PEARL Read online

  Table of Contents

  DEDICATION

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  EPIGRAPH

  ONE 1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  TWO 1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  THREE 1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  FOUR 1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  FIVE 1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  SIX 1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  SEVEN 1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  EIGHT 1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  NINE 1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  TEN 1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  ELEVEN 1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  TWELVE 1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  THIRTEEN 1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  FOURTEEN 1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  FIFTEEN 1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  SIXTEEN 1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  SEVENTEEN 1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  EIGHTEEN 1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  NINETEEN 1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  TWENTY 1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  TWENTY-ONE

  PEARL

  Tabitha King

  This is for my children, the best people I know.

  This book owes something to the following people: Marcella Sorg, the forensic anthropologist who provided me with vital information as well as a useful peek at some slides; my sisters Margaret Spruce Morehouse and Stephanie Spruce Leonard, first readers; my sister Marcella Spruce, who helped me with music; and Stephen, for editorial advice. Any boo-boos are my own doing.

  There was a body, and it cast a spell…

  —Theodore Roethke

  ONE

  1

  Learning the other ways into Nodd’s Ridge, the back roads, takes a lifetime of living there. Since she was from away, Pearl Dickenson arrived by way of Route Five. The first thing she saw was the view for which the Ridge was famous. One comes upon the skyward folding of the land into the White Mountains as a sudden revelation: all at once the woods open up around the individual houses of the village, standing apart from each other in a community of privacy, their backs to the ancient splendid hills. The lake is a wedge of sapphire in the middle ground between, a blue tear in all that rooted rock and green hallelujah of trees. Pearl forgot she was looking for this very place. Swinging into the scenic turnout, she gawked like a thousand other passers-through.

  “Jesus, Mary and Joseph,” she said aloud, “I’ve died and gone to heaven.”

  A huge, joyful energy welled up in her. She flung open the door of her ancient Dodge sedan and jumped out. She had gotten stiffer than she had realized in the sixty miles since Portland. Putting her hands to the small of her back, she thrust out her pelvis and groaned and stretched agreeably, filling up her lungs with the brisk, tingly air of northern May. Suddenly she felt as if she had just awakened from a very long nap. It was quite inexplicable, this sensation she ought to feel much older than she did.

  Paint faded to colorlessness mottled with rust, an aged Jeep truck limped arthritically into the turnout from the opposite direction. It looked as if it were old enough to find its way to the place by memory. It ground to a stop with a loud farting backfire. The old man at the wheel waved and grinned at her, giving her more of a view of what remained of his teeth than she really wanted.

  She waved back.

  He climbed down from the cab and approached her, still showing her the full glory of his ancient gums and choppers. Clutching a greasy, shapeless fedora, he wheezed up to her like the little train that could, bringing with him a cloud of old-man smell, a rich mix of bean-fart, cigar, old dog, and infrequently changed long johns.

  “Welcome to Nodd’s Ridge,” he said, flinging out both hands as if to gather up the town and present it to her.

  Pearl laughed.

  Something stirred in the old man, some almost forgotten well of heat. A belly laugh that never did get out of low gear, though it tried, rumbled up out of him in response.

  She stuck her hands in her jacket pockets and shrugged in the general direction of the mountains.

  “God had a good day here, didn’t She?”

  “Yes, ma’am,” he agreed, her use of the feminine pronoun for the Deity apparently perturbing him not at all. “You taking a snapshot?”

  She hesitated, looking back at the view.

  “Most folks take snapshots,” the old man explained.

  “I’m not surprised,” she said. “If I were a decent photographer, I’d be tempted. But I didn’t come here for the view.”

  The old man’s bushy eyebrows shot up. The tip of his tongue shot out to wet one corner of his mouth.

  “You ain’t, you ain’t…?”

  “I am. The woman you came here to meet. Pearl Dickenson.” She stuck out her left hand. “You must be Mr. McKenzie, the caretaker. Pleased to meet you.”

  The old man took her hand in his, his face scrunched up with mental effort.

  “Pleasure’s mine,” he finally decided.

  The gap-toothed grin took over his face again like a tattered flag suddenly filling with the wind.

  “And I thought,” he said with the same grinding of risible gears as before, “I thought you was turned around.”

  “Turned around?”

  “Lost. Looking for Camp Keywadin, prob’ly. The music camp, for kids who are kind of like musical watchyacallums, proda-gees.”

  She nodded. “Well, I’m not lost. I’m exactly where I want to be.”

  The old man waved his tired hat at the mountains. “Seen your fill?”

  “No. How long have you lived here?”

  More gums. “Whole life,” he said.

  “You seen your fill?”

  He shook his head.

  “That’s what I thought,” she said. “Well, I can’t spend the rest of my life standing here gawking like Lot’s wife. Let’s go see the place.”

  Chortling, the old man pointed across Route Five to where the land rose slowly in a slope patched with meadow and woods. At
the top, partially hidden by big old elms and maples in fresh leaf, stood a white farmhouse graced with deep porches. A thousand feet north of the scenic turnout, a town road set off from Route Five up the hillside. In the other direction, a parallel line of decrepit elms, more honored in the gap than by the few still standing, marked the boundary with a rock-walled cemetery.

  Pearl stared up at the house. “I thought it would be down some dirt road, out in the woods.”

  The old man shook his head. “Nope. Pract’cly on the main road. Walk to the post office and the store real easy. You and the folks in the cemet’ry got the best view in town.”

  “Uncle Joe’s up there?” she asked with a nod at the graveyard.

  “See that big wild rosebush, white rose, high up there?”

  “Ayuh,” she ventured. He didn’t seem to notice, so she thought she had said it right.

  “Joe’s right there. He planted that bush hisself for his mother. Josie died of the influenza, nineteen-and-nineteen. Reuben Styles had a hell of a time plantin’ Joe on account of the geedee roots, pardon me, miss. Didn’t do no damage to the bush, it prob’ly reaches halfway to Chiner. Anyway, Joe only moved next door so we figure he’s prob’ly resting comfy.”

  “Close enough to keep an eye on the place,” she said.

  The old man nodded and fixed her with a shrewd and watery eye.

  “Now, just so I can get this straight, you’re Joe’s sister Gussie’s granddaughter, which makes you Joe’s grand-niece.”

  “That’s right. I never met Uncle Joe.”

  “No,” the old man agreed, “I bet you didn’t,” and pulled his hat decisively over his freckled pate.

  2

  Whatever it is that signals to human beings that a house is empty was clear as a flag about this one even from the distance. It was like a silent alarm, some barely perceptible depth of quiet that declared the house uninhabited. Someone had mowed the grass and had taken pains to maintain the flowerbeds. As if from the vigorously plied crayons of a literal-minded five-year-old, clumps of early tulips spattered blots of primary colors against the clean white of the clapboards. Daffodils and narcissi trumpeted cream and paper-white and yellow.

  Walter McKenzie huffed and puffed up the back steps, hauling out a large, noisy key ring hung with smaller ones, like a cheap metal ring puzzle. His thick fingers scrabbled with the rings as if they were a stubborn knot in a shoelace. At last they parted, delivering one cluster into his hands. His knuckles were glossy, the skin of his hands waxy, with an undertone of iris blue.

  Pearl was reminded, with a flutter in her stomach, of her grandmother’s pallid hands, clutching green crystal rosary beads upon the small, unmoving, ivory-crepe-clad hummock of her belly as she lay at final rest on a bed of rose-petal satin.

  Sorting out the proper key required more clumsy jangling while he talked.

  “Ain’t been inside since I set the mousetraps. I keep forgetting to come back and see if there’s any dead ‘uns to dispose of. Hope the place don’t stink. If there’s any in the traps, I’ll clean ‘em up for you today.”

  He stopped stabbing the keyhole to gesture widely in the direction of the field that composed what could be called the front yard but was closer to a five-acre field.

  “ ‘Course, I come and mowed or else you’d be on your way to first haying by now.”

  “I appreciate that.”

  She touched the handkerchief in her pocket to reassure herself she had something to stifle the stench of a decaying mouse massacre.

  At last he got the door open. They went through a short T-shaped shed. Smelling of bark and sawdust and the faintest perfume of cat box, it had a door in either direction. The old man elected the door on the left, which had to be unlocked in its turn. This further fumbling admitted them to the kitchen.

  It smelled mostly of sun-heated dust and had as its centerpiece an iron wood-stove, massive and squat as an idol. The sight of it failed to evoke any nostalgia. The stove and the flatiron had been the ball and chain of her grandmother’s generation. Good riddance to such overthrown gods of the kitchen. Of course, the cast-iron range had been a step up from the colonial fireplace. Her grandmother had insisted biscuits couldn’t be made properly in any other kind of oven. Nevertheless, Gussie had had a gas range and a microwave in her kitchen, not one of these old dinosaurs. Pearl traced the name Atlantic Queen written gracefully in chrome on the oven door. Her nose picked up faded, more complicated oily odors, kerosene and stove polish.

  The small electric range and fridge, both not quite old enough to have any particular charm but still noisily functioning, were reassuringly electrical. Dated as it was, the room was basically clean under an understandable layer of dust. From it, back stairs marched tight-lipped upward to the second floor, giving scant headroom to anyone taller than five and a half feet.

  Wringing his fedora as if it were a lace hankie, the old man stared at the wooden table.

  “Many’s the time I’ve sat at the table with Joe, jawing.”

  With a huge sigh, he shucked off the cloak of remembrance and turned to the business at hand.

  “Well, you like to look around yourself, or you want me to show you?”

  His wheezing now seemed to have a distinct distress in it. She wondered if he were uncomfortable in her presence or only troubled by the ghostly past.

  The elderly caretaker reverted again to reminiscence.

  “Joe kep’ his personal business to hisself.”

  “Never spoke of me.”

  “Nope.” He thrust the small ring of keys at her.

  Startled by the number of them, she held the ring in both hands. She’d been expecting what one got when renting an apartment in the city: front door, back door, if any, maybe a spare. Not a baker’s dozen or so.

  “I thought nobody locked their doors up here, everyone was so honest.”

  The old man pulled a long face.

  “Sorry to say, folks ain’t as honest as once they was. Mostly it’s folks from away.”

  The implied slur dawned in his face and he backpaddled.

  “No offense to you, ma’am. Lots of nice people from away, it ain’t their fault they was borned someplace else. But there’s some bad apples come from New Hampshire, Massachusetts. It’s really only summertime you can’t leave nothing lying around loose. Come winter, those jokers go back to Taxachusetts and New Hampster, where they don’t have to chop wood to keep warm and there’s more liquor stores to stick up.”

  Pearl stifled a grin.

  “I guess Uncle Joe didn’t trust somebody,” she said, studying the keys.

  “Joe was awful careful. All them keys is labeled. Joe wouldn’t leave you a key you didn’t know what it unlocked.”

  He cast a quick glance around the room. There was a finality to it, as if he didn’t ever expect to see it again. Perhaps at his age, one fell into the habit of looking that way at everything.

  “You need anything, my number’s right by the phone. ‘Course the phone here’s shut off; you’ll have to call from the store. Everything else is working; Joe kep’ the place like a palace.”

  “Thanks.”

  He punched the hat back into a modicum of concavity.

  “You won’t have no trouble selling it.”

  “I’m not,” she said.

  The fedora was arrested halfway to his head.

  “Beg pardon, miss?”

  Pearl Dickenson’s laugh filled up the kitchen. She heard it first, resonating through the eustachian tube, the way we all hear the noises we make ourselves, and then it came back to her from the house, like a greeting.

  “I’m going to live here, Mr. McKenzie,” she said, and that was the first Nodd’s Ridge heard of it.

  3

  Walter McKenzie drove away, shouting out his open window if she needed anything just to holler.

  Pearl watched him go, then set off across the grass, skirting the flowerbeds and the substantial vegetable plot where asparagus was just breaking the mulch. Th
e sound of the old man’s Jeep faded away. The canopies of the remaining elms overlapped to make a cool, translucent green roof.

  “ ‘Glory be to God for dappled things,’” she murmured.

  Sometimes a great stump like a prehistoric mammoth’s foot marked a recent passing as surely as an unweathered stone. Other gaps in the line were like doorways, uneven underfoot as the stoops between unlevel rooms in an aged house, or the hummocking of the turf in a yet unsettled grave. The elms had been giants in the earth, as much as Abraham and Moses. The present generation was now in its last days, the huge old trees being felled everywhere because of the Dutch elm disease. She wondered who had planted these particular trees, which had surely not seeded themselves in a parade line. It was an appealing idea that it might have been one of the Nevers clan, Joe’s great-grandfather, perhaps, who had dug holes in the thin soil of this northern ridge and braced saplings in them. While she could expect to eat the apples from an apple tree she planted herself, an elm’s coming of age would be a gift to grandchildren and great-grandchildren she might never know. And if the elms connected her to those tree planters she knew only as grave antique faces in sepia photographs and names in her grandmother’s Bible, then the extinction of those great trees meant the severing of a connection to further generations. Did the old bones in this graveyard feel the unobstructed sun through the soil or know by the loosening embrace of the rotting roots that an old order was ending, perhaps forever, that God was imagining a new one?

  The drystone wall around the cemetery was low enough to climb easily. Making for the wild rosebush, she could see this graveyard had been in use for a very long time, for many of the stones were slates.

  The wild rose had seized possession of the family plot, where her Uncle Joe and his parents, her great-grandparents, were at rest. Its buds were still no more than points of punctuation among the tiny newborn leaves, but its thorns were long and brutal. The gnarled dwarf trunk and branches made her think of stone rather than wood. Never mind the roots of the moribund elms, the grip of the rosebush upon the bones beneath it must be unbreakable. Perhaps it was tickling Uncle Joe hello. Uncle Ghost.