Nursery Tale (2 page)

He heard his wife sit very slowly in a chair she'd brought in from the kitchen and had put near the bed. After a long moment, she whispered, "Why, Earl?"

But Earl Freeman couldn't answer the question—not, at least, in a rational way. The late afternoon walk had been planned for the Tripp Road, not Griffin's Road. He supposed, very briefly, that—where the two roads met, a mile from the house—he had inadvertently taken a left when he should not have turned at all. But that was no good, because he
remembered
turning, remembered knowing
where
he was taking Seth, remembered passing the remains of the house—passing, and walking to the end of Griffin's Road, where the fields started, remembered
knowing
they would have to pass the house again, when darkness was beginning . . .

"I don't know," he whispered, and from his tone his wife realized it was the very best he could do.

She said, "Why were you running, Earl?" She paused only a moment. "Did you have a reason, was there some
reason
?"

"No," he murmured. "No . . ."

"Earl," she cut in, nodding urgently at the boy in the bed. "I think he's coming around."

Earl Freeman went to the side of the bed. He looked anxiously at Seth. The boy's eyes fluttered open. "Seth?" Earl Freeman said. The boy's eyes stayed open. "Seth, you're home now." Wide open. Unfocused, and uncomprehending.

Earl Freeman heard his wife breathe, "Oh my God!"

"Seth, you're home now!" Quickly, desperately. "You're home now!"

Seth remained quiet. His breathing was slow and deep, as if he were sleeping.

"Seth," said Earl Freeman, "what do you see? Tell me what you see."

"Earl, don't . . ." his wife began, and stopped when he put his hand on hers and whispered, "Please."

But Seth remained quiet. For the next five years.

From
The Penn Yann Post Gazette
, October 12, two years later:

TRUCK DRIVER INJURED

Luis Alvarez, 32, of Rochester, New York, suffered a broken arm, cracked pelvis, and various cuts and bruises yesterday when the truck he was driving skidded off the Tripp Road extension, popularly known as Griffin's Road, about ten miles north of Penn Yann, and flipped over, landing on its roof. According to Alvarez, who works for the Pittman Construction Company and was hauling lumber to the site of a housing development in Penn Yann at the time of the accident, he swerved off the road to avoid hitting a child who had run out in front of his truck. Alvarez explained, "One moment the road is clear, and the next moment there is this kid right in front of me, about twenty feet away. I don't know where he came from." A thorough search of the area by Penn Yann police proved fruitless. Alvarez, recovering in the Penn Yann Memorial Hospital, has been charged with carrying an unsafe load, according to Penn Yann police.

From
The Penn Yann Post Gazette
, February 22, one year later:

GO-AHEAD GIVEN FOR CONTROVERSIAL HOUSING DEVELOPMENT

After several years of often bitter controversy, and after the granting of numerous waivers to existing zoning ordinances, the Zoning Board of Penn Yann has okayed a final rezoning proposal by New York City entrepreneur Rowland Reynolds for the Tripp Road and Tripp Road extension (known as Griffin's Road), about ten miles north of Penn Yann. The rezoning will allow Reynolds to develop a 60-acre site on the extension as a "small, planned community of large, two-story residences, with at least one half-acre per residence."

The proposal, which had been delayed for five years pending a series of environmental impact statements, also requested a widening and repaving of both the extension, which is now a gravel road, and Tripp Road itself, a narrow, two-lane road which will become a major four-lane highway as construction progresses.

After the decision was handed down by the Board, Reynolds said, "Now we can get on with the business of growth—which is what we, as a people, are all about. We have put all the rumors to rest, we have answered the extreme environmentalists, and the no-growth advocates, and those who seek more government control, and, as well, the dilettantes who would put even the things that slither about on the ground before the needs of men. And now we will do what Americans have always done best—we will make the land work for us. Because we are, after all, its caretakers. Because God has given the land to us for our use, and our enjoyment as his children."

According to Reynolds, construction will begin immediately.

August 15, five years after the Freeman accident

Janice and Miles McIntyre

I
t had looked like a magnificent game of tag; now, Janice McIntyre thought she should have known better. She nudged her husband. "Miles," she said, "did you see that?" But Miles McIntyre was busy talking to the builder. "Later, darling," he said. Janice muttered, "Sorry," and moved away from him to the front of what would someday be their new home—it was now only a cellar, plywood floor, and frame ("We'll have it dried in," the builder had told them, "in a week, maybe ten days." "Dried in?" Miles had asked. "Protected from the weather." "Oh.").

Janice watched as the hawk moved gracefully through the frigid blue sky toward the stand of trees at the horizon. The thing the hawk carried in its talons was no longer recognizable. Janice had supposed, when the two birds were close to the house—"playing tag"—that it was a sparrow, but, she admitted, it could just as easily have been any other small bird. Build a house in the country, she thought, and turn into a naturalist. She felt her husband's hands on her shoulders. "There's a snag, Ja."

"A snag?"

"Yes, and it'll make you cringe, I think."

She turned around, faced him. "Okay, so make me cringe."

"They found something–"

"They?"

"The builder. Well, actually the plumbing subcontractor—
he
found something, his men did, and they called the builder and the builder says he'll have to call the police. They were digging the hole for the septic tank"—he nodded to the north at a mound of dark, moist earth about fifty feet from the house—"over there."

"Yes?"

"And they found . . . they think they found some bones."

"Bones?"

"Human bones."

"
Human
bones?"

He hesitated, glanced away briefly, then looked back, obviously uncomfortable. "The bones of a child," he said. "That's what they think, anyway."

"Oh Jesus!"

"These people aren't, you know, qualified, I mean technically, to make a judgment like that, but–"

"I don't think I can handle this, Miles. I really don't think I can handle this!" She lowered her head and closed her eyes; he saw tears start and, despite himself, it angered him.

"Janice, it's been
five
years, and that's a
long
time—"

"Not nearly long enough, Miles. Twenty years, thirty—"

"Christ Almighty!"

"Please, Miles . . ." She quieted, closed her eyes, tried in vain to stop the tears.

Jodie—their first child—had died very suddenly, in his fifteenth month, of crib death. Jodie's doctor had apologized again and again for not having seen the child's susceptibility to Sudden Infant Death Syndrome right from the start. "We know so much more about it, now, than we did ten years ago," he told them, "but we obviously don't know nearly as much as we
need
to know." The apology had seemed, Janice thought at the time, a kind of explanation for Jodie's death, a reason for it, and it had made her very angry.

She felt the anger welling up inside her again, here, in the skeleton of what would soon be her new home. And Miles's home. And the home of the child growing inside her (it was a fact she hadn't yet shared with her husband, because she wasn't at all sure how
she
felt about it). She fought the anger down; it began to smoulder. She thought that if she spoke she would say something foolish and self-pitying, so she stayed quiet.

She stared blankly at a slowly moving speck on the horizon—the hawk and its small burden. "Damn you," she whispered. She wasn't certain what she was damning, exactly. The hawk. Miles. Maybe even Jodie.

"You want to go somewhere?" Miles asked. "To a restaurant or something? Away from here?"

She nodded yes.

Norm and Marge Gellis

N
orm Gellis brought his big Mercury to a quick, jolting stop; he pointed to his right at a field of corn, each of the hundred or so rows tall and straight and ready for the harvest. Norm Gellis puffed up a little, like a bullfrog; he puffed up when he was on the verge of sharing some bit of knowledge that, it was assumed, only he was privy to. "I got it straight from Reynolds himself," he said.

His wife, a short, frail woman who often looked as if she were coming down with some awful disease, smiled tentatively. "Yes," she said. "Yes." Her voice was the only substantial thing about her—it was a ludicrous, low tenor, and it was loud, despite her attempts to control it. "Yes," she said a third time.

"And he told me," Norm Gellis continued, "he told
me
that this area here—it's about twenty-five acres, you know—is eventually going to be part of Granada. What is that? Is that corn?"

"Uh-huh," his wife answered, and immediately put on her bemused, apologetic look.
Oh, forgive me, did I say that?
the look said.

"Yeah, okay. Well, Reynolds says a lot of the farmers around here are in a real hurry to sell, if the damned government'll let 'em. Reynolds says in ten years he'll have a couple square miles and it'll all be Granada. He's got big plans, Marge. He's a doer, and we'd be missing out on a good thing if we turned him down." He paused and wondered fleetingly if Marge would misread his last remark, if she would think he was asking her permission to do what was, after all, his right and duty, as her husband, to do. "But, of course," he hurried on, "I'm not going to turn him down." He paused, reflected. "In fact," he lied, "I phoned him this morning."

Marge looked surprised. She started to speak, could think of nothing to say, and stayed quiet.

"In fact, Marge, I'm going to give him twice what he says he needs." He put his foot on the accelerator; the car hesitated a moment—"Damned no-lead gasoline!"—then shot forward down the narrow gravel road.

"Can we afford that?" Marge asked, her eyes on her hands clasped in her lap.

Her husband ignored the question. "Reynolds needs people like us, Marge—like you and me." He paused, thought, then went on, "You know who we are, Marge? You want to know who we are?" He was going to make a speech, Marge realized (she remembered what he had told her a dozen times: "I shoulda been a politician, Marge, because things need changin' real bad. The blacks are riotin', and the spics are riotin', and good people are outa work, and welfare cheats are drivin' around in their Cadillacs—it's true, Marge; I seen it—and you know why all this is happenin'? I'll tell you why: Because there ain't no discipline. What's gotta be done is some heads have gotta be knocked around,
then
you'll see people fallin' into line.").

"Who are we, Norm?" Marge asked.

He glanced quickly, suspiciously at her. Had there been sarcasm in her question? he wondered.

"Marge," he said, "we are
the people
!" He grinned a huge, bloated grin.

Marge stayed quiet.

"And let me tell you what that means, Marge. Let me tell you what it means. It means we got
power
, I mean
real
power."

Marge listened intently for the next fifteen minutes. Every once in a while her arms and legs would tighten as her husband—caught up in the intensity of what he was saying—let the car wander dangerously close to the soft shoulder, or brought it well up past the speed limit. At the end of his speech, he sighed and grinned at her again, and she reached over and touched him affectionately. "You should have been a politician, Norm," she told him, and she thought,
It's true. He's a smart man. My husband's a very smart man—in his way!

Dick and Trudy Wentis and their adopted son Sam

S
am Wentis closed his eyes and remembered. Had he really seen a deer five minutes ago? A real deer? It was great that they let them run loose. Maybe they let other things run loose, too—like raccoons and foxes and cows. There could even be a wild pig, or maybe a wolf in the woods behind him. Or some mountain lions. Wouldn't that be something?

He straightened a little from his crouching position in the tall quack grass. He parted the grass with his hands and squinted—because of the background of bright sky—at the two people talking and smiling fifty feet away. He could hear the drone of their voices, and found that if he cocked his head to one side, toward them, he could make out what they were saying. His hearing had always been incredibly acute.