‘Might want to close y’shutters, though,’ Eden added. The dog lifted his tail and articulated another long and groaning dog-fart, as if to emphasize the point.
‘We’ll . . . we’ll do that,’ Elise said faintly, and then John had the Ford’s passenger door open and was nearly shovelling her inside.
‘You bet,’ he said through his large frozen grin.
‘And come back and see us tomorrow,’ Eden called as John hurried around the front of the Ford to his side. ‘You’ll feel a mite safer around us tomorrow, I think.’ He paused, then added: ‘If you’re still around at all, accourse.’
John waved, got behind the wheel, and pulled out.
There was silence on the porch for a moment as the old man and the woman with the pale, unhealthy skin watched the Ford head back up Main Street. It left at a considerably higher speed than that at which it had come.
‘Well, we done it,’ the old man said contentedly.
‘Yes,’ she agreed, ‘and I feel like a horse’s ass. I always feel like a horse’s ass when I see the way they look at us. At me.’
‘Well,’ he said, ‘it’s only once every seven years. And it has to be done just that way. Because
— ‘
‘Because it’s part of the ritual,’ she said glumly.
‘Ayuh. It’s the ritual.’
As if agreeing it was so, the dog flipped up his tail and farted once more.
The woman booted it and then turned to the old man with her hands clamped on her hips. ‘That is the stinkiest mutt in four towns, Henry Eden!’
The dog arose with a grunt and staggered down the porch stairs, pausing only long enough to favor Laura Stanton with a reproachful gaze.
‘He can’t help it,’ Eden said.
She sighed, looking up the road after the Ford. ‘It’s too bad,’ she said. ‘They seem like such nice people.’
‘Nor can we help that,’ Henry Eden said, and began to roll another smoke.
So the Grahams ended up eating dinner at a clam-stand after all. They found one in the neighboring town of Woolwich (‘Home of the scenic Wonderview Motel,’ John pointed out to Elise in a vain effort to raise a smile) and sat at a picnic table under an old, overspreading blue spruce. The clam-stand was in sharp, almost jarring contrast to the buildings on Willow’s Main Street. The parking lot was nearly full (most of the cars, like theirs, had out-of-state licence plates), and yelling kids with ice cream on their faces chased after one another while their parents strolled about, slapped blackflies, and waited for their numbers to be announced over the loudspeaker. The stand had a fairly wide menu. In fact, John thought, you could have just about anything you wanted, as long as it wasn’t too big to fit in a deep-fat fryer.
‘I don’t know if I can spend two days in that town, let alone two months,’ Elise said. ‘The bloom is off the rose for this mother’s daughter, Johnny.’
‘It was a joke, that’s all. The kind the natives like to play on the tourists. They just went too far with it. They’re probably kicking themselves for that right now.’
‘They looked serious,’ she said. ‘How am I supposed to go back there and face that old man after that?”
‘I wouldn’t worry about it — judging from his cigarettes, he’s reached the stage of life where he’s meeting everyone for the first time. Even his oldest friends.’
Elise tried to control the twitching corners of her mouth, then gave up and burst out laughing.
‘You’re evil!’
‘Honest, maybe, but not evil. I won’t say he had Alzheimer’s, but he did look as if he might need a roadmap to find his way to the bathroom.’
‘Where do you suppose everyone else was? The town looked totally deserted.’
‘Bean supper at the Grange or a card-party at the Eastern Star, probably,’ John said, stretching.
He peeked into her clam basket. ‘You didn’t eat much, love.’
‘Love wasn’t very hungry.’
‘I tell you it was just a joke’ he said, taking her hands. ‘Lighten up.’
‘You’re really, really sure that’s all it was?’
‘Really-really. I mean, hey — every seven years it rains toads in Willow, Maine? It sounds like an outtake from a Steven Wright monologue.’
She smiled wanly. ‘It doesn’t rain,’ she said, ‘it pours.’
‘They subscribe to the old fisherman’s credo, I guess — if you’re going to tell one, tell a whopper. When I was a kid at sleep-away camp, it used to be snipe hunts. This really isn’t much different. And when you stop to think about it, it really isn’t that surprising.’
‘What isn’t?’
‘That people who make most of their yearly income dealing with summer people should develop a summer-camp mentality.’
‘That woman didn’t act like it was a joke. I’ll tell you the truth, Johnny — she sort of scared me.’
John Graham’s normally pleasant face grew stern and hard. The expression did not look at home on his face, but neither did it look faked or insincere.
‘I know,’ he said, picking up their wrappings and napkins and plastic baskets. ‘And there’s going to be an apology made for that. I find foolishness for the sake of foolishness agreeable
enough, but when someone scares my wife — hell, they scared me a little, too — I draw the line.
Ready to go back?’
‘Can you find it again?’
He grinned, and immediately looked more like himself. ‘I left a trail of breadcrumbs.’
‘How wise you are, my darling,’ she said, and got up. She was smiling again, and John was glad to see it. She drew a deep breath — it did wonders for the front of the blue chambray work-shirt she was wearing — and let it out. ‘The humidity seems to have dropped.’
‘Yeah.’ John deposited their waste into a trash basket with a left-handed hook shot and then winked at her. ‘So much for rainy season.’
But by the time they turned onto the Hempstead Road, the humidity had returned, and with a vengeance. John felt as if his own tee-shirt had turned into a clammy mass of cobweb clinging to his chest and back. The sky, now turning a delicate shade of evening primrose, was still clear, but he felt that, if he’d had a straw, he could have drunk directly from the air.
There was only one other house on the road, at the foot of the long hill with the Hempstead Place at the top. As they drove past it, John saw the silhouette of a woman standing motionless at one of the windows and looking out at them.
‘Well, there’s your friend Milly’s great-aunt,’ John said. ‘She sure was a sport to call the local crazies down at the general store and tell them we were coming. I wonder if they would have dragged out the whoopee cushions and joy-buzzers and chattery teeth if we’d stayed a little longer.’
‘That dog had his own built-in joy-buzzer.’
John laughed and nodded.
Five minutes later they were turning into their own driveway. It was badly overgrown with weeds and dwarf bushes, and John intended to take care of that little situation before the summer got much older. The Hempstead Place itself was a rambling country farmhouse, added to by succeeding generations whenever the need — or maybe just the urge — to do some building happened to strike. A barn stood behind it, connected to the house by three rambling, zig-zag sheds. In this flush of early summer, two of the three sheds were almost buried in fragrant drifts of honeysuckle.
It commanded a gorgeous view of the town, especially on a clear night like this one. John wondered briefly just how it could be so clear when the humidity was so high. Elise joined him in front of the car and they stood there for a moment, arms around each other’s waists, looking at the hills, which rolled gently off in the direction of Augusta, losing themselves in the shadows of evening.
‘It’s beautiful,’ she murmured.
‘And listen,’ he said.
There was a marshy area of reeds and high grass fifty yards or so behind the barn, and in it a chorus of frogs sang and thumped and snapped the elastics God had for some reason stretched in their throats.
‘Well,’ she said, ‘the frogs are all present and accounted for, anyway.’
‘No toads, though.’ He looked up at the clear sky, in which Venus had now opened her coldly burning eye. ‘There they are, Elise! Up there! Clouds of toads!’
She giggled.
‘ “Tonight in the small town of Willow,” ‘ he intoned, ‘ “a cold front of toads met a warm front of newts, and the result was — ” ‘
She elbowed him. ‘You,’ she said. ‘Let’s go in.’
They went in. And did not pass Go. And did not collect two hundred dollars.
They went directly to bed.