remember seein’ Moorwood when I was a kid. He always looked dried up and old.
After his wife died, he stopped comin’ out of his house very often. But it
seems like we would’ve seen him now and again, don’t you think?”
“I’ve never seen Mr. Pritchard before. I guess they’re all hermits.”
“Except Vernon,” I said. “Until the weather turns cold, I mean.”
“Right as rain,” Dad said. “But I think I might ask around tomorrow. Find
out if anybody I know has seen Moorwood lately.”
“Why?” Mom frowned. “What does it matter? You’ll probably see him on
Saturday night.”
“Unless he’s dead,” came his answer. “Now, wouldn’t that be somethin’? If
Moorwood’s been dead for two years or more, and everybody in Zephyr still
jumps at the sound of his name because his dyin’s been kept a secret?”
“And why would it be kept a secret? What would be the point?”
Dad shrugged, but I could tell he was thinking in overdrive. “Inheritance
taxes, maybe. Greedy relatives. Legal mess. Could be a lot of things.” A smile
stole across his mouth, and his eyes sparkled. “Vernon would have to know it.
Now, wouldn’t that just be a hoot if a naked insane man owned most of this
town and everybody did what he said to do because we thought it was Moorwood
talkin’? Like the night the whole town turned out to keep Bruton from bein’
washed away? I always thought that was peculiar. Moorwood was more interested
in keepin’ his money in a tight fist than givin’ it away to Good Samaritans,
even if they had to be threatened to be good.”
“Maybe he had a change of heart,” Mom suggested.
“Yeah. I suspect bein’ dead can do that.”
“You’ll have your chance to find out on Saturday night,” Mom said.
And so we would. Between now and then, however, I had to face the Demon
and hear about how much fun her birthday party was going to be and how
everybody else in the class would be there. Just as my father was asking
around about sightings of Moorwood Thaxter, I asked my classmates at recess if
they were going to the Demon’s birthday party.
No one was. Most made comments that led me to believe they’d rather eat
one of her dog dookey sandwiches than go to any party where they’d be at her
booger-flicking, Munster-family mercy. I said I’d lie down in red-hot coals
and kiss that baldheaded Russian guy who beat his shoe on the table rather
than go to the Demon’s party and have to smell her stinking relatives.
But I didn’t say this where she could hear me, of course. In fact, I was
starting to feel more than a little sorry for her, because I couldn’t find one
single kid who was going to that party.
I don’t know why I did it. Maybe because I thought of what it would feel
like, to invite a classful of kids to your birthday party, offer to feed them
ice cream and cake and they wouldn’t even have to bring a present, and have
every one of them say no. That is a hurtful word, and I figured the Demon
would hear a lot of it in time to come. But I couldn’t go to the party; that
would be begging for trouble. On Thursday after school, I rode Rocket to the
Woolworth’s on Merchants Street, and I bought her a fifteen-cent birthday card
with a puppy wearing a birthday hat on the front. Inside, under the doggerel
poem, I wrote Happy Birthday from Your Classmates. Then I slid it into its
pink envelope, and on Friday I got into the room before anybody else and put
the envelope on the Demon’s desk. I thanked God nobody saw me, either; I never
would’ve lived it down.
The bell rang, and Leatherlungs took command. The Demon sat down behind
me. I heard her open the envelope. Leatherlungs started hollering at a guy
named Reggie Duffy because he was chewing grape bubble gum. This was part of
the overall plan; we’d learned she despised the smell of grape bubble gum, and
so almost every day somebody became a purple-mouthed martyr.
Behind me, I heard a faint sniff.
That was all. But it was a heart-aching sound, to think that fifteen
cents could buy a happy tear.
At recess, on the dusty playground behind the school, the Demon fluttered
from kid to kid showing them the card. Everybody had the good sense to pretend
they already knew about it. Ladd Devine, a lanky kid with a red crew cut who
was already showing signs of being a football star in his quick feet, loping
passes, and general fondness for mayhem, began telling all the girls he’d
bought the card when he heard they thought it was sweet. I didn’t say
anything. The Demon was already staring at Ladd with love in her eyes and a
finger up her nose.
On Saturday evening, at the appointed time, Mr. Pritchard arrived at our
house in the long black car. “Watch your manners!” Mom cautioned me, though it
was meant for Dad, too. We weren’t dressed up in suits; “casual wear” meant
comfortable short-sleeved shirts and clean blue jeans. Dad and I climbed into
the back of the car and the impression I had was of finding yourself in a
cavern with walls of mink and leather. Mr. Pritchard sat divided from us by a
pane of clear plastic. He drove us away from the house and took the turn up
onto the heights of Temple Street, and we could hardly hear the engine or even
feel a bump.
On Temple Street, amid huge spreading oaks and poplars, were the homes of
the elite citizens of Zephyr. Mayor Swope’s red brick house was there, on a
circular driveway. Dad pointed out the white stone mansion of the man who was
president of the bank. A little farther along the winding street stood the
house of Mr. Sumpter Womack, who owned the Spinnin’ Wheel, and directly across
the way in a house with white columns lived Dr. Parrish. Then Temple Street
ended at a gate of scrolled ironwork. Beyond the gate, a cobblestoned drive
curved between rows of evergreens that stood as straight as soldiers at
attention. The windows of the Thaxter mansion were ablaze with light, its
slanted roofs topped with chimneys and bulbous onion-shaped turrets. Mr.
Pritchard stopped to get out to open the gate, then he stopped again on the
other side to close it. The car’s tires made pillows out of the cobblestones.
We followed the curve between the fragrant pines, and Mr. Pritchard pulled us
to a halt under a large canvas awning striped with blue and gold. Beneath the
awning, a stone-tiled entryway led to the massive front door. Before Dad could
unlatch the car’s door, Mr. Pritchard was there to do it for him. Then Mr.
Pritchard, moving with the grace and silence of quicksilver, opened the
mansion’s front door for us, and we walked in.
Dad stopped. “Golly,” was all he could say.
I shared his sense of awe. To describe the interior of the Thaxter
mansion in the detail it deserves is impossible, but I was struck by the
vastness of it, the high ceilings with exposed beams and chandeliers hanging
down. Everything seemed to be shining and gleaming and glinting, and our feet
were cushioned by gardens of Oriental weave. The air smelled of cedar and
saddle soap. On the walls pictures in gilded frames basked in pools of light.
A huge tapestry showing a medieval scene adorned one entire wall, and a wide
staircase swept up to the second floor like the sweet curve of Chile Willow’s
shoulder. I saw textures of burled wood, burnished leather, crushed velvet,
and colored glass, and even the chandelier bulbs were sparkling clean, not a
cobweb between them.
A woman about the same age as Mr. Pritchard appeared from a hallway. She
wore a white uniform and had her snowy hair in a bun clasped with silver pins.
She had a round, pretty face and clear blue eyes, and she said hello to us in
the same accent as her husband. Dad had told me it was British. “Young master
Vernon’s with his trains,” she told us. “He’d like you to join him there.”
“Thank you, Gwendolyn,” Mr. Pritchard said. “If you’ll follow me,
gentlemen?” He began walking into a corridor flanked with more rooms, and we
were quick to keep up. It was obvious to us that you could put several houses
the size of ours in this mansion and still have room left over for a barn. Mr.
Pritchard stopped and opened a pair of tall doors and we heard the tinny wail
of a train whistle.
And there was Vernon, naked as the day he escaped the womb. He was
leaning over, examining something he held close to his face, and we had quite
a view of his rear end.
Mr. Pritchard cleared his throat. Vernon turned around, a locomotive in
his hand, and he smiled so wide I thought his face would split. “Oh, there you
are!” he said. “Come on in!” We did. The room had no furniture but a huge
table on which toy trains were chugging across a green landscape of miniature
hills, forest, and a tiny town. Vernon was attending to the locomotive’s
wheels with a shaving brush. “Dust on the tracks,” he explained. “If it builds
up, a whole train can crash.”
I watched the train layout with pure amazement. Seven trains were in
motion at the same time. Little switches were being thrown automatically,
little signal lights blinking, little cars stopped at little railroad
crossings. Sprinkled throughout the green forest were red-leafed Judas trees.
The tiny town had matchbox houses and buildings painted to resemble brick and
stone. At the terminus of the main street there was a gothic structure with a
cupola: the courthouse where I’d fled from Mayor Swope. Roads snaked between
the mounded hills. A bridge crossed a river of green-painted glass, and out
beyond the town there was a large oblong black-painted mirror. Saxon’s Lake, I
realized. Vernon had even painted the shoreline red to represent the rocks
there. I saw the baseball field, the swimming pool, the houses and streets of
Bruton. Even a single rainbow-splashed house, at the end of what must be
Jessamyn Street. I found Route Ten, which ran along the forest that opened up
a space for Saxon’s Lake. I was looking for a particular house. Yes, there it
was, the size of my thumbnail: Miss Grace’s house of bad girls. In the wooded
hills to the west, between Zephyr and the off-map Union Town, there was a
round scorch mark where some of the little trees had burned away. “Somethin’
caught fire,” I said.
“That’s where the meteor fell,” Vernon replied without even glancing at
it. He blew on the locomotive’s wheels, a naked Amazing Colossal Man. I found
Hilltop Street, and our own house at the edge of the woods. Then I followed
the stately curve of Temple Street, and right there stood the cardboard
mansion my father and I were standing in.
“You’re in here, Cory. Both of you are.” Vernon motioned toward a shoebox
beside his right hand, near a scatter of railroad cars, disconnected tracks,
and wiring. On the shoebox’s lid was written PEOPLE in black crayon. I lifted
the lid and looked down at what must’ve been hundreds of tiny toy people,
their flesh and hair meticulously painted. None of them wore any clothes.
One of the moving trains let out a high, birdlike whistle. Another was
pulled by a steam engine, which puffed out circles of smoke the size of
Cheerios. Dad walked around the gigantic, intricate layout, his mouth agape.
“It’s all here, isn’t it?” he asked. “Poulter Hill’s even got tombstones on
it! Mr. Thaxter, how’d you do all this?”
He looked up from his work. “I’m not Mr. Thaxter,” he said. “I’m Vernon.”
“Oh. All right. Vernon, then. How’d you do all this?”
“Not overnight, that’s for sure,” Vernon answered, and he smiled again.
From a distance his face was boyish; up close, though, you could see the
crinkly lines around his eyes and two deeper lines bracketing his mouth. “I
did it because I love Zephyr. Always have. Always will.” He glanced at Mr.
Pritchard, who’d been waiting by the door. “Thanks, Cyril. You can go now. Oh…
wait. Does Mr. Mackenson understand?”
“Understand what?” Dad asked.
“Uh… young master Vernon wants to have dinner alone with your son. He
wants you to eat in the kitchen.”
“I don’t get it. Why?”
Vernon kept staring at Mr. Pritchard. The older man said, “Because he
invited your son to dinner. You came along, as I understand, as a chaperon. If
you still have any… uh… reservations, let me tell you that the dining room is
next to the kitchen. We’ll be there eating our dinner while your son and young
master Vernon are in the dining room. It’s what he wants, Mr. Mackenson.” This
last sentence was spoken with an air of resignation.
Dad looked at me, and I shrugged. I could tell he didn’t like this
arrangement, and he was close to pulling up stakes.
“You’re here,” Vernon said. He put the locomotive down on a track, and it
clickety-clicked out from under his hand. “Might as well stay.”
“Might as well,” I echoed to Dad.
“You’ll enjoy the food. Gwendolyn’s a fine cook,” Mr. Pritchard added.
Dad folded his arms across his chest and watched the trains. “Okay,” he
said quietly. “I guess.”
“Good!” Now Vernon truly beamed. “That’s all, Cyril.”
“Yes sir.” Mr. Pritchard left, and the doors closed behind him.
“You’re a milkman, aren’t you?” Vernon asked.
“Yes, I am. I work for Green Meadows.”
“My daddy owns Green Meadows.” Vernon walked past me and around the table
to check a connection of wires. “It’s that way.” He pointed off the table with
one of his skinny arms in the direction of the dairy. “You know there’s a new
grocery store opening in Union Town next month? They’re almost finished with
that new shopping center there. Going to be what they call a supermarket.
Going to have a whole big section of milk in—can you believe this?—plastic
jugs.”
“Plastic jugs?” Dad grunted. “I’ll be.”
“Everything’s going plastic,” Vernon said. He reached down and
straightened a house. “That’s what the future’s going to be. Plastic, through
and through.”
“I… haven’t seen your father for a good long while, Vernon. I talked to
Mr. Dollar yesterday. Talked to Dr. Parrish and Mayor Swope today, too. Even
went by the bank to talk to a few people. Nobody’s seen your father for two or
more years. Fella at the bank says Mr. Pritchard picks up the important papers
and they come back signed by Moorwood.”
“Yes, that’s right. Cory, how do you like this bird’s-eye view of Zephyr?
