“Don’t you worry. Claude knows the way. Never got lost yet. Right, Claude?”
Claude looked back, neither amused nor serious, just ready.
“Just go easy on the reins. Claude’s got his own system. You just tag along. It’s the only way to see the town without any jabber from me. Giddap.”
Cardiff jumped aboard. Claude tugged, the wagon lurched forward.
“Hell.” He fumbled with the notebook, scanning the names and addresses. “What’s the first stop?”
“Git!”
The bread wagon drifted away, warming the air with the heady scents of yeast and grain.
Claude trotted as if he could hardly wait to be right.
Chapter 10
Claude jogged at a goodly pace for two blocks and turned sweetly to the right.
His eyes twitched toward a front yard mailbox: Abercrombie.
Cardiff checked his list.
Abercrombie!
“Damn!”
He jumped from the wagon, loaf in hand, when a woman’s voice called, “Thank you, Claude.”
A woman of some forty years stood at the gate to take the bread. “You, too, of course,” she said. “Mister…?”
“Cardiff, ma’m.”
“Claude,” she called, “take good care of Mr. Cardiff. And Mr. Cardiff, you take good care of Claude. Morning!”
And the wagon jounced along the bricks under a congress of trees that laced themselves to lattice out the sun.
“Fillmore’s next.” Cardiff eyed the list, ready to pull on the reins when the horse stopped at a second gate.
Cardiff popped the bread in the Fillmore mailbox and raced to catch up with Claude, who had resumed his route without waiting for his driver.
So it went. Bramble. Jones. Williams. Isaacson. Meredith. Bread. Cake. Bread. Muffins. Bread. Cake. Bread.
Claude turned a final corner.
And there was a school.
“Hold up, Claude!”
Cardiff alighted and walked into the schoolyard to find a teeter-totter, its old blue paint flaking, next to an old swing-set, its splintery wooden seats suspended from rusted iron chains.
“Well, now,” whispered Cardiff.
The school was two stories high. Its double doors were shut, and all eight of its windows were crusted with dust.
Cardiff rattled the front doors. Locked tight.
“It’s only May,” Cardiff said to himself. “School’s not out yet.”
Claude whinnied irritably, and perhaps out of pique, began a slow glide away from the school.
“Claude!” Cardiff put iron in it. “Stay!”
Claude stayed, drumming the bricks with both forefeet.
Cardiff turned back to the building. Carved in the lintel, above the main door were the words: SUMMERTON GRAMMAR SCHOOL, DEDICATED JANUARY 1st, 1888.
“Eighteen eighty-eight,” Cardiff muttered. “Well, now.”
He gave one last look at the dust-caked windows and the rusted swing chains and said, “One last go-round, Claude.”
Claude did not move.
“We’re all out of bread and names, is that it? You only take bakery orders, nothing else?”
Even Claude’s shadow did not move.
“Well, we’ll just stand here until you do me a favor. Your new star boarder wants to cross-section the whole blasted town. What’s it to be? No water, no oats, without a full trot.”
Water and oats did it.
Full trot.
They sailed down Clover Avenue and up Hibiscus Way and over on to Rosewood Place and right on Juneglade and left again on Sandalwood then Ravine, which ran off the edge of a shallow ravine cut by ancient rains. He stared at lawn after lawn after lawn, all of them lush, green, perfect. No baseball bats. No baseballs. No basketball hoops. No basketballs. No tennis rackets. No croquet mallets. No hopscotch chalk marks on sidewalks. No tire swings on trees.
Claude trotted him back to the Egyptian View Arms, where Elias Culpepper was waiting.
Cardiff climbed down from the bread wagon.
“Well?”
Cardiff looked back at the summer drift of green lawns and green hedges and golden sunflowers and said, “Where are the children?”
Chapter 11
Mr. Culpepper did not immediately respond.
For dead ahead there was afternoon high tea, with apricot and peach tarts and strawberry delight and coffee instead of tea and then port instead of coffee and then there was dinner, a real humdinger, that lasted until well after nine and then the inhabitants of the Egyptian View Arms headed up, one by one, to their most welcome cool summer night beds, and Cardiff sat out on the croquetless and hoopless lawn, watching Mr. Culpepper on the porch, smoking several small bonfire pipes, waiting.
At last Cardiff, in full brooding pace, arrived at the bottom of the porch rail and waited.
“You were asking about no children?” said Elias Culpepper.
Cardiff nodded.
“A good reporter wouldn’t allow so much time to pass after asking such an important question.”
“More time is passing right now,” said Cardiff, gently, climbing the porch steps.
“So it is. Here.”
A bottle of wine and two small snifters sat on the railing.
Cardiff drained his at a jolt, and went to sit next to Elias Culpepper.
Culpepper puffed smoke. “We have,” he said, seeming to consider his words with care, “sent all the children away to school.”
Cardiff stared. “The whole town? Every child?”
“That’s the sum. It’s a hundred miles to Phoenix in one direction. Two hundred to Tucson. Nothing but sand and petrified forest in between. The children need schools with proper trees. We got proper trees here, yes, but we can’t hire teachers to teach here. We did, at one time, but they got too lonesome. They wouldn’t come, so our children had to go.”
“If I came back in late June would I meet the kids coming home for the summer?”
Culpepper held still, much like Claude.
“I said—”
“I heard.” Culpepper knocked the sparking ash from his pipe. “If I said yes, would you believe me?”
Cardiff shook his head.
“You implying I’m a mile off from the truth?”
“I’m only implying,” Cardiff said, “that we are at a taffy pull. I’m waiting to see how far you pull it.”
Culpepper smiled.
“The children aren’t coming home. They have chosen summer school in Amherst, Providence, and Sag Harbor. One is even in Mystic Seaport. Ain’t that a fine sound? Mystic. I sat there once in a thunderstorm reading every other Chapter of Moby-Dick.”
“The children are not coming home,” said Cardiff. “Can I guess why?”
The older man nodded, pipe in mouth, unlit.
Cardiff took out his notepad and stared at it.
“The children of this town,” he said at last, “won’t come home. Not one. None. Never.”
He closed the notepad and continued: “The reason why the children are never coming home is,” he swallowed hard, “there are no children. Something happened a long time ago, God knows what, but it happened. And this town is a town of no family homecomings. The last child left long ago, or the last child finally grew up. And you’re one of them.”
“Is that a question?”
“No,” said Cardiff. “An answer.”
Culpepper leaned back in his chair and shut his eyes. “You,” he said, the smoke long gone from his pipe, “are an A-1 Four Star Headline News Reporter.”
Chapter 12
“I…,” said Cardiff.
“Enough,” Culpepper interrupted. “For tonight.”
He held out another glass of bright amber wine. Cardiff drank. When he looked up, the front screen door of the Egyptian View Arms tapped shut. Someone went upstairs. His ambiance stayed.
Cardiff refilled his glass.
“Never coming home. Never ever,” he whispered.
And went up to bed.
Sleep well, someone said somewhere in the house. But he could not sleep. He lay, fully dressed, doing philosophical sums on the ceiling, erasing, adding, erasing again until he sat up abruptly and looked out across the meadow town of thousands of flowers in the midst of which houses rose and sank only to rise again, ships on a summer sea.
I will arise and go now, thought Cardiff, but not to a bee-loud glade. Rather, to a place of earthen silence and the sounds of death’s-head moths on powdery wings.
He slipped down the front hall stairs barefoot and once outside, let the screen door tap shut silently and, sitting on the lawn, put on his shoes as the moon rose.
Good, he thought, I won’t need a flashlight.
In the middle of the street he looked back. Was there someone at the screen door, a shadow, watching? He walked and then began to jog.
Imagine that you are Claude, he thought, his breath coming in quick pants. Turn here, now there, now another right and—
The graveyard.
All that cold marble crushed his heart and stopped his breathing. There was no iron fence around the burial park.
He entered silently and bent to touch the first gravestone. His fingers brushed the name: BIANCA SHERMAN BATES
And the date: BORN, JULY 3, 1882
And below that: R.I.P.
But no date of death.
The clouds covered the moon. He moved on to the next stone.
WILLIAM HENRY CLAY
1885–
R.I.P.
And again, no mortal date.
He brushed a third gravestone and found:
HENRIETTA PARKS
August 13, 1881
Gone to God
But, Cardiff knew, she had not as yet gone to God.
The moon darkened and then took strength from itself. It shone upon a small Grecian tomb not fifty feet away, a lodge of exquisite architecture, a miniature Acropolis upheld by four vestal virgins, or goddesses, beautiful maidens, wondrous women. His heart pulsed. All four marble women seemed suddenly alive, as if the pale light had awakened them, and they might step forth, unclad, into the tableau of named and dateless stones.
He sucked in his breath. His heart pulsed again.
For as he watched, one of the goddesses, one of the forever-beautiful maidens, trembled with the night chill and shifted out into the moonlight.
He could not tell if he was terrified or delighted. After all, it was late at night in this yard of the dead. But she? She was naked to the weather, or almost; a mist of silk covered her breasts and plumed around her waist as she drifted away from the other pale statues.
She moved among the stones, silent as the marble she had been but now was not, until she stood before him with her dark hair tousled about her small ears and her great eyes the color of lilacs.
