The Afterlife (3 page)

Then, out of the bruised and scrambled sky, rain pelted down with such fury that the wipers couldn’t keep the windshield
clear; it became like frosted glass, and the car roof thrummed. Lucy lifted her voice: “There’s a lovely old inn right in the next village. Would this be a good time to stop and have a bite?”

Just in dashing the few yards from the parking lot to the shelter of the inn, the three of them got soaked. Inside, all was idyllic: big old blackened fireplace crackling and hissing and exuding that sweet scent of local woodsmoke, carved beams bowed down almost to Carter’s head, buffet of salmon mousse and Scotch eggs and shepherd’s pie served by a willing lad and blushing lass, at whose backs the rain beat like a stage effect on the thick bottle panes. The middle-aged trio ate, and drank beer and tea; over Lucy’s protests, Carter paid.

Next door, an antique shop tempted tourists through a communicating archway, and while the storm continued, Lucy and her visitors browsed among the polished surfaces, the silver and mirrors, the framed prints and marquetry tables. Carter was struck by a lustrous large bureau, veneered in a wood that looked like many blurred paw prints left by a party of golden cats. “Elm burl, early eighteenth century,” the ticket said, along with a price in the thousands of pounds. He asked Jane if she would like it—as if one more piece of furniture might keep her at home, away from good works.

“Darling, it’s lovely,” she said, “but so expensive, and so big.”

Elm burl: perhaps that was the charm, the touch of attractive fantasy. In America, the elms were dead, as dead as the anonymous workman who had laid on this still-glamorous veneer.

“They ship,” he responded, after a few seconds’ lag. “And if it doesn’t fit anywhere we can sell it on Charles Street for a profit.” His voice didn’t sound quite like his own, but only he
seemed to notice. The women’s conversation in the car had obligated him to make a show of power, male power.

Lucy, intensifying her hint of a British accent, courteously haggled with the manager—a straggly fat woman with a runny red nose and a gypsyish shawl she held tight around her throat—and got four hundred pounds knocked off the price. Carter’s plunge into this purchase frightened him, momentarily, as he realized how big the mark-up must be, to absorb such a discount so casually.

There were forms to sign, and credit cards to authenticate over the telephone; as these transactions were pursued, the storm on the roof abated. The three buyers stepped out into a stunning sunlit lapse in the weather. Raindrops glistened everywhere like a coating of ice, and the sidewalk slates echoed the violet of the near-cyclonic sky.

“Darling, that was so debonair and dashing and untypical of you,” Jane said.

“Ever so larky,” Lucy agreed.

“Kind of a game,” he admitted. “What are the odds we’ll ever see that chest again?”

Lucy took mild offense, as if her adopted fellow-countrymen were being impugned. “Oh they’re very honest and reputable. Frank and I have dealt with these people a few times ourselves.”

A miraculous lacquer lay upon everything, beading each roadside twig, each reed of thatch in the cottage roofs, each tiny daisy trembling in the grass by the lichen-stained field walls. Then clouds swept in again, and the landscape was dipped in shadow. Many trees were fallen or split. Little clusters of workmen, in raincoats that were pumpkin-colored instead of, as they would have been in America, yellow or
Day-Glo orange, buzzed with saws and pulled with ropes at limbs that intruded into the road. Waiting to be signalled past such work parties took time, while the little Austin gently rocked in the wind, as if being nudged by a giant hand. Carter caressed the sensitive center of his chest, under his necktie: his secret, the seal of his nocturnal pact, his passport to this day like no other. It had felt, in the dark, like a father’s rough impatient saving blow. “How much farther to the sea?” he asked.

“Well might you ask,” Lucy said. “On a day of smooth sailing, we’d be there by now.” The cars ahead of them slowed and then stopped entirely. A policeman with a young round face explained that lines were down across the road.

“That does rather tear it,” Lucy allowed. The detour would add fifteen miles at least to their journey. The landscape looked dyed, now, in an ink that rolled across the pale speckled fields in waves of varying intensity. Along a far ridge, skeletal power-line towers marched in a procession, their latticework etched with a ghostly delicacy against the black sky. A band of angels.

Jane consoled Lucy: “Really, dear, if I saw too many more charming villages I might burst.”

“And we see the sea all the time when we’re on the Cape,” Carter added.

“But not
our
sea,” Lucy said. “The
North
Sea.”

“Isn’t it just ugly and cold and full of oil?” asked Jane.

“Not for much longer, they tell us. Full of oil, I mean. Well, if you two don’t really mind, I suppose there’s nothing to do but go back. Frank
does
like an early supper after he’s been on a hunt.”

It was growing dark by the time they reached Flinty Dell. Exposing to view a small, drab Victorian church, the ancient
chestnut had blown down—a giant shaggy corpse with a tall stump torn like a shriek, pointing at the heavens. The tree had fallen across a churchyard wall and crushed it, the outer courses of sturdy-seeming brick spilling a formless interior of rubble and sand.

Frank came out into the driveway to meet them; in the dusk, his face looked white, and his voice was not amused. “My God, where have you people
been?
I couldn’t believe you’d be out driving around in this! The hunt was called off, the radio’s been cancelling everything and telling people for Christ’s sake to
stay off the roads!
” He rested a trembling hand on the sill of the rolled-down car window; his little fingernail still bore an azure fleck of today’s dawn.

“In this bit of a breeze?” Lucy cooed.

Jane said, “Why, Frank darling, how nice of you to be worried.”

And Carter, too, was surprised and amused that Frank didn’t know they were beyond all that now.

The town was sexy, or so it had always seemed to Ferris. He had lived there for years, and his former wife still lived there. It was a town by the sea, with marshes and a broad beach; summer had been a fête of sunburn and short skirts and cookouts and insect bites. Not only mosquitoes and midges and gnats but a curious plenitude of ticks and green-headed, bloodthirsty flies bred in the marshes and the winding saltwater channels. An air of siege persisted through the other seasons—fall pinching in with an ever-earlier darkness, winter when on the crooked slick roads cars slid into one another with a dreamlike slow motion, spring with its raw east wind and bouts of flu and considerable human irritability.

The town was not for everybody; it had no country club, its politics were unedifying, its schools were only fair, its tax base needed broadening. Up-and-coming young commuters to Boston, or hi-tech engineers employed along Route 128, moved elsewhere, to more proper towns—one with a pretty blue harbor lined in granite and adorned with the yacht club’s domed gazebo, another equipped with horses and stables and a weekly fox hunt, a third boasting a precious historic district of early-Federal homes, a fourth full of grand estates waiting
to be subdivided. All of these towns were more suitable and sounder investments for the aspiring than the ragged, raffish settlement where Ferris had lived in his physical prime.

Its natural beauty had verged on wildness and could overflow into violence. Marital scandals would suddenly rip through the school board or the Methodist choir. Early-morning murder-suicides would bestow a blasted aura upon a pale-green house hitherto innocuous in its row. Weather would hit oddly hard, so that power would be lost for the week after a nor’easter that had hardly touched the rest of the coast, or a drought would dry up the private wells and expose the gravel bottom of the town reservoir. Fires were common in this old town built almost entirely of wood. In the years after Ferris left, first one white Congregational church burned down—an irreplaceable example of carpenter Gothic—and then another, a noble Greek Revival edifice erected in a parish schism in 1842. The movie house, with its quaint Arabian Nights décor from the 1930s, vanished in yet another holocaust, along with the adjacent paint store, its cans of turpentine and Williamsburg colors exploding like rapid artillery. Ferris’s growing children reported these disasters to him, along with their own. He had remarried and lived in Boston.

Returning to the town, to take a child to dinner or to consult his dentist, who was aging along with him, he never failed to be uplifted by the local ambience into a sexier, more buoyant self. His very step became more youthful, and the rub of his shirt against his skin took on a suggestive nervous tension. Almost no one, after ten years, knew Ferris—even the corner drugstores, once operated by rival selectmen, had changed hands—but he was greeted by the familiar proportions of the buildings, the erratic layout of the streets, and unexpected souvenirs of his past: an antique store still offered, it appeared,
the same sun-baked furniture in the window, a gray-haired postman was still doing his rounds, a graceful great elm hadn’t died yet, a straggling stretch of dirt sidewalk hadn’t yet been paved. The town was patchy, informal, with seams where the true stuff of life—dirt, sex, saltwater, death—kept leaking through. Even the town’s children and dogs, as Ferris saw them, were scruffier and cannier than those of better-organized, more antiseptic communities.

In the ten years since he had left, a further plague had been visited upon the town—a plague of deer. Even while he had been a resident, housewives along the beach road would complain that in the night deer had consumed all their tulips and that their newly planted dogwoods and crabapples had been fatally girdled by deer nibbling the bark. But the marauders were furtive and shy, and it was considered a treat for the children, better than a trip to the zoo, when an October walk on the beach yielded a glimpse of deer, their white tails flicking, bounding away into the dunes.

Ferris still remembered a moment, freighted with guilt and rapture, early in his separation from his wife, when the property where he had lived still called forth his husbandry. He had come out from Boston and he and his son, Jamie, then in his mid-teens, were up on the tennis court, readying it for winter by placing two-by-fours on the tapes and weighting them with rocks. Otherwise, the freezing and thawing of the clay lifted the aluminum nails during the winter. Ferris happened to glance up. At the far edge of the shaggy field a family of deer had emerged from the woods. It was an unseasonably warm day in November, misty, and in this mist the forms of the three deer—the stag, the doe, and the smallest, no longer a fawn—hesitated as if posed in a soft old photograph, elegant gray-brown creatures from the dignified prehuman world.

“Look!” Ferris told his son quietly, but even this whispered utterance sent the ghostly forms racing, bounding across the wet unmowed field to the patch of woods in the opposite corner of the property, where the tidal creek turned. Ferris had not felt entitled, that haggard guilty day on the edge of winter, to so magical a sight, and had pressed it upon his son as if in compensation for his coming years of absence.

Now his son, in his mid-twenties and called James or Jim, had grown accustomed to his absence, and the deer had become a famous civic problem, which Ferris read about in the Boston newspapers. They multiplied while the undeveloped land around them diminished; starving, they robbed the dunes of vegetation and ravished the landscaping of the expensive seaview homes being built above the marshes. A Christmas tree tossed out into the snow was stripped of needles by the frantic animals, even in daylight; at night, high-school couples parking on the beach lot found themselves surrounded by a crowd of deer standing mute and mendicant around the car. The deer in their delicate heraldic beauty had become as pestilential as rats, and the town, with its curious flair for scandal, where another town might have found a quiet solution, debated the issue into a storm of publicity. Nature-lovers from the other end of the commonwealth came to protest the selectmen’s proposal to import hired Army sharpshooters to reduce the herds. Irate women threatened to mingle, dressed in deerskin, with the animals on the scheduled day, thus sacrificing their own lives to the ideal of unpolluted natural process. Several veterinarians came to testify that starvation is relatively painless and weeds out the weak; others counter-testified that it is agony and selectively destroys the young. There were meetings, picketing, interviews on television. Meanwhile, throughout large regions of
the town—and these the most fashionable and expensive—garbage cans were kicked open, azalea bushes eaten leafless, and dead deer bodies found frozen out by the bird feeders.

Then, worse yet, it developed that the deer population was crawling with the tiny tick
Ixodes dammini
, which in turn harbored the spirochetes of Lyme disease, named after the town in Connecticut where it first was recognized. Round red lesions, malaise and fatigue, chills and fever and stiff neck: these are its symptoms. Its final results can be heart damage and lifelong arthritis. We live in plague times. As our species covers the earth like a scum, the bacteria and viruses and parasites inventively thrive. When Ferris lived in the town, no thought was given, for example, to venereal disease. Herpes and AIDS and chlamydia were unheard of; sexual affairs involved a spiritual and economic peril only. Men and women tasted one another as if at a smorgasbord of uncontaminated dishes, a tumble of treats, some steaming, some chilled, some nutritious, some not, but all clean.