Cascade (11 page)

“I am seventy-four years old,” he said, his reedy voice tight with anger, “and I have seen drought and never-ending rain and pestilence and every manner of storm, and let me promise the Commonwealth of Massachusetts that the law of averages always wins out. This drought will end and will be followed by the kinds of rainy summers that towns like Cascade lament.”

He’s right, he’s right, everyone turned to his neighbor to say. Addis Proulx was always right.

Zeke raised a hand for the hall to quiet down. “Addis, I am sure you are right, and we all have high hopes that your golf course will change some minds, but unfortunately the Commonwealth of Massachusetts isn’t listening, nor are we dealing with reason here. What we’re dealing with is fear, always a formidable enemy. Fear and uncertainty that wasn’t a factor in the twenties. Secondly, we are dealing with a bureaucratic elite that is taking advantage of that fear, dreaming up elaborate schemes to solve problems in order to provide jobs for their friends.

“Now, remember who our governor is, good people.” Zeke stabbed his cigar into the air to make his point. “He is no patron of the arts, like his predecessor. He is Mr. James Michael Curley and the few piddling votes he can get out here don’t matter much to him. And as I implied, there’s talk that he not only wants to take our valley, but I’ve heard, through people I know I can trust, that he’s been telling his local voters he’ll bus them out here to get them jobs. This will be a political coup for the Boston politicians—oh, it will make them all look good. I can hear their slogans now.”

So that was the real reason. Dez looked out over the crowd. Instead of anger and outrage, she saw quiet, defeated faces.
We’ve been living with bad news for so many years now,
the general silence said,
here is one more
piece
. Bad news had simply been the stuff of normal life for too long, newsreels and radios delivering gloom nonstop: strife in Europe, dust storms obliterating the western prairies, city bread lines filled with the out-of-work.

From outside, a boy jumped up—high schooler Popcorn Webster, his face at the window for just a flash, hand cupped to his mouth. “Which will it be, though? Cascade or Whistling Falls?”

Everyone laughed; Zeke shook his head. “We just have to wait and see, folks. You’ll be seeing the surveyors around town again, the engineers, working out of the old boys’ camp. As you know, the 1927 legislature created the water commission and both the House and Senate passed the water bill back in 1928. So a good deal of the surveying has been done—but you all remember that.” He gestured to a stack of heavy, thick binders behind him on the selectmen’s table. He picked up one of the binders and dropped it with a heavy thud. “
Most
of the surveying, I’m afraid.”

Again, there was silence, as everyone remembered how the water commission’s engineers had, for a time, kept an office above Stein’s store. They’d surveyed every square inch of town property and roads, they’d drawn up maps. After the water bill passed, everyone expected the bill appropriating the Cascade River would be next. Cascade appeared doomed. Then the Richard Harcourt rumors started, the threat disappeared, and once it was gone, everyone had been happy to forget about it.

“What’s left is formalities,” Zeke said. “Deciding which valley is best suited to a dam—which valley has higher elevations, less ledge, better whatever-they-are-looking-for. They say we’ll know by July first, about two months.”

There were cries of
Two months?
“Impossible,” someone shouted.

In the front row, a woman’s hand shot up and stayed in the air.

“Lil?” Zeke asked.

Everyone strained to hear Lil Montgomery.

“Can you speak up?”

“Whistling Falls has a smaller population, barely any public buildings. There’s less disruption if they take Whistling Falls.”

“True, Lil, as we just said.” Zeke’s gaze from the stage, toward Lil and everyone else who would state the same thing over and over again, was patient. “And we have to hope that factors into the equation.”

“So is Midland really out of the picture, once and for all?”

Zeke answered her by speaking out to everyone. “Yes, folks, at last summer’s hearing in Midland, there was such vigorous and organized opposition that the water committee was decisive in their decision to look westward again. My friend at the State House tells me they made an awful lot of noise.”

Popcorn jumped again, his face at the window: “We can make noise, too!”

“
You
certainly can, Mr. Webster,” Zeke called, eliciting another laugh. “But I have to say, I’m not sure it will do much good. They rather easily dismissed Midland because Midland is
not
an ideal location. The Cascade River has been officially chosen, whether we like it or not. Now we have to wait and hope that our town will be spared. Final tests will begin after the Memorial Day holiday.”

It was already May 1. There would be all-around tension until the state made its decision. That tension was evident in the brief period of silence that followed before someone—was it Asa?—spoke out. “I say we fight it.”

Dez felt her arm shooting up—she couldn’t stop it. She didn’t really like speaking in front of groups but she could never stay quiet if she had something important to say.

Zeke put a shading hand to his eyes. “Who’s that?” Heads turned her way.

She jumped off her perch on the radiator too quickly, and in the tilt of her body, a feeling like vertigo hit her. The ground under her feet—she could almost imagine it giving way. She put a hand to the wall to catch her balance, but imagined flooding overhead, imagined herself at the bottom of a reservoir, unable to breathe, looking up, up through water, like the sketches she had done at Christmas.

She stepped into the aisle so her voice would carry clearly. “I’m thinking,” she said, “that the smart thing is to prepare for the worst. I think we’ve got to plan how we’re going to negotiate fair value for our land. I
mean, my father’s playhouse is worth much more than its timber and nails. And then if they take Whistling Falls, good, but we’ll have been prepared, at least.”

“Excellent point,” Zeke said. On the dais, the other men murmured their agreement. “And if your father was here, we all know he’d have a quote for us. One that comes to my mind is the Duke of Venice:
The robb’d that smiles steals something from the thief.
Thank you, Dez.”

She stepped back to the radiator and pulled her pad from her pocket, pencil flying over the paper, envisioning a new work. If the worst happened, if the reservoir was built in Cascade, she could record it all, maybe in a series of panels, explore what it meant to dismantle a town, to disincorporate it, to move everybody out and say
this place no longer exists
. In Europe, she had seen murals depicting the rape of Europa, the fall of Rome. You could tell whole stories with mural panels. In Paris, in the twelfth arrondissement, painted on the side of a courthouse, was a depiction of the French revolution, which began with early fires lit by insurrectionists and ended with Marie Antoinette’s neatly guillotined head falling into a bucket.

The panel idea was good—with the playhouse as the central theme somehow. First the playhouse on a long-ago opening night, with excitement and some kind of foreboding in the air. Second, the playhouse of now, uncertainty evident somehow. Then the playhouse of the future, with a tone she was still unsure of. Water closing over everything?

In any case, a series of panels, yes. She closed her pad with the satisfaction that came from solidifying an idea.

Up near the stage, Bud Foster had raised his hand and moved nearer the stage to speak. He was looking downright skinny, his jacket practically hanging off his shoulders, and he kept his eyes cast down as he rubbed his hands together apologetically. “I have to say Elaine and I’d be grateful to get cash for our land. I’ve never farmed it, and I sure can’t sell it in these hard times. With a bit of cash, we could start somewhere else.”

Hartwell Page himself rose from his chair on the dais. “I have to confess,” he said. “I’m thinking the same.”

A few others admitted that they, too, might benefit from selling to the state. The buzz in the room swelled as everyone started to talk at once. Onstage, Zeke covered the microphone and bent toward the front row. He stood up straight. “Folks, Asa Spaulding has something to say.”

Asa’s fair head poked up from the crowd down front, from a spot right beside where Lil Montgomery’s raised arm had emerged. He took a moment to regard the crowd soberly, then rested his hands on his hips and waited until all eyes were on him, until all the rustling and coughing and chair-scraping had ceased. His eyes found Dez and he imperceptibly shook his head.

“This is our home,” he said, enunciating each word. “This is our land.” As he spoke, he turned slowly, to address as many people as possible. “Most of us have been here for generations. We will get through these hard times, but if we sell our souls for cash, how will we live with ourselves?”

“It’s easy for them who have cash—” A shrill woman’s voice from the middle of the crowd. It sounded like Tilly Allison, and everyone knew she was a grudging sort.

Her remark was met with general coldness. Asa Spaulding was well-liked. Zeke banged his gavel and said, “Please let Asa speak.”

“I hate to wish this on our neighbors, but we have much more to lose than Whistling Falls. Like Lil pointed out, we’ve got a much larger population, far more businesses. It makes sense for the state to choose Whistling Falls.” Asa’s eyes passed over Bud, then Dez. “But we can’t just sit around and wait for that to happen. We have to
make
it happen.”

On the drive home he was grim, a hard man she did not know. After the meeting, people had peppered him with questions, “What did you mean, Asa? What can we do?”

“We have brains, imaginations, voices,” he said. “Let’s use them. Let’s think.”

Driving, he scoffed at Zeke’s
wait-and-see
policy. “Wait and see. In
other words, sit like hunters’ ducks until they decide to shoot us.” And he was disturbed by the fact that Dez had spoken. “You got people into a giving-in frame of mind. You got them thinking about dirty money.”

“I did nothing wrong. My point was well taken. Everyone thought so. People have no money, Asa. You’re lucky to have a business of your own, one that provides things people need no matter what. And that bit of cash your mother put away. You’re lucky! And I’ve got to think about the playhouse, don’t I? I can’t see it sold for pennies and torn down.”

They turned up River Road, but he drove right past their house.

“Where are you going?”

“I just need to see,” he said, vaguely.

See what?
But she didn’t say anything, though her fingers flexed with impatience. She had put off the ironing and now it was ahead of her.

At the end of River Road, past Pine Point, he turned left onto the old Amherst Road. They passed miles of dark fields with only the occasional farmhouse and arrived in the center of Whistling Falls, a simple four-corners. There were no streetlights, no public buildings, just a few houses and a grange hall. “Look at this,” Asa said, braking to a stop. “There’s nothing here. They’ve
got
to take this place. It makes so much more sense.”

He was more relaxed driving back to Cascade, taking the long, roundabout way, passing by the Cascade Golf Course, slowing the car as they rolled past. The handsome fieldstone mansion that had been the Clark estate had been transformed, with a double front door and striped awnings on every window, into the clubhouse. There were still signs of construction—some scaffolding near the chimney, and bushes with big root balls, not yet planted, but the club looked on course to open as scheduled in June.

“Makes no sense to build that then tear it right down,” Asa said.

“Perhaps.”

“What do you mean?”

“I’m skeptical. You heard what Zeke said about the governor. The man’s a crook! Who knows what will happen? I’m against this as much
as anyone, but I’m also starting to accept that it might really happen and if it does, well, then maybe it’s a blessing in disguise. In a city like Boston,” she said, “or New York,” she added, carefully testing the waters, “I might get an illustrator’s job. In any case, I’d probably get more portrait work than I do now. All I’ve had is those two little girls, and the mother sent her driver to pick up the painting last Friday, almost a week now, and I still haven’t been paid. And you could run a drugstore anywhere. We could be happy in a busier place, Asa.”

His face, lit by the moon as he turned to look at her, revealed deep distress. “Dez, I don’t want to run a drugstore anywhere. I want to run my drugstore here, in my town. Raise our children here.” He reached across the seat to pull her beside him, but the yank was clumsy, pinching the flesh above her elbow.

“Well, what if you can’t?” she said irritably. “There aren’t any more Stock Exchange vice presidents or governors to care about us anymore. Richard Harcourt went to jail! Everything’s changed. Cascade isn’t what it was and it may never be again. Maybe we need to realize that.”