Please Remember This (24 page)

So several moments passed before he looked around the shovel of the bulldozer to greet his brother. But it wasn’t Phil who had driven to the site. A woman was picking her way through the mud. It wasn’t his mother. It wasn’t Tess. He had to wait for her to come closer.

It was Sierra, wearing a canvas coat and calf-high rubber boots. A heavy blanket was draped over her arm. Ned stood up from the bulldozer.

“I heard the quiet from my place,” she said. “And I guessed you must have turned your pumps off.”

“About a half hour ago,” he answered.

“Are you sitting shiva for the boat?”

Sitting shiva was a Jewish mourning custom, not something people around here knew much about. “I suppose. Do you want to join me?” He gestured toward the broad shovel. “Be careful of the teeth.”

He helped her spread out the blanket. A sweet, musty scent clung to her.

“Rituals like that can be important,” she said. “Even if you don’t believe in what they stand for, they give you a way of grieving and saying good-bye.”

He wondered just how muddled his head was because what she’d said seemed to make sense. “So it’s not completely idiotic to be sitting here in the shovel of a bulldozer?”

“No,” she said simply.

During high school Ned, like many kids in town, had worked at Celandine Gardens. He had enjoyed the physicalness of the labor, the bending and the lifting, the warm dirt crumbling through his fingers. Most of the other kids had made fun of Sierra, mocking her efforts to share her philosophy with them. Ned had never joined in the teasing—he hadn’t considered her as weird as the others had—yet he hadn’t gone out of his way to talk to her.

But he was glad that she was here now.

The night was cloudy. The willows lining the riverbank were dark masses, and there were no stars. Ned
couldn’t see down into the base of the pit, but he could feel the water rising.

“You aren’t too cold?”

“No,” Sierra replied. “I’m fine.”

He remembered Dr. Matt once telling Carolyn that Sierra was the sort of person who was happiest when she was needed, that everyone in the Settlement had relied on her. Nina Lane’s talent might have been what had brought people to the Settlement, but the earthy magic, the homemade bread and the sunflowers gathered in galvanized milking pails, had come from Sierra.

But who needed her now? She was the weird lady on the outskirts of town.

“Did you grieve, did you sit shiva when the Settlement broke up?”

For a moment he didn’t think she was going to answer, but then she said, “No, not really. It happened gradually. There wasn’t one day that you said, oh, it’s over … and giving up the baby, that was what was hard. She was what mattered to me. After that, nothing else seemed important.”

“The baby … you mean Tess.”

“I didn’t call her that.”

“When you see her now, do you connect her with the baby you took care of?” Ned wanted to talk about Tess.

“She’s so different from what I thought she would be. I used to think that she would be a poet. I would look into her eyes and I was sure I was looking into the soul of a poet.”

“Are you disappointed in her?”

“Doesn’t she seem very flat and conventional to you?”

“Tess?” He shook his head. “She’s certainly very even-tempered, but that’s not the same as being flat. And if she seems conventional, you’ve got to remember that’s what her grandparents wanted.”

Sierra didn’t say anything for a moment. “That’s not what I would have wanted. She would have been different if they had allowed her to stay with me.”

The truth of that was undeniable. “Yes, she would have been.”

The wind rose, and they moved farther back into the shelter of the shovel. The charcoal-colored clouds stirred against the night sky, and every so often a few stars would appear for a moment or two and then hide again. Ned listened to the sounds of the night, the faint rush of the river, the rise and fall of a distant car.

It was over, the excavation was over; he had to accept that.

Tess wondered if spring would ever come. She had grown up hearing immigrants to California ache for the changing seasons, for the first days of spring, for the light, lilting feeling of a world flowering back to life. They had praised the glories of a fresh snowfall in the winter; they had delighted in the warm spring sun.

What they hadn’t talked about were the dreary days before the season changed, the tedium of March. Leftover snow, dingy and crusted with gray ice, lingered under bushes and at the edges of the driveways. The mornings were cold enough that you needed your heavy coat, but the afternoon’s pale sunshine made its weight feel stupid and cumbersome. No one felt like doing anything.

And Ned was the worst of all. In the three weeks since he had flooded the boat, he had done nothing. At first everyone understood. He was exhausted. He had done so much. What was facing him would daunt anyone—one hundred and fifty sharpening stones, five thousand hairpins, one hundred and thirty socks, two thousand feet of rope, four thousand
shoes, two thousand one hundred candles, maybe as many as a million nails. The contents of the
Western Settler
were stored in meat lockers, water tanks, and padlocked storage sheds, stable but in no condition to be displayed or, in many cases, even exposed to oxygen.

But the artifacts had to be displayed. The town was counting on it. The first weekend after the generators had been turned off, a number of the regular weekend people returned to see the flooded site, and that was also the weekend when the flow blue china collectors were in town. But the following weekend shocked everyone. Main Street was quieter than it had been since August. A few people came to shop, but not many, not enough. The next weekend was even quieter.

“We need the museum to open.” There were mutterings among the merchants. “We need Ned to get the museum open.”

Technically, the museum was open, but it held only the hastily arranged displays of whatever artifacts hadn’t required time-consuming preservation. When there had been something new each week, people had enjoyed making repeated visits, but now there was no reason to see the exhibits more than once.

“I know that Ned’s tired,” people kept saying. “I know that he’s done a lot, but …”

But their businesses weren’t doing well.

Phil was reminding everyone that the town’s marketing effort was multifaceted. There was still the Renaissance Fair planned for the fall, and the Nina Lane Annual Birthday Celebration in May. And as soon as the weather got better, more people would
show up to shop. “We knew that all the business after Christmas was a result of the excavation, that we couldn’t count on that again.”

But people
had
been counting on it, and they couldn’t help blaming Ned. Why wasn’t he working harder to get a proper museum opened up?

This anxiousness was, Tess acknowledged, quite different from fuss and gossip about other people’s love lives. People had a genuine stake in the outcome of this. Their businesses were their livelihoods. They had nothing else, no savings, no insurance.

Ned stopped coming into the Lanier Building. He didn’t want to see anyone. Tess noticed his car parked at the side of the Old Courthouse, but she never saw him.

Phil insisted that there was no reason to worry about Ned. “Oh, he’ll come around. He’ll be fine. He just needs a breather.”

This was one thing Tess was not going to trust Phil on. She crossed the street, intending to search Ned out. She hoped he might be in the exhibit space, but instead he was in his basement office, seated at his desk, his back to the open door. Over his shoulder Tess could see the green light of his computer screen. He was playing solitaire. It was a game called Minesweeper, played on a grid. The player tried to avoid the mines concealed on the grid. Mr. Greenweight back at Willow Place had been addicted to it.

She rapped lightly on the doorframe. Ned clicked the wrong space on the grid, and the game exploded on him. He swiveled his chair and looked up.

A sudden, fierce joy flashed across his face. His
eyebrows rose, his chin lifted, his face seemed to open up. Tess was taken aback by the intensity of his expression. But just as quickly as the joy had come, it retreated.

“So are you here to lecture me too?” he asked. There was no energy in his voice, and the winter tan had faded from his face.

“You know me better than that.”

He shrugged. Yes, he did. “I don’t know how this happened. I never set myself up to save the town. I just wanted to dig up my boat and then help the state historical society figure out what to do with the artifacts. Now all of a sudden it’s my fault that the tourists aren’t coming to town anymore.”

He should have gone away. He should have taken a month and gone to Hawaii or the Caribbean or someplace where no one would have expected anything of him. “Are you feeling trapped?” she asked.

“You bet.”

“Well, you aren’t,” Tess said unsympathetically. At least her voice was unsympathetic; her heart was sinking at his lifelessness. “Sell the flow blue china, and hire a curator to set up the museum for you.”

“I’m not letting anyone else do this,” he muttered. Then his voice grew more firm. “And I’d sell my share of the cement plant before I’d sell the flow blue.”

“Just remember that you do have options. This does need to be done, but not necessarily by you. If you only want to do the excavation and not the preservation, then tell Phil to figure out some way to get the museum underway and go find yourself another boat.”

She let him go back to his computer game and she went upstairs. He needed time to decide if he was going to do this himself. She wanted to give him that time.

She had cooperated with every one of Phil’s plans, but she had never taken any initiative, she had never planned any promotions herself. She had felt too new in town, too concerned with her own business. But this wouldn’t be for the town; this was for Ned.

Phil’s offices were in the courthouse’s upper story, and, not surprisingly, he wasn’t there. The one thing—surely the only thing—that Phil Ravenal had in common with Nina Lane was that he couldn’t stand to be alone. Tess sat down in the outer office to write a note.

So far, Tess had resisted any publicity that had focused primarily on the Lanier Building Coffee Company and its collection of antique linens and laces. Other businesses had needed the promotion more.

Suddenly April became Needlework Month in Fleur-de-lis.

Tess would have thought that these things would take months to plan, but Fleur-de-lis could get things done because the organizations were in place—the Scouts, the churches, the service clubs, the PTAs, the parents of the high school marching band—and because everyone knew who could do what or, more important, who wouldn’t do what.

The newspaper article about Tess appeared in the Sunday Kansas City paper. It featured her linen collection and included photographs of the napkins she had made for Carolyn Ravenal, using her three-times-great-grandmother Eveline’s needles. A sidebar detailed the April activities in Fleur-de-lis. People could bring in their linens and quilts for appraisals. On Sunday afternoons in the church basements, there would be old-fashioned quilting bees so people could make crib quilts for needy babies. One Saturday would be devoted to a “Stash Meet.” Apparently a number of women had bought many lengths of fabric that they ended up never using. They were invited to bring these to Fleur-de-lis to sell or exchange. On another Saturday, the high school was opening its computer lab for people to try out quilting and pattern-drafting software.

How Phil had come up with these ideas, Tess did not know. Any messages he was getting from the dead had P. T. Barnum at the telegraph key.

The worst of the weather was over. The stiff, narrow tips of daffodil and jonquil foliage were appearing in the flower beds. Outside town, the winter wheat was sprouting, glazing the plowed fields with light green. The heads of the wild grass were tight but thick, needing a little sunshine before flowering.

The needleworkers coming to town didn’t buy any T-shirts or very much fudge and were certainly capable of making their own pot holders and cornhusk dolls, but at least they were there, and that made everyone feel better. The townsfolk were fussing less about the museum.

They also had the Nina Lane Birthday Celebration to think about. Scheduled as always for the first weekend in May, it was going to be bigger than ever. In previous years, all of the activities had been confined to the fairgrounds, and many of the attendees never came down to Main Street. But Phil had been working with the organizers to get vendors to set up booths in the park across the street from the municipal building. The Lanier Building and the Old Courthouse—the first commercial locations on the west side of town—were only a block away.