Cascade (27 page)

At the drugstore, lunch hour was in full swing, every stool taken, grill sizzling, mixers whirring, the counter lined with Black Cows and Tin Roof sundaes and double-frank plates and ice-cream sodas. Mrs. Raymond and Billy, the after-school helper, barely glanced up. Asa was the same in the back room, bent over his table, holding up one finger when she knocked, his concentration steady as he measured liquid from a beaker into a bottle. He screwed the cap on tight and fixed a label to the front before looking up.

Billy popped his head in. “Zeke’s here to see you, Asa. Says it’s real important.”

And then it was all too late. Asa carried the bottle out to Mrs. Raymond to ring up. Then he turned to Zeke, who stood by the tobacco counter, bent over the blue flame that emitted from the Turkish cigar-lighter, puffing on his cigar to get it going. “You hear about that missing water man?” Zeke asked.

“I have. What’s going on?”

“Dwight and Wendell found his car quick enough, out at Pine Point, and I guess they found the poor fellow, too, drowned.”

“Oh!” Dez said, choking on the word. They’d found him so easily.

“I’m sorry to hear it,” Asa said. “Very sorry. What can I get you, Zeke?”

“Wendell called in. He tried to call you direct but I guess no one’s answering your phone.”

“We’ve been backed up.”

“They’re bringing in the doctor from Bath to do the coroner’s report here before they send him up to the funeral parlor in Athol. The doc needs me to deliver a few things for him for an autopsy. Wendell gave me a list.” He pulled a folded sheet of paper from his back pocket.

Asa said that he was out of a few things since he’d put off his Hartford trip. But he adjusted his spectacles and scanned the list and said, “No,
we’re in luck, all set.” He began to lead Zeke into the back room, then paused to turn to Dez. “Did you need me?”

But she shook her head no. It was too late to tell now. Or rather, there was no reason to tell.

At home, she sat down with her sketchpad at her worktable. The card depicting the bustling Cascade street scene needed finishing but she had no idea how she would manage to focus on it. She wondered what was going on in town, what kind of conclusions were being drawn by the people investigating the drowning.

Maybe her remarks had set him to exploring when he might otherwise have never walked the river at all.

Still. An accident was an accident. And certainly part of his job would have been to walk the river, inspect the area.

“Focus,” she said aloud. The hardest work was done. What was left was mindless enough, but instead she let her pen wander. Stan floating facedown, her mother as a three-year-old, pulled from that water. If her mother had died, Dez never would have been born. If Dez hadn’t told Jacob that Asa didn’t want him at the house, they never would have walked to Secret Pond and closed the dam. If Stan hadn’t caught his foot, he might have saved himself.

So many contingencies marked our destinies.

She imagined drowning to be terrifying. She was only four when the
Titanic
sank, but she remembered the adults talking of nothing else, and an older neighbor boy illustrating, with a stick in the dirt, how deep the ocean was, how far the ship had sunk, adding detail upon detail until Dez was sufficiently horrified to satisfy him.

She drew the awful, last image of Stan—the breathing of water into the lungs, the gasping, her pages filling with perspectives from many angles—looking down from the top of the dam, sideways, at ground level. What was it? What was she trying to discover? She wanted to grasp the
fact of his death, wanted to know that it did not matter that she might have encouraged him to walk the riverbank. An unfortunate and blameless accident could happen anywhere, anytime, to anyone.

We die, we know we must die,
she thought,
and still we treat death as surprise, as tragedy, as punishment
. It was always a drama—like in that newsreel, the one about the woman in the long black veil mourning Rudolph Valentino at his grave every year. The woman joined one of the drowning scenes, black veil flowing, a slender pale hand dropping flowers into the water: long, white, lugubrious lilies.

How many painters had seized on Shakespeare’s image of Ophelia floating among the flowers? How many maritime paintings had captured, for one transfixed moment, sailors going down at sea? People were fascinated by drowning—and here she herself had proof of that, with people from across the country responding to the mesmerizing prospect of a town drowned. A “great deluge” was part of the myth and legend of almost every culture on earth.

She assumed she would be alone until after eleven, when Asa closed the drugstore, but at eight-thirty she was bent over her postcard, inking in the final outlines, when she heard the Buick and the creak of the screen door, the sound of him walking around the kitchen—opening the icebox, running the tap.

She went out to meet him. His expression was haggard. “Swamped,” he said, “from seven a.m., and there are still customers looking for Cokes. I had to get out of there. Billy said he’d close up.”

“Is there any news of the water man? Were they able to figure out what happened?”

“I never had a chance to talk to Zeke. Simple drowning, I suppose.”

Dez realized that Asa probably did not know exactly where Stan’s body had been found. She screwed the cap onto her inking pen. “He was very big. He might have had a heart attack.”

“Maybe.” But he was too tired to pretend real concern. He was heading up to bed, he said.

Dez returned to her worktable; she had just a bit of outlining to finish. But when she picked up her pen, she stared down at the painting and pushed it away. All of it—the
Standard
, the job, New York—seemed remote, not quite real, and faintly distasteful.

T
hey overslept, both of them, waking to full daylight, to the metal clatter of the mail slot, the harsh morning sun casting bleached light over the bedclothes. Asa kicked them off and jumped out of bed, and in her own haste, Dez forgot to take her temperature, and then it was too late—once the blood started pumping, you couldn’t be sure of an accurate reading.

She slipped into a housedress, pulled her hair back, and headed downstairs, only to be stopped short in the hallway. “Asa, come down here,” she called.

The morning mail normally consisted of an envelope or two tucked through the slot. Now there were at least twenty-five postcards and envelopes scattered on the floor.

Asa joined her and together they knelt to sift through the pile. There were mostly postcards, all addressed to
Desdemona Hart, care of Doomed Cascade, Massachusetts, or Soon-to-Be-No-More Cascade, Massachusetts
. Many of the cards depicted the senders’ own cities and towns. There was sympathy for Cascade and the sharing of similar stories. A virtual ghost
town in Arkansas:
the farms literally dried up and blew away.
Big River, Washington, an entire town destroyed by fire:
Everything was timber and everyone worked for the timber company. The fire burned for four days and consumed every splinter.

Asa rocked back on his heels, a broad smile spreading across his face. “My God, Dez. You really started something.”

They counted an unbelievable thirty-three pieces of mail, one of them an envelope from the
Standard
, which, when she opened it, contained her first check. She held it in her hands, a simple rectangle of paper that represented seventy-five dollars—a lot of money, and so much more than money. Right now there were copies of the
Standard
in every city, every backwater, every single town in the United States, her work duplicated over and over again. Why, right now, a man in California might be glancing over the article. A woman in Nebraska might be buying a postcard of Omaha, spurred into connecting with Dez, with Cascade, with the terrible idea of obliteration.

“And to think you’ve got another issue coming out tonight,” said Asa. “This publicity has got to help.”

Dez gathered up the cards and carried them into the kitchen while Asa went upstairs to get ready for work. There was nothing wrong with him getting his hopes up. Anyway, what would happen would happen. Her little cards didn’t have that much control. She lit the gas and filled the coffeepot, scooped lard into the skillet, toasted bread. The response, at least, was a positive sign. She had touched people with her idea, a good thing.

She’d cracked three eggs and was beating them with a fork when she looked up, thinking she heard knocking. But there was no one on the porch when she peered through the window. She tipped the skillet back and forth to coat the surface with the fast-melting lard, and there it was again, a definite knock. She turned down the gas and wiped her hands on her apron, craning her head into the hall to look through the front-door sidelights. What she saw made her gasp. There, parked on River Road like a ghost, sat the big maroon Ford.

Her legs were quick and stiff, hand fumbling to unlatch and open the front door they never used. A haggard-looking woman wearing a black dress and black straw hat stood on the front step. Her hands were clasped close to her waist; a large pocketbook dangled from the crook of one elbow. “I’m Ethel Smith,” she said. “And I wanted to meet the lady who done that picture of Stanley.”

Dez stood back to hold the door open, stumbling over a string of condolences. “Such a terrible shock.” “I was sorry not to know him better.”

“Sit, sit,” she said in the kitchen, pouring coffee, asking Mrs. Smith how she took it, then setting out the sugar bowl, a spoon, a pitcher of milk. She tried to make conversation, but Mrs. Smith answered in simple words and phrases. “Yes,” it had been hard. “No,” her son wasn’t with her. “He’s at the hotel with my sister.”

The woman was thin, painfully so, with sharp, high cheekbones, and small blue eyes that sat deep inside bony sockets. Dez spread Asa’s toast with butter and strawberry jam and offered it. At first, she refused it, then carefully and silently devoured both slices as Dez grew increasingly uncomfortable, hoping Asa would hurry down.

“Thank you,” Mrs. Smith said, unclasping her purse and fishing out a nearly empty package of Chesterfields. She lit one and blew out a thin stream of smoke. “Stan expected trouble here, what with his job. Resentment. But you obviously befriended him, for long enough to draw that fine picture, so I wanted to talk to you, see if you have any idea what happened to him.”

“But Mrs. Smith,” Dez said uncertainly. “Stan drowned.”

“Stanley was a careful man,” she said, with a sudden, flinty look. “He’d never have gone close to the water like that, certainly not wearing his good suit and fedora. And his foot is broken, wrenched and all scraped-up.”

“He must have fallen,” Dez said, and saying this aloud confirmed what had to be true: however Stan died, his death was an accident.

“That’s what they say and I don’t believe it. All due respect, but I went up where his car was parked and it’s all flat shoreline, grass and dirt. He
was in this skinny little brook off the main river. No big rocks to clamber over.” Her voice cracked for the first time and she slapped her hand to her forehead to stop her eyes brimming. “Now, a man doesn’t just trip and fall into the water like that!”

“What are you saying?”

“There’s something more here than meets the eye.”

“Oh, Mrs. Smith, there’s not a chance—”

“Now hear me out. I think someone hurt Stanley. A lady lives up on the common told me she saw a boy throw mud at his car.” She wiped her eyes with the back of her hand in a fierce motion. “His very first day. Boys learn who to hate from their fathers, I know this, and I was wondering when you talked to him, if he mentioned getting any trouble, what with the resentment against the water board.”

“I did meet Stan right after the mud-throwing incident.”

Mrs. Smith leaned forward, as if she would glean extra insight from listening hard.

“That was the day I did the sketch.”

“He was real proud of it. You did him proud.”

“He came into the drugstore right after the incident, but it was his first day in town. He had no idea who had thrown the mud, just that it was a boy, and I don’t think it would ever occur to anyone that a boy’s prank would mean anything.”