Please Remember This (10 page)

“I did notice that you had to tell me about the problems the Lutherans are having with the basement of their church in order to explain why you had the Lanier Building key.”

“I did?” He didn’t remember. “See, it’s so automatic, we don’t even notice that we’re doing it. And the other thing is that it’s very easy to be sentimental about small towns, about how friendly and hospitable we are. And we are, but there’s a cost to all that friendliness. Everyone is so afraid of conflict that we avoid any confrontation that smells of friction. We make nice all the time. People are so used to stifling their thoughts and their preferences in the name of avoiding conflict that no one knows how to be direct. It hits the women especially hard, and I think a lot of them seethe way down inside.”

“Until someone explodes,” Tess said, “and it’s all dreadful and messy for a little while, but then just gets glossed over without being fixed.”

He looked surprised.

“And the one or two people who do pride themselves
on ‘speaking their minds,’ “ she continued, “actually only speak the negative things. They manage to repress any hint that they admire or approve of something.”

“I thought you said you hadn’t lived in a small town.”

“I work in a retirement home,” she explained. “It has its own little culture.”

“Then maybe you’ll do all right here, and I should leave you to your fate.” He stood up. “But let me warn you about my brother. He’s great, and he’s usually always right.”

“That’s a warning?”

“Sure. If he weren’t great and right, he wouldn’t be dangerous, would he?”

In the World-According-to-Ned-Ravenal, Tess should not have told Sierra that she wanted to be alone at the Birthday Celebration. Her remark was overly direct. It violated the principle of unceasing gregariousness and sociability. It might have Hurt Someone’s Feelings—obviously the greatest of all sins.

Tess had stayed out of the conflicts and embarrassments that Willow Place’s residents sometimes deliberately, sometimes inadvertently, inflicted on each other. If she moved here, she was also going to stay out of Fleur-de-lis’s similar messes. Had Sierra been the complete stranger that Tess had thought her to be, she would have not regretted her remark in the least. But Sierra was not a stranger, and Tess owed her something. She didn’t know what that something was, but it was there.

Shortly after ten on Saturday morning, Tess parked in front of the Celandine Gardens shop. The Kmart lot had been nearly full, but there were very few cars downtown.

The door to Sierra’s place was open, held ajar by a brick. Tess rapped lightly on the doorframe to announce herself, then stepped inside.

It was going to be a pretty shop. The walls were already painted, a semigloss lacquer two or three shades darker than the celadon green Sierra packaged her products in. Three fabrics were draped across a round fiberboard table. Obviously Sierra was selecting a tablecloth. All three had a Provençal air; they were golden yellow and cobalt blue. But the large print, while the most appealing on its own, would draw a person’s eye away from the products. One of the smaller prints had too much blue and not enough yellow. It had to be the third. It seemed like an easy decision to Tess.

Sierra was fitting brass-finished shelf braces into brackets that had been installed on the wall. She glanced over her shoulder at the sound of Tess’s entering. “Oh,” she said. She was surprised. “It’s you.”

Tess moved farther inside. “I’m not quite sure what to say.” That wasn’t being indirect or overly nice. It was the truth. “When I saw you in May, I didn’t know who you were.”

“I’m not like you.” Sierra’s words came out in a rush. “I’m not one for hiding how I feel. Some people can’t handle that. But I’m not going to change. This is who I am.”

Tess wasn’t aware that she was asking anyone to
change. “I really do appreciate your calling Duke. He came and saw me.” Sierra would think that Duke was her father. “I liked him.”

“Honesty is the key to an authentic inner life. Without openness there can be no nurturing wholeness.”

What did that have to do with anything Tess had said?
You’re not being honest. You’re hurt that I didn’t like you immediately. You’re talking about openness, and you aren’t making eye contact. You’re angry and you won’t admit it. “I
want to apologize because I know I must have seemed rude.”

Sierra turned away and started fitting another bracket into its slots. “I don’t think people should apologize for what they have done. People need to celebrate their mistakes. You should accept your errors and integrate them into the fabric of your being. Apologies are shields that keep you from reuniting your spiritual fragments.”

What?
Apologies are shields …
That made no sense to Tess, none at all. Maybe if she saw it written down, she could sort it out, but her best guess now was that whatever it meant, her grandmother wouldn’t have agreed. Violet Lanier had believed in apologies. “All right.”

“I don’t know why you’re here,” Sierra continued. “But you need to know that I believe in living in the moment. The past is not a goddess to whom we must pay tribute.”

What on earth was she talking about? Tess had occasionally helped out in Willow Place’s Alzheimer’s unit. Her standards for other people making sense were pretty low.

“To valorize that time”—Sierra was still speaking—
“as something magical implies that other moments are not, and we should honor all time as sacred.”

Now Tess got it. Sierra didn’t want to answer questions about Nina Lane. That was fine. Tess had only one question for Sierra—
What is wrong with you?
“I don’t expect that kind of conversation at all.”

“For your sake, I hope that’s true. But only you can evaluate the clarity of your expectations.” Sierra pointedly turned and started looking at her fabric samples again.

Last night Ned had warned Tess about small-town life, how hard it was to be honest. Now Sierra was saying that she was secretive, inauthentic, and fragmented. It sounded like she was going to fit right in.

Tess got in her car and drove out of town. She was glad to see that Ned’s truck wasn’t at the schoolhouse. She was looking forward to seeing both him and his brother again, but she didn’t want an audience for what she was about to do.

She stood in front of the solid, square building. If she were a young boy wanting to brand the building with his initials, where would she do it? The parents would be back at the farm, tying mattresses to the top of the car. It would have been summer; the teacher wouldn’t have been at the school, but there might have been people on the road from whom the boy would need to hide.

Jutting out from the side of the building farthest from the road was a cellar door that projected beyond the foundation and slanted down to ground level, the kind that Auntie Em had struggled to open during the tornado in the
Wizard of Oz
movie. A
child crouching behind the base of the door wouldn’t be seen.

Tess went around to the back side of the cellar stairs. A cluster of forsythia bushes hid the foundation. Springtime’s yellow blossoms had come and gone, but the willowy branches were lush with narrow green leaves. If there had been bushes here in 1937, they would have been dried and twiggy. The earth would have cracked and shrunk away from the building.

Tess lifted the forsythia. Would the boy have knelt down or stood? She liked to think of him as remaining standing, holding up to a little bit of pride. She ran her hands over the stucco. Her fingertips rasped against the grainy material.

But it was low on the wall that she felt the pattern of lines. She blew the dust away. R.H.L. Her grandfather’s initials.

I
came back, Grandpa. And everything’s green. You don’t remember Kansas this way, but your parents must have told you how green it can be. The sunflowers are higher than the fence posts, and I’m here.

Hobbing, as Fleur-de-lis was then called, was little other than a cluster of shacks at a river landing with but two families of respectable character. Yet all rallied to provide us with shelter and garments. Although the Western character often comes with an unrefined surface, it has an open heart and generous hands.

News of our catastrophe was spread by passing boats. The Gaithers family, the St. Etiennes,
and many of the deck passengers elected to continue their voyage on other westbound steamers. One such boat was persuaded to open its cargo hold and sell us the nails, hinges, doorknobs, frying pans, water buckets, boots, and cloth required by those of us who had decided to stay where Fate had landed us. The two Mr. Ravenals negotiated these purchases for us.

Our own family party had a tolerable dwelling within a very short time, and all the
Western Settler
passengers were snugly housed by winter.

We kept to ourselves that fall, but our first Christmas in our new settlement was not unhappy. By our second winter we had renamed the town and had established a school and a literary society. By the following summer, Mr. Troyes, an acquaintance of ours from New Orleans, arrived to start a newspaper.

The war years visited most grievous afflictions on our connections in New Orleans. When travel on the Mississippi became safe again, we welcomed friends and family eager to start life over in the West. Although often destitute, many were individuals of education and taste, and Fleur-de-lis became a town of no small degree of sophistication.

Mrs. Louis Lanier (Eveline Roget),
The Wreck of the Western Settler,
privately printed, 1879

 

Chapter 5

 

W
hen they had married, Dr. Matt and Carolyn moved into one of the old Victorian houses on the bluff overlooking the river, and that was where Ned Ravenal had done most of his growing up. He was there on Saturday evening, sitting in the dining room. The room faced west, and the light from the setting sun slanted in through the lace undercurtains Carolyn had in the windows, making pretty patterns on Tess Lanier’s cheeks and arms.

Ned didn’t see much resemblance between her and the picture of Nina Lane. Nina had had a modern crispness to her face, and she had always looked drawn, her eyes alert but wary. Tess had a more exotic face, her lips soft and full, her chin rather narrow. Her coloring was rose and gold. When he and Phil had run into her on Friday, her hair had been clipped back with tendrils escaping at ears and temples, hinting at an unruly wildness. When she had come to his parents’ house for dinner tonight, she had brushed it out, but while loose around her shoulders, it wasn’t wild. She clearly had it under control.

He suspected that she had most things under control.
No wonder she and Phil were getting along so well.

Dinner was over, and Phil was talking to her about investing in Fleur-de-lis’s future. He had demographic studies to show her and prenegotiated insurance packages to explain to her. As a new member of the Chamber of Commerce, she would have access to discounted advertising and would be able to use the Chamber’s copier, fax, and bulk-mailing services. She would get help with “workforce development,” and she would receive business-counseling services. Phil had even gotten a set of plans for the Lanier Building with a rough outline of the kind of work that would need to be done. But, he had told her quickly, if she made improvements to the building and those improvements resulted in a higher assessed value, she would be eligible for a refund on the additional taxes, thanks to the Neighborhood Revitalization Act.

This was Phil being Phil—poised, organized, likable, and prepared, magazine-ad handsome and good at cocktail-party conversation. Ned himself was none of those things, especially the cocktail-party business, but even as he sat there, watching Tess Lanier being so interested in everything Phil was saying, he would not have been Phil for the world.

Of course, he hadn’t felt that way as a kid. He had seen the expression on teachers’ faces too many times, and sometimes they had even said the words—
Why can’t you be more like Phil?

Phil had played team sports and had belonged to clubs. He had stayed out of trouble and had gotten perfect grades. Ned, on the other hand, had been more solitary and more adventurous, a Tom Sawyer
of a kid, living for dark caves and longing for buried treasure. The earth existed to be dug up, tunneled into, and burrowed under. And if that wasn’t enough, there was the river, the broad, muddy Missouri. Swollen by the spring rains, it would surge down from South Dakota and through Nebraska, leaving all kinds of grand debris clogging the riverbank—beer cans, broken chairs, dog leashes, safety-orange hunting vests, all waiting to be fished through. How could any right-thinking ten-year-old resist that?

Ned’s grandfather liked old license plates and rusty fishing lures every bit as much as Ned did. “What we really need to do,” Grandfather used to say after a long Sunday afternoon spent on the riverbank, “is to dig up Farmer Martin’s cornfield. They say the
Western Settler’s
down there.”

Grandfather had told him how they really did have buried treasure right here in Fleur-de-lis. A boat with a steam engine and paddle wheels and all kinds of other great stuff had sunk here,
right here.
Grandfather told him how everything on deck had cascaded into the water—the boxes, the barrels, the stools people had been sitting on—and how the passengers had all been screaming, clinging to the deck railings as the water rose. A little boy was the first in the water, and a very brave man jumped in to save him.

“Were you the little boy?” Ned had asked the first time he heard that part of the story.

Grandfather had laughed. “Oh, no. Even I am not that old. It was my great-grandfather who was on the boat. He and his brother were going to Nebraska to open up a store. They had boxes and barrels full of
things they were going to sell to the pioneers, and all of it went down with the boat.”

“Was our great-grandfather the very brave man?”

“No.” Grandfather had smiled. “And he was your great-great-great-grandfather. No, the very brave man was a Negro slave, and that’s the best story of all.”

There had been two slaves on the boat, a man and his wife; they belonged to one of the New Orleans families. They did survive the wreck. People saw the man in the water, helping people to shore, and the woman was on the riverbank, quieting the children. “It might have been the first time some of those people had ever been touched by a black person.”

But by nightfall, when all the passengers had gathered in the little town that was now Fleur-de-lis, the two slaves were gone. They had escaped. “They landed on the Kansas side of the river. If they had been on the Missouri side, they might not have dared to run away, but in Kansas there would have been people who would help them.”

Ned knew about that. It was one thing you always learned in school, how Kansas had been settled by abolitionists from New England, people who didn’t believe in slavery. You learned to be proud of it—that Kansas had always been free soil. That felt important. Kansas was a place where a very brave man could set himself free.

As an adolescent, Ned had grown as interested in odd bits of knowledge as he had once been in river debris. He had become the sort of kid who could spend hours in front of a set of encyclopedias, tracking down some breathtakingly irrelevant piece of information. But he would have taken notes on a legal
pad instead of on three-by-five-inch cards as the teacher had wanted, so he would lose a full letter grade on the paper.

He could have easily turned into the sort of man who relies on a woman to keep him organized, a woman who would nag him into using the assigned three-by-five notecards. He could have ended up as the dad who disappears into the basement every night after dinner to work on his elaborate electric-train landscape.

But one person saved him from a lifetime of indirection and ineffectiveness—his uncle’s wife, the woman he thought of as a mother, Carolyn Shelby Ravenal.

Carolyn had grown up in Kansas’s premier political family, surrounded by men who were articulate, organized, rational, and ambitious. That was why she had been able to guide Phil so well; she had seen him many times before.

It was also why she had a very special place in her heart for Ned. She had loved that he wasn’t like the Shelbys. She had encouraged every one of his messy adventures. She never told him that his science projects were too involved. When he had come back from the river full of stories about buried treasure, she had listened and listened.

“When I grow up,” he would say, “I’m going to get a big shovel and dig up that boat.”

“You do that,” she had said, never laughing. “You do that.”

“You have interests, Ned,” she said throughout his high school years. “That’s what makes you special. Follow them. Believe in them. Keep them in the center of your life. Don’t worry if they don’t make sense
to other people. If they make sense to you, that’s all that matters.”

When Phil had graduated from high school, he had gotten a car. When Ned graduated from high school, he had gotten a manila envelope. It had a deed in it. Matt and Carolyn had bought the cornfield from Farmer Martin and were giving it to him. Whatever was left of the riverboat, however much had survived after more than a century of water and mud, was his.

He had gone back East to college, only to discover that no one in an Ivy League history department cared about a nineteenth-century Kansas riverboat. But history wasn’t the problem. He knew the history. He needed to learn how to dig. So he had transferred to the Colorado School of Mines, figuring that if anyone knew how to excavate ground with an eleven-foot water table, it would be those guys, and he had been right. He had then gone to New Orleans, where a number of the passengers, including his own ancestors, had started their journey. He earned a master’s degree in history from Tulane, spending his time researching the passenger list. After that he spent six months as a volunteer with the Canadian national park system. If he found the boat, any artifacts on it would have to be preserved, and the Canadians, it turned out, knew more about freshwater preservation techniques than anyone else.

Then Carolyn and Dr. Matt made him travel, backpacking around Europe and India for a year.

Stuff happened when you traveled on a student budget. Trains that had been running every other day for ten years suddenly switched to an every-third-day schedule with no notice. A bus conductor would take
both sections of your ticket, and even though the two pieces were right there in his pile, he would swear he had taken only one and would refuse to look. You got strange rashes on your feet. But nothing had happened that Ned couldn’t handle, and he had learned not only to be self-reliant but to like it. He liked being able to take care of himself, and he now avoided women who wanted to do it for him. He wanted a woman who had interests of her own, who had her own three-by-five-inch cards to fill up. He didn’t want anyone who was going to make him her career.

Great-uncle Bob, the family’s oddball bachelor uncle, had died while Ned was traveling. “Can we hold on to his house?” Ned had written Matt and Carolyn. “I need somewhere to live. If I start out at home, it will be too easy and I’ll never leave.”

He was surprised to find, when he got back to the States, that Phil also had moved back to Fleur-de-lis. He was living at home; apparently he had nothing to prove on the self-reliance front. “What’s the deal?” Ned asked him. “How come you’re not still in Washington?”

“You’re going to start digging up the boat, aren’t you?” Phil returned.

“You bet.” He had waited long enough.

“If I know you,” Phil went on, and Ned was startled at the affection in his brother’s voice, “you’ll just dig the thing up and preserve all the artifacts for the state historical society.”

“What else would I do?”

“Use it as a focus for redeveloping the town’s economic base. Try to pull in out-of-state tourist dollars.”

Ned couldn’t think of anything he would like less. “I’m not going to do that.”

“I know you aren’t,” Phil said easily. “That’s where I come in. Have you been downtown yet?”

“Yeah. Mom and the girls use this sunscreen that has this funny smell. It smells like … I don’t know, toilet disinfectant that’s trying not to smell like toilet disinfectant, so I thought I’d go to the drugstore and get something normal.”

But the drugstore hadn’t been there. The hardware store was gone too. And the shoe store and Eislinger’s Electronics. It had been pretty depressing. Those stores had been there as long as Ned could remember. And Don Pierce, who ran the town’s air-conditioning/furnace business, had stopped him on the street, saying that if he was going to be digging in the winter, some of Don’s guys would be really glad of the off-season work.

Ned had mumbled something. He hadn’t started thinking about a crew yet.

“These men have mortgages and families, Ned,” Mr. Pierce had said. “Their wives are already working for Kmart. They don’t want to work there too.”

This was serious. Ned wasn’t a ten-year-old mucking around the riverbank anymore. He had funding, and people needed jobs. He took a breath, looked Mr. Pierce straight in the eye, and called him by his first name. “I’ll hire local people, Don. I promise.”

“So here’s the deal,” Phil was saying that first evening Ned had been home. “You dig up that boat and you make sure you find something down there in all that mud. Ideally, it will be something that
women want to come see—dishes, dresses, whatever it is that rich ladies from Kansas City will come look at. You get them here, and I’ll make sure there is something for them to spend money on once they are here.”

So clearly Tess Lanier and her plans for an espresso bar and gift shop were exactly what Phil had had in mind.

Tess was going to do this. She was really going to do this. She was going to quit a job that had a steady paycheck and good benefits, and she was going to move to a town where there were no movie theaters or Chinese food, no flower shops, bookstores, or fabric stores. Kmart sold little travel sewing kits with cheap threads on black plastic spools.

But why not? For the first time in her life, she had enough money to take a risk. There was nothing to keep her in California. The real estate prices were awful, the traffic horrible. She didn’t have to live near the ocean; the sight of its endless waves didn’t speak to anything in her soul.

She wanted to put down roots, to create a place for herself. So what if the building with her name had been painted teal? She wasn’t afraid of teal paint.

And so what if this was the one town where every single resident had heard of Nina Lane? She wasn’t afraid of Nina Lane either.

Ned was ready. The financing was set, the equipment had been purchased or leased—two big generators to run the dewatering pumps, a bucket drill, a bulldozer, a track loader, a one-hundred-ton crane for
lowering sixty-five-foot lengths of well casings, the discharge pipes, a trailer for a night watchman to sleep in, hoses with adjustable-pressure nozzles.

The sweet corn had been harvested. Little orange surveyor’s flags flapped in the wind, marking the outline of the boat. He had spent two days walking the field with a proton-magnetometer. Then, for another two days, he and Pete Dermott, the guy from whom he was leasing much of the equipment, had drilled. At thirty-five feet, the drill would start to shake, indicating that they had touched wood.

Not just wood. The boat. The
Western Settler.

They had marked each spot with an orange flag. Ned’s three sisters had come out with cans of white spray paint and connected the flags, forming what, from the air, must look like a 170-foot pencil, long and narrow, pointed at one end, flat at the other.