshaped by nature in its own likeness, as much a part of the island as the granite and evergreens themselves.

  Mostly puffed a lot as they climbed down the wooden steps to a grassy outcropping just above the beach. “Don’t come down here much durin’ winter,” he said. “Be time to put the floats over, though, ’fore you know it. Senator’s sailin’ up from Mass’chusetts just after Memorial Day.”

  Mostly stopped short of the edge. “Up there’s where they’d go most’ve the time,” he said, pointing up the long sweep of rocky beach. “‘They’d go jus’ ’round the corner of that point up there if they wanted a little privacy.” He stuck his hands into his overalls again and assumed his “this-is-as-far-as-I-go” stance.

  “Is it san
dy there? Around the point?”

  “I don’t know,” said Mostly. He took off his Make My Day, Shoot a Tourist hat and scratched his head. “I ain’t been up there in so long. Seems there might be a little sandy place.” He squinted at the tree-covered point of land as if to stare holes in it. “I wouldn’t be surprised.”

  “Did she spend much time there?” said Crisp. He turned up his collar and tucked his hands into his pockets.

  “Mandy? I guess so. She liked bein’ alone.” Some other emotion tugged at the corners of Mostly’s smile. “Don’t know what she seen in Neddy.”

  Crisp pulled a piece of sweet grass from its sheath and stuck it under his tongue. “Not his type?”

  “Hardly,” said Mostly. He was editing his thoughts. “Finer points of courtship ain’t exactly his strong suit.” Crisp nodded slowly. So did Mostly. “ ’Course, he’s still a kid, you know. You never know how they’ll turn out.” He nodded toward the beach. “Shows a little promise, I guess. He’ll come out all right once he grows up. Family’ll see to that, I s’pose.”

  A lobster boat sliced up the Thorofare, the husky shudder of its engine doubling off the rocks and trees. Crisp’s watery eyes floated after it as his thoughts jostled one another into order. Mostly hummed tunelessly at the back of his throat.

  “Mandy,” said Crisp.

  “Hmm?”

  “Mandy,” Crisp repeated. “Is that what they called her?”

  Mostly nodded. “She called herself that.”

  “She was different, you say?”

  “Night and day from most of ’em,” said Mostly. “Quiet. Kept her own company. I can see what he saw in her, but . . . well, it was a strange relationship.” For a moment the smile had gone completely.

  “How so?”

  “Well,” said Mostly, trying to marshal his thoughts. “You didn’t hardly ever see them two together. And when they was, it was—I don’t know how to say it. I seen him with plenty of girls over the years . . . his wife, too. Poor kid. But it wasn’t like he was with the rest of ’em.”

  “You mean he wasn’t as affectionate with her?”

  “You can say that.”

  “Maybe he was, since he was married, he was just trying to—”

  “I’ll tell you right now,” said Mostly, “you could say a lot of things about Neddy McKenniston, but you’d never say he was subtle. Everyone knew what was goin’ on. And the senator—”

  “And the senator didn’t mind if he brought her up here?”

  “You know,” said Mostly, “this will tell you somethin’ about Neddy and the senator. Neddy’d come up only one or two weekends during the summer. He brought her up when he first come, just ’fore the Fourth of July, and left her all summer! So when the senator come up—he usually spent every other week here—he finds her here! His son’s mistress! And he’s got to play host to her.”

  “Must have been terribly awkward,” Crisp speculated.

  “I guess,” Mostly agreed. “You’d never know it, though. The senator was real—what’s the word . . . graceful—gracious! That’s it. He was real gracious to her, far’s I could tell. I guess he could be like that ’cause of all those years campaignin’. You have to learn to put a good face on things.” Mostly brushed his heavy-toed boots lightly through the grass and thought for a moment. “Some ol’ sad.”

  “Any others like her?”

  “Not really,” Mostly replied. “Well, he took a fancy to Sarah Quinn for a while. I could never make heads nor tails of that. Got her in a family way, they say. Sure surprised a lot of people up this way. Those that know him.”

  “The child is his then?” Crisp asked.

  Mostly looked across the Thorofare. “That’s the story,” he said. “I don’t think he knew what he was gettin’ into with her.”

  “How do you mean?”

  “Well, I guess she had her sleeves rolled up for business,” said Mostly. “Marriage. I s’pose he probably made promises—you know how boys are—and, well, she didn’t know they wasn’t worth salt. How’s she s’posed to? Anyway, he got her in a family way. She’s never outright said it was him, but she ain’t the kind to—”

  “Play the field?”

  “That’s right.”

  “What does the senator think of all that?”

  “Oh, he don’t take much notice. Figures it’s just wild oats, I guess. He harvested a few acres himself, everyone knows. Still has an eye for the ladies, if you follow the tabloids.”

  “When did all this happen with Sarah?”

  “Summer ’fore last.” By degrees the smile had battled the frown from Mostly’s face and reasserted itself. “Must be somethin’ in the air up here in summertime.” He pinned his smile to his earlobes and tucked his hands back behind the bib. “Well, I gotta get down to the boathouse and creosote them pilin’s. You need’nything else?” Crisp said he didn’t think so. “Well, you need me, just give a holler. Not that it’ll do much good. I got Marky Williams over from East Haven helpin’ me. You know Marky Williams?”

  Crisp tugged his stocking hat into a thoughtful position. “Not that I recall,” he said.

  “Well, his pa’s Loriman. Builds boats over there. Anyways, this boy—I guess he’s fifteen or so—he listens to that goshdarn radio all day, an’ you wouldn’t believe the noises that come outta that thing. Sounds like a load of ball bearin’s an’ beer cans in the clothes dryer. Drives me right crazy. Whatever happened to good old rock ’n’ roll? That’s what I want to know.”

  About halfway through this critique, Mostly had started walking away. He continued to talk, and now and then the breeze nudged the sound of his voice in Crisp’s direction. He couldn’t make out the words, though an occasional pillow of laughter would bat at his ears.

  Crisp stood there for a minute watching until Mostly was gone, then he looked out over the water toward East Haven. The chilly wind had picked up a little, tossing the smells of pine, salt, and snow together with the sounds of gulls and whispering trees. He inhaled deeply and climbed down the rocks to the beach.

  There was a time when he could have covered the distance to the point in thirty seconds, jumping fearlessly from rock to rock, heedless of snow, ice, and seaweed. Somewhere in the mass of creaks and wrinkles that he’d become, that fleet-footed boy was hiding, teasing him with the memory. Falling had become Crisp’s chief fear.

  Fifteen minutes later he rounded the point and was confronted by a recumbent elephant of black granite. He rested a few minutes before beginning the ascent. By the time he reached the summit, he was breathless, but the effort was rewarded. Directly below him was a crescent of rough sand beach hemmed in on all but the ocean side by ledges. A very private place.

  Within ten minutes he had circumvented the beach and found a narrow cleft in the rock that provided easy access to the beach from ground level. He shook his head.

  “This place was made for murder.”

  Turning from the cleft he surveyed the area. A field of wave-worn boulders climbed from the beach to the woods, an ancient spruce forest that rested atop a three-foot lip of red soil, veined with tree and juniper roots.

  Crisp made his way across the boulders, over the driftwood, and up a well-worn ravine. At the edge of the forest, he peered through a tangle of low branches. The trees had been culled recently. There were no deadfalls, and the new growth was no more than a year or two old. The forest floor was bare except for a thick carpet of spruce needles, a scattering of ferns, and here and there a small pile of ice where the snow had found its way through the canopy of boughs overhead. He smiled.

  “That’ll save bending,” he said. “Now to find the granddaddy.” He went from tree to tree, talking softly to each in an old-man whisper. “You’re too young, aren’t you, fellah?” “You don’t have any hiding places, do you?” “No secrets here . . . ah!” Not twenty feet off the path, within a stone’s throw of the beach, he found what he was looking for—a huge old spruce tree, stripped of its bark in places, rotten in others, po
cked with woodpecker holes and laced with worm trails and hardened rivers of sap. “Hello, grandpa,” said Crisp, stroking the smooth, dry trunk. “Got something to tell me, old man?”

  He walked slowly around the great tree, bending and bobbing to avoid the naked branches. There were two big holes on the mossy side of the trunk. Standing on tiptoe, he could just reach the bottom lip of the uppermost of these. The lower hole was much more accessible. He took off his bulky down jacket, rolled up the sleeve of his checkered flannel shirt, and thrust in his arm up to the shoulder. His eyes roved their sockets blindly as he directed all his senses to his fingertips. Suddenly they stopped. “Had to be,” he said. He withdrew his arm from the trunk. Clutched between his second and third fingers were a small piece of black fabric and a length of rusty wire, in the middle of which was a frozen wad of cloth.

  The black fabric was frozen, too. He dropped to a knee and unfolded it over his leg. He stretched out the material. It formed a double triangle of material, very high-sided with thin strings at the corners. He folded the objects together and, standing, tucked the treasures into his coat pocket.

  He patted the tree trunk. “Sorry to trouble you, old man,” he said. “You’ll sleep better, now.”

  There is an indescribable but palpable electricity that troubles the atmosphere of a village when big news is afoot. Crisp felt it as he peddled through town. Something had happened in his absence. It was past four-thirty and the hardware store was still open. Nothing testified to the intensity of excitement as alarmingly as this simple fact. It was the equivalent of a news bureau staying open into the wee hours during a national crisis. It had last happened in the hardware store nearly twenty years ago, the night a part-time deputy from the mainland had gone crazy and set fire to the Odd Fellows hall, the bandstand, and Ingrid Libby’s prize forsythia all in one night, then disappeared into the woods, never to be heard from again.