Bagombo Snuff Box (10 page)

An inspiration came to him. He called Western Union and sent
a telegram to the man, offering fifty dollars for the drum and requesting a
reply collect.

But no reply came during B Band practice. Nor had one come
by the halfway point of the A Band session. The bandsmen, a sensitive,
high-strung lot, knew immediately that their director was on edge about something,
and the rehearsal went badly. Mr. Helmholtz stopped a march in the middle
because somebody outside was shaking the large double doors at one end of the
rehearsal room.

‘All right, all right, let’s wait until the racket dies down
so we can hear ourselves,” Mr. Helmholtz said.

At that moment, a student messenger handed him a telegram.
Mr. Helmholtz tore open the envelope, and this is what he read:

DRUM SOLD STOP COULD YOU USE A STUFFED CAMEL ON WHEELS STOP

The wooden doors opened with a shriek of rusty hinges. A
snappy autumn gust showered the band with leaves. Plummer stood in the great
opening, winded and perspiring, harnessed to a drum as big as a harvest moon!

“I know this isn’t challenge day,” said Plummer, “but I
thought you might make an exception in my case.”

He walked in with splendid dignity, the huge apparatus grumbling
along behind him.

Mr. Helmholtz rushed to meet him. He crushed Plummer’s right
hand between both of his. “Plummer, boy! You got it for us. Good boy! I’ll pay
you whatever you paid for it,” he cried, and in his joy he added rashly, “And a
nice little profit besides. Good boy!”

“Sell it?” said Plummer. “I’ll give it to you when I
graduate. All I want to do is play it in the A Band as long as I’m here.”

“But Plummer,” said Mr. Helmholtz, “you don’t know anything
about drums.”

“I’ll practice hard,” said Plummer. He backed his instrument
into an aisle between the tubas and the trombones, toward the percussion
section, where the amazed musicians were hastily making room.

“Now, just a minute,” said Mr. Helmholtz, chuckling as
though Plummer were joking, and knowing full well he wasn’t. “There’s more to
drum playing than just lambasting the thing whenever you take a notion to, you
know. It takes years to be a drummer.”

“Well,” said Plummer, “the quicker I get at it, the quicker
I’ll get good.”

“What I meant was that I’m afraid you won’t be quite ready
for the A Band for a little while.”

Plummer stopped his backing. “How long?” he asked.

“Oh, sometime in your senior year, perhaps. Meanwhile, you
could let the band have your drum to use until you’re ready.”

Mr. Helmholtz’s skin began to itch all over as Plummer
stared at him coldly. “Until hell freezes over?” Plummer said at last.

Mr. Helmholtz sighed. “I’m afraid that’s about right.” He
shook his head. “It’s what I tried to tell you yesterday afternoon: Nobody can
do everything well, and we’ve all got to face up to our limitations. You’re a
fine boy, Plummer, but you’ll never be a musician—not in a million years. The only
thing to do is what we all have to do now and then: smile, shrug, and say, ‘Well,
that’s just one of those things that’s not for me.’”

Tears formed on the rims of Plummer’s eyes. He walked slowly
toward the doorway, with the drum tagging after him. He paused on the doorsill
for one more wistful look at the A Band that would never have a chair for him.
He smiled feebly and shrugged. “Some people have eight-foot drums,” he said, “and
others don’t, and that’s just the way life is. You’re a fine man, Mr.
Helmholtz, but you’ll never get this drum in a million years, because I’m going
to give it to my mother for a coffee table.”

“Plummer!” cried Mr. Helmholtz. His plaintive voice was
drowned out by the rumble and rattle of the big drum as it followed its small
master down the school’s concrete driveway.

Mr. Helmholtz ran after him. Plummer and his drum had
stopped at an intersection to wait for a light to change. Mr. Helmholtz caught
him there and seized his arm. “We’ve got to have that drum,” he panted. “How
much do you want?”

“Smile,” said Plummer. “Shrug! That’s what I did.” Plummer
did it again. “See? So I can’t get into the A Band, so you can’t have the drum.
Who cares? All part of the growing-up process.”

“The situations aren’t the same!” said Mr. Helmholtz. “Not
at all the same!”

“You’re right,” said Plummer. “I’m growing up, and you’re
not.”

The light changed, and Plummer left Mr. Helmholtz on the
corner, stunned.

Mr. Helmholtz had to run after him again. “Plummer,” he
wheedled, “you’ll never be able to play it well.”

“Rub it in,” said Plummer.

“But look at what a swell job you’re doing of pulling it,”
said Mr. Helmholtz.

“Rub it in,” Plummer repeated.

“No, no, no,” said Mr. Helmholtz. “Not at all. If the school
gets that drum, whoever’s pulling it will be as crucial and valued a member of
the A Band as the first-chair clarinet. What if it capsized?”

“He’d win a band letter if it didn’t capsize?” said Plummer.

And Mr. Helmholtz said this: “I don’t see why not.”

Newell Cady had the polish, the wealth, the influence, and
the middle-aged good looks of an idealized Julius Caesar. Most of all, though,
Cady had know-how, know-how of a priceless variety that caused large
manufacturing concerns to bid for his services like dying sultans offering half
their kingdoms for a cure.

Cady could stroll through a plant that had been losing money
for a generation, glance at the books, yawn and tell the manager how he could
save half a million a year in materials, reduce his staff by a third, triple
his output, and sell the stuff he’d been throwing out as waste for more than
the cost of installing air-conditioning and continuous music throughout the
plant. And the air-conditioning and music would increase individual productivity
by as much as ten percent and cut union grievances by a fifth. The latest firm
to hire him was the Federal Apparatus Corporation, which had given him the rank
of vice-president and sent him to Ilium, New York, where he was to see that the
new company headquarters were built properly from the ground up. When the
buildings were finished, hundreds of the company’s top executives would move
their offices from New York City to Ilium, a city that had virtually died when
its textile mills moved south after the Second World War.

There was jubilation in Ilium when the deep, thick
foundations for the new headquarters were poured, but the exultation was possibly
highest in the village of Spruce Falls, nine miles from Ilium, for it was there
that Newell Cady had rented, with an option to buy, one of the mansions that
lined the shaded main street.

Spruce Falls was a cluster of small businesses and a public
school and a post office and a police station and a firehouse serving
surrounding dairy farms. During the second decade of the century it experienced
a real estate boom. Fifteen mansions were built back then, in the belief that
the area, because of its warm mineral springs, was becoming a spa for rich
invalids and hypochondriacs and horse people, as had Saratoga, not far away.

In 1922, though, it was determined that bathing in the
waters of the spring, while fairly harmless, was nonetheless responsible for
several cases of a rash that a Manhattan dermatologist, with no respect for
upstate real estate values, named “Spruce Falls disease.”

In no time at all the mansions and their stables were as
vacant as the abandoned palaces and temples of Angkor Thorn in Cambodia. Banks
foreclosed on those mansions that were mortgaged. The rest became property of
the town in lieu of unpaid taxes. Nobody arrived from out of town to bid for
them at any price, as though Spruce Falls disease were leprosy or cholera or
bubonic plague.

Nine mansions were eventually bought from the banks or the
town by locals, who could not resist getting so much for so little. They set up
housekeeping in maybe six rooms at most, while dry rot and termites and mice
and rats and squirrels and kids wrought havoc with the rest of the property.

“If we can make Newell Cady taste the joys of village life,”
said Fire Chief Stanley Atkins, speaking before an extraordinary meeting of the
volunteer firemen on a Saturday afternoon, “he’ll use that option to buy, and Spruce
Falls will become the fashionable place for Federal Apparatus executives to
live. Without further ado,” said Chief Atkins expansively, “I move that Mr.
Newell Cady be elected to full membership in the fire department and be named
head judge of the annual Hobby Show.”

“Audaces fortuna juvat!” said Upton Beaton, who was a tall,
fierce-seeming sixty-five. He was the last of what had been the first family of
Spruce Falls. “Fortune,” he translated after a pause, “favors the bold, that’s
true. But gentlemen—” and he paused again, portentously, while Chief Atkins
looked worried and the other members of the fire department shifted about on
their folding chairs. Like his forebears, Beaton had an ornamental education
from Harvard, and like them, he lived in Spruce Falls because it took little
effort for a Beaton to feel superior to his neighbors there. He survived on
money his family had made during the short-lived boom.

“But,” Beaton said again, as he stood up, “is this the kind
of fortune we want? We are being asked to waive the three-year residence
requirement for membership in the fire department in Mr. Cady’s case, and
thereby all our memberships are cheapened. If I may say so, the post of judge
of the Hobby Show is of far greater significance than it would seem to an outsider.
In our small village, we have only small ways of honoring our great, but we,
for generations now, have taken pains to reserve those small honors for those
of us who have shown such greatness as it is possible to achieve in the eyes of
a village. I hasten to add that those honors that have come to me are marks of
respect for my family and my age, not for myself, and are exceptions that
should probably be curtailed.”

He sighed. “If we waive this proud tradition, then that one,
and then another, all for money, we will soon find ourselves with nothing left
to wave but the white flag of an abject surrender of all we hold dear!” He sat,
folded his arms, and stared at the floor.

Chief Atkins had reddened during the speech, and he avoided
looking at Beaton. “The real estate people,” he mumbled, “swear property values
in Spruce Falls will quadruple if Cady stays.”

“What is a village profited if it shall gain a real estate
boom and lose its own soul?” Beaton asked.

Chief Atkins cleared his throat. “There’s a motion on the
floor,” he said. “Is there a second?”

“Second,” said someone who kept his head down. ‘All in favor?”
said Atkins.

There was a scuffling of chair legs, and faint voices, like
the sounds of a playground a mile away.

“Opposed?”

Beaton was silent. The Beaton dynasty of Spruce Falls had
come to an end. Its paternal guidance, unopposed for four generations, had just
been voted down.

“Carried,” said Atkins. He started to say something, then motioned
for silence. “Shhh!” The post office was next door to the meeting hall, in the
same building, and on the other side of the thin partition, Mr. Newell Cady was
asking for his mail.

“That’s all, is it, Mrs. Dickie?” Cady was saying to the postmistress.
“That’s more’n some people get around here in a year,” said Mrs. Dickie. “There’s
still a little second-class to put around. Maybe some for you.”

“Mmm,” said Cady. “That the way the government teaches its
people to sort?”

“Them teach me?” said Mrs. Dickie. “I’d like to see anybody
teach me anything about this business. I been postmistress for twenty-five
years now, ever since my husband passed on.”

“Um,” said Cady. “Here—do you mind if I come back there and
take a look at the second-class for just a minute?”

“Sorry—regulations, you know,” said Mrs. Dickie. But the
door of Mrs. Dickie’s cage creaked open anyway. “Thank you,” said Cady. “Now,
suppose, instead of holding these envelopes the way you were, suppose you took
them like this, and uh—ah—putting that rubber cap on your thumb instead of your
index finger—”

“My land!” cried Mrs. Dickie. “Look at you go!”

“It would be even faster,” said Cady, “if it weren’t for
that tier of boxes by the floor. Why not move them over here, at eye level,
see? And what on earth is this table doing back here?”

“For my children,” said Mrs. Dickie. “Your children play
back here?”

“Not real children,” said Mrs. Dickie. “That’s what I call
the plants on the table—the wise little cyclamen, the playful little screw
pine, the temperamental little sansevieria, the—”

“Do you realize,” said Cady, “that you must spend twenty
man-minutes and heaven knows how many foot-pounds a day just detouring around
it?”

“Well,” said Mrs. Dickie, “I’m sure it’s awfully nice of you
to take such an interest, but you know, I’d just feel kind of lost without—”

“I can’t help taking an interest,” said Cady. “It causes me
actual physical pain to see things done the wrong way, when it’s so easy to do
them the right way. Oops! Moved your thumb right back to where I told you not
to put it!”

“Chief Atkins,” whispered Upton Beaton in the meeting hall.

“Eh?”

“Don’t you scratch your head like that,” said Beaton. “Spread
your fingers like this, see? Then dig in. Cover twice as much scalp in half
the time.”

“All due respect to you, sir,” said Atkins, “this village
could do with a little progress and perking up.”

“I’d be the last to stand in its way,” said Beaton. After a
moment he added, ‘“111 fares the land, to hastening ills a prey, where wealth
accumulates, andtnen decay.’”

“Cady’s across the street, looking at the fire truck,” said
Ed Newcomb, who had served twenty years as secretary of the fire department.
The Ilium real estate man, who had put stars in every eye except Beaton’s, had
assured Newcomb that his twenty-six-room Georgian colonial, with a little
paper and paint, would look like a steal to a corporation executive at fifty
thousand dollars. “Let’s tell him the good news!” Newcomb’s father had bought
the ark at a bank foreclosure sale. He was the only bidder.