Please Remember This (13 page)

Chapter 8

 

T
ess intended to go to the church her grandparents had attended as children. She was entirely capable of doing this on Sunday morning even though she had been in town for fewer than twenty-four hours. She knew where her panty hose were; she knew where her good shoes were, and if her dress needed to be ironed, she knew where her iron was.

But she didn’t want to go to church. She wanted to finish dealing with all the shrink-wrap and other packaging that her Kmart trip had produced. She wanted to go to the Lanier Building and see what had been done there. The only reason for going to church would be to show everyone in town what a wonderful human being she was.

Oh, that Tess Lanier, she’s so nice, she’s so perfect. Let’s go buy overpriced coffee from her.

But maybe it would make more sense to let them all think that she was a godless, mammonistic heathen, and then they would be pleasantly surprised to discover her good qualities. That sounded a lot easier.

So she dealt with the shrink-wrap and the boxes, then picked up the keys and the thick manila envelope
Phil had left for her, and set out for her new business.

She walked. Two blocks north and then a block west. Three blocks, six minutes. This would be her commute. The worst possible traffic would add a tento fifteen-second pause at the crosswalk. So what if she found that she didn’t like serving people overpriced coffee? She could do anything that was three blocks and six minutes from home.

The Lanier Building had been transformed. The teal paint was gone, and the limestone blocks were as fresh and buttery-looking as those in the Old Courthouse building. The four tall, arched windows looked dignified and prosperous. Tess was going to paint the name of her business in gold on the windows.

Things inside were just as good. The crumbling partition had been removed and a long service counter had been installed along one wall. The pine floors had been freshly sanded; new Sheetrock had been hung over the crumbling plaster, its tape still visible beneath a coat of primer paint. The two new bathrooms with their wide wheelchair-size doors were not finished yet, but Tess had not expected them to be. The office and storage space were nearly completed and, as far as she could tell, were exactly according to the architect’s drawings.

But there was plenty more to do. The contractor had left tile boards and countertop samples. There was a note about the bathroom faucets. The ones she had picked were on back order; she needed to select another style. Another note said that the coat hooks had arrived in chrome instead of brass. Did she mind?

Yes, she did.

An hour later she was back in the office, opening a box of the furniture catalogs and fabric samples. She heard someone rap at the door.

It was Phil Ravenal. He was wearing a sport coat and a tie; he, superior human being to herself, must have gone to church. “I thought you might be here,” he said. “Are you finding everything all right?”

“It’s perfect. You know that. You’re the one who made sure of it.”

He shrugged. “It was nothing. My office is right over there.” He pointed toward the Old Courthouse. “We’ve had great weather. This gave me an excuse for coming outside and crossing the street a couple times a day.”

He had done a great deal more than that. “I feel as if I should offer to show you around, but I assume you’ve already seen it all.”

He acknowledged the truth of that. “Then let me show you around. Have you been out to see the boat yet?”

She hadn’t. So she got her purse, locked the door to the Lanier Building, and followed him outside. He was driving a different car from the one he had driven when she had come out in the summer. This one was a dark green Jeep.

“The girls usually drive this,” he explained, “but there’s so much mud out at the site that I traded cars with them for the fall … and I don’t know what is worse for a car, being stuck in a field of mud or being driven by my sisters. It’s a close call.”

Although there was some mud around the wheels and on the rear quarter panel, the interior of the Jeep was immaculate. Tess wondered if his orderliness
ever made relationships difficult. Was he able to be tolerant of a less tidy woman? Well, she wouldn’t find out. Her car was every bit as neat as his.

The riverboat site was north of town, out County Route Five, near the Prairie Bell School. The river, redirected by various Army Corps of Engineers projects, made a jag to the northeast, so it was now over a quarter mile away from where the boat had sunk. A line of trees marked the river’s current path. There was a little wind, and the narrow, darkish leaves of the willows were fluttering, their white undersides shimmering as the breeze flipped the edges of the leaves.

Bordered on the east side by the irregular riverbank and on the west side by the straight line of the country road, the former cornfield was bounded to the north and south by windbreaks of fast-growing, stout-branched cottonwood trees. Towering over the trees, dwarfing everything, was a construction crane, its cable dangling like a plumb line. Next to it was a white construction trailer and a yellow bulldozer-type thing—Tess knew little about heavy equipment—but instead of a bulldozer’s blade, it had a long, arching arm with a backward-facing claw mounted to it.

Phil bumped the Jeep across a rough track that cut through the stubbled cornfield. The track continued in a rough oval around the actual excavation site, which seemed about the size of a football field. Cables were looped onto wooden posts marked with DANGER HIGH VOLTAGE signs.

Phil parked at the edge of the oval track, next to Ned’s black pickup. The cables led to two big generators,
perched high on mounds of excavated earth at either end of the pit. The generators were chugging steadily. A massive cylindrical fuel tank, its white paint nearly worn away, sat on another little man-made hill.

The pit itself was perhaps thirty-five feet deep. Tall, columnlike pipes rose out of the wet, sandy ground. At the former ground level they elbowed, and the pipes, now horizontal, burrowed into the pile of excavated dirt. They were, Phil told Tess, part of the dewatering system. Twenty thousand gallons of water were being pumped every minute out of the water table into a drainage ditch that Ned had built and lined with plastic.

An actual bulldozer was working down in the pit, pushing and scooping, widening the far edge. The base of the pit seemed littered. There were pools of standing water, coils of fire hoses, a green picnic umbrella, buckets, and shovels. Two sets of broken timbers poked up out of the mud, and beyond them was an iron structure, three cylindrical tanks welded together. The tanks were about three feet in diameter and twenty or twenty-five feet long, and pipes of varying sizes jutted out of them and crossed over them.

Phil touched her arm. “If you stand here, it’s easier to figure things out. The stern of the boat is toward us.”

The
Western Settler
had had two paddle wheels, mounted on either side about two-thirds of the way back to the stern of the boat. Tess could now see that the broken timbers were arranged in spoke patterns; they had been the supports for the giant wheels. The
larboard wheel—the one to Tess’s left—sat higher than the starboard wheel. The boat had sunk toward its starboard side. The big iron thing was the boat’s steam boilers, positioned toward the bow of the boat. “There was still half-burned coal and wood inside the firebox,” Phil said.

The paddle wheels, the boilers, and other parts of the engine were the only pieces of the boat above the main deck that had not been carried away by the current. All the upper decks, the fancy white gingerbread railings, and the cabins and lounges whose social life Eveline Lanier had described were long gone. “Basically, we will just have the hull and what you see now,” Phil continued. “I think a lot of people were secretly expecting a full-scale Disneyland creation with fresh white paint and gold trim, but let me see if I can flag Ned down. He can explain this in a lot more detail than I can.”

Ned was apparently the person in the bulldozer. Because it was still Sunday morning, he was working alone. “No, no, don’t interrupt him.” Tess was willing to admit to herself that she would have been a lot more interested in the full-scale Disneyland creation. What was exposed now was guy stuff.

But the scale of the project was staggering. Phil could only be hinting at the difficulties Ned was confronting every day. Tess looked back at the bulldozer. It moved on the kind of rolling tracks that Sherman tanks had had in World War Two documentaries. It was being driven confidently, without jerks or false starts. Ned often had a distracted, even apologetic air about him, the perpetual younger brother, but he had organized all of this. Every decision that she had been
making about insurance, water, and electricity, he had been making with tenfold complexity.

“What kind of help did Ned have getting this started?” she asked.

“Not much. He did contract with a well-digging outfit because leasing a bucket drill on his own was going to be surprisingly expensive and those guys were efficient and safe, but he probably could have managed without them. He knows what he’s doing. His undergraduate degree is from the Colorado School of Mines, so if you ever need a coal shaft ventilated, he can do it for you.”

“Does this come naturally to him?”

“This is what he always dreamed of doing,” Phil said. “Ever since he was a little kid, he always wanted to dig up the boat. He’s just been putting one foot in front of the other, and here he is.”

Tess suddenly wished that her grandparents could have known Ned. Nina’s dreams, her urgent, inchoate longings, had tormented them. But dreams didn’t have to be bad. Look at Ned Ravenal. He had had a dream that had dominated his life, but he wasn’t miserable and self-absorbed. He wasn’t manic-depressive. He was a nice guy with an important goal. You could do that.

All week Tess worked at the Lanier Building. She had already ordered four love seats and six large easy chairs, all of them upholstered in brown-toned leather—tobacco, camel, café, and cocoa. She wanted the walls glazed with varying shades of apricot, a friendly, unusual color, feminine without being girlish, blending well with the warm stone outside. The walls would feature reproductions of oversize
French Beaux Arts posters. She would buy round oak tables and pine harvest tables. Some of her chairs would be ladder-back; some would be pattern-backed. She didn’t want anything to match; the twenty-foot ceiling would soften and unify the unusual combinations. And whenever she wondered if it was all becoming too unusual, she reminded herself that she didn’t need to be afraid of Nina Lane.

Her mugs arrived. They were straight-sided, and at first glance they looked like the speckled tin cups that the forty-niners, the California gold-rush miners, had used. But Tess’s were earthenware—tin would get too hot—and instead of the traditional blue, they were jade in color.

Each mug had her logo emblazoned in white. A double-lined border enclosed scrolling letters: “The Lanier Building Coffee Company.” The
?
in “The” and the
y
in “Company” broke through the lines of the border. Tess couldn’t remember the last time she had colored outside the lines.

Midway through her first week, Wyatt Cooper and Gabe Eldore, the two men who owned The Cypress Princess restaurant, stopped by and introduced themselves, first apologizing that they had so few memories of Nina Lane to share with her. “We came to the Settlement quite late,” Wyatt said. He spoke with a slight Southern accent. “We only met Nina two or three times.”

“That’s fine,” Tess assured them. “I’m not here for her.”

They were full of good advice. Call the high school guidance counselor, Mrs. Fornelli, about which high school kids to hire for weekend and evening help.
“She knows who works hard and who needs the money.” Don’t post your bad checks on the wall. “People think it’s really mean-spirited.” Deal with Pam at the bank. “She’s the smartest one there.” Once Tess had a floor plan drawn up, she should show it to the chief of police. “He’ll spot problems you won’t have thought of—where you might lose things to shoplifters.” Don’t ever gossip. “You’ll overhear stuff. You’ll see people fighting. You’ll see people crying. Just forget it all.”

“I will.”

“And above all, remember we are only four and a half blocks away. If ever you are caught short, whether your staff is sick or you’re out of milk or napkins, please call us.”

“That’s extremely generous of you.”

Many people were very friendly, bringing her food, inviting her over for supper. On Saturday, Phil took her to The Cypress Princess for dinner. The following week she went to Kansas City and St. Joseph, visiting the antiques warehouses that specialized in farmhouse oak. She had already ordered reproduction tables—she needed smaller sizes than had traditionally been built—but she found plenty of chairs as well as pie safes and china cupboards for displaying her merchandise.

At Phil’s suggestion, she had covered her windows with butcher paper on Friday afternoon so that the weekend visitors would know she would not be open. “You don’t want them looking in and being disappointed.” But during the week she took the paper down. People in town were interested in what was being delivered and what was being installed.

On the next Saturday—it was now early October—she heard a sharp rap on the glass of the Lanier Building door. She lifted aside the edge of the white butcher paper and peeked out.

It was Phil.

“Come on,” she heard him say as she was unlocking the door. “Ned’s found a bedroll.”

The Jeep was at the curb, the engine still running. Tess tucked the building keys in her pocket, not bothering to go back inside for her purse. “So tell me,” she said, climbing into the passenger side of the Jeep, “what’s the story?”

Some of the merchants in town, she knew, were growing impatient with Ned. They wanted him to speed up the pace of the excavation. Yes, he had now also uncovered the pumps, the coal box, and the steam “doctor”—whatever that was—but those things were more guy stuff. The people coming to see them weren’t the kind to buy one of Mrs. Ballard’s teacups. Fleur-de-lis needed him to find the human-interest artifacts, something pretty, like dishes, buttons, and silk gowns. So why couldn’t he forget about the engines and go straight into the cargo hold? People wanted Disneyland.