Fortnight of Fear Page 10

  “Sure. But you have to pick up all these goddamned stones. You can’t just turn ’em over and bury ’em. They always rise up to the surface again. Laws of natural physics. Cereal-box syndrome.”

  Richard looked around the weedy, triangular meadow. It was edged on its two far sides by dry-stone walls; and on the nearer side by a sparse screen of pine trees. Through the pines, he could just make out the paleness of the house, like a skull that had been hidden all summer in a hedge, only to be revealed by the onset of fall.

  He laid his hand on Ron Maccione’s shoulder, trying to act like a buddy. “Okay, whatever you say. I’ll wait to hear from you.”

  He turned and began to walk back to the house. Ron Maccione hesitated for a moment, sniffed, and then followed him.

  “Nobody thought we’d ever see a Palen back in Preston,” said Ron Maccione. “The Sturgeons are all gone now, so’s the Mitchells, and there hasn’t been a Nugent since sixty-one.”

  “I never meant to come back,” Richard told him, double-kicking his left ankle to help himself up the dry-stone steps that led to the house. “I always thought I’d retire to Palm Springs. Even had the plans drawn up. The Richard Palen Tennis Center. Ten tennis courts, six air-conditioned squash courts, health club, beauty parlor, restaurant. Nineteen-and-a-half million dollars.”

  They passed through the screen of pines, and crossed the overgrown garden. Huge rank cabbages grew amongst the grass. Artichokes stood as tall as giant thistles. The silence was complete, like a closed purse. At the end of the garden the huge weatherboarded house stood mean and miserable, a huge raft of dried-up wisteria hanging precariously from the roof of its conservatory.

  “Well, you had your good years,” remarked Ron Maccione.

  Richard stopped in the garden with his hand over his mouth as if he had forgotten something. Then he looked at Ron Maccione and said, “Yes, sure. I had my good years.”

  He stood by the front porch watching the red tail-lights of Ron Maccione’s pickup truck winking through the trees. Then he went back into the house and closed the door.

  The hallway was dark and smelled strongly of Black Flag. Everything that Richard remembered from his boyhood had disappeared; the long-case clock, the chair by the door. The last owners had left vestiges of jaundiced linoleum and multicolored Venetian blinds, thick with grease and clinging fluff.

  Richard stood with his back to the door, listening. The house was so silent that it seemed as if it were dead. Even houses can be killed. Appropriate, really, since Richard had been killed, too, in almost every respect except that he was still walking, talking, breathing, and waking up each morning with the knowledge that he was faced with yet another day.

  A day in which he would have to make his way in the world without wealth, without glory, and without any of the glamor of being Richard Palen, international tennis champion. A day in which he would have to survive alone, without his friends, without his children, without Sara, his wife.

  Withdrawn, tight-lipped, scarcely speaking to anybody from the moment he opened his eyes in the early morning to the second he closed them at night, numb with vodka and the exhaustion of trying to forget.

  But almost every hour of every day that split-second, as abrupt and vivid as if it were really happening – as if it would always be happening. Turning in the driver’s seat to smile at Sara, triumphant after winning the California Open. Then, instantly, a smash that he hadn’t even seen coming, straight into the front of an oncoming Safeway truck.

  He had spent that split-second in hell. Sara had dived beneath the glove-box in a spray of blood and ripped-apart upholstery, as if there were somewhere beneath the glove-box for her to go. Joanna and Davie had screamed like whistles. Then all he had heard was cracking glass, and the extraordinary crushed-sugar noise of his legs breaking, and somebody saying very close to his ear – maybe later, maybe immediately afterwards, “Jesus Christ.”

  The months that had followed had been an eternal calendar of pain, of white hospital laundry, of flowers that quivered in the afternoon sunlight, and friends with sympathetic, distracted expressions. Then fewer friends, and fewer flowers, but just as much pain.

  After almost a year he had sat in the offices of Weinman, Westlake & Calloway, on Nob Hill, with the whole of San Francisco invisible in the fog, and his lawyer had said, “Technically, Rick, you’re flat-busted.”

  That was why he was here, this pale gray October day, in Preston, Connecticut, in the home that his greatgrandfather had passed to his grandfather, and his grandfather had passed to his father. It was here that he had met Sara Nugent, only eleven years ago, and fallen in love with her. It was here that his mother had died of cancer.

  His father had sold the house in 1977 to some strange people whose eyes like blowflies had refused to settle in the same place for more than an instant, the Millers. But it had always remained Richard’s home. He always thought of the house as his.

  After the Millers had left, the house had stood empty for over two years – too far from New York to interest a daily commuter, too large for a weekend cottage, dilapidated, expensive to heat, a casualty of an ageing community that had dwindled to fewer now than had lived here in the 1700s.

  But the house had been priced almost embarrassingly low, and perhaps more importantly it had offered Richard a familiar home when everything familiar had been taken away from him. He planned to lay out tennis courts, renovate the house, and open it up as the Richard Palen Professional Country Club. Five guest suites, a bar, and professional coaching for vengeful executives who wanted to wipe out their senior colleagues on the tennis-court.

  It had taken Richard’s last $58,000; plus as much money as he had been able to borrow from the New Milford Savings Bank (another $75,000) plus the peculiarly cheerless determination that only the recently-bereaved can sustain.

  He went through to the sitting-room, and sat in solitary splendor on a huge damp Sears armchair in coffee-colored velour, and unscrewed a fifth of Jack Daniel’s, forbidden by his consultant.

  “Nazdravye,” he told the house, lifting his glass to the damp-jigsawed ceiling.

  He didn’t know when he fell asleep; but when he woke up it was raining, and the first light of dawn was straining into the room, the color of cold tea. The phone was ringing.

  He picked up the receiver and said, “Yes?” into the wrong end. It was Ron Maccione, the contractor. He said, “Sorry to call you so early, Mr Palen. Got to get down to Danbury by nine. Worked your price out, thought you’d like to know it.”

  “All right,” Richard replied, smearing his face with his hand. “What do you think?”

  “Well … seeing as how your family are Preston folk from way back, and there’s not too many Preston folk left, and seeing how the county’s just canceled my contract for asphalting the parking-lot down at the schoolhouse … well, I guess I can clear that meadow for you for two-and-a-half; two-two-fifty for cash.”

  Richard stood alone and hungover in the middle of the sitting-room. “All right,” he agreed. “Go ahead.”

  It wasn’t really the price that decided him. It was the fact that somebody had welcomed him home.

  The earth-movers arrived the following Monday, three of them, and churned up and down the field all day, while Ron Maccione came and went, and yelled instructions, and opened one can of Miller Draft after the other. Richard stood by the window feeling detached but somehow more complete, like the day they had taken the plaster off his smashed left ankle.

  Around noon, the doorbell chimed, and Richard went to the door to find a tall milky-faced woman standing on the step, holding a dish draped in a red gingham cloth.

  “I guess you could say I’m the welcome wagon,” she said. She was white-blonde, Scandinavian-looking, and she wore a thick old-fashioned woollen dress, gray, the color of rubbed charcoal. She held up the dish. “It’s a peach pie,” she told him.

  “Well, thank you,” said Richard. “Listen – why don’t you come on in? You’ll have to e
xcuse the mess.”

  She stepped inside, looking cautiously and curiously all around her. “I’ve never been inside before,” she explained. “The Millers weren’t sociable folk.”

  He took the pie and set it down on the windowsill. “I was brought up here,” he explained. “Do you want the cloth back?”

  “Oh, later will do.” She stepped across the sitting-room like a woman in a Bergman movie; unsmiling, self-possessed. “It’s strange to think of all the history that you and I share.”

  “I’m sorry?” asked Richard.

  She didn’t turn around. “My name’s Greta Reuter these days. But I used to be Greta Sturgeon. My family came here in sixteen-eighty, same as yours.”

  “Oh, really?”

  She turned at last, with a smile that looked as if it had been cut out of a magazine and held in front of her face. “Not that the Palens and the Sturgeons were ever friends. Not in those days.”

  “I didn’t know that,” said Richard, feeling as if he ought to apologize for something, but not knowing what.

  “Well,” she said, “the Palens accused the Sturgeons of witchcraft, back in the old days; and Nathan Nugent, too, although they withdrew that accusation when it finally came to a trial. But George Sturgeon was pressed to death; and Missie Sturgeon was burned to death; and neither the Sturgeons nor the Nugents forgave the Palens for more than a hundred years.”

  “My late wife was a Nugent,” said Richard.

  “Yes … Sara Nugent, I knew her.”

  “I’m surprised I never met you when I was younger,” Richard told her.

  “I wasn’t allowed to mix with Palens. Stay away from them Palens, that’s what my mother always used to say. Palens is poison.”

  Richard smiled. “Would you like a drink? Maybe we can patch things up after all these years.”

  Greta Reuter pursed her lips, and thought about it, but then she shook her head. “I’d best be getting back. I have chores to do. Baking, cleaning.”

  “Whatever you like,” said Richard, not sure if he had made a friend or not. He formally shook Greta’s hand, and then she left. He felt oddly guilty, as if he had been unfaithful to Sara for the first time.

  After she had gone, he stood by the window watching Ron Maccione’s caterpillars leveling the field, bright mechanical yellow amongst the dark trees. He lifted the gingham cloth from Greta Reuter’s peach pie. It was heavily sifted with sugar and the crust was burned at the edge.

  Across the top, Greta Reuter had cut out the pastry greeting, Welcome Home.

  It took Ron Maccione six days to clear the meadow. They trucked over 150 tonnes of rocks and stones which they stacked at the far perimeter of the property to form a dry-stone retaining wall. Then they leveled the ground in preparation for Fraser and Fairmont to asphalt and mark out the courts.

  Late Thursday afternoon, as the last caterpillar was loaded up on to a flatbed trailer, Richard came out with a chilled sixpack of Olympia Gold, and handed them around.

  “Never shifted so many damned rocks in my natural life,” said Ron Maccione, swallowing beer. “But you’ve got yourself a real clear site there now, Mr Palen. You could lay down a spirit-level anyplace you liked, any direction.”

  Richard said, “You’ve done a fine job, Mr Maccione. I’ll go get your check.”

  That evening, Richard took a slow lonely walk around the meadow. The oaks were thick with shadows, like Rorschach blots. A damp, chilly wind was blowing. Home is where the heart is, but the heart is not at home. He stood for a long time on the stone retaining-wall, looking back toward the house.

  He was just about to walk back when he heard the hollow knocking of dislodged stones. He hesitated, listened, but there was no more knocking, and the field remained silent. Silent as a closed purse.

  He walked back toward the house across the finely-graded soil which would soon be his tennis-courts. As he locked the doors and went upstairs to bed, he realized that he hadn’t thought about Sara and the children all day. Maybe grief did eventually die, after all.

  When he slept that night in his curtainless bedroom, on his foldaway bed, he dreamed he was being pressed down on to the mattress by an unbearably oppressive weight. He struggled and twisted, but the weight grew progressively heavier, crushing him, until he could scarcely breathe.

  He tried to scream, but in his dream he couldn’t make himself heard. The weight on top of him began to crush his feet, and then his shins, the bones crunching and splitting like bamboo canes. Then his kneecaps were edged sideways off his knees; his thighbones splintered; and finally, agonizingly, his pelvis broke apart, flooding the bed with his intestines.

  He woke up shivering, as if he were suffering from a high fever. He wiped the sweat from his face with his sheet; then he turned over and checked his watch. It wasn’t even midnight yet.

  He went downstairs to the kitchen and poured himself a large glass of water. He stood drinking it, holding on to the faucet the way that children do, watching himself reflected in the kitchen window. He had dreamed about Sara again and again, he had dreamed about the children screaming; but he had never dreamed about himself before, being crushed.

  Perhaps this was all part of the process of healing; of becoming whole again. He wasn’t sure that he liked it; he wasn’t even sure that he could handle it; but maybe it was what he needed.

  He rinsed his glass, and set it upside-down on the draining-board, and switched off the kitchen light. As he set foot on the stairs, however, he heard a dry clonking noise. He stopped still, listening. Maybe it was the plumbing. But it had sounded empty, echoing, like two skulls being knocked together.

  Two skulls, or two stones.

  Ron Maccione said, “Are you trying to kid me, or what?”

  Richard was standing in the hallway, his Dad U R The Greatest coffee-mug steaming on top of the kitchen stool beside him. It was a few minutes after seven o’clock the sun had been up for less than twenty minutes.

  “No kidding, Mr Maccione. The whole field is full of them.”

  “Well, that’s pretty damned hard to believe, Mr Palen. We shifted over one hundred fifty-eight tonnes of stone and rock off of that field. We graded that soil fine as baby-powder.”

  “You want to come over and check it out for yourself?”

  “Sure I’ll come over and check it out for myself. But I’m pretty damned tied up today. What do you say Monday?”

  “Mr Maccione I’m going to cancel your check. You promised me no stones, remember?”

  “I cleared the stones, Mr Palen, so help me. When I left that field, there wasn’t a single stone worth calling a stone.”

  Richard sipped coffee, and burned his mouth. “You said they could come back. Some kind of physics. The cereal-box syndrome.”

  “Well, sure, but that’s only if they’re there, Mr Palen, under the soil surface. We cleared them, Mr Palen. We cleared them good.”

  Richard picked up the telephone and stepped sideways in the hallway so that he could see through the sitting-room window to the gardens at the back, and beyond, to the meadow. The early-morning light was bony and uncompromising. Even though the meadow was screened by trees, the stones that were strewn across it were obvious, even from here. Hundreds of them, scattered right across the finely-graded soil from one side of the meadow to the other.

  “Shit,” said Ron Maccione. “Piove sul bagnato.”

  While he was waiting for Ron Maccione to arrive, Richard walked out across the meadow, picking his way between the stones with complete bewilderment. I mean, how the hell –?

  Even allowing for natural geological sifting – the so-called “cereal-box” effect in which smaller particles sift and trickle downwards between larger particles, like the powdery crushed-up bits in a box of Cap’n Crunchberries – all these hundreds of rocks couldn’t have risen out of the ground overnight. And yet nobody could have trucked them all back again – there were no footprints on the soil, no tiretracks.

  Richard began to feel peculiarly alarm
ed; as if the reappearance of the stones were more than a scientific phenomenon. As if it were a threat, or a warning.

  Some of the rocks were huge, four or five feet across, and must have weighed seven or eight hundred pounds. Others were not much than pebbles. He picked up one of the smaller stones and hurled it high toward the far side of the meadow.

  As he stepped back to watch it fall, a tissue-soft voice said, close behind him, “You’re up early, Mr Palen.”

  Richard turned around. Greta Reuter was standing close by, her face pale, her eyes the same crushed-sugar color as the morning light. She wore a thick maroon dress and a maroon woollen shawl.

  She looked around the meadow. “I thought you were going to clear it,” she said. “You can’t play much tennis on this, can you? Stones trip; stones hurt the feet; stones betray.”

  There was something about her expression that was almost amused. Richard said, “Stones seem to have the ability to come up overnight, too. This field was cleared yesterday. Not a stone in sight.”

  Greta Reuter said nothing, but continued to smile.

  Richard finished the last of his coffee. “You wouldn’t know anything about this, would you? I mean, there isn’t anybody local who doesn’t like the idea of a tennis-club, is there?”

  Greta Reuter turned her face away. “People are very reserved hereabouts. Very jealous about their privacy.”

  “Jealous enough to sabotage my tennis-courts?” Richard retorted. He hesitated, and then he said, “I’m only asking. I used to be a tennis champion. I’ve come across jealousy before.”

  “I suppose it could be sabotage,” said Greta Reuter. “But if it was, who would have done it, and more important, how was it done?”

  “Witchcraft?” Richard suggested. “This is prime country for witches.”

  Greta Reuter stared at him mischievously for a moment, then threw back her head and let out a loud, mannish laugh.

  Baffled, enraged, Ron Maccione brought two of his bulldozers back to the meadow, and spent the better part of a day and a half clearing the stones back to the perimeter.

  “I don’t know what happened, don’t even ask me,” he said. “I’m taking the full responsibility, okay? I guaranteed you a clear field, no stones, di riffe o di raffe. But I don’t know what the hell happened.” That night, Richard heard knocking noises in his sleep: heavy, hollow, knocking noises, skulls knocking together. He woke up sweating, trembling, terrified – but conscious that he hadn’t been dreaming of Sara. This dream was something new; something cold; something abrasive; something to do with Preston, and the stones in the meadow; and the crushed-sugar eyes of Greta Reuter.