Breaking Ground

B
REAKING
G
ROUND

BY
W
ILLIAM
D. A
NDREWS

 

 

ISLANDPORT PRESS

P.O. Box 10

Yarmouth, Maine 04096

www.islandportpress.com

[email protected]

Copyright © 2011 by William D. Andrews

First Islandport Press edition published in June 2011

All Rights Reserved

ISBN: 978-1-934031-77-3

Library of Congress Card Number: 2011922198

Book jacket design by Karen F. Hoots / Hoots Design

Book designed by Molly E. Charest for Islandport Press

Publisher Dean L. Lunt

 

Also from William D. Andrews:

Stealing History

Also from Islandport Press:

Old Maine Woman: Stories from The Coast to The County
by Glenna Johnson Smith

Where Cool Waters Flow
by Randy Spencer

Contentment Cove
and
Young
by Miriam Colwell

Windswept, Mary Peters
, and
Silas Crockett
by Mary Ellen Chase

My Life in the Maine Woods
by Annette Jackson

Shoutin' into the Fog
by Thomas Hanna

Nine Mile Bridge
by Helen Hamlin

In Maine
by John N. Cole

The Cows Are Out!
by Trudy Chambers Price

Hauling by Hand
by Dean Lawrence Lunt

down the road a piece: A Storyteller's Guide to Maine
by John McDonald

Live Free and Eat Pie: A Storyteller's Guide to New Hampshire
by Rebecca Rule

Not Too Awful Bad: A Storyteller's Guide to Vermont
by Leon Thompson

A Moose and a Lobster Walk into a Bar
by John McDonald

Headin' for the Rhubarb: A New Hampshire Dictionary (well, sorta)
by Rebecca Rule

At One: In a Place Called Maine
by Lynn Plourde and Leslie Mansmann

Dahlov Ipcar's Farmyard Alphabet
by Dahlov Ipcar

The Cat at Night
by Dahlov Ipcar

My Wonderful Christmas Tree
by Dahlov Ipcar

These and other New England books are available at:
www.islandportpress

Right after the publication of
Stealing History
, many friends and many more folks I met at book signings and talks asked if a sequel was in the works. It was, and
Breaking Ground
is it. I hope those who asked for the sequel will enjoy it. I want to thank those who helped, some who read and commented on this book, and some who more generally encouraged me to keep my fingers on the keyboard when a long trek on snowshoes had more appeal: Al Cressy, Bruce Edwards, John Jebb, Jeff Newsom, Francis Richardson, Kathy Richardson, Saranne Taylor. A small mystery surrounds the question of whether my wife, Debby Andrews, has read
Stealing History
. That's best left to Julie Williamson to solve, but I express again my thanks to her, along with my guess that, no lover of mysteries, she'll skip this one.

At Islandport Press, Amy Canfield repeated her performance as a sharp-eyed and supportive editor, and Trudy Price arranged promotions and signings both cheerfully and efficiently. Warm thanks to them.

My friends on the staff and board of trustees of the Bethel Historical Society suffered the odd delusion that they could find parallels between that organization and the Ryland Historical Society. To them I say, give it up. More seriously, I also say hearty thanks—for all they do to advance the Bethel Historical Society, and for giving me the chance to be part of that vital and fun cultural institution. Ryland should be so lucky.

The excavation site looked colorful, festive. Like a mother sheltering her children, a dark green tent spread its top and its partially furled walls over the patch of grass where construction stakes with small orange flags marked the outline for the digging. Also under the tent were chairs and a small table, and leaning against the table were shovels, each decorated with a bright red ribbon. The red ribbons contrasted colorfully with the green of the tent and the yellow of a backhoe that sat off to the side, with its long arm that ended in a toothed scoop turned down and tucked underneath like the neck of a sleeping swan.

Closer up, at the edge of the wood, just barely within the shade of the tent on the recently mown ground, was another splotch of red, but this red was not sharp and confined like the ribbons. Instead, it pooled around the head of a body crumpled and lying facedown in the grass.

Blood. So colorful. Not so festive.

Julie Williamson considered it positively absurd to quarrel about how many shovels to use at the groundbreaking for the Ryland Historical Society's Daniel Swanson II Center.

Similar disagreements had occurred over the past year, during which, as the historical society's director, Julie had been overseeing final planning for the project. Of course she understood that Mary Ellen Swanson, as the principal donor, had every right to express her opinions and expect them to be listened to. And Mary Ellen exercised that right at every meeting of the board of trustees and its building committee and, in what seemed to Julie, her daily—and rarely announced—visits to Julie's office. As she fell asleep at night, Julie could still hear Mary Ellen's questions in her head:

And on and on Mary Ellen went, questioning choices, suggesting alternatives, raising hypothetical issues. The problem wasn't really that she was trying to impose her will; the problem was that she didn't
know
her will. She had as many questions as there were details in the building plan, and she insisted on trotting them all out and subjecting everyone around her to the endless stream of doubts, thoughts, insights, and suggestions.

Now, just a day before tomorrow's July third groundbreaking, Mary Ellen was at it again. About the number of shovels! Because
she was the major financial backer and because the new building would bear her late husband's name, Mary Ellen Swanson was the obvious person to take a ceremonial scoop of earth and declare the ground broken. But last Friday, Mary Ellen had dropped by Julie's office to suggest that Julie, as the society's director, should also heft a shovel. Julie had expressed her humble thanks for the honor and tried to change the subject.

“So we'll require two shovels,” Mary Ellen had then said. “I'll take mine home as a memento of the occasion, and you can keep yours here in your office.” Eager not to prolong discussion of a point of such little significance, Julie had promptly agreed.

But this morning Mary Ellen had returned—this time to propose that there be
four
shovels—“one for each of us,” she had said. Responding to Julie's quizzical look, Mary Ellen had explained: “You, me, and Steven and Elizabeth. I think they should each take a scoop, too. I'm sure Clif Holdsworth would be happy to provide the extra shovels. He should do
something
for this project.”

Julie couldn't miss Mary Ellen's dig at Clif Holdsworth. Trustee and treasurer of the Ryland Historical Society, Clif owned the local hardware and lumber store and so could readily provide shovels. He was quite well off, but had contributed only $1,000 to the construction project, a fact that rankled Julie almost as much as it obviously did Mary Ellen.

As for the addition of Mary Ellen's son and daughter-in-law to the ceremony, Julie would be happy to comply, even though Steven—Julie thought of him as Always-Steven-Never-Steve—and his wife hadn't been involved in the planning of the Swanson Center and were, as far as Julie could tell from brief conversations with them, uninterested in the whole idea. Steven had at least been polite, but Elizabeth was simply cold about the project—and about pretty much everything else, really.

After Mary Ellen left, Julie had reluctantly called Clif Holdsworth to ask for the extra shovels. With equal reluctance, he had agreed. But fifteen minutes after that, Mary Ellen had called Julie to say she thought Steven and Elizabeth should share a shovel. “Elizabeth isn't really a Swanson, of course. She still uses her maiden name, you know,” Mary Ellen had explained with no small amount of distaste in her tone, “so I don't think she needs a separate shovel. Wouldn't it be better, symbolically, if the married couple used the same one?”

Julie agreed—and decided not to mention that she had already called Clif to ask for four shovels. She also decided not to call him back to reduce the order, guessing that before tomorrow morning Mary Ellen was likely to think of someone else who needed a shovel. Actually, Julie wondered if Mary Ellen was physically capable of lifting one herself. She was very tall and achingly thin. Julie couldn't quite put a finger on Mary Ellen's age, but she was aware that the gray-haired, patrician-looking elderly woman had grown more angular and grayer over the past year.

Anyway, the main thing was to get the ceremony over with and the construction under way, Julie thought. No, the main thing, she reminded herself, was to keep Mary Ellen from driving her crazy and stretching out the project to the point where the new building wouldn't be completed until Julie retired! And since she was only thirty-five and had been in the job for just a year, her retirement wasn't exactly on the horizon.

The new building had been one of the reasons Julie had accepted the job as director of the Ryland Historical Society. It would expand the society's three-building campus and provide secure, climate-controlled space for the papers and artifacts currently crammed into the archives/library and attic of the building where Julie's office was located. That building, Swanson House, was also named for the family, which had roots so far back in
Ryland that even Julie hadn't sorted them out yet. Mary Ellen took particular delight in the fact that with the new center named in her husband's honor, the Swansons would have an even bigger presence at the society. The new Swanson Center would support better public programming and attract more scholars and genealogists to use the rich collections. It would, in other words, improve the image and reputation of the Ryland Historical Society—and of its new director. Julie wasn't at all ashamed of her ambition. If she helped her career by helping the Ryland Historical Society, wasn't everyone a winner?

Besides giving her career a boost, the job had appealed to Julie for another reason: Ryland, Maine, was a two-hour drive from Orono, where her boyfriend taught American history at the University of Maine. She and Rich O'Brian had met in graduate school at the University of Delaware. He finished his doctorate a year before her and took the Maine job, and during that year they kept the relationship going by commuting by plane as their finances allowed. So when the Ryland job became available, Julie pursued it enthusiastically, and when she got the offer Rich was as happy as she was.

Their relationship was evolving. During the past year they had settled into an easy pattern for their visits. They'd enjoy one of Rich's gourmet meals, run and hike, or just sit reading or working. Julie kept trying to engage Rich in the board games and jigsaw puzzles she was drawn to, but he usually begged off on the grounds of having to read student papers or prepare lectures. Rich was quiet, steady, supportive, and loving. He was easy to be around, comfortable enough in his own skin to let Julie relax in hers. While she was ambitious and outgoing, he was self-contained and quiet. Julie liked to take hold of problems and solve them, and Rich enjoyed contemplating the bigger picture. She was a doer and Rich a thinker. As much as she hated the cliché, she had to
admit that the old saw about opposites attracting applied to them. But she just wasn't sure what the long-term held—or even what she wanted. Marriage? After so much time together, neither could help talking about it, but the conversations had been casual and indirect, and Julie sometimes did wonder what life would be like if they were together all the time. Would her frenetic pace wear him out? Would his constantly calm manner drive her mad? Well, she was prepared to see how things developed; and since Rich wasn't pushing for more, that part of her life was fine.