Keeping the Peace (3 page)

Still, although reserved and austere, they remained a close family. They would rather tolerate John Giamo than lose their daughter or the grandchildren, so for the most part, they kept any irritation they felt well under control. John watched in the rearview mirror as his father-in-law disappeared, like a snow-cloaked phantom, into the blizzard. He was inclined to think that if Tom cut himself, he would bleed ice water. The police chief shook his head as he peered through the snow, wondering from whence his sexy, lusty wife came. Perhaps she was a throwback to her great-grandfather, who, according to rumors in both families, might have been warmer than anyone imagined. It had been whispered around town for three generations that old Tom Dearborne was the reason the young and very beautiful widow Mia Giamo had never remarried.

John’s mind seemed stuck on his wife’s family this morning. Perhaps it was the cold and the snow. In this new world, the Dearbornes were seven generations on the same plot of land. The Giamos were only three. However, the new world was a great equalizer, and though the Dearbornes privately considered themselves to be several rungs up the socio-economic ladder from the Giamo family, the defining parameters of their assumption were blurred by a capitalist society that rewarded hard work and independent thinking. Although the Dearbornes would have vehemently denied it, they still held to a certain caste system that had put them on top, and they were loath to share the spot. For generations, everything from town politics to family dynamics had pretty much gone their way. They were ill-prepared when faced with the fact that their only daughter had fallen in love with a handsome Italian boy from a family only two generations born in America, and Catholic at that. It was frustrating for them to not be in control of their daughter’s life.

To add to their disgruntlement, they had to share another of their lifelines—their water, the life’s blood of their farm—and guilt didn’t shadow the somewhat perverse pleasure John felt about him and Melanie owning it. It had been the sore tooth the Dearbornes had been forced to bite on since the first Thomas Dearborne had signed the deed in 1790. For, although the Dearbornes could be rigid and elitist, they were nonetheless honest, and each generation following on the other knew the secret to the spring would eventually come out.

The Dearbornes

The Dearborne farm water had flowed copiously from a spring on the hillside a quarter of a mile from the farm buildings. It was not until the property lines were re-surveyed when the stone house was built that the Dearbornes discovered their spring lay nearly five hundred feet inside their neighbor’s land. Years passed, and each generation of Dearbornes inherited the duty of trying to acquire the hundred acres that held their secret and plentiful water supply. Acquiring the land would absolve them of the sin of stolen water for every previous generation. They tried everything, legal and sometimes barely so. Once, the spring was hidden with a carefully placed “blowdown.” Another time, the survey team was spied upon and the pins quietly moved after dark. When their neighbor finally died in 1939 without issue and the will was contested, the Dearbornes waited, money in hand and confident, for the lawyers to approach them. Rumors began to circulate that the place was being sold for a song to a newly landed Italian stone cutter, but the Dearbornes scoffed. No Italian stone cutter would ever want a place so far out of town. Most of them lived in Barre, but there were a few Italian families in Clark’s Corner. The Dearbornes didn’t know any of them. They worked in the local quarry owned by the Barre stone company. They lived down by the railroad tracks and seemed to be related to each other. The Dearbornes’ cold dismissal of the more common aspects of the world around them proved to be fatal for their plans.

The truth of the matter was that the foreman of the local quarry knew the banker who held the mortgage on the contested property. The foreman knew that one of his most talented workers, Paulo Giamo, was looking for land. The foreman wanted Paulo to stay with the company, preferably in his local quarry in Clark’s Corner. He was afraid that Paulo would be offered a better position in the headstone factory in Barre and leave his employ. So he approached the banker, the lawyers, and Paulo and brought them together one day in the bank. Paulo put his money—cash—down on the big desk, signed the proper papers, and walked out onto the street a landowner. When the Dearbornes learned about the sale, they were furious. They ranted and raved. They threatened. They cajoled. They almost begged. They tried to litigate, but Paulo Giamo had made an impression on the bank president, who, like many other people, secretly felt that it wouldn’t hurt the Dearbornes to be taken down a peg or two. The litigation was dropped.

During his lifetime, Paulo Giamo had cause to speak to the Dearbornes perhaps once or twice, but after his death, his widow came calling one Sunday afternoon asking to speak to Tom. Instantly curious, Mrs. Dearborne invited Mia Giamo into the big drafty kitchen and called her husband in from the woodshed, where he was chopping kindling. Mia Giamo sat at the kitchen table, hands folded, facing the Dearbornes. She was still very young, only thirty, and her olive skin was unlined and touched with a rosy glow. She was undeniably beautiful. With her dark hair curling out from under her bright kerchief, she would have been an exotic enough figure to the tall, pale Dearbornes, but it was the small gold hoops in her pierced ears and the gold bracelets on her wrist that made her so unspeakably foreign and somewhat frightening to them. They were uncomfortable in her presence, but they were well-mannered, after all, and listened to what she had to say.

“You may have heard that my husband was killed in an accident in the quarry,” Mia Maronetti Giamo said.

“Yes, I heard that. I am sorry for you,” Tom replied. He had never seen her up close.

Mrs. Dearborne made a noise. Mia Giamo thought she might say something, but when she didn’t, Mia continued. “Yes, well. In settling his estate, it has been necessary to account for certain taxes paid on certain acreage, and a survey of the property was ordered.” If Mia noticed the flicker of eye contact between the man and his wife, she ignored it and went on. “The survey has been completed.” She looked up at both of them then. “Here it is,” she said. “There is a spring on my property, from which a pipe runs to your property. Do you know this?” She noticed Tom’s jaw muscle flex. She waited.

“Our water does come from a spring on the hillside that abuts your property,” he said.

“It turns out that the spring is actually on my property, quite a ways in, actually,” said Mia with a little smile. No one spoke for a few moments. Then she said, “I have a proposal. I am a poor widow. I have three children. I am always in need of money.”

The Dearbornes’ hearts leaped as one.
At last
, they thought.

“I propose,” said Mia carefully, “I propose a lease. I lease you the water rights, a lifetime lease, renewable the next time the deed changes hands.”

It was not what the Dearbornes had been expecting to hear. Tom leaned forward, smiling in his most friendly way, but as he was not accustomed to smiling much, it appeared as more of a grimace.

“I have a proposal,” he said. “A counter proposal. I will buy the farm from you. Tomorrow. Name your price. I will pay cash. That will give you plenty of money, and your children will be safe.”

They were shocked when she laughed. She laughed suddenly and out loud, and her laughter was honest and beautiful. Mia’s full lips parted, and the sound cut through that somber household so dramatically that the beagle in the backyard bayed. The Dearbornes had never heard such a magical sound, although they were incapable of labeling it as such. Tom was moved by unfamiliar feelings.

“No, no, you misunderstand me,” she said. Her gold bracelets tinkled as she raised her arms playfully. “Let me explain. My farm is not for sale. If I sell my farm, I could only buy some house in Barre or in Clark’s Corner. I would spend my money on food, on fuel. I have a cow here for milk. I have wood for my fires. I have gardens and chickens. I have planted grapes and apples. I have security for my children. They will not go hungry. I would rather have a little money and a lot of land. No, the land is not for sale, but the lease…the lease is available to you. Pay the lease. I will have some money, and you will have your water.” She leaned forward, smiling.

Tom would not give up so easily. He cleared his throat. “Mrs. Giamo, I will buy just the acre of land that surrounds the spring, the water supply. Surely we can come to a price for an acre of land that is agreeable to us both.”

Mia blinked. She sighed, as if explaining something to a dull child. “Thank you for your offer, Mr. Dearborne. Normally, I might not be opposed to selling one acre of my land. However, the acre of which you speak has on it a spring. A spring that has fed this farm for over one hundred years. That’s a lot of water, and that makes that particular acre very valuable. Now, I have another spring, near my house. It gives me plenty of water, too, but we never know about these things. Certainly I know that unplanned things can happen at any moment. A husband can slip. A rock could slip, too. The earth could tremble. And there would be no more water for Mia and her children. That is why I must keep both springs. Just in case. However, since these events of which I speak may not ever come to pass, I agree to lease you the water rights. As I said before, it will give me a little cash and secure the water supply for you.”

Mia left that day with cash and a signed agreement for the lease of the water rights from her spring to the Dearborne Farm. The Dearbornes sat, unsettled, at their kitchen table long after she had left, each nursing their personal interpretation of what had just happened. Tom in particular felt warm around his ears. They had achieved their goal, but not in the way they had hoped. They had what they needed, but not what they wanted. The cool Yankee ingenuity that had made them wealthy and held them steady against countless Vermont winters had melted before the warm beauty of the Italian widow with the magical laugh.

Dark shapes in the middle of the road interrupted John’s pleasant daydreams. He slowed to a stop. He would have to wait. About thirty wild turkeys, spectacular in their bronze plumage, were crossing the road, single file, probably headed for shelter in the hemlock stand at the southeast corner of Dearborne’s lower woodlot. They were a common sight, but John never tired of watching them. As he waited for the big birds to cross, he glanced at his watch. It was nearly seven o’clock, and the snow seemed to be swirling faster and more densely than ever.

Chapter Three

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, Melanie continued to stare out the window after she had watched the billowing snow swallow the tail lights of her husband’s car. She let the storm mesmerize her. Recently, she had been on such a treadmill, her days running into one another. She juggled her household, her children, and her business automatically, changing hats as needed almost unconsciously. Sometimes she felt her life was a dizzying carousel, or a Ferris wheel, spinning round and round in concentric circles reaching such a crescendo lately that she felt if it stopped and she looked up, she wouldn’t know where, or even who, she was. So she appreciated the blizzard that now raged outside. It would ground her. It would give her a chance to look up. The storm would hold the rest of the world at bay. Suddenly, she wished that John had been stranded with her. She wished she had gone back upstairs with him this morning. He hadn’t shown much interest lately, and she had let an opportunity slip away.

She heard the creaking of the stairs. Somebody was awake. Melanie turned away from the window to see her daughter Mia shuffle sleepily into the room, still dressed in the T-shirt and yoga pants she’d slept in.