Tupper was just something that one had to tolerate. But I knew that I
never would forget that jaunty, happy voice, or his drooling as he talked,
or the habit that he had of counting on his fingers – God knows why he did
it as if he were in continual fear that he might have lost one of them in
the last few minutes.
The sun had come up by now and the world was flooded with a brilliant
light, and I was becoming more certain by the minute that the village was
encircled and cut off, that someone or something, for no apparent reason,
had dropped a cage around us. Looking back along the way that I had come, I
could see that I’d been travelling on the inside of a curve.
Looking ahead, the curve wasn’t difficult to plot.
And why should it be us, I wondered. Why a little town like ours? A
town that was no different from ten thousand other towns.
Although, I told myself; that might not be entirely true. It was
exactly what I would have said and perhaps everybody else. Everyone, that
is, except for Nancy Sherwood – Nancy, who only the night before had told me
her strange theory that this town of ours was something very special. And
could she be right, I wondered? Was our little town of Millville somehow set
apart from all other little towns?
Just ahead was my home street and my calculations told me that it was
located just inside the encircling barricade.
There was, I told myself, no sense in going farther. It would be a
waste of time. I did not need to complete the circle to convince myself that
we were hemmed in.
I cut across the backyard of the Presbyterian parsonage and there, just
across the street, was my house, set within its wilderness of flowers and
shrubs, with the abandoned greenhouse standing in the back and the old
garden around it, a field of purple flowers, those same purple flowers that
Mrs Tyler had poked at with her cane and said were doing well this season.
I heard the steady squeaking as I reached the street and I knew that
some kids had sneaked into the yard and were playing in the old lawn swing
that stood beside the porch.
I hurried up the street, a little wrathful at the squeaking. I had told
those kids, time and time again, to leave that swing alone. It was old and
rickety and one of these days one of the uprights or something else would
break, and one of the kids might be badly hurt. I could have taken it down,
of course, but I was reluctant to, for it was Mother’s swing. She had spent
many hours out in the yard, swinging gently and sedately, looking at the
flowers.
The yard was closed in by the old-time lilac hedge and I couldn’t see
the swing until I reached the gate.
I hurried for the gate and jerked it open savagely and took two quick
steps through it, then stopped in my tracks.
There were no kids in the swing. There was a man, and except for a
battered hat of straw set squarely atop his head, he was as naked as a
jaybird.
He saw me and grinned a foolish grin. ‘Hi, there,’ he said, with jaunty
happiness. And even as he said it, he began a counting of his fingers,
drooling as he counted.
And at the sight of him, at the sound of that remembered but long
forgotten voice, my mind went thudding back to the afternoon before.
2
Ed Adler had come that afternoon to take out the phone and he had been
embarrassed. ‘I’m sorry, Brad,’ he said. ‘I don’t want to do this, but I
guess I have to. I have an order from Tom Preston.’
Ed was a friend of mine. We had been good pals in high school and good
friends ever since. Tom Preston had been in school with us, of course, but
he’d been no friend of mine or of anybody else’s. He’d been a snotty kid and
he had grown up into a snotty man.
That was the way it went, I thought. The heels always were the ones who
seemed to get ahead. Tom Preston was the manager of the telephone office and
Ed Adler worked for him as a phone installer and a troubleshooter, and I was
a realtor and insurance agent who was going out of business. Not because I
wanted to, but because I had to, because I was delinquent in my office phone
bill and way behind in rent.
Tom Preston was successful and I was a business failure and Ed Adler
was earning a living for his family, but not getting anywhere. And the rest
of them, I wondered. The rest of the high school gang – how were they
getting on? And I couldn’t answer, for I didn’t know. They all had drifted
off. There wasn’t much in a little town like Millville to keep a man around.
I probably wouldn’t have stayed myself if it hadn’t been for Mother. I’d
come home from school after Dad had died and had helped out with the
greenhouse until Mother bad joined Dad. And by that time I had been so long
in Millville that it was hard to leave.
‘Ed,’ I had asked, ‘do you ever hear from any of the fellows?
‘No, I don’t,’ said Ed. ‘I don’t know where any of them are.’
I said: ‘There was Skinny Austin and Charley Thompson, and Marty Hall
and Alf. I can’t remember Alf’s last name.’
‘Peterson,’ said Ed.
‘Yes, that’s it,’ I said. ‘It’s a funny thing I should forget his name.
Old Alf and me had a lot of fun together.’
Ed got the cord unfastened and stood up, with the phone dangling from
his hand.
‘What are you going to do now?’ he asked me.
‘Lock the door, I guess,’ I said. ‘It’s not just the phone. It’s
everything. I’m behind in rent as well. Dan Willoughby, down at the bank, is
very sad about it.’
‘You could run the business from the house.’
‘Ed,’ I told him shortly, ‘there isn’t any business. I just never had a
business. I couldn’t make a start. I lost money from the first.’
I got up and put on my hat and walked out of the place. The street was
almost empty. There were a few cars at the kerb and a dog was smelling of a
lamp post and old Stiffy Grant was propped up in front of the Happy Hollow
tavern, hoping that someone might come along and offer him a drink.
I was feeling pretty low. Small thing as it had been, the phone had
spelled the end. It was the thing that finally signified for me what a
failure I had been. You can go along for months and kid yourself that
everything’s all right and will work out in the end, but always something
comes up that you can’t kid away. Ed Adler coming to disconnect and take
away the phone had been that final thing I couldn’t kid away.
I stood there on the sidewalk, looking down the street, and I felt
hatred for the town – not for the people in it, but for the town itself, for
the impersonal geographic concept of one particular place.
The town lay dusty and arrogant and smug beyond all telling and it
sneered at me and I knew that I had been mistaken in not leaving it when I’d
had the chance. I had tried to live with it for very love of it, but I’d
been blind to try. I had known what all my friends had known, the ones who’d
gone away, but I had closed my mind to that sure and certain knowledge:
there was nothing left in Millville to make one stay around. It was an old
town and it was dying, as old things always die. It was being strangled by
the swift and easy roads that took customers to better shopping areas; it
was dying with the decline of marginal agriculture, dying along with the
little vacant hillside farms that no longer would support a family. It was a
place of genteel poverty and it had its share of musty quaintness, but it
was dying just the same, albeit in the polite scent of lavender and
impeccable good manners.
I turned down the street, away from the dusty business section and made
my way down to the little river that flowed dose against the east edge of
the town. There I found the ancient footpath underneath the trees and walked
along, listening in the summer silence to the gurgle of the water as it
flowed between the grassy banks and along the gravel bars.
And as I walked the lost and half forgotten years came crowding in upon