The Good Neighbor (19 page)
Opening it to the first page, she read:
Sunday May 1851
This week we have buried our firstborn son Charles William Mus- grove, aged one month and two days. He rests now in our back plot at Adencourt. God speed his soul to heaven.
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Francie froze, disbelieving. Could this book really be that old? Could it have been sitting down here this long? Obviously it was a diary; the Musgroves had lived here for even longer than she could have guessed, then. The handwriting was blocky and awk ward, as if done by someone unaccustomed to holding a pen.
Francie paged through several more entries. All were short, no more than two or three lines, and all were made on Sundays. Whoever it was, it had been a woman; that was obvious. The en tries had to do with nothing more earthshaking than the thou sand mundane chores of running a household one hundred fifty years ago: sewing, baking, churning butter, washing, gardening, harvesting, ironing, et cetera. But they were fascinating; time had rendered their banality profound. Some entries contained notes on family members:
4th Sunday January 1853
A boy, Hamish, born to us this week. Lay abed, wrought lacework.
And then:
3rd Sunday December 1853
Hamish stood. Baked bread, made butter. Captain poorly in the chest. Am with child.
Am with child
? Francie thought. Gave birth, made lace? Baked bread, made butter, am with child—less than a year after having a baby? Clearly,
this
woman’s husband didn’t have any issues with raising a family. Her pregnancies merited no more mention than her other chores. And who was this Captain, and why was his chest poorly?
“You have got to be kidding,” Francie whispered again.
She closed the diary and hugged it, thinking. Something like this came along once in a lifetime, if ever. Perhaps it belonged in a museum—it was certainly old enough. The daily life of a woman
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who lived a century and a half ago. She’d never found anything as exciting as this before. She’d never found anything exciting be fore, period. Things like this did not happen to boring people like her.
She opened the diary again to the first page and reread the first entry. No statement of ownership, no “This Book Belongs To:” on the flyleaf, no acknowledgment whatsoever that this thing was in any way important. And yet, to the author, it must have been priceless. A book like this would have been expensive. It would have been jealously hidden away from the grubby hands of chil dren—and the prying eyes of a husband, perhaps.
And how sad that it should begin with the death of a child. A tiny newborn infant, only a month old. Their first. Perhaps it was that event which motivated the writer to begin recording the rest of her days—the realization that everything is temporary, and likely to be forgotten if not carefully noted. Even something like the loss of a baby—would that fade with time, or would it remain fresh forever, a wound that refused to scab over?
The “back plot.” Francie pondered that. In those times, she knew, it was not unusual for people to bury their dead on their own property. Was that what she was referring to? Was this lost infant still here, somewhere in the vast tract of the yard? And who else might be with him, one hundred fifty years later?
“Adencourt,” she whispered. “This house is called Adencourt.” The word escaped her lips and hovered in front of her, like a bee; and all around her she felt the walls swell outward and then relax, like dusty lungs drawing a breath.
“Yes,” Francie said. “Wake up, house.”
❚ ❚ ❚
“Michael,” Francie whispered into her brother ’s ear.
The diary was tucked inside her sweatshirt, cold against her ab domen. She had carried away the other treasures, too, the bottle
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and the rag doll and the hairpin, and stuck them in her suitcase. It was the one place she was sure Colt wouldn’t look, since she knew he would never bother to help her unpack. “Mikey!”
Michael stirred, whimpering. Francie joggled his shoulder. “Get up, sweetie,” she said. “We’ve got some exploring to do.”
Michael rolled over and pulled the sleeping bag over his face. Francie pulled it down again and blew in his ear. He jolted awake, alarmed. Then he sat up and looked around.
“I was dreaming,” he said peevishly. “What’d you wake me up for?”
“There’s something I want to find,” Francie said. “Come on, get dressed.”
“What time is it?”
“Who cares?” She yanked the sleeping bag off of him. Michael covered his crotch with his hands and rolled over again, pulling it back over him.
“Sissie, Jesus,” he said, “I’ve still got my morning woody!” “Well, get rid of it,” Francie said, unperturbed. “There’s no time
for your little fantasies. I’ll make some coffee.” Michael groaned.
“Yolanda,” he muttered.
Rolling her eyes, Francie went into the kitchen and started a pot brewing. The sun was almost fully up now, revealing a world of white outside the kitchen window. Snow had fallen all night. She could see the apple orchard, or what remained of it—the dwarfed and shriveled trees clothed now in robes of purity, like newly ordained clergymen, and the little pond frozen over. Even the old barn had become dignified in death, the snow drawn over it like a sheet.
She poured steaming coffee into two mugs and brought one to Michael, urging him to drink. He burned his mouth, as she’d known he would; then she had to wait and listen as he described every single detail of his dreams, which had been utterly com monplace. Finally she bullied him into his clothes and got into
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OWALSKI
hers, and they stepped out the back door and sank in snow nearly to their knees before their feet touched solid earth.
“Wow,” said Michael. “This is crazy.” “It really snowed,” said Francie.
She’d forgotten what snow could be like. Marveling at its depth, its texture, she forged a path beyond the barn and the or chard, out toward the far reaches of the property. Michael huffed along behind her, stepping in her footprints. All he had brought to wear were sneakers; he was not equipped to go hiking through the Arctic. The snow was getting in his socks, he complained. He was cold. He wanted to go in.
“This is not the Arctic. This is hardly anything,” said Francie. “Yeah? How would you know?”
“Because I’ve been to the Arctic.”
“Yeah? Really?” She could hear the uncertainty in his voice.
Her heart nearly broke at how easy it was to fool him.
“Yes,” she said. “Colt and I went there on vacation last summer.
To get away from the heat and the—”
Francie stopped suddenly, remembering, and stuck her hand in her jacket, under her sweatshirt. It was gone. Not the diary, which she still carried against her skin; the hole in her middle.
My God, she thought. Maybe I’m not crazy anymore. Maybe I never was to begin with! Maybe it was all in my head!
At that, she had to laugh. The craziness was in her head! That was a good one. Funny on several levels. Of course it was in her head. Where else could it be—in her liver?
“What is it?” Michael asked, stopping. “What’s so funny?” “Nothing,” she said. “Never mind.”
There was no point in explaining any of this to him. Michael needed to know that his Sissie was in one piece and able to take care of herself, and of him. The poor dear was feeling a little frag ile just now, what with all the nasty drug dealers and sneaky Col orado policemen after him.
“I’m just trying to think,” she said.
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She turned to look back at the house, but there were no clues there, no signs, not that she had expected any. She turned and faced northward again, toward the tree line. Nothing broke the surface of the snow. To the west there was a low, creeping jungle of undergrowth, all of it dead brown in this season except for the evergreens, weighed down under inches of snowfall. Perhaps the cemetery had been there, and was overgrown. She forged ahead in a new direction now, angling toward this little wilderness.
“What are we looking for, anyway?” Michael gasped. “Big foot?”
“Tombstones,” Francie said.
Her brother stopped short. “What?”
“There’s a little cemetery back here somewhere. I’m sure of it.
It can’t be that hard to find.”
“Jesus Christ,” said Michael. “You mean there’s actual dead bodies hiding back here? That’s creepy.”
“No, it isn’t. It’s beautiful. It’s touching. And they’re not hid ing. They’re just . . . lost.”
“Who’s buried in it?”
“A child,” said Francie. “A little boy named Charles.”
❚ ❚ ❚
They found it ten minutes later. The same plant life that had hid den the cemetery from view in autumn had shielded the stones from the bulk of last night’s storm; the effect now was that of be ing inside a small chapel, with walls of interwoven branches. A roof of snow filtered the light and gave it an aqua coloring, as though they were underwater. There was even a sort of natural doorway, through which one could walk nearly upright.
Francie entered first, and then Michael. It was, she thought, like being in a holy igloo. They waited without speaking, listening to the light wind scour the surface of the snow outside.
“Wow,” Michael whispered.
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At their feet, dusted lightly as though with sugar, were seven stone markers of varying sizes—two large, the rest smaller. Fran cie dropped to her knees and read the inscriptions. Most had suf fered greatly from the weathering decades, their letters drying up and dropping off one by one, the survivors clinging like desiccated insect shells to the fragile stone. Francie read:
And:
And:
C T. VIC GROVE 18
–
H MUS BR TH
18 –1
L M GR
[Illegible] 18 –1925
There was one that was completely illegible, its face worn smooth as paper. And finally:
MARLY BELOVED MOTHER
1835–1888
The letters of this last one had survived better than the others, for no more reason than that the stone had been partially shel tered by a fat old tree stump—which, in those days, would still have been a tree. If she were to count the rings on it, Francie knew, she would find more than a hundred, perhaps almost two. She sat on the stump, overcome.
“This is her,” Francie said. “Marly’s the one. It has to be.”
“The one what?” said Michael. “Sissie, have you got some kind
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of
Shining
thing going on here? Because you’re kinda creeping me out.”
“The one who wrote the diary. Marly Musgrove. She wrote about the funeral of her child. Her first son.” Francie turned and looked toward the house again. Here they were obscured from its numerous window-eyes, but back then, this cemetery would have been obvious, out in the open, looked after. It would have been trimmed and maintained. It would have had a little fence around it, maybe. They would have come a few times a year to put flow ers on the graves. People kept their dead close in those days.
“What diary?” Michael asked, but she could tell he didn’t really care, and so she didn’t answer him.
Of the smaller stones, only three bore names, none of them leg ible. The other two each said
BABY
, but did not indicate a name or even a gender, and only one of them a year: 1855. Five children, thought Francie. Out of how many? Maybe twice that number. Maybe even more. Those were the days when women had chil dren in the double digits. Yet five children seemed a horrible toll, even before medicines and vaccines. If every family had suffered such a loss, there would scarcely be any people left on the earth at all.
“Mikey,” Francie said, “we’ve made an important discovery.” “Okay, that’s great,” said Michael. “Can we go back in now,
please? I’m freezing my ass off.”
“In a few minutes,” said Francie. “I want to be here for a little while.”
“You go right ahead. I’m going in. See ya.” “Michael?”
“Yeah.”
“Maybe we shouldn’t tell anyone about this.” “Sure, Sissie,” said Michael. “Whatever you say.” “I’m serious. Especially Colt.”
“Why especially Colt?”
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“Because . . . he won’t appreciate it.”
He’ll want to ruin it some how
, she thought,
and it’s perfect just the way it is
.
“Okay,” said Michael. “Whatever. See ya.”
He exited the little enclave, leaving Francie alone in the church- like silence. She knelt, took a mitten off, ran her fingers over the cold letters of Marly’s flaking white stone. Then she leaned for ward and touched her tongue to it, gently, just to feel. She was surprised at how alive the stone seemed, even though it was frozen, and she pulled back quickly, before she could stick to it— guilty and pleased at her own weirdness.
When she was little, she’d had a fort that was kind of like this place, in the hedges of her mother ’s garden. She could go back there for hours and no one would know where she was. When Michael was old enough, she’d allowed him in, too, though it was supposed to be for girls only. Michael was always in need of a place to hide out. Often it wasn’t safe for him to venture into the company of other boys, who were more like wolves than people. But Francie didn’t have any girlfriends to come in there with her, so she took to keeping a raggedy spare dress on hand for Michael’s visits. When he wanted to come in, he had to put the dress on. That way he was in semicompliance with the rules, and Francie could feel like she was having a real live tea party, instead of one that had been polluted by the presence of a boy.
“You can be my people,” she whispered to the stones. “I’ll take care of you from now on.”
And the stones, though of course she knew better, seemed to whisper back.
