A Season of Whispers Read online

  He undid the bar, opened the door, held the lamp high. Nothing but shadow—the light failed to reach the floor below. Neither glimmer of light nor sounding of fiddle note wafted from the darkness.

  The flame of the lamp leaned and flickered. Air brushed the hairs of his short beard: a breeze on his face. Something moved toward him at fast speed he realized, something large, its mass pushing the air ahead of it. Even now it noiselessly rushed up the stairs at him.

  Lyman slammed the door, shot the bar through its cleat, threw his weight against the wood—steeled himself for the impact against the other side.

  None came. After a long moment he looked at his lamp. The flame stood straight as a soldier.

  He took a deep breath. Upon returning to his room it didn’t take him long to convince himself he had imagined everything, that the only music had been the cotton of a dream clinging to his sleepy skull. He tossed another log on the fire and lay back on the mattress, listening as the usual players outside again took up their instruments and played him off to sleep.

  •••

  In winter or rain, Lyman was told, meals were served indoors with every member sitting cheek by jowl; but because the morning was warm and dry, breakfast was like a picnic on July Fourth, served under an elm in the Consulate’s yard on battered tables with old linens and mismatched chairs. Hungry as he was, Lyman hesitated as he approached the band of men already established at the motley furnishings, gossiping as they awaited the meal’s arrival. Their trousers were striped, their waistcoats checked, and their frock coats the best offered by the shops of Providence or New London; but Lyman observed here and there the worn sleeves and frayed hems of good clothes put to hard use, and most of all he noted the sweat stains on every man’s cravat. Each fellow had removed and set nearby his hat—or, in some cases, used his to fan away the flies—all of which were specimens of the wide-brimmed style of the countryman rather than the tall, narrow-ledged trend of the metropolitan. Their faces, whether voluble or unforthcoming as they chatted, had none of the craggy dourness one expects of men accustomed to toil but instead bespoke of softer and more gracile origins, suggesting childhoods spent in fine homes rather than in fields and of lessons learned in heated schoolrooms rather than in frigid barns or henhouses.

  Just then Grosvenor noticed him and, after a series of introductions which pelted Lyman like the drops of a rain shower, each name too fast and insubstantial to catch, he was warmly invited to sit; when Lyman explained why he had missed supper, Grosvenor scolded himself for not checking on him before nightfall.

  “Your exhaustion is completely understandable,” said Grosvenor. “The travel, then a full day’s work just so you could sit down and make a fire. Anyone would have done the same.”

  A stream of women, their side curls bouncing, poured out of the kitchen door carrying platters of grits and butter and bread and jam and bacon and boiled eggs, spreading them among the tables before joining the seated men. When the most beautiful of the cooks plopped down next to Lyman, he struggled whether to rise—she being a lady and he a gentleman, and yet their experiment demanded tradition be overturned—and instead invoked a half-crouched position that seemed more apt for the outhouse than the breakfast table. She laughed.

  “This is the immediate dilemma, Mr. Lyman,” she said. “Which customs to keep and which to throw away as regressive? I can see neither benefit nor detriment to your standing while I sit—at least from my perspective.”

  “Into the trough with it then,” said Lyman, attempting to recover some measure of poise, “but what about the lady folk preparing the meals and the men working the fields? Isn’t that division of labor among the chief problems we seek to revolutionize?”

  “Agreed. But we each bring to Bonaventure the skills learned in the old mode—you have your carpentry, for example. Unfortunately, most men today are so poorly schooled that they can contribute little but the simplest brute labor, whereas we women can knit, cook, weed, and slop the pigs in equal proficiency. If the men dining alongside us right now were to do the cooking, we’d all starve by Monday. The key to reform is to teach our sons and daughters to bake and darn and sow and reap equally, regardless of sex.”

  Lyman nodded. “I should like to raise such sons and daughters with you,” he said, and immediately wished he hadn’t.

  But she laughed again and offered her hand. “Introductions first, if you please, Mr. Lyman. I’m Minerva.”

  Her full name, it turned out, was Minerva Katherine Grosvenor, the only child of the commune’s founders. Raised by such a pair of reformers she was perhaps more evangelical than the parents; but through some mysterious distillation of rearing had none of the seriousness of the zealot and all the good humor of a missionary among hopeless cannibals. Their cause, she understood, was Sisyphean from onset and therefore no excuse for pessimism and temper. She was, in no particular order, an obsessive reader of The Dial, fond of strolling the countryside over sitting in a sewing room, and the possessor of tanned arms and brown eyes that sparkled when she smiled, which was often.

  Lyman was smitten.

  “We should send down a rooster to the stone house so you don’t miss any more meals,” Minerva said. “City people think they only crow at dawn but the truth is they crow morning, noon, and night as it suits them. You will never oversleep again.”

  This talk of sound reminded Lyman of something, and he addressed Minerva’s father, sitting to her far side. Lyman had, while walking that morning to breakfast on the road not far from the stone house, been stopped in his tracks by several sharp retorts not unlike artillery or fireworks, followed by a low rumble rolling over the trees and fields that vibrated the ground itself. It was very different from thunder, which surrounds and envelops the listener from above, he said; this was more like a slow shallow wave on the outgoing tide, seething toward him from a specific direction roughly to the north and west. Lyman asked if there was a powder house nearby—for surely the whole thing had just gone up at a spark, though he never saw smoke or flame.

  “You truly are a newcomer to the area,” said Grosvenor. “Those, Mr. Lyman, are known as the Moodus Noises. They have nothing to do with gunpowder; rather they are a naturally occurring phenomenon unrelated to thunder. Reports date back to the earliest settlers.”

  “What in nature could produce so loud a noise but not be thunder?”

  “Ah, now we have struck upon a favorite pastime of mine: geology.” Grosvenor wiped his mouth with his napkin and leaned toward Lyman. “The noises usually occur with regularity—often in the early morning, as you have discovered, or at dusk. There are several competing theories. The first supposes there are various mineral deposits that mix to form a kind of naturally occurring black powder underground which occasionally detonates, but I find this too improbable. Another hypothesizes gases are to blame. This is more likely but alone is incomplete. Where then do the gases originate? I suspect volcanic activity may be the source. Undoubtedly underground hot springs and geysers, which are known to erupt with great predictability.”

  “Then where is the sulfur and brimstone?” asked his daughter. “Where is the hot water? It would save me the trouble of having to boil some on the stove for my bath.”

  “It is kept entirely subterranean, dearest. By the time it feeds into our streams it is already cold.”

  Lyman frowned. “But what of the fumes? I visited the springs at Saratoga once. Even the more temperate examples are evident by the plumes of steam and calcification of minerals on the earth around them.”

  Minerva said, “Not to mention such a theory fails to explain the sinkholes that exist on the property, as we’ve learned.” A strange shadow crossed her face.

  Grosvenor chewed his lip and tapped his finger against his cup, for in truth he had already recognized these nuisances to his theory. “You know, Mr. Lyman, one of the goals of Bonaventure is to demonstrate that labor and self-sufficiency do not preclude furtherance of the arts and sciences, and
that working to feed oneself and his community doesn’t necessitate ignorance. After all, doesn’t Mr. Emerson himself state that all science has but one aim, which is to discover a theory of nature? Perhaps you would like to assist me in my inquiries. It is a lot to ask, I realize—the spare minutes of your day are already few enough as is.”

  Lyman looked to Minerva. She smiled.

  “I’d be delighted.”

  Grosvenor slapped the table. “Excellent! Now tell me, what do you know of fossils?”

  •••

  Supplies arrived at the stone house. A stack of planks from the mill, a bucket of nails and tools from the smith. Lyman set about doing what he could, glad no one else was around to witness his trials. He had, in his letters to Grosvenor, mildly exaggerated his talents as a carpenter insofar as he had never before held a hammer in hand, let alone an ax. Having read about Bonaventure Farm in a newspaper at the Norwalk coffeehouse where he had taken to lurking, Lyman conceived that a winter in the wilds of eastern Connecticut would obscure his tracks completely. He immediately rattled off a letter to the farm’s master praising the experiment. Grosvenor responded kindly, and after another round of correspondence, Lyman obliquely sounded the depths for what skills were most in demand. When Grosvenor mentioned a certain enigmatic endeavor called for a carpenter’s deft touch, Lyman painted an appropriate self-portrait. He had assured himself at the time, as he dipped pen into pot, that woodworking could be easily learned in the field—whatever promises necessary to achieve his end could be fulfilled, would be fulfilled, once there. A week later came the offer of employment, an invitation to exhibit to the world what tomorrow would resemble.

  The road begun in midsummer now found Lyman scuttling about the back roof, orbiting the hole blasted clean through the shingles by a fallen branch, clearing debris and gingerly removing rotten boards to assess what must be done. To say he did so calmly or without a rising sense of anxiety over the warranties made by his letter-writing self would be incorrect. The roof, to his eye, seemed like a Chinese puzzle dropped by a clumsy child, then thrust at him to fix. He slipped, he stumbled, he rolled off once, badly bruising his ribs and shoulder, and on a separate occasion was left hanging when the makeshift stairway he had made of rocks and sticks, as stable as the skin on a bowl of soup, collapsed beneath him. When his plea up at the Consulate for a ladder was met with shrugs, in frustration he took the ax and with skinned knuckles, cut rails and rungs from saplings, bored the holes with the drill that had arrived with the rest of the tools, and pounded it all together. Only after it supported his weight, granting a wobbly passage skyward without accident, did the steam of his temper at the earlier Lyman ease by a modicum.

  Yet it was another preoccupation of Lyman’s that hindered progress at the stone house. The experience of the first night had never been repeated. Often, on the edge of sleep, he wondered if he had imagined the music; in the daylight the answer was unequivocal, but in the night less so. Then there had been the air blowing on his face, which suggested subterranean currents—perhaps caused by the springs Grosvenor had conjectured. So, against instinct, he lit a lantern and ventured down the cellar stairs.

  As a rule Lyman avoided basements for the same reasons he avoided manual labor, for both involved dirt and stains and unfortunate surprises such as cobwebs across his face. The basement of the stone house was deeper than he had imagined, with abundant room between pate and rafter, and here and there a few streams of sunlight cascaded down from cracks in the floorboards. He paced the rectangle of the fieldstone foundation from the stairway around again, holding his lantern up to widen the circle of vision, but finding nothing of interest beyond an old crate and a clump of rags in a corner where long ago a rat had made its nest.

  Dry as a chicken bone, the air musty and dense, no sign of Styx, no sniff of sulfur. The fiddle music had been his brain, Lyman accepted; being unaccustomed to the quiet of the woods, his mind had filled the emptiness with tavern noise. The breeze on his beard had probably been the wind outside, flowing through the roof hole then down between the floorboard cracks and up the stairs again in a sinuous stream. The only bogeyman in the house was Lyman, him and his too many years of city living.

  Yet as he stomped up the stairs, between the gaps created by the absent risers he noted a shadow that did not bounce with the lantern’s light. He leaned over the shaky banister. Something there, fixed and stable behind the stairway: an aperture in the stone that swallowed illumination.

  He descended again, ducked under the stairs, raised the lantern. At first an outline, then a recession, then an entrance leading away. A tunnel.

  Based on the rough jambs it was not part of the basement’s original design; stones had been pulled out of the wall and a lintel inserted over the break. Lyman ducked, holding the lantern ahead of him, shielding himself from the webs and spider husks.

  After ten steps the passage widened into a new chamber. Rougher and cruder than the basement, built of smaller stones, and round. Slowly Lyman rose from his tunnel hunch, holding the lamp overhead. He stood inside a dome: the stones fitted together like the blocks of snow in a child’s igloo. No one, Lyman believed, had been in the chamber for a long time: most of the iron in the rest of the house had been stripped and yet in the center of the chamber’s floor was set a large steel grate. It had been painted at some point, which, while flaked, had prevented it from rusting into a solid unmovable mass.

  Lyman held his lantern down to the bars, figuring to see its light reflected in black waters below. When it wasn’t, he attempted to lift the grate one-handed, and when this failed, he set the lamp down and attacked it with two.

  Once while walking along South Street, Lyman had witnessed a pair of ships collide in the harbor, their sides screaming as they rubbed past each other, the sailors swarming over the rigging and hollering and swearing to murder their brethren on the opposite vessel. Lyman wished the grate was as quiet as that. By bare inches it moved, and Lyman bent his knees and pushed himself standing, bringing it almost vertical—and then not. It slammed backwards to the dirt, the pit yawning and open, and for an instant Lyman teetered on the precipice, spinning his arms like whirligigs. But then a puff of gas, hot and rancid, blew up the shaft and pressed against his chest like a flat palm. He stumbled rearwards and away.

  The lantern, when Lyman knelt on the edge and tepidly dangled it as far over as he could reach, revealed an iron ladder bolted to the sides of the shaft. At the bottom some ten or twelve feet down, the round mouths of more tunnels gaped at intervals into darkness.

  “And there they shall remain, unexplored,” Lyman said aloud.

  A cistern gone dry. He could conceive no other purpose for the pit, though an amateurish mineshaft wasn’t out of the question—maybe Old Man Garrick had come over from England to dig for gold. But here again, as ever since coming to Bonaventure, was an answer to a dilemma.

  Lyman left the chamber, returning minutes later with the bag from under his bed. He knotted a double length of twine around its handles, locking it closed, then knotted the ends around a wrought-iron wall hook with a bowline taught to him by a stevedore. Hand over hand he lowered the bag into the pit; and when it reached its end, he clipped the hook onto the top rung of the ladder. The bag and its contents hung suspended in space, deep inside a pit in a secret basement beneath a half-ruined house in the wild Connecticut woods. No one, not even God squinting down from the cumulus, would find the money now.

  “Mr. Lyman!”

  Lyman jumped. From somewhere unknown a muffled voice, a hundred miles away, followed by thumps on wood. “Mr. Lyman, are you home?”

  The front door. Lyman rushed from the chamber, crouched and shuffled through the tunnel, bounded up the stairs. He remembered to blow out the lantern’s wick before pulling open the door.

  “Mr. Lyman!” said Minerva. “What—why look at you.” Lyman tried to steady the heavy breathing of his dash. She reached out to peel a cobweb off his sleeve. “I thought
you might be out but now I see you’ve been hard at work. Down the basement I presume?”

  “Ah,” said Lyman, “yes, as a matter of fact. Checking the foundation. Very dirty and dusty down there. I cannot recommend it. So I will not invite you to witness it. Or anyone else for that matter. Everyone should stay out. Of the basement, I mean.”

  “And?”

  “And what?”

  “The foundation? Is it sound?”

  “Oh yes. Yes. Absolutely. Steady as Gibraltar. All the more reason no one should go down there. No point.”

  Minerva’s perplexity was clear but fortunately for Lyman, the two stood in the early stages of infatuation in which any and all idiosyncrasies proved endearing. “Well, considering your situation so isolated from the rest of the farm, I thought it might be nice today if instead of you going to lunch, lunch should go to you.” She carried a basket under her arm. “Would now be a good time for a bit of a picnic, Mr. Lyman? If you are too involved in your work, I shouldn’t want to bother you —”

  “No! I mean—yes,” said Lyman, “I mean, no, I’m not too busy and yes, I should very much like to have a picnic with you. Thank you, Miss Grosvenor.”

  “Oh stop, Tom. Please address me by my given name.”

  There was a clearing a short distance from the house which the sun, just past noon, bathed in speckled light through the leaves. From her basket Minerva unrolled a blanket and set out a lunch of ham sandwiches and cold boiled potatoes and a jar of sun tea. She poured him a glass.

  “So I must ask,” she said, “have you met the Devil yet?”

  Lyman looked at her. “Whatever do you mean?”

  “The Devil. Have you heard him playing his fiddle in your basement?”